The Heidegger Affair, part 356

Report by Jonathan Derbyshire here.

This decade's eructation is the official publication of Heidegger's Schwarzen Hefte. The earlier story at Le Nouvel Observateur is here. The French article is interesting because it notes that Heidegger specified the release dates of all this stuff, including these notebooks, right before his death. It also describes Hadrian France-Lanord, of a recent French Heidegger dictionary, who after seeing the notebooks has publicly retracted his previous claim that Heidegger never wrote anything anti-semitic.

From the entire Observateur article I confidently predict that Heidegger's defenders will once again recycle the grossly ignorant canard that since Heidegger did not have a biological concept of race,* he was somehow undermining the Nazis.  

In any case, I'm not clear about what the stakes are supposed to be here.

(1) Yes it's depressing that philosophical and moral goodness can seperate so much, but most of us learned that in graduate school via human interaction. (2) One of the things we should have learned from National Socialism is to distrust overly romantic conceptions of anything, including and especially philosophy. Philosophy as a magical elixir that will turn you into a saint is dangerous because the conception of anything as a magical elixir is dangerous. (3) Just about anyone reading this who hasn't compromised themselves as bad as did the good Germans and occupied French and Polish should thank God they haven't been tested in the same way.  

 [Notes:

*Neither did Hitler or most of the influential Nazis! An anti-scientific racism rooted in romantic notions of blood and soil long predate the pseudoscientific biology that was part of Nazi usurpation of higher education. Heidegger on technology and the Frankfurt School on instrumental reason have made otherwise intelligent people forget this.]