Introduction: the crisis of Kultur
Whether one likes it or not, we are now in Germany of the 1930s. And maybe, we are all responsible for this situation. In his 1942 essay ‘The New German Mentality’, Herbert Marcuse talked of the “new mentality” and the “new language” created by German fascism and how it then produced two layers of this new mentality: (1) the pragmatic layer and the (2) mythological layer.3 According to this essay:
The German people today is oriented to essentially different values and standards; it talks of and understands a language that is different not only from that of Western civilization but also from that of former German Kultur.4
One could, however, ask: “what is this former German Kultur that fascism was destroying?” One way of looking at this idea is from the prisms of Martin Heidegger for whom a certain form of German Supremacism is seen. According to this view, Germany inherited Greek philosophy in its original pristine form thus “skip(ping) over this whole process of deformation and decay and attempt(ing) to regain the unimpaired strength of language and words…”5 Deformity and decay create a sense of homelessness.6 One needs (so Heidegger says following the German poet Hölderling) a “homecoming”, i.e., feeling of “belonging to the destiny of the West”7 where one realizes the “complete Europeanization of the earth and mankind” (vollständige Europäisierung der Erde und des Menschen).8
For Marcuse, this most certainly is not the case. German Kultur means something else. What then is this something else? According to this reading, German philosophy is “the best that humanity produced” along with English (and Scottish) political economy and French socialism.9 While German fascism created the Kultur of xenophobia, racism and imperialism, a revolutionary understanding of Kultur was needed such that Kultur could be rescued from the manipulability of Kultur. For this, the idea of freedom has to be inscribed on the banners of Kultur.
Writing an obituary to Engels, Lenin in 1895 talked of the radical politicization of Kultur. According to him, “in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat must win itself certain political rights” and for this “political revolution was necessary”.10 Further:
Only a free Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians or any other small nations, or constantly to set France and Germany at loggerheads, would enable modern Europe, rid of the burden of war, to breathe freely, would weaken all the reactionary elements in Europe and strengthen the European working class.11
Kultur thus has not only to be humanized and politicized, it has to be revolutionized. Thus one does not want the “culturalization of politics”, but the complete revolutionizing of politics, culture, and society. This humanization of politics and society needs, however, a humanization of philosophy and thus needs a humanist philosophy which places the human condition at centre of analysis. One thus cannot work with subjective, idealistic and partisan philosophy, but instead needs public philosophy. After all, did not Ludwig Wittgenstein decry that “private language” is simply nonsensical?12
Fascism as “private philosophy”
Strictly speaking, talking of “private philosophy” could be said to be nonsense. One can have a bad or spurious philosophy, but not a private philosophy. Yet in contrast to this statement, one can say that one can have a private philosophy with a private language that first liberalism engineered and then which was mastered by the fascists.
In his 1923–1924 essays, Freud talked of neurosis and psychosis and the ensuing loss of reality in psychosis.13 What German fascism did was that it took the idea of psychosis (as withdrawal from reality) and inserted it in the realm of fascist ideology and thereby creating the mumbo-jumbo of fascism’s private language. But here we are talking of fascism as private language and not merely and only restricting it to psychosis since philosophy had also a role in the promotion of fascism. What we are thus saying is that just as irrationality had a role in the emergence of European fascism, so too did philosophy have this same reactionary role.
The case of Martin Heidegger is a case in point where serious philosophy was bent directly towards fascism. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, he talked of the “inner truth and greatness” of the German Nazis.14 Of course one could ask the questions: “was he really a fascist, was his entire philosophy thus inherently fascistic, or was he merely an opportunist who welcomed Hitler to buttress his career, which in his own words was ‘the greatest stupidity of his life’ (die größte Dummheit seines Lebens)?”,15 and “is it not merely the case that fascism involves the ideology of irrationality, but does it also involve a philosophy?”
Writing in 1947, Marcuse wrote to his one-time teacher that:
…in 1933 you identified so strongly with the regime that today in the eyes of many you are considered as one of the strongest intellectual proponents. Your own speeches, writings and treatises from this period are proof thereof. You have never publicly retracted them—not even after 1945. You have never publicly explained that you have arrived at judgments other than those which you expressed in 1933-34 and articulated in your writings. You remained in Germany after 1934, although you could have found a position abroad practically anywhere. You never publicly denounced any of the actions or ideologies of the regime. Because of these circumstances you are still today identified with the Nazi regime. Many us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from such identification, a statement that honestly expresses your current attitude about the events that have occurred. But you have never uttered such a statement at least it has never emerged beyond your private sphere. I—and very many others—have admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews—merely because they were Jews—that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the Western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination—in this case, too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition … Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas? Every attempt to combat this cosmic misunderstanding founders on the generally shared resistance to taking seriously a Nazi ideologue. Common sense (also among intellectuals), which bears witness to such resistance, refuses to view you as a philosopher, because philosophy and Nazism are irreconcilable.16
Heidegger’s answer was:
Concerning 1933: I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism.17
To Marcuse’s statement that the Nazi “regime that has killed millions of Jews—merely because they were Jews” and that this regime “made terror into an everyday phenomenon and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite”,18 Heidegger’s response was that “I can merely add that if instead of ‘Jews’ you had written ‘East Germans’ (i.e., Germans of the eastern territories), then the same holds true for one of the allies”.19 What Heidegger does is that he relativizes the genocide by saying that “others would have done the same thing”.20
Others would have done the same thing? Sounds shocking, does it not? Or should one treat this as normal? Is this the “destiny” of Western Dasein that Heidegger wanted, a “destiny” that would lead humanity to Auschwitz where reason along with a great part of humanity was annihilated in the gas chambers?
The clear cut fascist philosophical statement is found in his 1933 Rector’s Address (Rektoratsrede) ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’ (Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität) where he talked of the need to create a “battle community of teachers and students (which) will only recreate the German university into a place of spiritual legislation”.21 For Heidegger, what German universities needed was “spiritual leadership” to lead the “spiritual mission”.22 The angst that propelled the Nazis to power would find a prominent place in this address—“German destiny is in its most extreme distress”.23
Not only was Heidegger’s lecture merely verbal, he was involved in the implementation of the anti-Semitic legislation and also the totalitarian Gleichschaltung (“unification” or “reconstruction”) policy that suppressed all opposition to the government. What was entangled with the idea of the “spiritual mission” was “German fate”.24
What needs to be stressed is the totalitarian and militaristic idea of philosophy that Heidegger was proposing in 1933. “Academic freedom” is declared untrue, “fit only to be banished from the German universities”.25 Instead, true freedom would emerge—as Germanic freedom—“bond and service”, i.e., bond to the national community (Volkgemeinschaft), to the “honour and destiny of the nation” where the student bo...
