left.
Those of leftist ideas — along with their rightist opponents, who expect violence from the left — will probably be surprised to know that the word left is originally from AS. lyft, weak, worthless. It was applied to the hand that was usually the weaker, as opposed to the right: from AS. riht, reht, straight, just; cognate with L. rectus; cp royal.
royal.
The L. words for king, rex, regis, and kingly, regalis, came in OFr. to be roi and roial. From this through the Normans came Eng. royal and royalty … Directly from L. the same words were adopted in Eng. Thus we have regal; regent, present participle of the verb regere, regens, regent-, regi, rectum, to rule, to make straight — since what the king did was right — and a right line was a straight one: as in right angle — we have Eng. rectitude, rector, rectify, erect, etc.
Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of Word Origins
Where does this concern for the question come from? And the great dignity accorded to the question? To question is to seek, and to seek is to search radically, to go to the bottom, to sound, to work the bottom, and, finally, to uproot. This uprooting that holds onto the root is the work of the question. The work of time. Time seeks and tries itself in the dignity of the question.
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
If the Destruktion of the history of ontology that is called for in Being and Time is indeed not merely negative or destructive, but is aimed at freeing a more proper relation to one’s historicity, and that means to one’s present, should the university itself, as the institution that shelters this specific relation to the tradition, not fall under the yoke of Heidegger’s deconstructive questioning? Should the university itself not become at once the object and the locus of a questioning aimed at redefining the nature of its relation to its historical situation? Must it not, from within itself, ask as to its relation with the various sciences it shelters, with its own history as well as with the public life of which it is a part? In the demand that science as a whole and philosophy in its relation to the fundamental forces of life and history be rethought, can these forces themselves simply remain untouched? What of the relation between science and power, between the institution and the State, between the university and the juridical, the social and the political? In the light of these questions and of that which, in modernity, links the institution to the material and ideological conditions of existence of the State,1 should it come as a surprise that Heidegger came to enter the political scene through the gate of the university,2 and came to see the possibility of the emergence of a new political configuration from out of a transformed conception of science?
Thus, to understand Heidegger’s entrance onto the stage of politics, to throw any significant light on his action and his declarations as a prominent figure of the early stages of Nazi Germany would primarily amount to clarifying his conception of science, of the university as an institution and of its relation to the nation as a whole. This, in other words, suggests that the university marked for Heidegger not only the site or the topos of a political action and a program of national ambition, not only the locus of a concrete choice and of an involvement of an historically irreversible dimension — not only the site of a politics, then — but the place of a philosophical questioning regarding the nature and the task of the university in the twentieth century, as well as a meditation on the historical and political possibilities freed on the basis of such a questioning. And the rectoral address of 1933, the very address that marks Heidegger’s official entry into the arena of politics, despite its steely rhetoric and its nationalistic sentimentality, continues to echo this questioning. Not only to the extent that the address raises crucial questions regarding the nature, the role and the organization of the university of the twentieth century, thus pursuing and decisively reorienting a German tradition that goes back to Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties,3 but also because questioning itself comes to be seen as the most originally disclosive attitude and identified with philosophy as such. Not only is Heidegger’s rectoral address not purely occasional; it is philosophical through and through. Yet its specificity lies in its political dimension, a dimension which is twofold. First, the address marks an attempt to gather the essence of the German nation as a whole by way of a repetition of the uniquely historical Greek beginning. Such a repetition, as our study of Being and Time has already demonstrated, is not the repetition of a moment that actually took place, but of an historical possibility held in reserve at the very dawn of history. The political that is at stake in the address, then, is entirely subordinated to the philosophical, to the possibility of its reawakening on the basis of a reflection concerning its essence. Second — and this is perhaps the most distinctive trait of the address — the meditation concerning the essence of the German nation takes the form of a politics, of a political programme and a political action in the most traditional sense. Thus, the address is not only a philosophical reflection on the essence of the political. It is also a call and an exhortation to the actualization of this essence. The address is this unique text in which Heidegger explicitly develops the necessity of a politics. The politics that is called for is one that we shall call “archaic.” It is a politics of the beginning in its most rigorously philosophical sense, a politics that has little if anything to do with what was then happening under the name of National Socialism. Where does the confusion come from, then? Was Heidegger misled? No, for to say that Heidegger fell for the wrong politics would not suffice. Rather, in Heidegger’s own positive commitment, it is a matter of acknowledging the ever so thin boundary separating the philosophical meditation on the historical Wesen of a people from a simple nationalism; it is a matter of marking the moment at which the concern for the affirmation of the distinctly German essence touches upon the filth of nationalism. More than ever, then, the boundary between the national, or between what Hölderlin calls das Nationelle4 and nationalism, the boundary between that which relates to the essence of the nation, namely the “heim” (the Heimat and the Heimweh, the Heimlichkeit and the Unheimlichkeit, the Heimkunft and the Heimischwerden) and the forces of blood and earth, is one that is in need of rigorous delineation. This task is one that became central to Heidegger’s own thinking after the period of the rectorate, and one that precisely consisted in a meditation on Hölderlin’s Dichtung as that of the essence of the German nation. His political misadventure will indeed be followed by a double gesture. On the one hand, the national, particularly in its biologistic version, will be submitted to the strongest critique. Along with the deconstruction of biologism, politics itself, that is, the very possibility of an actualization of a historical possibility on the basis of a metaphysics of the subjectivistic will, will itself be called into question. Heidegger’s withdrawal from politics will have been itself philosophical throughout: politics as we know it today must be given up on, because in it pervades a concept of the will that is most detrimental to the possibility of an authentic repetition of the Greek moment and of the freeing of a new beginning. On the other hand, Heidegger will not give up on the possibility of thinking the national altogether, and that is the essence of the German nation understood as a historical-destinal configuration. It is in this context that Hölderlin, as the poet of the Germans, will become the central destinal figure for Heidegger. This thinking of the nationell will remain politically ambiguous, for if it will indeed be directed against Nazism understood as a metaphysics of race, it will also be directed equally against the liberal democracies and against the Soviet nation, for both will come to be seen as completed forms of the nihilistic will to domination. What is aimed by Heidegger’s critique is the very form of the nation-state as the locus where this domination is carried to its extreme. What is at stake is the possibility of thinking the nationell independently of this nation-state. It is in this context that Heidegger’s meditation on the Greek polis in the 1930s and 1940s should be understood.5
By focusing on the rectoral address, this chapter wishes to establish three things. First, the address is not simply an occasional text. This will be shown by way of a sketch of a double genesis that underlies the text, that is, in terms of both a German tradition of the question of the university and a personal itinerary that goes back to Heidegger’s concern with life-philosophy in the early 1920s. Second, the address is through and through philosophical. The philosophical is here measured in terms of an ability to question. Third, the address is of course “political,” but the political that is at stake here is entirely subordinated to the philosophical: the political is identified in terms of the repetition of an historical possibility, that of questioning.
Heidegger’s rectoral address, as a philosophical text on the university, is in no way unique, although it is exemplary. It is indeed preceded by a long tradition that goes back to Kant’s The Conflict of the Facuities and that runs through virtually the whole of German idealism, all the way to Nietzsche’s “On the Future of our Teaching Institutions” (1872). The book of this extraordinary unity of concern remains to be written. It should be a long and detailed book, one that I cannot write here. I simply wish to focus on the political aspect of this legacy, and of the way in which it relates to Heidegger’s address. Specifically, I want to suggest that the address marks the completion of this tradition. It is the last philosophical gesture aimed at retrieving the university from its fragmentation into a manifold of disconnected disciplines, the last gesture in which philosophy is seen and affirmed as the very essence and unity of the university as a whole. After Heidegger, and according to his own predictions, philosophy becomes, or rather is confirmed in its status as a science, or even a discipline. It no longer designates this science underlying all the other sciences and providing them with their unity, this concept of Wissen and Wissenschaft, irreducible to any given science. Philosophy falls prey to the technical organization of the field of knowledge, that field which is governed by the imperatives of the state, of production and of calculative thinking, in short, of what Heidegger calls “technology.” The address will have marked an attempt to model the university after the project of fundamental ontology itself, where the various sciences, as positive sciences, would be brought back into the domain of their essence, back into fundamental ontology. The failure of the rectorate will have also marked the failure of a non-technical mode of organization of the university, of a university that would not entirely be submitted to the imperatives of the Gestell or the capital state. It will have marked yet a further turn of the screw in the subordination of the sphere of knowledge to that of planetary domination.
What becomes decisive with Kant, and will constantly be reaffirmed, is the way in which philosophy comes to be seen as the very unity and universality of the institution as a whole, as the very way in which the various sciences come to organize themselves into a totality. At a time when the sciences were beginning to develop themselves for themselves, and assert their domain over against that of philosophy traditionally defined as the all encompassing science, philosophy reacted by thinking of itself as the inner link and articulation of the various fields. The common observation, whether in Kant, in Schelling6 or in Heidegger, is that the university as it currently exists is the locus of a random gathering of disciplines lacking inner articulation and unity. Schelling even speaks of “chaos.” Philosophy is seen as the concept or the idea underlying the possibility of an institution that would not simply be an arbitrary collection of sciences, but a living totality. The university is associated with a living organism. Thus, for Kant, for example, the faculty of philosophy expresses the universality of the university by exposing the infinite act of a finite subject which totalizes and unifies the regional sciences, the decision that grants knowledge with its destination. What must preside over the university as a whole is the Idea of Reason, the teleological Idea of an infinite Progress. The Idea is the principle that serves to unify the university as a whole. It is the very principle underlying the possibility of a Uni-versity. This conception of the university as an institution of learning held together by the power of the Idea will remain central for German Idealism. Because of this power of unification, Philosophy comes to designate not one science amongst others, but science itself. Philosophy is Wissenschaft itself, the essence or the concept of science (see Schelling, First Lecture). All of the major texts written on the question of the German university between 1802 and 18167 are permeated by the spirit of that which Schelling calls the “uni-totality” (die Ein- und Allheit), or the spirit of the System (First Lecture). The very concept of Uni-versity suggests that the multiplicity turns itself toward a unity. In accordance with its concept, the university was to realise or actualize the systematic demand of philosophy, actualize the philosophical as such. As will later be made manifest, Heidegger does not suggest anything other than such a completion of the philosophical. The difference, however, is that “the rooting of the sciences in their essential ground” is the deed not of a systematic rationality, but of the essence understood as questioning. Yet the university is there to actualize and affirm this essence, this essence which is none other than philosophy itself.
Yet what makes the discussion of German Idealism particularly relevant is the historical context in which its texts were written, a context that has some bearing on the way in which the university comes to be thought in national terms. Until Kant, the university is thought from a cosmopolitan viewpoint. It is the university of universal reason, and not the German university in particular. Yet with the French invasion at the beginning of the nineteenth century the question of the university in Germany gains a distinctive national flavor. The peace of Tilsitt forces Prussia to abandon the duchy of Magdeburg, where its most important university was sheltered: the Royal University of Halle. The military disaster is therefore aggravated by a cultural threat. Consequently, the administrators of the University of Halle ask the Prussian kingdom for their transfer to the other side of the Elbe, in those territories that are not occupied by the French. Thus, the University of Berlin, conceived as early as 1802 by the minister Beyme for reasons of national prestige, becomes an intellectual necessity and a potent way of producing a response to the invader. The problematic of the German university becomes a speculative and systematic response to French imperialism. Once the decision to transfer the university is taken (4 September 1807), Beyme turns to various representatives of the cultural world to ask them how they would envisage reorganizing the university. Fichte writes a long and detailed initial report, that is followed by a critical response and a counter-project on the part of Schleiermacher. Von Humboldt, asked by Beyme to deliver his final report, decides in favor of Schleiermacher. The modern foundations of the German university were thus laid by the theses of Schleiermacher. It is that very university which was to be annihilated by the Nazis in 1933, that very university which Heidegger offers to revolutionize in the name of “the essence of the German university.” The conception that presides over the University of Schleiermacher and von Humboldt is liberal and devoid of nationalistic considerations. Fichte’s report, on the other hand, is authoritarian and many of Schelling’s remarks suggest that only the Germans might be in a position to create the truly systematic and conceptual university. This division between two conceptions of the university is far from being absolute and stable (it is difficult to reduce Schelling’s or Hegel’s views to this alternative). Furthermore, the designations “liberal” and “authoritarian” should not be misleading. They do not primarily suggest a political divide, that is, a divide along political sensibilities, but primarily conflicting readings of Kant and different ways of appropriating the Kantian heritage. In other words, the debate is philosophical throughout, even if the stakes might be political. As far as our problematic goes, and with respect to Fichte’s “Deductive Plan” to begin with, it suffices to say that the university, organized along the lines of the family (section 37) and the living organism (section 56), seems to indicate obligations (section 20), various types of subordination between the various elements of the system (for example, in section 21, that of the “assistants” to the “professors”), hierarchies (between the various disciplines, between the various classes of students), even the possibility of a repression on the part of bodies of surveillance and justice (sections 36 and 37). In short, the “totality” that is spoken of here can easily appear as totalitarian. And one can only be struck by the similarities between the university proposed by Fichte and the inner organization of the Prussian State itself. Fichte himself actually thinks the university in the context of its inscription with a larger totality, that of the nation (section 9) and of the State (see the long note at the end of the first section). Schleiermacher’s conception is quite different: he insists on the limited role of the State — limited to financial support — in order to guarantee the independence of the institution; on the necessity to provide the professors with the largest possible freedom, not to impose on them any set programs or methods, not to limit the competition between professors amongst a given area, and not to submit students to internal tribunals and obligations (obligations that Heidegger and the Nazis will seem so eager to reactivate). Most of all, perhaps, Schleiermacher insists on the independence of research (the academy) with respect to teaching (the university) and of teaching with respect to the practical goals of the other schools. These are the very principles one finds in Humboldt. “Autonomy” (Selbständigkeit) becomes the philosophem under which this liberal position comes to be gathered. As will become obvious in our reading of the address, Heidegger’s Selbstbehauptung can be read as a reaction to and a counter-model for the “autonomy” as a guiding principle for the organization of the university. Whereas Schleiermacher’s and Humboldt’s system insists on the autonomy of the various sciences, Fichte wishes to see those sciences unified under a common, philosophical concept of science. Can we conclude that Heidegger’s conception of science and of the university is Fichtean? As we shall see, many of its traits could be compared with those of Fichte’s conception: the Führerprinzip itself, the bias against autonomy, the vision of a totality that would not be limited to the walls of the university, the vision of philosophy as a unifying ground. Yet the major difference will lie in the fact that, for Heidegger, the university of the German people does not lie in a principle of rationality and systematicity, but in a reawakening of and to its historical beginning. The question of the university is not played out in the production of its concept, but in our ability to bring it back into the site of its essence. “Science,” then, is not thought of in terms of a unifying principle of an organic totality. Heidegger’s conception of the university is not organic but archaic. Which does not mean that it has nothing to do with “life.” On the contrary. But life is not bios, it is factical life.
From the standpoint of Heidegger’s personal philosophical itinerary, one can wonder as to how the university could have not become a question for him. After all, Heidegger’s life, life itself for Heidegger, particularly for the “young” Heidegger, was the university. In those years, in Freiburg and Marburg, when Heidegger was not yet a writer, the name “Heidegger” was associated only with a teacher. To be more specific, with a certain way of teaching, with a certain authority and yet a great passion in the voice, with a certain flame and a certain fire, that of life-philosophy, the flame of life itself. In his teaching, Heidegger upset the habits, lifted the image of the competent master addressing an interested audience, erased the image of the philosopher who, having ascended the ladder of professorship, irons philosophy out and reduces it to a simple discipline, a dusty and rusty corpus of texts and arguments. No, with Heidegger, philosophy was life itself! That is where it took its point of departure, that is what it wanted to illuminate. Life, Heidegger demonstrated, is not incompatible with philosophy, and the university is the place where this exhilarating encounter happens:
I work in a concretely factical manner, from out of my “I am” — from out of my spiritual, indeed factical nexus of life, from out of that which thereby becomes accessible to me as the living experience in which I live. As existentiell, this facticity is no mere “factical Dasein”; Dasein is proper to existence, which means that I live it — such is the “I ought” that is never spoken of. With this facticity of being-thus, i.e., with the historiological, existence rages; but this means that I live the inner obligations of my facticity, and that I live them as radically as I understand them. Proper to this facticity of mine is — this I mention only in passing — my being a “Christian theologian.” In this there lies a definite concern for self, a definite radical scientific character — in this facticity there lies a rigorous objectivity; in it there lies the historical consciousness of “spiritual history” — and all this I am in the nexus of life of the university.
“Philosophising” is connected with the university only in a factically existentiell manner, which does not mean that I claim that there can be philosophy only there, but that philosophising, precisely on the basis of its fundamental existentiell meaning, finds a proper facticity of actualisation within the university, and thus also its boundaries and its limitations.
This does not exclude the possibility of a “great philosopher,” a creative one, emerging from the universities; and it does not exclude the possibility that philosophising within the university will be nothing but pseudo-science, i.e., neither philosophy nor science. What university philosophy is in such a case can only be revealed by way of one’s life.8
No doubt, then, there are some great philosophers that left the university or even never made it to the university. Similarly, the corridors, the lecture halls and the offices of the university are filled with individuals that can claim to be “philosophers” solely on the basis of the fact that they are philosophy professors. Yet unlike Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, Heidegger never attempted to turn away from the institution, never turned it down. Even while objecting to its dominating mood, even while raging against its rigidity and scorning its dinosaurs, Heidegger always felt committed to the institution, as if at stake there were a responsibility, perhaps responsibility itself, in the form of an ability to respond to life by way of thought. To flee the university, Heidegger writes in 1921–2, is easy, all too easy.9 It is a vain flight. One only wonders whether a few years later, in 1933, such a flight would have been as easy and as vain, or whether “science” would have been better served in exile. Yet it is precisely then that Heidegger decided not only to stay, but to become concretely involved in the “revolution.” That move was by no means opportunistic. It was through and through philosophical, and thence comes its profoundly disturbing character. But in the 1920s, for the young Heidegger, as well as for an entire generation of students who attended his courses, the university was where it was all happening. It was not — not yet — the politicized university, but, as Krell puts it, the university of life.10 As early as 1919, in the “War-Emergency Semester” that lasted from January 25 till April 16, Heidegger opened his lecture with a “Preliminary Observation” on “Science and University Reform.” There, postponing any discussion regarding university reform — a postponement that will end with the rectoral address and with the call for a total Gleichschaltung of the German universities, on the basis of the fact that “we are not mature enough today to achieve genuine reforms in the university sphere”,11 Heidegger insists that the renewal of the university can take place only if scientific research is wrested from worldviews and redirected toward the essential and primordial phenomenon of life understood not in the biological sense but in the factical or existential sense, and that is with the meaning of the being of human existence as the ultimate goal of the investigation. In his 1921/2 lecture course Heidegger insists even further on this essential connection between the university and factical life.12 The university is even to serve as an access-situation (Zugangssituation) to the principal definition of philosophy:
If there is to be philosophising, here and now, then it can determine itself only in the direction of the factical nexus of life, which we designate by the term university.
(GA 61, 64)
Yet in the same lecture course Heidegger is already aware of a fundamental difficulty, a difficulty which is reformulated in the 1929 address to the faculty of the university of Freiburg and confronted most explicitly in the 1933 rectoral address. This difficulty has to do with what might be identified as an essentially historical nature of the university, a nature such that the philosophising that might take place within it will always be determined by the tradition underlying and supporting the institution. Does philosophy derive its possibility from the university as the institutiton that shelters the tradition (is philosophy university-philosophy?), or does the university itself presuppose philosophy as a concrete mode of relation to factical life? These questions presuppose that we first question the university with respect to its being-structure, with respect to what tradition and history mean for it. And since the university is a nexus of life, the question of its historical character can itself be addressed only on the basis of a concrete analysis of the historicity of factical life.13
From 1919 to 1933, Heidegger, in several occasions and sometimes at length, always in lecture courses and public addresses, came to formulate some illuminating remarks on the nature, the task and the future of the university as the locus in which a certain conception of science comes to be determined. In his inaugural lecture to the Freiburg University faculties on July 24, 1929,14 Heidegger identified the university as a community of researchers, teachers and students, whose very existence (Dasein) is determined by science (Wissenschaft). And already in 1929, Heidegger diagnosed in the university a certain distance from and indifference to its essence:
The scientific fields are quite diverse. The way they treat their objects of inquiry differ fundamentally. Today only the technical organization of universities and faculties consolidates this burgeoning multiplicity of disciplines; the practical establishment of goals by each discipline provides the only meaningful source of unity. Nonetheless, the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied.
(Wm 104/96)
Uprooted, cut off from their own ground, the sciences are now moribund disciplines artificially kept alive and held together by way of a purely technical organization. But what is this ground that is today forgotten? Science. Although the 1929 lecture gives some indication of what Heidegger understands by science, it is really in the 1933 address that this concept comes to be developed explicitly. Both in terms of the question of the university in its relation to the historical Dasein and of the concept of science, the rectoral address constitutes an extension of “What is Metaphysics?” It is really in that address that we find Heidegger’s previous remarks most explicitly and most economically captured. They, perhaps more than anything else, can help us decipher the political magnitude of Heidegger’s position. As for the “facts” surrounding the period of the rectorate, they are now well established. The circumstances of Professor Heidegger’s appointment as the Rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, the detail of his action, his declarations and his relation with his colleagues as well as with the Nazi officials during the period of the rectorate are carefully recounted in Hugo Ott’s biography of Heidegger, to which we can only refer.15 Ott’s book reveals the magnitude of Heidegger’s involvement, the depth of his faith in Hitler, the enthusiasm for the heroic and sacrificial pathos of Nazism, the grand and somewhat comical mise-en-scène of his adherence to the NSDAP on 1 May 1933, his personal telegram to Hitler calling for the Gleichschaltung of the Association of German Universities and his attachment to the Führerprinzip, his disgraceful political speeches in full support of the most radical aspects of Nazi politics, to say nothing of the indifference manifested over the sad fate of Husserl, of the sinister report written on Eduard Baumgarten and sent to the association of the Nazi professors of Göttingen, or, last but not least, of the no less ignominious report concerning Hermann Staudinger, the chemistry engineer of international reputation who had made public his anti-nationalist convictions during World War I. But most perplexing perhaps is the evidence contradicting Heidegger’s post-war version of his own political activities as a rector and his attitude toward the regime after 1934: starting in 1945, Heidegger carefully and consistently minimized his political responsibility during the period of the rectorate, truncated the circumstances of his resignation, and falsified the nature of his relation to the “movement” after 1934. Once again: the “facts” can hardly be disputed. The texts remain to be confronted.
The rectoral address, entirely dominated by the question concerning the task, the essence and the organization of the German university, envisages this question from the perspective of its “self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung). By self-assertion, Heidegger understands the will to the essence of the university. Why is the affirmation of the essence of the university tied into the philosmophem of the will? Is affirmation necessarily voluntaristic? What does this essence of the university consist in? And what is the essence of the specifically German university? Can the task of the “German” university be formulated on the basis of the essence of the university, in which case the Germanness of that university would certainly not be its most decisive aspect, or must the university be thought on the basis of a certain preconception of Germanness, whatever such a conception might be? This is a crucial question, for it determines the nature of the relation between science and power, between the institution and politics. Is Rektor Heidegger bringing the university of Freiburg into line by placing it under the yoke of Nazi ideology, or is he developing a non-aligned conception of the role and the nature of the university, one that will prove unliveable in the longer run and will be the cause of his resignation some ten months after the address is delivered? There is perhaps no straightforward answer to this question. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that Heidegger would not have been chosen to succeed to Sauer had his sympathies for the new regime not been known at the time. Furthermore, we now know that a great number of his actions and declarations during the period of his rectorate were aimed at implementing and speeding up the process of the Gleichschaltung of the universities planned in Berlin.17 On the other hand, though, the address does present itself as a philosophical reflection on the university, and on the metaphysical essence of knowing itself. Although taken into account and to a certain extent thematized, the national and the social are themselves envisaged in the light of such an essence. In no unequivocal way can the address be identified with a Nazi oath of faith. While openly supporting the ongoing “revolution,” while serving its cause and integrating much of its rhetoric, the purpose and the scope of the address exceed the Nazi official line in directions that I shall try to indicate. This, however, is not to suggest some subterranean resistance to the Nazi regime on Heidegger’s part; nor is it to suggest some politically disruptive dimension of Heidegger’s speech. But it is to locate the point at which Heidegger saw the historical possibility of a radical transformation of the German university aimed at reawakening an urgency for its essence and, through such a reawakening, at a new foundation of the German Dasein as a whole.
The question, then, is that of “the self-assertion of the German university”. Every term of this title — “assertion,” “self,” “university,” “German” — needs to be clarified. Do we know what such terms mean? Do they speak for themselves? If the university needs to assert itself, it is because it has not yet done so. It has not yet imposed itself, it has not yet found a way of affirming itself. Yet the university already exists, it is already there, as we hear Heidegger begin his address. Yet, what is given in the existence of this university, insofar as something is given at all, is not the German university, not the university itself, kat’auto, but something else, something other than the university or the essence of the university. What is given is the university in the age of technology, the university of the Gestell. To assert the university, then, would be to reveal it and posit it according to the power of its essence — an essence which, of course, would not simply be foreign or external to the university of the today, but with respect to which the today would be most oblivious. The self-assertion of the German university, or the assertion of itself, is not the positing of the university over against something that would by nature be external to it, and in the opposition to which it would come to be determined. The self-assertion does not primarily point in the direction of its “independence” with respect to power, to politics, to religion, etc. The self-assertion is not an assertion against or over against, but an affirmation according to. To what? To a principle that would be its very own: its essence. The university would come to be and assert itself only in appropriating for itself what most belongs to itself, only in opening itself to what is properly given to it. In its self-assertion, the university would obey and respond exclusively to the law of its essence, which is not the juridical or the political law, but, as we shall see, the law on the basis of which something like the juridical and the political can come to be. This law, the law of the essence of the university, is the essence of the law. It is the law of a fundamental relation, of a relation so fundamental and so old that without it there would be no relation to the whole of being, and this means no history, no politics, no right, and least of all, no “autonomy” or “independence” with respect to such regions. Throughout the address, Heidegger will dismiss the appeal to autonomy and independence on the basis of its secondary or derived nature. The nomos that is in question here is of a different nature. It is true autonomy, the autonomy that arises out of the affirmation of the essence of the university. What is most striking about this self-assertion is that its mode of positing is that of the will, as if assertion itself were necessarily of the will. Specifically, the very term “self-assertion” is one that belongs to the metaphysics of the will, that metaphysics that Heidegger will precisely confront and submit to the most rigorous questioning starting in 1935. The extent to which the deconstruction of the metaphysics of the will is central to Heidegger’s reorienting of the question of the political is something that will be made evident in the following chapter. This confrontation will take the form of a sustained reading of Nietzsche, yet only to the extent that, for Heidegger, the will to power as thematized by Nietzsche is the last philosophical expression of a historical unfolding that finds its roots in the very opening of modernity. The term “self-affirmation” (Selbstbejahung) is one that can be traced back to Schelling and to his metaphysics of the will. In his remarks contained in the Appendix to the Schelling lecture course (1936), Heidegger notes that Schelling’s “self-affirmation” goes back to the modern interpretation of being in the sense of the Leibnizian exigentia essentiae, that is, to a conception of being as that which presents itself on the basis of its ability to re-present itself in its essence.18 “Self-affirmation” means: “To will oneself.”19 It is this conception of self-affirmation, then, profoundly rooted in the metaphysics of the will, that presides over Heidegger’s political discourse. The voluntarism that seems so overwhelmingly present in the address, and that seems to echo and amplify the willful rhetoric of National Socialism is a metaphysical overdetermination that can be traced back to the very origins of modernity, a tendency which remains unquestioned and unproblematized in the address. As our following chapter will attempt to demonstrate, it is this very metaphysics that will become the crux of Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with Nazism starting in 1935.
Furthermore, this voluntarism is accompanied by, and to a certain extent subordinated to a “we,” that is, a first person plural that is perhaps far less universal than the singularity and mineness of Dasein, a pronoun that has come to replace Dasein as the name that designates the proper, the proper name. Was the appeal to this “we” inevitable? Does Heidegger, once elected rector of the University of Freiburg, become compelled to say “we,” and to speak in the name of a “we” that is no longer the “I” of Dasein? And does politics begin in this move? In other words, does politics begin when and where an “I” says “we”? If it is true, perhaps, that there is no “I” that is not fundamentally a “we,” the “we” to which this “I” belongs can only be a matter of extreme perplexity and radical questioning. In the name of what/whom can one say “we”? What is it that allows me to say “we”? Who are “we”? This is precisely the question that leads Being and Time into the designation of “man” as Dasein, as this singular being to whom mineness belongs essentially. Yet now, in 1933, the “we” seems to point in a different direction, in the direction of the national: “we,” the community of German professors and students. Yet how can this determination not resonate as the most abstract and ontologically emptiest of all determinations? True, section 74 of Being and Time had already laid the ground for an ontological understanding of the Volk and the Gemeinschaft. Yet in the very use of the “we,” Heidegger has moved from an ontological description of historicity to a historical and political decision: Heidegger now designates who “we” is, and speaks in the name of a specific Volk and a definite Gemeinschaft: the Volksgemeinschaft. One could object: the rectoral address is a “ceremony,” it officially marks the opening of an academic responsibility and is the outcome of an election; Heidegger thus represents a certain general will, a will that designated him as the leader of a community. Hence the “we”: it was Heidegger’s responsibility and duty to speak in this way. In effect: Heidegger’s “we” in the address is not the discreet and polite “we” that is required by the academic discourse, the “we” that corresponds to the logic according to which science does not belong to anyone in particular, but rather to everyone. Heidegger’s “we” is political. In this “we,” that is, in its very utterance, independently of any declaration of intention and of any programme, politics has already begun. If there is an irreducibly political gesture, one in which the “right” comes to be distinguished from the “left,” it is perhaps in the “we” in the name of whom one decides to speak that it is first brought about: either I say “we” in the name of the nation, of the people, of the majority of citizens, whether this people or this majority comes to be expressed “democratically” or otherwise, in which case I am driven by a logic of the “right,” that is, by this logic according to which the “we” would be the expression of a quantifiable reality, or the signifier of an identifiable and verifiable signified; or — and this is how one could begin to (re)formulate the leftist imperative — I say “we” in the name of those who are without a name and thus without a “we,” the “wes” that never have a voice in the logic of political representation (which is a political logic of representation), the “wes”, then, that can never be made into a we, the “wes” that are not we. We must distinguish between the “we” first person plural, and the “we” whose plurality is or has no person. This latter logic, “illogical” in that it is paradoxical, is also apparently usurping: for what allows “me” to say “we” is precisely the recognition that in the logic of the “we” there are those for whom to say “we” is their very im-possibility. Politics is perhaps played out in the recognition of this impossibility, or rather in the confrontation between these two irreconcilable logics of the “we.”
What, then, about Heidegger’s “we”? Who is this “we” in the name of whom it has become urgent to take up the highest academic responsibility? In a way, and in all appearance, Heidegger’s “we” seems to conform itself to this logic for whom to say “we” goes unproblematically and is a matter of willful affirmation: “We,” the German Volksgemeinschaft. Yet things begin to gain complexity when it becomes a question of defining this nation/people: it is not that which is gathered in a pregiven “we,” but that for whom the “we” comes to be constituted in its relation to being. The “we” is — we are — insofar as we are, thus insofar as, for us, in our “we are” (our being), our very being is at issue. For us, being is at issue, and it is in that respect that “we” are. It is in the extent to which there is, for us, being — or presence — and in the way in which, for us, presence is (unfolds according to its essence or destines itself), that something like a “we,” as a response to this summoning, comes to constitute itself. “We,” for Heidegger, can be — there can be a “we” — only on the basis of the way in which presence gives, sends or destines itself. It is on the basis of such a historical-destinal unfolding that we are disposed and dwell on this earth in a definite way. This dwelling marks the site of the national (of the political) as such, the site of that which, in Being and Time, Heidegger designated as Geschick or communal destiny. Heidegger’s error and errancy will have consisted in remitting the possibility of the national understood destinally into the hands of Hitler’s national populism, in having identified the place of the political with the “we” of the Volksgemeinschaft. That amounted to replacing the “we” of the nation-state with that of the totalitarian state, without the “we” being taken up in all its problematicity, without realizing that the latter “we” remained caught in the very logic of representation it was overturning and rejecting in the most violent of all gestures. By contrast, the move to Hölderlin’s poetry, enacted as early as 1934, can be seen as an attempt to problematize the “we” on the basis of which a discourse concerning the national — the nationell — or the essence of the Vaterland becomes possible.20
The question remains, however, as to what the essence of the university consists in. The question also remains as to how this essence determines the Germanness of the university. Does Germanness, and thus “Germany” itself not come to be determined in the light of this relation to the essence? Is it not in a certain responsibility with respect to the law of the essence that something like Germany comes to be constituted? Is it not in a certain ability to will its own essence that the German nation comes to constitute itself as such? Would this not also suggest, then, that the university, as the locus of the will to essence, is at once the place of the political?
What, then, is the essence of the university? Science (Wissenschaft). Not the sciences themselves, not this plurality of disciplines that refer to themselves as sciences, but science in the singular, science as essence. Thus the will to the German university is the “will to science as the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk.”21 The question, then, is that of the relation between science and the mission of the German people. As we shall see, this spiritual mission is nothing outside science itself. Exactly how problematic this identification of the will to science with a truly German mission is, is something that will need careful examination. Why, in other words, should science be geared toward voluntarism, spiritualism and nationalism? If Heidegger’s statement can indeed be viewed as promoting a nationalistic interpretation of science and of the university as a whole, it also suggests that the Volk itself, the German nation or people comes to be as such only in and through its will to science. From the very beginning, then, Heidegger locates the possibility of the national and the political, of the Volk and the Volksgemeinschaft, at the level of a common will to science. And this, as we shall see, is none other than philosophy understood authentically and primordially. In that respect, Heidegger’s appeal to the self-affirmation of the German university is a distant echo of the systematic and national university of Schelling and Fichte. The spirit and the destiny of the German nation lie in that nation’s ability to conform to science authentically understood, that is, to science understood on the basis of its concept or essence. The national is played out in this historical possibility: it is, for Germany, a question of actualizing or realizing philosophy as such, a question of bringing philosophy back into the open and of submitting the whole of the German Dasein to its power. This, as we shall now begin to see, is the authentically philosophical gesture of repetition of the historical possibility held in reserve in the Greek beginning.
What, indeed, is science? In essence, it is nothing German. Nor is it anything national. Unless one thinks of Ancient Greece as a nation, which it was, but precisely in the historical-destinal sense, that is, in the sense of its ground-breaking relation to the truth of beings — a relation which it defined as technè. Science is technè. The essence of science was first spoken and experienced in what Heidegger calls “the Greek beginning.” That beginning is a beginning insofar as it bespoke technè. It is not any beginning, but the very beginning of Western history. This, however, is not to say that Ancient Greece marks something like the “origin” of “world-civilization” or even “European civilization.” The question is not historiographical. Least of all would it be a matter of evaluating the level of intellectual, social, political and religious “maturity” of a definite “culture” and of privileging the Greek moment in what would no doubt appear as some nostalgic longing for a paradise lost. Rather, it is a matter of acknowledging how, in Ancient Greece, science emerges in the very specific form of man’s ability to question beyond beings into the truth of beings and to grasp himself as this being to whom a certain understanding of being belongs — this ability, then, of transcending the realm of phusis in order to ask about and experience the truth of phusis. Science is transcendence proper, or metaphysics: with the birth of what was to be called philosophy, the Greek man thinks of himself as the meta-physical animal. This, Heidegger says, is what the old word technè captures. It is archaic, not simply because it is old, but because it has become decisive — decisive to the extent that a history, history in the sense of an essential and insistent sending continues to unfold from it. Technè is essentially archaic; the archè is itself technical. By technè, we need to understand the emergence of a thinking and questioning confontation with the whole of being. For the first time, in Ancient Greece, man rises up (sich aufsteht) against the totality of what is and stands erect in the midst of that totality by way of his questioning attitude.22 It is there, in the full assumption of his verticality, that man finds his proper dwelling. It is in the wake of such a meta-physical stance that the polis, as the place in which the sharing of this archaic attitude occurs, is first made possible. Later on, through his reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger will identify this archaic dwelling with that of poetry. The Greek moment, then, marks man’s awakening to the power of being, his standing firm amidst the whole of what is.
It is this original verticalization, this long since forgotten erection that is in need of its own repetition. German man must learn to hold fast in the midst of being, to stand upright in his world, to steel himself before the weight of his history and his destiny. For Heidegger, life will have meant nothing but this: an upright state (if not a state of right), a rectitude or a standing erect, in brief, a stiffness or a stiffening of which the rectorate, precisely, formed the perversion and properly tyrannical caricature, an encampment right in the midst of presence and of the tempest which unleashes itself there (and doubtless the work camps, so dear to Rektor Heidegger with their dressy scouting appeal and their “bonding,” bündisch virility, would, in his eyes, have had a metaphysical foundation). To endure beings as a whole and the force of being that agitates it, to suffer the slings and arrows of destiny, far stronger than any will, without averting one’s eyes or submitting: here is what existing or knowing, in other words questioning, will have meant for Heidegger. He wanted to build the university of transcendence and of finitude, the university of the meta-physical ground in which all disciplines are rooted. Yet this ground is precisely that which opens onto the groundlessness of its own transcendence, or of its freedom. It is precisely here, at the very heart of transcendence, that Heidegger’s heroic pathos comes to take shape: his counter-bourgeois philosophy puts on the costume of hardness and heaviness, of virility and of confrontation. One cannot blame Heidegger for having wanted to bring the university back to the place of its essence, that place without place (as Heidegger will later characterize the Greek polis), unheimlich and unfamiliar: being in its (temporal) ekstasis, existence in its finitude. Yet one can blame him for having translated this place into a pathos and a rhetoric that would be simply grotesque had they not had vital (that is, human) consequences.
By turning itself toward the (Greek) beginning, the German Dasein would not simply turn to something of the past and reawaken it. One can turn to a beginning only if this beginning has already leapt ahead of us, only if its archaic power is such that it is always preceding us, always opening the way to the future. In other words, one can repeat the beginning only when one is already led and guided by the beginning. Such is the logic of the archè: its commencing is an ordering, its unfolding is ekstatic:
The beginning is still. It does not lie behind us as something long past, but it stands before us. The beginning has, as the greatest moment, which exists in advance, already passed indifferently over and beyond all that is to come and hence over and beyond us as well; it stands there as the distant decree that orders us to recapture its greatness.
(SDU 12–13/32)
Is this distant decree easily perceived? Is the voice of the beginning accessible to all ears? Or do we need to learn how to listen and hear? Who can teach us? What is required of us in order for our ears to become attuned? Is this attunement not the very stake of the revolution that is taking place in the university? If the ongoing revolution is to have some genuine orientation, it must be that of the transformation of the entire German historical existence, that is, a transformation in one’s relation to the totality of being such that we shall be brought face to face with the frailty and uncertainty of beings. This originary attitude, in a way the simplest one, is also what is hardest to attain, precisely because we have lost the simple power of questioning.
But what has happened since that beginning? How have we grown so estranged from what is most essential? What has happened to man’s original wonder at the power and mystery of nature, to his primitive confrontation with the overwhelming force of phusis? First, Christianity, and then technology, have removed science from its origin. Heidegger’s attacks on Christianity and technology, still somewhat veiled in the rectoral address, will become most explicit in the Contributions to Philosophy, where Christianity and Machination (Machenschaft) are reinterpreted in the light of the history of nihilism and of the abandonment of being (Seinsverlassenheit).23 As far as technology goes, and in the context of the possibility of a relation to the beginning, how technology can be inverted with a view to liberating a new relation to its essence is more immediately graspable, since in it the Greek technè still rules. What becomes central, as early as 1933, is the way in which technology, as the metaphysical Prägung of the today, relates to technè as the originally disclosive attitude of the historical Dasein. The key to this relation lies, of course, in Heidegger’s reworking of the question of truth in the early 1930s, and in the way in which this question will be allowed to shape the discussion concerning technè and technology as a discussion concerning different modes of disclosing (alethèuein). If technè and technology both designate modes of truth, in that through them beings come to be disclosed in a specific way, Heidegger, starting in the address, will always play technè against technology, will always be engaged in showing how, despite itself, technology still holds the power of technè in reserve, and that the freeing of this essence held in reserve would mark the possibility of a step beyond and away from technology.24 Technè will always designate the power of the archè for Heidegger, and the address is just one instance, indeed a very political one, in which Heidegger tries to think the possibility of a counter-movement to that of the Gestell on the basis of a reactivation of that fundamental ontological-existential attitude. At stake in the “revolution” for Heidegger was precisely this: a counter-movement to the global seizure of technology, yet one which was itself entirely dependent upon the metaphysics of the will to power that it was to overcome. National Socialism signified this promise: that of a new historical configuration in which those fundamental forces of life and earth still held in reserve would be liberated. National Socialism signified this hope: that of a nation and a people that would become attuned with the wondrous power of truth. What is most specific to the address is the way in which this counter-movement is sustained by a metaphysics of the will, and the way in which technè, as the essence of science, is identified with questioning. The address is perhaps the locus of this twofold privileging with respect to the notion of technè: the privilege of the will and that of the question. Soon after the failure of the rectorate, and that means after the failure of Heidegger’s techno-politics, technè will be thought against voluntarism, and bent in the direction of its other essence, art. With Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), art becomes the determination in which the historical comes to be thought. Art, whether in its original form, namely the Greek tragic poem or, most decisively perhaps, in the thinking poetry of Hölderlin, marks this attempt to free thought from the will to power as well as from that peculiar form of contemporary questioning which calls itself philosophy and which Heidegger identifies with questionlessness or sheer calculation. Technè, whether as tragedy or as myth — as Dichtung — comes to be thought in (the) place of the political, in (the) place of technologized politics:
What is the basic attitude in which the preservation of the wondrous, the beingness of beings, unfolds and, at the same time, defines itself? We have to see it in what the Greeks called technè. Yet we must divorce this Greek word from our familiar term derived from it, “technology,” and from all nexuses of meaning that are thought in the name of technology. To be sure, that modern and contemporary technology could emerge, and had to emerge, has its ground in the beginning and has its foundation in an unavoidable incapacity to hold fast to the beginning. That means that contemporary technology — as a form of “total mobilisation” (Ernst Jünger) — can only be understood on the basis of the beginning of the basic Western position toward beings as such and as a whole, assuming that we are striving for a “metaphysical” understanding and are not satisfied with integrating technology into the goals of politics.
(GA 45, 178–9)
If, starting in 1934–5, technè still means knowledge, it is no longer, or at least no longer primarily associated with questioning. Rather, it is identified with a certain stance with respect to phusis, yet one which does not seek to overpower it or exploit it, but which merely wishes to retain the holding sway of phusis in unconcealedness. Ultimately, then, it is subordinated to the self-manifestation of beings, that is, to the truth of beings. This trajectory also marks a shift of emphasis from the necessity of a repetition of the archè, inherited from fundamental ontology, a repetition through which a new historical configuration might begin to emerge, to the problematic of the other beginning (der andere Anfang), one which problematizes even further the question of the relation to the “first” or Greek beginning.
Yet, as we know, the beginning still stands before us, for its power has reached far beyond us. This means that its power and its greatness can still be recovered. To win back the greatness of the beginning, to bring science back into life and to open life onto its essence is to will the essence of science, and that is the great questioning confrontation with the whole of being: science must (again) become “the fundamental event of our spiritual-national existence [unseres geistig-volklichen Daseins].”25 Essentially, nothing has changed since 1921/2 and since Heidegger defined the task of philosophy in the opening pages of Being and Time: it is still a question of reawakening a fundamental attitude toward the world and toward life, of bringing fundamental moods back to life, those typically Greek moods of “wonder” and “admiration.”26 But, as we know from the structure of repetition, this reawakening is not an invitation to return to the beginning (how could one return to the beginning when the beginning has invaded our future?). Rather, it is an invitation to wrest contemporary science (that is, science as a fragmented field of multiple sciences or disciplines) from its questionlessness and to reassert the primacy or the worthiness of questioning as the highest form of knowledge, and not simply as the preparatory step to the answer.
What does questioning do? It shatters (zerbricht), but also gathers and grounds; it breaks the various sciences open, but with a view to a more fundamental attunement to the basic forces of human existence as a whole. In a remarkably apocalyptico-messianic passage, Heidegger sketches the revolution of the university to come in the following way:
Such questioning will shatter the encapsulation of the various fields of knowledge into separate disciplines; it will return them from the isolated fields and corners into which they have been scattered, witout bounds and goals; and it will ground science once again directly in the fruitfulness and blessing of all the world-shaping forces of man’s historical existence, such as: nature, history, language; the Volk, custom, the State; poetry, thought, belief; sickness, madness, death; law, economy, technology.
(SDU 13–14/33)
Questioning, then, blows the scientific landscape to pieces. It frees the forces of life from the fetters they have progressively been forced into. But this upheaval, this trembling is only with a view to reconciling science with such forces. It is to open science to the totality of life, but it is also to gather such forces under a common experience of wonder and awe. Elsewhere, in what constitutes perhaps Heidegger’s most enthusiastic and unconditional support for National Socialism and its Führer, in the midst of his most gruesome declarations, one finds, as if hidden away, the following passage:
For us, questioning means: exposing oneself to the sublimity of things and their laws; it means: not closing oneself off to the terror of the untamed and to the confusion of darkness. To be sure, it is for the sake of this questioning that we question, and not to serve those who have grown tired and their complacent yearning for comfortable answers. We know: the courage to question, to experience the abysses of existence and to endure the abysses of existence, is in itself already a higher answer than any of the all-too-cheap answers afforded by artificial systems of thought.27
Questioning means: exposedness, awakenness to the world, both in its sublimity and its darkness. Questioning is for the sake of questioning only. It is not to serve the technical imperatives of the time; it is not to be brought into the logic of use and usefulness. Nor even is it to open the way to answers, to those all too comfortable academic answers. As we have already suggested, originary questioning is a way of being (Seinsweise) and is itself a response to the way in which being is at issue for a historical Dasein. Let it not be forgotten that questioning is shattering. Yet even here, even when speaking of world-shaping forces and freedom, of marvelling and wonder, Heidegger cannot help leaving a certain dreary heaviness behind him: science understood as questioning is “the most extreme danger,” an awakening of the fundamental forces of sickness, madness and death. This is what Heidegger calls the “world of spirit.”28 Yet can’t spirit be light, healthy and joyous — alive? What happened to factical life? Can’t spirit be spirituel, witty, heedless and innocent? L’esprit de sérieux versus the joyous science. For Heidegger,
“spirit” is neither empty acumen nor the noncommittal play of wit nor the busy practice of never-ending rational analysis nor even world reason; rather, spirit is the determined resolve to the essence of Being, a resolve that is attuned to origins and knowing.
(SDU 14/33)
This hearkened and resolute nature of spirit is only aggravated when related to the national:
And the spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.
(SDU 14/33–4)
Spirit, that very German spirit, not only speaks the language of darkness, of sickness and of death; it also bespeaks blood and earth. It is nothing spiritual, nothing ethereal, nothing light: it is weighty, not witty, it is of the body and of the soil, it is attached, riveted as it were, to the frailty and the finitude of human existence. The strength of the German Volk lies in its ability to assume fully the extent of its condition, to suffer the blows of destiny by way of an essentially disclosive attitude which Heidegger calls “questioning.” The challenge awaiting the German people lies in the nation’s ability to confront the essentially tragic nature of history. Life is tragic in that it is both finite and transcending: man must become free for his own transcendence, and yet his heroic stance in the midst of beings is always threatened by necessity, that is, by his own mortality as well as by the force of destiny. It is in the light of such comments that we should understand Heidegger’s reference in the address to Aeschylus’ Prometheus, according to which, in Heidegger’s translation, “knowledge is far weaker than necessity” (technè d’anankès asthenestera makrò). Heidegger’s reference to Prometheus is not incidental. It is also promised to a long future. The address marks perhaps the point at which the tragic has already begun to “work” the question of technè, in a way that will become fully manifest in the 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics.
The university, as the place where questioning is waiting to be reawakened, has a leading role to play in the revolution of the German historical existence. The “true” revolution is primarily and above all a revolution of essence and of spirit. This revolution requires strength, resolve and unity. For what could conceivably be more difficult than to place oneself under the law of essence, to let one’s existence be governed by the shattering power of the essence? Yet this difficult path is the only path to freedom genuinely understood: not to the so-called and much praised “academic freedom,” which is essentially “negative,” insofar at it means predominantly “lack of concern,” “arbitrariness” and “lack of restraint,”29 not to this lower kind of freedom, then, which Descartes characterized as “liberté d’indifférence,” and Kant as “Willkür,” but to this positive and resolute freedom for the law of one’s essence. To tragic freedom, then.
Yet Science redefined as questioning is not only to shatter the old conception of the university as a place for theoretical speculation fragmented into various disciplines, disconnected from one another as well as from the fundamental forces of the nation. What is affirmed in the self-affirmation of the university is more than just the university itself. What is affirmed is the political as such. In other words, along with the affirmation of the essence of the German university as questioning, because the true revolution in the university consists in becoming attuned to such forces, the “new freedom” is one that binds the students to what Heidegger, certainly in agreement with the official line of the party, but also, and most of all perhaps, in a way that gathers the three types of citizen central to the constitution of Plato’s Politeia, designates as the two remaining fundamental domains of the Volksgemeinschaft: labor and defense. Yet if one can indeed recognize the three types of the technites (the artisans), the phulakes (the guardians) and the philosophos (the philosophers) in Heidegger’s organic description of the new state, a major difference with Plato’s Republic lies in the fact that for Heidegger every philosopher needed to be a worker and a soldier as well. The conception that is put forward here is thus more in accordance with a Nazi principle than with a Platonic one, if one recalls Socrates’ insistence in the Republic (423 d) that to every one citizen must correspond one job.
This is how Heidegger describes the first two obligations:
The first bond [Bindung, which also means obligation] is the one that binds to the Volksgemeinschaft. It entails the obligation to share fully, both passively and actively, in the toil, the striving, and the abilities of all estates and members of the people. This bond will henceforth be secured and rooted in student existence through labor service.
The second bond is the one that binds to the honor and the destiny of the nation [Nation] in the midst of the other peoples of the world. It demands the readiness, secured in knowledge and ability and firmed up through discipline, to go to the end. This bond will in the future embrace and pervade all of student existence in the form of military service.
(SDU 15/35)
Heidegger’s lack of an original and reflected political vision — and visibility — is startling: the philosophically inane and reactionary rhetoric of discipline, self-sacrifice, courage, service and honor only reveals Heidegger’s blind faith in Nazi ideology and his unconditional embracing of its most radical aspects.30 Furthermore, the considerations regarding labor and defense are so rudimentary and simplistic, so much in line with the most basic Nazi understanding of these “forces,” that one can only marvel at Heidegger’s lack of education and independent thought with respect to such matters. The “vision” that is offered here is indeed that of the Volksgemeinschaft — of a community of blood and earth whose inextricable unity is revealed in its forces of labor and defense, in its rigorously disciplined and resolute legions of workers and soldiers, marching to the sound of a single martial tune praising the virtues of a revitalized and resolute Germany, ready to confront its uncompromising destiny. The importance Heidegger attached to the military organization of the community as a whole, and of the university in particular,31 is now a well established fact. Also known is the so-called “scientific camp” the Rektor-Führer organized in Todtnauberg in October 1993 with its peculiar mix of virile comradery, paramilitary discipline and spiritual-scientific guidance, a camp which, in effect, was the effort to realize concretely and provide an example of what Heidegger meant by the unity of the three obligations and services of the German youth.32 Very much impressed by the heroism and the self-sacrifice of the German soldier romantically, if not mystically recounted in Jünger’s Storms of Steel, certainly distressed by the sight of a bankrupt, weakened and crippled Germany, Heidegger, like most other Germans, found a sign of rejuvenation and hope in the self-confidence, the steely pathos and the appeal to the national pride of Nazism. For many, without necessarily implying overt hostility and imperialism, military power primordially meant the recovery of honor and dignity, of faith in oneself and in one’s destiny, of pride in one’s abilities and resources as a nation. As for labor, Heidegger had a no less idealized and partial view of what he failed to recognize as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, a view that was informed by Jünger’s Der Arbeiter more than by Marx’s Das Kapital. Idealized, first of all, to the extent that Heidegger saw in labor an “obligation” and a “service,” not a reality with a logic and a law of its own (the law of Capital), a reality that is itself productive of ideologies; second, partial insofar as labor is seen as a power of political unification disconnected from its concrete material and economic conditions of existence, and transcending the boundaries of class and the imperatives of production. This raises the question regarding the possibility of taking any political responsibility, or making any political choice, without linking, from the very start, politics with a concrete situation, one which is as economically and materially mediated as it is historically decisive. It is to emphasize the absolute necessity of a material analysis of the various ontic forces constituting the historical-political field. It is only at the cost of such a vigilance, combined with a deconstructive awareness of the dominant ideological discourses, that the worst and politically most dangerous naivetes might be avoided. Having failed to take into account the specificity and the irreducibility of the ontic, having envisaged the emergence of National Socialism solely in terms of a renewed dialogue with the most hidden powers of being, Heidegger became blind to some of the most central aspects of the regime he so enthusiastically supported. Similarly, as much as his desire to reopen the university to the rest of society may seem legitimate, we have to wonder whether his disconnectedness from the world of economic realities and international politics does not exemplify his point concerning the isolation of German academia in the 1930s in a most concrete way — an isolation which, paradoxically, made the rise of National Socialism all the easier.
In any case, and to come back to the address, which we never quite left, through work, military service and transformed science, Germany was to become the heir to the European spiritual throne left vacant since the extinction of the Greek polis. The third bond and service, only alluded to so far, is that of knowledge, and the one to which Heidegger devotes the longest treatment. What contrast one finds between the rudimentary nature of the reflections concerning the first two and the rich and nuanced account of the third! If through the evocation of the first two services Heidegger demonstrates his unconditional fidelity to the regime, the last service, which most consistently echoes the whole of the address, reveals, albeit cryptically, the specificity of Heidegger’s conception of the fundamental goals and orientations of the revolution. At stake, in this third service, is nothing other than leadership or guidance itself, leadership in its essence. What is the essence of leadership? Essence itself. Essence leads. What is the true access to essence? Questioning. It is from within the university, insofar as it opens onto the most extreme questioning, that the people can take the full measure of their destiny and learn to endure the difficulty of their existence. Thus, insofar as the university constitutes the matrix of an originary and therefore exemplary relation to the overpowering power of being, a matrix within which the forces of the historical existence find their truth, the university can claim to guide the guides and the guardians of the nation. This, as already suggested, amounts to a resumption of the Platonic politeai: the workers and the defenders of the polis united under and guided by the power of knowing itself; the leaders themselves lead by the light of being, of the Good, of the True. This “vision” is nothing but the ancient — Platonic — model of an architechnocratic republic:33 power to those who are attuned to the highest principles. Yet whereas in Plato this power is described as epistemè and sophia, and is distinguished from the technè of the artisan, technè, in the context of Heidegger’s address, designates the highest and most truthful comportment. This retranslation, or rather reappropriation of the ancient technè does not go as far as to call into question the Platonic model of the organization of the polis. On the contrary. This is what Heidegger said in his 1931–2 lecture course:
As far as the “state” (this is how we translate polis, in a way that is not quite adequate) and the question of its inner possibility are concerned, that which, according to Plato, prevails as the highest principle, is that the genuine guardians of the being-with-one-another of men, in the unity of the polis, must necessarily be philosophising men. This does not mean that philosophy professors should become chancellors of the Reich, but that philosophers must become phulakes, guardians. The domination of the state and the ordering of this domination must be ruled by philosophising men who, on the basis of the deepest and widest knowledge, a knowledge that interrogates freely, bring the measure and the rule, and open the paths of decision. Insofar as they philosophise, they must necessarily know, in all rigour and clarity, what man is and what his being and his potentiality-for-being are.
(GA 34, 100)
No other power, no other authority than the university itself — granted that it is the university of true technè — can grant the university its ground, its destination and its law. The university, if it is to be at all, is self-grounding, self-determining and autonomous. This, then, is what Heidegger means by autonomy: the ability on the university’s part to relate to the law of its essence, and to affirm it as its sole law. To bring this law into the open and to open the university as a whole to its law means to revolutionize the institution. For the traditional university is a university that is oblivious of its essence and its beginning. The revolution for Heidegger, if it was to have any meaning, was to be a revolution of (the) essence. It is the essence that was to be reawakened and brought back to life; it is life itself that was to be reconciled with its long since forgotten essence (and this, I believe, explains why Heidegger long after the war continued to insist on “the inner truth and greatness of this movement,”34 which had to do with the “essence” of the movement, and that is to say precisely with the movement’s relation to the essence).
It is on the basis of this renewed conception of science, and with the law of essence firmly held in view, that Heidegger attempted to lead his revolution within the university. If Science itself is a Führer, it demands obedience and discipline. How compatible is the understanding of science as essential questioning and uncertainty, as fragility and risk in the face of being, with the ultra-disciplined and univocal organization which it requires at the level of the institution? Why, in other words, should “questioning” go hand in hand with Gleichschaltung? These questions point to the vision with which Heidegger tried and ultimately failed to shape the German university as a whole. If not only the rector, albeit as Rektor-Führer, but also the university as a whole, is to open itself to the call of being once heard in Ancient Greece, then the whole of the forces constituting the university must undergo a radical transformation, and not only a reformation. Such forces include the student body, the faculty, and the disciplines themselves. Each faculty, by way of a relation to its essence, must provide “spiritual legislation” to the specific disciplines that fall under its scope. This order of grounding and guidance is strikingly reminiscent of the ontological order of grounding Heidegger sketches in section 3 of Being and Time, where the positive sciences are said to depend upon their respective regional ontologies, which alone can open up the domain of investigation which the sciences always and necessarily presuppose. Thus, Aristotle is seen as having provided the concepts of phusis and ousia in which the physical and meta-physical sciences found their proper ground. Similarly, Kant provided the concept of nature, and the ontology corresponding to it, in which Newtonian physics revealed its presuppositions. Closer to us, Husserl himself revealed the transcendental ground of all investigations concerning the psuchè, and thus the ground proper to psychology as a unified though polymorphous science. Here, in the context of the structure of the university, the faculties are to serve as the place for the articulation of such regional ontologies. As such, they are not artificial categories under which disconnected disciplines can be subsumed. In submitting themselves to the regional-ontological legislation of the faculty, the disciplines find their proper point of anchorage and are able to relate to one another. Therefore, they are able to free themselves from the enclosure, the encapsulation and the abstraction in which they were thus far trapped. Yet the faculties themselves, as regional ontologies, still lack their proper grounding. This, as we recall from Being and Time, can be obtained only by way of a fundamental ontology, in other words by the type of investigation that reveals the meaning of being necessarily presupposed and operative in the sciences as well as in the regional ontologies themselves. Fundamental ontology, or philosophy proper, is in a relation of grounding with respect to all regional ontologies, which are themselves in a similar relation with respect to the manifold of positive sciences. That which Being and Time expressed in descriptive ontological terms is now offered as the basis for a transformation of the fundamental structure and constitution of the university: the rector must be a thinker of being (a philosopher) and a Führer because being has always guided in advance our historical existence, has always called upon us in such a way that we relate to beings and to one another according to that original illumination. We understand being, always already, albeit preontologically and pre-conceptually. We live, think and act in the light of being. We are thus being’s followers and disciples. The “discipline” Heidegger invokes is the self-discipline of the disciple; the spiritual legislation he calls for is the ap-propriation of that law which is ours from the start. The various disciplines are disciplines to the extent that they remain open to the law of their essence. As for the students, they are the concrete singularities whose relation to the truth of beings is determined by their submission to that of being. Ultimately, then, the university is not a place for the accumulation and transmission of knowledge; rather, it is the place where the Führung of being that has always already taken place and illuminated beings as a whole is explicitly brought back to its truth. This, perhaps, is the reason why Heidegger refuses to envisage the teacher—student relationship as one of learning in the sense of communicating a pre-defined and pre-articulated knowledge. Knowledge in the highest sense is philosophy understood as attunement to the truth of being. And this has nothing to do with science as a collecting and processing of information, nothing to do with the university of the Gestell. Because science is essentially attunement and self-exposition to the truth of being, teachers and students emerge out of a common ground and a common necessity. Teachers are indeed to a certain extent guides and leaders: they lead the way into given areas of being and help students find their own way through the area thus opened up. Yet because the originary light and ground of both the teachers’ and the students’ activities are identical, the relation between teachers and students is not only one of following. It is also one of “resistance” (Widerstand):
All leadership [Führung] must allow following to have its own strength. Every following, however, carries resistance [Widerstand] within it. This essential opposition between leading and following must neither be covered over nor, indeed, obliterated altogether.
(SDU 18/38)
Thus, the true and most fruitful relation between teacher and student is one that Heidegger characterizes as “struggle” (Kampf*), a relation which aims to keep the opposition between leading and following alive. Why must this opposition not be overcome? Because only in and through it does true questioning arise and is science made possible. Thus, it is in the very sustaining of the opposition, in the very affirmation of its strifely nature that the university can come to affirm itself on the basis of itself. Bearing in mind section 74 of Being and Time, and the reading of it we provided in Chapter 1 of this study, it is not surprising, in the context of the address, to see Heidegger reformulate what was then expressed in terms of a “kämpfende Nachfolge und Treue”35 and an Erwiderung.36 It was then a question of understanding Dasein’s relation to its own history as “repetition” and to the “heroes” it chooses for itself. Here, in the address, the same vocabulary is put to work to define the relation between teachers and students, and between leaders and followers in general: Folgen, Führen, Widerstand, Kampf: the structure of resistance and opposition is built into that of leadership. Kampf alone has the gathering power sufficient to bring about a true unity and a genuine community:
Struggle alone will keep this opposition open and implant within the entire body of teachers and students that fundamental mood out of which self-limiting self-assertion will empower resolute self-examination to true self-governance.
(SDU 19/38)
No doubt, the Heraclitean polemos finds here a novel field of application. But is this not because polemos designates the nature of not only ontic relations, but of being itself as a strife between concealment and unconcealment, and of man’s relation to being as one of mutual and strifely ap-propriation, as “the tightest gathering” (die straffste Sammlung)37 of the extremes? Is polemos not another word for being itself? Can the university be perceived as a Kampfgemeinschaft, as a “community of struggle between teachers and students”,38 otherwise than on the basis of the university’s essence as a questioning power exposed to the empowering overpowering power of being?39
In the end, there will have been, on Heidegger’s part, the desire to wrest science from its lack of questioning and its extreme technologization, from this tendency which has engulfed every thought in obviousness; there will have been this will to reaffirm questioning as the most essential attitude, this will to render philosophy permeable to the body of forces surrounding it, to the “world” as a whole and in the largest possible sense, in this sense so rich and so rigorously articulated by Heidegger himself throughout the 1920s. Yet this effort of repetition was ultimately subordinated to the voluntarism and the nationalism of the time, this mimetic task was actualized by way of a most repressive politics that signified the annihilation of a certain conception and a certain practice of the university that went back to von Humboldt, to a confusion and above all a fusion of knowledge, of power and of work, in other words of the university, of politics and of labour. That Heidegger saw in this fusion the possibility of a historical upheaval which, finally, would haul the German nation to the heights of the Greeks, that this identification had for him a value and a meaning that was above all metaphysical, this is beyond doubt. The political naivete lay in the belief that something like a politics of repetition were possible, as if politics itself, with its metaphysics of the will and of actuality, were in a position to actualize the essence of philosophy, to bring it into the open and inscribe it concretely in the State structure. At the time of Heidegger’s rectoral address the total “politicization” of the German university was already well underway. This politicization of science ultimately meant the application of the racial principle as the fundamental criterion and sole point of valuation of the institution as a whole. At that point, at the point when Rosenberg’s and Krieck’s views will have become predominant, Heidegger will no longer wish to have anything to do with leadership. Meanwhile, though, Heidegger’s address resonates like a pathos-filled call to the will to essence of the university, like a burning desire to convince and to find the political legitimacy to construct the university of essence. In vain. The battle for the university of essence was already lost. The true revolution will not have taken place. But can one ever revolutionize the essence? Can a movement of essence ever be the result of a political or historical will? Can the essence be summoned and called upon by man himself, or is man himself not always summoned by the essence? Can there ever be a politics of essence, that is, a politics that would have the essence as its object, if politics itself is nothing but a certain manifestation of essence, if it is always claimed by its power? Furthermore, can the essence be willed as an object of the will, when the will is always already made subject to the power of the essential unfolding of the essence? These questions began to develop as a result of Heidegger’s failure to revolutionize the university and the nation’s inability to remain faithful to its historical challenge. Can one go as far as to see the whole problematic of “the other beginning” (der andere Anfang), which can emerge only out of an Auseinandersetzung with “the first beginning” (der erste Anfang), a problematic so carefully laid out in the Contributions to Philosophy, as the direct result of what Heidegger interpreted as the “movement’s” failure to properly respond to the historical challenge of the time? Possibly. The words and the images will nonetheless remain, painfully and irreversibly inscribed in the flesh of thought: Volksgemeinschaft, Blut, Boden, Opfer, Heil Hitler!