C (9:33)

Yes, that's pretty crucial, I think, in these debates over Heidegger and National Socialism.

A (9:42)

Yeah, the reasoning behind, first of all, his joining the National Socialist Party in May of 33 has to do with his sense of the acute crisis afflicting Western civilization, which was already part of the critique of modernity in being in time, very much influenced by Nietzsche's critique of nihilism and also Oswald Schwengler's Decline of the West. An extremely momentous book for German intellectuals, conservative intellectuals. During the 1920s and especially after the crash economic crash of 1929, there was an acute sense that things could not go on as previously. And the death knell of the Weimar Republic began sounding really about a year later in 1930, when the Nazis made their first breakthrough in the Weimar parliamentary system, winning 18% of the vote in 1930, that really changed the political landscape where extreme parties were the dominant parties. So in keeping with his interest in what I called before historicity, heidegger appreciated the dimensions and proportions of this crisis. And you know, it's safe to say that he had a rather exalted sense of his own philosophical mission and the accomplishments of his fundamental ontology and being in time, placing Western thought on a radically new footing that would be beyond metaphysics, as he termed it. And to cut to the chase, he really did for a time attempt to assume the intellectual and philosophical leadership of Nazi movement. The expression that's used in this connection is he sought after the model of Plato, perhaps at Syracuse, and the tyrant Dionysus, a rather ill fated attempt on Plato's part. But he tried to lead the leader. In German it's Den. And of course the Fuhrer here was none other than Hitler. We have letters that Heidegger wrote to his brother. They've only been made available fairly recently in the last few years, which exposes his enthusiasm for Hitler's charisma as early as 1931, and his sense that Hitler could be the savior of a German political being or system that was teetering in many ways. So this is very important in terms of his motivations in stepping into the fray in 1933, as it were, and being quite active in trying to ensure that the university locally in Freiburg, where he taught and where he was, assumed the rectorship in May 33, but also on a national scale. He lobbied quite considerably several national university organizations and student organizations to ensure this is the word he uses, a fraught word, the Gleichschaltung, or political alignment of German politics and society in accordance with National Socialist principles. Quickly to jump to April 1934. The reason he resigned. It's often thought that he ran up against resistance by the party hierarchy, especially in his native region of Baden in southwest Germany. But it seems that the situation was more complicated by the fact that there was resistance on the part of the faculty. There was a long tradition of university self government in Freiburg. The faculty could generally be construed as traditional conservatives rather than radical conservatives or Nazis. And there was a lot of pushback against the rashness with which Heidegger tried to realign the university system, which was very important for Heidegger. This is the center of knowledge and philosophy, as you know, traditionally, so to speak, the queen of the sciences. We wouldn't use that term today, but it was used back then. Hence the mission of the university was considered to be very important for Heidegger. So he did resign in April 1934. The experience of day to day political struggles was something he was probably unprepared for. And unschooled for, but he remained active. And I just point out, in conclusion to an answer, it's becoming overly long, maybe, like the book itself that we're talking about, that Heidegger. Two weeks later, he joined Hans Frank, Hitler's former personal attorney, who had become Governor General of Poland, who had begun in 1933, an academy for German law. Heidegger joined an elite committee called the Committee on Philosophy of Law that had several luminaries. Hans Frank himself was the chair. There were only 16 original members. Carl Schmitt, who was the leading jurist in Nazi Germany at the time, was also a member, and so was Alfred Rosenberg, the ideology czar of the National Socialist movement. So the aspirations of this committee were nothing if not ambitious. So that's only to say that having given up on the rectorship of Freiburg University, Heidegger by no means withdrew into private life. And then to conclude with the black notebooks that began publication in 2014, we have nine volumes of them now. We can see. One of the reasons they're important is we can see Heidegger's ongoing meta commentaries on contemporary political life, including national socialism, World War II, in light of his own fundamental ontology or philosophy of being. So sorry for being a bit lengthy there, but, you know, they were broad questions. So I tried to do my best.

C (18:00)

Try to make this into an introductory prompt. So to be a little bit more, let's zero in on your introductory chapter. Why are entire volumes of the black notebooks and the collected works missing? How did they go missing? And then perhaps explain the significance of translations, for example, for nature, history, state.

A (18:23)

Yes, well, now we go from perhaps tragedy to farce. And I don't know how low I should stoop here in telling some of these anecdotes, but I guess they're in the book. So, you know, Heidegger gave one of the notebooks to a woman who was his lover in the early 50s. And it turns out that after she died, the notebook was in the possession of her son, who is a professor of German studies in Germany, now retired, Silvio Vieta. And when the notebooks began publication in 2014, there was an explanation about this missing volume and numerous queries. And all of a sudden, Vieta showed up on the scene and presented them. And it was a bit comical at the time, but. But this is kind of the tip of the iceberg concerning the editorial manipulation and, in point of fact, falsification of some of the texts. It's an important story. I didn't expect to spend a chapter on It. But I think it needs to be told in a coherent manner to understand the textual history of Heidegger's Collected Works Edition. But let me segue quickly to the second part of your question, which is also very important, namely the idiosyncratic nature of the translations that have appeared of Heidegger primarily in English, but in many languages. This is a real conundrum how one translates keywords that are embedded contextually in the ideology. Ideological situation of the times that in certain ways are almost untranslatable. It's a real problem. And of course the whole idea of having a translation is to render the keywords satisfactorily in the language of translation. On the other hand, it's fairly common practice when one's referring to key developments in National Socialism, such as the idea of Germany as a folk and the notion of, say, Hitler as the Fuhrer of Germany or leader. There's a whole litany of related terms that are very important in understanding the political self image or self conception of National Socialism in terms of the Fuhrer principle, the leadership principle, namely, and the whole idea of. In German it's Fuhrer Tummer leadership, this hierarchical notion of politics, which is a rejection, a conscious rejection of democratic egalitarianism, for starters. So my point in the book, to be brief, is that when one translates notions of. As leader and leadership and also folk, which by 33 had become monopolized by National Socialism, all the other political parties were declared illegal and the German right basically had been subsumed under National Socialism. It was a racial concept. By then one knew what one was talking about. In the 19th century, folk could mean people in English, it could be a democratic notion, it could indicate popular sovereignty. It had Rousseauian connotations. But when Heidegger's using it in the 1930s, it has very different connotations and meanings related to the racial tendencies and gist of the German people. So if one translates it as people, folk as people, this is definitely going to be misleading. It will not faithfully convey, to go back to my subtitle, the ideological crux of Heidegger's intentions. So it is a misnomer and it tends to really airbrush or factor out the ideological slant of his thinking. And if one wants to get to the bottom of this conundrum of the entwinement of philosophy and ideology in Heidegger's work, one has to heed these indicators or signs or semantics. If one wants to suppress or repress or marginalize them, then one pursues another route or avenue. And this is the problem we face with many high degree translations, unfortunately, that are slanted and geared toward downplaying the ideological aspects of his thinking.

C (24:26)

So in the context of his correspondence with his brother, can you explain the concepts of Sankasista and Razang Danka? I'll let you explain those and then, you know, you address periodically a pre Socratic thought in your book. And Heidegger, you don't have to go into that, but perhaps, you know, a later time you can. But I do want to hear about his correspondence with his brother and elucidate those two concepts.

A (24:56)

Yes. Yeah, I think signs Geschist History of Being. It's very important. We'll just stick with History of Being for the time being because that really is the kind of the COVID concept that bespeaks what in Heidegger parlance is known as the turn from the Dasein Being in the world centered perspective of Being in Time, his earlier work in existential ontology, toward a new shift that is more in line with his interest in, as you suggested, the pre Socratics, above all Heraclitus, because he feels that classical Greek philosophy of the Socratic school is still kind of committed an original sin of Western thought or philosophy by remaining indebted to the paradigm of the subject, especially Plato's doctrine of ideas or the notion of representation, which is exemplary of metaphysics for Heidegger, which is something he wants to get away from, hence the Presocratics. As an earlier approach, we only have a handful of texts to go on, but this seems to be, in Heidegger's estimation, more authentic. This really, as I said, bespeaks the fundamental shift in his thought from the 20s to the 30s, from the paradigm of existence, or Dasein to the history of being. So but this is also interfused importantly with the increasing ideological commitments on Heidegger's part, because another important philosophical theme that arises circa the early 1930s is that he perceives German Dasein, or as I call it in the book Deutschturm, or German being, as metaphysically privileged and as a unique link to the Greek beginning, as he calls it, referencing pre Socratic thought as the heir or inheritor of the Greek beginning and as the folk or people who are capable, who are uniquely capable of effectuating a transition to what he calls another beginning, Neue Anfang. It is in German. And this becomes, as it were, and I use this word intentionally and self consciously, the eschatological telos of Heideggerian thought. The transcendence of the age of nihilism and the age of civilizational decadence and decline. The perspective he inherits from Nietzsche and. And many contemporaries, one might say, and his allusions to the prospect of another beginning, paralleling a reenactment on a higher plane of the Greek beginning, whereby one might say in Heideggerian language that the being of beings for the first time can arise and come to presence. But what's important is that again, the dimension of historicity in Heidegger, circa 1933, when these fundamental philosophical transformations begin occurring in his thoughts, one also has this parallel conception that the project is tied to history and historicity, namely the role that Germany is going to play in this process. Hence my claim or thesis that there's this indispensable, essential entwinement of philosophy and ideology or ontology as the history of being and the rise of a political movement, namely National Socialism, which Heidegger identifies with considerably because many of the constituents, in terms of the leadership principle, in terms of Hitler's charisma, in terms of the unification of the national community, the Nazi term of art is Volkswagen, which Heidegger alludes to often enough, is going to be the vehicle, in a way that philosophy could never do on its own, will be the vehicle of this eschatological or mediating agency for this eschatological transformation or transition to another beginning. So there is this apocalyptical investment of apocalyptical energy in National Socialism and the Third Reich. And just to conclude here, I mean, the letters you mentioned, which haven't been translated in full into English yet to his brother, are very illuminating insofar as it shows that Heidegger really did keep in touch and on top of the political situation of the time. We know he subscribed to several right wing publications. We know he subscribed to the Nazi daily, the Volkscher Beobachter, edited by Alfred Rosenberg. And he on numerous occasions proffers judgments on various regime changes, political transformations in Germany I'm talking about in the early 1930s and 32 and 33. So it shows that he wasn't totally tone deaf to current events. So which is very important, but also that, you know, he did tie together in his own mind the developments in his philosophy or Denkin with actualities or current events.

C (32:21)

Can you elucidate connections between Heidegger's antisemitism and concepts such as Dankun and. And I might be erroneous here, and if you could address sort of his kind of the replacement of Cartesian metaphysics of subjectivity with kind of sign unconcealment and then this kind of emphasis on heteronomy. Were there any connections to his antisemitism with Sinai concealment and the concept of Duncan?

A (32:58)

Yes, I think that that's important. And it's been before the Black Notebooks were published. It's been a aspect of his work that concerning which there's been a lot of speculation, but it's been a little murky, you know, just to kind of begin with basics. It's hard to imagine someone like Heidegger joining the Nazi party and vying for a leading role in the movement as a philosophical leader without accepting one of the sine quinon or linchpins of National Socialist ideology, namely antisemitism. And if one looks back at Heidegger's earlier work to show that this isn't a total break or breach with his earlier philosophy or fundamental ontology. Certainly when one takes a look at the criticism of civilization, so to speak, in German, there's a word for it long one civilization's critique. The association of civilization in a disparaging sense with modernization and the role, the putative leading roles that Jews have played in the development of capitalism and modern society, or gesellschaft, et cetera, much of which was based on prejudice and anti Semitism. But many of these leitmotifs are implicit, I think, in the critique of society and civilization and Dasman, or the they as it's sometimes translated in being in time. Hence everything becomes, though more apocalyptical once this the development of the crisis, the progress of the crisis in the early 30s in both Germany and internationally, with the economic collapse, you know the proportions these phenomena assume. And when one steps into this role as an ideologue, these aspects that were previously more or less implicit, although they are implicit in, they are explicit in letters earlier on as well, and other aspects, but they assume a more acute and pitch and prominence. So there were many readers of Black Notebooks who were, so to speak, taken aback by the presence of avowed antisemitism. But in many ways this criticism of the international Jewish conspiracy to which Heidegger does allude in the Black Notebooks is part and parcel of the ideological mentality of the times. If one is on the German right, it's very hard to be on the right. Not even Nazi conservative revolutionary right, a la Spengler and Carl Schmidt and Ernst Junger. It's hard to be in this camp and totally ignore or distance oneself from antisemitism. There's an insight that Ernst Cassir has in the Myth of the state from 1945, Heidegger's interlocutor 16 years earlier at Davos, where Kassira mentions that in times of crisis, the trusted intellectual and ideological frames of reference also begin disintegrating. And there's the encroachment of a kind of desperation to try to make sense of dissonant circumstances. And then there was a recourse to explicit recourse or regression, as Kassira calls it, to myth and ideology, to rigid paradigms that tend to imprison thought within fixed parameters, which is something that's hard to associate with Heidegger, but it's something that really needs to be explored. So maybe I should stop there. There's a bit more, one could say, I think, about the philosophical basis of his critique of, as he calls it, world Jewry. But maybe I'll stop short of going into too much detail at this particular point.

C (38:29)

Okay, so if you could explain. I think this is really important to your book, Heidegger's. And you've already alluded to facets of it, Heidegger's spiritual National Socialism. And particularly within the context of the verjong and Jewish worldlessness. And then, if you can, I thought this was not so much compelling, but I think interesting is that he kind of almost has a racialized dialectic where he argues, the Jews, quote, the Jews have lived on the basis of the principle of race. If you can address that within the context of explaining his spiritual National Socialism, I think it would be helpful.

A (39:14)

Yes, I think that, as I said a minute ago, when the crisis, various crises, in fact overlapping crises, reach a certain pitch, there's an acute search for origins and explanations and culprits. And Heidegger, in terms of his critique of modernity, does begin to hold, you know, world Jewries. He puts it accountable. But this also relates to certain, as your question suggests, fundamental themes of his philosophy, above all, the leitmotif of having a world or, you know, kind of worldliness in Heidegger's existential sense, in being in time. And the way he develops this in the early 30s, actually beginning in 1929, is that he links the idea of having a world which is a basic constituent or sine qua non for existing in a meaningful sense. According to Heidegger. He relates this attribute to the phenomenon of rootedness and rootedness in soil and being tied to place or locality or regions. This is a very important leitmotif in Heidegger's thinking that he first develops in the mid-1920s. And one sees it recur also in his post war thinking in his work Gelassenheit from 59 or Discourse on Thinking as it's translated into English. So what happens is that he considers as a result of common misconceptions and prejudices, he believes that Jews as cosmopolitans are not rooted in place or rooted in soil and hence don't belong to nation states, a commonplace anti Semitic prejudice in the 1930s as this crisis metastasizes. Hence he claims that Jews are worldless because they are, in Heidegger's sense, not rooted in soil, a term that he uses repeatedly. And hence because Jews are, quote unquote, worldless, one cannot they have no capacity for authenticity and hence their existence is intrinsically or ontologically faulty. They fall into this category for Heidegger in terms of his reconceptualization of of historicity in the 1930s. As an unhistorical people, Heidegger divides the world in terms of unhistorical historical peoples and non historical peoples. Historical peoples are the carriers of history in the sense of Heidegger's. This term you mentioned earlier, the Seinsgeste, or the history of being. And not only are Jews worldless allegedly, but they contribute to the loss of tradition, substance, continuity, rootedness. And they are a risk to the as such, they are a risk to the Volksgemeinschaft. In fact, all these are fairly commonplace anti Semitic cliches of the first third of the 20th century. So I think this is very important that Heidegger's quote unquote prejudices against world Jewry are not merely biographical or contingent transient prejudices, but many of them, I think, are rooted in the framework, as Heidegger, I think, would be himself the first to say, and as the Black Notebooks and other texts attest, these criticisms are rooted in his philosophy, which gets back to the subtitle of my book, Between Philosophy and Ideology, that these two moments are often interfused in his thought. And one really needs to do a responsible, conscientious job of sorting these elements out to better understand the historicity of Heidegger's own thought.

C (44:21)

So you alluded to Plato earlier. If you can explore the significance of Platonic guardians as well as poet legislatures and Heideggerian thought.

A (44:32)

Yes, this is kind of an interesting aspect, because we know from several important philosophical texts, such as Plato's Doctrine of Truth, that Heidegger wrote and rewrote from the early 30s to 1940, that we know Heidegger conventionally as an arch critic of Plato and Platonism, and Plato as the culprit who set Western metaphysics along the route of ideation or representation through his emphasis on the ideas or the separation between super sensible being and sensible reality, which he dubbed inferior. But by the same token, there are early lecture courses in the thirties, in addition to his philosophically substantive rectorial address of May 1933, in which we get a different consideration of Plato's legacy, in which in the rectorial address, for example, he talks about three types of service, labor service, military service and service and knowledge. This kind of tripartite division, hierarchical division of social and political castes, which corresponds very much to. To Plato's formulations in the Republic, where Plato talks about philosopher kings, guardians and producers as the three tiers of his ideal society in the Republic, which in German by the way at the time was rendered Derstadt or the State. Interestingly, so Heidegger does reconsider this dimension of Plato's political thought at the time and actually has a dialogue, epistolary dialogue, with Germany's leading classicist, Werner Jaeger, who's on the cusp of publishing his great work on paideia, who's also interested in these questions of the role that education and philosophical education and the Greek conception of paideia as kind of a byword for education in the substantive sense can play in regenerating a state or a polity, etc. So it's especially relevant here is the motivation, Heidegger's motivation to reconsider the notion of poets and philosophers as legislators. And that's something he shares with Weber, I'm sorry, with Werner Jaeger. And of course this isn't Plato's view, since Plato held poets in low esteem and kicked them out of his Republic in book three. But there's a reconsideration of what Heidegger calls poetic revealing, basically tied to the figure of Friedrich Holderlin, whom Heidegger lectures on extensively in the early 30s.

C (48:31)

So on that note, Heidegger discusses, well, attempts to implement ideas of camps in his curriculum and pedagogy, joy and work, these militant services and the meta political camps, how are those tied? And if there was any connection to his, his kind of pursuit of the ontological potential of National Socialist education's inner truth and greatness. And am I wrong in thinking that this inner truth and greatness was in turn connected to, I think, a very fundamental idea of replacing and framing technique with this kind of pre modern Black Forest craftsmanship? Was that part of his curriculum? And how does that tie into the.

A (49:21)

Camps, Yes, I think in terms of the argument of my book and one of the central chapters, which is called only half tongue in cheek, Arbeit macht fry, which of course was the accursed maxim that was engraved in the gate to Auschwitz. In point of fact, one cannot help but notice that when Heidegger is interested in articulating what a philosophical reconstruction of German destiny would be, would resemble in correspondence to the Nazi seizure of power, one of the key words is arbeit in German or work. And admittedly there's an important confluence here because clearly, just to begin, for starters, the Nazi Party, the full name is the National Socialist German Workers Party. And there was a left wing current of the party associated with the Strasser brothers that was purged in the Night of the long knives, June 30, 1934. Gregor Strasser was one of the figures who was killed. But Heidegger's lectures and political texts 33 and 34, not just his political texts, but also lecture courses and seminars of this period are replete with paeans to the ontological mission of Arbeit. Just to step back for a minute, one of the conclusions of the German conservative revolutionary movement after Germany's defeat in World War I, which was in part a function of the November Revolution, which was a nationwide uprising and strike on the part of workers and soldiers, that one of the keys to regenerating Germany as an authoritarian state was to induce the workers to seduce them away from international socialism and from communism and the Social Democratic Party to a National Socialism, let's say with a small for now, a small N and a small S. This was the argument that Oswald Spengler made in his book After Decline of the west. Very important political book, Prussianism and Socialism, where Spengler basically argues that we don't need international values, international socialism, because we have the Prussian values of diligence and a work ethic, et cetera. And this is German socialism and it's organized according to principles of authority, etc. And of course, Ernst Junger, in his work that Heidegger revered, the worker or Der Arbeiter in German, pursued a similar argument. He conceived of German society in this dystopian, you know, work, several hundred pages as he envisioned it as a Beiterstadt, a worker state, a worker soldier state, really, when he realized that workers and soldiers were almost interchangeable, given the importance of industry and, you know, technological weaponry as a deciding factor in modern warfare, based on World War I and so forth, you know, Heidegger does have this semi provincial Black Forest mentality and approach to Arbeit craftsmanship, et cetera, on the one hand. But he also makes a sincere effort piggybacking, one might say, on Junger's notion of the worker to, you know, acclimatize his worldview with modern tech, with technology. Of course, he's known as a critic of technology in his later writings, especially the Question Concerning Technology and the Age of the world picture from the late 30s, et cetera. But there are other indices that have certainly been discussed in secondary literature on this problem in Heidegger, whereby, For example, in 1940, when the Wehrmacht has this miraculous Blitzkrieg victory over France and the Maginot line in June 1940, Heidegger calls this in a lecture course given at the time on Nietzsche, a metaphysical act. So there's this interesting discourse on technology in Germany, a traditional skepticism about modernity and technology, especially on the part of the German right of long standing, going back to figures like Werner Sombart, etc. On the other hand, one well knows that in order to be successful in modern warfare, this cannot be done without somehow assimilating technology to the values of German power politics or the values of the folk. And this is one of the aspects of National Socialism that Heidegger thought that the movement had gotten right or had at the very least taken a step in the right direction in this respect, namely, the ultimate reconciliation of the conflict between technology and quote, unquote, modern man, that somehow National Socialism, because of the values of the Volksgemeinschaft, the national community, this attempt to surmount the so called tensions and divisions or lacerations of modern society or Selschaft, the division of labor, class struggle, above all that in overcoming these lacerations or divisions, that Heidegger admired this about National Socialism, he speaks positively of the so called national community. And hence he believed that there was this integration of technology with the life of the national community. And this all has to do with his glorification of the. The concept of Arbeit, or work, which he actually speaks of as a legitimate philosophical category and existential, through which we unveil the world or the being of beings. Arbeit, or Wirk does this. And he develops this thought at length, actually in a seminar he gives in 1934. 33, 34. He's supposed to lecture on logic, but he actually lectured on philosophical understanding of the notion of folk and other key concepts in National Socialism to set the movement on proper philosophical footing. So, you know, there's also this concept very strange. One sees In Heidegger, of joy in work. In German it's Auerbeits Freude that was actually had been bandied about in the twenties by German industrialists trying to make the working class happy and more satisfied with their conditions. And so there's this whole philosophy of Taylorism that was in play during this period and that was somewhat taken up by the Nazi Beautification of Labor program with the. It's called the RAD or Reichsarbeit Service, that was the Nazi Ministry of Labor. I mean, Heidegger kept on top of all these developments. He followed them. And so it's actually quite instructive to see the way that he tried to merge his fundamental philosophical intuitions with the ongoing developments of contemporary history. It's both edifying and a bit, you know, well off. To say it's off putting it would be an understatement. It's disturbing.

C (58:43)

So you mentioned the seeming reconciliation of his technique critique with this kind of engagement with technology. How does that work within the context of his allusions to Jewish self annihilation and also in the context you mentioned this earlier, the age of the world picture and you know, did the Holocaust or World War II change any of, did it change Heideggerian thought in this regard?

A (59:17)

It didn't change it much. It kind of confirmed many of his negative suspicions about civilization, technology and the punitive role of world Jewry in all this. You allude in your question to one of the most disappointing and off putting remarks from one of the post war volumes of the black notebooks, Volume 97, where Heidegger describes, actually this is a remark that was made in the early forties where Heidegger discusses the idea of the death camps as a phenomenon of Jewish self annihilation, which at first view seems kind of puzzling. But what he meant to say was that the death camps, which were instances of industrialized mass murder. There was a perverse irony at work here since he adjudged the Jews to be the leading carriers of modernization and modern industrialism. An old argument that had been made by Werner Sombart and the Jews in Modern Capitalism. And they've bandied about, you know, countless times since then. Zombart's work is from 1911, that, you know, the irony for Heidegger is, you know, he's trying to say here disturbingly that one could make the argument, as Heidegger does, that that the Jews had died by their own hands because they, they had been murdered. Although Heidegger views this, interprets this process as impersonal There are no executioners, there are no perpetrators responsible. In keeping with his notion of the history of being, the history of being, one has these dispensations or happenings that stem from being itself. Hence one can't hold individuals, let alone nation states, accountable or responsible for these developments. So if one examines closely this very disturbing comment on Heidegger's part about the death camps as a locus or loci of Jewish self annihilation, it's the result of this impersonal process of modern industrialism, a dispensation of being as it were, which is a fundamental problem with the whole notion, later notion of the history of being in Heidegger. Because it seems a process that's almost unfathomable to mortals or to, you know, public interpretation. One needs kind of a privileged insight into the, as Heidegger calls them, the sendings of being, to discern their nature and rhythms. But I think one can take a look at remarks such as the one you allude to about Jewish self annihilation and treat them as a basis for examining some, you know, broader shortcomings or flaws in Heidegger's philosophical framework, which don't have to be tied to ideologically, to National Socialism or anti Semitism or any such phenomena, but just in terms of the interpretive blockages or incapacities that are part and parcel of this framework that views it as a imperative to go back somehow to the pre Socratics to divine or find a source of insight to explain modern, you know, history or events, etc. You know, this is probably, you know, put cynically, a subterfuge. And many of the witnesses and contemporaries who were so excited about being in time as this breakthrough in phenomenology and existential ontology felt, there was this openness and potential to phenomenological analysis and to worldliness, being in the world, etc. All these potentialities seem to be closed off, or many of them seem to be closed off or foreshortened. When Heidegger makes this momentous shift from fundamental ontology, being in time, to this much broader, all subsuming standpoint of the history of being. The phenomenological specificity seems to be lost in this analysis in favor of a more apocalyptic framework. So again, I think this is another instance where the problems of philosophy and ideology are entwined or related. And this is an important point to investigate or interrogate some of Heidegger's thought. I think one of them, just to digress really quickly, I think one of the problems In Heidegger interpretation is a lack of critical perspective. It's sometimes not good to speak in generalities like this. But in so many cases, Heidegger supporters regard themselves as authorized exegetes and treat the discourse as almost a master text that it's a privilege to interpret or analyze. And therefore these exegesis, authorized exegesis, assume that many of the presuppositions remain unexamined. And I think this is a real shortcoming. And I think to be reconceived and reconstituted, the Heideggerian framework needs to be like any other mode of thought or approach to doing philosophy, needs to be subjected to open ended criticism and discussion and debate. And I guess that's one of the important motivations on my part for having produced this book.

C (67:21)

So we briefly mentioned Heidegger's idea of labor as a calling, as kind of a vehicle to reconcile the Scholenromantik, so romanticism of the soil with techno industrialization. Is there any connection or context to his homeland, the Elminian Swabian kind of landscape?

A (67:44)

Yes, we know that Heidegger from many sources, and especially from occasional writings going back to the 20s and especially in the 50s. Once Heidegger was rehabilitated after, in 1945, he was banned from teaching for five years. After he was reinstated, he was quite a frequent. There's an expression in German for this festradner or speaker, public speaker on celebratory occasions, but almost all of these were local, for local occasions, celebrating local poets and composers, etc. And so this was actually a prominent feature of his philosophy, especially in the 50s. And it kind of culminates in this well regarded lecture or text from 59 called discourse on Thinking in English. I mentioned it before, Gelassenheit in German, where he makes these allegiances to locality and the Swabian Alaman Alemania is the region. He alludes to this already in some of his speeches from 1933, on the heroism of a figure who was executed in 1923 by occupying French troops in the Rorgabit, and in a text from 34 where he discusses his refusal of a position at the prestigious University of Berlin, his decision instead to stay in Freiburg. He musters many similar leitmotifs about his attachment to the local landscape and the mountains. And this is an indispensable ground or basis, a sense of rootedness that makes his philosophy what it is. And he comes back to these elements in the 1950s and they're quite pointed and in fact directed against the Federal Republic of Germany and the fact that Germany is occupied. West Germany for a time by France, Germany and the United States, of course, former East Germany was occupied by the Soviet Union. And one of Heidegger's modalities of offsetting or rebelling against this notion of Germany being occupied was distinctly his ensconcing himself in the region and in locality as a bastion or source of authenticity and rootedness. So I think this is actually very revealing in many respects as well. It bespeaks a perpetuation of Heidegger's anti cosmopolitanism and anti universalism, but it also in a more worrying sense bespeaks a certain provincialism and a continued attachment to these notions of rootedness in soil. Heidegger. There's an occasional speech he gives in 1925 where he says anything great is rooted in local soil. Any great work of art is rooted in locality and place. He repeats this verbatim in several places in his writings and speeches in the 1950s. So this is an explicit disavowal also of cosmopolitanism and a wider mentality which in terms of its dogmatism, I think, and rigidity is quite problematic and needs to be viewed critically as to kind of what's missing from this picture or image. Actually, you know, not to drop names, but Jurgen Habermas in a laudatio or speech of praise for one of his benefactors, Heidegger student Hans Georg Gadamer in the early 80s subtitled this speech on behalf of Gadamer, interestingly as the urbanization of the Heideggerian province, implying that Gadamer's hermeneutics had given a broader or more universal inflection to Heideggerian hermeneutics, which were often overly tied to place and locality and region and considerations of rootedness, etc. And I think this also tells us something about the source of Heidegger's limitations as a thinker and also helps explain his aversion to so called Western forms of philosophizing, which tend to be a bit often rather dismissive, I think, rather than, shall we say, nuanced and dialectical, but perhaps that's my judgment.

C (74:52)

How did all this foregoing Rompolitik, the politics of space, what was its relationship to the historical return to an authentic primordial rudder site? And was there any connection to the so called Kerr?

A (75:09)

Yes, I think that it's clear that especially in a seminar that Heidegger gave in 1934 on nature, state and history, he seems very explicit in his attachments to Concepts of. Well, we would translate it into English, I guess, as spatial politics, perhaps geopolitics. So that's a bit of a different term. And in German the term is, as you indicated, realm politik, which is the phrase Heidegger uses. So what's disturbing about this of course is National Socialism has been in power for a year and during the 1920s there had been the evolution and advanced this notion of German geopolitics or spatial politics as well. At a later point Carl Schmitt would specialize in this field when he reinvented himself in 1939 as an expert on geopolitics. But already in the the mid-1920s there were advisors to Hitler, Karl Haushofer, importantly, who emphasized geopolitics. And well, it's certainly related to Lebensraum. And what's problematic about this concept, to cut to the chase, is that it is a doctrine, or became a doctrine for German self assertion. The title of Heidegger's rectoral address is the self assertion of the German University. But he was also interested in questions, as were many German nationalists, on Germany's self assertion as a nation. So the whole doctrine of geopolitics was to reconceive international politics on a different basis than international law and a basis that was free of the dominant international body at the time, the League of Nations. And it entitled one geopolitics to disregard international agreements, international law, what we we call today cosmopolitan law as well organs of international governance. And this also coalesced with Heidegger's understanding of history as being driven by. It's an old trope that goes back to Johann Gottfried Herder, the idea that the carrier carriers of history, our Volksgeister, the spirit of peoples, individual Folker or peoples. It's not a cosmopolitan process, it's not a universal process. So this also fits with Heidegger's emphasis on the primordial influences of raum in German or space and territory and rootedness in soil, which is a phrase that recurs in his writing in the early 30s, but also before then. So I think these are also, if you will, ideological dimensions of his thought that betray a. An intellectual and philosophical and existential argument and basis for his commitment to something like National Socialism. Why he identified with it as a political movement, but something much more than a political movement, again as this transmission belt or mediator, historical mediator between the Greek beginning and what he called another beginning because of its rejection of all these so called Western values which following Nietzsche and Spengler and others, Heidegger believed were implicitly and thoroughly nihilistic. So it's the whole problematic still that Nietzsche had established, overcoming the problem of nihilism, Western nihilism. But this framework really foreshortens all the potentials in modernity, in democracy in the West. They're to a great extent based on prejudice, ideology. There's a lack of open mindedness here. Certainly there are aspects of this critique that are important and from which we can learn that resemble, shall we say, even a Marxist critique of reification and alienation and commodity fetishism and, you know, technology, et cetera. There have been attempts made, you know, in the post war period at a Heidegger mark synthesis, which on a certain level makes sense, but there I think are also limitations to this perspective. But yeah, I think that this, again, it's a similar kind of problem. This Heidegger's early, you know, existential ontology is tied to notions of existence. And often the notion of existence can be tied to notions of place and folk and you know, the specificity of German Dasein as well. So this partly goes back to the importance of the war experience. In this case It's World War I, which for Heidegger's generation was the foundational experience, such that they viewed the Nazi seizure of power in 33 as continuous with the experiences of their generation and as a justified and productive, you know, fulfillment of the hopes of that generation. The whole notion of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, to which I've alluded earlier, was viewed as a continuation of the so called community of the trenches during World War I. Of course, this is where Hitler came from and this is where many of Heidegger's contemporaries had been involved. And you know, Heidegger complained that he had a heart ailment and fortunately he lived to be, you know, 86 years old. So he must have had a good doctor who looked after him. But I think it was a source of great misgiving that he hadn't served in the war. There was so much. He even falsified his resume in the first years of Nazism by saying that he'd seen service near Verdun, the site of a major battle. But basically this was. He hadn't really seen service on the front. He was analyzing weather conditions for gas attacks. So that's something very different. But I think there was this, you know, it's biographically there was this feeling of inadequacy for not having participated in this foundational experience of his generation, the front experience or the War. And this does manifest. This generational, you know, sequence reappears in his philosophy. Generation is a category in being in time, in paragraph 74, a crucial explanation of historicity. Experience historicity with your generation and with your folk. That comes up too. And it's a struggle. It's all in being in time too. So these are, you know, if you will, elements that are also ideological or between ideology and philosophy, philosophy and ideology.

C (84:35)

Now, this is a couple decades on, but I. But I do recall there was a Heidegger convened a seminar on Heraclitus fragments, and I think the philosopher Gioro Agamben actually attended. What role did the fragments play, particularly fragment 53, the concept of polemos play in Heideggerian thought, particularly in the context of his doctrine of total annihilation and the Nietzschean internal enemy.

A (85:06)

Yes, in fact, this is not an attachment to Heraclitus, fragment 53, where Heraclitus calls polemos or war, the father of all things. And in fact, it was a slogan or a maxim that was bandied about quite frequently. Hitler, in fact, mentioned it in a speech from the late twenties. Carl Schmitt mentions it in his work, unsurprisingly in the concept of the political. And when Heidegger corresponds with Schmidt in 1933, August of 1933, possibly having in mind a kind of alliance for the reconstitution of the German state stayed under Nazism. As I mentioned earlier, Heidegger and Schmidt would join together on this committee under Hans Frank's leadership on philosophy of law approximately eight months later. So this was a slogan that seemed to capture the post World War I mentality, the Heraclitus fragment. That we were in a new age of. Well, Ernst Newman called it the age of total mobilization, and that the age of liberalism and pacifism had been surmounted and the total state was a state, as this is a phrase from Schmidt, the total state was on perpetual mobilization for war. But there's also a prominent Social Darwinist dimension to this formulation, that the essence of life is struggle, survival of the fittest. And this is also an ideological precept that one finds often in Nazi texts and conservative revolutionary texts of the 1920s that tries, as do so many conservatives today, disturbingly tries, to go beyond liberalism, not by improving it or not through democratic changes or transformations, but rather by ceding to some of the basis imperatives of struggle and survival. And there's also an aspect of Heidegger's early philosophy of existence in being in time that is conducive to moving in this direction because it deconstructs or destructs, destructures inherited metaphysical and value concepts from the Western tradition to begin with. Something, in Heidegger's view, very basic and elemental and presuppositionless, one might say, namely, being in the world. And there's a risk here, one might say, of confusing facts. Heidegger calls it facticity in earlier texts, facts and values. We shouldn't base values on facts. We have the capacity to reevaluate facts on the basis of principle. This is the basis of culture, I think. And so this recourse to facticity, to existence, in Heidegger's sense, naked facticity, basic existence throws away too much and attempts to be, I think, in certain respects, to smuggles in presuppositions, many Nietzschean presuppositions about the untenability of inherited values. And these Darwinian notions that are also prominent in Nietzsche, despite his critiques of Darwin, that life is struggle and we can learn from Darwin, and that. All these ideas are disturbingly coming back now with the New right and the alt right and the struggle of American conservatives who are disillusioned with neoconservatism as just another incarnation, pale incarnation of liberalism, looking to supersede liberalism and neoconservatism in a more muscular and Machiavellian direction. Hence Heidegger's prominence and inordinate relevance in these circles internationally.

C (91:03)

So, okay, so on the one hand, we have Heidegger's rootedness of or kind of soil place. On the other hand, we have the potential rootlessness of Lebenstraum, which you mentioned earlier, that he to a certain extent advocated for. You know, we're talking about reconciliation. How did he attempt to reconcile the two?

A (91:30)

Yes, it's an apparent paradox, because if one emphasizes the primordiality of rootedness in soil, one prima facie would have difficulty justifying, as Heidegger actually puts it in this seminar from 1934, Nature, History and state reaching out into the expanse and militarily or economically, in terms of trade and incorporating other spaces. So there seems to be a tension here which can only be resolved in terms of, if you will, social Darwinism and the fact that international politics and relations among nations is a struggle for survival and survival of the fittest, which was, you know, there was a certain consensus about this on the part of the right, especially in Germany in the 20s and 30s, which meant that those nations or peoples that didn't assert themselves or expand were consigned to extinction or disappearance. This whole notion of right wing geopolitics in Lebensraum in Germany, this whole discourse suggested, did deal with the idea of, was predicated on ideal of historical and unhistorical peoples. And the historical peoples were the ones who had the capacity to assert themselves at the expense of the smaller nations or unhistorical peoples. And of course, this could be interpreted, you know, in German, in German geopolitics, one has this figure that goes along with it all this discourse of Mittel Europa, Central Europe, Germany as the master of Central Europe, as the mediator between east and West. It has certain more anodyne connotations with the originator of the concept. Well, someone who used it in the book, Friedrich Naumann, a national liberal during World War I, had more of an economic sense, but it has a very bellicose and imperialist sense, you know, continental imperialism, let's say, with Haushhofer and other representatives of German geopolitics in the 1920s and 30s. So, you know, on the one hand you're rooted, but that shouldn't prevent you from, you know, temporarily uprooting yourself and using force and violence to uproot others and take over their spaces. It seems a bit contradictory and maybe it's not thought through that thoroughly, but at least in these meditations from 1934, that should be taken seriously. It's a philosophical text, Heidegger's seminar discussions and passages. This is nominally a solution that he perceives, which, if he's thinking like this in 34, before Germany is on a war, Nazi Germany, the Third Reich is on a war footing, one can see a philosophical basis or ground for identifying with German national socialist geopolitics in 1939, once World War II starts to fulfill the destiny and mission, the singular destiny and mission of the German folk. Even if Heidegger admittedly has specific criticisms of the Nazi movement at this point for being, you know, having abandoned prematurely some of its ontological potential in favor of mechanized warfare, let's say. But, you know, history is filled with historicity, one might say, is filled with compromises and setbacks. You know, perhaps this is only a temporary phenomenon. So even philosophers of Heidegger's stature have a remarkable capacity to rationalize, you know, untoward experiences within their frameworks, so should also be looked at critically.

C (96:46)

I have to remind myself Heidegger is all about the absolute unity of opposites when you talk about reconciliation. So to wrap up here, I'm going to connect these two questions. What role did the Heideggerian Metaphysics of myth play in trumping cognitive reason. I know there was a recent, actually pretty promising study of the Davos debate and can you connect that to the revival of Heideggerian thought among the Euro New Right. I know you just published an article on the great replacement theory as well.

A (97:23)

Yeah, I'll just kind of give a sketch of where this fits in actually, in terms of myth, it's a very interesting development, perhaps underestimated in the usual philosophical studies of Heidegger's trajectory, especially in relationship to the Davos debate with Cassirer. Already in 28, the year before the debate in Davos, Heidegger reviews the second volume of Cassir's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which is on Mythical thought. He does this in preparation for the debate and one notices an evolving sympathy for mythical worldviews as a contrast and ballast to rationalistic approaches to knowledge and truth. There's a famous saying, or, you know, I don't know how famous it is, but it's quoted at times from Heidegger's Nietzsche essay in 1941, Nietzsche's Word God is Dead, where Heidegger says that reason, often glorified, is really the most stiff necked adversary of thought. Well, if that's, if that's true, then one might reexamine the prominent reconsideration of the value of myth that is a recurrent theme or Leitmotif in 19th century German thought, beginning with Schelling's philosophy mythology. And it reappears, you know, forcefully in Nietzsche's early book the Birth of Tragedy, where he counterposes the Greek Enlightenment negatively to the Birth of Tragedy. As the title indicates, this is an important leitmotif. Then he develops, he, in this case being Heidegger, a friendship with Alfred Boimler in the late 20s, who deals with edits, an anthology of Bachofen, kind of a colleague of Nietzsche and Basel, who, you know, wrote on the Rite of Mother Mutarest, the law of mothers, etc. Which was in keeping with this rediscovery of the epistemological value of myth. Heidegger corresponds with Verna Jaeger about the importance of myth in the early 30s and his turn to Hilderlin and the foundational role of poets in founding states is consistent with this dimension. So. It deserves to be reconsidered, I think, in terms of Heidegger's alienation from epistemology, the lineage from Descartes to Kant to Husserl, et cetera. And you know, these motifs have resonance with the contemporary New Right As I was trying to argue in the article you kindly referenced in terms of. It's actually kind of surprising to see a thinker as at times impenetrable as Heidegger being invoked even superficially by the contemporary New Right. And it's an international phenomenon, after all. One of Putin's leading advisors and the ideologue of neo Eurasianism in the Russian context, Alexander Dugin, is also justly or unjustly, Russia's leading Heideggerian. He published at least four books on Heidegger. I had the surreal experience of debating some of Dugin's students at Moscow State University in 2015, a moment I'll never forget. Certainly it's a different kind of public spirit in certain quadrants of Russian intellectual life, certainly. But these arguments on Heidegger's part about rootedness and anti cosmopolitanism and anti liberalism had great resonance in this context. But it's not just in Russia, obviously. Heidegger is often invoked as a critic of National Socialism in terms of the whole program of the New Right, going back to the French Nouveldoit and Alain de Bonois, has been to rehabilitate the conservative revolutionary thinkers whom they read, rightly or wrongly, as non Nazis, hence as grist for their mill of re legitimating right wing thought and far right thought in a Post World War II context, when that whole tradition had been so seriously delegitimated as a result of the horrors and catastrophes of the Second World War. So, you know, this program has really gained a lot of traction. And it's figures such as Heidegger and Schmidt obviously who's everywhere these days. China, Russia, the United States, you name it, Spengler, etc. That seemed to be the guild of the intellectually sophisticated Nazi sympathizers, in certain case party members, Heidegger and Schmidt, et cetera. I mean, Spengler died in 36. Who knows what might have happened? So Heidegger is invoked as philosophical forebear and inspiration for many of these movements. These might not be the most sophisticated exegesis interpretations of Heidegger's thought, but still it's a phenomenon that bears note. And you know, certainly there are reasons why Heidegger is invoked as opposed to other German or European philosophers such as Kant, etc. So yeah, and this replacement theory, which of course is all over the world now and is being explicitly invoked in the case of these horrible Islamophobic mass murders in New Zealand and elsewhere, breivik in Norway, etc. You know, it all goes Back to the rethinking of citizenship away from civic belonging and political republican notions of citizenship based on principle and elective criteria such as rousseau's general will, etc. Just to use that as a figure or point of reference toward ethnic citizenship and the primacy of the ethnos rather than the demos, et cetera. This is a general cultural move we've seen in so many contexts. Even China, which still claims to be communist, is celebrating the primacy of the Han people and Xinjiang and other regions, et cetera. Chauvinistically, one must say it's a trend of the times. And unfortunately, one can see how Heidegger's defense of Rom politique and locality and even his provincialism and the notion of German exceptionalism that he stresses so often fits into this paradigm. And you know, these are phenomena that need to be reflected upon and analyzed rather than being dismissed. As, you know, this is just a part of Heidegger that is contingent and, you know, was politically opportunistic because it has deeper roots in a term he might appreciate, actually deeper roots in his thinking. So those roots have to be critically examined too.

C (107:21)

So I have one follow up question. What's up for you next? What do you, you know, is there anything you can disclose about your next study or collection?

A (107:31)

Well, it's. That's very kind of you to ask briefly in the penultimate chapter of the book that you've just alluded to, namely it's called from beyond the Heidegger, a bit portentously, maybe. Heidegger and the New Right. I did kind of ensconce myself in much of this international New Right discourse. You know, I've mentioned the protagonists, Russian context, French context, of course, the German context, which I left out, is a major context too, where you have this German Volksparti, basically the alternative for Germany that's made all these electoral inroads and known in Germany. The New Right in Germany, the Neue Reschte, they have all these think tanks and have gotten a lot of attention in recent years since the refugee crisis of 2015. So I think I now try to segue. You mentioned this article I wrote on the European origins of replacement theory. Segue to making some of these philosophical and intellectually more historical arguments, bringing them up to date and making it more contemporary and maybe hopefully turning the page from Heidegger and, you know, leaving that kind of work to others. But, you know, suddenly I worked on the far right in the past and had assumed, perhaps naively, that the conservative revolutionary thinkers and the panoply of New Right ideas were safely on the margins and would continue there. And we're in a very different world today. You read the newspapers and you know, you do this podcast and know as well as I what kind of significant ideological shift the world is undergoing toward authoritarian national populism today. And in so many cases, there's a reliance for ideological support on the part of these New Right thinkers. Julius Evola is very important. One sees references to his work all over the place. So hopefully I can play the role of someone who can communicate and make links between the original context of the development of these ideas and the contemporary use.

C (110:39)

Well, thank you for being on the podcast today, Professor Wolin.

A (110:44)

Thank you very much for having me. Ryan appreciated your questions.

C (110:50)

So the book is Heidegger and Ruins between Philosophy and Ideology, published by Yale University Press. It is out now. I've been your host, Ryan Tripp, on behalf of Professor Wallin and myself. This has been a production of the New Books Network, the New Books in History Channel. Please tune in next time.