…a response to a letter from Arjen Wezenburg…
(Dutch version on my substack. Subscribe!)
Hi Arjen,
Howrina wanted to bid you a last farewell.
To be honest, I do not understand why you write to me, saying you find my pieces very strong, until I ‘start grasping at mosquitos in a reactionary manner on the summit.’ Firstly, I write this to you because I managed to catch only one of the two mosquitos that were disrupting my sleep. I genuinely do not comprehend what could be reactionary about my piece: it seems you have the idea that I attribute some guilt to Wittgenstein for Nazism, as if I am engaging in some sort of moral work here. But that was not the crux of my piece at all. I merely assert that Wittgenstein’s work closely aligns with the ‘spirit’ of Nazism, which precisely derived legitimacy from that idea of cold Spitzenforschung: the massive amounts of pharmaceutical speed, deliberately underemphasized in WWII, were the real reason the Germans could conduct war so effectively. They were drugged, just like Hitler himself, the most drugged official in world history, using twenty-six different substances on the advice of his undoubtedly brilliant physician—the man nearly vibrated out of every image. He was so stiff with drugs that this very stiffness manifested in a salute.
No, of course Wittgenstein had no ‘guilt’ for WWII. But neither did Heidegger, scarcely. If you want to talk about guilt, you should look at who funded this misery because this ‘counterforce against the Bolsheviks in Europe’ was financed from overseas by those you call capitalists, and after the war, they smuggled a significant number of Nazis away through Operation Paperclip, again with the same Spitzenforschung in mind.
Perhaps you might consider that the word ‘capitalism’ legitimizes the swinery. After all, it is now a movement; you attribute a relatively clean intellectual capacity to it. But is this really ‘capitalism,’ or rather a sort of dynasty of Bushes, Trumps, and Clintons? With that throne succession built in, it seems more like a perverse kind of Habsburg construction. Combine that with the fact that it is the largest genocide factory in human history, and the word ‘Capitalism’ quickly becomes far too clean and clear for this phenomenon. I can certainly follow Russell, of course, Deus ex Machina, the spirit in capitalism, it is a cult, the thoughts follow each other. But I believe you do them a favor by calling them capitalists.
No, the question is not whether Wittgenstein had any guilt towards Nazism; the question is why this psychotic schoolteacher grew into a leftist icon: that was the question I addressed and find interesting from an anthropological perspective.
The idea he had to teach advanced mathematics to elementary school children, what sort of pedagogical frustration project is that? And then he knocks people unconscious with his fists when it doesn’t work, poor children from farming families, while he swims in money, and as you yourself write, he escapes justice thanks to his capital. And indeed, Josef Haidbauer had just lost his father on the eve of being beaten into a coma by this frustrated figure.
Why make such a person a sort of saint? The holy madman, in this case. That whole process has nothing to do with his work, it seems to me. I do not even consider it philosophy myself. If you think you can throw around ‘facts’ so tyrannically more than thirty years after Nietzsche, you have little understanding of any philosophical mountain range. No, the question is: why this man?
And with that mountain range, we are, of course, back in a circle at my last censored poetry collection, It’s Only Mountains, and the graphs that grew into mountains in the collection are obviously the famous corona graphs, which found their ultimate form in the album Unknown Pleasures as both mountain and graph, and thus also sound wave. The poet reveals himself to be obsessed with these graphs, and they grow into poems and music.
The Literary Fund does not understand that concept. My previous plan also had a negative impact on my livelihood, and despite the fact that I managed to fabricate a collection from that bad plan, which readers like Anneke Brassinga described as a positive, upward trend, it was, how surprising, again Mr. Benders’ plan that was not right, even though he clearly demonstrated that he could make a good collection out of bad plans (though it was not a bad plan).
No, this is all just a form of bullying and political manipulation. We will see if they get away with it; the matter is still under judicial review. I also constantly feel that projection of ‘madness’ on me, for instance, in the wording of the Literary Fund readers of my book The Eternal Freshman, which overflows with Secret Service jargon: the book is said to have been written by a loner, there are ‘conspiracy theories’ in it, and the conclusion is that it is ‘only psychologically interesting and not literary.’ The loner is mad, what a wit!
For these pseudo-leftists, it is apparently very important that there are several types of madness: the first, which this psychopathic schoolteacher could enjoy, yes, that was ‘our madness,’ the madness of the ‘genius.’ But then there is another kind of madness, and I apparently fall under that. The reading report hinted that at least one of the three readers is an avid connoisseur of my weblog because he noted that most articles had already appeared on my weblog, even though I had deleted them long ago: it is a fascinating piece of insight into the mechanisms that play a role in that quality kitchen. Apparently, you cannot find someone literary who has been marked by various major critics as the talent of his generation, and that does not prevent you from closely following his weblog. Are they not fascinating, Arjen, these debutants and writers of informative works?
I quote again from your letter:
His biographer Monk described it as the excision of ‘cowardice,’ and Wittgenstein himself described it as follows:
“Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relationship with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then.”
I would rather call it ‘stupid’ than ‘cowardly.’ The whole project of ramming advanced mathematics down children’s throats does not exude courage but a lack of judgment and intelligence. But then this problematic man is put on a kind of pedestal and worshiped as if we are dealing with the seventh wonder of the world here, and nowhere, no, nowhere does it even remotely touch upon his written work, which consists of a collection of shrill ‘statements’ that are supposed to express the essence of reality but are actually reductionism of the worst kind: whoever places science so religiously on a pedestal has great contempt for the tradition of philosophy.
He later tried to distance himself from that work, that is true.
Then I come to the core of your letter:
More interesting to me is the failure of both, the reduction of language to play in Wittgenstein, and in Heidegger to the violence of neologisms with the same death drive as the fascism he tried to narrativize as a Hegelian figure.
I also feel that enormous drive in Heidegger, but it is, I think, essentially the drive to create a great work, and what Heidegger wrote is almost pure poetry; he delves so deeply into language that he almost loses touch with philosophy and writes pure poetry. No really, that thin booklet ‘The Country Road,’ a book of only seven pages, but it is a brilliant little book, a poem in all its purity, without the metaphysical burden of wanting to look like a poem. There is much gentleness in Heidegger, gentleness that people can no longer see. Heidegger’s books are books you can truly get lost in.
Such will-o’-the-wisps are of course interesting, but are they interesting because of ‘their failure,’ as you put it? Because I do not experience Heidegger as a philosopher who has failed. Why would he have failed? Because he sided with the Nazis for a while? But were those Nazis not essentially a product of the American supermarket fascism that has been chopping the world into pieces for 100 years and selling it back to us bloodily? The games you see in Wittgenstein, I see in the moralistic plays people put on for us. And no, that does not mean I am a right-winger: I voted for Lef, the most left-wing party, I support Left Laser, I am an anarchist who does not believe in anarchism.
But the moral plays presented to us are too shallow for me: we must look at the bigger picture. And I do not think we should label it ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism does not need secret services.
Best regards,
Martijn Benders
Footnote: Here is a Reddit post sent by Arjen that addresses approximately the same issue as I did yesterday, although I focused more on text analysis: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/he7o0j/haidbauer_incident_and_wittgensteins_philosophy/
Footnote 2: The strange thing is that medical journals nowadays are also full of these “conspiracy theories.” Look at this: 72% of deaths attributed to the vaccination: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073824001968?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Incidentally, in my book, I consider the “conspiracy theory” as a marketing phenomenon. How dull do you have to be to then attack the book again with this kind of populist talk? Oh well, let me add my dear song about beheaded chickens, gracefully performed by Gala De Lucia:
Footnote 3: If this science rapport is correct, and it seems to be so, then those 18 million coronadeaths worldwide would account for a hidden genocide of 15 million people caused by these same farmaceutical giants, with Germany at the political helm. In other words: not any different from WWII. Wir haben es schon wieder nicht gewusst.