The poetics of thinking
pp. 92-113
in: David Rudrum (ed), Literature and philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2006Abstract
Concerning Heidegger's involvement with German fascism in the early 1930s, when Heidegger joined the Nazi party and, as Rector of the University of Freiburg, embraced a National Socialist vision of the "self-assertion of the German university', Hans Jonas, his bitterly disappointed student, stated that not only Heidegger's politics but philosophy itself "had declared bankruptcy'. Heidegger, the "most profound thinker' of that time, had erred not only politically, but had brought philosophy astray from its service of the good. Furthermore, Heidegger had invoked poetry, specifically Hölderlin's, as the primordial resource for his thinking of strife, struggle, and historical decisionism for the German people as a Volk, and their exclusive destiny. Though Heidegger later finds poetry also a source for extricating himself from his errors, and indeed for a very promising notion of non-violent, poetic dwelling, nevertheless at a certain juncture the poetic is implicated in a profound failure. To Heidegger's failure Jonas poses a counterexample, the "strict and uncompromising Kantian' professor of philosophy Julius Ebbinghaus, who "passed the test admirably' and resisted succumbing to the Nazi fervor — Ebbinghaus claimed later that without Kant "I wouldn't have been able to do it.'1
