The Heidegger Case: on Philosophy and Politics
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THE HEIDEGGER CASE EDITED BY TOM ROCKMORE AND JOSEPH MARGOLIS THE HEIDEGGER CAS E On Philosophy and Politics TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 1992by Temple University. All rights reserved Published 1992 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 (@ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Heidegger case : on philosophy and politics / edited by Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87722-907-4(alk. paper).-ISBN 0-87722-908-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Farias, Victor, 1940- Heidegger et Ie nazisme. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976-Views on national socialism. 3. National socialism. I. Rockmore, Tom, 1942- . II. Margolis, Joseph, 1924 B3279.H49F3413 1989Suppl. 193--dc20 91-38166 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction I 1 Heidegger's Apology: Biograph)' as Philosophy and Ideology 11 THEODORE KISIEL 2 Ontological Aestheticism: Heidegger, Junger, and National Socialism 52 M I C H A E L E. Z I M MER ~,.f AN II 3 Biographical Bases for Heidegger's "Mentality of Disunity" 93 HUGO OTT v vi Contents 4 Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Politics 114 OTTO POGGELER 5 Heidegger and Hitler's War 141 DOMENICO LOSURDO III 6 Heidegger and the Greeks 167 RAINER MARTEN 7 Heidegger and Praxis 188 JACQUES TAMINIAUX 8 The History of Being and Political Revolution: Reflections on a Posthumous Work of Heidegger 208 NICOLAS TERTULIAN IV 9 Philosophy, Politics-and the "New" Questions for Hegel, for Heidegger, and for Phantasy 231 HANS-CHRISTIAN LUCAS 10 A Comment on Heidegger's Comment on Nietzsche's Alleged Comment on Hegel's Comment on the Power of Negativity 255 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI V 11 Heidegger's Scandal: Thinking and the Essence of the Victim 265 J 0 H N D. CAP U T 0 Contents vii 12 Heidegger and Politics: Some Lessons 282 FRED DALLMAYR 13 Riveted to a Monstrous Site: On Heidegger's Beitriige zur Philosophie 313 REINER SCHURMANN VI 14 Foreword to the Spanish Edition, Heidegger and Nazism 333 VICTOR FARIAS 15 The Purloined Letter 348 DOMINIQUE JANICAU]) 16 The Political Incompetence of Philosophy 364 HANS-GEORG GADAMER VII 17 Heidegger's French Connection and the Emperor's New Clothes 373 TOM ROCKMORE 18 Discarding and Recovering Heidegger 405 JOSEPH MARGOLIS Contributors 423 Index 425 Preface It is always something of a marvel to send out invitations for fresh papers on a much debated topic-here, of course, that of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, and the larger question of the political responsibility of philosophy-and then to assemble the responses as they drift in. Authors at a distance from one another, having no clear sense of who else would be invited or what they would say, have an uncanny knack for distributing their own themes in such a way that no one really seriously invades the focused thesis of any other. Something of the sort has certainly happened here. It would be too much to say that every important point of view on Heidegger's philosophy and career has been equally represented. We did, in canvassing originally, try to include some half-dozen to ten additional voices that would have benefited an oversized collection of this kind, particularly those offering the strongest defense of Heidegger's philosophy (but hardly confined to that) that one could reasonably have expected to collect. We were turned down for various reasons-by some, it is fair to say, on the suspicion that the collection would be cooked. We are sorry to have lost the chance to include those papers, though the truth is that the added bulk alone might have made the entire venture unmarketable. In any case the ones we did receive form a lucky unity. We believe that there are no large questions regarding our topic, centered on Heidegger himself, that have not been effectively broached in the papers that follow. Inquiry will be endless here, of course. But the better strategy, now, would be to exorcise Heidegger's own case in order to recover the deeper puzzle behind it: namely, the one that confronts us as we would confront Heidegger. ix Acknowledgments We thank particularly Jane Cullen, Acquisitions Editor, and David Bart lett, Director, both of Temple University Press, for their unusually generous encouragement and support--which by this time, frankly, we have come to expect. The principal expenses in a project of this sort involve, of course, translations from several languages. David Bartlett and the Press made all of that manageable. The translations, made by many hands, inevitably required a good deal of further editing on the part of both of us. With the exception of Reiner Schiirmann's essay, translated by Kathleen Blarney, they were done by persons associated with the Translation Referral Service (Center for Research in Translation) at the State University of New York at Binghamton, under the direction of Marilyn Gaddis Rose. We thank all these people and list them here without matching translation to translator; it would be unfair to hold them accountable for the changes we have made in their renderings. Here they are: Carroll F. Coates, Giovanni Gullace, Roger C. Norton, Gustavo Pellon, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, William Snyder. The difficulties of shep herding this very large text by many hands and of bringing the final proofs into coherent order were, frankly, more onerous than the usual editorial experience could have anticipated. We must salute with special thanks Debby Stuart of Temple University Press, whose versatility and editorial expertise-and generosity and labor-brought the final proofs to the clean form we were relieved to find they could actually reach. xi THE HEIDEGGER CASE Introduction The unique career of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) poses questions of the most profound seriousness for our age and, hardly more narrowly, provokes genuine philosophical consternation, For many years, it was the practice, widespread among Heideggerians, to suggest that there was no "problem" that required discussion at all. But recently, largely through the labors of Victor Farias and Hugo Ott, it has become impos sible to deny or dismiss the deep and prolonged connection between the life of the man and his philosophy, and between his philosophy and his politics. None of the tortuous efforts in the recent discussions in France, for instance, or in virtue of the sustained inaccessibility of documents under the control of the Heidegger family in Germany, has finally suc ceeded in concealing the personal scandal of Heidegger's life and career. That Heidegger was a lifelong Nazi, not merely in a marginal or transient sense, is now entirely plain to all who care to read the record. But what that means, both in assessing his life and work and regarding what it exposes in our self-understanding, is still very much open to debate. The embarrassment of acknowledging Heidegger's eminence, his enormous influence as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century (according to some, one of the most original philosophical minds of all time), the indisputable connection between his philosophy and his poli tics, the difficulty of sorting what in his thought may be preserved free of his own Nazified orientation, the inability of the best philosophers of our day to indicate how to discern in the work of others the presence or absence of any threatening conceptual taint of the same sort-all this 2 Introduction clearly leads us to an existential quandary. Ironically, in putting the point thus, we are following part of Heidegger's own instruction. We cannot escape the parallel, and we are unwilling to draw conclu sions that would accord with Heidegger's own. Furthermore, philosophy is notoriously desultory in its discussion of the issues raised, in spite of the fact that the connection between politics and philosophy has played an honorable role in Western thought since Socrates' execution. Profes sional embarrassment, apparent everywhere, signifies an inkling of the humane importance of recovering the question of the relation between philosophy and politics, of rescuing it from its neglect within the steady routines of the profession. Now that the first genuinely public reaction to Heidegger's story has begun to wane-a reaction often unreflective, frequently confined to the more visible aspects of the problem-we must recover its disturbing questions more carefully. We must try to penetrate what Heidegger actually thought and did, what that signifies about the world we share (with him), and what we would now reclaim as a true picture of the world in our own (corrected) image. Heidegger's adherence to the Nazi party was quite unremarkable in the immediate German context. The famous rectoral address (Rekto ratsrede), delivered on the solemn occasion of his assuming the post of rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933, immediately attracted the attention of his philosophical colleagues. But it is a matter of record that the ensuing discussion, which reached the attention of the (French) intellectual public only in the second half of the 1940s, did not emerge as an issue of more than transitory importance until the publication of Victor Farias's study, Heidegger and Nazism (1989; first edition, in French, 1987), which was rapidly supplemented by Hugo Ott's work, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu einer Biographie (1988). Since that time, the debate about Heidegger's relation to National Socialism has elicited a wide reaction in scholarly and nonscholarly media, notably in Western Europe, where for a short time, particularly in France, it dominated philosophical and even nonphilosophical discussion.