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And now the apologists for Heidegger’s anti-semitism get to work

Brian Leiter

This is really quite remarkable ("it's OK, we always new he was a Catholic reactionary bigot"), and especially this:

Modernity is synonymous with subversion, since with its universalist ideologies (liberalism, democracy, communism) it destroys the communitarian and traditional bonds that unite the members of a given people and separates this same people from its territory and history. Inevitably, the critique of modernity ends up also concerning Jews. The black notebooks confirm this: present in many countries and attached to urban rather than rural life, Jews are the incarnation of "rootlessness", "distance from the soil" and thus subversion. And again, this attitude is far from surprising to the Heidegger scholar: the 2 October 1929 letter in which the philosopher emphasises the need to oppose "growing Judaisation within German spiritual life", reinforcing this by rooting it in authentically German forces, is already well-known. [bold added]

"Inevitably"?  And then there's this:

The outcry over the black notebooks is thus unjustified, but it would be all the more unjustified to imagine a mythical, eternally irredeemable Germany, ignoring the historical context in which Heidegger's life and work were situated. His Judeophobia came at a moment when across the west as a whole, on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a widespread view that the true culprits for the October Revolution were Jews. Indeed, in 1920 car tycoon Henry Ford wrote that this event had a racial and not political origin, and, though making use of humanitarian and socialist language, it in fact expressed the Jewish race's aspiration for world domination. It is worth noting that it was Ford's picture that had pride of place in Hitler's study and not Heidegger's: the origins of nazism and the ideological motives inspiring it were not exclusively German.

Certainly anti-semitism was more widespread before Hitler than after, but the suggestion that Heidegger's view were simply the norm is false, as this apologist must surely know.  Indeed, although his piece concludes with the defamatory association of Nietzsche with Heidegger and Schmitt, any actual reader of Nietzsche knows that his hatred of anti-semitism (and of German nationalism) was decidedly not part of the temper of his times.  Great philosophers don't typically need the excuse that car manufacturers shared their petty prejudices.

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer to this piece.)

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8 responses to “And now the apologists for Heidegger’s anti-semitism get to work”

  1. Bennett Gilbert

    Losurdo's logic is bad: there were many loyal or even leading nazis whose pictures Hitler did not have on his desk; therefore his not having Heidegger's picture on his desk is no proof that Heidegger was not a culpably willing Nazi.

    The premise that "modernism is synonymous with subversion" is factually wrong. Laying that aside, modernist "subversions" served fascist causes just as much as they served other causes. In that case, why would Jews be "inevitably" connected with it.

    As far as I can tell it is Losurdo's opinion, and not the opinion of others he is citing, that Jews are rootless.
    Right after referring to "new material" that reinforces received opinion as to Heidegger's heinous behavior, Losurdo says that outrage over the black notebooks "is thus unjustified."

    A final non-sequitur: who has ever suggested that fascist aggression "in any way absolve western imperial universalism of its own responsibility and crimes"?

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  2. Aldo Antonelli

    You seem to have missed this pearl: "Nazism constituted, or could constitute, a "new beginning" with respect to [liberalism, democracy, etc.]"

    Please don't take Losurdo as typical representative of Italian philosophy.

    Reply
  3. Alexander Stingl

    I recall being shocked many years ago, if I recall correctly, when reading a book by Neil Postman, wherein he dismissed the need to read contemporary continental thinkers, from Foucault to Derrida, and so on, with the argument that they were influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and, well, since – in his view – Nietzsche was mentally ill and Heidegger fell in love with Hitler, you do not need to read people who read either of them… case closed. I think the linked article and many recent related discussions and postings, are equally lacking as was Postman's tirade.
    There is little reason to excuse Heidegger on the basis that "one can still read him and profit". One does well to recall that the very article by Habermas that caught Adorno's and Horkheimer's attention, was a review of Heidegger lectures that were republished in the 1950s, without any comment on their origins and historic situation. Habermas, who did read Heidegger with much intellectual profit for himself, however, couldn't – and rightfully so – let stand the fact that a philosophical lecture series, however busy with metaphysics, that was clearly a child of its time and the political and ideological views of its time, was re-situated as if the political ideas that were interwoven with the philosophical ones could simply be ignored….
    It was, up to the publication of these new notebooks, my own understanding from reading differing texts on Heidegger by Farias, Rockmore, Habermas, Safranski, and so on, that Heidegger was the Nazi and an opportunist, and his wife the anti-semitist. The notebooks confirm that Heidegger's ideological make-up and affinity with the Nazis and related ilk ran much deeper on anti-semitic terms than previously known. To what extent is certainly still debatable but not deniable. It is, however, sad that people still haven't really understood that Nazi-ism, faschism, and anti-semitism are three different things. Here now, it seems as if people are trying to say: Oh, we already knew Heidegger was in the party, so what? But there is a big 'what' – reading Hannah Arendt's totalitarianism study, btw, makes that abundantly clear…. Anti-semitism is a very particular type of politics, that is still out there in many quarters of this world, leading to violence being committed against people, just because they are Jewish. The dismissal of these distinctions and of the different dimensions of the crimes committed in the names of either ideology – which happened to come together in Nazi Germany – is outright dangerous. Yes, we knew Heidegger was a Nazi, now we know he was an anti-semitist, too. A further and important problem now is, when he stopped being a Nazi (mostly because the Nazis dropped him), did he stop being an anti-semitist? It's not very likely. Does that mean that there is nothing (positive) to be learned from his philosophy? Sure there is. Do we stop reading Kant's moral philosophy and cosmopolitanism, because he was very much a racist (oh, like almost every philosopher in his time)? No. But it is important to know what the different limits of a philosopher's work are, and how these limits are perhaps drawn by the times he lived and (!) his ideological views.

    (I hope I have managed to state my views on this certainly sensitive topic as clearly as possible. But it is worth pointing out, that English is not my native language, and that I was born in Germany.)

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  4. P. Christian Adamski

    So, just to expand on the "inevitability" of Heidegger's criticisms… My understanding, or at the very least what I have read from history books and have been taught in some of my anthropology courses, is that historically Jews have had restrictions placed upon the sort of jobs they could work. In some times and in some places this meant that Jews were forbidden from owning land and/or otherwise restricted from all sorts of agricultural activity. The remaining jobs available to them then were, among other things, most famously, financial occupations. This is then, allegedly, the source, or one of the sources, for the antisemitic trope of Jews belonging to some "banking elite conspiracy." It seems to naturally follow that if Heidegger were to criticize modernity, that the Jews, in his eyes at least given this cultural depiction of Jews, were a prime target of a culture that was tied to a removal from rural life (given their occupation's "distance from the soil").

    Obvious disclaimer that this is not to defend Heidegger's antisemitism or any other form of racial prejudice. Although one doesn't need sophisticated arguments to point out the inherent flaws behind racial prejudice, I'm constantly reminded of Arpaly's beautiful discussion of this sort of thing in Unprincipled Virtue. Nonetheless, given what I know of Heidegger and my understanding of the history of antisemitism, the first quote by Losurdo seems straightforward enough.

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  5. J. Mitchell

    Perhaps one interesting point to keep in mind is to what extent 'Being and Time', originally published in 1927, is potentially separable from Heidegger's 'later', post-1930 work with regards to these issues.

    Whilst no Heidegger scholar it seems as if there was a significant shift in Heidegger's thinking around 1929/1930 (coinciding with the Great depression) which takes on a more overtly despairing quality in which the more 'existential' 'phenomenological' concerns of BT are largely passed over in favor of this view that modernity is irredeemably broken and quickly tending towards a kind of unthinking abyss. Hence Heidegger's quoting of Nietzsche that 'the wasteland grows' (from the Dionysian Dithyramb'sin 'What is called thinking).

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  6. David Gordon

    I think that Losurdo does not intend to defend Heidegger. Rather, he is a Marxist who views Heidegger as an ideologist of a reactionary worldview that glorified war. He has developed this thesis in his Heidegger and the Ideology of War. http://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Ideology-War-Community-Death/dp/1573929107. In like fashion, he has written a long book, not translated into English, that claims the key to Nietzsche's philosophy was his opposition to socialism.

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  7. bzfgt

    It seems that if he said "invariably" rather than "inevitably" the first quote would be pretty accurate. I didn't take it that it was his opinion that the Jews are "rootless" etc., but that what he was saying it was the doxa of the time.

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  8. bzfgt

    Sorry, my full name is Christopher Ruth.

    Reply

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