8

HEIDEGGER’S POLITICS AND FRENCH PHILOSOPHY

This is the second of two chapters1 intended to provide a concrete account of Heidegger’s influence in recent French philosophy. The preceding chapter provided a selective account of the impact of Heidegger’s thought in the postwar French debate. Heidegger’s theory influences recent French philosophy on three levels, including the small army of philosophers occupied with the exegesis of his thought; the frequent tendency to appropriate Heideggerian insights in the reading of various theories in the philosophical tradition; and as a source of insight informing the positions of leading French philosophers.

The present chapter will further demonstrate the influence of Heidegger’s theory in postwar French philosophy through an account of the current state of the French phase of the ongoing controversy raised by Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism. The French phase of the discussion of this problem will be understood in a wide sense as including not only French writers but also those occasional non-French participants, such as Karl Löwith, a German, Georg Lukâcs, a Hungarian, and above all Victor Farías, a Chilean, whose intervention provoked a heated response from French writers.

AN OUTLINE OF THE PROBLEM

The problem posed by Heidegger’s political turning is unique. It is without parallel in the prior philosophical tradition; no other major philosopher turned to National Socialism. Even Lukâcs’s support of Stalinism,2 which might be said to mirror Heidegger’s endorsement of German fascism, does not really compare for a variety of reasons:

although an important thinker, arguably the most important Marxist philosopher, Lukâcs is less important;

although long committed to orthodox Marxism, his Stalinist episode came to an end through explicit criticism of Stalin whereas Heidegger, who never clearly broke with Nazism, despite vague claims by himself and his closest supporters that he did so, apparently remained committed at least to an ideal form of Nazism;

Lukâcs did not later organize an effort to conceal the nature and extent of his attachment to Stalinism as Heidegger did for his own continuing attachment to Nazism;

unlike Lukács, whose Stalinism has been routinely acknowledged and sharply criticized even by his close supporters,3 a number of Heidegger’s followers, most recently Nolte, have long sought to deflect any criticism based on Heidegger’s Nazism.

Heidegger’s decision to affiliate with National Socialism has been the topic of often heated discussion over many years that still continues.4 It is useful to distinguish between the facts as they are now known, a situation which is obviously subject to change as new material emerges, and Heidegger’s reaction to them. In a remark about a lecture course on Nietzsche, already noted, Heidegger claimed that the course itself was intended to confront National Socialism.5 Yet he never publicly distanced himself from Nazism. In 1945, he composed an article, published only posthumously, in which he claimed that his period as rector was meaningless.6 In an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel in 19667 that was withheld at his request until his death ten years later, he maintained that after 1934 he no longer made favorable statements about Nazism. Earlier favorable statements include his public endorsement of the Führerprinzip,in Heidegger’s version the acknowledgment that the Führer alone is “the source of all German reality and its law now and in the future”8 — after 1934.

On the basis of this scant information about what Heidegger thought and did on the political plane, there is a widespread view that after an initial enthusiasm he later turned against Nazism. This view of the matter, due to Heidegger himself, what we can call the official view, has since gained currency in the debate on his philosophy and his Nazism, and has been maintained in various ways by his closest supporters. Yet the facts do not support that interpretation.

Heidegger’s indication that his Nietzsche lectures were intended as a critique of National Socialism is contradicted by evidence of a continued enthusiasm that belies this claim. Statements apparently favorable to Nazism were removed from notes of later lecture courses when they were later published. Although textual interpretation is always subject to disagreement, a number of passages clearly indicate Heidegger’s continued commitment to Nazism well after the war. The most prominent and clearest example is a statement in a lecture course published with his cooperation in 1953: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the truth and greatness of this movement …”9

Observers have further been troubled by Heidegger’s continued silence about this entire period, including his silence about the Holocaust, and what even his closest followers have on occasion seen as his insensitivity to the problems of the Holocaust. Many writers have been especially bothered by Heidegger’s claim, excised from the published version of a lecture delivered in 1949, that “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” 10 The most obvious thing to say about Heidegger’s failure to distance himself from the Holocaust or even to take a clear position on the Holocaust is that from the perspective of his theory it was not possible to do so.11

The facts of the matter are not inherently controversial. The interpretation of the link between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and political action is exceedingly difficult and highly controversial. This interpretation, an important exercise in hermeneutics, has led to a special cottage industry in the Heidegger literature centered on this and allied problems. Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism raises problems on a least three distinct levels, including the interpretation of his thought, its reception in an already enormous and steadily growing literature, and the traditional, normative philosophical view of philosophy.

One problem concerns the link between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and his political engagement. Although certainly deplorable, it is not philosophically interesting to know that Heidegger became a Nazi since many other Germans, including the vast majority of the philosophers who remained in Germany during the war, joined the German Nazi party.12 Yet Heidegger was neither an ordinary German, since he was a philosopher, nor even an ordinary German philosopher. Obviously, he was distinguished from all the other German Nazis as the author of an unusually important philosophical theory. It becomes philosophically significant if a link can be shown between Heidegger’s philosophical position and his political commitment. It is important to know whether Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism follows from, or is in some way motivated by, his philosophical position; or whether, on the contrary, it is merely a contingent fact unrelated to or at least not dependent on his philosophical position.

A second cluster of problems concerns the reception of Heidegger’s turn to Nazism, including its reception in the French philosophical discussion. Heidegger had numerous grounds to disguise the reasons for as well as the extent of his adherence to National Socialism, including the understandable desire, in personally difficult circumstances, to conceal his continued adherence to his personal vision of Nazism even after real Nazism was defeated. Other factors arguably include his alleged personal moral weakness, the supposed “inauthenticity” of his life, and assorted character flaws.

In defense of Heidegger, one might argue that his life was inseparable from the difficult historical period in which he lived. This argument, which is possible on Heidegger’s behalf, although not necessarily convincing, is neither convincing nor even possible with respect to Heidegger’s later students, those who, after the war, turned to his thought. It is disturbing that at this late date, when so much is known about Heidegger’s political engagement, when sordid details have emerged about his denunciation of colleagues,13 so many writers interested in his thought are hesitant, reluctant, unwilling to take up the matter, concerned to warn against the very idea of studying the link between his thought and his political commitment.14

Such well informed writers as Jean Wahl believe that although we need to be aware of Heidegger’s political misdeeds, his thought can be separated from his Nazism.15 Yet Heidegger’s Nazism is not irrelevant but precisely relevant to an appreciation of his philosophical theory. It is always difficult to come to grips with a novel body of thought. Novel theories require a process of reception before they can be assimilated and evaluated. On occasion this process can extend over centuries, for instance in the ongoing efforts to come to comprehend Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology, to say nothing of his Science of Logic,surely the darkest work of German idealism. It is difficult enough to comprehend an important new theory; but it is impossible to do so if a fundamental, or even a significant, element in that theory is hidden from view. And it is difficult to take the Heidegger discussion seriously to the extent that it handles the problem of the relation of his philosophical thought and political commitment through such strategems as sheer denial, mere silence, or even admonitions not to raise the problem at all.

A third set of problems concerns the normative self-image of philosophy. There is a longstanding controversy within philosophy about its social relevance.16 This controversy opposes those who maintain that philosophy is socially irrelevant and those who maintain the contrary opinion. On one view of the matter, philosophy is the source of truth and knowledge in an absolute sense and absolutely indispensable for the good life. This flattering view of philosophy is placed in jeopardy by the political engagements of such powerful thinkers as Lukdcs the Stalinist but above all by Heidegger the Nazi. A philosopher cannot be indifferent to the fact that an apparent philosophical genius like Heidegger adhered to Nazism. There is an obvious paradox that reflects on philosophy’s flattering view of its own social relevance. For ordinary statements such as that Heidegger is a great philosopher, that philosophy is socially indispensable or at least socially useful, and that National Socialism is evil, the clearest example of absolute evil in our time, statements that appear true in isolation, are clearly incompatible with each other.

FRENCH DISCUSSION OF HEIDEGGER’S NAZISM

At the close of the Weimar Republic, many Germans, including many German intellectuals, turned to Nazism as a purported third way between the twin evils of liberalism and Bolshevism. Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism was not exceptional, exceptional only in virtue of his unusual philosophical status as the author of an unusually important philosophical theory. Like the general banality of evil, Heidegger’s Nazism was and seemed to be unremarkable. It only began to attract attention after the war when he was called to account for his actions and sought to defend himself. It is at that point that a philosophical debate about Heidegger’s Nazism began that initially was largely conducted among members of the philosophical corporation, a rather exclusive society composed of those masters of blindness and insight. It is only recently, in the wake of the publication of Victor Farías’s study, Heidegger and Nazism (1987)17 that the debate has been brought to the attention of the wider intellectual public.

The problem — roughly how to understand the link between Heidegger’s philosophical position and his allegiance to National Socialism — is simple to state. Yet its analysis, like that of most philosophical problems, is endlessly complex as each facet of the argument calls forth a counterargument. The resolution of philosophical concerns, reputedly like psychoanalysis, is interminable.

As an aid in grasping a complex controversy, a distinction can be drawn between Heidegger’s critics, who think that the problem is real and significant, and his defenders, who think there is less than meets the eye. Heidegger’s critics discern more than an accidental relation between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and political commitment, and hence criticize Heidegger’s thought for what seem to be its political consequences. His defenders maintain that Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics have no more than an accidental relation so that his political misadventures reflect neither favorably but certainly not unfavorably on his philosophical position.

This disagreement illustrates the venerable concern with the relation of theory and practice that has aroused widespread discussion but no agreement throughout the philosophical tradition. The many variations put forward in the debate on Heidegger’s Nazism can be collected around two main assertions: either the relation between Heidegger’s thought and his political commitment, more precisely between fundamental ontology and National Socialism, is purely contingent, in which case there is no substantive problem, certainly no specifically philosophical problem; or the relation derives from his philosophy, in which case there is a serious philosophical problem on various levels, beginning with the way that his commitment to Nazism, on the assumption that Nazism is evil, reflects on his philosophy. Although Heidegger never wrote an ethics, in fact rejected the very idea of the philosophical analysis of values,18 there would be a clearly ethical problem, whatever the philosophical interest of his theory, if it could be shown that his philosophical theory is linked in some basic way to fascist politics.

It is a matter of fact that up to now the debate on Heidegger’s Nazism has mainly occurred in France. In retrospect, the French debate on Heidegger and politics occurred in three main phases or waves.19 We can distinguish between the factual issue of who intervened in the debate, at what point, in which way, and what, for want of a better term, we can call the dialectic of the ensuing discussion.

The initial wave occurred in 1946 and 1947 in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, a leading French intellectual journal, founded and edited by Sartre and his close associates. The discussion included contributions by Karl Löwith, Maurice de Gandillac and Alfred de Towarnicki. Löwith, who was Heidegger’s first graduate student and sometime colleague, is well known for his own philosophical work. Gandillac, who may have been the first French colleague to come in contact with Heidegger after the war, was later a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Towarnicki is a journalist who was later close to Beaufret. They were answered by Eric Weil, a former assistant to Ernst Cassirer, and Alphonse De Waelhens. Weil, an emigrant to France from Nazi Germany, later had a distinguished career in French philosophy. De Waelhens, a Belgian phenomenologist, published the first French language study of Heidegger in 1942.20 The discussion temporarily ended with rejoinders by Löwith and De Waelhens.

With respect to ongoing discussion of the problem, the importance of this initial wave of the discussion resides in the pioneering identification of some main issues and strategies that run throughout later phases of the ensuing debate. We can differentiate between contingentist and necessitarian analyses, roughly the claims that the link between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and his Nazism is merely contingent or not contingent but in some sense necessary.

In the first stage of the discussion, the contingentist reading of the relation between Heidegger’s thought and politics is represented by Gandillac and Towarnicki who maintain that Heidegger was politically naive and only unknowingly attracted to National Socialism. They imply that Heidegger was drawn to Nazism because of his basically untutored lack of awareness of the outside world. This line of argument relies on the familiar view of the philosopher as uninterested in or at least unaware of social reality, a view illustrated early on by Aristotle’s account of Thales’s supposed fall into a well while looking at the stars, appropriate for a thinker who claims that all is water. On this view, the philosopher is competent only in the library. A similar view has recently been restated by Gadamer, who claims that a philosopher not only has no comparative advantage, in fact is actually at a disadvantage; in understanding politics.21

In the initial phase of the discussion, the contrary, necessitarian reading is represented by Löwith. He holds that Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism is explicable only through a main principle of his position: existence reduced to itself reposes only on itself in the face of nothing. This is precisely the view that Koyré identified as Heidegger’s basic contribution in his introduction to the first French translation of a Heideggerian text.22

In response to Löwith, De Waelhens unveils a main defensive strategy in asserting that Heidegger’s detractors are insufficiently familiar with his theory. From this angle of vision, finally only specialists in Heideggerian exegesis, precisely those concerned only to explain but not to judge the master’s thought, are capable of evaluating it.

In practice, most scholars of Heidegger’s thought steadfastly reject any effort to associate his political convictions with his philosophy. Criticisms raised by such obvious defectors from the Heideggerian fold as Thomas Sheehan,23 Rainer Marten,24 Michael Zimmerman,25 and to a lesser degree Otto Pöggeler26 and Dieter Thomä27 are countered by such equally knowledgeable Heidegger defenders as Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann in Germany, in the United States by William Richardson, and above all in France by Beaufret and a host of others, including François Fédier and Pierre Aubenque, and in a restricted sense Jacques Derrida and Philippe LacoueLabarthe. In France, to the best of my knowledge at present Dominique Janicaud is the only philosopher strongly identified with Heidegger28 who has taken an openly critical stance.29

In the space of a year, with the exception of Löwith’s paper, the first wave unfolded as a calm debate among French colleagues. In retrospect, the very calmness of the initial phase of the French discussion was surprising in a country that was defeated in the Second World War by Nazi Germany with which Heidegger clearly identified. In comparison to the compact, civil, well defined nature of the first wave, the second wave of the French discussion was more amorphous, less compact, more international, and considerably more strident. Its limits can arbitrarily be fixed between 1948, when Lukâcs’s belligerent, even bellicose defense of Marxism against the perceived threat of existentialism appeared in French, and 1968 when Jean-Michel Palmier’s examination of Heidegger’s political writings, the first such volume in French, was published.30Ó Lukács criticized Heidegger’s Being and Time as prefascist in the initial edition,31 before expounding this criticism at greater length in a discussion of the “Letter on Humanism” later added in an appendix.32

In the initial wave of the French debate, the normally abstract character of philosophical discussion is compounded by relatively sparse reference to the relevant Heideggerian writings and their complete inaccessability in French translation. In the second wave, more than a dozen years later this lacuna was corrected by Jean-Pierre Faye. Faye, who was later derided by Beaufret as a mere so6iologist,33 published several Heideggerian texts relevant to any debate on the philosophical import of Heidegger’s political turn. These include Heidegger’s rectorial address, his public homage for Albert Leo Schlageter, a German executed for terrorist acts who was later transformed into a kind of Nazi saint,34 and Heidegger’s famous remark on supposedly authentic National Socialism.35

Obviously, academic careers were at risk in the commitment to the theory of a major philosopher. Since the personal stakes were high, it is not surprising that the second phase of the French debate on Heidegger’s Nazism was tough, even unyielding, at a point in time before the relevent materials were readily accessible. It quickly assumed a more personal, ad hominem character when pertinent Heideggerian writings were made available in translation. The intensity of the debate was heightened by Faye and Fédier, who represent opposing points of view. Faye noted close parallels between Heidegger’s language in the translated materials and Nazi terminology, due to the alleged Nazification of the German language. François Fédier rebutted perceived attacks on Heidegger.

At this point in the mid-1960s, Heidegger had for all intents and purposes already been naturalized as a “French” thinker. Fédier’s defense was directed against writings due to three foreign writers: Guido Schneeberger, Theodor W. Adorno and Paul Hühnerfeld.36 With the possible exception of Pierre Aubenque, at this late date, after the death of Beaufret, Fédier remains as the main, perhaps even the only important, proponent of the idea that from the appropriate perspective every objection raised against Heidegger’s politics can be explained away.

In hindsight, the second wave of the debate produced an extension of the expert defense first raised by De Waelhens. This is the view that only a Heidegger expert is entitled to criticize Heidegger. In France, where mastery of the German texts provides a distinct comparative advantage, acceptance of this view has often led to the attempt to show that critics of Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism are insufficiently versed in German, or in Heidegger’s admittedly peculiar use of the German language. In appealing to this strategy, Heidegger’s defenders are guided by the conviction that when we examine the texts it becomes apparent that what his critics have seen as problematic is only apparently so.37 Fédier, for instance, routinely poses as someone who knows German in the appropriate manner, presumably but improbably better than such native German speakers critical of Heidegger as Löwith, or later Pöggeler, Marten and Thomä. Fédier suggests that a “real” translation of the rectorial address will remove the traces of Nazism injected into it.38

Heidegger’s deep influence in French philosophy has led to an explicit tendency, naturally strongest among Heideggerians, to identify French philosophy with Heidegger’s thought. Fédier, at present Heidegger’s most uncritical representative in France after Beaufret’s death, spoke for others as well in stating that “the interest for philosophy today is inseparable from the interest for Heidegger.”39

The third, most recent wave of the French debate began with the publication of Victor Farías’s study Heidegger et le nazisme in French in the fall of 1987. Numerous French philosophers regarded this work as tantamount to an attack on French philosophy. Hugo Ott, the author of a critical biography of Heidegger, accurately captured this reaction in the observation that x“in France a sky has fallen in — the sky of the philosophers.40Ó This reaction is understandable for two reasons: the extreme extent to which French philosophy since the end of the war has continued to identify with Heidegger’s thought, and the well known French reluctance even now to reopen wounds caused by the war. It is common knowledge in France that at the end of the war there was in effect a tacit agreement among, representatives of all political tendencies not to address the French defeat in 1940 and not to address the moral failures of the collaborationist Vichy government.41 This desire has led to what has often been seen as a French inability to confront this phase of French history. An example among many is the recent decision of the French court system, later reversed, to reject an indictment for crimes against humanity brought against Paul Touvier, a French war criminal who was twice condemned to death in absentia and later pardoned.42

Since the third wave of the French debate may still be under way, any description must remain provisional, subject to change, as further publications emerge. What is clear is that it contains two subphases: an initial phase lasting several months, including an almost immediate, passionate, often raucous and strident series of reactions to Farías’s study by writers who attacked and defended the book, Heidegger, and even each other; and a later subphase, still under way, in which scholarly studies have been appearing in response to the renewed controversy. Farías’s study obviously changes the debate on the link between Heidegger’s thought and political commitment. It transforms what was initially a staid, austere discussion, mainly between philosophers, differing from other such discussions only in that its theme was unusually important, into what for academic circles, even for French academic circles, is a very violent debate.

This part of the third wave was mainly played out in daily newspapers, as well as weekly and biweekly journals. It was provoked, even incited by the sharply worded preface to Farías’s book by Christian Jambet, a former nouveau philosophe. Through a reference to the film Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), he drew a connection between Heidegger’s thought and Nazi concentration camps: “Heidegger has the merit of making ontology the question of our time. But how can we accept that philosophy, born of Socrates’s trial for leading a just life, ends in the twilight where Heidegger wanted to see the end of the gods, but which was only the time of Night and Fog?”43

The other subphase of the third wave is represented by a remarkable series of books devoted to the theme of Heidegger’s thought and his politics. In retrospect, this phase can be held to begin in 1975 in the publication of a solid study by Pierre Bourdieu, of Heidegger’s so-called political ontology against the background of the historical context. Farías’s book was published in October 1987. After the shock caused by this event that rapidly became l'affaire Farías, Bourdieu quickly updated his work.44

In an extraordinary fit of French philosophical creativity, in the short period running from that October 1987 until May 1988, unusually short by philosophical standards, no less than five other books appeared on the general theme of Heidegger and politics. These books were due respectively to Lyotard,45 Ferry and Renaut,46 Fédier,47 Derrida,48 and Lacoue-Labarthe.49 Since that time only Janicaud’s book50 on this theme has been published, although occasional journal articles have continued to appear as the controversy continues to simmer.

MAIN ASPECTS OF THE THIRD WAVE

Farfas’s controversial study forms an important link in the ongoing French debate on Heidegger’s Nazism. It presents a form of the more general necessitarian thesis advanced earlier by others, such as Löwith, in the French Heidegger debate. Like Löwith, Farfas sees a relation of continuity between Heidegger’s life and times, his thought, and his political engagement.

Yet Farfas’s discussion differs in several main ways from Löwith’s. One difference is that he is considerably less successful in drawing attention to, and certainly less able to analyze, the claimed continuity between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and politics. Another difference is that through extensive archival research he was able to discover numerous, relevant details. Together with Ott’s important biographical study, the result is to disclose a fuller, more rounded — and, in virtue of the comparatively richer detail, particularly in Ott’s work, an even more disturbing — picture of the relation of Heidegger’s political commitment and philosophical theory to his sociocultural background in a small town in Southwestern Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then there is the difference in tone between Löwith’s sober discussion, on the usual high plane of philosophical abstraction, intended to link Heidegger’s theory of being and his commitment to Nazism, and Farias’s similar effort, in what has been described as the style of a criminal dossier. As a result, Farias has become a kind of official enemy for Heidegger’s defenders in which attacks on his book tend to replace a careful consideration of the many issues arising from the link between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics.51

The new phase of the debate, its most concentrated, philosophically richest form to date, is to an important extent composed of a series of reactions to Farfas’s book. In this debate, the works by Lyotard on the one hand and Ferry and Renaut on the other address peripheral issues. Lyotard’s strangely vague book scores some points against other participants in the French debate concerning what he strangely insists is a French problem.52 This suggestion is correct if taken to imply that it is above all a topic that has attracted attention in France. Yet it is difficult to comprehend if it is meant to suggest that France or French philosophy were separately or collectively somehow responsible for the Heideggerian entanglement of philosophy and Nazism.

As in some of their earlier studies,53 the book by Ferry and Renaut is intended to call attention to a supposedly antihumanist tendency in recent French philosophy and French thought in general, based on a reading of structuralism as a form of antihumanism. Yet this line of argument is problematic. For instance, Ferry and Renaut fail to analyze or even to acknowledge the differences in the various, so-called structuralist views of subjectivity that lead to the questionable classification, say, of Foucault not only as a structuralist, an appellation he explicitly contests,54 but as an antihumanist.

The five remaining books can be grouped into three broad categories as variant analyses of the relation of Heidegger’s philosophical thought and of his politics as either contingent or necessary. In general terms, Fédier maintains that this relation is merely contingent whereas Bourdieu and later Janicaud independently argue that it is necessary. A compromise in the form of a more limited version of the necessitarian analysis is sketched in related fashion by both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida.

The allergy of orthodox Heideggerians to Sartre’s theory is matched, even exceeded, by their aversion to Farfas’s study. Fédier’s discussion consists of two parts: a lengthy attack intended to refute every significant objection raised by Farfas against Heidegger, and an alternative analysis intended to explain Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism in a way that does not incriminate his philosophical theory. In Sartrean terminology, we can say that Fédier attributes Farfas’s critique simply to bad faith. His own, alternative explanation innovates in introducing a form of scepticism to account for the supposed inability in 1933, when Heidegger joined the Nazi party, to foresee what it would later become.55 He strongly, but unconvincingly asserts that how Nazism would later evolve was clear only on September 1, 1939.56 Yet this line of argument is problematic since the likelihood that Nazism would develop as it in fact did was considerably clearer than, say, the famous Aristotelian problem of whether a sea battle will occur tomorrow.57 The main thrust of Nazism was already clear in the party program in 1920, restated in detail in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and elsewhere, and, as Heidegger later explicitly conceded, understood by Jews and “liberal” politicians.58 And if the standard for moral responsibility is anything resembling divine foreknowledge then no one, perhaps not even deus absconditus, is ever responsible for anything.

Bourdieu and Janicaud carry further the contextualist effort to understand Heidegger’s Nazi turning against his sociocultural background and his philosophical position. In retrospect, Bourdieu’s discussion that provided early, but important corrections on a number of details, including Heidegger’s anti-Semitism that can now no longer be denied,59 is doubly distinguished. One point is his methodological decision to refuse the distinction between philosophy and politics in favor of a double reading (double lecture) of Heideggerian texts. For Bourdieu, Heidegger’s texts are elaborated and must be read as “inseparably political and philosophical through the reference to two social spaces to which correspond two mental spaces.”60 Bourdieu’s refusal to isolate the philosophical and political components of Heidegger’s corpus enables him — this is the other point — to provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s thought against its sociocultural background. In this respect, he continues the task undertaken by Löwith, Farías, Ott and others, but rarely pursued in the French discussion, of providing a unitary interpretation of Heidegger’s life and thought.

Bourdieu, who relates the political and philosophical aspect of Heidegger’s corpus, is comparatively stronger in analyzing the former aspect. Janicaud, who also seeks to grasp Heidegger’s thought in its context, is comparatively stronger in analyzing the texts themselves. For Janicaud, Heidegger’s failure to elaborate a political doctrine — like many others in the French debate, such as Aubenque, he holds that Being and Time is not a political but an apolitical book61 — is philosophically and politically significant, leading to the effort to found an authentic politics.62 This effort is pursued in the rectorial address that Janicaud analyzes in detail. Janicaud sees the later Heidegger’s radicalization of his earlier thought, roughly the destinal theory of being announced in the “Letter on Humanism” and other later writings, as impeding an understanding of the lessons following from his turn to Nazism.63

On the deepest level, as Fichte recognized, philosophy is a matter of personal commitment prior to rational justification. For that reason, it is about as amenable to change through reasoned argument as is religious conviction. When so much is known — except for a few philosophical dinosaurs, such Heideggerian true believers as Beaufret, Fédier and Aubenque in France, Richardson in America, von Herrmann and from a different perspective Gadamer in Germany, or Vattimo in Italy — for even the most ardent Heideggerian it is now too late simply to maintain that Heidegger never did anything that could justify the objections raised against him or that those who criticize him are simply mediocre thinkers.64 In comparison, the works by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe represent a new effort by philosophers strongly influenced by Heidegger’s position to find a way to “save,” if not the man, or his entire theory, at least his later thought that has long been influential in French philosophical discussion.65

There are levels of possible Heideggerian interpretation of the link between his thought and politics, of which the first, suggested by Heidegger himself, is that his political episode is simply meaningless. Derrida and LacoueLabarthe, close students of Heidegger who disagree with him in regarding this episode as meaningful, exploit Heidegger’s suggestion of a turning in his thought to “save” his later thought.66

Heidegger suggests that through the radicalization of his concern with being he was led beyond metaphysics that is identical with philosophy, hence led beyond philosophy. This suggestion clearly bears on the proper interpretation of the continuity or discontinuity of Heidegger’s position as it develops over time. Where Heidegger sees continuity with difference in the development of his position through the later elaboration of his original beginning as the other beginning, Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe see difference without continuity, in other words a conceptual break. Their respective analyses turn on the reading of National Socialism as metaphysics — in Lacoue-Labarthe’s case as metaphysical humanism — and the supposition that Heidegger’s early thought, but not his later thought, was also metaphysical. From this angle of vision, each maintains that Heidegger’s Nazi turning followed from the metaphysical character of his early thought that is left behind in the turning.ó67 For both, as Heidegger turns away from metaphysics, he also turns away from National Socialism.

Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe both follow the same line of argument. Both attempt to “save” Heidegger’s later theory by reading it, against Heidegger’s own self-understanding, as reflecting a basic discontinuity. Both rest their defense of Heidegger’s later theory on the supposition of a break between Heidegger I and Heidegger II, between his early metaphysical theory and his later nonmetaphysical or postmetaphysical theory.

The line of analysis elaborated by Derrida is first stated by LacoueLabarthe who in turn later reworks it after it is taken up by Derrida. In a recent collection of papers,ó68 Lacoue-Labarthe maintains that the rectorial address is an effort to found the conservative Nazi political revolution in philosophy. Heidegger’s political engagement, leading to the collapse of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, was metaphysical, and his effort to lead National Socialism was basically spiritual.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s less radical version of the same basic strategy accords full responsibility to Heidegger for the link between fundamental ontology and Nazism based on the hegemony of the spiritual and philosophical over the political69 rooted in his early thought.70 To an even greater extent than Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe discerns a discontinuity between Heidegger’s early and later texts in which he supposedly broke with Nazism.71

According to Lacoue-Labarthe, the link between Nazism, humanism and the early Heideggerian theory is not difficult to discern. He goes so far, in a simply incredible statement, as simplistically to equate Nazism and humanism. Although philosophers have made all kinds of wild statements over the last two and half millenia, Lacoue-Labarthe, not to be outdone, straightforwardly claims that “Nazism is a humanism in that it rests on a determination of humanitas that it sees as more powerful, that is more effective, than any other.”72 If this is the case, then in basing the humanism in his early view on a determinate view of humanitas,what Heidegger calls the traditional, metaphysical view of humanism, Heidegger and Nazism naturally came together. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to see how Nazism can reasonably be understood as humanism, anymore than, say, Stalinism is humanism. And to call Nazis humanists without qualification, in effect to equate humanism and Nazism, is to imply that anyone interested in another, more traditional form of humanism, such as Sartre, is a Nazi, or at least a potential Nazi. This is an obvious error. Further, this overly general way of using the concept of humanism fails either to explain how and why Heidegger turned to Nazism or to identify anything typical of Nazism.

Even more than Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida illustrates the widespread tendency to separate Heidegger the thinker from Heidegger the Nazi enthusiast. Derrida, who has long portrayed himself as a member of the intellectual left wing, has recently used his important intellectual position to restrict discussion about the political involvements of both Paul de Man and Heidegger. In his recent writings, he has attempted to downplay the anti-Semitic leanings of Paul de Man as insignificant.73 He has threatened legal action to prevent the republication of an interview he gave concerning Heidegger’s Nazism.74 And in a recent controversy played out in the pages of the New York Review of Books,he has raised a series of obstacles to publication of relevant materials, such as denying the threat of legal action and calling attention to points of translation, that taken together have the effect of deflecting attention away from the deeper, more important issue of Heidegger’s Nazism.75

Derrida elaborates the supposedly limited connection between Heidegger’s early theory and National Socialism — that is a connection limited to the early phase of his theory only — by emphasizing what he regards as a basic difference between Heidegger’s early concern with metaphysics and later concern with postmetaphysical thought. According to Derrida, closely following Heidegger, there is a difference in kind between Heidegger’s initially metaphysical position and the later position that is no longer philosophy. Derrida’s variant of this line of argument turns on a reading of Heidegger’s conception of spirit. In an ingenious meditation on Heidegger’s use of the terms “Geist,” “geistig,” and “geistlich,”76 he contends that Heidegger’s spiritual commitment to Nazism was later overcome, for instance in an essay on Trak1,77 by transcending metaphysics.78

Derrida’s version of this argument is exceedingly radical since he holds that even in 1933 when Heidegger adhered to Nazism the latter understood this political movement in a spiritual sense. This is, I believe, at least partially correct since study of Heidegger’s writings, such as the infamous rectorial address, shows Heidegger’s frequent emphasis on the link between his own theory, philosophy, National Socialism, and the realization of the essence of the German people. The latter idea derives from the concept of the Volk that the Nazi ideologists took over from nineteenth-century, rightwing German Volksideologie. Yet there is clearly a political aspect to Heidegger’s Nazi turning as wéll, for instance in his public acceptance of the infamous Führerprinzip,what may have been his adherence to the Hitler cult, his conviction that there is anything like an authentic essence of Nazism that the Nazis failed to realize and may not even have perceived, and so on.

For Derrida, the problem is simply Heidegger’s spiritual concern with Nazism that is later overcome. Yet this adherence is not confined to his early writings, to his thought prior to the turning. For it is demonstrably present in his later thought as well. Derrida simply fails to realize that there are abundant references of the same kind, for instance in the Beiträge zur Philosophie,after Heidegger supposedly broke with Nazism, that is after he resigned as rector of the University of Freiburg and after the first series of Nietzsche lectures.79 Further, it is inconsistent for Derrida to portray the early Heidegger as concerned with spirit, and, by inference, with the problem of humanism. For the basis of his attack on Sartre, as noted above, is his objection to Sartre’s humanist reading of Heidegger’s theory.

SOME REMARKS ON THE FRENCH DISCUSSION

The French debate on the link between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics amply illustrates the influence, even the fascination that his theory has long exerted on French philosophy. This is doubly apparent: in the ease with which, despite widespread awareness of his Nazi turning, he became the leading French philosopher of the postwar period; and the capacity of his theory to counter objections based on its link to his politics.

The “Letter on Humanism,” as has been pointed out, is a key element in understanding how Heidegger became and continues to be the French master thinker of this period. Above it was pointed out that Heidegger’s concept of the turning in his thought is usually regarded from an anticontextualist angle of vision. But if we remember Heidegger’s difficult personal situation when he wrote this text, then the turning appears in a different light as responding to both philosophical and political imperatives, in short as a mainly strategical move determined by his then difficult political situation as well as his continued adherence to a form of Nazism. Heidegger’s suggestion in this text that he had turned away from any political commitment is in effect a simple but simply misleading reassurrance in the face of his apparently continued commitment to Nazism. But it was effective in France where the majority of intellectuals, like the population as a whole, were disinclined to rake over the coals of the recent past and also perhaps overly willing to accept on faith the idea that like other philosophers Heidegger was not worldly wise.

The philosophically interesting question, we have said, is not whether Heidegger was naive, which is possible, or a Nazi, since by any ordinary standard that point can no longer be reasonably denied, but rather whether his Nazism can be said to follow from, or to be based on, his philosophy. The Heidegger Archives in Marbach are not open to the public and his Nachlass is contfolled by his family. Heidegger’s defenders are well placed to obstruct the release of documents, to “censor” what has been released by removing politically incriminating passages, particularly in writings after the rectorate to perpetuate the fiction that Heidegger later broke with Nazism, and generally to impede efforts to arrive at a balanced judgment based on full and fair access to the relevant materials.

In the French debate to date, the two major lines of defense that have so far emerged include the related claims that Heidegger’s detractors are insufficiently versed in his thought or in the German language. The latter claim explains the otherwise incomprehensible, vigorous struggle, with clear political implications, over the proper translation of key terms in Heidegger’s theory. This type of linguistic defense is possible in France or in the US but not in Germany. It is further possible to hold that some of Heidegger’s critics misunderstand him in whole or in part, although this must be shown in detail. Textual interpretation is difficult at best and Heidegger’s texts present unusual interpretative difficulties. Yet it is implausible to contend that authorities on Heidegger’s thought — such as Sheehan, Zimmerman and Kisiel in the US, Löwith, Pöggeler and Marten in Germany, and Janicaud in France — simply base their criticism on misunderstandings of it.

Efforts to demonstrate a merely contingent link between Heidegger’s thought and politics are problematic. At this late date, it is about as convincing as suggestions that the earth is flat to maintain that there is no substantive link between Heidegger’s thought and his political commitment. Defenders of this view have a doubly difficult task. First, it is necessary to clear away the obstacle raised by textual analyses pointing to a link. Second, even if adequate rejoinders could be found to objections raised by Janicaud, Bourdieu, Tertulian and others who identify the suggested link, no argument could demonstrate the nonexistence of a relation between Heidegger’s philosophical theory and his political commitment.

Despite the improbable nature of the claim that Heidegger the Nazi philosopher is wholly without blame, it continues to be urged by some of his staunchest defenders. Heidegger’s unconditional defenders, for whom he in effect can do no wrong, in the French discussion writers such as Beaufret, Fédier and Aubenque, attempt to do too much. They wish to rescue Heidegger’s entire thought and life by insisting on a reading of Heidegger the thinker and Heidegger the man as wholly unrelated and each as wholly free from blame. If Heidegger’s thought is not the source of his politics, then one cannot reason backward from his politics to impugn his thought. And if his greatest fault is to be naive in the way that all philosophers are supposedly naive, as conceptual country bumpkins visiting at the city slickers' carnival of life, then Heidegger the man is no more responsible for his adherence to Nazism than anyone else who was similarly deceived.

The comparatively more modest attempt, put forward in the French debate by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida in effect candidly concedes that his early thought leads to Nazism. Yet although this weaker, fallback claim by some of Heidegger’s most ingenious defenders might seem advantageous in view of its concessions, its willingness to defend a smaller amount of terrain, it is open to significant objections.

One problem concerns the assumption of a difference — an assumption made by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, for example — not only in degree but in kind between the earlier and later forms of Heidegger’s theory as respectively metaphysics and nonmetaphysics or postmetaphysics. The two stages of Heidegger’s position are separated by a period of development during which the initial statement of the position, or fundamental ontology, is transformed by him into his later theory, or thinking, where the thinking that is to come is understood as being no longer philosophy. Through his distinction between the first beginning and the other beginning Heidegger insists on a radical change in his position; but his very distinction between these phases of his theory supposes a deeper level of continuity underlying its transformation.

Since authors do not have hermeneutical privilege with respect to their writings, it is conceivable that Heidegger misunderstands his texts. A number of existential factors might have led Heidegger to misrepresent the later development of his thought and its link to his early position. Yet since there is no single instance in the philosophical tradition of a conceptual rupture in the position of any important thinker, it is implausible to contend that there is a conceptual break, a radical discontinuity between Heidegger’s early and later phases of Heidegger’s thought as Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida suppose.

The other problem concerns an assumption about textual interpretation. Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida illustrate in practice a theory of textual interpretation formulated by Derrida and others. For Derrida there is nothing outside of texts and texts call forth other texts.80 From a hermeneutical angle of vision, this is a version of the anticontextualist view that philosophical theories can be understood apart from and without reference to the contexts in which they emerge. To allow this thesis is tantamount to restricting the comprehension of a position, any position, merely to textual study since there is, literally, nothing else. Yet if this move is allowed, it leads to the removal from consideration of a whole host of factors possibly relevant to the study of any position but surely relevant to an understanding of Heidegger’s thought and Nazism.

If no position, including Heidegger’s, can be reduced to the circumstances in which it emerges, neither can it be wholly understood in isolation from its sociocultural context. Heidegger belongs to a generation of thinkers whose entire life and thought are circumscribed by the series of events leading up to and leading away from the Second World War. This is a point that is often clearer to historians such as Ott and Nolte than to philosophers who, in order to maintain the fiction of philosophy as the source of transhistorical truth, often deny its dependence on contextual factors. Ott exhibits the importance of a contextual approach in his study of Heidegger.81 Following Ott, Nolte, unlike Ott a strong Heidegger defender, simply concedes the crucial need to interpfet Heidegger’s position, including his turning to National Socialism, from both a textual and a contextual perspective since each illuminates the other.82 Further, a contextual approach to understanding Heidegger’s thought is precisely Heideggerian. The Heideggerian perspective subordinates abstract theory to human existence within which it constitutes an aspect and against which it must be comprehended. From this angle of vision, the very idea of an interpretation of Heidegger’s thought of being that fails to consider his own being is deeply mistaken.

Heidegger was, in Löwith’s apt phrase, a thinker in a time of need (Denker in dürftiger Zeit),83 whose theory emerged in the specific historical circumstances of the Weimar Republic: after the defeat suffered in the First World War, in a time of resurgent industrial development and increasingly strident nationalism, in a historical moment when many Germans sought to recover from the defeat by a new awakening of the German people; and he turned to Nazism as the Weimar Republic foundered, when National Socialism appeared to many to offer a viable third way between Bolshevism and discredited liberalism, as the German economy was reeling under the worldwide economic catastrophe. To fail to acknowledge this, not to relate Heidegger’s thought and actions to the spirit of his times, to grasp his thought in isolation from its historical context, to consider Heidegger as Beaufret and some of his other students do as a thinker unrelated to his time or indeed to any other time, surely corresponds to the view that some thinkers like to hold of philosophical thought as in but not of time. But such an approach is also largely mythological. For it overlooks Heidegger’s own view of the matter in his concept of Dasein as existence, as well as his rare statements after the second defeat of Germany, and, finally, the reality of Heidegger’s own situation.

The deeper problem endemic in the French discussion of Heidegger’s Nazism is the failure, widespread elsewhere as well, to consider its specific nature. It is widely but incorrectly assumed that Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism was unremarkable and transitory. Writers as diverse as Fédier and Aubenque, orthodox Heideggerians, or Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, whose views are more nuanced, and even Janicaud, who is more overtly critical, uncritically assume that Heidegger’s Nazism comes to an end with his service as rector of the University of Freiburg i. B. in 1934. This approach has the advantage of freeing his later thought from any political taint. But it is simply unable to account for the known facts. In particular, it cannot explain Heidegger’s continued membership in the German Nazi Party until 1945, his later reaffirmation of his faith in Nazism in the Introduction to Metaphysics,his effort to develop further the supposed Nazi confrontation with technology in his own writings, and the disturbing remarks about the concept of the Volk in his Beiträge zur Philosophie.R84 And it cannot account for his continued silence on Nazism and the development of his later thought that is literally incomprehensible without an acknowledgment of his steady, stubborn commitment to his Own ideal form of National Socialism.

THE FRENCH DISCUSSION AND HEIDEGGER IN FRANCE

The main concern of this book is neither the proper analysis of Heidegger’s Nazism, nor the link between his philosophical thought and his commitment to National Socialism, but the reception of his thought in postwar French philosophy. Had the situation been normal, Heidegger’s influence in postwar French philosophy would have been usual not unusual. Yet the situation was not normal but abnormal in virtue of the unprecedented affiliation of an exceptionally powerful philosopher with National Socialism.

The unusual extent of the influence of Heidegger’s theory in French philosophy is manifest not only in its impact on contemporary French philosophy as well as his capacity to emerge and to remain as the master thinker in postwar French philosophy. It is manifest as well in the inability within the French philosophical discussion, still so strongly influenced by Heidegger’s theory, for most thinkers to come to grips with the issues raised by the link between his theory and his Nazism in other than Heideggerian terms.

There is a parallel between Derrida’s initial approach to the problem of sexual difference, on which Heidegger has nothing whatsoever to say, and the French analysis of the issues concerning the link between Heidegger’s theory and his Nazism. The effort of Derrida the Heideggerian to grasp the problem of sexual difference is at least initially undermined by his decision to remain within the framework of Heidegger’s theory. Similarly, it is striking that most efforts in the French discussion to understand the link between Heidegger’s theory and his Nazism remain within the framework of Heidegger’s own theory. The most striking example of all are the closely-related efforts by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe to come to grips with this link through Heidegger’s own concept of the turning without any effort to situate this concept in Heidegger’s own existential background.

We need to distinguish between Heidegger’s philosophical position and its reception in French philosophy. There is a distinction to be drawn between Heidegger’s position prior to and then after his adherence to National Socialism. There is a further, more complicated series of distinctions to be drawn between Heidegger’s initial influence in French philosophy at the beginning of the 1930s prior to his adherence to National Socialism, then his emergence after the war as the master thinker of postwar French philosophy when his turning to Nazism was known and the French debate on the significance of his political turning was under way, and finally the more recent phase, roughly since Farías’s book appeared, when there has been extensive debate on Heidegger’s politics.

Heidegger is known to have turned toward Nazism as early as 1931 but he did not'become a member of the NSDAP before 1933. The initial reception of Heidegger’s theory in France occurred prior to his official membership in the National Socialist movement; it is, then, unrelated to his political turning. At this point, his theory was widely misunderstood, for instance by Sartre, Beauvoir and their associates who oddly attributed their own concern with responsibility based on freedom to their reading of Heidegger.85 Although concerned in Being and Time with responsibility, there is no evidence that Heidegger ever held anything like the Sartrean theory that each of us is responsible for everyone. In Being and Time,where his understanding of the relation to others is highly undeveloped, Heidegger places the main emphasis on responsibility toward oneself, say, in his theory of authenticity.

In the immediate postwar period, Heidegger’s thought and politics were widely misconstrued since his thought was taken out of context. In postwar France, the potential danger posed by Heidegger’s Nazism was temporarily neutralized although not permanently defused for three main reasons: Heidegger’s reassurances concerning his politics that were repeated by his supporters, above all Beaufret, and uncritically accepted; the lack of knowledge of the nature and extent of Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism that was never clear and certainly not terminated at the end of the war; and the French disinclination to face up to Heidegger’s National Socialism in order to avoid coming to terms with their own past. Certainly, the ability of Heidegger’s supporters to make a convincing case for what was presented as a turning away from or even against Nazism rested on the way that his thought was literally read in isolation from its context.

If this analysis is correct, we can attribute Heidegger’s rise to prominence in the French discussion to the perceived importance of his philosophical thought, the widespread appeal to the traditional anticontextual approach to philosophy as not linked to its time and place in the reading of Heidegger’s theory, and a series of contingent factors. Together these factors made it plausible to ignore or at least to bracket Heidegger’s association with Nazism. It then became plausible to accept as valid without scrutiny declarations intended merely to reassure. An example is Gilson’s unsupported, unclarified, demonstrably incorrect remark that Heidegger’s interest in politics was merely spontaneous.86 This situation, favorable to Heidegger, in which his reassurances were accepted either as given or as reformulated by his closest supporters, no longer obtained when Heidegger’s Nazism began to be subjected to increasing scrutiny and the question of its possible link to his philosophy was raised.

In France, where the debate has been extremely vigorous, it is fair to say that the peculiar role of Heidegger’s thought has not so far been seriously “damaged” or called into question by renewed attention to his Nazism. Philosophers have long insisted on the social importance, indeed the indispensability of what they do for the good life. Yet few philosophers in France or anywhere else are more than casually concerned with an external world that, if certain deconstructionists are to be believed, does not even exist outside the texts. It is, then, not surprising that now as before there are those willing to accept Heidegger’s reassurances, or their second-hand repetition by his closest students, without further scrutiny. Yet it is striking that as the historical events become more distant and recede increasingly into the past, as the information now available about Heidegger’s Nazism increases and is examined, and as its possible links to his philosophical thought are probed, there is not the slightest hint that Heidegger’s preeminence in French philosophy has so far been counterbalanced, destabilized, or even threatened. That Heidegger’s thought has so far been able to maintain its preeminence in French philosophy in a situation significantly altered by the resurgent debate on his Nazism is another, striking indication, even more striking than his emergence as the central philosopher in France after the war, of his profound, indeed profoundly durable influence in contemporary French philosophy.