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