The Un-moored Pronoun

Martin Hiedegger

The following appears in the 8 November 2009 issue of The New York Times.

In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of his own beliefs. While he doesn’t dispute Heidegger’s place in the intellectual pantheon, Mr. Faye reviews his unpublished lectures and concludes his philosophy was based on the same ideas as National Socialism.

Note that the phrases highlighted in bold are essentially parallel—or so one assumes on first reading the passage. And yet that second “his,” the “his” highlighted in red, seems rather to have lost its mooring. Shouldn’t the sentence read as follows? “In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of their own beliefs.” Almost certainly the reference, here, is to the Anti-Semitic “beliefs” of Eliot and to the white-supremacist bearing of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (based on Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen). Whereas “his,” as it works in the paragraph published in the NYT, floats in reference, almost as if its antecedent were, in fact, “Mr. Faye,” which simply cannot be the case, as I read the paragraph. I run across such solecisms in the NYT fairly regularly these days.