Letting Heidegger be Heidegger
Greg Johnson

2,845 words

Scattered throughout Heidegger’s writings are some puzzling distinctions. For instance, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger claims that the essence (Wesen) of technology is nothing technological.[1]

In the lecture “The Danger,” Heidegger claims that the essence of death has nothing to do with “hundreds of thousands” dying “en masse” in “extermination camps” and man-made famines.[2] The essence of death, in short, is not to be found in actual deaths.

In “Language and the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work,” Heidegger claims that pain’s “essence remains closed to every thinking that represents pain in terms of sensations.”[3] In other words, the essence of pain is not to be found in sensations.

In “Language,” Heidegger also claims that “In its essence, language is neither expression nor an activity of man.”[4] The essence of language, then, is not to be found in actual speech.

In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger claims that “however hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in the lack of houses.”[5] The essences of dwelling and homelessness are something different than having or lacking a home.

In “The Thing”[6] and the “Memorial Address” in Gelassenheit,[7] Heidegger claims that the essence of destruction is something different from annihilation by atomic bombs.

Heidegger also asserts some puzzling identities.

For instance, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger claims that Soviet Russia and the United States “are both, metaphysically speaking [i.e., in essence] the same: the same dreary frenzy of unleashed technology [Technik] and the regimentation of rootless and normalized men.”[8]

In “The Danger,” Heidegger writes: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry—in essence the same [im Wesen das Selbe] as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”[9]

What sort of thinking allows Heidegger to draw such distinctions and assert such identities? The answer, of course, is philosophical thinking. Drawing a distinction between an entity and its essence is as old as Plato. Once Heidegger asserts a difference between a being and its essence, he is then in a position to assert that different beings are the same “in essence” because they are part of the historical period. This idea has its roots in the rise of modern philosophical historicism.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks Euthyphro to spell out the idea or the essence of piety: “teach me whatever this idea itself is, so that by gazing at it and using it as a pattern, I may declare that whatever is like it, among the things you or anyone else may do, is pious, and that whatever is not like it is not pious” (6d–e).[10] Knowing the essence of piety allows us to sort pious and impious acts. Pointing to an example of a pious act is not enough, because Socrates wants to know what makes it possible to point out an example of piety in the first place. So the essence of piety is different from pious acts. The essence of piety is neither pious or impious.

The same is true of every other essence. Knowing the essence of dogs allows us to sort dogs from foxes. But the essence of dogs is not a particular dog. Knowing the essence of courage allows us to distinguish courage and cowardice. But the essence of courage is not a courageous act.

Or, to put it in general terms: Knowing Being, the essence of what it is to be, allows us to distinguish beings from non-beings. But Being itself is not a being. This, of course, is Heidegger’s famous doctrine of the “ontological difference”: “The Being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being.”[11]

The puzzling distinctions listed above are simply examples of the ontological difference: The essence of technology is not a machine; the essence of death is not a particular death; the essence of pain is not a sensation; the essence of language is not speech; the essence of dwelling is not a house; the essence of homelessness is not simply lacking a house; the essence of destruction is not being blown up; and so forth.

But what licenses a philosopher to speak this way? There are experts in every field of phenomena. A philosopher, insofar as he is a philosopher, cannot claim to have greater knowledge than these experts. For instance, philosophers do not know more about living things than biologists. Philosophers know less about healing the sick than doctors. Philosophers know less about strategy than generals and less about courage than infantrymen. Philosophers know less about pain than physiologists or people who have suffered greatly. Philosophers have less expertise about dwelling than people who build houses and about homelessness than those who operate homeless shelters. And so forth.

The expertise of the philosopher lies in taking a step back from all these fields and asking the experts how they know what they know. Because experts get so involved in straightforwardly knowing and doing particular things that they don’t even wonder about how they are doing it, or where they as human beings fit into the picture. By talking about the essences of technology, death, pain, language, dwelling, and so forth, Heidegger tries to make us wonder about how the world shows up to us. That is the job of the philosopher.

Heidegger believed that how the world shows up to us changes from time to time. For the ancient Greeks, things showed up as having an independent existence that eluded our complete understanding and control. For moderns, things show up to us as transparent to our understanding and available for control and consumption. Heidegger called the modern way of seeing the world the essence of technology. It is a way of seeing the world that makes modern science and technology possible. This is the basis for Heidegger’s claims that the United States and the Soviet Union, or factory farms and extermination camps, are metaphysically the same.

Now, a layman might object to Heidegger’s views as follows. When Heidegger claims that the essence of homelessness is different from actual homelessness, isn’t this just a bit insensitive to the homeless? When Heidegger remarks that the essence of pain is different from actual pain, isn’t that insensitive to people who are actually suffering? If the essence of death is different from actual deaths, even spectacularly horrible deaths, isn’t that insensitive to everyone who has ever lost a loved one?

But these objections are based on simple misunderstandings. First, when Heidegger mentions extermination camps, man-made famines, mass homelessness, and atomic bombs in the years after the Second World War, he is obviously appealing to pathos. He is evoking deep feelings in his audiences, many of whom suffered personally from the very things he names.

But the task of philosophy is not to console the suffering. That is the work of doctors, priests, therapists, and social workers. Heidegger has no expertise in such matters. The task of philosophy is to take a step back from homelessness, pain, and death and raise questions about their meaning, their essences. And that is why people read Heidegger. They don’t come to him for a cup of chamomile tea and a shoulder to cry on.

One might also object that claiming that the United States and the Soviet Union are metaphysically the same overlooks the fact that life was better in the USA than the USSR. Surely there are lots of important moral differences between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. Likewise, the claim that factory farms are in essence the same as extermination camps, man-made famines, and hydrogen bombs seems a bit insensitive to humans who might resent being compared to pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and feedlots. Isn’t there a vast moral gulf between using technology to feed millions and using technology to murder millions?

But again, these objections are based on an elementary error. Heidegger is not saying that the US and the USSR, or factory farming and man-made mass death, are morally equivalent. He is not, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, claiming that for farm animals, every day is Auschwitz, which is meant as a moral equivalence. Heidegger is saying that these horrors are metaphysically equivalent. Moral and metaphysical equivalence are simply two different questions. So claiming that these phenomena are metaphysically the same does not commit one to claiming that they are morally the same.

Heidegger is not the clearest writer, but his ideas of the ontological difference between beings and Being, and of the stark differences between the Greek and the modern worldviews, can be understood by any moderately intelligent layman. I explained them above in barely a thousand words. So there is really no excuse for Heidegger scholars who ignore these distinctions in order to abuse Heidegger in what amounts to politically correct rituals of execration to appease his critics on the Left. Frequently, they sound like they are running for office.

For instance, John D. Caputo calls Heidegger’s distinction between the essences and the phenomena of pain, homelessness, and mass death “essentialization.” Caputo characterizes essentialization as “thoughtless, tasteless, offensive,”[12] “tasteless, insensitive, scandalous—thoughtless . . . grotesque and dangerous,”[13] an “obscenity,”[14] and even a “reductio ad absurdum”[15] of Heidegger’s thought. Essentialization:

accounts for a good deal of Heidegger’s habit of saying the most shocking and insensitive—which means unfeeling—things about living things: that real destructiveness is not found in the universal incineration of all life, human and otherwise, but the loss of a Schwartzwaldian Ding [Black-Forest thing]; that real homelessness is not a matter of children freezing on winter streets but the loss of a sense of Wohnen [dwelling]; that agricultural technology and gas chambers are “essentially the same” . . . It belongs to the essence of Heideggerian Wesen [essence] to neutralize the distinction between life and death, to raise itself up to such a point of transcendental purity that it can no longer tell the difference between agriculture and murder.[16]

The reader already knows enough to refute this tirade. Caputo is ignoring the difference between metaphysical and moral sameness. He claims that distinguishing between the essence of pain and sensations of pain is the same thing as denying that sensations are real, which does not follow at all. Caputo accuses Heidegger of aestheticism, asceticism, and even anestheticism (as in anesthesia) for distinguishing between pain and its essence. But Heidegger’s real crime is simply being a philosopher. Philosophers do not deny the existence of bodies in pain. They deny only that the essence of pain hurts.

For Caputo, however, the crime of being a philosopher is to reflect on human suffering—as opposed, I guess, to doing something about human suffering. “Doing something” like signaling how much he cares in the pages of philosophy journals:

What if one were to say that what essentially calls to us in homelessness is not the essence of dwelling but the cries of those who suffer from lack of shelter? What if the call were really a cry of grief? What if the call were the appeal for help of those who suffer? What if the summons by which we are summarily called were the summons for aid by the victim? What if responding to the appeal of the victim were the oldest responsibility of all?[17]

This, of course, is a legitimate response to human suffering. It is also the first response to human suffering. It is the response of concerned citizens, global humanitarians, policemen, firemen, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, priests, therapists, councilors, and social workers. But it is not the philosophical response to suffering, which first and foremost is to understand. Thus Caputo’s indictment of Heidegger is basically that he chose to be a philosopher, not a social worker.

Note that Caputo does not claim that distinguishing between the essence of language and human speech denies the reality of human speech. Nor does it trigger torrents of abuse. Caputo is only focusing on emotional hot-button issues: pain, homelessness, mass death. Thus his position is basically that only these issues should be off-limits to philosophical reflection, because to philosophize about the greatest problems facing humanity is somehow in bad taste.

When reading some of Heidegger’s more pedestrian-minded detractors, one often wonders: Why Heidegger? What attracted them to Heidegger in the first place? For instance, Richard Rorty writes:

One might think that the destruction of the earth and the standardization of man were bad enough . . . without bringing in the world of the spirit at all. But this would be to treat “forgetfulness of being” as just a handy label for whatever it is that has been going wrong lately . . . This way of putting things may suggest that I am, like a good modern, neglecting the “ontological difference” between Being and beings. But [when talking about the problems of modernity] Heidegger neglected it too—and it is well for him that he does.[18]

Heidegger evoked the crises of the post-War age to draw people into his philosophical reflections. Then he asked them to take a step back from engagement with the problems of the world and reflect a bit on their meaning. But, as Heidegger himself pointed out, to dispense with the reflective turn and leave it at “Mankind has entered the atomic age” is not to rise above the platitudes of illustrated newsmagazines.[19] For Rorty, though, that is all well and good. So why Heidegger?

Years ago, I submitted an essay on Nietzsche to a philosophy journal. It was rejected, and when I read the peer reviewer’s report, it was clear that he actually had no objections to my discussion of Nietzsche—beyond the fact that he would have preferred that I had written a paper on John Rawls instead. This is a very common vice in academia. Instead of criticizing a writer for what he has actually written, he is attacked for not writing what his critic would have preferred he had written. They want to change the subject. But they don’t just come out and say so, because then they would have no actual grounds to criticize you.

Caputo and Rorty don’t really want to engage Heidegger philosophically. They simply wish he were someone else, someone more like them. Philosophy, however, is fundamentally different from passionate engagement with the problems of mankind. Philosophy begins with reflective disengagement and then ponders the meanings of things, even things that we would like to abolish, like pain, homelessness, and mass murder.

But what if this reflective turn reveals that the deep metaphysical assumptions of liberal democracy are the same as communist and fascist totalitarianism? And what if allowing these assumptions to go unchallenged dooms liberal democracy into becoming nothing more than a soft totalitarian dystopia?

This is why Heidegger matters. This is why even academic Leftists who would prefer to simply change the subject and focus on politics need to take a step back and reflect on the meaning of what they are doing. Philosophical reflection itself changes nothing. But we can’t philosophize forever. We have to return to life. And when we do, philosophy allows us to see the world, its problems, and our tasks in a new light. And seeing the world anew can change everything. This is why we need to let Heidegger be Heidegger.
Remembering Martin Heidegger:
September 26, 1889–May 26, 1976
Greg Johnson

1,798 words

Translations: Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian

Martin Heidegger is one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, both in terms of the depth and originality of his ideas and the breadth of his influence in philosophy, theology, the human sciences, and culture in general.

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the town of Meßkirch in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He died on May 26, 1976 in Freiburg and was buried in Meßkirch.

Heidegger was from a lower-class Catholic family. His family was too poor to send him to university, so he enrolled in a Jesuit seminary. But Heidegger was soon rejected by the Jesuits due to a heart condition. He then studied theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909–1911, after which time he switched his focus to philosophy. Eventually Heidegger broke entirely with Christianity.

In 1914 Heidegger defended his doctoral dissertation. In 1916, he defended his habilitation dissertation, which entitled him to teach in a German university. During the First World War, Heidegger was spared front duty because of his heart condition.

From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger was the salaried research assistant of Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg. Husserl, who was a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, was the founder of the phenomenological movement in German philosophy, and Heidegger was to become his most illustrious student.

In 1923, Heidegger was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg. There his intense and penetrating engagement with the history of philosophy quickly became known throughout Europe, and students flocked to his lectures, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, who became Heidegger’s most eminent student, as well as such Jewish thinkers as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. In 1927, Heidegger published his magnum opus, Being and Time, the foundation of his world-wide fame. In 1928, Husserl retired from the University of Freiburg, and Heidegger returned to replace him, remaining in Freiburg for the rest of his academic career.

Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933. Heidegger joined the ruling National Socialist German Workers Party on May 1, 1933. In his inaugural address as rector on May 27, 1933, and in political speeches and articles from the same period, he expressed his support for the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler. Heidegger resigned as rector in April 1934, but he remained a member of the NSDAP until 1945. After the Second World War, the French occupation authorities banned Heidegger from teaching. In 1949, he was officially “de-Nazified” without penalty. He began teaching again in the 1950–51 academic year. He continued to teach until 1967.

A whole academic industry has grown up around the question of Heidegger and National Socialism. It truly is an embarrassment to the post-WW II intellectual consensus that arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century was a National Socialist. But the truth is that Heidegger was never a particularly good National Socialist.

Yes, Heidegger belonged intellectually to the “Conservative Revolutionary” milieu. Yes, he thought that the NSDAP was the best political option available for Germany. But Heidegger’s view of the meaning of National Socialism was rather unorthodox.
450px-Grab_Heidegger

Heidegger’s grave

Heidegger viewed the National Socialist revolution as the self-assertion of a historically-defined people, the Germans, who wished to regain control of their destiny from an emerging global-technological-materialistic system represented by both Soviet communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. This revolt against leveling, homogenizing globalism was, in Heidegger’s words, “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. From this point of view, the NSDAP’s biological racism and anti-Semitism seemed to be not only philosophically naive and superficial but also political distractions.

Heidegger knew that Jews were not Germans, and that Jews were major promoters of the system he rejected. He was glad to see their power broken, but he also had cordial relationships with many Jewish students, including extramarital affairs with Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann (who was half-Jewish).

In the end, Heidegger believed that the Third Reich failed to free itself and Europe from the pincers of Soviet and Anglo-Saxon materialism. The necessities of re-armament and war forced a rapprochement with big business and heavy industry, thus Germany fell into the trammels of global technological materialism even as she tried to resist it.

Heidegger was not, however, a Luddite. He was not opposed to technology per se, but to what he called the “essence” of technology, which is not technology itself, but a way of seeing ourselves and the world: the world as a stockpile of resources available for human use, a world in which there are no limits, in principle, to human knowledge or power. This worldview is incompatible with any sort of mystery, including the mystery of our origins or destiny. It is a denial of human differentiation — the differentiation that comes from multiple roots and multiple destinies.

Yet, as Heidegger slyly pointed out, the very idea we can understand and control everything is not something we can understand or control. We don’t understand why we think we can understand everything. And we are literally enthralled by the idea that we can control everything. But once we recognize this, the spell is broken; we are free to return to who we always-already are and destined to be.

But on Heidegger’s own terms, it is still possible to combine a technological civilization with an archaic value system, to reject the essence of technology and affirm rootedness and differentiation. This is what Guillaume Faye calls “archeofuturism.”

Ultimately, Heidegger’s philosophy — particularly his account of human being in time, his fundamental ontology, his account of the history of the West, and his critique of modernity and technology — is of greater significance to the project of the North American New Right than his connection with National Socialism. It is a measure of the embryonic nature of our movement that we are just beginning to deal with his work.
Notes on Heidegger & Evola
Greg Johnson

Kunze_Heidegger31,660 words

Spanish translation here

Evidence has recently emerged that Martin Heidegger read Julius Evola. In an article entitled “Ein spirituelles Umsturzprogramm” (“A Spiritual Revolution Program”) published in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung, December 30, 2015, Thomas Vasek reports on an important document he discovered: 

Julius Evola, the ultra-fascist Italian cultural philosopher, was eagerly read not only by Gottfried Benn, but also by Martin Heidegger as an unpublished note shows.

The keyword of Martin Heidegger’s note is “race”; below that appears, in the handwriting of the philosopher, the following sentence: “Wenn eine Rasse die Berührung mit dem, was allein Beständigkeit hat und geben kann — mit der Welt des Seyns — verloren hat, dann sinken die von ihr gebildeten kollektiven Organismen, welches immer ihre Größe und Macht sei, schicksalhaft in die Welt der Zufälligkeit herab.” [“If a race has lost contact with what alone has and can give resistance — with the world of Beyng — then the collective organisms formed from it, whatever be their size and power, sink fatefully down into the world of contingency.”] The quotation is taken verbatim from the book Revolt Against the Modern World, which was first published in German in 1935; only the spelling of “Being” has been Heideggerized.

The author of the work was the Italian cultural philosopher and esotericist Julius Evola (1898-1974) — a racist and anti-Semite who revered the SS as an elite order, developed a Fascist racial doctrine, and a wrote a Preface to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After the war, the Italian fascists revered him. To this day he is considered a leading figure of the extreme Right across Europe. [. . .]

The as yet unpublished excerpt could give new direction to the ongoing Heidegger controversy. Evola’s name does not appear in Heidegger’s published writings, and Heidegger scholarship has taken little notice of him. Even the Italian philosopher Donatella di Cesare does not mentions Evola in her book Heidegger, the Jews, the Shoah (2015). Yet textual comparisons suggest that Heidegger had not only read Evola, as this note indicates, but was also influenced by his ideas from the mid-thirties on, from his critique of science and technology, his anti-humanism and rejection of Christianity, to his “spiritual” racism. If this thesis is correct, then perhaps one could view the late Heidegger as a radical fascist esotericist who hoped that rule by a spiritual elite would bring about the reappearance of the gods.

Of course this single note establishes only that Heidegger read one of Evola’s books, not that he read it “eagerly.” Nor does it indicate what Heidegger thought of Evola. But it is still an important discovery. It could lead nowhere. (It could be Heidegger’s sole reference to Evola.) Or it could be the tip of an iceberg. An Evola connection could end up throwing a great deal of light on Heidegger’s interests and associations. No matter what the outcome, Vasek’s discovery is the beginning of an important academic research project. Are there other references to Evola in the Heidegger papers? Did Heidegger read other works by Evola? Did he annotate Evola’s books? Did Heidegger correspond with or meet Evola? (Both thinkers visited one another’s homelands.)

I have long wondered if more mainstream thinkers of the Right like Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were aware of the Traditionalist school of Evola and René Guénon. This suspicion was based less on shared doctrines than on shared concerns. A philosopher’s concerns are, in effect, the questions he is trying to answer; his doctrines are his attempts to answer them. Heidegger and Schmitt shared their Right-wing politics and critical eye on modernity with Evola and Guénon. That alone was sufficient reason to read them, even if they arrived at very different conclusions. Thus I was pleased to learn from Mircea Eliade’s Portugal Journal that Schmitt said, “the most interesting man alive today is René Guénon” and that Eliade agreed, although his conviction sometimes wavered. (Eliade also met Evola, corresponded with him, and read his works.) And now we have positive evidence that Heidegger read Evola.

I am somewhat skeptical, however, of Vasek’s assertion that Heidegger was influenced by Evola from the mid-1930s on, specifically on such matters as science and technology, anti-humanism, the rejection of Christianity, and race and anti-Semitism. For one thing, Heidegger had rejected Christianity long before the 1930s. I eagerly anticipate Vasek’s “textual comparisons,” but my fear is that they will be superficial. For although both Heidegger and Evola shared a generally Right-wing political outlook and believed that technological modernity was the culmination of a long process of decline going back to antiquity, their ultimate philosophical premises were very different.

evola2Evola’s “world of Being” is essentially a Platonic realm of eternal, intelligible truth that stands in opposition to the “world of contingency,” which is intelligible only insofar as it reflects the world of Being. By contrast, Heidegger’s concept of “Beyng” (a rendering of his use of Seyn, the archaic spelling of the German Sein) refers to his concept of “Ereignis,” which is actually an unintelligible contingency that establishes different reigning interpretations of man and world.

Evola believed that history’s downward trajectory toward technological modernity and cultural decadence was a falling away from the world of Being into the world of contingency. Heidegger, however, regarded Evola’s essentially Platonic outlook as part of the decline itself, indeed as standing very close to its beginning.

For Heidegger, the Platonic distillation of Being as pure intelligibility and intellect as the capacity to intuit the intelligible is false because it is an abstraction that overlooks a more fundamental unity, a mutual belonging of historical man and meaningful worlds. For Heidegger, we are too close to things and to ourselves, too involved in them, to fully understand or control them. He believes that metaphysics posits both intelligible Being and a self-transparent intellect out of a drive for mastery. Thus the will to power that comes to fruition in global technological civilization is present at the very beginning of the metaphysical tradition.

Heidegger claims that we overlooked this fundamental unity because it, in effect, concealed itself. It is a historical event that cannot exist apart from man but nevertheless was not controlled by man either. The self-concealment of Beyng creates metaphysics. And metaphysics inaugurates the downward course of history, culminating in technological nihilism. Contra Evola, the beginning of decline is not a fall from metaphysics, but a fall into metaphysics.

In terms of the topic of Heidegger’s unpublished note, namely race, Evola’s objection to biological racism is that it is insufficiently metaphysical, overlooking “races of the soul” and “races of the spirit.” Heidegger, however, had a very different objection to biological race.

Throughout his philosophical career, Heidegger battled against false concepts of human nature. The common denominator of these false concepts is that they are universal. In the metaphysical tradition, the essence of man is what all men have in common. What reason tells us we all have in common is reason itself. Man is the rational animal.

The rational animal is not, however, a national animal. Because reason is one, humanity is one, so the human community should be one as well. Thus more particular attachments are illegitimate. If man is the rational animal, and reason grasps the universal, then reason is in effect a “view from nowhere” which can take us anywhere. The view from nowhere makes us citizens of everywhere. The rational animal is a citizen of the world; the cosmos is our polis; we have wings not roots.

Heidegger’s word for human nature, however, is Dasein, which means “being here/there.” Dasein is not a view from nowhere, but a view from somewhere. Dasein‘s outlook on the world is particular, not universal. It is particularized by space and time, and particularized by language and culture, which it shares with other Dasein in its community — but not with all of humanity. Heidegger is a philosopher of distinct identities, of the concrete, of the local, and of belonging, which is a mutual relationship: we belong to our world, and our world belongs to us. (The name of this concrete mutual belongingness is Ereignis.)

Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is inherently political. We are not the rational animal but the national animal, and nation is defined by a common history, language, culture, and destiny. The politics of Dasein is, therefore, ethnonationalism.

Why not racial nationalism? Heidegger would not deny that race is part of ethnic identity. To be German one must be white. But there is more to being German than being white. Heidegger feared that defining identity is terms of biological race alone was another form of deracinating universalism. Not as universal and deracinating as “humanity,” but with similar consequences. For if whiteness is essential, then it is easy to become indifferent to Germanness and Englishness, which is the road to deracination and homogenization. But for Heidegger this is a form of inauthenticity, a failure to own up to our full identity and carry forward the cultural and linguistic particularities of our heritage.

This is very different from Evola’s metaphysical critique of biological racism. For Evola, biological race is too concrete and insufficiently metaphysical. For Heidegger, biological race is too abstract and metaphysical.

There is a view that Heidegger’s philosophy was essentially apolitical. Then he blundered into his unfortunate dalliance with National Socialism. Then he returned to an apolitical outlook. This is false. Heidegger’s thought is ethnonationalist to the core. This implies that it never ceased being so. Thus the later Heidegger’s politics simply went underground. They became hidden, occult, esoteric. Which means that Vasek may be on to something when he writes, “perhaps one could view the late Heidegger as a radical fascist esotericist who hoped that rule by a spiritual elite would bring about the reappearance of the gods.”

My view is that Heidegger’s disillusionment with National Socialism, which began in the middle of the 1930s, led him to search for a way of defining a post-totalitarian, ethnonationalist critique of globalizing, homogenizing modernity. In short, Heidegger was the first thinker of the New Right.
Heidegger & the Jewish Question, Part 1
Greg Johnson

3,287 words

Part 1 of 4

Part 2 here. Part 3 here. Part 4 here.

Author’s Note:

An abridged version of this essay was presented as a lecture at the inaugural meeting of the Scandza Forum in Stockholm on May 20, 2017. I want to thank the Scandza Forum and all who attended.  

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. Thus it is a problem that Heidegger was both a National Socialist and an anti-Semite, which are thought-crimes under the post-War intellectual dispensation.

The world has known that Heidegger was a National Socialist since 1933, but until recently, his precise attitude towards Jews was somewhat mysterious. Toni Cassirer, the wife of Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer, claimed in her autobiography that the Cassirers were aware that Heidegger was anti-Semitic in the late 1920s.[1]

However, whatever Heidegger’s attitudes toward Jews were at the time, they were not impediments to carrying on extramarital affairs with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, and Elisabeth Blochmann, who was half-Jewish, or having cordial and mentoring relationships with Jewish teachers, students, and colleagues.[2]

During the Third Reich, Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg, helping to purge the institution of Jewish students and faculty, although he protested against more vulgar manifestations of anti-Semitism and protested the sacking of certain Jewish faculty because it would make Germany look bad on the international stage.[3]

On June 30, 1933, after he had become Rector, Heidegger visited Karl Jaspers and his Jewish wife in Heidelberg. According to Jaspers, when he dismissed the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a forgery, Heidegger replied, “Nonetheless, there is a dangerous international alliance of Jews.”[4] Heidegger was right of course to dismiss the “forgery” canard. The Protocols, like the dialogues of Plato, are a literary presentation of ideas whose truth depends on their correspondence with reality. Thus it is thus simply irrelevant to protest that they are not really verbatim transcripts of actual conversations.

After the war, Heidegger was forced to undergo de-Nazification. He was characterized as Nazi fellow-traveler and banned from teaching until 1951. Heidegger enraged Jews by refusing to treat the holocaust as a morally and metaphysically unique event. Instead he compared it to other wartime atrocities and claimed that it had to be understood as a manifestation of the modern mindset which sees all of reality as material for human manipulation and control.[5] Also controversial was his decision in 1953 to publish a 1935 lecture course, An Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he characterized “the inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement as “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.”[6]

New light was thrown on Heidegger’s attitudes toward Jews beginning in 1989, when a 1929 letter from Heidegger to Victor Schwoerer, the vice-president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, was discovered. In the letter, Heidegger spoke of the necessity of promoting talented German scholars in order to combat the “Jewification” (Verjudung) of German intellectual life.[7] In 2005 a line from a letter from Heidegger to his wife Elfride, dated October 18, 1918, came to light. Heidegger writes, “The Jewification of our culture and universities is certainly horrifying, and I think that the German race really should summon up the inner strength to find its feet again.”[8]

These two letters clearly indicate that Heidegger opposed increasing Jewish influence on German cultural life almost fifteen years before Hitler’s rise to power, and more than a decade later not only did his attitude remain unchanged, he was taking active steps to combat Jewish power. His desire to see the “German race” fight back against Jewish influence and his willingness to actually cultivate and promote German scholars to counter Jewish influence explains his enthusiasm for National Socialism and his willingness to help implement National Socialist policies at the University of Freiburg.

However, in the Winter Semester of 1932–1933, before Heidegger openly embraced the party and became Rector at Freiburg, he wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt about rumors that he was an anti-Semite. After detailing all the favors he was doing for Jews during his sabbatical, he writes:

Whoever wants to call that “raging anti-Semitism” is welcome to do so. Beyond that, I am now just as much an anti-Semite in university issues as I was ten years ago in Marburg, where, because of this anti-Semitism, I even earned Jacobsthal’s and Friedländer’s support. To say absolutely nothing about my personal relationships with Jews (e.g., Husserl, Misch, Cassirer, and others). And above all, it cannot touch my relationship to you.[9]

Heidegger’s claim that he is “just as much an anti-Semite in university issues as I was ten years ago” was meant to be taken as sarcasm by Arendt, implying that he was not an anti-Semite then or now. Why else would he cite the support of two Jewish colleagues, archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal and classicist Paul Friedländer?

But another reading is possible: The statement could also be taken at face value. Heidegger really was anti-Semitic with regard to university issues in Marburg and in Freiburg, as would soon become clear. Heidegger had merely concealed his anti-Semitism from his colleagues—as he was concealing it from Arendt herself in this very letter. But when Hitler came to power, dissimulation was no longer necessary. Arendt herself certainly felt deceived. In later years, she declared that “Heidegger was notorious for lying about everything.”[10]

Beginning in 2014, a flood of new light on Heidegger and the Jews was cast by the publication of the first three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.[11] A fourth volume appeared in 2015.[12] These volumes encompass writings from 1931 to 1948. Jews and Judaism are mentioned in only 25 places in the 1,753 pages of the Black Notebooks published so far—fewer than ten pages, if we are generous in providing context—beginning in 1938 and ending circa 1948.[13]

But in Heidegger scholarship—as in politics, culture, and academia at large—the Jewish tail wags the dog. Thus the question of Heidegger and the Jews has become the topic of a flurry academic conferences, articles, and books, as well as articles in the middlebrow press.[14] These discussions are filled with the language of contamination and contagion. Anti-Semitism is treated as an intellectual form of lice or typhus, and scholars earnestly debate whether they or their students can catch cooties from reading Heidegger. When the hubbub about anti-Semitism dies down, however, I think the world of letters will eventually conclude that the Black Notebooks is one of Heidegger’s richest and most compelling works.

Indeed, I suspect that Heidegger, his family, and his publishing house Vittorio Klostermann handled the publication and promotion of the Black Notebooks in a quite cunning manner. Heidegger surely knew that these volumes would be highly controversial, so he specified that they be published last in his collected works—like an unexpected verb at the end of a long, meandering German sentence that suddenly charges everything that came before with new meaning and life. If there was going to be a controversy about Heidegger and anti-Semitism, best to wait until Heidegger scholars were maximally invested in his work. Moreover, the decision to leak the most inflammatory passages on Jews before the publication of the Black Notebooks was a masterstroke of marketing, for the predictable controversy in the press made the Black Notebooks philosophical best-sellers.

In 2016, excerpts from Heidegger’s correspondence with his brother Fritz dealing with National Socialism, the Second World War, and related topics were published. A similar wag-the-dog phenomenon can be observed in this publication. Although the letters make only passing and anodyne references to Jews, they were published as Martin Heidegger und der Antisemitismus.[15] The volume is co-edited by Rabbi Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger, one of Martin Heidegger’s grandsons. The book contains 127 pages of letters and 262 pages of scholarly essays on Heidegger and anti-Semitism.

So what do the Black Notebooks say about Jews? Heidegger’s remarks fall into four broad categories. Sixteen of the 25 references refer to Jewish intellectuals and movements, certain Jewish individuals, and Judaism as a religion. The remaining nine refer to Jews as a nation.

Jewish Intellectuals & Movements

In discussing doctrines of human nature, Heidegger refers to the “Christian-Jewish doctrine . . . that define[s] man immediately on the basis of his relation to a ‘God’ . . .” (1938; GA 94: 475-76; trans. Polt). Elsewhere, Heidegger speaks of rejecting the “anthropological determination of man, and with it, all previous anthropology—Christian Hellenistic-Jewish and Socratic-Platonic” (1938–1939; GA 95: 322; trans. Polt). Heidegger also wonders if thinking of human beings as a people (Volk) tacitly accepts the “Hellenistic-Jewish ‘world,’” i.e., worldview, that he wishes to question and transcend (1938–1939; GA 95: 339; trans. Polt).

There is nothing specifically anti-Semitic about these references to intellectual traditions. Heidegger rejects Jewish thinking, but he does not single it out. He hyphenates Jewish ideas with Christianity and Hellenistic thought and places these hyphenated constructs on a par with Socratic-Platonic thinking, which he also rejects. Moreover, it is not really anti-Semitic to reject Jewish ideas if one thinks they are false. It would only be anti-Semitic if one rejected them simply because they are Jewish, and obviously that is not what Heidegger is doing here.

In a remark on the völkisch outlook, Heidegger asks, “Is it an accident that National Socialism has stamped out ‘sociology’ as a term? Why was sociology gladly pursued by Jews and Catholics?” (1938–1939; GA 95: 161; trans. Polt). There is nothing specifically anti-Semitic about this remark either. Heidegger is not singling out Jews but placing them alongside Catholics. Heidegger’s likely answer to the question he raises is that both Jews and the Catholic church are international rather than national communities, thus they are attracted to sociology as a universal science.

In a remark on his critique of Cartesianism in Being and Time, Heidegger mentions that “it has been exploited just as strongly by Jews as by National Socialists, without being grasped in its essential core . . .” (1938–1939; GA 95: 168-69; trans. Polt). Again, there is nothing anti-Semitic about this remark. Heidegger is putting some Jews and some National Socialists on the same plane, as having a superficial understanding of his critique of Cartesianism.

In a remark on self-knowledge, Heidegger argues that the very idea of self-reflection is superficial, “even after one has pushed Jewish ‘psychoanalysis’ aside” (1938–1939; GA 95: 258; trans. Polt). Again, there is nothing specifically anti-Semitic about this remark. Heidegger’s point is that National Socialist critics of “Jewish ‘psychoanalysis’” fail to question the idea of self-reflection and thus end up on the same plane.

Heidegger makes a similar point elsewhere, mentioning Freud by name:

One should not get all too loudly indignant about the psychoanalysis of the Jew “Freud” if, and as long as, one cannot at all “think” about each and every thing other than by “tracing” everything as an “expression” of “life” back to “instincts” and “the atrophy of instinct.” This way of “thinking,” which in advance excludes all “being” whatsoever, is pure nihilism. (circa 1941; GA 96: 218; trans. Polt)

Here Heidegger is again criticizing National Socialist thinkers who indignantly condemn “the Jew ‘Freud’” yet themselves reduce psychology to instincts.

I think it is reasonable to read Heidegger’s very Nazi-sounding use of the phrase “the Jew ‘Freud’” as sarcastic echoing of Nazi cant.[16] This is reinforced by putting Freud’s name in scare quotes, which may mean that Heidegger believes the unnamed National Socialist writers are attacking a straw man, not Freud’s actual teachings.

In a reflection on “dogmatism, be it ecclesiastical-political or state-political,” Heidegger observes the tendency of the authorities to attribute any dissent from dogma as the work of “the enemy for it (for the dogmatism)—be it the heathens and godless ones, or the Jews and communists.” Given that “the Jews and communists” are the enemies, the dogma in question is clearly National Socialism. What’s more, Heidegger identifies himself with the dissidents, not the dogmatists.

Mentions of Jewish Individuals

In addition to Freud, Heidegger mentions several other Jewish individuals in the Black Notebooks.

In one passage Heidegger mentions two Jewish swindlers, Iwan Baruch Kutisker and Julius Barmat, who the Nazis claimed epitomized the Weimar Republic:

What is the difference between the following occurrences? Barmat and Kutisker make good business for themselves out of the postwar democracy; with the help of the National Socialist world view, primary school teachers turn into “philosophers” with whom a serious person would never bother. There is no difference; for in the latter case the historical essence of National Socialism is grasped as little as is, in the former case, the historical essence of parliamentary democracy. (1941; GA 96: 234; trans. Polt)

Here Heidegger is saying that two Jewish swindlers no more reveal the essence of parliamentary democracy than unnamed German academic frauds reveal the essence of National Socialism. This is actually a critique of National Socialist propaganda and a refutation of an argument against liberal democracy, although it also amounts to an analogous defense of National Socialism.

In another passage, Heidegger writes, “At the same time, the ‘cunning’ of Bolshevist politics comes to light. The Jew Litvinov surfaces again. . . .” (June, 1941; GA 96: 242; trans. Polt). This clearly seems to be an unironic use of the Nazi trope. 

Judaism as a Religion

In a remark on Karl Barth, Heidegger writes, “The Phariseeism of Karl Barth and his associates exceeds even the ancient Jewish Phariseeism, by the degree that is necessarily posited by the modern history of being” (GA 95: 395-96; 1938–1939; trans. Polt). Here again, no anti-Semitic judgment is intended. Indeed, Heidegger puts the Jewish Pharisees on a higher rung than a German Christian theologian.

Heidegger mentions Judaism in a number of post-war reflections from 1946 to 1948. Around 1946 he writes:

“Prophecy” is the technique for fending off what is destinal in history. It is an instrument of the will to power. That the great prophets are Jews is a fact whose secret has not yet been thought through. (Note for jackasses: this comment has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism,” which is as foolish and abominable as Christianity’s bloody and, above all, non-bloody attacks on “heathens.” The fact that Christianity even brands anti-Semitism as “un-Christian” is part of its highly developed and refined power technique.) (GA 97: 159; trans. Polt)

In this passage, Heidegger himself denies anti-Semitic intent or import. While his comment on the Jews places them in a class by themselves, his comment on anti-Semitism places it in the same company as the Church’s anti-heathenism, which Heidegger clearly rejects. Of course, he is only speaking here of Christian religious anti-Semitism, which leaves open the door to other types.

In 1947 or 1948, Heidegger writes, “God is the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus. But there is no God of be-ing” (GA 97: 357; trans. Polt). A few pages later we read, “On the doctrine of gods.—Jehovah is the god who presumed to make himself the chosen god, and not to tolerate any other gods beside himself. . . .” (GA 97: 369; trans. Polt). And a few pages after that, we find:

What if the god of the philosophers were still more divine than the god of Abraham, who tolerated no others of his kind aside from himself, and whose son Jesus sent all who did not love him to Hell and let them roast there? What sort of god is it who denies divinity, and who has none of the generosity of pure joy at his kind and at their inexhaustible richness?  (A note on Pascal.) (GA 97: 409; trans. Polt)

Finally, in a note from around 1948, Heidegger simply states, “The modern systems of total dictatorship stem from Judeo-Christian monotheism” (GA 97: 438; trans. Polt).

None of these passages are specifically anti-Semitic. Indeed, they apply to Christianity as much as Judaism. The first alludes to Pascal, and the third mentions him by name. Heidegger is clearly critical of the biblical God, but his remarks are no more anti-Jewish than anti-Christian. And the last remark is also as anti-Nazi as it is anti-Judeo-Christian.

Some Preliminary Conclusions

Of the sixteen references to Jews and Judaism that we have examined so far, only one is patently anti-Semitic, namely “the Jew Litvinov.”

There are six references to the Jewish or Judeo-Christian religion, one of which is explicitly anti-anti-Semitic, one of which places Jews above a German Christian, three of which are as much about Christianity as Judaism, and one of which is as anti-Nazi as it is anti-Judeo-Christian.

Jews are mentioned alongside communists as enemies of the National Socialist state, which Heidegger is taking to task for state-political “dogmatism.”

There are references to “Christian-Jewish,” “Christian Hellenistic-Jewish,” and “Hellenistic-Jewish” conceptions of human nature, the latter two of which Heidegger places on the same rung as the “Socratic-Platonic” conception.

Some Jews are placed on the same rung as some National Socialists in misunderstanding Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism. Other Jews are placed on the same rung as some Catholics in advocating the science of sociology. National Socialist psychologists are placed on the same rung as Freud because they too embrace self-reflection as a model of knowledge and instincts as an explanation of psychological states. Even the Jewish swindlers Barmat and Kutisker are placed on the same level as unnamed National Socialist educational careerists.

A clear pattern is developing here. In twelve out of sixteen passages, Heidegger places Jews, Judaism, and Jewish thought on the same level as Christianity, the Greeks, and German National Socialists. In all these cases, Heidegger rejects the Jewish as well as the non-Jewish terms as equally problematic.

In the passages where Heidegger places Jews and National Socialists on the same plane, his primary target is National Socialists, for whom the cruelest barb is to be compared to Jews. But Heidegger’s problem with the Jews is not that they are Jews, but that their ideas are as false and superficial as their National Socialist counterparts.

With this pattern in mind, we will now examine Heidegger’s remarks on Jews as a people
Heidegger & the Jewish Question, Part 2
Greg Johnson

1,291 words

Part 2 of 4

Part 1 here. Part 3 here. Part 4 here.

Heidegger discusses “Jewry” (Judentum, Judenschaft), meaning Jews as a people, in nine places in the Black Notebooks. I will also discuss a tenth reference to Jews as a people that was discovered in the manuscript called Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng, 1938-40) and published in 2014. All of these passages are anti-Semitic in an unproblematic fashion. They fall into three rough categories: descriptions of Jewish misbehavior, explanations of Jewish misbehavior, and remarks on fighting against Jewry.

Four passages fall into the first category.

1.

One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded. (1938–1939; GA 95: 97; trans. Polt)

Here Heidegger remarks on how diaspora Jewry, because of its rootlessness and predominantly commercial form of life is uniquely adapted to the conditions of modernity, which Heidegger characterizes by “worldlessness” and “the gigantic” (das Riesige). Heidegger believes that both meaning and measure are endowed by rootedness in a particular language, culture, and homeland. Rootlessness, therefore, leads to worldlessness (a void of meaning) and the gigantic (an abolition of limits; bigger is always better; new is always improved). Both worldlessness and the gigantic are forms of nihilism that are characteristic of modernity.

2.

World Jewry, incited by emigrants allowed to leave Germany, is pervasive and impalpable, and even though its power is widespread, it doesn’t need to participate in military actions, whereas all that remains to us is to sacrifice the best blood of our own people. (circa September 1941; GA 96: 262; my trans.)

In this passage, Heidegger expresses the belief that diaspora Jewry, stirred up by Jews forced out of Germany by the National Socialists, are responsible for the strange alliance of Soviet communists and Anglo-Saxon capitalists fighting against Germany. Furthermore, Heidegger remarks that Jews are warmongers, masterfully inciting gentiles to fight their battles for them.

3.

Through this “history,” the essence of history comes to the brink of a decision, for the first time, between nothing and be-ing—the imperialistic-bellicose way of thinking and the humanistic-pacifist way of thinking are only “dispositions” that belong to each other, each brought forward in different ways as a pretext, “historiological”—“history”-making “dispositions” in whose realms no decisions are possible anymore—because they are just offshoots of “metaphysics.”

Thus both can be used by “international Jewry” to proclaim and accomplish one as a means for the other—this machinational “history”-making entangles all players equally in their webs—(circa 1940; GA 96: 133; my trans.)

In the first paragraph of this passage, Heidegger alludes to an idea that recurs in some of his other remarks about National Socialism and Jewry. Heidegger had hoped that National Socialism heralded a fundamental turning point in Western civilization, which he here characterizes as a decision between “nothing and be-ing,” which is really the most fundamental choice of all.

For Heidegger, it was a choice between cosmopolitan rootlessness, unbounded nihilism, and the conquest of nature versus rootedness in culture, tradition, and homelands; an acceptance of finitude and uncertainty; and a sense that we are part of the natural world, charged with being its guardians, not its exploiters and consumers.

Heidegger, however, was deeply disappointed in National Socialism. As the Third Reich unfolded, he came to see it as just another form of modern technological civilization, fighting over much smaller stakes like the difference between imperialism and pacificism. Heidegger saw these as merely alternatives within modernity, whereas he was hoping for an alternative to modernity. As he puts it, imperialism and pacifism are both “just offshoots of ‘metaphysics,’” by which Heidegger means the Western tradition from Plato to Nietzsche, the outcome of which is the modern technological nihilism that he hoped National Socialism would go beyond.

Heidegger does not, however, think that the metaphysical ideas of thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche are actually the causes of the modern world. Heidegger does not think that philosophers and poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” who create the blueprints according to which history is built. Instead, Heidegger thinks that philosophers and poets are merely the first people attuned to changes in history and culture that cannot be meaningfully reduced to human intentions and purposeful activity and are fundamentally mysterious and unpredictable. For Heidegger, philosophy is not “behind” historical change, historical change is “behind” philosophy. Moreover, Heidegger believed that we cannot get “behind” historical change. It cannot be explained. It just happens. The idea that the human mind is behind historical change is sometimes called “humanism.” Heidegger’s idea that historical change is behind the human mind is thus referred to as his “anti-humanism.”

This explains the distinction in the passage above between history and “history” in quotes. When Heidegger uses history without quotes, he is referring to his own anti-humanist conception of history. When Heidegger places history in quotes, he is referring to the humanist conception of history as something that human beings create according to blueprints that they think up. The idea that mankind can make history according to our designs is just another manifestation of technological nihilism, which in the Black Notebooks Heidegger calls “machination” (Machenschaft), which connotes plans and schemes as well as technological manipulation and control.

The fact that human beings cannot really make history does not, of course, prevent them from trying. The unfolding political and environmental catastrophes of the 20th and 21st centuries are all exercises in what Heidegger calls “machinational ‘history’-making.” But Heidegger claims that the very idea that mankind can understand and control everything is not something that we can understand and control. We don’t understand why we think we can understand everything. We can’t control the idea that we can control everything. The idea that human reason makes us masters of the world is, ironically, a groundless mania that entralls us. Machinational “history”-making is an inscrutable dispensation from what Heidegger here calls the “decision regions” of genuine history. To speak of decision in this context, however, is misleading, because there is no subject or will behind history. It is a decision without a decider.

All those who fight over issues framed within the context of modernity—Jew and German alike—are equally entangled in its web. But because “international Jewry”—Heidegger himself puts the words in quotes, which indicates a reluctance to make the phrase his own—is a rootless and calculating people, it is uniquely adapted to modernity. Thus Jews are equally capable of using imperialism and pacifism as means to their ends in the struggle for power. Jews, moreover, have a systematic advantage over Germans and other rooted peoples in struggling for power within the context of global technological nihilism.

In the Black Notebooks and contemporary writings, Heidegger characterizes the outcome of machinational “history”-making as “planetary criminality” (Verbrechen). In 1941, he declared that:

The authentic experience that has been allotted to today’s generation, but which it was not able to take over, see through, and lay back into its essential inception, is the unrestricted outbreak of the unconditioned criminality of the modern human essence, in accordance with its role in the empowerment of power into machination. Criminality [Verbrechen]: that is no mere breaking up [Zerbrechen], but the devastation of everything into what is broken. (1941; GA 96: 266; trans. Polt)

This provides the context for passage number 4, from the manuscript of The History of Beyng:

4.

One would need to ask in what the peculiar predetermination of Jewry [Judenschaft] for planetary criminality is grounded. (Quoted in Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014], p. 51; trans. Polt)

Heidegger treats it as a matter of fact that Jews have a marked predisposition for planetary criminality. But as a philosopher, he cannot be comfortable merely noting this fact. He wants to understand it, which is the subject of our next installment.
Related
Heidegger & the Jewish Question, Part 3
Greg Johnson

1,711 words

Part 3 of 4. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 4 here.

Heidegger treats it as a matter of fact that Jews have a marked predisposition for “planetary criminality.” But as a philosopher, he cannot be comfortable merely noting this fact. He wants to understand it, which is the subject of the next three passages.

All three of these passages touch upon the question of whether Jews are best understood as a biological race or as a nation. Heidegger is clearly skeptical that anything essential about Jewry can be understood in simple biological terms. For Heidegger, Jews are first and foremost a people, defined by a common cultural heritage and a common destiny that cannot be meaningfully reduced to or explained by biological race.

5.

Jewry’s temporary increase in power is, however, grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, furnishes the starting point for the diffusion of a generally empty rationality and calculative ability, which in this manner took up residence in the “spirit,” without being able to grasp the hidden decision realms on its own. The more originary and primordial the prospective decisions and questions, the more they remain inaccessible to this “race.”

In the first sentence above, Heidegger states straightforwardly that Jewry’s “temporary increase in power” is grounded in the modern spirit of technical-instrumental rationality. Since Jews have long lived as a rootless, commercial diaspora people, they found themselves uniquely adapted to the spirit of the modern age and thus naturally rose to positions of power. Heidegger believed this power is “temporary,” because he believed that modernity’s days are numbered.

Jews are not, however, merely objects of the historical process. They are also agents. Modernity cleared the way for them, but their own will to dominate pushed them into positions of power, and once there, they used that power to push the modernization process further. Thus Jews as a people also bear responsibility for intensified globalization.

Heidegger’s views should be contrasted to conspiratorial accounts of Jewish power like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. For Heidegger, the Protocols and other conspiratorial views of history are naively “humanistic.” They presuppose that “machinational history-making” really is possible. They posit that some human beings have the immense power and knowledge necessary to create history according to their own designs—whereas the vast majority of humanity has no power or responsibility in this area. For Heidegger, however, the ultimate causes of historical change lie outside our powers of understanding and control. Thus Jews did not create the modern world as an exercise in machinational history-making. But because of their superior adaptation to modernity, they now enjoy more power and more responsibility than any other nation for the present unfolding of modernity.

Heidegger’s claim that empty rationality and calculation have taken up residence in the realm of the “spirit” (a term Heidegger himself puts in quotes) and are unable to grasp the “hidden decision realms” is a reference to his idea that the modern conviction that we can understand and control everything is the product of historical forces that we can neither understand nor control, and which are thus invisible to the modern mind. Because Jews as a people are the vanguard of rootlessness and calculation, they are the least capable of grasping the hidden realm from which historical change emerges.

Heidegger then offers parenthetically an example of this Jewish blindness to the ultimate origins of historical change: his own mentor and the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl.

(Thus Husserl’s writing on phenomenological observation while dismissing psychological explanation and historical settlement of opinions is of lasting significance—and yet it goes nowhere near the regions of essential decisions, but rather presupposes the historical tradition of philosophy throughout; the necessary consequence is reflected immediately in the swing to neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy that eventually makes a progression to a Hegelianism in the formal sense inevitable. My “attack” against Husserl is not directed against him alone and indeed inessentially—my attack goes to the neglect of the question of Being, i.e., the essence of metaphysics as such, on the ground of which the machination of beings can determine history. The attack grounds a historical moment of the highest decision-making between the primacy of beings and the grounding of the truth of Be-ing.) (circa 1939; GA 96: 46; my trans.)

One has to ask, however, if Husserl, who was Jewish, was really any blinder to Heidegger’s concerns than, say, Kant, who was German? At the end, Heidegger makes it clear that his objection is not to Husserl as a Jew, or Husserl specifically, but to the overall neglect of the question of Being, which in this context refers to the ultimate cause of historical change, and to philosophizing within the framework of the metaphysical tradition, which gives rise to modernity. Heidegger’s attack on the metaphysical tradition is an attempt to find an alternative to modernity, a new beginning for Western man.

6.

The idea of an understanding with England in terms of a distribution of imperialist “prerogatives” misses the essence of the historical process, which is led by England within the framework of Americanism and Bolshevism and at the same time world Jewry to its final conclusion. The question of the role of world Jewry is not racial, but the metaphysical question of the type of humanity that can accept the world-historical “task” of uprooting all beings from Being. (GA 96: 243; my trans.)

Hitler admired the British Empire and wished to preserve it. Hitler also wanted to create an empire in Eastern Europe at the expense of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. He hoped that Germany and Britain could reach an agreement not to fight with one another or interfere with one another’s imperial projects. Thus in this passage, Heidegger is criticizing Hitler’s thinking as superficial. As in passage number 3, above, Heidegger thinks that the struggle between empires, like the struggle between imperialism and pacifism, is superficial because it fails to understand that all of these options lie within the framework of modernity and are thus not alternatives to it.

For Heidegger, the “essence of the historical process” in modernity is the unbounded expansion of nihilism. In this passage, he speaks of “the world-historical ‘task’ of uprooting all beings from Being.” For Heidegger, “Being” refers to the realm of meaning, thus “uprooting” beings from Being means uprooting them from the realm of meaning, and the loss of meaning is nihilism.

Heidegger sees both Bolshevism and Anglo-American capitalism as merely different forms of the same technological nihilism. For Heidegger, an understanding with Britain is not possible, since Britain was not merely opposed to Germany’s imperialistic aims. Because Britain was an individualist, commercial-exploratory-imperialist seafaring civilization, she played a leading role in the global propagation of rootlessness and nihilism. Such a Britain could not allow a Germany that stood for rootedness, nationalism, and hierarchy and against globalization and leveling. Thus Britain used Hitler’s invasion of Poland as the pretext to start the Second World War, and was central to creating the alliance between Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet communism against German National Socialism.

But Britain is not the only nation in the vanguard of nihilism. World Jewry exceeds even Britain in rootlessness, commercialism, and calculation. Thus of all nations, the Jews are the best adapted to the spirit of modernity to rise to a position of leadership. This is why Heidegger says that that “question of the role of world Jewry is not racial, but . . . metaphysical.” Jews enjoy power and influence in modernity because of their long cultural adaptation to being a diaspora people and their collective will-to-power and sense they are destined for world rulership. Racial factors like IQ can’t hurt, but they do not explain why Jews gravitated toward banking, the media, and culture-creation, while other market-dominant diaspora peoples gravitated toward cheap hotels and hardware stores. Jews are powerful because they are “the type of humanity that can accept the world-historical ‘task’ of uprooting all beings from Being.” Jews then, really are a “chosen people” after all: “chosen” by the historical process to spread technological nihilism to the four corners of the earth.

7.

The Jews, with their marked talent for calculation, have “lived” longer than anyone by the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence. The establishment [Einrichtung] of racial breeding [eugenics] does not stem from “life” itself, but from the overpowering of life through machination. What it pushes forward with such a plan is the complete deracialization of all peoples by clamping them into a uniformly constructed and tailored establishment [Einrichtung] of all beings. At one with de-racialization is the self-alienation of peoples—the loss of history—i.e., the decision realms of Be-ing. (circa 1939; GA 96: 56; my trans.)

Here Heidegger observes a classic Jewish double standard. Jews have practiced racism and eugenics longer than any other nation, yet they oppose the racism and eugenics of other peoples. But Heidegger’s main point is that eugenics is not a manifestation of the life force, but of the domination of life by modernity, i.e., by technological nihilism. But if eugenics is a manifestation of technological nihilism, then one cannot use eugenics to fight against it.

If eugenics is a manifestation of technological nihilism, what does it lead to? Heidegger speaks of uniformity and deracialization, but he does not really explain them. Perhaps, though, we can understand them along the following lines. If people can choose the traits of their children, will they choose to make them more fit or less fit for functioning in the modern world? Clearly the tendency will be to make children more adapted to modernity. But modernity is rootless, globalized, calculating, and nihilistic. Thus any people that practices eugenics in the modern age will tend to deracialize itself and to converge toward the creation of a homogeneous global modern man. In other words, there will be a tendency to become more and more like Jews. Which means that eugenics is a form of nihilism, not an alternative to it. The better adapted we are to modernity, the further we are from understanding the sources of modernity and its alternatives, namely “the decision realms of Be-ing.”

How, then, can we fight against technological nihilism without falling back into it? This is the topic of Heidegger’s last three passages, which we will examine in our final installment.
Related
Heidegger & the Jewish Question, Part 4
Greg Johnson

3,050 words

Part 4 of 4. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 3 here.

As Heidegger’s letters on resisting the “Jewification” of German life indicate, he was not merely interested in understanding Jewish power, he also wished to combat it. Heidegger wished, however, to counter Jewish power on the most fundamental level, namely by fighting against the rootless, nihilistic modern world in which Jewish power flourished and for a new beginning, a rooted, meaningful world in which Jewish power would wither. He wanted to drain the swamp in which the mosquitoes flourish. Thus Heidegger constantly emphasizes the futility of fighting modern nihilism by means of modern nihilism.

8.

To appropriate “culture” as a means of power and thus to assert oneself and affect a superiority is at bottom Jewish behavior. What follows from this for cultural politics as such? (1938–1939; GA 95: 326; trans. Polt)

Heidegger is referring here to at least three well-known Jewish phenomena.

First, there is the appropriation of European culture by Jewish collectors, connoisseurs, performers, and scholars, which—regardless of any genuine appreciation—is regarded as a “means of power,” i.e., a pathway of Jewish upward mobility, of self-assertion and a desire for superiority within the status system of gentile society.

Second, there is the Jewish deconstruction of gentile culture. Jews have played a leading role in producing and promoting the deconstruction of European painting, sculpture, music, and literature, as well as religion, social structures, and sexual mores.

Third, Jews have played a leading role in producing and promoting a shallow, synthetic mass popular culture—films, popular music, comics, and the like—which has been weaponized with propaganda promoting rootless cosmopolitanism and nihilism.

Jewish cultural appropriation, deconstruction, and weaponization are all deeply inauthentic and manipulative relationships to culture. But, then again, it is not their culture.

For Heidegger, we do not so much “have” a culture as culture “has” us. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s concept of “Ereignis,” which is often translated as “appropriation.” We are appropriated or enthralled by culture. An authentic relationship to culture is a form of identification and belonging—in essence, rootedness—that does not allow us to objectify, manipulate, construct, or deconstruct it. A synthetic, weaponized culture is no culture at all. It is simply propaganda, a specific form of machinational history-making. But Heidegger’s remark can also be read as caution against National Socialist cultural politics falling into the same machinational and nihilistic Jewish pattern.

9.

. . . maybe in this “struggle”—which struggles over goallessness itself and which hence can be only the caricature of “struggle”—the greater groundlessness will “triumph,” which is bound to nothing and makes everything serviceable to itself (Jewry). (1938–1939; GA 95: 96-97; trans. Polt)

The “struggle” (Kampf) that Heidegger mentions here is the political, economic, cultural, and ideological battle between Germany and her opponents—primarily the British and international Jewry—that eventually led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Heidegger places this “struggle” in quotation marks to indicate that he thinks that it is only a superficial “caricature of ‘struggle.’”

Heidegger states that the present “struggle” is a caricature of real struggle because it is merely “over goallessness itself,” i.e., nihilism without bounds. For Heidegger, the true struggle is between modernity and the new beginning for European man that he hoped National Socialism heralded. The fake struggles of his time, however, all take place on the plane of modernity. They are over alternatives within modernity, not alternatives to modernity. For Heidegger, the true struggle is against nihilism, not between different versions of it.

If this is the case, however, then Heidegger raises a chilling question: if the fake “struggle” of our time is between different forms of nihilism, wouldn’t the most nihilistic party have a systematic advantage? Other things being equal, wouldn’t the purer nihilists “triumph”? (Heidegger also puts “triumph” in scare quotes to indicate that victory on the plane of nihilism is just as superficial as the struggle for it.)

Heidegger calls the most nihilistic party the “greater groundlessness,” meaning the least rooted and thus the most lacking in meaning and measure. The greater groundlessness is “bound to nothing,” meaning that it has no limits on its possible actions, which means that it can “make everything serviceable to itself.” The more grounded a nation, the more it is bound to a specific identity, and the fewer things it can make serviceable to itself. Pure nihilists have no scruples, so they are willing to do anything to win. Impure nihilists are hampered by their residual scruples. Therefore, other things being equal, the purer nihilists will win. Heidegger indicates parenthetically that Jewry is the most nihilistic party in the current “struggle,” thus the Germans are at a disadvantage.

The third and final passage is very clearly from a notebook. Heidegger’s remarks are unusually cryptic, his thoughts jump from topic to topic without making the connections clear, and he entertains ideas that are not entirely consistent with his published views.

10.

The anti-Christian [der Anti-christ], like every “anti,” must stem from the same essential ground as that against which it is “anti”—that is, the same essential ground as “the Christian” [“der Christ”]. The Christian stems from Jewry [Judenschaft]. In the timeframe of the Christian West, that is, of metaphysics, Judaism is the principle of destruction. What is destructive in the reversal of the completion of metaphysics—i.e. of Hegel’s metaphysics by Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure of “life”—i.e. of economics, i.e. of organization—i.e. of the biological—i.e. of the “people.”

When what is “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense combats what is Jewish, the high point of self-annihilation in history has been attained—supposing that the “Jewish” has everywhere completely seized mastery, so that even the fight against “the Jewish,” and it above all, becomes subject to it.

On this basis one must assess what it means, for thinking that enters the concealed, inceptive essence of the history of the Occident, to meditate on the first inception among the Greeks, which remained outside Judaism and thus outside Christianity. (circa. 1942–1945; GA 97: 20; trans. Polt)

Here Heidegger at least seems to ponder the possibility that all forms of opposition are futile, if indeed all opposition “must stem from the same essential ground as that against which it is ‘anti.’” But perhaps Heidegger is overstating his case here. For is it really true that all opposition to Christianity somehow secretly affirms Christianity? Or is this true of only certain forms of opposition, such as secular liberal critiques which affirm and intensify Christian values?

Heidegger’s thought process then jumps to the topic of Jewry. Christianity is a product of Jewry, but it is unclear what connection this has to the previous point about anti-Christianity. Is Christian opposition to Jewry futile because Christianity stems from Jewry? Perhaps, but Heidegger’s initial point is about anti-Christianity, not anti-Semitism.

Heidegger then jumps to a particularly pregnant statement: “In the timeframe of the Christian West, that is, of metaphysics, Judaism is the principle of destruction.”

First, what does Heidegger mean by equating metaphysics and the timeframe of the Christian West? This is only a rough equation, since Western metaphysics emerged in ancient Greece, centuries before the emergence of Christianity, but Christianity and Greek metaphysics became fused in late antiquity.

Second, in what sense is Judaism the principle of destruction within the age of metaphysics and the Christian West? It would make more sense and be more consistent with Heidegger’s other statements if he spoke of Jewry as a people rather than Judaism as a religion. Judaism is present in Christianity at the beginning, but the principle of destruction manifests itself near the end of Christianity and metaphysics, i.e., in the emergence of modernity, i.e., the age of rootlessness and unbounded technological nihilism, the metaphysically “Jewish” age in which Jewry rises to power and drives modernity to its completion.

Heidegger’s next remark seems to be an illustration of this principle: Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s metaphysics, transforming the realm of spirit and culture into a superstructure upon an economic basis. But Heidegger then equates Marxist materialism with other philosophies that treat spirit and culture as manifestations of more basic material forces.

The first material force is “life,” which Heidegger himself puts in quotes. This is an allusion to Nietzsche and the tradition of “life philosophy” (Lebensphilosophie) that took its bearings from Nietzsche. Then Heidegger cites two more materialist principles: the “biological” and the “people” (Volk), the latter term in quotes as well. This is an obvious reference to National Socialism.

Thus Heidegger is equating Marxism, Nietzscheanism, and National Socialism insofar as they are all forms of cultural materialism. Beyond that, Heidegger is equating materialism—and thus Nietzscheanism and National Socialism—with Judaism, the “principle of destruction” within the “timeframe of the Christian West.”

In the next paragraph, Heidegger paints National Socialist anti-Semitism as a combat between “what is ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical sense,” i.e., National Socialism, and “what is Jewish” in the factual sense, namely world Jewry itself. By putting “Jewish” in scare quotes, Heidegger distances himself from the usage of the word. He is using the word as National Socialists use it. But he is saying that they don’t really know what they are talking about. What National Socialists call “Jewish” is simply modernity: rootlessness, globalization, and technological machination. But Heidegger’s point is that National Socialism itself is “Jewish” in that sense of the word. The National Socialists thought they were fighting for rootedness and nationalism, but they unwittingly adopted the very ideas they rejected.

Thus National Socialist anti-Semitism, and the war in general, is “the high point of self-annihilation in history.” It is “self-annihilation” because the opposed forces are the same insofar as they are both modernist, that is to say “Jewish,” one in the metaphysical sense, the other in the factual sense.

To be clear, Heidegger is not saying that Jews in the factual sense are annihilating themselves, but that National Socialists and Jews are metaphysically the same (modern), so that in annihilating Jews, National Socialists are annihilating themselves. At first, Heidegger hoped that National Socialism would annihilate modernity. Later, he came to see the Second World War as modernity’s annihilation of itself.

If in modernity, everything is what National Socialists call “Jewish”—rootless and nihilistic—then all resistance to what is Jewish (in a metaphysical or a factual sense) will be “Jewish” as well. Which means that resistance is futile. But again, Heidegger is overstating his case, for here he is leaving out the possibility of a genuine alternative to modernity, and we know that he believed that such an alternative—a new beginning—was possible.

This possibility is hinted at in the final paragraph. The argument of the previous paragraph takes place entirely on the plane of modern nihilism, and on that plane, it futile to resist one form of nihilism with another. In the final paragraph, however, Heidegger’s discourse shifts to another plane. This shift is signaled by his reference to the “thinking that enters the concealed, inceptive essence of the history of the Occident,” the realm from which metaphysics, modernity, and a new beginning might emerge.

How can such thinking contribute to a new beginning? Heidegger’s only suggestion here is to “meditate on the first inception among the Greeks, which remained outside Judaism and thus outside Christianity.” We can free ourselves from the Judeo-Christian cultural legacy by reconnecting with the other origin of the Western civilization, namely pagan Greece. But this is not the whole story for Heidegger, because the ancient Greeks are also the source of the metaphysical tradition that gives rise to modern nihilism. Thus, we must attune ourselves specifically to the pre-Socratic, pre-metaphysical Greeks like Heraclitus.

Heidegger’s reflections on the apparent futility of fighting against modern nihilism within the framework of modern nihilism, against Jewry within the framework of “metaphysical” Jewishness—as well as his suggestion that a genuine form of resistance is possible by drawing upon hidden resources outside the frameworks of metaphysics and the Christian West—raise two questions.

First, although Heidegger eventually came to see National Socialism as a form of modern nihilism rather than an alternative to it, does this mean that he believed that National Socialism and the Second World War were entirely illegitimate and futile exercises, compared to the other options available on the political plane? Heidegger correctly believed that the Second World War was set in motion by the organized Jewish community, which created a coalition of Soviet Communists and Anglo-Saxon capitalists. From the start, the war was a clash between technological titans, and although spiritual and ideological factors played a role, its outcome ultimately depended on the technical-instrumental capacity to muster and deploy human and natural resources in the most destructive way possible. Clearly, such a war could only advance rather than overthrow the modern world.

But did Heidegger believe that Germany could have fought any other way? Did Heidegger think that the Germans should not have fought at all? Did Heidegger think that Germany should have produced fewer bombs and more editions of Heraclitus and Hölderlin? Clearly not. From a Heideggerian point of view, National Socialism was a disappointment only because it did not amount to the radical new beginning Heidegger had hoped for. But given that the battle ultimately took place on the technological plane, the Germans clearly had to take a gun to a gunfight.

In the reflections on the war from around September 1941, from which passage no. 2 is taken, Heidegger seems to accept that there is at least a kind of conditional or provisional  legitimacy of viewing the war in realistic terms, on the plane of clashing versions of nihilism.[1] And Heidegger is clearly on Germany’s side. It might be futile to fight against bad metaphysics with guns, but one can still win a war with them. And clearly, if Germany had developed the atomic bomb before the Allies, and used it, she could have won.

The Second World War is over. The interwar fascist movements—which I call the Old Right—were defeated. But the New Right is continuing the battle on the metapolitical plane: creating and propagating new ways of seeing the world and dwelling in it. We are still fighting for nationalism against globalization, for rootedness against cosmopolitanism, for identity against homogeneity, individualism, consumerism, and inauthenticity. We are still fighting for a world in which international capitalism has no place and international Jewry has no power.

But his brings us to a second question: Given Heidegger’s historical anti-humanism, can an individual or a movement do anything at all to produce historical change? Heidegger holds that movements to make and remake history are premised on a false understanding of how history works. Man cannot understand or control history. Thus we cannot engineer a new historical age. Of course, that does not stop people from trying. So isn’t it a danger that people who take Heidegger to heart will simply stop trying to fight, surrendering the world to be trashed by nihilists who have no such scruples?

But, properly understood, Heidegger’s historical anti-humanism does not lead to passivity and quietism.

First, for Heidegger, humanism is a false theory of man’s relationship to history. But historical change and human agency are real. Heidegger wishes to discard the false theory and replace it with a better one. He does not wish to abandon human agency and historical change as such, except insofar as they are influenced by a false self-understanding. Human agency may not be what the humanists say it is, but it still exists, thus it is still possible to fight for a better world.

Second, although Heidegger does believe that man cannot understand and control historical change, he also holds that the relationship of man and historical-cultural meaning is one of mutual dependence: man cannot exist without meaning, and meaning cannot exist without man. Individually and collectively, humanity might be unable to control history, but by the same token, we do sustain cultural and historical meaning. Thus we have some power in the relationship. As I put it in another essay:

The present dispensation may have claimed and shaped us, but it still needs us to sustain it. That means that each individual faces choices that sustain or undermine the present dispensation.

We sustain it whenever we participate in the global technological system, whenever we demand things that are faster, cheaper, easier, and more available. We undermine it whenever we prefer the local to the global, the beautiful over the useful, the earthy over the plastic, distinct peoples over monoculture and miscegenation, the acceptance of reality over the striving for power, the unique over the mass-produced, the ecosystem over the economic system, etc. . . . When enough of us live as if the new dispensation is already here, perhaps it will arrive.[2]

Third, there is a sense in which Heidegger’s anti-humanism is empowering to dissidents. On the humanist account, a dissenting idea is just the beginning of historical change. One must then create a movement and struggle for power just to get into the position to remake society according to one’s blueprint. In this fallen world, that is a daunting and depressing prospect indeed.

On the Heideggerian account, however, your dissenting idea is not just a quirk of an isolated brain but a sign that cultural change is already underway. The humanist thinks that he is a solitary genius who creates ideas separate from humanity and history and must impose his designs upon them. The Heideggerian knows that he is always-already immersed in collective historical meaning. So if he is thinking dissenting thoughts, others probably are as well, and more will follow, for they are all simply responding to changes in the Zeitgeist. For Heidegger, philosophers and poets are not the hidden legislators of mankind, but simply those most sensitive to coming changes. This is why Heidegger occasionally slips into the prophetic voice.

But if the change we desire is already on the way, does this mean that we can simply sit back and let history do our job for us? No, because some of us are not just called to dissent, we are called to fight. But we go forth into battle with the assurance that the change we fight for is already in some sense real, and it is coming to meet us.

Notes
Graduate School with Heidegger
Greg Johnson

3,506 words

HeideggerWritingSpanish translation here

The best decision I ever made was to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. I learned about the most important questions, I studied the most profound attempts to answer them, I acquired both the tools and the commitment to pursue the truth, and I became a better—that is, wiser—man in the process. 

No, it did not lead to an academic career. Indeed, all my hopes, schemes, and efforts in that direction just left me discouraged, drained, and embittered. I had the knowledge, skills, and commitment. But I was the wrong race and the wrong sex; I definitely had the wrong politics; and, frankly, I think I took it too seriously and wanted it too much, which does not go over well with people who treat philosophy as merely a technical game or an adjunct to Leftist politics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer told a joke that perfectly sums up my view of academia. On the 8th day, God rose from his rest and decided that Creation needed one more thing to perfect it, so he created the German professor. But then the devil ruined it by creating the colleague.

It is just as well. Knowing what I know now, writing academic journal articles (which get read by maybe 5 or 10 people) seems like fiddling while Rome burns.

Today, I am a teacher without colleagues, I can write whatever I please, my words are read by thousands, and instead of being confined to expensive books and obscure journals, my writings are available free to everyone.

Academia, moreover, has only gotten worse since I got my doctorate. Thus, unless you belong to a politically correct protected group that will guarantee you employment for what you are rather than what you know, I cannot recommend graduate school in philosophy, no matter how much you hunger for wisdom. And that goes for the rest of the humanities as well. The current reign of political correctness will make you miserable throughout your studies and unemployable once they are complete. And you won’t learn that much anyway, because your professors will do more to close off than open up the tradition to you. Moreover, there is very little chance you will find kindred spirits or even good company among your fellow graduate students.

Beyond that, graduate school is costly. Even with a full scholarship and stipend, it will be hard not to go into debt. And even if you don’t leave graduate school with enormous debts, you will still have spent 6 to 10 years getting a Ph.D. while other people your age are starting families and accruing assets. And any undergraduate loans you have will still be there.

Fortunately, it is no longer necessary to go to graduate school to get an excellent Ph.D.-level education in philosophy. For the price of a couple of shelves of books, you can attend the lectures of one of the greatest philosophers and most talented teachers of the 20th century, namely Martin Heidegger. And instead of a troop of tattooed, perforated, sexually confused, and politically correct graduate students, your classmates will be such eminent 20th-century thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean Beaufret.

The Complete Edition (Gesamtausgabe) of Heidegger’s works contains 52 projected volumes of manuscripts, transcripts, and notes of Heidegger’s lecture courses and seminars, spanning 54 years, from 1919 to 1973. By my count, these volumes contain materials from 53 lecture courses and more than 40 seminars. A significant percentage of these volumes have already been translated into English, and it is probable that virtually all of them will be translated, given enough time.

Although the texts Heidegger prepared for publication are notoriously crabbed and obscure, his lecture courses are lucid and engaging. Heidegger was a legendary teacher, renowned both for the insightfulness and originality of what he said and the spell-bindingly charismatic way he said it. His most eminent students have recorded their impressions. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes:

It is impossible to exaggerate the drama of Heidegger’s appearance in Marburg. Not that he was out for sensation. His appearance in the lecture hall certainly had something of a guaranteed effectiveness to it, but the unique thing about his person and his teaching lay in the fact that he identified himself fully with his work and radiated from that work. Because of him the lecture format became something totally new. It was no longer the “lesson presentation” of a professor who put his essential energy into research and publication.

The “great book” monologues lost their priority of place because of Heidegger. What he provided was the full investment of his energy, and what brilliant energy it was. It was the energy of a revolutionary thinker who himself visibly shrank from the boldness of his increasingly radical questions and who was so filled with the passion of his thinking that he conveyed to his listeners a fascination that was not to be broken. . . . Who among those who then followed him can forget the breathtaking swirl of questions that he developed in the introductory hours of the semester for the sake of entangling himself in the second or third of these questions and then, in the final hours of the semester, rolling up the deep-dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed to leave us half stunned? (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985])

Hannah Arendt had a similar experience:

. . . Heidegger’s “fame” predates by about eight years the publication of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927; indeed it is open to question whether the unusual success of this book—not just the immediate impact it had inside and outside the academic world but also its extraordinarily lasting influence, with which few of the century’s publications can compare—would have been possible if it had not been preceded by the teacher’s reputation among the students, in whose opinion, at any rate, the book’s success merely confirmed what they had known for many years.

There was something strange about this early fame, stranger perhaps than the fame of Kafka in the early Twenties or of Braque and Picasso in the preceding decade, who were also unknown to what is commonly understood as the public and nevertheless exerted an extraordinary influence. For in Heidegger’s case there was nothing tangible on which his fame could have been based, nothing written, save for notes taken at his lectures which circulated among students everywhere. These lectures dealt with texts that were generally familiar; they contained no doctrine that could have been learned, reproduced, and handed on. There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king. (Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971)

Leo Strauss also found Heidegger immensely impressive:

One of the unknown young men in Husserl’s entourage was Heidegger. I attended his lecture course from time to time without understanding a word, but sensed that he dealt with something of the utmost importance to man as man. I understood something on one occasion: when he interpreted the beginning of the Metaphysics. I had never heard nor seen such a thing — such a thorough and intensive interpretation of a philosophic text. On my way home I visited Rosenzweig and said to him that compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child. (Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], p. 461)

What are the chances you will find such a teacher in any graduate program today? Fortunately, because of the publication of Heidegger’s lectures and seminars, now you don’t need to.

There are two ways to use Heidegger’s lectures and seminars: some courses stand on their own, while others are commentaries on texts that should be read in conjunction. As you will discover, Heidegger’s coverage of certain texts was sometimes highly selective. Sometimes he digressed from his outline or ran out of time. But these are no objections, because lesser teachers do the same things too. And if it didn’t hurt Gadamer, Arendt, and Strauss, it probably won’t hurt you.

As you will also discover, people strongly disagree with Heidegger’s philosophy and his readings of other thinkers. But this is no objection either, because the same can be said of every lesser teacher as well.

One drawback of reading lecture courses is that you can’t ask Heidegger questions. But trust me, if you were actually there, you probably would have been too intimidated to say anything anyway. Gadamer tells the story of one of Edmund Husserl’s lectures, in which he spoke for an hour, took one question, spent another hour answering it, then dismissed the class. As Husserl left the lecture hall, he turned to Heidegger, who has his assistant at the time, and remarked on what an exciting discussion they’d had that day (Philosophical Apprenticeships, 36). In truth, Heidegger was probably no better. And we should all be grateful, because you wouldn’t want to be reading transcripts of graduate student questions anyway. (The most frustrating feature of the seminar notes is that the students’ views — and confusions — often intrude.)

Another disadvantage of merely reading lecture courses is that one cannot discuss them with one’s fellow students — although one can, of course, read what Gadamer, Arendt, Strauss, Löwith, and others had to say about Heidegger.

Both of these problems can somewhat be ameliorated by the internet. You can discuss Heidegger’s lectures and seminars with people around the globe, including credentialed Heidegger scholars, perhaps the very editors and translators of the volumes you are reading.

To that end, I have secured the domain name Heidegger.us. Although I do not have the time to run another website, I would be glad to work with responsible parties who are willing to create a web forum with sub-forums devoted to all of Heidegger’s lecture courses and seminars. Although one cannot ask Heidegger questions, one might be able to get recognized Heidegger scholars to pinch hit for him if the community becomes large and vibrant enough.

The rise of podcasting also provides a promising medium. It would be an interesting experiment for a talented speaker to perform and record audio versions of Heidegger’s lectures.

Heidegger cannot provide a complete graduate education alone, although his expertise is far wider than most professors. But no graduate program consists merely of coursework. The core of a graduate curriculum is a comprehensive reading list, on which students are examined. I recommend that you adopt a reading list from a Ph.D. program that puts a strong emphasis on the history of philosophy.

One’s coursework can never cover everything on such a reading list, so a significant portion of graduate study is self-education anyway. But, then again, one of the principal goals of graduate school is to produce educators — or, people who are at least capable of educating others, since you don’t really know it unless you can pass it on — and your first student should always be yourself.

Most Ph.D. programs require 18 to 20 lecture courses or seminars. Heidegger, however, left us more than 90 to choose from. Heidegger did not teach every subject, but most graduate students never take coursework from a whole philosophy faculty that is broader than what Heidegger offers alone. And if you really work through even half of Heidegger’s lecture courses and seminars, you will be vastly better-educated than many newly-minted Ph.D.s.

But what if you are not ready for graduate-level study in philosophy? The answer is simple. Before you go to graduate school with Heidegger, I suggest you go to undergraduate school with Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. One could get an excellent undergraduate-level education in philosophy by working through Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, ethics, logic, and philosophical theology; Hegel’s lectures on The History of Philosophy, The Philosophy of World History, The Philosophy of Religion, and Aesthetics; and Friedrich Nietzsche’s lectures on early Greek philosophy (The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks). Like Heidegger, Kant and Hegel were terrible writers but engaging and accessible lecturers.

I also recommend supplementing one’s graduate coursework with Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit and Leo Strauss’s lectures covering Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Vico, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the central questions of political philosophy.

The Western intellectual tradition is too precious to be left in the hands of an ideologically corrupt and hostile educational system. This is particularly true of philosophy. Much of academia is simply a museum full of dead and taxidermied cultural curios. They are worthy products of human creativity, precious parts of our heritage that should be preserved rather than distorted and destroyed by ideologues and obscurantists. But they are of interest to few and of vital importance to none.

Philosophy, however, is of vital importance to everyone who wishes to lead a good life, for philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and wisdom is the ability to make right use of all things. Fortune deals some of us good hands, others bad ones. Wisdom is what allows us to play our cards well, so we lead the best lives possible. Thus everyone needs philosophy, which means that everyone needs philosophy teachers, which means that we need to find non-academic paths to mastering philosophy and passing it on.

Graduate school with Heidegger — combining a good comprehensive reading list, Heidegger’s lectures and seminars, and internet based discussion — is merely one possible alternative to academia as usual. I urge you to try it, or to propose something better.

There are few if any teachers alive today who can offer you a better graduate education than Heidegger. And thanks to the publication of his lecture courses and seminars, the “hidden king” of thought can now reign openly, as long as there are students who wish to hear him.
Making Sense of Heidegger
Greg Johnson

SheehanCover29,864 words

Spanish translation here

Thomas Sheehan
Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Making sense of Heidegger just got a whole lot easier.

When I was in graduate school, Aristotle and Heidegger were the two philosophers I studied most thorougly. Heidegger is a notoriously difficult writer, so naturally I sought out secondary literature for guidance.

Unfortunately, most Heidegger literature is not particularly helpful. The best guides to Heidegger I discovered were Otto Pöggeler, Graeme Nicholson, Michael Zimmerman, Richard Polt, and Thomas Sheehan — especially Sheehan.

Sheehan’s work was particularly important for me, because he pays special attention to Heidegger’s debts to Aristotle and Husserl, debts which cannot be overestimated but are usually given short shrift. I found Sheehan’s writing to be so penetrating, while at the same time clear and engaging, that I went on to read practically everything he wrote, for instance his books Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations and The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, which I never would have read for the subject matter alone.

Two of Sheehan’s articles were particularly fateful for my subsequent intellectual development, for he was the first person I ever read who mentioned Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist, although my ultimate reactions were certainly not what he was aiming for.

Once I was out of graduate school, however, I stopped following the secondary literature on Heidegger, even the really good stuff. By then, I could read Heidegger on my own, without training wheels. And since I was a mere “amateur” Heideggerian, I had no professional credentials to maintain.

Of course I continued to follow new releases of Heidegger’s own writings. And I admit to picking up a few pieces of secondary literature: Polt’s The Emergency of Being, Charles Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Julian Young’s Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, and, just for the fun of it, Adam Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut. But I was pretty much on the wagon until November, when I decided to review Alexander Dugin’s dreadful book on Heidegger.

Fortunately, when I bought Dugin, Amazon suggested I might also like Thomas Sheehan’s Making Sense of Heidegger. Never have I clicked a “buy” button more quickly. The book arrived as soon as it was published, actually on the day I finished reading Dugin. But still, it felt late, decades late. I wish Sheehan had published this book 25 years ago. 

A Paradigm Shift

Making Sense of Heidegger argues for a “paradigm shift” in Heidegger interpretation: from Being to meaning, and from meaning to the source of meaning. According to Sheehan, Heidegger’s ultimate concern is with the question: what makes meaning possible? What makes it possible for beings to be meaningfully present to a knower? (For Heidegger, a scientific account of how the sense organs and the brain operate is not an adequate answer to this question, because science presupposes the meaningful presence of eyeballs, gray matter, etc.)

Sheehan makes a crushingly convincing case for his thesis, marshaling quotes from the nearly 100 volumes of Heidegger’s published writings, analyzing Heidegger’s basic terminology, establishing equivalencies among his terms, establishing equivalencies between Heideggerese and more intelligible idioms, re-translating and paraphrasing difficult texts in light of his analysis, and laying it all out step-by-step, with summaries and repetitions along the way, so you never lose the thread of the argument.

As you will see from some of the quotes below, Sheehan’s prose can be dense, bristling with hyphenated phrases, neologisms and unfamiliar terms, and words and phrases in German, Latin, and untransliterated ancient Greek. It is a lot more forbidding and thorny than it needs to be, which artificially limits the audience and impact of Sheehan’s argument to professional scholars and educated, dedicated amateurs. One wishes that Sheehan’s editors had forced him through one more draft with an eye to making this book intelligible to bright undergraduate students, which would have been possible for a writer of his proven skill. But still, the book is clear “in itself” and, unlike most literature on Heidegger, actually worth the effort. Heidegger is yet to find his Alan Watts, but whoever he may be will have to read this book.

Sheehan’s book has 10 chapters in three parts plus an Introduction and a Conclusion, occupying 294 pages altogether, plus three short appendices, a long and detailed bibliography of Heidegger’s writings in German and English translations, a briefer bibliography of other works cited, and two indexes: one of German, English, and Latin terms, the other of ancient Greek terms.

Sheehan’s Thesis

Sheehan states his basic thesis in his Foreword and Introduction (chapter 1) entitled “Getting to the Topic.”

Heidegger is famously interested in “Being” (Sein). Yet Sheehan argues that Heidegger’s concept of Being has been systematically misunderstood by most Heidegger scholars. In the philosophical tradition, talk of Being refers to objective, mind-independent reality, indeed “ultimate” reality — such as God, or atoms in void, or an underlying mental or material “stuff” — that gives rise to the beings we perceive around us.

For Heidegger, however, “Being” refers to the meaningful presence of beings to a knower. Heidegger makes this understanding quite explicit in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” where he glosses “the Being of beings” as “the presence of that which is present.”[1] Present to whom? Heidegger calls the one to whom beings show up Dasein. (In ordinary German, “Dasein” means existence. Heidegger treats it as a compound of Da [there] and Sein [Being], hence “the place of Being,” i.e., the one to whom beings are present.)

Heidegger does not question the existence of mind-independent objects, although he was certainly skeptical of accounts of “ultimate” mind-independent realities. But for Heidegger, Being is ultimately involved with the human knower. Indeed, it always has been. One of the most remarkable features of Heidegger’s interpretations of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle are his arguments that even their accounts of Being are implicitly cast in relation to the human knower.

For Heidegger, then, Being = the meaningful presence of beings to man. Thus ontology (the branch of metaphysics that deals with Being) is equivalent to phenomenology, which studies the disclosure of beings to man.

But this is just the beginning of Sheehan’s paradigm shift, for Heidegger’s ultimate concern is not Being (understood phenomenologically) but something beyond Being. In Being and Time, Heidegger calls this the “sense” (Sinn) of Being (hence the title Making Sense of Heidegger). Heidegger has many other names for this something “beyond” Being: the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Dasein, the truth (Wahrheit) of Being, the essence (Wesen) of Being, Being itself or Being as such (das Sein selbst), the manifestness (Offenbarkeit) of Being, the clearing (Lichtung) of Being, the event of appropriation (Ereignis), etc.

For Sheehan, all of these names point to the same topic: the source of meaningful presence, that which opens up the “space” in which beings are meaningfully present to a knower. “The single issue that drove Heidegger’s work was not being-as-meaningful-presence but rather the source or origin of such meaningful presence” (p. xv).

In Sheehan’s terms, this source is the “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) or “thrown openness” (der geworfener Entwurf) of Dasein, to use the language of Being and Time. Or it is the “clearing” (Lichtung) or “appropriated clearing” (die ereignete Lichtung) of the later Heidegger. But both vocabularies refer to the same thing: the a priori (always-already-operative) conditions that make possible meaningful presence to a knower. “The always-already-operative thrown-open clearing is the ‘thing itself’ of all Heidegger’s work” (p. 21). So I do not wear out the hyphen key on my computer, I am just going to boil this all down to one word: the clearing.

Before we go any further, I need to define the clearing (Lichtung) and another key term of Heideggerese: appropriation (Ereignis). 

The Clearing

In ordinary German, Lichtung means “clearing,” like a clearing in the forest. The verb lichten means to clear land. Lichtung is related to Licht (light), because a clearing allows light to reach the forest floor and illuminate whatever enters the clearing. (“Light from above” is the literal meaning of “epiphany.” The clearing allows light from above.) Heidegger uses the metaphor of the clearing to refer to the conditions allow beings to be meaningfully present to a knower. The clearing is the “space” in which beings become present.
clearing-lighting

We can see and hear physical objects in physical space. We can see and hear them, because there is a space between us which our senses can traverse. Physically, light and sound come to us, but from the first person point of view, our eyes and ears reach out for experience.

Just as we see and hear things in physical space, Heidegger believes that things have meaning in a “space” as well. Because Heidegger is talking about meaning, not seeing, this use of clearing exploits another sense of lichten: to weigh anchor, to lighten a load, to free up. In this sense, Lichtung is a free and open space: the space in which beings can be meaningfully encountered.

Each object has meaning within a larger network or “world” of meanings supplied by language, culture, and tradition. Worlds of meaning are collective. In hermeneutics, such contexts of meaning are called “horizons,” for just as the horizon is the boundary of the visible world, horizons are the context in which things have meaning. But what opens up these horizons, these worlds of meaning?

In Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of man as Dasein, the place (da) of meaning (Sein), and man is opened up as the space of meaning by “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit), the temporal structure of our consciousness of meaning. This is the sense in which for Heidegger “time” is the “horizon” of “Being” (meaning). In his later writings, summarized in the 1962 lecture “Time and Being,” Heidegger offers new terms. Instead of Being, he speaks of (meaningful) presence (Anwesenheit). Instead of time as the horizon of Being, he speaks simply of the clearing in which beings become meaningfully present.

For Heidegger, the clearing is intrinsically hidden. As Sheehan puts it, quoting Heidegger at the end:

As the ultimate presupposition, the clearing must always be presupposed in any attempt to know it. It always lies “behind” us, so to speak, and it will always remain behind us (i.e., unknowable) even when we turn around to take a look at it. Consequently, we cannot go “beyond” or “behind” it without contradicting ourselves. We cannot (without moving in a vicious circle) seek the presupposition of this ultimate presupposition of all our seeking. “There is nothing else to which appropriation could be led back or in terms of which it could be explained.” (p. 227)

Heidegger’s term for the intrinsic hiddenness of the clearing is Seinsvergessenheit (forgottenness of Being), although what is forgotten is not Being but the clearing, and it has not been forgotten so much as it has been hidden and overlooked throughout the history of Western philosophy. 

Appropriation

For Heidegger, Ereignis refers to the intimate and reciprocal relationship of man and meaning: meaning cannot exist without man, and man cannot exist without meaning.

In ordinary German, Ereignis means “event.” However, from its first appearance as a technical term in Heidegger’s lectures in 1919, it means more than an event. Contrary to Sheehan, who insists Ereignis does not mean an event at all, Heidegger introduces the term in the context of talking about processes of consciousness and “lived experience” (Erlebnis, which he hyphenates as Er-lebnis to intensify the sense of process). For Heidegger, Ereignis is the name of a more intimate connection between knower and known than Er-lebnis. To emphasize this intimacy, this mutual belonging between knower and known, Heidegger introduces a hyphen (Er-eignis), turning it — against all etymology — into a compound term meaning “to make one’s own,” to take possession. Heidegger later approved the French appropriement (appropriation, as in taking possession) as a translation of Ereignis. For Heidegger, the appropriation of man and meaning is mutual and reciprocal: we belong to one another.

The sense in which Ereignis also means “event” has to do with what Heidegger calls Seinsgeschichte, which is his account of the emergence of different worlds of meaning (such as the modern world, which is defined by the presupposition that all beings are transparent to consciousness and available for manipulation). Heidegger claims, in his late essay “Time and Being,” that these ages simply happen, one after another, and since these ages set the outward boundaries of intelligibility, we cannot get behind their succession to understand their why and wherefore. Meaning happens. Worlds of meaning happen. We can make sense of things within these worlds of meaning. But we cannot make sense of meaning itself. What gives meaning is hidden behind its gift.

These collective worlds of meaning are created and sustained by man, but they are not created by human consciousness. (There is more to man than consciousness. Even within the mind, consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.) For Heidegger, language, culture, and traditions create human consciousness; human consciousness does not create language, culture, and tradition. Human consciousness and creativity take place only within a space opened by language, culture, and tradition.

Heidegger does not deny that Shakespeare wrote plays, Handel wrote oratorios, and Klee painted pictures. But he would deny that their creations are entirely individual and entirely products of the conscious mind. If they were, they would be contrived and probably unintelligible. Human creativity is situated in existing worlds of meaning and traditions of practice, and it carries these forward. Humans are not disembodied consciousnesses who can create ex nihilo.

Thus when it comes to explaining deep historical transformations, Heidegger does not think that philosophers, poets, or other “hidden legislators” hatch ideas and plans and propagate them to the rest of the culture. Rather, he claims that such individuals are merely the first ones to become conscious of and articulate stirrings in the Zeitgeist.

This would seem obscurantist, were it not for the fact that it does capture our experience of being shaped and enthralled by collective worlds of meaning before we even attain self-consciousness. It would seem disempowering, if it did not imply that dissenting ideas, too, are not merely the subjective dreams of marginal individuals but rather our awareness of historical forces far greater than ourselves. Perhaps dissent occurs to us only when change is already underway. 

Part One: Aristotelian Beginnings

In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger recommends that his students spend ten or fifteen years studying Aristotle before they pick up Nietzsche. The same advice could apply to Heidegger himself. Thus Part One of Sheehan’s book is called Aristotelian Beginnings, encompassing chapter 2, “Being in Aristotle,” and chapter 3, “Heidegger Beyond Aristotle.” These chapters focus on Aristotle, but they also pay sufficient attention to Heidegger’s readings of Plato and the pre-Socratics to constitute a good introduction to Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient philosophy.

The chapter on “Being in Aristotle” deals with Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle as a proto-phenomenological thinker whose account of Being implicitly defines Being in relationship to the human knower: “. . . ousia [Being] is the intelligible appearance or meaningful presence (aletheia [truth] and parousia [presence]) of things in logos, and thus that ousia is the openness or availability of things to human beings” (p. 25). When Heidegger read Aristotle in light of Husserl’s account of “categorial intuition” in the Sixth Logical Investigation, Heidegger was able to focus on the phenomenon of intelligible presence (as opposed to mere sense experience), which then led him to his own distinct question: what is the source of intelligible presence? This is the topic of chapter 3.

These chapters are a tour de force. They brought me back to my graduate seminars in Aristotle and rekindled my first feelings of astonishment at Aristotle’s genius. Although this section is quite thorough and illuminating, at 76 pages, it becomes a bit of a slog. Sheehan himself suggests that some readers might be tempted to skip to the second section, on Being and Time, and read the Aristotle chapters later. I followed his advice, and I am glad I did. I think that he should have followed his own advice and made this the third and final section of the book.

Yes, one understands Being and Time better with a background in Aristotle, but that does not mean that we need to read about Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle first. All of us read Being and Time first anyway. And we all had questions that were later clarified by understanding Heidegger’s debts to Aristotle, Husserl, etc. Sheehan’s order of exposition could have followed that path of discovery, and his book would have much more accessible for it. 

A New Level of Inquiry?

At the beginning of chapter 3, Sheehan argues that there are three levels to Heidegger’s topic. According to Sheehan, Heidegger’s ultimate topic is: (1) not Being (meaning), (2) not the meaning of Being (the meaning of meaning = the clearing), but (3) the meaning of the meaning of Being (the meaning of the meaning of meaning = the clearing of the clearing). In Sheehan’s words:

Heidegger’s question turns out to be

1. not “Whence beings?” — the answer to that is: being; 2. nor even “Whence being at all?” — the answer to that is: the open clearing; 3. but rather “Whence and how is there ‘the open’?” or equally “Whence and how is there the clearing?” (p. 69)

This is news to me.

Sheehan offers the following quote from Heidegger in support of this:

When the being-question is understood and posed in this way, one must have already gone beyond being itself. Being and another now come into language. This “other” must then be that wherein being has its emergence and its openness (clearing — disclosing) — in fact, wherein openness itself has its own emergence. (p. 69)

For Heidegger, the clearing is the ultimate condition of meaning. It is what makes everything else intelligible. And that means that it itself is not intelligible, meaning that we cannot place it in a wider context, i.e., a clearing of its own. If we could put it in a clearing of its own, then it would not, by that very fact, be the ultimate condition of meaning. This leaves us with two options.

    First, one can accept that the clearing is unintelligible. Heidegger arrived at this conviction in 1930 in his lecture “On the Essence of Truth,” in which he argued that the ultimate context of meaning cannot be made meaningful. As Sheehan puts it, “the clearing is intrinsically ‘hidden’: always present-and-operative but unknowable in its why and wherefore” (p. 116).
    Second, one can claim that the clearing makes itself intelligible. And that is what Heidegger seems to be doing in the passage above: the “‘other’ . . . wherein being has its emergence and its openness (clearing — disclosing)” is our clearing. Then he claims that the clearing is “in fact, wherein openness itself [the clearing] has its own emergence.”

Of course, if the clearing is entirely unintelligible, then everything Heidegger says about it is nonsense. It frequently seems that way, but it is not. This implies that something like the second position is true: we “encounter” the clearing “in” the clearing, and although we cannot “get behind” it to make “ultimate” sense of it, we can still say a lot about it. For one thing, we can talk about the functions it performs. For another thing, we can understand why we cannot understand it.

Sheehan interprets the quote from Heidegger as follows:

We note here again the two elements of Heidegger’s own question (1) the move “beyond being” to its “whence” — namely, the clearing; and (2) the move “beyond the clearing” to its “whence” — namely Ereignis as the appropriation of ex-sistence. (p. 69)

I do not, however, think that Ereignis is “beyond the clearing” so much as it is a description from “within” the clearing of how the clearing operates, namely the clearing simply happens, and we can’t get behind it to understand why it happens or what is causing it. Ereignis is another term for the basic inscrutability of the clearing. 

Part Two: The Early Heidegger

Part Two is divided into three chapters: chapter 4, “Phenomenology and the Formulation of the Question”; chapter 5, “Ex-sistence as Openness”; and chapter 6, “Becoming Our Openness.”

The first chapter is a very accessible and engaging account of Heidegger’s basic phenomenological approach to ontology: We are immersed in a world of meaning. The world is always-already meaningful, before we even try to make sense of it. For Heidegger, this world of meaning, this meaningful presence of beings to us (Dasein), is Being. Heidegger’s overriding question is: what makes meaningful presence (Being) possible? What opens man up, allowing the meaningful presence of beings?

The second chapter deals with this question in terms of Being and Time, which aimed “to show that and how meaningful presence — ‘being in general’ — is made possible by and occurs only within human openedness as the clearing” (p. 134). 

Man’s Openedness

Heidegger distinguishes between individual instances of openedness, which he calls Dasein, and the structure of human openedness itself, which he calls Existenz and Da-sein (although he is not always consistent about using the hyphen). Sheehan renders the latter two terms as “ex-sistence,” from the Latin ex + sistere, to be forced to stand ahead or beyond. This forced aspect is captured by “openedness” as opposed to mere “openness.”

On pp. 136-37, Sheehan points out an interesting quote from a posthumously published collection of 1941-42 notes,[2] where Heidegger claims that the “da” in Dasein should not be translated as here, there, here/there, etc. (Which of course would include my preferred rendition “place.”) Instead, Heidegger claims that the “da” is not locative at all, but refers to the “openedness” of human ex-sistence. Of course, I do not think that anyone who translated the “da” as here, there, etc. thinks it refers to a literal place, any more than the clearing is a literal clearing.

Sheehan gives a series of very interesting quotes from Heidegger on the “da”:

[The “da”] should designate the openedness where things can be present for human beings, and human beings for themselves.

. . . being human, as such, is distinguished by the fact that to be, in its own unique way, is to be this openedness.

The human being occurs in such a way that he or she is the “Da,” that is, the clearing of being. (p. 137)

The Da refers to that clearing in which things stand as a whole, in such a way that, in this Da, the being of open things shows itself and at the same time withdraws. To be this Da is a determination of man.

[Ex-sistence] is itself the clearing.

The clearing: the Da — is itself ex-sistence.

The point is to experience Da-sein in the sense that human being itself is the Da, that is, the openedness of being, in that a person undertakes to preserve it, and in preserving it, to unfold it (See Sein und Zeit, p. 132f. [= 170f.]).

Ex-sistence must be understood as being-the-clearing. Da is specifically the word for the open expanse.

Ex-sistence [das Da-sein] is the way in which the open, the clearing, occurs, within which being as cleared is opened up to human understanding. 

To be — the clearing — to be cast into the clearing as the open = to-be-the-Da. (p. 138)

Human ex-sistence means that man is not defined by what he is at present, what is simply there, what is simply actual, what shows up to an outside observer as a being occupying a delimited space at the present time. When we view human ex-sistence from the inside, we realize that to be human means to be forced outside the present, the actual, and into the future, the possible. This compulsion is what Heidegger means by “thrownness.”

This thrownness outside the present and the actual is what makes man “open” to meaning. Humans ex-sist by projecting ahead of themselves a range of possibilities, a range of concrete potential ways of being. These possibilities are given to us by our past. They are also finite: we do not have all possibilities, and the possibilities that we do have cannot be simultaneously realized.

It is only in light of these possibilities that we “return” to what is present and actual and render it meaningfully present. For instance, if look across the prairie and see an oncoming storm, I am “ahead of myself” in appraising what might happen, and in light of those possibilities, what is present shows up to me in terms of its serviceability for shelter or escape.

This temporal structure in which the past creates possibilities in terms of which we render things (past and present) as meaningfully present is the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Da-sein, which for Heidegger is the “horizon” of Being (meaning), i.e., that which opens man up, that which creates the space in which meaningful presence is possible. This temporal structure of being thrown into future possibilities and returning to render things meaningfully present is also the structure of logos. In Being and Time, Heidegger equates “the temporality [Zeitlichkeit] of discourse [Rede = logos]” with that of “Dasein [ex-sistence] as such” (quoted on p. 150).

Heidegger describes human ex-sistence by saying that “possibility is higher than actuality” and that human existence is a matter of “excess.” Both of these claims point to the fact that human existence exceeds what is given and actual (to the outside observer). We exceed the actual and present into a realm of future possibilities.

On page 136, Sheehan makes a couple of dubious inferences from these claims.

First, that the priority of possibility over actuality is incompatible with a classical ethics of self-actualization, as if Plato and Aristotle did not recognize that each man has many possibilities besides the actualization of his nature in accordance with virtue; as if Aristotle believed, for example, that one can only hit the mean rather than stray into excess or defect.

Second, he claims that the idea of human ex-sistence being in “excess” of human actuality overturns the Greek idea of moderation (nothing in excess), as if the very notion of temperance did not imply the possibility of excess and defect in the pursuit of pleasure, and as if the very existence of human potentiality refutes the pursuit of virtue when in fact it is what makes it possible and necessary. Heidegger’s “excess” is the space in which virtue, as well as the vices of excess and defect, become possible. 

Becoming Who We Are

The third chapter of Part Two, “Becoming Our Openness,” does extraordinary work in illuminating some of Being and Time’s most alluring yet elusive and obscure ideas, namely its existential and practical (but, as well shall see, not moral) dimension, which is encapsulated in the injunctions of the 17th-century German mystic Angelus Silesius, “Human being, become what you essentially are!” and of Pindar, “Become what you already are!”

Now, as a follower of the Platonic or Aristotelian idea of an ethics of self-actualization, I would interpret what we “already” or “essentially” are as our daimon, our ideal self, which exists in potency and whose actualization is the well-being (eudaimonia) we all seek.

For Heidegger, what we already are is not a single determinate potentiality, but a whole range of possibilities — possibilities that could include self-actualization but also self-betrayal, virtue as well as vice, good as well as evil. Thus the choice Heidegger is discussing is not the moral choice between good and evil, but the existential choice between embracing or rejecting our freedom. And for Heidegger, our freedom means a whole range of possibilities, not just the good ones.

But in what sense are we even faced with such a choice? Long before we are mature enough to reflect upon who we really are, people have been telling us who we are. These external spectators (the crowd) look upon us as actual, present beings and ascribe traits to us: jock, bimbo, nerd, preacher’s kid, etc. Because we don’t know better, we actually come to internalize these traits. But what are the chances that these descriptions actually fit, that they really capture who we are?

But before we can become who we really are — and as an Aristotelian, I think that is meaningful and possible — we need to embrace our freedom, meaning our whole range of possibilities, including the inevitability of our death and the possibility that we might die at any time, which gives a certain urgency to our mission.

“They” tell us that who we are. But when we look within, we discover that we are thrown ahead into a range of future possibilities. We are not what we are (right now), i.e., actuality. Rather, we are what we are not (yet), i.e., possibility. We are free either to accept the fact of our freedom, which is what Heidegger calls authenticity, or to flee it into inauthenticity, which basically boils down to shrugging off the burden of freedom and letting others determine our identity for us.

But what makes our freedom, such as it is, possible? Heidegger’s answer would have to be: the things that determine us, which for him come down to our heritage: our language, culture, traditions, historical epoch, and the like. I would add our genetic heritage as well — our race, our sex, our individual traits — although that is a topic for another time. All of these give us certain possibilities, while making other things impossible. For example, being a prince or a peasant make certain things possible, other things impossible

And since it is in light of these possibilities that what is given becomes meaningfully present, our openedness as a whole is historically conditioned and particularized.

And if authenticity means embracing rather than fleeing our freedom, that is equivalent to embracing rather than fleeing from the heritage that determines us as well as frees us.

Heidegger talks about authentic Dasein “becoming its fate,” but he might as well have said amor fati, for one can come to love our limits when one appreciates that they are the conditions of our freedom.

Heidegger’s own discussion of our relationship to our past is primarily in terms of making our heritage meaningfully present in light of future possibilities, and retrieving/carrying forward certain elements. However, it strikes me that a deeper relationship with our past is implied by authenticity: not picking and choosing elements of our heritage that show up to us within our openedness, but embracing heritage as a condition of openedness — which, as an ultimate condition of intelligibility, remains obscure to us.

The affirmation of a form of historical identity so deeply constitutive of our self and self-consciousness that it can never be objectified, much less criticized or discarded, would place Heidegger in the tradition of anti-rationalist conservatism of David Hume and Edmund Burke. Sheehan — whose own Left-wing, progressivist agenda becomes more apparent as the book goes on — emphasizes the transcendental rather than the historical elements of Heidegger’s account of openedness, and freedom rather than the boundaries that make it possible. 

Part Three: The Later Heidegger

Part Three is divided into three chapters: chapter 7, “Transition: From Being and Time to the Hidden Clearing”; chapter 8, “Appropriation and the Turn”; and chapter 9, “The History of Being.” The first two chapters can be discussed as a unit, because they deal with the same topic: Heidegger’s concept of the “turn” (Kehre) which in its primary sense is identical to his concept of Ereignis.

One of Sheehan’s most important accomplishments is his clarification of the multiple sense of Heidegger’s “turn.” The “turn” is usually thought of as a shift in Heidegger’s thinking, either within Being and Time or between Being and Time and Heidegger’s later thought. Sheehan argues, however, that the fundamental sense of the turn is identical to Ereignis, i.e., it refers to the mutual dependence of man and meaning: meaning cannot exist without man, and man cannot exist without meaning.

The unity of man and meaning can, however, be viewed under different aspects: from the side of man or from the side of meaning. Being and Time was originally planned to have two divisions, each divided into three parts. In 1927, Heidegger published only parts 1 and 2 of division one. Part 3 was not published, and the manuscript was either lost or destroyed. Division two was never begun.

In Being and Time, parts 1 and 2, Heidegger approaches the man/meaning unity from the man side, using the phenomenological method to describe the temporal structure of ex-sistence which opens the space of meaningful presence. In the unpublished part 3, Heidegger was to approach the same unity from the side of meaning. Instead of showing how man opens up the space of meaning, he was to show how the space of meaning claims man. As Heidegger put it, the first parts of Being and Time deal with “human being in relation to the clearing” while part 3 deals with “the clearing and its openness in relation to human being” (quoted in Sheehan, p. 244).

This shift in perspective is often misinterpreted as the turn in Heidegger’s thought. But it is intimately related to the primary sense of the turn: the unity of man/meaning, which allows us to look at it from either side.

Heidegger never published Being and Time, division one, part 3. Sheehan does an important service by gathering all the testimonies about the lost text to reconstruct its outline and contents, to speculate about its teaching, and to explain why it was never published.

In the 1930s, Heidegger’s approach to his abiding topic — what makes meaningful presence possible — shifted from transcendental phenomenology to what he called Seinsgeschichte, which explores the different dispensations of Being/worlds of meaning in Western (and now world) history. This shift is also misinterpreted as the turn in Heidegger’s thought.

However, this turn, like the other, is made possible by the primary sense of the turn. Indeed, the turn within Being and Time and the turn from Being and Time to the late Heidegger are attempts to execute the same shift of perspective: from a transcendental/human-side approach to a meaning-sided approach to the man/meaning unity. Why did the first turn fail, and why did the second take a historical form?

The first turn failed because every discourse requires a context. A phenomenology of human ex-sistence provided the context for the first parts of Being and Time, but when Heidegger set aside the transcendental phenomenological method and the human-centered standpoint, he needed another context, another standpoint, from which to explore the man/meaning relationship from the side of meaning. But he lacked this context at the time he was writing Being and Time.

In 1930, Heidegger came to the realization, discussed above, that if the clearing is the ultimate condition of meaning, it itself remains unintelligible. But, although one cannot get beyond the clearing, perhaps one can say something about it from inside. But how? The outline of Being and Time, division two — which was to be a dismantling of Western ontology, moving from Kant to Descartes to Aristotle — certainly provided a clue.

For Heidegger, meaning embodied in language, culture, and tradition constitutes human consciousness, not vice-versa. But to say more about how history shapes human consciousness, one would have to compare different historical epochs. Heidegger is not, however, interested in ordinary intellectual and cultural history, but in the succession of fundamental interpretive slants — the a priori, i.e., hidden and always-already-operative assumptions about the nature of man and world — that cut through and unify entire cultures and ages. This brings us to Sheehan’s next chapter, “The History of Being,” to which I will attend in due course.

Inflating the Human

Heidegger’s belief that socially embodied meaning constructs individual consciousness — i.e., that consciousness is not “behind” history but history is “behind” consciousness — is the substance of his “anti-humanism.” “Anti-humanism” is something of a misnomer, though, since history and culture are just as “human” as individual consciousness. Heidegger is really opposed to the subject-centered transcendental method and the idea that the individual creates his own world of meaning, as opposed to receiving and passing on collective meanings to which he might contribute some small improvements.[3] The transcendental method also goes hand-in-hand with a dismissal of transcendent metaphysics. Sheehan writes:

The paradox of Being and Time as published is that the finitude of ex-sistence guarantees the infinitude of ex-sistence’s reach. Our structural engagement with meaning is radically open-ended and in principle without closure. Yes, there is an intrinsic limit to that stretch: ex-sistence can encounter the meaning only of material things, for as embodied and thrown, ex-sistence is “submitted” exclusively to sensible things rather than being open to trans-sensible (“meta-physical”) reality. But that notwithstanding, the search for the meanings of spatio-temporal things meets no barrier inscribed “thus far and no farther,” because we can always ask “Why no farther? What am I being excluded from?” and thus transcend the barrier, if only interrogatively. And secondly, yes, ex-sistence is thoroughly mortal and will certainly die, and its death will mark the definitive end to its search for meaning. But although it will surely end, perhaps even tragically, ex-sistence will nonetheless go out with its glory intact, insofar as it will die as an in-principle unbounded capacity for the meaning of everything it can sensibly encounter. (p. 192)

First, it strikes me as vacuous to say that we can make sense of everything by stipulating that one of those “senses” includes awareness that we have not made sense of something. Second, if this notion of the Faustian infinitude of ex-sistence’s reach is an accurate description of Being and Time, parts 1 and 2, it strikes me as precisely the kind of human-centric teaching that was to be modified by the turns in Heidegger’s thinking within Being and Time, and from Being and Time to the later Heidegger.

Indeed, as Sheehan continues to set forth this Faustian interpretation of Heidegger, it looks suspiciously like what Heidegger came to call the “essence” of technology, i.e., the a priori assumption that all beings are in principle knowable and disposable by man:

Structurally and in principle we are able to know everything about everything, even though we never will. Such ever-unrealized omniscience comes with our very ex-sistence. (Husserl: “God is the ‘infinitely distant man.’”) This open-ended possibility is a “bad infinity,” which in this context denotes the asymptosis of endless progress in knowledge and control. Heidegger’s philosophical critique of (as contrasted with his personal opinions about) the modern age of science and technology cannot, on principle be leveled against our ability to endlessly understand the meaning of things and even to bring them under our control, because this possibility is given with human nature, as Aristotle intimated and as Heidegger accepts in principle. What troubles Heidegger, rather, is the generalized overlooking of one’s mortal thrown-openness in today’s Western, and increasingly global, world. The mystery of human being consists in both the endless comprehensibility of whatever we can meet and the incomprehensibility of why everything is comprehensible. Everything is knowable — except the reason why everything is knowable. (p. 193)

The claim that we are able to “know everything about everything” strikes me as every bit as dogmatic as any claim of transcendent metaphysics. (Even if we knew everything about a particular subject, could we ever know that we knew everything?) And since when is “knowing” everything equivalent to “understanding the meaning” of everything, i.e., interpreting everything? Surely this kind of talk — which every academic knows can go on forever — is not necessarily equivalent to endless progress in knowledge.

Sheehan makes it quite clear that he thinks this Faustian viewpoint is not just “early Heidegger” but “late Heidegger” too. He also gives the strong impression that he thinks it is true:

. . . once Heidegger has established this argument about man’s a priori projectedness, he can and must affirm the obvious: that within the limits of our thrownness, we ourselves do indeed decide the meanings of things on our own initiative, whether practically or theoretically. . . . Yes, we are structurally thrown-open; but nonetheless it is we ourselves, as existentiel actors, who decide the current whatness and howness of things, their jeweiliges Sein. What is more, there is in principle no limit to what we can know about the knowable or do with the doable. There should be no shrinking back from the human will, no looking askance at the scientific and technological achievements of existentiel “subjects” in the modern world . . . Underlying the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy is the fact that we cannot encounter anything outside the parameters that define us as human — as a thrown-open, socially and historically embodied logos. But granted that much, we also cannot not make sense of anything we meet, whether in practice or in theory. . . . Heideggerians seem a bit anxious about the practical (not to mention technological) achievements of the existentiel subject — including socio-political projects for “changing the world.” However, as to zoon logon to echon [living beings possessing reason] we possess the power not only to make sense of things cognitively but also to remake the world as we see fit, for better or worse. But we possess that power only because we are possessed by the existential ability to make sense and change the world . . . (pp. 208–9)

This sense of being “possessed” by the ability to know and do anything captures the enthralling quality of every dispensation of Being, including the a priori assumption of technological civilization, which Heidegger calls Gestell or Ge-Stell. (Gestell is another untranslatable bit of Heideggerese which means the a priori assumption that for man everything is transparent and available. This is the “essence” of technology, meaning the prevailing mode of disclosing beings that makes modern technological civilization possible.)

But whereas Sheehan thinks we should be celebrating this worldview, Heidegger sought to awaken us from it, to break the spell. How? By showing us that the idea that everything can be understood and controlled is itself an Ereignis, a dispensation of meaning that we cannot understand or control. And if we can’t know why everything is knowable, isn’t that a refutation of the idea that everything is knowable?

Sheehan himself says: “Everything is knowable — except the reason why everything is knowable,” although he does not draw the conclusion Heidegger would like. If we cannot know why we think we can know everything, then we cannot know everything. Simply put, Heidegger is offering a counter-example to the idea we can know and control everything, and a single counter-example is sufficient to refute a universal generalization.

Heidegger’s counter-example is not, moreover, just a single instance that could be partitioned off as an exception to the rule, for what dispenses modernity is ultimately the whole of Western — and now global — civilization, understood as a realm of embodied meaning. We stand at the center of a circle — or better, a sphere — of meanings shading off into mysteries in all directions, and each time we bring a new mystery into the light, we understand that it is a gift from that which remains concealed.

Deflating the Trans-Human

Sheehan’s tendency to inflate the human (the subject-centered) is matched with a tendency to deflate the trans-human, historical dimensions of Heidegger’s thought. This is particularly evident in his discussion of Ereignis. In keeping with his program of breaking us out of both the egocentrism of the phenomenological method and the vaulting ambitions of the Gestell, Heidegger speaks of Ereignis and the clearing almost as if they have wills of their own. Sheehan, however, dismisses this as merely “reifying” language that:

. . . presents Ereignis or Sein selbst or Seyn as if it were a quasi-something that “catches sight” of human being, calls it into its presence, and makes it its own, as in such unfortunate sentences as . . . . “Er-eignen originally means: to bring something into view, that is, to catch sight of it, to call it into view, to ap-propriate it.” The “something” that is allegedly “brought into view” is ex-sistence; and this hypostatizing language makes it seem that something separate from ex-sistence “sees” ex-sistence and makes it its own property. . . . The danger that constantly lurks in Heidegger’s rich and suggestive lexicon is that his technical terms will take on a life of their own as words and then get substituted for what they are trying to indicate, the way some scholarship treats the clearing (or das Sein selbst) “as if it were something present ‘over against’ us as an object.” Thus Heidegger’s key term Ereignis — especially when English scholarship leaves it in the German — risks becoming a reified thing in its own right, a supra-human Cosmic Something that enters into relations with ex-sistence, dominates it, and sends Sein to it while withholding itself in a preternatural realm of mystery. To avoid such traps and to appreciate what Heidegger means by Ereignis, we must always remember that the term bespeaks our thrown-openness as the groundless no-thing of being-in-the-world, which we can experience in dread or wonder. Above all we should apply Heidegger’s strict phenomenological rule to appropriation itself: “avoid any ways of characterizing it that do not arise out of the personal claims it makes on you.” (pp. 234–35)

But Heidegger’s language does not suggest a false opposition between human ex-sistence and the clearing (which are just two different ways of viewing the same thing). Instead, Heidegger is trying to articulate a real opposition between the individual ego and socially-embodied meaning. Heidegger is trying to communicate that meaning is not created by the individual ego, but instead the individual ego is created by socially-embodied meaning. When individuals reflect upon language, culture, and history, we experience them as things that existed before our consciousness emerged, as things that will continue to exist after our consciousness has ended, and as external forces that envelop and enthrall us. They do stand over against us as objects — and also behind us as conditions of our subjectivity. Ereignis is not a “supra-human Cosmic Something” but a supra-individual Cultural-Linguistic-Historical Something. This something does enter into a relation with each individual Dasein. It does dominate us. It does send worlds of meaning to us while withholding itself in a realm of mystery, a mystery that is not “preternatural” but historical and thus “preterindividual.” This is not, in short, the “reification” of ideas but simply good, honest phenomenology: characterizing the experience of appropriation/the clearing as it actually occurs to us.

There is no question that Heidegger’s writing is highly rhetorical, with a penchant for mystical, religious, and prophetic forms of expression. The desire to get through the rhetoric to what Heidegger is really saying is completely understandable and commendable, and Sheehan has done more than any scholar I know to get to Heidegger’s real message. But once one arrives at this understanding, one cannot merely give Heidegger’s rhetoric the brush-off, like an annoyingly chatty cab driver once he has gotten you to your destination. One has to turn back to the rhetoric and try to understand why Heidegger adopted it in the first place.

One also needs to understand the contents of Heidegger’s teachings to separate the purely psychological dimensions of this thought. Heidegger was clearly an odd duck. He writes repeatedly about aberrant mental states in the 1920s and ‘30s, and in 1945–’46 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Heidegger’s biographers can provide many more psychological details. But before a competent psychiatrist tries to make sense of Heidegger’s psyche, he should read Sheehan to make sense of his thought.

The History of Being

Sheehan’s chapter 9, “The History of Being” and Conclusion, chapter 10, “Critical Reflections,” can be discussed as a unit, because they deal with the same essential subject matter. (Chapter 10 focuses on Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” which discusses the Gestell, which is the present dispensation in the history of Being.) As usual, Sheehan marshals a host of useful quotations, etymologies, and distinctions.

These chapters deal with Heidegger at his most anti-humanist, anti-modernist, and ultra-conservative. And, as you might already suspect, Sheehan is quite unsympathetic. At one point. Sheehan summarizes what he thinks is of enduring value in Heidegger:

. . . a phenomenological rereading of traditional being as the meaningfulness of things; a persuasive explanation of how we make sense of things, both in praxis and in apophantic discourse; the grounding of all sense-making in the a priori structure of human being as a mortal dynamism of aheadness-and-return; and, based on all of that, a strong philosophical exhortation, in the tradition of Greek philosophical protreptic, to become what we already are and to live our lives accordingly. (p. 267)

This is basically Being and Time, plus a couple of lectures, “What is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Truth,” with a cut-off around the end of 1930.

Heidegger interprets the trajectory of Western — and now global — history as one of decline from classical Greek and Roman civilization to the present day. Heidegger traces this decline in terms of the history of metaphysics, but contra Sheehan, Heidegger does not believe that philosophers are the “hidden legislators” of mankind, i.e., that philosophical ideas are the foundation of culture and the driving force of history. Rather, in keeping with his anti-humanism, Heidegger holds that historical change arises from inscrutable sources, and philosophers, as well as poets like Sophocles and Hölderlin, merely receive and articulate the deepest currents of the Zeitgeist.

As articulated by the pre-Socratics and the Attic tragedians, Heidegger thinks the deepest a priori assumptions of the classical view of the world are that man is a mortal being inhabiting a splendid world bounded by mystery and necessity, boundaries that man cannot transgress in thought or deed without hubris that courts nemesis. The deepest a priori assumptions of modernity are that all boundaries of thought and action, including human mortality itself, are ultimately temporary, i.e., that everything is in principle knowable and controllable by man.

Heidegger’s distinction between the classical and the modern corresponds roughly to Spengler’s distinction between classical and Faustian civilizations, although Heidegger places both within a single historical narrative of decline, whereas Spengler regards them as separate civilizational organisms each of which has undergone its own phase of decline, with the decline of the West still occurring today.

Sheehan points out that Heidegger names only two dispensations in the history of Being, both of them modern: the age of the world picture (the a priori assumptions of early modernity) and the Gestell (the a priori assumptions of present-day global technological civilization).

Sheehan dismisses Heidegger’s claim that the decline of the West is caused by man’s deepening oblivion of the clearing. But setting aside the question of causation, it is actually an accurate description of the decline, for oblivion of the clearing is equivalent to oblivion of human finitude, of the dependence of the individual on collective embodied meaning, and of the ineluctable mystery of the ultimate source of meaning — and all of these are traits of the Gestell. Forgetting the clearing is forgetting one’s place, metaphysically speaking. To the Greeks, this is hubris. Technology, surely, can exist without hubris. But could modernity?

Sheehan presents a wonderful quilt quotation from Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics illustrating Heidegger’s conservative lament at the civilizational consequences of modernity:

. . . the hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the rootless organization of the average man . . . spiritual decline . . . the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods . . . the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the preeminence of the mediocre . . . the disempowering of spirit, its dissolution, diminution, suppression, and misinterpretation . . . all things sinking to the same depths, to a flat surface resembling a dark mirror that no longer reflects anything and gives nothing back . . . the boundless etcetera of the indifferent, the ever-the-same . . . the onslaught of what aggressively destroys all rank, every world-creating impulse of the spirit . . . the regulation and mastery of the material relations of production . . . the instrumentalization and misinterpretation of spirit. (p. 282) 

In this same lecture course, Heidegger famously declared that the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” was its potential to reverse these tendencies, to preserve human rootedness, distinct identities, and traditional social structures from the deracinating and leveling forces of “global technology.” Sheehan suggests that Heidegger added this comment when he edited the lectures for publication in 1953, but if so, it is consistent with the rest of the lectures, as indicated by Sheehan’s own quilt quotation. (National Socialism falls outside the purview of Sheehan’s book, but he makes sure we know he’s against it.)

Sheehan is also dismissive of Heidegger’s postwar thoughts on the way out of the modern dispensation, particularly in his 1949 lecture “The Turn,” which is obscure even for Heidegger. The lecture also adds to the confusion about Heidegger’s concept of the turn by introducing a new sense of Kehre. This “turn” refers to the advent of the next dispensation of Being, in which mankind awakens “from oblivion of Being, to oblivion of Being.” Here Being refers to the clearing. Oblivion of Being refers to the intrinsic hiddenness of the clearing as well as to our lack of awareness of the intrinsic hiddenness of the clearing. Our awakening, therefore, refers to becoming aware of the intrinsic hiddenness of the clearing, which is equivalent to awakening to the fact that we cannot understand and control the dispensations of Being, which should overthrow the hubristic assumption that we can understand and control everything.

Sheehan again laments the “perverse rhetoric of hypostatization and reification that Heidegger employs, as if Being Itself, after centuries of ‘refusing Itself’ to humankind, suddenly chooses to turn and show Itself” (p. 265). But again, this is Heidegger’s description of how historical change presents itself to him. If the human will cannot control history, but history changes anyway, then history would seem to have a will of its own.

If we cannot control history, then what is the meaning of dissent? If ideas do not shape history, does that imply that dissenting ideas are merely subjective, private, and ineffectual? Not necessarily. Heidegger would have to hold that dissenting ideas are themselves dispensations of Being. If they are out of step with the present dispensation, perhaps they are the first glimmers of a new one. It is not surprising, therefore, that Heidegger occasionally adopts the tone of a prophet. If you find it annoying, just remember that it is far less pretentious than the idea that philosophers are the architects of history.

Heidegger is just one prophet of this new dispensation. It first stirred in 18th-century critics of the Enlightenment like Vico, Rousseau, and Herder. In the 19th century, it was taken up by such movements as Romanticism, Transcendentalism, utopian socialism, the pre-Raphaelites, and Arts and Crafts, as well as various Symbolists, Decadents, and dandies. In the 20th century, it stirred the prophets of deep ecology, agrarianism, and natural living like Aldo Leopold, Savitri Devi, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, and Carlo Petrini. It overlaps significantly with neo-paganism, Traditionalism, and Western seekers of Eastern wisdom, as well as with mystical and traditional forms of Christianity. It is also at work in the ongoing resistance to globalization, which, according to sociologists Charles Lindholm and José Pedro Zúquete, embraces the European New Right as well as movements of the Left.[4]

We should also remember that the man/meaning relationship is one of mutual dependency. Yes, collective meanings have the advantage in relation to any individual. But meaning depends upon man just as man depends upon meaning. The present dispensation may have claimed and shaped us, but it still needs us to sustain it. That means that each individual faces choices that sustain or undermine the present dispensation.

We sustain it whenever we participate in the global technological system, whenever we demand things that are faster, cheaper, easier, and more available. We undermine it whenever we prefer the local to the global, the beautiful over the useful, the earthy over the plastic, distinct peoples over monoculture and miscegenation, the acceptance of reality over the striving for power, the unique over the mass-produced, the ecosystem over the economic system, etc. Heidegger is just one face in a giant Sgt. Pepper’s collage of anti-modernists, along with generations of Wandervogel and hippies, historical preservationists and organic gardeners, Identitarians and Zapatistas, monkeywrenchers and tree-spikers, druids and swamis, down to flannel-clad hipsters tending bees and brewing beer in Brooklyn. When enough of us live as if the new dispensation is already here, perhaps it will arrive.

Sheehan complains that Heidegger’s account of the a priori assumptions of modernity is not based on fine-grained historical analysis. I guess it seems insufficiently inductive to him. (Yes, the oil industry seems in the grip of world-dominating hubris. But what about the coal industry?) But this seems to miss the point. We will not encounter the a priori assumptions of modernity in front of us, for they are already behind us, within us, structuring how we see the world and ourselves. Since we are all more or less modern men, we can test the truth of Heidegger’s claims simply through self-reflection.

Sheehan dates himself a bit by complaining that the 96 volumes of Heidegger’s Complete Edition published to date make no mention of Kapitalismus — as if Heidegger’s analysis of modernity needed recourse to Marxist buzzwords, as if he had not transcended the opposition of capitalism and socialism and revealed their underlying metaphysical identity.

* * *

Although I am nonplussed by Sheehan’s criticisms of Heidegger, I have some of my own. I am skeptical of his post-Kantian transcendental quarantine of metaphysics. I am skeptical of his biological race-denial and would like to explore his rationale. I am not so sure that the clearing is intrinsically hidden at all, or hidden in a non-trivial way.

But my main objection to Heidegger is his terrible writing. I long ago lost count of the Heideggerian words that actually don’t mean what they seem to mean. Heidegger translator David Farrell Krell recounts, “Occasionally, I would bring [Heidegger] a text of his that simply would not reveal his meaning; he would read it over several times, grimace, shake his head slightly, and say, ‘Das ist aber schlecht!’ (That is really bad!).”[5] I wish I could get back every hour I wasted reading Derrida and Foucault. I don’t feel the same way about Heidegger. But especially with certain works, I feel like those South African miners who have to sift through mountains of rubble for a pocketful of gems. When it comes to making sense of Heidegger, the philosopher was his own worst enemy, which makes Thomas Sheehan’s scholarly career a work of friendship. Making Sense of Heidegger is an indispensable book on an unavoidable thinker.[6]

Notes
Heidegger on Nietzsche, Metaphysics, & Nihilism
Greg Johnson

bythesea3,292 words

Spanish translation here

Heidegger’s central philosophical topic has a number of names: the sense (Sinn) or meaning of Being, the truth (Wahrheit) of Being, the clearing (Lichtung) of Being, the “It” that “gives” Being, and the “Ereignis” (“event” or “appropriation”) of Being, referring to the mutual belonging of man and Being.[1] All of these words refer to that-which-gives and that-which-takes-away different “epochs” in the history of Being, which are comprehensive, pervasive, and fundamental ways of interpreting the world and our place in it.

Heidegger’s topic is shrouded in mystery, for that-which-gives each epoch in the history of Being is hidden by the very epoch that it makes possible. This mystery is built right into the dual meanings of Heidegger’s names for his topic.

The word “Lichtung” refers both to Being (that which lights up beings) and also to the clearing that makes it possible for the light to illuminate beings—and the light attracts our attention to itself while leaving the clearing that makes it possible in darkness. The “it” that gives Being is hidden behind Being, its gift. Ereignis is the mutual belonging of man and Being, in which man in enthralled by the world opened up by the event and thus oblivious to the event itself. Heidegger even hears the mystery of Being in the word “epoch,” which refers both to the historical spans of particular dominant ways of interpreting the world, and, when heard in the Greek as “epoche,” refers to the withholding of that which grants the epochs, the giver that hides behind its gift.

Now we are in the position to begin to think through the connection that Heidegger draws between metaphysics and nihilism. Heidegger’s thesis is that nihilism is the consummation of Western metaphysics. To this end, I wish to comment on one of my favorite texts by Heidegger, the two lectures entitled “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power.” These lectures beautifully epitomize Heidegger’s vast two-volume work on Nietzsche, and they gather together and display the unity of themes discussed by Heidegger over a period of more than 50 years.

Heidegger’s thesis is that “Nietzsche’s philosophy is the consummation of Western metaphysics.”[1] For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s philosophy represents the epitome of modern nihilism, the ultimate manifestation of the nihilistic impulse built into Western metaphysics from the very beginning. Heidegger’s thesis that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician of the West is a stunning thesis, a thesis very difficult to defend, for Nietzsche is widely regarded as the first post-metaphysical thinker, not the last and ultimate metaphysical thinker.

Traditional metaphysics is constructed around the dualisms of permanence and change and of appearance and reality. The permanent is identified with Being, which is said to be a reality that lies beyond the world of appearances, the world of change, the realm of becoming. Nietzsche seems to overcome these dualisms by collapsing the distinctions between permanence and change, appearance and reality, Being and becoming. Therefore, Nietzsche seems to go beyond metaphysics.

How, then, does Heidegger establish Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West? Another way of putting this question is: How does Heidegger establish that Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome metaphysics is a failure? What does Heidegger think that a genuine overcoming of metaphysics requires?

Nietzsche’s Metaphysics

NietzscheSeatedWhen Heidegger uses the word “metaphysics” pejoratively, he refers to the metaphysics of presence: “These positions take the Being of beings as having been determined in the sense of permanence of presence” (p. 162). Another word for the metaphysics of presence in the Heidegger lexicon is “Platonism.” Platonism is a view that cannot necessarily be identified with Plato’s own views. Platonism, rather, is the pervasive interpretation of Plato’s views in the tradition. Platonism identifies Being with permanence as opposed to change, presence as opposed to absence, identity as opposed to difference.

The latter terms of these pairs—change, absence, difference—are identified with non-being. In the world around us, rest and motion, presence and absence, identity and difference are all mixed together.

Thus the Platonist concludes that this world is not the true world; it is not the realm of Being, but the realm of becoming, which is a mere blurred image or decayed manifestation of Being. Becoming is merely a veil of appearances which cloaks and hides that which is real, namely Being.

The Platonic realm of Being is identified as the place of forms or essences. The world of becoming is the world in which we find individual men, individual dogs, individual chairs, individual tables. All of these individuals come into being, change, and pass out of existence. The world of Being contains not individual men, but the essence of man, or “manhood.” It does not contain individual dogs, but the essence of dog, “doghood.”

Forms or essences, unlike individuals, do not come into being; they do not change; and they do not pass away. While particulars that become exist in time, forms of essences exist outside of time in eternity. Because particulars in time are infected with change, absence and difference, we cannot have certain knowledge of them; at best, we can have only tentative opinions about things in the world around us. We can have certain knowledge only of the forms or essences that make up the realm of Being.

Heidegger holds that the metaphysics of presence—the interpretation of Being as presence—and also the Platonic distinction between the world of Being and the world of becoming is retained in Nietzsche’s allegedly post-metaphysical doctrines of the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. What is the Will to Power? And what is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same?

Nietzsche called the ultimate constituent of the world Will to Power. This is a highly anthropomorphized name for something that is neither a will (for there is no agent behind it that wills); nor is it “to power” (for it is not directed toward the goal of power, or any other goal). Will to Power is Nietzsche’s name for chaos, which he conceived of as a virtual infinity of points of force charging and discharging entirely without pattern or purpose. Heidegger defines the “Will to Power” as “the essence of power itself. It consists in power’s overpowering, that is, its self-enhancement to the highest possible degree” (p. 163).

The Will to Power is the constant exercise of power as an end in itself.

The Will to Power makes possible the constant exercise of power by positing limits for itself and then exceeding them; Will to Power first freezes itself into particular forms and then overcomes and dissolves them.

The Will to Power is Nietzsche’s account of what the world is.

The Eternal Recurrence of the Same is a concept derived from the ancient Epicureans and Stoics. Both the Stoics and Epicureans believed that the cosmos is finite. The cosmos consists of matter and void, and there is only so much matter and so much void. Matter, however, is not fully inert. Matter has both inert and animate dimensions. Matter has the tendency to remain at rest or in motion, which the Epicureans represented by matter falling through the void. But matter also has a non-inert aspect that causes it to swerve from its fall or to move from rest to motion by its own power. The Epicureans represented this aspect of matter as the famous “clinamen” or “swerve” of the atoms. The Stoics represented this as divine logos, which following Heraclitus, they represented as fire. Matter, in short, is in some sense vital and animate; it is alive and ensouled. Matter’s vital principle allows order to form out of chaos. Matter’s inert dimension allows order to dissolve back into chaos.

Given a finite amount of matter and a finite void, given that matter has both a tendency to give rise to order and dissolve order, and given that time is infinite, the Epicureans and Stoics argued that the random play of chaos within a finite cosmos over an infinite amount of time not only gives rise to order, but gives rise to the same order an infinite number of times. Everything that is happening now has already happened an infinite number of times before and will happen an infinite number of times in the future. The Same events will Recur Eternally, hence the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. As Woody Allen once put it, “Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Does that mean I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again?” And the answer is: “Yes.” Not only will he have to sit through it again an infinite number of times, he already has sat through it an infinite number of times. It’s deja-vu all over again.

Nietzsche takes this argument over completely. The Will to Power corresponds precisely to the two aspects of matter discussed by the Epicureans and Stoics.

The animate aspect of matter that gives rise to form and organization corresponds to the Will to Power’s tendency to posit order.

The inert aspect of matter that causes form and organization to dissolve back into chaos corresponds to the Will to Power’s tendency to overpower and dissolve the very order that it posits.

Nietzsche holds that the Will to Power is finite and that time is infinite. Given the possibility of endlessly rearranging a finite Will to Power over an infinite amount of time, the same kinds of order will inevitably repeat themselves, and they will repeat themselves an infinite number of times: Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Just as Will to Power is Nietzsche’s account of what the world is, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same is Nietzsche’s account of how the world is.

Nietzsche claims to have abolished metaphysics because he abolishes the dualism between appearance and reality, Being and becoming, presence and absence, identity and difference, etc. All of these pairs of opposites are found blended together in the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. There is no realm of pure presence, pristine identity, total rest, and separate essences, lying behind the world that appears to us.

Heidegger’s critique of this claim is twofold. First, he argues that the basic elements of Platonism are still at work in Nietzsche. Second, he argues that Nietzsche really does not understand what it would take to overcome metaphysics.

How is Nietzsche a Metaphysician?

heidegger-cropHeidegger argues that Nietzsche’s doctrines of Eternal Recurrence and Will to Power are metaphysical in two ways. First, the accounts of Eternal Recurrence and Will to Power still buy into the metaphysics of presence. As Heidegger puts it:

“Recurrence” thinks the permanentizing of what becomes, thinks it to the point where the becoming of what becomes is secured in the duration of its becoming. The “eternal” links the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is not the unceasing otherness of an endlessly changing manifold. What becomes is the same itself, and that means the one and selfsame (the identical) that in each case is within the difference of the other. . . . Nietzsche’s thought thinks the constant permanentizing of the becoming of whatever becomes into the only kind of presence there is–the self-recapitulation of the identical. (pp. 164–65)

Elsewhere, Heidegger writes:

Will to Power may now be conceived of as the permanentizing of surpassment, that is of becoming; hence as a transformed determination of the guiding metaphysical projection. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same unfurls and displays its essence, so to speak, as the most constant permanentizing of the becoming of what is constant. (p. 167)

Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, in short, think Being in terms of presence too, by making becoming itself permanent, by making becoming recapitulate the identical, by making the motion of becoming circular, thus bringing a kind of eternity into time itself.

The second way in which Heidegger argues that Nietzsche is a metaphysician is somewhat more elusive and difficult. Heidegger writes on page 168:

From the outset, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same and Will to Power are grasped as fundamental determinations of beings as such and as a whole—Will to Power as the peculiar coinage of “what-being” . . . and Eternal Recurrence of the Same as the coinage of “that-being.”

Heidegger claims that this distinction is “co-extensive” with the basic distinction that defines and sustains metaphysics. “What-being” or “whatness” refers to the identity of beings. “That-being” or “thatness” refers to the existence of beings. To talk about the identity of a thing is to talk about what it is in contrast to the identity of different things, the things that it is not. When we talk about the existence of something, we are talking about the fact that it is, as opposed to the idea of its non-existence.

Now, in Platonism, the identity of a particular being is endowed by its form. A particular dog has its identity as a dog because it is related to the Form of dog, or “dogness.” A particular man has his identity as a man because he is related somehow to the essence of man, or “manhood.” A particular dog has his existence as a concrete individual dog because a bit of the material world has been informed by the essence of dog. So, for Platonism, the identity or whatness of a particular being is explained by its essence and its individual existence or thatness is explained by its materiality.

Heidegger holds that this Platonic distinction is present in the distinction between the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Will to Power names the whatness or identity of all beings. Therefore, it corresponds to the Platonic form. Eternal Recurrence names the thatness or existence of beings. Therefore, it corresponds to the instantiation of the Platonic Form in a bit of the spatio-temporal world. Will to Power is the principle of identity. Eternal Recurrence is the principle of existence. This dualism, Heidegger claims, is not overcome by Nietzsche, so Nietzsche does not overcome metaphysics.

Indeed, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche represents the culmination of metaphysics. To understand this, we must understand how, precisely, Nietzsche fails to overcome metaphysics. And to understand this, we need to know what Heidegger thinks a genuine overcoming of metaphysics would require.

What Constitutes a True Overcoming of Metaphysics?

Heidegger thinks that a genuine overcoming of metaphysics requires that we think his distinctive topic, the distinctive matter of his thinking: that-which-gives and that-which-takes-away the different epochs of the history of Being. It requires that we think the Truth of being, the Meaning of Being, the Clearing of Being, the Event of Being, etc. Heidegger mentions his distinctive topic in a number of places in these lectures:

It first appears on page 164 (second paragraph):

What this unleashing of power to its essence is [i.e., that which grants the interpretation of Being as Will to Power], Nietzsche is unable to think. Nor can any metaphysics think it, inasmuch as metaphysics cannot put the matter [die Sache, the topic] into question.

It also appears on page 165 (second paragraph):

This “selfsame” [Being interpreted as Eternal Recurrence] is separated as by an abyss from the singularity of the unrepeatable enjoining of all that coheres. Out of that enjoining alone does the difference commence.

Here Heidegger contrasts Nietzsche’s metaphysics of history (which encloses becoming in the circle of Being through the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same) with his own view of the history of Being as a sequence of unrepeatable contingent singularities in which new epochs in the history of Being displace one another.

One can ask, however, if Heidegger himself does not ultimately subscribe to a kind of cyclical history, since he seems to believe that (1) the pre-Socratic Greek sense of Being as the dynamic interplay of presence and absence is correct, even though it overlooked the conditions of its own emergence, and (2) that it is possible to return to this correct interpretation of Being, either (a) reflectively, with an appreciation of its importance in the light of the subsequent tradition, or (b) naively, though the liquidation of the present civilization and a return to barbarism, which may be the meaning of Heidegger’s famous claim that “only a god can save us now,” meaning a return to naive belief.

Heidegger’s topic shows up again in the very next paragraph:

Thought concerning truth, in the sense of the essence of aletheia, whose essential advent sustains Being and allows it to be sheltered in its belonging to the commencement, is more remote than ever in this last projection of beingness.

Here aletheia refers to that which both grants a new epoch in the history of Being and shelters its advent in mystery.

There is also an extensive discussion of the topic from the bottom of page 166 throughout the entirety of page 167.

Heidegger claims that Nietzsche does not overcome metaphysics because the overcoming of metaphysics requires that one think that which grants different epochs in the history of Being and Nietzsche does not think this topic. Heidegger adds, furthermore, that Nietzsche not only fails to overcome metaphysics, he actually make this overcoming more difficult because he fosters the illusion that metaphysics is already overcome, thereby enforcing our oblivion to that which grants metaphysics, thereby making us less likely to think this topic and thus to effect a genuine overcoming of metaphysics. As Heidegger writes on 166:

Inadequate interrogation of the meaning of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Return, when viewed in terms of the history of metaphysics, shunts aside the most intrinsic need that is exhibited in the history of Western thought [i.e., the need to think that which grants metaphysics]. It thus confirms, by assisting those machinations that are oblivious to Being, the utter abandonment of Being.

It is at this point that we can understand why Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche is not only a metaphysician, but the culmination of metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks the Being of beings, but does not think the meaning of Being, the clearing of Being, etc. Nietzsche is the culmination of metaphysics because Nietzsche’s metaphysics not only fails to think that which grants Being, but actually makes this altogether impossible because it fosters the illusion that metaphysics has been finally overcome.

A further reason for regarding Nietzsche as the culmination of metaphysics can be appreciated by examining Heidegger’s definition of nihilism. Heidegger defines the modern technological age, the age of nihilism as “the age of consummate meaninglessness” (p. 174). Consummate meaninglessness is equivalent to the interpretation of Being in terms of man’s own subjective needs: Being as certainty; Being as intelligibility; Being as availability and deployability for human purposes. The world is meaningless because wherever we look, we only encounter projections of our own overweening subjectivity and will to power.

The essence of modernity is the idea that everything can be understood and controlled. This view of the world is made possible by our failure to think about what grants it, what makes it possible, the source of this epoch in the history of Being. Heidegger claims that:

    We cannot understand why we think that we can understand everything.
    We cannot control the emergence of ideas, for example, the idea that we can control everything.

Trying to understand the origins of nihilism forces us to recognize that there is a mystery that cannot be explained or controlled. And this encounter with mystery is alone sufficient to break the spell that everything can be understood and controlled. This is the real overcoming of metaphysics and of its culmination in the nihilism of technological modernity.
The Jünger–Heidegger Correspondence
Alain de Benoist

1,358 words

Translated by Greg Johnson

Ukrainian translation here

When two great men—and what great men, in fact the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and one of its most important writers!—correspond with one another, what do they discuss? Not always great things: they also exchange pleasantries and speak of their publications, travels, and trivial preoccupations. But sometimes the tone rises. And sometimes it becomes sublime, as in 1956 when Jünger consulted Heidegger about the exact meaning of a maxim of Rivarol and received a veritable course in philosophy, stupefying in depth, on the concepts of time and movement.

The correspondence of Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger began in 1949 regarding plans for a journal called Pallas to be edited by the essayist Armin Mohler (who was Jünger’s private secretary from 1949 to 1953). This project came to nothing—but subsequently Jünger, along with the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, created another journal called Antaios. Their correspondence continued until Heidegger’s death in May 1976. Published in Germany in 2008, it is now available in French, beautifully translated, edited, and annotated by Julien Hervier.[1] It offers a rare kind of pleasure.

It was the preceding year, at the end of 1948, that Jünger first met Heidegger in his hut in the forest at Todtnauberg. Later he wrote: “From the beginning, there was something—not only something beyond word and thought, but beyond the man himself” (Rivarol and other Essays).

One is then in the immediate post-war period, a sad and painful time when the two men were treated as if they were radioactive. Jünger, on June 25th, 1949, wrote this superb sentence: “In the course of these last years, it has become quite clear to me that silence is the strongest of weapons, provided that it is dissimulated behind something that deserves to be hushed up.”

But what is most striking about these letters is the difference in tone between the philosopher and the writer. Both men genuinely admired one another, but intellectually Heidegger completely dominated his interlocutor. Jünger does not offer the slightest criticism of Heidegger, but the reverse is not entirely the case.

Martin Heidegger, 1889–1976

Indeed, Jünger—unlike his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger—did not have a genuinely philosophical mind. He lets on that Heidegger’s works, about which he knew little, were sometimes above his head. In November 1967, he noted: “Your texts are difficult and hardly translatable: thus I am always astonished by the influence as they exert on the intelligent French.” Everything indicates that Jünger had been more impressed by Heidegger’s intellectual charisma than by his thought properly speaking. He was also more inclined to pay visits, more eager to maintain relations with his contemporary. Heidegger was more reluctant to move, more estranged from “social” life—more concerned about the essential. As Lao-Tzu said about the sage: “He does not act, but he accomplishes.”

Heidegger, moreover, said explicitly that in his eyes Jünger was not a “thinker” (Denker). He was a man who theorized based on his experience, on what he saw and lived (beginning with his experiences in the trenches of the First World War), but not from what can only be thought. Jünger, in other words, had ideas more than he had thought. He was an “Erkenner,” a man who “recognizes,” more concerned to open up “new optics” than to arrive at “new truths.” This is why Heidegger writes:

He [Jünger] does not have the slightest idea of what occurs in the “objectification” of the world and man. Ultimately his knowledge remains psychological and moral. . . . He always remains within metaphysics. . . .  Because Jünger does not see what is uniquely “thinkable,” he regards the fulfillment of metaphysics as the essence of the will to power as the dawn of a new era, whereas it constitutes only a prelude to the rapid decrepitude of all recent innovations, destined to founder in the ennui of a nothingness of insignificance that incubates this abandonment of Being that is proper to beings.

Difficult language? There’s more.

Heidegger, in any case, was interested in Jünger for a long time. In 1932, The Worker, the great theoretical book of the veteran of the front, held Heidegger’s attention like few other works. During the winter semester 1939–40 at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger even devoted a whole seminar to this book. The texts that he wrote on Jünger, collected together in a volume of almost 500 pages published in Germany in 2004 (volume 90 of his complete works, still in the course of publication by Vittorio Klostermann!), testify eloquently.

In Jünger, Heidegger admired someone who had understood the world based on the will to power and had clarified the role played by technology in this perspective.  The Figure of the Worker is indeed present in the world in the form of power. It is through the Figure of the Worker that Technology, as engine and instrument, brings about “total mobilization.” In a direct reference to The Worker Heidegger wrote: “Work . . . today rises to the metaphysical rank of this unconditional objectification of all things present, which deploys its being in the will to will” (Vorträge und Aufsätze).

Heidegger was an admiring reader of Jünger, but also a critical one. The dialogue the two men maintained, often indirectly, proves this unambiguously. The best way to appreciate what separates them is to read side by side the texts they dedicated to one another on their respective 60th birthdays: Jünger’s “Over the Line”  (Über die Linie), (1950) and Heidegger’s “Regarding ‘The Line’”  (Über « die Linie ») (1955). Both texts relate to the essence of modern technology and the light it throws on the concept of nihilism. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche constitutes the central axis of the dialogue between Heidegger and Jünger.

In his text of 1950, Jünger in effect takes Nietzsche’s thought as the starting point for a tentative evaluation of contemporary nihilism. He concludes with a kind of optimism that the worst passed. The modern world, he says, has passed the “zero point,” i.e., the watershed of nihilism, while Heidegger affirms, on the contrary, that this world is more than ever plunged into the “oblivion of Being” that is impossible to escape unless one abandons the language of metaphysics (“the zero line, where the fulfillment reaches the end, is ultimately the least visible of all”).

Without going too far into abstract details, a review is necessary here. In the two volumes collecting his lecture courses on Nietzsche (1936–46), Heidegger claims that although the author of Thus spoke Zarathustra closes the circle of Western metaphysics, he nevertheless remains locked inside it. The will to power, in his eyes, is only the “will to will,” i.e., exacerbated subjectivity (it is a “will to itself,” a will that depends on itself at the same time as it is posited as its own object). The modern epoch of decline is that of the completion of metaphysics in the form of the metaphysics of the will, of which Nietzsche is the last representative. For Nietzsche, ultimately, “power and will have the same meaning.” Heidegger invites Jünger to think beyond the Nietzschean metaphysics of the will to power, the modern metaphysics of subjectivity upon which he continues to depend.

Heidegger has nothing but the highest opinion of Nietzsche. And of Jünger. He only invites him to think further. Ernst Jünger, it should also be emphasized, is one of the very rare authors with whom Heidegger agreed, after 1945, to maintain a continued dialogue, which is assuredly not nothing.

For the 80th birthday of the author of In Storms of Steel, Heidegger sent this message to him: “Remain with the luminous spirit of decision that you have always demonstrated in the quite distinct way in which you speak.” The sort of remark that one imagines would be badly conveyed today by text message or email!
Heidegger:
An Introduction for Anti-Modernists, Part 1
Collin Cleary

Martin Heidegger

3,208 words

Part 1 of 4

1. What is Metaphysics?

The term “metaphysics” has been appropriated in recent years to function as a synonym for “new age” or “occult.” I still vividly remember the two older women in my college metaphysics course who kept asking questions about crystals and astral projection, and who grumbled outside class that the professor was not covering any “real-world metaphysics.”

As a branch of philosophy, metaphysics could be defined as the study of the fundamental nature of reality. It asks such questions as “what is real?” – and, as Heidegger will shortly tell us, “what is being?” Metaphysics asks the most fundamental questions in philosophy – and thus it asks the most fundamental questions possible for human beings.

What Heidegger teaches, however, is that metaphysics should be thought of less as a timeless, perennial area of human inquiry and more as a “project” that began with certain assumptions that were very much rooted in a particular time and place. The project of Western metaphysics then changed and developed and played out the consequences of those assumptions, until it reached a climax and, for all intents and purposes, came to an end. For Heidegger, what has driven the Western metaphysical project is the desire to give expression to what being is. Curiously, however, Western metaphysicians have not only seldom actually identified this as their aim, they have systematically obscured the question of being itself.

Metaphysics begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of whom speculated about a primal and eternal “stuff” from which all things came. Others, like the Pythagoreans, believed in objective ideas after which the material world was fashioned. Plato’s “theory of forms” developed out of such speculations. Aristotle took up that theory, revising it and arguing for the existence of a God that causes worldly change and transformation through the unrequited love all things feel for him.

Modern metaphysics makes mind and subjectivity central, and reality for modern metaphysicians becomes increasing “mind-like.” The paradigm case is Leibniz, who takes up Aristotle’s doctrine of substance (true being) and argues that the only true beings are minds and that everything else is an idea in those minds. Kant argued against the possibility of metaphysics itself (especially the kind represented by Leibniz). But there is an implicit metaphysics in Kant: “what truly is” is the thing-in-itself, which lies forever beyond our ken. The metaphysical tradition culminates in Hegel (1770–1831), who makes “what truly is” equivalent to the whole of reality considered as an organic system (the Absolute), which completes itself through human beings coming to consciousness of it. One can see in Hegel’s philosophy all previous metaphysical ideas dialectically integrated into a new metaphysical system – which is why Heidegger described Hegel as the climax of western metaphysics.

2. The Ontological Difference and Forgottenness of Being

Although the history of Western metaphysics exhibits rich variety, according to Heidegger all the great metaphysicians have “forgotten being,” because they have all confused being with a being; i.e., some particular thing that has being. In short, they have violated what Heidegger calls “the ontological difference.” Those first coming to Heidegger always find this extremely difficult to understand, but it is absolutely crucial for comprehending his thought.

For Heidegger, the central question of metaphysics is “what is being?” Things, like the keyboard in front of me are beings: things that have being, things that are. But metaphysics is concerned not with beings or things themselves, but with the being that beings have. What do we mean when we say that this keyboard is? We say that it “has being.” What does this mean exactly? It can’t mean that it’s physically present to me. I also say that ideas are, that memories are, that history is – but these are not physically present to me. The meaning of “being” is the greatest mystery there is – and it is extraordinarily difficult to talk about. Especially in English.

In English “being” does double duty and we are forced to say that the keyboard is a being, because it has being. Matters are a little less confusing in German, where the being that a being has (being-as-such) is das Sein, which is a noun constructed from the infinitive of the verb “to be” (sein). Beings, the things that have being, Heidegger calls das Seiende. This is actually a singular noun, and it is probably best translated “what is” or “that which is,” but this is understood to refer to beings, the things that are (or that, again, have being). In order to avoid completely confusing ourselves in English, many Heidegger commentators have adopted the convention of referring to Being, capitalizing the initial letter of the word that denotes being-as such, the Being that a being or beings (small b) have.

This is not hair-splitting on Heidegger’s part: it is an absolutely crucial and valid distinction. The keyboard, the lamp next to it, the chair I’m sitting in, and I myself are all beings. We are called that because we are said to have Being. But what is this mysterious Being that we all have? One thing is certain: it cannot be a being. If Being were a being it wouldn’t be Being: it would simply be yet another thing that has being. To draw an analogy, you could say that what I have in common with my neighbor is that we both possess the characteristic of manness. But what is that? I’m not certain, but I do know that manness can’t be a man. If it were, it would be something that has manness, not the quality of manness as such.

This distinction between Being and beings is “the ontological difference.” And it leads to some peculiar consequences. First of all, if we recognize that Being can’t be a being then that means that Being isn’t. A being is something that is; something that has Being. But if Being is not a being then we cannot say that Being is. And so Being is not. This seems exceedingly strange, because if Being is not, then how can Heidegger or anyone else talk about it? But the logic here is airtight: Being-as-such cannot be a being (again, a thing that has Being). As I will discuss in a moment, Heidegger points out that not only do we speak of Being, we deal with it all the time in a whole host of different ways. Therefore, the fact that we cannot treat it as a being does not mean that it cannot be talked about at all. We just have to find a new way to talk about it, which is what Heidegger tries to do (and this is the reason that reading him is so difficult).

All the philosophers prior to Heidegger failed in the task of thinking Being, because in one way or another they sidestepped the question “what is Being?” and talked instead about some being or other – usually a very special or exalted being, but a being (a thing) nonetheless. Whether philosophers have spoken of a primal matter, or eternal numbers, or the Form of the Good, or God, or the One, or mind, or the thing-in-itself, or the Absolute Ego, or the Absolute, or Will, or Will to Power, Western metaphysicians have spoken only of some special, exalted, or supreme thing that has Being. But they have forgotten Being itself, Heidegger says.

3. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics

These are difficult ideas, and those wishing to tackle them – and to see exactly how Heidegger proposes to speak about Being – can do no better than to read his Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik). And the remainder of this essay will be devoted to an exposition of this important and readable text, which was originally a lecture course given by Heidegger at Freiburg University in the Summer of 1935. It had special significance for him. In the preface to the seventh edition of his magnum opus Being and Time, Heidegger suggested that readers seeking an accessible account of the question of Being should consult Einführung in die Metaphysik. The lecture series was published that same year, 1953. In fact, it was the first of his lecture series that Heidegger chose to publish, clearly indicating that he regarded it as particularly important. It was also the very first book by Heidegger to be translated into English (by Ralph Manheim, in 1959; a more authoritative translation was produced by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, and published in 2000). Being and Time would not be translated until 1962.

Heidegger’s high estimation of Introduction to Metaphysics no doubt was due not just to the book’s profound elaboration of the question of Being, but also to the fact that it is one of Heidegger’s clearest and most accessible works. But it is also a work fraught with controversy. Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in May of 1933, less than four months after Hitler came to power. Introduction to Metaphysics is, in fact, the work by Heidegger most closely associated with his Nazism. It was in the pages of this book that, as we shall see, Heidegger referred to National Socialism’s “inner truth and greatness.”

At the beginning of Chapter One of Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger asks the question “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” And he tells us that this is the most fundamental metaphysical question that can be asked. It is with this question that we can perhaps find some way to encounter Being.

4. Being and Human Beings

Heidegger tells us that the question “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” is not one raised exclusively in philosophy seminars. It actually occurs to us in states of despair and depression, or boredom. In these states, we are being moved by an original, philosophical impulse. The question becomes something real and vital to us — it is not an “abstract” philosophical concern. But what exactly does Heidegger mean?

Consider depression. This is a psychological state in which we often feel a profound sense of meaninglessness. Things which normally seem significant to us or which give us pleasure suddenly seem pointless and empty. But it is not as if other, different things suddenly seem more meaningful. No, depression is a condition in which existence as such loses its meaning. The smallest, most innocuous object or event may fill us with a gnawing sense of dread (this is the state that Sartre – whose thought was heavily derivative of Heidegger’s – called “nausea”). And we may feel the sense that existence as a whole is absurd. It may occur to us to wonder why any of this should exist at all. In other words, in such a state we are asking “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” Those exact words may never go through our minds – but we feel this question none the less. Even simple boredom can occasion this feeling.

Now, what is really going on in these states is that we are preoccupied with Being. We are preoccupied with the Being that all of this around us has, and we are asking “Why?” And so we realize, Heidegger says, that there is a deeper question underlying “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” and that is: “How does it stand with Being?”[1] In German, wie steht es um das Sein? – which might be translated more simply as “What about Being?”

Our ability to confront Being in states like depression and boredom gives us an answer to any who might think at this point in our discussion that the “Being” that Heidegger is preoccupied with is merely an empty word. As human beings, we find ourselves from time to time preoccupied with Being – and we find it disturbing and uncanny. Oddly, however, Heidegger never refers to us as “human beings.” Instead he calls us Dasein, and this word is normally left untranslated in English editions of Heidegger’s work. Da means “there” and sein, as we already know, means “to be.” This term is found in ordinary German, where it can be a separable verb (e.g. ist jemand da? Is anybody there?), or a noun meaning “existence” (e.g., ein angenehmes Dasein, a pleasant existence). (Existenz is the term more often used, however.) One finds this term used by earlier philosophers; it’s a category in Hegel’s Logic, for instance.

Dasein has a special, technical meaning in Heidegger’s philosophy. We are the only creatures who are not absorbed by the moment, and by preoccupation with particular things. We also have the ability to stand outside the moment and, as described earlier, register Being. In short, we ex-ist, where “ex” means outside and “ist” means to stand or abide. We are Da-sein because we are the only creatures who have an experience of being there, and registering Being. For Heidegger, what chiefly characterizes us and distinguishes us from all other living things is our preoccupation with Being.

5. The Fall of Dasein

But how Dasein has oriented itself toward Being – in philosophical reflection and in daily life – has changed over the course of time. Heidegger’s position, in fact, is that Dasein has fallen away from a primal openness to Being enjoyed by the ancient Greeks. He views modern Dasein as thoroughly degenerate, though he never announces this in such strong terms. At all times, Heidegger maintains a position of objectivity, seldom seeming to pass judgment on the times. He positions himself as a kind of detached “historian of Being.” It is clear, however, that Heidegger regards modern Dasein as defective, and that he seeks some way to bring about an orientation toward Being that would approximate that of our ancient ancestors. Introduction to Metaphysics is a particularly valuable text, among other reasons, because it is here that Heidegger makes some of his strongest and most explicit anti-modern statements.

As a model for a healthy, pre-modern Dasein Heidegger looks continually – and exclusively — to the Greeks (a problematic move, as I will discuss later). He tells us that for the Greeks Being was essentially phusis (sometimes also transliterated physis; we get “physics” from this). This word is normally translated “nature” but Heidegger takes the position that our cultural falling away from the “originary” Greek confrontation with Being has been facilitated by the translation of Greek words into Latin ones. And “nature” comes from the Latin natura – so we must be cautious in understanding phusis as “nature” and leaving the matter at that.

The basic difference between phusis and natura is that the latter basically connotes a kind of static collection of entities that surround humanity – the non-human world of animals, plants, minerals, elements, etc. The concept of phusis, on the other hand, suggests something dynamic and moving. Heidegger points out that the noun phusis is derived from the verb phuein, which means “to generate or grow.” Thus, “nature” for the Greeks was not simply the set of non-human-built things around us; rather it was a dynamic process. Heidegger writes:

Now what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance – in short, the emerging-abiding sway. . . . Phusis is the event of standing forth. Arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.[2]

Phusis is what emerges out of potentiality or out of absence (the rose blossoming, the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, the storm emerging from the heavens) and becomes present and actualized – then disappears back into wherever it is such things emerge from. Phusis is this continual unfolding, emergence, and return. And Heidegger tells us that “Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable.”[3]

Contrary to popular belief, Heidegger’s main objective is not to “define Being.” In these passages of Introduction to Metaphysics and elsewhere, Heidegger sets out very clearly what he thinks “Being” means, and makes it clear that he believes the standpoint of the Greeks (who equated Being with phusis) is basically correct. Heidegger’s main interest is actually in Dasein: in the being for whom Being is an issue; in how Being becomes an issue for us, how we have responded to Being, and the history of how our orientation toward Being has changed over time.

Now, Heidegger’s identification of Being with phusis allows him to make some interesting observations about physics and metaphysics. Physics deals with beings: with the things that have emerged from the abiding sway of phusis/Being (including not just “things,” but forces), and with the laws governing their interactions. Metaphysics points us beyond beings to Being itself (and indeed “metaphysics” literally means “beyond physics”). However, the entire history of Western metaphysics – really, from the Pre-Socratics on – has confused metaphysics with physics and treated Being as if it were some special kind of being (as I discussed earlier). This means that when Heidegger refers to “the Greeks” as having the proper conception of Being as phusis, he is really not thinking of the Greek philosophers. In fact, he is drawing his account of the Greek understanding of Being primarily from their poetry and drama. But that is a story too complicated to tell here.

Heidegger speaks of the “oblivion of Being,” that begins with the Greek philosophical treatment of Being as another kind of being, and has as its final consequence modern decadence. We have lost the original Greek wonder in the face of Being.[4] Even the medieval period, soaked in religious piety, was disconnected from Being. The Judeo-Christian tradition treats God as an exalted being and the world as an artifact constructed by him. And, as the Good Book says, God has given to man dominion over all the beings of this artificial world. Judeo-Christian religiosity is preoccupied with transcending this world, so as to be reunited with God – not with wonder in the face of the “emerging-abiding sway.” The formula for creating modernity out of medievalism is simple: retain the idea of our having dominion over all the earth (i.e., all this as raw material for human use) and simply remove God from the picture. The result is a life without wonder, in which we are preoccupied exclusively with this thing or that, focused on the manipulation, quantification, and acquisition of things.
Heidegger & Ethnic Nationalism
Greg Johnson

2,118 words

Heidegger doing his thing

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Author’s Note:

This is the text of a lecture delivered at the London Forum on Saturday, May 27th. I want to thank Jez Turner, the London Forum team, and everyone who attended this event.  

Martin Heidegger, the most celebrated and influential philosopher of the 20th century, was an ethnic nationalist—and not just any old ethnic nationalist, but a supporter of German National Socialism. Moreover, Heidegger’s National Socialism was not merely the superficial infatuation of a politically naïve intellectual. Instead, it was a logical outgrowth of his philosophy. Which means that we can draw upon the most formidable thinker of our time to deepen, sharpen, and defend the ethnonationalist idea.

The kinds of political orders that men create are based on their fundamental worldviews: their sense of who they are, where they fit into the world, what is right and wrong, and what is politically possible. These are the questions of “metapolitics”: those things that come before the political, i.e., the intellectual and cultural presuppositions of political orders. Modern globalism follows from modern man’s self-image and ethos. Modern man is rootless and cosmopolitan. Modern man is individualistic. Modern man uses science and technology to pursue the mastery and possession of nature.

These three traits are beautifully illustrated in the opening pages of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Howard Roark, the novel’s hero, has just been expelled from architecture school, basically because all he cared about learning was the science and technology of construction. He rejected the aesthetic tradition of architecture because he had his own vision. Supremely confident he can go it alone, he laughs off the defeat and goes swimming.

Rand describes Roark standing on a cliff overlooking his swimming hole. The water is still, so the rock is doubled by its reflection. There is blue sky above and blue sky below, so the rock appears to be floating in space. Then Rand adds an interesting little detail. Instead of the man standing on the rock jutting out of the earth, it appears that the rock is floating in space, “anchored to the feet of the man.”

But Roark does not laugh when he looks at the world around him. He does not see the living rock. He sees building stones. He does not see trees. He sees lumber. He sees the word as nothing more than a stockpile of resources to be appropriated and remade according to human plans—his plans. “These rocks, he thought, are waiting for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.”

Howard Roark is rootless: he does not stand on the earth. Instead, the earth is just a big ball of natural resources floating through the void anchored to him. Howard Roark is an individualist. He rejects tradition in favor of his own “unborrowed” vision. Finally, Howard Roark uses science and technology to master and transform nature according to his designs.

How do cosmopolitan man, individualist man, and technological man all hang together (lest we hang them separately, I suppose)? Do they spring from a common root? The answer is yes, and it is a deep root, teaching all the way back to the origins of Western philosophy and natural science in ancient Greece.

In traditional societies, the notions of order do not differentiate between the human and the natural worlds. The Chinese talk about the tao, which is the “way” of both natural and human things. The same is true of the Greek notion of nomos, from which our idea of the laws of men and the laws of nature derive.

The early Greek natural philosophers, however, noticed that there was a difference between the ways of the natural and the human worlds. Human ways of life—languages and customs—vary from place to place (meaning that men have different cultures) and from time to time (meaning that cultures have histories). Human ways of life are particular, not universal. They are not unchanging, but Protean and restless and hard to pin down.

Nature, by contrast, was the same everywhere, and it changes so slowly that the Greeks thought it never changed at all, just went through endless cycles. The early Greek natural philosophers believed that the universal is better than the particular, the unchanging is better than the changing, and cyclical change is better than non-cyclical change (including “progress”). Nature’s laws are better than human laws. Nature allows certitude and predictability, whereas human customs lack these advantages. Thus the early Greek natural philosophers replaced the old idea of the way of things with a distinction between nature, which is universal and unchanging, and convention, which is particular and mutable—varying from time to time and place to place, never repeating or returning to the same. And they held that nature is better than convention, thus we should guide our lives by nature and not convention.

Consequently, the beginning of the philosophical life is to take an inventory of the human condition. When we do this, we discover that there is a human nature, unchanging and common to all men—such as our bodily desires—and a crust of conventions, which vary from time to time and place to place, and which were taught to us by the people around us long before we were self-conscious, much less capable of exercising critical reason. These conventions include language, myths, and morals, some that help and others that hinder our ability to live according to our nature.

To become a philosopher, we must free out minds from prejudices—from beliefs that we have uncritically accepted from our society. Plato likened society—the world of authoritative shared opinions—to a cave in which shackled prisoners are forced to watch the equivalent of an Indonesian shadow-puppet play and mistake it for reality. He likened the process of becoming a philosopher to liberating oneself from the prison of the cave of opinion and toiling upward to the surface of the Earth where one can live in the sunlit world of truth.

The beginnings of individualism and cosmopolitanism are basically the same: to obtain objective knowledge of universal, unchanging nature, one must liberate one’s mind from the realm of opinion or custom, which are inherently social, meaning that they are shared by a whole community. One must, in an important sense, cease to be a citizen of one’s homeland, for a citizen believes that the traditions of his homeland are authoritative. But if the philosopher is not a citizen of Athens or England, what is his homeland? When Diogenes the Cynic, who was born in Sinope, was asked the name of his hometown—his polis—he did not say that he was a citizen of Sinope, but a citizen of the world. The cosmos was his polis, from which we get the word cosmopolitan. To say that one is a cosmopolitan is to say that one is an emancipated individual who lives by reason in accordance with nature, which is universal and unchanging.

How does cosmopolitan and individualist man become technological man? The common root of all three is the use of reason, emancipated from social prejudice, to gain knowledge of nature. Once the cosmopolitan individual decides to take his bearings from reason and nature rather than custom and convention, he looks within and finds his natural human desires for food, comfort, security, etc. Then he looks around nature with unblinkered eyes for ways to satisfy himself. Having discarded any merely social conventions that might prevent him from gratifying his wishes at the expense of nature, scientific and technological progress was up and running.

Two other attitudes allied with the quest for objective knowledge feed into technological progress.

First, just as the philosopher looks below the crust of opinion to get to the truth of nature, the scientist looks below the surface of nature—and the myriad of natural kinds—to find a few simple underlying laws of nature, which allow him to better understand and transform nature according to our will. Thus to the scientist, the natural world we see around us looks more and more provisional. It looks more and more like a stockpile of resources for human projects.

Second, the Will-to-Power is implicit in the very notion of objective knowledge. For why prefer the universal and unchanging to the particular and protean? Because the universal and unchanging is secure. You can always count on it.  Thus it provides a secure foundation for our plans. There is a well-founded cliché about ugly Americans abroad going to McDonald’s rather than eating the local cuisine. But there is a logic to it, because the food at McDonald’s is universal and unchanging, so you always know what to expect. That is why I don’t eat the food at MacDonald’s, but I do stop in to use the toilets, because you can always count on clean restrooms. The driving force of objective conceptions of knowledge was a subjective desire for certitude and control that, over time, gave rise to such ideas as Platonic and Aristotelian forms, Cartesian representations, and eventually the operationalization of science in terms of technical feats of prediction and control.

But what if, as Heidegger argues, the primary source of meaning in life and the primary source of moral and aesthetic measure is our participation in the worlds of shared custom and opinion—in various ethnic communities—the very things that cosmopolitan, individualist, and technological man is concerned to leave behind? Heidegger’s answer is that a world deprived of meaning and measure will become a world of unbounded nihilism—nihilism spreading out in all directions.

A world without measure is also a world without borders and boundaries. It is a world in which distinct nations and races will disappear, for liberation from particular collective identities is the toll we pay to play the whole cosmopolitan game, and if the satisfaction of our desires is what life is all about, why let racial differences constrict your potential dating and mating pool?

But the universal, homogeneous global state will be no utopia. What is the meaning of life for cosmopolitan-individualist-technological man? Basically to appropriate, transform, and consume nature. And doing so without measure leads to what Heidegger called “the gigantic” (das Riesige): the realm of exploding populations, of cities surging upwards, plunging downwards, and sprawling out in all directions—a world where the new is always improved and more is always better—a world where knowing that you can do something is equivalent to knowing that you should do it—a world of an ever-expanding humanoid biomass, throbbing, swarming, and pullulating over the globe—until, at last, we crash into objective limits that we refused to see and factor into our plans, and the earth becomes a scorched boneyard, in which some of the skeletons enjoyed the privilege of a long string of zeros in their bank accounts before the lights blinked out forever and the world returned to being just lifeless matter in space.

If the beginning of Western philosophy and science are leading to that end, maybe it is time for a new beginning. In 1932, Heidegger began to think that the National Socialist movement was just the new beginning or inception (Anfang) he had hoped for. National Socialism stood for rootedness in a particular homeland, language, and tradition, as opposed to cosmopolitan rootlessness and the beep beep, boop boop of machine communication and the cha-ching of commerce, which are the true universal languages. National Socialism was about collectivism over individualism, the common good before individual interests. And National Socialism was very, very “green,” seeking to preserve nature and human-scale living from the depredations of industrialization and giantism. Thus in 1935, Heidegger declared in one of lectures that the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism was based on “the confrontation of global technology and modern man.”

Heidegger eventually became disillusioned with National Socialism. He came to see it not as the new beginning for which he hoped, but as just another form of modern technological nihilism. After the war, he promoted the myth that his support of National Socialism was just the blunder of a naïve and essentially apolitical thinker.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Heidegger’s philosophy was always political—and specifically ethnonationalist—both before and after the Third Reich, although after the war he took pains to obscure this fact. After the war, Heidegger largely refrained from speaking about political topics, but as a philosopher he patiently laid the metapolitical conditions for a new post-totalitarian critique of cosmopolitanism, individualism, and technological nihilism. In short, Heidegger was one of the founders of what we today call the New Right.
Martin Heidegger
Jonathan Bowden

7,513 words

Editor’s Note:

heidegger-cropThe following text is a transcript of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on Martin Heidegger at the 6th New Right Meeting in London on February 18, 2006. You can listen at YouTube here. If you can make out the passage marked unintelligible, please post a comment below. 

In truth, this is not one of Jonathan’s best lectures, but even Heidegger experts would be hard pressed to deliver a good introduction in one hour. It is, in particular, highly misleading to characterize Heidegger as an “essentialist.” But Jonathan means simply the belief that reality that exists “outside” and “before” the existence of the mind. And indeed, Heidegger so strongly believed this that he rejected even Platonic essentialism as implicitly subjectivist, because it posits that ultimate reality consists of entities that satisfy our quest for certainty, thus conceiving the world based on the needs of the human subject.

Martin Heidegger: this talk in some respects is incredibly difficult, because I remember when the elitist Jewish academic George Steiner was asked to do the Fontana Modern Masters on Heidegger, it was because a long series of Oxbridge academics couldn’t do it. They basically couldn’t reduce the extraordinary complexity of, in particular this work, Being and Time, to 100 pages. Because Fontana Modern Masters, as you know, is a students’ sort of “cheat” primer, the sort of thing that people look up on the internet now. And to reduce Heidegger to that is slightly ridiculous. But you also have to provide a sort of middling and upper-middling foregrounding for people to come into the theory anyway, otherwise they’ll be at sea.

Now, what people do when they write Times Literary Supplement, never mind Sunday Times, articles about somebody like Heidegger is they basically talk about his politics; they talk about whether or not he had a mistress; they talk about his early Catholicism; they talk about wraparound and biographical matters, because the theory is amongst the most difficult metaphysical theories written in the last century.

Probably Adorno and Sartre on the ultra-Left—both of whom cross over with certain areas that Heidegger was concerned with, Sartre, biographically never mind anything else—and Heidegger are amongst the most complicated theorists that one can ever imagine. So, before we start on this talk we have to look at what’s happened to Western philosophy in the last hundred years.

Now, for those who read their philosophy at tertiary level in our universities—and tertiary education has been so degraded in many respects through egalitarian discourse that it’s almost meaningless, but for those who do—they know that there are two great clusters in Western academic philosophy: so-called Anglo-American philosophy, and so-called, but essentially actual, European and Continental philosophy.

We grow up, whether we like it or not—because even the Tony Blairs of this world are actually subliminally influenced by these ideas—in an empirical, naturalist, factually-oriented, slightly anti-theoretical current which comes from our alleged and soi-disant Enlightenment. And we come out of essentially an anti-theoretical and an anti-metaphysical discourse which is why something as unbelievably outré as this is literally outside of British and Anglo-concentric thinking in all sorts of ways. For a long time it was said that Being and Time would be untranslatable, and it wasn’t translated until ’62. And don’t forget, the book was written in the ’20s. And it’s translated by two academics, so it’s sort of two-for-one, with Blackwells, a sort of generalized Oxbridge publisher.

Now, what is Continental philosophy trying to do, and why does Anglo-American philosophy think it’s meaningless? Because these are questions that can’t be answered and therefore shouldn’t even be asked, in a Bertrand Russell and Wittgensteinian way of looking at things. Basically, Heidegger is trying, through semi-atheistic and allegedly secular discourse, to arrive at certain ultimate spiritual truths grounded in pure philosophy, and in pure thinking about thinking, even thinking about the thinking of thinking. And he is trying to prove certain cardinal things that, in many ways, gifted adolescents ask, but often as they atrophy into adulthood and early maturity they fall away from. Most people ask, “What’s life for?,” “Is there a God?,” “Is there ultimate purpose?,” “What is death about?,” “Will anything happen to me that can be acknowledged as existing before I die that impinges upon this cardinal event?,” “Why are most people completely oblivious to these issues and are terrified and often in a state of mild anxiety if they come up in general discourse?”

Now, Heidegger is trying to reach real conclusions, grounded philosophical conclusions, about these cardinal matters. Because he believed that Western metaphysics—and this is an incredibly arrogant statement really—that Western metaphysics had gone wrong for 2500 years of falsity and inauthenticity in relation to the primal nature of Being, which he believed is even a category within the notion of being which he calls Being-in-being.

Now, what’s “Being”? The “science” of Being in abstract philosophy is called ontology, and all of his work is about ontology. Now, this slogan behind me which Troy has kindly put up is, in part, a conceit because it says, “Martin Heidegger and Death’s Ontology.” Well you can’t really have an ontology of death, but you can have an ontology of life. But his whole point is to place life, as understood as concrete Being and as phenomenon, before death.

Heidegger is essentially a religious thinker, but he wants to route theoretical and theological energies through pure intellectuality. Why so? Because it is a way into intellectual understanding in the 20th century. Most of the cardinal ideas of the 20th century impinge upon him. And he was taught phenomenology at university by Edmund Husserl, to whom Being and Time is dedicated. In the sort of epigraph/frontal page he says, “Dedicated to Edmund Husserl in friendship and admiration. Black Forest 8th of April 1926.”

Now, many people, sort of undergraduates, people who go on Channel 4 documentaries, say that Martin Heidegger is an existentialist. And he influenced enormously that school, but in actual fact he is not an existentialist, hence the endless intellectual complication. He is as far removed as that, whilst being tangential to it, as one can possibly imagine. Now, he is a radical essentialist of the most primary and foundational form.

Most of the contemporary theory that’s influenced Western university professors and other intellectuals in the last 30 years is based on a particular type of existentialism which is designed, in a way, to get rid of this sort of material even before they start thinking. The idea is that existence is all there is, and existence foregrounds essence. There is no prior essence, there are no ontological variants which could be said to be true before us. Essentially, there is—put crudely and in Sun editorial terms if you can even describe Heidegger in such cultural proximities—they’re saying that God is not just dead, but was always dead and was always a mistake and even the admission of his existence or partial existence was based on a question that shouldn’t be asked, because it was epistemologically false even in the asking of it.

Epistemology is the science, or way, of understanding how one should think: thinking about thinking, if you like. Because in this type of thinking, before you have a thought you must, rather like a surgeon, make sure your tools are all right in order to operate. So you have to think about the thinking you’re going to initiate before you even start thinking.

Now, most Left-wing ideas are based upon the idea that we’re a tabula rasa, that we’re a sheet of paper, that you can write upon it as you want and as you will; that we’re the product of economics, or that we’re the product of social forces or interconnections of the two; there might be a bit of biology but it’s so mediated through socio-economic concerns that it’s lost sight of. Certainly, there are no prior truths to us and our existence. Hence Sartre’s famous essay which was designed to bring Leftist students, and a whole generation of them, many of whom are prominent in the media now and so on, in the Western world into a particular type of thinking. He wrote an essay called Existentialism is a Humanism because ultimately, in a sense, it is, although paradoxically there have been plenty of Right-wing existentialists.

They believe that existence precedes essence; essence is just an idea, is a ghost, is a spook in the machine, is that which is prior, is that which all modern theory rejected when the modern world replaced the medieval world. And in some respects, although it’s a very crude analysis, Heidegger is a super-charged modern who was a return of radically medieval ways of looking at the world; at meaning; at purpose; at will; and at existence in existence as clarified essence. So, in a way he is trying—scribbling away at this chalet he had, made of wood in the Black Forest— to confirm the existence of God, basically. That’s what he’s trying to do with this enormous amount of theory.

When post-structuralism, so-called, became the cardinal intellectual discourse of our universities, pretty much in the 1980s/1990s and subsequently, those theories are based upon the idea which radicalizes even the existentialist project of the ’50s and ’60s. And this is that there is no essential foundation to meaning. I remember a Marxist university professor I know quite well—he teaches at some upgraded poly which is now called a university in London—Malcolm Evans, who wrote a book about Shakespeare called Signifying Nothing, which is a quote from Macbeth of course, so there’s a clever interweaving of texts going on here. But he basically believes that essentialism is dangerous. Because of course, although your average Socialist Worker Party activist, and there’s few of them left, would even think in these terms, it is a totally rival and totally discontinuous and totally oppositional way of thinking. They believe, they begin with man in his predicament and the only way to get out of that predicament is to change one’s environment which creates the nature of that predicament.

Heidegger’s view is that everything is prior, everything is prior, and death is before you. And death, in accordance with essentially his religious nature, is what life is about. In other words, life is about preparing yourself for inexistence.

Now, one of the sort of comets that goes across this constellation which could be said to be Heidegger is Jean-Paul Sartre who did his thesis in Germany, partly during the Nazi period. Sartre, this rather sort of short-sighted ugly man, stooping around, running about, didn’t seem to know what was going on in Germany at this period. Indeed, there were circles of the Left in post-war France who held it against Sartre that he actually studied in Germany during this period, influenced by these sorts of ideas.

Now, Sartre takes these ideas in another direction. So, he doesn’t have a prior essence; that there are things like Beauty with a big “B,” Justice with a big “J,” Truth with a big “T,” and so on, that exist prior to man. He believes that everything is unknown prior to specific consciousness. But you authenticate yourself and the possibility of Being by confronting nothingness and filling the emptiness with volition, in his case by choosing to be an extreme Leftist. Life is utterly meaningless. But one chooses a course for one’s life and for one’s discourse.

And this led him to myopic apoliticism and moping around in German libraries in the 1930s through to Maoism, essentially, because he basically ended up in a sort of Maoist sect before he died in the 1970s. Something which, because Pol Pot of all people passed through some of those Parisian Salons in the 1970s, listening to people like Kristeva and these other post-structuralist theorists, has rather doomed Sartre in post-war and after his death terms, because you can’t claim existentialism as a humanism when one of your moral pupils turns out to be Pol Pot! That’s been a bit difficult, you see.

But you have this extraordinary radicalism in the examples of these two men: Sartre ends up with Mao (put crudely), and Heidegger ends up with Hitler. Because both of them, if you like, begin thinking cardinally about the values of our civilization which, when you think about it logically, would lead them to some of the most radical conclusions, socially, politically, and ideologically, which are possible.

Because this type of intellectuality—and I’m going to read certain sections of it because there is a pretension always to talking about people like Heidegger without dealing with what we’ll call the hard core; you’ve actually got to look at the material which is written in a sedentary way but is written, in a sense, in accordance with the notion of intellectual fury. It’s a belief that all of life and all of meaning can be revealed through mental processes, which I don’t believe is true, but it’s a heroic attempt to do this.

And this sort of language is virtually a system of thinking which has more relationship with artistic ways of describing things, actually. Because Heidegger’s theory is something that you have to experience. Here is a man dwelling upon ultimate questions of whether there is an essence in an essence, of what it means to be you, or this table, or anything that phenomenologically exists. Or, are there realms above us or beneath us or around us? And, how can you answer a moral question with an affirmative statement?

Wittgenstein’s point in Tractatus and after is that ultimately you can’t answer a morally affirmative statement because to do so is meaningless outside language, and language is all that exists, and language is given even only a partial meaning through context. There’s a famous and funny story of Wittgenstein where he’s ferociously berating an American visiting professor at Cambridge and he says, “You can’t make affirmative moral statements,” and he’s waving a poker in his face. And the university professor replies, “Here’s an affirmative moral statement: don’t wave pokers in the faces of visiting professors.” And Wittgenstein hurls the poker into the fire and storms out of the room in a rant.

But these attempts, abstract and very radical though they are, always, like Icarus in a sense, go up and then come down again. Because, mark my words, every politician and every pundit, no matter how low-level, no matter how 200 times beneath this sort of discourse they are, is actually replicating ideas that have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. The reason why—you know, you walk around London today—the world is as it is, is ideological in the broadest of senses. Because a man who has any sort of belief becomes the equivalent of 50 men in action. And Heidegger was a man whose action was theory in this purely Germanic way.

I met a German intellectual once and he said, “Ah, you’re an intellectual,” and he sits down and he looks right into your eyes and you begin the theory. This is a totally un-British sort of way of behaving because there’s no concept of irony in a way, but this idea that you achieve truth through almost a violence of intellectuality, which in a way Heidegger evinces.

Now let’s read something from Being and Time. Now, Being and Time is divided into two books, essentially. The first one is “An Explanation of the Question of the Meaning of Being; The Necessity, Structure and Priority of the Question of Being.”This is whether we can even talk about the nature of talking about the book. We have, “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being,” we have “The Formal Structure of the Question of Being,” we have “The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being,” and we have “The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being.” That takes him 32 pages before he’s even started. You’ve got to clear away all the refuse in your garden before you start, basically.

Part One is “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality,” that means the interpretations of Being in terms of time, and “The Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being.” Then there’s another section about “Being-in-the-world in General as the Basic State of Dasein.” Then there’s a section on “The Worldhood of the World,” by which he means, “Is the world as we appear?” Can we prove that you are actually there? Because it’s actually very difficult from first principles to prove common sense: that I’m speaking to you, that I’m not speaking to myself, that it’s a vision, that I’m talking about things that are endlessly solipsistic, in pure mental processes without being empirical, because this type of theory believes that empiricism distorts because you go down to matter, and so you must keep it totally at a theoretical level. It’s actually quite difficult to prove the idea that everything isn’t an idea, and that even addressing you in this way is an idea, and so on.

“Being-in-the-World as Being-within and Bringing-one’s-Self to the ‘They’.” This is the idea that one approaches the possibility of semi-existence in another, theoretically, before one gets there. Then we have “Being-in as Such.” Intellectual Germans love these little “as suches” and so on. “Care as the Being of Dasein,” now this is the self-reflexiveness of the possibility of Being in being. What does he mean by “Being in being”? He really means the presence of God in life. Really, deep down, in my view, he never left the Jesuits who trained him intellectually, and his thesis was on Duns Scotus; the idea that everything is, essentially, foregrounded before one gets there, theoretically.

Here’s the second book, Division two. “Dasein and Temporality; Dasein’s Possibility of Being-a-Whole and Being-Towards-Death,” which is the real point, to place man in full understanding of it before death.

Now, there’s always with this sort of theory, possibly a sort of alienation effect. But the way to look at it is there are few moments of profundity in most individual’s lives, but one of them is that period when one is probably pretty conscious that one is waiting for death. And it’s going to happen to all of us, you and me, and in some ways the way to overcome the sort of innate philistinism that exists about this pure, pure theory is to put yourself in that position. Because Heidegger’s work is a man in early life in full consciousness of radical mental gifts, thinking about what it means to die before you get there, and not responding at the level of emotion. Although I believe personally that all theory is physically based and comes out of the emotions as part of one’s physicality, but let’s not intrude my ideas too much.

Another section is “Dasein’s Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-Being, and Resoluteness.” Another section is “Dasein’s Authentic Potentiality-for-Being-a-Whole, and Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care.” Then there’s a section on “Temporality and Everydayness.” By this time we’ve got up to page 421, by the way. Then there’s a section on “Temporality and Historicality,” and then there’s a section on “Temporality and Within-Time-ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Time.” Then there’s some dealings with other theorists who are rather brushed away at the end, Hegel in particular.

The last section of all, which is Section 83, around pages 436–486, is “The existential-temporal analysis of Dasein, and the question of fundamental ontology as to the meaning of Being in general.” This is the moment when he wants to place man before death, self-aware of the nature of authentic existence.

As a critique of all this sort of material Adorno—in some respects his chief ideological nemesis on the other side—wrote a book called The Jargon of Authenticity which is an attack upon this type of thinking. Adorno is one of the key thinkers in what’s called Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School.

Now, here is a section on death, because it’s all essentially about death. “Underlying this biological-ontical exploration of death,” that just means the biological exploration of death, “is a problematic that is ontological.” That concerns the science of Being. “We still have to ask how the ontological essence of death is defined in terms of that of life. In a certain way, this has always been decided already in the ontical investigation of death. Such investigations operate with preliminary conceptions of life and death, which have been more or less clarified.” That’s in the last 290 pages which I’ll forebear from reading out. “These preliminary conceptions need to be sketched out by the ontology of Dasein.” Which is Being in being. “Within the ontology of Dasein, which is superordinate to an ontology of life, the existential analysis of death is, in turn, subordinate to a characterization of Dasein’s basic state. The ending of that which lives we have called ‘perishing.’ Dasein too ‘has’ its death, of the kind appropriate to anything that lives.” Basically he’s asking here, does what traditionalist orders have called the soul survive death? “And it has it, not in ontical isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being. In so far as this is the case, Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish. We designate this intermediate phenomenon as its ‘demise.’” Then there’s a large footnote which I’ll forebear from going into because it’s printed in point 6, I think. “Let the term ‘dying’ stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death.” Auxiliary footnote. “Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise only as long as it is dying.” So, he’s talking about the death of the concept of the soul which is self-aware of the possibility of that moment. “Medical and biological investigation into “demising” can obtain results which may even become significant ontologically if the basic orientation for an existential interpretation of death has been made secure.” Ah ha! “Or must sickness and death in general—even from a medical point of view,” Notice: “medical point of view.” Physical stuff which we keep out of sight. “Be primarily conceived as existential phenomena?”

The first thing that strikes you about this is his attitude towards death. You walk round a death ward in a hospital—you know they’re all about to give out—most people’s response is physical and emotional, the one and the other. He regards that as bourgeois deviation; even as filth. Always keep your theory before you because that’s how you apprise the nature of that which is real as against that which is mere appearance, and that which is governed by dread.

In the 1960s the counter-culture, that had many tendencies which ultimately tended overwhelmingly to the Left regardless of this, had the notion that life was not as it should be or could be. That there needed to be a spiritual dimension to human beings that had been lost sight of given the collapse of the Christian religion. And I take it as unarguable that in our civilization in the last hundred years, in accordance with what it once was, in the West largely, with the odd exception, individual and group, the Christian religion has collapsed. And it’s collapsed amongst the most advanced thinkers of our civilization and racial or ethnic group from early in the 19th century. Or at least they were aware of the possibility of its mass collapse long before it became a sociological phenomenon. This is why this theory, which ultimately has had much more impact in theology than it has in philosophy, has been put in this particular way.

When the Renaissance occurred in our thinking one of the great criticisms of the philosophical schools that preceded it, of which Duns Scotus was an accredited master, was that they were dealing with things that could never be proved at this level of reality, even theoretically. And the slogan that’s used is that they were debating the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. And it was all utterly pointless, and we had to get away from all that.

Now, Heidegger wants to go back there, up to a point, but in actual fact he wants to go even further back. He wants to go back to the pre-Socratics, he wants to go back to the Sophists, he wants to go back to the original and primary Greek thinkers that begin the process two-and-a-half thousand years ago, which is why Nietzsche obsessed him. Because, if you like, Nietzsche stands half way between this radical essentialist/quasi-religious thinking, that there is before you nothing but God, and God in all and God for all, and you’re part of Him. Which, if you sacralize this language, begins to make sense of what Being is, what Being-in-being is, what Being-in-being before all being is, and so on. It’s, if you like, a re-rooted theological language use. There’s that position. And prior traditionalists who have Right-wing views largely accord philosophically and psychologically with this area.

Nietzsche, who’s a figure who obsessed Heidegger of course, and who has this enormous theoretical explosion at the end of the 19th century, just preceding the emergence of people like Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger, in early 20th century Germanic thinking at a high philosophical level. Don’t forget, Anglo-American philosophy almost denies the possibility of metaphysics. Bertrand Russell would say, if he were sat at the back, which is a bit difficult considering he’s been a corpse for about thirty years, “It’s all meaningless. It’s an interesting talk but it’s about things that can’t be proved at any level and is therefore pointless. Because your view is as good as his, as good as so and so’s. The only difference is people can put it better, or worse. But there can be no grounded truth that I can grasp and put social practice and purpose to.”

Now, Nietzsche stands halfway between the Left existentialist view, that there’s nothing prior, that, put very simply, we make it up as we go along.

Baudrillard, a French intellectual, wrote a book in the 1990s saying that the first Gulf war was just a computer game; it didn’t happen. Didn’t happen, it was just a discourse. All those cluster bombs and stealth bombs and so on, it was just a fantasy in a televisual age: one man’s discourse, you see?

In an age of extreme relativism, which is the almost opposite of this absolutist theory, totalitarian theory, which is actually, mentally what it is, we see the division between what exists now and the reasons for some of the very controversial, certainly in the mainstream, political choices that Heidegger made in the middle of his life in Germany in the thirties.

Now, Nietzsche’s position is that there is a prior, there is an essence, but Nietzsche is a partial to semi-absolute existential thinker. Because Nietzsche’s contribution to modernity and to modern intellectual thinking is there may be things which may be prior, but we don’t know what they are, and we have to test them through struggle, through life, through will and purposiveness, and various levels of what he called Will to Power which he believed was the basis of all lived existence.

So, Nietzsche says God is dead partly to say he’s a militant atheist but partly to say that the idea of God in the minds of men has died, which means that theoretically it may not have completely died but is in a point of collapse. Because the point is to test and to rearrange, and you put up a view and I will attack it because life is struggle. And in that struggle comes out the possibility of meaning. Nietzsche would say, “There is a truth but I don’t know it yet.” There is a degree to which ontological circumstances cannot be proved but are not rendered prior meaningless, which is why Nietzsche approaches nihilism, the belief that there is no purpose and no values and no constraints and no morals that aren’t purely human, and that there is nothing outside. Which, of course, makes it very difficult to run any sort of a civilization because there are no lines.

And Nietzsche stands halfway between what you might call this existential Leftist praxis and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s become extremely fashionable on the Left in the last thirty years and there’s lots of post-modernist books by people like Deleuze and Guattari, and these sorts of people, who love the element of Nietzsche that tears down—“I come as a destroyer!”—because in order to create you’ve got to destroy first, you’ve got to level off a bit. There’s ruins around you, so you give them a bit of a push.

All of Nietzsche’s thinking before Zarathustra, when he begins to vouchsafe his own view, if you like, is largely a tearing down: a tearing down of the normative nature of ethics in The Genealogy of Morals; tearing down of the idea of truth itself; an erection of science in works like The Dawn or The Joyful Wisdom/The Gay Science; and then a tearing down of the idea of science; a playing up of certain Darwinian and evolutionary ideas which Nietzsche’s actually quite suspicious of because, he doesn’t think that life and circumstances are linear at all, he believes they’re circular and everything that was comes back again. He thinks that Darwinists are cretinous materialists and shallow optimists. Look at people around you. Are they progressing and moving upwards or are they just dullards led by a few people at the top who manipulate them?

Now, Heidegger made a radical, possibly the most radical, choice philosophically and politically in the century that’s just passed. Admittedly, he was living in Germany at a time when, if the Left-liberal consensus would have it, the most controversial regime in the 20th century came to power. Now, if you were in other races or in other societies you would actually refute that, you’d say that Stalin’s or Lenin’s or Mao’s or various other regimes were more important. You could argue that the most important regime in the 20th century is the American one. But put all that on another table for today.

Heidegger decided in 1933 to join the Nazi Party, to join the National Socialist German Workers Party and gave lectures for a year in his university in full Nazi uniform;[1] and was involved with all of the party Gauleiters and other figures in his area to the shock and horror and consternation of much of the academic elite that he was associated with. And don’t forget that Heidegger did this for purely speculative and theoretical reasons. Heidegger had no concern with doctrines of race, no concerns with doctrines of conspiracy, no concerns with politics at all. Politics was irrelevant in relation to placing man before death, which is what life was about. And what he loved about this movement was that he thought it was a primordial movement that was bringing back, almost in an occultistic way, the partiality towards death, and in some ways it was bringing back the ancient world with modern technology. That’s why he reached out to it.

Now, he regarded democracy, just like middle-brow secular humanism, as a deviation. Because in a sense his nature is so primordially prior and religious that he considers almost all normal life to be irrelevant: family, having a good time, pleasure, pleasure as a principle for life, which in liberal theory is cardinal. The American constitution talks about liberty, talks about property, talks about happiness. Heidegger doesn’t think the purpose of life is happiness; the purpose of life is death and facing ontology. But he doesn’t put it in the vocabulary that you must fall before the one who is on the cross and who bleeds for us because, in a sense, Heidegger just increasingly sees those as forms of metaphysics for metaphysics, stuff that needs to be put out of the way so that one can concentrate on the cardinal things of life, death, spirituality, and the possible existence of God.

“God”, as he told Paul Celan when they met in ’67, “has always been with me.” Celan is interesting of course, a Jewish poet who wrote in German for which he was condemned by his own group and converted to Catholicism because of Heidegger’s influence. And that was not a sectarian influence, because Heidegger was totally uninterested in what sect people were in, and so on. These were all forms that have no importance.

And in some ways there’s a great paradox, because Heidegger’s thinking is so purely, transcendently extreme that he’s one of the few figures where the pagan/Christian split in our civility doesn’t really mean anything to him. This is one of the things that interests me very much about him. With this Right-wing group, for example, a few Christians turned up early, they went, and it’s largely pagan in orientation. In the New Right in Europe, and so on, you have this very great split between the two. Heidegger’s almost totally unconcerned with those things because the forms that people worship Being in being through are incidental to placing man before ontological prerequisites.

His view is that you base life and society upon the profound thinking that will impinge upon a man of full consciousness, not [unintelligible] debilitated, before his moment of death. And that’s why he joined the Nazi Party. That’s why virtually no one could understand why he’d joined it, because he was totally sort of unorthodox in ideological terms because he had very little interest in that.

After a year he realized that: 1. Put crudely, they didn’t understand what he was on about. 2. That he was having to make political decisions in the university, the library, its use and so on that he didn’t agree with. And he fell away. He left the Party then[2] and continued to teach in the university until 1945. In ’45 he was proscribed by the de-nazification tribunals that were set up in the Western Allied zones. Now, he was forbidden from teaching in post-war Germany even though all sorts of people had him as a guest lecturer, so they used to get round it that way. And you have this strange situation where he became a sort of moral and spiritual leper in post-war Germany, and yet he was extremely respected. So Dr. Heidegger, Professor Heidegger, was everywhere. But at the same time he didn’t even have a university post.

And there’s all sorts of interesting things because Husserl taught him, and because Husserl was a Jew he was banned from the university library, but after the war Heidegger was banned from the library. And Jaspers wrote to educational authorities in Germany saying he shouldn’t be given a post. So you have all of this as well.

There was a play a couple of weeks ago on the BBC by John Banville, an Irish writer, about Heidegger that was very interesting. And it’s a dramatization, because all dramatists are interested in dialectic. They’re interested in two minds if it’s a theoretical play of any sort, two minds coming together that disagree, and the tension and the charge and the flow of energy that occurs between those two minds, and whether you can make a narrative out of it that can be listened to from beginning to end. And it’s this talk in his hut in the Black Forest.

Because, very interestingly, there is almost inevitably a monastic element to Heidegger. Heidegger is into the woods in primal inner Germany. To sit there in the middle of this forest and dwell upon death. And write a book of 450 pages of—to certain Anglo-Saxon minds—sheer intellectual torture, virtually, in order to get nearer to the truth that is the truth that is the truth, that will not set you free but release you to die with some dignity. Because that’s the only truth that matters. And there’s a sort of divine element to it in a way because it’s so near to the inexpressible.

Artistically, of course in a blowback sense, it’s had an enormous influence on novelists in Germany like Hermann Broch, who wrote The Death of Virgil, and wrote a book called The Sleepwalkers, and so on. And this extraordinary capacity for intellectual abstraction that many German writers have, that begin with a relatively straightforward narrative and then lurch off into ultimate speculative questions, is very much influenced by this type of theory.

But I don’t think people who are illiberal can understand the shock in liberal intellectual elitist circles of a man like Heidegger joining the Nazi party. It is actually emotionally slightly difficult to describe it. From a sort of BBC view of culture it is the worst thing, and not just the worst thing but beyond the worst, that one could do. This man of supreme intellectual gifts dwelling alone in his Shavian hut in the woods dwelling on the ontology of death in life in death in life in death in life—do you see what I mean?—joins, what they considered to be, a barbarous wrecking crew. And they’re appalled, they’re utterly morally appalled. And since the war people have not really known what to do with Heidegger at all.

And because, in a sense, his theory is an attempt to bring back a different version of the West’s civilization, most people who were on the side politically that he associated with, albeit only for a period, didn’t know how to make use of him either, in a strange sort of way. That’s why he’s this sort of illisible figure. It’s noticeable in Tomislav Sunic’s book on the New Right, for instance, Heidegger in a way can’t be integrated. It’s a sort of cigarette on the paper that burns through to the other side. He really is in a zone on his own.

And what’s he trying to do? He’s trying to see whether human beings can live authentically. There’s a moment in Nietzsche’s letters early on in his theoretical course/development/prognosis after the first text, Birth of Tragedy, when he describes seeing a goatherd killing a goat on a hill—I think it’s in Italy—and it’s what James Joyce would call an epiphany. It’s a moment of total, in his terms, authentication and realization. It’s a poetic moment. It’s what certain natures call a perfect moment. A moment that certain consciousnesses will look at before they die as the one moment that was perfect: the sky, and the goat, and the man, and the soil, and the sun. And, essentially, it’s a religious moment; it’s a sort of cosmotheist moment, in a way.

And Heidegger’s point is to get people to experience such moments, which is why he writes this enormous theory to try and intellectually prepare people for the possibility of having such moments. Which is why, of course, when people try and stimulate themselves to have such moments. They chant; they sing; they starve themselves; they go without; they live ascetically; they do things to alter consciousness. In a sense he just deals with pure consciousness because he doesn’t, almost, relate to the physical level at all.

But it is an attempt to go back to what many Western and Indo-European theorists have believed was cardinal at the beginning of Greek culture. It’s Nietzsche’s view and it’s other people’s view that the Greek tragedians—the great three, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides—that there is a “decadence,” in a sense.

Aeschylus is the most hieratic, the most removed from everyday, the most transcendental, the most ur-ascending.

Sophocles is not a humanist by any means—there’s the matter of the Theban plays, of course—but it’s a step down from that sense of mystery, that sense of sheer awe. We now live in a society without any sense of the sacred at all, as de Benoist has pointed out. It’s virtually void.

And a level down in this trajectory involving the Greek tragic writers is Euripides. He’s hardly writing soap opera, but the gods and the goddesses are seen almost, if not level with human beings, then as superhumans who are just a couple of levels up. But they relate to each other, they fight with each other, they make love to each other, and all this sort of thing, in a way which is recognizably humanesque.

And, in a way, you could metaphoracizse it, because with theory like this that’s all you really can do, certainly in a talk of this nature. Those prior moments when Aeschylus looks at the divine—because don’t forget Western theatre begins with religious ritual and gradually separates itself out—it begins with a monologue, and then Aeschylus has the idea this is going on a bit too long, so we’ll split it and we’ll have a duologue, and the two consciousnesses talk to each other. And in that you have the tension with which you can sustain drama in our culture, in any culture.

Now, in this theatricalization of this meeting in the hut in the woods where he wrote Being and Time and where he wrote other books on Greek tragedy and on Nietzsche, Celan and Heidegger have this talk. And this is Banville dreaming. But this type of theory is actually quite close to forms of artistic creation; forms of higher, non-entertainment based spiritual creation in art forms. And Celan says, “Why did you join the Nazi Party?” And Heidegger replies, “Because they were the one movement of the 20th century that, in my terms, had a tragic view of life. That had a view of life which is actually the motif and the inner essence—Dasein—of the Greek tragedians taken up to date two and a half thousand years later.” And I think that’s essentially a truthful statement.

He gave an interview to the Spiegel magazine after his death, in the sense that it was recorded before his death but could only be published as part of his will and settlement after his demise. I think it was published about three, four weeks after he died. And they ask him, because it was a very adversarial interview while he was alive, post-dated as I say, about why he’d joined, why he did this, why he did that, and so on. And in actual fact there’s lots of evasion and attempts at exculpation and bringing in all the usual things, and even though political correctness wasn’t a buzzword then, he’s in some ways playing games. He’s like a politician on the defensive.

But in actual fact, as often with art in my view, you’ve got to cut to the truth suddenly through all sorts of layers, even if the person never said it, it can actually illuminate because it crystallizes in a form the value of something. And when he says to Celan, with no one there, in this fantasy. Because Celan didn’t go and see him in that hut for nothing, just so he could put his name in Heidegger’s signature book, “I’ve been up to the professor’s lodge.” People at this sort of level don’t do those sorts of things. He wanted to know why, as George Steiner said, one of, if not the most, advanced theoretical minds of the Western civilization in the 20th century adopted this particular course.

And he did it because he believed that you cannot have a society where death has no meaning, because life has no meaning. And you cannot have a society which bases itself upon the absence of the religious urge, however you define that urge and whatever system you use. Because if you do the reverse you will end up with a society which has two values beyond subsistence. And that could be seen in the title of a grubby play produced in London a couple of years ago called Shopping and Fornication. But that is all that life is, if you do not have spiritual levels based upon that.

People will always be completely divided about the forms and the language that they use to talk about cardinal matters. But in a way, in a quite moving way really, Heidegger is attempting to get people to face in early modernity what it means to have a civilization and, not to be human, but to live with profound and real meaning. There’s no doubt that this theoretical postulation and this extreme abstraction is quite alien to certain elements of the Western civilization, certainly our own quadrant of it during the last couple of hundred years. But it is an attempt, not to aestheticize life, but to place life, ultimately, at the service of God, even and most especially for people who either don’t believe in him or can only approach such numinence through endless tiers of theory.

Thank you very much!
Jünger, Heidegger, & Nihilism
Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist

3,840 words

Translated by Greg Johnson

Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger engaged in a dialogue on nihilism in two texts published five years apart in the 1950s on the occasions of their respective sixtieth birthdays.[1] The study and comparison of these texts is particularly interesting because they allow us to appreciate what, on this fundamental subject, separates two authors who are frequently compared to each other and who maintained a powerful intellectual relationship for several decades. What follows is a brief overview.

In his approach, which he carefully presented as “medical” (it includes “diagnosis” and “therapeutics”), Jünger initially asserts that to remedy nihilism, one must give a “good definition” of it. Taking up Nietzsche’s opinion that nihilism is the process in and by which “the highest values debase themselves” (The Will to Power), he affirms that this is essentially characterized by the devaluation then the disappearance of traditional values, first and foremost the Christian values.

Then he reacts against the idea that nihilism is primarily a chaotic phenomenon:

One realized, with the help of time, that nihilism can agree with vast systems of order, and that it is even generally the case, when it takes on its active form and deploys its power. It finds in order a favorable substrate; it reorganizes it towards its ends. . . . Order not only yields to the requirements of nihilism, but is a component of its style. (pp. 48–52)

In this sense, nihilism is not decadence. It still does not go hand in hand with slackening, but “rather produced men who march straight ahead like iron machines, insensitive even at the moment catastrophe shatters them” (p. 57). Likewise, nihilism is not a disease. There is nothing morbid about it. On the contrary, one finds it “linked to physical health—above all, where one sets vigorously to work” (p. 54). Nihilism is in on the other hand essentially reductive: its most constant tendency is to “reduce the world, with its multiple and complex antagonisms, to a common denominator” (p. 65). Transforming society from “a moral community to a mechanical conglomeration” (p. 63), it marries fanaticism, the complete absence of moral sentiment, and the “perfection” of technical organization.

These observations are characteristic. They show that, whenever Jünger mentions nihilism, he refers first of all to the model of the totalitarian state, and most particularly to National Socialism. Indeed, the Third Reich exemplifies the social state where men are subject to an absolute order, an “automatic” organization, in which the devaluation of all traditional morals went along with an undeniable exaltation of “health.”

But one might ask if what Jünger describes is really nihilism. Is he not, rather, simply describing totalitarianism—the totalitarian Leviathan that has put technology at its bidding and turned nature into an industrial wasteland?

Martin Heidegger, 1889 - 1976

Jünger, moreover, professes a certain optimism already apparent in the title of his text: “Crossing the Line.” Evoking Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, he notes that their critiques of nihilism did not prevent them from showing themselves to be relatively optimistic, given that nihilism can be surpassed “sometime to come” (Nietzsche), given that it constitutes a kind of “necessary phase in a movement toward precise ends” (Dostoevsky). Here Jünger takes up an idea that is familiar to him: after the worst, it can only get better. Or more exactly: a tendency pushed to its extreme must go in the opposite direction. Thus he said, in the 1930s, they had “to lose the war to gain the nation.” It is in this spirit that he quotes Bernanos: “The light bursts forth only if darkness has overrun everything. The absolute superiority of the enemy is precisely what turns against him” (pp. 37–38). However, Jünger’s feeling is that the worst has passed, that “the head has crossed the line,” i.e., man has started to leave nihilism behind. This assertion also results from his assimilation of nihilism to totalitarianism. As Julien Hervier writes, “if Jünger believes in going beyond the absolute zero, then the collapse of Hitlerism, the triumphant incarnation of moral nihilism, was not for nothing” (Preface, p. 13).[2]

In his essay, Jünger thus tries primarily to describe the state of the world as it is, in order to assess the possibility that has one already passed to the other side of the “line.” His conclusion, moreover, might appear modest. Against nihilism, he proposes to resort to the poets and love (“Eros”). He calls for individual dissidence, for “authentic anarchy.” (In 1950, he had not yet invented the Figure of the Anarch.) “Above all,” he writes, “it is necessary to find safety in one’s own heart. Then, the world will change.”

Heidegger’s approach is quite different. His text, written in answer Jünger’s, is above all a critique—a friendly one, of course, which stresses the regard he has for his interlocutor, but nonetheless one that aims at replacing his analysis with a completely different point of view.

The modification of the title is already revealing. Whereas Jünger’s title Über die Linie means “Over the Line” in the sense of “beyond the line,” Heidegger’s title “Über ‘die Linie’” means “regarding ‘the line,’” indicating his conviction that the line has not been crossed and his desire to raise the question of why it cannot be crossed yet. Thus to Jünger’s trans lineam topography, Heidegger explicitly states that he wants to add (and in many respects oppose) a topology de linea: “You examine and you go beyond the line; I am satisfied initially to consider this line you have represented. One helps the other, and vice-versa” (p. 203).

Heidegger starts by disputing that one can, as Jünger seeks attempts, give a good “definition” of nihilism. Heidegger writes:

While keeping to the image of the line, we discover that it traverses a space that is itself given by a site. The site gathers. The gathering shelters the gathered in its essence. It is the site of the line that gives the source of the essence of nihilism and its realization. (p. 200)

Thus to inquire about the realization of nihilism, for which the entire world has become the theater—such that nihilism is henceforth the “normal state” of humanity—requires that we locate this “site of the line,” which points towards the essence of nihilism. For Heidegger, to pose the question of the situation of man in relation to the movement of nihilism requires a “determination of essence.” To understand nihilism implies that thought must go back to a consideration of its essence.

The answer was quick in coming. It follows from Heidegger’s philosophy, the essential tenets of which I will assume here. Nihilism, in Heidegger’s eyes, represents the consequence and the accomplishment of a slow trend toward the oblivion of Being, which begins with Socrates and Plato, continues in Christianity and Western metaphysics, and triumphs in modern times. The essence of nihilism “rests in the oblivion of Being” (p. 247). Nihilism is the oblivion of Being in realized form. It is the reign of nothingness.

The oblivion of Being means that Being is veiled, that it is held in a veiled withdrawal that conceals it from the thought of man, but which is also a protective retreat, a postponement of disclosure: “Such veiling is the essence of oblivion.” Oblivion is the concealment of Being to the profit of beings. In Western metaphysics, God himself is nothing but the supreme being. Metaphysics knows only transcendence, i.e., the thought of being. This is why it is prohibited not only to rise to Being, but even to examine its proper essence.

Ernst Jünger, 1895 - 1998

Heidegger adds that the essence of nihilism is realized in the “reign of the will to will.” Here, of course, the target is Nietzsche. One knows that, for Heidegger, the philosophy of the author of Zarathustra is, in spite of its merits, only Platonism in reverse insofar as it does not manage to leave the realm of values. The will to power, analyzed by Heidegger as the “will to will,” i.e., a will that wants to be in an unconditioned manner, is only one mode of appearance of the being of beings, and in this sense another form of the oblivion of Being. “It belongs to the essence of the will to power,” writes Heidegger, “not to allow the reality on which it establishes its power appear in this reality that it itself essentially is” (p. 205). Nietzsche states in vain that “God is dead”; he remains in the shadow of this God whose death he proclaims.

However, insofar as Jünger himself remains under the horizon of Nietzsche’s thought, Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche is also aimed at him.

Here Heidegger goes back to Jünger’s famous book The Worker, published in 1932.[3] He emphasizes that the Figure (or Form, Gestalt) of the Worker corresponds quite precisely to the Figure of Zarathustra within the metaphysics of the will to power. His advent manifests power as a will to enthrall the world, as a “total mobilization.” In The Worker, Jünger observes: “Technology is the means by which the Figure of the Worker mobilizes the world.” Work is deployed on a planetary scale under the direction of the will to power.

Of course, Heidegger is not unaware that Jünger’s view of technology had evolved. Jünger first had a revelation of the importance of technology through a concrete experience: the technological battles of the First World War. He then explored, not without reason, the sentiment that the reign of technology would inaugurate a new age of humanity. He assimilated this reign to the domination of the Figure of the Worker, thinking that only such a Figure could be opposed on a worldwide scale to that of the Bourgeois. On this point, Jünger was mistaken, and he later recognized his error. Lastly, his opinion on technology itself changed—perhaps under the influence of his brother, Friedrich Georg, author of The Perfection of Technique, 1946.[4] After 1945, Jünger clearly related nihilism to the “titanism” of a technology that, as a will to dominate the world, man, and nature, follows its own course without anything being able to stop it.[5] Technology obeys only its own rules, its most intimate law consisting in the equivalence of the possible and the desirable: all that is technologically feasible will be realized in deed.

Heidegger praises without reserve the way Jünger, in Total Mobilization (1931),[6] then in The Worker, described what he found “in the light of the Nietzschean project of being as will to power.” Heidegger gives him credit for having finally realized that the reign of technical work belongs to an “active nihilism” that is henceforth deployed on a planetary scale. At the same time, however, Heidegger reproaches Jünger for not having grasped how the “Nietzschean project” continues to prohibit thought about Being, and stresses that The Worker “remains a work whose metaphysics is the fatherland” (p. 212).

Heidegger reproaches Jünger for remaining, throughout his development, in the world of the Figure and of values. The Figure, defined by Jünger as this “calm being” that becomes apparent by giving the world form as a seal leaves its imprint, is indeed nothing but a “metaphysical power.” As Heidegger emphasizes:

The Figure rests on the essential traits of a humanity which, as a subjectum, is at the foundation of all being. . . . It is the presence of a human type (typus) that constitutes the ultimate subjectivity of which the achievement of modern metaphysics marks the appearance and who offers himself in the thought of this metaphysics. (pp. 212–13).

No longer taking part in nihilism still does not mean holding oneself apart from nihilism. The manner in which Jünger proposes “to exit” nihilism—“to listen to the earth,” to try to know “what the earth wants,” while at the same time denouncing the telluric and titanic character of technology—is in this respect revealing.

Jünger writes: “The moment when the line will be crossed will reveal to us a new turning of Being; then what really is will start to shine.” Heidegger answers: “To speak about a ‘turning of Being’ remains a makeshift solution, and thoroughly problematic, because Being resides within the turning, so that this can never first come to ‘Being’ from outside” (p. 229).

Heidegger by no means believes that the “zero line” is from now on behind us. In his eyes, the “consummation” of nihilism does not absolutely represent the end of it:

With the consummation of nihilism begins only the final stage of nihilism, whose zone will be probably of an unaccustomed breadth because it will have been dominated completely by a “normal state” and by the consolidation of this state. This is why the zero line, where the consummation reaches its end, is not yet at all visible at the end. (pp. 209–10)

But he also adds that it is still an error to reason, as Jünger did, as if the “zero line” were a point external to man that man could “cross.” Man himself is the source of the oblivion of Being. He himself is the “zone of the line.” Heidegger adds: “In no case does the line, thought as the sign of the zone of consummated nihilism, lie in front of man as something that one can cross. Then, however, the possibilities of a trans lineam and such a crossing collapse” (p. 233).

But then, if any attempt “to cross the line” remains “condemned to a representation that itself supports the hegemony of the oblivion of Being” (p. 247), how can man hope to finish with nihilism? Heidegger answers: “Instead of wanting to go beyond nihilism, we must finally try to enter in meditation on its essence. This is the first step that will enable us to leave nihilism behind” (p. 247).

Heidegger shares Jünger’s opinion that nihilism is not comparable to evil or a disease. But he gives another significance to this observation. When he asserts that “the essence of nihilism is not nihilistic” (p. 207), he means that the zone of the most extreme danger is also that which saves. The disease can also point towards the cure.

“To enter in meditation” on the essence of nihilism means gives oneself the possibility of an appropriation (Verwindung) of metaphysics. The appropriation of metaphysics is indeed also appropriation of the oblivion of Being—and consequently the possibility of a non-concealment, of a revealing of the truth (aletheia). Jünger wrote that “the difficulty in defining nihilism means that the spirit is unable to represent nothing” (p. 47). Heidegger quotes this sentence to stress the proximity of Being and the essence of nothingness. From this he argues that it is by a meditation on nothing that we will understand what nihilism is, and that it is when we understand what nihilism is that we will be able to overcome the oblivion of Being. Heidegger writes:

Nothing, even if we understand it only in the sense of the total lack of being, belongs, as absence, to Presence as one of its possibilities. So consequently it is nothingness that reigns in the essence of nihilism and that the essence of nothingness belongs to Being, if in addition Being is the destiny of transcendence, it is then the essence of metaphysics that is shown as the place of the essence of nihilism. (p. 236)

The place of the essence of consummate nihilism is thus to be sought “where the essence of metaphysics deploys its extreme possibilities and gathers itself in them” (p. 236). Finally, Heidegger writes, “going beyond nihilism requires that one enter its essence, which, when entered, nullifies the will to go beyond. The appropriation of metaphysics calls thought to a more fundamental recall” (p. 250).

However, to jump the “barrier” that prevents us from entering meditatively into essence of nihilism, it is still necessary to have a word likely to give access to the thought of Being. It is necessary, in other words, to give up the language of metaphysics—which is still that of the will to power, value, and the Figure—because this language, precisely, prohibits access. Heidegger is emphatic:

The only way in which we can reflect upon the essence of nihilism is initially to take the path that leads to the location of the residence of Being. It is only on this path that the question of nothingness can be located. But the question of the residence of Being withers if it does not abandon the language of metaphysics, because  metaphysical representation prohibits thinking the question of the residence of Being.

However, it is precisely there that Heidegger reproaches Jünger: he reproaches him for asking about nihilism in terms of thought and discourse that remain tributaries to the essence of metaphysics. Insofar as he continues to think and express himself in the language of metaphysics, which is the place of the essence of nihilism, Jünger makes it impossible for him to solve the problem he has posed. Heidegger asks:

In which language speaks the thought whose fundamental plan sketches a crossing of the line? Must the language of the metaphysics of the will to power, of the Figure, and of value be still preserved on the other side of the critical line? And is the language, precisely, of metaphysics, and this metaphysics itself (whether it is of the living God or the dead God) constituted as metaphysics, the barrier that prohibits the passage of the line, i.e., going beyond nihilism? (pp. 224–25)

Thus we cannot enter the essence of nihilism as long as we continue to express ourselves in its language. This is why Heidegger calls for a “change of saying,” for a “change in the relation to the essence of speech.” He calls for a saying that is necessary to overcome the oblivion of Being. Because this saying corresponds to the essence of Being, it can make Being’s essence accessible to thought. It invites Being “to say thought,” while specifying that “this saying is not the expression of thought, but is thought itself, its course and its song” (p. 249). It is necessary, he concludes, to make a “test of saying which is that of faithful thought.” It is necessary “to work on the path.”

How to conclude? I spoke of a “dialogue” between Jünger and Heidegger in connection with nihilism, but this term is not completely appropriate. Heidegger and Jünger often depart from analogous premises, but they arrive at partly opposed conclusions. They both agree that nihilism finds its most solid support in modern technology, but they do not have the same idea of it. For Jünger, technology is above all “titanic” in essence, whereas for Heidegger it is realized metaphysics. Jünger sees in nihilism the opposite of the values of Western and Christian metaphysics. Heidegger sees it as the ultimate consequence of these same values. Jünger is limited to knowing if man, in his relationship with nihilism, has “crossed the line.” Heidegger invites us to wonder about what “crossing” means. In fact, Heidegger presses Jünger’s work to go further and deeper, to enlarge the perspective of reflection, to invite thought to its own distinct transformation. Jünger suggested a “recourse to the forests” to the “rebels.” Heidegger invites us to take a forest path that leads to the clearing (Lichtung) where the truth (aletheia), unconcealment, finally leaves oblivion, i.e., this millennial erring that has governed the history of Europe, the planetary consummation of which enjoins us today to think of the way out.
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks:
The Diaries of a Dissident National Socialist
Greg Johnson

Heiddeger1,501 words

Spanish translation here

In December of 2013, the German and French press began reporting that Martin Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks (Schwartze Hefte), forthcoming as volumes 94 to 96 of his Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition), contain passages that constitute an anti-Semitic “smoking gun” (or maybe just a smoking chimney).

On Monday, March 3, I received the first volume of the Black Notebooks, more than 500 pages written from 1931 to 1938. The second and third volumes, which have just been released and are in transit, contain writings from 1938 to ’39 and 1940 to ’41. All told, the three volumes contain more than 1,200 pages of Heidegger’s most private philosophical musings, the seeds of many of his contemporary and later lectures and writings.

It turns out that the passages in which Heidegger discusses Jews are found in the second and third volumes of the Black Notebooks (as well as in volume 97 of the Gesamtausgabe). Professor Peter Trawny, the editor of the Black Notebooks, has also written a small volume, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy), which is due out this spring and which quotes and discusses the passages on Jews from volumes 95 to 97.

I will read and review these books in good time, but based on the quotes leaked so far, I predict that these passages will do little harm to Heidegger’s philosophical reputation.

Heidegger is still the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, despite the fact that it has long been known that he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1933 and remained a member until 1945. It has, moreover, long been known that Heidegger spoke against the “Jewification of German intellectual life” (Verjudung des deutschen Geisteslebens). But, we are told, Heidegger was only a “spiritual” or “cultural” anti-Semite rather than a racial one. Beyond that, Heidegger opposed displays of vulgar and petty anti-Semitism while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg. It is also cited in Heidegger’s defense that he cheated on his German wife with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, and with Elisabeth Blochmann, who was half-Jewish.

In sum, his defenders argue that Heidegger may have been a National Socialist, but he was never a particularly orthodox one, because the National Socialist ideology did not cohere with Heidegger’s own philosophy. And it is Heidegger’s philosophy that is of permanent importance, not his temporary dalliance with National Socialism.

Now, however, based on leaked lines from the Black Notebooks (that maybe amount to 1 or 2 pages out of 1,200), Heidegger’s detractors are claiming that this proves that anti-Semitism was not just a matter of “private insights” but that it is “tied to his philosophy,” indeed it is at the “core” of Heidegger’s thought, that Heidegger’s Nazi problem is “deeper” and “bigger” than had been thought, that this constitutes a “debacle” for contemporary Continental philosophy, and that from now on, it will be “hard to defend” Heidegger.

Of course we need to take this all with a grain of salt, since the sources of these comments are (1) Heidegger’s publishers, who, I believe, are cynically using this controversy — abetted by Heidegger’s gleeful detractors — to create advance publicity and sell books — and with great success, since before they were even released, the Black Notebooks were philosophical bestsellers on Amazon.de; (2) Heidegger’s editor Peter Trawny, who has a book of his own to sell; and (3) journalists who love controversies.

I predict that after Heidegger’s actual remarks and Trawny’s commentary are finally released, and hundreds of thousands of Euros have changed hands, and thousands of readers have weighed the evidence: (1) we will have learned some new details about Heidegger and the Jews but nothing that will alter the existing picture, (2) both Heidegger’s defenders and detractors will be confirmed in their existing opinions, and (3) and some observers of the intellectual hysteria and thuggery surrounding even a whisper of anti-Semitism might conclude that Jewish power and freedom of thought are incompatible. That conclusion certainly began dawning on me as I read my way through the last controversy about Heidegger and National Socialism, which was launched in 1987 by Victor Farias’ Heidegger y el Nazismo.

For what it’s worth, I think it is a mistake to frame the Heidegger-National Socialism question as a matter of whether National Socialism was “inside” or “outside” Heidegger’s philosophy. It is clear that Heidegger thought that National Socialism was “outside” his philosophy — or any philosophy, for that matter, i.e., that it was a movement containing many conflicting and confused intellectual strands.

The real issue is whether Heidegger thought that his philosophy could transform National Socialism into an intellectually coherent, philosophically grounded movement, a movement that understood its “inner truth and greatness” (as he put it in 1935), namely the confrontation of historical man with global technological civilization.

And the answer to this question is clearly: yes. Heidegger thought that his philosophy could provide the foundations for a kind of National Socialism — which is, by the way, one of the reasons for his enduring influence on the New Right.

Now it appears that Heidegger also turned his attention to the Jewish question. Again, it is a mistake to read too much into a few leaked lines, but we are told, for instance, that Heidegger speaks of Jews as “rootless” and “calculating,” which for Heidegger are general traits of modernity. But it is not yet clear whether Heidegger regarded Jews as the subjects or the objects of modernity, or both.

Heidegger apparently regarded Jews as hypocritical insofar as they live according to the principle of race (Rasseprinzip) but attack Germans for seeking to do the same. Heidegger also reportedly notes that Jews foment wars to advance their interests but are loath to shed their own blood.

Such remarks instantaneously transform modern liberal journalists into elderly Victorian spinsters, clutching invisible cameo brooches at their throats as their cheeks blanch (the original meaning of “appalled”) and all ratiocination is paralyzed by the vapors. But a quick comparison of Jewish political preferences in the United States and Israel proves the hypocrisy charge, and a cursory knowledge of Jewish lobbying for the US to attack Iraq, Iran, and Syria proves the warmongering charge. Nothing, apparently, has changed.

In the initial reception of the Black Notebooks — as with everything else in European and American life — the tiny Jewish tail is wagging the dog. But when scholars turn their attention from a few sentences about Jews to the 1,200+ pages of other material in the Black Notebooks, the contrived controversy about anti-Semitism will be quickly forgotten. For, judging from the first volume, there are materials here of far greater importance.

For instance, in volume one, the second notebook (entitled Überlegungen und Winke [Reflections and Hints] III) begins in the fall of 1932 and runs through the spring of 1934, i.e., the entire period of Heidegger’s most intense political involvement with National Socialism and his Rectorship at the University of Freiburg. It is, in truth, the diary of a dissident National Socialist.

The opening words express high hopes: “A glorious awakening popular will stands in a great world darkness” (p. 109). Heidegger outlines plans for reforming the university system. But he had far greater ambitions than that, namely, to put National Socialism upon firm philosophical foundations, namely, his own philosophical foundations: “The metaphysics of Dasein must according to its innermost structure deepen and broaden into a metapolitics ‘of’ the historical people” (p. 124).

Heidegger records his frustrations with “vulgar National Socialism” (p. 142) — a mass movement based in biological racism. He analyzes such basic concepts as the “people” (Volk), “socialism,” “wholeness” (Ganzheit), and the masses. He remarks that “National Socialism is a barbaric principle” (p. 194) and that “National Socialism in its present form is scarcely a ‘worldview,’ and if it persists in its present ‘form’ can never become one” (p. 196).

Heidegger also records his frustration with the Rectorship, which eventually led to his resignation. On April 28, 1934, the day after his resignation was accepted, he writes “The end of the Rectorate . . . Long live mediocrity and clamor [Lärm]!” (p. 162). The final page is a confession of despair: “‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’ [the title of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address] or — the small intermezzo in a great error” (p. 198). He foresees the complete absorption of the university by technical-instrumental modernity — and, by implication, the absorption of National Socialism itself, betraying its potential to offer a real alternative.

Scholars will be discussing these and other issues raised by the Black Notebooks long after the Lärm about anti-Semitism has died away.

Judging from the first volume, the Black Notebooks are where Heidegger initially drafted many of the ideas that characterize his later thinking. And, as with his lecture courses, they are expressed with great clarity and directness, poles apart from the contrived obscurity of many of the works he published in his lifetime, as well as posthumous works like Contributions to Philosophy, all of which read “like some evil incantation in gibberish,” as Flannery O’Connor put it in “Good Country People.”

Heidegger stipulated that the Black Notebooks and related texts be published only at the end of this Complete Edition. I think he was saving the best for last.
Q&A about Heidegger
Jonathan Bowden

1,527 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcription by V. S. of the Q&A session after Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on Martin Heidegger, which has recently been published in Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics. — Greg Johnson

Q: I’ve noticed that Leftists systematically completely misunderstand what Heidegger meant by “nihilism.” 

JB: Yes.

Q: In his conversations with Ernst Jünger, I think it was, he talks about how Jünger must inevitably pass through a period of nihilism. You know, it’s not that it’s good or bad. It’s just inevitable. You know, the question is whether or not he’ll come out the other side or not.

Now, I read that long, long ago before I ever tried to read Heidegger’s texts. Leftists, who have a prior investment in the idea that Nazism and Hitler in particular were nihilists in their point of view, they insist that Hitler had no principles, no values, and no ideals. He was simply a manipulator. Massive texts like Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler were produced specifically to sell this idea that Hitler was a soulless manipulator. So, Leftists, having that background, when they read Heidegger’s remarks about the spirit of nihilism they think that it’s Hitler he’s referring to, but in fact it’s precisely the opposite.

Heidegger, I think, saw Nazism as a defense of Europe against nihilism. I mean, nihilism is related to Communism in the thought of that period. Communism is a reduction not just of ethics but of all philosophical categories to zero. So, the fight against nihilism, in his mind, would have been very similar to the fight against Communism, in Hitler’s mind, don’t you agree?

JB: Yes. And it also relates to ascetic ideas within religiosity. A soul, or an inner consciousness let’s say, a higher inner consciousness, fights against non-belief, against doubt, against unbelief, and so does a civilization. It wrestles with the prospect of meaning as absence, because if you can’t have that counter-proposition before you, like darkness and light or life and death, you can’t think without an oppositional polarity. Much of Western thinking proceeds oppositionally, proceeds by wrestling with that which needs to be overcome, because the idea of nihilism . . . Which in itself is also a very complicated idea, because is it possible for any period of time, for a group, or even for an individual to sustain what nihilism really means: the prospect of believing that everything is purposeless? Even the Sartrean idea that you step back from purposelessness and volitionalize it through commitment, again, is a denial of nihilism. He’s gone there and doesn’t want to stay.

Q: I think the relationship with Communism might lie in dualism. You probably might agree here, because you said something that suggested you’re a materialist yourself.

JB: Well, a Nietzschean.

Q: Well, the person who comes to mind is not really an ideal example, but Guénon, who argues in The Reign of Quantity and books like that that materialism is really a state in the process of reduction of the universe to absolute zero, to nil. I mean, it’s naturally the last stop before nothingness.

JB: Yes, Heidegger is within the discourse of Continental, advanced Western philosophizing a Perennialist and a Traditionalist, really, for whom the most agreeable semiotic of truth and purpose probably would be the Catholicism of his youth. But in actual fact, he doesn’t want to get belabored by that. He would much rather approach the entire question theoretically.

Yes, the interesting thing for most of our species though is that . . . Look at the Muslim world now. One truth, one purpose, death to those who are excluded from it, at least in accordance with certain definitions of it in a militant vanguard way. That is a type of militantly essentialist that the Western mind, in my view, can’t encompass. It’s not that it’s cretinous. It’s just that it’s not the way we perceive reality.

I knew certain Catholics who went and became Muslims after Vatican II. They left the Catholic Church because they wanted an absolute structure. They didn’t want any revisionism, if you like, within Christianity at all. They had to have total and utter certainty. And these were advanced people. These weren’t people lying in the sand being told what to think by a bloke who’s up there with a beard, you know. These are people who almost need that degree of certainty.

Most people are comfortable with no certainty at all. Liberals can live with unbelievable areas of uncertainty. Even the language they use. They’ll say, “Well, I do agree with you, but on the other hand there’s this proposition here but he’s got another view and, of course, that needs to be canvassed for reasons of inclusion.” And they’re hopping all over, because they can never draw it down.

Sometimes materiality is necessary, actually, to deal with elements of casuistry and relativism of the moment. Do you see what I mean? That it’s part of a concretization because liberalism itself has become so deconstructed even of itself, because I think contemporary post-modern liberal ideas are devouring themselves at a level of theory. They’re eating themselves up and, of course, there will come a moment when you do eat yourself completely and the only way to go forwards — the interesting notion of the avant garde in the last 200 years — the only way to go forwards will be to go back. Can’t go forwards any further. You’re never going to progress at all.

We believe in the idea that we should progress. In that sense, I’ve always resisted the notion that people well to the Right of that, which is regarded as centrist or even moderately Right-wing, are reactionaries. We want to progress in another area and go in another direction, and I personally think that these philosophical matters are of crucial importance, which is why at the material and political level, if you wanted to use this terminology, Heidegger made an extreme choice and, although an anti-existentialist theoretically, look at the choice he made, because that choice in ’33 wasn’t just to fit in cynically with the regime that had come in. It was a sort of total choice, a religious choice, really.

I suppose Evola’s partiality for the governments in both Germany and Italy, probably deep down more the one in Germany than in Italy really, was of a similar order. I think Evola said several things that in correlation to modernity there were several responses. One of which was to just join in, I suppose, one was to kill yourself and be done with it, one was to ground yourself in the essential purpose of prior traditions which were transcendental in character, and the other is Nietzscheanism, let’s put it that way. Sort of power morality and the prospect of self-transcendence outside systems in a world where all systems have collapsed or seem to have collapsed.

Q: I gather Italian Fascism is more based on Hegel via Giovanni Gentile.

JB: That’s right!

Q: So, that’s a big difference.

JB: Yes.

Q: You could say that as a kind of postscript about Hegel there.

JB: Criticizing him, yes.

Q: It is still possible to take Hegel seriously, in my view.

JB: Yes, the Italians did and . . .

Q: What’s the Hegel postscript?

JB: Let’s have a look.

Q: What? Hegel undermines what Heidegger was saying?

JB: No, that Hegel had interesting ideas about the conception of time and the ideas between time and spirit (Geist), but at the same time in some ways Heidegger is in a crude way playing whist, somebody who’s got a good hand that he produces an ace at the end and puts it down to say, “I’ve won this round.” So, there’s a little bit of that and that is in a sense Heidegger’s human element. The humanism of a non-humanist, if you like, the fact he could care what other intellectuals said about him and went to war ferociously against other detractors, of whom there were many.

Adorno was asked by a woman at a party once, she said, “Well, at least Heidegger, Professor Adorno, has placed man before death.” And he said, “Ludendorff did that.” Which is a good answer, you know, but so what? This is just salon talk, isn’t it really? In a way, Adorno is another rival absolute. Adorno sits there, you see those photos of him with one hand cupped in his face saying, “It’s all misery. The culture industry is everywhere. Everything is destroyed.” Interesting streak of conservatism in this high Marxist, if you like. Adorno is there, “Poetry after Auschwitz shouldn’t even be permitted,” which is one of his famous lines from Minima Moralia. “We should have no glory again because there’s been a few massacres.”

Well! Heidegger’s response would be, if he bothered to look at these things at all, that massacres are just a speeded-up process anyway, because life will end in the massacre of death, if you like. So, there’s a degree to which he would regard that as a moralistic and slightly bitter-minded remark outside the scope of true study, basically.

Anyone else got any questions, as the glasses are collected?

Q: Thank you very much, Jonathan!
Heidegger “The Nazi”:
Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy . . .
Michael O'Meara

4,070 words

Emanuel Faye
Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935
Trans. Michael B. Smith, foreword Tom Rockmore
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

National Socialism was defeated on the field of battle, but it wasn’t defeated in the realm of thought.

Indeed, it’s undefeatable there because the only thing its enemies can do to counter its insidious ideas is to ban those thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, whose works might attract those wanting to know why National Socialism is undefeatable and why its world view continues to seduce the incredulous.

Or, at least, so thinks Emmanuel Faye in his recently translated Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

Why, though, all this alarmed concern about a difficult, some say unreadable, philosopher of the last century?

The reason, Tom Rockmore says, is that he lent “philosophical cover to some of the darkest impulses that later led to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.”

One.
The Scandal

Faye’s book is part of a larger publishing phenomenon — in all the major European languages — related to the alleged National Socialism of the great Freiburg philosopher.

Like many prominent German academics of his age, Heidegger joined Hitler’s NSDAP shortly after the National Revolution of 1933.

He was subsequently made rector of the University of Freiburg, partly on the basis of his party affiliation, and in a famous rectorial address — “The Self-Assertion of the German University” — proposed certain reforms that sought to free German universities from “Jewish and modernist influences,” reorienting it in this way to the needs and destiny of the newly liberated Volksgemeinschaft.

Heidegger’s role as a public advocate of National Socialist principles did not, however, last very long. Within a year of his appointment, he resigned the rectorship.

As he told the de-Nazification tribunal in 1945, his resignation was due to his frustration in preventing state interference in university affairs, a frustration that soon turned him away from all political engagements.

The story he told to the liberal inquisitors (which most Heideggerians accepted up to about 1988) was one in which a politically naive academic, swept up in the revolution’s excitement, had impulsively joined the party, only to become quickly disillusioned.

The story’s “dissimulations and falsehoods” were, indeed, good enough to spare him detention in a Yankee prison — unlike, say, Carl Schmitt who was incarcerated for two years after the war (though the only “Americans” Schmitt ever encountered there were German Jews in the conquerors’ uniform) — but not good enough to avoid a five-year ban on teaching.

In any case, it has always been known that Heidegger had at least a brief “flirtation” with “Nazism.”

Given the so-called “negligibility” of his National Socialism, he was able, after his ban, to resume his position as Germany’s leading philosopher. By the time of his death (1976), he had become the most influential philosopher in the Western world. His books have since been translated into all the European languages (and some non-European ones), his ideas have come to dominate contemporary continental thought, and they have even established a beachhead in the stultifying world of the Anglo-American academy, renowned for its indifference to philosophical issues.

Despite Heidegger’s enormous influence as “the century’s greatest philosopher,” he never quite shed the stigma of his early brush with National Socialism. This was especially the case after 1987 and 1988.

For in late 1987 a little known Chilean-Jewish scholar, Victor Farìas, produced the first book-length examination of Heidegger’s “brush” with National Socialist politics.

His Heidegger and Nazism was not a particularly well-researched work, and there was a good deal of speculation and error in it.

It nevertheless blew apart the story Heidegger had told his American inquisitors in 1945, revealing that he had been a party member between 1933 and 1945; that his National Socialism was something more than the flirtation of a politically naive philosopher; and that his affiliation with the Third Reich was anything but “fleeting, casual, or accidental but [rather] central to his philosophical enterprise.”

This “revelation” — that the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century had been a devoted Hitlerite — provoked a worldwide scandal.

In the year following Farìas’ work, at least seven books appeared on the subject.

The most impressive of these was by Hugo Ott, a German historian, whose Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1994) lent a good deal of historically-documented substance to Farìas’ charges.

In the decades since the appearance of Farìas’ and Ott’s work, a “slew” of books and articles (no one is counting any more) have continued to probe the dark recesses of Heidegger’s scandalous politics.

Almost every work in the vast literature devoted to Heideggerian philosophy must now, in testament to the impact of these studies, begin with some sort of “reckoning” with his “Nazism” — a reckoning that usually ends up erecting a wall between his philosophy and his politics.

In this context, Emmanuel Faye’s book is presently being touted as the “best researched and most damaging” work on Heidegger’s National Socialism — one that aims to tear down the wall compartmentalizing his politics and to brand him, once and for all, as an apologist for “the greatest crime of the 20th century.”

It’s fitting that Faye, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, is French, for nowhere else have Heidegger’s ideas been as influential as in France.

Heidegger began appearing in French translation as early as the late 1930s. The publication in 1943 of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, based on a misreading of Heidegger, gave birth to “existentialism,” which dominated Western thought in the late 1940s and 1950s, helping thus to popularize certain Heideggerian ideas.

At the same time, French thinkers were the first to pursue the issue of Heidegger’s alleged National Socialism.

Karl Löwith, one of the philosopher’s former Jewish students exiled in France, argued in 1946 that Heidegger’s politics was inseparable from his philosophical thought. Others soon joined him in making similar arguments.

Though Löwith’s critique of Heidegger appeared in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre’s famous journal, the ensuing, often quite heated, French controversy was mainly restricted to scholarly journals. Faye’s father, Jean-Pierre Faye, also a philosopher, figured prominently in these debates during the 1960s.

It was, though, only with Farìas and Ott that the debate over Heidegger’s relationship to the Third Reich spread beyond the academic journals and touched the larger intellectual public.

This debate continues to this day.

Part of the difficulty in determining the exact degree and nature of Heidegger’s political commitment after 1933 is due to the fact that Heidegger’s thought bears on virtually every realm of contemporary European intellectual endeavor, on the right as well as the left, and that there’s been, as a consequence, a thoughtful unwillingness to see Heidegger’s National Socialism as anything other than contingent — and thus without philosophical implication.

This unwillingness has been compounded by the fact that the Heidegger archives at Marbach are under the control of Heidegger’s son, Hermann, who controls scholarly access to them, hindering, supposedly, an authoritative account of Heidegger’s thinking in the period 1933-1945.

Moreover, only eighty of the planned 102 volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe have thus far appeared and, as Faye contends, these are not “complete,” for the family has allegedly prevented the more “compromising” works from being published.

The authority of Faye’s Heidegger — which endeavors to eliminate everything separating his politics from his philosophy — rests on two previously unavailable seminars reports from the key 1933-34 period, as well as certain documents, letters, and other evidence, which have appeared in little known or obscure German publications — evidence he sees as “proving” that Heidegger’s “Nazism” was anything but contingent — and that this “Nazism” was, in fact, not only inseparable from his thought, but formative of its core.

On this basis, along with Heidegger’s collaboration with certain NSDAP thinkers, Faye claims that the philosophy of the famous Swabian is so infused with National Socialist principles that it ought no longer to be treated as philosophy at all, but, instead, banned as “Nazi propaganda.”

Two.
Faye’s Argument

Heidegger’s seminars of 1933 and 1934, in Emmanuel Faye’s view, expose the “fiction” that separates Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics. For these seminars reveal a brown-shirted fanatic who threw himself into the National Revolution, hoping to become Hitler’s philosophical mentor.

At the same time, Faye argues that Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, particularly his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was already infected with pre-fascist ideas, just as his postwar work, however much it may have resorted to a slightly different terminology, would continue to propagate National Socialist principles.

Earlier, however, when the young Heidegger was establishing himself in the world of German academic philosophy (the 1920s), there is very little public evidence of racial or anti-Jewish bias in his work. To explain this, Faye quotes Heidegger to the effect that “he wasn’t going to say what he thought until after he became a full professor.” His reticence on these matters was especially necessary given that his “mentor,” Edmund Husserl, was Jewish and that he needed Husserl’s support to replace him at Freiburg.

(For those militant Judeophobes who might think this is somehow compromising, let me point out that Wilhelm Stapel [1882-1954], after also doing a doctorate in Husserlian phenomenology, was a Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic associate of the Conservative Revolution who played an important early role in NSDAP politics.)

Faye nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s early ideas, especially those of Being and Time, were already disposed to themes and principles that were National Socialist in nature.

In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental analytic, Husserlian phenomenology — along with every other bloodless rationalism dominating Western thought since the 18th century — for the sake of an analysis based on “existentials” (i.e., on man’s being in the world).

Like other intellectual members of Hitler’s party, Heidegger disparaged all forms of universalist thought, dismissing not only notions of man as an individual, but notions of the human spirit as pure intellect and reason.

In repudiating universalist, humanist, and individualist thought associated with liberal modernity, Faye’s Heidegger is seen not as contesting the underlying principles of liberal modernity, which he, as a former Catholic traditionalist, thought responsible for the alienation, rootlessness, and meaninglessness of the contemporary world. Rather he is depicted as preparing the way for the “Nazi” notion of an organic national community (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial and anti-Jewish criteria.

Revealingly, this is about as far as Faye goes in treating Heidegger’s early thought. In fact, there is very little philosophical analysis at all of Being and Time or any other work in his book. Every damning criticism he makes of Heidegger is based on Heidegger’s so-called affinity with National Socialist themes or ideas — or what a liberal defending a Communist would call guilt by association.

Worse, Faye lacks any historical understanding of National Socialism, failing to see it as part of a larger anti-liberal movement that had emerged before Hitler was even born and which influenced Heidegger long before he had heard of the Führer.

For our crusading anti-fascist professor, however, the anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and anti-modern contours of Heideggerian thought are simply Hitlerian — because of their later association with Hitler’s movement — unrelated to whatever earlier influences that may have affected the development of his thought. Q.E.D.

Faye, though, fails to make the case that Heidegger’s pre-1933 thought was “Nazi,” both because he’s indifferent to Heidegger’s philosophical argument in Being and Time, which he dismisses in a series of rhetorical strokes, and, secondarily, because he doesn’t understand the historical/cultural context in which Heidegger worked out his thought.

More generally, he claims Heidegger negated “the human truths that are the underlying principle of philosophy” simply because whatever doesn’t accord with Faye’s own liberal understanding of philosophy (which, incidentally, rationalizes the radical destructurations that have come with the “Disneyfication, MacDonaldization, and globalization” of our coffee-colored world) is treated as inherently suspect.

Only on the basis of the 1933-34 and ‘34-35 seminars does Faye have a case to make.

For the Winter term of 1933-34 Heidegger led a seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State.” If Faye’s account of the unpublished seminar report is accurate (and it’s hard to say given the endless exaggerations and distortions that run through his book), Heidegger outdid himself in presenting National Socialist doctrines as the philosophical basis for the new relationship that was to develop between the German people and their new state.

Like other National Socialists, Heidegger in this seminar views the “people” in völkisch terms presuming their “unity of blood and stock.”

Faye is particularly scandalized by the fact that Heidegger values the “people” (Volk) more than the “individual” and that the people, as an organic community of blood and spirit, excludes Jews and exalts its own particularity.

In this seminar, Heidegger goes even further, calling for a “Germanic state for the German nation,” extending his racial notion of the people to the political system, as he envisages the “will of the people” as finding embodiment in the will of the state’s leader (Führer).

Faye contends that people and state exist for Heidegger in the same relation as beings exist in relation to Being.

As such, Heidegger links ontology to politics, as the “question of all questions” (the “question of being”) is identified with the question of Germany’s political destiny.

Heidegger’s rejection of the humanist notion of the individual and of Enlightenment universalism in his treatment of Volk and Staat are, Faye thinks, synonymous with Hitlerism.

Though Faye’s argument here is more credible, it might also be pointed out that Heidegger’s privileging of the national community over the interests and freedoms of the individual has a long genealogy in German thought (unlike Anglo-American thought, which privileges the rational individual seeking to maximize his self-interest in the market).

The second seminar, in the Winter term of 1934-35, “On the State: Hegel,” again supports Faye’s case that Heidegger was essentially a “Nazi” propagandist and not a true philosopher. For in this seminar, he affirms the spirit of the new National Socialist state in Hegelian terms, spreading the “racist and human-life destroying conceptions that make up the foundations of Hitlerism.”

In both courses, Faye sees Heidegger associating and merging philosophy with National Socialism.

For this reason, his work ought not to be considered a philosophy at all, but rather a noxious political ideology.

Faye, in fact, cannot understand how Heidegger’s insidious project has managed to “procure a planetary public” or why he is so widely accepted as a great philosopher.

Apparently, Heidegger had the power to seduce the public — though on the basis of Faye’s account, it’s difficult to see how the political hack he describes could have pulled this off.

In any case, Faye warns that if Heidegger isn’t exposed for the political charlatan he is, terrible things are again possible. “Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”

Three.
Race and State

Martin Heidegger, 1889 – 1976

From the above, the reader might conclude that Faye’s Heidegger is a wreck of a book. And, in large part, it is, as I will discuss in the conclusion.

However, even the most disastrous wrecks (and this one bears the impressive moniker of Yale University Press) usually leave something to be salvaged. There are, as such, discussions on the subjects of “race” and “the state,” which I thought might interest TOQ readers.

A) Race

National Socialism, especially its Hitlerian distillation, was a racial nationalism.

Yet Heidegger, as even his enemies acknowledge, was contemptuous of what at the time was called “biologism.”

Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.

Quite naturally, Heidegger’s anti-biologism was a problem for Faye, for how was it possible to claim that Heidegger was a “Nazi racist,” if he rejected this seemingly defining aspect of racial thought?

In an earlier piece (”Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” TOQ, vol. 6, no. 3), I reconstructed the racial dimension of Heidegger’s thought solely on the basis of his philosophy.

But Faye, who obviously doesn’t put the same credence in Heidegger’s thought, is forced, as an alternative, to historically investigate the different currents of NSDAP racial doctrine.

In his account (which should be taken as suggestive rather than authoritative), the party, in the year after the revolution, divided into two camps vis-à-vis racial matters: the camp of the Nordicists and that of the Germanists.

The Nordicists were led by Hans K. Günther, a former philologist, and had a “biologist” notion of race, based on evolutionary biology, which sought, through eugenics, to enhance the “Nordic blood” in the German population.

By contrast, the Germanists, led by the biologist Fritz Merkenschlager and supported especially by the less Nordic South Germans, held that blood implied spirit and that spirit played the greater role in determining a people’s character. (This ought not to be confused with Klages’ “psychologism.”)

The Germanists, as such, pointed out that Scandinavians were far more Nordic than Germans, yet their greater racial “purity” did not make them a greater people than the Germans, as Günther’s criteria would lead one to believe.

Rather, it was the Germans’ extraordinary Prussian spirit (this wonder of nature and Being) that made them a great nation.

This is not to say that the Germanists rejected the corporal or biological basis of their Volk — only that they believed their people’s blood could not be separated from their spirit without misunderstanding what makes them a people.

For the Germanists, then, race was not exclusively a matter of biological considerations alone, as Günther held, but rather a matter of blood and spirit.

(As an aside, I might mention that Julius Evola, whose idea of race represents, in my view, the highest point in the development of 20th-century racial thought, was much influenced by this debate, especially by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, whose raciology was a key component of the Germanist conception, emphasizing as it does the fact that one’s idea of race is ultimately determined by one’s conception of human being.)

Faye claims that, in a speech delivered in August 1933, Hitler emphasized the spiritual determinants of race, in language similar to Heidegger’s, and that he thus came down on the side of the Germanists.

The key point here is that, for Faye, the “völkisch racism” of the Germanists was no less “racist” than that of the biological racialists — implying that Heidegger’s Germanism was also as “racist.”

The Germanist conception, I might add, was especially well-suited to a “blubo” (a Blut-und-Boden nationalist) like Heidegger. Seeing man as Dasein (a being-there), situated not only in a specific life world (Umwelt), but in exchange with beings (Mitdasein) specific to his kind, his existence has meaning only in terms of the particularities native to his milieu, (which is why Heidegger rejected universalism and the individualist conception of man as a free-floating consciousness motivated strictly by reason or self-interest).

Darwinian conceptions of race for Heidegger, as they were for other Germanists in the NSDAP, represented another form of liberalism, based on individualistic and universalist notions of man that reduced him to a disembedded object — refusing to recognize those matters, which, even more than strictly biological differences, make one people unlike another.

Without this recognition, Germanists held that “the Prussian aristocracy was no different from apples on a tree.”

B) The State

As a National Socialist, Faye’s Heidegger was above all concerned with lending legitimacy to the new Führer state.

To this end, Heidegger turned to Carl Schmitt, another of those “Nazi” intellectuals, who, for reasons that are beyond Faye’s ken, is seen by many as a great political thinker.

In his seminar on Hegel, Heidegger, accordingly, begins with the 1933 third edition of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1927).

There Schmitt defines the concept of the state in terms of the political — and the political as those actions and motives that determine who the state’s “friends” and who its “enemies” are.

But though Heidegger begins with Schmitt, he nevertheless tries to go beyond his concept of the political.

Accepting that the “political” constitutes the essence of the state, Heidegger contends that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is secondary to the actual historical self-affirmation of a people’s being that goes into founding a state true to the nation.

In Heidegger’s view, Schmitt’s concept presupposes a people’s historical self-affirmation and is thus not fundamental but derivative.

It is worth quoting Heidegger here:

There is only friend and enemy where there is self-affirmation. The affirmation of self [i.e., the Volk] taken in this sense requires a specific conception of the historical being of a people and of the state itself. Because the state is that self-affirmation of the historical being of a people and because the state can be called polis, the political consequently appears as the friend/enemy relation. But that relation is not the political.

Rather, it follows the prior self-affirmation.

For libertarians and anarchists in our ranks, Heidegger’s modification of Schmitt’s proposition is probably beside the point.

But for a statist like myself, who believes a future white homeland in North America is inconceivable without a strong centralized political system to defend it, Heidegger’s modification of the Schmittian concept is a welcome affirmation of the state, seeing it as a necessary stage in a people’s self-assertion.

Four.
Conclusion

From the above, it should be obvious that Faye’s Heidegger is not quite the definitive interpretation that his promoters make it out to be.

Specifically, there is little that is philosophical in his critique of Heidegger’s philosophy and, relying on his moralizing attitude rather than on a philosophical deconstruction of Heidegger’s work, he ends up failing to make the argument he seeks to make.

If Faye’s reading of the seminars of 1933-34 are correct, than Heidegger was quite obviously more of a National Socialist than he let on. But this was already known in 1987-88.

Faye also claims that Heidegger’s pioneering work of the 1920s anticipated the National Socialist ideas he developed in the seminars of 1933-34 and that his postwar work simply continued, in a modified guise, what had begun earlier. This claim, though, is rhetorically asserted rather than demonstrated.

Worse, Faye ends up contradicting what he sets out to accomplish. For his criticism of Heidegger is little more than an ad hominem attack, which assumes that the negative adjectives (”abhorrent,” “appalling,” “monstrous,” “dangerous,” etc) he uses to describe his subject are a substitute for either a proper philosophical critique or a historical analysis.

In thus failing to refute the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s National Socialism, his argument fails, in effect.

But even if his adjectives were just, it doesn’t change the fact that however “immoral” a philosopher may be, he is nevertheless still a philosopher. Faye here makes a “category mistake” that confuses the standards of philosophy with those of morality. Besides, Heidegger was right in terms of his morals.

Faye is also a poor example of the philosophical rationalism that he offers as an alternative to Heidegger’s allegedly “irrational” philosophy — a rationalism whose enlightenment has been evident in the great fortunes that Jews have made from it.

Finally, in insisting that Heidegger be banned because of his fascist politics, Faye commits the “sin” that virtuous anti-fascists always accuse their opponents of committing.

In a word, Faye’s Heidegger is something of a hatchet job that, ultimately, reflects more on its author’s peculiarities than on his subject.

Yet after saying this, let me confess that though Faye makes a shoddy argument that doesn’t prove what he thinks he proves, he is nevertheless probably right in seeing Heidegger as a “Nazi.” He simply doesn’t know how to make his case — or maybe he simply doesn’t want to spend the years it takes to “master” Heidegger’s thought.

Even more ironic is the scandal of Heidegger’s “Nazism” seen from outside Faye’s liberal paradigm. For in this optic, the scandal is not that Heidegger was a National Socialist — but rather that the most powerful philosophical intelligence of the last century believed in this most demonized of all modern ideologies.

But who sees or cares about this real scandal?