An illuminating review of a new book by the intellectual historian Richard Wolin; an excerpt:
Heidegger in Ruins draws on the work of a range of historians to present the by-now familiar story of Weimar’s reactionary modernists who attacked democracy and supported dictatorship. But four other elements of the book are new and important, especially in the English language scholarship. First, Heidegger’s mendacity and his corruption of scholarly ethics in connection with the publication of his collected works; second, the persistence and the intensity of his radical antisemitism; third, the apocalyptic, extremist, and eschatological nature of his writings during World War II and the Holocaust; and fourth, the manner in which his discussion of technology contributed to apologia for Nazism in postwar West Germany.
As has become clear, Heidegger's reactionary bigotry infects parts of his work (in a way, say, that Frege's virulent anti-semitism does not infect his). One reason, I suspect, for the appeal in the Anglophone world of Dreydegger (Hubert Dreyfus's selective reading of Heidegger) is that it extracts ideas of philosophical interest that are more remote from the ugly reality of the man and his actual views.
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