Heidegger's Silence

by Berel Lang

Overview

In What Is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger wrote, "Man speaks by being silent." Berel Lang demonstrates that Heidegger's own silence spoke consciously and deliberately in response to what has been called the "Jewish Question." Posed simply, the Jewish Question, as it gained currency in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, asked how (or if) the Jews were to live among the nations. The Holocaust radically altered the significance of the Jewish Question and, still, the great philosopher did not speak.

Lang interrogates Heidegger's silence for its possible meanings. He asks: What does it tell us about someone who prided himself on his ability to think that Heidegger never felt compelled to address the Jewish Question or to respond to the Nazi genocide? Lang demonstrates that Heidegger's silence after the Holocaust had its foundation in his silence on the Jewish Question before its occurrence. That earlier silence, he suggests, was based in the conceptual and historical role Heidegger ascribed to the Volk and in particular to the German Volk. Heidegger's silence, Lang concludes, was thus not simply an expression of prejudice or of his public persona. It derived from his philosophical thought and becomes, therefore, a necessary consideration in assessing Heidegger as a thinker. In this context, Lang suggests, Heidegger's silence still speaks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501727542
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Berel Lang is Professor of Philosophy and Letters at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory, also from Cornell, Holocaust-Representation: Art with the Bounds of History and Ethics, and Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History. He is the editor of Race and Racism in Theory and Practice and coeditor of The Holocaust: A Reader.

What People are Saying About This

Hayden White

This brilliant and compelling book deals with the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his political-pedagogical career and, more generally, between the thought of a professional thinker and the everyday life of the person who has chosen the role of philosopher.

Editorial Reviews

The Gesamtausgabe, or collected works, of Heidegger currently being assembled already number 79 volumes, but Lang faults Heidegger for what he left unsaid. Heidegger never addressed the "Jewish question," and as Lang contends, "silence can be as deliberate and pointed as presence." Although one might not expect references to Jews in Heidegger's metaphysics, Lang argues that it is a "thoughtful failure," one that "calls attention to itself." His thesis is that Heidegger believed the mystical German Volk and their subsequent embodiment in Nazism to be the meditation of Being and Time and Jews to be excluded from the Volk altogether. In this exclusion lies Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his reason for not mentioning Jews in his writings: they are extraneous and irrelevant in the apprehension of Truth. Although Lang's argument is convincing, it seems rather superfluous to use Heidegger's silence to prove his anti-Semitism. After all, in a speech as rector of the University of Freiburg, he welcomed National Socialism, knowing full well what it entailed, and made remarks about "Jewification" and the "dangerous international fraternity of Jews" while wearing the party insignia on his jacket. A more open question would have been, Can a great thinker be an anti-Semite, an anti-Semite a great thinker? (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Few are as well qualified as Lang (philosophy, SUNY, Albany) to consider Heidegger's Nazism. Taking Heidegger at his word that the key to a text or thinker is the unsaid, Lang considers Heidegger's near-silence on the Holocaust. Happily, he eschews apologetics, polemics, and hysterics for brutally honest, philosophical thoughtfulness. He argues against Habermas that, however mistakenly, Heidegger's early work is grounded in the historical concept of the German Volk. Indeed, this concept influences all of his work, and Lang contends that Heidegger's Nazism springs from such thinkinga tack that, surprisingly, most work on Heidegger and the "Jewish Question," as Lang puts it, does not take. Although Lang does not demonstrate convincingly his implication that Nazism follows necessarily from Heidegger's thinking, this disturbing, thought-provoking work is well worth reading for those specialists and general scholars interested in trying to understand the appalling fact that the greatest philosopher of our century was also a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite.Lee Horvitz, Miami Univ., Oxford, Ohio

Library Journal

This is a work that merits attention. It should be read not only by scholars interested in Heidegger as man and/or philosopher, but also by those who, like Lang, have found themselves researching something about which they expected to find a great deal, yet discovered instead a curious, and seemingly deliberate, silence.

Shofar

A fine, fair-minded, continually interesting study.

German Quarterly

"This brilliant and compelling book deals with the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his political-pedagogical career and, more generally, between the thought of a professional thinker and the everyday life of the person who has chosen the role of philosopher."

Hayden White

"A fine, fair-minded, continually interesting study."—German Quarterly

"This is a work that merits attention. It should be read not only by scholars interested in Heidegger as man and/or philosopher, but also by those who, like Lang, have found themselves researching something about which they expected to find a great deal, yet discovered instead a curious, and seemingly deliberate, silence."—Ellen M. Umansky, Shofar

"Few are as well qualified as Lang . . . to consider Heidegger's Nazism. Taking Heidegger at his word that the key to a text or thinker is the unsaid, Lang considers Heidegger's near-silence on the Holocaust. Happily, he eschews apologetics, polemics, and hysterics for brutally honest, philosophical thoughtfulness. . . . This disturbing, thought-provoking work is well worth reading for those specialists and general scholars interested in trying to understand the appalling fact that the greatest philosopher of our century was also a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite."—Library Journal

"This brilliant and compelling book deals with the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his political-pedagogical career and, more generally, between the thought of a professional thinker and the everyday life of the person who has chosen the role of philosopher."—Hayden White, University of California, Berkeley

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