Saturday, June 1, 2019

The Naked “Messiah”: Martin Heidegger



~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

All translations are by Phrontisterion. Further reading around Charlie Hebdo themes in Phrontisterion:

Other Phrontisterion posts concerning Martin Heidegger: