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In Nietzsche’s Shadow: Unenlightened Politics

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004, 400pp.

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Notes

  1. See Rorty (1988, 1990, 2004).

  2. An early indictment comes from one of Heidegger’s most famous students, Herbert Marcuse, who wrote to his former teacher in 1948 seeking some acknowledgment from Heidegger of what he had endorsed; none was received. Marcuse had admonished: “...we cannot make the distinction between the philosopher and the human being Martin Heidegger – It contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be mistaken about politics – Then he will openly admit his error. But he cannot be mistaken about a regime that murdered millions of Jews merely because they were Jews, that made terror part of everyday life and turned everything that ever was really tied to the concept of spirit and freedom and truth into its bloody opposite.” Quoted in Schalow (1989), p. 124. See also Rockmore (1992). Rather than disassociating Nazism from the substance of his philosophy, Heidegger himself proudly asserted an essential connection, as Mark Lilla reports: “In 1936...Karl Löwith saw him in Rome, where he wore a Nazi lapel pin and explained to his former student how concepts in Being and Time had inspired his political engagement.” See Lilla (2001), pp. 22–23 and similarly Wolin (1991), p. 10.

  3. See Sternhell (1986); Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri (1994).

  4. See Yovel (1998), and Wolin (1991), pp. 31–2 and 58.

  5. See for example, Aschheim (1992); Schrift (1995).

  6. Aschheim (1992), p. 258. (As is well-known, Heidegger devoted his lectures in 1936–1940 to Nietzsche.)

  7. Aschheim (1992), p. 259.

  8. Aschheim (1992), p. 261.

  9. Aschheim (1992), p. 55.

  10. See further, Noll (1994), on which Wolin draws.

  11. Odanjyk (1976), pp. 107–108. Consideration of these matters will in future have to include Bair’s (2003) massive Jung: A Biography, which cannot be addressed here.

  12. Gadamer (1997a), p.7.

  13. See Detmer (1997) and Gadamer (1997b).

  14. On these matters, appreciations and defences of Gadamer include McDowell (2002) and Taylor (2002). Gadamer aside, I myself have written favourably about the role of tradition in morals and politics, in Aronovitch (1996).

  15. See Gadamer (1997a), p. 13.

  16. See also Grondin (2003), pp. 181–183.

  17. Wolin has reviewed Grondin’s biography in Wolin (2003).

  18. See Eribon (1991), Chapter 19.

  19. By way of background, there is the interesting (but wearying) “L’affaire Derrida” which played out over many weeks in The New York Review of Books (1993). Derrida, Wolin, and others engaged in an exchange over Wolin’s (1991) publication in The Heidegger Controversy of a version of an interview Derrida had earlier given in France.

  20. See Bennington (2001) and Simon Critchley (1992) pp. XII, 236.

  21. See Dworkin (1986).

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    Hilliard Aronovitch

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Aronovitch, H. In Nietzsche’s Shadow: Unenlightened Politics. Philosophia 34, 209–221 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-006-9016-x

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