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Heidegger, Hermeneutics and History: Undermining Jeff Malpas’s Philosophy of Place

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Abstract

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism.

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Notes

  1. Heidegger in a letter to Herbert Marcuse, 20 January 1948, in Wolin (1991), 162.

  2. Faye (2009), 205–7.

  3. Farias (1989), 191–2.

  4. Proctor (1988), 40, 402.

  5. Heidegger, ‘The Rectorate 1933-34: Facts and Thoughts’, Neske & Kettering, 23.

  6. Faye, 51–2.

  7. Martin Heidegger, ‘Der Spiegel interview’, Neske & Kettering, 46.

  8. Ott (1993), 189.

  9. Hilberg (2003), 173, 1064.

  10. Malpas (2006), 17.

  11. Faye, 173 ff.

  12. Malpas, Topology, 20–21

  13. Young (1997), 6.

  14. Malpas (2012), 151.

  15. Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview, Neske & Kettering, 51.

  16. Kolakowski (1992), 255.

  17. Heidegger (1987), 195.

  18. On this posture, see Kershaw (1989), 129.

  19. Kolakowski, 261.

  20. Heidegger (1979b), 10.

  21. Faye, 253–54.

  22. Quoted in Faye, 291—from Zu Ernst Jünger, Peter Trawny ed., Band 90 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), 221.

  23. Heidegger (1996), 80.

  24. Heidegger (1992), 77.

  25. Heidegger (1979a), 123.

  26. Malpas, Topology, 23.

  27. Faye, 102.

  28. Olusoga and Erichsen (2010), 250. The quote is from Fischer’s Die Rehobother Bastards, first published in 1913.

  29. Olusoga & Erichsen, 358.

  30. Heidegger (2010), 172.

  31. Heidegger’s recently published ‘Black Notebooks’ amply confirm this intent. Heidegger regarded American culture and Soviet Bolshevism as metaphysically bankrupt, but he saw Jewry as a particular threat to his philosophical program against modernity. For Heidegger, Jewry was überall unfassbar (everywhere ungraspable): its slipperiness and cunning allowed it to exploit both bellicose and pacifist thinking, thereby entangling countries while not snaring itself. Further, Jews thrived on the empty rationality and calculativeness of modern Western metaphysics. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. IV. Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen, Band 96, Überlegungen C XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–41), Peter Trawny ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 262 and passim.

  32. Indeed, they appear in Mein Kampf. See Hitler (2009), 262 ff.

  33. And noting Hitler’s assertion that the main cause of German collapse in 1918 was ‘failure to recognise the race problem and especially the Jewish menace’—Hitler, 280.

  34. Faye, 125. The SA (Sturmabteilung) are perhaps better known as the ‘Brownshirts’.

  35. Faye, 69.

  36. Eugen Fischer, for example, did not become a member until June 1940. See Proctor, 292.

  37. See, for example, Sluga (1993), 50.

  38. Ericksen (1985), 85.

  39. Malpas, Place, 303.

  40. Heidegger, ‘Address to German Students’, Wolin, 47.

  41. Malpas, Topology, 148.

  42. The Sicherheitsdienst was the intelligence arm of the SS.

  43. Faye, 326–27.

  44. Faye, 329.

  45. Malpas, Place, 144.

  46. I note Julian Young’s view that Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1935, constitutes a powerful and courageous critique of Nazism—see Young, 214. Young cites Heidegger’s criticism of mass rallies at Nuremberg and the crass adulation of Max Schmeling, Germany’s world heavyweight champion boxer—see Heidegger (1959), 38. However, the Introduction is not a critique of Nazism; rather, it is a disappointed man’s attempt to put it back on track and thereby restore its essence. This is why in the same work Heidegger could refer to National Socialism’s ‘inner truth and greatness’ in that it proffered the potential to experience being ‘anew from the bottom up and in all the breadth of its possible essence’ (199, 204).

  47. There should be evidence if he did. For example, we know that in 1943 Paul Althaus talked to his family about German ‘bloodguilt’ after he learned about the Holocaust. See Ericksen, 98.

  48. See, for example, Hoffmann (1988)

  49. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger (1971), 87.

  50. Karl Löwith, ‘Last Meeting with Heidegger’, Neske & Kettering, 159.

  51. Malpas, Place, 226

  52. Malpas, Topology, 24.

  53. Zimmerli (1976), 67.

  54. Malpas, Place, 227.

  55. See Ericksen, 189, and Fest (1979), 376 ff.

  56. Hitler, 272.

  57. Cary (1992), 206.

  58. Eksteins (1989), 404.

  59. Roberts (1937), 17.

  60. Roberts, 53–4.

  61. Malpas, Place, 226.

  62. Heidegger, ‘Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?’, Sheehan (1981), 28.

  63. Safranski (1998), 129. Like many other readers of Heidegger’s philosophy, I always assumed, and had been told, that Heidegger built the hut with his own hands as an expression of his rural attachment.

  64. Gadamer (1985), 49.

  65. Ott (1993), 141 ff.

  66. Cary, 206.

  67. Roberts, 191–93.

  68. Roberts, 56.

  69. Malpas, Place, 20.

  70. Malpas, Place, 19.

  71. Steiner (1989), viii ff. The books included Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Karl Barth’s commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

  72. Steiner, xii.

  73. Bourdieu (1991), 96

  74. Bourdieu, 96.

  75. Malpas, Topology, 20

  76. Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, Heidegger (1966), 47-8.

  77. Bourdieu, viii.

  78. Malpas, Topology, 196.

  79. Landau (1992), 131.

  80. Malpas, Topology, 200.

  81. Malpas, Topology, 45.

  82. Young, 2.

  83. Lilla (2001), 42.

  84. Ott, 204.

  85. Malpas, Topology, 206.

  86. Malpas, Topology, 365.

  87. Malpas, Topology, 266.

  88. Malpas, Topology, 374.

  89. Malpas, Topology, 2.

  90. Malpas, Topology, 2.

  91. Malpas, Topology, 22.

  92. Karl Löwith, ‘The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism’, Wolin, 182.

  93. Malpas, Topology, 21

  94. Lehman (1991), 230–1.

  95. Revel (1991), 371.

  96. See Deutscher (1983) 36 ff. for an insightful criticism of such spurious objectivity.

  97. Mannheim (1943), 98. The paper in which these comments appeared was presented in 1941.

  98. Lehman, 256.

  99. Malpas, Topology, 20.

  100. Malpas, Place, 155–56.

  101. Heidegger, ‘National Socialist Education, 22 January 1934’, Wolin, 56. Julian Young describes it as Heidegger’s ‘Pol Pot solution to the problem of modernism’—see Young, 49.

  102. Heidegger (1968), 66.

  103. The text can be found in Sheehan (1988), 41–2. The quote was from an unpublished lecture in Bremen, part of the 1949 series on which The Question Concerning Technology was based.

  104. Malpas, Topology, 284.

  105. Malpas, Topology, 380.

  106. Stephen (1991), 3.

  107. Freud (2005), 199.

  108. Neill (1964), 205.

  109. Malpas, Topology, 380.

  110. Breitman (1991), 197.

  111. Sereny (1974), 165, 200.

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    David Clarke

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Statement of Relevance

Much has been written about Heidegger’s Nazism, but this paper is the first to combine knowledge of Heidegger’s philosophy, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into a detailed critique of important works by a leading Heideggerian. The aim is to demonstrate that any work about, or inspired by, Heidegger’s philosophy must also acknowledge and account for Heidegger’s long-term adherence to National Socialism and inability to understand the Holocaust.

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Clarke, D. Heidegger, Hermeneutics and History: Undermining Jeff Malpas’s Philosophy of Place. Philosophia 42, 571–591 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9534-x

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