Heideggeriana

020719_The Naked “Messiah”: Martin Heidegger. Charlie Hebdo editorial.

310519_"Heidegger et la mise en oeuvre du droit nazi". Paru le 27.10.2017 dans Le Monde
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/10/26/heidegger-n-a-jamais-cesse-de-participer-a-lamise-en-uvre-de-la-politique-nazie_5206008_3232.html

"Les Cahiers noirs, dont quatre volumes ont été publiés depuis 2014, montrent que Heidegger n’a pas hésité, durant les années du nazisme, à justifier « philosophiquement » ses propos antisémites. Pourtant, nombreux sont les chercheurs qui soutiennent que cet antisémitisme irait de pair avec une critique croissante du régime nazi. Ainsi, dans sa tribune parue le 12.10. dans Libération, Jean-Luc Nancy affirme-t-il – sans preuves – que Heidegger aurait « accablé » les nazis avec la dernière « virulence », dans ses textes des années 1930.

Cependant une découverte importante, confirme l’affinité en pensée et en actes qui existe entre Heidegger et le régime nazi. Elle concerne la participation à l’élaboration du droit nazi.
Nous savions depuis le livre de Víctor Farías, paru en 1988, que Heidegger n’avait nullement renoncé, en avril 1934, à sa fonction de recteur de l’université de Fribourg par simple opposition au régime nazi. Car à peine avait-il cessé d’être recteur qu’il acceptait, au printemps 1934, de devenir membre de la Commission pour la philosophie du droit. Farías montrait qu’il y avait siégé jusqu’en 1936. Cette commission était intégrée à l’Académie du droit allemand, mise en place, en juin 1933, par Hans Frank, juriste, qui occupait alors la fonction de commissaire du Reich chargé de la nazification du droit.
 
Emmanuel Faye avait poursuivi la recherche sur ce fait : en 2005, il mettait en évidence le lien étroit entre cet engagement pratique de Heidegger et sa pensée. Il rappelait que l’Académie pour le droit allemand avait élaboré les lois raciales de Nuremberg de 1935, dont la « loi pour la protection du sang et de l’honneur allemands » qui interdisait les rapports sexuels et les mariages entre juifs et non-juifs. L’adhésion de Heidegger à la Commission pour la philosophie du droit, concluait Faye, pesait au moins aussi lourd que son engagement à Fribourg.
 
En 1934, Heidegger décide d’intégrer cette commission. À cette époque, aucun des membres de la Commission n’ignore que Hans Frank prône la stérilisation de ceux qu’il qualifie de « caractères substantiellement criminels » ; son mot d’ordre : « Mort à ceux qui ne méritent pas de vivre ».
 
Quels sont les objectifs de cette commission, que Frank consacre dès 1934 « commission de combat du national-socialisme » ? En 1934, Alfred Rosenberg, également membre de la
commission, précise les objectifs en professant qu’ « un certain caractère juridique naît avec un certain caractère racial propre à un peuple » - ce caractère racial que le droit allemand a pour tâche de défendre face à ses « parasites ». Les membres de la Commission, qui oeuvraient en toute conscience à l’élaboration d’un droit « aryen » raciste, devraient en outre travailler en étroite collaboration « avec les représentants de la raciologie allemande et de l’hygiènisme raciale », raison pour laquelle un médecin, le psychiatre Max Mikorey, faisait partie de la Commission.

Or Miriam Wildenauer de l’université de Heidelberg, a découvert dans les archives de l’Académie du droit allemand, une liste datée des membres de la Commission, qui prouve que Heidegger en est resté membre au moins jusqu’en juillet 1942.
 
C’est là une découverte majeure puisqu’elle établit que Heidegger ne s’est pas contenté de justifier l’idéologie nazie : il n’a jamais cessé de participer activement à la mise en oeuvre de la politique nazie.
 
Hans Frank, le président de la Commission pour la philosophie du droit, sera nommé à partir de 1939 gouverneur général de Pologne, où il organisera l’extermination des juifs et des opposants politiques, y gagnant le surnom de « boucher de Pologne ». Il finira condamné à mort par le tribunal de Nuremberg et sera pendu en 1946.
 
Heidegger, qui, fin 1941, écrit dans les Cahiers noirs que « l’acte le plus haut de la politique » consiste à contraindre l’ennemi « à procéder à sa propre auto-extermination », continue à siéger dans cette commission, au moins jusqu’en juillet 1942, alors que la « solution finale » a été décidée en janvier 1942, et que l’extermination des juifs d’Europe atteint son paroxysme !
 
Comme le souligne à juste titre Wildenauer, il faudra poursuivre les recherches afin de déterminer précisément le rôle de l’Académie du droit allemand, et en particulier de cette commission, dans la mise en oeuvre du génocide perpétré par les nazis. De futures recherches devraient également clarifier les raisons pour lesquelles la Commission pour la philosophie du droit fut la seule, parmi es autres commissions de l’Académie, à être tenue secrète par les nazis. Les protocoles de séances restent introuvables. Alfred Rosenberg n’en dit mot dans son journal.
 
Le débat autour de Heidegger revient régulièrement depuis l’après-guerre. Loin de tenir, comme le suggère Nancy, au refus d’accepter une philosophie qui dérange, cette persistance peut être rapportée à deux raisons principales. D’abord, Heidegger fit preuve d’une grande habileté à effacer après-guerre les traces de sa participation active au régime nazi n’hésitant pas à « blanchir » plus d’une fois les textes qu’il publiait. Le débat reprend donc à chaque fois que ces faits, longtemps dissimulés, resurgissent au fil des recherches
 
La deuxième raison de cette résurgence tient à la manière dont Heidegger conçoit sa philosophie : pour lui, rien ne sert d’argumenter puisque tout se joue avant la discussion. Soit un Dasein a une essence qui lui donne accès à l’Être, soit il en est dépourvu. Raison et logique ne sont que l’échappatoire de ceux qui ne sont pas à la hauteur de l’Être.
 
Cette pensée autoritaire, qui criminalise la raison, imprègne aussi sa réception apologétique : dénégation des faits, procès d’intention et insultes tiennent alors lieu de discussion mesurée et argumentée.
 
Les totalitarismes ne sont pas, comme le suggère Nancy, des « éruptions » du destin, c’est-à-dire des désastres sortis d’on ne sait où. Ils sont mis en oeuvre par des individus à qui on peut en attribuer la responsabilité ; ils ont des causes économiques, politiques et sociales, qu’il nous incombe de déterminer et de comprendre."

180218_"Heidegger, théoricien et acteur de l’extermination des juifs ?" by François Rastier in The Conversation, 1 November 2017.
     Cf. Actu Philosopha: “François Rastier : Naufrage d’un prophète” ; Heidegger aujourd’hui; lundi 30 novembre 2015, par Nicolas Rousseau 
     Cf. “L’affaire Faye: Faut-il brûler Heidegger? A Reply to Fritsche, Pégny, and Rastier” by Thomas Sheehan.
     Cf. Sidonie Kellerer: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/10/26/heidegger-n-a-jamais-cesse-de-participer-a-la-mise-en-uvre-de-la-politique-nazie_5206008_3232.html
 

040118_Heidegger current events:
    •    http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/11/05/martin-heidegger-un-nazi-ordinaire_1608000
    •    http://religionsphilosophischer-salon.de/keys/miriam-wildenauer: "Heidegger war also bis Juli 1942 Mitglied in dieser Nazi – Kommission. Er wusste, dass im Januar 1942 die „Endlösung“, also die totale Ausrottung der Juden, von den Nazis beschlossen wurde."
  
010118_The Great Heidegger Debate -- Editorials from Charlie Hebdo (November 2017)

011117_"My Nights Without Heidegger" -- Editorial from Charlie Hebdo (4 October 2017)

230117_Bekenntnis der Professoren an den Universitaeten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat. [Dresden, 1933]. Cf. Heidegger's Ansprache beginning on page 13ff (in English, 36; in Italian, 58; in French, 83; in Spanish, 110). According to Faye (in Arendt et Heidegger, 2016, 537), Hans Gadamer also signed this document, which is confirmed by his signature-name on p. 131, Privatdozent Hans-Georg Gadamer, Universistaet Marburg.

180816_From the Zeil.de: „Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes“... on the question of Heidegger's antisemitism. Teaser: "Auch wenn Heidegger kein Antisemit im biologistischen Sinn gewesen sein mag, dürfte doch an seiner antisemitischen Gesinnung nicht mehr zu zweifeln sein."

070716_Heidegger: «Gli ebrei si sono autoannientati»; Nei nuovi «Quaderni neri» del filosofo l’interpretazione choc della Shoah. di Donatella Di Cesare

040716_Pour l'ouverture des archives Heidegger, par Emmanuel Faye

150416_Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, "Heidegger et la langue allemande." I(2005)
  
101115_While this article is not precisely "about" Heidegger, yet it is..... From Le Point.fr. [Publié le 09/11/2015 à 18:14 | Le Point.fr ] "Plus de la moitié des fonctionnaires allemands étaient d'anciens nazis. 54 % des fonctionnaires du ministère de l'Intérieur étaient d'anciens nazis que l'État fédéral allemand n'a pas cherché à remplacer..."

290815_Heideggeriana: Martin Woessner's review of Peter Trawny's recent book: "Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy" @ https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/fail-slow-fail-hard-heidegger

140615_Heidegger, on Death, from Philosophy Bro: "Heidegger says a bunch of shit I find generally and hopelessly incoherent but I think his point is that since death is inevitable anyway, we should live with an awareness of the possibility that gives us a sense of ownership over it, a lack of fear that comes not from ignoring the fact of my death but of acceptance of the fact. We shouldn’t sit around with our dicks in our hands waiting to die. I don’t fucking know, it’s Heidegger, fuck that guy." 

PS.- I have to admit, I like this philosopher-brother's tweak on H. We may be kindred spirits.

120315_Chronicle of Higher Education Review, March 2, 2015_Heidegger's Philosophy of Violence. By Richard Wolin.

Last spring, the Frankfurt-based publisher Vittorio Klostermann released the first three volumes (out of a projected eight) of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, a philosophical diary that the Freiburg sage dutifully kept, beginning in the early 1930s, over the course of four dec­ades. The Notebooks offer unvarnished access to his innermost thoughts and convictions. Their publication unleashed a major international controversy insofar as the full extent of Heidegger’s Nazi zealotry emerged.

Among other revelations, the Black Notebooks betrayed Heidegger’s seamless identification with the ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism that was the Third Reich’s alpha and omega. Thus he subscribed, without reservation, to the notion of a world Jewish conspiracy, holding "world Jewry" responsible for the technological degradation of the totality of Being (Sein). As he observes in a related text: "It would be important to enquire about the basis of Jewry’s unique predisposition toward planetary criminality."

The fourth volume of the Black Notebooks, covering the years 1942-48, will appear shortly. Advance copies demonstrate that, after the war, not only did Heidegger’s anti-Semitism persist unabated, but it reached new heights, including a twisted form of Holocaust denial. Perhaps his most disturbing claim is that the elimination of European Jews must be understood as an act of Jewish "self-annihilation" (Selbstvernichtung). Such an argument, offensive as it may be, is entirely consistent with the philosophical framework of "technology criticism" that Heidegger developed during the 1930s. Hence the damage that such assertions do to his credibility as a thinker is systematic rather than contingent. It compromises the very core of his later philosophy, which revolves around the ethereal doctrine of the "history of Being."

How, then, was it possible for a man whom some view as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher to arrive at such a repellent verdict? To answer this question, one must temporarily suspend disbelief and think like a Heideggerian.

During the 1930s, Heidegger identified "world Jewry" as the primary carrier of Western modernity—a cultural formation that, following Oswald Spengler, he viewed as a continuum of irreversible decline (Untergang). The term that Heidegger employed to describe this process of cataclysmic cultural decay was "machination," and at a certain point in his argument, "world Jewry" and "machination" became synonymous. Already in the first three volumes of the Black Notebooks, this standpoint had consequences that one can describe only as perverse and contorted. For example, Heidegger contended that, insofar as "machination" threatened to prevent Nazi Germany from realizing its ultimate historical potential, and since the Jews were machination’s primary exponents, Nazism itself had in part succumbed to "Jewification" (Verjudung).

Such arguments constitute anti-Semitism at its purest. Heidegger’s inculpation of "world Jewry" had nothing to do with real Jewish practices or life conduct. Instead it was based on his belief that Jews—who, during the 1930s, in the run-up to the Holocaust, had been persecuted and repressed as never before—have a phantasmagorical capacity to influence world politics from behind the scenes. By attributing to the Jews supernatural powers and abilities, Heidegger furnished a justification for combating Jewish influence by any means necessary—including extermination. As he observed in 1942: "The highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation."

Thus, in Heidegger’s view, the Holocaust was as an act of Jewish "self-annihilation" insofar as, at Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Jews—as the prime movers behind "machination" and the technological devastation of all of Being—themselves succumbed to industrialized mass murder. In this way, Europe’s Jews merely acceded to forces that they themselves had unleashed. As Heidegger states in Volume 4 of the Black Notebooks: "When the essentially ‘Jewish,’ in the metaphysical sense, struggles [kämpft] against what is Jewish [das Jüdische], the high point of self-annihilation in history is attained." In his estimation, therefore, the Holocaust signified little more than a massive and sanguinary instance of blowback. More seriously, in Heidegger’s view, the transition to a new "beginning" cannot come to pass until the Jewish spirit is vanquished.

Of course, Heidegger was simultaneously insulating Germany and the Germans from historical responsibility—as well as culpability—for having in 1939 launched (according to the indictment of the Nuremberg tribunal) an "imperial war of aggression." Following the war, throughout occupied Germany, the Allies posted signs at concentration camps and atrocity sites stating: "Sie sind schuldig daran!" ("This was your doing!") Heidegger’s doctrine of the "history of Being" (Seinsgeschichte) offered a powerful intellectual counterweight: a convenient rationalization for German nonresponsibility. As he says in the 1947 "Letter on Humanism," the canonical Heidegger text of the postwar period: "Human beings do not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of being." This claim represents a willful embrace of historical fatalism, a passive acquiescence in the face of the inscrutable "decrees" (Schickungen) of nameless higher powers. By blaming the European catastrophe on portentous abstractions such as "planetary technology" or the "destiny of Being," Heidegger sought to shift responsibility for premeditated mass murder.

Here, it is worth recalling that one of the most influential postwar interventions on the topic of German responsibility was Karl Jaspers’ pathbreaking 1946 book, The Question of German Guilt. Jaspers proposed that only by actively assuming responsibility for the Third Reich’s atrocities and misdeeds could the Germans as a people initiate the necessary process of moral regeneration. (Under the Nazis, Jaspers had been banned from teaching since the mid-1930s because he had a Jewish wife. During the latter stages of the war, the couple lived in constant fear of being deported.)

In the 1920s, Jaspers and Heidegger had been intellectually close and thought of themselves as pioneers in the development of existentialism as an alternative to neo-Kantianism’s staid rationalism. Thus Heidegger’s dismissive characterization of the Holocaust as an instance of Jewish "self-annihilation" was also intended as a riposte to Jaspers’ forthright, ethical summons to national repentance. As a man and as a philosopher, Heidegger possessed many talents. Intellectual integrity and moral rectitude were not among them.

An equally disturbing feature of the fourth volume of the Black Notebooks is that, despite the war’s devastation, Heidegger insists that the Germans, and they alone, harbor the capacity to redeem the West from its condition of unbridled nihilistic degeneracy. He takes this reasoning a step further, asserting that the Allies’ defeat of Germany was a far greater crime than the slaughter of the European Jews. He seeks to turn the tables on Germany’s conquerors. They are, in Heidegger’s view, more guilty than the Germans. He accuses them of "collective guilt" and of having turned occupied Germany into a "KZ" (concentration camp). One can only recoil in astonishment at his stunning myopia. Clearly, if any one nation was responsible for World War II’s unprecedented destructive frenzy, it was Germany. In so many respects, Heidegger’s narrow-minded Germanocentrism—which he wore like a badge of honor—contributed mightily to his undoing.

The latest installment of the Black Notebooks reveals how little Heidegger learned from the war. Unlike Jaspers, he failed to use the Armageddon of Nazi rule as a spur toward moral betterment. Instead he continually sought refuge in threadbare rationalizations and self-deception. He condescendingly dismissed critics and doubters by claiming, "Whoever cannot attack the thinking attacks the thinker." But this attitude merely betrays his prodigious lack of self-knowledge.

In Germany the fallout from these latest revelations concerning Heidegger’s indefensible views has already been widespread. Last month the president of the Heidegger Society, Günter Figal, resigned, claiming that he could no longer in good faith represent Heidegger’s philosophy in an official capacity. Last week the Black Notebooks editor Peter Trawny gave a forthright interview to the German philosophy review Hohe Luft in which he lambasted his fellow Heideggerians for their servile dishonesty, for having, for decades, acted as craven apologists for all things Heideggerian.

The most recent act of bad faith on the part of Heidegger’s defenders has been to claim that anti-Jewish elements are present in the work of earlier German thinkers as well, such as Kant and Hegel, suggesting that it is unfair to single out Heidegger for harboring anti-Semitic convictions that were widespread. However, such claims are misleading in two important respects: (1) The Black Notebooks make clear that anti-Semitism occupies a systematic position in Heidegger’s thought, which was not the case with Kant and Hegel; and (2) Kant’s and Hegel’s thoughts were predicated on the notion of the "autonomy of reason," and, therefore, unlike Heidegger’s, remained unserviceable for the ends of National Socialism. As Carl Schmitt observed in the 1930s, referring to the date the Nazis seized power: "On January 30, 1933, Hegel died."

In Germany, following the war, readmission to the family of nations has depended on a frank acknowledgment of historical transgressions and misdeeds. Now it’s time for Heideg­gerians elsewhere to follow this instructive lead by assuming a posture of forthright and unsparing criticism. In this manner alone might they restore their seriously compromised reputations as intellectuals and scholars.

Richard Wolin teaches history and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author, among other works, of The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (Columbia University Press, 1990).

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250215_Heidegger reads Hölderlin--a fragment from "Der Ister", a film by David Barison and Daniel Ross.

300914_It would seem, truly, that there is nothing new under the sun. In much the same way as we are scandalized and dismayed by Heidegger's problematic relationship to Nazi ideology and the German State, it would seem that Seneca, the high-minded ethical and Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD, also had a skeleton in his ethical closet -- in the form of the notorious tyrant, Nero!  

Classicist Mary Beard addresses this problem in her recent review for The New York Review of Books, entitled "How Stoical Was Seneca?" The hook:

"Part of this is the question of how to reconcile Seneca’s intimate involvement in the brutal power politics of the Roman court with the high-minded philosophical ethics he professed. That indeed is the question that Miriam Griffin addressed in her classic study, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (first published in 1976), and it is one to which both Romm and Wilson also turn.How could the true Stoic philosopher, who wrote so strenuously of the importance of virtue in politics, square his conscience with the role he had chosen to play at Nero’s right hand? Or to put it another way, how could a man who denounced tyranny take on the job of tutor to a tyrant?" 

300914_From Professor Peter Gordon's review in The New York Review of Books of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks": Heidegger in Black.

"Even if Heidegger came to regret his service to the Reich, the notebooks written after 1934 show that many of the political beliefs that first drew him to Nazism remained unchanged. Worse still, those beliefs continued to contaminate his philosophy. Many more notebooks are slated to appear, but there is little reason to believe that they will reveal a change of heart. Heidegger had the habit of blaming his personal misfortunes and the misfortunes of the modern age on conspiracies and anonymous metaphysical processes that no human being could hope to control. But one thing is certain: whatever damage the black notebooks may inflict on Heidegger’s philosophical legacy, the blame will lie with their author, and with him alone."

150914_From Alain de Botton's The School of Life: "A look at Martin Heidegger - the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived: THE BIG IDEAS"

070914_Calvin and Martin Heidegger obviously had the same response to their grade school writing teacher...

Calvin and Hobbes

280814_From August 2014: An inspired reading position for those valiant who wish to try wading through Heidegger's letters to his wife: 

"National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks." By Richard Wolin; summer 2014. It is a credit to his honesty that Professor Wolin speaks about the "problematic" of understanding either Heidegger's language or his thought: "In the anti-philosophical arguments of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger views reason, individualism, and democracy through the prism of modern humanity’s utter and wholesale “abandonment by Being.” His obscure point of departure leads to equally obscurantist forms of criticism. It is not merely Heidegger’s racist reliance on the Volk-ideal that is objectionable. His attempt to ground philosophy in unintelligible concepts and idioms renders his thought, in nearly all of its incarnations, deeply problematic."

260814_From DIE ZEIT Nº 12/201421. März 2014  10:52 Uhr: "Heideggers Schwarze Hefte. Das vergiftete Erbe. Die "Schwarzen Hefte" aus dem Dritten Reich von Martin Heidegger wurden jetzt veröffentlicht. Sind sie wirklich so antisemitisch und nationalsozialistisch beseelt wie befürchtet? von Thomas Assheuer."

Reminiscent of Euripides, Assheuer begins his article by giving away the entire plot: "Wenn es sich so verhält, dann ist Heideggers Katze jetzt aus dem Sack. Die Schwarzen Hefte, fast 1300 Seiten stark, sind in der Welt, und auch wenn mancher Gedanke darin bekannt war: Die Hefte sind ein philosophischer Wahnsinn und in einigen Abschnitten ein Gedankenverbrechen."