To the Editor:

“Homeless in the World” by William Barrett [March] contains some illuminating remarks about Heidegger’s thought, but the author’s cavalier dismissal of the “Nazi episode” in Heidegger’s life is most charitably described as distressing. It is also calculated to cause distress to Jewish readers of a Jewish magazine.

Mr. Barrett’s inadequate excuse for devoting but two paragraphs to the “Nazi episode” is that he is concerned not with Heidegger’s life but his thought. Such a distinction is at best tenuous in the case of an author whose thought centers on the specifics of the individual’s life; one has only to think of Heidegger’s emphasis on resoluteness, authenticity, choice. Moreover the Nazi episode of Heidegger’s life is reflected in Heidegger’s thought. Mr. Barrett has nothing to say about Heidegger’s Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (“The Self-Determination of the German University”). That is a speech, a printed speech, a part of Heidegger’s thought. By what right does Mr. Barrett ignore it?

Most problematic of all is Mr. Barrett’s apparent certainty that Heidegger’s Nazism is an episode, an incident of the past. He thereby wittingly or unwittingly fails even to hint that there is weighty evidence to the effect that Heidegger’s Nazism is more, much more, than an episode. One example must suffice. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics dates from lectures of 1935, a good year for Nazis and a bad year for Jews. The author reissued the book in 1953 “without change of content” except for having removed the errors. That book speaks of the inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist movement. Heidegger is too careful a writer to be excused on the ground of carelessness. Evidently he still believed in 1953 that his remarks about National Socialism did not constitute an error. It is, therefore, to put it bluntly, irresponsible to treat Heidegger’s Nazism as a mere episode. Mr. Barrett owes us an explanation. In the meantime I would refer the reader to Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism (Yale University Press, 1969) for a more balanced and profound treatment of this subject.

I write as an admirer of Heidegger’s thought and as an admirer of William Barrett’s contributions to COMMENTARY. However, I also write as one who thinks nothing is gained and much is lost when one denies that a good thinker can be a bad man. That is easy to do, but also reprehensible.

Werner J. Dannhauser
Ithaca, New York

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To the Editor:

William Barrett’s remarkable prose in “Homeless in the World” succeeds where one might have expected only serious poetry or prophecy could. The painstaking resuscitation of themes like God and existence by a secular philosopher, employing only the language and contexts of his day, would seem something of a miracle by itself. It is hard to imagine how any of the social reconstructions required in our time could seriously be undertaken without guidance from Mr. Barrett’s grasp of alienation, especially his prophetic warning on the real meaning of Utopia.

Henry De Cicco
Florham Park, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

. . . “Homeless in the World” offers extraordinary insight into our ordinary existence at a time when we badly need it. The larger questions are so eloquently stated here. We are made aware of our existence as a totality, yet within the context of our daily lives. A powerful truth emerges, and it is liberating in the perspective it opens up to our view. . . .

Betty Weitz
Chappaqua, New York

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William Barrett writes:

If I were “cavalier” about anyone’s being or having been a Nazi, I would not be appearing in the pages of COMMENTARY. That should be axiomatic; and if Werner J. Dannhauser had kept this in mind, there would not be this present misunderstanding between us.

Mr. Dannhauser is of two minds whether you can separate Heidegger the thinker from his thought. At first he says no, but then concludes yes, he can. Come, come, Mr. Dannhauser, which is it? Were I to borrow your accusatory tone, “you owe us an explanation.” But last thoughts are best, and we may take his final judgment as the one he really holds to: he admires Heidegger’s thought, and therefore he must be able to separate the bad man from the good philosopher. But if he permits himself to make this separation, why shouldn’t he allow me the same privilege?

And there the matter between Mr. Dannhauser and myself might end, except that Heidegger himself does not always allow us to remain with his ideas. When he enters the public arena, he seems to have a knack of making trouble for himself. Thus the disturbing fact for Mr. Dannhauser—and he is right to find it so—is Heidegger’s publication in 1953 of a 1935 lecture in which he refers in passing to the “inner greatness” of the National Socialist movement. The passage is entirely irrelevant to the philosophic content of the book and could easily have been deleted, Whatever Heidegger’s motives were, I do not know, but there are several points to be considered.

1. If he had suppressed the original statement, it could have been dug out anyway and then would have looked worse. He had said it, let it stand on the record. “You can run but you can’t hide,” as Joe Louis used to say.
2. The more important consideration is just what that “inner greatness” was supposed to consist in. The statement of it is compressed into one parenthetical phrase to the effect that its greatness consists in “the encounter of modern man with global technology.” What can this phrase possibly have meant? The perplexing thing is to try to square its meaning, whatever that might have been in 1935, with the kind of philosophical thinking Heidegger was doing in 1953. For the past twenty-five years he has been teaching that the grave danger to Western man and his civilization is just this: the self-assertion of the human will, particularly as this will expresses itself in the technical-technological organization of life on a global scale. National Socialism was hailed by its followers as a resurgence of the national will. The Triumph of the Will was Leni Riefenstahl’s title for her film of those early days of the movement, which some cineastes profess to admire still as a model documentary. Heidegger’s thinking in recent decades has been a persistent disparagement of the will in all its public shapes. The will to power, in particular, is condemned as leading to the demoniacal willfullness of modern life. In the background of this thinking there looms the figure of the gentle mystic, Meister Eckhardt, who can hardly be taken as a spiritual symbol by storm-troopers. One can see how Heidegger’s earlier notion of “resoluteness” might be twisted for Nazi purposes, but it would be quite impossible with the later philosophy, unless secretly all along National Socialism had been a pacifist and quietist movement. And unworldly in politics as Heidegger may be, I cannot believe that in 1953 he would be so naive as to believe that.
3. The damaging remark is embedded in a passage, the greater part of which is a very strong attack on the official National Socialist philosophy. Der Spiegel, in an otherwise unfriendly comment, acknowledges that this opposition to the official philosophy was a “courageous” act at the time on Heidegger’s part. Perhaps, in reprinting the 1935 lecture, Heidegger wishes to show where he stood at the time; but then also, in all honesty, he could not suppress the damaging passage. This year, 1935, significantly, marks also the beginning of his withdrawal from official Nazi connections. In 1936 he published the first of his studies of the poet Hoelderlin, which marks the beginning of the period that some commentators have called Heidegger II. Yet he himself has insisted that only in the light of Heidegger II can one grasp Heidegger I; in other words, the later phase seeks to rescue the earlier Heidegger from Nazi misinterpretations.

The foregoing is no defense of Heidegger. I leave that to his biographer, whoever he or she may turn out to be. Besides, some things I don’t find ultimately defensible. Heidegger’s connection with the Nazis, however brief and whatever the exculpating circumstances, was a very grave moral lapse, and will remain permanently so. Surely it should be unnecessary for me to repeat this here; yet we seem to have entered a peculiar climate of debate where, no matter one’s past record or present company, some overzealous policeman may demand that one show one’s credentials once again.

Nevertheless, Heidegger’s life did not come to an end with the destruction of National Socialism in 1945. During the last thirty years he has gone on thinking, writing, and teaching, and in that time his influence has spread and touched churchmen, theologians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary men. It would be a gratuitous insult to all those who have responded in any way to this influence to say that they were insensitive to the Nazi issue. The list would include Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. (Buber, reviewing Heidegger’s Holzwege [1950]), remarked that the level of philosophic thought there seemed to him to “belong to the ages.” He did not bring up the Nazi issue. Had Mr. Dannhauser been around, would he have charged forward demanding an explanation?) In view of that continuing influence, it seems to me regrettable that the two parts of this life have not been brought into perspective, and particularly that Heidegger himself has made no statement about his past, and in my article I said so. The expression of this regret may be what has thrown Mr. Dannhauser off. But surely—unless we have lost all sense of proportion—to express regret at a situation left inconclusive and ambiguous is not to soften one’s moral condemnation at what we find there to be condemned.

I do not know Heidegger. I have had only one formal exchange of letters with him, in the late 40’s when I was an editor of Partisan Review, over a possible contribution, which turned out not to be available for our use. (Ironically enough in the present context, the piece in question was the great 1950 essay on Nietzsche, which is his first full-scale philosophical blast against the will to power.) As to the kind of man he is, I have had to depend on the impressions of others. The Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss, who knows him well, told me, “Heidegger will defend his ideas stubbornly, but will not defend himself.”

I got the same impression from Hannah Arendt. In the early 60’s there was the possibility of Heidegger’s coming to this country to lead a seminar for a psychiatric circle in Washington; the Nazi question arose and Dr. Arendt and I were invited to come down and address ourselves to the issue. The last long conversation I was ever to have with her was on this subject; since she is not available, I can’t repeat what she said; but it can be confirmed that she was then very ready and willing to speak to the issue. As it happened, Heidegger’s visit never came through; and so far as I know, she never did speak publicly on this question. One of the things she made clear to me was that her correspondence on the matter, for the sake of particulars and documents, had been carried on with Mrs. Heidegger; he himself abstained from his own defense.

But perhaps he might be induced to change. His American publishers have been assembling a series of translations of his major works. They have been lucky to find some extraordinary interpreters and translators, and Heidegger himself has shown great interest in the project. Perhaps the editors could induce him to speak out for the sake of his American public. Otherwise the old question, in all its ugliness, will be coming up again and again.

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I find that what I have written here goes very far afield from my essay, and yet because of the seriousness of the issue had to be said. My article was not a case study of the Heidegger question; nor was it even an attempt at anything like a formal “critique” or “assessment” of his thought. My essay was a meditation on the theme of alienation, for which I made use of certain ideas of Heidegger—as well as some of my own. I wish Mr. Dannhauser had read it in that light, for he might not then have asked me to do a lot of other things besides what I intended.