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Martin Heidegger and the University as a Site for the Transformation of Human Existence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Alan Milchman  and
Alan Rosenberg
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Extract

Martin Heidegger's rectorate (1933–1934) was characterized by an incontestable involvement with Nazism. However, neither the rectorate, nor Heidegger's ambitious project for the transformation of the university within which it was embedded, was reducible to Nazism. Indeed, Heidegger's project to transform the university dates from his earliest lecture courses at Freiburg University in 1919 and was a hallmark of his thinking long before the rise of Nazism. That project was itself linked to the long-standing dispute in German academia over the role of the university in the modern world, which involved such thinkers as Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Despite the entanglement with Nazism, which stamped his rectorate, Heidegger's thinking about the university as a site for the transformation of human existence is especially pertinent today.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , Winter 1997 , pp. 75 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

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2 See for example, Farías, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, “Une vie, une oeuvre engages dans le national-socialisme” in La Quinzaine Litteraire, 496, 1–15 Novembre 1987.

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4 For an analysis of the distinctions between Heidegger's “private” or “Freiburg National Socialism,” and the Nazi project in the period 1933–1935, see Milchman, Alan and Rosenberg, Alan, “Resoluteness and Ambiguity: Martin Heidegger's Oncological Politics, 1933–1935,”The Philosophical Forum 25 (Fall 1993).Google Scholar

5 See Sluga, Hans, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nor did competing philosophical rationales for Nazism cease after 1933–3 Anson Rabinbach has shown that in the midst of the second World War itself, the “humanism” affair of 1940–41, in which Heidegger was tangentially involved, concerned opposing definitions of what it was to be a National Socialist. This controversy pitted biologizing “Nordicists” against “Hellinists,” who argued that culture, not blood or race, was the basis for National Socialism. See Rabinbach, Anson, “Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as Text and Event,” New German Critique 62 (Summer 1994): 16–20.Google Scholar

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9 While our focus here is the relationship between Heidegger's concern to transform the university and his entanglement with Nazism, this project for the renewal of the university was integrally linked to Heidegger's effort to re-pose the question of Being. The link between Heidegger's understanding of the Seinsfrage and his involvement with Nazism, however, lies beyond the scope of the present article.

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14 John Van Buren, for example, overlooks precisely this profound ambiguity which characterizes Heidegger's thinking in 1933–34, when he simply counterposes the young Heidegger's critique of Führung to his purported commitment to a vision of a philosopher-king in the university in the wake of Hitler's accession to power. See Buren, Van, Young Heidegger, p. 357Google Scholar. We believe that matters are not so cut and dried: the ambiguity of a continued insistence on radical questioning, together with a justification for Führung, uneasily coexist in Heidegger's thinking in the period of the rectorate; the vision of the young Heidegger does not disappear, so much as persist in a state of unrelieved tension with newer philosophico-ideological themes.

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20 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

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23 Heidegger, Martin, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. Krell, David Farrell (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977), p. 96.Google Scholar

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25 Ibid., p. 112.

26 Ibid.

27 The early Plans for Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe listed an Einführung in das akademische Studium as volume 29. After 1983, however, that volume disappeared from the Plan, swallowed up by the lecture course for the winter semester of 1929–1930, now become a double volume, volume 29/30. According to the editors, this was because the lecture course on academic studies was never given, and no manuscript for it existed. Yet, as Theodore Kisiel has pointed out in his paper, “Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe as a Philosophical Problem: Prolegomena,” (Paper delivered to the 27th Annual Heidegger Conference), the lecture course was indeed given, and at least two transcripts of it exist. In fact, a detailed account of the course was published in Japan in 1930, by Seinosuke Yuasa, who audited the course. See Yuasa, Seinosuke, “Heidegger im Vorlesungssaal” in Japan und Heidegger, ed. Buchner, Hartmut (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1989).Google Scholar

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29 For an analysis of this vocabulary, which makes its appearance in Heidegger's Winter semester lecture course of 1929–1930, see Franzen, Winfried, “Die Sehnsucht nach Härte und Schwere. Über ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heidegger's Vorlesung ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik’ von 1929/30” in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie and Poggeler, Otto (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988)Google Scholar. Beyond the vocabulary of hardness and rigor, Heidegger's insistence that Dasein is the Dasein of a Volk, and his Nietzschean voluntarism, opened him up to the lure of Nazism. While the germs of such a position were already present in nuce in Being and Time, their full development only occurred in the period after 1929–1930, and in particular in the period of the rectorate.

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31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 6.

33 Ibid., p. 7.

34 Ibid.

35 This is one of the strands of Derrida's essay “Mochlos.” See Derrida, Jacques, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,”; in Logomachia: The Conflict Of The Faculties, ed. Rand, Richard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).Google Scholar

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44 See Derrida, , “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” pp. 19–20Google Scholar. Indeed, Derrida challenges the rigid distinction between constativity and performativity, on which the Kantian ideal of the university in no small part depended.

45 Gérard Granel has made a case for the relevance of Heidegger's critique of the modern university that is consonant with our own in a number of respects. See Granel, , “Pouquoi avons-nous public cela?” in Del 'Université (France: Éditions Trans-Europ-Repress, n.d.).Google Scholar

46 The science camp was undertaken at Heidegger's initiative, and its goal was to foster a community between teachers and students, on the one hand, and students and workers newly admitted to the university, on the other. However, the project was immediately enmeshed in factional disputes between Heidegger and those who shared his vision of the renewal of the university, and Nazi ideologues for whom the purpose of the camp was to indoctrinate the students in Nazi racial principles and conceptions of discipline. For an account of this project, and its absolute failure, see Ott, HugoMartin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1988), pp. 214–23.Google Scholar

47 For an account of Heidegger's efforts to direct German higher education after the Nazis came to power, see Ott, Martin Heidegger, and Farías, Heidegger and Nazism.

48 For an excellent analysis of this facet of Heidegger's rectorate, see Pöggeler, Otto, “Den Führer führen? Heidegger und kein Ende” in Pöggeler, , Neue Weg mit Heidegger (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 1992).Google Scholar

49 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 33.Google Scholar

50 Sluga, , Heidegger's Crisis, p. 167.Google Scholar

51 Leaman, , “Contextual Misreadings,” p. 18.Google Scholar

52 Granel, , “Pourquoi avons-nous publié cela,” pp. 130–32.Google Scholar

53 See the accounts in Ott, Martin Heidegger, and Farías, Heidegger and Nazism.

54 Heidegger, Martin, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” in Neske, and Kettering, , Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 28.Google Scholar

55 See the account of the end of Heidegger's rectorate in Ott, , Martin Heidegger, pp. 224–46.Google Scholar

56 Ibid.

57 Lacoue-Labarthe, , Heidegger, Art and Politics, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

58 Ott, , Martin Heidegger, p. 239.Google Scholar

59 Heidegger, Martin, Beitrêge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausga.be, vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 149.Google Scholar

60 Ibid., pp. 155–56.