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.