Customer Reviews

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

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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."

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.

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.

This book includes some decent essays from all vantage points concerning the question of what is to be made of Heidegger's Nazism. The first section of the book includes essays from Heidegger himself, including "The Self-Assertion of the German University", "Overcoming Metaphysics", and the brilliant interview with <<Der Spiegel>> magazine "Only a God Can Save Us Now". The second section includes the important essay "Total Mobilization" by Ernst Junger as well as several other letters and essays dealing directly with Heidegger's Nazism. Finally, the third section includes essays attempting an interpretation of Heidegger's Nazism from various standpoints. A disturbing aspect of this approach is that many of the individuals writing these essays concerning Heidegger are themselves avowed Marxists, who supported a totalitarian regime far more bloody and repressive than the Nazis. For instance, we have the essay of the despicable individual Herbert Marcuse. This is from a man who lumped all of humanity into two categories: the progressive and the regressive. One can only wonder what sort of scheme Marcuse and his politically correct Marxist cronies had in store for those he deemed "regressive". However, despite this, this book is important for understanding Heidegger's relation to Nazism, for his interview "Only a God Can Save Us Now", his later thought, and also for the essay "Total Mobilization" of Ernst Junger.