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175

On Heidegger's Nazism

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he imagines an alternative life story for Heidegger (he marries a Jewish woman, moves to the US, renounces his anti-Semitism, etc) as a means of concluding that is just another confused human being (kill your heroes etc)

M. Rorty, R. (2000). On Heidegger's Nazism. In M. Rorty, R. Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin, pp. 175-200

196

To sum up: I have been urging that we can find in the early Heidegger's pragmatic antiessentialism reasons for abandoning the attempt to see the man and the books in a single vision, and perhaps even the attempt to see the books as stages on a single Denkweg. If we take that antiessentialism more seriously than Heidegger himself proved able to take it, we shall not be tempted to dramatize Heidegger in the way in which he dramatized his favourite thinkers and poets. We shall not assign thinkers and poets places in a world-historical narrative. We shall· see both them and their books as vector sums of contingent pressures. We shall see Heidegger as one more confused, torn, occasionally desperate, human being, someone much like ourselves. We shall read Heidegger's books as he least wanted them read - as occasions for exploitation, recent additions to our Bestand an Waren. We shall stop yearning for depth, and stop trying either to worship heroes or to hunt down criminals. Instead, we shall settle for useful tools, and take them where we can find them.

—p.196 by Richard M. Rorty 6 years, 6 months ago

To sum up: I have been urging that we can find in the early Heidegger's pragmatic antiessentialism reasons for abandoning the attempt to see the man and the books in a single vision, and perhaps even the attempt to see the books as stages on a single Denkweg. If we take that antiessentialism more seriously than Heidegger himself proved able to take it, we shall not be tempted to dramatize Heidegger in the way in which he dramatized his favourite thinkers and poets. We shall not assign thinkers and poets places in a world-historical narrative. We shall· see both them and their books as vector sums of contingent pressures. We shall see Heidegger as one more confused, torn, occasionally desperate, human being, someone much like ourselves. We shall read Heidegger's books as he least wanted them read - as occasions for exploitation, recent additions to our Bestand an Waren. We shall stop yearning for depth, and stop trying either to worship heroes or to hunt down criminals. Instead, we shall settle for useful tools, and take them where we can find them.

—p.196 by Richard M. Rorty 6 years, 6 months ago