Heidegger in Ruins, a Dialogue Between Richard Wolin and Martin Jay

Heidegger talk at BRLSI, Bath on 09/10/23 brought me here.

great convo

Jay needs to ask questions without simultaneously giving a lecture.

Or perhaps we should say that he was an extremely good judge of the attributes and character of a culture.

26:05 Derrida

Way back when,George Lichteim argued that Heidegger;s Nazism was derivable from his philosophy.

I want to know who I am. Please help!

There is a critical review of Wolin's "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology," by Emmanuel Faye (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2023.12.1) pointing out various weaknesses and omissions. (Seach "Heidegger in Ruins Wolin Notre Dame Faye", it should be the first hit. FWIW: I haven't read Wolin's book.) I thought these points from the review were notable. EXTRACTS ... There is a notable terminological issue throughout the book: Although Wolin mentions statements Heidegger made that are radically anti-Semitic or that praise the N#zi party, he does not examine the links between these statements and his National Socialism, preferring instead to speak of him as a conservative revolutionary (50, 53). He does not explain the reasons for this politico-historical downplaying of Heidegger’s actual political stance. ... Wolin also draws on Heidegger’s correspondence with his brother Fritz, excerpts of which Arnulf Heidegger published in 2015. These texts confirm the radical nature of Heidegger’s Hitlerism. His identification with Hitler is such that Fritz wrote to him on April 3rd, 1933 saying: “Hitler’s bearing and countenance, as conveyed by contemporary photographs, remind me of you” (70). Heidegger’s Hitlerism is no less radical in his Black Notebooks: in 1934, he rejoices that “the Führer has awakened a new reality: a reality that has galvanized my Denken and redirected it along the right path” (2014, 111, quoted 75). However, although Wolin provides a good documentation of Heidegger’s Hitlerism, he does not draw any serious conclusions from it. He continues to situate Heidegger among the “conservative revolutionary thinkers,” in this instance in the company of Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger (77). The rest of the chapter compiles judgments from highly dissimilar authors: Christian Tilitsky, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Claude Lefort, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Assheuer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Ernst Tugendhat. The fact that the thesis of revisionist historian Christian Tilitsky is quoted without any reservations and as an authority is the most surprising thing here. A disciple of the Heideggerian historian Ernst Nolte, who believed that Heidegger made the right choice in joining the N#zi party in 1933, Tilitsky supported the thesis of a seamless continuity in German philosophy before and after 1933 despite the dismissal and forced exile of “non-Aryan” professors and reduced N#zi anti-Semitism to the defense of particularity against universalism. And to equate authors as different as Gadamer, who in 1942 extolled “völkisch life,” and Adorno is no less confusing. No less surprising is Wolin’s reference to Hannah Arendt as a relevant critical authority on Heidegger. From the late 1940s onwards she set herself entirely to the task of rehabilitating his reputation. In a palinode that cannot fail to surprise the attentive reader, Wolin argues the opposite of what he had shown two decades earlier in his Heidegger’s Children (2001). There he claimed that Hannah Arendt’s “political existentialism” was “profoundly elitist and undemocratic.” In Heidegger in Ruins, on the contrary, he presents Arendt as defending, against Heidegger, “the virtues of the ‘democratic invention’” (81). There is no explanation for this reversal. At the end of the chapter, Wolin cites Arendt’s claim that Heidegger leads us “out of philosophy” in her 1946 article “What is Existenz-Philosophy?” (96), but he fails to mention that Arendt later entirely disavowed her article and categorically refused to have it republished in her lifetime. ... If Heidegger in Ruins is taken as an essay in the history of political ideas, the book deserves to be seen as a relatively well-informed popular work, particularly with respect to the New Right, and as largely useful—with the exception of its omission of the most recent critical works—to readers who have not kept up with the advances in research over the last two decades. However, Wolin does not just present Heidegger in Ruins as a contribution to the history of political ideas, but also as a book of philosophical reflection. And on this point, it’s hard not to be deeply dissatisfied by the polemical and vague statements at the end of the lengthy introduction. Without proposing his own philosophical analysis, Wolin is content to reiterate the long-standing positions of Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat, as if the publication of the Black Notebooks and the deepening of critical research in recent decades had shed no new light on the core of the problem.

The discussion has a number of severe weaknesses. - What exactly did Heidegger embrace in N#zi ideology? N#zism is taken as given but there were differences. The 1934 "Night Of the Long Knives" when the leadership of the SA was summarily executed expresses how sharp the disagreements were. - at 30:55 Wolin notes a critique that says "you're so comfortable in your liberal humanism that you don't realize how you're skating at the edge and it can transform itself into, to go back to the word, something that's diabolical. Maybe that's true but I think we have to make significant distinctions and differences. We have to ground ourselves uh both in history and institutions."   (JW: Why just "maybe that's true"?) Wolin goes on to say "[some members of the Frankfurt School] believed a rather conventional Marxist understanding of the state and rule of law as merely benefiting the bourgeoisie and the capitalists and often that can be the case.  But also these norms can be used against structures of authority and power, if they can be broadened, once we have a party system." Yet his history stops there. What is missing? In the November 1932 elections the Nazis lost 2 million votes compared to the July 1932 elections. The combined votes of the social democrats and the communists was once again above the Nazi party vote. The Nazi party went into a crisis. Hitler was still legally appointed Chancellor on 30 January and the new government began, slowly at first, the repression of the working class. Violent repression began. It was the passive acquiescence of the leaderships of social democrats (SPD) and the Stalinists Communist Party (KPD), despite a mass antifascist sentiment among workers, that let Hitler build the dictatorship without any organised opposition.  In fact Hitler was appointed as Chancellor by President Hindenburg on 30 January 1933 in a cabinet with a minority of N#zis.   The KPD and SPD (social democrats) participated in the March 1933 election although under conditions of severe repression. The Reichstag fire was just before the election and President Hindenburg had signed the Reichstag Fire Decree as an emergency decree according to Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. KPD leader Thalmann was arrested and no parties beside the N#zi Party and the German National People's Party were allowed to campaign. Violent repression against the rest continued. The N#zis still only won 43% of the vote in that election. Two weeks after that election the Enabling Act, that gave Hitler dictatorial powers, was passed by the parliament. Was any of this illegal under the constitution? After all this Heidegger joined the Nazi party on 1 May 1933, which is May Day. Why did he take so long? It is worth noting that there were large union marches on May Day in Berlin and across Germany. The following day most of the leadership of the trade unions were arrested. As early as 1932 the leadership of the unions had indicated they would work with at N#zi government. Fascism is on the rise again and threatens even in the United States. The US Supreme Court is discussing giving the Presidency superiority above the law.  Liberalism and its devotees like Wolin, still has no answer to it. MUST WATCH What is fascism? with Trotskyist David North, Socialist Equality Party https://youtu.be/GCSodSijB_o --------- QUESTION: Have the apologists for Heidegger ever found anything to suggest his philosophy entails opposition to N#zism? I have seen and read a number of things on his philosophy and no one has ever suggested it. (Apparently Derrida claims Heidegger's work after 1935 is essential to allow us to understand N#zism. Is that right?)  Heidegger's nationalism implies support for N#zism in particular and not fascism in general.

He wasn't a nazi in our sense of the term. He wasn't an anti-semite. I still haven't been convinced that anyone critical has more than liberal screeching on the matter.

Plato was fascist...and advocated for eugenics, yet we aren't questioning his philosophy and how it's diabolicism has tainted us...or at least, i haven't seen it in the public culture, such as Heidegger is being questioned.... do people hold forums like this on Plato?

Is Richard Wolin related to Doctor Maurice Wolin?

Heidegger was certainly a scumbag but every decade we seem to get these claims anew. Philosophy tends to bury its undertakers.

Hi, U need attractive YouTube Thumbnail designer?

Must be nice to be a totally fascist shit like Heidegger but still taken seriously as a writer. Most writers can not even get anyone to take a serious look at their books. But there will be justice: a world where the Heideggers will be broken and silenced, while better and more worthy voices are heard.