On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger's most perceptive critics, Paul Hühnerfeld, has said:  "These books, whose meaning was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Hödlerlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted."... What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time... And Heidegger's life -- his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city -- seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism.

... When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger displayed what many have since thought unfitting servility to his new masters -- did he not omit from prints of Sein und Zeit appearing in the Nazi era his dedication to the philosopher [Edmund] Husserl, to whom he owed so much but who was, inconveniently enough, a Jew?

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, the Outsider as Insider, Harper Torchbook, 1970, pp. 81-83.

I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher [Husserl], and he has a devilish influence on Germany.

Sir Karl Popper, quoted by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, Intellectus 23 (Jul-Sep 1992), pp. 1-5 [Hong Kong Institute of Economic Science, IES], HTML Version, 29th January 1997.

The controversy about Martin Heidegger's membership in the German Nazi Party ultimately reveals one very important thing: The very principles that attracted Heidegger to Hitler and the Nazis are also the principles that attract Heidegger's defenders to him. That most of Heidegger's defenders are leftists and "progressives" (like Richard Rorty) simply reveals a characteristic of the history of the 20th Century: that the Left (socialists, communists, American style "liberals") has far more in common with the far Right (fascism, populism) than anyone on the Left has ever wanted to admit -- except perhaps for Susan Sontag's classic, politically incorrect statement that "Communism is fascism with a human face" -- though one must then explain Alexander Dubcek's claim that the revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was to produce "Communism with a human face"; presumably he didn't think that it already had one. Since Dubcek had to live under communism and Sontag didn't, we can count on him to have gotten it more right. Sontag, however, who also said that Americans could learn more about the Soviet Union reading Readers' Digeshan The Nation, got it far more righhan most of her intellectual peers (Rockmore: "Sartre holds that Marxism is unsurpassable as the philosophy of our time," p. 147).

Tom Rockmore's book does not concentrate on bringing out this circumstance, but it could. We get the clear parallel in one passage:

There is finally no significant distinction between Heidegger's call for submission to the whim of the Führer and Lukács's similar betrayal of reason in the service of Stalinism. As concerns their voluntary subordination of philosophical criticism to political totalitarianism, both thinkers are outstanding examples of the betrayal of reason in our time. [p. 66] In his exhaustive examination of Heidegger's texts, he sometimes seems to be beating around the bush. However, he may have done things this way to guard against accusations from Heideggerians that he is unfamiliar with the texts or is misinterpreting them. And since his treatment is discursive and readable, which cannot necessarily be said for Heidegger himself, the thorough nature of the examination is noedious. Putting together the bits and pieces, however, Rockmore's analysis is damning, and obviously applicable to all subsequent Heideggerians.

... it must be noted that Heidegger's theory has no intrinsic resources to prevent him from accepting either National Socialism or another similar theory. [p. 72]

Whereas I regard Heidegger's philosophy as ingredient in his politics, Heidegger's defenders are concerned to exonerate his thought from any significant role in his actions. [p. 75]

-- Heidegger turned to Nazism on the basis of his philosophical position.

-- Heidegger's theory of Being, or fundamental ontology, includes a political dimension that can only lead to Nazism or something like Nazism -- in short, a totalitarian political movement.

-- Heidegger shared with National Socialism a common goal of the realization of the essence of the German Volk. [p. 123] The very title of the book, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, contains a suggestive ambiguity. Is it On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, or it is On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy? In the one case we just worry about Heidegger. In the other we worry about the meaning of this for philosophy as a whole. We certainly should worry about the meaning of it for philosophy as a whole, but Rockmore leaves this mostly as an implication, until the last sections of the book, on "Heidegger's Nazism and the Limits of His Philosophy" and "Heidegger's Thought, Its Reception, and the Role of the Intellectual."

The picture that emerges of Heidegger is mainly of someone whose enthusiasm for Naziism was dampened only by the lack of interest of the Nazis for him. When he became the Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger delivered an address in which he basically announced that he had the right understanding of the meaning the National Socialism, which had been confused by "political science" and should turn to philosophy (i. e. to him). This should have made him the Philosopher King, or at least Herr Hitler's official philosopher, the way Hegel had in effect become the offical philosopher of Prussianism. Nothing of the sort happened, and not many Nazis liked his attitude.

Heidegger goes on to observe that his address was understood neither by those to whom it was addressed nor by the Nazi party. He reports that Otto Wacker, the Staatsminister für Unterricht und Kultur in Baden, complained that the talk advanced a form of private National Socialism, not based on a concept of race, and that the rejection of "political science" was unacceptable. [p. 110]

In sum, Heidegger is unhappy that the National Socialists are unaware of his own ontological difference. What is surprising is that Heidegger should be either surprised or dismayed to learn that the Nazis were less than fully absorbed, were in fact uninterested in his own approach to Being, in the same way that they were also uninterested in the effort of Rosenberg, the well-known Nazi "philosopher," to bring about a profound spiritual renewal. Heidegger's objection reveals, then, an astonishing lack of awareness of the nature of Nazism. [p. 193] What Heidegger thought was hardly even comprehensible to the Nazis, and today it is hard enough to credit when baldly stated.

Heidegger seems literally to have thought that the future of the West depended on the proper understanding of physics, supposedly presented in his own thought. In other circumstances, someone who advanced such ideas would be a candidate for psychiatric treatment. It is a measure of the loss of perspective of contemporary philosophy that it accords such delusions serious consideration. [p. 92]

Here, his objection to National Socialism is always limited to its failure as a theory of Being. Heidegger's failure to object to the political consequences of the Nazi worldview is significant, since it suggests an incapacity of his thought -- that is, the thought of a great thinker, in the opinion of some observers the most important thinker of this century -- to grasp the political specificity of National Socialism. It is an error to hold that after the rectorate Heidegger breaks with Nazism on a political plane. Even in the rectorial address, his commitment to National Socialism was tempered by his refusal of the hegemony of politics, which he intended to found in philosophy. In the Beiträge his view has not changed, since he continues to accept the point he has always shared with Nazism: insistence on the authentic gathering of the Germans. [p. 201]

In the Beiträge, in his "postphilosophical" phase, from the vantage point of the other beginning Heidegger criticizes National Socialism as a mere Weltanschauung like Christianity or liberalism. According to Heidegger, both the Christian view of transcendence and its denial in terms of the Volk as the aim of history are forms of liberalism

(Liberalismus). [p. 190] The problem with the Nazis, according to Heidegger, was not that they terrorized and murdered people, and started World War II, buhahey had the wrong attitude towards physics. Whether they would have still been murderers if they had the right physics is a good question. One of the most disturbing things about Heidegger's thought is that the murders -- or even the public thuggery that he could have seen in the earliest days of the Third Reich -- don't really seem to have disturbed him all that much. It was not the murders or the public mayhem that discredited "existing" Naziism but simply the wrong attitude towards philosophy, i. e. Heidegger himself. The most damning accusation, however, is just that Naziism was a form of liberalism!

We are already familiar with Heidegger's frequent assertions, common in claims of orthodoxy, with respect to the views of Kant, Nietzsche, and Jünger, that only he, Heidegger, has understood them. Here [in the Introduction to physics], he makes a similar claim with respect to Nazism. For Heidegger evidently thought of himself as the only "orthodox" Nazi, as the only one able to understand the essence of National Socialism... To the best of my knowledge there is nothing in the public record to suggest that Heidegger was at all sensitive to the human suffering wreaked by Nazism, in fact sensitive to human beings in more than an abstract sense. [p. 240] Heidegger is not a moralist and does not have anything like a theory or system of moral principles. It is not clear how a prohibition of murder would even be grounded in his system. A "resolute" and "authentic" murderer actually sounds pretty good.

Although in theory resoluteness is the call of conscience, in practice there are absolutely no criteria that enable one to recognize where conscience lies, to make a rational choice. The words and deeds of the Nazi dictator are as good as any other form of resoluteness. For a theory that insists on resoluteness at all costs, resoluteness about pushpin is as good as that about poetry, and Nazism is as good as altruism. Heidegger's notion of resoluteness is, then, the ultimate parody of the Kantian idea of moral responsibility based on intellectual maturity and a wholly rational choice of moral principles. [p. 65]

If the ethical component is not present in the beginning, it will not be present at the end; and it was not present in -- in fact, it was specifically excluded from -- Heidegger's "antihumanist" meditation on Being. [p. 12] This absence of ethics means that lack of concern about the murders and thuggery of the Nazis should really not surprise us.

A point made by Jaspers, the former psychiatrist, whose testimony proved most damaging in the deliberations of the [de-Nazification] committee, is relevant here. "He [i. e., Heidegger] does not perceive the depths of his earlier mistake, which is why there is no real change in him but rather a game of distortions and erasures." [p. 86] Although Heidegger's Naziism was not, in the judgment of Otto Wacker (seen above) and both modern defenders and critics, based on race, it is now hard to see how there was in fact not a racial, or at least an ethnic, element in it -- the racial, or ethnic, element of the German people.

He fails, however, to mention his conviction, which he seems never to have abandoned, that the German people possess a Western historical vocation that requires realization. [p. 91]

Here and in other writings, Heidegger's chaivinism is evident in his repeated insistence on German philosophy as the sole legitimate heir of Greek thought. [p. 103]

... he now believes that Nazism did not fail him but that Hilter and other Nazis failed Nazism. He seems never to have regretted his adherence to National Socialism for the purpose of realizing the essence of the German people, or to further the understanding of Being, ends that he still accepts as valid. [p. 94]

The recurrence of Heidegger's stress on the Germans as German at this late date [the Beiträge, only published in 1989] in his thought is not less, but even more, troubling than before. [p. 187]

In this way, he obliquely suggests that his turn toward Nazism was not only intended to bring about a gathering of the Germans as Germans, hence, not only for the perverse humanism whose highest form is National Socialism. Rather, his Nazi turning is also, perhaps above all, for the purpose of realizing his own authentic thought of Being. [p. 192]

Heidegger's statement offers a remarkable anticipation of his persistent identification, presenhroughout his later writings, with a kind of ideal Nazism, distinguished from its real, Hitlerian form. [p. 110]

We have already noted that Heidegger's remark that he did not renounce his thought in his effort, in an official capacity, to realize the essence of what is German, is significant. This statement should be recognized as what it is, as a clear admission of a seamless web, a direct link, between his own thought, as he understood it, of the concept of authenticity applied to the Germans as a whole and his turn to Nazism as presenting a propitious moment, a kairos, to realize this goal. [p. 118, kairós = "the righime"] The ultimate purpose of Heidegger's thought, however mediated by Being, was always for the German people. This is easily excused and adaptable for the ethnic reification that we see in politically correchoughoday, but then these excuses and adaptations are used precisely by the same leftisotalitarians (e. g. Richard Rorty) whose moral kinship with Heidegger is so conspicuous.

Heidegger always saw a special philosophical status and destiny for the German people because of their language. He always saw the German language as the heir to Classical Greek as the truly philosophical language. He could draw real connections between the two languages, since German is highly inflected, still has an active case system for nouns, and makes extensive use of compounds. All these were characteristic of Classical Greek, but have otherwise disappeared from Western European languages. Russian preserves the same features, but then there was not much in the way of real Russian philosophical writing for Heidegger to notice. Now, as with the ethnic reification, the topic of language can also be adapted by Heidegger's trendy admirers, and Heidegger can be made out as another lingustic philosopher, right up there with Wittgenstein. This is to ignore, however, the specificity of Heidegger's valuation. It is not language, but the German language, that interests Heidegger. It is not just any poetry that takes over from the Nazis to uncover Being, but German poetry. Heidegger is thus not a "lingustic philosopher," but a self-consciously German philosopher. This made him a natural and logical admirer of Hitler.

The flagship of Nazi racism, of course, was their animus for the Jews, which led to the attempt to exterminate them during World War II. Heidegger's obscurantism and inconsistency have served to protect him from accusations that he was actually an anti-Semitic fellow traveler with the Nazis, even from Jews, like Hannah Arendt, who reestablished friendly relations with him after the War. But Heidegger, to an extent, did actually subscribe to and practice anti-Semitism, as we see here:

Recently, the efforts undertaken to protect Heidegger against this charge [anti-Semitism] have been refuted through the publication of a previously unknown letter, written by Heidegger in 1929, that is, before the Nazis came to power, which clearly shows his anti-Semitism in his pointed rejection of the "'Jewification' of the German spirit [Verjudung des deutschen Geistes]." [p. 111] Whether a full blown racism or not, Heidegger's attitude reflects the conflict between German nationalism and the tolerance of the Jews that would be characteristic of a liberal society. That conflict goes all the way back to people like Fries. Peter Gay [Weimar Culture, Outsider as Insider, 1968] already noted, before Heidegger's Naziism had become much of an issue, that Heidegger removed the dedication of Being and Time, which was to the "inconveniently Jewish" Edmund Husserl. There are various stories of Heidegger stiffing his Jewish graduate students, not signing their dissertations, but he also seems inconsistent in this, since he was very enthusiastic about some Jewish students, like Hannah Arendt, and did decline to take some Nazi anti-Jewish measures. what this looks like is that Heidegger actually had no real positive dislike of Jews but that he was, fitfully, willing to apply the logic of his own glorification of the German Volk, or to conform, occasionally, to the political direction of the Führer. This reveals him as a morally weak person (the Aristotelian moral category is incontinence) whose own beliefs directed him towards evil. Since the anti-Semitism was more or less incidental to this, it could be dismissed and forgotten when, after the War, it had become a personal and professional liability.

Heidegger's Germanism, then, is the functional equivalent of, and not so different from, Nazi racism. But what is the positive connection between this and his philosophical thought? That is the key question. There are at least four ways in which there is a connection: (1) the here and now of Dasein, (2) the revolutionary "uncovering" of Being in Time, (3) the conservativism of the idea that his "uncovering" is a return to a purer past, and (4) the collectivist authoritarianism of the Heidegger's notions of freedom and authenticity.

Heidegger's original approach to Being was as being is manifest in the "here and now" -- Dasein, being (sein) here (da). This introduces a positivistic, Hegelian ("the real is rational") aspect to any possibile moral guidance from this system. The here and now in 1933 meant Adolf Hitler. The truth and greatness of National Socialism was an authentic "uncovering" of Being. When this didn't seem to work out, Being "withdrew" itself, according to Heidegger.

"The Führer himself and alone is today and in the future German reality and its law." [from the Rectoral Address, p. 65]

The relative optimism present when he became rector was later transformed into a bleak pessimism about the possibility of surprassing what Heidegger, in the rectoral address, describes as "the forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is." [p. 216]

Everything is now dominated by the will to power that holds sway in the space lefhrough the withdrawl of Being, now present only in the mode of absence. [p. 95] If Hitler wasn't bad enough, the "withdrawl" of Being leaves the Nietzschean "might makes right" ethic of the Will to Power.

Heidegger now argues that the suggestion that God is dead and the reduction of value to will, or nihilism, can be understood only in terms of the will to power, in his view the central concept of Nietzsche's philosophy. [p. 93]

The "uncovering" of Being is a violent, irrational, revolutionary process. As this appealed to the irrationalism of fascists in the 30's, it appealed to the nihilists and irrationalists of the left from the 50's to the present. It is intensely romanticist in both groups.

Berlin's account of the antirationalistic, romantic approach to human life and action, including the problem of alienation, in the writings of Joseph de Maistre, an early forerunning of fascism, is an accurate description of the Volk-ideological approach to modern life which influenced Heidegger's own Nazi turning.... [p. 38]

The entire effort [the Nietzsche lectures, "Letter on Humanism," Breiträge zur Philosophie, Hölderlin lectures, etc.] represents a strengthening of the antirationalist, even gnostic side of Heidegger's thought.... The incipient antirationalist side of his position is already evident in Being and Time in various ways, for instance in his insistence on the analysis of Dasein as prior to and apart from the various sciences (§ 10), in the antiscientific perspective of the work in general which Jaspers, for example, found objectionable, in the abandonment of the Husserlian conception of transcendental truth, on which Heidegger insisted early in the book (§ 7) in favor of the view of truth as disclosure (§§ 44,68) and in the idea of resoluteness (§ 74). The conceptions of truth as disclosure and resoluteness are basically antirational since there are no criteria to discern the correctness of either one. [pp. 126-127] The irrationality of the "uncovering" of Being is an artifact of the unknowability of just what we are going to get from it. To find out what we are getting we have to look (at the Brown Shirts in the street), and to participate we have to be taken up into the furor of Being (in Heidegger's case, the furor Teutonicus). In the following quote we a classic expression of "existence over essence" Existentialism, later echoed by Sartre, with the "here and now" of Dasein, and the revolutionary characteristic of being future oriented.

Heidegger identifies two basic characteristics of Dasin: "the priority of existentia over essentia and the fact that Dasein is in each case mine." Unlike entities, or mere things, Dasein is intrinsically directed toward the future. It is essentially characterized by the fact that its "'essence' lies in its 'to be' [Zu-sein."]." [p. 44] Since most people, especially lefists, like to think of fascism as essentially conservative, the revolutionary aspect of it tends to be overlooked. But fascism, especially Naziism, was something new. It used as much from Marxism as from traditional culture. This is why the artists of the Italian "Futurism" movement could end up as Fascists. A similar phenomenon could later be see in Irân, where the Islâmic Revolution was intensely reactionary but also a novel event, with all the trappings of other 20th century revolutionary, "people's liberation" struggles. The Ayatollâh Khomeini certainly had much more in common with Fidel Castro than with Jimmy Carter, despite the atheism of the former and the Born Again piety of the latter.

Besides the revolutionary aspect to fascism, there is also the conservative side. If the "here and now" means Germany and the German language, this is a history, a tradition:

Clearly, a heritage is what is transmitted from the past to later generations. For Heidegger, who here anticipates Gadamer's notion of the tradition as itself valuable, what is "good" is a heritage, since goodness makes authenticity possible, and goodness is transmitted in resoluteness. It follows, since authenticity is understood as the realization of the possibility that most intimately belong to the individual person, that such possibilities are by their nature traditional in character. There is, then, a fiercely conservative strain in Heidegger's view of self-realization as the free choice of oneself, since to realize oneself, to resolutely seize the most intimate possibility available to one in choosing oneself, is finally to extend past tradition; for tradition itself is the vehicle of the "good." In a fundamental sense, the authenticity made possible by resoluteness is not innovative but repetitive in character; it is not the realization of what is new and unprecedented, but rather the repetition of a prior tradition which as such embodies "goodness." In a deep sense, for Heidegger to be authentic is to embrace or to repeat the past in one's own life through a reinstantiation of the tradition. Since Nazism claimed to embody the values of the authentic German, of the German Volk as German, there is, then, a profound parallel, providing for an easy transition without any compromoise of basic philosophical principles, between Heidegger's conception of authenticity through resoluteness and National Socialism. [p. 47] The "good" as tradition not only fits into the positivist, Hegelian "here and now" as intrinsically valuable, but it also reflects a characteristic of the "uncovering" of Being. That is, Is the Being that is "uncovered" something new all the time, or is it the same Being that has always been? There appears, indeed, to be a primordial and authoritative Being. Each "uncovering" reveals the same, original Truth. That is the lesson of Heidegger's own investigation of the Presocratics. To him, the Greeks knew something and were more authentic than we moderns know or are now. Our own revolutionary activity, however radical, is thus essentially revivalist in character, a revival that is, however, independently inspired since it involves return to the same ontological point of origin. Past and future come together in a Dasein that is at once traditional and ancient but also revolutionary and futurist. This is why someone observed, after reading the Rectoral Address, that he didn't know whether it meant he was supposed to read the Presocratics or start goose-stepping.

Heidegger's conservatism is also reflected in his hostility to modernity, not just in the form of liberal democracy, but in the form of science and technology and commercial culture. This is another area where he appeals to modern leftists, who not only want a socialist mandarinism, run by themselves, rather than liberal democracy, but who are also constitutionally hostile to science, which depends on criteria far harder than their own self-persuasive rhetorical sophistries, and to technology and commerce, which are not only similarly hard edged but have done far more to improve the life of most people than the chatter of Marxist dialectics ever has.

In this way, Heidegger establishes to his satisfaction that modern technology, and by implication the whole modern period, is only possible because of the turn away from an authentic comprehension of Being. The double consequence of Heidegger's analysis is to forge a physical link between the question of Being and technology, and to uncover a physical ground to oppose technology and modernity. [p. 211]

Ernst Jünger's influence on Heidegger's conception of technology, which has been studied in the secondary literature, is visible in a number of Heidegger's texts... Jünger's book reads like a kind of mad Spinozism in which determinism is freedom and the worker is free in submitting to a centrally organized dictatorship. [p. 217]

... Heidegger's understanding of technology is incompatible with a commitment to democracy, democratic values, and what is called the democratic way of life... Yet Heidegger rejects democracy because of his commitment to Being, but not to human being... There is a continuous line of argument leading from the Enlightenment commitment to reason to the insistence on responsibility as the condition of morality, which peaks in Kant's ethical theory. When Heidegger attributes ultimate causal authority to Being, he clearly reverses the Enlightenment view that through the exercise of reason human being can attain dominon over the world and itself. In the final analysis, if Heidegger is correct, human actions depend on the gift of Being, hence on a suprahuman form of agency. Heidegger's insistence on Being as the final causal agent signals an abandonment of the idea of ethical responsibility. [p. 237] Nothing is so trendy today as "post-modernism," which is largely a repackaging of nihilism and Marxism, a Nietzschean will to power which is hostile to almost everything characteristic of modern commercial culture. This is now folded together with an extreme environmentalism which sees the miserable poverty of say, Castro's Cuba, as a noble and virtuous "ecotopia." That such regimes are now demonstrably worse for the environmenhan free market development cannot denhe stubborn vision that using "natural resources" freely is bad for the future and for the planet. This general hostility to technology, wealth, and development is one of the key areas where everything that Heidegger hoped for from the Nazis is all but indistinguishable from what contemporary "progressive" academics and intellectuals want from the totalitarian, thought controlling police state that they constantly promote. "Modernity," meaning all the trappings of science, wealth, and freedom, is a dirty word among the modern leftist anointed.

The "uncovering" of Being is something that is done by a few but is then provided to the many, whose own "resoluteness" and authenticity are found in that process. Thus, the identity of the Germans is not something that they hit upon individually and develop for themselves. It is something "uncovered" by gifted individuals, whether the politician Hitler, the poet Hölderlin, or the philosopher Heidegger, and then taken up by the masses. This vision is collectivist, authoritarian, elitist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. As such it fits perfectly into German tradition, since this was already Hegel's vision of the State and the practice of Prussia, of which the Third Reich was merely a logical extrapolation and application. We also find the characteristic sophistry of reversing the idea of freedom, characteristic both of fascism and the political left, whereby it is no longer a matter of individual will but of group, collective conformity. Thus Trotsky could argue, well before Orwell's 1984 ("Slavery is Freedom"), that enforced (i. e. slave) labor was free labor because it would be contradictory to think that workers could be enslaved by the Worker's State. They were thus simply working for themselves.

There is a kind of aristocratic authoritarianism built into Heidegger's theory of fundamental ontology which leads seamlessly to a politically antidemocratic political point of view. [p. 72]

In sum, Heidegger's pursuit of Being, as he understood it, led to Nazism, and could in fact only lead either to this or another form of antidemocratic, authoritarian political practice. [p. 72]

In his remarks [in the Beträge] on "The essence of the people and Da-sein," Heidegger returns to his conviction that only the few can provide a people with its identity. For Heidegger, who here makes use of a notion of plural authenticity originally mentioned in Being and Time, a people only is one when it receives its unifying idea and so returns to Being. [p. 197]

The idea of the Volk as an authentic community, which Heidegger takes over from German Volksideologie and grounds philosophically in Being and Time in his conception of plural authenticity, remains a permanent part of his position throughout its later development. Beginning with the rectoral address, Heidegger continues to hold one or more versions of the venerable Platonic view that philosophy can found politics as the necessary condition of the good life, as the real presupposition of the radiant future. Heidegger never abandoned the familiar philosophical conviction in the cognitive privilege of philosophy, what after the turning in his position became new thought, with its familiar link to antidemocratic, totalitarian politics. [p. 285]

Consider, for example, the following passage from an article by Ernst Krieck, a leading philosophical theoretician of the Nazi Weltanschauung:

The revolutionary upheaval made itself known in a displacement of emphasis. Instead of the individual person, the völkische whole is central, as a result of which the basic reality of life comes into view.... The individual does not arrive at his worldview through reason according to his individual situation and inclination to arbitrariness and choice. Rather, we are subject to the movement of forces over us and directed in common. We do not seize, but we are seized and driven. ... and if the only metraphysical people is the German people which alone can know Being as the true heirs of the Greeks, then there is an easy, obvious transition from Heidegger's ontology to the concern with the German Volk. [pp. 286-287]

For Heidegger, who now distantly echoes his conception of freedom as submission to authority in the rectoral address, freedom is unrelated to will in any way. He insists that one becomes free in belonging to the area of destiny as someone who listens (ein Hörender) not as someone who obeys (ein Höriger). [p. 227]

For Heidegger as for Nietzsche, the essence of the people is grounded in the few exceptional human beings. Like Kant, who held that the philosopher is the lawgiver of human reason [?!], Heidegger apparently believed that only a "philosopher" could provide a new sense of direction in the age of nihilism. [p. 199] Rockmore makes a mistake here. For Kant, a philosopher is the lawgiver of human reason only because everyone is. Reason, which is available to all rational beings, enables them all to be morally autonomous. Heidegger, like Hegel, is not in this tradition. He is elitist and authoritarian, like Hegel, not liberal and individualist, like Kant. To Hegel, this made Kant "irrational." To Heidegger, it would make Kant merely an inauthentic "liberal."

At present [the Der Spiegel interview, 1966], he is unconviced that democracy is adequate as a political system in a technological age. Heidegger here draws the political consequence of his later conception of Being as the real historical agent. [p. 205] This is one of the most revealing admissions ever by Heidegger. His illiberal, authoritarian principles simply never changed. The only reason that there is no Führer in 1966 is that Being has "withdrawn" itself.

The earlier philosopher with whom Heidegger identified the most closely was Nietzsche. Nietzsche's own system, largely devoid of moral principle, is amenable to adaptation either to individualism or to authoritarianism.

Mussolini published an article on Nietzsche, in which he wrote: "In order to attain the ideal picked out by Nietzsche a new type of free spirit must arise, spirits which are hardened by war, and loneliness, and in great danger, spirits which will free us from love of our neighbor." [p. 149] "Love of our neighbor" is a principle of Christian ethics, despised by Nietzsche and, apparently, by Mussolini. Modern leftists, of course, have little but contempt for Christianity, but nevertheless affirm a kind of muddled, Marxist version of "love of neighbor." Most people, indeed, who admire Nietzsche for his nihilism, tend to have political views whose politically correct, sentimental moralism would only have been an object of contempt and derision by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's appropriation by Nazi thinkers for their own purposes is well known but not well studied. Two exceptions are provided by Lukács and Stackelberg. Lukács devotes a long chapter to Nietzsche as a leading irrationalist in the so-called imperialist period in the context of his lengthy study of the rise of irrationalism from the later Schelling and Kierkegaard to Hitler. For Lukács, fascism is the logical successor of vitalism, which draws the conclusions of the work of Nietzsche and Dilthey. [p. 149] Much as Nietzsche's many followers today blanch at his use by the Nazis, Heidegger, it turns out, was one of the Nazis to use him.

Yet Heidegger's overall approach to Nietzsche is redolent of the Nazi line, including his preference for The Will to Power as the height of Nietzsche's art and his treatment of it as a systematic analysis. [p. 154] As considered elsewhere, Nietzsche's moral aestheticism continues in Heidegger. Rockmore, as it happens, disputes charges of aestheticism against him:

It is further inaccurate to regard Heidegger's discussion of art or technology as illuminating the essence of Nazism. One can concede a certain perverse aestheticism in Nazi ideology, for instance in the writings of Albert Speer, the Nazi architect. But one must resist the idea that the massive political phenomenon of German fascism is solely, or even mainly, aesthetic. [p. 277] Rockmore can certainly define "aestheticism" in a way that would make this reasonable. Here, I see moral aestheticism as the denial that there is an intelligible and rational content to morality, and where valued behavior is based on some kind of creative, morally unlimited, activity. This is indeed characteristic of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as it is of the intersection of German and Japanese fascism in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, considered in a separate critique of Zen. The most specifically aesthetic manifestation of Heidegger's thought is not so much in his discussion of technology but in his notion that a poet, like Hölderlin, is engaged in the disclosure of Being. Hilter was simply a political artist, which is very much what he looks like in the Triumph of the Will. Nazi aestheticism in part means the devices of propaganda and pageanhat were used to arouse and engage the German people in Nazi politics.

In the end, it is hard to understand what there ever was about Heidegger that made otherwise apparently sensible people so enthusiastic. Being and Time does contain some interesting reflections on physics. The value of this can be appreciated even if Heidegger was personally running the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Frege's well-known, vicious anti-Semitism seems unrelated to his fundamental contributions to modern logic. [p. 40] But Heidegger's moral and political views were not unrelated to the whole rest of his philosophy, including most of the conclusions of Being and Time. Peter Gay's anecdote, that many German soldiers in Russia and North Africa died with Being and Time in their backpacks, is intuitively revealing in a way that many pages of analysis in Rockmore's book are not. Heidegger's thought makes a small contribution to physics; otherwise it is bad, false, dangerous, and even horrifying. Why it continues to appeal is frightening, but illuminating about the corrupt foundations of much of popular modern opinion. What it was that was ever personally appealing about Heidegger to people who actually knew him, but who despised his politics, is even more mysterious.

But both Jaspers and the commission sought to preserve Heidegger's philosophical achievement, which they regarded as untarnished by his turning to Nazism. [p. 83] This is senseless and impossible. Heidegger's "philosophical achievement" is indistiguishable from his "turning" to Naziism. He could literally look out his window in

1932-1933, see Brown Shirts beating up Jews and others, and from this he knew that the Nazis were "uncovering" Being. This bespeaks a moral perversity or blindness that would falsify any philosophical system intended to be a description or guide of proper action.

Arendt locates a turn against Nazism between the first and second volume of the Nietzsche lectures... [p. 172] Why Arendt, a Jew who had to flee Germany for her life, and a life long enemy of totalitarianism, should strain at gnats to derive comfort from Heidegger's feeble condemnation of Naziism as bad physics, can only be explained by a personal attraction which is now inexplicable.

Karl Popper's characterization of Hegelianism and Marxism as the "high tide of prophecy" (in The Open Society and Its Enemies) echoes a remark by Rockmore about Heidegger's apparently privileged epistemological status:

Even were it the case that Being had withdrawn, it is unclear how, otherwise than through the prophetic powers he now attributes to himself, Heidegger could possibly be aware of this occurrence. [p. 95] Prophetic powers indeed. But Popper did not consider in that context a Heidegger who did not even maintain the pretense of rationality, as Hegel and Marx did. Instead, Heidegger's word play and oracular powers are more like what have become popular among recent academics who have no respect for logic or evidence, let alone science, technology, or commercial culture -- just as Heidegger's exaltation of the Nietzschean will to power leads to the typical theory of human life as nothing but "power relationships" manipulated by a Marxist demonology of corporate and class or race ("dead white male") enemies. As long as this continues to dominate intellectual life, as it does in American universities, Heidegger lives. And the Third Reich lives, however much its principles have been transfered to self-described "oppressed peoples."