Inquiry, 43, 27188

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

Frederick A. Olafson
University of California, San Diego

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger s Nazism derives from his philosophical thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological apparatus of Being and Time and any political orientation. The elaboration of the concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger s own reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger s early life rural, conservative, and Catholic and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger s hatred of that world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi thought.

A great deal has been written about Martin Heideggers Nazism and its implications for the interpretation and evaluation of his thought. There are those who think that everything in Heideggers writings is tainted by his having enlisted himself and his philosophy under Hitlers banners; others are equally sure that no such conclusion follows from what is, nevertheless, conceded to be a terribly discreditable episode in his life. For those who think, as I do, that Heidegger was a great philosopher, a conception of the central inspiration of his thought as having a character akin to that of Nazism must be a gross misrepresentation. Those who argue for such a judgment on him pretty much dismiss his thought as an obfuscated version of his political views. To the extent that one can judge, the charge that Heideggers properly philosophical thought was complicit in his Nazism seems to mean that anyone who held such views would ipso facto have had a motive to join the Nazi party. There is, of course, the question about what the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler represented in 1933 and what they had come to stand for by 1945. This is a distinction that is not usually given a lot of weight when indictments like those of Heidegger are being handed down; and a Nazi past is usually taken to imply assent to, if not collaboration in, all the worst horrors for which that regime was responsible. Those who make these charges typically insist that the evidence of what Nazism meant was there for all to see from the outset. In a sense that is true, but one still has to ask how well people who supported the Nazis understood their intentions. There is also the possibility that in the case of a thinker like Heidegger his own personal history may have counted for more than his system of thought for purposes of explaining a political
# 2000 Taylor & Francis

272

Frederick A. Olafson

af liation. As thinkers, such people are very likely to claim, as Heidegger did, that their thought motivated the decisions they made; but their evidence on this point is not necessarily conclusive. Nor, I think, does a subsequent refusal, like Heideggers, to admit that one was in the wrong make the case for the prosecution, though it certainly re ects discredit on the person who so refuses. These are all-important distinctions and some of them have a clear bearing on the Heidegger case; but I am not going to try to exonerate him, even partially, on any of these grounds. I accept the fact that his conduct was morally indefensible; and my concern will be entirely with the role his philosophical thought may have played in his becoming and remaining a member of the Nazi party. The thesis of this article will be that although the views presented in Being and Time could not have supplied a substantive motive for becoming a Nazi, there was a connection between the Nazi episode and Heideggers thought a connection that has to be understood in terms of a certain counterpoint between his thought and his life. What needs to be understood is that both his thought and his life were marked by dualities that undoubtedly generated severe tensions. A fuller exploration of these tensions may enable us to render a more nuanced judgment on the relation between Nazism and Heideggers philosophical thought. The essential originality and power of that thought are not put in question by the argument that is made here.1 The case against Heidegger tends to go back and forth between Being and Time, together with the writings that followed closely upon it, and those that came during and after the famous turn or Kehre through which his thought passed in the mid-1930s. I will divide my discussion accordingly. In general, the attempts that have been made to show that the principal theses of Being and Time, his rst major philosophical statement, were implicated in his movement toward Nazism have been weakly supported at best.2 It simply is not possible to associate a political message with concepts like those of beingin-the-world or temporality; and the only result of trying to do so is usually to obscure their properly philosophical import. Nevertheless, a deep fault-line does run through the account of human choice and of our relations with one another that is presented in Being and Time; and when it is located, it may help us to form at least a rough idea of how it was possible for Heidegger to see Nazism as somehow converging with his own philosophical position. Although the later writings have been a happy hunting-ground for those who want to indict both Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, their deeper signi cance has, I think, been lost in the midst of this detective work. Their signi cance is not that they provided a rationale for a totalitarian ordering of society; it is rather that they mark a reaction on Heideggers part to certain aspects of his own thought as set forth in Being and Time. He evidently came to feel that the project to which that work was to contribute

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

273

was infected by a kind of Nietzschean hubris. As a result, it had come too close to the subjectivism that he thought was endemic in modern philosophy. 3 The subjectivism Heidegger had in mind cannot have been the epistemologically motivated kind that is associated with the names of Descartes and Kant, since Being and Time had done so much to put that kind of philosophy out of business. For Heidegger, human being was indefeasibly being-in-the-world and this meant that it could not withdraw into itself or adopt a skeptical attitude toward the external world. The issue of subjectivism that is relevant to the turn that Heideggers thought took had to do, instead, with the way in which self and world are associated with one another within being-in-the-world. According to Nietzsche, it is the self that sets the seal of being on becoming and thus on the world; and its life is precisely this appropriative, meaningimposing activity. Everything in the address Heidegger delivered on becoming Rector of the University of Freiburg after the Nazis came to power indicates that he understood Nazism as just such a hyper-activistic response to the human (and the German) condition. Nazism was, for Heidegger, a grandiose enactment of the supremacy of the (collective) self. That was also what he later wanted to repudiate; and it is his con icting attitudes toward any such exaltation of the self that are the key to an understanding of his venture into the political world. Accordingly, the repudiation just referred to was addressed not in the rst instance to Nazism as a political movement, but to what it represented in Heideggers philosophical interpretation of it. This reaction took the form of an extraordinary alienation of all personal responsibility and freedom and it issued in an extreme quietism. Unfortunately, there is a dimension of human life the properly moral one that is as effectively obscured in this alienated mode as it is in the assertion of self.

I
The rst fact about Heidegger to which attention needs to be drawn is the very great antecedent improbability that a book like Being and Time would or could be written by anyone who had been formed, in his childhood and early life, as Heidegger was. His upbringing was rural, conservative and Catholic; and his education was intended to prepare him for the priesthood. In itself, there is nothing unprecedented about someones turning against the beliefs and values of his family and his birthplace and producing works of thought or of art that express a very different view of the world. Heidegger does not, however, conform to any familiar image of the rebel; and there is every indication that his ties to his birthplace and to the way of life it represented remained very close. Throughout his life, he was strongly committed to the

274

Frederick A. Olafson

virtues of the little town of Messkirch, where he was born and where he was buried, by special dispensation, in the Catholic cemetery. The historian, Ernst Nolte, has even asked rhetorically whether Heidegger ever really left Messkirch. 4 The answer, I think, is that he did indeed leave it, but on a roundtrip ticket; and in the end, in the only way he knew, he returned there in spirit as well. Messkirch, and the rural ethos of home and tradition it represented, remained for Heidegger the great symbolic alternative to the homelessness of modern life the urban, industrial world that he detested. He did, however, reject the Catholicism in which he had been reared. Since it formed the doctrinal core of the way of life to which he was so deeply committed, separating himself from it cannot have been easy for such a man. But separate himself he did; and he did so most emphatically through the theses he set forth in Being and Time. That incomplete work has been variously interpreted; but it is clear that it was a radically modern work. Nothing shows this more clearly than the profound af nity with Nietzsches thought that is everywhere evident in it, if not in the details of its argumentation then in the moral atmosphere that presides over the work as a whole. Heidegger had already declared philosophy as such to be committed to atheism; and Nietzsches conception of the death of God was a dramatic expression of the new situation in which philosophical thought had to do its work. It is true that Being and Time, in mounting its polemic against the subjectivism of modern philosophy, harks back to some of the ancient sources of Christian and Catholic thought. It does so, however, in the context of a philosophical project of an altogether different kind. The theses Heidegger developed in Being and Time have been most commonly understood in terms of the treatment of individual human life that seemed to be implicit in the prominence assigned to notions like those of authenticity and anxiety. These became the identifying themes almost the mood-music of Heideggers thought in the public mind; and the same could be said of the assignment of everyday life and its values to an anonymous, public mode of selfhood that he called das Man. Authenticity and resoluteness, by contrast, were existential virtues that consisted mainly in not claiming any independent or prior form of justi cation for what one does. What Heidegger objects to is the claim he takes to be implicit in moral codes the claim that the values they are based on are somehow inscribed in the world itself and are thus prior to and independent of the choices we make. From this it follows that if we simply comply with a rule, what we call our choice will not express anything that is distinctively ours. By making it appear that we are choosing when we are, at most, going along with an anonymous directive that is the choice of no actual person, we introduce an element of falsity into our lives. In order to live authentically we have to stop playing delusory games with our lives that are motivated by the aspiration to confer some specious authority upon them; and if that requires a dismissal of

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

275

all traditional conceptions of moral truth, the Heidegger of Being and Time seemed to be willing to accept that consequence. This was, in any case, the message that Being and Time carried to the world; and in its Sartrean version it was the core of the existentialism that Heidegger was later to reject. In doing so, he seemed to suggest that it had been the result of a simple misunderstanding by Sartre of what Being and Time was about. This repudiation itself needs scrutiny. It dates from 1948 and thus from a time, well into his later period, when Heidegger had set aside many of the themes of that work that Sartre had appropriated. It is true that there are signi cant differences between Heideggers account of human being as Dasein and the radically voluntaristic character it takes on in Sartres rendering. Heidegger surely would not have wanted to associate himself with a position that carried views he had himself largely abandoned to new extremes. Nevertheless, as it stands, the picture that Being and Time gives us of human life is centered on the individual human being and on the alternatives of authenticity and inauthenticity by which that life is de ned. As far as human society what people are like and what they do in their association with one another is concerned, inauthenticity appears to be the dominant modality of their common life. As a result, society is understood by Heidegger principally as a negation of everything that could make what I do truly mine and thus something for which I would be responsible. The only principle of authority for what one does resides simply in the fact that it is, anonymously, the done thing. An individual human being who tries to emerge from this regime of conformism into a form of life in which there is true choice and thus responsibility and freedom can do so only on the strength of the call of conscience that turns out to be his own voice reminding him that he is capable of authentic agency in his own right. But why he would do so or be able to do so remains largely unexplained. It seems fair to assume that Heidegger must have felt a need to develop a conception of a possible society in which authenticity would somehow at least partially replace the inauthenticity that was the signature of the existing social order. (Heidegger insists, for reasons that need not be discussed here, that there can be no question of a life, individual or social, that is unalloyedly authentic.) There is, in fact, one section in Being and Time in which his thought seems to be moving in this direction and suggests the possibility of a conception of society as something other than an incubator for inauthenticity. Heidegger gives a sketch of what he calls Mitsein the way in which human beings are with one another in their own shared mode of being. 5 This is a mode of being that is constituted by the disclosure of other entities things and people as well as self. There are clear indications that in the case of the disclosure of other like beings such a relation has at least a proto-moral character as for example when Heidegger says that we are essentially for the sake of others.6 In my judgment, these hints could have been developed into

276

Frederick A. Olafson

a powerful conception of the ground of ethics, but Heidegger did not travel that route. If he had done so, he would have had to give up his extreme contrast between authentic and inauthentic modes of human life as well as his conception of a transition from one to the other that was essentially unmotivated. Instead, he could have built on the fact on which he in any case insists, namely, that we always have some understanding of the kind of entity each of us is even though that understanding is overlaid by very different, more of cial versions of our natures. All that would have been required was that that understanding be widened to include other human beings so that it could become the basis for a reciprocal relation among us that would be based on mutual recognition of one another as having the same access, in principle, to the world and thus to truth.7 By governing the kind of communication that goes on among human beings, such a form of reciprocity would have an explicitly moral character. This is not to say that either in ones own case or in that of others this relation would be perfectly realized. Doubtless, the obligations it carries would be honored as much in the breach as in the observance, as has always been the case. Even so, its authority as the ontological source of moral distinctions could, in my judgment, have been compellingly argued. The signi cance of the fact that there is this account of Mitsein in Being and Time is clear. It is that the large design of that work did not stand in the way of such a concept or require that it not be developed in a way that would have supplied some of the moral constraints that are missing from the account Heidegger actually gave of choice and action. It follows that if, as he in fact did, Heidegger preferred to pass up this opportunity and remain with the stark contrast between authentic and inauthentic as it stands in Being and Time, this has to be viewed more as a failure that is chargeable to him personally than as a vice inherent in the style of thought he developed in Being and Time. There is, moreover, nothing trivial about this failure. If he had been able to develop further the logic of his conception of Mitsein, he could have avoided the hazards associated with an authenticity that has no moral limits and there would have been no need for the subjection of all human choice and action to a mythically conceived being that occurs in the later writings. The concept of Mitsein could, in other words, have offered a middle ground between the hyper-activistic and hyper-quietistic versions of the moral life between which he himself moved. The idea would have been that the possibility of a reciprocal presentation of ones choices to other human beings as being consistent with their interests could supply the basis for moral validity. That would have required, however, that he accept the fact that such interests count for something; and for all his commitment to human nitude, such an idea of the good may always have seemed a bit too rooted in everydayness for his tastes. Although he was the philosopher par excellence of human nitude, his mind seemed to move, by preference, between much grander

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

277

alternatives. One of those was the distinctively modern project of Being and Time, and he was apparently unwilling to amend it in a way that would at least have acknowledged the principle of mutuality as a basis for moral validity under conditions of just such nitude. In spite of the availability to him of these interesting possibilities, Heideggers thinking about society and history moved into very different channels. More speci cally, he was deeply interested in the thought of Ernst Junger, the author of a well-known book, Der Arbeiter (1932), that presented the worker and the technology of which he was the bearer as introducing a new kind of society that would replace the bourgeois order of the nineteenth century. 8 Under these new auspices there was to be something like a total mobilization (totale Mobilmachung) of society a mobilization in which Germans would put aside the bourgeois mentality and live the life of soldiers and workers. To Heidegger, this meant that in this new order the German people would be enabled to transcend its ordinary mode of life by the resoluteness of the leader to whom it would have subordinated itself, although how that kind of subordination could count as authenticity was never explained. In the matter of technology that gured so prominently in Jungers writings, one might have expected that Heidegger would be primarily concerned with the threat it represented to any traditional mode of life and that his attitude would have been as negative from the start as it was to become later. That fear was undoubtedly implicit in the attitude he took; but in the period of his attachment to the Nazi cause there was another more positive view as well. He appears to have held that technology could somehow be mastered and turned to good uses by a regime like Hitlers. In this way, a matrix would be created within which technology would nd its proper place in which it would be subject to the will of such a people and not be the uncontrolled plaything of a consumer society. With the rise and advent to power of the Nazi party, Heidegger evidently thought he had identi ed the political instrumentality that could give effect to these ideas. He was, of course, conspicuously lacking in any actual experience of the political world; but that fact did not lead him to question his own judgments in such matters. It is tempting to trace this deeply felt af nity with the Nazi cause to the fact that it was characterized by a dual allegiance to the old and the new as Heideggers own thought was. In the Nazi case, there was a marked contrast between a Blut und Boden anti-modernism and, on the other hand, a deployment of modern technologies and organizational techniques that were anything but traditional. Indeed, Heidegger appears to have understood Nazism as a way of having things both ways. It proposed a drastic reform of German national life that would replace the unheroic life-style of a bourgeois society with something much more vital and authentic. At the same time, it would somehow protect the volkisch traditions of Germany that is, Messkirch by the military and

278

Frederick A. Olafson

economic power of a modern state that had been placed in the service of those traditions. It seems evident that the life of such a society as the one Heidegger conceived would be one great act of self-assertion the equivalent at the social level of the kind of authentic choice on the part of an individual human being that Heidegger had described in Being and Time.9 Although it has been convincingly argued that Nietzsche should not be seen as a Nazi avant la lettre, there is a clear sense in which such a society would have realized the kind of ruthless independence from moral constraints that he called for. In the life of such a society, neither individual human beings within it nor other nations and peoples would have any rights that could stand in the way of the collective will. Nor would they have any rights to express their preferences with respect to the content of that will. The idea of an interest on the part of such an individual that could be in con ict with the interest of the whole as expressed in the decisions of its leader would simply not be accepted, and in that sense individual human beings would count for nothing. 10 It has often been said that Heidegger aspired to be the philosophical guide of the revolution taking place in his country to be, in fact, the Fuhrer of the Fuhrer. That never happened; and one can only wonder at the magnitude of the self-delusion that such an ambition betrays. How could Heidegger ever have imagined that his concept of Dasein or of being had anything to do with the inspiration or the goals of the Nazi movement? In one sense, one could even argue that his Nazism was the idiosyncratic product of his own thought and had relatively little in common with the real-world Nazism of Adolf Hitler. If this were offered as a ground of exculpation, however, it would be a specious argument since he actively collaborated with that real-world version. What really counts is the fact that the national community he was himself imagining was in certain crucial respects just as undeterred by moral considerations as the real Nazi movement was. It is true that racism and genocide did not form a part of his vision as it did in the Nazi plan. Nevertheless, it has become dismayingly evident that he was prepared to adopt the language of racism on occasion and so this difference can hardly have re ected principled opposition by Heidegger to the program that led to the death camps. 11 Can one conclude from this that Heideggers thought was compromised across the board by his af liation with Nazism? What has been shown is that it was his failure to assign any real place within his thought to the principle of respect for other human beings, together with a profound dislike for most of the characteristic institutions of the modern world, that made it possible for him to associate his thought with the Nazi cause. The real issue, therefore, is whether that failure itself was a necessary consequence of the other major elements within the theory of human being he had proposed. As already noted, no one has been able to show convincingly that the central concepts

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

279

developed in that work Dasein, world, readiness-to-hand, temporality, or even being-toward-death presuppose or require any special political orientation. Even in the case of concepts like those of fate and historicity that have gured prominently in efforts to implicate Heideggers thought in his Nazism, there is every reason to think that they are politically neutral.12 Fate does sound rather spooky since it may suggest that the conduct of human affairs is being assigned to some supra-individual force of unknown intent. Nevertheless, something that might as well bear that name does play a role in our lives, both individual and collective. It was, for example, in no way part of the life-plan of young American men in the rst half of this century to have to ght and sometimes die in two great wars. It was, instead, in a perfectly clear sense, their fate. Again it was the fate of the Polish people that their country became the battle-ground between two larger and more powerful neighbors. What the concept of fate expresses is the undeniable fact that human life must contend with circumstances that are not only not of its own choosing but can effectively destroy it. It does not seem at all likely that facts of this kind can simply be removed from human history and so a concept that acknowledges them is plainly needed, whatever it may be called. The answer I would give to the rhetorical question that opens the preceding paragraph is an emphatic No. The conception of political society Heidegger developed in his Nazi period was not dictated by the theses of Being and Time. These could have made a place for a principle of reciprocal recognition among individual human beings and thus for a principle of moral limits. This would have meant that the ordinary experience of ordinary people as they live with one another could yield the basis for a strong concept of moral obligation. This, in turn, could have been understood as the basis for an at least quasi-authentic society that Heidegger needed. But because he did not have at his disposal any working conception of a society that would be based on such a recognition when he turned to questions about society and history in the early Thirties, he could not conceive leadership as growing out of and resting on a network of ethical relationships that was already, if imperfectly, in being. Instead, it would have to be conceived as the resoluteness of some individual, however achieved, that could somehow raise the mass of the people up out of their deeply inauthentic mode of life. Needless to say, they would not be called to any form of social or political life that could be called democratic and so that feature of the modern world would be effectively side-tracked. In its place would be the profoundly illiberal society that seems to have been the only one that Heidegger could effectively conceive and subscribe to. As all these developments show, Heidegger had, in the space of about a decade, travelled an immense distance from the world into which he was born. The radical originality of the philosophical achievement that we associate with his name had emerged once and for all in the pages of Being

280

Frederick A. Olafson

and Time. One can only guess at how the further development of the central theses of that work would have proceeded if Heidegger had not been drawn into the political life of his time. There is, however, as I hope to show, reason to think that he would have reacted against certain aspects of the position he had taken in Being and Time even if it had never come to be associated with political activism. That reaction, when it came, re ected two quite different sets of facts. There was, rst, the tension between the rejection of the modern world that came out of his allegiance to Messkirch and the pronouncedly modern character of his own thought with its Nietzschean af nities. Somehow, one suspects, that tension would have had to be resolved in some way that made a larger place for the authority of tradition than does the rather equivocal discussion devoted to it in Being and Time. There were also purely philosophical considerations having to do with the status of the concept of being as such that was originally scheduled to be set forth in Section 3 of Part I of Being and Time but never in fact appeared. In the next section, it will be shown that these required substantial quali cations of the conception of human being in the published sections of that work. In any case, it was in this quite unstable condition of his own thought that Heidegger had to deal with the political realities in his own country that were created by the assumption of power by the Nazis. As things turned out, the political program of the Nazis appears to have converged, in Heideggers eyes, with his own thinking about the situation of Germany. The consequences of that apparent convergence were to be disastrous for Heideggers reputation both as a thinker and as a human being.

II
When one tries to get at the sense Heidegger himself made of the debacle in which Nazism and his own intellectual and moral investment in it ended, the best evidence may be the direction his subsequent thought took rather than the few public statements he made. Those statements were markedly unrepentant and self-serving. Heidegger not only remained a member of the Nazi Party from the time of his resignation as Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1934 until the end of the war; he even went so far as to re-print in the 1950s a passage from his lectures in the 1930s in which he referred to the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism. There was no acknowledgment that he had associated his own thought with a political movement that carried out the mass-murder of the European Jews an event that he equated with the bombing of Dresden at the end of the war. In a rather different vein, there have been reports that he blamed Nietzsche for the trouble his views had got him, Heidegger, into; but even if these are true, they appear to make Heidegger himself the victim. That is hardly the mea culpa that was surely in

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

281

order. Claims have also been made by Heideggers supporters that his lectures at Freiburg were salted with comments that expressed his alienation from the actuality of Nazism from 1934 on. If the pense es that he was setting down at the time and appeared in his posthumously published Beitrage zur Philosophie are a fair sample of what he was saying and thinking at the time, it seems to have been pretty tame stuff and might easily have eluded the eye of a censor. Altogether, the claim that Heidegger ever did anything to rock the Nazi boat appears to lack any real foundation in fact. And there is no evidence at all that he saw what he had done as re ecting an abysmal failure of moral understanding as it in fact did. The evidence offered by his writings from the mid-Thirties onward is another story. Unfortunately, they too avoid the issue of his personal responsibility. What they do do is to use the conceptual apparatus of Being and Time which was still mostly in place so as to make it serve a signi cantly different purpose. If there was a failure in Being and Time to acknowledge our responsibilities to one another as human beings, the later writings remove the whole issue of human responsibility and freedom from the discussion and assign all agency to being which is thus conceived, in spite of all Heideggers prohibitions against just this move, as a super-entity. But in order to understand what Heidegger is doing in this later phase, one has to interpret Being and Time itself in a way that goes beyond the kind of philosophical anthropology discussed above to the deeper priorities of his thought. There is a strong temptation to view this phase of Heideggers thought as an ideological smokescreen a disguise for the failure in which his Nazis adventure had ended. There are, however, serious and recognizably philosophical issues that are raised in these later writings although it is extremely dif cult for those unaccustomed to Heideggers idiom of thought to understand what he is about. It has already been pointed out that the change of course they mark re ected both genuine philosophical considerations that speak against some of the theses of Being and Time and a sense on Heideggers part that the whole idea of a total mobilization as a response to the human condition had been misconceived. This is not to say that he was moved in any deep way by the human costs entailed by the forms that mobilization has actually assumed. Instead, what troubled him most seems to have been the idea that human beings can take their fate into their own hands and act independently of any signals that may be sent their way by being itself. Since the idea that something called being could play any such role is likely to strike most people as quite mystifying, the role of being as such in his later thought must be examined. This is the concept that expresses what I have called the deeper priorities of Heideggers thought. Although this concern with being is often thought to have emerged in the course of the turn or Kehre that occurred in the Thirties, there is every reason to think that Heidegger meant what he said about its

282

Frederick A. Olafson

central place in his thought at the beginning of Being and Time. It does not follow that the precise status of being as such within that work was clearly de ned at that time. Indeed, the evidence we have suggests that it may have been conceived quite differently from the way it later came to be. The publication of Heideggers lectures from 1927 contains what amounts to a draft of the third section of Part I of that work in which the concept of being was to be set forth.13 What strikes one about the treatment of being in those lectures is how closely it is tied to human being or Dasein. The fact that during his lifetime Heidegger never published this version of Section 3 of Part I is surely a strong indication that he was not satis ed with it and therefore presumably not with its way of relating Dasein to being. His decision not to go ahead with this account of being is what I take to be the beginning of the turn that was to lead his thought into its later phase. It pre-dates the advent to power of Nazism as well as Heideggers own participation in it so a political motive for this alteration of course does not seem at all plausible. What I am suggesting is, once again, that the line of thought he was developing in Being and Time had brought him too close to formulations concerning being as such that assimilated it to Dasein as the human mode of being. The reason why being cannot and must not be assimilated to the mode of being of Dasein is quite simply that there are many Daseins and no one of them can own or generate the being that is common to (and a necessary condition for) them all. How being is itself to be conceived has given a great deal of trouble, mainly because the answer Heidegger gives to this question The fundamental character of being is presence (Anwesenheit) is one that he had appeared to reject in Being and Time.14 The explanation of this apparent contradiction is that the presence with which Heidegger identi es being is not the static tenseless presence that the Greeks had conceived it to be. It was a tensed being that comprises pastness and futurity as well as the present as the conditions under which things are and have been and are about to be. To use a metaphor that Heidegger put to a somewhat different use in Being and Time, one could say that being is the Between that, in the language of Plato, connects knowledge with its object and does so, according to Heidegger, by enabling the latter to be there for the knower.15 The other essential element in the account the later Heidegger gives of being is the fact that being as presence hides itself in the sense that, in making it possible for entities to be there, it is itself eclipsed so that it is as though there were only entities. This (dis)appearance of being is what de ned metaphysics for Heidegger as a systematic confusion of being as such and entities and thus the presence of entities with their existence. This led him to conceive something that he calls the history of being which is really the history of the various disguises in which being as such has (dis)appeared. He insists that this history is not the history of philosophy or of human thought in some broader sense and also that it is not in any way subject to the control of

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

283

the thinkers whose names have been associated with these transformations. In a way, this idea stems from the claim in Being and Time that Dasein we human beings in one sense understands its own mode of being but in another persistently gets it wrong when it tries to work out a concept of itself. The relation between Dasein and being has now been reversed and Dasein is a (necessary) counterpart of being instead of somehow generating it in its disclosure of entities. Nevertheless, the same dif culty still arises when we try to form a concept of being as such. It eludes us by assuming some other guise which is always that of a super-entity of some kind the World-Spirit or the Will To Power, for example and the result has been that we live mostly in a condition of Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by being) in which being shows itself only by its absence. An understanding of being is thus at once at the center of our lives and our history and, in a quite radical way, out of our hands and even invisible to us. What Heidegger has to say about the modern European period in the history of being has a special interest. His thesis is that from Descartes onward the effort of philosophical and scienti c thought has been to achieve certainty in its grasp of the way the world around it works. This certainty in turn is instrumental to a determination to control and exploit the natural world for our own purposes. The goal of this effort is to establish the control of the human mind as the subject of subjects over the criteria for what is to count as real. Being is in this way effectively designed by human thought and projected upon things in the world; and any sense we may have had of the latter as showing themselves to us and of ourselves as the bene ciaries of their presence has been completely lost. What has just been said and the active verbs used in saying it may seem to make all of this a chapter in the history of human thought and human praxis. For Heidegger, however, it is being as presence itself that is at work here in one or another of its manifestations as what it is not. One of the guises in which it (dis)appears is the rei ed ontology that is appropriate to an age of technology; but there, too, being manifests itself by its absence. For all its vaunted self-suf ciency, the technological world-view is just as dependent upon what is given to it as any other. Since Nietzsche played such an important role in Heideggers early thought, the place assigned to him in this history of being deserves particular attention. Throughout the Thirties Heidegger gave lectures on Nietzsches thought and there is also a major paper from 1943 on his thesis about the death of God.16 Nietzsches stature as a thinker is still as impressive in Heideggers eyes as it ever was; but it is very differently interpreted. Heidegger argues that Nietzsche completes the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy the one inaugurated by Plato and, according to Heidegger, carried forward by Descartes that deals only with entities and misses the fact of being as presence altogether. Nietzsches innovation was to introduce an affective and

284

Frederick A. Olafson

volitional element into the way the being of entities is projected upon them. Being as such, in its properly conceived independence from human praxis for which it serves as a necessary condition, is reduced to the status of what Heidegger calls das Gemachte the creature or utensil of human intelligence and will. If piety is, as Santayana suggested, a sense of reverence for the deepest sources of our being (and thus presumably for being itself, however construed), then the manic self-assertion that is implicit in Nietzsches whole conception of a will to power that sets the seal of being on becoming would have to be judged to be irreverent and even impious in the highest degree. What is so extraordinary about the account of being that Heidegger himself presents is that it removes all agency from human life and attributes it to being. Being apparently arranges all the scenarios for what we have thought of as our lives the lives for which we ourselves had also been thought to be in some signi cant measure responsible. The original idea of being as presence was the idea of something that makes possible the being-there for human beings of things as well as other human beings. 17 The further ordering of the entities so disclosed was understood to be governed by pragmatic considerations the ways in which things might be used. It certainly did not portray being as itself the imposition of some kind of super-order on this milieu of presence. To assign it such a function is, as has already been pointed out, to treat it as though it were an entity of some kind with powers of its own, among them the power to hide and disguise itself and to make the world at least seem to conform to its current version of itself. Not only does Heidegger leave behind the pragmatic themes of his early thought; he even condemns evaluative judgment as such as a subjectivization of being. This effectively leaves human beings only the pitifully reduced agency implicit in their having the option of listening to what being may have to impart to them or going on blindly in their own way which on this view will not even be really theirs. But if there is no judgment of the relative value of alternative outcomes, rational agency itself will be excluded and so the nal message the later Heidegger leaves us with is something like a Lennonesque Let it be! This is a heavy price to have to pay for having overstepped the bounds within which human beings are evidently, on this view, supposed to remain. But in any case, the question must be: what do these limits derive from? One thing about this is clear and that is that if hubris was indeed involved in the project of Being and Time, it had nothing to do with any violation of something that may have been owed to other human beings. If Heideggers reaction had been primarily motivated by the horrors of the Nazi period the actual and needless harm suffered by the peoples of the world it would have marked a true revolution in his attitudes. Unfortunately, other human beings as well as anything resembling a reciprocal moral relation in which we all stand to one another remain the great absentees from Heideggers thought in all its major periods.

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

285

It seems clear that it was the distinctly numinous character Heidegger attributed to being as such that motivated this extreme but morally irrelevant reaction against certain themes of his own earlier thought. There is, moreover, no plausible source for his sense of this numinous character within the structures of his own philosophical thought. Its avor is markedly religious and so it is reasonable to assume that it is a transmogri ed version of something from his religious upbringing and education that had stayed with Heidegger through all the vicissitudes of his thought. It is not surprising, then, that he should have come to hold that being as presence, which certainly is not amenable to any kind of scienti c explanation, is a gift a gift of God or the gods and that thinking (Denken) as a response to this gift is a kind of thanking (Danken).18 To treat such a gift, as Nietzsche had done and as Heidegger may have feared he too had done, as though it were something that we can control and perhaps even generate ourselves was, in his eyes, a grave violation of a fundamental hierarchical difference embedded in the nature of things. As such, it activated his deepest religious feelings. One might hope that these also expressed Heideggers reaction to the calamity to which the whole Nazi adventure had led and to the endorsement he had given it in the belief that it was a realization of his own idea of a national community. Of that, however, there was no sign.

III
If one tries to sum up all the elements in this extremely complex situation, it is dif cult not to have the feeling that when Heidegger entered the world of human affairs and politics with which he had previously had minimal contact, he did so in a way that intensi ed the con ict in his thought him between tradition and modernity. He wanted to stand by the Messkirch way of life, but he could hardly do so while espousing the conception of human being set forth in Being and Time. There might have been a way of at least attempting to do justice to the legitimate claims of both traditional forms of human coexistence and the kind of ethical non-cognitivism Heidegger had espoused in that work. I have argued that the concept of Mitsein might have made something of that kind possible; but although Heidegger had developed that concept, he did not put it to any such use. As a result, he had to alternate between an extreme activism and an equally extreme quietism, neither of which could give any satisfactory account of the source of moral authority. I would also want to argue that, as a result, a historic opportunity was missed an opportunity to associate an unambiguously moral character with a radically modern, non-theistic conception of human being. When one tries to get a clear sense of the individual, Heidegger, who moved through all these vicissitudes of life and thought, it is hard to avoid a

286

Frederick A. Olafson

sense that he never truly understood the human reality of the matters that were at issue in the one and the other. T. S. Eliot once said of Oscar Wilde that he had been like a child actor; by that he presumably meant that it was as though Wilde had spoken his lines in a play that he could not really understand. Heidegger was not a child; but his career gives one a similar sense of someone who is simply not responding to the central moral facts of the matters he is ostensibly addressing, perhaps because he is somehow unable to register them. If that is so, it would be in keeping with his conspicuous failure as a philosopher ever to conceive our relations with other human beings as involving a bond and thus a limit on what we may permissibly do in that relation. That notion of a limit is what is introduced in the later writings, but it is introduced in a way that does not connect it to other human beings and in fact erases human agency as such. In Being and Time human choice and agency were conceived in a way that made no place for anything like obligation; it was as though Heidegger wanted to set it aside in favor of an expansive Nietzschean freedom. In the resulting absence of any principle of moral linkage among human selves, social authority had to derive from superior natures that impose their will on lesser beings. But when his reaction to this freedom set in, reinforced no doubt by the disasters to which it had led in its Nazi exempli cation, it was outsized and extreme. Now it was agency and choice as such that were treated much as morality and obligation had been previously. They were condemned because they derogate from the majesty of being a being that now takes on many of the attributes of the divine. Instability is the most charitable word that can be used to characterize these strange alternations. None of this exculpates Heidegger in the matter of his service to Nazism. What it does suggest, however, is that the drama of Heideggers public life is best understood not so much in terms of some primary identi cation on his part with the brutal character and goals of the Nazi regime as in terms of an unresolved con ict within his own thought (and, one may guess, his own life as well) that concerns the relation between Ego and Alter at its deepest moral level as well as the principle of moral authority by which that relation is to be governed. What makes this failure so deeply regrettable is the fact that in other respects his insights into the distinctive character of human being were original and profound in a way that is truly rare in philosophy. It is tragic that they will very likely never get the hearing they deserve because his failure, both personal and philosophical, to nd a place in his thought for moral relationships has identi ed his name and his philosophy with the darkest chapter in modern Western history. In this century he was certainly not alone in his blindness to this matter. But this signal failure on the part of a thinker who opened so many doors in philosophy has, if anything, aggravated the dif culties that still surround our whole consideration of the moral dimension of human being. 19

Heideggers Thought and Nazism

NOTES

287

1 It may seem as though the thesis of this paper contradicts the claim I have made elsewhere that there is a continuity in Heidegger s thought that bridges the Kehre. My argument has been that there was a shift from a conception of existence, in Heidegger s special sense of this term, as the ground of presence to a conception of presence as the ground of existence, but that the conception of being as presence is not affected by this shift. What I am saying here is that in neither period of his thought was Heidegger able to integrate an understanding of moral relations among human beings with his conception of their Mitsein. That was a grievous failure; but it does not affect the unity of his thought in other respects. See my essay, The Unity of Heidegger s Thought in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 9. 2 This certainly holds for two books in English that have tried to establish this conclusion: Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger s Nazism and Philosophy (University of California Press: Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1992) and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Both of these writers appear to be much more interested in politics than they are in philosophy; and neither demonstrates any real understanding of the aims or the achievements of Heidegger s philosophical thought. 3 The passage in which Heidegger comes closest to such an acknowledgment with respect to Being and Time occurs in his Nietzsche (Neske: Pfullingen, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 1945. 4 Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin: Propylaen, 1992). In some ways this is the best appraisal of the whole Nazi episode in Heidegger s career. 5 I have given a detailed account and analysis of this whole doctrine of Mitsein and its ethical import in my book, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6 Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer: Tubingen, 1957), p. 123. 7 The idea here is that truth-telling is a moral obligation and that, as such, it governs the representations we make to other people of the impact, for good or bad, of our actions upon their lives. For a fuller account, see my Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics, op. cit., ch. 1. 8 One needs to keep in mind the fact that Heidegger s own background was not at all bourgeois and that this may have contributed to his willingness to see the whole bourgeois world pulled down by the Nazi revolution. When the famous exchange took place in Davos, Switzerland between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer as the representative of the classical German tradition in philosophy, there seem to have been some doubts, at least in the mind of Cassirers wife, whether Heidegger was even, in that wonderful German expression, salonfa hig. 9 It has to be understood that self-assertion here is not equivalent to sel shness or outright aggression although it may, of course, take either of those forms. What it does denote is the absence of any true moral vis-a `-vis for whom some right of equal consideration would have to be acknowledged. 10 One of the ways in which Heidegger did express his dissent from orthodox Nazi thought was by criticizing the idea that many selves together in a community could, even in the absence of a proper relation to being, generate a validity for their actions that an individual self could not. Such remarks occur in his lectures on Nietzsche and in the Beitra zur ge Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly as Contributions to Philosophy (Enowning) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). In the latter, see, e.g., pp. 68, 9899, 321, 398. 11 These matters have been placed on the historical record in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Heidegger himself made two major statements about his involvement in Nazism. One dates from the time of his appearance before a de-nazi cation commission in 1945 and is entitled Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken . The other is the famous interview Heidegger gave Der Spiegel in 1966. Neither one of them offers anything that could be regarded as an explanation of how his philosophical thought pointed him toward Nazism.

288

Frederick A. Olafson

12 It has been suggested, on the basis of a remark made by Heidegger himself, that the concept of historicity moved Heidegger into Nazism. It may well be that this concept played an important role in his awakening to the political realities of his time from which he had previously lived at a very considerable distance. It cannot, however, have provided him with the view of the German situation in his time that led him into Nazism. As he formulated it, historicity acknowledges the quite general fact that collective action has as its context the way a generation understands its own past and responds to the present situation in which that past has issued and does so in the name of a certain future. Because it is a quite general feature of human being in its plurality and its historical situatedness, historicity as such cannot be assigned any particular political complexion. 13 See Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Phanomenologie, Gesamtausgabe , II, vol. 24 (V. Klostermann: Frankfurt, 1975), p. 318, where Heidegger went so far as to ask in a rhetorical question whether being itself should not be said to exist just as truth and world had already been. This is, of course, the word that is reserved for Dasein and to apply it to being is emphatically to pull being itself into the orbit of Dasein. 14 This statement occurs in Heidegger s Zollikoner Seminare (V. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1987) p. 283. I have discussed it in Heidegger on Presence: A Reply, Inquiry 39 (1996), pp. 4216. 15 See Platos Republic , book 6. 16 See Nietzsches Wort: Gott Ist Tot in Heidegger s collection of essays, Holzwege (V. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1980). 17 See, e.g., the many references to presence (as both Anwesenheit and Prasenz) in the lectures that constitute an early version of Being and Time: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs , Gesamtausgabe, II, vol. 20, pp. 25271. 18 Beitra zur Philosophie is full of references to the gods and to the last god whose ge passage (Vorbeigang ) is somehow connected to the gift of presence. 19 The charge that Heidegger and Nietzsche were somehow responsible for the moral relativism of students in American universities was made by Alan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), but it was attenuated by an acknowledgement that the version of their views current in the milieux in question was a crude over-simpli cation.

Received 20 February 2000 Frederick A. Olafson, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla CA 92093-0119, USA. E-mail: ir451@sdcc3.ucsd.edu