Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas

13. LEVINAS’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER

13. LEVINAS’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER What Levinas Says about Heidegger In 1932, Levinas published his first study on Heidegger, “Martin Heidegger and Ontology.” In it, he expressed his unbridled enthusiasm for the German philosopher: For once, Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter , one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument — with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride.1 This passage was omitted from the revision of the essay that Levinas published in 1949 in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Both this text and numerous statements by Levinas in the course of interviews attest to his embarrassment at his youthful enthusiasm for that rising star among Husserlian phenomenologists. Levinas was at Davos and witnessed the famous debate between Heidegger and Cassirer — and admitted having been more taken with the former. This raises an obvious question . To what degree, if any, was Levinas’s reading of Heidegger affected by the latter’s unrepentant support of Hitler and his policies ? It could be argued that this question has no philosophical significance, and that in any case there is no reliable way to answer it. Given the circumstances — that Heidegger became a member of the Nazi party, that Levinas was Jewish, that his Lithuanian 127 family was murdered by Nazis and/or local collaborators, and that he himself spent the war years in a German prison camp — it would indeed be surprising if Levinas’s reading of Heidegger’s work were not colored by circumstances. There are numerous examples, especially in the interviews after the war, of Levinas’s emotional reactions to Heidegger’s Nazism. Levinas was familiar with Heidegger’s manner of speaking, since he had been a student of his in Freiburg, Germany during the 1928–29 academic year. When asked about his personal impression of Heidegger and how he understood the latter’s attitude toward National Socialism, he recalled: “He seemed very authoritarian to me. . . . His firm, categorical voice often came back to me when I listened to Hitler on the radio. His family might have had something to do with it, too: Frau Heidegger was a follower of Hitler early on.”2 The possible relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and his support of the Nazis has received much attention. Frederick A. Olafson’s essay “Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism,”3 the work of a well-established Heideggerian who is both convinced of the great importance of that philosopher’s work and deeply distressed by his abysmal failure as a human being, takes up the question of whether there is anything in Heidegger’s philosophy (as expressed in Being and Time) that would lead its proponents to have a pro-Nazi disposition. He concludes that there is not, but does establish credible links between Heidegger’s social background (rural antimodern), his reaction to his early religious training for the priesthood (Nietzschean backlash), his failure to develop, on the basis of Mitsein, any limits to how other Dasein(s) are to be treated, and his delusional fantasy of becoming the Führer’s own philosophical Führer. Leaving aside the question of the degree to which he may have felt humiliated by his initial enthusiasm for Heidegger, it is a fact — difficult for some Levinasians to accept — that Levinas never wavered in his admiration for the phenomenological analyses of Being and Time. In a 1981 interview with Philippe Nemo, 128 Part Two: Themes he says: “Very early I had a great admiration for this book. It is one of the finest books in the history of philosophy — I say this after years of reflection. One of the finest among four or five others .”4 He admits to having been less impressed with, and less versed in, Heidegger’s later publications. We must bear in mind also that Levinas was a student of Heidegger’s during the latter’s early period, the winter semester of 1928–29. The areas of research, being and time, are shared by these philosophers. The most important aspect of Heidegger’s work, in Levinas’s view, is the ontological difference, which Levinas tends to speak of as the difference between the...