IT IS NOT surprising that Liberation was not solely political, but cultural as well, and that the Sartre bomb was not the only one to explode at the time of an intense intellectual turmoil, amidst a joyous confusion. Sartre himself noted and deplored that existentialism, transformed into a fashion, became a word that “has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all.”1 Existentialism had almost become a slogan, whose meaning was no longer clear. “At St. Germain des Prés, the language of that time was taking shape and so was its jargon. The critics were confusing everything: Jaspers’ philosophy with that of Gabriel Marcel, Trotsky with Malraux, Nietzsche with André Breton, and Kierkegaard with Heidegger.”2 Thus, there was nothing unusual in the fact that Heidegger was one of the involuntary members in this motley crew.
What is more surprising is the way in which Heidegger—his prestige suddenly at its zenith—was put on a pedestal by the snobbish Parisian intelligentsia, even though he had not done anything—at least in the beginning—to encourage such a level of curiosity and sympathy. Further, he was not being blamed for having been in the camp of the vanquished or for having compromised himself politically. Not only had the French presented themselves as victors just a few years after the worst routing in their history, but now they afforded themselves the opportunity to court and celebrate an obscure and difficult philosopher, while pretending, in a condescending way, to be unaware of his political error.
The indications of this paradoxical glory were numerous. One of the first was that as early as 1945, the French intellectuals began their visits to the Master.
One would be hard pressed to say that people had beaten a path to Heidegger’s door. The conditions of access and transportation in the occupied zone were quite difficult and controlled by the military. Given these serious obstacles, it is significant that Frédéric de Towarnicki was not the only one to use his French army uniform to go meet the Master on several occasions. He was followed by other officers, including Edgar Morin and Maurice de Gandillac, themselves forecasting the legions of French visitors from whom Heidegger would benefit later in more favorable circumstances.
It seems that Towarnicki was indeed the first to have dared to brave the many obstacles in order to venture to 47 Rötebuckveg, in Zähringen at the edge of Freiburg.3 In the course of a first unsuccessful visit (which took place around the end of the summer of 1945), he encountered only Heidegger’s wife. He returned during the fall with Alain Resnais and this time actually met with Heidegger. His very lively account of this meeting is worth reading;4 it is incontestably in good faith, and seems as faithful as possible; but one cannot find any philosophical revelation, nor any truly precise information about Heidegger’s past. This account offers the sketch of what was to become the typical scenario of the visits of the French to Freiburg—the visitors, who were visibly intimidated, would do their best to introduce themselves, inquire about the thinking of the Master and the state of his work, or even dare a few bolder questions regarding politics, while their host showed great courtesy mixed with an amused (or perhaps bemused) curiosity concerning his Parisian celebrity,5 and asked questions about the better known philosophers (he questioned Towarnicki about Sartre and Beaufret, but also about Sorbonne professors such as Le Senne or Bréhier—to whom he had written without having received any response). While Edgar Morin had not kept any accurate records of the content of his own conversations,6 he did recall that Heidegger was at first “extremely wary,” then cordial. Maurice de Gandillac, both in his article in Les Temps Modernes and in his autobiography, showed himself to be less sympathetic toward Heidegger than Frédéric de Towarnicki (even though there were no noticeably different elements in their accounts) in spite of his efforts to draw out the illustrious interlocutor: “Short, stocky (the Chaplin-esque mustache evoked certain comical aspects of the Führer), Heidegger seemed overwhelmed by the event. . . . Heidegger returned deliberately to the banality of everyday life. . . . Whatever his genius, how could one not take into account the contrast between the very demands of his philosophy and the vaguely evasive attitude of this ‘man in situation’?”7
Whether the atmosphere of these various discussions was cheerful or tense, Heidegger rarely opened up, and remained reticent. It is now known that he had some episodes of depression up to 1947. Is that so surprising? His country was defeated, devastated, and dishonored by the first revelations of the horrors of the extermination camps. Heidegger was subjected to strong psychological pressures and to seizures of his personal property. Even worse: his teaching privileges were suspended and he was the object of a denazification investigation; additionally, his two sons were in a prison camp in Russia and he received no word of any kind about their fate.
The asymmetry between the visitors and Heidegger was dramatic and, truth be told, quite incredible: on the one hand, one arrived—with either a real or feigned respect—to see what the great philosopher of the day, who was already legendary, looked like. On the other hand, one could sense Heidegger’s mixed feelings of sadness, of fear, and of relief as a philosopher haunted by his past, surrounded by hostility, nonetheless discovering admirers, and perhaps even unexpected friends, among the representatives of the occupying power. Did any of his neighbors believe that they were coming to arrest him?8 It was in fact the contrary that took place: these were acts of recognition and homage, which were the precursory signs for Heidegger of the enduring support that he would find in France.
Heidegger himself was so favorably impressed by these visits9 that he wrote to Jean Beaufret on November 23, 1945” “I sense, as far as I have been able to grasp in just a few weeks, an extraordinary élan which shows that a revolution is forming in this domain.”10
At a properly philosophical level, what was actually the case? Apart from the rumors of the existentialist fad, and except for Sartre, could one detect a sophisticated philosophical receptivity in France at that time? Even if there were no doubt that the answer is yes, we would still need to clarify the basis for such an appraisal.
During his very first visit to Heidegger’s residence, Frédéric de Towarnicki gave Mrs. Heidegger two issues of the journal Confluences with a series of recent articles by Jean Beaufret, “À propos de l’existentialisme.” A minor occurrence with great effects: this minor event occasioned one of the most profound and well-known philosophical friendships in history!
At the time, Towarnicki himself did not realize the consequences of this gesture. But he appreciated the quality of Beaufret’s work and hoped that Heidegger would recognize the effort being made to grapple with his thought in its specificity without reducing it to the Sartrean horizon.
This showed great instinct, considering that there was only one text involved. It must be emphasized that personal relations between Heidegger and Beaufret came after the philosophical readings and not the reverse. It has been suggested (and without doubt believed in good faith) that Heidegger wrote his famous “Letter on Humanism,” addressed to Jean Beaufret, in an attempt to establish support in France, throwing it out like a rescue buoy, when he was so terribly isolated in Germany. This last point is perhaps not completely erroneous, but prior to this, Heidegger’s attention had been awakened by the reading of Beaufret’s text—this act of recognition from such an exceptional reader as Heidegger had a unique value that transcended psychological or anecdotal considerations. Given the enthusiasm of some French intellectuals who had come to Freiburg, Heidegger was not lacking external “support” (was not Sartre potentially the most impressive among them?).11 What was lacking, much more radically in 1945, was an authentic philosophical account of the path of his thinking following the publication of Being and Time, which was already fifteen years old. Knowing now the ever so decisive volumes of the Gesamtausgabe, which punctuated his itinerary from 1936—in particular, the Nietzsche lectures and the Beiträge—one can better measure his extraordinary intellectual isolation, which was further reinforced by circumstances. Having published practically nothing for fifteen years, although intensely pursuing his “turn” all the while, he had no real interlocutors. Perhaps only a few former students or colleagues, such as Walter Biemel and Eugen Fink, were able to sense the depth of this profound intellectual solitude. Alphonse de Waelhens referred to this solitude in 1942 in these rather unusual terms: “It is not certain—according to Eugen Fink who could be, if he wanted, the most penetrating interpreter of his thought—that the philosopher of Sein und Zeit could one day overcome the crisis of discouragement and weariness that he has known for several years.”12 What hidden insight had Heidegger discerned, in the fall of 1945, in these pages from Jean Beaufret?13
It is difficult, though not impossible, to adopt Heidegger’s point of view by assuming, for a moment, his expectations and curiosity. With his keen intelligence, Heidegger had immediately grasped the obvious qualities of the text: clarity, absence of jargon and chatter, and a knack for bringing out the essential. One also notes, due to its mention in his first missive to Jean Beaufret,14 that he had particularly appreciated (which was not surprising) the sentence, “if German has its resources, French has its limits.”15
As for the question “What is existentialism?” Beaufret had an immediate response: “First and foremost, it is a certain way of philosophizing.” But there are two breeds of philosophers, those who return to the question of the human being only at the end of a systematic enterprise and those who, on the other hand, “address the human being directly.”16 Aristotle is the champion of the first, Pascal the hero of the second. Of the latter group, Beaufret writes, in his illuminating prose, “It is by aiming at the very heart of one’s ‘existing’ that they attempted to wrest a truth from the obscurity of one’s condition, which would be from the outset attuned to our fundamental nostalgia.” Each word carries weight, especially when Beaufret emphasizes the ambiguity of the word “presence” in Heidegger.17 It is, alas, impossible here to follow the text line by line in order to reproduce all of its richness. It suffices to characterize the role of Heidegger in this first article (which in theory concerned mainly Kierkegaard) and in the second article, which was explicitly devoted to the Master of Freiburg.
Heidegger is present in the text on Kierkegaard, despite a general orientation bearing Sartre’s imprint. He remained present throughout the four articles in emphatically laudatory terms. For example, we read, “Jaspers absolutely did not have the caliber, the power, or the originality of Heidegger”;18 and, “With Heidegger, indeed, everything is consistent.”19 (He goes so far as to compare the rigor of Heidegger’s text to a “sequence of equations.”)20
But these praises were neither formal nor removed: they relied on an already very astute reading of Being and Time—that he, Beaufret, had begun reading in German as early as 1942,21 even translating some fragments with his friend Joseph Rovan22—and on a careful consideration of the specific difficulties that Beaufret was trying to resolve by himself, without any help. Sensing that Heidegger abhorred “cheap sentimentality,”23 Beaufret showed that Heidegger rediscovered the “highest moment of openness [Offenheit] of philosophical thought.”24 As in this last case, Beaufret’s translations were not commonplace: for example, Beaufret translated das Seinsverständnis as “intelligence de l’être” and the word Dasein as “the bursting of an act of presence: Here I am.”25 We note as well that he confronted the difficulties of the text when he analyzed consciousness as Erschlossenheit (“the disclosure” of being in the world), when he evoked the facticity and fallenness (Verfallen) of the existential project; but above all, in the way he made authentic temporality explicit by presenting it in a remarkably synthetic manner and without jargon: “Being-ahead-of-oneself-already-thrown-into-the-world.”26
Finally, the significance he recognized in Heidegger’s work was such that it led Beaufret to authorize himself to correct Sartre’s flippant “carelessness”: it is not sufficient to say that “existence precedes essence,” and for existence to somehow vaguely mean “effective presence in the world.” Indeed, “the presence of man in the Da of Dasein has nothing to do with the presence of a thing”27 (we have already seen the need to be attentive to the ambiguity of presence). Further, with respect to Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism in 1933, about which he cared very little before being subjected to the psychological pressures of Liberation and denazification, Sartre had written: “Heidegger has no character, that’s the simple truth.”28 Beaufret responded that Heidegger thought he had discovered an “authentic philosophy of resoluteness in the face of death.” Was it simply a matter of naïveté? Beaufret’s explication, opposed to Sartre’s interpretation, was somewhat Marxist: Heidegger’s political error could be explained by “an unreflective petit-bourgeois moment,” with the Freiburg philosopher forgetting to be “attentive to infrastructures.”29
One can guess that neither this explanation nor that of Sartre was to Heidegger’s liking. But he had to make the best of the situation. Even if Beaufret was superficial or somewhat hasty on certain points,30 his brilliant intuitions and desire to do justice to Heidegger’s originality caused the Master to take careful note of his work. One must begin there to understand the thirty-year philosophical friendship between Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret. Their first meeting took place in September of 1946 at the Todtnauberg hut,31 which Beaufret approached with supplies and baskets given to him by Heidegger’s daughter-in-law in Freiburg. The expedition, which was captured in a picturesque account,32 was carried out to this point in a military vehicle thanks to Joseph Katz, who at the time had the rank of commander. Katz continued on to Salzburg; Beaufret settled at the inn at Todtnauberg, where he spent two days. “It was over the course of these two days that I asked Heidegger to explain to me who he was.” We do not know the answer to the first question posed: “Who is Husserl for you?” Heidegger did, however, dictate a response to the second question, “And you, who are you?” In a few pages,33 Heidegger announced both the “Letter on Humanism” and the elucidation of the “truth of being”: an explanation of his thought that he would continue to provide to Jean Beaufret, who would be his friend from then on. Beaufret later confided to François Fédier that he had immediately recognized Heidegger’s greatness:34 it was an extraordinary moment of recognition.
The proliferation of articles, lectures, and diverse discussions testified to Heidegger’s fame in Paris immediately after the war: we will initially address two interviews with Jean Beaufret that appeared in Le Monde; we will then return to the case of Alexandre Kojève; and finally, we will analyze at length, as warranted, the more detailed philosophical testimonies of Alexandre Koyré, Jean Wahl, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
While Kojève could have passed for a Heideggerian reader of Hegel, it seems that his texts suggest just the opposite.35 Raymond Queneau’s 1947 publication of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in no way contributed to stimulating interest in Heidegger himself, as it was The Phenomenology of Spirit that remained the constant reference for any anthropology. One footnote, however, quite illuminating in this respect, is worth citing: “In our times, Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy. But he does not seem to have pushed it beyond the phenomenological anthropology developed in the first volume of Sein und Zeit (the only volume that has appeared). This anthropology (which is without a doubt remarkable and authentically philosophical) adds, fundamentally, nothing new to the anthropology of the Phenomenology (which, by the way, would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published his book); but atheism or ontological finitism are implicitly asserted in his book in a perfectly consequent fashion.”36 This is certainly a homage to Heidegger (whose “inspirational” role was recognized), who Kojève nonetheless resituated (with the sharp clarity that belonged only to him) as an heir to Hegel. Whatever Heidegger’s place (but also Marx’s place) in the incomplete yet brilliant interpretation that Kojève gave of the Hegelian dialectic, there is no longer any doubt about the decisive role that his courses played from 1933 to 1939 in the emergence of French existentialism.
“What is existentialism?” This was exactly the expected question that Beaufret, who had just become known for his articles in the Lyon journal Confluences, was asked to answer in two interviews with the journalist Henry Magnan in December of 1945.37 Always the teacher, Beaufret answered in the retrospective manner of which he was fond, by resituating existentialism in the Pascalian tradition of questioning the human condition: “Being-in-the-world has the brutality of a fact without rhyme or reason.”38 The first interview almost paid more attention to Kierkegaard and Jaspers than to Heidegger. The second interview was much more interesting for us, because it concerned the “value system” of existentialism, and it required Beaufret to explain his ideas on the relationship between existentialism and fascism. Can existentialism be reduced to being the “hieroglyph of a fascism that does not admit to what it is?”39 The answer was more brilliant than precise: Heidegger, like Rilke, Kleist, or Novalis, was the object of a “sort of appropriation by the Nazis.” The journalist pressed further (it had been said that Heidegger was “the official philosopher of the Nazi party”). Jean Beaufret dismissed this objection all too easily since it was clearly constructed in inadequate terms. Recalling that he believed Heidegger was the “most important philosopher of the contemporary world,” he emphasized that the Master agreed to become a member of the Nazi party only after having been elected to the position of rector “with the insistence of his predecessor who had been threatened,” that he resigned a few months later so as to “not comply with Rosenberg’s orders,” and that finally he was critical in his courses of biologism and his publications were censored by the regime. This line of defense was—almost in the same terms—the one that Heidegger himself had suggested to Towarnicki, who was moreover cited by Jean Beaufret.40 At that time (December 1945), Beaufret had not yet met Heidegger; he had just received his first letter from him, dated November 23, 1945, which was a response to his first friendly missive that he sent at the suggestion of Frédéric de Towarnicki, and which had been delivered by an intermediary, a friend named Palmer.41 The personal relationship was only just beginning, but one could see that Beaufret was already a fervent defender of Heidegger. This contrasted with the more tempered, though generally favorable, attitudes of his friends and colleagues—Jean Wahl and Merleau-Ponty, in particular—who were also interested in existentialism and phenomenology.
At this point we need to address the case of Koyré. Among those who read Heidegger closely, he was certainly the most reserved. This reserve contrasted with his early enthusiasm. The crisis of 1933 and the Holocaust contributed to his change in attitude. But a long article published in two parts in the first issues of the journal Critique allowed Koyré to develop a careful and detailed argumentation to explain his disappointment and to conclude with respect to “Martin Heidegger’s failure.”42
This article is a very detailed report on the essay on truth (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit), a book published by Heidegger in 1943, which, of course, had still not been translated in 1946.43 The fact that an important scholar as distinguished as Koyré took on the task of writing such an in-depth study, the length of which exceeded that of the original work it was addressing, could only be seen as an homage to Heidegger’s philosophical importance. Nonetheless, one cannot overlook the other side of this high praise: a negative judgment on the contents of the work. The impossibility of publishing the announced part two of Sein und Zeit was not the result of a contingent failure: the essay on the essence of truth revealed that access to ontological authenticity was illusory and that Heidegger was constrained to abandon his existential anthropology44 while enclosing himself in an esotericism of so-called concealment (das Verbergen). Without speaking of a “turn,” Koyré noted rightly the profound transformation in Heideggerian terminology after Being and Time, and he identified in this respect a “completely anti-existentialist” orientation.45 Human subjectivity no longer played any role in the face of the concealment and the errancy of being. “The Irre (darkness, errancy, confusion, alienation) is irreducible. Dasein is a mystery.”46 The Heideggerian rejection of the traditional concept of truth and of the Platonic understanding of dialogue only resulted in a fascination with silence, a misunderstanding of history, and a regression toward the “concealment of concealment.”47 One should not have searched for the essence of truth (and its conditions of possibility) except in truth itself. Koyré’s text is an important step, and while it merited serious thought, it might be assumed that its rigor and technical difficulty must unfortunately have limited the number of its readers.
For his part, in an entirely different manner, Jean Wahl actively pursued his role as a pioneer. One finds a very interesting example of this in the journal directed by Wahl, Deucalion: the first issue contained a balanced treatment of “Heidegger and Sartre” by Alphonse de Waelhens, as well as an article by Wahl himself on the problem of nothingness in Sartre’s work. But above all, it contained a text by Levinas on the theme of the Il y a [the “there is”], in which one could detect (albeit in a subtle way) a challenge to Heideggerian existentialism as trapped in an ontology of finitude and thus incapable of opening itself to the hypostasis presupposed by nothingness: “the appearance of a noun, of a name, or a particular within the anonymous and universal rustling of the il y a.”48 Publishing in 1947 several phenomenological studies (on fatigue, on the now, on exoticism, and on insomnia, and so on) begun before the war, Levinas stated more clearly that his research “is governed by a profound need to leave the climate” of Heideggerian philosophy, without at the same time regressing to a “pre-Heideggerian”49 philosophy.
Wahl was something of a pioneer. This can be seen in a lecture he gave in 1946 at “Club Maintenant.”50 The lecture was interesting in and of itself, but also because of the rich discussion that followed. The lecture was very clear and didactic: it claimed to be impartial and only hinted at the political question by emphasizing that in Heidegger’s work, “resolute decision” remained formal, and did not correspond to any ethics properly speaking.51 This amounted to both lamenting a serious shortcoming and exonerating Heideggerian philosophy at its very core from any substantial association with Nazism. Wahl could not help but express his concerns, namely that Heidegger was not really able to ground an ontology on the basis of existence; furthermore, that in his later writings, Heidegger “has attempted, in certain tracts, to erect a kind of philosophy more myth-like than mystic, in which he enjoined us to a communion with the earth and the world, invoking to this end the thought of Hölderlin and Rilke.”52 In the discussion that followed, it was paradoxically the first person to have introduced Heidegger in France, Georges Gurvitch, who showed extreme hostility.53 Moreover, he was the only one to have been critical, since Berdiaeff, Koyré, Gandillac, Marcel, and even Levinas developed clarifications of Heidegger’s work rather than criticisms.54
Wahl’s role as a pioneer was revealed in a more surprising manner (we will see why) in the course he gave on Heidegger at the Sorbonne from January to June 1946. Published in 1998 by Jean Montenot,55 this course was unusual, first, because it was not in the strict sense a course on Heidegger but a commentary on a course given by Heidegger—obviously unpublished at the time (though it has since been published):56 a rather unusual and somewhat odd process (especially if one notes that the author of the course had apparently not been consulted). Secondly, Jean Wahl initiated a style of commentary that he would pursue (particularly in the course entitled Vers la fin de l’ontologie) and that consisted in introducing—due to his multiple references to different texts of Heidegger, most notably Being and Time—the academic audience to some original texts that were not accessible to most people. His was a commentary on unknown texts, like a medieval preacher who could choose to cite and comment on biblical verses unavailable to the common churchgoer! After Liberation and through the 1950s, a small circle of initiates was formed, those who obviously knew German, or allegedly so, and those who had read Sein und Zeit, or at least claimed to refer directly to it, and who benefited from a privilege not available to the general public, due to the absence of a translation. One could wonder, moreover, if this privilege did not in fact diminish, among the initiates (Wahl, Hyppolite, Beaufret, Merleau-Ponty, Birault, among others), any genuine interest in having the texts translated.57
Wahl, in any case, did not justify his choice; he directly followed the very terms and progression of Heidegger’s course. As Jean Montenot stated, Wahl’s “goal was probably less to offer a course on Heidegger’s thought than to follow step by step, sometimes critically, Heidegger’s reflection as it unfolded.”58 In fact, Jean Wahl was fortunate that Alexandre Koyré apparently supplied him with a copy of the lecture course in France as early as 1929.59
Whatever reservations one might have with respect to the method that was used, this course was nonetheless quite interesting. The very fact that it could have taken place at the Sorbonne without incident clearly confirms the exceptional stature that Heidegger’s thought enjoyed among Parisian intellectuals in 1946.
If it is certainly not a question here of examining in detail this course, which was itself already quite intricate in nature, by conducting a comparison with the Heideggerian “model,” it is however quite appropriate and necessary to reveal its intention in broad strokes. One must confess a major disappointment with Wahl’s text, especially since he had “just come back from visiting Heidegger.”60 What a contrast! In principle, the contents were the same, since Wahl followed the typed copy of the course. In fact, Wahl followed both parts of the course (“Philosophy and science” and “Philosophy and worldview”), and he closely followed Heidegger’s analyses (concerning the specificity of philosophy; its relation to the sciences; the meaning of worldview, truth, and the modes of being; Heidegger’s theses on truth, the concept of world and the Kantian interpretation; the world as a “play of life”; and finally philosophy as fundamental stance and shelter), even though he condensed the forty-six paragraphs of the course into twenty lectures.61
If the contrast is striking, although not flattering for Wahl, this is not only because a commentary is necessarily secondary in relation to the original that it addresses (Wahl could not have been unaware that he risked being overshadowed by a Heideggerian text); this is because, instead of effacing himself before the text to make its force and its extraordinary pedagogical virtues apparent (this is one of the best of Heidegger’s lecture courses), Wahl dithered without any method, with no guiding questions, multiplying the defects of an anarchic gloss. And while he was a Germanist and a decent translator in other respects, he kept the horrid translation of Dasein as “human reality.” Above all, he claimed mistakenly that Heidegger was criticizing the preeminence of the problem of being62 (he wrongly assumed that Heidegger “subordinated the problem of being to the problem of the world”63), and he did not at all clarify his own position, while asserting that he had detected “extreme idealist elements and also extreme realist elements”64 in Heidegger’s work. This projection of a traditional terminology onto the Heideggerian horizon (when Heidegger’s entire efforts had been to free himself from such a terminology) only added to the confusion without giving Heidegger his due—however debatable it might be. That being said, it must be admitted that Wahl followed Sartre, who had already resorted to the same kind of dualist reduction; furthermore, it would be out of place or unjust not to concede that he was able to identify decisive thresholds in the text (thus the passage from worldview as sheltering—Bergung—to worldview as stance—Haltung—was treated correctly in lessons 17 and 19).65 He also appropriately noticed that the Heideggerian notion of the divine was neither pantheistic, nor theistic, nor atheistic.66 Simply, his listeners would have needed exceptional skill in order to extract the most pertinent critical remarks from an occasionally brilliant, but most often improvised and quite disorganized, presentation. With some distance and thanks to the publication of this lecture course, we can however appraise both the strengths and the weaknesses of Jean Wahl’s reading. After having been a pioneer in Heideggerian matters, he continued—in his own way and in a critical mode—to publicize this thought, by stimulating the interest of the public in Heidegger’s thought.
Emmanuel Levinas, also a pioneer, and incidentally a friend of Wahl’s, gave four lectures in 1946 and 1947 under Wahl’s supervision at the Collège Philosophique on “Time and the Other,” in which Heidegger was often cited. In his preface to these texts,67 Levinas clarified that one must read these lectures “in the spirit of those years of openness,” when “new philosophical possibilities” seemed to be promised by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and “even the first statements of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.”68 This formulation from 1979 revealed some reservation that might lead one to believe that Heidegger was not as present as the other phenomenological authors. In fact, a reading of these lectures shows that Heidegger remained present throughout. He is the most cited author, whether it was on the subject of being, anxiety, equipmentality, or being-toward-death. However, it is quite interesting to note the reservations (also formulated in the introduction to the 1949 volume En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger69) that constitute important developments with respect to the early texts from before the war. With moderation, without direct allusion to the political question or to the Holocaust, without even really developing his new thematics of the alterity of the Other and of the “face to face,” Levinas clearly emphasized that he henceforth rejected the Heideggerian conception of “being-with” as well as a solitude reduced to “the privileged experience of being-toward-death.”70 Opposing both Marxism and existentialism, Levinas outlined a phenomenology of suffering, of modesty, and of the caress, which was no longer Heideggerian. Indeed, the privilege he granted to the “future” still seemed capable of being understood in terms of Sein und Zeit, but this “future” was no longer essentially that of Dasein: it was, rather, the radicality of the Other, as such, that Levinas introduced. In relation to his teacher, Levinas thus began a change of course in which the stakes were not yet explicit. Undoubtedly, there were only a few who noticed the intensity of the tension this created. Was it even possible to detect to what extent this change of course would be radicalized?
Merleau-Ponty’s approach in the Phenomenology of Perception was altogether different. Heidegger was integrated in a deliberate and methodical way in a long-term personal research project. As in the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but more subtly, Merleau-Ponty took his place next to Husserl as an important figure within phenomenology. From the first pages of his preface, Merleau-Ponty constantly mentioned the names of Husserl and Heidegger, the latter having completed and corrected the phenomenological project of the former by resituating “essences back into existence.”71 Could this quite conciliatory perspective benefit either? It is difficult to determine since the two projects were so intertwined. Anticipating objections, Merleau-Ponty clarified from the outset that “one may try to do away with these contradictions by making a distinction between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies; yet the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’ which Husserl, toward the end of his life, identified as the central theme of phenomenology, with the result that the contradiction reappears in Husserl’s own philosophy.”72 This overly subtle elliptical remark is extremely cryptic and raises more difficulties than it solves: by attempting to reduce Heidegger to an interpretation of the late Husserl, it in fact reinscribed Husserl in a Heideggerian landscape, albeit in terms that themselves were prompted by a Merleau-Pontian problematic of the pre-reflexive primacy of perception. A lot said in the space of a few lines! Mischievously, Merleau-Ponty suggested that this would discourage a “careless reader.” Is this the situation in which we find ourselves? If we follow our line of inquiry patiently—that is, the reception of Heidegger’s thought—what should we conclude? By indissociably mixing the names and projects of Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty succeeded both in including himself in what he called the phenomenological “fad” and “movement” and in asserting a style that was quite different from Sartre’s, namely, less aggressively “existentialist,” but just as committed to retaining the lessons of Sein und Zeit.
How did this project actually unfold in the text of the Phenomenology of Perception? Heidegger, in fact, was much less present in it than Husserl, Sartre, or even a forgotten philosopher from Lyon, a certain Lachièze-Rey (at least if one is guided by the actual occurrences in the text). Apart from the foreword, this project was essentially presented in the last part, the most philosophical one (“Being-for-itself and Being-in-the-World”), on the subject of the cogito and temporality. It is not surprising that Heidegger is absent from all the technical discussions on the psycho-physiological roots of perception, the body, sexuality, and space—areas of study neglected or given little consideration in Sein und Zeit. One expected Heidegger to be more present in the chapter on “Other People and the Human World.” Clearly, while acknowledging his closeness to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was reluctant to follow in the footsteps of his comrade and to embrace all of his polemics. Thus, with respect to Heidegger, he did not adopt any of Sartre’s criticisms, preferring to retain only those thoughts or themes that inspired him. In this light, the discussion of the cogito became very complicated; would he, like Sartre, affirm the imprescriptible rights of the Cartesian principle, or follow Heidegger on the less-traveled path of a nonreflexive openness of Dasein to its own transcendence? At first glance, one might think that the first was the case, since one rediscovered “an element of final truth in the Cartesian return of things or ideas to the self.”73 Very early on, however, Merleau-Ponty rejected an atemporal or purely reflexive conception of the cogito. The “I think” is indistinguishable from the world, and one must restore all of its linguistic and temporal depth as a “fundamental mode of the event and Geschichte”74 (one senses that Heidegger’s work is in the background, though it is never cited).
Without letting himself be caught up in an overly formal or dogmatic position, Merleau-Ponty thus treated the question of the cogito in a way that appeared compatible with the Sartrean position, although in fact it was quite similar to Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world. Two explicit references to Sein und Zeit testify to this, but in an unexpected way. Evoking “one single ‘living cohesion’”75 in a thought that regains its movement [son bougé] in time and in the world, Merleau-Ponty incorrectly cited the expression to which he was referring: in Heidegger’s text one finds the “connectedness of Dasein!”76 The beginning of paragraph 75 was an appropriate reference,77 because its theme is the historicity of Dasein, recognizable in its familiar world and institutions. It is strange, however, that Merleau-Ponty proceeds with a casualness that is repeated with the other reference on pages 124–125 of Sein und Zeit concerning the expression “Je suis à moi en étant au monde” [I belong to myself while being in the world]. This expression is not literally found in the aforesaid pages, which do not bear precisely on the relation between the self and the world, but concern, rather, being-with as constitutive of being-in-the-world. These are strange “citations,” which reveal more of an appreciation than a meticulous and deep reading.
In a comparable, though much more precise, manner, Merleau-Ponty proposed with respect to temporality what was the equivalent of a “rectification” of the idealist position78—though this time it was Husserlian—thanks to the reference to Heidegger. All of a sudden, Heidegger is much more present (and already in the epigraph of the chapter79), as if Merleau-Ponty had concentrated his reading of Sein und Zeit on the final pages concerning, properly speaking, temporality. From the outset, what Merleau-Ponty borrowed from Heidegger is the idea that time is not a “succession of instances of now.”80 Would he, however, follow Heidegger in his radical destabilization of the “vulgar” conception of time and in his “ek-static” reinterpretation based on the priority of the future? Merleau-Ponty certainly accepted the Heideggerian reformulation,81 although he reinscribed it within the intentional network of retentions and protentions, following the Husserlian scheme. One can discern a certain difficulty in his text,82 when he borrowed Husserl’s diagram for the sole reason that it allowed him to isolate a moment in the totality of motion, whose dynamic it was necessary to grasp.83 Merleau-Ponty was trying to consider at the same time the continuity of time and the discordance in its three dimensions. What is not at all Heideggerian, despite an obvious desire at reconciliation,84 is the apprehension of the essence of time as subjectivity. “We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.”85
In this chapter, which is both very rich and highly ambiguous, Merleau-Ponty seemed aware that he should continue his critical dialogue with Heidegger, a dialogue that was barely outlined by this very clever elliptical remark: “Heidegger’s historical time, which flows from the future and which, thanks to its resolute decision, has its future in advance and rescues itself once and for all from disintegration, is impossible within the context of Heidegger’s thought itself: for, if time is an ek-stase, if present and past are two results of this ek-stase, how could we ever cease to see time from the point of view of the present, and how could we finally escape from the inauthentic?”86 At times too subtle, but always suggestive, Merleau-Ponty’s intelligence was always at its peak in his engagement with Heidegger, which would never cease to deepen until his sadly premature death.
At the end of the course mentioned above, Jean Wahl made only one, very discreet, critical reference to the political error of 1933: “One is compelled to say that Heidegger as a man was inferior to Heidegger as a philosopher, at least at a certain time.”87 It is even surprising, considering the “honor” he paid Heidegger by devoting an entire course to him, that Wahl never counterbalanced that homage with a more vigorous stand on such a sensitive question, given the atmosphere of Liberation. Most importantly, Wahl did not even formulate the political question in its most decisive respect. He claimed that if Heidegger the man was inferior to Heidegger the philosopher, his error can be reduced to a psychological weakness: he lacked character. One finds this “explanation” offered by Sartre in the newspaper Action on December 29, 1944, which clearly consisted in placing Heidegger’s philosophy above reproach and not even suspecting the man of a genuine allegiance to Nazi ideology. To understand this account, one must recall the virulence of the communist attacks against Sartrean existentialism in which his subjective idealism and his Heideggerian leanings were treated as Nazi-like. “Immediately after the dissipation of the euphoria of Liberation, which had brought together Sartre and the communists, they began to attack existentialism harshly by accusing it of being a philosophy of diversion in the class struggle. The communist weekly Action, in its cultural section directed by Francis Ponge, served as the main instrument of these accusations, although it invited Sartre to respond.”88 What should we glean from Sartre’s explanation concerning Heidegger? Sartre replied in the following way to the criticism that he relied on this “German and Nazi philosopher”: “Heidegger was a philosopher well before he was a Nazi. His adherence to Hitlerism is to be explained by fear, perhaps ambition, and certainly conformism. Not pretty to look at, I agree; but enough to invalidate your neat reasoning: ‘Heidegger, you say, is a member of the National Socialist Party; thus his philosophy must be Nazi.’ That’s not it: Heidegger has no character; there’s the truth of the matter. Are you going to have the nerve to conclude from this that his philosophy is an apology for cowardice?”89 To consider the case of Rousseau: the man who wrote The Social Contract also abandoned his children. One should not condemn the work on account of the weaknesses of the man. “Why then does Heidegger matter?” concluded Sartre, since one only asked of him “techniques and methods” without there ever having been a question of allegiance.
Although this position was significant to the extent that it corresponded to the prevailing sentiment of the time, it was still not unanimously shared. The communists persisted in speaking of the “Nazi Heidegger,”90 and Camus followed suit, although without hostility.91 Furthermore, very little was known about Heidegger’s political engagement: he had joined the National Socialist party in 1933,92 and then he resigned as rector the following year. This was almost everything that seemed to have been established at the time, although the communist Henri Mougin tried to sharpen his attacks and began publishing excerpts from the “Rectoral Address.”93 But this is not what mattered: his philosophy was the issue. Although he was a communist at the time, Edgar Morin confirms today that the mood of young people who were interested in philosophy was hardly “punitive” with respect to Heidegger.94 It is true that there were more important matters to attend to and that the immediate political struggles, the internal purge, and postwar reconstruction were much more urgent than the reconstruction of the details of the political engagements of a great philosopher, among other intellectuals in Germany in 1933.
However, as we have seen, the question had indeed been posed. Silent during the Occupation, Sartre had to take a stand, however briefly, on this question, and then organized a debate in the pages of Les Temps modernes. It is worth referencing the debate and reconstituting its essential moments, because the discussion, taken as a whole, was of high quality and quite eventful, which attests that it was responding, as one could imagine, to a genuine concern and expectation.
The first installment concerning Heidegger appeared in January 1946. It contained a brief editorial note bearing Sartre’s signature, and began in the following way: “The French press spoke of Heidegger as a Nazi; it is a fact that he was a member of the Nazi party. If one had to judge a philosophy by the courage or political lucidity of the philosopher, Hegel would not stand up to the scrutiny. It can happen that a philosopher be unfaithful to his best thoughts when he arrives at political decisions.”95
The allusion to the “French press” (attacks were coming from the communists, but also from Christian democrats of the Mouvement républicain populaire) established that Sartre saw himself forced to take on a subject he would rather have avoided. There is no dispute with respect to the factual concession regarding Heidegger’s party membership in 1933. But the sentence that came immediately after considerably mitigated the significance of his party membership: the comparison with Hegel, eminently debatable in itself, from the outset put Heidegger on a pedestal by dissociating the value of a philosophy from the actions of the philosopher. And the short following sentence strongly suggested that Heidegger’s “best thinking” was diametrically opposed to Nazism. Already, on the basis of this short paragraph, which was quite skillful and worthy of a great lawyer, the reader understood that Heidegger must have lacked “courage” or “political lucidity,” but that his philosophy was not challenged as such.
In the ensuing debate, a new concession was made, which was once again skillfully cloaked in the parallel to Hegel, “It is possible, it will be necessary to look into what in Heidegger’s existentialism would motivate the acceptance of Nazism, as one could look into what, in Hegelianism, made Hegel’s support of the Prussian monarchy as well as the reactionary Hegel of the last period, possible.” On this point, Sartre was going farther than he had ever gone before. In admitting that he could see a link between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political engagements, he invalidated his own psychological explanation. But he made this concession thanks to the parallel with Hegel, “Tailored for Hegel, this analysis exonerates most of Hegelian philosophy, that is, of dialectical thought. When that concession is made for Heidegger, it will disculpate most of his philosophy, that is, existential thought (which is not unrelated to dialectical thought). Moreover, it showed perhaps that an ‘existential’ politics is diametrically opposed to Nazism.”
One would be justified in finding the allegation regarding Hegel debatable: not that Hegel must be “suspected” straightaway, but because Sartre hastily made two huge assumptions: the Marxist treatment of the “dialectic core” would save most of Hegelian thought by characterizing the speculative dimension as unimportant (and dangerous); dialectical thought would be politically acceptable. When one considers everything the expression “meaning of history” has justified, this last claim seems monstrous. But Sartre did not mind: he addressed a public that he knew supported “dialectical thought” and that, in the context of Liberation, had no doubt about the triumph of just causes.
The strangeness of the Sartrean intervention did not, however, stop there. By opening an inquiry, one already announces its result! Why would one undertake this inquiry under these conditions? The answer is already obvious: in order to comply with an external pressure, which was essentially communist. Furthermore, by not distinguishing Heidegger’s case from his own, and by affirming the proximity between dialectical thought and existentialism (“antipodal to Nazism”), Sartre created an effective illusion. His debate with the communists would largely eclipse the more precise questions concerning Heidegger. Sartre’s attitude can also be analyzed as defensive. It was because Sartre had to justify his own work that he was so peremptory. His conclusion confirmed his explanation of the mistake of 1933 in terms of Heidegger’s weakness. “The reader will thus find in these texts the occasion to observe in Germany and in the work of a famous philosopher the ambiguities we have known in so many mediocre people.”
It is equally significant that the two texts thus presented limited themselves to being anecdotal accounts of visits to the Master of Freiburg. Certainly, the first one, by Maurice de Gandillac,96 revealed a strongly unfavorable and critical tone. The second visit, by Frédéric de Towarnicki,97 proved favorable and even warm. But this opposition only gives the appearance of an actual debate. No precise fact was examined, and no clear argument was genuinely discussed. The two texts, as interesting as they were, remained personal testimonies that were rather anecdotal, and devoid of genuine conclusions (and did not bear exclusively on the political question).
I’ve already alluded to Towarnicki’s account. We must now address, in his account, the properly political elements, and first and foremost the atmosphere that reigned at the time. “Concerning Heidegger’s political past, there was little mention. Neither Sartre, nor Raymond Aron, nor Henry Corbin, his translator, dwelled on his stand in favor of National-Socialism in 1933. One might just as well say: I knew nothing.” Towarnicki added, however, that “serious rumors were circulating about the philosopher.”98
The paradox is that, because of these uncertainties, Towarnicki clearly questioned the Master concerning his relations with National Socialism and gave Heidegger the opportunity to justify himself vigorously with his wife’s support. “In no way troubled, Heidegger replied that in 1933 he had welcomed a national reawakening by virtue of which he had hoped that the people of Germany would be freed from misery and chaos.”99 The rest of Heidegger’s pro domo defense consisted of emphasizing his efforts at reforming the university and his resignation from the rectorate in February 1934 (he was silent on his public stand in favor of Hitler). Heidegger then rejected with indignation the “rumors” concerning his anti-Semitism or the actions that humiliated Husserl.100 On this point, he was more precise and more convincing. “He had criticized in his courses—notably the ones on Nietzsche from 1936—the racial biologism of Rosenberg, as well as the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of pseudo-philosophers of the regime who had used Nietzsche (as well as Hölderlin) to feed the official doctrine and compensate for its vacuity.”101
Without our knowing whether he literally quoted the Master, Towarnicki claimed that Heidegger pronounced the equivalent of a moral condemnation of the regime, which was so definitive that it left no room for additional commentary. “How could one not experience shame when thinking about what happened in Germany? Even if Germany had been victorious, it could not have survived such crimes. Heidegger stood up . . .”102
One might have expected that Maurice de Gandillac, clearly not well disposed to the Master, had put Heidegger in a difficult position by asking him more difficult questions. This was not the case. “We broached the political issue. He readily admitted that the process of changing the mind-set would be long and difficult, that Hitlerism, in a sense, was but the historical explosion of a structural illness of humanity as a whole. But he refused to incriminate specifically the ‘German’ man, or to confess to a sort of collective Verfallen of the German community. The only hope of the philosopher was to awaken in his disciples, gradually, the true meaning of their freedom. . . . He changed the topic. . . . Heidegger quite deliberately returned to trivial conversation matters. We will know nothing of his fundamental choices and of his true projects.”103
It is interesting to analyze the quite limited subjective basis on which the difference between the two reports rests. While Towarnicki gave Heidegger the opportunity to offer a strong defense, highlighting his sincerity, de Gandillac limited himself to a more cautious position that, in the end, was similar to Sartre’s psychological interpretation: “Whatever his genius, how could one not take into account the contrast between the very demands of his philosophy and the vaguely evasive attitude of this ‘man in situation?’”104
However vague with respect to the facts themselves and their philosophical stakes, these two reports would have the positive effect of provoking other contributions. The debate would take on another dimension with the contributions of Karl Löwith, Éric Weil, and Alphonse de Waelhens. This would be one of the signs of a progressive change in the intellectual climate during the period just following the war. The euphoria and slogans, and the lack of rigor during the time of Liberation, gave way to a more critical era.
From 1946 to 1947, there would be greater scrutiny, concerning not only the question of his political engagement, but also the singularity of Heidegger’s thought. Jean Beaufret’s role was taking shape. Recognized as the privileged interlocutor, gradually he became a sort of personal representative of the Master in France. As such, he was Heidegger’s first line of defense, especially in the leftist circles (and took this role into the columns in the Revue socialiste).105
Sartre’s well-known 1946 lecture L’Existentialisme est un humanisme106 marked the end of the immediate postwar era. In presenting the existential thesis in a simplified form for the public at large, Sartre occupied, more than ever, the center stage. But with respect to the content, he moved away from the high-level philosophical reflection that had allowed him to enter into dialogue with Heidegger. Sartre is cited henceforth only as the representative of “atheistic existentialism,”107 a circumstantial expression that is based on no textual reference but that nonetheless would be repeated for years, a veritable platitude in presentations on existentialism.108 Paradoxically, even with this intellectual distinction, which was barely perceived at the time, Sartre presented existentialism (in a critical confrontation with Marxism and Christian spiritualism)109 as an ideological camp to which Heidegger’s thought belonged. One does not find a word of reservation or criticism toward Heidegger in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. However, the concerns with political and moral engagement got the upper hand from then on in Sartre’s work over “phenomenological ontology,” and Heidegger’s very name would barely appear in his later writings.110 The unintended consequence of this artificial ideological alignment was that it gave Heidegger the opportunity to distance himself from Sartre entirely and once and for all. By grasping the olive branch offered by a young unknown philosopher (Jean Beaufret) whom he had noticed, and by writing a reply to Sartre’s lecture, he achieved a masterly coup that consisted of reclaiming the initiative on the philosophical scene by reasserting his originality. Was then the question of humanism only a pretext?