• PREFACE TO THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION •

SINCE HEIDEGGER’S CHILDREN was first published in 2001, the book’s central theme—the fraught conviviality between an inordinately talented group of assimilated Jewish thinkers and a philosopher who, until the very end, insisted on the profoundly Germanic nature of his Denkweg or path of thought¹—has seemingly only increased in relevance. Thus in the years following the book’s original publication, countless parallel studies have appeared, in a variety of languages, treating the controversial relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy of existence and Jewish themes.²

Perhaps it would not be going too far out on a limb to describe some of the literature on “Heidegger and Judaism” as frankly apologetic. Since the voluble controversy over Heidegger’s Nazi allegiances—an affiliation that, following the war, he not only never renounced, but which he continued to sport as a badge of honor—has continued apace, to associate Heidegger’s philosophy with Jewish themes has, in certain cases, been employed as a gambit among his supporters to defuse the ever-present aura of political taint. As a rule, however, such attempts have been superficial. Moreover, they usually ignore the insightful criticisms that many of his former students—both Jews and non-Jews—formulated in response to Heidegger’s perceived philosophical and political failings. There is something intellectually sordid about this sorry spectacle: latecomers who seek to compound the Master’s errors by providing (in many cases) a litany of threadbare and transparent rationalizations for his having committed them.³

One such instance concerns a high profile conference (among the keynote speakers were French académicien Bernard-Henri Lévy and the redoubtable cultural maven, Alain Finkielkaut) that took place in January 2015 on “Heidegger et ‘les Juifs’” in Paris. However, as soon as it was announced, this gathering became the target of a widespread intellectual protest. A number of invited speakers refused to attend. Among the “dissidents,” one central concern was that, ten years earlier, one of the conference organizers, Francois Fédier, had sought to publish an apologetic collection, Heidegger: à plus fort raison, that contained material adjudged to be “negationist”: that is, denying the Holocaust, which remains a criminal offense in France. Thereafter, prospective French publisher, Editions Gallimard, elected to renege on its publication plans. (The volume eventually appeared, without the offending essay, under a different imprint.)⁴

Many of the studies that appeared subsequent to Heidegger’s Children have raised interesting interpretive questions about who might rightfully count among a potentially long list of Heidegger’s Jewish disciples. They have also raised important issues concerning the various ways that Heidegger’s influence manifested itself. For these reasons, in the second half of this essay, I will address the question of the criteria of inclusion I employed in writing Heidegger’s Children. In conclusion, I will treat the cases of three Jewish philosophical “outliers”—Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas—whose names regularly surface in discussions concerning Heidegger’s impact on the world of Jewish Geist and Kultur.

From the outset, it is worth emphasizing that among the German-Jewish protagonists featured in Heidegger’s Children, none, with partial exception of Hans Jonas, self-identified as Jewish. Insofar as these figures came of age intellectually during the interwar years under Heidegger’s powerful tutelage, their dreams of unimpeded social acceptance remained fundamentally intact until the Weimar Republic’s rash and ignominious demise circa the early 1930s.

As late as 1929, Hannah Arendt wrote, under Karl Jaspers’s supervision, a dissertation on St. Augustine: the Christian thinker who, along with Luther and Kierkegaard, was the central influence on the so-called “crisis theology” movement that coursed through German intellectual circles during the 1920s. At the time, Arendt had no reason to doubt that this achievement would be the initial way station on the path to a successful academic career.⁵ Karl Löwith’s family had, prior to his birth in 1897, converted to Protestantism. Reacting to modernity’s disappointing agnosticism concerning questions of value or “ultimate ends,” Löwith’s intellectual allegiances lay firmly with ancient Stoicism. Thus, with the exception of a landmark 1942 essay on Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig (“M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time”), during a long and productive life he never concerned himself with Jewish themes.

As a philosophical Marxist, Herbert Marcuse was a convinced secularist who, in keeping with the prognostications of historical materialism, believed that religious questions would be resolved once the problem of capitalist-induced alienation had been cured. It was in a similar vein that, in Behemoth (1942), the first serious social scientific treatment of National Socialism, Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleague, the political scientist Franz Neumann, urged his readers to discount the importance of Nazi anti-Semitism insofar as the Germans remained the most pro-Jewish European people. I hereby cite Neumann’s remarkable avowal verbatim: “The writer’s personal conviction, paradoxical as it may seem, is that the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all”—a declaration that was published in 1942, the very same year that the Endlösung was decreed by the Nazi leadership at the infamous Wannsee conference. Although Neumann’s insight may have corresponded to his own personal experiences in the Weimar era, it failed to account for the gathering political storm that loomed following the Great Crash of 1929 and that became a reality with Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.⁶

The legendary scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, noting the writing on the wall, emigrated to Palestine in 1923. In his controversial retrospective on the German-Jewish symbiosis, Scholem insisted, with discernible bitterness, that, when all was said and done, this colloquy had been essentially a dialogue of the deaf—a one-way street. Scholem asserted that, whereas, since the age of emancipation, Jewish intellectuals had enthusiastically embraced the Germanic ideals of Kultur and Geist, not only did their love go unrequited, it was “rewarded” with the portentous rise of powerful and toxic anti-Semitic movements, such as the Pan-German League, that made no secret of their ultimate goal: to make Germany Judenrein—free of Jews.⁷ To be sure, the path to Auschwitz was “crooked” rather than linear. But the origins of that trajectory lay with unsavory political developments that fatefully came to prominence during with the Kaiserreich or Second Empire (1871–1918). For it was then that traditional, Christian anti-Judaism—which, under the right circumstances, could prove murderous enough—began to morph into eliminatory anti-Semitism that would culminate in the Holocaust. As Peter Pulzer observes in his classic study on the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, “It has always seemed evident to me that a force as elemental as National Socialism, with anti-Semitism as an essential, though not its sole, ingredient must have deep roots in the political culture in which it flourished.” As Pulzer then concludes: “There could have been no Third Reich without the pre-1918 Empire and no ‘final solution’ without the anti-Semitism of that epoch.”⁸

Although astringent caveats such as Scholem’s by no means resolve the much-debated question of the quality and content of the German-Jewish dialogue, they serve as an urgent reminder that later analysts must clarify their presuppositions and background assumptions. Otherwise, one courts the risk that the comfort of temporal distance will authorize a morally unacceptable and historically misleading interpretive complacency, one that papers over the rough edges and represses the wounds of an undeniably volatile cultural liaison.⁹

Peter Gay famously described the Weimar Republic as a paragon of Jewish upward social mobility—a situation in which those who had formerly been “outsiders,” above all, Jews—suddenly became “insiders.”¹⁰ Although Gay’s characterization is accurate, it is merely one among many competing Weimar cultural-political narratives.¹¹ Upon reading the remarkable testimony of the Romanist and avid memoirist, Victor von Klemperer, it is clear that the hypertrophic anti-Semitism that marked the Second Empire’s final years by no means simply disappeared. Instead, it simply went underground, continuing to suffuse the Alltagsleben (everyday life) of Weimar society. In retrospect, anti-Semitism’s persistence accounts for the fact that, during the initial decades of the twentieth century, Jews in German-speaking lands gradually began to abandon their dreams of unqualified social acceptance. (Here, the contrast with France, where, during the same period, the Dreyfusards ultimately triumphed over the anti-Dreyfusards, thus preserving the egalitarian ideals of 1789, is especially instructive.) The Jewish “abreaction” to the persistence of central Europe’s anti-Semitism provoked a rich and enduring Jewish cultural Renaissance.¹² Consequently, many Jews who felt that their path to “insider” status had been permanently blocked began to abandon the dreams of assimilation in order to explore the parameters of Jewish identity in a “post-liberal” age. As we now know, it was not a story that ended well.

“Revolution from the Right”

Hence, depending on the direction in which one trains one’s gaze during the post World War I period, the manifestations of political anti-Semitism could be visceral and highly toxic. As evidence, one need merely peruse the copious literary output of the Weimar Republic’s sizable coterie of right-radical publicists, many of whom were veterans of the paramilitary organizations that proliferated throughout Germany during the postwar years. Their bellicose writings make it indubitably clear that, Peter Gay’s insights notwithstanding, during the 1920s, philo-Semitism had by no means triumphed. Instead, in the view of these right-wing nationalists—whose political views Heidegger, to a great extent, shared—not only was Germany’s fledgling democracy intrinsically illegitimate, as a political system that had been “unlawfully” imposed upon Germany by foreign powers and then implemented by “unpatriotic,” Social Democratic politicians, it was tantamount to a Jewish Diktat. This influential cohort of proto-fascist scribes actively sought to derail Germany’s nascent experiment in republican government in order to facilitate the advent of, in the words of the right-wing social philosopher Hans Freyer, a “Revolution from the Right.”¹³ Thus if one peruses the program of the German National People’s Party (DNVP, the leading right-wing political party prior to Nazism’s emergence as a political force during the early 1930s), one reads: “We stand emphatically against the dominance of Jewry in government and public life, emerging evermore banefully since the [1918] Revolution.”¹⁴

One of the most prominent and influential right-wing veterans was the legendary Bard of Carnage, Ernst Jünger. In provocatively titled works such as Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) and Struggle as Inner Experience (Kampf als inneres Erlebnis), Jünger rapidly acceded to the rank of Germany’s foremost literary representative of the so-called Front Generation—an Erich Maria Remarque in reverse, as it were. Jünger viewed the Armageddon-like devastation of the Great War as a just verdict on a moribund, bourgeois civilization. In Jünger’s view, the war signified a return to the warrior ethos of earlier times, a welcome revival of the virtues of “manliness.” Combat, as a “boundary situation” (Grenzsituation), allowed for a confrontation with “danger” (die Gefahr) that permitted contact with the “elemental.” As Jünger observed in Struggle as Inner Experience: “War is an intoxication beyond all intoxication, an unleashing that breaks all bonds. It is a frenzy without cautions and limits, comparable only to the forces of nature.”¹⁵

During the 1920s, Jünger edited and wrote for an extensive list of far right journals: Arminius: Kampfschrift für deutsche Nationalisten; Standarte: Wochenschrift des neuen Nationalismus; and Die Kommenden: Überbundische Wochenschrift der deutschen Jugend. He possessed few qualms about writing articles in the National Socialist Party daily, the Völkischer Beobachter. As a race, the Jews were fundamentally different from Germans, standing out like oil in “clear and still water.” In light of the perils of racial mixing, Jewish assimilation was out of the question. The only choice that remained was “either to be a Jew in Germany, or not to be”—thus echoing Wagner’s recommendation, in “Judaism in Music” (1850), that the Jews, as a racially alien presence, “must perish.”¹⁶ Jünger left little doubt as to which option, in light of the racial imperatives of the Volksgemeinschaft, he preferred.¹⁷

In Decline of the West—one of the non-fiction best sellers of the interwar period—Oswald Spengler amplified the widely held view among the German right that, in modern society, it was the corrosive influence of Jewish intellectualism that was primarily responsible for the West’s terminal condition of spiritual decline. As Spengler asserts:

What has mattered in the West more than any other distinction is the difference between the race-ideal of the Gothic springtime… and that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West…It is want of race, and nothing else, that makes intellectuals—philosophers, doctrinaires, Utopists—incapable of understanding the depths of this metaphysical hatred [between these two types]….Jewry has been…destructive where it has intervened.¹⁸

Heidegger carefully read and engaged with the claims of both thinkers. As early as 1916, he lamented the “Jewification of our culture and universities.”¹⁹ Although Heidegger’s own military service was undistinguished (toward the latter stages of the war, he served as a weatherman, guarding against mustard gas attacks), the Freiburg sage identified profoundly with Germany’s so-called “War Youth Generation” (Kriegsjugendgeneration). In Being and Time, he embraced an aggressive idiom of “Volk” and “Gemeinschaft,” thereby demonstrating, already during the 1920s, the proximity of his thought to a right-radical discourse of combat and struggle. In a letter to one of his Jewish paramours that was written toward the end of the war, Heidegger, in a spirit of Social Darwinism, expressed the view that the war would have a salutary “purgative” effect (Reinigungseffekt) on German society, weeding out weak natures and allowing the strong to survive.²⁰

During the 1930s, Heidegger viewed the typology set forth in Jünger’s books and essays as a prophetic, metapolitical cryptogram of future developments. As he observed shortly after the war: “At the time [sc. the 1930s], I viewed the historical situation [through the prism of] Ernst Jünger’s essay on ‘Total Mobilization’….In this essay the basic features of his book, Der Arbeiter [The Worker; 1932] were announced….Using these writings…as a basis for our thoughts, we were able to think what was coming.”²¹

In The Worker, Jünger had enthusiastically elaborated his vision of a jackbooted and militaristic proto-totalitarian dystopia. In Jünger’s view, henceforth, soldiers and workers would become interchangeable. The conduct of war (Kriegsführung) would establish itself as the all-consuming raison d’être of politics, culture, and society. A foretaste of such developments had been provided by the Ludendorff dictatorship toward the end of World War I. (In 1937, Ludendorff, who in 1923 had accompanied Hitler during the ill-fated Munich beer hall putsch, made his own contribution to the escalating war literature with his book, Totaler Krieg [Total War].) Thereby, the timorous and effete nature of bourgeois civilization—in essence, an “anti-civilization,” in which mediocrity and craven social conformity reigned unchecked—would collapse from within and thereby self-destruct.

A cursory perusal of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks reveals the extent to which he subscribed to Jünger’s incendiary diagnosis of the times.²² During the 1930s, Heidegger taught two private seminars on Jünger’s doctrines. In Volume 90 of Heidegger’s Collected Works (“On Ernst Jünger”), he ruminates at length about “planetary” implications of Jünger’s monumental 1932 study. Although there was nothing foreordained about the Nazi Machtergreifung, it is undeniably clear that the ideological preconditions for Hitler’s dictatorship—the abandonment of traditional German conservatism in favor of a combative ethos of “total mobilization”—had, for all intents and purposes, already been formulated during the interwar years.²³ Recent scholarship has made it abundantly clear that, prior to Hitler’s accession to power, Heidegger’s philosophy strove to accommodate a warrior-mentality of Sturm and Kampf.²⁴

Although in Heidegger’s Children I sought to maintain an open mind vis-à-vis the constructive possibilities lodged in the sociocultural intricacies of German-Jewish relations, at the same time, I also tried to respect Scholem’s well-placed caveats and qualms concerning the limitations of this centuries-old, troubled, and contentious nexus. As Scholem, writing during the 1960s, observes:

Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept [sc. the German-Jewish dialogue] to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200 years. This dialogue died at its very start and never took place….To be sure, the Jews attempted a dialogue with the Germans.demandingly, imploringly, and entreatingly….[But] in all this I am unable to perceive anything of a dialogue. Never did anything respond to that cry, and it was this simple and, alas, so far-reaching realization, that affected so many of us in our youth and destined us to desist from the illusion of a German-Judaism.²⁵

The “Politics of Being”

Returning to the resonant, if fraught theme of Heidegger’s Jewish disciples, the question of the criteria of selection arises. For, of course, Heidegger had numerous additional accomplished Jewish students. At the same time, few of his other philosophical protégés rose to the level of prominence of the foursome who occupy center stage in Heidegger’s Children. To have treated a more expansive list of protagonists would have demanded a very different, less taut focus. It would have meant writing a much different book. Therefore, in addition to philosophical prominence, the criteria of selection I employed were: (1) belonging to the German cultural sphere; (2) generational belonging (the protagonists of Heidegger’s Children were all born between 1897 and 1906); and (3) having demonstrated a substantive commitment to the existential orientation of Heidegger’s early philosophy. Thus all of the figures I chose for inclusion were also, for a time at least, disciples. By the same token, as Nietzsche observed appositely: “One repays a teacher badly if one remains a pupil.”²⁶

In my mind, there could be no doubting that Heidegger had profoundly influenced his gifted Jewish disciples, most of whom were, in ways that were fairly typical for the era, “non-Jewish Jews.” But, certainly, the influence was far from mutual. As Hans Jonas observed in his Memoirs, there was something distinctly odd, nearly inexplicable, about the high percentage of Jews who, during the 1920s, flocked to Heidegger’s lectures and seminars. One could say, with a fair amount of certainty, that Heidegger, for his part, was none too pleased by this fact.²⁷ Yet what motivated me to undertake this study were not so much Jewish questions per se—these had been well treated already in many prior outstanding works of scholarship—but matters concerning what the literary critic Harold Bloom referred to as the “anxiety of influence”; in other words, the way that these German-Jewish philosophers grappled fitfully with the dynamics of Heidegger’s thought following the dual shock they experience in 1933: First, the January 30 Nazi seizure of power; then, Heidegger’s entry, with great fanfare, into the Party on May 1.²⁸

A few weeks later, blending the idiom of fundamental ontology with the lexicon of Sturm und Kampf, Heidegger delivered his infamous Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg. Inspired by Jünger’s doctrines, he effusively praised the virtues of “labor service” or Arbeitsdienst. He went on to celebrate the revival of the “forces of earth and blood” (erd- und blüthaftigen Kräfte), whose re-emergence had been catalyzed by the German “National Awakening”—one of the standard euphemisms for the Nazi Revolution. Heidegger redefined the mission the German university—which, since the days of Kant, Hegel, and Humboldt had served as a universal model that other nations sought to emulate—as, “the will to the historical-spiritual mission of the German Volk that knows itself in its State.”²⁹

Hence, it is doubtful whether Scholem’s caveats and qualms can be—as some critics have myopically proposed—simply disqualified as a product of retrospective bitterness or “sour grapes.”³⁰ Above all, in Heidegger’s Children, I strove to produce a fair-minded and balanced account. By the same token, in substance and in tone, Heidegger’s Children differed significantly from many subsequent scholarly works seeking to address the “Heidegger and Judaism” conundrum. Many of these studies concentrated on discovering hidden affinities and unanticipated commonalities between Heidegger’s existentialism and contemporaneous Jewish thought. Their guiding motivation seemed to be the exceedingly fashionable dismantling of inherited binary oppositions and classifications. However, in proceeding thusly, these studies often ignored or discounted vast stores of countervailing textual and empirical evidence. To be sure, “binary oppositions” can prove frustratingly obfuscatory. By the same token, when employed critically as heuristics, they can also provide indispensable hermeneutic keys, and thereby instruct. Everything depends, as Hegel once said, on die Sache selbst or the matter at hand: on the type of questions that are posed and on the nature of the topic one seeks to explicate.

Prior to writing Heidegger’s Children, I had published an exposé of Heidegger’s political thought, The Politics of Being, that gained a measure of international recognition: it was rapidly translated into five languages and became the point of departure for a series of contentious debates concerning the ideological legacy of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.³¹ By the same token, I took to pains to argue that, despite the vast evidence that had been amassed demonstrating Heidegger’s alacritous participation in Germany’s Brown Revolution, attempts to dismiss his thought on these grounds were misplaced and courted the risk of anti-intellectualism. Consequently, I suggested instead that, despite the troubling nature of Heidegger’s political loyalties—after all, beginning with Mein Kampf, which Heidegger had diligently read during the early 1930s, Hitler and his supporters never tried to conceal their ultimate genocidal designs—it was imperative that one find an interpretive via media between exoneration and condemnation.

Unquestionably, there were aspects of Heidegger’s early thought that stood out as ideologically compromised: for example, the theory of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) in Being and Time, Division II. There, Heidegger openly celebrated the virtues of Gemeinschaft (in anticipation of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft), Führertum (leadership), Volk (a term that, in German, possesses indubitable racial connotations), and, finally, in a nod to the “heroes of Langemarck,” the ideals of Generation and “Being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode). In all of these respects, Heidegger enthusiastically embraced the “warrior ideals” of the so-called Front Generation, as they had been forged in the battles of Verdun, the Somme, and the Marne—in retrospect, all crucibles of unspeakable tragedy and human horror. In the context at hand, it is worth recalling that the Nazi worldview had been forged in the “community of the trenches” (Grabenschützgemeinschaft) of the First World War. In the words of one prominent historian:

It was in this atmosphere of national trauma, political extremism and violent conflict and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born….The heady mixture of hatred, fear and ambition that had intoxicated a small number of Pan-German extremists suddenly gained a crucial extra element: the willingness, determination even, to use physical force. National humiliation, the collapse of the Bismarckian Empire, the triumph of Social Democracy, the threat of Communism, all this seemed to justify the use of violence and murder to justify and implement the measures which Pan-Germans, anti-Semites, eugenicists and ultra-nationalists had been advocating since before the turn of the century, if the German was ever to recover.³²

Questions concerning the ideological tincture of Heidegger’s philosophical doctrines, as well as his relationship to Jewish matters more generally, have assumed a new urgency following the recent publication of the Black Notebooks: philosophical ruminations on “metapolitics” that the Master dutifully composed over the course of four decades, beginning in the early 1930s and culminating in the 1960s. In the most recent volume, which covers the years 1942–1948, Heidegger, writing shortly after the war, goes so far as to pave the way for Holocaust denial.³³

It would be a mistake, Heidegger claims, to suggest that the European Jews were murdered by the Germans or Nazis. Instead, he continues, the Holocaust is best understood as an act of Jewish “self-annihilation” (in German, Selbstvernichtung). (Correspondingly, the German term by which the death camps came to be known is Vernichtungslager.) On what basis might he propose such an argument? Only by relying on the crudest and most derogatory anti-Semitic prejudices. The Jews, explains Heidegger, were the most prominent carriers of technological modernity. Writing in 1942, he asserts that the “community of Jews…in the age of metaphysics [embody] the principle of destruction.” He adds: “Only when what is essentially ‘Jewish,’ in the metaphysical sense, combats what is Jewish, is the peak of self-destruction in history reached.”³⁴

Hence, at Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Jews merely succumbed to the excesses and depredations of their own metaphysical destiny qua purveyors of modern technology (Technik)—a claim that, of course, is “true” only in the febrile projections of the anti-Semitic political imaginary. As Jean-Paul Sartre pointedly reminds his readers in Anti-Semite and Jew: “If the Jew didn’t exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”³⁵ This is precisely what Heidegger has done, reinventing “world Jewry” as a modern mythologeme.

Thus in Heidegger’s convoluted—and, frankly, disturbing—interpretation of the Shoah, the Jews were merely the victims of their own metaphysical cleverness. According to the rarified perspective of the “history of Being” (Seinsgeschichte), the Jews “essentially” died by their own hand. One might even go so far as to say that, in Heidegger’s view, there was an element of poetic justice in their mass annihilation. As the group historically responsible for the debilities of Western modernity, they merely reaped what they had sown.

Here, we have another troubling instance of Heidegger’s prodigious incapacity for political judgment. In truth, there is nothing clarifying or illuminating about the standpoint of the “history of Being.” As the foregoing example demonstrates, it is conducive to historical obfuscation insofar as it stifles and distorts the historical specificity of inner-worldly “events” (Ereignisse). These are questions that Heidegger’s purblind acolytes and supporters need urgently to address. What kind of light might Heidegger’s perspective shed on the vagaries of lived experience when, as we have seen, his errors in judgment are so numerous and so egregious? In almost all such instances, the misjudgments at issue are not concerned with trivial episodes but with the central moral dilemmas of twentieth-century history.

Heidegger and Rosenzweig

One of the major Jewish thinkers whose approach, it has been suggested, bears significant affinities with Heidegger’s is the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). It was Rosenzweig who, along with Martin Buber, during the 1920s was the main progenitor of the Jewish cultural renaissance. In 1923, Rosenzweig and Buber cofounded the legendary Freies Judisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt: a center for Jewish studies and continuing education, whose participants included Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Siegfried Kracauer. It was during this period that Rosenzweig and Buber also initiated a bold new translation of the Old Testament, an undertaking that was inspired by the search for Jewish authenticity.

In a posthumously published text, Rosenzweig conjectured that there appeared to be some unanticipated correspondences between his own brand of “New Thinking” and Heidegger’s summons in Being and Time for a “destruction of the history of ontology.”³⁶ For both men, the Great War, which had spread its hecatombs of carnage across so much of the European landscape, had confirmed the West’s wholesale moral and spiritual bankruptcy, as forecast decades earlier by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. In his autobiography, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was unquestionably Heidegger’s most successful non-Jewish student, offered the following cogent reflections on the motivations underlying the mood of uncompromising cultural radicalism that dominated the Zeitgeist during the early 1920s:

Under the influence of a new reception of Kierkegaard in Germany, the claim to truth at that time called itself “existential.” Existentialism dealt with a truth which was supposed to be demonstrated not so much in terms of universally held propositions or knowledge as in the immediacy of one’s own experience and in the absolute singularity of one’s own existence. Dostoevsky, above all others, seemed to us to have known about this. The red Piper editions of his novels glared on every writing desk. The letters of van Gogh and Kierkegaard’s Either–Or, which he wrote against Hegel, beckoned to us, and of course behind all the boldness and riskiness of our existential engagement—as a still scarcely visible threat to the romantic traditionalism of our culture—stood the titanic figure of Friedrich Nietzsche with his ecstatic critique of everything, including the illusions of self-consciousness. Where, we wondered, was a thinker whose philosophical power was adequate to the powerful initiatives put forward by Nietzsche?³⁷

Gadamer’s aperçu sheds important light on the War Youth Generation’s alienation from the reigning variants of academic philosophy—above all, the neo-Kantianism championed by the likes of Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer (Cohen’s student, whom Heidegger famously debated in 1929 at Davos)—that had predominated during the prewar years, and, correspondingly, the turn toward existential concerns that marked the thinking of Heidegger, Jaspers, and others. It was as though Nietzsche’s appeal three decades earlier for a “transvaluation of all values” had finally struck its mark. In this respect, the rise of “existence” as a popular intellectual topos followed cogently from Nietzsche’s concomitant prophecy concerning “European nihilism.” If the West was indeed experiencing a “devaluation of its highest values”—Christianity, reason, and morality, as seemed confirmed by the cultural crisis that followed in the wake of the Great War—the only remaining reality left to adhere to was unadorned and illusion-free Existenz. The critique of First Philosophy, which Lebensphilosophie had already pushed to an extreme in the decades following Nietzsche’s demise, had insisted that all “essentia” (essences) were an illusion. If that were so, and metaphysics’ traditional longing for timeless truth was chimerical, the only bedrock of certainty left was sheer existence. In Being and Time, Heidegger appropriated this standpoint when he announced that the point of departure for “fundamental ontology” was the insight that “existence precedes essence.”³⁸

Thus both Heidegger and Rosenzweig, in complementary ways, sought to provide a philosophical response to these more general cultural and intellectual trends.

In Heidegger’s case, the revolt against convention became so extreme that, in conjunction with his appeal for a “destruction” (Zerstörung) of Aristotelian “substance metaphysics,” he felt compelled to jettison the lexicon of the philosophical tradition; a discourse that, in Being and Time, Heidegger believed it was imperative to reinvent ab ovo. Hence, the plethora of cumbersome neologisms (being “present-at-hand,” “Being-toward-death,” “potentiality-for-Being-a-whole,” and so forth) that suffuse his 1927 chef d’oeuvre. Heidegger’s critique of the tradition bore similarities with Schelling’s rejoinder to the “subjective idealism” of Kant and Fichte. Schelling derided his adversaries’ approach qua “negative philosophy,” contending that by privileging the anthropocentric standpoint of the thinking subject (res cogitans), they ended up denigrating what they had set out to explain: the nature of Being. In this way, Schelling held that his predecessors had mistakenly accorded primacy to something—the Concept or Begriff—that, as his argument went on to claim, was in fact derivative. Schelling denominated his own approach, which began with nature or Being, as “positive philosophy.” It was a philosophical chess move that foreshadowed Heidegger’s orientation toward the question of Being (the Seinsfrage) as a type of new, ontological fundamentum inconcussum that was starkly opposed to transcendental philosophy’s misleading claims concerning the primacy of “mind,” “subjectivity,” and so forth.

All the same, Rosenzweig’s demarche in The Star of Redemption (1921) differed in certain fundamental respects from Heidegger’s. In fairness to both thinkers, it is imperative that one also do justice to their divergences.

Rosenzweig’s New Thinking adamantly rejected the Enlightenment’s empty promises of secular fulfillment. This pronounced disillusionment with the ideals of humanism and liberalism catalyzed his return to the redemptory promises of the Old Testament in The Star of Redemption and related works. In this and other respects, Rosenzweig, unlike Heidegger, was a resolutely theological thinker.

Another important intellectual discrepancy concerns their respective philosophical points of departure. Heidegger began with “facticity” or Existenz: Being-in-the-world, or Dasein, reduced to an ontological minimum of signification. For Rosenzweig, conversely, in a manner entirely consistent with his theological aspirations, philosophy must begin with divinely created being, or “creaturely life”: with a “fallen” humanity whose prospects for fulfillment urgently depend upon the possibility of salvation.

However, the contrast between them becomes even starker when one reflects on the way that each thinker defines the ultimate telos of human existence. For Rosenzweig, that goal involves the overcoming of creaturely life—and, thereby, ravages of temporality—via redemption, which is infinite and eternal. For Heidegger, conversely, Being-toward-death qua finitude represents the ne plus ultra of human existence as well as the key to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit); whereas for Rosenzweig, death signifies a way station on the path to transcendence: a rite of passage toward a higher form of Being that emancipates humanity from the travails of finitude in the name of the Eternal. Thus in stark contrast to Heidegger, Rosenzweig’s thought is impelled by a quest for what one might describe as “the connecting bridge between extreme subjectivity, [or]…deaf and blind selfhood, and the luminous clarity of infinite objectivity.”³⁹ In The Star of Redemption, the mediating link between these two apparently opposed moments is provided by Revelation. According to this perspective, the Jews’ status as an ahistorical people, which apostles of secularism perceive as a limitation and deficiency, means that they are especially receptive to the promises of eternity and salvation. Thus, “the entire history of the world, of states, of wars, and or revolutions does not have the seriousness and importance for the Jew that it has for other peoples. Eternity is at all times present for the ‘people of God,’ whereas the other peoples require the state, its laws, and its power in order…to assure themselves a lasting permanence.”⁴⁰

The existential analytic of Being and Time is profoundly shaped by Heidegger’s secular rereading of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. From this vantage point, the idea of redemption qua “luminous clarity of infinite objectivity” would be nonsense: an atavism of ontotheology. In this and other respects, Heidegger remained a resolutely post-Nietzschean thinker. He therefore believed that Nietzsche’s portentous declaration concerning the “death of god” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra represented a point of no return in the history of spirit.

In a landmark essay on Heidegger and Rosenzweig, Löwith, in a luminous passage, seeks to explain their fundamental dissimilitude. As Löwith asserts: the contingency of “factical life” that represents Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time corresponds to creation and redemption of The Star of Redemption; the freedom towards death [in Heidegger] to the certainty of eternal life [in Rosenzweig]; the being-momentarily for its time [Jeweiligkeit] to the always being prepared for the coming of the Kingdom at the End of Time. [Heidegger’s] thesis, “I myself am time,” parallels the proposition that God’s time is from eternity to eternity and therefore timeless. And the temporal truth of finite existence corresponds to the Eternal Truth of The Star of Redemption.⁴¹

To summarize, one might say that, in stark contrast with Rosenzweig’s approach, Heideggerian Existenz remains irretrievably mired in the angst-ridden vicissitudes of human finitude. With the prospect of transcendence permanently jettisoned, his existential ontology revels in the god-forsaken nature of the human condition. Deprived of the hope of salvation, all that remains is to stoically embrace the reality of “despair” as the insurmountable truth of Being-in-the-world. As Herbert Marcuse observed in a 1971 interview:

If you look at [Heidegger’s] view of human existence…you will find a highly repressive, highly oppressive interpretation. I have just today gone through again the table of contents of Being and Time and had a look at the main categories in which he sees the essential characteristics of existence or Dasein:… “Idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, falling and Being-thrown, concern, Being-toward-death, anxiety, dread, boredom,” and so on. Now this gives a picture which plays well on the fears and frustrations of men and women in a repressive society—a joyless existence: overshadowed by death and anxiety; human material for the authoritarian personality.⁴²

By the same token, upon closer inspection, the specifically Jewish dimension of Rosenzweig’s thought at times seems strained. This dilemma becomes clear in his depiction of creaturely life qua “extreme subjectivity” or “deaf and blind selfhood.” It would seem that this dimension of Rosenzweig’s New Thinking bears a greater resemblance to the discourse of “crisis theology,” which was inspired during the early 1920s by Karl Barth’s pathbreaking “Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” than it does to the indigenous traditions of Jewish theology. As Rosenzweig remarks in a revealing letter from the 1920s:

Actually, my viewpoint is that philosophy must be philosophized out of the standpoint of the philosophizing person if it is to be true. There is no possibility here of being objective except by starting honestly with one’s own subjectivity. The obligation to be objective requires only that the entire horizon really be considered, but not in the sense that things are to be looked at from a standpoint that is not one’s own or from no standpoint at all.⁴³

Thus upon further reflection, it is clear how profoundly Rosenzweig’s approach was influenced by the Kierkegaard renaissance that pulsated throughout German intellectual circles in the early 1920s. Only in light of this phenomenon can we appreciate the ramifications of Rosenzweig’s contention that true philosophy must derive from “the standpoint of the philosophizing person,” or “one’s own subjectivity.” This claim draws its substance from the existential spirit of the times. Hence, its relation to the tenets of traditional Judaism remains tenuous. In this way, the postlapsarian, “creaturely” world that Rosenzweig sketches in Part I of The Star of Redemption resembles the forlorn universe of Heideggerian “everydayness,” in which modalities of inauthenticity predominate: curiosity (Neugier), ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), and idle talk (Gerede). Hence, for Rosenzweig, too, bourgeois society is a site of dire spiritual and existential impoverishment in which subjectivity is tempted and confused by a variety of inauthentic choices and prospects. As such, it is a world that cries out for the succor and balm of redemption.⁴⁴

Rosenzweig’s discussion of the Jews as a chosen people—a people whose suitability for eternity and redemption derived paradoxically from their politically mandated isolation from the temporal and historical concerns–was often couched in the völkisch idiom of the day. Thus Rosenzweig was by no means averse to describing the Jews as a “community of blood,” and he did so often. His notion of Jewish election was often a mirror image of the discourse of German ethnic particularism, to which Rosenzweig’s vaunting of “eternity” offered a polemical response. In this way, Rosenzweig strove to make a virtue out of a necessity, viewing the Jewish diaspora as a spiritual badge of honor—a sign of Jewish election—rather than as a debility or a hindrance. Despite Rosenzweig’s manifest philosophical brilliance, it is surprising that his contemporary disciples have not called into question his celebration of the ahistorical character of Jewish life. After all, not long after Rosenzweig’s untimely death in 1929, the Jewish people—with the exception of those Zionists who had safely emigrated to Palestine—were to pay a very high price for their aversion to temporal concerns.

Heidegger and Leo Strauss

Another leading thinker whose name has surfaced regularly when the theme of Heidegger’s Jewish followers has arisen is the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Accordingly, in the years since Heidegger’s Children first appeared, a small cottage industry has emerged—for the most part, manned by Strauss’s disciples—on the ways in which Strauss’s ideas may have been influenced by Heidegger. (Since, in recent years, Heidegger’s legacy has been dogged by controversy, Strauss’s followers have generally been at pains to minimize the Freiburg sage’s influence on Strauss.) For these reasons, it might be worthwhile to review the question of what it was that Strauss, as an influential exponent of Greek political thought, may have gained from his brief, yet momentous, encounter with Heidegger’s legendary capacity to restore ancient texts to life.⁴⁵

Although in a scholarly context it is ill-advised to speak in riddles, it seems fair to say that the task at hand is both facilitated, but also rendered more opaque, as a result of Strauss’s own pronouncements on Heidegger’s status and stature. For Strauss, following Plato’s model, was someone who wrote in anticipation of being misunderstood by lesser minds—the hoi polloi. He consequently became an adept practitioner of esoteric writing, supplementing his exoteric communications with messages coded for disciples and cognoscenti. Can Strauss legitimately be considered a “disciple” of Heidegger?

Between 1922 and 1924, Heidegger presented a series of fascinating lectures and seminars on the theme of the “Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle.” These courses, almost all of which have now been published, were the ones that Strauss audited during the spring semester of 1923 and then, following Heidegger’s move to from Freiburg to Marburg, in fall of the same year.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these courses for Heidegger’s development. In many respects, they represent a prolegomenon to Being and Time. Although Heidegger treated a wide array of Aristotelian topics and themes—Heidegger’s influential critique of what he called “substance metaphysics” evolved out of his confrontation with Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics—of the greatest importance in these lectures was his encounter with the Nichomachean Ethics. In this text, Aristotle developed his conception of practical philosophy—as opposed to theoria or contemplation—or “praxis.” At issue was a uniquely rigorous philosophical examination of human practical life as a domain of existence that was essentially truth-related. Unlike Plato, Aristotle refused to subordinate practical reason to criteria derived from the sphere of First Philosophy. Instead, he understood praxis as a realm of activity and meaning that is valid in its own right: of lesser value than theoria, but a sphere that possesses its own distinctive criteria of meaning.

Heidegger’s confrontation with Aristotle as a philosopher of practical reason ultimately paved the way for his unique conception of “existence” qua “Being-in-the-world”: his notion of Dasein as defined by a series of “world relations” or practical involvements. Interpreters are fond of referring to Heidegger’s “pragmatism” in Being and Time, insofar as he upends modern assumptions about “theory of knowledge.” Whereas Descartes and Kant, in keeping with the scientific biases of the day, viewed theoretical reason as primary, Heidegger, inspired by Aristotle’s doctrine of praxis, reversed the order of meaning, treating “pure reason” as derivative of Being-in-the-world.

In his later autobiographical reflections, Strauss readily avows what a powerful influence Heidegger had been on his own intellectual development. He refers to the Freiburg philosopher as the “very great thinker of our time,” hastening to add (alluding to Heidegger’s unsavory political loyalties during the 1930s) that “his moral qualities do not match his intellectual ones.” These reservations about Heidegger’s political orientation notwithstanding, Strauss proceeds to pay the Freiburg sage an outsized compliment, noting that, “he was the first man who made me understand something written by another man, namely, Aristotle. It broke my vicious circle. I felt that I could understand. Then I began studying seriously, for myself seriously, not superficially.”⁴⁶

Strauss would not find his ultimate Denkweg (path of thought) until the early 1930s, when he discovered the Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s reformulation of the so-called “theological-political problem”—a reformulation that was, not incidentally, inspired by a reinterpretation of Aristotle. Hence, without stating it explicitly, Strauss, in the foregoing remarks, credits Heidegger’s influence as the turning point or kairos in his own youthful development: the formative intellectual experience that attuned Strauss to the unsurpassable nature of the “Greek beginning.” However, unlike Heidegger, who felt impelled to return to the pre-Socratics, Strauss focused on the political thought of Plato and Aristotle as an unmatched source of directives concerning the most noble or “highest life” in the sphere of human action or praxis.

Thus on the one hand, Strauss is quite forthright about the inherently flawed, even proto-fascist nature of Heidegger’s philosophy. As Strauss declares forthrightly in “A Giving of Accounts,” he views Heidegger as “the counterpart of what Hitler was politically.”⁴⁷ In “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism?,” Strauss provides a partial explanation of what he means by this claim, observing: “Everyone who read [Being and Time] and did not overlook the wood for the trees could detect the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger’s thought and the Nazis. What was the practical, that is to say, serious meaning of the contempt for reasonableness and the praise of resoluteness except to encourage that extremist movement?”⁴⁸ In a 1970s colloquy with a friend of his youth and fellow Heidegger auditor, the philosopher of mathematics Jacob Klein, Strauss returns to Heidegger’s conception of “Resolutenesss” (Entschlossenheit), suggesting that it was responsible for the pronounced ethical shortfall of Heidegger’s philosophy of existence. As Strauss explains: “Without any indication as to what are proper objects of resoluteness there is a straight line which leads from Heidegger’s resoluteness to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933.”⁴⁹ In this way, Strauss addresses one of the central paradoxes I had raised in Heidegger’s Children: viz., an intrinsically compromised philosophical standpoint that, nevertheless, managed to inspire the intellectual orientation of a young German Jew—Strauss—who would ultimately blossom into one of the twentieth century’s most original political thinkers.

Nevertheless, on those few occasions where Strauss addresses the pivotal nature of his encounter with Heidegger, there is a palpably elliptical aspect to his pronouncements. Could it be, in part, because, preposterous though it may seem given Strauss’s status as a Jew, in several crucial respects, Strauss himself profoundly sympathized with Heidegger’s right-radical political choice?

After all, reflecting on his intellectual development during the 1920s and early 1930s, Strauss avows that, like many young Germans who came of age during the interwar years, he treated as gospel Nietzsche’s sweeping critique of modern society as, in essence, nihilistic. Thus as Strauss wrote in a 1935 letter to fellow Heidegger student, Karl Löwith: “I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22^nd and 30^th years, that I literally believed everything that I understood of him.”⁵⁰

The centrality of Nietzsche’s influence on Strauss is confirmed by a revealing lecture he presented in 1941 at the New School for Social Research on “German Nihilism” that was only published in the late 1990s. Although Strauss conceived the lecture after he had made his “pivot” to the balm of “classical political rationalism” (as he observes tellingly at one point: “the lack of a resistance to nihilism seems to be due ultimately to the depreciation and the contempt of reason, which is one and unchangeable”), what cannot help but strike the contemporary reader is Strauss’s extremely empathetic (einfühlende) portrait of this generation—which was his own—of German nihilists, who, as Strauss admits, represented the human material out of which the Nazi movement was fashioned. What stands out about Strauss’s account in retrospect is that he wholeheartedly accepts the “war youth generation’s” Nietzsche-inspired rejection of the modern West as irredeemably nihilistic. Both Strauss and his protagonists view the West as the epitome of cultural philistinism; a “diagnosis of the times” (Zeitdiagnose) that had been powerfully set forth by Nietzsche in his devastating portrait of the “Last Man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In “German Nihilism,” Strauss explicitly invokes this well-known passage in support of his argument. What deterred Strauss from the abyss of nihilism and saved him as a thinker was his discovery, during the mid-1930s, of Classical Reason as a higher source of normative grounding.

For all of the foregoing reasons, Strauss endorses the nihilistic rejection of modern civilization as a legitimate form of “moral protest” analogous to Plato’s indictment of the “city of pigs” in Book II of the Republic:

That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization…are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially…the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.⁵¹

One would be justified in interpreting this indictment of political liberalism or the “open society” as a faithful rendering of Strauss’s own, youthful Nietzschean convictions and views. What is troubling is that, in so many respects, this description traffics in caricatures and simplifications. In essence, the indictment of “internationalism” and the democratic way of life that Strauss purveys is an expression of Central European ressentiment—a ressentiment that has been fueled by Germany’s defeat in the Great War. As such, it is a perspective that fails to do justice to the civic virtues that political liberalism has traditionally cultivated, not to mention the potentials for development of individual personality that are coincident with the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. (These civic potentials were masterfully recounted by Hannah Arendt’s portrait of the American founding in On Revolution. The developmental gains of modern “individualism” were in turn convincingly detailed by John Stuart Mill and Emile Durkheim.) However, equally troubling is Strauss’s celebration of the virtues of the “closed society,” which surpasses liberalism’s frivolousness by ceding priority to the patriotism and sacrifice that go hand in hand with a readiness for (in a nod to Carl Schmitt) the Ernstfall or war. Kampf or struggle (Strauss appositely cites the work of Ernst Jünger in this connection) is the one value that the German nihilists embrace in oppositions to liberal timorousness.

Along with many of his contemporaries, Strauss evaluated the normative potentials of political liberalism on the basis of his experiences during the Weimar Republic, which, in his view, seemed to lurch from one disaster to the next. From the very beginning, Germany’s fledgling democracy was beset by coup attempts, from both left and right. Whatever political stability it then enjoyed during the mid-1920s disintegrated rapidly with the economic Crash of 1929. Thereafter, its ultimate demise seemed a foregone conclusion. As Strauss comments pointedly in his preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion: “The Weimar Republic was weak….On the whole, it presented the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or of justice unable to use the sword….[This] weakness made certain its speedy destruction. It did not make certain the victory of National Socialism. … [This] victory became necessary [because] the man who had by far the strongest will or single-mindedness, the greatest ruthlessness, daring or power over his following…was the leader of the revolution.”⁵²

We know that, during this period, Strauss was staunchly anti-Republican. But what, then, were Strauss’s own political views at the time? We discover an important clue in an earlier letter that Strauss wrote to Löwith, following the Nazi seizure of power. In this revealing document, Strauss belittles the Nazis (as was common at the time; Charlie Chaplin’s mockery of Hitler in “The Great Dictator” immediately leaps to mind) since he—wrongly—anticipates that their rule will prove ineffectual. They are, in Strauss’s view, merely pseudo-fascists; whereas what Germany and Europe need are real fascists. As Strauss explains: “Just because Germany has turned to the Right and has expelled us [the German Jews] it simply does not follow that the principles of the Right are therefore to be rejected. On the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the Right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to the ‘inalienable rights of man,’ to protest against the mean nonentity.”⁵³

The “nonentity” in question is, of course, Hitler, along with his histrionic, brown-shirted followers. Nevertheless, Strauss makes no bones about the fact that, in his view, fascism, or a variant thereof, represents the Katechon that is needed to defuse the condition of anarchy that resulted from the endemic ineptitude of political liberalism: its inability to “rule.” Hence, Strauss’s choice metaphor of “justice without a sword.”

To summarize: on the one hand, Strauss’s diagnosis of the philosophical impetus subtending Heidegger’s turn to Nazism proved to be inordinately astute. By the same token, the critical narrative he employed to highlight Heidegger’s political failings seems to have been acutely lacking in self-knowledge. For Strauss’s own philosophical infatuation with the temptations of “political Platonism”—that is, his enthusiasm for the repressive and draconian features of Plato’s Republic—came with a steep cost: a brusque rejection of the “rights of man”—which, in the preceding citation, Strauss denigrates as “ridiculous and pitiful”–and, concomitantly, an alacritous embrace of “fascist, authoritarian, and imperial” political ideals.

In this way, the profound limitations of Strauss’s program, inspired by Heidegger, of a return to the “Greek beginning” become indubitably clear.

Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas was never a student of Heidegger’s, but he did follow Heidegger’s lectures in Freiburg during the winter semester of 1928–29. As he remarked in a later autobiographical avowal: “I had gone to Freiburg to [study with] Husserl, and I found Heidegger.”⁵⁴ Levinas also attended the legendary Davos summit between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, an encounter that had a life-changing impact on his philosophical development. Levinas viewed this colloquy, as would many, as a philosophical watershed: it both symbolized and codified the paradigm-change from the staid neo-Kantianism of pre-World War I Germany to the novelty of Heidegger’s unique brand of Existenzphilosophie. As Levinas commented, the intellectual result of the Davos encounter between these two philosophical titans was “the end of a certain humanism.”⁵⁵ In an essay from the early 1930s commenting on Heidegger’s philosophical breakthrough, Levinas observes enthusiastically: “No one who has ever done philosophy can keep himself from declaring, before the Heideggerian corpus, that the originality and power of his effort, born of genius, have allied themselves with a conscientious, meticulous, and solid elaboration.”⁵⁶

Both Heidegger and the young Levinas had been profoundly influenced by Dostoevsky’s critique of the “West” as a figure for a base and heartless, utilitarian approach to life. However, in retrospect, one realizes the extent to which this standpoint, when taken to an extreme, was itself an ideological construct: a concept of “enmity” or “struggle,” to employ the lexicon of Carl Schmitt. For his part, Levinas was fond of citing a maxim from The Brothers Karamazov: “We are all guilty of everything and everyone, towards everyone—and I more than all the others.”⁵⁷ For Levinas, Dostoevsky’s adage became an emblem of the priority of ethics over theoretical reason—an insight that became the signature of his philosophy.⁵⁸

The upshot of Levinas’s heady, initial encounter with Heidegger’s thought at Davos was a series of pioneering essays that introduced the basic terms of Heidegger’s philosophy to the non-German speaking world.

At the time, Levinas made no secret of his preference for Heidegger’s approach over that of Husserl, who, in Levinas’s view, remained excessively indebted to the Cartesian paradigm of transcendental subjectivity. Following Heidegger’s conclusions in the Nietzsche lectures of the late 1930s, Levinas held that the “will to knowledge” that had inspired epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie), when all is said and done, embodies a “will to domination.” In Levinas’s own words: “Modernity will subsequently be distinguished by the attempt to develop from the identification and appropriation of Being by knowledge toward the identification of Being and knowledge…The Wisdom of first philosophy is reduced to self-consciousness. Identical and non-identical are identified. The labor of thought wins out over the otherness of things and men.”⁵⁹ Levinas’s primary philosophical desideratum was to do justice to the dimension of “otherness” that epistemology had illicitly (and narcissistically) reduced to merely an efflux self-consciousness or thinking substance.

What was novel about Heidegger’s perspective was that, by demoting this paradigm of knowledge to secondary status—to that of a standpoint that was derivative rather than ontologically primordial—he was able to open up new, non-egocentric vistas on the problem of “Being-in-the-world” and its various relational modalities. Hence, in contrast with Husserl, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was able to philosophically foreground a variety of “existential” questions and themes—pertaining to matters such as moods, being-with-others, discourse, ambiguity, and idle talk—that, heretofore, had rarely been treated as legitimate topics of philosophical reflection. Levinas believed that, in this way, one might surmount the impasses and imbalances of traditional Western philosophy, which had primarily been an Aristotelian inheritance, via an approach that foregrounded questions of Existenz as opposed to issues pertaining to “mind” or “intellect.” As Levinas observes effusively: “In Being and Time’s analyses of anxiety, care and being-toward-death, we witness a sovereign exercise of phenomenology….For Heidegger one does not reach nothingness through a series of theoretical steps, but, in anxiety, from a direct and irreducible access. Existence itself, as through the effect of an intentionality, is animated by a meaning, by the primordial ontological meaning of nothingness.”⁶⁰

However, as it turned out, Levinas’s initial enthusiasm for Heidegger’s existential paradigm was precariously short-lived. In 1933, Heidegger demonstratively enlisted in the Nazi movement, under the delusion that he could play Plato to Hitler’s Dionysius (the tyrant of Syracuse) and thereby “lead the leader” (den Führer führen).⁶¹ At the time, Levinas was convinced that Heidegger’s distasteful political orientation, far from being a contingent life-choice, was firmly grounded in his philosophy. But how, exactly? This was the question that Levinas sought to work out, however tentatively, in early essays such as, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” and “On Evasion” (De L’Evasion).

In “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” Levinas concluded that National Socialism’s fateful error was that, by seeking to institutionalize a “new paganism,” it had abandoned the paradigm of “transcendence.” Although Heidegger’s name never surfaced in the essay, the implicit connection to his philosophy was not hard to discern. In Levinas’s view, by abandoning transcendence as a philosophical point of reference, Heidegger’s thought had sanctioned a perspective of radical finitude. And thus, “It was only a few steps, in Levinas’s depiction from the assault on the transcendental subject to its corporeal bondage, and from there to racial ideology: a politicization of the body confers legitimacy only on social forms based on the authenticity of consanguinity.”⁶² In these and other respects, Levinas found the proximity of Heidegger’s existential analytic, one of whose hallmarks was a glorification of “ontological fatalism” (in categories such as “thrownness”), to the National Socialist divinization of the precepts of Volk and rootedness-in-soil (Bodenständigkeit) profoundly disturbing.

In retrospect, Levinas’s interpretation of Nazism in “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” seems lacking in sophistication. After all, historically speaking, varieties of paganism have abounded. Yet, only on rare occasions had they threatened to morph into an inherently predatory political formation like National Socialism.

However, the same criticism cannot be made of “On Evasion,” which anticipated many of the central themes of Levinas’s mature philosophy. In these more rigorous and sustained reflections, Levinas grappled with a fundamental paradox: the necessity of surmounting (or “evading”) the limitations of Western rationalism, despite the awareness that one of the first systematic attempts to do so—Heidegger’s philosophy of existence—culminated in a satanic alliance between philosophy and a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship.

The rejection of the philosophical alternatives represented by Husserl and Heidegger propelled Levinas in the direction of his mature vision of “Ethics as First Philosophy.” Viewed phenomenologically, the “face of the other” (visage de l’autre) presents us with an ethical injunction that is ontologically and normatively prior to the claims of ratiocination—which Levinas rejects as merely conducive to an ethos of imperious world mastery. Hence, for Levinas, “theoretical reason” is essentially a discourse of domination; at base, an expression of Eurocentric egotism. One might even claim, following Levinas, that “Eurocentrism” and “egotism” go hand in hand. Levinas contends that when I search for my “place in the sun,” the quest always occurs at the expense of the Other. In this respect, his arguments bear affinities with the “critique of instrumental reason” that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno purvey in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

However, aren’t all cultures—and not merely the West—fundamentally self-regarding? And what about the countervailing or self-critical tendencies that exist within the continuum of Western reason: the spirit of moral reflexivity proper to the Socratic questioning; Hume’s earthy skepticism; Kant’s heroic effort in the first Critique to delineate the limits of pure reason; Dewey’s pragmatism; and Wittgenstein’s insights into the rule-governed specificity of various individual “language games.”

Can the evils that National Socialism unleashed upon the world rightly be attributed to the primacy of “theoretical reason,” as Levinas suggests? In “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas himself had gainsaid this supposition. In all likelihood, it seems that when one paints in such broad strokes, one overshoots one’s intended target or explanandum. In this way, one loses sight of the specificity of events qua “lived experience.”

Many of the same criticisms can be made of Dialectic of Enlightenment. National Socialism was less a triumph of “instrumental reason” than that of a delusional worldview—“redemptive anti-Semitism” (S. Friedlander)—that bore greater affinities with the doctrines of the Counter-Enlightenment than it did with apostles of moderation and tolerance such as Voltaire, Kant, and Hume.⁶³ One can find no more convincing testimony concerning the ideological lineage of National Socialism than Goebbels’s sinister avowal, hazarded shortly after the Nazi Machtergreifung, that “The year 1789 is hereby effaced from History.”⁶⁴

Conclusion: Reading Heidegger after the Black Notebooks

The recent controversy over the toxic anti-Semitism that pervades Heidegger’s Black Notebooks raises important questions about how to read Heidegger in the future. These debates also forcefully call into question Heidegger’s status and stature in the history of philosophy. Put bluntly: can we really view Heidegger as “the most important thinker of the twentieth century,” as number of his supporters claim, now that he has been unmasked as a rabid anti-Semite as well as someone who—to all intents and purposes—flirted with Holocaust denial?⁶⁵

For many Heidegger supporters, the Master’s appalling flirtation with Holocaust denial in the most recently published volume of the Black Notebooks (Gesamtausgabe 97) seems to have been the final straw. Thus, in recent months, both the president and the vice president of the International Heidegger Society have resigned their posts, avowing that they can no longer represent Heidegger’s legacy in good faith. As we have seen, in GA 97, Heidegger characterized the Holocaust as an act of Jewish “self-annihilation.” Since the Jews were the leading carriers of instrumental reason, and since at Auschwitz and the other extermination sites they were murdered by advanced technological methods (i.e., the gas chambers), Heidegger implausibly and maliciously describes their elimination as a type of collective suicide. However, equally disconcerting is Heidegger’s allegation (also in GA 97) that, after the war, the Allies turned Germany into a giant concentration camp, thereby suggesting that the Germans were the war’s real victims. Here, the philosopher’s inability to empathize with the victims of Nazi persecution led to a callous and inexcusable moral indifference.

These facts change everything. Heidegger’s disturbing efforts to trivialize National Socialism’s horrific misdeeds—which, not incidentally, free the real perpetrators, the Germans, of their historical responsibility—combined with his avowals of eliminationist anti-Semitism disqualify Heidegger as a “great thinker.”

To make matters worse, it has recently come to light that Heidegger’s Collected Works have been systematically redacted in order to expunge or downplay the extent of his anti-Semitism.⁶⁶ One dedicated researcher recently discovered that, in the published version of Heidegger’s 1934 lecture course on Hölderlin’s Hymns Germanien and Der Rhein, the abbreviation “N. Soz.” (an unambiguous stand-in for “National Socialism”) had been removed and replaced with “natural science.”⁶⁷ Moreover, there are a number of crucial documents and manuscripts that are still off limits to qualified researchers. All of these revelations raise the suspicion that much has been concealed because Heidegger’s champions have a lot to hide.

Henceforth, it will be impossible to deny that, as a thinker, Heidegger had nothing but scorn for what philosophers refer to as the “moral point of view.” Even worse, on many occasions he openly ridiculed moral considerations as beneath the dignity of ontological enquiry or the Seinsfrage. His first significant publication following the war, the 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” was in reality a manifesto of antihumanism. In this regard, let no one underestimate the ethical stakes at issue. By declaring war on “humanism,” Heidegger was simultaneously declaring war on the principles of “human dignity,” “human rights,” “self-determination,” and “democracy.” In sum, he scorned the “ideas of 1789” as “unGerman.” This rejection helps to explain his wholehearted advocacy of the (racist) German “Volk”-idea. As Heidegger observes in the (GA 95): “On the basis of total clear-sightedness concerning my earlier disillusionment with the historical essence of National Socialism, there results the necessity of its full-scale endorsement—above all, on philosophical grounds.”⁶⁸ There can be no clearer avowal of Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace, “on philosophical grounds” (!), of National Socialism: a regime that, from the very outset, made no attempt to conceal its racist, genocidal nature. In light of these facts, it is clear that, in Heidegger’s eyes, the “Letter on Humanism” and related postwar works represented a philosophically coded attempt to perpetuate the “German ideology” by other means.

Following the war, it was perhaps the philosopher Karl Jaspers who demonstrated the deepest insight into Heidegger’s lack of philosophical integrity when, in a letter to a Freiburg University Denazification Committee, he characterized Heidegger’s thought as “unfree, dictatorial, and incapable of communication” (unfree, diktatorisch, und kommunikationlos).⁶⁹

One of the reasons that it is imperative today to gain clarity with respect to Heidegger’s manifold ethical failings is that an international postwar moral and juridical consensus has evolved through an understanding of the Holocaust and National Socialism as negative touchstones. The international human rights regime that developed in the aftermath of World War II—the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, and, at a later point, the International Criminal Court—arose as a moral and legal response to Auschwitz and other Nazis crimes. To cite Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno’s memorable words from “Education after Auschwitz”:

Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz…The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy:…the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not playing along.⁷⁰

The problem with the myopic, rearguard attempts to preserve Heidegger’s status as a “great thinker” is the fact that, as both Jaspers and Adorno realized, his philosophy makes a mockery of the Kantian ideal of moral autonomy. Not only was Heidegger’s later thought incapable of resisting the depredations of National Socialist doctrine and practices. As the Black Notebooks reveal, his philosophy enthusiastically embraced those doctrines and practices. Judging from this perspective, one can only conclude that Heidegger’s philosophy, far from being a solution, is part of the problem.

Notes to the Preface

1. See, for example, Heidegger’s statement in the 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us,” where he remarks that his French colleagues insist that in order to properly philosophize they, too, must speak in German.

2. See, for example, Samuel Fleischacker, ed. Heidegger’s Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006); and Marie Anne Lescourret, ed., La Dette et la distance: de quelques éléves et lecteurs juifs de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2014).

3. Thus in Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), Peter Gordon seeks (and fails) to build a firewall separating philosophy and politics in Heidegger’s work essentially by inculpating those who have raised these questions and concerns as “anti-intellectual.” But this is merely a strategy of suppression or avoidance, designed to preempt real discussion or debate. Here, one of the ironies is that, when queried, Heidegger himself always insisted on the seamless continuity between philosophy and politics in his work. As he explained unequivocally to Karl Löwith in Rome in 1936, the philosophical basis for his Nazi engagement was his concept of “historicity.” (On this point, see Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936,” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 142. Thus Gordon asserts, rather feebly, that Heidegger’s critics, by raising such concerns, meretriciously seek to sully Heidegger’s greatness as a philosopher. There are two rather obvious answers to this complaint: (1) it was Heidegger himself who, in placing his philosophical talents in the service of a totalitarian regime that, from the very beginning, never sought to conceal its annihilationist agenda, permanently tarnished his own reputation; (2) the standard issue tu quoque rejoinder, viz., that in seeking to inculpate Heidegger’s critics as “anti-intellectual,” Gordon himself is engaged in what can only be described as a rather blatant and transparent whitewash of Heidegger’s nefarious political views. Here, one can only wonder: cui bono? When all is said and done, what is quite obvious is that to discuss Heidegger’s Nazi past is not a case of “either/or” (as Gordon misleadingly proposes) but one of “both/and.” In other words: there is no reason that one cannot engage in a critical and reasonable discussion of Heidegger’s Nazism as well as of his philosophy, and of how these two aspects are related. Neither approach necessarily precludes the other.

Instead, it is Gordon who errs by contending that these two matters, which stand in an obvious relationship to one another, are entirely dissociated—a claim that I find both naïve and superficial. For the record, I reproduce his argument verbatim: “Typical are those [interpretations] that commit what I have called an allegorical strategy of interpretation, whereby a disagreement concerning a philosophical problem is treated as if it were nothing but an outward manifestation of political struggle. The true danger in allegory, however, is that by dissolving the philosophical into the political, it threatens to divest us of any remaining criteria by which to decide intellectual debate other than the anti-intellectual contingencies of sheer power. For the ultimate tragedy of the Davos encounter is not that it ended in victory for politics of the wrong kind. The deeper tragedy is that it ended in politics at all” (Continental Divide, 357).

These claims are misleading, insofar as it is not “the anti-intellectual contingencies of sheer power” that decide these questions (as Gordon, adrift in his own rhetorical eloquence, suggests), but instead, as should be clear, criteria that are eminently normative, moral, and historical. What could be more obvious? Moreover, one should remember that it was Heidegger himself who, as numerous critics have pointed out, by relying on concepts such as “Resolve,” “Destiny,” “Volk,” and so forth, perceived existential affinities between his philosophy and the “contingencies of sheer power.” This was the result of Heidegger’s consistent scorn of normative questions, which he viewed as passé, in favor of questions of Existenz.

Here is what the Frankfurt School political scientist, Franz Neumann, says about the relationship between National Socialist doctrine and Heidegger’s Existenzphilosophie in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 135: “What is left as justification for the [Third] Reich? Not racism, not the idea of the Holy Roman Empire, and certainly not some democratic nonsense like popular sovereignty or self-determination. Only the Reich remains. It is its own justification. The philosophical roots of this argument are to be found in the existential philosophy of Heidegger. Transferred to the realm of politics, existentialism argues that power and might are true: power is a sufficient theoretical base for more power. Germany lies in the center, it is potentially the greatest power in Europe, it is well on its way toward becoming the mightiest state. Therefore, it is justified in building the new order.”

4. The reservations concerning the planned conference “Heidegger et les ‘Juifs’” were also substantive. An open letter penned by two prominent French intellectuals, Michèle Cohen-Halimi and Francis Cohen, called into question the curious apostrophization of the word, “‘Jews,’”—a diacritical practice that, in previous cases, has yielded to dubious interpretive license, signaling that “figural” rather than “real” Jews were at issue. Critics were concerned that to focus on “Juifs/Jews” as a freefloating “signifier” (one of the problematic legacies of “French Theory”) obviated the need to consider troubling empirical and historical questions concerning the history of Jewish persecution in France—during the “dark years” of 1940–44, but also, more recently, in light of the French left’s vociferous anti-Zionism, which, on many occasions, has devolved into anti-Semitism. Thus, recent attacks against Jews in Toulouse, Brussels, and Paris (at the Hyper Cacher market, where four Jews were killed in conjunction with the January 6, 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre), merely because they are Jews, has impelled many of France’s 600,000 Jews, who now fear for their security, to seriously contemplate emigration. For these reasons, skeptics concluded that a conference focusing on the idea of “Jews” as a semiotic “trace” as opposed to real Jews was, in essence, a strategy of avoidance, in order to preempt or downplay any serious discussion of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism—which, given the recent appearance of the Black Notebooks, has once again become a troubling theme in the often highly rarified sphere of Heidegger scholarship. As further evidence of their concerns, Cohen-Halimi and Francis Cohen pointed out that neither professional historians nor experts on anti-Semitism had been invited to the conference—in their view, a calculated way of ensuring that the more troubling issues pertaining to Heidegger’s Nazi involvements would be kept at bay.

5. See Jonas, Memoirs, trans. Krishna Winston (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 61: “Hannah was very aware of being Jewish, without really knowing anything about Judaism—she was what is called an am ha-aretz.”

6. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 121; emphasis added.

7. See Scholem, “On the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” On Jews and Germans in Crisis (New York: Schocken Press, 1976). For a lucid treatment of these questions, see the venerable study by Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

8. Pulzer, Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, xiv, xv.

9. Although Scholem, who died in 1982, could not have foreseen this, one of the ironies of this ongoing intercultural drama is that it was largely a group of returning German-Jewish émigrés—the so-called rémigrants—who, following the Stunde Null of 1945, helped to reorient the nascent Federal Republic’s moral compass by according centrality to the Freudian theme of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past). See the important essay by Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophers And Sociologists of Jewish Background As Returnees in the Early Federal Republic of Germany: A Recollection,” in The Lure of Technocracy, trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge, Mass. Polity Press, 2015), 105–119. See also Clemens Albrecht et al., Intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007).

10. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton 2001).

11. See David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

12. See the important study by See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

13. See Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag, 1931). See also, Jerry Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the De-radicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

14. Cited in, Helmut Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), 213.

15. Jünger, Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, 57.

16. See Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik. (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869).

17. See Jünger, “Die antinationalen Mächte,” Arminius, 5 (1927), 3–15; and Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage,” Die Kommenden, 38 (1930), 445–46. Jünger’s articles as a far-right publicist had been expurgated from his Sämtliche Schriften (Collected Works). However, they were finally republished in the early 2000s, a few years after Jünger’s death. See the fine article on this phase of Jünger’s career by Niklaus Wachsmann, “Marching under the Swastika? Ernst Jünger and National Socialism, 1918–1933,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (4) (1988): 573–589.

18. Spengler, Decline of the West., vol. II, trans. C. Atkinson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932) 317–18, 318–319, 320–21.

19. See Heidegger, Mein liebes Seelchen: Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride (Berlin: Deutsches Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 176.

20. See Martin Heidegger-Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel: 1918–1969 (Marbach: Deutscher Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 12.

21. Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität/Das Rektorat: Tatsachen und Gedanken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983).

22. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte, 1931–1938) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014); Heidegger, Überlegungen VII-IX (Schwarze Hefte, 1938–1939) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014); Heidegger, Überlegungen VII-XV (Schwarze Hefte, 1939–1941) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014). For more information see my article, “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: National Socialism, World Jewry and the History of Being,” in the Jewish Review of Books (June 2014) 40–45.

23. See the classic study by Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlags-Handlung, 1962) as well as Jeffrey Herf’s pathbreaking study, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in the Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

24. Winfried Franzen, “Die Suche nach Härte und Schwere,” in A. Gethmann-Siefert and O. Pöggeler, ed., Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 78–92.

25. Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” 62; emphasis added.

26. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, XII, 3.

27. Jonas, Memoirs, 59–60.

28. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

29. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 30.

30. See, for example, Peter Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 7.

31. Like Heidegger’s Children, The Politics of Being was also rapidly translated into five languages (French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese).

32. Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2008), 76.

33. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–48) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015).

34. Ibid., 20.

35. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George Becker, (New York Schocken, 1965), 69.

36. Rosenzweig, “Vertauschte Fronten,” in Franz Rosenzweig: der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften III (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976–84), 234–38. See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 41–49.

37. The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, L. E. Hahn, ed. (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1996), 6.

38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 41.

39. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption [II 23 f.]

40. Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time” in Löwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 73.

41. Ibid. 64.

42. Marcuse, “Heidegger’s Politics,” in Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 99.

43. Rosenzweig, Briefe, (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), 507.

44. In this regard, I respectfully disagree with two of Peter Gordon’s claims in his otherwise creditable book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger. First, the ad hominem suggestion that Karl Löwith’s skepticism concerning the ultimate compatibility between Rosenzweig and Heidegger’s doctrines was the result of Löwith’s bitterness over Heidegger’s turn to Nazism during the early 1930s. Such speculation concerning Löwith’s biographical or psychological motives overlooks the fact that the powerful arguments that Löwith employs in order to make his case stand on their own.

This is particularly true with respect to Löwith’s contention—entirely convincing on substantive grounds—that Rosenzweig’s strong commitment to the ideals of Eternity and Redemption remain fundamentally incompatible with Heidegger’s preoccupation with finitude. Here, I will merely cite one representative passage from The Star of Redemption in support of this claim: “The [Jewish] people is denied a temporal existence on account of its eternal existence….[The Jewish people] is not situated in some visible place in the world with its own national way of life, with a national language that expresses its own spirit in definite national region of the world that is founded upon and delimited by the earth. It lives instead solely and simply in…the immortality of its existence….It only puts its trust in its self-created eternity…this people really believes in its eternity….[As Jews] our life is no longer intertwined with anything external….Rootless upon the earth and therefore eternal wanderers, we became deeply rooted in ourselves, in our body and blood. The guarantee of eternity is that we have taken root in ourselves and in ourselves alone” (III, 49).

45. In his autobiography, Gadamer captures the existential orientation of Heidegger’s attitude toward the ancient Greeks, observing that one night “a bonfire was lit, and Heidegger gave a speech that deeply impressed all of us. It began with the words: ‘Be awake to the fire of the night…’ and his next words were: ‘The Greeks…’ Certainly the romanticism of the youth movement was in the air. But there was more. It was the decisiveness of a thinker who beheld as one our time and old times, the future and Greek philosophy”; Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. R. Sullivan, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 48.

46. Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, Kenneth Green, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 458.

47. Ibid., 450.

48. Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism?” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 30.

49. Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 461.

50. The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 183–84.

51. Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 26/3 (Spring 1999), 358. On the ensuing page, Strauss emphatically endorses the analogy between modernity and Plato’s “city of pigs.”

52. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 137–138.

53. Strauss, letter to Löwith of 19 May 1933, in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. H. Meier (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997), 625.

54. F. Poiré, Emmanuel Levinas : essais et entretiens (Paris: Actes du Sud, 1996), 78.

55. Ibid., 81.

56. Levinas, “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 53, no. 5–6 (May-June, 1932), 395.

57. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 332; emphasis added.

58. See the important essay, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in S. Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989), 75–87.

59. Ibid., 77–78.

60. See Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, Philip Nemo, ed., trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985): 39–41.

61. See Otto Pöggeler, “Den Führer führen: Heidegger, Nationalsozialismus, und kein Ende,” Philosophische Rundschau. 32 (2) (1985): 26–67.

62. Samuel Moyn, The Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 100.

63. For an important argument to this effect, see Zeev Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

64. Cited in Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship : The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism (New York: Penguin, 1991), 9.

65. See, for example, Antonio Carioti, “Donatella Di Cesare si dimette è ancora polemica sulla Società Heidegger: «Siete provinciali,»” Corriere della Sera, 30 March 2015.

66. See the article by Adam Soboczynski, “Was heisst N. Soz.?” in Die Zeit, 26 March 2015.

67. See Julia A. Ireland, “Naming [Physis] and the ‘Inner Truth of National Socialism’: A New Archival Discovery,” Research in Phenomenology 44 (2014), 315–346.

68. Cited in Markus Gabriel, “Wesentliche Bejahung’ des Nationalsozialismus,” in Die Welt, 7 April 2014.

69. Jaspers, cited in the Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 149.

70. Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” in Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 191.