The trouble with Heidegger

      How, then, do things stand with Heidegger’s engagement? Was it, in contrast to Foucault’s, not just a mistake, but a mistake grounded in his philosophy? There is something profoundly symptomatic in the compulsion of many liberal-democratic critics of Heidegger to demonstrate that Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation was not a mere temporary blunder, but in consonance with the very fundamentals of his thought: it is as if this consonance allows us to dismiss Heidegger as theoretically irrelevant and thus to avoid the effort to think with and through Heidegger, to confront the uneasy questions he raised against such basic tenets of modernity as “humanism,” “democracy,” “progress,” etc. Once Heidegger disappears from the picture, we can safely carry on with our common concerns about the ethical problems opened up by biogenetics, about how to accommodate capitalist globalization within a meaningful communal life—in short, we can safely avoid confronting what is really new in globalization and biogenetic discoveries, and continue to measure these phenomena with old standards, in the wild hope of a synthesis that will allow us to keep the best of both worlds.

      But this, of course, in no way means that we should rehabilitate the standard defense of Heidegger’s Nazi episode, which, unsurprisingly, follows yet again the borrowed-kettle formula: (1) Heidegger was never really a Nazi, he just made some superficial compromises in order to save whatever could have been saved for the autonomy of the university; when he realized that this tactic would not work, he consequently stepped down and withdrew from public life. (2) Heidegger was, for a limited period, a sincerely committed Nazi; however, not only did he withdraw once he become aware of his blunder, but the acquaintance with Nazi power precisely enabled him to gain an insight into the nihilism of modern technology as the deployment of the unconditional will-to-power. (3) Heidegger was a Nazi, and there is nothing to reproach him with for this choice: in the early 1930s, it was a perfectly legitimate and understandable choice. This final position is Ernst Nolte’s, and it is worth recalling here his book on Heidegger, which brought fresh wind to the sails of the endless debate on “Heidegger and politics”—far from excusing Heidegger’s infamous political choice in 1933, it justifies it, or, at least, de-demonizes it, rendering it a viable and meaningful choice. Against the standard defenders of Heidegger whose mantra is that Heidegger’s Nazi engagement was a personal mistake of no fundamental consequence for his thought, Nolte accepts the basic claim of Heidegger’s critics that his Nazi choice is inscribed into his thought—but with a twist: instead of problematizing his thought, Nolte justifies his political choice as a justifiable option in the late 1920s and early 1930s, given the economic chaos and the threat of Communism:

      Insofar as Heidegger resisted the attempt at the [Communist] solution, he, like countless others, was historically right … In committing himself to the [National Socialist] solution perhaps he became a “fascist.” But in no way did that make him historically wrong from the outset.²⁹

      And here is Mark Wrathall’s model formulation of the second position:

      Heidegger’s work after the war did go some way towards overcoming the political naivete that led to his disastrous involvement with National Socialism. He did this by, first, getting much clearer than he had been about the dangers of the modern world—the dangers which led him to think we need a new world disclosure. Once he was able to articulate the danger of modernity in terms of technology, it became clear that National Socialism was just another modern technological movement (even if it employed technology for reactionary goals).³⁰

      This passage tells much more than may appear at first glance—the key words in it are the innocuous “just another”: is the underlying premise not “even the best of political projects, the most radical attempt to oppose nihilism, remained just another nihilistic movement caught in technology”? There is no horror of Nazism here, Nazism is “just another” in the series, the difference is ontologically insignificant (which is why, for Heidegger, the Allied victory in World War II really decided nothing). Here Heidegger’s reference to Hölderlin’s famous lines enters: “where the danger is rising, that which can save us—das Rettende—also grows…”—in order to overcome the danger, one has to push it to the extreme—in short, in order to arrive at the ontological truth, Heidegger had to err ontically. So when Wrathall writes apropos Heidegger’s Nazi engagement: “It is disconcerting, to say the least, that Heidegger, who purported to have a unique insight into the movement of world history, proved to be so terribly blind to the significance of the events that played out before his eyes”³¹—a Heideggerian could easily turn this argument around: the “ontic” blindness to the truth of the Nazi regime was a positive condition of his “ontological” insight. However, when defenders of Heidegger claim that his acquaintance with the Nazi exercise of power precisely enabled him to gain an insight into the nihilism of modern technology as the deployment of the unconditional will-to-power, does this line of defense not sound a little bit like the attitude of the proverbial prostitute-turned-preacher who, after her conversion, ferociously attacks carnal sins, claiming that she knows from her own experience how destructive they are? Steve Fuller writes:

      Ironically, Heidegger’s intellectual stature may even have been helped by the time-honored practice of “learning from the opponent” in which victors indulge after a war. In this respect, Heidegger’s political “genius” may lie in having stuck with the Nazis long enough for the Americans to discover him during de-Nazification without ending up being judged an untouchable war criminal whose works had to be banned. As committed anti-Nazis ensconced in Allied countries, Heidegger’s existentialist rivals never underwent such intense scrutiny nor subsequently acquired such a mystique for depth and danger.³²

      There is truth in these