Richard Burt

Only a Rabbi Can Save Us:

Heidegger, Husserl, and the Crisis of the

German-Jewish / European University, 1929-1935

The European nations are sick;

Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis.

We are by no means lacking in

something like nature doctors.

Indeed, we are practically inundated

by a flood of naïve and excessive

suggestions for reform. But why do

the so richly developed humanistic

disciplines fail to perform the service

here that is so admirably performed

by the natural sciences in their

sphere?

Edmund Husserl, The “Vienna

Lecture,” 1938, 270

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Everything suggests that, from as

early as 1933, the date at which,

lifting at last the quotation marks, he

begins to talk of spirit and in the

name of spirit, Heidegger never

stopped interrogating the Being of

Geist.

--Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit:

Heidegger and the Question (1987),

83

Der Speigel: Professor Heidegger,

we have stated time and again that

your philosophical work has been

somewhat overshadowed by some

events in your life, which, while they

did not last long, have never been

cleared up.

Heidegger: You mean 1933.

--“Only a God Can Save Us,” Der

Spiegel’s Interview with Martin

Heidegger on September 23, 1966.

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And what if someone were to have

fun showing you that these two

books on soul and spirit are also the

books of a political activist? That the

essays on Heidegger and Nazism, on

Mandela and apartheid, on the

nuclear problem, on the

psychoanalytic treatment and torture,

on architecture and urbanism, etc.,

are “political writings”?

--Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger, the

Philosopher’s Hell” in Points:

Interviews, 1974-1994 (1995), 190

What is to Be Redone? A Geist Story

In this essay, I want to read Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” of 1933 together with

Edmund Husserl’s Vienna Lecture “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” of

1938 as a way of examining the currency of the “current” when it comes to an

understanding of the fate of the modern university in the U.S. and Britain. In doing so, I

want to put into question what it means to historicize philosophy. I ask the reader’s

patience as I rehearse some basic philological information about Heidegger’s “Rectoral

Address” of 1933, much of it regarding dates, before discussing it with Husserl’s lecture,

in order to recast more clearly historicizing as a practice of “re/reading.” Only by doing

so will the meaning of the crisis of the modern university become clear.

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Since the end of the Second World War, Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” has been at

the center of a debate, a debate that Richard Wolin called the “Heidegger Controversy,”

the title of a book he edited and published in 1991. The debate concerns the extent both

to which Heidegger was a Nazi who used his position as a university administrator in

1933-34 in anti-Semitic ways and the extent to which his philosophical writings

themselves constitute Nazi philosophy (as opposed to philosophy written by a Nazi) or a

rejection of Naziism. In 1945, Heidegger published “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and

Thoughts.” In 1985, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address “The Self-Assertion of the German

University: Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the

University Freiburg” was translated and published in English in along with “The

Rectorate 1933/34,” both prefaced by a short apologia for Heidegger written by his son,

Hermann. In a 1966 audiotaped and transcribed interview with Der Spiegel entitled

“Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger engages more broadly both the importance of the

year 1933 to the interpretation of his life and works, noting that his teacher Edmund

Husserl, dismissed form his post in 1933 because he was a Jew, broke off relations in

1938. In 1991, Richard Wolin published the Rectoral Address and the Spiegel interview

in his anthology The Heidegger Controversy, a book that proved itself to be highly

controversial and occasioned by book Victor Farias, Heidegger and Naziism.1

1 See also the less noted Günther Neske & Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and

National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990) and

Critical Inquiry 15:2 (Winter 1989); the issue includes a symposium on “Heidegger and

Nazism."

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Yet despite the controversy over “Rectoral Address,” I think it is fair to say that that it

continues to go unread, perhaps because the form of a debate forecloses the kind of

questioning that re/reading requires. Heidegger himself complained that it went unheard

by his audience when he gave it in 1933: “The Rectoral Address had been spoken into the

wind and was forgotten the day after the inaugural celebration. While I was rector not

one of my colleagues approached me to discuss the address in any way” (493).

Furthermore, he says that its contents were misreported in a student (Nazi) newspaper.

Jacques Derrida devotes relatively little time to the Rectoral Address in Of Spirit:

Heidegger and the Question (see 33-37; 44-45), a preemptive response to Farias,

discussing what he calls the key paragraph” (36).2 When Wolin included an English

translation of a Derrida interview entitled “Interview: Philosopher’s Hell” that had been

published in le Nouvel observateur in The Heidegger Controversy (1991), Derrida,

threatening legal action, demanded that the volume be withdrawn immediately, and, if

ever republished, all new editions would omit his interview. Columbia University Press,

the publisher of Wolin’s book, withdrew it, and a second edition of the book without

Derrida’s essay was duly printed by MIT Press in 1993 with a new preface by Wolin

devoted to an attack on Derrida entitled “Preface to the MIT Edition: Note on a Missing

Text.” In Points: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1995) Derrida published a complete and newly

commissioned translation of the Nouvel observateur interview as “Heidegger, the

Philosopher’s Hell” along with a second interview entitled “Comment donner raison?

How to Concede, with Reasons.” In a lengthy interview in the same book, Derrida lashed

out at Wolin, fiercely attacking his translation of Derrida’s interview as being grossly

incompetent.3 Like the contributors to Wolin’s book, including Wolin’s own, however,

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Derrida did not offer a reading of the “Rectoral Address.”4 Similarly, in The Telephone

Book (1989), Avital Ronell brilliantly discusses the telephone call Heidegger took from

SA Group Leader Dr. Baumann in 1933 just after he was in office for a few weeks, a call

that Heidegger mentions in “The Rectorate 1933/34” (492) and the interview “Only a

God Can Save Us.” Yet Ronell does not discuss the Rectoral Address.5

Why has the Address gone unread, then, used largely as a symbol to represent

Heidegger’s works and person? Why does it haunt readings of Heidegger, disappearing

in background noise? And what would it mean to re/read the Address now, particularly

in relation of the present crisis of the university in the U.S., itself a leftover of the

nineteenth century German university, itself in a state crisis by 1933 for both Heidegger

and Husserl? These are some of the broad the questions I wish to pursue in a questioning

mode in this essay; that is, I purse these questions from within a never to be overcome

Western metaphysics. Before I proceed to read the “Rectoral Address” together with

2 The relevant pages were exerpted from the book Of Spirit and reprinted under the same

tilte “Of Spirit” in symposium on “Heidegger and Nazism” in Critical Inquiry 15:2

(Winter 1989), as if the excerpt qua article were an abstact of the book (in which

Heidegger’s use of quotation marks around “spirit” is a major concern).

3 See Derrida’s essay “The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company Do Business)” in the same volume, Derrida 1995, 422-56.4 Oddly enough, the only time Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” is engaged in Wolin’s book occurs when, in the new preface to the MIT edition, Wolin attacks Derrida’s comparison of the “Address” to Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences in Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987). 5 The same inattention to the Address holds true for Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the Jews and for Phillipe Lacoue-labarthe’s Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political and Heidegger and the Politics of Poet. It may be to their credit, however, that they do read their criticism of Heidegger on a reading of the Address.

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Edmund Husserl’s 1938 Vienna Lecture “Philosophy and the Crisis of European

Humanity,” let me make it pause again to make clear that I think the “Rectoral Address”

can no longer be read in isolation, largely due to the history of its publication and English

translation. Heidegger himself recontextualized the “Rectoral Address” in the 1945

commentary “The Rectorate 1933/34” and again in the Der Spiegel interview: in both

cases, Heidegger states that two of his other works are central to any proper

understanding of his “Rectoral Address”: his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?” and

his lecture on Nietzsche, circulated in 1944 but unpublished until after the War due,

according to Heidegger, to Nazi denigration of his works, which were sold under the

counter wrapped in brown paper bags, and surveillance of his teaching. Moreover,

Heidegger is careful to record time lags between lectures and their publication. His

lecture on the essence of truth was given in 1930, copies of it circulated in 1932, but

“published only in 1942” (1985, 482). Heidegger says he gave a different lecture course

on the Greek concept of truth in 1930, gave it again in the “Winter Semester 1933/34”

(1985, 482), but published part of it only in 1942. Heidegger introduced other kinds of

gaps or gags into the he temporality of his publications: the editors of “Only a God Can

Save Us” begin their preface to the Der Spiegel interview by noting that they could only

publish it posthumously; “this was the strict wish of the philosopher” (1976, 267). This

wish seems rather odd given that the interview contains next to nothing not already

published in his much fuller and earlier account in “The Rectorate 1933/34.”

My concern in this essay is with how the years “1933/1934” joined by a slash bear on

the difficulty of reading of Heidegger’s works as philosophical rather than political works

and vice versa, not with the presumably transparent political import of Heidegger’s

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actions as Rector or the “Rectoral Address.” (I happen to think that his comments were

made in good faith, which is not necessarily the same thing as being entirely truthful. But

how could one establish that any such account was entirely truthful?). More specifically,

my concern is with the way Heidegger displaces his “Rectoral Address” from a position

of singularity to a position as part of a cluster of some of his writings circa 1933,

including changes he made to re-editions of his publications, like his omission of the

dedication to Husserl in the fifth edition of Being and Time published in 1941 (first

edition, 1927; fourth edition 1935).

Heidegger in effect concedes to his critics a certain way of reading his works in

relation to the “Rectoral Address,” granting it a relative exteriority by which it might be

said to explain both his works and Heidegger himself. Heidegger defends against this

move only by retotalizing his Address as part of a larger totality of works written

between 1929 and 1944. Heidegger and son demand that Martin’s critics actually read

his Address (rather than rely on inaccurate reports of its putative contents) and read it in

relation to specific works by Heidegger.6 A contradiction emerges, however, from

Heidegger’s yoking of the 1933 “Address” to the 1945 commentary “The Rectorate

1933/34” (or Hermann Heidegger’s yoking them together for publication): on the one

hand, Heidegger wants to translate the “Address” into a philosophical rather than political

work; on the other hand, Heidegger does not actually perform this translation and instead

offers an explanation of the political circumstances which led him to become Rector of

the University of Freiburg in 1933, give the Address, and then resign the Rectorship in

1934. Heidegger defers a philosophical translation of the Address by referring his

6 Heidegger’s critics, as Wolin’s collection makes clear, are not concerned with Heidegger’s philosophy but with Heidegger’s “political influence.” See especially Juergen Habermas, “On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935” (Wolin, 1993, 180).

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readings to his 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” By displacing and re-placing the

Address so as to alter its relative exteriority to his other works, Heidegger paradoxically

asks both that it be read and resists its being read, a paradox deepened by Heidegger’s

granting an interview he refused to have published during his lifetime.

The impossibility of reading the “Rectoral Address” in isolation, or of doing so without

interpretive violence, is due to another factor related to its publication history.

Heidegger’s paradoxical resistance to being read in order (not) to be (mis)read is

heightened by the framing paratexts written by Hermann Heidegger, the editors of the

Der Spiegel interview, a brief introduction by Karsten Harries to his translator of the

“Address” and the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts” (1985, 467) and a footnote

by the translators of the Spiegel interview in English. These paratexts more or less

directly reinforce Heidegger’s manner of resituating his “Rectoral Address” in the

situation of 1933/34. Similarly, Wolin puts the “Rectoral Address” in the first section of

his book under the heading, “Texts by Martin Heidegger,” a collection of texts that,

incidentally, looks like a poorly disguised dossier of documents gathered to produce an

indictment. Wolin does not include either of the documents Heidegger singles out for

consideration, namely the 1929 lecture on metaphysics and the 1944 essay on Nietzsche.

Instead, Wolin frames Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” so as to make its re/reading

unnecessary, following it with a subsection entitled “Political Texts, 1933-1934.” It is in

effect a legal document, testimony to a political crime rather than a philosophical.

Similarly, in Of Spirit, Heidegger sees the Rectoral Address as a repetition of being and

Time (1927), albeit in a different rhetorical form, and restated in the Introduction to

Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1935 lectures published in 1953). Derrida

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retains in both the French edition of Of Spirit and the English translation the German title

Einführung in die Metaphysik to analysis Heidegger’s linking of the leap (Ursprung) that

follows from “Führing” and the “Führer” (42-44) of spirit, which “goes or comes on the

way, in front, up in front, before all politics, all psychagogy, all pedagogy” (43).

I hope that the questioning I have pursued thus far in response to my question “Why

has the ‘Address’ gone unread?” bears directly on any response to my second question

“what would it mean to re/read it now?” My answer to my second question is to read the

“Rectoral Address” with what I consider to be an authorized violence, comparatively

with Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture.” By “authorized violence,” I mean the same manner of

reading Hölderlin’s poetry that philological critics attacked Heidegger for doing. As Paul

de Man comments in “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin, “Heidegger’s interpretation is

based on a notion of the poetic that seeks to assert the fundamental impossibility of

applying objective discourse to the work of art. Heidegger reduces philology to a

subordinate position, although he does not hesitate to upon call upon it when his cause

requires it; and he declares himself free of the restrictions it has imposed upon itself.

Such violence has been found shocking, and rightly so, but it must be seen that it derives

directly from Heidegger’s conception of the poetic, which he claims to have deduced

from Hoelderlin’s thought” (249). Although Derrida defends Heidegger’s “Rectoral

Address” comparing it to Husserl’s unfinished Crisis of the European Sciences and

Transcendetal Phenomenology, I concede that Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” and

Husserl’s Vienna Lecture are not in dialogue. Furthermore, I expect that some readers

might regard it as mildly scandalous to juxtapose the Address to a lecture by Heidegger’s

former teacher after the two had broken off relations.

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Yet it is precisely the German / Jewish connection here that constitutes the scandal in

that one cannot properly be thought without the other. More specifically, both are

concerned with the University, the main difference being that Heidegger is concerned

with the German University and the relation of Germany to Greece, while Husserl is

concerned with a national and supranational crisis that is European in scope. At a

moment when what’s left of the legacy of the German University in the United States and

Britain is under prolonged and fierce attack, it is worth examining, I think, how these

writers responded to the scientism. Bill Readings story of the decline of the modern

university from a State centered university of ideas to a corporate centered “university of

excellence” traced by in the University in Ruins neglects a central chapter in the history

of the German University itself which engaged less the political right’s attempt to

takeover the University system than it did a perceived reduction of the University to the

production of information and exact data (what Heidegger calls “political science”) to the

exclusion of the rigor of “science” (or metaphysics and language), the essence of which

of which is questioning. The “renewal” of the University, its “essence” and “inner unity”

were at stake for Heidegger. Perhaps in the putatively post-metaphysical positivism that

now dominates academia, the not so shiny patina of the “new” is all that remains for us.

The two wills must confront one

another, ready for battle. All

faculties of will and thought, all

strengths of the heart and all skills of

the body, must be unfolded through

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battle, heightened in battle, and

preserved as battle. We choose the

knowing battle of those who

question and profess with Carl von

Clausewitz: “I take leave of the

frivolous hope of salvation by the

hand of accident.”

Heidegger, “Rectoral Address,” 479

(emphases in the original)

I had no illusions about the possible

consequence of my resignation from

office in the spring of 1934; after

June 30 of the same year, these

consequences became completely

clear.

Heidegger, “The Rectorate 1933/34,”

49

The Heidegger Clause-Witz

To pose the question of what it would mean to re/read the Rectoral Address may now be

shown to put into question a pragmatic and supposedly therefore more powerful question

concerning how to construct a defense of the already obsolete “university of ideas” as it

is being destroyed. In any case, it may be that Husserl’s open break helps show how

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Husserl made possible Heidegger’s thinking through the question of metaphysics and the

renewal of the German university from a German Greek trajectory which dis-allowed a

Jewish German / German Jewish Greek trajectory. Heidegger as loser, doing a kind of

Larry David stand up schtick: “No one listened to my lecture; the Nazis hated me; no one

gets me; some of my best friends weren’t Nazis. Like I said, only a rabbi can save us.”

No (Jewish) joke, no “Witz.” Heidegger comments on the Greek meaning of the word

“battle” (1945, 488), bringing in Heraclitus, but Heidegger does not discussion his

mention of Clauswitz in the address.

Strauss persecution and the Art of Writing. Heidegger said that the book Logic was coded

(1934) that it was really a book on language.

In Rectoral address the tree kids of service are not differentiated in importance. They are

given equal importance, Heidegger says in 1966 interview.

Husserl After 1901, Husserl subtitled all of his works, “An Introduction to

phenomenology.” (Crisis of European Sciences xv)

Versus Heidegger on introduction to

It is like a sea, in which men and

peoples are the fleetingly formed,

changing, and then disappearing

waves, some with richer, more

complicated ripples, other with more

primitive.

Husserl, Vienna Lecture, 1938, 274

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But these events, too, are only a

fleeting appearance on waves of a

movement of our history, of whose

dimensions the Germans have as yet

no inkling, even now that the

catastrophe has engulfed them.

--Heidgger, “The Rectorate

1933/34,” 1945, 502

Husserl's Vienna Lecture is all about spirit. see p. 275, 297-99. It is paradpxocial in that reason directs a detour through external , physical , methemthemical reason into positivism and the disappearance of the human (spirit) but a reorientation through theory (philosophy—greek philosophy) returns the body into the world in a sort of total interpenetration and inwardness (298) to infinity yet the spiritual is also a fragment. “Spritualbeing is only fragmentary” (294)“this merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific investigation The working subject is himself forgotten, the scientist does not become a subject of investigation Thematic (281) Defines Europe to include the US. and Britain,273

Technical control over nature (271)

Prmoridial 281 Thematic 283Epoche 282-83Religious mythical versus philosophical 283-84

Mutual help, mutual critique (286)Bildlung (286)Prejudices and prejudices (289)Man and even the Papuan (290)Einstein (295)New reformers in psychology 297Accordingly, it is a mistake for the humanistic disciplines to struggle with the natural sciences for equal rights. (297)

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The need for a reform of the whole of modern psychology is felt mrore and more on al l sides, but it is not yet understood that it has failed because of oits objectivism. (296) of the spirit is the sceneI would like to think that I, the supposed reactionary am, am far more radical and far more revolutionary than those who in their words proclaim themselves so radical today.(290)The road (291) (autobahn of philosophy)Specialization as a problem (291)

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