[lit-ideas] Tom Rockmore's vested interest in Heidegger's National Socialism?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lawrenchelm1. post@blogger. com" <lawrencehelm1.post@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 11:02:06 -0800
I have for one month now been on a "dogged" (Geary's term) quest to
understand more about Heidegger and especially his involvement with National
Socialism. I am probably more inclined than Geary to launch off on such
quests, but I have taken his question seriously; which I take to be "why am
I more than casually interested in Heidegger?" I'm not sure that I am - not
as I define "casually."
Just yesterday I obtained Victor Farias' Heidegger and Nazism, 1987-9. I
was surprised to discover that Tom Rockmore was one of the authors of the
"Foreword" to Farias' English edition. Rockmore also wrote the Foreword to
Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger, 2009. This means that Rockmore has been
interested in exposing Heidegger's association with National Socialism for
more than 20 years. Surely, that is a better definition of "dogged."
Having read both Forewords, Rockmore strikes me as an intelligent fellow, a
cut above Faye in reasoning ability (I'm not sure about Farias yet). One of
his comments might bear on Geary's question. On page xii of the Farias
Foreword, Rockmore writes, "We should perhaps point out the asymmetrical
character of the discussion evoked by Farias' book in West Germany and
France: in West Germany, hardly any philosopher wishes to comment on the
Heidegger problem; in France, hardly any can actually avoid making a
comment. I read elsewhere that American interest in philosophy tends to
take its cue from France, but maybe in regard to Heidegger we can't quite
fit ourselves into either the French or the German frame of mind. Our
nation did not embrace National Socialism and we did not engage in a
holocaust so we have no reason to avoid the question of Heidegger's
involvement with National Socialism.
On the other hand, we were not as caught up with Political Marxism as France
was after World War II. France had a strong association with National
Socialism during World War II by means of the German domination during their
Vichy period. After the war they executed a few of their more notorious
collaborators and then sought an alternative to National Socialism in
Political Marxism. They had nothing like our McCarthy period in France.
They were rather fond of Communism for quite a long time, but then in the
60s they became disenchanted and in searching for an alternative hit upon
Heidegger. Many French philosophers (so I read) have an intense interest in
preserving Heidegger's respectability.
We don't seem to have that same intensity of interest in the
English-speaking countries. My impression is that it is more a matter of
curiosity for us - at least most of us. Tom Rockmore seems to be as
interested in the subject as Emmanuel Faye. I looked Rockmore up on
Amazon.com and find he wrote an anti-Heidegger book of his own: On
Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy - in 1997, halfway between Farias' and
Faye's books.
In the Farias introduction Rockmore (with Margolis) writes that Heidegger is
"the only major thinker to opt for Nazism, the main example of absolute evil
in our time - possibly of any time. The combination is without any known
historical precedent." Rockmore doesn't seem balanced in this statement.
He not only doesn't mention Stalinism as an evil ranking with Nazism, he
seems to exclude it from consideration. I wondered why.
So I did another search and found that Rockmore wrote a book entitled Marx
after Marxism: http://books.google.com/books?id=dq9TkukhOuMC
<http://books.google.com/books?id=dq9TkukhOuMC&dq=Tom+Rockmore+%2BMarx+after
+Marxism&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=U5cPDVgKTy&sig=amRgETdj5XPXyYXAKs
UM5CZ5Pjs&hl=en&ei=YKQWS4mdH4aotgOR7KGRBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resn
um=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false>
&dq=Tom+Rockmore+%2BMarx+after+Marxism&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=U5c
PDVgKTy&sig=amRgETdj5XPXyYXAKsUM5CZ5Pjs&hl=en&ei=YKQWS4mdH4aotgOR7KGRBA&sa=X
&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
In it Rockmore writes, "It is arguable that now, after the decline of
political Marxism, in a period in which for the foreseeable future in most
of the industrialized world there will be no alternative to economic
liberalism, Marx's theories have never been more relevant. . . political
Marxism came to an abrupt, unforeseen, frequently bitter end in much of the
world following the break up of the Soviet bloc toward the end of the 1980s.
At present, communism, which once ruled more than half the world, remains in
power in only a few places . . . . There is no reason to believe communism
will make a successful comeback in either the near or even distant future,
and certainly none to believe that, with the exception of China, where it
remains in power, it will ever again become a significant political
contender on the world stage. Other than as the study of Marx's theories
and their application to an almost bewildering series of phenomena from
literature, through aesthetics, to social theory, history, and so on, the
period of Marxism has ended. We have now entered a period after Marxism
when, in a way we could not do earlier, we can begin to understand Marx in
new ways, unencumbered by Marxist interpretations that have long dominated
the discussions of both Marxists and non-Marxists."
So Rockmore intends to rehabilitate Marx. I wonder whether
there was a Marxist reaction against Heidegger in France. Surely not all of
the French Marxists abandoned Marxism - at least not all of Marxism - after
the fall of the Soviet bloc. Did these post-Soviet-bloc-fall Marxists
oppose Heidegger in the way that Rockmore does?
I have one book that takes a less aggressive view of Heidegger's
politics: Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism by Julian Young, 1997. My
impression is that Young wouldn't exclude Stalinism from a place besides
Nazism in our condemnation. He seems neither a defender of Heidegger nor an
attacker. He doesn't seem to have either the French Heideggerian's need to
defend Heidegger, nor the Marxist (and former Marxist?) need to attack him.
I looked up Young on Amazon and found that he has written books on
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In one book, Nietzsche's Philosophy of
Religion, Young tells us (according to the product description) "that the
mature Nietzsche is neither an 'atheist', an 'individualist', nor an
'immoralist': he is a German philosopher belonging to a German tradition of
conservative communitarianism - though to claim him as a proto-Nazi is
radically mistaken."
So perhaps my impression that Young is balanced is that I don't
begin with a Marxist bias. I don't need to protect or rehabilitate Marx. I
have read Nietzsche in the past and the idea that he is a proto-Nazi has
never struck me as sound. Nietzsche was a complex philosopher and it has
always seemed a disservice to his brilliance to reduce him to a precursor of
Nazi "philosophy" which is actually no philosophy at all.
Associating Heidegger with Nazi "philosophy" runs into the same problem:
what is the Nazi philosophy? Did Heidegger wait with a blank mind while
lesser minds filled in the details of what German National Socialism was to
be? Or did he have something in mind prior to that? Young (who is
interested in rehabilitating Nietzsche) may be in a better position to
speculate about what Heidegger may have been thinking than Rockmore (who is
interested in rehabilitating Marx).
Lawrence Helm
www.lawrencehelm.com
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