Heidegger

Ostriches Awake!

This is not the thing I was looking for  - but it is interesting
anyway

Faye, Emmanuel “Nazi Foundations in Heidegger’s Work”
South Central Review
- Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 55-66
The Johns Hopkins University
Press

Abstract

This article presents the central theses of the author’s book, Heidegger:
l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. The author does not explore
simply the history of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, which is
well known, but rather examines the connections between National Socialism and
the foundations of Heidegger’s philosophy as the latter is presented in the
sixty eight volumes which have appeared to date of the Gesamtausgabe as well as
unpublished texts of two of Heidegger’s seminars given between 1933 and 1935..
The author argues that Heidegger’s Nazism is evident not simply in speeches he
gave in favor of Nazism but in the entirety of the courses he taught. In the
courses from 1933 and 1934, for example, Heidegger discusses the political
significance of his masterpiece, Being and Time, and linked it directly
to Nazi racist thinking.

The author also shows that the linkage between Nazism and Heidegger’s thought
did not end in the 1930s and that in the early 1940s Heidegger offered an
ontological legitimization of racial selection. After the defeat of Nazism,
Heidegger continued to stress at least implicitly the linkage of his conception
of death with heroic sacrifice. The upshot of this, ultimately was to call into
question in philosophical terms the “deaths” of Jewish victims in the death
camps. Heidegger thus contributed to what the author calls an “ontological
denial of the Holocaust.”