Heidegger\'s Racialism

Heidegger's Racialism

According to Karl Loewith, Heidegger located the connection between his philosophy and his politics in the concept of historicity. This is a plausible self-understanding, since, in Being and Time, this concept explains the possibility of authentic individuals by placing their self-definition within the collective self-choosing of a historical people (Volk). And it is in terms of a people's self-choosing that Heidegger couches his political statements. Some such move from the individual to the group is necessary also for philosophical reasons if Heidegger is to sustain his temporal rather than metaphysical approach to being. Nonetheless he does not go very far with the social terms of his attempt to stave off the subjectivism that otherwise threatens his project of rethinking philosophy in terms of historical relations to the question of the meaning of being. But it is noteworthy that the same concept on which the connection between his philosophy and politics turns is one on which the viability of his systematic project depends as well. The aim of this paper is to consider whether Heidegger's thinking of authentic historicity as a people's self-truth warrants our describing him as a racial thinker. First we will examine more closely the link between his philosophy and his politics and then we will turn to how this connection involves racial content. Given Heidegger's programmatic intent to rethink the western tradition, we may wonder if his racialism is a departure from that tradition or an indication of the depth of his rootedness in it.

I. Politics in Heidegger's Philosophy

We can approach the interrelation of philosophy and politics in Heidegger by way of the characterization of his thought as irrationalist. This claim is misleading if it says that Heidegger denies the reality or value of reason. Not only does he give a quasi-Kantian account of the conditions for the power of discursive reason in theoretical and practical contexts, but he also makes frequent use of traditional reasoning in the development of his own philosophical position. But this position, characterized in Being and Time as "fundamental ontology," does contextualize discursive reasoning so as to supersede its claims as made by such enlightenment thinkers as Kant. When it comes to the most profound problems of philosophy and of individual existence, discursive reason is both insufficient and positively misleading. This feature of Heidegger's work can be labeled "irrationalist" if we understand by this a kind of regression within modern thought.
To speak of "regression" here is to introduce a loaded and ambiguous term. Its immediate force concerns how this thinker retreats from the ambitions of modern enlightenment regarding both theoretical and practical reason. With his ontology, Heidegger claims to move to a deeper level where he can show both the limits of discursive reasoning and how inappropriate commitment to it undermines real understanding and contributes to false relations to the world and to oneself, for example, by objectivating persons or suppressing responsibility for individual choices. What from an enlightenment perspective regresses from methodical reasoning is, from Heidegger's perspective, a basis for opposing misguided modern ideas of progress, ideas which in fact undercut an appropriate relation to human possibilities.

A further sense of regression concerns respects in which the ontological perspective blurs logical distinctions between claims to truth and to normative validity. After superseding discursive reason in its theoretical and practical forms, ontology installs its own kind of truth, "being in the truth," which, when construed as a matter of grasping the "meaning of being," seems, from an enlightenment perspective, to regress to an archaizing, even quasi-mythological language. As Heidegger shifts the focus of truth questions to one's ontological orientation, modern differentiations between validity claims are replaced by self-relations which can be posed as questions of identity. Truth understood as one's authenticity comes to turn on resoluteness and existential choice. Not only does this philosophy seek to circumvent traditional forms of reasoning, it supplants traditional issues of knowledge and morality by questions of identity and self-relation.
This characteristic feature of Heidegger's position bears directly on the intersection cited above between his philosophy and his politics. Self-truth can be sustained only by the individual participating in a collective self-choosing with a historical Volk. And here the philosophical regressions in Heidegger overlap directly with a political regression so far as this Volkish solidarity is at odds with the enlightenment values of a liberal society. Heidegger is quite explicit in seeing this kind of politics as being at odds with individual rights or democratic procedures. His embrace of the "leader" principle is not only the adoption of authoritarianism, but of the suspension of legal process as developed in struggles over modern constitutionalism.
We see, then, from within Heidegger's philosophy a two-fold respect in which it intersects with his politics. The philosophical regressions from differentiated validity claims to identity claims corresponds to a political regression from liberal rights and democratic procedures to the individual's fusion with others in Volkish solidarity.

If it is plausible to speak of a regression here, this does not eliminate the difficulties of using this idea. Apart from questions about tacit commitments about values or ideas of the process of directional change, use of such language may misleadingly imply that Heidegger's philosophy is simply a retreat from the characteristic developments of modernity. But, far from being a reactionary in this sense, Heidegger is very much engaged with modern controversies. This point is captured by those who speak of "conservative revolutionaries" when referring to the late 19th century milieu from which Heidegger emerged-- with its hostility to organized labor, its suspicion of modern culture, and its often religiously-tinged radical nationalism. And this point hints at another difficulty with speaking of regression: doing so suggests that modernity itself is somehow progressive or at least that modernity harbors progressive tendencies. Not only has historical experience made any such idea problematic, it also implies that we have some clear idea of concrete paths to progressive outcomes. It is hard to cite another moment within the modern period in which there has been so little intellectual consensus on this question despite the persistence of institutional imperatives for growth and other kinds of ill-defined "development." In any event, the extent to which modern thinking, including ideas of progress, has been implicated in the worst evils of the modern period is itself a debated point.
But we cannot abandon the assumption of modernity's progressive qualities without abandoning the critical project itself. If we can speak of regressive features in Heidegger's work, this is because of the contradictory qualities of modernity and reflection. And we need to see the regressive sides of his work as rooted in the contradictions of that tradition. His own concerns with the coherence of individual experience and its relation to general features of modernity exhibit this.

To speak of Heidegger as a regressive thinker, then, is not to counterpose him to the tradition but to place him within its own contradictions. Such contradictions are illustrated by Kant, who is a key point of reference for Heidegger's own thinking. The various regressions noted above are easily illustrated as repudiations of Kant's account of reason and his liberal politics. But, as Lukacs has shown, Kant can also be read as an ideological thinker. Apart from class presuppositions, his sexism and racism have both been well documented. The race theme is particularly germane for us. Here we may note Kant's approving citation of Hume's notorious suggestion that Africans cannot really think, but merely mimic the actions of those who are fully human. As Popkin has shown, Hume here flies in the face of much empirical evidence readily available to him. The same holds for Kant, who is a more interesting case since he goes on to develop a theory of racial differentiation. Kant may be the first theorist of race since he went beyond the mainly classificatory discussions of the 18th century to an account of biological mechanisms that explain the relation between perceptible differences among individuals (e.g., skin color) and the real and imputed cultural and social differences that figure in racist beliefs. This kind of naturalizing differentiation of humans along racial lines introduces theoretical means for the qualification and even repudiation of the very universalism Kant's own philosophy so influentially posits. In other words, in Kant's own practice we find elements of the same amalgam of contradictory approaches to humanity that echo in Heidegger. A similar amalgam is given practical and social form in that great enlightenment document of the late 18th century, The Constitution of the United States, with its combination of liberal universalism and the exclusion from citizenship of the enslaved racial minority.

II. Race in Heidegger's Philosophy

But where then are we left regarding race in Heidegger's philosophy? There is convincing evidence that Heidegger willingly carried out the racist policies of the Nazi regime, but this facet of his politics does not of course show that his philosophy has a racial dimension. This question can be approached by way of what we can conclude from the Volkish aspect of his philosophy, where the theoretical aspect of the intersection of thought and politics is located. Can this irrationalist appeal to solidarity by way of collective identity be labeled "racialist"?
If we see a racialism here, it will have to be one that is not directly biological in content. In a way that is consistent with his critique of science, Heidegger rejects biologically-conceived solidarity. But we can acknowledge Heidegger's anti-biologism (even his criticism of the Nazis on these grounds), and yet not regard this as ruling out racialism in his thought. The question is how his arguments figure within the relations and practices of a racialized world. In particular, how do his arguments fit with the recognition relations characteristic of racism?
To pose this question is to emphasize the distinction between how we understand the workings of race within society and how we understand race to figure within the work of intellectuals. How intellectuals think about race is important mainly for how they thus contribute to the course of race relations. Such relations can be fruitfully treated as having to do with recognition, that is, as relations within which individuals experience each other and themselves as having specific social identities. What constitutes specifically racial recognition?
First we should remember that the language and concepts of race as we know them are modern phenomena, as are explicitly racialized social practices. Europeans began using terms for race only toward the end of the sixteenth century, and racial distinctions were established in North America only toward the end of the seventeenth century, evidently in response to conflicts over slavery, not as an initial justification for it. The color lines thus drawn anticipated the biological analysis of race, which was largely the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Racial inclusion or exclusion involves recognition of social membership against the background of ideas of full humanity. Thus recognizing individuals as members of a race (or asserting one's own racial identity) involves a very abstract sense of what one is (the member of a specific race) against the abstract ideal of full humanity. Recognition as belonging to an inferior race implies a compromised, incomplete, or impure relation to the possibilities that are equated with what it is to be human. So we can treat racism as involving recognition relations proper to exclusion from membership in a group that enjoys full humanity.
It is against the background of this kind of social recognition that the racializing ideas of theorists have their historical interest. Biological theories of race, as initiated by Kant, can help to explain and justify such exclusionary recognition. By citing biological mechanisms, an intellectual can argue that some groups are incapable of what otherwise are defined as human possibilities. But biological theory is not the only way such a case can be made. Heidegger's notion of a Volk, which is constituted by a set of historical relations, can have the same function as a biologically-conceived race. With his idea of historicity, Heidegger thinks of a people as being constituted in an active relation to a determinate past and a possible future. While a people is thus historically constructed, it emerges on the basis of contingent circumstances which make solidarity possible for some individuals and not others, providing grounds for some to be members while excluding others. The possibility of such historical self-constitution is understood in general theoretical terms which hold for humans (construed as Dasein) in general, but the opportunity for realizing this possibility is concretely available only to particular groups. The ontological theory, like biological conceptions of race, thus allows for establishing fateful differences between the members of different groups.

Heidegger's argument resembles the biological conception by appealing to an overarching condition that, in establishing exclusion, has the effect of suspending moral and political norms. We find an intellectual justification of the superseding of such norms by identity considerations where identity or membership follows from the overarching condition (biological or historical). Earlier we described one respect in which Heidegger's appeal to historical authenticity is regressive by superseding moral norms by identity claims. An equivalent regression is carried through by those who posit fundamental differences on the basis of alleged biological mechanisms that explain social and cultural patterns linked to claims of racial identity.
This account of Heidegger's racialism treats it as a response to problems that face modern philosophy and society alike. In both contexts difficulties associated with the assumptions and uses of universalism are countered by appeal to unifying social identities rooted in alleged fundamental conditions that somehow disqualify existing cognitive and normative claims. The claim for these identities is that they establish a concreteness for action or a unifying meaning that is unavailable from enlightenment universalism. The irony of such claims is that they juxtapose their own very modern and general abstractions, those of races and peoples, as an antidote to overly general abstraction. While Heidegger may be right to follow Hegel in finding in enlightenment abstraction forms that hide problematic historical content, his own ideas of authenticity and the Volk have proven susceptible to similar objections.

III. Conclusion

At the risk of blurring familiar assumptions about racism, we have seen how the specifics of Heideggerian irrationalism articulate a racializing politics. As a political act, this philosophy offers an articulation of the terms of political recognition under modern conditions understood in a certain way. Heidegger's philosophy is regressive when compared with Kant's, but in fact both operate within the same contradictory complex. The point of putting it this way is to forestall too simple a stigmatizing of either Heidegger or the tradition in which he works. Dialectical thinking is useful for capturing dilemmas within this tradition and thus for avoiding the kind of all or nothing conclusions that would either ignore the deep involvement of modern philosophy in the evils of modern society or make that involvement so total that any criticism would be impossible.

ENDNOTES





1. Karl Loewith, "My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936," in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 140-43.
. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 434-39.
. Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," in Wolin, pp.29-39.
. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Georg Lukacs The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980).
. For example, the reconstruction of the structure of experience in the ontological terms of Being and Time can be understood as following a Kantian model.
. H on limits of discursive reason..
. Heidegger's suspicions regarding the idea of progress
. A very different relation to modern discursive reason lies behind the discussion of Heidegger in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
. H on "being in the truth"; perhaps also note the evolution of H's concern with the problem of being and so shifts in the argument about rationality
. Being and Time, p. 436.
. Heidegger's address to students on Nov. 3, 1933 illustrates his adoption of this acceptance of Hitler's unique role, Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, p. 47.
. Perhaps Wolin on conservative revolutionaries
. For example, see Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition.
. Lukacs's classic account of Kant can be found in History and Class Consciousness.
. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, tr. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 111.
. Richard Popkin, "Hume's Racism Reconsidered,"The Third Force in Eighteenth Century Thought, pp. 65-75.
. Kant, "On the Different Races of Man," from E.W. Count, ed., This is Race (New York: Shuman, 1950).

. H's enforcement of racist policies
. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).
. H's criticism of Nazi biologism (letter on Rosenberg)
. Richard T. Peterson, "Race and Recognition," Proceedings of the Radical Philosophy Association, forthcoming.
. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1965).
. For an approach to this history see Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, no. 181, May/June, 1990, pp. 95-118.
. My emphasis on the relation to themes of humanism draws from Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," Anatomy of Racism, ed., David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp.283-92.

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