Extraphilosophic Factors in Heidegger's Nazi Turning
Heidegger's turning to Nazism is not explicable through any single factor or type of factor. It has been held that his Nazi turn is due merely to his philosophy or merely to nonphilosophical reasons.[3] In fact, it is the result of both philosophical and extraphilosophical—or, for want of a better term, "existential"—factors. Among the many factors that are cited as influencing the rise of Nazism, beyond Adolf Hitler, are "German philosophy, romantic mysticism, anti-Semitism, the 'stab in the back' argument aimed at the Weimar Republic, German big business, the German economy in the wake of the Versailles treaty, the Prussian tradition, insidious occultism associated with 'ariosophy,' and the threat of Stalinist communism."[4] Factors that led to National Socialism were part of the social, political, and historical background when Heidegger turned to Nazism. Among the many factors ingredient in the wider background in which Heidegger's philosophical position emerged and in which he turned to Nazism, three are particularly important for his own political evolution: the decline of the Weimar Republic, the prevailing conservative political thought, and the Volk ideology it expressed.
Historical Background: the Weimar Republic
Since a political engagement does not occur in a social, political, and conceptual vacuum, it is useful to indicate, at least in outline, some of
the main features of the social context when Heidegger became rector.[5] The Nazi accession to power occurred against the background of German history. Under Bismarck, the minister of war for Wilhelm I, Germany was unified, Schleswig-Holstein was wrested from Denmark, and Prussia took the place previously occupied by Austria. Germany successfully waged war against France, increased its imperial power, and acquired foreign colonies. The expansion and consolidation of German power came to an abrupt halt with the end of the First World War, culminating in the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, which was widely perceived as a humiliation by the defeated German population.
The Weimar Republic arose and can be understood against the background of more than a half century of imperialist expansion through war.[6] It was proclaimed on 9 November 1918 in Weimar—the site of the intellectual circle centered around Goethe, one of the greatest humanists in the history of European culture—by the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann. The Weimar Republic prospered during the golden twenties, which culminated in the world economic crisis in 1929.[7] The history of the Weimar Republic describes a short period of hope symbolized by the introduction of a republican form of government, in an obvious reaction against the consequences of German imperialism, which then quickly degenerated into one of the worst tyrannies the world has ever known. Whether the hope was ever justified, whether the period of the Weimar Republic was more than a failed effort at the introduction of a liberal democratic form of goverment in the interregnum between two world wars, is a topic of scholarly debate.
Even before the outbreak of economic depression, the Weimar Republic suffered from a series of deep ideological, social, political, and economic problems. The world economic crisis that arose in 1929 led to enormous inflation and staggering unemployment, among other social problems. It was accompanied by an almost palpable sense of decay in the university and many other areas of German life.[8] In Heidegger's philosophy, the influence of this particular problem is visible in Heidegger's analysis, in a lecture course, of the prevailing mood as one of boredom and in the rectoral talk in his concern to defend what he refers to as the essence of the German university. There was further a clear sense of instability, a belief that things could not just continue on the same course, a conviction that something needed to be done, a longing for a solution, even a radical measure to transform the situation in steady deterioration. The final part of the Weimar period has been aptly described, immediately before Hitler took office, as follows: "This, then, was the Weimar Republic in 1932: clear vision and political impotence, fear, suspicion, and moments of irrational hope, among the politi-
cians of the middle, politics as usual, but with everyone else, a sense of emergency."[9]
The reasons for the demise of the Weimar Republic are still not clear. One possibility is the failure to comprehend the growing threat of the imperialism of German monopoly capital.[10] Another is the concern with political freedom as the means to an end rather than an end in itself.[11] Yet another is the perpetration of a conservative revolution from the right.[12] Still others include the polarization between various right- and left-wing extremes, the idea of a democracy not itself democratic—both of which suggest that "the people" in a collective sense was in some sense responsible for the Republic's end—the fascist seizure of power, the interplay of certain forces, and so on.[13] What is known is that the outbreak of a world economic crisis destabilized a weak government, exacerbating social and political tensions, which in turn contributed to an unexpected Nazi electoral victory in July 1932. The end of the Republic less than a decade and a half after it began was hastened when von Papen persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor. It finally ended with the resignation of Kurt von Schleicher on 28 January 1933 and the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler on 30 January of that year, which led straight into Nazi tyranny.[14]
The complex series of events that led to the Nazi assumption of power is different from its significance.[15] The German revolution that began in 1933 and led to a second defeat of Germany was only the continuation of the historical process begun under Bismarck, which came to a temporary halt, during the Weimar period, at the end of the First World War. If this is true, then the rise of National Socialism can be regarded as an effort to win a war that had already been lost, to renew with a political approach the momentum temporarily suspended during the Weimar Republic, which unsuccessfully sought to lead Germany in another direction, to restore German self-esteem and confidence—in short, to bring about the historical realization of the German people.[16]
Conservative Political Thought
Heidegger's concern with the contemporary situation can be understood in the context of the interest of German intellectuals in general with modern life. He was one of a large group of German intellectuals who found change unsettling and who in various ways longed for a return to an earlier, more stable social structure.[17] He shared the widespread conservative worldview that emerged after the loss of the First World War, including conservative revolutionary tendencies, visible in his Nazi turning, and the rejection of the liberal democratic conception
embodied by the Weimar Republic. He further shared the anticapitalist romanticism that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century and that can be symbolized by the opposition between Kultur and Zivilisation , according to which culture in the deep sense required a rejection of modernity.[18] This view is evident in Heidegger's writings in his cult of Greek thought as the true form of philosophy. Yet it is important not to confuse the widespread conservativism of this period with support for National Socialism, which at the peak of its electoral success in the elections of April and July 1932 garnered no more than 37 percent of the popular vote.[19]
Heidegger shared the growing sense of unease widely felt by German intellectuals in the waning days of the Weimar Republic.[20] This intellectual sense of dismay found expression among German intellectuals in a concern to "locate" human being with respect to the present. Two extremes can be represented by Max Scheler, the phenomenologist and Jewish convert to Catholicism, whose thought influenced Heidegger's, and Karl Mannheim, a prominent sociologist who studied with the Marxist Lukács and with Heidegger. In 1928 in the "Author's Preface" to his last uncompleted book, significantly entitled Man's Place in Nature , Scheler writes in reference to contemporary work in philosophical anthropology: "In spite of this, however, man is more of a problem to himself at the present time than ever before in all recorded history."[21] Only one year later, from a radically different angle of vision, Mannheim observes that it is "imperative in the present transitional epoch to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute."[22]
Heidegger further shared the rejection, following from the concern to seek a third way between liberal democracy and Bolshevism, of modernity as such. Heidegger is already opposed to Cartesianism, a central form of modern philosophy, as early as 1919. Yet modernity is not a problem in Heidegger's fundamental ontology, either in Being and Time or in his other early writings. So far as I know, the word "modernity" does not even occur in the book. The question, however, of what Blumenberg has felicitously called the "legitimacy of the modern age" is in retrospect an obvious issue for Heidegger's philosophy.[23] As became clear in the later evolution of his thought—in his rejection of both metaphysics or modern theory and technology or modern practice—his conception of ontology brought him into conflict with anything modern as such. A typical instance is his later comment in a lecture course that
the danger we face lies not in the decline of the West but in the acceptance and development of the idea of modernity.[24]
Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism is exceptional only for the importance of his thought and the depth of his commitment. But his failure to oppose Nazism is typical of the behavior of German philosophers in general. It is not well known, in part because German philosophy during the Nazi period has not often been studied, that German philosophy played an equivocal role at this time.[25] It has been said that German philosophy failed in three different ways: in removing or even weakening the barriers against National Socialism, in creating an intellectual atmosphere propitious to it, and in apologizing for it.[26] Certainly, German philosophers both collectively and individually did little to prevent the rise of Nazism.
When one reads the texts from this period, the widespread insensitivity among philosophers to the specific currents, such as anti-Semitism, that shortly led to National Socialism is striking. An example among many is Heidegger's remark in a letter of 1926 to Jaspers, who was married to a Jewish woman, about the concern in the University of Marburg to appoint a non-Jew and if at all possible a German nationalist, a remark that typically evoked no protest from Jaspers.[27] It has been pointed out that many Germans unsympathetic to Hitler's anti-Semitism were willing to cooperate with him to revise the Versailles treaty and in general to strengthen Germany's position in Europe.[28] Indeed, it is a mistake to consider anti-Semitism as the single crucial problem, or maybe even as crucial at all, since it was not one of the central themes in Hitler's rise to power.[29]
Once Nazism had taken power, German philosophers typically either rushed to ingratiate themselves with the National Socialist movement, or at least failed to reject it. When they did reject it, they mainly did so in an ineffectual manner, for instance in Husserl's noble but pathetic call to defend the ancient Greek distinction between knowledge and opinion in order to resist the rise of Nazi barbarism.[30] In retrospect, however, Husserl's rejection of National Socialism, weak as it unfortunately was, shines like a beacon in comparison with the more typical philosophical effort to embrace, or at least to cooperate with, Hitler's movement, above all by Martin Heidegger. It is a matter of record that there is no important protest against Nazism by the German philosophical community.[31] Although this has been explained through the unpolitical nature of German philosophers, in fact many German philosophers who represented themselves as unpolitical were intensely political beings, including Heidegger. In 1933, when Heidegger issued his claim as the rector of the University of Freiburg to be the philosophical Führer of National
Socialism, he was only one of numerous philosophers each of whom claimed to provide the only correct idea of the new Nazi state through his own philosophy, including Krieck, Bauemler, Rothacker, Gehlen, and others.[32]
Although Hitler only came to power in 1933, as early as the presidential elections in early 1932 a manifesto of personal support for Hitler was issued by six professors, including a philosopher, Carl August Enge, professor of law (Rechtsphilosophie ) in Jena and scientific director of the Nietzsche Archives in Jena.[33] Between this initial manifesto and the election of the Reichstag in November 1933, there were no fewer than four other manifestos in which a progressively greater number of philosophers participated.[34] On the occasion of the vote for the Reichstag in November 1933, no fewer than a thousand professors, after an address by Heidegger, publicly acknowledged their support for Hitler and the National Socialist state, including Heidegger, N. Ach, O. F. Bollnow, O. Dittrich, K. Graf Dürckheim, H. Freyer, H.-G. Gadamer, A. Gehlen, J. E. Heyde, E. Jaensch, G. Krüger, F. Krueger, K. Leese, P. Lersch, H. Lipps, F. Lipsius, T. Litt, D. Mahnke, H. Noack, K. J. Obenauer, J. Ritter, H. Sauer, W. Schingnitz, H. Schneider, H. Schwarz, and W. Wirth.[35]
In fact, philosophical support for Hitler began even earlier. For instance, Ernst Krieck, professor of pedagogy, with whom Heidegger later collaborated on the National Socialist reform of German higher education, was disciplined for a pro-Nazi speech in 1931; and when he joined the NSDAP on 1 January 1932, he was suspended. Until the end of 1932, slightly more than 1 percent of the German academic establishment had publicly taken a position for Hitler, including eight philosophers: Enge, Schwarz, Krueger, Krieck, Baeumler, Rothacker, Bornhausen, and Jaensch.[36] Apparently the numbers would have been even larger had other philosophical colleagues, like German academics in general, not held back for tactical considerations.[37] The awareness of political consequences was not misplaced, since a number of academics, including more than thirty philosophers, quickly lost their positions in 1933.[38] Among the philosophers, in April, Max Horkheimer, Karl Mannheim, Paul Tillich, and Siegfried Marck; then in July Ernst von Aster was fired and August Messer and Hans Driesch were forcibly retired; and Bernhard Groethuysen was chased out of the university.[39] Other philosophers who were let go in 1933 include Richard Hönigswald, Ernst Cassirer, Jonas Cohn, Arthur Liebert, Dietrich yon Hildebrandt, Helmuth Plessner, Martin Buber, and Theodor Adorno.[40]
From a political perspective, Heidegger largely shared the conservative tendencies prevalent after the First World War, including the basic acceptance, or at least tolerance, of National Socialism with the exception
of its biological anti-Semitism, which was declined by most academics, and his participation, surprising for Heidegger, who seems to have had few or no personal heroes, in the Hitler cult. Heidegger followed other conservative intellectuals in rejecting both Bolshevism and liberalism of all kinds. But he carried his cooperation with Nazism further than most other academics, certainly further than any philosopher with the exception of Ernst Krieck. The main difference between Heidegger and all other philosophers, including Krieck, was his impressive ability to express his conservative worldview, itself typical of the conservative mood of the times among intellectuals, in a series of philosophical doctrines. These doctrines, all of which are deeply rooted in his philosophy of Being, include: the rejection of a democratic form of government as antithetical to modern life, particularly evident in the Spiegel interview; the philosophical reworking of Schmitt's conception of decisionism, the basis of the Führer principle, in his own conception of resoluteness;[41] the rejection of modernity itself in his espousal of Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism and European nihilism; and his own later rejection of technology.
The Volk and German Romanticism
The concern of conservative German intellectuals, including a large proportion of German academics, to seek a third way between the failed liberalism incarnated by the Weimar Republic and the Bolshevism which they unanimously feared was motivated by both historical and conceptual factors. On the one hand, it was motivated by such historical circumstances as the concern to redeem the German defeat in the First World War, to restore German honor and pride. But it was also spurred on by the reactionary tradition of German Volk -thought, with its stress on the historical realization and exaltation of the Germans as German, which impelled both the imperialist movement stemming from Bismarck and the National Socialist conception of the German nation. In Mein Kampf , Hitler clearly stressed the fact of belonging to the German Volk , namely the conception of nationality (Volkstum , from Volk ), as more important than the state, which was merely a means to the achievement and preservation of the higher form of human being.[42]
The Volk perspective, which is older than Nazism, was already an important current in nineteenth-century German thought. It emerged as a romantic response to the general problem of human being in modern society, the so-called condition humaine , with important ties to German romanticism and conservative thinking. The völkisch perspective, like romanticism with which it is allied, represents an approach to the problems of modern life which eschews rational solutions of any kind, includ-
ing economic analysis, social reform, and so on, in favor of an emphasis on human being in an often mystical sense. It differs from romanticism, which places primary emphasis on the individual, in the appeal to supraindividual, mystical forces and the stress on the people writ large. The importance of the individual is limited to the belonging to the group, typically the nation or the race, or both. Unlike romanticism, which is often apolitical, völkisch thought is typically related to extreme forms of political conservatism and the most virulent types of nationalism.
Völkisch ideas were typically advanced in order to counter widespread alienation held to be characteristic of modern society. The conception of alienation, understood as separation, say the separation of human being from its essence, or essential nature, is older than modernity. It has a long theological lineage, for instance in the idea that Adam and Eve, and human beings in general, were separated from God. In this view, which dominates Christianity, the purpose of human life is to overcome one's separation from the divine by finding the way back to God. This view receives a secularized development in the effort of modern thinkers to "think" the problem of the modern human being. It can be illustrated in a passage about labor that Hegel cites from Adam Smith:
But the value of labor decreases in the same proportion as the productivity of labor increases. Work becomes thus absolutely more and more dead, it becomes machine-labor, the individual's own skill becomes infinitely limited, and the consciousness of the factory worker is degraded to the utmost level of dullness. The connection between the particular sort of labor and the infinite mass of needs becomes wholly imperceptible, turns into a blind dependence. It thus happens that a far-away operation often affects a whole class of people who have hitherto satisfied their needs through it; all of a sudden it limits [their work]. makes it redundant and useless.[43]
The concern with alienation as the condition of human being in modern society is a frequent theme in modern thought in an almost bewildering variety of ways, in literature, art, and philosophy, but also in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and other disciplines. All of these disciplines are concerned with the recognition and analysis of the phenomenon of alienation and the diagnosis of ways to achieve reconciliation, to heal the perceived dichotomy. This concern is widely present in modern political philosophy, for instance in Hobbes's view of the social contract as a necesssary evil, and in Rousseau's espousal of a political reformulation of society to reach a simple human community that is neither the state of nature nor civilization as we know it. In the period after the French Revolution, the diagnosis and supersession of alienation becomes a main theme in the thought of Hegel.[44] The dual concepts of alienation
and reconciliation are important to the views of his main successors: Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.[45] Alienation is further a main theme in Heidegger's early position and, under the guise of a concern for the historical realization of the German people, a persistent aspect of all his later thought.
The philosophical concern with the diagnosis and supersession of alienation runs parallel to a similar concern in the romantic movement, including literature, art,[46] and politics. Political romanticism found expression in such diverse tendencies as romantic traditionalism, romantic humanitarianism, and romantic nationalism. In reaction to the French Revolution, a specific form of political romanticism was created in Europe by the fear of revolutionary ideology in the writings of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and L. G. A. de Bonald. Philosophically, romanticism has been described as a loosely related set of views consisting in the rejection of rationalism, of the Locke-Hume philosophical axis.[47] Romanticism is said to be typified by a cluster of beliefs including idealization of social relations in contrast with the Enlightenment view, the idea of the state as a social organism, opposition to the thought of the French Revolution, sympathy for Roman Catholicism, and nationalism.[48] It has further been observed that in all its varieties, romanticism celebrates the self.[49]
The idea of the Volk features a characteristic romantic response to the problem of the separation, or alienation, supposedly typical of life in modern society. The general idea of Volksgeist , or spirit of a people, which cannot be equated with Volk ideology, its degenerate, reactionary form, appears in historical investigations, in the writings of such diverse thinkers as Burke, Montesquieu, Hume, and Voltaire. The intellectual genesis of this concept has been traced to three writers.[50] Herder, who refers to the Geist des Volkes, Geist der Nation , and Nationalgeist ; Hegel's coinage of the term "Volksgeist, " in the course of early meditations on popular religion and Christianity;[51] and the controversy involving E K. Savigny and G. F. Puchta, in the historical school of law, about the relation between the national spirit and the legal system. Rotenstreich points out that the idea of a Volksgeist provided "a descriptive concept as well as a normarive demand of faithfulness"[52] influential in politics, literature, law, and philosophy, as well as the distinction between peoples and their traditions.
The idea of a Volksgeist need not, but can, be used for specifically conservative purposes, as witness the later Nazi confusion of the distinctions between Volksgeist and race. The concept of the Volk is difficult to define, but important to grasp as a central factor in Heidegger's turn toward Nazism. According to Bourdieu, who mainly bases himself on Mosse, the völkisch perspective is an attitude toward the world, which
resists any objectification, englobing literary, historical, and philosophical sources, as well as biological and philological forms of racism, including a series of confused views regarding phantasms, technology, workers, the elite, the people, and concerning history and country.[53] Mosse stresses the filiation leading from romanticism to the idea of the Volk , which he regards as similarly irrational and emotional. He adduces a series of traits as characteristic of right-wing, völkisch thought, including the Volk as a desired unity beyond contemporary reality, "a more tangible vessel for the life force that flowed from the cosmos," a romantic pantheistic concept of nature, a view of the spirit as limited to a national entity, and a concept of man as not vanquishing or overcoming nature but as living in harmony with it.[54] Heidegger's later exaltation of allegedly misunderstood nature as physis through his conception of Gelassenheit is, with the exception of the philosophical formulation, typical of the Volk perspective. From a quasi-philosophical perspective, the Volk point of view reached its dubious high point in the insistence of Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologist, in his analysis of the alleged myth of the twentieth century, on soul as the interior form of race and the racial soul as the effective motor of history.[55]
Romantic thought is essentially antirationalist, directed against the Enlightenment and its legitimate achievements in the defense of reason. Whereas the Enlightenment thinker seeks a rational solution to the problems of society, founded on faith in reason, the disillusioned romantic[56] typically eschews reason in an effort to return into oneself to seek the proper attitude to life and reality. There is a clear connection between the intrinsically romantic effort to resolve the great social and political problems of the day through essentially magical solutions and the essential antirationalism common to all forms of totalitarian thought. Berlin's account of the antirationalistic, romantic approach to human life and action, including the problem of alienation, in the writings of Joseph de Maistre, an early forerunner of fascism, is an accurate description of the Volk -ideological approach to modern life which influenced Heidegger's own Nazi turning:
Human action in his [i.e., Maistre's] sense is justified only when it derives from that tendency in human beings which is directed neither to happiness nor to comfort, nor to neat, logically coherent patterns of life, nor to self-assertion and self-aggrandizement, but to the fulfillment of an unfathomable divine purpose which men cannot, and should not try to, fathom— and which they deny at their peril.[57]
In his own way, Heidegger echoes this concern in his steadfast insistence throughout his entire career on the importance of Being. It is literally
through uncognizable Being, which in his view towers over beings, or mere entities, and human being alike, that he sought to comprehend all questions concerning human being now and in the future.