The Politics of Being

The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger

Richard Wolin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231543026
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Martin Heidegger's ties to Nazism have tarnished his stature as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014, which revealed the full extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and enduring sympathy for National Socialism, only inflamed the controversy. Richard Wolin's The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger has played a seminal role in the international debate over the consequences of Heidegger's Nazism. In this edition, the author provides a new preface addressing the effect of the Black Notebooks on our understanding of the relationship between politics and philosophy in Heidegger's work. Building on his pathbreaking interpretation of the philosopher's political thought, Wolin demonstrates that philosophy and politics cannot be disentangled in Heidegger's oeuvre. Völkisch ideological themes suffuse even his most sublime philosophical treatises. Therefore, despite Heidegger's profundity as a thinker, his critique of civilization is saturated with disturbing anti-democratic and anti-Semitic leitmotifs and claims.

ONE

Heidegger and Politics

Was it not through a definite orientation of his thought that Heidegger fell—and not merely accidentally—into the proximity of National Socialism, without ever truly emerging from this proximity?

Otto Pöggeler, “Afterword to the Second Edition,” Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking

In the passionate debate that has raged over the course of the last several years concerning the National Socialist convictions of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, many facts of great significance have come to light. At the same time, it is to be regretted that amid the din of partisan accusation “for and against,” the paramount theoretical questions at stake in this controversy have for the most part been shunned.

For example: did Heidegger’s partisanship for the National Socialist cause stand in an essential relation to his own “philosophy of existence’’ as elaborated in Being and Time and other writings? If so, what was the nature of this relation? What were the historico-philosophical conclusions that Heidegger would ultimately draw—if any—concerning the failure of his own National Socialist involvement? And, more importantly, what role would these conclusions play in his reevaluation of the fundamental premises of his own philosophical project from 1936 on?

Otto Pöggeler’s observation that it was “through a definite orientation of his thought that Heidegger fell—and not merely accidently—into the proximity of National Socialism,” strongly suggests that our initial query concerning the likelihood of an integral relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political involvement can be answered in the affirmative. But in conclusion, Pöggeler goes on to make a more sweeping, somewhat shocking claim: that Heidegger never truly emerged from this “proximity” to National Socialism; that in a crucial respect—which Pöggler leaves tantalizingly undefined in the context at hand—Heidegger’s experience with Nazism in the early thirties continued to have a defining influence on his thought. Circumstantial support for Pöggeler’s assertion would seem to be provided by the fact that in his later writings, Heidegger resolutely abstained from furnishing an explicit renunciation of his earlier National Socialist allegiances.¹

It would, however, be unjust to attempt to play off the sublimity of the “philosophical stakes” of the Heidegger controversy vis-à-vis the “subaltern” biographical data that have been newly unearthed. In this respect, both despite and because of the fact that neither work possesses philosophical pretensions, the recent books by Victor Farias and Hugo Ott have performed an extremely valuable service: it is primarily in consequence of their tenacious archival probings that a momentous reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire philosophical legacy has been set in motion.² The most significant change that has been brought about by the publication of their findings is that a number of facts concerning Heidegger’s political involvement, which for decades had either been downplayed by the Heideggerian faithful (following the dissembling tactics of the Master himself) or simply denied, have been established irrefutably. In sum, only thanks to the overwhelming mass of evidence compiled simultaneously by Messrs. Farias and Ott has the full extent of Heidegger’s commitment to the Nazi cause become a matter of public record.³

Indeed, the evidence, as most by now are aware, gives no small cause for alarm. When it came to the Gleichschaltung (the Nazi euphemism for the elimination of political opposition) of the modern German university system, which could proudly trace its origins back to the philosophies of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the German idealists, Heidegger, in his capacity as Rector of Freiburg University, proved well nigh plus royaliste que le roi—the “roi” in this case being Hitler himself. Or as we read in the personal telegram of May 20, 1933 that Heidegger sent to Hitler: “I faithfully request the postponement of the planned meeting of the executive committee of the German University League until a time when the especially necessary Gleichschaltung of the leadership of the League is completed.”⁴ In August of the same year, Heidegger personally assisted in the redrafting of the university charter at the provincial level in accordance with demands of the Führerprinzip. In the future, the rector, who had previously been elected by the university senate, would be known as the Führer of the university and would be directly appointed by the state minister of culture—thereby ending a long-standing tradition of university self-government at Freiburg. The various deans would likewise be referred to as the Führer of their respective disciplines and would be appointed by the new “Rector-Führer.”

Heidegger would also prove a vigorous agitator on behalf of the policies of the new regime. In one speech in Heidelberg, he declared that the present generation of university professors was unfit; consequently, it was necessary for a new generation to replace them in ten years’ time, one that would prove capable of meeting the demands and challenges of the “National Awakening.” It was this brand of right-radical posturing that would seal the fate of his fouteen-year friendship with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who was present in the audience when the speech was given.⁵ Or as he would proclaim in another of his addresses, the university should be “integrated again into the Volksgemeinschaft and joined together with the State.”⁶ In early November 1933, he would on three separate occasions make ardent public appeals on behalf of Hitler’s (ex post facto) plebiscite on Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. Nor does his ideological zealotry in these addresses leave much to the imagination of the audience. As he begins one speech: “The National Socialist Revolution is bringing about the total transformation of our German Dasein.”⁷ A “yes” vote in the referendum signaled for Heidegger a “decision” for “authenticity.”

The unfortunate cases of Heidegger’s political “denunciations” in his influential capacity as “Rector-Führer” have been well documented by Farias and Ott.⁸ Nor did Heidegger ever conceal his conviction that, in keeping with the goals of the new Reich, “political” criteria were of foremost importance in making decisions regarding appointments and promotions. As he would remark on one occasion: “With reference to future appointments, first of all the question arises which of the candidates, presupposing his scientific and personal suitability, offers the greatest guarantee for the fulfillment of National Socialist educational goals.”⁹ Or as Heidegger, with unabashed candor, formulates his “educational philosophy” under the Nazi regime in a December 1933 memo circulated to the university deans: “Since the first days of my acceptance of office, the defining principle and the authentic (if only gradually realizable) goal [of my rectorship] has been the fundamental transformation of scholarly education on the basis of the forces and demands of the National Socialist State…. The individual by himself counts for nothing. The fate of our Volk in its State counts for everything.”¹⁰

The vexing question of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism—once thought to have been settled in the philosopher’s favor—has recently resurfaced (a theme, moreover, that is surprisingly absent in Ott’s otherwise thorough study). Charges of this nature were first made in Toni Cassirer’s 1950 autobiography, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, where she speaks of having heard of Heidegger’s “inclination toward anti-Semitism” as early as 1929.¹¹ In addition, there has been a longstanding rumor that while Rector, Heidegger barred his former teacher, Edmund Husserl, from utilizing the university libraries on the grounds that Husserl was a Jew; charges that have been denied as “calumny” by Heidegger in the 1966 Spiegel interview.¹² Heidegger’s supporters point out that until 1933, the philosopher had many Jewish students—among them, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse. And in the Spiegel interview, Heidegger emphasizes his support for embattled Jewish professors during the early years of the Hitler regime.

But here, too, evidence that has recently come to light weighs heavily against the philosopher’s self-exculpatory strivings. We now know that Heidegger’s July 1933 intercession on behalf of two dismissed Jewish professors, the classicist Eduard Fraenkel and the chemist Georg von Hevesy (who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1945), had an exclusively pragmatic basis: he was merely concerned that the summary dismissal, on racial grounds, of two internationally renowned scholars might have deleterious consequences for Germany’s foreign policy interests. In his letter of July 12, 1933, moreover, Heidegger assured the Ministry of Education of his full support for the National Socialist ordinance barring Jews from civil service professions—the Säuberung (“cleansing”) actions, as they were known.¹³

Although Heidegger-supporters have always considered Toni Cassirer’s remarks regarding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as little more than unsubstantiated conjecture, a significant confirmation of her claims has recently surfaced in the form of a 1929 letter of recommendation composed by Heidegger on behalf of one of his students, Eduard Baumgarten. There, Heidegger attempts to bolster his appeal on Baumgarten’s behalf with the following observation: “at stake is nothing less than the urgent awareness that we stand before a choice: once again to provide our German spiritual life with genuine, indigenous [bodenständige] manpower and educators, or to deliver it over definitively…to increasing Judification [Verjudung].”¹⁴ When taken together, the testimony of Toni Cassirer and the Baumgarten letter suggest the degree to which Heidegger’s political attitudes in the late 1920s were preconditioned by a set of well-defined, traditional cultural prejudices; and in the light of a growing body of corroborating evidence, his embrace of the Nazi cause in 1933 would seem far from adventitious.

Ironically, another well-documented instance of anti-Semitic conduct on Heidegger’s part also concerns Baumgarten; though on this occasion, Baumgarten was the victim rather than the beneficiary of Heidegger’s prejudicial sentiments. Thus in December 1933, after the two had had an intellectual falling out, Heidegger tried to block Baumgarten’s appointment to Göttingen University by writing an unsolicited letter to the head of the National Socialist professors’ organization there. Baumgarten should be disqualified for the position, argued Heidegger, insofar as he hailed from a “liberal-democratic” milieu in Heidelberg, had become excessively “Americanized” during a sojourn in the United States, and, lastly, owing to his associations with “the Jew [Eduard] Fraenkel.”¹⁵

More recently, it has come to light that upon his accession to the Rectorship in May 1933, Heidegger immediately severed contact with all his Jewish dissertation students. And thus, according to the philosopher and former Heidegger student Max Müller, “From the moment that Heidegger became Rector, he allowed no Jewish students who had begun their dissertations with him to receive their degree.”¹⁶ According to the testimony of another Heidegger student in the early 1930s, Leopoldine Weizmann, he dashed the hopes of one highly touted doctoral candidate with the words, “You understand, Frau Mintz, that because you are a Jew I cannot supervise your promotion.”¹⁷

Despite the well-documented incidents of anti-Semitic conduct on Heidegger’s part,¹⁸ it would be precipitate to conclude that “racial thinking” occupied an essential niche in his “world-view”—let alone in his philosophy. Instead, as one commentator has suggested, it is more likely that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was of the “customary, cultural variety.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, it would at the same time be misleading to deny that so-called traditional “cultural anti–Semitism” formed the necessary historical precondition for the racial–biological anti–Semitism that had been germinating in German society since the late nineteenth-century; that is, for the virulent strain of anti–Semitism that proved to be the direct precursor of National Socialist racial doctrines.²⁰ What such flagrant displays of anti–Semitic sentiment suggest for our understanding of Heidegger’s political maturation is that his intellectual world–view was much more profoundly conditioned than one might have initially believed by the vehement, latently fascistic “critique of modernity”—of “Western” values, the Enlightenment, “cosmopolitanism,” and so forth—that was shared by both the German intellectual mandarinate and the provincial Volk alike.²¹ Moreover, it suggests a question that is essential from the standpoint of the inquiry at hand: viz., to what extent might this antimodernist world-view have impinged on the hypothetical purity of Heidegger’s philosophical outlook itself (a question we shall pursue at some length in the following chapter)?

In 1945, the de-Nazification commission at Freiburg University would provide a cogent summation of both Heidegger’s activities as Rector as well as the motivations underlying his actions. The most damning charges against him were formulated as follows:

Before the revolutionary upheaval of 1933, the philosopher Martin Heidegger lived in a fully unpolitical, spiritual world; however, he maintained friendly relations (also through his sons) with the Youth Movement of that time and with certain literary spokesmen of German youth, such as Ernst Jünger, who proclaimed the end of the bourgeois-capitalist era and the advent of a new German socialism. From the National Socialist Revolution he expected a spiritual renewal of German life on a völkisch foundation and, like many German intellectuals, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a preservation of Western culture in face of the dangers of communism. He did not have a clear understanding regarding the parliamentary political forms that preceded the National Socialist seizure of power [and] believed it was Hitler’s historical mission to bring about the spiritual transformation that he [Heidegger] himself envisioned….

By virtue of the fact that he spoke of “labor service” and “military service” as having equal rights with “service in knowledge” [in his Rectoral Address], he provided Nazi propaganda with the means to exploit his speech for political ends. While he envisioned the spiritual deepening and restructuring of the German university system…the Party used the mere fact that a scholar of his stature had joined its ranks and celebrated its victory in public addresses as a highly welcome propaganda tool. He himself had made its task an easy one, insofar as he sought to ensure a reliable following among the academic youth and allowed himself to be carried away to the point of inciting the students against their so-called “reactionary” professors. He hoped thereby to further his own plans for reform and also to gain a conspicuous standing within the Party, which would make it possible for him to maintain his own line, and where possible, to influence the internal development of the Party in a beneficial fashion. Naturally, these hopes were rapidly disappointed; the students were arrogant and insolent, the majority of professors were deeply offended by his often tactless and, in their eyes, impudent decrees, and were quickly driven into the opposition; the Party distanced itself from him the more it gradually recognized the internal opposition of his goals in the sphere of university politics to their own. The fact that he also enthusiastically participated in the transformation of the university constitution in accordance with the new Führerprinzip, in the introduction of the external forms of Hitlerism (e.g., the so-called “German gre...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Epigraph
• Preface To The 2016 Edition
• Preface
• 1. Heidegger and Politics
• 2. Being and Time as Political Philosophy
• 3. “To Lead the Leader”: Philosophy in the Service of National Socialism
• 4. “The Inner Truth and Greatness of National Socialism”
• 5. Technology, Antihumanism, and the Eclipse of Practical Reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index