Habermas progressively downgraded Heidegger’s thought between 1953 and 1959
Evidence
The least responsive of their opponents in the Federal Republic was Heidegger, on whose seventieth birthday in 1959 an article by Habermas appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the title `The Great Influence: a Chronicler’s Note on Martin Heidegger’s Seventieth Birthday’. In his first critical article on Heidegger in 1953, Habermas had still described Being and Time as being the most significant event in philosophy since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In 1959 he wrote, more moderately, that Heidegger had hadat least within the academic worldthe greatest influence of any philosopher since Hegel. Being and Time might be recognized, in the first place, as merely one more futile attempt to provide philosophy with a foundation within itself, and the contents of the work could be described as an ontological certification of concepts that had been commonplaces in cultural criticism from Spengler to Alfred Weber. Heidegger, disappointed by the vulgarization under the Third Reich of the élitism he favoured, had disassociated himself from social praxis, from science, and even from philosophy, and had retreated into the role of mythical thinker. Nothing remained in his work that could inspire any thinking concerned with the reintegrationprecisely through the analysis of science and technology and of a society shaped by having science and technology as its principal productive forcesof the rationality that had been bisected by positivism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2498
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Heidegger’s uncommented 1935 lecture shattered Habermas’s separation of politics from philosophy; Habermas grounded critique in language itself to escape historical relativism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2445
Broader Connections
- Habermas grounded critique in language itself to escape historical relativism
#responds-to(0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2445