Reflections on Emmanuel Faye’s

“Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy”

Robert YanalPhilosophy

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Heidegger 1889-1976

• “Being and Time” - 1927

• Professorship at Freiburg - 1928

• Voted for the NDSAP - 1932

• Joined Nazi party - 1933

• Elected Rector at Freiburg - 1933

• Quit the Rectorship - 1934

• French military authorities forbid Heidegger from teaching - 1946

• Decreed to be “Mitläufer” (fellow-traveler) - 1949

• Taught regularly at Freiburg 1951-1958; on-and-off until 1965.

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V. Exonerated, or non-incriminated persons (German: Entlastete)

IV. Followers, or Fellow Travelers (German: Mitläufer)

III. Less incriminated (German: Minderbelastete)

II. Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons (German: Belastete)

I. Major Offenders (German: Hauptschuldige)

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Heidegger, Being and Time

Postmodernism

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Two recent books on Heidegger’s Nazism in

relation to his philosophy

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1. Victor Farias, “Heidegger and Nazism,” 1989 (“Heidegger y el Nazismo,” 1987; “Heidegger et le nazisme,” 1987; + 7 other languages)

• “Few events in recent memory have shaken the world of French letters as much as the appearance last fall of Victor Farias’s book, Heidegger et le Nazism” - Richard Wolin, New German Critique

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• E. Martineau (a French Heideggerian) called Farias “the Chilean Zorro, just down from the Andes, who sought to destabilize the Western democracies by making Heidegger pay for the C.I.A.’s debts.”

• “As far as the essential 'facts' are concerned, I haven't discovered anything in this investigation that had not been known, and for a long time, to those with a serious interest in Heidegger.” - Jacques Derrida

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• Jean Beaufret: The “properly German situation” of 1933 “contained sufficient ambiguity” for Heidegger to adhere to the NSDAP. (PS. Beaufret was also a Holocaust denier.)

• François Fédier: “Nihilism, which remains the foremost historical achievement of Nazism [!!!], is not criminal in itself. Nor is it neutral, but as a historical phenomenon, the conveyer - on equal terms - of positive possibilities just as much as negative ones.”

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2. Emmanuel Faye, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935” France, 2005; English, 2009 (Yale)

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• A family business ...

• Jean-Pierre Faye, “Langages totalitaires,” 1972, 1990

• ___. “Le piège: La philosophie heideggerienne et le nationalsocialisme” (1994)

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• On Faye’s book: “How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.” - Carlin Romano, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Heidegger’s Nazism

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• After the war, Heidegger’s defense (echoed by many) was that he joined the Nazi party to preserve the freedom of his university

• Heidegger also encouraged the view that he was only committed to some relatively innocuous form of Nazism.

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• “The works that are being offered around today,” today being 1935, “as the philosophy of National Socialism, but have nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely with the encounter of planetarily determined technology and modern human beings), are fishing for big catches in the murky waters of ‘values’ and ‘wholes.’”

• Lecture 1935; published in 1953 as “An Introduction to Metaphysics”

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• As for the “freedom” of the German university:

• Telegram to Hitler: “I faithfully request the postponement of the planned meeting of the executive committee of the German University League until a time when the especially necessary bringing-into-line (Gleichschaltung) of the leadership of the League is effectuated.”

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• Assisted in redrafting of the university constitution to allow the Rector to be appointed by the state minister of culture (bypassing the university senate).

• Any new Rector would be henceforth referred as the “Führer” of the university.

• Prof. Dr. Martin Heidegger became the first Rector-Führer of the new Germany

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• “Academic freedom is being banished from the German University” because it only meant “lack of restraint in what was done”

• Freedom will “unfold” from “the bonds” of the German student, which binds them to “the community,” “the honor and destiny of the nation,” and “the spiritual mission of the German people,” which is “tied to blood and earth.” [Blut und Boden]

Rectoral Address

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• Ends with a quote from Plato: “!" #"$ %& '(#)*+ ,)-!+ .,/01+*2” Republic 497d

• Shorey: “For all great things are precarious.”

• Jowett: “All great attempts are attended with risk.”

• Heidegger: “All that is great stands in the storm.”

• This before an audience of students, faculty, and SA (Sturm Abteilung - “Storm Section,” aka “Storm Troopers,” “Brownshirts”).

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• Heidegger: “I forbade the book-burning that was planned to take place in front of the main university building.” Heidegger, Der Spiegel, 1966/76

• Faye: The book burning was instead held at the university stadium, where Heidegger spoke: “Flame, announce to us, light up for us, show us the path from which there is no turning back.”

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Speech at Freiburg U. 1933

“Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!”

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V. Exonerated, or non-incriminated persons (German: Entlastete)

IV. Followers, or Fellow Travelers (German: Mitläufer)

III. Less incriminated (German: Minderbelastete)

II. Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons (German: Belastete)

I. Major Offenders (German: Hauptschuldige)

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Heidegger’s Nazism & Being and Time

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1. Heidegger’s politics and philosophy (principally the metaphysics of Being and Time) are separate

• Jean Beaufret (a French Heideggerian): Heidegger’s Nazism is a “detail”

• Hannah Arendt: an “error”

• Richard Rorty: “Heidegger was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal and deceitful man. But he somehow managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's.”

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2. Heidegger’s Nazism and philosophy (metaphysics) are (somehow) of a piece.

• Farias and Faye endorse the 2nd

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• Faye’s book

• Chapter 1: a claim about Nazi thought and Being and Time

• Chapters 2-9 (the rest of the book): Heidegger’s speeches, lectures, and seminars 1933-40.

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• It’s clear that the 1933-40 texts extol National Socialist thought

• If you add them to Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, his works - at least to this extent - contain elements of Nazism

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• But Faye goes over the top:

• “In order to preserve the future of philosophical thought, it is equally indispensable for us to inquire into the true nature of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, a collection of texts containing principles that are racist, eugenic, and radically deleterious to the existence of human reason. Such a work cannot continue to be placed in the philosophy section of libraries; its place is rather in the historical archives of Nazism and Hitlerism.” (319)

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• However, it simply doesn’t follow either

• that Being and Time is preparatory for Heidegger’s later explicit Nazism

• Nor is that the 1933-40 political texts are a continuation of Being and Time

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• Compare:

• After Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell published writings arguing for atheism

• Therefore Principia Mathematica prepares the way for atheism and/or Why I am Not a Christian is a continuation of Principia.

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• On titles alone, the post-BT works (excepting the explicitly Nazi seminars) don’t look like disseminations of Nazi doctrine.

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1927 Being and Time

1927-8Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (lecture course)

1928 The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (lc)

1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (lc)

1929-30 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (lc)

1930-31 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (lc)

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1931The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave

Allegory and Theatetus (lc)

1931 Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (essay)

1933-34 Being and Truth (lc)

1934Logic as the Question Concerning the

Essence of Language (lc)

1935 What is a Thing (essay)

1936 The Origin of the Work of Art (essay)

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1937-8Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected

Problems of Logic (lc)

1940 Nietzsche’s Metaphysics (essay)

1941 Metaphysics as a History of Being (essay)

1942 Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (lc)

1942-43 Hegel’s Concept of Existence (lc)

1942-43 Parmenides (lc)

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Nazism inBeing and Time?

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• Heidegger, by means of a “destruction of the individual,” was making room for “the communal destiny of the people,” a task which was “in neither intent nor approach a purely philosophical undertaking,” but was in fact a “political project,” the ground-laying for an anti-individualistic ideology that lay “embedded in the very foundations of National Socialism” (Faye, 17-18).

A really weak reason

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• The “destruction of the individual” of BT

• Heidegger denies a “self” (whether a Cartesian “I” or Kantian-Husserlerian “transcendental ego”).

• H: An experience is “mine” but this “mineness” cannot be specified without reference to our mode of being-in-the-world: Dasein (there-being)

• The constitution of Dasein is an assemblage of social and historical contingencies (Being and Time)

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• The “self” that Heidegger denies (and Descartes affirms) is an observer of the contents of the mind

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“I”

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• The Cartesian “I” is echoed

• Kant: the transcendental unity of apperception

• Husserl: the transcendental ego

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• What is the argument?

(1)There is no “self” as certain philosophers (Descartes, Kant, Husserl) have posited.

(2)Therefore, anyone who believes (1) ought to (or should be predisposed to) embrace communalistic political movements.

• Non Sequitur!

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• Various philosophers have denied the existence of a “self”

• Hume: no “impression” of a self

• Dennett: the “self” is a short-lasting “virtual captain” that comes about as a result of a small group of information-parcels gaining temporary dominance.

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• And none of them became Nazis!

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Hume Not Hume

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• Heidegger says that to live authentically, humans must choose, but their “fate” is to choose from their “heritage” and the “happening of a community”

• And as a result “human life’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic happening of human life.” (BT, 384-5)

A weak reason

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• So, in 1930’s Germany, one should choose Nazism as one’s authentic mode of existence.

• Notice: not a logical consequence

• In 1930’s Australia (say), one should choose running a sheep station

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• But Heidegger also asserts - perhaps inconsistently:

• “One would completely misunderstand the phenomenon of resolute openness if one were to suppose that it consists simply in taking up and seizing ready-made and recommend possibilities.” (BT, 298)

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• It appears therefore that Nazism is but one option among many

• Monasticism

• Liberal democracy

• Being a pig farmer

• Etc.

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A Weak+ Reason:Heidegger’s Pragmatism

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• Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Cornell, 1987)

• Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” (Consequences of Pragmatism), “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism” (Essays on Heidegger and Others), etc.

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• “Classical” conception of truth and knowledge:

• Plato: Truth is changeless, eternal

• Descartes: Knowledge must be absolutely certain

Pragmatism

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• Skeptical doubts:

• Our historical location limits us

• There are no “eternal truths” as Plato envisioned them, merely historical contingencies

• Descartes’ way out of his skeptical doubts fails - no certainty about any correspondence between our “ideas” and the world

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• Pragmatism accepts these

• But does not discard the notion of truth

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• “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”

• “‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course.”

William James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of

Thinking” (1907)

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• Classical: Truth is our certain knowledge of the way the world really is.

• Pragmatism: Truth is what is expedient for our ways of thinking (James).

• Pragmatism: Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way. (Rorty).

The Pragmatist Pattern

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• Reading Mill (On Liberty) in a non-Pragmatist way:

• The best way to get at the truth is through the unrestricted discussion of ideas

• Mill as Pragmatist:

• Truth just is what emerges from the unrestricted discussion of ideas.

There’s a difference ...

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From Seminars 1933-34

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Seminar (1933-34): On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State

• The true Führer “understands, thinks, and puts into action what the people and the state are.”

• The Führer has a “living bond” with “the being of the people” which stems from a “unity of blood and race” (or “blood and earth” - Blut und Boden)

• “The people” are “a völkisch organism: A Germanic state of the German nation.”

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• “With each new moment the Führer and the people will be bound more closely, in order to realize the essence of their state, that is their Being; growing together, they will oppose the two threatening forces, death and the devil, that is, impermanence and the falling away from one’s own essence, with their meaningful, historical Being and Will.” (140)

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Seminar “The Essence of Truth,” 1933-34

• In a commentary on a “maxim” of Heraclitus (which H. translates as “Strife [polemos] is the essence of the entity”)

• This is “listening to the voice of the great beginning”

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• What is designated is “to stand up against the enemy ... Struggle as a holding out in the face of the enemy ...” (167)

• The struggle is the “rising up in being,” “the original surging up from being,” and the manifestation of “truth”.

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• H’s idea seems to be that there is an “essence” to the German race that has been clouded over by various historical events.

• Note: Heidegger says in Being and Time that “truth” is “uncovering” (a translation he offers of aletheia)

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• The truth (for the German race) is that which is uncovered from the being of the people (united by blood and earth) by the (true) Führer.

Heidegger’s Pragmatist Conception of Truth

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• One moral: If a philosopher is going to be a pragmatist with respect to truth, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be a nice one.

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Two ways to go:

1. In the 1933-34 seminars, Heidegger is propounding Nazi doctrines only as political philosophy - not a “pragmatist theory of truth”

2. In the 1933-34 seminars, Heidegger is propounding a pragmatist theory of truth.

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• It’s really only the second that gives any reason to see the Nazi courses as continuing Being and Time

• It may be a stretch to interpret the 1933-34 seminars as offering a pragmatist theory of truth

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• My conclusion:

• If the Nazi seminars are a pragmatist conception of truth, then they are a continuation of Being and Time.

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