Martin Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher?

Martin Heidegger

(Image from New York Times)

In a recent article for The New York Times (April 29, 2010), "The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger" (perhaps better titled "The Nazi Question"), senior editor for The New Republic, Adam Kirsch, reviews two recent books on this tarnished German philosopher, who joined the Nazi Party, served as rector of Freiburg University from 1933-34, and told the student body, in a November 1933 speech, that "the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law."

The more interesting of the two books would appear to be the one originally in French by Emmanuel Faye, The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (translated by Michael B. Smith), for Kirsch writes that Faye argues not just that that Heidegger was a philosopher who happened to join the Nazi Party, nor that Heidegger was a Nazi who just happened to be a philosopher, but that Heidegger was, crucially, a "Nazi philosopher":

Faye, an authority on Descartes, is driven to this pitch of accusation by his study of the seminars, till now untranslated or unpublished, that Heidegger taught during 1933-35, in the first flush of his Nazi enthusiasm. In these classes, Faye proves beyond doubt, we do witness "the introduction of Nazism into philosophy," the outright transformation of Heidegger's thought into a tool of Nazi indoctrination. The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger's work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms -- being, existence, decision -- as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship. Thus we find him, in the winter of 1933-34, declaring that "the question of the awareness of the will of the community is a problem that is posed in all democracies, but one that of course can become fruitful only when the will of the Führer and the will of the people are identified in their essence." At the same time, Heidegger tells his students -- "many of whom," Faye points out, "were to become combatants at the beginning of the following decade on the Eastern front" -- that "to a Semitic nomad," the "nature of our German space" is inherently foreign.

This is complex material, for a proper critique demands that one deal not merely with nationalist ideas, ideologies of blood, and the concept of the leader, but that one engage in philosophical thinking and its distortion, not an easy labor. At the conclusion of his article, Kirsch suggests a similar task:

[W]hat makes Heidegger's Nazism a challenge -- as opposed to merely a scandal -- is the fact that he did not drift into evil, but thought his way into it. And once we acknowledge the powerful attraction of his work, we are morally and intellectually bound to explore what part of that attraction is owed to ideas with a potential for evil . . . . [T]hat more difficult questioning . . . asks us to confront not just Heideg­ger but ourselves.

I'd be interested to know what my philosopher friend Bill Vallicella thinks about this matter, for I can mostly just direct attention to a matter outside my expertise. Heidegger's personal culpability is beyond question, but the question concerning the culpability of his philosophy remains, and I think it an important one, intellectually, for Heidegger the philosopher is considered a major thinker of the 20th century, and his ideas have influenced the intellectual left, continental philosophy, literary criticism, theology, and many other fields.

As noted, I can mostly just call attention to this matter of culpability, but I'm still willing to hazard a guess. In a statement quoted above, Kirsch observes:

The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger's work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms -- being, existence, decision -- as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship.

Kirsch isn't being very precise here in reporting on Faye's evidence, for he offers three different Heideggerian terms used for two different fascist characteristics, but none of the former seems to correspond with either of the latter. Perhaps Kirsch means "euphemisms associated with nationalism and Führer-worship"? But even if "being, existence, decision" are used by Heidegger in his seminars from 1933 to 1935 as euphemisms for Nazi concepts, Kirsch's term "euphemism" suggests that Heidegger is employing some intellectual sleight of hand, using more innocuous terms to hide something less reputable, a form of equivocation. If Heidegger is equivocating in his use of key terms from his philosophy, then his core concepts might not be essentially evil but merely corruptible.

But I haven't read Faye's book, and I would be in deep waters even if I had, so I leave this intellectual sea for better, more experienced sailors to navigate and chart . . .

UPDATE: My friend Bill Vallicella has offered his view of the matter.

Hans Blumenberg: The Threat to Theoretical Curiosity

Edmund Husserl

"counter to powerful interests"

(Image from The Husserl Page)

Many of my recent posts have spent an apparently inordinate amount of time delving into the so-called 'trial' of theoretical curiosity, that historical process by which the evaluation of curiosity changed from Antiquity's more or less neutral attitude through the Medieval period's condemnation of it as a vice to Modernity's extolling of it as a virtue.

If Hans Blumenberg is correct in the argument that he puts forth in his Legitimacy tome, then the Modern age emerged not as a secularization of the Medieval world, if one means by that expression that the Modern age simply appropriated Medieval concepts as its own in the same way that the Protestant states secularized the Catholic monasteries by confiscating their lands, their treasures, and their libraries. Rather, Modernity arose as something radically new, namely, through the self-assertion of mankind's right to unbounded curiosity as a existential necessity in the late Medieval period's nominalist construal of an indifferent cosmos and a hostile deity.

The 'trial' of theoretical curiosity might seem long over by now, possibly even of historical interest only, and such might have appeared the case in the early 60s, when Blumenberg's ideas were developing. As such, his study might have been seen as of theoretical interest alone, an investigation into an obscure issue long past, research that only a curious scholar would engage in. Perhaps so. Among scholars, at any rate, Blumenberg's work was recognized as original, even 'world-historical' in its far-reaching implications, but the issue seemingly remained an academic one.

Arguably, Blumenberg himself thought so at the time of his writing, for he noted:

Our situation is not that of the beginning of the modern age, however distinguishable by "specific transactions" that beginning may be. Is the problem of making a beginning still our problem? Jürgen Mittelstrass has answered this question by giving his concept of "'reflected' curiosity" as a specifically heterogeneous function that I would like to characterize as that of an already iterated 'reflection': What set the modern age's curiosity in motion no longer needs -- in its self-accelerated, immanently propelled motion -- rehabilitation and restitution of its primary energy; it has become indifferent to the new, as such, on account of its experience of the latter's inevitability, which may even constitute for it a burden to be endured, and instead it is all the more sensitive to the direction that belongs to the motion that is thus stimulated, sensitive to the question of where it is headed. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 235)

Still, Blumenberg knew better, knew from his own life -- interrupted at around age 20 by World War II -- the threat that powerful interests could oppose to curiosity:

In this [current] situation [of theoretical ease], anyone at all who "defends man's interest in what, so to speak, does not concern him" seems anachronistic -- unless perhaps this were once again an act of defending theoretical curiosity in circumstances where it was supposed to interest itself only in material that did not run counter to powerful interests. Even in the categorization of theory as a derivative attitude subordinate to the radical of "care," there is a possibility, if not a necessity, of requiring the interest in theory to legitimate itself once again by demonstrating a contemporary and relevant, or even an authoritatively prescribed, "care" as its source. Scarcely a decade after theory, as mere gaping at what is 'present at hand,' had been, if not yet despised, still portrayed as a stale recapitulation of the content of living involvements, it was the greatness of the solitary, aged Edmund Husserl, academically exiled and silenced, that he held fast to the resolution to engage in theory as the initial act of European humanity and as a corrective for its most terrible deviation, and that he required of it a rigorous consistency, which is still, or once again, felt to be objectionable. Hermann Lübbe has described as the characteristic mark of this philosophizing, especially in the late works, the "rationalism of theory's interest in what is without interest": "The existential problem of a scholar who in his old age was forbidden to set foot in the place where he carried on his research and teaching never shows through, and even the back of the official notice that informed him of this prohibition was covered by Husserl with philosophical notes. That is a case of 'carrying on' whose dignity equals that of the sentence, 'Noli turbare circulos meos' [Don't disturb my circles]." (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 235-236)

In a note to this text, the translator Robert Wallace explains the obscure allusion as "[a] remark reportedly made by Archimedes to Roman soldiers who, after conquering his city, Syracuse, were on the point of killing him" (p. 241, n. a). According to this tradition, Archimedes was busily working on problems of geometry, following the path that his theoretical curiosity was leading, all but oblivious to the dire events transpiring around him, and was simply requesting that no one disturb his work ("μή μου τούς κύκλους τάραττε").

In reality, of course, Archimedes was a practical man dedicated to the defense of his city and occupied in applying his theoretical expertise in geometry to his city's defense. According to Lucian of Samosata, Archimedes used a series of mirrors arranged parabolically to focus sunlight upon Roman ships and cause them to burst into flames before they could attack. Whether this story is true or not, it does recall the sort of role that Archimedes played as an advisor to the military on the use of scientific and technical knowledge for defensive purposes, and his work on improving the catapult could be applied not merely to defensive purposes but also to offensive aims.

Nevertheless, Blumenberg's point remains. Conditions are not always favorable to the open-ended questions posed by curious scholars. The obscure reference above to "theory [being despised] . . . as mere gaping at what is 'present at hand'" alludes to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, which Blumenberg implicitly criticizes for denigrating theory as a "mere gaping" at things "present at hand" that the active man would grasp. That active man Martin Heidegger who joined the Nazi Party and turned against his Jewish teacher Edmund Husserl was the very same man who conveyed to Husserl the Nazi directive that he was no longer permitted to use the library at Alfred Ludwigs University, in Freiburg, the place where he had conducted much of his research.

His curiosity was verboten.

For that malady, Europe required the treatment of radical surgery, and one might think the West cured, secure in a world now safe for theoretical curiosity, but I question whether or not this safety is so secure, for, arguably, we face again the resurgence of theological absolutism, only this time of a more implacable sort than the late Medieval Christian nominalist kind.

Perhaps a new defense is required...

Death as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?

Rudolf Otto

Author of The Idea of the Holy

(Image from Kelley L. Ross)

Still working on my prepared responses to several scholar papers scheduled for this week's upcoming religious studies conference at Sogang University on Death, Dying, and Spirituality, I have written the following couple of paragraphs as part of my response to a paper about experiencing the numinous in the face of death (albeit reworked for this blog to leave the scholar unidentified):

The scholar offers the interesting perspective that the world's religions provide a panacea for our fear of death, by which he may mean to imply that this is their primary function, but we will have to see on this point. What strikes me about his point is that he argues that even Hinduism and Buddhism affirm continuation of the self after death through reincarnation or translation to a heavenly realm and that this affirmation of the continued existence of one's self is what helps these religions provide consolation to the average believer. Even more striking, because surprising, is his observation that even science, or perhaps 'Scientism', seeks to deny death and aims to overcome it by achieving physical immortality. Yet, he wonders if fear of death is common to humans in every epoch, and he cites the possibility that our early ancestors didn't fear death as we do today. If this is correct, he suggests, then the world's religions have developed alongside a rising sense of self-importance. This would suggest that as the individual has grown increasingly in importance, so people have grown to see themselves as individually important, and perhaps all-important, which is somewhat counter-intuitive since the great world religions claim to diminish the significance of the individual. At this point, I would note the remark by Dorothee Soëlle quoted in the paper, namely, "never are people so self-involved as when they fear death" (Soëlle, Mystery of Death, page 5), which suggests the ironic possibility that belief in immortality reduces self-involvement by removing the fear of death. Moreover, if Hinduism and Buddhism have proven attractive for many people for so long because -- despite what they may affirm about dissolution of the self as an ultimate aim -- they offer personal immortality in their popular forms and have long done so in cultures not noted for their individualism, then I wonder about the thesis that fear of death undergirds religion and that the great religions have developed along with a growing fear of death as the self grows in significance. There is at least some complexity to this issue, and perhaps even an ironic counter-argument, as I've suggested.

At any rate, the possibility that death might end not just our earthly life but even our entire being remains troubling to many of us, and the scholar cites Martin Heidegger's description of the sort of anxiety stirred up by the realisation of one's impending demise as unheimlich, or uncanny, which is understood in the sense offered by Rudolf Otto for the experience of our encounter with "The Holy," for Otto describes our encounter with the numinous in the sense of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery both terrifying and fascinating (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy). In such a sense as this, death itself seems to take on the qualities of a fearsome deus absconditus who is not so much the ontological ground of our existence as an existential threat to our being. For most of us, however -- suggests the scholar -- perhaps as a sort of Freudian reaction formation (cf. Freud, Reader, page 295 et passim), rather than directly confronting our mortality, a belief arises in us that we shall become like the Wholly Other and live forever, the Wholly Other being a God who has not absconded but who offers a reliable promise guaranteeing the survival of our self.

Such is the current state of these remarks as I try to develop them. They sound a bit awkward to me now, partly because I've had to rework them to avoid quoting or mentioning the scholar whose paper I'm responding to, for the conference has yet to take place.

Perhaps I'll be reporting on this sort of topic over the next several days, for the conference begins tomorrow.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John Harvey. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Soëlle, Dorothee. The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007 (Mystik des Todes: Ein Fragment. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 2003).