February 20, 2015

Time and Being in a Rearview Mirror

Hats off to the first to show that Heidegger's philosophy required of him his Nazism, or conclusively establish that Nazism was merely a quirk of character unconnected in any essential way to his formally arranged thoughts. His newly released black notebooks provide enough material for a decent argument about how Heidegger managed to glide from the one to the other at the time, e.g., in the mid-Nineteen-Thirties, when he put himself in service of Hitler's regime as rector of an important university, and did a little cleansing of the staff.

As chairman of a society, which is named after a person, one is in certain way a representative of that person. After reading the Schwarze Hefte, especially the antisemitic passages, I do not wish to be such a representative any longer. These statements have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become difficult to be a co-representative of this.”

—The seriously disappointed response of the chair of the Heidegger Society, Prof. Gunter Figal, chair of the philosophy department of the famously seriousminded University of Freiburg, Germany.



For the timebeing, West Coast edition

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