Heidegger and Nazism
During the 1930s, the impenetrable Teutonic obscurant esteemed German philosopher Martin Heidegger was notoriously complicit with the Nazi regime. Debates have long been waged over just how deeply involved he was, and this topic is subject matter of the following BBC documentary. Focusing very little on Heidegger’s actual philosophy—other than to offer a few general observations—the documentary instead concentrates on detailing what is now known about his relationship, with and true attitude toward, Nazism. Covering his 1930s academic career under Hitlerism, campaigns against other academics (including his one-time mentor Husserl), the post-war rehabilitation provided by his former lover, Hannah Arendt, and featuring interviews with a number of prominent figures, it is a very interesting work that appears to remove any doubts about just how unequivocally Heidegger supported the Nazis.
One interesting aside: Though the documentary focuses predominantly on Heidegger’s political entanglements, an indication of his philosophical legacy comes from 36m48 to 37m35, in the form of a particularly naked example of postmodernist philosophizing on the ontological status of language: “…it is not we who speak language, but language that speaks us; it structures our world…” This passage is uniquely interesting as it provides a rare presentation of deconstructionism in straightforward language, without disguising it in the usual swirling mists of rhetoric and jargon. As such, we can cut to heart of the issue: do we see human society as the product of language, or language as the product of human society?
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8 Comments so far
Chris,
When I saw this earlier, I had a semi-digested thought which I held onto and am finally am spitting back to you. Does it really matter what Heidegger’s political beliefs were unlesss they protrude upon his philosophical wonderings?
I suppose you’d have a better angle on that, as I haven’t read Heidegger in some years, but I don’t recall any right wing or nationalistic rants amongst his writings. Certainly his campaigns againist other writers is not a good thing, but again, I’m not sure that they would be included in his philosophical body of works.
For example, Booby Fisher was an acknowledged Jew hater, but that doesn’t make his chess games any less phenomonal. Or Michael Jackson’s seeming problems with his identification with children doesn’t make him any less of a good dancer.
What does bother me, though would be people who readily bring their stereotypical opinions into their craft. I could easily point to Guns and Roses (though I like some of their less bigoted songs), but if I may borrow an example from among philosophical novelists, I personally don’t read Haruki Murakami because he is an acknowledged right winger who gives glimpses of that opinion in his writings. I don’t really care if he is the best read Japanese author outside of Japan, his usual nationalistic drivel about ‘the Japanese and their misunderstood relations with foreigners’ rubs me the wrong way.
Interesting that he got a literary award recently in Israel for his writing on the human condition, and was criticized for knocking his hosts indirectly about the Gaza mess. Perhaps he should clean his own house first. His comments themselves were;
“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.
“Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system” which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals.
“I have only one purpose in writing novels,” he continued, his voice as unobtrusive and penetrating as a conscience. “That is to draw out the unique divinity of the individual. To gratify uniqueness. To keep the system from tangling us. So – I write stories of life, love. Make people laugh and cry.
“We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs,” he urged. “We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us – create who we are. It is we who created the system.”
But I have to wonder, who is letting the system control them? Since when is it popular to be a right-wing nationalist? And why do I feel like a boiled egg recently?
“Does it really matter what Heidegger’s political beliefs were unless they protrude upon his philosophical wonderings?”
Thanks Walter. Indeed, I think that’s exactly the right question to ask, because it helps us clarify matters. Just to make it absolutely explicit, this post is about Heidegger and his political beliefs/actions, not Heidegger’s philosophy – it is important to maintain the distinction between the two, as you point out. [And best of luck to anyone who wants to prove that Being and Time supports fascist/Nazi political doctrines - what an impossible task!]
Nonetheless, the lives and actions of philosophers are of interest to us, even if they’re not philosophically relevant. As long as we keep that in mind, we can discuss (or gossip about) the lives of philosophers as much as we wish.
Are you sure you and the BBC are right about Heidegger and Naziism? Heidegger presumed to thinkingly engage with routine National Socialism from within — wherefore, joining the Partei, etc. But in lectures during this time (e.g. those publish’d in 1953 as An Introduction to Metaphysics) he mock’d ‘mass rallies [Nurnberg rally etc] making heroes of boxers [Max Schmelling], and so on, and brought out the Nietzschean and therefore pro-Old Testament, philosemitic ‘inner truth and greatness’ of national socialism as taught by him. Arendt remarks that anti-semitic comic books taught Hitler everything he needed for his ego’s will to power to (half-)govern Germany. (But these comic books didn’t seriously treat Nietzsche and this gave Heidegger his opening Heidegger brings in the Greeks, as you know, in a new way, a way made possible by Nietzsche.) If we consider the words of Leo Strauss very carefully — noticing the codedness — I think that we see that he concurs with Heidegger, even while foregroundly appearing to complain.
Not that in general you seem to me on the wrong track: you work from an implicit list of rights and wrongs (e.g. misogyny is bad and wrong, racism is bad and wrong, etc), and then judge Plato, Descartes, Hitler, Kant, whomever, accordingly. This procedure may seem strange since Plato et al seem to assume that perceiving right and wrong, good and bad, is extremely difficult and controverted. Nevertheless, your method doesn’t seem to me mistaken.
P.S. You’re right that contemporary atheists don’t call for the execution of believers, but Communist atheists had quite a program for this, eh?
Hi Jonathan, thanks for your comment. It’s not so much “me and the BBC” as the BBC and the scholars involved – I don’t pretend to have researched this particular topic in any depth. But there are a number of respectable scholars (with their own reputations to protect) and experts on the topic involved, and the evidence appears reasonably conclusive, so I’m not inclined to doubt it.
The question of how we should judge these philosophers is an interesting one, and I’ve got a half-written post on the topic. At this point, I’m inclined to think that we shouldn’t judge individuals too harshly for merely adhering to the prejudices of their society and time, but should when they provide bad arguments in support of those prejudices – at that point they’re simply doing bad philosophy. A primary example would be Aristotle and his biological/metaphysical justification of the inferiority of women, because he simply makes things up (eg. the soul develops in the male fetus after 40 days, but for the female it is 90 days).
p.s. Do atheist communists kill in the name of atheism or in the name of communist theory? Which of the two provides a teleological account of history that necessitates revolutions, political upheaval, and mass death in order to realize its political goals?
Dear Chris, I guess neither Plato nor Communism advocates killing for ostensible falsehoods but for injustice. For Marx, (theistic) religion prevents justice or support for revolutionary action [although technically, he maintains that every era has its own justice or Recht: (theistic) religion was right in the preceding era, the era of Necessity.] Marx holds that ideas (thus beliefs too?) are constructed by social relations. Presumably when changed social relations didn’t result in the new atheistic beliefs that Communists expected, they concluded that killing the believers in the old beliefs would be Necessary — during the brief transitional era of new Necessity under a Communist state, whereafter the state could wither away into mere police enforcement, and the era of Freedom would arrive.
I am actually surprised that more isn’t made of Heidegger and his Nazi ties, specifically in terms of his philosophy. As a really quick overgeneralization of what comes to my mind when I try to make the connection (which seems worthwhile to at least consider b/c Nazism is no insignificant thought system…as in, shouldn’t it have affected his thought process somehow?)…
So, and keeping in mind that this is oversimplifying, in trying to find what separates Heidegger from Husserl and other predecessors, that makes him stand out from them, I find that he was an atheist and many of them were not. Modern science likes to think of itself as secular, and therefore tries to make a non-issue of personal beliefs, but for Heidegger, his atheism made its way into his philosophy as the basis for his criticism of Kant, the most significant standing philosophical system by Heidegger and perhaps still today.
Kant’s asserted the soul as an unconditioned part of our internal existential process. He does it both explicitly by his mentioning the soul (often in the Critique) in a time when it wasn’t a dirty word but also implicitly by leaving some of his philosophy as not being able to be grasped, b/c of its unconditioned nature.
Heidegger, as an atheist doesn’t see any part of his existence as out of his grasp and so codifies an entirely new system, but interestingly bases it around the concept of the ‘dasein’ which as I understand it, is external to us at least in part, in that interactive existence he describes. This feels like a direct reply to Kant who keeps time and the soul as internal and subjective to each of us, splitting it off from the space that we can never grasp in its pure form.
All of which just looks to me like the two different directions that an atheist philosopher and a pious one would go. But since Heidegger was also a Nazi, its not too long a jump to see the similarities in the way he thought to a tendency towards a movement like Nazism, should it arrive in his time and claim him as one of their own. This is not because Nazism is a godless philosophy, but because it is self-contained, just as Heidegger’s philosophy.
Whereas Kant admits something external to all of us, to which we must subjugate ourselves if we want to understand human reason, Heidegger has codified an entirely new philosophy, which he claims does not draw from any commonalities, except natural ones. If you want to understand what Kant says, ideally you would have to only look around at the way he saw people think already. If you want to understand Heidegger, you need to read Heidegger and, effectively break yourself off from any natural tendencies to implicit belief in the soul or god, that Kant is claiming as natural and universal among humans (and for which he makes a pretty strong argument).
So Heidegger’s philosophy is self contained and only makes sense if you follow the rules he sets and all the new language that he needs to use to make it his own. But it makes sense. Nazism also makes sense, if you are wholly within it and you separate yourself from the way the remainder of the world sees things, which for Nazi’s would mean a weakness that ideas of god make even weaker. From this view, it makes sense to me that Heidegger would have gotten caught up in Nazism, even if his philosophy isn’t particularly changed because he was a Nazi.
I guess maybe i just see Heidegger’s philosophy as being more compatible with Nazism, in its ideal form. Past that, it is hard for me to think of his philosophy as effective or truly worthwhile if the same thought process led him to condone that movement. I also consider myself an atheist, but Kant helps me be a bit more realistic…
Chis said,’”Nonetheless, the lives and actions of philosophers are of interest to us, even if they’re not philosophically relevant. As long as we keep that in mind, we can discuss (or gossip about) the lives of philosophers as much as we wish.”
Sorry, I know at one time I had checked back here, but for some reason I couldn’t see the additional comments (admin reasons, I don’t know).
I guess my thinking is quite different on the matter. I noticed you ducked the Murakami issue all together. I tend to read philosophical wranglings that are embodied in novels, etc., rather than just raw philosophical treatsies. Why, I couldn’t tell you, I did use to ingest some of the latter some years ago, even after I had arrived in Japan I was still embarking on treks through that ilk, but recently ,no.
As I paraphrased earlier, certainly the person’s real life will have some influence on what they write (or try to hide), but as to the gossip itself, of course you’re free to talk about that. I see the other posters are more interested in trying to link the two and show that one might have support for the other, which seems more logical, in my opinion. That was why I brought up the Murakami example because I thought whether he is implicitly listed as a philosopher (as was Soseki), he still tends to pump out nationalistic philosophical diatribes, which I feel are linked to his right wing ‘past’.
Of couse Heidegger being deceased would have a lot more difficulty doing that.
Is that small strangled moustache a clue?
Also, one might be a wee bit suspicious of people who find mystic connections to forests, mountains, woodchopping and (guessing here) yodeling. There is something deeply sick with some aspects of Bavarian/Austrian nationalist yearnings. The BBC programme claims that Heidegger saw connections between his writings and Hitler’s politics. Nevertheless, it doesn’t need me to say that Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy stands on its own legs. Indeed, it is feasible that the creepy tendency could itself be a source of inspiration without being in any way malign.