Heidegger and Nazism: The Philosophy of Being and the Politics of National Socialism

“I argue against the apologetics of the sycophantic defenders of Heidegger who claim that his involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naïveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s ‘political’ history.”

American Heidegger scholarship continues to flourish, and the approach to interpretation generally proceeds along two lines: The first approach is focused on phenomenological and post-phenomenological writings, and the second seeks to elucidate the pragmatic elements of Heidegger’s earlier philosophy. It is the case that many scholars continue to engage with Heidegger’s philosophy in a legitimate and productive manner without focusing on any political implications, which is indicative of an approach that might be termed “winnowing the chaff from the grain.” This consists of an interpretive process that distinguishes what is pertinent, useful, and valuable from all that is useless or inconsequential. However, a third line of inquiry or, more accurately, critique has recently established itself in the world of ideas, and it seeks to explore and understand Heidegger’s undeniable and complex relationship with (and to) the philosophy and the politics of National Socialism. This third line of critique and debate surrounding Heidegger and Nazism continues to rage in academia, and it resoundingly eschews any and all approaches engaging in apologetics. This line of critique has radically expanded with the English translation and publication of selections of what is termed Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Ponderings (Schwarze Hefte), which inspired a number of edited collections devoted to their critical analysis such as Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Response to Anti-Semitism, an anthology of scholarly essays edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny and published in 2017.

I am of the view that Heideggerian scholarship should continue to acknowledge and grapple with the relationship between the philosopher and his politics, which undoubtedly includes working through new ideological chasms from his recently published Notebooks. Other interpreters agree with this view, and to provide but three examples from contemporary philosophy, Tom Rockmore, a professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, emphatically contends, “Heidegger’s Nazism raises important moral and political issues that cannot simply be evaded and must be faced as part of the continuing process of determining what is alive and what is dead in Heidegger’s philosophy.”

Thomas Sheehan, a professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, in a somewhat controversial essay, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1988, concludes: “One would do well to read nothing of Heidegger’s any more without raising political questions.” Likewise, Michael Zimmerman, an emeritus professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who also publishes extensively on Heidegger, firmly believes that since “Heidegger’s political orientation, especially his contempt for Enlightenment values, profoundly shaped his interpretation of Western history, [Heidegger] should also be read in light of those [political/historical] implications.” However, Zimmerman is careful to point out that readers and interpreters should avoid reducing Heidegger’s thought to an ideological reflex of the reigning social-historical conditions. In his view, interpreters would do well to resist the postmodern and post-structural tendency to view all “ideas,” philosophical or otherwise, as being largely determined by political and social activity.

To think Heidegger and National Socialism involves exploring the relationship between philosophy and politics and, in addition, the potential link between philosopher and philosophy. This includes thoughts on the value of philosophy in relation to its ability to provide answers to the questions it raises in terms of philosophy’s potential for practical efficacy, especially as this might be related to the real world exigencies of state and global politics. However, as Hans-Georg Gadamer observes, philosophical knowledge in the realm of praxis is often misconstrued as “bankable knowledge,” knowledge that is calculable and can be put—in the extreme—to predictable practical use. Yet, for Gadamer, what is unfortunately lost is the philosophical understanding that true practical philosophical knowledge (phronesis) “requires a special gift that does not rely on merely technically acquired information,” and this relates to the crucial sense of judgment or discernment that plays an indispensable role in practical philosophy. This opens the possibility that our deliberation and choice, our decisions leading to practical comportment, will be guided in a desirable manner by a philosophical sense of good judgment. It also, unfortunately, holds the unfavorable potential for the exercise of bad judgment in the practical decisions we make, in that there is perhaps the danger to overestimate philosophy’s power to address and solve practical problems. With this in mind, I turn to the interrelated issues of Heidegger, politics, philosophy, and National Socialism.