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’?
Professor Fra Francesco Alfieri and Professor Maurizio Borghi (both distinguished Heidegger experts) and I, with your help, will give serious and adult consideration to the widespread assertion that these notebooks manifest Heidegger’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. We shall use the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s epochmaking posting of his 95 theses against the Catholic church to explore whether Heidegger’s profound respect for Luther embraced, among other things, Luther’s ferocious denunciation of the Jews. But our investigation will be based on the accusatorial legal tradition, not on the international inquisitorial method that has condemned Heidegger. That is to say, we shall ask what exactly is the ‘anti-Semitism’ with which he has been vaguely charged and on exactly what evidence he has been summarily convicted. We shall examine varieties of anti-Judaism and ‘anti-Semitism’ over two millennia. And we shall presume that Heidegger is innocent until proved guilty.
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, established by Paul, asserts and Judaism rejects: ‘Original
Sin’; the Incarnation, Divinity, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus; 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, which, he says, is still being transformed 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 criticising the Church at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. Luther hoped that one result of his criticisms would be that the Jews would convert to Christianity. When they did not, he denounced the Jews as the killers of God, 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 ‘primal Christian’ community life.
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 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, who attended Heidegger’s legendary intimate seminar ‘Time and Being’ in his ‘hut’ at Todtnauberg in September 1962 and became Heidegger’s private assistant from 1972 until
his death in 1976; Heidegger entrusted him 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.
Professor Fra Alfieri shows that, for example, an entry of Heidegger’s in the Black Notebooks that has been read as attacking the Hebrew prophets actually affirms that they were the true prophets while Hitler, who had claimed to be a prophet, was a false one.
Professor Borghi points out that, had Heidegger been antisemitic, he could have proclaimed this publicly to great acclaim during the Nazi era.
This seminar will, it is hoped, make clear that those who signal virtue by attacking Heidegger distract from real antisemitism and thus perpetuate it.
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
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue,
London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 +44 (0) 7809
433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
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.
