Politics and Philosophy

I want to talk about another aspect of the project I’m working on, one that makes it particularly difficult. Martin Heidegger was a schmuck. I use this term in a non-technical sense, but I hope it gives the appropriate impression. I am referring, of course, perhaps among other defects, to Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism. It is a natural question – one that has been pressed upon me a number of times recently by a number of people I respect – whether someone of such evidently poor judgment, or worse, can be relied upon to say anything worthwhile about the proper dignity of human being. Why write a book on that topic in particular, one might wonder, through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s work?

I don’t want to try to answer that question here. This is not a way of trying to avoid it, but rather a way of recognizing how powerful I take its force to be. I’m simply not ready to answer the question yet. What I want to do instead is to press on it a bit, to understand the question better, and to see what presuppositions give it the force it has. And to hear your comments.

To do this, I need to set the ground rules carefully. To begin with, I do not want to deny that Heidegger was a schmuck, or minimize the extent of his schmuckiness. I don’t want to try to justify the importance of his work, in other words, by downplaying how contemptible his personal and political views were. Some people have taken this route, and I don’t mean to be criticizing them. Hans Sluga, for instance, in his book Heidegger’s Crisis, argued that Heidegger’s political views were really just an expression of what was normal for his social milieu. I think Hans’ book is interesting, and maybe even accurate as an historical account. But for my purposes, his analysis is neither here nor there. That’s because I want to think about the general issue of how a person’s political views should affect the reception of their intellectual work. And to do this carefully we need to assume the political views are heinous.

It follows from this that we should begin by assuming that Heidegger the person was at least as awful as his harshest critics claim. I will take it as given, therefore, that he was – even more than most German academics of the day – an extreme advocate of German nationalism, a committed anti-semite, and a perpetual champion of Hitler and his policies. Furthermore, I’d like to assume that he remained committed to these positions for his entire life. Maybe some of these assumptions are false. Maybe the literature around the recently published Black Notebooks, for instance, over-exaggerates these defects in Heidegger’s personality and character. I’m not saying it does, but it’s possible. Still, to depend on that empirical fact in attempting to justify his work just muddies the waters. So, let’s assume Heidegger was a full-on schmuck.

All that said, there is a second ground rule also. Whatever the awfulness of Heidegger’s personal or political views, I do not want to assume without argument that the philosophical work either follows necessarily from or is a direct expression of those views. Maybe there is such a connection, and if so that will be an important desideratum. But to justify that claim would require work.

So let’s start thinking about the question at hand. How should our knowledge of Heidegger’s political views affect our reading of his philosophical work? How, more generally, should our knowledge of anyone’s political views affect the reception of their intellectual work?

Let’s start the discussion with a potentially relevant and interesting fact. Most people will agree that the question seems to have particular relevance for Heidegger because he was a philosopher. And not just a philosopher, but a philosopher attempting to say something about the proper dignity of human being. If someone like Gottlob Frege had despicable political views, as he may well have, it wouldn’t generate as much concern. Or at any rate it hasn’t generated as much concern. I don’t hear many people arguing that we shouldn’t read Frege’s work in philosophical logic because he held awful political views. Dummett did express some concern; but he also wrote thousands of pages on the man!

To take a more extreme case, I suppose that nobody would think twice about reading the work of a mathematician whose political views are anathema. This is true no matter which extreme the person is at. Cauchy, for instance, was a reactionary royalist; his contemporary Abel called him a “bigoted Catholic.” Other mathematicians disliked him strongly for his radically conservative political views. He himself felt he was treated unfairly because of them. But everyone agrees he was a profound mathematician. Similarly for Galois on the other end of the political spectrum. He was a revolutionary and a political firebrand who was imprisoned for his extreme left wing political views. He was impetuous and short-tempered, and died at the age of 21 in a duel the motivations for which are unclear. Perhaps his character and his political opinions were objectionable. But in any case he was, by all accounts, a great mathematician. (See John Derbyshire’s interesting article on The Politics of Mathematicians for some details about both men.) In sum, the political views of mathematicians are simply irrelevant to them, qua mathematicians.

Or another case, as if we needed more: consider Bobby Fischer, the chess player. He was (let us assume) a crazy, anti-semitic Jew, an American with extreme anti-American political views. Let us agree that his political views were objectionable along many dimensions. Still, nobody would deny that he was among the best chess players who ever lived. A dedicated chess player would be silly not to study his games.

These examples are illustrative. They suggest that we are less motivated to dismiss a thinker’s work if it is obvious that it bears no relation to his or her political views. What Cauchy or Galois thought about Charles X is simply irrelevant when it comes to the quality of their mathematical work. Somehow, it seems, the fact that Heidegger is a philosopher makes the possibility of such a connection more worrisome. But how, exactly, does the connection work?

Now, one of our ground rules is that we cannot just assume Heidegger’s political views necessitate or are directly expressed in his philosophical work. So if we are worried about such a connection, we shall have to think hard about what it is. But suppose there is one. What exactly is the worry about it? I’m not saying there isn’t a worry; I just want to know exactly what form it takes.

Obviously, if the philosophical views are just a manifestation of the objectionable political views, then the philosophical views are objectionable in just the same way. But what does that say about how we should treat the thinker? Take Aristotle, for example. It was easy for him, because of his social milieu, to believe that some people are natural slaves. They are, by their very nature, pieces of property that belong to others. We take this, obviously, to be an objectionable view. But this personal and political position worked its way directly into Aristotle’s political philosophy. In his Politics, for example, slaves are excluded from the political community. So presumably this is a reason not to credit Aristotle’s work. Still, there is, of course, a broad consensus that Aristotle was one of the great philosophers in history. So even this kind of direct expression of contemptible political opinions in a philosopher’s work is not by itself sufficient to discredit the philosopher’s views as a whole. Is it that the bit about slavery is somehow separable from the rest? But it seems to play a fundamental role in the discussion about what a political community is. Is it somehow because Aristotle lived a long time ago? Are we to imagine, then, that the concerns about Heidegger’s political views will dissipate with time? If so, is this a good thing or not?

Or suppose the case is different. Suppose that the political views are not expressed directly in the philosophical work, but they somehow necessitate the positions taken there. What kind of worry should this generate for us? Well, let’s look a bit closer. Suppose that Heidegger’s nationalism is the motivation for his claim that works of art can open new worlds. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” an essay from 1935, as well as in Introduction to Metaphysics from the same year, Heidegger suggests that the statesman may play a role in opening up new worlds. Presumably the statesman he had in mind was Hitler. So, if it is his nationalistic admiration for Hitler that leads him to make this general claim, is the claim itself objectionable? Maybe. But if so, I don’t think it can be because of this connection. The argument for such a connection is somehow of the following form: If A necessitates B, and A is objectionable, then B is objectionable. But is this a good argument form? If a person’s love of violence guarantees his violent reaction in a certain circumstance, and the love of violence is objectionable, is the reaction objectionable? What if it saves someone from an attacker?

Another possibility is that it is precisely because of the thinker’s personal defects that he or she is so insightful on a particular issue. Philosophers sometimes become deeply interested in the very things that are difficult for them to understand or live. The ethicist has deeply developed ethical views because it is so counterintuitive to him how to operate in the ethical domain. The gullible man becomes an expert on the theory of good judgment. It can happen, I suppose, that the personal defect plays a role in the high quality of the work.

These are all possibilities.

In the end, however, it seems to me that this is all useless guesswork. One cannot have a view about the effect of the political views on the philosophy until one has a view about what the philosophy is. This can come, it seems to me, only through a careful confrontation with the work.

None of this, of course, is to excuse Heidegger’s abhorrent political views. But the fact of the matter is, I never met the man. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have taken his work so seriously. Instead, however, I learned about him through someone else, a teacher whom I admired very much. And whatever else you say about my teacher, you cannot attribute to him the terrible political views of Heidegger. Maybe, in fact, you can’t even attribute the philosophical views I am interested in to Heidegger. Maybe they come only from him indirectly through my teacher, and eventually through my own experiences in confrontation with what Heidegger has written. Maybe, in the end, they are as much my own views as they are Heidegger’s himself. I suppose this is the way the interpretation of texts always works. But I cannot get free of the fact that, whatever the views are that I find most interesting and most compelling, I have come to them in part, at least, through my confrontation with some version of Heidegger’s work. This makes me want to continue that confrontation. But my desire to do so is countered by my dislike of the man. The question is how powerful this countering force should be.