Re: Caring-for, and Dasein



On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Christopher Rickey wrote:

> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 15:29:41 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Christopher Rickey <crickey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Caring-for, and Dasein
>
> On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, William Lenco wrote:
>
> > Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 10:27:27 -0300
> > From: William Lenco <c6v9@xxxxxx>
> > To: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject: Re: Caring-for, and Dasein
> >
> > I think that it is completely useless to discuss the personal politics of
> > Heidegger as if it had any bearing on what he actually had say in his
> > philosophy (unless it did and I don't believe that Heidegger is read as if
> > it did). He didn't preach Nazism (or any other ism) and I find it almost
> > innane that anyone would find it relevant except from a historical
> > perspective. From the perch of philosophy what difference does it make?
> > Heck, maybe Hegel tortured small animals for fun; Plato *did* like young
> > boys. I still really liked their work.
>
> Of the many people who have commented on the relationship of Heidegger's
> philosophy and politics, very few have completely separated the two:
> Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty are two examples. Arendt pulls off her
> "salvation" of Heidegger by completely separating thinking from worldly
> affairs, which completely misses the historical nature of Heidegger's
> philosophizing. Anyway, Heidegger himself says he was led to his
> involvement through his long-held belief in the dissolution of science as
> an effective force in life and via Nietzsche's understanding of the death
> of God. Both are integral, perhaps the integral, parts of his thinking,
> both prewar and postwar. If his Nazism was some sort of nervous tic, no
> one would care, but the fact is that he claims the fundamental impulses
> of his thought were the counterpart to the truth and greatness of
> National Socialism.
>
> As for preaching Nazism, read his texts from 1933 and 1934 when he was
> rector. I'll leave it to you to decide if that counts as preaching.
>
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
Arendt's defense is even more offensive than that: the suggestion is that
the egregiousness of his political error is evidence of the
significance of his philosophy, because, after all, Plato made a similar
mistake.

An absolute separation of Heidegger's thought from his behavior and
political choices is not only as facile conceptually as a simple
identification of the two, it is deeply at odds with the entire impulse
of his reinvestigation of what thinking is. A thought that refuses to
take any responsibility for its facticity or the particular appropriation
it makes of the thrownness that it embodies is deeply inauthentic, in the
very terms of Sein und Zeit. A blanket condemnation of Heidegger, even if
it were feasible, would be a stupid reaction to his ghastly political
orientation; but to save him at the cost of positing some weakly
ideological autonomy of his philosophy, as if fundamental ontology could
be taken up on the other side of a protective fence erected by the New
Criticism or l'art pour l'art, is simply not to understand what radical
phenomenology is. Denying that there is a problem is an immature and
lazy attempt to conjure it away. Heidegger did not resign from the Nazi
Party when he resigned the rectorship, Heidegger continued to be
convinced of the potential transformative power of National Socialism
until the end of his life, Heidegger was, with Wittgenstein, one of the two
most important philosophers of the 20th Century. These facts need to be
dealt with. Thinking is work.


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