Heidegger's Jews: Inclusion/Exclusion and Heidegger's Anti-Semitism

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Acknowledgements

A preliminary and more extensive version of this essay has been published in French as “Heidegger et ses Juifs” in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Heidegger et les Juifs (Paris: Grasset, La Règle du Jeu, No. 58/59. Dossier: Heidegger et «les juifs», September 2015), pp. 411–54. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of this essay for their suggestions and to Rafael Winkler as well as to Tracy Burr Strong and Christophe Perrin for their insightful remarks.

Notes

1 See here: Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f.

2 Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et «les juifs», the result of a conference held at the Bibliotheque National in Paris in January 2015 as well as the (forthcoming) volume consequent upon conference held in April 2015 in Siegen: Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, Martin Heideggers »Schwarze Hefte” – Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte. A reflection on this last conference, beginning with the cautionary hyperbole, “Siegen is the most horrific city in the world”, has appeared authored by Hannah Lühmann: “Hier wird Heidegger der Prozess gemacht” in Die Welt, 27 April 2015 and, still more reflectively, if “walking dead” or zombie-style, a participant contribution by Dieter Thomä, “Eine Heidegger-Tagung in Siegen. Kann ein Untoter sterben?,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 29 April 2015.

3 Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks: 1931–1941.

4 I develop this point in Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte”.

5 There are a number of such reports, given for the most part in reviews. See, for one example, Greta Lührs’ interview with Sidonie Kellerer, “Des Meisters neue Kleider,” 5 March 2015 in Hohe Luft.

6 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f. Already made available in French, as if in time for the conference held at the start of 2015, an English translation is available as Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy.

7 See Heidegger, Être et temps. Indeed, the challenges of translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit have been compared to the challenges of translating Luther and thus to a reflection on translation as such. As Pierre Legrand observes, it is significant that the latter range of translations might be said to have “compelled the French language and French philosophy to undergo the kind of modification allowing for the narrativization of unfamiliar ideas”. Pierre Legrand, “Issues in the Translatability of Law”, p. 30.

8 François Vézin, «L’étendue du désastre» (8 août 2014).

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 If Heidegger did not ultimately support Stein, this matches his constant effort to keep his own work at a distance from what he felt to be a conflation with anthropology as this separated him from Stein, Husserl's student. This would also drive him to distance himself from Jaspers and other representatives of Lebensphilosophie and precisely the directions Stein sought to advance. Stein, whose work continued the direction of Max Scheler more than Heidegger, could not but follow another path, one that in fact would have, in a different world, taken her closer to Eugen Fink. See very generally, Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue and more specifically, Cordula Haderlein, Individuelles Mensch-Sein in Freiheit und Verantwortung: die Bildungsidee Edith Steins, as well as Hans Rainer Sepp, “Edith Steins Stellung innerhalb der phänomenologische Bewegung”.

13 François Vézin, op. cit.

14 The philosopher of music based in Nice, Daniel Charles writes on Smith and Husserl and Heidegger in his essay, “Singing Waves”. I discuss Smith in Babich, The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology, and see too Smith himself, especially his “Cartesian Theory and Musical Science,” in his The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music, pp. 119–42.

15 Babich, “Ad Jacob Taubes”, v–x.

16 Ihde himself is the source for this reference drawn from Smith's unpublished essay, “Heidegger and Insights Leading to a Phenomenology of Sound”, cited in Ihde as “Speech is a thing of sound, not a phenomenon but an akoumenon”. Ihde, Sense and Significance, p. 31. See too F. Joseph Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: A Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music. There is a large if esoteric literature here and an even larger research project. See for one recent contribution, Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, and see too my own study, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect.

17 Paul Virilio has his own line on this, as did Jean Baudrillard and in part, but in different ways, Friedrich Kittler and Sloterdijk too, among not too many others.

18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 82. See also Samuel Fleischacker, Heidegger's Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas.

19 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 47. Translation modified.

20 Sartre writes even more explicitly: “their atheism differs in no wise from that of a Roger Martin du Gard, who says he disengaged himself from the Catholic faith.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 47.

21 Cf., here, Babich, “Nietzsche's Antichrist: The Birth of Modern Science out of the Spirit of Religion”.

22 See again, Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Trawny is explicit that there is a problem here even as he argues that one can be, as Richard Wolin cites him in his own review in the Jewish Review of Books, “constructive” and even as he argued for the value of continued Heidegger studies, for Trawny it remains the case, in a striking parallel with Habermas’ language with respect to the danger that once was attributed to the influence of Nietzsche: “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.

23 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. IV Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen, Vol. 96, Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), p. 262.

24 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.

25 Cf. Trawny, “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.

26 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 1 + 2: Band 1: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte.

27 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, with a new preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken, 1995).

28 Heidegger, “Überlegungen XIV”, GA 96.

29 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.

30 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 136.

31 Ibid., p. 36.

32 I discuss this, also with respect to Günther Anders, in Babich, “O, Superman! or Being Towards Transhumanism: Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Media Aesthetics”.

33 See Jason Koebler, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm”, as well as Joachim Müller-Jung, “Das Schwein, dein Spender. Vermenschlicht: gentechnisch veränderte Ferkel aus München”, and Walter Weder, Jörg Seebach, and Ruth Baumann-Hölzle, „Ersatzteillager Mensch,”. Cf., Babich, “Körperoptimierung im digitalen Zeitalter, verwandelte Zauberlehrlinge, und künftige Übermenschsein”.

34 In addition to this, there is the ontic affair of it all as it is and has been for the largest part conducted in industrial laboratories across the world, and that includes the USA, all without regulation because all without report (Ag-gag laws keep much more than simple cruelty out of sight).

35 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 113.

36 Ibid., p. 72. For Heidegger this assessment is simply an “idle” projection. Earlier, Heidegger, notes “The superman constitutes a transformation and thus a rejection of man so far. Accordingly, the public figures who in the course of current history emerge in the limelight are as far from the superman's nature as is humanly possible”. Ibid., p. 70.

37 For to be sure, practical hitches remain: the seamless fantasy of switchable, upgradable body components is hardly at hand but the market for pig-human hybrids, and a profitable side-market in drugs and anti-rejection drugs, will be there as long as there is aging and disease – and what Sartre called bad faith.

38 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 40.

39 Ibid.

40 And you can turn to your Nietzsche scholar friends and ask them what they think of Heidegger's Nietzsche (as it is quite popular to denounce it) or the way Heidegger read everyone else in the history of philosophy. Heidegger's Nazism is like Heidegger's reading of the history of philosophy, the history of metaphysics, the end of philosophy.

41 Heidegger's word is noise Lärm and (the Latin is worth remarking upon for a Greek fetishist, as Heidegger was), it is the flatus vocus that echoes in his complaints.

42 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 73. The reference to Aristotle is, of course, a literal one; cf. 72–73.

43 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 95.

44 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 4.

45 However else would we know about the brain if it were not for the brains, thank you Claude Bernard, of dogs and the brains of the macaque monkeys we continue to capture, slave trade for our laboratories, in the wild? See for further discussion and references, Babich, “Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter: On Laboratory Life”.

46 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, pp. 5–6.

47 And after science and technology about which we are sure we could be thinking if mentioning it here were not a distraction, there is the literary emphasis of most translators who usually work less as philosophers (that time is past) than in departments of German. This is not true in the USA, but only for exceptional reasons (I am speaking of recent translators of Heidegger's works) and it is the reason we do not have more translations and it is above all the reason we still do not have a complete translation of Nietzsche's posthumous works.

48 Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France.

49 Ricoeur, mindful of his own legacy, met Dominique for the interview, as Dominique mentioned when we met before his death, but as he regretted, opted for a dinner “off the record”.

50 See my discussion of Duhem and German/French science in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science”.

51 Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”.

52 I discuss this with attention to the time that was the first few decades of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science (and mathematics) in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science.

53 “Let us agree that this point – which is itself nothing but an algebraic expression, only a world of geometric consonance take to designate an ensemble of n numbers – changes, from one instant to another, by an algebraic formula. From this convention, so perfectly algebraic in nature, so completely arbitrary in appearance, we deduce, with perfect rigor, the consequences that calculation can draw from it, and we say that we are setting forth mechanics.” Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”, p. 93

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., p. 112.

56 Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues”, here p. 122.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., p. 123

59 Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 5, GA 95, p. 97.

60 Heidegger, GA 96, pp. 46 (from Überlegungen XII, 24).

61 Heidegger, Ibid., p. 38.

62 That argument can be made, but for his part, Duhem is talking about “scholasticism”, that is what my old Jesuit teacher, the Canadian Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, author of the conspicuously named Method in Theology (1972) and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), with its famous listings of points to the seemingly nth degree, no mere sic et non, took the mid-twentieth century to an extraordinary pitch well beyond the tradition of generalized empirical method of “transcendental Thomism” inaugurated by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher, Joseph Maréchal. Indeed, Maréchal was probably one of the reasons Lonergan was able to answer my questions regarding the intersection of mysticism and empiricism as well as he did. Maréchal's initial main works included: Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, 5 vols (Bruges-Louvain, 1922–47) and Études sur le psychologie des mystiques, 2 vols (1926, 1937).

63 Dominique Janicaud, Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme: Ravaisson et la métaphysique.

64 Dominique Janicaud, La Puissance du rationnel. Janicaud published his own study of the darkness of Heidegger's thought, L'Ombre de cette pensée: Heidegger et la question politique together with Heidegger's insight into the more banal darkness of rationality itself.

65 This reflection is part of the history of ideas and indeed of books and publication. Thus Janicaud reissued his first book (réédition) and moved thereby as he did so from the scholastic provinces of Rome (La Haye) to Paris (Vrin), republishing his Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris, J. Vrin, 1997).

66 See Janicaud, Heidegger en France, p. 33.

67 See, for example, Babich, “Arendt's Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt”.

68 Werner Brock, Nietzsches Idee der Kultur.

69 Heike Delitz: „Brock, Werner Gottfried”. Martin Heidegger/Kurt Bauch, Briefausgabe: Briefwechsel 1932–1975, p. 51.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Adorno «Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (1966), p. 92.

73 Ibid.

74 See Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship. Cf. Paul Rée, Basic Writings.

75 Hirsch corroborates from a contemporary's perspective, as does, a bit earlier, Hans Georg-Gadamer, Hannah Arendt's report of Heidegger as the “hidden king”: “We were fascinated with Heidegger's new approach to philosophy which he developed in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a book that was published during his years at Marburg. Instead of starting with man as the creator of his world, it was Being (das Sein) that in epochal events opens a world for man's consideration. I belonged to a small group of students who were invited by Heidegger for a discussion of phenomenology every two weeks at his house. The sessions always started with Mrs. Heidegger reading a poem. Following the meetings we would have long, animated discussions among ourselves” (Hirsch, “Autobiographical Sketches”, p. 296.

76 Elisabeth F. Hirsch, 5 February 1988, Letter to the Editor, New York Times (March 2, 1988).

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 This is Gilbert Ryle's “bad man” apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No. 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher's ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger”, p. 4. Michael André Bernstein assesses the statement which is parsed in the THES from a letter written by James Thrower as somehow merely “supposed” simply because it is a report of a direct communication. See Bernstein's footnote 18 in his Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-century German Writing, p. 132. To be sure, the present author can corroborate the difficulty to which Bernstein alludes: Bernasconi's original citation is minimalist, if, as I can say, quite accurate, as I have spent time tracking what seem to be comparatively archaic archaeologies of microfilm cassettes, loading and reading at the glacial pace of that same reproductive technology. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger's Linguistic Omega”.

80 Heidegger, GA 96, §138, p. 161.

81 I have this from Jacques Taminiaux, and recommend that others start with Taminiaux to begin.

82 The list is longer still if we add those with animus, against Heidegger, as this too propels a thinker, we can count Jean-Michel Salanskis.

83 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 56.

84 NB: it remains a bit misleading to speak of the black notebooks in the plural here, not because the notebooks are not plural, they are, but the passages in question are limited to those to be found in the collective volume including the notebooks dating from 1939 to 1941. The next volume, which should have been published by the end of this past year (but manifestly was not: it should appear any moment now at the start of 2015), lacks any such references, inconvenient as that is, as the years of the war go on. Yet as the above citation from Trawny's reflections make clear, what is at stake is a concern to read Heidegger's entire philosophy under the lens of these notebooks and the concerns that appear in them. What Heidegger had wished to say, as he spoke of Nietzsche, as appropriate to philosophy per se, via the exemplary name of Aristotle, and following the fleurit vision of the doxographers of antiquity, he was born, he worked, he died, will not be said of Heidegger. Nor has it been said of Nietzsche. But Heidegger's point, that our concern with biography keeps us from the work, could not be more evidently confirmed. See Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte.”

85 Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger's Black Notebooks”. Wolin also details the parallel Heidegger makes with Americanism and all the other negative associations of Machenschaft.

86 Heidegger, GA 95, p. 194.

87 Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” pp. 92–109.

88 Derrida, Fichus: (Discours de Francfort), p. 56. I discuss Adorno on this note which he includes in his Beethoven book in Babich, “Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews”.

89 «[à] insulter l'animal dans l'homme ou à traiter l'homme d'animal.” Derrida, Fichus, 56. For a discussion, see Marie Berne, Derrida, Eloge de l'idiotie: pour une nouvelle rhetorique chez Breton, Faulkner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 185f.

90 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92. (“Er treibt die Menschen zu dem Unsäglichen, das in Auschwitz nach weltgeschichtlichem Maß kulminierte”.)

91 Ibid.

92 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 51.

93 Ibid., p. 54.

94 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92.

95 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.

96 Ibid.