AI Summary
5 min readIn December 1931, Martin Heidegger sent his brother Fritz a copy of Mein Kampf as a Christmas gift, noting that the choice was “in keeping with the spirit of the season.” This detail, drawn from correspondence published only about five years ago, is one of many that Richard Wolin uses in Heidegger in Ruins to dismantle the lingering myth that the philosopher’s support for National Socialism was a brief, naive mistake. Wolin, a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, argues that Heidegger’s Nazism was not a political error but a deep, sustained commitment that grew directly out of his philosophical system—and that the recent publication of the Black Notebooks and volumes of personal letters makes this connection impossible to ignore.
The Black Notebooks and the Unreconstructed Nazi
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:11) **Introduction of the Topic and Guest** - Jonathan Brent introduces Richard Wolin and the importance of understanding Heidegger for 20th-century intellectual history.
- 2 (04:45) **The Provocation: The Black Notebooks** - Wolin explains the direct stimulus for the book: the 2014 publication of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks" (1931-1948).
- 3 (08:59) **The Core Thesis: Continuity, Not a Mistake** - Heidegger saw deep philosophical continuity between *Being and Time* and his support for National Socialism, not a political error.
- 4 (12:15) **Post-War Evasion: Blaming Technology** - After the war, Heidegger blamed technology (originating from Descartes and "the West") for Nazi crimes, absolving German human responsibility.
- 5 (15:35) **The Book's Goal: Opening a Deeper Conversation** - Wolin agrees the book is not about "canceling" Heidegger, but understanding the profound connection between his philosophy and his politics.
- 6 (17:16) **Evidence of Long-Standing Antisemitism** - Wolin traces Heidegger's antisemitism back to WWI-era letters, using racialized terms like "Verjudung" (Jewification) and "infestation."
- 7 (21:40) **The "Cultural Code" of Antisemitism** - Explicit antisemitism was often absent from published works due to political self-censorship in the Weimar Republic.
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Show Notes
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.
In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.
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