Confronting Heidegger

In the wake of the “affaire Heidegger,” prompted by the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme, Michael Zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art—how can students of Heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his “postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of Western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery”?

Such an inquiry is nothing new for Zimmerman, whose 1981 book, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled “National Socialism, Voluntarism, and Authenticity.” In fact, the seeming novelty of the “affaire” itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants.

For years prior to the public debates surrounding the Farias study, many of Heidegger’s own students (among them Otto Poggeler, Heinrich Ott and Paul Huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of National Socialism. Indeed, as early as 1970, Joachim Fest had discussed Heidegger’s outright complicity with the NSDAP in The Face of the Third Reich.

But as David Carroll has suggested in his foreword to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “jews”, the most recent French version of the Heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the Farias book as “programmed”— designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

While Carroll’s take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the “place” of Heidegger in contemporary scholarship. Given the shape and focus of the discussion in France, it would seem that—in many ways—Heidegger’s ignominious affiliation with the Nazis and his silence on the Holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. In this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional “double-forgetting.”

Zimmerman’s book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of Heidegger’s historical and political context written to date, relating Heidegger’s critique of “productionist metaphysics” and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with National Socialism. But Zimmerman, unlike Farias, does not reduce the whole of Heidegger’s writings to a mere expression or reflection of Nazism. While clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, Zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on Heidegger’s part—a kind of “what-is-living, what-is-dead” exercise.

To this end, Zimmerman engages the texts of Heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of “the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of Heidegger’s commentators have explained his concept of modern technology” (249).

As Zimmerman points out, most of Heidegger’s readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. Zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self- foreclosure by decentering Heidegger as merely “one important voice in a cultural conversation into which Heidegger himself had been ‘thrown’.”

This is not to say that Heidegger’s politics are themselves construed by Zimmerman as a manifestation of Geworfenheit or “throwness.” Rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what Jeffrey Herf has described as “reactionary...