Pierre Bourdieu vis-à-vis Martin Heidegger: the first ‘conservative revolution’

Abstract

As a philosophy student in 1950s Paris, Pierre Bourdieu experienced a ‘certain fascination’ with the German phenomenologists, Husserl and Heidegger. He later went on in 1975 to write a lengthy article on The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, translated into English in 1991. Recently, notable Bourdieusian theorists have emphasised this Heideggerian contribution to Bourdieu’s thought, stressing its significance alongside the classical sociological theorists (Marx, Weber and Durkheim). They thus directly assert or imply its continued importance for the genesis of new social theory. The present article argues against this position and it does so in part by using Bourdieu’s own reflections on Heidegger. Like Theodor Adorno, this analysis rooted Heidegger’s thought in his social position as a lower-class outsider to the patrician German university system. Going beyond Adorno, however, Bourdieu stressed the crises of interwar Germany including the crisis within the country’s academia. Drawing attention to the interwar ‘conservative revolution’ of Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Erich Jünger, and Fritz Lang, amongst others, Bourdieu delineated Heidegger’s ‘alchemical transformation’ of this conservative current into ‘philosophical form’ to create a symbolic revolution. The article concludes by discussing later scholarship as well as the posthumous publication of Heidegger’s journal, The Black Notebooks. These newly-published sources reveal Heidegger’s coded but virulent antisemitism. In light of these, it is argued that Heideggerian ontology can be used neither for philosophy nor for social theory.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• Heidegger
• Conservative Revolution
• Philosophical Field
• Anti-Semitism

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), the influential French sociologist, switched from a prestigious philosophy trajectory to ethnography when he was called up to serve in the French Army in the Algerian War of Liberation. Few others, he remarked, have carried out ethnographic studies in the middle of a war.¹ On his return from Algeria, he carved out epoch-making studies of higher education.² These sought to explain why so few manual workers’ children became students of higher education—in France in 1965–6, only 4%.³

In 1984 he proceeded to a memorable work, Distinction, undertaking what many saw as a sacrilegious analysis of cultural and political tastes linked to class, within a wider renaissance of class analysis.⁴ He turned then to examine various social ‘microcosms’ with works on the literary, artistic, economic and scientific fields.⁵

Throughout his life he developed certain pivotal concepts with which to depict the social world—notably, habitus, capitals, field and doxa. I will address ‘habitus’ first, a concept that is not original to him but of major importance: in a late interview, he describes it vividly:

Social subjects are not instantaneous minds. Put differently, to understand what someone is going to do it isn’t enough to know the stimulus: there is at a central level a system of dispositions, that is, things that exist at a virtual level which will emerge in relation with a situation […] agents have a history – they are the product of an individual history, of an education associated with a milieu and are also the product of a collective history; […] in particular, the categories of thought and understanding, the schemas of perception, values etc are the product of the incorporation of social structures.⁶

Bourdieu’s much earlier book, Outline of a Theory of Practice, helps us to understand this:

Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from the simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings.⁷

Second, and also crucial, is capital. We need to realise that the main structures determining thought and practices are not just our economic capital⁸ or its absence, but—as Marx also realised in the Eighteenth Brumaire—the amount and type of education we have (our ‘cultural capital”). These internalised structures—economic capital and (legitimate) education—are the key social forces conditioning our tastes and lifestyles. Thus the tables in Distinction, classifying our musical, artistic and political tastes, are organised around two axes—the volume and type of our economic capital (wealth and income) and of our educational or cultural capital. Bourdieu also realised that our social capital or network of useful acquaintances is telling for other purposes: for it is often our distinctive social capital that determines who gives us work, from the shipyards to the House of Lords. Important too, is symbolic capital, another metaphorical capital, our capital of social honour or social recognition, or, indeed, its absence, leading at the extreme to the ‘social death’ of unemployment or slavery.⁹

Acknowledging the enduring power of these forms of capital, Bourdieu’s historical sociology could be seen, like economics, as a ‘dismal science’. It explains the remarkable tenacity of the dominant classes in ensuring that their children inherit their families’ privileges … He does, however, theorise contradictions and revolutions as well. As I have shown earlier, his social theory is by no means a tragic account of perpetual elite or dominant class reproduction.¹⁰

Bourdieu did not neglect to speak of the profound sociological influences on his thought—he will, he says, set these theorists against each other, so as to produce his own theory, the logic of practice:

I am convinced that it is possible to think with Marx against Marx, or with Durkheim against Durkheim: and surely also with Marx and Durkheim against Weber, and vice versa. It is not because I have a proclivity for the paradoxical that I want to suggest that Weber accomplished Marxist purposes where Marx was unable to redeem them.¹¹

This logic of practice will be consistent with the unified principles of theory and method that had emerged within the sociological field, despite these thinkers’ political differences.

Bourdieu acknowledged in an interview that his central concept of habitus originated from much deeper, philosophical roots—from as early as Aquinas, in the 13th Century, for example. Indeed, as well as social theorists (he mentions Marx, especially Theses on Feuerbach, and Lenin), he also refers to the influence of many philosophers, notably, Pascal, Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Austin and Merleau-Ponty.¹² As a student in Paris in the 1950s, he remembered, he was very much engaged with the German philosophers, Husserl (1859–1938), and Heidegger (1889–1976), principally for their notions of the experience of time:

[Interviewer]: ‘Were you never interested in existentialism?’

[Bourdieu] ‘I read Heidegger. I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses of Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which, together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal—as was later the case with Schütz—in my efforts to analyse the extraordinary experience of the social’.¹³

Now, recently, certain highly-regarded social theorists have held that Bourdieu was particularly indebted to Heidegger. For example, Will Atkinson in Beyond Bourdieu (2016) references Heidegger’s different experiences of space as particularly influential.¹⁴ Derek Robbins (2016) has suggested that there is value in thinking of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ as a different name for much of what Heidegger meant by Dasein. By Dasein, Heidegger had meant, he explains, the essential meaning and ground of an actor’s Being.¹⁵ Robbins goes on to argue that although the concept of habitus had a long provenance, Bourdieu had been particularly interested in the phenomenological tradition, not least that of Husserl, Schütz, Gurwitsch, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.¹⁶ Bourdieu himself had distinguished between two Heideggers: Heidegger I—that is, Being and Time (1927) and all the works up to 1933, before the proclaimed ‘famous “reversal” (“Kehre”)’, between 1933 and 1945—and Heidegger II, his later work: including the Letter on Humanism.¹⁷ Robbins claimed that Heidegger I had been particularly influential for Bourdieu.¹⁸

I find Atkinson’s and Robbins’ argument problematic in relation to Heidegger, not least because it has emerged from both Victor Farias’s intellectual biography¹⁹ and Emmanuel Faye’s reading of Heidegger’s unpublished teaching materials²⁰ that from his youth Heidegger had become an enduring and passionate anti-Semite. Moreover, although Heidegger claimed to have had only a brief 10-month period as an active member of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party), archival research has showed that he remained a paid-up member until the very end of the war.²¹

Under the Nazis, Heidegger was appointed the Rector—that is, the Principal (or Führer)—of Freiburg University in 1933. As such, he gave his now-notorious Rectoral Address.²² In this, he championed the authoritarian Führerprinzip throughout the newly National-Socialist universities, championed, too, the ending of academic freedom and autonomy, and championed also the new leader, concluding resoundingly (with words expurgated from some versions), ‘Heil Hitler!’. Under Heidegger as Rector, unemployed workers were urged to enter the universities—no bad thing—but note that he welcomed them for ‘special ideological training’.

The Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), a liberal, commented on Heidegger’s Rectoral Address:

One plunges today with one single blow into the gulf of the most fallacious historicism, into that which history refuses, for which the historical movement is conceived in a vulgar and materialist manner, as the affirmation of ethnocentrisms and racisms, as the celebration of the exploits of wolves and foxes, the lion and the jackals, whilst the unique and veritable actor, humanity, is absent. This one gives oneself up to, or exposes oneself to, providing philosophical-political services, which is certainly the way of prostituting philosophy.²³

Nor—as is sometimes argued—was the Rectoral Address exceptional in its devotion to the Führerprinzip. In a speech given in November, 1933: Heidegger beseeches students to dedicate their knowledge to the man to whom it falls to take the role of chief (der führer Menschen) in the State professions, in the creation of a new university spirit, thus:

Let your courage grow without ceasing so that you will be able to make the sacrifices necessary to save the essence of our Volk and to elevate its innermost strength in the State. Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. […] Heil Hitler! Martin Heidegger, Rector.²⁴

Later, Heidegger expelled Jewish academics from their posts,²⁵ reserved science for Germans, and was complicit with the burning of thousands of Jewish- and left-authored books.²⁶ His former thesis supervisor, the notable Edmund Husserl, was forced, as a Jew, to resign his German Academy position: indeed in 1938, when Husserl died, Heidegger even refused to attend his funeral. Moreover, throughout the entire Nazi period, 1933–45, whilst studiously cultivating his image of the hermit-like rural philosopher, in practice, he maintained a network of the top-rank SS elite.²⁷

Bourdieu’s The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1975, 1991)

Neither Bourdieu’s article nor his short book considers the German sociological field. We now know that, in 1932, there was a plan, approved by Hitler himself, to appoint the future Führer as a professor of Sociology at Braunschweig University, so as to assist his German citizenship!²⁸ Who knows what might have happened had he gained this post?

Bourdieu’s initial article and the book start by locating the philosopher, Heidegger, within the currents flowing in various political and cultural fields to constitute the conservative revolution of the interwar years in Germany.²⁹ This was a well-known movement spearheaded by celebrated authors and other cultural producers who had great popular success: such as Oswald Spengler, with his stark warnings of The Decline of the West, and Ernst Jünger—a charismatic novelist, whose books such as The Storm of Steel (1920) and On the Marble Cliffs (1939) critiqued modernity whilst celebrating masculinity, militarism and military technology.³⁰ Others followed in their wake, including Möller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch and the lawyer, Carl Schmitt—all lamenting the loss of the so-called ‘organic’, hierarchical and volkisch (folk) society. These were the leading cultural protagonists of a ‘reactionary modernism’, orchestrated together by their common habitus and their shared fantasies.³¹ They figured as a regressive block which stood out against the Welfare State and the sexual and artistic liberation of the Social Democratic Weimar Republic, as well, of course, as against the massively supported, ultimately unsuccessful, 1917–23 German Revolution³² and the economic insecurity of mass inflation and the 1929–30 Financial Crisis:

But the volkisch mood is also a set of questions through which the whole period offers itself up as a matter for reflection: these questions which are as vague as states of mind, but as powerful and obsessive as phantasms are concerned with technology, the workers, the elite, history, and the homeland. It is hardly surprising then, if this pathos-ridden enquiry finds its privileged expression in the cinema, in for example, the crowd scenes of Lubitsch, the queues in the films of Pabst (paradigmatic representation of Das Man [Heidegger’s anonymous ‘they’]) or that virtual summary of all their fantasized problematics, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a graphic retranslation of Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The Worker).³³

These bourgeois, stymied by the aristocracy and lack of civil service positions, or, if petty bourgeois, blocked in their academic aspirations, dreamed of a ‘spiritual renaissance’ through a ‘German revolution’.³⁴

Bourdieu’s distinctive argument is that Heidegger drew on the central protagonists of this Conservative Revolution; see, for example, Heidegger’s admiring letters to Jünger. But he did so by transmitting the ideas of their accessible and popular books, with their plebeian readership, into a new philosophical register. Bourdieu’s claim, then, is that Heidegger’s own works represent a double-coded or polysemic response.³⁵ In part he is responding enthusiastically to these conservative authors by refracting their subjects and concerns. In part, also, he is responding to the reigning authorities within the field of philosophy, using his erudition to carve out an entirely new position—a phenomenology and ontology using hermeneutic, or interpretative, methods to reveal the meaning of Being. In other words, Heidegger skilfully embraces both high and popular cultures.

Bourdieu certainly accepts that Heidegger has a habitus that is derived from his class position: Adorno, he says, is not wrong to give considerable weight to Heidegger’s social position, as the son of an artisan, a Catholic churchwarden.³⁶ For, argues, Bourdieu, unlike the upper bourgeois students and the patrician staff who had a hegemonic position within the academic philosophical field, he was an outsider—an upwardly mobile ‘interloper’. His ontology—represented by his 1927 magnus opus, Being and Time³⁷—claimed to transcend the earlier phenomenology linked to his former mentor, Husserl. In brief, Heidegger introduced a revolution within the philosophical field that ultimately gripped not just German followers but even the French.³⁸ So profound was his influence on Sartre and de Beauvoir before World War II (Being and Nothingness, The Second Sex) and on Jean Beaufret, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in the 1970s, that it was sometimes ironically claimed: ‘Today, Heidegger lives in France’.³⁹ Indeed, Bourdieu gently mocks those French Heideggerian Marxists, inheritors of Herbert Marcuse, such as Henri Lefebvre, when they contend that ‘Heidegger is quite simply a materialist’.⁴⁰

His lower class origins gave his words a disruptive force. As Bourdieu and others reveal, this was backed by his sternly austere appearance, but also by his ‘avant-garde’ ‘existential suit’⁴¹ along with his adoption of Baden peasant clothes—knee-length trousers or ledenhosen, decorated braces and feathered hats.⁴² This self-identification with the peasantry and his cultivation of rural isolation in his hut, was accompanied by what Adorno called, derogatorily, the ‘jargon of authenticity’.⁴³ For Heidegger focused on the meaning of being through pursuing an authentic existence, cut off from the diversions of urban cosmopolitan civilisation.

In brief, Bourdieu takes up one aspect of Adorno’s analysis. This is the key, for example, to Bourdieu’s references to Heidegger as displaying ‘the aristocratism of the poor man’: one who goes for highly-elevated thinking, conspicuously divorced from any everyday experience or material concerns, such as bad harvests or housing problems.⁴⁴

However, second, Bourdieu also takes Adorno to task for short-circuiting the analysis necessary if we are to have an adequate sociology of knowledge. Crucially, Adorno had ignored what the structure of the philosophical field was and, in particular, that it was necessary to have a symbolic revolution to be heard as a fresh voice. Thus Heidegger combatted the reigning German neo-Kantianism, perceived by the youthful Herbert Marcuse, in the 1920s, as ‘dry’ or even ‘sterile’.⁴⁵

Bourdieu illuminates how Heidegger became a ‘philosopher’s philosopher’, the ‘philosophical Führer’⁴⁶ for three reasons—first, the originality of his ontological thought, second, the erudition with which he referred frequently to Heraclitus, other Early Greek Philosophers, and to Plato and Aristotle, and last but not least, the way his ideas took up the discourse of the conservative revolution on a more abstract linguistic level: an ‘untranslatable idiolect’ or ‘academic aristocratism’.⁴⁷ Thus, whilst Heidegger rejected as mundane or positivist those rival empirical sciences like sociology and anthropology, he also smuggled terms like ‘fürsorge’ (solicitude) into his language. On the one hand he vigorously repudiated the Welfare State as creating individual irresponsibility, but on the other hand, appealed to a diffuse and unspecific ‘sorge’ (care or self-care) in its place.⁴⁸

Heidegger in this respect, became a prophetic figure, argues Bourdieu. We know from Weber’s Ancient Judaism that the most subversive Biblical prophets often came from within the priesthood itself.⁴⁹ In Heidegger’s case, he came from amongst the ranks of learned philosophers themselves, although he brought to his post only a partially-secularized teaching.

Thus Heidegger entered the fray against the neoKantians at—of all places—Davos, in Switzerland, the meeting-place these days of the G8 and of economists. In one such debate, in 1929, he locked horns with Ernst Cassirer, later forced into exile. ‘Overcoming’ Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger deployed his ontological arguments to confront Cassirer’s neoKantian critique of knowledge.⁵⁰ Against Cassirer’s submission of intuition to concepts and judgements, he stresses ‘sensory reason’: reinstating intuition, in an anti-Enlightenment move.⁵¹ Yet even in those last years of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler was voted into power, Cassirer’s wife wrote after Davos: ‘We did not like his antisemitism’.⁵²

I want to clarify this: Bourdieu certainly saw this as akin to Manet’s attack on Academic art: a symbolic revolution, or, in Kuhn’s language, a paradigm shift within philosophy. Heidegger had created a new ontological linguistic code having the warranty, so to speak, of both ancient philosophical ideas and modern thinkers, like Nietzsche.

In particular, as we have seen, this was the translation into euphemistic philosophical language of ‘the conservative revolution’ of populist authors, film-directors and polemicists, that right-wing thought that would soon become hegemonic as Nazism. It was this distinctively volkisch mood or ideology that Heidegger so skilfully captured and transfigured in ways that still resonated with the angst and profound disquiet of the populist leaders.

At the heart of his expression of this conservative reaction, argues Bourdieu, was a new way of conceptualising the old opposition between elites and masses. This was in any case circulating both via the youth movement’s treks to the mountains to free themselves from the stifling cities and the patrician elite’s veneration of the craftsmen and the peasant, rooted in the land. But Heidegger offered ways of signalling a noble appreciation of an authentic rural existence, uncontaminated by the constraints of urban industrial rhythms and blithely oblivious of wider social-structural determinants.

Heidegger appealed in particular, Bourdieu argues persuasively, to an increasingly proletarianised bourgeoisie. Not least amongst these, in the German university field, were those academics increasingly turning to conservatism who could not get chairs and felt frustrated in their ambitions. Heidegger himself in the period up to the end of the 1920s had been only a professor ordinarius, doubtful of his future security. So his distinctive grounding of his ontological analysis of existence with its increasingly evolutionary historical theorisation of essential German destiny was a philosophical idiolect or linguistic form which represented an ‘alchemical transformation’⁵³ of the anxious volkisch mood. It still bore its traces but possessed a crucial scarcity value in the philosophical market … 

Bourdieu observes:

To identify ontological alienation as the foundation of all alienation is, in a manner of speaking, to banalize and yet simultaneously dematerialize both economic alienation and any discussion of this alienation, by a radical but imaginary overcoming of any [political] revolutionary overcoming.

Heidegger reintroduces into the domain of academically acceptable philosophical thought […] topics and modes of expression – and in particular an incantatory and prophetic style – which were previously confined to those sects encamped on the margins of the field of academic philosophy, where Nietzsche and Kant, George and Dostoevsky, political mysticism and religious fervour, met and mingled. In doing so, he produces a previously impossible philosophical position, which is situated in relation to Marxism and neo-Kantianism in the way that the ‘conservative revolutionaries’ are situated in the ideologico-political field in relation to the socialists and the liberals.⁵⁴

It follows from the argument up to now, that I cannot see Bourdieu as adopting Heidegger’s philosophy himself, despite his earlier admission, referenced above, that he had read his Being and Time with some fascination. I would dispute Derek Robbins’s view, in particular, that Bourdieu took his concept of ‘habitus’ from Heidegger I. In my view, there are several better sources for the concept of ‘habitus’—Marx and Weber in particular, not to mention Norbert Elias’s use of habitus in his distinction between the German ‘Kultur’ (of inwardness) and ‘civilization’, the influence of which powerfully resonates throughout Bourdieu’s Political Ontology.⁵⁵

As noted, Being in Time represented a transformation of philosophical thought that went hand-in-hand with Heidegger’s outsider class position. Now I would argue that up to 1933, when the Nazis came to power, his writing was not in itself fascist—rather, it was drawing on a romantic, anti-Enlightenment, anti-capitalist traditionalism.⁵⁶ But in his writings from the 1933 Rectoral Address onwards, there is clear evidence of an affinity not just for conservatism but for Nazism too. I shall show this particularly by reference to his Black Notebooks (1931–41) or Ponderings, which Heidegger instructed should be published only posthumously.⁵⁷ These lay bare his full theory of modernity, including its fraught points of pressure, its internal conflicts and its racist messianic vision of the future. Here Heidegger’s anti-metaphysical ‘ontology’ is repeatedly presented.

These volumes are structured by what I might call the philosopher’s ventriloquism, or mimicry, of a peasant ethos (on Heidegger’s comparison of his philosophical work to peasants’ labour, see Farias).⁵⁸ On the one hand he depicts the experience of the metropolis, with its expanding industry and technology, its uprooted migrant labour and its das Man (the ‘they’)—the masses who pullulate with bored aimlessness within the metropolitan public sphere. On the other hand, there are the seasonal and other cyclical rhythms of an existence based on agriculture, with the ancient continuities of homogeneous communities (gemeinschaft). Put very simply, this is Tonnies’ opposition once again between the country and the city, or gemeinschaft and gesellschaft,⁵⁹ a dichotomy fundamental to Heidegger’s ontology and philosophy of history. But in Heidegger this is also glossed via a racial theory which had originated in 19th Century thinkers such as Count Joseph Gobineau (1816–1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927).⁶⁰

Heidegger’s The Black Notebooks offer an elaborated concept of authentic Beyng (sic), which for him is a renewed social practice underpinned by the principle of racial purity and the German nation’s ‘spiritual mission’. Thus, pitted against the German Volk and requiring a ceaseless struggle of resistance to them, is ‘the enemy’.⁶¹ The enemy, usually unnamed, clearly refers to Jews, who are said to have made ‘poisonous’ contributions to world history. Their alleged ‘inventions’ of industrial technology, plus their migrancy, ‘globalism’ (internationalism) and their instrumental, calculative reason, are referred to, in shorthand, as ‘Jewish machination’. It is, he says,

‘the domination of technology’ and especially its ‘giganticism’ that creates the distinctive ‘modern essence of truth’ grounded in ‘being in machination’.⁶²

Jews not only constitute a threat through their racial being as ‘existing without ties’, their ‘rootlessness’. More insidiously, as a landless people, they impede ‘access to Being’ and to ‘the possibility of decision’.⁶³ They effectively deracialize the Germans.

Thus Heidegger resuscitates the ancient prejudice against the ‘wandering’ or ‘errant Jew’:

The great doom is nearing, if searching is suffocated and the need for searching is blocked. The concealed errancy in the heartland of the homeland!⁶⁴

For the Jew is an advocate of a ‘mongrel mixture which will weaken the strength of the German race … ’.⁶⁵

In brief, Heidegger has no theory of capitalism or of alienation as linked to a specific mode of production or production relations, but rather, in the Notebooks, views technological alienation (or ‘giganticism’) as simply the creation of the enemy race. The only way ahead, for Heidegger, is by engaging in the struggle between races.

Thus the authentic conflict is between racial groups or, more explicitly, between the Jewish practice of ‘cosmopolitanism’ as opposed to the original purity of the Greek polis or, later, the Volksgemeineshaft, the German community ‘profoundly rooted in the earth’.⁶⁶ As the Italian scholar, Donatella di Cesare, puts it: ‘For Heidegger, the Jews were excluded from Being’.⁶⁷

It is true that Heidegger also says that Hitler’s Mein Kampf is ‘brainless’ because it contends that the spiritual-historical world ‘grows like a plant out of the people’.⁶⁸ But as di Cesare points out, he still assumes that race exists as a biological fact, although his anti-metaphysical ontology requires other, de facto ‘metaphysical’ supports for societal hierarchy, including Nietzsche’s imputed ‘will to power’.

Crucial here is his excoriation of both socialism and social welfare policies to which he opposes the ‘innermost essence of Germans’—‘the metapolitics of the German people’—with their nobility of a Dasein [or Beyng], not bound by class or vocation.⁶⁹

By 1941, Heidegger had fully accepted the ‘logic’ of Jewish annihilation: ‘Struggle is no longer to be that between classes but between Germans and the ‘enemy’ [Jews, Bolsheviks]’. In the same year, he was to rejoice that the War was going well, yet added, for the German nation, a more sombre reckoning:

8. The assimilation of the enemy in the mode of his actions has been completed. 9. [But] World-Judaism, incited by the emigrants allowed out of Germany, cannot be held fast anywhere and with all its developed power, does not need to participate anywhere in the activities of war, whereas all that remains to us is the sacrifice of the best blood of the best of our own people.⁷⁰

However, as Di Cesare points out, as early as 1933, his Being and Truth lectures claimed that:

The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it. The struggle is all the fiercer and harder and tougher, for the least of it consists in coming to blows with one another; it is often far more difficult and wearisome to […] harbour no illusions about the enemy, and to keep oneself ready for attack, to cultivate and intensify a constant readiness and to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation.⁷¹

A further passage in the Black Notebooks sees Germans as fighting a defensive war versus Judao-Bolshevism. In this conflict the Germans were depicted as defeated although Jews had ‘disappeared by the millions’.⁷²

The ultimate proof of the exterminist logic of these coded meanings is confirmed by Herbert Marcuse. Citing the 1953 Bremen lecture on technology, Marcuse and Cesare both note Heidegger’s extraordinary judgement that.

Agriculture is now a mechanised food industry in essence the same [das Selbe] as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, […] the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.⁷³

As Cesare has pointed out, by making this comparison, Heidegger, post-War, is still passing over the political, economic and social organisation that radically distinguishes the concentration camps as killing centres from mechanised agriculture:

for Heidegger the history of Being was exempt from historical and political events, which he relegated to an ontic indifference. Nothing else matters except the alienation of beings from Being.⁷⁴

After the German defeat, Heidegger minimised his membership of the Nazi Party, referring to it as his ‘great blunder’. But he never recognised the tragic enormity of the death of six million Jews, nor did he apologise for it.⁷⁵ In my view, his full ontology or philosophical anthropology is totally contaminated by his genocidal antisemitism, traces of which remain in the writings still used by many intellectuals, such as The Question concerning Technology⁷⁶ and the Letter on Humanism (1977).⁷⁷

What then of Bourdieu? As noted at the start, Bourdieu refers to Husserl’s, and even Heidegger’s, fine-grained perceptions of the subjective experience of time and temporality. He uses this productively to elaborate on Weber’s well-known emphasis on the social meanings of time (most notably in the Puritans and Protestant Americans’ emphasis on saving time in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Bourdieu applies this to peasants’ and ex-peasants’ attitudes to work, and their experience of unemployment, in Algeria, in the 1950s–60s.⁷⁸ But Bourdieu does not share Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, least of all its antisemitism, a dimension that the Freiburg sage had carefully censored in his publication of Being and Time, when he was still dependent on Husserl for references. It is this antisemitism that emerges with crystal clarity in the Nazi years, most infamously in his Rectoral Address and in all three volumes of the Black Notebooks (1931–41).

In this context, we should recall Bourdieu’s devastating critique that ends his short book on Heidegger, written before the discovery of the Black Notebooks or Farias’s revelations of Heidegger's early anti-Semitism:

It is perhaps because he never realized what he was saying that Heidegger was able to say what he did without really having to say it. And it is perhaps for the same reason that he refused to the end to discuss his Nazi involvement: to do it properly would have been to admit […] that his ‘essentialist thought’ had never consciously formulated its essence, that is, the social unconscious which spoke through its forms, [… not to mention] the crude ‘anthropological’ basis of its extreme blindness, which could only be sustained by the illusion of the omnipotence of thought (Bourdieu 1991: 105).

For my part, I would agree with Heidegger’s former doctoral student, Herbert Marcuse⁷⁹ when he argues that ‘Nazism and philosophy are irreconcilable’. I would also endorse Emmanuel Faye when he contends that if philosophy is the love of wisdom, or knowledge, Heidegger cannot be called a philosopher.⁸⁰

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bridget Fowler

Bridget Fowler, Emeritus Professor (Sociology, School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Glasgow) specialising in social theory, Marxist-feminism and the sociology of culture. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).

2 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1990 [1970]) and ibid, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1964]).

3 Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, op. cit., p. 92 (Figure 2).

4 Distinction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

5 Pierre Bourdieu The Rules of Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), Le Champ Economique, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 118 (1997), pp. 48–66 (also in Microcosmes Vol 1 (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2021, pp. 415–454) and Science of Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity, 2004)).

6 Bourdieu in Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Chartier, Le Sociologue et l’Historien (Marseille: Agone, 2010), p. 74.

7 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 95.

8 It should be clarified that Bourdieu defines economic capital very broadly, as the amount of ‘social energy’ an agent has at their command, whether from ownership of property (including stocks and shares) or high incomes (The Forms of Capital in J. G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, London: Greenwood, 1986).

9 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

10 Bridget Fowler, ‘Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions’, Theory and Society, 49:3 (April 2020), pp. 439–463.

11 He means by this that—simplistic readings of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) aside—Weber routinely adopted remarkably materialist analyses of religious beliefs and forms. Pierre Bourdieu, Franz Schultheis and Andreas Pfeuffer, ‘With Weber, Against Weber: in conversation with Pierre Bourdieu’ in Simon Susen and Bryan Turner (eds) The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 111–124, p. 114.

12 Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocsyba and Berndt Schwibs, ‘The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu’, Theory, Culture and Society, 3:3 (1986), pp. 35–51.

13 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 5.

14 Cambridge, Polity, 2016: p. 30.

15 Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Heidegger: epistemology, ontology and the prospects for social science. Unpublished keynote address to the British Sociological Association Bourdieu Study Group Conference, July 4, 2016.

16 Derek Robbins, The Bourdieu Paradigm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

17 Pierre Bourdieu L’Ontologie Politique de Martin Heidegger, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 1975, 5–6, pp. 109–56, p. 120 fn 44, p. 121 fn. 52, Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 99–103. Bourdieu emphasizes that despite this ‘change’, Heidegger ‘had repudiated none of his earlier positions’ (1991, op. cit., 90,101).

18 Robbins, 2019, op cit. pp. 190–191.

19 Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987).

20 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

21 Farias, op. cit., p 11. The account that follows raises the question as to whether Heidegger’s philosophical and/or social thinking can be separated from his politics and regarded in its own terms. This, in my view, is a very fraught and perilous enterprise for many reasons, not least the highly abstract, circular and unfalsifiable nature of his thought. However, those who do propose extending his phenomenological approach within sociology should not, of course, be interpreted as in any way advocates of Heidegger’s extreme Right political stances. This is a particularly important caveat since—as opposed to his brief period as Rector (1933–4)—Heidegger’s lifelong dispositions and commitments have only been brought to the fore from 1987 onwards, starting with the publication of Farias’s Heidegger et le Nazisme.

22 Heidegger, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, Review of Metaphysics, 38:3 (1985 [1933]), pp. 470–480, see https://archive.org/stream/MartinHeideggerTheSelfAssertionOfTheGermanUniversity1933/HeideggerMartinTheSelf-assertionOfTheGermanUniversity_djvu.txt.

23 Cited Farias, op. cit., p. 121.

24 Heidegger cited in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1993), p. 47; also cited in Farias, op. cit., p. 130).

25 There were a two highly conspicuous Jewish exceptions whose expulsion Heidegger vetoed, but only because their resignation would court adverse ‘foreign prejudices’ (Farias, op. cit., p. 131).

26 He wrote letters of admiration to Nazi academics such as Eugen Fischer, who later instituted anti-Jewish so-called ‘hygiene policies’—including forced sterilization—at the highest level (Faye, op. cit.). On Fischer’s policies for the ‘disappearance’ of all those of mixed race or possessing abnormalities, as well as for the methods for the Jewish genocide, see Wolin in Wolin ed. 1993, p. 282.

27 Farias, op. cit., p. 11.

28 Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 336.

29 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Bourdieu refers to this as the first conservative revolution, the second being that of the neoliberalism and ‘bankers’ realism’ of the 1970s onwards; see the Postscript to his The Rules of Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), Le Champ Economique, op. cit., Acts of Resistance (Cambridge Polity, 1998), pp. 45–51 and Sociologie Générale, vol I (Lectures 1981–3), (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, Seuil, 2015), pp. 482–3.

30 Tellingly, given the present resurgence of populism on the right, these have recently been republished by the prestigious Penguin Modern Classics (2004) and New York Review of Books (2023) respectively.

31 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., pp. 10, 25.

32 Pierre Broué, The German Revolution: 1917–23 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005).

33 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., p. 10.

34 Ibid., p. 26.

35 Ibid., p. 57.

36 See Farias, op. cit., pp. 26–7.

37 London: SCM Press, 1962.

38 On Heidegger’s pride of place in French philosophy from the 1970s, see especially Richard Wolin, French Heidegger Wars in Wolin, 1993, op. cit., pp. 272–300.

39 Cited by Wolin in Wolin ed., 1993, op. cit., p. 274. For his part, consistent with his intense nationalism, Heidegger referred to the French philosophers who took him up as learning ‘to think in German’.

40 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., p. 95, citing Henri Lefebvre.

41 Ibid., pp. 49, 119–120.

42 Farias, op. cit., p. 152.

43 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).

44 Bourdieu, Back to History: An Interview in Wolin, ed., op. cit., pp. 264–271: p. 267.

45 Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). We note, incidentally, that this inter-war neo-Kantianism was particularly strongly represented by the Marburg School, especially by the Jewish scholars there, such as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. Heidegger denigrated these thinkers as ‘Jewish philosophers’, just as the theoretical and nuclear physicists were to be labelled ‘Jewish scientists’ by Hitler. I note further that Bourdieu’s own sociology draws principally on Marx, Weber and Durkheim but also on Cassirer’s introduction of structuralism into his neoKantianism (Ernst Cassirer, Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, Word Vol ! (2), 1945, pp. 99–120). Cassirer’s linguistic structuralism is used as a rich source to establish a non-reductionist notion of cultural ideas and myths, whilst Bourdieu simultaneously stresses the structural forces of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capitals which bear on the different social classes as they forge their world-views and habitus.

46 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., p. 118.

47 Ibid., pp. 86, 79.

48 Ibid., pp. 79, 85.

49 Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952), pp. 226–235; cf Bourdieu, 2021, op. cit., pp. 63–65.

50 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., pp. 59–60.

51 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

52 Farias, op. cit., p. 78. In a well-informed, wide-ranging and insightful article, Geoffrey Waite also refers to Madame Cassirer (On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos, Political Theory, vol 26, 5, 1998, pp. 603–651). But he calls it her ‘famous (and disputed) testimony’ (ibid., p. 647). His research emphasizes the fateful nature of the confrontation between the tanned, peasant-dressed Heidegger and the conservatively-dressed, Neo-Kantian Warburg scholar, Ernst Cassirer. He endorses Bourdieu’s analysis of this as a symbolic revolution (ibid., p. 628) in which Cassirer was perceived to have lost and a ‘“new world”’ to have been inaugurated by Heidegger (ibid., p. 610). But he goes on to invite us to contemplate how it might have been understood by two other Davos conference participants who were then silent: Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School Marxist economist, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (ibid., p. 635). Thus, amongst other interests, his article offers an alternative, Marxist, account of the debate (ibid., pp. 609–10).

53 Bourdieu, 1991, op. cit., p. 3.

54 Ibid., pp. 68–9.

55 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

56 One might remember Marx’s comment in the Grundrisse that romantic anti-capitalism would be here until capitalism ends … ‘Bourgeois notions have never reached beyond opposition to that romantic view and thus will be accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end’ (cited David McLelland, Marx’s Grundrisse, London: Paladin, 1973), p. 82). See also Williams, Culture and Society (1961), which emphasizes this strand of aristocratic anti-capitalist nostalgia. But, as Herf clarifies thoughtfully: ‘For Heidegger, unlike the reactionary modernists, the choice still had to be made between the German soul and modern technology. The two remained irreconcilable. Nazism had been perverted by technology. The revolution from the Right had been betrayed.’ (Herf, op. cit., p. 114). Heidegger would later go on to condemn wholesale the mechanisation of technology, in a way that even William Morris would have found too sweeping (The Question Concerning Technology, in Manfred Sassen, ed. Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings (NY: Continuum Press, 2003 [1949]), pp. 279–303.

57 Heidegger, Ponderings (The Black Notebooks, Vol I (Journals Vols. II-VI, 1931–38) Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2016(a) and ibid. Vol 3 (Journals Vols XII-XV (1939–41) (2016b) both ed. Peter Trawny.

58 Farias, op. cit., p. 192.

59 Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955 [1987]). See Raymond Williams’s illuminating The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985) for a demystification of this myth of a rural golden age.

60 See Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 227–245, Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: The Merlin Press, 1980) pp. 697–714.

61 Heidegger, 2016a, op. cit., p. 103.

62 Ibid., pp. 330–331.

63 Heidegger, 2016b, op. cit., pp. 75–76.

64 2016a, op. cit., 160.

65 Ibid.

66 Donatella di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 81.

67 Ibid, p. 83. The Jews were the symbol of the end, the Germans of the beginning, claim the Black Notebooks, see Cesare ibid., p. 83.

68 Heidegger 2016a, p. 104.

69 Although Heidegger (2016a, p. 91) observed that ‘[it – Dasein] can be unfolded in status’.

70 Heidegger, 2016b, op. cit., p. 208.

71 Cited in Cesare, op. cit,, pp. 144–5, my emphasis.

72 Cited in Cesare, ibid., p.188.

73 Cited in Marcuse 2005, op. cit., p. 176, Cesare, op. cit., p. 187, see also Wolin, ed. 1993, p. 291.

74 Cesare, op. cit., p. 188.

75 Marcuse’s letters, Marcuse and Heidegger in ed. Wolin, 1993, op. cit., pp. 160–164, Farias, op. cit., p. 20.

76 Heidegger, Technology … in ed. Manfred Stassen, Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings (New York: Continuum Press, 2003 [1949]), pp. 279–304, Letter on Humanism, in ed. David F. Krell, Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977 [1946]), pp. 190–242.

77 Writing this essay six months into the Israeli/Palestinian War (2023–4), I cannot fail to register the tragically-renewed genocidal spiral of violence as the further consequence of this earlier history. For Israeli colonial settlements in Palestine were first constructed in the early 20th Century, in part as a response to centuries of anti-Semitic persecution (Leon 1970), and in part due to the 19th Century ‘invention of the Jewish people’, under the leadership of the Zionist Austro-Hungarian journalist, Theodor Herzl (Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992 [1980]). Significantly, in the 1890s, with the growing mass Jewish movement, the celebrated East End novelist, later Mayor of New York, Israel Zangwill, had referred to Palestine as ‘a land without people for a people without land’ (cited Said, op. cit., p. 9).

Israel, as a Jewish nation-state, became legitimated by the global hegemonic powers, Britain and the US—together with the UN (1948)—not least because of very recent memory of the Holocaust. From the outset, the Palestinian peasants who farmed the land were seen in Orientalist terms by most Jewish settlers; as Said summed up: ‘Arabs are Oriental, therefore less human and valuable than Europeans and Zionists; they are treacherous, unregenerate […] backward’ (Said, op. cit., pp. 28–9). ‘The fact is that Arabs were always being represented, never able to speak for themselves’ he wrote (ibid., p. 25), adapting Marx’s pessimism about smallholding peasants’ inability to represent themselves in the 18th Brumaire (2000 [1851–2]: 131). Arab villagers could thus be expropriated and cleared from a territory they had failed to ‘improve’ (Said, op. cit., pp. 90–91).

78 Bourdieu, 2008, op. cit., pp. 75–98.

79 Marcuse in Wolin ed., 1993, op. cit., p. 160.

80 Faye, op. cit., p. 321.