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Title: Letters : 1925-1975 by Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Andrew Shields, Ursula Ludz ISBN: 0-15-100525-7 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Finally Available
Comment: Perhaps it's a sign of the times in which we live, but the biggest stories of recent note in philosophy have been Heidegger's flirtation with National Socialism and the revelation of his affair with his student, Hannah Arendt, in the 1920s. The affair with Arendt has left a bad account of the affair (Ettinger) and a badly written novel in its wake, but perhaps these lumps of fool's gold have led us to the real thing, for they helped persuade Heidegger's son, Herman, to open the private files of his famous father and release these letters to the public. These, along with the letters to Arendt that are extant, comprise a volume that belongs in the library of every serious student of Arendt and Heidegger. It provides a glimpse of the lives and thought of two intellectual giants and of how events led to their estrangement and shaky reconciliation.
The first part of the book comes across as a one-way conversation, as only Heidegger's letters to Arendt are extant. Obviously Heidegger was smart enough to destroy Arendt's letters lest they fall into the hands of Mrs. H. The tone of these early letters is that of a besotted adolescent. Heidegger sends her bad poetry and, in one letter, refers to her as his "little wood nymph." As these letters were meant to be strictly private, we cannot help but suffer the embarrassment of an unintentional voyeur. However, the section ends on an ominous note with a letter from Heidegger in 1933 answering Arendt's charges that he is anti-Semitic. This came shortly after the ascension of Hitler and makes us sad that Heidegger destroyed Arendt's letter making the charges.
The correspondence begins anew after the war and only because Arendt saw it in her heart to forgive her former mentor and in effect bury the hatchet. Heidegger seems most pleased and the letters lead to a personal reconciliation with Arendt visiting Heidegger and his wife in Germany. But all was not to remain quiet. Heidegger had confessed all to his wife, and took her willingness to see Arendt again as a sign all was back to normal, as it were. The letters he sends in 1950 give the impression that he is more than willing to resume their affair; to once again have his cake and eat it, too. But a sudden dispatch from Heidegger warns Arendt to cancel a postponed visit and not to write for a while. Seems Elfride Heidegger was not the willing accomplice her husband believed her to be.
But time heals all and the letters (and visits) resume. Heidegger is more interested in what he is doing and the American response than in what Arendt is doing. In one telling letter, he admits he has no idea of what she means by "radical evil." Another subject on which Arendt treads lightly is that of Karl Jaspers: Jaspers and Heidegger attempted a reconciliation after the war, but failed and each has bitterness toward the other with Arendt playing the diplomat in the middle, though in her letters with Jaspers there is no doubt about whose side she is on.
Another missed opportunity is the sudden death of Merleau-Ponty a few months before he was to meet Heidegger in Marburg. Arendt has a higher opinion of him than does Heidegger, although in a philosophical debate I'd place my money on Merleau-Ponty, whose forays into aesthetics, ontology and physics expose Heidegger as stuck in a neo-Kantian continuum.
All in all, this is the book students of these two intellectual giants have waited for, and I, for one was not disappointed in the least.
Rating: 4
Summary: Heidegger as Dasein
Comment: Well, this is quite a surprising little book that casts Martin Heidegger less as the controversial and unrelenting thinker, and more as a man in his world concerned with the quality and concerns of his life and career. It is also an extraordinarily personal and endearing extended love letter to a woman who meant the world to him.
This will strike the usual Heidegger reader as entirely different. There is no hidden marvellous de-coding of his demanding trek. This is a collection of mostly Martin's letters to Hannah with a few responses. The collection spans the course of their lives, and clearly show not only how much he loved her but how much he trusted in her thinking. They were equals in far more sophisticated ways and in far more honest and enduring ways than Sartre and deBeauvoir, who come across as petty bourgeois rats in Henri-Levy's recent biography.
No, here you'll find sign posts and journal entries along the path to Language, Thinking, Heracleitus and Parmenides, Totalitarianism, and the resolution of past controversies. There are Romantic and Philosophical poems (yup, Martin was smooth), endearments and sentinments that come from the heart.
Heidegger refudiates categorically any notion that he is anti-Semitic, and in truth, there's no evidence that he ever was. A bit stupidly enthralled with German nationalism, and certainly a supporter of National Socialism as opposed to Communism, but not anti-Semitic. He refuses to engage in any mea culpa's on that score, and that's it, as far as he is concerned. Arendt, herself Jewish, must have believed him. And that's good enough for me, in any case.
But there is so much more to their relationship than just this point. Her presence in his life upset Elfride Heidegger. There is a curious absence of Hannah's letters to Martin, and perhaps Elfride or Jorg or Hermann decided against preserving them. It's a pity. They clearly had an impact on Martin. Nonetheless, the story of their emotional and philosophical lives continues apace, and the real hallmark of this story is that it succeeds in getting the reader to think, as Heidegger so desperately wanted humans to do, about the little things that we often take for granted, and yet open the way to what is hidden. Hannah has a brilliant description of what Heidegger is about about midway through the book, just before the "Autumn" section begins. It is an analysis that only comes from someone who honestly knows the person she admires, loves and respects, and it thoroughly presents Martin Heidegger as he is.
This isn't weighty stuff for the advance seminars, just a brilliant and extraordinarily personal view of the two greatest philosophical minds of the twentieth century. And it is quite moving.
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Title: Responsibility and Judgment by HANNAH ARENDT ISBN: 0805242120 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 18 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920-1963) by Martin Heidegger, Hans Saner, Gary E. Aylesworth, Walter Biemel, Karl Jaspers ISBN: 1591020603 Publisher: Humanity Books Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $59.00 |
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Title: Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969 by Hannah Arendt, Karl Japsers, Lotte Kohler, Hans Saner ISBN: 0156225999 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: November, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Studies in Continental Thought) by Martin Heidegger, Matthias Fritsch, Jennifer Anna Gosetti ISBN: 0253342481 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: March, 2004 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
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Title: Hanna Arendt: For Love of the World by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl ISBN: 0300030991 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1983 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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