Marburg and Eros

During 1985 I was fortunate to spend some months in Marburg, much of it at the old University, but with regular walks up in the woods on the other side of the Lahn.

While there was a small plaque at the old University for Hermann Cohen, the last philosopher with a street named for him at that time was Paul Natorp.  I recall nothing for Erich Frank. Cohen had no street named for him.

The memorial near where the synagogue had been was in memory of "fellow citizens who fell in the war".  Memorials in near by towns from WWI were often to the "heroes who fell" - but the missing Jews of Marburg did not "fall" in the war.  One railroad worker "fell" in the railyards during the war.

It was in Marburg that Heidegger seduced the young student Hannah Arendt and from Marburg that Heidegger made his many trips to Jaspers in Heidelberg.

It was to Marburg that Heidegger tried to have the Nazi Baeumler appointed and it was Marburg that dismissed the appointee, Erich Frank, who did not live to reclaim his post in 1945.

As a university in the 1920's Marburg was distinctively Protestant as Freiburg was Catholic.  In the 1980's the university had a distinctive leftest and anti-Israel pro-PLO rhetoric - but the radicals obeyed the street lights for traffic at interactions, very unlike the students in Montreal at any of the 4 universities there.

Marburg had a shameful history during the war, but remains a great tourist attraction having been untouched: there worked the brothers Grimm and here the Saint Elizabeth.  Except for the tourists, the old town is lovely and the hiking in the valley is beautiful and not demanding, but once out of the valley, this is farmland Hessen.

Heidegger had nothing to say about the body other than our use of our hands: particularly he had nothing to say about sex.  But his affairs with Blochmann and Arendt were decisive for him: his logos on concealment, uncovering, event are in sharp contrast to the modest Kierkegaard and his distant, remote Regina.  It is noteworthy that it was love for a married woman and her death that unbalanced Hölderlin.

For what he never said about the result of the mission of his German people, for encouraging others to embrace National Socialist "leadership", Heidegger should be spared no ridicule - nothing private should be spared.  I intend to be unsparing.

Heidegger likely suffered from what I think Jaspers would today recognize as a schizoid disorder in the spectrum for which there have been no ready diagnostic categories (Jaspers was an observant psychopathologist, but failed to see that in Heidegger it was not just a lack of "character" and not just a tendency to mendacious deceptions: this was an abnormal psyche in which the self could be anything for anyone and for which "nothing ever really happened" but that could not be interpreted in a reduction almost to a vanishing point.)

In all likelihood Heidegger was abused as a boy: he was impoverished and utterly dependent on his male Catholic mentors.  When finally crushed, he returned to his Archbishpo - but not to the fold.  He was almost certainly a homophobe judging from his close relations with Medard Boss and his predilection for denunciations.  He was a neurasthenic when stressed ( I think likely hypoglycemia with resultant tachycardia with irregular heartbeat ) and in his darknest hours slightly paranoic.  His logos of "Ereignis" and "Entdeckung" was his over-coming of some sequelae of child abuse in his affair with Arendt.  The practical problem was prevention of pregnancy: his writings on repetition and Heraklit suggest coitus interruptus but I think more likely that Arendt provided him either a corrective experience of  fellatio and/or anal intercourse but with a certain modesty: they never went off for a fling in a fine Berlin hotel, but met furtively. As if she were meeting with a priest.  The master.  And the result was not shame, but poetry.

An athletic boy who was later very fit and lived much longer than either of his parents, Heidegger does not fit the medical picture painted of him any more than his preferred picture of the Rector misunderstood.  His is a history: something happened.  His Hannah was as significant to him as Helen in Homeric poetry or the Diotima of Hoelderlin.  He took flight into marriage with a Lutheran and he would later embrace the NSDAP.  His pathology invites comment, but the conduct of his life of lies invites open speculation.  There is no case for being "fair" to Martin Heidegger.  Ad hominem is the order of the day.  Ridicule is the best weapon against this prophetic and pathetic obscurantist.

I leared German to read Heidegger and Husserl, but it was my misfortune to learn by reading Ernst Juenger.  I have a favor to repay: you might say that I owe a capon - a squab - to a chiropractor, a charlaton, a quack.