In eight Inner Circle Seminars over the last few years we have immersed ourselves in the
detailed reports of the seminars that the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave
between 1959 and 1969 in the home of the Swiss psychiatrist and Daseinsanalyst
Medard Boss at Zollikon near Zurich, retracing them after fifty years almost to the day. We have also
started to explore the discussions between Heidegger and Boss which were the
ground from which the seminars sprang.
In today’s seminar we step back even further and look at Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. It is here that, according to his brother Fritz, Martin Heidegger is
most authentically himself and his real philosophy is to be found. Yet
twenty-six short entries in these Notebooks
have been the occasion of yet another Heidegger ‘scandal’. How seriously should we take this ‘scandal’?
It has long been known that Heidegger was a paid-up member of the Nazi
party from 1933 to 1945; that he was Nazi Rector of
Freiburg University; that he told students: ‘The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law’;
and that in 1949 he said: ‘Farming is now a motorised
food-industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas
chambers and extermination camps.’ Was he ‘philosophically’ trivialising Nazi mass murder? But did he
not have warm relationships, and even at least two love affairs, with Jewish
students and colleagues? Did he not have a friendship, even after 1945, with
Martin Buber? Granted, he had complained before the war about the ‘Jewification’
of Germany,
but perhaps he meant this ‘metaphysically’? Heidegger was, it was said, a great
thinker, and not ‘anti-Semitic’ as his granddaughter Gertrud says his
wife Elfride was to the end of her life.
The rumours, rather than the reading, of
the Black Notebooks with their sprinkling of twenty-six remarks about
Jews have shaken this view. Peter Trawny, in two influential books, has claimed
the Notebooks prove Heidegger was indeed an ‘anti-Semite’. But if we take this word in the
non-religious sense of Wilhelm Marr in the nineteenth century, or in the
pseudoscientific, ‘biological’, ‘racial’ sense of the Nazis in the twentieth
century, then the Notebooks show unequivocally that Heidegger insisted,
with justification, that he was not an ‘anti-Semite’. In the Notebooks he denounces ‘anti-Semitism’ as ‘foolish and
reprehensible’, and he attacks Nazi ‘racial’ doctrine as itself part of the
same destructive ‘calculative’ ‘machination’ and ‘uprooting’ of which he
accuses not only In eight Inner Circle Seminars over the last few years we have immersed ourselves in the
detailed reports of the seminars that the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave
between 1959 and 1969 in the home of the Swiss psychiatrist and Daseinsanalyst
Medard Boss at Zollikon near Zurich, retracing them after fifty years almost to the day. We have also
started to explore the discussions between Heidegger and Boss which were the
ground from which the seminars sprang.
In today’s seminar we step back even further and look at Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. It is here that,
according to his brother Fritz, Martin Heidegger is most authentically himself
and his real philosophy is to be found. Yet twenty-six short entries in these Notebooks have been the occasion of yet
another Heidegger ‘scandal’. How seriously
should we take this ‘scandal’?
It has long been known that Heidegger was a paid-up member of the Nazi
party from 1933 to 1945; that he was Nazi Rector of
Freiburg University; that he told students: ‘The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law’;
and that in 1949 he said: ‘Farming is now a motorised
food-industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas
chambers and extermination camps.’ Was he ‘philosophically’ trivialising Nazi mass murder? But did he not
have warm relationships, and even at least two love affairs, with Jewish
students and colleagues? Did he not have a friendship, even after 1945, with
Martin Buber? Granted, he had complained before the war about the ‘Jewification’
of Germany,
but perhaps he meant this ‘metaphysically’? Heidegger was, it was said, a great
thinker, and not ‘anti-Semitic’ as his granddaughter Gertrud says his
wife Elfride was to the end of her life.
The rumours, rather than the reading, of
the Black Notebooks with their sprinkling of twenty-six remarks about
Jews have shaken this view. Peter Trawny, in two influential books, has claimed
the Notebooks prove Heidegger was indeed an ‘anti-Semite’. But if we take this word in the
non-religious sense of Wilhelm Marr in the nineteenth century, or in the
pseudoscientific, ‘biological’, ‘racial’ sense of the Nazis in the twentieth
century, then the Notebooks show unequivocally that Heidegger insisted,
with justification, that he was not an ‘anti-Semite’. In the Notebooks he denounces ‘anti-Semitism’ as ‘foolish and
reprehensible’, and he attacks Nazi ‘racial’ doctrine as itself part of the
same destructive ‘calculative’ ‘machination’ and ‘uprooting’ of which he
accuses not only ‘Weltjudentum’ (‘World Jewry’) but also the Bolsheviks,
the Americans, the English, in fact almost everybody except traditional
non-Bolshevik Russians, Martin Heidegger, and of all people Lawrence of Arabia,
an enemy of Germany in the first world war! He insists that his discussion of
the role of ‘Weltjudentum’ is not to do with ‘race’, but is ‘a
metaphysical questioning of the kind of humanity that can with downright
abandon undertake the uprooting of all being from Being’. He sees his teacher
Husserl, a convert to Christianity, as handicapped from attaining true insight
by the inescapable fact that he is, still, a Jew; but this is presumably a
cultural, not a ‘racial’, judgement; or if, in some Heideggerian sense, it is ‘racial’, this is not the Nazi ‘biological’
concept of ‘race’.
Trawny
simply disbelieves Heidegger, and calls him an anti-Semite anyway. But why should
we not believe Heidegger? Why should we not believe T. S. Eliot, who saw ‘freethinking
Jews’ as more ‘deracinated’ than free-thinking post-Christians and thought
Judaism a not very ‘portable’ religion,
but revered Martin Buber (as did Heidegger) and denounced ‘anti-Semitism’ as,
from the Christian viewpoint, a ‘sin’ and a ‘heresy’?
Why should
Heidegger and Eliot not criticise Judaism?
Judaism
differs from Christianity in many ways. The notion of a ‘Judaeo-Christian
tradition’ is a nineteenth-century politically correct euphemism. It blurs the
differences between these religions. Christianity asserts and Judaism rejects: ‘Original
Sin’; the divinity of Jesus; the Resurrection; the overcoming of Torah (law)
through faith in Jesus’s saving presence. Why should each of these religions
not, in a civil and civilised way, while recognising the right of the other to
its position, nevertheless advocate its own position and oppose the other?
Heidegger
sometimes opposes Judaic views from a Christian viewpoint and sometimes opposes
both Judaic and Christian views from a Greek viewpoint. Sometimes, in
traditional Christian or post-Christian fashion, he says things which are almost unthinkingly
critical of Judaism. In Being and
Time, and also in the Black
Notebooks, Heidegger casually uses the term ‘pharisaic’ in its conventional
Christian sense, as if the Pharisees had not been one of the most innovative
and liberal groups in history. Even after the Shoah, Heidegger’s Christian
theologian colleague Rudolf Bultmann, who bravely opposed Nazi ‘anti-Semitism’,
gives in his book Primal Christianity (recommended by R. D. Laing in The Divided Self) an
account replete with what are, from a Jewish perspective, ignorant assumptions
about the inferiority of Judaism. This is standard European culture, even at
its most sublime, as in Bach’s Passions. Such ‘anti-Judaism’ is not
experienced as a doctrine to be adopted or not: it is an unquestioning
presumption about the way things are. It presumes that a Jew can be saved by
converting to Christianity; indeed, there must remain enough Jews to be
converted at the end of time. ‘Anti-Judaism’
is not yet Wilhelm Marr’s
19th-century invention, ‘anti-Semitism’, far less the Nazis’ development of it
into an absolute ‘biological’ doctrine of ‘race’, although ‘anti-Judaism’ undoubtedly
prepared the ground for ‘anti-Semitism’. For the Nazi ‘anti-Semite’, the worst kind of Jew is the
one who converts to Christianity, or is an assimilated German, because he is
tenacious and harder to persuade there is no future for him in Germany. Nazi
‘anti-Semitism’ is absolute, simply because the Jews are an incompatible and
unacceptable ‘race’; there is no reason to disbelieve Heidegger’s denunciation
of such ‘anti-Semitism’. But when, in the Black
Notebooks, he accuses the Jews themselves of traditionally pioneering the
same kind of ‘calculative’ manipulation of ‘race’, Heidegger displays the ‘anti-Judaic’
prejudice that the Jews are a ‘race’, forgetting, if he ever registered, that
some of the greatest Jews were converts to Judaism, and that there are Jews of
all ‘races’.
Here it is
crucial to examine the role of Martin Luther in Heidegger’s (and European)
thinking. Heidegger began training as a Catholic theologian, but married a
Protestant woman and underwent a religious crisis. At the beginning of Being and Time, he lists
the current crises in the foundations of the natural and human sciences: for
example, the dispute between formalists and intuitionists in mathematics, the
questions raised by relativity in physics, and so on. But he does not mention
the names of the protagonists in these crises: Hilbert, Brouwer, Einstein, et al. Only in relation to one of the ‘sciences’ does
Heidegger mention a proper name: the ‘science’ of theology and its
transformation by Luther’s ‘insight’ into the primacy of faith We shall study the importance of Luther, as well as of his
precursor Paul, in Heidegger’s thinking, five hundred years after Luther posted
his ninety-five theses at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. For Luther, the Jews
were the archetypal children of the devil, whose essence was evil calculative
machination. Did this also influence Heidegger? Certainly, in an early lecture
course on the ‘phenomenology of the
religious life’, he extolled the ‘authenticity’
of Paul’s vision of community life in ‘Primal Christianity’.
But why
should Heidegger not be opposed to Judaic ideas? In fact, he is
opposed in many respects to both Judaism and Christianity, which, like
Nietzsche, he sees as itself Judaic. Heidegger’s religion is essentially Greek.
He may be right or wrong, if these terms are applicable here; but why should he
not be free to argue his case?
And what,
if any, are the implications of all this for the everyday practice of
psychotherapy? Can Heidegger’s thinking help us improve our practice, as the
Zollikon seminars make clear he hoped? It would seem so. But is he correct that
psychoanalysis is in essence ‘calculative machination’, as many existential
psychotherapists also seem to think? In the Black
Notebooks he writes of it in these terms, but in the Zollikon
seminars he is more nuanced, presumably under Boss’s influence. Existential
therapists generally seem closer to his Black
Notebooks position. If ‘calculative machination’ is all they can
see in psychoanalysis, are they not by that token guilty of it themselves? Is
this an unacknowledged ‘anti-Judaic’ tendency of existential therapy in
general?
The
Daseinsanalyst Gion Condrau expressed irritation that people mentioned what he
called Heidegger’s ‘political error’. Condrau told me that Boss told his
trainees they must not, in the Zollikon seminars, question Heidegger about his
Nazism. But Heidegger, if only for a short time, saw his so-called ‘political
error’ (and is ‘error’ the right word for a grave moral wrong?) as grounded in
his philosophical thinking. Might not existential or daseinsanalytic therapy,
also explicitly grounded in his philosophical thinking, be a ‘therapeutic
error’? In this seminar, I do not wish to argue this, but rather to be open to
this possibility. I hope that the consensus of participants in our seminars on
Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars, that his thinking is indeed a fundamental and beneficent
contribution to a more human and less alienated psychotherapy, will survive
such questioning and be confirmed by today’s seminar also.
We are
fortunate to have, as distinguished invited speakers, Professors Francesco
Alfieri, and Maurizio Borghi.
Professor Francesco Alfieri is a Franciscan Monk
at the Vatican and personal assistant to Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, himself private assistant to Martin
Heidegger from 1972 until Heidegger’s death in 1976, whom Heidegger entrusted
with the monumental task of bringing out the 102 volumes of his Collected
Works. Professors von Herrmann
and Alfieri have written a book,
already available in German and Italian, and soon to appear in English, in
which they seek to do justice to Heidegger’s position in the Black Notebooks.
Professor Maurizio Borghi has edited the Italian
translation of Heidegger's 1928-9 lectures (Introduction
to Philosophy) and contributed to the journal Heidegger Studies, including a paper on the allegation of ‘antisemitism’
in the Black Notebooks. He is Professor
in Law and Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and
Management at Bournemouth
University.
Your
contribution to the discussion will be warmly welcomed.
Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, mineral water, Durrants rock included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.
