The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader [Paperback]

Richard Wolin (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 3, 1992

This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.Richard Wolin is Professor of Modern European Intellectual History and Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Poststructuralism.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Victor Farias ( Heidegger and Nazism , LJ 12/89) started it; Jean-Francois Lyotard ( Heidegger and the "Jews , " LJ 7/90) and Gunther Neske ( Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers , LJ 11/15/90), among others, continued it; and now this book keeps the dialectic of "L'affaire Heidegger" alive and well. It is divided into three parts: Heidegger's own writings pertinent to his association with and attitudes toward Nazism (several of which, being basic, appear also in the aforementioned books); writings by his contemporaries; and, finally, essays by recent European critics. Editor Wolin, a professor at Rice University, provides an exceptionally perceptive introduction and a final essay entitled "The Heidegger Debate in France."-- Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This should become the standard sourcebook for those troubled by the links between arguably the greatest philosopher of our century and unarguably its most infamous political movement." Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Product Details

• Paperback: 327 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1st MIT Press Ed edition (December 3, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262731010
• ISBN-13: 978-0262731010
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful survey of the debate over Heidegger's vile politics, April 6, 2010

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Paperback)

This fascinating collection exposes Heidegger as a lifelong, unrepentant National Socialist. In 1936, Heidegger agreed `without reservation' with the suggestion that "his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy." He saw his political decision as a realisation of the analytic of Being and Time. He said that his concept of `historicity' was the basis of his political `engagement'.

Being and Time distinguished between ontology and its `factical' actualisation in everyday life: this is idealism, the claim that there is a reality beyond real life, real history. It rejects everyday life, science, and all thought since ancient Greece. Husserl spoke of Heidegger's `disregard for scientific rigour'.

Heidegger wrote in 1933 of `the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk'. He saw Being as rooted in earth and blood, `the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk'. The Germans were `the metaphysical people'. Only the Volk was real, authentic, only they could break through the `inauthenticity' of daily life to reality. This obviously denied our common humanity.

With Nietzsche, Heidegger stressed the `order of rank', the division of human Being into masters and slaves - the conventional, stupid view.

In a 1949 lecture, he said, "Agriculture is today a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps." This is not so much Holocaust-denial as Holocaust-normalisation.

Those whom Heidegger has influenced have imbibed all too much of his nihilism. Many of his French supporters have become Holocaust-deniers: one becomes what one defends. Jean Beaufret, his most stalwart advocate in France, is a Holocaust-denier who has defended Robert Faurisson, the French `historian' who denies the existence of gas chambers and the Holocaust. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the most important of his French students, wrote, "Nazism is a humanism."

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Different View than that of the Revisionist Reviewer, October 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Paperback)

This is a fine documentation of the Heidegger controversy, containing a fair and broad selection of views. Two points in the previous review I found infuriating. Firstly, Marcuse, although strongly influenced by Marx, was not a Communist, or at least in any form that the Communist parties of his time could accept or understand. He took very independent stands on many issues, and managed to infuriate both the hard left and the hard right at various times of his life. In fact, I found Marcuse's response to Heidegger's fairy tale--the beginning of the Nazi period looked wonderful, but then the Nazi leaders proved stubborn, close-minded, etc., especially because they refused to heed Martin H.--one of the most moving and devasting replies of all: the beginning was already
the end, at least of all humanist and humane values in Germany.
Secondly, nobody has an exact body count yet for the Soviet Union, but no serious historian has contested that the rate of the Nazi killing--at least 20 million killed in six years of war, about 5 million Jews within about two years at the end of the war, plans for further ethnic cleansing throughout Europe and Asia should they have won the war, and so on--far outmatched that of the Soviet Union, even at its worst. The deaths caused by lousy planning, famine, destruction of the environment, irradiating their citizens, and so on, are more difficult to tally, but this is not the same as systematically killing non-combatants on a scale perhaps never before seen in history. I beg the reviewer not to trivialize this issue.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars some background, August 30, 2004

By 

reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Paperback)

Just wanted to provide a little background for this book. The animus between Wolin and Derrida, which the first reviewer perceived, is real. Wolin reproduced (in the first edition of this book) Derrida's "the Philosophers' Hell" without permission and in a poor, often misleading translation. (Derrida cites many of these errors in "Points..." pp. 440-444. The editor of that text cites more of them on pp.486-487.) For these reasons, Derrida requested that it be excluded from subsequent printings. There is also an exchange consisting of several letters and articles from the various parties printed in The New York Review of Books in the Spring of 1993.