The more familiar a reader is with Heidegger’s work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms — being, existence, decision — as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship.
This is the most insightful piece I've read regarding Faye's book. But I would not be shocked to see Heidegger employing his key terms in this manner. A few years ago, I happened upon a passage of Heidegger in German and as I made my way more or less ignorantly and uncertainly into grasping what he was he was saying I grasped something else: that a good deal of what he was saying was simply classical philosophy disguised by Heidegger's personal terminology. He had, for instance - though I can't remember now what it was - his own term for the time-honored term contingency. I realized then that his vaunted originality consisted mostly in coming up with new terms for old concepts and passing that off as original thought. That he could adapt his terms further for reasons of expedience is hardly surprising. That he could seduce an 18-year-old philosophy student isn't surprising either. Kierkegaard, author of "The Diary of a Seducer," would have seen through the old fraud in a New York minute.
Heidegger's entire section on anxiety was just ripped off Kierkegaard's own brilliant treatise on anxiety. In Heidegger's section, he devotes one footnote to SK: "Kierkegaard was the thinker who most explored anxiety in penetrating depth. Cf. Sickness Unto Death".
ReplyDeleteSorry Marty, passing off an entire section of Being and Time and devoting one footnote to the original author is still plagarism.