Review of Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.* By Frank H. W. Edler
Hans Sluga's new book, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, has much to recommend it. The book is rooted in Sluga's own experiences learning philosophy in the late fifties as an undergraduate in West Germany, in particular, his own painful discovery that many German philosophers were involved in National Socialism in varying degrees. Sluga turned away from the early influences of Oskar Becker and Heidegger and shifted to Gottlob Frege, only to discover that even Frege was not above the taint of nationalism and antisemitism. This book represents Sluga's attempt to address that uncomfortable silence concerning the role of German philosophy in relation to the rise and takeover of National Socialism. One of the virtues of this book is its scope: it attempts to comprehend the larger question of the relationship between German philosophy and National Socialism in a holistic manner. Sluga does an admirable job of maintaining the balance between this larger objective and the vast array of details in his narrative of the historical aspects of German philosophy. Indeed, I believe Sluga may well be the first person to address this question comprehensively with a fair degree of success. Another virtue of the text is that for the most part Sluga accomplishes his objective without the ad hominem arguments, the moralizing, the "axe-grinding," and the innuendos which have at times muddied rather than clarified the debate over Heidegger, Paul de Man, and others. Most importantly, however, Sluga knows his stuff, in this case history and philosophy. He moves easily and well from one to the other without losing the reader either in a labyrinth of historical details or in the abstract complexities of philosophy. Apart from the problems discussed below, Sluga's work remains highly provocative, evenhanded and illuminating. There are a number of minor problems over which I
would quibble. One example will suffice. Sluga, following
Hugo Ott's claim that an alliance existed among
Heidegger, Alfred Baeumler, and Ernst Krieck in the
spring of 1933, at first states that they "found
themselves ... in close alliance" (144). However, by
the end of his discussion, Sluga talks about "the
alliance they struck" ( 151). As far as I know,
there is no evidence to date which proves they actually
struck an alliance, formal or informal. Even Sluga agrees
that "Baeumler's relation with Krieck seems never to
have been all that close" (151). The main, though not the only, culprit in this group of mediating concepts is the modern concept of crisis. Sluga defines it as a historical a prioi in the following way: "The essential consideration here is that human experience always takes place in a present perceived as constantly changing, as suspended between past and future, as constituting a break between them" (67). He then goes on to describe "three historical preconditions for the emergence of a modern sense of crisis" which stem from Foucault's critique of modernity: (1) a directedness to the present which "heroizes" it, (2) the perception of the heroized present "as sharply separated from the past as well as the future" within a linear conception of time as a sequence of moments (68), and, (3) the loss of confidence in a modern culture's own powers (this third condition is not clearly identified). According to Sluga, this concept of crisis for many German philosophers became a regulative, a priori concept which "determined their philosophical thinking as well as their political involvement" (67). The main problem, as I see it, is that Sluga simply
assumes that since Heidegger believed in a sense of
crisis and since he joined the Nazi Party, Heidegger
therefore must have believed in this a priori concept
of crisis based on a linear conception of time. What I
find astonishing is that Sluga makes this claim without
any discussion of Heidegger's concept of temporality,
which is probably the most original part of Being and
Time. Apparently, it does not matter that Heidegger
worked out an original concept of temporality, which
cannot be identified with the linear concept of time as a
sequence of moments. Moreover, Sluga provides no
substantial evidence for his claim that
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