Abstract
Even though methodology and theorizing seem more often like idling the engine of the mind, taking up a theoretical stance can be risky business. By ‘methodology’ I not only mean certain techniques of analysis, like statistics, for example; I chiefly have in mind certain commanding styles of inquiry which set the form and matter of our intellectual endeavours. Here one can count behaviourism, empiricism, Heideggerian existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, historicism, structuralism, functionalism and so on. Thus doing theoretical (some call it ‘methodological’)2 work commits us not only to certain ways in which conceiving and studying religion may involve us, but also to the larger visions of human nature embedded in them.
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Since this essay was first written (1978) and published (1982), significant attention has been given the issue of the relation of Heidegger to Nazism. I believe my essay, reprinted here with the addition of a short introduction omitted from The Christian Century published version, was however, among the first to raise this question in a trenchant way, and to draw the conclusions by the means employed. This is certainly the first essay directed at the community of scholars in religion and theology to broach the subject.
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Martin Heidegger: A Critical Bibliography
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale, 1946), Ch. XVIII, especially 292f. on Heidegger’s bearing for politics.
Arnold I. Davidson (ed), ‘Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism’, Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 407–88. Essays by Davidson, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Lévinas.
Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987). The most complete and thorough consideration of the subject.
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper, 1965), Ch. IV, especially pp. 80–6.
Karsten Harries, ‘Heidegger as Political Thinker’, Review of Metaphysics 29 (1976): 642–69. Most thorough and precise discussion of the relationship of Heidegger’s early and late philosophy to his Nazi politics of 1920s and 1930s and the ‘apolitical’ turn of the later writings.
David R. Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1978). Cassirer versus Heidegger on politics, philosophy and life. See especially pp. 155–67, but also Ch. 10, 11.
Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University, 1966), 293–48 on the ‘Political Decisionists’ and Heidegger.
George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Foundations of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964). General discussion of intellectual worldviews favouring Nazism in pre-Nazi Germany.
Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969). German professors, German thought (especially ‘methodology’) and atmosphere favouring Nazism.
Dagobert Runes, German Existentialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962). Small selection of Heidegger’s Nazi speeches, 1933–34.
George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (New York: Viking, 1979).
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California, 1961). Special attention to the subject of the Germanic religion, ‘irrationalism’, esthetics and politics, nihilism.
Peter F. Strawson, ‘Take the “B” Train’: review of Steiner’s Martin Heidegger, New York Review of Books 26 (19 April 1979): 35–7.
Michael Zimmerman, The Eclipse of the Self (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980). See especially Ch. 6, ‘National Socialism, Voluntarism and Authenticity’, pp. 169–97.
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© 1993 Ivan Strenski
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Strenski, I. (1993). Heidegger Is No Hero. In: Religion in Relation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11866-3_9
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