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41 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
JAMES RYERSON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW - 12-16-01, December 17, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. (Hardcover)
If recent history is any judge, Princeton University Press is taking a risk by publishing this book -- a provocative and erudite study of the affinities between the Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger and his Jewish philosophy students. Ten years ago, after Columbia University Press published Richard Wolin's last book on Heidegger, the French intellectual Jacques Derrida denounced it as ''a sneaky war machine'' and had his lawyer threaten to impound future editions. Though Wolin's grievance with Derrida is not at issue in ''Heidegger's Children,'' one can't help feeling that, indirectly, it is being reprised. The heart of that controversy was Wolin's accusation that Derrida had tailored his ''far-fetched and illogical'' opinions about Heidegger's Nazism to dodge an important question: by embracing the legendary German thinker's philosophy, had Derrida and other radical postmodern leftists accepted the core of Heidegger's dubious politics as well? A similar charge of guilt by philosophical association animates ''Heidegger's Children,'' although here the accused parties also had personal (and, in one case, sexual) dealings with the chief offender. Before Heidegger became the Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he served as teacher and sage to four gifted students of assimilated German Jewish backgrounds. Hannah Arendt, who at 18 began a three-year love affair with Heidegger, achieved fame as a political thinker. Herbert Marcuse, denounced by the pope in the late 1960's, became a philosophical guru for the New Left. Hans Jonas matured into a pioneering theorist of environmentalism, serving as a touchstone for the German Green Party. And Karl Lowith became a distinguished scholar of modern historical consciousness. Wolin, a historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is far more fond of these thinkers than he is of their mentor, but he frets that their work, like that of Derrida, exhibits ''a series of deep-seated prejudices'' about the modern West that reveals their Heideggerian pedigree. As Wolin presents it, all of the ''children'' tended to view the worst features of 20th-century life -- the bureaucratic administration of death camps, the environmental threats of technology, mass social conformity -- as the natural extensions of modern democratic ideals. Some even flirted with antidemocratic visions of rule by a philosophical elite. Until fans of Heidegger's work are made aware of the worrisome effect that his philosophy can have on one's politics, Wolin warns, ''the sins of the father will be visited upon the daughters and sons.'' After the late 1980's, when archival research first exposed the depths of Heidegger's longstanding faith in what he called the ''inner truth and greatness'' of National Socialism, many observers assumed nonetheless that his philosophy, like that of the great logician and anti-Semite Gottlob Frege, would remain untarnished. But the situation with Heidegger, Wolin argues, was not so cut and dried. Heidegger believed that Western philosophy was hopelessly preoccupied with unworldly abstractions like those of logic -- Descartes, for instance, had singled out disembodied thought as the defining feature of our existence. For Heidegger, the most primal aspect of our existence was the practical business of caring for ourselves in the world, the timebound particulars of our life-and-death decisions. This is why Marcuse, in a stern letter to Heidegger about his Nazism, wrote that ''we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it contradicts your own philosophy.'' This may be, but it's not the end of the story. It's one thing to observe that Heidegger was a philosopher of practical life, and it's another thing to claim, as Wolin does, that Heidegger was basically a philosopher of Hitler's practical life. It's another thing still to trace the political lapses of Heidegger's students back to this philosophical upbringing. Nonetheless, Wolin makes a forceful case, drawing expertly on everything from correspondence between teacher and pupils to subtle readings of dense academic texts. In Wolin's view, Heidegger and his students went astray by conflating the history of philosophy with history itself. Heidegger argued that to neglect our defining moods and actions, as the tradition of Western reason had done, was to fall into a type of inauthentic, perfunctory existence. To gauge the cost of this mistake on society at large, Heidegger looked at cosmopolitanism, the rights of man, the rise of science -- what he took to be the social and political counterparts of Western logic and reason -- and saw nothing but the vulgarities of mass society and a soulless technology that had supplanted a once glorious soldier ethic. Authentic Being had left the building. National Socialism would bring it back. Why did Heidegger's students buy any of this? Partly it was the sheer magnetism of an extraordinarily talented thinker. Partly, Wolin suggests, it was because they were secular, assimilated Jews who had staked their German identity on their mastery of the nation's cultural traditions, and Heidegger stood as a sort of ''self-proclaimed heir'' to those traditions. Arendt is Wolin's most dramatic example. But her case is also an example of the difficulty of what Wolin is trying to argue. Was her conception of politics as a forum for aristocratic greatness really a rehashing of Heidegger's idea of politics as an existential proving ground, as Wolin suggests? Or could it have simply been the result of a passion for the ancient Greek polis that she shared with her mentor? Was her notoriously unforgiving criticism of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis really the unconscious attempt of a reluctant Jew to absolve her former German lover of his crimes? Or could it have just been a harsh moral judgment that she made on the basis of the information in front of her? These are enormously difficult questions to answer with confidence, not least because they straddle the boundaries between intellectual, social and psychoanalytic history. If Wolin's verdicts sometimes come too easily, his arguments, at their best, provide insightful portraits of the intellectual evolution of some of the last century's most ambitious political and social thinkers. His case against Heidegger's children, though strained at points, sets a clear standard for those who wish to adopt an informed but cautious stance toward Heidegger's immense influence. James Ryerson, formerly an editor at Lingua Franca, is a senior editor of Legal Affairs.
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39 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful, January 1, 2002
This review is from: Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. (Hardcover)
Considering the current emphasis on Martin Heidegger and his thought during the last decade, it is more than a bit surprising this book wasn't written sooner. Besides being one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Heidegger was also a university professor, and quite a charismatic one at that. Living and teaching in Weimar Germany, it is not surprising, then, that many of his best students were Jews. And if we were to, say, pick a 'cream-of-the-crop' among those Jews, the names of Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse would easily spring to mind. It is interesting to note that none of the above were practising Jews; rather they saw themselves as assimilated and cosmopolitan in outlook. Ironically it would be their teacher, one of the greatest existentialist philosophers, who drove home to them the inauthenticity of their position when he dedicated himself to National Socialism. By abandoning them he turned his back on them and forced them to face their Jewishness, no longer as a metaphysical question, but in the harsh light of ontological reality, as an important component of their social being. Despite religious assimilation, they were still outcasts, only this time by basis of their racial identity - their very being. Though abandoned by their mentor, each of Heidegger's students would go on to make a mark in the field of philosophy. In the chapters concerning their careers Wolin takes the time to carefully not their contribution to phliosophy and their attachments to their former teacher. Each discourse is concise and to the point, often giving the reader important insights into the relationship between student and teacher in ways not directly observable. With Arendt, this is easy due to the mass of scholarship, some excellent, some on the level of a supermarket tabloid. With a thinker such as Jonas, whose public career is not so well known, such insights are most welcome. I remember Jonas as a teacher and remember quite well his relationship with Heidegger. Although he would criticize his mentor in the strongest possible terms, when traveling to Europe he would still be careful to make the pilgrimage to the Black Forest to pay homage to the old man. Jonas made his mark both as an expert on Gnostic philosophy and as a philosopher of the environment, his works helping to build the basis of Germany's Green Party. Lowith developed a love-hate relationship with his former teacher, becoming one of Heidegger's most insightful critics, and yet refusing to pull the trigger. One should not stop reading Heidegger; but one should refrain from reading him so naively. Perheps it was Heidegger's own latent, and naive, romanticism that led him from a critique of nihilism into the arms of totalitarian philosophy. Marcuse is the strrangest case yet, if we view he and his teacher merely from the outside. It would appear Marcuse made the strongest reaction of all to his former teacher, by Msarcuse incorporated more of his teacher's thought into his own than any of the others. Compare Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" with Heidegger's "Letter on Technology." Marcuse's retreat into the pseudo-rationalism of Marx to escape the demons of nihilism strangely mirrors Heidegger's own retreat into National Socialism for the same reason. Taking Spengler at his word, Marcuse accepted the decline and retreated into a new world order of sorts while Heidegger fought Spengler's prognosis by adopting the standards of what he saw as the defence of civilization in the Swatstika. Wolin wraps all this into 269 tightly constructed pages. Not a wasted word or thought. In other words, an excellent and entertaining introduction into a world of thought not usually considered. Highly recommended.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wherefore loyalty?, January 30, 2004
The controversy over Heidegger is likely to continue into future generations. One of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, he blotted his copybook (so to speak) by becoming one of the leading intellectuals of the National-Socialist movement in Germany in the 1930s, changing from a professor who attracted the best and brightest of students from all over Europe to one of the more rigid and dogmatic defenders of Nazi ideals, even at the expense of colleagues, students and friends. Even after the destruction of Germany, Heidegger remained unrepentent about his history and views. This book, while a stand-alone text, represents the conclusion of a multi-volume task to examine Heidegger's work and intellectual legacy. The first two texts, 'The Politics of Being' and 'The Heidegger Controversy', represented an attempt to look both the politics and the philosophy of Heidegger -- the latter book having created a bit of a fire-storm due to the inclusion of an article by Derrida, who objected to the inclusion. One of the more bizarre twists in the tale of Heidegger, however, was in the continuing intellectual development of his legacy among his Jewish students. Many of the top students in Heidegger's following in the 1920s and early 1930s were Jewish, and they would ultimately have to reconcile their associations and attachments to Heidegger (the person and the philosophical ideas) in response or reaction to his actions. Richard Wolin's text looks specifically at four key figures: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse. All of these four thinkers, acclaimed in their own rights, considered themselves more assimilated Germans than Jews; however, this was not the thinking of the powers-that-were in the 1930s/40s Germany. Each would have to, in the course of careers including academia and writing, have to reconcile to the past idolisation of Heidegger. Germany was, after all, the centre of culture, a nation of writers and thinkers, all to go horribly mad. Wolin's introductory chapter sets a context -- the real problem for Heidegger's students was to determine whether or not there was something integral, something necessary in the connection between the political totalitarian and vicious National-Socialism and Heidegger's existentialist ideas. Wolin gives a brief overview of the development of philosophy to existentialism. In the second chapter, Wolin gives a brief history of German-Jewish relationships, and looks to the points of divergence that culminated in holocaust. Wolin devotes a chapter to each of the key 'children'. Hannah Arendt was not only Heidegger's student, but also carried on an affair with him, making Heidegger's betrayal personal as well as political. Arendt's problem was not just a 'Heidegger problem', but also a 'Jewish problem', in the sense of her writing allowing that the line between victim and villain was not as distinct as might be believed. Karl Lowith is less well known outside the German speaking world, but his work in philosophy has made him a significant figure, particularly in examining the history of philosophical development -- this development is very much in line with much of Heidegger's methodology, despite the obvious problem that such development leads to a Heidegger. Hans Jonas did confront Heidegger's past openly and publically, in lecture format no less, causing a shift from theological Heideggerian developments such that the trend fell quickly from vogue. Herbert Marcuse is perhaps the most interesting development among Heidegger's children, having been more of an interested pupil rather than proto-disciple; Marcuse combined Heideggerian influences into a general Marxist framework. In the final chapters, Wolin looks at the overall synthesis and development of these ideas, the post-war German and European intellectual experience, and the problems and strengths that continue from Heidegger's primary work, 'Being and Time". In the conclusion, Wolin states that while it is hard to find better histories of philosophy than those produced by Heidegger and his students, they make the mistakes of confusing philosophy and history, and this can also explain part of Heidegger's general political trouble. There are a few issues -- Wolin is occasionally choppy, and sometimes repetitious needlessly. Also, Wolin's lack of inclusion of a few key figures (Strauss comes to mind here) leaves something to be desired. However, the construction with the four figures here is well-done and thorough. This is a fascinating text, highlighting a lesser-known but strangely pervasive strand in intellectual history, and helps to highlight difficulties and opportunities in the continuing development out of the work of Heidegger.
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