Not to be dismissive about Heidegger’s Nazism or anything, but the dialogue has begun (yet) again. I bookmarked an article entitled “Heil Heidegger,” for myself (and others, of course) on Twitter last week. The article discusses a recently translated book revolving around Heidegger’s Nazism and I just had a chance to look closely at it. It’s um…rather polemical. Consider the first paragraph:
How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.
Whoa. Nothing like a little ad hominem attack to get things going. Sure, Heidegger’s rhetoric is a bit bloated much of the time, but in fact, this paragraph kind of de-legitimizes anything else the author, Carlin Romano, writes afterward. The connection (identity, really) between Heidegger and Nazism has been picked over and I’m not so sure that Romano is correct to say that there’s been some sort of deliberate systematic disavowal of it on the part of academics. Anyhow, Romano’s polemic is centered around the forthcoming translation of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Faye’s claim, as far as I can tell, is that Heidegger wasn’t “caught up” or “flirting” with Nazism, but instead, was a theorist or philosopher of Nazism. Hmm. Baby. Bathwater. I don’t think it’s particular helfpul (or accurate) to reduce the whole corpus of Heidegger’s work to mere “hate speech.” Both Faye and Romano almost sound like those screaming health care protesters by insisting that publishers (er..Indiana UP and Continuum) stop publishing Heidegger and all of those librarian sympathizers need to cut it out with all this stocking up of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe in order to prevent Nazism from encroaching into the public realm and poisoning the minds of the unexpected. I hardly think Heidegger’s Nazism or minimally, Heidgger’s connection with Nazism should escape serious and legitimate scrutiny, nor should it be defended, but if Faye’s book is half the hatchet job I’ve heard it to be, then it’s not very helpful. That said, I will read the book with a good deal of interest.
Anyway, after picking on a couple of recent books by Heidegger scholars, Romano writes:
For Faye, new material about Heidegger’s 1930s teaching and administrative work turns a crucial point upside-down. While other thinkers, including Löwith and Maurice Blanchot, suggested that Heidegger’s Nazism stemmed directly from his philosophy, Faye counters that his philosophy grew out of his Nazism, forcing us to see it as a kind of philosophical propaganda for Nazism in a different key.Faye’s leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) rhetoric a perfect fit. Heidegger’s Nazism, he writes, “is much worse than has so far been known.” (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger family still restricts access to his private papers.)
Faye pulls no punches: Heidegger “devoted himself to putting philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing the very bases of Nazism,” and some of his 1930s texts surpass those of official philosophers of Nazism in “the virulence of their Hitlerism.” Lacking any respect for Heidegger as thinker, Faye writes that the philosopher Hannah Arendt so deeply admired “has done nothing but blend the characteristic opacity of his teaching with the darkness of the phenomenon. Far from furthering the progress of thought, Heidegger has helped to conceal the deeply destructive nature of the Hitlerian undertaking by exalting its ‘grandeur.’”
Faye agrees that it was possible, even in the wake of Farias’s and Ott’s work, “with a lot of self-delusion, to separate the man from the work.” He asserts it’s no longer possible, since scholars can now access “nearly all the courses” that Heidegger taught in the 1930s. According to Faye, “we witness, in the courses and seminars that are ostensibly presented as ‘philosophical,’ a progressive dissolving of the human being, whose individual worth is expressly denied, into a community of people rooted in the land and united by blood.” The unpublished seminar of 1933-34 identifies the people with a “community of biological stock and race. … Thus, through Heidegger’s teaching, the racial conceptions of Nazism enter philosophy.”
The “reality of Nazism,” asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger’s works “in their entirety and nourished them at the root level.” He provides evidence of Heidegger’s “intensity” of commitment to Hitler, his constant use of “the words most operative among the National Socialists,” such as “combat” (Kampf), “sacrifice” (Opfer) and völkisch (which Faye states has a strong anti-Semitic connotation). He also cites Heidegger’s use of epithets against professors such as the philologist Eduard Fraenkel (“the Jew Fraenkel”) and his fervid dislike for “the growing Jewification” that threatens “German spiritual life,” mirroring Hitler’s discourse in Mein Kampf about “Jewified universities.”
For Faye, Heidegger’s 1930s Nazi activism came from the heart. Pains takingly providing sources, Faye exhibits Heidegger’s devotion to “spreading the eros of the people for their Führer,” and the “communal destiny of a people united by blood.” We learn of Heidegger’s desire to be closer to Hitler in Munich, and his eagerness to lead the Gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line,” of the German universities with Nazi ideology. According to several witnesses, Heidegger would show up at class in a brown shirt and salute students with a “Heil Hitler!”
Tellingly, Faye also mines the internal papers of the Munich philosophy faculty, showing that the department’s professors considered Heidegger’s work “claptrap,” and saw him as so politicized that they believed “no philosophy could be offered the students” if he were appointed. They considered appointing Heidegger only because of his well-known status as a professor favored by the Nazis. Synthesizing details with the precision of a Simon Wiesenthal researcher, Faye further undermines Heidegger’s later lies that he was not involved with book burning or anti-Semitic legislation, withdrew from active support of the party after he resigned his rectorship, and became rector only to protect the independence of the universities.
“We must acknowledge,” Faye says in one fierce conclusion, “that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher.” Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: “If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?”
Hmm…I can’t see how this witch hunting attitude is helpful, really. Over the top? Yes.
[...] of the occasional resurfacing of the discussion of Heidegger’s Nazism, over at Perverse Egalitarianism, where Shahar Ozeri quotes a recent article by Carlin Romano about a new English translation of [...]
It’s quite bizarre how this kind of thing keeps popping up. I think the reason it does is found in the link between the charge of evil Nazism and the charge of obscurantism.
When confronted with any theoretical position that has unsavory consequences, the rational thing to do is show that it is not just hateful, or whatever, but that it is wrong. To do so involves working through it, coming to understand it, and then pointing out its flaws. This needn’t be an all or nothing matter either, as it is rare that someone is genuinely wrong about everything.
There is sometimes an argument to the effect that we need to ban such hateful (or whatever) works because they can have a poisonous influence on those who don’t have the theoretical resources to see the falsities that they are built up out of. Sidelining the issue of whether such arguments are ever good, it is important to note that such arguments are fundamentally pragmatic. They don’t undermine the idea that we should ideally aim to understand such works in detail so as to be able to show precisely why they are wrong (and thus why it would be bad for many to believe they were right). Pragmatic considerations aside, the best way to deal with Mein Kampf is just to show what a hackneyed piece of shit it is, rather than to treat it like toxic waste that potentially corrupts anyone who reads it.
It seems that the reason that these charges against Heidegger keep recurring is that those who demand that we treat his works as poisonous can’t engage with them in enough detail to actually pick out what is wrong about them, or what specific bits entail the horrible Nazi conclusions they claim to find there. This leads to this bizarre attitude whereby they must be treated as toxic waste. (Be careful! We’re not sure which bits of this are dangerous!) This then gets turned into a further accusation, to the effect that Heidegger is a deliberate obsurantist, who writes his work in a way that is intended to prevent us from coming through it and finding the horrid Nazi assumptions or implications.
This leaves those of us who think that there are some bits of Heidegger that are worth keeping (for good reason), and other bits of Heidegger that are not (for equally good reason), in a difficult position, because obviously we couldn’t have understood such a willful obscurantist enough to actually pinpoint bits of his philosophy that are wrong.
Myself, I think Faye’s accusations – and there is a good talk he gave on Heidegger that assembles the highlights on SCRIBD – http://www.scribd.com/doc/20861707/heidegger-faye-conference – fall into two parts: discovery and interpretation. Under discovery, I think Faye has found that some of H’s texts were ’sweetened” upon being put into French. He also makes a lot of noise about unpublished lectures from the 33-34 period. But from what he has shown, these simply add to what we already know from Farias.
Interpretation is where Faye, I think, goes badly wrong. For one thing, making Hitlerism and Naziism synonyms, which is what he does throughout, is highly distorting -after all, as Farias has shown pretty convincingly, Heidegger was most associated with the S.A. and the radical right that was purged in the Night of the Long Knives. While Heidegger continued to be a Nazi, it is obvious – from Faye’s own evidence! – that he then withdrew from Hitlerism. Faye’s evidence is that the common interpretation of Heidegger is wrong, and that the way H. uses the word metaphysics is positive, with the connotation of a sort of ascent to Nazism and the racist state:
“Nous devons bien prendre conscience de ce que signifie cette phrase. Heidegger soutient que toute l’histoire de la philosophie moderne de Descartes à Nietzsche, entendue par lui comme une« métaphysique de la subjectivité », culmine dans la sélection raciale telle qu’elle est alors trèsconcrètement mise en œuvre, de façon radicalement meurtrière, dans le nazisme. ”
I think Faye is really stretching when he interprets the comments in Nietzsche that support this as being meant to support Naziism. Knowing he is on thin ice, Faye claims that somehow, after Stalingrad, H. knew it was all finished, so he started slyly backing down. There’s no proof for this idea at all – just retrospective projection. If we don’t believe that, then – according to the common interpretation – H. is condemning, under the usual rubric of his philosophy, the movement from a metaphysics of subjectivity to the racial selection being put in motion.
There’s no question that H.’s political ideas, from the beginning of his career to the end, were radically rightwing and fascist. But the interpretation put on his work by Faye is I think entirely bogus, and it uses terms that were common throughout discourses about race and the characters of people in a highly selective way.
That H. could be a fascist and his philosophy could inspire philosophers who were clearly liberal or leftwing points to the limits of politics in determining philosophy. Which doesn’t seem very surprising. Though we can read the declaration of independence as a document written by a man who owned slaves, we don’t have to – we can even read it against slave owning.
The debate unfolding in the comments to the Romano article has actually gotten pretty good, thanks to at least two smart interlocutors, “zmrzlina” (who has come out as the Heideggerian philosopher Richard Fried, after I prodded them to get out from behind their pseudonyms) and “oldude” (who hasn’t yet). I’m guessing “zdenekv”, who has dominated the discussion, is Romano himself, but the other two have shown that not all philosophical debate has to disintegrate into flame wars — even when the sides are so opposed and the original shot so overheated as Romano’s was.
I’m interpreting this call for the burning of Heidegger’s works as mainly indicating how low the humanities have sunk; compared to the scientific culture that is – alluding to CP Snow’s Two Cultures.
Imagine a scientist saying: “I’ve just discovered Heisenberg was a Nazi. Therefore the Uncertainty Principle is Nazi physics, and all his works should be burned.”
Physicists would immediately laugh such a character all the way back to the provincial lab she emerged from.
Yet the Chronicle of Higher Education takes such silliness seriously.
I read that thread, and I’d be *very* surprised if “zdenekv” turned out to be Romano. Based on the piece, Romano seems like someone overly impressed by the single work (Faye’s) he’s read about something, while zdenekv shows a lot more familiarity with it. But I could be wrong.