What’s Left of Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is, without question, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. While existentialism and phenomenology as philosophical movements existed prior to Heidegger, his 1927 Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) was a landmark work that furthered (and significantly modified) the ideas of Heidegger’s mentor Edmund Husserl. In Being and Time, Heidegger introduced or at least helped develop such philosophical concepts as “being-in-the world,” “authenticity,” thrownness, “being-toward-death,” and “being-together.” Being and Time further greatly influenced Jean-Paul Sartre as well as members of the Frankfurt School. With its profound critique of everydayness, anxiety, and the problem of being absorbed into the “they,” Being and Time proved to be a fertile intellectual field for (late) Marxists as well as left-bank Parisian intellectuals. Heidegger’s later, post-World War II writings on poetry, art, and “dwelling poetically,”—most prominently “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) which have been gathered together in English in the collection Poetry, Language, Thought, further have had a tremendous influence, not only on later twentieth century poetics, but on philosophy in general. Finally, Heidegger’s two other most famous later essays, “The Question Concerning Technology” (Die Frage nach der Technik), published in 1954, and the 1947 “Letter on Humanism” (Über den Humanismus) have had a great impact on not only philosophy, but (especially with the former) on the environmental movement.
Heidegger was, overall, much better received on the political left than on the right. Indeed, especially in the Anglophone world, conservatives have viewed Heidegger as an odd and eccentric curiosity. Throughout his writings, Heidegger critiques the modern world, which in the 19th and 20th centuries, had a typically Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American flavor. While he viewed Soviet Communism with scorn, Heidegger saw American liberal capitalism as being fundamentally nihilistic and a threat to authentic Western civilization. In his own life, especially after the Second World War, Heidegger cultivated the image of the Bavarian peasant critic of modernity, condemning modern technology—especially the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As a result, he became embraced by the New Left as a profound intellectual critic of post-Fordian capitalism.
However, despite his embrace by the left, a very strong taint clung to Heidegger’s reputation. In the English-speaking world, this taint usually has been presented in the following (or at least similar) narrative: In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party as part of his role as the rector of Freiburg University. During his time as rector, Heidegger made a number of seemingly pro-Nazi statements and acted in an unfair way to Jewish professors. However, Heidegger and the Nazis had a falling out, and he was even surveilled by the Gestapo, having ultimately rejected National Socialism due to its materialism and racialism. Heidegger thus had his own “personal National Socialism,” which was spiritual and philosophical and not to be confused with the Nazism championed by Adolf Hitler. Heidegger made serious mistakes, but he was not truly a Nazi and his mistreatment of Jewish professors was “balanced” by his friendships with Jews—including his one-time mistress, Hannah Arendt. Ultimately Heidegger’s unquestionably genius and epoch-forming philosophy could be distanced from his immoral activities during a brief period of his life, thus forming a “cordon sanitaire” between Heidegger’s life and work.
This defensive narrative has not sat well with some scholars. Beginning with Chilean scholar and former Heidegger student, Victor Farias’s 1987 Heidegger and Nazism, some thinkers have attempted to prove that Heidegger’s philosophy, being anti-liberal and anti-modern, was fundamentally fascistic. However, although Farias’s thesis had been developed by several philosophers, it has never stuck. The primary argument is that Heidegger’s nebulous language is open to multiple interpretations, and it is certainly serviceable to New Left and Millennial Left environmentalism and Marxism. Moreover, this argument ran, there just is not enough evidence to suggest that Heidegger’s thought is fundamentally conservative, fascist, or National Socialist.
In his recent work, Heidegger in Ruins, Richard Wolin proves that the reading of Heidegger’s philosophy as being fundamentally reactionary and conservative (or what Wolin calls “revolutionary conservativism”) is sound. Even more importantly, Wolin has written one of the best English-language books on Heidegger, providing a key to the German philosopher’s seemingly nebulous verbiage. Paying close attention to Heidegger’s writings on poetics, Wolin reads Heidegger as a neo-pagan (and perhaps even “occultist”) philosopher. Such a reading elucidates much of Heidegger’s middle and later thought, which had been mystified for nearly a century. Wolin’s work is inspired by the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (2014-present), which reveal that, despite his personal friendship with individual Jews, Heidegger viewed Jews as a threat to Germany and Western Civilization. Moreover, Wolin places Heidegger as much an heir of reactionary German moderns like Oswald Spengler and Ernst Junker as he is of Edmund Husserl—despite the popularity of these former two thinkers among twenty-first century populists, Wolin shows that their thought contains elements of anti-Semitism and fascistic thinker.
Wolin additionally documents how the Heidegger estate and some Heidegger scholars have attempted to obscure Heidegger’s failings for decades. Wolin’s Heidegger is also blinded by his German nationalism, not only condemning materialism in American liberalism, but largely blind (outside of a few insensitive comments) to the evil committed by German National Socialists. Heidegger was not only a thinker who emphasized the historicity of Being as well as the importance of a volk or people, his German nationalism depicted Germans (along with the Greeks—Wolin points to the influence of Aryanism on Heidegger) as being the truly philosophical people, who are rooted in the German soil. Heidegger held that the Jews were a rootless people, but he also dismissed the French as being poisoned by Cartesianism and the Romans for having corrupted Greek; Heidegger’s depiction of “Latinate” corruption of language in Introduction to Metaphysics thus now, due to Wolin’s research, takes a new, unfortunately racialized meaning. Heidegger’s rejection of his childhood Catholicism (Heidegger himself was a former Catholic seminarian) is further reframed as a rejection of Mediterranean culture. Wolin’s Heidegger emerges as a pagan semi-theologian whose discussion of “gods,” “earth,” “sky,” and what were otherwise previously read as a Romantic poetic trope, as now being best read as (at least semi-) Nazified pagan concepts.
The second impetus for Heidegger in Ruins is the emergence of the European New Right, which draws heavily from Heidegger’s thought. Wolin notes that Russia’s Alexander Dugin draws from Heidegger as do many Alt Right or Dissident Right figures in America as well as New Right figures in Europe. Heidegger’s discussions of volk, destiny, homeland and earth serve as inspiration for some figures who reject not only liberalism but Christianity and who (over-) emphasize differences among humans—an Algerian, this thinking goes, is fundamentally at home in the desert, not in France. Using these contemporary political examples, Wolin heavily implies that Heidegger’s middle and later thought is so reactionary that it is dangerous, but, drawing from Immanuel Levinas, argues that there is much in Being and Time that is serviceable to philosophy. Wolin’s depiction of Heidegger as a reactionary neo-pagan with serious personal failings is convincing. Moreover, his moral condemnation of racial hatred (and its attendant Neo-Darwinist and amoral pre-Socratic worldview) found both in early 20th-century German thinkers as well as in the writings is something that will be shared by most readers. However, there is still some material in Heidegger’s later work which is salvageable.
Conservative revolutionaries abound in the post-Trump age. There are certainly racial chauvinists, anti-Semites, and sadistic anti-humanists who fit under the umbrella of “conservative revolutionary.” However, there are also Christian humanists, radical orthodoxy Protestants, kindhearted but serious neo-Stoics, Catholic traditionalists, Jewish conservatives, post-liberal university professors, as well as a host of other varieties of thinkers (one could start with “neo-Confucians”) who would not fall under the umbrella of “conservative revolutionaries.” These latter thinkers, in their best form, reject racial hatred and a martial stance toward other humans in favor of Christian charity, concord, and “humaneness.” Many of these thinkers have been influenced by Martin Heidegger but reject the poisonous elements of his thoughts. The choices for contemporary humans are not limited to the principles of 1789 or some form of fascism. One can be post-liberal but still humane. As for Martin Heidegger, Richard Wolin has proven that he was a very unpleasant character whose life and work are seriously flawed. As for the ultimate verdict on him, however: only God knows.
Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
By Richard Wolin
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023; 473 pp
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