1
Revealing Concealed Nazism
The concern of this book is not with Heidegger's position as a whole, but with the link between his Nazism and that position. Now the theme of his Nazism is only in part visible, because it is mainly hidden, or concealed, in Heidegger's philosophy. An important part of our task will be to reveal Heidegger's Nazism in a way that also preserves the capacity for critical judgment. Much of the Heidegger literature is limited to exegesis in which his disciples, who routinely forgo criticism, expound the "revealed truth."[1] On the contrary, the aim of this essay is to describe, to interpret, and, when necessary, to criticize this aspect of his thought.
We can begin with the description of some of the main obstacles impeding access to Heidegger's philosophical thought—in particular, access to his Nazism. Heidegger was concerned to conceal what he was not obliged to reveal about his Nazism, to provide what can charitably be described as an indulgent, even a distorted view of the historical record and of his thought. Some of Heidegger's closest students, above all Karl Löwith, Otto Pöggeler, and more recently Thomas Sheehan, Theodore Kisiel, and Dominique Janicaud, have scrupulously attempted to disclose the nature and significance of his Nazism. Others, convinced of the importance of Heidegger's thought, have on occasion confused, even clearly identified, allegiance to Heidegger's thought and person with the discovery of the truth. In consequence, a certain number of obstacles, conceptual and otherwise, have arisen which impede an objective discussion of Heidegger's Nazism. In order to discuss this topic, it will be useful to identify the main obstacles. Accordingly, this chapter,
whose intent is prolegomenal, will be devoted to clearing away some of the conceptual underbrush that has in the meantime grown up around the link between Heidegger's Nazism and his philosophy in order to expose this theme for more detailed study.
Concealing and Revealing
In the modern tradition, two of the best-known views of concealment are found in Marx and Freud. On the one hand, there is the Marxian concept of ideology, not to be identified with its Leninist cousin, or any of the myriad variant forms, according to which what Marxists call "bourgeois thought" tends to conceal the true state of society in order to prevent social change.[2] On the other, there is Freud's view of repression based on the complex libidinal economy of psychoanalysis. Now these two forms of concealment may or may not be relevant to Heidegger's thought. The dual insistence by both Ott and Farias on the significance of Heidegger's background depends on a form of the Freudian claim, not obviously inconsistent with Heidegger's own concept of Dasein, that thought is the conscious tip of an unconscious iceberg. Heidegger never tires of repeating that, as existence, Dasein is prior to a rational approach, which emerges only within existence.
To these two forms of concealment Heidegger opposes his own phenomenological view of the problem in the context of his focus on the problem of the meaning of Being, or Seinsfrage . In Being and Time , Heidegger maintains that there is nothing "behind" phenomena, although in the main, phenomena are not given and hence must be elicited by phenomenology.[3] He regards what he calls covered-up-ness, literally concealment, as the counterpart of the phenomenon.[4] Phenomenology in his view is then nothing more than the rendering visible of that which is not visible because covered up or hidden, which in turn leads to his characterization of phenomenological description as interpretation, that is, the hermeneutic that elucidates the authentic structures of Being.
For Heidegger, phenomenological hiddenness, perhaps even hiddenness as such, is either accidental or necessary. A necessary form of hiddenness is grounded in the very being of what is to be elucidated. According to Heidegger, a phenomenon is what shows itself and phenomena can in his words be "brought to light," or shown.[5] In Being and Time , Heidegger develops a view of truth as disclosure (Erschlossenheit ) based on the idea that the phenomenon shows itself.[6] He maintains that an assertion of truth presupposes the uncovering of the entity as it is in itself.[7] According to Heidegger, what he calls Being-uncovering (Entdeckend-sein ) must be literally wrested from the objects.[8] He sums
up his view in two points: First, truth belongs to Dasein. Second, Dasein is fundamentally in truth and in untruth.
The theme of concealment remains important in Heidegger's later writing.[9] He further develops his doctrine of concealment in an important essay "On the Essence of Truth" first published in 1943. Here, in the context of the exposition of his view of truth as disclosure, he maintains that concealment is undisclosedness, hence the untruth intrinsic to the essence of truth.[10] Unlike Hegel, Heidegger does not regard untruth as essentially privative. Heidegger maintains that untruth or concealment is inherent in the nature of truth itself, so that disclosure, which reveals, also conceals. He insists that Dasein is marked by a preservation of untruth as mystery, as well as the flight from mystery toward what is readily available, which he designates as errancy. It is only in his late essay, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," which appeared in 1964, that the doctrine of truth is denied, or at least basically revised. Here, as part of the effort to leave metaphysics and philosophy behind, he argues that uncovering is not truth but makes truth possible:
Insofar as truth is understood in the traditional "natural" sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings demonstrated in beings. but also insofar as truth is interpreted as the certainty of the knowledge of Being, aletheia , unconcealment in the sense of the opening may not be equated with truth. Rather, aletheia , unconcealment as opening. first grants the possibility of truth.[11]
Concealing in Heidegger's Thought
The present effort to elucidate the hidden dimension and philosophical significance of Heidegger's Nazism need not be, but in fact is, consistent with Heidegger's own view of concealment. Now Heidegger's thought is not distinguished by the very need as such to reveal it, since the study of other positions, particularly original theories, often encounters obstacles, linguistic, conceptual, or other, that impede their comprehension. What distinguishes Heidegger's thought is its link to Nazism, which is unprecedented among thinkers of the first rank and even among important philosophers in this century.
In virtue of its novelty, Heidegger's thought in general, not just the link between his thought and his Nazism, is concealed in a variety of ways. In an obvious sense, a thinker who has something importantly new to say, a novel doctrine to propose, a theory that differs in some significant way from other views, cannot be understood quickly. The reason is simply that ideas are always comprehended against a conceptual hori-
zon, a background that acts as its frame of reference. As soon as a position breaks with the familiar conceptual frameworks, either through the introduction of a new form of thought, the denial of an essential element of what we thought we knew, or the reordering of accepted conceptions, then the usual background that serves to promote comprehension is lacking. If a novel view is quickly "understood," then invariably it is misunderstood. Certainly, one should not confuse the claim that a new idea has been grasped with the grasp itself.[12] It is likely that anyone who can be understood immediately is not a novel thinker, although the converse claim does not hold. It is even more likely that a thinker who makes an original contribution is misunderstood in the short run and only understood, if at all, at a later date, at a temporal remove, when the work necessary to revise the established categories, to open the discussion to new ways of thinking, has had the time to occur. Since Heidegger is a genuinely novel thinker who breaks with established patterns of thought, he is difficult to understand. It is possible that Heidegger's particular philosophical contribution has not yet been understood, or rather has so far been largely misunderstood.[13] Indeed, one of the aims of this discussion is to suggest that despite the immense literature concerning Heidegger's position, the intrinsic political dimension of his theory of Being has not so far been clearly seen.
The novelty of Heidegger's position is only one of the obstacles to its comprehension. The difficulty of Heidegger's language is legendary. Other philosophers, such as Whitehead, have devised novel terms to describe their basic insights, but Heidegger carries this practice to unusual, perhaps unprecedented, lengths. He frequently coins new words to express his ideas, or imparts technical meanings to available vocabulary—which he often uses in odd ways in accordance with the allegedly original meanings supposedly covered up by the later evolution of the language—or even employs a dash or other devices to highlight a part of the word. The result is a vocabulary that often has no usual equivalent in German and even more frequently has no easy rendition into English. An example among many is the term "Ent-fernung " for the ordinary German "Entfernung, " which Macquarrie and Robinson translate by the neologism "deseverance."[14] The fact that many of Heidegger's formulations are at best unclear only heightens the difficulty of understanding.
Heidegger's thought is also difficult to comprehend in part because of the unfinished nature of Being and Time , his main treatise. It is well known that the published fragment is part of a much larger work, which never appeared. The extant fragment is difficult to interpret since Heidegger published his study before he had had a chance to give it a final form. A close reading of the text reveals ways in which he changed his
mind on fundamental points during the writing of the book. For instance, he insists on a concept of truth as veritas transcendentalis ,[15] similar to the Husserlian version of the traditional philosophical view of truth, before introducing an obviously incompatible hermeneutical notion of truth.[16] The incompatibility lies in the inability to make out a claim for the traditional philosophical notion of truth as absolute on the basis of the relativistic terrain of hermeneutics.[17] After the book was published, and in particular after Heidegger resigned his post as rector of the University of Freiburg in 1934, he increasingly devoted himself— perhaps under the influence of the intervening political events—to re-interpreting his main text in a long series of later writings. The result is that an already difficult book, bristling with strange neologisms and novel ideas, is rendered even more difficult by Heidegger's repeated efforts to construe his thought from an increasingly greater remove.
Heideggerian Concealment and the History of Philosophy
Heidegger's analysis of Being further conceals its relation to the history of philosophy. Now in part the relation of philosophy to its history has long been concealed through the normative view of philosophy current in the modern tradition. A main impulse at least since Descartes has been the preference for systematic over historical forms of thought. The result is the effort to begin again, finally to make a beginning, finally to make an acceptable beginning in virtue of the preference for a priori over a posteriori types of knowledge, succinctly formulated in Kant's insistence, following Leibniz, on cognitio ex principiis over cognitio ex datis .[18]
As the title of a well-known book about Heidegger suggests,[19] his entire philosophical career is focused to an unusual degree on a single project, initially identified as the question of the meaning of Being. The term "Being" refers to "Being in general," or the "Being of beings," as distinguished from beings, or entities, such as shoes or ships or sealing wax. Heidegger's conviction that since the early Greeks this question has been forgotten, or covered over, so that he needs to destroy later metaphysics in order to return to the original, and solely valid, form of the question, points both toward and away from the importance of the history of philosophy for Heidegger's position. His assertion that the Seinsfrage , or at least the Seinsfrage in its authentic form, has been forgotten since early in the philosophical tradition strongly suggests that his own thought cannot depend on other views in the history of philosophy which he seeks to "destroy" as the condition of freeing up the proper approach to Being.[20] Heidegger is unquestionably equipped with
a deep, in fact unusual, command of the historical tradition; yet his own argument implies that his theory is independent of the history of philosophy, more precisely of anything that happened in the tradition after the pre-Socratics, or at the latest Aristotle.
The implication that Heidegger's own thought is independent of the history of philosophy since the Greeks—which derives from a strategic move on his part to open the path leading to Being—tends to insulate his position from critical scrutiny. In effect, as a result of this move Heidegger contends that his thought is not only original but sui generis. If it differs not only in degree but in kind from any others, that is, all the other views in earlier and contemporary philosophical discussion, then obviously it cannot be understood or evaluated through comparison with them.
Heidegger's references to later thinkers, particularly in Being and Time , are mainly negative. Partly for this reason, Heidegger has been accused of distorting, in fact deliberately concealing, his dependence on previous writers, for instance Kierkegaard.[21] Others have suggested a wider philosophical debt including Nietzsche,[22] Jünger,[23] and others. My own view is that there is a strongly Kantian component in his thought. I think that his study of Being as present under the mode of absence can be regarded as a variant of the Kantian dualistic analysis of noumenon and phenomenon, mediated by such neo-Kantian thinkers as Rickert and Lask. This claim implies that Heidegger's view of Being is circumscribed by the dualistic Kantian framework that structures most later discussion in the German tradition.
Heidegger's strategy to free his position from dependence on the preceding philosophical discussion, a strategy that is neither convincing nor original, impedes the comprehension of his position. An example, among many, of the effort to break with the prior philosophical tradition is Kant's claim, in the famous passage on the Copernican Revolution, that his own position represents a clean break with prior thought.[24] The grounds for Kant's introduction of the Copernican Revolution is that all previous efforts at knowledge have failed and that we need to invoke a new approach, represented by him as systematic. If "critical" means, as it does in Kant's thought, "not dogmatic" but "demonstrable," then we can inquire about the nature of the proof. Now a proof of the critical philosophy is not forthcoming on the a priori, systematic plane it favors, since its claim rests in part on the alleged failure of prior views, that is, on a reading of the history of philosophy. Even Kant's effort to establish the transcendental conditions of the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever is historically tinged, dependent on its relation to other theories in the philosophical tradition.
Heidegger's position is highly dependent on a wide variety of modern
philosophers and even some nonphilosophers, such as Hölderlin, Jünger, and others. The dependence of Heidegger's thought on the preceding philosophical tradition is apparent in at least three ways. First, and most generally, we have already noted that all positions depend on prior thought for their evaluation, for their claim to advance the discussion. Second, Heidegger's argument depends on the history of philosophy since he needs to carry out his "destruction" of metaphysics in order to demonstrate the assertion that forms of ontology later than those of the Greeks have taken an incorrect turning in the road to Being. If he cannot show that later views of ontology are incorrect, then his claim to recover the only correct approach to Being, which has meanwhile lain hidden, is undercut. Third, his desire to return to origins, in this case the proposed return to the hidden beginnings of the philosophical discussion of Being, is merely another form of the widespread modern philosophical interest in bringing about an end to the discipline. In that precise sense, Heidegger's view is largely traditional.
Heidegger's Nazism and the Expert Commentator
An account of obstacles to an appreciation of Heidegger's Nazism needs to address the role of the Heidegger discussion in an enormous and still rapidly growing literature. Obviously, the justification for the debate concerning any thinker, including Heidegger, can only be to illuminate and ultimately to evaluate the position in question, which it must seek to reveal rather than to conceal. Unfortunately, the fact that this principle is often honored in the breach because of the evolution of the philosophical discipline itself has contributed in a powerful way to impeding access to Heidegger's thought, particularly to his Nazism.
Philosophy feeds on itself as the condition of its further progress. Despite the recent insistence on the independence of system from history, it is rather obvious that philosophy relies, indeed has always relied, on its preceding tradition for insight and impetus. Now the great philosophers are rarely if ever specialists in the interpretation of one or another body of thought, although their positions often depend on their understanding of a preceding position, as Aristotle depends on Plato, Spinoza depends on Descartes, Kant depends on Leibniz and Hume, and Fichte depends on Kant. But the recent development of philosophy has seen the emergence of the expert commentator, the person whose career is closely linked to the knowledge and interpretation of a single position, whose works he or she tends to know intimately and whose details loom large in the interpretation. This phenomenon is now almost pandemic in
the academy, where whole careers are built upon superior knowledge of Dickens, or Proust, or Mozart's music.
The phenomenon of the expert commentator figures largely in the role of Heideggerians in the interpretation of the master's thought. Heideggerians have always claimed, rightly in my view, that Heidegger's thought presents unusual difficulties. Heideggerians have tended to seize on the difficulties of Heidegger's thought in order to make of its interpretation an almost mystical, hieratic process. The result, in imitation of Heidegger's own strategy, is to shield Heidegger's thought from any attempt at criticism.
If the only person who is acknowledged as sufficiently versed in a position, say Heidegger's, is someone whose entire professional career centers on the position in question, then philosophy is no longer the affair of philosophers in general. In modern times, certainly until relatively recently, through the time of the British empiricists, at least until Kant, virtually anyone, such as gifted amateurs like Descartes or Locke, could participate in the discussion on an equal footing. But this changes if the discussion is restricted to experts only, that is, to specialized students of a particular thinker, a particular question, a particular period. The result is to exclude not only the gifted amateur but even the professional philosopher whose lack of the most intimate knowledge of the position is taken to mean that it is in principle beyond his or her grasp.
It is obvious that the rise of the expert commentator tends to reduce or even to eliminate criticism. Here we need to distinguish between the way into philosophy through the study of a position and the professional expert commentator. It is often the case that one will write a dissertation, or even a first book on a given thinker, say on Wittgenstein, about whom one is enthusiastic, and then later change one's mind and reject that view as part of the maturation process of developing one's own point of view. This is very different from the approach of the expert commentator, who is much less likely to reject that about which he or she is expert. Someone whose career is built on detailed knowledge of a given position, for instance a Platohist who really "knows" Plato and the Plato literature in a thorough way, is exceedingly unlikely to offer fundamental criticism that places the entire theory, or even a part of it, in jeopardy. The obvious fact that Heidegger experts inevitably have a heavy professional investment in the importance, even the correctness, of his position explains their widespread reluctance to call it in question in any but the most timid manner.
The reduction of criticism due to the rise of the expert commentator is now widespread in the philosophical discipline at the present time. There is now increasing stress on the creation of specialized societies, with specialized publications, accompanied by specialized professional meetings,
as philosophy, in imitation of nearly all forms of academic research, continues to fragment itself. The result is to inhibit philosophical change, even to impede philosophical progress. Obviously, philosophy advances through the scrutiny of previous views, which later thinkers find wanting in one respect or another and which they eventually seek to improve or replace. If the scrutiny of previous views is reduced to minute textual observations, then philosophical progress, such as it is, tends to diminish, even to come to an end. It is not privileged information that at present it is easier to advance in the profession by hanging around well-known colleagues and massaging their egos than by an effort at articulating a fundamental disagreement. Marxists talk about Marxists, Quine scholars dialogue with Quine scholars, Husserlians meet among themselves. But although the contact of experts, a frequent form of the manifestation of the rise of the expert commentator, often produces useful discussion, it inevitably tends as well to reduce the type of basic criticism that enables the discussion to progress beyond the particular view, even the particular form of the particular, under consideration.
There is a pronounced tendency among Heideggerian scholars to limit the Heidegger discussion to themselves. As a consequence the discussion becomes less adventurous, but perhaps more surefooted. This possible advantage is, however, dissipated by the transformation of what at best is a strategy for access to Heidegger's position through expert analysis into a strategy intended to prevent those outside of the Heideggerian fold from criticizing his thought. This tactic, which is much in evidence in the debate on Heidegger's Nazism, takes a number of different forms, including stress on the difficulty of rendering Heidegger's terminology, admittedly difficult by the standards of ordinary academic German, into other languages. I well remember a lecture of one and a half hours I attended devoted merely to the translation of the term "Gestell " into French. More recently, the undoubted linguistic unease in the translation of key terms has been transformed into a watershed question, in which defenders of the faith protect the master thinker through the claim that others are incapable of comprehending the central terms of his position. A particularly uncompromising form of this tactic consists in the denial that an outsider either does or possibly could understand the Heideggerian position. Examples include De Waehlens's assertion that Löwith, Heidegger's former student and later colleague, was not sufficiently versed in the thought of the master to criticize it, and Derrida's claim that Farias, who spent a dozen years writing a book about Heidegger's Nazism, could not possibly have spent more than an hour studying Heidegger's thought. A more general form of this tactic is to characterize whatever one says about the master thinker as metaphysics on the theory that Heidegger has somehow gone beyond it. This is
tantamount to claiming that, as Ryle used to say, there is a category mistake since a metaphysical statement cannot possibly apply to Heidegger's view.[25]
The tendency to limit the Heideggerian discussion to Heidegger scholars works to preserve the Heideggerian view from prying eyes by rendering it invisible to any but the orthodox believer. To accept this requirement is to place a nearly insuperable obstacle in the path of any effort to come to grips with Heidegger's Nazism. With rare exceptions, the orthodox Heidegger scholar is highly unlikely to offer such criticism, since to do so is to admit that a professional career is focused on a thinker whose relentless pursuit of Being was centrally related to Nazism; and anyone who seriously objects can simply be dismissed as not knowledgeable enough to pass judgment. In effect, Heidegger's thought, like Plato's reality, then becomes a secret visible to men of gold only, something which only they can know and about which others can at best have no more than opinions. In this way, Heidegger's position can be worshiped but not evaluated as philosophy transforms itself into theology.
Heidegger's Nazism
In practice, the discussion of Heidegger in the literature has often constituted a major hindrance to an appreciation of the extent and significance of his Nazism. The obstacles that specifically impede a comprehension of Heidegger's Nazism are of three kinds: those due to Heidegger's largely successful effort to manipulate the discussion of his writings through the presentation of an "official" view of his Nazism and its relation to his thought; those due to the affirmation and development of what I am calling the official view as a specialized aspect of the enormous Heidegger secondary literature; and finally those which are not strictly philosophical at all. Heidegger's own understanding of his Nazism is displayed in an article written in 1945, in the famous Spiegel interview, and in hints scattered throughout his later texts. Heidegger's closest followers have developed Heidegger's own view of the matter in the course of the lengthy, often intense debate that continues to oppose Heidegger's critics and, defenders on the theme of Heidegger's political views. The concern by some to defend Heidegger's person and thought at all costs has in practice led to further impediments to a grasp of his Nazism that are not always of a strictly philosophical nature, including simple problems of securing appropriate access to the texts.
What we can call "the facts" about Heidegger's Nazism have been known at least in part since the end of the Second World War. They are still not fully known since despite strenuous efforts by a small group of writers, most prominently Schneeberger, Ott, and Farias, efforts are
under way to protect Heidegger, or his reputation, by hindering the release of factual material known to exist, above all in Marbach, where the Heidegger Archives are still closed to scholars.[26]
We can begin with that part of the factual material which is not in dispute and which is accepted by all observers. From a factual perspective, we know at least the following: Heidegger initially took up a position at Marburg, and when Husserl retired, Heidegger assumed his chair at the University of Freiburg. In 1933, Heidegger was elected to the post of rector of the University of Freiburg by his colleagues and became a member of the Nazi party. In the spring of that year, on the occasion of taking his position as rector, he gave the rectoral address (Rektoratsrede ). In 1934 he resigned his position as rector and returned to teaching. After the Second World War, he was interrogated by the Allies and, mainly on the recommendation of Karl Jaspers, prevented from resuming his position in the university, although he was not formally charged with any war crimes. He was later permitted to resume teaching. He continued to write and occasionally to teach until the end of his life. Although he was often asked about the rectoral period, he avoided explicit comment except for two occasions: a posthumously published article, written in 1945; and an interview in 1966 with a popular weekly magazine, Der Spiegel which, on his explicit request, was published only ten years later when he died.
If this were all there were to say, Heidegger's Nazism would not be interesting, certainly not more than faintly so, above all not philosophically interesting. There were many, including a distressing number of philosophers, those strange masters of blindness and insight, who had a brief relation to Nazism for a variety of reasons. Heidegger's relation was, however, different from other such encounters, in fact in some ways unprecedented. Let us now provide a partial enumeration of some of these differences. An obvious factor is the fact that Heidegger stands absolutely alone among the major thinkers of this century as a voluntary adherent of Nazism.[27] If there were no other reason, then the fact that Heidegger was the only important philosopher to become a Nazi is worthy of consideration.
But this is not the only factor, since although Heidegger refused to comment publicly on his Nazism, his writings contain a series of cryptic hints concerning this episode. In his usual ambiguous style, Heidegger indicates that he confronted National Socialism in his writings and left it behind him, something Heideggerians like to stress.[28] Heidegger implies that he has come to grips with Nazism in several texts, including the account of the turning (Kehre ) in his thought in the "Letter on Humanism"[29] and the remark in the Spiegel interview that his initial course on Hölderlin and his courses on Nietzsche were a confrontation (Ausei-
nandersetzung ) with National Socialism.[30] I believe that Heidegger's version of his Nazism is overly indulgent, tendentious, and misleading. In my view, Heidegger's presentation of his Nazism as essentially meaningless occludes, or conceals, its deep significance for the understanding and evaluation of his view of Being. I hold that the study of the texts themselves presents a rather different view of the matter less favorable to Heidegger and in fact damaging to his thought.
One impediment to a comprehension of Heidegger's Nazism is the misleading series of hints about it in Heidegger's texts, hints that taken together constitute his own "official" view of the situation. In Heidegger's wake, a certain number of his followers have presented a version of events which at most denies, at least minimizes, and in any case further distorts Heidegger's Nazism as well as its relation to his thought. The result has been an effort, extending now over several decades, to construe Heidegger's turn to National Socialism in a way that is not harmful, or at least no more than minimally harmful, to the philosopher. Writers engaged in this task include some of his most important French students, but a number of others, all of whom follow Heidegger's own lead in an effort at what—in language more familiar from the political realm, but appropriate here, since the aim is clearly political—can charitably be called damage control.[31]
A strong statement tending to call in question the life and thought of a major thinker requires strong evidence. One factor is Heidegger's scandalous refusal to comment on his Nazism during his lifetime over a period of more than forty years. Then there is Heidegger's infamous stress on the supposedly misunderstood essence of National Socialism in a work republished in 1953.[32] Further, there is the exchange of letters with Herbert Marcuse, in which Heidegger seemed to justify Nazism, as well as the comparison, in an unpublished lecture on technology, between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and agricultural technology.[33]
Attention to these and other passages in his writings suggests that Heidegger did not engage in a confrontation with National Socialism; on the contrary, he sought to conceal the nature of his original and continued interest in Nazism. His writings, then, call in question his own publicly stated view of the matter and suggest that the "official" view, due to Heidegger and propagated by his disciples, is incomplete, inaccurate, or both. This suggestion is further supported by the role of the Heidegger family in controlling access to his Nachlass . Germany, until recently West Germany, has long maintained exceedingly strict restrictions on unauthorized publication. It is, then, relevant to note that the Heidegger family has consistently refused publication of a number of important documents concerning Heidegger's Nazism and restricted access to Heidegger's unpublished work.[34] This restriction even extends to the publica-
tion of Heidegger's collected works, now under way. The collected works of a major thinker usually, perhaps even always, contain the extant correspondence. In Heidegger's case, his correspondence would almost certainly provide important evidence for an evaluation of his Nazism, especially through the publication of his correspondence as rector of the University of Freiburg. It is, hence, significant that the edition of his collected works now in preparation, in a clear departure from the practice for the writings of a major thinker, will omit his letters.
The aim of this chapter has been to identify some of the obstacles impeding responsible study of Heidegger's Nazism. It is not meant as, and cannot take the place of, a detailed discussion of the texts themselves. This chapter has shown that the scrutiny of Heidegger's Nazism presents formidable obstacles due to the peculiar nature of his thought, as well as the efforts consistently deployed by himself, certain students, and even his family, to prevent an accurate understanding of his Nazism from emerging and to propagate an interpretation that is more charitable to Heidegger than to the truth. We can add to this complex situation the fact that more than forty-five years after the end of the Second World War many, including a number of Heidegger's disciples, are less than eager to engage in a dispassionate analysis of a difficult period, in which they were personally involved, and to which their relationship remains ambiguous. There is, hence, reason to believe that after some four decades of discussion beginning in the 1940s we still do not fully comprehend the nature of Heidegger's Nazism nor understand its relation to his philosophical thought. The remainder of this essay will be devoted to an elucidation and interpretation of Heidegger's Nazism and an evaluation of its significance for his philosophy, even for philosophy in a wider sense.