Nice summing up of Heideggers complicity, and a warning to those of us who also have a love of the soil: Heidegger held that the superiority of his Existenzphilosophie (existential philosophy) derived from its claim to being rooted in life or Being. Significantly, the völkisch ideology on which Nazism was predicated was based on the virtues of Bodenständigkeit, or “rootedness in soil,” and, in Heidegger’s view, this was the source of the deep-seated affinity between National Socialism and his own “fundamental ontology.” In his inaugural address Heidegger celebrated National Socialism for having reawakened the primordial “forces of earth and blood” (erd- und bluthäftige Kräfte). The same preoccupation with the values of ontological rootedness that attracted Heidegger to the Nazis explains his philosophical aversion to Jews. As “cosmopolitans,” Jews constitutionally lacked what Heidegger valued most: Bodenständigkeit, a capacity for völkisch belonging predicated on rootedness in Being. In a 1934 seminar, Heidegger condemned “Semitic peoples,” who, because they were “rootless,” were unable to appreciate the existential qualities of German “space” (Raum). In the Black Notebooks, he confidently claims that rootedness-in-soil provides us with structures that link us existentially to our “mother’s blood” as well as our “ancestors.” As the progenitors of biblical monotheism, the Jews had also invented religious universalism, a standpoint that was anathema to Heidegger. The positing of a single Lord of all creation precluded the concrete structures of existential belonging: Dasein, mood, and everydayness, as well as those of Volk, race, and rootedness-in-soil. In Heidegger’s view, universalism of any sort was a vestige of “idealism” or the “philosophy of subject” that Heidegger sought to “annihilate”—he was fond of violent and martial metaphors—by virtue of his turn toward the question of Being. In German anti-Semitic circles, it was a widely shared truism that Jews were the chief carriers of the corrosive spirit of modernity, which was associated with excesses of abstract thought. It followed that Jews must be held directly responsible for modernity’s manifold degenerative tendencies: above all, the dislocations associated with the momentous transition from organic communities (Gemeinschaft) to modern mass society (Gesellschaft). https://jewishreviewofbooks/articles/993/national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 20:14:31 +0000
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