--- On Wed, 7/9/08, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Heidegger never repudiated Nazism.
Heidegger stated that 1) the essence of NS was good, but that 2) the Nazi leadership had perverted it. Whether that counts as a repudiation depends on what you think counts as a repudiation.
He also continued to
> reprint the Introduction to Metaphysics with that sinister
> sentence about "the innter greatness of our
> movement."
He should have falsified the record?
I believe he did utter mildly disapproving
> remarks about the death camps,
but in the context of
> complaining about how badly the Germans were treated after
> the war.
He mentioned them IIRC in the Question Concerning Technology. I think you are referring to something he said to Arendt (that she relayed in a letter to Gunter Anders).
>
> He broke ties to Jewish friends, teachers, and colleagues,
> of course, and fired Jewish scholars as Rector of
> Heidelberg in the mid 1930s.
Everybody in Nazi Germany did who wanted to have a career. He wasn't a moral superhuman. This shit was pervasive.
>
> As has been often noted in various places, Heidegger's
> Nazism was not the industrial mass-murder aspect of
> "our movenent," which represented everything his
> philosophy attacked -- not ethically as evil or unjust of
> wrong, but as involving a wrong-headed merely instreumental
> attitude towards the world.
Yes.
Heidegger liked the Nazis'
> blood-and-soil beautiful Ayran Volk nature worship stuff,
> going on hikes, skinny dsippying in clear streams in the
> Black Forest, that sort of thing.
Yes.
There seems to be no
> reason to doubt that he was a real anti-semite, but that
> doesn't make you an advocate of genocide.
I think he was an anti-Semite in the "normal" pre-WWII European way of thinking Jews were sort of yucky, not in any kind of coherent sense. It certainly doesn't seem to ba a matter of central concern to him.
> It is additionally troubliung that he failed to repudiate
> "our movement" and its genocide, but a lot of
> ex-Commies who stayed on the left have had an ambigious
> attitude towards our movement (no scare quotes) and its
> little ethical problems, like the purges and the Gulag.
>
I was sort-of trying to allude to this before.