Martin Heidegger: Philosopher Among the Nazis or Nazi Philosopher

Many academics consider Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century even though, as Rector of Freiburg University, he welcomed Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany in 1933 as “the embodiment of the German soul.” In the years after 1945 Heidegger never expressed regret for his support of the Nazis, and in his lectures and writings never referred to the Holocaust.

This has always been known. But for many it did not diminish his reputation as towering thinker and father of existentialism. His defenders claim that his support for the Nazis was a temporary aberration and that he resigned his Rectorship after only one year. What mattered, they say, was that he made an invaluable contribution to the history of ideas and that he had a decisive influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and on many other dedicated anti-Nazis. The Canadian George Grant was also one of his disciples.

In his column in the National Post of Match 30, Robert Fulford reviewed a book by the French philosopher Emmanuel Faye that has just appeared in an English translation published by Yale University Press. Fulford calls the book “powerful but angry, dense and difficult.” In Faye’s view, Heidegger’s Nazi period was not at all a temporary aberration but at the centre of Heidegger’s thought and reflected the essential similarity between his and Hitler’s views. He and Hitler both opposed faith in reason and humanity and were believers in “community in biological stock and race.” There was also a strong anti-technology, anti-materialist and anti-big-city element in Heidegger’s thought, the legacy of German romanticism, which they had in common. No doubt it was that element that attracted George Grant whose Lament for a Nation deplored the Americanization of Canada.

Heideger did little, if anything, to protect Jewish professors and students from persecution in the Nazi years. In any case, after 1933 he could have done little to help Jewish professors keep their jobs – they were dismissed by decree. There is documentary evidence that Heidegger observed Nazi requirements after 1933, including a publicly stated belief in the Nazi state and an unwillingness to make purchases in Jewish shops. But anti-Semitism specifically was never part of his philosophy. For many writers, in Germany and elsewhere, and perhaps also for Heidegger, opposition to materialism was a code word for ideological anti-Semitism.

It is not easy to pin him down. Many tried. The American professor Carlin Romano of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, wrote an article quoted by Fulford in which Romano called Heidegger “a pretentious old Black Forest babbler,” over-rated in his own time, hideously over-rated ever since.

The difficulty to pin him down is at least in part due to his impenetrable style. German philosophers are often difficult to read, especially Kant and – notoriously – Hegel. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the other hand, were excellent stylists, entirely accessible. Heidegger was a grave setback, especially since he invented a terminology of his own. Nothing is easier than to confuse denseness with profundity.

But there must have been something unusually magnetic in his personality and in his thinking, however dense. Otherwise the brilliant Jewish writer Hannah Arendt (1908–1975) would not have fallen in love with him at nineteen, when she was a student of his in Heidelberg, and loved him for forty years. In these matters one must, of course, take into account that young and old men and women fall in love for good and for bad reasons, and for no easily discernable reason at all. But it is hard to understand why a woman of her gifts and accomplishments would have loved a man for so many unusually turbulent years if he was entirely unworthy of her love. (Heidegger was not as consistently enamored of her as she of him.)

Hannah Arendt’s position in German-Jewish matters as shown, for example, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, has been criticized on the grounds that she was, as the Israelis put it, a “self-hating Jew.”

That criticism may well be justified. If so, it may help to explain why, however brilliant her intellect, it was her personality, and not her love of him, that blinded her to Heidegger’s role as Nazi philosopher.