METAPHYSICAL ANTI-SEMITISM AND WORLDLESSNESS
On World Poorness, World Forming, and World Destroying
EDUARDO MENDIETA
One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous than the spirits [genies] of the Place. Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative. It is not a question of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate. Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding Place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity. Socrates preferred the town, in which one meets people, to the countryside and trees. Judaism is the brother of the Socratic message.
—Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us”
In our actual world Heidegger was a Nazi, a cowardly hypocrite, and the greatest European thinker of our time. In the possible world I have sketched he was pretty much the same man, but he happened to have his nose rubbed in the torment of Jews until he finally noticed what was going on, until his sense of pity and his sense of shame were finally awakened. In that world he had the good luck to have been unable to become a Nazi, and so to have had less occasion for cowardice and hypocrisy. In our actual world, he turned his face away, and eventually resorted to hysterical denial. This denial brought on his unforgivable silence. But that denial and silence do not tell us much about the books he wrote, nor conversely. In both worlds, the only link between Heidegger’s politics and his books is the contempt for democracy he shared with, for example, Eliot, Chesterton, Tate, Waugh and Paul Claudel—people whom, as Auden predicted, we have long since pardoned for writing well. We could as easily have pardoned Heidegger his attitude towards democracy, if that had been all. But in the world without Sarah, the world in which Heidegger had the bad luck to live, it was not all.
—Richard Rorty, “On Heidegger’s Nazism”
INTRODUCTION: IN HEIDEGGER’S SHED
According to the editors of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, the Schwarze Hefte were meant to be published as the final volumes of the series, which, as we know, is not the case. There are some volumes from other sections of the Complete Edition that have yet to appear. As in the past, the editors have either reversed or contravened Martin Heidegger’s directions, to the extent that we know what Heidegger himself may or may not have specified. It should not go unnoted that, notwithstanding the secrecy and tight control that is exercised over the Nachlass, there have been leaks over the last four decades about the contents of some of the unpublished manuscripts (the Contributions, for instance); nevertheless, the content of these Hefte was kept secret up until the moment they began to be edited for publication. This in itself is remarkable. Just as it is remarkable that Heidegger kept them and allegedly had intended to publish them as if they were a final testament or confession. Peter Trawny has written a wonderful book that aims to provide philosophical reasons for why Heidegger may have decided to publish them at all. I thus recommend his Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy.1
Before I touch on the theme of this chapter, I think it is important to reflect on Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe as an exemplar of what I would like to call “the philosopher’s workshop,” but which, in Heidegger’s case, should be more properly be called “the philosopher’s shed” because of Heidegger’s rejection of the urbane and refined and avowed preference for the rural and rustic. A workshop or shed is where we tend to keep our tools, some tables, perhaps bits and pieces of half-begun, half-finished, broken down or abandoned projects. A workshop is where we do our tinkering, where we experiment, try things out, get our fingers cut, burned, and bruised. It is also the place were we go to hone our skills at something. Workshops are also filled with the debris produced by our practicing at perfecting some skill. As you all know, the Gesamtausgabe is divided in four parts: in the first part we find the texts published during Heidegger’s life. The second is made up of all the lecture courses he gave from 1919 to 1944, divided according to the university were he was teaching. The third is made up of the many unpublished manuscripts Heidegger labored on, lectures, and notes, which evidently were intended as books, sequels, responses to published works, etc. The last section contains notes and recordings or protocols of seminars he gave, most of which came from his own hand, except in cases where his manuscripts have been corroborated and complemented with students notes. In addition, the publisher Karl Alber will be publishing, in three sections, Heidegger’s correspondence, which is made up of an estimated ten thousand letters.2 The output is simply staggering. I hazard to speculate that to this “five-part” Gesamtausgabe we could anticipate or project a sixth part, one made up of the typescripts of some of the lecture courses and lectures Heidegger delivered before the end of the war. For instance, we know that many of the lecture course manuscripts that have been published in the Gesamtausgabe were edited using extant versions of different manuscripts. Take an example: the lecture course from the summer of 1934, first announced as The State and Science, became Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language (GA 38). The editor of the Gesamtausgabe volume claims in his editorial note that the volume was reconstructed from three different sources, excluding an extant one, Helene Weiss’s manuscript. It is indeed peculiar that the editor of GA 38 makes a point to discredit a manuscript that is actually very close to the one now published as part of the authorized Gesamtausgabe.3 Just as we have different published variations of Kant’s lectures on anthropology and geography, there may be a time when we will have different versions of Heidegger’s lectures. Note, for instance, that Theodore Kisiel has reconstructed from different manuscripts what Heidegger may have or may not have said about “the greatness of the NS” or the “greatness of this movement” in his 1935 course Introduction to Metaphysics.4
I note all of this because I want to make a point about something that philosophers like Heidegger, who kept busy workshops and sheds, teach us about the nature of philosophy, which is often occluded or even rejected: philosophy is a praxis that requires relentless exercise, and thinking as writing and writing as thinking constitutes one, and only one, of the ways in which philosophy is practiced. As someone who is not a Heidegger scholar per se, but who has studied him closely and intensely since graduate school with what I would call a morbid and terrified fascination, I came to respect the intensity of Heidegger’s passion for thinking and for working on his thinking through his writing. This is exemplified in his Schwarze Hefte. Their status is ambiguous, as the genre to which they belong is not entirely clear. They were notebooks in which clearly Heidegger put down very personal, highly controversial, and potentially incriminating thoughts. In this sense they represent a sort of “philosophical diary” inasmuch as Heidegger is writing out thoughts that he does not feel confident about publicly voicing, but which at the same time have a temporal and occasional character. Many of the “considerations” and “reflections” in these notebooks are directly addressed to current events in Heidegger’s life and times. In this regard the annotations are historically and biographically indexed, as when Heidegger reflects on his year as Rektor. The Notebooks remind us that thinking takes place in time, and that time is preserved in the history of a thought, the temporality of a thinking. The notebooks are thus a testament to Heidegger’s conviction about the temporality of thinking itself. In fact, he wrote indexes to each so as to keep track of certain key ideas.
But the Hefte are also just “notebooks” in which Heidegger jots down ideas that he will elaborate on later, in greater detail and in a less “personal” way, in the book manuscripts, such as the Beiträge. As we read over the four volumes published so far, we can see that some of the annotations are brief, elliptical, and aphoristic. Some are no more than a couple of sentences. But a few go on for pages. And there are not only Heidegger’s own indexes but also elaborate internal cross-referencing, which means that Heidegger was rereading and reevaluating the developing coherence or integrity of his “considerations,” “reflections,” and “indications.” In this sense the notebooks are not just a diary, a record of what was thought or what took place, but also literally a writer’s workshop. In the notebooks Heidegger is fashioning a language, formulations, and phrasings that then get worked over in other words and into more developed texts. Trawny notes in his Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy that while the notebooks contain annotations that seem like attempts and first approximations of certain Heideggerian formulations, they also do not have the unfinished character of someone’s rushed diary, in which ideas have been, as it were, written in a condensed and hermetic way for later completion or articulation.5 Thus these Hefte are also texts that have a finished character that a diary or even a traditional notebook does not have, and we must approach them with the utmost seriousness and treat them with perhaps the same hermeneutical care that we devote to works like Besinnung and the Beiträge.6
These preliminary considerations set the stage for a more substantive discussion of why these notebooks were kept secret and why they have reignited a new wave of debates concerning Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism—or what we should call, following Domenico Losurdo, anti-Judaism.7 In what follows I will first identify at least seven ways in which Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is articulated in some of the remarks found in these notebooks and I will try to show why Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is a metaphysical form of it, what Peter Trawny and others call a “being-historical anti-Semitism.”8 Then I will turn to the vexed relationship between Heidegger’s metaphysical, being-historical, or linguistic racism and his metaphysical anti-Semitism by discussing the relationship between the animal and those “people” who are neither historical nor whose language is a privileged site for the disclosure of Seyn. These are peoples for Heidegger whose being cannot claim to be being-historical and who are unable to appreciate or respond to the givenness of Seyn. It should be noted at the start that reading these Hefte is an uncanny and discomfiting experience, for by reading them we are brought to the razor’s edge between the abyssal profundity of risky thinking and the depthless banality of philosophical kitsch—we are riveted at that edge of undecidability: whether to scream in outrage or to burst out in laughter.
METAPHYSICAL ANTI-SEMITISM, I.E., ONTOPOETIC-GEOPOLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM
In approaching Heidegger’s anti-Semitic comments in his Hefte, as well as in his correspondence and personal communications, I should like to begin with three important clarifications.
First, I take it that there is neither vulgar nor sophisticated racism, just as there is neither crass nor classy anti-Semitism, with one being supposedly more excusable, acceptable, or tolerable than the other because of its degree of “culture.” All forms of racism and anti-Semitism are as culpable and undesirable as the virulent, pedestrian, and unthinking forms we have painfully learned to immediately reject and denounce. Heidegger was an anti-Semite, even as he tried to give his anti-Semitism philosophical height, weight, and sophistication by dressing it in the philosophical regalia of the language of being and metaphysics.
Second, however, we also have to acknowledge that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was not a form of biological racism. As many have eloquently demonstrated, Heidegger was an inveterate critic of all forms of biologism and biologistic racism. Yet anti-Semitism does not require biologism. In fact, this is what makes anti-Semitism a distinct form of discrimination, namely that it endures and continues to be so entrenched because it does not fit within the schema of received, Western racialist thinking. The Jew does not belong first and foremost to a race. But the Jew also is not simply defined by a universal faith or traveling belief that has no homeland and no blood ties. While the Jew is a product of miscegenation from the outset, he or she is also held together and defined by blood ties that are always proclaimed and reclaimed in the name of a faith practice—a ritual, a belonging to a community of faith. Jews are thus neither a race nor simply an ethnicity. Jews are perhaps the hyper-race because of their blood lineage, held together by an avowed commitment to live by their faith. This is to say that one can be a committed anti-Semite even if one does not have a shred of racism, or, rather, biologistic racism. It is for this reason that, along with Beral Lang, notwithstanding Robert Bernasconi’s skepticism about the term, I would speak of metaphysical racism and metaphysical anti-Semitism, that is, forms of invidious distinctions that are matched and connected to very effective forms of discrimination, at times turning into forms of violent exclusion and extermination.9 By metaphysical anti-Semitism, however, I mean something that can be made more concrete by disaggregating it as an ontopoetic-geopolitical anti-Semitism.
The third preliminary reflection qualifies the prior one and takes up some of the themes that have emerged in the essays gathered in the present volume. Still, I will briefly illustrate with an example. Robert Bernasconi has been engaged in a debate with Pauline Kleingeld about whether and when Kant ceased to be a racist.10 As we begin to read and make sense of the Hefte, some may want to begin to debate a similar question about Heidegger. Some will ask, when did Heidegger cease to be an anti-Semite, if he ever did? I would like to suggest, in response to Tom Rockmore’s text, that we can discern at least three stages of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and/or anti-Judaism.11 In view of the evolution of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, it will become clear that he is not simply anti-Semitic but anti-Judaist as well. He develops a specific way of thinking about Jews, rather than simply the Semitic tribes.
There is a first stage that seems to stretch from the 1910s and 1920s up through 1933, which we might call pedestrian or das Man anti-Semitism. A second stage spans the Rektoratsrede to the end of the war. Following Trawny, we call this being-historical anti-Semitism, seinsgesischtchilicher Antisemitismus, or philosophical anti-Semitism. This anti-Semitism belongs to the period when Heidegger is engaged in his own form of “private National Socialism.” But we can also talk about a third stage that would reach from the end of the war to Heidegger’s death in 1976, and this belongs to the period of the fourfold, the thinking of Gelassensheit, the period of waiting to be saved by a god. We could call this “Letting be anti-Semitism,” “Releasement anti-Semitism,” or “postmetaphysical” racism. But this is just a very preliminary chronology.
I will now argue that we can discern at least seven ways in which Heidegger justifies or rationalizes his anti-Semitism during the 1930s and early 1940s, the period when he writes some of the remarks we are now forced to consider:
First, Heidegger thinks and argues that one has to identify the Jew with the completion of Western metaphysics. The alleged Jewish world conspiracy is but the culmination of Western metaphysics, just as the forces of the gigantic and of machination are expressions of the same world-historical process. For this reason, it could be argued that, for Heidegger, the Jew is Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” the embodiment of the culmination of metaphysics, understood as the fateful self-giving of Being.
Second, and along these lines, the Jew is representative of the empty rationalism and universalism that defines modernity and of the culmination of Western calculative thinking. As a vociferous critic of liberal and humanistic universalism, which is based on an anthropocentrism, Heidegger identifies the Jew with the cosmopolitan and democratic principles of a calculative thinking that stands in opposition to grounded, world-historical, localized, meditative thinking. If, as we read in the texts from the mid-1930s, in particular the 1933–34 seminar on Nature, History, State, “relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming marked by space, belong together with the essence and the kind of Being of a people,” then this relatedness and being marked by space is alien, inaccessible, and incomprehensible to “Semitic nomads” (NHS 81/55, 82/56).
Third, Heidegger takes the historical prejudice that associates Jews with money and gives it a “being-historical” sense. The Jew is the embodiment of the domination of calculation and machination that for Heidegger characterized modernity. The Jew is to calculation as number is to machination, i.e., the reduction of that which truly presences, being, to the empty, deterritorializing, and dehistoricizing formalism of number.
Fourth, the Jew, inasmuch as he or she personalizes “number,” the empty measuring of quantity that displaces and dislocates, likewise personifies the rootless nomadism of the cosmopolitan and enlightened liberal subject. Stuart Elden has provided an extremely useful summary of Heidegger’s thinking about number. It would be relevant to quote him extensively so as to see how it is that the philosophical reflection on number prepares the ground for the peculiar personification of Jewishness as quantity. Now quoting Elden (who is summarizing discussions of Aristotle’s physics in GA 9, Wegmarken; GA 10, Der Satz vom Grund; and GA 69, Die Geschichte des Seyn):
The Jew, qua personification of number, embodies the worldlessness and baselessness that stands opposite a “metaphysical” people who belongs to the homeland and whose autochthony is rooted and nourished by the soil of a “we” that affirms and decides for itself in and through its state. Additionally, since this “we” that affirms itself through its state is a historical decision, indeed, is the historical decision par excellence, it could be argued that, conversely, this worldlessness and this being without a proper home also mean that the Jew would be without history, would be outside the time of the decisive. The Jews, at least during the time Heidegger was writing, had neither a homeland nor a state. Thus, for Heidegger, they could not be epochal, make history, rather they just leave a mark in time as an event of nature. They were in time but not in history. One can also extrapolate, given the Jews’ relationship to their different adopted languages, including German, that Heidegger would see Jewish polyglotism as an additional mark of their worldlessness and baselessness. The Jew belongs to no language and thus lacks the most elemental ground of all: a world-historical language. They are not privy to the poietic-ontological gift of a metaphysical people. As Maurice Olender argued in his wonderful book The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century: “Language not only defined the human being; it was also the primordial instrument of political association.”13 Heidegger subscribed to this belief as well, but for him the politics of language and language as the site of the political become the ground for political exclusion.
Fifth, the Jew is the personification of the principle of race thinking that is ultimately based in Judeo-Christian and Renaissance humanism. The Jew lives by the principle of race thinking, and it is for this reason that Jews are both the target of racialism’s most virulent application and also, by the same token, those who seek to limit its application while nonetheless deploying it for their own ends. But, to underscore, Heidegger is here transposing biological racism onto what Marion Heinz has called “existential-ontological racism.” As she writes, “In the place of biologistic theories of the worthlessness of the Jewish people, Heidegger affirms a racism founded on existential ontology within his theory of the Jews as aliens and enemies of the life of the German people.”14 This existential-ontological racism places Jews within what Trawny has called a “being-historical Manichaeism,”15 in which the metaphysical people confront the antimetaphysical people. As a metaphysical foe and menace, the Jew instigates the sacrifice of the blood of the metaphysical people, while the Jew uses others as proxies for his or her world-historical criminality.
Sixth, the Jew is added to the pincers that grip central Europe, in general, and Germany, in particular, so that we now have a tripartite world-historical tongs made up of Americanism, Bolshevism, and world Jewry. The formulation articulated in Introduction to Metaphysics is now updated to say: “Europe lies in the pincers of Russia, America, and the Jews, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world-character and their relation to the spirit.” (cf. GA 40:48–49/50). Jews are now also part of the “dawning spiritlessness, the dissolution of spiritual powers, the deflection of all originary questioning about grounds and the obligation to such grounds” (GA 40:49/50). Additionally, we have to see how these 1935 claims are updated in the Schwarze Hefte and how they are also articulated in the Beiträge, where we find explicit articulations of the assimilation of Jewishness to Bolshevism and Christianity (GA 65, §19).
Seventh, and following on the prior elevation of Jews to a world-historical phenomenon, the Jew, Jewry, and Jewishness are now viewed in terms of an ontological-geopolitical struggle. They are now a foe in an ontological-geopolitical conflagration and metaphysical confrontation. Jacques Derrida, in Of Spirit, had written:
Geopolitical, then: Europe, Russia, and America are named here, which still no doubt means just Europe. But the dimension remains properly geopolitical. Thinking the world is determined as thinking the earth or the planet.… Geopolitics conducts us back again from the earth and the planet to the world and to the world as a world of spirit. Geopolitics is none other than a Weltpolitik of spirit. The world is not the earth. On the earth arrives an obscuring of the world (Weltverdüsterung): the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the preeminence of the mediocre.16
The Jew is now not just part of this Welpolitik, but the prime instigator and framer of it. Jews become the acme of Americanism and Bolshevism, with their social leveling and their despiritualization of the world as well as their enframing and machination of the earth.17 Kisiel’s further elaborations on Heidegger’s philosophical-cum-metaphysical geopolitics, however, allow us to see more clearly what is at stake in the assimilation of the Jew to the Weltpolitik of spirit. Kisiel argues that when we read the texts from the mid-1930s carefully, Introduction to Metaphysics in particular, we can see that Heidegger’s philosophical geopolitics displaces itself along three levels: geographical, spiritual, and poietic-ontological.18 I would argue that the Jew, within this Welpolitik or ontological geopolitics, is metastasized into the groundless and rootless cosmopolitan subject that contributes to the despiritualization of the world or rather to the desertification of the world (Verwüstung). The Jew is excluded while occluding the poietic-ontological site of the disclosure of being in the most metaphysical of languages: German. If we consider Heidegger’s reflections from the late 1920s and 1930s on the world-forming essence of Dasein, to which I will turn in the last part of this chapter, then we could add that the Jew is a destroyer of worlds. While the Greeks and Germans are world formers, the Americans, Russians, and Jews turn out to be world destroyers.
HEIDEGGER’S ANTI-SEMITIC BESTIARY
In the rest of this chapter I want to explore the relationship between Heidegger’s reflections on the animal and what I have called his ontopoetic-geopolitical anti-Semitism. Elsewhere I explore what I call Heidegger’s bestiary and analyze the relationships that Heidegger establishes between time, history, language, the “who” of a people, and the state vis-à-vis his conception of the animal.19 Heidegger’s bestiary, I argue, turns out to be a political bestiary as well.20 I want to begin with two important quotes from the 1929 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The first citation reads:
As we said, man is not merely a part of the world but is also master and servant of the world in the sense of “having” world. Man has world. But then what about the other beings which, like man, are also part of the world: the animals and plants, the material things like the stone, for example? Are they merely parts of the world, as distinct from man who in addition has world.… We can formulate these distinctions in the following theses: [1.] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2.] the animal is poor in world; [3] man is world-forming.
(GA 29/30:263/177)
The second reads:
Who forms the world? Man according to our thesis. But what is man? Does he form the world in the way that he forms a choral society, or does he form the world as essentially man? Is this “man” as we know him, or man as one whom for the most part we do not know? Man insofar as he himself is made possible by something in his being human? Could this making-possible precisely consist in part in what we are proposing as world-formation? For it is not the case that man first exists and then also one day decides amongst other things to form a world. Rather world-formation is something that occurs, and only on this ground can a human being exist in the first place. Man as man is world-forming. This does not mean that the human being running around in the street as it were is world-forming, but that the Da-sein in man is world-forming. We are deliberately employing the expression “world-formation” in an ambiguous manner. The Dasein in man forms world: [1.] it brings it forth; [2.] it gives an image or view of the world, it sets it forth; [3.] it constitutes the world, contains and embraces it.
(GA 29/30:413–14/285)
In these quotes humanity, or more specifically the Dasein of the human, is defined as that type of being that forms worlds in three ways: it creates them; it creates or produces images, or representations, of them in such a way that Dasein can survey them as a totality, as the other of itself; and third, once it constitutes them, Dasein can embrace them or take possession of a world or worlds. Provisionally, we can claim that while the animal has its habitat, humans make their habitats. They do this by imagining their habitat, by making images and representations of it, and then by possessing it, owning it, embracing it and claiming it as their world. These passages are also provocative, for they claim that what is world forming in man is something that determines its essence as human. The world-forming capacity of the human is prior to our humanity. It is inasmuch as we are world forming that we ascend to the height of our proper Dasein. There is another aspect to the world-forming capacity of Dasein that is profiled—inchoately yet effectively—in light of Heidegger’s remarks on Americanism, Bolshevism, and the Jews, and that is that Dasein also appears as world destroying. In order to form worlds, Dasein may also have to destroy worlds. If truth is both unconcealment and concealment, the worldhood of Dasein is one that also pivots between creation and destruction. Dasein is world destroyer. In this sense the polemos that is epochal and disclosive takes on a bellicose, violent, overpowering character.21 In fact, in Introduction to Metaphysics we find the following passage:
But humanity is deinon, first, inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being. However, humanity is also deinon because it is violence-doing in the sense we have indicated [i.e., it gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into an openness]. Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense, it is to deinotaton, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming.
(GA 40:159/167)
Heidegger then ponders why deinon is not translated as “strange” (unheimlich), as that which is not at home or is without home. The violent one is also the one who is without a proper place. In fact, in the reflections on polis that follow these etymologies of deinon, Heidegger turns to an analysis of polis, which is the wherein, the there, the being-in and the being-with of historical being-there. But, when the poets, thinkers, and priests truly are, in the being-historical sense of being-there, then they turn out to be the violent ones. They “are—but this says: [they] use violence as violence-doers and become those who rise high in historical Being as creators, as doers. Rising high in the site of history, they also become apolis, without city and site, lone-some, un-canny, with no way out amidst beings as a whole, and at the same time without ordinance and limit, without structure and fittingness [Fug], because they as creators must first ground all this in each case” (GA 40:162/170). The violent ones are the true founders and creators of historical worlds.
Similar thoughts are expressed in the seminar from winter 1933–1934, titled Nature, History, State, to which we have access through the procotols kept by his students. As the many contributions to the present volume document, these thoughts also resound through the Black Notebooks. In these notes, which we know are not from Heidegger’s own hand, but which nonetheless were corrected and annotated by him, he claims: “The Now requires the We. For it is the we who says, ‘Now it is seven o’clock.’ The Now obliges us to decide both forwards and backwards. The animal does not stand under this obligation to decide, because otherwise it would have to be able to order things, as we know from the lecture course. The animal has no time” (NHS 67/33, em). And: “We do not understand time as a framework, but as the authentic fundamental constitution of human beings. And only an entity whose Being is time can have and make history. An animal has no history” (NHS 69/37, em).
From 1929 to 1934, we have in Heidegger’s corpus a clarification of the worldhood of the world. The world is not simply spatiality, the Da, of Da-sein. The worldhood of the world is intricately related to time, to temporality, to temporalizing. The world is also a temporalizing of Dasein. The worldhood of the world is the Da—as the here and now of the Dasein. The world-forming essence of the human is related not simply to a projecting-appropriating image making but also a prospective-retrospective temporalizing of Dasein. The animal is world poor because it cannot temporalize. Its world is a habitat without time and thus without history. Conversely, the Dasein that is world destroying is also the destroyer of history, i.e., is dehistoricizing and detemporalizing. This Dasein tears us out of history and plunges us into the time of flows and processes. We are returned to the natural time of the earth’s geological time.
During the summer of 1934, after he has ceased to be Rektor, in the course originally announced as The State and Science but that appeared bearing the title Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, Heidegger again takes up the question of the relationship of temporality, history, and the animal. Now, however, Heidegger does acknowledge that there is something like a “history of nature.” Fossils give us “instructive evidence” of the history of life on the planet. Heidegger acknowledges that there is indeed “history” outside the region of the human, but, at the same time, even within the region of the human, history can be missing, as is shown by Heidegger’s comments on “Negroes” (GA 38:81–83/71–73). In order to get to the essence of the history that is proper to the being that is Dasein, Heidegger introduces a tripartite distinction within history or time. We can see time: as flow (as with the earth), as movement and process (the time of life), or as the event or happening that is proper to the human being. Heidegger claimed that “history [Geschichte] is an event [Ereignis], insofar as it happens [geschieht]. A happening [Geschehen] is historiographical, insofar as it stands in some lore [Kunde], is explored [Erkundet] and manifest [bekundet]” (GA 38:87/76). Then Heidegger’s central thesis here is that “ ‘history is the distinctive kind of being of the human being’ ” (GA 38:88/76). History as an event and as a happening is the result of a decision decided out of the resoluteness of a “we,” which, in its decision, answers the question Who are “we”? We know that, in this course, history and decision are linked to language. Temporalizing takes place in language. Language is the temporalizing of Dasein. The animal, which does not have time and thus no history, cannot temporalize, and thus it cannot speak. The animal, then, is both speechless and unhistorical. And, we should add, the animal is also incapable of silence, the kind of willful reticence that silently lets Seyn speak its truth.
In this same course we also find Heidegger making the following claim: “Even nature, the animate as well as the inanimate, has its history. But, how do we come to say that Kaffirs are without history? They have history just as well as the apes and the birds. Or do earth, plants and animals possibly have after all no history? Admittedly, it seems indisputable that that which goes by, immediately belongs to the past; however, not everything that passes by and belongs to the past needs to enter into history” (GA 38:83/73). So the choice is not between nature having a history and Negroes not having one or between nature having no history and Negroes having one. The choice is between what enters properly into history, i.e., enters into it through language, resoluteness, and decision. In short, what is at stake is the affirmation/formation of a people who finds its historical being in its state. Thus Negroes are assimilated to the time of life as process and organic movement because of their lack of a properly metaphysical language and a world-historical state. The time of Kaffirs is the time of living organisms, but not the time that is proper to human Dasein. Interestingly, Heidegger’s Negroes are no different than Kant’s happy sheep on Tahiti—or his conception of the Tahitians themselves.
With these reconstructions on hand, we can perhaps begin to see how Heidegger’s ontopoetic-geopolitical anti-Semitism can lead to the bestialization of the Jew. The Jew is the last human, and the one that plunges Dasein back into animality: the Jew is the beast that bestializes. If Jews are worldless, if they are deprived of a proper metaphysical language, and if they stand as personifications of a calculative attitude toward the being of beings then none of this is entirely different from the thought of an animal being guided by instinct. One can see how it is that Jews are thus also rendered ahistorical, speechless, and without world, even world destroying, without being apolis, in the positive sense discussed in the Introduction to Metaphysics. The Jew, the lonely wandering nomad of the desert, is outside history, is without world, but destroys worlds. The Jew is like the rock, worldless, and like the animal, world poor, but also like those who are apolis, the violent ones who are world destroying. The Jewish people may be a people, but they are no different than Kaffirs, Negroes, and Tahitians—the peoples, chimeras of Being, without history, who may as well be happy beasts stranded on the Jurassic Islands of political bestiaries.