I finished Safranski biography of Heidegger and I wish to bring out some points…
It has been said, that Heidegger was the most influential philosopher
in the 20th century… possible… but at every “turn” yep, I went there…
comes the point of Heidegger time as a Nazi… the elephant in the room
for any discussion about Heidegger…
so some history… in 1927 Heidegger publishes a book, “Being and Time”
instantly become the preeminent philosopher in Europe… bar none…
but think about the path of Heidegger… he was consider, even as late
as 1919, to be a “Catholic philosopher”… he trained to become a priest,
didn’t last very long, but he was thought of in philosophical circles as
being a “Catholic philosopher” and was trained to be so in his university
studies…he lost his “faith” so to speak after the first world war,
(and he wasn’t alone in that)… so by 1922, he had simply walked away
from Catholicism… and 5 years later produced “Being and Time”…
one might think of “Being and Time” to be a religious book without
any mention of god…for the idea of the book is thinking about
“being” which is a concept long gone over by the Medieval philosophers,
who were also Catholic… the question of “being” had a long history before
Heidegger going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and the pre-socratic
philosophers… you could say that the greatness of Socrates comes
from walking away from “Being” as a subject to his question of the earth,
about the soul…what is the right thing to do? that isn’t a question of “being”…
to Heidegger, we have “lost” this question of “being” that so fascinated the
“pre-Socratic” philosophers…
and in the midst of all this philosophy, rose the Nazi regime…
and in 1933 joins the Nazi party and becomes the “Rector” (head of the university)
in Freiburg… and he still considers himself to be a philosopher even though he
joined the Nazi Party… that is the problem with Heidegger… how does philosophy
itself allow him to join a party like the Nazi’s?
How does one philosophically justify joining a party that is so “Evil”…
the problem comes from the fact that Heidegger didn’t use philosophy
to engage in his decision to join the Nazi party…
he abandon philosophy to engage with the lower ism’s of nationalism
and hatred of Jews to justify his joining the party…
had Heidegger stayed with his philosophy, he would have rejected the vile
bigotry and hatred of the Nazi party… he didn’t live his life by philosophy…
for had he, he wouldn’t have join the Nazi party… he followed the lower instincts
of “Germany first” and the Anti-semitism of the party…
how does one go from the study of “being” to joining the Nazi party?
only by walking away from the business of philosophy… he became
a patriot and a proud German… but he was no longer a philosopher…
he didn’t live his philosophy… it was now something he did as a job, it
wasn’t something he was dedicated to or actually followed… philosophy
became something like a hobby, not something to live by…
for if you truly engage with philosophy, truly engaged with, then
you will have a hard time justifying becoming a Nazi…
if you live your philosophy, then it becomes hard to justify
becoming a Nazi…Philosophy for Heidegger, was not about
living one’s philosophy… it was about playing at philosophy…
it was a hobby, nothing more then a way to make money, a job…
and if one takes philosophy seriously, then one cannot just play at
philosophy or take it as one might do a hobby… it must become life…
philosophy taken to be a method of how to live one’s life…
so, basically Heidegger failed at philosophy because it failed him
in reaching the right decision which is to be in opposition to the Nazi
party and what stood for…
Kropotkin