Charles Bambach
To raise the question of Heidegger and National Socialism, and to raise it precisely as a question rather than as an already foregone conclusion, is to enter into one of the darkest and most fiercely debated topics within Heidegger’s thinking. Not only is this a question about philosophy and politics, of the Platonic guardian and his relation to the leadership of the polis; it is also – if not primarily – an ethical question about the support of one of Europe’s greatest philosophers for perhaps the most terrible and violent regime in her history. There are so many dimensions to this question – of Heidegger’s personal involvement as rector and academic leader (Führer) of Freiburg University from 1933 to 1934, of his fall from power and his claims of being persecuted in the Reich, of his post-war interrogation by the Freiburg University de-Nazification committee, of his public silence on the National Socialist years and the Holocaust, and his famous defence in the Spiegel interview of 1966. There is also the testimony of his contemporaries, including his students (Karl Löwith, Hermann Mörchen, Rainer Marten and Herbert Marcuse), his colleagues (Karl Jaspers), his friends/family (Elisabeth Blochmann, Elfride Heidegger, Heinrich Petzet) as well as the vast secondary literature that, after the publication of works by Victor Farias (1989), Hugo Ott (1993), Jacques Derrida (1989), and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1990), spawned the notorious l’affaire Heidegger, whose echoes still resound in current discussions of the philosopher.
To genuinely think the question of Heidegger and National Socialism, however, means to attend to its philosophical meaning rather than to its merely factical relation to issues such as party politics, personal ambition, ideological affinity or rhetorical excess (all of which no doubt constitute a telling chapter in the story of Heidegger and politics). The twelve years of National Socialist rule in Germany (1933–45) coincide with some of the most important years of Heidegger’s thinking: the years of his so-called “turning”, when he writes Contributions to Philosophy, develops his notion of the history of being and another beginning, and delivers important lectures on Hölderlin, Nietzsche and the Presocratics.
In what follows I should like to approach the question of Heidegger’s embrace of National Socialism by reflecting on its ontological significance in terms of the ontical commitments that Heidegger made. In order to do this we shall need to consider not only Heidegger’s “official” involvement with National Socialism in the period of his rectorship (1933–4), but also the reasons for his break with the institutions of the Reich and how that break shapes the direction of his later thought.
In late April of 1933, just three months after Hitler’s rise to power, Heidegger is elected as rector of the University of Freiburg and on 1 May he officially joins the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). In his Rectorial Address of 27 May 1933, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, he issues a call to the German Volk to become who they are in and through a renewal of their resolve “to stand firm in the face of German fate in its extreme distress” (SU 30 =R 10). In the heady atmosphere of the National Socialist revolution of 1933, Heidegger comes to believe that he has the unique opportunity to shape the National Socialist movement in an originary philosophical way, to become the Führer of the German university, which he sees as the catalyst for revolutionary change. The Rectorial Address announces a bold mission for the German Volk whose sense of itself can come, Heidegger believes, only through the philosophical direction of a spiritual (geistiger) Führer. If at this time the intellectual leadership of the Nazi movement was still up for grabs (with other prominent Nazi professors such as Ernst Krieck, Alfred Baeumler and Hans Heyse vying for ascendancy), Heidegger’s address announces his own philosophical brand of National Socialism rather than merely affirming Hitler’s political takeover.1 Heidegger’s enemies (both in 1933–4 and after the war) interpreted his decision to join the NSDAP as opportunistic and megalomaniacal, and one can certainly find such motives at work in his essays and addresses from this period. But it would be both cynical and simplistic to maintain that this was his primary motivation. Heidegger genuinely put his faith in the possibilities afforded by the National Socialist revolution, which he viewed as only the precursor and precondition for a second ontological revolution that would bring the German Volk (People) to its proper historical mission as the saving force in the history of the West.2
This eschatological vision of German destiny grew out of Heidegger’s own profound disenchantment with the course of German politics following Germany’s crushing defeat in the Great War and the humiliation inflicted on it by the Treaty of Versailles. Drawn to Hitler by his bold affirmation of the renewal of the German Volk, Heidegger understood his own task as rector as parallel to Hitler’s. In his very first lecture course as rector in Summer Semester (hereafter SS) 1933, Heidegger declared:
Of the greatness of the historical moment through which the German Volk is now passing, this is what academic youth knows. The German Volk as a whole comes to itself; that is, it finds its leadership. In this leadership the Volk (which has come to itself) creates the state. The Volk, which forms itself in the state and establishes its permanence and continuity through it, grows up into a nation. The nation takes upon itself the fate of its Volk. Such a Volk attains its spiritual commission among peoples and creates its own history … All essential leadership lives from the power of a great and fundamentally concealed vocation. This is first and last the spiritual commission of the Volk that reserves for itself the fate of a nation. What matters is to awaken the knowledge of this commission and to root it in the heart and will of a Volk and the individuals in it … This knowledge concerning the spiritual–political commission of the German Volk is a knowledge about its future.
(GA 36/37: 3–4)
Heidegger goes on to claim that by asking the question about its commission, vocation and destiny, the German Volk enters into the genuine realm of philosophy, since philosophy is nothing other than “essential” questioning (which he understands in turn as a questioning concerning the essence of being). But such questioning does not take place on its own; it requires a fundamental decision by the Volk, a resoluteness to become authentically what it is. In this sense Heidegger understands the Volk not as a fixed historical essence, but as a possibility of historical becoming that sets for itself a task (here National Socialism can be literally thought of as a move-ment). In §74 of Being and Time Heidegger links this form of anticipatory resoluteness to the possibility of retrieving the past, not as something merely gone or outdated, but as the choice for authentically retrieving “the possibility of existence that has-been-there (dagewesen)” (SZ 386). In other words, to speak the language of fundamental ontology, the historicity of the Volk – its futural fate retrieved from the possibility of its having-been – lies in its resolute decision to make itself “free for the struggle to come” by handing itself over to the “there” (da) of the moment (Augenblick). In this resolute openness to the authentic temporality of its fate, the Volk understands itself in terms of a communally shared destiny rather than as an assemblage of individuated egos or a collective “subject”. In this new self-understanding Heidegger finds the basis for his political commitment to National Socialism. Yet what the Volk requires to grasp the authentic meaning of its historicity is the leadership of a truly great poet, philosopher and/or statesman (GA 39: 51; EM 47). In their struggle (Kampf) to disclose the concealed meaning and direction of the Volk’s destiny, these leaders expose both themselves and their countrymen to the danger and distress of “the incessant questioning struggle concerning the essence and being of entities” (GA 36/37: 12). The Rectorial Address presents itself as an ontological call for the hardness (Härte) of will required to initiate such questioning so that a space can be opened up for “the most constant and hardest self-reflection” (SU 29 = R 9, trans. mod.).
“The Self-Assertion of the German University” takes up this task of questioning by thinking the political revolution of National Socialism as the first step in transforming the historical legacy of Germany’s defeat in the Great War into a national awakening to the Volk’s authentic destiny.3 Drawing on his earlier phenomenological engagement with St Paul’s epistles (GA 60: 98–105, 114, 149–50), which focused on the early Christian experience of resolute wakefulness to the kairos moment of “the coming of the Lord” (parousia), Heidegger envisages the Volk’s awakening as an attunement to the kairos moment of revolutionary possibility. In this sense, the euphoric self-renewal brought on by Hitler’s coming to power can be understood as the preparation for instituting a transition to an “other” beginning: not only for the German Volk but through them for the history of the West. The site for this national awakening (Aufbruch) was to be the university, but not the middle-class definition of the university as a place to choose a career or to gain an “education”. On the contrary, Heidegger contends, the genuine essence of the university lies in science (Wissenschaft). Science in its present form, however, offers a mere semblance of what it originally meant for the early Greeks; hence Heidegger calls for a radical rethinking of the essence of science in terms of its original roots in the ancient Greek practice of philosophia, which Plato (Theaetetus 155d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 982b) both conceive as “wonderment” (thaumazein) rather than as mere evident or self-certain knowledge. Thaumazein, or what Heidegger termed “the initial wondering perseverance in the face of what is”, constitutes the root, the beginning and the archē of genuine science (SU 33 = R 13, trans. mod.). Yet within the contemporary university, philosophy has become merely another technical discipline, a discipline unaware of its original relation to the other disciplines and to its own proper essence. What is required in Heidegger’s estimation is a rethinking of “the essence of truth”: not as “adequation” or the correspondence between a judging subject and a perceived object, but as a movement of Heraclitean oppositions, a mutually implicating interplay between harmony and conflict, concord and discord, consonance and dissonance. On Heidegger’s reading, truth is polemos or Aus-einander-setzung, a setting out (setzen) and apart from (aus) one another (einander) that involves Kampf, struggle and conflict. To grasp the logic of this Kampf between the coming to presence and rescinding of truth demands “being completely exposed to (Ausgesetzheit), and at the mercy of, what is concealed and uncertain”, of being attuned to the originary Greek experience of truth as alētheia – the primordial play in phenomena between concealment (lēthē) and unconcealment (a-lēthēs) (SU 33 = R 13; see also Chapter 8). If the German Volk is to come into its authentic destiny of sheltering alētheia, if it is to attain a “primordially attuned knowing resoluteness toward the essence of being”, Heidegger claims, it must pursue its originary kinship with “the Volk of the Greeks whose ancestral stock and language have the same origin as we do” (GA 36/37: 6). As Heidegger put it in the Rectorial Address:
All science remains bound to the beginning of philosophy and draws from it the strength of its essence, provided that it still remains equal to this beginning … The beginning still is. It does not lie behind us as something long past, but it stands before us … The beginning has invaded our future; it stands there as the distant injunction (Verfügung) to us to recover its greatness.
Only if we resolutely submit to this distant injunction to win back the greatness of the beginning, only then will science become the innermost necessity of our existence. Otherwise, science will remain something in which we become involved purely by chance or will remain a calm, pleasurable activity, an activity free of danger, which promotes the mere advancement of learning. If, however, we submit to the distant injunction of the beginning, then science must become the fundamental happening of our spiritual existence as a Volk.
(SU 32–33 = R 12–13, trans. mod.)
In this pro-vocative call to his fellow Germans to heed their vocation as the only Volk capable of recovering the originary power of the first Greek beginning, Heidegger clearly emphasizes the necessity of submission, sacrifice and self-renunciation, even as he interprets all of this as a necessary part of wilful self-assertion. What the university demands of us all, Heidegger proclaims, is
the originary, common will to its essence (Wesen) … which is the will to science as the will to the historical–spiritual commission of the German Volk as a Volk that knows itself in its state. Science and German fate must above all come to their essential will to power.
(SU 30 = R 10, trans. mod.)
This unflagging commitment to a Nietzschean form of self-assertive will-to-power marks Heidegger’s Rectorial Address in the most striking way (see Chapter 12). And it is this “massive voluntarism” (as Derrida terms it) that has emerged as one of the defining characteristics of Heidegger’s early commitment to National Socialism in the name of the “Volk”, “spirit (Geist)” and “will”: three terms whose meaning will profoundly change as Heidegger becomes ever more disenchanted with “official” National Socialism (Derrida 1989: 37; Davis 2007: 65–99). The Rectorial Address’s commitment to a quasi-Platonic educational state grounded in work-, military- and knowledge-service depends on the communal resolve to will the futural happening of the Volk and to find in this will the strength and energy to fashion a community of teachers and workers, soldiers and students, all bound to their mission of preparing an/other beginning by “standing-firm” in the storm of European nihilism.
The Rectorial Address has rightly been criticized for its unmistakable affinities to National Socialism – its rejection of liberal academic freedom, its embrace of the principle of Gleichschaltung (the levelling of German society), its commitment to the Führerprinzip (leader-principle), its affinity with “the blood and soil” rhetoric of hard-core Nazi ideologues – but in December 1945, in response to questions from the de-Nazification commission in Freiburg, Heidegger defended his actions as rector and maintained that they sought “to oppose the advance of unsuited persons and the threatening supremacy of the party apparatus and party doctrine” (MHNS 17 = R 24). In this sense, Heidegger claimed, the Rectorial Address constituted a form of “spiritual resistance (geistiger Widerstand)” to National Socialism and in his official letters and report to the Freiburg commission he maintained that his Nietzsche lectures, delivered from 1936 to 1944, were conceived as nothing less than a “confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with National Socialism” (MHNS 42–51). From the beginning Heidegger framed this defence of his National Socialist ties by separating the “political” and the “philosophical” aspects of this question. In his famous Spiegel interview of 1966, for example, he grants that the political events of 1933 were hardly unknown to him, yet he maintains that at the time he was more of an observer than a participant: “I certainly followed the course of political events between January and March of 1933 and occasionally talked about them with younger colleagues as well. However, my work was concerned with a more extensive interpretation of pre-Socratic thinking” (MHNS 42 = GA 16: 653).
Despite Heidegger’s contentions, however, it is difficult to separate his National Socialist politics from his philosophy since they were so profoundly joined in his work. Heidegger himself was convinced that originary philosophy could only be done in dialogue with politics, something that has to be understood here not as the institutional, legal, military or socioeconomic aspects of statecraft or legislative–executive decision-making, but as the historical–ontological site within which Dasein struggles to find its place and its own sense of being rooted: in a community (Gemeinschaft), a Volk, a tradition and a history. Hence, Heidegger could write so passionately about his commitment to the earth, the homeland, the native ground and the “inner belonging of [his] own work to the Black Forest and its people that comes from a centuries-long and irreplaceable rootedness [Bodenständigkeit] in the Alemannic-Swabian soil” (GA 13: 10–11). This is what Heidegger means in the Rectorial Address when he writes of “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of the Volk” (SU 33–34 = R 14, trans. mod.). The earth in this sense is not a natural region demarcated by the boundaries of settlement nor a mere geographical or political enclosure measured by the science of cartography; rather, “earth” for Heidegger becomes what the ancient Greeks termed “chthoõn”, the place where humans dwell and form a homeland.4
During his time as rector Heidegger committed himself in an institutional way to bringing about the sweeping changes necessary for the “total transformation of German Dasein” (GA 16: 192). The vision put forward in the Rectorial Address was of a Volk reawakened to the forgotten Greek disposition of wonder, awe and thaumazein, of a German community so attuned to the Heraclitean play of concealment/unconcealment that it would reject the careerist and technocratic application of learning that dominated the contemporary university with its educational calculus of measurement, management and computation. But the failure of the rectorate – this “thorn in my flesh” as Heidegger described it – would crush his ambitious hopes to take upon himself the institutional leadership of this “German awakening” (HJB 157). Instead, in his Freiburg lectures Heidegger would ever more powerfully embrace his own idiosyncratic form of National Socialism, a “private National Socialism” as the National Socialist Minister of Culture and Education, Otto Wacker, termed it, one that “circumvented the perspectives of the [official] party program” (GA 16: 381).
In one set of his Freiburg lectures from SS 1935, “Introduction to Metaphysics”, Heidegger offered a forceful critique of the contemporary ideological position of National Socialism, which he saw as trapped in a cultural form of subjectivist worldview- and value-philosophy. “What is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism”, he declared, “has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement” (EM 152). But what genuinely constitutes “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism? In his 1953 revision of these lectures Heidegger claims that it has to do with “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity”.5 This nexus between National Socialism and global technology would provide the question-frame within which Heidegger would think through his political ties into the post-war era. Even in his 1949 Bremen lectures he goes so far as to circumscribe the atrocities of the Holocaust within his pervasive analysis of “das Gestell”: the enframing structure of modern technology that manifests beings solely as available resources on constant standing reserve to be calculated, consumed and stockpiled for instrumental purposes (see Chapter 13). There he writes:
Agriculture is now motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockading and starving of countries, the same thing as the manufacturing of hydrogen bombs.
(GA 79: 27)
And yet, as prescient as Heidegger’s critique of modern technology proved to be, it remained “scandalously inadequate” as a way of addressing the torture and systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime (Lacoue-Labarthe 1990: 34).
One of Heidegger’s former students, Herbert Marcuse, wrote to him in 1947 expressing his shock that Heidegger could defend “the world historical guilt of the Nazi system” by equating “the torture, the maiming, and the annihilation of millions of people with the forcible relocation” of East Germans at the end of the war (HC 164). Nonetheless, Heidegger did offer a “defence” of Nazi Germany’s position and, aside from a few private letters/conversations, he remained silent on the Shoah, never acknowledging his complicity in the National Socialist Gestell of terror. As for charges of anti-Semitism, Heidegger’s defenders can console themselves by noting that there is no systematic doctrine of biological racism within his writings, something that cannot be said of his National Socialist colleagues in philosophy, Alfred Baeumler, Ernst Krieck and Hans Heyse (see Sluga 1993). And yet in both his official and private correspondence one can find troublesome expressions about the “Judaification of the German spirit”, and warnings as early as 1916 that “the Judaification of our culture and universities is frightening to be sure and I believe the German race (Rasse) should summon as much inner strength as it can to reach its peak”.6 No matter how we try to contextualize or qualify these kinds of statements, or dismiss his collusion with Hitler’s regime as an early “error” on his part – “the greatest stupidity in my life” Heidegger is reported to have said (Petzet 1993: 37) – we are left with troubling questions about Heidegger’s place in the history of Nazi Germany and in the history of philosophy. And while doubts remain about Heidegger’s “culpability” in the atrocities of the Nazi terror, it is hard to deny that his post-war cover-up of his National Socialist ties and his failure to clearly address the horrors of Auschwitz stand out as egregiously inadequate responses to the question of philosophical responsibility. Yet what of Heidegger’s writings from the post-rectorate period (1934–45), those composed after his official withdrawal from public life in the National Socialist regime? How do they appear under the scrutiny of later reflection?
After Heidegger resigned as rector in April 1934, he retreated to his philosophical routine of writing and teaching as he abandoned his ambition to become the philosophical leader of the National Socialist movement. In the Winter Semester (hereafter WS) 1934–5 he delivered his first set of lectures on Hölderlin’s Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, which, like the SS 1934 lectures on Logik, continued Heidegger’s focus on the Volk and on the question: “Who are we?” (GA 38: 34–64; GA 39: 48–59). In no uncertain terms Heidegger declares: “the Fatherland [is] the historical beyng of a Volk” (GA 39: 120). But now Heidegger seeks to offer a subtle critique of the “more dubious and noisy patriotism” spouted in official Nazi propaganda. Instead, he claims that “this historical beyng of the Volk, the Fatherland, is cloaked in mystery forever in keeping with its essence” (ibid.). What the Volk “is” remains recalcitrant to the ideologue’s grasp; only in be-coming, only as a move-ment that accepts its futural mission to come to itself via a retrieve of the first Greek beginning, can the Volk hope to shelter its “essence”. More than ever before, Heidegger will rethink this “essence” in terms of a new Hölderlinian myth of temporality. “The hour of our history has struck”, Heidegger proclaims (GA 39: 294). By SS 1942 in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (HHI = GA 53) Heidegger will have renounced the aggressive, self-assertive nationalism of his early National Socialist years to embrace a more originary form of völkisch nationalism: a politics of the archē that he founds in/as language, history and autochthony. Each of these three spheres becomes the site for the homecoming of the German Volk. In its poetic confrontation with the first Greek beginning, the Volk of Hölderlin’s invocation takes upon itself the call of/from beyng to fulfil its ontological destiny as those called on to prepare the transition to an “other” beginning.
In this turn away from the ambitions of the Rectorial Address Heidegger no longer conceives of the hoped-for revolution as imminent; on the contrary, after 1937 he slowly loses his faith in “official” National Socialism and instead embraces an Alemannic Volksreligion of Heimat, hearth and Hölderlin that defers the political revolution in favour of a poetic form of national renewal. Here Heidegger turns to Hölderlin’s notion of “the festival” and of festal time as that which founds anew the time of the Volk-community. “‘The festival’ is itself the ground and essence of history”, Heidegger declares; and, in turn, “to think the essence of history means to think the West in its essence from out of its relation to the first beginning, i.e., to the Greek world and to Greece” (GA 52: 68). The festival announces “the appropria-tive event” (Ereignis) that conciliates gods and humans in kairological time, a time of celebration, benefaction and consecration that is more originary than the calendrical time of planning, policy and the political. It is this festal time that Hölderlin had already uncovered in Sophocles’ tragedies that Heidegger seeks to retrieve for an originary German politics of “authentic history” (GA 52: 77).
On this basis Heidegger will rethink his earlier notion of time as the historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein in terms of a new reading of the destiny (Geschick) of be-ing as Ereignis (see Chapter 10). This shift within Heidegger’s thinking – from the fate of Dasein to the destiny of the Volk by way of a Hölderlinian reflection on the essential homeless-ness of human being – will provide a pathway into the larger question of a “turning” (Kehre) of/within the history of being. This new being-historical mode of thinking will ultimately lead Heidegger to abandon the National Socialist politics of the Volk for a poetic–ontological interpretation of an apolitical Volksreligion that draws its inspiration from the archaic Greek experience of the polis as “the essence of being and of truth” (GA 54: 132). In his Parmenides lectures of WS 1942/43 (delivered during the bitter German defeat at Stalingrad that proved to be the turning point of the war) he will abjure the very language and conceptuality of politics, writing: “The essence of the Greek polis is grounded in the essence of aleētheia … The polis is neither city nor state … It is the abode of the essence of historical man that discloses and conceals beings as such” (GA 54: 132–7). As the pole around which all beings turn, the polis becomes the place of settlement, where “the historical dwelling (Aufenthalt) of Greek humanity” takes place. In this abode, Dasein abides the conflictual play of concealment and revelation that defines the nature of truth. In this sense the polis serves as the site where Dasein inhabits the habitudes of its native and indigenous habitat in such a way that it comes to confront its essential homelessness as its sole and proper “home”.
In his SS 1942 lectures Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, Heidegger takes up again this Sophoclean–Hölderlinian theme of “coming to be at home in not being at home” and claims it as “the highest thing that the poet must poetize” (GA 53: 147–51). As he deconstructs the meaning of the “political” back to its ontological ground in the polis as the site for the possibility for “poetic dwelling” (GA 53: 137–9, 171–3), Heidegger comes to think of dwelling as bound up with the question of our ēthos/Aufenthalt. In these habitual haunts of our habitat and settlements – habits that come to be un-settling, uncanny and unheimlich precisely because they engage the fundamental homeless-ness of human being – Heidegger finds the measure for the possibility of poetic dwelling. This possibility of finding a proper historical dwelling place for the German Volk will preoccupy Heidegger long after the collapse of National Socialism. His late work will thoughtfully take up this question of “dwelling”, abiding in the “abode”, “becoming homely” and embracing a people’s “destiny”: topics that Heidegger will think in dialogue with Sophoclean tragedy and Presocratic philosophy. As Heidegger becomes ever more convinced that the Nazis’ form of National Socialism is but another instance of the same machination, unbridled subjectivism, and drive for dominion over the earth as in modern Cartesian metaphysics, he turns to the archaic Greeks for a different ideal of German homecoming.
What becomes fundamental to this turn is the way Heidegger sets the Presocratic experience of alētheia into an engaged confrontation with Sophocles’ insight into the essential homelessness/uncanni-ness (Unheimlichkeit) of the human being. Here Heidegger comes to embrace the tragic dimension of human being and its Oedipal legacy of hybris/Vermessenheit that transforms Heraclitean logos into a calcula-tive-instrumental form of measurement (Messen) that can be deployed in the service of machination and control. It is only by experiencing this ontological legacy of homelessness, this deep and ineradicable sense of our own Unheimlichkeit, Heidegger claims, that the German Volk can hope to find again their home in being. By experiencing the question of truth’s conflictual essence between hiddenness and unhiddenness as a question about the confictual essence within human being itself, between its homelessness and its primordial yearning for its lost home within being, Heidegger comes to think Sophoclean uncanninesss as the nature of tragedy itself (GA 54: 134). In this persistent questioning of the riddles and enigmas of Greek tragedy Heidegger grapples with what he considers to be the most difficult and urgent questions facing the Volk, questions that traditionally get posed under rubrics such as “ethics” and “justice”. Rejecting the standard ways of interpreting the Greek notions of dikē and ēthos as “justice” and “ethics”, Heidegger treats them, rather, as primordial ways of attuning ourselves to a nonhuman measure for dwelling poetically on the earth. In experiencing the earth as our proper abode (ēethos/Aufenthalt) and understanding the human being as only one part of an overarching balance of forces within the fourfold of being (see Chapter 15), as part of the jointure (Fug) of joinings (Fügungen) that join together in the adjustment (dikē) of being, there emerges for him the possibility of poetic dwelling that Hölderlin held out as the destiny of the Germans (EGT 40–47 = HW 326–33; PM 270–76 = WM 187–94; PLT 211–27 = GA 7: 189–208).
This kind of thinking about eēthos, dikeē and ontological homeless-ness constitutes for Heidegger “the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (GA 7: 164). It is in this primordial thinking of aleētheia as bound up with the homelessness of modern humanity that Heidegger experiences “German Dasein in its originary bond with the Greeks” (MLS 186). And while there still persist troubling traces of a human, all too human, German exceptionalism in Heidegger’s writings after 1942, we can also find there formal indications that can be read as a devastating critique of historical National Socialism and its reign of terror. Heidegger’s work will never be free of the legitimate moral outrage that attends its reception and interpretation. His personal failings were staggering and his unwillingness to honestly address his mistakes constituted insularity at best and prideful arrogance at worst. And yet his later writings put forward a challenge to any simple moral calculus that could account for the barbarities of National Socialism, even his own “private” strain. To read Heidegger’s work on tragedy against the tragedy of his own contorted involvement in German politics is to confront the enigma that is Heidegger’s legacy. For to think the question of the tragic means nothing less than to confront the irresolvable paradox of exemplary greatness and tragic blindness that marks the texts of Heidegger’s beloved Sophocles. This thinking of the tragic as what involves abiding the irreconcilability of inward contradiction might even help us, once again, to more thoughtfully address the question of “Martin Heidegger and National Socialism”.
1. Sluga (1993) provides the background for the Rectorial Address.
2. See especially Heidegger’s letter to Elisabeth Blochmann, HBB 60.
3. “The Great War must be spiritually conquered by us in such a way that it becomes an inner law of our Dasein” (GA 16: 283).
4. For the ancient Greek interpretation of the earth in its profound relation to dwelling and the gods, see Sophocles, Antigone v.368ff. and Oedipus Tyrannus, vv. 736, 939.
5. For a discussion about the controversial status of this “addition”, see Gregory Fried and Richard Polt’s “Introduction” to IM.
6. For some examples of Heidegger’s callous remarks about Jews, see MLS 51, 112, 116.
Davis, B. W. 2007. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, G. Bennington & R. Bowlby (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Farias, V. 1989. Heidegger and National Socialism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 1990. Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, C. Turner (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Ott, H. 1993. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, A. Blunden (trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Petzet, H. 1993. Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, P. Emad & K. Maly (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sluga, H. 1993. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
See Heidegger’s Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität; Gesamtausgabe 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges; Gesamtausgabe 36/37: Sein und Wahrheit; Heidegger Jahrbuch IV: Heidegger und National Sozialismus, esp. “Dokumentationsteil”; and Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann Briefwechsel (all in German).
Neske & Kettering (1990) includes “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts” as well as various primary and secondary texts relevant to Heidegger’s political thought. Wolin (1993) includes “The Self-Assertion of the German University” as well as various primary and secondary texts relevant to Heidegger’s political thought.
See Bambach (2003); de Beistegui (1998); R. Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Alleged Challenge to the Nazi Concept of Race”, in Faulconer & Wrathall (2008), 50–67; Fried (2000); Rockmore (1992); and Zimmerman (1990). See also M. Gillespie, “Martin Heidegger’s Aristotelian National Socialism”, Political Theory 28(2) (2000), 140–66; and T. Kisiel, “The Essential Flaw in Heidegger’s ‘Private National Socialism”, in Philosophie und Zeitgeist im National Sozialismus, M. Heinz (ed.), 291–311 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006).