Heidegger: L'Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. Autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935 (review)

Faye, who is a lecturer at the University of Paris X–Nanterre and an authority on Descartes, goes perhaps farther than any other Heidegger critic in seeing a corpus of philosophic works filled with the "danger" of disseminating Nazi ideas (3). Indeed, he considers Heidegger's works "as destructive and dangerous for contemporary thought as the Nazi movement was for the physical existence of the exterminated peoples" (517). With this kind of hyperbole, Faye pushes the limits of critical, academic discourse beyond what can normally be accommodated. He has thereby rendered suspect the contributions of any number of Heidegger scholars who do not view the Heideggerian corpus as a danger to the thought processes of their students. Faye stands, of course, in a critical tradition that he credits and that includes Hugo Ott, Victor Farías, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Wolin, and Tom Rockmore. Among the Americans, he seems to be particularly indebted to Richard Wolin, whose The Politics of Being (1990) can be considered a forerunner to Faye's work. Where he goes beyond his predecessors is not only in the extreme nature of his antipathy toward Heidegger's opus, but also in the incorporation of analyses of the writings of some of Heidegger's contemporaries (Carl Schmitt, Alfred Baeumler, et al.) who had more obvious ties to the Nazi movement as well as points of contact with Heidegger's works. In addition, Faye deals (in two of his nine chapters) with as-yet-unpublished seminars of Heidegger from the winter semesters 1933–34 and 1934–35.

Faye does not attempt to specify those elements in which Nazism consists, but it becomes evident from his presentation that he means the totalitarian Führer-state, as well as the virulent racism and anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. These elements, Faye contends, are present throughout Heidegger's entire opus. One would not want to dispute the first of these points, at least for his writings between 1933 and 1935. There is much evidence to show Heidegger's justification of a state organized in a dictatorial way with total dependence on the will of the Führer. Studies written to the contrary—attempting to show Heidegger's support of democratic ideals (e.g., Frank Schalow's Language and Deed, 1998)—have to overlook this evidence, as well as his later statements in his Spiegel interview (1966), that he was not sure that democracy was the correct way to address the problem of ever-expanding technology, but that National Socialism was at least going in the right direction for a time. A rather long passage from the unpublished seminar of 1933–34, which Faye quotes (as usual) in the German original as well as in French translation, states most succinctly Heidegger's political philosophy at the time. Heidegger begins by seeing the movement toward ever greater individualism in the Western world since the Renaissance in a negative light. He continues as follows:

As time went on all the cultural areas were allowed to grow ever farther apart into the incalculable, until our time when the seriousness of such doings was demonstrated with elementary clarity in the decomposition of our state. We therefore recognized it as a pressing task of our time to confront this danger by trying to give back to politics its rightful rank and enabling it to be seen as the basic characteristic of the human being philosophizing in history and as the being [Sein] in which the state develops . . . ".

(193–94)

A later passage has the "will of the Führer" joining the disparate parts of the state into a "living bond" (240).

The circumstances are different in the case of Heidegger's alleged racism. Aside from occasional remarks in letters that betray a kind of residual anti-Semitism common to much of Europe in pre-World War II times, there is nothing in his philosophical...