Applying Heidegger to Guyana

Sep 11, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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If you asked me 30 years ago which was the most informative, fascinating non-fiction I ever read, I would have said, Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. If you asked me 20 years ago which was the best academic book I ever read, I would have said, Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. If you ask me now to name the one book of all the books I have read that has influenced the way I see life, nature, people, the world and my own existence, I will say it is Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time.’
Stacking ‘Being and Time’ against the great ideas found in Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Sartre, Foucault, Freud and Derrida, to name a few, I would say, ‘Being and Time’ is very far ahead. I find three books the most fascinating to date. Two are from my favourite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and “Human, All Too Human.” And Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontent.” But ‘Being and Time’ has outclassed them.
Heidegger’s magnum opus is a notoriously difficult book to read. If any philosophy student from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard etc., says that he/she comprehended Heidegger on the first or second reading that may not be true. An advanced graduate student would need professorial help in understanding this text. I certainly got such professorial assistance. I was fortunate to have an extremely patient philosophy professor.
Heidegger’s masterpiece is an exceptionally brilliant, ontological adumbration of what constitutes the essence of human existence; what role our own individual “Being” plays in that existence and how “Being” should relate to time, space and death. Heidegger, in obtuse language, explains why life shapes “Being” and not the other way around, and how “Being” could survive to have “Authentic Existence” in relation to “Time”.
It is outside the scope of a mere column to explain Heidegger, but this column is not about the book, but the man himself. It is about one of the deep mysteries of human knowledge. Here was a man whose mind was so penetrating and whose brilliance could compare to any classical or modern philosopher yet in reckless and mysterious abandon, supported the most sadistic, violent, hateful and semi-civilized government that human society has ever known – Hitler’s Third Reich.
The name Martin Heidegger does not travel well in academic circles in any part of the world. My approach to Heidegger is not the man but his work. You can love a person’s work and feel totally distant from what the person is. It will remain one of the greatest enigmas in human knowledge why such an extraordinary mind chose to support Adolf Hitler. Few have attempted to find the answers, none have been satisfactory.
When you read one of the reasons for the wrong path Heidegger took, then as a Guyanese your mind comes to Burnham and Jagan. With the intervention of Burnham’s daughter, Roxanne, eulogizing her father in a letter in this newspaper and the caustic responses it evoked, one wonders if Heidegger can be applied to understanding why good men like Burnham and Jagan who started out with Quixotic dreams turned out to be so badly flawed.
One theory is that Heidegger didn’t concentrate on Hitler and the Nazis but Germany itself. Taking up from where Nietzsche left off about the soul of Germany, and that Germany will produce the Übermensch to save civilization, Heidegger saw Germany under Hitler as the beginning of the German “geist” that would eventually bring sanity and rationality to civilization; in other words the Übermensch was coming. This explanation puts Heidegger in a different light, meaning that his intentions were good and he was inherently wishing well for the world.
Could one apply Heidegger’s methodology to Jagan and Burnham? Could it be that Burnham wanted to make Guyana and its people great, and he saw himself as the Übermensch? What he was doing was for the good of the country and its soul, and he believed it was destined for him to perform that task. After all, Nietzsche contended in ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ that the Übermensch had to come. I am sure Burnham was familiar with the philosophy of Nietzsche. This Heideggerian application to Burnham meant therefore that he had no inherent tendency to do harm.
Maybe this was also how Jagan saw it. That in communism lay the Übermensch. Perhaps Jagan was not bothered by his exclusive ethnic support, since communism was the Übermensch that would make Guyana a glowing nation. Like Burnham then, the intentions were originally pure. I guess as the years move on and more research is done, we will know.

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