Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right by Ronald Beiner

Author:Ronald Beiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036020 History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775), Political Ideologies, Political, Political Science, Philosophy, History & Theory, SOC054000 Social Science / Slavery, General
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-04-05T00:45:42.944000+00:00

Heidegger’s Shell Game

For the attentive reader of Heidegger’s work, nothing is more disturbing than the evident politically and strategically motivated doctoring of texts in Heidegger’s postwar publications.51 There are two versions of Heidegger’s book on Schelling. The first was published in 1971; the second was published in 1988 as part of his Collected Works. In the part of the book corresponding to pp. 22–23 of the Joan Stambaugh translation,52 Heidegger inserts several paragraphs offering a discussion of Nietzsche’s views concerning nihilism. A long sentence at the end of one of these paragraphs that appeared in the original lectures was omitted from the 1971 version53 (and hence is absent from the Stambaugh translation) but was reinstated in the 1988 version.54 Here is my translation of the text that was suppressed and then later reinstated: “As is well known, both of the two men in Europe who have, in the political-national fashioning of their respective Volks, inaugurated counter-movements [Gegenbewegungen] to nihilism, namely Mussolini and Hitler, were in turn, each in their own way, essentially determined by Nietzsche; still, this was so without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical domain having properly come into its own.” This originates in a lecture course given in the summer of 1936.55 The following winter (1936–37), Heidegger gave the first set of his lectures on Nietzsche. Here too there was a damning text that was omitted from the edition of 1961 yet reinstated in the 1985 edition of the Collected Works:56 “Europe still wants to cling to ‘democracy’ and does not want to see that this would constitute its historical death. For democracy is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, only a degenerate form [eine Abart] of nihilism.” The two texts are complementary: Democracy = nihilism. Nietzsche is the thinker who understood this most clearly. Mussolini and Hitler were the two political figures who sought to learn what Nietzsche had to teach and to apply countermeasures in practice (even if they fell short of Heidegger’s own deeper understanding of the metaphysical significance of Nietzsche). Contemporary Europe offers three concrete alternatives: liberalism, communism, and fascism. The first two stand for “leveling” and the “historical demise” of Europe; the third stands for grandeur and rebirth. These affirmations are not to be found in political speeches delivered by Heidegger in 1933 functioning as a quasi-official of the regime; they are delivered in academic lectures on metaphysical topics three to four years later.

It seems apparent that there is a pattern here. The Collected Works was supervised by Heidegger’s son, and large decisions about the edition were, it seems, dictated by Heidegger himself. Reinstatement of these texts, presumably, was deliberate. Why would Heidegger be willing to sanction the publication of texts (published posthumously in 1985 and 1988) that he self-consciously repressed (for obvious reasons) in 1961 and 1971 respectively? For what it’s worth, here’s a quick statement of my own theory. On Heidegger’s view one needs to think in centuries.57 He assumed that people would be reading him for centuries (just as one continues to read Aristotle or Hegel).

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