Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy
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With this, the concept of machination itself falls into a crisis. To be sure, Heidegger emphasizes that the word “machination” names “an essencing of being” (ein Wesen des Seins) and “not somehow the comportment and demeanor of a particular being named ‘the human’”; consequently “the latter machination,” i.e., that of the “human,” is “thought of as at most a distant consequence of the beyng-historical one.” Is not “world Judaism” or “Americanism” precisely the model for such an “essence of being”?45 The concept of machination could contain ideological moments that are not far from those that are ideologically ascribed to “world Judaism”—without, however, being reducible to these moments.46 The thought that machination would pursue a military conflict between Jews and National Socialists, which nonetheless would only circle about in “aimlessness,” cannot wipe away the impression at this point of an anti-Semitic influence of the Protocols upon Heidegger’s thinking. When Heidegger writes that in Americanism, “nihilism” reaches “its pinnacle,” then no possible resolution of that conflict can hinder this any longer.47
This delineates the actual problem with a being-historical anti-Semitism. If certain elements of the being-historical narrative are to retain a determinate role from the outset—if, for example, “Americanism” could not have come about otherwise than as the “organizing of the nonessence of machination,” if then “everything horrible” is supposed to lie “in Americanism,”48 precisely because “Americanism” is simply incapable of a “beginning,” because it does not know the “origin,” because it is the offspring of an England that pursues its “gigantic business” (cf. note 33)—then is the history of being itself not anti-Semitic?
The Being-Historical Concept of “Race”
Heidegger’s conception of race is ambivalent. Clearly the concept was kept out of his philosophical texts prior to 1933. Before 1933, the philosopher generally kept silent about his political sympathies for the National Socialists. When we take into account his publications and lectures, it becomes difficult to discern where he could have interested himself philosophically in something like “race.”
Regarding the concept of “race,” it can generally be said that its provenance is actually not to be found in biology. It “relates above all to the kinds of animals that have been newly produced by humans through domestication and breeding.”1 When Plato carries over the breeding of dogs, birds, and horses to humans in his Republic (459b), he is admittedly less concerned with new production than with eugenic ennoblement. Plato’s great student in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, probably has such ideas in mind when he notes in Daybreak that “the Greeks” offer us “the model of a race and culture that have become pure.”2 Nevertheless even Nietzsche’s relation to the concept of race is anything but univocal, as shown by the fact that he regards the “Greeks” as the “model” for a “pure European race and culture.”3
Heidegger sees the problematic status of “race” in Nietzsche. He could also see how the application of the concept of race in Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The Worker) brought with it complications. Jünger speaks of the “race of the worker,” thus of a “new race,” which mobilizes the world.4 Indeed, Jünger adds that this “race within the landscape of work” would have “nothing to do with the biological concept of race.”5 It is telling that the concept of race as found in contemporary discourses forces its way into the text. Jünger wanted to enter into these discussions, without thereby giving himself entirely over to them. The actuality of the concept of “race” was recognized by Jünger.
This would also have to be Heidegger’s strategy. He was prepared to take up the dominant discourse so as to set himself apart from it at the same time, a movement of thought that Heidegger often performed around 1933. In his lecture course of summer 1934, Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, he comes to speak about “race.” The concept would mean “not only that which is racial [Rassisches], as in the bloodline [Blutmäßige] in the sense of heredity, of hereditary blood connection, and of the drive to live,” but also “at the same time, often that which is racy [das Rassige].” “Racial in the first sense does not by a long shot need to be racy”; instead “it can rather be very drab [unrassig].”6 Heidegger’s dealings with the concept of “race” appear akin to Jünger’s. It is altered into his own language and integrated into it. There is, however, a decisive difference.
Heidegger does not doubt the biological significance of the concept. “Race” is “not only that which is racial as in the bloodline.”7 That there is this “bloodline” is not put into question. Much more, the philosopher speaks in the same lecture course of the “voice of the blood” in its relation to the “fundamental attunement of the human.”8 For a moment, “blood” takes center stage. This is also seen in a sequence of concepts from the seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “Care” would have to be understood as “truth (nature—soil—blood—homeland—landscape—gods—death)”; a sequence of concepts that are not placed together accidentally.9
Just as Heidegger proceeds with the concept of race, namely, by acknowledging its positive significance in order then to restrict it (nevertheless in a seemingly obscure way, for what is “racy”?),10 so too does he treat the ideologeme of “blood and soil.”11 “Blood and soil” are “indeed powerful and necessary, but they are not sufficient conditions for the Dasein of the people.”12 Like race, the blood is a “necessary” but not “sufficient condition.” So too runs the formulation already mentioned in Überlegungen III: “One condition” is “raised to the unconditional.”
So much appears clear, but the question remains as to what positive significance Heidegger sees in the necessary condition of race for historical Dasein. The reference he gives is restricted to “thrownness” and “blood.” In a further statement from the first of the Black Notebooks, he speaks of the “power of ‘race’ (the native).”13 This “power,” however, would not be developed. Instead a “short-sighted cluelessness” was bred. This omission of development pertains to “thrownness.” What lies ready for further development here does not get actualized. Put in the language of Being and Time, it could be said that “thrownness” here lacks a “project.”
A statement of Heidegger’s corresponding to this idea links “project” with the ideologeme of “blood and soil.” The “project of being as time” would overcome “everything prior in being and thinking.” It would concern not only an “idea,” but a “mission,” for the sake of not a “solution” but rather a “bonding.” This “project” is not “converted into pure spirit,” but rather first opens and binds “blood and soil to a preparedness for activity, to effectiveness, and to the capacity for work.”14 Understood in this way, “blood and soil” appear as a thrownness that takes effect only in such a projection. The thrownness of “blood and soil” would then be “race” as a necessary condition, one that first receives its mission and its bond in the project—namely, a belonging to the “body of the people [Volkskörper] in the sense of the corporeal life,” a belonging that first attains its authentic significance in this project.15
Thus the philosopher defines the “rootedness” that he repeatedly addressed as the attribute of a human who “coming from out of the soil, [is] nourished by this and stands upon it.” That would be “the originary—that—which often undulates through my body and mood—as though I went across the fields at the plow, along lonely field paths through ripening grain, through the winds and fog, sun and snow, that which kept the blood of the mother and that of her ancestors circulating and undulating.”16 Race is one’s belonging to a “body of the people” in the sense of the “blood of the mother” and “that of her ancestors.” It is the “origin” in this sense.
Given Heidegger’s concession of a legitimate use of the concept of race (something directly conveyed by his restriction of its use), we must pose the question as to whether he is not applying a rhetorical figure here that allows him in his dealings with the National Socialists to purs
ue his own ideas potentially critical of the regime. Without question, we cannot rule out that the philosopher may have wanted to keep suspicions at arm’s length, when, in the academic meetings immediately after 1933—especially as rector of Freiburg University—he approached the National Socialists in the hopes of drawing them in his direction. It is also quite likely that he never agreed philosophically with National Socialism as it actually existed (and if so, then only within very narrow limits). Not without reason did he keep the Black Notebooks and the being-historical treatises hidden from publicity. To be sure, our concern here is not at all with this issue. Ours is much rather to show that Heidegger could definitely combine a being-historical anti-Semitism—including a being-historical concept of race—with a critical distance from actual National Socialism.
Already during the course of his rectorship, Heidegger attributed increasing importance to the supposed incapacity of the Germans to set in motion their “body of the people” in relations of “thrownness” and “projection.” The “many who now” give speeches “‘about’ race and rootedness” would prove “by every word and in everything they do and fail to do . . . that they not only ‘have’ nothing of all that, but even less are racy [rassig] and autochthonous from the ground up.”17 As he did in other areas where the ideological motives proclaimed in the revolution of 1933 were concretely actualized, Heidegger the rector began quite quickly to strike critical notes also in regard to race. The revolution, in his eyes, did not live up to its potential. There was talk “‘about’ race and rootedness,” belonging to a “body of the people” was emphasized, but no consequences were drawn from this. The project-character of race, namely, the “Western responsibility” of the Germans, this “people of the earth,” was simply not recognized.18
Along with disappointment over these missed revolutionary chances, an authentic philosophical reaction also followed: “All ‘blood’ and all ‘race,’ every ‘people’ [Volkstum]” is “in vain and a blind course of action, if this has not already” swung over “into a risking of being” and “as a risking” placed itself “freely before the lightning bolt,” which would meet it there “where its numbness” would necessarily “disintegrate,” “for the sake of making room for that truth of beyng, within which beyng” could first be “set in the work of beings.”19 The view has changed. Heidegger acknowledges more and more that the thrownness of race recedes before the “risk” of corresponding to the “truth of beyng.”
The path that Heidegger set out upon in the late 1930s in regard to the concept of race is the same that he took in nearly all dimensions of his relations with National Socialism. The more he saw that the narrative of the “first” and “other beginning” had nothing to do with the “national revolution,” the more clearly he recognized that actual National Socialism never had any interest in orienting itself on Hölderlin’s poetry, the more he kept his philosophical distance from “race thinking.”
“All race thinking” is “modern,” it moves “along the lines of conceiving the human as subject.” In “race thinking,” the “subjectivism of modernity” is “consummated through the inclusion of corporeality in subjectivity and the complete grasping of subjectivity as the humanity of the human masses.” “At the same time” there occurs an “unconditional empowering of machination.”20 Wherever the human with its body-soul-spirit-anthropology makes itself the foundation of being, a “brutalitas of being” is instated whereby the human turns itself “into a factum brutum” and “‘grounds’ its animality through the doctrine of race.”21 This thought, which Heidegger also stated publicly (in the Nietzsche lectures, for example), forms the core of the being-historical critique of race thinking. An apologetics that would like to recognize a thoroughgoing renunciation of the concept of “race” here simply goes astray.
This holds even when Heidegger distances himself ever further from actually existing National Socialism. “Indeed, one should not fall prey to the basic deception,” he says at one point, “as though with this insight into the biological breeding conditions of the ‘people,’ an insight easily possible for anyone, something essential would be hit upon—whereas the predominance of this biological way of thinking, crude and contemporary by its very nature,” precisely hinders “a meditation upon the fundamental conditions of being a people.” The “knowing and even producing of these conditions” would have to be a “liberation from all calculation of utility . . . whether this be for private or common use.”22 With this renunciation of the “insight into the biological breeding conditions of the ‘people,’” Heidegger appears to call for something like an abolition of the Nuremberg racial laws. What a “people” is cannot be brought about by technological organization. At this time, the philosopher leads the genesis of a “people” back to “Da-sein” in an entirely nonbiological manner.23
But now it seems advisable not to lose sight of the remark about the Jewish “gift for calculation.” Must the needed “liberation from all calculation of utility” not awaken the impression that Heidegger wanted the Germans to free themselves from their epigonal role in relation to the “racial principle” of the Jews? Certainly not every criticism of calculative thinking can be led back to Heidegger’s anti-Semitic invective that the Jews would be the avant-garde of racial politics. But here we also cannot let the being-historical-anti-Semitic contamination of Heideggerian thinking mentioned above simply go unremarked.
We must carefully consider how the being-historical interpretation of race belongs in the context of the self-unfolding narrative of the history of being more generally. One aspect of the criticism of “race thinking” repeats the criticism already mentioned of an erroneous absolutization of “race.” It appears now as one moment of an inherent tendency within the “subjectivism of modernity” to posit the subject absolutely, along with its specific anthropology and organization. But this can in no way mean that Heidegger would have to distance himself from continuing to take race seriously as a historical phenomenon. On the contrary: the “unconditionality” of machination includes the absoluteness of “race thinking” so inescapably within it that only with this does race actually become relevant at all, namely, in its being-historical significance.
Now “world Judaism” must be presented as one of the leading figures of machination. This results from its unconditionality. Since the Jews have lived “for the longest time in accordance with the principle of race,” they have a privileged position in the play-space of the “subjectivism of modernity” as situated within the unconditionality of machination. At this point it becomes conceivable that Heidegger’s statements about the Jews need not be bound up with an aggressive aversion to them. Taking into account the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one can assume that in Heidegger’s eyes the topography of the history of being made a recourse to the “unfurling power” of the Jews inevitable.
If the being-historical integration of race thinking into the subjectivism of modernity in no way makes the concept of race superfluous, then this already shows that the “deracination of the peoples” appears as a “self-alienation” for Heidegger. He still holds that race would be a necessary, even if not an absolute, condition of the body of the people. A later thought also accords with this. As Heidegger increasingly emphasized the being-historical significance of the Russians toward the end of the 1930s, he at one time posed the question “why the purifying and securing of the race should not one day be defined as having had as its consequence a great mixing: with the Slavs,” with “the Russians—upon whom Bolshevism would have been forced and not something rooted in them.”24 In the “Russians” the philosopher saw a parallel to the Germans. Like the Germans, the Russians would be held in check by the unconditionality of machination. What here was National Socialism, there was Bolshevism. And the third figure of the “planetary master criminals” was “world Judaism.”
Being-historical anti-Semitism consists in Heidegger thinking: the Jews, living “in accordance with the principle of race,” in the “uncon
ditionality” of “machination,” this “brutalitas of being,” interpret themselves in a manner founded precisely on this “principle of race,” which surrenders them, “utterly unattached,” to the pursuit of an “uprooting of beings” with the aim and intent of their “unfurling of power.” World Judaism must have appeared to him as a people, or as a group within a people, who single-mindedly pursue no other aim than the putrefaction of all other peoples: a “race” that consciously pursues the “deracination of the peoples.”
The Foreign and the Foreign
One of the most irritating thoughts in Heidegger’s thinking at the end of the 1930s is that “machination” would pursue a “complete deracination of the peoples by harnessing them in a uniformly fabricated and sleek arrangement of all beings” and that thereby a “self-alienation of the peoples” would take effect “to the detriment of history.” The problem in thinking the relation between race and people in Heidegger has already been addressed. The connection between “deracination” and “self-alienation of the peoples” suggests the assumption of a connection of some sort between race and what is proper (Eigenen) to a people; “of some sort” because Heidegger could never make the connection clear.
The proper, one’s own, is distinguished from the foreign. We could then ask, how did Heidegger think the foreign? What is conspicuous is that at the start of the 1930s and across the further course of the decade a great amount of space is devoted to the word cluster around the term “foreign”: “foreignness,” “strangeness,” “estranging,” the “most strange,” the “ever-strange” (Fremdheit, Befremdlichkeit, Befremdung, das Befremdlichste, das Nur-befremdliche). Heidegger is at pains to connect a philosophy of the foreign with the specific choreography of a revolution. At the moment when the customary breaks apart, everything should become other, and that means “foreign.”