HEIDEGGER AND NAZISM: ON THE RELATION BETWEENGERMAN CONSERVATISM, HEIDEGGER, AND THENATIONAL SOCIALIST IDEOLOGY*

ARET KARADEMIR

I. INTRODUCTION

Martin Heidegger became the first Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg onApril 21 and joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)on May 1, 1933. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, he defended himself onmany occasions by saying that he had been an apolitical thinker until his assump-tion of the rectorate; he accepted the post and then became a party memberreluctantly just because he thought he could protect the university from politicalintrusions. Even during his rectorship, he was an apolitical professor. Immediatelyafter his resignation from his post on April 23, 1934, but especially in hisNietzsche lectures beginning with 1936, he criticized National Socialism asharshly as possible.1 However, thanks to the archival works of Victor Farias, HugoOtt, and Rüdiger Safranski, we know today that the Heideggerian version of thestory is not completely true. Heidegger was not, neither before nor after hisrectorship, an apolitical thinker; he and his Nazi colleagues did their best to makethe German philosopher the new rector of the University of Freiburg; he did notstop collaborating with the Nazi officials even after his resignation; and he wasdirectly responsible for the politicization of his university.2

* I thank Stephen Turner, Charles Guignon, Ofelia Schutte, Muhammad Velji, and David Cheely fortheir comments on earlier versions of this paper.

1 For Heidegger’s defense, see Martin Heidegger, “The Rectorate 1933/1934: Facts and Thoughts,”The Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985): 481–502; and “Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heideg-ger,” The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 91–116.

2 See Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel Ricci (Philadelphia:Temple UP, 1989) 84–87, 148–55, 192–212; Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans.

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Nevertheless, considering that Heidegger is one of the most important philoso-phers of the twentieth century, what mostly concerns us is not his personalcommitments but the relationship between his philosophy and the National Social-ist ideology. Accordingly, since the publication of Victor Farias’ book in 1987,Heidegger and Nazism, Heidegger’s Nazism has become a point of attention forHeidegger scholars. In this paper, I will claim that those scholars—for example,Karl Löwith, Victor Farias, Richard Wolin, Tom Rockmore, Emnanuel Faye—who thought there was a close connection between Heidegger’s philosophy andNazism, mostly assumed that it is warranted to identify the Nazi ideology withnineteenth- and twentieth-century German conservatism, more precisely, withwhat we might call the Völkisch ideology. They assumed that pointing outHeidegger’s Völkisch affinities would be sufficient to read Nazism into hisphilosophy. I will claim that such identification is wrong for several reasons. In thefirst two sections of the paper, I will describe the conservative world Heideggerwas thrown into and the Völkisch ideology that reigned in it; then, I will claim thatHeidegger was a Völkisch philosopher. In the last section, I will show why it iswrong to question the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and theNational Socialist ideology through identifying Völkisch conservatism with theNazi worldview.

II. HEIDEGGER’S CONSERVATIVE WORLD

Heidegger’s world was a product of quite a long dissatisfied desire for a unifiednation. The anxious desire of Germans for unification was not soothed by the firsttwo attempts. First, after the collapse of Napoleonic power, from the Congress ofVienna, instead of a unified nation, a Confederation of loosely connected stateswith their independent destinies came to life. Second, though those stateswere unified under Bismarck in 1871, the violent industrialization of Germanyduring this period produced nothing but the collapse of traditional lifestyles,self-alienation, and isolated individuals of self-interest.3 The rapid industrializa-tion of Germany destroyed the traditional German world and German lifestylebetween 1870 and 1914 immensely. First, it transformed the German economydrastically, which had mostly been based on agriculture. Second, it engenderedpopulation increase about 50% in 40 years and significantly increased the amount

Allan Blunden (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993) 140–48, 187–209, 224–34; and RüdigerSafranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard UP,1998) 225–47.

3 For the German desire for unification and the German dissatisfaction in the face of Bismarck’s Reich,see George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (NewYork: Howard Fertig, 1998) 1–4.

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of immigration from loosely populated small German towns to overpopulatedbig cities. Third, it was responsible for the transformation of traditional farmsinto industrial loci of big factories and for the collapse of traditional occupationssuch as artisanship.4 Thus, Bismarck’s unification, associated with the industrial-ization of Germany, did not only fail to construct a unified nation but draggedGermans into even more alienation from their tradition, soil, and traditionalcommunity.

Germany’s defeat in World War I (WWI) aggravated the social collapseGermany had been dealing with for a long time. For WWI brought to Germansnothing but national humiliation, poverty, unemployment, and social conflict.Both the expenses of war and postwar reparations crushed the socioeconomicstructures in Germany. While beginning with 1924 the German economy began toheal its wounds, the 1929 economic crisis created an irreparable collapse of theGerman economy. Unresolvable conflicts between different social strata both inthe streets and in the parliament, which was having hard times reconciling variousinterest groups, including anti-parliamentary parties of the parliament such asNazis and Communists, ensued instantly. The impotence of the parliament occa-sioned mistrust among Germans to the Weimar Republic (1919–33) in such a waythat Germans became attached to anti-parliamentary, revolutionary parties.5

However, the German mistrust was not limited to the Republic but also directed topolitics in general. People saw in the pluralist party system nothing but thebattlefield of economic interests, egotism, and commercialism. Such mistrust wasfollowed by a sort of messianic expectation. Most Germans were waiting for anon-political, even authoritarian, Führer. Taking the relation of German politics toeconomy into account, their mistrust was not unwarranted. Beginning with the1870s, Germany saw the formation of politically influential cartels and of variousleagues, both on the part of employees and employers, going after their economicinterests even in the political arena.6 The Weimar Republic was not well equippedto fight economic influences exerted upon the political life. Economic collapse,commercialism, egotism, and interest politics influenced German intellectualsas well, such that even German academics were expecting the realization ofnon-parliamentary politics. Due to the economic crisis in Germany, academic

4 See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community,1890–1933 (London: UP of New England, 1990) 42–43; and Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’sConfrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Indiana: Indiana UP, 1990) 5–8.

5 For the socioeconomic and sociopolitical shortcomings of the Weimar Republic, see Jeffrey Herf,Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 19–21; Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 61–63;and Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, 13–16.

6 See Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 42–44.

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research became a luxury and academics turned into unskilled workers withrespect to their salaries. Rapid industrialization was responsible for the fall ofthe traditional pure intellectualism ideal as well—considering that beginningwith the late nineteenth century, technical institutions were allowed to give doc-toral degrees, and new universities, modeled on unscholarly research institutions,such as those of business or international trade, came to life. For Germanacademics, this meant the sneaking of specialization, instrumentalism, andcalculative thinking into German universities. Thus, German academics regardedthe transformation of the German intellectual life as an indication of spiritualcollapse.7

As a result, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany was in crisis in the eyesof most Germans due to its lack of unification, rapid industrialization, commer-cialization, technologization, and urbanization; in short, modernization. Againstthis background was born what we might call the Völkisch ideology. A far rangeof disparate thinkers from Herder to Fichte, from Paul de Lagarde to JuliusLangbehn, from the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy to the twentieth-centuryNietzscheans such as Alfred Baeumler, from the nineteenth-century new idealistssuch as Diederichs to the members of the Youth Movement, from the members ofthe famous Stephan George circle to the defenders of the “ideas of 1914” such asMax Scheler, have defended, distributed, and developed Völkisch ideas. In the faceof their unsatisfied desire for unification and a unified nation, and in the face offurther self-alienation and social division, they asked what defined, made unique,and worth praising the German identity, nation, destiny, and mission. That is, asHans Sluga puts it, modernity in Germany gave birth to “the metaphysics ofGermanness.”8

Facing the lack of unification and de-unifying modernity, Völkisch writersappealed to the Volk (people), tradition, common roots, language, or nature asunifying elements. They contrasted the ideal of “the rooted German” (i.e., rootedin the Volk, tradition, and nature; i.e., rooted in the “organic” whole) to theself-alienated subject of modernity striving after material gain. Hence, theypraised the life of peasants as opposed to city dwellers. They longed for therevitalization of the Volk and German heritage as opposed to the uprooting,individualizing, and, thus, self-alienating materialism, instrumentalism, technolo-gism, commercialism, urbanization, and capitalism. They desired the preservationand regeneration of nature as landscape, tradition as heritage, Volk as the essence

7 For the way the industrialization of Germany affected German academics and the latter’s reaction,see Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 42–80.

8 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: HarvardUP, 1993) 123.

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of contemporary Germans.9 In other words, they contrasted the authentic GermanVolksgemeinschaft (community of people) to the modern Gesellschaft (society). Inthe eyes of Völkisch thinkers, Gemeinschaft was an organic community, groundedon the Volk, tradition, and nature. Its members were not isolated individuals butmembers of an organic whole with a certain communal essence. They were notself-interested subjects but people of commitment and belongingness. Gemein-schaft was what Germans had and what they had to protect in the face of moder-nity. On the other hand, Gesellschaft was a society of atomistic individuals with nosense of community, commitment, and belongingness.10

Similar to the Völkisch attempt to overcompensate for the absence of realunification by appealing to the spiritual one, Völkisch thinkers tried to overcomethe humiliation of a defeated nation—first to Napoleon, then to the Allies—bytheir exaggerated chauvinism. They thought Germans were the “primordial”people in the sense that they were speaking an original, uncorrupted, and evenphilosophical language. This was the reason why they were blessed with Inner-lichkeit (inwardness). As the spiritual and inwardly people, endowed with anatural inclination to anything spiritual—be it art, philosophy, or morality—theywere the only people who could save the world from materialism and correspond-ing spiritual collapse, as long as they protected their Germanness and did notsuccumb to the self-alienating modernity.11 However, not only their Innerlichkeitbut also the geographical location of the German Volk made the task of saving theworld Germans’ mission. For Germany was the center of Mitteleurope (centralEurope). In other words, Germans were located at the center of the world, and,thus, only they could distribute the much-needed healing powers to the world fromthe center. As Fichte once said, Germans were “in the centre of the civilized world,like the sun at the centre of the cosmos.”12 Moreover, the greatness of Germans wascomparable only to the greatest ancient civilizations such as the Greeks or theRomans. As a matter of fact, every Greek and Roman achievement, be it militaryor intellectual, was caused by Germanic heroes. Völkisch writers went so far aseven to identify Germans with the Greeks. Thus, in the hands of Völkisch thinkers,the Greeks became proto-Germans.13

9 See Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 1–30; and Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontationwith Modernity, 8–13.

10 For the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction, see Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 21.

11 For the myth of Innerlichkeit, see Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, 14–15.12 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2008) 170.13 For the myths of Greco-Germanic and Roman-Germanic kinship, see Mosse, The Crisis of German

Ideology, 67–71.

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As a result, in the eyes of Völkisch thinkers, the world, but especially Germany,was in crisis and it was urgent to revolutionize the German spirit in order to protectthe German Innerlichkeit and Gemeinschaft in the face of alien intrusions.However, such revolution was not possible due to the current political system inGermany, insofar as the current politics was an interest politics. Therefore, aspiritual/educational revolution was required such that the new educational systemwould plant the sense of community, altruism, and belongingness into the people.It would save the state from being corrupted by interest politics, and eventuallyturn the state into not only a product but also the cultivator of pure spiritual ideals.Therefore, the educational system had to be purified from its current shortcom-ings, that is, from the reign of positivism, utilitarianism, and specialization.Education must aim at the cultivation (Bildung) of the whole personality ratherthan filling young minds with practical and worldly knowledge. Scholarship hadto be rooted in the German mission and destiny, and students had to be reinte-grated into the Volk and German heritage. Moreover, academic specialization hadto be overcome. This does not mean that interdisciplinary studies had to beencouraged, but academic research and scholarship must be guided by a holisticWeltanschauung, and university education must give students an ability to viewthe world holistically from a certain philosophical viewpoint.14

III. HEIDEGGER AS A VÖLKISCH PHILOSOPHER

We need to interpret the Heideggerian philosophy, especially his writings andlecture courses of the 1930s, against this background, considering that just likeother Völkisch intellectuals, Heidegger defended, distributed, and developedVölkisch ideas. He thought Germany was in crisis due to the shortcomings ofmodernity. Accordingly, throughout the 1930s, he was opposed to the worldof industrialization, urbanization, technologization, and instrumentalism. Hebelieved modernity not only transformed the traditional German world but alsobrought about nihilism, spiritual collapse, and self-alienation. Similar to the pro-posals of other Völkisch writers, regarding the nature and necessity of a Völkischrevolution in the face of self-alienating modernity, he preached the necessity of aspiritual/educational revolution. That is, as a Völkisch philosopher, he was notcontent with Bismarck’s political unification of the German states:

I had something further to add on the internal causes of Bismarck’s political failure. We havelearned that, besides a Führer, a people also needs a tradition [. . .]. But the main reason is doubtless

14 For the Völkisch spiritual/educational revolution, see Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology,149–70; and Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 253–304.

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the fact that the völkisch character of the Second Reich was limited to what we call patriotism andfatherland. In themselves, these elements of the 1870–1871 unification should not be evaluatednegatively, but they are totally insufficient for a truly völkisch state. Nor did they any longer havethe least roots in the people.15

The Heideggerian critique of modernity, especially in the late 1930s, amounts tothe critique of Will. For in the world of modernity, Heidegger believes, Beingreveals itself as Will. That is, “in nature, art, history, politics, in science and inknowledge,” beings are interpreted as objects of willful manipulation at the dis-posal of the willful subject.16 Thus, Will refers to the willful way humans approach,experience, and conceptualize human and non-human beings. In Heidegger’swords, “It is the way we find ourselves particularly attuned to beings which we arenot and to the being we ourselves are.”17 Heidegger conceptualizes Will as “Beingmaster out beyond oneself.”18 That is, Will wills to reach what is beyond as to placethat which is beyond under its control. It wills to incorporate what is beyond andunfamiliar in order to eliminate the alterity of what lies beyond its dominion. AsBret Davis puts it, it functions through “ecstatic-incorporation.”19 In this respect,Will is always “will to power”; it is will to incorporate, control, and dominate. Willto power refers, in turn, to “will to will” and “power to power.” For there is noother way for Will to preserve itself, that is, to preserve its dominion over itsdomain of control, than overpowering itself, than reaching beyond its domain ofcontrol and imposing its dominion from afar: “Power empowers solely by becom-ing master over every stage of the power reached.”20 Thus, Will’s willing thatwhich is beyond amounts to Will’s willing its self-preservation. Therefore, Willalways wills itself; it is self-willing, will to will. And accordingly, its will to poweris to be more power; it is power to power. In this respect, both the “enhancementand preservation” of power belong to Will’s essence.21

In the world of will to power, Heidegger continues, since Will wills to control thatwhich is beyond and unfamiliar, beings are experienced as objects of representa-tion, as that which are brought before the willful subject for utilization. Beings

15 Cited in Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in light of theUnpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael Smith (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009) 141.

16 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. DavidFarrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) 19.

17 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York:Harper & Row, 1979) 51.

18 Ibid: 63.19 Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2007)

9.20 Heidegger, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, 195.21 Ibid: 197.

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become familiar objects in the sense that they are classified, calculated, andarranged by and for the sake of willful subject’s desire for the preservation andenhancement of its power. Thus, the world is turned into a “picture” the willfulsubject is “acquainted with” and “equipped and prepared for.”22 As a result, in theworld of will to power, beings as a whole are conceptualized as malleable andcalculable raw materials at the disposal of the willful subject. Accordingly, thesubject becomes the sole authority in distributing existence to beings in the sensethat, in the world of modernity, beings exist as long as they are classified, calculated,familiarized, and, thus, transformed into raw materials for willful manipulation. Towit, no being is allowed to be unless it is assaulted (i.e., turned into the object ofutilization, “the object of assault”) by the requirements of modern subjectivity.23

Heidegger’s Völkisch antimodernism amounts to anti-technologism and anti-industrialization as well. In his view, in the world of “machination,” beings are put“in service” to the expansion and preservation of power. They are valued as longas they can be utilized for further power. Thus, they “are valued purely accordingto their estimated use-value,”24 or as Heidegger puts it in his 1936–38 Contribu-tions to Philosophy, according to whether they are “providable in production andimplementation,” whether they function as “material for further work, an impetusto progress, and an opportunity for expansion and augmentation”—hence, asobjects of willful manipulation.25 Heidegger says, “Everything ‘is made’ and ‘canbe made’, if only the ‘will’ to it is summoned up.”26 Such willful frenzy isresponsible for “the destruction of the earth” in the name of so-called technologi-cal progress, that is, “in the name of speed, calculation, and the claim of themassive.”27 He goes even further and claims that “progress” (i.e., “discoveries,inventions, industry, machines”) does nothing but increases and veils the “uproot-edness” of the modern subject.28 In his mature critique of modernity—and espe-cially in his 1955 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology”—Heideggerargues, in the technological era, even the subject–object distinction disappears.Every being, human and non-human alike, is regarded as a raw material for willfulmanipulation—“The current talk about human resources, about the supply of

22 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and OtherEssays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 129.

23 Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” The Question Concerning Technologyand Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 100.

24 Heidegger, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, 175.25 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and

Daniella Vallega-Neu (Indiana: Indiana UP, 2012) 86.26 Ibid: 86.27 Ibid: 94.28 Ibid: 94.

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patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this.”29 Thanks to modern technology, bothhuman and non-human beings are interpreted as “standing-reserve” (Ge-stell).That is, “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand,indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”30 ThoughHeidegger does not directly defend a sort of pastoral life in the face of moderntechnology, the way he contrasts the technological way of experiencing beingswith the world of peasants and with the more natural way of experiencing betrayshis affinity to the Völkisch pastoralism. In this respect, two passages, cited belowfrom his 1955 lecture, are illuminating:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts tonature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. Butdoes this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; theyare left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currentsin order to store it.31

The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it placesthe seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile eventhe cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which setsupon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanizedfood industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, forexample; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy.32

As a result, for Heidegger, in the world of modern technology, beings are objec-tified, calculated, stocked, organized, and prepared for further manipulation; andwhat lies beyond such processes sinks into oblivion. In this respect, the modernman completely forgets what is not objectifiable (i.e., what is, in Heidegger’swords, “mysterious,” namely, Being). Hence, in the modern world prevails “theexclusive preeminence of beings over Being.”33 Therefore, modernity is “The ageof consummate meaninglessness.”34 For in the age of modern technology, Willdoes not allow the existence of any non-objectifiable, meaning-bestowingmystery, cultural practice, or traditional heritage that is not turned into standingreserve. Heidegger says, “the will to will absolutely denies every goal and onlyadmits goals as means to outwit itself willfully and to make room for this game.”35

29 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technologyand Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 18.

30 Ibid: 17.31 Ibid: 14, emphasis mine.32 Ibid: 15, emphasis mine.33 Heidegger, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, 164.34 Ibid: 175.35 Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 82.

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In such a willful, yet meaningless, game, neither the spiritual ideals of one’straditional heritage that determines what is worthy and what is not, nor one’slandscape, that is, one’s natural home that shapes its residents, is effectiveanymore. Instead, the modern world of technology and industrialization bringsabout “the darkening of the [traditional] world, the flight of the [meaning-bestowing] gods, the destruction of the earth [as landscape], the reduction ofhuman beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free.”36

Hence, Heidegger holds the Völkisch belief that the world is in crisis due to theshortcomings of modernity, and that the world, but especially the German world,requires an antimodern revolution, insofar as “everything essential and everythinggreat,” as Heidegger says as late as 1966, “originated from the fact that man hada home and was rooted in a tradition.”37 However, this does not mean that apolitical revolution in the sense of transforming the bureaucratic structures of thesociety is sufficient to fight modernity. Hence, a spiritual/educational revolution issine qua non.

The nature of the Heideggerian spiritual/educational revolution is delineated inthe speeches and lecture courses Heidegger gave in the early 1930s—especially inhis Tübingen speech of November 30, 1933, in his rectorial address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” and in The Fundamental Question of Phi-losophy. Heidegger opens his Tübingen speech with the sign of dissatisfaction inthe face of Hitler’s political revolution: “According to the very words of theFührer, the revolution has reached its end and has become evolution. Evolution isto replace revolution. Yet, at the university, not only has the revolution failed toattain its goal, but in fact it has not really even begun.”38 Moreover, not only theeducational but also the political revolution cannot go further than transformingthe inessential surface of the German world, unless the new generation is culti-vated properly in line with a Völkisch education. The first step for the realizationof genuine revolution is to know the new German reality and to commit to itsrealization. But what is the new reality? As Heidegger puts it in The FundamentalQuestion of Philosophy, “The German people as a whole is coming to itself, thatis, it is finding its leadership. In this leadership, the people that has come to itselfis creating its state. The people that is forming itself into its state [. . .] is growinginto a nation. The nation is taking over the fate of its people.”39 It is such fate thatdetermines “the spiritual-popular mission” of Germans; and in the face of such

36 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven:Yale UP, 2000) 40.

37 “Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” 106.38 Cited in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 142.39 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Question of Philosophy, in Being and Truth, trans. Gregory

Fried and Richard Polt (Indiana: Indiana UP, 2010) 3.

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historical happening, what needs to be done is to “awaken the knowledge of thismission.”40 Such knowledge also refers to the knowledge of Germans’ future, thatis, what the German Volk is going to become. In other words, knowing the missionof the German Volk means to “honor” the German past and “demand” the Germanfuture at the expense of fighting the decadent present to the point of overcomingit. Heidegger says, “This knowing demands what is not yet, and quarrels with whatstill is, and honors the greatness that has been.”41 Such knowing—that is,“demanding,” “quarreling,” and “honoring”—is the precondition of becoming areal Volk. Hence, for Heidegger, Germans must know their fate and destiny inorder to become the Germans they are. They must know who the German Volk is,what is its heritage, and what it wants to become. That is, the German Volk mustquestion its Being (i.e., ask “the fundamental question of philosophy,” insofar asphilosophy “is the question of the law and structure of our Being”).42 Only thoseGermans who are blessed with such knowledge can transform and revolutionizethe German world. But it is particularly the German youth that will bring suchrevolution into realization. For the youth are not yet corrupted by the self-alienating powers of modernity. They are “those who are not yet worn out, thosewho by the roots of their being and their existence become one with the people,those who feel in themselves the elan toward the future, the need to begin byassault [Stürm]”—hence, the importance of educating the youth and revolution-izing the educational system.43

The new educational system, for Heidegger, must aim at cultivating the stu-dent’s whole personality in such a way that the student will not become anindifferent expert on an academic subject but a “worker” in the sense thatthe student will know the Volk, become one with it, learn the blessings ofcomradeship, become an authentic member of the German Gemeinschaft, and becommitted to the historical realization of the mission of the German Volk.44 In otherwords, Heidegger agrees here with other Völkisch writers that education cannot belimited to filling young minds with scholarly knowledge, but it must aim at holisticcultivation. That is, for Heidegger, as for other Völkisch thinkers, the student mustbe transformed from top to bottom. In this respect, as Heidegger explicates it in hisrectorial address, the student must be reintegrated into the Volk through variousservices. First, the student must be bound to “the ethnic and national community[Volksgemeinschaft]” through “labor service,” where the student learns his/herGerman brothers and sisters’ way of life. Second, the revolutionized education must

40 Ibid: 3.41 Ibid: 4.42 Ibid: 4.43 Cited in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 144.44 Ibid: 145.

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bind the student to “the honor and the destiny of the nation in the midst of the otherpeoples of the world” through “military service.” Lastly, “knowledge service” mustequip the student with the knowledge of “the spiritual mission of the GermanVolk.”45 Obviously, such education requires the transformation of what is under-stood by university education, scientific knowledge, science itself, and academicresearch. Heidegger says, “Knowledge of the Volk that is actively involved with theVolk, knowledge of the destiny of the state that holds itself in readiness; it is thesethat, together with the knowledge of the spiritual mission, first create the originaland full essence of science.”46 Moreover, the liberal understanding of “university”must be transformed in such a way that neither the teachers nor the researchersshould become indifferent scholars, but both their teaching and research should berooted in the traditional heritage and guided by the German mission and destiny; inshort, they should be “led by the inexorability of that spiritual mission whichimpresses onto the fate of the German Volk the stamp of their history.”47 This alsomeans the overcoming of what the German industrialization brought into theGerman academic life, namely, specialization. The new university should not becomposed of “isolated fields,” but each field must originate from the same root,namely, from “the world-shaping forces of man’s historical existence, such as:nature, history, language; the Volk, custom, the state.”48

As a result, both the way Heidegger interprets the arrival of German modernityand his humble proposal for dealing with the self-alienating industrialization isVölkisch. Even the way he mixed his stance toward modernity with Germanchauvinism is identical with that of his Völkisch comrades. That is, Heideggerappeals to the myths of Mitteleurope, Innerlichkeit, and Greco-Germanic kinshipin determining Germany’s historical mission. In his view, Germans are “a histori-cal people of thinkers and poets,”49 who speak a primordial and philosophicallanguage such that even the French, “When they begin to think,” speak German,“being sure that they could not make it with their own language.”50 Therefore, onlyGermans, the central and metaphysical people, can save Europe from the fall onthe condition that they revitalize their heritage. Heidegger says, “this people, as ahistorical people, must transpose itself—and with it the history of the West [. . .].Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of

45 Martin Heidegger, “The Self Assertion of the German University (1933),” The Heidegger Contro-versy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 35.

46 Ibid: 36.47 Ibid: 29.48 Ibid: 33.49 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Indiana: Indiana UP)

77.50 “Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” 113.

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annihilation—precisely then can this decision come about only through the devel-opment of new, historically spiritual forces from the center.”51 For Heidegger,revitalizing the German heritage amounts to asking the question of Being andreappropriating the Greek understanding of Being, considering that the Greek“ethnicity and language have the same provenance as ours.”52 Therefore, reappro-priating the Greek understanding of Being does not mean “to contemplate Greekcivilization, but rather fully to draw on the fundamental possibilities of the proto-Germanic ethnic essence and to bring these to mastery.”53

IV. VÖLKISCH HEIDEGGER VERSUS NAZISM

In the first half of the 1930s, Heidegger took the National Socialist movementto be the only Völkisch agent in Germany that was capable of resuscitating Europeby revitalizing the German heritage. He stated in 1945, “I saw in the movementthat had gained power the possibility of an inner recollection and renewal of thepeople.”54 However, one does not need to review Heidegger’s postwar accounts tounderstand what he saw in the movement. Even in his 1933–34 lecture course, hestated what he was expecting from his Führer:

If today the Führer speaks again and again of reeducation for the National Socialist worldview, thisdoes not mean promulgating this or that slogan, but bringing forth a total transformation, aprojection of a world, on the ground of which he educates the entire people. National Socialism isnot some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the German world—and, as webelieve, of the European world too.55

Considering that the National Socialist movement was a Völkish movement, or atleast it had presented itself as one until 1936, it is understandable why Heideggerwas enthusiastic about the new movement. The NSDAP was speaking the samelanguage as Völkisch intellectuals, which is why most Völkisch writers had nosecond thought about welcoming the nazification of Germany. The NSDAP prom-ised Germans the reintegration of the Volk into the German heritage, mission, anddestiny in the face of self-alienating industrialism, capitalism, interest politics, andpostwar class conflicts. It aimed to construct an organic society through nation-alizing the masses and organizing one’s whole life in line with the totalitarian state

51 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 41, emphasis mine.52 Heidegger, The Fundamental Question of Philosophy, 5.53 Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, in Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard

Polt (Indiana: Indiana UP, 2010) 3.54 Heidegger, “Facts and Thoughts,” 483.55 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, 171–72.

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ideology in such a way that there would be no distinction between the public andprivate spheres of life. Accordingly, it brought public institutions into line with anantimodern and holistic worldview, and emphasized the virtues of belongingnessand rootedness against the uprooting modernity.56 Moreover, in the eyes of mostVölkisch thinkers, the National Socialist movement, especially because of itseducational program, was promising. The NSDAP was committed to overcomingintellectualism and its products such as disinterested teaching and research. Theyhad to be grounded on the same root, namely, on the Nazi Weltanschauung as thecarrier of the German heritage, mission, and destiny. Furthermore, education hadto be limited not to the distribution of purely academic information but the wholepersonality of the student had to be cultivated through imposing upon the studentthe sense of belongingness and comradeship.57

Does this all mean that we can infer from Heidegger’s very philosophy Nazism?Is it sufficient to show the Völkisch character of both Heidegger’s philosophy andthe NSDAP’s political ideology for giving our final verdict that Heidegger wasguilty of Nazism not only personally but also philosophically? Whether or not wecan answer these questions, we are certain that for almost 70 years now,those Heidegger scholars who thought there was a close connection betweenHeidegger’s philosophy and Nazism mostly assumed that it is warranted toidentify the Völkisch ideology with the Nazi worldview such that the presentationof Heidegger’s Völkisch affinities would be sufficient to read Nazism intohis philosophy. Löwith claims, for example, that Heidegger’s decisionisticphilosophy, as it is exhibited in Being and Time, where Heidegger refuses toacknowledge any universal norm that may tell the individual Dasein upon whichsocial ideal it should commit itself, is turned into Völkisch decisionism in thehands of the Heidegger of the 1930s. That is, for the Heidegger of the 1930s, theGerman Volk has no source of moral judgment other than its traditional heritage,mission, and destiny. In Löwith’s view, it was such Völkisch decisionism that wasresponsible for Heidegger’s political choice in 1933:

Those who reflect on Heidegger’s later partisanship for Hitler’s movement will find, in this firstformulation of the idea of historical existence, the constituents of his political decision of severalyears hence. One need only abandon the still quasi-religious isolation, and apply authentic‘existence’—‘always particular to each individual’—and the ‘duty’ [Müssen] which follows from itto ‘specifically German existence’ and its historical destiny, in order thereby to introduce into thegeneral course of German existence the energetic but empty movement of his existential categories(‘to decide for oneself’; ‘to take stock of oneself in the face of nothingness’; ‘wanting one’s

56 For the Völkisch aspects of the NSDAP, see George Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural andSocial Life in the Third Reich (Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1966) xix–xli.

57 For the NSDAP’s educational program, see Mosse, Nazi Culture, 263–318.

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ownmost destiny’; ‘to take responsibility for oneself’) and to proceed from there to ‘destruction’,now on the terrain of politics.58

Wolin accepts Löwith’s account and claims that the fact that in Being and Timethere is no place for universal norms as to save Heidegger from remaining“intellectually (and morally) defenseless against the ‘absolute historical evil’of thetwentieth century” is responsible for his Nazism.59 Moreover, Wolin remindsLöwith that Heidegger’s Völkisch affinities are not limited to his writings of the1930s but even Being and Time is full of Völkisch elements, such as the notions of“destiny,” “repetition,” “historicity,” etc.60 Farias goes one step further andannounces that “there is every indication in it [i.e., Being and Time] of his later turnto National Socialism,”61 considering that in his masterpiece, Heidegger introducesthe notion of “a (so-called) community of people [Volksgemeinschaft], with its owntradition and heritage,” which must be sufficient for anyone who wants to see thetruth that Heidegger “comes close to the interpretations that circulated widely underNational Socialism.”62 Similarly, Rockmore claims that Heidegger’s “Nazism isconcealed in his philosophy.”63 For Heidegger forms his philosophy by using thesame elements of the Völkisch ideology as National Socialism, such as “thehistorical realization of the German Volk,” “a metaphysical commitment to theGerman Volk,” “the concept of the spirit of the people [Volksgeist],” and “theessence of the German people.”64 Moreover, Rockmore continues, Heidegger’sunderstanding of authenticity is Völkisch and, thus, similar to National Socialistunderstanding, because authentic existence for Heidegger refers to “the repetitionof a prior tradition” and because “Nazism claimed to embody the values of theauthentic German.”65 However, it is Faye who takes the most extreme position onecan take regarding the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to Nazism. Faye claims,“Heidegger devoted himself to putting philosophy at the service of legitimizing anddiffusing the very bases of Nazism and Hitlerism” both before and after Hitler’sseizure of power in 1933.66 We learn from Faye that the basis in question, “the veryfoundation of National Socialist doctrine,” lies in such Völkisch concepts as the

58 Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, trans. Elizabeth King (Chicago: U ofIllinois P, 1994) 31–32.

59 Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York:Columbia UP, 1990) 118.

60 Ibid: 33.61 Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 59.62 Ibid: 64.63 Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 10.64 Ibid: 9 and 54.65 Ibid: 47.66 Faye, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, xxiv.

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“community of destiny” and the “community of the people,” namely, “the Gemein-schaft understood as Schicksalsgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft.”67

However, it is wrong to identify the Völkish ideology with the Nazi ideology forseveral reasons. First, beginning with 1936, Heidegger began to approachNational Socialism critically, just because he thought the movement was notVölkisch enough. Heidegger’s criticism was not unwarranted, considering that inthe late 1930s, the basis of the Nazi ideology was what Jeffrey Herf calls “reac-tionary modernism,” more than it was the Völkisch ideology. The reactionarymodernist ideology was based on an attempt to combine German nationalism andits Völkisch jargon with modern technologism.68 Just like Völkisch writers, reac-tionary modernists such as Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Werner Sombartwere antimodernist nationalists. Similar to the Völkisch account of modernity,they thought the contemporary world was conquered by technologism, industri-alism, commercialism, liberalism, and capitalism. However, contrary to most, ifnot all, Völkisch thinkers, they thought the shortcomings of modernity were notdirectly engendered by industrialism or technologism, but by liberalism, commer-cialism, finance capitalism, and egoistic interest politics. Hence, they wereopposed to the Völkisch pastoralism. Accordingly, they tried to do what seems tobe undoable: embracing modern technologism without acknowledging what isusually regarded as its twin brother, namely, modernity. In order to overcome theshortcomings of modernity, they proposed the reintegration of modern technologyand German industry into the German Gemeinschaft and its political representa-tive, namely, the state. Moreover, they not only acknowledged the intrinsic inno-cence of modern technologism, but also mystified and aestheticized technology. Intheir eyes, technology was the agent of will, imposing its forms on the formlessand overwhelming nature. It was a product of aesthetic creativity, the expressionof the Nordic Innerlichkeit. In other words, it was an indication of Germancreativity and productivity as opposed to the Jewish finance capitalism.69

Heidegger was not indifferent to the reactionary modernist ideology. In his“Facts and Thoughts,” for example, he says he interpreted the modern world andits technologism, especially in the early 1930s, from the perspective of Jünger.70

For Jünger, WWI teaches us that neither the recruitment of professional soldiersnor a limited budget utilized for waging wars can satisfy the hunger of contem-porary wars, insofar as both the extent and the expenses of today’s warsare immense. Instead, contemporary wars demand the utilization and “total

67 Ibid: 16.68 Though Herf reads Heidegger as a reactionary modernist philosopher (pp. 109–15), as we will see

below, Heidegger was opposed to reactionary modernism throughout the 1930s.69 See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 1–48.70 Heidegger, “Facts and Thoughts,” 484.

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mobilization” of every social, economic, political, and technological resource,together with the total and totalitarian organization of such resources. Of course,in such an age, distinguishing the private spheres of life from the public onescannot be accepted—hence, “the increasing curtailment of ‘individual liberty’.”71

Accordingly, the “aim” of total mobilization, Jünger says, “is to deny the existenceof anything that is not a function of the state.”72 But this does not mean that Jüngeris opposed to the age of total mobilization. Instead, his target is the Völkischpastoralism and the worship of anti-industrialist Gemeinschaft, together with thetraditional ideal of pure intellectualism, namely, Kultur: “Who would deny that‘civilization’ is more profoundly attached to progress than is ‘Kultur’; that itslanguage is spoken in the large cities, and that it has means and concepts at itscommand to which Kultur is either hostile or indifferent?”73 He rather praises thevirtues of urbanization, technologization, and industrialization. Moreover, hethinks what needs to be done in Germany is to accelerate the processes ofindustrialization, urbanization, and total mobilization, if it is true that Germanylost WWI just because it was unable to mobilize every force and to place tech-nology and armament industry in service of war. Accordingly, Jünger concludes,“the new form of armament, in which we have already for some time beenimplicated, must be a mobilization of the German—nothing else.”74

Heidegger and the NSDAP responded differently to Jünger’s call for totalmobilization. For Heidegger, total mobilization was not a viable solution in theface of the shortcomings of modernity. As he put it in his 1938 lecture, “The Ageof the World Picture,” in order to overcome the shortcomings of modernity, “it isnot sufficient to affirm technology, for example, or, out of an attitude incompara-bly more essential, to set up ‘total mobilization’ as an absolute once it is recog-nized as being at hand.”75 For “Total mobilization,” just like other shortcomings ofmodernity, is “a consequence of the original abandonment by being.”76 For theNazis, on the other hand, it was possible to combine German Innerlichkeit withtechnologism as long as the latter was not contaminated by the Jewish financecapitalism. In this respect, Hitler announced his 4-year plan for the industrializa-tion of Germany in 1936, thanks to which German industry would be rationalized,German technology and rearmament would be one of the priorities of the state,Germany would be one of the most industrial and technologically developed

71 Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1993) 127.

72 Ibid: 127.73 Ibid: 133.74 Ibid: 139.75 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 137.76 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 112.

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countries in the world, German technology would be saved from the shackles ofthe Jewish finance capitalism and reintegrated into the German Gemeinschaft.77 Inother words, as Michael Zimmerman points out, while the National Socialistmovement had presented itself as the preserver of the non-industrialized Germanessence and heritage in the first years of Hitler’s seizure of power, the Nazipropaganda, beginning with 1936, was based on the veneration and aestheticiza-tion of modern technology.78 As a Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels wasone of the most powerful representatives of the NSDAP’s un-Völkisch aim toindustrialize Germany and to aestheticize technology. What he said in his addressat the Berlin Auto Show in 1939 was the exact opposite of anything Heidegger hasbelieved throughout the 1930s:

We live in an era of technology. The racing tempo of our century affects all areas of our life. Thereis scarcely an endeavor that can escape its powerful influence. Therefore, the danger unquestionablyarises that modern technology will make men soulless. National Socialism never rejected orstruggled against technology. Rather, one of its main tasks was to consciously affirm it, to fill itinwardly with soul, to discipline it and to place it in the service of our people and their cultural level.National Socialist public statements used to refer to the steely romanticism of our century. Todaythis phrase has attained its full meaning. We live in an age that is both romantic and steellike, thathas not lost its depth of feeling. On the contrary, it has discovered a new romanticism in the resultsof modern inventions and technology. While bourgeois reaction was alien to and filled withincomprehension, if not outright hostility to technology, and while modern skeptics believed thedeepest roots of the collapse of European culture lay in it, National Socialism understood how totake the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time.79

Accordingly, Heidegger, as one of the “modern skeptics,” began to criticizeNational Socialism and its reactionary modernism beginning with 1936. First, histarget was Nazi eugenics. Heidegger took it as an instantiation of the corrupt ageof will to power: “Only where the absolute subjectivity of will to power comes tobe the truth of beings as a whole is the principle of a program of racial breedingpossible; possible, that is, not merely on the basis of naturally evolving races, butin terms of the self-conscious thought of race.”80 His second target was the Nazitotalitarianism (i.e., the obsession with absolute utilization of every force from thesame source through unconditional planning and organization). For Heidegger,the age of the obsession with “the completely equipped plan and certainty of allplans whatsoever in every area” was the age of “erring” that “knows no truth of

77 See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 201–08.78 Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, 104.79 Cited in Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 196.80 Heidegger, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, 231.

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Being.”81 In this respect, even the Nazi “leadership” was an instantiation of thecorrupt age of the oblivion of Being: Leaders “are the necessary consequence ofthe fact that beings have entered the way of erring in which the vacuum expandswhich requires a single order and guarantee of beings. Herein [lies] the necessityof ‘leadership’.”82 However, such necessity cannot hide its aimlessness insofar as,as we have seen above, in the age of the oblivion of Being reigns nothing butmeaninglessness—hence, Heidegger’s critical question: “The priority of proce-dures and contrivances in the totality of the rallying of all the masses and pressingthem into service—toward what end?”83

As a matter of fact, Heidegger’s Völkisch critique of National Socialism was notlimited to his lectures of the late 1930s. Even before, Heidegger was not com-pletely content with the un-Völkisch aspects of the movement. In his 1935 Intro-duction to Metaphysics, for example, he attacks National Socialism by placing itnext to his two mortal enemies, namely, positivism and Marxism, as anotherinstantiation of the un-Völkisch world of modernity. In his view, in the modernworld of spiritual decline, “the disempowering of the spirit” has many aspects, oneof which is the interpretation of “the spirit as intelligence.” Intelligence is con-ceptualized either as mental sharpness or as the ability of planning and organizing.But in either case, Heidegger claims, interpreting the spirit as intelligence is anindication of the decline—regardless of whether it is a Marxist, positivist, or Naziinterpretation:

Whether this service of intelligence now relates to the regulation and mastery of the materialrelations of production (as in Marxism) or in general to the clever ordering and clarification ofeverything that lies before us and is already posited (as in positivism), or whether it fulfills itself inorganizing and directing the vital resources and race of a people [as in National Socialism]—bethis as it may, the spirit as intelligence [. . .] is spirit-less or even hostile to spirit.84

Moreover, Heidegger implies that modern Germany is no different than Russiaand America with respect to the spiritual decline, considering that the spiritualdecline and uprootedness of the world of machination reveal themselves not onlyin the American and Russian “frenzy of unchained technology” but also in every-day German life, insofar as in Nazi Germany, “a boxer counts as the great man ofa people” and “the tallies of millions at mass meetings are [regarded as] atriumph.”85 As Julian Young points out, Heidegger has the German world heavy-weight champion, Max Schmelling, in mind when he refers to “a boxer.” And the

81 Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” 85.82 Ibid: 85.83 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 112.84 Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy, 49, emphasis mine.85 Ibid: 40.

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triumphant mass meetings are the famous Nüremberg rallies, which were propa-gandized by the Nazis as the Triumph of the Will.86 As a result, the first reason whyit is wrong to identify the Völkisch ideology with the Nazi ideology is thatVölkisch Heidegger himself is opposed, in the late 1930s, to the un-Völkischaspects of National Socialism such as its obsession with eugenics, total mobili-zation, and mass propaganda.

Second, Heidegger not only casts doubt on the un-Völkisch aspects of NationalSocialism, but also questions the value of the National Socialist version of theVölkisch ideology. The NSDAP defines the Volk through its natural qualities as ifthe Volk were a present-at-hand entity with its fixed essence. For Heidegger, on theother hand, since humans are historical beings who are endowed with the under-standing of Being, human existence cannot be understood through “an antiquatedbiology,” which presupposes that humans are biological beings with racial differ-ences, who have an additional faculty with respect to other animals, that is, reason.Heidegger believes that such conception of human existence is a by-product ofmodern subjectivism, insofar as it assumes that humans are unhistorical, Carte-sian subjects.87 In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger goes one step furtherand attacks the National Socialist version directly by asserting that the Völkisch“worldview,” which takes the Volk to be “the goal and purpose of all history,”together with its political instantiation, that is, the compound of “cultural politicsand ideas of a people,” is no different than “the kind of thinking that characterizes‘liberalism’.”88 This does not mean that Heidegger is opposed to the Völkischideology per se. For what he is critical of is not the idea of the Volk, but the ideaof the Volk with its fixed essence—the static understanding of the Volk. In otherwords, both the liberal and the Nazi thinking presuppose that “the human beingcan be taken as already known in essence,” and that humans are “fixed in theirdeterminability.”89 In Heidegger’s view, on the other hand, the Volk has no fixedessence, but it is an indeterminable becoming. In this respect, for Heidegger, thereis no Volk as a present-at-hand entity with its racial constants, as one that waits forbeing empirically identified by Nazi or positivist observers. A Volk “as an existingone,” as Heidegger puts it, is an imaginary Volk, “an alleged people.”90 This is thereason why Heidegger is opposed to the Nazi understanding of the Volk as it isbased on biological racism. And this is the reason why he attacks, in his 1933–34lecture course, one of the most widely recognized and read racist writers of Nazi

86 Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, 117.87 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, 138.88 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 65.89 Ibid: 22.90 Ibid: 35.

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Germany, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, by calling him Plato’s “cave dweller,”“bound to the shadows [. . .] as the only definitive reality.”91

To understand Heidegger’s dynamic account of the Volk, it is promising toreview his writings of the mid-1930s. In his 1934 lecture course, Logic as theQuestion Concerning the Essence of Language, Heidegger begins with a question:“What is the human being?” He claims that such question is an ill-formulated oneinsofar as human beings are not present-at-hand entities.92 The genuine question isnot the what but the who question. Then, “Who is the human being?” It is a “self.”But “Who is a self?” It is not the individual I but the communal we, “the Volk.”93

However, since it is always possible that the Volk is already alienated from itself,the genuine answer to the who question can be given only if we, Germans, commitourselves to the traditional heritage of the Volk and thereby become who we are.Therefore, the Volk question is not a question for self-reflection but a question ofcommitment and becoming, “a question of decision.”94 Committing oneself toone’s heritage is to reappropriate it through the genuine works of art, philosophy,religion, or politics, which open up, as Heidegger says in his 1936 “The Origin ofthe Work of Art,” “the world of this historical people.”95 Only in such a world canthe Volk acquire its identity and become what it is: “The temple [i.e., the religious-work], in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlookon themselves.”96 Similarly, the philosophical work of the Volk, “The philosophyof a people,” refers, as opposed to the static understanding of the Volk, not to thework that reflects the natural qualities of the Volk, but to the one that “makespeople people of a philosophy, [and] grounds them historically in their Da-sein.”97

As a result, for Heidegger, the Volk never is, but becomes and constantly trans-forms itself thanks to the genuine works, whereas the Nazi version of the Volk,together with its racism, is static. And since it is static, it is a stumbling block onthe way to becoming, creating, and transforming. As Heidegger puts it, for a staticand totalitarian worldview, “creating can never come to its own essence andbecome a creating beyond itself, because the total worldview would thereby haveto put itself into question.”98

91 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, 159–60.92 Martin Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, trans. Wanda Torres

Gregory and Yvonne Unna (New York: SUNY Press, 2009) 30.93 Ibid: 33.94 Ibid: 60.95 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New

York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993) 167.96 Ibid: 168.97 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 35.98 Ibid: 33–34.

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Thirdly, Heidegger was neither the first nor the last Völkisch German who wasopposed, or would be opposed, to the National Socialist version of the Völkischideology. For example, as George Mosse points out, most members of theVölkisch Youth Movement, who exalted and demanded the preservation of theessence of the Volk, German heritage, native landscape, and the fatherland asopposed to modernity and its products such as industrialization and urbanization,were opposed, at least until the Movement’s total nazification, to National Social-ism because of the latter’s paramilitarism, racism, and violent patriotism.99 Inother words, Völkisch elements were so widespread in Germany that identifyingthe Völkisch ideology with the Nazi ideology would help us do nothing butembark on an unreasonable and irresponsible Nazi hunt in German history fromthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries onward. In this respect, espe-cially the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder is an illuminating example,considering that he was one of the first Völkisch philosophers who determined thevery jargon of the Völkisch ideology, even though he was opposed to imperialismand aggressive chauvinism. For Herder, each Volk is a product of its particularVolksgeist which expresses itself in Volk’s language, art, and way of life. This isthe reason why each Volk should preserve “its impress, its character” and not be“mixed up with and top of each other.”100 Moreover, since each Volk has its ownGeist, there can be no such thing as universal moral or scientific criteria forjudging the moral or scientific products of different Völker. Accordingly, Herdermocks “the universal, philosophical, human-friendly tone” of his contemporaries,insofar as they utilize the ideals of their Nationalgeist to judge the ethical prin-ciples of other Völker.101 It is such incommensurability of different Völker thatmotivates Herder’s dislike toward chauvinism and racism. For “The negro has asmuch right to consider the white man a degenerate, a born albino freak, as whenthe white man considers him a beast, a black animal.”102 The Völkisch character ofHerder’s philosophy is the basis of his rejection of imperialism and slavery aswell, insofar as colonization and slavery uproot the colonized and the enslavedVölker from their native soil. Herder asks, “What gives you the right, you despi-cable slave-drivers, you inhuman brutes, even to approach the lands of theseunfortunates, let alone to tear them away from it by cunning, fraud and cruelty?

99 See Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 170–89.100 Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2002) 385.101 Ibid: 297–98.102 Ibid: 394–95.

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For ages these regions were theirs by heritage; it belonged to them just as theybelonged to it.”103

The fourth reason why it is wrong to identify the Völkisch ideology with theNazi ideology is already implicated in the third one: It is wrong to believe that theVölkisch decisionism or relativism would render one defenseless in the face ofNazism. It is also wrong to believe that one should appeal to universal norms to seta bulwark against any genocidal ideology. Not only the fact that Völkisch relativ-ism was a bulwark for Herder himself against chauvinism and imperialism, butalso the history of racial and sexual discrimination, together with the history ofimperialist aggression in the name of so-called universally valid scientific or moralnorms, is sufficient to see the naiveté of assuming that only universalism can saveone from being an accomplice of the NSDAP’s genocidal crimes. Against thisbackground, it is illuminating to remember the story of “The German Philosophi-cal Society” (Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft, DPG) and its famousmember, Bruno Bauch. As Sluga reminds us, DPG was founded on the Völkischideology and mixed its Völkisch character with the faith in ahistorical, “objectivevalues.” Throughout the 1920s, DPG has defended Völkisch ideas—such as thepressing need to dissipate the crisis in Germany, inevitability of preserving andrevitalizing the German essence, and the value of communal togetherness andbelongingness—and thought that most of these ideas came to force in 1933 thanksto Hitler’s seizure of power.104 However, Bauch, as opposed to Völkisch decision-ists and relativists, believed that the unique value of the German race and way oflife could be appreciated only by appealing to ahistorical, universal values. In thisrespect, for Bauch, “one could,” as Sluga puts it, “not be a good racist and asteadfast antisemite without a belief in such values.”105 As a result, one of themotivating forces behind Bauch’s loyalty to the National Socialist movement wasthe opposite of what made Heidegger, in the eyes of Bauch, “not a true NationalSocialist but a nihilist,” namely, universalism.106

But is it not true that most Völkisch thinkers were anti-Semites? And does thisnot show that there is something already wrong with the Völkisch ideology? Bethat as it may, Völksich anti-Semitism is the fifth reason why it is wrong to identifythe Völkisch ideology with the Nazi ideology. For, first of all, most Völkischthinkers were not racist in the sense of blood racism, even though most of them

103 Johann Gottfried Herder, Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1969) 286, emphasis mine.

104 Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis, 85–86.105 Ibid: 214.106 Hans Sluga, “ ‘Conflict is the Father of All Things’: Heidegger’s Polemical Conception of Politics,”

A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried(New Haven: Yale UP) 221.

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were anti-Semites. Secondly, anti-Semitism in Germany was neither the productof Völkisch ideology nor limited to Völkisch thinkers. The nineteenth- andtwentieth-century anti-Semitism was rather based on some ancient myths rootedin the Middle Ages: “Accusations of ritual murder, the curse of Ahasverus thewandering Jew, and fantasies about the universal Jewish world conspiracy.”107

From the Middle Ages onward, it has been thought that the Jews celebrated theirreligious feasts by murdering Christian children and drinking their blood. Thoughthe myth gradually lost its power and credibility in urban areas in Europe, it wasrevitalized over and over again in rural places thanks to the Catholic Church.108

Moreover, the biblical myth of the wandering Jew has always been behind theEuropean Jews as their shadow. It was thought that the curse of Ahasverus, whowas doomed to spend his life wandering as a result of what he had done along thepath of Christ’s crucifixion, would always be on the Jews such that they wouldalways be uprooted from and unable to be assimilated into the natives’ soil andheritage.109 The myths of the wandering Jew and Jewish world conspiracy helpednineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Semites take the Jew to be the symbol ofunproductive finance capitalism. Jews were regarded as the uprooted and unpro-ductive mass that would never be able to form an organic Volk rooted in the forcesof nature and traditional heritage. Thus, overcoming the uprooting modernity andunproductive finance capitalism was identified with the elimination of the “mate-rialist” Jews. However, the myth of the capitalist Jew was not only worshipped bythe Christian Church or Völkish thinkers, but also taken for granted by someleft-wing ideologues and communist leaders—usually but not always with a racistjargon—such as Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Alphonse de Toussenel, KarlKautsky, and Heinz Neuman.110

V. CONCLUSION

As a result, though it has often been assumed that it is sufficient to point out theVölkisch character of Heidegger’s philosophy to deduce Nazism from his thought,it is wrong, as we have seen above, to identify Völkisch conservatism with theNational Socialist worldview. However, this does not mean that the politicalimplications of Heidegger’s philosophy should not be problematized. It also doesnot mean that Heidegger the man should be distinguished from Heidegger the

107 George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: HowardFertig, 1978) 113.

108 Ibid: 113–14.109 Ibid: 114–15.110 Ibid: 150–68, 171–90.

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philosopher once and for all. But it means that it is misleading, unfair, andirresponsible for several historical and philosophical reasons to question therelationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political choice in 1933under the assumption that nineteenth- and twentieth-century German conserva-tism is identical with the Nazi ideology.

University of South Florida

HEIDEGGER AND NAZISM

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