Heidegger and the Nazis (Postmodern Encounters) - Softcover

Collins, Jeff

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9781840461305: Heidegger and the Nazis (Postmodern Encounters)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840461306 ISBN 13: 9781840461305

Publisher: Icon Books, 2000

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Martin Heidegger's enthusiastic advocacy of Nazism has left discordant traces in the political culture of postmodernity. As a philosopher, he proposed an extraordinary thinking calculated to "overcome" Western philosophy. A major resource for the counter-philosophies, anti-essentialism and deconstructive movements of the postmodern era, his work has proved attractive to thinkers such as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Baudrillard. Critics, however, have seen in their work some dangerous failures of political judgement and responsibility. Their applause for Heidegger seems crucially symptomatic. "Heidegger and the Nazis" reviews the facts and arguments surrounding Heidegger's politicism, and situates them within critical political debates as we move into the 21st century. Reason, modernity, humanism, subjectivity and identity - as well as the futures of Marxism and social democracy - are among the issues. At stake are not only philosophical reputations, but also the possibility of successful opposition to the resurgent nazisms of our own time.

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About the Author:

Jeff Collins is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Plymouth. He is also the author of "Introducing Heidegger" and "Introducing Derrida", both published by Icon.

'Nazism' and 'Heidegger' are deeply problematic figures. The former brought into existence a novel machinery of totalitarian government, harnessed to industrial capitalism and modern technology, that within twelve years had murdered more than six million people in its extermination programmes, subjected millions more to brutalised slave labour or to forced migrations across and beyond Europe, and in a war of its own prosecution had killed nearly four million troops on the German side alone, whilst reducing the German economy, its major cities and infrastructures to ruin. The list of indictments, much longer, can at least begin there.

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, is problematic for different reasons. In his early work of the 1920s he proposed a radical rethinking of human subjectivity, questioning what it might mean to have one's existence as a 'human being'. In this he rivals other modern, innovating discourses on subjectivity, for instance Freud's psychoanalysis and scientific psychology.

Also, Heidegger proposed a 'thinking', distinct from 'philosophising', which relentlessly questioned the foundations of Western philosophy. The stakes are high, if we take that tradition to span two and a half thousand years. Reason, logic and truth, for instance, might no longer be allowed their assurance.

Heidegger had an even more ambitious project: the question of being. He interrogated not just human being, but being 'in general', the fact that entities have their existence. He offered to ontology, the grand tradition of philosophical speculation on being, a radically new beginning.

The encounter between Heidegger's thinking and Nazism has been described as disastrous, even monstrous. Metaphors of collision lend themselves—as if in some train crash, perhaps, productive or not, the most innovative philosopher of the twentieth century lent his thinking to one of its most notorious political regimes. The encounter between these two, blunderingly aligned or grossly impacted, has had repercussions ever since.

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