Lia’s Reviews > Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber (Discovering the Mind 2): > Status Update

At the heart of Heidegger's hermeneutical method is the claim that the interpreter must use "violence", that is, impose his own ideas upon the text. Kaufmann castigates Heidegger's method as "exegetical thinking": "Interpretation is inevitable but exegetical thinking is not. The exegetical thinker endows his text with authority, reads his ideas into it, and then gets them back endowed with authority."

The enmity is personal: [Kaufmann] personally knew Heidegger and Buber. I first visited Heidegger on Easter Sunday 1952, in Freiburg, where he lived and where I was born. We spent about an hour alone, talking mostly about Nietzsche. We saw more of each other during the winter semester 1955-56, when I attended his weekly lectures on " Der Satz vom Grund,"

Kaufmann unabashedly breaches the prevalent prohibition against any ad hominem approach to philosophers...the principal inspiration of this and several other of the book's remarkable qualities is Friedrich Nietzsche.

I “perceived” this just from browsing sample pages, before I even read the intro, where’s my prize?

Quick! Call 911! I caught Kaufmann murdering Heidegger with words