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Heidegger

The Trouble with Martin

Even his best friends thought he was a Nazi, so why should we pay any further attention to Heidegger’s philosophical writings? We asked a selection of Heidegger scholars this question: “Does Martin Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi Party and his anti-Semitism, as evident in the recently published Black Notebooks, make a difference to how we should regard him as a philosopher and engage with his work?”

Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism were known about before the appearance of the Black Notebooks. But the extent of his anti-Semitism is made much clearer by the Notebooks, where he connects some of his key ideas to racist ideas in the Nazi period. For example, he links the difference between ‘being’ (things being intelligible at all) and ‘entities’ (the specific ways in which things are framed by a practice or a discipline) to “World Jewry, which, absolutely unattached, can undertake the deracination of all entities from being as a world-historical ‘task’.” He is referring to the transnational role of Jewish financiers in commodity exchange (which can in some respects be seen as turning everything into an exchangeable ‘entity’). However, his claims are vacuous: instead of analysing the economic roots of the crises of his times, he tries to give deep philosophical significance to often trivial cultural phenomena.

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