~by David Aiken~
The
waves of our past seem inevitably, inexorably, to wash up on the sun-drenched beaches
of our present—as if wanting to deliver to the unforgiving sunlight of open
judgment the most hidden nooks and crannies in the multi-layered history of our
lives. To judge the books by their covers, it would seem to be the season of
the great equinox flood tides for Martin
Heidegger, because his oceanfront intellectual property is materially dissolving
under the relentless pressure of the tidal pounding. Especially in current French
scholarship.
The academic question of whether MH was
anti-Semitic is now resolving into trite justifications of whether it really
matters that the Great One was anti-Semitic, “which,” says French philosopher
Barbara Cassin, “we all knew anyway.” And while this woolly state of affairs may
certainly ensure scholarly debate among philosophers, it guarantees no
significant inquiry into whether MH’s general philosophical postures are
essentially informed by, even if just in part, his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic opinions,
and what difference this might make to those who stand to inherit from this
more than dubious philosophical, as well as moral
legacy.
This is indeed the philosophical essence of
the affaire Martin Heidegger—whether
his philosophy is contaminated by elements of Nazi ideology, and what that
might exactly look like when articulated for transmission. But what generally
flies under the radar of the Academy are the moral (in)sensibilities of a man
like Martin Heidegger, who was both Nazi and anti-Semite. There is massive hue
and cry from the parental public when we discover a school teacher who turns
out to be a pedophile; and rightly so, although the content of what (s)he
teaches in the classroom may be right as rain academically speaking. The issue
in this latter case is not so much the intellectual content of classroom
instruction, although this should clearly also be scrutinized, but rather the ‘other’
sensibilities of the pedophilic teacher. As a society, it would seem that we
would generally rather not discover that these ‘other’ (in)sensibilities have
also been taught or transmitted to our young, receptive students. Is not the
metaphor apt for a Martin Heidegger as well? Any more than pedophiles, do we
really want admitted Nazis and anti-Semites to occupy the front of our
classrooms? To what levels of moral vacuousness do we need to accede before we
can, like philosopher Barbara Cassin, presently directeur de programme at the Collège international de philosophie, sigh blushingly, look on adoringly, and
listen rapturously as “Heidegger helps us understand the
Greeks and the importance of poetry for thinking”?
Whatever….
Among other debris recently washed up on
the shores of contemporary studies into the Life & Times of Martin Heidegger,
is the Meister’s problematic 8-year long tenure as a member on the Nazi state’s
Commission for the Philosophy of Law,
from Spring 1934 until July 1942, “which concerns … the practical elaboration
of Nazi law” (Kellerer). This Commission
for the Philosophy of Law was integrated into the Academy for German Law under the jurist Hans Frank in June 1933. This
is the same Hans Frank who was condemned to death by the Nuremburg Tribunal and
hanged in 1946.
Now, all of this may seem only bland and
boring academic nitpicking… until we begin making other connections. For
example: that the Academy for German Law
was responsible for elaborating the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which forbid
marriage between Germans and Jews. And that, for further example, when the Nazi
policy of Endlösung was legally
adopted in January of 1942, which meant that the total annihilation of the
Jewish people was given the official go-ahead by the Academy for German Law to be legally enacted as Reich policy, it is
absolutely clear that Martin Heidegger absolutely knew, but said absolutely nothing,
ever, about the permission that he also gave with deliberation, as a member on
the Commission, for the legal
adoption of the Final Solution as the Nazi response to the Jewish Question.
So much debris; so much sunlight; so much repetitive
denial by All & Sundry. And this is just the history of the question. But has Heidegger’s racial endgame not also
been philosophically predictable all
along, whose ideological roots reach all the way back to an Aristotelian notion
of entelechy applied to the questions of race and value? Listen to Sidonie Kellerer’s
reenactment of MH lite: “…for Heidegger,
there is no use for [philosophical debate] because everything has already
happened before the discussion. Either a Dasein has an essence that gives him
access to Being, or he does not. Reason and logic are only loopholes for those
who are not at the level of Being.”
The concerted efforts of international scholarship
have now brought us clearly to the historical
denouement of the affaire Heidegger. As Ms. Kellerer writes in Le Monde:
“Heidegger did not just content himself with justifying Nazi ideology, he never
stopped actively participating in the implementation of the Nazi political program”
(Heidegger ne s’est pas contenté de
justifier l’idéologie nazie : il n’a
jamais cessé de participer activement à la mise en œuvre de la politique
nazie.).
For other contemporary teaching
philosophers, the personal cautionary tale contained in this glum history is
clear: that we need to remain alert and vigilant, and extremely lucid,
concerning the real world that is happening around us, so as never to stray too
far off-course from a recognizable moral compass. At the very least, this is
part of any philosopher’s response to the Socratic encouragement to pursue the
Examined Life of justice and honor with a certain degree of
insight, lucidity and humility. However, a more general question on the intellectual
table concerns, as it always really has, whether public educators and public education,
and fields of knowledge for public consumption, such as philosophy, should or
should not be aligned with certain moral expectations and parameters. Or
whether we are all really alright with learning about Life and Wisdom, Poetry
and Thinking, from those who have neither respect for, nor commitment to,
either.
Charlie
Hebdo
(Totem et Tabite, Charlie
Hebdo No 1383 / 23 January 2019, p. 6): Yann Diener’s “Heidegger,
This Messianic Messiah.”
[Translated
by David Aiken]
The 8th
of January last, in the French periodical Libération,
Delphine Horvilleur (NdT: French female rabbi, editor-in-Chief of the quarterly
Jewish magazine Revue de pensée(s) juive(s) Tenou'a) announced that
“antisemitism is never an isolated hatred, but rather the first symptom of an
impending collapse.” What is the relation to psychoanalysis, you ask? (Well,
there is already the fact that the term ‘symptom’ is rarely used in its correct
sense).
One can try to find some modicum of
comfort by pretending that antisemitism reeks only from the pores of
neo-fascist gangs from eastern European countries, from the daises of Islamic
fundamentalists, or from the yellow and brown Facebook pages* –which already
seems like enough—but it just so happens that the whole of Western philosophy
is dominated by a certain Martin Heidegger, who calmly called for “the
destruction of the enemy inside” (i.e., the Jews), and prophesized the end of
Judeo-Christian philosophy to arrive at the hegemony of German thought, and
more particularly at his own, Heidegger’s, thought. What might have remained
the isolated delirium of a philosopher lost in his mountains has seduced entire
generations of philosophers, and in particular French philosophers.
At least two books have demonstrated
recently that one can no longer separate the man Heidegger, his engagement in
the Nazi party, his observations concerning the beauty of Hitler’s hands, from
his grandiose philosophy. Emmanuel Faye wrote Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into the Philosophy in 2005,
and François Rastier, Naufrage d’un prophète, Heidegger aujourd’hui, in 2015. Since then, they have
both become incessant targets of attack by a great many, very zealous
Heideggerians, who do not respond with any sort of arguments, but rather with
insults and threats of extermination. Like this former president of the
philosophy department at the Sorbonne, Michel Fichant, who has declared that Rastier’s
book, Naufrage d’un prophète, is, and
I quote, “a fuming pile of sh#t.” You
can see how the Sorbonne raises the tone of the debate! “It is even worse than Faye’s book, which just about says it all.
Philosophically, Heidegger dominates the preceding century. That is just how it
is. Insects simply cannot do anything about that.” (Just to remind us all:
the Nazis used to compare Jews to insects, and in particular to lice, and
promised to reserve the same type of treatment for them. On a broader scale,
Heidegger was of the opinion that Jews, like other animals, have no land [Boden/sol], and that they are weltarm, which is to say that they are
“world-less”—so that there would be no difficulty in exterminating either of
them.)
With a new book, François Rastier takes
stock of these flippant questions: Heidegger,
Anti-Semitic Messiah (Lormont: Le Bord de L’eau). He demonstrates the
actuality for Heidegger of this deleterious and deadly reference, by citing the
different nationalists, Islamicists and other identitarians who today lay claim
to the great Martin Heidegger in order to legitimize an anti-Semitic dogma;
that goes for Alexandre Douguine to the Heideggerian school of Teheran, from
Slavoj Zizek to Tariq Ramadan.
Heidegger,
Anti-Semitic Messiah
is an important book for taking the measure of the wave of contemporary
obscurantism, and it will be introduced at the Heinrich-Heine House in Paris on
the evening of January 24.
*[NB:
Gilets jaunes (the recent Yellow Vest movement in France); the Brownshirts
(German SA)]
References
& Further Readings:
·
Heidegger’s
Der Spiegel Interview (EN): http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEHeideggerSpiegel.pdf
·
https://philochat.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/heidegger-das-spiegel-interview/; Heidegger’s Der Spiegel Interview (DE): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByBmdFWIrZRhVEM0V0RDTU9yNGs/edit?pli=1
All
translations are by Phrontisterion. Further reading around Charlie Hebdo
themes in Phrontisterion:
Other Phrontisterion posts concerning Martin
Heidegger:
