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Traumatic Roots of Heidegger’s Fall into Nazism

June 25, 2014 by Wayne Schroeder 4 Comments

toporBrain“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.”― Albert Camus, The Fall 

What accounts for Heidegger's fall from grace into Nazism? This topic is touched on in the episode on Being and Time. Are we all vulnerable to the same or some similar fate, if only the circumstances were right? Of course not, we say--we are exceptional cases.

Two questions are at issue here: 1) What motivated Heidegger?; 2) Is seeking to answer this question valid?

Robert Stolorow,  a psychoanalyst who sought to found psychoanalysis in Heidegger's phenomenology of Being, gives us his "psychobiographical" study of Heidegger's fall into Nazism in chapter nine, "Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being, a Distant Mirror" in his book, World, Affectivity , Trauma, in which he argues that a Heideggerian understanding of phenomena such as anxiety, trauma, and mortality can contribute to a post-Cartesian, intersubjective founding of psychoanalysis (he is a Heideggerian).

His psychoanalytic argument hinges on Heidegger's emphasis on 1) authentic and inauthentic existence; 2) authentic relationality or "Being-With." To start with the final conclusion, "Only someone for whom differentiated Being was such a monumental, preoccupying issue could have come up with the understanding of the foundational structures of our intelligibility to ourselves that pervade the pages of "Being and Time.'"  While it may be excessive to claim that Heidegger was psychologically preoccupied with Being, perhaps there are other psychological forces that may explain Heidegger’s shocking, anti-philosophical descent into Nazism.

Stolorow documents Heidegger's history of emotional trauma as involving a dependency on his parent's belief in the Catholic Church, and then on his financial dependence on the Catholic Church for his education (both anti-authentic, anti-individuation ties). His attachment to the Catholic Church purportedly led to a psychosomatic reaction of "heart trouble," after which he was released from his priestly commitment.

An additional emotional trauma is apparent in his relationship with the love of his life, Hannah Arendt, a young student (he was 17 years older) with whom he engaged in a clandestine affair, though he was married with kids. Having analyzed his love letters, Stolorow and others claim that his love, rather than being true love, went only so far as his valuing her only to the degree that it allowed her to worship him; he used her, so goes the claim, as a self-object (narcissism). She felt his was a disingenuous "philosophical idealization love" and told him about her real feelings of depression (expressed in her diary writings entitled, "Shadows"). He denied this was so, and she then terminated the relationship.

This double emotional trauma struck in 1927 when he finished his Being and Time, which he said was so consuming that it was as if "one's heart is ripped from one's body." He placed a copy of the book on his mother's death bed, "leaving the book for her as a last effort, futile and pathetic, to justify his existence and find [her] acceptance." He had a crisis of "authentic relationality or 'Being-With.'" He lost his lover and his mother, his magnus opus was met with incomprehension, and Nazism loomed.

Stolorow’s claim is that these emotionally traumatic factors led Heidegger to seek to bolster his threatened ego with identification with a political force that he in turn idealized as the way out, the way for himself, and a nation, to rise to authenticity and significance, and he blindly cast his hope idealistically with the Nazi nightmare--the fall which led him "to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself," a stance which he never recanted.

Finally, is it even valid to try and answer the question of the influence of a philosopher’s life on his work? It would seem Heidegger invites us to do so; he gave a central role to moods (affectivity) in the disclosure of our Being-in-the-World. “Ontologically, mood is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure” (B&T, p. 175). Mood discloses how “what [Dasein] encounters within-the world can ‘matter’ to it” (B&T, p. 176).  For Heidegger, ontical experiences of mood, are ontologically revelatory. Therefore, Heidegger’s slide into Nazism can be seen as his ontic reaction, his angst in the face of massive political and cultural oppression of Nazism, especially as it affected academia, and his ability to do philosophy.

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger argues that “fundamental ontology” is “originary ethics” itself (p. 271).  Throughout his life he resolutely refused to address ontical ethics, the ethics of everyday life which leads to choices and actions (see Olafson, Heidegger and the ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein). Heidegger's privileging of the ontological (Being) over the ontic (beings, everyday ethics) should be a warning that the most brilliant philosophical theory is no guarantee against inauthentic life choices,  which Zizek has been warning against since The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Wayne Schroeder

 

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Filed Under: PEL's Notes Tagged With: heidegger, nazism, psychoanalysis

Comments

  1. ara baliozian says

    July 14, 2014 at 6:29 am

    translated into dollars and cents: not guilty by reason of insanity.

    Reply
  2. Martin Knap says

    July 14, 2014 at 11:50 am

    I’m not very convinced by this sort of psychoanalytic overinterpretation. Heidegger can not be understood apart form turn of the century European history, when there was a dawning of a new age and tradition broke down; many struggled to make sense of the new predicament: think of W. Benjamin or Kafka. In his “Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma” Ernest Gellner wrote beautifully about the antagonism between the word view of atomic individualism and “romanticism” (or the Gemeinschaft and Geselschaft dichotomy, as it is also understood) and how this was one of the primary dilemmas of the European psyche and also a root of modern (i.e. not just religiously based) anti-semitism. Heidegger was a virulent anti-Semite as his recently published Black Notebooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks show, the reason, of course, is, that Jews with their “rootlessness” destroy the authentic being (or Being). Maybe Europeans thought that Jews are somehow “essentially” rootless, because they were in a diaspora since time “immemorial” which is, of course, a myth (most Jews are from the Kavkaz region), but this shows how Europeans thought about themselves and “others”, for example an immigrant society like the American must have been something almost obscene in Heideggers mind – another reason to support Hitler.

    Reply
  3. Wayne Schroeder says

    July 15, 2014 at 11:10 am

    Martin, in a similar vein, Jan Vilse made the following observations:

    “I think Heidegger’s lapse into Nazism is a multi-dimensional topic of its own in Heidegger scholarship which I think it would be too simplistic and reductive to explain by psychoanalysis alone. For example, I think the above characterization of Heidegger and Arendt’s affair might be accurate, but I wouldn’t use heartbreak and personal struggles to explain Heidegger’s plans for revitalizing German academia.

    As I’ve argued on the PEL FB group a few times, I think Heidegger’s own work does lend support to the idea of contextualizing philosophical thought into a particular historical situation (“factical life”), and to me that includes personality, background, psychological development etc. So in this sense, we cannot isolate the thought from the thinker. But historical context involves so much more as well, beyond autobiography.

    A partial explanation of Heidegger and Nazism, which I read recently and which I found compelling, is 1) Heidegger’s overturning of Aristotle’s prioritization of ‘theorein’ and ‘sophia’, and making ‘phronesis’, a situational resolutness/decision the most authentic and “highest” form of existence. This can be coupled with 2) eliminating any clear normative guidance that was still present in Aristotle — Heidegger’s version of “seizing the moment” was pretty relativistic — as well as 3) Heidegger’s remarks on historicity, repetition (Wiederholung), shared destiny (Geschick) etc.

    If you combine those three factors with a general distrust of modernity, then it’s easy to see what Heidegger might have seen in the initial outbreak of Nazism: a political movement trying to seize the moment, based on newly appropriated historical possibilities (= German nationalism). This development seems to have fit Heidegger’s own ambitions as well, which were probably more about the German university system, and the role of philosophy therein, than about German society on the whole.

    I find that kind of explanation more persuasive than anything to do with Heidegger’s mother, lover and personal turmoil.”

    Reply
  4. martin knap says

    July 18, 2014 at 4:46 am

    Wayne, thanks for sharing.

    Reply

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