Thinking and Killing: Philosophical Discourse in the Shadow of the Third Reich by Alon Segev (review)

Alon Segev’s book Thinking and Killing is about the connection between philosophy and Nazism, a theme of obvious interest and much debate. Segev first looks at thinkers who were to some degree involved with National Socialism and are often regarded as severely compromised—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger—and then examines, quite skeptically, the thought of later philosophers with some relationship to the earlier group, such as Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The book not only scrutinizes philosophers or philosophies that influenced or were influenced by National Socialism, but aims to serve as a more general review of the philosophical ideas in some way entangled with or responding to Nazi rule and genocide. The subtitle is appropriate: Philosophical Discourse in the Shadow of the Third Reich.

In his preface, Segev asks whether the critical thinking to which philosophy is committed can help guard against the rise of a party with totalitarian ambitions, institutionalized antisemitism, and industrialized mass murder. His answer to this question in the chapters on Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger is negative. Celebrated German philosophers and thinkers supported Nazism, and some of their statements encouraged and justified submission to the movement. Heidegger, Segev claims, formulated a fatalistic understanding of history and urged students to abandon rationality. This tendency, on display in his Rectoral Address (1933), was compatible with the National Socialist imperative of obedience. The difference between Heidegger’s Address and a later text such as Letter on Humanism (1946) are, Segev asserts, merely cosmetic; Heidegger’s thought remained deeply problematic.

Carl Schmitt’s positions, too, exhibit a definite kinship with Nazi ideology. Schmitt provided legal-philosophical arguments for the unrestrained exercise of power by the Führer, and he expressed racist views. The writer Ernst Jünger was not a National Socialist, yet he glorified military struggle and, in The Worker (1932), he imagined a society in a state of permanent mobilization for war.

The chapters on Löwith, Arendt, and Gadamer turn our attention to how thinkers close to and inspired by Heidegger dealt with his legacy. While Löwith was critical of his former teacher and spoke of the similarities between Heidegger’s idioms and Nazi jargon, Segev claims that Gadamer’s thought remained bound to the premises of a philosophy implicated in National Socialist ideology. The chapter on Arendt is devoted to Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Segev thinks that Arendt is insufficiently attentive to ideological antisemitism, much due to her wish to warn against the danger of an atrophied sense of personal responsibility in the large-scale bureaucracies of modern mass societies.

A seventh chapter on Jean Améry discusses his philosophical exploration of the suffering he was subjected to as a prisoner of the Nazis. It provides a contrast to the preceding chapters on Nazi philosophers and their legatees. The book ends, somewhat unexpectedly, with a sharp critique of the contemporary Egyptologist Jan Assmann and his idea that monotheism fosters intolerance, which finds an outlet in violence. The chapter seems rather loosely connected to the first segment of the book. One could say that the book as a whole shifts away from its initial focus on philosophers submitting to Nazism to a concern with the Jewish people, their vulnerability, suffering, and religious traditions. The Arendt chapter criticizes her underestimation of antisemitism; the Améry chapter captures his suffering in concentration camps; the section on Assmann points to the tradition of tolerance in Judaism, against Assmann’s picture of intolerant monotheism.

The movement from one theme to another is peculiar, given the brevity of the book. There are about ninety pages of text, around ten of which are translations of interesting pieces by Schmitt and Jünger. Most chapters are about ten pages long and Segev frequently inserts long quotations from philosophers and commentators. This does not always give the author sufficient space to reconstruct the relationship...