The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow

Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other

Elliot R. Wolfson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231546249
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Holocaust History

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his well-known transgressions—his complicity with National Socialism and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow, Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in a debate that has seen much attention in scholarly and popular media from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work.

Wolfson sets out to probe Heidegger's writings to expose what remains unthought. In spite of Heidegger's explicit anti-Semitic statements, Wolfson reveals some crucial aspects of his thinking—including criticism of the biological racism and militant apocalypticism of Nazism—that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought: the triangulation of the concepts of homeland, language, and peoplehood; Jewish messianism and the notion of historical time as the return of the same that is always different; inclusion, exclusion, and the status of the other; the problem of evil in kabbalistic symbolism. Using Heidegger's own methods, Wolfson reflects on the inextricable link of truth and untruth and investigates the matter of silence and the limits of speech. He challenges the tendency to bifurcate the relationship of the political and the philosophical in Heidegger's thought, but parts company with those who write off Heidegger as a Nazi ideologue. Ultimately, The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow argues, the greatness and relevance of Heidegger's work is that he presents us with the opportunity to think the unthinkable as part of our communal destiny as historical beings.

Chapter One

BARBARIC ENCHANTMENT

From Existential Ontology to Abyssal Meontology

He who thinks greatly must err greatly.

—Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.

—Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

Let me begin this chapter with the following methodological caveat: moral condemnation does not necessarily interfere with the stated objective of this study, to consider Nazism philosophically in the shadow of Heidegger’s thinking. On the contrary, to suspend all judgment would compromise the ability to provide the historical context wherein the piety of Heidegger’s thought will illumine and be illumined by the impiety of National Socialism. By casting aspersions on some of the dicta and actions of Heidegger, I am not reducing the intricacy and originality of his thought to the brutality exemplified by the Nazi movement. Furthermore, the rebuke of Heidegger does not interfere with the ability to hear the thinker in an unbiased way. In particular, the Heideggerian presumption that questioning is the means to reveal the matter of thought is not forfeited by adopting a critical stance regarding the monstrosity of Nazism nor is there justification to argue that objectivity can be achieved only by abandoning oneself to a thinking that would preclude the ability to discriminate between right and wrong. After all, Heidegger did not relinquish the sanction of good and evil, even if he thought their valence was determined by historical destiny and the worldplay of the shining forth and withdrawing of being rather than by some metaphysical ground of transcendence.1

I do not deny that on occasion Heidegger does explicitly speak as if the truth of beyng is beyond the duality of good and evil. Consider, for example, the following description of the plight (die Not) of the human being in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), composed between 1936–1938 but not published until 1989: “That which compels, and is retained without being grasped, essentially surpasses all ‘progress.’ For that which compels is itself what is genuinely to come and thus resides completely outside of the distinction between good and evil and withdraws itself from all calculation.”2 Unlike progress, the plight of what is to come in the future cannot be calibrated and hence cannot be defined as either good or evil. This is not to say, however, that historical instantiations of the event of beyng—or what Heidegger called the essential occurrences—are not subject retroactively to an evaluation of those instantiations within a larger enframing of sociocultural mores. Such an appraisal is an inherent component of the plight of the thinker to transform the question of being by relentless interpretive questioning out of the ground of Dasein.3 This, I submit, is the intent of Heidegger’s comment in the Schwarze Hefte, “The whither is not the concerning-what! Instead, the concerning-what belongs to the questioning itself, which as a whole—as this whole of the question concerning being—has its whither.”4 This interrogation is no doubt part of the “all-embracing disclosive questioning,” whose purpose is “to impart to beings their full empowerment and to lead humanity to a more originary poetry—i.e., to one by which humanity can become great and can experience the bliss of high spirits.”5

To sharpen my perspective, it is pertinent to recall the divergent observation of Hans Jonas regarding the inherently amoral, if not immoral, nature of Heidegger’s thought: “But as to Heidegger’s being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger’s thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.”6 The “adequate response to the call of being” is identified as thinking about being, which is inseparable from speaking about being, but not as “action, brotherly love, resistance to evil, promotion of the good.”7 The ostensibly irredeemable corollary of Heidegger’s primal thinking centered on the eventfulness of being is thus condemned by Jonas:

But the terrible anonymity of Heidegger’s “being,” illicitly decked out with personal characters, blocks out the personal call. Not by the being of another person am I grasped, but just by “being”! And my responsive thought is being’s own event. But called as person by person—fellow beings or God—my response will not primarily be thinking but action (though this involves thinking), and the action may be one of love, responsibility, pity; also of wrath, indignation, hate, even fight to the death: it is him or me.… In this sense indeed also Hitler was a call. Such calls are drowned in the voice of being to which one cannot say No; as is also, we are told, the separation of subject from object. This is the final claim of pride, and the betrayal of man’s task growing from the acceptance of his lot.8

There is no doubt that Heidegger challenged the conventional measure of moral agency connected to the sovereignty of a willful and self-legislating subject, but perhaps in its place, as François Raffoul argued,9 he maintained an alternate notion of responsibility as exposure to the inappropriable. The latter, however, is not the opposite of what is appropriable, but rather the play of expropriation that delimits the very limits of the aporia in which ethics is grounded as the inappropriation of the event of the appropriable. That there is no appropriation without expropriation means, as Reiner Schürmann deduced, there is no centripetal aggregation without a centrifugal disaggregation, no universalization without singularization, no legislation without transgression. Hence the henological difference between being and beings “makes the law by binding us both to the dissolution of the phenomena of the world and to their consolidation that is under way.… This double bind is embedded in our condition as mortals. We can call it the henological differend.”10 Thinking incessantly demands of one to ascertain if the historical destiny wherein one is situated—or into which one is thrown—is the means by which that differend is manifest in the concealment of being that is concealed and therefore revealed or if the concealment of concealment is concealed such that the nothingness is enveloped by the abyss of nihilism rather than nihilism being enveloped by the abyss of nothingness. I concur, therefore, with the assessment of Alexander Duff, “The politics that issue from Heidegger’s thought—his teaching on community, as well as the impetus his thinking gives beyond or in spite of this teaching—derive from his formulation of the problem of Being and its presentation to us as a perplexing, anxiety-inducing, disintegrating question. Given that our finite understanding has us apprehend Being as distinct from the beings when we can see its ‘sameness’ with the nothing, then a time when we are surrounded by the phenomena of nihilism may be a uniquely disclosive moment in the history of Being.”11

Tragedy, wrote Karl Jaspers, obliquely responding to Heidegger, “depicts a man in his greatness beyond good and evil.”12 This does not mean that the categories of good and evil are no longer relevant to substantiating the contours of greatness. The beyond encompasses what is trespassed; overcoming (Überwindung) is always a transition (Übergang) that signals an undergoing (Untergang).13 Alternatively expressed, the ungrounding of the ground is an upholding of the ground, an eradication that is taking hold of the root. Any attempt to elicit a radical politics from Heidegger should be tempered by the astute formulation of Pierre Bourdieu that Heidegger’s ontologization of history and the understanding of alienation in the völkisch sense of uprooting foster a “radical overcoming of all possible radicalism, which provides conformism with its most water-tight justification. To identify ontological alienation as the foundation of all alienation is, in a manner of speaking, to banalize and yet simultaneously dematerialize both economic alienation and any discussion of this alienation, by a radical but imaginary overcoming of any revolutionary overcoming.”14 As Heidegger explicitly noted in the late 1930s, “Our own hour is the era of downgoing [das Zeitalter des Untergangs]. The down-going, in the essential sense, is the path to the reticent preparation for what is to come, i.e., for the moment in which and the site in which the advent and the remaining absent of the gods will be decided. This downgoing is the utterly first beginning.” The first beginning is of the past, but it belongs to the future, and thus those who go down are designated the “futural ones” (die Zukünftigen). The knowledge attained by these individuals is not subject to calculation (errechnen) or compulsion (erzwingen); from the scientific-technological standpoint, it is useless (nutzlos) and without value (Wert) and, consequently, it “cannot be taken as an immediate condition for a currently ongoing business.” As historical cognition (geschichtliche Erkenntnis), this knowledge “never consists in determining and delineating current incidents in their circumstances and orientations and in their cherished goals and claims,” but it is decidedly concerned “with knowledge of the domain out of which future history is decided and with (questioning) steadfastness in that domain.”15 To suggest that the unrest (Un-ruhe) integral to this questioning of what is most steadfast, literally, the standing-in (Innestehen), the questioning into the essence of truth and into the essential occurrence of being, excludes or bans moral evaluation is unjustified and imprudent.

I concur with William Franke’s comparison of Heidegger’s piety of thinking to the phenomenon of apophaticism inasmuch as both summon one methodologically to “an ardent questioning for the sake of opening all beliefs to their furthest reach of possibility. Among such beliefs, traditional religious teachings often prove to be the richest and the most laden with symbolic meaning and implication for ethics and for life in general.”16 The questioning Heidegger demands subjects these beliefs to their potential undoing, but in the undoing they are preserved as what is undone. Moreover, the presumption that adherence to truth pursued through radical questioning can only be achieved by breaking the circle of self-validati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface: Calculating Heidegger’s Miscalculation
• Chapter One. Barbaric Enchantment: From Existential Ontology to Abyssal Meontology
• Chapter Two. Nomadism, Homelessness, and the Obfuscation of Being
• Chapter Three. Jewish Time and the Historiographical Eclipse of Historical Destiny
• Chapter Four. Being’s Tragedy: Heidegger’s Silence and the Ring of Solitude
• Chapter Five. Political Disavowal: Truth and Concealing the Unconcealment
• Chapter Six. Heidegger, Balaam, and the Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index