Heidegger's Humanism, from John Gray's Straw Dogs, continues.

Heidegger praised 'the crooked path of thought', but he did so because he believed it led back to 'home'. In Heidegger's never-renounced engagement with Nazism, the quest for 'home' became a hatred of hybrid thinking and the worship of a deadly unity of will. There can be little doubt that Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism was in part an exercise in opportunism. In May 1933, with the help of Nazi officials, he was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg.

Heidegger was elected rector by the faculty on April 21. He joined the National Socialist Party on May 3.

He used the post to give speeches in support of Hitler's policies, including one in November 1933 in which he pronounced, 'The Fuhrer himself and alone in the present and future German reality and its law.' At the same time he broke off relations with students and colleagues (such as his old friend and former teacher Edmund Husserl) who were Jewish. In acting in this way, Heidegger was not much different from many other German academics at one time.

Husserl converted to the Evangelical Lutheran faith in 1886.

But Heidegger's involvement with Nazism went deeper than cowardice and power worship. It expressed an impulse integral to his thinking. By contrast with Nietzsche, a nomad who wrote for travellers like himself and who was able to put so much in question because he belonged nowhere, Heidegger always yearned desperately to belong. For him, thinking was not an adventure whose charm comes from the fact that one cannot know where it leads. It was a long detour, at the end of which lay the peace that comes from no longer having to think. In his rectorial address at Freiburg, Heidegger comes close to saying as much, leading the observer Karl Lowith to comment that it was not quite clear whether one should now study the pre-Socratic philosophers or join the Brownshirts.

Gray is here following a common pattern: Heidegger is considered an important philosopher by those who have read him; I don't understand him; Heidegger was a Nazi; Nazism is universally condemned; I'll simply dismiss Heidegger's way of thinking by ascribing his politics to it. It is, of course, Heidegger's own fault that his critics can avail themselves of this excuse, but it doesn't say much for the critics either.

Heidegger claimed that in his later thought he turned away from humanism. Yet, except perhaps in his last years, he showed no interest in traditions in which the human subject is not central. He held resolutely to the European tradition because he believed that in it alone 'the question of Being' had been rightly posed. It was this belief that led him to assert that Greek and German are the only truly 'philosophical' languages -- as if the subtle reasonings of Nagarjuna, Chuang-Tzu and Dogen, Jey Tsong Khapa, Averroës and Maimonides could not be philosophy because Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Arab and Jewish thinkers did not write in these European tongues. Purged of alien voices and returned to its primordial purity, philosphy could once again become the voice of Being. Philosophers could read the runes of history, and know what mankind was called upon to do -- as Heidegger claimed he did in Germany in the thirties. Seldom has a philosopher claimed so much for himself, or been so deluded.

Putting delusions to one side, Heidegger's claims about the privileged status of Greek and German were really a dig at the Western philosophers that wrote in Latin from Augustine to Kant. Although not as much of an orientalist as Schopenhauer, Heidegger was quite keen on seeking out affinities for his thinking in other philosophical traditions. Gray's sarcasm is self-defeated in his next paragraph.

In Heidegger's last writings he speaks of Gelassenheit, or releasement -- a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. Perhaps that reflects the influence on him of East Asian thought, particularly Taoism. More likely Heidegger's Gelassenheit is only the release from willing that Schopenhauer had long before seen as the source of art. In art, and above all in music, we forget the practical interests and strivings that together make up 'the will'. By doing so we forget ourselves, Schopenhauer claimed: we see the world from a standpoint of selfless contemplation. In the last phase of his thought, the only one in which he really turned away from humanism, Heidegger did little more than return to Schopenhauer by a roundabout route.

If Heidegger's critique of humanism is reduced to a matter of selfless contemplation, then Heidegger might be considered a minor follower of Schopenhauer, but instead, the issues Heidegger grappled with extend far beyond the boundaries of the metaphysical box John Gray is in.

The argument that Heidegger unjustifiably privileges humans above animals is one worth persuing, but to do so, one first has to unpack Heidegger's reasons for privileging Dasein.  ¶ 1:06 PM