arendt and heidegger

[Don Antenen]

Reading Arendt's correspondence with Jaspers (which I recommend highly), it seems clear that privately Arendt had no illusions about Heidegger.She knew he was a fascist and remained one after the war. However, she also considered him the greatest living philosopher (rightly or wrongly, I haven't read enough of him to say).

So, rehabilitating him publicly was necessary in order to get him translated/published in English and to allow him to continue teaching and publishing in Germany.

It's a fascinating and terrible ethical problem: publicly defending an unrepentant fascist after the Shoah - who could find time to denounce industrial farming but never industrial murder - for the sake of philosophy, for the sake of Ideas.

Part of the equation, of course, is that Arendt knew Nazism had been defeated and that Heidegger, however noxious his politics and decisions, was not a threat to post-war democracy.


all the best,
Don
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131202/66822ced/attachment.html>