Heidegger and Nazism

There was recent revival in the controversy over Heidegger's connection with Nazism. I did quite a bit of research on this a few years ago, so I thought it might be useful to someone to summarize what I found out, and the conclusions I reached.

Some people think that Heidegger was simply a liar and a hypocrite, who cooperated with the Nazis to further his career and/or save his skin. Other people claim that he wasn't a hypocrite, and that this makes his behavior even worse. He joined the party before Hitler came to power, and because he never formally apologized for joining, many people think he remained a Nazi for the rest of his life.

The first group gets to say that Heidegger, like Charlie Parker or Richard Wagner, was a schmuck who happened to be a great creative thinker, and there is therefore no reason to think that his ideas are contaminated by his Nazism. The second group concludes that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi, and therefore no one should read his work anymore.

As usual, the reality is more complicated. Heidegger was a schmuck, but he was not a coward. His relationship with the Nazis actually showed a considerable amount of moral courage. He was also in a sense a sincere Nazi, but that does not mean that no one should read his books. It does, however, reflect badly on his character, but not in the usual ways he is criticized. Here is a summary of what I consider to be the essential facts. I have not gone back to check my research so I may have a few details wrong. Nevertheless, I think this summary captures essentially what happened.

Heidegger was a great admirer of both Hitler and the Nazis before they came to power. This was why they made him Chancellor of Freiburg University, and why the the most famous speech he gave as Chancellor was so optimistic. That speech is pretty clearly in Heidegger's style, and was in my opinion written entirely by him. That speech contains few statements that would freak people out if it had been written at any other time in history, but it looks pretty scary when you realize he is talking about the Nazis. Over the next year, Heidegger signed (and in my opinion did not write) a variety of other pronouncements which sound like general issue boiler plate Nazi propaganda, calling for the burning of books, the expulsion of Jews etc. These speeches have been collected in a book called something like "German Existentialism". Although they are obviously important historical documents, I don't think they tell us anything about what Heidegger was thinking at the time.

After about a year of this, Heidegger resigned as Chancellor. The reason he gave was that the Nazis were not living up to their own ideals. Over the next few years, Heidegger frequently criticized the Nazis, so much so that his books were eventually banned and he lost many of the privileges that he once had. Heidegger was never jailed or physically punished for his criticisms. He was the only intellectual of any stature the Nazis had, and they didn't want to completely disassociate themselves from him. He was, however, forced to work on a labor crew when he was over fifty, lifting rocks and doing other kinds of hard menial labor. Some of his critics have pointed out that essentially all German boys and men were pressed into these labor crews as the war was winding down. However, it's obvious that an important figure like Heidegger would have been exempted from this kind of treatment if he had simply kept his mouth shut, so he really did pay a price for not being silent.

All this looks pretty good for him until you consider a few other factors. His criticisms of Nazism were limited almost exclusively to their misinterpretations of Nietzsche. No mention of the imprisonment, torture, and murder of Jews. He did not even speak up against the firing of his Jewish teacher Edmund Husserl, and editions of Being and Time published in Nazi Germany removed the original dedication to Husserl. Also, what about this claim that the Nazis were not living up to their ideals? For the Nazis, this seems like it would be a good thing, considering how vile their ideals were. To understand what Heidegger meant by this, however, you have to consider another statement attributed to him: That Hitler himself didn't really understand Nazism.

Here is where we can see that Heidegger's big character flaw was not cowardice, but hubris. Heidegger had a very special gift for reinterpreting the great classic texts of western philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratics. He believed that he was uncovering the true meaning of these texts that had been lost for centuries. The rest of us who admire this work usually see these re-interpretations as brilliant original creations,and don't worry about how accurate they might be. Heidegger apparently had an interpretation of Nazism which was as original and idiosyncratic as his interpretations of Parmenides and Heraclitus, which apparently made Nazism look pretty good. He thought that his interpretation was the only one that mattered. Perhaps he was aware of Nazism's innumerable evils and believed that eventually he could purge those out and come up with a more essential Nazi ideology that was humane and decent. This is not as preposterous as it would be for you or me to believe. Heidegger really was one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and he had a profound effect on the minds of thousands of people. This particular delusion is also not a problem when you're reinterpreting the ideas of someone who has been dead for thousands of years. But Marty, when Hitler is alive and his troops are marching across Europe, you don't get to decide what Nazism is. It's his ball, so you have to play by his rules.

Surprisingly, Heidegger never seemed to have grasped this obvious point. Apparently he believed to his dying day that he was the only person who really understood what Nazism was, (or at least could have been) and that is why he never apologized for being a Nazi. He felt that he had stood up for his beliefs, and therefore he had nothing to apologize for. However, to understand why he felt this way, you have to give a meaning to Nazism shared by no one but him, and also believe that this idiosyncratic interpretation is the only one that mattered.

Richard Mcdonough's Martin Heidegger's Being and Time has a chapter on the relations between Heidegger's ideas and Nazism which is the best work I have seen on this topic. It shows pretty clearly that Heidegger's idea of Nazism was so different from anyone else's that it was only Heidegger's scholarly hubris that enabled him to ignore the numerous evils and stupidities in Nazism, and focus only on the parts he liked.