The "Beats" claimed Heidegger as one of their inspirations and the effect, or perhaps association", of Heidegger to the 60s generation seems apparent. (Thomas Seay)
Bob Fitch told a story of spying Michael Lerner reading Heidegger in Berkeley around 1968, and asking him "Why are you reading that Nazi gasbag?" Lerner replied that it was very important. The rest is history, or at least the politics of meaning. (Doug)
Besides Sartre, didn't Herbert Marcuse play a significant role in introducing Heidegger to the '60s generation? (Jim F.)
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If its of any interest, the sequence here (LA/SF) started from the writers Malraux, Camus and Sartre to the US fifties pop/beat milieu as a counter culture and positive resistance to the complete absence of a philosophy of living experience. Then in an academic context, first the existentialists and phenomenologists, then the Frankfurters Marcuse, Horkhiemer, Adorno were injected into slightly later academic struggles. These academic struggles were about paying attention to real life in the larger pop culture and for a more general embrace of intellectual freedom, etc. The central figure in all these lines was Nietzsche and to a lesser extent Marx.
When I took an existentialism and phenomenology course at Northridge (CSUN) in `65, we began with selections from Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, using Nietzsche as the bridge to both branches: Husserl and Heidegger and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
Its hard to re-capture just how electrifying these writers were at the time. They have to be contrasted to the long, abstract and tedious Anglo-American analytical tradition, which was the absolute standard. And there was the fact that many of their works had just been translated (Being and Time, trans 1962, for example).
In continental philosophy as it was called then, phenomenologists and existentialists actually discussed the realm of ideas and its direct expressions in life and concrete experience: living in a mass technological society, death, alienation, the suffocation of mass culture... Compared to the lengthy and abstract deliberations on language and truth, the nuances of empirical induction and so forth in the Anglo-American tradition, these other guys were fire breathing radicals. They were so immediate in their appeal, that I am afraid the fact that Heidegger was a Nazis collaborator or that Sartre was turning into a Maoist was not very important compared to the overwhelming impact of their writing. This was especially so when you consider that deep thoughts about life in US at the time were restricted to academic banalities in the social sciences and the indirect critiques in literature.
As the 60s dawned it was just barely possible to assemble some kind of cultural life through abstract art, jazz, european film and writers like the existentialist, phenomenologists, and marxist sociologists. These were just coming into view, that is penetrating the depths of the LA suburbs, Iowa, and Berkeley were I went to school. The contrast between that world and say the Beach Boys was tremendous.
The Frankfurters emerged slightly later, in the context of radical student political movements---made famous by Angela Davis's struggle with the UC system and her linkage with Herbert Marcuse---both at UC San Diego. But it was Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (published 1964) that had made the rounds in student reading outside of any courses that was the key introduction to that school.
In retrospect, it seems to me that there was an explicit, uniform and complete suppression of these works in the US academy and indeed the whole realm of thought that they represent. What existed instead was a tradition of extra-curricular student readings and a linkage with advanced counter-cultures particularly in writing, art and music---not the later popularized mass counter-culture of rock, but its antecedent typified by jazz, the Beats, and politicos. What marked this counter-culture underground and its readings was its profound resistance at every level and in all dimensions to the universalized cultural system of a seamless bourgeois corporate order.
Chuck Grimes