By ROBERT EAGLESTONE [Times Higher Education] – I am interested in the philosophy of Heidegger, in the thought of Arendt. To study Shakespeare means to be interested in his plays and poems, not him: what we learn about Darwin – about his interest in dogs and dog breeding, for example – is key to explaining the genesis and methodology of On the Origin of Species.
This is not to say that someone’s life has nothing to do with his or her work, but that these links are complex, often obscure, and need to be treated with care to avoid simply becoming post facto justifications or, worse, just gossip. This is, sadly, where Daniel Maier-Katkin’s Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness
In 1925, when Arendt was a student, she and her professor, Heidegger, began a love affair. This is now almost mythologised and is the subject of books, plays and a novel. It could easily be turned into a Hollywood movie (“Decadent Germany – before the storm! She was the brilliant Jewish student! He was the famous professor, soon to join the Nazis! Their passion was forbidden! And destructive!”).
This affair is often used to attack Arendt, who is still an astonishingly controversial figure, as if she remained somehow for ever in hock to Heidegger. In this more sympathetic book, the affair is taken to be the fulcrum of Arendt’s whole life. However, it seems to me that the issue of importance here is not this “celebrity gossip” (“‘This Girl Must Go!’ says Elfride Heidegger”) but the intellectual impact of Heidegger’s work on her own.
His contemporary reputation was as the “hidden king of thinking”. The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, no friend of European philosophy, reviewed Heidegger’s major work Being and Time
Continued at Times Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.
