The Perils of a Total Critique of Reason

Abstract

Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton University Press, 2001. One of the most tormenting realities of contemporary social thought is the fact that many thinkers devoted the cause of emancipation unwittingly embrace philosophical positions with totalitarian consequences. Another tormenting reality is that thinkers sometimes embrace such positions deliberately. A case in point is Martin Heidegger, whose advocacy of the conceptions of Volk, labor, and historicity in the early 1930s led widespread-though far from universal-condemnation of his philosophy as inherently pernicious. Those who find the terms of Heidegger's philosophy be inseparable from his support of National Socialism see in that support an expression of a metaphysical commitment; thus, for example, RUdiger Safranski, the most recent in a line of biographers, observes that to the National Socialist seizure of power was a revolution. It was far more than politics; it was a new act in the history of Being, the beginning of a new epoch.1 To anyone familiar with Heidegger's conception of beginnings-one the achievement of the early Greeks in the establishment of the polis and the other an as-yet unrealized advent that promises overcome the specter of nihilism-these words ring ominous. For they confer on the National Socialist revolution a metaphysical significance, and they make it impossible not ponder the implications of Heidegger's unyielding insistence that the Germans possess pride of place in the unfolding of world history and in the endeavor overcome nihilism.2 No contemporary critic of has pondered these implications with greater tenacity than Richard Wolin. In the past decade Wolin has published no less than four books and numerous essays that deal exclusively or significantly with der Fall Heidegger. And yet by the late 1980s a certain kind of conventional wisdom had already begun spread among strong critics of Heidegger, the effect that Heidegger's philosophy is obviously pernicious in principle and therefore no longer worthy of serious examination on its own terms. The generation of this conventional wisdom was given tremendous momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Victor Farias's et le nazisme and Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, published in 1987 and 1988 respectively.' But the world did not have wait for these publications in order explore the relationship between philosophy and politics in Heidegger; much had already been written on the subject by then, most notably Alexander Schwan's Politische Philosophie im Denken Heideggers.4 Schwan concluded his 1965 study with the judgment that Heidegger ultimately appears adhere a utopian and illusory romanticism, and in the late 1970s Karsten Harries argued that Heidegger's romantic conception of the state... in the image of the polis will tend towards totalitarianism.5 What, then, would motivate a thinker like Wolin not only re-open the case long after all the evidence about Heidegger's National Socialism had come light, but do so with such energetic attention the details of Heidegger's philosophy'? And why would Wolin, after authoring two books and editing another dealing significantly or exclusively with Heidegger, devote his energies the writing of yet another, his latest book, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse? For while this book is ostensibly concerned with the fundamental limitations of the thought of each of these most famous and influential students of Heidegger, its real theme is the pernicious anxiety of influence exerted by even on his most talented and presumably free-thinking students-all of them Jews. In order appreciate Wolin's aims in writing Heidegger's Children, one must bear in mind above all else his commitments as an intellectual historian rather than as an academic philosopher. …