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.