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        4 surviving nazism     August 1, 2017
        gary e. davis

 
     
     


I presume that Heidegger was smarter than me; so, my ability to read in good faith and find his available views admirable, based in his thinking and my own, is granted to him.

Given that the reality of nazism was easy to see during the 1930s, one can’t expect that Heidegger was interested in anticipating later skepticism by others that he “had eyes to see” (as he said to insinuators of culpability), such that lack of strident public opposition by him is a sign of acquiescence to a dangerous machine.

Wanting more explanation from him in his manuscripts (that are intended for readers not having lived through his local times—with his colleagues’ issues, with friends’ issues, etc.) doesn’t warrant that Heidegger lacked admirable reason for not saying more. For example, one’s suffering belongs to one’s life, not to demands for accountability to much-later others, as if otherwise silence “says” that he did not suffer enough (for “whom was entitled to speak” “with being”?)

Private notebooks likely serve project needs or virtually address others in his life who motivate private thoughts. Privacy that is posthumously available to public readers is, to my mind, entrusting the later reader to be vigilant about likely-missing context of writing and later-obvious context of the author’s work already done (publications, lectures) and work in progress (Contributions, Mindfulness, etc.) that is directly relevant.

When academic critics put aside standard concerns for evidence and validity of claims, the resultant reading becomes not only invalid, but symptomatic of the reader. Of course, good faith reading depends on one’s capability to imagine and understand (relative to published work and work in progress), which is so much a part of hermeneutical theory. A premise for me is that integrity and dignity, decency and graciousness, belong to the other as well as to oneself in at-least-equal degree. Pretending that armchair reading trumps Heidegger’s living claims (that are explicitly contrary to insinuations) is self-incriminating.


My sense of Heideggerian validity is congruent across the following postings, but they resulted from independent circumstances. Relevant parts could be extracted, re-ordered, and edited into a singular argument without reference to particular disputes from correspondence or without unrelated musing. Dispute and musing could be drawn together into a discussion about discursive reading generally, relative to Heidegger’s notebooks.

A sequence of current posting passages which comes close to providing a singular case is:
Heidegger and the university
‘Heidegger’ as no mirror of the few and rare,”
overcoming The Dialectic” section of “Dialectical defaming”
posting 1 below
posting 5 below

     
 
  November 2015
  1 emancipatory interest as deconstruction
    a short psychoanalysis of critical reading (wondering off into musing toward the end)
 
  August 2014
  2 Nearing fear and trembling in Germany, 1938-1941
    frustration with an interlocutor becomes the first of two postings on others’ issues with ‘Jewry’ in Heidegger’s Considerations
 
  August 2014
  3 Dialectical defaming
    part two on Heidegger, Jewry, and Considerations
 
  September 2013
  4 Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Globalization
    Bernhard Radloff’s outstanding essay on Heidegger’s animus toward giganticism, machination, and their philosophically-important implicature, prefaced in a posting.
 
  October 2019
  5 some consideraations of ideology
    There is no anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s notes for a critical phenomenology.
   
 
Be fair. © 2016, g. e. davis.