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Date Posted: 10:43:36 11/09/09 Mon
Author: Ned Depew
Author Host/IP: 75.106.172.186
Subject: Heidigger Redux....

interesting article from the NYT in re: a new book on Martin Heidigger - whom we discussed here last year. The author takes an even more extreme position than was espoused by some here (but in some ways a logical extension of their arguments) - that Heidigger's entire opus should be discounted on account of his distorted political views.

But just as the fact that the distortion of Christian principles into such travesties as the Crusades, the Inquisition and St. Bartholomew's Day doesn't "discredit" Christ's teaching wholesale, so Heidigger's shortcomings in developing and applying his philosophical insights to the real world doesn't make those insights any less valuable.

Wagner was a racist, but that doesn't make the beautiful parts of his music any less beautiful. Jefferson (and Washington, and many others) were slave-owners, but that doesn't make their insights into the basic dignity of humanity and the rights proper to that dignity any less compelling, does it?

If no less a personage and brilliant thinker than Hannah Arendt can look past Heidigger's grave errors of application to see the value of his ideas and insights, such blanket condemnation seems like a baby/bathwater excess.

Certainly no one is suggesting that Heidigger's actions or his pro-Nazi pronouncements should be ignored - or even forgiven - but they should also be seen in context, and used to refine and illuminate the errors of logic and development of his sound insights and ideas, rather than to dismiss those insights altogether.

He was an original and iconoclastic thinker, and the fact that he himself misused and distorted some of the lines of thought he pursued to fit in with a racist, rabidly-nationalist society doesn't make understanding and further examination of those lines of thought any less valuable.

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