Heidegger . . . claims to be engaged, as the passive yet resonant medium of destiny, in the preparation of “another beginning,” or a return to the original manifestation of Being to the archaic Greek thinkers and poets. . . . [T]he end of metaphysics, . . . of which the last is the mature teaching of Nietzsche, is the sign of future salvation, a sign that is incarnated in Heidegger as the second coming. We should not begrudge Heidegger the assumption of the robes of prophecy. This is after all a costume that has been irresistible to all the great thinkers of our race. We must nevertheless beware of false prophets.
—Stanley Rosen
I have no doubt that there are many good, thoughtful, and decent human beings who sincerely believe that Martin Heidegger has indispensable things to teach us and that recognition of Heidegger’s intellectual preeminence requires us to bracket some of the most questionable aspects of his thought and biography. As a consequence, many good and well-meaning Western intellectuals have done their utmost to give the benefit of the doubt to a great philosopher who in fact was not a decent human being. Over the decades, much has come to light that is very disturbing about Heidegger—not least the pattern of dishonesty in how he presented himself in the years following the defeat of the Nazi regime. This would perhaps be a manageable problem if it were possible to draw a clear and firm line between Heidegger the thinker and Heidegger the human being; but as one rereads his work in the light of what we now know about his deeds and character, that line has become harder and harder to sustain. It might be appropriate to cite Marx’s acute maxim: “One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.”1 Recent books (including, but not limited to, Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy) have shown that Heidegger’s Nazism penetrated much more deeply into his philosophy than was commonly believed, and the controversies surrounding publication of the Black Notebooks have driven home that awareness with even greater decisiveness.2 Even more worryingly, we see much in recent events that give us ample reason to fear that the fascist episode in modern politics is not over. Hence this might be the appropriate time finally to accept that Heidegger the human being, and hence Heidegger the philosopher, is tainted beyond repair. One notable left-Heideggerian—namely, Fred Dallmayr—says that his work on Heidegger is animated by a desire “to build a bridge between Freiburg and Frankfurt.”3 If the reading of Heidegger that follows is on the mark, I’m afraid that there can be no such bridge. In his 1993 book on Heidegger, Dallmayr also avows that when he read the Letter on Humanism for the first time, he was pleasantly surprised to find it “untainted by any of the sinister pronouncements I had expected.”4 Well, I truly wish that were the case, but sinister pronouncements are not lacking in this text, as we will see below. The question I’m raising in this chapter is whether, finding ourselves now in a political landscape where the possibility increasingly looms of Heidegger as a potential resource for the far right,5 it might be best for left Heideggerianism (a paradox to begin with) to close up shop.
When a representative of the contemporary far right such as Aleksandr Dugin reads Heidegger, what does he absorb as the pertinent political-cultural message? In Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning, Dugin subsumes Heidegger’s philosophy under what he calls “the political ideology of the Third Way.”6 What is “the Third Way”? It was an intellectual movement—which Dugin also refers to as “the Conservative Revolution”—that arose primarily in Germany in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War defined by equal rejection of Marxism in the East and “‘Americanism’ and, broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon Liberalism (‘planetary idiocy’) in the West.”7 Membership included such thinkers as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Othmar Spann, Fredrich and Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ludwig Klages, and many others. These were thinkers, needless to say, who cultivated the cultural ground that bred fascist and Nazi politics and who are still widely read on the far right.8 Clearly, it was “third way” in relation to liberal democracy as the first way and communism as the second way. Dugin’s project is to return, intellectually and ideologically, to this world of the German far right of the 1920s, and to resume their political enterprise before it went a little haywire with the Nazis:
Heidegger was . . . an integral part of this movement. He was a “conservative revolutionary” in the sense that, as he understood it, man was called upon to . . . take a risky leap into another Beginning (the “Revolutionary” moment). . . . The Conservative Revolution in Germany and its counterparts in other European countries, notably in Italy, Spain, etc., were that very ideological environment in which Fascism and National Socialism—Third-Way ideologies—sprung up. . . . The main object of criticism from the leaders of the Conservative Revolution was the spirit of Modernity and its most striking manifestations: individualism and rationalism, utilitarianism, dogmatism, materialism, subjectivism—in other words, [First Way] nihilism and [Second Way] Machenschaft [machination].9
This is obviously an ideological appropriation of Heidegger. But it is an ideological appropriation to which Heidegger’s philosophy quite readily lends itself. To be sure, Heidegger and those philosophically/ideologically akin to him did not get the destruction of modernity that they were hoping for from fascism and Nazism. Many of them (including Heidegger, eventually) recoiled from “compromising” with the “vulgarity, populism, and unprincipled pragmatism [!] of Hitler’s Party.”10 Of course, they were aristocrats and the Nazis were plebeians. The fact that Dugin in this text is able to rebuke Nazism on account of its “unprincipled pragmatism” (implying that Heidegger’s version of National Socialism, subscribed to by Dugin, was “principled” in a way that Hitler’s wasn’t!) might help to clarify why Dugin in another striking text issues a stirring call for a more purely and authentically “fascist fascism.”11
Available on various Russian propaganda websites, including Dugin’s own 4PT website, one can find an interview with Dugin on the topic of Heidegger, which is indeed quite illuminating for those interested in penetrating the smoke screen of Dugin’s supposed “philosophy.”12 What follows is my brief summary of what Dugin says in that interview. Dasein = Volk. Heidegger could only criticize the Nazis from within the Nazi Party because criticisms of Nazism deriving from other ideologies are more contaminated by modernity than Nazism is and hence lack validity. The defining sin of liberal society is that it lacks rootedness in an ethnos (“artificial societies that have broken ties with their ethnic base”). Heidegger can affirm the “metaphysical destiny” of the German Volk, and Dugin can affirm the “metaphysical destiny” of Russia, without either of them counting as a vulgarly modern “nationalist.” Similarly, one can be a fervent anti-Semite, as Heidegger was and as Dugin is, without counting as a racist.13 The liberal West is approaching its final Eschaton, and the Greek Logos will be reborn in Russia, after Dugin’s conservative revolution definitively overthrows liberal barbarism. Heidegger as a völkisch fascist can only be understood by fellow völkisch fascists. Heidegger will be capable of being understood once the world undergoes transformation by a new, purer (i.e., less modern) fascist dispensation.14 What is especially striking to me in this neofascist defense of Heidegger is how closely it matches the account of him that we get from penetrating critics of Heidegger’s philosophy such as Charles Bambach and Emmanuel Faye.
The question of Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism has not gone away. On the contrary, in important ways, the question of that relationship has over time (including quite recently) become much more intense. Why is that? Well, it’s a widely held view (not universal, but widely held) that Heidegger was the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. That’s a credible view of his importance. Yet he very publicly endorsed just about the most barbaric political movement that has ever existed, aligned himself with that movement in a very active way for at least one year, did so in a less active way probably for something like fifteen years (1930–1945),15 and never expressed an ounce of regret or contrition, though he was urged to do so by many who were close to him.16 We generally expect philosophy to contribute to wisdom at least on the part of philosophers themselves. Heidegger, through his misguided political commitment, not only significantly discredited his own philosophy; arguably, he contributed to the discrediting of philosophy as such.
Someone might say that Heidegger was a great philosopher but had nothing of interest or importance to contribute with respect to political philosophy. One might say that, but personally, that would not be my view. My view would be that with someone offering as intellectually ambitious and encompassing a philosophy as we get from Heidegger, there has to be a political philosophy as well. And indeed there is. On Heidegger’s view, we are provided with a political standard for judging the worth of different cultures or different civilizations by considering to what extent those cultures or civilizations measure up to the question of Being, the question of what it means to be—not “what does it mean for you or me to be?” but “what does it mean for beings or entities in general to be?” According to Heidegger, some cultures are attuned to that question, make it present to us, bring us into closer proximity to it; other cultures obscure it, hide it, encourage us to forget about it. On Heidegger’s view, we are today living in a civilization—liberal modernity—that represents the most woeful abyss with respect to the question of what it means for beings to be—that is, for the whole amazing variety of beings that we know to “have” being to “come forth,” as opposed to being frozen in nonbeing, as it were. One can imagine eternal nothingness. But the world we have isn’t eternal nothingness; it’s a plentitude of being. Why isn’t that at the center of our attention? Why do we devote so much energy to all the trivial and banal things that occupy us from day to day and so little attention or energy to the astonishing fact of being? Why don’t our cultures imbue us with this wonder at the reality that the world is being and not nothingness? On Heidegger’s view, this is a cultural/political/metaphysical catastrophe, and we have to trace this catastrophe back to its roots, in the history of philosophy commencing with Plato. There will ultimately be over a hundred volumes in the Heidegger Collected Works in German, no doubt because he thinks it takes that scale of intellectual exertion in order to do the indispensable work of diagnosis and criticism.
Heidegger’s hope was that this “oblivion of Being” could be overcome by a root-and-branch destruction of liberal modernity under the guidance of German hypernationalism in the 1930s. We all know that that path led to mind-boggling genocide and the utter destruction of civilized life in Europe. Maybe Heidegger would say that what was at stake required us to roll the dice on that and that there was no guarantee that the dice roll would give us what was desired. A similar challenge, of course, could be put to Nietzsche. But by what authority did they think that they could authorize or legitimize a dice roll that could have those consequences? Who elected them as civilizational philosopher-kings? From Heidegger, who lived to see the consequences of a thoroughgoing annulment of Western egalitarianism and humanitarianism, of freedom and decency, we didn’t get even a modest apology.
There are affinities and also important differences between Heidegger’s philosophical project and Nietzsche’s. We should sketch both. With respect to the differences, Nietzsche dismissed nationalism under the rubric of “petty politics,” and whatever vague and probably crazy ideas he might have had with respect to “grand politics” (groβe Politik), what he was yearning for was significantly different from what Heidegger was yearning for. The German Volk, for Nietzsche, was not the solution.17 But with respect to the diagnosis, the parallels between Nietzsche and Heidegger are indeed overwhelming. For both, Plato and Socratic-Platonic rationalism are the ultimate culprits behind the movement of banalization and modernity’s relentless tendency to render human existence utterly shallow. For both of them, Christianity was a disaster, and whatever was wrong with the history of Western metaphysics was made incomparably worse by the fact that our civilization is a civilization thoroughly shaped by Christianity. According to Heidegger, the last major culture to be properly “attuned” to the question of Being (and that had the cultural and existential depth that flows from being capable of measuring up to that question) was the tragic culture of the pre-Socratic, pre-Platonic Greeks. Nietzsche doesn’t use the same vocabulary and doesn’t express his central idea in the language of the question of Being, but his view was basically the same.
What do we make of Heidegger’s megalomaniacal philosophical project? Let me begin with three quick points: First, if there was nothing to the question of Being that Heidegger defines as the center of his philosophy, it’s impossible that Heidegger would have had the enormous cultural impact and philosophical influence that he has undoubtedly had. Second, a question: Did Heidegger really need to write a hundred volumes of philosophy in order to put this back on the agenda? There’s something truly insane in that kind of manic intellectual activity. And third, however insane it may have been to inflate his philosophical concerns to the gargantuan proportions that he did, it was far more insane to think that these reflections in the realm of metaphysics, and the history of metaphysics, directly generated political prescriptions—and not just conventional political prescriptions but revolutionary imperatives of such force that it was legitimate for them to trump all foregoing standards of justice, morality, civility, and political sanity. In this respect at least, Heidegger was the most direct, most important, and most catastrophic of Nietzsche’s many intellectual heirs.
There was a point at which it might have been possible for Heidegger’s defenders to say that while Heidegger was indeed a committed German nationalist, and notwithstanding his direct complicity during the first year of the Nazi regime, the real Nazi in the Heidegger household was not Martin but Elfride;18 that unlike Frau Heidegger, he wasn’t an anti-Semite; and that in any case one could hive off his philosophy from his misguided political commitments. The facts that have come to light concerning Heidegger in recent decades have steadily diminished the credibility of such defenses, and we now know that they don’t hold up. True, Heidegger rejected the biologistic ideology of the Nazis (which doesn’t mean that he rejected anti-Semitism). But he truly believed in the greatness of Hitler and truly believed that the Nazi movement, under the leadership of Hitler, had the cultural power to plumb the depths of the mystery of Being in a way that liberal democracies were utterly incapable of doing.19 That is, he believed that the experience of the self-revelation of Being that the Greeks were plugged into before Socrates and Plato came on the scene—and that was closed to the 2,500-year history of metaphysics but recovered with tantalizing brevity in the life and poetry and neopagan yearnings of Hölderlin—could be put within reach once again by a Nazi-ruled Europe. That’s not just a mistake (we all make mistakes). That’s an enduring stain on the philosophy of Heidegger, and it proves that, notwithstanding all the rhetoric of humility that runs throughout the oeuvre of Heidegger, in the final reckoning his megalomania far exceeds his humility.
It’s impossible to make judgments about the political dimensions of Heidegger’s thinking without first making some effort to penetrate what his philosophy is about. A ready way of doing the latter is to take a look at what is arguably the decisive text of early Heidegger—namely, Being and Time, and the chapter on being-toward-death in particular.20 The commentary on that text that follows is intended as a convenient shortcut into the philosophical universe of Heidegger.
Let me begin my account of this specific authentically Heideggerian text with a discussion (a sketch) of what Heidegger might intend with his crucially important term Dasein (human existence). Dasein, we might say, is the “local” manifestation of Being as a whole—hence all of us are “particles” of the overall mystery of being, if I could put it that way. We should live with an ever-present sense of awe, or at least acute awareness, that we are and that the rest of the world available to us is. But we don’t. Instead, we deal with the world and our own presence in it as if it were the most natural thing in the world for things to have being. Wrong: the natural thing would be for there to be nothing. In a text entitled “Metaphysics as History of Being,” Heidegger strikingly refers to Being as an “insurrection against nothingness.”21 We live wholly (or at least mainly) in the present, doing our mundane tasks and fulfilling what our mediocre society expects of us in the way of habitual routines. This is what Heidegger calls (234) the “tranquillized everydayness” of inauthentic Dasein. No mystery, no awe. Our social existence is prosaic and banal, and for most of us our own experience of life is prosaic and banal. In his book on Schelling, Heidegger calls this “self-stupifying [self-anaesthetizing?] routine” (sich selbst betäubenden Gewohnheit),22 and he clearly regards it as the norm in a democratic culture. Heidegger gives us a particularly powerful statement of his thought in an essay on Heraclitus: Being as Heraclitus experienced it, Being experienced as “lightening,” is what has been forgotten in the modern forgetfulness of Being. “We see this lightening only when we station ourselves in the storm of Being. Yet everything today betrays the fact that we bestir ourselves only to drive storms away. We organize all available means for cloud-seeding and storm dispersal in order to have calm in the face of the storm. But this calm is no tranquility. It is only anesthesia; more precisely, the narcotization of anxiety in the face of thinking.”23
The history of metaphysics ought to convey a sense of how strange and uncanny the world is, and Heidegger thinks that Greek philosophy—before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with their rationalism came along—did do this. But the philosophical tradition as shaped by these Greek metaphysical rationalists simply reinforces this dulling of our sense that the presence of a world at all is an unfathomable riddle. The fact that the world exists, the fact that anything exists, is either a miracle or a curse. But whether miracle or curse, we seem to take it utterly for granted, and nothing in our social existence or in our intellectual traditions encourages us to do otherwise; if anything, they merely reinforce whatever it is in our experience of life that dulls or occludes the appreciation of the mysteriousness of being.
But for Heidegger there is a saving grace: death! Death means that we are always standing right on the precipice of utter nothingness. Proper awareness of one’s own mortality ought to make this clear to us. Five minutes after writing this sentence, I could suffer a ruptured cerebral aneurism and die on the spot. Immediately, the world in the splendor of its self-disclosure would for me slam shut like a clam! No more Being! No more world! Back to nothingness! As Heidegger rightly says, “What is peculiar to the certainty of death [is] that it is possible in every moment. Together with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its when” (238). We stand on the edge of a precipice and somehow dull or repress our awareness (which at a deeper, more authentic level is never lacking) that that is where we stand, not ever knowing when a little unexpected breeze will come along and tip us into that abyss of being. If only I could be fully alive to this decisive vulnerability to nothingness, Being would start becoming accessible or “meaningful” as the unfathomable riddle that it is. But just as we thoroughly dull ourselves to the “beingness of being,” so we just as thoroughly dull ourselves to the unspeakably radical implications of our standing on the portal of nothingness. Heidegger calls this “the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence” (242). One could easily assume that this couldn’t possibly mean anything coherent, but in fact I think we can see fairly well what Heidegger is getting at.
Let me quote a more accessible version of what preoccupies Heidegger that doesn’t get so bogged down in Heidegger’s ponderous jargon in Being and Time. The following is from Samuel Scheffler’s provocative book, Death and the Afterlife: “Consider this: Every single person now alive will be dead in the not-so-distant future. This fact is universally accepted and is not seen as remarkable, still less as an impending catastrophe. There are no crisis meetings of world leaders to consider what to do about it, no outbreaks of mass hysteria, no outpourings of grief, no demands for action.”24 How do we live at all knowing that death is looming up over all of us? Why aren’t we utterly paralyzed by it? There isn’t really a good answer to it, and it tells us something interesting about the capacity of human beings to “bracket” what is existentially of supreme ultimacy. I think Heidegger is saying something similar, and it’s something that’s very much worth saying. In the same vein, Ian McEwan’s great novel, Enduring Love, also comments tellingly on how little impression death really makes on the mundane course of our lives: “A friend who had been wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness once told me of the loneliness she had felt as she left the doctor’s office. The sympathy of friends simply marked her out with a different fate. She herself had known people who had died, and she knew well enough how life would go on without her. The waters would close over her head, her friends would feel sorrow and then recover, a little wiser, and the unrecorded workdays, parties and dinners would tumble onwards.”25
Being and Time is intended as an exercise in “fundamental ontology”—that is, an investigation of what it means for beings in general to be, and Heidegger pursues this investigation (there may be other ways of pursuing it, but this is how he pursues it in this particular book) by trying to lay out fundamental structures of human being (Dasein: what it means for the kind of beings that we are to be).26 That is, he presents this philosophical inquiry as “structural” or formal; he would dispute the suggestion that the basic categories of his philosophical analysis are “normative” in any sense. But notwithstanding that deliberate self-presentation, one would have to be a little tone-deaf in reading the book not to notice the quite conspicuous “normative resonances” of the book, not excluding his ontological account of death.
Heidegger writes, “The end is imminent for Da-sein” (231). Indeed it is. But he also concedes that “many things can be imminent for Da-sein as being-in-the-world” (232). So why privilege death? I think Heidegger is very clear about this. He says, “It is the most extreme” mode of recognizing what is truly “ownmost” (i.e., of forcing oneself to confront the terror of being absolutely alone in the face of the ultimate realities). “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Da-sein.” It forces upon us “absolute” reflection on the world and how we relate to it. Existence in its totality must be wrestled with in the face of reflection on the unavoidable imminence of the fate whereby the being of the world is, so to speak, sucked back into nonbeing (at least for the singular Dasein confronting its own death). There is indeed something ontologically “extreme” about knowledge of death as an awareness that the world given to us (as either blessing or curse) will assuredly be taken back. The more aware we are of the world’s imminent nonbeing, the more intense is our reflection on and ontological relation to its givenness in the first place. This, he says, isn’t mere “fear of one’s demise” (232); that’s too banal. Rather, it’s an “Angst” of more metaphysical proportions, or it ought to be if it is to serve Heidegger’s function of restoring our attentiveness to “the meaning of being” that we otherwise forget about.
Heidegger’s philosophy in Being and Time is an ontology of care: human existence (Dasein) is as a mode of having things matter to us, caring about them or being concerned about them, and relating to a world defined by those existential concerns. Above all, we care about the fact that that world of human concerns will at some point no longer be available to us. We die and our world is no longer there for us. We and our world succumb to nonbeing. So Heidegger’s ontology of care is, he would say, vindicated by the imperative of caring about whether we are or we aren’t, about whether the world is or it isn’t (for that is what is at stake in the death of any singular individual). But the reality is that we don’t necessarily care about this, or at least not in the way that is privileged by Heidegger’s ontological analysis. (Heidegger realizes that this is the case and in fact makes it central to his analysis.) This is where the normative dimension of Heidegger’s philosophy becomes more conspicuous. Imagine someone who never for a moment reflected on his or her mortality. Surely, such people exist. In fact, it can’t be ruled out (and Heidegger doesn’t rule it out) that in a society devoted to a life of complacent bourgeois comforts, a great many people give little or no thought to the meaning of their own mortality. What does Heidegger say about such people? He says that they are fleeing from the reality that death will be a retraction of the world that we currently have, and that defines a concernful existence for us. It is “flight from uncanniness” (233).27 Our own being is uncanny, and people who shy away from full awareness of what death is are thereby fleeing their own being. Being calls out to us (by enforcing awareness that our access to Being is of necessarily finite duration), and we—cowards that we are—run away! So the embrace of uncanniness is a kind of existential obligation, and recognizing that our being is essentially being-toward-death is a necessary way of living up to such an obligation. Heidegger writes that inauthentic Dasein flees death by “interposing . . . manageable urgencies [as opposed to the ‘unmanageable urgency’ of our looming mortality!] and possibilities of the everyday matters nearest to us” (239). Well, all of that puts us in recognizably normative territory, even though Heidegger would strongly resist acknowledging the implicit “morality of Angst,” if I could call it that.
Heidegger wants to say that he’s in the business of ontological analysis, not normative analysis. But there is something insistently normative about his discussion of the “evasion” or “tranquillization” of death:
The “neighbors” often try to convince the “dying person” that he will escape death and soon return again to the tranquillized everydayness of his world taken care of. This “concern” has the intention of thus “comforting” the “dying person.” It wants to bring him back to Da-sein by helping him to veil completely his ownmost nonrelational possibility. Thus, the they makes sure of a constant tranquillization about death.28 But, basically, this tranquillization is not only for the “dying person,” but just as much for “those who are comforting him.” (234–235)
We could say that “Being itself” demands a kind of ontological courage. And something at the core of our own being flees in terror from this ontological challenge: the challenge of seeing death as it truly is. “Entangled, everyday being-toward-death is a constant flight from death. Being toward the end has the mode of evading that end—reinterpreting it, understanding it inauthentically, and veiling it” (235). That is, the ultimate standard is authenticity or inauthenticity, and far from it being part of the natural order of human existence for individuals to respond authentically to something utterly constitutive of their own Dasein, ontological “veiling” or “evading” or “fleeing” is inscribed in the very fabric of human existence. Death gives us an opportunity to embrace genuine authenticity with respect to the meaning of being, and we utterly fail that test! The ultimate demand of Being is for us to relate to it in an untranquilized way, but our “everyday” responses (or nonresponses) to death “fall” into “constant tranquillization.” Death is privileged because it is “the most extreme possibility of [Dasein’s] existence” (235), and we need precisely confrontation with this “most extreme possibility” as the condition of an ultimate testing of whether our relation to being as such is tranquilized or untranquilized.
Is “tranquilization” an ontological concept or a normative concept? It’s normative. Heidegger writes, “The they does not permit the courage to have Angst about death” (235). Those who have the “real stuff,” the inner fortitude to live alongside the imminence of nonbeing, possess ontological courage; those who succumb to the society-wide-endorsed “estrangement” from death exhibit ontological cowardice. As for Nietzsche and Weber, the human vocation is to display courage in the face of the starkest realities of human existence. Heidegger’s version is that fundamental ontology is for heroes.
Similarly, Heidegger speaks of the human possibility “to exist” as “understanding oneself in the being of [Dasein’s] being” (242). That is, “existing” is not something that happens spontaneously or naturally or without exertion; on the contrary, “to exist” is demanded of us as a normative challenge. Quite explicitly, we are challenged to turn inert existence, existence that falls short of being seized as a deliberate “project” or commitment, into authentic existence (or what we might call ontologically animated existence). Hence, what is presented (misleadingly, I would say) as a strictly “ontological” investigation of structures of human existence as a window into an understanding of structures of being as such in actuality is shot through fairly pervasively with normative challenges and normative judgments.
Heidegger doesn’t speak in this context of possible reorganizations of social or cultural life that would be less tranquilized, but surely he believes that such a thing is a meaningful option. Does he think that ancient civilizations like the tragic culture of pre-Socratic Greece were as tranquilized as modern society is? Does “idle talk” exist in the Greek polis, when human beings lived in far closer proximity to “the truth of being”? That seems extremely unlikely! When he refers polemically to “the they” (das Man), is that a local cultural condition or a universal one? Surely the former! Yet the abstract “ontological” form in which he lays out this analysis very much suggests that the analysis applies to all instantiations of human Dasein (i.e., applies equally to all of them). My countersuggestion here is that we see quite clearly from the less formal writings of the 1930s that terms like “tranquilization,” “the they,” “flight from Angst,” and so on are meant to insinuate a robust cultural critique aimed at modern cultural experience in particular. In books like An Introduction to Metaphysics, we’re no longer involved in the enterprise of fundamental ontology that Being and Time aspires to practice, but the rhetoric and polemics are exactly the same: modern experience is cowardly and effete, and Heidegger surely has in mind premodern societies that wouldn’t be subject to the same polemics (or wouldn’t be subject to them to the same extent). In fact, one wonders whether without that implicit polemical edge and the normative punch it obviously carries, Being and Time would have become quite as famous a book as it actually did become.
Heidegger’s core thought in the meditation on death may be expressed as follows: Life as we ordinarily live it is a kind of “sleepwalking.” We live in oblivion of what confers depth and drama upon the human condition. “Being” calls out to us to be properly aware that we live on the edge of the abyss of utter nothingness, an abyss any of us could tumble into at any moment,29 and somehow we live as if that abyss isn’t there. Isn’t that in itself the most profound existential condemnation of the modern/liberal/bourgeois mode of life? Don’t we require a cultural revolution of epic proportions in order to shake us out of this condition of existential sleepwalking? In the same vein, Heidegger writes, “The lives of men began to slide into a world which lacked that depth from out of which the essential always comes to man.”30 Richard Rorty, at the end of his essay “On Heidegger’s Nazism,” makes the not unreasonable point that in order to profit from Heidegger in ways that don’t involve various kinds of political and cultural pathology, one must “stop yearning for depth.”31 Rorty is probably right that this fixation on depth contributes crucially to why things go fundamentally off the rails with Heidegger. The problem is that Heidegger minus the yearning for depth would no longer be Heidegger!
Of course, I’m not saying that one shouldn’t think about death as a portal to deeper reflection about the uncanniness of human existence and of being in general. What I’m objecting to, I guess, is the underhandedness of Heidegger’s rhetoric. On the one hand, he claims to be engaging in an analysis of structural universals that are part and parcel of the human condition; on the other hand, he sneaks in surreptitious polemics contrived for the purpose of getting us to yearn for some more ancient culture and politics supposedly more primordial than the shallow culture and politics we currently have. One could say that Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Heidegger are all committed to the following normative principle: we are bound by an existential obligation to live lives that are untranquilized. Two of these thinkers affirm and two of them deny that it follows from this principle that we must do everything in our power to repudiate liberal modernity from top to bottom.
There is only one philosopher directly quoted within the text of the “being-toward-death” chapter. Who is that? Of course! It’s Nietzsche—a quotation from the “On Free Death” section of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (244).32 That is no accident. It helps flag for us the fact that Heidegger’s purpose is to articulate an “ontological task” (240) that is as bracing and that rises to the same existential heights as Nietzsche’s root-and-branch questioning of modernity’s (limp) horizon of life. That is true not only of early Heidegger but also of more mature Heidegger, as we’ll see in the next section.
Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power. The abusers of humanism, of course, are guilty of none of those sins. From Heidegger to Althusser, they come as emancipators. I think we should emancipate ourselves from their emancipations.
—Leon Wieseltier33
The Letter on Humanism, read carefully, is a disturbing text. And as with many of Heidegger’s important works, the more one exerts oneself to draw a political philosophy out of it, the more disturbing it gets.
As is well known, the main narrative of the Letter concerns a far-reaching critique of the history of Western metaphysics: “Thinking is the thinking of Being.”34 Customarily, we would presume that thinking means thinking about X or Y or Z. But, Heidegger insists, that is not real thinking. Real authentic thinking is the pondering of the being of X or Y or Z. That is, all real thinking is directed toward the mystery of being whereby X or Y or Z are, and thinking concerned with X, Y, or Z that abstracts from this mystery or uncanniness of being is condemned as shallow: “ontic” (oriented to given beings) rather than “ontological” (oriented to the unfathomable “Being” that gives or discloses or renders available these beings). The history of philosophy as we have known it since Plato contributes to this shallowness, and insofar as we are now in the pervasive grip of a whole civilization that is shallow through and through, we ultimately have the traditions of Western philosophy to blame for this foreclosed access to the profundity or primordiality of Being. As Heidegger puts it, “Even such names as ‘logic,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘physics’ begin to flourish only when original thinking comes to an end. During the time of their greatness, the Greeks thought without such headings. They did not even call thinking ‘philosophy’” (219–220; cf. 256). These are characteristic Heideggerian tropes, and they display recognizable Nietzschean provenance.
Apart from Nietzsche and Heidegger, it would be a universal view that the moment of greatness of ancient Greek philosophy ran from Socrates to Aristotle via Plato. Nietzsche was the first to declare that the true grandeur of ancient philosophy predated Socrates, and Heidegger offers his own ambitious version of that revisionist thesis of Nietzsche’s. The fact that Aristotle’s philosophy can be divided into “logic” and “ethics” and “physics” already shows that authentically ontological thinking has been reduced to a lower level, a merely “ontic” level (investigation of X or Y or Z, whatever X, Y, or Z happen to be). That “lowering” or corruption from the ontological level to the ontic level is ultimately the doing of Plato, the thinker who committed the “original sin” of Western thought. Put otherwise, thinking in its heroic phase becomes merely prosaic and commonplace. Heidegger is following Nietzsche’s lead in adopting this kind of rhetoric. Thinkers come in two basic varieties: the heroic thinkers who “think Being”; and the banal thinkers who merely think beings (X or Y or Z). Our whole civilization is banal because it has taken its bearings from thinkers of the second variety rather than those of the first. But thanks to Heidegger, it is not too late to reverse course. We can resume where Heraclitus and Parmenides left off and bypass the long detour from Plato to the nineteenth century. Nietzsche, unknowingly (on Heidegger’s account), was part of or an expression of the long, failed metaphysical detour taken by Western thinking, but Heidegger can restore it to the true path.
This is a grand mythology, with noble heroes and low villains (not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s noble heroes and low villains). The immediate target of the Letter is Jean-Paul Sartre. (The letter to Jean Beaufret on which the text is based was written in 1946, the same year that Sartre published his famous lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism.”) Sartre takes himself to stand outside or beyond the metaphysical tradition, which he assumes has reached its end. This is superficially similar to Heidegger’s claim, but Sartre appeals to the idea of human subjectivity as a self-grounding manifestation of freedom, action, and l’engagement (“commitment”). For Heidegger, appeal to subjectivity is still very much part of the metaphysical tradition originating with Plato and fails to penetrate to the deeper mode of thinking oriented to Being that gets corrupted into the more shallow division of the world into mere subjects and mere objects. To distinguish between subjects and objects is already to implicate oneself in the kind of “ontic” relationship to the world that betrays philosophy’s having cut itself off from Being in its profundity and mystery. Sartre is as banal as Descartes, and Descartes is as banal as Aristotle. They all fail the test of truly heroic thinking focused on Being as an abyss that tests our existential mettle to the limit. “Existentialism” presents itself as heroic, face to face with death, the absurd, and the possibility of the meaninglessness of existence, but all of this looks pretty paltry compared with the world-shattering experience of “thinking” to which Heidegger thinks the Greeks rose “during the time of their greatness” and which he alone (heralded by Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s failure to liberate himself fully from metaphysics) is capable of resuming.
As Heidegger says on p. 221, “philosophy” as such already represents a degeneration from the ontological domain to the ontic domain. Philosophy as a discipline is divided into various “isms,” one of which is “existentialism.” “The thinking that is to come,” Heidegger writes at the end of the text, “is no longer philosophy, because it thinks more originally than metaphysics—a name identical to philosophy” (265). Nietzsche and Sartre are part of the philosophical tradition, and hence they too are part of the essential problem—namely, being implicated in the metaphysical tradition that alienates us from “the nearness of Being” (242). They, no less than all other participants in the philosophical tradition, founder with respect to the truly ontological achievement of authentic thinking in the company of Being. They are metaphysicians who have duped themselves into believing themselves liberated from metaphysics. (Jacques Derrida later deploys the same kind of rhetorical trick against Heidegger himself!)
It is easy enough to draw from Heidegger a picture of life in liberal-egalitarian modernity as governed by alienation from, or oblivion in relation to, the meaning of what it means to be. Yet what concretely is to be associated with the notion of “nearness to Being”? Here Heidegger supplies little that is tangible. This is what some have called Heidegger’s “pseudo-concreteness,”35 though it isn’t impossible to extrapolate from certain Heideggerian gestures. The asymmetry between the concreteness of what Heidegger is attacking and the abstraction or vagueness with respect to what he is celebrating is obviously a problem. Still, we can locate some texts within the Letter on Humanism that give us a somewhat clearer indication of what Heidegger hopes for by way of a new dispensation—namely, one that will deliver the desired nearness to Being. In particular, starting on p. 224, Heidegger traces a history of humanism, beginning with the Hellenistic Greeks, via the Romans, via the Renaissance,36 and then arriving at the German “humanism of the eighteenth century [borne] by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller” (225). Yet there’s a countertradition, and Heidegger clearly aligns himself with this countertradition: “Hölderlin does not belong to ‘humanism,’ precisely because he thought the destiny of man’s essence in a more original [anfänglicher: more originary? more primordial?] way than ‘humanism’ could” (ibid.; cf. 241–243).37 Classical humanists like Goethe and Schiller are less “original,” presumably because they build on Renaissance conceptions, which in turn are built on Roman conceptions, and so on, whereas Hölderlin circumvents those spiritually depleted traditions and connects directly with the real origin—Being itself (as does Heidegger!). As Heidegger develops his conception of the distinction on pp. 225–226, it’s clear that in his view there are the shallow humanisms, going all the way back to the Greeks, that fail to “ask about the truth of Being” because they presume “metaphysical” predeterminations of the essence of the human being, and on the other side, the more primordial humanism associated with Hölderlin—more primordial because it does orient its questioning concerning the essence of the human being to the deeper questioning directed toward the truth of Being: the disclosure of a genuinely historical world in its uncanniness38 and unfathomableness. (Note Heidegger’s reference on p. 243 to the “mere” cosmopolitanism [das bloße Weltbürgertum] of Goethe—a text to which we’ll return.)
How does Heidegger show that the tradition of “metaphysical humanism” is shallow relative to the nonmetaphysical humanism or antihumanism he celebrates? His first argument is telling. The metaphysical tradition posits the human essence as animal rationale. Heidegger (226) claims that Being and Time succeeded in excavating “the essential provenance of metaphysics,” thereby allowing those schooled by Heidegger to grasp that the metaphysical determination of man as rational animal falls short of being able to think the difference between beings and Being and thereby doesn’t plumb the authentic depths of the human essence. The idea of man as rational animal (the metaphysical definition of man par excellence) is lacking in primordiality, in depth, because it fails to attend thinkingly to Being as the origin, the dwelling-place, of Dasein, the potential “shepherd” of Being (234). The metaphysical tendency to attribute “soul,” “reason,” or “personality” to the human animal counts for Heidegger as an “insufficient definition of man’s essence” (229). Dasein captures the essence of the human because it highlights the human vocation to be aware of itself as the Da (the “there”) of Being (Sein): that is, the site of “the clearing of Being,” the place where Being discloses itself in its character as fate or destiny (ibid.).
In Heidegger’s view, the metaphysical tradition wrongly conceives Being to be merely a common property that runs through all beings and that can be apprehended by the light of reason, and this misconception of Being ultimately has pervasively catastrophic consequences for history, culture, and politics. Heidegger’s rhetoric of “metaphysics” as the supreme villain responsible for everything that isn’t right with the world has obviously been an astonishingly effective and influential rhetoric. Derrida, for instance—and postmodernism more broadly—is unthinkable without that rhetoric. But the rhetoric doesn’t really tell us anything until we have a more definite conception of the nonmetaphysical or postmetaphysical approach to the world that will supplant the metaphysics that has stretched from Plato to the nineteenth century. So what fills that empty box in Heidegger’s thought, as articulated in the Letter on Humanism as an exemplary Heideggerian text?
Heidegger, starting on p. 241, returns to the question of Hölderlin over against the totality of the rest of Western thought, more or less.39 The issue here is the possibility of experiencing a sense of “homeland” (Heimat), versus “the homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] of contemporary man.”40 Heidegger wants to say that metaphysical conceptions of the human animal, whether in terms of reason or soul or personality, prove themselves to be “insufficient definitions of man’s essence” precisely because they issue ultimately in “the homelessness of contemporary man.” Redirecting thought concerning what it is to be human from, say, the idea of the rational animal to man as the Da of Being, or as the shepherd of the mystery of Being, or as the place where the clearing of Being “happens”—all of which are alternative formulations of, or metaphors for, the same basic conception—will, if successful, restore “home” or “dwelling” to what is homeless. Nietzsche, Heidegger says, “experienced this homelessness” (241) but didn’t fix the problem because he offered merely a “reversal” (= inversion) of the metaphysical mode of thinking rather than broke out of it. Nietzsche perceived the problem but couldn’t solve it. Why does Heidegger think that Nietzsche had a unique experience of the “homelessness” of modernity? This is a crucial question for the interpretation of the Letter on Humanism. My own view is that what Heidegger is here calling homelessness represents his attempt to translate into his own terms what we in chapter 1 characterized as Nietzsche’s critique of “horizonlessness.” For both of them, the open-horizoned universalism of modernity, as well as modern humanity’s tendency to think according to a day-to-day or week-to-week rather than century-to-century time frame, makes it impossible for human cultures to be genuine cultures. Nietzsche’s solution is for ruling elites of the future to will into existence binding cultural horizons that are as remote from modernity as they can possibly be. Heidegger’s solution is to await a new experience of attunement to Being that will be at the same time the recovery of a genuine experience of rootedness. This in turn draws Heidegger into a kind of “blood and soil” thinking that would have been anathema to Nietzsche.
With respect to Heidegger’s ambition to identify a solution to the problem of modern homelessness that he thinks eluded Nietzsche, Heidegger’s privileging of Hölderlin over against the so-called metaphysical tradition again appears pivotal. Hölderlin beckons the Germans to connect with the essence of Germanness and to do so not for prosaically “patriotic” or “nationalistic” purposes but rather in order to achieve “belongingness to the destiny of the West.” And not merely the West but “world-historically out of nearness to the source” (241). One needs to acquire a “homeland” in order to become fatefully world-historical; and one needs to become fatefully world-historical in order to overcome “the homelessness of contemporary man.” What is at stake in the poetry of Hölderlin is not merely proper rootedness in the essence of being German but in fact overcoming of alienation from Being, because “homelessness . . . consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being” (242). Or rather, rootedness in the homeland and healing of the alienation from Being are one and the same thing.41 I think one starts to get the picture. The least rude thing one can say here is that it shows a lot of chutzpah on the part of Heidegger to talk about German Romantic poetry and nationalism as a guiding vehicle for “fatefulness,” “world-historicalness,” “the destiny of the West,” and recollection of Being itself a mere eighteen months after German nationalism had left the world in ruins!
The key passage comes on pp. 242–243: “The world-historical thinking of Hölderlin [is] essentially more primordial and thus more significant for the future than the mere cosmopolitanism of Goethe.” This hostile reference to Goethe is a reminder of Heidegger’s famous 1929 Davos debate with Ernst Cassirer, who presented himself as a representative of precisely the humanism of Goethe. Geoff Waite has claimed that Cassirer specifically cited Goethe because he was “likely aware that Heidegger loathed Goethe.”42 Here, at any rate, that loathing seems to be made explicit. “Hölderlin’s relation to Greek civilization is something essentially other than humanism,” implying that Goethe as a classic expression of mainstream Western culture derives ultimately from the shallow rationalism/universalism of Socrates and Plato, whereas Hölderlin connects to something far deeper and more authentic in the Greek experience of Being. “When confronted with death, . . . those young Germans who knew about Hölderlin lived and thought something other than what the public held to be the typical German attitude” (243; my italics). Heidegger doesn’t say what constitutes “the typical German attitude” or precisely what confrontation with death draws these young Germans into a more primordial expression of life and thought. But he does offer a very clear gesture back toward the “being-toward-death” chapter of Being and Time and hints strongly that dying gloriously for the German homeland (with Hölderlin in mind!) puts one in the vicinity of the kind of authentic existence that Being and Time is intended to valorize. The underlying message seems clear. Hölderlin-inspired German nationalism is “rooted” and hence near to Being. All alternatives to that kind of romantically charged-up/reactionary German nationalism are “homeless” and hence remote from Being. Recall again that Heidegger was writing this in 1946, when it was blindingly obvious to everyone (including the Germans) that heroically inflected German nationalism had destroyed Europe and very nearly reduced civilization to universal barbarism.
To be sure, there are passages in the Letter (241 and 244) where Heidegger makes noises intended to put distance between a conventional nationalism aimed at mere power and supremacy for Germany, and his supposedly more “spiritual,” more metaphysical variety of German nationalism.43 I don’t take these disclaimers very seriously. By contrast to conventional nationalism, which seeks merely to exalt the German Volk in relation to other nations, Heidegger’s nationalism is aimed at plugging the Volk into the destiny of Being in its unfathomable depth and uncanniness. For sure, it is a spookier nationalism (or at least one enveloped in a more mystical rhetoric). Still, as we saw with the text celebrating the young Germans “confronting death” in communion with Hölderlin’s poetry, there are definite points of intersection between his version and the version that prompted a bid for the dictatorial enslavement of Europe, leading to World War II and the Holocaust. In any case, what I draw from all this is that Heidegger’s purpose is to elevate the “homeland” even higher than it is elevated by ordinary nationalism. After all, the Volk is far more heroic (“metaphysically” or ontologically heroic) if it serves as the guardian of Being than if it is merely in the service of the glory of Germany.
The philosophically more important point is this: for Heidegger, the history of metaphysics is shallow because it seduces us into thinking that we stand on solid and comprehensible ground. Privileging our identity as rational beings is a key part of this error since it reinforces our confidence that we can know and master the world and hence rest content with mere commerce with beings. The truth of Being, by contrast, means that what we “stand” on is pure groundlessness: the abysmal mystery of Being as the “ungrounded ground” of Dasein. Heidegger doesn’t use the language of Übermenschen, but it seems clear that the whole pathos of Heidegger’s writings rests on the suggestion that if we really faced up to the truth of Being and proved ourselves equal to it, we would vindicate ourselves as a new kind of Übermenschen: oriented not to the bathos of life in a fully rationalized and banalized modernity but to the higher mysteries and the sublime destiny of nearness to Being. (I say that Heidegger avoids talk of Übermenschen, but there is one significant Heideggerian text in which he tellingly fuses Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch with his own idea of the disclosure of Being: “‘Overman’ is the man who grounds Being anew—in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.”44)
As is also the case with the early text treated in the previous section, the purpose of Heidegger’s rhetoric is to play up the sense of terror and cosmic loneliness in a world suspended over the abyss of the unplumbable event or “happening” of Being bringing forth beings, as well as the underlying natural but typically repressed Angst concerning the groundlessness of it all. And yet the world gets on with its tedious, commonplace business as if everything were entirely solid and under rational control. How could we be so oblivious to the fact of the pure inexplicable givenness of the world?
But here’s my challenge: it’s fine for Heidegger to make these claims. But on what basis can he persuade us that he isn’t just pulling (imaginary) rabbits out of hats? Do we simply take it on his singular authority that “Being” intends a special destiny for Dasein and that we have to embrace a kind of heroism of “ecstatic” existence in order to fulfill that destiny? What if it’s all just a concoction of his own manic philosophical imagination? (Obviously I’m not the first reader of Heidegger to raise this sort of challenge.) Why would “Being” select out one particular nation for this privileged destiny or select “Dasein” (i.e., one particular species on a very minuscule and obscure planet), for that matter? Of course, the world religions have always been in the business of making these kinds of far-fetched claims, and with just as little basis beyond the arbitrary authority of charismatic prophets and preachers. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger seems to have reinvented the idea of what philosophy should be in a way that renders it a kind of hybrid of, or intermediate possibility between, theory and (atheistic) religion. This is expressed in the fact that both of them exhibit a conspicuous lack of hesitation or reserve in deploying a grandly prophetic tone in their writings—a grandly prophetic tone that, conveniently enough, is marvelously effective in attracting readers and disciples. (Needless to say, the worry about false prophets that we quoted from Stanley Rosen at the head of this chapter applies with equal force to both of them.)
The ultimate answer to the question of whether Heidegger’s philosophy is or isn’t a form of humanism is presented as a response to Sartre’s suggestion that in the wake of the death of God, we are “in a situation where there are only human beings” (237). Heidegger strenuously denies this. There is no God, but there are human beings and there is fateful and unfathomable Being—the “clearing” that brings forth human beings, that brings forth both nature and history. Heidegger’s stunning feat here, and it should not be minimized, is to have hit upon a way of continuing to conceive of the world, and human beings within it, as a gift even if it is not the gift of a Creator-God. According to Heidegger, this gift-like character of the world is inscribed in the German idiom, es gibt (there is = it gives). “This ‘es gibt’ rules as a destiny of Being. Its history comes to language in the words of essential thinkers. Therefore the thinking that thinks into the truth of Being is, as thinking, historical” (238). Being = destiny. This is Heidegger’s historicism: What happens historically is not simply a function of human agency but the “giving” that emanates from what constitutes the es that is referred to in es gibt. On p. 255, Heidegger writes, “Being . . . has made itself known in the present moment of world history by the uprooting of all beings.” That is, we live in a technological age not because millions of human beings have opted, rightly or wrongly, for the possibilities of life that modern technology makes available to them, but because this is the destiny that “Being” has chosen for us. As Heidegger puts it on p. 240, the luminous manifestation of the Da “is the dispensation of Being itself.” It follows from this that human existence as we live it historically (Dasein) is not something created or fashioned ultimately by human beings; it is given to us, which is something we appreciate if and only if we attend more to the es gibt than we attend to ourselves as mere beings. It also follows from this fundamental repudiation of subjectivism (and hence “humanism” as a mode of subjectivism) that Sartre is in a crucial sense more the heir of Nietzsche than Heidegger is. This departure from Nietzsche (formulated as Nietzsche being still a metaphysical thinker and Heidegger being a decisively postmetaphysical thinker) is at the core of Heidegger’s self-understanding or philosophical identity.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most consequential of Heidegger’s disciples, once said in an interview that “when [Heidegger] first started coming out with his mysterious allusions to the return of the gods, we were really shocked.”45 We get just this kind of talk on p. 242. Gadamer says that he got in touch with Heidegger and Heidegger reassured him that such talk was not to be taken too literally. Fine. Yet if Heidegger doesn’t literally expect an epiphany of awaited gods, what’s the function of this kind of talk? (Another question: If Heidegger says to Gadamer that we shouldn’t take too literally his talk of “the return of the gods,” why should we take any more literally the talk of “nearness to Being,” etc.?)
Heidegger’s rhetoric is implicitly Nietzschean. We are enveloped in a universal “night” of utter oblivion of Being; we await a Nietzschean “dawn of day” when Being decides to give us the means to dwell once again in nearness to Being. We are homeless; we await a return to our Heimat. We live a Being-granted “destiny” or we live utterly alienated from historicity. Like Nietzsche, it’s either “last man” or Übermensch; there is no middle ground. Hence we have to await the epiphany, the return of the gods, the return from homelessness to authentic dwelling, that will (in the words of the Der Spiegel interview) “save us.” Being gives us new gods or we are consigned to complete forsakenness; Being gives us poets and thinkers who restore our sense of rootedness or we are utterly homeless; Being gives us destiny or we are left in a state of limitless alienation. (Heidegger approves of Marx’s talk of wholesale alienation [243].) It was misguided eschatological thinking of this sort that led Heidegger in 1933 to think that he was in the vanguard of a “revolution” that would usher in a whole new dispensation for Germany and for the world under Germany’s leadership. But thirteen years later, the basic structure of his thinking is no different. One feels compelled to say that here is a man who experienced political events without really experiencing them.
Someone might object: What’s the point of submitting a text that’s fundamentally philosophical—that’s preoccupied by the history of metaphysics, for instance—to a critique that’s so directly political? As should be clear by now, I don’t buy this argument. For me, what is in question here is the political philosophy of the Letter on Humanism. That the philosophy includes a political philosophy is simply unavoidable; a philosopher as ambitious as Heidegger is virtually guaranteed to have a political philosophy. And one obviously can’t have a political philosophy that’s nonpolitical. So the politics of the Letter on Humanism (albeit a politics that is subtle or perhaps somewhat duplicitous) is fair game.46
Heidegger concludes the Letter with a lavish display of humility: we must lower our expectations of philosophy. The thinker is like the humble peasant, descending “to the poverty of [thinking’s] provisional essence” (265). The “inconspicuous furrows in language” laid by the thinker are “more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.” The humble peasant communes with the mystery of Being by living in “nearness” to Being, and the humble thinker does the same. This pastoral imagery harks back to the formulations offered earlier in the Letter according to which the thinker is merely the shepherd of Being, not the lord of beings (234 and 245). “The essential poverty of the shepherd” (245) is a gain and not a loss since the relinquishing of mastery over beings is a condition of attaining to the truth of Being. That stance of the peasant-like humility of the postmetaphysical, postphilosophical “thinker” is largely a theatrical pose on the part of Heidegger: a rhetoric—one that actually exalts him above all previous contributors to the philosophical tradition! There’s a dialectic of hubris and humility throughout this text, and it’s not obvious whether the humility exceeds the hubris or the hubris exceeds the humility. Clearly, I lean toward the latter interpretation.
Why should we be skeptical of Heidegger’s professions of peasant-like humility? Heidegger’s closing theme is that philosophy needs a new appreciation of the stringency of its limits in the world of praxis. True! But he is dissembling when he presents himself as the exemplar of the earnestly desired humility of the thinker. On p. 258 he writes that ethics rightly construed “ponders the abode of man”; “that thinking which thinks the truth of Being as the primordial element of man . . . is in itself the original ethics.” That is, Heraclitus—because of his direct communing with the truth of Being—is suitably plugged into the Greek “ethos” (Sophocles is as well) and hence offers a more “primordial” ethics than that offered by Aristotle or any other representative of the history of moral philosophy. And who is Heraclitus’s successor in practicing this more primordial form of “ethics”? Heidegger. Hence I’d suggest that we take Heidegger’s appeals to the humility of the thinker (matching “the essential poverty of the shepherd”) with a very large grain of salt.
We get a similar formulation in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics: ethos as “the shaping of man’s historical being” was “under the influence of morality . . . later degraded to the ethical.”47 That is, ethos reaches to the ontological depths of our existence because it is in direct communion with a historical revelation/bodying-forth of Being, relative to which “the ethical,” as a mere appreciation of virtues and vices, is ontologically “degraded.” Or, to put it in Nietzschean terms, the experience of Being is beyond good and evil. Any reader of Heidegger who doesn’t find this a little disturbing perhaps needs to think harder about what he is saying in this and related texts.
I think Heidegger would say (in fact, it’s implicit throughout his writings) that the very fact that a city like Los Angeles exists proves that the history of the West has culminated in our being profoundly alienated from historicity, alienated from the truth of Being, and alienated from the tragic depth of human existence qua Dasein.48 (I actually composed this sentence while I was in an airplane looking down on LA. The thought suddenly came to me: What would Heidegger think of all this? As soon as one poses that question, it’s pretty obvious that if LA isn’t the very epitome of Seinsvergessenheit [forgetfulness of Being], then nothing is—just as the Black Forest is, in a Heideggerian view, the closest we can come to being capable of a genuine recollection or appropriation of the truth of Being.) By contrast to the inauthentic and deracinated existence available in a modern urban metropolis, Being and historicity are fully present in Heidegger’s own cabin in the Black Forest just as they were present in the temples of ancient Greece, put into a “primordial saying” by Heraclitus and Sophocles. This, I suspect, is what is meant by language as the house of Being (probably the Letter’s most famous line): one can genuinely “dwell” in the animating presence of Being when Ur-poets and Ur-thinkers find the words that summon Being out of its absence or silence. In order for Being and “the gods” to return, one would have to somehow conjure away modernity in its totality and supplant it with a whole new civilization founded on the ethos experienced by Heraclitus and captured in his premetaphysical thinking or the ethos experienced by Heidegger in his ski hut and captured in his postmetaphysical thinking. Are Heidegger’s followers (who are content to parrot his jargon and appear unconcerned by the lack of content of his endlessly repeated formulas) aware that this is what he’s saying?49 And if so, are they prepared to endorse this approach to life as superior to the alternatives?
Heidegger’s basic idea, it seems, is that peasants, soldiers, and Romantic poets have a capacity for “communing with Being” that ordinary intellectuals and the educated middle class will never have. The history of the West is a process rendering our experience of the mystery of existence progressively more and more superficial, and “modernity” is the culmination (or the final nadir) of this process. Hence modernity has to be destroyed, and the sooner the better. Consider Leo Strauss’s telling encapsulation of what those under the immediate spell of Heidegger took the project to be: “Enthusiastic pupils of Heidegger said that Martin Heidegger marks the end of the epoch which was opened by another Martin, Martin Luther.”50 In other words, in order to imagine what habitation of a genuinely Heideggerian ethical-political universe would comprise, we would need to begin imagining what life would be like if human beings had never experienced the democratizing cultural revolutions associated with the Reformation and the Enlightenment, if urbanization and industrialization had never happened, and if Christian monotheism had never displaced the gods of the pagan world. And as for the privileging of Heraclitus and Sophocles, it’s eye-opening and starkly sobering to see how images of ancient Greece figure in the iconography of the contemporary far right. Just look at some ultraright websites! I can more or less guarantee that it will have a strong effect on how one thereafter responds to Heideggerian (and Nietzschean) Hellenophile rhetoric. It’s easy to be drawn to the abstract language of “Being” as long as it’s serving to discredit those aspects of modernity that we dislike, but are any of us really prepared to entertain the possibility of the comprehensive cancelling-out of modernity to which Heidegger in his radicalism seems committed? And are we taking Heidegger seriously if we fail to think through exactly what this radicalism signifies?
For the attentive reader of Heidegger’s work, nothing is more disturbing than the evident politically and strategically motivated doctoring of texts in Heidegger’s postwar publications.51 There are two versions of Heidegger’s book on Schelling. The first was published in 1971; the second was published in 1988 as part of his Collected Works. In the part of the book corresponding to pp. 22–23 of the Joan Stambaugh translation,52 Heidegger inserts several paragraphs offering a discussion of Nietzsche’s views concerning nihilism. A long sentence at the end of one of these paragraphs that appeared in the original lectures was omitted from the 1971 version53 (and hence is absent from the Stambaugh translation) but was reinstated in the 1988 version.54 Here is my translation of the text that was suppressed and then later reinstated: “As is well known, both of the two men in Europe who have, in the political-national fashioning of their respective Volks, inaugurated counter-movements [Gegenbewegungen] to nihilism, namely Mussolini and Hitler, were in turn, each in their own way, essentially determined by Nietzsche; still, this was so without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical domain having properly come into its own.” This originates in a lecture course given in the summer of 1936.55 The following winter (1936–37), Heidegger gave the first set of his lectures on Nietzsche. Here too there was a damning text that was omitted from the edition of 1961 yet reinstated in the 1985 edition of the Collected Works:56 “Europe still wants to cling to ‘democracy’ and does not want to see that this would constitute its historical death. For democracy is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, only a degenerate form [eine Abart] of nihilism.” The two texts are complementary: Democracy = nihilism. Nietzsche is the thinker who understood this most clearly. Mussolini and Hitler were the two political figures who sought to learn what Nietzsche had to teach and to apply countermeasures in practice (even if they fell short of Heidegger’s own deeper understanding of the metaphysical significance of Nietzsche). Contemporary Europe offers three concrete alternatives: liberalism, communism, and fascism. The first two stand for “leveling” and the “historical demise” of Europe; the third stands for grandeur and rebirth. These affirmations are not to be found in political speeches delivered by Heidegger in 1933 functioning as a quasi-official of the regime; they are delivered in academic lectures on metaphysical topics three to four years later.
It seems apparent that there is a pattern here. The Collected Works was supervised by Heidegger’s son, and large decisions about the edition were, it seems, dictated by Heidegger himself. Reinstatement of these texts, presumably, was deliberate. Why would Heidegger be willing to sanction the publication of texts (published posthumously in 1985 and 1988) that he self-consciously repressed (for obvious reasons) in 1961 and 1971 respectively? For what it’s worth, here’s a quick statement of my own theory. On Heidegger’s view one needs to think in centuries.57 He assumed that people would be reading him for centuries (just as one continues to read Aristotle or Hegel). The twentieth century was a lost cause. No point in generating needless hostility to his books, so one should make local, short-term concessions to a benighted age. But eventually people would forget Mussolini and Hitler and remember Heidegger. Three hundred years from now, people would see that philosophically, Heidegger was right, even if he made some tactical mistakes in the ’30s. (Over the span of centuries, who would care what happened in the 1930s?) Gadamer once said (in the context of defending Heidegger!) that Heidegger, “true visionary” that he was, was so preoccupied by modernity’s forgetfulness of Being that even the Nazi genocide “appeared to him as something minimal compared to the future that awaits us.”58 That seems correct. For Heidegger, the extermination of European Jewry was “small change” compared with what modernity is doing to the experience of Being.
So if what counts is the struggle against modernity spread over centuries, what is needed is a definitive version of Heidegger’s views in their historical totality. Hence the doctoring of his texts in 1961 and 1971 had to be undone or undoctored—that is, annulled. (The same interpretation can presumably be applied to the decision to publish the Black Notebooks.) The Gesamtausgabe is advertised as being an “edition of the last hand,” which means that what counts is the final version as authorized definitively by Heidegger. What the reinstatement of earlier deletions (the annulling of those deletions) tells us is that this final version displays a defiantly unrepentant Heidegger, with his “private National Socialism”59 (his National Socialism that was superior to Hitler’s) intact.
The question of how to assess Heidegger philosophically was at the heart of the intellectual relationship between two of the leading German theorists of the last half-century: Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I’ve been doing theory since the 1970s, hence I’ve had the good fortune to encounter these two eminent philosophers, both of whom importantly influenced my own career as a political theorist. In February of 1979, I attended a talk in Oxford by Habermas. He made some disparaging remarks about Gadamer, so I put up my hand and asked a question, pointing out a whole series of intellectual commonalities between Habermas and Gadamer. Habermas looked very annoyed and paused with deliberate dramatic effect to light a cigar. He responded with a question: “What are you, an American?” “No, a Canadian.” “OK, a Canadian. Well, you don’t understand the German context.” End of reply. Charles Taylor and Richard Bernstein were in the room. I know that Taylor at least was shocked by this response. Here was Habermas, the great champion of universalistic dialogue, rejecting my right even to ask the question on grounds of bare nationality. As is perfectly clear in retrospect, he was flagging Heidegger, and Gadamer’s intellectual fidelity to Heidegger, without mentioning Heidegger’s name.60
Five years later I found myself having dinner with the eighty-four-year-old Gadamer at Chez Piggy’s in Kingston, Ontario. (He ordered steak tartare, so I followed the master and ordered the same.) I put the same question in reverse—that is, I asked Gadamer what was his view of Habermas. His response too was shocking. As I best recollect his words, they were as follows: “Habermas is not really a philosopher, he’s more like a sociologist. He’s incapable of taking Heidegger seriously, and that by itself proves he’s no philosopher.” If I remember correctly, he also complained that Habermas “politicizes everything.” It’s obviously telling that Heidegger figured crucially in both responses. At the time, and for many years thereafter, I sided with Gadamer. To align Gadamer with reactionary German conservatism, as Habermas implicitly did, seemed grossly unfair to Gadamer; and on the other side, Gadamer seemed right to say that an incapacity to recognize the greatness of Heidegger qua philosopher was to the intellectual discredit of Habermas. However, I have over the last couple of years, for reasons sketched in this book, swung over to leaning much more on the side of Habermas.
Philosophy as such is a universalistic enterprise. As Plato rightly suggested at the very outset, philosophy is the aspired-to exit from particular caves and their parochial opinions. Nietzsche and Heidegger, by attacking the history of Western rationalism, simultaneously undermine the universalism of philosophy. Although I was shocked by Habermas’s response at the time, I now see that he was probably right to point out that “the German context” was more relevant to Heidegger’s efforts as a philosopher than I then appreciated and therefore right too in suggesting that this context and his ostensibly incriminating implication in it does indeed impugn Heidegger as an exemplar of the universalistic calling that is philosophy.61
There’s a celebrated dictum of the elderly Heidegger reported by Gadamer: “Nietzsche ruined me.”62 What could Heidegger have meant by that? Here’s a bit of speculation on my part about what it could have meant. Heidegger was persuaded by Nietzsche’s critique of the decadence and “homelessness” or rootlessness of liberal modernity (its “nihilism”). In the course of the 1920s and early ’30s, he came to the view that the Nazi version of destiny, spirit, and power represented antidecadence—that is, the remedy for liberal/modern spiritlessness. However, in the late ’30s and early ’40s, Heidegger started to perceive German fascism not as an essential antidote to modernity but as part of modernity’s alienation from some deeper ontological reality and its destruction of the human essence. In its essence, Nazism (Heidegger had at some point realized) did not stand outside the boundaries of modernity conceived as the negation of the truth of Being but rather inside those boundaries. Liberating himself from Nazism thus required the monumental effort of liberating himself from Nietzsche—hence the famous “confrontation” (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche requiring a truly epic interpretation of Nietzsche as the completion of the history of metaphysics. This culminated in the 1961 publication of Heidegger’s two-volume (in English, four-volume) Nietzsche. The full unfolding of this trajectory, according to the standard narrative, terminates in Heidegger’s embrace of Gelassenheit: “letting be.” All of this is central to the familiar apologetics on Heidegger’s behalf by his defenders as well as Heidegger’s own self-apologetics (as laid out, for instance, in the famous Der Spiegel interview), and there is in fact considerable warrant for it in the texts. Did Nietzsche “ruin” him by contributing to the Nazi commitment in the first place or by making necessary the heroic labors of disengaging himself from that commitment (to the extent that Heidegger did disengage himself)? Possibly both.63 It’s clear from Heidegger’s own account that Nietzsche helped to make him a Nazi.64 For Heidegger, then, the critical distancing from Nazism necessarily took the form of a critical distancing from Nietzsche (which required a philosophical exertion of epic proportions). So cast within this framework, the question then becomes, When exactly did Heidegger liberate himself from the spell of Nazism and become an apostle of Gelassenheit?
So far so good. The truth, however, is that there are significant problems with this exculpatory narrative of Heidegger’s twin liberation from Nietzsche and Nazism. Consider the following:
1. He never relinquished his party membership.
2. As we know from Appendix A of Faye’s book, Heidegger remained in the good graces of the regime, as documented by secret police files that testify to his continuing to be considered an exemplary Nazi, as defined by the regime (contrary to the story he told in 1945 and in 1966).65
3. In his January 20, 1948, letter to Herbert Marcuse, he could still say that it was his yearning for “spiritual renewal” that motivated his political commitment in 1933.66 What a feat of hermeneutical imagination it was to interpret the seizure of power by a gang of racist thugs as an enhancement of spirituality!
4. In 1953, he could publish the suggestion that there had been such a thing as “the inner truth and greatness” of German fascism, even if the Nazis themselves betrayed that possibility of truth and grandeur.67 This notorious line was reaffirmed and elaborated upon in Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview: “I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inextricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction [my italics]. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.” Even for the Heidegger of 1966, National Socialism in principle can be the source of that “satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity” that Heidegger seeks and that modernity in general puts out of reach. The problem is that the official political representatives of the movement (“those people”)—or perhaps more likely, party ideologues who were in bitter competition with Heidegger—failed to understand themselves and their movement in a sufficiently Heideggerian manner. I don’t think it would be going too far to say that according to Heidegger’s own self-understanding (as expressed in this interview), his philosophical stance toward National Socialism (as an idea rather than as a regime) had not undergone any significant alteration between 1935 and 1966! One can draw the same shocking entailment from Heidegger’s willingness in the Der Spiegel interview to defend his 1933 Rectoral Address: “Who among those who have engaged in polemics against this address has read it thoroughly, thought it through and interpreted it in terms of the situation of those times?”68 Heidegger could have said to his interviewers, “I was talking nonsense. I was deluded.” Instead, he stands by the Rectoral Address and excoriates his critics (as he did in the letter to Marcuse). This notorious Nazi text—intended to marry Hitler and Plato—was famously, and aptly, described by Otto Wacker, Minister of Culture and Education for Baden under the Nazi regime, as Heidegger’s “private National Socialism.”69 I don’t see how one can avoid inferring from the 1966 interview that it was a private National Socialism to which Heidegger remained committed long after 1933.
5. Near the end of his life, Heidegger decided to include the Black Notebooks (including explicitly racist passages conjuring up a diabolical conspiracy on the part of “world Judaism”) in the official Collected Works, whereas any reasonably sane person would have burned them, or at least burned the most incriminating passages. It’s as if he either were trying to spur a revival of fascist ideology or intended to confess to the world just how grievously stained he had been by that ideology. All of this is thoroughly damning. Also fairly damning is a story related by Bambach.70 Heidegger had a carved swastika decorating the stone well outside the window of his study in the cabin in Todtnauberg. According to a visitor at the ski hut (Rainer Marten), the swastika was removed at the conclusion of the war, but no earlier. As Bambach comments, “Heidegger retained an elemental faith in the symbolic power of the National Socialist myth . . . until 1945.”
Even if one hadn’t known in 1933 that the Nazis would launch a project of wholesale genocide in the 1940s, one surely couldn’t avoid knowing right from the start that Nazism was a political movement founded on violence, dictatorship, and racial hatred. (Marcuse made this point in his letter to Heidegger dated May 12, 1948.) Heidegger bought into all of that and subsumed it under the rubric of “spiritual renewal”! Where was the truth and grandeur in any of that? It’s not what any of us would associate with truth and grandeur—with or without extermination camps. Our conclusion: even a “best-case scenario” account of the history of Heidegger’s philosophical development falls far short of an adequate exculpation.
***
As a sequel to our brief consideration in chapter 1 of Freud and Weber as intellectual heirs of Nietzsche, it may be of interest to resume that discussion in the context of our current treatment of Heidegger as an intellectual and political heir of Nietzsche. In chapter 1 I tried to suggest that Nietzsche offers a kind of fetishism of the tragic and the heroic. It is in precisely this sense that Heidegger is a direct disciple of Nietzsche. Of course, one could say something similar about Weber. But my sense with Weber is that for him the world just is tragic; this is part of what he intends when he speaks of polytheism as the “default position,” so to speak, of human experience—hence it’s less a question of “fetishizing” tragedy. Accordingly, my verdict on Weber would be much less harsh than my judgments concerning Nietzsche and Heidegger.
As I put it in an earlier section, for Heidegger (even though he never really spells this out in so many words), peasants, soldiers, and Romantic poets have a privileged access to the ineffable mystery of Being. Nietzsche, by contrast, doesn’t particularly care about peasants or soldiers; all he really cares about, as he says in Schopenhauer as Educator, are “artists, philosophers, and saints,” because they are capable, single-handedly, of putting human cultures on a different and higher plane. Nietzsche, no less than Heidegger, hates modernity and wants to see it disappear—because modernity’s egalitarianism means that the welfare of shopkeepers and state functionaries counts for as much as that of great artists like Wagner and great philosophers like Schopenhauer. (Why great artists and great philosophers but not great scientists? Why Schopenhauer and Wagner but not Einstein? I don’t think that there is a good answer to this question.)
Weber’s view is more complicated: his view of modernity is as harsh as that of the harshest of modernity’s critics (Theodor Adorno or Alasdair MacIntyre, say). Modernity is “an iron cage”: it’s hard to see that as a flattering description! But Weber, unlike Heidegger and Nietzsche, affirms modernity—for “dialectical” reasons, one could say. Living in the iron cage is a test of character and that appeals profoundly to Weber’s tragic sensibility.71 The worse modernity is, the more intense is the experience of tragic fate or tragic destiny and hence the greater the potentiality of nobility in “manfully” facing up to grim existential imperatives. (I would actually be inclined to say that because it doesn’t rest upon the entertaining of fantasies about the transcendence of modernity, Weberian nobility is ultimately more noble than Nietzschean nobility.) So for Weber, precisely the unlovability of modernity makes it more lovable, or more redeemable. It’s a bit like Nietzsche’s amor fati, but applied to modern life.
Freud and Weber are very pessimistic liberals. Nietzsche and Heidegger are very pessimistic (about the existing dispensation) but also very hopeful/hubristic antiliberals. It’s their hope/hubris that’s dangerous! Freud and Weber aren’t Nietzscheans, but they’re shadowed by Nietzsche and especially by Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture. (Weber, in “Science as a Vocation,” says that only “overgrown children” would take seriously the idea of happiness as moderns conceive it in the wake of Nietzsche’s “devastating” depiction of the last men.) All four of the thinkers that concern us here—Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Heidegger—are committed to conjuring up a deeper sense of tragic pathos than is made available by the rationalistic approach to life privileged by liberal modernity. For all four of them, life in liberal modernity involves a basically shallow and naive response to the world—which doesn’t mean that all four want to banish it. Nietzsche and Heidegger do; Weber doesn’t, for the reason I specified in the previous paragraph; and Freud doesn’t because (given Freud’s deeply pessimistic account of human nature) the alternatives are guaranteed to be far worse. I’m certainly with Freud on this. Nietzsche was right that this whole intellectual movement was started by Schopenhauer, with his stringent rethinking of Western rationalism in the light of the unfathomable forces that are impenetrable by reason. And in that sense, Nietzsche’s heirs are also Schopenhauer’s heirs.72
Let me add one more point: One might say that for Weber and Freud science itself supplies the ethos of steely courage and cold-eyed realism that Nietzsche sought to introduce into philosophy. This whole pathos is captured by Weber’s term “disenchantment,” which Freud too fully buys into: it is precisely the man of science who exhibits the manliness, refusal to be duped by sentimentalism, and unflinchingness required to face up to the stern realities of life as they truly are. This indeed opens up an enormous philosophical chasm with Freud and Weber on the one side and Nietzsche and Heidegger on the other. Freud and Weber’s debt to Nietzsche is beyond question. Yet Nietzsche wanted to unleash the life-affirming energies of Dionysus, whereas Freud wanted to rein in or domesticate the id (whether in the form of Dionysian Eros or Dionysian Thanatos) by appealing to the analytic powers of Logos and Weber wanted to look for possibilities of nobility precisely within a world where processes of rationalization reach their apogee.
HANNAH ARENDT: People ought to leave him in peace.
KARL JASPERS: I don’t think it desirable “to leave Heidegger in peace.” He is a presence, and one that everyone who wants an excuse for his own Nazi past likes to fall back on. The significance of his behavior seems to me of no small consequence for current politics in the Federal Republic.73
In closing, let me come back to Gadamer and his determination to stand by Heidegger. In a TV documentary entitled “The Magus of Messkirch,” available on YouTube, Gadamer (with Jacques Derrida sitting next to him) makes the following statement: “[The question was put to me: ‘you said] that Heidegger was so upset about Röhm because he realized that his expectations regarding the spiritual renewal of Europe were a mistake. So how come he didn’t get upset about the extermination camps that were so much worse and so incredibly shameful for us?’ My reply was: he was so upset that he couldn’t open his mouth about it.” Gadamer appears to say this in a tone of considerable indignation that people dare to put this challenge to Heidegger.74 This defense of Heidegger is quite misguided on multiple levels: First, Gadamer parrots Heidegger’s own outrageous line that what drew him to fascism and Hitlerism was the promise it offered of effecting a “spiritual renewal” of Europe. Second, Gadamer (again taking at face value Heidegger’s own apologetics) presumes that Heidegger fully realized his mistake at the time of the Röhm purge. That was in 1934, whereas we know for a fact that Heidegger’s belief in Hitler and Nazism extended until at least 1936 and probably much later. Third, Gadamer asserts that Heidegger was horrified and shamed by the extermination camps. We have good anecdotal reasons to be skeptical of this latter suggestion. Consider the following story told by Heidegger’s friend, Rudolf Bultmann, about a postwar encounter between them: “‘Now you must,’ I said to him, ‘like Augustine write retractions [Retractiones] . . . in the final analysis for the truth of your thought.’ Heidegger’s face became a stony mask. He left without saying anything further.”75 What we glean about Heidegger’s character from the Bultmann story is reinforced by an account given in Hans Jonas’s Memoirs concerning a 1969 visit by Jonas to his former teacher: “Any clarification on his part, let alone a word of regret, was not to be. What had come between us for good would remain shrouded in silence.”76 These stories help to put in context another story that was passed on to me and that rings true. Stanley Rosen informed his teacher Leo Strauss that he planned to go meet Heidegger. Strauss said words along the following lines: Fine, go have an intellectual discussion with him. But don’t shake his hand.
Near the end of The Periodic Table, Primo Levi’s masterpiece describing his experiences during the Holocaust as well as before and after the war, Levi gives an account of a postwar correspondence that he had with a German manager under whom he did slave labor in a chemical factory at Auschwitz. The German was not exactly a persecutor but was still tangibly stained by complicity with the Nazi terror. Levi imagines two kinds of letters that such a German, twenty years after the Nazi defeat, might write to a former concentration camp inmate: “a humble, warm, Christian letter, from a redeemed German; a ribald, proud, glacial letter from an obdurate Nazi.”77 Levi’s point is that this particular German, a typically unimpressive but not outrightly evil human being, wrote letters that were neither one nor the other, thus illustrating the neither-black-nor-white character of human reality. Not so with Heidegger. Consider again the exchange with Marcuse. The second polar possibility sketched by Levi, the outrightly evil one, exactly describes Heidegger’s tone with Marcuse: proud, glacial, obdurate. He had gained not a particle of humility, compassion, or wisdom from the Nazi catastrophe, as is clear to anyone who reads the Marcuse-Heidegger exchange. The recent Black Notebooks revelations have stoked up further waves of Heidegger controversy, but in essence they tell one nothing that one cannot infer from his arrogant, impenitent January 20, 1948, letter to Marcuse. Only a real Nazi, as opposed to a naïve fellow-traveler, could have written such a letter. In fact, Faye plausibly suggests that the whole enterprise of German revisionism spearheaded by Ernst Nolte in 1986–1987 is already latent in Heidegger’s 1948 letter to Marcuse.78 Hermeneutical generosity is generally an important intellectual virtue, but drawing together all the various troubling aspects of the Heidegger dossier surveyed above, we may well have reached the stage where we justly conclude that this particular philosopher—notwithstanding his intellectual greatness—just isn’t worthy of that sort of generosity.