Heidegger’s Downfall
-
Loading... - David Belmonte
- 23 Feb 2023
- 59 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
Richard Wolin’s reappraisal of Martin Heidegger offers both original contributions and a synthesis of critical scholarship. The result is a timely work of enduring importance.
On April 21st, 1933, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, then famous as the author of the 1927 philosophical treatise Being and Time, gave one of the most famous speeches delivered by any scholar living in the dictatorships of the 20th century. It was titled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” and it called upon students at the University of Freiburg to abandon objectivity and academic freedom and instead join the “spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German Volk [people] the stamp of history” while the “moribund pseudocivilization” of the West “collapses into itself.”
By the time Heidegger delivered that speech, the Nazi regime had already declared a national emergency and suspended civil liberties following the Reichstag Fire of February 28th. The regime had violently destroyed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, thereby clearing a path to dictatorship, and it had introduced national legislation calling for the expulsion of all Jews from the civil service. The antisemitic clauses of the Nazi Party were now government policy, and purges of Jewish professors were underway in the universities, including at Freiburg, where Heidegger had just been elected rector. Over the summer and into the fall, he openly declared his support and admiration for Hitler and the new regime and called upon all to vote for the Nazis in elections.
For many of his contemporaries, Heidegger’s texts of spring to fall 1933 offered sufficient proof that he had placed the prestige of the academy in the service of evil—a paradigmatic example of the betrayal of the intellectuals who abandoned liberal democracy for the supposed benefits of totalitarianism. But a spectrum of theorists across the Left and Right have stubbornly refused to accept that the reputation Heidegger acquired in 1927 as a serious philosopher was dented by his support for Nazism, which they maintain was merely an irrelevant (albeit embarrassing) deviation.
In six previous books since 1990, American historian Richard Wolin has sought to take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher while also placing him in the context of German intellectual and political history. In his seventh installment in this series, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Wolin examines the philosopher’s Black Notebooks. Finally published between 2014 and 2022, in volumes 94 to 102 of his collected works, the Black Notebooks contain essays, lectures, and notes Heidegger wrote between 1931 and 1970. Read More…
