you may find the whole article here:
BTW, that's Freiberg, not Freidberg, university, or University of Freiberg for you purists reading this... sorry about the spelling error on the last post...
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Contra Mundum
No. 13 Fall 1994
Heidegger Deconstructed
by Peter J. Leithart
(please note some very curious correspondences between Heidegger and Landmark philosophy: " the great noble awareness of the insecurity of "existence"", "the necessity for order", "the total transformation of our [German] being", "the claim that the individual is a "fiction", and so on... does any of this sound familiar ????)
A pastor attending Heidegger's pro-Nazi summer camp in 1933 summarized Heidegger's argument that a philosophical critique of Christianity cannot begin with the second article of the creed:
One must start by rejecting the first article, that the world was created and sustained by a God, that what exists is merely an artifact, something that has been made by a divine craftsman. This was the origin of that false devaluation of the world, that contempt for the world and denial of the world - and the source of that false feeling of comfort and security, founded on subjective ideas about the world that are untrue compared with the great noble awareness of the insecurity of "existence" (quoted on p.227).
In truth, Heidegger formulated his own gnostic religion, centered on a hope for the eschatological Advent of Being, which had been forgotten throughout the history of post-Socratic Western philosophy. Ott calls attention to the prominence of the Advent theme in Heidegger's thought. In 1932, he wrote to Karl Jaspers about his hope that men were coming on the scene who "bear a distant dispensation within them" (quoted on p. 22). The following year, he was more confident: "I feel more and more that we are emerging into a new reality, and that the old era has run its course" (quoted on pp. 24-25).
Karl Lowith summed up Heidegger's shift in these dramatic words:
A Jesuit by education, he became a Protestant through indignation; a scholastic dogmatician by training, he became an existential pragmatist through experience; a theologian by tradition, he became an atheist in his research, a renegade to his tradition cloaked in the mantle of its historian (quoted on p. 120).
Ott's middle and later chapters provide a detailed examination of Heidegger's brief term as the rector of Freiburg University under the Nazi regime. Using new archival evidence, he supports beyond reasonable doubt the conclusions of Victor Farias,[1] that Heidegger was an active supporter of the Nazi regime who sought to bring Freiburg into conformity with the genius of Nazism, the "leadership (Fuhrer ) principle." Heidegger discovered in Nazism stirrings of the secular Advent for which he yearned. Though Heidegger's philosophy was not crassly anti-Semitic, Ott found evidence that Heidegger had denounced one of his Jewish colleagues, and his treatment of his friend and mentor, the "non-Aryan" Husserl, was ugly. Ott also demonstrates that Heidegger's later attempts at self-justification were distorted in many particulars and in their general thrust. More on these matters below.
Whereas Ott gives detailed attention to the life of Heidegger, Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis is an attempt to "contextualize" Heidegger by surveying the philosophical currents before, during, and after the Nazi regime. Sluga argues that the basic philosophical division of the time was between "conservatives" (inspired by Fichte) and "radicals" (disciples of Nietzsche). This essential division existed before Hitler and continued to define German philosophy after the war. Though there are significant differences between the two traditions, both groups shared what Sluga calls a "four-fold template" of issues: a sense that the world faced a cultural crisis of massive proportions; a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the German race and in the spiritual mission of the German nation in the world-historical crisis of modernity; Germany's need for a strong leader (Fuhrer ); and the necessity for order. Beginning with Fichte, these issues shaped much of German philosophy. Heidegger's Freiburg rectorial address rang the changes on several of these themes."