HEIDEGGER’S BLACK NOTEBOOKS AND THE JEWISH QUESTION 2.0

That the works of Martin Heidegger might not take pride of place in any Jewish library is axiomatic. Heidegger has been associated with the Nazis from the time of his short tenure as Chancellor of German universities which began in 1932. This was an appointment sanctioned by Hitler himself, and from that moment Heidegger was destined to be blacklisted by international Jewry. Heidegger soon became disillusioned with the new ruling party, however, and left in 1933, his quietism after the war adding to the atmosphere of suspicion and complicity that surrounded him and still surrounds his work. (As we shall see, even Heidegger’s split with the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbiterpartei will be held in evidence against him due to the reasons for his disillusionment).

But the academic debate gradually died down until 2014, when the first of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks (schwarze Hefte) was published. These were a cross between diaries and working notes Heidegger kept between 1932 and the early 1970s, and this hybrid of personal record and professional note-taking will become significant when Heidegger is accused of a familiar crime; Anti-Semitism.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Columbia University Press, 2017) is a collection of 12 essays looking at the controversy from different academic and intellectual angles, but all centered around the cluster of “anti-Semitic” entries found in these working diaries. The charges against Heidegger — for this is something of an academic show-trial — are two versions of anti-Semitism. The first is what we may call the “normative” type of anti-Semitism, that is, any criticism of Jewry and its traditions deemed “anti-Semitic” by the arbiters, the Jewish lobby themselves. The second operates on a philosophical level and has to do with the Heideggerean concept of “being-historical” Judaism, present not overtly in Heidegger’s jottings, but supposedly ingrained into his philosophy and accessible via remarks made in the Black Notebooks. While criticism of Jews is typically rebranded as anti-Semitism by Jewish activists, and thus made pejorative rather than neutral.

It is a familiar tactic. At the philosophical level Heidegger’s critics use some of the most dubious intellectual strategies drawn from the very dysfunctional academic environment they helped create.

Firstly, a note on Heidegger. To the non-philosopher, his work is obscure and unreadable. The reader also needs some knowledge of the philosophical tradition in which Heidegger is writing to understand where he is situated historically and therefore what it is he’s writing about and in reaction to. Even for those with a firm grounding in philosophy, few in today’s academic environment are likely to engage with the German who is often called — including among these essays — the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century. I would guess (and it is a guess) that if you are, say, an analytical philosopher or a philosopher of mind in a redbrick university in Britain, you will never have read a page of Heidegger. Any degree connected with “grievance studies”, on the other hand, will mention him only in connection with his links to the only man in history who was literally Hitler, and Heidegger’s supposed anti-Semitism.

With all this in mind, I will stay away from the essays which are couched in overtly Heideggerean language, ignore the debate at an ontological and epistemological level, and concentrate on those sentences of Heidegger which stand accused, those little drops of philosophical, anti-Semitic poison that have so exercised the Jewish academic caucus. And it will repay inspection to note further to what use these words of power are put by their alleged victims.

One of the essayists, Sander L. Gilman — a Jewish academic activist if ever there was one — neatly encapsulates the focus of the collection:

The current scandal concerning Heidegger concerns the presence of anti-Semitic content in the Black Notebooks that he kept during the war years. Defenders have stressed the small quantity of such utterances across thousands of pages, accusers that they reflect on the entirety of Heidegger’s philosophy.

What is to be judged as anti-Semitic content? The editor’s introduction provides a definition of anti-Semitism worth quoting in full as it dictates the telos of the collection, its raison d’être, as well as being susceptible to criticism on its own terms:

Anti-Semitism is an attitude or pattern of behavior that is directed against Jews, sprung from rumor, prejudice, and pseudoscientific sources (whether from race theory or simply racist), functioning affectively and/or administratively, and leading to a) defamation; b) universal vilification; c) isolation: professional prohibitions, ghettoes, camps; d) expulsion: emigration; e) annihilation: pogroms, mass executions, death camps. We also deem anti-Semitic anything that is supposed to characterize the Jew as ‘Jew’. In short: anti-Semitism is ‘the expression of hostility and hatred against Jews.

This is quite a definition. Perhaps we are too used to dictionary definitions, with their tendency to brevity. It’s also quite manic. One can imagine it being spoken by a Dalek, the pitch constantly rising, as do the butterfly effects of the merest hint of anti-Semitism. The exponential increase in threat from “defamation” to Holocaust is reminiscent of the “Pyramid of Hate”, an extraordinary visual map partly co-produced by the Anti-Defamation League and relating to that ever-present constant, racism. In this structure, “Biased Attitudes” are at base camp, graduating upwards into “Acts of Bias”, through “Discrimination”, on to “Bias-Motivated Violence”, and finishing with the cherry on top, “Genocide”. Just as marijuana is often described as a “gateway drug” leading to darker addictions, so too “insensitive remarks”, “non-inclusive language”, and “microaggressions” lead inexorably to the death camps. The editor of the collection under consideration uses the same hyperbolic template in the definition noted above.

The inclusion as anti-Semitic of “anything that is supposed to characterize the Jew as ‘Jew’” is a curious proposition. Are only Jews allowed to characterize Jews as “Jews”, in the same way only Blacks can call one another “nigger”? Even when exploiting a pre-fabricated victimhood, the academic Judaic tone is often a quasi-Freemasonic one. Only the Jew can know the Jew. Part of the ferocity of the response to Heidegger’s Jew-criticism is a fear of being known.

It is important to note that there are two schools of defense of Heidegger against the charge of anti-Semitism: those who point out the paucity of apparently offending text, and those who assert that any personal animus towards Jewry was irrelevant to Heidegger’s philosophical project. The first of these defenses is clearly outlined by one of the essayists here, Richard Polt:

The first four volumes comprise 1,753 pages by Heidegger. By my count, twenty-seven pages refer to Jews or Judaism, and these references along with their context easily fit on ten pages. I consider about ten of these pages to be overtly anti-Semitic.

If we were old-school structuralists, we might express that as follows: Rounded up to two decimal places, 0.6% of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks are deemed anti-Semitic even by an author who believes the general charge against Heidegger is justified. This is powerful magic, and Heidegger clearly has an almost occult command of fearsome words of power. So few words, such vast repercussions, with a second Holocaust as its final destination predestined by the performative utterances of even the most casual anti-Semite.

Returning to the introduction, we are introduced to exhibit A, “One of the more infamous statements in the Black Notebooks”, as Heidegger muses over Jewry and national and military boundaries:

World Judaism, spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere elusive. In all the unfurling of its power, it need nowhere engage in military actions, whereas it remains for us to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people.

If Heidegger is saying that a stateless people can’t raise a standing army, and so cannot meaningfully participate in any warfare, then that is hard to counter as an argument. But it is the question of context the editor raises next that is the key to the whole collection:

Does this mean that the [note above] would be anti-Semitic, or is the whole list not anti-Semitic? The individual points situate themselves within larger contexts, to isolate the exact words as anti-Semitic is to overlook the enabling conditions for such remarks, the contexts, and even the manner of thinking itself. In a text, no statement stands alone, but is made possible by the surrounding context. And what of cases where no anti-Semitic statements are uttered. Is it possible that one could create the conditions for anti-Semitic remarks, encourage those remarks, but without ever uttering any such remark, and nonetheless still be found anti-Semitic?

The editor goes on to qualify this with a crucial sentence;

Anti-Semitism can still be operative even without being fully present in incriminating statements.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, he continues, mean that his work as a whole, his Nachlass, is “susceptible to being developed in anti-Semitic directions”.

This is where we have to be acutely aware of the wiles of post-structuralism, and a detour is necessary to situate Heidegger — and his critics considered here — within this apparently ruinous intellectual movement. A lot of ill-informed nonsense is regurgitated by the dissident right on the subject of post-structuralism, or post-modernism, if you will. The usual suspects responsible for causing today’s academically endorsed epistemological free-for-all are Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan (if anyone reading can understand a word he says, do let me know), Julia Kristeva and others. Their complicity in untethering reason from its post-Enlightenment moorings is justified in many cases, but outside of universities no one reads these people.

Philosophy works via a sort of trickle-down effect, much like the world of fashion design (and the academic world in general). The models in absurd outfits parading the catwalks of Paris and Milan are not wearing anything they expect people apart from pop stars to actually wear, but very watered-down versions of whatever is on display will one day hit the high streets. So it is with post-structuralist thought, and with any influential school of thought throughout history. People didn’t suddenly become thinking individuals, aware of their own being for the first time, the day after Descartes’ Discourse on the Method was published. Science didn’t have a “Kantian revolution” when The Critique of Pure Reason hit the stands, Kant just wrote about reason in such a way that would eventually dovetail with a certain strain of science, i.e., the scientific fields which have to account for the interaction between the observer and the observed. It takes time for philosophical thought to realize its full range of effects, and the worst excesses — or, rather, their misappropriation — of the post-structuralism/modernism born in the 1960s are only now beginning to bear bitter fruit.

But I have a particular interest in the early writings of Derrida, the philosophical essays and books, and a lot of what I read about him when the wind is blowing from the extreme right reads like someone who has read something about someone who has read a bit about Derrida. I’m not seeing any familiarity with any texts or concepts. To read Derrida, you have to realize that this is not philosophy for the people, it is philosophy for other philosophers. But, like a virus from a Chinese lab, the worst strains of Derrida’s “deconstruction” got out and became popularized via a series of Chinese Whispers. Post-structuralist thought is important and insightful, as long as it remains a field exercise. If it escapes the seminar room and starts to infect those in the outside world, we get the results we see all around us once people at university start — closely followed by the media — believing that Derrida really did say that a text can mean anything you want it to mean. I wrote a defense of Derrida here at Counter Currents, with particular reference to Of Grammatology, for those interested. So, overall, the style of post-modern thinking allows for a lot of trickery. It’s the same with Heidegger.

Epistemologically speaking, and in terms of inductive argument, there is dirty work at the crossroads going on in some of these essays.

The overall charges against Heidegger throughout, the parsing out of his alleged anti-Semitism, include accusations of Jewish singularity, the role of the Jews in the domination of the world by the promotion of technology, and their hyper-rationality. Bettina Berto writes of “the putative worldlessness of the Jews, not to mention their abilities for calculation, which have allowed them to participate in the Machenschaft and gigantism that Heidegger argues is destroying the world”. The editor refines the three categories of anti-Semitism in the context of Heideggerean thought. Anti-Semitic thought or writing contains one or all of the following:

1. The idea that Jews would be purely calculative in their thinking.
2. The idea that Jews live by a principle of race.
3. The idea that Jews would be relentlessly devoted to the task of uprooting all beings from being.

The Jewish lobby likes its tropes, and the first two points are exactly tropic in the sense they would understand it. For those who forensically seek anti-Semitism, an oft-repeated criticism — regardless of its accuracy — becomes a “trope”, And tropes are bad.

The third point, however, is less familiar because more properly philosophical. Peter Trawny, whose essay The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical Anti-Semitism opens the collection, also wrote a book entitled Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, and “Being-Historical Anti-Semitism” is his working concept with regard to Heidegger. This highlights a noteworthy aspect of what we might call the Jewish tendency to employ “accusatory defense”. Even when they are being insulted, Jews insist on this being a world-historical event. Even anti-Semitism must be pressed into service to confirm the presence of the Jew in world history, the all-importance of the tribe. This is in-group behavior on the world-historical stage, and not a little narcissistic. Perhaps, with so much vested interest in show-business, international Jewry just can’t resist the limelight.

Mr. Trawny is something of a specialist on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. Considering Heidegger’s appraisal of Judaism as part of a “historical process”, this author notes Heidegger’s opinion on “world Judaism”:

’World Judaism’ is… introduced as a distinctive representative of machination in the narrative of beyng. [Beyng” is a translation of “Seyn”, an archaic spelling intended by Heidegger to give a historical dimension to the concept of Being.] Already the term world Judaism signals a problem. It is not unusual for Heidegger to wish that his words be understood ‘literally’.

I would have thought that “literally” was one of the few words you can’t wrap in inverted commas, but we’ll let that pass. Again, although there is a link to be made, albeit in the context of the looseness of post-modern thought, that does not imply it is valid to make it, or at least to extrapolate any further significance from it. But Mr. Trawny has a text of his own, a Judaic Ace of Spades, in support of his claim that Heidegger has accused world Judaism of all the ills of mankind. He brings in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The section is worth quoting at length, as it illuminates the Jewish manipulation of the Protocols hoax:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion… [shows] a ‘world Judaism’ [which acts] on a global scale and in secret, surreptitiously pursues world domination by modern means, like the ‘international press’. In my opinion, Heidegger did not read the Protocols. Yet he did not have to. They were continually present in Hitler’s speeches and in the propaganda of the ‘Third Reich’. A different source for the concept of ‘world Judaism’ can be ruled out. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the ‘absolute reference point’ (Wolfgang Benz) for the term world Judaism.

What is interesting here is that Jewish discussion of the Protocols usually revolves around the “blood libel”, an obvious and cartoonish absurdity. But the global domination part is rarely on display, coming out as it does only within the cloistered halls of academia, where not many people will see it. And accusations made of Jewish global triumphalism rely on a related Jewish trait, their worldlessness.

An essay by Sander Gilman finds Heidegger accusing the Jews of “worldlessness”, and thus being opposed to any nation-state other than their own rather hastily — and British-assembled — state of Israel. Gilman, the academic  Jewish activist, writes that all the world’s peoples should be able to be “citizens of the world”, even if that world has been redefined to include the mental geographies of transgender dysfunctionalism. Gilman includes the “borders” of gender as ones which should be freely crossed, and available as such. This harks back to the discussion of “topographies” thematized by Trawny in the opening essay. By virtue of taking no part in the world in national terms, therefore the Jews must take the world as their state. If this is Heidegger’s secret fear, it is hard to see it as an irrational one, a phobia. Jews are past masters at using acceptable conceptual commerce in which to secrete their own contraband cargo. They can and will use any medium, including that of post-modern academia, to keep the emblem of anti-Semitism raised high above the battlefields of the culture wars.

“Worldlessness” or “rootlessness”, the nomadic as opposed to the cosmopolitan way of life, is seen as a natural mode of existence for Jews. Heidegger is spotted describing them as “scheming and rootless”, according to one author, and quotes Heidegger from the Notebooks as referring to their “tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling”. These nomadically honed skill-sets have, of course, proved to be of great evolutionary advantage for world Jewry, and it is a skilled piece of epistemological realignment to cast their being noticed as criticism. It is more like praise.

The most extraordinary thing about Jew-criticism is that it can be recycled and re-used by Jews. I believe there is a principle for this. Several years ago, I was talking to a gentleman I had never met before. We were at a party, with mutual friends in attendance, and so were making small-talk, as party-goers will. His hobby was judo, and I asked him the one principle he thought important to the discipline that would be of use to people who were not versed in the art. He answered within a heartbeat; “Use your enemy’s strength against them”. This is the only protocol of importance to today’s elders of Zion.

Michael Marder’s essay, ‘The Other ‘Jewish Question’”, alludes to Karl Marx’s 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question”. Marder is exercised about how a people can become a question, although an alternative query might be: What might a people do to become a question? Marder finds a failure in Heidegger to turn “international Jewry” into a question, as well as a failure to provide “a concrete figuration, a clandestine ‘agency’… for the nihilistic completion of metaphysics”. Again, Heidegger is accused of equating mankind’s apparent lust for self-annihilation with an existential masochism found only among the hegemonic Jews.

Slavoj Žižek’s final essay, “The Persistence of the Ontological”, looks as though it might be an attempt at academic balance, as it opens with a sub-heading reading “Why Heidegger Should Not Be Criminalized”. The essay takes place largely on Heideggerian terrain, and scarcely mentions the anti-Semitism controversy, but where it does, it adds pointers to the central question of Heidegger’s “anti-Semitism”. Žižek reiterates, for example, Ernst Nolte’s defense of Heidegger’s academic engagement in 1933, that in the wake of Communism — which, after all, fascism was a reaction against — “a moderate fascism was a justified response to the communist threat”. This seems perfectly reasonable: It is unlikely that Heidegger read through and approved the ground-plans for Auschwitz before he accepted Hitler’s job offer. But despite the evidence in the Black Notebooks that Heidegger was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Hitler, the verdict was in a long time before. Heidegger’s waning faith in the Reich was not because of Nazism as such, but due to “the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to technological-nihilist Machenschaft”.

This is the same Machenschaft for which, according to the consensus opinion in this collection, Heidegger blames the Jews. There is a lot of this rather spurious hitching of philosophical wagons to ideological horses in this collection, and the rather libertine approach to critical thought encouraged by “critical theory” is both encouraged by the education system and allows numerous sleights of hand in order to produce an argument.

Žižek provides a review of his colleagues’ preceding 11 essays with a single sentence:

[W]hile anti-Semitism persists and survives Heidegger’s disenchantment with Nazism, one should note that it doesn’t play a central role in Heidegger’s thought but remains relatively marginal, an illustration or exemplification of a central scheme that survives without it.

Žižek notes that, although he has “a consistent ‘theory’ about the Jews”, Heidegger avoids “primitive biological racism”. This despite another author here pointing out that in 1934, shortly before he resigned the rectorship at Freiburg, Heidegger was “demanding… a full professor’s chair in racial doctrine and racial biology”.

It is curious that today, universities have faced effectively the same demands from the Black caucus and has acquiesced in every case. Instead, Heidegger links Jewish global endeavor with “the technological degradation of the totality of Being”. Heidegger, along with Spengler and Evola, warned consistently about the dangers of technology, not just as the runaway mechanization of the world, but also of its consequence, the turning of man himself into no more than a standing reserve for the machines. In our age of AI, this echoes loudly.

As for the question of the Holocaust, Zizek concedes that worried Jews may have a point. “Here it gets really dark”, he notes. A note of Heidegger’s from 1942 turns up in several of the essays collected here:

The highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation.

The Holocaust is, of course, portrayed as a fully mechanized event conducted in a managerial and technocratic fashion. It is exemplary of the machination of the world, accusations of which the Jews firmly reject. Again, it only takes a piece of casual association to come up with the following formula:

The Jews have boosted and utilized the rapid growth of global technology and mechanization.
The Holocaust was a technological, mechanized event.
Therefore, the Jews have contributed to their own annihilation.

For the gentile with an eye on world affairs, Heidegger needs no defense. Whatever type of world we find ourselves in — fallen into, Verfallen, to follow Heidegger — it is as it is because of at least some measure of Jewish design. For the academic community, dictated by the protocols of modern Jewry as much as any other intellectual sector, a defense must be mounted. The last line of Zizek’s essay provides half of the case for the defense:

Nothing in the Black Notebooks changes the fact that Heidegger’s thought provides a key contribution to our dealing with [the] ultimate question.

Although this seems like giving a naughty student a gold star to excuse his reckless behavior in class, the point is applicable to any contentious literary or philosophical figure. Their texts are not changed either by their actions, or by fragments of text which can be used as leverage to discredit the whole. And the same argument, mutatis mutandis, applies to the tendency of the Jewish academic lobby represented in these essays to use isolated fragments and extrapolate them into an interpretation of larger texts and the philosophical positions put forward therein. Another essayist here, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, makes the same point:

That some of the most intemperate critics such as Emmanuel Faye have marshaled such evidence to declare Heidegger anathema to the philosophical canon, as if all his insights were thereby beyond consideration, strikes me as a hyperbolic response unbefitting our usual habits of philosophical interpretation.

Of course, this textual sensitivity goes both ways. There are those on the “dissident Right”, as I suppose we are still loosely termed, whose critical stance towards Jewry has long since passed from a healthy and inquisitive skepticism into pathological obsession. I wish I had kept a collection of comments to my pieces over the years from these people, who I think of as the “Goy Division”. Personally, I left what we might call the “Jewish Question 2.0” for some time before addressing it. It seemed too all-consuming, and the reason I call it “The Jewish Question 2.0” seems to me to be that it’s no longer a question of “What do we do with the Jews?” so much as “What will the Jews do with us?” Without wishing to appear obsequious, I then came to read The Culture of Critique by the editor of this magazine. What struck me, apart from the depth of analysis, the credibility of the narrative, and the context and method a psychologist brings to a subject, was the level-headed relation of facts, figures, and cultural phenomena. How different in tone from the Touretter chatterings of the Goy Division. I once wrote a piece elsewhere on a famous British gangster movie, and the very first comment was an essay-length piece on how the Jews run Hollywood. I thought; I know. I know they do. But what has that to do with this film? Valid criticism of Jewry is hardly helped by histrionics.

The Jewish conceptual apparatus of “anti-Semitism” is just that, an apparatus. It has inter-linking parts which function together, it is not just mere placardism, like “racist” or “fascist”, which are just performatives rather than descriptors in any meaningful sense. And its main drive is a simple inversion of reality, a trap which is laid for the unwary anti-Semite to fall into, an anti-Semite so unwary of his condition he didn’t even know he was an anti-Semite until he fell into the trap. When Heidegger writes, in the Black Notebooks, “What is the basis for the peculiar predetermination of Jewry for planetary criminality?,” are we not entitled to ask the same question, if we believe planetary criminality to be the province of the Jews? Why should we not be? Simply by edict, ex cathedra prohibitions not permissible in any court of appeal.

Next year being the centenary of the publication of Being and Time, I intend to read the book again over Christmas, I think for the fourth time. Fortunately, not being Jewish, I will be able to enjoy it once more without the creeping feeling described by Emmanuel Levinas. Robert Bernasconi relates that in 1988, after the publication of a major book in terms of the Heidegger debate, Levinas “reaffirmed his long-standing admiration for Being and Time, but posed the question of whether there was not an echo of evil there”. Levinas himself explained the eerie effect Heidegger’s masterpiece is wont to have on some of its selected readers:

The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. [Italics added].

Intellectual effort is indeed required to make Heidegger into the Devil, but it is in Jewish tribal interests to do so. And that intellectual effort will use all post-modernism’s tricks of the trade to make flimsy evidence stick to a spurious crime. One of the favorite verbs employed by the left is “to demonize”, by which they mean noticing that people from different parts of the world are different colors and behave in different ways. It’s a silly, fortune-cookie motto, like “Othering”, but we may tease a little relevance from it. Heidegger has been thoroughly demonized by the Jewish-academic complex, and it is rather encouraging to see. It means they fear him, which makes him worth studying. It also means they fear his knowledge of their guile, and guile is why the Devil was depicted in the Bible not as a horned demon but as a snake.

This is a collection which is highly recommend to the Heidegger scholar, and worth being aware of should you wish to take the pulse of the contemporary response to White Western philosophy. The modern hunters of racism and Islamophobia learnt their trade from the book of Jewish victimhood, and the first lesson is that anti-Semitism/racism/Islamophobia must be found everywhere, particularly within those cultural enclaves begun, developed, and dominated by Whites, which is almost all of them, and certainly all of them that are of worth. In particular, the closer the criticism to what the professionally offended know to be the truth, the more vociferous the response must be.

Heidegger’s comments on Jews and Jewry in the Black Notebooks are obviously over the target, and that is why there is so much flak. Anti-Semitism in the greatest philosopher of the last century may be a dangerous glitch for the academic Jewish complex, but it is a design feature for those who wear their anti-Semitism with a measure of pride, because they have thought it through rather than responded to that thought with the instinctive horror Adam shows in Eden when he understands what it is the Devil has done.