Heideggers ,,große Politik“. Die semantische Revolution der Gesamtausgabe von Reinhard Mehring (review)

Mehring’s title refers directly to Nietzsche’s “large-scale politics” (große Politik), a term Nietzsche employed several times. In some instances Nietzsche was following Bismarck in asking whether central Europe should direct its efforts toward weakening its adversary, Russia, or to strengthening itself in order to compete. The latter is an example of large-scale politics, which can be contrasted with pettier agendas. Nietzsche’s term could also be interpreted to mean “taking a long view.” According to Mehring, the long view taken by Heidegger was his concern with his legacy. Heidegger expended energies addressing future readers and in anticipation of the production of future Heideggerians. Chief among his aims was producing a semantic revolution leading to the conquest of German minds (eine geistige Eroberung) and to the re-education (Umerziehung) of the people. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger was looking toward the future, and he expected that his own students would become leaders, eventually overcoming their mentor. Mehring’s earlier book on this subject, Heideggers Überlieferungsgeschick (Königshausen & Neumann 1992), argued that Heidegger’s thought was more strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s self-stylization than by the pre-Socratics. Mehring writes that his new study builds on his earlier one, but that it proceeds from the controversy surrounding the recent publication of the Black Notebooks. These contemporary disputes form part of Mehring’s picture, although that discussion is somewhat subdued here by the philological attention he pays to Nietzsche, Gadamer, and other major influences.

Without a doubt Mehring is an expert in some of the reception material that is rarely cited elsewhere. He discusses, for example, Ludwig Feuchtwanger’s fascinating critical assessment of Heidegger from 1932, and a lengthy chapter on how Heidegger’s Jewish students eventually became critics of Carl Schmitt and thus critiqued their mentor by proxy is extraordinarily illuminating. It is sometimes difficult, however, to see the connection between these points and the book’s larger argument about posterity and the Nachlass insofar as Heidegger can hardly be said to have controlled these diverse aftereffects. The section on Wilhelm Dilthey’s student Eduard Spranger, a philosopher and psychologist who rejected Heidegger’s ideas, is similarly enlightening. Here too, however, Mehring dwells on Spranger’s letter exchanges with Gadamer in ways that provide evidence of remarkable erudition, yet speak less to the study’s professed line of argument.

At times Mehring adopts a highly critical perspective on Heidegger’s behavior: his “other way of thinking” (anderes Denken) was, according to Mehring, performative. Heidegger spoke programmatically about self-staging and became a media-analyst of his own appearance. According to Mehring, Heidegger’s audience, “muss faktisch nichts lernen; nicht einmal die Etymologien muss es buchstäblich festhalten und memorieren können. Es soll sich aber auf das akademische Ereignis des Vortrags einlassen und davon nachhaltig und legendär berichten. Es soll dabeigewesen sein wollen” (48). He fashioned his own aura in the seminar room, and, as it turned out, he also forbade students from laughing (39). Mehring describes Heidegger as an “Aktionskünstler,” the upshots of whose performances could not be adequately explained by the propositional content of his thought. These passages contain a strong reproof: Heidegger called for devotees and built a sectarian circle around himself. This approach, which was somewhat cultic, was meant to provide every answer.

Where debates associated with the posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks are concerned, Mehring is defensive and almost apologetic. He offers a circuitous justification of Heidegger wherein National Socialism is portrayed as an ideology and for this reason generically distinct from Heidegger’s philosophy. One can agree that there is a terminological difference between an academic philosophy and a worldview or political religion, but as a practical matter such distinctions are less consequential. National Socialist philosophy, Mehring writes, was, unlike Marxism, not scientific, but rather legitimated itself in biological or naturalistic terms, and it thus overlapped in only limited ways with Heidegger’s field. However, Heidegger’s philosophy...