Heidegger's a-humanism
The following passage is from Steiner's Martin Heidegger
Steiner believes that the real Heidegger is not accessible from any of his writings. He apparently had some sort of charismatic presence as a lecturer, and if you never heard him, you're clueless.
Being and Time is rather a failed (according to Steiner) attempt to arrive at some sort of new and irrational comprehension of Being. All the neologisms and piles of words are meant to clear the rational clutter that blinds us to the being of Being. In this, it's kin to Surrealism, which seeks to bypass the intellect and express a higher truth.
And both Surrealism and Heidegger are a kind of stress response to the end of WW1. Steiner says this period in German history is a catastrophic collision with nihilism. Where the period after WW2 was a deafening silence, the time between the wars was a desperate attempt to rise above a dark godless defeat, manifesting as apocalypticism.
The question is: did this longing to ditch rationality turn into in-humanism that set the stage for the Holocaust?
Steiner:Being and Time is written during the early 1920s. It comes, as I have said, of the apocalypse of 1918 and of the Expressionist climate. It fully predates National Socialism. No Nazi hoodlum, to my knowledge, ever read or would have been capable of reading it. The crux, made more complex by the problem of Deconstruction and of such post-Heideggerians as De Man, is this: are there in Heidegger’s incomplete ontological summa categories, advocacies of inhumanism, eradications of the human person, which, in some sense, prepare for the subsequent program of Nazism? Is Heidegger’s play with and on Nothingness (a play intimately analogous with negative theology) a nihilism in extremis rather than, as it professes to be, an “overcoming of nihilism”? Assuredly, Sein und Zeit and Heidegger’s theory of a language that speaks man rather than being spoken by him is utterly seminal in the modern anti-humanistic movement. There is little in Deconstruction or in Foucault’s “abolition of man,” with its background in Dada and Artaud, which is not voiced in Heidegger’s a-humanism — where the privativum of the prefix does seem to me more accurate and just than would be that of in-humanism. Secondly, there is the famous urgency of death, of the will to and motion toward death in Heidegger’s analysis of felt being, of human individuation. Rooted in Pascal and in Kierkegaard, this death-insistence does, by virtue of the fact that it attempts to free itself from theological contexts, carry a heavy charge of negation. Can we say that this weight inflects Heidegger’s and his reader’s attitudes toward the macabre obsessions of National Socialism? I see no ready answer to either of these questions. Post hoc is not propter hoc. Books of the difficulty and singularity of Sein und Zeit do not, in any immediate or programmatic way, exercise their effect upon politics and society. It may indeed be the case that Heidegger’s tonality, that Heidegger’s charismatic regency of certain circles of intellect and of sensibility in the Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s did contribute to the ambience of fatality and of dramatization in which Nazism flourished. Intuitively, such a conjunction seems plausible. But it could only be demonstrated if specific texts in Heidegger’s magnum could be shown to have generated dependent motions of argument and of action in Hitler’s rise to power. No such demonstration has, despite attempts by such critics of Heidegger as Adorno and Habermas, carried conviction. It could well be that we stand too near the facts. Darkness can blind as sharply as light; and the two may take centuries to untangle (consider the debates which persist over the politics and the impact on politics of Machiavelli or of Rousseau.
Steiner believes that the real Heidegger is not accessible from any of his writings. He apparently had some sort of charismatic presence as a lecturer, and if you never heard him, you're clueless.
Being and Time is rather a failed (according to Steiner) attempt to arrive at some sort of new and irrational comprehension of Being. All the neologisms and piles of words are meant to clear the rational clutter that blinds us to the being of Being. In this, it's kin to Surrealism, which seeks to bypass the intellect and express a higher truth.
And both Surrealism and Heidegger are a kind of stress response to the end of WW1. Steiner says this period in German history is a catastrophic collision with nihilism. Where the period after WW2 was a deafening silence, the time between the wars was a desperate attempt to rise above a dark godless defeat, manifesting as apocalypticism.
The question is: did this longing to ditch rationality turn into in-humanism that set the stage for the Holocaust?
Comments (56)
In the wake of the catastrophic defeat of Kaiser's Germany, Heidegger's amoral (Levinas, Adorno) bifurcating of beings into "authentic" and "inauthentic" (Dasein and Das Man ... us and them) seems to have set up the latter as readymade scapegoats for redeeming (or 'purifying') the former. Imho, 'ir-rationality' did not cause mass murder so much as its willing stupification (Arendt) ironically made it much easier for "The They" to not question / not resist Das Führerprinzip (i.e. banality of evil).
Btw, decades ago I'd found George Steiner's Martin Heidegger to be an excellent synopsis – I wonder how well Steiner's interpretation (or my own rationalist, anti-obscurant bias) has aged in light of more recent scholarship on the old Rektorführer.
Don't know. I've mainly been trying to figure out how Being and Time connects to Heidegger's fascism. I read Wolin's Heidegger in Ruins (2023), and it left me unconvinced that there's any obvious relationship. Wolin just sort of suggests that anyone who was that much of a Nazi must have produced radioactive philosophy.
Steiner's work is the first one I've come across that suggests that Being and Time isn't actually supposed to make sense. It's just supposed to be pointing toward some new comprehension (which I think is alluded to in the speech you linked, thanks for that.)
Are you open to the possibility that it may have no connection and is more concerned with his attempt to retrieve the way Being was originally encountered before it was conceptually distorted by centuries of bad metaphysics? I can make no sense out of the work, so I'll rely on those who have studied it to let me know. :wink:
Well, no, I don't see the argument for it. But anyone attending the Lectures on Metaphysics, given in 1935, would have heard that "in speaking of greatness we are referring primarily to the works and destinies of nations" (11); and "The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) -- have all been written by men fishing in the troubled water of 'values' and 'totalities'" (199).
This sort of thing seems like it would have provided much more aid and comfort to Nazis than anything in Being and Time. The second quote in particular looks to be in line with your question about ditching rationality. I don't know nearly enough about Germany in 1935 to be able to guess how such talk of national greatness would have been received at a university. Nor is it clear to me that Heidegger's scorn for values, in this context, equates to an irrational endorsement of in-humanism. Yet Heidegger is clearly buying in to 1) the concept of national greatness, and 2) the belief that National Socialism offers "inner truth and greatness." If not irrational, then surely nuts.
That document is interesting in how it ties a revival of a "Greek awakening" to his moment. The references to the Republic seem to be a direct appeal to the unified participation in the proposed Ideal city.
There is a desire for immersion at play here.
Quoting Tom Storm
Heidegger did argue that thesis in many places. It may not be a marker for a particular set of beliefs but does set up a Golden Age logic you have questioned in other places.
Your focus does fit with the politically conservative "cultural war" Heidegger fought earlier as a dutiful Catholic opposing modern expressions of individual liberty. There is a strange twist to his attempt to re-direct the Nazis to his paradigm because many Catholics were put down during that time.
To have been a crucifix on the wall during those confessions....
Is this too over the top?
I was trying to understand what Habermas and Adorno were detecting in it. I guess I didn't explain that. :grin:
Quoting Tom Storm
It's phenomenology peppered with dialectics. It ends up being a zoo of strange creatures which are supposed to be hiding behind the veil of language.
It's probably more that he was a creation of the same forces that crash landed in a Holocaust.
The problem for the misanthrope is to figure out how to survive the realization that Heidegger is your brother. You aren't above him. You have the same genes, the same blood, the same permanent stain.
Yea, it was an end-of-history narrative. Ironically, it's twin was Communism.
As an aside, Hitler was no philosopher - he seemed to be a variety of romantic (all blood, providence, destiny) I wonder how he and his impatient cronies made sense of Heidegger. Can we find any contemporary assessments about how they might have made it fit? It always struck me that populists don’t really do ideas, they do slogans.
I haven't read Mein Kampf, but Steiner mentions it more than once in explaining the climate of post WW1 Germany.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think Hitler was a populist. Populists don't usually have substantial agendas. Hitler obviously did.
Those are difficult questions. Judging from my readings of the Lectures on Nietzsche, the "Last Metaphysic" is the end of finding "value" in a system of the world as conceived as a given condition..
Against that, Heidegger is abandoning a formulation of virtue.
On the other hand, he exhorts his listeners to follow a higher good than their previous understanding permitted. Another thought: The Rector speech speaks of being at war with other people, within and without the borders of the state. Not a great context to talk about the "good" life while glorifying sacrifice.
Works for me, even if that is not the only thing to be said.
I’m fairly comfortable with the notion that Hitler was a populist armed with a hate manual: a list of resentments, given a little order by Hess. I don’t think he had ideas as such, he operated with axioms and statements of belief, mostly untethered from reasoning. Interestingly, Ian Kershaw (one of the better AH historians) doesn't regard Hitler as a populist in a strict sense, largely because the label belongs to a later era. He instead frames Hitler as a charismatic authoritarian. That works just as well from my perspective.
I think de-individualization is more precise than "immersion" describes what Heidegger is after.
Quoting Ciceronianus
No, sir, that's quite fair actually. :smirk:
Quoting Tom Storm
It would seem so.
Quoting frank
As if Schopenhauer was a rambling, antisocial mystagogue ...
Quoting Tom Storm
:up: e.g. 'Make A-holes Great Again'.
That's weird that you brought up Schop. He would confirm that you and Heidegger are two facets of the same diamond.
I was thinking of how Heidegger played hide and seek with Nietzsche's version of Dionysus.
Adam Lecznar's Dionysus After Nietzsche does a great breakdown of which aspects of the "Greek awakening" Heidegger wanted to emphasize or ignore.
The provocative answer is: the rise of naturalism. Eugenics, which reduces people to something like genotype started in Britain and spread like wildfire to the US. During its height, women were being sterilized by state governments with the assent of the Scotus, for no other reason that they had checkered pasts.
Eventually it was discovered that this was all based on deplorable pseudo science, but lurking in the background was the real a-humanism of the naturalist perspective.
That's what caused the Holocaust. Heidegger's himself later blamed it on technology. I'd say that was close, but missing the bullseye.
In the context of the Rector speech, it is helpful to contrast Heidegger's vision with Nietzsche's.
I think my post of three years ago is germane to the role of retributive justice in locating the enemies of the "German people"
No. Heidegger is VERY accessible. Of course, reading B&T does not give one a phd in continental philosophy, and true, one really should read Kant, at least, first. But really, so much of it is very intuitive, not easy, but within reach if one but makes the effort. And one can read his lectures, some of which are admittedly challenging, indeed, but so what. Just read it again.
Quoting frank
Failed?? Incomplete, but it is continued in subsequent writings. No, it is nothing like Surrealism. Its primary difficulty lies in its phenomenological ontology, which is radically different from the ground for thinking about the world we grow up with, which is informed by science. One has to make the Husserlian move, which is the phenomenological reduction, and this requires one to suspend the entire world's assumptions in the attempt to discover the essential structure of this world. Kant did this with reason, Husserl did this with intentionality, and Heidegger does this with the full breadth of human existence.
But anyway, the really hard part is NOT looking at the world as if it were appearing as it really is apart from the observation in which it is discovered. Suspending altogether anything science has to say! For science doesn't do ontology. It couldn't care less about what a human being is at the level of basic questions. It doesn't even ask basic questions, so how could it have anything to say about basic assumptions?
Quoting frank
Keep in mind that Steiner's failure to understand Heidegger at its core, and I am sure he has a technical understanding far beyond mine, is due to two things: one is his rootedness in analytic philosophy, which is explicitly bound to the very naturalism, as Husserl put it--as did Quine, Dewey and others. Even Rorty was a kind of naturalist, and analytic philosophy is emphatically against phenomenology. Why? Because there are two kinds of people, those who can actually DO the phenomenological reduction, which is a method moving to the presuppositional ground of everydayness by ignoring what everydayness and its sciences has to say, in order to discover the essential structure of this everydayness; then there are those who may be terrific intellectuals, but cannot do this, cannot make this existential move, and these people are baffled by those those who can and write about it. Analytic philosophers are of the latter type. They just do not understand phenomenology.
Heidegger did not ditch rationality. But he was a phenomenologist, and so he began with the world of what appears, that is, what is there PRIOR to what scientists, theologists, and everyday thinking has to say, and Heidegger is just astoundingly reasonable; the trouble is, what he is talking about is a threshold field of issues and themes that language models at hand cannot deal with. As I see it, Heidegger takes the lived experience that has always been left out of objective analyses, brings it into a radical exposition (though not nearly as radical as some of the post Heideggerian thinking he inspires), radical because one has to drop physicalism, and its varieties, from foundational talk completely! Physics is right, rigorous, important, productive, and so on, and phenomenology admits this freely. It is just that physics is not philosophy. SImple. Those who are bound to science to address philosophical issues are simply looking in the wrong place.
The Holocaust: Heidegger's human dasein IS, in its content, a mirror image of the nation: the institutions, the pride, the "folkish"(?) sense of values, the language, the caring, the attitudes, and on and on. This leads to one thing: nationalism.
Quoting frank
It sounds like Being and Time didn’t make sense for Steiner. Based on my knowledge of Steiner s philosophical background and perspective, the poststructuralist ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida probably didnt make any sense to him either.
... those who assume "there are two kinds of people" and those who don't.
To what end? :chin:
"The essential structure of everydayness" seems ineluctable blindness to its presupposed "essential structure" ... like, to use a naturalistic example, an eye that must exclude itself from its visual field in order to see. Afaik, phenomenological reduction (i.e. transcendental deduction) is just an overly prolix way for the puppet (e.g. dasein) to show itself its strings (e.g. being-with-others-in-the-world-towards-death) that is only shocking or profound to Cartesians, subjectivists, and other mysterians.
[quote=Freddy Zarathustra, TGS]Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.[/quote]
(Emphasis is mine.)
Quoting Tom Storm
Not a moral content but an ethical process. Authenticity guards against reifying experience into totalizing moral categories, and that is an ethical achievement.
Dialectics? You mean Hegelian dialectics?
Quoting Tom Storm
Hitler and his cronies couldn’t make sense of Heidegger. That’s why they fired him from his brief position as rector of the German university. He wasn t useful to their cause as they had hoped because his ideas were so abstract.
The irony is that reductive naturalism is the product of Enlightenment philosophy, and is often aligned with rationalist theology and deism, where humanism is more closely aligned with atheistic existentialists like Sartre.
I’ve found it to be shocking ( and also incomprehensible) to realists and naturalists too.
Quoting 180 Proof
I’m with @Constance here. Neither of us find Being and Time obscure. Do you find it obscure?
Oh, the horrors of everyday thinking! Ineluctable to those of us in the common herd, mired in life and living, and its seemingly real problems, neglecting its essential structure.
Just make sure your everyday common realities are sensitively geared to the unique particularities of the actual, changing circumstances of the people you care about. Otherwise you run the risk of turning the common , the everyday and the real into abstractions which conceal more than they reveal. Sometimes we need to bracket the abstractions to get to what’s genuine.
Steiner wasn't saying that Being and Time doesn't make sense. He was explaining that it's incomplete and that people who heard him speak said his lectures went beyond what he wrote. I guess the same was said of Plato. Apparently there is a recording of him somewhere, and Steiner says it reveals a magnetic personality.
I'm thinking of how mesmerizing I found What is Metaphysics. Maybe that gives me a hint as to what Arendt and the others are talking about.
Quoting Joshs
Or Neoplatonic, yea.
Quoting Joshs
Theists can definitely be a-humanistic to the extent that sinners are tossed away like garbage into a fire.
70% of Heidegger’s published work is lectures or seminars.
Okay?
Yes. That would be part of the intelligent resolution of real problems, not philosophical ones. Dewey called the tendency to neglect context "the philosophers fallacy."
Heidegger initially called his approach philosophy but then called it ‘thinking’ in order to distance it from the association between philosophy and abstraction.
According to this essay, it's rationality itself he wants people to learn to get past.
This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability.
If that meant giving up what Heidegger thought of as the special destiny of the Germans, it wouldn't have even been a consideration. Redemption wasn't on the table after WW2. There was nothing but silence. I never realized what the intellectual climate of post-WW2 Germany was like. It was a like a dark, empty cave. Just pure desolation.
We need a thread on this alone. :wink:
Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts.
Habermas was a long way from Heidegger philosophically. His longing for a metaphysical and moral foundation causes him not only reject Heidegger and poststructuralism, but Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Gadamer, Freud and the many philosophical movements they were connected to which questioned foundationalism and recognized the need to reconcile
the rational and the irrational.
I suggested that previously in this thread. I'm reading a book called Another Country which covers the intellectual scene in Germany after the war and into reunification. People who lived through it said the German tendency toward irrationality was the real problem. What occurred to me was that eugenics, which Hitler loved about the USA, was a product of scientism, not irrational nationalism and what not.
Quoting Joshs
I get that. But whatever you and I may love, you have to respect the attitude of people who are trying to find the way for their culture to come out of shock and take a step into the future. I'd leave it to them to figure it out, even if that means burying something had potential.
Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass tried to talk about it. Their attempts listened to the silence.
:up:
I knew this sounded familiar. It goes back to Pierre Gassendi's argument against self knowledge. He writes,
[i]In my reflections as to the reason why it is the case that neither does
sight see itself nor the understanding understand itself, the thought
presents itself to me that nothing acts on itself. Thus neither does the
hand (or the tip of the finger) strike itself nor does the foot kick itself.......
Give me then a mirror in which
you yourself may in a similar fashion act; I promise you that the results
will be that this will reflect back your semblance into yourself and
that you then will at length perceive yourself, not indeed by a direct,
but a reflected cognition. But, if you do not give this, there is no hope
of your knowing yourself."[/i] (p 57)
I discovered this in Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation, which I have been struggling with (it is, after all, written for other continental philosophers exclusively. He simply assumes one has read everything). His response is phenomenology's essential problematic is presupposed by empirical models of auto-discovery, so when one thinks about eyes seeing themselves and the like, one has yet to determine whether they have any real application to the phenomenological problems Descartes opened up. He says that this kind of reasoning works from an empirical ground, "which has not yet learned to lift to an ontological level the problematic it raises." That is, the kind of intimation of "life," as he puts it---immanent affectivity, the phenomenology of life--that is the reduction's essential discovery, is not at all like the empirical conditions that apply in Gassendi's thinking. The reduction takes one into an affective existential affirmation, which then provides the basis for theoretical work, but this affirmation occurs in teh world of phenomenality.
It is interesting to add how the 19th century transcendentalists succinctly said somethig along these lines. Emerson's "I, eye, Aye!" comes to mind. "Aye" is an event apriori, a sublime recognition that brings affirmation to a singular primordiality, which is revelatory, not discursive in its nature. Of course, Emerson of considered something of a crank by philosophers, but then, it is powerfully argued, I think, that philosophy's end is not more philosophy. It seeks the truth at the most basic level of inquiry, and here, one has to make a dramatic move out of philosophy. This is the "direction" or the telos of phenomenology. For me, I think of things like Heidegger's extraordinary analysis of the ecstatic nature of existential temporality. This occurs in the second division, around from section 65 and forward, and its makes, to my thinking, crystal clear, how human existence is essentially outside of time when time is conceived in the "vulgar" linear way. The reason why I talk about two kinds of people (above) is that I am now convinced that when someone like Steiner comes away from B&T with the kind of cynical remarks mentioned in the OP, I can only conclude that while he could work competently through the thought, he really had no existential significance to bring to it, and so it remained merely theoretical, speculative, an work that cannot fully account for the its raison de'tre. I think it is clear Heidegger himself was baffled by his own thinking, evidenced here and there, like, e.g., near his death when he said he had never really left the church! I think it was Karl Rahner who was asked to say a few words at the ceremony, and who was just puzzled, because Heidegger was so bound to the finitude of his analysis of human existence in everything he wrote. Maybe he was like the early Wittgenstein who was aware how much the presumption of language could offend the seriousness of deep religious sentiment. He did used to carry a copy of Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief.
But then, philosophy proper is not the philosophy of this and that, as in one's philosophy of having a lasting relationship or that of making friends and influencing people, is it? Rather, it goes to basic question, the most basic questions, and here the world is turned on its head. Someone says existence for us can be understood best as the survival of the fittest, then I ask what is meant by 'fittest" and "existence" and "human" we are thrown into a world of thought about the presuppositions facile claims rest on, and it is here philosophy actually begins, and it is unfamiliar as can possibly be, asking questions pertaining to the nature of existence, of thought, of freedom, of ethics and aesthetics.
Philosophy is, in my estimate, a full assault on everydayness. And its insights can literally undo familiarity itself. The comments I made above are meant to suggest that there is a gravitas to our existence which everydayness cannot see because it exists, if you will, within the enclosure of common assumptions. Reading something like Heidegger's Being and Time puts a question to this enclosure: What IS it? It is THE philosophical question. Why not set aside a few months, or years, and read it? Or maybe I have it wrong and you have already done this?
My reading of the works of that dreadful man has been limited to short works, like What is Metaphyics? and The Question Concerning Technology. As to the former, I'm sympathetic with Carnap's view of it. As to the latter, I thought it so Romantic as to be almost silly (it seemed as if he was ignorant of the fact humans have been manipulating nature for many thousands of year). I've also read his rhapsodic tributes of Hitler while at Freiberg. I doubt I'd have the patience to read anything longer.
Carnap's intelligence was limited, but I think profound. I think he was right in thinking the vagaries of Heidegger and others are, if anything, efforts of persons lacking any artistic talent to do what artists do-evoke insights into life and the universe and our place in it. The spiritual can play a similar role.
Frankly, I find it difficult to believe anyone would think it's the goal of philosophy to address such questions as "Why is there something rather than nothing?" If the question relates to the origin of the universe, it strikes me as unlikely that philosophers will answer it by thinking really hard. It's possible, though, that physics, cosmology and astronomy may provide insight.
If the question relates to something else, I'm not sure what it can mean. I doubt it's a question, in fact, or that there's an actual problem to be solved.
Philosophy has all too often been an assault upon everydayness. Originally in the ancient West, though, it was vitally concerned with the best way to live our lives. I think that's a worthy inquiry. I don't look to an unrepentant Nazi like Heidegger for guidance in that regard.
I have a friend who can probably outdo you in the insult department when it comes to Heidegger. The difference between him and you when it comes to that philosopher he refers to as that ‘little worm of a man’ is that, to his horror, my friend found that Heidegger’s ideas were indeed indispensable to him. Such is the dilemna many of us find ourselves in; one of most more despicable 20th century philosophers happens to be one of most profound thinkers in the history of philosophy, in the opinion of many who hate him as much as you do.
Quoting Ciceronianus
For the record, Heidegger doesn’t ask why there is something rather than nothing. He asks why philosophy has focused so much on ‘something’ and not on that which is not a thing.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I agree with Constance. Philosophy should be about challenging everyday common sense, not reifying it. As Deleuze says:
I'm not sure what philosophers mean by "common sense." It seems they think it to be something the less enlightened and less intelligent of us rely on, but my suspicion is they have recourse to it all the time.
We live in and are part of an environment. Our minds are part of it because we're part of it. All we know, all we feel, all we do results from and are part of our interaction with it. That is what's "natural" to me.
To the extent our interaction with the rest of nature indicates certain conduct and information is useful and beneficial, we may come to rely on it and it may become customary. But we should always be willing to accept that our judgments and conduct are subject to change when what is learned through further interaction establishes change is appropriate. What's customary may become inadequate or undesirable. I consider that to be common sense. If Deleuze thinks we can gain special insight from some extra-natural source I think he's wrong.
But we may find nature, the universe, includes more than we know or is different from what we know.
:up: :up:
Quoting Ciceronianus
Wisdom. :fire:
I read it. I see you haven't really read any phenomenology, I mean the way you talk strongly shows this. You have to read Kant first, then Husserl, Hegel. Fichte, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and so on. As for me, there is a great deal I haven't read, but Being and Time is ESSTENTIAL to understand phenomenology post Husserl. Who cares that we don't like what he failed to say about the Nazis. This is just ad hominem and entirely outside of the substance of this seminal philosophers work. It is not that he deserves to be read, regardless of what has been called his narcissistic disinclination to second guess his own decisions. It is rather that Being and TIme is flat out the most important contribution one could make to one's philosophical understanding. Good Luck!
It's interesting that the encomiums of Heidegger made by his admirers resemble so closely his praise of Hitler.
But I thank you for wishing me Good Luck, whatever that may mean in the proper, phenomenological, sense, and wish you the same.
Jung would say you have a Heidegger complex.
I have a fondness for Jung, primarily because he had a vision of God
defecating on a cathedral, though it seems he interpreted it differently than I would.
I remember it as God pooping out of the sky. I don't remember a cathedral.
mQuoting frank
Holy Sh*t
Exactly.