Rebecca Kukla: commitment

Transcript context

…Heidegger. I’ve looked at every page of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I’m not sure I can say I’ve read the book. What’s in there? What’s in there? [laughs] Okay. I have an incredibly emotional and vexed relationship to Heidegger. I used to publish on Heidegger, and I don’t anymore. That was a conscious choice that I made. This is not yet a direct answer to your question, but I will answer your question. We always knew Heidegger was a Nazi. Philosophers, for many years, had this line, which was that, “Oh, yeah, politically he was a Nazi because everybody was. But it has nothing to do with his philosophy.” I think that was just willful obtuseness on the part of people who wanted to read him and take him seriously. I think that more and more has come out, showing just how deeply held his Nazi convictions were, and that it was not just him going along with the crowd. It was stuff that he deeply believed. In a lot of books that don’t get read as much, he explains in detail the ways in which Nazism shaped his ideas. I think now that we have entered an era in which there are real, live Nazis crawling out of the woodwork and having a serious voice in public discourse, my intellectual labor is finite, and I’ve just decided I’m not willing to spend any more of it on a Nazi. That said, back in the day, I took Heidegger really seriously, and I found him a really important thinker. I’m trying to think of what the acute little nugget of take-home summary of Being and Time might be. [laughter] It’s like the Monty Python skits summarized Proust.…

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