Sir, – In his own words, it is indeed hard to know why Fintan O’Toole reckons that Martin Heidegger’s Nazism is “even up for discussion” (Culture Shock, April 5th). The evidence of Heidegger’s notebooks is only the culmination in a very long process of investigation, philosphical as well as historical, into his ugly political affiliations. In 1945, he was investigated by the Bundesrepublik’s Denazification Committee (here Hannah Arendt testified on his behalf and his former friend Karl Jaspers testified against him). In its report, it charged him with being a significant member of the Nazi Party, with introducing the “Fuhrer principle” into Freiburg University during his tenure as rector, engaging in Nazi propaganda, and inciting students against some of their professors.
Nevertheless Heidegger was reintegrated into the German academic system in 1951. The emerging laureate of German philosophy, Jürgen Habermas, responded in 1953, accusing Heidegger of wishing to exculpate himself for his wartime behaviour by arguing that the Nazi period figured as an element in the “history of Being”. In the 1980s, exposes of Heidegger’s Nazi past were published in France and in America. The revelation is old.
The question, surely, is not whether we read Heidegger, but how we read him. Wagner was an anti-Semite, but does this mean that we cease listening to his music? Conrad was an imperialist and perhaps a racist, but does this mean we don't read Heart of Darkness ? Yeats and Pound had fascist sympathies: does this mean we don't read these great artists and writers? No: it means that we seek to listen to them or to read them critically, carefully, looking precisely at how such repellent ideas could co-exist with great insight and great aesthetic gifts. Yours, etc,
CONOR McCARTHY,
De Vesci Court,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin
Sir, – Martin Heidegger thought that modern human beings had a fundamental problem with technology. Far from controlling it, they were themselves controlled: technology had them in its grip. A good example of human beings in the grip of technology is the Holocaust. Another good example is the atomic bomb. In 1933 Heidegger believed, or let hope convince him, that Nazism had the potential for a human counter-movement. Within a few years he realised he was wrong. By 1941, with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, he knew (as his recently published diaries show) that his earlier opinion was the opposite of the truth. The Nazis were taking modern man deeper into the condition of subordination to technology, which in Heidegger’s opinion was most clearly promoted and affirmed in what he saw as contemporary Jewish thinking. If such opinions have to be tainted by association with subsequent projects of mass murder (Fintan O’Toole, April 5th), then we should all be very, very careful what we say on account of what someone in our own cultural sphere may possibly do next year. We might find it preferable to say nothing. Yours, etc,
JOHN MINAHANE,
Bakosova,
Bratislava,
Slovakia