Martin Heidegger was a Nazi who is loved by the Western Left as well as Russian ideologues. He was not born in a vacuum but had several influences. Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be understood holistically without understanding him on the backdrop of Nietzsche’s existentialism[1] among other issues, but to understand where Heidegger’s ideas are being repurposed in the most dangerous ways today—specifically in the Russian genocide against Ukrainians in the Russian struggle against the West—it is helpful to understand Heidegger’s role as a fascist philosopher among the 20th century Marxist discussion.
The Historical Background
To understand Heidegger, it is necessary to understand the developments in Marxist thought that were occurring around Eurasia before the Second World War. One of the main shortcomings of Marx’s work is that he failed to produce a clear and workable solution for moving the struggling proletariat into a classless society. He saw revolution as a permanent mission to take state power as the proletariat class enlightened and organized itself through the generations.[2] Marx did not call for a sudden uprising of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie because he saw the change as inevitable when the season was right, but the historical experience was different. No matter how ripe the proletariat class seemed to be, revolutions did not occur naturally and so some modifications had to be worked into the practice of Marxism.[3]
As the Soviet Union attempted to instill Marxist ideas, some disputes over methodology came to the surface as vocalized in a dispute between Lenin and Kautsky (among others). In the months leading up to the German Revolution, Lenin was supportive of the German proletariat, but as the revolution progressed, it became increasingly apparent that the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) was becoming prominent.[4] During these formative years of the Weimar Republic, Lenin wrote criticisms of the German development of Marxism.[5] To Lenin, it was necessary to instill a dictatorship of the proletariat, but to Kautsky, a democracy that is slowly overtaken by the proletariat would lead to a socialist utopia.[6] In the words of Lenin’s famous criticism, “Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than every bourgeois democracy; Soviet authority is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.”[7] Soviet socialism continued to develop in Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute while the Frankfurt School developed a socialism that broadened Marx’s economic theory into a social theory. Though the two schools stayed cordial through the mid-1920s,[8] there were significant developments in Germany as Frankfurt’s critical theory sought to identify several critical groups beyond the bourgeois/proletariat dichotomy. Critical theory fits well with Kautsky’s model of the proletariat expanding his influence in politics as the proletariat was no longer restricted to an economic class, but expanded to include members of critical groups. The Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was competing with the expanding proletariat of Weimar democracy.
Meanwhile, Marxism was developing as fascism in Italy as Italian Marxists responded to the same problems as their Russian and German counterparts. Giovanni Gentile was an influential Italian philosopher who wrote in the same vein as Marx, but with the experience that revolution is not natural, so, as Dinesh D’Souza puts it, “he conceived the struggle not between the working class and the capitalists, but between the selfish individual trying to live for himself and the fully actualized individual who willingly puts himself at the behest of society and the state.”[9] The fascist emphasis on the state is evident in Benito Mussolini’s words, “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.”[10]
As Italian fascism seemed to succeed, critical theory advanced to some natural conclusions in Germany. When people view the world through the lens of critical theory, they lose the ability to differentiate and become paranoid as they view the world as being full of people who are bent on their destruction.[11] As the idea of critical theory gained momentum, it continued to identify new oppressors and quickly turned to racism with an anti-Semitic flavor. The Jews were not viewed as a minority in need of protection, but rather as an oppressive group that needed to be exterminated.[12] In Germany, the philosophical background was set for the perfect storm that led to the rise of a new sort of socialism called National Socialism. This new socialism came to fruition in the German Workers’ Party, which drew inspiration in part from Mussolini as it morphed into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.[13] While Hitler was rising to prominence among German socialist politicians, Heidegger was rising among German socialist philosophers.
Heidegger’s Contributions
Heidegger made significant contributions to the fields of ontology, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, but for this paper, his ontology of Dasein will receive the most attention. The German word Dasein can be translated into English as “existence.” It is not a special word that Heidegger invented; rather, he repurposed the old word for his own philosophical invention in his 1927 work, Being and Time. Books have been written and debates have ensued over who or what a Dasein is, but a basic description of Dasein that comes from Heidegger is: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it… Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.”[14] It seems that Dasein is something that is aware of its own existence, so the debate dwells over whether Dasein is best spoken of as individuals, broader groups, or if Dasein describes both.[15] A significant attribute of the study of Dasein is a social dimension, by which an individual categorizes himself and then the broader collection of individuals will have a collective Dasein of a sort. This social aspect fits well within the critical theory that had been developing in Germany.
1933 was a significant year for Heidegger. On April 21, he was appointed the rector of the University of Freiburg and ten days later on May 1, he joined the Nazi Party along with Carl Schmitt, Erich Rothacker, and other influential philosophers. Heidegger was intentional about bringing change to the universities, with students recognizing him “as a philosopher and as a champion of National Socialism” and fellow professors admitting he “might be politically too extreme for the faculty… with such clap-trap, no philosophy could be offered the students.”[16] He had already established National Socialist roots in Being and Time by advocating that Dasein does not have a destiny apart from community,[17] then in his coursework in 1933, he taught that Germany was the sole people who still have a “völkisch destiny.” Having established one critical group as superior to the others, Heidegger merely took another step and concluded that it was “necessary to accomplish a ‘total transformation’ of the existence of man, in accordance with ‘the education for the National Socialist worldview,’ inculcated in the people through the Führer’s speeches.”[18]
Following the critical theory line of thinking, Heidegger established a system of Dasein that identified a critical group that is superior based on völkisch destiny. Also aligned with critical theory, Heidegger saw this group as being threatened. Bringing in a fascist influence, Heidegger saw this threatened critical group as needing to be cleansed from within, and so he claimed in this inexcusable quote:
The enemy is one who poses an essential threat to the existence of the people [des Daseins des Volkes] and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy… The root requirement is then to find the enemy, bring him to light or even to create him, so that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and so that existence [das Dasein] does not become apathetic. The enemy may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people, and oppose the latter’s ownmost essence [des Daseins], acting contrary to it. All the keener and harsher and more difficult is then the struggle… with the goal of total extermination.[19]
Also in 1933, Carl Schmitt wrote The Concept of the Political in which he developed a system to identify the enemy as one who is a racial foreigner, which was a concept that Heidegger praised.[20] This racial definition of the Dasein combined with “the goal of total extermination” of those enemies who were outside the Rassesein served as the philosophical basis for the atrocities that Nazis are most well-known for today.
More could be said about the environment into which Heidegger emerged and his contributions to philosophy, but suffice for now to show that Heidegger emerged during the debates between 20th-century European Marxists and provided an ontological middle ground for bringing critical theory and fascism together into a genocidal worldview.
[1] Mark Musser, Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust (Santa Fe, NM: Advantage Books, 2015), 156–164.
[2] Lars T. Lih, “Why Did Marx Declare the Revolution Permanent?: The Tactical Principles of the Manifesto,” Historical Materialism 28:3 (2020): 39–75.
[3] Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 71–75.
[4] Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 302–312.
[5] Most notably Vladimir Lenin, Proletarskai͡a revoli͡ut͡sii͡a i renegat Kautskiĭ [The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky], Lenin V.I. Polnoe sobranie cochneniĭ [Complete Collected Works of V.I. Lenin] volume 37 (Moscow: Politicheskoĭ Literatury, 1969), 237–238.
[6] Jukka Gronow, On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 205.
[7] «Пролетарская демократия в миллион раз демократичнее всякой буржуазной демократии; Советская власть в миллион раз демократичнее самой демократической буржуазной республики.» Vladimir Lenin, The Renegade Kautsky, 257.
[8] John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 180–184.
[9] Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie, 53.
[10] Benito Mussolini, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” translated by Jane Soames in Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography: With “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” EBSCOhost ebook version (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006).
[11] Ehrhard Bahr, “The Anti-Semitism Studies of the Frankfurt School: The Failure of Critical Theory” German Studies Review 1:2 (May, 1978): 133.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Robert Payne, The Life & Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995), 240–243.
[14] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), §4.
[15] John Haugeland and Joseph Rouse, Dasein Disclosed John Haugeland’s Heidegger (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013), 78–82.
[16] Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 48–49. He quotes Karl Genenbach who spoke on behalf of the Deutsche Studenschaft and the session of full professors of the Faculty of Philosophy of Munich, 26 September 1933. Genebach’s quote is cited from Claudia Schorcht, Philosophie an den bayerischen Universitäten 1933-1945 (Erlangen: H. Fischer, 1990), 235.
[17] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, §74.
[18] Emmanuel Faye, “Nazi Foundations in Heidegger’s Work,” South Central Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 57, trans. Alexis Watson and Richard Joseph Golsan. He cites GA 36/37, 225.
[19] Feind ist derjenige und jeder, von dem eine wesentliche Bedrohung des Daseins des Volkes und seiner Einzelnen ausgeht. Der Feind braucht nicht der äußere zu sein… Dann ist Grunderfordernis, den Feind zu finden, ins Licht zu stellen oder gar erst zu schaffen, damit dieses Stehen gegen den Feind geschehe und das Dasein nicht stumpf werde.
Der Feind kann in der innersten Wurzel des Daseins eines Volkes sich festgesetzt haben und dessen eigenem Wesen sich entgegenstellen und zuwiderhandeln. Um so schärfer und härter und schwerer ist der Kampf… mit dem Ziel des völligen Vernichtung auszusetzen (Heidegger, GA 36/37:90–91). Translation adapted from Emmanuel Faye, “Being, History, Technology, and Extermination in the Work of Heidegger,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 1 (January 2012): 112, trans. Alexis Watson and Richard J. Golsan.
[20] Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, 158–162.
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