Luke Ford

I don’t know why this is any more shocking than that many of the greatest scientists and generals of the 20th Century were Nazis.

There is nothing inherently unphilosophical about Nazism, a movement of ethno-nationalism. If Germany would have won WWII, Nazism may well have become the dominant Western philosophy of the 20th Century. The Nazis were people like you and me. They loved their people and they wanted it to prosper, even at the expense of other people.

Murder, conquest, racism and dictatorship were not unique to the Nazis.

A Jewish friend says: “It really bugs me the self righteousness of critics of those who fell under the sway of Nazism. We are all products of our time and circumstances. It takes a really brave and unusual person to stand up against the tides of conformism, peer pressure, and social, economic, professional advancement. That someone is a brilliant philosopher doesn’t provide immunity. All this shows is that Heidegger was human and subject to human needs and wants.”

Adam Kirsch writes:

One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century was a Nazi. There is no disputing this stark fact: Few people would argue Martin Heidegger’s claim to preeminence, and his Nazism, at least at first, was public and enthusiastic. In the spring of 1933, a few months after Hitler took power, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and was elected rector of Freiburg University, where his expressed goal was Gleichschaltung—the “alignment” of the academy with the new party-state. At his inaugural ceremony, the audience gave the Hitler salute and sang the Horst Wessel Song, the anthem of the Nazi party, before Heidegger spoke about “the glory and greatness of this new beginning.” Just what was involved in the “glory and greatness” of National Socialism was already on full display: Dachau opened in March, Jewish businesses were boycotted in April, and Heidegger was sworn in as rector in May. He lasted only a year before he was outpoliticked by cruder and more aggressive Nazi academics, and for the rest of the Third Reich he made no overt political statements. Yet Heidegger never publicly apologized for his early endorsement and service of Hitler, nor fully reckoned with what his Nazism meant for his legacy as a thinker.

Yet for some reason among philosophers and intellectuals there seems to be perpetual amnesia about this subject. Heidegger’s Nazism was common knowledge to anyone who lived through the 1930s. After World War II, he was banned from teaching by the Allied occupation authorities because of his Nazi allegiances. But when biographers Victor Farias and Hugo Ott wrote about Heidegger’s political involvement in the 1980s, the world of thought, especially in Germany and France, greeted it as an explosive new discovery. The same thing happened in 2005, when Emmanuel Faye unearthed Heidegger’s course lectures from 1933-35 and showed that he had, in Faye’s terms, accomplished “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy.”

…Why is this 80-year-old story still able to shock? The reason must be that, no matter how much we find out about Heidegger’s Nazism, it still seems like a contradiction in terms. After all, we think we know what Nazis are like and what philosophers are like, and the two identities simply don’t match. Thinkers are supposed to be idealistic, moral defenders of the highest values of civilization; fascists are brutal, barbaric, appealing to humanity’s lowest instincts. Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both. In 1927, he published one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy, Being and Time; six years later, as rector of Freiburg University, he presided over a public bonfire of “un-German” books, proclaiming, “Flame, announce to us, light up for us, show us the path from which there is no turning back.” Like the famous optical illusion in which the same figure is both a duck and a rabbit, then, we keep twisting and turning our image of Heidegger, trying to see in him both the Nazi and the philosopher at the same time.

…Of course, Heidegger’s thought does not lead directly to fascism. On the contrary, his most important readers were French existentialists like Sartre and Camus, who believed the ideal of freedom called for commitment to the anti-Nazi resistance. But in an important sense, Heidegger leaves the door open for fascism, because he values the intensity and authenticity of a belief over its goodness or truthfulness. In a world defined by nihilism, any source of strong new beliefs and convictions is potentially redemptive. That is why, in the early days of the Hitler dictatorship, Heidegger could take the new Nazi regime as a potential source of new values—an assertion of will that would create an entirely new spiritual and philosophical world.

This hope is expressed again and again in the “Black Notebooks” for 1933, the year Hitler took power and Heidegger became rector of his university. “A marvelously awakening communal will is penetrating the great darkness of the world,” Heidegger writes. Nazism, with its rhetoric of destiny and rebirth, was going to define new coordinates for human life, simply by the authenticity and confidence of its self-assertion. These coordinates might be upside-down, from the perspective of conventional morality; Nazism might call murder, conquest, racism and dictatorship good, where the old Judeo-Christian morality thought them bad. But because values are determined by conviction, not vice versa, the Nazis could succeed in bringing into being a new world in which evil actually was good.

…A central part of the new Nazi “essence of truth,” of course, was anti-Semitism. When the accounts of Heidegger’s Nazism are drawn up, it has usually been counted in his favor that he was not a racist anti-Semite, as though this demonstrated the refinement of his own version of Nazism.