Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. - Hardcover

Wolin, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691070199 ISBN 13: 9780691070193

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Martin Heidegger is perhaps the twentieth century's greatest philosopher, and his work stimulated much that is original and compelling in modern thought. A seductive classroom presence, he attracted Germany's brightest young intellects during the 1920s. Many were Jews, who ultimately would have to reconcile their philosophical and, often, personal commitments to Heidegger with his nefarious political views.

In 1933, Heidegger cast his lot with National Socialism. He squelched the careers of Jewish students and denounced fellow professors whom he considered insufficiently radical. For years, he signed letters and opened lectures with ''Heil Hitler!'' He paid dues to the Nazi party until the bitter end. Equally problematic for his former students were his sordid efforts to make existential thought serviceable to Nazi ends and his failure to ever renounce these actions.

This book explores how four of Heidegger's most influential Jewish students came to grips with his Nazi association and how it affected their thinking. Hannah Arendt, who was Heidegger's lover as well as his student, went on to become one of the century's greatest political thinkers. Karl Löwith returned to Germany in 1953 and quickly became one of its leading philosophers. Hans Jonas grew famous as Germany's premier philosopher of environmentalism. Herbert Marcuse gained celebrity as a Frankfurt School intellectual and mentor to the New Left.

Why did these brilliant minds fail to see what was in Heidegger's heart and Germany's future? How would they, after the war, reappraise Germany's intellectual traditions? Could they salvage aspects of Heidegger's thought? Would their philosophy reflect or completely reject their early studies? Could these Heideggerians forgive, or even try to understand, the betrayal of the man they so admired? Heidegger's Children locates these paradoxes in the wider cruel irony that European Jews experienced their greatest calamity immediately following their fullest assimilation. And it finds in their responses answers to questions about the nature of existential disillusionment and the juncture between politics and ideas.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Not the least of Martin Heidegger's contributions to twentieth-century thought was his ability to inspire gifted disciples who read him against the grain, producing political theories very different from the ideology endorsed by the master, to his eternal disgrace, in l933. Looking closely at four of the most talented of their number, Richard Wolin, with the provocative directness his readers have come to expect, argues that troubling residues remain not far beneath the surface of their influential work. Heidegger's Children is a book that many will seek to refute, but none can ignore."--Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

"This is an exceedingly important book that goes right to the core of debates about modernity and the human condition. It is both timely and enduringly important. It is also engrossing--provocative in some places, deeply insightful in others. More than a significant contribution to the field, it constitutes a new field in its own right. Wolin has defined a philosophical Pandora's box, and his interpretation is going to initiate some agonized soul-searching."--Michael Ermarth, Dartmouth College

About the Author:

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of The Politics of Being, The Heidegger Controversy, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism, and he served as academic consultant for the BBC documentary Heidegger: Design for Living. He is a frequent contributor to the New Republic and Dissent.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0691070199
• ISBN 13: 9780691070193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312