Abstract
The controversy concerning the relation between Martin Heidegger and National Socialism 1 is not something new, as it could seem when we read the book published in 1987 by Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, and the most recent book of Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, published in 2005. Heidegger’s 1933–4 political engagement has never been ignored, since in September 1945 Heidegger had to appear before a de-Nazification committee and as a result was dismissed from the university. The controversy, which started immediately after in 1946, has in a way never ceased in France, where Heidegger was the object of what has been rightly called ‘an exceptional reception’. If I may begin with a personal testimony, when I started working on Heidegger and left France for Germany in 1963, I already knew almost everything about Heidegger’s political engagement in 1933. I had read the French translation of some passages of Heidegger’s 1933 inaugural address and of a few of his 1933–4 speeches which were published in 1961 in a French review by Jean-Pierre Faye. I had also read Guido Schneeberger’s book, Nachlese zu Heidegger [Complement to Heidegger], published in 1962, which includes, besides all the texts of the rectorate period, other documents and testimonies related to it. I can therefore assert that I never ignored Heidegger’s compromise with Nazism and that the publication of Victor Farias’ book has not been for me the ‘revelation’ that it seems to have been for many. I do not intend here to discuss the arguments, the interpretative mistakes and the false assumptions of this book. I just want to stress, especially for the American public, that the aim of Farias’ book publication was, as Dominique Janicaud explained in Heidegger en France [Heidegger in France], ‘to liquidate the intellectual hegemony of heideggerianism in France’, since some prominent philosophers, with Jacques Derrida first among them, were the real targets of this very French affair. This is also valid for Emmanuel Faye’s book, which could nevertheless take advantage of the absence of opponents and of the relative present vacuum of the French philosophical scene.
Because Faye’s recent book had a very important impact on Heidegger’s image as a philosopher, it is necessary to be more specific about it. Its author is the son of Jean-Pierre Faye, who is a philosopher, a poet and a writer, and also a specialist in German philosophy and German language, interested in the political and social uses of language. Since the 1960s he has been one of the most engaged anti-Heideggerians, and has argued that Heidegger is a Nazi ideologue. Emmanuel Faye, also a philosopher, decided some years ago to engage in an anti-Heideggerian crusade in order to continue his father’s work, and so the matter became a family enterprise. But he does not possess his father’s knowledge of German language, history, literature and philosophy. This crusade against Heidegger is based on the very nationalistic feeling that French philosophy, i.e. Cartesianism, should prevail over German philosophy. He is therefore engaged in a kind of ideological battle, which renders him unable to understand Heidegger’s way of thinking. This explains the interpretative mistakes and false assumptions that his book contains. He is convinced that he possesses the truth and has decided to fight against evil, represented by Heidegger, in order to save the spirit of philosophy. This leads him not only to a total blindness concerning the meaning of Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics, but also to a kind of delirium. He believes, for example, that Heidegger in 1934 and 1935 was Hitler’s ghost writer. In addition he requires that Heidegger’s books should be banned from all philosophical libraries, which is reminiscent of Nazi book-burnings. The only interest of Faye’s book is that he brought to attention the seminars that Heidegger held in 1933–4 and 1934–5 on ‘Nature, History and State’, and on ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’.
The question remains, however: how was it possible that, after the publication of Farias’ book, some philosophers suddenly discovered that the Heideggerian texts that they had been reading and commenting on with admiration for more than 40 years, contained in fact hidden, shameful allusions? But on the other hand, should Heidegger be cleared of all suspicion and presented as ‘irreproachable’, as the French orthodox Heideggerians tried to maintain? This would mean that Heidegger remained a ‘pure’ philosopher throughout, and never committed himself to the necessities of his time. But is this not a rather idealistic view of what philosophy is? Heidegger himself insisted in his 1929–30 course on the ‘ambiguity of philosophy’ which is at the same time a science and a testimony of a worldview. To think that we could so easily separate in a philosophy what belongs to a historical worldview and what belongs to philosophia perennis would therefore be preposterous, since it would imply that we are ourselves in a non- historical situation. This is the reason why it would be better to refrain from too quickly passing judgement on what has been called ‘the Heidegger case’. To take sides either for the prosecution or for the defence effectively means to agree to take part in the inquisitorial process brought against Heidegger in the media and in the academic world since the publication of Farias’ and Faye’s books. Virtuous indignation and solemn moral condemnation are not the best means if we want to understand not only what really happened in the 1930s, but also what is going on today in the world, which can be concealed by the ‘fascination’ with the Nazi period we are witnessing today.
I shall therefore content myself with asking a few questions.
The first question concerns the reasons which led Heidegger to a political engagement in a period of the acute crisis that Germany was going though in the early 1930s. It is necessary to recall that the Weimar Republic of Germany had been devastated by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Germany could not pay France the Treaty of Versailles’ high reparation costs. In 1923 France had already invaded the German industrial area of the Ruhr, and diverted all its profits to itself. In 1929 the situation became worse. Because there was very little money left in Germany, the Weimar Government printed lots of extra currency. This resulted in ‘hyperinflation”’and meant that people lost all their savings overnight. Many companies throughout Germany went bankrupt and, beginning in late 1929, unemployment began to rise sharply. By early 1932, 6 million workers were unemployed, i.e. 25 per cent of the German workforce. It is not all that surprising that the Germans who saw no end to their troubles turned to the extreme political groups, the National Socialist and communist parties. It is in such a desperate situation that the National Socialist Party became the largest party in the Reichstag in 1932 and that Hitler became chancellor at the end of January 1933. Heidegger himself was elected rector of the Freiburg University in April 1933, and joined the National Socialist Party in May.
The question can now be asked: Was this political engagement completely external to Heidegger’s thought, was it directly related to it? In order to answer this question, one must first become aware of the revolution in the conception of philosophical thinking that takes place in Being and Time. It has to be stressed that in that work Heidegger demonstrates that philosophy does not have to do with abstract questions, but on the contrary requires to be attested in an existential manner. Philosophy, for him, is not a mere conceptual game or a pure contemplative activity, but, as he explains in his 1930 course on ‘the essence of human freedom’, possesses an ‘offensive’ character which affects the person who asks the philosophical question in his or her depths, so that this person is completely involved as existent in the question he or she is asking. Could Heidegger, on the basis of such a conception of philosophy, be satisfied by shutting himself away in his ivory tower and refusing to join in the revolution that was under way?
The second and more important question concerns the nature of Heidegger’s political engagement. Was this political engagement an adhesion given to what we call today ‘Nazism’ in a retrospective way? Is it not thoughtlessly essentialist to revert to such an abbreviation? Is not the use of such an abbreviation a way of preventing all possibility of understanding the phenomenon indicated in such a reductive term? This inevitably calls us to judge what happened in 1933 in the light of the later events in 1942 and 1945, which means judging the beginning of what has been a ‘movement’, i.e. a process involving changes in time, on the basis of the horrors that were committed at the end. Heidegger clearly explained in his 1966 Spiegel interview that in 1933 he chose to take part in a movement which was presented as a National Socialism, and not in what is today understood under the abbreviated name ‘Nazism’, i.e. a racist ideology which is absolutely incompatible with the foundations of the Heideggerian thought. It has to be stressed here that Nazism was a racist and not only an anti-Semitic ideology, and that it had planned and carried out the extermination not only of the Jews, but also of the mentally ill, the congenitally infirm, homosexuals, and roughly half a million Gipsies; the extermination of the population of Slavonic origin having been also considered.
To go back to the question of the incompatibility between Hitler’s racist ideology and Heidegger’s thought, it has to be stressed that Heidegger considers the traditional definition of the human being as animal rationale to be a definition which failed to reach the roots of what constitutes humanity precisely because it still sees in such a human a living being among others, which can be distinguished only through the addition of a specific property, mind, reason, or spirit. This is what Heidegger explained once more in his 1946 letter to Jean Beaufret, the famous ‘Letter on Humanism’, when saying that the metaphysical tradition, as well as the humanism that is based upon it, has not been able to think what truly constitutes humanity. Heidegger’s entire philosophical enterprise since 1925 consisted in distancing himself from Lebensphilosophie, the philosophy of life which was then still prevailing and which had been the origin of some philosophical streams going in the direction of biologism which, in turn, had contributed to the genesis of the racial ideology of Nazism. This was, for example, the case of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the German representative of Darwinism, who explained in his anthropology that the justification of the superiority of the Indo-Germanic races over all other human races can be based on Darwin’s laws. How could Heidegger have ever given his support to the racial worldview which is at the basis of the Hitlerian ideology?
Now, what did Heidegger mean when he declared in his Spiegel interview that the question for him was to find ‘a national and above all social position, perhaps in the sense of Friedrich Naumann’s attempt’ 2 in the politically and ideologically confused situation of the 1930s? The reference to this liberal politician, who was a friend of Max Weber and the author of a famous book on the geopolitics of central Europe, Mitteleuropa, has to be taken seriously. It must be recalled that Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919), who was a Protestant parish pastor, founded in 1894 the weekly magazine Die Hilfe [‘The Help’] to address the social question and in 1896 the National-Social Association, in an attempt to provide a social liberal alternative to the social democracy. His goal was to help the working class who lived in miserable conditions and to raise interest for this issue in the middle class. In 1919, shortly before his death, he was, with Theodor Wolff and Hugo Preuss, the ‘father of the constitution of the Weimar Republic’, the co-founder and first president of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), the German Democratic Party. A very active member of the ‘Naumann Circle’ was Gertrud Baümer (1873–1954), a teacher and the head of the Federation of German Women during the First World War, with whom Elfride Petri, Heidegger’s future wife, was in contact at the beginning of that war. Elfride Petri had come to Berlin to take part in the Women Movement and there she was introduced to Friedrich Naumann’s political ideas. 3 It is quite probable that Heidegger was indirectly influenced by Naumann’s conception of National Socialism, as his 1934 lectures on the German university show. In this lecture Heidegger opposed National Socialism to ‘unbridled, arrogant and war-like nationalism’ and defined socialism as ‘the concern for the internal order of the people’s community’. 4
It is therefore possible to understand what he meant by ‘social position’ when reading some of his 1933 and 1934 speeches, especially those that deal with the labour service, or his address of 22 January 1934 to the unemployed to whom he declares that there is no difference between scientific knowledge and the knowledge of the workers, since both depend upon spirit. It has to be recalled here that Heidegger himself came from a working-class background. He was born in a small town where his father was at the same time the sexton of one of the Roman Catholic churches and a barrel maker. His mother was the daughter of peasants. He was able to go to high school and the university only because he was granted a scholarship by the Church. Heidegger always remained close to the rural world, and this has often been considered something highly suspicious in what could appear as a kind of anti-peasant and anti-pagan racism. One cannot deny, however, that Heidegger’s speeches when he was rector sound nationalistic. But is the feeling of belonging to a nation, and even, as is the case with Heidegger, to a specific region, the Alemanic region, a feeling that tends to awaken and become dominant in critical periods, is such a feeling in itself reprehensible? We should not here fall into Manichaeism. Nationalism is not intrinsically bad, as shown, for example, by the struggles for national independence in the colonized countries. Internationalism is not intrinsically good either, as shown by the example of the mercantile internationalism aiming today at the domination of the whole planet under the name of ‘globalization’. One sometimes has the feeling that what is considered wrong with Heidegger is simply the fact that he is German, and not French or American, so that the spirit of universality seems to be intrinsically lacking in him. It is true that the United States with the 1791 Bill of Rights, and France, with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, both had a leading role in the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But this did not prevent France from pursuing a segregationist and racist policy in its colonies all through the 19th century and until the 1960s. And it did not prevent the United States from considering Native Americans as second-rate citizens and allowing racial segregation until the promulgation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
For is not ‘the’ human being, as Marx remarked, as difficult to find as ‘the’ fruit which, as Hegel explained, cannot be bought in any market? The human being in general is only an abstraction, a pure ‘essence’, which explains that recognizing rights to this abstract being does not necessarily result in the promotion of a real equality of all human beings. Heidegger has, since the mid-1920s, opposed to this essentialist way of thinking his own manner of defining the human being as Dasein, which is not the essence of the human being, not the common species to which all human beings would belong, but the distributive structure on the basis of which there are only singular historical ways of existing. One cannot deny that this thought of the intrinsic historicity and of the indisputable finitude of all existence can lead to the disregard of other ways of being than one’s own. But the unconditional assertion of a universalism which is itself only the historical result of this part of the world that is called the Occident is no less unable to address the demand of singular beings.
What remains nevertheless irrefutable is the fact that the strong feeling of belonging to a specific nation, the German nation, is at the origin of Heidegger’s blind trust in Hitler, a blind trust that was shared at that time by the majority of his fellow countrymen and also by a great number of other Europeans. As the English historian Ian Kershaw showed in his 1987 book on The ‘Hitler Myth’, 5 the Germans did not follow Hitler on the basis of the racist ideology of Mein Kampf, but because until 1939, they believed that he genuinely wanted peace. And they were not the only ones. In France, a famous philosopher, Alain, declared in 1933, after having heard Hitler’s discourse on peace, that ‘there will never be any more war in Europe’ and in 1936 he still maintained that Hitler was a great man and a great patriot. In September 1936, Lloyd George, the former English prime minister, visited Adolf Hitler and, after his return to England, explained that Hitler had achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the German people, who were cheerful, living in security, and had no desire to invade any other land. He added that Hitler was ‘the George Washington of Germany, the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors’. During the same period, the famous American-Jewish writer Gertrude Stein, who was living in Paris, proposed Adolf Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize, and apparently it was not a joke.
A third question now has to be asked: what was Heidegger expecting of his engagement in the National Socialist movement? Did he want, like Plato in Syracuse, to try turning a tyrant into a philosopher, as Hugo Ott seems to suggest in his 1988 book on Heidegger’s biography? It has to be recalled that Heidegger, when he accepted the position of rector, engaged himself in the National Socialist Movement only as a university professor, and because he wanted to contribute to reforming the academic system. We know now, after the publication of the lecture courses he held in Freiburg from 1919 to 1923, that he was for a long time preoccupied by the question of the future of the German university. By accepting the rectorate, Heidegger considered that the application of the Führerprinzip to the academic world was necessary, since the university was at that time urgently in need of reforms. It is therefore only for this reason that he engaged himself in the National Socialist ‘movement’, not, however, without being aware that he would not be able to stay away from compromises. But in his view, this was the price to pay in order to apply to the university the reforms he had in mind, which had nothing to do with the ideological Gleichschaltung, the forcing into lines and the programme of politicized science imposed by the Nazis. As shown clearly in his inaugural address, which, it has to be emphasized, was received with enthusiasm and praised by Karl Jaspers, Heidegger required on the contrary the autonomy of the university against all kinds of politicization of knowledge. Heidegger wanted apparently to seize the right moment and acted on the belief that he was in the presence of a revolution without sufficiently taking into account the actual balance of power. Is this a fault? This question can indeed be answered in a positive manner, but should we take it as a pretext for considering Heidegger as a potential criminal?
The seminar Heidegger held in the winter semester 1933–4, i.e. during the rectorate period, under the title ‘On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and State’ shows that at that time Heidegger was seeing in Hitler, the Führer, the very incarnation of the German people, and that his idea of the state was founded on his understanding of what was the Greek polis, which was for him the ‘place’, the ‘Da’ of a common historical Dasein. In his view, democracy had failed, as was shown by the fact that the Weimar Republic was unable to overcome the 1929 crisis and the Depression, because it was founded on the primacy of the individual, and communism had also failed since it is not rooted in the historical Dasein of a people, but in the primacy of the collective. Heidegger said explicitly in this seminar that Russia and America are the same from a metaphysical point of view, something that he would repeat in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, because they are characterized by the same lack of historical rooting in a specific community and are submitted to the same limitless power of technology. The solution was therefore, as he proclaimed, the ‘Führerstate’, in other words, National Socialism, in which the human beings can really become Dasein, that is to say, the place of Being. This implied that the Führer, the guide, was nothing else than the incarnation of the people’s will and decision and that he was, as Heidegger also said in his inaugural address, in fact himself ‘guided’ by the people.
In his 1936 lecture on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger explained that the foundation of a political state is, like art, religion, sacrifice and thought, a ‘happening of truth’, meaning the foundation of a ‘there’ in which the fight of world and earth can take place. Politics has therefore an ontological meaning: it can build a place in which human life becomes possible. From 1933 to 1935 Heidegger saw in the National Socialist revolution and its leader, Hitler, the fulfilment of such a programme and began only slowly afterwards to understand the real nature of the Nazi regime. But the question remained for him: which kind of politics and which form of state can perform the task of granting a place where the human being can exist in an authentic manner? Is democracy, this form of government that the West today wants to impose on the rest of the world, the solution? In his 1966 Spiegel interview, Heidegger still declared he was not convinced that democracy was the appropriate form of government for the technological age and that this remained a decisive question for him. We too have to ask the question: Who decides in our modern democracies? Is it really the demos, the people? Or is it the media, which are themselves under the power of financial, industrial and technological international forces? Are the politicians really the representatives of the will of the people, or are they themselves submitted to the power of these anonymous forces which take the form of a technological indefinite development? How should we understand democracy so that it could be the place in which a truly human life can be lived? This question is today more relevant than ever.
The question that has to be asked now and which has been the object of numerous commentaries is the question of the duration of Heidegger’s engagement in the National Socialist Party of the German Workers, to mention here its full name (NSDAP). One of the so-called Farias’ ‘revelations’ consisted in having given the proof that Heidegger had paid his subscription to the party until the end of the war. Does this necessarily mean that he still continued to adhere to it with an entire conviction? Are we really in a state that could allow us to judge in this matter, since we do not live in a totalitarian society of the kind that Germany knew between 1933 and 1945 in which the fact of leaving the party, especially for somebody like Heidegger who was internationally famous, could have led him to be imprisoned and even put to death, and could also have endangered his family, especially his sons who had to serve as soldiers during the war? We know that Heidegger remained rector for 10 months and that he resigned because he could not impose his own view as to what should become of the university. Should we consider that after 1945 and the de-Nazification process, Heidegger worked out a personal defence strategy which consisted in claiming that he had broken with the Nazi regime as soon as 1934? But this amounts nevertheless to treating several testimonies with disdain, in particular the testimonies of those who followed Heidegger’s teaching during the second part of the 1930s and who testified that Heidegger took great risks since he openly criticized the regime in his lectures. I have personally no reason to have doubts concerning the testimony given by Siegfried Bröse, who followed all Heidegger’s courses and seminars from 1923 to 1945, and to whom we owe some manuscripts of courses which have been published in the last years. Nor do I have any doubt about the testimony of Walter Biemel, who studied in Freiburg from 1942 to 1944, and with whom I had the opportunity to discuss Heidegger’s attitude during the war. But if we are to choose between these two contradictory versions: a real break with the regime after 1934 or a late conjured account in 1945 that conceals a longer adhesion to the Nazi regime, is not the best means to go directly to Heidegger’s texts themselves, not the seminars from 1933 to 1935, which still show Heidegger’s blind trust in Hitler’s alleged pacifism, but those dating from the second half of the 1930s?
Is it not therefore possible to consider that the ‘turn’ of Heidegger’s thought has directly something to do with the 1933 events and that Heidegger’s debate with Nazism continued afterwards in his lectures and courses not only in the 1930s but also during the war and even in his last publications? We are coming here to the question of what has been called ‘Heidegger’s scandalous silence’ on the Extermination. What was expected from him was a public self-criticism, a moral condemnation of what happened to those who died in the German extermination camps, and the mea culpa of an ‘intellectual’ who had seriously compromised himself with Nazism; what was obtained was only the answer of a thinker who saw in the development of western metaphysics the source of a historical disaster which in his view neither ended with Nazism’s defeat in 1945 nor began only with its accession to power in 1933. Is such a silence, as many people think, unforgivable? It would be the case if its meaning were indifference or, even worse, approbation. But it could also have the meaning of restraint out of a concern not to make a spectacle of oneself through a public confession, and of the desire to explain oneself only in a thinking way, since a public explanation could have the meaning of a self-justification and a self-absolution.
Heidegger’s silence, which he broke only to answer the questions asked by the Spiegel journalists, is indeed based, as he explained to them when asking them to publish this interview only after his death, upon the fundamental motivation of preserving the possibility of continuing his work. But his silence can also be caused by a genuine embarrassment, by a feeling of ‘shame’, a word he used in a 1950 letter to Karl Jaspers, explaining why he never visited him after 1933. We 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, and this critique includes also a self-criticism of the voluntarism and the warlike pathos which were perceptible in his 1933 inaugural address as rector as well as in his speeches of the following months.
Heidegger’s critique of Nazism, which began to be developed in the years following his resignation as rector, is included in the broader context of his deconstruction of the metaphysics of modernity, understood as the history of subjectivism and will to power. In the 1938 lecture Heidegger held in Freiburg on ‘The Age of the World Picture’, there is an analysis of what constitutes the fundamental process of modern times, which is the struggle aiming at the primacy of humankind in the form of the glorification of technology and of the will to submit everything to planning and calculation. What is therefore taking shape today is the reign of the quantitative and the gigantic, of which Heidegger says that it nevertheless comprises a shadow not yet visible, which is the shadow of the incalculable, through which the modern world begins to free itself from the realm of representation and objectification. 6
This historical process takes the form of the devastation and exploitation of the world; in brief, of what Nietzsche called nihilism. In regard to this fundamental historical movement, Nazi ideology and worldview appear as an epiphenomenon. In his Nietzsche lectures of the 1930s, Heidegger takes up the Nietzschean concept of nihilism, but maintains that Nietzsche himself remains caught in nihilism with his concepts of will to power and superman. This leads Heidegger to see in power a fundamental value of modernity based on the absence of finality and in the superman the very incarnation of the domination process. Heidegger at that time considered nihilism the fundamental movement of western history, but he nevertheless wanted to go beyond the Nietzschean analysis by understanding it as a form of Seinsverlassenheit, of the abandonment from being, and by seeing in technology the menacing fulfilment of the modern thought of domination.
It is, however, in ‘Contributions to Philosophy’, a long manuscript that Heidegger wrote for himself between 1936 and 1938, and which was published only in 1989, that his critique of Nazism becomes more explicit. One can read, for example, in § 56 that the abandonment from Being can be seen in the idolatry of the Völkisch, of the ‘nationalistic’. One also finds there a fierce critique of the ‘totale Weltanschauung’, of the ‘totalitarian worldview’ which leads to a struggle that cannot be creative, and to a Betrieb, a bustling activity, which is consistent with the gigantism of machination that characterizes modern times, such a struggle being able to be fought only by ‘propaganda’ and ‘apologetics’. 7
Heidegger was therefore able to see, already in the mid-1930s, that in this ‘machine’ that was the Nazi propaganda something even more dangerous was brewing: the reign of the domination of technology, i.e. of a global mode of thought and action characterized by the calculability and limitless exploitation of everything, the final product of the ‘Enlightenment’, which, as a demythologizing process, is nevertheless beginning to succumb to the ‘bewitchment of technology’ which is nothing else than ‘a sign of this enchantment by which everything is pushing toward calculability, use, selection, convenience and control’. 8 Nazism therefore lets the domination of reason in the western world clearly appear, a domination about which Heidegger will dare to say, in the 1940s, that it is ‘the most unremitting enemy of thinking’. 9 By saying this, Heidegger does not fall, as many want to believe, into irrationalism or anti-rationalism. It is rather, on the contrary, as he clearly intimates, rationalism becoming dogmatic which is the basis of irrationalism and anti-rationalism, since the ‘despotism of reason’ pushes back all questioning on the origin of reason into the darkness of irrationalism and remains unable to acknowledge that cogitatio and ratio, thinking and calculation have, since Descartes, become identical. What Nazism has therefore brought to light in the most brutal manner is nothing else than the very essence of the Occident.
Has Heidegger’s critical analysis of western metaphysics succeeded in explaining the specificity of Nazism? This has to be left to the personal judgement of each of us, but what has nevertheless to be acknowledged is not only that this critical analysis of the origin of Nazism is due to Heidegger himself, but also that it was developed during the 1930s and not only after the fall of the Nazi regime and the victory of the Allies.