The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage (review)

Zarader’s striking assertion is that Heidegger is the thinker who, more than any other, “restored to Western thought the determinations central to the Hebraic universe,” even as it is he, more than any other, who “effaced” Hebraism “from thought and, more broadly, from the West itself.” In what sense does Heidegger covertly or inadvertently Judaize philosophy? His idea that time is not a homogenous sequence of nows but is instead tensed toward an unforeseeable event—the idea is curiously Hebraic. Likewise his ideas that words are not merely signs but bear the presence of things themselves; that thinking is not foremost logic and representation but thanking and memory; that truth is not correspondence but revelation and concealment; that poetry is best understood as prophecy and prayer; and that thought is saturated with interpretation so that philosophy itself is an endless hermeneutic (or midrash). At almost every point that Heidegger turns away from metaphysics and epistemology, he pivots on the Hebraic heritage. When the old Nazi lectured in France at the Cerisy Colloquium in 1955, Paul Ricoeur confronted him with a question to that effect. But Heidegger misprized his interrogator, shrugged his shoulders, and simply reasserted that what he was uncovering in the premetaphysical heritage of the Greeks had nothing to do with “biblical dogmatics.”

It has fallen to Zarader, a Heidegger scholar with impeccable credentials, to expose the profound extent of his “unavowed dependence” on the Hebraic. She demonstrates that Heidegger’s return to what is unthought and unapparent in the Greek tradition appropriates some of the most blatantly apparent features of the Hebraic tradition. As she pithily concludes: “I am not doubting that such experiences might be attributed to the Greeks’ unthought, to that which they had not thought. I have simply sought to show that these experiences were present elsewhere. In clear terms, I in no way assert that these experiences could not be found, between the lines, among the Greeks. I am simply recalling that they were set down, in letters black on white, among the Jews.” In addition to Heidegger scholars, anyone interested in modern Jewish thought will be indebted to Zarader, for her work indirectly demonstrates why post-Heideggerian philosophy is so amenable to Judaization. They should also be unnerved by her book, whose conclusions must at some stage cut both ways. For if Heidegger betrays an unthought debt to the Hebraic tradition, this indiscrete affinity is also painfully manifest in the proximity between undeniable strains of Jewish thought and his account of the political, with its emphasis on the heritage, language, and authentic destiny of the Volk.