Heidegger's Jewish Followers: Essays on Arendt, Strauss, Jonas, and Levinas (review)

Heidegger's Jewish Followers comprises ten essays, plus an Introduction by the editor, Samuel Fleischacker. The volume addresses the work of four Jewish students of Martin Heidegger (in different capacities, including doctoral student and lecture course student), Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. Each would write on Jewish topics, among other interests, each regarded Heidegger's thought as of paramount importance philosophically, and each was very seriously shocked by Heidegger's public support of the Nazi government in the early 1930s. The distinguished contributors here, from a range of disciplines, include: Norma Claire Moruzzi, Dana Villa, Catherine Zuckert, Daniel Doneson, Lawrence Vogel, Christian Wiese, Paul Franks, Peter Eli Gordon, Leora Batnitzky, Richard Wolin, and Samuel Fleischacker.

The essays succeed at identifying significant elements of Heidegger's thought that were affirmed by the individual Jewish figures. Where Levinas is concerned, the matter is particularly unsettled. In the final essay, "Levinas and Heidegger: The Anxiety of Influence," Wolin claims that Levinas's overall criticism of the philosophical tradition came from Heidegger, and that as a result of it, Levinas fails to recognize the importance of political developments associated with the Enlightenment. Wolin, unfortunately, reinforces his point regarding positive assessment of those developments with particularly forced readings of Levinas's understanding of rationality, freedom, and language. The polemics here contrast, for example, with Gordon's insistence that his claim regarding a certain lasting importance of Heidegger's thought for Levinas's thought is not intended to expose any ostensibly disreputable roots of Levinas's thought, with Batnitzky's explicit refusal, in her essay on Levinas, to confuse the polemics of identity politics (which Wolin summarily blames, along with all "postmodernism," on Heidegger) with philosophical thought (a needed point in addressing "Heidegger's Jewish followers"), as well as with Villa's refusal to allow ongoing criticism of Arendt for her Eichmann in Jerusalem to obscure the import of Arendt's analysis of the action or the gesture that underlies the political. Also regarding Levinas, the overall focus on the relation to Heidegger's thought results in a neglect of Levinas's French context. Sartre is mentioned once, tangentially.

Regarding how Arendt, Strauss, Jonas, and Levinas differed with Heidegger's thinking, the issues, in different ways, generally are that Heidegger neglected the political, or neglected the ethical, which the respective younger philosophical figures did not consider derivative or second order. These factors are specifically pertinent to Heidegger's declaration of support for the Nazi government. These departures are serious enough to require qualification of the term "followers."

The broad question concerning the attraction Heidegger's teaching held for this roster of Jewish intellectuals (and the volume makes the point that these four were among a noticeably large population, comparatively, of Jewish students who sought out Heidegger's courses) is addressed, in regard to Arendt, in Moruzzi's opening essay "From Parvenu to Pariah: Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen," as well as in Fleischacker's introduction, "Heidegger's Affinities with Judaism." Pertinently, Fleischacker writes that "[a]s both they [the "fol-lowers"] and Heidegger would insist, we keep a serious question open only when we remember that the answers we offer . . . are less than satisfying, and in any case less important than the question itself." This is certainly pertinent to the crucial issue, at stake here more indirectly, of the possibility of accounting for the havoc and destruction in the middle of the previous century.

The volume is important reading for those interested in a Jewish contribution to the intellectual life of the twentieth century, to Heidegger scholars interested in the possibility of original appropriation of and response to Heidegger's thought, and to all who wrestle, politically, intellectually, and psychically, with effects from last century's devastation.