Ronald Beiner. Dangerous minds

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Ronald Beiner (Toronto)

Dangerous minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the return of the Far Right

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.

Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

Transcript

August Baker: Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker, and today I'm talking with Professor Ronald Beiner about his book, Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, University of Pennsylvania Press. Welcome, Professor Beiner. Ronald Beiner: I'm happy to participate. Thanks so much for your interest in the book. That's great. August Baker: Yes. I actually listened to it on audio. It comes in audio. I listened to it but sort of read it first. Let me just, first of all, give the listeners an overview, at least through some of the reviews of the book, and I'll just read three quick paragraphs here. August Baker: One is from John McCormick, University of Chicago. "Ronald Beiner's Dangerous Minds is a staggeringly impressive and deeply needed book that traces the philosophical foundations of contemporary reactionary politics in the philosophical works of Nietzsche and Heiddeger. Beiner avoids both shrillness while confronting present-day opponents of liberal democracy; and shallowness while excavating the work of their intellectual heroes. Indeed, he treats authors such as Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin with deathly seriousness, and he soberly and with exquisite philosophical care delves into the fundamental core of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's writings. Dangerous Minds is elegantly structured and beautifully written. It will be widely read and debated in this frightening age of fascist resurgence." August Baker: Second one is Steven Smith, Yale University. "A great book. If it proves anything, it's that ideas have consequences, often profound and dangerous ones. One perhaps unintended benefit of the emergence of the new right is that it forces readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger to see them for what they are: apostles of a resurgent fascism. For those accustomed to reading these thinkers as prophets of individual liberation and moral self realization, Ronald Beiner has a clear message: think again." August Baker: Finally, from Contemporary Political Theory: "In this erudite, insightful and short monograph, Ronald Beiner takes aim at often French-inspired intellectuals who believe that Nietzsche and Heidegger can and should be deployed to advance a progressive or radically democratic politics. Beiner believes that the two philosophers often serve as better resources for fascists. Dangerous Minds mounts its critique in the light of the recent rise of far right movements, which often rely on Nietzsche and Heidegger for philosophical ballast." August Baker: Professor Beiner, do you have any corrections or clarifications on those? Ronald Beiner: No. I kind of appreciate the generous reactions to the book, and I think they all kind of stated what the basic enterprise is. So... August Baker: Good. Ronald Beiner: ... I'm comfortable with those blurbs. So... August Baker: Right. Right. I understand that. I want to read, start off, a paragraph from your book. You say, "Hopefully, no reader of my book will draw from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche Heidegger, that is, stop reading them. On the contrary, I think we need to read them in ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life, and hence what defines that view of life." Would you expand on that? I thought that was an interesting approach. Ronald Beiner: Yeah. Happy to do that. Someone actually said quite recently on a podcast where my book came up, said, "I don't want people reading Nietzsche. I'm trying to dissuade people from Nietzsche." Well, that's just complete nonsense. I never said that. I never have said it. I never would say it. It's kind of basically a slander. I myself been reading Nietzsche and Heidegger my whole adult life. I mean, since I became a political theorist in my early 20s. I've taught them. The book came from a grad seminar I taught on Nietzsche. So if I'm teaching him, I want people to read him and read Heidegger and learn from them and draw from them insights that will be helpful in dealing with contemporary cultural and political crises, which that's the context for the book. That gives us extra reason to read them, try and understand what their essential message is and learn from them. Ronald Beiner: Unfortunately, the people seem not to have gotten the core message or think that, well, there is no core message. He's just being playful or he's just tossing out ideas, or he's kind of contributing to a wonderful hyperpluralism or something like that. Well, I think that's just mistaken. I think people who think that need to reread Nietzsche or reread both of them and understand better what the core vision is. Once we understand that, perhaps it'll make it easier for us to cope with and respond to the kind of cultural and political crises we currently face. That's why I wrote the book. If you're writing a book on them, if I just wanted to shoo them away and or not engage with them and not encourage other people to engage with them. Ronald Beiner: The core insight one needs to get here is with respect to Nietzsche, to start with Nietzsche, and Heidegger in this respect is a kind of disciple of Nietzsche, political disciple of Nietzsche. I think he understood himself in those terms, that there is a definite political project in Nietzsche. I mean, it's just shocking the number of commentators who refer to Nietzsche as he's apolitical; he's antipolitical. There's no politics in Nietzsche; there's no political philosophy in Nietzsche. All that's just so totally wrong that it's hard to fathom how people could read this thinker and think such a thing. It may be that the majority of readers are somehow getting that crazy upside-down idea of Nietzsche from there not being a politics or political project in Nietzsche. That political project is what's powering, what's animating the whole thing. These thousands and thousands of pages he's writing, there's politics on every page of Nietzsche. Ronald Beiner: The core of his thought is that there is a political imperative to undo the cultural political dispensation in which we currently live, which is a kind of liberal egalitarian dispensation inherited from the French Revolution, liberal thinkers in 19th century, such as Hegel and Tocqueville assumed that that dispensation was irreversible, that the world we're launched into by the French Revolution cannot be undone and should not be undone and it raises us to a notably higher level. Ronald Beiner: Nietzsche thinks the opposite. That it's degrading. That it's dehumanizing, that it's impossible to have culture within the political, moral, political horizons shaped by the French Revolution. Nietzsche thinks that politics should be at the service of culture, but if you have the wrong kind of politics, you can't have culture. What is taken to be culture in a liberal egalitarian world is a non-culture, a pseudo-culture. Heidegger says the same thing, a moribund pseudo-civilization, he calls it. Ronald Beiner: The political project is to undo those horizons, undo that dispensation so we can once again live in a culture, live in a world where culture is possible. For Nietzsche, culture is what everything is about. But culture has political conditions. If you live in a world where everyone thinks they're the equal of everyone else... I mean, for him, the only real culture's top-down cultures. So if you live in a world where top-down cultures are unacceptable, then you live in a culture-less world. I think Nietzsche and Heidegger shared that view, and hence their political preoccupations were the same, that that world has to be swept away or it has to be razed, or we'd have to start over, wipe the slate clean and recreate a world where you can have real cultures. Ronald Beiner: So, the idea that this is unpolitical in any sense, that's just in insanity. If that's what most people are getting out Nietzsche, they really have to take another look at those texts and reread them because they're missing the forest for the trees. I'm trying to set that straight, not because I don't want them to read Nietzsche, but I want them to come closer to a genuine understanding of what his enterprise is such that they can then draw insights from that about our world that can help us respond to the crises of our liberal world. August Baker: Yes. I think you touched on this a little. It's not really the topic of your book, but you touched on it a little, that what is it about us with our intellectual heroes, that once we align with someone, we want to read everything they wrote in a positive light? It's difficult to see them complexly, it seems. I find that in myself. I'm kind of like rooting for this particular philosopher or this particular thinker, and it's difficult to see where they... It's like you spend a lot of time with them, and then it's difficult to see where they're just totally wrong and you end up wanting to defend them in some way. Ronald Beiner: I can totally understand that. I'd say I spent decades reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, probably read more Nietzsche and Heidegger than reading anyone else. I felt that in myself, that you don't want to think poorly of Nietzsche. He draws you into his net. You get seduced by him. He's a retortion of genius and he knows buttons to press and how to draw people's attention and how to keep their attention and how to make people feel drawn to him. Totally understandable. My way of thinking about the book was time to square accounts with Nietzsche, precisely because I was so drawn to and seduced by him myself. So, I totally understand that. Ronald Beiner: The times in which we're living are severely serious. Stakes are very high to understand what anti-liberal thinkers are really saying. There's much more extreme example than Nietzsche and Heidegger. Look at Carl Schmidt. Look at Carl Schmidt's reception in contemporary intellectual circles. He said [inaudible 00:11:18] the left. Well, how did that happen? He's much more evil than either of those two. He was a totally, totally committed Nazi. Not that Heidegger wasn't, but Carl Schmidt's much worse. Yet, he has the same loving defenders and people apologizing for him, people kind doing all kinds of somersaults to make him out to be a good guy and a healthy contributor to contemporary culture and theory. It's just insanity. Ronald Beiner: There's not much discussion of Schmidt in the book, but it's really a kind of trinity of people who being misguidedly appropriated by people, theorists and intellectuals you should know better. All three of these guys belong very much to the far, not just the right, but the far right. They themselves understood themselves that way. They all regarded liberalism and egalitarianism as a curse. They shared the project of putting an end to it and undoing the hegemony of liberalism and of the idea of the freedom and equality of all human beings. They tested that idea. They saw it as a destruction of genuine culture. We have to fight back. In order to fight back, have to understand clearly what their project is. August Baker: Start with Nietzsche. What does the far right find in Nietzsche? Well, he writes, you quote him in Ecce Homo, that his text Beyond Good and Evil is in all essentials a critique of modernity, encompassing the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern politics. The purpose is to conjure up a contrary type that is as little modern as possible, a noble yes-saying type. White nationalists and fascists appear to be noble yes-saying types? Ronald Beiner: Well... August Baker: To the [inaudible 00:13:32] Ronald Beiner: I don't see them that way. So if a fascist is reading Nietzsche, they're going to see themselves inscribed in Nietzsche's pages. When Nietzsche gave... Often, his descriptions are kind of cryptic or incomplete or just gestures towards something without filling in the details. But insofar as he does fill in the details, it does fit what became fascism. You can't call Nietzsche a fascist because fascism didn't exist in the 19th century. But when it did come to exist, there's no question that fascists saw Nietzsche as articulating their project, their endeavor. Ronald Beiner: George Lickteim wrote that not a single fascist from Mussolini to Oswald, mostly, escaped Nietzsche's pervasive influence. Well, that's just a historical fact. The influence of Nietzsche on fascism, that's not something a hypothetical. That's just empirical. The breeding ground for what became fascism in the 30s was the what has been called the conservative revolution in the 1920s. Those people were Nietzschean and through in through in their self understanding. That fed into Nazism. Now, once they saw Hitler and saw the Nazis in power, they didn't necessarily like what they saw. They maybe saw it as too plebeian. It wasn't aristocratic enough. But of course, you're going to have these grand ideas of some wonderful aristocracy. Nietzsche himself did. Ronald Beiner: So, if Nietzsche was still around in the 30s, he might have looked down at his notes at the fascists, and says, "Well, this is more democracy. It's not aristocracy." But of course, setting some agenda for some aristocratic revolution that's going to overturn liberalism and overturn egalitarianism, well, of course it's not going to quite match what your grand vision was. That would be true of Nietzsche, too. Ronald Beiner: But there are the kind of rhetoric he does, the great question is where do we look to for the barbarians of the 20th century? He wanted barbarians. He praises barbarians. He praises vikings or civilizations that had no qualms about shedding blood. That's kind of almost a test of... That was part of the tragic vision, that we can fight wars and be up to our knees in blood and not worry about it, feel that it's part of what it is to have a civilization. August Baker: In terms of the rhetoric that is appealing to the far right, you have this quote from an early Nietzsche text on the uses and disadvantages of history for life. In talking about, you might say, the modern liberalist... I think this is what the people on the right say... The modern liberal can no longer extricate himself from the delicate net of judiciousness and truth for a simple act of will and desire. Is that what you think? Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:17:03] There's no question that Nietzsche wants to reorient the core of human life from reason to will. That whole idea that, the will to power, that if you live in a civilization that's dominated by intellect and reflection and science and reason [inaudible 00:17:23] August Baker: Dr. Fauci and... Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:17:25] civilization, and hence the kind of pseudo-civilization. The test is whether can you have a kind of civilization that, I don't know, builds pyramids? Well, to have pyramids, you need slaves. To have slaves, you can't believe in equality. You have to believe that there's a kind of top-down dictation of cultural norms. There have to be people who are mirror instruments of that. If you can't believe, liberalism undermines a belief in the kind of top-down vision of things that make it possible for there to be cultures, any cultures. Ronald Beiner: Where does liberalism come from? Well, it ultimately comes from Christianity, mediated through the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution. But ultimately, it's traceable back to Christianity and the belief that we're all equal children of God. Well, for Nietzsche, those are culture-destroying premises and they have to be destroyed. So he declares war on Christianity. What's the reason for that? Well, that too is political, that if you start with the premises of Christianity, what you end up with are liberalism as egalitarian liberalism as a general dispensation. That means no culture. People have to be ruthless and impose their will and strive for the heroic and strive for grand visions of things. That's what the fascists were trying to do. Look at their architecture. Nietzsche says, well, look, at least they're trying to be a real civilization. They aspire to be around for a thousand years. Well, no liberal civilization is going to aspire to that. They hated Christianity for precisely Nietzsche's reasons. Ronald Beiner: There's a very powerful book, my book on Nietzsche and Heidegger's very short, 1,000 page book by Domenico Losurdo called Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel in which he kind of spells out how Nietzsche's political through and through. If you're not persuade by my little book, well, I'd encourage people to read the 1,000 pages of Losurdo. Bery incisive account of what the fascist owe to Nietzche. It's all spelled out, I think, in an utterly compelling way, in a way that's, I think, irrefutable. It's not an accident that fascists historically have looked to Nietzsche as an inspiration, including, including Mussolini, including Hitler himself, went to the Nietzsche archives and warmly embraced Nietzsche's sister and had himself photographed with a bust of his hero. And contemporary fascists all love Nietzsche. There's nothing accidental about that. They have a good case for him belonging to them rather than belonging to us. It's all fully intelligible, why fascist, whether fascists of the 20s and 30s or fascists in the 21st century would find inspiration from Nietzsche. And it all makes sense. Ronald Beiner: I mean, Nietzsche's fundamental purpose as an intellectual, as a philosopher, is to de-legitimize equality. In order to do that, he has to delegitimize Christianity. That's the twin project. Everything flows from that. If you can't see that as being at the core of Nietzsche's project, I don't think you can understand anything in Nietzsche. You have to appreciate what the core is because there is a core. It's not just playful pluralism. There is a hard core there. There's a political project in Nietzsche [inaudible 00:21:14] and then there's a political project in Marx. Ronald Beiner: For Marx, the political projects just carry forward to the next stage the egalitarianism of liberalism. In Nietzsche, it's the opposite. The civilizational commitment to equality has to be completely annulled, has completely annihilated in order that there be real cultures. I think fascists see themselves as carrying that baton and putting into practice and trying to put Nietzsche's theory into action. Whether Nietzsche would have been impressed, entirely happy with the results, well, that's a different question. But then would Marx be happy with Stalinism? August Baker: I... Ronald Beiner: It's not the point. The point is there is a vision there, and fascists saw themselves as trying to realize what Nietzsche had articulated normatively. August Baker: Would you say that both for Marx and Nietzsche, they were long on criticism and short on how the new world is going to be? Ronald Beiner: Yeah. 100%. You could say that's a kind of parallel between them, that they're both writing blank checks, very dangerous blank checks. And no. Nietzsche said that the 20th century would be ideological war the likes of which would had never been seen in human history. That was more or less true. That was pretty prophetic. The ideas, well, you have the Marxist on one side and you'd have the fascists on the other, and you'd have the liberals in the middle who would be irrelevant, and that he was on one side of that ideological war. Ronald Beiner: The problem is for Nietzsche as much as for Marx. They're both utopians, but they don't fill in the content of this utopia. All the emphasis is on destroying the existing order. For Marx, we wipe out capitalism, but then what succeeds capitalism? Well, we find out later. [inaudible 00:23:22] Leninism and Stalinism. In the case of Nietzsche [inaudible 00:23:28] that they're very powerful cultural critique. Sure. Let's destroy liberalism. Then what? Well, then we get Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche didn't spell out, well, if you follow this path, you're going to wind up with Hitler. There's society. Well, we'll get to the further shore. Well, we'll figure it out when the arrow hits the further shore. Well, by time you get to the further shore, sorry, it's too late. Ronald Beiner: So, yeah. It's that part of what makes him attractive as theorists is there's a kind of tremendous kind of ambition and reaching for the stars and climbing Mount Everest culturally and intellectually. That's part of what defines our theory tradition. But the theory tradition's dangerous precisely because you get in the theory can and by virtue of your ambition, but then that can turn out to be politically ambitious if all you've done is write a bunch of blank checks. Ronald Beiner: I think both Nietzsche and Marx did that. August Baker: Yeah. One of the [inaudible 00:24:35]. Ronald Beiner: We paid the place for it in the 20th century [inaudible 00:24:37] there's no guarantee right this moment that the 21st century won't be a replay of the 20th century. God help us if it is. But there's plenty to suggest that the 21st century could turn out to be as horrifying as the 20th century was. Again, that's part of [inaudible 00:24:57] August Baker: Be realistic. Ronald Beiner: ... of what I wrote, why I wrote the book. It's here we go again. It's like Weimar over again where you get intellectuals... I guess like most liberals, the assumption was, well, fascism now will never happen again. It's in the rubbish bin of history. It'll stay in the rubbish bin of history and wouldn't go to the extent of Fukiyama, that liberal democracy who will reign forever. That was, I think, obvious nonsense from the start. Ronald Beiner: But certainly, the idea of there being fascist intellectuals, trying to pull fascism out of that rubbish bin of history, that was sort of beyond my imagination. Then I don't [inaudible 00:25:38] starting in 2015 more or less, and then it got worse after Trump was elected. You start think, well, fascist intellectual do exist. And it's back. It's back not just in with respect to mob behavior, but it's back with respect to intellectual activity. That was a very scary realization for me. I wrote this book, I guess, as feeling a kind of citizens' imperative to say something or do something with the equipment I had, to say, well, we better wake up and smell the coffee. August Baker: Yep. Yeah. One of the points you made that I thought really interesting was you said Nietzsche puts a lot of energy into exposing liberal and leftist resentment, but he turned a blind eye toward or was silent about the resentment of the right, including his own. I was like, "Yes." Ronald Beiner: It's pretty hard not to see all the resentment in the pages of Nietzsche. For him, that's the standard of the things that he rejects, supposedly, are defined by resentment and all the business about yay-saying and that's the opposite of resentment. Well, his texts are, not always, at least not every page, but there's plenty of resentment packed into Nietzsche's texts. It delegitimizes him according to the standard he himself is applying. He's not as yay-saying as he makes himself out to be. There's this rhetoric of yay-saying, but he doesn't live up to that rhetoric. I think that that's true of the political legacy he's left up till the present. Right wing populism is powered more than anything by resentment against supposed liberal elites who are running the world and so on. Well, a lot of that you can actually trace back to Nietzche. He was completely ignored in his own time. Hardly anyone knew him. Hardly anyone knew who he was. August Baker: What a miserable life. Ronald Beiner: Yeah. Not a fun life. It's a lonely life. I think he bitterly resented the fact that he wasn't being treated as the intellectual giant that he took himself to be. He was right. He was right that people would start reading him in the 20th century, in fact, regard him as one of the leading thinkers of his time. But... August Baker: He only barely saw that, I think, before he went mad. Just briefly did he realize that he was becoming successful, as I understand it. Ronald Beiner: Well, he went mad in 1889. I don't think there was much there. Yeah. Hardly any knows [inaudible 00:28:36] August Baker: Hardly, right. Ronald Beiner: ... was starting. It really picked up in the 1890s, and then as one got into the 20th century, he took off and became perhaps the most influential thinker of the 20th century or one of the most influential thinkers. August Baker: You talked about culture and one of the things that you say was that Nietzsche would say that modern liberals are to reflective about their membership in cultures and about the equal validity of alternative cultures. We do talk a lot about culture, but not in the way... I was trying to think how, with all the talk of multiculturalism, how that fits in with his critique of cultures. Ronald Beiner: Well, again, I think that you can draw a direct line from that to the contemporary far right. I think in this sense, they're precisely Nietzscheans in the strict sense, that part of what we associate with modernity and part of why Nietzsche condemns modernity is one's trying to assent to a kind of universalism where one can appreciate different cultures and what different communities within the human world have to contribute to a larger conversation and a larger human experience and a kind of impartiality. Ronald Beiner: Again, I think here where you could see Heidegger as an intellectual heir to Nietzsche, that real cultures are so deeply rooted that they don't see outside of themselves, don't see outside of their own [inaudible 00:30:19] want to. August Baker: Interesting. Ronald Beiner: And you could say the central rhetoric in Heidegger is that modern man is homeless. You get this idea in his important Letter on Humanism, that homelessness is the core modern experience. Again, it's like for Nietzsche, is what condemns modernity. For Nietzsche, what condemns modernity is there are no horizons, that the universalism that has been introduced into Western experience by Christianity has dissolved horizons. The horizon for much of Christianity was the idea of God itself, and God's dead, and we're left with nothing and we're just left with some kind of residues of Christian civilization. But those are fast eroding. And so we're left just drifting. Our kind of supposed openness to a variety of cultures shows we have no culture; we have no horizons of our own. We live in this horizonless world. Ronald Beiner: Well, Heidegger similarly, we kind of live in this homeless world where everyone's trying to be universal and they're not rooted in any particular identity or cultural experience of their own. The kind of far right attack on multiculturalism, I think, just draws straight out of that. One of these alt-right thinkers, Greg Johnson, said that the originator of the European new right was Heidegger. I think that's a plausible claim. But I think you can trace similar preoccupations back to Nietzsche, and I try and do that in the book. August Baker: As we go to Heidegger, I think immediately of Rorty in the New York Times said similar to you in the sense that we're not trying to say don't read Heidegger, but Rorty said Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come. But the smell of smoke from the crematories, the grave in the air, referring back to Paul Celan's Death Fugue, the grave in the air will linger on their pages. Ronald Beiner: I think that's true. I discuss in the book how some of the most incriminating texts in Heidegger were taken out by Heidegger in the '60s, and then when they put together the collected works in the '80s, they were put back in. I think that that tells you a lot about Heidegger, that he was never prepared to admit that he had made any mistakes. He was silent about the Holocaust, or insofar as people forced commentary out of him, it was kind even more incriminating than silence. Ronald Beiner: I think it relates to what I was saying earlier, that the core project is to destroy the liberal egalitarian world founded on the idea of a universal dignity of human beings. The commitment to fascism is actually not some... I don't know... some ornament or some add-on, but what connects quite centrally to what his fundamental project was. In a sense, if fascism didn't work out in the 20th century, well, his thought will still be around centuries later and some later version will have to try and do what Hitler and Nazis failed to do in the '30s. I mean... August Baker: Rorty also says he lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did its best to ignore the murder of the European Jews. But for those who care about philosophy, things are not so simple. He says, as far as whether to read him, and this is again getting back to your point, he managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. You can't understand really Gadamer or Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas without reading Heidegger. That's what Rdy was saying. Ronald Beiner: I pretty much agree with all that. Yeah. We should read him. He earned his place in the canon of Western philosophy. I think it's almost certainly correct that people will read him long from now just as they read Aristotle store or read Hegel. I don't want to expel him from the canon and I wouldn't want to pull his books off the library, as one prominent critic of Heidegger suggested. So, I think that's right. There's a reason why people read him, and there's a reason why he's just been essential to 20th century, as he's been, and why he had the tremendous influence he's had on a whole generation of philosophers, many of whom I kind of cherish. Same for Nietzsche. I mean, they are a indispensable part of the history of modern philosophy. That's not a reason to try and whitewash them or [inaudible 00:35:32]. August Baker: Exactly. Ronald Beiner: ... apologize for them or kind of pretend that the project was something different than what it really was. August Baker: Right. Ronald Beiner: [inaudible 00:35:41]. August Baker: No, absolutely. Ronald Beiner: Look at that clear-sightedly and face up to it and understand why these thinkers have such attraction for people who are not good liberals, but who are ferociously anti-liberal. Those people are on the rise and have a big and growing following. If they understand themselves in Nietzsche and Heidegger in terms we have to understand that and maybe if necessary, reread Nietzsche and Heidegger until we're clear about it, and trying to contribute in my modest way to that. August Baker: That's certainly the way I understood it. Fascinating. We don't have time. But for the listener, there's an interesting anecdote you have about your own personal interactions with Gadamer and Habermas, which is quite interesting. Time, unfortunately. But I was just wondering, what are you working on now? Freud? Is that... Ronald Beiner: Well, I'm writing a book called Moses and Political Philosophy, looking at the whole diversity of appropriations of the Moses story within the Western theory canon, and I'm co-writing it with my friend Harrison Floss. Freud figures in that because of course he wrote [inaudible 00:37:06] that's why he gets included in the book. But it's kind of a broader story of how Moses intersects with Western theory. August Baker: Well, we look forward to that. Professor Beiner, thank you so much for talking with me. Was really interesting and I really enjoyed the book, and appreciate what you've done with that. Ronald Beiner: Great. Well, thanks so much for your interest in it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. August Baker: Same here. Okay. Bye.