Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism [Paperback]

Karl Löwith (Author), Richard Wolin (Editor), Gary Steiner (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231084072 | ISBN-13: 978-0231084079 | Publication Date: March 15, 1998 | Edition: 1st Printing

Written by a former student of Heidegger, this book examines the relationship between the philosophy and the politics of a celebrated teacher and the allure that Nazism held out for scholars committed to revolutionary nihilism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A flurry of books has appeared on Heidegger's seduction by Nazism.... [b]ut Löwith's work has a very special claim, and its publication in English is an event of major significance.... [T]he present volume is unique as an indispensable, insightful, philosophical account of why Heidegger decided for National Socialism. As a devoted student and intimate friend of Heidegger in Freiburg.... Löwith understands Heidegger minutely and sympathetically, and his interpretations of Heidegger's works are wide-ranging and unerring.

(Choice )

Review

Remains one of the most insightful critical commentaries ever composed about this century's leading----and most disturbing----philosopher.... An important publishing event not only for Heidegger scholars, but for everyone concerned with the fateful entanglement of thought and politics in twentieth-century Germany.

(Michael E. Zimmerman, author of Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, Technology, Politics, and Art )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1st Printing edition (March 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231084072
• ISBN-13: 978-0231084079
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,480,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Europe has been outdone, December 13, 2010

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This review is from: Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (Paperback)

An introduction makes clear that Karl Lowith was wounded in World War I and held as a prisoner of war by the Italians for a few years. Lowith heard a famous Max Weber lecture in 1919, "Science as a Vocation" in Munich and followed Martin Heidegger from Freiburg, Germany, to Marburg in 1924. For hundreds of years, great thinkers have been hoping Europe will produce an outstanding advance on an intellectual level to match higher living standards. For many of these thinkers, the way in which governments have used military strategies has been a big disappointment. Nietzsche was studied by Martin Heidegger, but the way in which Heidegger attempts to be creative on his own concerns avoids how Nietzsche "calls into question the applicability of the concept of values to the total character of life," (p. 121).

Jakob Burckhardt is mentioned on totaltitarian states arising by "centralization without right" (P. 185) and a few pages later, I find:

The universities, Bauer continues, have become insipid; their philosophy teachers simply recount antiquated systems and do not advance even one new idea that could, as before, move the world. (p. 188).

General studies have been declining since students flocked to technical specialties. Anyone willing to generate criticism might be hounded from any position that would have the attention of millions of people. According to Burckhardt, the system we now have:

results in a boundless augmentation of military power and of the national debt which such an augmentation requires, and these are considered to be national necessities. The state has learned from the industrialists how exploit credit, and it defiantly maintains that the nation cannot cause credit to go bankrupt--"alongside all the swindlers there now stands the state as the greatest swindler." Ever since an economic order has ceased to exist in Europe, the state has suppressed foreign groups within the population, and nationality has been misused as the sole means for establishing associations. (p. 185).