Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
"Into Life"
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 281-341
Keywords:
Heidegger, Martin, Criticism and interpretation
;
Rosenzweig, Franz, Criticism and interpretation
;
Jewish philosophy 20th century
;
Jews Identity 20th century
;
History
;
Jews Public opinion 20th century
;
History
;
Homeland (Theology)
;
Antisemitism Philosophy
Abstract:
This essay identifies a surprising, but non the less striking affinity between Heidegger’s later distancing from the National-Socialist geocentrism and Rosenzweig’s affirmation of essentially diasporic character of Jewish existence. The author shows first how Heidegger’s earlier confluence of the ethnolinguistic and the geopolitical results in his distorted critique of the Jewish people, as the ones with no home, language, world, or historical destiny. Though, without exonerating at any rate Heidegger’s distorted and flawed views, the essay proceeds in depicting how Heidegger’s later theological-poetic shift, inspired from and exemplified in Hölderlin’s poetry, shows itself to be highly akin to Rosenzweig’s understanding of Holiness. Asides from his insistence of the special character of the German and the Greek language, Heidegger’s later thinking is characterized by the far-reaching insight regarding the centrality of a poetics that celebrates the sense of the unhomely (das Unheimische) as essential for the possibility for human beings to feel at home (einheimisch) in the world and, hence, by the affirmation of the nomadic nature of poiesis. Heidegger’s turn is analogous to Rosenzweig’s affirmation of the essentiality of the diasporic character of Jewish existence. According to Rosenzweig and to his reading of the tradition, the Holiness of the land and of the language “prevents the eternal people from ever living entirely at one with the times.” A feeling that also applies, according to Rosenzweig, to the way that the Jewish poet perceives his poetic activity and his place in the world. Thus, so the upshot of the essay, despite Heidegger’s denial or ignorance, a deeper convergence between Jewish and the German poiesis can be identified, namely, that the “serenity of being-at-home necessarily belongs together with the turbulence of not-being-at-home.”
DOI:
10.1163/9789004468559_013
URL:
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