Heidegger [Paperback]

My review is going to differ from most of the others here in that I've actually read the book. This is no mean feat because it is pretty densely written and it refers to countless historical figures unlikely to be familiar to American readers, even those who have studied 20th century German Philosophy and Heidegger. Many of the people Faye discusses are second tier jurists or others who are relatively unknown. Faye also discusses better known figures, like Carl Schmitt and various students of Heidegger (a surprising number of whom were Jewish), but a substantial percentage of them are not academic household names.

Because anything touching politically controversial figures raises suspicions of one's own particular partisanship, let me provide some context by stating in rough outline my own positions. First, I'm extremely liberal politically, very, very far to the left. I consider today's Democratic party a moderate right part (as opposed to the Republicans, who have devolved into a radical right party) and I lament that there is no viable left in America today. I took a graduate seminar on Heidegger and read him in other grad school classes, but my philosophical preferences, despite specializing on Kierkegaard in my proposed but uncompleted doctoral dissertation, leaned strongly in the direction of Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin. So Heidegger represents neither my philosophical nor political ideal.

And I have no trouble whatsoever about viewing Heidegger as a Nazi. I will confess that this book reshaped my views about Heidegger and Nazism. Prior to the book I believed that Heidegger had backed away from the Nazis after ending his rectorship and that he had been rather tepid afterwards. Faye did convince me he never lost his Nazi beliefs, though I am not certain what his feelings about the extermination of the Jews were after its reality became public knowledge were nor does Faye give us much of a clue. So, while I have no doubts that Heidegger remained a Nazi even after his rectorship ended and that he attempted to systematically deceive everyone after WW II about his connections to the Nazi party, it is far from clear what his attitudes were towards the nastiest aspect of the party in the forties. This does not let Heidegger off the hook as one might think, since everything about Nazis in the thirties were completely nasty, but it leaves open the question of what his attitude towards the Final Solution was.

Faye goes into excruciating detail into the details of lectures that Heidegger gave in the thirties, either lectures that have not been released at all or some that were released but carefully edited to omit some of the more controversial passages. Faye provides a valuable service by rendering it beyond doubt that Heidegger did not give up his Nazi beliefs after leaving his rectorship and that he did not cease to be an admirer of Hitler. The latter is important because many, including Victor Farias, who was crucial in making Heidegger's Nazism popular public knowledge, argued that while Heidegger was a Nazi, he was neither an admirer of Hitler nor an advocate of the biological school of Nazism. Faye shows that the former was not true, that Heidegger never lost his admiration for Hitler. This is perhaps the greatest single value of Faye's book, dispelling this mistake about Heidegger. But I think that Faye completely gets wrong the significance of Heidegger's abjuration of the biological school. Here is why: under the biological view of Jews, their fault lies in their genes (or so they would have said if they had had access to genetic terminology) and therefore nothing can be done for them except to either isolate them away from all Aryans or to kill them. Goebbels and the other main Nazis actually preferred relocating Jews, preferably either to Russia or to Madagascar, but with the losses in North Africa and failures in the Eastern Front, relocating Jews was cut off as an option. This was when they moved to the Final Solution (final because it was the only solution that they envisioned after the loss of relocation options). But Heidegger held to a more traditional form of Anti-Semitism whereby Jews were not locked into biology. Being Jewish was for Heidegger more a mental state than a dictate of biology. Therefore the traditional solution to the "Jewish problem" was open to him: conversion. Jews were not "irreclaimable" as they were for Hitler and Goebbels, because they could convert. Heidegger was absolutely whacked out and held absolutely evil beliefs about Jews and the goals and aims of the Nazis, but Faye is incapable of granting any such distinctions.

Despite the new insights that Faye offers about Heidegger, this is nonetheless an appalling book. One of Faye's arguments is that Heidegger cannot be considered a philosopher because of his political beliefs, which represent a complete denial of all humane values. But I don't think that Faye's book can be considered either a work of philosophy or a work of historical scholarship simply because he has one and only one goal in writing the book: the identification and condemnation of Heidegger as a Nazi. He not only is not a dispassionate thinker, he is a person with a goal: proving that Heidegger is evil. He therefore is not interested in the calm assessment of Heidegger's writings, he is not interested in fairness, he is not willing to give Heidegger the benefit of the doubt, he does not hesitate to leap to some outrageous conclusions, all because he is a man on a mission. He is cherry picks, he argues to conclusions, he knows where arguments are going to end up before he has all the information before him, and he his convictions trump all else. Faye is a zealot, a Grand Inquisitor, a true believer. He is not here to praise or do justice to Heidegger, but to bury him. In short, Faye is a man on a mission and absolutely everything is directed to that mission: the destruction of the reputation of Heidegger.

There is a political purpose to Faye's goal. Heidegger is easily the most dominant philosopher in Europe over the past 80 years. Virtually everything done on the Continent in that period of time, except for some strains of Marxism, has been either heavily or moderately influenced by Heidegger. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and countless others had their work framed by some degree by Heidegger, not to mention Heidegger's students like Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Levinas, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Jan Pato'ka. Whether or not these people were critical of Heidegger or not, his thought frames all of it. The one thing that virtually all of these thinkers (though not all) have in common is an adherence to some form of anti-foundationalism and to a form of historicism. The major tendency in all these thinkers is the denial that there is any kind of universal, objective foundations to thought.

Now, Faye wants to defend a form of foundationalism. What more effective way of doing this than by smearing the dominant thinker from this period with accusations of heinous political beliefs? This comes out at several points in the book. Although Anglo-Americans couldn't give a flip about Heidegger the Prussian philosopher versus Descartes the Gallic philosopher, it is an opposition that matters to Faye. So, writing in France, he employs a double opposition: Heidegger the anti-foundationalist and German versus Descartes the foundationalist and Frenchman. This is not merely a question of damning Heidegger's politics, but smearing an entire philosophical movement by intimating that anti-foundationalist thought leads to anti-humanism and Nazism.

This all leads to Faye making some extreme recommendations. He advocates removing Heidegger from the role of philosophers and moving all of his books out of philosophy into hate speech and collections of Nazi thought. Nevermind that Heidegger is considered second only to Wittgenstein as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Faye's move is a deft act of philosophical gamesmanship. You don't have to debate and confront someone if you can merely say that their thought -- and by implication so also the thought of anyone who agrees with him -- to Nazism. Faye is explicit about this claim. Faye insists that reading Heidegger can subtly shift his readers to Nazism. I'm not making this up. Faye states it over and over in his book.

Here one has to ask what Faye's philosophy of reading is. Here is the structure of Faye's argument. Heidegger is a Nazi. People who read Heidegger can be contaminated and polluted by Heidegger's books even if they are unaware of it. Start reading Heidegger and you end up getting influenced by every aspect of his thought. You are critically incapable of critically evaluating and sifting through his books, taking only what you find valuable and rejecting that which you find nonsensical. In other words, Faye imagines that readers are idiots. It is almost a purity and taboo philosophy of reading, whereby anything you read is going to force you to certain beliefs. Read a book and you are helpless as the contents forcibly take over your brain turning you into a philosophy zombie.

There are so many absurdities inherent in Faye's way of assessing both Heidegger and the reading of Heidegger that it is hard to know where to begin in refuting him. First, let's take a purely historical question. Has the reading of Heidegger led to widespread right wing thought? Well, let's look at this in two ways. One is to look at the major strains of right wing thought over the past fifty or sixty years to ask which have been influenced by Heidegger. Now, it is possible that there has been some of this in France (I'm not conversant with the finer nuances of French thought), but in the Anglo-American world Heidegger is not a mainstay of right wing thought. The only one of his students who has had a major impact on the Right is Leo Strauss, who parted company with Heidegger to a greater extent than even someone like Herbert Marcuse or Emmanuel Levinas. On the other hand, the Vienna School - people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek - who have little in common with Heidegger, have exerted an immense influence on the Right. The flipside of this is to look at those who study Heidegger. Is there even the tiniest shred of evidence that reading Heidegger leads to right wing thinking? I would assert that there is none whatsoever. There simply is no correlation - at least in the Anglo-American world - between reading Heidegger or even being strongly influenced by Heidegger and holding even moderate Right Wing political opinions, let alone reactionary Right Wing opinions like Nazism.

Faye also fails to grasp what people find appealing and compelling in Heidegger's thought. I personally find Heidegger extremely impressive in combating a Cartesian view of knowledge. Faye sees this as the epitome of objectivity, but I agree with Heidegger that Descartes posits bizarrely artificial conditions for determining knowledge. The thought experiments in the MEDITATIONS do not lead to knowledge, but abstract from the real conditions of life and ignore what it really means to know things in actual existence. Heidegger's anti-Cartesianism is extremely impressive and does not lead to the right wing political extremism that Faye so passionately fears. If you have not read Heidegger but read Faye as your first introduction to him, you would come away with an utterly bizarre, incomplete view of Heidegger's thought.

Here is the thing: if you read any of a number of books in the Anglo-American Heidegger school you will not ANYWHERE find the right wing monsters that Faye imagines Heidegger is producing. I mean, actually read books on Heidegger to see what people are taking from him and you will sense a vast gap between what people are actually getting from his work and what Faye so passionately fears. Faye seems to be engaging in an ornate, bizarre fantasy. I mean, read at random any book on Heidegger's philosophy instead of his political affiliations and you'll not get anything like you find in Faye. None of the books I've read contain anything even remotely like the kinds of people Faye thinks are being created by Heidegger's books. Test this. Read books like: Rudiger Safranski's MARTIN HEIDEGGER: BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (a German biography which is one of the best overall resources on Heidegger's Nazism, but still finds lots to value in his thought); Richard Polt's HEIDEGGER: AN INTRODUCTION; Charles Guignon's HEIDEGGER AND THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE, John Richardson's EXISTENTIAL EPISTEMOLOGY: A HEIDEGGERIAN CRITIQUE OF THE CARTESIAN PROJECT; Hubert Dreyfus's BEING-IN-THE-WORLD: A COMMENTARY ON HEIDEGGER'S BEING AND TIME, DIVISION 1; or Herman Philipse's HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF BEING (significant because Faye lists him among the "critics" of Heidegger in his bibliography). The gap between what Faye hints that people will take from Heidegger and what they are obviously taking is chasmic - I mean like the Grand Canyon. Faye describes a reader of Heidegger that simply does not exist and has never existed. Right Wingers in the United States get their inspiration from entirely different sources. And you simply don't encounter people who say things like, "Well I became a conservative from reading BEING AND TIME."

I could go on. While I enjoyed reading about some less widely discussed aspects of Heidegger's thought, the many excesses of reasoning, his determination to damn Heidegger any way he can, and his absolutely bizarre assumption about what the reading of Heidegger can and might lead to render this one of the most absurd "philosophy" books ever written. I appreciate being better informed about Heidegger's Nazi beliefs, but I otherwise consider this book to be an utter farce.

First let me just say that I'm a long-time reader of philosophy, especially phenomenology and the continental European canon from early modern Rationalism and Empiricism to German Idealism to French Poststructuralism and Postmodernism.

I spent quite some time reading Heidegger's "Being and Time" appreciatively and fruitfully. For anyone else like myself who is sympathetic to Heidegger's impressive and important work in that book, let me just say that this critical take by Faye can function as an enlightening alternative interpretation in light of other, not-so-philosophical motives that may have driven Heidegger's thinking, concealed in abstract terminology. For anyone who already has one fruitful reading of that book -- e.g. I tend to understand it in the same vein as Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty, as a 'transcendental pragmatist' account of human experience via phenomenology -- then Faye's book can simply serve to point out another possible reading in terms of Heidegger's less-obvious political background concerns.

Now, notice the negative reviewers here who say nothing but that Faye 'doesn't understand Heidegger' without any further rational argument. That's a warning sign right there.

I understand and often empathize with the counter-Enlightenment social critical tradition on the left (where I do not empathize with the counter-Enlightenment right), but this book shows just how dangerous counter-Enlightenment thinking of any stripe can get when it goes to extremes as in Heidegger's eventual embrace of Nazism.

The most philosophically important part of this book is Faye's argument for more strongly linking Heidegger's intent to destruct the ontology of the Cartesian rationalistic cogito -- the thinking I, posited as a possession of all human individuals universally -- with his attraction to the ethnicity-based National Socialism of Nazism. Heidegger sees the universalized "I" of rationalistic thinking as the cause of inauthentic self-hood within liberal individualist society.

One can see Heidegger's support for the ethnicity-based solidarity of 'the Volk' against the 'rootless' Jews in his critique of the 'rootless' rationalistic "I" with its 'abstraction' from the more concrete aspects of life (like race and ethnicity, or 'blood and soil').

Yet, Heidegger's critique of the Cartesian ego cogito is also philosophically defensible and important, particularly in his impressive phenomenological account of the way the "zuhanden" (the ready-to-hand, familiar) is more primordial, more meaning-full, than the "vorhanden" (the being merely present) type of phenomena, meaning-less in its being merely present, something to see without the involvement of Dasein.

But no matter the philosophical import, it is a healthy exercise in liberal political sobriety to understand Faye's argument.

Although many intellectuals on the left, like reviewer Robert Moore here, are loathe to admit it, I would argue it is the powerful anti-cogito, anti-individual structure and effect of Heidegger's philosophy which functions as such a powerful attractor to so many New Left Marxists, post-Marxists, etc. in pursuit of alternative strategies for collectivism in the post-Soviet world.

It matters not that Heidegger's folk-traditionalist collectivism had a right-wing sensibility. It is the abstract language of 'Being as a gathering together' that is seen to work by New Left thinkers like Derrida and his students (like Spivak) to dissolve the modern, Cartesian type of individualist thinking by which many in 'late modernity' are often apparently burdened and alienated (as witnessed in the rise of right-wing religious fundamentalism as much as left-wing anti- or post-modernism).

Faye's Heidegger study can be a helpful guide for thinkers on the left to the potential dangers of abandoning the liberal principals of reason and equality -- the principals of democratizing reason -- which Heidegger's enemy Descartes humbly articulates so well in the still-impressive opening to his "Discourse on Method" Part One (the book which inaugurated the modern idea of philosophy that Heidegger sets his whole project against).

Emmanuel Faye has here treaded familiar ground, albeit in a more direct and honest way than many others who have performed hatchet jobs on Heideggerian philosophy. Faye at least acknowledges that he dislikes Heidegger's philosophy as philosophy, and he acknowledges that he regards it as a kind of moral threat that needs to be stamped out. Unfortunately, this does not mean that he has added anything new or even thoughtful to the examination of Heidegger's nazism.

The basic strand of Faye's argument is tired and over-used: Heidegger was a nazi, he said nazi things, therefore his philosophy is nazi, or carries some kind of nazi virus in its core. Unfortunately, Faye provides no convincing support. As is usual in this genre (these critiques of Heidegger are by now a virtual genre) nothing 'nazi' is demonstrated in his ideas, only his affiliations and sentiments. Faye, no discriminating thinker apparently, regards this as sufficient evidence and method to brand Heideggerian philosophy as a danger so great that anyone who insists on taking it seriously could be regarded as a carrier of the virus. Moral arm-twisting has seldom been used to battle rival philosophical ideas with such shamelessness and vapidity as here [in short: Faye doesn't like Heidegger's rejection of humanism].

Philosophers should be troubled by two aspects of this book: 1) The attempt to place a scarlet letter on a thought, and 2)The mind-blowing failure of yet another anti-Heidegger rant to justify itself on genuinely philosophical grounds. Where in this book (and genre) is there a single intelligent discussion of method or an intelligent commentary on the premises underlying the critique? One premise is painfully obvious, however, without the necessity (or likelihood) of Faye pointing it out: the thoughts are only as good as the man.

Apparently, Socrates wasted his time on us if we're still permitting ourselves to be overawed by the philosophy of hypocrisy. BTW: It is instructive, in a not unrelated way, to read the comments of Faye's supporters in various places. Clearly Faye has succeeded to some degree in his true task: making people feel morally superior for not understanding Heidegger, and also flattering the urge to toss accusations of nazism into substantive debates about philosophy. Disgusting.