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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Juice Research, Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo, and we're really thrilled to have with us today Richard Wallen for a talk about his new book, Heidegger and Ruins, which will be led by our own executive director, Jonathan Brent. Before I hand it over to the two of them, I just want to tell you a little bit about yivo. We're a very special place for the celebration and cultivation of Jewish history and culture. We have a library and archive with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books which are used by researchers from around the world. We make the world of those collections available and accessible also through a variety of public programs like this, as well as through exhibitions and classes, including a really special focus on Yiddish language instruction. We have upwards of 350 students studying with us each term learning Yiddish. So if that's of interest, I encourage you to check it out. And without further ado, I'd like to hand it over to our executive director, Jonathan Brent, who's leading today's talk.
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C
Thank you all. Thank you very much, Alex. Welcome to everybody, especially to our guest, Richard Wolin. I do want to say a couple of words about Richard, but I want to begin by just noting that I think it is impossible for any serious intellectual historian, any one serious about understanding the thought of the 20th century, the course of philosophy in our time as well, without somehow or other colliding with Heidegger, with those acolytes of his who popularized some of his ideas, either through deconstruction or other philosophies. And so this is a subject of great importance in terms of understanding where we are, where we have been and where we are today. It seems to me in 1946, Max Weinreich wrote a book called Hitler's Professors. And in that book, he showed how the entire educated elite of Germany, from kindergarten teachers to the most distinguished professors, legal minds, doctors, fell into line with Nazi thinking. Heidegger was among those. That alone shows the. The link between what our interests here at YIVO are and the subject of this book. And so, without more introduction, I want to say a couple of words about our guest, Richard Wolin, who is Distinguished professor of History, Political Science and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Professor Wolin is the author of numerous works on European intellectual history, including Heidegger's Children, Hannah Arendt, Carl Luritz, hans Jonas in 2001, and Herbert Marcuse and the Seduction of Unreason, the Intellectual Romance with Fascism, from romanticism to Postmodernism, 2004. His whole intellectual life had been devoted to understanding the issues that are embedded in his new book, Heidegger in Ruins, which I urge everyone to read because I believe it has tremendous power to dislodge preconceptions, to create a new context in which you may understand your own interests in Heideggerian philosophy or the philosophy of history in the 20th century. And so, without any further ado, I want to ask Richard, if you would, to say a few words about yourself, how you came to write this book, what the meaning of the book is for you and what you hope that it can accomplish. Right.
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Thank you very much, Alex and Jonathan, for the very kind invitation to communicate with a wider audience. The program at YIVO is terrifically, truly commendable. And I just like to take the opportunity of congratulating you, Jonathan, publicly on the fantastic job you've done. And I feel privileged to be a part of it, having taught courses at evo, et cetera, and having the opportunity to, to present my book, which, as I joked with you a few minutes ago in private and with Alex, was a long haul. When you tackle a thinker whose collective works total 102 volumes. I mean, Hegel comes in a distant second or third at, you know, in the low 40s, I think, or maybe even upper 30s. Someone should have warned me in advance that I was potentially biting off more than I can chew. But the stimulus to write this book, or the spur, as you correctly pointed out earlier, I've written previous books actually on Heidegger and quite happy not to continue to work on him, to go on to other themes. You mentioned some of the other books that I've published on Seduction of Unreason and Intellectual Origins of Fascism, which is a topic that's not entirely unrelated, as you can see, to the current book. But the provocation I was responding to in writing this book was the appearance of the so called black notebooks. In 2014, successively volumes were appeared totally 9. The notebooks span the years from 1931. So right at the beginning of Heidegger's incipient political self awareness as a pro Hitler. We know some more biographical background now about his support for the Nazis at this time. Just one tidbit here that I think sometimes the anecdotes get you to the heart of the matter. In December 1931, prior to this, the myth existed that Heidegger had never read Mein Kampf. He was ignorant about the movement. And this was a big political mistake. He misconstrued the Zeitgeist, et cetera, et cetera. That view is untenable. We know that in December 1931, in a letter that was published about five years ago, correspondence with his brother Fritz, who was his confidant and almost secretary, type up the lectures Heidegger had given for a future publication. He. In December 1931, he sent Fritz a copy of Mein Kampf as a Christmas gift. Okay, well, that's one thing, you know, I mean, people can make mistakes. And maybe he was short on time to pick out gifts. But then he appends the thought that sending this as a gift is in keeping with the spirit of the season. So that's food for thought there. That somehow to try to reconcile Christmas and Mein Kampf, that's something one could puzzle over for quite a while. But there's a follow up to this in Heidegger's correspondence and in the black notebooks where one can actually trace quite closely the evolution of his political thinking. And what's been important for me from the outset is that this isn't kind of a political one off or as I said before, political mistake or error. In fact, Heidegger perceived important continuities between his, you know, fundamental ontology, called it his great work of 1927, being in time, and his support for National Socialism as, you know, incomprehensible as that might seem to us. Perhaps we understand Heidegger better than he understood himself. But we need to come to grips with what he saw these connections to be and indeed his support for the regime, both in correspondence that's recently been published and his public statements was articulated self consciously in the idiom of existential phenomenology that he developed in Being in Time the same categories. So he felt, in a way that was profound, that the movement that was coming into being under Hitler was potentially or objectively the fulfillment of certain historical and cultural and philosophical desiderata that he'd outlined in Being in Time. So when these black notebooks came out, there was a. Because of the. Above all because of the shocking professions of antisemitism that had been toned down in the published work, the work that was published heretofore. And it spurred quite an international debate, not just among scholars, but in the cultural sections of the Foil of major European dailies. The New York Times published an article and many weeklies in the US Weighed in. And of course, it took a while for the black notebooks to get translated. There are about four or five volumes that cover the pivotal years of 1931 to 1948. So we also have insight into the way Heidegger viewed the collapse of Nazism, the reasons for that collapse, and his attitudes after the war. And I'll just interject at this point, what's especially disappointing is there was no learning process or attempt to. Unlike his companion companion de ROUT in the 1920s, Carl Jaspers, who wrote this breakthrough book in 1946, the Question of German guilt, urging his countrymen to come to grips and accept responsibility for the catastrophes and excesses of nationalism, was nothing like that on Heidegger's part. In fact, and this is an important part of my argument later on in the book, is that he began focusing on his critique of technology, which certainly, you know, outlines had appeared already in the late 30s in other works. And so there's. There was, for Heydrich, there was no question of German responsibility. There was no question that Nazism had committed atrocities. This he had admitted. But it was as though these atrocities were committed in the name of a higher mission, which fell short. And he held out the hope, as appalling as this might seem, that in the future some different version of Nazism, National Socialism might succeed. So he winged everything on technology. It's all technology's fault. And where does technology come from? It comes from the West. It came in Heidegger's chronology or explanation from Descartes and Descartes distinction between thinking and extended substance. This is Eckart Husserl might have shared this skepticism about aspects of Descartes, but that's neither here nor there. But Heidegger, after the war, he was banned from teaching for five years and he needed to kind of climb back and rehabilitate his reputation, which he did through this incredibly influential technology critique, where there's no discussion of the, as they're called by historians, pathologies of German social and political development. Of course, the 19th century, Germany's belated status as a nation, which only came into being under Bismarck in 1871, et cetera, no self scrutiny or self examination. Instead, everything was the fault of technology, in which case human responsibility and human intentionality plays no role. To talk about criminality or responsibility, in his view, hence was totally misplaced, both for his fellow Germans who were, as you know, the Nuremberg trials had. The first Nuremberg trials had taken place in 45, 46, and you know, implicitly, at least, those were totally misguided, since there was no question of, you know, human fault, cultural fault. It was this impersonal process of technology that was responsible.
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C
And of course, Jews were responsible to a great extent for technology.
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Right. And.
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C
And so this all fits in together with the larger framework of his thinking. But I want to say one thing before we go too much farther. Your book is not written with the intention of canceling Heidegger from conversation. It seems to me. It's written with the intention of opening up the conversation in a much more deep and important way than that conversation has been conducted heretofore. Would you agree?
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Yes.
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C
Yeah. And part of this came home to me when I was still a student and remained lodged in my head for 50 years till today. Toward the end of the Introduction to Metaphysics, he writes, the world has yet to learn of the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism. And I marveled to myself, even as a student, how he could say that, how he could write that. I read that page over and over again, asking myself how he could have allowed that to be printed. And two, how could Yale University Press have published in that form? So he was a completely unreconstructed Nazi and his views about Jews never changed either. And I wonder if you could talk about that.
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A
Right. The other spur for writing the book, or a parallel incentive, has been in the last 10, 12 years, the publication of volumes of letters. I think eventually we will see something like 35 volumes of correspondence. Heidegger was a prolific writer, philosopher, but also a letter writer. And many of these correspondences that have been published, he shows him engaging in a kind of self reflection that's very helpful for scholars to reconstruct his own self understanding, which is to say that if one goes back to letters he wrote to his wife, some of which were published 18 years ago at the time of World War I, he's already engaged in a certain amount of typecasting of Jews and Jewish responsibility. He uses the phrase, this is a phrase called in German, called from the lexicon of racial antisemitism. He uses the phrase ver judic, or he's worried about the judification of German culture and German universities, which indicates, I mean, of course there's supplementary evidence to this effect in his lectures and seminars at the time, that this opposition between Germanontum or Germanness and Jewry is a central cultural and political opposition. It doesn't have to become racial yet, but implicitly it's already racial. Because here we're right, we're reading these lines after Wagner and Wagner's Jews in music from 1850, and after this poisonous text on Judaism versus Germanism, which is the foundational text of German antisemitism from racial antisemitism from 1879. It's already well underway and Heidegger buys it. We can see him buying into this lexicon of antisemitism in 1920. Just one more quick example. He uses the word. I have it written down here, so I'll get it right. The word vertexiphone, but social. In German it's. And in English it's infestation, which is a term of course, one uses about vermin and plagues, et cetera. So he's already appropriating this lexicon as kind of a cultural political prism through which he's viewing this problem of decline thematized by Spengler's book in 1918, Decline of the West. How do we account for decline? Technology is one manifestation. And as you implied, who's been leading the charge in favor of technology according to the dominant prejudices, bankers, et cetera. It's the Jews. So it's clear Heidegger took these issues quite seriously. And you know, this is an important kind of contextual point. And I'll stop here for now. But people wonder. Well, you know, we read his philosophical work, Being in Time and other works from the twenties and from this period, and we don't see explicit traces of antisemitism. So it must not have been so important for him. Well, one might not see these epithets specifically and explicitly, but there's an interpretation of antisemitism that talks about antisemitism as a cultural code, namely that when one talks about technology, civilization in a disparaging sense, the banking system exchange international cliques that are very powerful. The protocols had recently been translated into German right after World War I. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These are often code words. And in Germany, just to finalize this, all professors were public officials. The term in German is baamdet. They were employees of the state. And if you expressed political views in your capacity as, as you professed as a professor, you could be dismissed, as did happen in certain cases, for, you know, political proselytism from, from the podium. So one had to be very careful, you know, so liberal. It was the liberal state. Short lived the final republic. 15 years. But it was a constitutional state. So any direct attacks on the state by someone in office could be sanctioned. This is a motivation for self limitation in this regard. So we have to look at the big picture.
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C
So we want to allow 15 minutes or so for questions. And I don't want our hour to pass without my readings. This Extraordinary comment by Heidegger, which I hope you will be able to shed some light on. He writes in speaking about the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They perish. They are cut down. They become items of material available for the manufacture of corpses. Do they die? Hardly notice they are liquidated in extermination camps. And even apart from that in China, millions now perish of hunger. Aside from the almost incomprehensible cruelty of these lines, which indicates something of the temperament underlying his philosophy. A temperament of cruelty, brutality, a proclivity toward ideas of violence. It seems to me that there's more here that needs to be talked about. Particularly with respect to another one of his comments, that the Jews did it to themselves.
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Right? Yes. This remark, I think allows me to return to Heidegger's. The lack of a learning process or failure to process this incredible tragedy, this level of criminality that the world had never seen before. You can, you've read the quote. The impersonal nature of the language he uses to describe these events is indeed horrifying. This was written in 49. It was a lecture Heidegger gave. He'd been banned from teaching. He was trying to
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C
re.
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A
Establish his reputation through his critique of technology. And if I may be blunt and to a certain extent subjective, this was an explanation that at the time Germans wanted to hear that there was a lot of resentment against the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials and the whole. What Jaspers called the question of German guilt, that Germans were made to feel guilty. And we, we know from empirical social scientific studies that have been done by the Frankfurt school of German attitudes in the early 50s, that Jews were blamed and held responsible, the few that were, that remained for inculpating the Germans, for. For not being willing to forget. And so there was continuity between the types of antisemitism that existed during the Third Reich and the variations of antisemitism that manifested themselves in the post war period. The whole myth of a world Jewish conspiracy was still very prominent. Heidegger, in fact, in the black notebooks, talks about, you know, alludes to the spirit of revenge that's circulating across the globe. And he talks about. He doesn't say world Jewry, which would be. But he talks about world journalism that's indicting the Germans, that's repressing the Germans, trying to keep them down. So it's this, it's the same Jews were often associated with, of course, you know, professions of journalism and writing and, you know, intellect, et cetera. So it wasn't too hard to figure out what he was getting at. But this is another almost macabre feature of these pseudo explanations for the German catastrophe and specifically the Holocaust, is that Heidegger is formulating an elaborate explanation for what happened, usually without mentioning things by name. Does he mention that the Jews were killed in that sentence? There's mention of Jews. We don't know who the victims are. People die, they die en masse, they die. And also, but notice this is a really important quote. He says hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands have died. He's gotten his numbers wrong. And this isn't an accident because this is the slippery slope toward Holocaust. Now there's this great line, if you will, in Adorno where he's analyzing the slippery slope toward Holocaust denial. And he says he's much more succinct than I am. To his credit, he says, you know, it starts off with the view, well, maybe it wasn't 6 million, maybe it was 5, maybe 4.5. And then he says, before you know it, it didn't happen at all. So this is, I mean, Heidegger, Adorno didn't know this passage because it wasn't printed at the time. Heidegger left it out of the printed version. But, but there you have it right there. One other small aspect of this disturbing citation. You read about referencing the Holocaust. And then he goes on, Heidegger goes on to say in conclusion, apart from that in China, this is after the seizure of power by Mao in 49, who lost China a perfect then China millions perish of hunger. Well, they. Why did they par. First of all, there weren't millions. Second of all, There was an occupation by Japan that had lasted 15, 16 years. So who's responsible? This is not to whitewash Mao's reign of terror, which has been well documented, but what's going on as well is this, what was called in the Holocaust is right, immoral equivalence between the crimes of fascism or Nazism and communist crimes. The Communists did it. Communists did it too. So why are you bothering with us so much? This is all an elaborate excuse to really stick it to the Germans and country. And it comes up again. Aaron Sonolta, who engaged in the first historians debate historical strike during the late 80s, he was a Heidegger student. I don't know if you read this passage, but the argument he used that set off this valuable debate in 86 used these arguments that the, the crimes of the commune of Stalin and the Gulag were more original than Auschwitz. And the. The Nazis and Hitler just responded it was a defensive war for them. They feared that, you know, Stalin was going to stick it to them. Well, it doesn't really explain the Hitler Stalin pack in in August 1939. Very well. If, if this was such a, a deeply rooted fear, there are a lot of, you know, shortfalls there anyway, but, but thanks for, for mentioning that passage because it, it, it does tell us a lot.
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C
I want to then go to one other thing, Richard, which is that it seems to me embedded in that passage and so many other passages that you quote throughout the book from the Black books and others writings of his, this idea of German exceptionalism. In other words, the Germans could do this to the Jews because they had the right to do it to the Jews. And the Jews do not have the right to feel vengeance. They have the right to do that to the Russians. And the Russians have no right to reciprocate because the Germans are the chosen people, they are the elect. And I want you to explain a little bit how he came to this idea through race thinking, through the analysis of the folk, Blut und Boden and so on and so forth, and how the folk figures into this. And I hope we have some time to make a transition then into the way Heidegger is being used today in various movements left and right to, to accomplish some of the same ends in addition to Holocaust denial.
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A
Yeah, that's really important. And I think if, you know, I were, I were asked, the book got a bit involved succinctly to say what I discovered, what my thesis is, what I discovered that is new in Heidegger studies or Heidegger scholarship, that's important. It's not so much the relationship to Nazism, which can vary politically and historically can kind of go up and down depending on the fortunes of that specific movement. But the point you raised about German exceptionalism and the idea that Heidegger uses this language repeatedly in a political context, but also in a philosophy context in his later notion of the history of being. But it's that the Germans have a mission and, and a commission, a Zendon, an Auftrag, a commission to realize a destiny, historical destiny. And that the way he conceives of the history of being, which is the major figure of thought in his later ontology philosophy, is that the Germans there are only two authentically philosophical peoples in the world, the ancient Greeks and not the Socratic school. You've got to go back to the pre Socratics, the ancient Greeks and the Germans. And then this is part of the mythos of German exceptionalism. That there's this. And it had a very, you know, insalubrious right wing political meaning too. There's the secret affinity between Germans and Greeks. In Aryan lore, the Greeks were viewed because this is a great culture, so they have to have been our ancestors. They were viewed as Aryans and Aryans were responsible for the cultural greatness of ancient Greeks. But the way Heidegger's history of being works is that, okay, you've got the Greek beginning, that's his phrase, the. Then you get the forgetting of being, which is an important concept in Heidegger, which lasts for millennia. And now with the dawn of National Socialism, Germany is coming to self consciousness again. The title of his rector's address in 1933 was the self assertion of the German University. Germany's asserting itself again under Hitler and the Nazis. One doesn't have this kind of liberal pluralism and confusion which is un German anyway. But the Germans are recapturing this secret telos, as it were, and working on the forgetting of being to recapture this, this destiny of the West. So they're going to save the West. So this ideology of German exceptionalism has numerous valences going back to the early 19th century with fishte and the so called wars of liberation against Napoleon, where it's presupposed that Germans, the German nation, the German folk, has a special mission. So it takes various forms. But the form that develops with folkish thought after World War I is especially radical, unforgiving and racist. And as you said in your opening remarks with this question, it's exclusionary and superioristic vis a vis other people, such as Slavs, Jews, Roma and Sinti, et cetera. Along with this cultural and ethnic and racial superiority comes the right to dominate. So you had iterations of this view in the late 19th century, early 20th century. They weren't Nazi and they weren't necessarily folkish yet. So all this came together in a very disturbing mix after World War I.
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C
Yes, talk a little bit and then we'll move on quickly. But I, I don't know that all of the people who are watching today quite understand the meaning of the word folk. Here in the United States we have folk art, folklore, folk dancing. But in Germany it had a much deeper meaning.
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A
Well, this is of course it's really important because the word folk in a nutshell. But by the late 20s it had become fully racialized and those who were advocating for, or the folk were advocating for a type of. They didn't all have to be Nazis by any means, but there was A consensus that the idea of the folk, the Volksbegrift, had a racial basis and connoted these ideas that we've been discussing about German superiority, along with the right to rule, along with an entitlement to unify the so called ethnic Germans who were scattered throughout Eastern Europe and as far away as Ukraine, et cetera, under one unified Reich, which was Hitler's goal. You know, it's clearly stated in Mein Kampf for anyone who cared to read it and take a look. And that's what he acted on in, you know, when World War II began. But the irony is that when, when the. The German word for popular sovereignty, which is a term, you know, dates back to Rousseau and under undergirds the ethos and the of the French Revolution. It's conceptual basis popular, not monarchical sovereignty, but sovereignty of the people. This is the basis of modern democracy and constitutionalism. Aspects of the word in German folks Sorenite popular sovereignty. It uses the word folk. So folk throughout the 19th century too had democratic connotations and implications. So it's this really tricky conceptual reoccupation of the. The terrain here by the German right and by what's called the Volkish movements weren't just Nazi, they were, you know, many advocating these ideas sometimes with not the same, you know, racially imperialist virulence as the Nazi movement. But that's a really important transformation to note. And once again it's pretty clear, I think, that World War I was the crucible and also the German defeat and the settlement of Versailles Treaty was, to speak in pop psychological terms, this incredible blow to the national psyche or collective narcissism. There were compensations for it by these kind of wild assertions of German superiority. This is an important dynamic, especially on the right.
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C
And I know this is getting us a little bit off track and some people would not wish to make this kind of a connection. But do you see anything comparable happening today, for instance, in the reassertion of white supremacy and far right movements, which at least in some cases openly acknowledge Heidegger?
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A
Yeah, that's an important question because if one traces the growth of, let's call it neo fascism after World War II, when the fascist movements, the fascist movement in Italy, National Socialism in Germany. I mean, German cities are course like my book title, they're ruins, unfortunately, because they were very beautiful. But of course, Hitler would not surrender unconditionally and fought to the very end it could have been otherwise. So from the very beginning, Neo Fascism there was a evolution at stake. How to rehabilitate fascist ideas. Italy had a neo fascist party immediately after the defeat in World War II. In Germany, things were different, partly because of the occupation. And of course, forming a neo Nazi party had been banned. But there was an attempt to reconceive the lexicon of fascism and the meaning of fascism and racism through euphemism, by camouflage. And one point of emphasis in my book, in the penultimate chapter, where I explore what I'm calling the New Right, international New Right. In France with the Nouvelle Droit, in Russia with someone like Alexander Dugin, and also in the US with the Alt Right, the attempt is made to reintroduce racist ideas and racist concepts through the euphemism of cultural difference and natural difference, and that people weren't meant to mix, et cetera. So the hardcore biological ideology of race thinking seemed to be delegitimated in the aftermath of World War II. It was never scientifically cogent or verifiable. So even back then it was a myth and genetically had, from a genetic standpoint, had no credibility of the correlation. Attempt to correlate chromosomes with cultural or intellectual capacities just doesn't work and then doesn't now. So they're striving. There's a striving for an alternative discursive framework to get to the same goals or similar goals through a recoded rhetoric. And that has to do with the emergence of the New Right in France at End of Noise, the Neuville droit that was very successful, in fact, in infiltrating what was then called the National Front under Jean Marie Le Pen by providing it with, in a nutshell, rhetoric of let's accept it. It's. It's almost a. A fake multiculturalism. Let's, We're. We're really the, the advocates of cultural difference. We want everyone to be different. Yeah. We want to respect differences, the integrity of differences. And Le Pen, in a famous quote which I cite, says, I love North Africans, but I love them a lot better in. When they're in North Africa where they belong. So this is an excuse for, you know, this is the, the forerunner of what Eric Zimmer today or last year in the French presidential election campaign, calls the Reconquista. Let's get all the Muslims out of Europe. But. But not because we're hostile to Muslims. Right. Here's the thought. It's. It's because they're going to be happier if they're, if they're back there. No one asks them what they prefer, of course, but it's the, the same problem, quote, unquote, problem with Jews or, or other, you know, supposed non Aryans. Yeah.
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C
See, problem with Jews was worse because they didn't have a nation state to go back to. Right. So they were.
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A
And, and you know, one thing I noticed in Heidegger's recently published text from 33:34 is that there was a symbiosis with Carl Schmidt's notion of friend and enemy. And Schmidt says that more dangerous than the external enemy, because you know who the external enemy is, that this person lives outside your borders and is recognized. But more dangerous is the inner enemy and especially the Jews, because they look like. They look and act and speak like regular Germans, but their corrosive effect is even, you know, more, more insidious for that reason. And Heidegger picks up this, this Schmittian notion. They served together under Hans Frank in 34 and a committee on the Philosophy of Law, which I'm investigating at the moment. But Heidegger picks up on this notion of the inner enemy and in a line that's been widely cited, says, and it's an impassioned statement in the course of a seminar he's given, we have the text that we have to root out and exterminate, annihilate or exterminate vernichtung in German, the domestic or. Or inner internal enemy. And this can only refer to one population group. But once you accept this paradigm of German exceptionalism on a racial basis and this dynamic racial antagonism between Germans and Jews, this redempt, what Charles calls, calls redemptive anti Semitism, whereby the, the mission, the salvific mission of, of Germans can only be accomplished if they rid themselves of the Jewish enemy that is, you know, corrosive and stands in the way of this mission. But, but you can see it. Once you buy into these oppositions and this discursive paradigm, there's no coming back. And you accept almost everything to realize these goals when you have this sacred sense of political destiny and it's allied with the fate of National Socialism.
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C
So unfortunately, we've run out of time for our part of the conversation. I think we should allow 10 minutes or questions. But I do want to say one last thing, that your book, more than just about any book that I have read in a long, long, long time, drives home the fundamental fact that ideas have consequences. Ideas are not things that simply happen in the glass bottle of academia. They permeate society. They have genealogies and they have consequences. And so we need to take ideas seriously. We didn't even get into the whole conversation about the post fact world. That Heideggerian thinking opened up and in which we are drowning today in the United States and throughout the world. So I urge all of our listeners and viewers to read this book. It's an important book. You will learn a lot, it will be provocative. And if you were a Heideggerian, as I was in my youth, you will be truly shocked by much that you will find here. That said, let's turn to the questions that we have. I think we have quite a few.
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B
Yeah, we have a lot of questions. So my apologies in advance for those that we won't get to, but we'll get to as many as we can. And I just want to say once again that this book is available on YIVO's online store and Julia has put the link in the chat. Okay, so a first question. Why do you to what do you attribute the inclination to indulge or make excuses for or hide Heidegger's views about Jews?
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A
Well, given the, you know, significance, historical significance of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, as the German historian Dan Diener refers to it as a break in civilization. Civilization in German. Adorno, after the Holocaust, trying to formulate guidelines for new morality, says to begin with, never again Auschwitz. He reformulates categorical imperative acts such that your actions, your words and deeds ensure that something like Auschwitz never happens again. Given the fact that this has been these events have been the touchstone for so much moral and political and legal thinking after the war, crimes against humanity, et cetera. The normal. The fact that Heidegger was involved quite deeply and never repented with the movement is extremely disturbing and it's not justifiable, but almost to be expected and certainly almost instinctual that his more devoted supporters would try to interpret away give an upbeat spin on some of these revelations. And I think until the black notebooks had come out, that they were able to do this with some measure of success. But I think that from now on it's a lot trickier and the situation is much more challenging.
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C
And Richard, talk about some of his Jewish followers who have also had a role, had a hand in either camouflaging or perfuming Heidegger's reputation because I think that's an important element.
- [53:16]
A
Yeah, well, you were kind enough to point to the fact that I wrote an earlier book on this Heidegger's Children on Hannah Arendt and Anzionis and Livid Marcuse part of this work. I'll be brief study. It was just fascinating because on the one hand, they'd all studied with heidegger during the 20s, and he was, as Hannah Arendt mentions, there was this rumor of a hidden king, the philosopher, who had to hold his lectures at six in the morning because so many students flocked to hear them. He was completely renovating philosophy, which, of course in Germany at the time still had this place of honor. It's a land of poets and thinkers. But the difficulty they all had in different ways. And of course, in Hannah Arendt's case, there was a very marked libidinal cathexis and difficulty to reconcile everything they learned from Haidir as a philosophy teacher, which is valid, perfectly valid up to a point. And then with this descent into political vulgarity, it was a very difficult problem. Marcuse wrote an early critique in 1934 in German for the Frankfurt School journal, the Zeitgenforchung that still holds up today. In many ways. He wrote this. I translated it, actually. This impassioned letter to Heidegger in 47, very sincere and authentic, asking him to come clean, to make a final break with Nazi. He said it was very moving. It means so much to your students. It would mean so much to Germany. If he came out and drew a line in the sand vis a vis what had happened. He wouldn't do it. He said the Allies, in a example of inauthenticity. He said the Allies did the same thing in Dresden when they firebombed Dresden. So why blame the Germans? This immoral equivalence, you know, I think Dresden shouldn't have happened. It's probably technically a war crime, but one can't compare it to all the mast. The inherently genocidal nature of National Socialism. So this was a very difficult process for all of them. And of course, Hannah Arendt, they, you know, recommence their. Their relationship that had begun in 24, when she was a student, when they reunited in 1950. And, you know, at the time, not much was known. There were a lot about his actions, there were a lot of rumors, et cetera. So, you know. But just one aspect. She delivered a magnificent critique. But before they'd reconciled in the mid-40s, writing for partisan Review, she wrote a magnificent and insightful critique of Heidegger's philosophical shortcomings in this essay. What is existential philosophy, which is really a tour de force from Kierkegaard to Jaspers. Of course, her mentor after Heidegger was the culmination of this trajectory. But she's quite insightful about the failings of being in time And Heidegger's fatalism, the functionalism of his categories, that it's anti humanistic and it's anti Kantian. He doesn't appreciate human autonomy, rather dependency, anyway. But that changed very radically, I think, after the reconciliation. And she's very defensive about his reputation and what she perceived as the prejudices against Heidegger in the US that she might have been right, that the prejudices weren't always fair. Of course, prejudices never are. But I think there was also a personal. A wider, larger personal motive for her. She was always extremely put off by the facility with which Americans was associate, Germans and Nazis. And, you know, rightly so. I mean, it was pretty hard to separate at a certain point, but unfair nevertheless. And I think she saw a need in much of her work in the Eichmann book, too, which is not immediately related to Heidegger, to make the separation. So Eichmann was kind of an everyman. He was a schweibtischtter, a desk murderer, a bureaucrat. It could have happened anywhere. There are bureaucrats all over the place. So it wasn't. I think this was an additional movement away on her part from. From German responsibility. But it also spoke to her upbringing and training and that her own ambivalence is about the German tradition, which has this incredible power and greatness culturally, but also descended to the depths of criminality under Nazism.
- [58:57]
B
So we're just about out of time. But that does answer some of the questions a lot of people were asking about Hannah Arendt. Maybe we can. We can end with one final question. Even though we're going over time a little bit, which is a lot of different people in different forms have basically asked some version of the question, why shouldn't we throw Heidegger out? And if we don't, how do we navigate the kind of nuance of what is a kind of coded antisemitism? How can we kind of pick apart the complexities here?
- [59:35]
A
You want a short answer, Alex, Is that right?
- [59:38]
B
Yeah, yeah. The AFEIT fus, as they say in Yiddish, on one foot. You know, the two to three minute version. And then we'll get wrapped up here.
- [59:46]
A
Yeah, no, it's a important question, but of course, you know, a demanding one. Well, we shouldn't throw Heidegger out. I say this early on in the book. You know, that would just be kind of a subjective dismissal gesture, probably that allowed, you know, understandably, perhaps in part, given his, you know, stubbornness, dogmatism. Jonathan mentions this line, insists after the war, talking about National Socialism's inner truth and greatness. That's the line the young Habermas, like you, Jonathan, there's kind of a parallel trajectory. Was a Heideggerian when he read this line as a 24 year old in 1953, he broke with Heidegger and made the the debate and polemic public. It's a celebrated event actually in the intellectual life of the fledgling Federal Republic of Germany. But we have numerous testimonies also by Jewish students. I mentioned some of them, Gunther Anders Hung, Arendt's first husband, ironically, and Emmanuel Levinas, about the freshness with which Heidegger was able to recast the project of phenomenology. Not transcendental phenomenology like Husserl, but existential phenomenology. He was able to ask all these questions proceeding from Dasein and being in the world. And there was this new pragmatic sensibility having to do. You could philosophize about Kapp, unlike neo Kantianism, say about concepts such as being toward death, historicity, the other categories, curiosity. It's kind of a critique of mass society, in part, this critique of civilization. But be that as it may, it seemed to open up the field. And then there's the kind of after the fact reason that Richard Worthing once said that it would be impossible to write the intellectual history of the 20th century. Well, Heidegger, and he's correct in that. And Heidegger has been so influential in so many various fields, it can't be just dismissed on the basis of contamination. But we have to kind of pursue, I think, a dual track here. And while recognizing what has been innovative and constructive about the questions he poses to the history of Western thought, also proceed in full awareness about the intimacy between his philosophy and German ideology. Everyone wants to construe that it doesn't have to be Nazi, but the project to go back to the beginning of German exceptionalism and how he endowed the German people, the folk, with this salvific mission in terms of Western destiny, you know, that has to be factored into the equation.
- [63:19]
B
Well, it gives us a lot to think about. And once again I want to just say that this book is available on Yivo's Shop. Richard, thank you so much for sharing this with us today. And yeah, we look forward to continuing this conversation.
- [63:32]
A
Thanks for inviting me, Alex and Jonathan.
- [63:34]
C
Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Al.