added discussion: August 25, 2024, second half below
Heidegger’s interest in transforming the university began relatively early in his career. For example: In a passionate letter to Karl Löwith, August 1921 (Heidegger was already 31!), he was very intent that...
the old university cannot be overcome [through merely replacing] the “intellectualism” of fossilized lecturers [with] individuals whom one considers to be richer, more lively, and deeper; instead it can be overcome only by returning to the origins of action in what has survived in contemporary facticity and by deciding for oneself what one can do....we [are to] sacrifice ourselves and find our way back into our existential limitation and facticity rather than reflecting our way off into programs and universal problems....That activist sentiment, five years prior to Being and Time, would gain vast elaboration in later years (and live with embittering disappointments). [The 1921 letter is reproduced in the back of Löwith’s book Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 1984 (English 1995).] Indeed, Being and Time seeks to activate authentic care for others “concretely.”
Since German universities understood all of their faculties of sciences and humanities as “Philosophy Faculty,” and the university was the training ground for government mandarins (the original purpose of the German university!), Heidegger’s engagement with transforming philosophy throughout the 1920s is implicitly attention to his passionate desire to overcome the “old university.” In Being and Time, the 1921 sentiment isn’t elaborated in terms of university reform, but B&T shows a communal sense of action that Heidegger applies later only in terms of university reform.
His communal sense of emancipatory action has been made clear by Theodore Kisiel (which I’ve referenced in the past so often that this might seem tiresome now):
• pp. 1-7 of “...Heidegger’s three concepts of the political” (If that link doesn’t automatically open the essay, click the download icon at the upper right of the GoogleDrive window.)
Heidegger’s 1933 enthusiasm for “self-assertion of the German university” was based on a grassroots, communal sense of potential for political economic renewal that had nothing to do with actual German national politics. (See especially his discussion of that era, written in 1945: beginning at p. 481 of this 36 page PDF.) I could argue in evidentiary detail that he wanted the universities to be the basis for national economic reform (at the height of the Depression), and he sought to lead a local and regional coordination of universities that would shape Berlin educational policy. This is why he accepted being elected to the rectorate position (which he didn’t seek). Every note of enthusiasm for a “national socialist movement” was relative to his long-held hope for university leadership in economic recovery after the 1929 Crash.
After that “…university” address, there was a faculty dinner, where Heidegger was criticized for not referring to any Nazi Party aims. His response was a sarcastic “Oh, you noticed that!” (Shortly later, Heidegger reported that scene to his good friend H. W. Petzet, recounted by Petzet in his Encounters and Dialogues, 1993.)
When he gave an expansive lecture on university reform at Heidelberg University, end of June, 1933 (more than a month after his “Self-Assertion...” speech as Rector of Freiburg University), there was no reference to Nazi Party policy. But there was passionate expectation that university policy reform would affect Berlin policy (bottom-up thinking) that had not yet crystallized for Berlin. One should keep in mind that, in early 1933, there was no presumption that the vast bureaucratic structure of German education could be immediately dominated by Nazi ideology. Thinking that grassroots initiative vis-à-vis the mandarin German state could be fruitful was hardly unrealistic—though he was working with the university faculty he had to work with, many of whom were Party supporters. (What is one to do about that constructively?)
But Karl Jaspers missed the fact that Heidegger was working for bottom-up reform, i.e., alignments from university-based coordinations to regional policy, regional policy to Berlin. What Karl Jaspers heard at the Heidelberg lecture reflected Jaspers’ proper fear of top-down alignment, which Heidegger never intimated.
That is why Jaspers thought that Heidegger was a Nazi. But Heidegger was actually working to have regional universities follow his lead, not have universities follow Berlin’s lead (or rather—unrealistically—Heidegger wanted university leadership to decisively affect Berlin educational policy). Jaspers did not understand Heidegger’s communal approach to change—warranted by Being and Time, an approach which was obviously being improvised in 1933—and Jaspers mistook Heidegger’s constructive engagement with regional administration as an effort to collude with Berlin’s efforts (and then, so did so many later scholars who relied on Jaspers’ view).
In fact, Heidegger resisted Nazi efforts at every opportunity while he was Rector, not just getting critical after quitting in disgust. In August, 1933, he wrote to Carl Schmitt that he was “depressed” about what was happening. In September, 1933, he wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann that he had just returned from a weekend at The Hut where he was considering resigning from the rectorship—five months into the job.
Heidegger’s efforts of constructive engagement were fated to fail, but his attempt is no evidence of collusion. A habitual mistake of scholars considering Heidegger’s administrative time is to expect that lack of public opposition signals private acquiescence. But obviously, overt oppositional activity was self-destructive (and his “black notebooks” obviously document his bitterness in late 1933 onward).
Throughout critical philosophy in the 20th century, a hegemony of the negative dialectical paradigm (which equates [a] lack of dramatic opposition and [b] acquiescence or appeasement, if not affirmation) has perpetuated blindness about how non-collusional constructive engagement may work to change others’ practices by working with the misguided other (e.g., in remedial parenting, teaching, counseling—and realpolitik). Non-collusional constructive engagement is not appeasement (let alone duplicitous collusion). [When one could be jailed for not saying “Heil, Hitler”—a law imposed July 1933—it’s good to play along with what became a casual joke; circa page 29, I believe—see “Hitler salute“ in the Index.]
Jaspers’ misunderstanding of Heidegger’s emancipatory (constructively deconstructive) approach to action in teaching became decisive after the war. People made careers, based on Jaspers’ caricature of Heidegger as “mystical” thinker (which was Jaspers’ label in his statement to the De-Nazification Committee, 1945).
But Heidegger never thought that Jaspers understood him. Heidegger unwittingly disclosed that to Jaspers in 1929, when Jaspers heard from a student that Heidegger was making fun of Jaspers’ “philosophizing” in Heidegger’s discussions with some students; and Heidegger later apologized to his friend (not denying that he was dismissive of Jaspers’ views). [This is recounted in a long footnote to Heidegger's letter in the letters between Jaspers and Heidegger, p. 281, based on Jaspers's account in his Autobiography.]
Then, we see in the Considerations (Überlegungen, “black notebooks,” English edition: Ponderings) that Heidegger is often dismissive during the mid-1930s about Jaspers’ “philosophy of existence,” while Jaspers refused to speak to his friend of 13 years after that one June 1933 evening following the Heidelberg lecture, not giving himself a chance to believe otherwise about Heidegger—but willing to cause Heidegger to lose employment.
Decades passed where Jaspers’ bias became “common sense” for many “scholars” who were apparently relieved that they didn’t have to really dwell with what Heidegger was trying to do (which is an old discussion by now—part of a larger project—but may be news to some).
added discussion: August 25, 2024
Prosecution of Heidegger is actually led by a small number of scholars who read Heidegger as a threat to their own thinking: intellectual historians, mostly; but also scholars with theological commitments.
Post-theological thinking is not anti-theological, just as post-adolescent adulthood is not anti-adolescent. The matter for thinking is to be appreciative of developmental and historical relativity. Metaphysicalism (the legacy of Western philosophy up to the 20th century) conceals the historicality of so-called “ontology”; and conceals the life-oriented developmentality of conceptual views.
For Heidegger, the unfathomable criminality of the nazi period was a secret collusion of traditional elite academic authority, German Catholic authority, and techno-capital backing of nazi autocracy—the “onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics” (1957 lecture by Heidegger) as criminal power.
Heidegger sought a critique of ideology which was that radical—but then calling on students to create (“building”) a home (“dwelling”) which enables Our flourishing wholly (“thinking” openly).
Below are two recent postings from my Heidegger project page at Facebook.
Heidegger was not a nazi sympathizer, April 4, 2024
Must it be said again?
Belief otherwise continues, especially in marginal online media which presume the phony claim. Heidegger merely wanted to lead admirable university reform without getting fired.
A Berlin policy, summer 1933, required public officials to sign off with “Heil Hitler" (citation available.) Heidegger considered Hitler to be a bozo (letter to E. Blochmann, summer 1933). But public opposition would have caused his firing; and commonly, public opposition resulted in arrest, even imprisonment as early as mid-1933 (cit. avail.). Heidegger’s son, Hermann, insisted that Heidegger did all he could to resist Hitlerism (cit. avail.).
November. 1933, Heidegger, in speeches to students and faculty (easily available, but commonly misread), urged that everyone vote for authentic reasons (at a time when the Weimar Constitution was still valid!), not that they vote for Hitler. “Hitler is Germany” is a warning; and entails that Germany can determine its own future because Hitler was a creature of populist opinion in a time of economic crisis. German voters could, in principle, control Hitler, if everyone voted responsibly for the interests of Germany’s welfare. Unfortunately, that hope wasn't widespread. (Hitler was not very popular in southwest Germany; cit. avail.)
As professor, Heidegger overtly countered the nationalist misunderstanding of Hölderlin; countered the nazification of the Greeks as roots of Aryan lineage; countered the nazification of Nietzsche in academia; and countered the phony Catholic order which supported “messianic” autocracy (as also did German capitalism).
Hitler was repulsive to the 1933 Hindenberg administration, and that was commonly known. Hindenberg was going to fire Hitler, summer of 1934 (cit. avail.)—a power over a Chancellor which a German President had by Constitutional authority. But Hindenburg died, mid-August. An untimely death gave Hitler the license he needed.
Heidegger invented critical phenomenology, May 6, 2024.
In the 1930s, there was not yet any sense of phenomenological critique of ideology. Heidegger attempted privately to create that, filling much of his notebooks with narratives about what “They” say (not expressing support for those views).
But some critics of Heidegger haven’t reached the phenomen-
ological stance of reading by distanced framing of what people say, which implicates their linguistic relativity or socialization. That new focus on linguistic relativity is the Heideggerian revision—relating primarily to persons—of Husserl's misleading motivation by objects. Relating to things as objects is a derived mode of primal (infant—> child—>) relating to other persons (and personifying things because we value them).
Heidegger created the use / mention distinction, shown by his common placement of terms and phrases in quote marks, indicating a mention of (referring to) what “They” say (not saying it as his asserted view).
That serves his development of a critique of ideology beyond the neo-Hegelian paradigm of Marxist critique during Heidegger’s era (since the Hegelian-Marxist tradition is part of that metaphysical-
ism of rationalization which culminates as messianic dictatorship of the Absolute mandate). His Mindfulness book expresses that in his idiom.
When he refers to “world Jewry” (one notebook passage; and once in History of Beyng, p. 66), it’s in quote marks: a rubric that They use in the 1930s, which he places in contexts of how those uses are self-undermining (indeed, racist). He uses what They say to show how ideology works (and “rationalizes” a criminality of power). “They-self” was already integral to Being and Time.
For the nazis, ‘world Jewry’ was a scapegoating rubric: criminal power deflected from itself by demonizing the Jewish world. This is what was in mind at p. 66 of History of Beyng, as part of developing a critique of ideology.
