South Central Review

Richard Wolin’s work is the latest in a series of recent efforts making the case that Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is now entirely compromised by its proximity to Nazism, and that the thinker’s notorious and disastrous political entanglement with National Socialism ought to invalidate any and all philosophical legacy and accomplishment associated with his name. That legacy is vast: the scope of Heidegger’s influence is presently enormous, on both the left and the right. He is the celebrated forefather of a good deal of contemporary postmodern, hermeneutical and deconstructive thought, with continued influence in fields as diverse as theology, aesthetics, and environmentalism. However, this influence seems to have been predicated on down-playing the centrality of Heidegger’s political commitments to his philosophy in ways that the full publication of the life-work have now called into lasting question. Wolin’s book seeks to make the case that it is now impossible, as more and more of Heidegger’s texts and correspondences are published, to partition his politics from his overall thinking. Heidegger’s abstract ruminations on being were not what anyone thought they were. A once-meteoric intellectual legacy is now in shambles.

One of the more recent triggers for renewals of the “Heidegger controversy” is that many politically toxic passages were edited out of the initial German, French and English-language editions of Heidegger’s Nazi-era works, before reappearing in the Gesamtausgabe. This allowed the Heidegger-industry to thereby set in motion a continuing series of apologetic claims to preserve his philosophical legacy from his political engagement. In reaction, the central interpretive premise of Wolin’s approach is that reading Heidegger only and always politically is warranted. Given that Heidegger’s collected works are editorially compromised, Wolin rejects any text-immanent approach in favor of just such a reductionism. Critics had already long been suspicious of the obscurantism of Heidegger’s texts, describing them as hypostatizations and pseudo-explanations masking serious thought. For Wolin, the published revelations once and for all call for an end to any charitable reading, any sympathetic analysis, any reverential treatment. Given Heidegger’s own emphasis on how a thinker’s life-experiences inform their fundamental philosophical impulses, Wolin seizes upon the recently appearing correspondences and Black Notebook revelations, reading them back into Heidegger’s philosophical timeline, and using them as the skeleton-key by which to unlock what Heidegger was really thinking, and what his philosophical texts were really all about. Having both moral and hermeneutic license to proceed in this way, Wolin’s conclusion is that the evidence reveals not merely that the thinker’s output had all along, and from its earliest days, been hopelessly intrinsically racist and fascistic, but also that it provided cover for one of the most murderous and destructive regimes known to human history, while pretending to be oblivious to the unscrupulous brutality occurring right before its eyes. [End Page 130]

Anticipating the criticisms that his book presents nothing new, Wolin synthesizes the spiraling totality of contemporary evidence to devastating effect, displaying a tremendous grasp of the vast recent scholarship on this issue. Heidegger in Ruins tracks down and refutes every alibi: it is now difficult to claim that Nazi politics had no connection with his philosophical thought, or that this naïve thinker was out of his depth in the political realm, or that he mustered some internal opposition to the chaos that swirled around him, or that Heidegger’s politics were a transitory event, or that he somehow was a supporter of Hitler but not a Nazi, or was a Nazi but not an anti-semite.

In addition to covering the traditional proximity to Heidegger of figures like Jünger, Spengler, and Sombart, Wolin expands to less well-known tributaries to Heidegger’s worldview, such as how Beumelburg’s military nationalism drew Heidegger’s praise for the Volksgemeinschaft, how the work of Hans Grimm informed Heidegger on the imperatives of German geopolitical expansion, how correspondence with Kommerell had Heidegger exalting the demiurgic capacities of poets. Wolin also...