The Magazine Litteraire had a nice dossier about Heidegger
last month, heralding, I suppose, the translation of Heidegger’s Black Notebook
into French. Those who keep up with those things will remember that the notebook
is full of pro-Nazi, anti-semitic remarks, and continues in that vein even
after WWII. Heidegger never learned anything.
Which of course leaves a problem for those who think
Heidegger’s philosophy is important. Is it all, as Emmanuel Faye has maintained
for decade, a coded philosophy of fascism? The argument here is pretty much one
of critical integrity: it is disingenuous to leave out what we know about
Heidegger’s naziism when explicating his texts. Faye, though, goes further, and
relates Heidegger’s biggest text, Being and Time, to his naziism as a master
explanation of what is going on. Bourdieu did the same thing. One takes a term
like Sorge, care, and shows how it it is primarily a political, and not as
Heidegger pretends, an existential signifier. In this way, by looking at Sorge
in Nazi texts and in Being and Time, one pierces through to the true meaning of
Heidegger’s text.
This claim would be more convincing, however, if there were
control texts – if we also went through Communist texts, or those in the
journalistic world. Without doing this, we are pre-determining the orientation
towards Naziism.
My own view is that the question of what to make of
Heidegger’s Naziism throws into relief the larger question of how we do philosophical
history. For my money, I’d say we do it badly. It is about great heads, marble
busts lined up one after the other, all engaged only with each other. I think
that philosophy, like any discourse, is less personal than that. Reading Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Bloch and
Benjamin, who were all writing in the 20s, gives one a sense that each writer
is playing a variation of a code that was shared among a certain spectrum of German
intellectuals who were trying to find an escape from the liberal paradigm that broke
down in WWI. Looked at in this way, Heidegger represents the far right part of
that spectrum, whereas people like Lukacs (whose Weber influenced essays, even
before the war, could be read as though they were influenced by a much later
book, Being and Time) represent its changing far left. But Heidegger’s philosophy in almost all its
major moments was easy to capture by leftists as well as rightists. It shows a
misunderstanding, I think, of how philosophy operates – how the special terms
and arguments are affordances that can be radically shifted in various systems
without being negated – to pretend that Heidegger was writing merely for the
cryptofascist crowd. He did, obviously, have the freedom to do so when he was
loose in Hitler’s Germany, but he notoriously failed as the third Reich’s pet
philosopher. The reason for that failure is that the Hitlerians suspected that
vocabulary – they sensed something indelibly Weimarish in it. And they were
right.
There’s a famous story – so I’ve been told – about Michael Dummett.
He was completing a book about Frege’s mathematical philosophy when he read
Frege’s own “black notebook”, his diaries, and found that he was a raving
anti-semite. For a while, supposedly, he laid his work on Frege aside, not
knowing if he should continue it. He finally did continue it.
I like the attacks on Heidegger for his naziism. I would
love to see some more attacking on Locke and Hume for their racism. In Locke’s
case, this wasn’t just a matter of condoning slavery – Locke, as a member of
the board of Trade and Plantations, which supervised Virginia, was instrumental
in coming up with slave codes. This is mentioned in Intro classes to Philosophy
about zero times, in my experience, whereas Heidegger’s Naziism is always
mentioned when he is explained. I would love to see a philosophy magazine
dedicate a dossier to Locke and slavery, but I am pretty sure that is not on
anybody’s agenda.
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