Martin Heidegger: A Political Life

Rating:
Summary: Sacred Reich
Review: True enough, Heidegger had no *real* knowledge of the parliamentary-political processes which led to the rise of National Socialism, long covenanting himself to the historical mission of Adolf Hitler to bring about the spiritual and intellectual metamorphosis of the Germanic peoples, assured of the Fuhrer's status as a true fountainhead of Being, the penultimate expression of Being-in-the-world. "Of this there was no doubt at all in Heidegger's mind - to him alone had been vouchsafed the quasi-mystical vision of the true essence of National Socialism, 'the inward truth and greatness' of the movement; and this knowledge he could never disavow, never, as long as he lived"(135).

It sends us back to the old discussion, reviled by Primo Levi and his peers, of whether any of our belated generation could have had the foresight to universally rejected the Nazi programme, our morality and self-esteem buttressed by such debasing simplifications as Spielberg's *Schindler's List* and its imitators, history as melodrama, the flattering of modern audiences with a contrived moral superiority. After all, if one of the greatest minds of the century could endorse Hitler as a spiritual leader, how can any of *us* ever claim inviolability?

Hugo Ott has given us one of the most chilling historical treatises of the preceding decade. Its subtle cataloguing of archives, anecdotes, documentation and desideratum, is at times grindingly dull and absolutely gripping. We see Heidegger the promising young theology student develop into the mind-blowing author of *Sein und Zeit*(1927), followed by a shattering journey of the fall as he tries catastrophically to adapt his philosophy of Being to the political realm. Isolating himself from his Jewish colleagues, his correspondence becomes increasingly logistical and militaristic, and by this point it is clear that Heidegger has lost all contact with reality. Addressing an assembly of students: "May you ceaselessly grow in the courage to sacrifice yourselves for the salvation of our nation's essential being and the increase in its innermost strength in its polity. Let not your being be ruled by doctrine or 'ideas'. The Fuhrer himself and he alone *is* the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know: from now on all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Heil Hitler!"(164). Before we know it, Heidegger has become Fuhrer-Rector of Freiburg University, encouraging his pupils to greet him with Nazi salutes, and recommending that his mentor Husserl be sacked on account of "political undesirability."

Barely surviving the nightmare of the WWII, Heidegger had another war waiting for him when the French "denazification" commission arrived to get some political payback for the German Occupation. Virtually banished from the academic world, it took many petitions and signed affidavits (from such wary supporters as Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre) to assure the French authorities that the confiscation of Heidegger's library (!) would needlessly aggrandize the suffering he had already inflicted on himself and others.

Felix Guattari once wrote that it took a Heidegger for humiliation to ENTER INTO philosophy, that the Heidegger question remains the most outrageous defamation of Western thought since...well, to what can we compare this politico-philosophical shock to the system? Granted, before Heidegger, philosophy was always more or less isolated from the priorities of 20th century political life, but by 1946 the rift had been blown open forever, all future attempts to align politics with theory permanently chastised, despite the sublime efforts of Sartre and Camus to resuscitate the burning effigy of a politicized existentialism.

*Martin Heidegger: A Political Life* is a definitive modern horror story (a real chiller), one of the most overlooked narratives in the wider realm of pre-WWII scholarship. It deserves treatment by PBS or the History Channel, pending the vision of some brave and sympathetic documentary-filmmaker to take it on.