On Philosophy by McCumber John

Author:McCumber, John [McCumber, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

THE FRAGILITY OF REASON

EARTH, ART, AND POLITICS IN HEIDEGGER

A Controversy Out of Joint

If Hegel has been dismissed for being an uncritical metaphysician or a hypertrophic Kantian, Heidegger has been excoriated for being something much worse: a Nazi. The excoriations themselves are well deserved, but their timing seems to be somewhat out of joint. As with the Great Modernism Debate, there seems to have been a strange delay—not in settling the controversy, but in beginning it. Why did Heidegger’s engagement in and on behalf of the National Socialist Party of Germany not come to public light in the United States for a full fifty-six years, until the 1989 French publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism (Farias 1991)? The facts were known in Germany long before then; Hans-Georg Gadamer’s astonishment at the outrage ensuing upon the “revelations” of Victor Farias lay not in learning that Heidegger had been an active Nazi in 1933–34 but in learning that the French had been so totally ignorant of it (see Gadamer 1989). Nor was knowledge of Heidegger’s Nazi engagement limited to his circle or to those in Freiburg, where it mostly took place. My own Doktorvater, the Jewish philosopher/theologian Emil Fackenheim, told me (in the late 1970s) that he heard about Heidegger’s joining the Nazi Party as a nineteen-year-old student in central Germany. It was announced on the radio by a Nazi Party eager to gain the respectability Germany’s greatest living philosopher could give them. The news brought Fackenheim a grim satisfaction, he told me, for if Germany’s leading philosopher had become a Nazi, things couldn’t possibly get any worse. The satisfaction was fleeting; five years later, Emil Fackenheim was in Sachsenhausen.

How could something so widely known in Germany in 1933–34 be so unknown across the Rhine in 1988? What, moreover, does it mean that the Americans did not know about it until the French told them?

The date of discovery is not the only thing out of joint here. In scandals like this, the usual first reaction is shock and anger, which then gives way to a more measured reaction as time goes on. This has not happened in the Heidegger controversy. In France itself, the anti-Heidegger reaction has not only lasted but grown shriller, to the point where Emmanuel Faye is now claiming that Hitler got at least some of his anti-Semitism from Heidegger.1 The Americans, as usual, have simply divided into groups that ignore one another. One group dismisses Heidegger altogether as a mere Nazi, while the other takes him more “philosophically” by ignoring or explaining away the Nazi engagement. A notable few, such as Gregory Fried, struggle with the issue (Fried 2000).

One explanation for both the long denial and the present hysteria is that Heidegger’s Nazi behavior is so deeply unfathomable as to fracture philosophy itself, in several directions. One is moral: if such an accomplished philosopher can give his heart and soul to the Nazi Party, what good is philosophy? Clearly it needs to be redefined, and in the most radical of ways.

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