Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher.

Heidegger and Nazi Germany

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, before being appointed the rector of the university in Freiburg. He resigned from the rectorship in April 1934. During this time Heidegger's former teacher Husserl, who was Jewish, was denied the use of the university library at Freiburg because of the racial cleansing laws issued by the Nazi Party. Heidegger also removed the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941. Heidegger later claimed that this was due to pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Additionally, when Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures originally given in 1935) was published in 1953, he declined to remove a reference to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement ," i.e. National Socialism. Instead of deleting or altering the text, he merely added the parenthetical gloss, "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)." Many readers, notably Jürgen Habermas, came to interpret this ambiguous remark as evidence of his continued commitment to National Socialism.

Related Topics:
Nazi Party - May 1 - 1933 - Freiburg - 1934 - Husserl - Jew - Racial cleansing laws - Being and Time - 1941 - Max Niemeyer - 1935 - National Socialism - Jürgen Habermas

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Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, when she was a doctoral student of his at the University of Marburg. This affair mostly went along in the 20s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, but it did not end when she "fled" from him and moved to Heidelberg to continue with Karl Jaspers, and she later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on young German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt, who was Jewish, resumed their friendship, if extremely cautiously, after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt that Heidegger was held in for his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden from teaching for a number of years.

Related Topics:
Hannah Arendt - University of Marburg - Heidelberg - Karl Jaspers - Denazification

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Der Spiegel Interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he promised to discuss the issue provided it was published posthumously. It should also be mentioned that the published version was not a real interview, but the protocol had been largely "corrected" on Heidegger's demand. In this interview, Heidegger's defense of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: first, he argues that there would have been no alternative; he says he had tried to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and had to make compromises with the Nazi administration. Second, he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch"), something which might help to find a "new national and social approach". From 1934 on, he says, he would have been more critical towards the government. Heidegger is evasive on some questions in this interview. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" in national socialism he links this to Friedrich Naumann. But Naumann's "national-sozialer Verein" was not at all national socialist, but liberal. This confusion seems to be put up deliberately by Heidegger. Also, he changes between his two arguments quickly, not regarding they are in a way contradictory. And his statements often tend to take the form "others were much more Nazis than me" and "the Nazis did bad things to me, too" which is true, but misses the point in question. Also, the Spiegel interviewers did not bring to question Heidegger's quote from 1949 where he compares engineered food production to the Holocaust ("essentially the same"); in fact, they were not in possession of much of the evidence for Heidegger's sympathies towards Nazism which is known today. To further evaluate this issue, read "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective." translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): pp. 431-456.

Related Topics:
Der Spiegel - Friedrich Naumann - The Holocaust - Jürgen Habermas

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Obligations & Unsplendid Silence: Celan at "Todtnauberg"

Shortly after giving the Spiegel interview and following Celan's lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger hosted Paul Celan at his chalet at Todtnauberg. The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany (also evident in his poetry), and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview. Celan signed Heidegger's guest book.

Related Topics:
Paul Celan - Botany

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In his Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe advanced the argument that, although Celan's poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger's philosophy, Celan was long aware of Heidegger's association with the Nazi party and therefore fundamentally circumspect toward the man and transformative in his reception of his work. Celan was nonetheless willing to meet Heidegger (although he may not have been willing to be photographed with him or to contribute to Festschriften honoring Heidegger's work). Heidegger was a professed admirer of Celan's writing, although he did not attend to it as Hölderlin or Trakl. "Todtnauberg", however, seems to hold out the unrealized possibility of a profound rapprochement between their work, albeit on the condition that Heidegger break a silence that virtually blanketed his work to the end (Lacoue-Labarthe has commented on the insufficiency of Heidegger's one known remark about the gas chambers, made in 1949). In this respect Heidegger's work was perhaps redeemable for Celan, even if that redemption or what need was had for it was never transacted between the two men. Lest one implicitly take this as Celan simply demanding an apology of Heidegger (such a scenario seems simplistic, the more so given that neither was given to simplism), there are reasonable grounds to argue that it was (and still is) at least as important to specify how the Nazi period is das Unheil (disaster, calamity) (which is to say: specificity as to a great deal more than counting the dead). What compelled Heidegger to write about poetry, technology, and truth ought to have compelled him to write about the German disaster, all the more so because, on the basis of his thought, Heidegger attributed an "inner greatness" to the movement that brought about that disaster.

Related Topics:
Hölderlin - Trakl

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Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida have both commented extensively on Heidegger's corpus, and both have identified an idiomatically Heideggerian National Socialism that persisted until the end. It is perhaps of greater importance that Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, following Celan to a degree, believed Heidegger capable of profound criticism of Nazism and the horrors it brought forth. They hold that Heidegger's greatest failure not to be his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his "silence on the extermination" (Lacoue-Labarthe) and refusal to elaborate a thorough deconstruction of Nazism beyond laying out certain of his considerable objections to party orthodoxies and (particularly in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe) their passage through Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Richard Wagner, taken to be susceptible to Nazi appropriation. It would be reasonable to say that both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger as capable of engaging Nazism in this other fashion and have undertaken such work on the basis of this (one ought to note in due course the questions raised by Derrida in "Desistance" in calling attention to Lacoue-Labarthe's parenthetical comment: "(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)").

Related Topics:
Jacques Derrida - Nietzsche - Hölderlin - Richard Wagner

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Conclusion

Heidegger's involvements with the Nazis and the lack of a clear apology for them complicated many of his friendships, and continues to complicate the reception of his work. It is disputable whether Heidegger was antisemitic or if he was taken in by the charismatic projections of Nazi propaganda, but he had clear sympathies for certain elements of Nazism. Whether this is in any way a result of his philosophy is still contested. It has also been noted that many parts of "Sein und Zeit" can be read as anti-democratic, anti-modernist and anti-liberal, e.g. the condemnations against the "lordship of the they" (Herrschaft des Man), the "chatter" (Gerede) and the Dasein's Verfallenheit (roughly, being-fallen-to) the world.

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The possibility that Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi party was the result of his philosophy would lead many to discredit Heidegger as a philosopher solely on this basis, as Jean-François Lyotard remarked, the formula becomes "if a Nazi, then not a great thinker" or, conversely, "if a great thinker, then not a Nazi").

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