Star philosophers of the alt-right (1 of 2): Heidegger

Erik Baker takes a look at how the American alt-right use the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in Why the Alt-Right Loves Nietzsche Jacobin 01/02/2019).

It's definitely worth reading to see how the two are portrayed by the highbrow portion of the alt-right as important intellectual icons of the their outlkook. Richard Hofstadter reminded us decades ago that there are "lowbrow" and "higbrow" versions of far-right ideology, even "middlebrow" ones. I like the latter term, but it never really seems to have caught on more generally. A not-inconsiderable amount of what passes for intellectual discussion on the far right is actually hack work dressed up with academic pretensions. "Middlebrow" would be the appropriate label for a lot of it. Mileage may vary on whether someone like Jordon Peterson rises to the "highbrow" level.

I won't try to nitpick Baker's article, which is a review of Ronald Beiner's book Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right (2018). Because he's arguing from actual positions that the two philosophers took (as processed by Beiner) and makes good points.

I'm much more familiar with Nietzsche's work and biography than Heidegger's.

But both of them are important philosophers whose work has influenced others who are not definitely not rightwingers. And their influence is such that it would be both historically inaccurate and politically confused to relegate Nietzsche and Heidegger as relevant only to the political right.

Martin Heidegger

To be very clear on one point: Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. As in, he was a member of the German NSDAP, Hitler's Nazi Party, all the way to the end of the Second World War. And he was a member by conviction as well as opportunism. The American occupation authorities after the war required him to go through the denazification process. Politically, Heidegger was literally a Nazi. Of course, after the war, he tried to downplay the significance of that. There could be some dispute about how much he rejected his past Nazi politics later in his life. Because of course he did a lot of mealy-mouthing about the whole thing. But I'm not convinced that he ever rejected his Nazi past. Whatever good ideas he had in philosophy, I find him to be an intensely unsympathetic character.

Key philosophical issues in and around Heidegger's philosophy include: his concept of truth as aletheia (ἀλήθεια), which he understood as the un-forgetting of the experience of Being; the privileged position he assigned to the pre-Socratic philosophers; his notion of the history of metaphysics as a long-term decay from the pre-Socratics; his concept of the inauthenticity of the present human Dasein (mode of existence); Heidegger's relation to Hegel's philosophy; his notion of historicity; the role of intense experience of living in Heidegger's outlook; the concept of death in his thought; the surprising adaptation of Heidegger's though in French philosophy not only in Sartre's existentialism but also by thinkers by Jacques Derrida and others in the deconstructionist school of literary criticism.

Argentine philosopher and political theorist José Pablo Feinmann wrote an interesting philosophical novel about Heidegger. La sombra de Heidegger (The Shadow of Heidegger) (2005). It includes an interesting twist in which the character serving as the novel's narrator decides that the Argentine Peronism of the 1940s represents the kind of political movement that Heidegger really wanted to see. This is a generous interpretation on the character's part, because Peron's movement was a complex one that was mainly left-populist with some authoritarian tendencies that also included a rightwing Catholic component. Heidegger might have liked the authoritarian part. The rest is more dubious. (The narrator winds up committing suicide.)

In a book of essays, La sangre derramada: Ensayo sobre la violencia política (1998/2006), Feinmann includes a chapter, "Digresión: Heidegger y el nazismo, ¿contingencia personal o necesariedad interna de su filosofar?", in which he identifies the concept of the Germans as a "metaphysical people" as the central problem in Heidegger's philosophy and political outlook. He quotes from Heidegger's description of the historical mission of the German people in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and concludes (my English translation):

Détras de estas líneas late el genocidio. Cuando un pueblo se adjudica un misión histórica, cuando esa misión consiste en rescatar a los otros pueblos de su decadencia espiritual y remitirlos a un centro originario y puro que él, ese pueblo, representa, aquí, exactamente aquí, se abre el horizont conceptual del genocidio.

[Behind these lines lies genocide. When a people assigns itself an historical mission, when this mission consists in rescuing other peoples from their spiritual decadence and sending them to an original and pure center {of existence} that they, this people, represent: here, precisely here, is where the conceptual horizon of genocide opens.] (italics in original)

Two important German philosophers, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Löwith, studied under Heidegger, and he was an important philosophical mentor to both. Marcuse and Löwith were both Jewish; Löwith himself was Protestant but his parents were Jewish, which made him Jewish in the Nazis' view. Both of them later expressed surprise at Heidegger's Nazi politics and anti-Semitism that became public after Hitler took power. So if he held those views strongly at an early period, he managed to compartmentlize them well. After the war, Marcuse and Heidegger had a tense correspondence, in which Marcuse expressed his view that Heidegger's political outlook must be rooted in his philosophy, as well (Correspondence with Martin Heidegger, 1947-48 Marcuse.org, Richard Wolin's 1998 English translation):

This week I will send off a package to you. My friends have recommended strongly against it and have accused me of helping a man who identified with a regime that sent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers (in order to forestall misunderstandings, I would like to observe that I was not only an anti-Nazi because I was a Jew, but also would have been one from the very beginning on political, social and intellectual grounds, even had I been "100 per cent aryan"). Nothing can counter this argument. I excuse myself in the eyes of my own conscience, by saying that I am sending a package to a man from whom I learned philosophy from 1928 to 1932. I am myself aware that that is a poor excuse. The philosopher of 1933-34 cannot be completely different than the one prior to 1933; all the less so, insofar as you expressed and grounded your enthusiastic justification of the Nazi state in philosophical terms.

Marcuse is considered one of the key figures in what came to be known as "Western Marxism" and part of the "first generation" of the critical theory/Frankfurt School. Another philosopher of that "first generation" was Theodor Adorno, who wrote a book called Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [The Jargon of Authenticity] 1964 that criticizes Heidegger's central concept of "authenticity".