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Martin Heidegger and Nazism

Martin Heidegger c. 1960

Philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer[1] or "fellow traveller."[2] The teaching ban was lifted in 1951, and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953, but he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chairmanship.

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements,[3] although they also contain statements where Heidegger appears extremely critical of racial antisemitism.[4] After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars.[5] Heidegger never apologized for anything[6] and is only known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens").[7]

Whether there is a relation between Heidegger's political affiliation and his philosophy is another matter of controversy. Critics, such as Günther Anders, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Hans Jonas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Löwith,[8] Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas,[9] Luc Ferry, Jacques Ellul, György Lukács,[10] and Alain Renaut assert that Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi Party revealed flaws inherent in his philosophical conceptions.[5] His supporters, such as Hannah Arendt, Otto Pöggeler, Jan Patočka, Silvio Vietta, Jacques Derrida, Jean Beaufret, Jean-Michel Palmier, Richard Rorty, Marcel Conche, Julian Young, Catherine Malabou, and François Fédier, see his involvement with Nazism as a personal "error" – a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics[11][12] – that is irrelevant to his philosophy.

  1. ^ Mitläufer (literally, "with-runner"; similar to "lemming-like"): a person who, unlike a fellow traveler, gives into peer pressure without participation nor resistance nor inner conviction.
  2. ^ Daniel Morat: Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit. Göttingen 2007, p. 302. Helmuth Vetter: Grundriss Heidegger. Ein Handbuch zu Leben und Werk. Felix Meiner, Hamburg 2014, p. 398.
  3. ^ Assheuer, Thomas (21 March 2014). "Das vergiftete Erbe" [The poisoned legacy]. Die Zeit (in German).
  4. ^ Escudero, Jesús Adrián (2015). "Heidegger?s Black Notebooks and the Question of Anti-Semitism". Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual. 5: 21–49. doi:10.5840/gatherings201552. Among other things, it remains clear that Heidegger rejects the National Socialist ideology of racial and biological oppression. [...] In light of the available documentation, it seems difficult to speak of a racist or biological anti-Semitism in Heidegger. Also, in the Black Notebooks and in other writings there are passages in which Heidegger appears extremely critical of this type of anti-Semitism. [...] In Heidegger's case, it is a type of anti-Semitism that could be qualified as "religious," "cultural," or "spiritual." [...] It seems that for every piece of evidence for anti-Semitism there is another piece of evidence against it.
  5. ^ a b Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis" (Archived 2011-11-07 at the Wayback Machine), a review of Victor Farias' Heidegger et le nazisme. Original article: "Heidegger and the Nazis". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 35, no. 10. 16 June 1988. pp. 38–47. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Spiegel was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Heinrich Wiegand Petzet Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, 1983 p. 37. See also Frédéric de Towarnicki, A la rencontre de Heidegger. Souvenirs d'un messager de la Forêt-Noire, Gallimard 1993 p. 125.
  8. ^ Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 57, translated by Paula Wissing as cited by Maurice Blanchot in "Thinking the Apocalypse: a Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David", in Critical Inquiry 15:2, pp. 476–477.
  9. ^ "Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Politics of Dwelling" Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine by David J. Gauthier, Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2004, p. 156
  10. ^ "Heidegger Redivivus by Georg Lukacs 1951". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 2024-03-29.
  11. ^ Arendt, Hannah (Oct 21, 1971). "Martin Heidegger At 80". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 17, no. 6. pp. 50–54. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
  12. ^ Arendt, Hannah (1978) [reprint from 1971]. Murray, M. (ed.). Martin Heidegger at 80. Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 293–303.

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