8
Being, the Volk, and Nazism

Interpretations of Heidegger's Nazism

In this book we have examined the nature and significance of the relation between Heidegger's Nazism and philosophy. There is a maximally wide range of opinion encompassing virtually all possible views of this relation. While aware of the various views, I have attempted to steer an independent course through examination of the full range of Heidegger materials now available for scholarly study.

At present—leaving aside the widespread idea that the best way to deal with the problem is to ignore it—we can isolate six main lines of analysis^[1] of Heidegger's philosophy and Nazism in the Heidegger literature: First, there is Adorno's extreme view that everything that Heidegger ever said and did was Nazi to the core.^[2] Second, there is the conviction that Nazism is not Nazism, most prominently associated with Beaufret, through his acceptance of the French historian Faurisson's radical form of historical revisionism, in fact a denial of the historical reality of National Socialism.^[3]

Third, there is the idea, now most prominently represented by Fédier, that Heidegger is not responsible for the political consequences of Nazism since they could not have been foreseen.^[4] Fourth, there is the belief, following Heidegger's own view of the matter, that Heidegger's Nazism was merely an insignificant moment in his biography unrelated to his thought, developed by Aubenque^[5] and Vietta,^[6] and hinted at by Habermas^[7] and Rorty,^[8] based on a distinction in kind between Heidegger

the thinker and Heidegger the man. Fifth, there is the claim—rooted in Heidegger's conception of the turning in his thought—due mainly to Derrida^[9] and Lacoue-Labarthe,^[10] that Heidegger's early thought led to Nazism, but his later thought led away from it, a reading presupposing a break between the earlier and the later Heidegger. Sixth, there is the organic analysis, presented by Löwith,^[11] and more recently by Bourdieu,^[12] Janicaud,^[13] Zimmerman,^[14] Wolin,^[15] Thomä,^[16] and myself, according to which Heidegger's philosophical thought and his Nazism are inseparable.

With the exception of Beaufret's effort, quite mad at this late date, to deny the historical reality of Nazism, the various lines of analysis tending to exculpate Heidegger's Nazism were suggested by Heidegger as part of his effort after the Second World War to limit the damage to himself and to his thought, and then only later adopted by his followers. The views that Heidegger is not responsible for his adherence to Nazism, that his Nazism was meaningless, or that he later moved away from Nazism are all claims that he himself raises. The central point at issue, of course, on which all of these explanatory models divide, is how to understand the relation between Heidegger's Nazism and his philosophical thought. My basic response is to argue that any interpretation of Heidegger's Nazism which denies the intrinsic link between his theory of Being and his Nazi politics is unable to comprehend the origin of his Nazism, which becomes a merely inexplicable, contingent fact; and it is unable as well to comprehend the later development of Heidegger's thought, specifically including its turning beyond philosophy. In short, whatever their respective virtues, the other lines of analysis all fall short of accounting for central items required in any comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's Nazism and philosophy.

It is important to be clear about what is being said, since one of the favorite strategies to defend Heidegger's thought consists in equating any criticism of it with a simple dismissal of its value in general in order then to dismiss the criticism of the position. This protective mechanism should be seen for what it is: an effort to remove Heidegger's position from critical evaluation, to prevent it from being addressed in the normal course of discussion as part of the process of reception of an important body of thought. There is no suggestion here that Heidegger's thought can merely be reduced to his Nazism or even to politics. What I am suggesting is that for Heidegger, ontology and politics are basically conjoined. For a denial of the historical reality of Nazism, which underlies the second approach, is simply not credible, no more so than assertions that the earth is flat. If the exculpation of Heidegger's Nazism depends on the demonstration of the unreality of Nazism, then it would seem that no such argument can reasonably be made.

The third and fourth approaches, which are variations on the theme

of the supposed difference in kind beween Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, are refuted by examination of Heidegger's texts. Study of his thought, and what he says about it, shows that Heidegger was also led to Nazism on the basis of his philosophical position, as he himself admitted. His Nazi turning is, then, not merely due to external factors, such as the decline of the Weimar Republic, and the concern with reactionary German Volksideologie , nor to his inability to comprehend politics, nor even to his psychological need to achieve a powerful position in the German university. None of these factors should be omitted from a comprehensive analysis. Yet from the narrow philosophical perspective, the decisive point is the political nature of Heidegger's ontology which led him into the realm of practice, and toward Nazism as an authoritarian political conception compatible with, and made necessary by, his own view of Being. The effort to pry apart Heidegger the thinker and Heidegger the man should further be rejected on Heideggerian grounds as inconsistent with the theory it intends to defend. It is because there is an intrinsic link between Heidegger's philosophical position and his Nazism that from a philosophical perspective nothing, nothing at all would have been altered had Heidegger simply said it was all a mistake, that he was sorry about his acceptance of Nazism, that it was all a dreadful mistake in judgment, and so on. Heidegger's acceptance of Nazism is surely a contingent fact, since it might have been the case that Nazism had not existed. Yet his thought literally demands some type of antidemocratic, totalitarian politics in virtue of his own conception of Being. For Heidegger's ontology and politics are intrinsically and inseparably linked through his conception of authenticity, his lifelong quasi-Platonic understanding of the political vocation of the thinker of Being, and his commitment to the destiny of the German Volk , all aspects of his understanding of Being.

The fifth line of analysis, which is particularly prominent in the French discussion, depends on a supposed discontinuity in the evolution of Heidegger's position, based on the interpretation of the turning in his thought as a break. This approach, which is presently the most philosophically sophisticated alternative to the organic approach favored here, presents a subtle restatement of Heidegger's own effort to protect his thought by invoking the conception of the turning, understood as turning over a new conceptual leaf, so to speak. But the suggestion that the turning represents a break between Heidegger's early and later thought, between Heidegger I and II as it were, is clearly refuted through the obvious continuity of his intellectual development and through his own understanding of the turning as a deepening of his theory of Being beyond the original beginning through the introduction of a new beginning.

In arguing for a break in Heidegger's thought—similar to the supposed, but finally fictitious, break in Marx's development recently popular in French Marxism—Heidegger's French adherents take seriously Heidegger's suggestion in the "Letter on Humanism" that there has been a turning in his thought, in fact a reversal. There is an obvious analogy between the view that Heidegger's turning constitutes a fundamental break and Marxism's traditional view of Marx's supposed materialism as the reversal of Hegelian idealism, as a break between Marxism and philosophy. Yet Marx's thought does not reverse Hegel's, and Marx's later position develops further but does not break with his own earlier theory. Similarly, Heidegger's later theory of Being carries further, develops, modifies, transforms, but does not break with, his earlier thought. As study of Heidegger's texts show, above all the recently published Beiträge zur Philosophie , Heidegger understood the concept of the turning as a further development but not as a break in his thought.

Heidegger's thought exhibits a continuous development, but certain aspects of his position remain virtually unchanged. The idea of the Volk as an authentic community, which Heidegger takes over from German Volksideologie and grounds philosophically in Being and Time in his conception of plural authenticity, remains a permanent part of his position throughout its later development. Beginning with the rectoral address, Heidegger continues to hold one or more versions of the venerable Platonic view that philosophy can found politics as the necessary condition of the good life, as the real presupposition of the radiant future. Heidegger never abandoned the familiar philosophical conviction in the cognitive privilege of philosophy, what after the turning in his position became new thought, with its familiar link to antidemocratic, totalitarian politics.

I favor the sixth, organic line of analysis of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as integrally, in fact inseparably, connected. In my view, none of the other approaches to this theme can provide a satisfactory account of what is now known, above all the durable nature of Heidegger's concern with the destiny of the Germans, his tardy insistence when it was no longer even advantageous on the misunderstood essence of Nazism. In their own ways, each of the other approaches to this problem also overestimates the importance of Heidegger's connection to National Socialism, that is real Nazism. There is a widespread tendency in the debate about Heidegger's politics to analyze its relation to Nazism mainly or solely in terms of his link to real National Socialism. Yet this tendency is wrong on two counts. For it fails to consider the possibility that Heidegger's allegiance to Nazism was always to his own, idiosyncratic idea of Nazism. And it further ignores Heidegger's later, more consistent, and certainly deeper fidelity to an ideal form of Nazism.

It is important to understand the limits of Heidegger's initial, enthusiastic commitment to National Socialism. Although Heidegger became a member of the NSDAP and a Nazi in that sense, starting in 1933 he continued to insist on the cognitive privilege of his "philosophy," to found authentic politics. Even after his resignation as rector, he never abandoned, or even dampened, the enthusiasm about destiny of the Germans, which he initially shared with real National Socialism, and which he continued to seek in his ideal concept of National Socialism. Derrida is correct that Heidegger's thought is open to a whole variety of Nazisms,^[17] both real and imaginary. Yet Derrida does not appear sufficiently aware of Heidegger's later writings, especially the important Beiträge zur Philosophie . This explains his failure to realize that Heidegger's Nazism did not disappear in Heidegger's later thought, in which it remained a central component in imaginary, ideal form.

Even real Nazism is more present in Heidegger's later thought than is often understood. Stress on the later development of Heidegger's theory is often employed to suggest a clean break with real Nazism. Yet Heidegger's later view of Being after the turning conserves important elements of continuity with some National Socialist views. Consider, for example, the following passage from an article by Ernst Krieck, a leading philosophical theoretician of the Nazi Weltanschauung :

The revolutionary upheaval made itself known in a dispacement of emphasis. Instead of the individual person, the völkische whole is central, as a result of which the basic reality of life comes into view.... The individual does not arrive at his worldview through reason according to his individual situation and inclination to arbitariness and choice. Rather, we are subject to the movement of forces over us and directed in common. We do not seize, but we are seized and driven.^[18]

If we overlook the idea of a Weltanschauung , which Heidegger consistently rejected, common elements between this Nazi view and Heidegger's later thought, after the supposed turn away from his earlier thought and Nazism, include a displacement of emphasis from the individual to the group taken as a whole, the reliance on extrarational forces which we do not choose, but which choose us and operate through us, and so on.

Heidegger invokes and never abandons the destiny of the Germans in virtue of his theory of Being. His position, even in its later formulation, turns on the authentic thought of Being. According to Heidegger, metaphysics, his later name for an inauthentic form of ontology, tends to cover up, or to hide, an authentic understanding of Being. If the authentic thought of Being requires authenticity, if authenticity is defined as the

acceptance of one's being as defined by the concern with Being, and if the only metaphysical people is the German people which alone can know Being as the true heirs of the Greeks, then there is an easy, obvious transition from Heidegger's ontology to the concern with the German Volk . Heidegger's position, Nazism, German Volk ideology, and the interest throughout the Weimar Republic in the resurrection of a Germany still suffering from the effects of the First World War come together in the desire for a vibrant development of the German people. The problem is not due to Heidegger's political naïveté; nor can it merely be ascribed to a casual interest in a political phenomenon; nor is it due to a change from his initial view of Being to a view of Being as historical and destinal, to a change in the initial view; rather it is due to the initial view itself as Heidegger understood it. Perhaps Heidegger's theory of Being can be interpreted in different ways; perhaps one can argue, as he himself argued about others' theories, that Heidegger did not understand his own theory or that others failed to understand it; but this is the way in which Heidegger comprehended it, in my view correctly understood it.

The conception of the German Volk , which Heidegger stressed, means different things from different perspectives. What for the Nazis was a step to world domination was for the average German a way to restore self-esteem, a means to correct the perceived injustices of the First World War, even a way to win back what was lost in the war and perhaps finally to win the war. For Heidegger, it is mainly a means for the authentic thought of Being. Hence, the problem does not lie in Heidegger's Nazism but in his ontology, on whose soil his Nazism flourished. Specifically, the problem follows from his assumption that genuine ontology required a certain purity of mind, what he called authenticity, an effort to be oneself, not in order to overcome alienation, for that was never Heidegger's goal, but rather in order authentically to think Being. Heidegger's Nazism should not be excused as merely momentary or meaningless. For it was not momentary, a mere incident; and it is philosophically meaningful within the context of his ontology. Yet the basic problem does not lie in Heidegger's Nazism, which is an effect of a deeper cause, but in his theory of Being, which requires for its realization an authentic subject.

Heidegger is an important, perhaps even a great thinker. Yet if Nazism is significant, his thought is fundamentally flawed. The problem of Being has no necessary connection with Nazism, but Heidegger's view of the problem points directly to this or similar kinds of political practice. It is not a simple accident, a merely contingent fact that Heidegger's effort to reawaken the long-forgotten question of Being leads seamlessly to Nazism and his consistent but finally grotesque comprehension of Na-

zism as a necessary step to the authentic comprehension of Being. If human being is important, if at this late date human being is more important than Being, then the project of the authentic thought of Being is intrinsically compromised. It is time, then, to reaffirm human being, which Heidegger sacrificed in the name of the thought of Being. For we need to hold fast to humanism, if necessary even by renouncing an antihumanism intended to lead to Being through the way station of Nazi barbarism, hence to renounce a thought of Being which denies and necessarily denies human Being.

This problem is not ameliorated but only complicated by the character of the Heidegger reception, which has not always been worthy of the reputation of philosophy as the main form of the search for truth. While some have sought for truth in disinterested fashion, others have sought to protect themselves, their reputations, their investment in what must be true to uphold their views of Heidegger and of themselves. Still others have routinely reaffirmed the traditional philosophical claim that philosophical theories occur in time but are not of time, that if they are determined by anything at all, it is only by other theories in a form of epistemological behaviorism. It is held that philosophy, say Heidegger's philosophy, has nothing to do with the type of person one is. Heidegger, we are told, was a bad person, a terrible man, ein richtiges Schwein , but his thought is completely independent of who he was.^[19]

This fashionable "liberal" approach is based more on a reaffirmation of the traditional dogma of philosophy as independent of the context in which it arises than on careful study of the Heideggerian texts. It avoids coming to grips with the harder issues that arise as soon as one realizes that thought in general belongs to time. For Heidegger contributes powerfully to the demise of the traditional philosophical dogma of the independence of thought and time, and the depths of Heidegger's own thought literally can only be plumbed against the background of the period in which it arose.

At this late date, at least two things should be clear to anyone who examines the relevant writings: Heidegger's theory, like that of most important thinkers, was never static, never fixed in final form, always under way. Yet as examination of Heidegger's writings has shown, Heidegger's Nazism is deeply seated in his thought, so profoundly rooted as to remain unchanged throughout evolution of his position over forty-two years from the end of his rectorate to the end of his life; and the philosophical discussion of his political engagement both during and after the rector-ate has often contrived to conceal rather than to reveal his Nazism. The remaining task is to build on this knowledge, to examine the philosophical significance of Heidegger's Nazism and the complex discussion to which it has given rise both for Heidegger's thought and for philosophy.

Heidegger's Nazism and the Limits of His Philosophy

Heidegger's Nazism and the failure to confront it are philosophically significant for Heidegger's philosophy, for its reception, and for philosophy itself. At a time when some are still concerned to deny the existence of the Holocaust, in effect to deny that Nazism was Nazism, and many still deny that Nazism had a more than tangential appeal to one of the most significant theories of this century, merely to assert the philosophical significance of an abject philosophical failure to seize the historical moment for the German Volk and Being is not likely to win the day. Yet there is something absurd, even grotesque about the conjunction of the statement that Heidegger is an important, even a great philosopher, perhaps one of the few seminal thinkers in the history of the tradition, with the realization that he, like many of his followers, entirely failed, in fact failed in the most dismal manner, to grasp or even to confront Nazism. If philosophy is its time captured in thought, and if Heidegger and his epigones have basically failed to grasp their epoch, can we avoid the conclusion that they have also failed this test, failed as philosophers?

Since even those thinkers who hold that we need to begin again, to begin from the beginning, rely on a reading of the history of the philosophical tradition, philosophy is inseparable from its past. If philosophy is a historical discipline, then it is unavoidably under obligation to come to grips with what has come before in order to progress. Yet it is significant that after some twenty-five hundred years of practice, there are no widely accepted standards as to how to judge prior philosophical views. In the absence of clear guidelines, we can measure the failure of Heidegger and some of his students to come to grips with Nazism in his thought or even with Nazism as it existed, parenthetically like so many other philosophers and academics in general, against the idea of the philosophical pursuit offered by the philosophers themselves.

At the dawn of the Western tradition, a flattering view of philosophy was formulated as the ultimate source of truth and social goodness, as the only way to know in an ultimate sense and as indispensable for the good life. The question of what philosophy can know finds a partial response in an assessment of what Heidegger in fact knew and what he claimed to know. He claimed to know how to go about arriving at an authentic thought of Being, and perhaps how to think Being, as well as to be able to interpret the present and even the future through Jünger's reading of Nietzsche's philosophy. At the end of the Second World War, he foresaw difficult times ahead; but by then he was scarcely alone in that perception. He was also hardly isolated in his initial enthusiasm for Nazism as the express route to German greatness, a misapprehension

widely shared by the literati—among them candidates for the title of master thinker, heirs to the great German philosophical tradition in our time—and the illiterati, the uneducated, many of whom were equally mistaken about the prospects of the Nazi movement. It is sobering to realize, despite Heidegger's claims as a philosophical seer, a prophet of Being, that his theory was of no comparative advantage when it came time to confront the present and to foresee its consequences. Although Heidegger reacted against nihilism as early as the rectoral address, in the same talk he publicly threw in his lot with a leading example of nihilism in our troubled century.

There is an old view that the thinker needs to preserve a distance, to be alienated from reality in order to know it. Supposedly, it is because one is distant from what one wants to know, not caught up within it, that objectivity becomes possible; out of the distance one is paradoxically nearer to what one seeks to know. Similarly, Heidegger insists in his own way that the thinker needs to withdraw, to be oneself alone, in order to be able to know Being. Yet if we discount bad faith as an explanation, in which case anything is possible, Heidegger genuinely did not seem to know, never seemed to recognize, that there was something absolutely new about Nazism, which made it different in kind from, and for that reason literally incomparable with, anything else. Here and there one can point to a word, even a sentence in his wider corpus, that perhaps indicates an obscure awareness of the problem. But even to allow this kind of interpretative license, in order retrospectively to isolate in Heidegger's voluminous writings a passage or two in his works that might charitably be read as showing a minimal sensitivity to the issues, is in effect to confirm the essential poverty of his understanding of the entire Nazi phenomenon.

The problem posed by Nazism is a human problem in the most basic meaning of the term "human." It is widely known that Nazism posed a decisive threat to values, to human beings, to the democratic form of life, to the idea of human and racial equality, to concepts of mutual tolerance—in short, was a menace to the small advances of human beings concerned to realize, as Hegel put it, the idea of freedom. Heidegger either could not understand or was unconcerned with the problem posed by Nazism to human beings since he consistently offered the main role to Being. Heidegger's philosophy is rooted in his antihumanistic subordination of human being to Being, to which he subordinated his own entire life, and to which his students on occasion seem willing to subordinate themselves and others in the increasingly unavailing effort to excuse Heidegger the philosopher and sometimes even Heidegger the man. Heidegger's understanding of the problem of Being required him

to reject values and anything linked to value as incompatible with thought in the deepest sense, which is limited to contemplation of the idea of Being. According to Heidegger, any concept of value is inextricably linked to the philosophies of the worldview which are philosophy in name only, since they fall below the genuine thought necessary to think Being.

It is often said by Heidegger's supporters that his later thought is a confrontation with Nazism. Heidegger himself makes this claim more than once. It is also possible that Heidegger's claim expressed his deep conviction and not merely what it was convenient to state, that it was not finally a statement of what the many in their unwisdom desired to hear from him. Heidegger may sincerely have believed that he was confronting Nazism. But he did not and could not since his thought of Being, as he understood it, required him to turn away from human values and human being. Yet Nazism's threat to human values and human beings cannot be usefully understood through the lens provided by technology or even inauthentic metaphysics. The reason why Heidegger's critique of Nazism is limited precisely and solely to its philosophical status, its character as a Weltanschauung that falls short of philosophy as he conceives it, is that this is the only aspect of the problem which falls within the domain of "philosophy" or authentic thought as Heidegger understood it. In a position that puts Being before human being, and argues that Being is literally the only question, there is literally no way to differentiate the extermination of people in gas chambers from agricultural technology. As his statement of this point makes clear, Heidegger's position simply does not possess the conceptual resources necessary for this end. If to name reality is the paramount philosophical task, Heidegger's thought suffers from its paradoxical incapacity, despite its emphasis on concreteness, to do so.

Heidegger's philosophical insight is accompanied by a pervasive blindness to what perhaps is visible to almost everyone, with the possible exception of those rare individuals who at this late date continue to deny the existence or the importance of the Holocaust. A novel philosophical position offers a perspective that uncovers whole new regions of thought, vast domains that become salient through the formulation of new ideas that circumscribe and give meaning to regions they literally render visible. Heidegger's thought, as he repeatedly emphasized, was limited to the single task of thinking Being. In Heidegger's wake, a whole cottage industry of philosophers has arisen who share his view that Being is the central question of the discipline. But the same perspective that has uncovered the problem of Being for our time also conceals while it reveals, covering up from view what for most of us is so starkly

visible. It is difficult to know what is more important: Heidegger's insight in uncovering Being or his blindness to Nazism which lay concealed to his ontological gaze.

Heidegger's embarrassment reflects the limits of his thought. A painter might reasonably be expected to focus on painting and all that pertains to it, as would a literary critic with literary topics. An issue such as Nazism falls outside the immediate ken of painting or literary criticism. Yet it would be surprising if either a painter or a literary critic not only did not but in fact could not find a way to evoke the most significant example of moral and political evil in this century. If philosophy were peculiarly handicapped in this regard, we would need to think seriously about what we could expect from the love of wisdom. Fortunately, this strange forgetfulness has not afflicted the entire community or even very many among us. Heidegger objected to the forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit ). Yet if attention to Nazism is the criterion, he is the only major thinker who seems to suffer in a serious, incurable way from an even more important lapse of memory: the forgetfulness of human being (Menschensvergessenheit ). One need not hold that philosophy is as rigid and unconnected with reality as schizophrenia^[20] to conclude that something is basically amiss in philosophy if a major representative neither notices nor can notice the series of issues raised by Nazism.

Heidegger's claim for the significance of his thought is based on the idea that in Being he has uncovered the forgotten, central question of philosophy. Yet Heidegger's approach to metaphysics is preferable to others, such as those defended in our time by Kant and Hegel, only if we accept it as normative. His view of Being is an illustration of the contemporary thought of Being, more precisely the contemporary reading of what he regarded as the recapturing of the original insight into Being. But there is a difficulty in Heidegger's inability to engage the contemporary epoch in a more direct way. The Socratic view of philosophy is intended to respond to the felt need to examine life. But Heidegger's position fails the Socratic test since, despite its frequently repeated claims about insight into concrete human being, life is merely a secondary theme that must inevitably be sacrificed for a deeper concern.

Heidegger later realized that his thought required him to reject not only Cartesianism but Platonism in all its forms. But we need to reaffirm the value of the Socratic stress on critical thought about human existence. A lesson of the behavior of intellectuals in this century is that it is too easy to invoke mitigating circumstances in which intellectuals account for the abandonment of the critical intellectual role, such as the supposed political incompetence of philosophers.^[21] What an intellectual of any kind needs to do, including a philosopher, even in difficult circumstances, is to contribute to separating the intellectual wheat from the

rhetorical chaff, to continue, as philosophers have always done, to separate good arguments from bad ones. In his thought, Heidegger claimed to be critical with respect to a tradition that covered up and hence served to obscure genuine insights about Being. We in turn need to be critical about this claim in order to judge it on its merits since not to do so is to contribute to the consequences of this thought, albeit unwillingly, and to abnegate our intellectual responsibility.

What we can hope for from philosophy depends as much on the way we exercise our intellectual responsibility as on philosophy itself. It is becoming ever clearer, if it was not clear already, that philosophy is not what it seems and seems to be what it is not and cannot be. Despite the flattering image of their discipline which philosophers have long presented, it is not in itself a source of perfect knowledge, nor intrinsically linked with virtue. It is merely one way among others, with no particular cognitive privilege of any obvious kind, to contribute to the truth and perhaps to serve the good.^[22]

Despite the urging of others in the discussion, we cannot simply turn away from Heidegger's turn to Nazism—that is, not if we still desire to understand his thought. Heidegger obscurely held that his thought went back behind the distinction of theory and practice,^[23] although he continued to insist even in his later position on the political relevance of his thought. Yet Heidegger's view of thought as retaining the relevance of pure theory, which satisfies our desire to know, nonetheless falls below the standard supposedly ingredient in all the other sciences: the human good. For even if we accept the idea of a good for the German people, a good that is one only for them is obviously not the general human good. And how are we to make out the claim that the question of Being is the central question of human history?

Heidegger's Thought, Its Reception, and the Role of the Intellectual

A different point, concerning the responsibility of intellectuals, needs to be made about the frequent failure in the Heidegger literature to come to grips with Heidegger's Nazism.^[24] The French discussion is an extreme example of the problem posed by the reception of Heidegger's Nazism. Philosophers in general, not just Heideggerians, have been slow in confronting this theme for all the reasons already cited. Although certainly less gifted than the master, Heidegger's interpreters have a comparative advantage which they need to exploit. Philosophy as such is essentially critical since its role is not to celebrate but to know. Yet philosophy only remains critical in the continual effort to uncover

and to evaluate previously undisclosed presuppositions. Heidegger manifests his commitment to this view in two ways: in his effort, in confronting another thinker's thought, to think what is unthought, to bring to light what is still obscure within it; and in the long conceptual journey, leading from what he later came to call the first beginning to the other beginning, which is in fact a journey back behind the original formulation of his thought of Being through its presuppositions to a deeper approach to Being.

When philosophers fail even to make this attempt, they cross the fragile line separating their discipline from theology, the study of revealed truth. Like all positions, Heidegger's reflects and embodies themes current in the context in which it took shape. Obviously, the capacity of any thinker to engage the surrounding conceptual framework is limited by one's very nearness to the themes that prevail at any given moment. It is difficult even for a gifted thinker to come to grips with ideas and concepts that shape one's consciousness at any given moment but of which one may be at most only dimly aware. But philosophy demands that one who would interpret Heidegger do battle with what is unthought in his position—with an idea or ideas, as Kant would say, which he knows how to employ but which he may not have been able to make clear to himself or analyze correctly.^[25]

Heidegger's responsibility in his unquestioning acceptance of many of the themes of the Weimar Republic is tempered by the way in which his personal fate was inextricably linked to the events of the time. But the immediate proximity that hinders Heidegger's appreciation of his surroundings cannot be invoked by later interpreters of his thought, who enjoy the advantage of a temporal and cultural remove. The recent discussion of Heidegger's Nazism provoked by Farias and Ott is not a mere episode in the reception of his thought, a trend we are at liberty to accept or reject as we like. Obviously, all is not yet known and may never be known about Heidegger's Nazism. Nonetheless, enough is now known to make it less than fully philosophical, even intellectually irresponsible, to continue as before, to go on reading Heidegger's texts without so much as acknowledging the significance of his Nazism.

Ironically, the desire to understand Heidegger in an apolitical way by putting his Nazism in parentheses threatens the possibility of the comprehension it wishes to preserve, the comprehension of his thought of Being. If it is ever the case that philosophy and politics are separable, it is not true with respect to Heidegger, since his political commitment and his thought are inseparable. Obviously, someone who has important new ideas cannot be understood immediately since a way must be found to comprehend a position that differs significantly from previous views. If this is true, then no original thinker is ever grasped without an inter-

vening process of reception since a claim to instant comprehension can only be based on a misunderstanding. Perhaps, then, we have not yet fully grasped Heidegger's thought. Perhaps his view is so original that we still lack adequate ways to understand it. Whether or not this is true, it is obvious that no one's thought can be comprehended if an essential element is omitted. In Heidegger's case, his Nazism is indeed an essential element, without which his position is literally incomprehensible. It follows that those who are concerned to protect Heidegger's position by any conceptual means at all often do not, in fact cannot, fully understand what they intend to shield. Their actions indicate more a commitment on faith than a grasp of the ideas.

The failure to come to grips with Heidegger's Nazism is further important for philosophy. The only difference between the reception of Heidegger's position and others lies in the public controversy to which his Nazism has given rise. If our reading of the prior tradition, our reception of earlier views, merely provides what we wanted to believe, then it is mainly useful as a form of reassurance. Certainly, in that sense the failure to engage Heidegger's Nazism stands for the incapacity of philosophy as some have understood it to make good on its promise to supply truth and, accordingly, to be useful in a general sense.

Can we speak of guilt with respect to or following from Heidegger's Nazism? If we employ Jaspers's useful fourfold distinction,^[26] we must immediately exclude criminal guilt since, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that Heidegger ever violated a criminal statute. If one is responsible for the form of government under which one lives, certainly Heidegger, although not necessarily his defenders, must bear the responsibility of voluntarily submitting to Nazism. Heidegger must also accept the moral guilt deriving from certain questionable acts committed because of his Nazi affiliation, such as the denunciations of Baumgarten and Staudinger, perhaps also his questionable behavior in respect to Husserl. Since definitive proof of Heidegger's anti-Semitism, which his followers have denied for decades, has only recently come to light,^[27] we cannot exclude the possibility that other revelations may yet be forthcoming.

There is further a deeper, more pervasive so-called metaphysical guilt shared by Heidegger and those followers who excuse his Nazism for whatever reason. If one can speak of solidarity among human beings, then whoever identifies in any fashion with a movement that exalts one group above another, unquestionably the aim of Nazi ideology, shares a metaphysical guilt. If it is wrong to comprehend Heidegger's thought in a reductive fashion, to reduce it to Nazism, then it is equally wrong to exempt him from responsibility and blame for what he did in his turning toward National Socialism. And if it is important to comprehend the

Nazi constituent of his thought in order to maintain solidarity with everyone excluded by the Nazi option, then all of us concerned with Heidegger bear a responsibility to examine this aspect and a blame for failing to do so.

Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche's racism as not biological but metaphysical.^[28] Whatever his own racial views may have been, one must wonder if Heidegger's concern with the German as a distinct historical entity is a form of philosophical, even metaphysical "racism" based on the exaltation of this people alone among all others. In his "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger maintained that "every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or made to be one,"^[29] and he further offered his own "humanism that thinks the humanity of man from nearness to Being."^[30] If all humanisms are metaphysical, then so also is Heidegger's. His specific attachment to the Volk as a potentially authentic community presupposes an intrinsic superiority of the Germans as German above all other contemporary peoples. What I am calling Heidegger's metaphysical "racism"—which is neither biological^[31] nor anti-Semitic as such— surpasses a merely nationalistic attachment to the German people in his conviction that the Germans are the true heirs to undistorted Greek metaphysics, the idea that philosophy in the deepest sense can only be thought in German, the claim that only the Germans can save us from the decline of the West, and so on, in short in the conception of the specifically German as a different and better human species, alone adequate to Being, and in his implicit denigration, for the same reasons, of others.

What are we to say about Heidegger's view of Nazism? There is a tendency, since Heidegger is also a powerful philosopher, to accord disproportionate respect to his ideas in areas where he has no comparative advantage. Certainly, one of these areas is his conception of Nazism, and his related claims to understand the present and to foresee the future. In this crucial respect, Heidegger's correspondence with Jaspers is illuminating. In a letter to Jaspers, he finally admits that in 1933 and earlier the Jews and the left-wing politicians, who were directly menaced by events, saw further than he did; and he privately accepts the existentialist conception of blame for the acts of the individual. In respect to Stalin, Heidegger writes:

Stalin does not need to declare war any more. He wins a battle every day. But "one" does not see it. For us there is no possible evasion. And every word and every text is in itself a counterattack, if all this does not play itself out in the sphere of the "political," which is itself long since outwitted through other relations of Being and leads [only] a false existence.^[32]

And he continues:

Despite all, dear Jaspers, despite death and tears, despite suffering and horror, despite need and torment, despite landlessness and exile, in this lack of a homeland it is not that nothing occurs; here is hidden an Advent, whose most distant hint we can perhaps experience and must take up in [the form of] a mild [wind] blowing, in order to preserve it for a future, which no historical construction, above all not the contemporary one, most certainly not one that thinks in technical ways, will decipher.^[33]

Jaspers's response, written by a fellow philosopher and friend, who unfortunately greeted the rectoral address as a conceptual breakthrough surpassing Nietzsche, is important. After quoting the passage about Stalin, Jaspers writes in part:

To read something like this frightens me. If you were in front of me, as decades ago so today you would experience my flood of words in anger and plea for reason. I find the questions urgent: Is [not] such a view of things through their imprecision the promotion of ruin? Isn't the possibility of doing whatever is possible spoiled by the appearance of the greatness of such visions? . . . Isn't the power of evil in Germany also what has steadily grown and in fact prepared the victory of Stalin: the covering up and the forgetting of what has occurred, the new so-called nationalism, the return to the old ways of thought and all the ghosts, which, although null and void, ruin us? Is not this power the imprecision in all thought (imprecise because it accompanies the life and activity of the thinker)? Is not a philosophy, which one perceives and composes in such propositions in your letter, that which brings about the vision of the monstrous, again the preparation of the victory of the totalitarian in that it separates itself from reality?^[34]

And Jaspers continues, after citing Heidegger's passage on the Advent, as follows:

My fright grew as I read this. It is, so far as I can think, pure fantasy, in line with so many other fantasies, which, each "in its own time"—has made fools of us during this half century. Do you mean to come forward as a prophet, who shows the transcendent from hidden knowledge, as a philosopher, who was misled through reality? Who neglects the possible for fictions? The same questions can be put to your views of full power and preservation.^[35]

I submit that Jaspers's alarmed reaction to Heidegger's troubling view of social reality is essentially correct. There is something irrational, fantastic, and frightening in Heidegger's conviction that the future of the

German people could be attained through real National Socialism, even more in his later insistence on an ideal form of Nazism. Beyond Heidegger's psychological inability to confront his mistake, present even in his continued insistence on what Jaspers correctly diagnoses as Heidegger's self-characterization of himself as a prophet of Being, whose errors are due to reality itself, there is Heidegger's obvious inability to provide the concrete analysis of experience, especially social experience, for which he increasingly substituted a complex mythology.

Despite his undeniable philosophical capacities, Heidegger's thought is weakened by his evident failure to understand the world in which he lived, for which he increasingly substituted a rich fantasy that he presented as ultimate reality itself. Whatever the merits of Heidegger's original position, its later evolution is also an increasing turning away from the concrete analysis of the world he sought in his fundamental ontology, whose grasp was increasingly impeded and imperiled by the conceptual framework meant to interpret it. There is no reason to believe that anyone, including a philosopher, even a gifted philosopher has direct access to "reality," however that term is understood. Yet if philosophy still has meaning for the good life, it must continue to strive to name reality, mindful of the danger that what appears most evident and even true might still be illusion. The role of the philosopher and all intellectuals can only be to speak the truth as best we can, to defend the distinction between blindness and insight, to refuse the dangerous confusion between fact and fiction which has lately become fashionable.^[36] For in the final analysis, we can only do this, we can only play a responsible role as intellectuals, we can indeed only construct a philosophical theory of social value on the basis of a true grasp of the world in which we live.

Heidegger's thought finally remains paradoxical. Ever since its origins in ancient Greece, there has been a flattering view about philosophy making the rounds, which numerous philosophers have been content to repeat. According to this view, philosophy is the source of reason in the highest sense, productive of truth and intrinsically linked to goodness. Yet Heidegger failed to come to grips with Nazism, the main instance of evil in our time, toward which his own thought led. If the true is good and Nazism is evil, then by implication it is also false, certainly false as a political option. Heidegger's thought is not useful, and certainly not true when evaluated by its capacity effectively to confront Nazism. The consequence is a paradox, since it is paradoxical to acknowledge that Heidegger is a powerful, perhaps even a great philosopher on the one hand and a proponent of Nazism on the other. But unless we merely overlook Nazism and turn away from a central moral problem of our epoch, it is not possible to maintain that great philosophy preserves the link between truth and goodness and to describe Heidegger as a great philosopher.

Conclusion: On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

For obvious reasons, the present discussion is, in fact must be, provisional. As part of our inability to understand the relation between thought and action, we do not comprehend the link between Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker. Any effort to elucidate this connection is forced to develop its own way of going about things, since there is no well-established procedure or even a firm idea of what that would look like. This discussion is further limited by the unfortunate fact that, even now, portions of Heidegger's corpus are still unavailable for scholarly study. We cannot exclude the possibility that writings or documents may later emerge which will alter our present picture of what we now know about Heidegger's Nazism. Since the documents are held by Heidegger's closest admirers, presumably everything is already released which tends to exculpate the master. It is more likely that future publication will chip away little by little at the surrounding wall his unconditional defenders have erected to shield him from critical discussion. A likely source of incriminating evidence is Heidegger's correspondence from his period as rector. It is no accident that perhaps alone of all the major thinkers, the publication of Heidegger's complete works will not include his correspondence.

The basic claims of this essay are that Heidegger's Nazism is influenced by a series of contemporary factors, particularly German Volk ideology, but is finally based on his philosophy; and that the later evolution of his philosophy in the period after his service as rector of the University of Freiburg cannot be understood without, in fact must be understood through, his continued interest in an ideal form of Nazism. Heidegger stressed the concept of the turning to describe the evolution of his thought. The relation between his philosophical thought and his Nazism can be understood as a series of three turnings: an initial turning on the basis of his philosophy to National Socialism as it existed, a turning in which social, political, and historical factors, including German Volk ideology, and Heidegger's own philosophy of Being come together; a second turning away from really existent National Socialism when Heidegger became aware that the rectorate had failed; and a third turning—still based on his personal and philosophical acceptance of the manifest destiny of the German Volk —toward an ideal form of Nazism, from which he never later averted his gaze, and whose acceptance influenced the later evolution of his theory of Being.

The framework proposed here provides a coherent, plausible reading of the relation between Heidegger's philosophical thought and his own philosophy. Yet in the present, overheated atmosphere, in which the

political stakes are high, in which scholarly careers are tied to the defense of Heidegger the man and above all Heidegger the thinker, no reading can be judged squarely on its merits. It would be illusory to anticipate that even best possible study could produce widespread assent, least of all among those Heidegger scholars who, following the master's lead, have already worked out various strategies for damage control. Just as Heidegger repeatedly hinted at a confrontation with Nazism but in fact finally never addressed it otherwise than as a rival theory of Being, there is no reason to forecast that Heidegger's closest supporters will confront the issues raised by the link between Heidegger's thought and his Nazism. In short, like the master himself, whenever possible they will continue business as usual.^[37] Yet to do so, to fail to confront this problem, clearly reflects badly not only on Heidegger's philosophy but on philosophy in general.

As the materials about Heidegger's Nazism continue to accumulate, as the discussion expands, as more and more philosophers become aware of the complex issues, as we become ever more cognizant that the Holocaust is a central event of our time from which we cannot simply turn away, it becomes increasingly difficult, even for Heidegger's closest admirers, simply to pretend that his fateful decision for National Socialism was, is, or even could be essentially meaningless, or that it might be sufficient merely to deplore it. The point is emphatically not to discard Heidegger's philosophy, to consign it to the dustheap of history, as he so candidly consigned the history of ontology he intended to "destroy." It is rather to understand what remains of value in his thought through a thorough evaluation comprising all the relevant factors, including his attachment to Nazism.

As the master conception of his later thought is the event, it is appropriate to utilize the event of his lengthy adherence to Nazism as the turning point for a detailed examination of his entire corpus, to sift his ideas, to measure their worth, cognizant of the intrinsic link in his philosophical thought between ontology and politics. The effort to analyze and evaluate the basic concepts is a necessary part of the arduous process of coming to grips with the theory of an important thinker, someone who introduces new ideas. In that sense, what is necessary for Heidegger is what is required for any novel thinker. The difference, however, is that unlike any other philosopher in this century, Heidegger clearly and unambiguously, on the basis of his philosophical thought, identified with Nazism.

It is too late to expunge Heidegger's Nazism from the historical record or from the interpretation of his thought. Examination of Hei-

degger's corpus shows that Heidegger's Nazism, real and ideal, is a permanent feature of his thought beginning in 1933. To fail to take his Nazism into account in the interpretation of his philosophical and "postphilosophical" thought, to endeavor to be more friendly to Hei-degger than to the truth, is finally to distance oneself from the concern with truth.