"All you need to know": on intellectual life and moral responsibility.

• Author: Serber, Bradley A.
• Position: Report

In Fall 2011, while wrestling with Being and Time, I made a comment to Jim and others that I was determined to understand Martin Heidegger. In response, Jim replied:

All you need to know about Heidegger is this line from a 1933 speech to his university students: "University study must again become a risk, not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed toward the goal to which it has committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university" (Aune, personal communication, December 3, 2011).

At times, at least, it seemed that Aune had decided not to consider Heidegger's (arguably) great insights because of his involvement with Nazism. Given that the two of us shared the same religious background, I understood the source of his discomfort. At the same time, I was uncomfortable rejecting Heidegger solely on that basis. Not fully satisfied with Jim's response, I enrolled in a graduate course on Heidegger. The course, which professor Dennis Schmidt had named Intellectual Life and Moral Responsibility, focused on the Heidegger question, or, as Schmidt put it, "whether it was possible to be a person of great insights while being blind to the world and to one's own influence" (Schmidt, personal communication, 2013). Aune may have considered this question closed, but this essay seeks to reopen it. In an effort to expand how rhetoricians have studied (or not studied) Heidegger, I call for deep reflections upon the complexity of ethos in both our readings of controversial figures and our own intellectual practices.

In the field of rhetorical studies, several individuals have engaged in studies of Heidegger. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, for instance, has written about the relationships between Mitdasein (Being-with-the-other) and rhetorical listening (Ramsey, 1993) and Heidegger's Principle of Reason address (Ramsey, 1997). Michael Hyde, Susan Zickmund, Allen Scult, and others have also written about Heidegger's relationship with rhetoric. However, as late as 2005, Gross argued in Heidegger and Rhetoric that the story of Heidegger and rhetoric "has not been adequately told" (Gross & Kemmann, 2005, p. 1). The subsequent chapters in that volume include...