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groovedaddy

(6,229 posts)
Mon Mar 31, 2014, 12:54 PM Mar 2014

Heidegger’s Notebooks Renew Focus on Anti-Semitism

It has long been one of the most contentious questions in 20th-century intellectual history: Just how much, and what kind, of a Nazi was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger?
To his strongest detractors, Heidegger was a committed National Socialist whose hugely influential ideas about the nature of being and the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and much of the modern philosophical tradition itself were fatally compromised by his membership in Hitler’s party from 1933 to 1945. To his staunchest defenders, however, he was a Nazi of convenience — a sometime personal anti-Semite, perhaps, but a philosopher whose towering intellectual achievements are undiminished by temporary political dalliances or everyday bias.
Now, the recent publication in Germany of the first three volumes of Heidegger’s private philosophical notebooks has brought the controversy roaring back, revealing what some say is an unmistakable smoking gun: overtly anti-Semitic statements, written in Heidegger’s own hand, in the context of his philosophical thinking.
The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941 and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews, as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to political events of the day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/heideggers-notebooks-renew-focus-on-anti-semitism.html?emc=edit_th_20140331&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=38945174

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