Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

by Emmanuel Faye, Tom Rockmore (Foreword), Michael B Smith (Translator)

In the most comprehensive examination to date of Heidegger’s Nazism, Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism’s influence on the philosopher’s thought and politics. In this provocative book, Faye uses excerpts from unpublished seminars to show that Heidegger’s philosophical writings are fatally compromised by an adherence to National Socialist ideas. In other documents, Faye finds expressions of racism and exterminatory anti-Semitism. Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a naïve, temporarily disoriented academician and instead shows him to have been a self-appointed “spiritual guide” for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what some have written, Heidegger’s Nazism became even more radical after 1935, as Faye demonstrates. He revisits Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time , and concludes that in it Heidegger does not present a philosophy of individual existence but rather a doctrine of radical self-sacrifice, where individualization is allowed only for the purpose of heroism in warfare. Faye’s book was highly controversial when originally published in France in 2005. Now available in Michael B. Smith’s fluid English translation, it is bound to awaken controversy in the English-speaking world.

Genres: Philosophy, Germany, European History

464 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

Reviews

[Martin Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heidegger is undoubtedly a genius. You can tell he's a genius because his philosophy is so hard to understand. A word of background first, before we tackle Faye's book.

Alasdair MacIntyre, venerable Twentieth century philosopher especially respected for his views on politics and morality, says of Heidegger's key text, Being and Time, that "The great difficulty with Sein und Zeit (which is a far better book than those who have not read it generally allow) is that the perhaps warranted apprehension of traditional philosophical terminology is too often used to permit the invention of a new word… to be a substitute for a solution to an old problem."

Naturally, not wishing to waste time on those who have not worked through Heidegger, he does not elaborate, but one example that springs to mind is that Heidegger tells us as part of his discussion of 'nothingness', which is "disclosed in the Angst that reveals to Dasein" is that 'Nothing noths'. 'Noths' being a world Heidegger has made up, it is hard to know what it means.

Add to which that for many it is hard to understand why he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s, and why he continued to support them during the war, and even why he refused to condemn the ideology afterwards. Fortunately many philosophers have offered to explain all this.

MacIntyre himself says that: "We should not be surprised that Heidegger was for a short period a Nazi, not because anything in Sein und Zeit entails National Socialism but because nothing in Sein und Zeit could give one a standpoint from which to criticise it or any other irrationalism."

Trinity College Heidegger expert, Michael (M. J.) Inwood offers that the 'controversies' over Heidegger's "initial support" for Nazism, result from a failure to understand that Heidegger's stance was rooted in his "distaste for technology and industrialised mass society (which he associated with the USA and USSR) rather than with anti-Semitism". If some aspects of his conduct "are still matters of controversy", he concludes firmly, Oxford-style, “his immense learning, his profound and innovative intelligence, his commitment to philosophical inquiry, and above all his intense influence on modern thought, are not open to doubt."

Other respected authorities also offer reassurance of Heidegger's motives. John Cottingham (Professor Emeritus at Reading) concludes that Heidegger's aim as to bring us together into a "community of other involved agents, and thus into solicitous concern for others - what Heidegger calls Sorge or 'Caring'."

Even those like Thomas Sheehan, who elsewhere (Heidegger: the Man and the Thinker) regrets that Heidegger's "misguided sally" continues to haunt his name", summarise his philosophy as being motivated only by the existentialist worry 'I hardly know any more who or where I am' and as making an important response to it by proffering the advice that 'None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves".

David Farrell Krell (Professor of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago) even hints at a secret conspiracy to discredit the master. Yet while convinced analytical philosophers fulminate against "without doubt the most powerfully original and influential philosopher of the century","their students have long been reading him". Krell then adds that the reason why Heidegger "failed to speak out after the War in condemnation of the Nazi atrocities" had more to do with a Kierkegaardian contempt for publicity and our media-dominated lives" than anything else.

Overall, then, the general message to the rest of us is that only brief mentions of the controversy are necessary these days. Phillip Stokes, (Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers (2006), closes the debate firmly by saying that Heidegger's "contribution to philosophy, fortunately, is not politically oriented".

So why step forward, into this old controversy, now fortunately settled, Emmanuel Faye, a mere associate Professor at the University Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense? His account, provocatively subtitled 'The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy' (first published in France in 2005) was probably destined to be one of those books filed in the second shelf up from the floor, in the basement room stack, long-term loan encouraged. But then, within France, Heidegger is not only 'understood' but much cherished. The reading of his thoughts is obligatory for all high school students as part of the Baccalaureate. And now along comes this upstart professor to dispute the philosophical merit of Heidegger's oeuvre, and instead trace it back, phrase by phrase, idea by idea, to the world of tawdry Nazi party politics - - racial purity, 'lebensraum', special role of the Führer, the virtuous necessity of cleansing war - the lot!

But Faye is a man with a mission. Not here the search for two sides to every question. He wants to throw light both on unpublished German Heidegger texts that are "every bit as racist and virulently National Socialist as those of the official 'philosophers' of Nazism" and to connect up Heidegger's political writings with his supposedly 'apolitical' philosophy. He warns that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a gray cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds."

Even so, Faye does not want toadd to Heidegger's renown by making him "even more diabolical", but to show how "far from furthering the progress of thought, Heidegger has helped to conceal the deeply destructive nature of the Hitlerian undertaking by exulting its 'grandeur'.

He warns that the vast literature on Heidegger has already physically displaced "the shelves reserved for twentieth-century philosophy" and continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of nazism on a world-wide scale".

This then, is the case Faye takes on. He offers extensive quotation from unpublished material in the spirit of "what legal scholars have called our right to history", to show that the philosophical task that Heidegger dedicated himself to was the introduction of Nazism and the ideas of the Führer into philosophy. So who is right? Faye and a few other agenda-pushers - or the great majority of open-minded, impeccably neutral, recent experts in fields as diverse as literary theory, psychology and theology, as well as philosophy - across the themes of existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction to philosophy of science and ethics.

Philosophers such as these have been content to note that Heidegger was 'Inspired" by Aristotle to attack Husserl's neo-Kantian thesis, without seeing any political ramifications. Yet Faye works patiently and carefully through the documents to show the connections. Documents such as a letter Heidegger wrote regarding a Jewish applicant for an academic post, in which Heidegger explains:

"Hönigswald comes from the school of Neo-Kantianism, which has defended a philosophy that goes hand in hand with liberalism. In it, the essence of man has been dissolved into a free-floating consciousness, and the latter, it the final analysis, diluted until it becomes a general logical word-wide reason. In taking this route, of ostensibly strictly scientific, philosophical foundations, our attention has been diverted away from man in his historical enrootedness and his tradition derived from the people and from blood and soil…"

Heidegger considers the appointment of "this man to the University” to be a scandal that he blames on individual who are "objective -liberal", and finishes his letter, of course, "Heil Hitler!"

In 1942, the year of the 'Final Solution', Heidegger is to be found working on an idea in a poem by Hölderlin. Faye notes that philosophers are ignorant of the significance of Hölderlin - but that the answer is very easily obtained by perusal of Nazi texts. (By keeping themselves ignorant of these, the philosophers have been left defenceless and easily seduced by Heidegger.)

In Heidegger's theory, Hölderlin presents the key theme of how the historic mission of Ancient Greece was passed to the German volk. Heidegger explains that the Germans and the Greeks sprang from a shared root somewhere in the East. "The name Heraclitus is not the title of a philosophy of the Greeks long run dry, no more than it is the formula for universal humanity as such. In truth, it is the name of an original power of Occidental-Germanic historical existence, and it is such in its first confrontation with the Asiatic."

Heidegger's development of Hölderlin is to add a kind of swastika symbol, as he outlines a new philosophical justification for racial purity based on passing via distress to light. Faye adds that Heidegger was evidently so pleased with this work that he revived it after the war in a superficially different form.

Great understanding was shown by Hannah Arendt, herself Jewish and a former student of Heidegger's, shortly after the end of the War, when Heidegger was being prosecuted for his Nazi links. Arendt, remembered for her description of Auschwitz as showing the 'banality of evil', offered that Heidegger was essentially a kind of modern Plato, (who had tried too to serve a tyrannical ruler) but one who was "served somewhat worse, because the tyrant and his victims were not located beyond the sea but in his own country". Anyway, Arendt, concluded, "Heidegger corrected his own "error" more quickly and more radically than many of those who sat in judgement over him".

One of the strange omissions of this book, (which lacks an index, offering only a short 'name index', and does not place Heidegger, even sketchily, in the general philosophical context of German Fascism - notably Hegel and Nietzsche) is Arendt appears only once fleetingly in the text, and it is left to the foreword by Tom Rockmore to briefly note that in fact Arendt's influential perspective on Heidegger was less neutral than is often presented, but was one of a student who had had a love affair with their famous-but-married professor.

And if over the decades that followed the war, Heidegger's critics kept nibbling away, Sartre, Foucault, Ricoeur, Levinas and so on kept admiring the philosophy. In a newspaper interview in 1987, Jacques Derrida, commenting on a particularly nasty book on Heidegger by Victor Farias, threw down the gauntlet to Heidegger's critics -to either show the substantial links between Heidegger's texts and "the reality of all the Nazisms" - or to shut up. That challenge, is in effect, what Emmanuel Faye's book has taken up.

Take Heidegger's graduate course 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State', for instance. This explicitly locates 'being' as developing within the state, which in fact "can truly be called the mode of being of a people". Similarly, people are described by Heidegger as "the being of the state, its substance, the basis that sustains it". And it is but a short step from there to consider the 'health of the people'. This depends on the "unity of blood and common stock".

Heidegger concludes by talking of "creating the granite foundation upon which someday a state will rest that represents not a mechanism alien to our people… but a völkisch organism: A Germanic state of the German nation".

"If the expression is less crude, the extremism of the intent rivals that of the theses of Mein Kampf", says Faye. But let Heidegger continue to link his philosophy and politics:

"Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny, and fight for the realisation of one idea, does true order grow. Then spiritual superiority and freedom respond in the form of deep dedication of all powers to the people, to the state, in the form of the most rigid training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love. The existence and the superiority of the Führer sink down into being, into the soul of the people and thus bind it authentically and passionately to the task."

(Emphasis added.) And so, to Heidegger’s final rousing vision:

"And when the people feel this dedication, they will let themselves be led into the struggle, and they will want and sacrifice themselves. With each new moment the Führer and the people will be bound more closely in order to realise the essence of their state, that is the Being; growing together, they will appose the two threatening forces, death and the devil, that is impermanence and the falling away from one's own essence, with their meaningful, historical Being and Will."

By highlighting the links between Heidegger's politics and his philosophy, and going where our experts have so manifestly been unprepared to, Emmanuel Faye has done both history and philosophy a valuable service.

[Chungsoo Lee]

After reading this book, published in French in 2005 and in English in 2009, no one can doubt that Heidegger was a racist and an active collaborator of Nazism. He was, to be sure, a Nazi. But was he a Hitlerian furthermore, as Faye suggests? No, if by Hitlerian or Hitlerism we mean a thought that one follows. Hitlerism is not a thought or philosophy to begin with. We cannot dignify it by calling it as such. Hitler was a naive thug with the insurmountable conviction of his own and who was a skilled rhetorician and preyed on the fears of the German people at the time, very much like Trump now. Judging from Trump, any demagogues can be a Hitler or President--thus all the more danger then and now. But how can a great thinker like Heidegger fall for a thug like Hitler? He admired Hitler, wanted to be closer to him so much so as to decline a chair at Berlin University. He telegraphed Hitler and gave him a few pointers, hoping to advise him. Heidegger's becoming the Rector at Freiburg on April 21, 1933 was not a passive participation yielding to the force of history. Rather it was an active participation to play his part in changing history: to "bring in line" (Gleichschaltung) the students and the faculty at Freiburg University and all other German universities to defend, propagate, and uphold the "Führer principle" (40). Heidegger was also a racist. He had no regret when on April 14, 1933 his mentor and promoter, Edmund Husserl, was stripped of his emeritus status and was dismissed from Freiburg for being a "non-Arian"; just as when his assistant, Werner Brock, was dismissed for being half-Jewish (41). He cut off communications with Husserl thereon. Moreover, he allowed students' burning of non-German books as such events were happening around the country (124). He provided workshops to indoctrinate Nazi programs and ideologies in the University and elsewhere (125). He delivered public speeches and radio talks to actively promote Nazism and for people to vote for Hitler and his crucial referendum in 1935. Therefore, his collaboration with the Nazi Party was done not mindlessly, haphazardly, or in order to pretend loyalty in order to keep his job. He was an active participant in the event of history that his philosophy could and did explain. As Faye convincingly shows, his rectoral address at Freiburg ("The Self-Affirmation [Selbstbehauptung] of the German University"), his winter seminars of 1933-34 (On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State that specifically discusses Hitler as the leader and that was designed as "a course in Hitlerian 'political education'" (114)) and 1934-35 winter seminar ("Hegel, On the State") and other speeches and seminars all show abundantly clear that Heidegger influenced Nazi party intellectuals (such as Erik Wolf, his student)(175-79) as well as was himself influenced by concepts found in the Nazi ideology created by the party intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt (who joined the NSDAP in 1933 on the same day Heidegger did) and Alfred Baeumler. Yes, Heidegger read and incorporated the Nazi ideology. On August 22, 1933 Heidegger even wrote to Carl Schmitt, the Nazi Party jurist and political theorist (who published his The Concept of the Political in 1927, the same year when Heidegger published his Being and Time), inquiring about the possibility of the "decisive collaboration" regarding, as he says in his letter, "the entire rebuilding, from the inside, of the Faculty of Law, in its educational and scientific orientation" (155). There is no record of Schmitt replying to Heidegger. But, Faye states: "[the] writings [of Heidegger and Carl Schmitt] of the period bear the mark of a deep and undeniable reciprocal influence" (154). Faye further writes: "[Heidegger] admitted to having wanted to bolster his position by means of Nazi power to reform the university. And that is precisely what the introduction into the university of the Führerprinzip and the Führung-Gefolgschaft [leader-follower] relationship represented to Heidegger, and it is explicitly central to his [rectoral] address, The Self-Affirmation of the German University" (62-3), he gave at Freiburg. Heidegger's relationship with Nazi was symbiotic. The Party needed intellectuals like him; and he wanted to brings about his philosophy into action. Or, better yet, he thought Hitler was the embodiment and manifestation of being of the German people.

As a historian more than as a philosopher, Faye points out some close parallel between Heidegger's choice of words in pairs and Hitler's in Mein Kampf (vol. 2 containing his core political doctrine which appeared in 1927; Hitler's Führung und Gefolgschaft appeared in 1933 (122)), which attracted Heidegger rather than repulsing him for Hitler's intellectual poverty. Hitler's idea of the ideal state in which the bond between the head and the followers is essential is repeated and promoted in Heidegger's winter course of 1933-34 (122).

Heidegger's "struggle for being" (as stated in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 44, pp. 164-65) in 1929 becomes during the unpublished 1933-34 winter seminar the struggle, the Kampf for being that involved the third term: the Volk, the people, specifically the German people. Faye writes: "Heidegger takes up the struggle for the meaning of being in the name of what he will designate, in the Beiträge zur Philosophie [Contributions to Philosophy, published in 1989 in German and in 2012 in English], as the "völkisch principle" (90). In the same winter course, Heidegger even says infamously: "What we call 'race' [Rasse] has a relationship with what binds the members of a people to one another--according to their origin--by body and by blood" (101). The expression "body and blood" will soon become the "blood and soil." For example, the health of the people is closely tied to "the unity of blood and a common stock" [der Blut-und Stammeseinheit], with race [Rasse]" (118; cf., 130). In discussing Hölderlin's two poems, "Germania" and "The Rhine," Heidegger says that these poems "announce the future being of a people in its history" (104). He even says: "the 'fatherland' is being itself" (104). Hölderlin is honored as the "poet of poets qua poet of the German" (105). The idea of idealizing the German people as race almost exactly coincides with the Nazism. But, as Faye points out, it has its root in § 74 of Being and Time (1927), long before Hitler's rise, in which Heidegger talks about the community of a people united in a common 'destiny' (138).

The Leader is the embodiment of the being of the people. Heidegger says: "For the origin of all political action and Führung is not in knowledge, but in being. Every Führer is a Führen, must be a Führer, in accordance with the stamp of his being, and simultaneously, in the living unfolding of his proper essence, he understands, thinks, and puts into action what the people and the state are" (121). He states: "the people, that is, beings, bear a very precise relation to their being, that is, to the state" (131). Or, "the existence and the superiority of the Führer sink down into being, into the soul of the people and thus bind it authentically and passionately to the task" (140). Faye correctly observes: "we see how Heidegger identifies totally with the principle of Hitlerism" (140). In Mein Kampf Hitler identified the Jew as the personification of the devil ("No one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jews" (140)). Heidegger refers to the devil as follows: "With each new moment the Führer and the people will be bound more closely, in order to realize the essence of their state, that in their Being; growing together, they will oppose the two threatening forces, death and devil, that is, impermanence and the falling away from one's own essence, with their meaningful, historical Being and Will" (140).

In August 1934 Heidegger signed a public declaration of allegiance to Hitler, stating: "The impact of the matter both abroad and at home requires the renewed expression of the unity and resolve of the German people and its will to freedom and honor through a declaration of faith in Adolf Hitler" (211). That was his second declaration. His first declaration was made in November 1933, shortly after becoming the Rector of Freiburg University.

In the unpublished winter seminar of 1934-35 entitled "Hegel, On the State" Heidegger declares Hegel to be "the fulfillment of Occidental philosophy altogether" and that "with him philosophy had arrived at its end point" (213). He further declares: "What comes after Hegel is no longer philosophy. Not even Kierkegaard or Nietzsche" (213). What is astounding is that he omits Husserl, Henri Bergson, or Ernst Cassirer. This is so because, according to Heidegger, Hegel completes "Western metaphysics" (213). Hegel is touted not only as the end and completion of Western philosophy but also the beginning of the German State: "It has been said [by Carl Schmitt in his book published in 1933) that in 1933 Hegel was dead; on the contrary, it was only then that he began to live" (231). This is astonishing, because in 1933 Heidegger came to power. Thus the final political State as Hegel envisioned it is for Heidegger the Third Reich. In Hitler Heidegger sees the actualization of Führer-Gefolgschaft relationship in which the essence of German people will be concretely realized in German nation--and to last, as Faye emphasizes, for the next 100 years (204). Heidegger thus states: We are indeed speaking of the total state. It is not a particular domain (among others), not an apparatus intended to protect society (from the state itself), a domain with which only certain persons are to be involved. But politically, what is 'the total state'? How are things arrange in it, such as the university, for example? In the past, the relation of the university to the state had been such that the state only supported it, and it followed its own path. How do things stand with it today?" (231). The "total state" (his pupil Erik Wolf's term Heidegger borrows here) does not mean Hegel's universally encompassing State in which the Absolute Spirit is concretely realized, totalizing and thus engulfing all aspects of the individuals' lives therein but rather an system of a total control in which the Führer has absolute power that dominates his followers in all aspects of their lives--a totalitarian state manifesting the being of the people.

On November 13, 1935 Heidegger gave a lecture entitled "The Origin of the Word of Art" in Freiburg. He gave it the second time in Zurich in 1936 and a third time in Rome on Nov. 24 and December 4, 1936. It was later revised and published 1949 in Holzwege [[book:Off the Beaten Track|314937]] and the two earlier versions were published in 1987 and 1989 respectively (238). In the version that we know from Holzwege the Greek temple is discussed as purely an architectural art revealing the ancient Greek world with its people in harmony with the gods. However, in the version delivered at Freiburg in Nov. 1935, the temple is spoken of as the "authentic center of the empire of existence," "in which the assembly of the politeia finds its place" (239). In his April 8, 1936 lecture entitled "Europe and Its German Philosophy," given in Rome, Heidegger speaks about art as the medium between political action and the organization of the order of the people (239). Now, the Nov. 1935 Freiburg lecture was preceded by the Sept. 1935 congress of the NSDAP held in Nuremberg, in which Hitler gave speech "on the grounds of the Zeppelinfeld, bordered by a 394-yard grandstand, complete with colonnades and basins intended to recreate the atmosphere of a Greek temple" (238). Faye's point is that after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Heidegger revised his lecture to eliminate the specific references to Nazism in the lecture. But in 1935 when the lecture was delivered the first time, only two months after the annual congress of NSDAP, the allusion to the political event was unmistakable for the audience. Faye describes the event as follows: "The Zeppelinfeld was 'but a sea of swastikas, lit up at night by torches'" (238).

[Continued in "Comments" below.]

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faye has an odd sense of intellectual agency, in which Heidegger's works, by simply existing on library shelves, seep Nazism out into the body politic. But Faye succeeds admirably in demonstrating his thesis: that Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi before the party's rise and well into their period of rule.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Get this, you sixth-formers! Heidegger wasn't just a casual or opportunistic or temporary Nazi with a bit of distaste for his co-Germans of the Hebraic persuasion - he was a cunning, canny, secretive and ambitious Nazi, always hoping to get close to Hitler, coveting power over his fellow-academics, and watching his step every step of the way - he told a friend (who was banned by the Allies after the war, while Heidegger himself fared much better) "I'll say what I really think when I am a full professor." And after Hitler took power, the faculty of the University of Munich rejected him as a candidate for their Rectorship because he seemed to them too extreme!
And a wonderful account of a letter from Mme. Professor Heidegger to the Husserls, after they had been thrown out of the university and cut off from pension, etc., thanking them carefully for everything they had done for her and her mann and explaining that of course they would understand what the German Volk had to do now, hard but necessary.
I'm halfway through, but I fear that I will be treated to an explanation of why the content and method of argument of Heidegger's philosophy is itself Nazi-istic.
Poor Hannah Arendt - it looks more and more like Heidegger was just USING HER for sex. Men!
But Faye goes farther in the second half. Heidegger was not a casual or oppportunistic apologist for his pre-1945 behavior, but, with his son, first denied in calculating fashion his Hitlerism, then went about sneaking back into his collected works passages that would persuade future generations of the possibility that National Socialism was correct, while keeping out the most egregious works that showed Heidegger's Hitler-adoration. Faye thinks that Heidegger's plan is already working, hitting Anglo-Saxon shores in two waves, first from the left, via the works of Althusser (a fiend) and Foucault (largely a fraud), and then via deconstructionism, under the leadership of the cryptofascist Paul de Man (my teacher) at Yale. Faye thinks Heidegger's claim to have invented a new future for philosophy, to overcome the entire history of moral reasoning and ontology, etc etc , he thinks is merely a highbrow version of the works of the Fuhrer and a fairly successful attempt to undermine the moral stature of human beings. And Faye may be right.

[Cheppalleee]

Decisamente troppo estremista per i miei gusti. In poche parole, senza alcunissimo problema, getta via il bambino con l'acqua sporca.
Ma un essere umano non è un tantino complesso per poterlo ridurre ad un bianco e nero?