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Heidegger enjoys rock star status in Beijing

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...ing-group/

EXCERPTS: I first met the members of the Heidegger Reading Group in a small coffee shop at the social science library of Tsinghua University. [...] After explaining that I myself was a philosophy exchange student with an interest in Heidegger, I was invited to join the club’s next meeting.

[...] Martin Heidegger enjoys a rock star status in Chinese universities, and the two biggest names at [...an...] event were considered celebrities: Professors Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie, who as graduate students had helped translate Being and Time into Chinese in 1987 when the nation was in the throes of existentialism fever. The revolutionary turbulence of the Maoist days was out, and mid-20th-century Western philosophers were in. “In the 1980s, after years of having their lives defined by what was going on in the country, I think people really liked the idea of philosophy that was all about the individual,” Chen suggested. “Many people were hungry to talk about questions related to personal existence and freedom, not society.”

Sun Zhouxing, one of the younger scholars on the stage, agreed. “Heidegger is the number-one name in philosophy research,” he said, “surpassing even Marx, perhaps.” Even in a communist country, studying Marx is more potentially threatening to the government than studying Heidegger because the former deals with sociopolitical relations while the latter doesn’t care. For those looking to stay away from politics, Heidegger is their man.

Philosophy independent from politics is frowned upon in the Chinese intellectual tradition, in which an aspiring member of the literati would spend decades studying classical works of philosophy and poetry in order to prepare for the civil service exam. By the time he passed the exam and was appointed to a government position, he would have memorized a vision of ethics that would guide his work. Philosophy, in other words, was a foundation for service. If you were a Western-style academic buried in a singular discipline about abstract questions, you were neglecting your duty.

[...] Heidegger’s personal story is relevant here, as it demonstrates the corrupting impact that a bad regime can have on a great thinker. After publishing Being and Time in 1927, he was one of the rising stars in German philosophy ... when his rector had to step down in April 1933 for refusing to put up anti-Jewish posters, Heidegger readily succeeded him. Ten days later, he joined the Nazi Party just as book burnings were coming into vogue, and Jews were being stripped of their posts at universities.

While his private relationship with the party’s ideas remains a matter of controversy — his mentor, Edmund Husserl, was Jewish, as was his student-turned-lover, Hannah Arendt — in public, he embraced Adolf Hitler with the zeal of a convert. In a bid to become the Führer’s personal philosopher, Heidegger used his platform to endorse and expound on the party’s theory of a new great leader. “Let not theories and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future,” he told his students.

Many Chinese intellectuals today are following in Heidegger’s dismal footsteps. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stepped up its efforts to co-opt some of China’s leading academics in recent years, some former critics have become sycophants. [...] Under an authoritarian regime, “philosophy, beliefs, and morals” can lose their grip on intellectuals. They, like everyone else, can be driven by the politics of fear. Heidegger’s dark legacy teaches this lesson.

But while Rong Jian concludes from Heidegger’s legacy that intellectuals must remained unbowed in speaking truth to power, Teacher Wang instead learns from it the importance of staying out of subjects that lie beyond your expertise. “We cannot fully trust Heidegger, for his personal or political conduct,” Teacher Wang once said at a meeting of the reading group, when a member raised the issue of Heidegger’s antisemitism. “He is a thinker in the modern Western sense, one who should be understood within his discipline. That is the power of the modern university system, with its academic divisions.” To Teacher Wang, Heidegger offers a lesson in the value of sticking to philosophical inquiry within the walls of the university, in burrowing into truth for truth’s sake without the messy gray zones of the world... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Counter perspective of Heidegger's behavior
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