“He who thinks greatly must err greatly.”
Heidegger,
The Thinker as Poet
Since the release of the volumes
of his letters, I have been thinking about Heidegger.
Philosophy, as a practice of
thought and inquiry, is a search for wisdom that we can cherish and that,
perhaps, can help us live our lives better and with greater consciousness than
we would without it. Although in pursuit of philosophy language may enter the
realm of abstract discourse, it is reasonable to suppose that it has a
practical application in the actual world, teaching us how to live with
ourselves and with one another, and teaching us how to bear living with
ourselves and with one another throughout and despite the vicissitudes of
fortune and the ambiguities, complexities, and treacheries of human behavior.
The study of philosophy ought to help us to understand the nature of the world
in all its aspects and ourselves in all our aspects. Rather than providing
answers, however, the study of philosophy ought to accomplish these things by
endowing its students with a capability to think flexibly, disinterestedly, comparatively,
with guides to judging and evaluating, and it ought to foster a capacity to
observe, to notice, to distinguish, to analyse and to synthesize. It ought to
be what Maimonides called a guide for the perplexed.
As a philosopher, then, what is
Heidegger about? What does he offer? And – whatever he offers – how valuable,
useful, worthy is it, given that he was a member of the Nazi Party and as such,
a source of perplexity? Did his allegiance to Hitler infect his thought? What
can Nazi thought, if his is, contribute to our lives when, at root and in
practice, it is barbarous and reprehensible beyond our powers of condemnation? Is
his? To consider Heidegger’s work honorably must entail considering the
relation of his work and Nazi ideology to each other, with regard to the savage
brutality of Nazism and, particularly, with regard to the virulent
anti-Semitism that was one of the foundation stones of National Socialism and
that can also be found in Heidegger’s writing, although with a lesser intensity
and, perhaps with a significance that is less about the Jews than it is about a
characteristic stereotypically and ignorantly attributed to the Jews.
How do Heidegger’s thought and
Nazi ideology reflect each other? What is or is not their correspondence? Are
they cut of the same cloth? If so, what is that cloth? If not, where is the
difference? Is anti-Semitism either a foundation of or a necessary consequence
of Heidegger’s philosophy?
As a practice, the term philosophy
has two acceptations. Traditionally, in Plato, for example, philosophy means
thinking about the world in an argumentative way, weighing this against that,
trying to find what is true and what is false, trying to figure out how to
figure out what makes something true and what makes something false. It is the
study of what is good and what is not, of how we ought to form ourselves and
our environments and conduct our interactions.
Philosophy can also be a species
of academic discourse that seems to thrive on being obscure and difficult;
that, for most people, is an involuted language game played by adepts and
specialists, a discourse that seems to turn back on itself, that seems more
like a venture at verbal mathematics than a real attempt to share thought or
wisdom; that seems designed to exclude the unenlightened and uninitiated and to
inflate the egos of people who can manipulate abstractions and prove thereby
their potency. Heidegger seems to talk like this group, and his work, to belong
to its practitioners; and those who talk about him or whose practice is derived
from his, seem to talk that way also.
Heidegger seemed to be proposing
that the idea of Being — which is essential and unique to the definition of
Being, through which definition we identify the Being of human beings — beings
whose Being is defined by their awareness and contemplation of Being – that the
idea of Being itself must be considered when we think about Being and what
makes Being authentic rather than corrupt. Heidegger asserted that the meaning
of a thing we seek, even when we don’t know the meaning of the thing we seek,
or even what exactly it is that we are seeking — in Heidegger’s case, Being –
that this meaning is already available to us, in what Heidegger calls, rather
unhelpfully, “a certain way,” a term full of suggestion but empty of
specificity. Heidegger seemed to admit the un-satisfactoriness of this
formulation when he added that our a priori understanding of
Being is “average and vague,” but nevertheless “a fact.” Our sense of Being is
the proof of its existence. But what is that sense? When is it authentic? How
do we know it is authentic? How do we actualize it? And is our sense of
something a valid proof of its existence or only of our having a sensation?
The question, How is Heidegger’s
thought similar to or related to something at the core of the Nazi worldview? can,
perhaps, help explore what is at the core of the Nazi worldview. And perhaps a
formulation of what is at the core of the Nazi worldview can reveal what the
core of Being is for Heidegger.
The essential problem for
Heidegger is to establish a unifying integrity, to abolish duality, the
duality of matter and spirit, to overcome the duality of the mind-body split,
and to rid language and thought of the polarity of subject and object, to
break the boundary between thinking and feeling, between the knower and the
known, between a technique and a technician. Duality is generally accepted
as a defining, historical axiom of Western European thought. Socrates teaches,
Know Thyself. Scientists examine the world using the scientific method that
makes understanding or explanation the bridge and the boundary between the
inquirer and the thing examined. Science relies on mind to figure out, make
hypotheses, and draw conclusions from events by collecting data about the
events. In part Heidegger’s is a project
designed to topple bi-polar, materialistic science and scientific reasoning and
method from their place of dominance in the quest for knowing. Establishing the
integrity of matter and spirit, dissolving the boundary between mind and body,
subject and object, perceiver and perceived, the experience and the person
experiencing, turning duality into unity, was a very popular thing to do during
the first decades of the twentieth century, in the teens, twenties, thirties.
Psychoanalysts, philosophers, and physicists, Freud, Husserl, and Einstein, and
later, Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst, as well as Heidegger, developed
systems of epistemology and ontology…techniques of knowing — and formulations
of being – that eradicated, or attempted to eradicate, the division between
matter and spirit, between perceiver, perception, and perceived, between
subject and object, between knowing-about and being-within. A symptom, as Freud
understood it, for example, was the physical manifestation in the body of an
intangible idea, or memory, or association residing in an intangible realm.
What they were trying to
establish was that true knowing is not a matter of a subject knowing about an
object but happens when boundaries and borders between subject and object,
perceiver and perceived, mechanic and machine, dissolve, and knowing is
articulated feeling, so that a seamless unity of process and product, of means
and ends, replaces an alienating, intellectually-created duality, loosens
experience from ego, and turns it into authentic -- because egoless -- knowing.
This can also suggest the eradication of the boundary between self and
other(s). The ego becomes collective rather than individual. The selfless self
is defined as the fundamental and authentic self.
Heidegger supported Hitler, and never publicly recanted that support,
never overtly and unambiguously recanted, explained, lamented it after the war.
(His anti-Semitism, however, although actual but nuanced, did not lead him to
subscribe to the liquidation of the Jews. His 1949 statement, for example, -- “Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry — in essence, the same as
the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and
extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the
same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” – seems to be
a condemnation both of the extermination of the Jews and an attack on a socially
organized, technologically-determined disposition that brings such a thing into
being.) So, what does his
form of adherence to National Socialist policy and to Hitler himself mean for
his philosophy?
Heidegger’s anti-intellectual model
of Being seems to suggest that collective identification – everyone’s
identification with everyone else – is the basis for authentic, non-mediated
being. The authenticity of being is predicated on the obliteration of the
boundary between self and Other. It is not possible to know, in a pure,
unmediated, authentic sense, anyone or anything without that happening. The
sort of Being that is at the root of one being’s ability to penetrate another
being and experience it unmediated, as if the two were a unity, and that can
also experience itself that way, Heidegger conceives, is the consequence of the
exercise of a meditative consciousness. Opposed to this meditative
consciousness is a calculating consciousness, the kind of consciousness the
Nazis attributed to Jews and that Heidegger did, too, describing it as a Jewish
“talent for calculation.” It is the quality of consciousness that
excludes Jews from Being itself and condemns Jews to an individuality, even if
a stereotypical, collective individuality, that is inauthentic and outside the
realm and definition of Being. But the “talent for
calculation” is not a
characteristic that Heidegger attributes only to Jews, although he does seem to
hold Jews as its supreme practitioners and responsible for its world-wide
influence as the basis for the dominant social, industrial, technological, and
intellectual templates.
It appears that for Heidegger
and for the Nazis, the emergence of authentic Being depends upon the creation
of a collective self, i.e., subordination of each individual self to the group,
so intensely that the individual self is brought to identify with a group self.
This kind of collective self-identification is driven not only by love for the
group and its leader, but by resentment of anyone not perceived as belonging to
the group, of anyone not constituted by the group. Anyone who is not a part of
the collective self, not a part of the Volk, actually has no
being, is a negative, a negation that threatens the very existence of the group
because it represents the condition of being fallen away from the group. The
individuals who are the negation of Being embody the fear of those in the group
of what they would be – or of what they would not be — without the group.
According to Heidegger,
duality -- the mind / body, spirit / matter, subject / object split -- exists
because of a misapplication or misuse of mind – because of an individualistic
assertion of individualized consciousness. That misapplication reveals itself
as the process of calculating, of a subject contemplating an object — rather
than meeting it, instead of seamless, non-mediated being, which is achieved
through an ecology of direct labor in nature rather than the alienation from
labor that results from working upon rather than within nature. Upon the
processes and varieties of calculating, a great deal of western thought, industry,
and most western institutions, have been and are based – thinking about things,
figuring things out: deliberate manipulations of nature and of experience.
These manipulations remove a person who calculates — and the system resulting
from calculation — from the directness of being-there. “There” in this usage,
indicates a boundaryless connection with everything around.
For Heidegger, calculation
gets in the way of a pure melding of beings with each other, with nature, and
with the aggregate being that is the way life presents itself
as life. It creates an alienated, self-conscious, self-centered ego. Calculating
— manipulating ideas and things; thinking about rather than thinking within —
threatens the integrity and cohesion of consciousness, perception, and the selflessness
that is the life of the group, of the Volk.
Calculation can be considered a form of retreat from Being and a form of
paranoia, the assertion of a bounded, self-protecting individuality afraid of
the grip of Being over self, of the loss of self when one is absorbed within,
within nature and within the human agglomerate, for Heidegger and Hitler: the Volk. The act of calculating is a
defense against the exerted force field of the group and the power of Nature as
a power independent of person, of Nature as ineluctable myth, and myth as
primal manifestation of unimpeded Being. As such the calculating mind
interrupts and short-circuits the ideal of unmediated contact and of the
group-self.
The construct of Volk that
Hitler posited was predicated on a meditative relationship rather than a
calculative one, no matter how calculating he himself and his underlings were.
Hitler’s Weltanschauung was Heideggerian, even if he never
read a word of Heidegger. It postulated Being itself as necessarily one with
nature – nature manifesting in the common blood of the Volk -- and as threatened by intellect and ratiocination – and
non-being as what Being is when it is outside nature primarily because of the
interventions of the canny mind. Each individual who has being constitutes part
of the unity of Being by centering consciousness on the figure of the leader,
who is the embodiment of Being. The leader replaces the mind. The leader
directs the conjoined individual and collective consciousness through
non-mediated mythological channels. Hitler, as an embodied mythological
figurehead, was the only mediation between the individual, the group, and Being,
and he existed independent of mind. In him, individual, calculating
consciousness dissolved in the rapture of a collective consciousness.
What I have described –
glorification of an ideal community, of a unified tribe led by an inspiring / inspired
figure of mythic, deific proportions -- is not criminal activity, may not be
evil in itself — but is it a pre-criminal indicator, a pre-condition for the
construction and perpetration of evil?
I did not mention above, in the
catalogue of early twentieth-century theoreticians concerned with the problem
of mind, body, matter, and spirit, the psychologist, mystic, mythologist, and
theologist C.G. Jung. I think he warrants particular attention for an
understanding of Heidegger’s idea of Being, for the dynamic of National
Socialist cohesion, and for a sense of what can tie them together and the
dangers incipient in both. Jung’s idea of a collective consciousness, as
constructed in his formulation of the collective unconscious, more than his concessions to National Socialism –
which some explain and some condemn — is what may be what really links his
thought to “Aryan” ideology. His own formulations of the mystic and
mythical collective consciousness reinforce the sense of Being itself, not
mediated by ratiocination, that Heidegger had formulated. Reason and scientific
authority, sensory data, physical facts, judgement beholden to calibration,
Jung suggests, are of a lesser authority than a shared and binding psychic
belief. Here is an extract from a note to the reader Jung placed as an
apologetic preface before his book Answer to Job:
“Whoever talks of [religious
belief] inevitably runs the risk of being torn to pieces by the two parties who
are in mortal conflict about those very things. This conflict is due to the
strange supposition that a thing is true only if it presents itself as a physical fact.
Thus some people believe it to be physically true that Christ was born as the
son of a virgin, while others deny this as a physical impossibility. Everyone [?]
can see that there is no logical solution to this conflict and that one would
do better not to get involved in such sterile disputes. [Is it not safer to
say that there is a logical solution but not a metaphysical one since the
Immaculate Conception defies logic and biological law but, it is clear, not
belief.] ]Both are right and both are wrong. Yet they could
easily reach agreement if only they dropped the word
‘physical.’ ‘Physical’ is not the only criterion of truth: there are
also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved
nor contested in any physical way. [This assertion, really a trick of
language, a reader must accept on faith, which means conceding the argument to
Jung without his having to make it. Rather than saying that there are psychic truths,
might one not say there are entrenched beliefs that are not open to physical
validation?] If, for instance, a general belief existed that
the river Rhine had at one time flowed backwards from its mouth to its source,
then this belief [“this belief,” i.e., that the river did flow backwards? or
that people believed it did?] would in itself be a fact even though such an
assertion, physically understood, would be deemed utterly incredible. Beliefs
of this kind are psychic facts [things
that are only imagined? confabulated?] which cannot be contested [?]
and need no proof [?].”
[To me this seems quite
specious. But, Jung continues,] “Religious statements are of this type.
They refer without exception to things that cannot be established as physical facts.
If they did not do this, they would inevitably fall into the category of the
natural sciences. Taken as referring to anything physical, they make no sense
whatever, and science would dismiss them as non-experienceable…. [I do not think that scientists dismiss
unreal things as non-experienceable, but consider the possibility of experience
not tied to physical reality. Daydreaming is a real phenomenon, for example,
but a daydream of a physically impossible feat does not preclude the sensation
of having achieved such a feat, nor does it make the feat any more actually
achieved or possible, except in imagination. The daydreamer who takes the
daydream as having been an in-the-material-world phenomenon as well as a
phenomenon of his or her own corporal and mental sensations is making a mistake
and may commit injurious acts. One who has experienced the sensation of flying
ought not to jump out of windows. (Jonathan Swift, master anatomist of the
imaginary and aficionado of its fruits, was equally aware of the importance of
framing it so cannily as not to have mankind governed by “a thing which is
not.”)]
“If, therefore,… I concern
myself [, Jung continues,] with these ‘metaphysical’
objects, I am quite conscious that I am moving in a world of images and that none
of my reflections touches the essence of the Unknowable. [Because as
“unknowable,” it cannot be touched. Additionally, the word “unknowable” is a
linguistic construct and another way of saying “something that is not.” Thus
giving the non-existent the shadow of existence.] I am also too well aware
of how limited are our powers of conception — to say nothing of the feebleness
and poverty of language — to imagine that my remarks mean anything more in
principle than what a primitive man means when he conceives of his god as a
hare or a snake. [To me, this sounds like he is saying: You may have trouble
understanding what I’m saying not because of a fault in what I’m saying but
because, as far as I see it, the human capacity to understand (what I say) is
limited.] But, although our whole world of religious ideas consists of
anthropomorphic images that could never stand up to rational criticism, we
should never forget that they are based on numinous archetypes, i.e., on an
emotional foundation which is unassailable by reason. [i.e., not open to
reason; impervious to rational argument] We are dealing with psychic facts
[phenomena?] which logic can overlook
but not eliminate. [Can science?] In this connection Tertullian [Christian theologian, 160-225 ] has
already appealed, quite rightly, to the testimony of the soul. In his De
testimonio animae, he says :
“‘These testimonies of the soul
are as simple as they are true, as obvious as they are simple, as common as
they are obvious, as natural as they are common, as divine as they are natural.
[This is argument by unsubstantiated assertion and incantation.] I
think that they cannot appear to anyone to be trifling and ridiculous if he
considers the majesty of Nature, whence the authority of the soul is derived. [The authority of the soul is derived from
the majesty of Nature. What does that mean? Why not, for example, from its
closeness to God?]What you allow to the mistress you will assign to the
disciple. Nature is the mistress, the soul is the disciple; what the one has
taught, or the other has learned, has been delivered to them by God, who is, in
truth, the Master even of the mistress herself. [These words, to me, seem
like the smoke of myrrh, with no substance.] What notion the soul is
able to conceive of her first teacher is in your power to judge, from that soul
which is in you. Feel that which causes you to feel; think upon that which is
in forebodings your prophet; in omens, your augur; in the events which befall
you, your foreseer.’
[This argument is dizzying in
its circularity. The arguments of both Jung and Tertulian are
compounded of unsubstantiated assertion – of unsubstantiatable assertions that
are simply constructions of language but both Jung and Tertullian would argue
that is just what their reality consists in and what makes them – properly –
invincible, and show up any challenger as limited. ‘‘Faith’’ as St, Paul
asserted, ‘‘is the evidence of things unseen.’’ And language is the means of
fashioning the existence of what is not. This is the sound of one hand
clapping.]
“I would go a step further [Jung
adds] and say that the statements made in the Holy Scriptures are also
utterances of the soul… The statements of the conscious mind may easily be
snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly [?]
not true of the statements of the soul [a
hypothesised construction based on sensation]: to begin with they always go
over our heads because they point to realities that transcend consciousness. [to
the existence of unimaginables whose proof of being is that we cannot imagine
them] These entia are the archetypes of the collective
unconscious, and they precipitate complexes of ideas in the form of
mythological motifs. Ideas of this kind are never invented, but enter the field
of inner perception as finished products, for instance in dreams. [A dream is not an ‘invention’?] They are
spontaneous phenomena which are not subject to our will, and we are therefore
justified in ascribing to them a certain autonomy. [independence of us in
their existence] They are to be regarded [directive delivered in passive
grammatical construction; by whom are they so regarded?]not only as objects
but as subjects with laws of their own.”
This is dizzying stuff that
seems to defy argument or rational consideration. It can roughly be reduced –
at the risk of seeming like a philistine and lacking any higher sensibility —
to the formula that things that are actual are less real than things that are
believed and that propositions that are reasoned have less authenticity than
beliefs that are felt. — That intangibles fabricated of words have more reality
than tangibles that can be perceived by the senses. Accordingly, things that
can be shown to be are less potent than things believed to be. Things whose
existence can be known because they can be calibrated have less being than
things that can be experienced because they are objects of belief.
Jung’s concept of consciousness
as presented theoretically above can seem alluring to some and specious to
others – in counter argument, someone might bring up feelings of love, desire,
fear, hatred, envy, jealousy, pride, admiration, etc., and point out that they
are both intangible and real and, in order to exist, need not be directed at
another person or thing, but also at abstractions and intangibles -- but when theoretical
concept of consciousness is considered in relation to practical matters, his
thought comes out like this:
“The Jewish race as a whole. .
. possesses an unconscious which can be compared with the ‘Aryan’ only with
reserve. Creative individuals apart, the average Jew is far too conscious and
differentiated to go about pregnant with the tensions of unborn futures. The
‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the
advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from
barbarism. ” 1934, “The State of Psychotherapy Today.”
Ignoring the mental cramp that
the words “the average Jew” induce, what does “the average Jew is far too
conscious and differentiated to go about pregnant with the tensions of unborn
futures” mean? “Pregnant with the tensions of unborn futures.” Indeed!
“Conscious and differentiated?” Of what? From what? Is this another way of
saying “calculating and therefore alienated from Being itself?” The sentence
that comes next certainly cannot be accused of inhabiting the world of reason
or calibration, or even everyday observation: “The ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a
higher potential than the Jewish? ”For what? How does he know? And what does he
mean by “barbarism?” A condition of being anti-intellectual or, maybe,
pre-intellectual, or without the mediating filter of the intellect or the
constraints of civilization? Like the natural animal Rilke describes, in the
eighth Duino Elegy, that “gazes into openness with all its eyes,” while “our
eyes…as if they were reversed,…surround it, everywhere, like barriers against
its free passage.”?
Jung, Tertulian, and Rilke are
each celebrating the belief that the idea of true Being is realized in the idea
of an unconscious Being, Being that represents being-at-one with a
mythological, omnipotent essence of Being. It is not the Being that one can
find or identify by using mind or fact. But each has a purpose and a focus
different from the others. For Rilke, the focus is the person, and the purpose
is to convey Rilke’s concern with the personal authenticity that comes from
inwardness. For Jung and for Tertulian the force above the person is what
matters. Tertullian — using God, and Jung — using the mythological collective unconscious,
assert a hierarchy of truth that moves from a lower form of intellectual
knowledge to a higher form dependent upon an unmediated overwhelming sensory
experience of divinity. This is akin to what Heidegger valorizes as Being
itself. It devalues intellectual knowing and celebrates unmediated experience
dependent upon the experience of existing within a mythic construct whose
existence as myth goes unnoticed by all except the ruling mythographers: it has
the force and dimension of religious experience. It leads a person into
non-mediated contact with the numinous, offering a rapturous existence with and
within the divine.
This mythical, mystical,
incomprehensible, transcendent, unapproachable Being is at the root of
Heidegger’s thought, and it is at the root of the National Socialist
experience. It is hard to speak of Nazi ideology or philosophy because Nazism
was not a philosophy or an ideology but an overwhelming, ecstatic condition of
being. Although Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party and a functionary for
a time, his philosophy does not directly or consistently espouse the Nazi
agenda even if he did – and of that there is question, too -- but Heidegger and
his philosophy both were open to it and he was sometimes congenial to and in
apparent accord with those who did espouse it. The Nazi worldview drew upon the
same anti-intellectual metaphysics that his thought did, shared first
principles with it, and used that vision as the template for its project.
Something resembling the anti-intellectual theory of the
unmediated apprehension of Being, upon which Heidegger’s philosophical work is
constructed was made actual by Hitler in National Socialist culture, primarily
through spectacular ritual that everyone participated in and that everyone
beheld. Later, once the blush of national re-emergence and worship of Hitler
turned and paled, fear and darkness became the realities of life; rituals that
had been celebrated in the measureless space of glory and exultation gave way
to grim ones performed in the barren confines of deadly torture chambers. The
myth of men and women as subjects in a supreme society of subjects gave way to
the fact of people as objects to be used or discarded, as things that furthered
or obstructed the primacy of Being, that approached and honoured it, or that
marred, polluted, tainted, it.
Perhaps in the contrast between a philosophical system and a
social arrangement, the vulnerability and, consequently, the critique of the
Heideggerian vision can be found. Of itself, it is a vision that did not
advocate the brutalities of National Socialism. Despite his categorical
prejudice that allowed him to stereotype Jews as calculating, manipulative, and
in control of world political and economic events, Heidegger did not call for the extermination
of Jews or anyone else. Nor does his comment in 1949 — “Agriculture is now a
motorised food-industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses
in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same as the blockade and
starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen
bombs.” — imply his sanction of the genocide, nor its trivialization. He is
condemning a blanket mentality, not discussing its specific application. He speaks
like a philosopher, not like a social critic.
But National Socialism can be held to be a practical
application, a perverted version, of his conception of Being and of his
intuition of Being as a transcendental phenomenon that cannot be known by
reason, computation, or science but by sensing it, by finding oneself thrown
within it. It thus follows that the unadulterated awesomeness that is the
substance of being can be manifested as wonder or as terror. Wonder is
terrible, and terror contains horrible wonder. Rilke, the poet of Being’s
inwardness, saw the symbiosis of beauty and terror: that they are two aspects
of unmediated Being; both states of being that precede explanation. But the
problem is to distinguish the aetiology of each, coming as they do from the
same root.
In ritual, each participant in the ritual becomes part of the
ritual spectacle and the ritual mood; individual identity metamorphoses into an
identity conferred by the role the ritual bestows. Entrance into the unmediated
state of experience, the experience of Being itself, is achieved through
ritual: rational discourse is banished as well as private reflection and
individual, personal experience; person gives way to performer; behaviour, to
performance; intellectual observation, scrutiny, consideration, evaluation are
not only inadmissible, they are exorcised and obliterated; the capacity for
thinking is short-circuited and the need for thinking disappears. Ritual is
liberation from thought. Direct apprehension of being is achieved just because
of immersion in the ritual confines of overwhelming sensory overload. Ritual
causes both blackout and illumination.
Engulfed in the vortex of ritual, even when its participants
are standing still they are dancing. They lose themselves in sensation and
apprehend their existence as sensation. It is hypnosis. Ritual is hypnotic. It
facilitates rapture, the condition of existing more truly outside oneself than
within it. Ritual redefines and relocates the center of being. The participant,
no longer centered in him- or herself, stands outside self, in the center of
something more sure and powerful than self. His will is centered in another
will. Rituals enchant, invigorate, and fill the enchanted participants with
grace and the experience of unadulterated Being. This is ecstasy, and it is
born of ritual.
We speak of ecstasy as a joyous state, but it is of ecstasy,
too, that we are speaking when we speak of out-of-body experiences. And they
are often the result of excruciating physical, mental, and emotional pain. One
stands outside or hovers above oneself in an effort to escape pain.
In ritual, participants get lost through participation in
ritual, even as ritual inflates the sense of being through a disciplined
frenzy. Shaped by the ritual, participants apprehend themselves as irreducible
atoms of Being, unmediated and radical, Being itself — whether manifested in
determined exertion or in obedient stillness.
From the great assemblages in stadiums to the banner-draped
street marches, from the street fighters, goose-stepping soldiers, and
bacchanalian rioters, from the denigrators and torturers of Jews to the burners
of books, from the bellowers of songs in beer halls to the sharers Hitler
salutes, from the idealization of physical Aryanism to the proliferation of
insignia, the life of the Germans under Hitler was transformed from depression
to mania. The ordinary and the routine were replaced with ritual. The book
burnings, for example, not only trained people how to think about knowledge and
discourse. They were ritual ceremonies, ecstatic collective acts that caused
participants to disappear in the action, to become the action, and, in that
way, to become enhancements of themselves. Their capacity for thought itself
went up in smoke with the words on the paper of the burning pages.
The physical violence, the inherent and unrepressed physical
brutality of the Nazis — street-fighting (in the early years), war, and
extermination of peoples and persons, even the showers and the death chambers
and the ovens — were rituals, too. Rituals are existential acts. Existential
acts are raw and unmediated. They touch the Being that precedes identity, and,
consequently, they touch the excitement of pure energy and the terror and
resignation and frenzy of death. Death, in one form or another is the
phenomenon that awaits at the end of the rapt expenditure of energy. Rituals go
beneath thought, sense, and the individual person. They are pure action and
pure passion, and cause both to become indistinguishable from each other.
Ritual induces madness. In Nazi Germany, it was a madness normalized by being a
socially-created and socially-condoned madness.
For the living, death without myth represents non-being, an
entrance into a state of obliteration. With myth it represents entrance into a
state of consecration, into a realm of essential rather than mortal and
material life. Rituals are the life of death, whether they are performed in
defiance of death or in death’s service. In the first sort, there is the loss
of self, through absorption into essential being. In the second, the loss of
self means the loss of life itself. The self becomes a weight that crushes
itself.
The National Socialist rituals that I
have been writing about have been, for the most part, rituals that can be
called inclusive, rituals that cement participants to each other in
exhilaration, rituals with participants who participate willingly, who perform
in them ecstatically, giving themselves to the grand moment and the common
action they share. In The Victory of Faith and The
Triumph of the Will, films Leni Riefenstahl assembled from
footage taken at the National Socialist festivities in Nuremburg in 1933 and
thirty-four, one sees hundreds of thousands of strapping, uniformed, young men
and boys, bearing banners and rifles, trumpets and drums, quiver with disciplined
excitement, pride, and devotion, strain at attention, gaze mesmerized at
Hitler. They erupt mightily when he elicits their thunder. They surrender
crescendos of Heils. The gatherings appear to be military rallies
but they are rituals with a complex choreography, fiery torches, sacred
banners, outsized emblems forged of iron, hoisted on towering pillars, and the
air is charged with chest-piercing music of brass instruments and percussion.
Surprising, how boring these films are to
watch! They are boring because they are spectacle, the least profound aspect of
drama, according to Aristotle. Action itself in them becomes spectacle. That,
too is a characteristic of ritual. It converts action to spectacle. They are
boring, too, because I am watching them analytically, studying them as
historical phenomena, as records of rituals, knowing to what they were
precursors, how what they show is the first stirring of horror at the time
unimagined. I stand outside their present and want to understand how it leads
to what is past now but what was future then. I am a spectator not in the grip
of or part of the spectacle of the National Socialist ethos, although awed by
its power, organization, and terribleness. The more than 700,000 men
enthralled, assembled in the well-ordered columns, however, are not bored. They
are overwhelmed by the spectacle, but they are not spectators. They are transfixed
in obedience, devotion, camaraderie; they are mindless vessels filled with the
ether of the ritual that engulfs them, proud of being individually and
collectively, essential to the ritual — as are the thousands of other men and
women and children lining the streets, watching, raising their arms in salute,
rapt, as the squadrons pass by on their march to the rally.
Rituals, celebrations of ecstasy, catalysts of
a transcendental transformation of individual identity into group identity,
demand victims. In the first years of Hitler’s regime, hysterical screeds
against past betrayals, dangerous attitudes, inferior comrades, and toxic enemies
— particularly the Jews, portrayed as wishing and able to undermine the health,
power, and identity of the German collective and its members — were an
integral, central, part of the rituals, whether at rallies, riots, or book
burnings. The threat the Jews presented to the German people was pounded into
the hearts of the German people – becoming part of German identity.
Countervailing, protective defense against the Jews was made an overwhelming
need of the German people. The true Volk were drawn together
by the common need to subdue Jewish influence and to assert the triumph and
glory that the rituals of nationalism had inculcated into them as a Volk
defined by superiority.
As well as the organized rituals, rallies, book
burnings, marches, banners, songs, and salutes, there were the raw ritual
eruptions of national unity and might: street fighting, arson, beatings, public
humiliation of outsiders, and rioting. Inherent in these was an unmediated
existential frisson. They were acts of unmediated Being, adrenaline rushes to
action. They bypassed thought, existential encounters with fear that
obliterated fear in volcanic attacks on designated provoking agents of fear.
They ratified the dominion of body over mind, of blood over humanity. Ritual in
Hitler’s Germany was a cult of body that overwhelmed mind and drew it,
enslaved, into its service.
National Socialist rituals, which, from the
start, contained a fist of coiled violence at their center, throughout the
1930s and into the forties, exploded into the holocaust of the shoa, a
shattering convulsion of Being so primordial that to grasp it subverts the
power of language and thought. The shoa was, itself, the great
ritual of exclusion, a ritual exhortation to chaos.
For participants, rituals are as free of mindfulness and as incorporeal
as breathing. They trigger autonomic, involuntary acts that occur in the realm
of pure Being. Ritual elicits behavior unhampered by reflection or
deliberation. The result is a thrill of freedom that arises from surrender.
The involuntary releases a person from the strain of
deliberating and choosing. When I watch one of Riefenstahl’s documentaries of
the early Nuremberg rallies, I see the exultation of the young men and boys.
Their playful camaraderie and their exquisite and disciplined rapture as they
stand in their well-ordered squadrons shows nothing so much as their sense of
liberation. Perfectly do John Donne’s lines in the “Hymn to God the Father”
express their condition: Take me to you, imprison me, for I / Except you
enthral me, never shall be free[.] Significantly, too, in the shots of early
morning happy Nazi horseplay are pans of well-wrought and healthy youth eating. By the certainty of food the
picture suggests, implicit without even being shown, is the hunger that had
just gripped Germany and now has become a thing of the past. Brecht is the
appropriate poet to quote: “Erst kommt
das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral:” Getting fed
takes precedence over moral considerations.
In thinking about how
to evaluate Heidegger’s work, considering his apparently willing participation
in the cultural project of Nazi Germany, statements of his that conform to the
discourse of anti-Semitism, and focusing on whether his thought is compatible
with Nazi ideology or sympathetic to it, derives from it or a similar source,
or leads to it, I have not been arguing that it is, in itself, anti-Semitic or
totalitarian. I have been trying to see if it gives aid and comfort to
anti-Semitic and totalitarian agendas and to discover what about it does, if it
does, or, at least, might seem to, or might be liable to appropriation.
In order to pursue this
problem, I have been discussing the way ritual can short-circuit the detachment
of consciousness and bring its participants into a realm of unmediated Being –
to a state of what can appear to be Heideggerian authenticity — through the
force of visceral experience inside a ritual environment that restructures the
experience and the validity of self, surroundings, and time. I have been trying
to show the importance of ritual in the establishment of the Nazi objective,
and that the rituals Hitler devised, both the highly organized rallies and book
burnings and the less orchestrated and organized, although no-less-encouraged
rituals of street fighting and rioting, exploited the power of rituals to
undermine intellectual consciousness and analytic thinking, and that
participation in them brought participants, sensorily, emotionally, and even
intellectually, as they apprehended and conceived of themselves and their
relation to themselves and to everything else, into the sphere of an unmediated
experience of Being, into a state of existential immediacy, where both space
and time are reconfigured and events become imbued with something essential and
infinite rather than accidental and ephemeral, which seems to be Heidegger’s
model of authenticity.
I have written about
the National Socialist rituals as vehicles for fostering inclusion, and,
although they were in their depths frighteningly anti-social means for undermining
humanity, to their participants they were not; they were examples of social
celebrations and of profound brotherhood for people united by the myth of being
of one soil and one blood. For participants they were ceremonies of inclusion,
glorifying goals to be achieved, as Hitler thundered at the Nuremburg rally of
1934, by selflessness and obedience to the one principle embodied in him: the
ideal of the German Volk. But the very inclusivity of these rallies made
them exclusionary. They brought participants together on the strength of
setting them against those who were marked to be unworthy of inclusion, of
authenticity, of Being itself, of those not of the same blood and the same
soil, nor even, really, from the Nazi perspective, of the same time.
When I speak of the
violence, brutality, and unspeakable horror of the Nazi extermination programs
that followed, and all the vile circumstances attached to them, as rituals,
too, rituals of exclusion, I am not trivializing them or being precious but
trying to argue that they follow consequentially from the early National
Socialist celebrations. I am trying to trace the evolution of the dynamic that
helped build Nazism and to see what dangers are inherent in Heideggerian
propositions, if any, and what worthwhile conceptions were perverted by
National Socialism, if any were, and why and how, if so, they can be liable to
such perversion.
Every idea has its
conceptual opposite, and the idea of Being ineluctably generates the idea of
non-Being, and the Nazi rituals of Being were not only creation rituals but
rituals of extirpation and cleansing, of banishing, and casting out non-Being.
Non-Being was represented in the form of opponents, forces of non-Being that
threatened to annihilate forces of Being. It was a recapitulation of the primal
struggle of the devil against God.
Writing about Hitler’s
ritual culture and its binding spells, I am not forgetting the victims;
victims, as much as willing participants, are essential to ritual. Through
symbolic enactments, ritual brings rebirth or renewal for the willing,
enthusiastic participants by humiliating and obliterating those who are made
sacrificial victims around whom the ritual is centered. Ritual is a drama of
heroes and villains, executioners and victims, priests and sacrifices. As much
as rituals need a band of comrades, they also need defined enemies. Enemies
define the bonds that join the participants in their fellowship.
The hero is a
ritualistic figure who stands in the center of myth and determines how
believers value others and themselves. The hero is the representation of the
self in its most achieved form and in its most universal form. The hero
encompasses the multitude and represents immediate being. The hero is someone
who has, not supernatural powers, but natural powers, powers not stifled by the
denaturing constraints of civilization but free because of natural barbarism.
The hero approaches and vanquishes the enemy and by that very act vanquishes a
populace of admirers. The hero brings life to the populace by giving it an
enemy to vanquish, by providing an existential enemy, a pure threat to being.
Commonly conceived as “the good guy,” the hero is not necessarily good. The
hero defines the context in which virtue and vice are defined. Accordingly, one
can talk of Hitler as a hero without according to him any virtue or merit and
without diminishing in the least his embodiment of evil. But one may have to
confront what characteristics evil may contain that seem borrowed from good or
also are often its components.
The hero is a
mobilizing, mythic figure, not just as a strong man. The myth of the hero gives
the strong man a metaphysical dimension. It makes tyranny not only an external
condition guaranteed by fear, threat, and actual brutality, but an internal condition
anchored in a swooning surrender to the strongman as a mythic hero. He is an
embodiment of essential Being. The hero exerts a force that obliterates the
difference between brutality and Being. The hero sanctions arousal when arousal
has been repressed, when the expression of excitement is no longer in the power
of the individual but is possible only when permitted by an external commanding
authority that has taken its place inside the person. The hero can be,
consequently, the embodiment of essential Being or of primordial Non-Being.
Milton’s Satan, far from goodness, is a hero, the hero of the fall, the hero of
evil, the hero of Non-Being. Hitler is such a diabolical hero. For me, he is a
hero of non-Being, yet for those who were and some still are, drsawn into his
orbit, he is a hero of being. The role of the hero is to actualize and activate
the myth to which he sees himself as central. The tenets of the National
Socialist myth are widely known, but usually cast as political beliefs rather
than as the dimensions of a myth.
Myth ought not to be
confused with lie. A myth is neither a lie nor a truth. Myth is a way of
organizing the surrounding world and the experience of that world. It is a
story, a fictive construction, false, perhaps, if viewed from one perspective,
but not false if seen from another, as Jung argued in his preface to Answer
to Job. Myth is a technology of naming, defining, and explaining that is
focused less on truth than on ordering the nature, shape, texture, and feeling
of the world that exists. It transcends physical facts and actuality. Jung is
not wrong about that. But so does psychosis.
The Myth of Hitler’s
Germany was the myth of a superior civilization, of a superior Volk, bound
together by blood, culture, and devotion. The construction of the idea
Superiority demands its complementary opposite, Inferiority. Superior is
superior to something, and that something, whatever it is, is inferior. The
Hitlerian ideal was defined by an anti-ideal represented by the Jews. The bill
of particulars drawn up against Jews by Nazi propaganda was not in the service
of rational opposition to a culture of fault; fault, as it was constructed, was
the instrument of creating the inferior opposite that was essential for
mobilizing a culture that could esteem itself and its members as superior.
Just as the existential proof of German superiority
lay in the realm of the physical even as the concept of German superiority
itself and of its being rooted in the body lay in myth, indeed, in the myth of
the Aryan body, so the proof of the myth of Jewish inferiority, for the
Germans, also was rooted in the body. The Jewish body was presented itself as a
twisted, stunted, poor thing, and at the height of Nazi propaganda, the image
of its human form was obliterated and replaced by rats. Following upon
depiction of Jews as rats, quite reasonably, is extermination, a fiercely
physical process that concentrates on the body. And it is just this
concentration on the body that reduced the Jews to non-beings.
