National Socialism, Anti-Semitism, and Philosophy in Heidegger and Scheler
| Autor: | Johannes Fritsche |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Literature
White (horse) 030504 nursing business.industry Philosophy media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Metaphysics Destiny World history Modern philosophy 0506 political science Epistemology 03 medical and health sciences Contemporary philosophy Continental philosophy 050602 political science & public administration 0305 other medical science business Accident (philosophy) media_common |
| Zdroj: | Philosophy Today. 60:583-608 |
| ISSN: | 0031-8256 |
| DOI: | 10.5840/philtoday2016602109 |
| Popis: | Peter Trawny, Heidegger & the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).Glasses can be half-empty or half-full, and a beige-colored vest a stained white one or a brightened brown one.1 In the case of a stained white vest, one can try to whitewash it and restore it to its original purity. Many of Heidegger's apologists have taken this path, when, that is, they did not deny Heidegger's National Socialism and anti-Semitism from the outset. Peter Trawny-the editor of the so-called Black Notebooks, voluminous private notes of Heidegger's from 1931 to 1975, which according to his will "were to be published as the conclusion to the Gesamtausgabe" (HM 5)-has interpreted passages that he, rightly, regards as anti-Semitic and concluded that one has to talk of a "beinghistorical [seinsgeschichtlicher] anti-Semitism" (HM 2) in Heidegger.2 Despite this finding, however, even Trawny's book is a kind of whitewash, interestingly enough already in its terminology. In this paper, I present the framework within which Trawny interprets Heidegger's anti-Semitic statements, and show that it is too narrow. Trawny focuses on anti-Semitic sentences in the Black Notebooks from the years from 1937 (HM 20) to around 1945 (HM 88) and relates them to a "narrative" (HM 8) that Heidegger began to develop in 1930 and used up into the 1940s. However, Heidegger had employed such a narrative already earlier, namely in Being and Time. Thereafter, I clarify Heidegger's position by comparing him with Scheler-who, because of Hitler, gave up any rightist politics and turned to the center-and relate Trawny's narrative to the one in Being and Time to conclude that Heidegger's National Socialism and most probably also his anti-Semitism extended significantly further than Trawny assumes. In an appendix, I suggest alternatives to Trawny's detailed interpretations of three of Heidegger's anti-Semitic statements, show that Trawny misconstrues and downplays Heidegger's anti-Semitism and that his criterion for anti-Semitism in Heidegger is false, and summarize the anti-Semitic aspects of the history of Being (or "'history of beyng [Geschichte des Seyns]'" [HM 11]).TRAWNY'S INTERPRETATIVE FRAMEWORKAccording to Trawny, after Being and Time Heidegger found himself in a crisis in which finally, in 1930, "something came to the philosopher that well-nigh revolutionized his thinking" (HM 8), namely the history of Being, the history of the first beginning and its repetition in the other beginning (see HM 8-17). There are two main actors in this history, the Greeks and the Germans. In the first beginning, the Greeks-Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides-conceived of theory and logic in an appropriate fashion; thereafter, however, philosophy decayed. The history of Being is, therefore, a story of "the relationship between origin and decline, i.e., fallenness" (HM 12) in which destiny has reserved for the Germans the task to break, in the end phase of that decay, with modern philosophy and to repeat the abandoned first beginning.Trawny emphasizes that this was "at first a purely philosophical undertaking" (HM 14). How, then, did real history enter the picture? According to Trawny, the narrative offered Heidegger the opportunity to "link his thinking to the entire course of a European history that was revolutionary to its core" (HM 10). In the explosive political situation, Heidegger got the impression that what he was articulating philosophically was taking place "world historically; and that-so it seemed to him-could be no accident" (HM 10). How did the Jews come into this world history? This question Trawny answers in two steps. Heidegger claims that the "end-formation of metaphysics"-namely, "'machination [Machenschaft],' that is, modern technology"-"covers . . . over" the first beginning and thus "blocks" the possibility of experiencing the happening of the truth of Being. Hence machination must "disappear" in order for the repetition of the first beginning to "occur" (HM 12). … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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