• CONCLUSION •

SHORTLY after I completed my earlier study of Heidegger’s political thought, a favorably disposed reviewer concluded his evaluation of my findings by wondering whether, in using the precepts of democratic politics to assess Heidegger’s philosophical legacy, I wasn’t employing an alien measure.¹ If during the Cold War such ethical issues seemed unclear and confused—after all, didn’t both the Western democracies and the Soviet Union act on the basis of a sinister Realpolitik that left the moral high ground vacant?—following the collapse of communism, they seem much less so.

Alternatively, one might employ a “historicist” standard to judge the philosophical and political choices Heidegger made in order to “sympathetically” reconstruct his motivations, thereby suspending critical judgment. But the failure of this approach has been demonstrated by Ernst Nolte’s recent political biography of the Freiburg sage, in which the controversial historian, employing the historicist technique of “identification” (Einfühlung), concludes that in opting for National Socialism in 1933, Heidegger essentially made “the right choice.”² Yet Heidegger’s (and Germany’s) “choice” was extremely prejudicial to the interests of Germany’s 500,000 Jewish citizens; it was a choice that boded cata-strophically for Europe’s future. To suggest that writing history is merely a matter of “choosing sides” (as did some of Nolte’s allies in the German Historikerstreit) is plainly inadequate.³ The bankruptcy of historicism and the value relativism it promoted was sealed by the Nazi catastrophe. Though the measure of historical judgment is rarely unambiguous, the refusal to search for some adequate measure is the path to despair.

Would one not, then, be justified in turning the reviewer’s question around to inquire: what better standard might there be to judge Heidegger’s legacy—and that of his children—than a democratic one? For if one renounces historicism as a criterion of judgment, as well as the ethos of “authentic decision” that Heidegger and Carl Schmitt revered, what choices then remain? It is a troubling paradox, redolent of the era of German romanticism, to discover a thought so penetrating and rich, yet by the same token so bereft of constructive moral prescriptions; a thought that by virtue of its sweeping critique of the present age has virtually deprived itself of prospects for normative grounding.

Although there are few better guides to the history of philosophy than Heidegger and his disciples, they, like Hegel, often succumbed to the error of confusing the history of philosophy with history itself; yet the logics of the two realms, philosophy and history, often proceed in opposite directions. Thus, for each of Heidegger’s children (Marcuse is a lesser offender), following the Master’s lead, Descartes’ philosophy (“Cartesianism”) becomes a figure for modernity and all its glorious indigence. And while Descartes’ impact on modern philosophy was certainly great, his actual historical influence in these standard polemical accounts is grossly exaggerated. At issue is one of the congenital debilities of the mandarin intellectual tradition: an aristocratic scorn for considerations of social history and a predilection for contentless speculative claims. As one critic has aptly remarked: “In the case of the old mandarins the conservative alliance between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘social pessimism’ … was strong enough to keep republican thoughts at a distance; and, when such thoughts did occur, they impelled transcendence in an ‘authoritarian’ direction.”⁴ As we have seen, even Herbert Marcuse, who sought to redress modernity’s shortcomings from the standpoint of the political left, openly flirted with the idea of “educational dictatorship” once it became clear that the revolution he sought had failed to materialize.⁵

Paradoxically, in the case of Heidegger’s children, their intellectual weak point was also their strength. They manifested a capacity for probing philosophical insight that one risks losing sight of today. As a generational cohort, they never shied away from posing the “ultimate” questions about the meaning of human existence—questions that their contemporaries the logical positivists, following Wittgenstein’s famous prescription at the end of the Tractatus (“about that which one cannot speak one should remain silent”), wished to banish from the realm of serious intellectual discourse. And although today the positivist legacy has been largely discredited, traces of its influence remain strong among analytical philosophers, who, following the later Wittgenstein, narrowly insist on philosophy’s “therapeutic” raison d’être. According to this standpoint, the idea of establishing an independent critical agenda lies beyond philosophy’s purview. It should instead confine itself to the modest goal of resolving linguistic misunderstandings.

Yet this inordinately restrictive idea of philosophy’s mission seems unjustifiably resigned. Just when things start to get interesting—when matters of philosophical substance are raised—it is suggested that philosophy beat a hasty retreat. Philosophy thereby surrenders—voluntarily and without a fight, as it were—its capacity for “strong evaluation”: its ability to make significant distinctions in the realms of culture, morality, and truth.⁶ One cannot help but sense that in the last analysis, the rash concessions linguistic philosophy has made to a Humean-derived epistemological and normative skepticism are extreme. Thus, whereas under positivism truth was narrowly associated with “protocol sentences” or basic logical truths, more recently it has been identified with the context-dependent vagaries of “use.” In both cases, the autonomy of philosophy has been demeaned: in the case of positivism, it has been sacrificed to philosophy of science; in that of analytical philosophy, to the conditions of ordinary language use.

The “existential” paradigm initiated by Heidegger and refashioned by his intellectual heirs merits attention insofar as it has managed to preserve a distinctive manner of philosophical questioning, one of whose virtues is a willingness to remain out of sync with the predominantly utilitarian orientation of the “globalized” contemporary life-world. In a sense, then, the value of the existential tradition is as much “aesthetic” as it is “material.” It consists of an approach to thinking that refuses to be measured by instrumental criteria of use-value or effectiveness. In part, then, its value consists in the fact that it promotes a space for reflection about ultimate values or “ends” untainted by the pressures of “everydayness.” It thereby manages to recapture, however momentarily, the spiritual autonomy prized by the age of German classicism. Thus, as the theme of her last book, Hannah Arendt chose “the life of the mind” in order to emphasize a set of philosophical themes that endured above and beyond the changing winds of intellectual fashion.

If there is an obvious “deficit” characteristic of existential thought, this has to do with its lack of commitment to the values of “public reason”—an ethos that is the mainstay of a democratic political culture. As Kant once characterized the value of public reason: “The touchstone whereby we decide whether our holding a thing to be true is conviction or mere persuasion is external, namely the possibility of communicating it and of finding it to be valid for all human reason.”⁷ The lack of confidence in public reason on the part of Heidegger and his philosophical heirs is surely in part a generational phenomenon overdetermined by the disorientation of the interwar years. To be sure, if ever there was an epoch in which claims to reason and reasonableness seemed more honored in the breach, this was surely one. Yet, for those of us who seek to ascertain the contemporary relevance of the “existential paradigm,” this deficiency cannot be passed over in silence. Instead, it must form an essential part of the equation.

Once again, Marcuse’s quasi-exceptional status—the fact that, unlike Heidegger’s other disciples, he approached the Master’s thought from the philosophical left—allowed him a measure of privileged insight concerning the intellectual bases underlying the fascist repositioning of Heidegger’s philosophy circa 1933. Thus, among Heidegger’s children, he was the first to perceive the elective affinities between Heidegger’s thought and the Nazi cause he made his own for a time.

In “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934), Marcuse tellingly delineated the troubling family resemblances between Heidegger’s philosophy and the illiberal worldview espoused by the Nazis and their supporters. In Marcuse’s eyes, much hinged on Heidegger’s self-conscious abandonment of the Kantian ideal of the “autonomy of reason” that had been promoted by classical German philosophy. As Marcuse remarks, “Kant had obligated man to self-given duty, to free self-determination as the only fundamental law.” He believed in the existence of inalienable human rights, which “man cannot surrender even it he so wills.” Existentialism, conversely, paved the way for its own sorry end, observes Marcuse, insofar as its “struggle against reason [drove] it blindly into the arms of the reigning powers.”⁸ Hegel continued to celebrate the “Idea” as “all that holds human life together and that has merit and validity,” as the “consciousness of truth and right.” But as Carl Schmitt knew well, on January 30, 1933 (the infamous date of the Nazi Machtergreifung) “Hegel died”—a development that Schmitt personally welcomed.⁹ As of that fateful date, German Idealism’s utopian dream of reconciling reality and the Idea went up in smoke. In keeping with this new mood of biopolitical realism, Heidegger, in his desire to recast truth as “concrete,” declared that “The Führer himself is the German reality and its law.”¹⁰ Only an understanding of Heidegger’s children that appreciates their relationship to the German catastrophe and the traumas it bred will prove capable of doing justice to their powerful and complex philosophical legacy.