La comunità, la morte, l'Occidente

by Domenico Losurdo

Il tema della guerra «grande e meravigliosa», l'adesione di intellettuali della levatura di Spengler, Junger, Schmitt, Jaspers, ma anche Max Weber e Thomas Mann, all'« ideologia della guerra» sono il filo conduttore e la tela di fondo di un doppio percorso al termine del quale il pensiero di Heidegger risulta contestualizzato e finalmente offerto a una comprensione sottratta tanto all'apologia quanto alla demonizzazione. Un primo percorso studia gli aspetti per così dire «interni», relativi alla società, di una diffusa configurazione filosofica incentrata sul tramonto e sulla trasfigurazione dell'Occidente. Si tratta del tema della comunità che, intrecciato con quello della morte - la morte in guerra, la morte «per qualcosa» - produce in Germania una miscela esplosiva: si pensi al «terra e sangue» dell'ideologia nazista. Un secondo percorso analizza la dimensione per così dire «geopolitica» del tema del destino occidentale, anzi occidentale-tedesco, di fronte agli opposti «mercantilismi» delle democrazie e dell'Urss. Così ricondotti al contesto storico-politico, i nessi del pensiero di Heidegger col nazismo possono risultare persino più chiari che non da uno studio limitata al dato biografico. Ma non è questo l'obiettivo principale di Losurdo che, anche quando s'interroga sugli elementi ideologici nella teoria di Heidegger, evita accuratamente di ridurre tutto a ideologia.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Theory, Politics, Nonfiction

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism.

He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.

From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Losurdo does not miss. Tracing the historical pathway of reactionary philosophy from the attacks on the French Revolution personified in Edmund Burke, through the Ideology of War that emerges in 1914 as a means of unifying the nation in rejecting modernity, to the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche, and finally the extreme reactionary thought of Heidegger and his full support for the Nazis, he lays out the path from classical liberal thought to fascism. This is a theme Losurdo covers heavily in other texts of course, but that's because it is so vital to breaking through ruling class hegemonic concepts of what liberalism is.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite being written several years earlier, this work acts as somewhat of a much smaller and more compressed sequel to Losurdo's Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet. Losurdo, starting in 1914, traces the development of "Kriegsideologie" in German philosophical discourse and its relationship with the developing movement of intellectual fascism and National Socialism.

The beginning of the work focuses on Husserl, Thomas Mann, Weber, Max Scheler, Ernst Junger, Georg Simmel, and non-German thinkers like Bendetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile and their role in fashioning an ideology emphasizing the spiritual bonds and fulfillment which allegedly resulted among troops fighting in World War I and contrasting it with the "bourgeois" and "mercantile" nature of both the liberal democratic system and socialism (as an interesting aside, Losurdo notes that Wittgenstein, one of the few who actually fought in the war, totally refused this trend). Alongside this Losurdo notes the theme of the German "Gemeinschaft" as a model for society vs. the non-German (and liberal or socialist) "Gesellschaft."

The rest of the work focuses on the ideology of Martin Heidegger and to a lesser extent Karl Jaspers (generally as a liberal foil demonstrating how even those who weren't as radical as Heidegger were swept up into support or at least acquiescence to Nazism). Losurdo analyzes Heidegger's hostile attitude towards the Weimar Republic and his support for the Nazi regime as late as 1944, delving deep into not only the famous "Rectorial Speech," but books and works published before and after Hitler's rise and demonstrating their reactionary content. Alongside this, Losurdo compares Heidegger's work within the context of the philosophical community under the Nazi regime, including Schmitt, Bollnow, Spengler, and many others.

Losurdo wholeheartedly rejects the apolitical reading of Heidegger by Arendt and others, and notes how his writing always took note of the historical and political events of his days, and how he often clarified his views in complete opposition to liberalism and Bolshevism, even keeping up the reactionary trend of comparing the Allied blockade efforts to the Holocaust in the postwar period.

There are some issues with the work. I wish Losurdo would have engaged more with existentialism as a philosophy rather than passages from Heidegger and Husserl's works, and most of the chapters seem as though they were written as disconnected articles rather than as a book. It could have, and perhaps should have, been longer with more philosophical analysis relating to the philosophers of the Nazi regime and Heidegger's professional and academic relationship to them.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we say we are anti-fascist, it doesn’t mean we are only against the specific forms of fascism that developed in Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, but that we are against all forms of fascism—an ideology of war and violence to benefit the community of the privileged off the subjugation and genocide of the out-groups. Fascism adapts to the specific conditions of a time, and it is happy to put on disguises to best appeal to the needs of a nation. That means we cannot be so reductive as to divide philosophers into camps of “Nazi” or “not Nazi” (or “fascist” or “not fascist”), but must understand and recognize those schools of thought that give birth to fascism, or otherwise nurture it and give it cover. 

To do so, we must correctly understand the political currents of these proto-fascist philosophies at the time they were written. Philosophy fails particularly spectacularly at this task with Heidegger, a philosopher still widely upheld and read today, as Losurdo lays out:

The debate regarding Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism is still unsettled, and it encompasses several unique aspects. Usually, the historian of philosophy tries to single out the interlocutors and the concrete targets of a certain position, and then tries to reconstruct the real historical framework, even for propositions that have the ambition of being valid sub specie acternitatis. He does this not for the sake of historicist reductionism; on the contrary, his starting point is the awareness that even the excess of one theory with respect to its time cannot be grasped and evaluated without a preliminary attempt at historical clarification. In the case of this debate, however, many interpreters of Heidegger seem dominated by the opposite preoccupation: that of relegating all of his texts, even those in which the political dimension is explicit and declared, to a rarefied, politically aseptic sphere. In this way Heidegger, who not only in his letters and occasional speeches, but also in his theoretical writings, tirelessly comments upon the events of his time, is subjected to a purifying process that is supposed to cleanse him of any worldly contamination.

Losurdo places Heidegger in his historical context again, connecting his philosophical work with his political commentary, and comparing him with both his colleagues that clearly denounced the Nazis (Jaspers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Husserl, etc) and those whose philosophy is much more broadly accepted as aligned with Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s (Schmitt, Spengler, Junger). Losurdo traces themes of community and belonging, historicity, epistemology, identity, modernity and war through the philosophical developments between the start of the war in 1914 through the end of the war in 1945.

One of the difficulties with understanding fascism is that within their political movements, at any given time and over the course of time, different strands of philosophies become expressed. For example, the Nazis upheld a bucolic ideal, but then facing the pressures of war, had to elevate mechanization and production, its antithesis. Heidegger’s relationship with fascism is sometimes excused by pointing to these different currents. His denunciation of the Nazis for giving into mechanization and modernity is hardly a damning blow against fascist ideology. It is not particularly exonerating to criticize certain Nazi ideologues for being too liberal: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’,” (1935) nor is his rejection of specifically biological racism much consolation given his strong antisemitism. His philosophy elevated the transformational aspects of war and volkische community throughout the war, and he shows little self-criticism for his relationship with the Nazi movement after the war.

Losurdo’s argument here hits similar beats as his masterpiece on Nietzsche, however where that work demolishes Nietzsche as a possible pillar from which to build progressive politics, this blow to Heidegger landed as less fatal. This might be partly due to the length; at only one fifth the page count, Losurdo doesn’t have the space to prevent a full intellectual development of Heidegger. Are there parts of Heidegger that can be salvaged, developed towards some other end? It seems unlikely, but Heideggerians might follow their lodestar in doing a poor job of self-critique.

[Vapula · Rating 4 out of 5]

a level-headed and effective intellectual history of an epoch, Losurdo's work allows for no liberal moral pretense insofar as anglophone & liberal roots of German reaction are covered in detail with reference to Burke, 1789, and the political position of universalism — a history which also happens to trivialize the abstract category of "totalitarianism". The coverage of the Kriegsideologie and the general intellectual milieu of Germany following the first world war makes apparent the difficulties of separating what may be identified as proto-Nazism from even figures like Husserl. This book is not a hasty polemic looking to throw Heidegger in the trash, but rather a work that pleads for honesty over the works and author being collectively investigated. As Losurdo astutely observes, historical contextualization does not reduce a work but rather situates it optimally for knowing how one could even get the work's contents to transcend the context of its author and creation.

[Miles Trujillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely necessary book for those who wish to understand Heidegger and his thinking. It delineates his relationship with nazism and the deep and irrevocable ties his thinking has with Nazi thought, and the mission of Nazi germany. Moreover, it does a great job of disambiguating Heidegger and clarifying his concepts through their historical context.

[Felipe Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Situated Heiiderger’s political thinking in the context of recurrent tropes in German culture regarding war and nationhood. As usual, Losurdo dazzles with his erudition as well as his political lucidity.

[Dejan Basic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expect nothing less from the great Losurdo

[S S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, good, compares Heidegger and a few other's theoretical works to their political statements during interwar and Third Reich periods

[Mohamed Mzoughi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il miglior libro che abbia mai letto su Heidegger. Grazie Domenico Losurdo.