At the Existentialist Café (13 page)

But what is it, to think? Or, as Heidegger would ask in the title of a later essay,
Was heisst denken?
This could be translated as ‘What does one call thinking?’ or ‘What calls for thinking?’ — a play on words in the German. One might expect that Heidegger, with his constant reminders to shake off forgetfulness and to question everyday reality, would be the best placed of all philosophers to think well, and to call his compatriots to the task of responsible alertness.

Indeed, that was what he believed he was doing. But he did not do
it in the way Arendt, Jaspers, Husserl or most of his other later readers would have wished.

Being and Time
contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called
das Man
or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because
das Man
is so nebulous.
Man
in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s
der Mann
), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’, or ‘they’ in ‘they say it will all be over by Christmas’. ‘The they’ is probably the best translation available, except that it seems to point to some group ‘over there’, separate from myself. Instead, for Heidegger,
das Man
is
me
. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however,
das Man
takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my
responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.

If I am to resist
das Man
, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘
voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me. I may fail to hear it, or I may hear it but not know that it’s me calling. I might mistake it for something coming from afar, perhaps a thin and reedy keening like the unheard cries for help of the microscopic hero in the 1957 film
The Incredible Shrinking Man
— one of the best mid-century expressions of paranoia about the disappearing powers of authentic humanity. The idea of being called to authenticity became a major
theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to
do
something: to take a decision of some sort.

You might think that the decision would be to defy the siren song of the they-self in the public realm, and thus to resist intimidation and the general tendency towards conformity. You might deduce that the authentic voice of Dasein would call on you
not
to raise your arm as the march passes by.

But that was not what Heidegger meant.

Rumours had been circulating about Heidegger’s Nazi associations for a while. In August 1932, the writer René
Schickele noted in his diary that Heidegger was said to be consorting ‘exclusively with National Socialists’. Husserl was told that Heidegger had made
anti-Semitic remarks. Hannah
Arendt heard similar stories. She wrote to Heidegger during the winter of 1932–3 asking point-blank whether he was a Nazi sympathiser. He denied it, in an angry letter emphasising how helpful he had been to Jewish students and colleagues. She was unconvinced, and they lost contact for seventeen years.

Heidegger seemed able to hide his views when it suited him. Moreover, when he was in love with Arendt, her being Jewish didn’t seem to disturb him; he later became close to Elisabeth Blochmann, also Jewish by origin. He had taught many Jewish students, and had shown no objection to working with Husserl earlier in his career. A certain amount of anti-Semitism was common in everyday speech at the time; so there could have been room for doubt that these rumours about Heidegger added up to much.

But as it turned out, Arendt was right to assume the worst of him. In April 1933, all doubts about Heidegger were blown away when he accepted the post of rector of Freiburg University, a job that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws. It also required him to join the party. He did so, and then he delivered rousing pro-Nazi speeches
to the students and faculty. He was reportedly seen attending the Freiburg
book burning on 10 May, trooping through a drizzly evening by torchlight towards the bonfire in the square just outside the university library — almost on the steps of his own philosophy department. In private, meanwhile, he filled notebooks with philosophical thoughts alternating with Nazi-flavoured anti-Semitic remarks. When these
‘Black Notebooks’ were published in 2014, they provided yet more confirmation of something already known: Heidegger was a Nazi, at least for a while, and not out of convenience but by conviction.

One gets a feel for how he spoke and thought during this time by reading the inaugural
address he gave as rector, to an assembly of university staff and party members in a hall adorned with Nazi banners on 27 May 1933. Most of what he said reflects the party line: he speaks of how German students must replace the old, so-called ‘academic freedom’ with new forms of labour, military and ‘knowledge’ service. But he adds distinctive Heideggerian touches, as when he explains that this knowledge service will make students place their existence ‘in the most acute danger in the midst of overpowering Being’. As the German
Volk
in general confronts ‘the extreme questionableness of its own existence’, so must the students commit themselves ‘to essential and simple questioning in the midst of the historical-spiritual world of the
Volk
’. Thus, Heidegger used his speech to travesty two of the most profound themes of existentialist philosophy: self-questioning and freedom. He stressed this so-called ‘questioning’ again in another address that November, this time to accompany his (obligatory) ‘
Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State’. He also developed enthusiastic educational plans of his own, volunteering to host
summer camps for faculty and students at his Todtnauberg hut. They were designed to combine physical training with seminar discussions — a kind of philosophical Nazi boot camp.

Heidegger’s Nazism was significant because he was now in a position of real power over others’ lives. He had developed from being the nutty professor in funny clothes, writing beautiful and barely
comprehensible works of genius for the few, into the official whom every student and professor would have to court. He could ruin careers and endanger people’s physical safety if he chose to. Heidegger had said that Dasein’s call would be unrecognisable, but few people reading
Being and Time
could have imagined that it would sound so much like a call to Nazi obedience.

His position also led him into personal betrayals. Among the new regulations of April 1933, which Heidegger had to enforce and maintain, was one removing from public and university posts all those whom the Nazis identified as Jews. This affected Husserl: although he was retired, he lost his emeritus status and the associated privileged access to university facilities. Husserl’s son Gerhart, who was a law professor at the University of Kiel, lost his job by the same regulation — Gerhart, who had been wounded in the First World War and whose brother had given his life for Germany. The new laws were a stupendous insult to a family who had given so much. The only help the Heideggers offered was to send a bouquet of
flowers to Malvine Husserl, with a letter from Elfride emphasising the Husserls’ record of patriotism. The letter was apparently designed for them to use in their own defence, should they ever need it. But its tone was cool, and Malvine, who was not the type to put up with insults meekly, took offence. In the same year, a new edition of
Being and Time
appeared; Heidegger’s
dedication of the book to Husserl had disappeared.

Another friend was watching Heidegger’s new role in dismay: Karl Jaspers. He and Heidegger had become close after they met at
Husserl’s birthday party — the one at which Malvine referred to Heidegger as the ‘phenomenological child’. As Jaspers lived in Heidelberg, they only travelled to see each other occasionally, but their correspondence and long-distance friendship were warm.

They had many points of philosophical contact. Following his early encounter with Husserl’s ideas, Jaspers had gone on to develop his own work, building on his psychology background as well as on Kierkegaardian existentialism. He was especially interested in
Kierkegaard’s studies of ‘either/or’ choices and of freedom: the ways in which we face up to dilemmas and decide what to do. Jaspers focused on what he called
Grenzsituationen
—
border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality, or some event may make you realise that you have to accept the burden of responsibility for what you do. Experiencing such situations is, for Jaspers, almost synonymous with existing, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Although they are hard to bear, these are puzzles in our existence, and thus open the door to philosophising. We cannot solve them by thinking in the abstract; they must be lived, and in the end we make our choices with our entire being. They are
existential
situations.

Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to
die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.

(Illustrations Credit 4.1)

For all of this, he relied on his wife Gertrud, to whom he was very close. Like many philosophers’ wives, she took charge of his schedule and helped him with paperwork, but she also collaborated on his work. Jaspers developed his ideas through his discussions
with her, almost in the way that Sartre later worked with Beauvoir, with the major difference that Beauvoir had her own philosophical career.
Heidegger was amazed to learn of Jaspers’ work with Gertrud; he would never have thought of involving Elfride so closely in his intellectual life. For him, philosophy was for doing alone in the Todtnauberg hut — or, at best, hammering out with chosen disciples and students.

Jaspers, far more than Heidegger, believed in the value of of shared thinking. Despite his shortness of breath, he loved talking with people. Hannah Arendt, a lifelong friend, later looked back on their conversations in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘
I think about your study … with the chair at the desk and the armchair across from it where you tied your legs in marvellous knots and then untied them again.’ Heidelberg was renowned for its scholarly salons and social circles: the most famous revolved around the sociologist Max Weber, but Jaspers became the centre of another. He had an almost religious reverence for the ideal of the university as a focus for cultural activity, which made him scrupulous even with dull administrative tasks. His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century
BC
, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface.
‘True philosophy needs
communion
to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’

Jaspers’ enthusiasm for philosophical talk drove him, after meeting Heidegger at Husserl’s party, to invite him to Heidelberg for an initial bout of ‘symphilosophising’ in 1920, and then another eight-day stay in 1922. On this second occasion, Gertrud was away, so the two men played like children on a week-long philosophical sleepover. Jaspers became fired up by the idea of publishing a journal together — two editors, two contributors — to be called The Philosophy of the Age. It would be filled with short, clear, decisive essays on their times. This never happened, but their plans brought them closer as friends. Having begun by addressing each other as ‘Professor’ in
letters, then
as ‘Herr
Heidegger’ and ‘Herr Jaspers’, they were hailing each other by late 1923 as ‘Dear Jaspers’ — ‘Dear Heidegger’. Heidegger was more subdued; when they were together, he sometimes sank into silences, which made Jaspers even more inclined to talk, to fill the gap. Yet Heidegger also wrote to tell Jaspers that these first steps in friendship had given him an ‘uncanny’ feeling — high Heideggerian words of praise.