Abstract
The articles that follow came out of a conference held at Boston College on the theme ‘Heidegger and Politics’. Recent work on Heidegger’s politics – notably Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy – was the occasion for the conference. But the contents of that particular book were not at issue. With the translation of this book into English, awareness in North America of Heidegger’s involvement and therefore questions about how to understand this involvement had reached a critical juncture. The conference participants took up this question by exploring different themes and drawing upon the thought of Heidegger’s contemporaries to create a multifaceted discussion. These speakers were united by the conviction that the question of the relation of Heidegger to political life and thought remains an urgent undertaking. For if we do not continue to examine how and why one of the 20th century’s most original and important thinkers became embroiled in the most pernicious political movement in history, we miss an opportunity to better understand the role and efficacy of philosophical thought in political life.
The collection begins with an essay by Françoise Dastur who proposes that we can find in Heidegger’s thought a concerted critical engagement with Nazism. Heidegger’s engagement has gone largely unremarked, she points out, because rather than responding directly to specific events, acts and leaders, as many of us wish he had done, Heidegger chose to analyse the fundamental basis for the Nazi phenomenon. Dastur writes that ‘we can find in Heidegger neither a moral discourse on Nazism, nor a systematic analysis of this historical phenomenon, but only a critique of what constitutes its foundation’. That is, Heidegger addressed the Nazi issue indirectly through a critical analysis of ‘the essence of the Occident’: an increasing subjectivism that was reaching its apotheosis in the ‘will to submit everything to planning and calculation’ and the unbridled ‘glorification of technology’ that characterized the Nazi Party.
Gregory Fried examines Heidegger’s relation to Nazi political developments by taking up Heidegger’s critique of liberalism and western accounts of human rights. Like Dastur, he reminds us that Heidegger is an ardent critic of Enlightenment rationality with its emphasis on universal ideals. Yet unlike her, Fried does not see this critique as the basis for a condemnation of Nazism but rather as the fundamental ground for Heidegger’s embrace of it. Fried notes that for Heidegger, it was Plato who, by proposing ideas as the real bases for understanding reality, initiated this slide into the dogmatic universalism that rules in liberal societies like the USA. According to Fried, Heidegger develops an alternative, non-universal way of grounding beings by drawing from Heraclitus’ notion of ‘polemos’ or ‘war’. Fried argues that Heidegger’s ontological polemos is problematic insofar as it harbors no resources for adjudicating between competing political claims or for studied self-critique and improvement. For Fried, it is Plato who, precisely by proposing transcendent forms as ideals for meaning and action, allows us to critique and transform our current, often complacent and destructive ways of being.
Unlike the first two articles, which address Heidegger’s philosophical work in light of his 1933–4 political engagement, the next two pieces examine how Heidegger’s students and acquaintances responded to his involvement in National Socialism. James Bernauer discusses Hannah Arendt’s academic response to Heidegger’s political engagement while Serena Parekh discusses the personal responses of several of his students and friends.
In Bernauer’s article, the problem of silence serves as a continuing provocation. Like Heidegger, who in his lifetime refused to directly address his rectorate period, Arendt rarely addressed the issue of Heidegger’s politics publicly, directly or systematically. Bernauer suggests that Arendt’s relative silence does not mean that she was not articulating a critique of the political ramifications of Heidegger’s philosophy, and that in fact ‘Her writings disclose a clear-minded treatment of the guiding assumptions which enabled [Heidegger] to embrace National Socialism’. He insists that Arendt offers a compelling alternative that can be read as ‘the intended antidote to the powerful Nazi seductions to which Heidegger and much of German intellectual culture succumbed’. According to Bernauer, Arendt’s work serves as a challenge to Heidegger’s thought insofar as it provides a better answer to a universal desire: the genuine human longing for community. Her work grounds the need for community ‘not on the horizon of inner experience but as a public virtuosity’ that emerges through the free cooperation of peers seeking formal and informal spaces to act in concert. It thus does away with the atomized self that stands, according to Arendt, at the root of the failure of the Heideggerian concept of community.
Concluding our section is a piece by Serena Parekh who looks at the personal responses from a number of Heidegger’s students and friends to analyse the reasons behind their failed and successful attempts at reconciliation. Jaspers’ deep friendship to Heidegger turns into ‘strange hopeless pain’ and Marcuse’s unresolved care for his teacher ended in a famous intellectual explosion. Against this background Parekh discusses Arendt’s ability to maintain friendship with Heidegger. While Parekh agrees with Bernauer that much of Arendt’s conceptual work is an implicit rebuke of Heidegger’s political undertaking, she still wonders what facilitated Arendt’s ability to maintain her relationship with him. Parekh’s answer runs the conceptual gamut of the private and the political – it was ‘the great and incalculable grace of love’, on the one hand, and ‘the boldest of human actions’, forgiveness, on the other. While Arendt was clearly critical of Heidegger’s political involvement in 1933, ‘for her it was ultimately more important that Heidegger be allowed to continue to act, to be, than to have him reduced to or imprisoned by his actions’.
Three seminal issues emerge from these contributions. First, the opening and final articles touch on the matter of past appropriation. Dastur suggests we should entertain the possibility that Heidegger recognized he could not appropriate his past and accepted to be subjected to it until the end of his life. Parekh, assuming Arendt’s perspective, suggests the latter’s forgiveness was a political action aiming to prevent exactly this imprisonment by one’s past. These perspectives leave us with a question: Was Heidegger’s silence a symptom of shame or of the lack thereof? Second, there is the issue of reader’s responsibility. What should Heidegger’s political engagement mean to us? To what extent are we to free his work by forgiving so that it can ‘act’ and to what extent should we let it be imprisoned by the past deeds of its writer, or better yet, by the deeds it allowed? Bernauer’s article provides a possible answer when it depicts Arendt’s work as a project that seeks to give a better answer to the question at the heart of the appeal of Nazism – the desire for a sense of community. On this reading while we can judge Heidegger’s political endeavors and work, we can still appreciate the desire at its core as a genuine human need that awaits a satisfactory account.
Finally, the question of the relation of Nazism to the Occident presents itself as pivotal in the collection: was Nazism an oddity in the West or was it a natural offspring of the Occident? While Dastur’s claim is that Heidegger’s critique of the Occident amounts to his critique of Nazism, Fried asserts it was this critique of the West that facilitated his support of Nazism. Read in these two different ways Heidegger’s exchange with Marcuse in which the former compares the extermination camps to the bombing of the Allies could be read as either a condemnation of both (since Nazism and the Occident belong to the same political species) or a justification of the camps by way of normalization (since Nazism is as ‘normal’ as the Allies, yet not of the same species).
We see then that, as Bernauer reminds us, Derrida does well to suggest that it is important to understand Heidegger if we are to discuss the meaning of his unfortunate political endeavors in the early 1930s. Our hope is that the different perspectives on the matter presented here will help cultivate a robust and discerning discussion around the issues of Heidegger’s thought and its relation to his political involvement. It is also our hope that such a discussion will demonstrate the complexity of such attempts. Since for whatever reason Heidegger chose to remain silent as to specific events and engagements in 1933 and since his comments and work could be read in different and sometimes mutually exclusive ways, it might be the case that, as Arendt suggests, one is left with
… a complicated process [of reconciliation] which never produces unequivocal results … an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.
1
It might be the case that we must continue to struggle with this dark past, and with how to understand, appropriate and relate to Heidegger’s enigmatic silence.