Heidegger’s Entscheidung: “Decision” Between “Fate” and “Destiny” [1 ed.] 0367341328, 9780367341329

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HEIDEGGER’S ENTSCHEIDUNG

This book critically examines Martin Heidegger’s concept of Entscheidung (“decision”) and his engagement and confrontation with Nazism in terms of his broader philosophical thought. It argues that one cannot explain Heidegger’s actions without accounting for his idea of “decision” and its connection to his understanding of individual “fate” and national (and European) “destiny.” The book looks at the relation of biography to philosophy and the ethical and political implications of appropriating Heidegger’s thinking in these domains of inquiry. It highlights themes such as Heidegger’s differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany; Heidegger on Kant and practical reason; and his reading of Nietzsche and Hegel. It offers a philosophical assessment grounded in Heidegger’s own texts, with reference to historical and other philosophical commentaries on the rise of National Socialism in post-Weimar Germany and the philosophical issues associated with the interpretation of Nazi genocide and ideology. An important intervention in Western philosophy, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political philosophy, continental philosophy, German philosophy, philosophy in general, and political studies. Norman K. Swazo is Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Philosophy, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He specializes in recent European philosophy, ethics in international affairs, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of religion, and has numerous publications in journals within these areas. He is the author of several books, including Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections (2002), Destroying Idols: Revisioning the Meaning of ‘God’ (2019), and editor of Contemporary Moral Problems and Applied Ethics: An Anthology (2018).

HEIDEGGER’S ENTSCHEIDUNG “Decision” Between “Fate” and “Destiny”

Norman K. Swazo

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Norman K. Swazo The right of Norman K. Swazo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-34132-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32409-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Preface

vi

Introduction: the “debate” again

1

1

Heidegger’s “historical” situation

20

2

Heidegger on Kant and practical reason

72

3

Heidegger’s intimations of Entscheidung

94

4

Concluding reflections

137

Bibliography Index

171 181

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PREFACE

Notwithstanding any deficiency in my extended argument throughout the discussion in the chapters that follow, it is my objective to show that Heidegger’s actions manifesting his entanglement with National Socialism are to be understood and explained from “within” his philosophical project. That said, so I would argue, it does not follow that Heidegger’s philosophy is “of a suit” either with “fascism” generally or with “Nazism” specifically such as we understand it in common parlance today (the quotation marks here pointing to the fact that there is variable and ambiguous discourse about the meaning of these terms). As many have already observed, and as Heidegger himself acknowledged, I also grant that Heidegger made “mistakes” in thought, word, and deed as he interpreted his philosophical project vis-à-vis the rise of National Socialism in post-Weimar Germany. But, I submit, Heidegger’s philosophical works from the time of his Rectorate, during World War II, and onward to his death in 1976, also are to be read as part and parcel of his “resolute” effort to work out “in his thinking” what he would have us understand in relation to what he learned from those mistakes. This is so, I would argue, even if those of us who read his corpus find that work of resolute investigation deficient according to one or another temperament of philosophical critique, or problematic according to one or another hermeneutics of suspicion, or morally to be condemned according to some posited standard of public conscience. Whatever the disputation at hand, it must be admitted that Heidegger never ceased to continue “the task of a historical destructuring [de-construction] of the history of philosophy” that he began with Being and Time (and even earlier, as published works on his early lecture courses show). Without one having to issue some judgment about his status as a philosopher of the twentieth century, Heidegger’s task remains important for us in our day in making sense of both the history of the Western philosophical tradition and of the “call to thinking” that Heidegger discerned to be essential for our future in the age of the planetary rule of technology. Failure to take up this task – with or without Heidegger’s thought as that which is most enigmatic in the

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present age, as Heidegger asserts – serves only to perpetuate our ignorance and our own indecision despite the crisis of thinking that yet governs us. Whether Heidegger was himself successful in his post-Rectorate writings in “overcoming” the dominance of the “Nazi das Man,” specifically through his efforts in thought to appropriate his authentic Dasein consistent with his potentiality-of-being, cannot yet be discerned fully in our day. Certainly, this matter cannot be judged reliably without sustained study of his Gesamtausgabe, and this is to be undertaken without surrender to facile claims of philosophical “contagion.”

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INTRODUCTION The “debate” again

In this introduction, I begin by situating the debate with reference to those who are critical of Heidegger’s actions, specifically those who see any continuing engagement of Heidegger’s thought as “contaminating,” the whole of his thought (so it is asserted) therefore a “contagion” of “fascism” ostensibly infecting anyone who engages his thought. This position that insists on contagion I reject in the course of my extended argument in the subsequent chapters. Further, I take into account prominent philosophical voices (such as Leo Strauss, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and so on) and the philosophical problem of providing a “moral” evaluation of Heidegger’s conduct (e.g., Aristotelian, Kantian). In the various chapters that follow, I attempt to show that an appeal to any of the main moral philosophies remains problematic in any attempt to judge Heidegger’s actions from the time of his assuming the Rectorate at the University of Freiburg. Indeed, in contrast to such moral assessments there is good reason to evaluate Heidegger’s own actions in terms of his understanding of tragedy, specifically with reference to his reading of Sophocles’s teaching, in which case one must have a tragic sense of ethics that, for Heidegger, discloses a sense of ethos more originally than do the later formal systems of normative ethics. I also proceed to account especially for Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism that spoke to the need to overcome “modernist” approaches that construe the human being conceptually as a “rational animal,” but that (as Nietzsche had already remarked) left the unity of this rationality and animality “undetermined.” That Heidegger reminded of this is pertinent to any moral assessment grounded in modern moral philosophy in particular. I turn here first to the issue of contagion. In the Protagoras (310b ff.)1 Plato represents to us a conversation between Socrates and young Hippocrates, when the latter was excited to involve himself with the sophist Protagoras. Hippocrates presumed uncritically Protagoras to have a kind of wisdom he desired also to possess. At the outset, Socrates puts Hippocrates to the test of his dialectic, with two penetrating questions: “But what is he, 1

INTRODUCTION

and what do you expect to become?” Given Hippocrates’s reply, Socrates continues: “And if somebody asks you what you expect to become in going to Protagoras?” – Hippocrates answers: “obviously, to become a sophist.” It is at this point in the conversation that Socrates poses the principal question that goes beyond suspicion of Protagoras qua sophist to the question of “contagion” and prospective “harm” to the young Hippocrates’s psychē: What? You? Wouldn’t you be ashamed to present yourself to the Greek world as a sophist? .  .  . Then do you know what you are about to do now, or does it escape you? . . . That you are about to hand over your soul for treatment to a man who is, as you say, a sophist. As to what exactly a sophist is, I would be surprised if you really knew. And yet, if you are ignorant of this, you don’t know whether you are entrusting your soul to something good or bad. . . . Do you see what kind of danger you are about to put your soul in? . . . although you obviously have no idea what this sophist is to whom you are about to entrust yourself. Socrates provides his counsel that Hippocrates, as “buyer,” beware: So if you are a knowledgeable consumer, you can buy teachings safely from Protagoras or anyone else. But if you’re not, please don’t risk what is most dear to you on a roll of the dice, for there is a far greater risk in buying teachings than in buying food. . . . You put down your money and take the teaching away in your soul by having learned it, and off you go, either helped or injured. But there is more than suspicion of Protagoras here. There is the further issue of “shame.” If Hippocrates would become a sophist alike to Protagoras, this would be a presentation of self that, for the Greeks (i.e., the Athenians), is one of shame. But, one should consider, “Why ‘shame’?” – more on this in due course, but in relation to the principal question pertinent to the contemporary scene of discourse in recent European philosophy and associated history of ideas. The question of contagion and shame has been raised once again in contemporary European philosophy. For many years since the latter half of the twentieth century, those familiar with German philosophy have struggled to come to terms with the so-called “problem” of the relation of “philosophy” and “biography,” specifically the relation of the “thought” of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to his “biography.”2 At the source of the latest commentaries is Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (“Black Notebooks”). The term “biography” refers to matters of fact that, in their interpretation, are denominated “the Heidegger affair,” “the Heidegger case,” both denominations indicting Heidegger for his “scandalous” entanglement with the 2

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National Socialism of Hitler’s Reich – a continuing “tabloid spectacle”3 for philosophers, historians, and journalists, such that some even speak of “Heideggerian fascism” internal to his philosophy.4 According to this indictment, the otherwise prominent philosopher’s thought supposedly suffers from an insidious “pathology,” the whole of his thinking since his magnum opus, Being and Time, “suspiciously” a “contagion,” his own infection with “fascism” having the consequence of infecting similarly anyone who engages his thought even when nonpolitical and manifestly ontological in its concern. In contrast to recent critics, Jürgen Habermas at least allowed for “an alert and perceptive appropriation” of Heidegger’s thought, so long as one engages Heidegger’s “arguments” and takes them “out of their ideological context.” Indeed, he asserted, “The moral judgment of a later generation . . . must not be allowed to cloud our view of the substantial content of his philosophical work.  .  .  . Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his thought.5 The assessment of Leo Strauss is similar to that of Habermas, an assessment important precisely because it is issued by one whose intellectual distinction is that of an eminent political philosopher of the post-war period, and which therefore merits our sustained attention. The Heidegger of philosophical interpretation such as Strauss characterized him, having a “seriousness, profundity, and concentration” in the interpretation of philosophical texts, is for that reason not to be dismissed. Heidegger, Strauss wrote in 1956, was preparing a revolution of thought unseen in Europe since Hegel, Heidegger having “dethroned the established schools of philosophy in Germany.”6 Strauss thereby reasonably opined: “The only question of importance of course is the question whether Heidegger’s teaching is true or not. But,” he cautions, “the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence – of who is competent to judge.”7 However this question is to be answered, it cannot be answered without elucidating a concept of “truth” that is at the base of such a judgment. To consider an answer to this question Strauss took up the distinction Kant made, between “the thinker” and “the scholar.” Does a scholar, who is wholly and “radically dependent on the work of the great thinkers,” have the authority and competence to judge a thinker, especially a great thinker? Great thinkers, among whom Strauss includes Heidegger, “are so bold they are also much more cautious than we are; they see pitfalls where we are sure of our ground.” In that respect, Heidegger’s detractors today all too readily consider themselves sure of their ground, especially their “moral” ground, where Heidegger was not, for reasons he articulated in various texts (to be noted later). Heidegger intimated a possibility of thought that is post-“metaphysical” and therefore also post-“moral-philosophical.” Some scholars readily dismiss his intimations for sundry reasons. Yet, as Strauss reminded,“who are we to believe that we have found out the limits of human 3

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possibilities?” – “we” who “are occupied with reasoning about the little we understand of what the great thinkers have said.”8 Heidegger’s recent detractors are serious “scholars,” no doubt, engaging historical or philosophical questions through the intermediacy of Heidegger’s writings. But they do not engage the philosophical problems directly as Heidegger did, wherein however lays the deficiency of their moral judgment, (i.e., in their presumption of a superior vantage point from some often-unstated moral philosophy). That is why Strauss’s question is instructive in the present round of disputation. Ruminations against Heidegger’s thought are installed in a hermeneutics of suspicion and condemnation, signaling a warning – “let the reader beware”; “let the buyer beware” – as if Heidegger’s thought is alike to that of the sophist Protagoras, available for one’s consumption and problematically conducing to a “fascist”/“polemical” mastery over others in settings both public and private. With this warning from Heidegger’s detractors and accusers, the prospective reader is forewarned to “prevent” his/her contamination and, more importantly, to prevent his/her “shame” – shame, first of all, that comes from irresponsibly and imprudently permitting him/herself unprotected access to this contagion; and, second, for manifesting for all to see that s/he is now similarly situated in a suspect thinking qua “Heideggerian” to the detriment of what is reasonably to be “expected” of a “genuine” philosopher, viz., professional responsibility manifest in the word, thought, and deed that is “virtue” rather than “vice,” “honor” rather than “shame,” “good” rather than “evil.”9 Yet, if Heidegger is to be judged to have been in “error” or, worse for others, fallen into “fantasy”10 about the promise and the “reality” of National Socialism, then s/he who would be prosecutor and judge has the burden of argument justifying that conclusion. That judgment, however, presupposes a standard of justice, one, it must be admitted at the outset, among rival conceptions of justice relative to a given rationality, as moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre makes clear.11 Even the National Socialists had a concept of justice consistent with the Nazi ideology qua rationality of political decision. One is reminded that the Minister of Justice of the Third Reich Otto Georg Thierack himself conceived of justice ominously when, in September 1942, “after the Final Solution had been launched – [he] spontaneously renounced his criminal jurisdiction over Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies to [Reichsführer-SS Heinrich] Himmler,” such that “‘In doing so,’ he explained, ‘I stand on the principle that the administration of justice can make only a small contribution to the extermination of these peoples’” – extermination a “necessary” act of “self-defense” against “asocial elements.”12 Such was Thierack’s entirely problematic conceptual prejudice about “justice” within the National Socialist ideology, yielding his official responsibility for “juridical” governance of this domain of criminal action to the “military” means at the disposal of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), thus to make the matter no longer “criminal” and entirely a matter of “state security.” 4

INTRODUCTION

Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin, along with others, have examined the practice of law in Nazi Germany to provide a coherent assessment of the facts such that it is clear “both the law and the conduct of legal professionals did much to influence the tragic course of German history in the twentieth century.”13 Indeed, Steinweis and Rachlin observe, even as it is to be granted that the Nazi state was not a “Rechtsstaat” or “nation of laws” in its usual sense, the fact is that Nazi Germany had a legal code and legal system such that many Germans “acknowledged the constitutional and legal legitimacy of dictatorial rule and of the racist and repressive laws that extended from it.” Justice here could be construed, as Ernst Fraenkel described it, distinguishing a “normative state” (“the traditional legal order”) and a “prerogative state” (“the realm in which the Nazi regime wielded arbitrary power”).14 This distinction of categories is relevant to the discernment of “complex motives” among legal professionals during the Third Reich, some “genuine Nazis committed to racial purity, authoritarian rule by a single party,” and so on, others “driven more by personal and professional ambition,” yet others believing “sincerely in the rule of law, even if the law supported a social order that was racist and a political order that was dictatorial.”15 Thus, it is not surprising that many such individuals, in their capacity as civil servants, would work “to translate the political will of the Nazi leadership into the language of the legal code.” As one would expect in an authoritarian regime, only judges who could be trusted to share the Nazi ideology would be retained, even as some may have had an alternative disposition (e.g., those who appealed to a notion of “duty”) that nonetheless was such as to have “overcome their personal opposition or even revulsion in the face of such laws and inhibited them from invoking principles of natural law or universal rights to escape what they saw as their duty.”16 Here a “positivist” concept of law takes center stage in the performance of legal professionals and the judiciary: As the law had become infused by the principles of Nazism after 1933, such an objective application of the law, made without ideological bias, inevitably transformed judges into accomplices of the regime. Definitions of race, penalties for violating race laws, the criminalization of dissent and political opposition – all of these provisions had been formally integrated into the German legal code, and judges understood it as their job to enforce them.17 Yet, there were others who adhered to a “judicial philosophy,” the “core” of which was expressed in “two principles”: “first, the legal system was subordinate to the will of the Führer, and second, the traditional dictum nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without a law) should not apply in Germany.”18 In short, it may be argued (as Steinweis and Rachlin do) that (1) neither the “intelligence” nor the level of “academic achievement” of the legal 5

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professionals was sufficient to “immunize them against ideological selfdelusion,” and that (2) “their intellects may have enabled them to rationalize their participation in morally questionable activities more easily than most people.”19 “To rationalize” here is a pejorative term, of course, distinguished from the normatively accepted term “to justify,” in which case the presupposition is that the concept of justice in use in the process of rationalization is morally at issue from the perspective of those who condemn such rationalizations of professional conduct. But one must be clear here regarding whether what legal professionals manifest in their conduct is to be explained merely as a matter of ideological self-delusion and rationalization that is contrary to strict justice and a morality to which many may consent. Raphael Gross20 has addressed the relation of Nazi law and Nazi morals in a way instructive on this question, what he calls a “socio-historical phenomenology of Nazi morals.” Gross is clear from the outset that the law in Nazi Germany had a “moral foundation” and an “underlying moral agenda.” Gross attributes this to the fact that “German society persisted in developing and implementing values rooted in shared moral sentiments such as guilt, shame, anger, or indignation,” as well as to the claim that, “Nazi ideology was based on ‘moral’ notions such as honor, loyalty, comradeship, and decency.”21 This suggests an inductively valid way of explaining Nazi conduct in terms of a normative theory of moral sentiments rather than in terms more normatively rationalist. Even so, it is assumed here that sentiments are “reasonable” in the sense that “people can only make judgments and act to the extent that they have feelings, without which the world loses all meaning, and life all significance.”22 Gross exemplifies his argument with reference to Nazi legislation, specifically the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor,” one of the Nuremberg Laws enacted in September 1935. He argues that the laws not only postulate a specifically Aryan morality, but also reinforce the old anti-Semitic notion of a Jewish counter-morality, fixing this idea in the law . . . [even as the legal texts of these laws] were infused with a sadistic passion.23 Here a “system of normative categories” or conceptions of “virtue” and “vice” are intertwined: “a range of moral feelings – guilt, anger, and indignation – were connected to what the Nazis declared as their quintessential virtues: comradeship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and decency.” It is this “morality,” Gross argues, that is at “the root of anti-Jewish legislation” in Nazi Germany.24 Thus, If one’s own honor is based so strongly on remaining untouched by anything Jewish, while honor itself always encompasses not only

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the individual, but also the entire Volksgemeinschaft, then the latter suffers from each and every contact between Jew and Aryan.25 Clearly, for the committed Nazi, one must logically affirm the antecedent and hence affirm the consequent of the proposition, in which case a Nazi’s properly “moral” conduct is to do as the judgment affirms and expresses in the earlier proposition. In light of this, then, it is not surprising that one such as Peter J. Haas has written convincingly that there was such a thing as a “Nazi ethic.”26 Only by realizing this to be so are we to have a sufficiently plausible explanation for the “astoundingly widespread participation” in the Nazi genocide, including those in Nazi Germany who were “the best educated.” Haas asked quite reasonably how one is to explain “the fact that normal, well-adjusted people acted atrociously over a sustained period of time” when, according to “all the canons of traditional Western moral thinking, this should be impossible?”27 He means here not just individuals but “a whole community would do so regularly and as a matter of course,” that “people very much like you and me were in fact doing evil consistently and in apparently good conscience year after year.” Haas accounts for two categories of explanation: (1) “perpetrators of the Holocaust either simply were evil people” or (2) they “were not evil per se, but had consciously chosen, for whatever reason, to do evil.” Explanation (1) implies that some human beings are not capable of morally correct judgments and conduct – a claim contrary to Western moral philosophy’s operative assumption that all have this capacity. Thus, the “intentionalist” explanation is that “the Holocaust was planned out from the very beginning, that at least in 1932, if not in 1924 or even earlier, leaders of the Nazi party had already pretty well in mind what ultimately occurred in 1943–45.”28 The second “functionalist” explanation holds that, “the Nazis were not demons or essentially evil, but rather that they were normal people who, under [an] unusual constellation of pressures and conditions chose a path of response that resulted in evil.”29 This explanation “argues not that some people are intrinsically and unavoidably bad, but that some people – all people really – are capable of knowing what is right and what is good, but then are fully capable of consciously choosing to act otherwise.” Haas accepts neither of these explanations, however, for various reasons not to be rehearsed here. Accounting for the writing of Hannah Arendt, Richard L. Rubenstein, Raul Hilberg, and Christopher Browning, Haas proposes instead a Nazi ethic with its own sense of duty, its content “anchored in scientific paradigms of the late nineteenth century, especially Social Darwinism” – all of which content “was poured, as it were, into the normal language of received morality” such that “the perpetrators of this new

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scientific ethic could still talk coherently about right and wrong and good and bad.”30 In this way, the Nazi ethic is itself a “coherent” set of concepts and judgments with individuals “enmeshed in a linguistic and symbolic culture.” Consequent to his analysis, Haas concludes (1) that “there is simply no way of positing the existence of a ‘universal ethic,’ that is, an ethical stance that is detached from particular linguistic, semiotic and cultural traditions that it can be understood by, and applied to, everybody and still have real content,” and (2) that “the Holocaust shows us that the whole Western moral philosophical tradition has been based on mistaken assumptions, not only in content, but in overall orientation.”31 Thus, to be reasonably in a position morally to evaluate Heidegger the man and the thinker, one has to account for these possible explanations of individual and collective action in Nazi Germany and come to some reasonable judgment as to whether Heidegger’s conduct is to be explained by one of these hypotheses – intentionalist, functionalist, Nazi ethic, or, indeed, some other explanation consistent with Heidegger’s own philosophical understanding. And, further, in the course of seeking an explanation, one wonders about the Eastern European Jewish concept of justice and the rationality of compliance and appeasement that conduced to their extermination; for, as H.R. Trevor-Roper observes, During the Eichmann trial in Israel a question constantly asked by younger Israelis was: But why was there no resistance? . . . Resistance was negligible.  .  .  . For when the Germans had done their worst, we cannot escape the fact that the Jews of Europe [millions in number] obedient to their leaders and their own habits of mind, collaborated in their own destruction.”32 Such was the “pattern of Jewish ‘appeasement,’” Hilberg narrated. Here was a “utilitarian calculus,” itself a moral determination of prospective outcomes, one that failed utterly in its predictive ability to prevent and to save Jews on the basis of a commitment to “compliance” with German orders: ‘I will not be afraid,’ said the president of the Eastern Upper Silesian Jews, ‘to sacrifice 50,000 of our community in order to save the other 50,000.’ But he did not save the other 50,000. . . . ‘With a hundred victims,’ said the chief of the Vilna Judenrat, ‘I save a thousand. With a thousand, I save ten thousand.’ But he did not. Having handed over for execution the man who preached resistance, the Vilna Ghetto was duly exterminated. The same argument was used in Warsaw. The Ghetto Jews agreed that the Germans might deport 60,000 people but not all 380,000; that was ‘inconceivable.’ So they let 60,000 go, and then more, and more. By the time an internal revolution snatched control from the Judenrat and declared a policy 8

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of resistance, the Ghetto had been reduced from 380,000 to 70,000. Fifty SS men, with 400 Lettish and Ukrainian guards had carried off 310,000 Jews ‘like sheep to the slaughter.’33 Both the German public and the Jews succumbed to the illusion that made extermination bureaucratically feasible, as Trevor-Roper adds: “Like the Germans, who did not wish to admit that, as a nation, they were murdering, the Jews did not wish to admit that, as a nation, they were being murdered.” And this is, indeed, a manifest lesson on the power of illusion in its contest with the disclosure of reality. Hence, a standard of justice cannot be privileged merely because it is compatible with a given conceptual prejudice, as that of the Nazi leadership and of the Jewish leadership show. One must, therefore, include for examination the prejudices of “liberal capitalist democratic,” “Marxist-socialist,” “Christian-theological,” or even an ostensibly “post-Holocaust Jewish theological” ethos. This is true also for some “principled” determination (eudaemonist, utilitarian, deontological, divine command, and so on)34 of what Heidegger understood as a “preemptory directive” and set of “rules” (categorical, general, particular, variable, provisional, and so on)35 that are postulated to guide human conduct, all of which Heidegger put into question in his Letter on Humanism.36 Hence: •

One recalls Aristotle, for example. If one were to judge from an Aristotelian position, one would have to consider what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book 3, Chapter 1, §13), such that if Heidegger committed an “error” and his error was a matter of his “ignorance” or even (rather unlikely) “moral weakness,” akrasia, then: “An act done through ignorance is in every case not voluntary . . . since a man who has acted through ignorance and feels no compunction at all for what he has done, cannot indeed be said to have acted voluntarily, as he was not aware of his action, yet cannot be said to have acted involuntarily, as he is not sorry for it. Acts done through ignorance therefore fall into two classes: if the agent regrets the act, we think that he has acted involuntarily; if he does not regret it, to mark the distinction we may call him a ‘non-voluntary’ agent.” Thus, in Book 3, Chapter 5, §12, Aristotle asserts by contrast, only “if a man knowingly acts in a way that will result in his becoming unjust, [then] he must be said to be voluntarily unjust” (italics added). But the question remains: Did Heidegger act “knowingly,” in Aristotle’s sense? As for whether Heidegger might be accused of akrasia in the usual sense of a conflict between his “intellect” (nous) and his “desire” (orexia), this too seems problematic. Jessica Moss presents an interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion in De Anima III.10, that is perhaps more plausible in Heidegger’s case if one construes akrasia as a conflict between “rational judgment” and “phantasia” (as 9

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•

rooted in phantazesthai, “to appear” or to “be made apparent”), in the sense of one’s “reasoning faculty” (to logistikon) succumbing to “perceptual illusion” while allowing that phantasia is, as Aristotle surmises (433a9-b12), “a sort of thinking (noesin).”37 But this requires proper analysis that accounts for moral psychology as well as how perceptual illusion occurs. Consider, also, Kant’s position insofar as Heidegger is accused of not showing any remorse for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. What of Kant’s own opinion that, “All remorse [Reue] is idle and absurd; for a wrongdoer appraises his deed [Tat] not from his former but from his present frame of mind which, if it had existed in him then, would certainly have prevented the deed, though the supposition that it also ought to have prevented the deed is false because it was not actually present in his former state.”38 To apply a deontological standard is not without its difficulties. When he said that Hitler is the German people’s present and future “law” and “reality,” Heidegger said nothing so different from Kant in his declaration of the authority of the sovereign (Herrscher) as a matter of practical principle: “the principle that the presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin.”39 Kant allows only “complaints” (gravemina) if a citizen claims that the sovereign acts are “contrary to law” but not “resistance,” there being “no right to sedition (seditio), still less to rebellion (rebellio).”40 Any individual citizen’s action so construed, for Kant, counts as “high treason” (proditio eminens) amounting to an attempt “to destroy his fatherland (parricida).” Clearly, had he followed Kant here, Heidegger would be acting consistent with Kant’s deontological expectations of duty, and yet many today would find Kant’s counsel morally unacceptable in the face of the actions of Hitler and the Third Reich bureaucracy. After all, Kant also held that, “the doctrine of virtue . . . commands us to hold the right of human beings sacred,”41 that therefore “every murderer – anyone who commits murder, orders it, or is an accomplice in it – must suffer death; this is what justice, as the idea of judicial authority, wills in accordance with universal laws that are grounded a priori.”42 Even Kant, thus, understands that “great crimes are paroxysms, the sight of which makes whose soul is healthy shudder,”43 such then being the paroxysm of the reality of Nazi genocide. That said, one must be clear: Heidegger personally committed no murder and personally ordered no murder, even as it is problematic to accuse him of being an accomplice to murder simply because he joined the National Socialist party prior to assuming the Rectorate at the University of Freiburg.

With the foregoing preliminaries in mind, it is clear that Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism puts the usual normative formulations into question. To

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be morally “responsible” in any indictment of Heidegger one must confront “philosophically” what he says in this Letter in terms of what he means both by “moment” and “attempt” in his questioning concerning the anticipated transition from “the first beginning” of Greek antiquity to the “second beginning” that is heralded at the closure/consummation of Western metaphysics in the thought of both Hegel44 and Nietzsche45 (i.e., in their effort to rethink the first beginning and to move beyond it. In this historical moment, Heidegger is clear that he is philosophically aware of the question of ethics in the normative sense of the word.46 In the Letter Heidegger stated, explicitly, that the greatest care must be fostered on the ethical bond at a time when technological man, delivered over to mass society, can be kept reliably on call only by gathering and ordering all his plans and activities in a way that corresponds to technology. One must work philosophically to understand his counsel here. Does it make sense as a matter of fact that extant humanity is reasonably to be characterized as “technological” man? Yes. Is it increasingly manifest that humanity is delivered over to mass society? Yes. Is it true that human plans and activities are increasingly ordered in ways that correspond to the demands of technology? Yes. Are we clear what we mean by “ethical bond” in this historical situation? No. Given the earlier assertions, what then does it mean to foster the ethical bond between human beings and what is our historical situation? Heidegger is clear that the problem is to know “how” to foster this bond in a way that does not merely gather and order humans and their activity technologically. He means humans gathered and ordered on the basis of a “calculative mode” of thinking (rechnendes Denken) that (a) transforms people (and one ought not read into this word the Nazi sense of Volk) into mere “collectives” (mass society) and (b) “structures” their proper action through institutions of “bureaucracy” and “mass-scale” industry as manifestations of “the gigantic” (das Riesenhafte) of “planetary” technology, individuals thus manipulated as “human resources” not merely in the mode of the “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) but as “standing reserve” for plans and goals not of their own (eigen) making, thus for possibilities of being that are not properly their own.47 Such is our “historical situation” today, the whole of humanity disposed to plans and goals proper to the planetary rule of technology. Heidegger understood this to be our situation relative to the extant political worldviews (Weltanschauung) of the early twentieth century – liberal-capitalist “Americanism,” Marxist “Bolshevism,” and, in due course, “vulgar” National Socialism as it unfolded contrary to his expectations in the early 1930s. He resigned as rector of the University of Freiburg

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in April 1934, his “philosophical” pronouncements about Germany’s “destiny” relative to National Socialism entirely ignored by party officials locally and nationally. This he observed to be so in 1933: “Is it any wonder how Spießbürgerei rises up all around, conceited half-culture, petty-bourgeois phony education – how the inner requirements of German socialism are not even recognized and therefore also not desired?”48 Gary Fried clarifies, Spießbürgerei “expresses such a depth of virulent contempt for the cowardice, lack of imagination, and conformism of the many who pretend to be Nazi revolutionaries,” a term of “loathing.” Thus, Heidegger rejected the racial focus (“biologism”) of the extant Nazi ideology: “The question of the role of world Jewry is not a racial question,” Heidegger argued, “but the metaphysical question about the kind of humanity that, without any restraints, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical ‘task.’”49 What does he mean? For those critical or suspicious of Heidegger’s discourse on historicity and Seinsgeschichte, it is important in understanding his thought during the 1930s that, being a student of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger was aware of his teacher’s own sense of crisis in Europe, Husserl expressing this in a series of lectures delivered in Prague in November 1935.50 One surmises reasonably that for Heidegger, thoroughly familiar with Husserl’s project of transcendental phenomenology, this particular set of lectures was likely a contributing philosophical motivation for his own questioning of the history of the Western tradition and metaphysics specifically. Thus, Heidegger would have been familiar with Husserl’s characterization of “the greater historical phenomenon” at issue, viz., “humanity struggling to understand itself,” struggling for “a universal transformation of meaning,” this in view of a meaning “inborn in this history from its origin,” Husserl thus anticipating the need in his dayto-day work “to initiate a new age” at a time of “plight” in which European humanity was losing its hold on its “own truth.”51 Husserl conceived of this crisis not only or merely as a crisis of the modern European “sciences” in their development since the Renaissance (i.e., in their insistence on a “universal philosophy” having “an apodictically intelligible methodology” and an inherently rational “theoretical autonomy”) in response to “skepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism.” Rather, Husserl saw this as a problem of the “inner dissolution” of Western metaphysics, and in that way a “radical lifecrisis of European humanity,” thus a matter of fundamental decision such as both Husserl and Heidegger could discern in their respective ways. Although he was concerned to advance the project of his transcendental phenomenology to overcome modernity’s “enigma of subjectivity,” thus to discern the meaning of the positive sciences and philosophy for “human existence” (menschliches Dasein), Husserl questioned the deficiency of “fact-minded sciences” that did not respond to the basic questions of meaning, “questions universal and necessary for all men.”52 His concern was to discern the meaning of “man’s spiritual [geistig] existence .  .  . within the 12

INTRODUCTION

horizon of his historicity.” The consonance with Heidegger’s concern for European and German “historical” Dasein and “spiritual” existence is clear. The key difference, of course, is Heidegger’s conceptualization of the basic question as one of Seinsgeschichte and not merely one of the epistemological status of universal reason. Nonetheless, as did Heidegger in his effort to elucidate his Seinsgeschichte, Husserl also spoke of the problem of metaphysics being one of “historical process” having “a remarkable form, one which becomes visible only through an interpretation of its hidden, innermost motivation”53 and the need to understand “the innermost driving force of all historical philosophical movements.”54 Here Husserl and Heidegger are concurrent and consonant in seeking to interpret what is “hidden” and “innermost” to the historical process wherein both universal philosophy (in its “modern” formation) and the “collapse of the belief in ‘reason’” (in its asserted apodicticity) are in supposed “inner” dissolution (i.e., the problem is inner to Western reason). Thus, Husserl clarified, This is not just a matter of a special form of culture – “science” or “philosophy” – as one among others belonging to European mankind. For the primal establishment of the new philosophy is, according to what was said earlier, the primal establishment of modern European humanity itself – humanity which seeks to renew itself radically, as against the foregoing medieval and ancient age.55 Husserl went further in asserting the significance of the “decision” at hand: “to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy . . . whether this telos, then, is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations [Menschheiten] and histories [Geschichtlichkeiten], or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy.”56 Thus, clearly Heidegger, along with Husserl, privileges European humanity over all other civilizations and histories – a point Derrida took into account in characterizing Husserl’s text here as a kind of “metaphysical racism,” notably to speak of “spiritual” racism in Heidegger’s case when he joined the National Socialist party, and deliberately not to say “biological” racism, the point here being that Husserl positions “European” humanity in first rank relative to a concept of human essentiality. To understand Heidegger, thus, it was within his perspective of interpretation that National Socialism “might” move Germany and Europe forward into a fundamental confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with this “uprooting” (consequent to the planetary rule of technology) “if and only if” its proponents – especially the intellectual elite of the universities – understood the metaphysical question at the base of world events with a proper 13

INTRODUCTION

“conception” of “humanity”57 – “what it means to be human” other than as the ens creatum of Western scholasticism’s onto-theo-logy that succumbs in the nineteenth century to the “death of God”; other than as the Cartesian res cogitans that certifies its existence only on the basis of a divinity; other than as the animale rationalis that fails to understand the unity of its animality and rationality for a proper determination of humanitas; other than as the transcendental ego that as “consciousness” (Bewusstsein) is unclear about the position of humanity relative to being (Sein) and time (internal time consciousness in need of a rethinking of historicity and temporality); and other than as a merely biologically determined “master race” produced through “breeding” and consequently installing something “mediocre” as “deutsche Kultur.” If a new concept of humanity “could” be apprehended – a concept Heidegger tried to prepare in Being and Time with his concept of Dasein so as to go beyond the undecided determination present in the concept of “rational animal” – then Germany “might” appropriate its “world-historical” task in the service not merely of a “revolution” such as the ideologically motivated Nazis understood to be extant (as Fried has pointed out) or even a “transvaluation” of values in Nietzsche’s sense of overturning Platonism, but rather in preparation for a fundamental transformation (Wandlung) the contours of which were entirely unknown and unpredictable in what promised to be a very long period of transition.58 Frank Edler aptly cites Heidegger’s remarks from correspondence to Elisabeth Blochmann in 1932 that speak to Heidegger’s motivation that was clearly part of his conviction in 1933/34: the more vigorously I get into my own work, the more confidently I find myself compelled each time back to the great beginning (Anfang) with the Greeks. And often I waver as to whether it isn’t more important to give up my own endeavors and act solely on behalf of bringing about the realization that this world isn’t there simply to be presented and taken over but must be brought before us again in its provocative greatness and originality (Vorbildlichkeit).59 Heidegger wavered, but, eventually, in assuming the Rectorate, tried to act on behalf of the essential connection of his historical time – what, as Edler noted, Heidegger called “the present world-moment (Weltaugenblick) of Western events” – to that of the first beginning in Greek antiquity, an understanding not achieved if there was only “one awakening” [“ersten Erweckung” given as “ein Weg der ersten Revolution”]60 (i.e., that he believed to be represented by the rise of National Socialism) but also a “second, deeper one” that Heidegger clearly intimated and hoped to realize.61 Interpreting elements of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address, Edler concludes: “Only by

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thinking through the revolutionary awakening (Aufbruch) of Greek thought to its origin is it possible for a new appropriation of being to take place. This new appropriation of being itself, is, in my view, Heidegger’s conception of the second revolution.”62 That said, Heidegger also decried, this awakening would not be realized by existentialist philosophy such as that of Karl Jaspers. Thus, it is not surprising that Strauss remarked, in the context of comments on Heidegger’s influence on existentialist thinking contra “essentialist” metaphysics in the early twentieth century: “Existentialism has reminded many people that thinking is incomplete and defective if the thinking being, the thinking individual, forgets himself as what he is.”63 That forgetfulness extends to disquiet not only about the metaphysics of presence but also about moral philosophy, about ethics in all its normativity. In Heidegger’s engagement of Ernst Cassirer and the neo-Kantian thinking of Hermann Cohen, Strauss reminds, while Cassirer failed to engage the problem of ethics in contrast to Cohen, “Heidegger did face the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.”64 That philosophical position is, of course, contrary to the Kantian commitment to the possibility of universal moral truths certified as perfect duties by the test of the categorical imperative and the law of humanity as foundational moral principles. Hence, it behooves us to think anew our situation when the fact as Heidegger asserts it opens up an abyss.

Notes 1 Plato, “Protagoras,” in Plato’s Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997). 2 Gesaumtausgabe, Vols. 94–96, Vittorio Klostermann, 2014. For a reasonably accurate and critical engagement of much of the scholarship related to this topic, see Francesca Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the Thinking of Evil: From the Original Ethics to the Black Notebooks,” Ivs Fvgit, Vol. 19, 2016, pp. 87–134. For my own engagement of this “problem” in the initial round of scholarly debate, see: Norman K. Swazo, “L’Affaire Heidegger,” Human Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1993, pp. 359–380, and Norman K. Swazo, “Gnothi sauton: Heidegger’s Problem Ours,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 25, No. 3, October 1994, pp. 262–286. On the idea of “pathology” in relation to Heidegger’s thought, see, James Osborn, “Philosophy and Ethical Life,” 17 January 2014, http://notphilosophy.com/philosophy-and-ethical-life/, accessed on 19 April 2018; James Osborn, “Framing Heidegger: Technology and the Notebooks,” 01 March 2014, http://notphilosophy.com/framing-heidegger-technology-and-the-notebooks/, accessed on 19 April 2019. 3 Gary Fried, “The King is Dead: Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 September 2014. 4 Shawn Kelley, “Hermeneutics and Genocide: Giving Voice to the Unspoken,” Palgrave Communications, Vol. 1, 13 October 2015, doi:10.1057/palcomms. 2015.31, accessed on 03 May 2018. Kelley reminds of Theodor Adorno’s view

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5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

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15 16 17 18 19

that “Heidegger’s thought is fascist down to its innermost core,” and Emmanuel Faye’s position that “Heidegger’s thought . . . is reducible to Nazism.” Following this line of thought, Kelley asserts (in my judgment, an inductive fallacy of false cause): “The concentration camps, sterilization, anti-Semitic laws and book burnings were [for Heidegger] a small price to pay for the chance to restart Western philosophy anew.” Thus, at Heidegger’s level of abstraction, Kelley concludes, “Heideggerian hermeneutics is unable to think the Holocaust.” Jürgen Habermas,“Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” trans. J. McCumber, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1989, pp. 431–456. Leo Strauss, “Existentialism,” Interpretation, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 303–320. Ibid., p. 305, italics added. Ibid., p. 306. Consider (e.g., Gunter Figal) (formerly chair of philosophy at the University of Freiburg and chair of the Martin Heidegger Society from 2003–2015) commented on 15 January 2015: “As chairman of a society, which is named after a person, one is in certain way a representative of that person. After reading the Schwarze Hefte, especially the antisemitic passages, I do not wish to be such a representative any longer. These statements have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become difficult to be a co-representative of this.” Translation from the German text given by Eugene Walters, “Martin Heidegger Society Chair Steps Down After Reading the Black Notebooks,” Critical Theory, 20 January 2015, www.critical-theory.com/martinheidegger-society-chair-steps-down-after-reading-the-black-notebooks/, accessed on 25 April 2018. For the original German text, see “Vorsitzender der HeideggerGesselschaft zurückgetreten,” Presseportal, 16 January 2015, www.presseportal. de/pm/7169/2927823, accessed on 25 April 2018. Heidegger understood, in his “Hegel and the Greeks,” that some would speak thus: “The enigma of ‘Aletheia’ comes closer to us, but, simultaneously, the danger, that we are hypothesizing it as a fantastic world essence.” Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, “The Destruction of the European Jews, by Raul Hilberg: Review,” Commentary, 01 April 1962, www.commentarymagazine. com/articles/the-destruction-of-the-european-jews-by-raul-hilberg/, accessed on 02 July 2018. Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin, “The Law in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,” in Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin, eds., The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice (New York: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 1–13, at p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. The authors cite Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941). The distinction of “normative” and “prerogative” is an “analytical” category or “heuristic device” Fraenkel uses, and, as the authors note, not a distinction made by the Nazi regime. Steinweis and Rachlin, “The Law in Nazi Germany,” p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8. See here Robert D. Rachlin, “Roland Freisler and the Volksgerichtshof: The Court as an Instrument of Terror,” in Steinweis and Rachlin, The Law in Nazi Germany, pp. 63–87. Steinweis and Rachlin, “The Law in Nazi Germany,” p. 3.

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20 Raphael Gross, “Guilt, Shame, Anger, Indignation: Nazi Law and Nazi Morals,” in Steinweis and Rachlin, The Law in Nazi Germany, pp. 89–103. 21 Gross, “Guilt, Shame, Anger, Indignation,” p. 89. 22 Ibid., p. 90. 23 Ibid., p. 91. 24 Ibid., pp. 92 ff. 25 Ibid., p. 102. 26 See here Peter J. Haas, Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992) and his subsequent paper, “Ethics in the Post-Shoah Era: Giving up the Search for a Universal Ethic,” Ethical Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001, pp. 105–116. 27 Haas, “Ethics in the Post-Shoah Era,” p. 108. 28 Ibid., p. 108. 29 Ibid., p. 110. 30 Ibid., p. 114. 31 Ibid., p. 115. 32 Trevor-Roper, “The Destruction of the European Jews.” 33 Ibid. 34 See here Daniel Guevara, “The Will as Practical Reason and The Problem of Akrasia,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 62, No. 3, March 2009, pp. 525–550. 35 See here, e.g., John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 36 See here Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” trans. F. Capuzzi, Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 239–276. One should note that, even though the original German version was published in 1949, according to Capuzzi’s translation, “What is said here was not first thought up when the letter was written, but is based on the course taken by a path that was begun in 1936, in the ‘moment’ of an attempt to say the truth of being in a simple manner. The letter continues to speak in the language of metaphysics, and does so knowingly. The other language remains in the background.” 37 Jessica Moss, “Akrasia and Perceptual Illusion,” Archiv für Schachter der Philosophie, Vol. 91, Bd., S. 119–156. 38 Immanuel Kant, “Review of Schulz’s Attempt at an Introduction to a Doctrine of Morals for All Human Beings Regardless of Different Religions (1793),” in P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, eds., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd Edition, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 104. 40 Ibid., p. 463. 41 Ibid., p. 525. 42 Ibid., p. 475. 43 Ibid., p. 516. 44 Heidegger, Contributions, §103, p. 142, opines: “German Idealism was too ‘true’to-life and in a certain sense itself produced the non-philosophy of positivism, which took its place and now celebrates its biologistic triumphs.” Later, p. 154, Heidegger adds: “The utmost and at the same time most insidious offshoot of ‘idealism’ is manifest at that place where idealism is seemingly abandoned, nay even opposed (e.g., when one denies that German Idealism is ‘true’ to life. This idealism takes the shape of biologism, which is and wants to be essentially and necessarily ambiguous.”

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45 Heidegger, Contributions, §89, p.  124, comments: “To grasp Nietzsche as the end of Western metaphysics is not a historical [historisch] statement about what lies behind us but the historical [geschichtlich] onset of the future of Western thinking.” 46 For a reasonable discussion of Heidegger and the question of ethics, see here William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), especially “Chapter 6, Ethos and Poetics Dwelling.” McNeill’s discussion (p. 133) reminds us that “Heidegger’s early phenomenological interpretations – like those of Aristotle – themselves display the inherent limits of any theoretical or scientific approach to ethical life in pointing into the dimensions of temporal finitude, singularity, and circumstance that no theoretical logos can disclose.” 47 See here Denis McManus, “Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit Revisited,” in D. McManus, ed., Heidegger and the Measure of Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 48 As cited by Fried, “The King is Dead.” 49 Ibid., italics added. 50 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). For a commentary see Timo Miettinen, The Idea of Europe in Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Study in Generativity and Historicity (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Philosophical Studies 36, 2013). Miettinen finds Husserl’s concern for universalism seeking a way between the “Kantian-Hegelian concept of historical teleology as a narrative of inevitable progress” with Europe “the torchbearer of human freedom,” and “renditions” of “the Nietzschean-Spenglerian formulations of inevitable decline,” Nietzsche highlighting Europe’s “melancholy in regard to its lost origin” (p. 32). 51 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 14, italics added. 52 Ibid., p. 6. 53 Ibid., p. 11, italics added. 54 Ibid., p. 12, italics added. 55 Ibid., pp. 12 & 14, italics added. 56 Ibid., p. 15. 57 See here Leo Strauss, “Existentialism,” pp.  303 & 304, http://thecinst.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/03/Strauss-Existentialism.pdf, accessed on 29 May 2018. 58 See here Günther Neske, ed., Errinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullinfen: Neske, 1977), pp. 234–235, with the idea of a transformation of “our Dasein itself, a transformation which informs the innermost necessity of our destiny (Geschickes),” and Frank Edler, “Alfred Baeumler on Hölderlin and the Greeks: Reflection on the Heidegger-Baeumler Relationship (Part IIIA),” Janus Head, www.janushead.org/3-2/edler.cfm, accessed on 11 July 2018. The “task” Heidegger believes, is to understand “in an originary way the concealed governance (verborgene Walten) of the ancient Greek ‘logos’ and setting it to work (ins Werk zu setzen).” 59 Frank H.W. Edler, “Heidegger’s Interpretation of the German ‘Revolution,’” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 23, 1993, pp. 153–171, at p. 153. 60 Ibid., p. 154. 61 Edler (p. 155) argues that, “one of Heidegger’s primary concerns in the [Rectoral] Address is to focus the first revolution toward a second, deeper one.” 62 Edler, “Heidegger’s Interpretation,” p. 164. Edler adds (p. 165), quite correctly I think, that, “For Heidegger, the first revolution is precisely this rupturing of metaphysical foundations, especially the metaphysics of modernity grounded in the subjectivity of hypokeimenon. The reason Heidegger included National Socialism as one path in this first revolution is that it exhibited an extreme intolerance

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toward modernism. . . . For Heidegger, this extreme intolerance directed against communism, capitalism, Christianity, bourgeois liberalism, egoistic materialism, logical positivism, and scientific rationalism was a hidden rejection of metaphysics itself, a hidden No to the rule of metaphysical archai.” 63 Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 303. 64 Ibid., pp. 303 & 304.

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1 HEIDEGGER’S “HISTORICAL” SITUATION

Here I wish to argue that Heidegger’s differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany, as expressed in his debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929 and then in his Kantbuch, sought to clarify the need for a more fundamental approach to Kant that would have its implications for moral philosophy as well. Further, reviewing historical accounts of the rise of National Socialism, such as that of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, helps to situate Heidegger’s own observations and reflections. Moreover, I believe clearly, Heidegger’s position was consonant with other German philosophicalhistorical thought of the time (e.g., that of Max Scheler) as post-Weimar Germany found itself struggling to find its way politically between American liberal capitalist democracy and Soviet Bolshevik communism. Accordingly, one may conclude, the whole of this overview allows one to posit that Heidegger (a) was keenly aware of the problematic of ethics in its normative sense, even though he did not write any systematic treatise on ethics as such; but (b) he was attentive to, and desired phenomenological clarification of, a more “originary” confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the Western philosophical tradition in view of an impending post-metaphysical “decision” (Entscheidung) he intuited. Heidegger’s understanding of such decision, I propose to show in due course, is essential to moral discourse generally, but also in the way in which one may seek to evaluate Heidegger’s own actions. Some choose not to account for Heidegger’s historical situation as he and other Germans construed it. Commenting on Peter Gordon’s study of Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929, David Nirenberg reminds that, “World War 1 destroyed Europe’s confidence in the old material forms of its modernity, while at the same time ushering in an age of sharp struggle between new articulations – such as capitalism and Marxism – of the same.”1 In 1933–1934, “Hitler seemed to most Germans to be the final and best hope against economic depression, political stalemate, national disorder, and the communist menace.”2 Indeed, one hypothesizes that, listening to Hitler’s pre-election speech of 15 July 1932 decrying the failures of the political parties to find remedy for the economic situation, and stating 20

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expressly that “the fate of the individual German is inseparably linked to the fate of the entire nation,” Heidegger (one surmises) could hope those words meant what he expected of a “spiritual” National Socialism (about which more later). He might have agreed with Hitler’s seemingly unproblematic statement that, “Socialism cannot exist unless it is served by the power of the intellect,” and this existence to be had only when “an inseparable community” is united “with a common destiny.”3 Indeed, as Hannah Arendt herself remarked, “among intellectuals” in Germany at the time, “Gleichshaltung [conforming to the regime] was the rule,” in which case, as Maier-Katkin infers, it is reasonable “to see in Heidegger an instance of the mass phenomenon, Gleichshaltung . . . the rapid adjustment made by many Germans to the opportunities, conditions, and requirements of the budding totalitarian state.”4 One cannot ignore the national politics of post-war Germany as the context of political decision any German would take in those fateful years, irrespective of ability to emigrate. It is important to account for the fact that most Germans, very likely including Heidegger, in July and November 1932 were concerned about the number of seats won by the Communist party in both elections. Many feared influence from the Bolsheviks in Russia in determining Germany’s and Europe’s “destiny” at a time of post-war economic crisis, hence the popular turn to the National Socialists in the November election, followed by Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, supported even by ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen of the German National People’s Party.5 Given his familiarity with the writing of Karl Marx, further, Heidegger would have understood Marx’s prediction of “communist revolution” in “a highly industrialized country,” the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 perceived to be too close for comfort in space and time to Germany.6 It is important also that many Germans, including Heidegger, rejected not only communism but also democracy in the form they experienced it in the Weimar Republic – a democracy “established in 1919” with “a highly liberal constitution,” but this democracy “a product of defeat in war and revolution . . . never accepted by most of the German elites, notably the military, large landholders and big industry,” a democracy suffering from “irreconcilable political, social and cultural divisions,” and then “submerged by the collapse of the economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929.”7 For many Germans, “Democracy had failed them.” Heidegger understood this, finding both American-style highly intensive “capitalist” “industrialist” democracy and Weimar democracy (suffering the insults of the Versailles Treaty) unacceptable political paths for postwar Germany, unlikely successfully to confront the nigh advance of Bolshevik communism – even as one may argue it was factually wrong to associate both “international capitalism” and “Bolshevism” with Europe’s Jews and causally linked to world communism and Marxist ideology. That Heidegger would be concerned about Bolshevism’s threat to Europe after the October revolution is not in and of 21

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itself problematic since he, like Max Scheler before him, understood German destiny to move in its inner necessity against Bolshevism. This contraposition inevitably included concern for the influence of Jews who supported the Bolshevik revolution as members of the Red Army and even as members of the communist faction of the Mensheviks. Thus, Seth Franzman observes, When Theodor Herzl visited the Russian Empire in 1903, he met Count Witte, the minister of finance. According to Leonard Schapiro, who authored The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement in 1961, Herzl found that ‘50% of the membership of the revolutionary parties was Jewish.’ Herzl asked Witte why. ‘I think it’s the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed.’ Schapiro argues that Jews moved into revolutionary circles as they gained access to intellectual circles. Ironically then, the more Jews gained wealth and freedom in the empire, the more they also awakened to their predicament and joined the slow gurgling rebellion against the ancient regime.8 Shapiro claimed further that, “Jewish Marxist social democracy diverged from Bolshevism,” yet many Germans fearful of Bolshevism did not make this distinction of political factions. The fact that they were “communist” was sufficient cause for Germans to believe their political advance into the heart of Europe should be obstructed.9 That German opposition to communism was equal to the opposition to democracy. In his lecture of 1956 on the rise of existentialism in Europe in this period, Leo Strauss similarly asked: Is there no problem of democracy, of industrial mass democracy? The official high priests of democracy with their amiable reasonableness were not reasonable enough to prepare us for our situation: the decline of Europe, the danger to the west, to the whole western heritage which is at least as great and even greater than that which threatened Mediterranean civilization around 300 of the Christian era. . . . It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy even if they are enemies of democracy – provided they are thinking men and especially great thinkers and not blustering fools.10 In all fairness to Heidegger, specifically in this historical situation, those who condemn should also point out what Notebooks editor Peter Trawny himself says in his “Afterword” to Heidegger’s Ponderings II-VI (despite his own published critique of Heidegger’s conduct): “by the summer of 1936 at the latest, Heidegger took distance from the actually existing National Socialism, inasmuch as he could recognize and disdain the “worldview” of 22

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“desolate and crude ‘biologism.’ . . . The Ponderings of this time therefore show how Heidegger extricated himself step by step from his earlier support for National Socialism.”11 Weltanschauung philosophy was not the means to either a fundamental or a world-historical transformation of Western humanity such as Heidegger envisioned. Thus, whatever one knows as the facts of Kristallnacht of November 1938 and of Auschwitz as of April 1940, one cannot reasonably project responsibility for these events upon either Heidegger as thinker or Heidegger as man, faulty claims of causality and fallacious assertions of guilt by association having no rightful place in a reasonably efficacious normative judgment. Indeed, historians especially – including here intellectual historians such as Heidegger critic Richard Wolin  – are expected to exercise caution in their interpretations of the “facts,” consistent with a basic sense of justice comprised of both truth and fairness;12 and also, as Hans-Georg Gadamer would remind, while keeping otherwise “hidden prejudices” explicit – assuming we know or can otherwise warrant what these concepts “truth” and “fairness” mean, and seeking their meaning “philosophically” and not merely historically. Wolin shows himself exceedingly disdainful of everything “Heideggerian” when he writes, “any discussion of Heidegger’s legacy that downplays or diminishes the extent of his political folly stands guilty, by extension, of perpetuating the philosophical betrayal initiated by the Master himself.”13 One wonders, even doubts, of the “standard” of guilt Wolin imposes, and whether that standard is “vindicated” in the scene of contention about rival concepts of rationality and justice about which we are instructed by Alasdair MacIntyre, all of which points to Wolin’s fallacious moves of hasty conclusion and jumping on the bandwagon of current critique. Jeff Malpas is entirely correct to observe concerning the language of “contamination” that, “It is strange to find such language – a language so characteristically employed by Nazis and anti-Semites themselves – at work in a context in which the dangers of irrationality are at the same time so frequently warned against.”14 Such is what a historian of ideas might do, when caught up in a hermeneutics of suspicion, thus without competently engaging the “philosophy” and the “thinking” that is at the center of the dispute. Ingo Farin and Malpas provide the pertinent caution, in their assessment of the current controversy: “No single viewpoint prevails; there is considerable divergence in the way different authors assess the material in the “Black Notebooks.” Even similar passages are read in different ways by different authors (and sometimes translated differently); and it can be argued that this divergence underscores the enormous difficulty in interpreting Heidegger, as well as the vanity of supposing that the matter can be definitively resolved.”15 The fact is that there are “cognitive limits of historical representation” when one writes about National Socialist Germany, even as master Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg understood (as he linked the Nazi genocide not only to the events of the early twentieth century but also to some “twelve 23

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hundred years of conversion policy” within Christendom and followed by policies of expulsion).16 Hilberg argued that, The expulsion and exclusion policy was adopted by the Nazis and remained the goal of all anti-Jewish activity until 1941 . . . [when] total war [meant that emigration] was impossible . . . [and the] ‘Jewish problem’ had to be ‘solved’ in some other way. At this crucial time, the idea of a “territorial solution” emerged in Nazi minds. The “territorial solution,” or ‘the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,’ as it became known, envisaged the death of European Jews.17 Therefore, one must account for the transition in policy – from both Roman Catholic and Protestant policy insisting that Jews convert to Christianity to the policy of expulsion from Europe’s “Christian” states, then to a policy of expulsion from Germany in 1930 to the eventual policy of annihilation (murder/genocide) decided formally in 1941. Significantly, Hilberg opines about the final solution, “The operation was over before anyone could grasp its enormity, let alone its implications for the future.”18 That is a significant observation in the face of the massive administrative and bureaucratic process of destruction the Nazi machinery put in place to implement the policy of extermination. Aside from the functionaries of the death camps, among those who did not grasp the enormity of the genocide were the everyday Germans and German intellectuals, but also Heidegger. Yet, all of this requires its historical context if it is to be understood causally. Properly understood, Hilberg writes of the Nazi final solution: The German Nazis, then, did not discard the past; they built upon it. They did not begin a development; they completed it. In the deep recesses of anti-Jewish history we shall find many of the administrative and psychological tools with which the Nazis implemented their destruction process.19 But they did so with precedents: The German bureaucracy could draw upon such precedents and follow such a guide, for the German bureaucrats could dip into a vast reservoir of administrative experience, a reservoir that church and state had filled in fifteen hundred years of destructive activity.20 But there is a further sense of history present in twentieth century German philosophy that affected Heidegger in his own thinking about post-war Germany’s place in Europe and its historical destiny. While Nietzsche and Hegel 24

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were prominent in his thought about the consummation of metaphysics, one cannot ignore Max Scheler’s influence on his thinking on this topic, Heidegger having dedicated his Kantbuch (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) to Scheler. This is significant for the fact that Scheler sought to articulate a new sense of ethics at a time when Heidegger disputed the neo-Kantian position on ethics as articulated by the Marburg school and as otherwise delimited in the thought of Ernst Cassirer. Scheler’s thinking on destiny links “essentially” to what Heidegger has to say about Germany’s destiny. This is manifest in Heidegger’s discussion of historicity in Being and Time. In the fifth chapter of Being and Time (§72 ff.) Heidegger begins his existential and ontological exposition of the problem of history. There he asserts: Disclosure and interpretation belong essentially to the occurrence of Da-sein. From the kind of being of this being that exists historically, there arises the existentiell possibility of an explicit disclosure and grasp of history. Making it thematic, that is, the historiographical disclosure of history, is the presupposition for the possibility of ‘building up the historical world in the sciences of the humanities.’21 Thus, historiography in the sense of the writing of history proceeds by way of interpretation conditioned by Dasein’s capacity for apprehension and disclosure of history. For Heidegger one must be clear here of the meaning of “historicity” – the “existential problem of historicity” that requires a clarification of “the fundamental constitution of historicity” – even as one accepts the existentiell possibility of historiography. When considering the human being as Dasein, Heidegger says, we understand that “Da-sein can never be past, not because it is imperishable, but because it can essentially never be objectively present.”22 That means, in its implication, that historiography cannot correctly write about humanity as if human beings were merely to be apprehended as objects, and even as objects present-at-hand. “Standing out” (ek-sisting) beyond the objective present, individual Dasein exists (ek-sists) by “finding the possibility of its existence” in its anticipatory resoluteness (i.e., as it is resolved upon possibilities of being that it “anticipates” and “chooses” for itself). But it does so either authentically or inauthentically. As part of a given society or culture, every individual has his/ her “heritage” (Erbe), in relation to which s/he discloses and chooses “actual factical possibilities” of existence, familiar even if ambiguous.23 Relative to such heritage, the individual apprehends his/her possibilities, sometimes choosing possibilities accordingly, sometimes choosing in opposition to that heritage. But here, Heidegger says, fate (Shicksal) also enters: “Existing fatefully in resoluteness handing itself down, Da-sein is disclosed as being-inthe-world for the ‘coming’ of ‘fortunate’ circumstances and for the cruelty of chance.” Hence, “if fateful Da-sein essentially exists as being-in-the-world in being-with others, its occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined 25

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as destiny [Geschick].” Here “fate” and “destiny” are essentially connected. How so? Heidegger clarifies: With this term [destiny], we designate the occurrence of the community [Gemeinschaft], of a people [des Volkes]. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can being-with-one-another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in being-with-one-another in the same world and in the resoluteness for definite possibilities. In communication and in battle the power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Da-sein in and with its “generation” constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Da-sein.24 What Heidegger says here is essential to his understanding of himself as an individual having “his own fate” and to his understanding of Germany as a community and a people “having its destiny.” His use of the concepts Gemeinschaft and Volkes preceded their use by the Nazis. One cannot assume the two are equivalent in meaning and, therefore, it is philosophically irresponsible to “read into” those words a Nazi meaning. Heidegger did not use the Nazi word for community, Volksgenosse, as given, (e.g., in the “twenty-five-point program, dated February 24, 1920,” described by Hilberg).25 At no time is it evident that Heidegger accepted “this” Nazi political designation of community, according to which German citizenship was automatically to be restricted only to persons with “German blood.” On the contrary, Heidegger understood that he in his fate and Germany in its destiny were “already guided beforehand” in their being-with-one-another (according to his concept of Mit-seienden) in the same “world” (the same “referential context of signification”). That was so in 1930 as the National Socialists came to power and as Heidegger resolved upon a given possibility of his own being, his own fate inextricably connected to the destiny of the German people as it unfolded at that time in relation to National Socialism. In his lectures on thinking from 1957 Heidegger spoke similarly about history. In this post-WWII discourse, he said: As long as we represent history historiologically, it appears as occurrences, these however in the sequence of a before and after. We find ourselves in a present through which what occurs flows away. Starting from here, on the basis of this present, the past is calculated. For it, the future is planned. The historiological representation of history as a sequence of occurrences prevents us from experiencing to what extent authentic history is constantly an impending [Gegen-wart] in an essential sense. By present [Gegenwart] here we do not mean what is directly present-at-hand in the momentary now. The impending [Gegen-wart] is what waits toward us [uns 26

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entgegenwartet], waits for whether and how we expose ourselves to it or, contrarily, close ourselves off from it. That which waits toward us also comes to us; it is the future [Zu-kunft], rightly thought. It pervades what is impending as an imposition [Zumutung] that approaches the Da-sein of the human, seeming [anmutet] to him in one way or another, so that he would surmise [vermute] the future in its claim. Only in the air of such surmising does questioning thrive, that essential questioning which belongs to the bringing forth of every genuine work in any field whatsoever.26 Again, Heidegger would have us distinguish historiology in its empirical sense from “authentic history,” from what is “impending” in an “essential” sense and is impending as an “imposition” upon us, and this as “the injunction of the future,” to which we either expose ourselves, “appropriating” that claim, or close ourselves off from that claim, thereby “preventing” the unconcealment [Unverborgenheit] of an authentic history, hence not heeding the claim of the future as a “concealed gathering” upon the present. Such was Heidegger’s sense of what he took to be imposing upon him in the moment that he interpreted the significance of the National Socialist movement relative to German and European destiny. Clearly, insofar as he intuited what was an actual “factical/existentielle” possibility of his own being, Heidegger was able to choose resolutely either in favor or in opposition (although that claim is deceptive for any number of reasons, to be discussed later). He sought to appropriate his ownmost fate as well as the destiny of the German nation conceived in terms of its injunction for an authentic history, and an authentic history disposed relative to both the first beginning of the history of metaphysics that yet governed and the second beginning that was impending. One must consider what in “foresight,” in contrast to our hindsight, Heidegger anticipated and chose and what he could not reasonably foresee in the National Socialist movement as it unfolded. Hilberg makes clear in his assessment that the process of destruction of European Jews did not . . . proceed from a basic plan. No bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what kind of measures would be taken in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to foretell the configuration of the undertaking in 1942. The destruction process was a step-by-step operation, and the administrator could seldom see more than one step ahead.27 Critics of Heidegger should consider that this assessment holds true for Heidegger as the otherwise a-political intellectual he was. Thus, as a matter of historical reflection, Hilberg’s assessment allows for distinction of (1) “isolated actions” (Einzelaktionen) of Nazis here and there that were, of course, condemnable from many points of view, and (2) the destruction 27

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process itself [involving, as Hilberg identifies it, a sequence that included, (1) a conception of the Jews, then (2) expropriatory operations, followed by (3) concentration of Jews in ghettos, and then, finally, (4) the decision to annihilate European Jewry]. In the course of time, Germans would have been witness to these two “policies” being implemented by the Nazi authorities – calls for emigration (1933–1940) of non-Germans, specifically those of “non-Aryan descent,” the designated term after the “regulation” of 11 April 1933,28 and then that of the final solution, annihilation (1941–45)29 – in which case Heidegger’s decision of 1933 has to be considered in the chronological context of Nazi administrative measures undertaken accordingly. Heidegger’s “decision” of 1933 at this time was not automatic, and of course it was by no means necessary. Indeed, given his reading of Being and Time, Charles Guignon, for example, would not interpret Heidegger’s choice as in any way mandated by Heidegger’s philosophy as expressed in 1927.30 Heidegger chose in favor, for reasons we understand in part from his own statements and philosophical developments of the time period, but also according to his own assessment in hindsight. One cannot in all fairness ignore or merely dismiss Heidegger’s statement of 04 November 1945, even if one considers his remarks self-serving, in which he explained his decision: “it sufficed for me to express my fundamental philosophical positions against the dogmatism and primitivism of Rosenberg’s biologism.”31 As he said then, “I was nevertheless absolutely convinced that an autonomous alliance of intellectuals [der Geistigen] could deepen and transform a number of essential elements of the ‘National Socialist movement’ and thereby contribute in its own way to overcoming Europe’s disarray and the crisis of the Western spirit.” He “was equally convinced,” he added, that his “basic spiritual position” and his “conception of the task of the university could be reconciled with the political will of those in power.” This “basic spiritual position that was the result of [his] long years of philosophical work,” he conceded, was misplaced, as he “realized that it was a mistake to believe . . . [he] could immediately influence the transformation of the bases – spiritual or non-spiritual – of the National Socialist movement.” But, more fully to appreciate his own choice at the time as it involved his anticipatory stance vis-à-vis his conception of Europe’s authentic history, one must include the influence on his thinking from Scheler. The relation of Heidegger and Scheler can be constructed with reasonable competence from Heidegger’s obvious esteem of Scheler’s position in German philosophy, despite his criticisms of Scheler’s thinking, and from Scheler’s own representation of his ideas about Germany’s destiny. Johannes Fritsche has already ably described this in relevant detail in his Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time,32 to which I turn for some pertinent insights while having my reservations about some conflation of the positions of the two philosophers. 28

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As Fritsche reminds, Scheler was concerned to understand Germany’s destiny after the events of World War I, how to construe possibilities of German society as well as community. Fritsche argues that Scheler initially expressed his alignment with “rightist politics” and then turned “to the center and the social democrats.”33 For Heidegger, commenting in a eulogy of Scheler in summer 1928, Scheler represented “the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and even in contemporary philosophy as such.”34 Scheler was concerned for the destiny of Europe, pressed as it was between Anglo-American capitalism and the expanding Russian empire as a union of “soviet” states. He desired that Europe – not America, not Russia – retain “the spiritual leadership of the world.” For him this meant following “the call of a fate . . . unshakeable and . . . firmly built into the entire German history” up to that time.35 Thus, Scheler opined, “only that Volk has a true fate [Schicksal] that is strong and great and that has deep respect for the inner necessities of its history [den inneren Notwendigkeiten seiner Geschichte] and follows the profound orders of its inner makeup beyond all transient opportunistic ends and the possible arbitrariness of its government and its diplomats.” Here one finds Scheler and Heidegger in accord in their sense of Germany’s destiny and its history having its own inner necessity. But they are not merely in accord with each other. There is every reason to believe that Heidegger appropriated Scheler’s insight as he examined the promise of National Socialism with a view to Europe retaining this “spiritual” leadership of the world “against” AngloAmerican capitalism, against “the bourgeois-capitalist spirit” (bürgerlichkapitalistischen Geist), and against Russian Bolshevism, in which case what happened in World War I was “ordained by fate” (Schicksalmässigkeit). And what is ordained by fate presents Germany with a fateful and destined decision (Entscheidung). This fateful destiny, for Scheler and for Heidegger, supervenes upon all party politics and squabbles (Parteiengezänk) such as both Weimar and post-WWI Germany experienced, in which case “a specific national fate reaches down into the core of each individual” as that which is “the most intimate” (das Heimlichste).36 In contrast to Heidegger’s questioning of the whole of metaphysics and, by inclusion, the whole of the Western political/moral philosophical tradition including Kantian universalism, Scheler allowed for “an objective world of values and truth” (einer objektiven Güter - und Wahrheitswelt) even as he advanced a philosophical anthropology. However, in allowing this Scheler did not agree with Kant: “in Scheler reason is no longer a faculty that determines others but only accompanies their activities.”37 Fritsche argues therefore, “It is only this step of ruling out reason as a relevant faculty that allows Scheler to dismiss classical liberalism as well as social democracy.” Along with that dismissal comes a “rank-ordering” of individuals and peoples, thus “inequality” within the political order, and that includes “inequality in value of being.” This means, as Fritsche says, that “the state must give 29

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life-communities equal or unequal {political} rights {gleiche, resp. ungleiche politische Rechte}”38 with a view to “the aristocracy that pervades all living nature” and according to which “noble blood and tradition determine the unity of the group.” Heidegger himself did not appropriate either this notion of inequality in value or Scheler’s notion of aristocracy while he concurred with the notion of national destiny. And that, in part, is due to his reading of Nietzsche and locating Nietzsche’s effort at a transvaluation of values as still a metaphysics, despite its anti-Platonism.39 The point is important for the fact that Heidegger did not accept a “biologistic”/“racial” sense of German destiny such as the ideological Nazis did. Precisely because there are other texts of Heidegger that must be taken into account in sorting out the “politics” of Heidegger (some of which are engaged in what follows), I do not subscribe to the interpretation of §74 that Fritsche subsequently discusses as if it is analogous to the thought of Scheler. There are patent differences, as later commentary here works to make clear, in which case one may not reasonably read and interpret Heidegger’s texts as if they are “Schelerian” in intent. Hence, to make sense of Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism one can appreciate his appropriation of “elements” of Scheler’s sense of history and specifically the idea of “inner necessity” of German destiny. But this is mediated also by Heidegger’s reading of Hegel (about which more later), in which case one cannot merely settle on a claim of singular or primary influence of Scheler. How Heidegger construes Western history philosophically under various philosophical influences is pertinent to understanding both his sense of individual fate and Germany’s national destiny. Hence, that fact is a reason for pause as intellectual historians who engage Heidegger’s works trying to sort out the relation of his philosophy to his biography cannot reasonably do so without reflection upon their own methodological commitments. As Dominick LaCapra argues, “we should recognize the inevitability of the historian’s projection of his or her values onto empirical reality through ideological narratives.”40 This projective interpretive maneuver is even present in our efforts to understand the Nazi genocide itself. Ranking historian Saul Friedlander concedes, for example, that “an opaqueness remains at the very core of historical understanding and interpretation of what happened,” as well as the problematic of reconstructing “reality” without “some sort of narrative that leaves the unsayable unsaid,” thus without “closure” on what is represented as one “keeps watch over [the] absent meaning of the Holocaust.”41 Thus, Daniel and Birgit Maier-Katkin rightly observe, “Whichever of Heidegger’s principles his public statements reflected, and whatever they may reveal about his character and judgment, they were not calls for aggressive war or genocide.”42 Hence, the task for the expositor and/or critic of Heidegger’s thought, especially in relation to whatever methodological commitment s/he appropriates relative to normative ethics, is to discern a thinking from Heidegger 30

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that, while not an “ethics” in the usual sense of a preemptory directive and set of rules that say how humans ought to live in a fitting manner, is nonetheless “not immoral.” For Heidegger, the pertinent insight is to be found in a poet-thinker such as Sophocles – a telling insight in the sense of Heidegger’s method of formal indication, since he points not to the ethics that begins with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to Kant’s practical rationality, not to Nietzsche’s master-slave morality, not to a theologically grounded morality, but to the ēthos of Sophoclean tragedy, which speaks more “originarily” (in Heidegger’s sense of ‘originary,’ ursprünglich).43 Noteworthy also is Heidegger’s reference in the Letter on Humanism to Heraclitus (Fragment 119), who says “ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn,” Heidegger emphatic that this is not to be understood in “a modern way” but in a Greek way – ēthos as “abode,” “the dwelling place,” that “pertains to man’s essence,” to preserving what “belongs to man in his essence,” viz., “daimōn, the god” (thus “daimon” and not “theos” in the sense transmitted by onto-theo-logy). Hence, understood in a Greek way, we have, says Heidegger: “Man dwells, insofar as he is man, in the essence of the god.” “Insofar as one is human” one dwells in the essence of the god. With this yet to be fathomed understanding,44 we are pointed to “the original ethics” (die ursprüngliche Ethik) – and it is this origin qua “inception” in contrast to the “beginning” of Western thought that is to prompt our thinking beyond the normative-ethical conception of either a preemptory directive or set of rules that governs human conduct. But that means also against a “moralizing” indictment of Heidegger himself from the perspective that “one knows better” and, with a blatantly smug arrogance of “perfect hindsight,” that one knows “one would have done otherwise” than he. One may be instructed here by Jürgen Habermas, who says, even as one may argue that “Heidegger’s methodical solipsism prevents him, finally, from taking seriously normative validity-claims and the meaning of moral obligations,” even so, “in general, as members of a later generation who cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of political dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions and omissions from the Nazi era.”45 This is especially important relative to those who issue presumptively “moral objectivist” judgments couched in obvious polemic and motivated by sometimes visceral sentiments of disdain. What does it mean to say that Heidegger should have known better and done better than he did? All too often, such a pronouncement is grounded in an unspoken commitment to a religious ethic. But one must consider in that case that, lacking the Christian faith and idealism of a compatriot German Lutheran theologian such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Heidegger qua philosopher could not and would not in 1933–1934 or later make the choices of an “ecumenical” appeal to peace, or a flight to London in 1933–1935, or resistance to Hitler that Bonhoeffer did in his address of 1934 at an ecumenical meeting held on the Danish island of Fanø. Both Heidegger and 31

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Bonhoeffer lived in the two decades of the Third Reich “in an unparalleled time” that promised “a perilous future” interpreted variously (to use the words of Devin Maddox).46 Bonhoeffer’s was a calculative (rechnendes) and consequentialist thought that went from civil disobedience in 1934 to conspiring in an attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 and a final solace in his Christian faith when he was imprisoned at Buchenwald and then hanged at the gallows for espionage at the “extermination camp” at Flossenberg in 1945. Whereas, in contrast, Heidegger had turned away from the overt philosophically interpreted politics he initiated with his Rectoral Address to a kind of quietism within which he would work to settle in his essential (wesentliche) or meditative (besinnliches) thought the confounding “political” experience he had at Freiburg. He would not “play the hero” or utter “a courageous word, a Christian word” such as Bonhoeffer would, if that is what either civil disobedience or violent action against Hitler would mean during the turbulent years of Hitler’s Reich.47 Hence, one would have to look elsewhere for any pertinent practical rationality that Heidegger would consider sufficiently normative for a post-Holocaust world. Further, then, this we must understand also in terms of Heidegger’s critical engagement of Kant’s articulation of the relation of pure reason and practical reason, as presented in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (about which more later), itself significant for its disagreement with the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, including here Cassirer. Allowing, then, that Heidegger (a) was aware of the problematic of ethics in its normative sense but (b) was attentive to a more originary confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) in view of an impending post-metaphysical decision (Entscheidung) essential to moral discourse as well, there is yet another criticism of Heidegger’s thought to which he in fact has a response. That is, even more than a charge of “fantasy”48 or “error,” one might declare the whole of Heidegger’s thought “nonsensical,” following Rudolf Carnap in his method of language analysis. Thereby one would reject the whole of Heidegger’s thought as just another “metaphysics” (fully a set of “metaphysical pseudo-statements”) to be abandoned so that one can attend to the genuine philosophical problems that language analysis examines and resolves according to the “pragmatics” that belong to a “syntax” and “semantics.” In this way one finds meaning, sense related to reference for its objective validity, and certifying actuality in the relation of subject to object as “correspondent,” “true” qua a concept of “veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” (truth is the adequation of the real and the intellect), but in the empirical sense of “veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem” (truth is the adequation of the intellection to the thing) (i.e., “material truth” (Sachwahrheit)).49 Following Carnap, setting aside Heidegger’s thought along with all metaphysics, one might then once again find “philosophical repose,” devoting oneself “entirely to the practical tasks which confront active men every day of their lives!”50 32

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But why must logical positivism, or, what is later to it (e.g.,“experimental” philosophy, cybernetics, and “systems” philosophy) provide the measure of meaning? It cannot, and does not, have the authority so to measure when the meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) of “meditation” (die Besinnung) is pitted against the calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) of “calculation,” of “regulation” of the whole of beings, (i.e., where meditation stands in the “venture” (Wagnis, tolma) against the rule of technology that everywhere installs the “gigantic” (das Riesenhafte) that belongs to “machination” (die Machenshaft). Where calculative thinking is the measure, as Heidegger says, there is a “lack of a sense of plight” (die Notlosigkeit) about our “history” (die Geschichte), a lack of recognition of the “primordial conflict” yet now present between thinking and being51 that is manifest in calculative thinking, in which case the “self-certainty” of modernity’s ego cogito becomes seemingly “insuperable,” “everything . . . calculable,” and already “decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.”52 Thus, as Heidegger said in his lectures of 1957, “The gigantic contemporary deployment of calculation in technology, industry, economy, and politics attests to the power of a thinking obsessed with λóγος of logic in a form almost bordering on insanity.”53 Contra such as Carnap’s methodological (“logocentric”) commitment, Heidegger could and did ask: “But what if the essence of thinking has been lost to us and ‘logic’ has been predestined to commandeer ‘thinking,’ even though ‘logic’ itself is indeed merely a vestige of the powerlessness of thinking.”54 Indeed, Heidegger writes, it is not necessary to guard transitional thinking against the “antimetaphysical” intentions of “positivism” (and its varieties) .  .  . if we consider that “positivism” indeed represents the crudest of all “metaphysical” modes of thought, insofar as it on the one hand entails a very definite decision regarding the beingness [die Seiendheit] of beings (sensibility) and on the other hand always surpasses precisely those beings through the fundamental application of a homogeneous “causality.”55 And yet, if this sense of beingness is only one mode of presentation of the relation of thinking and being, then it is important to think more primordially about what is “inceptual” (anfänglich) in thinking qua lógos. So much for the positivist critique that would dismiss Heidegger’s thought, and so much for its ability to deal with the contemporary problematic of our technologically determined world. This critique does not engage the foundational question of truth, as Heidegger distinguished it in the opening statement of his On the Essence of Truth (1943): The question regarding the essence of truth is not concerned with whether truth is a truth of practical experience or of economic 33

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calculation, the truth of a technical consideration or of political sagacity, or, in particular, a truth of scientific research or of artistic composition, or even the truth of thoughtful reflection or of cultic belief. The question of essence disregards all this and attends to the one thing that in general distinguishes every “truth” as truth.56 Only by asking this question do we decide whether truth is to be understood on the basis of (1) “the subjectivity of the human subject” or (2) an “objectivity [that] remains along with subjectivity something human and at man’s disposal,” or (3) something else much more fundamentally and originally determinant, of what “holds sway ‘beyond’ man,” holding sway, Heidegger intimates, as “emerging presence” [aufgehendes Anwesen].The latter emerges as “unconcealment” [Unverborgenheit] and as the “primordial disclosure” of the whole of being and, in that way, in a mode of “world-disclosure” with its (a) “context of signification” or “structure of both being and meaning”; or (b) a Lebenswelt (life-world) in which an individual “lives, works, and dies”; or (c) the “occurrence” or “bestowal” in thought, word, and deed of a “historical epoch” according to which “every destiny of Being [Geschick des Seins or Seinsgeschick] is already complete” (i.e., unfolded at once in the way it “governs” as a world, so that with the “revelation of a world” we have a “happening” of truth.57 If truth is primordially “the unconcealing concealment of being,” then truth is at once unconcealing and concealing, in which case possibilities of being are situated in this simultaneous disclosure and hiddenness that we observe and try to understand in everyday historiological occurrences – and this holds for individuals such as Heidegger faced with his dilemma of political-philosophical responsibility in1933–1934 and later, as well as for nations such as Germany as it faced the installation of Hitler’s Reich. Problematic in the present world, Heidegger decries, is that, “The epoch of total lack of questioning does not tolerate anything worthy of questioning and destroys any and all solitude” – including his solitude, one may add, hence his retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city life of Freiburg to the peasant environs of Todtnauberg.58 “Therefore,” Heidegger continues, precisely this epoch must spread the word that “creative” men are “lonely,” and that therefore everyone is apprised and is promptly informed in “picture” and “sound” of the loneliness of these lonesome men and their deeds. . . . [Yet] . . . This epoch of total lack of questioning can be withstood only through an epoch of simple solitude, in which preparedness for the truth of be-ing59 itself is being prepared.60 Such was, undoubtedly, a motivating comportment in Heidegger’s postwar solitude and silence on the events he was expected to confront, and as he, in 34

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his own self-understanding, situated himself in a “time-space”61 of “crossing from metaphysics into be-ing historical thinking,” seeking a more primordial truth at the origin of the Western tradition of metaphysics for “an essential transformation of the human from ‘rational animal’ (animal rationale) to Da-sein.”62 As Gadamer instructed, of course, truth and method are related in the task of a productive philosophical interpretation and understanding, involving either explicit or tacit prejudices. The latest round of disputation about Heidegger has its own manifestation of prejudices, in many cases strikingly “ideological” and “polemical,” manifestly a “logic of accusation and defense,” rather than “philosophical” in the sense of a reasonably honest analysis and engagement of Heidegger’s thought relative to “reasonably applicable hermeneutic principles” that philosophically contextualize Heidegger’s thought and that are not palpably tendentious in their reading.63 Francesca Brencio, in her masterful analysis of recent scholarship, aptly presents this characterization of the Heidegger affair with a reasonable corrective to such tendentious reading.64 Further, the masterful, but all too neglected, discussion among Derrida, Gadamer, and Lacoue-Labarthe65 (each reputed a European philosopher of distinctive rank) at the Heidelberg Conference on 05–06 February 1988 remains the most prominent philosophical antidote to more recent overly prejudicial commentaries (e.g., those of Richard Wolin, Peter Trawny, and Donatella DiCesare)66 – some, like Trawny, as Brencio remarks, “prone to consider Heidegger himself philosophically responsible for the Holocaust,”67 Heidegger’s thought itself supposedly rightly typecast as a “hidden” and “ontological” or “metaphysical” “anti-Semitism,”68 an analysis Freidrich-Wilhelm von Hermann finds “philosophically” lacking.69 Yet, as Jesús Escudero clarifies for our instruction, whatever one says about Heidegger’s so-called anti-Semitism, “there were and are important differences” we must take into account,“between a) an ideological prejudice against Jews conditioned by cultural and religious motives, and b) the pseudoscientifically justified goal of exterminating the whole ‘Jewish race.’”70 Thus, “In practice, a clear difference must be established between antiSemitism, understood as racial and biological animosity against Jews, and anti-Judaism, understood as reflecting a long-held European tradition against the Jewish people and religion.”71 So many, in attending to “facts” (sometimes with error and blatant dishonesty, as in the case of Victor Farías, not to mention Wolin’s facile dismissal of Heidegger’s turn to the Greeks in preparation for a new thinking) fail to grasp the essentials and thus “what is at stake,” as Mireille Calle-Gruber put it,72 thus to situate “the problem of the political . . . on a philosophical plane,” as Reiner Wiehl forecast would issue in the encounter of Derrida, Gadamer, and Lacoue-Labarthe at Heidelberg. Calle-Gruber expressly stated the task of the Conference and a salient point of interpretive endeavor: to read Heidegger as he did not read himself, that is to say, rather than limiting 35

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ourselves to condemning him, to have the courage to think despite his own silence about Auschwitz.73 Lacoue-Labarthe posed the issue aptly: If someone like Heidegger, that is, a thinker like Heidegger, has been compromised, as they say, in this political history, this poses an enormous question. And it is with respect to the enormity of this question that I believe we have engaged our philosophical responsibility.74 Let us consider, in remembrance of some of what was said by Gadamer, Derrida, and Lacoue-Labarthe, what they said as they engaged their philosophical responsibility. Considering the profound events of our time (das Geschehen der Zeit), including the Nazi genocide, Gadamer asked how Heidegger after the war could have remained silent about the industrial extermination of the Jews. Why not retract publicly some of what he had said that showed his support for the movement? Gadamer argued that Heidegger did not consider himself “responsible” for all of these factual matters – Hitler’s rise to power, the new barbarism, the Nuremberg laws, the terror, the bloodshed, the extermination camps.75 On the other hand, Lacoue-Labarthe asserted starkly that the Nazi crimes reveal “the totalitarian essence” of our Occident, in which case all of the events mentioned are somehow derivative, implicating Western political and philosophical thought long before and beyond only Heidegger’s thinking.76 Thus, Gadamer spoke of the determining factors in Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s – the critique of transcendental idealism; neo-Kantianism; and critique on the part of Jewish and Catholic thinkers immediately after World War I. More recently, Jeff Malpas similarly comments on “the horrendous events of the 1930s and 1940s . . . in which European thought and culture . . . were themselves implicated and from which they cannot be entirely disentangled,” hence concern for the resurgence of “right-wing politics across Europe and rising anti-Semitism” (that, of course, now includes Islamophobia) and “a long-standing suspicion of European thought that takes the horrors of Europe’s modern past to be rooted in the claimed failings of such thought.”77 Bearing these factors in mind, then, Heidegger’s decision to join the movement (not to say “ideology”) seems “contradictory” and is “troubling,” Gadamer remarks, inasmuch as at the same time, this decision was not articulated as anti-Semitism, or as racism, or as the biologism of Nazism. Such, Gadamer opines, is “the great ambiguity” in the Heidegger case, even as Heidegger admitted that his joining the National Socialist party was “the biggest mistake” of his life.78 Beyond this, there is the seemingly unforgivable fact of Heidegger’s silence, bearing in mind, however, that one must be cautious about “appearances” and mistakenly judging appearances to be the “reality” even as one must be cautious about the basis for any judgment that speaks of forgiveness or its denial in a given case. 36

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Some see the date of 30 June 1934 as a date having “fatal consequences” (i.e., what was for Heidegger the end of the “revolution” such as he understood it): “that is to say, a spiritual and philosophical revolution that would have led to a renewal of humanity throughout Europe” – finished in prospect because, with the support of the military, the Nazi revolution stabilized, and it became certain that the regime could not be liberated from a catastrophe. Such was Gadamer’s opinion. Indeed, it behooves us to recall that at the time (1934) Heidegger refused faculty appointment opportunities at Berlin and Munich. He described it “very solemnly,” Gadamer noted, in Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? [Why do I stay in the province?]. But, added Gadamer, the real reason is that Heidegger understood that at Berlin and Munich he risked the same possibility of failure that he faced at the University of Freiburg, as he pitted “his” concept of a “second beginning” against the concept of “cultural revolution” that was advanced by the principal Nazi ideologues. Hence, one may infer from this “decision” that the “self-assertion” Heidegger hoped to initiate at Freiburg was one “contrary to the ideological movement led by Rosenberg and Baeumler at Berlin” (and the similar movement at Munich).79 Heidegger had a different vision of transformation in the making. Aware of the ideological positions taken by Rosenberg and Baeumler, Heidegger did not agree with their vision entirely. For example, Rosenberg believed that democracy advanced the cause of “liberal economic imperialism” and entailed “the extirpation of racial and national consciousness,” hence the struggle of National Socialism in “the contemporary world revolution,” the essence of which was “the awakening of racial types,” a “decision about ideas.”80 Heidegger’s Rectoral Address clearly was not a speech promoting Rosenberg’s apparently “philosophically” determined Nazi ideology. Heidegger’s speech was addressed to all as a commitment to “the spiritual leadership” of the University of Freiburg, and not merely in the usual sense of a university’s academic administration and all that this entailed in everyday operational affairs.81 Heidegger’s early views (e.g., in November 1918 as Germany faced defeat in WWI) already presage his Rectoral Address, as Iain Thompson reports: “Certain and unshakeable is the challenge to all truly spiritual persons not to weaken at this particular moment,” Heidegger wrote, “but to grasp resolute leadership and to educate the nation toward truthfulness and a genuine valuation of the genuine assets of existence.”82 None of this had anything remotely National Socialist about it as he linked spiritual personhood, resolute leadership, truthfulness, and genuine (authentic) existence, in which case this conjunction of terms is important to an interpretation of Heidegger’s meaning in the Rectoral Address. The opening statement of his address discloses Heidegger’s concept of “leadership” to be a leadership of “spirit” in a sense he, but not others, fathomed. His second sentence spoke of “a true and common rootedness” not in the German “nation,” not in the native “soil,” not in German “blood,” but 37

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“in the essence [Wesen] of the German university.” In his subsequent reflections, he clarified that his “sole concern” was “reflection on the ethos that should govern the pursuit of knowledge and on the essence of teaching.”83 That “essence,” Heidegger asserted, was not clear to the many assembled at Freiburg but could gain “clarity, rank, and power” – “if first and foremost” the leaders of the university would themselves “be led” “by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history.” The question “undecided” at that moment, however, was whether there was clarity among the leaders about “this destiny” and how this destiny could shape “German history,” could shape the German national Dasein. The question would remain undecided, however, in the absence of a genuine “self-administration” or “self-governance” that would allow the university community to “be” what they “ought” to be. But this self-administration had to be grounded on a self-examination, one that would apprehend the “essence” of the university “while German destiny [was] in its most extreme distress.” Problematic here is the concept of “science,” the National Socialist concept of science all caught up, Heidegger discerned, in “a mere semblance of a true struggle [Heidegger here meaning polemos in the Greek sense of the word, thus “strife”] for the essence of science.” Such was the “politicized” Nazi concept of science (politische Wissenschaft) that Heidegger rejected. It was by no means certain that the “true” struggle would prevail over the “semblance” extant at the time. Only a thorough-going self-examination could assure that the “truth” (reality) of science would prevail over the semblance of science, that this truth would attain to its requisite “power” to prevail over semblance; and this “only if” German intellectuals placed themselves under (i.e., allowed themselves to be led by) “the power of the beginning” of the German “spiritual-historical Dasein.” For Heidegger, that meant under the power of “Greek philosophy” – where one finds the “true” science: “All science remains bound to that beginning of philosophy.” Yet, pertinent to the decision about German destiny, Heidegger held, were two historical transformations: (1) the “Christian-theological interpretation of the world,” and (2) “the later mathematical-technological thinking of the modern age” – neither of which, however, “overcomes” or “negates” what is “essential” in the Greek beginning for both philosophy and science, what (Heidegger claimed) “still endures” and which, therefore, “stands before [the German nation],” having long before “invaded” the “future” of the German Dasein.84 Clearly, Heidegger understood the interest in “National Socialist” leadership in the “Nazi” sense of the term to be a “threat to the real essence of the university” – and he did not think this threat to be “merely imagined.”85 It is “in this beginning” – not in the extant Nazi cultural revolution such as led by Rosenberg, Bauemler, and Krieck – that Heidegger found both a “call” and a “command” that is greater (other) than that of the Christiantheological and mathematical-technological interpretations of the “world.” 38

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Beyond these two interpretations and beyond the vulgar Nazism of Rosenberg, the German future was at once “hidden” and “uncertain,” Heidegger acknowledged. For Heidegger (and for us), the question is how one is to think of the “meaning” of Nazism and National Socialism in terms of “being-historical thinking” (seynsgeschichtliche Denken) and not merely historiologically in the sense of a sociopolitical historical occurrence. To judge Heidegger’s actions from 1933 onward, one would have to ask whether his being-historical thinking  – if that is what it is – is compelling for our thought as well as his, whether we can “assent” reasonably (with understanding) to his “intimation” of a second beginning that is “in the process of decision but is as yet undecided with respect to its epochal occurrence.”86 Indeed, as Daniela Vallega-Neu opines, properly to understand Heidegger is to see his own thinking as “historical (geschichtlich) (i.e., as partaking in the historical event of be-ing” and not merely as historiological.87 Thus, against the neo-Kantian philosophy of culture championed at Marburg, against the conceptions of cultural revolution heralded by Baeumler and Rosenberg at Berlin, Heidegger asserted: “And the spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture.” A genuine “leader” who would heed the beginning Heidegger intuited is not one who “marched ahead of others” but one who possessed “the strength to be able to walk alone” precisely because such a leader is “empowered by the deepest purpose and the broadest obligation” – a purpose and obligation that are given in the “call” and the “command” of the “future” beginning. This future beginning is “essentially connected” to the first beginning present in Greek philosophy (i.e., in Greek metaphysics, in the concept of being (Sein) present there and yet holding sway over the contemporary epoch that Heidegger designates as the rule of planetary technology). For Heidegger this included attention to a concept of “law.” Thus, Heidegger declared: “To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.” The statement recalls Kant, of course, in line with Kant’s principle of autonomy and, in that sense, one disposed against “law” that would be given entirely heteronomously (i.e. given by the Nazi Reich according to merely extraneous purposes). But Heidegger’s statement also resonates with the position on the organization of the university taken by Wilhelm von Humboldt (i.e., an “internal vocation . . . [that links] objective science with subjective cultivation [Bildung]” such that, “the state must assume that if the university fulfills its own autonomous goal, the goals of the state will also be achieved, and indeed ‘from a much higher point of view.’”88 Steven Crowell adds, “Grounded in the ideal of individual Bildung, academic freedom would, in the long run, advance the spiritual aims of the state.” Thus, Dennis Schmidt reminds us of the importance of reading Heidegger’s Rectoral Address in the context of similar concerns expressed by Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche, all of whom thought philosophically about the task of the university.89 But Schmidt also thinks that the text of the address 39

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“misunderstands its own task by seeing it wedded to the concerns of nationalism,” in this case the German nation. This, of course, is a matter of interpretation, with which one may differ as follows. For Heidegger, students and faculty, severally and jointly, had to become “capable” of this highest freedom and, therefore, not merely to implement the “Student Law” that organized university students on the basis of the Führerprinzip even as the faculty would be so organized. This autonomous freedom “obligated” one and all to “three bonds”: (1) “to the national community” [Volksgemeinschaft]; (2) “to the honor and the destiny of the nation in the midst of all other peoples”; and (3) “to the spiritual mission of the German people.”90 If to give oneself the law is the highest freedom, then for Heidegger the faculty must become capable of a “spiritual legislation” to which they would hold themselves accountable, to which they would be subject, contributing in this way to shaping the power of the German Dasein into “one spiritual world of the people.” Thus, Crowell interprets: “Heidegger determines the idea of philosophy and its role in the university wholly in terms of the goal of self-clarification on the basis of the moral desideratum of self-responsibility [Selbstbehauptung].”91 With this discourse, Heidegger then asked: “Do we, or do we not, will the essence of the German university?” To will this essence is itself a manifestation of compliance with the “moral” desideratum so identified (i.e., ‘moral’ inasmuch as the appeal is to autonomy and not heteronomy), and appeal to the authority of the essence that calls for a thinking attuned to the future in Heidegger’s sense of Seinsgeschichte. And, it is important to bear in mind that, in asking this question, Heidegger had already, in his inaugural address of summer 1929 (under the title, “Was ist der Metaphysik?”) clarified what was for him at once “necessity” and “task.” As he reminded, in his reflections afterward, he had stressed that the university’s most pressing concern was its renewal by returning to its essential ground, which is also the essential ground of the sciences; that is to say, by returning to the essence of truth itself instead of persisting in a technical organization pseudounity, it was to recover the primordial living unity that joins those who question and those who know.92 Heidegger, therefore, in 1930, “spoke on the essence of truth,” (published as Vom Wesen der Wahrheit) repeated (as he reminded) several times until 1932, with a winter semester 1933/34 “lecture course on the Greek concept of truth” [“Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”]. Thus, when he spoke of “science” all of the foregoing texts were part of the philosophical context for what he construed “essential” to the university’s self-affirmation and essential to the origin of science (Urwissenschaft) in Greek thought. If the faculty and the students at the University of Freiburg were to fail to will the essence 40

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of the university, through the autonomy of self-legislation, then the cause of that failure would be evident, Heidegger warned, “when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.” That warning, clearly, went unheeded because those to whom Heidegger spoke did not understand him philosophically, and because the “semblance” of leadership – the Nazi ideologues of the cultural revolution – prevailed over the “real”/“spiritual” leadership, the spiritual revolution, that Heidegger envisioned. As Heidegger conceded, “The Rectoral Address had been spoken into the wind and was forgotten the day after the inaugural celebration.”93 Hence, the fateful and destined “decision” (Entscheidung) was taken, each individual German, each faculty member, each student, “participating” in that decision both by their acts of commission and acts of omission, the latter evident in their “evasion” of their spiritual mission such as Heidegger conceived it. As Heidegger forewarned: All forces were dragged into confusion and succumbed to the madness that was vulgar, anti-Semitic, racist, biologistic Nazism that Rosenberg guided ideologically from Berlin, with all that followed with world war and Nazi genocide. And, of course, Heidegger for all practical purposes lost this struggle for direction of the cultural revolution when, in January 1934, Hitler appointed Rosenberg the “Führer’s Delegate for the Entire Spiritual and Philosophical Education and Supervision” in charge of the philosophical leadership of Nazism. One may argue, then, that at the moment of dire decision, Heidegger pitted his philosophical authority against the philosophical authority of Rosenberg, Heidegger assuming his own most proper responsibility [Verantwortung] as a philosopher and as a German to re-direct, within the means at his disposal, the National Socialist revolution. As he said in his Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? “The struggle to mold something into language is like the resistance of the towering firs against the storm.” That Heidegger failed to re-direct the movement is a fact. But that he made the attempt, that he “ventured into the storm” – and one must think here the Greek concept of tolma – is also another salient fact not to be ignored in the agonistic “decision about ideas” then to be taken by German intellectuals, Heidegger included. What “moral” judgment is to be given in that case? As far as Heidegger was concerned, following Nietzsche in his insights, “the universal rule of the will to power within history” embraced the planet, communism, fascism, and world democracy “all” included in the rule of this will to power. It is with this understanding of his own historical situation that, in 1943, Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche’s word, “God is dead.” World Wars I and II were for him evidence of the “great politics” (grosse Politik) Nietzsche foresaw coming after his time. The metaphysics of the will to power is still with us today and has by no means been “surpassed,” making the twenty-first century all the more ominous for humanity in the 41

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absence of the Auseinandersetzung that Heidegger deemed both possible and necessary. Thus, in view of this interpretation of Germany’s place in European history and of the German responsibility as part of the Western world (Abendländlische Verantwortung), Heidegger is correct to say that if, indeed, “one wants to look for those who are guilty and judge them by their guilt,” then there is also guilt “incurred by failing to do what is essential.”94 This, in Heidegger’s judgment, is his guilt as well as the guilt of the German university intellectual who failed to lead “essentially.” Heidegger makes a further important point in refutation of “irresponsible” critique in the interpretation of his Rectoral Address: “One can proceed in so irresponsible manner when interpreting the address; but then one has no right to present oneself as someone who knows himself responsible for the spirit and the welfare of the German university.”95 This remark coincides with that of Habermas and Strauss concerning the limitations of judgment concerning Heidegger’s actions in a situation of dictatorship. To answer the question of “moral” responsibility one must consider what one means by “responsibility,” as Derrida remarked. But one also is reminded, in passing to Derrida, of the need to construe this concept of responsibility in terms of what one may mean by “moral” here. Malpas correctly reminds, “the moral does not itself stand apart from the interpretation nor from the hermeneutical, and to suppose that moral judgment can be exercised independently of such considerations may itself be viewed as a particular form of moral blindness.”96 Further, Malpas is entirely correct in his reminder in the reading of Heidegger’s work that, The interpretive injunction that one cannot, in interpreting a body of thinking, prioritize the facts of the life [i.e., in this case, Heidegger’s biography] over the content of that thinking – so that the reading derived from the life also needs to be supported by evidence that supports that reading in the thinking itself – is essentially an injunction that requires that one look to the whole body of evidence in the attempt to understand thinker, and not merely to any one part of that evidence.97 This injunction, in short, is itself moral in the sense of the scholar’s expected disposition of a “responsibly” just interpretation. When he spoke at Heidelberg, following Gadamer’s remarks, Derrida was concerned of the need to clarify the terms in which “responsibility” is to be defined, and what category of responsibility should guide us in questioning Heidegger’s responsibility. Even today, Heidegger’s more recent critics have not adequately addressed this need for clarification. Derrida recognizes that the attention to the Heidegger case has for its context concern for the destiny of Europe, for the manner in which political discourse dominates the politics of Europe in France, Germany, and other Western democracies, as they face 42

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resurgent ideologies and dispositions identified with Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, as well as those of social-democratic discourse, where the values of reference are those of human rights, democracy, and the freedom of the political subject.98 All of this, Derrida observed, is philosophically very fragile relative to expectations for consensus in official political discourse, hence a certain disquietude. And, when Derrida speaks of philosophical fragility here, one may consider what Reiner Schürmann said in consonant voicing. Engaging Schürmann’s autobiographical book Les Origens about Nazism, Gérard Granel reminds that there are “Hitlerian brutes” who are “Americans” – “a devastating revelation,” Granel opines, which only releases one from the past by suddenly imposing something obvious: the origins themselves have an origin, and the later is so deeply anchored in Western being that it is still active, thirty years after the end of the war [not to mention today, in the year 2019], at the very heart of the nation which defeated Nazi Germany – ‘the country which is the center of the free world.’99 The fact is one “can be prepared” – “should be” prepared – “for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” even in the center of the free world, even in the United States of America, as Hannah Arendt warned.100 This is properly understood, as Schürmann reminded, if one calls oneself to an anamnēsis, not merely in the sense of a “remembrance of things past” but, more fundamentally, in a return to the origin, to an arché, that yet governs in the historical present from that origin. It is only by way of this return that one understands “the tragic condition of all principal construction.”101 This is a foreboding insight even for democracy. As Marinus J. Schoeman interprets, Schürmann came to the conclusion that ethics and morals do not belong to (and should be banned from) philosophy. For Schürmann this is because ethics and morals remain naïve about the norms they seek to posit. . . . [E]very ethical system, precisely as an articulation of a normative order, will deny the ultimacy of the tragic double bind by positing some universal domain of law. Ethics and morals believe the promise of law, its fantasmatic claim to provide human beings with the wherewithal to master the human condition.102 But that claim is “fantasmatic” precisely because all principles of law manifest the tragic in their construction. Hence, as Granel said, we are faced with a “deadly illness of temporality, in which that which is without a future could have a future,” but it is always a future infirm with tragedy, where sooner or later hegemonies break as their principles break – including those of the liberal-capitalist democracy of America that Heidegger refused as a choice for Germany. 43

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Bearing the foregoing in mind, then, one notes that accusations against Heidegger and against “Heideggerian” philosophy, in France for example, seemed to Derrida both compulsive and precipitous. If the Heidegger affair is to be engaged, then, Derrida claimed, it is to be engaged as “a problem of philosophical reading as such,” and not merely as a problem of reading Heidegger, a problem of reading as if “with good conscience” and, thereby, without the accusation of political irresponsibility.103 But that means we take into account Heidegger’s question as given in all of his texts, without “rewriting” them, inasmuch as Heidegger allowed one to question the traditional categories of responsibility, of the subject, of right (droit), for example. If it is the question of Europe that united those at the conference, as Derrida opined, then this “responsibility” regarding Europe calls for a “redefinition” of responsibility. He commented: when we say that ethics, the way we define ethics today, trembles on its lack of foundation, or when we say that we do not know very well what it means to be responsible, the violence to which we are exposed is: ‘therefore, you hold an immoral speech, an irresponsible speech!’104 Yet, one must consider the legitimacy of this charge. All of the old discourses are not exempt from complicities with Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, Derrida adds. What of the “democratic humanist” who has not critically elaborated his own categories and what he opposes? The obvious example given is that of the Vichy government’s authoritarian complicity in France during World War II (June 1940–1944) in the deportation and delivery of Jews to Germany, thus indirectly complicit in the massacres and extermination that took place there – and yet even the USA recognized the Vichy government as “legitimate” without official protestation of its actions.105 What is one to say of “responsibility” in this case? Derrida risked a “hypothesis,”106 and asked the participants in the conference to join him in this risk: Suppose Heidegger said, not only “I made a big mistake [Dummheit], a stupidity, in 1933,” but also said “Auschwitz is absolute horror” (what it is, is it not?), “that’s the thing we have to condemn, that I condemn radically.” One would say, “good.” These are the sentences we all make. At that moment, what would have happened? Probably Heidegger would have been absolved, or at least more readily absolved. The record of relations between the thought of Heidegger and the event called Nazism, the overdetermined events called Nazism, Derrida proposes, would have been closed, with a sentence in the direction of an easy consensus. Heidegger would have shot things down. And we, Derrida continued, would not be asking ourselves today – as we have to do – what the experience of Heidegger’s thought could have for affinity, synchrony, rooted community, with this still impenetrable thing that is for us Nazism. If, Derrida opined, 44

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Heidegger had let go of a sentence, say, of immediate moral reaction, or of a declaration of horror, or of non-pardon – a statement which was not itself a work of thought to the measure of everything he has already thought – well, perhaps we could feel more easily excused from doing the work we have to do today: because we have done this work. It’s the heritage. This, of course, points to Heidegger’s silence. “And I consider that the terrifying, perhaps unforgivable, silence of Heidegger, the absence of those sentences we want to hear, of those we are able to pronounce about Nazism, or of their relation to Nazism, this absence,” Derrida opined, leaves us a legacy, leaves us the injunction to think what was not thought. . . . At least [Heidegger] did not pretend, as it would have been easy to do, to have understood what had happened and to condemn it. I think that, perhaps, Heidegger said to himself: ‘I will be able to pronounce a sentence against Nazism only if I can pronounce it in a language that is not only as good as that I have said before but also to measure the extent of what happened.’ And that he was not able to do. And this silence is perhaps an honest way of recognizing that he was not capable of it. Such was Derrida’s hypothesis seeking some explanation of Heidegger’s silence. Thus, Derrida added: Without this silence, this terrible silence, we would not feel the injunction to our responsibility before the necessity of reading Heidegger as he did not read himself – at least he did not pretend. Or maybe he pretended, and that’s the assumption that he has so comforted himself in his silence, that he had already said, in his own way, without yielding to easy sentences which, in Nazism, had to corrupt. Even so, the injunction remains in the “heritage” of Heidegger for those who seek clarity about his responsibility, and our responsibility. That said, then, one must consider the substance of Heidegger’s thought after “the turn” (Kehre, tournant), what it signifies philosophically and politically if one is to insist that Heidegger’s thought has political implications, and especially if that thought after the turn is itself a confrontation with all that Heidegger had to settle in thought after World War II. Thus, Lacoue-Labarthe rightly pointed out that Heidegger confronted Nazism philosophically through (1) his lectures on Hölderlin concerning the question of poetry, (2) his critical deconstruction of Nietzsche so as to counter the ideological utilization of Nietzsche’s thought in the way the Nazis did, and (3) in his engagement of the problem of freedom in Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom – all as part of an immense debate about 45

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what is National Socialism situated in the history of the Occident.107 Here, Lacoue-Labarthe’s remarks resonate with Heidegger’s own remarks about Germany’s historical destiny essentially connected to the “spiritual” destiny of the Occident. Heidegger saw National Socialism in that context, derivative of the nineteenth-century philosophy of history issuing in the thought of both German idealism and Nietzsche. Of course, recent commentators judge Heidegger to have been “morally irresponsible” for having maintained philosophical silence108 on that unprecedented event of the twentieth century that is the Nazi genocide of the Jews, irrespective of the fact that Heidegger wrote no “ethics” and did not engage explicitly with “moral philosophy” as such.109 Derrida is by all means correct to caution against a rush to condemnation of Heidegger, the immediate consequence of which condemnation is “to prevent reading or thinking.”110 Yet, for Derrida as for Heidegger, in the period under review, the task of thinking is at once historical and political, in which case to foreclose today both the reading of Heidegger’s works and the thinking elicited while indicting him for “Nazism” is, as Derrida opined, itself merely “the conformist opinion of ‘good conscience’” – indeed, one that does not realize “the chasms” that are present (i.e., what more has to be thought). Derrida reminded that to think about Nazism requires that one understand its “contact with the rest of Europe, with other philosophers, with other political or religious languages” even as one cannot reasonably deny that, “We still do not know what it is and what made possible this vile, yet overdetermined thing, shot through with internal contradictions.”111 Furthermore, Derrida added (without intending a fallacious tu quoque), “Nazism was able to develop only with the differentiated but decisive complicity of other countries, other ‘democratic’ states, academic and religious institutions,” this, too, part of the “chasm” present in American and British “good conscience” about their military engagement of the Third Reich. Political scientist Alexander Groth and others have documented the facts of complicity in numerous published works.112 Consider, for example, the fact of President Roosevelt’s personal representative to Pope Pius XII delivering a memorandum to the Vatican, dated 26 September 1942, citing information provided by the Geneva Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, reporting of liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, (i.e.,‘all Jews . . . being removed . . . in groups and shot’). Their corpses . . . utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer . . . 50,000 Jews . . . executed in Lemberg . . . on the spot . . . 100,000 . . . massacred in Warsaw .  .  . Jews deported from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, and Slovakia . . . sent to be butchered . . . new deportations [occurring] as soon as space is made by executions. 46

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The US government sought confirmation of these reports and otherwise solicited “any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.”113 This differentiated but decisive complicity – what Groth has described as the “myth of innocence”114 on the part of both Roosevelt and Churchill – must also be understood as the historical context of Heidegger’s own pronouncements at the time, especially in terms of “philosophical” rejection of democracy as a possible form of government for Germany.115 One cannot ignore, also, as Joseph Bendersky observed recently, that “at the very point that European Jews confronted antisemitism’s most perilous consequence in the Holocaust,” the fact is that “American antiSemitism [was] at its height.”116 Contrary to the optimism and “triumphalism” associated with Wilsonianism, Bendersky tells us, “a dramatic resurgence of anti-Semitic racial theories, institutions, and political forces characterized 1920s and 1930s America” – including “sophisticated versions of Darwinian scientific racism” being promoted by “prominent intellectuals at major universities and the U.S. Army War College.”117 Notably, the USA’s “restrictionist immigration laws of the 1920s . . . all but halted Jewish (and other) immigration, and became a major impediment to rescue from Nazi persecution and murder.” There could be no appeal to American religious authorities either; for, as Bendersky reports, many observers of anti-Semitism in the USA “naively failed to grasp how deeply rooted it was among large numbers of average American Catholics and Protestants.”118 Germany’s Weimar Republic, and especially the German Democratic Party (“with which most German Jews identified,” Bendersky reminds), similarly was inadequate to assure protections of Germany’s Jews as a counterforce to the emergent threat of the National Socialist party. Democracy, in short, in and of itself, is not sufficient as a political form of government to prevent anti-Semitism or even its horrible consequences, such as occurred in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. In contrast to other recent critics, and reasonably considering a hermeneutic principle to explain Heidegger’s silence, Adam Knowles at least suggests appealing to Heidegger himself, specifically to his remarks in his Parmenides lecture course of 1942, in which Heidegger said: “The Greeks are often silent, especially about what is essential to them [Die Griechen schweigen viel, wenn wir auf ihr Wesenhaftes denken]. And when they do say the essential, they say it in a way that is simultaneously reticent [in einer zugleich verschweigenden Weise]” – Heidegger’s silence thus perhaps to be explained in his imitation of the Greek “reticence” to speak about what is “essential” when it is by no means clearly to be understood either in its “grounding” or “guiding” meaning for essential thinking (wesentliche Denken).119 However, given Bernard Dauenhauer’s phenomenological clarification of the phenomenon of silence120 as both “positive” and “complex,” one can say Heidegger’s silence is not merely a deliberate abstention from unequivocal 47

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or unambiguous pronouncements on the Nazi genocide that he “could” have made. Rather, his silence may have had the positive goal of expanding “the possibilities of discourse” that are essential to the task of thinking in this transitional era that he attempted to address.121 In this sense, Heidegger’s silence is (from his comportment and attunement) “vigilant,” attentive to “how” one might speak about measure or measures (including here measures proper to normative ethics) when all such measures are put into question. Heidegger’s silence may be characterized then as a “fore-silence” (in Dauenhauer’s sense), “awaiting thinking” in its point of departure. But it can also be a “deep silence,” attentive to what is to be said, inasmuch as, as Dauenhauer clarifies, this mode of silence refers “to something which in principle lies beyond what human agents can achieve by their own endeavors.” Commenting on this point, Steven Bindeman adds, “The to-be-said is a silence beyond all saying. It tests all that has been said, and in doing so it performs the normative function of validating or invalidating what has been uttered before it.”122 This is an important insight – “silence can have a normative function,” Heidegger’s silence thus plausibly and decidedly normative. That said, one should also consider Heidegger’s own remarks about “reticence in silence” as expressed in his Contributions to Philosophy.123 He said there: “Reticence in silence means mindful lawfulness of being reticent and silent,” the latter referred to the Greek concept sigan. Indeed, Heidegger adds, “Reticence in silence has a higher law than any logic,” in which case silence commands one’s attention, one’s vigilance, in the task of questioning and thinking in a way that a proposition as assertion does not.124 Thus, The basic experience is not the assertion or the proposition, and consequently not the principle – be it ‘mathematical’ or ‘dialectical’ – but rather the reservedness that holds unto itself over against the hesitating self-refusal in the truth (clearing or sheltering) of distress, from which the necessity of decision arises. Hence, Heidegger’s ownmost decision relates to the distress he discerned that called for not only Germany’s fateful decision concerning its destiny, not only Europe’s fateful decision as the Occident, but an essential decision confronting the epochal emergence of the planetary domination of technology as it disclosed itself in various historical occurrences, including the Nazi genocide and the American deployment and use of thermonuclear weapons that (for Heidegger) are coordinate with a self-understanding of the human way to be what Heidegger calls the technicized animal i.e., the contemporary technological determination and enhancement of modernity’s animal rationale with its “machinational” and “gigantic” calculative thinking. Thus, Heidegger asked concerning the “attempt”125 to think “in the epoch of the crossing” between the present and the second beginning: 48

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Will this attempt ever find its expounder? The one who can speak of the way that goes into and prepares for what is futural? But not the one who calculates out of it only what belongs to much of today and thus ‘explains’ and destroys everything.126 In light of the earlier passages, one might reasonably argue that, therefore, precisely in the face of such unprecedented horror in the extermination camps and in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Heidegger has a “right to be silent” in contrast to a “duty to speak” and that this right superintends the putative duty. Derrida surely allowed for this when he interpreted “this silence as ‘an honest’ admission by Heidegger that he could not respond adequately to what had happened.”127 Mark Bevir commented: “Derrida’s interpretation can seem appallingly generous given that the silence was over a moral condemnation of Auschwitz not a philosophical problem.” Yet, here, Bevir errs in thinking such moral condemnation “not” to be a philosophical problem – surely both Derrida and Heidegger hold otherwise. Derrida was clear, furthermore, on the question of Heidegger’s “guilt:” I wouldn’t say that Heidegger’s attitude is neither forgivable nor unforgivable. I don’t see how I, for one, can formulate the question in these terms. Who would have to forgive Heidegger? . . . I believe that the responsibility for Heidegger’s decisions, in any particular circumstance . . . is a responsibility that must be examined in itself. Indeed, all the texts I have devoted to Heidegger, revolve not only around his work which remains, for me, very powerful as well as very provocative, but also around European thought as a whole, in which Heidegger occupies a place which is so visible and, so to speak, so impossible to get around.128 Indeed, as Felix Adler argued at the close of the nineteenth century, there is “moral value” to silence that is deferential to the other as it harbors a “silence of tact and discretion,”129 even as some might protest that this is not the type in Heidegger’s case. Yet, William Franke presents what is perhaps more philosophically correct relative to Heidegger’s silence when he describes the Greek concept of apophasis: As a discursive mode, apophasis arises in the face of what cannot be said. It bespeaks an experience of being left speechless. There are no words for what is experienced in this form of experience, no possibility of a positive description of it.130 49

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Franke adds, “The experience of apophasis, as an experience of not being able to say, is quintessentially linguistic: the experience itself is intrinsically an experience of the failure of language.”131 Concerning the Holocaust itself, pertinent in present context, Franke remarks: Meaning cannot be contained within or communicated intact by a word that has been torn apart and rent asunder. Rather, an aura of what the word cannot say hangs over the desert landscape left by the Holocaust and its concentration camps.132 Thus, whereas once one might have spoken of “bodies and souls,” of “persons,” who have “died” because they have been murdered, Heidegger speaks of “corpses,” corpses as “products” of “manufacturing” in the gas chambers and as ashes in the crematoria, evidence of the “gigantic” (das Riesenhafte) at work even in this ghastly way of “making” human beings the equivalent of “things” ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Franke reminds further, “In the post-Holocaust period, from within and beyond Jewish culture, many have emphasized the brokenness and shattering of meaning as necessary to opening it up to the indefinable, the unsayable.”133 How does one “speak” about the Holocaust, whether one is a Jew or a German? Daniel Langton identifies three perspectives according to which Jewish scholars have provided a religious response: (1) “that the Holocaust was a unique event which has proved inexplicable and beyond the reach of historical inquiry”; (2) “the Holocaust provides dramatic evidence of God’s action in history”; and (3) “the Holocaust demands profound changes in Judaism, which would imply that Judaism is vulnerable to the influence of historical forces – a problematic idea for those who would see it as a collection of timeless, unchanging truths.” Significant in relation to Heidegger’s case are statements from Emil Fackenheim, who holds that, “Resisting rational explanations, Auschwitz will forever resist religious explanations as well”; thus also Arthur Cohen, who asserts that, “Thought and the death camps are incommensurable,” that the death camps are “beyond the discourse of morality and rational condemnation,” that the camps represent “a new event” that is “severed from the connection with the traditional presuppositions of history, psychology, politics, morality.”134 There is the further recent examination of empirical data that underscores Heidegger’s concern for the manifestation of the technological and calculative thinking among the Nazis in the “facts” of the extermination camps. Lewi Stone, for example, reports on “hyperintense kill rates” during the Nazi genocide during Operation Reinhard (1942–1943), considered “the largest single murder campaign of the Holocaust, during which some 1.7 million Jews from German-occupied Poland were murdered by the Nazis,” most, as Lewi reports, having “perished in gas chambers at the death camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka,” with an “extreme phase of hyperintense 50

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killing” occurring in “an intense, 100-day (~3 month [August to October 1942]) surge.”135 Examining a dataset from Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad on “railway transportation to the death camps,” involving “480 train deportations from 393 Polish towns and ghettos to the death camps,” such that ~515,000 were murdered at Belzec, ~126,000 at Sobibor, and ~897,000 at Treblinka – all provided evidence of a “huge ‘burst’ of activity in mass killing,” made possible (as the historian Hilberg had observed) by “unprecedented assembly line dynamics of mass murder” – some “445,700 murders per month,” meaning about “14,700 murders per day” – “Almost all of those arrived at these death camps . . . murdered, usually within hours in the gas chambers.”136 What more fundamental “historical” or “moral” sense is to be made of such empirical data, when reasonable speech is silenced in the face of such horror? One recalls the work of two rabbis, Richard L. Rubenstein and Fackenheim, as two Jewish scholars who spoke to renounce or re-examine the Torah-observant faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob after Auschwitz, wondering what to do with 613 commandments as identified by the Rambam (Rabbi Moses Maimonides) and central to rabbinic tradition (halacha), the adherence to which demonstrates one’s piety and assures one’s sanctification before the one true God.137 With them, one wonders: •

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Are we in a position to object to Rubenstein when he says, similar to Heidegger that, “Jewish thinkers . . . failed to recognize the extent to which death camps are as much an expression of the innate potentialities of a technologically competent civilization as are jets and computers?” Are we to deny his assertion that “after Auschwitz” we are faced with “a religious situation of great fluidity . . . developing under the impact of contemporary technology,” that our religions speak to a “condition entirely enclosed within the fatalities of an absurd earthly existence,” the extermination camps a singular representation of that technological absurdity? Are we to remonstrate against Fackenheim’s assertion that the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews provoked “few countermeasures or even verbal protests on the part of the civilized world,” although one’s common sense at the least judges that they should have done so? Or, when he says that, “What historians and philosophers must face is that Auschwitz was a kingdom not of this world” – in which case, what we say may not be governed by the concepts and categories of the Western tradition of political philosophy (as Heidegger also understood)? Fackenheim understands as Heidegger did: “philosophers must face a novum within a question as old as Socrates: what does it mean to be human?” As already noted, that is also Heidegger’s question in his Letter on Humanism. “Yet,” Fackenheim writes, “whereas Auschwitz was a kingdom not of this world, its creators and operators were neither super- nor 51

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sub- human but rather – a terrifying thought! – human like ourselves. Hence, in however varying degrees, the mesmerized and manipulated allowed themselves to be so treated, and the dominated and terrorized gave in to craven cowardice. Not only Eichmann but everyone was more than a cog in the wheel. The operators of the Auschwitz system were all its unbanal creators even as they were its banal creatures.”138 In short, the philosophy that for Socrates began with “wonder” is now transformed into a philosophy that begins in “horror.” How does a philosopher respond to that insight at the very core of Fackenheim’s assessment of the relation of philosophy and the Holocaust? Further, what of his reference to the technological, similarly to Heidegger, when Fackenheim writes: •

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Can the historical conditions producing the actuality of the rational (and hence the rationality of the actual) pass away? The religious incursion into the world of God in Christ may or may not leave room for subsequent eruptions of the demonic evil in the world which produce genocidal industries with by-products including human skin made into lamp-shades, human hair used for pillows, human bones turned into fertilizer. Hegel’s actuality of the rational leaves room only for world-historically insignificant evils to be disposed of as relapses into tribalism or barbarism. In their postEnlightenment optimism, all but a few modern philosophers have ignored or denied the demonic. Hegel’s philosophy – which unites Christian religions with modern secular optimism – is the most radical and hence most serious of this modern tendency. . . . Any inquiry into its truth must confront its claims with the gas chambers of Auschwitz.139

And, listening to Elie Wiesel,140 like him we can wonder, what does one say to Cain the murderer and to Abel the victim, even as the record shows that the world remained silent before the enigma that is the singular event of Nazi genocide? And “not” to say “holocaust,” Wiesel cautions, so as not to concede that God somehow “desired” the “burnt offering” of six million souls. What could or would such an assertion mean? What would one do with one’s theodicy if that were true? Can a Jew still take up as his “moral” duty to receive and transmit the tradition of rabbinic teaching of the Talmud, when this unprecedented event places the whole of that tradition in question – even if, as Wiesel says, that means one “denies” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? How does one “write,” reminds Wiesel, “without fear of using the wrong words,” words such as “holocaust,” “death,” “without misrepresenting the truth,” hence Wiesel’s reticence to speak as he found no ground and only an abyss, unsure about his belief in humanity, if one still knows what it is to be human? Criticizing many, Wiesel complained: “We didn’t know a thing [in Europe], while they knew in the Land of Israel, and 52

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they knew in London, and they knew in New York. The world was silent and the Jewish world was silent. Why silent? Why did they not find it vital to inform us of what was going on in Germany? Why did they not warn us? Why? I also accuse the Jewish world and its leaders for not warning us.”141 This silence and lack of due warning about this catastrophe tested Wiesel’s faith: “We believed in miracles and in God! And not in fate and we [fared] very badly not believing in fate. If we had, we could have prevented many catastrophes. . . . There is no longer a god in the heavens; he whispered with every step we put on the ground. There is no longer man on the earth below.”142 Wiesel spoke according to the academic discourse of the moment, but he was also a novelist, trying to say what he had to say in the narrative of the novel. David Patterson’s insights into what happens to the novelist confronting the Holocaust reinforces the foregoing assessment in the setting of a philosophical confrontation: “the problem confronting the novelist is not the breakdown of a link between reality and imagination but “the restoration of the relation between word and meaning.”When that relation collapses, the word goes into exile, leaving a silence. . . . [Only] when silence may thus speak can meaning be returned to the word.”143 Here one may recall Wiesel as one who long resisted “the culture of prattle” and as one representing “the culture of reticence,” underscored by the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin when he wrote: “Were [the prophet] Jeremiah to sit by the ashes of Israel today, he would not cry out a lamentation. . . . He would maintain a deep silence. For even an outcry is now a lie, even tears are mere literature, even prayers are false.”144 Given this biblical authority, this surmise of Jeremiah’s likely conduct, protests against someone’s silence quite simply go astray. In short, Heidegger had a right and a duty, even a necessity, to hold to his silence, that silence resonating according to any of the earlier plausible explanatory perspectives where reticence (die Verschweigung) is united with silence (das Schweigen). Yet, a serious study of Heidegger’s corpus and the so-called “Black Notebooks,” especially at the time of his early confrontation with National Socialism in 1933–1934 when he was elected rector of the University of Freiburg, moves one in the direction of reasonably grounded philosophical protest of the contemporary polemic – protest at what amounts to a manifest failure to understand Heidegger’s “philosophically interpreted” “situation,” his “position” (in the technical sense of that term as used by Heidegger in his discussion of “positionality”), and his thoughts of this period as given in the notebooks and other published lectures. Accordingly, here I wish to highlight some of this philosophical situation, admittedly without being exhaustive (impossible with sustained engagement of both Heidegger’s published and unpublished works bearing on this issue). I do so with a “guiding hermeneutic principle of analysis” that, so I submit, contributes to a “judicious” understanding of Heidegger’s words, thoughts, and deeds at this time and 53

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thereafter. This hermeneutic principle involves Heidegger’s concept of Entscheidung – simply said, “decision,”145 but a word that is much more complicated when understood in terms of Heidegger’s attention to the essential human struggle to discern “reality” (true “being”) in the face of “appearance” (phenomena), “semblance” (eidōlon), and “non-being” (ouk on, me on). All of this is at issue in the “everyday” of the human life-world (Lebenswelt) and human projects (i.e., in what, in Being and Time, Heidegger called our “thrownness” and “idle chatter” in the “public” (öffentlich) realm of human action), as “the many” (one may think here hoi polloi) are steeped in the anonymous rule of “das Man” (“the they”) and its “inauthentic” (uneigentlich) mode of being-there. This “principle” of Entscheidung, governing all human decision without exception, may be stated as Heidegger himself states the point in his Introduction to Metaphysics: If the man who holds to being as it opens round him and whose attitude toward the essent (the particular being) is determined by his adherence to being, then necessarily he must take three paths. If he is to take over being-there (i.e., his place, his topos, in the polis, in the modern State) in the clarity of being, he must bring being to a stand, he must endure it in appearance (seeming) and against appearance (seeming), and he must wrest (tear away) both appearance (seeming) and being from the abyss of not-being. “The human being must distinguish these three paths and, accordingly, [he must] come to a decision for or against them.”146 This principle of Entscheidung is one of “necessity” in the very nature of human Dasein’s engagement of “world” qua “context of signification” (Bedeutsamkeit) as Heidegger worked to clarify it in Being and Time147 and subsequently in his concept of “the fourfold” (das Geviert) of Being. This principle is inescapable in its governance over word, thought, and deed in the history of metaphysics from its “explicit beginning” in Plato through to its “completion” or “consummation” in Nietzsche and Hegel, understood not merely as a series of fundamental metaphysical positions148 identifiable with given philosophers but as the history of Being (Seinsgeshichte)149 that requires our “attunement” for a “beyng-historical thinking” correspondent to the “second beginning.” This is true, therefore, also for Heidegger himself in his word, thought, and deed, as he insisted on sustained attention to the question of Being/Beyng (Seinsfrage/Seynsfrage) motivating his constant inquiry, and even as he encountered and interpreted his own historicity, his own historical Dasein, as the National Socialist Party began its rule over the German national “being-there.” That said, however, Heidegger clarifies the sense of ‘Entscheidung’ further. In his Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Heidegger writes: When we speak here of de-cision, we think of an activity of man, of an enactment, of a process. But here neither the human character in an activity nor the process-dimension is essential. 54

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Actually it is hardly possible to come close to what is ownmost to decision in its being-historical sense without proceeding from men, from us, without thinking of ‘decision’ as choice, as resolve, as preferring one thing and disregarding another, hardly possible in the end not to approach freedom as cause and faculty, hardly possible not to push the question of decision off into the ‘moralanthropological’ dimension; indeed it is hardly possible not to grasp this dimension anew in the ‘existentiell’ sense.150 But Heidegger does not intend “decision” in this sense, hence the importance of being clear that “de-cision” (Ent-scheidung) is to be understood in the being-historical sense Heidegger privileges in clarifying the relation of thinking and being. This requires a “shift” in thinking such that one recognizes the human “belongingness to be-ing as founder of be-ing’s truth.” Thinking “de-cision” contra the modern metaphysical commitment to philosophy qua “system,” Heidegger informs us, signifies a “crossing from modernity to the other beginning.”151 Yet, anticipating as much, “it is advisable to prepare the originary being-historical interpretation of decision by means of indicating ‘decisions’ that arise as historical necessities out of that de-cision.”152 Heidegger clarifies further, with several indicating questions: What is decision here [in our epoch]? What is ownmost to decision is determined by what is ownmost to crossing from modernity into what is other than modernity? Does decision thereby determine its ownmost, or is crossing only a hint of what is ownmost? Do the ‘decisions’ arrive because there must be an other beginning? And must the other beginning be because the essential sway of be-ing is the very de-cision and, in this unfolding of what is ownmost, gifts its truth for the first time to the history of man?153 With these questions, Heidegger presses the significance of the distinction between the “moral-anthropological” sense of “decision” and the “essential” sense that intimates an “other” beginning in the history of “Beyng” beyond the sway of modernity. Thus, one may say, Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” resonate with this distinction, disclosing his intimations of what was “possible,” what was “actual,” what was “in tension,” in the “struggle” for “being” (reality) over mere “appearance” and “semblance” (a) “in the politics” and (b) “in the philosophy” of his time: a

Germany’s “destiny” – as he said in his Introduction to Metaphysics – was caught between “Americanism” (democratic capitalism on the one side)154 and Russian communism (“Bolshevism”) on the other, both “world powers” struggling for “mastery over the earth” (understood here in Nietzsche’s sense of grosse Politik, “great politics”); yet, this 55

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struggle for mastery was itself a sign of a more fundamental “danger:” the danger that is disclosed in Being’s “veiled” and “disguised” unfolding in “the self-endangering truth of its essence” as “the essence of technology.”155 Philosophy qua “onto-theology” altered the Greek beginning when medieval and scholastic philosophy installed a “Christian” philosophical anthropology and correspondent religious teleology and eschatology. The human being “in essence” then is no longer conceived as zoon logon echon in the Greek sense such as Aristotle articulated it, but “in essence” as ens creatum, situated in “Christian” “mono”-theism (inextricably connected to the “Jewish” “mono”-theism of rabbinic tradition). Thus, “God” – in contrast to the Greek sense of ‘god’ or ‘gods’ – is “the supreme being” (summum ens) among beings, the thinking of the fate or destiny (Geschick) of “the West” now determined differently (un-fatefully and un-destinally) by this teleology and eschatology. Yet, given that this philosophy is itself “now” at an “end” or “consummation,” as “forethought” by Nietzsche in his return to the Greek beginning (thus Heidegger’s linkage of ‘forethought’ to the Greek concept “pro-metheisthai”), Heidegger observed the thought of modernity to be deformed, presenting itself in the “semblance” of the otherwise genuine (“authentic”) thinking156 that was needed – Bauemler, Rosenberg, Krieck, and Ernst Bergmann, all ideologues of a National Socialism deformed in thought, word, and deed. In Heidegger’s assessment, this so-called National Socialist “philosophy” failed in the task of “essential” apprehension of the fundamental “struggle” for a “second beginning” that Heidegger understood was there to be appropriated in recollection (Erinnerung), retrieval (Wiederholung), and overcoming (Uberwindung) of the “first beginning” of Greek antiquity, the history of Being “unfolding” in the epoch-al transformations of that history in fundamental positions of Western metaphysics, and governing with a unique significance in the “apparent” world-historical present of the 1930s. What the Nazi ideologues did not understand, and which Heidegger believed he understood, was that an “originary gathering” had to be prepared such that “a gathering in and as which what dares to be called a people becomes historical.”157 “In its origin and destiny,” Heidegger opined, “this people is singular, corresponding to the singularity of be-ing itself, whose truth this people must ground but once, in a unique site, in a unique moment.” That unique moment is one that is historically necessary. “But,” Heidegger observed, “necessities light up only in distress”158 – a distress, one may infer, such as he found present in the historical necessity of the crisis in Germany’s destiny unfolding in 1933, but with the further understanding that when one is in “nearness” of decision one faces the prospect of “utmost danger of completely missing the domain of decision.”159 56

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It is easy to miss the domain of decision, to go wrong, as apparently Heidegger did, given the conceptual distinctions he was making. He tried to be a “creator” in a world-historical moment that called for a fateful and destined decision. But, as he said, “The decision must create that time-space, the site for the essential moments, where the most serious mindfulness, along with the most joyful mission, grows into a will to found and build – a will which is not exempt from chaos.”160 What did Heidegger not want in this decision? He would answer: Does decision once again bring on the grounding of the site for the moment of grounding the truth of being? Or does everything roll on simply as a ‘struggle’ for the barest conditions for continuing life and surviving in gigantic proportions, so that ‘worldview’ and ‘culture’ are themselves only props and means for this ‘struggle’? What is being prepared for then? The transition to a technized animal, which begins to replace the instincts, which have already grown weaker and less refined by the gigantism of technicity.161 What is characteristic of this direction of decision is not the technicizing of ‘culture’ and the imposition of ‘worldview.’ Rather, characteristic of this direction is that ‘culture’ and ‘worldview’ become the means for the strategy for a will that no longer wants a goal; for, preservation of a people is never a possible goal but only the condition for setting goals. Only the utmost decision from within and about the truth of being still brings about clarity; otherwise what remains is the continual dawning of renovations and disguises, or even a total collapse.162 Clearly, Heidegger does not have a conception of the human being that is given in the calculative thinking of technology and that sees the human being as a technicized animal. His “time-space” is other than what is given in technology, in worldview philosophy, and in the specification of culture issued by philosophical anthropology. These latter all entail a decision, but not a grounding decision. Heidegger asks: “What is decision at all? Not choice. Choosing always involves only what is pregiven and can be taken or rejected.”163 “Worldview” and “culture” are pregiven for choice; they can be taken or be rejected. But, for Heidegger,“De-cision here means grounding and creating, disposing in advance and beyond oneself or giving up and losing.” Heidegger had no intention, in the face of vulgar Nazism, of giving up and losing the struggle he envisioned and thus he sought to ground and to create in advance and beyond himself. “But why this decision? Because a saving of beings [is possible] only out of the deepest ground of be-ing itself – saving as justifying preservation of the law and mission of the West.”164 Saving from what? It is a struggle “against destruction and uprooting” that the human qua technicized animal installs willy-nilly, uncannily, this struggle “only the 57

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first step in preparation, the step into the nearness of the actual realm of decision.” And, most important: “truth itself is already the very thing to be decided”165 – to be decided as “the necessary form of enactment of freedom.” However, one must be clear that, “The time-space character of decision [is] to be grasped being-historically and not morally-anthropologically.” Heidegger’s “position” relative to the politics and philosophy of his day, his “position” at the “site” (topos) of “world” disclosure that is the polis/ State, his “de-cision,” cannot be understood, furthermore, without “contextualizing” it in three pertinent features of his own thinking of the whole of the Western tradition from Plato to Nietzsche: 1

2

3

the history of the West as the “history of Being” (Seinsgeschichte), on the basis of which one must discern “the crisis of ‘European’ humanity,”166 such as heralded by Nietzsche and subsequently, but inadequately, articulated by Husserl only as a crisis of the European “sciences”; Nietzsche’s anticipatory thought linking the “will to knowledge” and the “will to power” to the “battle” – the “great politics” – for “mastery of the earth,” hence Heidegger’s extensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphysical position in relation to that of antiquity and modernity, Heidegger thereby reading Nietzsche’s thought with a depth of understanding wholly “contrary” to the ideological and “biologistic” reading of Nietzsche’s thought cast into the German self-concept (by such as Bauemler and Rosenberg) as a “National Socialist” philosophy; and, the “planetary totality” of the present “epoch” of unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) and withdrawal of Being/Beyng (Sein/Seyn) in the “history of Being” that is never merely “historiology” (Historie) according to the empirical interpretations of historians, but instead, understood essentially, what Heidegger denominates “the essence of technology” and more explicitly as “the essence of positionality” governing the mode of being of the whole of beings, including the human way to be as technicized animal, hence the planetary totality of technology and its unique “danger.”

I shall engage each of these elements of Heidegger’s “position” in turn, finally to conclude that it is a fundamental mistake of recent commentators to indict Heidegger “the man” and Heidegger “the thinker” as culpable of moral and philosophical failure that makes him “personally guilty” of the Nazi genocide itself. Any such moral indictment would first of all have to engage “philosophically,” and not relative to some facile journalistic commentary, what Heidegger said in his Letter on Humanism, but also what he said about Kant, in §30 of his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, concerning “Transcendental Investigation and Practical Reason,” to which I now turn, bearing in mind Heidegger’s statement that “saving” involves here preserving “the law” and “the mission” of the West (Occident). 58

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Notes 1 David Nirenberg, “When Philosophy Mattered,” The New Republic, 13 January 2011, https://newrepublic.com/article/81380/heidegger-cassirer-davoskant, accessed on 29 May 2018. 2 Daniel Maier-Katkin and Birgit Maier-Katkin, “Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Calumny and the Politics of Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2006, pp. 86–119, p. 105. 3 Adolph Hitler, “Appeal to the Nation,” 15 July 1932, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gzkqbAm7iyQ, accessed on 18 June 2018. 4 Maier-Katkin and Maier-Katkin, “Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger,” pp. 102 & 103. 5 See here “Adolf Hitler Is Named Chancellor of Germany,” www.history.com/ this-day-in-history/adolf-hitler-is-named-chancellor-of-germany, accessed on 28 May 2018. For an overview see Richard Pipes, “Did the Russian Revolution Have to Happen?” The American Scholar, Vol. 63, No. 2, Spring 1994, pp. 215–238. 6 Noteworthy here is that, in rejecting Marxist socialism as implemented in the Bolshevik movement, Heidegger was clear about the problematic of concepts and doctrines being played about (Contributions, §19, p.  38) in relation to answers to the question, ‘Who are we?’: “the final form of Marxism, which essentially has nothing to do with Judaism or with Russia; if anywhere a spiritualism still lies dormant and unevolved, then in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western, a European possibility: the emergence of the masses, industry, technicity, the dying off of Christianity; but insofar as the dominance of reason as equalization of all people is merely the consequence of Christianity and Christianity is fundamentally of Jewish origins. . . . Bolshevism is actually Jewish; but then Christianity is fundamentally Bolshevist! And then what decisions become necessary from this point on?” This mishmash of ideas is what was not fundamentally clear in the Nazi ideology Heidegger sought to contest and displace. 7 See here, Ian Kershaw, “How Democracy Produced a Monster,” The New York Times, 03 February 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03iht-edker shaw.1.9700744.html, accessed on 28 May 2018. 8 Seth J. Franzman, “Was the Russian Revolution Jewish?” The Jerusalem Post, 15 November 2017, https://m.jpost.com/Magazine/Was-the-Russian-Revolu tion-Jewish-514323/amp, accessed on 05 June 2018. 9 Leonard Shapiro, “Letter: The Jews and the Revolution,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 4, 14 September 1967, www.nybooks.com/ issues/1967/09/14/, accessed on 05 June 2018. 10 Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 307. 11 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), “Editor’s Afterword” (13 December 2013), p. 386, referring here to “Ponderings IV, 31.” 12 Wolin exaggerates Heidegger’s connection to current right-wing political events in Europe (e.g., Wolin’s lecture), “Martin Heidegger and the Far Right in Contemporary Europe,” Thursday, 06 April 2017, University of Vermont, billed on the thesis that Heidegger’s “doctrines and ideas” play a “central role” by “nurturing” “the ideology underlying the new political authoritarianism” of “far right parties” in Europe that “are threatening to tip the political balance from democracy to new forms of autocracy.” Were that the case in fact Heidegger would surely provide a counter-critique in the same manner in which his multi-volume study of Nietzsche countered the Nazi ideological appropriation

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of Nietzsche’s thought. Moreover, Heidegger is clear that he advances no “doctrine” in the traditional sense of that word, saying in his Contributions to Philosophy (p. 166): “It is not a matter of proclaiming new doctrines to a human operation that has run aground, but of displacing man out of the lack of distress into the distress of lack of distress, as the utmost distress.” To speak of transition from the first beginning in the Western tradition of metaphysics to a new or other beginning as Heidegger does is not to introduce a doctrine, nor are Heidegger’s ideas intended to be “doctrinal” for “disciples” or co-thinkers dubbed pejoratively as “Heideggerian” apologists. Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2014, http:// jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/national-socialism-world-jewry-andthe-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/, accessed on 19 June 2018. Jeff Malpas, “Chapter 1: On the Philosophical Readings of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks,” in Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), p. 10. Farin and Malpas, Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, pp. xi–xii. See here Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 2nd Revised Edition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), who, despite his careful work with the archives, concedes to statements and conclusions “incomplete or imprecise.” Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 8. Ibid. Ibid., p. 9, italics added. Ibid., p. 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), H.376, p. 345. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.380, p. 348. Ibid., H.383, p. 351. Ibid., H.384, p. 352, italics added. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, p. 31. Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. A.J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 78–79. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, p. 53. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, p.  68, informs us that the term ‘non-Aryan’ was intended in German policy in 1933 to distinguish “types of races” (Verschiedenartigkeit der Rassen) from “qualities of the races” (Verschiedenwertigkeit der Rassen), in which case, “According to this view, each race produced its own social characteristics, but the characteristics of one race were not necessarily inferior to those of other races.” It was in 1935 that the law was drafted that then spoke not of “non-Aryans” per se but explicitly of “Jews.” Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, p. 54. Charles Guignon, “History and Commitment in the Early Heidegger,” in H.L. Dreyfus and H. Hall, eds., Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1992), pp. 130–142. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, 04 November 1945,” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 61, 63, & 64. Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), http://ark. cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5k4006n2/, accessed on 04 June 2018. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 87.

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35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

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Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., pp. 91 & 92. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 106. It is well known that Heidegger claimed subsequently, “Nietzsche hat mich kaput gemacht” – “Nietzsche has destroyed me,” suggesting his need not only for a cautious reading of Nietzsche but also to move beyond a mere appropriation of his thought in view of a second beginning that is not merely a transvaluation of values such as Nietzsche championed. Hans Sluga, interpreting Heidegger’s statement suggests: “He meant by this, perhaps, only that his ‘confrontation with Nietzsche,’ as he called it, had demanded an overwhelming effort. But two factors must be considered to fully explain this remark. The first is that Heidegger approached Nietzsche from within his own philosophical problematic and not from a neutral, scholarly position. The second is that he turned to Nietzsche only after he had abandoned the assumptions and doctrines of Being and Time and after 1929 when he had embarked on new lines of thought.” See here Hans Sluga, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” in H.L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall, eds., A Companion to Heidegger (Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Blackwell Reference Online, 04 July 2018, www.blackwellreference. com/public/book.html?id=g9781405110921_9781405110921, accessed on 04 July 2018. Michael Dintenfass, “Truth’s Other: Ethics, The History of the Holocaust, and Historiographical Theory After the Linguistic Turn,” p. 10, www.blackwellpublishing.com/BPL_Images/Journal_samples/HITH0018-2656~39~1/110.pdf. Ibid., pp. 5 & 7. Maier-Katkin and Maier-Katkin, “Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger,” p. 105. See here Norman K. Swazo, “Preserving the Ethos: Heidegger and Sophocles’s Antigone,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 441–471. Also see Dennis J. Schmidt, “The Monstrous, Catastrophe, and Ethical Life: Hegel, Heidegger and Antigone,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 59, No. 1, 2015, pp. 61–72. Noteworthy here is the fact that there is ongoing interpretive disagreement about whether there is a political thought that can be derived from Heraclitus’s fragments, whether it be aristocratic or democratic in inclination, and the degree to which any conception of ethics here is linked to both cosmology and metaphysics in the various fragments. See here Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, “Heraclitus’ Political Thought,” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1515/apeiron-2017-0009, accessed on 18 July 2018. See also David Sider, “Heraclitus’ Ethics,” in S. Sider and D.  Obbink, eds., Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2013), pp.  321–334. E.g., Sider, citing Diogenes Laertius, observes that Heraclitus’s thinking on peri phuseos has three parts (logoi) one on cosmology (to pan), one on politics (politikon) and another on divine matters (theologikon). Christopher Moore, “Heraclitus and ‘Knowing Yourself (116 DK),” Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2018, pp.  1–21, https:// doi.org/10.5840/ancientphil20183811, citing Stobaeus (Flor. 3.5.6), states that “Heraclitus makes the earliest reference to the Delphic ‘Know yourself’: “All people have a share in knowing themselves and being sound-minded” (ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι μέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν), alternately translated, “Recognizing oneself and being of a sound mind are for all men.” Thus, Sider is perhaps correct to suggest that Heraclitus’s ethics are consistent with

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Plato’s views, in which case one would have to consider the linkage of ethics and politics in the Delphic dictum, or, as Moore puts it, the role of self-knowledge in relation to Heraclitus’s conception of logos (Moore acknowledging the scholarly disagreement about the authenticity of the fragment 116 on self-knowledge within the works of Heraclitus). Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung,” pp. 439 & 433. Devin Maddox, “Civil Disobedience and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Fanø Address,” 05 November 2018, https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/civil-disobedienceand-dietrich-bonhoeffers-fano-address, accessed on 12 November 2019; reference here is to Bonhoeffer’s sermon, “The Church and the People’s of the World.” Here see my “Heidegger’s Destruktion of Theology: ‘Primordial Faith’ and ‘Recognition’ of Messiah,” Modern Theology, September 2018, https://doi. org/10.1111/moth.12447; print version, Modern Theology, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 2019, pp. 138–162, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10:1111/ moth.12477. What then is to be said of Heidegger’s ethics if there is an ethics to his quietist turn? Bonhoeffer’s Ethics – which required one to set aside the two questions “How can I be good?” and “How can I do something good?” in favor of the question, “What is the will of God?” who is “the good” (das Gute), and this in rejection of Nietzsche’s assertion of a “twilight” or “death” of “the gods” – does not provide an answer Heidegger might have appropriated for his own political and moral resolve. Heidegger’s “decision” would not and did not presuppose the “decision” Bonhoeffer privileged as “a decision about ultimate reality, that is, a decision of faith.” See here Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, ed. R. Krauss, C.C. West, and D.W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 48. Thus, Bonhoeffer wrote (p. 49): “The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. . . . God, however we decide, has already spoken the revelatory word and we . . . even in our false reality, can live no other way than from the true reality of the word of God.” For a comparative analysis, see Brian Gregor, “Formal Indication, Philosophy, and Theology: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2007, pp. 185–202. It is noteworthy that Aristotle spoke (De Anima III.10) to the relation of rational intellect and fantasy on the understanding that the intellect (nous) is “always correct” in its judgment, whereas fantasy (phantasthēnai), as either belief (dóxa) or reasoning (logismós) “can be correct or not correct” in relation to “the good” or the “apparent good” thought to be achievable by action. Yet, Heidegger’s concept of Entscheidung redirects our understanding of this interpretation. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 111–138. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” Erkenntnis, 1932, pp. 60–81. Heidegger, “Lecture V,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 150. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rijcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), §60, p.  99, italics added. The volume is a translation of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis, 1936–1939, published posthumously in 1989, as Vol. 65 of the Gesamtausgabe (Completed Works). Heidegger, “Lecture V,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 147. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, §82, p. 134. Ibid., §85, p. 136.

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56 Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. J. Sallis. 57 See here Sandra Lee Bartky, “Heidegger and the Modes of World-Disclosure,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 40, No. 2, December 1979, pp. 212–236. 58 Heidegger, having declined to move to Munich and Berlin where Rosenberg and Bäumler were respectively located as ideological leaders (not to mention Frankfurt where Ernst Krieck assumed philosophical leadership), was undoubtedly aware of Rosenberg’s The Myth of The Twentieth Century, published in 1930, and Bäumler’s view of Germany’s post-Weimar “world-historical” greatness achievable through “Great War.” Indeed, Heidegger perhaps opportunistically appropriated some of Rosenberg’s jargon as his Rectoral Address initiated his philosophical foil to Rosenberg’s ideology, including the ideas of “awakening,” national “revolution,” and “service,” all ideas Rosenberg understood as essential to “the beginning of a new era.” Heidegger’s rejection of Nazi biological racism was a philosophical counter to Rosenberg’s belief in an “essence” of “contemporary world revolution” that centered on “awakening of racial types . . . on the whole planet,” this interpreted as a “counter movement” to “liberal economic imperialism” and “Bolshevik Marxism,” the latter understood as a completion of a type of democracy that promised “the extirpation of the racial and national consciousness.” See here, “Nuremberg Trial Defendants: Alfred Rosenberg,” Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary. org/nuremberg-trial-defendants-alfred-rosenberg, accessed on 05 November 2019. Rosenberg linked “Bolshevik Marxism” and “Marxist internationalism” with what he called Europe’s subjection to “Jewish dictatorship” and “Jewish parasitism.” Having spoken of “the great world battle” in “the present epoch,” Rosenberg likely reminded of Nietzsche’s forecast of grosse Politik as precisely such a great world battle – a claim Heidegger would have understood from his own reading of Nietzsche. 59 When Heidegger writes “be-ing” here one must understand, as he says in Contributions to Philosophy, §137, p.  182, “Be-ing – rather, the essential swaying  – is that out of and back to which a being as a being is above all unconcealed and sheltered and comes to be.” With this understanding of be-ing (in contrast to that of metaphysics as presence) and to avoid misinterpretation, Heidegger says (§138, p. 183), “In response one has to refer to the basic determination of understanding as projecting-open, which consists in an opening-up and a throwing and putting oneself out into the open, wherein the one who understands first comes to himself as a self.” Here the “self-discovery” (Selbstbefindlichkeit) of Dasein is at issue in being “rooted in the earth and rising in a world,” and “wherein what is closed off opens itself up as what sustains and binds.” The task here (§139) is to be attuned to this essential sway of be-ing “which opens itself up only to the full historical [geschichtlich] enactment of inceptual thinking.” Thus (§142), “as inceptual thinking of the other beginning, thinking is also capable of coming into the remote nearness of the last god.” When he says “god” here one must understand further Heidegger’s clarification (§143, p. 185) that, “God is neither ‘a being’ nor a ‘not-being’ – and also not commensurate with be-ing.” 60 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 77. 61 See here for further elaboration, Heidegger, Contributions, §§237–242, pp. 256 ff. 62 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 3. At §95, p. 132 Heidegger says: “But measured against their ordinary representations, time and space are here more originary; and ultimately, they are time-space, which is not a coupling of time and space but what is more originary in their belonging together.”

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63 I have in mind the comportment expressed by Kenan Malik, for example, have “dig-deep contestations through which we test each other’s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested” – from Malik’s “Are Soas Students Right to ‘Decolonize’ their Minds from Western Philosophies?” The Guardian, 19 February 2017, www.theguardian. com/education/2017/feb/19/soas-philosopy-decolonise-our-minds-enlighten ment-white-european-kenan-malik, accessed on 13 May 2018. 64 Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the Thinking of Evil.” 65 Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and P. Lacoue-LaBarthe, La conference de Heidelberg, textes réunis, presents et annotés par Mireille Calle-Gruber, note de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. (Paris: Lignes-Imec, 2014); English translation version: Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference, 1st Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 66 See here Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann Verlag, 2015), English translation: Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. A. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Shoah,” in J. Malpas and I. Farin, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016); Donatella DiCesare, “The ‘Jewish Question’ and the Question of Being: Heidegger before and after 1945,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Vol. 4, 2017, pp. 173–182. Characterizing these assessments as “philosophically” irresponsible is by no means to commit a fallacy of ad hominem, but alike to Richard Bernstein’s disagreement with Richard Rorty’s assessment of Heidegger’s conduct as “misleading . . . because it obscures and displaces the question of whether there is anything about Heidegger’s ‘philosophy’ that lends support to, justifies, or would enable us to account for why he ‘erred’ so greatly.” See here pp. 81 ff. of Bernstein’s “Heidegger’s Silence? Ethos and Technology,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). 67 Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the Thinking of Evil,” p. 126, italics added. 68 Adam Knowles, “Heidegger’s Mask: Silence, Politics and the Banality of Evil in the Black Notebooks,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 5 (2015), pp. 93–117, remarks: “The anti-Semitism of the Black Notebooks is pungent, and though limited to less than three pages out of twelve hundred, the forcefulness of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is all the more troubling for its brevity.” Richard Polt, translating some of the text of the notebooks and finding some of this “ugly stuff,” at least, admits that, “the German is awkward and I am not 100% sure what Heidegger meant.” See here Zachary Siegel, “7 New Translated Excerpts on Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism,” Critical Theory, 23 February 2015, www.critical-theory.com/7-new-translated-excerpts-on-heideggers-antisemi tism/, accessed on 25 April 2018. 69 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the Context of his Oeuvre,” in Farin and Malpas, Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, pp. 89–94. 70 Jesús Adrian Escudero,“Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Question of AntiSemitism,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, Vol. 5, 2015, pp. 21–49, p. 36. 71 Ibid., p. 37. 72 Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics, opening remarks of 05 February 1988, p. 1. 73 Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, p. 31. 74 Ibid., p. 115.

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75 Ibid., p. 39. 76 Ibid., p. 41. 77 Malpas, “Chapter 1: On the Philosophical Readings of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks,” in Farin and Malpas, Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, pp. 3–22. 78 Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, pp. 50–51. 79 On Heidegger’s effort to “redirect” the revolution, see Frank Edler, “Philosophy, Language, Politics: Heidegger’s Attempt to Steal the Language of Revolution in 1933–34,” Social Research, Vol. 57, 1990, pp. 197–238. 80 See here The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,” Vol. 2, Chap. 16, Part 7, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap16_part07. asp, accessed on 23 June 2018. 81 For a developmental assessment of Heidegger’s views about university reform since the early 1920s, see Iain Thompson, “Heidegger and the Politics of the University,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2003, pp. 515–542. 82 As cited by Thompson, “Heidegger and the Politics,” p. 519, italics added. 83 Martin Heidegger, “Rector’s Address: The Self-Assertion of the German University and The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” trans. K. Harries, Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 38, No. 3, March 1985, pp. 467–502. 84 All of the foregoing statements are from Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” as published in Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism (New York: Paragon House, 1990, pp. 5–13, italics added throughout. 85 Heidegger, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” p. 493. 86 Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 45. 87 Ibid., p. 8. 88 Steven G. Crowell, “Philosophy as a Vocation: Heidegger and University Reform in the Early Interwar Years,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, April 1997, pp. 255–276, italics added. 89 Dennis J. Schmidt, “The Baby and the Bath Water: On Heidegger and Political Life,” pp.  160–162, www.sunypress.edu/pdf/9780791488737.01.01.10.pdf, accessed on 02 July 2018. 90 Ibid., p. 166. 91 Crowell, “Philosophy as a Vocation,” p. 263, italics added. 92 Heidegger, “Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” p. 482. 93 Ibid., p. 493. 94 Ibid., p. 486. 95 Ibid., p. 490. 96 Malpas, “Chapter 1: On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks,” p.  5. See also, Malpas, “Assessing the Significance of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” Geographica Helvetica, Vol. 73, 2018, pp. 109– 114, p. 5, italics added. 97 Malpas, “Chapter 1,” p. 7. 98 Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, p. 64. 99 Gérard Granel, “Untameable Singularity (Some Remarks on Broken Hegemonies),” trans. Charles T. Wolfe, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997, www.gerardgranel.com/txt_pdf/Tren-untameable.pdf, accessed on 29 June 2018. 100 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 478. 101 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies (Des Hegemonies brisées), ed. R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 221.

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102 Marinus J. Schoeman, “Abstract: ‘Moraliteitskritiek en tragiese bewussyn in die werk van Reiner Schürmann,’” Tydskrif vir Gesteswetenkappe, Jaarang 53, No. 3, September 2013, pp.  305–313, pp.  305–306, http://hdl.handle. net/2263/32404, accessed on 29 June 2018. 103 Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, p. 66. 104 Ibid., p. 67. 105 See here, Lorraine Boissoneault, “Was Vichy France a Puppet Government or a Willing Nazi Collaborator?” Smithsonian Magazine, 09 November 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vichy-government-france-world-war-iiwillingly-collaborated-nazis-180967160, accessed on 19 June 2018. See also, Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 106 Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, pp. 81–83. 107 Ibid., p. 85. 108 This point was made in the early round of commentary by Richard J. Bernstein (“Heidegger’s Silence? Ethos and Technology,” The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, pp.  79–137, p.  80): “What is still most scandalous and incomprehensible is not what he did and said in 1933–4, but his refusal after 1945 to confront directly and unambiguously the full horror of the Shoah and the barbaric crimes of the Nazis.” Eugene T. Gendlin speaks similarly to the point of Heidegger’s silence, but also of the fear of contamination, in his “Heidegger and Forty Years of Silence,” in M. Frings, ed., Proceedings of the 20th Annual Heidegger Conference (Chicago: Depaul University, 1986), pp.  48–56, www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2018.html, accessed on 28 April 2018. Gendlin asks: “Must we not mistrust [Heidegger’s] seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? . . . Did [Heidegger] simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. . . . And Heidegger did write of his ‘mistakes. . . . [But] Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation.” 109 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung and Trawny, “Heidegger and the Shoah.” For an earlier assessment, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Philosophical Stakes of the Heidegger Wars, Part II: Ethical and Political Ramifications of the Reading of Heidegger,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 3, September 1994, pp. 443–454. Further, it will not do merely to take a given piece of text and, without situating Heidegger’s remarks philosophically, take Heidegger to task, as occurs with Timothy O’Hagan, “Philosophy in a Dark Time: Martin Heidegger and the Third Reich,” [www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/publications/engel/liberamicorum/ ohagan.pdf], who asserts (p. 951): “At the grotesque level of generality adopted by Heidegger, all morally relevant distinctions between the two cases [“battery chicken farms” and “extermination camps”] evaporate, and with them all questions of moral responsibility.” 110 Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger, the Philosophers’ Hell,” in E. Weber, ed., Points . . ., Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 181–190, at p. 183. 111 Derrida, “The Philosophers’ Hell,” p. 184. 112 See here Alexander Groth, Accomplices: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); also see David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust (The New Press, 2007); Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (The Overlook Press, 1998). Also see video presentations from the Conference on the Allied Powers’

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Response to the Holocaust, held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, 19 March 2015, www.alliedpowersholocaust.org/2015-conference-archive/videoarchive/, accessed on 26 June 2018. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers 1942, Vol. III, Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), pp.  776–777, www.alliedpowersholocaust.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/03/1942-Sept-Letter-Taylor-to-Vatican-Jews-in-Poland.pdf, accessed on 26 June 2018. See here also, Lily Rothman, “‘It’s Not That the Story Was Buried.’ What Americans in the 1930s Really Knew About What Was Happening in Germany,” Time, 10 July 2018, http://time.com/5327279/ushmm-americans-and-the-holocaust/, accessed on 11 July 2018. As a critique of the political-philosophical problems associated with institutions of American democracy, one notes in passing here what has been called the U.S. Supreme Court’s “legacy of legitimizing racism” through various decisions: “it ruled, for instance, that black people couldn’t be citizens (in Dred Scott v. Sanford), that ‘separate but equal’ accommodations for African Americans was legal (in Plessy v. Fergusson), and (astonishingly) that tossing 140,000 JapaneseAmericans into internment camps during World War II was a legitimate exercise of constitutional authority (in Korematsu v. United States). . . . In light of their 5–4 decision on Tuesday [26 June 2018] upholding the Muslim travel ban [imposed by the Trump Administration], it is clear to see that the court’s less savory legacy continues unimpeded.” See here Arsalan Iftikhar, “The Supreme Court’s Travel Ban Decision Adds to Its Legacy of Legitimizing Racism,” NBC News, 27 June 2018, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/supreme-court-stravel-ban-decision-adds-its-legacy-legitimizing-ncna886771, accessed on 27 June 2018. Iftikhar correctly observes: “And so, although many Americans tend to view the Supreme Court as legally infallible, our highest court actually has a racist legacy which continues to affect millions of minorities in the United States today.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the dissenting minority on the Court, was clear to opine that, “The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against official religious prejudice and embodies our Nation’s deep commitment to religious plurality and tolerance. That constitutional promise is why, ‘[f]or centuries now, people have come to this country from every corner of the world to share in the blessing of religious freedom.’ Town of Greece v. Galloway, 572 U.S., at ___(Kagan, J. dissenting) (slip op., at 1). Instead of vindicating those principles, today’s decision tosses them aside. In holding that the First Amendment gives way to an executive policy that a reasonable observer would view as motivated by animus against Muslims, the majority opinion upends this Court’s precedent, repeats tragic mistakes of the past, and denies countless individuals the fundamental right of religious liberty.” See here Supreme Court of the United States, Trump, President of the United States, et al., v. Hawaii et al., Certiori to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 17–965, Argued 25 April 2018, Decided 26 June 2018, p.  25, www.suprem ecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf, accessed on 27 June 2018. Joseph W. Bendersky, “Introduction,” to “Holocaust-Era American Antisemitism,” Selected Articles from Holocaust and Genocide Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://academic.oup.com/DocumentLibrary/ HGS/HGS%20Introduction%20Virtual%20Issue%20Antisemitism%202. pdf, accessed on 23 July 2018. See also Joseph W. Bendersky, “Dissension in the Face of the Holocaust: The 1941 American Debate over Antisemitism,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 85–116. In

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120 121 122 123 124

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this latter paper, Bendersky discusses the Council for Democracy’s debate of 1941, which eventually “characterized anti-Semitism as a foreign import and as part of Nazi Germany’s broader threat to democracy, Christianity, and Western civilization” rather than “emphasize the role of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology.” Bendersky, “Dissension in the Face of the Holocaust,” p. 2. For further discussion, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed. Deciphering the New Antisemitism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Bendersky, “Dissension in the Face of the Holocaust,” p. 108. Knowles, “Heidegger’s Mask,” citing Gesamtausgabe 54, 116/79. Here one is to recall Heidegger’s distinction of “the grounding question” that is the question of being (Sein) and “the guiding question” of metaphysics that is the question of beingness (Seiendheit) of beings. Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence, The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). John F. Teahan, “Review: Silence, The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance by Bernard P. Dauenhauer,” Journal of Religion, Vol. 63, No. 2, April 1983, pp. 204–206. Steven Bindeman, Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2017), p. 6. Heidegger, Contributions, §37, pp. 54–56. See Norman K. Swazo, “A Preface to Silence: On the Duty of Vigilant Critique,” Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1999, pp. 189–215, www.janushead.org/2-2/nswazo.cfm. Heidegger’s use of the word “attempt” here is important relative to his reminder (p. 59) that “Because in the thinking of be-ing everything steers toward what is unique, stumblings are, as it were, the rule!” In short, there are failures and errors along the way. There will be failures and errors especially if the thinking is itself wrong-headed: “The historical mastery over the history of Western thinking becomes increasingly important, and dissemination of a ‘merely historical’ or ‘systematic’ erudite philosophy becomes increasingly impossible.” Heidegger, Contributions, §40, p. 57. Mark Bevir, “Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy: Global Friendship Against Racism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000, pp. 121–138. See here, “An Interview with Professor Jacques Derrida,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 08 January 1998, Jerusalem, interviewed by Dr. Michal Ben-Naftali, translated from the French by Dr. Moshe Ron, Shoah Resource Center, www.yadvashem.org. Felix Adler, “The Moral Value of Silence,” International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1898, as cited by George P. Rice, “The Right to be Silent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 47, 1961, pp. 349–354. William Franke, On What Cannot Be Said (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 1. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. For an overview of Jewish theological responses to the Nazi genocide and the problem of historical understanding, see Daniel R. Langton, “God, the Past and Auschwitz: Jewish Theologians’ Engagement with History,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 29–62; quoted text from pp. 29–30 and p. 32.

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135 Lewi Stone, “Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense Kill Rates during the Nazi Genocide,” Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 1, 02 January 2019, https:// doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/ eaau7292, accessed on 13 January 2019. 136 For a summary overview and interview of Lewi Stone, see Gary Stix, “A Biologist Reconstructs the Grotesque Efficiency of the Nazis’ Killing Machine,” Scientific American, 10 January 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/abiologist-reconstructs-the-grotesque-efficiency-of-the-nazis-killing-machine/, accessed on 14 January 2019. 137 See here, e.g., Richard L. Rubenstein, “A Consideration of Faith after Auschwitz,” The New York Times, 04 March 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/03/04/ archives/a-consideration-of-faith-after-auschwitz.html, accessed on 30 May 2018; Emil Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 82, No. 10, October 1985, pp. 505–514. 138 Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” p. 513. 139 Emil Fackenheim, “On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 23, No. 4, June 1970, p.  698. See here Michael A. Meyer, “Judaism after Auschwitz,” Commentary, 01 June 1972, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/judaism-after-auschwitz/, accessed on 13 June 2018. 140 Elie Wiesel, “Ethics after the Holocaust Conference,” May 06–08, 1996, University of Oregon, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfbQKStipgA, accessed on 31 May 2018. 141 Ofer Aderet, “Newly Unearthed Version of Elie Wiesel’s Seminal Work is a Scathing Indictment of God, Jewish World,”HaAretz, May 2016,www.haaretz. com/amp/jewish/.premium-harsher-version-of-night-found-in-elie-wiesel-ar chive-1.5377614. 142 Ibid. 143 David Patterson, “The Word in Exile: A Phenomenology of Silence in the Holocaust Novel,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1 December 1993, pp. 402–420, italics added. 144 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr. “A Time to Be Silent About the Holocaust,” The Washington Post, 18 October 1986, quoting here Irving Howe’s citation of Zeitlin’s poem in Howe’s essay, “Writing and the Holocaust,” The New Republic, 27 October 1986, 27–39. The full poem entry with a slightly different translation is given in Aaron Zeitlin, “Israel’s Ashes (1945),” in M.M. Faierstein, ed. and trans., Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith (New York: iUniverse, 2007), p. 43. Here the silence refers not only to that of Jeremiah but to that of God also. 145 This reference to Entscheidung is not to be confused with what Rüdiger Safranksi, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) calls “decisionism.” 146 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 116. 147 In Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 93, Heidegger clarified several senses of ‘world’: (1) “the totality of those entities which can be present-at-hand within the world”; (2) “the Being of those entities,” including “any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities, (e.g., as in “the ‘world’ of a mathematician)”; and (3) “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’ . . . [with] different possibilities . . . the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment.” 148 Heidegger clarifies what he means by fundamental metaphysical position (e.g., in relation to Nietzsche), as having four elements: (1) a concept of human being;

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(2) a concept of being; (3) a concept of (the essence of) truth; and (4) a concept of the manner of standard-giving. In Appendix 8 to “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 145, Heidegger stated the same, but with some further clarification: What is essential in a fundamental metaphysical position embraces: 1 The manner and mode in which man is man, (i.e., is himself); the manner of the coming to presence (Wesensart) of selfhood, which is not synonymous with I-ness, but rather is determined out of the relation to Being as such. 2 The interpretation of the coming to presence (Wesensauslegung) of the Being of whatever is. 3 The delineation of the coming to presence (Wesensentwurf) of truth. 4 The sense in which, in any given instance, man is measure.

149 150 151 152 153 154

See further, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. II (Eternal Recurrence of the Same), pp.  184–197. At p.  191, Heidegger writes: “The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which one who poses the guiding question [viz., what is being?] remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the question comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings.” See here Martin Heidegger, The History of Beyng, trans. W. McNeill and J. Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), §43, p. 60. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid. Ibid., §44, pp. 63–64. See here, e.g., Walter Euchner, “Philosoph im Weltbürgerkreig,” Zeit Online, 19 March 1993, www.zeit.de/1993/12/philosoph-im-weltbuergerkrieg, accessed on 24 April 2018. Euchner accounts for Ernst Nolte’s historical writing [Politik und Geschichte in Leben und Denken (Berlin and Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen Verlag, 1992)] insofar as Nolte addresses “the effects of the ‘European civil war’ between the fascist, Soviet communist and liberal-capitalist camps” and, more specifically, Heidegger’s decision for National Socialism as one of “antiBolshevism.” Euchner comments: “Die Prinzipien der liberalen pluralistischen Demokratie sind mit Heideggers Philosophie kaum vereinbar.” [“The principles of liberal pluralistic democracy are incompatible with Heidegger’s philosophy.”] In which case, it is asserted here, “es im Jahre 1933 nahegelegen habe, Republikanismus und (soziale) Demokratie zu verwerfen und sich für die ‘kleine Lösung’ der Nationalsozialisten zu entscheiden.” [“in 1933 it was obvious to reject republicanism and (social) democracy and to opt for the ‘small solution’ of the National Socialists”] – a solution preserving a German sense of “nation” and solidarity (“socialism”) [without the Marxist-communist portent of a classless, stateless society that “levels” all distinction of “rank.”] Thus, joined the NSDAP, even as it is to be admitted that: “Heidegger den nationalsozialistischen Rassenwahn nicht teilte und sich bereits im Verlauf des Jahres 1934 von den Nationalsozialisten zu distanzieren begann.” [“Heidegger did not share the National Socialist racial delusion and began to distance himself from the Nazis in the course of 1934.”]

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155 Heidegger, “The Turn,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 64. 156 Jeffrey A. Barash, for example, in his Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp.  147–148, comments Heidegger has the “tendency” to “exclude the objective, theoretical character of both historical and natural sciences from the sphere of authentic thinking,” Heidegger concerned in his own thinking with contributing to “the overcoming of traditional criteria of knowledge.” Further, as Barash states in Chapter 1, “The Emergence of the Problem of Historical Meaning in Nineteenth Century German Thought” (p.  1), “The German idealist philosophies [of the 19th century – Fichte, Schelling, Hegel] had each proposed a unified, metaphysically grounded view of the world of human experience, but, as Heidegger noted, the approach to this world as a unity gave way after midcentury to a pronounced specialization and fragmentation in the empirically oriented university disciplines.” This development was not satisfactory for Heidegger, Barash reminds (p. 7), given the place of Hegel’s thought as: “the most powerful system of a historical worldview, which no essential encounter with the history of philosophy could fail to engage in discussion.” 157 Heidegger, Contributions, §44, p. 67. 158 Ibid., §45, p. 67. 159 Ibid., p. 68. 160 Ibid., italics added. 161 Note here also Contributions, §152, p.  194, where Heidegger asks: “What should technicity be? Not in the sense of an ideal. But how does technicity stand within the necessity of overcoming the abandonment of being, respectively, of putting up being’s abandonment to decision, from the ground up. Is technicity the historical pathway to the end, to the last man’s falling back into a technicized animal, which thus loses even the originary animality of the enjoined animal – or can technicity be above all taken up as sheltering and then enjoined into the grounding of Da-sein?” (italics in the original). 162 Heidegger, Contributions, §45, p. 68. 163 Ibid., §46, p. 69. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid., §47, p. 70. 166 Heidegger says in Contributions, §170, p. 208: “Only now comes the collapse of animal rationale, back into which we are again in the process of falling headlong, everywhere where neither the first beginning and its end nor the necessity of the other beginning is known.” Heidegger adds subsequently (§173, p. 208), “Da-sein is the crisis between the first and the other beginning. According to the name and the matter itself, Da-sein means something in the history of the first beginning (i.e., in the whole history of metaphysics) that is essentially other than in the other beginning.” Further, Heidegger says (p. 209), “In metaphysics ‘Da-sein’ is the name for the manner and way in which beings are actually beings and means the same as being-extant – interpreted one definite step more originarily: as presence. . . . The meaning and matter of the word Da-sein in the thinking of the other beginning is completely different, so different that there is no mediating transition from that first usage to the other one.”

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As is well known, Kant advanced a moral philosophy qua “metaphysics of morals” grounded in a theoretical critique of “practical reason.” Many philosophers interpreted Kant’s project to be epistemological in character rather than metaphysical, hence Heidegger’s debate with Cassirer at Davos on what should be a proper reading of Kant’s project. As is well known to Heidegger scholars, Heidegger’s Kantbuch further elucidated his disagreement with the neo-Kantians at the University of Marburg. Here I consider this difference in interpretation of Kant and argue that this difference is meaningful for an understanding of moral philosophy, in particular such as Heidegger might accept. The point is not to suggest that Heidegger was a Kantian in his moral philosophical perspective. On the contrary, there are elements of both Plato and Aristotle’s political thought that show up here and there in his various philosophical works. Rather, the point is to show that Heidegger’s contentions about Kant’s critical project spoke to a proper understanding of Kant’s categorical imperative in particular – a discussion one must take into account in view of the criticism that Heidegger’s thought excludes a “systematic” concern with “normative” ethics. Consider Laura Papish’s recent book, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform, wherein Papish aptly characterizes the more or less standard understanding of Kant’s account of ethics: Kant’s moral writings largely discuss the metaphysical underpinnings of morality, such as the possibility of moral motivation, how freedom and rationality relate to the ability to bind oneself to moral principles, and the need to specify the terms of the moral law independent of historical context, generalizations about human nature, or the specific desires or goals of any given individual. This allows Kant to purify his moral theory of any cultural, anthropological, or personal elements, and to develop an account of the moral law that would hold for any rational agent whatsoever.1

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In this way Kant advances a moral philosophy qua metaphysics of morals grounded in a critique of practical reason, understood as one of moral universalism. The critique of practical reason, however, cannot be understood properly except relative to Kant’s critique of pure reason, hence the need to understand the relation of the two. That means a proper understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy cannot find its ground in philosophical anthropology and thereby not in an appeal to human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as if Kant’s deontology expresses an “epistemological” project. This interpretive position is significant in view of Heidegger’s disagreement with the Marburg neo-Kantians (der Neukantionismus) following Hermann Cohen and including here Cassirer. This philosophical development is important in Heidegger’s motivation to write his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, itself written after Heidegger’s disputation with Cassirer in Davos. Heidegger’s engagement of Kant’s elucidation of practical reason is to be situated in terms of this philosophical development in Germany. Peter Uwe Hohendahl provides the relevant insights in what he calls the “crisis of neo-Kantianism” after World War I, a “turn” away from “the Kant orthodoxy,” but in relation to “the larger social field” in which this turn functioned.2 Thus, Hohendahl asks a pertinent question: “Can one argue that specific controversial appropriations of Kant left significant traces in the radical political transformations that occurred in 1918/19 and 1933?” An answer to that question certainly bears upon the present concern for Heidegger’s own philosophical engagement of Kant’s thinking, in its contribution to both metaphysics and moral philosophy. As Hohendahl reminds, in the early years of the twentieth century philosophers positioned themselves in relation to Kant by way of affirmation, critique, or polemic. From what we know in his writings, Heidegger did not fully affirm Kant’s critical philosophy, given its position within the history of metaphysics; and, that holds true for both Kant’s articulation of pure reason and practical reason conceived as a metaphysics of morals. Neither did Heidegger advance a polemic. Rather, he engaged Kant’s works critically in view of the grounding question he has asked since Being and Time, a question that remained in his perspective when he engaged Cassirer in Davos and when he published his Kantbuch. In Hohendahl’s judgment, Heidegger’s Being and Time “combined a rigorous reconstitution of fundamental ontology with a highly abstract response to the contemporary cultural and social crisis of the Weimar Republic” by being itself a Weltanschauung.3 That is a curious judgment, since Heidegger indeed understood his project to be one of fundamental ontology and was consistently critical of Weltanschauung as the proper basis for understanding the task of contemporary philosophy. Given his distinction of (1) “existential” (ontological) analysis of the structures of human Dasein and (2) “existentiell” (factical-ontical) concerns specific to individual

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potentiality-for-being, it is rather odd to think that Heidegger’s work in this text was at base, or even in its intended implications, such a response. Nonetheless, one can concur with Hohendahl in his claim that Heidegger “refused to grant neo-Kantianism the status of an improvement over the historical Kant,”4 a refusal that rests upon a basic difference in interpretation of Kant’s methodological intent (i.e., to lay the groundwork (a) for a metaphysics or (b) for a rationalist epistemology and the human sciences). That he interprets according to the former and not the latter intent means that Heidegger does not see Kant as somehow or other “accommodating the needs of a modernscientific industrial society.” Indeed, Heidegger’s debate with Cassirer presaged the interpretation he advanced in the Kantbuch. At Davos, Cassirer began his disputation with Heidegger by suggesting that he encounters neo-Kantianism in Heidegger.5 Heidegger disagrees, given his definition of neo-Kantianism as: that understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason that explains the part of pure reason of the transcendental dialectic as a theory of knowledge (epistemology) with relation to the natural sciences. This is an interpretation, Heidegger says, that was not something essential to Kant; and if it is inessential, then neo-Kantianism is not an improvement over Kant. Instead, Heidegger argues: “mais il a voulu manifester la problématique de la métaphysique, plus exactement de l’ontologie”6 (he, Kant, wanted to demonstrate the problem of metaphysics and concretely that of ontology), thus a fundamental critique of metaphysica generalis. Heidegger considers, therefore, that there is a problem of appearance (i.e., Kant’s understanding of “the phenomenal,” “le problème de l’apparence,”“das Problem des Scheins”) in the transcendental logic, viz., how the phenomenal pertains necessarily to human nature (“la nature de l’homme”). That has its implications for a metaphysics of morals such as Kant sought to elucidate. Whereas Cassirer wanted to demonstrate the concept of finitude that turns transcendent in Kant’s ethical writings [ethischen Schriften], Heidegger speaks of the need to think the concept of the categorical imperative in its intrinsic relation to a finite essence, thus specifically in relation to human Dasein: Cette relation intrinsèque qui reside dans l’impératif lui-même, ainsi que la finitude de l’éthique, ressortent clairement dans un passage où Kant parle de la raison de l’homme comme d’une instance autonome, c’est-à-dire d’une raison qui repose purement et simplement sur elle-même et ne peut s’evader dans un éternel, un absolu, qui ne peut du reste non plus s’évader dans le monde des choses. Cet entre-deux est l’essence de la raison pratique. Je crois qu’on se trompe dans l’interprétation de l’ethique kantienne, si l’on s’attache d’emblée à la direction vers laquelle s’oriente l’action humaine et si l’on néglige la fonction interne de la loi elle-même pour la Dasein. On ne peut élucider le problem de la finitude de l’être moral, si l’on 74

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ne pose pas la question: que signifie ici “loi” et comment la légalité elle-même est-elle un element constitutif du Dasein et de la personalite? Certes, on ne peut nier qu’il y ait quelque chose dans la loi qui va au-delà de la sensibilité. Mais la vraie question est: comment se preésente la structure interne du Dasein lui-même? Est’elle finie ou infinie?7 [This intrinsic relationship that resides in the imperative itself, as well as the finiteness of ethics, emerges clearly in a passage where Kant speaks of the reason of man as an autonomous entity, that is, to say of a reason which rests purely and simply on itself and can not escape into an eternal, an absolute, which can not escape to the world of things either. This in-between is the essence of practical reason. I believe that one is mistaken in the interpretation of Kantian ethics, if one immediately attaches oneself to the direction towards which human action is oriented and if one neglects the internal function of the law itself for Dasein. We can not solve the problem of the finiteness of the moral being, if we do not ask the question: what does “law” mean here and how is legality itself a constituent element of Dasein and personality? Certainly, we can not deny that there is something in the law that goes beyond sensibility. But the real question is: how does the internal structure of Dasein itself appear? Is it finite or infinite?] What Heidegger says here concerns how one situates human finitude relative to Kant’s discussion of the transcendental imagination and the internal possibility of ontological knowledge – this knowledge in general is necessary before all factical experience. But for Heidegger ontological knowledge relates to a given meaning of “truth” (Vernunft, vérité), to Dasein as “being-in-the-truth” (être-dans-la-vérité) who is at the same time a “beingin-the-nontruth” (être-dans-la-non-vérité). This means one cannot readily speak assuredly of truths as universally and eternally valid, as Cassirer and neo-Kantians do, in which case likewise one cannot speak assuredly of universally and eternally valid “moral” truths. Understood ontologically, truth is relative to the existence (ek-sistence) of Dasein, says Heidegger, being clear that he is not speaking ontically (i.e., as if to say that truth is merely what some individual thinks). The point is metaphysical: If Dasein does not exist, then there is no truth, in which case there is nothing given absolutely, although precisely as a being-in-the-truth Dasein is positioned to configure what/who he is temporally (not to say “eternally”), Dasein’s “horizon” one of presence but in a projection of the future (Künfttigheit) and in remembrance of the past (Gewesenheit) consistent with Dasein’s temporality and historicity. It is in this way that one encounters a transcendental ontological determination of time. To speak in this way of fundamental ontology is not to speak in terms of the neo-Kantian expression of philosophical anthropology, thus not a 75

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philosophy of culture and of human being understood in this sense. In his later work, The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant is clear that his disposition is ontological and not epistemological as the neo-Kantians interpreted him. Kant says at the beginning of the “Preface:” “The critique of practical reason was to be followed by a system, the metaphysics of morals, which falls into metaphysical and first principles of the doctrine of right [Recht] and metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of virtue.”8 Kant is keen on distinguishing “what is metaphysics” as such concerning these doctrines and “what is empirical application of rights [Rechtspraxis].” Philosophical anthropology works with a vision of the world, a “world-view” (Weltanchauung). It presupposes a concept of freedom; and yet, for one such as Cassirer, freedom is incomprehensible, but incomprehensible as a problem of theory and specifically a theory of knowledge. Heidegger does not interpret Kant in view of such a theory but rather in terms of the question of the possibility of ontology, including thereby the question that has become problematic for him even as it was evidently problematic for Kant: “What is man?” And, given this question, Heidegger is clear that he speaks of freedom in the sense of the freedom of internal transcendence of Dasein, of Dasein’s freedom for its finitude, and not in the sense of freedom of conscience, or spirit, or life. The point, then, is not to answer according to an empirical study of human being as a given object present-athand, but instead to reveal in its freedom the “negativity” of its being-there, and this without “pessimism” or “melancholy.” Philosophy thus pursues its task of returning to the human being in his destiny as it engages Kant’s question: “What is man?” For Kant, if one is to speak at all of a “moral anthropology” then it is only as “the counterpart of a metaphysics of morals,” having to do with “the subjective conditions in human nature that hinder people or help them in fulfilling the laws of a metaphysics of morals.”9 Heidegger thus engaged the “metaphysical” problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason in his Kantbuch. Taking note of Kant’s declaration (A800, B828)10 that by “the practical” Kant means “everything that is possible through freedom,” Heidegger argues (§30): However, insofar as the possibility of theoretical reason depends upon freedom, it is in itself, as theoretical, practical. But if finite reason is receptive even in its spontaneity and, therefore, arises from the transcendental imagination, then practical reason must also be based on the latter. However, the origin of practical reason cannot be “deduced” by means of such arguments, no matter how they may seem to be, but requires an explicit revelation through an elucidation of the essence of the “practical self.” The point is salient ontologically: an elucidation of the essence of the practical self is required. With that observation Heidegger situates the origin of 76

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practical rationality on the essence of the practical self. Yet, it is not immediately clear what that means, in which case he clarifies (quoting here at some length from §30, to lay out Heidegger’s attention to practical rationality as it is laid out in Kant’s Critique and elsewhere, and to appreciate the force of Heidegger’s interpretation in relation to his own project of Da-sein analysis):11 According to what has been said concerning the ego of pure apperception, the essence of the self lies in “self-consciousness.” However, the mode according to which the self exists and the form in which it exists in this “consciousness” is determined through the “Being” of the self. The self is always overt to itself, and this overtness is what it is only insofar as it co-determines the Being of the self. Now, in order to examine the practical self relative to the basis of its possibility, it is necessary first of all to delimit this self-consciousness which makes the self qua self possible. In considering this practical (i.e., moral self-consciousness), we must seek to determine the respect in which its essential structure refers back to the transcendental imagination as its origin. The moral ego, the self, the true essence of man, Kant also terms the person. In what does the essence of the personality of the person consist? “Personality itself . . . is the idea of the moral law and the respect which is inseparable from it.”12 Respect is “susceptibility” to the law, that which renders us capable of responding to it as a moral law. If respect constitutes the essence of the person as the moral self, then according to what has been said, it must be a mode of self-consciousness. In what way is it such? Can respect function as a mode of self-consciousness when, according to Kant’s own designation, it is a “feeling”? The feelings as effective states of pleasure or displeasure belong to sensibility. But since this last is not necessarily determined by bodily states, there remains open the possibility of a pure feeling, one which is not necessarily determined by the affections but “produced by the subject itself.”13 It is necessary, therefore, to examine the essence of feeling in general. The elucidation of this essence will enable us to decide in what way “feeling” in general, and therewith respect as a pure feeling, can constitute a mode of self-consciousness. We take note here of several prominent assertions. The self, insofar as it is the self of self-consciousness, is always “overt to itself.” It is open to its selfdisclosure in its ownmost (eigentlich) being, i.e. to a resolute disclosedness (Entschlossenheit). It understands itself as a “practical” self and not merely as a “theoretical” self. Its way of being is not merely that of a being having theoretical insight and living the theoretical life (bios theoretikē or vita 77

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contemplativa) but one engaged by the freedom expressed in its deeds. Thus, this practical self identifies this freedom as a “moral” self-consciousness, and in that moment of self-identification as a “person” – not the person that is merely a transcendental ego but the moral ego, the personalitas moralis. It is in the latter that, in Kant’s formulation, one finds the human essence properly disclosed. And, that essence discloses to the individual moral ego “the moral law” and the manner of obligation to the person that is represented by the words “respect” and (its corollary) “dignity.” One who understands this obligation finds him/herself as moral ego susceptible to the demands of the moral law. Significantly, one who is conscious of him/herself as a moral ego does so by way of “feeling” that does not derive from the faculty of “sensibility” and thus is not related to the desideratum of pleasure and the avoidance of displeasure. Obviously, then, this is not a manifestation of mere inclination, one’s actions therefore not motivated by mere subjective desire or interest. And, here Heidegger captures an important distinction, the idea of feeling as “pure” feeling. It seems, then, that the moral ego has the capacity or susceptibility for the moral law and respect only because s/he has this capacity for pure feeling. When he focuses on the significance of the moral law Heidegger understands what Kant clarifies in The Metaphysics of Morals: moral laws . . . hold as laws only insofar as they can be seen to have an a priori basis and to be necessary. Indeed, concepts and judgments about ourselves and our deeds and omissions signify nothing moral if what they contain can be learned merely from experience. And should anyone let himself be led astray into making something from that source into a moral principle, he would run the risk of the grossest and most pernicious errors.14 One who would do so could, by appeal to experience, represent to himself nothing but experience raised by induction to generality, a generality (secundum principia generalis, non univeralis) still so tenuous that everyone must be allowed countless exceptions in order to adapt his choice of a way of life to his particular inclinations and his susceptibility to satisfaction and still, in the end, to become prudent only from his own or others’ misfortunes. Thus, the point is not mere feeling that belongs to sensibility, to experience, but pure feeling that is given a priori. Heidegger turns, then, to what Kant says about this in his Critique of Practical Reason. Heidegger’s interpretation challenges the usual position according to which one finds here Kant’s normative approach to action:

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As such, respect is respect for . . . the moral law. It does not serve as a criterion by which to judge our actions, and it does not first appear after a moral act has been carried out perhaps as a way of adopting an attitude toward this act. On the contrary, respect for the moral law first constitutes the possibility of such an act. Respect for . . . is the way in which the law first becomes accessible to us. It follows, then, that this feeling of respect does not, as Kant expresses it, serve as a “foundation” of the law. The law is not what it is because we have a feeling of respect for it but conversely: this feeling of respect for the law and, hence, the way in which the law is made manifest through it, determines the manner in which the law is as such capable of affecting us.15 On Heidegger’s view here clearly the moral law, manifest through the pure feeling of respect, affects us by constituting the possibility of a moral act. Thus, he adds, Respect for the law is respect for oneself as that self which does not let itself be determined by self-conceit and self-love. Respect, in its specific mode of manifestation, has reference to the person. “Respect is always directed toward persons, never things” (italics added). Hence, when one discloses oneself as a moral ego, having the pure feeling of respect and motivated to action with reference to the moral law, then respect is first and foremost self-referential, to oneself as person, even as it is felt in reference to other persons. Central to this self-referentiality is the pertinent fact of moral obligation: “In having respect for the law,” Heidegger clarifies, “I submit to it. This specific feeling for . . . which is characteristic of respect is submission. In having respect for the law, I submit to myself” (italics added). This is the essence of autonomy, of the freedom that is practical freedom: that one submits to oneself as a moral ego, as one possessing this pure feeling of respect for the moral law and acting on that basis. One’s consciousness of self in this way is self-constituting: “In having respect for the law,” Heidegger adds, “I submit to myself, I am myself in this act of submitting to myself” (italics added). But that elicits a question: “What, or more precisely who, is the self manifested to myself in this feeling of respect?” An answer to this question accounts for oneself as the transcendental ego of pure reason as well as the moral ego of practical reason. Thus, says Heidegger, “In submitting to the law, I submit myself to myself qua pure reason. In submitting to myself, I raise myself to myself as a free being capable of self-determination.”16 Hence, in submission one is conscious of one’s freedom to act and most importantly of one’s freedom to “determine” the “who,” the “self” disclosed in the pure feeling of respect. One “reveals the

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ego in its ‘dignity’” thereby “unable to despise” oneself, unable to reject “the hero in his soul.” When one reveals oneself thus, Heidegger opines, respect is “the mode of being responsible for the Being of the self” (i.e., “the authentic being-as-self”). All who are familiar with Heidegger’s Being and Time will recall Heidegger’s concept of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) and his distinction of authentic self (eigentlich Selbst) and unauthentic self (uneigentlich Selbst), the former that way of being oneself that resolves upon itself to surrender its being governed by das Man-Selbst, the anonymous “they-self,” and to determine its own most proper possibilities of being that manifest its authentic selfhood. Related to his clarification of Kant’s terms here, then, Heidegger appreciates the significance of “respect” for understanding self-determination in a way that assumes one’s responsibility, one’s moral responsibility, for one’s authentic selfhood: “The projection of the self, in submission, on the total, fundamental possibility of authentic existence, this possibility being given by the law, is the essence of the self (i.e., practical reason).”“The very possibility of authentic selfhood, in short, depends on one’s submission to the moral law,” thereby on one’s appropriation of one’s capacity for practical reason. Hence, concerning the relation of the transcendental imagination and practical reason, Heidegger concludes: only by understanding that the origin of practical reason is to be found in the transcendental imagination are we able to understand why it is that in the feeling of respect neither the law nor the active self is objectively apprehended but that both are made manifest therein in a more original, unthematic and unobjective way as duty and action, and form the non-reflective, active mode of being-asself.17 What the foregoing interpretation discloses to us is that Heidegger understands the Kantian metaphysics of morals, Kant’s practical reason “at its origin,” as Kant clarifies the relation of transcendental ego to moral ego, theoretical or pure reason to practical reason, and the freedom of human conduct that can move in the direction of that manner of self-determination that is authentic selfhood. As he said subsequently: Through the laying of the foundation of metaphysics in general, Kant first acquired a clear insight into the character of the “universality” of ontologico-metaphysical knowledge. Now, for the first time, he had the means to undertake a critical exploration of the domain of “moral philosophy” and to replace the vague, empirical generality of the ethical doctrines of popular philosophy by those essential and primordial ontological analyses which alone are capable of securing a metaphysic of morals and the foundation thereof. 80

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In the struggle against the superficial and palliative empiricism of the reigning moral philosophy, Kant attached increasing importance to the distinction which he established between the a priori and the empirical. And since the essence of the subjectivity of the subject is to be found in personality, which last is identical with moral reason, the rationality of pure knowledge and of [moral] action must be affirmed.18 The earlier passage points to what Heidegger found relevant and what not – Kant’s metaphysics of morals superior in analysis to empirically grounded moral doctrines, the latter “superficial” and merely “palliative” relative to the task of clarifying the moral law and the moral ego, precisely because those who proceed empirically fail to discern that “metaphysics .  .  . belongs to ‘human nature,’”19 the transcendental ego then a being determined by morality (Sittlichkeit), but as duty (Sollen) that cannot be given in empirical sensibility. While he did not write an “ethics” qua moral philosophy, as a metaphysica specialis structurally related to and derivative from a metaphysica generalis, Heidegger nonetheless appreciated the significance of Kant’s discussion of normative ethics, engaging it as discussed earlier because he understood the importance of “repetition of a fundamental problem,” this repetition undertaken because one is to recognize that there are “primordial possibilities concealed in it.”20 The question that follows from that, however, is whether Heidegger sustained that appreciation so as to vindicate it as a guiding formulation (i.e., as a moral philosophy issuing a preemptory directive and set of rules for human conduct, or, instead, as philosophical insight into the foundation of metaphysics that is yet indeterminate, incomplete, and thus “indecisive.” In §38 of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger explains: “it is a matter first of all asking how in the laying of the foundation of metaphysics it is possible to bring man into question and why it is necessary to do so.”21 When one asks this question one becomes mindful of human finitude, asking as one does, as Kant asked, “What am I able to do?” But that question presupposes not mere ability but “duty,” the problematic of obligation that is essential to authentic selfhood. Thus, Heidegger clarifies: When an obligation is brought into question, the being who raises the question hesitates between a “yes” and a “no,” thus finding himself tormented by the question of what he should do. A being fundamentally concerned with his duty understands himself through a not-yet-having-fulfilled, so that he is driven to ask himself what he should do. This not-yet of the fulfillment of something still indeterminate reveals a being who, because his duty is his most intimate interest, is basically finite.22 81

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What one realizes thereby is that with one’s ability, one’s obligation, and one’s hope, one “holds oneself” in this finitude. But that means further that we must ask, as Heidegger does in §39, “The Problem of a Possible Determination of the Finitude of Man”: “How is the finitude in man to be examined?” Consider that the events of the twentieth century unfold over two world wars in which Germany’s “destiny” and that of Europe are implicated, manifesting in sundry ways this human finitude for all to see in an absence of what Western philosophy presumed to be absolute, eternal, and universal – even as Heidegger sees more fundamentally to speak of the consummation of the Western tradition in the “essential connection” of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Hegel. What do these historical events disclose of human imperfection, and thus of human finitude in relation to moral duty? Heidegger answers: even if we succeeded in adding together the sum of all human imperfections and “abstracting” what is common to them, we could understand thereby nothing of the essence of finitude. We would not be able to know in advance whether the imperfections of man enable us to obtain a direct insight into his finitude, or whether, on the contrary, these imperfections are merely a simple consequence of this finitude and, hence, are understandable only through it.23 One cannot fathom the foundation of metaphysics in general or the metaphysics of morals in specific without clarifying this question of human finitude. And, one cannot move forward in this task without understanding what Kant has or has not achieved through his Critiques, in contrast to the philosophy that precedes him: The Kantian laying of the foundation of metaphysics begins with a justification of metaphysica generalis as that which is at the basis of true metaphysics (i.e., metaphysica specialis). But metaphysica generalis – under the name “ontology” – is the fixed form of that which in antiquity, and finally with Aristotle, was established as the problem of prōtē philosophia, philosophizing in the true sense of the term.24 By clarifying practical reason in its relation to the transcendental imagination, Kant shows that it is not metaphysica generalis, not prōtē philosophia, that is the “true metaphysics,” but metaphysica specialis (i.e., the metaphysics of morals and all that it says about the moral ego, the moral law, and the imperatives of practical reason. That is the genuine problem of practical reason for the present that Heidegger discerns to be yet thought-provoking for our time. 82

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Finding Kant’s metaphysics of morals important yet incomplete and indecisive about basic questions in relation to human finitude, one may not therefore readily appropriate the Kantian deontology, thus the categorical imperative in any of its formulations as an objectively, absolutely, universally true preemptory directive, even in 1930 when Heidegger had to make his own choices both political and moral. Hence, it behooves us to reflect somewhat on Heidegger’s political pronouncements of the time with his remarks on Kant in the foreground of our analysis. One may argue reasonably that Heidegger tried to work out in his thought what was his own (i.e., authentic) moral duty, even while we may acknowledge that in the post-WWII period he tried “to minimize the extent of his support for Nazism,” as Günter Figal has opined, even as Figal concedes that “the philosophy of the twentieth century is unthinkable without him.”25 It may be granted, further, as Figal asserts, that “even when [Heidegger] distances himself from Nazism he does so only from a philosophical, not a moral or political, point of view.” But the fact that Heidegger does so philosophically is entirely salient to any effort to interpret how he understood both his moral and political responsibility in his “situation” of decision. Figal is correct to assert that Heidegger tried “to break away” from National Socialism “in the second half of the 1930s” (i.e., post-Rectorate), because Heidegger saw it as “an expression of the modernity that he considered fatal.” This would include the moral philosophy of that period, including here both utilitarianism and deontology, even as Heidegger was much more receptive of Kant’s efforts to clarify practical reason. In particular, Figal is entirely correct to say that Heidegger’s post-Rectorate relation to National Socialism is to be understood in the context of his critique of “the technical-scientific rationality of modernity” (razionalità tecnico-scientifica della modernità), even as one may be critical of Heidegger’s method insofar as his early analytical framework “leaves no room for political and moral distinctions.” One may concur with Figal further that, faced with Heidegger’s remarks that are anti-Semitic “we must not hide ourselves” but instead must “ask ourselves questions” to understand their context, this remaining “a task we have before us.” Important to all critical views and even to committed Heideggerian apologists, Figal opines, “For me it is an open question how exactly Heidegger’s anti-Semitic phrases should be interpreted, even with respect to his critique of modernity,” that indeed studying Heidegger is perhaps essential to understand “the pathologies of the twentieth century.” This problem of understanding requires that one assess Heidegger’s thoughts, words, and deeds in view of the claim that Heidegger’s post-Rectorate thinking manifests his effort to be authentic and resolute, even as one may say as a reasonable judgment, following Charles Bambach, that Heidegger’s “break with National Socialism was less the result of a courageous resoluteness than the human, all too human sense of disappointment at not being appreciated 83

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for his philosophical genius.”26 This disappointment, however, points to Heidegger’s determinate effort to counsel the Nazi ideologues according to his vision of National Socialism. Indubitably, Heidegger hoped for a “new rooted unity” of the German people in their state, believing they could commit themselves “to act in accordance with their destiny” – but “destiny” such as he understood this “philosophically” and not ideologically. His could not and would not be rooted in the so-called “Nazi conscience,” and this is an important point of differentiation as one tries to make sense of Heidegger’s understanding of National Socialism contrasted to “vulgar Nazism.” Consider, for example, that historian Claudia Koonz, exploring the period of 1933–1939 in Germany, characterized as “the normal years” of the Third Reich, argues that, “The Nazi conscience” is not an oxymoron. Although it may be repugnant to conceive of mass murderers acting in accordance with an ethos that they believed vindicated their crimes, the historical record of the Third Reich suggests that indeed this was the case. The popularizers of anti-Semitism and the planners of genocide followed a coherent set of severe ethical maxims derived from broad philosophical concepts. As modern secularists, they denied the existence of either a divinely inspired moral law or an innate ethical imperative. Because they believed that concepts of virtue and vice had evolved according to the needs of particular ethnic communities, they denied the existence of universal moral values and instead promoted moral maxims they saw as appropriate to their Aryan community. Unlike the early twentieth-century moral philosophers who saw cultural relativism as an instrument for tolerance, Nazi theorists drew the opposite conclusion. Assuming that cultural diversity breeds antagonism, they asserted the superiority of their own communitarian values above all others.27 Thus, adherents to the NDSP could accept what Koonz calls “an ethnic conscience,” expressed in Hitler’s remarks of 08 October 1935: I view myself as the most independent of men . . . obligated to no one, subordinate to no one, indebted to no one – instead answerable only to my own conscience. And this conscience has but one single commander – our Volk! This view of conscience, Koonz reminds, means that, “The universe of moral obligation, far from being universal, is bounded by community.”28 But Hitler’s sense of conscience was total and became totalitarian in due course. Heidegger thus was faced with a philosophical quandary as he understood, on the one hand, the Kantian appeal to the universal moral law while also, 84

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on the other hand, recognizing the National Socialist appeal to the moral obligation that binds a community and a people in what Koonz calls an “ethnic fundamentalism” that contrasts to the Kantian appeal of moral universalism. This ethnic fundamentalism manifest “the deeply anti-liberal collectivism that was the hallmark of public culture in the Third Reich,”29 this anti-liberal sentiment of course shared by Heidegger. If he were to “lead” those who believed themselves chosen to lead consistent with the Führerprinzip, Heidegger discerned what was needed: “The university must again become an educational force that draws on knowledge to educate the State’s leaders to knowledge.”30 Indeed, Heidegger asserted, to accomplish this it would not suffice “to take the new situation (dem Neuen) into account by painting everything with a touch of political color,” especially since, “All the talk about ‘politics’ is nonsense as well, for it does nothing to put an end to the old routine way of doing and thinking about things (dem alten Schlendrian).”31 As always, Heidegger insisted on a confrontation with the present reality “with full inner commitment to the future,” and this by attending to “the fundamental questions of Wissenschaft,” this as part of a “decision” having “epochal importance.”32 These statements are not ideological but philosophical according to Heidegger’s more fundamental insights into German and European destiny as he conceived it as a manifestation of Seinsgeschichte. Thus, Heidegger pitted himself against the merely ideological Nazis for a “battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university (ein Kampf um die Gestalt des Lehrers und des Führers an der Universität).”33 This he took to be an obligation (thus a “duty”): “You are obliged to know and act together in the creation of the future university (hohe Schule) of the German spirit.” In the light of this obligation, spoken in terms of his commitment to a “spiritual” interpretation of possibilities of being that he discerned (rightly or wrongly) in the National Socialist movement, one must ask: Do we really understand what Heidegger meant – “philosophically,” not politically or morally – when he said, “The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law,” and this in terms of his reading of both Kant and Hegel on the relation of “State” and “people”? Was this statement factically, existentielly, false? Taking it to be true philosophically (according to Heidegger’s sense of a “spiritual National Socialism”), in that sense, the assertion calls for both “decision” (Entscheidung) and “responsibility” in action. Hence, in his speech dated 10 November 1933, Heidegger stated that the German people were faced with “the highest free decision of all: whether it – the entire people – wants its own existence (Dasein) or whether it does not want it.”34 One must ask: Is it clear to us even today how Heidegger understood these concepts philosophically, not politically? This is yet to be clarified despite abundant negative critique of Heidegger’s political pronouncements. Speaking philosophically despite the political context of his remarks, leading the university community, qua philosopher Heidegger asserted: “This ultimate 85

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decision reaches to the outermost limit of our people’s existence. And what is this limit? It consists in the most basic demand of all Being (Sein), that it preserve and save its own essence.”35 In trying to lead Hitler, Heidegger “counseled” – assuming (falsely, it turned out) that Hitler would heed his counsel – that if Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations it should not be out of “ambition,” or “desire for glory,” or “blind obstinacy,” or “hunger for power,” but rather from a “clear will to unconditional self-responsibility in enduring and mastering the fate of our people.” Such was his counsel as he sought to move Hitler away from the political justification that would accept (and thereby manifest) ambition, desire for glory, blind obstinacy, and hunger for power. Heidegger remarked that this was not to be construed negatively as “turning away from the community of nations,” in which case Heidegger did not value an ideal of international “universalist” ethics and politics or the post-WWI international legal order initiated by the League. To speak of an unconditional demand for self-responsibility is no different “politically” from an appeal to the principle of sovereignty that is at the center of the logic of statecraft and Realpolitik, even as one must engage the philosophical ground of Heidegger’s appeal that allows for a “true community of nations” (Völkergemeinschaft) having “self-reliant” states.36 Consistent with this view, Heidegger counseled, even though Hitler and the principal ideologues of the movement ignored his counsel: “Our will to national (völkisch) self-responsibility desires that each people find and preserve the greatness and truth of its destiny (Bestimmung).” This discovery and preservation of national self-responsibility Heidegger understood to be one of “ethniccultural (volkhaft) unity.” He claimed this would install a will that is “the highest guarantee of security among peoples,” without a “reversion into barbarism” and without “the eruption of lawlessness.”37 This self-responsible existence Heidegger interpreted in terms of “questioning about the essence of Being” that was “returning” at the end of philosophy. Thus, Heidegger spoke in anticipation: If the will to self-responsibility becomes the law that governs the coexistence of nations, then each people can and must be the master who instructs every other people in the richness and strength of all the great deeds and works of human Being (Sein).38 Is such counsel philosophically, politically, or morally objectionable? On what grounds of practical rationality would this objection be lodged? It is consistent with twentieth-century Realpolitik and would be problematic, of course, if one’s political philosophy sought to overcome the logic of statecraft and its central principle of state/popular sovereignty to privilege a more universalist conception of international law and morality such as Kant’s thought envisioned in the quest for perpetual peace. Notwithstanding, these 86

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various “political”/“philosophical” pronouncements from the time of his Rectorate disclose indubitably that Heidegger spoke “as if” he were leading the Nazis into a proper knowledge of their individual fates and collective destiny, and this as part of the spiritual destiny of Europe itself. In doing so, he subjected himself to the “will” of Hitler even as he worked in his thinking, words, and deeds to redefine for the Nazi ideologues what he conceived to be the “authentic knowledge” (eigentliche Wissen) of the National Socialist revolution. As he later admitted, he failed in this task. This context of connected philosophical and political/moral outlook cannot be ignored in making moral judgments about Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism. Obviously, one may argue reasonably that the prohibition against murder is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also to Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, and more recent articulations of human rights ethics. One may argue that, therefore, Heidegger “ought” to have acted in the 1940s expressly to condemn the Nazi acts of murder and war that did not let other people discover and preserve their selfresponsibility and that he “ought” to have condemned the Nazi genocide of the Jews in particular. This prohibition can be appropriated as one’s “duty,” out of “knowledge” of one’s duty, Heidegger having that same duty, bearing in mind that all too many can, do, and will yet murder out of ignorance, out of sheer inclination to malice, or because of wickedness of character. Yet, there is a problem here with merely appropriating Kant’s imperative, whatever other moral philosophy one may engage. Despite his devotion to Christianity as he understood and experienced it in his day, Kant asserted, problematically for one intent on appropriating his moral philosophy: “The euthanasia of Judaism is the pure moral religion.”39 That statement is by no means simply to be accepted as true and therefore as reasonably normative guidance about the “moral” relation of German Christians to German Jews or Jews anywhere in the diaspora. One must ask: How and why is one to countenance “euthanasia” of Judaism? What does Kant mean here? Kant continues in his remarks that this possibility of “pure moral religion” requires that Judaism be “freed from all the ancient statutory teachings, some of which were bound to be retained in Christianity (as a messianic faith). But this division of sects, too, must disappear in time, leading, at least in spirit, to what we call the conclusion of the great drama of religious change on earth (the restoration of all things), when there will be only one shepherd and one flock.” In short, Kant privileges Christianity over Judaism, with a view to an eschatologically defined drama in history, and this as a matter of moral progress in contrast to Jewish “statutory belief.” He allowed for “freedom” of religious belief in the German State, “provided,” however, that “the principle underlying it is of such a nature as to bring with it universal agreement on the essential maxims of belief, as the concept of religion requires, and to distinguish this agreement from conflicts arising from its non-essentials.”40 87

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What is essential to religion, Kant held, is “the moral improvement of men.” This improvement depends on the veracity of the moral law, duty being its own incentive to performance according to that law. Judaism does not have this incentive, Kant argues, since a lawgiving that is juridical provides otherwise (i.e., the incentive is “drawn from pathological determining grounds of choice, inclinations, and aversions, and among these, from aversions); for it is a lawgiving, which constrains, not an allurement, which invites.”41 Hence, Kant adds, “ethical lawgiving cannot be external (not even external lawgiving of a divine will).”Thus, concerning Judaism, Kant opined, Without dreaming of a conversion of all Jews (to Christianity in the sense of a messianic faith), we can consider it possible even in their case if, as is now happening, purified religious concepts awaken among them and [they] throw off the garb of the ancient cult, which now serves no purpose and even suppresses any true religious attitude. As Sidney Axinn observes, Kant “holds that there is really but one religion, and various faiths,” while also claiming that Judaism in its history was in its origin [eine Staatsverfassung] “merely a political entity”42 (although he allows that the Jewish people had “a moral period” [in seiner gesitteten Epoche] in their history) and “not essentially religious” insofar as: 1

2 3

“its commands relate merely to external acts and lay no requirements ‘upon the moral disposition’”; that “The commands are directed to nothing but outer observance,” although allowing for the Decalogue itself as a set of “ethical commands”; that “Judaism limits reward and punishment to this world”; and the Jewish “concept of a chosen people . . . [shows] hatred toward all other peoples, and therefore evoked the enmity of all.”43 Further, the Jewish interpretation of Abraham’s binding of Isaac as a sign of the patriarch’s righteousness is, to Kant, mistaken: “Abraham’s decision to prepare to slaughter his son at the apparent command of God was an immoral decision.”44

For Kant, practicing confessant Jews who follow the 613 commandments of the Torah, who follow the oral law (halacha) of rabbinic tradition, are yet in slumber, not awakened – not “enlightened” – to the authority of autonomous reason, bound as they are by the divine law given in those commandments, decrees, and judgments, all of which are not part of a true religious attitude. Jews may yet possibly throw off the incubus of this religious tutelage, even to the point of their conversion to Christianity, but if and only if they adopt a truly religious attitude that shifts individual Jewish action from one that is heteronomous to one that is autonomous as is proper to 88

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a rational being capable of formulating moral imperatives. That is Kant’s opinion of Judaism. For Kant reason is the power to judge autonomously, an individual enlightened when his or her understanding is no longer under the tutelage of another’s power (i.e., his or her actions no longer heteronomously directed). Kant accepts religion “based on inner laws that can be developed from every man’s own reason,” in which case religion so understood “can never be based on decrees (no matter their source),”45 and that includes Judaism. Hence, what is represented as a divine command is to be accepted if and only if it is not merely consonant with the “inner law” of a rational being, but that it in fact “issues from” a person’s own reason, the person’s understanding certifying the concept and the law in its universality and not in its particularity. Merely to accept the divine commands heteronomously is to accept “juridical” law (legality) and not “moral” law (morality). Judaism, in Kant’s view, counts as a “particular” faith in contrast to a pure religion that in concept is “universal.”46 What matters is religion within the limits of “reason alone” (thus, not “revelation”), pure religion grounded in pure concepts, thus not in commands (imperatives) that are presented to have a source other than reason and its inner law. Thus, in his later period of writing, Kant “presents Judaism as a morally empty shell that the true moral religion must entirely discard.”47 Clearly, from Kant’s understanding, the categorical imperative and the law of humanity apply to Germans as rational beings even as they apply necessarily to Jews as rational beings. And, the moral law grounded in these universal imperatives applied to Hitler, the Nazis, and Heidegger himself even as one would say these imperatives applied to the Jewish forefathers such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were applicable even when the divine law was not explicitly delivered as a divine revelation in an explicit set of commands (e.g., when delivered to Moses). If morality, in Kant’s view, constitutes an ethical commonwealth, a “kingdom of ends,” the State so constituted must itself legislate juridically in recognition of the moral autonomy of its citizenry. That legislative intent holds true for Germans and for Jews. Yet, Kant clearly has some conditional thoughts when one considers Judaism in contrast to Christianity. Kant understands Judaism in its historical representation to establish a people subject to “civil” statutes having a political particularity but not a moral determination. Submission to the divine will merely because one “believes” this will to be divine, merely because one “believes” in the divine presence, is precisely that: merely belief, and not knowledge that is in the category of Kant’s project to delimit knowledge qua possible experience. Practical rationality, the delimitation of universally valid moral imperatives, privileges autonomy, not heteronomy. A Jew who submits to the authority of divine law issued as a matter of revelation does so at the expense of the authority of pure reason and practical reason from within which a rational being is 89

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to disclose and appropriate the moral law as a moral ego and then act in conformity to that law. Kant argues: yet since the spiritual natures of the subjects of this government [Jewish theocracy] remained responsive to no incentives other than the goods of this world; since consequently they chose to be ruled only by rewards and punishment in this life; and since, therefore, they were suited only for such laws as were partly prescriptive of burdensome ceremonies and observances, and partly ethical, but all purely civil, in that external compulsion characterized the law and the inner essence of a moral disposition was not considered in the least. This is the basic point of disputation – whether Jewish Torah-observance is merely a matter of ritual practice and sanctification that is “external” or a matter of “intrinsically” moral motivation. For Kant, Jewish theocracy possesses a “political” concept of the coming “messiah” in the “kingdom of David” – God thus conceived as “political regent” – but this in contrast to Christianity ostensibly possessing a “moral” concept, represented in the gospel tradition with its “abolition of the civil statutes, decrees, and ordinances” while accepting the Decalogue as the only universally valid, thus morally valid, “law” to be appropriated by a rational being in and for existence in a “kingdom of ends.” Even political theorist Sheldon Wolin writes in a way such as to question the contribution of Judaism to the politics of Europe: For the religious experience of the Jews had been strongly colored by political elements. . . . The terms of the covenant between Jahweh and his chosen people had often been interpreted as promising the triumph of the [Jewish] nation, the establishment of a political kingdom that would allow the Jews to rule the rest of the world. The messiah-figure, in turn, appeared not so much as an agent of redemption as the restorer of the Davidic kingdom.48 Reading this passage, Yoram Hazony infers: Thus according to Professor Wolin, a thousand years of Jewish political thought prior to the advent of Christianity can be effectively nutshelled as the belief that the Jews should seek ultimate political power with the aim of establishing their rule over the entire planet.49 Such a view is consonant with Nazi ideology in its critique of world Jewry. As Bendersky comments, “Christianity and Judaism were intertwined as the fundamental ethical premises of Western civilization.” But, “It was this culture – Western culture in its entirety [as incorporating “Jewish” aims] – that 90

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the Nazis sought to destroy in the name of a barbaric, ancient, pagan tribalism,” in which case “ingrained prejudices against Jews made Christians complicit in the destruction of their own cherished ideals and government through the surreptitious Nazi strategy.”50 What, then, is a reasonable representation of Jewish history, Judaism as religion, the Jewish people as a political people if not as a morally grounded people, and so on? All these questions seem to go begging even as one reads Kant in his later discussion of the metaphysics of morals and the conflict of the faculties in the university. Hence, those who would appeal to Kantian deontology as a source of moral imperative pertinent to resolution of moral dilemmas of the twentieth century at the time of the rise of National Socialism would have to confront Kant’s perspective summarized earlier as it pertains to Judaism and as it would have been understood by many German intellectuals, including Heidegger, who thereby reasonably and understandably considered Kant’s metaphysics of morals incomplete and “indecisive.” It will not do, then, to take Kantian deontology as a preemptory directive and evaluate Heidegger’s conduct thereby until Kant’s own dismissal of Judaism is confronted for its significance in the relation of German and Jew in the early twentieth century. To impute to Heidegger moral wrong for the Nazi genocide is to judge his actions as actions that (a) were “subject” to explicitly stated laws (practical, universal, positive) and (b) were such that Heidegger “failed” to act in conformity with those laws and was, therefore, morally and/or legally personally “culpable” (i.e., culpable as the moral agent that he was) and not judged to be guilty (merely) by reason of his association with the NDSP. That means one must here distinguish “proximate” from “remote” causality and then judge according to proximate causality, not some tacit and equivocal or ambiguous remote causality – for example, in judging Heidegger’s action of joining the National Socialist Party “in 1933” to have been morally wrong and making him culpable of the crime of genocide that ensued “in the 1940s” or any number of murders of Jews that occurred anywhere at any time between 1933 and 1945 on German soil or in the territories where one finds the extermination camps. What the foregoing review means is that we today have yet to consider what moral philosophy we find adequate to judge the event of the Nazi genocide, recognizing that our assessment may ever be merely provisional and by no means definitive amidst the “agon” of contention about concepts of justice and concepts of rationality.

Notes 1 Laura Papish, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 2 Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “The Crisis of Neo-Kantianism and the Reassessment of Kant after World War I: Preliminary Remark,” The Philosophical Forum,

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3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

2010, pp.  17–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9191.2009.00346.x, accessed on 05 June 2018. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. “Colloque Cassirer-Heidegger” (Davos, printemps 1929), Redaction: Dr. O.F. Bollnow, Dr. J. Ritter, trans. Pierre Aubenque, pp. 29–51. Cassirer says: “Je dois avouer que j’ai trouvé ici en Heidegger un neo-kantien que je ne supposais certes pas en lui.” “Colloque Cassirer-Heidegger,” p. 29. Ibid., p. 34. Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, eds., Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 365. Ibid., p. 372. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 632. Citing here Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J.S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 162–163. Heidegger cites here Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. See translation by T.M. Greene and H. Hudson (Chicago: Open Court, 1934), p. 22f. Heidegger here cites Kant’s Fundamental Principles of Morals. See translation by T. Abbot (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 19. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” p. 370. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 164. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 228. Interview with Tonia Mastrobuoni, “Günter Figal, ‘Disgustose e terribili,’” La Stampa, 26 June 2019. Charles Bambach, “Review of Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 1933– 1934, ed. & trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomberg, 2013),” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 05 June 2014. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 1. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 13. William S. Lewis, “Martin Heidegger: Political Texts, 1933–1934,” New German Critique, No. 45, Autumn 1988, pp. 96–114, at pp. 99 & 100. Ibid., p. 100, italics added. Ibid., italics added. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 103–104. Ibid., pp. 104 & 106. Ibid., p. 107.

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39 Immanuel Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M.J. Gregor (New York: Albaris, 1979), p. 95. 40 Ibid., p. 93. 41 Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” p. 383. 42 This interpretive position is not without its historical validity. E.g., see here Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Y. Lotan (London: Verso, 2009); Yoram Hozony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 43 Sidney Axinn, “Kant on Judaism,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 59, No. 1, July 1968, pp. 9–23, at pp. 9–10. See also, Susan Meld Shell, “Kant and the Jewish Question,” Hebraic Political Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 101–136. 44 Axinn, “Kant on Judaism,” p. 10. Axinn interprets here (p. 15) that even though there were no specific divine commandments given until the time of Moses, nonetheless, for Kant “the categorical imperative existed for Abraham, if he was human.” 45 Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, p. 61. 46 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), pp. 98–99. 47 Shell, “Kant and the Jewish Question,” p. 102. 48 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: A Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 97. 49 Yoram Hazony, “Judaism and the Modern State,” Azure, 2005, pp.  33–51, www.yoramhazony.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/judaism_and_the_modren_ state_-az21_hazony_yoram.pdf, accessed on 11 June 2018. 50 Joseph W. Bendersky, “Dissension in the Face of the Holocaust: The 1941 American Debate over Antisemitism,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 85–116, at pp. 93–94.

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Heidegger’s thinking never is far from his reading of Nietzsche and Hegel as consummating the tradition of Western metaphysics, hence his focus on that tradition as a history of being. Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that Heidegger’s philosophical self-understanding depends significantly on his critique of Hegel and German idealism, as this philosophy was articulated in his day. In his Contributions to Philosophy he asked concerning the “significance” of the nineteenth century in the thought of Friedrich Hölderlin, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in addition to that of Hegel: “What hidden history of the much invoked nineteenth century happened here? What motivating principle of those who belong to the future is being readied here?” These questions point to the continuing hermeneutical problem of “reading” such thinkers, especially if the argument is that they somehow also “erred” in their thinking. Similarly, one may argue that it would be problematic to say that Heidegger “erred” in his thinking about National Socialism, understood relative to the history of metaphysics qua history of European humanity as he construed it. It would be a mistake to read Heidegger’s corpus without having some (albeit incomplete and interpretively challenging) clarity about how he conceived “the problem of historical meaning,” as Jeffrey A. Barash put it, and without situating this problematique in the philosophical developments of the nineteenth century, viz., German idealism’s confrontation with Enlightenment thought that includes Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s philosophy. As is well known, Hegel, as Barash writes, took issue with Kant (e.g., the Critique of Pure Reason): He challenged Kant’s stipulation that consciousness, while providing a universal and necessary intuitive, conceptual, and rational structure to experience, nonetheless could not penetrate the appearances it gave to things in themselves and provide certain knowledge of the ultimate metaphysical foundations underlying those appearances.1

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Heidegger understood this Hegelian critique to be significant for a proper conception of human historicity situated in the history of Being, including here Hegel’s perspective articulated in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. According to these lectures, Hegel described the concrete embodiment of the interrelated spheres of philosophy, political history, national constitutions, art, and religion in the life of a people: “It is one determinate essence or character that penetrates all aspects and represents itself in the political and in the other, as in diverse elements; it is one condition that coheres [sich zusammenhängt] in all of its parts and whose different aspects, as manifold and contingent as they might look and as much as they might seem to contradict one another, contain nothing heterogeneous in their foundation.”2 All of this had to be thought through as part of the basic “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” and the intermediate distorting influence of Christian dogma (i.e., the patristic tradition of Augustine and Aquinas and later scholastic thought such as that of Francisco Suarez and Duns Scotus) that is manifest historically in the transition from the “implicit inception” in the thought of the pre-Socratics (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander)3 to the “explicit beginning” in the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, and onward to early and later philosophical modernity (the tension between empiricism and rationalism and the subsequent development of the natural and social sciences). Thus, Heidegger interpreted Hegel’s thought “essentially,” stating in his “Hegel and the Greeks,” in answer to the question, “How does Hegel present the philosophy of the Greeks within the horizon of his philosophy?”: something else is at stake (auf dem Spiel) [“something other is in play”]. With the name “the Greeks” we are thinking of [back to] the commencement [beginning] of philosophy; with the name “Hegel” [we think] of its completion. Hegel himself understands his philosophy according to this determination [in such a manner].4 Learning from Hegel – but attempting an advance beyond his “completion” towards the task of an essential thinking – Heidegger reminds that, for Hegel history as such is determined in such a manner that it must be fundamentally philosophical. . . . The history of philosophy is no mere succession of diverse opinions and doctrines that without connection5 supplant one another. . . . No philosophy prior to Hegel’s had acquired such a fundamental grounding of philosophy,

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enabling and requiring philosophizing itself to simultaneously move within its history and be in this movement philosophy itself.6 Heidegger understood his own task thereby posited by his questions: Should we now take Hegel’s determination of the purpose of philosophy as truth as a clue for reflecting on the matter of thought? Presumably: yes. . . . So we ask first of all: to what extent must the history of philosophy as history be in its fundamental traits philosophical? What does philosophical mean here? What does history mean here? Heidegger anticipates and responds to the critique of Hegel’s conception of his place in the history of the Western tradition as one of “error”: One is astonished at Hegel’s statement on the completion of philosophy [understood as the completion of the “system of speculative dialectics”]. One considers it presumptuous and descries it as an error that has long since been refuted by history. Because after Hegel’s time there has been philosophy, and there still is. But the statement on the completion of philosophy does not say that philosophy is at an end in the sense of a cessation and a breaking off. Rather the completion provides precisely for the first time the possibility of diverse transformations even to its simplest expressions: the brutal turnaround and the massive opposition. Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest Hegelians. They are so despite themselves. The completion of philosophy is not its end [in the sense of cessation], nor does it consist uniquely in the system of speculative idealism. The completion is only as the whole course of the history of philosophy, a course in which its inception belongs just as essentially as its completion: Hegel and the Greeks.7 Heidegger adds that there are those who realize that Hegel explains the Greek fundamental words for being from a perspective of modern philosophy and that “we are tempted to judge that interpretation as incorrect.” However, he reminds: But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history. Prior to a decision as to the historical correctness of the representation it is therefore necessary to consider if and how history is experienced, from whence to determine its fundamental traits.

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Heidegger comments elsewhere concerning his interpretation of Hegel and German Idealism generally that when “truth” is construed as “the certainty that unfolds into an unconditioned trust in spirit,” then: Beings are completely misplaced into objectness, which is by no means overcome in being “sublated”; on the contrary. . . . Machination as the basic character of beingness now takes the shape of the subject-object-dialectic, which, as absolute, plays out and arranges together all possibilities of all familiar domains of beings. Here once again the continuous securing against all uncertainty is attempted . . . which avoids the truth of be-ing without knowing it. There is no bridge from here to the other beginning. But we must know this thinking of German Idealism, because it leads the machinational power of beingness to the utmost, unconditioned unfolding (raises the conditionedness of the ego cogito to the unconditioned) and prepares the end.8 Heidegger does not judge this to be “error” in thinking. It is what it is as part of late modernity’s consummation of the metaphysical tradition that installed the ego cogito as the ground of truth conceived as certainty. One must know what this idealism implies, as he says, but that is not to construe it as an error as one seeks to move beyond it in a more originary thinking. Rather, we must ask, as he asked concerning the significance of the nineteenth century in the thought of Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche: “What hidden history of the much invoked nineteenth century happened here? What motivating principle of those who belong to the future is being readied here?”9 The same counsel against judging Hegel to be in error, while thinking the philosophical significance of the nineteenth century, applies to those who are “tempted” to – and in fact “do” – judge Heidegger to be in error in his attempt to think the truth (a-letheia, “un-concealment”) of the history of Being/Beyng (Sein/Seyn), Seynsgeschichte. Heidegger’s thought, seen as a continuing movement that is deconstructive and arché-ological in its return to the beginning (Anfäng) cautions us about the inadequacy of the representational language of the metaphysical tradition, but also of the failure (Versagen) of language in the attempt to disclose what is ongoing in the interplay of concealment and unconcealment. These are no mere human failures; they are manifestations of the play of concealment and unconcealment in the history of the tradition. Heidegger’s concern for historical meaning in reflection on Hegel’s “completion” moved him likewise beyond the more essentialist methodological commitment of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, thus to appreciate Hegel’s sense of the “world-historical” above and beyond both “empirical,”

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“naturalistic,” and “transcendental” conceptions of reality, including how these apply to a conceptual determination of history. Thus, in the early period of National Socialism, and in the self-presentation of Hitler as the “apparent” – a word one must think always in relation to “the semblant” – “essential” personality of this new German ideology, Heidegger could (rightly or wrongly) construe Hitler much as his former teacher and neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert construed Napoleon. As Barash reminds, For Rickert, the attempt to comprehend historical personalities did not mean the application of the same sort of evaluative judgments that the personalities themselves employed.  .  .  . Historians attempted to understand the past, not by taking sides for or against historical personages and the events they produced, but only by attempting to understand their theoretical sense for history, in a way that might be recognized objectively by each historian. Thus they asked, not whether Napoleon’s actions exercised a beneficent or deleterious effect for Europe, but how his actions shaped the direction of European history.10 Thus, similarly, for Heidegger, the question at issue in terms of the political and philosophical developments in Germany of the 1930s was not whether Hitler represented something beneficent or deleterious, but instead what his actions portended for the direction of European history, and how Germany was itself thereby situated in this direction of European history – assuming Hitler to be a “world-historical” figure in the same sense as Napoleon, Hitler having what Rickert would call an “essentially historical individuality,” and this within the context of “the structures of signification” (Sinngebilde) that historians seek to clarify in theoretical insight.11 Barash explains: Rickert faced the problem of how . . . the historian could systematize empirical particularity in the form of valid representations. To solve this problem Rickert, following the lead of Windelband, brought to bear his notion of values. Historical understanding constructed its concepts amid an infinity of possible facts, not by employing laws, but by focusing on individual unities – both persons and objects – in view of what it judged to be their unique historical value. . . . Through values, Rickert believed that historically relevant individuality could be revealed and made coherent in the field of culture. . . . [Napoleon’s] personality, unfathomable in the infinity of his real characteristics, became understandable in relation to a given set of values involving certain people, objects, and events; it was the actualization of these values that we had to study to comprehend the historical sense of Napoleon. 98

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Yet, Heidegger had a different sense of essential history, constantly linked to Greek thought and essential to human decision relative to the history of Being. As Eugen Fink put it at the outset of the Heraclitus Seminar of 1966/1967, “From Martin Heidegger’s dialogue with the Greeks, in many of his writings, we can learn how the furthest becomes near and the most familiar becomes strange, and how we remain restless.”12 Thus, in his engagement of Friedrich Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom, Heidegger rejects both “historicist” and “actualist” conceptions of human freedom relative to understanding of history, thus: Historicism brings the past to the present and explains it in terms of what lies further back in the past to find something to hold on to and counts on escapes from the present. It wants “restoration” or else “eschatology.” Actualism is the reverse of historicism. Through it relativism is seemingly overcome. It calculates the present value of the past. The “future” is the prolonged “present” whose plans are to be guaranteed by calculability. The relation of the “future” changes nothing if it is only the prolongation of the present in a forward decision and is that present in its rigidification. The calculating game between origin and future turns out to be servitude to the uncomprehended present.13 Here, with these distinctions and with this stark emphasis on historians and philosophers unwittingly gathered in this servitude to “the uncomprehended present,” Heidegger presupposes a more basic conceptual distinction between “historiology” (Historie) and “history” (Geschichte): The word Historie (historein) means to explore and make visible, and therefore names a kind of representing. In contrast, the word Geschichte means that which takes its course inasmuch as it is prepared and disposed in such and such a way (i.e., set in order and set forth, destined). Historiography is the exploration of history. But this historiographical observation does not first create history itself. Everything “historiographical,” everything represented and established after the manner of historiography, is historical [geschichtlich] (i.e., grounded upon the destining resident happening). But history is never necessarily historiographical.14 With this distinction in mind we can then appreciate the “essential connection” between Greek antiquity and nineteenth-century German idealism, thus the connection between, e.g., Heraclitus and Hegel. In the Heraclitus Seminar of 1966/1967, this connection was engaged explicitly.15 Hegel’s thought moved away from “mono-theism” in the Christian 99

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sense, signaling to Heidegger the need for attention to a concept of “divinities” (which does not mean, therefore, a religious belief that is one of “polytheism” as traditionally conceived), and thus to the concept of “divinization,” i.e., how “the gods” come to be, a question central to Nietzsche’s thought as well, hence Heidegger’s placement of both Hegel and Nietzsche in the position of consummation of metaphysics. Heidegger (along with Fink) worked to clarify Heraclitus’s meaning of “hen” (one) and “panta” (the many), Heidegger commenting: “For me the question is how much we know, according to the purest sources, about the gods in their relationship to humans with the Greeks,” humans here denominated “mortals.” As Fink puts it, “The immortal being of the gods is only possible if they relate themselves toward the mortal being of humans.”16 Heidegger considers what Hegel has to say in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, noting that, “the relationship of gods and humans is a higher and more difficult one, a relation that is not to be determined with the terminology of customary metaphysical theology.” In that sense, Heidegger moves away from the mono-theistic onto-theo-logy of medieval and scholastic “Christian” philosophy,17 Heidegger asking: “Where do gods and humans belong?” Fink answers: “humans and gods belong in one respect in what is, but in the essential respect they belong in being” – which is to say, in Heraclitus’s sense, “in one regard in panta” and “in another regard in hen.” What this means is by no means settled, of course, hence Heidegger’s later attention to the concept of das Geviert for his concept of “world” as “the jointure” of gods, mortals, earth, and sky, Heidegger here appropriating the Heraclitean attention to the relation of gods and mortals for a proper sense of “world” in relation to “earth.”18 Given Heidegger’s distinction of Historie and Geschichte, one may then gain clarity about Heidegger’s sense of Entscheidung as it relates to the task of thinking at the end of philosophy qua metaphysics: Any thinker who thinks toward a decision is moved, and consumed, by care over a plight which cannot at all be sensed in the historiologically reckoned lifetime of that thinker. . . . The more essential the decision which is to be disclosively thought, all the more grows the distance between the thinker and a historiological explanation by way of the tradition, and all the greater becomes the danger that the thinker will, at best, count as an exception.19 Thus, Heidegger sees himself as just such a thinker concerned with the contemporary plight and tasked with discerning this fateful decision. The task of one attuned to the age of the consummation of metaphysics is to recognize “the genuine essential depth of his own epoch” – words here which require attention to Heidegger’s sense of “essence” (Wesen) and “epoch” both in

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relation to the grounding question of being (Sein/Seyn). Here Hegel and Nietzsche are guides to proper discernment of the present, i.e., to what is “fateful” to the nineteenth century: [The nineteenth century] saw the consummation of Western metaphysics . . . [thereby having] an essentiality distinguishing it from what preceded and endowing it with the historical destiny to remain historically essential beyond the hubbub of the twentieth century, even when that century was supposed to carry out the endeavor to withdraw from recollection everything genuinely past in history and to offer only its bustle and the meaninglessness of the various Americanisms.20 Hence, what is experienced as present-at-hand in the 1930s – all that is the post-World War I experience of Weimar Germany, Bolshevik Russia, capitalist America, and so on – detracts from a genuine encounter with what is historically essential. Heidegger understood his time as one of “inmost plight” but, importantly, as related to and “prompted” by a “distant injunction”: “The great concealed event – the remoteness of everything of today. The proximity to the inmost vocation of the people.”21 Those steeped in the bustle and hubbub of the American capitalist “industrial” revolution on the one side and the Marxist socialist “communist” revolution on the other side are lost to the plight, suffering from a lack of sense of plight, even as the German people seek their own place (topos) in thinking (Ortschaft des Denkens). The plight that concerned Heidegger in his sense of Geschichte was such that he posited: The Germans have even been torn away from their essential ground, one that has still not even been discovered, let alone fathomed, and so they totter in the alien essence modernity foisted upon them. Therein lies the danger, namely, that they will fall victim to the exclusive dominance of their own distorted essence.22 Again, one sees Heidegger’s concern for what is present-at-hand as “semblance” of what is essential to history. Germany thus faces its own Entscheidung in apprehending what is essential in contrast to what is semblant. In his Contributions to Philosophy from 1936–1938, Heidegger gives an account of “de-cision” (Ent-scheidung), in §43 of the “Preview” and in §44. Commenting on this account, Parvis Emad writes: Heidegger presents the gist of the notion. . . . [De-cision] can neither be grasped in terms of the “will” nor in terms of “consciousness.” Decision means neither reckoning with an either or nor is it an

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urge-driven affirmation of oneself.  .  .  . [De-cision] should not be confused with deciding between alternative things, choosing one thing over another, and preferring one thing over another.23 What, then, are we to understand here? Heidegger understands his situation to be that of the age of transition from metaphysics to the thinking of beyng [Sein/Seyn] in its historicality. This involves the human being in an “essential transformation” – “from ‘rational animal’ (animal rationale) to Dasein.” Assuming he is himself “attuned” to this transition and “appropriated” to the task of preparing the ground of the other beginning, Heidegger attempts to “pave the way,” even as he does not see this as a “purposive act of an individual”; neither is it “something delimited and calculated by a community,” thus not even by the German people in the extant condition of their domination by the National Socialist ideology i.e., by the “Nazi das Man.” Accordingly, Heidegger asserts that, “philosophy, in the clarity of its knowledge, must come to a decision regarding its own essence.” This requires a “transitional thinking” that is a “historical meditation” (i.e., a meditation on history qua “that which first awakens and brings about thoughtful questioning as the site of the decisions of history.” The transition, if undertaken, seeks a disclosure of the basic question of the second beginning, viz., the question of the truth (alētheia) of beyng, Heidegger deliberately using “being” (Seyn) rather than “being” (Sein) to distinguish this essential ground from the guiding word of the history of metaphysics. This speaks to Heidegger’s Hegel-influenced insight that beyng occurs essentially as the “event” (Ereignis) relative to the history of metaphysics in the unfolding of fundamental metaphysical positions since Plato. But to seek a proper disclosure of what is eventful for the second beginning, one cannot ignore the problematic tension of being, appearance, semblance, and non-being amidst the task of inceptual thinking: “In the essence of the truth of the event, everything true is simultaneously decided and grounded, beings come to be, and non-beings slip into the semblance of beyng.”24 The only superintending “goal” of the historical human in this essential history is “to become the one who grounds and preserves the truth of beyng, to be the ‘there’ as the ground required by the very essence of beyng, or, in other words, to care.”25 Given that the human as “Dasein” – the site of disclosure of being – is evident in the long history of metaphysics, then the human as “da-Seyn” is similarly to be the site for disclosure in attunement with the second beginning that thinks the grounding question (Grundfrage) instead of the guiding question (Leitfrage). To think in terms of care (Sorge), in Heidegger’s sense, is not to think in terms of values or to “presuppose the previous interpretations of beings and the customary understanding of the human being.” That means, furthermore, that one cannot think the human being according to modernity’s subjectivity, as “Ego” or as animal rationale, thus especially not in terms of 102

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a “distorted animality” that “denies to the historical human beings the last god.” With this comment Heidegger reminds that the second beginning turns away from the divinization that was the onto-theo-logy of the first beginning, and thus also away from the Christian “god” of scholasticism and modernity, to an awaiting of the “last god” anticipated by Nietzsche. In this sense, all beings, including the human being conceived as animal rationale and god conceived as the summum ens, as “actual” beings “are non-beings under the dominance of the distorted essence of semblance, the origin of which remains veiled.”26 These concepts thus are subjected to a fundamental interrogation. In speaking of the last god, Heidegger clarifies, The last god has its most unique uniqueness and stands outside those calculating determinations meant by titles such as “monotheism,”“pan-theism,” and “a-theism.”“Monotheism” and all types of “theism” exist only since Judaeo-Christian “apologetics,” which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the death of this god, all theism[s] collapse. . . . The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities of our history.27 Hence, the task of Entscheidung speaks to the destiny of philosophy, because what is needed is “the knowledge of that which disturbs, disfigures, and would lend validity to a mere semblance of philosophy.”28 Thus, Heidegger asks: “how are humans certain they are present to themselves and not merely to a semblance, or superficies, of their essence?”29 As part of the first beginning, Christianity, Marxism, Bolshevism, Jewishness – one must add here, Nazism – Heidegger reminds, all in their own way inform us of “who” “we” “are” – but that also means we are not clear about this at all, neither for “oneself” nor for a “people,” in which case this challenges those who would philosophize according to “worldviews:” “Which decisions thereby become necessary?”30 Heidegger’s own decision involves a rejection of “worldview” (Weltanchauung) philosophy and the anthropology of “culture” extant in his day, especially if these ways of thinking are meant to prepare, explicitly or tacitly, a “transition to the technologized animal . . . through the gigantism of technology.”31 Problematic here, says Heidegger, is that “culture” and “worldview” become resources of a battlefield technology for the sake of a will that no longer wills any goal; for the preservation of the people is never a possible goal but is only a condition of the setting of a goal. The “great politics” of the twentieth century anticipated by Nietzsche and manifest in politicized scholastic Christianity, capitalist Americanism, Marxist Bolshevism, and National Socialism reduced to biologism after the first 103

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World War, all are keen on preservation of “peoples” but without clarity as to “what goal, what decision,” is necessary in the face of what promises to be a transition to the human being as the thoroughly technologized animal. That Heidegger includes Christianity here should be no surprise. As he says in Contributions to Philosophy, “Christianity and its dogmatics” represent the abandonment of beings (in the Greek sense) by explaining every being “in its origin as ens creatum,” while “the creator is what is most certain,” i.e., recalling here all “ontological” proofs for the existence of God, and “beings are the effect of this cause which is most eminently.” In this case, through Christianity beings, including human beings, “become mere things made by another being.” In particular: “These beings, formerly made by a creator God,” then become the “dominion” of humanity (i.e., they “come under human domination”). In this understanding one may not automatically, thoughtlessly, speak, then, of the “progress” of the present over the past because we have “produced” for us “an unbroken supply of useful and enjoyable things, things already objectively present, ones which can be increased through progress.”32 On the contrary, Heidegger asserts: “Progress has no future . . . because it merely takes things that already are and expedites them ‘further’ on their previous path.” Hence, beyond and before all “moral-anthropological” assessment, Heidegger clarifies: That which compels, and is retained without being grasped, essentially surpasses all “progress,” for that which compels is itself what is genuinely to come and thus resides completely outside of the distinction between good and evil and withdraws itself from all calculation.33 Heidegger’s words here are telling – calling into question how and why one distinguishes between good and evil and who and why one involves oneself with calculation. What this means for the “complete transformation of the human being” is today by no means clear. Yet, according to the distinction of being and appearance and that of being and semblance, we are cautioned: “we have been content to seem to pursue culture and are unwilling to renounce such semblance, because as soon as even that is taken away, not only would the necessity of action disappear but also action itself.” When the human moves in the direction of the thoroughly technologized animal, calculative thinking consistent with the consummation of modernity reigns over human disposition and action. Machination (Machenshaft), referring to “making” (Machen, poiēsis, technē), continues and modifies “an interpretation of phúsis carried out in terms of τεχνη . . . the makeable and the self-making.”34 In view of events of the early twentieth century, Heidegger claims, the machinational now thrusts itself forward more clearly .  .  . through the coming into play of both the Judeo-Christian thought of 104

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creation and the corresponding representation of God, ens becomes ens creatum . . . (God as causa sui) [and “world” as saeculum]. That is an essential deviation from Φυσις and is at the same time the transition to the emergence of machination as the essence of beingness [Seiendheit] in modern thought. The mechanistic and the biologistic modes of thinking are always only consequences of the concealed machinational interpretation of beings.35 This inevitably includes the apparently progressive “industrial” revolution of Americanism and the apparently “world-historical” but decidedly “biologistic” National Socialist revolution in Germany – both of which contribute to “everything” sinking down “into the mediocrity and groundlessness of the ‘logical’ and ‘biological’ interpretation” since Nietzsche.36 Thus, Heidegger explains, Machination is the early – but, for a long time to come, still concealed – distorted essence of the beingness of beings. Yet, even when machination takes definite forms, as in modernity, and shows itself in the popular interpretation of beings, it is not recognized as such and certainly is not grasped.37 With the twentieth century the consequences of this interpretation of beingness become patently clear. “Science” is clear, says Heidegger, that its “liberal” character and its “ideal of objectivity” are not only perfectly compatible with a political-ethnic “alignment” but are actually indispensable to that. . . . The “ethnic” as well as the “American”“organization” of science are both moving on the same path.38 And, as for the Nazi depiction of science qua “German” science, Heidegger decried: “Sheer idiocy to say that experimental research is Nordic-Germanic and that rational research, on the contrary, is of foreign extraction! We would then have to number Newton and Leibniz among the ‘Jews.’”39 So much for the validity of an “ethno-nationalist” interpretation of science. Yet, there remains the prior question as to what basic decision is necessary when one proposes an organization of science, and even more so when one posits that organization with reference to a conception of “the people.” And, here it will not do either to privilege the god of politicized Christianity or the Nordic-Germanic god, or even the rejection of all gods in Marxist atheism. Quite to the contrary, Heidegger argues, A people is a people only if it receives its history as allotted to it through finding its god, the god that compels this people beyond 105

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itself and thus places the people back amid beings. . . . The essence of a people is grounded in the historicality of those who belong to themselves through their belonging to the god.40 This means, however, that one can no longer think “god” onto-theologically. “The last god,” Heidegger anticipates, has his own most unique uniqueness and stands outside of the calculative determinations expressed in the labels “mono-theism,” “pan-theism,” and “a-theism.” There has been “monotheism,” and every sort of “theism,” only since the emergence of Judeo-Christian “apologetics,” whose thinking presupposes “metaphysics.” With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. In his remark Heidegger’s insight resonates with Nietzsche’s “antiChristian” and “anti-metaphysical” philosophy that announces the death of God and all gods hitherto, but also a “fore-speaking” (Fürsprache) of a possible new god after a transvaluation of all values. It is with this insight that Heidegger turns to Hölderlin: “The historical destiny of philosophy culminates in knowledge of the necessity to create a hearing for the words of Hölderlin.”41 And, to the extent one hears Hölderlin speak of many gods, Heidegger clarifies, To speak of the “gods” does of course not mean that a decision has been made here affirming the existence of many gods instead of one; rather it is meant to indicate the undecidability of the being of gods, whether one or many.42 This is the most fateful “decision” (Entscheidung) confronting humanity in this transitional era to the second beginning.

Rethinking the German self-concept as “people”43 In his Ponderings of 1936–1938, Heidegger manifests his belief that the National Socialist “revolution” was moving astray. But he held out some hope: It bodes well for the future that the German youth deeply reject “philosophy” and “science,” for only in that way will these youths be able to experience all this again essentially and indeed want to experience it – they would then no longer be German. Such rejection is the first actual deed.44

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To reject both philosophy and science is to reject the conception of knowledge as worldview and as mere cognition, steeped as that concept is in the epistemology of modernity. What is to be anticipated here, in contrast, is a world “in reconstruction; mankind is reawakening.”45 That holds true for Germany as well. But, this reawakening requires vigilance in the face of the semblance of being, given the first beginning’s “world formation and its first failure, along with its entanglement in presence.”46 This is precisely why Heidegger proposes that we “again dare to learn about the Greeks and from them” – “So that in the re-beginning we come to struggle against them” – i.e., struggle against the metaphysics of presence. Like Hegel and Nietzsche, Heidegger counsels this return and dares it, thereby to understand the tradition since Plato as one of Seinsvergessenheit. Heidegger explained his anticipation: “I saw in the [National Socialist] movement that had gained power the possibility of an inner recollection and renewal of the people and a path that would allow it to discover its historical vocation in the Western world.”47 It is important to be clear that this is what Heidegger saw, not that others even within the NDSP party apparatus saw the same. This meant, for Heidegger, that it would not do for the future of Germany to have the German people construe their destiny in terms of worldview or in terms of a “philosophy of the people” qua German. Thus Heidegger opined: A nation first becomes a people when those who are its most unique ones [Einzigsten] arrive and begin to intimate. Thus a people first becomes free for its law, which it must struggle for, as the ultimate necessity of its most noble moment. Philosophy of a people is that which makes a people into a people of a philosophy, which historically founds the people in its Da-sein, and which prevails upon a people to become guardians48 of the truth of be-ing. Therefore, philosophy of “a” people cannot be calculated and prescribed according to some kinds of dispositions and abilities. On the contrary, thinking about philosophy comes from “the people” only if it grasps that philosophy has to spring forth from its very ownmost origin and that this “leap” can succeed only if philosophy as such still belongs to its first, essential beginning.49 This recollection, as return in thought to the Greeks, has its implications and consequences for the German self-concept. Thus, writes Heidegger: Neither the immediacy of the “total” state, nor the awakening of the people and the renewal of the nation, a fortiori not the salvation of “culture” as supplement to the people and state, and utterly not the flight into Christian faith and the frightful scheme of a Christian culture could or should be determinative first and last.50

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To sustain these stances towards the German people is not to appreciate fundamentally enough what is this people’s decisive task. In the fall of 1932, Heidegger wrote: The actual work should exist – once again in posing the question of being – and should configure that questioning in its entire originality and breadth for the remote fate of the age, in order thereby to join back into the great beginning the most secret communal [volkich] mission of the German.51 This, for Heidegger, is not a political work but a philosophical work, assuming philosophy is equal to the task above and beyond the claim of this or that worldview and ideology such as was presenting itself in distorted essence. To be ready for such a task requires tolma, venture (Wagnis), in thinking. And, wrongly, Heidegger anticipated, in a way resonating with Rickert’s sense of the world-historical personality: “The great experience and fortune that the Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking a correct course and impetus.”52 That said, however, one must be ready, “with a broad will, to be frustrated by the everyday bustle”53 of the movement. “National Socialism,” Heidegger opined, “is a genuine nascent power only if it still has something to withhold behind all its activity and talk – and only if it operates as strongly holding back and in that way has effectivity into the future.” He uttered a warning: “National Socialism not a ready-made eternal truth come down from heaven – taken in that way, it is an aberration and foolishness. Such as it has become, it must itself become in becoming and must configure the future – i.e., it must itself, as a formation, recede in favor of the future.”54 Hence, already in the fall of 1932, Heidegger discerned a failure in the official and popular conception of the movement, and he descried it as an aberration in its essential mission and thus as foolishness in its ideological appeal. To think National Socialism in this aberrant way is to make it into a metaphysics, indeed into “metaphysics as metapolitics.”55 This metaphysics that manifests itself as metapolitics cannot issue the pertinent “standards”: “we must not,” Heidegger asserted against this metapolitics, “consider the creators of the coming time to be the philistines who mutually appoint themselves ‘Führers.’”56 Thus begins Heidegger’s disaffection with the Nazi movement. It is one thing to configure the German people in view of the past, another to do so in view of the unknown future: Is it a natural consequence that today by necessity the form of the future spirit is misunderstood and that within the National Socialist movement one must misunderstand those beginnings that in it

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press on to an actual developed transformation of powers, ways, and works?57 To speak of “necessity” here is to recognize that the error is not merely contingent upon the will of individuals. Instead of cultivation of knowledge (Wissenserziehung) essential to transformation, Heidegger opined, “we have instead . . . Only an uncreative floundering in daily whims and a verbose din over demands already obsolete thirty years ago and never vitally rooted.” Germany of 1932 thus suffered loss of what might have been its greatness, the form of its future spirit: “The complete misunderstanding of the polylawfulness of the great powers in a creative people brings this people into a disastrous mediocrity and inner impotence.”58 Here, too, the lawfulness of decision had its effect: “We ever struggle only in misguided and conventional aims which are anticipatory merely in semblance.”59 Failing to understand its “spiritual mission,” what Heidegger calls “Spiritual National Socialism,” the present-at-hand National Socialism was already overcome by semblance, the “semblance of spiritual vitality.” “Is it any wonder,” Heidegger mused, that flourishing on all sides are philistinism, conceited half-culture, and bourgeois pseudorefinement and that the inner demands of German socialism are not at all known and thus also not striven for – least of all on the basis of much-invoked character? The most facile platitude as thinking tied to a people! Such states of affairs, however, cannot be avoided. Mediocrity must exist; most severely in that it knows nothing of its wretchedness and in accord with its own law must not know it.60 Overcome by semblance of spiritual vitality, as far as Heidegger judged, National Socialism became mere ideology and misplaced morality: One can already speak today [fall 1932] of a “vulgar National Socialism”; by that I mean the world and standards and demands and attitudes of the presently appointed and respected newspaper reporters and makers of culture. From there, naturally under a brainless appeal of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a quite determinate doctrine of history and humanity proceeds to the people; this doctrine can best be designated ethical materialism, which does not refer to the precept of sensual pleasure and living life to the full as the highest law of Dasein; by no means. The designation serves as a deliberate contrast to Marxism and its economic-materialistic conception of history. This ethical materialism – indeed stands above economic materialism – insofar as one places morals above economics – which

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indeed must first be grounded and which cannot be decided by “character.” This ethical materialism is therefore in no way invulnerable to economic materialism. This extremely bourgeois pretense over character, a pretense which one day could founder on its own incapacity – now joins up with a dismal biologism providing indeed the correct “ideology” for ethical materialism.61 In this way, National Socialism undermined and forfeited its ostensible mission to build “the historical-spiritual world of the [German] people” that is essentially connected to the Greek beginning in the consummation of that beginning in the thought of Hegel and Nietzsche. Heidegger’s call for the “self-assertion” of the German university in the service of the cultivation of knowledge itself was thereby foreclosed. Thus, Heidegger decried: “Programs and institutions are useless, if there is no one who bears an inner directedness; it is time to call off the semblant revolution of the university.”62 As far as Heidegger was concerned, his German contemporaries did not appreciate the depth of their essential plight, which was more than the actuality of the present that is between the first beginning and the second beginning he anticipated: We have undergone a global economic plight and still stand within it (unemployment), we are held in a plight relative to history and the state (Versailles), we have long experienced the concatenation of these plights – but we still sense nothing of the spiritual plight of Dasein – and the fact that for this latter we are still not ready as regards experience and suffering, i.e., still not great enough for it: precisely that is the greatest plight. For we are now in the act of wiping out quickly and crudely every dawning of this plight, either through a mendacious flight into a now empty Christianity or through the heralding of a National Socialist “worldview” that is spiritually questionable and of dubious origination. When will we come to the great plight of Dasein?63 Having found himself frustrated by the “everydayness” and “idle chatter” of vulgar National Socialism, Heidegger characterized the “essential experience of the rectoral year” as it came to an end on 28 April 1934: “This is the irresistible end of the university in every respect, on account of the impotence for a genuine ‘self-assertion.’” It was “a foundered year.”64 All that was left after that fateful year as rector of the University of Freiburg was for Heidegger to “remain in the invisible front of the secret spiritual Germany” – and to do so with the reticence of the silence that awaits a grounding word of a “distant injunction.”65 110

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It was then that Heidegger admitted to his “error”: “My rectorate was based on a great mistake, namely, my wanting to bring questions into the temperament and regard of my ‘colleagues,’ questions from which they were at best excluded, to their advantage – and undoing.” To bring these questions to the fore, Heidegger also insisted, must be understood as he did his intent: despite what many believed, the address [Rektoratsrede] did not seek to apply “my” philosophy to the “university” and its configuration, but instead sought the reverse, to bring the university to a meditation from the course and in the face of its tasks.66 Moreover, Heidegger says of his Rektoratsrede, The great error of the address surely consisted in its assuming that in the purlieu of the German university there would still be a concealed genus of questioners and in still hoping these could bring themselves to the work of an inner transformation.67 But, historiology, anthropology, positive Christianity, German science,68 biologism as “the idolization of race,” the metaphysics of metapolitics – all worked against the “authentic happening” Heidegger believed possible in the self-assertion of the university. [The] address and its attitude were a mistake: the university does not want to meditate and can no longer want to, not because someone or other has forbidden it to meditate – but because modern science has reached that stage in its technologization whereby “progress” would be impeded by meditation.69 “How was this miscalculation possible?” he asked, answering: Because courage was lacking to face what I already knew, courage for coming to terms with the “death of God,” with the abandonment by being in the current appearance of beings, i.e., because courage to face what we already know is, as Nietzsche says, “so rare”.70 Against all of this Heidegger described the contour of the task of thinking towards the essential decision, itself involving five related decisions: 1 2 3

the confrontation with and clear attitude toward “Christianity” and toward the whole of “Western philosophy”;71 the confrontation with “Nietzsche”;72 the creative – not merely organizing – relation to “technology”;73 111

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4 5

the new “European” world; the “world of the earth” as such.74

“All five decisions,” Heidegger clarified, “constitute the one decision of beyng, a decision that thereby in itself at the same time is the one concomitant with the entirety of Western history.” Advocates of “vulgar” National Socialism knew nothing of this decision, given “the wretched counterfeits circulated by Baeumler, Krieck, and their cronies.”75 Heidegger’s critique of Christianity is at base a critique of Roman Catholicism, and in this day also a critique of Germany’s concordat with the Vatican insofar as it represents “a center that is expanding into the spiritual-political domain.” Thus, in patent disagreement with such as Baeumler, Heidegger asserts: “National Socialism can never be the principle of a philosophy but must always be placed under philosophy as the principle.”76 Against being guided by such as Baeumler who takes National Socialism to be the principle of philosophy, Heidegger issued a stark judgment: National Socialism is a barbaric principle. That is its essential character and its possible greatness. The danger is not National Socialism itself – but, rather, its trivialization into a sermon on the true, the good, and the beautiful (as in an indoctrination session). And the danger is also that those who want to form its philosophy are able to base the latter on nothing other than the traditional “logic” of common thinking and of the exact sciences.77 What did all of this portend? “God is gone; things are used up; knowledge is in ruins; action has become blind. In short: beyng is forgotten – and a semblance of beings is raging or is fleeing into what was hitherto.”78 Party functionaries such as Baeumler contributed to this Seynsvergessenheit through their ungrounded “pseudophilosophy”; for, “the blindness toward beyng survives in a desolate and crude ‘biologism’”79 that, as far as Heidegger was concerned, “is radically un-German.”80 In the whole of this semblant philosophy, Heidegger discerned “der letzte Mensch” Nietzsche warned about: “The ‘last human being’ is raging through Europe.”81 Here is evident “the great turmoil in humans – their position between being and semblance.”82 Here Heidegger discerned the essential connection between Nietzsche’s foresight of the twilight of the gods and Hölderlin’s poetic Nachdenken (thinking back to the Greeks): the creative decision in the thinking that thinks back consists in finding the poet and in grasping the one who is found such that he appears as the one who must be thought back to . . . I am speaking here of Hölderlin. 112

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Like Hölderlin, we are called to rethink the divinization of the gods in what is, for Heidegger, “the onset of the decisive phase of modernity.”83 But this can happen if and only if Europeans – and especially the Germans in their essential connection to the Greeks in their opening up of the “dawn” of the gods – become, at the time of the “flight” of the gods, a “‘people’ of poets and thinkers,” thus to understand “what are poets for.”84 Such a people, attuned to poet (Hölderlin) and thinker (Heidegger?), would understand that Hölderlin discloses our time as “destitute,” a time in which we have only “traces of the fugitive gods” and the passing of “the last god” – thus, the death of “God” in the onto-theo-logical sense. But this requires a vigilance that tracks those traces, even as one like Heidegger is given to concede and anticipate: “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” – (only a god can save us now).85 But why Hölderlin? Hölderlin is the pre-cursor of poets in a destitute time. This is why no poet of this world era can overtake him. The precursor, however, does not go off into a future; rather, he arrives out of that future, in such a way that the future is present only in the arrival of his words.86 If Heidegger is correct in his intuition of the West’s spiritual plight, the fact is that we have yet to think fundamentally the significance of Hölderlin’s words as the essential poetic insight transitional to the second beginning.

The “positionality” of “the Shoah” It is uncontroversial to say that “to die” is not the same as “to be murdered,” even as, since World War II, one can speak of that extraordinary “murder” that is industrial-scale technologically enabled genocide, and more specifically of what is the “singular” crime of genocide committed by National Socialist Germany as a “crime against humanity” and not only a crime against the Jewish people and others who suffered the indignities and atrocities of the “extermination” camps. Heidegger did not speak of “death,” of “genocide,” or of crimes against either humanity or against Jews. He spoke of “extermination” camps, the “massive” (i.e., “masses”) and “gigantic” “production” (Herstellen) of “corpses” in gas chambers. But he spoke also of hydrogen bombs, the technologically enabled productive/devastating consequence of American liberal democracy that, “likewise,” “exterminated” Japanese civilians and produced “corpses” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here was the use of these “indefensible” weapons of “mass” destruction, likewise contrary to the extant law of armed conflict and the Western (Christian) tradition of just war theory requiring both discrimination of combatant targets and the civilian population as well as due proportionality in the deployment of weaponry. All such technologically 113

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enabled “production” occurred according to the “demand” for “conscription” [die Gestellung] of humans into the service of modern technology. The Jews murdered at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and so on did not “die” even as the Japanese murdered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not “die,” not to mention those killed (murdered?) in the Allied powers’ indiscriminate firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, even as one may mention with equal condemnation the systematic terror “Blitz” bombing of London by the Nazi Luftwaffe. Individual “persons” “die.” “Corpses” are what remain of those who were once persons but treated as “things” and manifestly “ordered into” (einbestellen) and “produced” from a “position” of “deformation” of the essence of the human being. This is all part of the “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit) of the “planetary destiny” that technology brings forth and into which humans are being ordered. But, what is here as dispensation (das Geshickliche) “can be neither logically-historiologically predicted nor metaphysically construed as the result of the process of history,” says Heidegger.87 The distinction is important as Heidegger situates the extermination camps. In his lecture on “Positionality” Heidegger clarifies the concepts “positionality” (das Ge-Stell) and “requisition” (das Be-stellen) in terms of the work of the carpenter: The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin. What is produced, set here, is not tantamount to the merely finished. What is set here stands in the purview of what concernfully approaches us. . . . The carpenter in the village does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a “death-tree” [Totenbaum]. The death of the deceased flourishes in it. Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced.88 One may speak of a “peasant” who is “dead” and who will be placed within a Totenbaum, in essence different from a “corpse” that did not “die” but was produced as such whether amidst the “thermonuclear” ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz after having been “positioned” in an “extermination” camp for “orderable destruction,” thus “forced into conscription [die Gestellung]” to that end.89 For Heidegger, here reigns not presence that is a self-emergence (phúsis) but “monstrosity,” the violence of a merely human yet “inhuman” “machination,” the latter yet essentially not a merely human doing. Those “humans” (i.e., the Nazis) who inhumanly “positioned” the Jews in the extermination camps, who “worked” the gas chambers, but also the “humans” (i.e., the Jews) who were inhumanly produced as corpses – all 114

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were “already ordered into this requisitioning.” Thus: “The essence of the human is imposed upon to collaborate in carrying out the requisitioning in a human manner.” Such is the operation of the essence of technology, i.e., “modern” technology, as even death is appropriated into its service. Here “death” understood as the uttermost possibility of one’s own being is abolished; the “uniformity” of “extermination” for one and all is “requisitioned” without distinction of person, both in the gas chambers that exterminated and through the nuclear bombs that likewise exterminated. The humans who undertook the decisions and actions to exterminate in this way belonged “inhumanly” to positionality – “The inhuman and yet human is admittedly more uncanny, while more evil and ominous, than the human who would merely be a machine.”90 What is inhuman, in these cases of extermination, of the production of corpses, is at once evil and ominous – that is Heidegger’s judgment of the Nazi genocide as well as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for all who care to hear. Moreover, such a “judgment” (taking this here as a “moral” judgment) has to be understood in terms of the calculative thinking he characterized later in his lectures of 1957, when he commented about the “violence” of (i.e., that “belongs” to) thought: the violence of thought, which surpasses every possible quantum of atomic energy and does so infinitely, i.e., in accordance with its essence. For nature would never be able to appear as a standing reserve of energy, as it now is represented, if atomic energy were not challenged forth along with it by thought, i.e., was put in place [gestellt] by thought. Atomic energy is the object of a computation and steering performed by a scientific technology that calls itself nuclear physics. That physics reaches this point of positioning nature in this way, however, is a meta-physical incident – if not something else besides. But if it now were to come to the point that the thinking being [Wesen] is extinguished by atomic energy, where would thinking then remain? What is more powerful, natural energy in its technological-mechanical form or thought? Or do neither of the two, which in this case belong together, have the privilege? Is there still anything at all when all mortal essencing of the human on earth “is” extinguished?91 With these words Heidegger clarifies the violence of calculative thinking in the installation of positionality, in the case of the atomic energy that was challenged forth and thereby “unconcealed” for the first time (except for the prior secret testing in New Mexico) in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was a “metaphysical” incident manifesting the power of the thinking that holds sway as humanity is positioned vis-à-vis the planetary 115

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domination of technology. All of this comes about as a result of calculative thinking, hence the importance of questioning thinking, questioning the basic “principles” of thinking, the “laws” of thinking, questioning thinking in the entirely novel experience of positionality as it holds sway not only over the present but also over the impending future. Heidegger reminds us that, if we call upon the fact that in our age everywhere upon the earth a uniform manner of thinking achieves world-historical dominance, then we must just as decisively hold in view that this uniform thinking is only the form, leveled down and rendered useful, of that historical formation of thought that we name the Western-European, the dispensational singularity of which we scarcely even experience and seldom enough acknowledge.92 It is this thinking, “this dispensational singularity,” that determines the “historical Dasein” of “the Occident” qua “singular destiny of Western humanity” and begins to dominate and displace even what was autochthonic of “the Orient.” Thus, Heidegger speaks of “the present age” as one in which is manifest “the raging storm of world historical battles for mastery of the earth,” this present strife itself enabled by a more “primordial strife” at the beginning of Western-European thinking where the logos, logic, was given determination and directed subsequently according to the laws of thinking and become the “logistics” and “computation” of cybernetics. Hence, if (1) we today find the Nazi genocide of the European Jews an historically “singular” event “incomprehensible” for the “irrational” industrial manufacture of corpses that it was; if (2) we find the American deployment and use of thermonuclear weapons “unthinkable” for the sake of future generations and safeguarding the planet against nigh-total ecological decay consequent to thermonuclear warfare; if (3) we find thermonuclear weapons, however, yet “thinkable” in the case of a “supreme emergency”93 such as the just war theory of Michael Walzer may deem morally permissible; if (4) we find the planetary domination of technology “uncanny” for its total and totalizing unpredictability as it holds sway over the present and future; then, as Heidegger argues: “Thinking – and the talk can be of this alone [i.e., not to say, thinking “as such” (“dem” Denken)] – is the ‘hidden and innermost dispute’ of our history” that remains for one and all what is “most enigmatic” in the present age.94 Heidegger’s point of “enigma” here cannot be gainsaid. It is an essential indication of what must be thought. Thus, in William McNeill’s translation of Heidegger’s prefatory remarks on Hölderlin’s hymn “Germania” (from the 1933–35 lecture course), Heidegger says: The “start” [Beginn] is something other than the beginning [Anfäng]. . . . A start is the onset of something; a beginning is that 116

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from which something arises or springs forth. The world began centuries ago in the political and spiritual history of the Western world. The world war started with the battles in the outposts. The start is immediately left behind, it vanishes as an event proceeds. The beginning, the origin, by contrast, first appears and came to the fore in the course of an event and is fully there only at its end.95 Taking this distinction to be pertinent to our discernment of the significance of Heidegger’s remarks on the extermination camps of Eastern Europe, one infers that in the same way WWI “began” so WWII and its unfolded events “began” centuries ago in the political and spiritual history [Geschichte, not Historie] of the Occident, this beginning [Anfäng] coming to the fore in the “world-historical” event of the rise of the National Socialist movement, in Hitler as a “world-historical” personality, in the Nazi genocide as the singular event that it was, and all of this in the “essential connection” of the contemporary calculative thinking of technicity and the human being positioned as “technicized animal”; all of which “together” manifest the planetary domination of technology as the “end” of the metaphysics of presence that “began” the political and spiritual history that yet holds sway over our present time. All of these historical events point toward the origin (Ursprung), “to what is most remote and most difficult [das Fernste un Schwerste]” to comprehend in the absence of a “deconstruction” (Destruktion) of the fundamental metaphysical positions (especially of modernity) and “retrieval” (Wiederholung) of what is essential (wesentlich) to this first beginning. If, indeed, “The beginning already contains the end in a concealed manner,” as Heidegger said in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” then we cannot understand the events of WWII – especially the extermination camps and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – except as the unconcealed “end” (Ende) contained in the beginning of the metaphysics of presence, in the movement of logos into logistics, into positionality, into machination, into the gigantic, such being the Occident’s epochal “destiny” from that first beginning, our present history (Geschichte) a disclosure, an “irruption,” of that “essential world” of “not being at home” (Unheimlichkeit) that Heidegger denominates with the rubric “the planetary domination of technology.” This thinking we are called to apprehend, bearing in mind, as does Heidegger, Nietzsche’s assertion that the “thoughts that ‘guide the world’ ‘come on doves’ feet,’” in which case, Heidegger instructs, “it requires a fine ear to perceive the coming and the provenance of world-guiding thinking” – a perception that is never simply that which obtains in “a comprehensive and penetrating historiological overview of the history of Western thinking.”96 Rather, what is needed, Heidegger opines, is a “transformation” of the calculative thinking that determines our age as a “world-historical” determination – and that, minimally, in the direction of a “meditative” 117

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(besinnliche) or “essential” (wesentliche) thinking. Further, following Hölderlin, Heidegger holds that this is a task for mortals, not for the gods; “For,” Hölderlin writes in his Mnemosyne, erste Fassung, “they are not capable of everything, the heavenly ones. Namely, the mortals reach sooner into the abyss,” i.e., into the Ab-grund into which humanity (qua “mortal” beings who think) has been determined, for better or for worse, in the worldhistorical epoch of the planetary domination of technology.97 Thus, for Heidegger, we live at a time in which the paths of essential thinking are for the most part yet to be hewn, but which, once hewn, expectedly provide us possibilities of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) into what comes to us out of the future that he anticipates as the second beginning. This is why he said that, “at a time that we cannot know, a still-higher determination in the essential destiny of being is reserved for thinking.”98 But, Heidegger also warns, “Many, even most, indications are that devastation [Verödung] of Dasein into an always merely calculative thinking will continue to increase. To imagine that nihilism would be overcome is probably the fundamental error of the present age.” Heidegger opines, the belief in a commonplace thinking, universal only by appearances and supposedly the same throughout all ages, is one of the sources for the rise of nihilism and the tenacity of its imperceptible powers of asserting itself into all regions of the world.99 Citing Nietzsche’s question – “Nihilism stands at the door; where does this most uncanny of all guests come from?”100 – Heidegger remarks, concernfully for the imminent future: Even today one still evades the question of the essential place of origin of this guest and thereby first opens the doors of this guest to both the East and the West in equal measure; for both worlds are incapable of addressing one another from the dimension that each would have to be released into, so as to experience both what is and from which essence of being it is that all beings speak.101 Critical to Heidegger’s assessment here is that both Western and Eastern thought are in equal measure affected by nihilism, without philosophers from these two worlds fathoming its origin.102 Yet, West and East must somehow find the means of addressing one another according to the proper “thinking” that would “release” both worlds from the sway of nihilism without assuming that the commonplace thinking to which there is nigh-universal assent is sufficient to address the task of thinking.103 Understanding this, all critics are gainfully instructed to recall Gadamer’s observation at the Heidelberg conference of 1988:

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In my own eyes, Heidegger, I believe was a true visionary: with regard to the future where so many problems are written; as to the last man, with regard to Nietzsche; the forgetfulness of being . . . [The] text of Heidegger that speaks of the industrial manufacture of death, is in line with this vision. This prospect has so preoccupied him that even this extreme disgrace for our nation, the extermination of the Jews, even that seemed to him something very small compared to the future that awaits us.104 Hence, one must not ignore here Heidegger’s discourse of “extermination” and the “industrial manufacture of death” as an “uncanny” and “ominous” evil, this discourse declaring Heidegger’s “moral” judgment of the “extreme disgrace” of the German nation. But Heidegger thereby also warns of a future that can bring far worse to humanity during the reign of planetary technology, all that is present in the enhanced threat of thermonuclear warfare far beyond what was evident in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – since the dread of such warfare is not merely mutually assured “destruction” of the built-world of human habitation, but, worse, “devastation,” the blocking of all future life, the blocking of all future “dwelling” on the earth.105 This discourse is significant, furthermore, if one accounts for Gadamer’s view that Heidegger was so scandalized by the reality of the extermination camps that he could not even open his mouth to utter words that would speak to this horror.106 And yet, as Gadamer counsels, this needs to be interpreted not only for its meaning vis-à-vis the events of Nazi genocide but also for its significance for today and our imminent future. Thus, for example, if one is called to interpret this discourse of extermination, one might consider, as Lacoue-Labarthe did, taking issue with Heidegger’s declaration that the industrial manufacture of corpses is “the same” thing as motorized agriculture.107 He thinks there is a “hierarchy” in these phenomena, without which hierarchy Heidegger’s declaration is “scandalous.” But, here LacoueLabarthe speaks of the individual “phenomena” (phénomènes), which misses the point of Heidegger’s use of the words “the same as,” which is not a reference to what is extant qua phenomena merely, but instead to what is “essential” (wesentliche), what is unconcealed as the essence of technology, what is disclosed “in these phenomena” and that is “not itself” something merely technological. When Heidegger speaks of “essentially the same” here we are to consider why he chooses this expression, what significance it has relative to his interpretive remarks about the law of identity, why he says here “the same” and not “equivalent,” that, following Plato in the Sophist (254D), one may say “each of the two is another,” but, nonetheless, “itself the same as itself,” which then brings to the fore what is here in essence and not merely in

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appearance, what is a unity in identity, a “belonging together” in sameness, in their mode of being, how they come to presence (an-wesen). One can, as Heidegger says, think “the whole of the technological world . . . as something made by humans.” In this way of thinking, With this representation of the whole of the technological world, one winds everything back upon the human and, at best, arrives at the demand for an ethics of the technological world. Caught up in this conception, one opines that technology would be merely the affair of humans, no claim of being would speak in it.108 Yet, in speaking of the “essential sameness” of the occurrences he mentions, Heidegger is telling us that these are not merely the affairs of humans, different as they are qua historical occurrences, but that these individually and together disclose a claim of being (Sein/Seyn) such that humans and being “belong together” in these manifest ways, such that these occurrences are not merely human affairs that require an ethics of the technological world, but instead requires that we must think “how” there is a claim of being in these historical occurrences, in these “manifold appearances” of the technological, how the claim of being is specifically manifest “in, as, and for” the planetary domination of technology. Here Heidegger refers us to the saying of Parmenides that being and thinking are “the same” (to auto).109 What happens with the planetary domination of technology, beyond all historical occurrences, is an event (Ereignis) in which being (Sein/Seyn) and human (as Dasein), being and thinking (Denken), are “positioned” (as noted earlier). This does not mean merely “an occurrence, an incident” but, instead, “a singulare tatum,” Heidegger says, as we “experience” (historically) that in positionality “there reigns a bringing into ownership [Vereignen] and a delivering into ownership [Zueignen], the human being and being appropriated [ge-eignet] to each other (i.e., enter into what we name the event of appropriation) [Ereignis].” Hence, Heidegger continues, Event of appropriation names the letting belong that is to be thought from it, and thus the authentic letting belong that brings the human and being into the ownership of each other. In positionality, what we experience as the essence of this constellation in the modern technological world is a prelude to what is called the event of appropriation.110 And one should understand here “prelude” in the various significant senses pertinent, viz., “opening,” “precursor,” “forerunner,” “herald” to the “sustained” planetary reign and domination of technology into which all beings, humans included, are “enowned.” But one should understand here also, as 120

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Heidegger intimates, a possible “conversion,” (i.e., “the appropriative retraction of the technological world from its position of mastery into one of servitude within a realm where the human more authentically reaches into the event of appropriation).”111 For now, human and being belong together in the event that comes to presence as the planetary reign of technology. But there is the possibility of a movement in being and thinking “other than” as “the challenging forth of the human and being into the calculability of the calculable” (i.e., an appropriating event “that first brings the human and being into the ownership of what is authentically their own”).112 Thus, Micha Brumlik rightly commented at the Heidelberg conference of 1988 concerning Heidegger’s remarks about the various historical occurrences, These industrial murders, here [Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but also through the Allied bombing of Dresden, the Nazi bombing of London, and so on], over there in the gas chambers, reflect, in a certain way, the destiny of being, the Gestell which by death takes power over humanity.113 Brumlik, of course, also asked an important question: “is it really reasonable to ‘de-moralize’ – in the strict philosophical sense of ‘to remove from the field of morality’ – such impenetrable events, that is, to eliminate the concept of responsibility?” The assumption here is that Heidegger’s discourse of extermination removes the concept of responsibility. Yet, the very question Brumlik asks, as formulated, concedes that the events of genocide are “impenetrable,” implying that one’s attempt to understand is halted, in which case we are left with the very problem Derrida identified – the problem of understanding the concept of responsibility, of responsibility in relation to individual and collective guilt. In response, Derrida opined114 that the metaphysical concept of responsibility, as it has been formed through the history of philosophy, especially in Kant, as it has been inscribed in human rights discourse, in “the democratic axiom,” in Western morals and politics – these European concepts did not prevent Nazism, did not prevent Auschwitz. And even Nazism, Nazi discourse, very often even used this axiomatic discourse. There was something in the discourse, in the heads, Derrida reminds, to which the theoretical concept and the form of injunction of this responsibility were not enough. Not only was it not a barrier to Nazism, but it established a network of complicities of all kinds, in all dimensions, to the point that this gives us all such “a bad conscience” (mauvaise conscience) today, such that, indeed, the people who speak for human rights (droits de l’homme) are so nervous that this concept of responsibility is not enough (i.e., it was not enough in 1930, in the 1940s, and remains unsatisfactory today). Thus, on the second day of the Heidelberg conference (06 February 1988), Derrida reminded that the 121

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definition of “responsibility” remained difficult for him, for he could not define it in the ordinary moral or legal sense of the term, because the concept names “open problems.”115 This is also why reading Heidegger remains an injunction: “I think Heidegger’s meditation on responsibility is an obligatory passage. It’s a passage in which I did not think I could stop, and so the question of responsibility stays open.” Hence, the task is to read, rethink, and interpret what Heidegger says about conscience and guilt in Being and Time. (The following citations are from the Stambaugh translation.) Heidegger (H.268) is clear that the “voice of conscience” is a primordial phenomenon of the human way to be, thus for him its ontological analysis is prior to any “psychological description and classification of experiences” of it. Ontological analysis of conscience grants that it “makes itself known only in factical existence.” Especially pertinent to Heidegger’s analysis of conscience is that the latter is “disclosive” (H.269) “as a call,” thus a “summons” to one’s potentiality beyond what one lacks at any given moment, thus to a potentiality of “authentic selfhood.” Conscience allows an individual to listen “to itself” instead of to others who dominate to the point of falling away from its authenticity. Having said this, Heidegger does not interpret conscience in Kant’s sense as a “court of justice” (H.271) where one is given to the voicing of a judgment. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes the “abrupt arousal” of the call of conscience so that the dominion of das Man “collapses” (H.273) – not, Heidegger clarifies, in the sense of an objectification of a self “on which to pass judgment” in relation to some “mandate” for “trial” of the self. Important in any assessment of Heidegger in his self-understanding is his characterization of the call of conscience: “Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence” (H.273). In contrast, one can “hear” the call such that one is deceived: “‘Deceptions’ occur in conscience . . . only because . . . instead of being understood authentically, [one] is drawn by the they-self into a manipulative conversation with one’s self,” in which case the call “is distorted in its character of disclosure” (H.274). When conscience “speaks” in the mode of silence the idle chatter of das Man is set aside, this as a way of having an “existentiell way of listening to the factical call of conscience” (H.275). Notwithstanding, one is to understand that one does not “plan” for, “prepare” for, or “willingly” bring the call of conscience about (H.275). It is in the transition from idle chatter to silence, from everydayness to uncanniness, that one apprehends one’s potentiality to be authentic (H.277) – without one having to appeal to some “objectively present” or “universally binding” voice (H.278) that is in fact nothing other than “public conscience” (i.e., the voice of das Man). To appeal to such concepts is to forget that “at bottom conscience is essentially “always mine,” not only in the sense that one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is always summoned, but because the call comes from the being that I myself always am” (H.278).

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Despite such elements of ontological analysis, Heidegger does not dispute the existentiell facticity (i.e., the “natural experience”) of conscience in the sense that it functions to “reprove and warn” (H.279), this in relation to concrete “failures and omissions which have already occurred or which we intended.” Seeking only to differentiate his ontological analysis from such an interpretation, Heidegger concedes this interpretation has its own justification as natural experience, as an “ontic understanding” of guilt in the usual sense. He is clear: “When the call is understood with an existentiell kind of hearing, such understanding is the more authentic the more Dasein hears and understands its own being summoned in a nonrelational way, and the less the meaning of the call gets distorted by what one says is proper and valid” (H.280). In this sense, then, what matters in the call of conscience is that one be “directed forward toward” one’s potentiality-of-being, as a call “out” of uncanniness. Thus, it is not sufficient that one moves existentielly from everydayness to uncanniness, since one is called out of one’s situation of uncanniness to one’s own authentic potentiality and not some “ideal universal potentiality-of-being” (H.280). If Heidegger were to interpret his being “guilty” it would not issue from some universal ideal but only from his interpretation of his ownmost being (H.281), irrespective of any “common sense” perspective on being guilty such that one might say Heidegger has some “debt,” “owes” something to someone (H.281). Granted, Heidegger asserts that “one can owe something to another without being responsible for it oneself,” and this in the sense that “Another person can ‘incur debts’ to others ‘for me’” (H.282). One might appropriate this assertion to argue, e.g., that Heidegger owed something to the Jews he knew personally (Husserl, Arendt, and so on), (e.g., a professional and personal courtesy and care for their persons,) and also for European Jews in general who were suffering under the Nazi Nuremberg laws and movement, without being responsible for this himself when others incurred debts to them “for him” – saying here “for him” precisely insofar as “they” (the Nazi das Man) committed one and all in the NDSP to the solidarity (Anschluss) and devotion to the soil of greater Germany. In this way it may be argued that Heidegger had a “personal responsibility to others” by “having the responsibility for the other’s becoming jeopardized in his existence, led astray, or even destroyed” (H.282). In this way, one can argue, Heidegger manifest what he called “a failure to satisfy some demand” placed on his being-with with others, including here both the German “Aryans” promoted by the Nazis and the ethnic Jews rounded up and destroyed consequent to Hitler’s final solution (Endlosung). Especially significant is that Heidegger recognizes this demand in its “normative” sense: “being guilty in this latter sense of breaking a ‘moral requirement’ is a kind of being of Dasein” (H.282). What troubled Heidegger in this conceptualization, however, is that one shifts from care of self to “the

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area of taking care of things in the sense of calculating claims and balancing them off” (H.283). In this, of course, Heidegger is concerned only with clarifying the “idea” of guilt, not its existentiell, ontic presentation in behavior and natural experience. Hence his remarks that, The idea of guilt must not only be removed from the area of calculating and taking care of things, but also must be separated from relationship to an ought and a law such that by failing to comply with it one burdens himself with guilt. (H.283) This concern for the idea of guilt in its “ontological formalized sense” does not diminish the fact that Heidegger recognizes the “common sense” notion of guilt that relates to a moral ought and law. This latter sense is to be acknowledged so long as one concedes that the human way to be is not that of “objective presence” and which can be assessed to be incomplete due to a “lack” of either what is possible or what ought to be: “Dasein is altogether incommensurable with something objectively present or valid which it itself is not, or which is not in the way Da-sein is, that is, exists” (H.283). The point is not to speak of a lack as a “privation,” “of a lack as compared with an ideal which is set up but is not attained in Da-sein” (H.285). Presumably, when one listens to the call of conscience (i.e., one “listens to one’s ownmost possibility” and thus “chooses oneself”), one is authentic in one’s choice of one’s potentiality. In choosing oneself one does not choose to judge oneself according to the “handy rules” or “public standards” of das Man; one does not “calculate infractions” and announce one’s being-guilty by talking “about mistakes all the more vociferously” (H.288). One cannot but expect that in the post-Rectorate era of his thinking Heidegger applied the same understanding to himself, and criticism of his actions would have to account for this as rationale for his comportment. Heidegger thus differentiated the ontological analysis of conscience from that of the everyday, the latter characterized as “the vulgar interpretation of conscience” (i.e., “We call this interpretation of conscience vulgar because in characterizing this phenomenon and describing its ‘function’ it keeps to what they know as conscience, how they follow or fail to follow it” (H.289). Heidegger is quite aware that the vulgar sense of conscience attends to “basic forms of the phenomenon” (i.e., “to ‘evil’ and ‘good’ conscience, to what ‘reproves’ and ‘warns’” (H.290). If one expects that Heidegger “should” have accounted himself guilty in the vulgar sense of conscience that “turns up after the deed has been done or left undone” (H.290), so that “The voice follows up the transgression and points back to the event through which Da-sein has burdened itself with guilt,” then (in Heidegger’s assessment) one’s interpretation is misplaced. Such is the expectation of guilt according to “public” conscience and not an

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authentic (ownmost) response to the call that is attuned to one’s authentic potentiality. In reference to himself, Heidegger would be rather unlikely to judge himself according to the vulgar interpretation of conscience, whether as having behaved in some way “good” or “bad” precisely because, as he sought to clarify phenomenologically, Becoming certain of not having done something does not have the character of a phenomenon of conscience at all. On the contrary, it can rather mean a forgetting of conscience, that is, that one is emerging from the possibility of being able to be summoned. This “certainty” contains the tranquilizing suppression of wanting to have a conscience, that is, of understanding one’s ownmost and constant being-guilty. “Good” conscience is neither an independent form of conscience nor a founded form of conscience, that is, it is not a phenomenon of conscience at all (H.292). The same holds in the case of “bad” conscience: “For factically,” Heidegger observes, “the idea of ‘bad’ conscience is oriented toward that of the ‘good’ conscience. The everyday interpretation keeps to the dimension of calculating and taking care of things and balancing out ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’” (H.292). Heidegger thus referred to Kant’s understanding of conscience: The fact that Kant takes the “idea of a court of justice” as the key idea for the basis of his interpretation of conscience is not a matter of chance, but was suggested by the idea of moral law, although his concept of morality was far removed from utilitarianism and eudaimonism (H.293). This remark Heidegger makes to state the point of his own ontological analysis of conscience: The appeal to the scope of what the everyday conscience is familiar with as the sole higher court for the interpretation of conscience, cannot be justified unless it has stopped to consider whether conscience can become authentically accessible at all. Obviously, the common sense view of conscience seeks a positive content qua judgment. That is, “we expect to be told something actually useful about assured possibilities of ‘action’ that are available and calculable.” Such would be “‘practical’ directions” or “unequivocally calculable maxims.” But, in this way, Heidegger claims, “conscience would deny to existence nothing less than the possibility of acting” (H.294). In that case one may ask what

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Heidegger would have one do in any appeal to conscience, understanding the possibilities of deontology, utilitarianism, and eudaimonism? His answer is perhaps stated by him thus: The call discloses nothing that could be positive or negative as something to be taken care of, because it has to do with an ontologically completely different being, namely existence. On the contrary, the correctly understood call gives the “most positive thing of all” in the existential sense – the ownmost possibility that Da-sein can give itself as a calling back that calls forth to its factical potentialityof-being-a-self. To hear the call authentically means to bring oneself to factical action. (H.294) With that said, Heidegger utters what may be taken as a cautionary note, viz., that with the existential interpretation of conscience one would have the “misunderstanding that by showing the lack of existential primordiality of the everyday experience of conscience one wanted to pass judgment upon the existentiell ‘moral quality’ of Da-sein” (H.295). But this is not so. This is why Heidegger clarifies what he means by the existential structure of authentic potentiality-of-being attested in conscience. Every human is, as human, primordially or originally guilty (ursprüngliche Schuldigsein). Yet, Heidegger clarified that this guilt is “separated from the relationship to an ought and a law that by failing to comply with it one burdens oneself with guilt”.116 The distinction is pertinent in sorting out a meaningful definition of responsibility, but it also defines one category of responsibility as an individual’s relationship to “an ought and a law” (i.e., that by failing to comply with it one burdens oneself with guilt). This is a moral and legal indebtedness. But, as Derrida stated, this concept was not a barrier to Nazism and was even appropriated by Nazi discourse to its own ends, even by Hitler in linking the fate of the German citizen to the fate of the German nation, all called to a common responsibility for a common destiny. Hence, Heidegger’s Kehre points to a needed revision of concept, his lecture on “The Turning” (1949) delivered after the events of the war were becoming more evident; for, it is at this point that Heidegger discerns the need for an essential (wesentliche) or meditative (besinnliche) thinking that challenges calculative (rechnendes) thinking, and thereby also puts into question the concept of responsibility understood as one’s relation to a moral or legal indebtedness, to what is appropriately called “calculative responsibility.” Heidegger tells us in Being and Time that we unavoidably engage our potentiality for being in a situation of thrownness, and that in choosing one or another possibility such choice is at once unconcealing and concealing, thus continuously unfolding without assurance of a “determinate” disclosure. 126

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What we apprehend of ourselves in that simultaneous unconcealment/ concealment (Unverborgenheit/Verborgenheit) of one’s potentiality for being is finite, and subject to the interplay of being, appearance, semblance, and non-being. One is reminded, thereby, that with an individual’s “lostness” (Verlorenheit) in das Man, what in that way is given as an individual’s closest factical capacity-to-be (Seinkönnen), there is also given the tasks, rules, and standards, the urgency and reach, of “concernful” and “solicitous” beingin-the-world (besorgend-fürsorgend In-der-Welt-seins), all of this already decided in that “thrownness” into das Man.117 In this way, Heidegger instructed us, das Man has always already kept the individual from taking hold of his or her own possibilities of being (Seinsmöglichketein), even hiding from the individual the explicit choice (ausdrücken Wahl) of these possibilities. It remains “indefinite” (unbestimmt) who has “truly” (eigentlich) chosen. This indiscriminate (wahllose) “getting-carried-along by nobody” is the manner in which the individual entangles him/herself in “impropriety” (“inauthenticity,” Uneigentlichkeit), and which can be “reversed,” Heidegger says, only in such a way that the individual solely (eigens) brings him/herself back to the authentic self from this lostness in das Man. It is thus that one is to understand human freedom to be, one’s individual possibilities of being. Clearly, this applies to Heidegger himself as he was “thrown” into the possibility of being that “vulgar” National Socialism presented to him in 1933, Heidegger partly “carried along” by this movement but also a possibility “partly chosen,” Heidegger “entangled” in this way in impropriety/ inauthenticity. In that sense, it is unclear “who” really chose. Heidegger himself seemingly chose as das Man Selbst, or at least so he seemed to suggest by his post-war pleadings of mistake and error; but which Heidegger nonetheless “tried to reverse,” at least “for himself” and “his own” proper potentiality for being, by pitting his concept of a “spiritual” National Socialism against the extant Nazism that was ideological, racist, and biologistic and that was without a “deeper” sense of German destiny such as Heidegger believed to be unfolding. Thereby, Heidegger exercised “his own sense of responsibility” against the “calculative” sense of responsibility that was unfolding in the Nazi ideology of the day, seeking to remove himself from being “positioned” into the “tasks, rules, and standards” given thereby for “Nazi das Man.” Qua Dasein, Heidegger was, at the time of his entanglement with National Socialism, “already beyond” himself as captured by das Man Selbst, beyond the objective facts that we take to be historiologically represented. That “beyond” is the horizon of the future in its claim upon the present as Heidegger intuited or “projected” it, his projection (Entwurf ) and his thrownness (Geworfenheit) structuring his own potentiality-for-being. Such was Heidegger’s “essential constitution” even as he had his own “existentiell attestation” (Besengung). Hence, such was Heidegger’s “thrown projection” but also his ownmost call of conscience (understood ontologically and not morally or psychologically) to his ownmost potentiality-for-being 127

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(eigenstes Seinkönnen). Resolutely appropriating his ownmost potentiality since at least the time of his Rectorate vis-à-vis vulgar Nazism, Heidegger “listened” to that call rather than surrender to das Man-Selbst unfolding as the “everyday” of the vulgar Nazism as he sought to disclose his proper self (das eigene Selbst). Such was his “fateful” risk, his tolma, in the confrontation of possibilities. In short, one may say, as Heidegger himself might say from Being and Time, that the calling to which he responded came “from” him yet “over” him, even as he had “fallen prey” to das Man of vulgar Nazism and then sought to counter it. In light of these various remarks about Heidegger’s discourse, it should be clear that the production of corpses such as Heidegger’s meaning intends can never be a “Shoah” or a “Holocaust” in the strict sense of those words (i.e., in the sense of a “calamity” that presents us with mere “destruction,” or in the ritualized sense of “a burnt offering to God on an altar”). For, the event of positionality displaces and disposes of both “mortals” as mortal and “gods” as divinities who draw humans into the jointure of “the sacred,” thus displacing the very possibility of a sacred jointure in which humans may dwell. Hence, Heidegger asserts: Hundreds of thousands die in masses. Do they die? They perish. They are put down. Do they die? They become pieces of inventory of a standing reserve for the fabrication of corpses. Do they die? They are unobtrusively liquidated in annihilation camps. To die, however, means to carry out death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of carrying this out. We are only capable of it, however, when our essence is endeared to the essence of death. To be capable of death in its essence means to be able to die. Those that are able to die are first of all the mortals in the weighty sense of that word. Massive distresses innumerable, horrific undying death all about – and nevertheless the essence of death is disguised from the human. The human is not yet the mortal.118 One surmises that Primo Levi would agree with Heidegger, given Levi’s own words characterizing the Auschwitz Muselmänner: Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death.119 Fackenheim, reflecting on Levi’s words, thereby asserts: “Philosophers are faced with a new aporia. It arises from the necessity to listen to the silence 128

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of the Muselmann.”120 If the philosopher must do so, then s/he may have to do so by sustaining that silence, awaiting the proper word at the appropriate time, if indeed it is to be disclosed at all. Of course, in the interim wherein the word is lacking, Fackenheim counseled otherwise. His 614th commandment issues a negative imperative: “Thou shalt not hand Hitler posthumous victories.” This implies that one should continue to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, since “To despair of the God of Israel is to continue Hitler’s work for him.” And, for a Reform Jew such as Fackenheim, that means a post-genocide Jew ought to retain belief in the legitimacy of the 613 commandments articulated by Maimonides. Hence, Fackenheim’s argument is starkly clear: we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler’s victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.121 These imperatives apply to a post-Holocaust Jew who is prepared to accept the significance of the 614th commandment today, whether for reasons religious or secular. But they are not universal imperatives for humanity, in Kant’s sense, for the commandment as imperative has its ground in religious belief and not in religion within the limits of reason alone. Further, the “authority” for the 614th commandment is only its author, Fackenheim, not Yahweh’s revelation as is understood to be given in the 613 commandments discussed so carefully in the halacha of the Talmudic texts, although Fackenheim appeals to “the commanding voice of Auschwitz”122 to warrant the commandment. His appeal to the post-Holocaust obligations of the Torah retains belief in the absolute validity of the law, thus on a heteronomy, rather than rest individual moral decision on a merely human autonomy. David Patterson states the point aptly by contraposing the Cartesian dictum, “I think, therefore I am” to the formula “God commands, therefore I am,” the point being that Fackenheim will not live without God, will not deny God.123 But, if one cannot live without God, specifically without the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then that proposition is made counter as well to Heidegger’s own thinking. Distinguishing between Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, Fackenheim faulted Heidegger for a “philosophical failure” rather than for a “political error.” Despite his attention to 129

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Ereignis, Fackenheim complained, Heidegger either could not or did not interpret the Holocaust as such, while Fackenheim deemed the Holocaust not only as a “world-historical event” but one “beyond explanation.” Fackenheim’s critique of Heidegger thus contraposes Jewish monotheism to what he takes to be a “pagan polytheistic” view in Heidegger’s later thought, says Ari Bursztein, in which case Heidegger’s thought permits a moral relativism such as could motivate Nazi genocide, while Fackenheim’s defense of monotheism assures “an ultimate ethical truth.”124 But, one must ask here: Does this mean that Heidegger thereby becomes a committed “neo-pagan,” as Hans Jonas has argued?125 Or, is it, as Rudolph Bultmann opined, more akin to a “pure” Christianity to the degree that it “demythologizes” traditional onto-theo-logy?126 Whichever, if either, it is not clear that we have a religiously grounded answer reasonably and indefeasibly capable of explaining the Nazi genocide or powerful enough to advance an ethics that will prevent future genocides. As noted earlier with reference to Fackenheim’s position, neither a pure Christianity nor a neo-pagan theology will achieve what is necessary for a post-Holocaust ethics, for “The religious incursion into the world of God in Christ may or may not leave room for subsequent eruptions of demonic evil in the world.”127

Notes 1 Jeffrey A. Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), Chapter 1, “The Emergence of the Problem of Historical Meaning in Nineteenth Century German Thought,” p. 8. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 See here Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Martin Heidegger (with Eugen Fink), Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. C.H. Seibert (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1979). 4 Martin Heidegger, “Hegel and the Greeks,” from Conference of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg, 26 July 1958, www.morec.hegelgr.htm, accessed on 26 April 2018; published text in Pathmarks, 1998. 5 Heidegger intends here an “inner connection” of basic concepts – “hen” (Parmenides); “logos” (Heraclitus); “Idea” (Plato); “energeia” (Aristotle) – “within the horizon of the key word ‘being.’” 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., italics added. For further insight on this see Ryan Johnson, “Thinking the Abyss of History: Heidegger’s Critique of Hegelian Metaphysics,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, Vol. 6, 2016, pp. 51–68. 8 Heidegger, Contributions, §104, p. 142. 9 Heidegger adds later, §119, p. 164: “What lies between Hegel and Nietzsche has many shapes but is nowhere within the metaphysical in any originary sense – not even Kierkegaard.” 10 Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem, p. 27, italics added. 11 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 12 Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar.

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13 Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 168. 14 Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt, p. 175. 15 Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar, Chapter 10, “The Standing Open of Gods and Humans (Fragment 62). The ‘Speculative’ in Hegel – Hegel’s Relationship to Heraclitus – Life-Death (Correlated Fragments: 88, 62),” pp. 108 ff. 16 Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar, pp. 110 & 111, italics added. 17 D. F. Krell, Basic Writings, noted Heidegger’s reference to his mother having “a prescient intimation” of Heidegger having taken a path, “apparently turned away from God.” What this means is unclear, but it may be interpreted in terms of Heidegger’s opposition to “Christian” metaphysical theology present in the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church in contrast to what insights he found in the thought of Martin Luther. For this see Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J.A. Gosetti-Ferenci (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), the English version of his lectures from 1920–1921. 18 Heidegger, Contributions, §155, p. 195, asks: “What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences? . . . What was it once? The site for the moment of the arrival and dwelling of gods, when the site – still ϕυσις – rested in the essential swaying of be-ing. . . . Must nature be surrendered and abandoned to machination? Are we still capable of seeking earth anew? Who enkindles that strife in which the earth finds its open, in which the earth encloses itself and is earth?” 19 Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 201. 21 Ibid., Ponderings II–VI, p. 119. 22 Ibid., Ponderings IX, p. 141. 23 Parvis Emad, On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 37–38. 24 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 21. 25 Ibid., p. 15. 26 Ibid., p. 26. 27 Ibid., §256, p. 289. Heidegger clarifies further, in §259, p. 308, to forestall an interpretation of a doctrine of polytheism: “But the talk of ‘gods’ here does not indicate the decided assertion on the extantness of a plurality over against a singular but is rather meant as the allusion to the undecidability of the being of gods, whether of one single god or of many gods. This undecidability holds within itself what is question-worthy, namely, whether anything at all like being dare be attributed to gods without destroying everything that is divine. The undecidability concerning which god and whether a god can, in utmost distress, once again arise, from which way of being of man in what way – this is what is named with the name ‘gods.’” Understanding this, then, Heidegger says further (p. 309): “Be-ing historical thinking is outside any theology and also know no atheism, in the sense of a worldview or a doctrine structured in some other way.” 28 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 33. 29 Ibid., p. 41. 30 Ibid., p. 44. 31 Ibid., p. 78. 32 Ibid., p. 89. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 100. 35 Ibid.

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36 Ibid., p. 336. 37 Ibid., p. 101. 38 Ibid., p. 117. Earlier in the text (pp. 26–27), Heidegger remarked: “For even in the ‘liberal’ worldview there lies this self-righteousness, in the sense that it demands that each be allowed his opinion. But the arbitrariness is slave to what is ‘accidental” in contrast to being open to what is ‘essential,’ surrendering to ‘the omniscience of public opinion,’ in which way such a worldview is ‘necessarily limiting’ and even ‘dictatorial’ in its manner of self-preservation against new possibilities of questioning. Thus, (p.  28), “That ‘worldview’ can be the ownmost matter for the individual and his respective life-experience and his very own formation of opinion, that in opposition to this ‘worldview’ a ‘total worldview’ can come forward in order to extinguish every individual opinion – even this belongs to what is ownmost to worldview as such.” The consequence is clear (p. 29): “Because of their total posture, total political belief and total Christian faith [one must think here Roman Catholic Christendom and also “philosophy in its distinctively Christian cast (in the systematization of German Idealism)”] are based upon renouncing essential decisions. Their struggle is not a creative one but rather ‘propaganda’ and ‘apologetics.’” 39 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 127. 40 Ibid., p. 316. 41 Ibid., p. 334. 42 Ibid., p. 345. 43 Richard Rojcewicz, the translator of Heidegger’s Ponderings II–VI, p.  75, note 26, clarifies words in use here: “Heidegger employs in these notebooks three adjectives derived from the noun das Volk, ‘people’: volkhaft, volkich, and völkisch,” which are translated respectively as ‘populist,’ ‘communal,’ and ‘folkish.” 44 Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 42, italics added. 45 Ibid., p. 48. 46 Ibid., p. 66. 47 Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University/The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1985, pp. 467–502. 48 Heidegger, Contributions, §173, p. 209, clarifies that, in the “other” or “second” beginning, “Da-sein is the very own self-grounding ground of αληθεια of ϕυσις, is the essential swaying of that openness which first enopens the selfsheltering-concealing (the essential sway of be-ing) and which is thus the truth of be-ing itself.  .  .  . Da-sein can never be encountered as the character of a being that is encountered and is extant. . . . Nevertheless, Da-sein and man are essentially related, insofar as Da-sein means the ground of the possibility of future humanness and insofar as man is futural, in that he takes over being the t/here [Da], granted that he grasps himself as the guardian of the truth of be-ing, which guardianship is designated as ‘care.’” 49 Heidegger, Contributions, p. 30. 50 Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, pp. 69–70. 51 Ibid., p. 80. 52 Ibid., p. 81. 53 Ibid., p. 82. 54 Ibid., p. 84. 55 Ibid., p. 85. 56 Ibid., p. 88. 57 Ibid., p. 89. 58 Ibid., p. 90.

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid., p. 97, italics added. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 104 & 105. Ibid., p. 48, p. 108. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 210. Heidegger is unequivocal (Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 194): “The blind and busy! They believe the ‘they’ of ‘Dasein’ is now replaced by the people – or could be at any time; ‘the people’ merely provides a hardening, which means a greater veiling. Besides, the question in Being and Time does of course not have the least to do with the prattle about ‘nationality’ [‘Volkstum’] which is becoming more and more common in science.” Thus, Heidegger rejects the metapolitics of metaphysics in its presumptive yet misplaced effort to appropriate Heidegger’s conceptual framework for National Socialist philosophy. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 236. Ibid., p. 222. Heidegger means here not only scholastic Christianity but also “positive” Christianity: “Meanwhile, positive Christianity is demanded – or conceded – on the basis of the concordat and the universal perplexity and the need for a certain ‘morality’; besides this – besides those doctrines – there are the all too hasty ones who make a movement out of ‘belief’; then those who mix an unclear Germanity with a still more diluted Christianity; then those few who form for themselves a standpoint out of sheer Godlessness; and finally the majority, the sheer indifferent ones, who look on and wait for something to which they can ‘attach’ themselves one day. If all of this is not a flight of the gods – if this is not Godlessness – the lack of all art is no wonder!” (Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 135). Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 236, is concerned with how Nietzsche’s thought is to be transmitted to the future without the National Socialist deformation of “the essential aspect of it” in a “crude ‘biologism.’” Against National Socialism, Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p.  342, complains: “The new politics is an intrinsic essential consequence of ‘technology’ and is so not only with respect to the ways and means of proceeding which are set in motion by it. On the contrary, in itself this politics is the machinational organization of the people to the highest possible ‘performance,’ whereby even people are grasped with regard to the basic biological determination in an essentially ‘technological’-machinational way (i.e., in terms of breeding). . . . [“Technology”] can never be mastered through the folkish-political [völkisch-politisch] worldview. This that in essence is already a slave can never become master.” Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 131. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p.  142. Heidegger adds (p.  216) Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p.  48: “That ‘science’ is now made ‘political’ is only the consequence of its intrinsic, modern – (i.e., technological)– essence.” Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 169, italics added. Ibid., p. 243, objects: “Who is the future human being, assuming he would still ground a history? Answer: the steward of the stillness of the passing by of the last god – the grounding preserver of the truth of beyng. But where and how are these stewards of the stillness to come forth? Can we ‘breed’ them? No!” Said

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80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

more starkly: National Socialist’s privileging and breeding of an “Aryan” race is crude biologism that founders in the inessential. “Mere breeding of human exemplars with such and such qualities would be a mistake, indeed the mistake pure and simple.” Not only is it a mistake; it is a “basic illusion” – “that everyone’s easily possible insight into the biological condition for the breeding of a ‘people’ could touch what is essential – whereas the predominance of this naturally crude and common biological way of thinking precisely suppresses meditation on the basic conditions of being a people.” (p. 246) This mistake rests upon a mistaken commitment to a worldview presumably “reasonable” and “endowed with a higher truth.” Therefore, in consequence, National Socialists “pursue the breeding of the animal as the slave of this ‘reason’” – (i.e., the “rational animal” as the combination of “race” and “reason”). Yet: how is “the saving of the West . . . to come from that?” (p. 267). Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 171. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 272. Ibid., p. 352. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 89–139. Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel, 30, May 1976, 193–219, trans. W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. T. Sheehan, pp. 45–67, www.ditext.com/ heidegger/interview.html, accessed on 17 May 2018. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” p. 139. Heidegger, “The Turn,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. A.J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 65. Heidegger, “Positionality,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 25. Ibid., pp. 26–27. Ibid., p. 35, italics added. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 84–85, italics added. Ibid., pp. 89–90. One has in mind here Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977); see also Walzer, “Supreme Emergency,” in Malham M. Walkin, ed., War, Morality, and the Military Profession (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986). Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 93. William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), pp.  117–118. The German text is given as: “‘Beginn’ – das ist etwas anderes als ‘Anfang’ . . . Beginn ist jenes, womit etwas anhebt, Anfang das, woraus etwas enspringt. Der Weltkreig fing an vor Jahrunderten in der geistig-politischen Geschichte des Abendlandes. Der Welkrieg began mit Vorpostengefechten. Der Beginn wird als bald züruckgelassen, er verschwindet im Fortgang Geschehens. Der Anfang der Ursprung, kommt dagegen im Geschehen aller erst zum Vorschien und ist voll da erst an seinem Ende.” Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 94 & 95. Ibid., p. 106. Heidegger, “Lecture IV,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 126. Ibid., p. 133. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 7. Heidegger, “Lecture IV,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p. 126. Ibid., p.  137, comments: “European thinking also threatens to become planetary in that the contemporary Indians, Chinese, and Japanese in many cases

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103

104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122

report their experiences to us only in our European way of thinking. Thus from there and from here everything is stirred up in a gigantic mishmash wherein it is no longer discernible whether or not the ancient Indians were English empiricists and Lao Tzu a Kantian. Where and how is there supposed to be an awaking conversation calling each back into its own essence, if on both sides substanceless has the final word?” Heidegger would have us reconsider the fact that the beginning of thinking as logic set up the eventual appearance of thinking as calculation. However, with this disposition towards thinking, as he says (Heidegger, “Lecture IV,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, p.  136), what is lost from sight is that thinking is apophantic in character, a loss problematic for the contemporary technological world so long as “we do not engage in a meditation that shows what lies resolved in the casting of thinking as logos, in this disappearance of the apophansis-character.” [Greek words transliterated.] Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and P. Lacoue-LaBarthe, La conference de Heidelberg, textes réunis, presents et annotés par Mireille Calle-Gruber, note de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. (Paris: Lignes-Imec, 2014), p. 89. Despite “uncertainty about the operational statuses and size of total inventories,” the latest assessment places the size of global nuclear weapons inventories at approximately 14,175 nuclear weapons, 92% of such weapons produced by the USA (6,450) and Russia (6,600). See here, “World Nuclear Weapon Stockpile,” Ploughshares Fund, www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report, accessed on 21 June 2018. Derrida et al., La Conference de Heidelberg, p. 96. Ibid., p. 98. Heidegger, “Lecture III: The Principle of Identity,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 108–121, at p. 115, italics added. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., italics added in this and the previous sentence. Ibid., pp. 117–118. Ibid., p. 120, italics added. Brumlik, La conference de Heidelberg, p.  100. Brumlik was professor at the time at the Goethe University, Frankfurt-sur-le-Main, and from 2000–2005 director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for the study and documentation of the Holocaust. Derrida et al., La conference de Heidelberg, p. 103. Ibid., pp. 111–112. Heidegger, Being and Time, p.  272. For an insightful discussion, see Frank Schalow, “The Hermeneutical Design of Heidegger’s Analysis of Guilt,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1985, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.2041-6962.1985.tb00406.x, accessed on 21 June 2018. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 268. Heidegger, “The Danger,” Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 33–34. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. S. Woolf (New York: Orion, 1959), p. 82. Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” p. 511. Emil Fackenheim, “Jewish Values In the Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium,” Judaism, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer 1967, p. 294. Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz,” God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, 1972, “THE COMMANDING VOICE OF AUSCHWITZ”: NEVER FORGET: 70th ANNIVERSARY OF AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION, isranet-publications Isranet

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123 124 125 126

127

Daily Briefing, January 27, 2015, www.isranet.org/daily-briefing/commandingvoice-auschwitz-never-forget-70th-anniversary-auschwitz-liberaton/, accessed on 21 June 2018. David Patterson, “Emil L. Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Critique of Modern Philosophy,” Research Paper, The 10th International Conference on Arts and Humanities, pp. 1–19, at p. 2. Ari Bursztein, “Emil Fackenheim on Heidegger and the Holocaust,” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, July 2004, pp. 325–336, at p. 334. Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 235–261. See here John R. Williams, Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 1977). Also see Norman K. Swazo, “Heidegger’s Destruktion of Theology: ‘Primordial Faith’ and ‘Recognition’ of Messiah,” Modern Theology, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 2019, pp. 138–162. Fackenheim, “On the Actuality of the Rational,” p. 698.

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[If] fate constitutes the primordial historicity of Da-sein, history has its essential weight neither in what is past nor in the today and its “connection” with what is past, but in the authentic occurrence of existence that arises from the future of Da-sein. (H.386) This is what Heidegger would have understood to be so for himself in his situation such as he interpreted it during the period from 1933 onward in all of his philosophical projects that were at once a retrieval, a deconstruction, and a reconstruction as he worked to appropriate his ownmost (i.e., authentic), potentiality-of-being responsible for his fate and destiny. At the end of the discussion presented in the preceding chapters, we are left with our own “judgment” of the inescapable fact that we ourselves are daily steeped in a “fateful decision” (in Heidegger’s sense of decision, Entscheidung). Each of us individually and jointly confronts a disclosure of reality, appearance, and semblance as we appropriate or ignore our ownmost possibilities of historical being. We may argue, in the end, that Heidegger “could” have and “should” have declared the Nazi genocide of the European Jews to have been “morally” wrong. We may argue further that, both as “person” and “philosopher,” Heidegger was mistaken not to have asserted these fundamental moral judgments when given the opportunity to do so. If there is a post-Holocaust ethics reasonably to govern our time – this is in our day by no means evident – one who makes that moral judgment must be clear that, if and when it is so given, it is given in the context of one of the three possibilities of our individual and collective mode of concealment/unconcealment. That is, we are left as always with our own judgment in the face of the inescapable fact that we ourselves are daily steeped in a fateful decision involving the threefold path of being, appearance, and semblance in confrontation with non-being as we individually seek to disclose our own most proper possibilities of being other than those of das Man into which we are thrown. “We,” severally and jointly, are also readily “politicized” in that

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decision so long as the polis, the State, the political community (Gemeinschaft), the people (Volk), all, are gathered and ordered at the site (topos) of our Dasein, our Mit-sein, and Mit-daseienden. We may argue with Heidegger the thinker, even indict Heidegger the man, according to this or that ontological, epistemological, and moral standard, disposing both theoretical and practical accounts of rational judgment in the service of either condemnation or apology. One account of rationality rivals another; one account of justice contends with another. Many of us nowhere have a satisfactory resolution of these disputations, even as we ourselves may be in error in our own discernment of the present, unclear about what is real, apparent, or semblant, this or that philosophy of history tacitly or explicitly presupposed as we advance our respective analyses. Obviously, for many a philosopher who is an observer of the Heidegger “case,” there “must” be some judgment that is not only reasonably defensible but also one that, pitted against others, prevails qua due judgment of moral right. Yet, as William James commented aptly long ago, even though “The entire understanding of the philosopher obliges him to seek an impartial test,” the fact is that, “That test . . . must be incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can he pick out that person save by an act in which his own sympathies and prepossessions are implied?”1 Indeed. That is what is to be said even today, in the absence of some “essence” of “the good upon which all thinkers were agreed.” This, too, is a present fact – not only is there no universal assent on a claim of “the good”; it is by no means clear that such assent would serve as a meaningful or reliable standard, in which case the dilemma of the moral philosopher’s quest for certitude remains a matter of unresolved perplexity. Hence, James seems to be correct in holding that there can be no moral universe created a priori. When “the ideal” and “the actual” are related one to the other, inevitably inhabiting the actual means that we navigate our lives only “by leaving part of the ideal behind.” So, as James observed further, “Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire.” Thus, so it is with every political ideology that is presented to us with its own ethical content, and inevitably already contraposed to another. Each of us, as James reminds, is “born into a society whose ideals are largely ordered already” – much as Heidegger spoke of our “thrownness” into the publicness of das Man – such that these “ideals” govern to the exclusion of others, the latter either rejected out of hand or ignored altogether. One wonders, then, whether James’s insight is apropós to the moral philosopher’s task – “to be a philosopher” without being “the champion of one particular ideal.” And, in choosing to be that philosopher, perhaps there is one guiding principle, viz., that “those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed,” as James suggests. In other words, to “invent some manner of realizing [one’s] own ideals which will 138

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also satisfy alien demands – that and that only is the path of peace!” Such seems to be James’s pragmatic counsel. But here one encounters an obvious difficulty. A liberal political ideology would be the more accommodating of a plurality of moral ideals, in contrast to a fascist/totalitarian political ideology that would be more exclusive of that plurality. James’s moral imperative is clear: The presumption in cases of conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs of the community on top. Yet, philosophically, given Heidegger’s clarification of the ontological structures of human existence and his rejection of the authority of public conscience and its public standards “calculatively” derived, this moral imperative is entirely contingent if not immediately suspect; for, the “fact” is, as James himself adds, that the imperatives of the present may very well and in all likelihood in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order. . . . [So that] the philosopher must allow that it is at all times open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw. So has it been for all the master moral philosophers – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greek antiquity; Augustine and Aquinas in medieval Christianity and Maimonides in rabbinic Judaism; Ibn Rushd in Islamic philosophy; Mill, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in late Western modernity – and so it must be for any today whose thinking is “postmodern” such as is articulated in the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Yes, “even” Heidegger who, as both man and thinker, is castigated for his “experiment,” for his tolma, as he worked in thought to disclose the human plight of Abgrund – this between the “end” of the first beginning and the “origin” of the second beginning in a Seynsgeschichte he could barely intuit without being able to disclose it, except in words at once anticipatory and preparatory. In the Heidegger “case” – a word appropriate to a casuistic assessment – one may be casuistical in James’s sense, understanding that “every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no previous rule exists.” Surely that was so in the historical situation of vulgar Nazism, with all that this ideological appeal issued forth in its dogma of racist self-assertion and associated acts of destruction and atrocity. The philosopher must “be,” in short, one who 139

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refuses to be dogmatic, instead remaining open to ongoing renovation of the moral and the political as the threefold path of Entscheidung presents itself anew to moral decision. To speak of casuistry here, however, is not to entertain some calculative approach to moral decision. Shalini Satkunanandan, in her Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus, captures what is at issue for Heidegger in the vulgar interpretation of conscience when she speaks of “calculative responsibility,” i.e., that “particular way of approaching human responsibility [that] .  .  . takes human responsibility as something amenable to calculation – as a series of debts that can be identified in advance, reckoned up, negotiated, balanced out, and discharged.”2 More important, “calculable responsibility curbs our attention and can actually render us unresponsive to our world and thereby irresponsible.” Indeed, “As a diminished form of attention to the world,” – one would say better, a mode of attention that is “inauthentic” consequent to its having fallen prey to the dominating comportment of “public” conscience – “calculable responsibility obscures the more open-ended dimensions of our world and our responsibility,”3 an openness, one may say, that is open to one’s ownmost potentialityto-be responsive to the call of conscience. In this regard and bearing James’s counsel in mind, one considers that Kant offered some important counsel pertinent to the present point: I cannot deny all respect to even a vicious man as a human being; I cannot withdraw at least the respect that belongs to him in his quality as a human being, even though by his deeds he makes himself unworthy of it.4 In that case, following Kant, one may say that those who condemn Heidegger for his “errors,” “fantasies,” “failures,” and so on, stand to be instructed by Kant when he counsels on “a duty” – not mere “charity” – to respect a human being even in the logical use of his reason, a duty not to censure his errors by calling them absurdities, poor judgment and so forth, but rather to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out, uncovering, at the same time, the deceptive illusion (the subjective ground that determined his judgment which, by an oversight, he took for objective), and so, by explaining to him the possibility of his having erred, to preserve his respect for his own understanding.5 Obviously, one cannot today speak directly to Heidegger to fulfill this counsel. But, nevertheless, Heidegger’s detractors can surely exercise restraint in their condemnation as their professional responsibility obligates them to engage all of Heidegger’s texts to judge what “truth” they may yet contain, 140

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and to be sure that it is clear what concept of truth is governing (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, aletheiological, and so on). That said, one can consider here Heidegger’s early remarks on the essence of truth. At §17 of his Logic: The Question of Truth,6 Heidegger discusses how he construes “communicating an analysis of phenomena” for the purpose of letting someone “come to see the phenomena” about which he is speaking. One speaks so that those to whom one is speaking “might form an understanding of them,” Heidegger’s remarks anticipating his discussion in Being and Time on the concepts of “care” (Sorge), “concern-for” (Fürsorge), “concern-about” (Besorgen), authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), and inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). He characterizes himself and us as “being-in-theworld” (in-der-Welt-Sein), meaning “as being familiar with the world,” his own existence (also for our own existence) characterized as “Dasein,” each Dasein standing “out” (thus Heidegger’s sense of ek-stasis) “unto its ownmost being as what it is concerned about.” Heidegger, like us, lives in the world of his day and time, familiar with it and concerned about his ownmost being – bearing in mind here that “existence’s entire structure belongs to the phenomenon of care because care is what characterizes existence.” Inasmuch as this being “cares about that very being [Sein]” Heidegger calls this “care” [Sorge]. Here Heidegger is moving beyond “traditional ontological categories” such as Kant (in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, §2) uses when speaking of humans as “things whose existence is an end in itself,” each having “absolute value in itself” as a “rational being.” Kant has an important insight here, but for Heidegger Kant does not think fundamentally enough (e.g., beyond the tension of empiricists and rationalists in their posit of a subject-object dichotomy that Kant seeks to settle in his Critique of Pure Reason) to capture the phenomenon of the human manner of being in the world and having the structure of care. Understanding this phenomenon of care, Heidegger instructs that all “modes of comportment unto the world (including the modes of concern) spring from care,” even as we are to understand that “care, as existence’s kind of being, is co-original with existence as being in a world.”7 In the course at hand Heidegger seeks to expound on the essence of truth in relation to logic, thus “communicating the subject matter and helping people see it in a lecture.”8 He clarifies there for his students that, “the lecture cannot really produce in you the vision of the subject matter but can only awaken it or arouse it.” The point is salient in understanding how Heidegger construes his relation of teacher to student and the task of communication in which he is engaged. The lecture has its limitation, at best awakening the students to the subject matter being discussed. Heidegger thus understands himself and the students in a situation of “being-with” and “mutual-care,” thus “being concerned-for” [Mitsorge, genauer: Fürsorge].” At issue in all such Fürsorge is how anyone comports himself, how, 141

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for example, Heidegger comports himself in the mode of his Fürsorge with his students. And, as one may expect, Heidegger understands and explains to his students the two comportments that are possible – the sort of solicitude that “leaps in” and the sort that “leaps ahead,” the former a manifestation of inauthenticity and the latter one of authenticity. One assumes that Heidegger prefers that in this case with his students he himself have a comportment of Fürsorge that is authentic (eigentlich) and not inauthentic (uneigentlich), but one that holds beyond that particular engagement also. Let us consider what he says here for its further implications in the case of his Recktoratsrede. Anticipating what he will write in Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of “concern-for” carried out in a way “that virtually takes away the other’s care.” This he clarifies thus: In concern-for him I put myself in his place: I step in for him, which entails that he give himself up, step back, and accept ready-made the concern I show him, thereby completely freeing himself from his care. In the kind of being concerned – for where care “steps in,” the person on the receiving end becomes dependent and dominated, even though the domination may be entirely unspoken and not experienced.9 This “step-in” solicitude Heidegger distinguishes from the “step-ahead” solicitude: By contrast there is a second kind of being-with-the-other that does not step into his place (his situation and project) and take it away, but instead carefully steps ahead of him, not so as to take away his care – which is himself, his very existence – but to give it back to him. Such concern-for does not dominate but liberates. Which of these two is preferable? For Heidegger it is the step-ahead mode of Fürsorge that recognizes the significance of authentic being-with-theother. As he says, “The second kind of concern-for is the concern-for of authenticity, because the existence who receives it can and should return to himself and become his own authentic self.”10 Notice that the concern here is normative “for safeguarding the other’s possibility of authenticity,” thus to “liberate” the other to that possibility, and deliberately to avoid contributing to the other’s possibility of inauthenticity by “dominating” and “taking away” the other’s “care for himself,” making the other “dependent” and thereby not free for the possibility of appropriating that “care” for his own existence. Heidegger’s preference for the step-ahead comportment of solicitude, he clarifies, is such as to be careful not to step into the other’s proper (ownmost) place (i.e., what is properly his or her own possibility of being): 142

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Here I certainly do not understand the other existence primarily in terms of the world I’m concerned about. Rather, I understand the other’s existence only in terms of himself. By contrast, the first mode of being concerned-for is concerned for the other in such a way that, in his place and at his service, it procures for him a possible possession. It understands the other existence in terms of the things that he is concerned about, which are giving him difficulty. This concern-for throws the other out of his place, as it were, and engages only with what must be done to restore the other to a now-guaranteed possession of that thing. This kind of being concerned-for treats the other like a nothing, as if he had nothing of existence about him. In this form of being-concerned for he is not present as his own existence but as inauthentic existence, as something merely there in the world, someone who cannot get anywhere with his life.11 One may think analogically here in reference to the setting of Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, accounting for the difficult political circumstances of university administrations, academics, and students “jumping on the bandwagon” of the Nazi movement and the novel youth “leadership” frenzy where one and all succumbed to implementation of the Führerprinzip. All such individuals understood themselves and the movement accordingly. Heidegger restrained himself – attentive to his own possibility of being, his manner of comportment – in his address as Rector. We should keep in mind here that his address is his “spoken” word, and as such this had its own philosophical significance for Heidegger, for example, in his phenomenological insight that, The fundamental way of the Dasein of world, namely, having world there with one another, is speaking.  .  .  . In the manner in which Dasein in its world speaks about its way of dealing with its world, a self-interpretation of Dasein is also given. It states how Dasein specifically understands itself, what it takes itself to be.12 Thus, Heidegger sought to guide the Freiburg academic community by “stepping ahead” of the academic leaders and student leaders rather than “stepping in” for what he recognized to be their properly individual possibilities of existential care and concern. Heidegger undertook as his task to act “authentically” in his own Fürsorge, seeking to “liberate” the academic community of the University of Freiburg to their ownmost care and proper solicitude. He hoped they, together with him, would recognize what he called the “self-assertion”/“self-affirmation” (Selbstbehauptung) of the university qua university (i.e., not as an institutional extension of the NDSP). He worked through his address to communicate to his colleagues as best he could, in the moment of fateful decision (Entscheidung), “how” they might 143

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construe the “essence” of the National Socialist movement relative to the “historical” (geschichtlich) destiny of Europe; and this he contrasted to the way they were being misled by “vulgar Nazism” with its biologism and racism, in this latter way academics and students being dominated and made dependent by the ideologies spouted out of Munich and Berlin. Heidegger sought to “communicate” with the students and the faculty gathered in what was for him presumably a setting of mutual “concern” and mutual “trust,” thus from a comportment of what he called “bondedness” (i.e., a concern-for one another that recognizes they are bound to each other, that their lived world binds them to a mutual care and concern). Indeed, as Heidegger remarked in his lecture course on logic, “From that bondedness with the other there can first arise the authentic issue (i.e., the correct concern about the same issue). Only from that does ‘communication’ (as we now call it) arise.”13 This notion of “correct concern” is significant. Heidegger’s communication in the Rektoratsrede was a concrete way of “comporting himself,” but a way he sought to manifest as a Fürsorge that was at once an “appropriation of his own” authentic self and a “liberating of the others present” to “their own” possibility of authentic selfhood relative to the “correct” task at hand as he intuited it. That task was to understand the “plight” into which the German nation had been thrown relative to the destiny of Europe. Heidegger’s “care” (Sorge) for his own authenticity related to his “concern-for” (Fürsorge) the authenticity of those to whom he considered himself “bonded” – but without stepping in for them, without making them dependent on some vision that only he could or would produce and deliver to them ready-made. Aware of the structures of existence as he understood them in the unity of his own experience of the lived world, Heidegger had to be faithful to his own “concern-for-oneself” even as he was “concernedabout” the destiny of the German nation relative to the destiny of Europe and as he was “concerned-for” his compatriots seeking to make their way forward with their own possibilities of political being. For Heidegger, “existence has usually not yet grasped itself or has already lost itself” (as would be so, e.g., for the adult partisans of the NDSP to whom Heidegger spoke in delivering his Rektoratsrede) or existence has “not yet achieved itself or has not yet found itself (during its youth, for example)” – as would be so for the student leaders at the German universities, including the youth seeking to implement the Führerprinzip at the University of Freiburg at the time he spoke. In this setting of decision (emphasizing Entscheidung here), Heidegger presumably appreciated that, “There is a non-genuine authenticity, that is, existence may be a non-genuine being-with-oneself; and there is a genuine inauthenticity, that is, a genuine losing of oneself that grows out of the concrete existence in question.”14 This distinction has not yet had its proper philosophical (i.e., phenomenological) clarification, although it is important in appreciating the possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity as comportments of the structure of human 144

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existence and thereby how such possibilities have their manifest concretion in human behavior (i.e., how “a particular comportment is de facto chosen and lived out”).15 How one de facto chooses and lives out a particular possibility of being is important in relation to what Heidegger called “the difference between authentic and inauthentic truth,”16 hence the importance of recognizing there is truth that can be authentic and inauthentic. Existence is always such that “a decision has already been made” about one’s existence, says Heidegger, not in the sense of an a priori irrevocable or necessary determinism but in the sense that the structures of human existence place one in a decision wherein one “grasps” oneself, “achieves” oneself, “finds” oneself, “loses” oneself, or where one is simply “indifferent”: “For the most part – and this is important,” Heidegger says, “– existence comports itself neither in the mode of authenticity nor that of simply being lost, but instead in a remarkable indifference.”17 And, this comportment of indifference is none other than “the averageness of existence” that Heidegger calls “everydayness,” where one is dependent and dominated, hence one’s manner of being that of das Man-Selbst, “the they-self.” It is in this sense of “determination” that Heidegger says, Thus the world of my concern and the things with which I am involved ultimately determine me and my being. I now understand myself and regulate the possibilities of my being (whether primarily or in large measure) in terms of those things and their involvement.18 Heidegger reminds, “Whatever existence is concerned about and cares for, is where existence dwells.”This is an individual’s “facticity.”Thus, in the same way there can be a “Christian conception of existence” or some other religious confession with its own conception of existence, in the same way such a conception “has changed multiple times in the course of history” so that it “is not a monolith at all,” so there can be and was a “National Socialist” conception of existence – thought in “one way” by the principal party functionaries and ideologues like Rosenberg, Krieck, and Baeumler, and in “another way” by Heidegger, and “thus in its conception National Socialism was by no means monolithic.” This is an important point, since in the post-WWII “world” of political reflection, it is all too often posited that there was one and only one (thus monolithic) National Socialism=Nazism=fascism. Yet, for both the ideologues at Berlin and Munich and for Heidegger at Freiburg, one submits, National Socialism as a political ideology “opened a specific area of existence for philosophical consideration and inquiry,”19 in the same way one can speak of political philosophy inquiring into this or that form of government (in the Greek sense of politeia), its deformations, and ideologies. That said, however, it is important to bear in mind, as Heidegger opined, “A philosophical reflection does not fall out of the sky, nor is it an arbitrarily 145

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concocted undertaking. Like all knowledge it grows out of our factical existence and its everydayness.”20 Thus a “philosophy” of National Socialism (assuming that makes sense) can be one having its “vulgarity” consequent to its elements of biologism, racism, and anti-Semitism (thus “vulgar Nazism” as Heidegger characterized it), or another (such as that of Heidegger) having its “spiritualization” according to a conception that philosophically intuited an “event” (Ereignis) of “transition” from the “first beginning” of the history of the Western tradition with its metaphysics of presence to a “second beginning” in the history of Sein/Seyn, the contours of which were yet hidden (thinking here “concealment,” Verborgenheit) but “opening up” (thinking here, “unconcealment,” Unverborgenheit), depending (as Heidegger would have it) on whether one’s intuition of that second beginning was an “attunement” (Bestimmung) to the call for thinking (in Heidegger’s sense of Was heisst Denken?). Aware of “the ontological structure of concernful care” such as he had to “live it” at the onset of and during the Third Reich, we should say, Heidegger “enacted” his understanding of National Socialism even as did the ideologues he hoped to displace; and, he tried “to live it” in the manner in which he understood it. Thus, his Rektoratsrede was an act of “his own” self-assertion21 as a philosopher, as a German, as a European, calling for the university’s “self-assertion” and “self-affirmation” in the midst of a movement that promised to install both domination and dependence. Heidegger’s was an act of “communication” precisely in the sense of “sharing” a vision, Heidegger seeking to “uncover” for his audience what he envisioned, but also seeking to open up “a new shared-being” with them, thus to “generate” and “form” a world of shared being (in Heidegger’s sense of weltbildend), “stepping ahead” of them while working in thought and in deed to avoid stepping in for them. Hence, Heidegger opened his address with his guiding and formally indicative statement: The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership [geistigen Führung] of this institution of higher learning. The following of teachers and students awakens and grows strong only from a true and joint rootedness in the essence of the German university.22 As he himself conceded, Heidegger failed in this attempt, but so did those who, in his estimation, had a “fallen” concern, fallen away as they were from proper resolve (Entschlossenheit), not having a “correct” concern for the German Dasein and not understanding what was their “essential plight” in the fundamental history of their “time.”23 One may argue, thus, that Heidegger’s self-assertion was itself a tragic act. Writing in the year of Heidegger’s death, Michael Gelven was correct to opine that, 146

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tragedy can throw light on our understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy. For it is the particular characteristic of tragic genius to teach us how to see worth – and hence meaning – in noble existence without relying upon fortuitous circumstances or even moral excellence to prompt our approval.24 Thus, if indeed we may accept the premise that Heidegger is a great philosopher, even as Emmanuel Levinas acknowledged this while being critical of Heidegger’s mistaken entanglement with National Socialism in the mid1930s to early 1940s, then it behooves us to attend to Gelven’s remarks: “The interrogation of tragedy must always proceed from a profound realization of the paradox inherent in our obvious appreciation of what should seemingly be censured and rejected: the suffering of a noble person.”25 Of course, one may object that one ought not equate being a philosopher with being noble, in Heidegger’s case, precisely because of facts disclosed about his biography that some will find morally disreputable and repugnant to their sensibility. Nonetheless, one may consider here Gelven’s question, intending here an analogy with Heidegger’s situation: How is it possible to be so uplifted and so inspired to greatness at our witnessing the madness of Lear, the death of Hamlet, the damnation of Faustus, the desperate dilemma of Antigone? In order to show what this paradox means, we must avoid every attempt to dissolve the paradox by treating the suffering as morally deserved (Antigone ought not to have irritated Creon; Hamlet was too weak to avenge his father, hence he should have been killed; etc.). For our experience is not that of moral satisfaction – but on the contrary, there is a sense of greatness and boldness, if you will, purchased at the price of moral dissatisfaction. Thinking parallel to Gelven’s remarks on Othello, one may ask: If it is his “philosophy” that attracts us to Heidegger, is it his philosophy that also brings him to the “disaster” that was his entanglement with National Socialism? And here the answer seems to be yes, given Heidegger’s interpretive assumptions about the possibility of a “spiritual” National Socialism that he might lead, his philosophical leadership (thinking here his appropriation of the Führerprinzip only insofar as it served his “epochal” cause in the unconcealment of Seynsgeschichte) intended to counter and, if successful, supplant the ideological leadership of Rosenberg, Baeumler, and Krieck. In this sense, Heidegger’s intellectual (not to say here, “moral”) virtue – if that is what it may be said to be – became his intellectual vice, but only because he failed to discern that his own supposedly authentic decision, his Entscheidung, was made while he was situated between a personal “fate” and a national “destiny” in which “semblance ruled to his and the nation’s detriment.” 147

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Thus, the tragic paradox of Heidegger’s post-metaphysical musings placed him subsequently in the “silence” of what one may call his “epochal interregnum” between the first beginning and the ostensible second beginning in the history (Geschichte) of Sein/Seyn, wherein he sought his dwelling (ethos), there awaiting the first signs of a “god” who alone could disclose the saving power, no more to be found in National Socialism, and for him further not to be found in either the liberal democracy of America or the Bolshevik communism of Russia. Alas, “when semblance reigns” – or, said otherwise using Gelven’s words that he applied to Othello’s tragic act (i.e., “when one cannot hope that wrongdoing can be avoided”) – then one cannot in retrospect issue a moral judgment about a tragic outcome. In such outcome, virtue and vice have their admixture in a paradox of “justice sought” (i.e., overcoming the supposed injustices imposed upon the German people by the Treaty of Versailles and by the political failures of the Weimar Republic) and “justice thwarted” (i.e., all that “vulgar Nazism” realized in the worst of its crimes against humanity and genocide of European Jews, this contrary to Heidegger’s hope for a political-philosophical way between the “pincers” of American capitalintensive democratic liberalism and the communist Bolshevik revolution). Where and when semblance misleads, “true reality remains undisclosed”; and so it was with Heidegger’s tragic political-philosophic choices initiated in 1933–1934. In this setting of nigh “forced” political judgment, it is not a reasoned moral censure that is fitting but an emotively registered pain, unhappiness, and aghast dejection. Levinas, himself a Jew critical of Heidegger’s project, remarked, that, for him, “Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the century, perhaps one of the very great philosophers of the millennium; but I am very pained by that because I can never forget what he was in 1933.” Had we been present in 1933–1934, we might have intervened in private (had we been more prescient then than Heidegger) to warn Heidegger that his philosophy was blinding him in the moment he sought to discern his personal fate and his nation’s destiny; warned him that he was failing to discern the danger of his Entscheidung in which semblance had the upper hand and withheld the “truth” (alētheia) about National Socialism; warned him that his “existentiell” choice was in fact inauthentic despite his intended resolve; warned him that his tolma was inevitably to fail as his ownmost fateful undoing, such as tragedy issues – as, in fact, it did, and as he eventually acknowledged, even if with some disingenuous self-serving representations of events and actions. But the point is taken that even in his failing one credits Heidegger philosophically; for, as Gelven reminds, What Heidegger argues is that our existence as such is open to rational inquiry, and is hence meaningful in and of itself. But furthermore, Heidegger’s analyses show us that what makes our existence meaningful is: first, that the modes or ways in which we exist 148

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are either authentic or inauthentic; and second, that the basis for authenticity and inauthenticity is our capacity to fail at being, or to be as the basis of nullity in guilt. . . . Thus without this profound sense of being the basis of my own failure (and the resolute acceptance of this being guilty in authenticity), my existence could not be thought about, and as such, could not be meaningful.26 Indeed, one is disposed to ask today, in a time of recrimination that is itself all too journalistic, polemical, and un-philosophical: Who among us has the insight to be able to say with a high degree of confidence that Heidegger was not “guided by a correct instinct” about this history, or this history specifically according to his conception of time27 (as if one had a better, more correct, conception)? Who, indeed, if, as Derrida, submits, Heidegger’s “discourse is first of all that of response and responsibility”28 – i.e., responsibility for himself, for his colleagues and students, for his nation, for the state? And, this, course, without the “vulgar” ideological appeals or “step-in” solicitude that would remove from them their own responsibility to understand, to know, and to will the essence of the university, if they could, if they would, if they should have willed as much? In light of the foregoing, and despite (1) my philosophical engagement with Heidegger’s thinking over the years and in the extended commentary of these chapters, (2) Heidegger’s own manner of speaking of his error and miscalculation as considered here,29 and (3) whatever one may argue about the need for a post-metaphysical articulation of the human “essence” beyond modernity’s assumed, yet ambiguous, unity of animality and rationality about which Heidegger cautioned us: “We” who are politicized according to one or another theoretical/practical prejudice about the political life into which we are thrown, and within which we construe our sense of political being, can undoubtedly assert (with one or another ostensibly defensible justification, e.g., in James’s pragmatic sense reviewed earlier) that: (a) murder is morally and legally wrong; that (b) genocide is morally and legally wrong; and that, (c) despite his post-Rectorate “quietism” and “silent meditation” awaiting what may or may not be the “second” beginning of die Seinsgeschichte, Heidegger could have and should have declared the Nazi genocide of the Jews morally wrong. “We” may find, therefore, that Heidegger, both as a person and as a philosopher, was mistaken not to have asserted these fundamental moral judgments when given the opportunity to do so. However, one who makes these judgments must be clear that, if they are so given, they are given in the context of one of three possibilities, if there is a “post-Holocaust” ethics reasonably to govern our time: (1) one with a “metaphysical” ground (Grund), such as Kant and Hegel attempted philosophically or such as Heidegger’s contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer30 attempted theologically in his moral-political resistance to Nazism; (2) one “without ground,” the whole of humanity suspended over an abyss (Abgrund) and, 149

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hence, in the “fear and trembling” of “in-decision” that is yet an inevitable Entscheidung, as Heidegger intimated; or, (3) one that has the human being take a “leap of faith,” whether onto-theo-logical according to this or that religious tradition, all the while recognizing at once human finitude and the contingency of one’s thoughts, words, and deeds in the historical present. One might object, of course, that there remains for us, however, the thinking of the consummation of Western philosophy in Nietzsche and Hegel, and hence there remains the question of whether one of these two great thinkers offers the possibility of a post-Holocaust ethics that does not merely repeat the “grosse Politik” political options of the early twentieth century – American liberal-capitalist democracy; Germany’s National Socialism; Bolshevik Communism. Heidegger positioned Nietzsche’s thought within the history of metaphysics, explicitly in the sense of anti-Platonism, but remaining itself a fundamental metaphysical position. While there is much yet to be fathomed in Nietzsche’s thinking, there is no ready and meaningful appropriation to be had that accounts for genocide relative to the contemporary planetary domination of technology. But, some may argue it to be otherwise with Hegel, specifically because of his “essential connection” to Heraclitus, such as Heidegger took into account in his engagement of the pre-Socratics. This Hegelian possibility, however, is unclear in the methodological process Hegel advances as historical conflict of one “thought determination” (what is commonly, for some Hegelian scholars, considered an unfortunate and even “grotesque” mistaken choice of word, “thesis”)31 and another thought determination (“antithesis”) that resolves itself in some higher unity (“synthesis”) – the conceptual linkage of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” that was used by Fichte and Schelling. Heidegger would be quick to observe that National Socialism was by no means a “resolution” of some “contradiction” in the politics (political thought-determinations) of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, even as he would continue to reject both capitalisttechnological Americanism and Bolshevik Communism as political options for Germany in the post-WWII world order. Hegel scholar Richard Winfield offers some possibility for our examination in his thinking of “the just state” and “the just economy” grounded in Hegel’s thought. But he thinks in terms of a foundation-free systematic philosophy, thereby advancing beyond the two dominant sociopolitical and economic systems of the century according to a resolution of the problem of political justice. Allen Wood similarly has worked to elucidate Hegel’s “ethical” thought in a contemporary view that moves beyond the contradictions in reality to their resolution in “a higher theoretical conception.”32 One might consider each of these two perspectives in brief in relation to the question of the possibility of a derivative post-Holocaust ethics. On this question, Fackenheim also is pertinent, given his own commitment to Hegel’s thought prior to his turn to thinking about a post-Holocaust theology, in which case we may consider briefly also his comments on Hegel. Thereafter, one may also engage Hannah Arendt’s 150

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remarks on the banality of evil in relation to the task of thinking such as Heidegger engages it. In brief, Winfield elucidates what he believes to be the basic features of political self-determination, including what he calls “the minimal determinacy of citizen” and “the minimal requirements for citizenship” and allowing for a “basic territoriality” for a “normative political association” and “normative patriotism” relative to a “minimal determination of constitutionality.”33 Winfield’s discussion is complex as he thinks systematically in Hegelian conceptual frame. He writes with an eye on contemporary political events. But, as he construes the relation of reason and justice, Winfield is clear that all such “convulsions and their continuing repercussions can no more prescribe what the state, society, and the family should be.”34 Here and later in his extended argument, Winfield distinguishes what is “empirically given” and what is “normatively prescribed,”“observations of political practice [leaving] unanswered whether given political phenomena measure up to what politics should be.”35 Thus, he adds, “Far from providing any normative prescriptions, empirical science may at best observe what political norms have been advanced, how they have been followed, and what other phenomena have been connected to their appearance.” Undoubtedly, then, empirically considered, given political phenomena do not measure up to the concepts of either the just state or the just economy. But that raises the pertinent question as to what those concepts entail for a state and economy that realize the requirements of justice. Winfield argues that, “Since all observations remain particular in time and place, none can ever certify what is universal and necessary in any putative ‘political’ reality.”36 But, of course, this assumes there should be such a certification, that political reality should in some way express both the universal and the necessary, that this is essential for “any firm distinction [to] be upheld between right and wrong politics.” Bearing this point in mind, Winfield then is concerned for the relation of politics to nihilism: “If ethics can overcome the challenge of nihilism and mandate that agents ought to participate in a form of association sufficiently resonant with common usage to bear the term “political,” a normative conception of the state becomes possible that escapes the arbitrariness of nominalism while providing the standard by which deviating political formulations can be distinguished.”37 The question here, of course, is whether ethics can overcome the challenge of nihilism. But what might that be? What is included within this conceptual category, “nihilism”? By “nihilism” Winfield means the “denial of reason’s ability to prescribe conduct,” which denial, if true, permits neither a secure possibility of ethics nor the emergence of a normative politics. This is a theoretical problem, however; one of rationalist epistemology in contrast to an understanding of nihilism as one finds it evident in empirical events the traits of which seem to represent a nihilist perspective on human existence. The Nazi genocide would be one such manifestation of nihilism, insofar as any foundational ethics is put into question 151

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even as any concept of a just state is rendered doubtful (notwithstanding the military victory of the Allied powers over National Socialist Germany in 1945 and a principled commitment to the doctrine that “might does not, in and of itself, make right,” that “victor’s justice” empirically manifest is not justice “de jure”). Since Winfield writes from a Hegelian framework, what others say about the relation of Hegel to the Holocaust is instructive on the question at issue in Winfield’s expectation that one can distinguish a right from a wrong politics on normative grounds. Gidon Halbfinger has engaged this question in brief.38 If one understands in a Hegelian manner, then whatever one is to understand about the Nazi genocide is to be discovered and articulated only in hindsight: “knowledge of the meaning and purpose of an era can come only at the close of that epoch.” Such is the classic refrain about Hegel’s intent in the symbolic “owl of Minerva” that takes its flight at dusk. Halbfinger observes that, in the Philosophy of Right, “Rather than critique the social and political institutions of his day, Hegel defends them, arguing that they represent the instantiation and perpetuation of true, absolute freedom.” For Hegel, the German sociopolitical structure is to be upheld as “the proper instantiation of right, freedom, and autonomy in the world.” Halbfinger is disturbed by the implications of Hegel’s insight: To say that all philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, has only the past and present as its object means that we can make no claims upon the future – and that entering a new moment of history makes all that we thought we knew about the world and its greatest questions irredeemably obsolete. There is a fundamental problem here, Halbfinger pointing to it in the question: “Does history not scream at us that those moral systems we assume transcend eras, which we believe to be deduced flawlessly from unquestionable axioms, unfailingly crumble with time?” An affirmative answer seems to be warranted, allowing here for the empirical evidence warranting the inductively valid or defeasibly contingent proposition. Indeed, contemporary world order studies make it clear, in contrast to the doctrine of Realpolitik, that the logic of statecraft and commitment to the modernist principle of sovereignty in place since the Treaty of Westphalia are entirely problematic for the future of a just and peaceful world order. One can no longer assume, in a time of the planetary domination of technology, as complex life-altering technologies are appropriated by the powers of the modern nation-state, that “the State” is either benevolent or benign in its assigned responsibility for public welfare or international peace and security. Contemporary world disorder exhibits ongoing problems of international law, problems of conflict prevention and resolution, problems of socio-political justice, problems of economic well-being, as well 152

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as problems of environmental decay and imbalance, all of which continue to endanger present and future generations.39 Thus, any reasonable engagement of the promise of the Western tradition of political philosophy, political theory, or political science cannot serve merely as an apology for the modern configurations of political association or even the normative bases of these institutional structures and patterns of behavior as we have come to experience them.40 Hence, Halbfinger is correct that, “many see Hegel’s emphasis on the nation-state as outmoded and dangerous.” If we subscribe to Hegel’s view, then it seems, Subscribing fully to the idea that true understanding comes only with hindsight means believing that those still-current moral tenets of the Talmud, of Aquinas, and of Locke are the result of an epistemically-unsound happy accident which makes them seem applicable in our own era, or that they remain true only because those thinkers’ eras, sublated by the historical dialectic, are quietly undergirding our own. Yet, “we do make moral claims upon the future,” Halbfinger reminds, even as we seek to understand the past and hope to understand that past better than it was understood at the time. If that is a belief that is more warranted than not, even if we admit to its defeasibility, then we may argue, as Halbfinger does, that “more knowledge will necessarily lead to more advanced and therefore better answers to the questions of ethics that Hegel thinks are impossible to answer without historical contingence.” There is a further presupposition to accepting Hegel’s argument, Halbfinger claims. That is, if we accept Hegel’s view about historical contingency, then this view “doesn’t simply force us to accept the moral dictates of the future; it also forces us to condone many of the atrocities of the past.” And, that includes apparently accepting the Nazi genocide of the Jews for the historical event that it was. Such seems to be the logical consequence of Hegel’s “historicist intuition.” But precisely therefore, Hegel seems an unlikely source for a post-Holocaust ethics intent on providing a rational basis efficacious enough to prevent such further atrocities in the near- and far-term future. At this point, and in that case, there is reason to object to that intuition, as does Allan Wood. He opines that, “Viewed from a late twentieth-century perspective, it is evident that Hegel totally failed in his attempt to canonize speculative logic as the only proper form of philosophical thinking.”41 But, Wood argues in favor of what is yet meaningful for us in Hegel’s thought, viz., “his reflections on the social and spiritual predicament of modern Western European culture. Like no one before, and perhaps no one since, Hegel’s thought explores the self-conception of modern human beings, the ambivalent relation of modern European culture to its Hebraic-Hellenic heritage, its quest in the modern world for a new image of nature and society, its hopes 153

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and self-doubts, its needs and aspirations.”42 Hegel understood the importance of the human contribution to “the actualization of reason,” as Wood reminds. But that fundamental feature of Hegel’s thought leaves a very basic question begging: Does the Nazi genocide of the Jews, all that is understood and not understood in the historical representation of the death camps and the massive bureaucracy that was instrumental to this horror, represent “an actualization of reason” in Hegel’s sense of that classic dictum? If so, what is the significance of this interpretation, not only for our understanding of that historical event, but also for our sense of our own future beyond that horror? Can we agree with Wood that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right aims “to provide us with a rational theodicy of modern social life, by exhibiting the actuality of divine reason and the rationality of the social world it has created,” even as we would not be too hard pressed to concur that, “every existing state, standing as it does in the sphere of transitoriness and contingency, is disfigured to some extent by error and wickedness, and fails to be wholly rational, because it fails to be wholly actual?”43 Therefore, would we not have to state the same for National Socialism and the Third Reich in its time? It is unclear that we have a Hegelian effort to understand and explain the Nazi genocide, as if this were some unavoidable “dialectical paradox.” We do have Fackenheim’s effort to understand with reference to Hegel’s thought, in which case we may consider whether here we are to find answers we seek to our questions. Enroute to Fackenheim’s views, we should first consider what David Bronstein says about Hegel and the Holocaust, this in light of Fackenheim’s The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought.44 At issue for Fackenheim, Bronstein tells us, were two questions: (1) “can a Jew be a Hegelian?” (a question that applies to Fackenheim himself) and (2) “can anyone today, ‘after Auschwitz,’ be a Hegelian?” Fackenheim argues in the negative, in view of Hegel’s commitment to Lutheran Protestantism, for example, “the living historical presence of Lutheran Protestantism,” a commitment that “fails to do justice to Judaism.” Thus, one would have to consider how one is to comprehend the Holocaust in a Hegelian sense. After Auschwitz, Fackenheim does not think one can be Hegelian, since it is unclear how one is to explain “the utter uniqueness and incomprehensibility of the demonic evil that transpired there,” specifically surrendering “any claim to absolute comprehension” that seems necessary to the Hegelian system.45 Bronstein represents Fackenheim to argue that,“philosophical reflection on the holocaust finds itself in an aporia that it cannot overcome but must endure: philosophical thinking cannot remain silent about the holocaust, but neither can it claim to fully understand it.” But, for Fackenheim, this requisite “thinking” cannot be Hegelian. Following Hegel, Fackenheim identified the Holocaust as an event of world-historical significance.46 It was, for Fackenheim, “radically evil,” a kingdom not of this world, and, thus, “philosophically, theologically unredeemable.”47 Fackenheim finds Hegel’s thinking problematic in relation to 154

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the Holocaust, one that understands Hegelian “rationality” to have “moral as well as logical significance.”48 And, moreover, it would hold for Hegel’s Lutheran Protestantism that, “God’s Providence governs the world, and the world is the place where His providence may be recognized.” For Fackenheim, after the experience of the actuality of the Holocaust, the question is whether we may affirm such divine providence. If one follows Hegel, it seems that “one may affirm a God who remains indifferent to the world or, indeed, a deus absconditus:” and, further, “with the exception of certain ‘heretics,’ no Christian theologian affirms a divine Providence (or Grace or Revelation or Redemption) which has an indiscriminate worldly presence.”49 Fackenheim then provides his “interpretation” of the Hegelian dictum: “Since the rise of Christianity the Rational has become actual; but whereas Christian faith has from the start grasped the religious aspect of this event (that through the indwelling of the Spirit all is accomplished) it has been left to secular reality, often indifferent or even hostile to the Christian faith, to grasp its secular aspect (that through human action much, if not everything, is forever yet to be accomplished.”50 At issue here for Fackenheim is a more important question, given the actuality of the Holocaust: “Can the historical conditions producing the actuality of the Rational (and hence the rationality of the Actual) pass away?” Grasping the significance of this question, Fackenheim warns of the consequence of the answer being given in the negative. Let us consider how so. Recall Winfield’s comment that there should be a certification, that political reality should in some way express both the universal and the necessary, that this is essential for “any firm distinction [to] be upheld between right and wrong politics.” If we accept this judgment, then how does one combine (a) the “particularity” of a “remnant” Judaism (which accepts the 613 commandments of the Torah and, perhaps, also the 614th commandment Fackenheim issues) with (b) the ostensibly desirable “universality” of a postHolocaust ethics, assuming the latter is yet a possibility? This is the question that is central to Fackenheim’s effort to speak to the world-historical event that the Nazi genocide of the European Jews was for him. Does one yet look to “Athens” for a possible philosophy, continuing to privilege reason while unsure of its moral efficacy? Or, does one instead turn to “Jerusalem,” to revelation, and thereby to a theological/rabbinic tradition different from that of rationalist modernity? Fackenheim sought a resolution beyond Hegel, articulated in his Metaphysics and Historicity (1961) and in The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (1967), but which he did not find as long as he continued to think in Hegelian frame. He asked: How can thinking be at once truly philosophical and essentially Jewish? How then can it at once have the objectivity and universality which is required of it as philosophy, and yet be essentially committed to a content which has Jewish particularity?51 155

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One sees here the dual influence of a Kantian and Hegelian philosophy and rabbinic tradition, the questions here posed, as Zachary Braiterman remarks, in defense of “‘the revealed morality of Judaism’ against Kantian ethics” (which, as we have seen earlier, put Judaism and its juridical/civil approach to human conduct in question from the perspective of a universal morality grounded in reason, in practical rationality). But, even so, Fackenheim understood the historical situation of Jewish theology in the early twentieth century (i.e., Judaism lacking “a binding commandment supernaturally revealed to a particular people”) in which case “it makes as little sense to have a Mosaic religion for the Jewish people today, as say, a Platonic religion for the modern Greek nation.”52 The Holocaust “ruptures” – but does not “destroy” entirely – the present’s appeal to the authority of both philosophy and theology. Hence, Jews need to rethink the authority of “Mosaic religion,” that which is at the core of Judaic faith after Auschwitz, after the experience of radical evil. After all, Fackenheim held that, “‘the Jewish eschatological expectation is at least in part falsifiable by future history’ and ‘precisely insofar as it holds fast to history Jewish faith risks falsification by history.’”53 Eventually, however, as Braiterman reminds, Fackenheim had to conclude that: “even revelation cannot resolve all existential contradictions, that everything can be lost, that nothing remains safe.”54 The assumed factuality of revelation, belief in the historicity of the forefathers and the sacred texts vouchsafed by tradition for their normative veracity, all this comes into question in the presence of radical evil as an “empirical” test of the veracity of faith. Moreover, Hegel’s own supposedly “utopian vision of the future” with its “pantheistic theodicy” that holds that “good has already established itself in the world so that evil can never stand ‘inequality beside it’”55 is called into question. A pantheistic theodicy seems questionable as a ground for a post-Holocaust ethics if, as David MacGregor puts it, “Hegel’s program deals at once with the arbitrary and contingent aspects of evil by removing the factor of human will, and also the unpleasant necessity to explain the inscrutable actions of a personal God.”56 In this sense, in a seeming contradiction to the optimism of this theodicy, “Hegel is usually more frequently aligned with clearing a conceptual space amenable to the commission of an event like the Holocaust than with ensuring against any future recurrence of it.”57 Thus, Karl Popper critiqued Hegelian thought for “the emergence of modern totalitarianism,” as MacGregor reminds. Similarly, we have Theodore Adorno’s opinion that “there is something about the Hegelian claim to a universalist or comprehensive speculative position that associates his metaphysics with atrocity.”58 In light of these notices, it is somewhat curious that, historically speaking, “Talmudic” Judaism (in the strict sense of rabbinic tradition) was not the conceptual framework governing German Jewish intellectuals insofar as they were influenced in the nineteenth century by German idealism.59 156

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Fackenheim, among others such as Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, understood that German idealist philosophy influenced German Jewish intellectuals to reconfigure their self-understanding. But Fackenheim wanted to speak of “the existing God” rather than a philosophical “concept” of God. At issue was the debate between Jewish particularity and the universality more or less common to the German idealists since Kant. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his “metaphysics” of morals were such that Jewish particularity in its “civil”/“juridical”/“legal” dispensation should be surrendered to a “universal” ethical monotheism. Human autonomy qua the autonomy of rational beings assumes its rightful authority and, thereby, displaces the traditional heteronomy that is central to the individual Jew’s deference to the authority of the written and oral law of Torah and Talmud. The later Fackenheim turned away from his initial commitment to German idealism to engage the problematic of the Holocaust, arguing then that, “Human existence without God is tragic; with God it is at least partially redeemed.”60 Said differently, Fackenheim asserted, “Men must act as though all depended on them; and wait and pray as though all depended on God.”61 (If, as considered earlier, Heidegger’s actions were tragic, his existence one without God in the Jewish and Christian sense of the divine, then this would be consistent with Fackenheim’s disjunction, hence Fackenheim’s critique of Heidegger’s ontological analysis of human existence.) Following Martin Buber in part, Fackenheim could interpret the event of the Holocaust in one of two ways. On the one hand, scripture teaches that God “hides his face” (“hester panim,” Devarim 31:17), which means that sometimes God does not choose to reveal his presence. Whether God will manifest Himself to a particular individual or withhold Himself even from an entire age must, of course, be God’s decision, not man’s. Man is therefore left not knowing whether to regard the absence of God he experiences as “an eclipse of God’s presence,” as Buber proposed, or “as the final exposure of an illusion,” as many Jews would and did conclude after the Nazi genocide of European Jews was manifest for all to see.62 Fackenheim chose to follow Buber. But there is a marked revision in Fackenheim’s thinking that accounts in part for the results of historical criticism and the critique of Jewish particularity that was present in German Idealism in the nineteenth century. What is the import of the foregoing rehearsal of the possibilities of Hegel’s thought? The fact is, Heidegger, of course, did not (and would not) turn to Judaism or to Christianity to resolve the philosophical, political, or moral quandary in which we find ourselves. In the midst of Nazism he was not a Nazi resister such as Bonhoeffer with his commitment to a theologically grounded ethics.63 What Heidegger proposed in terms of the Auseinandersetzung with 157

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the first beginning in the history of metaphysics and in anticipation of the second beginning is likewise clear as the context in which, accepting Heidegger’s discourse on the history of being, we are called to think. Scholars who continue to engage Heidegger’s thought are well-served by Malpas’ observation, as he considered the task of reading Heidegger’s oeuvre: part of what the Considerations [Überlegungen] surely bring home is the extent to which every philosophy is indeed “of its time,” subject to the blindnesses and prejudices of that time, just as every philosophy is also subject to the blindnesses and prejudices of the thinker herself. The real measure of the significance of a philosopher is determined by the extent to which their thinking is able to transcend the blindnesses and prejudices their work will inevitably contain, and to continue to speak to us in our own time in a way relevant to it.64 Nonetheless, I submit, there is another pertinent philosophical conclusion here, one that Heidegger himself stated concerning the academic and public reception of his lifelong thought, what has been his own Entscheidung in the face of all contemporary “idle chatter” and “hurried misinterpretation” grounded in hidden prejudices: Would that a thoughtful grounding again became a sort of compilation of dicta, well protected against idle talk and unharmed by all hurried misinterpretation; would that the opera omnia of twenty or more volumes along with the concomitant snooping into the author’s life and the gathering of his casual utterances (I mean the usual “biographies” and collections of correspondence) would disappear, and the work itself be strong enough and be kept free of the disfavor of being explained through a bringing in of the “personal” (i.e., kept from being dissolved into generalities).65 Heidegger’s thought can never be reduced, on the basis of plausibly reasonable argument, to mere “fascism” or to mere “National Socialism” per se. No doubt, there is yet need for historical-critical confrontation with Heidegger’s texts to identify what was and was not present in original manuscripts and what has been subsequently re-presented in modified form, thus to settle claims of Heidegger’s own misrepresentation or falsification of his own archived texts.66 Whether we agree or disagree with him, Heidegger asserts that philosophy, “assuming it actually is such – can also never be appraised ‘politically,’ neither in an affirmative or negative direction. A ‘National Socialist’ philosophy is neither a ‘philosophy’ nor a service to ‘National Socialism’ – but instead simply runs behind it as burdensome pedantry – an attitude which is already sufficient to demonstrate its incapacity for actual philosophy.” Indeed, Heidegger adds, “To say a 158

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philosophy is ‘National Socialist,’ or is not so, means the same as to say a triangle is courageous, or is not so – and therefore is cowardly.”67 Thus, to speak of Heidegger’s thought in this way is to misunderstand the entirety of his attempt to think the question of beyng (Seyn), mistakenly reducing his thought to the sort of nonsense that would, were it meaningful to do so, describe a triangle as either courageous or cowardly. That would be the sort of blindness that does not heed Malpas’s cautionary remarks cited earlier. And, as for Heidegger’s post-war silence, attributed to him by recent critiques as a point of condemnation, as noted earlier, Heidegger’s own word speaks to the issue most emphatically: If philosophy in the current moment of the history of being had recognized its unique duty to put itself back into the history of being . . . then philosophy would have renounced the pursuit of all erudition about itself and of all advancement of itself and would have become a master of silent meditation.68 Indeed. Who, among philosophers, is today a master of this silent meditation, itself what Heidegger intends in his call for besinnliches Denken? Why not silence in the face of “the horrible” [das Entsetzliche] and the “horrors” of the twentieth century that “shock” our sense of who we as humans are and what we as humans are to do? After all, as Heidegger reminds: The word as word never offers any immediate guarantee as to whether it is an essential word or a deception [think here eidōlon, “semblance”]. . . . Thus language must constantly place itself into the illusion [semblance] which it engenders by itself, and so endanger what is most its own, genuine utterance.69 But, on the other hand, through one’s “silent meditation” (as in besinnliches Denken) one may hear what the poet bestows through his word: The poet himself stands between . . . the gods . . . and . . . the people. He is the one who has been cast out – out into that between, between gods and men. But first and only in this between is it decided who man is and where his existence is settled.70 Therein is Hölderlin’s import, as poet – to speak the word of decision, Entscheidung, on the basis of which we may know who man qua human ‘is’ and where his existence, his ek-sistence is settled (i.e., how and where he is to ‘dwell’).71 Understanding the import of the poet’s word, Heidegger muses: “If we knew the law of the arrival and the flight of gods, then we would get a first glimpse of the onset and staying away of truth and thus of the essential swaying of be-ing.”72 159

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With this conditional proposition we may consider another pertinent question, however, a question we must ask in the light of Levinas’ estimation of Heidegger’s standing as a philosopher: What is Heidegger’s import, as thinker, for our destitute time? His own words provide one answer, assuming we are prepared to “consider the essence of being [Sein/Seyn] as thought-worthy”: We are capable of all this only if, in regards to what seems to be the question that is always closest and solely urgent – what are we to do? – we first and only consider this: How must we think, for thinking is the authentic action [Handeln].73 That is the essential question of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. And so, if indeed ours is a fateful historical (geschichtlich) juncture, between a first beginning yet holding sway since the time of Greek antiquity and a second beginning that calls for our meditative thinking today, between the flight of the gods and the arrival of a god we may only intimate without naming during the passing of the last god, then we should listen and hear in a silent meditation – and not with idle chatter or assertion of calculating propositions that are presumptuous in their “correctness” concerning what is extant, what is “historical” (historisch) – to answer Heidegger’s question: “How must we think?” In at least attempting to answer this question, one must “know,” as Heidegger instructs us from his own insight into being-historical thinking: “The onset of be-ing, which is allotted to historical man, never makes itself known to man directly but is hidden in the ways of sheltering of truth.”74 In “the ways,” Heidegger says – plural, many, as “pathways” are many. Our present task is to “venture” along a “pathway” of meditative and essential thinking where signposts are few if any at all (that contrasts with the plentifully signposted “paved road” of calculative thinking). Along this way we may find ourselves attentive to the “onset” of be-ing, being attentive to a “moment of vision” (Augenblick) that is also at the same time a moment of hearing (Hörens), attentive thus to a call from the future. In such a moment we may then appropriate the unavoidably given Entscheidung that calls us, severally and jointly, to the task of thinking and to the simultaneous unconcealment and concealment of truth (alētheia) (i.e., that truth we “shelter” as “guardians” of an originary – yet constantly renewing – truth in and for a second beginning now unfolding). That said, Heidegger cautioned: Whether this re-casting of the hitherto existing human and, prior to that, the grounding of the more originary truth in a being of a new history is successful, cannot be calculated, but rather is the gist or withdrawal of enownment itself.75 160

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Furthermore, Heidegger reminds, “In the sense of the other beginning, Da-sein is still completely strange to us; it is what we never find lying before us.”76 That is an insightful assertion that calls for caution – if the human in its being has hitherto been “strange,” even “the strangest,” as the preSocratics remarked, then this is even more so as the second beginning opens up in its unconcealment. One must therefore be all the more acutely attuned to the call: “Only now does the question of who man is break open a trail, which still runs its course in what is unprotected and thus lets the storm of be-ing come over it.”77 This was Heidegger’s question in Being and Time as he sought to think the ontological difference and elucidate the hermeneutic of Dasein; his question in his Rectoral Address of 1933 as he attempted to discern the “inner greatness” of the National Socialist movement against the ideological deformations of vulgar Nazism; his question in his post-WWII meditations after the Kehre as he put into question the concept of humanity given in that of animal rationale and attempted to clarify the meaning of Dasein in relation to the history of being (Seinsgeschichte); his question in his attempts at meditative/essential thinking pitted against the calculative thinking of modernity that installs the “technicized” animal and that abandons humanity to the planetary domination of technology. Speaking out of his own prescience, Heidegger warns us: Man with his machinations might for centuries yet pillage and lay waste to the planet, the gigantic character of this driving might “develop” into something unimaginable and take on the form of a seeming rigor as the massive regulating of the desolate as such – yet the greatness of be-ing continued to be closed off, because decisions are no longer made about truth and untruth and what is their ownmost.78 Indeed, if one is not clear about the meaning of “de-cision” (Ent-scheidung) in Heidegger’s sense of our placement on the threefold path that always includes a disclosure/withdrawal of being, appearance/semblance, and nonbeing, then one cannot fathom the difficulty of an individual historical (historische) decision in its relation to the fundamental history (Geschichte) that holds sway in a given epoch and time. One who understands this significance of Ent-scheidung, understands, to cite Edler here: that knowledge must experience its finitude as the finitude of being. It is the limit against which the will to mastery shatters itself and the place where mastery can turn into the completely unguarded exposure to the hidden and the uncertain, that is, the essence of being.79 Heidegger showed his own finitude in his tolma, in his attempt “to think” what calls for thinking (Was heisst Denken?) in the midst of National 161

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Socialism, and showed through this decision his own effort shattered in the contest of being, semblance, and non-being. That was the tragic disclosure of his tolma. All of this yet calls for thought, for our thinking – but also for our “poetizing, building, leading, sacrificing, suffering, celebrating”80 – so long as we accede to the “intimation” represented in Heidegger’s words in the projected transition to this other beginning, in the projected transition from the human as “technicized animal” to Dasein as “guardian of be-ing.” That said, Heidegger instructs us: the “basic” fact of our history cannot be demonstrated by any “analysis” of the “spiritual” or “political” “situation” of the time, because even the “spiritual” as well as the “political” perspectives proceed from what is superficial and belong to the heretofore and has already refused to experience the actual history – the struggle of enownment of man by be-ing – refused to inquire and to think along the tracks of the disposal of this history (i.e., to become historical from the ground of history).81 In this respect, Heidegger would be entirely correct to remind of Plato’s doctrine in the Republic (496a), where Socrates says that those who have “come to understand the madness of the multitude sufficiently . . . have seen that there is nothing . . . sound or right in any present politics.” For that reason, Socrates said – and Heidegger most likely concurred in his own commitment to silence after his experience with the historical events of the 1930s–1940s – that the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, stands aside under the shelter of a wall in a storm.82 Thus, it will not do, in appropriating the essential thinking to which we are called, to proceed as if we may simply defer to historiological analyses of Historie for understanding our time of crisis qua time of decision, when instead we jointly and severally are called to attend to what is essential to history, Geschichtlichkeit, to what is essential to Entscheidung, in the disclosure of our be-ing-historical. To say “severally” here is to recall that it is not yet clear what Heidegger means (but which we must come to know) when he says: “An essential swaying of Da-sein, selfhood springs forth from the origin of Da-sein. And the origin of the self is own-hood (Eigen-tum), [as in ‘own-dom’] when this word is taken in the same way as the word king-dom [Fürsten-tum].”83 To understand this saying, I submit, is to fathom what is essential to politics and morals in the new beginning Heidegger heralds – holding oneself in “originary questioning,” “exposing” oneself to the truth (alētheia), and putting “what is ownmost up for decision”84 – all undertaken according to “the law of the great individuation in Da-sein”85 that is forthcoming, a law that disposes of the rule of the Western tradition

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of political philosophy and installs a mode of governance that displaces all that is given in the conceptual framework that began with Plato’s delimitation of government in the sense of politeia. This task of political thinking remains ahead of us. It is thus that one may appreciate the significance of Hannah Arendt, who spoke to the problem of thinking in the face of the Holocaust. It is well known that Arendt spoke of “the banality of evil” when characterizing Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem, the concept disclosing a matter of fact. As she said, I spoke of “the banality of evil” and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However, monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.86 Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as a Nazi manifesting this quite authentic inability (I would say “inauthentic” ability) to think cannot be transferred to Heidegger when he is characterized as a Nazi; for, if he is anything, Heidegger is “the thinker” whose Being and Time heralded the distinction of authenticity and inauthenticity and the need for a post-metaphysical thinking that yet remains our task. Arendt had the provocative insight to interrogate the phenomenon of evil as she asked several questions that yet have no adequate answer. Among these questions she asked: Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove the villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? . . . Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it “conditions” men against evil-doing? The fact is that some Nazis could not but be considered wicked in the sense that they were determined to prove the villain, even as others who joined the National Socialist party merely joined the bandwagon without the safeguard of any thinking that would condition them against evil-doing. This

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was a matter of presence or absence of conscience, in Arendt’s view. Thus, she remarked, If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant, how intelligent or stupid he may prove to be.87 Surely this holds for Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, assuming him to be a sane person, having the ability to think and hence the ability of conscience to discern right from wrong and choose the right over the wrong. Yet, there is a reservation here in Heidegger’s case. It is not clear that Heidegger would follow Kant (in Arendt’s sense) in opining that, “one would need philosophy, the exercise of reason as the faculty of thought, to prevent evil.” Why not? Because, as Arendt understood, “the business of thinking is like the veil of Penelope: it undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.” The consequent of this insight is the proposition that “we cannot expect any moral propositions or commandments, no final code of conduct from the thinking activity, least of all a new and now allegedly final definition of what is good and what is evil.”88 Indeed, Arendt asserts later, “thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.”89 Such would be the consequence of Heidegger’s post-metaphysical thinking – assuming, as Arendt expects by analogy with Socrates’s task as gadfly, that one can be aroused to think “without being taught a doctrine,” the latter clearly not Heidegger’s intent when he speaks of the task of thinking at the end of metaphysics, clearly not a doctrine to be appropriated in ideology such as expounded by the Nazi ideologues Rosenberg and Baeumler. Given Heidegger’s understanding of Entscheidung with its reference to the threefold path of being, appearance, and semblance, one wonders whether Heidegger, in the midst of his post-Rectorate thinking, may have taken to heart the insight of Democritus that Arendt mentions: “one must avoid speaking of evil deeds.” Arendt clarifies this to have the function of depriving evil deeds of “their shadow, their manifestation.”90 The point, evidently, is that, “Ignoring evil will turn it into a mere semblance.” Yet, that interpretation remains thought-provoking for one working in thought to discern the ontology of evil and what it means to turn evil into mere semblance, especially when Entscheidung is always engaged by the threefold path in which (1) being competes with “appearance” for unconcealment even as (2) “appearance” competes with “semblance” for unconcealment, and (3) “both” being and appearance “compete with semblance” for presence. It is, perhaps, rather as Wiesel understood – similarly to Heidegger in his recognition of our plight as one of Abgrund – that the Nazi genocide presents 164

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us with an “awful awareness of the abyss that lay beneath the feet of each individual inmate [in the extermination camps] and the dreadful [one recalls here Heidegger’s clarification of ‘Angst’] realization that there was no path one could tread to reach safety.”91 Arendt tried to discover “whether the thinking activity, the very performance itself – as distinguished from and regardless of whatever qualities a man’s nature, his soul, may possess  – conditions him in such a way that he is incapable of evil.”92 She claimed that both Socrates and Plato came to believe “that men can and do commit evil voluntarily.” Moreover, Arendt opined, it seems both Socrates and Plato “knew what to do philosophically with this disturbing fact,” and this apparently involves the imposition of threats upon “the many” (hoi polloi). Yet, with Socrates, who worked in private as gadly, torpedo fish, and midwife, one finds his dialectic the sort of thinking that has its “purging element.” That is, as Arendt put it, it “brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them – values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions”93 which is thereby “political by implication,” with a “liberating effect” upon an individual’s faculty of judgment – which is “the ability to say ‘this is wrong.’” In that situation of judgment of particulars, Arendt opines, “judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think.” For Heidegger, one surmises, it is in the captivity to the hustle and bustle of calculative thinking that one is much too busy to be able to think qua meditative thinking, to be able to see beyond appearances, beyond semblance, and to apprehend the claim of being upon one’s ownmost potentiality for being authentically oneself. In the end, then, I submit one must be careful not to at least attempt to think what Heidegger intuits or intimates – thinking in his sense always a venture, tolma, so that one must be cautious that one may go astray or be one’s own undoing. There are some who have the pretension of being learned without being sophistic, others who denominate themselves philosophers or thinkers, who necessarily and perpetually understand the task to begin philosophy anew, and so who can be “attuned” to the possibility of a new dispensation, in Heidegger’s sense of transition from Seinsgeschichte to Seyngeschichte, “beyond” the planetary domination of technology. Not to attempt the task of thinking as Heidegger proposes, for all the reasons advanced by detractors consequent merely to Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism, is falsely to sustain a condemnation of Heidegger the man and the thinker. Far be it from those who would be true to “the piety of thinking” to be fearful of contagion in thought, especially when we are called to think anew the call of the future while following the many pathways cleared by Heidegger. One way or another, we travel the same pathways upon which we may disclose our authentic potentiality-of-being, or, failing that, dispose of our ability to dwell upon the earth with care. 165

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Notes 1 William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” International Journal of Ethics, April 1891, www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/American/ mp&ml.htm, accessed on 06 January 2019. 2 Sahilini Satkunanandan, Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 2. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 4 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 5 Ibid., italics added. 6 Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. T. Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 7 Ibid., p. 186. 8 Ibid., p. 187. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 188, italics added. 11 Ibid. 12 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, English-German Edition, trans.W. McNeill (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), p. 8E. 13 Heidegger, Logic, p. 188, italics added. 14 Ibid., p. 190. 15 Ibid., p. 191. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 192. 18 Ibid., p. 193. 19 Ibid., p. 194, italics added. 20 Ibid., p. 206. 21 In his translation of the Rektoratsrede, Karsten Harries notes, “Selbstbehauptung means not just ‘self-assertion’ but a defense of one’s proper place against attempts by others to usurp it.” To defend one’s proper place (thinking here ‘topos’ in Heidegger’s sense of the polis as the site of one’s being-there) is to act authentically. To act so against attempts by others to usurp it is to pit one’s commitment to authenticity against those who act according to a comportment of steppingin mode of solicitude, in this case the sort of stepping-in solicitude that party functionaries and ideologues exercised as if they knew better and which “vision” of National Socialism and sense of the being of the university they insisted on assuring by way of the implementation of the Führerprinzip. 22 Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University and the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 38, No. 3, March 1985, italics added. It remains to be clarified how Heidegger understood this concept of “spiritual leadership,” why he chose that particular word of “spirit” to modify the word “leadership,” whether meaning here “geistige” or “geistliche” of “Geist,” as Derrida queries this “motif” in relation to a concept of “philosophical nationality and nationalism” in his Of Spirit, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 23 Heidegger had spoken of: “willing the spiritual historical mission of the German people (Wille zum geschichtlichen geistegen Auftrag des deutschen Volkes) as a people that knows itself in its State.” As Derrida reminded, further, Heidegger provided his own definition of “spirit”: “spirit is the being-resolved to the essence of Being (ursprünglich gestimmte, wissende Entschlossenheit zum Wesen des Seins), of a resolution which accords with the tone of the origin and which is knowledge [savoir].”

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24 Michael Gelven, “Heidegger and Tragedy,” Boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2, Martin Heidegger and Literature, Winter, 1976, pp. 554–568, p. 555. 25 Ibid. p. 556. 26 Ibid., p. 561, italics added. 27 One thinks here concepts: Zeitlichkeit, Temporalität, Historie, Historicalität as elucidated in Being and Time, and as discussed in related works (e.g., History of the Concept of Time, The Concept of Time); then Heidegger’s more complex discussions of Seinsgeschichtlichkeit in his later works as he sought to work out more fully the history of being. But, important here is the need to focus not on statements about time but on time’s temporality; for, as Heidegger put it in his Logic: The Question of Truth (pp.  339–340), “when statements deal with time, time is rendered inaccessible in its proper temporality,” (i.e., in its authentic form): “We look at the world and find that time is that within which all processes run their course. Whenever we try to understand time more originally, it is time conceived in this way – ‘world-time’ – that guides all further explanations. In this way, we either do not see time at all or we see time only as a mode of what is just out-there, namely, the world or nature.” In view of this, Heidegger (p. 341) clarifies what he means so as to appreciate the correct significance of the future: “the word ‘future’ is an inappropriate expression for the original ‘futurity’ of human existence. The command, ‘Become what you are!’ – understood ontically – is possible only if, taken ontologically, I am what I am becoming (i.e., only if the very being of my ability – namely, my being-ahead-of-myself – has the structure of expecting).” 28 Derrida (Of Spirit, p. 39) acknowledges that one might fault Heidegger for spiritualizing National Socialism. “But,” he adds: “on the other hand, by taking the risk of spiritualizing nazism, he might have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation (spirituality, science, questioning, etc.). By the same token, this sets apart [demarque] Heidegger’s commitment and breaks an affiliation. This address seems no longer to belong simply to the “ideological” camp in which one appeals to obscure forces – forces which would not be spiritual, but natural, biological, racial, according to an anything but spiritual interpretation of ‘earth and blood.’” 29 It is noteworthy that Heidegger’s grandson has himself stated that, “the ways of my grandfather . . . in part were also erroneous ways” (“die Denkwege meines Grossvaters, die zum Teil auch Irrwege waren”), in Arnulf Heidegger, “Der Vorwurf geht ins Leere,” Zeit Online, 25 March 2015, www.zeit.de/2015/12/ martin-heidegger-schwarze-hefte-antisemitismus, accessed on 07 July 2018. 30 See here Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, ed. R. Krauss, C.C. West, and D.W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 31 I here use the preferred term as given by Alan Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32 See here Richard Dien Winfield, The Just Economy (New York: Routledge, 1988); The Just State (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005); Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 33 Winfield, The Just State, Chapter 2, pp. 125 ff. 34 Ibid., p. 14. 35 Ibid., p. 15. 36 Ibid., p. 16. 37 Ibid., p. 17. 38 Gidon Halbfinger, “As Minerva’s Owl Flies: The Dark Side of Hegel’s Historicism,” Gadfly, April 2017, www.thegadflymagazine.org/home-1/2017/4/10/ as-minervas-owl-flies-the-dark-side-of-hegels-historicism, accessed on 12 June 2018.

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39 See here, e.g., Burns H. Weston, Richard A. Falk, Hilary Charlesworth, and Andrew L. Strauss, International Law and World Order, 4th Edition (St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 1990); Jean-Marc Coicaud and Daniel Warner, Ethics and International Affairs: Extent and Limits (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2001); Joel H. Rosenthal and Christian Barry, eds., Ethics & International Affairs: A Reader, 3rd Edition (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009). 40 See here my Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). 41 Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 4. 42 Ibid., p. 5. 43 Ibid., p. 8. 44 David Bronstein, “Hegel and the Holocaust,” Animus, Vol. 10, 2005, www2. swgc.mun.ca/animus/OLD_SITE/2005vol10/Bronstein.pdf, accessed on 24 June 2018. 45 Bronstein, “Hegel and the Holocaust,” p. 3. 46 See here Emil Fackenheim, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). For a review of this and an interpretive commentary on Fackenheim’s position, see David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). Also see Daniel Fraenkel, “Review: Jewish Metaphysics after Auschwitz,” April 2009, www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev. php?id=23941, accessed on 12 June 2018. 47 Fackenheim, “An Epitaph for German Judaism,” p. xxix. 48 Emil Fackenheim, “On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 23, No. 4, June 1970, pp. 690–698, at p. 690. 49 Fackenheim, “On the Actuality,” p. 694. 50 Ibid., p. 697. 51 Emil Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 205, as cited by Zachary Braiterman, “Fideism Redux: Emil Fackenheim and the State of Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1. 1997, pp. 105–120, at p. 107. 52 Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future, p. 71, as cited by Braiterman “Fideism Redux,” p. 107. 53 Shubert Spero, “Review Article: Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, Vol. 15, No. 4, Spring 1976, pp.  113–125, http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2015/ No.%204/Encounters%20Between.pdf, accessed on 02 April 2019. 54 Braiterman, “Fideism Redux,” p. 110. 55 See here J. McCarney, Hegel on History (London: Routledge, 2000). Citation from David MacGregor, “Problem of Evil,” Marx and Philosophy Society Joe McCarney Memorial Conference, Saturday, October 25, 2008, London, https:// marxandphilosophy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/macgregor2008.doc, accessed on 25 June 2018. 56 MacGregor, “Problem of Evil,” p. 3. 57 Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), “Chapter 1: Holocaust Memory and Hegel,” www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60798.pdf, accessed on 25 June 2018. 58 Eisenstein, “Chapter 1: Holocaust Memory and Hegel,” p. 25. 59 See here, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” in Habermas’s Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 37–59.

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60 Michael A. Meyer, “Judaism after Auschwitz,” Commentary, June 1972, www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/judaism-after-auschwitz/, accessed on 02 April 2019. 61 As cited by Kurt Buhring, “A New Sinai? A New Exodus? Divine Presence During and After the Holocaust in the Theology of Emil Fackenheim,” in Buhring, ed., Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African and American Jewish Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 85–130, p. 113. Buhring here cites Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future, p. 261. 62 See here, e.g., Jennifer Lassley, “A Defective Covenant: Abandonment of Faith among Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust,” International Social Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, 2015, pp. 1–17; Reeve R. Brenner, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (New York: The Free Press, 1980); Alexander J. Groth, Holocaust Voices: An Attitudinal Survey of Survivors (New York: Humanity Books, 2003). 63 What then is to be said of Heidegger’s “ethics” if there is an ethics to his quietist turn? Bonhoeffer’s Ethics – which required one to set aside the two questions: “How can I be good?” and “How can I do something good?” in favor of the question, “What is the will of God?” who is “the good” (das Gute), and this in rejection of Nietzsche’s assertion of a “twilight” or “death” of “the gods” – does not provide an answer Heidegger might have appropriated for his own political and moral resolve. His “decision” would not and did not presuppose the “decision” Bonhoeffer privileged as “a decision about ultimate reality, that is, a decision of faith” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, p. 48). Thus, Bonhoeffer wrote (p. 49): “The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. . . . God, however we decide, has already spoken the revelatory word and we . . . even in our false reality, can live no other way than from the true reality of the word of God.” For a comparative analysis, see Brian Gregor, “Formal Indication, Philosophy, and Theology: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2007, pp. 185–202. 64 Malpas, “Chapter 1,” p. 9. While concurring with Malpas on this counsel on the hermeneutic task of philosophical reading, I nonetheless disagree with his opinion (pp. 10–11) that “there can be no question . . . that Heidegger’s decision to commit himself to the National Socialist ‘Revolution’ was not merely a ‘mistake’ but a horrendous failure of moral as well as political judgment,” even if Malpas expects that one may utter such an assessment with “an element of sorrow or compassion.” The whole of my extended argument speaks to why I sustain this disagreement. 65 Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 239. 66 See here Eggert Blum, “Die Marke Heidegger,” Zeit Online, 27 November 2014, www.zeit.de/2014/47/philosoph-heidegger-antisemitismus, accessed on 07 July 2018. 67 Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, p. 254. 68 Ibid., p. 352, italics added. 69 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 51–66. See here also, in relation to discourse on the Holocaust and “the deformative power of Western reason,” Norman K. Swazo, “A Preface to Silence: On the Duty of Vigilant Critique,” Janus Head, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1999, www.janushead.org/2-2/ nswazo.cfm, accessed on 17 May 2018. 70 Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” p. 64. 71 Hölderlin’s import as poet links essentially to Sophocles’s import as poet, whose thought Heidegger claimed, may yield a more originary ethics, Hölderlin himself

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

having engaged Sophocles’ tragic sense of human existence. See here Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), who writes (p.  4): “among the most haunting questions that are posed . . . is whether tragedy is a viable form, or even a possibility, for art today. . . . [The] claim is that, properly understood, the decision to take up such questions – to struggle to ask again or anew the questions put in tragedies – is not an arbitrary one, nor is it the expression of a nostalgia for another time; rather, this decision is best understood as the response to a certain assignment of history. . . . In the end it will be necessary to ask whether or not the turn to the question of tragedy is indeed an imperative of history at this historical juncture, and whether or not this imperative permits itself to be explained and justified with reference to a notion of destiny.” Further, in his “Ethics after Heidegger,” in Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, eds., After Heidegger? (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pp. 133 ff., Schmidt writes: “my conviction that reading Heidegger can contribute to thinking about the difficulties of ethical life still remains.” Heidegger, Contributions, p. 166. Heidegger, “The Turn,” pp. 66–67. Heidegger, Contributions, p. 167. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., §173, p. 210. Ibid., §174, p. 211. Ibid., §255, p. 287. Edler, “Heidegger’s Interpretation,” p. 167. Heidegger, Contributions, §177, p. 213. Ibid., §189, p. 217. See here Norman K. Swazo, “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” Man and World, Vol. 19, 1986, pp. 203–223. Heidegger, Contributions, §197, p. 224. Ibid., §237, p. 258. I have endeavored to think through the implications of Heidegger’s thought for politics in my Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). See here especially Part Two: “Essential Political Thinking.” Heidegger, Contributions, §255, p. 287. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn 1971, pp. 417–446. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” p. 422. Ibid., p. 425. Ibid., p. 434. Ibid., p. 437. Langton, “God, the Past and Auschwitz,” p. 34. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” p. 438. Ibid., p. 446.

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180

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Birkenau (concentration and extermination camps) 114 Blochmann, Elisabeth 14 Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 21–22 Bolshevism 11, 21–22, 29, 55, 103 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 31–32, 149, 157 Braiterman, Zachary 156 Brencio, Francesca 35 Bronstein, David 154 Browning, Christopher 7 Brumlik, Micha 121 Buber, Martin 157 Buchenwald (concentration camp) 32 Bultmann, Rudolph 130

Abraham 51, 88, 89, 129 Adler, Felix 49 akrasia 9 anti-Jewish legislation 6–7 anti-Platonism 30 anti-Semitism 6, 23, 35–36, 41, 47, 83–84, 146 apophasis 49–50 appeasement 8–9 Aquinas, Thomas 139 Arad, Yitzhak 50 Arendt, Hannah 7, 21, 43, 150–151, 163–165 aristocracy 30 Aristotle 9, 31, 56, 72, 95, 139 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 139 Auschwitz (concentration and extermination camps) 23, 36, 44, 49, 50–52, 114, 121, 128–129, 154, 156 “authentic history” 26–27 authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) 80 authentic self (eigentlich Selbst) 80 authentic truth 145 Axinn, Sidney 88 Baeumler, Alfred 37–39, 56, 58, 112, 145, 147, 164 Bambach, Charles 83 banality of evil 151, 163 Barash, Jeffrey A. 94, 98 Being and Time (Heidegger) 3, 14, 25, 54, 73–74, 80, 126, 141–142, 161 being-historical thinking 39, 55, 58, 160 Belzec (extermination camp) 50–51 Bendersky, Joseph 47, 90 Bergmann, Ernst 56 Bevir, Mark 49 Bindeman, Steven 48

calculative thinking 11, 32–33, 48, 50, 57, 104, 106, 115–118, 126, 127, 139–140, 160–161, 165 Calle-Gruber, Mireille 35 Carnap, Rudolf 32–33 Cassirer, Ernst 15, 20, 25, 32, 72–76 categorical imperative 15, 72, 74, 83, 89, 129 Christianity 87–91, 103–104, 112, 130, 154–155, 157 Churchill, Winston 47 Cohen, Arthur 50 Cohen, Hermann 15, 73 community 7, 21, 26, 29, 40, 44, 84–86, 102, 138–139 compliance 8–9 conscience 7, 44, 46, 76, 84–85, 121–128, 139–140, 164 Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning] (Heidegger) 48, 54–55, 94, 101, 104 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 78–79

181

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ethnic conscience 84–85 euthanasia 87 existentialism 15, 22 extermination camps 23, 50–51; see also Auschwitz (concentration and extermination camps); Belzec (extermination camp); Birkenau (concentration and extermination camps); Flossenbürg (extermination camp); Sobibor (extermination camp); Treblinka (extermination camp) Extraordinary Responsibility (Satkunanandan) 140

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 74, 76–77, 94, 141 Crowell, Steven 39–40 cultural revolution 37–39, 41 Dasein 13, 14, 25–26, 35, 38, 40, 54, 73–76, 85, 102, 109–110, 116, 118, 120, 123–124, 127, 138, 141, 143, 146, 161–162 Dauenhauer, Bernard 47 democracy 20–22, 29, 37, 41, 43, 47, 55, 113, 148, 150 Democritus 164 Derrida, Jacques 1, 13, 35–36, 42–43, 44–46, 49, 121, 139 destiny 25–29, 38, 46, 48, 55–56, 82, 85, 103, 106, 107 Destruction of the European Jews, The (Hilberg) 20 DiCesare, Donatella 35 disclosure 9, 25, 34, 58, 102, 117, 122, 126, 137, 161–162 “divinities” 100, 103 duty 5, 7, 10, 49, 52, 53, 80–83, 85, 87–88, 140, 159 Edler, Frank 14, 161 Eichmann, Adolf 8, 52, 163 Emad, Parvis 101 empiricism 95 Entscheidung (decision): being-historical thinking and 160, 162; the being of gods and 106; daily condition of 137; Heidegger’s intimations of 94–130; philosophical understanding of 20, 85–86, 143–144, 147–148, 149–150, 158–159; principle of 54–55; task of 100–103, 111–112; threefold path of 140, 164–165 Escudero, Jesus 35 ethics: akrasia and 9; Aristotelian virtue 87; in existentialist philosophy 15; Heidegger’s tragic sense of 1; human rights 87; Kantian 72, 74–75, 156; lack of foundation 44; moral philosophy and 43, 46, 81, 87, 164; Nazi ethic 7–8; neo-Kantianism 25, 32, 36, 73–74; nihilism and 151–152; normative 11, 20, 30–32, 48, 72, 81; post-Holocaust 130, 137, 149–150, 153, 155–156; religious 31; of technological world 120; theologically grounded 157; universal 8, 86

Fackenheim, Emil 50–52, 128–130, 154–155 Farias, Victor 35 Farin, Ingo 23 fate 25–29 Figal, Gunter 83 final solution 24, 28; see also Holocaust Fink, Eugen 99 first beginning 11, 14, 27, 39, 56, 110, 139, 146, 148, 158, 160 Flossenbürg (extermination camp) 32 Foucault, Michel 139 Franke, William 49–50 Franzman, Seth 22 freedom 22, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 55, 58, 72, 76–80, 87, 99, 127, 152 Fried, Gary 12, 14 Friedlander, Saul 30 Fritsche, Johannes 28–30 Fürsorge 141–144 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 23, 35–37, 42, 118–119 Gelven, Michael 146–149 “Germania” (Hölderlin) 116 German idealism 46, 94, 97, 99, 156–157 German National People’s Party 21 Gleichshaltung [conforming to the regime] 21 Gordon, Peter 20 Granel, Gerard 43 Greek philosophy 38–39, 47, 56, 99–100, 107, 113, 119–120, 139, 162, 165 grosse Politik (“great politics”) 55 Gross, Raphael 6 Groth, Alexander 46–47

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Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 141 Guignon, Charles 28 Haas, Peter J. 7–8 Habermas, Jurgen 1, 3, 31 Halbfinger, Gidon 152 Hamlet 147 “Hegel and the Greeks” (Heidegger) 95 Hegel, Georg W.F. 3, 24–25, 30, 39, 82, 85, 94–98, 100–102, 107, 110, 139, 149–150, 152–156 Heidegger, Martin: accusations against 44; analysis of conscience 121–128, 139–140; appropriation of Scheler’s sense of history and idea of “inner necessity” of German destiny 30; assessment of Jurgen Habermas on conduct of 3; assessment of Leo Strauss on conduct of 3; on comportment of Fursorge 141–144; concept of “divinities” 100, 103; concept of “leadership” 37–38; concept of second beginning 11, 27, 37, 39, 48, 54, 56, 102, 106, 110, 113, 118, 139, 146, 148–149, 158, 160–161; critique of Christianity 112; critique of Hegel 30, 94–98, 100–102; debate with Ernst Cassirer 15, 20, 25, 32, 72–76; decision of 1933 28; dilemma of politicalphilosophical responsibility 34; discourse of “extermination” and the “industrial manufacture of death” 113–119; elected rector of the University of Freiburg 53; engagement with Kant’s thinking 20, 25, 32, 72–91; entanglement with National Socialism 2–4, 10–15, 21–23, 26, 28–30, 53, 84–85, 87, 94, 98, 103, 108–110, 112, 127, 147–148, 165; on ethics 1, 15, 20, 25, 31–32; fate and destiny of 26; Heraclitus Seminar 99–100; on history 26–27, 46, 94–106; on “last god” 103–106; on machination 104–105, 161; methodical solipsism of 31; Nazi genocide and 10, 23, 34–36, 45–49, 58, 87, 91, 115, 119; paradox of post-metaphysical musings 147–148; political irresponsibility of 44; political pronouncements 85–87; “politics”

of 30; “position” to politics and philosophy of his day 58; position with other German philosophicalhistorical thought 20; positivist critique 32–33; post-metaphysical thinking 163–164; prefatory remarks on Hölderlin’s hymn “Germania” 116–117; prejudices in latest round of disputation about 35–36; reading of Sophocles 1, 31; Rectoral Address 14–15, 37–42, 111, 143–146, 161; refusal of faculty appointment opportunities 37; remarks on the essence of truth 33–34, 40, 141; resigns as rector of University of Freiburg 11–12; silence of 34–36, 45–49, 53, 87, 122, 128–129, 148, 159, 162; so-called anti-Semitism of 35; thought after “the turn” 45, 126, 161; on truth 32–35, 37–40, 55–58, 75, 96–97, 102, 140–141, 145, 160–162; understanding of tragedy 1 Heidegger, Martin, works: Being and Time 3, 14, 25, 54, 73–74, 80, 126, 141–142, 161, 163; Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning] 48, 54–55, 94, 101, 104; On the Essence of Truth 33–34, 40; “Hegel and the Greeks” 95; Introduction to Metaphysics 54, 55; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 25, 32, 58, 72–73, 81; Lectures on the History of Philosophy 95, 100; Letter on Humanism 1, 9–11, 31, 58, 160; Logic 141; “Origin of the Work of Art, The” 117; “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” 40; Ponderings: Black Notebooks 2, 22–23, 53–55, 106; “Positionality” 114; “Turning, The” 126; Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? [Why do I stay in the province?] 37; “Was ist der Metaphysik?” 40 Heidelberg Conference 35, 42, 44, 118–119, 121–122 Heraclitus 31, 99 Heraclitus Seminar 99–100 Herzl, Theodor 22 Hilberg, Raul 7, 8, 20, 23–24, 26–28 Himmler, Heinrich 4 Hippocrates 1–2 Hiroshima 49, 113–115, 117, 119, 121

183

INDEX

Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Fritsche) 28–29 “historicist intuition” 153–154 historiology 26–27 history 25, 46, 94–106 Hitler, Adolf 20–21, 32, 34, 41, 84, 86, 89, 98, 109, 129 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe 73–74 Hölderlin, Friedrich 45, 94, 97, 106, 112–113, 116, 118, 159 Holocaust: absent meaning of 30; American anti-Semitism and 47; characterizing 128–130; “functionalist” explanation 7; Heidegger’s responsibility for 35; “intentionalist” explanation 7; Nazi ethic and 7–8; Nazi expulsion and exclusion policy and 23–24; perspectives for speaking about 50–53; relation of Arendt to 163; relation of Hegel to 152, 154–157 humanity 12–14, 15, 89, 129 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 39 Husserl, Edmund 12–13, 97 Ibn Rushd 139 immigration laws 47 inauthentic truth 145 inequality 29–30 interpretation 13, 25, 30, 35, 38–39, 42, 104–105, 123–126, 140 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 54, 55 Isaac 51, 88, 89, 129 Islamic philosophy 139 Jacob 51, 89, 129 James, William 138–140, 149 Jaspers, Karl 15 Jeremiah (prophet) 53 Jewish theocracy 90 Jonas, Hans 130 Judaism 51, 87–91, 103, 139, 155–157 justice 4, 8–9 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger) 25, 32, 58, 72–73, 81 Kant, Immanuel: account of ethics 72; categorical imperative 15, 72, 74, 83, 89, 129; Critique of Practical Reason 78–79; Critique of Pure Reason 74, 76–77, 94, 141, 157;

distinction between “the thinker” and “the scholar” 3; on doctrine of right 76; on doctrine of virtue 10, 76; on duty 10, 81, 140; Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 141; Hegelian critique 94–95; Heidegger’s engagement with Kant’s thinking 20, 25, 32, 72–91; metaphysical concept of responsibility 121–122; metaphysics of morals 72–74, 76, 78, 80–83, 91, 157; Metaphysics of Morals, The 76, 78; moral philosopher’s task 139; moral philosophy 20, 72–73, 80–83, 87, 91; “post-Holocaust” ethics of 149; practical rationality 31; practical reason 32, 75–76, 78–80, 82–83, 89–90; principle of autonomy 39; pure reason 32, 73–74, 76, 79–80, 89–90, 94, 141, 157; relation of pure reason and practical reason 32; on religion 87–91; Scheler’s disagreement with 29; understanding of conscience 125 Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform (Papish) 72 Kierkegaard, Soren 94, 96 Knowles, Adam 47 Koonz, Claudia 84–85 Krieck, Ernst 38, 56, 112, 145, 147 Kristallnacht 23 LaCapra, Dominick 30 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 1, 35–36, 45–46 Langton, Daniel 50 “last god” 103–106 law 5–6, 39–40, 43, 72, 77–82, 84, 88–90, 125 “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” 6 “leadership” 37–38 League of Nations 86 Lear 147 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Heidegger) 95, 100 Les Origens (Schurmann) 43 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger) 1, 9–11, 31, 58, 160 Levinas, Emmanuel 147–148, 160 Levi, Primo 128 Logic (Heidegger) 141 Lutheran Protestantism 154–155

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INDEX

Nazi genocide: awareness of 164–165; countermeasures/protests 51; democracy failing to prevent 47; Heidegger as guilty of 23, 58; Heidegger scandalized by 119; Heidegger’s judgment of 115; Heidegger’s lack of remorse for 10; Heidegger’s silence on 34–36, 45–49, 53, 87, 122, 128–129, 148, 159, 162; as historical “singular” event 116–117, 153, 155; historical understanding/interpretation of 30, 157; “hyperintense kill rates” during 50; impute Heidegger moral wrong for 91; as “morally” wrong 137, 149; moral relativism and 130; Nazi ethic and 7–8; Nazi expulsion and exclusion policy and 23–24, 27–28, 41; understanding in hindsight 151–152, 154; world silence on 52 Nazi ideology 4–5, 6, 12, 30, 37–39, 56, 90, 127, 145 neo-Kantianism 25, 32, 36, 39, 73–74 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 14, 24–25, 30, 31, 39, 41, 45, 55, 56, 58, 82, 94, 100–101, 103, 105–106, 107, 110, 139, 150 nihilism 118, 151 Nirenberg, David 20 nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without a law) 5 Nuremberg Laws 6

MacGregor, David 156 machination (Machenshaft) 104–105, 161 Maier-Katkin, Birgit 30 Maier-Katkin, Daniel 30 Maimonides 51, 129, 139 Malpas, Jeff 23, 36, 42, 158, 159 Marxism 20, 103 Marx, Karl 21, 96 master-slave morality 31 McNeill, William 116 medieval philosophy 56, 95 Mein Kampf (Hitler) 109 Mensheviks 22 metaphysics 12–15, 25, 29, 32, 35, 39, 73, 76, 81–82, 102 Metaphysics and Historicity (Fackenheim) 155 metaphysics of morals 72–74, 76, 78, 80–83, 91, 157 Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant) 76, 78 method 35 Mill, John Stuart 139 Mnemosyne, erste Fassung (Hölderlin) 118 “moral” conduct 5–7 moral duty 52, 82, 83 moral ego 77–82, 90 morality 89 moral judgments 31, 41–42, 115, 119, 137, 148 moral law 72, 77–82, 84, 88–90, 125 moral philosophy 1, 4, 15, 20, 43, 46, 58, 72–73, 81, 83, 87, 91, 164 “moral” responsibility 42, 80 moral truths 15, 75 Nagasaki 49, 113–115, 117, 119, 121 Napoleon I, Emperor of the French 98 nationalism 39–40 National Socialism: “being-historical thinking” of 39; Heidegger’s “break with 83–84; Heidegger’s entanglement with 2–4, 10–15, 21–23, 26, 28–30, 53, 84–85, 87, 94, 98, 103, 108–110, 112, 127, 147–148, 165; historical destiny and 45–46; “philosophy” of 56, 112, 145–146, 150, 154, 158; rise of 20, 91; struggle in contemporary world revolution 37 Nazi conscience 84–85 Nazi ethic 7–8, 84–85

On the Essence of Truth (Heidegger) 33–34, 40 ontological knowledge 75 Operation Reinhard 50 “Origin of the Work of Art, The” (Heidegger) 117 Othello 147 pantheistic theodicy 156 Papen, Franz von 21 Papish, Laura 72 Parmenides 47, 120 Patterson, David 129 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 154 Pius XII, Pope 46 Plato 1–2, 31, 58, 72, 95, 102, 107, 119, 139, 162, 165 Platonism 14 political self-determination 150–152

185

INDEX

Ponderings: Black Notebooks (Heidegger) 2, 22–23, 53–55, 106 “Positionality” (Heidegger) 114 post-Holocaust ethics 130, 137, 149–150, 153, 155–156 post-metaphysical thinking 163–164 practical rationality 31, 76–77, 86, 89–90, 156 practical reason 32, 72–73, 75–76, 78–80, 82–83 pre-Socratic philosophy 95 Protagoras 1–2 Protagoras (Plato) 1–2 “pure moral religion” 87 Rachlin, Robert D. 5–6 “rank-ordering” 29–30 rationalism 95 reason 29–30 religion 87–91 Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, The (Fackenheim) 154, 155 Republic (Plato) 162 responsibility 36, 41–45, 49, 80, 83, 85–87, 121–123, 126–127, 140, 149, 152 “reticence in silence” 48 Rickert, Heinrich 98, 108 right 76 Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, The (Schapiro) 22 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 47 Rosenberg, Alfred 28, 37–39, 41, 56, 58, 145, 147, 164 Rosenzweig, Franz 157 Rubenstein, Richard L. 7, 51 Satkunanandan, Shalini 140 Schapiro, Leonard 22 Scheler, Max 20, 22, 25, 28–30 Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von 39, 45 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. 39 Schmidt, Dennis 39–40 Schoeman, Marinus J. 43 scholastic philosophy 56, 95, 103 Schurmann, Reiner 43 Schutzstaffel (SS) 4 science 38, 40, 105 second beginning 11, 27, 37, 39, 48, 54, 56, 102–103, 106, 110, 113, 118, 139, 146, 148–149, 158, 160–161

Shoah, “positionality” of 113–130; see also Holocaust sigan 48 Sobibor (extermination camp) 50–51 Social Darwinism 7 social democracy 22, 29 Socrates 1–2, 31, 52, 139, 162, 165 solicitude 142–143, 149 solipsism 31 Sophist (Plato) 119 Sophocles 1, 31 Soviet Bolshevik communism 20–23 speculative idealism 96 spiritual revolution 41 Steinweis, Alan E. 5–6 “step-ahead” solicitude 149 “step-in” solicitude 149 Stone, Lewi 50 Strauss, Leo 1, 3, 15, 22 “Student Law” 40 Talmud 129, 157 “The Turning” (Heidegger) 126 Thierack, Otto Georg 4 Thompson, Iain 37 tolma 41, 108, 165 Torah 51, 88, 90, 129, 155, 157 tragedy 1 transcendental dialectic 74 transcendental ego 78–81 transcendental idealism 36 transcendental imagination 75–77, 80, 82 transcendental logic 74 transcendental phenomenology 12–13, 97–98 Trawny, Peter 22, 35 Treaty of Versailles 148 Treblinka (extermination camp) 50–51, 114 Trevor-Roper, H.R. 8–9 truth 12, 23, 29, 32–35, 37–40, 52, 55–58, 75, 96, 102, 107, 140–141, 145, 148, 160–162 “turn, the” (Kehre, tournant) 45, 126, 161 unauthentic self (uneigentlich Selbst) 80 universal ethic 8, 86 U.S. Army War College 47 Vallega-Neu, Daniela 39 vice 4, 6, 84, 147–148

186

INDEX

Vichy government 44 virtue 4, 6, 10, 76, 84, 87, 147–148 von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm 35 Walzer, Michael 116 Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? [Why do I stay in the province?] (Heidegger) 41 weltanschauung philosophy 23

Wiehl, Reiner 35 Wiesel 164 Wiesel, Elie 52–53 Winfield, Richard 150–152 Witte, Sergei Y., Count 22 Wolin, Richard 23, 35 Wolin, Sheldon 90 Wood, Allan 153–154 Zeitlin, Aaron 53

187