3

Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy,

Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

That Rickert and Frege associated with DPG and that, in their final years, they
leaned to the political views of the extreme right, is important on other grounds,
however. It has often been said that right-wing politics in Germany after the
First World War was the product of a general hostility to reason and that it was
associated with irrationalism in philosophy. This irrationalism has also frequently
been considered the essential link between Heideggers philosophy and his politics.
It is certainly true that Heidegger criticized rationalism and that he subjected
appeals to reason to withering attacks (though he always added that he was not an
irrationalist). But these facts are insufficient for establishing an intrinsic connection
between irrationalism, on the one hand, and right-wing and Nazi political views,
on the other. The assumption of such a link may be refuted by the cases of Rickert
and Frege. Though both men joined the DPG and subscribed to its political
program, they also believed in the power of reason and strove to apply it in their
philosophical work. Frege and Rickert were, moreover, by no means singular. Other
German philosophers, such as Bausch, Hartmann, and Gehlen, similarly believed in
science and reason and rejected the criticisms of philosophical antirationalists like
Heidegger; at the same time they committed themselves to Nazi beliefs. Analyses
that are based on the assumption of an intrinsic connection between irrationalism
and National Socialism fall short of the mark because they explain little.1
Much has been made of the tenor of Heideggers rhetoric in the 1930s in particular.
In many cases rather less than level-headed critics end up taking some of Heideggers
more inflammatory iterations as an excuse to tar the entire corpus with an unctuous
layer of heavily nationalist, conservative revolutionary or even Nazi pitch. An
indication that the preponderance of these discussions have wandered down the
garden-paths of intellectual gossip, guilt by association and innuendo is the fact that
so many sensational anecdotes are interspersed through these rants masquerading as
proof or evidence. There is little question but that Heideggers philosophy is influenced
by its historical context, indeed, Heidegger himself would acknowledge this quicker
than most. Nevertheless, Heideggers titanic intellectual travails no more reduce to
the crude jingoism of National Socialism than Aristotles science of human affairs
reduces to the martial aspirations of Alexander. Neither can Heideggers philosophy be
straightforwardly reduced to the work of the conservative revolutionaries!