HEIDEGGER ET LE NAZISME
Victor Farias
Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987
$39.95
Martin Heidegger was one of the most important Western philosophers since Hegel. He was also, at least for a time, a confirmed Nazi activist who, unlike so many of his fellow Germans, never expressed a word of regret for the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich. Moreover, even after ceasing to be visibly active as a Nazi he retained his membership in the Nazi Party (&##35;312589 Gau Baden) until they very end of the war, faithfully paying his dues and assessments.
Debate over Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism has been carried on since the end of the war. The question has been raised once again in a new book, Heidegger et la nazisme, by Victor Farias, a Chilean former student of Heidegger who teaches at the Free University of Berlin. Farias' book has created a sensation in Europe and has been widely reported on in the United States. Translations are currently under way in ten languages. An American edition is scheduled for publication sometime this coming winter. Although the book was originally rejected by a German publisher, and enlarged German edition is now scheduled for publication. One hopes the German edition will show more careful editing than is present in the inexcusably sloppy French edition. There is neither an index nor a bibliography, and the critical apparatus is inaccurate and unreliable. These lacunae are especially regrettable in view of the controversy the book has generated.
In spite of its overall sloppiness, Farais' book is important for the issues it raises as well as for the hitherto unpublished documents it makes available. Were Heidegger a lesser figure, his involvement with Nazism would be of little concern save to historians with a special interest in twentieth-century German philosophy. Unfortunately, such is not the case. If, as Farias contends, Heidegger was an unrepentant follower of a political movement whose most distinctive institutions were death camps with a factory-like capacity for the extermination and incineration of as many as twenty-five thousand people a day, one must either come to understand philosophy in a radically new light or one must seriously question the value of Heidegger's contribution.
The intrinsic connection
Some of Heidegger's defenders insist there is no intrinsic connection between his thought and his politics. This is a position Heidegger himself rejected. The philosopher Karl Lowith, a former student of Heidegger, was written of a conversation he had with Heidegger in 1936 in which Heidegger admitted that his commitment to National Socialism was an intrinsic expression of his philosophy. Moreover, as early as 1927 in his major work, Being and Time, Heidegger implied that there is an intrinsic connection between authentic existence, thought, and politics. In that work Heidegger's readers are called to "authenticity," which is characterized as honest acceptance of man's own being, and which Heidegger further identifies as "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), that is, the authentic response to the call of conscience. In that call man, who is referred to by Heidegger as Dasein, is summoned out of his accepted, routine ways toward openess to the uncertainty and groundlessness of human
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