4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

INTL  

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Subscribe om just $2 per week

HIDE IMAGE

EUROPE 11 SEPTEMBER 2019

Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

Once discredited by his association with Nazism, Martin
Heidegger is enjoying a posthumous revival. So what is it
about his ideas that resonate with so many?

BY SAMUEL EARLE

   
   

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 1/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

Sign Up
Get the New
Statesman’s
Morning Call
email.

SIGN-UP

f every philosopher has a home that is not a house – the mountains, the sea, the city streets –
for Martin Heidegger, it was the Black Forest. This sprawling woodland, situated by the

I French border in south-west Germany, imbued Heidegger’s language – his writings are
lled with references to “forest paths”, “waymarks” and “clearings” – and shaped his
thought. There, in the solitude of his small wood cabin, he wrote his great work, Being and
Time.

The forest even infused Heidegger’s love life. During his a air with Hannah Arendt, which
began in 1924 while she was his student, Heidegger referred to her as his “wood nymph”.
Following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Arendt, who was Jewish, was forced to ee. But
their relationship resonated long after, in what the late scholar of comparative literature
Svetlana Boym called a “lover’s discourse”. In language, if not in life, “the poetic landmarks
of their interaction” – an exchange of concepts such as home, world and freedom; a shared
aching for ancient Greece; and a small chest of classical quotes to call upon – stood until the
end.

But today it’s another of Heidegger’s relationships that overshadows his life and legacy: his
a liation with the Nazi Party, which he joined in 1933 and never truly renounced. Heidegger
and Hitler also shared a lover’s discourse of sorts: terms such as Heimat (homeland), Volk
(people) and “historical destiny”, a fondness for the German forest, and contempt for
cosmopolitanism and “humanism”. Since the posthumous publication of Heidegger’s private
notebooks, their common foe is also beyond doubt, despite his feelings for Arendt: “World
Jewry”.

And yet, Heidegger still stands as one of the commanding gures of 20th-century philosophy.
His heirs include Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and
Jacques Derrida. His denial of mind-body dualism – his belief that we are rooted beings,
inextricable from time and place – continues to in uence elds as diverse as architecture,

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 2/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

ecology and art history. Readers are left to discern whether the essence of his ideas leads
inexorably to fascistic thinking or whether, in that aged refrain, the life can be separated from
the work, so that we are free to forage as we please.

Perhaps the most worrying sign of Heidegger’s relevance today lies in politics – where all
manner of dangerous reactionaries delight in declaring their indebtedness to him. Martin
Sellner, leader of the Austrian branch of the neo-fascist network Generation Identity – which
allegedly has ties to Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in attacks on two mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand this year – attributes his “path of thinking to Heidegger”. For the
ultra-conservative thinker and adviser to Vladimir Putin Aleksandr Dugin, mastering
Heidegger “is the main strategic task of the Russian people”. When Steve Bannon, Donald
Trump’s former chief strategist, was interviewed by Der Spiegel last year, he held up a
biography of Heidegger. “That’s my guy,” he said.

Heidegger’s thought cannot be con ned to a single idea or interpretation. He pined for a lost
harmony and simplicity, but left one of the most divisive and complex oeuvres in the history
of philosophy. He was a nature lover and a Nazi philosopher; an anti-Semite and an almost
rabbinical thinker (some Nazis were suspicious of his avid Jewish readers and wanted to ban
his work because of a perceived “Talmudic-Kabbalist” quality). He was obsessed with the
West and is adored by its self-appointed defenders. But he was also in uenced by Eastern
philosophy and, convinced that the West had lost its way, he became central to anti-Western
thought, inspiring the 1979 Iranian Revolution’s idea of “Westoxi cation”. Meanwhile, his
more spiritual musings circulate innocently on social media, as life advice for the lost at
heart.

****
***

There is no clear political philosophy in Heidegger. Born in 1889, in the small village of
Messkirch, he was a philosopher whose style was often willingly – some say comically –
opaque. Many of his key terms are so di cult to de ne that translators simply opt to keep the
original German. At the time of writing, “Martin Heidegger” is one of only 174 English
Wikipedia pages –out of a total 29 million – o cially agged as “incomprehensible” by the
site.

This is also one of the reasons why Heidegger’s standing is so fraught, even when his Nazism
and anti-Semitism are set aside. The way he wrote has especially irked Anglophile readers,

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 3/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

who suspect a man without substance. So whereas for Arendt he was “the secret king of
thought” and for Levinas “the greatest philosopher of the century”, Bertrand Russell, by
contrast, thought Heidegger did not even warrant a place in his History of Western Philosophy
(1945). “Heidegger is the only world-famous philosopher of the 20th century about whom it
can seriously be argued that he was a charlatan,” Bernard Williams wrote in 1981.

But when, in 1927, the professor of philosophy – already known as “the magician of
Messkirch” among his students – published Being and Time, the response was extraordinary.
Heidegger acquired international renown, an even more fervent following and the coveted
chair of phenomenology at Freiburg University, ideally located within the Black Forest.

The book was a refutation of the distinction between mind and body, and all the fallacies that
follow. “I think, therefore I am” was, in Heidegger’s reckoning, a “naive supposition”, an
anthropocentric conceit that went all the way back to Plato. Humans cannot be imagined
either outside or prior to the world into which they are “thrown” – a bed of land, language,
tradition, history and more. Heidegger believed that only once this embeddedness, this
“Being-there” (Dasein) in the world, is recognised can it be restored to its fullest, most
authentic form, and the “forgetfulness of Being”, “the homelessness of man” and “the
Fallenness of the world” overcome.

For Heidegger, the rise of Nazism seemed serendipitous. Here was a movement heaving with
his ideas, a rming the sacred soil on which Germans stood, exalting an existential enemy
and deriding the empty equality of liberalism. As the Nazis promised to ful l the “historical
destiny” of the German Volk, Heidegger saw an end to the spiritual void at the heart of
modern existence. Every day, he witnessed rationalism and science rid the world of wonder,
and the logic of the market subsume both society and mind, while machines, rather than
liberating humans, simply made them more machine-like. All this sprang, in Heidegger’s
eyes, from the mind-body dualism that rst separated life from landscape thousands of years
ago, and was then embodied by both Jews and cosmopolitan liberals. Heidegger thought that
Nazism represented – at least initially – a reunion with nature, history and the sacred power
of things. When the Nazis planned the autobahns, they wanted them to wind through
Heidegger’s beloved forest as much as possible, similarly sensing that it would arouse a
primordial, patriotic spirit.

****
***

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 4/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

The recognition of a spiritual homeland is at the heart of Heidegger’s appeal today. When
large numbers of citizens describe no longer feeling at home in their country, or say they
would rather live elsewhere, Heidegger’s belief that “homelessness is becoming the destiny
of the world” seems to have been borne out. Amid our global crisis of unbelonging,
Heidegger’s homesickness resonates with those who see themselves as strangers in their own
land.

Inadvertently or not, most of today’s far right speak in Heideggerian terms: lamenting the
rootlessness of modern life and the ravishing of national character by the liberal world order;
longing for a lost social harmony between land and people. So while, say, Nietzsche – another
favourite philosopher among the far right – fulminates on the fate of man, Heidegger’s
emphasis on home has made a compelling political philosophy easier to nd. On this basis,
Aleksandr Dugin – who has been described as “Putin’s brain” – nds in his thought a
“Fourth Political Theory”, against fascism (ostensibly), Marxism and – above all –
liberalism.

Just as Heidegger argued that a Volk is not simply “placed in an arbitrary unrelated strip of
land”, so does Dugin declare that a homeland is not one of those “arti cial societies that have
broken ties with their ethnic base”. Rather, Dugin says a true home is “a community of
language, religious belief, daily life, and shared resources and goals” – a Heimat, lled with a
feeling of belonging. “All philosophy is a form of homesickness,” Heidegger liked to say,
quoting the 18th-century poet, Novalis.

For Heidegger and his politically minded pupils, the cause behind our unsettled condition is
clear: liberalism. His understanding of liberalism was expansive, encompassing all notions of
abstract equality (including Marxism) and stemming from the misguided “metaphysics” of
mind-body dualism.

Any notion of a “universal” human must deny the embeddedness of Being, he argued, leaving
individuals to languish in a lifeless state. Long before our “age of globalisation”, Heidegger
warned that by wanting to treat everyone the same, liberalism would make the entire world
the same – robbing it of all the particularities that made life meaningful. Stripping humans of
their di erences in the name of equality led not to individual empowerment, but to collective
impoverishment – a spiritual death.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 5/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

This re ects one of the key paradoxes of the far right today. What seems like an attack on
di erence – a desire for ethnically homogeneous peoples – is actually experienced as a desire
for di erence: for a unique national character not to be subsumed within a globalised whole.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s Rassemblement National, calls globalisation la
mondialisation sauvage: it “was supposed to bring us prosperity and happiness”, she said
recently, “and in reality it brought us social and environmental devastation”. Even small
symbols such as blue passports or measuring with feet and pounds (as opposed to what Fox
News host Tucker Carlson calls “the tyranny of the metric system”) become the signs of an
authentic existence, totemic traditions that tie a “people” – an ethnos, a Volk – to the past.

As the West’s reactionaries take an environmental turn – seeing the potential for planetary
fears to combine with patriotic pride – Heidegger becomes even more attractive. His beloved
forest, with all its trees rooted rmly in the soil, is nding new defenders. In Germany, the
Alternative für Deutschland declares that society is not “some abstract environment standing
in opposite to Man, but concretely the forests, meadows, elds, animals and plants of our
homeland”. In France, Jordan Bardella, the new face of France’s far right and Le Pen’s
protégé, eulogises the forests of Brittany. “The only forest I knew for a long time was a dreary
row of skyscrapers,” he said in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, referring to
his upbringing in a Parisian banlieue. “But I have an image of Brittany carnally French, proud
of its identity and the cycles of history.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 6/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

Great minds: Albert Einstein and, to his left, Martin Heidegger, in Switzerland, 1928. Credit: akg
images

Heidegger’s hopes in Nazism didn’t last long. He soon saw how Hitler’s regime idolised
e ciency and mythologised machines as much as nature. In the madness of crowds, he
identi ed a dismal inversion of Descartes’s dictum: “I do not think, therefore I am.” He rued
the way pseudo-scienti c racism and anti-Semitism – as opposed to Heidegger’s more
philosophical versions – reigned supreme. “The question of the role of world Jewry is not a
racial question,” Heidegger wrote privately, “but the metaphysical question about the kind of
humanity that, without any restraints, can take over the uprooting of all beings from Being as
its world-historical ‘task.’” The problem wasn’t that Nazism was anti-Semitic – it’s that it
was anti-Semitic in the wrong way. Disappointed with the Führer, Heidegger retreated to his
hut in the forest, vowing to “remain at the invisible front of the secret spiritual Germany”.

But despite his disillusionment, Heidegger was unrepentant to the end. The Holocaust forced
many thinkers to reconsider the nature and purpose of philosophy. Yet for Heidegger, rather
than lead him to reckon with his mistakes, it somehow showed him he was right all along.
Nazism was recast as just another morbid symptom of liberal modernity.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 7/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

“Agriculture is now a motorised food industry,” Heidegger said in 1949, “in essence, the
same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps.” He
seemed betrayed by the Nazis, even quipping to a colleague that, rather than apologise for his
Nazi past, he wished Hitler could be brought back to apologise to him.

In 1949, Hannah Arendt returned to Germany on an o cial visit and arranged to see
Heidegger. She was unimpressed with who she found, dismayed by his “childish dishonesty”
and desire to “do nothing but philosophise”. Now it was Arendt looking down on Heidegger,
“the secret king of thought” who had compromised his crown. In a letter to their friend, the
philosopher Karl Jaspers, she lamented his retreat into the woods, where “the only people
he’ll have to see are the pilgrims who come full of admiration for him. Nobody is likely to
climb 1,200 metres to make a scene.”

****
***

Today, Heidegger’s hut still stands among the Black Forest hills. On a recent June afternoon, I
took a train and a bus from Freiburg and walked up the 1,200 metres. It’s understated: barely
bigger than a bedroom, very much a hut, with no more than a small wooden sign to identify it.
Despite Heidegger’s busy afterlife, it remains oddly silent, apparently immune to the cycles of
history. Since Heidegger’s death in 1976, it has become a minor pilgrimage site, with lea ets
in local tourist information o ces – each exonerating his Nazism – and a sparse number of
visitors seeking insight into the philosopher’s “work-world”.

The irony of all this attention – especially of Steve Bannon holding his biography in his hands
– is that Heidegger had such little time for biography.

“As for the personality of a philosopher,” he said during a lecture on Aristotle in 1924, “our
only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked and that he died.” For a
philosopher whose main idea was that we are rooted beings, forever tied to a particular place
and time, living within and through a land and language, it was always a strange stance. Now
it’s as if Martin Heidegger simply knew how damning his own biography would be. 

SUBSCRIBE
To stay on top of global a airs and enjoy even more international
coverage subscribe for just £1 per month!

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 8/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

This article appears in the 11 September 2019 issue of the New Statesman, Cameron’s legacy of chaos

RELATED ARTICLES

Angela Merkel’s Why the clock is The State of

long ticking for European Politics:
chancellorship is Belarus's Special Series
nearing its close, Lukashenko
but Merkelism
will live on

NS Media Group

About us

Advertising

Contact us

History

Privacy policy

RSS feeds

Subscribe

T&Cs

Supplements

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 9/10
4/9/2020 Heidegger, the homesick philosopher

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/09/heidegger-homesick-philosopher 10/10