History 427/527: Modern German Intellectual History (McCole)
READING QUESTIONS: HEIDEGGER AND THE HEIDEGGER CONTROVERSY
“The Self-Assertion of the German University”
1. What does Heidegger define as the “essence” of “the German
university?” What is German about it? (If you are familiar with Weber’s “Science
as a Vocation,“ contrast his conception with Weber’s remarks on
science and the relations between professors and students.
2. Who or what is the Volk? the Volksgemeinschaft?
3. “Science [Wissenschaft] is the questioning standing firm
in the midst of the totality of being as it continually conceals itself. This
active perseverance
knows of its impotence in the face of Fate” (33). How do you understand
this? How might it have been heard at the time?
4. What are the three “services?” How do they relate to academic
freedom?
5. “To give the law to oneself is the highest freedom” (34). Who
else thought so? Did he mean the same thing that Heidegger seems to?
6. Who or what is the “moribund pseudocivilization” that he predicts
will “come apart at the seams…pulling all forces into confusion and
allowing them to suffocate in madness” (38)?
“Political Texts, 1933-1934”
What are some of the specific ways that these texts help to clarify what Heidegger
was calling for in “The Self-Assertion of the German University?” Are
there any aspects of his speech that these short texts do not help us to understand?
"'Only a God Can Save Us': Interview with Der Spiegel"
1. How does Heidegger present his motives for becoming rector of Freiburg university?
For instance, he explains some of his actions by stating that in early 1933, “only
one possibility was left, and that was to attempt to stem the coming development
by means of constructive powers which were still viable” (92). What did
he mean, and how would you evaluate this claim? What other motives does he
offer?
2. How does he respond to the interviewers’ quoting of his reference to
the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement (103ff)?
3. “Everything is functioning. This is exactly what is so uncanny, that…the
functioning drives us more and more to even further functioning, and that technology
tears men [Menschen] loose from the earth and uproots them” (105).
How would you describe the politics of that assertion?
4. The interviewers press Heidegger on the question of what is to be done.
What is Heidegger’s response?
5. Why does Heidegger think that all this implicates the Germans in particular
(112ff)?
“Overcoming Metaphysics”
1. What does Heidegger hold responsible for the general “decline” or “collapse
and desolation” of things (68 ff)?
2. “Metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but
perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance.
The will of that planetary dominance is now in turn affecting the center of the
West” (72). Ponder.
3. “The basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and
calculates itself in the…world of completed metaphysics can be stringently
called ‘technology.’ This name includes…objectified nature,
the business of culture, manufactured politics, and the gloss of ideals overlying
everything” (74). Ponder further, and keep this in mind when we consider
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
4. “The ‘world wars’ and their character of ‘totality’ are
already a consequence of the abandonment of Being” (84). How could the “abandonment
of Being” be responsible for such consequences?