Heidegger and "the jews", and: Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (review)

152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30: ~ JANUARY ~992 Benedetto Croce" (29), writes Finocchiaro, yet even he was liable to contradict his theory in his practice. Gramsci caught him at it. Gramsci rightly attacks Nikolai Bukharin 's deterministic materialism and scientism, but wrongly presumes that they fatally infected Bukharin's actual sociology. Against Gramsci and Luk:lcs, Finocchiaro even depicts Bukharin's sociological studies as dialectical exercises. Gramsci plays Machiavelli against conventional Marxism's reductive attitude toward politics by insisting on the "autonomy of politics" and the distinctiveness of "political imagination." Gramsci's effort to theorize a dialectical politics stumbles on the recognition that the concept applies retrospectively, not prospectively, where it would have bite. Taking Hegel as the plumb-line for dialectic, Gramsci's "primary" conception of dialectic as the mental activity of finding unity in diversity and difference within unity (or avoiding onesidedness ) is preferable to his "official" view that dialectic is a real process of development from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. This preferred concept of dialectic serves Finocchiaro as a hermeneutical standard , and he regularly calls attention to his own dialectical proceedings. But his defense of this "meta-philosophical" interpretation of Hegel's dialectic against the triadic, the systemic-immanent, and the onto-phenomenological interpretations seems Procrustean. What happens to necessity, immanence, self-generation, and reality in Hegel's dialectic? Only by thinning the dialectic to a couple of sensible maxims--be judicious; avoid one-sidedness--can Finocchiaro construe Bukharin as a dialectical sociologist (86). Regarding Finocchiaro's three concluding criticisms of Gramsci, we gratefully learn of Croce's great influence on Gramsci, but why make so much of Gramsci's failure to recognize it? Second, even apart from my doubts about Finocchiaro's defense of Bukharin, to speak of Gramsci's "methodological positivism and scientism" (247) strikes me as overwrought. That "Gramsci's project of developing a concept of dialectical politics is a failure, since the notion turns out to be either political but undialectical or dialectical but unpolitical" (247-48) is the telling, final criticism; it would exclude ranking Gramsci with Hegel and Marx in the history of dialectical thought. But Gramsci's conception of"democratic centralism" as the "critical search for what is equal in the apparent diversity, and distinct and even opposite in the apparent uniformity" (237) may be all that can properly be asked of a dialectical politics. PATRICK MURRAY Creighton University Jean-Franqois Lyotard. Heidegger and "the jews." Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, t99o. Pp. xxix + Io6. Cloth, $29.5o. Paper, $12.95. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers. New York: Paragon House, 199o. Pp. xl + 319 . Cloth, $29.95. The question of Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism, along with his view of the people most persecuted by that movement, namely, those of a Jewish heritage, has BOOK REVIEWS 153 become one of the most provocative and yet at the same time most inscrutable topics in philosophy today. On the one hand, there remains the difficult task of gathering the historical "data" and the testimony surrounding Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party, which began in 1933 with his acceptance of the position of rector of the German University. On the other hand, there is a parallel need, long overdue, to juxtapose the factual side of Heidegger's political involvement with the more complex issue of the relation between a thinker's philosophy and his politics. Of the preceding two books, Lyotard's Heidegger and "thejews" takes an audacious, though still preparatory approach toward responding to the second part of this problem. The volume edited by Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering, which contains insightful testimony and viewpoints of prominent scholars who knew Heidegger well--including the likes of Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, and Jaspers--takes the initial step toward balancing the apparent flaw of Heidegger's own political orientation with his enduring legacy as the twentieth century's best recognized philosopher. In setting off the second half of his title in lower case, Lyotard indicates that his task is to uncover the fate of those who have become the "object of a dismissal with...