By Jonathan Rée
Prospect - March 12, 2014
You do not have to admire a philosopher personally to admire his work
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger died nearly 40 years ago, but
his work has never stopped making the headlines: not because of his
ideas, but because of his association with Nazism. The latest stage of
the controversy (well covered here and here by Jonathan Derbyshire) has been occasioned by prepublication hype for an edition of the Schwarzen Hefte,
a 1000 page transcript of the little notebooks bound in black covers,
in which he jotted down observations for most of his life. According to
the pre-publicity, these notebooks show that Heidegger was a deep-dyed
anti-Semite, and suggest that no self-respecting thinker should touch
him with a bargepole. I can’t say that I agree.
1. In the first place, it’s common knowledge that,
as well as being a member of the Nazi party for many years, Heidegger
was an anti-Semite. Not a violent one, but the sort of cultural
anti-Semite (DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound) often found in the 1920s
and 30s, not only in Germany but throughout Europe and America. For
good measure, I guess he was also a womaniser and a male chauvinist pig.
The question is whether these facts are a reason for avoiding his
works, or whether we can in fact read him without putting our political
purity in danger.
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