To the Editor:

I agree with Mark Lilla, in “What Heidegger Wrought” [January], that although Victor Farias’s evidence in Heidegger and Nazism is partly unoriginal and partly out of focus, the book offers essential information on Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism. . . . Clearly, the older generation of Germans has always known about the Heidegger case while the younger, for the most part, has conveniently forgotten it. Americans, on the other hand, have been largely unaware of the problem.

As it happens, most students in the U.S. read Heidegger in English. More importantly, they read him disconnected from the 19th- and 20th-century German cultural milieu to which he belongs. If they see Heidegger as part of any political movement, it is the nationalist, conservative one. Lacking the skills to identify the shifts of this movement in Germany in the late 20’s, however, and thus failing to note the interplay between Heidegger’s concepts and some of the basic ideological tendencies of Nazism, many American students measure Heidegger’s philosophy against contemporary concerns and apply it to those concerns. . . . Present-day American students have until recently had little access to the hard evidence Farias has amassed. This evidence will now reach not only the uninitiated, but also the experts clinging to their apolitical stance. Although the latter may still insist upon teaching Heidegger apart from his context, Farias’s book forces them to take a stand regarding Heidegger’s role as accessory to the greatest crime in history.

Furthermore, Mr. Lilla is to be commended for his excellent analysis of the relationship between Heidegger’s ideas and those of la pensée 68 [“’68 thinking”], as it is called in France. . . . The hatred and contempt of yesteryear’s radicals for such traditional “anthropological” values as logic and rationality, the desire of the philosopher- linguists to “deconstruct” 19th-century man, chimed in readily with Heidegger’s call. Whence Heidegger came and what he stood for was no concern of theirs: what mattered was debunking the “myths of Western civilization.”

As for Heidegger’s ever-busy apologists, I would like to cite excerpts from a letter written by him on October 2, 1929, . . . asking for financial aid for a younger colleague, Eduard Baumgarten:

What I could only hint at in my recommendation letter, I now shall express more explicitly: . . . we must, ultimately, either return our fresh, home-grown manpower and educators to our German intellectual life [emphasis in original] or surrender the latter-in both a broader and a more narrow sense of the word—to ever-spreading Semitization. We shall, however, only then find the way back if we foster the development of that fresh and energetic manpower—and if we do so without agitation and unproductive arguments.

What the English term “Semitization” cannot quite convey here is the sense of spreading Jewish malignancy (“der wachsenden Verjudung”) expressed in the original German. As for the subject of this letter, ironically, it was this same Baumgarten whom Heidegger denounced four years later for having a friend who was a Jew.

In this letter Heidegger is quite open about his “great goal.” His apologists should not try to conceal it.

Zsuzsanna Ozsvath
University of Texas
Richardson, Texas

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To the Editor:

My late teacher, Jacob Klein, who studied with Heidegger, used to say that Heidegger was a very bad man but a very great philosopher. One could learn from Mark Lilla’s able article the reason for the condemnation, but not the praise. Yet Klein’s judgment is defensible, and such a defense may sharpen the issues raised by Mr. Lilla.

The phenomenological movement with which Heidegger was associated had as its goal the precise description of the fundamental structures of thought and experience. Being and Time was conceived as part of the project. In it, Heidegger hoped to remove from the primary concerns of philosophy all traces of mere speculation or moralistic accommodation. Thus, Heidegger uses the term Dasein, which means “being-there,” to denote human “Being.” Beyond the horizon of consciousness lies Being. Out of the confrontation between humanity and Being, our world arises. History is this confrontation, through which humanity and Being interact.

Two things follow. First, as reflected in Heidegger’s subsequent publications, the philosophical tradition takes on a new significance, becoming historically central. Second, history in its broader significance has an importance for philosophy which it had previously borne only for Hegel.

Heidegger came to believe that the Western tradition involved an aggrandizement of humanity over Being, a sort of overassertion of consciousness and intentionality . . . that distorts our world. His preoccupation with Greek philology and fragments of pre-Socratic philosophy, which was often exasperatingly quirky, arose from the desire to recover a more spontaneous, less willful, more authentic, yet philosophical sense of interaction with Being. . . . Though atheistic, Heidegger’s philosophy came to have religious overtones. His attitude toward Being may be characterized as pious, as a genuine reverence for that which lies beyond consciousness, and a desire for a genuine revelation. . . .

It is within this framework, to which Mr. Lilla, of course, alludes, that one must understand Heidegger’s rejection of humanism, and his generally reactionary stance. . . . The philosophical importance of Heidegger rests primarily on his radical recasting of the terms of inquiry in an attempt to recover, beyond scholastic disputation, the original sense of wonder out of which philosophy was born. . . .

So if Heidegger the philosopher unsettles us and asks us to think more profoundly, how does this relate to Heidegger the Nazi? Mr. Lilla suggests that for Heidegger politics became a purely aesthetic phenomenon, and he was responsive to anyone who promised violent creativity. I do not think that Heidegger was so fundamentally amoral. Rather, he was a genuine, if somewhat eccentric, reactionary. . . It seems to me that Heidegger was a sort of victim of an idée fixe, who reduced the quest for meaning, for authenticity, to the quasi-religious terms I have outlined. In so doing, he became a kind of fanatic, converting philosophical insight into a single-minded pursuit of a corrective relationship to Being. His reaction, eccentric as it was, was profoundly moral, but with the morality of the monomaniac. What should have been suggestive became, as it were, creedal. He first misconstrued Nazism as a reactionary movement similar to his own concerns. . . . Later, he became disillusioned with the Nazis, who were as committed to aspects of modernity as anyone. But like a true fanatic, he justified his own motives, regardless of consequences. The philosophy does not lead, of necessity, to the fanaticism. That is a matter of character, perhaps primarily of arrogance. Nor does the philosophy lead to reaction, unless one views Heidegger not as a suggestive thinker, but as a prophet. As a philosopher, Heidegger is illuminating. Unfortunately, one has to watch out for the crank.

Michael David Blume
Annapolis, Maryland

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To the Editor:

I found Mark Lilla’s discussion on the controversy over Heidegger and the Nazis informative and, considering the subject matter, admirably evenhanded. However, it would have been helpful if Mr. Lilla had offered more of an explanation of Heidegger’s philosophy and why it is considered so important. Philosophers since the Greeks have claimed that Being—reality, roughly speaking—may be grasped and described with total completeness and certainty by the mind of the philosopher.

Heidegger calls this doctrine “metaphysics.” He shows that, on the contrary, life and the world are in key ways always partly beyond understanding and description; similar anti-metaphysical positions have been taken by a great many other post-Enlightenment philosophers, including John Dewey, William James, Richard Rorty, Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, Nietzsche, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Austin. But since modern social, political, and economic thought is largely based on metaphysical assumptions, the question becomes how we should live our lives if we go along with the new critique of metaphysics.

In the 1930’s Heidegger thought the answer was German fascism. . . . As Michael Zimmerman explains in his 1981 book, The Eclipse of Self, Heidegger started out with a conception of authenticity as resolute will, a conception that matched that of the Nazis and so led him into their movement. Later on, however, he came to view authenticity not as will but as a sort of accepting, contemplative calm that is the very opposite of Nazi arrogance.

Unfortunately, Heidegger’s final position offers little basis for deciding how to organize social life, and his French followers (most of whom are actually much more Nietzschean than Heideggerian) have not done much better. In light of this failure, it is easy to understand why the French would now revive a Kantian humanism. The problem is that, while humanism has had some valuable consequences, it simply cannot stand up to the penetrating critiques of the various post-metaphysical philosophers. . . .

Les Brunswick
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

Mark Lilla’s “What Heidegger Wrought” is correct as far as it goes. It does not go far enough, however. What Mr. Lilla overlooks, as do Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut in their book La Pensée 68, is the significance of the rapid rise to popularity of Nietzsche’s thinking in the France of the 1960’s. Heidegger’s three-volume Nietzsche was published in German in 1961, and it helped trigger a quick French response in the form of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche as Philosopher, published in French in 1962. Deleuze’s pathbreaking work was rapidly assimilated to the thinking of Paul Ricoeur and the then-little-known Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. . . .

What Mr. Lilla disparagingly calls a “highly unstable mixture based on irreconcilable philosophical contradictions. . . . ,” is actually a fairly respectable summary of the “new” Nietzsche. . . . In this new French Nietzsche can be found a virtual program for the relativization of humanistic values. Selectively employed, as in the “archeology” of Foucault or the “deconstruction” of Derrida, the thinking of the “new” Nietzsche . . . undermines and discredits the case for humanistic values. It also provides a set of tools for turning the tables on Heidegger in a way not considered in Mr. Lilla’s analysis.

Heidegger’s portrait of Nietzsche is a composite constructed from the fragmentary papers that Nietzsche left behind. Nietzsche is said to have fashioned a new image of man, one which Heidegger calls a “brutal beast.” . . . The Western metaphysical tradition is seen as a downward spiral from Being to beast. But stripped down to its. . . . essentials, Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche does suggest a form of degraded humanism and thus sets the stage for Heidegger’s wholesale condemnation of it. . . .

Heidegger’s Nietzsche inadvertently revealed more about Heidegger’s thinking than about Nietzsche’s. Derrida intimated as much in Spurs, published in 1978. Farias’s book simply confirmed what Derrida had guessed. It therefore played right into the hands of the most radical French social and political thinkers. . . .

Marxism and Catholicism are no longer sources of legitimation in French civil society, but humanism is, and radical French thinkers who wish to undermine the institutions of civil society in France therefore want to discredit it. Heidegger was a tool toward this end, but the “new” Nietzsche’s thinking proved to be a better tool, and so Heidegger had to go. Or rather, he had to stay, in the form of the “last humanist.”

Robert R. Sullivan
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . It is significant that Heidegger, once a Jesuit, never until his death gave up his efforts to help and guide Jesuits after he left the order. So it is not surprising that students who attend Jesuit universities in Managua and San Salvador receive a secularized interpretation of the Gospel, as is favored by Heidegger’s perspective on religion . . .

Mark Lilla explains how astute Heidegger was in covering up his past Nazi sympathies. However, he was equally clever, and over a much longer period of time, at not calling attention to his strong influence on Jesuit theologians, persuading them to ignore the supernatural and seducing them little by little to accept his own secular outlook. As a result, the Catholic Church in a number of places in Central America and elsewhere is blinded to the supernatural by its adherence to Heidegger’s world view.

Heidegger’s thought hatched liberation theology. His greatest triumph was his success at persuading religious people to ignore the divine and the prophetic, and to limit their perspective to human finitude.

Felipe Conneally, S.J.
Loyola High School
Los Angeles, California

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To the Editor:

I was most impressed by the high level of questioning initiated by Mark Lilla, though I feel he was a bit unfair to the immense and singular critique of Heidegger by Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe (who is by no means merely “one of [Derrida’s] eager young followers,” unless the same could be said of Plato to Socrates). Before closing the Heidegger dossier, I would urge readers to consider an important book on the issues raised by Mr. Lilla, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, which focuses on Heidegger and contemporary politics. The author, Avital Ronell of Berkeley, offers a first-rate interpretation of the failure of democracy and of Heidegger’s thinking on technology. This constitutes an American response to the Heidegger scandal, which is possibly more to the Left than one has been accustomed to.

Peter T. Connor
Berkeley, California

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To the Editor:

Mark Lilla’s excellent article . . . is not only a well-deserved indictment of Heidegger but also an indictment of the whole field of philosophy. It shows rather clearly the bankruptcy of meaningful ideas in this field and its domination by our Greek forefathers, particularly Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Their mode of thinking has been the nemesis of our academic world. The Greek thinkers started with definitions of such things as love, courage, etc. and then proceeded from these to design models for living, like Plato’s Republic. In actuality, however, we first experience loving or courage or heroism in our own lives; only after having done so a number of times, do we attempt to generalize about these experiences and deal in abstractions. by this time the passionate commitment which was involved in the original emotion has long since vanished, so that we are talking about rather pale leftovers of what had been intense experiences. The Greek way of thinking tends to deal with these pale abstractions as though they were the highest form of human thought and value, whereas in actuality it is the original passionate experiences that make society function. . . .

If you listened to our academics you would be led to believe that no one can become involved in a love affair unless he knows some fancy definitions of love and hate, which obviously is not true. If anything, the possession of such definitions tends to incapacitate one from being involved in genuine experiences. . .

Hans R. Huessy
University of Vermont
Burlington, Vermont

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Mark Lilla writes:

I am heartened to learn that a handful of readers felt that my eleven-page, densely printed discussion of German and French philosophy did not, as Robert R. Sullivan puts it, “go far enough.” The editors and I tried to distill a series of lectures into a digestible magazine article, and in the process deleted many of the nuances and references that several correspondents now with to reintroduce. (For instance, readers were spared a more extensive treatment of the Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe tag-team, which Peter T. Connor compares, without evident irony, to Socrates and Plato.)

I am especially grateful for the thoughtful remarks of Michael David Blume and Les Brunswick. I cannot, however, share Mr. Blume’s conviction that Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and pursuit of a fresh encounter with Being might have issued in a less disturbing doctrine had he not been such a “bad man,” an “eccentric,” and a “crank.” At least in Heidegger’s hands, the phenomenological method that seeks to avoid all “speculation” seems inevitably to drive its followers into a void that can only be filled by something extra-phenomenological and wildly speculative: piety for Being or existential pragmatism in the weak, a warrior-creator for the bold.

Heidegger’s boldness contributed to his philosophical greatness, but it also drove him beyond the natural limits of phenomenological philosophy into what can only be called (if the word has any meaning) evil. Something in, or something missing from, his philosophy seems to have contributed to his indifference to evil. Had he been less bold, or had chance not landed him in a position of power, the desensitization might have been less apparent but no less real. Those of us who read Heidegger today, therefore, have no choice but to pose with philosophical seriousness, and without parti pris, some of the questions to which Mr. Brunswick alludes. Is the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics indeed sound? Are there philosophical foundations for humanism more substantial than utility or mere sentiment? These have become the central issues of French philosophy today.

Robert R. Sullivan is absolutely right that a “new” Nietzsche was behind many of the French intellectual and philosophical developments in the 1960’s, but wrong to think that the French themselves ever mustered the nerve to follow their new maitre to his most radical anti-humanist conclusions. Here Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are more reliable guides, for they reveal how la pensée 68 became a flabby but very convenient syncretic ideology permitting those versed in it to shift from Heidegger and Nietzsche to Marx and Freud, and back again, as the circumstances warranted. Thus, both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault were publicly engaged in movements calling for political and libidinal liberation (i.e., Marx and Freud), but would revert to “deconstruction” or “genealogy” (i.e., Heidegger and Nietzsche) whenever they sought to discredit the “metaphysical” or “anthropological” assumptions of Western bourgeois democracies. This philosophical incoherence offered them the luxury of fighting colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, all the while proclaiming that the human subject is a fiction and there are no truths, only interpretations. This is a clever political strategy but it is hardly sound philosophy. (And Father Felipe Conneally’s letter, although it exaggerates the importance of Heidegger’s youthful two-week experiment as a Jesuit novice in 1909, helps remind us that the ideological success of halfhearted Heideggerianism has now extended well beyond the secular quartiers of Paris.)

Finally, I confess to a certain perverse satisfaction in receiving Hans R. Huessy’s evidently well-meant but utterly misguided note. Clearly without meaning to, Mr. Huessy has done a fine job of recapitulating Heidegger’s doctrine: the distrust of academics and “fancy definitions,” the incrimination of Greek abstraction, the call for a passionate return to “genuine experiences”—this is pure Heidegger. At a time when many public defenders of humane values in the United States have taken to idealizing the virtues of the common man over those of eggheads and professors, it is useful to be reminded that those who kick intellectuals around often end up repeating their ideas in vulgarized form, ignorant of the consequences.