Evans Experientialism  Evans Experientialism
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| The Cover - Up By the internationally respected Alex Steiner | ||||||
Having reviewed some of the pertinent facts
in the career of German philosopher Martin
Heidegger, we must now turn to the myths
and evasions that constitute the building
blocks of his postwar reputation. The official
version of the story, propounded by Heidegger
and his supporters, has it that his 1933
turn to Nazism was a youthful mistake, a
brief flirtation by a scholar who was naïve
about politics and the ways of the world.
Within a few months, so the story goes, the
young philosopher realized his mistake, resigned
his position as rector of Freiburg University
and refused henceforth to take part in Nazi
activities. Furthermore, the legend continues,
even during his period as rector, Heidegger
tried to protect the integrity of the university
from the worst predations of Nazism and personally
intervened with the Nazi authorities on behalf
of a number of Jewish students and colleagues. Finally, even if one is not convinced by
this account of events, the most one can
say, according to his defenders, is that
Heidegger the man suffered from a character
flaw. Heidegger's personal failing, however,
is an entirely separate matter from his philosophy,
which must be judged "on its own merits."
Concretely this means that any assessment
of Heidegger's philosophy that tries to relate
it to his Nazism is deemed illegitimate by
his apologists. This viewpoint further implies
that there is nothing in Heidigger's pre-Nazi
philosophy, particularly in Being and Time
that bears any affinity to Nazi ideas. Similarly,
the later turn [Kehre] in Heidegger's philosophy
has been interpreted as a purely internal
reaction, unrelated to politics, to problems
encountered in the initial formulation of
his thought. This is a multi-layered effort at damage
control. One can view the cover-up as a redoubt
upon whose walls Heidegger's supporters stand
fighting to prevent a breach. If the facade,
the story of Heidegger's youthful indiscretion,
is broken, all is not lost. The inner wall,
Heidegger's actions as rector in defiance
of the Nazis, still stands. Even if this
line of defense is broken, and the supporters
are forced to concede the defects of Heidegger
the man, there still stands the last line
of defense, the so-called autonomy of Heidegger's
philosophy. Marshaling an impressive array
of intellectuals in his defense, many with
impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, Heidegger
managed to maintain his reputation relatively
intact until the middle of the 1980s. One can trace the beginnings of the campaign
to rescue Heidegger's reputation from the
verdict of posterity to the efforts of Heidegger
himself. The outlines of the legend of the
politically naïve scholar are already adumbrated
in the biographical essay Heidegger submitted
to the de-Nazification committee in 1945.
Here he wrote: “In April 1933, I was unanimously elected
Rector (with two abstentions) in a plenary
session of the university and not, as rumor
has it, appointed by the National Socialist
minister. [That appointment would come later
when Heidegger was made Führer of the university,
something he fails to mention. A. S.] It
was as a result of pressure from my circle
of colleagues ... that I consented to be
a candidate for this election and agreed
to serve. Previously I neither desired nor
occupied an academic office. I never belonged
to a political party [This is not exactly
the full story as we know that in his early
20s he was the president of a right-wing
Catholic youth movement. A. S.] nor maintained
a relation, either personal or substantive,
with the NSDAP or with governmental authorities.
I accepted the rectorship reluctantly and
in the interest of the university alone.”[1] Having painted a picture of his reluctant
enlistment as rector, the letter proceeds
to describe how its author joined the Nazi
party, almost as an afterthought, in order
to facilitate administrative relations with
the university. “A short while after I took control of the
rectorship the district head presented himself,
accompanied by two functionaries in charge
of university matters, to urge me, in accordance
with the wishes of the minister, to join
the Party. The minister insisted that in
this way my official relations with the Party
and the governing organs would be simplified,
especially since up until then I had no contact
with these organs. After lengthy considerations,
I declared myself ready to enter the Party
in the interests of the university, but under
the express condition of refusing to accept
a position within the Party or working on
behalf of the Party either during the rectorship
or afterward.”[2] [He fails to explain here
why, if his party membership was motivated
by his desire to facilitate his work as rector,
he renewed it every year until 1945, long
after his duties as rector were terminated.
A. S.] Finally he presents evidence of his opposition
to Nazism after his resignation as rector
in 1934. “After my resignation from the rectorship
it became clear that by continuing to teach,
my opposition to the principles of the National
Socialist world-view would only grow....
Since National Socialist ideology became
increasingly inflexible and increasingly
less disposed to a purely philosophical interpretation,
[The "purely philosophical interpretation"
is apparently how Heidegger wishes to convey
to the reader his initial attraction to Nazism,
which unfortunately had lost its metaphysical
lustre by 1934. A. S.] the fact that I was
active as a philosopher was itself a sufficient
expression of opposition ... “I also demonstrated publicly my attitude
toward the Party by not participating in
its gatherings, by not wearing its regalia,
and, as of 1934, by refusing to begin my
courses and lectures with the so-called German
greeting [Heil Hitler!]... [We now know from
some of the documentation published by Farias
that this last statement is a patent lie.
A. S.] “There was nothing special about my spiritual
resistance during the last eleven years.”[3] By presenting himself as accidentally caught
up in a form of "philosophical"
Nazism for a brief period that was later
transformed into one of "spiritual resistance"
Heidegger tried to build a wall around his
philosophical views. The methods he employed
were silence about much of his activity before
and after 1933, evasions, half-truths and
outright lies. In Heidegger's philosophy, the category of
"silence" denotes not simply the
absence of speech, but is itself an active
form of being in the world. Likewise in his
practice "silence" has meant the
active suppression of evidence about his
Nazi years. Much of Heidegger's correspondence
and other personal documents have been unavailable
to scholars for decades. These documents
are kept under lock and key by the Heidegger
family and sympathetic scholars. Furthermore,
in the immediate postwar years, the academic
community in Germany had been loathe to publicize
anything related to Heidegger's Nazism. One
early scholar who did much original research
in this area, Guido Schneeberger, found that
he could not find a publisher for his book.
He eventually published his findings on his
own in 1962. Nor has Heidegger shied away from out-and-out
falsification of his own history. A well-documented
example involves the republication of his
1935 lecture on metaphysics. The 1953 edition
of this lecture includes the infamous depiction
of the “inner truth” of Nazism. The full
statement in the 1953 edition reads as follows: “The stuff which is now being bandied about
as the philosophy of National Socialism—but
which has not the least to do with the inner
truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology
and modern man)—is casting its net in these
troubled waters of ‘values' and ‘totalities'.”[4] The publication of this article caused a
bit of consternation in Germany. Some questioned
why Heidegger chose to reprint this article
in this exact form. He responded: “It would have been easy to drop the aforementioned
sentence, along with other ones you cite,
from the printed manuscript. But I did not
and I will keep it there in the future because,
for one thing, the sentences belong historically
to the lecture course ...”[5] We now know that Heidegger did indeed make
changes to the 1935 text when he prepared
it for republication. For one thing, the
more general "inner truth and greatness
of this movement" is actually the much
more specific “inner truth and greatness
of National Socialism” in the original lecture.
When an assistant helping him prepare the
galley proofs for publication noticed this
phrase, without any explanatory text, he
asked Heidegger to remove it. Heidegger responded
that he would not do so. Nevertheless, without
telling his assistant, Heidegger did change
the text a few weeks later. He removed the
direct reference to “National Socialism”
and substituted the general term “this movement.”
He also added the explanatory comment about
technology in parenthesis. Heidegger always
maintained until his death that he never
altered the text of this lecture. He reiterated
this point in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview.
In a later attempt to finally settle this
controversy, a search was made of the original
1935 manuscript of the lecture. The page
containing the controversial phrase was missing.[6] The same methods—suppression of evidence,
evasions and falsifications—were employed
by the legions of Heidegger interpreters
and apologists. They were, until the publication
of Farias epochal book, largely successful
in preventing any critical scrutiny of Heidegger's
ideas and their relation to his politics.
An ironic chapter in this enterprise was
played out by the deconstruction theorist,
Paul De Man. De Man did much to publicize
Heidegger among the American intelligentsia
in the 1960s. Then there came the posthumous
revelation in the late 1980s that De Man's
hands had not exactly been clean. He had
been a Nazi collaborator in occupied Belgium
during World War II and in that capacity
had written some anti-Semitic articles for
a Nazi-sponsored literary magazine. After
De Man's war-time essays were published there
ensued a lively controversy about the relationship
between De Man's war-time activity and his
subsequent ideas on deconstruction.[7] An even more sinister champion of Heidegger
was the French translator Jean Beaufret.
Beaufret, a former Resistance fighter, published
several volumes of conversations with Heidegger
before his death in 1982. For 35 years he
was the most consistent defender of Heidegger
in France. His credentials as a former Resistance
fighter lent added weight to his defense
of a former Nazi. Yet it seems that all along
Beaufret had a hidden agenda. He had been
for some time a secret sympathizer of the
notorious Holocaust revisionist historian
Robert Faurisson. Beaufret, like Faurisson,
denied the existence of the Holocaust and
more specifically of the gas chambers. In
a letter sent to Faurisson, Beaufret was
quoted as saying: “I believe that for my part I have traveled
approximately the same path as you and have
been considered suspect for having expressed
the same doubts [concerning the existence
of the gas chambers]. Fortunately for me,
this was done orally.”[8] Beaufret's credentials were never questioned
until Faurisson published his letters in
the 1980s. As part of their public relations campaign
Heidegger and his apologists were particularly
keen to enlist the testimony of German Jewish
philosophers who had themselves suffered
under the Nazis. To this end the well-known
philosopher and German émigré Hanna Arendt
was solicited to write an essay for an anthology
honoring Heidegger on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday. Arendt's essay, “Heidegger
at Eighty,” contains the following cryptic
allusion to Heidegger's political activities: “Now we all know that Heidegger, too, once
succumbed to the temptation to change his
‘residence' and to get involved in the world
of human affairs. As to the world, he was
served somewhat worse than Plato because
the tyrant and his victims were not located
beyond the sea, but in his own country. [The
reference is to the sojourn Plato undertook
to Syracuse. He hoped to counsel the tyrant
of Syracuse, Dionysus. After a relatively
brief experiment in seeking to temper Dionysus
rule with a dose of wisdom, Plato returned
to Athens, concluding that his attempt to
put his theories into practice had been a
failure. A. S.] As to Heidegger himself,
I believe that the matter stands differently.
He was still young enough to learn from the
shock of the collision, which after ten short
hectic months thirty-seven years ago drove
him back to his residence, and to settle
in his thinking what he had experienced ... “We who wish to honor the thinkers, even
if our own residence lies in the midst of
the world, can hardly help finding it striking
and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heidegger,
when they entered into human affairs, turned
to tyrants and Führers. This should be imputed
not just to the circumstances of the times
and even less to preformed character, but
rather to what the French call a déformation
professionelle. For the attraction to the
tyrannical can be demonstrated theoretically
in many of the great thinkers (Kant is the
great exception). And if this tendency is
not demonstrable in what they did, that is
only because very few of them were prepared
to go beyond ‘the faculty of wondering at
the simple' and to ‘accept this wondering
as their abode.'”[9] According to the legal brief presented by
Arendt, Heidegger's unfortunate lapse was
due neither to the circumstances in which
he lived, nor to his character and certainly
has no echo in his ideas. The fact that Heidegger
became a Nazi, which she euphemistically
describes as, having “succumbed to the temptation
to change his ‘residence' and to get involved
in the world of human affairs,” can be ascribed
solely to the occupational hazard of being
a philosopher. And if other philosophers
did not follow in these footsteps, that can
be explained by the fact that they did not
take thinking as seriously as Heidegger.
They were not prepared to "accept this
wondering as their abode." Arendt's piece is notable for its sheer effrontery.
She manages to make Heidegger into the victim
who fell prey to the greatness of his thought.
To say that “He was served worse than Plato”
is to imply that he was tossed about by forces
beyond his control, that he bore no responsibility
for his own actions. As if recognizing the
absurdity of her position, Arendt shifts
the argument from the body of her text into
a long explanatory footnote. In this note
she descends from the lofty rhetoric of her
musings on Plato to some of the concrete
issues surrounding the Heidegger affair.
She returns to the theme of Heidegger's primal
innocence and political naiveté, writing
that “... the point of the matter is that
Heidegger, like so many other German intellectuals,
Nazis and anti-Nazis, of his generation never
read Mein Kampf.”[10] Actually there is good evidence to suppose
that Heidegger not only did read Hitler's
opus, Mein Kampf, but approved of it. Tom
Rockmore has convincingly argued that in
his speech assuming the rectorate of Freiburg,
Heidegger's “multiple allusions to battle
are also intended as a clear allusion to
Hitler's notorious view of the struggle for
the realization of the destiny of the German
people formulated in Mein Kampf.”[11] At a later point in her note, Arendt seeks
to turn the tables on Heidegger's critics
by trotting out the legend, manufactured
by Heidegger himself, of his redemptive behavior
following his “error.” “Heidegger himself corrected his own ‘error'
more quickly and more radically than many
of those who later sat in judgment over him—he
took considerably greater risks than were
usual in German literary and university life
during that period.”[12] Even in 1971, Hannah Arendt certainly knew
better, or should have known better, than
the tale she relates in this embarrassing
apologia. She certainly knew for instance
of Heidegger's 1953 republication of his
essay discussing the “inner truth of National
Socialism.” She was also aware, through her
friendship with Karl Jaspers, of the deplorable
behavior Heidegger exhibited toward Jaspers
and his Jewish wife. (Heidegger broke off
all personal relations with Jaspers and his
wife shortly after he became rector. It was
only after the war that Heidegger tried to
repair their personal relationship. Despite
an intermittent exchange of letters, the
two philosophers could never repair their
personal relationship as a result of Heidegger's
refusal to recant his support of Nazism.) The reference to the “considerably greater
risks” he took, is, like Heidegger's "spiritual
opposition" to Nazism, an echo of Heidegger's
own postwar fabrications. Why then did Hannah
Arendt, a prominent liberal opponent of fascism,
weigh in with such fervor in the attempt
to rehabilitate Heidegger's reputation? One
can only guess. Perhaps there was an element
of loyalty to her former teacher, a loyalty
that was strained but not broken by her persecution
at the hands of the Nazis and her years in
exile. (At one point she found herself in
a Nazi prison. Later when war broke out,
she was trapped in Nazi-occupied France,
from which she managed a daring escape.)
The most charitable interpretation of her
grotesque defense of Heidegger is that she
turned away from a truth that she could not
face. When Victor Farias' book hit the stores,
it had an electrifying effect on Heidegger's
followers in France. Following the publication
of his Heidegger and Nazism in October of
1987, no less than six studies on the subject
of Heidegger and Nazism were published in
the following nine months. This should not
have been a surprise. It was in France, after
all, that Heidegger's influence found its
deepest roots in the postwar period. The
French debt to Heidegger extends from the
existentialism of Sartre in the early postwar
period to the more recent waves of structuralism,
post-structuralism and deconstruction associated
with Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault
and Jacques Derrida. Also weighing in with
their own interpretations of Heidegger's
relation to Nazism were the postmodernists
Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. One could, broadly speaking, break down the
type of responses to Farias into three main
categories. The first is the unconditional
defense of Heidegger by his most orthodox
keepers of the flame. This group is represented
by Francois Fedier, who, since the death
of his teacher Beaufret, has been the most
consistent defender of Heidegger in France.
Fedier continues to deny that Heidegger ever
had any problem with Nazism and simply dismisses
the rectorate period as a youthful flirtation
that has no bearing on Heidegger's thought.
Fedier's response, in light of the voluminous
material in Farias's book and others published
since, commands little credibility outside
of the most ardent devotees of the Heidegger
cult. The second type of response, represented
by Derrida and his followers, is to acknowledge
in general that there is a problem with Heidegger's
philosophy insofar as it allowed him to realize
its implications by becoming a Nazi. But
then Derrida tries to turn the tables on
Farias by insisting that the ultimate cause
of Heidegger's turn to Nazism was the fact
that Heidegger had not sufficiently emancipated
himself by 1933 from pre-Heideggerian ways
of thinking, particularly rationalism and
humanism. According to Derrida's tortured
logic, once Heidegger succeeded in liberating
himself from "metaphysics" following
his post 1935 "turn," his philosophy
became the best form of anti-Nazism. This perverse viewpoint was aptly summed
up by one of Derrida's students, Lacoue-Labarthe,
who said that “Nazism is a humanism.” By
this he meant that the philosophical foundations
that underpinned the Enlightenment tradition
of humanism had as their consequences the
domination of humanity in the service of
an all-encompassing universal-totalitarianism.
Such thinking has become a common stock in
trade of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and their
followers. The notion that Nazism is just
another expression of Enlightenment universalism
has recently been expressed by the Americans
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. They write,
“This principle of sufficient reason, the
basis of calculative thinking, in its totalizing,
and imperialistic, form, can be seen as the
metaphysical underpinning which made the
Holocaust possible.”[13] From this premise, Lacoue-Labarthe builds
a sophisticated defense of Heidegger. Unlike
the orthodox Heideggerians, he concedes that
Heidegger's thought was consistent with his
Nazism. However, Lacoue-Labarthe then seeks
to rescue Heidegger by claiming that the
post-1935 Heidegger who had overcome metaphysics
and humanism, was free from any Nazi blemish.
This bizarre argument is then carried to
its logical conclusion by other deconstructionists
who insist that not only is the second coming
of Heidegger free of the fascist taint, but
that his work for the first time makes it
possible for us to “think the Holocaust.”
Lest the reader thinks this is a polemical
extravagance, listen to the words of Milchman
and Rosenberg, “While facets of Heidegger's thinking can
provide insight into the experience of the
Extermination, make it possible for us to
think Auschwitz, the Holocaust can also help
us to penetrate the opaqueness of the later
Heidegger's thinking.”[14] Heidegger's accusers on the other hand have
been dubbed “totalitarians” in some of the
annals of the deconstructionists. Once more,
as we saw in Arendt's piece, Heidegger was
portrayed as a victim of small-minded and
envious enemies. Weighing in on the French
debate from the other side of the Rhine was
the long-time Heidegger interpreter Hans-Georg
Gadamer. In a curious echo of Arendt's 1971
essay, “Heidegger at Eighty,” Gadamer returns
to the image of the well-meaning but naïve
thinker retreating from his attempt to educate
the prince of Syracuse.[15] In contrast to the philosophical obscurantism
practiced by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe,
some voices have been raised in the French
discussion that clearly acknowledge the problem
posed by Heidegger's lifelong relationship
to fascism. Most prominent among these is
Pierre Bourdieu who wrote a major study on
Heidegger long before Farias' book even appeared.
This book was republished in French in a
somewhat revised format after the controversy
elicited by Farias's book broke. The Political
Ontology of Martin Heidegger, attempts to
ground Heidegger's philosophy in the historical
context from which Heidegger emerged. At
the same time Bourdieu avoids the temptation
of simply reducing Heidegger's thought to
a reflex of his historical and class position.
Bourdieu engages in a textual analysis of
Heidegger's work in an attempt to show the
intrinsic relationship between Heidegger's
philosophy and his politics. His textual
analysis is distinguished from the type of
“immanent” reading of texts characteristic
of Derrida and other deconstructionists that
artificially isolate texts from the historical
circumstances in which they were produced. Perhaps the most curious and damning recent
defense of Heidegger came not from France
but from Germany. Ernst Nolte, a historian
and long-time friend of the Heidegger family,
published a biography of Heidegger in 1992,
Martin Heidegger: Politics and History in
His Life and Thought. Prior to the publication
of this book, Nolte was already notorious
as a revisionist historian of the Holocaust
and apologist for Nazism. Nolte has to be
given his due as he was much more consistent
and far more intellectually honest than some
of the French defenders of Heidegger. For Nolte, Heidegger's turn to Nazism does
not represent any problem at all. Not only
does Nolte insist on the intimate connection
between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazism,
but he also defends Nazism as a necessary
response to the internal and external threat
posed by the Russian Revolution. To Nolte
Nazism was a necessary response to Bolshevism
and Heidegger, by turning to Nazism, was
merely responding to the call of historical
necessity. Nolte even goes so far as to defend
the Holocaust as a defensive measure made
necessary by the hostility of world-Jewry
to the National Socialist regime. Nolte's
defense of the Holocaust is couched in the
following rhetorical question: “Could it be the case that the National Socialists
and Hitler carried out an ‘Asiatic' deed
[the Holocaust] only because they considered
themselves and their kind to be potential
or actual victims of a [Soviet] ‘Asiatic'
deed. Didn't the ‘Gulag Archipelago' precede
Auschwitz?”[16] There is a symmetry between the early apologists
for Heidegger and Nolte's effort. Whereas
the original defenders sought to minimize
Heidegger's political involvement, then to
build a wall between his politics and his
philosophy, Nolte inverts the terms of the
argument. Not only was Heidegger a politically
engaged thinker from the start in Nolte's
view, but he made the right choice. He writes,
“Insofar as Heidegger resisted the attempt
at the [Communist] solution, he, like countless
others, was historically right.... In committing
himself to the [National Socialist] solution
perhaps he became a ‘fascist.' But in no
way did that make him historically wrong
from the outset.”[17] Elsewhere Nolte returns to the story of Heidegger
the otherworldly thinker who became briefly
ensnared in political matters that he did
not understand. This fertile image, introduced
by Hannah Arendt, is turned on its head by
Nolte. Doubtless he did not wish to let a
Jew get in the last word here. He writes
of Heidegger's support for Hitler that, “...
it was not an episodic ‘flight' from the
realm of philosophy into everyday politics
but was sustained by a ‘philosophical' hope
... [and was] essential to his life and thought.”[18] In other words, Heidegger's thought and his
practice were cut from the same cloth. He
was not just a Nazi, but in the words of
Thomas Sheehan, he was “a normal Nazi.” Finally, mention should be made of the most
recent biography of Heidegger, Rüdiger Safranski's
Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil,
first published in English in 1998. This book, unlike Nolte's effusive
support for Heidegger's Nazism, is a retreat
back to a more orthodox defense of Heidegger.
Once again, we are presented with a schizophrenic
division between Heidegger the man and the
philosopher. The author diligently presents
the known facts of Heidegger's association
with Nazism. It is no longer tenable to deny
these facts. At the same time he provides
a largely positive reading of Heidegger's
ideas. While avoiding the excesses and logical gymnastics
of Lacoue-Labarthe and other deconstructionists,
Safranski seems incapable of making any essential
judgment about his subject. This deficiency,
a common trademark of modern biography and
historiography, is considered an advantage
in today's dismal cultural context. The watchwords
here are “detached” and “balanced.” Despite
the minutiae of facts, there is little understanding.
In its own way, this book is another contribution
to the cover-up. In the end, Safranski weighs
in on the side of those who praise Heidegger
for making it possible for us to "think
Auschwitz." He writes: “The fact that Heidegger rejected the idea
that he should defend himself as a potential
accomplice to murder does not mean that he
shied away from the challenge ‘to think Auschwitz.'
When Heidegger refers to the perversion of
the modern will to power, for which nature
and man have become mere ‘machinations,'
he always explicitly or not, also means Auschwitz.
To him, as to Adorno, Auschwitz is a typical
crime of the modern age.”[19] We cannot let pass commenting on the arrogance
of Safranski's juxtaposition of Heidegger
with Theodore Adorno. Adorno despised Heidegger
and had nothing but contempt for Heidegger's
“jargon of authenticity,” which he viewed
as a form of philosophical charlatanry passing
itself off as profound insight. This dismal
book, despite its account of the facts, represents
but another apology for Heidegger's involvement
with Nazism. It has nevertheless met with
largely positive reviews. A typical example is Richard Rorty, who wrote,
“Heidegger was oblivious of the torment of
his Jewish friends and colleagues, but after
a year of hectic propagandizing and organizing,
he did notice that the Nazi higher-ups were
not paying much attention to him. This sufficed
to show him that he had overestimated National
Socialism. “So he retreated to his mountain cabin and,
as Safranski nicely says, traded decisiveness
for imperturbability. After World War II,
he explained, imaginatively albeit monomaniacally,
that Americanization, modern technology,
the trivialization of life and the utter
forgetfulness of Being (four names, he thought,
for the same phenomenon) were irreversible.”[20] Once again we meet the quotidian figure of
the well-meaning but bruised thinker who
“retreated to his mountain cabin.” At least
this time we are spared another return from
Syracuse. We should point out that there
is no basis even in Safranski's book to draw
the conclusion that Heidegger, after “a year
of hectic propagandizing and organizing,”
his period as rector at Freiburg, “withdrew''
from the political fray. What Safranski does
say is that over a period of several years
following his resignation as rector, Heidegger
gradually loosened his involvement with Nazism,
without cutting them completely until 1945. It turns out that Heidegger has defenders
beyond the legion of French deconstructionists.
Rorty represents a tendency that has emerged
in recent years among American pragmatists,
a tendency that has tried to amalgamate pragmatism
with elements of continental philosophy.
In his capacity as something of a public
spokesman for American pragmatism, Rorty
has above all sought to enlist the followers
of Heidegger to his cause. In the following
section we will briefly examine the philosophical
basis for this curious amalgam of two seemingly
disparate traditions. Yet even the most cursory
examination reveals that when Rorty focuses
on the relationship between Heidegger's politics
and his philosophy, we are served up with
another version of the by now familiar theme
of Heidegger accidentally stumbling into
Nazism. In an essay that had been revised as recently
as 1989, well after Farias' book was published,
Rorty wrote that, “... Heidegger was only
accidentally a Nazi.” He then expanded on
this thought in a note with the following
explanation, “His [Heidegger's] thought was,
indeed, essentially anti-democratic. But
lots of Germans who were dubious about democracy
and modernity did not become Nazis. Heidegger
did because he was both more of a ruthless
opportunist and more of a political ignoramus
than most of the German intellectuals who
shared his doubts.”[21] Although Rorty tosses in some harsh words
in Heidegger's direction, to wit his characterization
of Heidegger the “ignoramus” and “opportunist,”
the gist of his presentation is another caricature
of the naïve philosopher getting in over
his head. By this time, we have become quite
familiar with this argument. We have seen
variations of it in Heidegger's own apology
for his term as rector, in the orthodox defenders
of Heidegger in France, in the reflections
of personal friends such as Hannah Arendt,
and in its inverted pro-Nazi form in Nolte's
biography. That this argument can be repeated
ad nauseam, in the face of an ever-mounting
array of facts demonstrating that Heidegger's
relation to Nazism was more than incidental,
shows that we are dealing here not with an
objective, scholarly judgment, but with bad
faith and apologetics. The debate in France lasted for about two
years following the publication of Farias'
book in 1987. Nowadays, very little is heard
in France about Heidegger's politics. In
contrast, since the beginning of the 1990s
the discussion has continued unabated in
the United States, Great Britain and other
English-speaking countries. In fact, three
separate books have appeared on the subject
since 1997. Of these, Julian Young's book,
Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism, is foursquare
in the tradition of the Heideggerian whitewash.
In fact, the author announces his intentions
right at the beginning, where he says that,
“This work aims to provide what may be described
as a ‘de-Nazification' of Heidegger.”[22] Tom Rockmore sums up the flavor of Young's
book in a recent review. Rockmore writes,
“In sum, according to Young, despite the
many texts to the contrary (for instance,
the comment in the Spiegel-Gesprach, where
Heidegger questions the democratic ideal),
the same philosopher turns out to be more
or less like you and me: to wit, a proponent
of liberal democracy. This is to say not
a credible but an incredible picture of Heidegger
...”[23] It is evident that a quarter century following
the death of Heidegger, the cover-up still
continues. At the same time, we do not wish
to suggest that there has been an absence
of countervailing tendencies working to expose
Heidegger's politics. In fact, we have seen
just this past year the publication of what
may be the most important examination of
Heidegger's philosophy in the context of
his politics, namely Johannes Fritsche's
work, Historical Destiny and National Socialism
in Heidegger's Being and Time. We will comment
on this book in the next section. Notes: 1. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector
of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,
Wolin, p. 61 2. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector
of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,
Wolin p. 64 3. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector
of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,
Wolin, pp. 64-66 4. Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis” 5. Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis” 6. Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis” 7. Denis Donoghue, “The Strange Case of Paul
De Man,” New York Review of Books, June 29,
1989 8. Richard Wolin, “French Heidegger Wars,”
Wolin, p. 282. 9. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,”
New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971 10. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” 11. Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and
Philosophy, Berkeley: Univeristy of California
Press, 1992, p. 6 12. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” 13. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Heidegger,
Planetary Technics, and the Holocaust,” Milchman
and Rosenberg, p. 222 14. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Heidegger,
Planetary Technics, and the Holocaust,” Milchman
and Rosenberg, p. 224 15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Back From Syracuse?”
Critical Inquiry 15(2): 1989, pp. 427-430 16. Cited in Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,”
New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993 17. Cited in Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi” 18. Cited in Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi” 19. Safranski, p. 421. 20. Richard Rorty, Rev. of Martin. Heidegger.
Between Good and Evil, by Rüdiger Safranski,
New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1998 21. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as Science,
Metaphor, Politics,” Essays on Heidegger
and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 19 22. Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy,
Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997, p. 1 23. Tom Rockmore, “Recent Discussion of Hediegger
and Politics: Young, Beistegui, Fritsche,”
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol.
21, no. 2, 1999, p. 53 | ||||||
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