I didn't say Heidegger was a philosophical innocent. I said he was a political innocent, which isn't the same thing. He was also morally corrupt, and appears to have been a personal creepazoid. My recollection of his philosophy is now a decade old, but I recall being impressed in the way that maybe Gilbert Ryle (who gave a favorable and thoughtful review to S&Z) was, given that my own orienation is a lot closer to Ryle's (that is. "positivist," as some here would say), than I thought I would be.
H's isn't a philosophy that is merely a symptom of evil. H was a genuinely great philosopher, in the same class as Wittgenstein, Dewey, Quine, and Lukacs, whose work scan be studied profitably by thinkers of whatever political orienatation. A lot of what I saw in H, I already had gotten from Marx, Dewey, Lukacs, the later Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and a lot of what was there left over I didn't much care for. But hell, there is a lot in the later W, etc. that I don't care for either. That doesn't excuse H's capitulation to evil, but Lukacs did his share of that too, a different evil. (At least he made up for it in his later life. H never seems to have repented.)
I confess not to being able to make anything of Adorno; I never have been able too. Lack of patience, I guess. Frederick Jameson didn't help me with him either.
--jks
>
>Hardly. Heidegger is worth reading the same way that Riefenstahl's
>"Triumph of the Will" is worth seeing -- in order to understand 1930s
>Fascism, which was part of the constellation which birthed Stalinism, the
>New Deal and ultimately the Cold War. But Heidegger was *not* some
>philosophical innocent who wandered down the wrong path (a Holzweg, no
>doubt); that was Nietzsche's historic fate. Adorno says it best:
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