HEIL HEIDEGGER!
BY CARLIN ROMANO |
The Chronicle Of Higher Education
Editorial offices: 1255 23rd Street Washington,
DC 20037
October 18, 2009 |
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.
To be sure, every philosophy reference book
credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher
achievement. One lauds him for his "revival
of ontology." (Would we not think about
things that exist without this ponderous,
existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his
helpful boost to phenomenology by directing
our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein,
or "Human Being." (For a reified
phenomenon, "Human Being," like
the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera
confirmation.) A third praises his opposition
to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative,
nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic
apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease
the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
Next month Yale University Press will issue
an English-language translation of Heidegger:
The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,
by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor
at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's
the latest, most comprehensive archival assault
on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who
informed Freiburg students in his infamous
1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner
truth and greatness," declaring that
"the Führer, and he alone, is the present
and future of German reality, and its law."
Faye, whose book stirred France's red and
blue Heidegger départements into direct battle
a few years back, follows in the investigative
footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor
Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian
Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu
Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim?
To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar,
often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's
chief academic tribune, and his post-World
War II contortions to escape proper judgment
for his sins. "We now know," reports
Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at
self-justification of 1945 is nothing but
a string of falsehoods."
The Heidegger exposés, like Annie Leibovitz's
tasteless photos of partner Susan Sontag
in the latter's final battle against cancer,
force even refined, sophisticated observers
of intellectuals to gape. See "Professor
Being and Time" wear his swastika like
a frat pin while meeting German-Jewish philosopher
Karl Löwith! Recoil at the hearty "Heil
Hitlers" with which Martin closed his
missives! Wince as he covertly maneuvers
another Jewish colleague or student out of
a job with a nasty, duplicitous "recommendation"
letter!
Unfortunately, Faye's scrupulously documented
study, like Jytte Klausen's controversial
The Cartoons That Shook the World, about
depictions of Muhammad, lacks the satirical
illustrations that might have given it knockdown
force. In the case of Heidegger, it may be
that only ridicule—not further proof of his
sordid 1930s acts—can save us.
To his credit, Faye takes the usually avoided
logical step of articulating that goal. He
essentially calls on publishers to stop churning
out Heidegger volumes as they would sensibly
desist from hate speech. Similarly, he hopes
librarians will not stock Heidegger's continuing
Gesamtausgabe (collected edition), shepherded
by the Heidegger family, a project that Faye
rightly attacks as sanitized and incomplete.
Even on this side of the Atlantic, one can
share Faye's distaste for the flow of reverent
Heidegger volumes. In 2006, MIT Press brought
us Adam Sharr's Heidegger's Hut, about the
philosopher's Black Forest hideaway in Todtnauberg.
It began with Simon Sadler asking in a foreword,
"Is the hut described in this text the
smallest residence ever to merit a monograph?
Might it be the most prosaic, too?"
A couple of quick yeses would have stopped
the project right there. We wouldn't have
had to read that while Heidegger's "politics
were an abomination," the reader must
"concede that any belief in something
at Todtnauberg conducive to political crime
would be essentialist." Oh, really?
Sounds bad. You wouldn't want "essentialism"
to make you think Heidegger's mullings at
home base for 50 years had any connection
to his rancid politics.
MIT, in fact, gifted us that year with a
doubleheader, also offering up Heidegger's
Topology: Being, Place, World. That came
from Jeff Malpas, professor of philosophy
at the University of Tasmania, which is about
as far away from the camps as you can get.
While conceding Heidegger's true-believer
behavior, Malpas wrote of "the addresses
from the early 1930s in which Heidegger seems
to align himself with elements of Nazi ideology,"
as if there were any doubt. Malpas repeated
a falsehood put into play by Heidegger himself
after the war, that the philosopher had resigned
his rectorship "after having apparently
found it increasingly difficult to accommodate
himself to the demands of the new regime."
For Malpas, "Heidegger's own politics
cannot be taken, in itself, to undermine
his philosophy in any direct way."
In that respect, Malpas revived an old standard
view that Faye seeks to eliminate once and
for all. 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?"
Is it superficial to yoke wildly different
cultural worlds (Daseins, if you will) together?
Might much the same reasoning heard among
a few Manhattan TV executives recently about
David Letterman—like Heidegger, a would-be
touchstone for the authenticity of his Volk—apply
as well to the Meister from Messkirch? Well,
Heidegger did think that Daseins intersect.
"Only the jokes can do him in,"
opined one savvy network veteran in the group.
All agreed that Letterman would survive or
fall at the hands of fellow talk-show hosts
and comics torn between instincts to eviscerate
and guild solidarity. No sober column by,
say, The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof,
analogizing Ball State University's most
famous alum to a Cambodian brothel owner,
would pack the requisite resonance with key
audiences.
It would seem that Heidegger, likewise, will
continue to flourish until even "Continental"
philosophers mock him to the hilt. His influence
will end only when they, and the broader
world of intellectuals, recognize that scholarly
evidence fingers the scowling proprietor
of Heidegger's hut as a buffoon produced
by German philosophy's mystical tradition.
He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject
of dissertations.
In the meantime, we can expect Heidegger's
Faux Tyrolean Wardrobe and the Specter of
Carl Schmitt to roll off a university press
before too long, sans cartoons or illustrative
plates.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle
Review, teaches philosophy and media theory
at the University of Pennsylvania.
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