The First Wave

The initial phase of the French discussion comprises no fewer than three subphases, including articles by Karl Löwith, Maurice de Gandillac, and Alfred de Towarnicki, followed some time later by articles by Eric Well and Alphonse De Waehlens, and ending with responses by Löwith and De Waelhens. Gandillac, who was apparently the first French philosopher to come in contact with Heidegger after the war, went on to an important career as a professor at the Sorbonne. Löwith is a former student, later colleague of Heidegger, who spent the war in exile. He is well-known for his own work as well as for an interesting study of Heidegger which attempted to understand why and how Heidegger achieved such philosophical importance.^[38] Weil, a Jew who was the assistant of Cassirer, himself a Jew, early emigrated to France where he achieved prominence as an original thinker, above all for an important analysis of philosophical categories.^[39] De Waelhens was a well-known Belgian scholar of phenomenology and existentialism, the author of important studies of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Towarnicki is a journalist who is still active.

Here as in the later debate, it is instructive to regard the discussion as a series of dialectically interrelated analyses of the same phenomenon from diverse points of view. Both Gandillac and Towarnicki embroider various themes of the "official" view of Heidegger's Nazism, due finally to Heidegger himself. Gandillac provides a short account of a visit to Heidegger's home which from the present perspective makes two interesting points.^[40] On the one hand, he presents with sympathy Heidegger's view that Hitlerism was the historic manifestation of a so-called structural disease of human being as such. It is significant, since Heidegger later insists on the misunderstood essence of Nazism, that in Gandillac's

account he refuses to incriminate the fall of the Germanic community, whose true sense of liberty he still desires to awaken. On the other hand, several times in the article we are told that Heidegger was seduced like a child by the exterior aspects of Hitlerism, that he was induced to enroll in the Nazi party by his children, and so on. Taken together, these two points tend to indicate that Heidegger was unaware of the consequences of, and hence not responsible for, his political actions, while holding open the possibility, which he later never renounced, of the true gathering of the metaphysical Volk .

Towarnicki's version of the official view is at least partly false.^[41] He suggests that Heidegger was unanimously elected rector, although that is now known to be untrue. Towarnicki quotes Heidegger to the effect that the death of Röhm opened his eyes to the true nature of Nazism, which he later criticized in his courses on Nietzsche; but we know that Heidegger continued to affirm his belief in an authentic form of National Socialism. The article ends with an affirmation, in the form of a direct quotation, of Heidegger's emotional proclamation of the spiritual importance of France to the world. When we recall that Heidegger also justified his turn to Nazism through the concern with the spiritual welfare of the German people, this remark appears less uplifting.

Löwith's discussion, which was written outside Germany in 1939, hence at the beginning of the war that was to devastate Europe, is still surprisingly complete.^[42] It mentions topics that continue to occur and recur in the later debate, such as the link between Heidegger's turn toward Nazism and his famous description of resoluteness in paragraph 74 of Being and Time , an analysis of the Rektoratsrede , Heidegger's praise of Schlageter, Heidegger's relation to the students of Freiburg, the role of E. Jünger, and so on. Löwith's analysis can be summarized as follows: In the final analysis Being and Time represents a theory of historical existence. It was only possible for Heidegger to turn toward Nazism on this basis since an interpretation of his thought in this sense was possible. Further, Heidegger's turn to National Socialism follows from his prior philosophy, in fact is squarely based on a main principle of his thought: existence reduced to itself reposes only on itself in the face of nothing. Finally, this principle expresses the identification of Heidegger's thought with the radical political situation in which it arose.

Löwith's analysis is a clear attempt to understand Heidegger's Nazism as following from Heidegger's position, and his position as the expression of the historical situation, in Hegelian terms as the times comprehended in thought. Löwith contradicts two points maintained by all subsequent defenders of Heidegger: Löwith denies that Heidegger's philosophy can be understood otherwise than through its social and political context. Accordingly, he contradicts in advance the well-known "tex-

tualist" approach, especially prevalent in French circles, to Heidegger's writings without reference to the wider social, political, and historical context in which they arose. He further denies the "official" view of Heidegger's National Socialism—most prominently represented in the French debate by Fédier and Aubenque, and from a different perspective by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe—which tends to minimize, even to excuse, Heidegger's turn toward Nazism as unfortunate, temporary, and above all contingent with respect to Heidegger's thought.

At the outset of the French debate, the opposition between Löwith on the one hand and Gandillac and Towarnicki on the other already symbolizes the two basic alternatives in their respective readings of Heidegger's Nazism as either necessary or contingent. Every other, later debate both within and without the French context only varies, but does not fundamentally modify, these two main options. Obviously, these two extremes are incompatible. Since Löwith traces Heidegger's actions to his thought and Heidegger's thought to the historical context, Löwith disputes Towarnicki, who regards Heidegger's link to National Socialism as temporary, regrettable, and unmotivated by the underlying position; and Löwith disputes as well Gandillac's assertion that Heidegger was unaware of what he did.

The disagreement gave rise to a debate. In the debate Weil, who correctly qualifies Towarnicki's article as a plea for Heidegger, or as he says rather by Heidegger, intervenes against the necessitarian thesis, whereas De Waelhens defends the contingency view. Weil criticizes Heidegger for a supposed failure to assume the responsibility of his acts and as the sole important philosopher who took up Hitler's cause.^[43] But he denies the necessitarian thesis on the grounds that even by Heideggerian standards the link between Heidegger's thought and National Socialism is illegitimate. According to Weil, what he incorrectly calls Heideggerian existentialism is intrinsically defective since it leads to a decision in general, but not to any particular decision. From this perspective, Weil claims that Heidegger has falsified his own thought in merely pretending a contrario that a political decision could be derived from his apolitical thought. Although it is correct to point to the open-ended quality of Heidegger's view of resoluteness, this does not impede the derivation of a political consequence from another aspect of Heidegger's position, such as his conception of authenticity.

This effort to deconstruct the necessitarian reading is peculiar—not because of the amalgam between Heideggerian phenomenology and existentialism, which Heidegger took pains to deny in the "Letter on Humanism," nor in virtue of the denial that Heidegger is a privileged interpreter of his own thought, since there is no need to accord him this interpretative privilege—but because it fails to address the claim that a

clear political decision follows from Heidegger's view of authenticity. Now Alphonse De Waelhens—who also identifies Heidegger's thought as an existential phenomenology—suggests, through an attack on the necessitarian thesis, that the theme of Heidegger's fidelity to his own position is less significant than its possibly intrinsic relation to National Socialism.^[44]

De Waelhens's attack on the necessitarian thesis is remarkable for two reasons. On the one hand, he raises the issue of who really understands Heidegger as a precondition for the critique of the latter's thought. Later in the discussion, even when the defenders of Heidegger are led to acknowledge that Nazism is central to his position, Derrida and others, including numerous writers outside the French debate, continue to insist that only someone deeply steeped in Heidegger's thought, by inference an unconditional adherent, is possibly competent to measure its defects. On the other hand, De Waelhens formulates a kind of transcendental argument meant to demonstrate that Heidegger's political turning could not have followed from his philosophy. According to De Waelhens, who has obviously been contradicted by history, an analysis of Heidegger's conception of historicality shows that its author could not accept fascism, a doctrine incompatible with the ideas of Being and Time . And he disposes of Löwith's version of the necessitarian thesis through a rapid but unconvincing effort to demonstrate that Heidegger's former colleague did not always possess a sufficient grasp of the master's texts.

When we compare the views of Weil and De Waelhens, we see at once that since both deny that Heidegger's thought bears an intrinsic relation to Nazism, each is obliged to interpret what Heidegger thought and did as an instance of Heidegger's infidelity to Heidegger's own position. Yet since Heidegger rapidly abandoned an "inauthentic" type of Nazism in favor of an "authentic form" which he never forsook, the effort to defuse the necessitarian thesis undertaken by Weil and De Waelhens is insufficient to demonstrate that the relation in question is contingent. At best, their respective arguments could show only that Heidegger was mistaken on the basis of his thought in turning toward National Socialism as it in fact existed, which he himself later admitted, but not that he was mistaken on the basis of his thought in turning toward National Socialism as he desired it to exist, that is, from the futural perspective intrinsic to his position.

De Waehlens is more radical than Weil since he does not assert that Heidegger misunderstood his own thought, but rather claims—a point widely asserted in the later discussion—that the action of the individual Heidegger is without philosophical interest. Perhaps for that reason, he drew a response by Löwith, who does not take up the issue of who is capable of judging Heidegger.^[45] This omission is important, since it is always possible

to claim that a criticism, any criticism at all, is based on an insufficient awareness of the position. Rather, Löwith restates his own conviction that Heidegger's relation to Nazism is a necessary consequence of Heidegger's philosophy of existence. He further affirms that it is curious to defend Heidegger against Heidegger's own voluntary political engagement. In his rejoinder^[46] De Waelhens insists that his attempt to show that Heidegger's political action did not, and cannot, follow from the latter's philosophy is only a specific instance of the more general claim that one cannot deduce a particular political stance from a philosophy.

De Waelhens's rejoinder invokes a principle, which, if followed, would effectively suppress the possibility of analyzing the relation between thought and action. His principle, which contradicts the entire ethical tradition, whose unexpressed premise is that reasons can be causes, is false for at least two reasons: First, throughout history, at present in eastern Europe, millions of people have been motivated to political action on behalf of ideas. This is a point De Waehlens can accommodate only on pain of denying that such ideas are philosophical. Second, De Waelhens calls on us to abandon the political act of an analysis of the link between Heidegger's philosophy and politics, which precisely assumes the political efficacy of philosophy he is concerned to deny.

The initial phase of the French discussion of Heidegger's relation to Nazism records a calm, scholarly exchange. In retrospect, this exchange is interesting as a clear statement of the necessitarian and contingent analyses, and for the anticipation of later variants of the effort to "deconstruct" the necessitarian thesis on a priori grounds. These include the effort to construct an a priori impossibility argument and the related claim—from the perspective of conceptual orthodoxy—that whoever criticizes is uninformed. It is notable that the two attempts to deconstruct the necessitarian thesis canvassed here, due to Weil and De Waelhens, avoid a direct analysis of the relevant passages in Heidegger's texts in favor of more general statements. This is specifically the case for the arguments advanced by De Waehlens—including his a priori argument against the very possibility of an intrinsic link between philosophy and politics as well as his assertion that any possible criticism is impossible because based on insufficient knowledge—each of which responds to any and all criticism in general without engaging the criticism on its merits.