16

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Heidegger commits to a voluntarism that demands more than either the existential
framework or the concept of resoluteness in Being and Time can support:
How are we to explain this sudden inflammation and inflation of Geist? Sein
und Zeit was all tortuous prudence, the severe economy of a writing holding
back the declaration within a discipline of severely observed markers. So how
does Heidegger get from this to the eloquent fervor and the sometimes righteous
proclamation dedicated to the self-affirmation of the German university? What is
the leap from the one to the other?16

Subsequently, Heidegger recoiled from this monstrous, voluntaristic willfulness and

moved toward a position even closer to the deconstrucionist attitude favoured by
Derrida if not fully divested of traces of Western humanism/metaphysics. So while
Being and Time is glued together with a hidden humanism, it is not of the same
consistency as the humanistic, voluntarist posture of Heideggers political thought
in the 1930s. Heideggers thought then, though contaminated with an ever-present,
if ever diminishing, metaphysical humanism, which may in turn have facilitated the
move to the far more radical humanism of the 1930s, at no point either side of his
fateful political misadventure simply reduces straightforwardly to Nazi ideology.
In Heidegger, Politics and Art: The Fiction of the Political, Lacoue-Labarthe echoes
some of Derridas sentiments concerning Heideggers early humanism.17 However,
Lacoue-Labarthe finds the seeds of Heideggers humanist, voluntarist rhetoric in
the 1930s in a dangerous humanism which goes to the very foundations of Being
and Time. Again, Lacoue-Labarthe seems eager to preserve the integrity of the later
work, in his case, at the expense of Being and Time, riddled as it is with this alleged
surfeit of metaphysical humanism which paved the way for Heideggers commitment
to National Socialism. Lacoue-Labarthe then, sees Heideggers political writings and
views from his Nazi years as entirely consistent with Being and Times erroneous and
dangerous humanism which Heidegger disavowed in his work from the Nietzsche
lectures onwards. In many ways, Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe can be seen as victims
of a cultural and political atmosphere which ordained that anything that bore the least
relationship to National Socialism or conservative nationalism had to be expunged or
rejected from work they were favourably disposed to or indeed artificially transplanted
into areas of Heideggers work that they were willing to sacrifice for the greater good
of their interpretative schemes.
For other critics and commentators, it seems preferable to scapegoat Heidegger in
the intellectual kangaroo courts so prevalent since the publication of Farias massively
controversial Heidegger and Nazism;18 it would certainly seem less troublesome than
the casuistry and apologetics often engaged in. The condemnation of Heideggers activities before, during and after the war mirrors the manner in which we have collectively
perpetuated a comfortable myth concerning the Second World War (the good allies
against the evil Nazis). These approaches, once the clamour subsides and the dust
settles, tell us as much about ourselves as they do about thinkers such as Heidegger
who enthusiastically supported his own rather idiosyncratic vision of National
Socialism. George Santayana famously warned that those who did not remember the
past were condemned to repeat it.19 I would submit that what we currently accept as