Abstract
It is well known that Martin Heidegger was famous in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s not only for his brilliant mind, but also for his charisma as a professor. He had legions of students that admired and looked up to him, and he represented an intellectual father figure to more than a few of them. It is not surprising then that one aspect of Heidegger’s relationship with National Socialism that has captivated people’s attention is the way that this affected – or failed to affect – his personal relationships with his students and colleagues. While the other articles in this volume deal with intellectual engagement with Heidegger after 1933, this one looks at the personal responses from a number of Heidegger’s associates in order to understand why some were able to reconcile with him after the war and why others were not.
One of the most striking features of the ‘Heidegger Controversy’, as it has come to be called, is the inept and disappointing way that Heidegger responded in the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than being honest about his views and actions, acknowledging their impact and harm, and sincerely apologizing, he did quite the opposite. He obfuscated his actions, failed to acknowledge any moral harm and never gave friends, students, or colleagues even a word of apology. The only kernel of remorse he allowed was in a private letter to his friend Karl Jaspers where he acknowledged feeling ‘ashamed’ (Wolin, 1993: 146). In short, not only were his actions around National Socialism shocking and morally repugnant, his behavior after the fact did very little to help those who wanted to renew a relationship with him after the war; in fact, he made it as hard as possible to forgive him. Yet despite this, many of his friends and students struggled with how to reconcile their personal relationship with Heidegger in light of his support of National Socialism. What we see below is that though some friends, such as Herbert Marcuse and Karl Jaspers, wanted to reconcile with him after 1945, they were unable to do so not because of his support for National Socialism but because of his failure to respond to and apologize for this support. Despite this, others, like Hannah Arendt, were able to reconcile with Heidegger. This article explores the basis for their different responses.
Jaspers and Marcuse: Disillusionment and silence
Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers had been friends since the 1920s. They had much in common intellectually, such as a distaste for academic philosophy, a keen interest in Kierkegaard, and a concern for philosophy as it related to human existence. Their intellectual relationship, though fruitful, was always bumpy: in 1921 Heidegger critiqued Jaspers’ The Psychology of World-Views, and Jaspers in turn responded coolly to Being and Time when it came out in 1927. On a personal level, however, they considered each other good friends. Of their relationship, Heidegger once wrote: ‘Since September 1923 I have lived with you on the assumption that you are my friend. That is the all-bearing faith in love’ (Safranski ,1998: 387).
After years of friendship, however, Heidegger’s support for National Socialism in 1933 naturally caused a rift in their relationship. They broke off communication, but this break was less intentional than one would imagine. Jaspers writes: ‘Heidegger did not plan to break off contact with us. It just happened. Myself, I did not, after 1945, decide never to see him again, it just came about that way, unintentionally’ (Safranski, 1998: 386). That Jaspers’ break with Heidegger after 1945 was unintentional on his part reflects something interesting. Though Jaspers obviously disapproved of Heidegger’s support of National Socialism, this alone was not sufficient to cause him to completely reject Heidegger. Though it saddened him, he still held on to the hope that their relationship could continue. ‘The infinite sadness’, wrote Jaspers to Heidegger in 1949, ‘since 1933 and the present state of affairs, under which my German soul is suffering more and more, did not unite us, but silently separated us’ (ibid.: 373). He wanted to start their correspondence again in 1949 because of the importance of their relationship, ‘holding firm to something that was and that cannot be just nothing’ (ibid.). Heidegger eagerly took up this opportunity.
Jaspers and Heidegger began corresponding again between 1949 and 1950. It was at this time that Heidegger wrote what Richard Wolin has argued was his only expression of contrition over his behavior during the Nazi years (Wolin, 1993: 146): ‘The reason why I did not visit your house after 1933 was not because a Jewish woman was living there, but because I was, quite simply, ashamed’ (Safranski, 1998: 386). After thanking Heidegger for this ‘unreserved statement’ and a few birthday wishes, Jaspers remained silent for two years. When Hannah Arendt visited Jaspers in 1956 and told him she was going to be visiting Heidegger, Jaspers demanded that she sever all ties with her former teacher (to which Arendt responded with fury). The reason for Jaspers’ change of heart regarding Heidegger is not totally clear. Some suggest that he might have been angered by what he took to be Heidegger’s critique of him (Wolin, 1993). Though this may account for part of it, it seems clear that Jaspers’ wound was much deeper than that. Though Jaspers struggled to reconcile himself with Heidegger, he simply could not. Heidegger was a ‘unique figure’, for Jaspers, ‘in a philosophically poor world’ (Safrankski, 1998: 388), and he struggled with the loyalty their friendship had engendered in him (Jaspers wrote that he had remained publicly silent about Heidegger since 1933 ‘out of loyalty to good memories’ [Wolin, 1993: 147]). Yet he simply could not forgive Heidegger. Jaspers’ very last note on Heidegger, written shortly before he died in 1969, is telling:
The philosophers on their day have always met high up in the mountains on a wide rocky plateau. From there one looks down on the snow-capped mountains.… There the philosophers engage in an astonishing merciless struggle. They are seized by powers that contend with one another through their thoughts, through human thoughts.… It seems that today there is no one left there to be encountered. Yet to me it seemed as though, seeking in vain in the eternal speculations for men who might think them important, I encountered but one, and no one else. This one, however, was my polite enemy. For the powers we served were incompatible. Soon it seemed that we could not talk to each other at all. Joy turned into pain, into a strange hopeless pain, as though a chance that was within arm’s reach had been missed. This is what happened to me with Heidegger. (Safranski, 1998: 389; emphases added)
Though Heidegger’s friendship to Jaspers was clearly a vital part of his life, both intellectually and personally, it nonetheless could not endure what Jaspers took to be Heidegger’s insufficient response to his actions in 1933.
The trajectory of Herbert Marcuse’s relationship with Heidegger took a similar path though neither his struggle nor his wound was as deep as Jaspers’. Marcuse was a student of Heidegger’s between 1928 and 1932 and it is clear that the teacher had a deep impact on his student. For many, Marcuse’s work can be understood as a synthesis of Marxism and Heideggerian existentialism. So deep was Heidegger’s influence on him that many consider him, even in his later work, to be a Heideggerian Marxist (Wolin, 2001). Ultimately, he remained intellectually indebted to Heidegger but personally estranged from him.
Though Marcuse was stunned by Heidegger’s support for National Socialism, he was one of the first people to argue that one could see latent political ideas in Being and Time that could lead to support for National Socialism. For example, Marcuse suggested that his focus on being-toward-death could be used to justify the emphasis on sacrifice as an end in itself (Wolin, 2001: 164). Despite this intellectual break with Heidegger, Marcuse continued to struggle with his relationship to him. At the end of the war, Marcuse was living in the United States and working for the State Department. It would have been understandable if he never tried to reconcile with Heidegger. Yet he did – despite living in the United States and against the advice of his fellow émigrés. In 1947 he returned to Germany and visited Heidegger in Todtnauberg. Marcuse claimed that he took this trip to search for some sign of repentance in Heidegger. He found none.
Though his visit had been profoundly disappointing, he continued to send Heidegger care packages and believed that he still owed something to ‘the man from whom I learned philosophy from 1928–1932’ (Wolin, 1993: 158). He and Heidegger continued to exchange letters between 1947 and 1948 until a particularly disingenuous letter from Heidegger forced him to stop. Marcuse had asked Heidegger to give a statement ‘that would clearly and finally free you from such an identification [with the Nazi regime], a statement that honestly expresses your current attitude about the events that have occurred’ (ibid.: 161). To this, Heidegger responded by dissembling, obfuscating and equating the Holocaust to the damage done by the Allies in Eastern Germany. Marcuse was outraged. ‘You write’, replied Marcuse, ‘that everything that I say about the extermination of the Jews applies just as much to the Allies.… With this sentence don’t you stand outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible – outside of Logos?’ Heidegger’s attempt to exculpate himself, rather than apologize for his behavior, had placed him beyond the realm of human communication for Marcuse. Morally, Heidegger’s letter also outraged him. ‘How is it possible’, wrote Marcuse, ‘to equate the torture, the maiming, and the annihilation of millions of men with the forcible relocation of population groups who suffered none of these outrages.’ Later in the letter he writes: ‘On the basis of your argument, if the Allies had reserved Auschwitz and Buchenwald – and everything that transpired there – for the “Eastern Germans” and the Nazis, then the account would be in order!’ (ibid.: 163). This, not surprisingly, was the end of their relationship.
What the stories of both Marcuse’s and Jaspers’ postwar relationship with Heidegger have in common is that what forced the final break in their respective friendships was not Heidegger’s connection to National Socialism itself, but the way in which Heidegger responded to it. Both Marcuse and Jaspers clearly struggled with how to respond to him and wanted very badly to be able to reconcile with him. But Heidegger did not respond in the way that they needed him to, morally, intellectually, or personally. That is why their relationship ended in disillusionment and silence. Given this, it is all the more surprising that things turned out so differently for his relationship with Hannah Arendt.
Arendt: The grace of friendship
It is not hard to become fascinated with the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, two of the great thinkers of the 20th century who were involved in a passionate romance and lifelong friendship. Were this all there were to the story, it would be interesting enough. But if we add the broader political and social context to it, it becomes even more gripping. Their relationship began in the mid-1920s in Germany, against the background of the rise of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. Heidegger was a well-known and popular philosophy professor; Arendt a brilliant young Jewish student. She became one of the most important theoreticians of the Holocaust and he became one of the most infamous supporters of National Socialism. Yet despite this, a set of circumstances that one would expect to push two people as far apart as is humanly possible, they maintained a lifelong friendship that both parties appeared to treasure and rely upon. 1
Perhaps the most well-known book on this subject is Elzbieta Ettinger’s small book entitled simply Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1997). The author had access to the then unpublished correspondence between Arendt and Heidegger, and from this, painted a very particular picture of their relationship. Arendt was portrayed as a submissive woman, eager to please the father figure she saw in Heidegger, and consequently willing to overlook and downplay his relationship to the Nazi regime. Heidegger was portrayed as manipulative and scheming, wanting to turn Arendt at first into his lover in Germany, and later into his apologist in America. Their relationship was reduced to their psychological deficiencies, with each party trying to get from the other something that was missing from his or her own life, though without the self-conscious awareness to know that this was so.
Such a reading of their relationship is unfortunate on a number of levels. As Jacques Taminiaux has pointed out, the book entirely neglects their scholarly work. On his reading, Arendt, far from being a docile manipulated woman, is engaged in a dialogue with Heidegger’s ideas throughout her career (Taminiaux, 1997). Taminiaux’s analysis complicates the simplistic and reductive picture drawn by Ettinger and shows that Arendt’s fundamental categories – action, speech, judgment, etc. – were not simply written with the aim of pleasing her teacher, but to rebuke what she saw as the deficiencies in his work.
Yet what neither reading helps us to fully understand is why Arendt was able to forgive Heidegger for his involvement with and support of National Socialism to such an extent that she was able to renew their relationship after the war, and, in many ways, deepen the personal bond that existed between them. If one looks at their correspondence, especially towards the end of their lives, one sees intimacy, tenderness and a bond that is genuinely moving. Indeed, after the war, Heidegger revealed his affair with Arendt to his wife and was able to insist openly to her that he and Arendt shared a spiritual bond. By the end of the war, Arendt was happily married, living in New York City, and had established herself as one of the leading German ex-patriot intellectuals in America. Yet despite all that she had achieved, she felt it important to renew her relationship with Heidegger and ultimately went to great lengths to help Heidegger get translated and published in the English-speaking world. If we are looking for an explanation for this that goes beyond simply psychologizing (that Arendt needed Heidegger as a father figure, was still in love with him despite being happily married, and still needed to please him and receive his approbation, etc.), we need to turn to her writing itself. Ettinger, of course, suggests that Arendt needed to exculpate him not out of a sense of justice or loyalty, but ‘out of her own need to save her pride and dignity’ (Ettinger, 1997: 79). While this may or may not be true of her personal motivation, her act of reconciliation was at least rooted in her long-held philosophical views about human relationships. What I want to suggest below is that we can make sense of Arendt’s view of Heidegger’s past via two concepts that are central to her work, namely, forgiveness and love.
It is often said that Arendt forgave Heidegger for his Nazi past but it is worth inquiring into precisely what Arendt would have understood by forgiveness in this context. When forgiveness is used in common speech, it is often used in the phrase ‘to forgive and to forget’, as if forgiving also entails forgetting about the offense. That is not, however, what Arendt means by the term. Forgiveness, on Arendt’s account, ‘one of the greatest human capacities and perhaps the boldest of human actions’ (Arendt, 1994: 308), is the only human remedy to the irreversibility of human action. To forgive, in her view, is to release a person from the consequences of what he or she has done in order for that person to continue acting and to prevent his or her being confined to a single deed that could never be recovered from (Arendt, 1998: 237). Forgiveness is particularly important for the kinds of everyday trespasses that are ‘in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations. Such mistakes need forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly’ (ibid.: 240).
In this sense, forgiveness is not merely a reaction to deed, but an action in its own right insofar as it is unexpected and unconditioned by the act which provoked it. It further has the character of action in that like action it possesses the capacity to reveal. She writes: ‘Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal … affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it’ (Arendt, 1998: 241). In this way it is similar to love which also possesses this capacity to reveal who a person is – that ineffable essence that is distinct from what a person is, that is, all the traits that can be objectively listed about a person.
It is clear from this summary why Arendt would have felt forgiveness appropriate for Heidegger. She certainly did not see his actions as a kind of willed or radical evil, but the result of an error in judgment that, while blameworthy, was not a reason to imprison a person in his deed. She quotes Jesus as saying that the reason we forgive people is that ‘they know not what they do’. Of course this is also what is controversial about Arendt’s action – many claim that Heidegger knew exactly what he was doing, benefited from National Socialism as much as he could, and only needed forgiveness when his side lost. Consequently, Arendt was either deliberately downplaying his actions or else had been duped by Heidegger into believing that he had not really known what he was doing.
I do not think that this latter assessment is correct. It was clear that over time Arendt knew – as much as anybody did at the time – the extent of Heidegger’s involvement and even considered him to be a ‘murderer’ for his involvement in the end of Husserl’s life. She certainly did not underestimate what he had done or turn a blind eye to it. Yet for her, forgiveness is still applicable in this situation. She forgave what Heidegger had done for the sake of who he was. For her, the person, the unique individual, took precedence over the deed and 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. We may judge that to have been the right or the wrong decision, but it is clear that this was not simply the reaction of a love-struck woman; though no doubt grounded in love, it was a powerful and thoughtful action in precisely Arendt's sense of the term – a deed which begins something anew.
But forgiveness is not the only response that Arendt had to Heidegger’s past. Another important response to the past is reconciliation, which is grounded on understanding. Reconciliation differs from forgiveness for Arendt in that forgiveness is a single action designed to respond to a particular deed. Reconciliation, though, requires understanding which is in certain ways much more difficult to achieve than forgiveness. Understanding ‘as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is 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’ (Arendt, 1994: 307–8). Reconciliation, I think, is the more appropriate way to understand Arendt’s response to Heidegger insofar as she spent a large amount of her intellectual life grappling both with Heidegger’s ideas and with his Nazi past. Taminiaux has documented Arendt's lifelong indirect intellectual dialogue with Heidegger. But we need only look at her later writings on conscience and moral judgment to see her attempt to understand ‘what went wrong’, so to speak, with Heidegger. That Arendt uncritically took Heidegger back after the war is belied by this body of work. It really seems that Arendt spent a good part of her life trying to understand how someone so knowledgeable, and in many ways so thoughtful, could have failed so profoundly when it came to moral judgment. In that way, we can understand much of Arendt’s work as an attempt to reconcile herself with Heidegger and, consequently, to a world in which people like Heidegger can have such an effect.
Finally, I think Arendt’s understanding of love sheds light on the complex and often puzzling relationship she had with Heidegger. When Arendt was a student, she left Marburg where she was working with Heidegger, and moved to Heidelberg to work with Karl Jaspers. With him she wrote a dissertation entitled Love and Saint Augustine (Arendt, 1996). While in one way, it is quite odd that a thinker who is best known for her political concepts should begin her career on something so seemingly impractical as a philosophical analysis of the concept of love in a late-antiquity Roman Catholic thinker like Augustine; in another way, it is not. Love for Arendt is one of the powers that allow us to live together with others, despite our limitations and weaknesses. A passage from The Origins of Totalitarianism explains, in part, why Arendt was able to love Heidegger throughout her life, despite his actions:
All that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis [I want you to be]’, without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (Arendt, 1978: 301)
Love, for Arendt, is an ‘incalculable grace’ and, along with friendship, is the only capacity we have to deal with what remains ultimately mysterious about the human condition and who we are as individuals. Love ultimately is beyond reason, or at least there is no reason that can be given for this ‘supreme and unsurpassable affirmation’. That she was able to bestow this supreme affirmation on Heidegger despite her knowledge of his past and the harm it caused her (both directly and indirectly) is perhaps less surprising given the weight she placed the importance of the mysterious and unpredictable elements of human life. Contra Ettinger, far from being a passive dupe, Arendt did take a strong stand about Heidegger’s past but the conclusion she came to was not rejection and abandonment, but love. Because love for her is something that can never be fully explained, it seems that readers of Arendt will always have to struggle with understanding her response to Heidegger.