Arendt and Heidegger, the postwar 'friendship"

[Fiona Shnapple]

Nice try Kai, but you've danced your way into a corner now. Stepping
in strict measure against the use of the word, "race" and, swinging
your arms against the facts. HA provides a concise and accurate
summary of race-thinking in Germany on page 219 of OT.

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Actually Heidegger does not use the term 'race' in an affirmative sense. And
> where he discusses ethnicity it's never about biology or blood. Not only is
> Heidegger's notion of people (Volk) strictly culturalistic, it does not even
> refer to the concrete German people of his time. With a grain of salt you
> could say that Heidegger's 'Germans' are the future readers of the poet
> Hölderlin! He even writes in the mid 1930s   - vgl. Beiträge zur Philosophie
> (Vom Ereignis), # 196: "Da-sein und Volk" - that one's people can never be
> goal or purpose and that such a traditionally ethnic understanding is just
> an extension of the liberalist ego-concept and the economic struggle (right,
> that manuscript had to be hidden by Heidegger's brother Fritz, because
> SS-men were already sitting in the lectures). Those future readers of
> Hölderlin are the coming people ("die Zukünftigen") of the last god (another
> idea of Hölderlin which Heidegger tried to develop). So to become German à
> la Heidegger you don't have to be born in Germany or have a German passport
> or like to eat sauerkraut or anything like that. All you need - "Language is
> the house of Being" - is to learn the language and to read Hölderlin in
> original. In this sense Heidegger called Hölderlin "the most German of all
> Germans" in 1934. For Heidegger the study of Hölderlin's poetry is the only
> (!) way to get an understanding what being German means and who the real
> Germans are. It is obvious that Heidegger does here - Hölderlin became
> psychotic in later years and did not exactly match Hitler's ideal of German
> toughness - not imply ethnic cleansing, 'euthanasia' or others ways to
> 'improve the people's body'. In fact, the close reading of Hölderlin led
> Heidegger to a decidedly European thinking, since Hölderlin nourished the
> idea of a mutual reference of ancient Greek and modern German culture
> ("vaterländische Umkehr"). This also (co)inspired Heidegger's interest in
> Asian thought.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_H%C3%B6lderlin
>
> And here you can hear Heidegger reading Hölderlin's poem "Der Ister":
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQk060lcA2M
>
> On 05.12.2013 18:46, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>
>> The strain in Heidegger's thinking that seems most dangerous to me was
>> something very common to his time. It is the idea of race , of some
>> essential unique identity of a "people" which was becoming synonymous with
>> nation. This identity generally turns out to be the master race, the chosen
>> ones, the exceptional nation, the smartest kids in the room, the true faith,
>> the royal rulers of land and sea. Purity ain't easy; there is all that
>> cleaning to do: ethnic cleansing ...
>
>
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