The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger

By Richard Wolin

Martin Heidegger’s ties to Nazism have tarnished his stature as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy. With the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, which reveal the full extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as well as his enduring sympathy for National Socialism, the controversy has reemerged in full force. When first published during the 1990s, Richard Wolin’s The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger played a seminal role in the voluble debates that ensued over the intellectual consequences of Heidegger’s Nazism. In this expanded edition, Wolin provides a substantial new preface that addresses the question of how the Black Notebooks’ publication affects our understanding of the relationship between politics and philosophy in Heidegger’s work. Building on his path-breaking, earlier interpretation of Heidegger’s political thought,.Wolin demonstrates convincingly that philosophy and politics cannot be disentangled in Heidegger’s oeuvre, insofar as. völkisch ideological themes suffuse even his most sublime philosophical treatises. Thus despite Heidegger’s profundity as a thinker, his critique of civilization is saturated with disturbing anti-democratic and anti-Semitic leitmotifs and claims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231543026

Richard Wolin

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990) and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992).

Book preview

THE POLITICS OF BEING

THE POLITICS OF BEING

The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger

RICHARD WOLIN

Columbia University Press    New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2016 Richard Wolin

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933812

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CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover designer: Rebecca Lown

Cover image: Giorgio de Chirico, the Great Metaphysician: 1917. Oil on canvas, Philip L. Goodwin Collection.

For Melissa

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d’éclairs de chaleur

Ma femme aux épaules de champagne

Ma femme aux yeux de savane

André Breton, L’Union Libre

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE 2016 EDITION

PREFACE

ONE. Heidegger and Politics

TWO. Being and Time as Political Philosophy

Between Philosophy and World-View

The Historicity of Being and Time

Authenticity and Decision

The Call of Conscience

A Self-Canceling Social Ontology; The Aporias of Decisiveness

Destiny or the Incorporation of Dasein Within a Historical Community

THREE. To Lead the Leader: Philosophy in the Service of National Socialism

Essential Affliction and the Impoverishment of Bourgeois Normalcy

From Active Nihilism to Total Mobilization

The Rektoratsrede or The Glory and Greatness of the National Awakening

FOUR. The Inner Truth and Greatness of National Socialism

A Politics of Authenticity

The Ontological Vocation of Art

The State as Work for the Works

The Equiprimordiality of Truth and Error

A Spiritual Aristocracy of Leader-Creators; Violence as an Ontological Imperative

FIVE. Technology, Antihumanism, and the Eclipse of Practical Reason

Rethinking Nietzsche

Seinsgeschick as a Strategy of Denial

A Philosophy of Heteronomy

The Leveling Gaze of Heidegger’s Later Philosophy

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

It is possible that a Philosopher might be guilty of a compromise with political authority in an apparently inconsequential manner; he himself might be aware of this. But what he might not be aware of is the possibility that this apparent compromise with authority is grounded in the deepest deficiency…of his own doctrine. If therefore a philosopher should conform [with authority], his disciples will have to explain in an internal and essential fashion what he himself was aware of in a merely external way.

Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

PREFACE TO THE 2016 EDITION

The Politics of Epistemology: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in Real Time

The National Socialist Revolution is bringing about the total transformation of our German Dasein…. The choice that the German people must now make is…the strongest expression of the new German reality embodied in the National Socialist State. Our will to national [völkisch] self-responsibility desires that each people find and preserve the greatness and truth of its destiny [Bestimmung]…Let not propositions and ideas be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Führer is the future German Reality and its law. Heil Hitler!

—Martin Heidegger, Freibürger Studentenzeitung, November 3, 1933

The rebirth of philosophy and its future will not come to pass at anytime or anyplace through the efforts of World Reason [Weltvernunft]; it will only be realized through a Volk: as we believe, through the Germans.

—Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

I

The spring 2014 publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks confirms many of the fundamental arguments and claims I set forth during the 1990s in the first edition of The Politics of Being and subsequent works.¹ To my great satisfaction, upon its initial publication some twenty-five years ago, The Politics of Being was rapidly translated into five languages (French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese) and has continued to serve as a touchstone for the recurrent debates about the fraught connection between politics and philosophy in Heidegger’s work.²

My argument was and remains the following: from its earliest beginnings, Heidegger’s thought was always already ideological—which, by the same token, does not mean or imply that ideology is all there was and is. (I will return to this point shortly.) Thus from Heidegger’s very first lecture courses at the University of Freiburg as well as his earliest publications (e.g., the articles he published in his early twenties for the Catholic journal Der Akademiker), Heidegger was an impassioned advocate of the values of German particularism. (However, this aspect of his work, which is striking and undeniable in the original German, has been intentionally neutralized or extruded in many English translations of his work.)

When all is said and done, there is nothing especially shocking or revolutionary about this claim. It is well known that Heidegger set great store by considerations of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). In fact, one of his central ripostes to the tradition of Western metaphysics was that its main currents had banished temporality from consideration. Nor did Heidegger ever try to conceal the fact that, during the early 1920s, the temporal or ontic spur to his own philosophizing had been the experiences of his Generation—colloquially known as the War Youth Generation (Kriegsjugendgeneration)—an age cohort whose worldview had been permanently forged amid the combat experience of World War I.³ The War Youth Generation with which Heidegger identified so profoundly venerated the so-called ideas of 1914 and vaunted the values of German particularism.⁴ Of course, Hitler was also a member of this generation, and in the Black Notebooks and elsewhere, Heidegger exalted the fact that the German Führer and he were born in the same year, 1889.⁵ So greatly did Heidegger esteem the existential value of the concept of Generation that he would accord it a prominent role in his Meisterstück of 1927, Being and Time.⁶

Consequently, henceforth, any fair-minded evaluation of Heidegger’s work and legacy must take into account both questions of first philosophy as well as considerations of Weltanschauung (worldview).⁷ Heidegger’s intellectual testament is not a case of either/or but one of both/and: legitimate philosophical themes as well as markedly ideological elements both come into play. Needless to say, the interpretive challenge involved in attempting to sort out these two facets of Heidegger’s voluminous and demanding oeuvre (his Collected Works is projected to run to 102 volumes upon completion) is immense—unmasterable, perhaps, in view of the ways that these two dimensions of his thought are so profoundly and inextricably interwoven.

Certainly, by trying to mask his early cultural and political allegiances—he staunchly opposed all attempts to interpret his work biographically—Heidegger compounded the difficulties for researchers seeking to discern the qualities or nuances of his thought that bear affinities with what Karl Marx once labeled the German ideology. Critical scholarship has been further hampered by the fact that Heidegger rejected the idea of a critical edition of his work, that is, an annotated edition that would have made clear the genesis of his manuscripts as well as, crucially, their textual variations. Instead, Heidegger stubbornly insisted on an edition aus letzter Hand, meaning that his texts should be published as found in his estate at the time of his death, without an accompanying editorial apparatus.⁸ Consequently, it has become extremely difficult for well-meaning scholars to ascertain the textual history of Heidegger’s manuscripts. As recent research has shown, Heidegger frequently returned to earlier texts to revise them; moreover, in many cases, he actively sought to conceal the later alterations and emendations—a practice that poses insuperable obstacles for the task of reconstructing his Denkweg, or path of thought.⁹ In the Black Notebooks, for example, one regularly encounters passages that signpost or anticipate later entries, a practice that raises the question: how often did Heidegger return to these texts to edit or revise earlier entries or passages?¹⁰

In March 2015, the publisher of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, Vittorio Klostermann, went so far as to issue a desperate plea to the editors of earlier volumes to come forward with information about passages that have been omitted.¹¹ The occasion for Klostermann’s bizarre request was the admission that an unseemly, anti-Semitic passage from Heidegger’s 1938 lecture course, History of Being (Geschichte des Seins), alleging world Jewry’s planetary criminality (planetarische Verbrechertum), had been mysteriously excised.¹²

According to Peter Trawny, the editor of the volume and director of the Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, the passage was removed at the suggestion of Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, a Heidegger student and longtime editor of the philosopher’s literary estate. This avowal raises questions concerning what, if any, other compromising or unsightly passages have been omitted from the Gesamtausgabe. Here, there are few grounds for optimism or confidence—especially considering that, in another lecture course from the 1930s, Hölderlins Hymne Germanien und der Rhein, Heidegger’s employment of a standard abbreviation for National Socialism, N. Soz., was disingenuously and misleadingly (and somewhat laughably) transcribed as natural science!¹³

II

The Black Notebooks’ publication has been a headline-grabbing event that has preoccupied the feuilleton sections of major European dailies for nearly two years. As such, it offers an unparalleled opportunity for a forthright reckoning with the ideological deformations of Heidegger’s thought.¹⁴

By ideological deformations I mean the philosopher’s hypertrophic allegiance to central aspects of the German intellectual Sonderweg, or special path. The German Sonderweg developed in the aftermath of the French victory under Napoleon at the battle of Jena (1806), which put an end to the (largely mythological) Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and gave rise to the so-called Stein-Hardenberg Reforms and the German Confederation (1815). Sonderweg ideology entailed a visceral hostility to the ideas of 1789—liberalism, individualism, constitutionalism, and droits de l’homme—and a correlative elevation of the values of German particularism: above all, an uncritical glorification of the Volk idea as an approach to questions of national identity far superior to the lifeless platitudes and abstractions of Western universalism.

Heidegger’s loyalties and indebtedness to the Sonderweg ethos are apparent from his earliest writings. Already in Being and Time, Heidegger had linked the notions of fate (Geschick), decisiveness (Entschlossenheit), struggle (Kampf), and destiny (Schicksal)—all of which were keywords in the discourse of 1920s German radical conservatism—with the concept of Generation.

On first view, Generation may seem an unlikely inclusion in a scholarly treatise on existential ontology. Nevertheless, Heidegger is adamant in his insistence on Generation’s centrality for understanding the meaning of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). As Heidegger declaims in paragraph 74 of Being and Time, "Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communication and struggle [Kampf] does the power of destiny [das Geschick] become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘Generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein."¹⁵

In this quote, the historical or factical derivation of Generation is unambiguous: it serves to exalt ontologically the experiences of the War Youth Generation (Kriegsjugendgeneration) with which Heidegger identified so profoundly. The experiences of this community of the trenches (Grabenschutzgemeinschaft) would also become a touchstone for Germany’s far-right literati during the 1920s.

The war youth generation was born between 1880 and 1900. Thus Heidegger’s birth year, 1889, represents the mean. One can justifiably speak of the generation of 1914 as a pan-European phenomenon. But in Germany, this concept entailed deep-seated anti-Western, illiberal ideological valences. Thus, as we have seen, the generation of 1914 embraced a standpoint that exalted the ends of German particularism and advocated markedly völkisch views.

So profoundly did Heidegger identify with the experiences of the War Youth Generation that, in 1933–34, he falsified a biographical submission to the Deutsches Führer Lexicon—in essence, a Nazi Who’s Who—by claiming that, during the Great War, he had been posted at Verdun. This was the site of one of the war’s deadliest battles: over a four-month stretch in 1916, German and French commanders had each sacrificed 200,000 men and, despite the immense human cost, had almost nothing to show for their losses. Heidegger thereby implied that he had seen action as a soldier on the front lines (Frontkämpfer).¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, Heidegger acolytes, who remain wedded to narrowly exegetical, text-immanent readings of Heidegger’s work and who, consequently, seek to keep historical considerations at bay, prefer to ignore the well-nigh overwhelming evidence concerning the historicity, or historical determinacy, of the Master’s thought. Writing during the 1930s, the philosopher and Heidegger-intimate Karl Löwith seemed to provide the definitive answer to these questions by pointing out:

Given [Heidegger’s] significant attachment…to the climate and intellectual habitus of National Socialism, it would be inappropriate to criticize or exonerate his political decision in isolation from the very principles of Heidegger’s philosophy itself. It is not Heidegger, who, in opting for Hitler, misunderstood himself; instead, those who cannot understand why he acted this way fail to understand him. A Swiss lecturer regretted that Heidegger consented to compromise himself with everyday life, as if a philosophy that explains Being from the standpoint of time and the everyday would not stand in relation to daily affairs. The possibility of a Heideggerian political philosophy was not born as the result of a regrettable miscue, but from the very conception of Existenz that simultaneously combats and absorbs the Zeitgeist.¹⁷

III

The mentality of eliminationist anti-Semitism that suffuses the Black Notebooks, which has been the target of unsparing and widespread criticism, had also been anticipated by Heidegger’s earliest writings.

In his very first lecture courses at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger already demonstrated a profound attraction to the discourse of Vernunftkritik (the critique of reason), an orientation that went hand in hand with the temptations of vitalism or Lebensphilosophie—a philosophical current with which Heidegger was also highly enamored. At the time, Heidegger announced that his goal as a philosopher was to gain access to life in and for itself or, as he termed it, pre-social, living substance ("vorweltliche Lebens-etwas").¹⁸ In Toward a Definition of Philosophy (1919), one finds a preliminary—yet, for this reason, no less extreme—adumbration of the variety of radical Vernunftkritik that would resurface in his later writings. As Heidegger asserts: "decomposition means destruction; all theoretical comportment [is] devitalizing [Entlebendes]; all attempts to objectify are devitalizing."¹⁹

The problem with Vernunftkritik as a paradigm or worldview is that it does not seek to mollify or redress reason’s biases and excesses, however one might choose to define them. It is uninterested in providing a mere course correction for a Western civilization that, to its detriment, has become too enamored of the world-transformative potentials of instrumental reason. Instead, in the spirit of counterenlightenment, Vernunftkritik holds reason exclusively accountable for a vast and vexatious array of incurable social ills. Its tone, therefore, is often apocalyptic. When all is said and done, reason and intellection are perceived as antagonists of life (Leben) in its lived immediacy. As such, they are held responsible for a rash and inexorable process of civilizational decline. In the words of one of Heidegger’s influential contemporaries:

Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language history…this machination was without importance for life. But now, from a being that occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought system to subject life, once and for all to the domination of the intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual [Wirklichkeit] as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.

Abstract maxims of life are acceptable only as figures of speech: trite maxims of daily use underneath which…life [Leben] flows onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than language.²⁰

Moreover, the proximity of Lebensphilosophie to anti-Semitism is an irrefutable Durkheimian social fact. Thus Jews were frequently caricatured as being hyper-intellectual social parvenus. Already in 1916, Heidegger vociferously lamented the excessive "Jewification [Verjudung] of our [German] culture and universities."²¹ Here, his use of "Verjudung" leaves no doubt about his proximity to the standpoint of the German Extreme Right.

As I have already suggested, the interpretive key to deciphering the ideological valences of Heidegger’s thought was furnished by the Master himself in Being and Time, especially in those passages where Heidegger develops the concept of historicity. Thus in Being and Time, Division II, Heidegger asserts that when Dasein exists authentically, with knowledge of its fate (Geschick) and in an essential relation with other Daseins, the path is cleared for a Volk to engage in historicity (Geschichtlichkeit)—Heidegger’s euphemism for authentic historical existence.

Already in 1927, Heidegger viewed the German Volk as an authentic carrier and embodiment of historicity in ways that other nations were not. By the early 1920s, this conviction had become one of the central pillars of German antidemocratic thought.²² Going back to the early nineteenth century, the ideology of German particularism held that the German Volk possessed a distinct eschatological-historical mission—that is, a unique capacity to redeem humanity from the decadence-cum-barbarism of Western civilization.²³

It is at this point that the link between the role that the Volk idea plays in Being and Time as a quintessential determinant of historicity and its reappearance as a central figure in the Black Notebooks emerges with undeniable clarity. As Heidegger proclaims, The metaphysics of Dasein must deepen itself in a manner consistent with its inner structures and extend to the metapolitics ‘of’ the historical Volk.²⁴ And in a lecture course, from the same period, he redefines philosophy as "the constant questioning struggle [Kampf] concerning the essence and Being of beings. This questioning is itself historical, that is, it is the encouragement, struggle, and celebration of a Volk for the sake of the hardness and clarity of its destiny."²⁵

During his rectorship (1933–34), Heidegger devoted a number of seminars and lecture courses to explicating the Volk idea. He viewed this task as essential, both for fundamental ontology (as he commonly referred to his philosophical project) as well as for Germany’s political self-understanding during the tenuous initial months of the Nazi dictatorship, when so much was at stake.

The Black Notebooks reveal that, although Heidegger had a number of specific policy disagreements with the regime—foreseeably, his criticisms became more numerous after his rectorship foundered in 1934—he remained perennially loyal to what he described, in 1935, as the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.²⁶

In a lecture course On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger asserts—astoundingly—that the search for truth is integrally related to "the fundamental possibilities of primeval Germanic tribalism [des urgermanischen Stammeswesens] for the sake of according these possibilities predominance [Herrschaft]."²⁷ The more one peruses Heidegger’s lectures, seminars, and treatises from the 1930s, the more it is undeniable that, in the philosopher’s own mind, the question of Being was inextricably tied to the themes pertaining to German destiny and German historicity. In Heidegger’s view, the German Volk—its genocidal wartime depredations notwithstanding—represented the saving power (das Rettende) that, 150 years earlier, came to the fore in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry. Thus, Heidegger remarks during the early 1940s, as the Battle of Stalingrad raged: "the planet is in flames, the earth is coming apart; but the saving power, if it is to be found, will only come from the Germans."²⁸ Similarly, one of the Black Notebooks’ guiding threads is Heidegger’s myopic allegiance to the virtues of German exceptionalism, expressed in a manner wholly consistent with his dogged insistence on the redemptory mission of Germanentum (Germanness).

By the same token, this steadfast völkisch enthusiasm rendered Heidegger oblivious to the transgressions and misdeeds that were inseparable from National Socialism’s ruthless struggle for European hegemony. Hence, the perverse double standard with which he operates. Thus in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger observes that reports of Soviet atrocities have been especially gruesome. Conversely, when it comes to the transgressions of the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile SS killing units that were responsible for the atrocities and mass shootings on the Eastern Front), he remains silent. Heidegger justifies Nazi Germany’s brutal treatment of conquered Slavic lands, such as Serbia and Poland, claiming that, were France and England to triumph, they would do the same to Germany.

Equally alarming is the fact that Heidegger’s understanding of European political culture and traditions rarely rises above the level of caricature and cliché. He suggests that, from the perspective of the history of Being, a combined French and English triumph would be catastrophic, since it would retard Being’s emergence as Event (Ereignis). In virtually the same breath, Heidegger expresses the fear that a victorious France would inflict its ahistoricality (Geschichtslosigkeit)—not to mention its inferior metaphysics!—on Germany. England would do the same, turning all that it touched into a giant business concern (Riesengeschäft).²⁹

For all of these reasons, Heidegger viewed a German victory in the war as an historico-ontological imperative. Since Germany’s geopolitical opponents—England, France, and the United States—were representatives of an ontologically inferior Weltanschauung (he explicates the nature of this inferiority on countless occasions and in numerous passages), at stake in a German triumph was the Seinsfrage or question of Being itself. In sum, a German triumph alone would make the world safe for Being. Only a German victory would ensure what Heidegger disturbingly refers to as the transition toward reflection (Übergang zur Besinnung).

However, in keeping with his antipathy to Idealism, Heidegger deprives reflection of its most valuable trait: the subject’s capacity for self-consciousness and self-awareness, the capacity that facilitates the emergence of human consciousness from its blind integration with nature, and which thereby allows it to become self-determining or autonomous rather than remaining a plaything of fate. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel eloquently expresses this thought, remarking that, With self-consciousness, we have therefore entered the native realm of truth…. Self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the world of sense and perception, and is essentially the return from otherness…. It is in self-consciousness, in the notion of spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning point, where it leaves behind it the colorful show of the sensuous here and now and the night like void of the supersensible beyond and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present.³⁰

Heidegger’s ceaseless polemics against the Cartesian I think (and transcendental subjectivity more generally) are also part and parcel of a calculated ideological crusade against the Western ideals of selfhood.³¹

It is at this point that Heidegger’s proximity to National Socialism risks metastasizing into an outright betrayal of philosophy. After all, since the days of Socrates, the capacity for reflection—that is, the ability of the mind to form so-called second-order concepts—is what differentiates philosophy from the entrapments of cultural conformity, from the blind allegiances of mere habit or convention. When viewed in this light, reflection (Besinnung) constitutes the very fundament of philosophy’s capacity for refusal or negation. As such, it goes to the heart of philosophy’s distinctive emancipatory function, which since Socrates’s day has been integrally tied to its ability to oppose the reigning consensus in the name of considerations of principle—that is, in the name of norms of a higher order. When thought remains true to its innate capacities for critical vigilance, it stands as the inveterate foe of conventional morality and blind adaptation. Thus in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger expressly betrays philosophy’s emancipatory raison d’être by associating reflection (Besinnung) with the trappings and characteristics of National Socialist domination (Herrschaft).

IV

In practically every instance, pulling the strings behind the scenes of world politics, Heidegger finds the ignominious practices of world Jewry. In this way, he remains faithful to the precepts of eliminationist anti-Semitism that formed the core of the National Socialist worldview.

In this respect, Heidegger’s discourse displays an obsessional quality that verges on paranoia. As he observes at one point, whereas since time immemorial, the Jews, relying on their express talents for calculation, have ‘lived’ according to the principle of race, they now seek to defend themselves against that same principle’s unrestricted application. Here, the application of race to which Heidegger refers is National Socialist racial legislation: above all, the 1935 Nuremburg laws that finalized the terms of German-Jewish de-emancipation.³² Moreover, in this passage, Heidegger takes pains to place the word live in quotation marks, thereby indicating that the Jews as a people lack the capacity for authentic historicity. This is yet another way of saying that they are devoid of ontological worth. Thus, in Heidegger’s view, the Jews as a race—in stark contrast with the Germans—display an inauthentic mode of temporality (Zeitlichkeit). They lack a destiny (Schicksal) as well as the capacity for authentic decision (Entschlossenheit)—a point that, in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger returns to on several occasions. By the same token, in the social Darwinist universe that Heidegger inhabits, it goes without saying that peoples like the Jews who lack the capacity for authentic historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) have essentially forfeited their right to exist.

Heidegger repeatedly expresses the view that international Jewry is responsible for secretly orchestrating a world-historical process of deracination—the German word he uses is Entrassung—which abets and encourages the alienation of the world’s peoples from their rootedness-in-soil. The term that Heidegger employs to connote existential rootedness is Bodenständigkeit, an epithet that, in the völkisch tradition, possesses indelible and profound racial connotations and traits. Bodenständigkeit is linked to the Blut und Boden ideology of the Kaiserreich or Second Empire (commonly satirized by its opponents as Blu-Bo), but following the Great War, its tonality changed qualitatively, in keeping with German conservatism’s rightward ideological shift. Hence in the 1920s many German conservatives became—in a phrase coined by radical conservative stalwart, Edgar Jung—conservative revolutionaries. Having realized the wisdom of the Italian writer Giuseppi Lampedusa’s insight that for things to remain the same, everything must change, the German right began to pursue a Flucht nach vorne; in other words, it went on the offensive. Henceforth, the discourse of radical anti-Semitism that had been somewhat of a fringe phenomenon gained momentum among a wide coterie of influential right-wing publicists and political figures.

The fear of diminishing Bodenständigkeit had been a recurrent leitmotif in Heidegger’s work going back to the Weimar years, attaining prominence in his writings well in advance of the Nazi Machtergreifung. It surfaced prominently in Heidegger’s 1925 Kassel lectures on the Concept of Time, a crucial way station in the development of his concept of historicity.³³ As Heidegger laments in an address he gave that same year, Life today gravitates entirely toward the metropolis. The human beings that determine life there are uprooted human beings [entwurzelte Menschen]. The rootlessness [Bodenlosigkeit] of contemporary life is the ground of the advancing decay [Verfall]. All renewal and innovation would remain hopeless, if one does not again manage to restore the leading forces back from out of the native soil [aus heimatlichem Boden].³⁴

In a manner that is both uncanny and disturbing, at a certain point Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism, or the philosophy of the subject, and his denigration of world Jewry coalesce. As Heidegger declaims in On the Essence of Truth: "Not only is this purported new beginning of modern philosophy with Descartes a sham; in truth, it is the beginning of a further decline [Verfall] of philosophy. Instead of bringing philosophy back to itself, that is, to its basis and roots [Boden], Descartes removes it even further from fundamental questioning."³⁵ The convergence between first philosophy and worldview occurs insofar as the discourse of the German ideology that Heidegger embraces typecasts Jews as the leading carriers of modernity. According to this perspective, what Descartes initiated epistemologically, the Jews put into practice sociologically and politically. Consequently, the momentous transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft—a persistent trope in turn-of-the-century Central European Kulturkritik—is simultaneously a story of the triumph of Judaism over Germany.³⁶ According to the politics of Being, the struggle against world Jewry’s disintegrative sociohistorical influence goes hand in hand with the struggle against the philosophy of the subject.

In the Black Notebooks the idea of Bodenlosigkeit, a lack of ontological rootedness, underlies Heidegger’s racial castigation of world Jewry. Heidegger accuses the Jews of being worldless—an apparently innocuous charge, perhaps, until one delves into the philosophical particulars subtending this indictment. In the existential ontology of Being and Time, the capacity to have a world constitutes the crux of what it means to be human. In opposition to the traditional Western paradigm that understands man qua animal rationale or thinking substance, Heidegger reconceives epistemology in terms of Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein). This represents the essential difference between fundamental ontology and competing, modern attempts to resolve the riddles of Erkenntnistheorie, or theory of knowledge. Since in the existential analytic of Being and Time the capacity to have a world becomes an indispensable hallmark of authentic Selfhood, beings or peoples that are divested of this capacity suffer from a deep-seated and irremediable ontological deficiency. In essence, they are inhuman. As Heidegger explains: "Man is not simply regarded as part of the world within which he appears and which he makes up in part. Man also stands over against the world. This standing over against is a ‘having’ of world as that in which man moves, with which he engages, which he both masters and serves, and to which he is exposed. Thus man is, first, a part of the world, and second, as this part, he is at once master and servant of the world."³⁷

By describing world Jewry as worldless, Heidegger makes a point of ascribing to Jews an ontological shortcoming that they share with inferior forms of organic and inorganic life: plants, stones, and animals. The upshot of this rather crude normative scheme in which the capacity to have a world plays a determinative role is that Jews as a people are devoid of a raison d’être. Insofar as they are worldless, they are incapable of authenticity as well as historicity. In sum, they have no compelling ontological reason to be.

Heidegger would take this manner of ontological-historical discrimination a step further by distinguishing between historical and unhistorical peoples. It is in this vein that, in his 1934 lectures on Logic as the Essence of Language he observes that negroes, like nature, have no history.³⁸

In Heidegger’s view, world Jewry as a race stands for deracination (Entrassung) simpliciter. For this reason, the Jewish contribution to world history is essentially negative: as inveterate cultural interlopers devoid of roots, Jews are corrosive elements that serve to accelerate a world historical process of civilizational decline (Verfall, Untergang). All of these rationales furnish justifications for world Jewry’s annihilation (Vernichtung).³⁹

Such pejorative characterizations of Jews harmonize with another one of Heidegger’s standard, cliché-ridden inculpations of world Jewry: the allegation that Jews have somehow taken the lead in the degenerative process of Machenschaft (machination).

In Heidegger’s view, Machenschaft indicates Western civilization’s obsessive preoccupation with the ends of technological world mastery. Heidegger contends that these developments threaten to reduce Being in its totality to mere stuff of domination or standing reserve (der Bestand). As Heidegger comments: One of the stealthiest forms of Gigantism and perhaps the most ancient…[is] the fast-paced history of calculation, pushiness and intermixing whereby [world] Jewry’s worldlessness is established.⁴⁰

Thus in the Black Notebooks one of Heidegger’s central arguments is that world Jewry is the prime mover behind the two most serious manifestations of European cultural dissolution: deracination (Entrassung) and machination (Machenschaft). In Heidegger’s view, National Socialism, by virtue of its inner truth and greatness,⁴¹ represented the only viable counterweight to this precipitous trajectory of decline. In all of these respects, Heidegger’s hyperbolic anti-Judaism coincided with the redemptive anti-Semitism that constituted National Socialism’s ideological core. As a worldview or belief system, redemptive anti-Semitism held that the intractable problems of political modernity would be magically resolved were one only to eliminate the Jews as a people.⁴²

To attribute to Jews—who were, of course,