Abstract
For Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger was ‘like a fox who sweeps away the traces behind him with his tail’, while Hannah Arendt declared that Heidegger ‘lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can’ (p. 32). Nevertheless, Pöggeler made a name for himself as an expositor of Heidegger’s philosophy, and even Arendt – the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, let’s not forget – defended Heidegger against those critics who condemned him for his enthusiastic membership of the NSDAP. (While Arendt portrayed him as an essentially naïve man who rapidly found himself out of his depth, Paul Celan discovered that Heidegger’s policy was ‘never apologize, never explain’; and Heidegger himself stuck to the principle articulated in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (From the Experience of Thinking, 1947), Wer groß denkt, muß groß irren (who thinks big thoughts, must make big mistakes.) Not so Richard Wolin, for whom no such excuses are plausible in the slightest and whose new book constitutes a relentless polemic against Heidegger – his reputation is said to be in tatters (or, to use the image of the title, ‘in ruins’).
Although Heidegger’s membership (which he never revoked) of the NSDAP has never been a secret, fresh impetus for the critics of Heidegger has come in the form of the Black Notebooks, published so far as volumes 94 to 101 of the 102-volume Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. In the view of Judith Werner, the publication of these Schwarze Hefte was an ‘earthquake’ that has provoked ‘a far-reaching caesura in Heidegger scholarship’ (p. 1), while for the former president of the International Heidegger Society, Günter Figal (who resigned after the Notebook’s publication), ‘the philosophical future portends the end of Heideggerianism’ (pp. 8–9). Wolin gives short shrift to those such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Donatella di Cesare who would claim that ‘we need Heidegger more than ever’ (cf. pp. 9–11), and he lambasts those who advocate what he calls the paradigm of ‘Heidegger-as-redeemer’ (p. 89). Even those who, in turn, are now themselves critics of Heidegger are not exempt from criticism: in 2014 Peter Trawny, the editor of the Black Notebooks, described how, when preparing the 1939 lectures Die Geschichte des Seyns for publication, he had been pressured by Heidegger’s literary executors to remove an anti-Semitic statement from the text. ‘On what editorial grounds’, demands Wolin, did Trawny ‘[consent] to this elision as well as [waiting] sixteen years before finally reveal[ing] the truth?’ (p. 36). Yet there is more at stake than editorial infelicities.
On Wolin’s account, the Black Notebooks demonstrate that ‘Heidegger’s ontological ‘Turn’ during the 1930s was integrally bound with an intensification of his commitment to the regenerative attributes of ‘German Dasein’ and ‘German destiny’’, and that he ‘construed Germanentum as authentic history incarnate’ (p. 4). Starting with this core thesis, Wolin takes the reader on a tour of the ‘ruins’ in which he now finds Heidegger: how his philosophical corpus has been politically sanitized (chapter 1), how he was a keen political actor in the Third Reich (chapter 2), how a biological notion of race is integral to his philosophical thought (chapter 3), how his treatment of the philosophical significance of Arbeit [work] reflects National Socialist approaches (chapter 4), and how his consistent praise of Bodenständigkeit (or ‘rootedness-in-soil’) is aligned to a National Socialist politics of space (chapter 5). What this account does not explain is how so many other thinkers – Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Hans Jonas, Rudolf Bultmann, to name but a handful – have found in Heidegger a valuable philosophical resource and a persuasive critique of modernity. How could so many get it so consistently wrong for so long?
Surprisingly, in his introduction, Wolin himself issues a caveat or a disclaimer, explicitly stating that he ‘do[es] not argue that Heidegger was a “Nazi philosopher” and that, on these grounds, his work should be condemned and dismissed’ and instead applauding Heidegger’s ‘reformulation of transcendental phenomenology’ for having ‘opened up significant new pathways and possibilities’ (p. 22). This reviewer finds it hard to square this disclaimer with the negativity towards Heidegger displayed in the rest of Wolin’s book which (acknowledging the work of such scholars as Christian von Krockow, Johannes Fritsche, Charles Bambach, Daniel Morat and Florian Grosser) argues that ‘Heidegger’s existential ontology is shot through with the idiolect of the conservative revolution’ (p. 24). Taken as a whole, Wolin’s study aligns itself entirely with Ernst Tugendhat’s claim that Heidegger’s Nazism was ‘no accidental affair’ and that ‘a direct path led from his philosophy – from its de-rationalized concept of truth and the concept of self-determination defined by this – to Nazism’ (cf. pp. 99 and 359).
Yet in his final chapter, Wolin provides us with a different reason to persist with Heidegger, despite his alleged ‘ruination’: his ongoing reception by the New Right, including such Nouvelle Droite figures as Dominique Venner and Alain de Benoist, and – especially significant in the context of the current war in Ukraine – Heidegger’s ‘dubious Russian disciple’, Alexander Dugin. If the presence of right-wing topoi in Heidegger’s work is as obvious and omnipresent as Wolin would have us believe, might it then offer us a powerful intellectual tool with which to identify, analyse and ‘deconstruct’ these dangerous political tendencies? In this respect, maybe we really do need Heidegger more than ever? That said, Wolin appends a short postscript entitled ‘Heidegger and Heimat’, in which he examines Heidegger’s turn to Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1828) during the 1950s as the poet of the Alemannic Landschaft and (here’s that word again) Boden. Given the parallel with Heidegger’s celebration of Hölderlin during the 1930s as the ‘Dichter der Deutschen’, this discussion implicitly raises the possibility that, in the wake of National Socialism, it is not just individual philosophers but an entire culture that has become contaminated. ‘Whither Heidegger Studies?’, asks Wolin, but one might also ask, ‘whither Germany’ and, indeed, ‘whither the West’? For better or worse, it is hard to imagine how one could address those questions without taking note, even if only as a warning, of what Heidegger meant and means, then as now.