Heidegger and race

ABSTRACT In this article, Wolin attempts to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the philosophical grounds of Heidegger’s support for National Socialism. Much of the previous literature has assumed that Heidegger, as an exponent of Existenzphilosophie, opposed Nazism on epistemological grounds. Heidegger’s defenders maintain that, since the Nazi world-view was predicated on ‘biological racism’, and since Heidegger was an inveterate critic of modern science, an unbridgeable gulf separated his Denkhabitus from the Nazi credo. However, careful scrutiny of the basic tenets of Nazi race doctrine indicates that it had very little in common with ‘scientism’. Instead, race thinking was an inherently ideological construct that emerged in polemical opposition to nineteenth-century positivism. As such, it was saturated with mystical and spiritualist elements. The end result was a confused, yet highly potent, amalgam of German romanticism, fin-de-siècle esotericism (Ariosophy), Aryan supremacism and Bismarckian Machtpolitik. At base, Nazi ‘race science’ was a contradictio in adjecto, a paradigmatic instance of modern political myth. As ‘myth’, it was untethered by the customary empirical and disciplinary constraints of the ‘logic of scientific discovery’. Moreover, Heidegger’s views on race thinking were far from unilaterally negative. In the Black Notebooks II–VI, he praised ‘race [as] a necessary and mediate condition of historical Dasein’. Fundamentally, there are very few qualitative differences between Heidegger’s defence of ‘spiritual racism’ and the understanding of race thinking propagated by Nazi ideologues such as Hans F. K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. According to the philosopher and Heidegger student Karl Löwith, Heidegger ‘was not merely a distinguished representative of the “German revolution”; he was so in a manner much more radical than Ernst Krieck or Alfred Rosenberg.’