Malcolm Bradbury's novel Doctor Criminale may appeal to readers of this blog in search of entertainment. It's the story of a graduate in pomo literary studies who's tasked with writing a TV documentary on one of Europe's foremost intellectuals, Bazlo Criminale, known partly for his famous quarrel over irony with Heidegger. The Doctor has a mysterious past in Communist Hungary, which our hero slowly uncovers through the Doctor's aquaintances in Vienna and Budapest, and then by following the Doctor to conferences in Italy and Switzerland. The more he learns the more the intrigue grows, especially about the author of the only biography of Criminale.

Yet, as I'd noticed earlier, the book also seemed quite distant and critical. And this was particularly true of one section that I had not really taken in before.

    This was actually not too surprising, since it was an extremely obscure discussion of something the book called 'Criminale's silence'. It turned on various deep philisophical concepts, as well as on some splendid German compound nouns that reached parts of thought that even my larger German dictionary did not reach. It concerned his interpretation of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher with whom he had had, in print, a very famous quarrel (it was over irony, you will probably recall). Criminale's attack was in English translation, and by putting this and the book together I was able to grasp rather more of the issue this time round. Briefly, the question was whether it was possible to elevate thought over circumstance. The issue was Heidegger's famous silence after 1945, when the acknowledgedly great German thinker had refused to give any real account or explanation of his activities both as a philosopher and as a university rector over the Nazi years. (Incidentally, there is plenty written about this, if you want to follow it up.) Despite being banned from teaching for a while, Heidegger simply insisted that his thought lay so immeasurably far above and beyond the historical episode of Hitlerism and the Holocaust that it required no explanation, no confession, no apology.

    To Criminale, Heidegger was here taking the line of Hegel: 'So much the worse for the world if it does not follow my principles.' But this, Criminale said, led his thought into a fundamental philosophical error. This arose from two contradictory beliefs: thought stood above history, but also created it. For Heidegger, the task of the German philosopher (Heidegger saw Germany as the true philosophical nation) was therefore to deliver German history. That Heidegger tried. He thus trapped philosophy in an impossible position. He was fundamental to modern philosophy, no doubt about that. He placed it over and above history; yet the philosophy helped make the history, and it proved disastrous. Criminale held that this was in fact inevitable, since history could never satisfy philosophy, being made of muddle, conflict, and uncertainty. But that is what led to 'Heidegger's silence', which was impotence, and marked the end of the road not just for his thought but for his concept of the philosopher's task itself.

    So Criminale took the opposite view: the philosopher's work was what he called 'thinking with history'. This meant that philosophy itself was actually 'a form of irony', one of his more famous remarks. It observed failure, and dimantled itself. It did not consider a truth was something that corresponded to a reality. It assumed there was no escape from time and chance. However, the author of the book (this made the who, who, who much more interesting) argued that this had simply caught Criminale in the opposite trap. His view tied philosophy irretrievably to muddle, historical directionlessness, moral confusion. It also robbed him of the means of being free to think, or even to decide. So if one path lead to 'Heidegger's silence', the other lead to what was called 'Criminale's silence', which prevented him from constructing any form of mental or ethical independence. A familiar state, I thought, not unlike my own.

What Criminale's biography says, hinges on, as Mensonge said somewhere, the absence of its author.  ¶ 7:42 PM