Knowles teaches philosophy at Drexel University, Germany and is the author of Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence
We should be wary of attempts to rehabilitate Martin Heidegger as a apolitical, timeless figure
Rediscovery of Heidegger must be read in context of new global nationalist movements.
Whenever the infamous German philosopher Martin Heidegger appears in the headlines, it is worth pausing to ask what current events have put him there. Although a devoted Nazi and anti-Semite who worked energetically to reform the German university according to Nazi principles, Heidegger remains one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In the wake of World War II, academics globally devoted an immense amount of energy to rehabilitating Heidegger even though he was declared a “fellow traveller” by the Denazification Commission — a hasty entity of post-war justice notorious for overlooking forms of complicity both large and small. In the meantime, scholars have produced many different cleansed versions of Heidegger to serve particular political needs. There is Heidegger the mystic, the naïve professor incapable of navigating Nazi party politics, the pseudo-Buddhist thinker of tranquillity and letting-be, the man of the soil and province, etc. As Ramin Jahanbegloo has brought Heidegger back (‘Philosopher of the future’, IE, September 23), it is worth asking which Heidegger might be mobilised to serve the political needs of today’s India. A brief glance at an event last week can help answer this question.
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