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after crediting Heidegger with being the first to give some under–
standing of the nature of Nazism (its relation to planetary technique,
etc.), she blames him for having never read
Mein Kampf
(This point
also had been made by Eric Weil in 1948.) This "error," which can
almost be viewed in his favor, is nonetheless damaging for a respon–
sible intellectual. Yet Arendt forgets that such cases may well have
been typical of the period and that Benjamin , who is certainly one of
the outstanding examples of a modern intellectual, embraced Marx–
ism without having read more than scraps of Marx .
It is one more irony of the present debate that , to defend
Heidegger, his apologists can respond to a question like Gadamer's
by saying: yes, but he
knew.
No thinker in this century, except
perhaps Benjamin, has so clearly foreseen the emergence of a new
barbarity and worse - which he associated with the preponderance
of technique and the closing era of metaphysics. And it is probably
true that he expressed his responsibility , and was one of the first
to
do so, by knowing. Yet even this knowledge and the warning it con–
tains could not prevent him from taking the wrong side, at least for a
time. (And critics who accent his ex treme and overt reservations
concerning democracy may suspect that , for Heidegger even after
the war, there was no right side.) This is one more imperious sign
that he does not deserve to be defended as much as thought-out.
The images of the man's involvement run from the hapless
scholar thrown into the political maelstrom or carried away in a mo–
ment of "pathos" to the convinced, Machiavellian activist or the
lifelong proponent. But the living danger of Heidegger's case will
never simply depend on our view of his conduct in 1933-34 or even
l
in the years following. Heidegger made visible attempts to come
to
.
terms with Nazism as of 1935, with the
Introduction to Metaphysics
and
in subsequent years with his work on Nietzsche and Schelling. These
works represent the first massive evidence of the "Kehre," the turn in
his thought away from the fundamental ontology of
Being and Time.
This is the moment in which he asserted the urgent need for
"thought" to undertake the dismantling of Western metaphysics
("philosophy"). To take the measure of these changes, to see in what
way they form a response to that culmination of philosophy which,
for Heidegger , was the Nazi movement: these are subjects beyond
the scope of a media debate which, in the name of a consensus, risks
leaving the old categories intact. (The recent book by Philippe
Lacoue- Labarthe,
La fiction du politique,
has not curtailed the
debate, but his discussion of Heidegger and Nazism has greater
