'He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors,' German philosopher, Martin Heidegger is quoted as saying in a BBC documentary about his life and politics. This may well be the best explanation we're ever going to get for how one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century could also have been a member of the National Socialists.
I was 18 years old, in 1972, when I first started reading Heidegger. I had just emerged from the peasant backwaters of my Italian, working class background, being the first in my extended family to go to university. I was a brooding, reflective adolescent, and probably overly preoccupied with death. 'Heavy' was how some of my friends described me. As for my family, they had no idea about the existence of my interior life. I grew up in an Italian, speaking household in Montreal, where most of the conversation was about the survival tales of southern Italian peasants and nostalgic reminiscences of a world left behind. My penchant for poetry and abstract thought went unnoticed.
It was an introductory course in Existentialism which first planted the seeds for my escape from the restrictive confines of the Italian, Catholic community I grew up in, and gave me a vision of a life radically different from the one I had been programmed to lead. I remember the catalyzing moment. I was sitting in the audience at a Keith Jarrett concert at Place des Arts in Montreal, when the thoughts hit like revelatory arrows: I'm free. I can create my own life. I don't have to conform to customs and values that make no sense to me. It's my existential obligation. Jean-Paul Sartre says so. It's my life, my death. I have to live it as I see fit. Heidegger says so. Making choices in the face of death. That's what makes us human, genuine. This was the first indispensable influence of Existentialism in general, and Heidegger in particular, on my life.
As it turns out, I left Montreal and ended up in Toronto, doing a doctorate in philosophy, just for the hell of it, it seems sometimes, since I never really had any scholarly or academic ambitions. I just wanted to be free. And despite my efforts I never quite managed to feel like I belonged to the world of higher learning. The work often felt pretentious and tedious and disconnected from my feelings. Maybe I was just too emotional or perhaps laughed too loud for the halls of academia. But I did want to become educated. I wanted to know what there was to know and I desperately wanted to escape the morass of ignorance and illiteracy of the world I grew up in.
It was 1988 when I first had to seriously contend with the shadow of Heidegger's Nazi past. Previously, I guess I hadn't given it much thought. It's not that I hadn't know there had been some involvement, but I had understood it to be brief, and prior to all the known atrocities committed by the National Socialists. Heidegger had been extremely influential to other philosophers I had loved in my youth, such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of whom were known communist sympathizers. And my long time, Heidegger teacher and mentor at the time, Sam Mallin, was a Jew and former Zionist. Everyone I knew who was reading Heidegger during the 70's and early 80's, here in North America, didn't mention his politics much. If they did, his actions were usually justified as some kind of naivety or error of youth that did not bear on his philosophy. My own attitude was shaped in this context. Heidegger's questionable political involvements seemed inconsequential, given that in combining abstract thought with a sense of poetry, his philosophy seemed specifically suited for me.
It was during the 70's and 80's that I spent the most time in concentrated philosophical study. At the time, inspired by Merleau-Ponty's work on Cezanne and Heidegger's thinking on Holderlin and Rilke, Sam Mallin was developing a methodology of philosophizing through art. Our classes sometimes took place in an open field at King City, the location of a sculpture by Richard Serra. Often we met at the Art Gallery of Ontario and once I remember traveling together as a class, to see some art works in a gallery in Buffalo. We met many times on Ward's Island, where Sam lived, and searched for the meaning of Being in songs by Leonard Cohen, the Clash and the Talking Heads. We shared wine from a jug while discussing Heidegger's essay on “The Thing”. It was exciting and inspiring to be a part of this fresh way of doing philosophy and to contribute to developing a way of thinking that brought philosophy back to its creative roots. It was this experience which kept me in academia, eventually completing a dissertation on the phenomenology of dance. I was just getting ready to defend that dissertation in 1988, when Victor Farias's book Heidegger and Nazism ignited the debate about Heidegger's shady political past. Suddenly I was cautioned and warned that I might be asked to defend my use of Heidegger as a basis for my thesis. I scrambled to read the book and to sort out how to position myself in relation to it.
As it turns out, the book was crude and simplistic. Heideggers' philosophy was repeatedly taken out of context and its meaning distorted or misunderstood. There were numerous errors in translation and many instances of misinterpretation. I was not at all persuaded that Nazism had been intrinsic to Heidegger's philosophy as Farias wanted to argue. My plan, if asked, was to argue a version of the position I had previously held, that Heidegger had obviously been naive and mistaken about his initial expectations of the National Socialists, and that these expectations had been short lived and did not bear upon his philosophy. For as Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, once put it: “You have to allow the greatest philosopher since Aristotle to make a political mistake.”
The oral defense came and went and I never did get asked to justify my use of Heidegger's philosophy. But I did have the remaining problem of what to do with my life now that I had graduated. I bought myself some time by working as a receptionist at Now Magazine, where I was a bit of a conversation piece as the receptionist with the Ph.D. But I was used to doing clerical work, having done a lot of it putting myself through school. It wasn't demanding and it gave me time to think. Eventually it became clear that I didn't have the stamina to pursue an academic career, nor was I willing to move to Florida or Sudbury just to have a job. I had always studied philosophy out of pure interest and had stuck with it for as long as I did because of Sam Mallin. I loved the kind of philosophy he was doing and the sense of urgency and commitment which he brought to everything we discussed. But by then I had decided that it was time to move on, to leave philosophy behind.
Given my illiterate, working class, background, in addition to being female, I had contended with some pretty debilitating feelings of inferiority during the course of my education, which had caused me to seek out psychotherapy for extended periods of time. I was in my eighth year of participation in a psychotherapy group when one of the leaders of the group suggested that I would make a good therapist. It didn't take long for me to realize that he was right. The idea of working in a one-to-one relationship with people was far more appealing to me than the prospect of teaching. It seemed like a fitting move since my analytical abilities and studies on the nature of existence would certainly serve me well in working as a psychotherapist. In 1992 I applied and was accepted to study at The Centre for Training in Psychotherapy, in Toronto
With this move I thought I was leaving philosophy behind. But Heidegger's philosophy, in particular, seemed not to want to leave me behind. At the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy I encountered a coven of women deep in the study of Martin Heidegger as a basis for therapeutic practice. While the school taught a broad based psycho-dynamic approach to the practice of therapy, it had on its faculty a woman named Anna Binswanger-Healy, who had been trained in Daseinsanalysis in Switzerland, a tradition of psychotherapy based on the philosophy of Heidegger. By the time I arrived on the scene she had quite a following of budding Heideggerians. I immediately mention this to Sam Mallin, who as it turns out, actually knew of Anna Binswanger-Healy, as she also lived on the Toronto islands, though he hadn't known of her interest in Heidegger. He decided to make contact with her and before you know it, we are both being asked to give seminars on Being and Time to interested students and faculty at the school, which we did for several years.
I've now been working as a psychotherapist for over ten years. My continued involvement with Heidegger's philosophy in the context of studying psychoanalysis has inspired me to write a book titled Sweet Nothing: An Elemental Case for Taking our Time. While not exclusively based on Heidegger, the book relies heavily on his concept of truth and his critique of modernity, drawing parallels between existential thought, psychoanalysis, and neo-pagan spirituality. On a cold December morning in 2009, just after rolling out of bed, I turned on the radio to the CBC morning show, 'Q', hosted by Jian Gomeshi. As I drank my first coffee, before preparing to send my manuscript off to Inanna Publications which had agreed to read it, I was amazed to hear a heated debate about Heidegger's philosophy. The discussion was precipitated by the latest book by French philosopher, Emmanuel Faye titled, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. The conversation, extremely disturbing, was about whether Heidegger's work should continue to be taught as philosophy, or rather metaphorically 'burned' as Nazi propaganda. One of the speakers suggested that we don't need Heidegger as part of the philosophical cannon because he hadn't contributed anything new or creative, nothing other philosophers hadn't already said before. He should be dispensed with, eliminated from the philosophical curriculum, I hear him say. Yet, it was clear from the conversation that neither of the speakers had any real knowledge of Heidegger's work and one of them had not even read the book in question!
I have bad timing, I think. The shadow of Heidegger's questionable political past keeps stalking me. I need to deal with it once and for all. But how can I sort it all out, I wonder, given that I'm not willing to do fifteen years of research, as Faye is purported to have done in order to write his book. That is the amount of time which would probably be needed to verify all of the facts and citations of Faye's defamatory tome. I was horrified after I read the book, both by the prospect that a philosopher who had been so indispensable to my life could possibly have been the devil incarnate and also by the venomous hatred with which Faye cast him as such. I don't know what to think. So I decide to give myself one summer, not fifteen years, just to read more about it and mull it over for a while.
What seems fairly clear, not just from Faye's book, but also from Heidegger's own admission, is that he did, for a time, believe that the political goals of the National Socialists were compatible with his own philosophy, and in grandiose fashion, may have seen himself as the spiritual leader who could help the party realize these goals. From a variety of sources I've gathered that Heidegger's commitment to the National Socialists, was partly based on his opposition to both American capitalism and Russian communism, and his hope for a kind of political 'middle way' which could challenge both. Faye's book paints Heidegger as enthusiastically working towards bringing the University of Freiberg into line with Nazi policies while he was rector from 1933 to 1934. He also suggests that during this period Heidegger denounced numerous of his colleagues to the Nazi party, of which he was then a member. This seems to be confirmed by testimonials from other sources as well, most notably in a letter sent to the de-Nazification committee by philosopher Karl Jaspers. Yet during an interview in Der Spiegel, which was published after his death, Heidegger denies any participation in implementing the anti-Semitic policies demanded of him during his rector-ship. He claims never to have dismissed any Jewish professors, although he was pressured to, and adamantly denies forbidding his former philosophy teacher, Edmund Husserl, access to the university library. When asked why people would say such things about him if they weren't true, his answer was 'slander'. He also states in the Der Spiegel interview that he had been very reluctant to take on the rector-ship and did so only because of pressure from colleagues and in hopes of possibly protecting the university from politicization. Yet Faye's book does seem to provide ample evidence that Heidegger did, nevertheless, have some long-standing friendships with known Nazi ideologues, most notoriously with Eugene Fischer, a leading theorist of eugenics and director for a time of the Institute for Racial Hygiene. And though it's true, as some have suggested, that it's problematic to establish guilt based simply on the company one keeps, Faye's book has certainly given us cause for concern. But what it surely does not do is show that Heidegger's philosophy is riddled with Nazi propaganda or somehow synonymous with it.
One of the main claims which Faye makes in defense of his position is that Heidegger's philosophy, especially Being and Time, exalts the power of the collective over that of the individual, and repeatedly suggests that Heidegger's philosophy is set on destroying the idea of individual consciousness. Yet based on my reading of Heidegger over the years, I've never encountered such a view. The notion of being-in-the-world, which is central to Being and Time, is the basis of Heidegger's critique of western thought's conception of the human as a rational animal. In describing humans as being-in-the-world Heidegger is not denying the existence of individual consciousness. He is simply challenging the view that consciousness is locked within the confines of the rational subject. By using the unity of being-in-the-world as a basis for his description of existence, Heidegger suggests, instead, that consciousness circles out beyond itself, and binds us to the world, from the start. This certainly means that the collective or being-with-others is a necessary dimension of existence. But I can't quite see how it could ever imply the destruction of individual consciousness. On the contrary, for Heidegger, in Being and Time, living out of our individually determined possibilities, in the face of the circumstances we have been 'thrown' into, is what individuates us, what makes us 'authentic'.
Faye's handling of the term metaphysical is also very problematic. As early as Being and Time Heidegger was critical of western metaphysics for its neglect of the question of the meaning of Being. It's probably safe to say that Heidegger makes it his philosophical mission to redress this neglect. In the process, he seems to eventually 'turn' away from traditional modes of addressing the question altogether. For Heidegger, the term metaphysical ends up being synonymous with western metaphysics as a whole, which he saw as having reduced Being to an empty, meaningless concept, or alternately, reified it into a kind of object, like Plato's forms or the Christian god. In the end, he seems to come to the belief that perhaps art and poetry are more likely routes to thinking the meaning of Being than traditional, philosophical argumentation, constrained as it is by the limits of logic and abstraction. It is this particular, Heideggerian critique of western thought which Faye seems not to understand. For though he acknowledges throughout his book that Heidegger is fundamentally critical of western metaphysics, he repeatedly cites Heidegger's use of the term metaphysical in conjunction with nationalist or racist thinking, as if this were evidence of Heidegger's endorsement of such views, when they are, in fact, instances of his criticisms of them.
This confusion around the term metaphysical is most pronounced in Faye's reading of Heidegger's work on Nietzsche, several volumes of lecture courses given during the years 1936-40. In these volumes Heidegger attempts to demonstrate that Nietzsche's metaphysics of will to power represents the completion of western thought, with its starting point in the rational subject. He argues that while Nietzsche appears to be critical of the western tradition with his use of earthy, instinctual, sensuous language, he simply overturns the traditional dualities, which according to Heidegger, is not yet to overcome them. To assert, as Nietzsche does, that the whole of Reality can be characterized as will to power is viewed, critically, by Heidegger, as the metaphysical culmination of a way of thinking which was always implicit in the western view of man as a willful, rational subject. Yet, Faye repeatedly quotes from the Nietzsche volumes in an attempt to prove that Heidegger was concerned with legitimizing racial thinking on metaphysical grounds, without realizing, once again, that to link racial thinking with metaphysics, is for Heidegger, in this context, a criticism, and not an endorsement.
Yet despite some of the obviously inaccurate interpretations of Heidegger's philosophy, Faye's book is, nevertheless, alarming, leaving its trail of charges and warnings that Heidegger's work is some kind of blueprint for the possible revival of Nazism and should be eliminated from the philosophical canon. But I cannot help but feel, that in making his case that Heidegger's work poses some kind of extreme danger to the reading public and to society at large, Faye is extremely patronizing. His tone seems to imply that your average Heidegger reader is some kind of idiot who could not discern for him/herself which ideas are politically acceptable and which are not. Heidegger's philosophy has been widely influential, from existentialism to Marxism, from psychoanalysis to post-modernism, from architecture to deep ecology. Something about his way of thinking has resonated deeply with a lot of people. Have we all been so stupid or blind not to recognize or see Nazi propaganda implied by Heidegger's work? Anti-semitism and fascism is indeed on the rise, again, in Europe. Yet I doubt very much that it has anything to do with the reading of Heidegger. While this is only anecdotal, I have never know or heard of a single person who turned fascist from reading Heidegger. And as many have noted, most Heidegger readers and supporters have tended to be from the left of the political spectrum rather than the right.
Some have suggested that the reason why Heidegger is so hated, especially in France, is because of his dominance of the intellectual discourse, combined with the fact that his particular critique of technology and modernity implies a critique of the whole western philosophical tradition. In his book Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas suggests that there are two main intellectual trends in the west, one which sees western civilization in terms of progress and one which sees it in terms of decline. Heidegger definitely falls into the latter category. He believed that philosophy since Plato had been progressively forgetting a deeper, more primordial sense of Being and that modernity itself was the inevitable result of such forgetting. The dominance of our culture by technology, according to Heidegger, is the natural culmination of an intellectual tradition which has been principally determined by its emphasis on reason, science and techne. It is interesting to note in this context that Faye's philosophical specialty is Rene Descartes, a philosopher whose mechanistic view of the body and of nature has often been associated with the progressive devastation of the earth. Given the extreme polarity of their philosophical views, it is not difficult to imagine that Faye might very well have wanted to dislodge Heidegger's philosophical dominance in France whether he was a Nazi or not.
As I write this piece, I keep thinking about the 1988 film, “Betrayed”, directed by Costa Gavras, which is about an FBI agent who is sent under cover to a small American town to investigate KKK activity. She falls in love with one of the men in the town while she's working under cover, and then gradually begins to discover that the man she is falling in love with is one of the KKK members she was sent in to investigate. At first she doesn't want to believe it, it doesn't seem possible. But then the truth crashes in on her and she's forced to confront it. It's a heartbreaking film, which disturbingly captures the sometimes, incredibly complex nature of human emotion and relationship. And though I have never been 'in love' with Heidegger's philosophy with the same cultish reverence which many of his followers exhibit, he has certainly help shape who I have become. He has influenced both my understanding of modernity and my sense of the history of philosophy. I was inspired to write a book which is partly concerned with drawing a parallel between Heidegger's conception of Truth and the neo-pagan myth of the Goddess and Her consort. In this he has influenced both my particular brand of feminism and my spirituality. But most importantly, with his phenomenological sense of existence being both 'thrown' and 'free', Heidegger helped me to cultivate the courage to do what was unheard of, at the time, in the Italian, Catholic community I came from, to leave home as an unmarried woman, and live my own life.
So what am I supposed to do, now, with this weight of Heidegger's Nazi past, given his formative influence on my life? Maybe he made an abominable mistake in initially putting his faith in the National Socialists. But what about the racism and anti-Semitism? He would have had to have know about the anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists when he joined. And even if he didn't comply with the pressure to implement the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime when he was rector of the University of Freiberg, how could he possibly have reconciled these policies with his belief in the supposed 'inner truth and greatness' of the National Socialists, a phrase he uses in his essay “Introduction to Metaphysics”. For while Heidegger admitted that he soon realized his mistake in thinking he could philosophically influence the Nazis, he refused to retract his belief that the National Socialists did originally have the potential to revolutionize and revitalize German reality and potentially challenge the increasing dominance of global technology. But how could he possibly have believed that a party which was fundamentally racist could help realize his greatest philosophical and spiritual ambitions? This is the contradiction which I find incomprehensible, and in the end, morally inexcusable.
One way of looking at it, I suppose, is that intellectual brilliance doesn't necessarily preclude emotional or psychological disturbance. The academic world, like the world in general, has its fair share of schizoid individuals and people suffering from grandiosity, pathological competitiveness and intellectual dissociation, among other things. The psyche is complex and fragile, sometimes shadowed by dark forces that are hidden from conscious awareness, but which nevertheless still motivate and influence our behavior. Maybe Heidegger was neither just the 'secret king of thought' as Hannah Arendt once referred to him, or the 'devil incarnate' as Faye seems to want to suggest. Perhaps he was, problematically, both a visionary thinker and a Nazi, both a brilliant philosopher and politically and psychologically suspect.
Having read Faye's book, I will now certainly read Heidegger with more political vigilance than I used to, with a lurking shadow in mind, the shadow of a man who might very well have been an anti-Semite and a racist. But I cannot disavow the parts of myself that were shaped by reading him, mostly to do with individual freedom, one of the very things which Faye accuses Heidegger of denying, and with a different conception of philosophy itself, viewed as a poetic enterprise rather than a purely logical one. But despite his influence on my life, my reading of Heidegger has always been practical, existential, and not without criticism. Maybe my general problems with commitment have been of help to me here. I do not feel utterly betrayed as I know some have felt. The existential psychoanalyst, Hans Loewald, for example, a lover of philosophy and student of Heidegger, apparently was so devastated by Heidegger's joining of the National Socialists, that he gave up the study of philosophy altogether.
As for myself, I'm perplexed and disturbed. But I won't discard Heidegger to the trash bins of Nazi propaganda or metaphorically 'burn' his books. It must surely be obvious to most that to suggest such an idea expresses the very fascist inclinations Faye so forcefully opposes. Maybe we just have to contend with the fact that, generally speaking, people are not either all good or all bad. Didn't Melanie Klein suggest that this observation was a developmental achievement for children? Maybe so too for adults, in coming to grips with the fact that even great artists and writers, sometimes, have dark sides and do bad things.