As If Consenting to Horror

Abstract

I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after Hitler's huge success at the time of his election to the Reichstag, of Heidegger's sympathy toward National Socialism. It was the late Alexandre Koyr6 who mentioned it to me for the first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit, which had opened the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry. Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was the interlocutor and equal of the greatest-those very few-founders of European philosophy? that here was someone, this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer? This is a greatness whose dimensions it is not easy to measure. It lies in the extension of the work of Husserl, to whom Sein und Zeit was dedicated in all sincerity in the twenties. The Heideggerian opus presupposes Husserlian phenomenology but transfigures it. Here traditional notions of rationality are modified, while Heidegger's stylistic genius makes the unsaid of the highest discourses of our culture resonate. Thought had always been understood in terms of knowledge arriving at what is,