Arendt excused Heidegger’s Nazism with the Thales metaphor of an unworldly thinker

Evidence

In 1969, she wrote an essay which was published two years later in the New York Review of Books as ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’. There, she reminded a new generation of readers of the excitement his call to thinking had generated, back in the ‘foggy hole’ of Marburg in the 1920s. Yet she also asked how he could have failed to think appropriately himself in 1933 and thereafter. She had no answer to her own question. Just as Jaspers had once let Heidegger off lightly by calling him a ‘dreaming boy’, so Arendt now ended her assessment with an overgenerous image: that of the Greek philosopher Thales, an unworldly genius, who fell into a well because he was too busy looking at the stars to see the danger in front of him. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 950

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘thinking as unworldliness excuses moral failure’ theme parallels ideas in Hannah Arendt’s own Eichmann in Jerusalem on thoughtlessness. — connects to: Heidegger refused to disavow Nazism because he saw easy repudiations as loathsome — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 604; Arendt remained deeply ambivalent about Heidegger throughout her life — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 949; Heidegger’s Nazi involvement remained a recurring French intellectual scandal — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1311 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: how intellectual biographers and friends routinely reframe moral failure as charming absent-mindedness — the ‘genius exemption’ in philosophy’s institutional memory.

Broader Connections

• Arendt remained deeply ambivalent about Heidegger throughout her life #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 949