Heidegger's Failure

Peter P. Kenny

Among those who appreciate the intellectual brilliance of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger there is sometimes a reluctance to confront the important question of Heidegger's moral failure or blindness in being directly or indirectly associated with National Socialism and its ideology. I think that this is not simply a personal failure, but a philosophical question to be explored, for it is related to the style of philosophizing that Heidegger was doing at the time.
For the historical record, I can recommend Hugo Ott's book, Martin Heidegger, A Political Life, which appeared soon after Victor Farías' work Heidegger et le nazisme (which is also good) and which contains some additional sources.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has made some insightful remarks on Heidegger with respect to this question. In an interview in French in 1997 in the journal Construire Ricoeur responds to the question about whether Heidegger's philosophy is inseparable from his association with the Nazis. He remarks:
"I would make the connection in the following way. I think that the philosophy of Heidegger is so focused upon the question of being, of ontology, that within it the criteria for moral and political decision are completely absent. It is an ontology that has been incapable of producing an ethic. And thus, it was lacking an internal line of defense. Since Heidegger at that time was in a phase of refounding his own philosophy, the figure of the hero was perfectly capable of filling in a sort of empty niche. But it is true that there were already certain para-heroic themes in Sein und Zeit. And even when his work has some ethical components, this would be in resolve in facing death. But this theme, which is profoundly a problem that a person must face onself, from the moment in which you make an adaptation from this to community life, to politics, you are on the path to terrible things. It is no longer someone facing his or her own mortality. It is then related to the death of other people. ... There is there an indirect responsibility and by default in the work of Heidegger."

As a theologian, I am interested in Heidegger both as a philosopher and as someone who theologians sometimes refer to either directly or indirectly through the use of his approach within their hermeneutics. Much is made of Heidegger's Catholic background, both negatively and positively. I don't think that one can make any easy links between a Christian theological understanding of God and Heidegger's utterances on the divine. At the same time, a closer reading of his biographies suggests a rejection by Heidegger after 1917 of Catholicism both as church and as body of thought. It is difficult to judge his remarks after 1945 because many of his expressions from this time onward were oriented toward his longing for rehabilitation and some sort of a role within philosophy in Germany. (Heidegger had been declared unfit to teach students after the war on the recommendation of no less than Karl Jaspers). I would suggest that one consider the sociological dimension as well: the brilliant but poor student using the theological education offered as a scholarship as a means of moving beyond the provincial world of Messkirch. Heidegger appears to have gone through a "Protestant" period after 1918, influenced by Luther (and his reading of the apostle Paul) and Kierkegaard, but I think that one could easily suggest that Nietzsche was a much larger influence that any Christian philosopher or thinker. The struggle within Heidegger for a genuine understanding of "Being", purified of the misconceptions of traditional Christian theology, meant that for him it excluded Christian faith. There are themes in his writings that seem Christian in origin, such as that of a new coming, an Advent that must be prepared for and carefully awaited, but what is here awaited is not anything recognizably Christian. It is more Hölderlin than John the Baptist. Thus Ricoeur remarks on Heidegger's appropriation of Nietzsche's "God is dead" proclamation as the death of the God of metaphysics: "What he himself sees beyond this death is a thinking of Being that has jettisoned all biblical dross and been enriched by the kind of philosophizing poetry best illustrated by Hölderlin. A new sense of the divine may arise on the horizon of this thinking, but it will be in terms of a post-Christian thinking, strongly marked by a kind of neopaganism." [Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 356–57]

Ott's book has some insightful quotes on the "renewal" program that Heidegger was trying to install within the German university system in the 1930's. Heidegger's famous quote from his speech on becoming the Rector of the University of Freiburg, "The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law" (Ott p. 243) was not a once-off, isolated remark. When Heidegger traveled to the University of Tübingen in November 1933 to speak on "The University in the National Socialist State", the local newspaper reported on the talk. As Ott quotes from the newpaper's report of Heidegger's words:
"But the revolution in Germany's universities is not only not at an end, it has not even begun. And if indeed we have reached the stage of evolution, as the Führer has said, then it can only take place through struggle and in the midst of struggle. The revolution in Germany's universities has nothing to do with changing externals. The National Socialist revolution is and will become the total re-education of the people, the students and the coming generation of young university teachers."

He concluded the address with the words:
We of today are in the process of fighting to bring about the new reality. We are merely a transition, a willing sacrifice. As the warriors in this struggle we must be a hard race, that cares for nothing of its own, that rests firmly on the foundation of the people and the nation. The struggle is not about individuals and colleagues, nor about empty tokens and general measures. All genuine struggle bears some permanent mark of the image of the combatents and their work. Struggle alone reveals the true laws whereby things are brought into being. The struggle we seek is one in which we stand shoulder to shoulder, man to man."

One can argue about to what degree Heidegger had his own version of National Socialism and how his ambition to play a role in reforming the intellectual orientation of a whole nation caused him to associate with those whose ideals he did not fully accept. But the philosophical question remains: what caused this emphasis on the need for a following of authoritarian leadership, of the overcoming of the individual, of learning not from traditions but from a new spirit forged in sacrifice and struggle? I would suggest they are not unrelated to the unresolved questions that Heidegger's struggle for a new ontology presents, as well as the shortcomings that Ricoeur referred to.
There is this side of Heidegger that needs to be further explored and which has implications for those who with great enthusiasm invoke Heidegger or Nietzsche without considering all their writings or the consequences of their thought. (Cf. Ernst Tugendhat's article on Nietzsche in Die Zeit Nr. 38, 2000: Der Wille zur Macht Macht und Antiegalitarismus bei Hitler und Nietzsche - Einspruch gegen den aktuellen Versuch einer Verharmlosung) which points to passages from Nietzsche which challenge the friendly Nietzsche interpretation of some modern critics.