Denken ist die Einschränkung auf einen Gedanken, der einst wie ein Stern am Himmel der Welt stehen bleibt.1
More than 200 years ago, astronomers speculated that a star of sufficient size would, owing to its gravitational pull, absorb rather than emit light and would therefore exert an enormous influence while remaining, literally, invisible.2 Today, such is the role of Heidegger’s philosophy in France. Like a massive, yet rarely visible dark star, Heidegger shapes and determines the nature and course of French philosophical debate. As Michael Roth has stated, “Heidegger’s influence on French philosophy can scarcely be overestimated.”3
In an earlier work,4 I studied the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism. This book continues the concern with the relation between Heidegger’s theory and his politics through a self-contained, independent inquiry into the French reception of Heidegger’s thought. We need to understand, since it is by no means evident, the process leading to the emergence of a philosophical theory linked to Nazism as the dominant view in the basically humanist French philosophical tradition in postwar France. And we need to grasp the background that makes possible the recent, strange claim of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the most important French students of Heidegger, that “Nazism is a humanism.”5
Study of the French reception of Heidegger’s theory is interesting for three main reasons. First, it offers an occasion to delineate some main aspects of the French philosophical tradition, in particular its deep humanist commitment, extending over centuries, that is crucial to the reception of Heidegger’s theory in France. Second, it represents a special case of the wider, but little understood relation of philosophy to the history of philosophy. We simply do not know how philosophy relates to the philosophical tradition, nor how philosophical theories are taken up in the later discussion. Third, it provides an opportunity to learn something important about Heidegger’s theory through study of its French reception. Simply put, this book contends that in the period after the Second World War, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy, the main “French” philosopher; and it further contends that for the most part the French reception of Heidegger’s theory, to begin with as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism, is systematically mistaken.
The impact of Heidegger’s theory in France since the end of the Second World War is comparable to Kant’s in Germany after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason toward the end of the eighteenth century. Some philosophers were uninterested in Kant’s theory and a few opposed it. But for the most part, it dominated the immediate post-Kantian discussion in German philosophy. Some French philosophers are uninterested in Heidegger’s theory and others reject it; but for more than half a century it has continued to exert a decisive influence in French philosophy that still gives no clear signs of abating.
The nature of Heidegger’s philosophical dominance in France after the Second World War can be suggested through a Kantian concept. In a famous passage, Kant employs the astronomical metaphor of the Copernican Revolution to describe the central organizing function of the subject with respect to the objects of possible experience and knowledge.6 If to an increasing extent since the end of the war Heidegger has become the master thinker of French philosophy, if Heidegger’s theory is central to French philosophy today, if it forms the horizon in which French philosophy formulates its problems and seeks their solutions, then it is literally comparable to the Kantian subject, the transcendental unity of apperception, in transmitting its categories to the debate, in structuring the French philosophical discussion.
Heidegger’s philosophical importance is mainly due to his brilliant early work, Being and Time. When this book appeared in 1927, its genuine importance was quickly recognized, and its author was propelled to the center of the philosophical stage almost before the ink was dry on its pages. Otto Pöggeler compares the appearance of this treatise to a flash of lightning that illuminated the philosophical landscape in a new way so that things could no longer remain as before.7 When Alexandre Koyré introduced the first French translation of Heidegger’s texts in 1931, he contended that “[Heidegger’s] ‘philosophy of existence’ would not only determine a new stage of the development of Western philosophy but would form the departure point for an entirely new cycle.”8
Koyré’s contention can be read as a prediction that actually came true in France. An even more radical view is passionately embraced by certain of Heidegger’s French followers. François Fédier, one of the French philosophers closest to Heidegger’s thought and since Jean Beaufret’s death one of Heidegger’s most tenacious French defenders against the view that his philosophy and his Nazism are directly related,9 contends that French philosophy is essentially Heideggerian: “It is very simple: the interest for philosophy today is inseparable from the interest for Heidegger. It follows that if there is a survival of philosophy in France, it is in strict relation [étroitement en rapport] to the gigantic work that Heidegger has carried out in this century.”10 It is, then, hardly surprising that so many French philosophers, convinced that Heidegger’s theory is central to philosophy, perceived the renewed controversy about his Nazism, following the appearance of Victor Farías’s study in 1987,11 as an attack on French philosophy.
To point out the French interest in Heidegger’s theory is not yet to address the problem as to how to proceed. The two main possible approaches are contextualism and anticontextualism. Philosophical anticontextualists take their cue from the traditional philosophical conception of knowledge as absolute. Absolute knowledge is unlimited in any way, for instance with respect to the cognitive capacities of human beings, their relation to a historical or conceptual context, and so on. Such writers as Descartes, Kant and Edmund Husserl argue that knowledge is in time but not of time, not temporally limited. Others, such as Hegel, Karl Marx, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, insist that claims to know are not only in time but of time, hence temporally limited.
Contextualists insist that we consider the relation of ideas to context in order to understand and evaluate them. Anticontextualists hold that we can do all these things without examining the link of theory to context. Con-textualists hold that if we fail to consider context we arrive at a very different and often erroneous understanding of theories, for instance Heidegger’s theory, as when we fail to see Heidegger’s theory against the background of his enthusiasm for National Socialism in the context of the later Weimar Republic. Anticontextualists tend to eschew the relation of texts to context in order to concentrate on the texts themselves. Contextualists think that such information leads to a very different understanding of the texts. Anticontextualists, such as Jacques Derrida and many French Heideggerians, tend to engage in ever more elaborate scrutiny of the texts while neglecting information that contextualists maintain is essential to their interpretation. Anticontextualists regard contextualists as falling into sociology of knowledge, as devoting insufficient attention to textual study for which they substitute the gathering of textually peripheral information.
Contextualism, the approach of this book, is widely employed. Arthur Lovejoy, for instance, appeals to this doctrine in an essay on William James when he writes that “All philosophies … are the result of the interaction of a temperament (itself partly molded by a historical situation) with impersonal logical considerations arising out of the nature of the problem with which man’s reason is confronted.”12
In the Heidegger debate, anticontextualism is widespread on two levels: in the reading of Heidegger’s theory as utterly different from, hence incomparable with, the prior philosophical tradition, and with respect to his Nazism. Heidegger’s turning to Nazism has been known for more than half a century. Yet efforts are still under way to save if not the Nazi Heidegger at least the philosopher Heidegger, typically by insisting on a strict separation between Heidegger’s theory and his Nazism, on a distinction in kind between Heidegger the great philosopher and Heidegger the ordinary Nazi.13
Heidegger was, and on some interpretations remained, a Nazi even after he turned away from real National Socialism.14 With respect to his Nazi turning, the controversy about how to approach Heidegger’s theory, more precisely the relation between his life and thought, divides his defenders and critics. His defenders like to argue that his life and thought are separable and separate, and that his thought does not depend in any basic way on his life. They view his thought as untarnished by, even as unrelated to, his life, including his Nazi turning. His critics tend to argue that his life and thought are inseparable, and that his thought cannot be understood without understanding his life, in particular his endorsement of Nazism.
Those who hold that Heidegger’s thought is not affected by his politics — in practice many important Heidegger scholars, whose careers not incidentally depend on their grasp of Heidegger’s writings, but also others whose relation to Heidegger’s thought is more distant — like to diminish or even to disregard his political commitment as a factor in the comprehension of his thought. Richard Rorty, for instance, the self-described liberal ironist concerned to reduce human suffering, surprisingly regards Heidegger’s theory, or the theory of someone apparently unconcerned with human suffering, as relevant to this task.15
Some observers deny that Heidegger’s thought after his turning to Nazism can be understood without reference to the turbulent context in which it arose. Yet others consider his writings without reference to their context. And others, still more extreme, argue that to do otherwise, even to attempt to understand Heidegger’s writings in the context of his political commitment, is to make it impossible to understand them at al1.16
Yet any effort to “save” Heidegger’s theory by reading the texts without reference to their context, by turning away from his politics, is doubly problematic: for it “saves” his theory through an anticontextualist maneuver only at the cost of violating his own contextualist commitment; and it provides a properly “sanitized” reading of his theory that conceals more than it reveals, and finally misconstrues the theory it claims to uncover.
The approach of this book will be resolutely contextualist for two reasons. First, contextualism is specifically appropriate in Heidegger’s case since, although he does not use the term, Heidegger is himself a contextualist. In Being and Time,he proposes a theory of Dasein, understood as existence, in order to study being as time. He thinks understanding through its existential roots in the preconceptual surrounding world. For Heidegger, assertions of all kinds are based in interpretation; and interpretation is grounded in understanding that, with state of mind and discourse, is one of the fundamental ways in which human being is in the world.17 Human being’s grasp of itself and its surroundings in terms of itself, what Heidegger calls its disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), literally depends on the fact that it is understanding situated in the world. For Heidegger, understanding is always and necessarily situated, literally inseparable from the context in which it arises. It follows that if Heidegger’s political turning is to be defended or even understood, this must be done on contextualist grounds. It further follows that the widespread effort to interpret or to defend Heidegger’s theory from an anticontextualist perspective is misguided on strictly Heideggerian grounds.
Second, this book is contextualist since any other approach, in particular an anticontextualist strategy, would be incompatible with its task of understanding the French reception of Heidegger’s thought. French philosophers, like others, are attracted to Heidegger’s theory because of its philosophical power that no one denies. Yet there are a number of factors intrinsic to the French situation that need to be elucidated in order to understand, not why French philosophers are interested in Heidegger’s theory, but rather why they are so interested, arguably more interested than philosophers elsewhere, and why their interest has taken shape in the way that it has. On methodological grounds there seems to be no other way to understand how and why Heidegger’s theory was received in France as it was than through a careful account of some main features of French philosophy. Those who desire a detailed discussion of Heidegger’s texts, certainly a legitimate concern, will need to look elsewhere since his writings will be discussed only to the extent that they bear on their French reception. It is easy to anticipate that many of those committed to Heidegger’s thought will find the critical remarks scattered throughout this essay to be trivial, based on an insufficient grasp of the master’s thought. Yet this discussion may satisfy those who are concerned with the troubling question of how an apparent philosophical genius who was drawn to Nazism has continued to attract attention among many philosophers who do not share his political views, above all those working in the humanist tradition of French philosophy.
Heidegger and French philosophy came together through a double movement in which he turned toward French philosophy and the latter turned toward his theory. Both movements require explanation, and neither can be explained without reference to the context that frames the texts. When he wrote Being and Time and even afterwards, Heidegger was uninterested in French philosophy and deeply critical of Descartes’s position that has long been central in the French debate. His turn toward French philosophy, which cannot be explained through his prior thought, can only be explained through his own difficult existential situation at the end of the Second World War. Similarly, we need to consider the nature of French philosophy in order to understand why, immediately after the Second World War, it turned toward the difficult theory of an obscure German thinker widely known to have been an enthusiastic Nazi.
The Heideggerian turning of French philosophy can be characterized in language now in vogue as “overdetermined.” French philosophy has long been unusually receptive to Heidegger’s theory for a number of reasons, including its continued strong link to religion, especially to Roman Catholicism, which appeared to find a distant echo in the theory of a former seminarian; its traditional investment in Cartesianism that Heidegger opposed, which in turn made his theory attractive in the French context striving to break its traditional Cartesian bonds; the widespread French philosophical concern with phenomenology, particularly the Hegelian and Husserlian positions, which created interest in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, a form of phenomenology, and so on.
Like the French political structure, French philosophy is highly centralized. French philosophical centralization is manifest in the phenomenon of the master thinker, someone who tends to dominate the debate for a period, in Descartes’s case over hundreds of years. Beside Heidegger, there have been a number of other master thinkers in French culture in this century, including Henri Bergson, Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean-Paul Sartre. And perhaps most extravagantly of all, there is Jacques Lacan, the Freudian psychoanalyst, who has been described in a nearly untranslatable phrase as le maître absolu.’18 From this perspective, Heidegger is merely the latest in a line of “French” master thinkers, not all of whom wrote in French, were French in origin or even French at all.
Another factor is the traditional French philosophical concern with subjectivity going back to Descartes or even earlier to Michel de Montaigne. The opposition between those committed to Cartesian and post-Cartesian views of subjectivity is strikingly apparent in a debate between Michel Foucault, who treats the subject as a concept to be discarded,19 and Jacques Derrida, who affirms that the lesson of Foucault’s supposedly superficial reading of Descartes is that one cannot escape from the Cartesian framework.20 Heidegger’s concern with subjectivity is a constant theme in his position: in the approach to being through the analysis of Dasein dominant in his early view, and in the later turn away from subjectivity through an effort to decenter the subject, which was influential in the French structuralist movement.
These and other factors are certainly important. Yet perhaps the single most important factor for understanding Heidegger’s extraordinary French reception derives from the persistent French philosophical commitment to humanism broadly conceived. The humanist revival of classical studies (studia humanitatis) in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was accompanied by the development of a philosophy of human being that is particularly strong in France. Not only the writings of literary figures like Rabelais, but a long series of French philosophical theories, going back beyond Jean Antoine Condorcet to Descartes and Montaigne, and continuing to the present, turn on the problem of human being. This theme is widely visible in recent French philosophy: in Alexandre Kojève’s celebrated interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as philosophical anthropology,21 in Sartre’s famous lecture Existentialism is a Humanism,22and in various forms of French structuralist antihumanism due to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jean Piaget, Louis Althusser, and others.
The French Heidegger reception, which began in the late 1920s and early 1930s, received a strong impetus in Kojève’s famous lectures (1933–1939) on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Others influential in the initial phase of the French Heidegger reception include Koyré, Henry Corbin, Georges Gurvitch, Emmanuel Lévinas, and later Jean Wahl. Kojève, who insisted on close continuity between the views of Hegel and Heidegger, influenced the initial reception of Heidegger’s theory as philosophical anthropology that finally peaked in Sartre’s famous lecture after the war. Yet this initial way of reading Heidegger’s theory was misleading, as Heidegger himself pointed out. For despite contrary indications in Being and Time, and following Husserl, he distinguished sharply between his theory and the sciences of human being of whatever kind, including philosophical anthropology.
We can differentiate between the first and second stages of the French Heidegger reception. The second stage was clearly begun through the publication of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” appropriately enough a letter to the French on how to read his writings. It was sustained through the determined efforts of Jean Beaufret, its addressee and from the mid-1940s until his death in 1982 Heidegger’s most important French student, to transform the view of this text into the French view of Heidegger.
Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is indispensable to appreciate the phenomenally rapid rise to prominence of his theory at the end of the Second World War. In this text, Heidegger distances himself from Sartre’s uneasy humanist embrace through a description of his own theory as a new, viable, postmetaphysical form of humanism. His rejection of Sartre’s and all other traditional views of humanism in favor of a supposedly new humanism attracted considerable attention to his theory in France immediately after the most inhumane of wars, when humanism was a theme on everyone’s mind.
Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” hinges on the underdetermined concept of the turning (Kehre) mentioned in this text. This concept, which has acquired an important role in the interpretation of Heidegger’s later thought,23 can be interpreted from philosophical and political perspectives. Philosophically, the concept refers to the evolution of the original position that takes place in the later writings of all thinkers, including Heidegger, who are not content merely to repeat themselves. Politically, it suggests a turning away, away from all that, away from National Socialism, toward which Heidegger publicly turned and which he served as rector of the University of Freiburg in Hitler’s Germany. Yet it is misleading to read the supposed turning in Heidegger’s thought as a further turning away from Nazism. If Heidegger turned away from National Socialism as it existed after he resigned his post as rector of the University of Freiburg in 1934, it was only to transfer his allegiance to an ideal form of National Socialism — a concept that, in his view, the German Nazis failed to put into practice — that he never abandoned.24 Heidegger’s apparently constant fidelity to the allegedly misunderstood “inner truth and greatness of this movement”,25 as he put it in 1953, well after the end of the war, must be kept in mind in interpreting his later writings.
Heidegger’s rise to prominence in French philosophy after the war was due not only to the impact of his “Letter on Humanism” but also to the tireless efforts of Beaufret on his behalf. Many other thinkers, such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx have had committed disciples. In an extended sense, as Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, the entire Western tradition is the work of those toiling in Plato’s shadow.26 Yet perhaps no thinker — probably not even Heidegger, whose disciples are notoriously ready to excuse any possible defect in his life and thought, even to the point of presenting a consciously engaged Nazi as simply naive — ever had a closer disciple than did Heidegger in Beaufret. Over a period of more than thirty years, Beaufret, who quickly acquired a preeminent position in French Heidegger studies, devoted himself to Heidegger’s life and thought in a way that has few if any precedents in the philosophical tradition and that contributed greatly to Heidegger’s growing importance in French philosophy.
There is a distinction between a retrospective analysis of factors ingredient in the French philosophical turn toward Heidegger’s theory and the influence of that theory within contemporary French thought. The stunning impact of Heidegger’s position in the contemporary French philosophical discussion will be documented below in two ways. One way is through attention to some among the many French thinkers concerned with Heidegger’s theory. These include those devoted to its exegesis, those dependent on Heideggerian approaches in studies of phenomenology and the history of philosophy, and those whose own views are crucially dependent on Heideggerian insights, most prominently Derrida. The sheer number and quality of those concerned with Heidegger’s theory, and the volume of their writings on that theory, is an impressive indication of its influence.
The influence of Heidegger’s theory in French philosophy is further apparent in the way it has tended to shape French philosophical consideration of the complex issues arising from the turning of one of the main philosophers in this century to National Socialism. No treatment of the French Heidegger reception is complete that ignores the efforts of French thinkers since the war to come to grips with the link between Heidegger the ordinary Nazi and Heidegger the great philosopher, between the political engagement and the philosophical theory, from a point located within the thoroughly Heideggerian framework of the French discussion. As the following discussion will show, the widespread French philosophical commitment to Heidegger’s thought restrains the ability of French thinkers to analyze the link between Heidegger’s thought and his political engagement, between his fundamental ontology and his Nazism. And as the discussion will further show, recent efforts by important French Heideggerians such as Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe in effect to minimize the political damage to Heidegger’s thought continue to presuppose a mistaken reading of his early position as humanism.
The French Heidegger reception illustrates the way in which important theories are understood only much later if at all. There is a French reading of Heidegger’s theory, as of French philosophy itself, as humanist. Heidegger himself contributed to widespread misapprehensions about his theory as humanism in two systematically ambiguous, but crucial texts: in § 10 of Being and Time, which indicates that his fundamental ontology both is and cannot be philosophical anthropology; and two decades later in the “Letter on Humanism”, which suggests that his position is a postmetaphysical humanism.
The correction to the first reading of his theory, its misreading as anthropological humanism, was provided in its later reading as nonanthropological humanism, which developed after the war under the influence of the “Letter on Humanism.” This later reading, intended to correct the initial reading, only does so through yet another misreading of Heidegger’s theory. In his “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger condemns humanism while touting his own theory as a new humanism. Yet if humanism is metaphysics, if his own theory is no longer metaphysics, then it cannot be humanism.
It follows that the frequent French reading of Heidegger’s theory as humanism, which has been widely influential, particularly in the American Heidegger discussion, is in fact a misreading of his thought. The predominant French reading of Heidegger’s theory depicts it early and late, or as he later cast it himself, at least after the so-called turning in his thought, as a new, deeper form of humanism. Yet this is a demonstrable misreading, possible only because his own antihumanism, or more precisely his indifference to human being and humanist concerns, as illustrated in his later commitment to an ideal form of Nazism, has so often been minimized or even gone unnoticed.
We can end with a word about the nature and intended audience for the present study. Heidegger’s work has led to a massive literature, often technical, mainly aimed at Heidegger specialists, a literature that is frequently devoid of criticism of any kind. On the contrary, this book will be critical and as nontechnical and accessible as possible. Naturally, Heidegger specialists will be unhappy with and unconvinced by the discussion, which they will find uninformed, superficial, or both. That much can be safely anticipated. Yet it is normal to be critical of another philosopher, to attempt to determine what, to paraphrase Benedetto Croce’s famous approach to Hegel, is living and dead in their theories.27 Indeed, it is especially important to be critical of the link between Heidegger’s philosophical theory and his Nazism since so many writers believe that this link is unimportant or even desire to overlook it on the grounds that Heidegger is an important, even a great philosopher. But I am convinced that unless we try to grasp Heidegger’s theory in the context of its times, we cannot understand it.
In this sense, the issues that this book raises are not the concerns of a few specialists but an illustration of the much broader problem of how to comprehend and evaluate ideas in the context of their times. Accordingly, the book is not intended for the Heidegger specialist, but for intelligent men and women of good will, philosophers and nonphilosophers, who, toward the end of our troubled century, are legitimately concerned by the link between philosophy, or philosophers, whose craft is allegedly indispensable for the good life, and the outstanding illustration of evil in our time.