Heidegger’s Entscheidung

“Decision” Between “Fate” and “Destiny”

Norman K. Swazo

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367674571
• eBook ISBN: 9781000064124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Biographies

This book critically examines the debate on Martin Heidegger's concept of Entscheidung ("decision") and his engagement and confrontation with Nazism in terms of his broader philosophical thought. It argues that one cannot explain Heidegger's actions without accounting for his idea of "decision" and its connection to his understanding of individual "fate" and national (and European) "destiny." The book looks at the relation of biography to philosophy and the ethical and political implications of appropriating Heidegger's thinking in these domains of inquiry. It highlights themes such as Heidegger's differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany; Heidegger on Kant and practical reason; and his reading of Nietzsche and Hegel. It offers a philosophical assessment grounded in Heidegger's own texts, with reference to historical and other philosophical commentaries on the rise of National Socialism in post-Weimar Germany and the philosophical issues associated with the interpretation of Nazi genocide and ideology.

An important intervention in Western philosophy, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political philosophy, continental philosophy, German philosophy, philosophy in general, and political studies.

1
HEIDEGGER’S “HISTORICAL” SITUATION

Here I wish to argue that Heidegger’s differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany, as expressed in his debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929 and then in his Kantbuch, sought to clarify the need for a more fundamental approach to Kant that would have its implications for moral philosophy as well. Further, reviewing historical accounts of the rise of National Socialism, such as that of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, helps to situate Heidegger’s own observations and reflections. Moreover, I believe clearly, Heidegger’s position was consonant with other German philosophical-historical thought of the time (e.g., that of Max Scheler) as post-Weimar Germany found itself struggling to find its way politically between American liberal capitalist democracy and Soviet Bolshevik communism. Accordingly, one may conclude, the whole of this overview allows one to posit that Heidegger (a) was keenly aware of the problematic of ethics in its normative sense, even though he did not write any systematic treatise on ethics as such; but (b) he was attentive to, and desired phenomenological clarification of, a more “originary” confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the Western philosophical tradition in view of an impending post-metaphysical “decision” (Entscheidung) he intuited. Heidegger’s understanding of such decision, I propose to show in due course, is essential to moral discourse generally, but also in the way in which one may seek to evaluate Heidegger’s own actions.

Some choose not to account for Heidegger’s historical situation as he and other Germans construed it. Commenting on Peter Gordon’s study of Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929, David Nirenberg reminds that, “World War 1 destroyed Europe’s confidence in the old material forms of its modernity, while at the same time ushering in an age of sharp struggle between new articulations – such as capitalism and Marxism – of the same.”¹ In 1933–1934, “Hitler seemed to most Germans to be the final and best hope against economic depression, political stalemate, national disorder, and the communist menace.”² Indeed, one hypothesizes that, listening to Hitler’s pre-election speech of 15 July 1932 decrying the failures of the political parties to find remedy for the economic situation, and stating expressly that “the fate of the individual German is inseparably linked to the fate of the entire nation,” Heidegger (one surmises) could hope those words meant what he expected of a “spiritual” National Socialism (about which more later). He might have agreed with Hitler’s seemingly unproblematic statement that, “Socialism cannot exist unless it is served by the power of the intellect,” and this existence to be had only when “an inseparable community” is united “with a common destiny.”³

Indeed, as Hannah Arendt herself remarked, “among intellectuals” in Germany at the time, “Gleichshaltung [conforming to the regime] was the rule,” in which case, as Maier-Katkin infers, it is reasonable “to see in Heidegger an instance of the mass phenomenon, Gleichshaltung … the rapid adjustment made by many Germans to the opportunities, conditions, and requirements of the budding totalitarian state.”⁴ One cannot ignore the national politics of post-war Germany as the context of political decision any German would take in those fateful years, irrespective of ability to emigrate. It is important to account for the fact that most Germans, very likely including Heidegger, in July and November 1932 were concerned about the number of seats won by the Communist party in both elections. Many feared influence from the Bolsheviks in Russia in determining Germany’s and Europe’s “destiny” at a time of post-war economic crisis, hence the popular turn to the National Socialists in the November election, followed by Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, supported even by ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen of the German National People’s Party.⁵ Given his familiarity with the writing of Karl Marx, further, Heidegger would have understood Marx’s prediction of “communist revolution” in “a highly industrialized country,” the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 perceived to be too close for comfort in space and time to Germany.⁶

It is important also that many Germans, including Heidegger, rejected not only communism but also democracy in the form they experienced it in the Weimar Republic – a democracy “established in 1919” with “a highly liberal constitution,” but this democracy “a product of defeat in war and revolution … never accepted by most of the German elites, notably the military, large landholders and big industry,” a democracy suffering from “irreconcilable political, social and cultural divisions,” and then “submerged by the collapse of the economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929.”⁷ For many Germans, “Democracy had failed them.” Heidegger understood this, finding both American-style highly intensive “capitalist” “industrialist” democracy and Weimar democracy (suffering the insults of the Versailles Treaty) unacceptable political paths for postwar Germany, unlikely successfully to confront the nigh advance of Bolshevik communism – even as one may argue it was factually wrong to associate both “international capitalism” and “Bolshevism” with Europe’s Jews and causally linked to world communism and Marxist ideology. That Heidegger would be concerned about Bolshevism’s threat to Europe after the October revolution is not in and of itself problematic since he, like Max Scheler before him, understood German destiny to move in its inner necessity against Bolshevism. This contraposition inevitably included concern for the influence of Jews who supported the Bolshevik revolution as members of the Red Army and even as members of the communist faction of the Mensheviks. Thus, Seth Franzman observes,

When Theodor Herzl visited the Russian Empire in 1903, he met Count Witte, the minister of finance. According to Leonard Schapiro, who authored The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement in 1961, Herzl found that ‘50% of the membership of the revolutionary parties was Jewish.’ Herzl asked Witte why. ‘I think it’s the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed.’ Schapiro argues that Jews moved into revolutionary circles as they gained access to intellectual circles. Ironically then, the more Jews gained wealth and freedom in the empire, the more they also awakened to their predicament and joined the slow gurgling rebellion against the ancient regime.⁸

Shapiro claimed further that, “Jewish Marxist social democracy diverged from Bolshevism,” yet many Germans fearful of Bolshevism did not make this distinction of political factions. The fact that they were “communist” was sufficient cause for Germans to believe their political advance into the heart of Europe should be obstructed.⁹

That German opposition to communism was equal to the opposition to democracy. In his lecture of 1956 on the rise of existentialism in Europe in this period, Leo Strauss similarly asked:

Is there no problem of democracy, of industrial mass democracy? The official high priests of democracy with their amiable reasonableness were not reasonable enough to prepare us for our situation: the decline of Europe, the danger to the west, to the whole western heritage which is at least as great and even greater than that which threatened Mediterranean civilization around 300 of the Christian era. … It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy even if they are enemies of democracy – provided they are thinking men and especially great thinkers and not blustering fools.¹⁰

In all fairness to Heidegger, specifically in this historical situation, those who condemn should also point out what Notebooks editor Peter Trawny himself says in his “Afterword” to Heidegger’s Ponderings II-VI (despite his own published critique of Heidegger’s conduct): “by the summer of 1936 at the latest, Heidegger took distance from the actually existing National Socialism, inasmuch as he could recognize and disdain the “worldview” of “desolate and crude ‘biologism.’… The Ponderings of this time therefore show how Heidegger extricated himself step by step from his earlier support for National Socialism.”¹¹ Weltanschauung philosophy was not the means to either a fundamental or a world-historical transformation of Western humanity such as Heidegger envisioned. Thus, whatever one knows as the facts of Kristallnacht of November 1938 and of Auschwitz as of April 1940, one cannot reasonably project responsibility for these events upon either Heidegger as thinker or Heidegger as man, faulty claims of causality and fallacious assertions of guilt by association having no rightful place in a reasonably efficacious normative judgment. Indeed, historians especially – including here intellectual historians such as Heidegger critic Richard Wolin – are expected to exercise caution in their interpretations of the “facts,” consistent with a basic sense of justice comprised of both truth and fairness;¹² and also, as Hans-Georg Gadamer would remind, while keeping otherwise “hidden prejudices” explicit – assuming we know or can otherwise warrant what these concepts “truth” and “fairness” mean, and seeking their meaning “philosophically” and not merely historically.

Wolin shows himself exceedingly disdainful of everything “Heideggerian” when he writes, “any discussion of Heidegger’s legacy that downplays or diminishes the extent of his political folly stands guilty, by extension, of perpetuating the philosophical betrayal initiated by the Master himself.”¹³ One wonders, even doubts, of the “standard” of guilt Wolin imposes, and whether that standard is “vindicated” in the scene of contention about rival concepts of rationality and justice about which we are instructed by Alas-dair MacIntyre, all of which points to Wolin’s fallacious moves of hasty conclusion and jumping on the bandwagon of current critique. Jeff Malpas is entirely correct to observe concerning the language of “contamination” that, “It is strange to find such language – a language so characteristically employed by Nazis and anti-Semites themselves – at work in a context in which the dangers of irrationality are at the same time so frequently warned against.”¹⁴ Such is what a historian of ideas might do, when caught up in a hermeneutics of suspicion, thus without competently engaging the “philosophy” and the “thinking” that is at the center of the dispute. Ingo Farin and Malpas provide the pertinent caution, in their assessment of the current controversy: “No single viewpoint prevails; there is considerable divergence in the way different authors assess the material in the “Black Notebooks.” Even similar passages are read in different ways by different authors (and sometimes translated differently); and it can be argued that this divergence underscores the enormous difficulty in interpreting Heidegger, as well as the vanity of supposing that the matter can be definitively resolved.”¹⁵

The fact is that there are “cognitive limits of historical representation” when one writes about National Socialist Germany, even as master Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg understood (as he linked the Nazi genocide not only to the events of the early twentieth century but also to some “twelve hundred years of conversion policy” within Christendom and followed by policies of expulsion).¹⁶ Hilberg argued that,

The expulsion and exclusion policy was adopted by the Nazis and remained the goal of all anti-Jewish activity until 1941 … [when] total war [meant that emigration] was impossible … [and the] ‘Jewish problem’ had to be ‘solved’ in some other way. At this crucial time, the idea of a “territorial solution” emerged in Nazi minds. The “territorial solution,” or ‘the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,’ as it became known, envisaged the death of European Jews.¹⁷

Therefore, one must account for the transition in policy – from both Roman Catholic and Protestant policy insisting that Jews convert to Christianity to the policy of expulsion from Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction: the “debate” again
• 1 Heidegger’s “historical” situation
• 2 Heidegger on Kant and practical reason
• 3 Heidegger’s intimations of Entscheidung
• 4 Concluding reflections
• Bibliography
• Index