Midwestern Marx Institute

Heideggerian thought is everywhere. A list of thinkers influenced by Heidegger reads like a “who’s who” of famous twentieth century philosophers. Foucault said: “For me, Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher.”[1] Derrida once called Heidegger “the great unavoidable thinker of the century.”[2] Sartre conceived of Being and Nothingness while reading Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” Deleuze acknowledges the influence of Heidegger in the Preface to Difference and Repetition.[3] Žižek wrote his first book on Heidegger.[4] Many of Heidegger’s students became famous philosophers, including several who significantly impacted political theory: Hannah Arendt would develop the discourse of “totalitarianism” found in liberal philosophy, Leo Strauss would influence the neoconservative movement, and Herbert Marcuse would be a leading thinker for the New Left. It seems surprising that Heidegger should exert this much influence on contemporary thought, given that he was an unapologetic Nazi who began each lecture with “Heil Hitler” during his tenure as rector of Freiburg. One wonders, especially, why he has been embraced by so many thinkers on the Left.

Heidegger scholars have long attempted to separate Heidegger’s philosophy from his Nazism. This separation became increasingly difficult, however, after the Black Notebooks were published in 2014. These personal notebooks offer further evidence of Heidegger’s open embrace of racism, antisemitism, and Nazism. They also show Heidegger developing some of his most famous philosophical concepts directly out of Nazi ideology. In 1933, Heidegger writes:

The Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thoroughness, it would have remained lost in itself and would only with great difficulty have found its way to effectiveness.[5]

When Heidegger’s collected works were published, evidence of the extent of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement was largely erased. As Richard Wolin points out: “Following the war, Heidegger fabricated and rewrote entire passages, inserting them in earlier texts in order to promote the myth that, during the 1930’s, he had acted ‘heroically,’ as an intellectual and political dissident.”[6] Among those “in the know,” however, it was already an open secret that many of Heidegger’s published works had been altered to hide incriminating references to Hitler, fascism, or “world-Judaism.”[7]

While most leftists have no problem rejecting Heidegger as a person, many ostensibly progressive or left-wing philosophers have nevertheless adopted Heideggerian positions. This includes thinkers who identify as communists like Sartre, Kojève, and Marcuse. There are reasons for Heidegger’s popularity. Heidegger talks about feelings of angst, the struggle to be authentic amid conformity, the weight of future possibilities, and our fears regarding our inevitable mortality. Young people are drawn to Heidegger because they wrestle with these questions, especially given the pressures of capitalist society. As a young person, I too was drawn to Being and Time for similar reasons, leading me to spend almost a decade studying Heidegger’s thought. Although I have broken completely with Heidegger, I wouldn’t deny that Being and Time is a powerful and thought-provoking work of philosophy. Yet there are deep-seated problems within Heidegger’s thinking, contradictions that bubble to the surface when we examine Heidegger’s positions carefully. Criticizing Heidegger is important. Seeds of Heideggerianism are scattered throughout leftist thought, and we cannot simply point to Heidegger’s Nazi roots to unplant them. We must scorch the soil of Heidegger’s thinking with the fires of critique.

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