A disturbance of vision on the Capitol: Philosophy and the Far-Right – Towards an interdisciplinary inquiry

1. Either silencing or ignoring, including not teaching, translating (see iv.), or denouncing as barbarous misreadings the vast number of Far-Right, fascist, and National Socialist uptakes of Nietzsche in the interwar period, as well the postwar and contemporary Far-Right literature which continues to appeal to Nietzsche, but also Heidegger, Schmitt, etc., alongside Evola, Guenon, and others (e.g. Bar-On, 2007). In Nietzsche’s case, there has under this topos been the attempt to save Nietzsche by blaming his sister for the Nazi appropriation of his writings, including claims (which have now been decisively refuted; Holub, 2002; Losurdo, 2020: 711–15) that she tried to play up, not down, her brother’s anti-Semitism, and play down, not up, his anti-Germanism.

2. Either denouncing as incompetent (if not themselves ‘fascistic’), ignoring or ‘no-platforming' progressive, anti-fascist scholars who argue for real and important links between Far-Right political movements and these thinkers, for example Bourdieu, Farias, Faye and others on Heidegger, or Lukacs, Losurdo, Beiner, and others on Nietzsche. One variant of this position (see below) is to claim that only established experts can be licensed to comment on, and perhaps even to understand, the ‘almost mystical, hieratic’ utterances of the philosopher (Rockmore, 1997: 22). But such positions will usually appeal to versions of the remaining 18 topoi, insofar as further reasoning is presented.

3. Ignoring or suppressing discussion of passages in these authors which point clearly and distinctly to messianic, violent, inhumane and proto- or para-fascist aims, such as the creation of a new man or superman, the permanent need for slavery to enable high culture (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 100–7, 383–96, 409–22), the deployment of eugenics, the need to sterilize or annihilate the decadent, the ontological basicness of violence, war and struggle to reality (or ‘the essence of truth’), the naturalness and desirability of rank-ordering and the decadence of modern egalitarian, liberal, democratic, and socialist ideas and politics, the basis of philosophical, intellectual, political and artistic productions in sub-rational, physiological (or even, in the later Nietzsche, psychopathological; cf. Losurdo, 2020: 625–6) forces not subject to refutation, the undesirable racial attributes of the Jews (including, in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, their cunning cleverness, invisible global influence, etc.), and more. The effect of this is necessarily paradoxical: Nietzsche, for example, is celebrated as radical and pronounces himself dynamite and an anti-Christ; Heidegger as the discloser of the truth of Beyng forgotten at least since Heraclitus. Yet apologetic interpreters commit to reading them as relatively benign, even broadly culturally liberal figures whose more radical statements must be read as innocuous or unrelated to their philosophies, and only their more innocuous statements taken as literal or expressive of their true positions.

4. In addition, the selective publishing, editing, compiling, and non-translation or innocuous translations of texts, ² as well as the exclusion of certain texts (e.g. the Black Notebooks) from properly ‘philosophical’ status. Most notably, there is the case of the publication of Heidegger’s Nazi-era works all decades after his death, with the Black Notebooks only being made public in 2014/15, and recent claims that the latter are ‘private’, without wider bearing, despite being published in the Gesamtausgabe. In Nietzsche’s case, we find comparable disputes surrounding his sister, Elizabeth’s, editing and publishing of her brother’s work, led by Will to Power, after his breakdown and death (cf. Holub, 2002; Losurdo, 2020: 711–15).

5. Finally here, the insulation of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s texts from their contexts, central to the discipline of intellectual history, and arguably to the discernment of authors’ intentional meanings (cf. Holub, 2018; Bambach, 2003; Faye, 2009). Although Nietzsche was a ‘master of suspicion’, reading the texts of adversaries as expressive of historical, political, moral, and psychophysiological determinants, the tacit model here is of the great thinker who transcends all such worldly, contextual determination. The ‘untimely’ label Nietzsche gave to his second published work is hence taken on Nietzsche’s word, but as an interpretation of his work whole-cloth, despite his immersion in the philosophical, literary and scientific literature of his time, and engagement in the sociopolitical concerns of his day, from the Franco-Prussian war and Bismarck's social and educational reforms to the inner workings of the House of the Hohenzollerns (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 26–8, 526–33). In the case of Heidegger, his celebrated claim that all we need to know about Aristotle is that he lived, worked, and then died is applied to the German philosopher, without acknowledging that there can be historical and political reasons why a thinker who had publicly supported Hitler’s Gleichschaltung might wish to minimize the effects of the times on their work.

6. The arguments that apparently-directly political statements concerning, for example, ‘the annihilation of the enemy’ (in Heidegger) or of ‘the many too many’, ‘those who have turned out badly’ (in Nietzsche), denouncing modern political forms as nihilistic or decadent, etc. are somehow intended only metaphorically, in order to describe what are in fact supra-political, ontological (in Heidegger’s case) or ethical (in Nietzsche’s case) claims. Such arguments themselves operate with, and presuppose, the decontextualization of 5.

7. The argument that the same statements are ‘taken out of context’ or ‘cherry-picked’ from Nietzsche and Heidegger, although in each case, critics argue that other confirming statements in the same texts and oeuvres, as well as in the debates surrounding the appearance of the texts (see v.), set out contexts which in fact it is the apologists who are selectively negating (cf. Dombowsky, 2004, 2014; Landa, 2017; Losurdo, 2020). There are also hermeneutic issues, if a statement is sufficiently inflammatory and extreme, that it becomes difficult to as it were ‘find’ a context which could possibly soften its explosive contents, or sweeten the cherry. Finally, here, we would still need to ask why only some philosophers, appealed to by the Far-Right, felt motivated to include radically inhumane statements in their published as well as unpublished remains, the like of which we do not find in other recognized philosophers.

8. The adducing of seemingly and actually contradictory statements and positions, such as Nietzsche’s criticism of Bismarckian Germany after around 1875, or Heidegger’s claims that biological racism is a product of modern Technik, and concluding that these statements, interpreted in a liberal direction (when, for instance, Nietzsche’s anti-second Reichism is explicitly tied to his hostility to modern democratic politics and the democratization of education, and doesn’t preclude continuing hopes for a redeemed Germany; Losurdo, 2020: 191–200, 225–39, 273–82, 520–3, 753–9), are sufficient to establish the entire political perspective on these authors, without co-presenting and considering these passages alongside contradictory statements on the same subjects more troubling to the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ (Losurdo, 2001).

 9. The periodization of the thinker in question, so one period only can be assigned blame for undeniable proximities and cross-overs with troubling political ideas and prescriptions, while scholars remain ‘safe’ to work on other periods (with the interesting cost that one must suppose more or less radical ‘breaks’ in thinkers’ works). In the case of Nietzsche, one could for instance assign any Judaeophobia we find to the early period of the association with the Wagners, or any radical eugenic positions solely to the late (post-1882/3), as against early or middle periods. In the case of Heidegger, the principal post-structuralist position before the Black Notebooks was to assign ‘blame’ for Heidegger’s politics on the early Heidegger, sanctifying his post-Kehre thinking as a source of criticism of the Far-Right (see xvi. below) (Ferry and Renaut, 1990).

10. In this line, arguing especially in Nietzsche’s case that there is no ‘one’ Nietzsche (see xx.), in the sense of a philosopher with a more or less coherent, large-scale vision of the world, human history, nature and human nature, etc. The evident costs of this apologetic move include arguably demoting Nietzsche’s status as a thinker, given that coherence is widely considered an intellectual virtue, especially one pertaining to great philosophers capable of seeing farther and deeper than other human beings.

11. Arguing that there is no connection between Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, so his troubling political statements should be insulated from any connection with his National Socialist politics. ³ In the case of Nietzsche, one might propose that troubling doxa hail from his sister’s influence (see 4.), that of Wagner (who was soon shrugged off, see 9.), or even his later madness. There is again an evident cost here, especially with philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger whose appeal in no small measure lies in their appeal to the possibility of forms of authentic, philosophically-shaped modes of existence. This cost was pointed out by Hans-Georg Gadamer (at Givsan, 2011: 21): one finds oneself in the tricky position of defending (for example) Heidegger’ greatness as a thinker, whilst arguing that this greatness did not carry into his political thinking and actions. ⁴

12. In a cognate manner, arguing that at least some philosophers’ epistemological, metaphysical, ontological, or aesthetic views have no relationship with any determinate political stance, and certainly not any Far-Right position. One instance of this is Peter Trawny’s claim (2015b) for Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as ‘Being-historical’, which implies (contra Jean-Luc Nancy and others) that it is elevated and of philosophical value, in contrast to the more ‘vulgar’ or ‘banal’ anti-Semitism of the ‘real'

Nazis (see 5.). This position faces real problems in the facts that, as we saw before, Far-Right politics nevertheless involves the valorization of prerational data such as will, decision, struggle, instinct, race, heritage, as well as affinities for eschatological narratives of historical decline and rebirth. These are both differentiating features which in fact few philosophers share, and many dispute.

13. Claiming that historical study of philosophers’ political words, deeds, and stances necessarily precludes serious engagement with or understanding of their thought. The preeminent case of this might be the criticism of Victor Farias’s groundbreaking 1987 work on Heidegger and Nazism, in which critics pointed to arguable errors of philosophical interpretation to discredit Farias’s work as a whole, whose principal contribution was archival and historical (see 2.). Here as elsewhere, despite Nietzsche’s own interdisciplinarity, interpreters can support this insulating gesture by pointing towards distinctions in Nietzsche’s work between scholars and philosophers (in Beyond Good and Evil, §§204–213) and to Heidegger’s ontological positioning of the philosophy of Beyng as thinking a determinative domain (Beyng) at once prior to and inaccessible to scientific objectification. Heidegger himself claimed that ‘he who thinks greatly must err greatly’ (cf. Trawny, 2015a), turning this divide between historical action and philosophical thought to apologetic purpose after 1945.

14. Moving as it were from subject to predicate, accepting partial interpretations of ‘fascism’ or ‘Nazism’ which enable these thinkers to be safely insulated from any ‘contamination’ with these movements; for instance, the idea that fascism and Nazism were solely nationalist regimes (while pointing to Nietzsche’s hostility to Bismarckian Germany after around 1875 (cf. Losurdo, 2020: 191–200, 224–39, 329–38), or that they were ‘metaphysical’ or ‘humanist’ (cf. Ferry and Renaut, 1990), or that Nazi racism was only and ever biological (whereas Heidegger was critical of post-Darwinian biology as an incarnation of modern Technik) (cf. Bernasconi, 2000).

15. Denouncing the fascists and Far Right movements as comprising entirely ideas-less, anti-intellectual barbarians, while stressing the real intellectual or literary-rhetorical credentials of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt et al., making any intersection between their thought and Far Right politics seem impossible – as above, ‘it could happen to anyone’ (Hendricks, 2017), when it remains a matter of historical record that Far Right thinkers continue to not appropriate Montaigne, Spinoza, Lessing, Kant, Cicero, Aquinas, Habermas, Voltaire, Diderot…

16.   Relatedly, contending that fascism and Nazism were ‘too democratic’ (see v.), in the sense of too populist, and hence vulgar, whereas Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt, were highly educated men whose works, avowedly esoteric, can at most be understood by a small number or ‘happy few’ ‘free spirits’, experts, etc. There are evident difficulties that exponents of this position face, insofar as they also claim progressive or broadly left-liberal or left-libertarian perspectives. For this apology appeals to the avowed elitism of these thinkers, and their anti-democratic animus towards the ‘herd’, ‘masses’, ‘many too many’…

17. Once more in the case of Heidegger, accepting his own reading of National Socialism, and critique of Nazism after 1945, namely that it was not a failed attempt to smash the modern constellation of ideas enshrined in the bourgeois revolutions, as well as their immanent challengers in forms of socialism and feminism, but paradoxically too modernist (rational, technological). This has the effect of presenting the postwar Heidegger as ‘anti-Nazi’ (see vi.). Analogous arguments can take form with Schmitt, who also survived the war, and Ernst Jünger (who was never in fact a member of the NSDAP).

18. In conjunction with this, again following the later Heidegger, relativizing the distinction between Far-Right and other political regime-types with recourse to some deeper historico-philosophical category, like the slave revolt in morals, slave morality, instrumental reason, Western metaphysics, ontotheology, Technik/Gestell, racism…One also points here to the real ills of the liberal-democratic world, including principally the technologies for surveilling and controlling subjects and the natural world. These arguments have the consequence of minimizing any pejorative charge that attends thinkers’ invocations by, or participation, Far-Right politics, at the price of relativizing ‘ontic’ political differences between different regime types, the need for fascism to enshrine a counter-revolutionary overthrow of liberal-democratic political forms, the deadly enmity of Nazism towards the liberal West and Soviet East, etc.

19. One argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt or other thinker belonged to the German ‘conservative revolution’ (Woods, 1996), which included thinkers who were claimed by, or else members of, the NSDAP in Germany, but which was nevertheless putatively deeply opposed to Nazism. This latter view is contested by scholars of fascism such as Roger Griffin (1995: 351–7). It usually depends upon versions of 14–17, all of which are far from universally accepted in scholarship on fascism and National Socialism.

20. Perhaps the most radical (as it were ‘nuclear’) move is to take Nietzsche’s own ‘perspectivist’ statements as license to argue that there can be no more or less complete, determinate or veridical interpretation of these (and perhaps any) thinkers’ works at all, let alone any favoring radical political stances. This means their texts are in effect ‘tool-boxes’ or palates of textual colorings with which the interpreter can paint whate’er s/he pleases. This position faces several deep problems. It disallows advocates to consistently exclude Far-Right interpretations of these thinkers, although it is often used exactly as a putative means to do this: for why not paint a Far-Right vision of irrational self-assertion? It disqualifies claims that these thinkers’ texts, as against any others, could be ‘great’, or amount to specifically ‘philosophical’ works, rather than aesthetic objects. It runs up against these thinkers’ own statements concerning the superior philosophical insights granted them by their key notions like will to power, the historicization of moralities, eternal recurrence…and in Heidegger’s case, the truth of Beyng, the history of (the forgetting of) Beyng, and more; as well as their epistemic bases for criticizing earlier and other philosophies and claiming the superiority of their own.