The Heidegger Controversy

Shore’s own judgments and connections

The Rectoral Address identifies the university's will to science with the Volk's will to its historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time."

Put simply Heidegger's inaugural speech as university rector ties the university's pursuit of knowledge to the German people's historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time."

"We are guilty of being alive": we Germans who survived preferred living to protesting as our Jewish friends were taken, reasoning, logically but feebly, that dying would have helped nobody.

Put simply Jaspers: "We are guilty of being alive." Germans who survived chose living over protesting when their Jewish friends were taken away, telling themselves, logically but weakly, that their deaths would have helped no one.

Marcuse, like many fellow admirers, cannot split the philosopher Heidegger from the man: Heidegger's own philosophy rules out that separation.

Forgiveness, for Arendt in The Human Condition, is the sole remedy for irreversibility: a deed cannot be undone, even when its doer had no way of knowing what it was.

Put simply Arendt: what is done cannot be undone, even when the person who did it could not have known what they were doing. Forgiveness is the only remedy for that.

Where to read it Arendt, The Human Condition §33.

In the 1966 Spiegel interview, released only after his death, Heidegger conceded that Nazism had perhaps been wrong, yet insisted the West's real crisis was still godlessness after Nietzsche.

Put simply In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published only after his death in 1976, Heidegger allowed that Nazism was perhaps wrong. Still, he insisted, the West's real crisis was a world without God, after Nietzsche.

In the text In the Spiegel interview (1966, published 1976), asked about his 1933 statement that the Führer alone was Germany's reality and law, Heidegger replies: "The sentences you quote I would no longer write today."

Shore takes Heidegger's Nazism as known; the real controversy is what it means for reading Heidegger, and, she asks, for reading Arendt too.

Derrida, in Gumbrecht's retelling, treated Heidegger's Nazism as settled; the real question was whether the ineffable something that drew him toward Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher.

Put simply Derrida, as Gumbrecht tells it: that Heidegger was a Nazi is settled. The real question is whether the hard-to-name quality that drew him to Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher.

Other readings Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (published from 2014), reads them as showing antisemitism at work in Heidegger's account of the history of being (Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, 2015).

Celan, Shore says, spoke of German after the war as both Muttersprache and Mördersprache: the mother tongue and the murderers' tongue.

In Heidegger's Todtnauberg guestbook, Celan wrote of looking toward the well's star "in the hope of a word to come."

Put simply The poet Celan, visiting Heidegger's hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, wrote in its guestbook that he was looking toward the well's star "in the hope of a word to come."

Writing to his wife during the war, Heidegger rejected Husserl's phenomenology as "too narrow and bloodless": no such method could be made absolute, because life outruns it.

Put simply Heidegger, in a wartime letter to his wife: Husserl's philosophy of how things appear to consciousness ("phenomenology") is "too narrow and bloodless." No such method can be made absolute, because life is richer than any method.

By 1919 Heidegger privately believed his thinking had passed Husserl's, yet he told his wife he must keep playing the loyal phenomenologist, for a Freiburg chair and for money.

Put simply In 1919 Heidegger told his wife he had already outgrown Husserl's philosophy but had to pretend to follow it, to win a professorship at Freiburg and to support them financially.

Writing to Ingarden, Stein said Heidegger was using Husserl's complete trust to steer students away from phenomenology, and that everyone but "the good master" himself could see it.

Put simply Stein, writing to a fellow student: Heidegger was exploiting Husserl's total trust to lead students away from Husserl's philosophy. Everyone could see it except Husserl himself.

The Rectoral Address identifies the university's will to science with the Volk's will to its historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time."

Put simply Heidegger's inaugural speech as university rector ties the university's pursuit of knowledge to the German people's historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time."

The Rectoral Address asks: if Nietzsche was right that "God is dead," and we take seriously "the abandonment of man today in the midst of being," what follows for science?

Put simply Heidegger's rector's speech asks: if Nietzsche was right that "God is dead," and people today really are left abandoned in the world, what follows for science?

For the Rectoral Address, a Volk's spiritual world is a power, one drawn from guarding at the deepest level the forces rooted in its "soil and blood."

Put simply Heidegger's rector's speech: a people's spiritual world is a power. It comes from guarding, at the deepest level, the forces rooted in that people's "soil and blood."

What strikes Shore in the Rectoral Address passages she reads is an absence: nothing about Jews, antisemitism or extermination, but a great deal about will and the German Volk.

Put simply Shore: what strikes her in the passages she reads from Heidegger's rector's speech is what is missing. Nothing about Jews, antisemitism or extermination, but a great deal about will and the German people.

Shore sees in the address's insistence on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the governing verb is not thinking but willing.

Put simply Shore sees in the speech's stress on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the key verb is not "think" but "will."

Addressing students as rector, Heidegger declared that the Führer alone was Germany's reality, present and to come, and its law.

In Heidegger's call for decision in everything and responsibility in every action, Shore hears existentialist motifs, decisionism and answerability, surfacing in his 1933 address as rector.

Put simply Shore hears existentialist themes in Heidegger's 1933 rector's speech. His call for decision in everything and responsibility in every act echoes the existentialist stress on choosing and answering for one's choices.

In 1935 lectures, Heidegger distinguished what passed for Nazi philosophy from the movement's "inner truth and grandeur," which he located in the encounter between planetary technology and modern humanity.

Put simply Heidegger, in 1935 lectures: what was being peddled as Nazi philosophy had nothing to do with the movement's "inner truth and grandeur." That, he said, lay in modern humanity's encounter with worldwide technology.

In the text In Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures 1935, published 1953), Heidegger writes of "the inner truth and greatness of this movement". In the Spiegel interview he says the parenthesis that follows was in his manuscript; the Fried and Polt translation marks it as a later insertion.

Why no university would habilitate Stein is uncertain, Shore says: perhaps her being a woman, perhaps her being Jewish, perhaps both at once, overdetermining the outcome.

Put simply Shore: it is unclear why no university would let Stein qualify as a professor. Perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was Jewish, perhaps both together.

Asked by the denazification committee, Jaspers called Heidegger's gifts perhaps unmatched in contemporary Germany, yet urged that he philosophize but not teach, not yet: students could not think for themselves.

"We are guilty of being alive": we Germans who survived preferred living to protesting as our Jewish friends were taken, reasoning, logically but feebly, that dying would have helped nobody.

Put simply Jaspers: "We are guilty of being alive." Germans who survived chose living over protesting when their Jewish friends were taken away, telling themselves, logically but weakly, that their deaths would have helped no one.

After Nazism, Jaspers held, a German has one route to truth and no other: purification arising from a deep consciousness of guilt.

In 1947 Marcuse told Heidegger he passed, for many, as a leading Nazi intellectual: he had bound himself to the regime in 1933 and never publicly recanted, even after 1945.

Marcuse, like many fellow admirers, cannot split the philosopher Heidegger from the man: Heidegger's own philosophy rules out that separation.

Political error is possible for a philosopher, who then owns up to it openly; being fooled by a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews is not.

Put simply Marcuse: a philosopher can get politics wrong, and then he admits it openly. But he cannot be fooled about a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews.

Replying to Marcuse in 1948, Heidegger said he had expected in 1933 that National Socialism would spiritually renew all of life, reconcile social conflict and save Western existence from communism.

Heidegger granted Marcuse's point that he never issued a public, plainly intelligible repudiation; doing so, he claimed, would have destroyed him and his family.

Put simply Heidegger admitted to Marcuse that he never made a public, clear statement disowning his Nazi past, claiming that doing so would have been the end of him and his family.

Arendt forgave Heidegger, in Shore's reading, although he never asked; as to how, Shore points to her 1958 writing on forgiveness, in a book silently dedicated to him.

Put simply Shore: Arendt forgave Heidegger, even though he never asked. To see how, Shore points to what Arendt wrote about forgiveness in 1958, in a book she privately dedicated to him.

Forgiveness, for Arendt in The Human Condition, is the sole remedy for irreversibility: a deed cannot be undone, even when its doer had no way of knowing what it was.

Put simply Arendt: what is done cannot be undone, even when the person who did it could not have known what they were doing. Forgiveness is the only remedy for that.

Where to read it Arendt, The Human Condition §33.

In a 1997 essay, Derrida holds that forgiving, to have any meaning at all, must mean forgiving exactly what is unforgivable.

Derrida's aporia of forgiveness: because forgiveness forgives only what cannot be forgiven, it must declare itself to be impossibility as such.

Put simply Derrida: forgiveness only applies to what cannot be forgiven. So it is caught in a contradiction (an "aporia"): it must present itself as impossibility itself.

In the 1966 Spiegel interview, released only after his death, Heidegger conceded that Nazism had perhaps been wrong, yet insisted the West's real crisis was still godlessness after Nietzsche.

Put simply In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published only after his death in 1976, Heidegger allowed that Nazism was perhaps wrong. Still, he insisted, the West's real crisis was a world without God, after Nietzsche.

In the text In the Spiegel interview (1966, published 1976), asked about his 1933 statement that the Führer alone was Germany's reality and law, Heidegger replies: "The sentences you quote I would no longer write today."

"Only a god can save us," Heidegger told Der Spiegel; what remains for us is to ready ourselves, staying open to whether a god comes or stays away.

Patočka asks whether Germans in 1933 could have known what is now obvious about Nazism, and whether, in some circumstances, there might have been no choice but trying it.

Coming from a Czech who had lived under Nazi occupation, Patočka's willingness to ask what a German could have known in 1933 strikes Shore as extraordinarily generous.

The word Celan hoped for from Heidegger at Todtnauberg, Shore judges, never arrived: not while Celan lived, and not in Heidegger's remaining years either.

Put simply Shore: the word Celan hoped to hear from Heidegger at his hut never came, neither in Celan's lifetime nor in the years Heidegger had left.

Shore takes Heidegger's Nazism as known; the real controversy is what it means for reading Heidegger, and, she asks, for reading Arendt too.

Derrida, in Gumbrecht's retelling, treated Heidegger's Nazism as settled; the real question was whether the ineffable something that drew him toward Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher.

Put simply Derrida, as Gumbrecht tells it: that Heidegger was a Nazi is settled. The real question is whether the hard-to-name quality that drew him to Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher.

Other readings Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (published from 2014), reads them as showing antisemitism at work in Heidegger's account of the history of being (Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, 2015).

For Gumbrecht, Derrida's question (did what drew Heidegger to Nazism also make his thought great?) justifies the university's existence: somewhere must exist where even that can be asked.

Husserl leaves Göttingen for a chair in Freiburg, with almost no students left because they had gone to war.

Heidegger tells his wife he has outgrown Husserl but must feign loyalty for his career; Stein notices him drawing students away.

Arendt goes to Marburg to study with Heidegger.

Arendt leaves Marburg for Heidelberg and grows close to Jaspers.

Heidegger, needing a major publication to secure the Marburg chair, withdraws to his hut at Todtnauberg to write Being and Time.

Heidegger delivers the draft of Being and Time to Husserl for his birthday, dedicated to him.

Husserl retires at Freiburg and Heidegger succeeds to his chair; Levinas studies with both.

Levinas studies with Husserl in Freiburg and attends Heidegger's seminar as Heidegger succeeds Husserl in the chair.

Heidegger visits Heidelberg and breaks off the affair with Arendt.

The Self-Assertion of the German University (Rectoral Address) Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität

Stein enters a Carmelite convent shortly after the Nazis take power.

Hitler is appointed chancellor (January 30, 1933) after the Nazis become the largest party in the 1932 elections.

New Nazi law removes Husserl's surviving son from his law professorship as a non-Aryan.

Heidegger joins the Nazi party.

Heidegger delivers the Rectoral Address, The Self-Assertion of the German University.

Heidegger resigns the rectorship but stays in the party.

Introduction to Metaphysics (1935 lecture course)

Heidegger's 1935 lectures dismiss the "philosophy of National Socialism".

Patočka helps bring Husserl to Prague for lectures he can no longer give in Nazi Germany.

Husserl dies; Heidegger and his wife do not attend the funeral.

Stein is moved to a Carmelite convent in Echt, the Netherlands.

The Gestapo arrests Stein at Echt; she is murdered at Auschwitz days later.

Jaspers reports to Freiburg's denazification committee on Heidegger.

The Question of German Guilt Die Schuldfrage

Jaspers publishes The Question of German Guilt.

Marcuse writes to Heidegger asking for a public repudiation of his Nazi identification.

Heidegger replies to Marcuse, explaining his 1933 hopes and his silence.

Arendt visits Heidegger and Elfride after the teaching ban ends; letters and a poem follow.

The Human Condition The Human Condition

Arendt publishes The Human Condition, silently dedicated to Heidegger.

"Only a God Can Save Us": Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten

Heidegger gives Der Spiegel an interview on condition it appear only after his death.

Paul Celan visits Heidegger's hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, three years before Celan's suicide.

Paul Celan drowns himself in the Seine.

At Derrida's seminar in Germany a student asks how a Jew can read Heidegger the Nazi; Gumbrecht is present.

Derrida's essay on forgiveness appears ("Le siècle et le pardon"); in English in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 2001.

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! / Le siècle et le pardon