NP (but him again): Dear Herr Doctor Professor Heidegger:

[David Morris]

Yes, Kai!  Your expertise in modern philosophy is deep and wide.  We need
your balance in Mr. H.  Good synopsis .

On Thursday, May 1, 2014, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Kai,
>
> Thank you for this long, informative, personal and objective response.
> I had hoped I would draw out our plist
> Heidegger expert with my post. Your post is worth pondering after
> reading again, which I am doing..
>
> Now I can also say I know someone who has "reread" BEING & TIME.
>
> You, as does the NYorker guy (and as one guy from the event he quotes)
> do focus on the possibility of
> BEING & TIME not being contaminated. "a phenomenology of freedom" is
> one nice succinct phrase,
> which I think I get.  I was led to wonder about BEING & Time too,
> intellectually...amid the blackness....
>
> Take Care,
>
> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 6:05 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, it's not beer-hall antisemitism. More like the Spinoza chapter in
> Carl
> > Schmitt's book on the Leviathan from 1938: Jews as agents of modernity
> who
> > are dissolving all traditional social relations outside their own tribe.
> The
> > most problematic thing here is the assumed contradiction between
> Germanness
> > and Jewishness. For Heidegger, the Germans are the people of 'the other
> > beginning' (which recapitulates and transforms 'the first beginning' in -
> > especially: pre-Socratic - Greek philosophy); as such they are according
> to
> > Heidegger the only people who can find an escape from alienated and
> > overtechnologized modernity. As I already explained here some months ago,
> > this is not about the matter of fact Germans of Heidegger's time (or some
> > fictional 'Aryan' gene pool), yet about the future readers of the poet
> > Hölderlin. "One nation under a groove," so to speak.
> > The sad thing now is that the Heidegger from the Black Notebooks -
> despite
> > the concrete relations he had with Jewish people before and afterwards -
> > sees 'world-Jewry' (das Weltjudentum) as kinda spiritual enemy to the
> German
> > people in their effort to find 'the other beginning'. He diagnoses a
> > transition phase inside which 'the monstrous' (das Riesenhafte),
> globalizing
> > the planet by science and capital, is trying to hold 'the other
> beginning'
> > down. And the Weltjudentum - there's no way to deny this - is to
> Heidegger a
> > (perhaps: the) major agent of this process.
> > So here we have it: Germans vs. Jews. While this has, as far as I can
> see,
> > no consequences for the thinking of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) from
> > 1927, which I just reread completely, all writings after the Kehre
> (turn),
> > which took place in the early 1930s, must now also be seen in this
> context.
> > So do we have, as some people do suggest, to put Heidegger into the
> > poison-cabinet? Not really. In its basic way of thinking Heidegger's
> > philosophy - on art, technology and the history of Being - does work
> without
> > ethnic identifications. Actually it's a phenomenology of freedom. The
> human
> > Da-sein ('existence') is what connects people from all nations. Heidegger
> > doesn't say 'The German is the shepherd of Being,' he says 'Man (der
> Mensch)
> > is the shepherd of Being' (Letter on Humanism).
> > But of course it's a problem for me as a Heidegger reader. Since I'm
> also a
> > reader of Carl Schmitt (and of Ernst Jünger), I know the feelings and
> > profound worries related to it. So let me toss in a very personal
> statement:
> > In my - 'other', 'secret', or 'imaginary' - Germany people are welcome no
> > matter their religion/ethno-cultural background or color of skin.
> Language
> > skills might be helpful.
> > You know, when I got started with philosophy, I was a huge fan of the
> > Frankfurt School. Over the years it became obvious to me, that if you
> took
> > all the Schmitt and all the Heidegger out of the Frankfurt School
> teaching,
> > a rather crude brand of Freudomarxism would be all that's left . So I got
> > confronted with the decision whether to quit research out of political
> > correctness or to dig deeper where it all came from and what exactly
> > happened during the 1930s in the sphere of thinking.
> >
> >
> > On 30.04.2014 21:47, Mark Thibodeau wrote:
> >>
> >> It seems to me the problem with Heidegger's thinking/writing on the
> >> Jews isn't that it is "totally unhinged" and "irrational", as some
> >> quoted in that article pretend, but that it is rational in a way that
> >> they find disturbing. This is a problem for Heidegger's readers more
> >> than it will ever be for Heidegger.
> >>
> >> YOPJ
> >>
> >> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>   "Please tell me EXACTLY where we were standing when we 'fell into
> >>> Being?'"---
> >>> Moses Herzog.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/is-heidegger-contaminated-by-nazism.html
> >>>
> >>> Yes, his whole 'philosophy' is contaminated. All of it.
> >>> -
> >
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