Heidegger’s Curse: Postmodern Anti-Semitism

The Black Notebooks confirm that Heidegger supported National Socialism not despite its barbaric methods [the Death Camps, the SS, the Gestapo, the “War of Annihilation” …] but because of them! —Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins, 2022

To the Jews, seen as the rootless agents of Modernity … Heidegger imputed the gravest guilt: the oblivion of Being. The Jew was a sign of the end of everything, impeding the rise of a new beginning.—Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews, 2016

With Heidegger, the question is: what future is there for a thinking that sees in “world Judaism” a destructive power of history—a form of destruction that ultimately destroys history itself? —Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, 2015

The current outbreak of anti-Semitism, centred on the universities, has become a very revealing portal through which can be seen the full horrific scale of the crisis of the humanities, arts and social sciences in Western societies. This crisis is symbolised by the exalted status granted to Martin Heidegger, the founding father of Continental Philosophy, whose now deeply compromised thought stands at the headwaters of Postmodernism, Critical Theory, Deconstruction, and Post-structuralism, with all their self-satisfied militant irrationalism, anti-humanism, moral and cognitive relativism, power worship, universal scepticism, solipsism and self-referentiality, exaltation of subjective over objective reality (such as the idea of “my truth”), obsession with language and discourse, rejection of “grand narratives” (such as that of Western civilisation), denial of universals (reason, biological sex, human nature), social constructionism, general impenetrability and a convenient capacity to be mobilised ideologically in pursuit of any item on the progressivist agenda of the far Left, in this case the Palestinian side of the Israel-Gaza conflict with its accompanying virulent anti-Semitism.

The situation in the universities is indeed bleak. But before it can be fully comprehended we must first locate this postmodern anti-Semitism historically, identifying how it builds upon the monstrosities that went before. For such present purposes, we can identify six main types of anti-Semitism that have emerged in stages (often overlapping) over the past 2000 years.

1. Pre-Christian Classical Anti-Semitism. This hostility was primarily ethnic in nature and was prevalent in Ancient Greece and Rome and amongst pagan peoples, reflecting antagonism to the mono­theism of Judaism and what was perceived as its insular nature. It culminated in the series of devastating Jewish Wars (66 to 135 AD), which saw the destruction of Jerusalem, the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Middle East, and their dispersal across three continents where they existed as “alien” communities for two millennia.
2. Christian Anti-Semitism. This extreme hostility towards, and suspicion of, the Jews flowed from the Christian insistence that they were the “Christ Killers”, responsible for the death of Jesus. Also known as “the longest hatred”, it emerged in the first century AD, and became closely associated with apocalypticism and mytho-theological concepts such as the Antichrist, Gog and Magog, and the infamous “blood libel” of child sacrifice. It has reached a murderous crescendo many times over the past millennium, including the Rhineland Massacres (1096); the expulsion of Jews from England (1290); the Europe-wide pogroms during the Black Death (1348 to 1351); the Lutheran anti-Semitism during the Reformation; the persecution, massacres, and expulsion of Jews from Spain (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries); the innumerable pogroms in Ukraine and Russia (seventeenth to twentieth centuries); and the Dreyfus affair in France (1894 to 1906).
3. Islamic Anti-Semitism. This avoided the extremism of Christianity but nevertheless relegated the Jews to a secondary social status, as a “People of the Book”, dhimmis—adherents of a previous revelation superseded by Islam—who are required to pay a special tax and observe a generally subservient attitude towards Muslims. Over the past century it has adopted some of the central elements of Christian anti-Semitism (such as the blood libel) along with the conspiracy theory aspects of the next category. Both Jews and Christians have been systematically driven out of many Muslim countries, even though their ancestors may have lived there for centuries.
4. Paranoic Anti-Semitism. Emerging during the European Enlightenment, this gained tremendous traction as a popular obsession during the French Revolution and its aftermath. It focuses on the belief that the Jews are leading members of various conspiracies (the Illuminati, the Carbonari, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy) exercising or seeking economic and political domination over society. This type of anti-Semitism gained even more traction with the appearance in Russia and then Europe and America of the bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion (c. 1903), which detailed an alleged plot for Jewish world domination. Although it is a fraud, it has proven to be the most influential work of anti-Semitism, has gained a second life on the internet, and is still held in high regard in the Muslim world. During the twentieth century, especially in Germany, the belief spread that the Jews were seeking control of the cultural sphere (Freudianism, Modernism in literature and art, and in cinema) via “Cultural Marxism” and “Cultural Bolshevism”.
5. Racial Anti-Semitism. This developed out of the previous religious and paranoic forms of anti-Semitism by identifying Jews as a specific racial type that was invariably seen as subhuman and antagonistic to mainstream (Christian/Muslim/Völkisch) society. An important feature of this type is the belief that “Jewishness” is biologically inherited and ineradicable even amongst those who convert to Christianity or other religions. This reached its most extreme expression under Nazism with the Nuremberg Laws, which carefully defined who is Jewish, going back many generations, and stripped them of their citizenship, all human rights, and ultimately their lives in the Holocaust (1939 to 1945). As we will see, Martin Heidegger embraced this type of anti-Semitism and sought to move it from a biological to a metaphysical level.
6. The New/Postmodern Anti-Semitism. This brings us to contemporary anti-Semitism. This draws on various aspects of the previous types but places these within the context of radical critiques of capitalism and colonialism (neo-Marxism, Trotskyism, Critical Theory) welded together with Postmodernism, especially identity politics. It dates ultimately from the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 but particularly from the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel defeated a surprise attack by a coalition of surrounding Arab states, and the New Left entered into ideological and terrorist partnerships with radical Palestinian groups. Uniquely, it has come to involve the convergence of far-left, far-right, and Islamist versions of anti-Semitism within formulations derived from more recent postmodern theoretical and ideological discourses (Identity Politics, Postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory). Above all, this is a form of anti-Semitism that has been born and bred in our universities, and has captured the allegiance of much of academia, the intelligentsia, and the arts, as well as their foot-soldiers, the staff and students on our university campuses, as we are witnessing in the US, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere.

This article explores the intellectual and ideological origins of this new departure. It focuses on the work of Martin Heidegger, the extent and depth of whose anti-Semitism was carefully and shamelessly obscured by his family and his innumerable academic supporters for many decades but is now being fully exposed with the publication of his Black Notebooks. These are a set of thirty-four journals of some 3384 pages in which Heidegger recorded his frequently chilling and bizarre thoughts and observations over the key period, 1931 to 1970, during which he experienced the Götterdämmerung into which Hitler led the over-excited German people.

The Second World War and the Holocaust that accompanied it revealed that the Wagnerian “Twilight of the Gods” for which der Führer and Heidegger both longed, amounted to only immense transcontinental destruction and sordid death and misery for tens of millions of people, and yet throughout this period Heidegger simply went about recording and elaborating his abstract and often deranged thoughts about the “History of Being”, of which he came increasingly to see himself as the Prophet.

Amongst the insights gained from The Black Notebooks is a sense not only of the metaphysical depth of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, but also how he pre-figured the progressivist attack on liberalism and the rise of identity politics. According to Heidegger, the Cartesian Cogito reduced the person to an isolated rationalistic “thinking I” and ignored the need to consider the “whole person”, Dasein, including the emotions, moods, embodiment, racial and ethnic predispositions, located within both history and community. The atomised Cartesian self finds its fullest expression in the nihilistic individualism of liberal democratic society, whereas National Socialism, Heidegger insisted, recognised how the German people are collectively integrated into the land, traditions, and destiny of the Volk, within which alone Dasein can be most fully realised.

In this fashion, true and authentic selfhood can only be attained by those who are “rooted” in a collective identity (such as the Volk or the Muslim Ummah), and this authenticity is denied, first, to the Jews, who are seen as historically stateless and cosmopolitan in essence and lack any “rootedness” in any sort of nationhood; and second, it is also denied to the Western masses who exist “rootlessly” in a capitalist liberal democracy premised on the primacy of isolated and atomised individuality. As we will see, according to Heidegger’s analysis, neither of these two categories of persons are even fully human. It is to escape this fate that identity politics, involving the identification with some valorised group (such as the “Palestinian people”), has emerged.

Ominously, Heidegger insisted that the elevated mode of Dasein enjoyed by the German people conferred upon them a special role within the metaphysics of “the History of Being” (Seinsgeschichte), a status denied to other peoples or races that lack such rootedness, such as Untermenschen (subhumans) like the Slavs, but above all “the Jews”, who can live only a limited, inauthentic mode of existence. Heidegger conceived all this in eschatological terms, according to which the German people “possessed a salvific historical mission, a calling that elevated it metaphysically above other peoples” in the epic struggle to redeem authentic humanity from the nihilistic civilisational bog into which it had sunk under the domination of modernity, represented above all by “the Jews”. (Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins)

Despite (or because of?) all this, it is impossible to over-emphasise Heidegger’s intellectual and ideological importance. For example, Charles Bambach observes in Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (2003) that he was “one of the preeminent philosophers of the last century, if not of the entire Western tradition”. And in a comprehensive ranking of “The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time”, Heidegger is ranked in the Top Ten, well ahead of some of the world’s greatest philosophers, as well as being recognised as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, ahead of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but also Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, upon all of whom he had a tremendous influence, and who collectively served as vital intellectual and ideological conduits via which Heidegger’s style of thinking corrupted much of the century’s scholarship and teaching in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Heidegger began as a charismatic, high-flying young academic in Weimar Germany, whose students included some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, including such influential thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Nolte, and Leo Strauss. He became recognised as a major philosopher with the publication of Being and Time (1927). This ensured his appointment to the chair in philosophy at Freiburg University vacated by Edmund Husserl, his mentor, but also a Jew who Heidegger would later treat with unforgiveable callousness. Heidegger was only thirty-nine, but five years later he was rector of the entire university and was soon manoeuvring to assume ideological leadership of National Socialism. As we will see, Heidegger’s total embrace and elaboration of an extreme—indeed “metaphysical”—form of anti-Semitism exemplifies the type of grip that this form of intellectual, ideological, and psychological pathology can exercise over even the most brilliant minds. Heidegger is especially important because his commitment to anti-Semitism and associated beliefs means that a central stream in the humanities, arts, and social sciences pursued in Western universities was utterly corrupted—indeed, poisoned—at its source.

There had been a dawning awareness over the decades that Heidegger shared much of the irrationalism, power worship, and anti-Semitism that appealed to significant sections of the European intelligentsia (and necessitated Julien Benda’s classic critique in La Trahison des Clercs, 1927), and that Hitler both nurtured and exploited as he rose inexorably to become der Führer and lead Germany into the abyss. And it was also known that Heidegger had taken advantage of the Nazi takeover in 1933 to manoeuvre himself into the rectorship of his university; had immediately assumed the title of “Führer-Rektor” and implemented the dictatorial Führerprinzip in his administration; had proclaimed his absolute allegiance to Hitler in an inauguration speech of unbridled metaphysical abstruseness and stunning obsequiousness; and had importuned der Führer to exclude all of Germany’s other rectors from the national association who weren’t card-carrying Nazis fully committed to the promulgation of Nazi race doctrine or were ill-prepared to provide the “spiritual leadership” based on the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism as Heidegger sought to define it.

However, all this tended to be discounted by his myriad supporters as mere errors of judgment and as a regrettable but transient divergence by Heidegger from the central tendency of his work which, these innumerable acolytes were convinced, was one of the greatest achievements in the entire history of Western philosophy going all the way back to Plato.

To preserve this image of their hero, the more disreputable aspects of Heidegger’s thought and activity were carefully cordoned off, leaving scholars to cultivate those parts of his compendious output that seemed to suit the postmodern zeitgeist as it evolved after the Second World War in the context of the intense ideological battles of the Cold War and the re-emergence in the late 1960s of highly politicised forms of irrationalism. For these epigones, Heidegger was embraced as an exemplary critic of modernity, giving profound expression to a postmodern cultural pessimism about the relationship between capitalism, humanity, technology, and nature, concluding, for example, that “the Western world had declined to a state of commercialism, industrialism, socialism, liberalism—in short, nihilism”, as lamented by Michael Zimmerman (The Heidegger Case, 1992), a leading Heideggerian scholar who found it easy to integrate Heidegger’s anti-humanist ideas into Deep Ecology. This is the most radical and misanthropic form of environmentalism, the manifesto of which argues, inter alia, that the preservation of the ecosphere requires a decrease of some 80 per cent of the human population. Heidegger himself called for “an age of struggle” in which there would be “a purification of Being [culminating in] the self-obliteration of the earth and the disappearance of contemporary humanity”.

Attempts were also made to capitalise upon Heidegger’s otherwise demented insistence that the “inner truth” of Nazism was not vile, systematic anti-Semitism and race hatred, but actually a mystical insight into “the encounter between global technology and contemporary man”. His defenders claim this involves a critique of dehumanisation, as if Heidegger believed the Nazi Revolution would put an end to this. In fact, dehumanisation was intrinsic to Heidegger’s thought, so that he could observe in his 1949 Bremen Lectures that “the fabrication of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps … is the same thing in essence” as the mechanisation of the agricultural industry. Moreover, such victims don’t really die, they merely “perish [and] become supply pieces for stock in the fabrication of corpses” on a lethal production line. Appalled, Emmanuel Faye (Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, 2009) rejects this trivialisation of the Holocaust and explains that, for Heidegger, the victims didn’t really die because they weren’t alive to start with—they were non-Aryans and therefore incapable of participating in Dasein or human being in its full authenticity. As Faye observes, “it is impossible to go further in the negation of the human being than Heidegger does … The entire populations who were gassed … none of that involved human beings. Not only did the massacred populations not die, they could not even live.”

Furthermore, in an obscene inversion of reality that would in other persons be taken as clear evidence of mental illness, Heidegger came to insist in his Black Notebooks that the Final Solution was completely justified as a necessary “racial-ontological” measure if the Volk was to protect itself from defilement: “By ‘living’ according to the principle of race purity [the Jews] themselves promoted the very reasoning by which they were now being attacked and so they had no right to complain when it was being used against them by the Germans promoting their own racial purity.” (Note that Heidegger qualifies the word living because, according to his metaphysics of race, the Jews don’t actually live in any authentic sense.) Moreover, not only was “Jewry” complicit in its own destruction in the death camps, but this complicity was integral to the type of “being” that it is: “Jewry incarnated the principle of metaphysical destruction [and] its inherent violence inevitably had to turn against itself and culminate in an ‘ontological massacre’” at Auschwitz and other death camps. Indeed, “the Holocaust was an act of Jewish self-annihilation”. (Steven Aschheim, “Poor Judgements”, 2023)

Behind such stupefyingly hateful diagnoses lay Heidegger’s circular critique of modernity, inherited by the Greens and other radical environmentalists. He criticised modernity in terms of his own metaphysical interpretation of the ontological basis of the world, while this ontology was essentially a projection onto reality of his own anti-modernism. Therefore, what purports to be a philosophical argument is actually just the expression of Heidegger’s Völkisch longings—a profoundly nostalgic yearning for a static (“sustainable”), pre-industrial, pre-urban, pre-democratic, and specifically German pastoralism, coupled with a deeply reactionary hatred of every aspect of modernity, personified above all by “the Jews”. It was this that led him to the Nazi commitment that proved to be an embarrassing dimension of his life’s work, which however, was conveniently overlooked for half a century.

It was the Berlin-based Chilean intellectual historian (and ex-student of Heidegger), Victor Farias, who first lifted the lid, in Heidegger and Nazism (1987), revealing the previously unimaginable extent of Heidegger’s intellectual and personal commitment to National Socialism. Farias exposed the deep Völkisch roots of Heidegger’s decision to embrace Nazism, and revealed how this expressed “a thought process nourished in traditions of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and ultra-nationalism that sanctified the homeland in its most local sense”. Farias provided innumerable instances of Heidegger’s radical commitment to the Nazi cause, both before and after he was finally outmanoeuvred by his rivals in the struggle for ideological supremacy within the Nazi Party. (Incidentally, this was a struggle that was better to lose, as the victor, Alfred Rosenberg, was tried at Nuremberg, convicted and hanged.)

Inevitably, Farias was accused by Heidegger’s acolytes of inadequate scholarship, superficiality, a poor understanding of Heidegger’s work, and of a deliberately sensationalist approach. Leading the attack was the pre-eminent postmodernist Jacques Derrida, whose own work was extremely derivative of Heidegger while also being integral to deconstructionism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and radical social theory generally. In “Heidegger, l’enfer des philosophes” (1987), he emphasised his hero’s claim that his thought took a turn (Kehre) around 1930, and that it was his early humanist work (such as Being and Time) that had led him to support the Nazis, while his later, post-turn work was anti-humanist and free of any Nazi stigma. In this manner, Derrida was quite happy to sacrifice the early Heidegger, who was concerned with the individual, while celebrating the later Heidegger, who focused on collectivities, race, language, power and an abstruse “History of Being” (“Being” is a sort of immanent god from whom all beings derive their existence), and which Derrida successfully adopted as the basis of his own career. Derrida also claimed that there were many Nazisms, of which Germany was just one case, while Western civilisation provided other examples (for Heidegger, America rivalled the Jews as the epitome of nihilism), meaning that it was unjust to single out Heidegger for condemnation while ignoring other philosophers implicated in the alleged Nazi-like mendacity of the West. According to this tortuous logic: humanism entails Nazism; Heidegger became an anti-humanist; therefore Heidegger wasn’t a Nazi … and even if he was, others were worse! As Tom Rockmore observed in On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (1992): “there is something absurd, even grotesque about the conjunction of the statement that Heidegger is a great philosopher with the realization that he, like many of his followers, failed in the most dismal manner to grasp or even to confront Nazism” in its monstrous reality.

Following Farias, a wave of critical analysis came crashing down upon the Heideggerian edifice. Various excellent studies appeared, including Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being (1990), and Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History (1994), which exposed the rot that had set in across a range of university scholarship and teaching. It seemed there was little still to be discovered about Heidegger’s Nazi past, but two more books then appeared. Yvonne Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers (2013) is an intellectual history that explores Heidegger’s role in the context of the general response of German philosophers to the rise of the Third Reich; while Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2009) provides detailed evidence of Heidegger’s deep commitment to Nazism and shows how his thought has infected contemporary Continental Philosophy and Theory with the core concepts of Nazi ideology.

More recently, several works have been able to analyse most fully The Black Notebooks. These include Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins (2022), Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews (2016), and Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (2015). The picture that emerges from these books is of a philosopher caught up in a maelstrom of politics, ambition, pride, commitment, opportunism, misplaced self-confidence, delusion, and mendacity at a time of crisis without parallel in modern history, and who developed a complex system of thought that proved to be deeply seductive for the post-war intelligentsia and the generations that followed.

The main revelation has been that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is not incidental but absolutely central to his philosophy and all thought influenced by it, and this is why it has now burst forth in all its hateful intensity. Perusing these exposés, anyone with a normal grip on reality can only ask: How did this man ascend to such an exalted position of prominence in the intellectual pantheon of the twentieth century, and how could he have exercised (and continue to exercise) such a profound influence? And therein lies the tragedy of our universities, as Western civilisation continues its slide towards its latest great challenge.

Mervyn Bendle wrote “Hannah Arendt and the Evil of Anti-Semitism” in the May issue