Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy Page 2
But the unique style of the Black Notebooks is part of their flavor. If one assumes that the unpublished treatises are esoteric texts, then these notebooks are still more intimate traces of Heideggerian thinking. The author who usually remains hidden now appears in the form of a persona. But how is such a personalization of the text possible at all, when the manuscript presents itself never as a diary or thought-journal, but instead always as a presentation of thought itself at its most authentic? Is the persona of the Black Notebooks yet another mask, behind which the philosopher hides—and not only from the public? In the disconcerting words that arise at times, especially in the 1930s, is he not also hiding from himself?
Does Heidegger’s philosophy come to its culmination far from the public and at the edge of silence and stillness? In a postwar note Heidegger says of a particular observation that “in keeping with its essence,” it would “no longer be said in public for a reader,” but instead would belong “to the destiny of beyng [Seyns] itself and its stillness.”9 To write beyond the reader for the “destiny of beyng itself”? As we shall see, Heidegger himself ultimately contravenes this extreme stylization.
Nevertheless, this does throw a light on the Black Notebooks to be considered in what follows. It is a question of those notebooks that were composed before 1948. In these, and especially between 1938 and 1941, Heidegger comes to speak more or less directly of “the Jews.” They are transposed into a being-historical topography or autotopography (since every location bears a corresponding relation to the self), in which they are assigned a particular and specific significance, one that is of an anti-Semitic nature.
Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements—enlisted into a philosophical context—are found exclusively in manuscripts that the philosopher wanted to withhold from the public for as long as possible. He even hid his anti-Semitism from the National Socialists.10 Why? Because he was of the opinion that his brand of anti-Semitism was distinct from theirs. This is provisionally correct. Nevertheless, caution is advisable. Heidegger concealed not only his anti-Semitism from the public, but his thinking itself, as he explains already around 1935: “Thinking in the other beginning is not for the public.”11 The concealment of anti-Semitism is connected to a thinking that sees in the public only a perfect crime against philosophy.
The following considerations pursue an interpretation beyond that of apology, something of which Heidegger’s work remains in need. They follow the above-mentioned movement of a contamination. Consequently, one judgment or another might appear too one-sided or even go astray. Coming discussions may well contradict or correct my interpretations. No one would be happier than I.
The Being-Historical Landscape
In the years after Being and Time, Heidegger found himself in a philosophical crisis. This made itself known in various ways. It was not merely that the second part of Being and Time (as announced in § 8) was held back. But even the third division of part 1 was provided only after the fact in the form of a lecture course from the summer of 1927. The lecture courses that followed offered only tentative experiments. The project of an “absolute science of being” was not realized.1 Similarly, the undertaking of a “metontology” remained just an unfinished torso.2 The concomitant elaboration of a metaphysics of freedom likewise remained rudimentary.
Then something came to the philosopher that well-nigh revolutionized his thinking: a narrative.3 Philosophy appeared frozen in lifeless positions. Being and Time was an academic success, to be sure, but this did not somehow mean that academic philosophy as a whole was moved by it. Heidegger viewed the unceasing proliferation of academic research with growing intolerance. The era itself had fallen into an economic crisis. It could not continue like this. Political changes announced themselves; first tentatively, then with violence.
Already in Being and Time the philosopher had elucidated what he understood by “destiny” (Geschick).4 “Destiny” would be the “historizing [Geschehen] of the community, of a people.” In “our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities,” the life paths of these individuals “have already been guided in advance.” “Only in communication and in struggling,” does the “power of destiny become free.” This would be the “sole authority which a free existing” could have.5 For Heidegger “authentic Dasein” was constantly exposed to such a destiny. Were this destiny to remain outstanding, it would entail the fallenness of Dasein. Later, after 1945, this is exactly what he discerns as “nihilism”: the “unhistoricalness” of “Americanism,” i.e., the destruction of every “destiny.”6
Thus as everything was drawing to an end, Heidegger began to look for the “beginning.” Already in winter 1931–32 he held a lecture course that concerned the “beginning of Western philosophy” and the understanding of truth inherent in it.7 In the first half of the course, Heidegger interprets Plato’s cave analogy publicly for the first time. In the midst of the interpretation, Heidegger emphasizes that while “poison and weapons for death are indeed at the ready today” (referring to the death of Socrates by hemlock), nevertheless “the philosopher” is lacking. “Today” there are, “when it comes down to it, only better or worse sophists,” who can “at best prepare the way for the philosopher who will come.”8 End and beginning align themselves with the coming of a philosopher and a philosophy beyond the sophistry of academic everydayness.
But the real lecture course of the beginning is the following one, from the summer of 1932. Heidegger referred to it later, saying that “since the spring of 1932 the basic features of the plan” had been established, which “received its first formulation in the project Of the Event.”9 This lecture course, notably an interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, begins with an invocation of the narrative:
Our mission: the demolition [Abbruch] of philosophizing? That is, the end of metaphysics through an original questioning concerning the “meaning” (truth) of beyng.
We want to seek out the beginning of Western philosophy.10
What Heidegger found was the narrative of an end and a beginning, which he would repeatedly reflect upon over the next decade and a half.
The departure that so energized Heidegger’s philosophy at this moment was the possibility of no longer pursuing philosophy as a hermeneutics of historically canonical texts or of a historically canonical world. Instead—in a more decisive integration of Being and Time—Heidegger would link his thinking to the entire course of a European history that was revolutionary to its core. The beginning, which Heidegger increasingly found in the pre-Socratic thinking of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, had come to an end. “Sophists” made tired attempts at convincing each other to adopt historically ossified positions, and Heidegger himself appeared to have become one of these. Moreover, the political situation was volatile. One got the impression that the beginning needed repeating. What Heidegger expressed philosophically was not something limited to his thinking alone, but instead something that took place suddenly and world historically; and that—so it seemed to him—could be no accident.
In the passage just cited from the beginning of the lecture course from summer 1932, one finds a reference to Überlegungen II, i.e., the first Black Notebook that we have. There the thought of a demolition of philosophy is entertained:
Must we today, in the end, break off [abbrechen] from philosophizing—because people and race are no longer up to the task and as a result the force of these becomes increasingly withered and denigrated to the point of nonforce?
Or is the demolition totally unneeded, since for a long time now there has been nothing happening anyway?11
The choice is the following: we must break off from philosophy either because it stands in the end-situation of a distinctly atrophying history, or because it itself is already so atrophied as to preclude any further degradation. Ultimately, the two go together: the academic philosophy of the era was as weak as the era itself.12
One consequence could be a “flight into faith or so
me kind of raving blindness,” with Heidegger understanding the latter as “rationalization or technologization.” This and “faith” were naturally to be avoided. The “demolition” must happen otherwise. For the demolition was something that needed “to be accomplished just as much as the beginning—such that this cessation would have to be a most proper occurrence and the ultimate effort.” Just as the beginning must be actualized, so the “demolition.” What would have to be “demolished and ended,” however, was “only that history of ‘post-Greek’ philosophy, poor in beginning and gone astray.” From this occurrence an “opening of the beginning,” a “beginning again,” could arise. The narrative of the “first” and “other beginning”—accentuated by a “demolition”—was thereby found.13
It is the narrative of the “history of beyng,” which Heidegger once summarized so:
First beginning: Departure, (Idea), Machination.
Other beginning: Event of Appropriation [Ereignis].
The whole would be “beyng.”14 The narrative connects two beginnings and an end, which is characterized as “machination” (Machenschaft).15 This “machination” is the “metaphysics” that is coming to its end, which in the “event of appropriation” is overcome (überwunden) or, more precisely, converted (verwunden). This is a loose definition. The “event,” which Heidegger construes in various ways, cannot be stated in a word, if it can be expressed at all.16
This structure of the history of being, this narrative, is ambivalent. One version of the story unfolds into the relationship between origin and decline, i.e., fallenness, whereby such fallenness does not destroy the possibility of a specific repetition of the origin, but covers it over and refuses it. In this sense and as the end-formation of metaphysics, “machination” blocks our entry to a place where the “truth of beyng” might be experienced not merely as refused, but instead as purely occurring. From here, it is only a short step to a way of thinking that we can characterize as a being-historical Manichaeism.17
This “machination,” i.e., modern technology, becomes an enemy, so to speak, of the opening of that other place. “Machination” must disappear, must destroy itself, so that this other—whether blocked or open—can occur. Around the year 1941 Heidegger thought that “all imperialism”—i.e., the political dynamic of all warring parties—would be “driven toward the highest consummation of technology.” He foresees the “final act” of these events, that “the earth itself will explode and contemporary humanity disappear.” This, however, would be “no misfortune, but rather the first purification of being from its deepest deformation by the precedence of beings.”18
The use of the word “purification” is ambiguous: (1) The “purification” is a κάθαρσις, the element of an onto-tragic thinking by Heidegger in which being itself is regarded as tragic. In the context of tragedy, κάθαρσις plays an important role in the Poetics of Aristotle (1449b27). Excessive cases of lamentation and trembling lead to the purification of just such excitations. Κάθαρσις as a holy action antedates this.19 (2) The “purification” is a liberation from a contaminant, from a stain, that could be identified with “beings” as matter, as material. This thought recalls Neoplatonism, which, roughly stated, sees evil in matter as such. (3) The “purification” is an annihilation of the foreign body that obstructs the possible purity of what is one’s own. This purification, as one of beings, Heidegger rejects. Indeed, it is ultimately to be asked whether he could entirely escape the ideology of this third sense of purification.
Accordingly, purification appears to concern “decisions between beings and beyng”—as if the difference between “beyng” and “beings” posed a choice.20 By the end of the 1930s, this narrative and the atmosphere surrounding it grow more intense in Heidegger’s thinking. The intensity of the supposed “decision”—which is tantamount to a liberation of “beyng”—leads to a dependency on beings that is all the stronger, the more radically Heidegger invokes this liberation.21 The world war has left its mark on this thinking. In the later version of Heidegger’s thinking of technology, the possibility of a transformed relation to “positionality” (das Ge-Stell) is found within positionality itself.22 Here, the being-historical Manichaeism is revoked, the distinction between “beyng” and “beings” is no longer a choice, and technology as the “enemy” disappears, although the philosopher does still speak of its “conversion” (Verwindung).23
A further example of what I am calling “being-historical Manichaeism” is provided by a note from Überlegungen IX composed sometime around 1938. Heidegger remarks that while “the Second World War occasionally” shifts “into the purview of humans,” it nevertheless seems “at other times as though the authentic decision” can “not be counted upon.” For such a decision would mean “in no case: war or peace, democracy or authority, Bolshevism or Christian culture—but instead either: meditation [Besinnung] and the quest for an inceptual appropriation by beyng or the madness of a final humanification [Vermenschung] of an uprooted humanity.”24 Indeed, the human is most likely not only “incapable of decision” but now “without need of decision.” For “human contentment” in its “enjoyment (wherein mediocrity and violence go agreeably together)” increasingly escalates “into the gigantic.” A more extreme either-or can scarcely be thought. It unfolds between a thinking of the freedom of Da-sein dwelling in “beyng,” and the merely vegetative wasting away of a creature utterly integrated into the functioning of modern society, i.e., integrated into “beings.”25 Such a choice can only be a violent decision. Whoever ignores this decision falls victim to the “madness.”
There is no narrative without leading and supporting roles for the actors. We have already heard that Heidegger speaks of “people and race,” a formulation that he suppressed in the lecture courses prior to 1933. Even before this, though, we find in a manuscript, seemingly from out of the blue, the assertion: “The German alone can newly and originally poetize and say being—he alone will conquer anew the essence of θεωρία and finally produce the logic.”26 The narrative has at its beginning two leading actors: “the Greeks” and “the Germans,” each time embodying, in a chiasmic manner, both beginning and end. “The Greeks” have marked “the beginning of Western philosophy.” When this beginning goes over into its end, they themselves have a stake in this (in a way and manner we cannot further develop here). “The Germans,” on the other hand, find themselves at the place where this end occurs, in that it arrives in the “West” (Abendland). But an end can take place in history only where a beginning occurs.
While all thinking is caught up in this end, it is “German thinking” as such that welcomes it. Indeed, as the Germans begin to discern this beginning by the Greeks, they become the ones capable of repeating it otherwise. What Heidegger expects of the Germans is at first a purely philosophical undertaking, to actualize anew the “essence of θεωρία” and produce “the logic”—i.e., another θεωρία and a logic different from the previous modern ones—projects the National Socialists certainly would have held for abstruse, had they had any interest in them whatsoever. For the sake of realizing this project, however, the end would first have to be prepared: “The greatness of the downfall [Untergangs] would be achieved—not as something worthless—rather as a seizing of and persisting in the most inner and extreme mission of the Germans,” a statement that comes as the conclusion to the above remark concerning the demolition of philosophy. The “downfall” is the end indicative of the “mission of the Germans.” It is the form of “demolition” that the end would knowingly actualize—and not simply allow to happen. Later, Heidegger will repeatedly return to this “mission” of “downfall.”
Heidegger now saw the landscape of his thinking before him. The Greeks : the first beginning :: the Germans : the other beginning. Henceforth all that the Middle Ages, modernity, and contemporary times had brought forth would be enlisted into this relationship. And all that had appeared on the stage of history would be attributed to distinct protag
onists. At first there were the “Romans,” then the “Christians,” and among these above all the “Jesuits,” but also the “Protestants” and “Catholics,” then the “Russians” or “the Russian” (Russentum), “the Chinese” (Chinesentum), the “English,” the “French,” the “Americans” or “Americanism,” the “Europeans,” the “Asians.” All these collectives were localized within the relation of the first to the other beginning. And the “Jews” were added to this.
For us today, the use of such collective concepts has become problematic. To condemn them for Heidegger’s time, however, is anachronistic.27 It was common. Thus Hermann Cohen in his essay “Germanism and Judaism” (“Deutschtum und Judentum”) from 1915 expresses himself in a way scarcely different from Heidegger’s years later. As the Germans generally ascribed characteristics to the Jews, so do the Jews to the Germans.28 The end of the Third Reich was the end of such collective concepts—and thereby the end of that Heideggerian narrative relying upon a polarity between “the Germans” and “the Greeks.”
All that connected Heidegger to National Socialism stems from this narrative of the “first beginning” with the Greeks and an “other beginning” with the Germans. On the basis of this story, Heidegger embraces the “National Socialist revolution” and places himself in its service.29 He connects a “spiritual National Socialism” to this, which he distinguished early on from a “‘vulgar National Socialism.’”30 To the very end, up to the “capitulation,” and despite all philosophical distancing, it was to this “spiritual National Socialism” that Heidegger remained loyal.31 Heidegger’s thinking was connected with National Socialism not “directly” but “indirectly”—according to Heidegger—since they both pressed “at the same time, in different ways, for a decision about the essence and definition of the Germans and with that the destiny of the West.” For Heidegger, the revolution was from the very beginning precisely this: the mission of “the Germans” for a turning of the “destiny of the West.”32 It was difficult for Heidegger to part from such views, and only slowly did he find a thinking freed from the dream of a world-historical German revolution.