Abstract
With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become impossible to avoid Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. There has been the expected controversy with Heideggerians on the defensive and the philosopher’s detractors condemning his work outright. But there has been little serious exploration of the matter aside from several recent works. This article builds on this literature on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and concludes that an anti-Semitic narrative lies at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the oblivion of Being as nihilism. Moreover, Heidegger adopts the narrative framework set up by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. In the end, we assert that Heidegger advocates a kind of war against Judaism that seeks to eradicate the Jewish influence in the western tradition. Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ anti-Semitism aims to overcome the nihilism of the ‘Jewish Christian’ revenge [Rache] against death, a nihilism that has evolved into the technological effort to make everything secure.
No Greek god is a god that commands.
1
The recent publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks occasioned considerable comment largely because they contain statements that were interpreted as providing definitive proof of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. For some these statements reflect a crude and clichéd anti-Semitic attitude, for others they merely confirm Heidegger’s ugly and cowardly acquiescence to the platitudes of National Socialism, an acquiescence that is now all the clearer in the admiration Heidegger expressed for Hitler to his brother Fritz. 2 While these views have their merit, we think that, with a few notable exceptions, they do not fully address the extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. From our reading of the Black Notebooks, we come to the conclusion that Judaism has a central, if rarely overt, role to play in Heidegger’s narrative of overcoming metaphysics; indeed, Judaism and the Jewish ‘falsification’ of the Greek beginning are responsible for the transformation of metaphysics into nihilism. 3 In this light, Heidegger’s clarion call to overcome metaphysics is also a call to overcome the Jewish appropriation of metaphysics. Heidegger seems to agree with the National Socialist war against Jewry to the extent it is a war against the Jewish appropriation of metaphysics, against Jewish nihilism, against the slave revolt declared by Friedrich Nietzsche. 4
The evidence for these propositions is abundant but has to be put together with care because Heidegger is, with important exceptions, rarely direct in the currently published and edited version of the Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe or GA). Concerns about editorial policies in regard to the GA have been persistent since publication of the earliest volumes and were articulated best by Theodore Kisiel in a famous article. Of all people, Kisiel, who wrote the authoritative text on the drafts of Being and Time, knew how difficult editorial work on Heidegger’s manuscripts could be – even a casual glance at the multiple layers of text for the lecture courses with their many corrections in various inks can affirm his judgement. Aside from these specific difficulties, having to do with the fact that the GA is explicitly not a critical edition but a so-called ‘Ausgabe letzter Hand’, a more fundamental difficulty is that access to the manuscripts has been restricted to very few, principally the Heidegger family, their intimates or other Vertrauenspersonen. Critical voices have not been granted significant access to the manuscripts. Hence, it is easy to understand why scholars are suspicious not only about the scholarly rigor of the GA but, more importantly, about the possible suppression of passages potentially harmful to Heidegger’s reputation as well. The Black Notebooks are no exception in both regards. In 2015, one of the editors of the GA, Peter Trawny, indicated that he had been asked by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, a main editor as well as a friend and disciple of Heidegger, to strike out a particularly disturbing anti-Semitic passage in volume 69 of the GA. The publisher reacted strongly to this claim and asked confirmation of similar suggestions from all other editors of material from the 1930s and 1940s. No confirmation was forthcoming. Von Herrmann criticized Trawny quite severely, both in the press and in an article published in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, for sensationalizing Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. These quarrels will no doubt continue long into the future, even after the archives are opened in 2026 and the entire work moves to the public domain (2046). 5
Alongside these controversies about the GA, Heidegger engages for the most part in what we may call an argument by insinuation, and when he is most direct he is still careful to cultivate a certain potentially exculpatory ambiguity – no doubt to avoid giving rhetorical advantage to his opponents. 6 The narrative universe Heidegger creates in the 1930s features an almost mythic struggle between those opponents, the darkening forces of nihilism – Bolshevism, Marxism, egalitarianism, rationality, the United States and the Soviet Union – and the heroic counter-forces, Greek and German, that seek to liberate the world by turning to an other beginning. Heidegger never counts Judaism among the liberating forces. To the contrary, Judaism and ‘Jewish’ Christianity are the twin sources of corruption behind the emergence of egalitarianism, rationality, Bolshevism and Marxism.
If one ties the associations together deftly, one finds that Heidegger consistently holds Christianity – and that is Jewish Christianity since for Heidegger there seems to be no other – responsible for nihilism, the illness of the modern world;
7
hence, Nietzsche’s importance for Heidegger. Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt in On the Genealogy of Morality is an inescapable text describing the ‘deepest and most sublime hatred’ of all – that of the Jews, a hatred, we might add, appearing in its ‘most sinister and irresistible form’ in Christ himself.
8
Indeed, Heidegger creates a metaphysical fantasy (or myth) to rival Nietzsche’s account of Jewish cunning whereby the strong are seduced by the weak and thereby lose their true essence in an enervating deception. This loss continues to this day, if in the altered form of modern technology, or what Heidegger called Machenschaft in the 1930s, insofar as technology uproots the human from its essence as a mortal being. In a telling passage from Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1936–8), Heidegger links together in a single sentence the slave revolt led by Jews, Christianity and the modern technocratic regime of beings and calculability (here in the particular form of Bolshevism) as follows: Bolshevism is originally Western, a European possibility; the rise of the masses, industry, technology, the dying out of Christianity; insofar, however, as the supremacy of reason, qua equalization of everyone, is merely a consequence of Christianity, which is itself basically of Jewish origin [cf. Nietzsche’s idea of the slave revolt in morals], Bolshevism is in fact Jewish; but then Christianity is also basically Bolshevist!
9
Even though the Black Notebooks have appeared only very recently, they have already garnered a considerable amount of scholarly attention. The scholarly reception of the notebooks by some tends to view them as private rants by a philosopher who became unhinged; this view protects the ‘scientific’ Heidegger of the 1920s from the supposedly ‘mad’ Nazi anti-Semite of the 1930s. 10 Other scholars have attempted to offer a more nuanced reading of the notebooks, not seeking to exclude them from Heidegger’s otherwise ‘proper’ philosophical work but rather exploring how they might be connected to it. In regard to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism specifically, Peter Trawny has discussed some of the primary sources written during the 1930s and Peter Gordon and Donatella Di Cesare as well as others, in a volume edited by Marion Heinz and Sidonie Keller, have drawn out some of the implications of the new evidence now available to us. 11 Despite these important contributions, we do not think that the scholarship hitherto has fully come to terms with the radical content and implications of Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical anti-Semitism’. 12 Indeed, a basic question remains unanswered: What precisely is his ‘metaphysical anti-Semitism’?
We suggest that Heidegger advocated – and never renounced – a kind of war against Judaism. This is a claim that we do not take lightly. The subsidiary claim, that Heidegger became disappointed with National Socialism largely because it failed to take on Judaism effectively as a ‘metaphysical question’, may be equally problematic. 13 Yet, if we are to grasp the philosophical legacy of Heidegger more fully, accurately and soberly, it seems to us that we have to come to terms with what is potentially most distressing in his thought without taking the ‘short cuts’ of apology or outright condemnation. 14 In this regard, our article seeks to provide a threefold contribution to the emerging scholarship on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism: (1) by showing the importance of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism to Heidegger, a debt Heidegger himself directly acknowledges in the important passage cited above from Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) and, if more subtly, in other writings; (2) by demonstrating the radicality of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as an ‘anti-metaphysical’ fantasy that views the need for transcendent norms not only as Platonic but as essentially Judaic as well – in the end, the need for norms as a means of imposing a transcendent, egalitarian authority seems to be almost wholly Judaic for Heidegger; and (3) by showing that Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics involved eradicating ‘Jewish Christianity’ as a nihilistic attitude towards the world that rejects Dasein as a being-towards-death. 15 Of these three contributions, we think the last one might ultimately be our most original point: Heidegger’s anti-Semitism consists in his hostility to the ‘Jewish Christian’ attitude towards suffering. One might counter this claim by saying that it attributes to Heidegger a view that is Nietzsche’s but not his own; a critic might doubt that Heidegger expresses the kind of concern about suffering that Nietzsche does. We think the passage above from the Contributions suggests otherwise, as does Heidegger’s central concern with death. We suffer because we die as Heidegger himself says directly. 16 And Heidegger maintains that the western metaphysical tradition, in no small part because of the Jews, has shunned our mortal lot. Jewish Christianity has uprooted us from our relation to being as dying beings.
Our account begins with an examination of two sections from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality that provide an instructive context within which to view Heidegger’s most aggressive comments concerning the role of Judaism in the Black Notebooks. We then proceed to examine those comments in detail as sketching out a narrative or cosmic fantasy in which the Jews are the supreme enemy in the sense that they represent for Heidegger, as they did for many other German conservatives since the Kaiserreich, everything that he opposed in the modern era – technology, Bolshevism, Americanism, and so on. ‘Judaism’ is a figuration – or perhaps a ‘cultural code’ – that stands for an attitude towards the world which Heidegger’s revolutionary thought seeks to overcome. 17 Specifically, we argue that Heidegger’s rejection of Judaism amounts to a rejection of the attitude to death and suffering that he associates with the Jews, an attitude that turns us away from what is truly ours – death – to a deracinated existence aimed at ensuring the extension of life at any cost.
I
Few writers have said more condemning things about the Jews with less consequence to their reputation than Nietzsche. The Jewish slave revolt at the center of the first treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality is a primary case in point. In sections 7 and 8 of that treatise Nietzsche develops an argument against the Jews in the context of an historical or pseudo-historical account of the origins of our morality. 18 While offering a tale of origins may be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse (1755), the association of modern European civilization with the Jewish slave revolt is an innovation of Nietzsche’s that explains modern civilization as the consequence of the triumph of a slave revolt so cunning and seductive that the masters quickly acquiesce.
The key term is revenge [die Rache]. Nietzsche calls the revenge of the priestly class, spiritual revenge [geistliche Rache], a revenge that emerges with great force and power because it is an expression of hatred resulting from impotence [Ohnmacht]. The priest is the one who becomes a priest precisely because he lacks the healthy physicality of the warrior who is not afraid to act. The priest cannot overcome the warrior on the warrior’s own ground; afraid of the warrior, he seeks to overcome that fear through a form of combat – the re-evaluation of the values of the warrior. Nietzsche extends this notion of combat to one among peoples. He considers the Jewish people to be the ‘priestly people’ who have brought about in their quest for revenge a formidable re-evaluation of their enemies’ values. Through this re-evaluation of warrior values the Jews have managed to seduce and ensnare their enemies, all those who have held power over them.
This ‘Jewish’ re-evaluation of warrior values shows itself most starkly in its transformation of what is divine. If the warrior class evinces its own values of decisive action, violence and brutality without remorse – values that the warrior class does not even consider as such – the Jewish re-evaluation first recognizes and rejects those values, asserting in their stead the supreme value of suffering [Elend] – those who suffer are divine. They are not divine in the sense they are like God, but they are divine to the degree they suffer and maintain a faith in God, like Job. The truly divine and ‘blessed’ person is one who has suffered, who has lived through any number of depredations, while remaining steadfast. In place of the warrior who cares nothing for pain, the properly blessed accepts pain and suffering as creating the foundations for a communal life – the Jewish city emerges as the predecessor to Thomas Hobbes insofar as the most important aspect of that city is communal security.
Suffering becomes the highest value, and a most seductive one, born of hatred for the warrior class and the ‘natural’ attitude it represents. Nietzsche’s formulation of this transformation bears citation in full: …from the trunk of the tree of revenge and hatred, Jewish hatred – the deepest and most sublime, indeed a hatred which created ideals and changed values, the like of which has never been seen on earth – there grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime kind of love: – and what other trunk could it have grown out of?…But don’t make the mistake of thinking that it had grown forth as a denial of the thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! This love grew out of the hatred, as its crown, as the triumphant crown expanding ever wider in the purest brightness and radiance of the sun, the crown which, as it were, in the realm of light and height, was pursuing the aims of that hatred, victory, spoils, seduction with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were burrowing ever more thoroughly and greedily into everything that was deep and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodiment of the gospel of love, this ‘redeemer’ bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, to sinners – was he not seduction in its most sinister and irresistible form, seduction and the circuitous route to just those very Jewish values and innovative ideals?
19
These Jewish values are decadent: they seduce and enervate. They are responsible for the war without death that is capitalism and the bourgeois who seeks nothing more than comfort and peace. These Jewish values, which covet comfort and freedom from fear, lead to the Nietzschean last man who is unable to do anything more than preserve his life regardless of whether it is worth preserving or not, such questions no longer having any relevance: the last man lives longest. If we employ a certain degree of hyperbole here, we do so in order to emphasize three crucial connections with Heidegger and, indeed, a whole anti-Semitic tradition: (1) the Jews shape our worldview, triumphing over an earlier – and far healthier – tradition; (2) they do so through a cunning deception whereby the victim, the poor slave, is actually the aggressor; and (3) peace ends up as a concealed form of war.
The breadth of Nietzsche’s narrative deserves emphasis: Christianity is the product of a Jewish revolt, and, as we know, Christianity is ‘Platonism for the “people”’. 20 The creation of a supersensible world above our own is adopted as the bulwark of authority allowing the servant to become master by convincing his erstwhile master, the warrior, that this is not the case. The claim that ‘we are all servants’ shows the ironical situation. For the claim itself comes from the servant who usurps the master’s authority by declaring a higher authority that benefits the servant at the cost of the master and which the servant is evidently far more capable of interpreting than the master. The peace of equality is a war against the master, the warrior, who becomes lost in the culture created for him by the servant.
II
In the lecture course Peter Trawny identifies as introducing an apocalyptic narrative of salvation into Heidegger’s thought, Heidegger refers to a signal fact: that Greek thinking has been falsified by Roman and Jewish-Christian elements. 21 The question arises: In what way has Greek thinking been falsified? The standard view – to the extent there is one – is that Greek thinking in its original energy and adventurousness was lost as soon as Greek ideas were turned to purposes inimical to their original contexts, becoming doctrines or models of thinking, like a codified logic. One of the basic narratives Heidegger develops is the narrative of decline (and decay) that begins with the Roman appropriation of Greek thought. For Heidegger the Romans are not a distinctively philosophical people and show themselves incapable of creatively developing Greek thought. To the contrary, the Romans are inclined to what Heidegger calls ‘Lehrphilosophie’, that is, to assertion of a doctrine that all can and must follow. 22
Heidegger situates his narrative of falsification within one of the basic narratives of his thinking – that of the decline of truth into correctness. This narrative is propelled to the forefront of Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s with the delivery of his talk, ‘On the Essence of Truth’, in 1930. 23 Heidegger frequently refers to this talk – first published in revised form in 1943 – and he returns again and again to the distinction between truth as disclosure and truth as conformity or correctness in his writings of the 1930s. The basic Heideggerian narrative of the decline of truth assumes a point of origin for a given truth, which is first and foremost the disclosure of some being as the being it is. This point of disclosure becomes normative such that the being as initially disclosed becomes the point of reference for all subsequent members of that same class. Hence, Heidegger maintains that any given thing, say a tree, was disclosed as such and in a certain way that became normative – that is, determinative for all subsequent claims of what a tree might be. These claims are based on the similarity of any subsequent tree to the tree as initially disclosed. For Heidegger, the Greek sense of truth as disclosure or ‘disclosive’ remains very much alive in Aristotle before settling into a regime of norms or normalization that forgets the point of initial disclosure.
Roman thought is inherently normative and imperialistic. It takes over Greek thinking without thinking it. Roman thought amplifies the tendency in Platonism to examine things as belonging to a class unified by a normative picture or íδέα. The íδέα is similar to a command [imperium] in the sense that no thing that does not reflect the íδέα can belong to the class unified by it. To be a thing, is to conform to an íδέα, and no thing that cannot be made to conform to an íδέα can have any being at all – what has no íδέα is not. Conforming is the relation of normalizing equivalence that rules over different things as a means of unifying them by eliminating their particularity as inherently problematic or defective. The íδέα affirms its rule over a class by eliminating particularity – what does not conform to the íδέα is false, and falsehood must be eliminated. The truth as correctness commands conformity to a normative model and the eradication of falsehood as deviation or mistake. 24
The Christian appropriation is the crucial step that transforms Roman rule from temporal political rule to a non-temporal rule that extends far beyond the ambitions of the Roman Empire. Christianity is in this sense both Roman and Jewish, both norm-giving and extending norm-giving power to a God that holds us all in common servitude. 25 It is not merely the commanding role of this God that is so different from the Greek gods, it is also the command itself – that we become like God – a command essentially opposed to the Greek tragic imperative to respect one’s place in the cosmos and accept the burden of mortality rather than cowering away from it in fear.
To emulate God as a command invites human beings to become capable of command themselves, a distinctively Christian element. Hence, it may seem that the command to emulate God is the antithesis of the slave revolt in morality. It is not, however, because Heidegger interprets the command to become like God as stemming from a slavishly fearful attitude towards death. The ideal of perfection that underpins the command to assimilate oneself to God derives from a desire to be saved from the terror of death. The fear of death creates the slave who imagines a savior God to shelter and protect him from the great imperfection of the human being, namely its awareness of its mortality.
The slave’s fear of death creates revenge. If in On the Genealogy of Morality this revenge stems from impotence and seeks to re-evaluate the knightly-aristocratic values, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra it is directed against a far different master – time. Nietzsche writes: ‘This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will’s revulsion against time and its “It was.”’ 26 Heidegger comments on this sentence at some length in the last lecture course he delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1951–2 before his official retirement (and the first course he was permitted to deliver after the war). He focuses on what time means in this sentence.
Heidegger asks: Why does ‘time’ prompt revenge? Why is time viewed as something that one scorns? The answer he gives is somewhat complex. It hinges on the way that time has long been conceived in western history going back at least to Aristotle but finding its greatest expression in the slave revolt of ‘Jewish Christianity’. According to Heidegger, the western tradition has long thought of time as an actualized thing or being that we can ‘have’ or ‘measure’ like any other object we encounter in the world. Time, we say, is limited. We only ‘have’ so much of it because time is constantly passing: the ‘not yet now’ constantly passes into the ‘no longer now’. 27
This understanding of time as something that passes betrays a pessimism about one’s mortal lot for Heidegger; it betrays an attitude towards time – towards death – as a master that one fears. This fear of death reflects the view of the slave who wishes to be freed from the oppressive yoke of time as something that passes away. The slave laments and hates time so much that he dreams of becoming like God, of becoming a wholly different kind of being not burdened by suffering. The slave wants to be freed or saved from his mortal estate. This desire for salvation understood as security is nihilistic for Heidegger insofar as it derives from hatred of human fragility. 28
This nihilistic hatred of mortality culminates in the Christian promise of salvation in another world through the immortality of the soul, a promise that consolidates the centrality of salvation in western history. As Heidegger explains in one of his lectures on Nietzsche, titled ‘European Nihilism’, Christianity establishes salvation as the aim to which all human action becomes oriented: The Being of a being consists in its being created by God…[Christian doctrine] is a question of securing the salvation of individual immortal souls. All knowledge is tied to the order of salvation and stands in service to securing and promoting salvation. All history becomes oriented towards salvation: creation, the fall, redemption, last judgment.
29
What is new about the modern period as opposed to the Christian medieval age consists in the fact that man, independently and by his own effort, contrives to become certain and sure of his human being in the midst of beings as a whole. The essential Christian thought of the certitude of salvation is adopted, but such ‘salvation’ is not eternal, other-worldly bliss, and the way to it is not selflessness. The hale and the wholesome are sought exclusively in the free development of all the creative powers of man. Thus the question arises as to how we can attain and ground a certitude sought by man himself for his earthly life, concerning his own human being and the world. While in the medieval world it was precisely the path to salvation and the mode of transmitting truth [doctrina] that was firmly established, now the quest [Suchen] for new paths becomes decisive.
30
III
If salvation is the greatest product of revenge against time, then the Jews for Heidegger are most certainly the primary agents in western history who have advanced the metaphysical hatred and fear of death from which the ‘need’ for salvation arises. For the Jews have imagined and aggressively advanced not one but two powerful types of universal salvation: the Christian vision of salvation and the modern capitalistic form of salvation. 31 Both forms of salvation have spread remarkably across the world under the cunning appearance of universalism. The Christian conception of salvation requires little explanation, since the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, down to the flesh, says it clearly enough. But how precisely might capitalism be characterized as a form of salvation from time and death? This is a much more difficult form of salvation to grasp initially, for it does not even seem like salvation and therein lies its sinister power to control the world, the perfect kind of power to assign to the ‘secretive’ Jews. 32
While Heidegger himself does not use the word capitalism, what he calls Machenschaft describes all but in name the metaphysical basis of capitalism. According to the Grimm Dictionary, Machenschaft denotes something that has been made or produced: it denotes a product of human labor. As Heidegger says, ‘Machenschaft means the accordance of everything with producibility’. 33 This accordance of everything to production rests on an interpretation of Being and time that Heidegger views as an evasion of Dasein’s being-towards-death. Machenschaft turns away from death as a future possibility and from the pure ephemerality of time: it compels us to turn away from Being and time by creating a regime of beings and calculability.
Machenschaft aligns Being with beings. In this sense, it goes back to the earliest origins of metaphysics with Plato who established a productionist model whereby beings in this world partake in or assimilate to a pre-established prototype or idea [íδέα]. Plato interpreted Being in terms of a permanent being ‘existing’ in another world that can be apprehended by philosophical reasoning. Machenschaft is Platonic but of an inverted kind: the prototype is a physical one befitting of the English word for the Greek paradeigma and the beings it produces are hardly viewed merely as lesser or imperfect copies as they are in Plato’s system. On the contrary, beings are elevated as what is highest under the regime of Machenschaft. Beings are everything. Consider the great deal of energy invested in them in the modern era: beings are made, stored, transferred, consumed, and so on.
The tremendous amount of energy invested in beings is not purely physical. It is also mental or ‘rational’. Beings are calculated, which is a crucial aspect of Machenschaft. Calculability as the fundamental metaphysical basis of Machenschaft allows it to run as a system of equivalences that regulates and reduces the relation of all things to units of exchangeability. In this respect, the rise of modern mathematics creates the condition of possibility of Machenschaft. 34 For Machenschaft reduces everything to something that can be counted. Machenschaft even turns one of the most elusive and perplexing aspects of human existence, time, into a calculable being. Time is nothing other than something that one counts and manages under Machenschaft.
Given this basic discussion of Machenschaft, how does Heidegger relate Machenschaft to salvation and Jews? Regarding the latter first, the most obvious relation appears in some of the most blatant quotes from the Black Notebooks that have garnered significant attention over the past several years where Heidegger connects Jews with Machenschaft. Jews are carriers of ‘empty rationality’ who possess a ‘talent for calculation’:
35
The temporary [zeitweilig] increase in power of the Jews has, however, its ground in the fact that western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, offered a starting point for the expansion of an otherwise empty rationality and capacity to calculate [Rechenfähigkeit] that created its own dwelling place in the ‘spirit’ without allowing the hidden areas of decision to be grasped. The more fundamental and more original the future decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible they remain for this ‘race.’
36
In many masked forms of multiple violent forces Machenschaft demands in advance the completely surveyable calculability [Rechenhaftigkeit] of the subordinating dominion of beings for the purposes of accessible organization.
37
The last phrase is important to Heidegger’s overarching claim about the salvific aspect of Machenschaft. The uprooting of all beings from Being would mean the uprooting of Dasein as a being with a distinctive relationship to death and time. It would mean the total and complete rule of Machenschaft as a regime that reduces everything to calculable beings. Such a system of total domination is for Heidegger the modern form of salvation in that it offers an escape – unwittingly – from death as one’s ownmost possibility. It offers such an escape by turning Dasein away from Being as time. Machenschaft turns one away from the pure ephemerality and transience of one’s being in the world.
Herein lies the central issue around which Heidegger’s anti-Semitic fantasy turns. In Heidegger’s fantasy, the Jews, out of a profound fear of death, condemned this world of servitude to time as imperfect and imagined for their own aggrandizement freedom from suffering and death.
The slave cannot face the fragility of human existence and seeks to be freed from it either through religion or Machenschaft. In this sense, the Jewish slave revolt is nihilistic for Heidegger. The slave revolt creates a notion of salvation that is predicated upon leaving the imperfections of this world behind. The salvation imposed by the slave creates an ideal of perfection as being beyond suffering, beyond defect, beyond time – a being that rejects all the conditions of everyday existence. From this perspective, Heidegger claims that the salvation imposed by the slave is nihilistic not only in the sense that it rejects the conditions of everyday existence but also in the sense that it imposes an ideal that can be nothing for us since its perfection subtracts it from time itself. The Judeo-Christian model envisages salvation as a kind of self-immolation in perfection, an imitatio Christi of the most radical sort. Yet, it is one thing to refer to this ideal of emancipation as nihilistic and quite another to connect it with Machenschaft and technology, let alone hegemonic capitalism. In which way are these creations of the slave revolt nihilistic?
Heidegger’s immediate answer is that they are ways of forgetting Being so seductive that they allow us, in Heidegger’s ironic expression, to forget our forgetting of Being. They are ways of oblivion. This oblivion issues into a Heideggerian form of reification. Oblivion and reification go hand in hand. We forget Being and turn ourselves into beings or things. Reification is a form of oblivion and that oblivion is a rejection of mortal or temporal existence as much as the seductive afterlife. The oblivion of Being is thus an oblivion of temporal existence, merely another way in which human beings seek to avoid the transience of their existence and their subjection to the most complete and final master: death. The slave revolt and Jewish nihilism, within Heidegger’s terms, reject or at least evade death. Rejecting death is itself nihilism for Heidegger. Rather than taking on death as a burden [Not] to be borne with something akin to wonder or resourcefulness, the modern human being turns away from death and the suffering it brings in a spirit of revenge and hate that ends up as a rejection of human being so violent that it has transformed the earth into a massive graveyard where we seek nothing else but to be free of our human bondage. Rather than seeking to bear the burden of death, we seek to emancipate ourselves from it, an attitude that demonstrates that we are ruled by the attitude of the slave – we have turned metaphysics from a contest to appreciate the possibilities that our relation to death offers us into a dolorous striving to overcome our mortal state – the final end and triumph of technological transformation.
What seems to be most pernicious about this technological, nihilistic rejection of the world for Heidegger is its desire for global power that is disguised in the form of universalism: both Christianity and capitalism are Jewish power plays to gain world domination, not through physical force, but through the imposition of a specific set of values on the world. 39 Heidegger writes: ‘World Judaism, goaded on by the emigrants let out from Germany, is ungraspable everywhere, and it – with all its growing power – does not need to take part in any military actions, whereas we must sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.’ 40 With these words, Heidegger expresses an anti-Semitism cognate in spirit to that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although there is no direct evidence that he read this anti-Semitic tract. 41
This sense of ‘world conspiracy’ comes out very forcefully in the last volume of the Black Notebooks, GA 97, in the figures of Americanism and Bolshevism, the twin sources of a coming ‘Großfaschismus’ or ‘Great Fascism’ in Heidegger’s terms. 42 Indeed, these notebooks, covering the period from 1942 until 1948, show Heidegger utterly unrepentant in regard to Germany’s role in the war and the Holocaust. To the contrary, they show Heidegger’s growing sense of alarm that the possibilities he saw (too early as he says 43 ) in 1933 would be extinguished, and the German spirit exterminated. Given the context, it is not only surprising that Heidegger refers to the extermination of the German spirit by using two terms, ‘vernichten’ and ‘ausrotten’, intimately linked to the murder of European Jewry by the Nazis, 44 it is also provocative in a violent way. The violence associated with Heidegger’s interpretation of texts, his transformation of conventional meanings of terms, is no more evident than in this provocation.
But it is not limited to it either: Heidegger uses precisely the terms associated with the Nazi war on European Jewry to make the astonishing claim that the true victim of violence in the war is the German spirit, the only spirit that might save the West (and now the world) from the technocratic rationality he associates with the Jews and Machenschaft now in the form of the occupying powers and, in particular, the Americans. Let us take a brief look at how Heidegger reinterprets 4 crucial terms aside from ‘vernichten’ and ‘ausrotten’: (1) machinery of death [Tötungsmaschinerie]; (2) terror; (3) guilt; and (4) revenge.
Heidegger speaks of the ‘machinery of death’ being deployed by the Americans. 45 What kind of death? The death of the German spirit in the imposition of democracy on the Germans and attribution to them of blame for the war. If the atrocities of the Nazis do not strike Heidegger as anything but crimes, the greater terror is a fundamental event in which the chance of liberation from technological modernity – Machenschaft – in its American and Russian forms becomes impossible. 46 One tool of this terror, as Heidegger notes, is guilt to which Heidegger responds by turning it completely around. The Germans are not so much guilty for the Nazi atrocities as they are guilty for lacking the courage or vitality to resist Americanization, for capitulating too easily to the extermination of the German spirit by the Americans (and, presumably, the Russians too). 47
Heidegger’s use of the term ‘revenge’ to describe this process is very telling, especially if we connect it to Nietzsche’s characterization of Jewish revenge.
48
The slave revolt, which Heidegger sought to overcome by eradicating or overcoming its various manifestations in modernity, collected together under the term Machenschaft, has not been overcome; rather, the Heideggerian (and German) attempt to overcome Machenschaft came ‘too soon’ and ends by plunging not only Germany but the world into a ‘worldwide night’ [Weltnacht]
49
from which perhaps only a new god can save us. In short, Heidegger expresses a deep frustration and melancholy over the defeat of Germany as the ostensibly last bastion in the fight against world Jewry, i.e. the Judaization of the world, through a ‘flattening’, egalitarian politics that is reflected in the use of technology and Machenschaft: The German people has been ruined politically, militarily, economically and in its best vitality, as much through the criminal insanity of Hitler as through the exterminating will of foreign nations that has finally achieved success. One should not deceive oneself: it is now just as ridiculous to calculate [rechnen] history first from 1945 on and to chatter about oppression and injustice as it is to begin instead only from 1933. Perhaps it is simply mistaken to calculate in this way and to grasp history only historically, although the entire modern European world deals with the Germans, calculating in this way. Yet the latter do not yet notice what is going on and that this calculation has not yet come to a final accounting. The task remains: to extinguish the Germans spiritually and historically. One should not deceive oneself. An ancient spirit of revenge walks the earth. The spiritual history of this revenge will never be written – the revenge itself prevents this; this history does not even come to the attention of the public; the public is itself already revenge.
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IV
Heidegger envisages what appears to be an intricate and elusive interplay between the Platonic origin, the Roman transformation of that origin into doctrine and the Judeo-Christian transformation of both into a hegemonic doctrine that enshrines suffering as the central affliction and motivating force in human affairs – the slave seeks freedom above all else. Freedom, understood as emancipation, becomes the central preoccupation of modernity, a preoccupation oriented to the emancipation from suffering through technology. Only a slave dreams of freedom, and the slave comes to enslave others to the extent the pursuit of freedom becomes the primary and almost exclusive task of modernity. As we have discussed, Heidegger associates this pursuit of freedom from suffering with nihilism. 51
Indeed, the most far-reaching consequence of Heidegger’s polemical narrative against the destructive influence of the Judeo-Christian slave revolt is its attempt to transform the fundamental value attributed to suffering. One of Heidegger’s harshest critics, Theodor Adorno, remarked that ethics begins with suffering. 52 Heidegger’s thinking controverts that statement as expressing an almost transcendental imperative that must be put in question if we are to open up a new epoch in western history that might free us from nihilism.
For Heidegger this notion of suffering shuts us off from the world by reducing all relations to the world to one oriented to salvation in oblivion. The opening to the other beginning that Heidegger announces as the proper end of his thought emerges at the same time as his more radically anti-Semitic narrative, and this is no coincidence. For the thinking of the event Heidegger begins to sketch out in the Contributions requires as a fundamental condition of entering into a transition from the nihilistic history of Being an attitude or disposition or, as Heidegger suggests, a Grundstimmung, of Verhaltenheit. Like so many other basic words in Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, Verhaltenheit is difficult to translate. The current translation is ‘restraint’, which points to a central aspect of the term: resistance to the impulsion to flee from things and from Being itself through oblivion. 53
Heidegger’s ‘other beginning’ in this sense is an attempt to turn to things and, at the same time, to suffering as well, not in fear, but as a burden to be assumed freely: All necessity is rooted in a plight. Philosophy, as the first and most extreme meditation on the truth of beyng and on the beyng of truth, has its necessity in the first and most extreme plight. This plight is what propels humans around among beings and brings them for the first time before beings as a whole and in the midst of beings and thus brings humans to themselves and thereby lets history begin or perish. What propels humans around is their thrownness into beings, a thrownness that destines humans to be projectors of being (of the truth of beyng).
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This remarkable turn is one that takes on the burden of our finite existence rather than rejecting it. Heidegger does not seek to transcend the world but rather to explore and question it, to change with it as it changes with us: In philosophical knowledge, on the contrary, the first step initiates a transformation of the person who understands, and this not in the moral-‘existential’ sense, but rather in relation to her Da-sein. That is: the relation to being, and always prior to that, the relation to the truth of being, are transformed in the mode of a displacement [Verrückung] into Da-sein itself. Since in philosophical knowledge everything is in each case displaced at once – the being of humans into standing in the truth, the truth itself, and thereby the relation to beyng – an immediate representation of something objectively present is never possible, and on that account philosophical thinking will always seem strange.
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While this may seem to be a stirring form of emancipatory rhetoric, a rhetoric of emancipation from the Judeo-Christian form of emancipation, it of course holds another significance that is far more menacing. For if one decides to live dangerously in this Heideggerian manner by embracing suffering, by evaluating suffering not as an evil to be avoided, but as a burden to be assumed against the Judeo-Christian tradition, then how might one justify any ethics that seeks to eliminate or alleviate suffering? If we take Adorno seriously – and there is no reason why we should not – Heidegger’s re-evaluation of suffering, or its de-evaluation, leads to the conclusion that Heidegger undermines the basis for ethics. One might even argue that Heidegger creates an alternative to ethics since the burden to be assumed – suffering and death – creates an ethics of innovation and change that undermines the legitimacy of any ethical system, even its own.
If we live dangerously in Heidegger’s sense we live without foundations, banisters, enduring norms – all is open to question, including questioning itself. One may call this a liberated life or one may call it a criminal life except that Heidegger’s denial of enduring norms also abolishes criminality. We are left with a devaluation of suffering that tends to ignore the victims of suffering or, even more strikingly, suggests that victimization is itself a base form of nihilism, an attempt to destroy the human dressed up as exaltation.
In this latter regard, Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is at its most horrendous because it may be used not only to denigrate suffering itself but, in particular, to denigrate the suffering of all those who endured the most brutal suffering at the hands of their German overlords. Indeed, we now know that Heidegger viewed Jews as promoters of the technological interpretation of Being that he claimed was the metaphysical basis of their mass murder. In the summer of 1942, he wrote, ‘when the essentially “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense struggles against the Jewish, the height of self-destruction in history is reached’. 58 By blaming the victims for their own death, Heidegger’s anti-Semitism reaches its height precisely as the mass murder of European Jewry was unfolding in eastern Europe.
Rather than being an invocation to hear the voices of those who suffered and died, Heidegger’s thinking appears to tell us to ignore those voices or even to criticize them for their lack of sober courage in the face of suffering and death. Moreover, Heidegger’s thinking may go even farther to de-legitimate suffering – and of course Jewish suffering – as being little more than politics. By following Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt into the darkest conflict of the 20th century Heidegger beckons us to live dangerously in a way almost unimaginable; that is, to live with suffering in such a way that the great suffering which crowds and clouds the 20th century, must be overcome and re-evaluated in order to free us to the other beginning. We cannot begin again until we have become hardened and courageous, until our restraint has allowed us to be free of pity for others and ourselves. Once again, Heidegger follows Nietzsche: Pity is the practice of nihilism. Once more: this depressive and contagious instinct runs counter to the instincts that preserve and enhance the value of life: by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable, pity is one of the main tools used to increase decadence – pity wins people over to nothingness!…You do not say ‘nothingness’: instead you say ‘the beyond’, or ‘God’, or ‘the true life’, or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness…
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