Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 069116861X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Martin Heidegger is perhaps the twentieth century's greatest philosopher, and his work stimulated much that is original and compelling in modern thought. A seductive classroom presence, he attracted Germany's brightest young intellects during the 1920s. Many were Jews, who ultimately would have to reconcile their philosophical and, often, personal commitments to Heidegger with his nefarious political views.

In 1933, Heidegger cast his lot with National Socialism. He squelched the careers of Jewish students and denounced fellow professors whom he considered insufficiently radical. For years, he signed letters and opened lectures with ''Heil Hitler!'' He paid dues to the Nazi party until the bitter end. Equally problematic for his former students were his sordid efforts to make existential thought serviceable to Nazi ends and his failure to ever renounce these actions.

This book explores how four of Heidegger's most influential Jewish students came to grips with his Nazi association and how it affected their thinking. Hannah Arendt, who was Heidegger's lover as well as his student, went on to become one of the century's greatest political thinkers. Karl Löwith returned to Germany in 1953 and quickly became one of its leading philosophers. Hans Jonas grew famous as Germany's premier philosopher of environmentalism. Herbert Marcuse gained celebrity as a Frankfurt School intellectual and mentor to the New Left.

Why did these brilliant minds fail to see what was in Heidegger's heart and Germany's future? How would they, after the war, reappraise Germany's intellectual traditions? Could they salvage aspects of Heidegger's thought? Would their philosophy reflect or completely reject their early studies? Could these Heideggerians forgive, or even try to understand, the betrayal of the man they so admired? Heidegger's Children locates these paradoxes in the wider cruel irony that European Jews experienced their greatest calamity immediately following their fullest assimilation. And it finds in their responses answers to questions about the nature of existential disillusionment and the juncture between politics and ideas.

The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy (Routledge Philosophy Companions)

An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford World's Classics)

Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures)

The Racial Contract

Why Tolerate Religion?

Les lois : Livres I à VI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

facticity.” In the letter, he returns to this point repeatedly: I do not make a distinction between the scientific, theoretical life and one’s own life…. The essential manner in which my facticity becomes existentially articulated is scientific research…. In this connection, for me the motive and goal of philosophizing is never to augment the store of objective truths, because the objectivity of philosophy … lies within the meaning of my existing.41 From these brief characterizations and

present. Experience itself, the primordial encounter between self and world, far from being mute, and as always already meaningful, already contains an expressive dimension: it cannot help but speak to us if we reacquire the capacity to heed its signals. As Heidegger observes in a lapidary aside: “Philosophy as fundamental knowing is nothing other than the radical actualization of the facticity of life in its historicity.”45 One of Heidegger’s crucial discoveries of this period, one that would

roots of my existence.”12 In 1929, Heidegger had already complained that Germany was faced with a stark alternative: “the choice between sustaining our German intellectual life through a renewed infusion of genuine, native teachers and educators, or abandoning it once and for all to growing Jewish influence [Verjudung]—in both the wider and narrow sense.”13 According to a former student, the philosopher Max Müller, “From the moment Heidegger became rector, he allowed no Jewish students who had

hardly have been otherwise. It was Heidegger who initiated the affair. Arendt, an impressionable eighteen-year-old, was clearly awestruck by this formidable embodiment of Geist, a man nearly twice her age. Ettinger reconstructs the prehistory of their acquaintanceship as follows: That Hannah Arendt was drawn to [Heidegger] is not surprising. Given the powerful influence he exerted on his students it was almost inevitable. Neither her past—that of a fatherless, searching youngster—nor her

assimilated German-Jewish family in Munich in 1897. His father, Wilhelm Löwith, a convert to Protestantism, was a successful artist and stimulated his son’s early interests in European cultural life. After attending high school in Munich, Löwith volunteered for World War I and was seriously wounded in the Italian campaign of 1915. He spent the next three years in a prisoner of war camp near Genoa, an experience that inspired a lifelong affection for the Mediterranean sensibility. He was deeply

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