Hitler wasn't spiritual enough

The most popular European philosophical movement of the last generation has been "Deconstructionism" sometimes called "post-structuralism" or "postmodernism". Jacques Derrida 1930-2004) is usually named as the father figure of the movement.. Derrida believed that the history of Western philosophy had been a futile quest for a logos, i.e., a creative presence or original intelligence that gives meaning and purpose to all things, a transcendent Word or reference point from which all particular points get their bearings. In short, God or Reason.  Deconstructionism has been a sustained attack upon the idea of "Logos" and a rejection of the classical Western philosophical tradition.

Since Plato, "Logocentrists" have considered meaning to emanate  from some logos or original source that is pure and undefiled. So, for instance, if one wanted to understand Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, it was thought that he could, ideally, with enough background study, close reading, empathy, etc., arrive at the undefiled and original understanding of the work that Jane Austen possessed as she wrote it and sent it out into the world. Deconstructionists deny we can ever arrive at or even approximate to such an understanding. They reject the idea of knowing Jane Austen and claim we can only know the text and even the text can't be understood "objectively" since its meaning changes according to whoever is handling or reading it. There is no original construction to be had. So deconstructionists spend their time disabusing the rest of us of the notion that we objectively know any text, event, person or thing. Everything is perspectival and malleable.

This is a revolution in Western thought. Historically, examples of the rejected Logos would include:

• Plato’s Forms,
• John’s Logos,
• Augustine’s Trinity,
• Descartes’ Mind,
• Kant’s "Thing in Itself",
• Hegel’s "Idea" or "Absolute Spirit" 
• Coleridge’s "I Am that I Am".
• Sometimes this logos becomes internalized and is known as the absolute self or transcendent ego.

Derrida sees all these efforts as failures. There is no pure and undefiled source of meaning from which we can gain orientation to life's ultimate purpose. No great I Am, no Ideal Form, no knowing the thing-in-itself, no Logos. 

 According to the "logocentrist", the purpose of all art and language is to point back to this original pure and undefiled source. Louis Markos in his lecture series From Plato to Postmodernism traces this history. He also describes Derrida's immediate predecessors. For example,

• Nietzsche who did away with concepts like Being and Truth.
• Freud who dismissed the subjective Self as a reliable transcendent presence.
• Heidegger who did away with a pre-existent, eternal Being or "I Am". 

In my read of things, Nietzsche really deserves the credit for the grand break with the "logocentric" tradition of classical, scholastic, enlightenment and Catholic confidence in Reason. Nietzsche described our culture's killing not only of God but of Reason.

So what happens when we've lost any sense of ultimate meaning but can't deny the abiding power of art and language in our lives. That's where Heidegger and his fascination with language was so important and why his lapse into Nazism was so instructive. When we reject God as the source of ultimate meaning, we don't reject all meaning. We are meaning seeking creatures and are driven to locate the source of meaning in something other than God. We fill the vacuum left in our hearts. Even Nazism was plausible to the man who rejected any sense of logos.

Martin Heidegger wasn't the only thinker in this genealogy of elite postmodern thought to be stained by contact with Nazism. Derrida, a Jew himself, was taken by surprise to find that his friend and colleague Paul de Man (1919-1983) had been a Nazi collaborationist during WWII. De Man had also displayed a sophisticated anti-semitism in some of his letters. This must have been especially vexing for Derrida since, coincidentally, his friendship with de Man began at the very conference in which Derrida came to public notice with his 1966 seminal essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." He should have loved the irony. At the very conference that launched the most popular academic assault on "logocentrism" in our generation, a irrational and barbaric ghost of Europe's rejection of Christianity hung over this next generation's new spokesman. The shadow of the twisted cross was cast across the lecture hall. Derrida, however, went on to defend Heidegger and de Man refusing to see what we fogey logocentrists thought we saw: Deny God and dance with the devil.

In a 1982 article I just stumbled on tonight, "Heidegger is no Hero", Ivan Strenski points out that the Nazis disappointed Heidegger, de Man and others like him mainly because they were not as “spiritual” as some followers had believed them to be. They settled down to administration and forsook the spiritual revolution Heidegger seemed to have welcomed in 1933.

"Heidegger’s reversal, then, was not so much away from a spiritual ideology which he genuinely believed Hitler embodied, but merely away from the Führer’s failure to live up to Heidegger’s Nazi ideals. Say what one will about the dubious quality of Heidegger’s judgment here, the problem for his interpreters seems to remain one of demonstrating that his later philosophical views are any less dubious than his earlier ones -- especially as they are rooted in the manner in which he lived."

Kresta theology point: Pope John Paul II was intimately acquainted with both the political and philosophical consequences of rejecting the Word, the Logos and he lamented Europe's postmodern condition much as Jesus wept over Jerusalem as His people rejected the Logos made flesh.

“I would like to mention in a particular way the loss of Europe’s Christian memory and heritage, accompanied by a kind of practical agnosticism and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. It is no real surprise, then, that there are efforts to create a vision of Europe that ignores its religious heritage and, in particular, its profound Christian soul, asserting the rights of the peoples who make up Europe without grafting those rights onto the trunk that is enlivened by the sap of Christianity…

“This loss of Christian memory is accompanied by a kind of fear of the future. Tomorrow is often presented as something bleak and uncertain. The future is viewed more with dread than with desire. Among the troubling indications of this are the inner emptiness that grips many people and the loss of meaning in life. The signs and fruits of this existential anguish include, in particular, the diminishing number of births, the decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and the difficulty, if not the outright refusal, to make lifelong commitments, including marriage…." 

May his insight motivate us in our work of the New Evangelization. As Europe declines as the center of world Christianity, might America experience a baptism of Catholic spirituality and a confirmation to follow a path unlike her European parents. Then again, the future vitality of the Church may emanate from Africa. In any case, if God's judgment in history collapses Western political, economic and philosophical preeminence, we need not be afraid. Isn't it another opportunity to cast out into the deep and toss out our nets. As for Heidegger, de Man and the rest of us, the divine mercy promises that, for the sake of His sorrowful Passion, none of us need to be defined by our own worst act. The Logos has redefined, regenerated and redeemed us.