Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)
“The man who some find the most important philosopher of the twentieth century not only joined the Nazi Party but also agreed to take the top post at the University of Freiburg. Philosophers and historians still argue about the importance of those facts. In his inaugural lecture he gave a rousing defense of the new spirit created by the Nazi revolution that drove his own assistants into unemployment or exile. (His comments about that are confined to complaints about the extra work created for him by the edict banning Jews from universities.) It’s true that his tenure as rector was too short and his work too abstract to provide concrete ideological support for Nazi ideology.
Heidegger’s students, and their students, have argued that Heidegger’s concern was not the petty details of politics, but the deeper questions about the nature of Being that took him back to the pre-Socratics. In fact, the recently published letters to his brother, who did not share the philosopher’s enthusiasm for the new regime, reveal that Martin followed the day-to-day turn of political events very closely. His private notebooks were even more damning, particularly since Heidegger, always obsessed with his legacy, left exact instructions in his testament about the order in which they were to be published. It’s stunning to imagine the man in his Black Forest cabin decades after the war’s end, preparing for the 2014 publication of passages about ‘World Jewry’ that are more ponderous than Goebbels’s tirades, but hardly different in substance.
At least as chilling as the anti-Semitic passages are the antimodern ones. Infamously, Heidegger wrote that there was no fundamental difference between the killing machines of the death camps and the growth of mechanized agriculture. The notebooks go even further: modernity, which he sometimes thought began with Socrates, is the source of all our woes. Anti-Semitism and antimodernism often go together, as the image of the wandering, rootless cosmopolitan Jew shows. The difference is that straightforward anti-Semitism is (mostly) condemned in the United States and Germany, while antimodernism runs stronger than ever. Will progressive intellectuals continue to talk of reading Heidegger against Heidegger when they read the Black Notebooks passage declaring that the Allies’ refusal to allow him to return to teaching was ‘a greater brutality than any of Hitler’s’? The monstrous narcissism thus unveiled was too much even for Günter Figal, the longtime head of the Heidegger Society, who gave up his chairmanship when the ninety-eighth notebook was published in 2014. . . .
Heidegger’s conviction that nothing Hitler did was as brutal as the Allies’ refusal to allow him to infect German youth with his murky antimodernism almost beggars belief. By the time he wrote that sentence, the dead had been counted. What kind of a mind weighs withholding permission to teach at a university against the murder of millions?”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)
