Style and Idea in the Later Heidegger: Rhetoric, Politics and Philosophy

Abstract

After fifteen years Robert Minder’s learned analysis of Heidegger’s lecture on Johann Peter Hebel remains by far the most persuasive effort to link Heidegger’s thought to Nazism.¹ Minder does this through a deft exegesis of the style of Heidegger’s essay, which leaves no room for doubting that there are highly significant connections between the later Heidegger’s style and a certain conservative, Catholic-peasant ideology which could and in fact did easily become Nazified. Proceeding from the (dubious) premiss that Adorno’s philosophical analysis of the “Jargon of Authenticity” accurately exposes the philosophical shortcomings of Heidegger’s Seinsdenken, Minder considers the later Heidegger’s literary affiliations with the same end in view. Heidegger’s style goes through four phases. First, we have his early student years when his writing is aridly academic. In his second period he writes Sein und Zeit in a style that adapts Expressionism to philosophical prose. The third phase coincides with his overt support of the Hitler regime as rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 and is, consequently, overtly Nazi. The final phase, Minder argues, represents a muted depoliticization of Nazi pseudo-Romantic obscurantism. This represents an extension of the thesis first advanced in Paul Hühnerfeld’s trenchant study In Sachen Heidegger.²