Book Review: The Banality of Heidegger

This formidable little book is a tightly-argued response to the publication, still ongoing, of Heidegger's sprawling Black Notebooks. In them, the German thinker puts to good use his incantatory jargon to add metaphysical clout to one of the vilest prejudices in history: anti-Semitism. He writes of Weltjudentum (world Jewry), the notion of a 'Jewish World Conspiracy' and, in concocting the image of a global network of uprooted, unpatriotic and scheming Jews, he unwittingly followed the advice of another renowned anti-Semite, T.S. Eliot, who advised poets to steal rather than borrow. Heidegger was no poet, though in his late, sibylline pronouncements fancied himself as a pre-Socratic dreaming under an olive tree of a bucolic Dasein unharmed by the evils of science and socialism.

What the book unmasks is the embarrassing fact that Heidegger took this 'most banal, vulgar, trivial, and nasty discourse that had long been scattered across Europe' from a 'miserable publication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' (p 23).

Nancy's merit is to have found an argument that is all the more devastating as it is measured. It does not simply condemn Heidegger but investigates the reasons for the condemnation; it is unsettling because in the process it indicts the history of the West and of Christianity in particular. Heidegger was one of the most sophisticated intellectuals of twentieth-century Europe; his anti-Semitism is not shouty, incoherent, nor (as apologists are keen to say), limited to a handful of ill-conceived statements. It is deeply philosophical; it permeates his thought; it is an incisive statement about world history. It is also utterly banal. Its banality evokes the one perceived by Hannah Arendt (2006) in Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem, an observation that continues to be misinterpreted to this day as indifference to evil. But it was not indifference; it was instead, as Nancy writes,

...an attempt to indicate... the extent to which it had been possible for judgements and practices that converged in the extermination of some five million people to be made into a banality

(pp 1-2)

Eichmann's defence strategy had focused on describing the huge order-execution machine of the concentration camp he presided upon in utterly normalized terms that made them sound banal and did not question the deeper motives behind those orders. Despite the righteous indignations Arendt's remarks have provoked, the painstaking work of historians and analysts of the last fifty years confirmed she was dead right.

Eichmann dutifully followed orders; he then went home for dinner with the wife and kids. Heidegger followed the ignorant and prejudiced doxa of anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1940s and turned it into a philosophy. But what kind of philosophy? The first task of any philosophy worth its salt is to think critically. Heidegger's failure here is not only moral, social and political. It is a philosophical failure. He proved incapable of applying vigilance and critical faculty to a vulgar and murderous thought that the majority of people in the early years of the twentieth century fell for. He sheepishly followed the abject thinking of das Man, the 'they' whose mediocrity he had so lucidly decried in his works.

Most philosophers had expressed a fierce criticism of anti-Semitism appealing to either 'democratic or religious, Marxist or humanist convictions', while Nietzsche 'clearly detected' the 'vulgarity inherent in racism' (p 4). Not a single trace of this is present in Heidegger.

He believed instead in the need for a second beginning, a new sunrise in the Abendland (evening-land, the place where the sun sets) of the West. The first beginning had occurred with the Greeks. But in order to have a new sunrise, Heidegger tells us, we need to bring about 'the complete destruction of the Greek beginning' (p 9), the destruction of Western civilization as we know it. We need to bring about a complete shipwreck, a task that needs its 'appropriate people' (ibid). And, Heidegger says, 'this appropriate people [are] the Jewish people' (p 10). In his notebooks he writes:

The question concerning the role of world Jewry is not a racial question but the metaphysical question that bears on the type of human modality which, being absolutely unbound, can undertake as a historial "task" the uprooting of all beings from being.

(cited on p 10)

'Historial' (rather than 'historical') is the translation of weltgeschichtlich (literally, 'world-historical'), an expression used by Heidegger in order to give metaphysical import to the perceived world-historical role of the Jewish people in bringing about nothing less than the demise of the West. This is not common or garden racism but racism elevated to dizzy ontological heights. It is, as Nancy argues, not so much Nazism as a worldview but a form of 'archi-fascism'... a kind of hyperbolic revelation of a destinal truth of being based on 'a people' (p 13). 'World Jewry' is for Heidegger the synthesis of all the evils that befall the West, the quintessential evil he found scattered in Bolshevism, Americanism, rationality, democracy, technology, the necessary evil that in shipwrecking our land of sunset, will bring about a new sunrise.

Among other vices such as calculation, commerce and shrewdness, he sees the Jews bringing about the demise of Western culture by spreading Bodenlosigkeit, the groundlessness or lack of soil of those 'citizens of nowhere' berated by Theresa May during a speech at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham in 2016. Groundlessness, Nancy quotes Heidegger as saying, is 'being bound to nothing, making everything serviceable for itself (Jewry)' (p 20). The other evil is what Heidegger calls, literally mishmash, the true beginning of the end, 'the mixing, confusion, and indistinction of peoples in a humanity that does not place high enough the humanitas of man' (pp 22-23). All of these arguments can be also found, word by word, in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That a shrewd thinker 'so adept at tracing provenances... did not ask where anti-Semitism could have come from' (p 27), that he would blindly follow tabloid-style prejudices is precisely what constitutes Heidegger's banality. But he 'knows very well what he is doing', Nancy writes; Heidegger collects 'banal rubbish for the sake of higher ends' (p 24). In so doing, he also shows a lack of historical consciousness and of common historical sense, conspicuous in a thinker who has supposedly made of historical 'Being-in-the-world' his trademark contribution to philosophy.

Heidegger is uninterested in questioning the origins of anti-Semitism because of the predominance in his thought of archeotropy, that is, a need to turn towards a beginning. This notion 'prevents consideration of any development, any history in the simplest sense of a succession of events' (p 33). There is also misrecognition in Heidegger of the initial split introduced by the Judeo-Christian culture, a split that for Nancy signalled 'the mutation of a relation-to-self' (ibid) which for Foucault (1986) brought about the very birth of the self as we know it before askesis and care of self in Hellenic culture. With the advent of monotheism, the self becomes split and begins to be judged, loved, consulted and summoned. Part and parcel of this split, overlooked (and replicated) by Heidegger is Christianity's rejection of Judaism. In this painful process, Christendom rewrites its own identity, transposing its own self-hatred into a body that it sees as other, as errant (both 'wrong' or bound to err, and 'wandering') and, crucially, that does not belong to the modern European state – a split that is then painfully replicated within Judaism with the birth of Zionism.

These historical events, I feel, ought to interest psychologists and psychotherapists because at their core are the disastrous self-hatred and painful rifts of an entire culture. Not only is Heidegger unwilling to diagnose them; he is in fact substantiating them by adding his philosophical gloss to a dishonourable tradition of hatred that has characterized the history of the West at least since Rome – a hatred that is, at heart, self-hatred. In a passage that clearly invokes Heidegger while referring to 'we' as a culture, Nancy explains:

We do not like the Jews, or technics, or money, or commerce, or rationality ... We do not like ourselves, perhaps precisely because we would like to be "ourselves" – which most often we believed we had to interpret as "to be Greek", misrecognizing in this way that with and after the Greeks a great deal has happened that did not always come from the Greeks.

(p 39)

That 'we' in Nancy's text is not merely rhetorical: we (including the beautiful souls that people so much of the humanistic psychology world) are also implicated in the destructive and self-destructive horror that is the history of the West and that continues to manifest as hatred of difference and otherness and that 'indulges in beginnings and ends... in sunrises no less than bloody sunsets' (p 62). I understand Nancy to be saying that the hatred of anti-Semitism, so eloquent and virulent in Heidegger is, at heart, fear: a fear of anything that might constitute uncomfortable reminder of fragility, error, wandering, of transience and complicity with the wind. One thing only will remain of our cities, Brecht said once: the wind blowing through them. Being acquainted with this primordial fear, with the existential anxiety of impermanence may work as a useful antidote.

Manu Bazzano

References

Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1986). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The care of the self. New York: Vintage.