《Heidegger's Crisis》

Philosophy and politics make uneasy bedfellows. Nowhere has this been more true than in Nazi Germany, where the pursuit of truth and the will to power became fatally entangled. Though Martin Heidegger's Nazi past is well known and much debated, less is understood about the role of philosophy - and other philosophers - in the rise and development of National Socialism. This is the subject of Hans Sluga's book, which offers considerable historical insight into the uncertain relationship between philosophy and politics. Starting with Fichte and Nietzsche, whom the Nazis claimed as their intellectual forebears, "Heidegger's Crisis" shows not only how the Nazis exploited philosophical ideas and used philosophers to gain public acceptance, but also how German philosophers, using National Socialism to promote themselves and their own philosophical agenda, played into the hands of the Nazis. Sluga describes the growth, from World War I onward, of a powerful rightwing movement in German philosophy, in which nationalistic, antisemitic, and antidemocratic ideas flourished. By 1933, representatives of different philosophical traditions were vying to establish their thought as the official philosophy of National Socialism. In this contest, we can see the roots of an intense political struggle between philosophical traditionalists and radicals that would erupt after the Nazi takeover - and that, because of the Nazis' lack of a coherent ideology, would never be resolved. In Sluga's analysis of this controversy, the concepts of crisis, nation, leadership, and order emerge as terms at once philosophical and political, bridging the distance between these supposedly separate worlds. This book puts the controversy over Martin Heidegger into its historical context, but goes far bevond that to show that no discussion of philosophy and politics is without such a context - that interactions between philosophers and politicians are inevitably shaped by an ongoing, historical relationship.