Martin Heidegger

[eternallife]

Can anyone give me a biography of the German philosopher (Martin Heidegger). Does he belong to Nazi party

 

[invocation]

Heidegger was raised Catholic, eventually became Lutheran.

Heidegger joined the Nazi party around the time Hitler came to power. Worked on behalf of the Nazi party as Rector for one year. He was removed from the post because of disagreements he had with the party (Heidegger was anti-Semitic in many ways, but he had great disdain for the Nazi doctrines regarding racial biology), and he remained a member of the Party until the end of WW2.

During the process of de-Nazification, the French were going to remove Heidegger completely from the University system, because he had provided intellectual legitimacy to the Nazi movement. But several of his former Jewish colleagues and students (including Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt) came to his defence, arguing that despite his noxious personal and political attitudes, Heidegger was too important a thinker to silence. Thus he was allowed to continue to do his research and write.

Nazi themes are easily noticeable in his writings from the 1930s, esp.

Heidegger remains one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, especially because of his book Being and Time, published before WW2. He is appropriated, read and reinterpreted by figures from a variety of philosophical and political positions: Marcuse (Marxist), Derrida and Levinas (political liberalism, i.e., “democracy”), Jean-Luc Marion (Catholicism), Sartre (existentialism) and even during WW2 he was importantly influential on members of the Confessing Church, esp. Rudolf Bultmann.

I am sure Wikipedia probably has more on his life.

 

[Betterave]

Heidegger was raised Catholic, eventually became Lutheran.

Heidegger joined the Nazi party around the time Hitler came to power. Worked on behalf of the Nazi party as Rector for one year. He was removed from the post because of disagreements he had with the party (Heidegger was anti-Semitic in many ways, but he had great disdain for the Nazi doctrines regarding racial biology), and he remained a member of the Party until the end of WW2.

During the process of de-Nazification, the French were going to remove Heidegger completely from the University system, because he had provided intellectual legitimacy to the Nazi movement. But several of his former Jewish colleagues and students (including Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt) came to his defence, arguing that despite his noxious personal and political attitudes, Heidegger was too important a thinker to silence. Thus he was allowed to continue to do his research and write.

Heidegger was anti-semitic? How so? Also, Arendt argued that he was personally noxious? She was his lover and lifelong friend and correspondent, was she not?

 

[invocation]

Heidegger was anti-semitic? How so? Also, Arendt argued that he was personally noxious? She was his lover and lifelong friend and correspondent, was she not?

Arendt was Heidegger’s lover and student before the war (Arendt is not the only Jewish student he slept with either). Just as Karl Lowith was his student (his thoughts on Heidegger’s politics substantively more critical than Arendt’s), Jaspers was his colleague, and Husserl (who explicitly calls Heidegger an anti-Semite) was his mentor. Arendt and Heidegger were reunited sometime around 1950, but Arendt never suggests that Heidegger was anything other than blind to the truth of Nazism, no matter how brilliant she thought he was (and she clearly thinks he is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and, arguably, she is quite right).

And while Heidegger did not buy into the Nazi versions of racial biology, he was fairly convinced that ‘the Jews’ ran the media and banks, and were conspiratorial forces behind the rise of capitalism and communism. He complained about the “Judaization” of German life as early as the late 1920s. No one had illusions about Heidegger’s treatment of Jews: Arendt herself complains to him that he is banning Jewish students from his classes. In his role as Rector he fired Husserl along with any one else at the University who was Jewish, purged the dedication to Husserl from SuZ (only to restore it again towards the end of his life (the 6th edition, if I remember correctly off the top of my head)). Arendt even suggests to Jaspers that Heidegger practically killed Husserl.

Finally, at a more general level, it is hard to see how Heidegger could possibly endorse the Nazi Party to the extent that he did, and even to continue to embrace the basic thrust of its tenets well after the war, and not be anti-Semitic. Surely Jews and Judaism, from Heidegger’s point of view, would have to pose a threat to the Germanness of the German people, and thus to their cultural destiny (summarized in his oft cited Nazi mantra: “Blood and Soil”). The attempt to include Jews within the mainstream of German society could only take place through liberalization, which was a horror as far as Heidegger was concerned.

 

[Betterave]

Arendt was Heidegger’s lover and student before the war (Arendt is not the only Jewish student he slept with either). Just as Karl Lowith was his student (his thoughts on Heidegger’s politics substantively more critical than Arendt’s), Jaspers was his colleague, and Husserl (who explicitly calls Heidegger an anti-Semite) was his mentor. Arendt and Heidegger were reunited sometime around 1950, but Arendt never suggests that Heidegger was anything other than blind to the truth of Nazism, no matter how brilliant she thought he was (and she clearly thinks he is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and, arguably, she is quite right).

And while Heidegger did not buy into the Nazi versions of racial biology, he was fairly convinced that ‘the Jews’ ran the media and banks, and were conspiratorial forces behind the rise of capitalism and communism. He complained about the “Judaization” of German life as early as the late 1920s. No one had illusions about Heidegger’s treatment of Jews: Arendt herself complains to him that he is banning Jewish students from his classes. In his role as Rector he fired Husserl along with any one else at the University who was Jewish, purged the dedication to Husserl from SuZ (only to restore it again towards the end of his life (the 6th edition, if I remember correctly off the top of my head)). Arendt even suggests to Jaspers that Heidegger practically killed Husserl.

Finally, at a more general level, it is hard to see how Heidegger could possibly endorse the Nazi Party to the extent that he did, and even to continue to embrace the basic thrust of its tenets well after the war, and not be anti-Semitic. Surely Jews and Judaism, from Heidegger’s point of view, would have to pose a threat to the Germanness of the German people, and thus to their cultural destiny (summarized in his oft cited Nazi mantra: “Blood and Soil”). The attempt to include Jews within the mainstream of German society could only take place through liberalization, which was a horror as far as Heidegger was concerned.

So Heidegger was anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic? Or do you think we ought not to distinguish the two?