Appropriating Heidegger.

Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, by Charles Bambach, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. 400 pp.

IN 1922 MARTIN HEIDEGGER wrote a rather brief, yet particularly signal essay entitled "Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation." (1) Intended as an introduction to a larger--though, never-to-be-completed--monograph on Aristotle, the essay attempts to lead the reader into a kind of philosophical comportment within which Heidegger's phenomenological research will be undertaken; that is to say, it seeks to offer a way by which Heidegger--and the reader along with him--may affect a disposition not only toward the work to be interpreted (in this case, Aristotle), but also toward one's own "hermeneutical situation" in and through which reading always takes place. For the Heidegger of this early path-mark on the way to Being and Time (1927), a philosophical reader always encounters the hermeneutical problem of interpreting works through the "conceptual resources" that the researcher brings to the text.

Moving away from the historicist model of the "suspension of all subjectivity," Heidegger argues that we need to elucidate these conceptual resources of the hermeneutical situation motivating our research, and to recognize that such research and reading are never an immediate transfer of the past into the present, but rather an appropriation of the past by the present. "The situation of interpretation," Heidegger writes, "i.e., of the appropriation and understanding of the past, is always the living situation of the present." Indeed, the task of philosophical research, for Heidegger, is not to render the present mute and impotent in order to allow the text and time of Aristotle, for example, to shine forth in its universal objectivity, for if that were possible, the present would not so often feel compelled to retranslate its received authors. Quite the contrary, that which the reader brings to the text remains pivotal insofar as "the past opens itself up only in accord with the degree of resoluteness and power of the capacity to disclose that the present has available to it." For Heidegger, the hermeneutical situation of the interpreter must be laid bare and elucidated if philosophical interpretation is to distinguish itself from historiography and to appropriate and make the past its own.

It is precisely in the spirit of this hermeneutical elucidation that Charles Bambach--in his Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks--undertakes the topic of Heidegger's readings (and writings) in philosophy and poetry from the years 1933 to 1945. As the reader quite clearly intuits from the title, Professor Bambach's book endeavors to analyze and to evaluate Heidegger's work from this tumultuous period in the philosopher's academic and political life. A card-carrying member of the Nazi party and holder of the highly political rectorate at Freiberg University for 9 months in 1933-34, Heidegger remained famously and conspicuously silent in the post-war years when it came to philosophically assessing the guiding essence of his involvement in the movement. Further, he appeared to orchestrate his publications in a way designed to insure that this "hermeneutical situation" remain undisclosed and un-elucidated.

By way of a refreshingly clear and elegant prose style--a quality so often lacking in the majority of secondary literature on Heidegger--Bambach engages Heidegger's earlier philosophical propaedeutic by placing his works and language within their historical/political context. On the one hand, the author navigates the reader through a selection of Heidegger's texts from this stormy period, a period which is often marked by impenetrable prose in highly edited essays published 15 years or more after they were originally penned. On the other hand, through carefully reading Heidegger alongside his more or less forgotten contemporaries, Bambach locates the Alemannian-Schwabian philosopher's language within the sociopolitical context of these years in turmoil--an approach which truly discloses the works in ways unimaginable to those reading them in their published versions, stripped of their historical domain.

Of course, as the author quickly brings to our attention, there exists already a vast body of secondary literature on the topic of Heidegger's activity in the National Socialist movement during these years. However, Bambach claims that these studies commonly posture themselves in two opposing ways of approaching the topic--both of which lend themselves to philosophically assessing Heidegger's political comportment or the questions born out of this comportment insofar as it shapes his reading of philosophy and its history. On the one hand, secondary literature often relies upon the rhetorical force of anecdotes that are then employed to affirm suspicions of non-critical conceptions of National Socialism as a unified monolith. "All too often the discussion about Heidegger's politics rests on an ahistorical conception of Nazism as a moral evil rather than on the concrete ideological concepts, themes, language, and presuppositions that generated the NS movement in Germany during the 1920s and 30s." Or, on the other hand, commentators argue for making a clean line of separation between Heidegger's politics and his philosophical work, as if Heidegger's corpus were "like a toolbox from which we can pick and choose what we like, ignoring the pernicious elements of National Socialist thinking at our leisure."

Rather than avoiding what is hermeneutically at stake by embracing either of these two approaches, Bambach claims that we ought attend carefully to the historical and rhetorical contexts in which Heidegger's works were penned and/or orally given. Thus we will be able to interpret Heidegger's language from out of the historical and geographical soil from which it was cultivated, effectively unhinging Heidegger's language and philosophemes from their apolitical posturing and releasing them into an historical constellation among other German philosophers and political figures employing the same vocabulary and reading the same authors.

Central to the task of retracing and laying bare this hermeneutical situation lies the need to indicate the guiding metaphysical essence governing Heidegger's philosophical and political decisions during the period between 1933-45. The author will point toward a leitmotiv that binds Heidegger's political speeches to his properly philosophical works: Bodenstandigkeit (rooted-ness or autochthony). In order to give conceptual shape to this essential structure ruling over Heidegger's works, Bambach appropriates the paradoxical trope of pastorale militans from Ernst Bloch's essay "Heritage of Our Times" (1935). With this essay, Bloch presents a disturbing account of the emergence of National Socialism. Through a folkish nostalgia and romantic preoccupation for a certain pastoral connection to earth and soil, there emerges in Southern Germany a form of National Socialism rife with the language of "landscape" and "homeland."

For Bloch, pastoral appeal to the Heimat and its deep connection to the land give rise to "a dangerous political ideology of oppression, exclusion, violence, and terror." The political appropriation of the language of the bucolic German country-side--the strength derived from being rooted in the soil of the homeland, the healthy spirit achieved by attending to and working the native land that nourishes the Volk--will simultaneously serve as the motivating militant call for the exclusion of (and violent confrontation with) the culturally-sick in the communist East and the capitalist West. Through caring for its Bodenstandigkeit and relying upon the strength of its cultural rooted-ness in hearth and home, the German Volk will provide the world with a Sonderweg, a third political path grounded upon "the steadiness and steadfastness that comes from being rooted."

Although careful to distinguish Heidegger from "third-rate ideologues parroting the homologies of a political regime," Bambach nevertheless makes the claim that the philosopher of the Black Forest pursues his questions within a vocabulary that bespeaks precisely the spirit of pastorale militans. "From within the organizing matrix of Bloch's presentation, Heidegger's pastoral language of field paths, native soil, path marks, fertile ground, and folkish rootedness--what I will summarily term 'Heidegger's roots'--betrays a fundamental unity with the language and axiomatics of his 'other' paramilitary discourse about heroism, sacrifice, courage, will, struggle, hardness, violence, and self-assertion that marks his political works of the '30s and beyond." Taking this paradoxical structure as the guiding metaphysical force behind many of Heidegger's political and philosophical questions during the years of both world wars and beyond, Bambach reads Heidegger's interpretations and writings as a militant confrontation--or Auseinandersetzung--not only with the reigning political powers of his day, but also with the received tradition, especially Nietzsche and "the Greeks."

By way of a provocative and revealing textual analysis of many of the works written during the period ("What is Metaphysics," the political speeches. "On the Essence of Truth," "Introduction to Metaphysics," "The Self-Assertion of the German University," the Nietzsche lectures, among other less known documents), Bambach argues that Heidegger's confrontation with and critical appropriation of the originary philosophical comportment of "the Greeks" and Nietzsche was principally in the service of a geopolitical, national socialist vision in which Germany leads the world upon a decisive, revolutionary Sonderweg. That is to say, the well-grounded Volk--enriched by its cultural rooted-ness and steadfastness in the soil of the great beginning of the Greeks and attuning itself to the proper cultivation of its communal soul in preparation for the "other beginning" to come--will achieve its destiny by leading the world upon a self-assertive, authentic political path.

Perhaps the most overt articulation of this geopolitical vision lies in the essay Bambach re-titles "The Nietzschean Self-Assertion of the German University." While this document--Heidegger's rectoral address presented in 1933--remains the text most often read and cited as an example of Heidegger's National Socialism, the author argues that for the most part it has been philosophically neglected. Convinced that the essay should be read hermeneutically as a "condensed and concentrated expression of Heidegger's most enduring philosophical themes," Bambach counters those, like Orlando Pugliese, who criticize attempts to focus on this short political speech on the grounds that it represents a fraction of the more than 100 collected volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe.

In comparison with other nationalistic speeches presented by other academics at the time, the Rectoral Address does indeed betray a certain modish and trendy thematic structure: like Heidegger, many committed national socialist philosophers--such as Baeumler, Heyse, and Krieck--conceived of the university as the "vanguard of university change." The fervor of rhetoric circulating in the German university lecture economy suggests that many, in addition to Heidegger, held great hope that the university would emerge as the center of the geopolitical revolution, committing itself to the careful cultivation of the Aufbruch (the revolutionary awakening) through a retrieval of a more originary articulation of science from "the Greeks," a science that might cure the illness of Western nihilism that Nietzsche had already diagnosed. While the Rectoral Address participates in this common, modish rhetoric, Bambach argues that the problem of Bodenstandigkeit remains the guiding metaphysical trope that governs and orients the claims of the text. As such, it not only transcends the rhetorical context of 1933, but also binds itself to the theme with much more longevity, the theme of autochthony that determines the conceptual shape of Heidegger's "private" National Socialism.

But what are we to make of Heidegger's "private" National Socialism? While Bambach's careful and scholarly study contributes enormously to our understanding of the hermeneutical situation delineating Heidegger's political and philosophical "conceptual resources," and while we, reading in English, feel compelled to understand Heidegger's vocabulary in the context of this period, we can scarcely do without this book. Nevertheless, the author's approach has perhaps limited the scope of his interpretation of Bodenstandigkeit. It would seem that, in this appropriation of the past, Bambach's sincere attempt to disclose the historical/political context of 1933-45 has perhaps overly determined his own reading of Heidegger. If an interpretation of the past takes place by the present, then the present must remain open--in Heidegger's understanding of that term--to freeing the philosopheme from its historiographical articulation. It seems to me that this rigorous study desires so much to orient Heidegger in his historical situation, that it overlooks or ignores certain profound and unavoidable moments that would break out and overflow the "conceptual resources" the author describes.

If Heidegger's Nazism articulates itself in and through the leitmotiv of Bodenstandigkeit, then we must question whether Bambach's study goes far enough in assessing autochthony. In an essay often cited by the author--"On the Essence of Truth"--Heidegger describes the situation of interpretation as "freedom." On occasional, rare moments, the human being finds himself outside of himself (ekstasis)--outside of his own traditional concepts and categories in such a way that he "or she" is free and open, suspending judgment. Normally, one lives within a comfortable harmony with these traditional concepts, but occasionally, they become question-worthy, forcing one into a disposition that Heidegger describes as "letting be" and "openness." Heidegger writes, "Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure (Aussetzung) to the disclosedness of beings as such." When one finds oneself pulled from the limits of conceptual resources, one is free not to pass judgment on the matter at hand--free to allow the matter to show itself. Yet, also, one is exposed; without the security of traditional concepts and categories, one remains naked, exposed.

For Heidegger, authentic, philosophical existence is rooted in this exposed disposition in which the limits of one's traditional resources remain almost foreign and held in suspicion. Thus, there seems to be an inherent dichotomy in the notion of autochthony in Heidegger's work, one side of which--exposure--Charles Bambach perhaps neglects. In taking Heidegger's propaedeutic for hermeneutic reading seriously, one reads ek-statically; that is, one affects a disposition that contradicts the concepts we normally associate with National Socialism: totalitarianism, xenophobia, and the like--dispositions that rely upon traditional concepts and categories, while shunning that which does not fit into these categories. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Heidegger's autochthony, qua "exposure" and "openness," is inherently antithetical to presumed tenets governing our conception of National Socialism. And so, we continue to wonder what kind of National Socialist Heidegger was.

1. "Phanomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)" Ed. Hans-Ulrich Lessing. Dilthey Jahrbuch 6 (1989). Recently re-translated by John van Buren in Supplements (Albany, 2002).

RUSSELL WINSLOW teaches philosophy at Eugene Lang College in New York City.