Martin Heidegger and the university as a site for the transformation of human existence

Review of Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 75-96

  Milchman, Alan ^a   Rosenberg, Alan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248101292     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500027169     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Martin Heidegger, "Die Universitat im nationalsozialistichen Staat," in Martin Heidegger und das "Dritte Reich": Ein Kompendium, ed. Bernd Martin (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), p. 179.
2. See, for example, Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989
3. and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, "Une vie, une oeuvre engages dans le national-socialisme" in La Quinzaine Litteraire, 496, 1-15 Novembre 1987.
4. George R. Leaman, "Contextual Misreadings: The US Reception of Heidegger's Political Thought" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1991), p. 154.
5. For an analysis of the distinctions between Heidegger's "private" or "Freiburg National Socialism," and the Nazi project in the period 1933-1935, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, "Resoluteness and Ambiguity: Martin Heidegger's Ontological Politics, 1933-1935
6. The Philosophical Forum 25 (Fall 1993).
7. See Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. Nor did competing philosophical rationales for Nazism cease after 1933-34. Anson Rabinbach has shown that in the midst of the second World War itself, the "humanism" affair of 1940-1941, in which Heidegger was tangentially involved, concerned opposing definitions of what it was to be a National Socialist. This controversy pitted biologizing "Nordicists" against "Hellinists," who argued that culture, not blood or race, was the basis for National Socialism.
9. See Anson Rabinbach, "Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as Text and Event," New German Critique 62 (Summer 1994): 16-20.
10. Hannah Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty" in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 295.
11. See Heidegger's letter of 20 January 1948 to Herbert Marcuse, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 162.
12. Jacques Derrida, "Philosopher's Hell: An Interview" in Heidegger Controversy, p. 268.
13. While our focus here is the relationship between Heidegger's concern to transform the university and his entanglement with Nazism, this project for the renewal of the university was integrally linked to Heidegger's effort to re-pose the question of Being. The link between Heidegger's understanding of the Seinsfrage and his involvement with Nazism, however, lies beyond the scope of the present article.
14. John D. Caputo, "Heidegger's Kampf: The Difficulty of Life," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14/15 (1991): 70.
15. John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 352-353
16. Martin Heidegger, "German Students/' New German Critique 45 (Fall 1988): 102.
17. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 121.
18. John Van Buren, for example, overlooks precisely this profound ambiguity which characterizes Heidegger's thinking in 1933-1934, when he simply counterposes the young Heidegger's critique of Ftihrung to his purported commitment to a vision of a philosopher-king in the university in the wake of Hitler's accession to power. See Van Buren, Young Heidegger, p. 357. We believe that matters are not so cut and dried: the ambiguity of a continued insistence on radical questioning, together with a justification for Fiihrung, uneasily coexist in Heidegger's thinking in the period of the rectorate; the vision of the young Heidegger does not disappear, so much as persist in a state of unrelieved tension with newer philosophico-ideological themes.
19. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 11.
20. Caputo, "Heidegger's Kampf," p. 63.
21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962), p. 29.
22. Caputo, "Heidegger's Kampf," p. 64.
23. Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophic, Gesamtausgabe, vols. 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987), p. 4.
24. Ibid., pp. 4-5.
25. Martin Heidegger, Phanomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einfuhrung in die phanomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe, vol.61 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 26.
26. Ibid., p. 64.
27. Martin Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977), p. 96.
28. Ibid., p. 97
29. Ibid., p. 112.
30. Ibid.,
31. The early Plans for Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe listed an Einfuhrung in das akademische Studium as volume 29. After 1983, however, that volume disappeared from the Plan, swallowed up by the lecture course for the winter semester of 1929-1930, now become a double volume, volume 29/30. According to the editors, this was because the lecture course on academic studies was never given, and no manuscript for it existed. Yet, as Theodore Kisiel has pointed out in his paper, "Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe as a Philosophical Problem: Prolegomena," (Paper delivered to the 27th Annual Heidegger Conference), the lecture course was indeed given, and at least two transcripts of it exist. In fact, a detailed account of the course was published in Japan in 1930, by Seinosuke Yuasa, who audited the course. See Seinosuke Yuasa, "Heidegger im Vorlesungssaal" in Japan und Heidegger, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1989).
32. Seinosuke Yuasa, "Heidegger im Vorlesungssaal," p. 112.
33. For an analysis of this vocabulary, which makes its appearance in Heidegger's Winter semester lecture course of 1929-1930, see Winfried Franzen, "Die Sehnsucht nach Harte und Schwere. Uber ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heidegger's Vorlesung 'Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik' von 1929/30" inHeidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Poggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). Beyond the vocabulary of hardness and rigor, Heidegger's insistence that Dasein is the Dasein of a Volk, and his Nietzschean voluntarism, opened him up to the lure of Nazism. While the germs of such a position were already present in nuce in Being and Time, their full development only occurred in the period after 1929-1930, and in particular in the period of the rectorate.
34. Martin Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 9.
35. Ibid.,
36. Ibid., p. 6.
37. Ibid., p. 7.
38. Ibid.,
39. This is one of the strands of Derrida's essay "Mochlos; See Jacques Derrida, "Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties," in Logotnachia: The Conflict Of The Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
40. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 45.
41. F. W. J. Schelling, Vorlesungen tiber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1974), p. 23.
42. Ibid.,
43. Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Philosophy at the Universities" in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 139.
44. Ibid., pp. 194-195
45. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Philosophy in Hard Times" in Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selectwns from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1990), p. 113.
46. Caputo, "Heidegger's Kampf," p. 63.
47. David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington, IN:: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 137.
48. See Derrida, "Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties," pp. 19-20. Indeed, Derrida challenges the rigid distinction between constativity and performativity, on which the Kantian ideal of the university in no small part depended.
49. Gerard Granel has made a case for the relevance of Heidegger's critique of the modern university that is consonant with our own in a number of respects. See Granel, "Pouquoi avons-nous public cela?" inDe I'Universite (France: Editions Trans-Europ-Repress, n.d.).
50. The science camp was undertaken at Heidegger's initiative, and its goal was to foster a community between teachers and students, on the one hand, and students and workers newly admitted to the university, on the other. However, the project was immediately enmeshed in factional disputes between Heidegger and those who shared his vision of the renewal of the university, and Nazi ideologues for whom the purpose of the camp was to indoctrinate the students in Nazi racial principles and conceptions of discipline. For an account of this project, and its absolute failure, see Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1988), pp. 214-223
51. For an account of Heidegger's efforts to direct German higher education after the Nazis came to power, see Ott, Martin Heidegger, and Farias, Heidegger and Nazism.
52. For an excellent analysis of this facet of Heidegger's rectorate, see Otto Poggeler, "Den Fiihrer fiihren? Heidegger und kein Ende" in Poggeler, Neue Weg mit Heidegger (Freiburg/ Munchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 1992).
53. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 33
54. Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis, p. 167.
55. Leaman, "Contextual Misreadings," p. 18.
56. Granel, "Pourquoi avons-nous public cela," pp. 130-132
57. See the accounts in Ott, Martin Heidegger, and Farias, Heidegger and Nazism.
58. Martin Heidegger, "The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 28.
59. See the account of the end of Heidegger's rectorate in Ott, Martin Heidegger, pp. 224-246
60. Ibid.,
61. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, pp. 20-21.
62. Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 239.
63. Martin Heidegger, Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, vol.65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 149.
64. Ibid., pp. 155-156