Philosophy under political judgment

What you will work out

• Distinguish established political commitments, reported notebook passages and arguments about their philosophical significance.
• Explain how Heidegger’s ideas about inquiry, inheritance and a shared world enter his political thinking.
• Assess Di Cesare’s account of metaphysical antisemitism and Malpas’s competing interpretation.
• Judge particular philosophical claims without granting the work an exemption from its history or assuming that every question has already been answered.

A question that has become unavoidable

Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party that year. His rectorate ended in 1934, but his party membership continued until the regime’s end in 1945. His political involvement was more than an opinion kept to himself: it included an attempt to transform the university within the National Socialist movement.[1]

Heidegger’s commitments are not in suspense while we assess his philosophy. The further question is what his philosophy contributed to them, and what that connection gives us reason to reject or rethink. We have followed an account of taking over a life, retrieving an inheritance and participating in a people’s destiny, and the political record belongs within our examination of those ideas.

Lesson 06 distinguished owning a commitment from justifying it: someone may face a decision seriously and still wrong another person. Lesson 07 carried the problem into shared history, asking what warrants the demands made in the name of an inheritance. Heidegger’s political thinking gives these questions a setting in which their consequences cannot be left abstract.

We need to examine the connection closely enough to reach a judgment. That involves asking what Heidegger did, what particular texts say and what follows from their arguments. Keeping those questions distinct is a way of making responsibility more precise; it should not become a way of postponing it indefinitely.

The weight of a people’s destiny

The previous lesson followed §74 of Being and Time from an individual’s fate to the destiny of a community, a people. The passage brings communication and struggle into this shared occurrence, places a generation within it and speaks of choosing a hero in retrieving a possibility. These are features of the text itself, not meanings added solely by later readers who know what happened in 1933.[4]

There is also a substantial reply to a direct identification of this passage with Nazism. §74 names no party and prescribes no program. Heidegger distinguishes the structure of historical existence from the particular possibility someone resolves upon, and retrieval need not reproduce a former arrangement: it can answer an inherited possibility while repudiating what the present treats as its past. The claim that we take up possibilities we did not create can be understood without accepting National Socialism.

That reply limits what we may infer, but it does not make the language of a people and its destiny politically empty. The passage gives this shared occurrence a place in the fullest account of authentic historical existence. Why should a people occupy that place? How are its boundaries drawn? What happens to people who live alongside it, belong to several histories or contest the demand made in its name?

The passage does not answer those questions by showing that an inheritance has been owned resolutely. An excluded person’s claim cannot be settled by the depth of someone else’s commitment. Lesson 07’s meeting hall made the distinction easier to see: there, recovering an inherited purpose did not itself justify continuing an ancestral exclusion. Here the issue is the authority claimed for a collective destiny, and the stakes reach far beyond that teaching example.

Iain Thomson reads historical existence as part of the framework through which Heidegger understood his political engagement, and then looks for a more specific connection in the university program. That distinction is useful: a way of understanding one’s historical situation is not yet a justification of what one does in it.[3]

Inquiry and the authority to lead

In his 1933 rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Heidegger presents the university’s task in terms of the German people’s historical mission. He calls for inquiry that questions the foundations of its disciplines, but he links that questioning to leadership and service. Labor, military and knowledge service form the student’s three bonds. He rejects what he calls merely negative academic freedom and gives university life a place within national destiny.[2]

There is a recognizable philosophical ambition here. A discipline can become so occupied with its established procedures that it stops asking what they let it understand, and a university ought to make room for questions that its ordinary arrangements discourage. Yet none of this tells us why those questions should be organized around a national mission, or why someone who claims to understand that mission should have authority over other people’s inquiry.

Thomson traces a specific route from Heidegger’s philosophy to his university politics. In Being and Time, particular sciences already rely on some understanding of the beings they study. A biologist, for example, must have some way of identifying life: should inquiry center on metabolism, on self-replication or on some other feature? Different answers could change what gets studied and how. Philosophy investigates such underlying understandings and, on Heidegger’s account, can help transform a science by clarifying them. Thomson argues that Heidegger’s ambition to ground the sciences also encouraged his ambition to reunify and direct the university.[3]

In its strongest version, this account does not make a professional philosopher the only person allowed to think. Thomson stresses that scientists themselves can question their assumptions; a biologist who asks what should count as life is already doing the philosophical work in question. Nor need guidance mean issuing orders. It could help a field recognize possibilities emerging within its own investigations.

The difficulty comes when a claim about understanding becomes a claim to political leadership. Clarifying a discipline’s assumptions does not establish who may rule its practitioners, still less that they have a duty to serve a particular people’s destiny. The address joins these things, but joining them in a vision does not supply the missing justification.

Thomson locates part of the trouble in Heidegger’s confidence that a fundamental ontology could unify the disciplines before he had worked that ontology out. This is a serious explanation of how his philosophy contributed to the political project. But the difficulty goes further than premature confidence. Even if Heidegger had completed the proposed account, its explanatory power would not by itself have justified suppressing academic freedom. Other people must be able to contest the account and its institutional use, and their standing in that inquiry cannot depend on accepting the leader’s mission. That is an ethical and political demand we are making, not a result Heidegger has already supplied. A theory’s reach and a person’s right to command remain different matters.

We can therefore recognize a worthwhile question about the sciences while criticizing the political authority claimed in its name. That judgment also changes how we hear an appeal to a supposedly deeper understanding: deeper in what sense, supported by what argument and with what consequences for those required to follow it?

When a people becomes a philosophical figure

The Black Notebooks sharpen the problem. They record Heidegger’s reflections on his own thinking and on the events of his time. Ingo Farin places them within a changing project, in which Heidegger moves from hopes invested in political action toward an inquiry into a history of being. Here a history of being concerns changes in how beings are understood and encountered, rather than only a succession of events. Farin relates the notebooks’ inquiry to what Heidegger calls machination: the increasing dominance of making, managing, planning and calculating in the treatment of beings.[5]

An inquiry into that dominance could address many institutions and ways of life without singling out a people as its bearer. Yet the notebook scholarship reports antisemitic generalizations within this philosophical account. Farin identifies passages implicating Judaism in machination, and Donatella Di Cesare examines how a vocabulary of rootlessness, calculation and worldlessness attaches to Jews and acquires a role in explaining what has supposedly gone wrong with the modern world.

These are claims attributed to Heidegger and criticized here, not descriptions of Jews that this lesson accepts. Nor is their philosophical vocabulary a reason to treat them as less serious than overtly biological racism: a theory can reject a biological classification while still assigning a demeaning essence or a destructive historical role to a people.

Our access to these passages comes through Farin and Di Cesare; their full notebook contexts have not been independently checked here. We can examine the scholarly reports and their arguments while keeping that limitation in view.

Di Cesare calls the antisemitism she analyzes metaphysical. Her point is that it reaches beyond a personal dislike or an isolated insult: a figure of “the Jew” is made to perform a role in a philosophical account of being and history, and the diversity of actual Jewish lives disappears beneath that figure. Instead of an argument grounded in what people do, the alleged essence begins to explain them in advance.[6]

This conflicts with the attentiveness that seemed promising in the early account of a shared world, where we learned to ask how something or someone is encountered within a situation. The antisemitic generalization puts a ready-made account of a people’s nature in place of attention to particular lives and relationships. Its philosophical harm is not exhausted by the presence of offensive language: the account distorts the people it describes and gives that distortion explanatory authority.

Worldlessness and the limits of an inference

Di Cesare quotes Heidegger’s phrase “worldlessness of Judaism.” Her note identifies the passage as Ponderings VII–XI, §5, p. 76. This is her reported quotation, not a sentence checked here against the notebook edition.[7]

In the study so far, world has meant more than a place one possesses or the things surrounding a self; it concerns the relations within which things and possibilities matter. For that reason, describing Judaism as worldless cannot safely be softened into the claim that some people lack a homeland. Di Cesare argues that the language takes part in an antisemitic construction, in which a supposed rootlessness is made to explain a supposed capacity for worldwide domination. She is exposing that construction, not endorsing it.

She then draws a stronger inference. In Heidegger’s 1929–30 lectures, as she recounts them, human beings are world-forming, animals are poor in world and the stone is worldless. Setting this distinction beside the notebook phrase, she argues that the Jew is assigned a position like that of the stone. The comparison is Di Cesare’s interpretation across passages: in the notebook quotation she supplies, Heidegger does not say “the Jew is a stone.”

The inference has force because world is a philosophically charged term in these discussions. If being able to inhabit or disclose a world marks a decisive distinction, attributing worldlessness to a people can deny them a place on the side of that distinction occupied by other human beings. But to establish this stronger claim, a reader must show that the term carries the relevant sense across the different passages and dates; the shared word alone cannot do all that work. A defender might argue that a historical condition of worldlessness differs from the stone’s inability to have a world. To answer that reply, the critic must establish which sense is at work in the notebook passage and how it relates to the lectures. Supplying a context we have not read would not settle that question.

Even without that further step, something serious is in view. On the reported wording, Judaism is assigned a deprived relation to world, and in Di Cesare’s account that assignment is woven into a story of threatening power. We need not pretend that her further comparison is a direct quotation in order to criticize this philosophical use of a stereotype. Equally, the criticism should not quietly turn into the claim that every use of world throughout Heidegger’s work has the same antisemitic meaning.

Di Cesare’s discussion of a later passage is more disturbing still. In her reading of Anmerkungen I, p. 20, a passage about the metaphysically “Jewish” opposing itself and self-annihilation is understood against the destruction of Europe’s Jews. This scheme, she argues, makes the victims’ destruction appear as a process generated by the very principle attributed to them.[8]

Di Cesare reads the passage against the Shoah, that is, the Holocaust. That historical identification is part of her interpretation: the reported sentence does not itself explicitly name the Holocaust, and we have not verified the primary context here. The philosophical objection she raises is nevertheless intelligible. A history of being can displace both the people who persecuted and murdered others and the people who suffered, putting an alleged metaphysical process in their place. If the interpretation holds, victims are made to bear an explanatory burden for their own destruction. A theory that performs that displacement has failed to understand responsibility, however far beneath ordinary events it claims to look.

What a competing reading must answer

Jeff Malpas disputes the claim that antisemitism is central to, or necessitated by, Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole. His account of the notebooks stresses a period of unstable philosophical development, within which, he argues, particular errors and distortions need to be located. His objection is also evidentiary. He thinks the stronger claims made by Di Cesare and Peter Trawny depend on suppositions that outrun the sparse notebook material, and that objection bears on the cross-textual inference we have just considered as well as on claims about the whole philosophy.[9]

This is not simply a separation of bad character from good philosophy. Malpas grants that the antisemitism can have philosophical origins without following necessarily from Heidegger’s basic commitments. His own criticism is that the priority given to being in this period threatens to cut thinking off from the ordinary worldly and human concerns to which it should remain answerable. A philosophy that loses that contact can become grandiose precisely where it believes itself most fundamental.

Malpas thus offers a reason to distinguish philosophical stages and connections; Di Cesare offers a reason to examine the conceptual work done by antisemitic figures rather than counting their appearances as incidental remarks. To decide between them, we need to examine what the disputed passages do: whether an antisemitic generalization supplies a premise, organizes a contrast or explains a historical development. The number of occurrences alone will not answer that question. A prejudice need not be logically inevitable, or present on every page, to damage the argument in which it operates. Conversely, demonstrating its role in an argument does not establish that it is necessary to every other claim the author made.

Thomson also argues that Heidegger learned something philosophically from his political failure, particularly by abandoning the expectation of a fixed fundamental ontology beneath history. But Thomson’s chapter predates the publication of the notebooks, and its assessment cannot settle what the later evidence shows. Nor is a change in philosophical approach, by itself, repentance or a correction of the wrong done to others.

Hubert Dreyfus finds a further resource in the later work on art: a work that opens a world should sustain resistance to making everything explicit and subject to control. He takes this as a possible criterion by which Heidegger’s own allegiance could be judged. Yet Dreyfus also recognizes the danger of investing cultural renewal in a charismatic figure or event, and the difficulty of applying such a criterion without interpretation.[10]

These are proposals to test as we go on. Does a later account allow the people and events it interprets to challenge it, including people denied a place in its preferred history? Does its criticism of domination reach its own claims to authority? An account that sees an entire age under one description must still answer for the particular distinctions it erases.

Try the argument: four items in a dossier

Consider these four items, remembering that the notebook wording remains mediated through the named source.

1. Historical record. Heidegger served as rector in 1933–34 and remained a Nazi Party member from 1933 until 1945. Sources: Blattner, chapter 1, and Di Cesare, I.2.[1]
2. Reported passage. Di Cesare quotes “worldlessness of Judaism,” citing Ponderings VII–XI, §5, p. 76. The underlying notebook passage has not been independently read here.[7]
3. Inference. Di Cesare connects that phrase to Heidegger’s distinction among world-forming humans, animals poor in world and the worldless stone. She argues that the Jew is placed alongside the stone.[7]
4. Competing interpretation. Malpas accepts that the antisemitism has philosophical origins but denies that it is thereby shown to be necessary to Heidegger’s basic philosophical commitments or central to his work as a whole.[9]

Explain what each item establishes and what would be needed to reach a stronger conclusion. Then assess these two responses:

“Item 3 is an inference rather than a quotation, so the politics can be kept outside the philosophy.”

“Items 1–3 show that every claim about a shared world is necessarily antisemitic.”

Your answer should identify the philosophical harm the dossier supports as well as the limits of its evidence. You may disagree with either scholar’s larger interpretation, as long as you give reasons. No personal experience or disclosure is needed.

A worked answer

The first item establishes political commitments and how long they lasted; in particular, the end of the rectorate cannot be treated as the end of party membership. These facts make a detached story of political irrelevance implausible, but they do not identify the relation between every philosophical premise and every political act. For a stronger conclusion we need more. The address and Thomson’s account of the university program supply the additional evidence discussed in this lesson: they show a philosophical ambition entering political action. Even then, explaining why Heidegger found the program compelling does not justify it.

The second item gives us an attributed quotation with a source locator, and its immediate evidentiary basis is Di Cesare’s book. To verify the quotation independently and establish its notebook context, we would need to read the passage in an identified edition and translation, with enough surrounding material to determine how it is used. We should neither disguise that gap nor treat it as though no evidence had been offered. As reported, the phrase assigns Judaism a deprived relation to world, bringing a generalization about a people into a vocabulary that has philosophical work to do.

The third item is an argument connecting different texts, and it requires more than proving that both contain a word translated as worldless. We would have to establish the relevant continuity of meaning, examine the transitions in the lectures’ distinction and test whether the notebook passage assigns the same deprivation to the people it describes. A serious alternative would distinguish a condition that someone can undergo historically from the stone’s inability to disclose a world at all, and Di Cesare’s stronger conclusion requires grounds for rejecting that distinction in this case. If her steps succeed, the comparison would identify a radical exclusion within Heidegger’s philosophical distinctions. If one step fails, the comparison would need revision or rejection, but that failure would not automatically remove the antisemitic generalization in the reported notebook phrase.

The first proposed response therefore goes too far. An inference can be well supported, and recognizing it as an inference is the beginning of assessing it. More importantly, the political problem does not depend entirely on the stone comparison. Using a people as a figure of worldlessness and machination can already distort the account of shared existence, replace diverse lives with an alleged essence and lend philosophical authority to a hostile generalization. The university address gives another, independently supported connection between philosophy and politics. The theory cannot be insulated merely by distinguishing quotation from interpretation.

The fourth item distinguishes a philosophical connection from a necessary consequence. Malpas is not denying that the reported antisemitism can arise within Heidegger’s thinking; he disputes how far that connection extends and whether it is unavoidable. His interpretation would be strengthened by showing exactly which commitments produce the distortion, how other arguments can be sustained without it and whether later changes actually address the problem. Merely describing the remarks as few, or the period as one of transition, would not answer Di Cesare’s argument about their role.

The second proposed response goes too far in the other direction. Membership, a reported phrase and a cross-textual inference do not establish a necessary consequence of every account of world; the idea that things make sense within shared relations does not itself assign worldlessness to Jews. What needs examination is the further move that turns differences in life and history into an allegedly essential division between peoples. Rejecting that move can preserve a philosophical question while changing or rejecting Heidegger’s answer to it, though it is no promise that the rest of the work will survive unchanged.

The dossier consequently supports a demanding judgment without requiring a verdict on everything at once. The historical involvement is established; the reported notebook wording raises a philosophical problem; Di Cesare’s stronger inference has identifiable premises to test; Malpas’s alternative carries explanatory obligations of its own. At issue is whether Jewish lives can appear in their variety as lives shared with others, or are explained away through a hostile figure assigned to them. The further displacement of suffering and responsibility by a metaphysical story came from Di Cesare’s separate reading of the self-annihilation passage, and the four dossier items do not establish that additional claim on their own. Keeping the claims connected without merging their evidence lets the criticism become more exact.

A stopping place

This stage began with anxiety and the possibility of a life that can end. Conscience and resoluteness raised the question of taking responsibility for a life we did not begin from nothing. Temporality connected possibilities, having-been and present involvement; historical existence brought inheritance and shared destiny into view. Through all of them the political inquiry has pressed one question: what justifies the commitments a life or a community takes up?

You can stop here with a distinction worth keeping. Understanding how a possibility becomes ours does not establish that it is right, and a philosophical account can illuminate existence while also making claims we have reason to reject. Part of the work of understanding is finding where an explanation gives authority to something it has not justified.

The final stage turns to Heidegger’s later accounts of disclosure. We will ask whether they escape these problems or reformulate them, attending both to what they let us see and to what they obscure.

Sources and limits

[1] William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2024), complete chapter 1, “Context,” and notes 1–26; and Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, translated by Murtha Baca (Polity, 2018), I.2–4 and notes 8–29; both for the historical record. Di Cesare’s I.2 questions the account of an accidental political involvement and records continuing party membership. The biographies and documents these scholars cite have not thereby been directly read.

[2] Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (1933), in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (Paragon House, 1990), pp. 5–13, for the rectoral address. The complete six-page University of Texas teaching transcription was read, including the translator’s notes; the bonds and academic freedom appear on its p. 4. The transcription identifies its 1990 source but gives no translator credit. The Heidegger bibliography attributes that edition’s translation to Lisa Harries; it is distinct from Karsten Harries’s 1985 translation. The reading is not a collation with the 1990 printed volume or with the German address.

[3] Iain Thomson, “Heidegger and National Socialism,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, eds., A Companion to Heidegger (Blackwell, 2005), pp. 32–48, complete with notes and further reading, for the route from Heidegger’s philosophy to his university politics. The university argument occupies pp. 34–44. The distinction between ontological explanation and a right to command is this lesson’s assessment of the argument. Thomson’s other essays and the works he cites were not directly read for this lesson.

[4] Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (SUNY Press, 2010), complete §§72–74 and linked notes, including §73’s continuation across EPUB files, for fate, destiny and retrieval. The defective EPUB has no verified mapping to print pages. The damaged sentence about anticipation in §74 is excluded; the discussion rests on the clear passages about factical resolutions, destiny and retrieval. Earlier exclusions and the strictly bounded witnesses from the 1996 translation remain unchanged.

[5] Ingo Farin, “Black Notebooks, The (Die schwarzen Hefte),” in Mark A. Wrathall, ed., The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 124–126, complete, for the notebooks’ changing project and machination. His discussion of machination and antisemitic passages is on p. 125, with the reported primary references GA95:97, GA96:46–47 and GA97:20 (volume and page in Heidegger’s collected edition, the Gesamtausgabe). These are mediated locators, not direct readings of those notebook pages. The entry’s publication chronology is not used to certify the current notebook corpus.

[6] Di Cesare, III.22–23, with notes 455–475, especially III.23’s treatment of essence and metaphysical antisemitism. The account here keeps her argument distinct from the lesson’s assessment of its philosophical stakes. The philosophers and historical texts Di Cesare quotes have not thereby been directly read.

[7] Di Cesare, III.22, note 455 for the quoted phrase and notes 459–466 for the comparison across Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Her reported notebook locator is Ponderings VII–XI, §5, p. 76; the volume’s English translation is by Richard Rojcewicz (Indiana University Press, 2017). The notebook passage and the 1929–30 lecture argument remain mediated here. The comparison of the Jew with the stone is Di Cesare’s construction, not a direct Heidegger quotation. Neither preview nor publisher access supplied the necessary primary context.

[8] Di Cesare, IV.8, with notes 121–132, particularly notes 122 and 127–129 referring to Anmerkungen I, p. 20, for the self-annihilation passage. Her identification of the passage with the Shoah is reported as her interpretation, and no primary witness to the passage’s context was obtained. No claim is made here to have established Heidegger’s precise knowledge of the killings from this passage, or to have read its newly available English translation, Remarks I–V, translated by Adam Knowles (Indiana University Press, 2025).

[9] Jeff Malpas, “Assessing the significance of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks”, Geographica Helvetica 73 (2018), pp. 109–114, complete, including notes and references, for the competing interpretation. Note 5 on p. 111 distinguishes contingent philosophical origins from necessity. His account of a later change is an interpretation, not evidence here of repentance or philosophical purification. His 2018 article addresses earlier formulations of the controversy; this lesson compares its argument with Di Cesare’s English 2018 book rather than claiming a documented exchange between these two texts.

[10] Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics,” in Charles B. Guignon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006), the complete “Politics” discussion and the chapter notes, with the discussion of practices and cultural renewal that immediately precedes it, for the proposal about art. This is a bounded reading of the chapter. Dreyfus’s chronology of a break with National Socialism is not treated as the end of party membership, and the primary works he quotes remain mediated in this discussion. The later-art proposal is introduced only as a claim to test.