It took a while for scholars and practicing philosophers to come to terms with the full extent of Heidegger's relationship with Nazism. Judging from his initial reception, the French never seemed to care either way (aside from Bourdieu2) until Victor Farias, a former student of Heidegger, published his Heidegger et le nazisme in 1987.3 What could before be passed off as an 'error' or flirtation by Heidegger's apologists became undoubtedly something more nefarious.4 Further complicating the issue is that Heidegger never implicated himself in his guilt.5 For Richard Rorty, interviewed in the BBC documentary Human, All Too Human, Heidegger is an exemplary case of a 'bad man writing a spectacular book.'
Today, despite of this, Heidegger is embraced by a growing number of philosophers working in the analytic tradition—Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, William Blattner, Charles Taylor, to name a few—and it is practically impossible to understand 20th century continental philosophy without him. Foucault acknowledged that Heidegger was 'the essential philosopher' and that his 'entire philosophical development was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger' (though Nietzsche ultimately came out on top).6 Derrida was Heidegger's most obvious disciple. Merleau-Ponty's influence is heavily indebted to Heidegger's silence concerning the body and perception in Being and Time. Bourdieu, in conversation with Dreyfus, called Heidegger his 'first love' in philosophy. And Habermas, originally enamored by Heidegger as a student but who denounced him after he stumbled upon Heidegger's pronouncement of 'the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism' in a lecture of 1935, can still find it in himself to declare Being and Time the greatest work of philosophy since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hannah Arendt, famous for her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, herself a former student of Heidegger and, more interestingly, a Jew—not to mention his one-time lover—referred to him before the publication of Being and Time as 'the hidden King' of philosophy. It goes without saying that the reputation Heidegger has enjoyed is complicated by the questioning of the relation between two extremes: his profound and original contribution to philosophy, and his unquestionable involvement with Nazism.
Adding to the history of the many ambivalent and controversial responses to his work—and something that makes approaching Heidegger difficult to navigate, not just morally but intellectually—is the obscurity of his writing. Heidegger's prose prompted A. J. Ayer to denounce him as a 'charlatan'. Carnap basically founded logical positivism on his encounter with Heidegger in his influential article, 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,' which was published in 1932 on the cusp of Heidegger's most fervent embrace of Nazism as rector of the University of Freiburg. Adorno wrote his The Jargon of Authenticity in response to Heidegger and other existential authors, who he saw as undermining the very authenticity and freedom they sought to advance through an abuse of language that was entangled within the logic of contemporary capitalism.
[Post in progress.]
Notes
1. See Immanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye represents the latest attempt to directly link Heidegger's philosophy to Nazism. See also Adam Kirsch's review, 'The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger,' New York Times, May 1, 2010.
2. Bourdieu published a book on the connection between Heidegger's thought and politics in 1975. For an English translation, see The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991).
3. It was an event that inaugurated a public debate among many European intellectuals and prompted Jean-Francois Lyotard to publish Heidegger and 'the Jews' (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Richard Wolin has collected and presented with an introduction many of the contributions to this debate, along with relevant texts by Heidegger, as editor of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992). Derrida's response is notably absent from the volume due to a legal quibble with Wolin. For a discussion of this see Thomas Sheehan's review, 'A Normal Nazi,' The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993.
4. When Heidegger turned 80 years-old in 1969, Hannah Arendt contended during a radio address in West Germany that his affiliation with Nazism was an 'escapade' that should not influence how the work of Heidegger is understood, apart from his politics. See Kirsch, op. cit. However Farias' book, along with Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, which was published shortly after, and with the dearth of articles and books on Heidegger's politics that followed, has made any apology for Heidegger which argues that his Nazism was somehow 'episodic' impossible.
5. 'What is irritating is the unwillingness and the inability of this philosopher, after the end of the Nazi regime, to admit his error with so much as one sentence—an error fraught with political consequences.' Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 155.
6. Qtd. in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 3. The quote comes from an interview Foucault gave shortly before his death in 1984.
Today, despite of this, Heidegger is embraced by a growing number of philosophers working in the analytic tradition—Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, William Blattner, Charles Taylor, to name a few—and it is practically impossible to understand 20th century continental philosophy without him. Foucault acknowledged that Heidegger was 'the essential philosopher' and that his 'entire philosophical development was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger' (though Nietzsche ultimately came out on top).6 Derrida was Heidegger's most obvious disciple. Merleau-Ponty's influence is heavily indebted to Heidegger's silence concerning the body and perception in Being and Time. Bourdieu, in conversation with Dreyfus, called Heidegger his 'first love' in philosophy. And Habermas, originally enamored by Heidegger as a student but who denounced him after he stumbled upon Heidegger's pronouncement of 'the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism' in a lecture of 1935, can still find it in himself to declare Being and Time the greatest work of philosophy since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hannah Arendt, famous for her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, herself a former student of Heidegger and, more interestingly, a Jew—not to mention his one-time lover—referred to him before the publication of Being and Time as 'the hidden King' of philosophy. It goes without saying that the reputation Heidegger has enjoyed is complicated by the questioning of the relation between two extremes: his profound and original contribution to philosophy, and his unquestionable involvement with Nazism.
Adding to the history of the many ambivalent and controversial responses to his work—and something that makes approaching Heidegger difficult to navigate, not just morally but intellectually—is the obscurity of his writing. Heidegger's prose prompted A. J. Ayer to denounce him as a 'charlatan'. Carnap basically founded logical positivism on his encounter with Heidegger in his influential article, 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,' which was published in 1932 on the cusp of Heidegger's most fervent embrace of Nazism as rector of the University of Freiburg. Adorno wrote his The Jargon of Authenticity in response to Heidegger and other existential authors, who he saw as undermining the very authenticity and freedom they sought to advance through an abuse of language that was entangled within the logic of contemporary capitalism.
[Post in progress.]
Notes
1. See Immanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye represents the latest attempt to directly link Heidegger's philosophy to Nazism. See also Adam Kirsch's review, 'The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger,' New York Times, May 1, 2010.
2. Bourdieu published a book on the connection between Heidegger's thought and politics in 1975. For an English translation, see The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991).
3. It was an event that inaugurated a public debate among many European intellectuals and prompted Jean-Francois Lyotard to publish Heidegger and 'the Jews' (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Richard Wolin has collected and presented with an introduction many of the contributions to this debate, along with relevant texts by Heidegger, as editor of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992). Derrida's response is notably absent from the volume due to a legal quibble with Wolin. For a discussion of this see Thomas Sheehan's review, 'A Normal Nazi,' The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993.
4. When Heidegger turned 80 years-old in 1969, Hannah Arendt contended during a radio address in West Germany that his affiliation with Nazism was an 'escapade' that should not influence how the work of Heidegger is understood, apart from his politics. See Kirsch, op. cit. However Farias' book, along with Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, which was published shortly after, and with the dearth of articles and books on Heidegger's politics that followed, has made any apology for Heidegger which argues that his Nazism was somehow 'episodic' impossible.
5. 'What is irritating is the unwillingness and the inability of this philosopher, after the end of the Nazi regime, to admit his error with so much as one sentence—an error fraught with political consequences.' Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 155.
6. Qtd. in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 3. The quote comes from an interview Foucault gave shortly before his death in 1984.
