Technology and Heidegger's Nazism

The discussion of the origins and nature of Heidegger's theory of technology provides the background necessary to grasp its relation to his Nazism. One observer has seen Heidegger's inability to come to grips with Nazism as deriving from his view of technology.^[112] But others, Heidegger's defenders, while aware of these passages and others as well, have accepted as correct his own statements that he broke with National Socialism in 1934 and that his later thought, in particular his analysis of technology, represents his effort come to grips with National Socialism. One qualified observer maintains that Heidegger's break in 1934 with his political engagement was total, and further maintains that Heidegger's thought around the period of the Beiträge was already in opposition and contradiction to Nazism.^[113] Another observer even regards Heidegger's critique of technology as following from his critique of Nazism.^[114]

The view that Heidegger broke with politics in general or Nazism in particular through his view of technology is not supported by an examination of the texts. As in his other writings, Heidegger's criticism of National Socialism as a theory is balanced by visible sympathy for its political goal, construed narrowly as the gathering of the Germans as German. The Spiegel interview clearly records Heidegger's conviction that the Nazi effort to confront technology was in principle correct, although

the Nazis were too unsophisticated to carry it out. Heidegger's suggestion that his own view of technology can be understood as an extension of the National Socialist effort to confront this phenomenon has been amply supported by examination of Heidegger's "The Question concerning Technology."

Heidegger's suggestion in the Spiegel interview that the Nazis were correct to confront the hegemony of modern technology was not an isolated comment in his corpus. A similar passage, among the most controversial in his entire corpus, occurs in his lecture course on metaphysics. The lecture course in which the remark occurs was originally given in 1935 and was published in altered form in 1953. Heidegger's comment is embedded in a longer remark about values, in which he characteristically criticizes any approach to philosophy in terms of the concept of value before turning to the philosophy of National Socialism. His comment, which was reproduced in the version of the lecture course which appeared in 1953, gave rise to a well-known polemic, which can be briefly summarized as follows.^[115] Prior to publication, Heidegger was advised to change the passage in question.^[116] After the revised version of the lecture course appeared, Heidegger was attacked by Habermas^[117] and was defended by Lewalter.^[118] In a letter to the editor, Heidegger uncharacteristically defended himself and claimed, contrary to fact, that the passage had not been altered.^[119] He repeated this claim in a letter to S. Zemach,^[120] and again in the Spiegel interview.^[121]

According to Petra Jaeger, the editor of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics , the original text probably contained still another sentence, which Heidegger omitted in the revised version.^[122] The initial version is unavailable and, hence, unverifiable, since the page of the manuscript containing this passage is missing in the Heidegger Archives. In the revised version, presumably modified in order to obscure his continued attachment to an ideal form of Nazism, Heidegger seems to have altered the passage in two ways: in the substitution of "movement" for "N.S.," which might perhaps lead one to think that he had some other movement in mind; and in the addition of the passage in parentheses to indicate the continuity between technology and National Socialism, which one qualified observer reads as imparting a negative cast to the concept of greatness.^[123] The revised passage reads

The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)—have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of "values" and "totalities.^[124]

The revised version of this passage is singularly important for an understanding of Heidegger's Nazism after the rectorate, including its link to his theory of technology. Here, with great clarity, in 1953, well after the end of the Second World War, at a point when Heidegger, who has returned to teaching, no longer has anything to fear from the Nazis or anyone else, he states his appreciation for the supposedly misunderstood essence of National Socialism, in virtue of the so-called movement's important effort to confront global technology. Heidegger publicly affirms his conviction in Nazism, not the real Nazism of Adolf Hitler, but an ideal kind that has not yet been and still might occur. Heidegger's remark is not a strategic claim, an effort to curry favor, to protect himself or his family, but in all probability a sincere statement of his conviction. We are already familiar with Heidegger's frequent assertions, common in claims of orthodoxy, with respect to the views of Kant, Nietzsche, and Jünger, that only he, Heidegger, has understood them. Here, he makes a similar claim with respect to Nazism. For Heidegger evidently thought of himself as the only "orthodox" Nazi, as the only one able to understand the essence of National Socialism.

This passage further stresses the connection, later emphasized in the Spiegel interview, between Heidegger's Nazism and his theory of technology. As in the interview, here as well, Heidegger insists on the importance of National Socialism in confronting the rule of technology. Heidegger's statement in 1953 is fully consistent with the later statement in the Spiegel interview in 1966. In both instances, he underlines his conviction that National Socialism is a valuable, but finally incomplete, effort to counter the effects of modern technology. Although his view of technology later changed, his appreciation of Nazism's role remained constant. It is, then, appropriate to consider Heidegger's theory of technology as a revised, reworked, better formulation of the unsuccessful Nazi effort, as Heidegger understands it, to free us from the rule of technology.

In the accounts of Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures and the Beiträge , it was possible to point to passages in which he criticized the failures of Nazism regarded as an ontological theory. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing in the public record to suggest that Heidegger was at all sensitive to the human suffering wreaked by Nazism, in fact sensitive to human beings in more than an abstract sense. The best that Vietta, currently the staunchest German defender of Heidegger, can do is to point to a diary entry by Heribert Heinrichs recording a discussion in which Heidegger supposedly described Hitler as "the robber and criminal of this century"—certainly a mild judgment in view of the enormity of the evidence—and further claimed to have totally revised his own view of National Socialism after 1938.^[125] Yet the available evidence contradicts this view, since Heidegger's own writings after that date reveal a

continued sympathy for National Socialism, namely for the Nazi effort to confront technology, and a lack of concern for the crimes committed by the Nazis.

Heidegger's failure to denounce, or even to acknowledge, Nazi practice can be interpreted as an oblique resistance to the practical consequences of his theoretical commitment. He was obviously unwilling to acknowledge the failure of his turn to Nazism, not for mere psychological reasons, but on good philosophical grounds; for his turn to Nazism was grounded in his own theory of Being, which he never abandoned. For the same reason, he was also unwilling to abandon National Socialism, or at least an ideal form of it, because of his continued interest in certain points where his thought converged with Nazism, including the coming to be of the Germans as German and the confrontation with technology. Heidegger's insensitivity to the effects of Nazism in practice is coupled, then, with a residual theoretical enthusiasm for a form of Nazism in theory.

In Heidegger's writings on technology, at least two passages indicate a striking insensitivity to human suffering. Heidegger, who understood technology as a form of disclosure, was careful to conceal and not to reveal some of his most deeply held views about the technological process. There is a passage in the original version of Heidegger's essay, "The Question concerning Technology," which originated as a lecture in 1949 under the title "Enframing" but which was altered in the version published in 1954.^[126] In the version published during Heidegger's lifetime, the text, which was clearly changed to conceal an earlier formulation, retains only seven words in the translation, five in the revised text: "Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry."^[127] This banal point hardly reveals the startling claim embedded in the original manuscript, which only became available some seven years after Heidegger's death. The original passage reads as follows: "Agriculture is now a mechanised food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs."^[128]

From a strictly Heideggerian point of view, this passage is literally correct, since he maintains that all of modernity suffers from the turn away from Being which leads to the hegemony of technology. Yet this passage is disturbing, in part because of Heidegger's manifest insensitivity, in a period when he emphasizes the Ereignis , to the most catastrophic moral Ereignis of our time: the Holocaust. Heidegger, who is sensitive to Being, is startlingly insensitive to human being. There is further a manifest conceptual mistake in simply considering all forms of technology as indistinguishably alike. For Heidegger has failed to consider, and certainly failed to comprehend, the relation of technology to

the event of the Holocaust: the unparalleled way in which all available technological resources were harnessed, and new ones were invented, specifically to commit genocide. No amount of liberal handwringing at this late date should be allowed to obscure Heidegger's incapacity, not only to respond to, but even to comprehend, the Holocaust through his theory of technology.^[129] His theory, hence, fails the test of experience.

Another passage occurs in a still unpublished lecture on technology, delivered in 1949. The manuscript reads:

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die.'? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die.'? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China.

But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible.^[130]

Heidegger's obvious insensitivity to the suffering wrought by the Second World War is also exhibited in another context, in a letter to Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, Heidegger's former doctoral student, as a Jew early emigrated to escape persecution by the Nazis. He later corresponded with Heidegger about Heidegger's role in National Socialism. In answer to a letter from Marcuse, dated 20 January 1948, Heidegger replied in part:

To the severe and justified reproaches formulated "over a regime that has exterminated millions of Jews, that has made terror a norm and that transformed everything connected to the concepts of spirit, freedom, and truth into its opposite," I can only add that instead of the "Jews" one should put the "East Germans," and that is even more the case for one of the Allied Powers, with the difference that everything that has happened since 1945 is known to all the world, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in reality was kept secret from the German people.^[131]

This chapter has examined the link between Heidegger's Nazism and his view of technology. Heidegger's supporters have suggested that Heidegger confronted Nazism through his theory of technology, or even that his theory of technology arises out of his confrontation with Nazism. Study of Heidegger's texts presents a different, darker picture of Heidegger, a thinker stubbornly committed to the metaphysical racism he shared with Nazism and to a revised version of the supposed Nazi effort to oppose technology. Heidegger's theory of technology is, then, not a

confrontation with Nazism but a confrontation with technology from a Nazi perspective. Heidegger's theory of technology only extends, but does not free him from, his concern with National Socialism.

The account of Heidegger's conception of technology closes the second phase of this discussion. The initial phase considered Heidegger's turning to National Socialism on the basis of his philosophical thought. The second phase discussed Heidegger's understanding of the rectorate and the later evolution of Heidegger's position as philosophy and beyond philosophy in relation to Nazism. Heidegger's defenders maintain that in his Nietzsche lectures, in the Beiträge , or in his writings on technology, he confronted Nazism. Yet inspection of Heidegger's texts shows that although Heidegger did criticize National Socialism as an unsatisfactory theory of Being, the same criterion he brought against philosophical positions, such as Kant's and Descartes's, he did not criticize its political practice. Study of the texts has further shown Heidegger's continued acceptance of certain aspects of National Socialism, such as its supposed insight into technology. Heidegger continued as well to maintain his steadfast conviction in the metaphysical racism he shared with both the real and ideal forms of National Socialism. Now the effort to defend Heidegger, above all his thought, has mainly been conducted in abstraction from Heidegger's texts, which inconveniently tend to undermine efforts to defend Heidegger's life and thought. In the third and final phase of the discussion, we need to examine the Heidegger reception itself.