July 17, 2025
A few readers, labeling themselves the European Centre for Heidegger Studies, wrongly rely on there being “antisemitic statements found in some of his writings,” a view which is shared by other misled readers. (“found”? Christians “found” Judaists to be Satanic.)
So, that ECHS group is “About” promoting what is “nevertheless…of importance to the modern world.” Redeem Heidegger! Assuage European guilt for hosting Holy Roman Empire? [I say a little more about that misled view as an end note below, “splitting ‘Heidegger’”].
Heidegger’s notebooks targeted German ideologies for critical considerations.
A psychiatrist wants to understand pathology. That doesn’t make her/him an apologist for it. Likewise, seeking to understand German ideology—Christology especially—isn’t a subscription to it.
Understanding antisemitism requires understanding the premodern political-economic history of Christianity which deeply infected the socio-economics of modern Eurocentrism.
In Germany, mandarin academia was intimately entwined with German-Catholic (“aristocratic”) capitalism whose technocratic orientation toward maximal efficiency was mirrored by the German government.
Heidegger sought to understand the academic conceptuality of that complex: “the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics” which scientizes the audacity of power. Its antisemitism is a function of its “Christian” audacity.
Heidegger’s animus toward “Christian” historiology is portended in his 1920s analysis of Christian doctrine, continued in his notebooks’ considerations of German antisemitism, and implicit to his Nietzsche lectures. The Holocaust was a product of technocratized “Christian” pathology.
His post-war framing of technological power was implicitly a warning that “Never Again” was no given.
We see that today in right-wing appeal of autocracy mirrored by Hitler fan Trump, which echoes 1930s gullibility about Hitler, commonly regarded as a bozo (by Heidegger, too).
splitting Heidegger
The ECHS isn’t “about” alleged “antisemitic statements found in some of his writings,” they would say. Quite the contrary, it’s about what’s “of importance…nevertheless.”
That’s better than presuming “antisemitism expresseed in some of his works,” which the “About us” statement displayed, until recently (before I complained):
That’s a common attitude by readers of Heidegger: A split personality is posited; the split is not addressed as such; and reader departure from the unresolved split is forgotten. Meanwhile, “Heidegger” is left culpable (given guilty character), but still having merit.
That’s schizoid reading. Careful reading of Heidegger’s texts can show that there is no split at all. His critical and educational concerns derive from his fundamental conceptual interests. But many readers can’t figure out how that works. Above, I begin to indicate how there is no split, inauthentic Heidegger. But what’s needed is close attention to Heidegger’s framing of the linguistic phenomenality of German-“Christian” ideology for developing a critical phenomenology.
The split belongs to the reader, mirroring the reader’s apparent inability to resolve dilemmas in their own thinking, dilemmas which are concealed through displacement, writing an inauthentic, split off “Heidegger” who is nevertheless redeemable. But redeeming a split-off straw man is phony scholarship.
