50 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

through ‘social assistance’ (Sozialfuersorge), looks after them and cares for their future on their behalf. One could list the commonplaces of academic aristoc-ratism which recur throughout this oft-commented passage, replete with topoi on the agora as an antithesis of the schole, leisure versus school. There is a hatred of statistics (harping on the theme of the ‘average’) seen as a symbol of all the opera-tions of ‘levelling down’ which threaten the ‘person’ (here called Dasein) and its most precious attributes, its ‘originality’ and its ‘privacy’. There is a contempt for all forces which ‘level down’, doubtless with a particular disgust for egalitarian ideologies which endanger ‘everything gained by a struggle’, meaning culture (the specific capital of the mandarin, who is the son of his works), ideologies which encourage the masses to ‘take things easily and make them easy’. There is also a revolt against social mechanisms such as those of opinion, the hereditary enemy of the philosopher, which recurs here through the play on Öffentlichkeit and Öffentlich, ‘public opinion’ and ‘public’, and against anything symbolizing ‘social assistance’, that is democracy, political parties, paid holidays (as a breach in the monopoly of the schole and meditation in the forest), ‘culture for the masses’, television, and Plato in paperback. Heidegger was to say this so much better, in his inimitable pastoral style, when, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, written in 1935, he set out to show how the triumph of the scientific-technological spirit in Western civilization is accomplished and perfected in the ‘flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative’ …16

On the one hand, this simply parrots Adorno’s heavy-handed derision of Heidegger, and indeed we find versions of the same criticism in Habermas, Steiner and Wolin too. And yet, Bourdieu thinks this kind of superficial reductionism is proof positive of the cogency of his story concerning the sociology of knowledge. One wonders, however, if Bourdieu’s claim isn’t staggeringly arrogant in its scope, since there seems to be little reason to suppose that his claims can be restricted to Heidegger, and, if they are not, then Bourdieu’s position amounts to a rejection of the possibility of doing philosophy at all which is not a claim that warrants serious consideration. One might well ask why Bourdieu’s own analyses are impervious to the historicizing and contextualizing he insists upon in terms of dismissing Heidegger’s thought as simply the by-product of a series of cultural, political and historical features beyond his control? Bourdieu consolidates his own hermeneutic prejudices with a lofty summary and dismissal of Heidegger and his thought in the final lines of his text as follows:

It is perhaps because he never realized what he was saying that Heidegger was able to say what he did say without really having to say it. And it is perhaps for the same reason that he refused to the very end to discuss his Nazi involvement: to do it properly would have been to admit (to himself as well as others) that his ‘essen-tialist thought’ had never consciously formulated its essence, that is, the social unconscious which spoke through its forms, and the crudely ‘anthropological’ basis of its extreme blindness, which could only be sustained by the illusion of the omnipotence of thought.17