No surprise to find a philosopher like Jonathan Rée - co-founder of that home of critical theory in the UK, Radical Philosophy, and frequent contributor to the LRB - defending Heidegger in the wake of recent revelations about the man's soon-to-be-published Black Notebooks. We'd known for some time of Heidegger's membership of the Nazi Party - not as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of conviction - but now, apparently, these notebooks show how central anti-Semitic thought was to his philosophy.
Not a problem for Rée, though:
In the first place, it’s common knowledge that, as well as being a member of the Nazi party for many years, Heidegger was an anti-Semite. Not a violent one, but the sort of cultural anti-Semite (DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound) often found in the 1920s and 30s, not only in Germany but throughout Europe and America. For good measure, I guess he was also a womaniser and a male chauvinist pig. The question is whether these facts are a reason for avoiding his works, or whether we can in fact read him without putting our political purity in danger.
This is a bit desperate. There's a world of difference between a poet like Eliot and his distasteful but relatively insignificant upper-crust Anglo-Catholic anti-Semitism, and a man who built his whole philosophy on the attempt to rescue society from the spiritual desert of the modern western world, and came to believe that such a revolution was heralded in the rise of the Nazi Party.
As I argued here, there are many thinkers who held deeply unpleasant beliefs whose contributions nevertheless continue to be valued. I cited Gottlob Frege as a good example: a virulent anti-Semite whose work on the foundations of philosophical logic were a major influence on Bertrand Russell and others. Heidegger cannot be so excused. From Thursday's Guardian:
The most controversial passages of the black notebooks are a series of reflections from the start of the second world war to 1941. While distancing himself from the racial theories pursued by Nazi intellectuals, Heidegger argues that Weltjudentum ("world Judaism") is one of the main drivers of western modernity, which he viewed critically.
"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 notion of "world Judaism" was propagated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination. Adolf Hitler stated the conspiracy theory as fact in Mein Kampf, and Heidegger too appears to adopt some of its central tropes.
"Heidegger didn't just pick up these antisemitic ideas, he processed them philosophically – he failed to immunise his thinking from such tendencies," the notebooks' editor, Peter Trawny, told the Guardian.
The notebooks also show that for Heidegger, antisemitism overlapped with a strong resentment of American and English culture, all of which he saw as drivers of what he called Machenschaft, variously translated as "machination" or "manipulative domination".
In one passage, Heidegger 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: "The bourgeois-Christian form of English 'bolshevism' is the most dangerous. Without its destruction, the modern era will remain intact."
Rée explains why he finds Heidegger so important: because of his critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity". But when you're keen, as so many of our modern critical thinkers are, to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism.
It's a bit late now, though. Whole careers - whole "radical" schools of thought - have been built on the back of Heidegger's philosophy. Hence the continuing need for such desperate last-ditch defences...
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