Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #913026 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
Despite a flood of recent works on Martin Heidegger and Nazism, there has been no sustained investigation of the shared themes that were the common ground between Heidegger's thought and that of the ideologists of National Socialism. In this lucid and fair-minded book, Charles Bambach reads Heidegger's writings from 1933 to 1945 in historical context. Bambach shows that Heidegger was engaged in a conversation with the National Socialists and others on the German right about the authentic mission of the German Volk, and that this theme was central to all of his thought. Bambach depicts the development within Heidegger's work of a philosophy marked by a belief in rootedness in the homeland, the ground of ancestral kinship, and a notion of a privileged, originary connection to the ancient Greeks. Bambach makes clear that Heidegger's philosophical account of the history of the West is structured by a grand metaphysical vision of German destiny as something rooted in the soil. All of Heidegger's post-1933 works can, Bambach maintains, be read as arguments for a German form of racial-political autochthony.

An essential reference in the debates over one of the twentieth century's most influential - and controversial - philosophers, this book demonstrates the profound influence on Heidegger's work of both historical context and the other thinkers with whom he engaged in dialogue. These latter include not only the ancient Greeks and such German predecessors as Hegel, Holderlin, and Nietzsche, but also those contemporaries of the radical right from whom he would later try to distance himself.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful work of scholarship
This is a first rate book of philosophy and history of ideas. I suppose the book focusses on the question of Heidegger's relationship to National Socialism but rather than the great many other books in this area, does not do this by examining the events around Heidegger's Rectorate per se but rather by a careful and contextualized reading of his philosophy from 1933 to 1945. The title alludes to the notion of rootedness and autochthony that permates Heidegger's thought (up until his last works) and how this notion interacted with his conceptualizion of the Greeks and his attempt at first to recruit, and then later relegate, Nietzsche. Thus, the book places Heidegger's thinking in the wider context of how the Greeks and Nietzsche were viewed in Germany at this time, how other thinkers used them to support Nazi goals, and how Heidegger differed from such thinkers. Although clearly against biologistic racism, as Bambach says, through invoking a similar strength of 'rootedness' in the Germans as the classical, particularly Pre-Socratic, Greeks he argues for a cultural or metaphysical superiority: a thought that remians with him after the close of WWII, albeit in a more folksy guise. Reading Heidegger brought me into philosophy and this book will never let me read him as I had before. Very highly recommended! Have ordered several books he cites on Ancient Athens ...