Book of the week: Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy

...So why step forward into this old controversy - now seemingly settled - Emmanuel Faye, professor at the University of Rouen? Particularly as within France, Heidegger is not only "understood" but much cherished, and the reading of his thoughts obligatory for all high school students as part of the baccalaureate. Over the decades that followed the war, if elsewhere Heidegger's critics kept nibbling away, in France the likes of Sartre, Foucault, Ricoeur, Levinas and so on kept admiring the philosophy. In a newspaper interview in 1987, Jacques Derrida threw down the gauntlet to Heidegger's critics, demanding that they either show substantial links between Heidegger's texts and "the reality of all the Nazisms" or shut up. It is this challenge, in effect, that Faye's book, first published in France in 2005, takes up.

Despite its provocative subtitle, Faye's work was probably destined to be one of those books filed on the second shelf up from the floor in the basement room stack. But now along comes this excellent translation to support a professor who wants to dispute the philosophical merit of Heidegger's oeuvre, and instead trace it back, phrase by phrase, idea by idea, to tawdry Nazi party politics: racial purity, lebensraum, the special role of the Fuhrer, the virtuous necessity of war - the lot!

For Faye is a man with a mission. Not here will we find a search for two sides to every question. He intends to throw light on unpublished Heidegger texts that are "every bit as racist and virulently National Socialist as those of the official 'philosophers' of Nazism". Faye believes that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a grey cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds", and that the vast literature on Heidegger continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a worldwide scale".

And so he offers extensive quotation from unpublished material in the spirit of "what legal scholars have called our right to history", to show that the philosophical task to which Heidegger dedicated himself was the introduction of the ideas of the Fuhrer into philosophy.

Where philosophers have been content to note that Heidegger was "inspired" by Aristotle to attack Edmund Husserl's neo-Kantian thesis, Faye works patiently and carefully through the documents to show the connections. For example, Heidegger writes that to be neo-Kantian is to go "hand in hand with liberalism" and betray "man in his historical enrootedness and his tradition derived from the people and from blood and soil". That was in a letter warning against a Jewish colleague. In 1942, the year of the Final Solution, Heidegger is to be found working on an idea in a poem by Friedrich Holderlin. Faye notes that philosophers are ignorant of the significance of Holderlin - but that the answer is very easily obtained by perusal of Nazi texts.

Heidegger uses Holderlin as part of a theory explaining how the historic mission of Ancient Greece was passed to the German volk. Heidegger thinks that the Germans and the Greeks sprang from a shared root somewhere in the East. "The name Heraclitus is not the title of a philosophy of the Greeks long run dry, no more than it is the formula for universal humanity as such. In truth, it is the name of an original power of Occidental-Germanic historical existence."

Heidegger's development of Holderlin is to add a kind of swastika symbol, as he outlines a new philosophical justification for racial purity based on passing via distress to light...

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