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Heidegger's Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence
Reexamining the case of one of the most famous intellectuals to embrace fascism, this book argues that Martin Heidegger's politics and philosophy of language emerge from a deep affinity for the ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi movement. Himself a product of a conservative milieu, Heidegger did not have to significantly compromise his thinking to adapt it to National Socialism but only to intensify certain themes within it. Tracing the continuity of these themes in his lectures on Greek philosophy, his magnum opus, Being and Time , and the notorious Black Notebooks that have only begun to see the light of day, Heidegger's Fascist Affinities argues that if Heidegger was able to align himself so thoroughly with Nazism, it was partly because his philosophy was predicated upon fundamental forms of silencing and exclusion. With the arrival of the Nazi revolution, Heidegger displayed―both in public and in private―a complex, protracted form of silence drawn from his philosophy of language. Avoiding the easy satisfaction of banishing Heidegger from the philosophical realm so indebted to his work, Adam Knowles asks whether what drove Heidegger to Nazism in the first place might continue to haunt the discipline. In the context of today's burgeoning ethno-nationalist regimes, can contemporary philosophy ensure itself of its immunity?
256 pages, ebook
Published March 5, 2019
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April 7, 2022
This ought to have been a really good book. Knowles says he sets out to read“Heidegger’s politics and philosophy in the light of the Black Notebooks,” with their völkisch affinities. The point, he says, “is not to prosecute the ‘Heidegger case’ once again, but instead to show how his philosophy and National Socialism share a common set of fundamental commitments.” (P. 8) As Knowles puts it, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks “reveal a . . . straightforward national-conservative thinker, with an unwavering set of fidelities, not to National Socialism per se, but to the political inclinations that brought him to National Socialism in the first place.” (P. 25) This is a perspicuous observation.
Knowles’s recognition that Heidegger’s philosophy is situated in volkisch dogma is hardly new — See especially Lang and Trawney (ed.). Still, his argument that anti-Semitism lies close to the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy should have been worth making. As Knowles says, “Heidegger’s politics and philosophy are not separate entities, but instead constitute an integral, yet complex whole, even despite his own skilled and politically expedient postwar attempts at dividing his thinking from his political activities.” (P. 8) The problem is that Knowles approaches his argument “through a reading [of Heidegger] centered around the theme of silence.” (Id.) But “silence” is not a particularly strong organizing theme, and the argument quickly becomes tedious.
Granted that, for Heidegger — and many of his colleagues before 1945 — the Aryan German is Nature’s nobleman, a man of few but deeply meaningful words. He is distinguished from common people, who chatter, and especially from Jews, who have raised chatter to a subversive strategy of sowing confusion in the minds of the noble German peasant stock. For Knowles, this observation leads into analyses of Heidegger’s tortured discussions of the speech that expresses silence, the silence that must be spoken. These seem to be structured similarly to Heidegger’s notion of the disclosure that conceals concealment and the concealment that discloses itself. In short, the analysis of silence is uninformative in the way that is typical of analyses based on contradictions. Points are repeated, modulated, reiterated, examined, taken apart and put together — but the contradictions are ineradicable. And lurking underneath this chatter is the critical notion of “originary speech,” which is never explained or exemplified.
My take from this torrent of verbiage is, as stated above, that Heidegger is praising not silence per se but the laconic Quiet Man, who is the archetypical German, and was the archetypal Greek. So, according to Knowles, Heidegger spends a lot of time analyzing Nicomachean Ethics on the grounds that it is the quintessential Greek expression of Heideggerean silence. Indeed, since Heidegger sees the Germans and ancient Greeks as the blue bloods of the world’s racial stock, he spends inordinate time rummaging through Greek literature — in addition to Aristotle, the pre-Socratics and the neo-Platonists — to find precedents for his peculiar world view.
Since so much of what Heidegger and consequently Knowles dredge up is tendentious, it would be a waste of time to dwell on it. But given the importance of Nicomachean Ethics, it’s worth noting that Knowles concludes — well, he constantly offers conclusions. But a typical one runs: “In Heidegger’s terms, ethics teaches us to dwell where we already are. Through ethics, we find our way to that place. As a practice of self-mastery, philosophical training must teach the measure of speech that keeps us in that place in order to imbue learners with the capacity for silence. This sort of speech roots one in one’s place, one’s polis, and even in one’s being. The ability to listen to and participate in the ethical inquiry is the culmination of the attainment of this manner of speech as an attunement to silence—a silence at all times haunted by what it has silenced.” (P. 121) But, as various writers (e.g., Solomon) make clear, Aristotle’s theme is not silence but the great man’s superiority to the hoi polloi, and indeed to any petty feeling that might find expression in a lesser man. Aristotle’s good man is born to rule, not to make small-talk; he learns self-mastery (if, indeed, the Greeks ever strove for, much less attained, that state, and Nicomachean Ethics is not a kind of philosophic self-help fiction) by ruling, not from ethics.
Knowles mines the Ethics for every reference to silence, reticence, hesitation. He does the same for the Parmenides and various other dialogues, also Pythagoras and Iamblicus. In each case he engages in Heideggerean-type analysis, using Heidegger’s tendentious translations (cf., Wolensky), indeed, taking Heidegger’s analyses at face value. He writes, “In his recovery of the ancient Greek tradition, Heidegger perpetuates an act of silencing that is deeply embedded in Western philosophical discourse.” (P. 130) I am not aware of any reason to assert that Heidegger recovered Greek tradition, much less identified anything that could be counted as a Greek tradition. Nor, in his hundred volumes, does Heidegger seem to perpetuate silence.
Having beaten the Greek philosophers into submission, Knowles then shifts to a discussion of women in ancient Greece. In roughly 25 pages, he mentions Heidegger two or three times: Heidegger, after all, is writing about men, the bearers of Aryan nobility. (P. 130) No doubt he saw women as mothers and supports for men whom they idolized. That view fits with the Nazi view and, indeed, with the apparent view of Heidegger’s contemporaries whom Knowles cites. But the discussion proper has nothing to do with Knowles’s thesis, except that it’s yet another subject that can be mined for quasi-Heideggerean mystification about silence. Knowles asks how woman, “the vessel to which all attributes can be assigned, even as all can be denied,” fit into the ancient Greek man’s world view. Luce Irigaray, he says, presents a possible answer by offering “the following (im)possibility: ‘Now, if everything is taken up with the realization of the physis, woman has, and will have, no place and thus no existence. This will be true even in her privation of being, which it is the essential task and ceaseless effort of dialectic and dialectic’s indispensable intermediaries to bring or bring back to the fullness of the self ’s possession of substance.’”
This is where I gave up.
Knowles’s recognition that Heidegger’s philosophy is situated in volkisch dogma is hardly new — See especially Lang and Trawney (ed.). Still, his argument that anti-Semitism lies close to the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy should have been worth making. As Knowles says, “Heidegger’s politics and philosophy are not separate entities, but instead constitute an integral, yet complex whole, even despite his own skilled and politically expedient postwar attempts at dividing his thinking from his political activities.” (P. 8) The problem is that Knowles approaches his argument “through a reading [of Heidegger] centered around the theme of silence.” (Id.) But “silence” is not a particularly strong organizing theme, and the argument quickly becomes tedious.
Granted that, for Heidegger — and many of his colleagues before 1945 — the Aryan German is Nature’s nobleman, a man of few but deeply meaningful words. He is distinguished from common people, who chatter, and especially from Jews, who have raised chatter to a subversive strategy of sowing confusion in the minds of the noble German peasant stock. For Knowles, this observation leads into analyses of Heidegger’s tortured discussions of the speech that expresses silence, the silence that must be spoken. These seem to be structured similarly to Heidegger’s notion of the disclosure that conceals concealment and the concealment that discloses itself. In short, the analysis of silence is uninformative in the way that is typical of analyses based on contradictions. Points are repeated, modulated, reiterated, examined, taken apart and put together — but the contradictions are ineradicable. And lurking underneath this chatter is the critical notion of “originary speech,” which is never explained or exemplified.
My take from this torrent of verbiage is, as stated above, that Heidegger is praising not silence per se but the laconic Quiet Man, who is the archetypical German, and was the archetypal Greek. So, according to Knowles, Heidegger spends a lot of time analyzing Nicomachean Ethics on the grounds that it is the quintessential Greek expression of Heideggerean silence. Indeed, since Heidegger sees the Germans and ancient Greeks as the blue bloods of the world’s racial stock, he spends inordinate time rummaging through Greek literature — in addition to Aristotle, the pre-Socratics and the neo-Platonists — to find precedents for his peculiar world view.
Since so much of what Heidegger and consequently Knowles dredge up is tendentious, it would be a waste of time to dwell on it. But given the importance of Nicomachean Ethics, it’s worth noting that Knowles concludes — well, he constantly offers conclusions. But a typical one runs: “In Heidegger’s terms, ethics teaches us to dwell where we already are. Through ethics, we find our way to that place. As a practice of self-mastery, philosophical training must teach the measure of speech that keeps us in that place in order to imbue learners with the capacity for silence. This sort of speech roots one in one’s place, one’s polis, and even in one’s being. The ability to listen to and participate in the ethical inquiry is the culmination of the attainment of this manner of speech as an attunement to silence—a silence at all times haunted by what it has silenced.” (P. 121) But, as various writers (e.g., Solomon) make clear, Aristotle’s theme is not silence but the great man’s superiority to the hoi polloi, and indeed to any petty feeling that might find expression in a lesser man. Aristotle’s good man is born to rule, not to make small-talk; he learns self-mastery (if, indeed, the Greeks ever strove for, much less attained, that state, and Nicomachean Ethics is not a kind of philosophic self-help fiction) by ruling, not from ethics.
Knowles mines the Ethics for every reference to silence, reticence, hesitation. He does the same for the Parmenides and various other dialogues, also Pythagoras and Iamblicus. In each case he engages in Heideggerean-type analysis, using Heidegger’s tendentious translations (cf., Wolensky), indeed, taking Heidegger’s analyses at face value. He writes, “In his recovery of the ancient Greek tradition, Heidegger perpetuates an act of silencing that is deeply embedded in Western philosophical discourse.” (P. 130) I am not aware of any reason to assert that Heidegger recovered Greek tradition, much less identified anything that could be counted as a Greek tradition. Nor, in his hundred volumes, does Heidegger seem to perpetuate silence.
Having beaten the Greek philosophers into submission, Knowles then shifts to a discussion of women in ancient Greece. In roughly 25 pages, he mentions Heidegger two or three times: Heidegger, after all, is writing about men, the bearers of Aryan nobility. (P. 130) No doubt he saw women as mothers and supports for men whom they idolized. That view fits with the Nazi view and, indeed, with the apparent view of Heidegger’s contemporaries whom Knowles cites. But the discussion proper has nothing to do with Knowles’s thesis, except that it’s yet another subject that can be mined for quasi-Heideggerean mystification about silence. Knowles asks how woman, “the vessel to which all attributes can be assigned, even as all can be denied,” fit into the ancient Greek man’s world view. Luce Irigaray, he says, presents a possible answer by offering “the following (im)possibility: ‘Now, if everything is taken up with the realization of the physis, woman has, and will have, no place and thus no existence. This will be true even in her privation of being, which it is the essential task and ceaseless effort of dialectic and dialectic’s indispensable intermediaries to bring or bring back to the fullness of the self ’s possession of substance.’”
This is where I gave up.
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October 26, 2020Can't even finish the first chapter, I think the title says it all
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