Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks, 1931-1941 by Farin Ingo; Malpas Jeff;

Author:Farin, Ingo; Malpas, Jeff;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

12

Heidegger’s Metaphysical Anti-Semitism

Donatella Di Cesare

1 The Jew and the Oblivion of Being

What Heidegger wrote in the Black Notebooks about Jews and Judaism can in no way be minimized or trivialized. In a passage from 1941, he clearly warns that the “Jewish question” is a “metaphysical question”:

The question of the role of World Jewry [Weltjudentum] is not a racial question [rassisch], but the metaphysical question [metaphysisch] concerning the kind of humanity [Menschentümlichkeit], which, free from all attachments, can assume the world-historical ‘task’ of uprooting all beings [Seiendes] from being [Sein].1

What is the relationship between being and the Jew? What is the link between the Seinsfrage, philosophy’s question par excellence, and the Judenfrage?

Anti-Semitism takes on a new philosophical relevance in the Black Notebooks. The Jew is positioned at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, and as central to his philosophy. Yet, to the Jew, inscribed in the history of being, is also ascribed the greatest fault, the oblivion of being.

Metaphysical anti-Semitism sheds new light on Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism, which can no longer be considered a mere political interlude, but represents, rather, a key philosophical moment in his work. Anti-Semitism is the cornerstone of National Socialism, and not some ideological decoration. The “Heidegger affair” cannot be clarified within the gap between politics and philosophy. Since Heidegger’s decision to support Nazism is a philosophical one, the “Heidegger affair” must be discussed first in its philosophical context.

Faced with the Black Notebooks, some critics have been quick to accuse Heidegger of being a strange obscurantist, closing the issue of totalitarianism with a totalitarian gesture. Alternatively, others have unthinkingly acquitted him, thus immediately dismissing the question. These two gestures are completely inadequate and deeply antiphilosophical. The seriousness of the issues themselves should prohibit criminalizing condemnation as well as complicit denial, moral indignation, and cynical banalization. Yet hasty judgments and absolute verdicts have multiplied and the discussion surrounding the Heidegger affair has become increasingly agitated. What has developed, especially in France, is a form of “process” that also exhibits some highly problematic traits.

What purpose is served by such a “process”—by putting the philosopher on trial? And who is served by that “process”? The not-too-secret hope of those who prosecute the case, both old and new, is to do away with Heidegger once and for all, thereby also bringing on a confrontation with that mode of philosophy, the “continental,” in which Heidegger is a central figure.

Getting rid of Heidegger, however, would mean getting rid of the difficult questions he has raised, and, above all, erasing the question (perhaps the most complex of all) concerning the responsibilities of philosophers toward the Shoah. If one defines Heidegger’s reflections as “pathological,” then in so doing one also effectively participates in the continued setting of Nazism apart from philosophy—as if Nazism were a “folly” outside reason, outside history. In contrast, the Black Notebooks can provide an opportunity to think philosophically about what happened—an opportunity to think not only about the Third Reich, nor only about Auschwitz, but also about the place of the “Jewish question” in the history of the West.

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