HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY WAS INTRINSICALLY A NAZI ONE

HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY WAS INTRINSICALLY A NAZI ONE

1. HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY CANNOT BE DIVORCED FROM HIS NAZISM

Frank Tipler, professor of physics at Tulane University, THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, 1994, p. 83-4.

Heidegger can be considered the most influential Nazi philosopher of all. It is well known that he was a member of the Nazi party before Hitler took power in Germany, but many of Heidegger's later followers have attempted to argue that this was incidental to his philosophy. This is false. When Heidegger's own student Karl Lowith (driven out of German in the 1930s because he was half Jewish) told Heidegger that his philosophical work was being damaged by his politics, Heidegger disagreed, claiming that in fact the idea of 'historicity,' as outlined in Heidegger's most famous work, BEING AND TIME, was the justification for his Nazism. And 'historicity' as understood by Heidegger was repetition, Eternal Return.

Frank Tipler, professor of physics at Tulane University, THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, 1994, p. 84.

Heidegger considered technology to be the greatest danger facing humankind, for it threatened to change the very essence of personhood. The two nations with the greatest admiration for technological progress, the United States and the Soviet Union, must therefore be opposed. Since both capitalist democracy and Marxist totalitarianism believed in technological progress without limit, they were equally suspect in Heidegger's eyes. Heidegger hoped the Nazis could provide the necessary restrictions on technology; indeed, he believed that the very essence of Nazism was to keep technology in its proper bounds. As he put it in his INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS, published after World War II, 'the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism must be sought in the encounter between global technology and modern man.'
3. HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY IS PRIMITIVE, FATALISTIC

Murray Bookchin, Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, GREEN PERSPECTIVES, April 1989, p. 1.

Not surprisingly, assorted environmental groups who have made biocentricity a focal point in their philosophies tend toward a passive-receptive mysticism. Heidegger's numbing "openness to Being," Spinoza's fatalism, and various Asian theologies that enjoin us to yield to a mindless quietism have attained a trendy quality that beclouds ecological issues with mystical overtones. We thus spin in an orbit of circular reasoning that subordinates human action to a supernatural world of largely mythic activity. The result is that action as such becomes suspect irrespective of the social conditions in which it occurs. Exactly at a time when we need the greatest clarity of thought and rational guidance to resolve the massive environmental dislocations that threaten the very stability of the planet, we are asked to bend before a completely mysterious "will" of "Gaia" that serves to paralyze human will and that darkens human perception with theistic chimeras. The ability to clearly think out the contradictions this mentality produces is blocked by theistic appeals to a mysticism that places a ban on logic and reason.

HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY ENTRENCHES POWER HIERARCHIES

1. HEIDEGGER'S THINKING STOPS A TRUE SOCIAL CRITIQUE, IS DESTRUCTIVE

Murray Bookchin, Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, SOCIAL ANARCHISM OR LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM, 1995, http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/bookchin/sp001512/Social6.html, accessed May 11, 2001.

As I have already suggested, this mythos of a 'falling from authenticity' has its roots in reactionary romanticism, most recently in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose v'lkisch 'spiritualism,' latent in Being and Time, later emerged in his explicitly fascist works. This view now feeds on the quietistic mysticism that abounds in the antidemocratic writings of Rudolf Bahro, with its barely disguised appeal for 'salvation' by a 'Green Adolf,' and in the apolitical quest for ecological spiritualism and 'self-fulfillment' propounded by deep ecologists. In the end, the individual ego becomes the supreme temple of reality, excluding history and becoming, democracy and responsibility. Indeed, lived contact with society as such is rendered tenuous by a narcissism so all-embracing that it shrivels consociation to an infantilized ego that is little more than a bundle of shrieking demands and claims for its own satisfactions. Civilization merely obstructs the ecstatic self-realization of this ego's desires, reified as the ultimate fulfillment of emancipation, as though ecstasy and desire were not products of cultivation and historical development, but merely innate impulses that appear ab novo in a desocialized world. Like the petty-bourgeois Stirnerite ego, primitivist lifestyle anarchism allows no room for social institutions, political organizations, and radical programs, still less a public sphere, which all the writers we have examined automatically identify with statecraft. The sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the consistent, purposive, organized, and rational, indeed any form of sustained and focused activity apart from publishing a 'zine' or pamphlet -- or burning a garbage can. Imagination is counterposed to reason and desire to theoretical coherence, as though the two were in radical contradiction to each other. Goya's admonition that imagination without reason produces monsters is altered to leave the impression that imagination flourishes on an unmediated experience with an unnuanced 'oneness.' Thus is social nature essentially dissolved into biological nature; innovative humanity, into adaptive animality; temporality, into precivilizatory eternality; history, into an archaic cyclicity.

Gerry Stahl, Research Professor at the University of Colorado's Institute of Cognitive Science, MARXIAN HERMENEUTICS AND HEIDEGGERIAN SOCIAL THEORY, 1975, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/publications/dissertations/philosophy/ch0.html, accessed May 10, 2001.

This theoretical point has practical consequences for Heidegger's philosophy insofar as he fails to reflect on the relation of society to his language. Heidegger's failure to deal adequately with the present social context of philosophy is perhaps Adorno's strongest indictment of him: his ontology is an unfortunate response to social conditions in which people feel powerless. In the guise of a critique of subjectivistic will, it fetishizes the illusion of powerlessness and thereby serves those in power. Following a restorative thrust, Heidegger's formulation of a real felt need merely assumes a solution and thus serves to perpetuate the underlying problems according to Adorno's analysis. Strengthening conservative ideology, Heidegger's approach avoids those issues which point to the realm of society, an arena in which people could possibly exert some joint control.