Getting Heidegger. Letter to The Jewish Chronicle, published 25 March 2022

 

Getting Heidegger

Letter to The Jewish Chronicle

published Friday 25 March 2022

Anthony Stadlen

[Note:

Alex Hearn, director of Labour Against Antisemitism, had written “The Essay”, with the title The sinister ideologue who is Putin’s favourite philosopher: Alexsandr Dugin draws upon Heidegger for incendiary worldview of new Russian empire pitted against ‘globalist elites’, in The Jewish Chronicle, 11 March 2022.]

Getting Heidegger

Alex Hearn’s account of the philosopher Martin Heidegger is grossly inaccurate (The sinister ideologue who is Putin’s favourite philosopher, 11 March).

Heidegger became, for less than a year, Nazi Rector of Freiburg, not Heidelberg. Heidegger called this the greatest “Dummheit” of his life. He was rebuked by the observing Nazi minister for not referring to “race” in his 1933 Rectorate speech.

He had warm relationships with Jewish students, colleagues, lovers, and friends. He denounced antisemitism as “stupid and reprehensible”, and Nazi “biological” antisemitism and “manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps” as part of the destructive “calculative machination” that characterises our age.

He wrote that we stare, appalled, at our possible annihilation by thermonuclear war, but do not realise that “the Dreadful has already happened”: since Descartes, the world is already atomised.

But Heidegger did not oppose technology. He insisted our task is to meditate on its essence and live creatively with it, far from the crude rejection of technology Hearn falsely imputes to him.

Anthony Stadlen

London N22