A Fight for the Right to Read Heidegger
As a Jew, who suffered from anti-Semitic discrimination in the final years of the Soviet Union, I am weary of the contemporary manifestations of this hateful ideology. But I also find irksome the attempts to use the label “anti-Semitism” as a tool for silencing dissent. Both opposition to Zionism and the thinking inspired by Heidegger now incur this charge, which is leveled too lightly, thoughtlessly, and therefore without a minimum of respect for the actual victims of ethnic or religious oppression.
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This spring, the Students’ Union at the University
College London banned
meetings of a group called the Nietzsche Club, which was formed to discuss
the ideas of philosophers who inspired, among others, far-right politicians and
leaders of the past, like Benito Mussolini, an admirer of Nietzsche’s work. The
Union Council decided that the discussion of such thinkers and ideas would
foster a dangerous wave of fascism among its students, and prevented them from
holding a public meeting.
To those of us in philosophy concerned with ideological
censorship, this incident seems like the tip of the iceberg in an impending
struggle over the prospects of a serious scholarly engagement with some of the
most important philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
But, unlike the actual Arctic ice sheets that are melting at an alarming rate,
the freeze imposed on thinking is showing no signs of abating. In particular,
there is a menacing chill forming around the work of Martin Heidegger.
With the publication of Volumes 94-6 in Heidegger’s
“Complete Works” containing the infamous “Black Notebooks” (or private diaries,
not yet translated into English) earlier this year, his critics, pointing at
the incontrovertible evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, now claim that his
philosophy is suffused with objectionable ideas through and through — so much
so that the critique of modernity developed by the German thinker is being
reinterpreted as a way to “launder”
his anti-Semitism.
As a Jew, who suffered from anti-Semitic discrimination in the final years of theSoviet Union , I am weary of the contemporary
manifestations of this hateful ideology. But I also find irksome the attempts
to use the label “anti-Semitism” as a tool for silencing dissent. Both
opposition to Zionism and the thinking inspired by Heidegger now incur this
charge, which is leveled too lightly, thoughtlessly, and therefore without a
minimum of respect for the actual victims of ethnic or religious oppression.
As a Jew, who suffered from anti-Semitic discrimination in the final years of the
Of course, none of the recent revelations about Heidegger
should be suppressed or dismissed. But neither should they turn into mantras
and formulas, meant to discredit one of the most original philosophical
frameworks of the past century. At issue are not only concepts (such as “being-in-the-world”)
or methodologies (such as “hermeneutical ontology”) but the ever fresh way of
thinking that holds in store countless possibilities that are not sanctioned by
the prevalent techno-scientific rationality, which governs much of philosophy
within the walls of the academia. It is, in fact, these possibilities that are
the true targets of Heidegger’s detractors, who are determined to smear the
entirety of his thought and work with the double charge of Nazism and
anti-Semitism.
Now, if canonical philosophers were blacklisted based on
their prejudices and political engagements, then there wouldn’t be all that
many left in the Western tradition. Plato and Aristotle would be out as
defenders of slavery and chauvinism; St. Augustine
would be expelled for his intolerance toward heretics and “heathens”; Hegel would
be banned for his unconditional admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, in whom he
saw “world spirit on horseback.”
As for Heidegger himself, those minimally versed in his
thought will know — whether they admit it or not — that his anti-Semitism
contradicts both the spirit and the letter of his texts, regardless of the
ontological or metaphysical mantle he bestows upon anti-Semitic discourse.
Perhaps the German thinker did not sense this contradiction, but this does not
mean that it was not there. Let me give you an example.
In one deplorable turn of phrase in “Black Notebooks,”
Heidegger writes about the “worldlessness” of Judaism and associates the Jews’
uprooting from a national territory with the “world-historical ‘task’ of
uprooting all beings from Being,” which, according to Heidegger, Judaism
presumably shares with modernity as well as with Bolshevism, Americanism,
British imperialism, and so on. The French philosopher Emmanuel
Faye is correct to trace this concept of “worldlessness” that
describes the state of an inanimate object, such as a stone, back to
Heidegger’s 1929 course on “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.” As
worldless, the Jews are reduced to the level of things — a classical
dehumanization technique. But from this valid argument, Faye jumps to a
ridiculous conclusion that “the Heideggerian notion of ‘being-in-the-world,’
which is central to ‘Being and Time,’ may take on the meaning of a
discriminatory term with anti-Semitic intent.” While his first point probes the
depths of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, the second is an amateurish trick,
endeavoring to taint a fecund idea by means of nothing but free association.
Well before the publication of “Black Notebooks,” Heidegger’s
organicist metaphors for spiritual life that is rooted, plantlike, in the
native soil (for instance in “Discourse on Thinking”) could be read as denying
genuine talent and creativity to those who did not enjoy a strong connection to
the “home ground,” including, in the first instance, the Jewish people. But
such racist nearsightedness does not at all follow from the content of his
philosophy. In fact, one could say that the Jewish mode of rootedness was
temporal, rather than spatial; before the Zionist project undertook to change
this state of affairs, the Jews were grounded only in the tradition, instead of
a national territory.
Such grounding is anathema to the uprooted condition of
modernity, with which Heidegger hurriedly identified Jewish life and thought
and which is expressed, precisely, in the destruction of tradition. From the
perspective of the author of “Being and Time,” the temporal nature of Jewish
rootedness should have been viewed as more desirable than spatial ties to the
soil. After all, didn’t Heidegger want to make (finite) time, rather than
space, fundamental to human existence?
There is, then, a profound disconnect between Heidegger’s
anti-Semitic prejudice and his philosophy, which influenced a number of
prominent Jewish thinkers, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida, and from Leo
Strauss to Emmanuel Levinas. Yet, more and more, one is forced to justify the
very act of reading his works for purposes other than denunciation and censure.
As my colleague Marcia Cavalcante Schuback (who translated “Being and Time” into
Portuguese) and I write in our forthcoming commentary
on Heidegger’s 1934-5 seminar analyzing Hegel’s political philosophy:
“ ‘The case of Heidegger,’ or ‘l’affaire Heidegger,’ as the French call
it, is the case of philosophy facing the loss of its right. And what are all
the controversies surrounding Heidegger’s Nazism about if not the right of and
to his thought, not to mention the right to think further on his path, despite,
against, or with his past?”
More broadly formulated, the question is about who has the
right to pursue philosophy, to call herself or himself a philosopher, and to
deny this appellation to others. In his book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of
Nazism into Philosophy,” when referring to Heidegger, Faye often renders the
word philosopher in quotation marks. The current fight for the possibility of
reading certain philosophical works is, therefore, a fight over the very
meaning of philosophy, with or without quotation marks.