Do bad men make good philosophers?
Heidegger was a Nazi follower from 1933 and never really recanted. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks indicate he was fiercely anti-Semitic. Some commentators believe he should be regarded as a Nazi philosopher not an Existentialist.
Others regard him as a supreme thinker. I struggle with both his views and the cogency of his thought.
Just do an experiment in mentu. Imagine modern philosophy with Heidegger definitively erased and see what happens. If his ABSENCE makes essential difference than let his political background go.
Just do an experiment in mentu. Imagine modern philosophy with Heidegger definitively erased and see what happens. If his ABSENCE makes essential difference than let his political background go.
The notion that Heidegger was either not a Nazi nor Anti-Semitic seems far fetched (an expression employed by Prof. Babette Babich, a Heidegger scholar) when his Black Notebook is read. As for having an affair with Hannah Arendt, well personal and sexual impulses will often overrule prejudices. Especially given their age-difference. This is nevertheless a case to be made for his mindset, described by Arendt as someone whose thinking 'rebounds upon itself and finds its solitary object within the soul.' (Arendt: Rahel Varnhagen, p.10, 2000).
Any distinct definition of personalities such as Martin Heidegger is a vacuum. Labels are made by his contemporaries or by his investigators, whose affairs have not influenced world philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, methodology of science, as Heidegger's deeds. If a man seeks Truth and Essence-he will read Heidegger. In today's world without Truth and Essence, any personal career at the end of the life turns out to be meaningless.
Is Truth separate from action, Ivo. Say for example it was found that Hitler or Stalin wrote magnificent philosophy or equally scintillating poetry, etc. Does that:
Absolve them of their actions
Place alternative views of their actions
Can be constructed into a Truth separate from their actions
Is the horror of their actions immediately disconnected from their ideas?
Are you not here personifying Truth?
I'd rather not.
Words can simply construct the alternative, and often conjure actions that didn't happen. Words are not faithful presenters of reality. Remember the Bible.
As reality requires deconstruction, that surely is done through language-or actions such as ritual and ceremony through the accommodating leverage of art -and as language constructs reality also, it itself must be deconstructed. We actively engage in these processes. Human societies are the result of these processes. Reality therefore is what we have made of a wider environment. If reality is a language, and why not, it must have a number of repeated and repeatable signals-mainly empirical, but not only empirical.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Publication