Martin Heidegger: A Political Life

Ott’s work is at the core of the discussion about Heidegger’s Nazism, maybe one of the two most important sources for the facts, along with Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism. There are certainly other books and many articles and papers as well — too many to mention — but those two at least are essential.

It’s hard to put our attention as readers on anything other than the Nazism discussion, but the book also addresses Heidegger’s early Catholicism (as does Farias’s book), a discussion I found extremely interesting in its own right.

Ott organizes the book around what Heidegger, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, called “the two great thorns in my flesh — the struggle with the faith of my birth, and the failure of the show more rectorship” (it was during Heidegger’s time as rector at the University of Freiburg that he became most involved with National Socialism).

The first of these “thorns” is Heidegger’s struggle with Catholicism. Somewhat parallel to Nietzsche’s upbringing in the Protestant faith and intended career in the clergy, Heidegger looked destined for a place in the Catholic Church. In fact, he applied to become a member of The Society of Jesus but was rejected, not on grounds of faith but for health matters. Until that time, he had pursued theological studies, and, judging by his writings up through 1914/15 (his middle twenties), his faith appeared firm.

When his intended career in the Church was closed to him, he turned first to mathematics and then to philosophy. But his philosophical studies remained, for the moment, heavily influenced by his religious convictions, even through his habilitation.

He was a “Catholic philosopher” within the university system. As such, he was both constrained to and available for certain positions and not others. His eventual turn away from Catholicism opened his ambitions to non-theologically laden positions, while eliminating him from consideration for positions reserved for Catholic thinkers.

Although within a few years of his habilitation, he was questioning his faith, eventually explicitly abandoning adherence to Catholic doctrine, he later maintained that he remained a Catholic all his life.

It is interesting to read (or re-read) some of Heidegger’s writings on religion, now knowing more about his early convictions and his turn away from them. In particular, his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion along with his book on Augustine and Neo-Platonism (both drawn from lecture notes) provide some bridges between central aspects of his mature thought, such as anxiety, facticity, and even the difficult notion of Gelassenheit from his later writings, and his deep Catholicism.

His rejection of Catholic doctrine was life-changing. Certainly his thought could not be confined within the bounds of Catholicism, and the Church demanded faithfulness to its doctrines. His marriage, to the Protestant Elfride Petri, was a turning point. And of course, his career opportunities changed, as he was no longer confined to or qualified for positions reserved for “Catholic philosophers.”

The bulk of the book, though, addresses Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism.

I think it is beyond debate by now that Heidegger was truly a Nazi. His addresses, letters, and public statements during his rectorship at the University of Freiburg in 1933 and 1934 establish that much. The questions that remain of interest for me, and that appear open for debate, are to what extent he truly embraced the ideology of National Socialism (and may have continued to embrace it after his rectorship), and to what extent his involvement in Nazism compromises his philosophical work.

Ott’s book is especially helpful on the first of those questions.

Ott is not a dispassionate reporter of facts. And at times his rhetoric is polemical, although not so much as Farias’s. And Ott is concerned to give fair treatment to Heidegger, considering Heidegger’s and others’ excuses and explanations, although rejecting any softening of his judgment of those critical years 1933 and 1934.

I won’t go through the evidence that supports and establishes Heidegger’s participation and support for National Socialism during those years, or the evidence for anti-semitic attitudes and behavior. That’s what Ott’s book is for. Heidegger not only gave official support, as he must have to occupy a position as rector of one of Germany’s leading universities, he also pursued his own ambitions within the “movement” to reform philosophy and the German university itself. He vied for the intellectual leadership of Nazi Germany.

I think it’s also true, in more substantial terms, that Heidegger’s thought contained a strain of affinity for German nationalism. Heidegger saw the world in a cultural crisis. And he saw Germany as a savior.

Why Germany? Aside simply from his being German, Germany was, in his terms, a “metaphysical nation”. Germany alone stood against the threats on either side of Europe — “a giant pincer grip between Russia on one side and America on the other”. From a “metaphysical perspective”, both America and Russia (or the Soviet Union) represented “the same soulless spectacle of technology run riot and ordinary people at the mercy of social organization without roots.”

Germany stood in a position to recapture a more “authentic” existence, lost since the time of the early Greeks. Throughout his later writings, Heidegger repeats this theme of the need to release ourselves, German or not, from the hold of a technological world and recapture that lost relationship to Being.

So why National Socialism? Why Hitler? National Socialism appeared to embody the destiny of the German historical role — to reassert an affirmative relationship to nature and among its people, to assert itself positively. And Heidegger pulls no punches in his statement to the Freiburg University students as rector — “The Fuhrer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law.”

National Socialism presented an opportunity for Heidegger, one that he threw himself into during those years. A Germany in revolution was the opportunity, even if it is difficult to see any evidence of “authenticity” in the National Socialist ideology itself.

Ultimately Heidegger failed — his personal ambitions for the German university system and for German philosophy were not fulfilled, and just failed to catch on. He was ultimately at odds with any dogmatic order, much less one so strict as National Socialism, and he was undoubtedly out of his depth among the knife-sharp political skills of others also pursuing personal goals within the Party.

There was a strong backlash against Heidegger after his time as Freiburg’s rector. As an example, in 1934, Erich Jaensch, a philosopher and former colleague of Heidegger’s at the University of Marburg, condemns Heidegger in a report meant to limit his influence in National Socialist intellectual leadership circles and positions — “Heidegger’s thought is characterized by the same obsession with hairsplitting distinctions as Talmudic thought. This is why it holds such an extraordinary fascination for Jews, persons of Jewish ancestry and others with a similar makeup. If Heidegger acquires a decisive influence over the formation and selection of young academics, this will mean with absolute certainty that the selection criteria in our universities and intellectual life will favour those of Jewish stock who remain in our midst.”

But it would be a stretch to say that the backlash had much to do with unfaithfulness to the Nazi cause on Heidegger’s part — it appears instead just to be part of the power struggle within the intellectual leadership of National Socialism (allowing that the quote from Jaensch sounds anything but “intellectual”).

Beyond the question of Heidegger’s actual Nazi participation, the question of the relation between his philosophical thought and his Nazism is complicated. I don’t think that is the strength of Ott’s book. There are other, more penetrating works to go to — Victor Farias’s book (Heidegger and Nazism) for one. And Hans Sluga’s Heidegger’s Crisis provides a much needed, broader look at Heidegger’s context, the role of philosophy in Germany in the 30s and 40s and the philosophical battles both between supporters and opponents of National Socialism and among the supporters for standing within the Third Reich. Unlike Ott, a social historian, both Farias and Sluga are philosophers, better equipped for the complexities of the philosophical side of the topic.

it’s a volatile topic, to say the least. I think it would be foolish to simply throw all of Heidegger’s philosophical work into disrepute. The epistemology of Being and Time, and Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics, both in Being and Time, and in later work, are critical pieces of twentieth century philosophy. Are they tainted by, in some way supportive of his Nazism? Good question. To some extent, the question was addressed after the end of the war, in the decision to allow Heidegger to resume his philosophical work within the post-war “denazified” Germany. That decision was based in part on the importance of his work and his contributions to philosophy per se.

His guilt during the rectorship is hard to deny (although he attempted to do so himself in his apologia, both written and verbal during the denazification procedures and during his subsequent career), as is the damage he did to others — students, colleagues, and personal relations. Jaspers’ judgement speaks well, I think — “I can accept to some extent the personal excuse that Heidegger was unpolitical by nature, and that the special brand of National Socialism he concocted for himself had precious little to do with the real thing.” Jaspers then refers to something that Max Weber had said — “children who stick their fingers into the wheel of world history are going to get them broken.” show less