Heidegger's Fountain Pens

[Time-Traveller]

[…] One last question as far as I am concerned: some people in France are positive about H. being a Nazi and a Hitlerian since Being and Time, i.e. 1927 at least, and that his philosophy was indeed designed to be the Nazi's ideology. I have not read any convincing proof or argument about that.

 

There isn’t any, and there can’t be (see below. By the way, he joined the nazi party only in 1933).

 

There is a general tendency in western Europe, esp. in circles in Germany that desperately want to think of themselves as progressive, to tarbrush anything that with the greatest stretch of the imagination can be linked with nazism or even remotely resembles some aspects of it, in a very cramped way (as an outsider with some distance to the matter, I can say this more easily than the locals can). If you’re a researcher and write an article that somehow touches upon nazism (the bolder and wilder, the better), it’ll be published (100% guarantee), no matter what the quality of your writing is.

 

When Heidegger’s discarded notebooks surfaced, there was some unsurprising hysteria, though they apparently contained nothing really new. H. was a small-town guy, from a really stifling parochial environment. Much of his career reads like an interesting struggle to free himself from that; but by the early 1930s, he hadn’t succeeded yet. He was a child of his time; nazism, too, was a product of that time. H. goofed for a while and was a card-carrying nazi. He realized that he goofed (and he was clumsy in his later embarrassed attempts at face-saving), because nazism is actually the antithesis to the main drift of his philosophy of personal authenticity and his criticism of the ‘dictatorship of the “they”’. As more time passes, it’s perfectly possible to filter out what is useful from what is not useful in H.’s work.

 

(And I’m delighted to see he used fountain pens. )

Edited August 11, 2019 by Time-traveller