This is a good article on Heidegger, the politics of university reform and the 1933 Rectorial Address entitled, 'The Self-Assertion of the University.' It takes us beyond the standard reading of Heidegger as an apologist for the German University, an advocate for the nationalism (Germanification) of the sciences and the politicization (Nazification) of the liberal university.

The earlier post indicated that the task of leading academic intellectuals (philosophers) is understood in terms of finding an appropriate historical way to carry on Nietzsche's struggle against the process of nihilism. This meant combating the growing problem of historical meaninglessness with the university needing to be renewal to enable this form of philosophical questioning of a fundamental ontology.

What Ian Thompson usefully points (pp. 19-20) out is that in the early 1930s Heidegger thought that he could dig beneath the regional ontologies of the various sciences to a fundamental ontology and engage in a destruction of that fundamental ontology (eg., mechanism) to uncover a fundamental ontology beneath history.

This is a falling behind the Hegelian insight that western culture is marked by a number of historical world views, basic metaphysical understanding or basic ontologies (eg., the mechanist one of modernity). The task of philosophy is a reflective one, in that it aims to make us aware of this mechanistic understanding of being and the way it shapes our thinking about the world and ourselves. It is a questioning of this understanding of being.

Ian Thompson says that Heidegger came to this historicist understanding of being in the later 1030s. Heidegger becomes aware of this when he actually engages in the destruction of the history of ontology called for in Being and Time. It characteristicizes the turning (Kehre).

previous next start