Martin Heidegger: "Let not doctrines and 'Ideas' be the rules of your being. Today and in the future, only the Führer himself is German reality and its law." (1933)
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
His discussion of existentialism has a particular biographical interest in Marcuse's life. At the University of Freiburg, he had studied under the theologian/philosopher Edmund Husserl and the Christian philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was considered the founder of existentialism. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Heidegger became an enthusiastic support of the NSDAP and the Third Reich. This „Kampf gegen den Liberalismus“ essay included an early reckoning by Marcuse with this ugly turn in his philosophical mentor’s thinking. With particular reference to Heidegger, he writes:
In philosophy, existentialism begins as the antagonist in a great debate with Western rationalism and idealism, intending to save their conceptual content by injecting it into the historical concretion of individual existence. It ends by radically denying its own origin; the struggle against reason drives it blindly into the arms of the powers that be. In their service and with their protection, it turns traitor to the great philosophy that it formerly celebrated as the culmination of Western thought. The abyss between them is now unbridgeable.By way of explanation, he quotes Kant on human rights:
Human right must be kept sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice it costs the ruling powers. One cannot go only halfway and contrive a pragmatically conditioned right. ... All politics, rather, must bend the knee before sacred human right ...By contrast, Heidegger notoriously declared in 1933, "Let not doctrines and ‘Ideas’ be the rules of your being. Today and in the future, only the Führer himself [Adolf Hitler] is German reality and its law."
In that statement, Heidegger was arguing against the insistence on Reason, the need for understanding empirical reality, and the insistence on the centrality of freedom and humane values that were core elements of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel incorporated.
When Marcuse describes the brand of existentialism from advocates of the Third Reich, he emphasizes two components of it. One is the sense that the nation and the Aryan race are in constant existential danger, that their enemies are always trying to destroy them and are in danger of suceeding. This constant state of fear had the practical political value of allowing the Nazi dictatorship to rally the public in the us-against-them tribal feeling of a group in danger from without. Heidegger's existentialism up until his Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] had attempted to get beyond the limits of classical German idealist philosophy, which considered the human subject primarily in terms of his rational capabilities (Decartes’ "I think, therefore I am"), by aiming at "regaining the full concretion of the historical subject in opposition to the abstract 'logical' subject of rational idealism." But the existentialism of the Third Reich subsumed the existence of the individual in the race, made the individual completely subservient to the needs of the Race and the Nation as interpreted by the Führer who headed the state:
A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even as a political falsification on the part of liberalism. "We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this our essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance" [quote from Alfred Bäumler].The jurist Ernst Forsthoff (1902-1974) defended the Nazi Führerprinzip (leadership principle) this way:
Die Führergewalt ist umfassend und total; sie vereinigt in sich alle Mittel der politischen Gestaltung; sie erstreckt sich auf alle Sachgebiete des völkischen Lebens; sie erfasst alle Volksgenossen, die dem Führer zu Treue und Gehorsam verpflichtet sind.The other major component of Nazi existentialism is the emphasis on taking a side as being in itself more important than decided what side rationally makes sense. Bäumler again:
[The authority of the Führer is comprehensive and total; it unites in itself all means of political formations; it extends to all specialized fields of the life of the people; it includes all those related to the people [i.e., those considered ethnic Germans], who are obligated to provide the Führer their loyalty and obedience.]
Action does not mean 'deciding in favor of' ..., for that presupposes that one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather, action means 'setting off in a direction', 'taking sides', by virtue of a mandate of destiny, by virtue of 'one's own right'. ... It is really secondary [inferior] to decide in favor of something that I have come to know.The Nazi brand of existentialism therefore rejects the heritiage of philosophical liberalism in two critical ways. One it rejects the concepts of Reason and the possibility of objective knowledge. The other is that it erases the essential value of the individual and his rights, it denies the necessity for society to be independent of the State, and also denies that distinct groups within society have conflicting interests. In the latter case, National Socialist ideology was particularly intent on denying the existence of class conflict within the Aryan race and the German nation. And the embodying of the collective into the will of the Führer was about as far removed as it could be from liberal notions of a social contract, the need for representative institutions, limited government, and the separation of powers.
Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism
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