Why is heidegger an idiot

A cool judge of history? He turned out to be a tall, disarming man of fifty who sounded less like a judge than a disappointed lover. In a soft German accent, he explained what it had been like to read the notebooks for the first time.

Why is he doing this? Berkowitz, who served as moderator, started things off by reading passages from the black notebooks. Then, slowly, the professors, along with members of the audience, tried to talk about what Heidegger had written.

No one knew what to say; the conversation was halting and desultory. After a while, the group paused for wine and crackers—the glummest cocktail hour ever. Anyone who is capable of that sort of argument cannot be trusted to think. After the break, the group reconvened in a more reflective mood. Someone else wondered how Heidegger, who had chosen to publish these notebooks, imagined people would react to them.

He set the publication schedule himself, ensuring that the black notebooks would be published last. Had he meant, by further damaging his reputation, to atone? There was a weary tone to much of the discussion, as if the Heideggerians, having been pushed around for too long, might at last have reached the end of their tolerance. These books have always been controversial in themselves. But, because of them, Heideggerians have been forced to grow accustomed to a certain set of facts.

But he was also an enthusiast. He remained a member of the Party until , but was on its margins. This parallel alone sometimes leads me to the conclusion that Hitler is an exceptional individual.

The opprobrium Martin Heidegger directs at Jews in the letters may have been typical of the widespread anti-Semitic discourse and conspiracy theories of the time.

After the end of the war, Heidegger stayed true to this victim mentality, both in regard to his country and to himself. And the Jews? Translated from the German by Charles Hawley. If the man himself was—to put it minimally—a Nazi sympathizer, is his philosophy also in some way fascistic? Does his thought, in whole or part, lend itself to political reaction or at least a nondemocratic view of the world?

And those convictions did not change when, in the mid-Thirties, he became disappointed with the direction the party was taking. In fact, Heidegger admitted as much. Victor Farias, a Chilean who studied with Heidegger and now teaches at the Free University of Berlin, has dramatically reopened the question with his Heidegger et le nazisme.

The book is currently being translated into ten languages. Temple University Press will bring it out in English early next year. Even though some of his information has been public knowledge for a long time, much of it, especially the documents Farias found in East German archives and in the Documentation Center in West Berlin, had not been published before and is of enormous value.

I say this without having seen the forthcoming German edition of the work, which will add three new chapters and correct the numerous errors that mar the French edition. For example:. And that idiot Heidegger has gotten us into this mess, after we elected him rector to bring us a new spiritual vision for the universities. What irony! On December 13, , Heidegger sent a letter to a group of German academics, requesting financial support for a book of pro-Hitler speeches by professors that was to be circulated to intellectuals around the world.

On September 29, —knowing full well that this could cost Staudinger his job—Heidegger leaked information to the local minister of education that Staudinger had been a pacifist during World War I.

Three weeks later Heidegger recommended a milder punishment, but only because he feared adverse international reaction to the dismissal of such a famous scholar.

The ministry humiliated Staudinger. It forced him to submit his resignation, then dangled it in front of him for six months before tearing it up and giving him back his job. Eduard Baumgarten, a student of American philosophy.

After lecturing at the University of Wisconsin in the Twenties, Baumgarten returned to his native Germany to do advanced research under Heidegger. But in they had a falling out over philosophy. On December 16, , Heidegger, unbeknownst to Baumgarten, wrote a damning letter to Dr. By family background and intellectual orientation Dr. Baumgarten comes from the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber. During his stay here [at Freiburg] he was anything but a National Socialist.

Have there been any changes in his political attitude since then? I know of none. Unquestionably his stay in the United States—during which he became very Americanized—allowed him to acquire a solid understanding of that country and its inhabitants.

But I have excellent reasons for doubting the sureness of his political instincts and the capacity of his judgment. In , after a de-Nazification committee had confronted him with the letter, Heidegger sent Baumgarten a brief note. The question of whether—or to what degree—Heidegger was an anti-Semite is much debated.

On the one hand, Heidegger claimed after the war that his defense of certain Jewish professors and his support for certain of his Jewish students during the Thirties proved that he was not anti-Semitic; this was before the Baumgarten letter became known publicly.

On the other hand, as we have seen, Farias and Ott have documented despicable conduct concerning Jews. And from other sources we now know that after Heidegger declined to direct the doctoral dissertations of Jewish students: he sent all those students to his Catholic colleague Professor Martin Honecker.

But this attitude of his should not be misunderstood as anti-Semitism, although it has often been interpreted that way. As he was leaving, Heidegger asked him not to take things badly. For the hundreds of pages that he published on the dehumanizing powers of modern civilization, for all the ink he spilled decrying the triumph of a spiritless technology, Heidegger never saw fit, as far as I know, to publish a single word on the death camps.

Instead, he pleaded ignorance of the fate of the Jews during the war—even though the Jewish population of Baden, where Heidegger lived, dropped dramatically from 20, in to in , and even though virtually all of the who remained were deported to France on October 22, , and thence to Izbica, the death camp near Lublin. As Heidegger was lecturing on Nietzsche in the Forties, there were only Jews left in all of Baden.

We have his statements about the six million unemployed at the beginning of the Nazi regime, but not a word about the six million who were dead at the end of it. But even though he did not publish anything on the Holocaust, he did mention it in two unpublished lectures and in at least one letter. All three texts are characterized by a rhetoric, a cadence, a point of view that are damning beyond commentary. Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations [it was the year of the Berlin blockade], the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses.

They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible. Two years earlier, on January 20, , Heidegger answered the letter of his former student, Herbert Marcuse, who had inquired why he had not yet spoken out about the Nazi terror and the murder of six million Jews.

It is not as if, after the war, Heidegger made no attempt to explain or justify his actions under the Nazi regime. In fact, he did a lot of explaining. In he produced three texts one for a de-Nazification committee, one for the rector of Freiburg University, and one for his own files , and in he gave a long interview to Der Spiegel , which at his request was published posthumously.

However, so riddled are they with omissions, historical errors, and self-serving interpretations that these texts can be used only with the greatest caution and a constant cross-check of the facts. In the book, which was issued eight years after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger attacks certain hack Nazi philosophers and, in the process, makes a daring affirmation:. The publication of this passage in caused a great stir in Germany.

Heidegger responded to such questions in a letter to the editors of Die Zeit September 24, :. It would have been easy to drop the aforementioned sentence, along with other ones you cite, from the printed manuscript. But I did not, and I will keep it there in the future because, for one thing, the sentences belong historically to the lecture course….

And again, in the Spiegel interview of , Heidegger reiterated that the sentence as printed in corresponded exactly to the text of the handwritten manuscript from which he had lectured in —no changes.

But now we know that Heidegger intentionally misrepresented the facts. And yet, to the day he died, he continued to maintain that his lecture notes read exactly that way and that he had never tampered with them. But in the Heidegger archives in Marbach, West Germany, that page of the original manuscript is—missing. Some matters are trivial. Other matters are not so trivial. Equally suspect are his claims that he broke with the regime and its projects in He also left no doubt about his faith in Hitler; only two things had he underestimated: the vitality of the Christian Churches and the obstacles to the Anschluss of Austria.

The only thing that seemed questionable to him was the endless organizing, at the expense of vital energies. And later that summer in his course on Schelling, Heidegger had some good things to say about the leaders of European fascism, even if he thought they had not gone far enough:. The two men who, each in his own way, have introduced a counter-movement to nihilism—Mussolini and Hitler—have learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially different way.