Romano starts off modestly by asking
How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.I moved on to 'A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research', a review [PDF] by Thomas Sheehan in (2001) XXXII(2) Continental Philosophy Review 1-20 of the dark prince's Beiträge, complete with gems such as the
definition of Denken: "Thinking no longer appears as a faculty of the mind but as the mystery through which the sway of being sways as the counter-sway of a finite projection and a finite but always already on-going and self-sustaining forth-throw"Sheehan commented that
The Beiträge hits us at a time of crisis when, in the eyes of many, the Heidegger establishment has painted itself into a corner. It's not just that outsiders don't understand what we're talking about; there is a growing suspicion that we don't either. Heideggerians seem to have abandoned philosophy to become glossolalics. ...What would Sister Constantia think of an undergrad who assumes that John Rawls was channelling Ayn Rand (admittedly an interesting variation on announcement in one 2008 tutorial that Rawls was a Communist, presumably of the godless atheistical babies-for-breakfast and boots-on-the-table variety)?
Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist, reports that well into the 1930s Heidegger was plagued by a recurring nightmare in which he is back at his Maturitätsprüfung, the final exam before leaving high school. He freezes up and cannot find the right answer to the examiners' question. It's a terrifying experience ...
I imagine a similar nightmare in which all of us in the Heidegger Conference are compelled, like elementary school children, to take a standardized test in Heidegger. The bell rings out over the schoolyard - say, at my own Mission Dolores Grammar School in San Francisco. Reluctantly we leave our games and, under the watchful eyes of the Sisters of Notre Dame, trudge into our seventh-grade classroom. We slouch into our seats and whisper a desperate prayer to der letzte Gott as the stern-faced Sister Constantia hands each of us a number-two pencil and a bluebook. There is only one question: 'In plain English, define each of the following terms and relate them to one another: Ereignis, Geschick, Lichtung, Austrag, Entzug, Seyn, Sein, Sein, and Wesung'.
Time to reread Sheehan's 'A Normal Nazi' [PDF] in (1993) XL(1) New York Review of Books 30-35.
