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| Heidegger''s Silence
ISBN: 9781501727542
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Cornell University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Heidegger Martin 1889–1976 -- Views on Jews; Antisemitism -- Germany -- History -- 20th century;
The Gesamtausgabe, or collected works, of Heidegger currently being assembled already number 79 volumes, but Lang faults Heidegger for what he left unsaid. Heidegger never addressed the "Jewish question," and as Lang contends, "silence can be as deliberate and pointed as presence." Although one might not expect references to Jews in Heidegger's metaphysics, Lang argues that it is a "thoughtful failure," one that "calls attention to itself." His thesis is that Heidegger believed the mystical German Volk and their subsequent embodiment in Nazism to be the meditation of Being and Time and Jews to be excluded from the Volk altogether. In this exclusion lies Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his reason for not mentioning Jews in his writings: they are extraneous and irrelevant in the apprehension of Truth. Although Lang's argument is convincing, it seems rather superfluous to use Heidegger's silence to prove his anti-Semitism. After all, in a speech as rector of the University of Freiburg, he welcomed National Socialism, knowing full well what it entailed, and made remarks about "Jewification" and the "dangerous international fraternity of Jews" while wearing the party insignia on his jacket. A more open question would have been, Can a great thinker be an anti-Semite, an anti-Semite a great thinker? (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Berel Lang is Professor of Philosophy and Letters at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory , also from Cornell, Holocaust-Representation: Art with the Bounds of History and Ethics , and Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History . He is the editor of Race and Racism in Theory and Practice and coeditor of The Holocaust: A Reader . |
