From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 15:39:57 EDT
Subject: Quote without Comment


Quote without Comment





Quote without comment: The analogy that occurred to me grew out of a 
conversation I had several years ago with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of Act 
and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, a talk that took place in the course of 
researching my book, Explaining Hitler. Mr. Lang is an extremely thoughtful and 
meticulous thinker on the question of degrees of evil, and the role of intentionality 
in determining them. He was speaking about the question of whether one could 
say there was "a history of evil"—whether Hitler represented a new fact, a new 
landmark in that history, and if so, what the next step might be. . . . Mr. 
Lang . . . had his own notion of what the next step in the history of evil 
might be. The paradigm for it, he told me, was the postwar career of Martin 
Heidegger, the Nazi-friendly philosopher beloved to distraction by postmodernists 
(and Hannah Arendt).All of whom apologized for him, despite an increasingly 
damning series of revelations that disclosed his toadying to Hitler’s thugs in 
order to attain professional advancement, hailing Hitler’s Reich as the ultimate 
synthesis of politics and his philosophy.



But that wasn’t what made Heidegger a new chapter, Mr. Lang said; it was his 
astonishing postwar behavior. After everything came out, after it was no 
longer possible to deny at least post facto knowledge of the Holocaust, nothing 
changed for Heidegger. He felt no need to incorporate what happened into his 
philosophy. "His silence," Mr. Lang said, "it wasn’t even denial. For him, it 
wasn’t important! It wasn’t important …. Now if you ask which of them is worse … 
the Revisionists [Holocaust deniers] deny it occurred, but their official 
position, at least, is that if it occurred, it would have been wrong. But 
Heidegger knows it occurred, but it’s just not important—it’s not something to 
distort history to deny. For Heidegger, this is not history to concern oneself 
with."Ron Rosenbaum, in 



New York Observer



Apologia?

Cheers,

Jud.

<A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> 
Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY.
<A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A>


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