It's a Battlefield Out There

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Wed Dec 9 17:04:24 PST 1998


In a message dated 98-12-09 06:38:12 EST, you write:

<<

Heidegger was a paid up member of the NSDAP from the 1930s right to the

end of the war. . . .

Yes, he has a lot to teach us about the way that scientific enquiry can

be crushed under the iron heel of fascist ideology, but not much to

teach us about science itself.

--

Jim heartfield >>

I'm no Heidegger scholar, though I taughgt him now and then in classes on existentialim or cont phil when I was a phil. professor. I was quite startled to raed severa essays collected in the Farrel Krell anthology of Basic Writings which I thought were very deep and insightful as people of straight- out philosophy and history of science, written in intelligible and lucid prose. The point of view expressed in them was proto-Kuhnian--in fact, I'd say that H anticiapted a good many of the ideas which are now associated with Kuhn.

As to his Nazism, I don't think it's relevant to this. The view I came toa t the time is that he was attrcated to Nazism because of its superficial use of a certain anti-modernist romanticism, the Blut und Erde scheisse,a s well as my his own ambivalent antisemitism. (Why ambivalent? Well, he studied with Husserl and taught Arendt, and both of them loved him and so far as we can tell, he them.) I don't think his politics means he has nothing to teach us about science.



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