Philosophy, Language, and Politics:
Heidegger's Attempt to Steal the Language
of the Revolution in 1933-34 *
By Frank H.W. Edler [ See below for responses to this essay ]
[Endnotes are now included]
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1934, the Foreign Policy Office of the Nazi party, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, received a letter from the National Socialist Doctors' Association. It was written by Walter Gross and reads as follows:
Dear Party Comrade Trotha!
Again and again from different sides my attention has been directed to the activity of Heidegger in Freiburg. It
is understood already in the broadest circles that he is considered to be the philosopher of National Socialism.
I myself have no definite opinion of Heidegger, but I have recently inquired of Jaentsch [name misspelled] in
Marburg (you know him of course from his visit with Rosenberg in Munich), and I have received a completely
negative statement which Jaentsch gave to a similar question from Krieck.
It is a fact that Heidegger is a serious candidate for election as director of the Prussian Academy of Professors.
Please speak with Rosenberg himself about it, in case he has no knowledge of this dangerous situation.
Best greetings and Heil Hitler,
Your Gross (1)
This is a stunning letter. What we have on the one hand is clear evidence, from this letter and other sources, that one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century was not just actively involved in National Socialism by joining the Nazi party, by giving speeches which supported Hitler and National Socialism, and by participating in conferences sponsored by Nazi organizations, but was ranked among the leading philosophers of the movement or "revolution" alongside Alfred Baeumler, Ernst Krieck, and Rosenberg himself. Indeed, it was the fact that Heidegger was being considered as director of the proposed Prussian Academy of Professors that sparked the Krieck-Jaensch faction into action and galvanized their assault against him.(2)
On the other hand, we have Heidegger's letters of 1945 written for the denazification proceedings in which he tries to explain his political involvements.(3) Here, while maintaining that he was opposed to the National Socialist worldview based on biologism and racism, he admits that he tried to change National Socialism from the inside:It was never my intention to deliver the university to the party doctrine but, conversely, to attempt while being inside of National Socialism and while being a point of reference to it, to bring about a spiritual change in its development. (4)
Is this merely a belated excuse to cover up the truth that Heidegger was indeed a true believer
of National Socialism? Or was Heidegger really trying to influence and shape the revolution from
the " inside "?Interpreting the Revolution
The problem with Heidegger's own defense not only in the 1945 letters but also in the Spiegel interview and his "Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken" is that he never clearly states what he was trying to accomplish by working on the inside. He never defines, for example, what this so-called spiritual change he was trying to bring about was. In the end, Heidegger's vague references to the purpose of his political involvement merely add fuel to the argument that he was really nothing other than a Blut-und-Boden (blood-and-soil) Nazi and that they are nothing but attempts to cover his tracks.
And yet there is something nagging about these characterizations of Heidegger. It is not the fact that these are "easy labels"-obviously, easy labels may turn out to be true ones. Rather, there is something about Heidegger's whole involvement which is very difficult to pin down politically. Jaspers himself admits to this difficulty in the expanded edition of his Philosophische Autoblographie where he writes that Heidegger does not fit any of the Nazi stereotypes.(5) This problem is evident in Heidegger's political speeches, where it is clear that he is supporting the revolution, Hitler, and National Socialism and yet it is virtually impossible to explicate their precise political content.
Some critics such as Robert Minder have argued that the language of Heidegger's speeches proves that he was a Blut-und-Boden Nazi. Briefly, the argument runs and follows. If someone is a Blut-und-Boden writer (such as Erwin Kolbenheyer, Hans Johst, etc.), then he or she uses language in a certain identifiable way which includes the use of a particular set of images, a particular way of making conclusions, and the use of stylistic ticks such as energized verbs and glowing superlatives.(6) The second premise states that Heidegger used language in this idenifiable
way. The conclusion drawn from this is that Heidegger was a Blut-und-Boden writer. In other words, Heidegger was a racist and an anti-Semite not only in his speeches but also in his philosophical writings. This argument, however, is simply an example of the fallacy of affirming
the consequent. I do not deny that Heidegger incorporated a certain range of' Nazi street talk into his speeches. What I do deny is the "conclusion" that Heidegger did so because he believed in the Nazi ideology based on biological racism and anti-Semitism. My claim is that Heidegger neither interpreted the revolution on the basis of Nazi ideology nor sought to promote the "ideal portrayed by Juenger," as Joseph Kockelmans claims.(7) The establishment of any Weltanschauung is totally antithetical to the direction of Heidegger's thought just as the establishment of the Gestalt of the worker-turned-machine in Juenger's sense is totally antithetical to Heidegger's understanding of human existence or Dasein.In his own speeches, Heidegger emphasized that he was not reading the convulsion which Germany was going through in the narrow sense of political change where one party or ideology is replaced by another. In two separate speeches (Nov.11 and Nov. 30, 1933), Heidegger states that "[t]he National Socialist revolution is not simply the takeover of the existing power of the state by another party which has arisen for that purpose; rather this revolution brings the complete upheaval Of our German Dasein." (8) In other words, Heidegger is reading the revolution as'the beginning of a monumental change which goes beyond the scope of ideological conception--this includes Nazi ideology.
It is at this juncture that a whole throng of perplexing questions arise. Critics hostile to Heidegger point to the departure of his thinking into a "transideological" realm as evidence for the irrational, antiscientific, quasi-mythical, and apocalytic aspects of his thought. What has hampered any extensive critical examination of these problems is that after 1929, Heidegger did not publish anything until the appearance of his rectoral address in 1933. Thus the development of Heidegger's thought between 1929 and 1933 remains extremely unclear.
Two of Heidegger's lecture courses belonging to this period have now been published: Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929-30) and Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1931-32). With the help of these courses, we can begin to draw a sketch of the direction of Heidegger's thinking which led to his political involvement. However, even with a knowledge of these courses, it is evident that there are dimensions of Heidegger's thought which are hidden or at times hinted at but not fully explicated. (Heidegger's manner of holding back aspects of his philosophical thought becomes strikingly evident during his political involvement, as I shall show in a moment.)
Five of these "hidden dimensions" are important to Heidegger's political involvement: (1) the significance of the Aufbruch as the immanent occurrence of being as difference, (2) the significance of modern metaphysics in relation to science and technology, (3) the significance of Germany in relation to the Greek as well as the modern traditions, (4) the significance of Hoelderlin in relation to the first three points, and (5) the significance of language in relation to all the above. These dimensions, or issues, and their interrelations form the philosophical context which determines not only Heidegger's interpretation of the Nazi revolution but also the purpose of his political involvement. When Heidegger enters the political arena, the conflict is between his interpretation of the revolution as a transition (Uebergang) to something else (the confrontation between human being and the difference itself) and the strategies he employs to guide it in this direction and the
ever-increasing entrenchment and domination of Nazi ideology.
Philosophical Context
Before this conflict can be examined extrinsically, we need to understand the intrinsic philosophical context whereby Heidegger is interpreting the revolution. Although all five issues are interrelated, the most important for understanding the purpose of Heidegger's political involvement is the first: the significance of what Heidegger means by Aufbruch in the rectoral address. It provides the context in which Heidegger is interpreting the revolution and the direction in which he thinks it is moving. The issue which is most pertinent to his strategy of how to guide the revolution is the fifth: the significance of language. To state the matter in a somewhat reductive way: being and language shape the "what" and the "how" of Heidegger's entry into politics. Heidegger admits this,
albeit in a more general way, in "A Dialogue on Language," where he says that "reflection on
language, and on Being, has determined my path of thinking from early on. . . ." (9)The term Aufbruch which Heidegger uses at the end of the rectoral address to designate the revolutionary change commencing in Germany provides the context for his interpretation of the revolution:
... [b]ut we fully understand the splendor and greatness of this setting forth [Aufbruch] only when we carry within ourselves that profound and far-reaching thoughtfulness which gave ancient Greek wisdom the word: "All that is great stands in the storm."(10)
In other words, as Heidegger saw it, the revolution taking place in 1933, especially among the youth, had an intimate and even necessary connection to the Greeks.
This connection is included in the concept because Heidegger also used the word Aufbruch near the beginning of the address, where he claims that science could be maintained as a destiny for Germany
... only if we again place ourselves under the power of the beginning [Anfang] of our [emphasis mine] spiritual-historical being (Dasein). This beginning is the setting
out [Aufbruch] of Greek philosophy. (11)Thus Heidegger defines the present revolution or awakening as a recommencement of the original awakening which gave rise to Greek thought.
In order to show that the German Aufbruch of 1933 is to be understood in terms of the original Greek Aufbruch, Heidegger shows how they are interconnected:
... [t]he beginning [the Greek Aufbruch] still is. It does not lie behind us as something that was long ago, but stands before us. As what is greatest, the beginning has passed in advance beyond all that is to come and thus also beyond us. The beginning has invaded our future. There it awaits us, a distant command [ferne Verfiigung] bidding us to catch up to its greatness. (12)
Thus the essential element of the nascent German Aufbruch or revolution which constitutes its uniqueness is that the event which gave rise to Greek philosophy had broken into the German future. For Heidegger, this eruptive event, which formed the hidden basis of' all Western metaphysics, hung there as a real possibility waiting to be realized.
The task that stood before the Germans, especially in the universities, Heidegger believed, was precisely to reenact the original event which gave rise to Greek philosophy. That was the destiny
of Germany in terms of science:... [o]nly if ve resolutely submit [enjoin ourselves: uns fuegen] to this distant command [enjointure: Verfuegung] to recapture the greatness of the beginning, will science become the innermost necessity of our being (Dasein). (13)
The urgency of Heidegger's rhetoric in the rectoral address, with its emphasis on the university's will to the essence of science, is an exhortation toward the reenactment of the occurrence of the Aufbruch looming before the university and the German people.
But, as Christopher Fynsk asks, isn't the exhortation toward an either-or decision falsified at the end of the address when Heidegger says that "the young and the youngest strength of the people, which already lies beyond us has by now decided the matter...."? (14) Fynsk's criticism depends on a misunderstanding of what Heidegger means by "the matter." Although Heidegger does not specify precisely what "matter" refers to, I think it can be easily interpreted: the decision the youth have made is the choice for revolution, that is, a choice for self-examination which penetrates to the very foundations as opposed to one which merely changes "old arrangements and add[s] new ones." (15) In other words, the youth made the choice to break through traditional oppositions such as capitalism and Marxism, egoistic individualism and anonymous collectivism and move toward a rebirth of Germany involving the conception of a "new man" and a "new community." That Heidegger identifies the core of the National Socialist revolution with the uprising of the German youth is abundantly clear from his speeches. On November 11, for example, Heidegger speaks of the revolutionary change in the following way: "It is the revolutionary awakening [Aufbruch] of the ringing youth who are growing back into their roots."(16) However, this does not imply that they have already made the choice to reenact the Greek Aufbruch. That decision had not yet been made, and Heidegger's exhortation is aimed precisely at making such a choice!
Immediately after Heidegger makes the statement that the young and the youngest strength of the people has by now decided the matter, he goes on to qualify it: "But [my emphasis] we fully understand the splendor and greatness of this setting out [Aufbruchl only [my emphasis] when we carry within ourselves that profound and far-reaching thoughtfulness that gave ancient Greek wisdom the word. . . ." The "but ... only" clearly qualifies the decision in that even though the decision for revolution has already been made, it can be an authentic Aufbruch only if action and thought are aimed at the occurrence which gave rise to Greek philosophy. For Heidegger, this was still an open question. But the possibility for it existed.
In my view, Heidegger entered the political arena in order to guide the revolution toward that decision of reenacting the origin of Greek philosophy. He willingly entered into association with Alfred Baeumler and Ernst Krieck not to subsume his philosophy under the umbrella of Nazi ideology but to work on the "inside" to ensure the continuation of the revolution. What he was trying to ward off was ideological fixity and domination. Even as late as November 30, 1933, months after Hitler had called an official end to the revolution, Heidegger says that
... the revolutionary reality is nothing present at hand.... We must first of all inquire after the new reality, ask ourselves whether and how we stand in it. In doing so, we must displace ourselves [uns herausstellen] out of the shells of traditionally handed down forms and externalities of the university. They are nothing but useful stops along the way. (17)In a letter to Jaspers on April 3 less than a month before he joined the Nazi party, he writes that although much is unclear and questionable, he senses more and more that they are growing "into a new reality and that an era has grown old." (18) More importantly, he continues, "[everything depends on whether we [ Baeumler, Krieck, etc.] can prepare the right place of entry for
philosophy and aid its beginning." (19) For Heidegger, the real revolution was to take place in philosophy, which meant the thinking-questioning confrontation (Kampf) between Dasein and the origin not only of Greek philosophy but of' the Western tradition as a whole. Clearly, much depends on the way Heidegger understands the word Aufbruch philosophically. As we shall see in a moment, he does not use the word in the same way as Baeumler and Krieck do.The word itself goes back to the emergence of the revolutionary spirit in the youth movement after the turn of the century. It can be seen, for example, in the manifesto of the Freideutsche Jugend on October 1913 at Hohen Meisner. (20) Fritz Stern describes the explosion of the movement in the following way:
The German youth movement erupted like a great phenomenon of nature.
Out of unsuspected depths leapt forth defiance, hate, yearning, love, all the hopes and fears
that for decades had been repressed, denied, forcibly sublimated. The movement was
spontaneous, translating sentiment directly into action.... ( 21 )Concurrent with the rise of the youth movement, and at times overlapping it, was the rise of Expressionism in art and literature which also manifested a contempt for the empty conventions of bourgeois society and for the mutilation of the spirit by industrial capitalism and shallow materialism. As Richard Sheppard states,
... the Expressionist artist inclined to see himself as a prophetic visionary who was called to explode conventional reality, to break through the crust that had formed around men's psyches....... ( 22 )
Ernst Stadler, for example, used the term Der Aufbruch as the title of a poem sequence
whose "warlike imagery ... is one of liberation from outworn conventions." (23) Much of the
vitalism and neoromanticism of the intellectual youth was fueled by the writings of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.At the same time these movements were emerging during and after the first decade of the century, a renaissance of Friedrich Hoelderlin's poetry was beginning which would completely revise the nineteenth-century interpretation of him as an overly sensitive romantic dreamer who escaped to the bucolic world of the ancient Greeks and eventually went mad because he could not confront the reality of his own age. The revision of Hoelderlin began with Wilhelm Dilthey's essay on the poet included in his book Poetry and Experience (1906) and two important publications by Norbert von Hellingrath: Hoelderlin's translations or transcriptions of Pindar (1910) and the four-volume critical-historical edition of Hoelderlin's works (1913-23), which included the late poetry, much of which had never been published. Of these two publications by Hellingrath, Heidegger says: "These two books hit us students like an earthquake."(24) He never again speaks of being affected in such an intense way by any other author.
It may well have been this "earthquake" which stimulated the revolutionary temperament in the thinking of Heidegger, who was then in his early twenties. Already in his 1916 work on Duns Scotus, Heidegger mentions the need for a "translogical" context in which to understand logic and its problems and for philosophy to become "a breakthrough [Durchbruch] into the true reality
and the real truth...." (25) If Hoelderlin's poetry provided a more radical impetus to Heidegger's thinking, what was it about his poetry which shook Heidegger so profoundly? And why does Heidegger give preference to Hellingrath over other literary critics of that period such as Dilthey, Wilhelm Michel, and Friedrich Gundolf?The reason why Hellingrath is important to Heidegger is twofold. First, Hellingrath provided the linguistic key which opened up Hoelderlin's later poetry (after 1800) by showing how important Hoelderlin's Pindar translations were to the language and style of those poems. Second, Hellingrath claimed that Hoelderlin, in his later poetry, had composed into language a hidden or secret Germany (das geheime Deutschland) which did not yet exist.(26) Thus Hoelderlin's poetic development took place in what is later called the Greek-Hesperian context. In and through his linguistic confrontation with Greek poetry, Hoelderlin shapes a new, poetic language which is the essence of the future Germany to come. The striking affinity between Hellingrath's claim that Hoelderlin, in his retrieval of Greek poetry, renovates the German language in a way which enables him to compose the essence of a Germany- yet- to-come and Heidegger's claim that the German revolution or Aufbruch, if it is to lead to the creation of a genuine community, must be a reenactment of the Greek Aufbruch which itself had broken into the German future, is clearly evident. Before pursuing this matter, however, the two points made above need to be clarified.
In his widely read essay on Hoelderlin, Dilthey glimpsed this new language and style --even the genius -- of the poet's later work, but he withdrew from it. As Dilthey remarked about the later poetry,
... [Hoelderlin's] language grows in its figurative power to the point of oddness and eccentricity. It contains a unique mixture of pathological qualities and the intimations of a new style of a lyrical genius. (27)
Dilthey's problem was that he saw the strength of Hoelderlin's poetry in its connectedness, symmetrical ordering, and musical effect.(28) He could not make sense of Hoelderlin's comments on his translations of Sophocles which belong to the period of his later poetry and, thus, thought the poet had turned his earlier poetics "into a heap of ruins."(29) When in the later poems "the gentle, regular play of stressed and unstressed syllables" (30) and the "composed, simple, soft tone" (31) receded and the breakdown of logical connections increased, Dilthey perceived this as the approach of madness in which Hoelderlin's "inability to preserve logical connections is apparent."(32) This lack of logical connection gives the later poetry the appearance, at times, of being a word salad which, in turn, was interpreted as a sign of dementia praecox.
The linguistic key which Hellingrath found in Hoelderlin's Pindar translations (1800) concerns the compositional structure Hoelderlin was experimenting with in his confrontation with the Pindaric Greek. Hellingrath, using the language of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, called Hoelderlin's new
style die harte Fuegung ( harmonia austera ) or the hard jointure as opposed to the
smooth.( 33 ) Hoelderlin's translations of Pindar's Epinikians are as close as one can get to a direct transliteration into the German language. Hoelderlin attempted to infuse both the surface and depth of the Pindaric Greek directly into German.(34) At first sight, these transliterations appear to do nothing more than mangle the German grammar and syntax. The soft, smooth, logically connected language of Hoelderlin's earlier work which Dilthey loved so much is now full of dislocations, juxtapositions, and enjambments. Words begin to stand alone like rough chunks of granite in the poetic line.Hellingrath presents all three modes of composition (the hard, the smooth, and the well-tempered), but he focuses on the polarity between the hard and the smooth jointures or styles in order to make his point that Hoelderlin's translations seek to transpose the hard jointure so evident in Pindar into his own poetry.
The smooth jointure is usually associated with rhymed poetry and the folk song-- Hellingrath cites Eichendorff as the best example (35) -- where the smooth and melodious words are gathered together in the symmetrical hippity-hop of the meter until the line or poem is fulfilled in the completed image. The well-oiled words roll in the melos, always connecting and always pointing beyond themselves toward the greater synthesis of the images in the poem as a whole.
The hard jointure differs from the smooth in that it abhors "the nonresistant sequential flow of logical connection,"(36) the easy f'usion of attribute with subject matter and the undisturbed gliding from one word to the next. It seeks to arrest and break the smooth syntax and rhythm by inversions, dislocations, juxtapositions, and enjambments. As Dionysius says, the hard jointure
. . . requires that the words should be like columns firmly planted and placed in strong positions, so that each word should be seen on every side, and that the parts should be at appreciable distances from one another, being separated by perceptible intervals. It does not in the least shrink from using frequently harsh sound-clashings which jar on the ear; like blocks of building stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth, but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity. (37)
Attention is called to the word itself.
Where no logical connection is achieved, the word itself becomes volcanic etymologically
in that it releases meaning from its original sources -- once again the attempt to break through the worn-down surface smoothness of the language. As Richard Sieburth puts it, Hoelderlin's words are "virtual echo chambers in which Swabian regionalisms ricochet off Lutheran German and Dorian or Attic Greek."(38) Rather than connecting logically across the horizontal surface of the language, Hoelderlin uses the figura etymologica somewhat like a depth charge to unearth the mysterious depths of language itself. Meaning is established through the words themselves as a form of echo-location from the surface to some hidden source and back again:
Hoelderlin's theory of language is based on the search for the numinous, perhaps sacred
Grund des Wortes. It is in the individual word that the elemental energies of immediate signification
are literally embodied. (39)The importance of Hellingrath's argument -- especially for Heidegger -- lies in the relation all the above have to language itself. What Hoelderlin has done, according to Hellingrath, is to lay the linguistic building blocks for Herder's dream of a truly national language. For Herder, nothing was more important for a nationality than its own language: "In this language dwell its whole world of tradition, history, religion and principles of life, its whole heart and soul." (40) Moreover, "[w]lthout a common native tongue ...in which all classes are raised like branches of one tree there can be no true mutual understanding, no common patriotic development, no intimate common sympathy, no patriotic public." (41) Herder also claimed a special affinity between the Greek and the German languages, especially in philosophy.(42)
Hellingrath agrees witli Herder regarding the centrality of language.In his 1915 lecture, "Hoelderlin and the Germans," Hellingrath says that "Language is the soul of a people, boundary of a people, the inner core of a people."(43) He goes on to identify this inner linguistic core with what he calls the secret Germany (das geheime Deutschland):
I call us "the, people of Hoelderlin" because it is of the very essence of the German character that its burning innermost core should become manifest at an infinite distance below the crust of slag which is its surface, manifest only in a secret Germany.... (44)
But what is this secret Germany and what relation does it have to Hoelderlin's use of the hard jointure? Since Hoelderlin learned the hard style or jointure from Pindar, the question concerning the relation between the hard jointure and the secret Germany is also a question which involves the relationship of Greece and Germany. These questions are based on a crucial shift which takes place in Hoelderlin's poetic development, that is, a shift or movement away from an almost complete preoccupation with the Greeks and toward a preoccupation with his own people, his native land, and his own time. Wilhelm Michel in 1911 already referred to this as Hoelderlin's Umkehr or turn from the Greeks to the reality of his own time.(45) Later, in 1923, Michel would refer to this as Hoelderlin's westward turn (abendlaendische Wendung).(46)
The crux of Hellingrath's argument is that Hoelderlin's development into a German poet, indeed, into the most German of poets, is the consequence precisely of his Greek being. Or, to put it more paradoxically: Hoelderlin becomes the most genuinely German poet because he was genuinely able to listen to the Greek. Hoelderlin's achievement consisted in learning the hard jointure from Pindar and transposing it directly into the German language. No other German poet had learned his Greek directly from the Greek and tried to transpose it in this way.(48) The Renaissance brought in church Latin; humanism substituted classical Latin for church Latin. However, the hard jointure of the Greeks was never brought into the language as such and, thus, never elicited that capability from the German language.(49) In other words, the first intimate poetic confrontation between the inner cores of both languages takes place in Hoelderlin's poetry. In translating the Pindaric Greek
and its hard jointure into German, Hoelderlin brought forth the hard jointure latent in the German language.Thus, the secret Germany is literally the linguistic space which Hoelderlin establishes in his poetry as the essence of a future German people. It is also a language which has the capacity to find new names for a rebirth of what was once considered divine in antiquity: ". . . the old gods are dead [and] live on only in mythical language [Sage] but their shadows crowd around it for a new birth." (50) For Hellingrath, Hoelderlin is the herald of this coming Germany, nurturing the life of its inner fiery core and "foreseeing its more profuse breakthrough [Durchbrechen]...." (51)
What may be called Hellingrath's religious or mythical interpretation of Hoelderlin, shared by Gundolf and Michel in varying ways, was already established before the First World War and dovetails with the interpretations of the war itself grouped under the heading of the "Ideas of 1914." The latter phrase, coined by Johann Plenge, was intimately tied to the great surge of almost religious fervor which swept Germany in August, 1914. Plenge himself interpreted the war as the German revolution.(52) The prewar sense of purposelessness, fragmentation, and alienation evaporated and was replaced by a sense of national and spiritual purpose. Ernst Troelsch in "The Spirit of German Culture" (1915) comes very close to Hellingrath's notion of a secret Germany when he says that the war was a moment of fate which "brought about 'the revolution of the hidden or obscured cultural unity of the spirit. The inner connections are instinctively illuminated, and the spiritual unity flashes into view like lightning.'" (53)
The war was seen not only as a decisive break (Bruch) with bourgeois liberalism, capitalism, egoistic individualism, crass materialism, and positivism, but also as a crucible in which the new Geist and new community (Gemeinschaft) of Germany were being forged. Although Max Scheler changed his position as the war progressed, his initial position set forth in The Genius of War and of the German War (1915) affirmed the war as a " profound break" (ein tiefgehender Bruch) with bourgeois capitalism (54) and as a process wherein the new spirit could weld together the torn contacts on all levels of society.(55)
In addition, the emerging belief that the front-line soldier embodied this new spirit and sense of community through his Fronterlebnis (experience of the front) with other soldiers persisted after the war. It was this younger generation, this Kameradschaft or community of the front, who experienced something of a new measure of existence for the future Volk. Heidegger was part of that generation who packed copies of Hoelderlin's works into their Tornisters.(56)
A resonance was felt after the war between Hellingrath's interpretation of Hoelderlin as a seer who heralded the spirit of the new community and the experience of Kameradschaft among the Frontkaempfer. More specifically, a resonance was found between the way Hoelderlin used the hard jointure to break up the logical connectedness of the language in which the silent spaces between the words become just as figural as the words themselves on the one hand and the soldiers' experience of breaks or moments of shock which punctured and shattered the logically ordered world of bourgeois reason and rationality on the other.
Ernst Juenger, for example, in Combat as Inner Experience (1929), described these breaks or moments of shock in the following way:
... it [the moment] works by surprise; it suddenly pulls away the ground from under the
feet of consciousness and brings about the feeling of a sudden fall; the heart skips a beat..... a new, unaccustomed space opens up like a fissure torn in the ground into which one suddenly falls. (57)For Juenger as well as Hans Freyer, also a veteran Frontkaempfer, the war was an eruption
( Ausbruch, Aufbruch) of the life-force, a break-in (Einbruch) of the anarchic, elemental forces of man into the world of certainty which the rational Burger had buttressed through reason.(58) Both regarded the war as the beginning of a paradigm change of metaphysical proportions which would dramatically alter the very configuration of human existence.Just as Hoelderlin had subverted the logical connectedness of language to create a new, linguistic space of the spirit which made possible a new community and a return of the gods, so too the experience of the war had disrupted the logically ordered world of bourgeois liberalism and opened a vista for a new community. The one who propelled this resonance and gave it a political and historical context in the 1920s was the neoconservative Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the greatest proponent of what was called "the third way."
After the war, he resuscitated the Ideas of 1914 by showing that something was beginning to happen to the Germany that was not only defeated but also torn and sundered (zerissen) by all manner of oppositions, dualisms, and contradictions. This characterization of the Germans as a torn people can be found even in Hoelderlin where he says in Hyperion that "I can think of no people more divided and torn [zerissener] than the Germans."(59) Moeller also believed that the Great War had proved to be the collapse of nineteenth-century liberalism and rationalism.(60)
On the other hand, he attacked Marxism, which he thought was based on the same materi-
alism as liberalism.Out of the chaos of the war, however, he saw a great change (Umkehr) beginning to take place. (61) As he says in one of his articles, "our collapse [Zusammenbruch] signifies an opening and a passage [Durchgang]."(62) This change, which was already taking place as a spiritual revolution, could be witnessed in the jolt toward the Right (Ruck nach Rechts).(63)
Scientific rationalism and materialism could not understand this Umkehr as a revolutionary awakening (Aufbruch), because it arose from "the German fog," that is, the Innigkeit or profound metaphysical depth of the Germans.(64) As Roy Pascal says, what science and rational calculation cannot foresee is that man
. . . can break through to an unknown unforeseeable future -- "Mankind has always been a new departure (Aufbruch), to which it made up its mind without being sure of the way, let alone the goal." (65)
From the German Aufbruch, a new society would arise which, as Fritz Stern says, "would solve the problems of modernity. According to Stern, Moeller thought that
. . . [a] German socialism [which is also a nationalism] would reconcile the antagonism of industrial society and humanize its life, and it would do so by creating a synthesis between the individualistic Western society and the collectivistic society of the Soviet Union. (67)
Against Oswald Spengler, who also held the view that Germany was in the middle (Mitte) between the capitalist West and the communist East but who proposed a deterministic view of history, Moeller defended free will vis-a-vis what he called the Incalculable: "History is the story of the Incalculable."(68) In fact, history is understood as creative destiny in which there is no progress from one stage to the next. Rather, the great moments (Augenblicke) arise from the Incalculable and insert themselves in between one stage and the next.(69) These moments as Aufbrueche constitute "breaks" in the linear progression of history into the real (Durchbruch ins Wirkliche).(71) For Moeller, these breaks go beyond the grasp of rationality and calculability. Moreover, they are beyond the reach of all politics. In the moment when the break (Aufbruch) occurs in linear, progressive time, "there is no longer any politics but only history."(71) Thus the Aufbruch is a metaphysical occurrence which belongs to the Incalculable.
Moeller here diverges from Spengler in the sense that Moeller believes human freedom can affirm or deny the unique metaphysical destiny which the Aufbruch offers in terms of possibilities. Beneath the rational, linear surface of each nation lies a unique destiny (Schicksal) which breaks forth spontaneously in the Aufbruch.(72) This is what the Germans need:
. . . they should be seized by a conviction of obeying a metaphysical destiny in this sense, an inward conviction which need have no rational proof or test, but is the expression of the vital urge which shows itself in the growth of their population and is justified by its own reality and power.(71)
The similarities are striking when we compare Hellingrath's interpretation of the hard jointure, Juenger's moments of shock experienced at the f'ront, and Moeller's notion of a breakthrough of' destiny into linear time. All of them present variations on the theme of a revolutionary awakening which involves the subversion of the logical, rational order in order to establish a new community. For Hellingrath, Hoelderlin subverts the grammar of logic in the German language in order to establish a new linguistic space for a future German community. Wilhelm Michel continues this line of interpretation when he claimed in 1926 that "Hoelderlin is the revolutionary awakening [der Aufbruch ] from the science of nature to the piety of nature."(74)
For Juenger, the experience of the front subverted the rationally ordered consciousness of ideologies on the left (Marxism) and the right (bourgeois capitalism). The war was the beginning of the German revolution or Aufbruch in the sense that it was the first catastrophe in which the world of the Enlightenment was shattered and a new gestalt of "humanity" began to be forged. This new configuration of human being was the worker--turned--machine.(75) Even nationalism and socialism would be destroyed in the fiery process of this paradigm change.(76) This new reality, which would be a global one, would not emerge through the resolution or synthesis of oppositions and antitheses but rather through their intensification. The goal was not to reconcile oppositions but to sharpen them so that one could pass between and beyond them.(77)
For Moeller, the moment (Augenblick) as a metaphysical Aufbruch of destiny subverts the rational, linear progression of history. What Moeller called "the mysterious Germany" (das unheimliche Deutschland) in one of his last articles (January 1924) would rise up from the brink of political suicide in order to establish a third German Relch.(78) Unlike Hellingrath's secret Germany, the thought of this third Reich was a philosophical idea -- "our last and our highest philosophy"(79) -- and would provide a synthesis between the old oppositions and contradictions.
The Ripe Moment
When Heidegger and Scheler met for three days toward the very end of 1927 on Scheler's initiative, both philosophers were clearly aware of this revolutionary process which had been building since the end of the war. Both wanted to see a rebirth of the German spirit. Both agreed
that the official philosophical situation was hopeless and that the moment was ripe "to risk again the step into an authentic metaphysics, that is, to develop metaphysics from the ground up." (80)Scheler clearly saw the danger of the fascist tendencies in the revolutionary drive of the youth movement and of radical conservatives as well as the dictatorial tendencies of Marxism and National Socialism.(81) In all those movements, he saw a massive resublimation taking place in which the vital drive or life force had burst asunder and swept away the old, hardened, and ineffectual forms of the intellect. Indeed, it was "a transformation of man himself."(82) However, without any guidance from the spirit, the vital drive or life force would become anarchic. This called for a new metaphysics -- for Scheler, a philosophical anthropology -- whereby a new interpenetration and new integration of drive and spirit could be achieved. Only in this way was it possible to overcome what Scheler called the "disease of all intellectual life in Europe," that is, the old dichotomies between idea and reality and between thought and action.(83) The ideal of the coming era of adjustment (Ausgleich) between spirit and drive was what Scheler called the total man (Allmensch), which he described as follows:
The man who is most deeply rooted in the darkness of the earth and nature....... the man who, simultaneously, as a spiritual person, in his consciousness of self, reaches the utmost heights of the luminous world of ideas, that man is approaching the idea of total man, and wherewith, the idea of the substance of the very source of the world, through a constantly growing interpenetration of spirit and drive. "The person who thinks most deeply, loves what is most alive." (Hoelderlin) (84)
Surprisingly, we find Scheler using Hoelderlin's poetic thought as an exemplification of how
the highest tension between spirit and drive could be bridged. In order words, Hoelderlin's poetry points toward the future integration "of these two forces into one form of existence and one kind
of action."(85)For Heidegger, however, the task of developing metaphysics from the ground up did not involve yet another synthesis or integration of opposites: "Just reconciling differences will never be really productive." (86) Heidegger says of Scheler that he
... was optimistic and believed he had found the solution, while I was convinced we had not yet even raised and developed the problem radically and totally. My essential intention is to post the problem and work it out in such a way that the essentials of the entire Western tradition will be concentrated in the simplicity of a basic problem. (87)
What Heidegger is referring to is the problem of the ontological difference, more precisely, the problem of being as the difference itself.
As I shall show in a moment, Heidegger's understanding of being as difference, which includes its philosophical as well as historical significance, forms the context which defines the way he uses the
word Aufbruch in the rectoral address. I have already mentioned the historical context: the task of the German Aufbruch is to reenact the original event of Greek philosophy which had invaded the German future. But Heidegger does not state in any precise way the philosophical meaning of the word Aufbruch in the address; he holds it back. This is an example of' Heidegger's way
of holding back aspects of his thought from his political speeches. But this "holding back" is also a double-edged sword. On the one hand by leaving this word philosophically vague, Heidegger could play his philosophical "cards" close to the vest when he entered the political arena; on the other hand, the same vagueness creates the likelihood that a cursory reading of the address will result in the impression that Heidegger seems to agree with Nazi ideology.To understand the philosophical meaning of the word, we must go back to The Essence of Reason (1929) and Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-30), where it appears for the first time in a significant way. In the former, the word appears twice, in the following phrases: (1) ein
Aufbruch von Welt (" an uprising [or emergence] of the world") (88) and (2) das Aufbrechen
des Abgrundes (" the breaking-open of the abyss "). (89) In both cases, the words Aufbruch
and Aufbrechen refer to the essence of Dasein -- its transcendence. However, this transcendence
has already been defined earlier in the text in terms of the ontological difference. (90) What this means is that Dasein's transcendence is not to be understood as grounded in the ontological truth of beingness (the being of entities) or the ontical truth of beings; rather, Dasein's transcendence must be understood more primordially in terms of the difference between the two.(91) Transcendence, as a primordial temporal movement (Urbewegung), spans this dimension between being and beings.(92) But the happening of this dimension, the breaking open of this abyss of Dasein, is an event over which Dasein has no power.(93)In Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, especially at the end of that lecture course, Heidegger presses his questioning toward the conditions of Dasein's thrownness. As a thrown projection, Dasein is made possible and constituted by the breaking open of the difference or the "between" itself: transcendence is understood "as eruption [Einbruch] into the difference of being [presence] and beings [present entities], more precisely, as the breaking-open of this Between [Aufbrechen dieses Zwischen] . . . ."(94) This Between is the dimension of being as presencing-and-absencing.
As Heidegger says in Basic Concepts,Human being is history, or better, history is human being. Human being is carried away in the transition and thereby essentially "absenting." Absenting in a fundamental sense -- not in any way present at hand but rather absenting in that he moves away [wegwest] into what has been and into what is coming, absenting and never present at hand, but existing in ab-sence.(95)
Being as difference is the event of the opening of time itself wherein past, present, and future are differentiated and thus the boundaries of presencing and absencing, concealing and unconcealing. Being as difference is the originary jointure (Fuegung) of presencing-and-absencing. This is the philosophical meaning of the word Aufbruch for Heidegger. Greek philosophy emerges from this Aufbruch during the time of the Presocratics.(96) By the time of Plato and Aristotle, however, this understanding of being has been reduced to permanent presence, which excludes absence and concealment altogether.
Heidegger is in agreement here with Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Juenger, and Hans Freyer insofar as they claimed that the German Aufbruch was a revolutionary change; he also agreed that this change went beyond the calculable sense of history as a linear progression, beyond party politics, beyond capitalism and Marxism, beyond modern liberal subjectivity, and beyond modern rationalism. However, he parts company with them and the Nazis insofar as their interpretations of the Auftruch were based on some form of Nietzsche's early vitalism or will to power, or on some form of Volkisch or racial "substance," or on some inner experience (Erlebnis) of subjectivity.
In the rectoral address, Heidegger claims that this Aufbruch, as the origin of Greek philosophy,
had invaded the German future. But how is this possible? Through language. Although language
does not appear to play any significant role in the Rektoratsrede, it is important to remember how
Heidegger describes the Aufbruch of Greek philosophy:Here, for the first time, Western man raises himself up from a popular base and, by
virtue of his language [my emphasis], stands up to the reality of what is.... (97)Thus the Greek language originally enabled the Greeks to confront the difference as a jointure (Fuegung) of presencing-and-absencing, concealing-and- unconcealing. Although Heidegger does not use the language of presencing and absencing in the address, he does so earlier in his lecture course On the Essence of Truth (1931-32), where he characterizes aletheia as a setting apart of unconcealment and concealment. When Heidegger says in the address that the university community should resolutely submit or enjoin itself (fuegen) to this distant command (Verfuegung) (99), he means the university community should enjoin itself to the difference as a jointure (Fuegung) of presencing-and-absencing which has invaded the German future.
It is precisely at this point that Hoelderlin becomes so significant for Heidegger: the place where
the most intimate of transitions has occurred between the Greek and the German languages is in Hoelderlin's translation of Pindar and Sophocles as well as in his late poetry which bears the impact of that transition (Uebergang). To put it bluntly, the Aufbruch from which Greek philosophy and thus Western science arose had invaded the German future through the language of Hoelderlin's poetry. Hoelderlin opened up the German language to those aspects of the Greek language and its grammar which enabled the Greeks to confront the difference itself. Hellingrath in his own way perceived that Hoelderlin's translations and poetry represented a breakthrough beyond the grammar of logic.Already in Being and Time, Heidegger talked about the need to liberate grammar from logic in order to penetrate the ontology of the present-at-hand.(100) In Basic Concepts, he claimed that logic had become entrenched in the grammar of language:
. . . the logical theory of the logos as proposition took over the dominion within the theory of logos generally as speech and language, that is, in the grammar.(101)
However, if the event of aletheia as a jointure of presence-and-absence were to occur again,
there would first have to be a change in language itself.
Again, in Basic Concepts Heidegger hints that this was indeed taking place:
It is not because of capriciousness or eccentricity in philosophy that we today no longer speak of
lived experiences, conscious experiences and consciousness but rather we are compelled to another language because of a change of existence ... [which] occurs with this other language. (102)
By 1931-32, or shortly thereafter, Heidegger writes that "[t]he essence of truth will change and
our questioning must set this change in motion." (103 ) The "new reality" Heidegger mentioned
in his April 3,1933, letter to Jaspers was " [t]this change of the essence of truth, at whose
beginning we stand, [which] is the revolutionary upheaval [Umwaelzung] of the whole of man's
being."(104)
But how was questioning to set this change in motion? What was this "other language" in and through which the German Aufbruch would unfold toward a confrontation with being as difference? The question of what language would be used to interpret the revolution was a
crucial one in 1933-34, especially in the area of univesity reform. As Farias and others before him have pointed out, a political and ideological vacuum existed during the first year or so of the Gleichschaltung (alignment or coordination) concerning the role of the universities in the revo-
lution. (105) It was during this period that the battle was fought over the language of the revolution.
Heidegger's Strategy
If the purpose of Heidegger's political involvement was to guide the German revolution or Aufbruch (especially in the universities) toward a confrontation with the difference itself as the origin of Greek philosophy, the primary way he sought to accomplish this was to gain access to the "inside," that is, political access to the arena where the struggle over the language of the revolution was being waged. Heidegger's strategy was primarily a linguistic strategy consisting of two interrelated aspects.In his article on Heidegger's rectoral address, Graeme Nicholson has already indicated the first aspect of this strategy: Heidegger appropriated certain Nazi street words such as Kampf (struggle), Arbeit (work), Gemeinschaft (community), Volk (people), Entscheidung (decision), Fuehrerschaft (leadership), and Aufbruch into his philosophy in order to redefine and transform the meaning of these terms. (106) Nicholson shows this explicitly in relation to Heidegger's use of Fuehrer, Volk, and Kampf. By displacing these terms from the context of Nazi ideology into the context of his own philosophy, Heidegger attempted to redirect the meaning of these terms. In the case of the word Volk, for example, the biological concept becomes subordinated to the historical concept of Volk. (107)
Unfortunately, Nicholson's exegesis does not go beyond the rectoral address and does not attempt to connect this aspect of Heidegger's linguistic strategy to the larger context of his philosophical concerns. Moreover, Nicholson's claim that Kampf cannot be interpreted as polemos is incorrect. He says that the interpretation of Kampf as polemos "is unacceptable where it diverts attention to cosmological struggles of earth, gods, etc."(108) I would argue that Kampf in the rectoral address is defined in terms of Aufbruch and that Kampf means a thinking-questioning confrontation with the origin of Greek philosophy. This event from which Greek philosophy arises ( bricht auf )is the opening up of temporality and its differentiation into its ecstatic dimensions of past, present, and future -- in a word, the differencing of presence and absence. This is the event which had invaded the German future via Hoelderlin's poetry.
Heidegger's own use of the word Aufbruch is one of the best examples of how he displaces a term out of its Nazi context and transforms its meaning into the context of his philosophy. The Nazis used the word Aufbruch to signify not only the eruption of the racial-volkisch "substance" into German consciousness but also the victory of this eruption on the national level in the form of National Socialism. Both Krieck and Baeumler used the word in this way. (109) Krieck, for
example, in his slim volume Volk im Werden (1932), claimed that the only task which faced German poetics and art was that of shaping and framing this Aufbruch or break-out of racial-volkisch "substance." ( 110 )For Heidegger, however, the Greek Aufbruch as the beginning of philosophy originates from an event, that is, the happening of the temporality of being whereby the Western economy of presence (being) and absence (nonbeing) was first established. Even when Heidegger uses the word to designate the German revolution, in no way can it be read as an attempt to retrieve a racial-volkisch "substance" from the Greeks. In his lecture course during the summer of 1933 entitled The Basic Question of Philosophy, Heidegger states that the great beginning of the Greeks lies in their poetry and philosophy and that the Greeks "cast themselves off for the first time into that questioning which clears and thinks and out of which the spiritual world of the West was to be built." (111)
There is no doubt that Heidegger was trying to penetrate the ontology of the present-at-hand
by deconstructing it to its Greek origin in the event of being as difference and that the German revolution was an opening beyond that ontology. He also knew, I believe, that the entrenchment of Nazi ideology meant the domination of yet another version of this ontology -- only in this case it would be based on racial-volkisch "substance." Instead of confronting this racial ontology directly, he used a double language whereby he appropriated a certain range of Nazi discourse in order to subvert it. The subversion, however, is extremely subtle. If this is so, then the question arises as to how Heidegger's audience was supposed to understand the way in which he was subverting the language.This brings me to the second aspect of Heidegger's linguistic strategy. If Heidegger was subverting the language, into what context was he trying to shift and transform it? It is precisely at this juncture that the problem of the content of Heidegger's political speeches became pertinent. There appears to be no specific concrete political content and conceptualization in them that could serve as a context for understanding how Heidegger was using language in a new way and apart from Nazi ideology.
This lack of political content and conceptualization, however, is deliberate on Heidegger's part. The context into which the Nazi street words are transferred is not explicated conceptually either in terms of politics or philosophy because to do so would have been to explain the subversion he was attempting. Rather, Heidegger tried to enact the subversion through his use of the language. The second aspect of his linguistic strategy consisted in his attempt to embody the energeia of the revolution in the very grammar of his speeches. In other words, the subversive element in Heidegger's speeches resides primarily in the way he uses language and grammar, the way his language works.
The linguistic action of' Heidegger's words and grammatical constructions function in at least
two ways: (1) it builds up a context in and through which the words he uses are displaced from their connection to Nazi ideology and (2) it provides a prelogical logos or housing in which these words are fastened and secured apart from that ideology. In this way, Heidegger sought to provide the "other language" in and through which the German Aufbruch could be set in motion as a change in the essence of truth.In his study of Heidegger's language, Erasmus Schoefer has identified three types of grammatical constructions that Heidegger employes in order to move beyond the grammar of is-predication:
the hermeneutic circle as a larger grammatical structure of sentences, the figura etymologica,and paronomasia. (112) These constructions are designed to liberate grammar from logic, that is, to articulate a prelogical but not an alogical logos. Both of the latter constructions are already in use in "What Is Metaphysics?": the figura etymologica in the phrase "the nothing nihilates" (113) and the paronomasia in the sentence "The question [die Frage] of the nothing puts us -- the questioners [die Fragenden] -- in question [uns in Frage stellen]." (114)The paronomasia assembles together different word types such as die Frage, die Fragenden, in Frage stellen based on the same word stem (fragen). As Schoefer indicates, this circumscribes the phenomenon through etymological iteration which manifests the moments of the phenomenon without the use of is-predication.(115) The paronomasia enacts grammatically what Heidegger is trying to show conceptually: the moments which belong to the phenomenon of questioning ( the question, the questioners, that which is questioned ) are maintained, held together by their linguistic relations to the stem word (fragen). Furthermore, these moments belong to the movement of questioning which not only puts the subject matter in question but at the same time puts the questioners themselves in question.
This movement of questioning becomes crucial in Heidegger's rectoral address where it figures as the movement of hermeneutic retrieval between the Greek and the German Aufbruch. But this movement is not a mere repeating of the Greek Aufbruch; it questions the origin of the Greek Aufbruch (the origin of the ontology of the present-at-hand), at which point it will transform "into the completely unguarded exposure to the hidden and the uncertain, i.e. the questionable." (116) Even when Heidegger does not use the grammatical form of a paronomasia, his exegesis of the movement of questioning in terms of various verbs shows the hermeneutic movement in all three temporal ecstases:
Such questioning shatters the [present] division of the sciences . . ., carries them back from their [present]... dispersal [to a more originary origin in the past] . . ., and exposes science [to that origin which has invaded the German future]....( 117)
Notice how Heidegger attempts to translate the movement of the revolution linguistically into the action of the verbs and thus to displace it into the movement of retrieval.
The following is an example of how Heidegger did explicate questioning in the grammatical form of the paranomasia:
But such questioning is no idle meditating, no inquisitive pumping for data but rather the highest irruptive spiritual entry [Einsatz] -- essential questioning. We hold our destiny out [halten . . . aus] to such questioning and hold ourselves out into [halten uns selbst hinein in] the darkness of the necessity of our history. This questioning, in which a people bears [aushalt] its historical Dasein, perseveres [durchhalt] in the midst of danger and threat and holds out for [hinaushalt] the greatness of its task; this questioning of a people is
its philosophizing, its philosophy. ( 118 )The paronomasia here is based on variations of the stem verb halten. The variations include halten . . . aus, halten . . . hinein, aushalten, durchhalten, and hinaushalten.
What the paronomasia enacts grammatically is the identity and difference of the hermeneutic
movement of questioning in and through the relationship between the verbal variants of the stem verb and the stem verb itself. The variations emphasize their specific difference through their directional prefixes such as durch and hinaus while maintaining their identity in the stem verb halten. The paronomasia accomplishes a grammatical gathering together and setting apart at the same time. It enacts linguistically the prelogical logos of questioning as a temporally determined movement which participates in both presence and absence. Questioning holds itself out into both the absence of the past and the absence of the future. This dimension of absence (and concealment) is one which traditional logic cannot reach precisely because it is based on the ontology of permanent presence and restricts itself to whatever is presently present in the present.In the above example, we can see clearly how Heidegger takes a word like Einsatz (which the Nazis used as a reference both to the political empowerment of' the National Socialist party on the national level and to the growing domination of their racial-biological worldview) and transforms it through his use of the paronomasia. For Heidegger, Einsatz is the entry into the hermeneutic movement of questioning circumscribed by the verb halten. The movement of questioning itself becomes the essence of a people's historical existence. It cannot be reduced to the political empowerment of a party or to a worldview based on a racial-volkisch "substance." The paronomasia relocates the word Einsatz into a grammatical knot of verbs which "redefines" it apart from Nazi ideology.
Failure
Heidegger's use of his linguistic strategy in the political arena did not do unnoticed. In January,
1934, Johannes Harms' article entitled " On the German of German Philosophers " appeared in
the journal Muttersprache in which the author praised Heidegger's use of neologisms, his compact
sentence structure, and the way in which he " repeatedly discovers the German language anew...."
(119) Harms also praised Heidegger for finding new possibilities of expression, citing precisely the
kinds of verbal variants (and their prefixes) such as wegruecken and bedraengt which Heidegger
used in his paronomasia. (120) Krieck used Harms' article as the opportunity for his first attack
against Heidegger which focused on his use of language.
Another article also appeared in January 1934 by Richard Deinhardt, who also praised Heidegger's use of language while criticizing that of other philosophers as still being ego-captivated and unable to use a common language close to the peasantry. For Deinhardt, Heidegger's work, however, shows the unity of thought and language.(121) His language had Schwung (movement), vehaltene Kraft (concealed power), and Wucht (fervor). (122) In fact, he claimed that "no work has been produced since the German mystics and Hegel . . . which creates new words from the depths of the spirit of the language like Being and Time."(123)Clearly, Heidegger's use of language had an impact; it was noticed and discussed. It was also this use of language and its impact which posed a threat to the faction that formed against Heidegger in the early part of 1934 consisting primarily of Krieck and Erich Jaensch. Krieck's attacks against Heidegger in Volk in Werden were directed primarily against Heidegger's language. On February 14, 1934, after hearing rumors that Heidegger was to be chosen as head of the proposed Prussian Academy of Professors, which was to be expanded for the whole of Germany, Krieck wrote Jaensch asking him to prepare an obviously negative report on Heidegger as material to be sent to higher party functionaries as well as to the Ministry of Education.(124) Jaensch's twenty-three-page evaluation also included the report of an experiment he performed with his students which consisted in "observing their reactions to sentences which were constructed in Heidegger's terminology." (125) What Jaensch learned from his experiment was that these statements had a suggestive influence on the student who, however, "was unable to formulate coherent and cohesive explanations for them."(126) According to Jaensch, Heidegger's thinking manifests a kind of schizophrenia; it would be "a contradiction to sound reason" to put him in charge of perhaps the most important future educational institution in the country. (127)
What Krieck and Jaensch discerned was Heidegger's attempt to move beyond scientific rationalism and traditional logic which is reflected in his use of language. Heidegger's "verbal magic" had indeed become a threat to them politically, and the way to dispose of it was to brand it the result of a schizophrenic thinking rooted in the contamination of Jewish phenomenology and Talmudic exegesis.(128)
This characterization of his thought and language, however, should not have come as a complete surprise to Heidegger. The primary goal of his philosophical thought including his political involvement was to displace metaphysical thinking into the dimension of being as absence so that it would respond to it. The Aufbruch of 1933 was a Ruck (jolt) not so much toward the right but rather a jolt into this dimension of being as absence and thus toward the difference itself. The "death of God," World War 1, the world depression of 1929, and the fall of the Weimar government signaled the collapse of the modern metaphysical order of presence. The abyss of Dasein which this collapse opened was the dimension of being as absence, as darkness, as concealment and thus opened the way to the difference itself.
What Heidegger meant by this was that the Aufbruch as a breakthrough from the dominance of presence to the dimension of absence (both the past and the future) made possible the event of the opening up of ecstatic temporality as such of past, present, and future, that is, of presence and absence. But this event of the opening of temporality was nothing other than the event wherein the past, the present, and the future are differentiated, bounded, and enjoined. In short, the event of the opening of temporality "is" the event of the difference as the "differencing" of temporality, as the "differencing" of presence (traditionally called being) and absence (traditionally called nonbeing).
The effort to displace thinking toward absence, however, involved the engagement of thought
in a prelogical logos. This obviously left Heidegger open to the charge that his philosophy was illogical, irrational, and nihilistic. Looking back, it was inevitable that Nazi ideology would turn against Heidegger and level these charges against his philosophy once that ideology gained power and sought to justify its racial biology in rational terms. And it did so precisely as another metaphysics of presence. In this case, however, the permanence of presence was not based on the idea of the good or God or the absolute spirit --, rather, it was interpreted as the will to power based on biology and race or, as Krieck called it, the racial-volkisch "substance."(129) As another metaphysics of presence, Nazism would find Heidegger's displacement of thought toward a prelogical logos which necessarily deconstructed presence back to a more original conception of being and time a threat to its stability. It is not a complete surprise, therefore, to find Krieck and Jaensch slinging such epithets as "a philosopher contaminated by Jewish thought," "schizophrenic," "nihilist," "talmudic exegete," and "irrational" at Heidegger.The racial, biological version of the metaphysics of presence is clearly presented in Krieck's slim volume entitled Volk in Process (1932; he will give the journal he edited the same title). In this work, Krieck sets forth the metaphysical principle which provides the unity and permanence underlying all change:
Body, mind and spirit are once again grasped as modes and forms of expression of the unifying and eternal ground of life [and] reduced to a common alignment and direction by the overarching and spreading law of blood and of race. (130)
He even compares this principle of unity with Heraclitus' logos. Just as this unchangeable logos provided the measure and center for the flow of Greek life, so, too, the metaphysical volkisch substance of blood and race provides the permanence for that of the Germans. (131) Thus the task of the Germans is not to appropriate the Greek sense of polis but to structure and shape the volkisch substance. (132)
The epithets which Krieck and Jaensch throw at Heidegger are the language in which a metaphysics of presence based on race and biology attacks its opponents who are in a position to disturb and disrupt that presence. Toward the end of his first article against Heidegger, Krieck quoted loosely from Matthew 26:73, stating "'Your language betrays you, Galilean!'" (133) This
is clearly aimed at Heidegger's use of language which, according to Krieck, identified Heidegger as a philosopher who did not share the Nazi ideology based on a racist metaphysics of presence. Krieck, however darkly, had spotted Heidegger's linguistic strategy and exposed it. Heidegger could no longer divert the energeia of the revolution into a genuine renewal and retrieval of thought through the "word magic" of his linguistic strategy. The political fight for the language which was to give shape to the revolution was lost.What Heidegger saw taking place prior to and including 1933 through such scholars and classicists as Wolfgang Schadewaldt, W. F. Otto, Karl Reinhardt, and Friedrich Beissner was a renaissance in Greek studies which he interpreted as a reemergence of the question of being from the origins of the Greek tradition. All these scholars also agreed in varying ways that Hoelderlin's translations from the Greek and his late poetry were extremely important. This renaissance was to meet up with and join the revolutionary spirit of the German youth and forge the spearhead of the real revolution in the universities which would then radiate out into German society. This is what Heidegger meant, I believe, by his version of National Socialism. The alternative was to go down with what he perceived to be the collapse of modernity into a Juengerian nightmare somewhat like the transformation in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love of coal miners into machines.
When this is coupled with Heidegger's desire for German self-determination apart from the "isms" of modernity, we see him not only throwing his support to Hitler as a dictator who would make the transition possible but also plunging into the political arena of National Socialism in order to guide that transition. I use the word "plunge" because there is no evidence that Heidegger was a political person prior to 1933 -- in fact, in the Reichtag elections of 1932, Heidegger (according to his son, Dr. Hermann Heidegger) still voted for the small, politically insignificant party of Wuerttemberg winegrowers. (134)He plunged into politics, I think, because he believed that, like a Janus, his double language would enable him to accomplish two tasks at once: on the one hand, his language appeared, on the surface at least, close enough to the ideology to pass muster, while on the other it covertly circumscribed and displaced the metaphysical foundations of the ideology into the hermeneutic movement of questioning. In other words, Heidegger thought he could guide the revolution by stealing the language out from under the noses of Nazi ideologues such as Krieck, Baeumler, and Rosenberg. As late as 1935 in An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger still believed that a revolution in language was the prerequisite for a revolution in education: ". . . the first step must be a real revolution in the prevailing relation to language." (135)
NOTES
1. Karl A. Moehling, "Martin Heidegger and the Nazi Party: An Examination," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1972, p. 40; see also Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, tr. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 193. I am using Moehling's translation because the English translation of this letter in Farias is incorrect. In most cases the translations from the German edition of Farias are my own; see n.111.
2. Farias, Heidegger, pp. 202-203.
3. Moehling, "Martin Heidegger," pp. 264-272.
4. Ibid., pp. 29, 264.
5. Karl Jaspers, "On Heidegger," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 7 (Spring 1978): 122.
6. Beda Allemann, "Martin Heidegger und die Politik," in Otto Poggeler, ed., Heidegger (Koln und Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969), p. 255; Robert Minder, "Heidegger, Hebel und die Sprache von Messkirch," Der Monat, 114 (1966): 13.
7. Joseph Kockelmans, On the Truth of Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.267.
8. Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger: Documente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern, 1962), p. 150; see also Farias, Heidegger, p. 142.
9. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 7.
10. Martin Heidegger, "The, Self-Assertion of the German University," Review of Metaphysics, 38 (March 1985): 473.
11. Ibid., p. 471.
12. Ibid., p. 473.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 480; Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 116.
15. Heidegger, "Self-Assertion," p. 479.
16. Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 149.
17. Farias, Heidegger, p. 143.
18. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterweg zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988), p. 31.
19. Ibid.
20. Klemens von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 44, 47; Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 45.
21. Fritz Stem, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 176; James H. McRandle, The Track of the Wolf- Essays on National Socialism and Its Leader, Adolf Hitler (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 54-57.
22. Richard Sheppard, "German Expressionism," in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism 1890-1930 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976), p. 277.
23. Michael Hamburger, Contraries: Studies in German Literature (New York: Dutton, 1970), p.280.
24. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 78.
25. Martin Heidegger, Fruehe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermannn, 1972), pp. 347-348.
26. Norbert von Hellingrath, Holderlin: Zwei Vortraege, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hugo Bruckmann Verlag, 1922), pp. 41, 44.
27. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 383.
28. Ibid., p. 377.
29. Ibid., p. 380.
30. Ibid., p. 374.
31. Ibid., p. 372.
32. Ibid., p. 3 8 1.33. Norbert von Hellingrath, "Kunstcharakter der Hoelderlinischen Uebertragungen," in Der George-Kreis: Eine Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. Georg Peter Landmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), p. 113. See also M. B. Benn, Hoelderlin and Pindar ('S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962), pp.138-139, and Eric L. Santer, Friedrich Hoelderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 84-85, 100-101.
34. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 324-326.
35. Hellingrath, "Kunstcharakter," p. 114.
36. Ibid, p. 116.
37. Benn, Hoelderlin and Pindar, pp. 138-139.
38. Friedrich Hoelderlin, Hymns and Fragments, tr. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 28.
39. Steiner, A