A Correspondence

"A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot he deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews - merely because they were Jews - that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination - in this case, too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition. " Marcuse writing to Heidegger about his silence regarding National Socialism

Heidegger to Marcuse

Freiburg, January 20, 1948

The package that you mentioned in your letter of 28 August has arrived. I thank you for it. I think that it accords with your and your friends' wishes that I have had the entire contents distributed to former students who were neither in the Party nor had any other connections to National Socialism. In their names, too, I thank you for your help.

If I may infer from your letter that you are seriously concerned with [reaching] a correct judgment about my work and person, then your letter shows me precisely how difficult it is to converse with persons who have not been in Germany since 1933 and who judge the beginning of the National Socialist movement from its end. Regarding the main points of your letter, I would like to say the following.

1. Concerning 1933: I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of western Dasein from the dangers of communism. These convictions were expressed in my Rectoral Address (have you read this in its entirety?), in a lecture on "The Essence of Science" and in two speeches to students of [Freiburg] University. There was also an election appeal of approximately 25-30 lines, published in the [Freiburg] student newspaper. Today I regard a few of the sentences as misleading [Entgleisung].
2. In 1934 I recognized my political error and resigned my rectorship in protest against the state and party. That no. 1 [i.e., Heidegger's Party activities] was exploited for propaganda purposes both here and abroad, and that no. 2 [his resignation] hushed up for equally propagandistic reasons, failed to come to my attention and cannot be held against me.
3. You are entirely correct that I failed to provide a public, readily comprehensible counter-declaration; it would have been the end of both me and my family. On this point, Jaspers said: that we remain alive is our guilt.
4. In my lectures and courses from 1933-44 I incorporated a standpoint that was so unequivocal that among those who were my students, none fell victim to Nazi ideology. My works from this period, if they ever appear, will testify to this fact.
5. An avowal after 1945 was for me impossible: the Nazi supporters announced their change of allegiance in the most loathsome way; I, however, had nothing in common with them.
6. To the charges of dubious validity that you express "about a regime that murdered millions of Jews, that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite," I can merely add that if instead of "Jews" you had written "East Germans" [i.e., Germans of the eastern territories], then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people.

In conclusion I would like to ask you to consider that today, too, there is false propaganda, for example that rumors are spread that contradict the truth. I have learned about positively nonsensical defamations about me and my work.

I thank you for the open expression of your misgivings about me; I can only hope that you will someday find again in my works the philosopher with whom you studied and worked.

With my best greeting,
M. Heidegger

Marcuse to Heidegger

May 12, 1948
4609 Chevy Chase Blvd.
Washington 15, D.C.

Dear Mr. Heidegger,
For a long time I wasn't sure as to whether I should answer your letter of January 20. You are right: a conversation with persons who have not been in Germany since 1933 is obviously very difficult. But I believe that the reason for this is not to be found in our lack of familiarity with the German situation under Nazism. We were very well aware of this situation - perhaps even better aware than people who were in Germany. The direct contact that I had with many of these people in 1947 convinced me of this. Nor can it be explained by the fact that we "judge the beginning of the National Socialist movement from its end." We knew, and I myself saw it too, that the beginning already contained the end. The difficulty of the conversation seems to me rather to be explained by the fact that people in Germany were exposed to a total perversion of all concepts and feelings, something which very many accepted only too readily. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain the fact that a man like yourself, who was capable of understanding western philosophy like no other, were able to see in Nazism "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety," a "redemption of occidental Dasein from the dangers of communism" (which however is itself an essential component of that Dasein!). This is not a political but instead an intellectual problem - I am tempted to say: a problem of cognition, of truth. You, the philosopher, have confused the liquidation of occidental Dasein with its renewal? Was this liquidation not already evident in every word of its "leaders," in every gesture and deed of the SA, long before 1933?

However, I would like to treat only one portion of your letter, otherwise my silence could be interpreted as complicity.

You write that everything that I say about the extermination of the Jews applies just as much to the allies, if instead of "Jews" one were to insert "East Germans." With this sentence don't you stand outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible - outside of Logos? For only outside of the dimension of logic is it possible to explain, to relativize [auszugleichen], to "comprehend" a crime by saying that others would have done the same thing. Even further: how is it possible to equate the torture, the maiming and the annihilation of millions of men with the forcible relocation of population groups who suffered none of these outrages (apart perhaps from several exceptional instances)? From a contemporary perspective, there seems already to be a night and day difference in humanity and inhumanity in the difference between Nazi concentration camps and the deportations and internments of the post-war years. On the basis of your argument, if the allies had reserved Auschwitz and Buchenwald - and everything that transpired there - for the "East Germans" and the Nazis, then the account would be in order! If however the difference between inhumanity and humanity is reduced to this erroneous calculus, then this becomes the world historical guilt of the Nazi system, which has demonstrated to the world what, after more than 2000 years of western Dasein, men can do to their fellow men. It looks as though the seed has fallen upon fertile ground: perhaps we are still experiencing the continuation of what began in 1933. Whether you would still consider it to be a "renewal" I am not sure.
With my best greeting

Upon reading these comments one is immediately struck by Heidegger’s complete lack of empathy for the victims. The East Germans have also suffered and their assailants are equally guilty. As Hannah Arendt indicated during the Eichmann trial, if everyone is equally guilty than no one is.

But the key question Marcuse raises is whether Heidegger stands outside the space in which conversation can take place at all. Without empathy, and acceptance of responsibility, how is it ever possible to communicate?

Comments

[John Emerson]

I just posted something at Adam Kosko (double-posted with extras at my own site) about the Carl Schmitt/ Leo Strauss relationship.

I think that the anti-neocon thing is overblown, but it's clear that in 1932 Strauss was a very right-wing guy. "Anti-Nazi by accident of birth" is probably too harsh, but after leaving Germany Strauss asked Schmitt for a letter of introduction to Charles Maurras, a quasi-fascist French anti-Semite.

My conclusion is that German seriousness is a very bad thing indeed. If serious thinking about fundamental questions ends up giving you Hitler, you might as well be shallow and irresponsible.

[Alain]

John

I will defninitely check out your post. Regarding the Schmitt/Strauss relationship, I am familiar with the review that Strauss wrote of one of Schmitt's works (Political Theology I think). And certainly the friend/enemy distinction influenced his Platonic bias toward "love of one's own." But I am not sure about German seriousness. That seriousness gave us Kant, Schelling and Hegel as well as Hitler and Goebels.

[John Emerson]

What has German seriousness done for us lately?

I think that a lot of Nietzsche was an only-partly-successful attempt to escape from the seriousness.

[Alain]

John

I responded to your entry at Kosko's site. But regarding seriousness, is it really just a German thing? And is it always an inappropriate response? I am not so sure.

[John Emerson]

I have to work this out. But there's a specifically German kind of seriousness, and I have declared war on it. There was also a related Victorian British variety. The name Ernest / Ernst (no, I'm not kidding) was a hostorical marker of this seriousness. (Cue Oscar Wilde and Samuel Butler).

[Christoph]

"America declares Another War. This time, it's German Seriousness"

Hilarious. Hope you prevail.

[Thivai]

I don't know... why do we never forgive the individual yet forgive the system over and over again (in particular as I develop a film course I have been thinking about the hatred directed toward Elia Kazan by film professionals who continue to work for the Hollywood studio system that supported and encouraged the McCarthy proceedings.)

Heidegger did no good though by his refusal (cowardice) to discuss this time in his life...

Thanks!

[hum]

dear reader, this might be a long post so please -- as john would say -- do not take it seriously; i don't know, maybe that means don't even read it.

i would have liked to address the question alain raises regarding 'empathy' and 'communication' but since he is not around for a bit, that will have to wait.
now john, not being german, am i supposed to take you seriously? when for example you say that neo-con lying is no big deal? is hannah arendt being too seriously german in wondering and worrying about the destruction of public discouse and language ( and the possibility of a political and public space and memory ) by its evisceration by lies? ( or, if you will, what if liberal democracies accomplish nihilism far more effectively than decadent writers?)

am i to take seriously a discussion of schmitt which does not mention sovereignty? or a discussion of liberalism -- and its "patchworks that postpone argameddon" ( and don't kill ) as you say -- when precisely that liberalism is watching and participating in not a little killing around the world? is liberalism seriously without fundaments -- the nation state to name one, the market economy for another? you mention negotiation, and yes i am all for that -- in the sense that derrida thinks it -- but seriously is that kind of generosity and hospitality easily compatible with present liberalism which loves getting cheap oil and shoes from places where unspeakable atrocities occur, when liberal borders are open only provided your identity is well in order, unless of course you're thoroughly exploitable and without recourse in liberal courts of law? i'd love to be lighthearted about the next U.S. supreme court nominee and maybe it won't touch me at all, but...

which -- believe it or not -- brings us to the heidegger 'affair'. as marcuse says in the above letters, heidegger is one who most powerfully thought the western tradition. ( i don't know if i'd agree with marcuse on heidegger justifying the tradition, it seems to me almost the contrary but let's leave that for another day.) anyway, there really would be no heidegger 'affair' if what marcuse says wasn't the case, that it is an entire tradition and history which is in question. and one that heidegger would have attempted to think in an unparalleled way. please note, marcuse says western and not merely german ( or is one going to accuse him as well of thinking the west is german!). please note also that liberal democracy, marx, and nietzsche are involved in this "same" tradition.
(isn't it a funny thing that wagner, who john somehow does not mention, is performed everywhere in the liberal world, though if that isn't german seriousness and attendant problematic 'world view', i don't know what is?)
does one seriously need to add that the denunciation of heidegger is often aimed at those who precisely acknowledge and attempt to think through such questions?

(in keeping with non-seriousness this is being written while consuming a third of a bottle of pastis, so that i might be somewhat immured to the july 4th festivities, or perhaps pass out and miss them altogether.)

to end with a little sense, re the victor farias book which supposedly kindled the heidegger 'affair':

"What would be worrying, however, would be for the affair to be considered 'settled' at least for a while, and for a doxa to form that regarded the matter as closed. We can already see the 'Is it still alright to read Heidegger?' articles making the rounds. If this were to be the effect of this book ( dissuading people from reading and questioning ), it would be a catastrophe. But it would be sad to despair of people's capacity to read..."
( Ph. L-L)

[John Emerson]

My context for Schmitt and Strauss (and Adorno and Heidegger) was 1932. My point was that both Schmitt and Strauss at that time seemed unwilling and unable to support what was then clearly the lesser evil (the liberalism of the Social Democrats), and that their theoretical seriousness, thoroughness, and depth didn't seem to protect them from that blunder. And then when things turned out worse than anyone could have imagined, they all blamed the lesser evil (liberalism) for the problem.

As for neocon lying, Bush didn't learn to lie from the neocons. Some lying is intrinsic to any system where you're trying to convince 51% of the population that you'll do whatever they want you to.

While I think, as I said, that the caricature of Straussianism you see in liberal political writing is unfair and inaccurate, I do not think that someone who could be as close to Schmitt as Strauss was could have been (or was) a good guide for liberal democracy, or has been. (In fact, I wonder whether the common contemporary polemical accusation of "lack of seriousness" hasn't come into American political life via the neocons and ultimately from Strauss, for whom lack of theoetical depth seems to be a killing criticism.)

My interpretation of American history since 1941 is that the foreign policy / military establishment has been autonomous and electoral politics and public opinion have been thoroughly subordinated. The Straussians stepped into that development in the middle, and with Strauss's help the US has been made serious. Alas.

As for sovereignty -- I might have mentioned that, and the "monopoly of legitimate violence", and I even had them in a draft, but what I focussed on in my very short piece was the way that Schmitt (after establishing the autonomy and primacy of the state) rushed to the conclusion that only when the killing started was ethics possible, and only then could people really be serious.

No, I didn't mention Wagner, but I'm a music buff and I do hate Wagner. On my site I celebrate Satie, the French anti-Wagnerian, who was a much more important composer than people think. And not serious.

Various critiques of my little squib have convinced me that I need to flesh out my description of the German seriousness I'm talking about, which includes theoreticism, a fondness for grand struggles-to-the-death, contempt for the everyday and the soft and pleasant and ordinary, a lack of a sense of proportion, humorlessness, and cruelty. And there was a Victorian British version of it too.

I got on this particular hobby horse when I read some of the harsher statements of Wittgenstein, who isn't usually thought of in his Gemranic aspect.

[Amish Lovelock]

Marcuse's struggle to keep up appearances in these letters is wrenching. It resembles the man who has just seen a begger after dining expensively. Heidegger responds with dignity and probably a little embarassment for his former student concerning the food package.

Marcuse does not "doubt the word" of Heidegger's second point. Neither does he dissent from the third point.

Is point 4 factually correct? Does anyone know?

Heiddegger's hopes were dashed and therefore he is entirely right to critique the morally empty gestures of those in point 5.

Granted, point 6 is better on the ear coming from Arendt and hardly outside the Logos as this is not a hypothetical comparison.

[John Emerson]

#6 really ruined the whole effect. It was a cheesy sort of special pleading. As a small part of a larger argument, the fate of the East Germans might have been relevant, but as the clinching point it is abhorrent. Up till then Heidegger had been doing well, and then (like the fairy-tale frog-prince who flicks out his tongue at a fly) his true nature peeks out.

When I talk about German "seriousness", it includes this kind of hard-heartedness and refusal to attend to soft humanitarian considerations which are not profound and fundamental.

[enowning]

Regarding #4 his lectures cannot be said to have been "unequivocal" because (1) the Gestapo didn't shut them down after sending spies to report back on what Heidegger was saying, and (2) today's specialist historians debate what he meant at various points in his lectures. He was lecturing about Greek and German poets and philosophers and never directly about contemporary politics. He does occasionally refer to what was going on the world, but its only after Stalingrad that the tone changes and the hostility to the Reich becomes apparent.

Point 6 is essentially correct in terms of the Soviets murdering millions of eastern Germans. In the West most people know WWII as the Battles of Britain, D-Day, Bulge and the Holocaust. Less well known are the battles of the Eastern front (the largest is history) and the slaughter of millions of civilians there.

[John Emerson]

#6 is still weak. Even if the numbers were the same, the Jews were not enemy subjects killed in the context of a dirty war. By the time the Soviets were able to start killing German civilians, the Germans had killed millions of Soviet citizens. The battle line had just been pushed onto German territory for the first time, without the nature of the war changing.

The Jews were unarmed civilians, a high proportion of them German citizens, killed by the German state, in an action initiated by the German state without any cenceivable provocation. "Who started it?" is a reasonable question.

[Adam Kotsko]

Thank you for posting this. I assume that was the end of their correspondance? It's already a very rich set of letters and contributes a great deal (albeit indirectly) to the assessment of "Nazism vs. Stalinism."

[Troll of Sorrow]

The Heidegger's guilt stuff is so passe. Devastating and penetrating critiques of Heidegger and phenomenology were put forth by Carnap and the vienna circle in the 20s. And behind all the quasi-frankfurt accusations and jargon, there is, as in most of Emerson's scribblings, the sentimental liberal outrage- "how could this happen"- when the same types of brutalities were occurring a few hundred miles to the east with Stalin/Zhukov's "liquidation of the reactionaries" (as per Marx's orders).

[hum]

john, thanks for responding to my previous laughably -- or lamentably -- drunken post. to clarify:
i'm with you on wagner and satie, and preferring a certain lightness.
but i don't quite follow the idea that liberalism -- then and now -- is a light and cuddly thing without teeth and claws.
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that 'the state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that accords with this fact."
Benjamin wrote this in 1942, but isn't it just as true for today, given that the world's liberal superpower has basically declared/decided a state-of-exception, the ability to put to death? and wouldn't this also make it difficult to be comfotable with the lying which is just "a part of the system", i.e., no big deal?

[YH]

hum, he wrote the Theses in 1940 (he was dead by '42), not that this affects the substance of your point.

[hum]

er, thanks YH, have no idea why i wrote 1942, maybe i wanted him to live longer!

[John Emerson]

You see, Strauss has taught us seriousness.

Hi, Basho! Loved your little travel book with the little poems in it! Try your hand on something ambitious next time -- you're very talented.

I never scribble though. Always on the word processor. I'm a very contemporary guy. And there's no quasi-Frankfurt jargon in my peckings. None at all.

[John Emerson]

We seem to be encountering turbulence.

Troll, you are in the right ball park as to my politics, but just barely, but you're not within a million miles regarding my political affiliations.

Yeah, there's a hidden, esoteric Carnap that they don't teach in the schools.

[hum]

"The fields of the sciences are very far removed from one another. Their matter of treating their objects is radically different. These multiple, disparate disciplines owe their cohesion solely to the technical organization of the university and the faculties and only retain their meaning by virtue of the practical goals of the disciplines themselves. By contrast, the rooting of the sciences in their essential ground is long dead."

Thus MH in his 1929 inaugural lecture at Frieburg; quoted verbatim in a TV interview in 1969 where MH emphasises how thinking this one proposition has always been essential for him. Indeed, one can discern in the question of the university a 'political' engagement that predates heidegger's involvement with national-socialism, which informs this involvement, and which he will never repudiate.
It is perhaps not hard to discern why, as the university has always been a major question in the western tradition, the question of knowledge and techne, or of knowledge as techne.

Now, the courses to which Heidegger refers in the letter to Marcuse are ones that attempt an explication of techne. Was this far-reaching explication ( since it the entire western tradition that is thus engaged ) an attempt by MH to explain the 'truth' of national-socialism, an attempt at a response -- which he hopes Marcuse might one day be able to read?
And have the years since not rendered it ever more necessary to think knowledge as techne?
One last note about the above MH quote: despite the continuity affirmed from 1929 to 1969 there is a major shift -- the famous kehre -- precisely at the time of the lectures of "Introduction to Metaphyics" when Heidegger will break with National-Socialism and renounce -- coincidentally? -- the project of "fundamental ontology".

( John, to call MH a 'fundamentalist", as you suggest, would require thinking though this kehre, with a light step? )

[John Emerson]

Well, this is a merged thread. The word "fundamental" in what I said came from my own Schmitt / Strauss thread at Kotsko. I know little about Heidegger.

I recently was reading Wittgenstein (mostly Culture and Value) and was surprised at how Germanic he sounded. He had The Seriousness really bad. That's really what got me started.

(And of course, to use the word "fundamentalist" in this context is just an amusing pun.)

[Headed out (again) after making a positive, albeit vague, contribution (finally)]

"Despite the continuity affirmed from 1929 to 1969 there is a major shift -- the famous kehre -- precisely at the time of the lectures of 'Introduction to Metaphysics' when Heidegger will break with National-Socialism and renounce -- coincidentally? -- the project of 'fundamental ontology.'"

This is the crux of what Wohlin, et al., pass over with a bit too much in the way of cavalier surface-reading and psychologizing--and also where some good work departs from.

[OT?]

As I did not want to leave the statement above to annoy through generality and lack of specificity, here's somewhere to start that, perhaps, will develop one (namely Thomas Sheehan's) conception of the "turn" in order to provide for further engagement:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/pdf/00-kehre.PDF

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/pdf/parad.pdf

Here's Sheehan's Stanford page (no Loyola page):

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/Sheehan.html

[Alain]

OT

Thanks for the links. Sheehan is a very interesting Heidegger scholar. It seemed to me that when he "discovered" the extent of Heidegger's Nazism, he underwent a deep personal intropsection that, to a certain extent, played itself out in his published work. The articles in the NYTimes are excellent for establishing historical facts but I get the sense that he feels personally betrayed.

Thanks again.