Richard Wolin - Heideggers Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

HEIDEGGERS CHILDREN

HEIDEGGERS CHILDREN

HANNAH ARENDT, KARL LWITH, HANS JONAS, AND HERBERT MARCUSE

RICHARD WOLIN

with a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2001 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

press.princeton.edu

First new paperback printing, with a new preface by the author, 2015

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16861-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943157

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Dante Typeface Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

FOR
JRGEN HABERMAS
IN ADMIRATION AND GRATITUDE

Do not become anxious, you German republicans; the German revolution will not take place any more pleasantly and gently for having been preceded by the Kantian critique, Fichtean transcendental idealism, or even natural philosophy. Through these theories revolutionary forces have built up which only await the day on which they may break loose, filling the world with horror and awe. Kantians will appear who want nothing to do with mercy even in the phenomenal world; they will plough up without pity the very soil of our European life with sword and axe, in order to eradicate every last root of the past. Armed Fichteans will arise, whose fanaticism of will can be restrained neither through fear nor through self-interest. More terrible than all will be the natural philosophers, who will participate actively in any German revolution, identifying themselves with the very work of destruction. If the hand of the Kantian strikes swift and sure because his heart is not moved by any traditional reverence; if the Fichtean courageously defies all danger because for him it does not exist at all in reality; so the natural philosopher will be terrible, for he has allied himself to the primal forces of nature. He can conjure up the demonic powers of ancient German pantheism and that lust for battle that we find among the ancient Germans will flame within him.

H EINRICH H EINE, History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany (1834)

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE
Todesfuge and Todtnauberg

ONE
Introduction: Philosophy and Family Romance

TWO
The German-Jewish Dialogue: Way Stations of Misrecognition

THREE
Hannah Arendt: Kultur, Thoughtlessness, and Polis Envy

FOUR
Karl Lwith: The Stoic Response to Modern Nihilism

FIVE
Hans Jonas: The Philosopher of Life

SIX
Herbert Marcuse: From Existential Marxism to Left Heideggerianism

SEVEN
Arbeit Macht Frei: Heidegger As Philosopher of the German Way

EXCURSUS
Being and Time: A Failed Masterpiece?

Conclusion
233

PREFACE TO THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION

S INCE H EIDEGGERS C HILDREN was first published in 2001, the books central themethe fraught conviviality between an inordinately talented group of assimilated Jewish thinkers and a philosopher who, until the very end, insisted on the profoundly Germanic nature of his Denkweg or path of thought

Perhaps it would not be going too far out on a limb to describe some of the literature on Heidegger and Judaism as frankly apologetic. Since the voluble controversy over Heideggers Nazi allegiancesan affiliation that, following the war, he not only never renounced, but which he continued to sport as a badge of honorhas continued apace, to associate Heideggers philosophy with Jewish themes has, in certain cases, been employed as a gambit among his supporters to defuse the ever-present aura of political taint. As a rule, however, such attempts have been superficial. Moreover, they usually ignore the insightful criticisms that many of his former studentsboth Jews and non-Jewsformulated in response to Heideggers perceived philosophical and political failings. There is something intellectually sordid about this sorry spectacle: latecomers who seek to compound the Masters errors by providing (in many cases) a litany of threadbare and transparent rationalizations for his having committed them.

One such instance concerns a high profile conference (among the keynote speakers were French acadmicien Bernard-Henri Lvy and the redoubtable cultural maven, Alain Finkielkaut) that took place in January 2015 on Heidegger et les Juifs in Paris. However, as soon as it was announced, this gathering became the target of a widespread intellectual

Many of the studies that appeared subsequent to Heideggers Children have raised interesting interpretive questions about who might rightfully count among a potentially long list of Heideggers Jewish disciples. They have also raised important issues concerning the various ways that Heideggers influence manifested itself. For these reasons, in the second half of this essay, I will address the question of the criteria of inclusion I employed in writing Heideggers Children. In conclusion, I will treat the cases of three Jewish philosophical outliersFranz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinaswhose names regularly surface in discussions concerning Heideggers impact on the world of Jewish Geist and Kultur.

From the outset, it is worth emphasizing that among the German-Jewish protagonists featured in Heideggers Children, none, with partial exception of Hans Jonas, self-identified as Jewish. Insofar as these figures came of age intellectually during the interwar years under Heideggers powerful tutelage, their dreams of unimpeded social acceptance remained fundamentally intact until the Weimar Republics rash and ignominious demise circa the early 1930s.

As late as 1929, Hannah Arendt wrote, under Karl Jasperss supervision, a dissertation on St. Augustine: the Christian thinker who, along with Luther and Kierkegaard, was the central influence on the so-called crisis theology movement that coursed through German intellectual circles during the 1920s. At the time, Arendt had no reason to doubt that this achievement would be the initial way station on the path to a successful academic career.(M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time), during a long and productive life he never concerned himself with Jewish themes.

As a philosophical Marxist, Herbert Marcuse was a convinced secularist who, in keeping with the prognostications of historical materialism, believed that religious questions would be resolved once the problem of capitalist-induced alienation had been cured. It was in a similar vein that, in Behemoth (1942), the first serious social scientific treatment of National Socialism, Marcuses Frankfurt School colleague, the political scientist Franz Neumann, urged his readers to discount the importance of Nazi anti-Semitism insofar as the Germans remained the most pro-Jewish European people. I hereby cite Neumanns remarkable avowal verbatim: The writers personal conviction, paradoxical as it may seem, is that the German people are the least anti-Semitic of alla declaration that was published in 1942, the very same year that the Endlsung was decreed by the Nazi leadership at the infamous Wannsee conference. Although Neumanns insight may have corresponded to his own personal experiences in the Weimar era, it failed to account for the gathering political storm that loomed following the Great Crash of 1929 and that became a reality with Hitlers seizure of power in 1933.