Heidegger's Aristotelian National Socialism.pdf

Gillespie / ARISTOTELIAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S ARISTOTELIAN

NATIONAL SOCIALISM

MICHAEL ALLEN GILLESPIE

Duke University

S INCE THE PUBLICATION of Farias’s Heidegger et le Nazisme , the

question of Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism has assumed a

central position in the debate about the significance and meaning of his

thought. 1 We now know that Heidegger’s Nazism began earlier and lasted

longer than he and his supporters had previously led us to believe and that

Heidegger himself had no doubts that his earlier thought was compatible with

at least some idealized version of Nazism. 2 There are also clear indications

that Heidegger never abandoned his support for the ideals of National Social-

ism. The reference to “the inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist

movement in the 1953 publication of An Introduction to Metaphysics is one

clear example of this, and Heidegger’s mendacious attempt to conceal the

meaning of this phrase with his later addition of an “explanatory” parenthesis

only confirms suspicions about his real intentions. 3 Moreover, even in his

1966 Spiegel interview, he still claimed that the Nazis had failed only because

the leaders of the party were too limited in their thinking (i.e., because they

were not radical enough). 4 Coupled with his unremitting criticism of other

contemporary political possibilities, there is little doubt that Heidegger con-

tinued to regard the Nazi movement as the most promising political develop-

ment of his time.

It is the purpose of this article to explain Heidegger’s attraction to National

Socialism through an analysis of his encounter with the thought of Aristotle. I

will show that from 1919 to 1933, Heidegger developed a vision of praxis and

politics on an Aristotelian foundation that he believed would reverse the

domination of theory and technology in modern life and put in its place the

rule of practical wisdom or phronêsis that was rooted in a historical under-

standing of the world and that put human beings and human action ahead of

values, ideological imperatives, and the process of production. I will show

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 28 No. 2, April 2000 140-166

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POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

Gillespie / ARISTOTELIAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

141

further that Heidegger believed the Nazi movement was bringing such a poli-

tics into being and that even when he recognized this was not the case, he con-

tinued to believe such a politics was both necessary and desirable, modifying

only his conception of the means by which such an end could be attained. I

will then indicate in conclusion how and why Heidegger’s vision of phronêsis

is fundamentally flawed.

HEIDEGGER’S VISION OF THE CRISIS OF THE WEST

Heidegger was attracted to Nazism because he believed it offered a solu-

tion to the crisis of Western civilization. He saw this crisis as result of the for-

getfulness or withdrawal of the question of Being. In Heidegger’s view, exis-

tence at its core is mysterious. Being as such in the most fundamental sense is

always only as a question. We become human to the extent that we are struck

by this question and thereby come to think and dwell in language. Our

encounter with the question of Being, however, produces anxiety and pain,

for it involves an encounter with not being, with nothingness and death.

Being itself thus repels us from the question toward answers, toward an inter-

pretation of Being as something, as some being. In our flight from the pain of

Being, we fall into a realm of beings, into what Heidegger in Being and Time

called everydayness.

Such fallenness takes two different forms. In the first instance, it is a

fallenness into the everyday world of our concerns, the daily business of life,

what Heidegger in Being and Time calls the ready-to-hand. The other and

deeper form of fallenness is a fallenness into theory, into presence-at-hand.

Heidegger believed that such a falling away from Being had characterized the

West since Plato. Being itself thereby came to be experienced not as a ques-

tion but only in and through beings, as the Being of beings. Western thought

is nothing other than a continuing elaboration of this answer and thus an ever

more distant flight from Being itself as a question.

The steps in this process are relatively straightforward. The West began

with the pre-Socratic experience of the question of Being. Plato, by contrast,

interpreted Being as eternal presence, accessible only by means of a long and

difficult dialectical ascent. Being was projected even further into the unat-

tainable transcendence of eternity by Christianity. Human beings could no

longer experience Being immediately or even reach it through a dialectical

ascent. Being was attainable only through grace. The final withdrawal of

Being that characterizes the Western metaphysics produces the death of God

that lies at the heart of modernity, a withdrawal of Being that leaves man him-

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self as the foundation on which to establish the world. Man in this sense

becomes the ground or subiectum that makes possible the transformation of

nature into a universal object. The modern world for Heidegger is thus the

ever more encompassing attempt to objectify nature, to convert it into an

object that can be mastered and controlled. This process Heidegger calls

technology. It culminates in a will to convert everything, including humanity

itself, into a raw material that can be exploited and used up in the production

of the means of production (i.e., in the service of technology). 5

Heidegger argued that the most dangerous forms of this technological

impulse were Americanism and Marxism. 6 Europe, he felt, was being

crushed between these two forces that aimed at the universal organization of

everyday man for the unlimited exploitation of the earth and all other human

beings. In Heidegger’s view, neither provides man with the means to come to

terms with technology because both are under the illusion that technology is

merely a tool. This notion makes it impossible for human beings to recognize

or ameliorate their own degradation. The salvation of the West thus depends

on raising anew the question of Being as the question of technology. This was

the task that Heidegger set for himself and that he believed, at least for a time,

was also vouchsafed to National Socialism.

What, then, did Heidegger see in National Socialism that seemed to afford

an answer to this problem? He told Karl Löwith in 1936 that his partisanship

for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy, asserting that

“‘historicity’ was the basis for his political ‘engagement.’” 7 In a letter to Mar-

cuse after World War II, he suggested that he “expected from National Social-

ism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antago-

nism and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism.” 8

Heidegger clearly felt that resolute action was needed to deal with the social

and spiritual crisis and was attracted to the Nazis because of their determina-

tion for action. This fact has led critics such as Karl Löwith and Richard

Wolin to argue that Heidegger’s political thought was decisionistic and thus

indifferent to the content of the Nazis’ political program. 9 While this factor

certainly plays an important role in explaining Heidegger’s attraction to radi-

calism, it cannot account for his attraction to National Socialism rather than

Bolshevism or anarchism.

A second and more important attraction of Nazism was the centrality of

the idea of Heimat and Gemeinschaft . As Catherine Zuckert has shown, Hei-

degger believed that German communal life could only be reconstituted on

the basis of a new aesthetic religion. Heidegger saw in the early Nazi move-

ment the seeds of such a community, reflected in the notion of Blut und

Boden . While Heidegger uses this phrase at least once, he more typically uses

only the term Boden , which reflects his clear and longstanding rejection of

Gillespie / ARISTOTELIAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

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racist or biological National Socialism. The national focus of his Nazism was

thus centered on the idea of the German tradition, focused and filtered

through the transformative lens of Hölderlin’s poetry. 10 While there is much

to be said for this explanation, it still does not explain Heidegger’s attraction

to Nazism rather than any of the other nationalistic movements.

I want to suggest that what distinguished Nazism and particularly

attracted Heidegger was its rejection of theory in favor of leadership. As we

will see in what follows, Heidegger saw in the Nazi idea of leadership an idea

of knowledge and action that was akin to what Aristotle called phronêsis or

practical wisdom. Moreover, it was precisely this form of knowing that his

earlier work on Aristotle had led him to believe would alone make possible

the humanization of technology. To understand Heidegger’s attraction to

Nazism, we thus must examine the interpretation of Aristotle he developed

during the early 1920s.

THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND PHENOMENOLOGY:

THE BACKGROUND OF HEIDEGGER’S

RECEPTION OF ARISTOTLE

Heidegger’s reception of Aristotle was shaped by his earlier encounters

with medieval theology, Dilthey’s historicism, and Husserl’s phenomeno-

logical investigations. Heidegger grew up in a deeply religious lower-middle-

class Catholic family. His education was supported by the Church with the

understanding that he would become a defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and

in the period before World War I, Heidegger was seen as a promising young

Catholic academic. His brief experience at the front and a crisis of faith in

1918, however, propelled him away from the system of Catholicism. He

came to believe that the conceptual framework of scholastic theology jeop-

ardized the immediacy and intensity of life that were essential to true philoso-

phy and religion. 11

Heidegger had never been a simple neo-scholastic. The young Heidegger,

for example, had never accepted the imposition of Thomism as official

Church dogma. 12 His choice of the protonominalist Duns Scotus for his

Habilitation reflected his desire to cut through conceptualism to the concrete

reality of ordinary experience. His crisis of faith thus did not lead him to athe-

ism but toward a more immediate conception of religiosity that grew out of

his reading of Schleiermacher, Scotus, Eckhardt, and Luther. 13 He had

already pointed out in his Habilitation that in comparison to medieval man,

modern man faced the danger of a growing uncertainty and complete disori-

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POLITICAL THEORY / April 2000

entation because he lacked an immediate tie to an ultimate ground. 14 Because

scholastic theology destroyed the immediacy of such feeling, religion as the

contemplation of the universum thus had to give way to a quasi-mystical

meditation on the infinite. 15

While Heidegger was moved by theological questions from the beginning,

he soon developed a more secular voice. He began to look for the intensity he

believed medieval man had found in religious experience in the concrete

experience of contemporary life. Drawing on Eckhardt and Luther, he sought

a relationship to his own life that was akin to the relationship the mystic had to

God. 16 In this effort, he drew heavily on Dilthey and Husserl. Dilthey be-

lieved that the ultimately real was to be found not in transcendence but in con-

crete historical experience. Husserl too was convinced that philosophy had to

come to terms with concrete experience, but he thought that the real was to be

discovered in the process of consciousness, the fundamental intentionality of

all experience. The aim of phenomenology thus was to break through to a true

reality, to “the things themselves.” In his phenomenology, Husserl thus

sought to set aside theory and mere perception in pursuit of the underlying

intentional reality of life itself. 17

What was particularly attractive to Heidegger in both Dilthey and Husserl

was the possibility they held out for coming to terms with the immediate

experience. Heidegger attempted to conceptualize this “life” in which one

found oneself and which one “had” under a series of names from “primal

something” to “life in and for itself,” “factic life,” the “historical I,” the “situ-

ated I,” “factical life experience,” “facticity,” “ Dasein ,” and “Being.” 18 Until

1922, this undertaking had an explicitly religious significance, but at that

time Heidegger decided that there could be no theological philosophy and

thereafter considered himself a philosophical (although not a personal) athe-

ist. 19 Heidegger’s philosophical atheism, however, was not the result of his

determination that philosophy was at odds with religion. Far from it. Philoso-

phy had to separate itself from religion to break through to an immediate

experience of primal life because it was only on the basis of such an experi-

ence that the realm for true religiosity, the realm of the holy, could be opened

up again. 20

In contrast to Husserl, Heidegger believed that this primal something

could not be understood through consciousness, but only through an under-

standing of the I in its historical and social context. 21 Here Dilthey’s thought

was of cardinal importance. The concern with the historical, however, meant

a concern with praxis. Heidegger hoped to find the concrete immediacy he

found missing in current philosophy and theology in praxis. On this point,

however, neither Dilthey nor Husserl were of much help. 22

In pursuit of a

solution to this problem, Heidegger turned to Aristotle.

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