TEN YEARS ago I wrote a book, The Politics of Being,1 on Martin Heidegger’s political thought. At the time, it was far from my intention to expend further energies on matters Heideggerian. Yet it seemed increasingly clear that if one is interested in the fateful intersection between politics and the history of ideas in our time, an encounter with Heidegger’s “case,” in all its tortured complexities, is indispensable. Thus I argued—at the time, distinctly against the grain—that the philosopher’s enlistment for the Nazi cause, far from being casual or unpremeditated, was deeply rooted in specifically German intellectual traditions to which Heidegger stood as a type of self-proclaimed heir. My intention was not to “finish with” Heidegger, but to alert interpreters to the historico-political depth dimension of his thought. To many German critics and disciples, this so-called depth dimension was, for cultural and linguistic reasons, more or less self-evident and, hence, less controversial. On this side of the Atlantic, owing to the predominance of ahistorical and text-immanent readings of Heidegger’s philosophy, such claims proved more contentious and, in certain quarters, unwelcome.
At that time, the first-wave North American reception of Heidegger had undergone a major paradigm shift. The time of reverential exegesis of the early “existential” Heidegger had passed. Instead, it was the later Heidegger of the “Letter on Humanism”—the unyielding critic of “man” and “reason” who once proclaimed that “reason is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought”—who had seized the imagination of American interpreters. Confidence in Western ideals was at an all-time low due to cold-war cynicism and the apocalypse in Vietnam. Heidegger’s philosophical attack against “reason” and “modernity” in the name of “Being” and “poesis” dovetailed surprisingly well with the alienated orientation of a younger generation of scholars. Ironically, Heidegger’s powerful critique, which took its cues from the pre-Socratics and the “primordial” (das Ursprüngliche), meshed seamlessly with an emergent postmodern Zeitgeist that wished to bid “farewell to reason” and the modern age, with its attendant horrors and catastrophes. Thus, a strange marriage of convenience was arranged between Heidegger and postmodernism; a marriage brokered in Paris, where French intellectuals, frustrated by orthodox Marxist dogmatics, perceived in Heideggerianism a more ruthless and unforgiving critique of the modern West. Among North American continental philosophers, this intellectual mood ultimately gave rise to an exotic merger between Heidegger and Derrida, producing a potent new breed of Heideggerian Derridians or Derridian Heideggerians. At the time, I was little aware of how the volatility of this new breed would complicate attempts to ponder the political implications Heidegger’s doctrines.
Shortly after The Politics of Being, appeared I decided to pursue the interpretive tack I had initiated there with a documentary complement, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader.2 My intention was to make available to an English-speaking readership Heidegger’s key political texts from the 1930s (which, remarkably, had remained untranslated), along with perceptive commentaries concerning the philosophical stakes of Heidegger’s ill-fated political involvement. When Jacques Derrida strenuously objected to the inclusion of a brief interview (despite the fact that permission to reprint it had been readily granted by the original publisher), The Heidegger Controversy itself became an object of controversy.
Of course, the publishing dispute itself was merely the tip of the iceberg. “L’Affaire Derrida,” as it came to be known, was, as the Freudians might say, highly overdetermined. As it turned out, Derrida and his supporters utilized the occasion to respond to a variety of events that had, justly or unjustly, besmirched the repute of deconstruction: first, the de Man affair, in which it was revealed that Derrida’s chief transatlantic benefactor had compromised himself as a collaborator in Nazi-occupied Belgium; then, the revelations concerning the depths and extent of Heidegger’s own activities on behalf of the Nazis—insinuations that, for decades, had been successfully parried by Heidegger and a battery of faithful disciples. Yet the more recent charges, buttressed by the publication of well-researched biographies by Victor Farias and Hugo Ott, seemed both undeniable and genuinely incrimi nating. Since “deconstruction,” as a critique of metaphysics and reason, openly proclaimed its own Heideggerian pedigree, it felt implicated amid the rising tide of political scrutiny. Ultimately, “L’Affaire Derrida” metamorphosed into a strange referendum on the “cultural left.” Devotees of postmodernism felt obliged to cast their lot with Derrida, whose detractors, for their part, had long made up their own minds. Sadly, but predictably, in view of our fad-ridden scholarly Zeitgeist, expressions of intellectual independence were few and far between.
As usual, what suffered amid the rising tide of accusations and counter-accusations were central matters of substance pertaining to the evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical legacy. To paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, one might say that, regrettably, the real debate never took place.
Following The Politics of Being and The Heidegger Controversy, Heidegger’s Children represents a final installment in my effort to come to grips with Heidegger’s ambiguous and powerful intellectual legacy. In part, it is a study in what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.” My four protagonists—Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse—all were Jewish and were also for a time “convinced Heideggerians.” Even Marcuse, who hailed from the political left, continued to idolize his fallen Master. Late in life, he dreamed of returning to Freiburg, where he studied with Heidegger during the late 1920s, and giving a lecture with Heidegger looking on approvingly from the gallery.3 All four would go on to become major thinkers in their own right and would be faced with the conundrum of how to reconcile their youthful philosophical allegiances with the “totalitarian turn” in Heidegger’s thought circa 1933. All four, moreover, thought of themselves as assimilated Germans rather than as Jews. Yet this self-understanding would be severely put to the test by the antidemocratic—not to mention anti-Semitic—turn taken by German politics in the early 1930s.
In Chapter 7, “Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger as Philosopher of the German ‘Way,’” I explicitly return to the vexed question of Heidegger and politics. The occasion for reassessing his political thought was the recent publication of a fascinating lecture course offered immediately following the philosopher’s resignation as Nazi rector of Freiburg University in spring 1934. Announced in the university catalogue as a course on “Logik” (as it turns out, a great misnomer), the lectures contain Heidegger’s systematic reflections on the “ontological import” of Nazism: an appraisal of the movement’s “essential” significance when viewed from Heidegger’s standpoint of the “history of Being.” The material is significant insofar as it contains not occasional political musings—since Heidegger had already resigned from the rectorship, he no longer had cause to dissemble his true sentiments and kowtow to the regime—but a systematic articulation of Heidegger’s own positive “metapolitical” standpoint. Far from being a Nazi tract, the lectures systematically ponder a number of key political concepts—“Volk,” “labor,” and “historicity”—to demonstrate hidden affinities between Nazism and Heidegger’s own philosophy of existentialism.
The book that follows evolved out of a number of independent, yet related, projects. Two of the chapters—“Hannah Arendt: Kultur, ‘Thoughtlessness,’ and Polis Envy” and “Hans Jonas: The Philosopher of Life”—first appeared as articles in The New Republic. Both have been substantially revised. I owe a tremendous debt to The New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, for his confidence in my ability to convey at times ponderous philosophical themes to a broadly educated public. The assignments I have undertaken for The New Republic have been compelling exercises in the virtues of intellectual communication. They have helped me unlearn (in the constructive sense) the debilities of scholarly specialization, whereby what matters is one’s ability to interact with a handful of fellow cognoscenti. Expert training no doubt has its merits and place, but it can also readily lose sight of matters of broad public importance. In today’s academy, the arcane nature of much debate, reinforced by a forbidding linguistic exclusivity, has led to a kind of crippling self-ghettoization. One of the ironies of the present situation is that the academic left, trumpeting the virtues of “relevance,” has defensively rallied around a type of discursive hermeticism. Ironically, whatever grains of truth this discourse might have to purvey are lost in advance by virtue of its willful rhetorical impenetrability.
I owe an equal debt of gratitude to my editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, who has nursed this project along from embarrassingly inchoate beginnings. I initially conceived the book as a series of loosely related essays. Much of its final focus and coherence are the direct result of Brigitta’s gentle and timely prodding. There is no doubt in my mind that were it not for her astute editorial guidance, the end result would have been inferior. I would also like to thank my copyeditor, Jody James, for her promptness and professionalism. Thanks are due to my research assistant, Martin Woessner, for his perceptive comments on the manuscript.
Lastly, I would also like to acknowledge the insightful feedback I received on an earlier version of the manuscript from Michael Ermarth of Dartmouth University and William Scheuerman of the University of Minnesota, both of whom are extremely well versed in the ruses and complexities of the German intellectual tradition. At different points, their remarks proved indispensable in helping me rethink key aspects of my argument. In the end, the strengths and weaknesses they were able to identify in the manuscript version provided me with a much-needed external touchstone.
I have dedicated this book to Jürgen Habermas. I first met him twenty years ago in Berkeley, where he presented a series of remarkable lectures that were ultimately published as The Theory of Communicative Action, volumes I and II. For me personally, and I’m sure for many others in the overflowing lecture hall, these lectures marked an intellectual turning point. As a product of the 1960s and a disciple of Hegelian-Marxism, I had until then been a convinced Adornoian who viewed Negative Dialectics as a type of philosophical holy writ. I was persuaded that Adorno, in describing late capitalism as a “totally administered world” and a “context of delusion,” had more or less delivered the final word. Listening to Habermas’s reconstruction of modern social theory from Durkheim to Parson caused the scales to fall from my eyes. I came away from his stimulating presentations with a keen awareness of how much ground the first generation of Critical Theorists had unwittingly ceded to the enemy camp by (à la Max Weber) narrowly identifying “reason” with “instrumental reason” or “positivism.” I also came away with a renewed appreciation of the valuable potentials for reform, contestation, and critique residing in existing democratic societies—a lesson that, I fear, has taken too long to learn for many of my generational compagnons de lutte.
Ten years later, our paths crossed again when Professor Habermas was gracious enough to serve as academic host during my tenure as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. During this year, I probably learned more about German intellectual traditions than it would be possible to recount. It was also from this period that my investigations concerning matters Heideggerian date. This dedication, to the man who has done so much to remind his countrymen and women about the importance of “democratic norms” that Americans too often take for granted, is then a modest way of repaying an enormous intellectual and personal debt.
Let me also seize this occasion to acknowledge the generosity of Professor Habermas’s successor, Axel Honneth, who was kind enough to host me during a return trip to Frankfurt (also under the auspices of the Humboldt Stiftung) three years ago, at which point my conception for a book on “Heidegger’s children” first took shape.
New York City
July 2001