• NOTES •

Preface

1. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

2. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

3. This anecdote was related to me in Germany by a philosopher who was a close friend of Marcuse’s.

Prologue: “Todesfuge” and “Todtnauberg”

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquerrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

2. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 245.

3. The title of a recent biography of Heidegger by Rüdiger Safranski: Heidegger: Ein Meister aus Deutschland (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1994). English translation: Martin Heidegger: Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a very different reading of the Celan-Heidegger encounter, see Richard Rorty, “A Master from Germany,” New York Times Book Review (3 May 1998): 12.

4. This situation was especially characteristic of the early years of the regime. For more on this problem, see my article on the attitudes of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the German classics profession, “Fascism and Hermeneutics,” The New Republic (May 15, 2000): 36–45. See also T. Laugstein, Philosophie Verhältnisse im deutschen Faschismus (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1990); and ‘Die besten Geister der Nation’: Philosophie und Nationalsozialismus, I. Korotin, ed. (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1994).

5. See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, in a plaintive and moving letter to Heidegger written in 1948: “Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from such identification [with the regime]…. Common sense (also among intellectuals) … refuses to view you as a philosopher, because philosophy and Nazism are irreconcilable. In this conviction common sense is justified. Once again: you (and we) can only combat the identification of your person and your work with Nazism (and thereby the dissolution of your philosophy) if you make a public avowal of your changed views”; cited in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 161.

6. On this problem in Heidegger, see Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also A. Milchman and A. Rosenberg, eds., Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996).

Chapter 1—Introduction: Philosophy and Family Romance

1. Needless to say, there is inevitably something arbitrary about such hypothetical kudos. The other likely contenders would be Leo Strauss, Antonio Gramsci, and Carl Schmitt. The thought of the latter two has been compromised as a result as a result of proximity to left- and right-wing political extremism. Strauss—for all his astuteness as a reader of philosophical texts—like his fellow German-Jewish émigrés, seems strangely out of touch with the demands of modern politics, despite his fleeting influence on American neoconservatism. On this connection, see Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For a comparison of Strauss and Arendt, see Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought After World War II, eds. P. Kielmansegg et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 182; emphasis added.

3. For a classic study of modern poetry along these lines, see Harold Bloom, Anxiety and Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

4. For an important discussion of this problem in Heidegger’s work, see Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: Work and Weltanschauung,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. S. Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 140–172.

5. For a discussion of nihilism as a generational phenomenon, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

6. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). On this question, see also Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modern Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

7. “Herbert Marcuse-Martin Heidegger: An Exchange of Letters,” in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, 161. This fascinating letter has recently been reprinted in Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, D. Kellner, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 263–67.

8. Martin Heidegger, “Why We Remain in the Provinces,” in The Weimar Sourcebook, M. Jay, A. Kaes, and E. Dimendberg, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1992), 426–28.

9. Martin Heidegger, “German Students,” in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, 47.

10. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 60.

11. Letter from Arendt to Jaspers, Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 48.

12. Edmund Husserl, Letter of May 4, 1933, in Martin Heidegger im dritten Reich ed. B. Martin (Dormstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 149.

13. Ulrich Sieg, “Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes,” Die Zeit 52 (22 December 1989): 19.

14. “Ein Gespräch mit Max Müller,” Freibürger Universitätsblätter 92 (June 1986): 13–31.

15. Léopoldine Weizmann, “Heidegger: était-il Nazi?” Etudes, 638.

16. The story of Heidegger’s denunciation of Baumgarten is told by Victor Farias in Heidegger and Nazism 209–211. See also Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books (15 June 1988): 38–47.

17. Karl Jaspers, “Letter to the Freiburg University Denazification Committee,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 159.

18. Oral communication from Heidegger biographer Dr. Hugo Ott. For an account of Heidegger’s breakdown, see Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 309–51.

19. On this problem see Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Tom Rock-more, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

20. See Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, J. Kohn, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 1–23.

21. See Löwith, “European Nihilism: Reflections on the Spiritual and Historical Background of the European War,” in R. Wolin, ed., Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) pp. 173–224; and Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), passim.

22. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1–2. In the passage cited, Arendt surely exaggerates the pervasiveness of the longing to “escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” Though at times such attitudes may have been expressed, they seem to have been a distinctly minoritarian view. Moreover, it was often difficult to draw a clear-cut distinction between the longing for “escape” and the glorification of new technological possibilities. Pace Arendt, the predominant sentiment at the time praised humanity’s capacity to explore unknown horizons. Hence, the prevalent comparisons with the Columbian “age of explorations.”

23. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 201–2.

24. The phrase “planetary technology,” employed by Heidegger on numerous occasions, bespeaks his profound indebtedness to the apocalyptical prognostications of Ernst Jünger, who first coined this epithet in the early 1930s. For more on Jünger, see Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature After Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

25. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrope: German Intellectuals Between Apocalpyse and Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 27.

26. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 21.

27. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 7, 9. For an important study of the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in a German context, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

28. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959), 20.

29. See Richard Wolin, “The House that Jacques Built: Deconstruction and Strong Evaluation,” in The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, and Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Chapter 2—The German-Jewish Dialogue: Way Stations of Misrecognition

1. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 39.

2. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 121; emphasis added. Neumann’s study was first published in 1942; a second edition appeared in 1944. In a parallel deflection of German historical culpability, George Mosse has observed: “Ironically, before the first World War it was France rather than Germany or Austria that seemed likely to become the home of a successful racist and National Socialist movement.” See Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1974), 14.

3. Cited in George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985), 14.

4. See Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, L. Kohler and H. Saner, eds. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 198.

5. H. I. Bach, The German Jew: A Synthesis of Judaism and Western Civilization, 1730–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 143.

6. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth, 1959), 273–74. Although he went on to speculate: “Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and to do without agreement with the ‘compact majority.’” For more on Freud’s relationship to Judaism, see Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

7. Kafka, Dearest Father (New York: Schocken, 1964), 173.

8. Bach, The German Jew, 167.

9. Kafka, Letters to Milena (New York: Schocken, 1990), 219. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin emphasized Kafka’s importance as a denizen (and bard) of modernity. Kafka is an individual “confronted with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in modern physics, and practically in the technology of modern warfare. What I mean to say is that this reality can virtually no longer be experienced by an individual, and that Kafka’s world, frequently of such playfulness and interlaced with angels, is the exact complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale.” See Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 143.

10. Stephen Magill, “Defense and Introspection: German Jewry, 1914,” in Bronsen, Jews and Germans from 1866–1933 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), 220.

11. Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York: Schocken, 1978), 289.

12. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 84.

13. Cited in Jacques Le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 215.

14. Cited in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire: 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berghahn, 1985), 219.

15. Ernst Jünger, “Uber Nationalismus und Judenfrage,” Suddeutsche Monatshefte 27 (1930): 845. Upon hearing a similar sentiment expressed by a German mandarin-type during the late 1940s, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas notes that he paid little heed, since he was too engrossed in reading authors such as Husserl, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

16. See Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); see also Otto Dov Kulka, “Richard Wagner und die Anfänge des modernen Antisemitismus,” in Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 4 (December 1961): 281–300.

17. Cited in Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, 41. For more on Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000).

18. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 394.

19. Isaiah Berlin, “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” Jewish Chronicle (21 September 1951).

20. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken, 1978), 80.

21. Ibid., 83.

22. Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz,” in P. Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

23. Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany, trans. D. Weissbort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 40.

24. Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), 111.

25. See Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg, eds. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 195–211; and Amos Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1 (winter 1995): 1–14.

26. Martin Buber, “Jüdische Renaissance,” Ost und West 1 (1901): 7–10.

27. Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” Der Kunstwart 25 (March 1912): 283.

28. Ismar Schorsch, “German Judaism: From Confession to Culture,” in Die Juden im Nationalsozialistschen Deutschland, 1933–1943, A. Paucker, ed. (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1986), 68. For a lucid survey of these trends, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Chapter 3—Hannah Arendt: Kultur, “Thoughtlessness,” and Polis Envy

1. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans” (Washington: Library of Congress, 1945), 18.

2. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 150; Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” in R. Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, 111.

3. For a comparison, see Ian Kershaw and Moishe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

4. For an important recent study of anti-Semitism that, in many respects, picks up where Arendt’s analysis leaves off, see Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

5. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, 45.

6. See Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Briefe: 1925–1975 (Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag, 1998), 21–25.

7. Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 15.

8. Martin Heidegger, “Why We Remain in the Provinces,” 426.

9. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 34.

10. Cited in Claudia Schorcht, Die Philosophie an den Bayerischen Universitäten 1933–45 (Erlangen: Harald Fischer, 1990), 161.

11. For an account of this episode, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Beyond Good and Evil, 327.

12. Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, 15.

13. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Briefe, 1925–1975 (Frankfurt am main: Klostermann, 1998) 76.

14. Ibid., 66.

15. Ibid., 150.

16. Hannah Arendt/Heinrich Blücher, Briefe, 1936–1968 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1996), 208.

17. See Sartre’s classical account in Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Grove Press, 1960).

18. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, R. Feldman, ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 92.

19. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, Jerome Kohn, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 6, 12.

20. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 111.

21. Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 28.

22. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 247.

23. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 29.

24. See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23: “Underlying the discussions of emancipation was an image of a corrupt and debased Jewish people. Because of this image, emancipation was to become linked to the notion of the Jews’ moral regeneration. The emancipation debate essentially turned on whether this regeneration was possible, who was to be responsible for it, and when and under what conditions it was to take place.”

25. Wilhelm Marr, Vom Jüdischen Kriegsschauplatz: Eine Streitsschrift (Berne, 1879), 19; cited in Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 48.

26. Hermann Cohen, “Germanness and Jewishness,” in Reason and Hope (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 187.

27. Heinrich von Treitschke, A History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 556.

28. Cited in Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, 22.

29. Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, 68. See also Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 78: “The historical image of the Jew had never died in Germany and was available for exploitation in appropriate structural crises. Onto the traditionalfear and distrust of the Talmud and ghetto Jew was grafted the notion of the modern Jew, characterless and destructive in intent.”

30. In his dissertation written the previous year, The Role of the Individual in Fellow Being, Karl Löwith also directly challenged Heidegger’s concept of “Being-with” in Being and Time. However, Arendt does not refer to Löwith’s dissertation in Love and Saint Augustine. For Löwith’s critique, see Chapter 4.

31. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 178. I thank Samuel Moyn for pointing out this aspect of Arendt’s critique.

32. See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).

33. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 100; emphasis added.

34. Ibid., 102.

35. Arendt, The Human Condition, 53; emphasis added.

36. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. L. Weissberg, trans. R. and C. Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 91.

37. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 11. For Heidegger’s letter to Husserl, see Bernd Martin, ed., Martin Heidegger und das dritte Reich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 149.

38. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 85; emphasis added.

39. Ibid., 88.

40. For Weber’s discussion of the Jew as pariah, see his Ancient Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1967).

41. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 91.

42. Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” Partisan Review 13(1) (1946), 46; emphasis added.

43. Thomas Mann, Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949, 51, 65.

44. Arendt/Heidegger, Briefwechsel, 75.

45. Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers, Correspondence (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1925), 142.

46. Arendt, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” 48; emphasis added.

47. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in M. Murray, ed., Martin Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 302. See also Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski (New York: Seabury, 1975). For Hugo Ott’s refutation of Heidegger’s anti-Nazism, see Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 235–260.

48. Cited in Seyla Benhabib, “The Personal Is Not the Political,” The Boston Review 24(5) (October–November 1999): 46; emphasis added.

49. Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 457.

50. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Briefe, 94.

51. Seyla Benhabib, “The Personal Is Not the Political,” 47.

52. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1963), 117, 125–26; emphasis added.

53. Yehuda Bauer, History of the Holocaust (New York: F. Watts, 1982), 166–67.

54. Scholem, “An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” in The Jew as Pariah, 243.

55. Michael Marrus, “A History of the Holocaust: A Survey of Recent Literature,” Journal of Modern History 59 (March 1987): 149.

56. For a fictionalized account of Rumkowski’s reign, see Leslie Epstein, The King of the Jews (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).

57. For the remark about Eichmann as a “convert to Judaism,” see Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 40.

58. Ibid., 58.

59. Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 586.

60. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journal of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), 149–50.

61. For more on this issue, see Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 137–53.

62. Hans Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial,” From Weimar to Auschwitz, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 271, 255.

63. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. S. Gilbert (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1955).

64. Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” The Jew as Pariah, 230; emphasis added. For more on the so-called functionalist approach to Nazism, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: E. Arnold, 1993); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), especially chapter 5; Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz; and Omer Bartov, Murderers in Our Midst: The Holocaust and Modern Mass Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

65. Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” 229.

66. Ibid., 231.

67. Ibid., 234.

68. Ibid., 232; emphasis added.

69. Of course, this is not to claim that other groups did not suffer immensely. Yet, even Romany and homosexuals, who were also killed in great numbers, were not the explicit targets of an Endlösung or Final Solution.

70. As Dan Diner has remarked, “Blücher’s inspiration and influence on Hannah Arendt is still a subject for research…. Especially in the last and third part of Origins, the discursive structure of an ex-communist narrative makes itself conspicuous”; Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil of Her Holocaust Narrative,” New German Critique 71 (spring-summer 1997): 187. In a 1963 letter to Jaspers, Arendt remarks that Blücher’s “opinion of the Jewish people is not always what one might wish”; Arendt/Jaspers, Correspondence, 511.

71. Arendt/Jaspers, Correspondence, 542.

72. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20.

73. Steven Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe (London: MacMillan, 1996), 111–12.

74. See for example, Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, especially chapter 7.

75. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 26.

76. Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered,” 185.

77. See, for example, Dana Villa’s Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), whose main failing is a blissful lack of awareness concerning the historical and cultural matrix in which the political thought of Arendt and Heidegger developed and, as such, is paradigmatic of the aforementioned decontextualized approaches. Thus, Villa, following Arendt and Heidegger, uncritically appropriates a mass of pejorative characterizations of modern society (e.g., trafficking in timeworn clichés such as “the alienation of modern man”), judgments that must be documented, verified, and elaborated instead of merely assumed. The problem is that Arendt’s celebration of “aestheticized politics” and “action for action’s sake”—positions she freely endorses in The Human Condition—stands in perilous proximity to the “actionist” and “decisionist” critiques of liberal democracy accepted by the political right during the 1920s. The more closely one examines the (to be sure, intellectually fascinating) antimodernist biases of Arendt’s political thought, the harder it is to reconcile it with any historically known incarnation of democratic practice, ancient or modern. (Her belated endorsement of council democracy represents a partial exception to this verdict.) By failing to take seriously the frankly antiliberal context in which Arendt’s political philosophy emerged, Villa’s interpretation unreflectively inherits a welter of dilemmas proper to German antidemocratic thought of the 1920s. Finally, the attempt to view Arendt as a “postmodernist” (as in the claim that her political thought attempts to “think political action and judgment without grounds”) seriously misconstrues the classicist biases of her approach to political theory.

78. On this point, see Pierre Bourdieu’s important study, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. P. Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

79. Arendt, The Human Condition, 23.

80. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 143.

81. Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Studies in Critical Philosophy, trans. J. de Bres (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 13–14. See also Michael Walzer’s criticisms of Arendt’s “republicanism,” her prejudicial attempt to privilege citizenship or political “virtue” at the expense of “work” and “sociality”: “In practice, work, though it begins in necessity, takes on a value of its own—expressed in commitment to a career, pride in a job well done, a sense of camaraderie in the workplace. All of these are competitive with the values of citizenship”; Walzer, “The Concept of Civil Society,” in M. Walzer, ed., Tower Is a Global Civil Society (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), 10.

82. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 292. See the revealing remarks by Philip Ariès: “The historians taught us long ago that the King was never left alone. But in fact until the end of the seventeenth century, nobody was ever left alone. The density of social life made isolation virtually impossible, and people who managed to shut themselves up in a room for some time were regarded as exceptional characters”; Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962), 398.

83. John Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, ll. 192–94.

84. For a convincing rebuttal of the claim that liberal political thought remains devoid of virtue, see Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

85. Arendt, The Human Condition, 31.

86. See François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

87. To be sure, Arendt’s Aristotle has been Heideggerianized. As Villa remarks, “Thus, when Arendt takes up Aristotle’s distinction between acting and making [phronesis and poesis], she is in fact reformulating praxis as authentic existenz” (Arendt and Heidegger, 140). See also Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 107: “Arendt, as opposed to Heidegger, found in Aristotle’s concept of praxis the key to a new revaluation of human action as interaction unfolding within a space of appearances.”

88. On this point, see the important book by Donald Sassoon, One-Hundred Years of Socialism (New York: The New Press, 1996).

89. J. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 177.

90. Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1988), 274.

91. Her veneration of workers’ councils, however, harbors some serious misrepresentations of the movement’s content and orientation. As Arato and Cohen point out in Civil Society and Political Theory (p. 199): “Her argument [with reference to workers’ councils] is entirely fictitious, though, since the movements from 1848 to 1956 to which she refers cannot be represented as having no social and economic interests and demands, and even less as not playing a major part in the economic reproduction of society.” For a more recent account of the ways in which Arendt’s political thought has influenced the German left after reunification, see Jan Müller, “Intellectuals and the Berlin Republic,” New German Critique 72 (1998): 178–81.

92. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 210.

93. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 133.

94. Ibid., 153.

95. Arendt, The Human Condition, 211.

96. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 275.

97. Ibid., 279–80.

98. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 135.

99. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 205; emphasis added.

100. Nietzsche’s vindication of “great politics” appears in his late works, such as Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1968): “The time for petty politics is over; the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to great politics”; section 208. For a parallel critique of Arendt’s political philosophy, see Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, L. and S. Hinchman, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 289–307.

101. Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought”; cited in Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 142.

Chapter 4—Karl Löwith: The Stoic Response to Modern Nihilism

1. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). See also Löwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, A. Levinson, ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966); Leo Strauss’s extremely favorable review of From Hegel to Nietzsche, in Social Research 8 (4) (1941).

2. Löwith, “The Historical Background of European Existentialism,” Nature, History and Existentialism, 7.

3. Goethe, letter to Zelter, June 6, 1825, Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe, vol. 4 (Munich: Beck, 1988), 146.

4. Charles Baudelaire, “Fusées,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 665–66.

5. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 861–862, 866, 868; emphasis added.

6. For an excellent discussion of Löwith’s endorsement of the so-called secularization thesis (with a sideways glance at Heidegger and Carl Schmitt) focusing on political implications, see Jeffrey Barash, “The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Karl Löwith’s Concept of Secularization,” History and Theory 37 (February 1998): 69–83. See also Robert Wallace, “Progress, Secularization, and Modernity: the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 63–79. For an influential rejoinder to Löwith, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), especially 27–35.

7. Löwith, “Welt und Menschenwelt,” Sämtliche Schriften I (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), 302.

8. Löwith, Meaning in History, v, vi. For a good treatment of Löwith’s intellectual trajectory in relationship to Stoicism, see Josef Chytry, “Zur Wiedergewinnen des Kosmos: Karl Löwith contra Martin Heidegger,” in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, D. Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler, eds. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 71–99.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1969), Part I, section 5. Human, All-Too-Human dates from 1880.

10. “As Löwith remarks in “The Historical Background of European Existentialism,” (pp. 15–16): “From Napoleon and Bismarck, Nietzsche learned that the democratic leveling of Europe would some day culminate in dictatorship…. Thus [his] ideas paved the way for the Third Reich.”

11. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 8.

12. For an important critique of Löwith’s later thought, see Jürgen Habermas, “Karl Löwith: Stoic Retreat from Historical Consciousness,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, 79–98.

13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), 481.

14. Löwith, “Natur und Humanität des Menschen,” Sämtliche Schriften I, 294.

15. Löwith, “Welt und Menschenwelt,” 295.

16. See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt, ed. (New York: Harper & Row), 115–54.

17. Löwith, “Welt und Menschenwelt,” 295.

18. Ibid., 307.

19. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford, 1946), 156

20. Karl Löwith, “Curriculum Vitae,” in Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1986), 147.

21. See Dieter Henrich, “Sceptico Sereno,” in Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967), 458–463.

22. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Karl Löwith,” in Philosophical Apprenticeships (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 171.

23. Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 1.

24. Ludwig Feuerbach, “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,” in W. Schirmacher, ed., German Socialist Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 1994), 77.

25. Ibid., 41. For an excellent survey of leading twentieth-century philosophies of intersubjectivity, see Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. C. McCann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).

26. For Husserl’s remarks, see his letter of May 4, 1933, in Bernd Martin, ed., Martin Heidegger und das “dritte Reich,” 149.

27. Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. The text dates from 1940. The Harvard prize committee had made it clear that it was in not interested in “philosophical reflections about the past,” but in testimony that was “factual” (wahrheitsgetreu). Needless to say, Löwith failed to win the prize. His reflections on the great personages and events of the period undoubtedly proved too substantial for the tastes of the Harvard prize committee. The manuscript then lay dormant for some forty-six years until it was discovered by Löwith’s widow and published in 1986. For an English translation, see My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, trans. E. King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

28. Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland, 19.

29. Ibid., 25. For a recent survey of this trend in intellectual history, see Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

30. For an excellent account of Nietzsche’s conception of “great politics,” see Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

31. See Fritz Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins,

32. Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland, 44–45, 57

33. Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 182–83.

34. Cited in Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, R. Wolin, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 236.

35. For an analysis of National Socialism as “revolution of nihilism” (written by a disillusioned former party member), see Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Alliance, 1939).

36. For a systematic discussion of this problem in Heidegger’s thought, see Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

37. Löwith, “The Political Horizon of Heidegger’s Existential Ontology,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 212.

38. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger, 307.

39. Arendt, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” 34–56.

40. Heidegger’s letter to Sartre was originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 January 1994): 27. For Frédéric Towarnicki’s own account of their encounter, see his memoir, Martin Heidegger: Souvenirs et Chroniques (Paris: Rivages, 1999).

41. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Das Sein und das Nicht-Sein,” in Traugott König, ed., Sartre: Ein Kongress (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988), 37.

42. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” in G. Guignon and D. Pereboon, eds., Existentialism: Basic Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 271.

43. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper Row, 1977), 208, 213–214. For more on antihumanism as a philosophical trope, see my discussion in, “Antihumanism in the Discourse of Postwar French Thought,” Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 175–209.

44. Heidegger’s letter to Schmitt has been reprinted in Telos 72, (2)20 (summer 1987): 132.

45. On Schmitt’s relationship to liberalism, see John McCormick’s important study, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). For a discussion of Schmitt within the context of Weimar legal culture, see Peter C. Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

46. With reference to Mussolini, see Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 82: “Just as in the sixteenth century an Italian has once again given expression to the principle of political realism.”

47. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1979), 67. English translation: The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For Nietzsche’s discussion of the importance of “grasping the value of having enemies,” see Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 43–44.

48. I discuss the relation between these two phases of Schmitt’s development in “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State,” in The Terms of Cultural Criticism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 83–102; and in “Carl Schmitt: the Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror,” in Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas, 103–22. For an excellent treatment of Jünger, see Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

49. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 215.

50. It went through three editions during Löwith’s lifetime and in 1984 was included as the titular essay of volume 8 of his collected works.

51. On these points, see Heidegger’s essays, “The Age of the World-Picture” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” in W. Lovitt, ed., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). See also his important text of 1936–38—touted by some as the missing sequel to Being and Time—Beiträge zu Philosophie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989); Contributions to Philosophy, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

52. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p.

53. Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being (Chicago: Regnery-Gateway, 1949), 287. See also the following remarks from Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” 51–52: “The historical Dasein of nations—their emergence, flowering, and decline—originates from poetry; out of the latter [originates] authentic knowledge in the sense of philosophy; and from both of these, the realization of a Volk as Volk through the state—politics. This original, historical age of peoples is therefore the age of poets, thinkers, and state-founders, that is, of those who authentically ground and establish the historical Dasein of a Volk.”

54. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in D. Krell, ed., Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 210, 216.

55. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 86. Heidegger citation from “The Anaximander Fragment,” 19.

56. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology, 112; emphasis added.

57. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 43.

58. Ibid., 251 (translation altered).

59. Reprinted in The Heidegger Controversy, 91–116.

60. Ibid., 106.

61. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 90–91.

62. For the controversy surrounding this claim from An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 159, see Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 186–197.

63. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 78–79.

64. Cited in H. W. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, trans. P. Emad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91.

65. Habermas, “Karl Löwith,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, 85.

66. In “Karl Löwith,” Habermas formulates the dilemma in the following terms: “Precisely from the eminently practical experience of the risks that appear to be posed by modern consciousness, Löwith wants to get back to an attitude toward the world that is theoretical in the classical sense [i.e., theoria or contemplation] because it is elevated above practice and free from the restrictions of pragmatic consciousness” (p. 84). Habermas goes on to observe caustically that Löwith’s embrace of the “cosmos” is a standpoint one might expect to find in the pages of the Eranos Jahrbuch.

67. See, for example, R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

68. See Löwith’s Jacob Burckhardt, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), first written in 1935. For Löwith’s reflections on suicide, see “Töten, Mord, und Selbstmord: Die Freiheit zum Tode” and “Die Freiheit zum Tode,” in Mensch und Menschenwelt, 399–425.

69. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 67–90.

70. For an important vindication of “modernity” in this sense, see Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity,” eds. D’Entreves and Benhabib (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 38–55.

71. For a classic discussion of this evolutionary trend, see T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

Chapter 5—Hans Jonas: The Philosopher of Life

1. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 210.

2. Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (New York: Delta Publishing, 1966), 247.

3. Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

4. Jonas, “Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolf Bultmann and Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects of His Work,” in Mortality and Morality (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 146.

5. Jonas, Wissenschaft als persönliches Erlebnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), 20–21.

6. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958).

7. Jonas, “Gnosticism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 340.

8. Ibid., 337.

9. Ibid., 340.

10. Bacon, Novum Organum, in E. Burtt, ed. The English Philosophers From Bacon to Mill (New York: Random House, 1939), p. 28.

11. Jonas, “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” in The Phenomenon of Life, 214.

12. Ibid., 233.

13. Ibid., 44–45.

14. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 8.

15. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 3.

16. Ibid., 4.

17. Jonas, “Evolution and Freedom: On the Continuity Among Life-Forms,” in Mortality and Morality, 66.

18. Ibid., 68.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 69.

21. Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 409–410.

22. Cited in Christian Zimmerli, “Prophet in dürftiger Zeit,” Focus 19 (May 10, 1993): 82.

23. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 9.

24. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 101.

25. Ibid.

26. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 26–27.

27. Ibid., 27.

28. Ibid., 131.

29. Ibid., 104ff.

30. Ibid., 137; emphasis added.

31. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany: 1831–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 140. For an extreme case of correlating vitalism and fascism, see Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1982), passim.

32. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 138. For a good discussion of Green Party politics, see A. Markovits and P. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117.

33. Ibid., 139, 142; emphasis added.

34. For an impressive account of these changes, see Donald Sassoon, One-Hundred Years of Socialism: The Western European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1997).

35. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 143, 145.

36. Ibid., 146–47.

37. Ibid., 147. See Erik Jacob, Martin Heidegger und Hans Jonas (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1996), 355: “For Jonas the ideology of Marxism, as a result of its theoretical principles, would be better able to meet the demands of an ethic of responsibility than a liberal system with a market economy and democracy: an economy of needs would replace the profit economy, a rational and centrally organized bureaucracy would replace free, profit-oriented entrepreneurship.”

38. Ibid., 149, 151.

39. Jonas, “Dem bösen Ende näher,” Der Spiegel 20 (1992): 95.

40. Ibid., 99, 101.

41. Ibid., 101.

42. Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz,” in Mortality and Morality, 139.

43. Ibid., 142.

44. Jonas, “Heidegger’s Entschlossenheit und Entschluss,” in Neske and Kettering, eds. Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1988), 225.

45. Ibid., 227.

Chapter 6—Herbert Marcuse: From Existential Marxism to Left Heideggerianism

1. Paul Piccone and Alexander Delfini, “Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” Telos 6 (1970): 36–46. For a good assessment of Marcuse’s relationship to the New Left, see Paul Breines, “Marcuse and the New Left in America,” in J. Habermas, ed., Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), 134–151.

2. Marcuse confirms this portrait of his political development in a 1978 interview: “I was involved briefly, as a member of the soldiers’ council in Berlin in Reineckendorf in 1918. I left that soldiers’ council very, very quickly when they began electing former officers to it. Then I belonged to the SPD (Social Democratic Party) for a short time, but I left that too after January 1919. I believe my political stance was fixed at that time, in the sense that I was uncompromisingly against SPD policy. In this sense I was a revolutionary.” See Marcuse, “Theory and Politics: A Discussion,” Telos 38 (Winter 1978–79): 125. For the German original, see Jürgen Habermas et al., Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 9–62.

3. Ibid., 125. In his contribution to a Heidegger memorial volume in 1977, Marcuse expressed a similar insight:

Being and Time appeared in the dissolution-phase of the Weimar Republic: the proximity of the Nazi regime, the coming catastrophe, was generally sensed. Yet, at the time the major philosophical trends in no way reflected this situation. Heidegger’s work appeared to me and my friends as a new beginning: we experienced his book (and his lectures, of which we possessed transcripts) as, finally, a concrete philosophy: here was talk of Existence, of our existence, of anxiety, care, boredom, etc. And we experienced yet another “academic” emancipation: Heidegger’s interpretation of Greek philosophy and German idealism gave us new insight into lifeless texts.

See G. Neske, ed., Erinnerungen an Martin Heidegger (Neske Verlag: Pfullingen, 1977), 162.

4. Marcuse, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism,” Telos 4 (Fall 1969): 4; emphasis added. As a cursory examination of this essay bears out, the preponderance of citations and references refer to Marx (especially to the recently published MEGA edition of his and Engels’ work).

5. Frederick Olafson, “Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview,” in R. Pippin et al., eds., Marcuse and the Promise of Critical Theory (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 96. For a more philosophically sophisticated analysis of the problem of pseudo-concreteness of the phenomenological approach, it is worth consulting Marcuse’s critique of Sartre, in which a number of similar charges are made and substantiated. See Marcuse, “Sartre’s Existentialism,” Studies in Critical Philosophy, trans. J. de Bres (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 157–190.

6. See the account of Bernstein’s position in James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper, 1966), 93: Above all, Bernstein “maintained that Marx was wrong in his predictions about the future development and impending collapse of the capitalist order. In spite of the growth of trusts and cartels, capitalism was not becoming exclusively a system of large concerns, the members of lower middle class were not everywhere being forced to become members of the proletariat; there was no absolute and rigid division between classes, and therefore it was false to interpret the political situation solely in terms of a class struggle; the standard of living of the working class was in fact rising and they were not being forced into the ever increasing misery which Marx had prophesied.”

7. Georg Lukács, Preface (1962) to The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 11.

8. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 324.

9. Marcuse, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism,” 5.

10. Marcuse, “The Foundation of Historical Materialism,” Studies in Critical Philosophy, 34. For a description of “automatic Marxism,” see Russell Jacoby, “Towards a Critique of Automatic Marxism, Telos 10 (winter 1971): 119–146.

11. The Marx-Engels Reader, 143. Although the “Theses on Feuerbach” were written in 1845, they remained unpublished until Engels discovered them among Marx’s papers nearly four decades later.

12. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 358.

13. For an analysis that makes this claim, see Günther Stern, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948): 337–370.

14. Marcuse, “Contributions,” 3. Marcuse’s article first appeared in an issue of Philosophische Hefte (1928), which was devoted entirely to Being and Time.

15. Marcuse, “Contributions,” 16; emphasis added.

16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 46.

17. Marcuse, “Contributions,” 32; emphasis added.

18. Ibid., 6; emphasis added. For one of the most extensive discussions of some of the uncanny philosophical parallels between Lukács and Heidegger, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger, trans. W. Boelhower (London: Routledge, 1977). For more on Goldmann, see Mitchell Cohen, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). In a conversation with Marcuse in April 1976, he confirmed to me the formative philosophical role that History and Class Consciousness had played in his intellectual development. In Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (pp. 387–88), Douglas Kellner reports a similar response: “Marcuse stressed the importance of History and Class Consciousness for developing Marxism and noted its impact on his own thought. Marcuse also said that he believed that Lukács and Korsch were the ‘most intelligent’ Marxists to write after the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and that in his 1930s work, with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, he took a more favorable position toward History and Class Consciousness than Horkheimer and his other colleagues.”

19. Marcuse, “Über die konkrete Philosophie,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 62 (1929), 120.

20. Marcuse, “Contributions,” 15.

21. Ibid., 6

22. Ibid., 12, 16; emphasis added.

23. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxii; emphasis added. In The Destruction of Reason, trans. P. Palmer (Atlantic Heights, N.J.: 1980), Lukács’s judgment of Heidegger was far less charitable. He viewed Heidegger’s philosophy as an expression of despair that was typical of the bourgeois imperialist era. In Lukács inimitable words (p. 503): “One may say without undue exaggeration that in the period of the imperialistic bourgeoisie’s struggle against socialism, Heidegger was related to Hitler and Rosenberg as Schopehauer, in his own day, was related to Nietzsche.”

24. The Marx-Engels Reader, 145.

25. Marcuse, “Contributions,” 11; emphasis added.

26. Ibid., 17.

27. Marcuse, “Über die konkrete Philosophie,” 126.

28. Ibid., 18, 21.

29. Ibid., 124, 127.

30. Adorno, review of Marcuse, “Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1) (1932): 409–410.

31. Marcuse, “The Foundation of Historical Materialism, 3.

32. Two of the more important studies are Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: Seabury, 1977); and the introductory discussion in Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, trans. P. Falla (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 132–146.

33. The Marx-Engels Reader, 72.

34. Cited by Marcuse in “The Foundation of Historical Materialism,” 12.

35. Ibid., 5, 6, 10.

36. For an overview of this debate, see Seyla Benhabib, Translator’s Introduction, Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), ix–xl. In “Marcuse and Hegel on Historicity” (in Marcuse and the Promise of Critical Theory), Robert Pippin makes a strong case for the centrality of Hegel’s Ontology in relationship to Marcuse’s later work (in particular, Reason and Revolution). But on the whole I think Pippin attributes more developmental significance to Marcuse’s habilitation study than it can bear. Moreover, his reflections omit the important question of Marx’s influence. For another important survey of the early Marcuse’s relationship to Heidegger, which is highly critical of Heidegger’s influences, see Alfred Schmidt, “Existential Ontology and Historical Materialism in the Work of Herbert Marcuse,” in Marcuse and the Promise of Critical Theory, 47–67. Marcuse’s writing style was as a rule remarkably lucid. Hegel’s Ontology constitutes a significant exception. As Benhabib remarks (p. xxxiv): “Those readers familiar with the German original will know the tortured and convoluted character of Marcuse’s style, a combination, undoubtedly, of academic conformism, Heideggerian neologisms, and philosophical profoundity at times bordering on obscurity.”

37. Quoted in Benhabib, xii.

38. Marcuse, “Das Problem der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit: Wilhelm Dilthey,” Die Gesellschaft 8 (4) (1931): 350–367.

39. For more on these parallels, see Pippin, “Marcuse and Hegel on Historicity,” 69–74.

40. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 298.

41. Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 283, 289.

42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 314, 252.

43. Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, 290.

44. Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” trans. D. Kellner, Telos 16 (summer 1973), 11; emphasis added.

45. Ibid., 13; emphasis added.

46. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: A Series of Letters, trans. R. Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), 80.

47. Cited in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little and Brown, 1973), 57.

48. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 39.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. Ibid., 77.

51. Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” 25. Here, the parallels with aspects of Kojève’s argument in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel are striking. For Kojève, “desire” is an expression of human lack. Of course, the ultimate source of Marcuse’s and Kojève’s argument may have been the same: the master-slave section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

52. Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” 25; emphasis added.

53. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Robbs-Merrill, 1962), 1176A.

54. Ibid., 15; emphasis added.

55. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 16. Suffice it to say that speculation concerning the “abolition of labor” stands in marked contrast to Marx’s characterization of labor as a fundamental mode of man’s species-being in the Paris manuscripts. To be sure, Marcuse’s suggestion that, “Technology would become subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification of nature and society,” points in the direction of his romantic argument for a new technology that would engage nature in a manner that was nonobjectivating and nonmanipulative.

56. See Benhabib, Introduction to Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology, xxx: “Depending on what degree of individual self-reliance and autonomy of thought Heidegger could tolerate among his disciples, he might have had grounds to reject this work as a Habilitationsschrift, which he fully endorsed even if it appears that historically he never had to do so. Marcuse’s proto-Marxist reading of Hegel and Dilthey could have hardly escaped Heidegger’s acute knowledge of and sense for the history of philosophy.”

57. Olafson, “Heidegger’s Politics,” 99.

58. Heidegger, “Schlageter,” in R. Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, 42. As he remarks in one address commemorating a popular Nazi martyr: “As he stood defenseless facing the rifles, the hero’s inner gaze soared above the muzzles to the daylight and mountains of his home that he might die for the German people and its Reich with the Alemannic countryside before his eyes…. He was not permitted to escape his destiny so that he could die the most difficult and greatest of all deaths with a hard will and a clear heart.”

59. Olafson, “Heidegger’s Politics,” 101.

60. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1962), 216.

61. Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 40.

62. Heidegger, Being and Time, 345.

63. Although Marcuse never fully developed these criticisms, they display a remarkable affinity with Jonas’s critique of the vacuousness of Heideggerian “decisiveness.” See Jonas, “Heideggers Entschlossenheit und Entschluss,” in Kettering and Neske, eds., Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1988), 221–31.

64. Olafson, “Heidegger’s Politics,” 100; emphasis added.

65. Marcuse, letter to Heidegger of August 28, 1947, in The Heidegger Controversy, 160.

66. Heidegger, letter to Marcuse of January 20, 1948, in The Heidegger Controversy, 162–63.

67. For an exposition of this idea, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Organization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982) and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: History, and Political Theory, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

68. For the argument about labor, see Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 196–202; for the argument about death, see 202–214.

69. For one of Heidegger’s most powerful articulations of this idea, see “The Overcoming of Metaphysics,” in Heidegger Controversy, 67–90.

70. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 9, 10, 11.

71. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (New York: Penguin, 1969), 19, 25; emphasis added.

72. “Left Heideggerianism”—a Heideggerianized Marxism—became a prominent intellectual current in France during the 1960s under the influence of Arguments group thinkers such as Kostas Axelos and Edgar Morin. See, for example, Axelos’s Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).

73. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); cited by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, 153–54. To my knowledge, this is the only time Marcuse ever directly cited Heidegger following the war.

74. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 154; emphasis added.

75. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 24.

76. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 166–67.

77. For an important critique of Marcuse’s notion of a “new science,” see Jürgen Habermas, “Science and Technology as Ideology,” Towards a Rational Society, trans. J. Schapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 81–122.

78. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. M. O’Connell (New York: Seabury, 1973), 241.

79. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 206; emphasis added.

80. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Barrington Moore Jr. et al., Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 121.

81. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), 505.

Chapter 7—Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger As Philosopher of the German “Way”

1. On this point, see Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, W. Barrett and H. D. Aiken, eds. (New York: Random House, 1962).

2. Heidegger, Being and Time, 41–49.

3. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 293.

4. Ibid.

5. Heidegger, “Why We Remain in the Provinces,” 428.

6. Heinrich Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 9.

7. Ulrich Sieg, “Die ‘Verjudung des deutschen Geistes: Ein unbekannter Brief Heideggers,’” Die Zeit 52 (29 December 1989): 19.

8. On this point, see the important essay by Jürgen Habermas, “‘Work’ and ‘Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Constroversy from a German Perspective,” in The New Conservativism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, S. W. Nicholsen, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 140–173.

9. Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 182–83. For the full text of Löwith’s memoirs, see My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, trans. E. King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

10. Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 142.

11. Heidegger, Being and Time, 358.

12. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Heidegger’s Political Ontology; and Winfried Franzen, “Die Suche nach Härte und Schwere: Über ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiven Heideggers Vorlesung ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik’ von 1929/30,” in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, A. Gethmann Siefert and O. Pöggeler, eds. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 78–92. For an analysis of similar motifs that can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century, see Karl Löwith, “European Nihilism: Reflections on the Spiritual and Historical Background and of the European War,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 173–283. See also the fascinating discussion of Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger in Karl Heinz Bohrer, Asthetik des Schreckens (Munich: Hanser, 1977).

13. Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” 173–74. For an early treatment of the conservative revolutionaries and their parallel worldviews, see Christian von Krockow, Die Entscheidung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990).

14. For the story of Heidegger’s rectorship, see Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 235–262.

15. Ernst Jünger, “Le Traveilleur Planétaire,” in M. Haer, ed. Martin Heidegger (Doris: Editions de l’Herne, 1983), 150.

16. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 38

17. Otto Pöggeler, “Den Führer führen?” Neue Wege mit Heidegger (Freiburg/Munich: Karl Albert, 1992), 203–54.

18. For the best account of the later Heidegger’s political convictions, see his interview with Der Spiegel, “Only a God Can Save Us,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 91–116.

19. Ibid., 111.

20. Cited in Pöggeler, “Den Führer führen?,” 44.

21. For Nietzsche’s concept of monumental history, see “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 94.

22. Heidegger, Logica, 42. These lectures should not be confused with Heidegger’s 1925–26 Marburg lectures of the same title (Gesamtausgabe vol. 21).

23. Marx does precisely this for the history of capitalism. Ernst Bloch’s study of Thomas Münzer: Theologe der Revolution (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921) does this for the peasant wars.

24. Though the literature on this topic has become voluminous, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The Second Empire (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985); and David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

25. Heidegger, Logica Lecciones de Martin Heidegger, V. Farias, ed. (Barcelona: Anthropo, 1991) 2.

26. Ibid., 38.

27. Ibid., 6.

28. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 199.

29. Heidegger, Logica, 16.

30. Ibid., 18.

31. Cited in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 247.

32. Heidegger, Logica, 32.

33. Ibid., 22.

34. Ibid., 28.

35. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 199), 152–59.

36. See the discussion of “mood” in Being and Time, 172ff.

37. See, for example, Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 199.

38. See the characterization of Descartes in Being and Time, 122–34. See also the long discussion of Descartes’s place in the history of modern thought in Heidegger, Nietzsche: Nihilism (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), 96–101.

39. Heidegger, Logica, 82.

40. Ibid.

41. The story of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi labor camps is told by Ott in Martin Heidegger, 224.

42. Both the rectoral address and Heidegger’s political addresses from the years 1933–34 are contained in The Heidegger Controversy. For more on the role of the labor camps under Nazism, see Peter Duden, Erziehung durch Arbeit (Wiesbaden: Westeuropaische Verlaganstalt, 1988).

43. The Heidegger Controversy, 42, 59.

44. Anson Rabinbach, “The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 11 (1976): 44. On the more general question of the pride of place Nazism accorded to aestheticized politics, see Peter Reichl, Der schöne Schein des dritten Reiches (Munich: Hanser, 1991). For an examination of Nazi attitudes toward the working class, see Timothy Mason, Nazi, Fascism, and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

45. David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class, Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), 75–76.

46. On this point, see Heidegger, “Why We Remain in the Provinces,” note 5 above.

47. Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 60.

48. See Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, passim.

49. Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich: Beck, 1925), 99; emphasis added.

50. See Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). A translation of Jünger’s essay “Total Mobilization” may be found in The Heidegger Controversy, 119–39. For Heidegger’s indebtedness to Jünger, see his remarks in “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, G. Neske and E. Kettering, eds. (New York: Paragon House, 1990). For a recent study of Jünger, see Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

51. See note 31 above.

52. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann, ed. (New York: Vintage, 1967), 866; emphasis added. Also see Nietzsche’s discussions of mechanism and machine at 888 and 889. On Nietzsche’s reception by the conservative revolutionaries, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California, 1992). For the more general question of the way in which 29. German fascism reconciled itself to modern technology, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

53. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 868; emphasis added. Nietzsche concludes these reflections as follows: “Obviously they [the new barbarians] will come into view and consolidate themselves after tremendous socialist crises—they will be the elements capable of the greatest severity toward themselves and able to guarantee the greatest will.”

54. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Europäischer Nihilismus, Gesamtausgabe 48 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986): 205; emphasis added. The extant English translation published by HarperCollins is based on an earlier German that does not contain many of the passages in question.

55. Ibid., 333.

56. For an important discussion of “national socialism” (lower case) in the French context, see Eugen Weber, “Nationalism, Socialism, and National Socialism,” in My France: Politics, Myth, Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 261–284.

57. Heidegger, Logica, 82.

58. Ibid., 84–85.

59. For a discussion of this theme, see Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), especially Chapter Three.

60. Martin Heidegger, Das Rektorat 1933–34: Tatsachen und Gedanken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), 40.

61. Ibid.

62. For a good treatment of the “Beautification of Labor” program, see Anson Rabinbach, “The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich,” in International Fascism: New Thoughts and Approaches, G. Mosse, ed. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 189–222.

63. Heidegger, Logica, 102.

64. Herbert Marcuse, “Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview,” in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 99.

65. See, for example, Introduction to Metaphysics, where Heidegger speaks of the equiprimordial role of philosophers, statesmen, and poets. Similar remarks may be found in his 1934 lecture course, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980).

66. Heidegger, Logica, 104; emphasis added.

67. Ibid., 120.

Excursus: Being and Time: A Failed Masterpiece?

1. Heinrich Petzet, Auf einen Stern Zugehen: Begegnungen und Gespräche mit Heidegger (Frankfurt: Societäts Verlag, 1983), 9.

2. See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 310.

3. Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Apology: Biography As Philosophy and Ideology,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14 (2), 15 (1) (1991): 364.

4. “Dialogue Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 6.

5. This path has recently been painstakingly and magisterially reconstructed in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1993).

6. Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” in On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 74.

7. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire: 1971–1918, trans. K. Traynor (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985), 116–17.

8. Hugo Ott, “Heidegger’s Contributions to Der Akademiker,” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14 (2), 15 (1) (1991): 482.

9. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Martin Niemeyer, 1964), 82.

10. Carl Braig, “Was soll der Gebildete von dem Modernismus wissen?”; cited in Dieter Thomä, Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990), 35.

11. Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker,” 487.

12. Ibid., 493, 495.

13. Ibid., 497.

14. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” in The Heidegger Controversy, 106.

15. See Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (GA 53) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975), 85; Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 45–46.

16. Cited in Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Apology,” 395.

17. Heidegger, Being and Time, 310. For the best discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of “life,” see his important lecture course of 1919, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GS 57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987).

18. The letter of August 19, 1921 is reprinted in Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, Richard Wolin, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 236.

19. Heidegger-Blochmann Briefwechsel, J. Storck, ed. (Marbach am Necker: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 7; emphasis added.

20. Heidegger discusses Spengler in the as yet unpublished 1920–21 lecture course, “Phänomenologie der Religion.” For a discussion, see Kisiel, Genesis, 161–63.

21. Heidegger-Blochmann Briefwechsel, 7.

22. Ibid., 15.

23. Ibid., 12.

24. Heidegger, “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” GA 1, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag, 1978), 194.

25. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien- und Bedeuteungslehre Duns Scotus,” GA 1, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag, 1972), 194.

26. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988), pp. 3, 8.

27. The letter is cited in Thomas Sheehan, “Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, C. Guignon, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 71–72.

28. Karl Barth’s “dialectical theology” would also have a profound influence on Heidegger, but his important interpretation of The Epistle to the Romans was not published until 1921. In the later “Dialogue on Language,” Heidegger emphasizes the importance of his encounter with Protestant theology and Dilthey’s historicism: “Later, I met the term ‘hermeneutics’ again in Wilhelm Dilthey in his theory of the historical human sciences. Dilthey’s familiarity with hermeneutics came from the same source, his theological studies, especially his work with Schleiermacher”; On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 10.

29. Cited in Hugo Ott, “Zu den katholischen Wurzeln im Denken Martin Heidegger’s. Der theologische Philosoph,” in Akten des römischen Heidegger Symposions (1992), 82.

30. Kisiel, Genesis, 71.

31. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in M. Murray, ed. Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 303.

32. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 66.

33. Cited in H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 84.

34. Husserl, “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (16) (1956): 297.

35. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 74.

36. Gerda Walther to Alexander Pfänder, June 20, 1919, cited in Kisiel, Genesis, 58.

37. Husserl, Ideen III (Husserliana V) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 19), 75.

38. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 209. As far as Husserl’s own ego is concerned, Gadamer tells the story of how at the end of a long-winded lecture (there was seldom room for discussion in his seminars), Husserl observed:” My, we certainly had a fascinating discussion today!” See Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 36.

39. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 74.

40. Ibid., 63.

41. Heidegger to Löwith, August 19, 1921, in Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 235–36, 237.

42. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 89–90.

43. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Intepretationen zu Aristotles, GA 61 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 199), 54.

44. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 117.

45. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Intepretationen zu Aristoteles, 111.

46. Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, 19.

47. Heidegger, Being and Time, 216; emphasis added.

48. Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, 18, 16.

49. Aristotle, Metaphysica, trans. D. Ross (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1928), 1028a, 15.

50. Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. T. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 5.

51. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. M. Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 1139, 6; emphasis added.

52. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,” Man and World 25 (1992): 359–60.

53. Ibid., 363–64.

54. Ibid., 364–65.

55. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 133.

56. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 67. Since the English translation is faulty (for example, in the sentence cited, the word “great” is simply left out), I have relied on the German edition, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963), 67.

57. K-H Bohrer, Asthetik des Schreckens (Munich: Henser Verlag, 1978).

58. See Heidegger-Jaspers, Briefwechsel (Munich: Piper, 1992), 70.

59. See “A Discussion Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in The Existential Tradition, N. Langiulli, ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997). At the same time, one may discern an interim phase of his philosophical development during the mid-1930s, in which he proposes for consideration the alternative idea of the “setting-to-work of truth,” chiefly in the realms of politics and in art. The two most representative texts of this phase are “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (Heidegger’s 1933 rectoral address) and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” For a more detailed discussion of this theme, see the important study by Winfried Franzen, Von der Existentzialontologie zur Seinsgeschichte (Messenheim am Glan: Anton Heim 1975). See also Alexander Schwan, Politische Philosophie im Denken Heideggers (Köln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965).

60. Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 304.

61. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 82.

62. Arendt, “For Martin Heidegger’s Eightieth Birthday,” in Neske/Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 217.

63. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 25.

64. Heidegger, GA 65 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1965), 239.

Conclusion

1. Mitchell Aboulafia, review of The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, International Journal of Philosophy (1991).

2. Nolte, Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin and Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1992).

3. Here, I am thinking predominantly of Andreas Hillgruber’s claim in Zweierlei Untergang that it is the “duty” of the German historian to identify with the brave German troops fighting to stave off the Red Army on the Eastern front. For a discussion of these matters, see Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); see especially chapter 4. For more on the background of historicism, see George Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

4. See Hauke Brunkhorst, Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), 9.

5. See Chapter 6.

6. For a classical articulation of this position, see Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–45.

7. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Oxford University Press), 645. In her later writings (e.g., her unfinished lectures on Kant’s political philosophy), Arendt seemed to be moving closer to a Kantian standpoint, taking as her benchmark the Third Critique. Thus, in the essay “The Crisis of Culture,” she discusses the relationship between aesthetic and political judgment, claiming that both pertain to phenomena proper to the “public world” (i.e., art and politics). It is in this context that she enthusiastically cites Kant’s suggestion in the Critique of Judgment that:

The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. This means … that such judgment must liberate itself from the “subjective private conditions,” that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are only privately held opinions, but which are not fit to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm.” Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 220.

8. Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 41, 40; emphasis added.

9. Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatischer Verlag Anstalt, 1933), 32.

10. Cited in The Heidegger Controversy, 47.