/lit/ - Literature

>>21397678
Well yes, this obvious dilemma in generalizing about ALL Jews (surprisingly difficult for some to understand) is I think why Heidegger was far too sensitive and intelligent to be a Nazi. His “Nazism” is overstated, he was more drawn to what someone earlier in this thread called being a “conservative revolutionary,” the National Socialists at first seemed like this in Germany but I’m certain he stopped following the party-line internally as Nazism progressed, and was only “playing along to get along,” protecting his career from persecution. But it is also undeniable his Black Notebooks include commentary on “world Judaism” or the character of Jewish culture, which today definitely are construed as antisemitic.

> 18th of August, 1941

Dear Fritz, dear Liesel, dear Boys! […] It is not Russianism that will bring about the destruction of the earth but Americanism, not just the English but all of Europe has fallen prey to it as it represents modernity in its monstrosity.

However, in yet another passage, relevant to what I brought up before, he puts “Jewish” in quotes and seems to be suggesting the character of totalitarian Nazism ultimately was or became itself, paradoxically, “Jewish.” One much more sympathetic reading I saw, was that his “scare quotes” around it was meant to say, “What the Nazis were labeling as ‘Jewish’ or ‘destructive trends of world Jewry,’ was in fact to be found in themselves. The Nazis were like the ‘Jews’ they hated, or the image of the enemy they had.”

>Only when what is essentially "Jewish" in the metaphysical sense battles against the Jewish is the pinnacle of self-annihilation in history attained; assuming that what is "Jewish" has everywhere seized dominion entirely for itself, such that even the battle "of the Jewish," and this above all, becomes subjection to it.

Peter Trawny explicates this thus then quotes Heidegger’s BN (Black Notebook) again:

>As it turns out, the dubious quotation marks are the key to making sense of this tortured, disastrous line of thought. By "Jewish" (in quotation marks) Heidegger means the hyperrational, calculative, technological ordering and manipulation of everything. In this (perverse) sense, Soviet communism and American capitalism are both "essentially 'Jewish'" -- and so is Nazism, at least by the late 1930s, that is, in the form it had by then assumed of a fully mobilized, military-industrial killing machine. So Heidegger can refer, in a hopelessly confused way, to:

>>the historical process which England plays out to the end from within Americanism and Bolshevism, and this means at the same time also from within world Judaism (Weltjudentum). The question concerning the role of world Judaism is not a racial one, but rather the metaphysical question concerning the kind of humanity which, utterly unattached, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical "task."

>>18461050
ah yes the monks who want to "escape" the world because it is marked by impermanence are not nihilistic...

>The anti-Christian [der Anti-christ], like every “anti,” must stem from the same essential ground as that against which it is “anti”—that is, the same essential ground as “the Christian” [“der Christ”]. The Christian stems from Jewry [Judenschaft]. In the timeframe of the Christian West, that is, of metaphysics, Judaism is the principle of destruction. What is destructive in the reversal of the completion of metaphysics—i.e., of Hegel’s metaphysics by Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure of “life”—i.e., of economics, i.e., of organization—i.e., of the biological—i.e. of the “people.”

What is Heidegger even going on about?

>tfw too stupid to understand him