Abstract
Today’s planetary ecological and social problems, which result at least in part from modernity’s project of gaining technological control over nature, provide grounds for continuing to study Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity and its domineering impulse, despite the fact that that same critique once led him to embrace National Socialism. After all, during the 1940s, the left-leaning Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer also criticized modernity in ways that closely resembled Heidegger’s critique.’ Nevertheless, after Victor Farlas and Hugo Ott revealed that Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi movement was more deeply entangled with his thought than most people had previously believed, many responsible scholars recognized that, henceforth, they would have to read Heidegger’s work more carefully, with an eye open for the possible political implications of his philosophical analyses. Though some commentators continue to defend Heidegger by distinguishing between the man (guilty of political misdeeds) and his work (loftily detached from mundane affairs), the fact is that Heidegger himself believed that he was destined to play a key role in the revolutionary transformation — to be carried out by National Socialism — that would supposedly save Germany and the West from modern nihilism.
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Notes
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming ( New York: Continuum, 1988 ).
Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterweg zu seiner Biographie ( Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988 ).
Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe 29–30 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983). Henceforth, citations will be referenced in the text with the abbreviation “GA 29/30”.
Despite Heidegger’s antipathy toward racism and, presumably, toward eugenics, he nevertheless was a friend of Eugen Fischer, a central figure in NSDAP racial purity schemes. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has asked, is linguistic racism (see Heidegger’s conviction of the linguistic superiority of German and Greek) more acceptable than biological racism? See Jacques Derrida, L’esprit: Heidegger et la question ( Paris: Editions Galilée, 1987 ).
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, reprinted in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I ( New York: Bantam Books, 1984 ).
Heidegger was always puzzled about how to speak of the “openness” of animals to things. Years after Die Grundbegriffe, he noted: “The rising of animals into the open remains closed and sealed in itself in a strangely captivating way. Self-revealing and self-concealing in the animal are one in such a way that human speculation practically runs out of alternatives when it rejects mechanistic views of animality - which are always feasible - as firmly as it avoids anthropomorphic interpretations. Because the animal does not speak, self-revealing and self-concealing, together with their unity, possess a wholly different life-essence [Lebe-Wesen] with animals.” Early Greek Thinking, Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 116–117.
The best available treatment of Heidegger’s views on animal life is David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life Philosophy ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 ).
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz ( New York: Harper and Row, 1971 ), p. 107.
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim ( Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1961 ), p. 69.
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, ed. Manfred Frings, Gesamtausgabe, Band 54 ( Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982 ), pp. 118–119.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell ( New York: Harper and Row, 1977 ), p. 204.
Ibid., p. 206.
Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh ( New York: Harper and Row, 1971 ), p. 190.
Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe, Band 51 ( Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981 ), pp. 4–5.
Ibid.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1961 ), p. 69.
Ibid., p. 92.
Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy ( New York: Basic Books, 1980 ).
I owe the term “ontological hysteria” to Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (New York: Bantam Books, 1989).
See Philippe Van Haute, “Lacan’s Philosophical Reference: Heidegger or Kojève?”, International Philosophical Quarterly 32: 225–238, 1992.
Richard Boothby, Death and Desire (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. Boothby provides an excellent account of Lacan’s notoriously complex thought. Thanks to Elizabeth Bronfen both for informing me of this book and for helpful discussions about it.
Jacques Lacan, as cited by Boothby, Death and Desire, p. 29.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 102.
Ibid., p. 227.
Ibid.
Lacan, cited by Boothby, p. 184; my emphasis.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London/New York: Verso, 1990 ), p. 5; my emphasis. On this topic, cf. also Berman, Coming to Our Senses, p. 289.
Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 5.
See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, ed. Susanne Ziegler, Gesamtausgabe, Band 39 ( Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980 ).
For a critical account of Heidegger’s idea of productionist metaphysics, cf. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ).
Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, pp. 292–293.
Ibid., p. 293.
Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, pp. 323–324.
Ott, Martin Heidegger.
See John D. Caputo, Deconstructing Heidegger ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 ).
On this topic, cf. Ken Wilber, Up From Eden ( Boulder: Shambhala, 1981 ).
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Zimmerman, M.E. (1995). Ontical Craving Versus Ontological Desire. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_31
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