Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 ReviewMy review is going to differ from most of the others here in that I've actually read the book. This is no mean feat because it is pretty densely written and it refers to countless historical figures unlikely to be familiar to American readers, even those who have studied 20th century German Philosophy and Heidegger. Many of the people Faye discusses are second tier jurists or others who are relatively unknown. Faye also discusses better known figures, like Carl Schmitt and various students of Heidegger (a surprising number of whom were Jewish), but a substantial percentage of them are not academic household names.
Because anything touching politically controversial figures raises suspicions of one's own particular partisanship, let me provide some context by stating in rough outline my own positions. First, I'm extremely liberal politically, very, very far to the left. I consider today's Democratic party a moderate right part (as opposed to the Republicans, who have devolved into a radical right party) and I lament that there is no viable left in America today. I took a graduate seminar on Heidegger and read him in other grad school classes, but my philosophical preferences, despite specializing on Kierkegaard in my proposed but uncompleted doctoral dissertation, leaned strongly in the direction of Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin. So Heidegger represents neither my philosophical nor political ideal.
And I have no trouble whatsoever about viewing Heidegger as a Nazi. I will confess that this book reshaped my views about Heidegger and Nazism. Prior to the book I believed that Heidegger had backed away from the Nazis after ending his rectorship and that he had been rather tepid afterwards. Faye did convince me he never lost his Nazi beliefs, though I am not certain what his feelings about the extermination of the Jews were after its reality became public knowledge were nor does Faye give us much of a clue. So, while I have no doubts that Heidegger remained a Nazi even after his rectorship ended and that he attempted to systematically deceive everyone after WW II about his connections to the Nazi party, it is far from clear what his attitudes were towards the nastiest aspect of the party in the forties. This does not let Heidegger off the hook as one might think, since everything about Nazis in the thirties were completely nasty, but it leaves open the question of what his attitude towards the Final Solution was.
Faye goes into excruciating detail into the details of lectures that Heidegger gave in the thirties, either lectures that have not been released at all or some that were released but carefully edited to omit some of the more controversial passages. Faye provides a valuable service by rendering it beyond doubt that Heidegger did not give up his Nazi beliefs after leaving his rectorship and that he did not cease to be an admirer of Hitler. The latter is important because many, including Victor Farias, who was crucial in making Heidegger's Nazism popular public knowledge, argued that while Heidegger was a Nazi, he was neither an admirer of Hitler nor an advocate of the biological school of Nazism. Faye shows that the former was not true, that Heidegger never lost his admiration for Hitler. This is perhaps the greatest single value of Faye's book, dispelling this mistake about Heidegger. But I think that Faye completely gets wrong the significance of Heidegger's abjuration of the biological school. Here is why: under the biological view of Jews, their fault lies in their genes (or so they would have said if they had had access to genetic terminology) and therefore nothing can be done for them except to either isolate them away from all Aryans or to kill them. Goebbels and the other main Nazis actually preferred relocating Jews, preferably either to Russia or to Madagascar, but with the losses in North Africa and failures in the Eastern Front, relocating Jews was cut off as an option. This was when they moved to the Final Solution (final because it was the only solution that they envisioned after the loss of relocation options). But Heidegger held to a more traditional form of Anti-Semitism whereby Jews were not locked into biology. Being Jewish was for Heidegger more a mental state than a dictate of biology. Therefore the traditional solution to the "Jewish problem" was open to him: conversion. Jews were not "irreclaimable" as they were for Hitler and Goebbels, because they could convert. Heidegger was absolutely whacked out and held absolutely evil beliefs about Jews and the goals and aims of the Nazis, but Faye is incapable of granting any such distinctions.
Despite the new insights that Faye offers about Heidegger, this is nonetheless an appalling book. One of Faye's arguments is that Heidegger cannot be considered a philosopher because of his political beliefs, which represent a complete denial of all humane values. But I don't think that Faye's book can be considered either a work of philosophy or a work of historical scholarship simply because he has one and only one goal in writing the book: the identification and condemnation of Heidegger as a Nazi. He not only is not a dispassionate thinker, he is a person with a goal: proving that Heidegger is evil. He therefore is not interested in the calm assessment of Heidegger's writings, he is not interested in fairness, he is not willing to give Heidegger the benefit of the doubt, he does not hesitate to leap to some outrageous conclusions, all because he is a man on a mission. He is cherry picks, he argues to conclusions, he knows where arguments are going to end up before he has all the information before him, and he his convictions trump all else. Faye is a zealot, a Grand Inquisitor, a true believer. He is not here to praise or do justice to Heidegger, but to bury him. In short, Faye is a man on a mission and absolutely everything is directed to that mission: the destruction of the reputation of Heidegger.
There is a political purpose to Faye's goal. Heidegger is easily the most dominant philosopher in Europe over the past 80 years. Virtually everything done on the Continent in that period of time, except for some strains of Marxism, has been either heavily or moderately influenced by Heidegger. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and countless others had their work framed by some degree by Heidegger, not to mention Heidegger's students like Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Levinas, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Jan Pato'ka. Whether or not these people were critical of Heidegger or not, his thought frames all of it. The one thing that virtually all of these thinkers (though not all) have in common is an adherence to some form of anti-foundationalism and to a form of historicism. The major tendency in all these thinkers is the denial that there is any kind of universal, objective foundations to thought.
Now, Faye wants to defend a form of foundationalism. What more effective way of doing this than by smearing the dominant thinker from this period with accusations of heinous political beliefs? This comes out at several points in the book. Although Anglo-Americans couldn't give a flip about Heidegger the Prussian philosopher versus Descartes the Gallic philosopher, it is an opposition that matters to Faye. So, writing in France, he employs a double opposition: Heidegger the anti-foundationalist and German versus Descartes the foundationalist and Frenchman. This is not merely a question of damning Heidegger's politics, but smearing an entire philosophical movement by intimating that anti-foundationalist thought leads to anti-humanism and Nazism.
This all leads to Faye making some extreme recommendations. He advocates removing Heidegger from the role of philosophers and moving all of his books out of philosophy into hate speech and collections of Nazi thought. Nevermind that Heidegger is considered second only to Wittgenstein as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Faye's move is a deft act of philosophical gamesmanship. You don't have to debate and confront someone if you can merely say that their thought -- and by implication so also the thought of anyone who agrees with him -- to Nazism. Faye is explicit about this claim. Faye insists that reading Heidegger can subtly shift his readers to Nazism. I'm not making this up. Faye states it over and over in his book.
Here one has to ask what Faye's philosophy of reading is. Here is the structure of Faye's argument. Heidegger is a Nazi. People who read Heidegger can be contaminated and polluted by Heidegger's books even if they are unaware of it. Start reading Heidegger and you end up getting influenced by every aspect of his thought. You are critically incapable of critically evaluating and sifting through his books, taking only what you find valuable and rejecting that which you find nonsensical. In other words, Faye imagines that readers are idiots. It is almost a purity and taboo philosophy of reading, whereby anything you read is going to force you to certain beliefs. Read a book and you are helpless as the contents forcibly take over your brain turning you into a philosophy zombie.
There are so many absurdities inherent in Faye's way of assessing both Heidegger and the reading of Heidegger that it is hard to know where to begin in refuting him. First, let's take a purely historical question. Has the reading of Heidegger led to widespread right wing thought? Well, let's look at this in two ways. One is to look at the major strains of right wing thought over the past fifty or sixty years to ask which have been influenced by Heidegger. Now, it is possible that there has been some of this in France (I'm not conversant with the finer nuances of French thought), but in the Anglo-American world...Read more›Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 Overview

Want to learn more information about Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now