A Letter to Emmanuel Faye

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Dear Professor Faye, Let me begin by thanking you for taking initiative to send me your book, Heidegger: Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. contacted me because I had contributed to the line debate in the commentary to Romano's review of your book in The of Higher Education.1 I owe you an apology. When I upon that review, your book was not yet in English except to reviewers, and so I was ing not so much to your work as to what I took be the intellectual glibness and laziness of the view, which struck me as inappropriate to the scope and the seriousness of the philosophical, ethical, and political questions at stake.2 ter having read your book with care, I must now acknowledge that some of what I wrote then would no longer write today. In my first post the discussion, I claimed, To a very large extent, [the furor surrounding your book and review] is simply a repeat of the scandal erupted 22 years ago when the work of Farias and Hugo Ott was published. There nothing really new here, except perhaps an increase of the 'data' of Heidegger's loathsomeness as a human being.3 1 also wrote: We have known that [Heidegger was a dedicated National Socialist] for a long time now. But the devil is in the details. It has long been well known that Heidegger was opposed to biological racism and opposed to global imperialism. He was what we might now call a mulitculturalist, but between nations, not within them. He thought Nazism would allow national cultures and historical traditions to maintain themselves in their own bounds. But note, in my view this still leaves room for what might be called a metaphysical or ontologica! racism (see the work of Berel Lang or Robert Bernasconi for a responsible treatment of this point), and I believe Heidegger was guilty of that. But it was by no means orthodox Nazism. After reading your book, I would no longer say all of this. Indeed, this is one of your most important contributions: to set out in great detail the intricacies of the developments and the battles between strands of Nazism about precisely what should and would count for orthodoxy. I wrote: [Romano's] article wants to paint Heidegger as a hack, who dressed up his Nazism in philosophical clothing. That is a crude dodge that avoids what is seriously at issue for real thought. Heidegger was never an orthodox Nazi and the orthodox soon came to suspect him of deviationism. It is absurd to claim that Heidegger somehow was an architect of Nazi ideology, in the way, say, that Lenin or Marx were of Communism, or that Locke or Jefferson were of liberalism.... Yes, Heidegger lent his respected name to the movement, but little to its content or direction.5 Having read your book, I now believe much of this to be false: he was orthodox (to the extent that there was an orthodox Nazism), and he did have a significant impact. The verdict is clear: never again can anyone say that Heidegger, who played a passionate role in the debates over the core meaning and direction of the movement, who subscribed to a form of non-biologistic racism that was in fact by no means alien to National Socialism, who lent his voice and his weight as a thinker, as an administrator, and as an educator to the consolidation Gleichschaltung) of Hitler's dictatorship, was not fully in the ambit of orthodox Nazism, because Nazism contained many strands, especially in the first years after the revolution, and Heidegger fit within the scope of this diversity. While some of the elements of this picture have been know since Farias and Ott, this issue is too important to be digested piecemeal, with a biographical detail leaking out here, a new text there, as they do over the years. While you also contribute some decisive new information, I find that it is the totality of what you assemble that is impossible to ignore: it conveys the portrait of a man entirely dedicated to the cause of Nazism, and not just in a fit of temporary madness or enthusiasm, but as an enduring mission. …