By STEVEN B. SMITH [The Claremont Review of Books] – Perhaps most revealing is Heidegger’s response to a letter written to him by his former student, Herbert Marcuse, shortly after the war. “A philosopher can be mistaken in politics,” wrote the future author of One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, “but he cannot make a mistake about a regime that killed millions of Jews simply because they were Jews.” Not only does Heidegger refuse to apologize for his “mistake,” he takes the occasion to reaffirm the correctness of his decisions. Encouraging Marcuse to read the “entirety” of his Rectoral Address, Heidegger repeats Marcuse’s statement about the murder of millions of Jews and suggests that Marcuse should have said “East Germans.”

At the core of Heidegger’s self-justification was a belief in the moral equivalence between the Allies (including the Soviet Union) and the Hitler regime. The belief that the issue of the Holocaust could be explained as a form of unfettered technological rationality was central to all Heidegger’s later works after the so-called “turn” (Kehre) in his thought. In the Bremen lectures of 1949 Heidegger begins to treat metaphysics as a form of technology that now threatens all humanity. Though he had earlier praised the Nazi conquest of Europe as a supreme metaphysical act, he now gives the term metaphysics an increasingly negative meaning. His statement that “[a]griculture today is a motorized industry of alienation” no different from the fabrication of corpses in the death camps must rank as one of the most odious pieces of self-justification ever uttered. By treating the Shoah and the “Final Solution” as representing the triumph of an autonomous technology, Heidegger issues a blanket exculpation of himself and the whole Nazi hierarchy from any moral and political responsibility. His excuse seems to be “metaphysics made me do it.”

Continued at The Claremont Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.