Philippine E-Journals

Adam Knowles Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence

Noelle Leslie C. De La Cruz

 

Abstract:

What has come to be known as the “Heidegger affair” has a long history. It turns on the vexed question of the philosophical import of Martin Heidegger’s anti-Semitic writings and relationship with Nazism. As the popular quandary goes, “If Heidegger was a great philosopher, then he was not a Nazi, and if he was a Nazi, then he was not a great philosopher” (di Cesare 2018, 1). The controversy began almost immediately after World War II, within the pages of the French existentialist journal Les temps modernes. This was to be revived in the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s (Malpas 2016, 3). Most recently, Heidegger scholarship was thrown into crisis once again with the publication of the Black Notebooks.