Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place-never both.

This had turned out to be an impossible subject. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound-a tendentious task, but there you are-one of them would be reading Heidegger. In the New Yorker, Rothman begins by recounting his own magical encounter with Heidegger’s texts. In it, Trawny seeks to evaluate Heidegger’s antisemitism and to ask to what extent that antisemitism contaminates Heidegger’s philosophy. Alongside these edited volumes, Trawny has published a slim companion volume, Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy. In these notebooks Heidegger works out his ideas of what he calls a “spiritual National Socialism” which he distinguishes from a “vulgar National Socialism.” He also, in the years from 1936-1941 discusses the Jews on about 10 pages (out of 1,200) and unquestionably trades in antisemitic stereotypes, referring to the Jews as worldless and homeless in one entry, Heidegger writes of a Jewish world conspiracy. Trawny has just edited three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, philosophical notebooks Heidegger kept from 1931-1941. This week in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes about the recent scandal over Heidegger’s antisemitism and reports on the recent discussion at the Goethe Institute between myself Babette Babich, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and Peter Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal.

Heidegger, Being Human, and Antisemitism 05-03-2014

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