274

THE MAN ON THE MOON?

THE QUESTION OF HEIDEGGER'S

"SELF-ASSERTION OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITY"

HARRY NEUMANN

"University philosophers never will understand what Novalis

said:
Philosophy is actually homesickness."

Heidegger

In an interview clarifying the grounds o f his Rektorat speech o f 1933, Heideg-

ger tells o f the terror ("Ich bin e r s c h r o c k e n . . . " ) inspired in him by the
astronauts on the moon. 1 H o w can the earth be home for men on the m o o n ?
Unable to see anything irrevocably tying men to the earth, the interviewer sees
no reason why they should not live on the m o o n . Heidegger answers that
everything vital (Wesentlich) and great has emerged only because men had a
h o m e l a n d (Heimat) and were rooted in the traditions o f their respective
homelands. Consequently the literature o f modern, rootless intellectuals who
are at home nowhere and everywhere inevitably is destructive o f greatness.2
The main thrust o f "The Self-Assertion of the G e r m a n University" is not
support for Hitler w h o m Heidegger rejected after a few months, but pre-
servation of his h o m e l a n d and therefore the possibility o f greatness in his
homeland, by the liberation of its universities f r o m the tyranny o f those
intellectuals. A m a n ' s h o m e l a n d was not always threatened by that tyranny
which springs from the " b r e a k - o u t " (Aufbruch) o f Greek philosophy. 3
Aufbruch is a term of violence which means to break out or up, to rebel.
Greek philosophy is rebellion against the familial and civic piety out o f which
and against which it arose. R o o t e d in a piety sanctifying their families and
cities, pre-philoSophic men experienced themselves primarily, if not ex-

* Authors Note: The research for this article was assisted by a sabbatical grant from the
Earhart Foundation.
1 The speech is "The Self-Assertion of the German University" ("Die Selbstbehauptung der
Deutschen Universit/it," Breslau, 1933); hereafter referred to as "Speech." The interview is
"Only a God Can Save Us Now" ("Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten," Der Spiegel, May 31,
1976; hereafter referred to as "Interview."
2 Interview, pp. 206, 209.
3 Speech, p. 8.
 The Man on the Moon? 275

clusively, as pious fathers and citizens. On this horizon, only slaves, men with
no familial or civic piety of their own, were primarily men and not fathers and
citizens. Prephilosophic men never seriously questioned this piety's Draconic
prohibitions which shaped their lives from birth to death. Serious concern
with moral or religious questions the transformation of morality or religion
into something questionable-becomes possible and necessary only outside of
that pre-philosophic horizon. 4
Socrates (or some other Greek) became the first philosopher by questioning
the hitherto unquestioned authority of the piety that shaped him prior to his
questioning. Although he doubted this piety's claim to be the highest wisdom,
the "one thing needful," he admitted that a lifetime of questioning had given
him only his ignorance to put in its place. Yet how can ignorance of what is
good for oneself guide life? Does it not justify anything or nothing? Is not
Socrates' life an indirect proof that the only sound guide is the pre-philo-
sophic piety which his ignorant questioning sought to discredit? For that
piety, over centuries and millenia, achieved an instinctive hold even over the
souls of the questioners who rejected its claim to be indubitable wisdom. At
least in philosophy's infancy, its questioning hardly could dent the power of
an instinctive certainty shaped by millenia of pious obedience. 5
Like Hume and Nietzsche, Heidegger saw life's chief guide in that in-
herited, instinctive certainty. On their philosophic horizon, pre-philosophic
piety is interpreted not as eternal wisdom but as acquired instinct, however
necessary such instincts are to life. For they are heirs of the Socratic ignorance
which experiences any morality or piety as questionable and which, therefore,
is unable to live morally or piously. This inability was not yet evident to the
ancient philosophers, since they were still steeped, however unconsciously, in
pre-philosophic piety. Thus Socrates could interpret his questioning as a
divine mission to champion the self-evident superiority of the examined over
the un-examined life. 6 Yet if he was as ignorant as he claimed, how could he
justify that superiority or any superiority? With the destruction of the ancient
cities and their piety, the impossibility of such justifications was no longer
hidden from philosophers by that piety's unconscious residue in their souls. 7
Gradually they came to perceive that any moral or pious preference is
sparked by nothing but the will or resolve to have it so. This resoluteness
(Entschlossenheit) is unguided by anything but itself in its choice of goals. In
this crucial sense, life's heart is not morality or piety but the abyss of freedom
uncovered by the necessarily arbitrary resoluteness informing Socrates' pre-
ference for philosophic doubt over pious obedience. Since Athenians born
and bred in that obedience saw no reason for choice or freedom in morality,
they did not experience the need for Heideggerian resoluteness in order to be

4 L. Strauss, On Tyranny(Ithaca, 1968)p. 129, note 50; The Argument and the Action of Plato's
Laws (Chicago, 1975) pp. 40-41, 43.
5 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 188; The Twilight of the Idols, II, 5-6; IX, 39-41.
6 Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, II, Part 2, 72.
7 Nietzsche, Joyful Science, 108-109, 125, 344.
276 The Journal o f Value Inquiry

pious. They understood themselves as pious fathers and citizens and not as
human beings free to choose, however thoughtfully, among various mora-
lities.
Arising from an ignorance unable to give its heart to any cause, the
philosophic emphasis upon freedom destroys religion or morality except as a
questionable activity. After 1933, Heidegger interpreted this doom as the fate
manifesting itself through the victory of philosophic questioning and its
contemporary heir, scientific technology. He believed that only a god now
could save us from this doom. 8 However in 1933, he still clung to the
desperate hope that Germany, properly led, could avoid that fate. In the
Germans he found a now rare attachment to traditional pieties which some-
how sanctified even philosophic questioning of those attachments. Unlike
the democrats (Americans) and communists (Russians), the Germans of 1933
retained more rootedness in their soil (BodenstSndigkeit) and its traditions
than any other modern, industrial people. 9 For Heidegger this rootedness
was the instinctive sine qua non of the resoluteness which chose greatness over
mediocrity. Thus intellectuals debunking that rootedness in favor of a cosmo-
politan academic freedom are, in reality, destroying the soil for any greatness
and, in particular, for philosophic inquiry, the greatness closest to
Heidegger's heart, i~ For only men deeply rooted in traditions which, as it
were, sanctify philosophy's essentially unsanctifiable activity can muster the
resoluteness necessary to persevere in its questioning.
In the absence of divine revelation, resoluteness alone is the ground of
moral choice. Heidegger feared the rootlessness of democratic and com-
munist regimes as destructive of the conditions of that courage. Their usually
unconscious goal is global rootlessness, destruction of the soil out of which
courage grows, Unaware of this ultimate goal, their courage in defense of
freedom from traditional restraints presents itself to them as the loftiest
morality. 11 A similar obfuscation led Socrates to attack the unexamined life.
However, in spite of himself, the Athenian Socrates was not so endangered by
this attack, since his commitment to the examined life took its fervor, as all
strong commitments must, from the unconscious instincts consciously attack-
ed by him. In Socrates' Athens, those instincts had not yet been enervated by
two millenia of"Socratic" questioning as they were to become by Heidegger's
time. By then, the very success of the Socratic enterprise threatened finally to
doom it by eroding the soil required for its flourishing. This doom is the one
confronted by "The Self-Assertion of the German University."
Heidegger's 1933 struggle to avoid that doom bears some similarity to
Oedipus' equally futile efforts. Oedipus' own gods doomed him to commit the
greatest impiety. However harsh his faite, it never occurred to Oedipus to cast

8 Interview,p. 209.
9 Interview, pp. 214, 217; cf. Introduction to Metaphysics (Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik,
Tiibingen, 1953,pp. 28-29, 152).
lo Speech,p. 15.
11 Speech,p. 15.
 The M a n on the Moon? 277

doubt on the gods responsible for it. For he realized instinctively that only his
ancestral piety lent substance to his life. This realization led him to rely on his
, own cunning, unassisted by divine guidance, 12 but only in order to piously
avoid the impious fate allotted to him by his gods. Like Heidegger's question-
ing, Oedipus' resolve to stand on his own ignorance arose from the effort to
remain pious in spite of its apparent impossibility. For Oedipus was doomed
to impiety by the gods responsible for his piety, while Heidegger,s question-
ing, like all philosophic inquiry, destroys the instincts which make that piety
possible. Yet neither Heidegger nor Oedipus ever deny the need for the piety
which makes their respective forms of courage possible, however opposed
that courage is to the pious soil nourishing it.
To be sure, what might be called Heidegger's instinct is not the pre-
philosophic piety of an Oedipus. Here the word instinct is a philosophic or
scientific substitute for what pre-philosophic men called piety. By calling it
instinct, philosophy degrades that piety to something sub-human, since it
regards only the examined life, the life striving for liberation from instinct, as
truly human. Since Socrates rejects the fate dooming fathers and citizens,
Greek tragedy's family curse, as bestial, he casts doubt upon the piety
informing it. The success of this Socratic enterprise, the soul of Western
civilization, culminates in the global rootlessness fostered by scientific tech-
nology, the emphasis on human creativity/3 Thus loyal Athenians usually
disappointed Socrates' desire for cosmopolitan answers when he asked them
what the "idea" of justice or piety is. Instead they replied in narrow, chauvinis-
tic Athenian ways. However two millenia of Socratic indoctrination changed
that. Now answers sparked by civic piety no longer are possible, except
perhaps for a few tribes in "backward" areas still "undeveloped" by global
technology. For even if some politician or ecologist prefers small towns to
cosmopolitan states, he can only articulate this preference by claiming that
men - all men - are better off in those smaller communities. An ancient
Spartan or Aztec was not morally concerned with all men but only with those
few who shared his old, inherited religion.
Contrary to most intellectuals, Heidegger prized the pious rootedness of
the pre-philosophic as the ground out of which philosophy arises. In 1933, he
wanted to preserve the German remnant of that piety from democratic and
communist efforts to eradicate it. Although he knew the philosophic quest
necessarily opposes the piety sustaining it, he saw that in contemporary
regimes, as distinct from Socrates' Athens, preservation of traditional pieties
was more necessary than questioning tliem. In those regimes "philosophy" is
in danger of becoming a fashionable prejudice, a pleasant amusement for
Nietzsche's Last Man. 14 Everything would be tolerated as equally worthless
or worthwhile; nothing would be venerated. Divorced from its roots in
Athenian piety, Socratic ignorance causes human degeneration.

J2 Sophocles,Oedipus the Tyrant, 395-98, 1080-85.

~3 H. Neumann, "Socrates and History," Nietzsche-Studien, 6 (1977) pp. 64-74.
J~ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5.
278 The Journal of Value Inquiry

Alive to this threat, Heidegger, in 1933, sought to preserve the possibility of

philosophy in that m o d e r n c o u n t r y whose ancestral roots were strongest.
T h u s his speech concerns the self assertion of the German university a n d is, as
such, hostile to the usual praise of academic freedom "liberated" from its
necessary roots. He was convinced that only G e r m a n universities had roots
strong e n o u g h to sustain the iron d e t e r m i n a t i o n required to raise philosophic
questions in c o n t e m p o r a r y regimes. F o r what was an u n c o n s c i o u s fear in
Socrates has become a terrifying certainty for c o n t e m p o r a r i e s courageous
e n o u g h to be t h o u g h t f u l - the fact that god is dead, that m a n has n o guidance
outside of his o w n resoluteness.
Lacking the courage which only t r a d i t i o n a l roots can sustain, democrats
a n d communists, a m o n g which Heidegger soon included Hitler, m u s t flee
p h i l o s o p h y ' s exposure to "the eternal silence of those infinite spaces." The
courage lacked by them c a n n o t be acquired by m o r e schooling, since the
intellectuals c o n t r o l l i n g the schools encourage the rootlessness destructive of
that courage. C o n s e q u e n t l y Heidegger m e a n t to preserve p h i l o s o p h y by
purging the universities of those intellectuals 9 This purge necessarily presents
itself as fascist b r u t a l i t y a n d n o t p h i l o s o p h y ' s preservation to intellectuals
who c a n n o t seriously ask

9 if it is true what that passionate, that God seeking,last German philosopher, Friedrich
Nietzsche, said: "God is dead" - if we must take seriously this abandonment of con-
temporary man in the midst of being, how do things then stand with science?Then the
original wonderingpersistenceof the Greek before being transform itself into a completely
unprotected exposure in the hidden and uncertain, i.e., questionable. Then questioning no
longer is only the transcendable prelude to an answer or to knowing, but, on the contrary,
questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing... Such questioning shatters the
splitting of the sciences into separate disciplines, brings them back from their aimless
dissipationinto separate fieldand corners... If we want the essenceof sciencein the senseof
questioning, unprotected perseverence in the uncertainty of being as a whole, then this
essentialwill of our people will create its world of the greatest internal and external danger,
that is, a truly intellectual (geistige)world. For "intellect" is neither empty clevernessnor
the uncommitted play of wit...but intellect is fundamentally determined, knowing re-
solutenesstoward the essenceof being. And the intellectual world of a people is not the by-
product of a culture, as little as it is a market for practical insightsand values; rather it isthe
power of the deepest preservation of a people's forces of soil and blood; it is a power of the
innermost convulsion of its existence. Only an intellectual world insures a people's great-
ness. For it compels to this, that the perpetual need to choose between the will to greatness
and the permissiveness [which breeds] degeneration, [this need to choose] becomes the
marching orders for the march with which our people enters into its future history... If we
wish this essence of science, then the university's faculty really must advance to the
outermost posts of the danger created by the world's perpetual uncertainty.~s

W h e n Heidegger asked those questions, he still believed that, in G e r m a n y at

least, p h i l o s o p h y ' s t r a d i t i o n a l roots could be preserved. However he soon
realized that Greek p h i l o s o p h y a n d its c o n t e m p o r a r y heir, global technology,

is Speech, pp. 12-14.

 The M a n on the Moon ? 279

preclude human possibilities of salvation: "Only a god can save us now!"

Inevitably Hitler, like his democratic foes, served that technology's global
uprooting. No German was less interested in preserving the aristocratic
traditions of old Germany than Hitler. The marxist, Koj6ve, rightly interprets
him as the man who made Germany safe for democracy by destroying its
aristocratic traditions. 16 Like Tocqueville, Heidegger came to see the victory
of modern egalitarianism as a global necessity. The interviewer who saw
nothing irrevocably binding men to the earth reflected this inevitability.
How could that interviewer share Heidegger's terror at the sight of the
television pictures relayed to earth by men on the moon? Instead, he was
proud of this latest victory of technology's "creativity." This pride hides
technology's essential aimlessness which uproots whoever it touches. This
uprooting is no accident but the fate of the questioning initiated by Greek
philosophy. Socrates' lifelong questioning persuaded him that philosophic
questioning cannot justify its rebellion against pre-philosophic piety. How-
ever resplendently that rebellion clothes itself in the robes of humanita-
rianism, science or progress, its ultimate justification is nothing more than an
ignorance too stubborn to abandon its enterprise. This stubborness always is
in danger of forgetting its humble origin in ignorance. In philosophy's long
career, nothing has encouraged this forgetfulness more than the contem-
porary faith in technology or creativity. For how can the most sophisticated
creativity repair the Socratic ignorance at the heart of Western or global
civilization?
Even if technology could control everything, it still could not answer the
simple Socratic question: What good is it?, although it could perhaps prevent
the question from being asked. If, as Heidegger insisted, raising that question
is its own answer, how is any moral guidance possible? Indeed how is
Heidegger's resoluteness a substitute for that guidance? Does not its vain
stubborness obfuscate its humble need for the ancestral roots despised by it?
Did this not lead philosophers to welcome the destruction of the ancient cities
and their piety by the global conquests of Alexander, Caesar, Christianity and
modern technology?
After that destruction, must not pious roots, if they are desired at all, be
manufactured? 17 Was not Heidegger's "Self-Assertion of the German Uni-
versity" such an attempt to do the impossible, to persuade the modern
university, the heir of Socratic rebellion against traditional piety, to create
that piety ex nihilo, as it were ? Heidegger's quixotic efforts to square this circle
were abandoned when he perceived, what the old piety always knew, that only
gods could save us by creating those ancestral roots.
This sobering lesson, which Heidegger learned so well in 1933, is lost on
contemporaries addicted to various "liberation" movements which are sched-

J6 A. Koj6ve,Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (NewYork, 1969)p. 160 (note);Heidegger,

Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (above, note 9) p. 152; Nietzsche, II (Pfullingen, 1961)p. 198; O.
P6ggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg, 1972)pp. 33-34.
iv Plato, Republic, 414B 415D.
280 The Journal of Value Inquiry

uled to culminate in a cosmopolitian happiness. Like the 1933 Heidegger, if in

leftist directions, they seek to enoble their cherished causes by the ex nihilo
creation of lofty traditions or histories. However their ultimate appeal be-
trays their essential emptiness. Thus champions of female or black liberation
make their ultimate appeal to their rights as human beings free to determine
their own destiny. Appeals to such cosmopolitan standards were made pos-
sible by a Socratic questioning whose ignorance cannot justify them. The
ancestors of the black liberationists were more reasonable- and therefore less
"scientific"! - when they appealed to their tribal gods to justify their tribal
ways. These gods, if they existed, could justify those ways, while philosophy
or science can justify nothing. 18
The interviewer is unhappy about Heidegger's insistence upon
philosophy's inability to save men from the abyss into which its questioning
hurled them. 19 Probably an even sadder consequence of its uprooting of the
old pieties is erosion of the soil necessary for its own growth. Heidegger
interpreted Nietzsche as the last philosopher, while he saw himself as a
thinker, one struggling to think through the grounds and final consequences
of philosophy's eradication of its own roots. In the aftermath of that
uprooting, men of great cleverness and technological sophistication un-
doubtedly will continue to emerge. However the human roots will be too
weak to nourish philosophy (Socrates) or thought (Heidegger). For these
activities no longer can command the depth of seriousness distinguishing
them from mere amusement or routine academic drudgery.
Nor can that seriousness be manufactured by any human creativity ("hu-
manities") or technology ("sciences") however sophisticated. Indeed the
greater the sophistication, the more thorough the eradication of the old
pieties. To "be sure, partisans of human creativity and they include practi-
cally everyone today - see no reason to deny that they can create cosmopo-
litan substitutes for the provincial piety of the ancient families and cities. Like
the interviewer they discern no inevitable bondage of men to the ancestral
roots out of which all human greatness has grown. Their modern rootlessness
makes it impossible to acknowledge their deep need for what they despise as
backwardness, superstition or racism. So far as their "Socratic" reason can
see, anything is possible to human ingenuity; there are no grounds for despair.
Heidegger was too thoughtful to be blinded by this pseudophilosophic op-
timism whose appeal depends upon obfuscation of its own roots.
After the lesson of 1933, Heidegger became convinced that the most wide-
spread contemporary experience is one which he called by the lovely German
word, Heimweh, which literally means the pain of home or homepain, but
usually is translated as "homesickness. ''2~ In scientific jargon or slang, both
of which Heidegger was too thoughtful to use, the terms would be "alie-

is H. Neumann, "Is Philosophy Still Possible?," The Thomist, 36 (1972) pp. 546-49.
19 Interview, pp. 212, 214, 217, 219.
2o Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag yon Seiner Heimatstadt Messkirch (Frankfurt am
Main, 1969) pp. 18-26, 38-45.
 The M a n on the Moon? 281

nation," "loss of identity," or "being turned-off." Because slang and scientific

jargon, in their craving for quick, thoughtless communication, shun the
ambiguity of ordinary speech, they lose the immense richness and breath of
insight yoked to that ambiguity. That loss reflects desperate but vain efforts to
remedy the homesickness informing Socratic or Western civilization.
Since Heidegger saw no remedy either in scientific technology or in its twin,
the rootless political "movements" responsible for slang, he preferred a word,
"homesickness," which leaves one with the full force of the pain created by
Socratic eradication of ancestral roots. The more successful that uprooting,
the more that pain becomes a global epidemic for which no human cure is
possible.
Today in the more "liberated" - in this context "liberated" seems to mean
freed from one's own roots - regimes, college catalogues and other popular
magazines trumpet the need to cut the heart out of even the few remaining
traditional limits on freedom and creativity. Yet in the same regimes, ever
more young (and sometimes old) people who have the wealth to enjoy this
unchecked freedom escape to drugs, violence and whatever else dulls the pain
of their homesickness. The global extent of this pain demonstrates that
atomic destruction is not needed to make men homeless.2 J
The terror inspired by this pain is caught in the German word unheimlich.
Just as Heirnweh usually is translated as homesickness, so unheimlich is
translated as monstrous, uncanny, bizarre or chilling, although it literally
means "without a home." Men lacking a home, a familial and civic piety of
their own, are doomed to live in monstrous or uncanny ways. However
terrifying their fate may be, it is not absolutely hopeless so long as they still
experience the homesickness which is, as it were, ancient piety's lament in
their modern, "Socratic" souls. It is the curse of the Furies, those ancient
goddesses outraged by crimes against that piety. However, as Oedipus "in-
stinctively" knew, being cursed by one's gods is not the worst fate. Dis-
tinguishing him from rootless intellectuals, this awareness prevented him
from pleading Socratic ignorance as an apology for incest and patricide. For
he did not know that the man killed by him was his father and that his wife
was, in reality, his mother. More importantly, if he were Socratic, he could
have questioned the traditional "prejudice" against those crimes. However
Oedipus was too rooted in his ancestral piety to raise such questions. Con-
sequently he lived out his days with the hopeless remorse cursing those who
have destroyed, however unintentionally, the sanctity of their own hearth.
Terrifying as this curse is, it still bound Oedipus to his hearth, if only in the
wretched awareness that he had made it hostile to himself. Similarly those
contemporaries fortunate enough to be alive to their homesickness' terror
reveal a depth of being unknown to intellectuals who chatter learnedly about
"identity crises," "being turned-off," or lack of "feed-back." In this decisive

21 Interview,p. 206; Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag (above, note 20) pp. 25-6.
282 The Journal of Value Inquiry

sense, Oedipus' tragic fate is infinitely less terrifying than the comic fate
imposed upon people who, in their Socratic rootlessness, cannot grasp why
men should not be on the moon.

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