European Existentialism

Nino Langiulli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351311144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

European Existentialism is a rich collection of major texts and is made all the more significant by the range and depth of its contributions. This book aims to give greater intelligibility to existentialism by providing samples from antecedents of and influences upon it. Although existentialism is regarded as an example of twentieth-century philosophizing, the book presents nineteenth-century thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as its forerunners. Thinkers, such as Dilthey, Husserl, and Scheler, frequently associated with other trends hi philosophy, such as historicism and phenomenology, are included because of their influence upon existentialism. Informative biographies of each author represented are also included.

European Existentialism includes a broad range of philosophers working in the existentialist mode not only French and German, but also Spanish, Italian, Jewish, and Russian philosophers. This volume is also distinctive in that it omits existentialists from the literary world. While Dostoevsky is often included in other existentialist collections, Langiulli represents Russian philosophy with a selection by Berdyaev. In his new introduction, Langiulli discusses how the themes of existentialism have led to contemporary aberrations. He uses the language of political rights as an example; whereas we once referred to "freedom of speech, " we have transformed that phrase into a much wider category, "freedom of expression."

Langiulli also examines various trends that have derived from existentialism: postmodernism, deconstructionism, and multiculturalism. Langiulli's introduction and the contributions place existentialism as a genuine tradition in the history of philosophy. European Existentialism is an invaluable collection for philosophers, educators, and all those interested in the existentialist tradition.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Heidegger was born at Messkirch in Baden, Germany, on September 26, 1889. He was the eldest son of Johanna Kempf and Friedrich Heidegger, the sexton of St. Martin’s Catholic Church in Messkirch. After completing his studies at the Gymnasium, he became a Jesuit postulant for ten days but left for unknown reasons to enter the diocesan seminary of Freiburg. At one point during his two years there he was introduced to Franz Brentano’s doctoral dissertation on the many senses of “being” in Aristotle. Interestingly enough, it is the problem of the meaning of “being” that has been the principal concern of Heidegger’s philosophical career.

Apparently Heidegger received a solid foundation in Greek and medieval philosophy at the Gymnasium and seminary; his mature work bears the marks of these two epochs of philosophical inquiry. It seems, however, that he had trouble with the seminary authorities when he tried to organize seminars in modern philosophy.

In 1909 he entered the University of Freiburg where he studied philosophy under Heinrich Rickert. Before completing his dissertation he published in 1912 a critical survey of current logical studies for a Catholic journal. The survey showed familiarity with Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica as well as Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen. The article notes and approves of Husserl’s attack on the psychologistic interpretation of the foundations of logic. Another article written in the same year on the problem of reality in modern philosophy for another Catholic journal indicates Heidegger’s preference for the Aristotelian and scholastic analyses of the “problem of reality” over those of Hume, Kant, and Mach.

In 1914 Heidegger submitted his dissertation Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus (The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism) and in 1916 published his Hahilitationsscrift entitled Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Meanings). The same year Husserl arrived at Freiburg, and in 1920 Heidegger became his assistant. This association between the full professor and the Privatdozent is an important one in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, as much for the disagreements between the two as for their agreements.

Heidegger did his turn of military service during World War I between 1917 and 1919. In the same year that he entered the service, he married Elfride Petrie. Three children were born to them, two sons and a daughter.

In 1923 Heidegger was called to Marburg as a full professor. He became friendly with Rudolf Bultmann, who suggested that he look at Karl Barth’s analysis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Kierkegaard’s influence on that work led Heidegger to make a study of the Danish thinker.

Heidegger’s lectures made a profound impression on those who heard them. He taught simply, patiently, clearly, and deliberately. His teaching has been the source of praise from philosophers as diverse as Ralph Barton Perry and Hannah Arendt. Leo Strauss also alludes to it in commenting on the Davos discussion between Heidegger and Cassirer. There have been remarks to the effect that his teaching was in marked contrast to the bombastic and abstruse character of his writing. These remarks betray a misunderstanding of his fundamental philosophical aim—the raising of the most ordinary characteristics of reality, by means of ordinary German expressions, to the level of theoretical inquiry.

In 1927 Heidegger published Being and Time which was dedicated to Husserl, as was the essay of 1929, Vom Wesen des Grundes. The relationship between the two cooled, as joint ventures such as the article on phenomenology for the Encyclopaedia Britannica failed or Heidegger’s editing of Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness proved unsatisfactory to the latter. But the real source of the estrangement was a difference between their conceptions of philosophical inquiry—Husserl maintaining that its task is the analysis of the structures of consciousness; Heidegger the analysis of the structures of being. Husserl became convinced that Heidegger had fallen into the error of anthropologism, another guise of the error of psychologism against which Husserl had directed so much of his energy. Despite his reservations about him, Husserl, at the point of retirement in 1928, nominated Heidegger as his successor for the chair of philosophy at Freiburg.

Then in 1933 there occurred an incident in Heidegger’s career that bears the mark of tragedy. He had been elected Rector Magnificus of the University of Freiburg by his colleagues. On May 27 he delivered his inaugural address entitled Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (The Self-Affirmation of the German University), endorsing the National Socialist government which had come to power that year. His brief flirtation with politics was described recently by Hannah Arendt in Merkur as a misadventure comparable to that of Plato with the tyrant Dionysius in Syracuse. Heidegger saw through his error quickly and resigned from the Rectorship early in 1934, apparently for political reasons. As a matter of fact, although he had been elected by the faculty, he never received the necessary confirmation of the Nazi government. Heidegger did not publish frequently during these years. It seems that he was forbidden to do so because of his lack of cooperation with the government.

The accounts of what occurred during the occupation at the end of the Second World War differ to some extent. One report states that from 1944 to 1951 he was forbidden to teach. Another report claims that although he was forbidden to teach in 1944, the French Occupation reinstated him in 1945. In this report he refused the reinstatement and withdrew from public academic life. In 1952 he became emeritus. He did, however, continue to lecture and give addresses during the Occupation with relative frequency. Since 1957 he has appeared rarely on the public scene, living a fairly isolated life in Todtnauberg near Freiburg.

The belief that Heidegger was an out and out Nazi and that his philosophical inquiry served as a propaedeutic for Nazism is fairly widespread. As recently as July 12, 1970, a book review in the New York Times repeated the claim that tied Heidegger to the Nazi intellectual establishment. The persistence of this claim requires an explanation of some of the facts that have become available since it was originally made. The claim stems from the events surrounding his becoming the rector at Freiburg.

In an article entitled “Trois attaques contre Heidegger,” published in the French journal Critique (November 1966), François Fedier conscientiously lays bare both the facts and the fictions of Heidegger’s association with Nazism.

First of all, Fedier says that Heidegger did not belong to any political party and avoided political activity. But in the “new” Germany of 1933, holding a position of responsibility was almost automatically accompanied by registration in the Nazi party. Thus when Heidegger was persuaded and then elected by his colleagues to be the rector of the university, Nazi officials made it clear to him that enrollment in the party would facilitate dealing with the ministry of education. Heidegger consequently enrolled but only on the condition that he neither attend meetings nor participate in activities of the party. This condition probably led to the government’s not confirming his rectorship.

This, of course, does not excuse the fact that on at least two occasions Heidegger publicly endorsed certain positions of the Nazi party. His inaugural lecture, moreover, not only endorsed certain of the party’s positions but the party itself, inasmuch as Nazism had brought national stature to the university and awareness of national destiny to the students. Heidegger argued that university training had been haphazard and without relation to concrete social and political needs, that vague ideals of scientific progress and academic freedom should be rooted and strengthened in German tradition as it struggled to achieve its destiny of self-determination. Commitment to this struggle on the part of the students and professors in union with the labor force, said Heidegger, was the initial grasp of the glory and greatness of Hitler’s revolution.

The strength of his endorsement may be gauged by these words which appear on page 22 of the published version of the speech: “It is not theses and ideas that are the laws of your being! The Führer himself, and he alone, is Germany’s reality and law today and in the future.”

Another occasion on which Heidegger’s political views coincided with those of the Nazis occurred in the fall of 1933 when he publicly encouraged his fellow Germans to vote affirmatively in the plebescite on whether or not to withdraw from the League of Nations.

Yet in February 1934, after Heidegger refused government orders to discharge two anti-Nazi deans, von Mollendorf and Wolf, and when he realized that the government was not going to confirm his rectorship, he resigned from the position. The ministry of education chose his successor, who was congratulated in the Nazi press as “the first National Socialist rector of Freiburg University.” Heidegger was conspicuously absent from the new rector’s investiture.

From 1934 to 1944, those students of Heidegger who attended his lectures claim that his public posture was one of obstinate disapproval of the Nazi regime, with the result that the lectures received surveillance from the secret police. Furthermore, in 1944 when labor conscription was begun in order to construct entrenchments along the Rhine, the current rector, with the party’s approval, “volunteered” Heidegger and designated him “the least indispensable of the university’s professors.”

The claims that Heidegger lectured in an S.A. uniform as reported in France-Observateur (December 19, 1964), and that he refused Husserl access to the university or to its library as reported in Der Neue Zürcher Zeitung (January 5, 1961) and repeated in Der Spiegel (February 7, 1966), are false. Heidegger, in fact, has made a public denial of these claims (Der Spiegel, March 7, 1966).

Finally we must deal with the allegation that Heidegger tended toward anti-Semitism. The only ascertainable source for this is a remark made by Frau Toni Cassirer in memoirs (Aus meinem Lehen mit Ernst Cassirer) published in 1950. On pages 165–67, she refers to the occasion of the 1929 Davos discussion between her husband and Heidegger. Besides finding his presence discomforting, she makes the following assertion: “His inclination toward anti-Semitism was not strange to us.” Fedier questions the objectivity and validity of that assertion and calls attention to the fact that Heidegger’s first disciplinary act as Freiburg’s rector was to forbid anti-Semitic propaganda at the university by the Nazi students.

Sometimes the claim that Heidegger was a committed Nazi is repeated innocendy and out of ignorance; at other times the malice and shamelessness seem obvious. An instance of the latter is a book brought out in 1965 by a New York publisher with the tide German Existentialism enclosed in a jacket carrying a white swastika against a black and red background. Though Heidegger is named as the author, the book contains only snatches of some of Heidegger’s speeches, and it is composed mostly of newspaper reports from 1933 with none later than February 1, 1934. Another example of this mischievous detraction can be found in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. One of the contributors, in referring to the Davos discussion on Kant between Cassirer and Heidegger in 1929, compares the two philosophers in a reckless display of misrepresentation. Cassirer is the “heir of Kant,” “tall, powerful and serene,” his effect upon the audience “Apollonian.” He is the product of liberal culture of Central Europe. Heidegger, on the other hand, despite his “gigantic intellect,” is “of petit bourgeois descent from Southwest Germany” who “had never lost his accent.” The writer then forgives him this and takes it as a “mark of firm-rootedness and peasant genuineness.” He is, however, “a renegade” from the seminary; his “gloomy, somewhat whining and apprehensive tone of voice” expressed his “feeling of loneliness, of oppression and of frustration.” He is a “little man with sinister willful speech … who loved to say that philosophy is no fun … over against the representative of Enlightenment, basking in spiritual fortune, for whom the philosophers life was joy and inspiration. …” This remark, of course, illustrates the depth of the writer’s understanding of philosophy and neatly complements his report of the debate. But he is not yet finished with Heidegger, for he adds that subsequently the philosopher “professed himself unreservedly for National Socialism” and that he “placed his philosophy at the service of the self-destruction of the German intelligentsia.”

Such remarks could very well be dismissed were it not for the wide measure of acceptance they have received.

A Discussion Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger¹

Translated Toy Francis Slade

[P. 17.] Cassirer: What does Heidegger understand by Neo-Kantianism? Who is the opponent whom Heidegger has in mind? The concept “Neo-Kantianism” must not be defined substantially, but functionally. What is at issue is not the character of that philosophy as a dogmatic doctrinal system, but a way of formulating the question.

Heidegger: If I am to begin by naming names, I will mention Cohen, Windelband, Rickert, Erdmann, Riehl. What is common to every form of Neo-Kantianism can only be understood in terms of its origin. This is the embarrassing dilemma of philosophy before the question of what still really remains to it [as a field of inquiry]² within the totality of knowledge. There appeared to remain only the knowledge about science, not of “that-which-is” [das Seiende]. It was this point of view that defined the movement back to Kant. Kant was seen as the theoretician of the mathematico-physical theory of knowledge. Kant, however, did not wish to provide a theory of natural science, but to show the problematic of metaphysics, more specifically of ontology. My intention is to work this essential content of the positive basis of the Critique of Pure Reason into ontology. By reason of my interpretation of the Dialectic as ontology, I believe that the problem of Being [Sein] in the Transcendental Logic, seemingly only negative in Kant, is really a positive problem.

Cassirer: Cohen is only understood correctly if he is understood historically, not simply as an epistemologist. I do not conceive of my own development as a defection from Cohen. The positioning of the mathematical sciences of nature is for me only a paradigm, not the whole of the problem.—Heidegger and I are in agreement on one point: for Kant the productive imagination is of central significance. I have been led to this through my work on the symbolic. The imagination is the relation of all thinking to intuition, synthesis speciosa. The synthesis is the fundamental power of pure thought. What matters for Kant is the synthesis which makes use of the species. [P. 18.] And this leads to the heart of the image-concept,³ of the symbol-concept.—Kant’s major problem is how is freedom possible. Kant says that we conceive only that freedom is inconceivable. And yet there is the Kantian ethics. The categorical imperative ought to be such that the moral law holds not only for men, but for all rational beings in general. The moral as such leads beyond the world of appearances. What is at stake here is the break-through to the mundus intelligihilis. In the ethical realm a point is reached which is no longer relative to the finitude of the cognizing being.—And this ties in with what Heidegger has done. The extraordinary importance of the schematism cannot be overestimated. Yet in the ethical realm Kant suppresses the schematism. For he says our concepts are “senses of …” [Einsichten] (not cognitions), “senses of …” which can no longer be schematized. There is at most a typology, not a schematism, of Practical Reason. For Kant the schematism is a terminus a quo, not a terminus ad quern. Kant’s point of departure is the problem posed by Heidegger. However, this circle widened for Kant. Heidegger has made the point that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and confined. But how does such a finite being attain knowledge, reason, truth?—Heidegger formulates the problem of truth and says there c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Personal Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
• Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)
• Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
• Max Scheler (1874-1928)
• Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)
• Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
• José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955)
• Nicholas Abbagnano (1901–1990)
• Martin Buber (1878-1965)
• Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)
• Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948)
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
• Albert Camus (1913–1960)
• Selected Bibliographies
• Additions to the Bibliographies