Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60312 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review
�The book is not a pamphlet but the outcome of several years of extensive and serious research. [�] Faye has unquestionably succeeded in collecting and laying out for the reader the documents of Heidegger�s deep involvement with National Socialism.��Robin Celikates, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences (Robin Celikates )

"All scholars and admirers of Martin Heidegger�s �uvre should read the voluminous book on Heidegger�s infusion of Nazism into philosophy published by Emmanuel Faye. Having studied this tome, even French Heideggerians will no longer be able to deny the embarrassing depth and persistence of Heidegger�s philosophical involvment with Hitler�s National Socialism."�Herman Philipse, Dialogue, Canadian Philosophical Review (Herman Philipse )

�Faye�s reading of Heidegger�s philosophy is quite simply transformative. Through a meticulous perusal of new sources�letters, heretofore unpublished seminars and lecture courses�he demonstrates that, during the 1920s and 1930s, right-wing ideological concerns were absolutely central to Heidegger�s Existenzphilosophie. Upon completing Faye�s study, it will be impossible to read Heidegger again naively, i.e., in a narrowly text-immanent manner.� � Richard Wolin, author of Heidegger�s Children and Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center (Richard Wolin )

"Emmanuel Faye incontestably shows that Heidegger�s Nazism was not fleeting, casual or accidental, but central to his philosophical enterprise. Faye�s book challenges us to draw the ethical consequences from this fact." � Robert E. Norton, University of Notre Dame (Robert E. Norton )

�Is it possible for a great philosopher to become a devoted Nazi? In his absorbing and challenging study Emmanuel Faye grasps the complexity of Martin Heidegger the man and the magnitude of his achievement." -Elie Wiesel (Elie Wiesel )

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Mistitled book
As far as I've been able to discern, Faye does not discuss any "unpublished seminars of 1933-35". More correctly that should be: "seminars that were not translated into French at the time the book was written." All of Faye's references to Heidegegr appear to be from books published as part of Heidegger's complete works.

People who are interested in Heidegger can read his works, read shelves of secondary literature that don't all agree everywhere but generally interpret Heidegger as an ontologist, or they can read Faye's attempt to create a Nazi philosophy from bits and pieces from Heidegger's works.

That's not to say that Heidegger wasn't a nasty character, or that he meets contemporary tests of political correctness. He did use the Nazi's rise to promote his own career, and so forth, but the bulk of Heidegger's writings are consistent across the 100+ volumes of the complete works, and that's what's Faye's Nazi philosophy needs to be judged against.

Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger's Nazi Philosophy
This is an important new work in the struggle against fascism.

In praising Raymond B. Cattell at a conference called in his honor in 1984, John Horn said, "He has been psychology's master strategist. ... He has put forth a theory of human behavior rivaled in comprehension only by the theory of Freud, and rivaled by no other theory in its adherence to evidence derived from careful research. He must rank among the 20th centuries most influential behavioral scientists." This was high praise for the man who lauded Hitler in 1938 and created a religious movement, Beyondism, which aimed to replace Christianity with an ethic that promoted fascism and genocide.

In front of two hundred of the nations most influential psychologists, Cattell declared that we must accept "the results of psychological science" which show that "much of mankind is obsolete" and that the only real advance for humans will come "through the breeding for brain size." None of those in attendance seemed troubled by this call for a eugenic program of Hitlerian dimensions. It was at that point that I began to seriously question the notion that fascism was an archaic ideology, which like mercantilism, existed only as a remote historical phenomenon. And now comes Emmanuel Faye, who writes in the preface to his study of Heidegger, "We have not yet grasped the full significance of the propagation of Nazism and Hitlerism in the domain of thought and ideas... Against it, the military victory was but the winning of a first battle -- a vital one, to be sure, and a costly one for humanity, since it took a world war. Today a different battle, more protracted and sinister, is unfolding: a contest in which the future of the human race is at stake. It calls for a heightened awareness in all areas of thought, from philosophy to law and history."

According to Faye, promoters of Nazi ideas "have progressively conquered a planetary audience with a public that most often does not realize what is at stake...." Martin Heidegger has done more than anyone else to place philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing Nazism and Hitlerism. Using materials only recently made available, particularly Heidegger's lecture notes from 1933 to 1935, Faye demonstrates the "virulence of their Hitlerism, which no other "philosopher" of the regime has equaled." And what troubles Faye is that despite this, "these Hitlerian and Nazi texts of Heidegger are to be found on the philosophy shelves of public libraries." This is a serious situation which calls for "a new and heightened awareness" of the dangers we face. For a start, he advocates moving Heidegger's work from the philosophy shelves to shelves that contain the works of Nazi ideologues.

Faye proposes a new understanding of what Heidegger accomplished. He "helped to conceal the deeply destructive nature of the Hitlerian undertaking" and like Raymond B. Cattell, but with far greater success, has insinuated this philosophy in language, literature and art. "The diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war, Faye concludes, slowly descends like ashes after an explosion--a gray cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds."

I count myself among the few who agree with Faye that it is of the utmost importance that we resist the ongoing influence of the most destructive ideology in human history "before it is too late."


The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology

Emmanuel Faye's book, a hatchet job? I don't think so.
I know the Heideggerians are circling the wagons now for about the fifth time since the 1940`s. First Jürgen Habermas wrote his famous letter of outrage to the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung in the late 40's (I think it was 1948),when he discovered his teacher Heidegger to be a Nazi. Then in 1962 Guido Schneeberger, a former student of Heidegger, published Nachlese zu Heidegger, which contained almost all of Heidegger's Nazi speeches, articles and reports from his time as Rector of Freiburg University and after. Schneeberger couldn't get anyone to print the book so he self published it, guaranteeing a limited audience. The Heideggerians seemed quite successful in their damage control and then in 1987 Victor Farias published in France, Heidegger and Nazism. The dam burst and all hell broke loose among the French philosophical establishment. Hugo Ott wrote in the Zuricher Zeitung, "the sky has fallen in France!" Many attempted to belittle Farias' scholarship, but the flood waters of Heidegger's Nazi past could not be contained. Then came Hugo Ott's Heidegger, A Political Life, right on the heels of Farias, then Richard Wolin's The Politics of Being, then Tom Rockmore's On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy. My God, what's a Heideggerian to do against such an onslaught? Knocked down but not quite out, the remnants of the battered cover story of Heidegger's Nazi past were hanging on for dear life. Iain Thomson, a Heidegger scholar at the University of New Mexico, has attempted to take the middle path -- admitting Heidegger's nefarius past in his book, Heidegger On Ontotheology, but salvaging what is worthwhile in Heidegger's thought. Now Emmanuel Faye comes along and renders what seems to be the final blow. So devastating is Faye's book on Heidegger that one has to ask if it isn't the coup de grace. Thomson's protests loud and clear in the first letter of that long string of comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education demonstrates clearly the anguish of even those trying to ride the middle of the wave of contemporary Heidegger scholarship. Thomson cries, "This is horrible!" and "a hatchet job!" But is it?

Emmanuel Faye is to be commended for his tireless research and close reading in the unpublished lectures(1933-1935)Heidegger gave at Freiburg University. In my recently completed documentary film on Martin Heidegger, ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US, Faye speaks most eloquently and passionately about his research. Even Iain Thomson, who is also in my film, told me that Faye is much more sympathetic in the film than on the written page. Faye makes clear in no uncertain terms not only the sordid content of Heidegger's lectures but also the questionable circle of friends Heidegger courted among French intellectuals -- Jean Beaufret, Robert Faurison, Maurice Bardesh, all of them Holocaust deniers and
rabid anti-semites. It was Beaufret who played a great role in Heidegger's reception in France and who in the late 1970's was exposed for his enthusiastic support of his friend and former student, Robert Faurison, who was fired from the University of Lyon in the 80's for his outrageous remarks about the Jewish "myth" of the Holocaust. He claimed there were no gas chambers and Hitler didn't kill anybody. Faurison even dedicated his revisionist book about Auschwitz to "Martin Heidegger, who precedes me in revisionism." As Victor Farias makes clear in my film, "This is the swamp we find ourselves in" in France. I disagree with Faye on several points. I don't think Heidegger's writings should be re-classified in libraries, nor should they be censored in any way. But I do agree that people interested in the truth should read this important book. Faye has done a thorough and honest job revealing to us new and disturbing truths about Martin Heidegger. We must now read Heidegger differently, more critically than ever before, always aware of his Nazi past and the dangerous elements that lie within his philosophy.