Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, is published this week in the UK. I've posted about this before, after Carlin Romano put the boot in last autumn. Now here's John Keenan at CiF, under the heading Heidegger, Hitler's 'spiritual guide'. Of those who've criticised Faye's take on the master he writes:
They all miss the point. Faye does not call for Heidegger's books to be burned or banned. He calls for the books to removed from the shelves of philosophy departments and rehoused under the history of Nazism. This is eminently sane. Being and Time deserves its place alongside Mein Kampf – as the work of a dangerous and deluded mind.
Well...I'm certainly happy to see the end of the man's reputation as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century, but this seems to be going a little too far the other way. He may have been a bad philosopher, but he's still a philosopher. The point about Heidegger, surely, is not that he leads straight to Nazism, but that he's the godfather of the whole anti-enlightenment obfuscatory tradition of late 20th Century post-modernist thinking, and it's as well to be reminded on occasion of its totalitarian and anti-humanist roots.
Most philosophers find nothing philosophical in Nazism. I can only interpret Faye/Romano/Keenan's attempt to call Heidegger's way of thinking Nazi philosophy as a subterfuge to create a philosophical basis for Nazism.
Posted by: enowning | January 21, 2010 at 06:29 PM
Does anyone actually understand what philosophers write, though? I'm just astonished that anyone can find a meaning in philosophers' writings, to such an extent that they can interpet it. To me, it's almost all been churned out by the postmodern text generator.
Posted by: Tendryakov | January 23, 2010 at 02:26 PM