Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is considered one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Often called one of the fathers of existentialism, he had powerful influence on many eminent intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt, who called him the “secret king in the empire of thinking.” (She had an affair with him at eighteen when she was a student of his.) Those who are not academics usually find his writings inaccessible. University libraries around the world are filled with books about him and his philosophy.
Three months after Hitler came to power, Heidegger was appointed rector of Freiburg University. In his inaugural address he welcomed the Nazi state. A year later he resigned. During his time in power he applied himself single-mindedly to organizing the university’s Gleichschaltung (bringing into line) with the Nazi program.
Secret transcripts of the seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State” he conducted in 1933 and 1944 have recently been published for the first time. In part they are based on students’ notes. They show, according to scholars who have scrutinized them, a deep affinity of his thinking with the irrationalist and chauvinist ideas of the interwar German right.
The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye goes much further. His book, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, published in France in 2005 and last year in English and German translations, takes the view that Heidegger was not a philosopher who was a Nazi but a Nazi philosopher. In a review in the New York Times Book Review of May 19, Alexander Kissler writes: “Quoting a memorandum written by Hitler in December 1932, Faye suggests that its language and ideas resemble Heidegger’s. Since it appears materially impossible that the Führer could have written entirely by himself all his speeches and memos, Faye goes on, and since we do not know precisely what Heidegger’s activities were from July 1932 to April 1933 – well, Faye doesn’t quite spell it out, but he is clearly implying that Heidegger was functioning as Hitler’s ghostwriter.”
Faye wrote that Heidegger’s ideas were “as destructive and dangerous to current thought as the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples…. Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”
If such a conclusion was plausible – it is not – it would be impossible to understand why in 1969 Hannah Arendt would have found it possible to absolve him in a birthday address broadcast on West German radio on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. His Nazism, she explained, was an “escapade,” a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely “succumbed to the temptation…to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.”
If Heidegger remains a puzzle to the world, Hannah Arendt’s words may provide an important clue. As the author of Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, she had given more intensive thought to the nature of Nazism than most of her contemporaries. There is a distinction, she suggested, between thinking in an ivory tower and “the world of human affairs.”
Even a man as sophisticated as Heidegger, Hannah Arendt implies, living, as he did, in an ivory tower, is not immune to naiveté. Motivated by the intoxication of the moment, self-illusion, vanity, ambition and opportunism, he could easily succumb to the temptation of “intervening in the world of human affairs.”
As a matter of fact, those in ivory towers may be more vulnerable than others.
Heidegger never uttered a public word of regret after the war for having supported a doctrine that had caused, among other things, the ruin of Germany. But Hannah Arendt absolved him. She understood that in the ivory tower philosophers philosophize. They play philosophical games. They influence each other. They don’t “intervene in the world of human affairs” and commit mass murder. Heidegger had not provided Hitler with his ideology. Hitler had manufactured his own mixture. Many of the ingredients were provided by writers who had inspired good and evil.
Among them was the man who taught him that the fittest survive. His name was Charles Darwin.
Philosophers are no different than other human beings, and subject to the same pathologies. They can have their heads in the clouds – and clouds in their heads – oblivious to their own madness and lack of human feeling, and if taken too seriously by vulnerable and naive followers, they can inspire destructive acts. Philosophers should come, like pharmaceutical products, with warning labels.
You may broaden “philosophers” to mean all academics, of course.
The interesting question in relation to the Gleichschltung of academics in the early Nazi years is how smoothly and how quickly so many of them managed to adjust their thinking to that of the new government, turning their backs on the liberal principles most of them had observed in the Weimar years. Heidegger (and many others) of course had always been a right-winger and didn’t find it hard.
Many academics in the US ( I don’t know whether they included philosophers ) gave their full support to McCarthyism, as I recall.
If an ivory tower inhabitant sees an opportunity to play an active part in human affairs, he is most likely to grab it. And in 1933 a right-winger would certainly have seen such a chance. Now the Weimar liberals, that is another matter, they generally were opportunists. They did not want to lose their academic appointments.
I had a professor who attributed the fall of countries like Vietnam to the writings of Marcuse. I have a hard time blaming the world of ideas as a cause of poor governance and inhumanity.
That is a HUGE subject! One is tempted to go along with the conventional wisdom that Marxism leads to poor governance and inhumanity, as does Fascism, of course – both are undoubtedly ideologies – but the causal relationships are not entirely clear. I also have a hard time with that!
Darwin teaches that the most adaptable–not the fittest–survive. An important distinction.
Good point. But A.H. would simply have said What’s the difference? Aryans are more adaptable than anhybody else. So there…..