Jeffrey Herf at Quillette reviews Richard Wolin's Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology.
On April 21st, 1933, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, then famous as the author of the 1927 philosophical treatise Being and Time, gave one of the most famous speeches delivered by any scholar living in the dictatorships of the 20th century. It was titled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” and it called upon students at the University of Freiburg to abandon objectivity and academic freedom and instead join the “spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German Volk [people] the stamp of history” while the “moribund pseudocivilization” of the West “collapses into itself.”
By the time Heidegger delivered that speech, the Nazi regime had already declared a national emergency and suspended civil liberties following the Reichstag Fire of February 28th. The regime had violently destroyed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, thereby clearing a path to dictatorship, and it had introduced national legislation calling for the expulsion of all Jews from the civil service. The antisemitic clauses of the Nazi Party were now government policy, and purges of Jewish professors were underway in the universities, including at Freiburg, where Heidegger had just been elected rector. Over the summer and into the fall, he openly declared his support and admiration for Hitler and the new regime and called upon all to vote for the Nazis in elections.
Yes, the great hero of so much modern philosophy was an out-and-out unrepentant Nazi. He was also a virulent antisemite. Both these not unrelated facts have been down-played by his followers:
In the opening chapter of Heidegger in Ruins, titled “The Heidegger Hoax,” Wolin examines Heidegger’s mendacity, and the violation of scholarly norms by those publishing his collected works (Gesamtausgabe). In those now 102 volumes, “the scope and degree of his [Heidegger’s] National Socialist allegiances have been consistently downplayed and misconstrued.” That fact, he adds, has been “an open secret” among Heidegger scholars but rarely publicly discussed. “For decades,” his published works were “systematically manipulated by a coterie of well-disposed literary executors,” including family members and “interested parties possessing limited professional competence” who displayed “blatant disregard for conventional scholarly standards.”
This “opened the door to a series of highly compromising editorial falsifications and distortions” and the publication of “politically sanitized versions of Heidegger’s texts … in which evidence of Heidegger’s pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic convictions was consistently masked and expunged. … Numerous passages that attested to the magnitude and depth of his ideological zealotry during the Nazi years were systematically elided” (emphasis in original). These deletions included Heidegger’s 1936 praise of Hitler and Mussolini for introducing a “countermovement to nihilism,” intended as praise for their invocation of the Nietzschean will to power....
Many of the expunged passages have now been restored to Heidegger’s 102-volume Gesamtausgabe. However, Wolin reminds us that, in 2014, Trawny revealed that, while working on Heidegger’s lectures of 1939 in the 1990s, he agreed to excise Heidegger’s assertion that “it would be worthwhile inquiring into world Jewry’s predisposition toward planetary criminality.” Wolin notes that this contradicts the misleading claim, “frequently advanced by Heidegger’s diehard defenders, that Heidegger rejected race thinking as a matter of principle.”
Heidegger made that statement shortly after Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” speech of January 30th, 1939, in which he declared that if “international Jewish financiers” were to start another world war, “the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” In Heidegger in Ruins, Wolin plausibly suggests that, “Heidegger’s comments seem to represent a profession of solidarity with Hitler’s views.” This is almost certainly why Heidegger sought to pass off revised texts as originals during the early 1950s in an attempt to suppress evidence of his explicit support for Nazi doctrine.
In 2015, the editorial scandal surrounding the revision of Heidegger’s collected works finally became public. His German publisher, Klostermann, acknowledged “numerous inquiries as to why Martin Heidegger’s anti-Jewish enmity hadn’t surfaced in Gesamtausgabe volumes that had been previously published. … Recent discoveries have raised the concern that a search for further inaccuracies in the Gesamtausgabe will arise.”...
The depth of Heidegger’s antisemitism was frankly expressed in his many years of correspondence with his brother Fritz. In 1931, two years before Hitler came to power, Wolin tells us Heidegger wrote the following about Mein Kampf: “No one who is insightful will dispute the fact that, whereas often the rest of us remain lost in the dark, this is a man [Hitler] who is possessed of a sure and remarkable political instinct … what is at stake is the redemption or destruction of Europe and Western Culture.” Until 2016, this document was omitted by those overseeing Heidegger’s collected works and correspondence.
None of this would matter so much outside a small coterie of professional philosophers if it wasn't for Heidegger's extraordinary legacy, as perhaps the most influential philosopher in the second half of the 20th century.
In the sixth and final chapter of Heidegger in Ruins, Wolin concludes by examining the enthusiasm for Heidegger among the Nouvelle Droit in France, the Neue Rechte in Germany, Alexander Dugin and the Putinist nationalists in Russia, the activists of the American far-Right, and right-wing terrorists denouncing the “great replacement” in Norway and New Zealand. Dugin, who has made the case for a Russian national socialism and for a “neo-Eurasian” policy of Russian territorial expansion, has published several volumes on Heidegger’s importance to Russia and the attack on Western liberalism. Wolin detects echoes of the moods and language of the conservative revolution of Germany’s 1920s in the nationalism and reactionary identity politics that have flourished in the West in recent years.
He was also influential in Iran.
And of course in the UK's Radical Philosophy movement. Jonathan Rée, co-founder, and one-time frequent contributor to the LRB, explained that Heidegger was so important because of his critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity". Well yes. But when you're so keen to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it does seem odd to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and liberal democracy, and the answer in Hitler and National Socialism.