48

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

with middlemen substantiate this opinion. The socially clumsy person who may
be partially excluded from society hates those middlemen as jacks of all trades.
This hatred joins with resistance against all agents, from the cattle dealer to the
journalist. In 1956 the stable professions, which are themselves a stage of social
development, are still the norms for Heidegger. He praises them in the name of a
false eternity of agrarian conditions: Man tries in vain to bring the globe to order
through planning, when he is not in tune with the consoling voice of the country
lane.11

Again, this is a strategy which is all too common with critics of Heidegger; because
some of his rhetoric smacks at some level of a kind of an anti-modernism which they
associate with German conservative revolutionary views which in turn are seen as
an obvious precursor to Nazism, they merely assume the offensiveness of the ideas
Heidegger is trying to peddle. And, in a way, they do themselves a disservice since
Heideggers onslaught against modernity is genuinely flawed for a number of reasons
which we will examine closely in the chapters that follow. However, to suppose that
these are just the ravings of a German mandarin, or worse, some deluded Nazi hack,
misses again the real problem we have to face and it is certainly easy enough to show
how Heideggers thought does not reduce to such a crass ideology.
There is no question that Adorno catches a whiff of something thats off in
Heideggers rhetoric and, like so many of his contemporaries, is painfully sensitive to
any association with the Blubo rhetoric of the day which Heidegger sutured onto his
philosophy at different junctures. However, Adorno bases his analyses of Heideggers
highly questionable invocation of rootedness on the relatively unimportant and
slightly pathetic paean to provincialism that is his radio address. That being so, he
does identify one line in that piece which relates to a problem which we will examine
in the context of Heideggers philosophical writings concerning the authentic Dasein
of a people and his concomitant conceptions of history, art and truth: Ones own
works inner belonging, to the Black Forest and its people, comes from a century-long
Germanic-Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable.12 Adorno could have developed
a line of criticism here and related it to key aspects of Heideggers philosophy. Alas,
he fails to do so, and contents himself instead with ad hominem attacks and further
examples of the genetic fallacy which Heidegger can all too easily be defended against.

Bourdieu and Heideggers ontological politics

We have two important sources concerning Bourdieus assessment of Heideggers
philosophy and the discomfiting issue of the relationship between that philosophy and
his political activities in the 1930s.13 Given the rather jaundiced views of Bourdieu as
we find them in his interview and the basic premise underlying his approach to the
question, it is quite surprising that he took the trouble to write a book on the issue at
all since his basic point in the interview amounts to the rather uninspired claim that
Heideggers philosophy is essentially a repackaging of the reactionary, anti-modern,
conservative nationalism of his day, albeit cloaked in an almost impenetrable language.