The "Heidegger affair" as an institution of sophistry: On rightness and reason

The idea of the “politically correct,” when said with scorn (which the right, certain of the unarguable correctness of its own convictions, trades much in in lieu of argument) , is one of a reduction of reason to psychology, which is the dominant tendency of thinking in our time in all realms touching on social control or management. It is of the nature of opinions that they exist in a public sphere where they are understood to be propositions, asserted and proposed as possibly true and important, that they are expressions of states of mind and preference but not only that. “Political correctness” is rightly scorned as a wrong way of deciding the identity and difference between the private, or personal, where beliefs are held because they please the one who holds them, and the political, or public. People whose thinking is “politically correct” in the wrong way say of what is privately felt that it is publicly true, when they should just retreat to privacy.

The ever-repeated "Heidegger affair" has as its condition of possibility the assumption that philosophy is a matter of opinions, and the rightness of opinions is established and secured by neither facts nor reasoning, but social propriety. There could be no equivalent of the Heidegger affair in mathematics.

Though there is at least one near-equivalent in mathematical logic: Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern predicate logic and analytical philosophy, was himself an anti-Semite. This little-known fact has apparently troubled the sleep of no defenders of the priority of morality to logic. This is doubtless because logic and analytical philosophy are associated with positivist ideas of science. Their corollary in ethics is legal positivism, which holds that the law has no foundation and needs none, except the originary power of a legislating authority, which in fact founds normativity in a state of exception. A positivism of norms and a sophism that refuses normativity (there are no truths, everyone may think as they please), which is what grounds the possibility that opinions are mere properties of the people who hold them, are, obviously, both refusals of reason. 

Frege's argument against "psychologism" is a refutation of sophism. Psychologism in logic holds that states of mind are what determine the meaning of statements. A statement means what it does because that is what the person who holds or enunciates it believes, and maybe expresses how he feels. In bureaucratic situations, and it is clear enough on reflection that a bureaucratic society, that is, "the state" (which is roughly the set of institutions in a society, both public and private; it is that set of institutions constituted in thought and social life as a totality), whoever has power in the situation is right, and they and those subject to them may believe this is for the reasons they give. Whoever is not in power is entitled to believe what is "(just) your opinion." Kant said that freedom is when while doing what you are told, you may privately think what you like.

Psychologism is false by virtue of a reductio ad absurdum. Which does mean that logic must be assumed to prove the truth of logic. But no other meaning can be given to statements about matters of fact. I say "2+2=4," "The sun is shining," or "Black lives matter," part of what I mean is that the statement is true, that it matters or is important, that it could turn out to be false though I expect otherwise, that I want you to agree, or else persuade me that I am mistaken, and that I am prepared to give reasons to show that it is true, and all good persons must recognize it.

The tacit presupposition of all ad hominem arguments about works of thought or art is a psychologistic reduction, which in turn makes possible the reduction of thought to morality. And to a morality that exists prior to thought.

What this means is just that we live in a highly performative society, performative in both Austin's sense of the performative utterance, essentially commands, and the theatrical sense of appearing in public spaces as if wearing a mask that consists of how we appear, and wanting approbation and fearing shame.

This society is thus more aesthetic than political, and its aesthetics is Platonist, which is why it rests on so much social control of people by their peers on the basis of an assumption that statements are reduced to presentations or images that are to be evaluated merely in terms of how well the person is performing. There is then only a good and bad that pertains to performance, and this normativity is both moral and a matter of social conformity, so that evil is assimilated to the ugly, which ought not to be shown, as the obscene is shameful. This way of thinking dictates the need for censorship, such as we have today in the university and corporate worlds, where at the hands of progressives or left-liberals, the one great sin is shaming another person by offending and insulting them by speaking improperly of their social group membership. Beneath this idea lies Plato's of mimesis: art and thought present likenesses. And people want to be like what they like or appreciate. What looks cool to them. The people who think this way are apt to follow the leader.

This society is anti-philosophical and therefore anti-intellectual and anti-democratic.