Life and works
Heidegger himself was little interested in philosophers’ biographies or personalities. Near the beginning of a 1924 lecture-course on Aristotle he said: “About the personality of a philosopher only this has interest: He was born then and there, he worked and died. The character of the philosopher, and issues of that sort, will not be given here” [BCA 4]. He was relentlessly focused on philosophers’ thinking, and not at all inclined to suppose that this would be illuminated by any attention to facts about their lives or persons.
Such a policy of ignoring biography might seem to favor him. For attention to parts of his own biography may make us less sympathetic and receptive to what he has to say. Many have found certain facts about his life and personality reasons to dislike him. So there’s special risk in his case that biographical facts will spoil proper attention to his thinking. Of course those facts will only “spoil” this attention if it’s not actually the case that they reveal flaws in his thinking. Heidegger’s biography includes choices and actions which, to the extent that they “flow from” the ideas, may seem to discredit them. The central such fact is his embrace of Nazism in 1933, and for the moment I’ll use this to stand for what we’ll see is a much wider phenomenon. If his thinking caused this embrace, or expresses a personality or mentality that caused this embrace, does that not count against it? This is an easy application of one of our favorite and most effective reductios of positions, not to absurdity but ad Nazism.
The general question—a philosophical question—is whether we better understand a philosopher’s thinking by seeing its involvement in his/her life. We may partition this involvement on two sides: the thinking may (1) express this individual human being’s psychology, and/or (2) lead the individual to live and act in certain ways. Don’t we better understand—and better judge—a philosophy by seeing its source and its effects? And don’t we find these in the philosopher’s own life? On both grounds (1) and (2), it seems Heidegger’s Nazism should count strongly against his ideas.
Nietzsche, in contrast with Heidegger, famously insists on the relevance of “personal” factors. Indeed his most characteristic move is to shift our attention to them, so that we understand and judge Christian morality (e.g.) by the psychic set it expresses (ressentiment, according to Nietzsche). This psychological turn is perhaps the most constant lesson in his writings. Heidegger read Nietzsche intently—is he so unpersuaded by that pervasive point?1
We’ll see that there are places where Heidegger agrees with Nietzsche on the importance of the personal and contingent in philosophical thinking. For example, Being and Time will claim that phenomenological insight is only attainable through the thinker’s personal authenticity. And later, Heidegger will stress how his own thinking expresses his personal roots in his region and “soil.” So here, in certain ways, the particular is germane.2
Nevertheless I think Heidegger does largely deny the relevance of such factors, and for his own strong reason, at deep odds with Nietzsche. What’s crucial in philosophy is to have the special vision needed for its special topic, being, and for this all biographical facts are irrelevant. A philosopher’s thinking—the genuine thinking that matters—reflects this special access, and not his/her idiosyncratic psychic or life situations.
It’s not, however, as we might think is true of, e.g., the mathematician or logician, that the philosopher occupies a purely rational and decontextualized viewpoint—a “view from nowhere,” in Nagel’s expression [1986]. Rather, the philosopher has special access to being because he/she is most deeply attuned to the historical moment. The philosopher thinks as must be thought, in his/ her age. He/she is uncommonly responsive to the “destiny of being.” So Heidegger has less a Nietzschean than a Hegelian diagnosis of philosophers: their ideas reflect the “understanding of being” that typifies their respective times. So they are to be understood “by context,” but only by their most general and cultural-historical context.3
The upshot of all this is that if Heidegger can persuade us to his idea of philosophical truth, we will be more likely to count his biography irrelevant. But we shouldn’t discount that relevance in advance, while we’re weighing his ideas. So I’ll survey his biography here, including “his Nazism,” and will briefly anticipate what relations there do seem to be with his ideas themselves.
I’ll start with a barebones account of the main events in his life, focusing on his academic training and career, and on how economic and career considerations interacted with his intellectual direction. (Since he lived most of his life on the academic calendar, I use it in age-dating below.) I’ll then locate particular topics against this framework, and treat them further.
“He was born … ”: September 26, 1889 in Messkirch, a town in the district of Baden of SW Germany, near the upper Danube, and within the historical and cultural region of Swabia. His childhood and early education were here: from age 6 to 13 (1895– 1903) he attended local schools (the town’s Volks- and Bürgerschule); he began private lessons in Latin at 11, to prepare for seminary. Heidegger recalled a happy childhood. The family was “lower middle class,” secure by the father’s job, but with little to spare.
Due to his abilities, as well as his family’s staunch Catholicism and meager resources, he went away for further schooling through the Church. From age 14 to 16 (1903–06) he was in Konstanz (60 km south of Messkirch) on a Weiss Grant: he boarded at an archdiocesan seminary (Studienhaus St. Konrad, or Konradihaus), and went to school in the state Heinrich-Suso-Gymnasium, where he and the other seminarians mixed uneasily with the urban, liberal, and often wealthier local students.
He then obtained an Eliner Grant to continue his studies in Freiburg (115 km west of Messkirch), and from age 17 to 19 (1906–09) he boarded at the archiepiscopal seminary (St. George) in Freiburg, and attended the state Berthold Gymnasium. Of this he recalled especially his work in mathematics, his discovery of Aristotle, and his strong side-interest in German literature. This “high school” education was designed to prepare him for Church service as a Jesuit, but when, at age 20 (1909), he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice (at Tisis near Feldkirch, in western Austria), he lasted only two weeks before being dismissed with heart pains.
He returned to Freiburg in time to enter the archdiocesan Freiburg Theological Seminary (“Sapienz”), and take classes in the Department of Theology at the University of Freiburg (officially Albert Ludwig University), still in preparation for a Church career as a priest; he did so from age 20 to 21 (1909–11). It was in this period that he began to study Husserl. But in early 1911 he left the seminary and returned home to Messkirch due to a recurrence of his heart problems; these were deemed to exclude him from future Church service.
He then moved to the Department of Natural Science and Mathematics, where he studied mathematics, the sciences, and philosophy from age 22 to 23 (1911–13), with the aid of a Grieshaber-Pino Grant that would be renewed until 1916. His philosophical studies were dominated by Husserl, and by the neo-Kantians Rickert and Lask. He earned his doctorate, summa cum laude, with a dissertation (in philosophy) on “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-Positive Contribution to Logic.”
He then completed his education with a further two years, age 24 to 25 (1913–15), in the Department of Philosophy (still in Freiburg), writing his qualifying dissertation [Habilitationsschrift] on “The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning of Duns Scotus.” It was in this period that his philosophical interest shifted from logic and philosophy of mathematics to history, and particularly medieval philosophy, which he aspired to relate to phenomenology; this shift may have been partly motivated by his hopes for the vacant chair in Catholic philosophy at Freiburg. He was supported in this work by the award of a Schäzler Grant designed for Thomistic philosophers.
He now entered upon his 30-year teaching career. He began as a Privatdozent at Freiburg, and taught there from age 26 to 33 (1915–23). He was called for military service in 1915, but his heart problems remanifested (they had also ended two brief periods of service in 1914), and he was assigned to home reserve work in the postal censorship office, where he worked 1915–18; in 1918 he was assigned to the meteorological service, and, after a training course in Berlin, served the last few months of the war at a weather station near the front lines in the Ardennes (weather predictions were needed for poison gas attacks). In 1916 he was disappointed not to get the chair in Catholic philosophy that he had seemed a strong candidate for. But Husserl arrived in Freiburg in that year, and Heidegger pursued him assiduously, with eventual success, so that by early 1919 Husserl was his strong advocate and secured for him a paid teaching post at Freiburg. (Heidegger had lost support from his wife’s parents when they lost their fortune after the war.)
Again with Husserl’s energetic support, he was offered an associate professorship (Extraordinarius) at Marburg (420 km north of Messkirch), and taught there from age 34 to 38 (1923–28). Here the noteworthy event was the publication of Being and Time in 1927, which soon made him internationally famous. On its basis (his publications had been sparse before) he was promoted to full professor (Ordinarius) at Marburg, but then offered Husserl’s (former) chair back in Freiburg, where he returned to teach from age 39–55 (1928–44). He declined offers of chairs at Berlin (in 1930 and 1933) and Munich (1933). But the outstanding event in this period was his brief term in 1933–34 as Rector of the university, and his associated involvement in the Nazi party and movement (to which I’ll return).
This long stretch of teaching ended when he was very briefly conscripted into the militia (the Volkssturm) in October 1944; on his release from this he left Freiburg (which had been devastated by bombing) for Messkirch. He obtained leave to do so on the ground that he needed to move his manuscripts to safety; in February 1945 he extended his absence from Freiburg with a medical exemption. As the war was ending he taught an informal spring term at Castle Wildenstein near Messkirch, to which most of the Freiburg faculty had by now fled.
After the war he was prohibited from teaching by a university committee and the military authorities. This ban remained in effect until 1951, and he never resumed lecturing at Freiburg with his former regularity. Instead he mainly turned in this period, age 56–84 (1945–73), to a different kind of outreach: talks to non-academic groups, seminars in a variety of less formal venues, as well as more intensive publication. Among the non-academic settings in which he repeatedly lectured—to businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals—were the Bremen city hall, the Bühlerhöhe spa above Baden-Baden, and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. And he taught special seminars in Zollikon (Switzerland) and Le Thor (Provence), organized respectively by his friends Medard Boss and Jean Beaufret. He ceased teaching in his last couple years, age 85–86 (1974–76), and now devoted himself to the preparation of his Collected Works. He died May 26, 1976 in Freiburg, and was buried May 28 in Messkirch, in the Catholic service he wanted.
This outline shows the great simplicity of his academic career: all of his higher education took place in Freiburg, and all of his formal teaching as well, with the exception of the five middle years at Marburg. But he also reached beyond academic settings in his post-war lectures and seminars. Now let me add to this outline by treating in turn a series of themes.
i. Places
It was by choice that Heidegger lived in so few places. He had offers to teach elsewhere, including Berlin, but declined for reasons he expressed in the little 1933 radio talk “Creative Landscape: Why Do We Stay in the Provinces?” [CL]. These reasons ramify into his very conception of philosophy, as we’ll see. And “place” is an abiding topic for him.4
His first home, around which he orbited all his life, was Messkirch, a town of about 2,000 (in the late nineteenth century). His own family roots went well back in the area, among farmers and craftsmen. On a plain above the narrow valley of the Upper Danube, it later took for Heidegger the spiritual significance Hölderlin had given to that river, as flowing back from modern Europe to its beginnings in the East (Greece). He came back often to Messkirch, to visit his parents and brother, and in periods of stress. Northwest of Messkirch, in the valley itself, were two other places he would return to: the Benedictine abbey in Beuron, by the river (where he spent break weeks from Freiburg, in a monastic cell, and also gave talks), and Castle Wildenstein, on a cliff edge overlooking the valley. He identified all his life with Messkirch’s rural simplicity in contrast with city sophistications.
Still, he lived most of his life in Freiburg, a city of about 100,000 in the 1920s and 1930s. He and his wife bought land and had a house built in the Zähringen district to the north of Freiburg, at Rötebuckweg 47, in preparation for his return in Fall 1928. Above the front door he put (where it remains today) Luther’s translation of Prov. 4:23: “Shelter your heart with all diligence; for life flows out of it.” He resided here until his death—in his last years in a “retirement” apartment added in the back garden. The house is now the home of his granddaughter and her family.
Heidegger’s third crucial place was Todtnauberg, a village 30 km south of Freiburg, at about 1,000 m elevation. Heidegger owned a cabin (the “Hütte”) on a slope above the village, built by his wife’s arrangement in 1922, and which he traveled to even in the Marburg years. It was here he felt he thought and wrote best. (Being and Time was written in a room he rented in a farmhouse nearby, to escape family distractions.) In CL he describes writing in the cabin while a storm batters it. And he took from his walks in this area his primary image for thinking, naming works after “woodpaths,” “fieldpaths,” “pathmarks.”
Outside of this home ground in southwest Germany, Heidegger had other special places afield, which he sought out or found by travel. Chief among these was Greece, cathected by his history of being (and reading of Hölderlin) as the site of the “first beginning.” He made his first trip there in 1962 (at 72), after backing out of two previously planned ones. He visited, by ship and bus, many main sites; his strongest impressions were of Olympia, Mycenae, and especially Delos.5 He returned to Greece in 1964 (when he spent two weeks on Aegina), 1966, and 1967.
ii. Childhood and family
Heidegger’s parents both came from local families. His mother, née Johanna Kempf (1858–1927), came from a family of farmers on good property in nearby Göggingen, while his father, Friedrich Heidegger (1852–1924), was descended from local craftsmen and peasants. The father was a master cooper, and as a child Heidegger frequented his workshop. But his chief employment was as sexton of St. Martin’s (Catholic) Church, and the family lived (with an interruption I mention on p. 32) in the sexton’s house, which still faces the church across a small square.
Heidegger’s grandparents all died before he was born. All the rest of his family were his two siblings, his sister Marie (1892–1956) and brother Fritz (1894–1980). Neither Heidegger nor his biographers have much to say about Marie. Fritz was a well known and liked character in Messkirch, where he lived all his life as a bank official; Heidegger kept up good relations with him.
iii. Religion
The region of Messkirch is strongly Catholic, and the family was all the more firmly so by the father’s employment. The region’s Catholic community was strongly divided in the 1880s and 1890s by the growth of the “Old Catholic” movement that resisted papal infallibility and aimed to liberalize and nationalize the Church. By contrast Heidegger’s parents belonged to a conservative “Roman” faction, more broadly based in the rural population. When in 1875 the Old Catholics were allowed partial use of St. Martin’s, the conservative group removed to worship in a nearby fruit barn, which was converted to a church with the help of Beuron monks. And Heidegger’s parents removed to a small house (at 16 Kolpingstrasse, but since torn down), where Heidegger was born (and then baptized in the ex-barn). It was only in 1895 that the “Roman” Catholics were restored to sole use of St. Martin’s, and the family moved back into the sexton’s house on the square.
Heidegger kept through his life the anti-liberal and populist sentiment evinced in his family’s religious stance. He did not, however, keep his Catholic faith, but very gradually and painfully separated from it by the time of his late twenties. His philosophical reasons will concern us in Chapters 2, but here we should notice the life-circumstances.6
His separation was difficult partly because his economic and professional prospects depended heavily on the Church. As we saw his education, from age 14 until he finished his post-doctoral thesis at 25, was underwritten by Church grants. The expectation behind this support was that he would enter Church service as a priest—or, when his health ruled this out, as a professor of Catholic philosophy. (E.g. the grant that supported him from 1913 to 1916 committed him to study “in the spirit of Thomist philosophy.”) This economic dependence greatly complicated his intellectual engagement with religious issues. As his thinking pulled him away from Church doctrine, he concealed the widening gap because of these career considerations—and was perturbed over this.
While economic needs pulled him towards the Church, we’ve seen how his bodily health held him back. Chest pains prevented him from entering the Jesuit order at age 20, and a recurrence a year and a half later led him, on advice of the archiepiscopal authorities, to abandon hopes of a Church career. (To what extent these may have been psychosomatic or even feigned is open to question.) Nevertheless he still had the prospect of an academic career as a Catholic philosopher, and persisted in this aim even as his philosophical views shifted from orthodoxy. Let’s look quickly at this shift.
His early allegiance was to a conservative and antimodernist strand of Catholic thinking. While in the Freiburg Department of Theology he was a member of the Gralbund (Society of the Grail), which dreamed of reorganizing Germany under a revived Catholic faith. And he was much affected by his favorite teacher, Carl Braig, a theologian whose critique of modern secularism is a clear ancestor to his much later attack on technology.
Heidegger’s path out of Catholicism was not by liberalizing these early views, but by a kind of intensification of their conservative themes. He found in medieval mysticism—Meister Eckhart in particular—a return to a purist Christianity, unadulterated by the conceptual frameworks of Plato and Aristotle, whose views lie behind modernity. And he found a similar authentic return in Luther, read as preaching an unmediated relation to divinity, a personal religious experience.
This shift towards a more Protestant sensibility was already underway when, in 1916, he suffered the crushing disappointment of being passed over for the chair in Catholic philosophy, which he had long set his sights on. With this hope removed his shift accelerated, and in early 1919 he wrote Engelbert Krebs, who had married him, to announce that his thinking about “historical knowledge” had made “the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics—these, though, in a new sense” [S 69]. But he continued to view himself as a Christian thinker, and Husserl now recommended him for positions as a Protestant philosopher.
During the 1920s, however, he seems to have passed out of Christianity altogether. By now I think philosophical considerations become primary, and I’ll come back to these in Chapters 2. By the late 1920s he has begun to adopt the Hölderlinian view that we live in a godless age, but must hope for the “return” of a god or gods. He held this religious but (it seems) non-Christian position the rest of his life, though it should be noted that by his own direction he was buried in a Christian service following the Catholic liturgy. But his (and his wife’s) headstone bears a star, not the crosses on the flanking stones for his parents and for his brother (and his wife).
iv. Health and physicality
He was short—shorter than his wife—with black curly hair. He tanned easily and referred to himself in letters to his wife as “Little Blackamoor.” He was unprepossessing, at least in his early years, and lacked urban polish, showing his rural and lower-middle-class roots. His student Löwith wrote that in conversation he didn’t look one in the eye, and conveyed a personal discomfort. Yet in his teaching, we’ll see, he was a magnetic presence; for this he dressed, very eccentrically, in lederhosen and a peasant-style coat, which some students called his “existential suit.”
As we’ve seen, he suffered from heart problems that recurred at certain stressful moments; these prevented him from pursuing a Jesuit career, and also spared him from most military service
(he spent four weeks in a military hospital in 1915). The problems are described as “a nervous heart condition,” “of an asthmatic nature”; Heidegger says that this was “brought on by too much sport.”
For he was also vigorously physical. He skied avidly, and was impressed by Sartre’s philosophical treatment of skiing; he proposed in a letter that Sartre come to Todtnauberg so that they could ski and philosophize together. We’ve seen that he hiked, and will see that he valued “physical education” in the university. In his late years he watched soccer matches on a neighbor’s TV, and became a great fan of the German star Beckenbauer.
In the wake of the war and his subjection to denazification processes he suffered a physical and mental breakdown in 1946, and went to the Haus Baden sanatorium in Badenweiler, just south of Freiburg. He suffered a stroke in 1970 in Augsburg, and was taken by ambulance to Freiburg, where he recovered at home.
v. Marriage and children
In 1915 Heidegger broke off a two-year engagement with a woman (“Margaret”) from Strasbourg. It was in the same year that he met Elfride Petri, a student in the first class he taught. She was from Saxony, an economics student, an advocate of women’s rights, and a Lutheran. They were married in a Catholic service in the university chapel of the Freiburg Cathedral in March 1917 (Heidegger was 27).
Elfride was an authoritative and capable woman. Unlike Heidegger, she embraced the racial and anti-Semitic aspect of Nazism—and the movement itself earlier and later than he did. As a Nazi activist, she alienated many by her harsh impressment of neighborhood women to dig trenches in late 1944. She was Heidegger’s dedicated enabler and defender, who took care of his practical needs and facilitated his work. Their marriage lasted 59 years until Heidegger’s death—and Elfride slept beside him in their bed the night after the morning he died.
The marriage was strong despite the stresses of affairs by both husband and wife. (Their granddaughter published a selection from over 1,000 letters and cards he wrote to Elfride.) They raised two sons, Jörg (b. 1919), and Hermann (b. 1920), but Hermann was the product of Elfride’s affair with Friedel Caesar, a Freiburg doctor and old friend of hers. (Heidegger treated him as his own; Hermann was told by Elfride when he was 14.) In 1935 they brought into their home, from Brazil, an adoptive daughter, Erika Birle (b. 1921), whose parents had died (the mother was related to Elfride and had been Hermann’s godmother).
The sons both served on the Eastern Front in the war, and Heidegger and his wife had no word from them towards the end. Both were held in Russian prisoner-of-war camps, not returning home until 1947 and 1949.7
vi. Friendships and affairs
Heidegger inspired strong personal attachments. He formed friendships, especially with teachers, colleagues, and students, right up to his later years. It does seem, however, that these connections were somewhat more than usually dependent on practical (career, political) or theoretical considerations. Heidegger also seems generally to have expected more to be done for him than by him. His confidence in his own preeminence—on the depth of his own truth—cast others into orbital roles. Many friendships expired around 1933 when they became inexpedient for his political advancement—and, later, security. The relation to Husserl was emblematic.
Heidegger had been impressed and influenced by Husserl’s writings for some six years before the latter fortuitously moved to Freiburg, taking the philosophy chair, in 1916. Heidegger worked hard to come to Husserl’s attention and eventually succeeded. Husserl came to regard him not only as his most outstanding student, but as his best friend; their wives were also close.
There were the usual complicating motives on both sides: Husserl wanted his student to bring his phenomenological method to glory; Heidegger wanted to pull himself up by Husserl’s standing, the better to be something of his own that left Husserl behind. Perhaps it’s inevitably the student, in this context, who looks more calculating, but Heidegger carries this far. He stressed their affi-nities in his dealings with Husserl, but was scathing and dismissive behind his back (e.g. in letters to Jaspers).8
Husserl was his greatest academic patron, securing him first a paid position at Freiburg, then an associate professorship at Marburg, and finally arranging for Heidegger to succeed him back in Freiburg in 1928. But within two months of taking the chair Heidegger began to avoid him, Husserl later reported, and their friendly relations ceased. It also became increasingly clear to Husserl that Heidegger was deeply opposed to him philosophically. By 1933 Husserl, a Jew, was also a political liability to Heidegger, who made no practical efforts or personal gestures towards him as Husserl suffered various insults under Nazi rule, nor in his long illness, nor to Husserl’s wife after his death in 1938.
Heidegger apparently had numerous affairs, but by far the most important was that with Hannah Arendt,9 which began soon after she arrived as a student in Marburg in 1924. She was 18 but already a remarkable, strong-willed woman; he was 35. The affair was passionate on both sides, but kept absolutely secret not only with an eye to Elfride’s jealousy, but because Heidegger’s job was at stake. Indeed it was to reduce this risk that he persuaded Arendt to transfer to Heidelberg to study with Jaspers in 1925. They continued to meet at points between, and the affair went on until Heidegger broke it off after he was appointed at Freiburg in 1928.
Heidegger was clearly energized by this brilliant young woman who he felt understood his thinking. He credited her as making Being and Time possible. And she felt a reverence and gratitude towards him that survived even “his Nazism,” and the defects in him this exposed. Jewish, she had fled Germany in 1933 and eventually found her way to the United States to make her own academic reputation. She reestablished contact with Heidegger when she revisited Germany in 1950, and thereafter did him many large and small services. She was undissuaded by the hostility evinced towards her by Elfride, who had since learned that she “was once the passion of his life.” She was also undissuaded by Heidegger’s complete inability to regard her as a thinker in her own right.
vii. Teaching
Heidegger was becoming famous as a teacher well before he debuted with Being and Time. He had a powerful effect on his audiences, and attracted a remarkable number of talented students who went on to eminence themselves. Although many would later break drastically from Heidegger’s central views, they caught from his lectures a philosophical spark which founded their later achievements, and which they always credited him for. His lectures brought concepts and problems to life, out of abstraction and routine.10 Their overall trend was in a way Socratic: to show that we don’t know the most basic things—but in a way that energizes us to try to find them out.11 When he was barred from teaching after the war, this was not on purely punitive grounds, but in recognition of the strength of his pedagogic impact. The lectures he gave to non-academic audiences in these later years likewise generated great excitement.12
viii. Nazism
The “episode” in Heidegger’s life that has tended to overshadow all the rest—or to give a central meaning by which the rest is judged—is his participation in the National Socialist party and movement in 1933–34. Or rather, it is this participation, and then Heidegger’s very inadequate apologies or atonements for his involvement—and indeed his efforts to diminish its extent. It’s the feeling that his favorable interpreters continue these efforts that explains the cyclically renewed campaigns by other scholars to show that the full scope of his Nazism has still not been faced.13 I will present what seem to me the main facts.
It’s not clear just how long before 1933 Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies began. He seems to have been largely unpolitical, but with conservative sentiments that prepared him for conversion; this was a radical conservatism that hoped for a transforming spiritual renewal of Germany, which National Socialism seemed to him to promise. He viewed the party favorably by at least 1932. But he largely kept these sympathies out of his classes, and they were a surprise to his students.14 A part of the movement’s appeal to him was Hitler himself; Heidegger famously spoke to Jaspers of Hitler’s “wonderful hands.” He thought that Hitler would grow past the party and many of its doctrines.
In 1933 the Nazi regime began to consolidate its control by absorbing all other social organizations, including the universities (this was the Gleichschaltung). Several academics jockeyed for leadership in this, Heidegger among them. While he later depicted himself as persuaded to take the Rectorship of Freiburg in an emergency situation, he had been lobbying and negotiating for some time before. Already Germany’s most famous philosopher, he aspired now to a national and social role; he had in particular a vision of pedagogic reform to effect.
He was elected Rector on April 21, 1933, by a faculty that had already been thinned by the suspension of its non-Aryan members. In early May he joined the party, and in late May delivered his inaugural address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University” [SA], at a ceremony at which, by his arrangement, the Horst-Wessel Lied was sung, and “Sieg Heil!” shouted. This speech and several others he gave in the period supply his pedagogic, political, and metaphysical grounds, which fit well with his practical steps as Rector.
His guiding idea is metaphysical: it concerns the relation to being. This sets these speeches at a level of abstraction that must have mystified most hearers. Proper relation to being depends on revolutionary moments of decision through which one “chooses oneself” and becomes authentic; we’ll see how this idea was central to Being and Time. But in 1933–34 Heidegger applies the idea not to individuals but to the people [Volk]. He fuses it into a communitarianism in which it is the Volk that unifies itself by acts of authentic choice.15 And the role of the university is to serve this national self-discovery and self-choice, not to abet the private insights of faculty or students, nor to pile up scientific or scholarly facts. (So the aim reaches all the way down to his different idea of truth, our theme.) The university needs to be shaken up and overhauled to play this proper role; it is mired in routine and complacency, Heidegger thinks, especially among its full professors. The urgency of working in this national service must be inculcated in its younger members.
Heidegger’s speeches present these tasks in strongly martial terms, appropriated not just from the Nazis but from Nietzsche. The radical break requires an intensity of will and effort which is abetted by conceiving it as a “fight” and “struggle” requiring “courage.” “[T]he German university can only attain form and power when the three forms of service—labor-, military-, and knowledge-service—come together originarily into one formative force” [SA 37]. As Rector he furthered a military orientation of the university, requiring participation in sports; he organized paramilitary exercises and labor service. He also devised and led a “science camp” [Wissenschaftslager] in October 1933 in Todtnauberg, a philosophical retreat whose participants were (somehow) “fighting” for national ends.
His comportment towards Jewish colleagues and students changed during these years. He had had many Jewish students, including Arendt, Blochmann, and Karl Löwith, but began to hand his current ones off to other colleagues. He broke off personal contacts with Jewish colleagues. And in 1940 he acceded to pressure from his publishers to remove from Being and Time its dedication to Husserl. This seems to have reflected political calculation rather than personal anti-Semitism, and in the same period he extended help to Jews in other ways: as Rector he defended two professors he was called to fire as Jews; he helped his personal assistant find employment in England. He never expresses anti-Semitism in his writing, and indeed is hostile to “biologism” of all sorts.16 (And it may be added that he was hostile towards Christianity and Catholicism in particular in this period—as standing in the way of revolutionary change.)
Heidegger served as Rector of Freiburg University for almost exactly a year, submitting his resignation letter on April 23, 1934. He later claimed he resigned because unwilling to carry out an order from the Ministry of Education to dismiss two deans on political grounds. But it seems, rather, that he felt himself not adequately supported by this ministry in his radical vision for the university. He came to see National Socialism as betraying the revolution it had promised. And on the other side he was viewed by the real Nazi ideologists as a fraud and mystifier, whose speeches mimicked Nazi themes but with an unintelligible abstractness.
Although he remained a party member through the end of the war, he fell increasingly out of favor with the authorities and in 1937 was apparently put under surveillance. He felt himself to be making a public critique of the party, especially in his lectures on Nietzsche, so widely viewed as the Nazis’ philosopher. In diagnosing Nietzsche as in fact subject to the nihilism he attacked, Heidegger meant to imply a similar critique of National Socialism. He saw it, from 1935 on, as an especially thorough application (along with Communism and “Americanism”) of the technological understanding of being that became his principal target.
When he returned from Messkirch to Freiburg after the war he faced serious problems. He was identified by the French military authorities as a Nazi, and his house and library were at risk of being confiscated. A denazification commission (three faculty picked by the authorities) examined his case. At Heidegger’s request they asked for an opinion from Jaspers, with whom he had had no contact since 1936. Jaspers wrote that “Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial, and uncommunicative, would have a very damaging effect on students at the present time”;17 he recommended that he be prohibited from teaching, but allowed to keep his pension, and this was the upshot the French authorities eventually settled on. In addition people were billeted in his house, which drove him to spend much of 1946 in his Todtnauberg cabin.
In defending himself to this committee Heidegger set the pattern of disavowal that would so grate. He refused to acknowledge guilt, beyond brief political error. He depicted himself as “resisting” the regime by his lectures’ critique of its metaphysical underpinnings. (“I claim no special credit for the spiritual resistance [Widerstand] I have rendered over the last eleven years,” he says in a November 1945 letter to the rector’s office [GA 16 404].) From his 1945 accounts of himself, right up to the Der Spiegel interview of 1966 (and published after his death [DS]), “Heidegger simply whitewashes himself,” as Habermas puts it [1992 199].18
I’ve tried to state the main points concisely. Obviously I hope that readers will not take these to refute in advance the philosophical ideas the rest of this book will recount. My own view, very briefly, is that this “episode” certainly shows various flaws in Heidegger the man, but that the relevance to his ideas is complex and mixed. The “turning” into his later ideas really is, in important part, an effort to learn a deep lesson from Nazism—to correct, at the very bottom of his thinking, what had led him to embrace it.19 But even the earlier views, of Being and Time, are not condemned by this connection, since it is mediated by that extension from individual to Volk just mentioned. I hope in what follows to give a clear enough picture of his philosophical thinking to enable readers to judge these relations for themselves.
His one-sentence biography of Aristotle stresses that “he worked,” and Heidegger certainly did so himself, as we see from the roughly 100 volumes projected for his Gesamtausgabe. To be sure much of this writing consists in one-draft lecture notes, but it is very striking how many different such courses he taught, on how many different philosophers, and how little he reused material. We can classify his work under three main headings.
First are the 16 volumes of “published writings” that make up the first part of the Gesamtausgabe. These include, on the one hand, several books, including Being and Time [BT], What Is Called Thinking? [WCT], The Principle of Ground [PG], and Identity and Difference [ID], as well as the massive, two-volume Nietzsche [N], assembled from various lecture-courses and lectures, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [KP]. There are also several important collections of essays, including Pathmarks [P], Woodpaths [W], Underway to Language [UL], Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry [EHP], Early Writings, and Lectures and Essays. (All but the last two have been translated into English. Besides Being and Time, I most recommend to first readers What Is Called Thinking?, Pathmarks, and Woodpaths.)
Next are the 44 volumes of lecture-courses in the Gesamtausgabe’s second part. These tend to be more thoroughly historical than some of the published works, and less forthcoming as to Heidegger’s own views, though there are many exceptions to this. They span the period from 1919 to 1944, and so reflect Heidegger’s great shifts in viewpoint. Of particular interest are (1) Towards the Definition of Philosophy [DP], from Heidegger’s earliest lecture-courses, (2) two volumes from the period of Being and Time that fill out its ideas, Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time [PH] and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology [BP], and (3) Introduction to Metaphysics [IM], from 1935 and reflecting the start of Heidegger’s “turning.”
Third are the 39 volumes in Part 3 (“unpublished treatises—talks—thoughts”) and Part 4 (“indications and notes”) of the Gesamtausgabe.
These include Heidegger’s “secret writings”—books that he worked on apart from his lecture-courses but never finished for publication, above all Contributions to Philosophy [CP] and Mindfulness [M]—and other miscellaneous productions, very few of them translated into English; of special value for Heidegger’s late quasi-mysticism is Fieldpath Conversations [FC].
Summary
The question whether Heidegger’s life is relevant to his thinking is much disputed, and mustn’t be ignored. The issue obtrudes in a way it doesn’t with most philosophers, due to the large fact of Heidegger’s Nazism. How his political ideas and activities in the decisive period 1933–34 are related to his philosophical thought in Being and Time [1927] will affect appraisal of that work. In later years Heidegger stubbornly refused to issue the apologies many critics have thought requisite, but he did make fundamental changes in his thinking that plausibly reflect lessons he thought he learned from these events. We must look at the main facts about his Nazism in order to weigh these philosophical connections. Beyond this, there are many less dramatic ways in which his biography may either affect or reflect his thinking. This chapter compresses as much relevant information as it can.
Further reading
R. Safranski: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Tr. E. Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. [A sympathetic biography that tries to introduce his ideas as it goes.]
H. Ott: Martin Heidegger; A Political Life. Tr. A. Blunden. New York: Basic Books, 1993. [A more critical biography centered on Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism.]
R. Wolin (ed.): The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. [A useful collection of texts by Heidegger and others bearing on his Nazism.]