What to Make of Heidegger

On reconciling the philosopher with his politics

I.

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, if not the greatest. He was also an unrepentant supporter of Nazism, even after the fall of Hitler’s brutal regime. These are the facts that confront every serious student of Western philosophy and political thought. With the 2017 publication of the Black Notebooks - a collection of notebooks he authored between 1931 and 1970 - the association between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political beliefs becomes once more a prescient topic of debate. 

Recently, an honest effort to undergo this task resulted in a volume titled Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology. The book’s author, Professor Richard Wolin of the City University of New York, reveals that Heidegger’s Black Notebooks exhibit a deep, unsavory and widespread connection between the German’s philosophy and his ideological convictions. Furthermore, the book details the lengths in which Heidegger and his publishers would go in order to sanitize his works of any allusions to national-socialism in their later editions.

I must confess, my first reaction to this is one of staggered disbelief. Having recovered from the aftershock of knowing such a great mind can be poisoned by one horrid ideology or another (think Eric Hobsbawn and Stalinism), I am now faced with the reality that Heidegger’s mind was not only stewed in national-socialism, but was also instrumental in providing intellectual credibility to its totalizing reign. It is impossible, at this point, to separate Heidegger from the time period in which he lived. Nevertheless, each of us can draw valuable lessons and insights from him, but only after an honest assessment of his achievements and flaws.

First we have to confront the astounding question: How could someone of Heidegger’s intellect buy into such a rotten ideology? A careful reading of Heidegger reveals that he is far from a fan of modernity, especially democracy. His revolt against technology and ideology is Nietzschean in scope, give or take the drab nihilism. If Nietzsche purports to have written the final chapter of Western philosophy, Heidegger hopes to rewrite the entire canon. He holds fast in his belief that Western thought has taken a turn for the worse after Socrates, when metaphysics and the examined life become the main concern rather than the nature of being. According to Professor Michael Gillespie of Duke University,

On the surface, Heidegger’s attempt to convince the reader that a pervasive misconception regarding Being can, and in fact has, characterized all of Western civilization seems absurd, since it seems highly unlikely that such an abstract metaphysical question could ever concern more than a handful of individuals. However, this is not Heidegger’s meaning. Rather he assumes that those thinkers who have developed the basic framework within which we think and act, those whom we might justly call law-givers in the most fundamental sense, have misconceived Being and forgotten its original meaning. The failure of these thinkers to recognize the truth about Being, i.e., the truth about what is most fundamental, has led in Heidegger’s view to a fundamental distortion of the categories of language and thought. This distortion not only prevents us from coming to terms with Being or understanding its importance for our everyday lives but also establishes a framework for thought and action that cuts man off from authentic human understanding and activity. In this sense it renders an authentic ethical and political existence impossible and ultimately casts man into nihilism. (my emphasis)

Throughout his career, it is unclear whether Heidegger is interested politics as a philosophical matter. His magnum opus, Being and Time, does not posit any political problem or solution. Nevertheless, the increasing contemporary interest in him as a ‘political’ philosopher is due to the unfortunate reality that he was a fervent Nazi ideologue. In the inaugural speech he gave as the new Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger’s rhetoric eerily echoes the Nazi German Fuhrer in his repeated appeals to the mythological volk:

“The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership of this institution of higher learning. The following of teachers and students only awakens and strengthens through a true and common rootedness in the essence of the German university. This essence, however, only gains clarity, rank, and power if the leaders, first and foremost and at any time, are themselves led – led by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history… The self-assertion of the German university is the primordial, common will to its essence. We regard the German university as the “high” school that, grounded in science and by means of science, educates and disciplines the leaders and guardians of the destiny of the German people. The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as will to the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its state [Staat]. Together, science and German destiny must come to power in the will to essence.” (my emphasis)

These neo-Hegelian pronouncements, coupled with the speaker’s fervent anti-individualism, provide a solid intellectual foundation for National Socialism. His ethno-nationalist beliefs, inspired by neo-Kantians such as Johann Wolfgang von Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, inevitably leads him to single out the Jewish people as the source of Germany’s decline. This poisonous prejudice was largely inspired by Heidegger’s contemporary Carl Schmitt, the most notorious intellectual champion of Nazism. According to Raphael Gross’s book Carl Schmitt and the Jews, Schmitt’s polemical indictments of “parliamentarianism”, “normativism,” “universalism,” and “cosmopolitanism” expressed his deep-seated fears of post-emancipation Jewish domination. In the words of Schmitt himself:

“The real misunderstanding of the Jewish Volk with respect to everything that concerns soil [Boden], land, and territory is grounded in its style of political existence. A nation’s relation to its soil [Boden], determined by its own work of colonization and culture, and by the concrete forms of power that arise from this arrangement, is incomprehensible to the spirit of the Jew.” (my emphasis)

On the Jewish question, there is no divergence between the views of Schmitt’s and Heidegger’s. According to Professor Wolin, “Heidegger identified German Jews as the ‘inner enemy’ par excellence: a corrosive presence that threatened to undermine the unity of the Volksgemeinschaft…As the Black Notebooks attest, he held that the reemergence of Being in its glory and plentitude would not take place until ‘world Jewry’s’ disintegrative influence was eliminated.” We can still perceive this strand of anti-semitism in the pro-Palestinian Left, the “realist” suggestion of an “Israel lobby”, and the tiki-torch far-right’s obsession with the Great Replacement Theory.

II.

In the annals of philosophical debate, great thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss forged a consensus on the separation of Heidegger’s philosophy and his ideology. Now with the emergence of the Black Notebooks, that wall of separation is set for demolition. A serious student of political philosophy is duty-bound to keep Heidegger’s poisonous political views in mind when he/she encounters his philosophical works. Nevertheless, it is also the job of a serious student to critically engage with Heidegger’s thinking, rather than casually discarding it due to his politics.

What makes Martin Heidegger even more relevant in our time is his pessimism regarding the overwhelming prevalence of technology in our society. Take a moment to contemplate these lines from Being and Time:

All kinds of increasing speed which we are more or less compelled to go along with today push for overcoming distance. With the “radio,” for example, Da-sein is bringing about today de-distancing of the “world” which is unforeseeable in its meaning for Da-sein, by way of expanding and destroying the everyday surrounding world.

Imagine the horror that would strike him when he is transported to today’s world, with its smartphones, social media and Artificial Intelligence. De-distancing (or schärfer) is what Heidegger calls the process of making distance disappear, thus eliminating the notion of remoteness altogether. Think of all the Zoom conferences we participate in while on virtual house arrest during Covid, or the rising emergence of the laptop class who can work without a fixed workplace. These phenomena lead us to think of time differently.

With the increasing speed of the information superhighway, the news can become old within seconds, leading to the 24-hour cable news networks like CNN. The great French theorist Jean Baudrillard once proclaimed that “the Gulf War did not take place”. This is not a categorical denial of the 1990/91 Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the UN’s response, but an awareness of the excessive media coverage of destruction and bloodshed - of which CNN was the pioneer. “When you understand a war to be something that happens on your screen rather than in the world,” says Professor Justin E.H. Smith of the University of Paris “this significantly constrains your capacity to arrive at a mature and sober analysis of war’s moral and human costs.” It is plausible that the same de-distancing is happening in our conception of the Russian War in Ukraine. Broadcasts of President Zelensky’s heroism are equally matched by heated debates among foreign policy experts on whether the West should continue its support for his war efforts. In other words, from the academic to the average news-watcher, people thoughtlessly take sides during the war rather than seriously pondering the massive human costs.

Much like Heidegger, the Internet is an enthusiastic inventor of neologisms. One of the new slang terms that appeared (and will be dated as soon as this essay is published) is ‘touch grass’. According to Urban Dictionary, the go-to site for explaining Internet lingo, the phrase is “used when someone is doing something weird, stupid, or pointless. it means they need to come back to reality, they need to get some fresh air and get back in touch with how the real world works.” Well guess what, Heidegger has thought of this concept almost a century ago, in his frustrations with the modern world’s pernicious effects on Da-sein (or “being-in-itself”):

When there is a prior orientation toward “nature” and the “objectively” measured distance of things, one is inclined to consider such interpretations and estimates of remoteness “subjective”. However, that is a “subjectivity” which perhaps discovers what is most real about the “reality” of the world, which has nothing to do with “subjective” arbitrariness and the subjectivistic “conception” of beings which are “in themselves” otherwise. The circumspect de-distancing of everyday Dasein discovers the being-in-itself of the “true” world, of beings with which Dasein as existing is always already together.

Unlike Kant, who posits that we can only perceive mere appearances of a thing and not the “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich), Heidegger suggests a way in which we can meditate on the nature of things without the sophisticated apparatus of modern science (“The primary and even exclusive orientation toward remoteness as measured distances, obscures the primordial spatiality of being-in”). In this sense, Heidegger calls for a return to the pre-Socratic tradition of philosophy, wherein the “is” dominates the discourse instead of the “ought”. According to Professor Gillespie:

“This pre-Socratic experience of Being, in Heidegger’s view, is fundamentally tragic. The abyss of Being that evokes wonder and thought also casts man out of the everyday order of things…The tragic age in which such figures have meaning and significance comes to an end with the disappearance ofthe revelation ofBeing. This world ended when the question of Being became submerged in its answers and failed to reappear as a question.”

Therefore, Heidegger finds the turn towards metaphysic, spearheaded by Plato, to be a catastrophic wrong turn in the history of Western intellectual thought, for it abandons the question of being altogether:

Metaphysics, insofar as it always formulates being as being, does not think about be[ing] itself [denkt nicht an]. Philosophy does not focus on its basis [auf ihren Grund]. In fact, in metaphysics, it always abandons it. But nevertheless it never escapes it. If thinking sets out to experience the basis of metaphysics, to the extent that such thinking tries to think the truth of be[ing] itself instead of only formulating being as being, it has in a certain way abandoned metaphysics. (my emphasis)

III.

Nothing is as hard to read and disseminate as Heidegger. Thus, this essay is by no means a comprehensive interpretation of his thoughts. Rather, it seeks to acknowledge the extent to which Heidegger’s political views share a direct connection with his philosophical works. It shows the way in which some of the greatest minds can fall prey to dangerous ideas and ideologies, and cautions against the old human vice of hubris. Here is Professor Gillespie again: “Heidegger may well teach us that those who pass beyond the city in their search for a new god often find themselves worshiping at the feet of the beast, that those who derive reason from revelation all too easily become entangled in the highest and most monstrous unreason.” It is because of this that Heidegger should not be approached without protective equipment. This does not mean, however, that one should avoid immersing oneself in his thinking. Critically engaging in the works of Heidegger means questioning the very existence of your being, and the being of others. It is to adopt a new paradigm of perceiving objects and subjects, to remove oneself from the technology-soaked modern world, and to reach ever closer to the authenticity of being-in-itself. It is no wonder why Heidegger has become a fountain of influence to the existentialists, post-modernists and critical theorists who succeeds him:

“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense... And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.”