THE FORGOTTEN: IMPLICATIONS OF LYOTARD’S HEIDEGGER AND “THE JEWS”

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Keep in mind the lies surrounding the Holohoax.... and the lies surrounding the killing of the Turks by the Israeli Commando Jews... and the creepy support for the attack around the world.  The Jews love to throw up Heidegger as the typical Nazi Jew Hater but he was pretty straightforward about removing their corruption from German society and German education. He had lived it and knew the extent of it personally. --The CSR
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2008 Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society

THE FORGOTTEN: IMPLICATIONS OF LYOTARD'S HEIDEGGER AND
"THE JEWS" FOR ISSUES OF RACE IN PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE

Gregory D. Loving
University of Cincinnati and Clermont College

Race has been largely forgotten in Western philosophy's self-narrated identity. A stereotypical criticism of much of traditional academia is that it only studies "dead white males." Those from outside the cultural elite normally did not have a chance to participate in formal philosophical study. Others, even when they had a chance to participate in philosophy, were not incorporated into the philosophical canon in any substantial way. This truncation of the possible to the actual works in all human identity construction. The narrative structure of identity recognizes that all experience comes to us through an inherently selective interpretive framework.1 Some experiences escape notice and so are not included in the narrative. Events which are noticed must then be organized to form coherent narratives. Some narratives are then considered unimportant; others become central. In essence, experience must be forgotten in order for a narrative to cohere. This forgetting, this editing, is at the heart of narrative. The dangers and opportunities which arise from such forgetting, made explicit through the work of Jean-François Lyotard, lead to an ethic of listening among those from the historically dominant culture.

Lyotard accepts narrative as both positively and negatively constitutive of human identity. Some things are not experienced and so cannot be represented. Other things are experienced but are not later represented. Only those events that are experienced and then represented enter the realm of narrative. Lyotard's Heidegger and "the Jews" deals with the necessity of narrative to forget, to leave out events that do not fit into or would upset narrative structure.2 Issues such as race, power, and gender work in the truncation of experience to narrative. The types of forgetting Lyotard highlights will help us investigate how race has been forgotten in the crafting of the story of Western philosophy and reflect on ways to deal with this forgetting, including practicing an ethic of listening. As the nature of narrative requires, however, some of the current story of philosophy must be forgotten to make room for the retelling, and this can be very contentious within the discipline.

Lyotard's Project

From the rubble of World War II and sequential collapses of the French government, from the violent loss of French empire in VietNam and Algeria to the 1968 rebellion at home, Lyotard philosophically came of age in a time of comprehensive upheaval in social, political, and ethnic power relations. Lyotard shared with other thinkers the critique of Enlightenment optimism and reason that was to be called "deconstruction." Lyotard's work may be seen as "a thoroughgoing rejection of the place of theory or critique, of the project of enlightenment, of the commodification of knowledge."3 Lyotard accepts the Heracletian observation of the radical singularity of all events. No matter how hard we try to capture experience in thought and understanding, something escapes notice, escapes expression.

All that happens is reduced to a story about what happened. First, narratives are received: "every narrator presents himself as having first been a narratee: not as autonomous, then, but, on the contrary, as heteronomous." Tradition is essential at this point: without being given a narrative, we are nobody. Where tradition is concerned it is a mistake to "think identity without difference, whereas there is actually much difference: the narratives get repeated but are never identical." Identity is seen as innovation within tradition, of being narrated by others but at the same time contributing to the narrative. Life for everyone is a continual creative challenge because "they must constantly match wits with the fate they have been given, as well as the fate they are being given" in being addressed by other narrators. For Lyotard the fluidity of narrative from one moment to the next, from one narrator to the next, holds both power and danger.4

At first Lyotard criticized only metanarratives, those stories that try to explain all human experience for all time. A metanarrative forces all other narratives to accept its terms of description and prescription. All metanarratives serve a legitimating function, declaring a certain concept of life and justice to be true. This idea of metanarrative, according to Lyotard, does not work without falsifying human experience—no narrative can explain everything. Having no grand explanatory system in place to describe everything, however, does not mean that people are "reduced to barbarity. What saves them is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction." We are left with small narratives that explain things from different perspectives, and this competing arena of narratives Lyotard saw, at the time, as more capable of promoting justice.5 For Lyotard justice can occur when all sides, all competing narratives, are allowed the chance to speak and be heard. Injustice occurs when one narrative overpowers the others and dominates, manipulates or ignores their input. The hope of justice is that "every one of us belongs to several minorities, and what is very important, none of them prevails. It is only then that we can say that the society is just."6 The problem of justice, however, does not go away if no narrative dominates, for there are still conflicts between narratives to resolve. For Lyotard, total agreement between narratives will never be forthcoming: "We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus."7 Lyotard's assumption is that there will always be conflicts between narratives that will never be resolved, an injustice that is left over after all efforts fail, and that is the "differend."8 Differends are beyond arbitration because at some point narratives simply have no translations available to adjudicate differences.

All narratives, whether metanarratives or localized narratives, suffer limitations based on their structure—there is a space between narrative and experience, a space between what actually happens and what we tell about what happened. This "space of forgetting" goes largely unnoticed by those within both metanarratives and local narratives and may foster situations of injustice. For Lyotard, narrative itself is merely how reality is structured and is in essence ethically neutral. The curse of narrative is that everything cannot be told, even if we wanted to. We have not the time, energy, or capacity to tell all. Power relationships, however, work in this forgetting. Often those with little power are the ones being forgotten. If attention is not given to the workings of power in the building of narrative, that power all too often turns to domination. If one seeks to combat the injustice of domination, one must let more people speak so that they are not forgotten. Justice is not then guaranteed—within a deconstructionist framework justice is a choice and never an inevitability—but justice is then at least possible. When people are silenced, however, circumstances are ripe for injustice.

Heidegger and "the Jews" deals with the structural tendency of narrative to bowl over conflicting points of view. In this work Lyotard deals with the necessity of a narratizing memory to forget, to leave out people and events that do not fit into or would upset narrative structure. Martin Heidegger represents the totalizing narrative of Western philosophy itself, a thinking that tries to tell the whole story of life for all time. Heidegger represents ultimate narration. "The Jews" represent what is left out of that story, what is forgotten, and in the forgetting, trampled underfoot. Lyotard's paradigmatic problem is how a thinker as profound as Heidegger, who highlighted the "forgetting of Being," could be complicit in the forgetting of the Jews.9

Every narration for Lyotard is precarious, for "the 'this is how it was' is impossible." The nature of human memory and the limited viewpoint of human life mean that no narrative can be total. One must "fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. It means to fight against the precariousness of what has been established, of the reestablished past." There are two modes of forgetting for Lyotard. The first is what we normally mean when we forget—we once knew it and now we don't. We may remember of our own accord, we may be reminded and remember, or possibly we cannot remember at all. This type of forgetting can be entirely unintentional, and we could say that though we are responsible for it we are not "guilty" of it. My own subconscious desires and assumptions could be working in this. On the other hand, we can ignore things we know, and in an ethically negative sense this is intentional. They did not slip from consciousness, we tossed them out. In either case, something has been there and now it is not, but we may be reminded of it by others.10

A second kind of forgetting is more dangerous. Contrary to the common kind of forgetting in which we may recognize that something was there, a deeper forgetting is not really forgetting at all, since there was nothing represented to begin with. This for Lyotard is "a past that is not past," and "is thus not even there as absence, as terra incognita, but it is there nevertheless."11 In this type of forgetting something simply did not register in an experience. If I ignore something, I know it is there but decide not to pay attention to it. If I unintentionally forget, someone can call it to my attention from his or her narrative perspective. If I did not or cannot represent it to begin with, however, I can never ignore it, or remember it. This kind of forgetting is irreversible. The experience of the Jews in Germany illustrates for Lyotard both types of forgetting. First of all the Jews only fit into the Nazi story as that which had to be eliminated as enemy. Second, the SS strove to eliminate evidence of the slaughter. If there is no evidence, there is nothing to jog the memory of the forgotten. Third and most important, many Germans have no memory of the extermination of the Jews because they never knew about it; it was never inscribed in memory. Either they were kept from information or their narrative never allowed them to take in the information. This is the deep forgetting Lyotard speaks of. That there is nothing to remember, though, is not an acquittal. Lyotard is careful to point out that this specific effort at forgetting was a failure. The story of the Jews could not be squelched in the end, and the German narrative was faced with what it had wrought. Allowing such a tragedy by forgetting amounts to partial complicity.

Heidegger's problem is not that his philosophy necessitated Nazis, but that it allowed Nazism in both modes of forgetting: "It is thus necessary to distinguish what is political in this thought, what, because of a lack, this thought adds to itself to make itself political, and what is missing from this thought itself, what it forgets because it permits this politics."12 Heidegger's forgetting is for Lyotard an indictment of the entire Western approach to philosophy. Western philosophy from the beginning has sought to tell the story of existence, to narrate everything. In this attempt to narrate, something will always be forgotten. Narrative will always be guilty of leaving people and events out. The question of race has been frequently written out of the story of Western philosophy, but it has resisted the acknowledgment of this forgetting. The question then arises, what do we do about this forgetting if we are bound to tell narratives? Narrative holds equal potential for justice and injustice, for it is merely the structure of human identity. Here lies the importance of deconstruction for Lyotard. For him, deconstruction is not destruction. Deconstruction is not a negative quest, but one step in a positive quest, for "one deconstructs...because everything is badly constructed."13 Deconstruction is an attitude of suspicion toward explanatory systems. In our case here, a thought that narratizes must always remember that it has forgotten something, that there are also things it can never remember because it never knew them. Narrative can never exhaust life—there is always more that can be told. Some of this forgetting can be remedied by letting others tell their story. Some of this forgetting, however, can never be remedied. Lyotard wants us to remember this so that in our inevitable drive to narrate we never assume that any narration is definitive. And certainly, in a postmodern philosophical landscape, we must argue for what we want—we must struggle to retell the story in a way we see as more just, all the time knowing there is no ethical grounding for this other than our collective will, all the time humble because we know that we forget something at every moment we retell the story. Within the context of Western philosophy, race has largely been forgotten in the telling of the story. Though some philosophers have dealt with the concept of race, these ideas are seen as no more than sideshows and insignificant to their overall thought.14 In fact, in much of the history of Western philosophy, biography has often been shunted aside because of the dedication of Western philosophy to the study of ideas divorced from context. There is value in this effort, mainly in avoiding the genetic fallacy of judging an idea not for its own merit but by the source of the idea. One of the consequences, however, is that those who had a voice tended to come from the privileged classes who had access to education and leisure time in which to pursue the practice of philosophy. This means that literate, educated persons who could leave an intellectual legacy were almost always white men. Whiteness is an interesting concept in this case, for whiteness, colloquially interpreted as the "lack of color," points out the fact that "white" folks are not forced to remember their color in the telling of their own narrative. Those "of color" are not allowed to forget. Hence the grand divide: white folks don't see why folks of color can't forget their color, and folks of color don't see why white folks can't remember theirs.

The Ethic of Listening

In order to rediscover forgotten voices of Western philosophy, those who have until now told the story should practice an ethic of listening. Incessant speaking is essentially a power position which demands that one's own narration take center stage. After the forgetting of race in Western philosophy, those within that narrative must listen to alternatives. This inclusion of alternative voices requires a wider definition of philosophy, for the traditional definition focusing on the study of ideas divorced from context allowed the forgetting of race to begin with. The narrowness of contemporary philosophy is accentuated by the ghettoization of philosophy to the university context. Since few who disagree with academic philosophy's basic self-conception emerge intact through the university gauntlet, new voices are often found only outside academic philosophy—in literature, sociology, religion, music, and other places. (Even academic philosophers too often refuse to listen to each other—the historic mutual disdain between Analytic and Continental philosophies a case in point.) Only after listening and gathering alternative voices, however, can the discipline retell itself in a more inclusive manner. Philosophy is not an oral history, but a written history. Those people not from the dominant culture most often did not have the chance to pursue philosophy (of course gender plays an important, if ancillary, part as well.) The few who could pursue philosophy did not often have the chance to pursue publication. Without the permanent record of publication, philosophy does not exist in history. This level of the forgetting of race is analogous to Lyotard's forgetting that never allows experience to register in the narrative to begin with. Many great thinkers whose ideas were not preserved in writing are forgotten. Unfortunately, within an ethic of listening we can only here silence at this point, and lament the loss. Those who did sneak through the cracks of the philosophical story often fell victim to Lyotard's other main type of forgetting: forgetting what was indeed represented. The thinker was not taken up in the story though there may be a written record of him. Here arises the possibility of listening to these voices speak once more. Certainly W.E.B DuBois would fall into this category from recent history. The farther one recedes from the earlytwentieth century, the more difficult the task becomes. Is Frederick Douglass not a philosopher merely because he was overwhelmed with specific social concerns? The only advice I would have would be to listen to suggestions from all sides without belaboring all options with immediate judgment. Another interesting reality is that those outside the dominant culture are indeed part of the story but their racial otherness was narrated out of the story. The very origins of Western Philosophy in Greece sprouted in a soil made up of a number of interacting ethnicities and perspectives. This diverse beginning was then "downplayed in later historical accounts" as the story of philosophy developed.15 This same dynamic continued as the story of philosophy developed. Augustine of Hippo is an interesting case in point. Augustine is now a central part of the story of Western philosophy, indeed often lambasted as just the type of philosophy that we must combat in an effort to make philosophy more diverse. Augustine's African-ness, specifically his Berber heritage, has been narrated out of the story, as has the fact that he was then seen as a backwater and unsophisticated philosopher.16 However original his ideas were at the time, he has become part and parcel of the Western tradition that many critique as a dead white male adventure. Philosophers in the Middle Ages such as Averroes and Avicenna have suffered a similar fate. Their inclusion often serves only to advance, not challenge, the accepted story. This serves to point out that many of our arguments about race are not about race per se, but about diversity of thought. We might tend not to want to count ethnic perspectives if they agree with the dominant viewpoint.

One standard solution to the lack of balance in philosophy is the inclusion of ideas from philosophical traditions in other cultures. With the lack of records from persons of color from within the Western tradition, it is natural to look outside the Western tradition when seeking balance. One need only glance at philosophical textbook offerings of the last several years, which run the gamut from token inclusions of Lao Tzu and Mencius to substantive and balanced inclusion across cultures and genders from various continents. These inclusions may solve the problem of getting multiple races in the discussion, but does not solve the deeper problem that these other ideas often arise from the dominant narrative within their own culture which has dominated and forgotten in its own context. Confucian thought, for example, has been used in its own context to support gender inequality and rather blind political obedience. We would be wise to heed Lyotard's warning that all narratives forget as a part of their own construction. Ideas we may include in order to increase diversity in our own context are seen as combating diversity in their own context. This caveat aside, selections from a wide variety of cultures should be encouraged in order to widen the conversation and at least knock a few foundation blocks out from under the Western philosophy metanarrative. To listen to these other cultures requires a generous ear to the possibilities they hold, and sets an important precedent of inclusion.

As valuable as the inclusion of non-Western philosophers, marginalized Western philosophers and thinkers outside philosophy are, the hardest part of the new narration of Western philosophy is not what to include, but what to abandon. Dedicated to Lyotard's idea that a narrative must forget in order to make sense, we must ask the question: what parts of philosophy can now be righteously forgotten? We have limited time, limited attention. After we listen we must speak, but we cannot simply add to the story without subtracting. I have already mentioned the nobility in philosophy of recognizing the genetic fallacy, of avoiding the situatedness of an idea to judge that idea on its own merits. Certainly this has not been achieved fully, and philosophy has been guilty of the negative side of the genetic fallacy—rejecting an idea on the basis of its speaker. Race has often played into this. However, philosophy has also been guilty of the positive side of the genetic fallacy—accepting an idea simply because of its speaker. Race has often played into this as well. If we put these two ideas together, that of forgetting in order to retell the story and that of rightfully avoiding even the positive side of the genetic fallacy, then we must admit that some if not many ideas and thinkers in the history of philosophy deserve to be forgotten. Many ideas we take seriously merely because they came from thinkers the story regards as philosophical cornerstones, and therefore all of their ideas are assumed to be worthy of study. If Immanuel Kant said it, it must be worthy, right? Storytelling is unfortunately a zero-sum game. To win some, you must lose some. Who ends up on the chopping block? Is it time to finally forget Baruch Spinoza? Karl Marx? Plotinus? God forbid G.W.F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege? Can we not agree that Gottfried Leibniz's concept of the monad is simply boneheaded, worthy of forgetting? This is a very loaded question for philosophers, given that we all have our biases and want to determine our own philosophical agenda.

Not only do we struggle with eliminations personally, but professionally. When a colleague or department chair sees that a syllabus is missing philosopher x, often the reaction is a questioning of our professional acumen. This problem becomes acute in the classroom, and I am as guilty as anyone. The solution involves giving space to diverse voices in the history of philosophy and in contemporary philosophy. While it may be easy to pack a few more pages onto an anthology, packing a few more items into a semester is not nearly as feasible. When I look at my existing syllabus and ask what I should forget in order to include new voices, my answer is too often: nothing. I have already left out too much. But in order to retell the story of philosophy, I must leave out some and include others.

There Is No "End of the Story"

It is easy to do things as we have always done, putting off the changes. Listening, however, is an action, an action that puts others' stories before our own. To put others before ourselves is often the most difficult thing to do—and yet this inclusion of the other, especially by one from within the dominant narrative, is the essential key that makes listening an ethical action. Recentering from the self to the other is one of the ethical cornerstones of most of the world's ethical systems, both East and West. To retell the story of Western philosophy is to recenter the story, not merely to pull more into its orbit. What we want to do here is significant. A philosophy which will not sweep race under the rug is a more honest philosophy which has a chance of reengaging with the multicultural problems of the day. Philosophy in the West has had its share of armchair insignificance, but it has also offered its share of solutions. If our problems today are multicultural, multi-religious, multipolitical, multi-gendered, then our philosophy must become these as well. To do this, philosophy must not only retell itself, but invite all comers in the retelling. This will undoubtedly lead to chaos, to multiple retellings, but that is the nature of this new world we live in. Frankly, it has always been the nature of the world whether or not the dominant culture has told it that way. If philosophy can mirror the chaotic order of the world of competing stories, but do so in a critical way, it might gain some of the vitality that it once had before its self-relegation to the ghetto of academia. Philosophy retold may engage with the larger society to, in the words of Cornell West, "look to new frameworks and languages to understand our multilayered crisis," and foster leaders "who can situate themselves within a larger historical narrative of this country and our world."17 Issues of race, gender, culture, and economy can either work silently in the space of forgetting or come to consciousness in the retelling of the story of philosophy. Even then philosophy must remember that something will always be left out in the effort to retell the story, making the ethic of listening crucial in the coming task.


PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION – 2008/Volume 39 105

Notes
1. The narrative structure of human experience is argued in Steven Crites, "The
Narrative Quality of Experience," in Why Narrative, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and
L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989).
2. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the Jews," trans. Andreas Michel
and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
3. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (New York: Routledge,
1991), xvi.
4. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad
Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 32, 33, and 36.
5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
20 and 41.
6. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 32.
7. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 66.
8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges
Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
9. Lyotard, Heidegger and "the Jews," 4. Both "heidegger" and "the jews" are
largely figural in this work, thus Lyotard's lower-case designations. Lyotard
wishes to support the importance of Heidegger's thought but at the same time,
"one must admit that Heidegger was implicated in Nazism in a way that is not
merely anecdotal" (52). He accepts a sort of double-nature of Heidegger,
claiming that his thought neither necessarily leads to or away from Nazism.
10. Ibid., 9 and 10.
11. Ibid., 11.
12. Ibid., 68.
13. Ibid., 81.
14. See Andre Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005), on how many prominent modern philosophers
dealt with the concept of race. Many of these sometimes embarrassing ideas
have been conveniently forgotten to not sully the received story of philosophy.
15. Gail M. Presby, Karsten J. Struhl, and Richard E. Olsen, The Philosophical
Quest: A Cross-Cultural Reader (McGraw Hill: Boston, 2000), xv.
16. Kwame Okoampaahoofe, Jr., "St. Augustine the African," New York
Amsterdam News 90, no. 32 (1999), 26.
106 Loving – The Forgotten
17. Cornell West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books,
1993), 11 and 13.

http://www.ovpes.org/2008/Loving.pdf

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Was Heidegger Anti-Semitic?

Emmanuel Faye claims Heidegger criticized the "Judaization" ("Verjudung") of German universities in 1916, and favored instead the promotion of the "German race" ("die deutsche Rasse").[2] However, this claim is based on indirect evidence: a non-extant letter of Heidegger's quoted by Edmund Husserl twenty years later.[3] Faye also claims that Heidegger said of Spinoza that he was "ein Fremdkörper in der Philosophie", a "foreign body in philosophy" — Faye notes that Fremdkörper was a term which belonged to Nazi vocabulary, and not to classical German.

The widow of Ernst Cassirer claimed she had heard of Heidegger's "inclination to anti-Semitism" by 1929.[1] In June of 1933, Karl Jaspers criticized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propaganda book supporting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Jaspers recalled much later that Heidegger responded: "But there is a dangerous international alliance of Jews."[1]

There were "rumors" that Heidegger was anti-semitic already in 1932, and he was aware of them, and vehemently denied them, calling them "slander".[4]

Heidegger's rectorate at the university of Freiburg

Heidegger was rector of the university of Freiburg in 1933 and part of 1934. While he was rector, he implemented the Gleichschaltung totalitarian policy, suppressing all opposition.[1] According to Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, along with Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baeumler, spearheaded the "conservative revolution" enforced by the Nazis. He sent a public telegram to Hitler on May 20, 1933.[1]

Inaugural Address

Heidegger's inaugural address as rector of Freiburg, the "Rektoratsrede", was entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University", and later became notorious.[5] It culminated in three "Heil Hitlers". In this speech, he declared that "the essence of University was science", as well as the need to "exploit at its best the fundamental possibilities of the originally German stock and to conduct it to domination." He also praised "the historical mission of the German people (Volk), a people that knows itself in its state." He also invoked "the power to preserve, in the deepest way, the strengths [of the people] which are rooted in soil and blood."

Speech to Heidelberg Student Association

In June 1933, Heidegger gave a speech to the Student Association at the university of Heidelberg, in which he gave clear form to his views on the need for state control of the university, "in the National Socialist spirit" and free from "humanizing, Christian ideas":

    We have the new Reich and the university that is to receive its tasks from the Reich's will to existence. There is revolution in Germany, and we must ask ourselves: Is there revolution at the university as well? No. The battle still consists of skirmishes. So far, a breakthrough has only been achieved on one front: because new life is being educated (durch die Bildung neuen Lebens) in the work camp and educational association (Erziehungsverband) as well as at the university, the latter has been relieved of educational tasks to which it has till now believed it had an exclusive right.

    The possibility could exist that the university will suffer death through oblivion and forfeit the last vestige of its educational power. It must, however, be integrated again into the Volksgemeinschaft and be joined together with the State. The university must again become an educational force that draws on knowledge to educate the State's leaders to knowledge. This goal demands three things: 1. knowledge of today's university; 2. knowledge of die dangers today holds for the future; 3. new courage.

    Up to now, research and teaching have been carried on at the universities as they were for decades. Teaching was supposed to develop out of research, and one sought to find a pleasant balance between the two. It was always only the point of view of the teacher that spoke out of this notion. No one had concerned himself with the university as community. Research got out of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid behind examination requirements.

    A fierce battle must be fought against this situation in the National Socialist spirit, and this spirit cannot be allowed to be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas that suppress its unconditionality.

    Danger comes not from work for the State. It comes only from indifference and resistance. For that reason, only true strength should have access to the right path, but not halfheartedness. [...]

    The new teaching which is at issue here does not mean conveying knowledge, but allowing students to learn and inducing them to learn. This means allowing oneself to be beset by the unknown and then becoming master of it in comprehending knowing; it means becoming secure in one's sense of what is essential. It is from such teaching that true research emerges, interlocked with the whole through its rootedness in the people and its bond to the state. The student is forced out into the uncertainty of all things, in which the necessity of engagement is grounded. University study must again become a risk, not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed toward the goal to which it has committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university.[6]

Denounced or demoted non-Nazis

Heidegger also denounced or demoted several colleagues for being insufficiently committed to the Nazi cause.

On September 29, 1933, Heidegger leaked information to the local minister of education that the chemist Hermann Staudinger had been a pacifist during World War I. Heidegger knew this would cost Staudinger his job. The Gestapo investigated the matter and confirmed Heidegger's tip. Asked for his recommendation as rector of the university, Heidegger secretly urged the ministry to fire Staudinger without a pension.[1]

Heidegger also denounced his former friend Eduard Baumgarten in a letter to the head of the organization of Nazi professors at the university of Göttingen, where Baumgarten had been teaching. In the letter, Heidegger called Baumgarten "anything but a National-Socialist" and underlined his links to "the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber."[1]

The Catholic intellectual Max Müller was a member of the inner circle of Heidegger's most gifted students from 1928 to 1933. But Müller stopped attending Heidegger's lectures when Heidegger joined the Nazi party in May 1933. Seven months later, Heidegger fired Müller from his position as a student leader because Müller was "not politically appropriate." Then in 1938 Müller discovered that Heidegger had blocked him from getting a teaching position at Freiburg by informing the university administration that Müller was "unfavorably disposed" toward the regime.[1]

Attitude towards Jews

On November 3, 1933, Heidegger issued a decree applying the Nazi racial policies to the students of Freiburg university. These laws meant that Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from privileged and superior positions reserved for "Aryan Germans". Heidegger announced that economic aid would henceforth be awarded to students who belonged to the SS, the SA, or other military groups but would be denied to "Jewish or Marxist students" or anyone who fit the description of a "non-Aryan" in Nazi law.[1]

After 1933, Heidegger declined to direct the doctoral dissertations of Jewish students: he sent all those students to his Catholic colleague Professor Martin Honecker. And in his letter denouncing Baumgarten, cited above, Heidegger wrote that "after failing with me" [not as a student but as a friend!], Baumgarten "frequented, very actively, the Jew Fränkel" -- i.e. Eduard Fränkel, a noted professor of classics at Freiburg.[1]

Nonetheless, Heidegger also intervened as rector to help several Jewish colleagues. He wrote appeals in defense of three Jewish professors, including Fränkel, all of whom were about to be fired for racial reasons.[1] Heidegger also helped certain Jewish students and colleagues to emigrate, including his assistant Werner Brock, who found a position in England with Heidegger's assistance.[7][8]

Support for the "Fuhrer principle"

According to Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger supported the "necessity of a Führer" for Germany as early as 1918.[2] In a number of speeches in November 1933, Heidegger endorsed the Fuhrerprinzip ("leader principle"), i.e. the principle that the Fuhrer is the embodiment of the people - a kind of absolute monarch. For example in one speech Heidegger stated:

    Let not propositions and 'ideas' be the rules of your being (Sein). The Fuhrer 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![9]

In another speech a few days later Heidegger said:

    The German people has been summoned by the Fuhrer to vote; the Fuhrer, however, is asking nothing from the people; rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it - the entire people - wants its own existence (Dasein), or whether it does not want it. [...] On November 12, the German people as a whole will choose its future, and this future is bound to the Fuhrer. [...] There are not separate foreign and domestic policies. There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve.[10]

In late November Heidegger gave a conference at the University of Tübingen, organized by the students of the university and the Kampfbund, the local Nazi party section. In this address he argued for a revolution in knowledge, a revolution which would displace the traditional idea that the university should be independent of the state:

    We have witnessed a revolution. The state has transformed itself. This revolution was not the advent of a power pre-existing in the bosom of the state or of a political party. The national-socialist revolution means rather the radical transformation of German existence. [...] However, in the university, not only has the revolution not yet achieved its aims, it has not even started."[11]

Heidegger addressed some of these remarks in the 1966 "Der Spiegel" interview, "Only a God Can Save Us"[12] (see section below). In that interview, he stated: "I would no longer write [such things] today. Such things as that I stopped saying by 1934."

However Hans Jonas, a former student of Heidegger's, argues in a recent book that Heidegger's endorsement of the "Fuhrer principle" stemmed from his philosophy and was consistent with it:

    But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—liguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.[13]

Resignation from rectorship

According to the historian Richard J. Evans,

    By the beginning of 1934, there were reports in Berlin that Heidegger had established himself as 'the philosopher of National Socialism'. But to other Nazi thinkers, Heidegger's philosophy appeared too abstract, too difficult, to be of much use. [...] Though his intervention was welcomed by many Nazis, on closer inspection such ideas did not really seem to be in tune with the Party's. It is not surprizing that his enemies were able to enlist the support of Alfred Rosenberg, whose own ambition it was to be the philosopher of Nazism himself. Denied a role at the national level, and increasingly frustrated with the minutiae of academic politics - which seemed to him to betray a sad absence of the new spirit he had hoped would permeate the universities - Heidegger resigned his post in April 1934.[14][/quote]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger_and_Nazism

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

More on Heidegger and Jews. If you keep in mind the on-going Jewish lies surrounding the Holohoax, the arrows aimed at Heidegger after all these years seem to miss their target. Growing up lower-middle class in Germany in countryside, and struggling, Heidegger likely knew intimately how Jew Produce Market fixers rigged the system against German farming communities -- much like they do in Chicago today.  Nazism actually had a core following first in the conservative non-Communist countryside regions of Germany - precisely where the Jew money lenders preyed with cruelty on common people. --The CSR

On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy
by Tom Rockmore
University of California Press, 1992

    In recent years [Martin Heidegger] has allowed his anti-Semitism to come increasingly to the fore, even in his dealings with his groups of devoted Jewish students... The events of the last few weeks have struck at the deepest roots of my existence.

    Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), 4 May 1933, after Heidegger, as Rector of Freiberg University, had revoked Husserl's access to the University Library [quoted by Richard Wolen, Heidegger's Children, Princeton University Press, 2001, p.11].

    Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger's most perceptive critics, Paul Hühnerfeld, has said:  "These books, whose meaning was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Hölderlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted."... What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time... And Heidegger's life -- his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city -- seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism.

    ... When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger displayed what many have since thought unfitting servility to his new masters -- did he not omit from prints of Sein und Zeit appearing in the Nazi era his dedication to the philosopher [Edmund] Husserl, to whom he owed so much but who was, inconveniently enough, a Jew?

    Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, the Outsider as Insider [Harper Torchbook, 1970, pp. 81-83] -- Husserl had actually become a Lutheran in 1887, though, of course, this was irrelevant to the racial theories of the Nazis.

    Heidegger's political views are commonly deplored today on account of his early and open support of Nazism. Because of this connection, many like to suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought (as distinct from general intellectual thought) in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Heidegger's major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the left, which they were... In the writings of numerous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, "Heideggerianism" was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual left for the next generation.

    James Ceaser, "The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe," in Understanding Anti-Americanism, Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, ed. Paul Hollander [Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2004, p.58].

    After the paroxysm of the Nazi and Hitlerian period, long elaborated in Heidegger's writings even before 1933, and after the toxic spite often characterizing his courses taught in 1933-1934, the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after an explosion -- a gray cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds. Soon the 102 volumes of the so-called complete work (sixty-six volumes have appeared to date), in which the same assertions are repeated over and over through thousands of pages, will encumber by their sheer bulk the shelves reserved for twentieth-century philosophy and continue to spread the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a world-wide scale.

    Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, translated by Michael B. Smith, foreword by Tom Rockmore [Yale University Press, 2009, p.xxv].

    For what is healthy and what is sick, every people and age gives itself its own law, according to the inner greatness and extension of its existence [seines Daseins]. Now the German people [Volk] are in the process of rediscovering their own essence [sein eigenes Wesen] and making themselves worthy of their great destiny. Adolf Hitler, our great Führer and chancellor, created, through the National Socialist revolution [nationalsozialistische Revolution], a new state by which the people will assure itself anew of the duration and continuity of its history.... For every people, the first warranty of is authenticity and greatness is in its blood, its soil [in seinem Blut, seinem Boden], and its physical growth. If it loses this good or even only allows it to become considerably weakened, all effort at state politics, all economic and technical ability, all spiritual action [alles geistige Wirken] will remain in the end null and void.

    Martin Heidegger, address to the Freiburg Institute of Pathological Anatomy, August 1933, quoted by Emmanuel Faye, op cit., p.68, German text, p.351, note 35

    The enemy [Feind] is one who poses an essential [wesentliche] threat to the existence of the people [des Daseins des Volkes] and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy, and the outside enemy is not necessarily the most dangerous. It may even appear that there is no enemy at all. The root requirement is then to find the enemy, to bring him to light or even to create him [oder gar erst zu schaffen], in order that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and that existence not become apathetic [und das Dasein nicht stumpf werde]. The enemy may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people, and oppose the latter's ownmost essence [eigenem Wesen], acting contrary to it. All the keener and harsher and more difficult is then the struggle, for only a very small part of the struggle consists in mutual blows; it is often much harder and more exhausting to seek out the enemy as such, and to lead him to reveal himself, to avoid nuturing illusions about him, to remain ready to attack, to cultivate and increase constant preparedness and to initiate the attack on a long-term basis, with the goal of total extermination [völligen Vernichtung].

    Martin Heidegger, quoted by Emmanuel Faye, op cit., p.168, German text, p.376, note 47, boldface added

    I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher [Husserl], and he has a devilish influence on Germany.

    Sir Karl Popper, quoted by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, Intellectus 23 (Jul-Sep 1992), pp. 1-5 [Hong Kong Institute of Economic Science, IES], HTML Version, 29th January 1997.

The controversy about Martin Heidegger's membership in the German Nazi Party ultimately reveals one very important thing:  The very illiberal and irrational principles that attracted Heidegger to Hitler and the Nazis are also the principles that attract Heidegger's defenders to him. Thus, a doctrine that some might try to represent as an endorsement of freedom and liberation instead leads to ideologies that are collectivist, authoritarian, and totalitarian. We know what is going on when when "individualism" is attacked, or when there are sneering allusions by leftists (not by Rush Limbaugh) to "liberalism," meaning a social order of individual rights and freedom -- something that Heidegger (and Nietzsche) and the Left never admired. That most of Heidegger's defenders, in the United States at least, are leftists and "progressives" (like Richard Rorty) simply reveals a characteristic of the history of the 20th Century:  that the Left (socialists, communists, American style "liberals") has far more in common with the far Right (fascism, populism) than anyone on the Left has ever wanted to admit. The phenomenon of illiberal politics dismissing the authority of conventional morality but embracing the authority of "progressive" government, even in its police state incarnations, is examined elsewhere under the moral fallacy of "moralistic relativism". Heidegger should be grateful that the whitewash of Communism by trendy intellectuals, past and present, ended up spilling over into an apologia for his Naziism [note].

Tom Rockmore's book does not concentrate on bringing out this circumstance, but it could. We get the clear parallel in one passage:

    There is finally no significant distinction between Heidegger's call for submission to the whim of the Führer and Lukács's similar betrayal of reason in the service of Stalinism. As concerns their voluntary subordination of philosophical criticism to political totalitarianism, both thinkers are outstanding examples of the betrayal of reason in our time. [p.66]

In his exhaustive examination of Heidegger's texts, he sometimes seems to be beating around the bush. However, he may have done things this way to guard against accusations from Heideggerians that he is unfamiliar with the texts or is misinterpreting them. And since his treatment is discursive and readable, which cannot necessarily be said for Heidegger himself, the thorough nature of the examination is not tedious. Putting together the bits and pieces, however, Rockmore's analysis is damning, and obviously applicable to all subsequent Heideggerians.

    ...it must be noted that Heidegger's theory has no intrinsic resources to prevent him from accepting either National Socialism or another similar theory. [p.72]

    Whereas I regard Heidegger's philosophy as ingredient in his politics, Heidegger's defenders are concerned to exonerate his thought from any significant role in his actions. [p.75]

    -- Heidegger turned to Nazism on the basis of his philosophical position.
    -- Heidegger's theory of Being, or fundamental ontology, includes a political dimension that can only lead to Nazism or something like Nazism -- in short, a totalitarian political movement.
    -- Heidegger shared with National Socialism a common goal of the realization of the essence of the German Volk. [p.123]

The very title of the book, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, contains a suggestive ambiguity. Is it On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, or it is On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy? In the one case we just worry about Heidegger. In the other we worry about the meaning of this for philosophy as a whole. We certainly should worry about the meaning of it for philosophy as a whole, but Rockmore leaves this mostly as an implication, until the last sections of the book, on "Heidegger's Nazism and the Limits of His Philosophy" and "Heidegger's Thought, Its Reception, and the Role of the Intellectual."

The picture that emerges of Heidegger is mainly of someone whose enthusiasm for Naziism was dampened only by the lack of interest of the Nazis for him. When he became the Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger delivered an address in which he basically announced that he had the right understanding of the meaning the National Socialism, which had been confused by "political science" and should turn to philosophy (i.e. to him). This should have made him the Philosopher King, or at least Herr Hitler's official philosopher, the way Hegel had in effect become the official philosopher of Prussianism. Nothing of the sort happened, and not many Nazis liked his attitude.

    Heidegger goes on to observe that his address was understood neither by those to whom it was addressed nor by the Nazi party. He reports that Otto Wacker, the Staatsminister für Unterricht und Kultur in Baden, complained that the talk advanced a form of private National Socialism, not based on a concept of race, and that the rejection of "political science" was unacceptable. [p.110]

    In sum, Heidegger is unhappy that the National Socialists are unaware of his own ontological difference. What is surprising is that Heidegger should be either surprised or dismayed to learn that the Nazis were less than fully absorbed, were in fact uninterested in his own approach to Being, in the same way that they were also uninterested in the effort of Rosenberg, the well-known Nazi "philosopher," to bring about a profound spiritual renewal. Heidegger's objection reveals, then, an astonishing lack of awareness of the nature of Nazism. [p.193]

What Heidegger thought was hardly even comprehensible to the Nazis, and today it is hard enough to credit when baldly stated.

    Heidegger seems literally to have thought that the future of the West depended on the proper understanding of metaphysics, supposedly presented in his own thought. In other circumstances, someone who advanced such ideas would be a candidate for psychiatric treatment. It is a measure of the loss of perspective of contemporary philosophy that it accords such delusions serious consideration. [p.92]

    Here, his objection to National Socialism is always limited to its failure as a theory of Being. Heidegger's failure to object to the political consequences of the Nazi worldview is significant, since it suggests an incapacity of his thought -- that is, the thought of a great thinker, in the opinion of some observers the most important thinker of this century -- to grasp the political specificity of National Socialism. It is an error to hold that after the rectorate Heidegger breaks with Nazism on a political plane. Even in the rectorial address, his commitment to National Socialism was tempered by his refusal of the hegemony of politics, which he intended to found in philosophy. In the Beiträge his view has not changed, since he continues to accept the point he has always shared with Nazism: insistence on the authentic gathering of the Germans. [p.201]

    In the Beiträge, in his "postphilosophical" phase, from the vantage point of the other beginning Heidegger criticizes National Socialism as a mere Weltanschauung like Christianity or liberalism. According to Heidegger, both the Christian view of transcendence and its denial in terms of the Volk as the aim of history are forms of liberalism (Liberalismus). [p.190]

The problem with the Nazis, according to Heidegger, was not that they terrorized and murdered people, and started World War II, but that they had the wrong attitude towards metaphysics. Whether they would have still been murderers if they had the right metaphysics is a good question. One of the most disturbing things about Heidegger's thought is that the murders -- or even the public thuggery that he could have seen in the earliest days of the Third Reich -- don't really seem to have disturbed him all that much. It was not the murders or the public mayhem that discredited "existing" Naziism but simply the wrong attitude towards philosophy, i.e. Heidegger himself. The most damning accusation, however, is just that Naziism was a form of liberalism!

    We are already familiar with Heidegger's frequent assertions, common in claims of orthodoxy, with respect to the views of Kant, Nietzsche, and Jünger, that only he, Heidegger, has understood them. Here [in the Introduction to Metaphysics], he makes a similar claim with respect to Nazism. For Heidegger evidently thought of himself as the only "orthodox" Nazi, as the only one able to understand the essence of National Socialism... To the best of my knowledge there is nothing in the public record to suggest that Heidegger was at all sensitive to the human suffering wreaked by Nazism, in fact sensitive to human beings in more than an abstract sense. [p.240]

Heidegger is not a moralist and does not have anything like a theory or system of moral principles. It is not clear how a prohibition of murder would even be grounded in his system. A "resolute" and "authentic" murderer actually sounds pretty good.

    Although in theory resoluteness is the call of conscience, in practice there are absolutely no criteria that enable one to recognize where conscience lies, to make a rational choice. The words and deeds of the Nazi dictator are as good as any other form of resoluteness. For a theory that insists on resoluteness at all costs, resoluteness about pushpin is as good as that about poetry, and Nazism is as good as altruism. Heidegger's notion of resoluteness is, then, the ultimate parody of the Kantian idea of moral responsibility based on intellectual maturity and a wholly rational choice of moral principles. [p.65]

    If the ethical component is not present in the beginning, it will not be present at the end; and it was not present in -- in fact, it was specifically excluded from -- Heidegger's "antihumanist" meditation on Being. [p.12]

This absence of ethics means that lack of concern about the murders and thuggery of the Nazis should really not surprise us.

    A point made by Jaspers, the former psychiatrist, whose testimony proved most damaging in the deliberations of the [de-Nazification] committee, is relevant here. "He [i.e., Heidegger] does not perceive the depths of his earlier mistake, which is why there is no real change in him but rather a game of distortions and erasures." [p.86]

Although Heidegger's Naziism was not, in the judgment of Otto Wacker (seen above) and both modern defenders and critics, based on race, it is now hard to see how there was in fact not a racial, or at least an ethnic, element in it -- the racial, or ethnic, element of the German people.

    He fails, however, to mention his conviction, which he seems never to have abandoned, that the German people possess a Western historical vocation that requires realization. [p.91]

    Here and in other writings, Heidegger's chauvinism is evident in his repeated insistence on German philosophy as the sole legitimate heir of Greek thought. [p.103]

    ...he now believes that Nazism did not fail him but that Hilter and other Nazis failed Nazism. He seems never to have regretted his adherence to National Socialism for the purpose of realizing the essence of the German people, or to further the understanding of Being, ends that he still accepts as valid. [p.94]

    The recurrence of Heidegger's stress on the Germans as German at this late date [the Beiträge, only published in 1989] in his thought is not less, but even more, troubling than before. [p.187]

    In this way, he obliquely suggests that his turn toward Nazism was not only intended to bring about a gathering of the Germans as Germans, hence, not only for the perverse humanism whose highest form is National Socialism. Rather, his Nazi turning is also, perhaps above all, for the purpose of realizing his own authentic thought of Being. [p.192]

    Heidegger's statement offers a remarkable anticipation of his persistent identification, present throughout his later writings, with a kind of ideal Nazism, distinguished from its real, Hitlerian form. [p.110]

    We have already noted that Heidegger's remark that he did not renounce his thought in his effort, in an official capacity, to realize the essence of what is German, is significant. This statement should be recognized as what it is, as a clear admission of a seamless web, a direct link, between his own thought, as he understood it, of the concept of authenticity applied to the Germans as a whole and his turn to Nazism as presenting a propitious moment, a kairos, to realize this goal. [p.118, kairós = "the right time"]

The ultimate purpose of Heidegger's thought, however mediated by Being, was always for the German people. This is easily excused and adaptable for the ethnic reification that we see in politically correct thought today, but then these excuses and adaptations are used precisely by the same leftist totalitarians (e.g. Richard Rorty) whose moral kinship with Heidegger is so conspicuous.

Heidegger always saw a special philosophical status and destiny for the German people because of their language. He always saw the German language as the heir to Classical Greek as the truly philosophical language. He could draw real connections between the two languages, since German is highly inflected, still has an active case system for nouns, and makes extensive use of compounds. All these were characteristic of Classical Greek, but have otherwise disappeared from Western European languages. Russian preserves the same features, but then there was not much in the way of real Russian philosophical writing for Heidegger to notice. Now, as with the ethnic reification, the topic of language can also be adapted by Heidegger's trendy admirers, and Heidegger can be made out as another linguistic philosopher, right up there with Wittgenstein. This is to ignore, however, the specificity of Heidegger's valuation. It is not language, but the German language, that interests Heidegger. It is not just any poetry that takes over from the Nazis to uncover Being, but German poetry. Heidegger is thus not a "linguistic philosopher," but a self-consciously German philosopher. This made him a natural and logical admirer of Hitler.

The flagship of Nazi racism, of course, was their animus for the Jews, which led to the attempt to exterminate them during World War II. Heidegger's obscurantism and inconsistency have served to protect him from accusations that he was actually an anti-Semitic fellow traveler with the Nazis, even from Jews, like Hannah Arendt, who reestablished friendly relations with him after the War. But Heidegger, to an extent, did actually subscribe to and practice anti-Semitism, as we see here:

    Recently, the efforts undertaken to protect Heidegger against this charge [anti-Semitism] have been refuted through the publication of a previously unknown letter, written by Heidegger in 1929, that is, before the Nazis came to power, which clearly shows his anti-Semitism in his pointed rejection of the "'Jewification' of the German spirit [Verjudung des deutschen Geistes]." [p.111]

Whether a full blown racism or not, Heidegger's attitude reflects the conflict between German nationalism and the tolerance of the Jews that would be characteristic of a liberal society. That conflict goes all the way back to people like Fries. Peter Gay [Weimar Culture, Outsider as Insider, 1968] already noted, before Heidegger's Naziism had become much of an issue, that Heidegger removed the dedication of Being and Time, which was to the "inconveniently Jewish" Edmund Husserl. There are various stories of Heidegger stiffing his Jewish graduate students, not signing their dissertations, but he also seems inconsistent in this, since he was very enthusiastic about some Jewish students, like Hannah Arendt, and did decline to take some Nazi anti-Jewish measures. What this looks like is that Heidegger actually had no real positive dislike of Jews but that he was, fitfully, willing to apply the logic of his own glorification of the German Volk, or to conform, occasionally, to the political direction of the Führer. This reveals him as a morally weak person (the Aristotelian moral category is incontinence) whose own beliefs directed him towards evil. Since the anti-Semitism was more or less incidental to this, it could be dismissed and forgotten when, after the War, it had become a personal and professional liability.

Heidegger's Germanism, then, is the functional equivalent of, and not so different from, Nazi racism. But what is the positive connection between this and his philosophical thought? That is the key question. There are at least four ways in which there is a connection: (1) the here and now of Dasein, (2) the revolutionary "uncovering" of Being in Time, (3) the conservatism of the idea that his "uncovering" is a return to a purer past, and (4) the collectivist authoritarianism of Heidegger's notions of freedom and authenticity.

   1. Heidegger's original approach to Being was as being is manifest in the "here and now" -- Dasein, being (sein) here (da). This introduces a positivistic, Hegelian ("the real is rational") aspect to any possible moral guidance from this system. The here and now in 1933 meant Adolf Hitler. The truth and greatness of National Socialism was an authentic "uncovering" of Being. When this didn't seem to work out, Being "withdrew" itself, according to Heidegger.

          "The Führer himself and alone is today and in the future German reality and its law." [from the Rectoral Address, p.65]

          The relative optimism present when he became rector was later transformed into a bleak pessimism about the possibility of surpassing what Heidegger, in the rectoral address, describes as "the forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is." [p.216]

          Everything is now dominated by the will to power that holds sway in the space left through the withdrawal of Being, now present only in the mode of absence. [p.95]

      If Hitler wasn't bad enough, the "withdrawal" of Being leaves the Nietzschean "might makes right" ethic of the Will to Power.

          Heidegger now argues that the suggestion that God is dead and the reduction of value to will, or nihilism, can be understood only in terms of the will to power, in his view the central concept of Nietzsche's philosophy. [p.93]

   2. The "uncovering" of Being is a violent, irrational, revolutionary process. As this appealed to the irrationalism of fascists in the 30's, it appealed to the nihilists and irrationalists of the left from the 50's to the present. It is intensely romanticist in both groups.

          Berlin's account of the antirationalistic, romantic approach to human life and action, including the problem of alienation, in the writings of Joseph de Maistre, an early forerunning of fascism, is an accurate description of the Volk-ideological approach to modern life which influenced Heidegger's own Nazi turning.... [p.38]

          The entire effort [the Nietzsche lectures, "Letter on Humanism," Beiträge zur Philosophie, Hölderlin lectures, etc.] represents a strengthening of the antirationalist, even gnostic side of Heidegger's thought.... The incipient antirationalist side of his position is already evident in Being and Time in various ways, for instance in his insistence on the analysis of Dasein as prior to and apart from the various sciences (§ 10), in the antiscientific perspective of the work in general which Jaspers, for example, found objectionable, in the abandonment of the Husserlian conception of transcendental truth, on which Heidegger insisted early in the book (§ 7) in favor of the view of truth as disclosure (§§ 44,68) and in the idea of resoluteness (§ 74). The conceptions of truth as disclosure and resoluteness are basically antirational since there are no criteria to discern the correctness of either one. [pp.126-127]

      The irrationality of the "uncovering" of Being is an artifact of the unknowability of just what we are going to get from it. To find out what we are getting we have to look (at the Brown Shirts in the street), and to participate we have to be taken up into the furor of Being (in Heidegger's case, the furor Teutonicus). In the following quote we get a classic expression of "existence over essence" Existentialism, later echoed by Sartre, with the "here and now" of Dasein, and the revolutionary characteristic of being future oriented.

          Heidegger identifies two basic characteristics of Dasin: "the priority of existentia over essentia and the fact that Dasein is in each case mine." Unlike entities, or mere things, Dasein is intrinsically directed toward the future. It is essentially characterized by the fact that its "'essence' lies in its 'to be' [Zu-sein."]." [p.44]

      Since most people, especially leftists, like to think of fascism as essentially conservative, the revolutionary aspect of it tends to be overlooked. But fascism, especially Naziism, was something new. It used as much from Marxism as from traditional culture. This is why the artists of the Italian "Futurism" movement could end up as Fascists. A similar phenomenon could later be see in Irân, where the Islâmic Revolution was intensely reactionary but also a novel event, with all the trappings of other 20th century revolutionary, "people's liberation" struggles. The Ayatollâh Khomeini certainly had much more in common with Fidel Castro than with Jimmy Carter, despite the atheism of the former and the Born Again piety of the latter.

   3. Besides the revolutionary aspect to fascism, there is also the conservative side. If the "here and now" means Germany and the German language, this is a history, a tradition:

          Clearly, a heritage is what is transmitted from the past to later generations. For Heidegger, who here anticipates Gadamer's notion of the tradition as itself valuable, what is "good" is a heritage, since goodness makes authenticity possible, and goodness is transmitted in resoluteness. It follows, since authenticity is understood as the realization of the possibility that most intimately belong to the individual person, that such possibilities are by their nature traditional in character. There is, then, a fiercely conservative strain in Heidegger's view of self-realization as the free choice of oneself, since to realize oneself, to resolutely seize the most intimate possibility available to one in choosing oneself, is finally to extend past tradition; for tradition itself is the vehicle of the "good." In a fundamental sense, the authenticity made possible by resoluteness is not innovative but repetitive in character; it is not the realization of what is new and unprecedented, but rather the repetition of a prior tradition which as such embodies "goodness." In a deep sense, for Heidegger to be authentic is to embrace or to repeat the past in one's own life through a reinstantiation of the tradition. Since Nazism claimed to embody the values of the authentic German, of the German Volk as German, there is, then, a profound parallel, providing for an easy transition without any compromise of basic philosophical principles, between Heidegger's conception of authenticity through resoluteness and National Socialism. [p.47]

      The "good" as tradition not only fits into the positivist, Hegelian "here and now" as intrinsically valuable, but it also reflects a characteristic of the "uncovering" of Being. That is, Is the Being that is "uncovered" something new all the time, or is it the same Being that has always been? There appears, indeed, to be a primordial and authoritative Being. Each "uncovering" reveals the same, original Truth. That is the lesson of Heidegger's own investigation of the Presocratics. To him, the Greeks knew something and were more authentic than we moderns know or are now. Our own revolutionary activity, however radical, is thus essentially revivalist in character, a revival that is, however, independently inspired since it involves return to the same ontological point of origin. Past and future come together in a Dasein that is at once traditional and ancient but also revolutionary and futurist. This is why someone observed, after reading the Rectoral Address, that he didn't know whether it meant he was supposed to read the Presocratics or start goose-stepping.

      Heidegger's conservatism is also reflected in his hostility to modernity, not just in the form of liberal democracy, but in the form of science and technology and commercial culture. This is another area where he appeals to modern leftists, who not only want a socialist mandarinism, run by themselves, rather than liberal democracy, but who are also constitutionally hostile to science, which depends on criteria far harder than their own self-persuasive rhetorical sophistries, and to technology and commerce, which are not only similarly hard edged but have done far more to improve the life of most people than the chatter of Marxist dialectics ever has.

          In this way, Heidegger establishes to his satisfaction that modern technology, and by implication the whole modern period, is only possible because of the turn away from an authentic comprehension of Being. The double consequence of Heidegger's analysis is to forge a metaphysical link between the question of Being and technology, and to uncover a metaphysical ground to oppose technology and modernity. [p.211]

          Ernst Jünger's influence on Heidegger's conception of technology, which has been studied in the secondary literature, is visible in a number of Heidegger's texts... Jünger's book reads like a kind of mad Spinozism in which determinism is freedom and the worker is free in submitting to a centrally organized dictatorship. [p.217]

          ...Heidegger's understanding of technology is incompatible with a commitment to democracy, democratic values, and what is called the democratic way of life... Yet Heidegger rejects democracy because of his commitment to Being, but not to human being... There is a continuous line of argument leading from the Enlightenment commitment to reason to the insistence on responsibility as the condition of morality, which peaks in Kant's ethical theory. When Heidegger attributes ultimate causal authority to Being, he clearly reverses the Enlightenment view that through the exercise of reason human being can attain dominion over the world and itself. In the final analysis, if Heidegger is correct, human actions depend on the gift of Being, hence on a suprahuman form of agency. Heidegger's insistence on Being as the final causal agent signals an abandonment of the idea of ethical responsibility. [p.237]

      Nothing is so trendy today as "post-modernism," which is largely a repackaging of nihilism and Marxism, a Nietzschean will to power which is hostile to almost everything characteristic of modern commercial culture. This is now folded together with an extreme environmentalism which sees the miserable poverty of say, Castro's Cuba, as a noble and virtuous "ecotopia." That such regimes are now demonstrably worse for the environment than free market development cannot dent the stubborn vision that using "natural resources" freely is bad for the future and for the planet. This general hostility to technology, wealth, and development is one of the key areas where everything that Heidegger hoped for from the Nazis is all but indistinguishable from what contemporary "progressive" academics and intellectuals want from the totalitarian, thought controlling police state that they constantly promote. "Modernity," meaning all the trappings of science, wealth, and freedom, is a dirty word among the modern leftist anointed.

   4. The "uncovering" of Being is something that is done by a few but is then provided to the many, whose own "resoluteness" and authenticity are found in that process. Thus, the identity of the Germans is not something that they hit upon individually and develop for themselves. It is something "uncovered" by gifted individuals, whether the politician Hitler, the poet Hölderlin, or the philosopher Heidegger, and then taken up by the masses. This vision is collectivist, authoritarian, elitist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. As such it fits perfectly into German tradition, since this was already Hegel's vision of the State and the practice of Prussia, of which the Third Reich was merely a logical extrapolation and application. We also find the characteristic sophistry of reversing the idea of freedom, characteristic both of fascism and the political left, whereby it is no longer a matter of individual will but of group, collective conformity. Thus Trotsky could argue, well before Orwell's 1984 ("Slavery is Freedom"), that enforced (i.e. slave) labor was free labor because it would be contradictory to think that workers could be enslaved by the Worker's State. They were thus simply working for themselves.

          There is a kind of aristocratic authoritarianism built into Heidegger's theory of fundamental ontology which leads seamlessly to a politically antidemocratic political point of view. [p.72]

          In sum, Heidegger's pursuit of Being, as he understood it, led to Nazism, and could in fact only lead either to this or another form of antidemocratic, authoritarian political practice. [p.72]

          In his remarks [in the Beträge] on "The essence of the people and Da-sein," Heidegger returns to his conviction that only the few can provide a people with its identity. For Heidegger, who here makes use of a notion of plural authenticity originally mentioned in Being and Time, a people only is one when it receives its unifying idea and so returns to Being. [p.197]

          The idea of the Volk as an authentic community, which Heidegger takes over from German Volksideologie and grounds philosophically in Being and Time in his conception of plural authenticity, remains a permanent part of his position throughout its later development. Beginning with the rectoral address, Heidegger continues to hold one or more versions of the venerable Platonic view that philosophy can found politics as the necessary condition of the good life, as the real presupposition of the radiant future. Heidegger never abandoned the familiar philosophical conviction in the cognitive privilege of philosophy, what after the turning in his position became new thought, with its familiar link to antidemocratic, totalitarian politics. [p.285]

          Consider, for example, the following passage from an article by Ernst Krieck, a leading philosophical theoretician of the Nazi Weltanschauung:

              The revolutionary upheaval made itself known in a displacement of emphasis. Instead of the individual person, the völkische whole is central, as a result of which the basic reality of life comes into view.... The individual does not arrive at his worldview through reason according to his individual situation and inclination to arbitrariness and choice. Rather, we are subject to the movement of forces over us and directed in common. We do not seize, but we are seized and driven.

          ...and if the only metaphysical people is the German people which alone can know Being as the true heirs of the Greeks, then there is an easy, obvious transition from Heidegger's ontology to the concern with the German Volk. [pp.286-287]

          For Heidegger, who now distantly echoes his conception of freedom as submission to authority in the rectoral address, freedom is unrelated to will in any way. He insists that one becomes free in belonging to the area of destiny as someone who listens (ein Hörender) not as someone who obeys (ein Höriger). [p.227]

          For Heidegger as for Nietzsche, the essence of the people is grounded in the few exceptional human beings. Like Kant, who held that the philosopher is the lawgiver of human reason [?!], Heidegger apparently believed that only a "philosopher" could provide a new sense of direction in the age of nihilism. [p.199]

      Rockmore makes a mistake here. For Kant, a philosopher is the lawgiver of human reason only because everyone is. Reason, which is available to all rational beings, enables them all to be morally autonomous. Heidegger, like Hegel, is not in this tradition. He is elitist and authoritarian, like Hegel, not liberal and individualist, like Kant. To Hegel, this made Kant "irrational." To Heidegger, it would make Kant merely an inauthentic "liberal."

          At present [the Der Spiegel interview, 1966], he is unconvinced that democracy is adequate as a political system in a technological age. Heidegger here draws the political consequence of his later conception of Being as the real historical agent. [p.205]

      This is one of the most revealing admissions ever by Heidegger. His illiberal, authoritarian principles simply never changed. The only reason that there is no Führer in 1966 is that Being has "withdrawn" itself.

The earlier philosopher with whom Heidegger identified the most closely was Nietzsche. Nietzsche's own system, largely devoid of moral principle, is amenable to adaptation either to individualism or to authoritarianism.

    Mussolini published an article on Nietzsche, in which he wrote: "In order to attain the ideal picked out by Nietzsche a new type of free spirit must arise, spirits which are hardened by war, and loneliness, and in great danger, spirits which will free us from love of our neighbor." [p.149]

"Love of our neighbor" is a principle of Christian ethics, despised by Nietzsche and, apparently, by Mussolini. Modern leftists, of course, have little but contempt for Christianity, but nevertheless affirm a kind of muddled, Marxist version of "love of neighbor." Most people, indeed, who admire Nietzsche for his nihilism, tend to have political views whose politically correct, sentimental moralism would only have been an object of contempt and derision by Nietzsche.

    Nietzsche's appropriation by Nazi thinkers for their own purposes is well known but not well studied. Two exceptions are provided by Lukács and Stackelberg. Lukács devotes a long chapter to Nietzsche as a leading irrationalist in the so-called imperialist period in the context of his lengthy study of the rise of irrationalism from the later Schelling and Kierkegaard to Hitler. For Lukács, fascism is the logical successor of vitalism, which draws the conclusions of the work of Nietzsche and Dilthey. [p.149]

Much as Nietzsche's many followers today blanch at his use by the Nazis, Heidegger, it turns out, was one of the Nazis to use him.

    Yet Heidegger's overall approach to Nietzsche is redolent of the Nazi line, including his preference for The Will to Power as the height of Nietzsche's art and his treatment of it as a systematic analysis. [p.154]

As considered elsewhere, Nietzsche's moral aestheticism continues in Heidegger. Rockmore, as it happens, disputes charges of aestheticism against him:

    It is further inaccurate to regard Heidegger's discussion of art or technology as illuminating the essence of Nazism. One can concede a certain perverse aestheticism in Nazi ideology, for instance in the writings of Albert Speer, the Nazi architect. But one must resist the idea that the massive political phenomenon of German fascism is solely, or even mainly, aesthetic. [p.277]

Rockmore can certainly define "aestheticism" in a way that would make this reasonable. Here, I see moral aestheticism as the denial that there is an intelligible and rational content to morality, and where valued behavior is based on some kind of creative, morally unlimited, activity. This is indeed characteristic of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as it is of the intersection of German and Japanese fascism in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, considered in a separate critique of Zen. The most specifically aesthetic manifestation of Heidegger's thought is not so much in his discussion of technology but in his notion that a poet, like Hölderlin, is engaged in the disclosure of Being. Hitler was simply a political artist, which is very much what he looks like in the Triumph of the Will. Nazi aestheticism in part means the devices of propaganda and pageant that were used to arouse and engage the German people in Nazi politics.

In the end, it is hard to understand what there ever was about Heidegger that made otherwise apparently sensible people so enthusiastic. Being and Time does contain some interesting reflections on metaphysics. The value of this can be appreciated even if Heidegger was personally running the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

    Frege's well-known, vicious anti-Semitism seems unrelated to his fundamental contributions to modern logic. [p.40]

But Heidegger's moral and political views were not unrelated to the whole rest of his philosophy, including most of the conclusions of Being and Time. Peter Gay's anecdote, that many German soldiers in Russia and North Africa died with Being and Time in their backpacks, is intuitively revealing in a way that many pages of analysis in Rockmore's book are not. Heidegger's thought makes a small contribution to metaphysics; otherwise it is bad, false, dangerous, and even horrifying. Why it continues to appeal is frightening, but illuminating about the corrupt foundations of much of popular modern opinion. What it was that was ever personally appealing about Heidegger to people who actually knew him, but who despised his politics, is even more mysterious.

    But both Jaspers and the commission sought to preserve Heidegger's philosophical achievement, which they regarded as untarnished by his turning to Nazism. [p.83]

This is senseless and impossible. Heidegger's "philosophical achievement" is indistinguishable from his "turning" to Naziism. He could literally look out his window in 1932-1933, see Brown Shirts beating up Jews and others, and from this he knew that the Nazis were "uncovering" Being. This bespeaks a moral perversity or blindness that would falsify any philosophical system intended to be a description or guide of proper action.

    Arendt locates a turn against Nazism between the first and second volume of the Nietzsche lectures... [p.172]

Why Arendt, a Jew who had to flee Germany for her life, and a life long enemy of totalitarianism, should strain at gnats to derive comfort from Heidegger's feeble condemnation of Naziism as bad metaphysics, can only be explained by a personal attraction which is now inexplicable.

Karl Popper's characterization of Hegelianism and Marxism as the "high tide of prophecy" (in The Open Society and Its Enemies) echoes a remark by Rockmore about Heidegger's apparently privileged epistemological status:

    Even were it the case that Being had withdrawn, it is unclear how, otherwise than through the prophetic powers he now attributes to himself, Heidegger could possibly be aware of this occurrence. [p.95]

Prophetic powers indeed. But Popper did not consider in that context a Heidegger who did not even maintain the pretense of rationality, as Hegel and Marx did. Instead, Heidegger's word play and oracular powers are more like what have become popular among recent academics who have no respect for logic or evidence, let alone science, technology, or commercial culture -- just as Heidegger's exaltation of the Nietzschean will to power leads to the typical theory of human life as nothing but "power relationships" manipulated by a Marxist demonology of corporate and class or race ("dead white male") enemies. As long as this continues to dominate intellectual life, as it does in American universities, Heidegger lives. And the Third Reich lives, however much its principles have been transferred to self-described "oppressed peoples."

Postscript, 2010

A recent book, Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, by Emmanuel Faye [translated by Michael B. Smith, foreword by Tom Rockmore, Yale University Press, 2009], features ever more disturbing revelations about Heidegger. This stuff is pretty damning. I was willing to believe that Heidegger, with his own "metaphysical" form of Nazism, did not subscribe to Nazi theoretical racism. Indeed, we find Richard Wolin (who forcefully argues the connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics) saying in 2001:

    [Heidegger] never subscribed to the racial anti-Semitism espoused by the National Socialists. To him this perspective was philosophically untenable, insofar as it sought to explain "existential" questions in reductive biological terms. For Heidegger, biology was a base exemplar of nineteenth-century materialism -- a standpoint that needed to be overcome in the name of "Existenz" or "Being." [Heidegger's Children, Princeton University Press, p.6]

However, Faye convincingly demonstrates that Heidegger did subscribe to "the racial anti-Semitism espoused by the National Socialists," wishing to avoid Darwinian "biological" racism, not just because of Ninteenth century "materialism," but because it was too Anglo-Saxon and "Liberal." His own "metaphysical" racism, a "spiritual" racism, was not unique to him and was in fact legitimized by some statements from Hitler himself. This provided a Heideggerian theoretical basis for Anti-Semitism. In an epigraph to this page, we see Heidegger speaking of the need for identifying an Enemy, even creating one, with the goal of "total extermination." If we are looking for a Heideggerian justification for genocide, this looks like it.

Also, the apologistic narrative for Heidegger is that he dropped out of Nazi politics after resigning the Rectorship (Wolin also seems to accept this). But it was not true. Faye shows that Heidegger first of all was appointed to a legal commission (he had taught a seminar in Nazi law) which may actually have been responsible for many of the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Then he was appointed to the editorial committee that was overseeing the Nazi era edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which is one reason why Heidegger was giving Nietzsche seminars later in the 1930s. Both of these were significant appointments for Nazi academics, and Heidegger got them for being politically reliable, not because he was suddenly disillusioned with politics, or Nazi politics.

I must say that I felt that I had Heidegger's number merely from reading An Introduction to Metaphysics back in Professor J.L. Mehta's class at the University of Hawaii in 1973. And it wasn't just the "the inner truth and greatness of this movement" quote, although that was bad enough. It was the actual theory, of the "terrible" and "shattering" Uncovering of Being. There was nothing rational or moral about that theory. At the time, there was also Peter Gay's Weimer Culture, Outside as Insider, which was without illusions when it came to Heidegger (see above). At the time I recommended Gay's book to some people in the Philosophy Department, who (sometimes literally) shrugged it off. With that in mind, I have never been able to think of admirers of Heidegger as anything but very confused people, philosophically and morally.

Now my old advisor from UH, Lenn Goodman, tells me that Professor Mehta "told me once about Heidegger's flattering him by saying that only Sanskrit, Greek and German were real languages." This sounds like Heidegger indeed, both to be adding Sanskrit to Greek and German and to characterize them as the only "real languages."

One of the most chilling features of the story of Martin Heidegger is the interview that he gave late in life to Der Spiegel magazine, which was only published postumously. I was long under the impression that he still was asserting the "the inner truth and greatness" even in that interview. On the other hand, I recently have seen some comment that he distanced himself from Naziism in the interview. Faye settles the matter with the actual quote:  "National Socialism indeed went in the right direction," der Nationalsozialismus ist zwar in die Richtung gegangen [op. cit., p.242]. I do not agree with Karl Popper that people simply should not speak about Heidegger; but when anyone does talk about him, they must face the fact that he was a bad man and that his politics were the obvious application of his thought. And we must wonder about the agenda of the apologists, especially if we find them disparaging individualism, rationality, liberalism, or modernity (i.e. democracy and capitalism). Since we get a lot of this among recent intellectuals and academics, it is no wonder, again, why they have been attracted to Heidegger.

A Letter to Commentary, "Of Time and Being a Nazi," Tod Lindberg, March 2010

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