Recent attempts to dismiss Heidegger as 'a Nazi philosopher' resemble the Nazis' attempt to dismiss Einstein's theory of relativity as 'Jewish physics'. In both cases, we are urged to test a body of thought not against competing bodies of thought but against something more easily accessible - our moral intuitions. If you know that the very idea of relativity is a product of cultural decadence, you are spared the trouble of labouring through a lot of equations and then deciding whether the phenomena can be explained non-relativistically. If you know that the very idea of 'authentic existence' or of 'harkening to the voice of Being' is inherently fascistic, you are spared the trouble of comparing Heidegger's account of the history of Western philosophical thought with, for example, Hegel's, Dewey's, Popper's or Blumenberg's. You need not labour through Heidegger's fantastic etymologies and idiosyncratic neologisms. What is more, you can brush aside the books of the people influenced by Heidegger - Derrida, de Man, Foucault - as just more of the same discredited claptrap.

LRB 8 February 1990 | PDF Download