Heidegger and Nazism

Michael D. Daniels Trinity University

Since the end of World War II, controversy has raged over the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his affiliation with the Nazi party. Some critics have argued that the connection taints Heideggers philosophical contributions. To accept this and reject Heideggers philosophy would be to reject the work of arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and perhaps the greatest philosopher since G.W.F. Hegel. Heideggers philosophy of Being should not be dismissed simply because of political implications, because the deeper hopes and aspirations for society posited by Heidegger in his writings provide purer, and much more understandable motivations behind his philosophy and political affiliation. A quality synthesis of Being and Time could easily constitute a whole book. As such, the analysis of Heidegger contained herein will be limited to the Aristotelian foundation that serves in defense of Heidegger and will be analyzed in relation to Heideggers politics. To understand where the controversy arises, it would be helpful to first analyze Heideggers activities in Nazi Germany.

CONNECTION WITH NAZISM

Heideggers documented Nazi connection began when he accepted the rectorship at the University of Freiburg and officially joined the party as a dues-paying member on May 1, 1933.1 In taking his position, he delivered the now infamous rectoral address (discussed later) in which he first publicly asserted his Nazism. Some scholars, such as Alan Paskow, argue that there were evident precursors prior to the address.2 It is known, however, that Heideggers rectorship lasted only ten months, ending early in 1934. There is evidence that he never fully abandoned his Nazi beliefs after the War. In the 1953 publication of his Introduction to Metaphysics, he makes references to the inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist movement.3 His later inclusion of an explanatory parenthesis in order to conceal the true meaning of the statement further confirms suspicions of his real intentions.4 There is an exchange of letters between Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, his former student, in which he attempted to justify the virtues of National Socialism.5 In an unpublished lecture on technology, Heidegger allegedly drew a comparison between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and agricultural technology.6 In a 1966 interview for the weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, Heidegger claimed that the Nazis had failed only because the leaders of the party were too limited in their thinking.7 This evidence, coupled with continued criticism of other contemporary political movements, leaves little doubt that Heidegger continued to regard the Nazi movement as the most promising political development of his time.8 Many scholars, some of them former students, have attempted to defend Heidegger on various grounds. They employed various methods, from denying the implications, to concealing evidence about the period. Regardless of methods, in my opinion, they

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provide only superficial defenses and fail to reach a deeper insight into why Heidegger supported Nazism. The answer to why such a great philosopher can make such a horrible mistake is to be found in Heideggers philosophical roots Aristotle. Through an analysis of Heideggers philosophy of Being, with its strong grounding in the thought of Aristotle, we can better understand and explain Heideggers attraction to Nazism. While no attempt will be made to defend Heideggers involvement, an analysis of his philosophy will lead to an understanding of the motives behind his politics.

ARISTOTELIAN GROUNDING OF BEING

The Philosophy of Being and the Crisis of the West Heidegger was initially attracted to Nazism because he believed it offered a solution to the crisis of Western civilization. He saw this crisis as a result of the forgetfulness or withdrawal of the question of Being. Being, in the most fundamental sense, is always a question. We become human to the extent that we are struck by this question and thereby come to think and dwell in language.9 Our encounter with the question of Being, however, produces anxiety and pain, for it involves an encounter with not being, with nothingness and death.10 Being itself thus repels us from the question toward answers, toward an interpretation of Being as something, as some being. In our flight from the pain of Being, we fall into a realm of beings, into what Heidegger refers to as everydayness or fallenness.11 Such fallenness takes two different forms. First, it is a fallenness into the everyday world of our concerns, the daily business of life, what Heidegger refers to as the readyto-hand. Second, there is a deeper fallenness into theory, into presence-at-hand.12 Heidegger believes this second form of fallenness has characterized the West since Plato.13 Being itself thereby came to be experienced not as a question, but only in and through human beings, as the Being of beings. Thus, Western thought is nothing other than a continuing elaboration of this answer and is an ever more distant flight from Being itself as a question. The steps in the descent are fairly straightforward. The West, from Plato through Christianity, to Western metaphysics served to produce the death of God that lies at the heart of modernity, a withdrawal of Being that leaves man himself as the foundation on which to establish the world.14 Thus, man becomes the ground that makes possible the transformation of Nature into a universal object. The modern world for Heidegger is an ever more encompassing attempt to objectify nature, to master and control it. Heidegger calls this technology. It culminates in a will to convert everything, including humanity itself, into an exploitable raw material to be consumed in the service of technology.15 Heidegger thought the two most pervasive forms of technological impulse were Americanism and Marxism, and he felt that these two forces were crushing Europe. The salvation of the West thus depends on raising anew the question of Being as the question of technology; a question that Heidegger vouchsafed to Nazism.16 Heidegger told Karl Lwirth in 1936 that his partisanship for Nazism lay in the essence of his philosophy, that historicity was the basis for his political engagement.17 In a letter to Marcuse after World War II, he suggested that he expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of

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social antagonism and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism.18 This has led Lwirth and Richard Wolin to argue that Heideggers political thought was decisionistic and thus indifferent to the content of the Nazis program.19 These explanations alone do not satisfy the question of why Heidegger chose Nazism in particular. As Michael Gillespie contends, the concept of leadership in Nazism was akin to Aristotles phronesis, or practical wisdom.20 To understand Heideggers attraction to Nazism, we must examine his interpretation of Aristotle, developed in the early 1920s. Aristotle and the Human Being as the Place of Truth Aristotle played a decisive role in the development of Heideggers thought. Between 1915 and 1930, Heidegger taught or lectured on Aristotle fifteen times.21 In the mid-1920s, he began preparing a comprehensive book on Aristotle as the culmination of his previous work, and as Theodore Kisiel and others have shown, in the process of revision, this book became Being and Time. What distinguishes Heideggers interpretation of Aristotle is his approach to the question of Being through an examination of Aristotles account of human Being, or Dasein. For Heidegger, Dasein is the place, the there (da-) at which Being (Sein) comes to be, the place at which Being is opened up or uncovered. The Greek word for uncovering is (aletheia) which we translate as truth. The principle activity that constitutes us as human Being is thus (aletheuein), or uncovering.22 This, not coincidentally, is the topic of Book Six of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics. As mentioned earlier, uncovering beings in their Being means revealing them as something in and through language, or (logos). As the place of the uncovering of beings, man is thus the zoon logon echon, life having speech, or as is typically translated, the rational animal.23 According to Heidegger, the Greeks believed that before the natural world was opened up, it was merely the realm of natural needs.24 Human beings and the world both are, but they are not yet there. It is in and through logos that the world is opened up, that human beings and the world are there in their Being, that they are Da-sein. Thus, Being from the beginning for the Greeks is Dasein, and the real question is about the character of the da-, the there.25 Mans Being-in-the-world is fundamentally determined by logos.26 Speaking as uncovering or revealing, according to Heidegger, always means for Aristotle speaking and revealing the world to other human beings.27 As a rational animal, man is thus the political animal. According to Heidegger, the Being of those having logos, for Aristotle, is a Being-with-one-another, a communion or fellowship.28 In and through logos, we make the world our own, as a there that we have. Heidegger thus argues that for Aristotle, the beginning is not the Cartesian I am, but I am one of many, a member of the polis.29 So, logos organizes human beings into a community in which they can have the good together. Because mans Being is Being-with-one-another, the good is not related simply to the individual and is not intended for solitary contemplation. Dasein includes the Being of ones parents, children, wife, friends, and fellow citizens. The communitys pursuit of the good life is, therefore, necessarily practical and are only derivatively theoretical activities. They depend on conversation,

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discussion, and rhetoric. Indeed, Dasein depends on rhetoric in order to struggle for uncovering.30 The question for Aristotle, in Heideggers view, is whether (phronesis), practical wisdom, or (sophia), wisdom or understanding, more fully reveals Being. Heidegger notes that for Aristotle, sophia is better than phronesis, but Heidegger is convinced otherwise and attempts to argue on an Aristotelian foundation for the superiority of phronesis . In short, Heidegger feels that the one-sided Platonic interpretation of Being (responsible for the crisis of the West) led Aristotle to nominally devalue phronesis, even though he recognized it as central to ethical and political life.31 Phronesis crucially depends on intuition into the moment and it is a moment of vision and decision. This moment forces a decision and holds open the possibility of breaking out of the mundane present into a different and truer reality.32 This moment appears in the same fashion as a religious conversion experience in which one faces the possibility of their own death and thus the possibility of nothing (Heideggers theological background comes into play here). Furthermore, it is a moment of personal commitment that requires a trained strength to follow through with.33

Heideggers Vision of Nazism: The Rule of Phronesis

In the early 1930s, Heidegger believed he saw the decisive moment for the transformation of Germany and the West.34 In contrast to his contemporaries, Heidegger saw these crises not as disasters, but as a valuable shock that he hoped would stimulate a communal confrontation with the question of Being. He was disappointed, however, that public concern focused not on the humanization of technology, but how to make it more productive.35 He believed the solution to this lay in the social and political program of Hitler and the Nazis. They seemed to offer the possibility of a confrontation with the problem of technology and the chance of subordinating it to the rule of phronesis, in short establishing what he called a free relationship to technology.36 While he did not believe that every Nazi had this in mind, he believed that the potential for revolution lay solely within Nazism. Despite his grave concerns about technology, he was never simply an opponent of it nor did he seek its abolition or destruction. The problem, Heidegger believed, was not technology per se, but the hegemony that technology had come to exercise over human action. Techne as a form of uncovering reveals the world as a process of production. Everything within the world is thus merely the equipment with which this productive enterprise is carried out. Modern man imagines that technology produces goods to satisfy his wants and desires, providing a nice lifestyle. Technology, however, can only serve human beings if they live according to something other than technical and economic imperatives. Only if distinctively human action is placed at the center of our concern will technology serve our ends. We can only become active, as opposed to productive, beings if we are guided by phronesis. Phronetic insight, however, is only possible if we resolutely face the possibility of our own death and accept the destiny that is revealed in the moment of vision. Thus, we must resolve ourselves to face the question of Being. Without resolve to do this, we will lose the capacity for action and become mere cogs in the equipment that constitutes the world uncovered by techne.37 Heidegger saw this resolve in the Nazi movement.

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The Nazis, Heidegger believed, were opposed to the view of technology held by Americanism and communism, rather they trusted the feelings and sensibilities of the Volk and the need to create a German state out of German Volk. The Volk stresses historical realization and exaltation of the Germans as German.38 Alan Paskow notes that Volk is merely a metaphysical justification for racism, however, Heidegger saw much more in the Volk. Central to Heideggers support of the Nazis was that their radicalism made possible a courageous confrontation with the question of Being. This, in his view would make possible a truly human, or what Heidegger called a truly spiritual, world.39 If spiritual leaders pose this question radically enough, a common questioning will pervade the community. Thereby, the Volk can play an active role in shaping its fate by placing history into the openness of the overpowering might of all the world-shaping forces of human existence and by struggling ever anew to secure its spiritual world.40 Heidegger believed that Hitler was committed to facing the deepest and most troubling questions. Furthermore, Heidegger hoped Hitler would evoke a communal reflection on the question of Being. In effect, Hitler would engineer a communal escape from the Platonic cave into the light of reality.41 In Heideggers view, the Nazis understood that knowledge was fundamentally rooted in praxis and thus reconstituting the unity of life in a way unknown since the pre-Socratics. For the Greeks before Plato, there was no theory apart from, or above, practice. The Greeks understood that theory was the highest mode of human activity, but they understood it as the supreme realization of practice.42 Heidegger attempted to implement this plan in the universities. He believed what was important was not the quantity of knowledge that one has but whether knowledge springs out of ones own concrete existence.42 Thus, in thinking about the future of university education in the National Socialist state, he believes that it will be necessary to train students not merely in intellectual disciplines, but in practical ways as well.43 In his now infamous 1933 Rectoral Address, he recommends training in labor service, military service, and knowledge service to further perfect this growing unity of acting and knowing. The reestablishment of praxis as the central moment of human life and of phronesis as the principal form of human knowing dethrones technology and subordinates it to human ends. This is particularly evident in the Nazi transformation of the role of labor. Labor under the hegemony of technology is merely a means to further means, what Heidegger would later call the will to will that turns everything into standing reserve.44 Technology under the rule of phronesis roots production in human purposes. Thus, Heidegger argues that every worker of our people must know why and to what end he stands there, where he stands, for it is only in this way that the individual is rooted in the people as a whole and their fate.45 Labor is not simply the production of goods for others. Nor is labor simply the occasion and the means to earn a living. Rather, for us, work is the title of every wellordered action that is borne by the responsibility of the individual, the group, and the State and which is thus of service to the Volk. It is just such an experience of labor that National Socialism offers. Heidegger clearly has in mind the work camps of the labor service and a similar science camp he ran for faculty and students at Freiburg. He believed that in these camps, the distinction between theory and practice, between thinking and

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doing, is eliminated as individuals come to think of themselves not as self-interested actors, but as members of the work group and the people.46 While all of these are hopes Heidegger holds, they depend on the self-assertion of the people in an act of founding in which it wills itself as the end of its activity. This is the supreme phronetic act, and it was an act Heidegger was convinced the Nazi movement was in the process of carrying out. A people, or Volk, as Heidegger understands it, is not based on blood, but on a common feeling or mood.47 In this respect, he distances himself from the explicitly racist elements in the Nazi movement. In his view, moods or feelings are not expressions of individual souls, but a fundamental occurrence of temporality in which our Dasein primordially is. We thus wrongly denigrate feelings because we do not see how they connect us to beings as a whole. We can overcome an I-centered world when we immerse ourselves in the feelings or mood of the people. To submit to the communal mood is the highest form of self-responsibility, and it is only in this way that one becomes an authentic self.48 Heidegger argues that this will to self-responsibility is not only the basic law of the existence of the people; it is also the fundamental event that brings about the Nazi state. Appealing to his fellow Germans to vote for Germanys withdrawal from the League of Nations, Heidegger argues that Hitler is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it the entire people wants its own existence [Dasein] or whether it does not want it. This withdrawal, according to Heidegger, is necessary for the internal self-constitution of the people and is not the result of ambition, desire, glory, or hunger for power. This is not merely a decision that Germany has to make, but one that all peoples must make to find and preserve the greatness and truth of their destiny. Heidegger saw Germanys withdrawal from the League of Nations as a prerequisite for a lasting and manly place among autonomous peoples.49 A people can maintain itself, Heidegger argues, only by self-governance that aims not at maximizing technical or economic efficiency, but in determining what we ourselves ought to be.50 Self-governance depends not on abstract theory, but on selfexamination and is thus the ground of a new freedom. Heidegger understands freedom in an essentially Greek fashion as the freedom of the people that arises from giving themselves their own laws. This freedom is obviously not individual freedom and it imposes new duties on individuals. Furthermore, social differences based on economic or technical distinctions will be swept away and replaced by distinctions that arise from the needs of the people. Heidegger believed the Nazis were already beginning this transformation. Village and city were being reunified and bound to rural areas. Class differences were eroding, leading to one class of fellow countrymen, members not of a divided society, but a community.51 The successful establishment of the Volk, its self-government, the freedoms it affords, and the elimination of class differences all depend on the preeminence of phronesis. Phronesis, however, is not present in all human beings. For the most part, human beings are lost in their everyday concerns. Only those rare individuals who are resolute in their questioning and courageous enough to face death and nothingness have phronesis and it is these people who must lead. Without such leaders, a free community cannot come into being or sustain itself. Successful leadership also depends on others being willing and able to follow: All leadership must allow the following to have its

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own strength. In each instance, however, to follow carries resistance within it. This essential opposition between leading and following must neither be covered over nor obliterated altogether. Struggle is thus necessary to preserve this opposition and to secure true self-governance, but at the same time it is necessary that loyalty and the will to follow be daily and hourly strengthened. Heidegger believed that the Fhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law, but he also recognized that a leader could only lead with the willing compliance of his followers. Both the leader and the people must share the same fundamental feeling or mood, for it is only the basis of such a fundamental feeling or mood that great things are possible. An authentic leader thus cannot merely command or work his will, but must inspire by directing the people according to the fundamental mood through which they are a people.52 Essentially, Heidegger envisioned the Nazi movement to be a hybrid between the Greek polis and the Christian monastery. What is missing, however, are the gods and established rituals and traditions. Moreover, at its head stands not the man of God who has retreated from the world but those who seek an engagement with it in the most complete way to lead his people and help them fulfill their common destiny.53 The Failure of Phronesis National Socialism failed to realize Heideggers dreams for it. Indeed, Heidegger came to recognize that Nazism, like Americanism and communism, was dominated by technology. However, he did not believe that this was the necessary or inevitable conclusion of the Nazi revolution. In reflecting on this period, he asks, What would have happened and what could have been averted if in 1933 all available powers had arisen, gradually and in secret unity, in order to purify and moderate the movement that had come to power?54 The failure of Nazism to achieve the transformation Heidegger had desired demonstrated to him that the forgetfulness of Being and hegemony of technology were much more profound than he had imagined. He concluded that the West was not on the verge of a new dawn as he had believed, but at the world-midnight. No immediate relief was possible, and as he later put it, Only a God can save us. This does not mean that human beings can do nothing. He remained convinced that the possibility for revolutionary change had existed in the Nazi movement, but that the Germans had not been prepared to take advantage of it. Years later, Heidegger refocused his approach from phronesis as a moment of vision in the face of death (i.e. directly confronting the question of Being), to listening to poet-prophets, such as Hlderlin, who had peered into the abyss of Being and marked out our way and destination.55

CONCLUSION
Heidegger never made any explicit remarks regarding the possibility of phronesis within the framework of a liberal democracy. It seems quite obvious, however, that Heidegger thought that to be able to confront Being, and thus to reach phronesis, necessarily required a totalitarian, elitist framework because leadership was of the utmost importance. Heideggers embrace of an ideal form of Nazism was made in the face of

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what he saw as the crisis of the West resulting from its subjectivist and humanist strains. Liberalism, as Heidegger saw it, is very much a part of this tradition that he rejected. The liberal emphasis on individual rights and liberties rests on a nave conception of the individual I. The self is taken to be one being among others distinguished only by its ability to represent other beings and use them (i.e., make beings present in whatever way it wills). In all this, the meaning of Being itself is taken for granted: Being is understood as presence. Thus, liberalism consists in trying to ensure the continued presence of the being that manipulates and represents other beings. Christian, Communist, and liberal ideologies differ only in how they circumscribe the limits of the subject as creature, class, race, or individual. All these ideologies enslave us to the oblivion of Being and close off the possibility of Dasein. Dasein would be characterized by creative receptivity to the differences that beings make to us, which would involve an appreciation of the sheltering of Being in beings. Even after World War II, Heidegger stood firm in his rejection of subjectivist metaphysics the foundation for liberalism and contended that a communal confrontation with the question of Being could only be reached within his idealized version of National Socialism: a movement guided by a spiritual elite who could recognize the need to decide how the peoples heritage was to combine with the peoples destiny to reveal the significance of what is as a whole. Before he was a supporter of the Nazi revolution, Heidegger was first and foremost a student of Aristotle, and his philosophy was very much grounded in the writings of Aristotle. While this linkage certainly does not absolve Heidegger for supporting the greatest evil of the twentieth century, it brings to light the deeper potential that Heidegger saw in an idealized National Socialist movement. In the Nazi movement, Heidegger saw the best opportunity to, in his mind, save the West through a regime that would bring forth a courageous confrontation with the question of Being something Heidegger saw as essential to the progress and success of civilization.

REFERENCES Farias, Victor. Heidegger and Nazism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Gillespie, Michael A. Martin Heideggers Aristotelian National Socialism. Political Theory 28.2 (2000): 140-167. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Fried, G. and Polt, R. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. Lovitt, W. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.

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Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Luper, Steven. Existing: An Introduction to Existential Thought. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000. Neske, G., & Kettering, E. (Eds.). The Rectorate: Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, Questions and Answers. New York: Paragon Press, 1990. Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Paskow, Alan. (October 1991). Heidegger and Nazism. Philosophy East & West, 41:4 (1991): 522-528. Philipse, Herman. Heideggers Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Rockmore, Tom. On Heideggers Nazism and Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Sadler, Ted. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being. London: Athlone Press, 1996. Safranski, Rdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Trans. Osers, E. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Sluga, Hans. Heidegger Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Wolin, Richard. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Wolin, Richard. The Heidegger Controversy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Young, Julian. (1997). Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.