Heidegger and Nazism

You might not remember, but the late 1960s were a heady time at American universities. Most especially within the world of literary studies. At that time a French intellectual by the name of Jacques Derrida introduced a practice that he called deconstruction. It was a variant on a practice introduced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Germany’s most famous Nazi thinker.

In brief, and as I argued in another work, deconstruction is yet another word for pogrom. It is not about taking things apart but about identifying alien elements in literary and philosophical texts, then neutralizing them, lest they contaminate the culture.

The alien ideas were associated, Derrida argued, with repressing the importance of writing in favor of speech. Western civilization had run afoul by degrading writing and elevating speech. If you have the courage to see this structure as a reprise of the Nazi idea that Western civilization has been corrupted by Judaic thinking or even Jewish memes, you are getting closer to the stakes here.

Naturally, no one at the time really noticed that this was all a bunch of Nazi thinking, sanitized for American graduate students. But alas, it was.

Leftist intellectuals happily embraced a Nazi practice because they imagined that it was radical and even revolutionary. Derrida was a grand master, but the great genius of the movement was Martin Heidegger.

The mania broke somewhat in the late 1980s when a Venezuelan academic named Victor Farias wrote a book arguing that Heidegger’s association with Nazism was not just some incidental quirk. It was not extraneous to his philosophy, but was basic to his philosophy.

Ever since that moment academics, especially those who had been duped into becoming carriers for Nazi practices, have been arguing the point. For the most part deconstruction has faded into oblivion. Where it certainly belongs.

Now, everyone knew that Heidegger was a Nazi. Everyone knew that he was a staunch supporter of Hitler and the Nazi program. He had been forbidden from teaching in the post war period because his appeal was deemed too dangerous.

Among those who have offered the most cogent analyses of Heidegger and Nazism is Professor Richard Wolin. On the occasion of his new book on the topic, wherein he continues to argue that Heidegger was always a Nazi, and an anti-Semite, Jeffrey Herf reviews the book for Quillette. I will not go into too much detail, but the case is highly persuasive.

Herf offers a picture of Heidegger’s most important public speech about Nazism, from 1933. And he follows Wolin in painting the background of that speech:

On April 21st, 1933, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, then famous as the author of the 1927 philosophical treatise Being and Time, gave one of the most famous speeches delivered by any scholar living in the dictatorships of the 20th century. It was titled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” and it called upon students at the University of Freiburg to abandon objectivity and academic freedom and instead join the “spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German Volk [people] the stamp of history” while the “moribund pseudocivilization” of the West “collapses into itself.”

By the time Heidegger delivered that speech, the Nazi regime had already declared a national emergency and suspended civil liberties following the Reichstag Fire of February 28th. The regime had violently destroyed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, thereby clearing a path to dictatorship, and it had introduced national legislation calling for the expulsion of all Jews from the civil service. The antisemitic clauses of the Nazi Party were now government policy, and purges of Jewish professors were underway in the universities, including at Freiburg, where Heidegger had just been elected rector. Over the summer and into the fall, he openly declared his support and admiration for Hitler and the new regime and called upon all to vote for the Nazis in elections.

As it happens, many theorists have refused to accept that Heidegger’s philosophy had anything to do with his Nazi convictions. After all, he wasn’t a conservative Republican:

But a spectrum of theorists across the Left and Right have stubbornly refused to accept that the reputation Heidegger acquired in 1927 as a serious philosopher was dented by his support for Nazism, which they maintain was merely an irrelevant (albeit embarrassing) deviation.

Wolin and many others have debunked the notion that the philosophy had nothing to do with Heidegger’s politics:

An array of historians and philosophers, including Wolin, compellingly argue that there was a clear connection between the concepts of Being and Time and Heidegger’s support for Hitler, that his support for Nazism never wavered, that his antisemitism shared the genocidal characteristics of Nazi ideology and propaganda, and that he was dishonest after the war about what Nazism was and about his own role in lending it respectability. If all of that and more is true, then surely it is long past time that we recognize Heidegger’s philosophy as “irreparably contaminated” with fascism and Nazism.