Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings,and: Disclosure and Gestalt: Heidegger and the Question of NationalSocialism

Mark Migotti

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 1, Winter2010, pp. 395-398 (Review)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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extensive discussion of solutions to the Cartesian circle (the puzzle ofgetting Descartes out of what appears to be a circular argument whereDescartes appeals to God as guaranteeing the truth of what we clearlyand distinctly perceive, yet we know that God exists because we clearlyand distinctly perceive it). We get our discussion and solution, but the sur-prise in the chapter is the focus on the ‘axiom of fabrication’: the moreexcellent the work, the more excellent the author. Gombay suggests thatDescartes’ inspiration for this approach in his argument might havecome from innovations in the Jesuit education system where Descarteswas taught, which involved rankings and explicit acknowledgements ofdifferences in abilities and corresponding accomplishments. Gombay’sdiscussion is supplemented with an amusing and illuminating appendixdetailing a seventeenth-century Jesuit equivalent of report cards.

Some aspiring scholars may be disappointed with the lack of suggestedfurther readings. Presumably, however, Gombay’s zesty and dramaticdiscussion would be sufficient to inspire further independent inquiry.(GWEN BRADFORD)

Robert Mugerauer. Heidegger and Homecoming:The Leitmotif in the Later Writings

University of Toronto Press. xxii , 614 . $95 .00

Bernhard Radloff. Disclosure and Gestalt :Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism

University of Toronto Press 2007 . xiv, 489 . $80 .00

If Martin Heidegger had anything right, the modern world and itsphilosophy are in a shockingly bad way. At the core of Heidegger’s think-ing is the claim that we have lost touch with being – with what it is tobe – and therefore with ourselves. Societally, we betray this in ourpathetic obsession with efficiency and our mad drive to dominatenature; philosophically, in our naive faith in the powers of rational argu-ment and conceptual thought. This is a heady brew of ideas, which needsto be taken with the right balance of curiosity and caution, open-mindedness, and critical awareness. In my view, Robert Mugerauer andBernard Radloff could do with more caution and critical awareness intheir handling of Heidegger’s grand philosophical design. But whereasMugerauer’s effort contributes duly to our understanding of its subject,Radloff’s is a grandiloquent and off-putting exercise in special pleading.

The ‘homecoming’ of Mugerauer’s title is the third term in Heidegger’sversion of a venerable pattern of thought about the origins and destiny ofhumanity: at first there is primordial unity, then a plunge into disruptionand dissension, in the midst of which there is nonetheless hope for reinte-gration and reunion with our truest and best possibilities. In Heidegger’scase, as Mugerauer interprets him, the terms of this pattern are being

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once-at-home, being no-longer-at-home, and being not-yet-at-home. (Itwill not escape notice that plain old ‘being-at-home’ figures nowhere.)These conditions are instantiated in three great epochs: the not yet meta-physical time of pre-Socratic philosophy and poetry, in which an origin-ary belonging together of being and being human took shape; thefateful age of metaphysics – inaugurated by the conceptual advances ofSocrates, Plato, and Aristotle – in the two thousand year span duringwhich human beings ‘forget’ being and being in turn ‘abandons’ us;and an envisaged no-longer-metaphysical epoch to come, in which,with luck, we turn towards home, to our proper kinship with being.

At this point, some of us will want to ask, for example, how being itselfcan do anything at all, much less take leave of the human scene. And itwill not appease us to be told that ‘the most profound homelessness[that] results from the abandonment of beings by being . . . can scarcelybe thought or said.’ As Frank Ramsay memorably quipped (ofWittgenstein’s Tractatus), if you can’t say it, you can’t say it, and youcan’t whistle it either.

That said, we do need to take Heidegger seriously. The influence ofclassical Greek philosophy has been so deep and pervasive that theidea that its ‘advances’ have not been an unmixed blessing deserves ahearing. If, further, Heidegger is right to claim that metaphysical thinkingreveals its true colours in the excruciating ascendancy of instrumentalreasoning, representational thinking, and nihilistic living, well, we hadbetter try to do better. And Heidegger thinks that we can do better; ifwe are patient and thoughtful and attentive – to our deepest needsand moods, to language and poetry, and above all to the history ofphilosophy – we can initiate a counter-movement of recollection andrecovery, a renewed appreciation of the distinctive belonging togetherof being and being human.

The big problem with Heidegger’s writings is that the line between thedeeply insightful and the pseudo-profound can be so difficult to detect.And the big problem with Heidegger himself is worse: he was a card-carrying Nazi who, as rector of the University of Freiburg betweenApril 1933 and April 1934, contributed signally to the goals of thenewly empowered regime. For most of us, Heidegger’s Nazism is embar-rassing; for Bernhard Radloff, it is the occasion for an unfortunate book.

Radloff begins with a firm refusal to take the Heidegger admirer’s easyway out and draw a sharp distinction between Heidegger the philosopherand Heidegger the political actor. Such a distinction in hand, we canregard the insight and judgment of Heidegger the philosopher as exemp-lary, while decrying Heidegger the political actor as at best disgracefullynaive, and at worst just plain disgraceful. According to Radloff, though,an emerging scholarly consensus on the relation of Heidegger’s politicsto his philosophy has it that this vexed matter ‘is essential to the

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understanding of [the] philosophy.’ But if the attempt to get beyond meta-physics and ‘rethink being’ is deeply bound up with Hitler’s attempt toremake Germany, that would surely be a decisive reason to reject theenterprise out of hand.

Radloff maintains that Heidegger’s reasons for endorsing NationalSocialism are intelligible only against the background of his conceptionof Nazism as ‘an anti-imperialist national liberation movement’ (emphasisin original), committed ‘at least in theory’ to an ‘ideal of [ethnic] diver-sity.’ In effect, Heidegger’s Nazism turns out to be a Nazism withoutHitler, since Heidegger’s ‘understanding of the differentiation of beingis incompatible with totalitarian politics’; and even more bizarrely, it isa Nazism without anti-Semitism. Though Radloff grants that ‘insofar asit has been documented, Heidegger’s insensitivity to the plight of hisJewish colleagues and to German-Jewish citizens brooks no excuse’ –acurious way to put it, given that this ‘insensitivity’ is amply documented –he assures us that, since Heidegger is ‘by all evidence, philosophicallyopposed to anti-Semitism,’ his ‘willingness to work with the new regimecan only be explained by the mistaken expectation that the . . . “authentic”core of National Socialism might be liberated from the dominance of theanti-Semitic ideologues.’ Evidently, Heidegger ‘hoped to build a bridgebetween his understanding of nihilism . . . and the “public” interpretationof this crisis on the conservative and National Socialist Right.’

But if we take this line of argument seriously, we must ask how anyoneof the slightest perspicacity and sensitivity could have been so horriblyduped. It remains a mystery how Heidegger could have tortured theresentment-fuelled thuggery of the National Socialist German Worker’sParty into the shape of a thoughtful response to, rather than a ghastlysymptom of, nihilism. As his sometime student Herbert Marcuse put itdirectly to Heidegger in 1948, ‘common sense takes Nazism to be incom-patible with philosophy, and in this conviction it is right.’ It is telling that,in a book about Heidegger and the ‘question’ of National Socialism thatboasts a twenty-six-page bibliography, this exchange of letters is nevermentioned, for it brings a central issue, which Radloff talks around andabout and over for page after turgid page, into sharp focus: whethercritics of Heidegger’s behaviour in 1933–34 are guilty of ‘judging thebeginning of the National Socialist movement from its ending’ (asHeidegger claims in response to Marcuse), or whether (as Marcusejustly retorts) it was entirely clear that ‘the beginning already containedthe ending, already was the ending.’

Naturally, Radloff assures us that Heidegger ‘had legitimate reasons toread the historical situation as he did’ – that his understanding of the situ-ation was shared by a motley host of German conservatives, and that theatmosphere of cultural crisis and confusion in late Weimar Germany wasso toxic as to make it plausible to believe – and believe in – just about

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anything. The first reason simply pushes the question back to the legiti-macy of the reasons offered by ‘revolutionary conservatives’ for believingthat ‘Hitler’s assumption of power [was] a means to the end of a true[non-totalitarian] German revolution’; the second eviscerates any robustdistinction between legitimate and illegitimate reasons for politicaljudgment.

Radloff’s convoluted attempts to ‘establish’ the ‘essential’ defensibilityof the indefensible things Heidegger said in the early 1930s put me inmind of the old quip about Wagner: his music is not as bad as itsounds. Sometimes, Heidegger’s rhetoric is exactly as bad as it sounds,though more often his writings contain much that is of great philosophicalworth. How the pompous, misguided rector of the Albert LudwigUniversity of Freiburg in 1933 could be the same person who, in 1960,wrote ‘Language and Homeland’ – a richly insightful unprepossessingmeditation on the poetry of the late-eighteenth-century Swiss-GermanJohann Peter Hebel – or more celebrated texts such as ‘The Origin ofthe Work of Art’ (1935), Being and Time (1927) etc., may not, in the end,admit of a philosophically satisfying explanation. But the proper way tochampion Heidegger is not Radloff’s, but Mugerauer’s: by trying‘patiently to hear what Heidegger says for himself’ in his resonant reflec-tions on the philosophers and poets he deeply loved. In any case, puttingphilosophy to work in the public square is not Heidegger’s forte.

Because Mugerauer’s work is so much better than Radloff’s intellec-tually, I am sorry to have to report that the proofreading and copy-editingof his book leave a great deal to be desired. For one thing, the twenty foot-notes to the afterword are missing from the Notes section; for another, theindex entry for National Socialism is useless: the page numbers givenrepeat identically those correctly given for the immediately previousentry, nation. For these faults the Press must be held responsible, at leastin part. (MARK MIGOTTI)

Robert C. Sibley. Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, andCharles Taylor: Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought

McGill-Queen’s University Press. viii , 398 . $29 .95

Northern Spirits is a set of reflections on various stages, both historical andpresent, of Canada’s self-conception seen through the eyes of three of itsmost important thinkers. Given our national proclivity for navel-gazingthat often trots out the same platitudes about ‘the Canadian identity,’Robert Sibley, a senior writer at the Ottawa Citizen, has provided uswith a welcome addition to the discourse that enriches it by giving it tem-poral depth.

The objective of the book is to explore how three Canadian thinkershave drawn on Hegel’s thought in working out both their descriptive

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