Why Does It Matter If Heidegger Was Anti-Semitic?

The controversy stirred up by the revelations in Evelyn Barish’s new biography of the literary scholar and “deconstructionist” Paul de Man (which Louis Menand recently discussed in the magazine) will, I suspect, seem like a collegial colloquium compared with the uproar attending the publication of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s “Schwarzen Hefte” (“Black Notebooks”), written between 1931 and the early nineteen-seventies.

The first three volumes (1931-41), have been released in German in the past few months. They’re being published only now because, according to their editor, Peter Trawny, Heidegger requested that they be the final publications in his complete works. The notebooks have been the talk of European op-ed pages, and much of the discussion—at least, in Germany, France, and Great Britain—is centered on their revelations of Heidegger’s deep-rooted and unambiguous anti-Semitism.

It’s not news that Heidegger (1889-1976) had more than a flirtation with Nazism. After becoming a Party member, in 1933, he was named rector of the University of Freiburg, and he praised the Party in his inaugural address. He resigned from the job the following year (though he remained in the Party). Even as a high-school philosophy buff, in the seventies, I knew of Heidegger’s enthusiasm from reading “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” from 1935, which contains a line of praise for National Socialism. When Victor Farias’s book “Heidegger and Nazism,” which amplified the historical record of Heidegger’s activities and public remarks during the time of the Third Reich, appeared, in 1987, it became, as Menand writes, a central topic of debate in the intellectual world for a time. It also gave rise to Jacques Derrida’s book “Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question,” which defends Heidegger by showing that the underpinnings of his philosophy—his vocabulary and his network of metaphors—were the same as those of the era’s ostensibly liberal thinkers.

But early debate about “Black Notebooks” is focussed on Heidegger’s acknowledgment of the important role of anti-Semitism in his philosophy. Unlike de Man, whose anti-Semitic texts, written when de Man was in his early twenties, seemed mainly a matter of overweening careerism, Heidegger’s “Notebooks” are works of the full flowering of his philosophical maturity, written privately, as a means for him to work out his ideas. Heidegger has long been suspected of anti-Semitism in his private life, as well as of collaboration with an anti-Semitic regime, but, Trawny writes, “nobody would have suspected an anti-Semitism transmuted into philosophy.” (Trawny’s new book is titled “Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy.”)

According to Thomas Assheuer, writing in Die Zeit, “The Jew-hatred in ‘Black Notebooks’ is no afterthought; it forms the foundation of the philosophical diagnosis.” In other words, these newly published writings show that, for Heidegger, anti-Semitism was more than just a personal prejudice. In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann offers some choice passages:

“World Judaism,” Heidegger writes in the notebooks, “is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”

In another passage, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their “talent for calculation,” were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi’s racial theories because “they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest.”

The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye picks up on one notably insidious term in the new publications:

We know that [Heidegger] speaks in his “Black Notebooks” of the “worldlessness” of Judaism…. Jews aren’t just considered to lack a homeland, they are said definitively to be worldless. It’s worth recalling that worldlessness is an expression that Heidegger doesn’t even use for animals, which, in a 1929 lecture, he calls “world-poor.” In this complete dehumanization of Judaism, the Jews no longer have a place in the world, or, rather, they never had one. We also discover…that the Heideggerian idea of “being-in-the-world” which is central to “Being and Time” can take on the meaning of a discriminatory term with an anti-Semitic intent.

Oltermann adds that Heidegger also “argues that like fascism and ‘world judaism,’ Soviet communism and British parliamentarianism should be seen as part of the imperious dehumanising drive of western modernity.” Yet, in the magazine Prospect, the philosopher Jonathan Rée attempts to defend Heidegger by minimizing the significance of this idea: “One of his arguments is that Judaism, like Bolshevism and Fascism, participates in the corrosive calculative culture of modernity, even though it goes back thousands of years.” This makes me wonder about Rée as well: Isn’t it a priori anti-Semitic to consider Judaism “corrosive”? And wouldn’t that idea, as Oltermann suggests, place anti-Semitism at the core of Heidegger’s philosophical conception of history?

So the discussion has begun. But the underlying question is: Why the ongoing fascination with deconstructionism and with the work of the philosopher whose radical works inspired it? Why does this philosophical strain seem strangely central to the conception of modern criticism, even as it recedes in influence? And why do these thinkers’ personal lives and ideological compromises seem unusually relevant to their work, beyond the usual scandal-sheet Schadenfreude?

It may have something to do with their distinctive views regarding the relevance (or, rather, irrelevance) of character and personality to the objects of their study. Menand offers a crucial insight in his Critic at Large piece on de Man, explaining that deconstructionism offered a sort of nuclear physics of literature:

It generated intellectual power by bracketing off most of what might be called (with due acknowledgment of the constructed nature of the concept) the real-life aspects of literature—that literature is written by people, that it affects people, that it is a report on experience. But it was exciting to get inside the atom.

The crucial difference is that, when a physicist splits atoms, they’re not the atoms of the chair that he’s sitting on or of the equipment that he’s splitting them with. Deconstruction pulls the chair out from under the reader, compels the reader to undermine his own habits of reading. By dissolving the overt categories of reading—plot, story, style, character, moral—deconstruction wrenched literature away from the amateurs and delivered it to the sole care of academics, who alone had the tools with which to approach it. Thus, it transformed the academic study of literature from a marginal scholarly apparatus of footnotes to the only game in town, thereby turning traditional readers into spectators.

Deconstruction is a reflexive philosophy: it makes the very notion of literary analysis a self-revealing, self-questioning, quasi-poetic creation, undoing the traditional hierarchy by which the literary critic is the handmaiden of the creative writer. This philosophy doesn’t merely study the art of writing, it fuses with the art; instead of depersonalizing literary criticism into a quasi-scientific activity, it turns the literary critic into a self-defined peer of the novelist and the poet. (Similarly, Roland Barthes’s famous “death of the author” was actually the birth of a new author; namely, the critic who proclaimed that death.)

Heidegger happens to have been—a blessing and a curse—a brilliant writer, whose serpentine, spellbinding prose was both an argument against the traditional authority of logical reasoning and a performative undermining of that authority. (De Man, by contrast, is a rather dully mechanical writer; when I read his books in college, I found it strange that his influence should have survived his prose.)

But, even without particular regard to Jews and Nazis, Heidegger’s brilliance was intrinsically political. For Heidegger, the project of rescuing language from the ostensible truth of logic and restoring it to iridescent incantation implied kicking out the intellectual struts from under the claims to progress on the part of technological society. By undermining logic and science, Heidegger also undermined the Enlightenment—and the individualism, the freedoms, the claim to rights that are made in the name of reason and progress. Even apart from his specific ideological pronouncements, Heidegger was, philosophically, an anti-humanist rightist.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is another splendid writer whose prose is also a performance of his philosophy. But, for Derrida (who was Jewish), the project of deconstruction, with its undoing of long-sedimented hierarchies and categories, was, in effect, a way of attacking traditional power structures philosophically. If I had to sum up his life’s work in a single sentence, it would be: redefining the Heideggerian project as leftist. Derrida is gone now, but, with the discovery of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks,” this reconstruction of Heidegger may prove harder, in retrospect, for his acolytes to sustain.

Photograph: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty