Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy by Peter Trawny

Author:Peter Trawny [Trawny, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226303871
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Excursus

Emmanuel Levinas attempted in his essay “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” published in 1961, to lay out the most important difference between Judaism, Heidegger, and—they are explicitly named—the Heideggerians. In all essentials, this concerns the topographic order of the world emphasized by Heidegger and the destruction of this order by the technology affirmed by Judaism.

“One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place,” this would be the “splitting of humanity into natives and strangers.” In this perspective, “technology is less dangerous than any spirit of a place.” It attacks “the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile.” Technology “wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding place.”15

Against this, Gagarin showed us how we could abandon place. Thus Levinas says: “For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon—everything around him was sky, or, more exactly, everything was geometrical space. A man existed in the absolute of homogeneous space.”16 In the year 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth for 106 minutes in the space capsule Vostok I.

Decisive, however, is that Levinas relates the idea of replacing “place” with “homogeneous space” to Judaism. Judaism “has not sublimated idols—on the contrary, it has demanded that they be destroyed.” “Like technology,” Judaism “has demystified the universe.” Through its “abstract universalism” it damages “imaginations and passions.” Indeed, it has “discovered man in the nudity of his face.”17

Even Levinas speaks of a destruction. In Heidegger’s eyes it concerns the “destruction” proceeding from universalism, the destruction of machination, which is still no “annihilation.” It is a little uncanny to see to what extent Levinas affirms the apocalyptic reduction of the history of being. It is he who, coming from the other side, writes the confrontation between “universalist” Judaism and Heidegger into the apocalyptic reduction.

Heidegger assigns all this to the history of metaphysics. Sometime at the start of the 1940s he noted the following about Platonism:

The estimation of the ἀγαθόν [the good] as the τελευταία ἰδέα [last Idea] beyond ἀλήθεια [truth] and the ἀληθές [true] as γιγνωσκόμενον [what is known] is the first, i.e., the authentic, step that goes the furthest toward the serial production of long-range bomber planes and the invention of radio-technological news reports, with whose help the former are deployed in service of the unconditioned mechanization of the globe and humanity, equally predetermined by that step.18

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.