This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).
Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]
There are abundant ways before Wolin to abhor the man and diminish one’s respect for Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s one-time lover and postwar friend: Keep in mind that Hannah was, also postwar, the dear friend of Karl Jaspers and his Jewish wife—Jaspers who officially denounced MH as pedagogically off-license, meaning, he could teach, but not in a university, for he was a corruptor of enlivening spirit (Geist). It is fair to add that, writing to Jaspers, Arendt described her postwar friend as having retired to his cabin, “grumbling about Zivilisation and writing Sein [Being] with a Y [Seyn] – really a kind of mousehole he has crawled back into.”
A final preface: beginning graduate students of Comparative Literature at Cornell ca. 1962 would enroll in Paul de Man’s “Introduction to Comparative Literature.” And the text for that term? Heidegger’s Being and Time in the brand new Macquarrie and Robinson translation. It would obviously give de Man the opportunity to study Heidegger on his own. Here is one memorable conclusion from de Man. On his finding fraudulent Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s hymn “How, when on a holiday . . . , ” in which Heidegger claims the poet in the poem receives a direct transmission of … Being – a claim utterly refuted by the poet in the portion of the hymn that Heidegger suppresses – de Man ruminated, concessively, as follows: Heidegger chose to write on Hölderlin just because “Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say.” This could seem an unpromising project. But de Man continues:
Such an assertion is paradoxical only in appearance. At this level of thought it is difficult to distinguish between a proposition and that which constitutes its opposite. In fact, to state the opposite is still to talk of the same thing though in an opposite sense, and it is already a major achievement to have, in a dialogue of this sort, the two interlocutors manage to speak of the same thing.[ii]
And so, for example: to resist Heidegger’s dismission of reason as “the stiff-necked adversary of thought” — by exposing, on grounds of reason and evidence the violence of Heidegger’s views on world-Jewish conspiracy-mongering but also “worldlessness” would constitute a “major achievement.” And for this bliss, one must be grateful to Heidegger, for it is owed, in the first place, time and again, to his brutal philology and rebarbative mystifications.
I’ll add here the reflections of the scholar Peter Makhlouf, with whom I have discussed these matters. In a letter to Heidegger dated September 29, 1941, the great (Nazi) literary critic Max Kommerell wrote to Heidegger of the “co-incidence” (Zusammenfall) of Heidegger’s “philosophy” with “a certain sort of opening-up (Erschließung) of Hölderlin’s poetry.” Kommerell reformulated the matter some months later, in a letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer, as a “train wreck” – to be sure, a “productive” train wreck. Makhlouf, wonders, What is the product, exactly, of a train wreck, other than twisted metal and dead bodies? And what of the reading effect, of a metaphor that was being daily literalized as trains carrying people to labor and concentration camps? Hitler had ordered the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between September 15 and 17 of that year. Makhlouf writes: “So, to say, as Kommerell does, that Heidegger’s interpretation ‘has something of a train in it, and perhaps of the end of a train’ can only inspire revulsion when this sentence is returned to its historical context. The other thing to note would be the cheek of Kommerell’s availing himself of the train metaphor to refer to the technology-allergic Heidegger.”
To this misology, we can now add lesson after lesson taught us by Richard Wolin. Preceding the text of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik [1953]) in the new Complete Works (Gesamtausgabe), an editorial note explains the source of words in parenthesis. In every case, that source, the note continues, is the original draft version: the words can be found there. Here, now, is a passage from the Introduction:
And so, what today is being passed around entirely as the philosophy of National Socialism, but what hasn’t the slightest to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, with the encounter of planetary-determined technology and modern man), does its fishing in the troubled waters of “values” and “totalities.”
How odd, however, that this parenthetical edulcoration of “the movement” was never carried over from the source-draft into the original lecture manuscript. One would assume that it was contrived and added afterwards to help Heidegger escape outrage at his support of Nazi “greatness.” The editors reject this imputation: the parenthetical words were already present in the draft version, they claim, and so they can be added now. And may we see this draft? No, unfortunately it has vanished from the archive.
This is only one such case — another concerns Nietzsche — where Heidegger’s publications have been tampered with by their editors. The result is that the Complete Edition, read from the standpoint of rigorous philology, is deeply compromised. After Wolin’s account of the sporadic, vicious anti-Semitism of Heidegger black notebooks, one might conclude that even the nicer meaning of “the encounter with planetary technology” is not much better than a couple of SS thugs smashing up the office of a Jewish accountant. For, consider Heidegger’s code, from the black notebooks: planetary technology is the product of cosmic, mensurative-minded, conspiratorial Jewish criminality.
This philological misfortune is one of the most telling achievements of Wolin’s study: the Complete Edition is being edited by sympathisants (one is Heidegger’s son Hermann!) bent on eradicating or misdating compromising remarks of a Nazi stripe. The result is that we do not have an authoritative Heidegger corpus to study.
But much the major achievement of Heidegger in Ruins is Wolin’s thoroughgoing demonstration of the abuse of reason informing Heidegger’s full commitment to Hitlerite Nazism. It has been no secret, for decades, that Heidegger was an admirer of Hitler and, as Rector of Freiburg University, an enthusiastic member and devoted functionary of the Nazi party. But until Wolin, no one has shown the depth and persistence of this commitment: the extent of Heidegger’s allegiance to “the inner truth of the ‘movement’” is astounding, although, true, Heidegger swore allegiance only to a higher order type of “spiritualized Nazism,” shunning assassinations in favor of character assassinations, on occasion.
One immediate, plausible, pre-emptive reader’s response would be to ask why Heidegger’s writing should be blighted root and branch by what we have learned about his politics? If we were to put the empirical life of the author to one side, as Heidegger at times would have us do — viz., “Aristotle was born, thought, and died, and the rest is anecdotal” — wouldn’t we be more properly attentive to the truth of his work? Wolin has an astute answer: the refrain of Being and Time is the “factical” (faktisch) immersion of Dasein in a web of involvements. The meaning of any single Dasein is an efflux of its involvements, en situation — faktisch. And so, can Heidegger himself, as the totality of his texts, be cleansed of the stain of his empirical commitments? His works are the sum total of his deeds, and Heidegger would have it so. Consider a 1921 letter to Karl Löwith cited by Wolin: “I work in a concrete factical manner, from out of my ‘I am’ — from out of my spiritual, factical heritage/milieu/life context, from that which becomes accessible to me as living experience.”
At a late point in Wolin’s book, I think that the author’s justified indignation at the blindness of many of Heidegger’s devotees goes awry. Wolin documents the casual references to “Heidegger’ in the vile scripts of such white supremacists as Dominque Venner and Richard Spencer. What does it say about the merit of Heidegger’s work that it should function as the opportunity of some halfwits to cite it? What we have in their screeds is not Heidegger but the Heideggeresque, as it were. In the comparable case of Kafka and the Kafkaesque, one might well assume a zero correlation between any sustained reflection on Heidegger and the allusions of these madmen: Their use of Heidegger is neither an argument for rejecting Heidegger’s work tout court nor for reading him with an insistent consciousness of where, “factically” speaking, it is coming from. And it is one of the many merits of Wolin’s study that the latter argument — namely, read Heidegger, but with caveats! — should be his main brief.
In April 2014, writing in the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman reported on panel discussion on Heidegger and Nazism shortly after the revelation of Heidegger’s incriminating black notebooks.[iii] At one point, the moderator, the Bard professor Roger Berkowitz, read aloud a passage from one of the notebooks: “The Jews, with their marked gift for calculating, live, already for the longest time, according to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence.” Rothman continued: “An enraged audience member responded to the passage by saying, ‘That sentence strikes me as somehow so deranged, so alien to a sense of the real. . . . Anyone who is capable of that sort of argument cannot be trusted to think.’ A few people — by no means everyone — applauded.” (A disclosure: The “enraged” audience member was I, the object of some applause.)
Notes
[i] Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin, 1975), 36; originally1956 as a Meridian book.
[ii] Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 2nd edition, 254–5.
[iii] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/is-heidegger-contaminated-by-nazism