Books reviewed : Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)

Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 1993

Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, 1993

Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 1993

Reviewed by Peter Osborne (click below for a pdf of the essay)

Radical Philosophy 070 (Mar/Apr 1995)

There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in translation – when the literature about them, building up a critical mass, explodes, giving rise to whole new subdivisions of the academic industry. It happened to Hegel and Marx in the 1970s and to Benjamin and Habermas in the 1980s. Now it is happening to Heidegger. Such events are rarely of merely academic interest and Heidegger’s case is no exception. Indeed, following Victor Farias’s mould-breaking Heidegger et le Nazisme (1987, translated 1989) debates about Heidegger’s work have acquired a directly political dimension, absent from European philosophy since the heyday of Marxism in the early 1970s. It used to be said that Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism was a barrier to the dissemination of his thought; today, it is the means of its publicity.*

At first sight, it is hard to see why this should have occurred. After all, Heidegger’s involvement with fascism in the 1930s was never a secret; nor is the idea that it was intrinsically linked to his philosophy a new one. Karl Lowith, a one-time pupil, made the connection at the time, in an essay which was published in Les Temps Modernes after the war. He was followed by Habermas in his review of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Lukács in The Destruction of Reason (1954), and Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) – a work which gives free and splenetic rein to an analysis which Adorno had held since the early thirties.

Heidegger's followers have always known about this literature, but they have rejected it, referring their opponents to Heidegger's apologia for his political history, crafted over the years from his 1945 letter to the rector of Freiburg University (which failed to prevent him from losing his right to teach) to the posthumously published collection Das Rektorat, 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken (1983). The defence has two main strands. On the one hand, it distinguishes in principle between the ideology of National Socialism and the terms of Heidegger's thought, on the basis of which he identified himself with the movement, allegedly mistaking its true character. On the other, it involves a series of detailed empirical claims: about the Nazi establishment's increasing hostility to his work after 1934, his political inactivity from then on, his supposed attempt to use his position as rector at Freiburg in 1933/4 to protect· university life from political interference, and his attitude and actions towards colleagues who were Jews. More generally, however, Heidegger's supporters have tended to suggest that there is something intrinsically philistine about the very idea that so great a thinker should have his work judged in relation to his (supposedly passing) political opinions, however distasteful. Steering clear of the politics of the work, they have focused on the autonomy of the text relative to the life, confining the question of politics to the level of biography.

Protected by a close-knit band of disciples who stressed the 'turn' in his thought registered in the lectures on Nietzsche (1936-40), Heidegger maintained a silence about his political history so far as was tactically possible. (His famous interview with Der Spiegel in 1966, 'Only a God Can Save Us', was embargoed until after his death, a decade later.) Meanwhile, outside Germany, the very different inflection of existentialism in France (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) helped to protect Heidegger's philosophical heritage from political critique. Yet it cannot be said that material about Heidegger's views and activities during the Nazi period was unavailable, for those sufficiently interested to look. A significant collection of documents was published by Guido Schneeberger in Germanyin 1962, only to go largely unnoticed. 

So why all the fuss now? What's new? The driving force behind the debate has undoubtedly been Farias' s use of documentary evidence to expose the duplicity of a number of Heidegger's claims about his actions, and to assert the fundamentally reactionary character of his thought, from its earliest Catholic phase before the First World War onwards. Yet in itself, this would probably not have been enough to provoke the storm which followed. Little of Farias' s material is new, although it was not previously wellknown, and the connections he draws between Heidegger's political beliefs and his philosophical writings are often crude. 

Rather, the decisive factor lies in the change in the stakes of the debate brought about by the influence of Heideggerian anti-humanism on radical thought in Francesince the 1960s, and especially on deconstruction. Farias's book appeared at the high point of Derrida' s influence in the USA. It coincided with both the revelations about literary theorist Paul de Man's  collaborationist past in wartime Belgiumand the publication of the English translation of Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which the politically loaded charge of 'undermining Western rationalism' was once again raised against Heidegger, as a prolegomenon to an attack on Derrida. (Habermas subsequently provided the introduction to an expanded German edition of Farias' s book.) Lobbed into this heavily overdetermined situation, Heidegger et le Nazisme acted as a bombshell in another war. It has since sparked off a series of protracted battles of its own... 

…Indeed, it is this temporal structure – a reactionary appropriation and modification of the

temporality of modernity, a reactionary modernism - that provides the framework for Heidegger's esoteric nationalism, in which it is the Germans' affinity with the Greeks that is the key to their spiritual destiny. It is not surprising that Heidegger lost out, politically, in his attempt to inflect the ideology of National Socialism in this direction, to the crude anti-Semitism and biologistic racial stereotyping of Rosenberg and others - which was an anathema to his thought. The return to the Greek origin was hardly a plausible basis for 'total mobilisation' in the dying days of the Weimar Republic. Yet the temporal logic of this call is nonetheless similar to that of Rosenberg' s appeal to the 'soul' of a naturalised 'race', insofar as it too has recourse to the self-fulfilling logic of an essentially mythic structure, prior to the historically established social spheres of citizenship and class which were blamed by the Nazis for the crisis. As a form of conservative revolution, the politics of National Socialism was inscribed within the paradoxical temporal logic of a crisis-ridden hyper-modernity

Under such conditions, the intensification of the experience of change (in this case, exacerbated and epitomised by soaring inflation) ultimately negates duration, opening the way for appeals to principles outside of historical time to restore the semblance of order. Such appeals combine the comfort afforded by the restoration of a lost past with the energising promise of a new dawn, as the temporal dynamic underlying the experience of crisis is normalised and controlled through the mediating political form of national revolution. This is the Uiform of conservative revolution as a form of historical time consciousness. 

Furthermore, if we abstract the temporality ofthis 'solution' from that of the situation to which it is a response, it displays distinct affinities with the temporal-political logic ofthe Reformation, in which religious authority was challenged by reference to the concealed essence of an extra-worldly domain (conscience), delegitimising the established Church and energising the present with a newly transcendent futurity: justification by faith alone. In this regard, it is possible to see Heidegger's interest in Luther as a crucial stage on his journey from Catholicism to Hitlerism. The complexity of the mediations is daunting, but Kisiel has done much to help us. The relationship between the theological and political dimensions of Heidegger's thought appears ripe for further, more direct exploration.. 

Heidegger, we might say, plumped for the Nazis because he recognised them as the most authentic representatives of 'conservative revolution' of his day. And he stuck with them, despite the fact that he gradually came to believe that they had misunderstood their 'true' mission, for the same reason. (His criticisms of the regime were always philosophically based, never merely political.)

click for a pdf of the essay, 

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/tactics-ethics-or-temporality