Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  Heidegger’s philosophical intention thus aims at a rather strange project: “To goad humanity through the entire foreignness and strangeness of the essence of being, with all the essentiality of it.”1 The “essence of being” is foreign. This foreignness apparently produces a certain comportment of refusal in humans, which necessitates “goading” them. This occurrence is supposed to take nothing from the essence of being, its “essentiality” is to be retained. The revolution must be radical.

  The topography of being now becomes a unique landscape of the foreign. The question “why are there beings at all and not nothing?”—for Heidegger the question of metaphysics—becomes the “approach into what is estranging of the foreign, of the Da.”2 “Da-sein”—a foreign location. Philosophy has the task of opening this location. It “goes back into the concealed as the incomprehensible and estranging.”3

  In this landscape, particular thinkers come to embody the foreign. “Heraclitus—Kant—Hölderlin—Nietzsche” are “entirely foreign,” and must be put back “into what is their great ownmost [Eigenstes],” so that “we with our half measures” do not make them “common.”4 Thinkers are—according to a saying of Socrates—the atopical, the placeless. They are the ones who “found [stiften] beyng and think the truth of beyng,” who are “foreigners among beings and estranging to everyone.”5

  What matters is the “arrival of another truth,” for the sake of an “assault by the fullness of the ever-strange.”6 This “other truth” cannot be accommodated within the customary, i.e., usual, conception of truth. The “assault by the fullness of the ever-strange” is the philosophically intensified understanding of revolution. In this, nothing more should remain of what Heidegger could only view as configurations of the end.

  The “ever-strange” can be clarified philosophically only through the distinction between beings and being, i.e., through the splitting off of being from beings, a splitting off that is still termed the “ontological difference” at the beginning of the 1930s. Being itself is the fully other to beings. It is so much other that it must be thought as the not-being (Nicht-Seiende). This being (Sein) withdraws itself, is concealed, and can be experienced only as the “truth of beyng,” in the sense of a concealment, of a withdrawal into particular and fundamental moods. Since it contains nothing known and usual, it can be characterized as the “ever-strange.”

  We can extend Heidegger’s thought a bit further. We can pose a question concerning the atopography of the foreign, an atopography that could liberate the foreign and its place or placelessness from a boring dialectic of foreign and familiar.7 In such a xenology, a philosophy of the foreign as the foreign of philosophy—i.e., as a thinking of the foreign that would not itself remain untouched by this—could perhaps develop. Heidegger’s thinking of the foreign shows how extreme he thought the consequences of revolution to be and how radically he thereby destroyed every form of politics—even the Platonic. The revolution was for him a total being-historical upheaval, not only of the accustomed lifeworld, but also of philosophy, science, art, and religion. Clearly, the National Socialists could not have held something like this to be anything but the remote idea of a daydreamer. Heidegger well knew why he entrusted such ideas only to the Black Notebooks, why he—as he says—“kept them silent.”8

  Such questions of philosophy are certainly not unknown since the Neoplatonism of a Plotinus, since the mystical theology of a Pseudo-Dionysius, or since certain sermons of Meister Eckhart. Seen this way, Heidegger shows himself to belong to a particular tradition of thought that acknowledges the foreignness of philosophical truth and defends this against comfortable simplifications. All in all, we can say that behind the revolutionary pathos of Heidegger’s style, for which the taste of the times is responsible, there stand enticing philosophical questions.

  The authentic problem, however, begins somewhere else. Remarkably, Heidegger did not reserve the phenomenon of the foreign solely for being, but also acknowledged a foreignness of beings. Otherwise it cannot be understood why, in connection with the “radio apparatus,” which had “already been talked up” to the “peasants,” he comes to speak of “urban foreigners” who “increasingly flood the village.”9 Here foreignness obtains another meaning. It is experienced as something that endangers the presumed origin. “Technology and uprooting” form a unity in which technological devices destroy the original customs of life.10

  Heidegger’s dealings with foreigners become still more problematic when he inscribes them into the being-historical polarity of Germans and Greeks, of the “first” and the “other beginning” of philosophy. Here he avers a “hereditary defect of the Germans of looking toward the foreign.” This defect would have to be “overcome” and one’s “own taste” developed. It would be wrong “to emulate the other” and to put “every last thing on ‘politics.’” For the more “what is one’s ownmost” is taken as merely “what is one’s own [das Seine] and something incomparable,” the more easily does a people lose it.11

  This “hereditary defect—the running-after-the-other and the aggrandization of the foreign because it is foreign” would have to be set aside.12 On the whole, “the Germans tumble in the essential foreignness that modernity” has forced upon them. Therein would lie “the danger that they fall prey to the exclusive dominance of their own un-essence.”13 The “un-essence” is, on the one hand, the National Socialists serving “machination,” and, on the other hand, it is that “hereditary defect” itself.

  This leads to the dramatic-sounding question: “What have the Germans stumbled into?” They would always still be just where Hölderlin and Nietzsche found them. Thus the increasingly resigned suspicion that “perhaps” it would be the “essence of the Germans” to “ever still and ever more unwittingly—aggrandize and imitate ‘the foreign.’” “Perhaps” this abnegation of “essence” would come “from their still more fundamentally practiced ‘Americanism,’ and from their still more ‘restlessly’ executed ‘Romanism.’” Then they would not be the “people” that “prepares for beyng the site of its truth.”14

  Otherwise stated: “Liberation” for Heidegger is a “grounding in the buried essence,” a grounding that receives “its direction from out of the autochthonic nearness to the origin.” The “illusion of liberation,” however, is a “leading away into the rootless foreign,” which can “provide no order [Fug].”15 The “deracination of the peoples” as their “self-alienation” is this delivery into the “rootless foreign.” The price that they pay for this self-alienation is an illusory freedom.

  Consequently, Heidegger proposes a pair of foreigns. To lend the distinction between the two some initial philosophical persuasive force, we must distinguish the ontologically foreign from the ontically foreign. There would be, on the one hand, being itself as the foreign itself and, on the other hand, foreign beings that, among other things, could also appear as ethnic foreigners. Nevertheless, the persuasive force of this distinction should not be overestimated, for Heidegger ascribes the foreign as being itself to both the Greeks and the Germans, and this in a twofold manner.

  First, it is the “origin” plain and simple that imparts “rootedness,” although—or perhaps precisely because—according to Heidegger it is the “assault of the fullness of the ever-strange.” “Origin,” however, is proper to the Greeks and Germans only in so far as they decide about the “first” and “other beginning.” This once again is essential for the second manner of being’s foreignness (Seinsfremdheit). For there is an exceptional foreign for the Germans: that of the Greeks. This foreign is interpreted by Heidegger in his Hölderlin lecture courses.16 It belongs in the narrative of the encounter of the Greeks and the Germans, an encounter in which they each “learn their own” through their respective penetration of the other, of what is respectively foreign. Through its establishment in the narrative, the foreign attains the signature of the “beginning” and is thus transformed into one’s own (das Eigene).

  The question, however, is how
a signature could be proper to being itself, to this wholly other to beings, a signature that precisely permits the Germans (and the Greeks) “to prepare a site” for it? One can certainly claim that the thinking of being itself bears a Greek provenance. Nevertheless, there is no cause for assuming that being itself would harbor such a provenance, especially since it displays nothing—not even a language—that would make possible its “rootedness” in a particular historical constellation of two peoples.

  Here we are in no way denying that philosophy, and along with it the thinking of being, has a history. Nor that the German reception of the “Grecian” since Winckelmann and his writings constitutes a European peculiarity. Without this, the cultural-political project of Goethe or Wagner (two names against which Heidegger long stood hostilely opposed) could not be understood. And so, with his narrative of the being-historical importance of the relationship between the Germans and the Greeks, Heidegger likewise belongs in such a series of great thinkers, poets, and composers. But this does not change the fact that the very idea of being (Seins) forbids both the ascription of historical (or historiological) attributes to it and the reservation of a specific narrative for it.17

  For it is true that being itself, on account of its own self-negativity, is “ever-strange.” In being (Sein) itself there is nothing that could be known by us after the manner of a being (ein Seiendes). Accordingly, the addressee of this “ever-strange” cannot be exclusively a German, a French, a Russian, or a Chinese person. Its addressee is possibly anyone. And the “rootless foreign”? Heidegger determines it continually as “Americanism,” more rarely as “Romanism,” although even “the French” are incapable of corresponding with the “origin,” according to certain statements in the Black Notebooks. Regardless, whether Heidegger actually meant something crudely conservative by “Americanism,” i.e., that the American is at its core the European principle of nihilistic mass culture, or whether he saw in this the continuation and even the authentic form of “world Judaism”—the one possibility just as much as the other stands for the “rootless foreign.”

  Doubtless the supposed “hereditary defect of the Germans,” this running after the foreign, can be understood only when this foreign takes on a form. For the “peasant” it is already the “city dweller,” the one who recommends the “radio apparatus.” For the German it may be multiple: one of the figures of the foreign can be “world Judaism” or a “still more fundamentally practiced ‘Americanism.’” To the extent that “world Judaism,” as mentioned above, is “everywhere elusive,” it can appear as the “rootless foreign” plain and simple. Heidegger never conceived that precisely in the experience of this foreign—if it can even be characterized as “foreign”—one’s “own” could have proven itself.

  Rather did it become increasingly important for him that the “hereditary defect” exact its consequences. The Germans did not want to be the “people of poets and thinkers.” They were not ready to answer the “first beginning” with the “other beginning.” This drove Heidegger ever deeper into the thought that even the Germans would have nothing to oppose to global technology. The “rootless foreign” was more powerful, it dominated the Germans, it was always already everywhere. Everything would now be ascribed to “total mobilization” (E. Jünger), more specifically, to “machination.” The question remained, which way of life best corresponds to this foreign. After 1945, “homelessness” (Heimatlosigkeit) had become “the destiny of the world.”18 Was the triumph of technology not the final victory of “world Judaism”?

  After the war, Heidegger remarks in one place that a “foreign essence” surrounds and distorts “our own essence still kept from us.”19 With his customary ambivalence, he further asks “from where” it would all stem, whence “the seduction of the German by a foreign essence, whence this incapacity for politics,” “whence the presumption and whence the efficiency with which even what is erroneous and measureless is pursued,” “whence the formlessness and lack of essence [Unwesen] in everything that accompanies this”? Indeed, the ambivalence lies not in the question, but in the view that there would be a “foreign essence” that seduced “the Germans.” The “foreign essence” is a being-historical quantity that can embody itself in factical foreigners. Often for Heidegger, these “foreigners” are simply the Jews.

  Heidegger and Husserl

  How a philosophical movement conceives itself is firmly tied to the history of its emergence. Generations of philosophers give shape to a conversation on the basis of a common descent. The descent need not be harmonious, it is enough if one can join it from a set range of standpoints. “Phenomenology,” as it was able to develop in the twentieth century—particularly in Germany and France and, from there, emanating to the whole of Europe, indeed, to the entire world—received and receives its self-conception from its pair of founding fathers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.1

  This self-conception has established points of reference. Husserl came to Freiburg in 1916. The habilitated Heidegger became his assistant; he “practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching, and learning in Husserl’s proximity after 1919,” as Heidegger recalls in a position statement from 1963.2 Heidegger particularly treasures the sixth “Logical Investigation” and speaks of Husserl as the “master.”

  In addition, in 1926 Heidegger’s Being and Time was “dedicated to Edmund Husserl in admiration and friendship”—a book that even today still draws those who philosophize under its spell and that even Jürgen Habermas characterized as “the most profound turning-point in German philosophy since Hegel.”3 And even when it became clear that Heidegger’s later thinking had basically nothing more to do with Husserl’s, one could still point back to the “magnum opus” with its dedication. It all speaks of a time when no one could suspect that German history would painfully inscribe itself even into this founding story of phenomenology.

  In the meantime it has become known that Husserl dismissed the book. It is no exaggeration to say he was shocked.4 He had to recognize that the one whom he had expected to carry on “transcendental phenomenology” had instead struck out on his own path, and in Husserl’s eyes an erroneous one. In a letter to Roman Ingarden, Husserl says that he is thinking about writing “an article against Heidegger.”5 In 1934 he speaks of Heidegger’s thinking as the “contemporary ontology of irrationalism.”6

  It is naturally no small matter that Heidegger dedicated Being and Time to Husserl. One can imagine that Heidegger, despite all their differences (not only on technical matters), would have assumed his teacher to be in a position to recognize the towering significance of the work. Psychologically, we must presume Heidegger to have been disappointed, though he never actually acknowledged this. The teacher did not want to learn. And what is a teacher who refuses to learn? Is not a learner the only teacher?

  In 1928 Heidegger became Husserl’s successor at Freiburg University. The teacher still supported the student for this promotion. The reading of Being and Time occurred later. Perhaps a portion of German academic history would look very different today had Husserl read the book immediately upon its release. The difficulty in being able to speak of a pair of founding fathers for phenomenology begins with Heidegger’s assumption of Husserl’s chair.

  In the “Spiegel Interview” of 1966, Heidegger speaks quite rightly of “our differences of opinion on philosophical matters,” which “in the beginning of the thirties” “intensified.”7 Husserl is said to have “settled accounts with Max Scheler and me in public. The clarity of Husserl’s statements left nothing to be desired.” At Berlin University, Husserl had “spoken before an audience of sixteen hundred.” There was report of a “‘kind of sport-palace atmosphere.’” The source of this report is known.8 It is not without significance that after 1945 the Berlin sports palace would come to connote, above all else, Goebbels’s call for “total war” in February 1943. Heidegger knew this. Had Husserl publicly agitated against him?

  The lecture that Husserl gave at the invitation of t
he Kant Societies in Frankfurt, Berlin (June 10, 1931), and Halle comes to us with the title “Phenomenology and Anthropology.”9 But what Husserl carries out there he had already presented a year before in greater detail in his “Afterword to Ideas I.”10 Notably enough, in this earlier text Heidegger’s name does not appear. Husserl speaks of the “situation of German philosophy, in which life-philosophy struggles for predominance, with its new anthropology and its philosophy of ‘existence.’”11 Yet one of the proponents of “existence-philosophy” as characterized there was Heidegger. It was clear who was intended.

  The confrontation is measured in tenor, though indeed here and there quite gruff. Husserl defends himself against “reproaches of ‘intellectualism’ and ‘rationalism’” that, in fact, were made by the representatives of those currents either in writing or orally.12 Nevertheless, in the “objections raised from these sides” Husserl could “recognize nothing justifiable.”13 On the contrary, he assertively emphasized “that one thereby remains stuck in anthropology, whether empirical or a priori.”

  It is true that Heidegger also publicly criticized Husserl (and did so earlier in private correspondence). But these criticisms cannot be said to have abandoned the level of a purely philosophical dispute. Heidegger’s disappointment over the refused recognition of this father figure surely reached deep.14 Now Husserl also turned away in the public sphere. Heidegger’s presentation of the events in the “Spiegel Interview” nevertheless remains unreasonable.

  In Anmerkungen V, a Black Notebook from the end of the 1940s, Heidegger anticipates the self-defense that appears in the “Spiegel Interview.” Of the Husserl lecture just mentioned, one could speak “sooner of a rally.”15 Husserl is said to have denounced Heidegger’s thinking as “unphilosophy,” and here Heidegger is able to point to the “Afterword to Ideas I.” He, however, has “gone past” Husserl.16 Even as rector he “never undertook the slightest thing against Husserl.” It is a lie that Heidegger would have “driven him out of the university and prohibited him entry to the library.” Moreover, “his work was never even removed from the seminar library, as was mandatory for Jewish authors.”