The German Genius

identity.
    He urges that our attitude to “being” is a complex philosophical issue and points to our ethical behavior in regard to corpses and dead fetuses. We insist on their dignified disposal—they are more than inert matter to us; they were beings —grown, not made—and therefore they are not things .
    We don’t have bodies, he concludes, we are bodies, and this typcially Heideggerian distinction is all-important. We stand on the verge of a major transformation in the understanding of human nature and the way we choose to go forward (since nothing is inevitable, however blinded we may be by the notion of “progress”) is a philosophical matter, not a scientific-psychiatric-technical one.
    There is of course a further ironical contextual level to all this. Given the notorious eugenic policies carried out in the Third Reich, Habermas, as a German identifying the future risks of genetic preprogamming, has a redemptive quality. Habermas is himself naturally aware of this context, quoting Johannes Rau, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 2001: “Once you start to instrumentalise human life, once you start to distinguish between life worth living and life not worth living, you embark on a course where there is no stopping point.” 58
    Genetic preprogramming is not the only philosophical problem we face as a matter of urgency. As global warming starts to lay waste our planet, as the rain forests and ice caps shrink together, as inland seas disappear, as terrorists threaten nuclear annihilation, as genocide and famine continue to ravage Africa, as India and China begin to run out of water, does it not ring ever more true that Heidegger had a profound point (and wasn’t being merely “priggish”) when he said we should stop trying to exploit and control the world with our technological brilliance? Is this not a form of hubris that will in time destroy all we have, should we not instead learn to accept the world, to submit—without interference—to the pleasures nature has to offer, to enjoy them as poets enjoy them, and should not our main stance now, our first and only priority, be to care for the world?
    Heidegger was caught up in what he saw as the redeeming energies of National Socialism and about that he was wrong, very wrong. And yet, despite the undoubted advantages that science and capitalism have wrought, they now seem incapable of rectifying the ravages they have also brought about. Hannah Arendt counseled us to be adult, and part of her own achieved adulthood was that she forgave Heidegger and in that sense redeemed him. Can we not do the same and learn from him (and her), despite what went before?
    For that matter, is Germany itself always to remain unredeemable? Perhaps Norbert Elias was correct in saying that the country cannot move ahead until a convincing explanation for the rise of Hitler has been given. Yet Heidegger was prescient and was part of a recognizable line of German thinkers, from Kant through Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Habermas himself, who remained and remain skeptical of modernity (there’s that word again, “skepticism”), who remind us that human nature—life itself—is as much about pride, shame, independence, coherence, and respect for others and for ourselves, for morality, for our “inner environment,” for autonomy, intuition, and disgust, as it is about money, the markets, the profit motive, and the hard drives of technology. Germany is not only a “belated” nation in terms of modernity; it is also a reluctant nation and maybe there is a lesson in that reluctance. If science and capitalism—the market—cannot prevent the degradation of our environment, our very world, indeed if they are now the primary ingredient in that devastation, then only a change within us, a change of will , can do it. The way out of our dilemma, the Germans tell us, is not technical or scientific, but philosophical .
    There must never come a time when a Schlußstrich , a final line, is drawn under Germany’s past, when the events of 1933–45 become just another episode, another catastrophe mothballed in the chain of history. Gerhard Schröder had it right when he said, “We cannot emerge from our past so easily. Perhaps we should not even wish to.” 59
    Germany should not wish, or seek, to leave its past behind. But embracing this view, as Beuys showed, as Gunter Demnig and his “stumbling stones” show, as Habermas and Ratzinger show,