A book deserves careful reading throughout Brazilian universities. I am thinking above all of the humanities sectors. The volume was translated by Editora Perspectiva. The most apparent aspect of it appears as a double love biography of intellectuals dealing with the German political, ideological and religious world during the two great European wars. The plot was created by Antonia Grunenberg, an academic who was in Brazil recently. Following his exhibition is like entering a time tunnel that expands threatening landscapes at the same time that the years flow towards disaster. In its pages we go from the bonds between lovers to the massacres of the 20th century. A terrifying procession of individuals transformed into ghosts of freedom or dolls of murderous anti-Semitism. Let us follow the guidelines of Hanna Arendt & Martin Heidegger, Love Story.
Grunenberg does not assume a committed attitude, his writing alienates the militants. The biographical examination continues without abrupt cuts. Little by little the characters Arendt and Heidegger appear, preceded by the most relevant members of their families. Then, illustrious names in science and philosophy enter the scene, which have shaped debates to this day. Heinrich John Rickert of the so-called Baden School, a Kantian in his own way, and the initiator of phenomenology Edmund Husserl are among the first. Several authors appear alongside strategic characters such as Max Weber and other pinnacles of European universities. Some caricatured entities become ridiculous when they are brought close to tragic personalities such as Walter Benjamim, who killed himself due to Nazi repression. Unlike many analyzes of important individuals, Grunenberg never cites anyone without presenting the historical, social and scientific framework in which his theses emerged, developed and were questioned.
On the panel erected around the loving couple, the figures of Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers stand out. At a time when minds bent before the most virulent ideologies, those masters maintained the straight posture of the philosophers who deserve the name. Driven by symbolic thinking, Cassirer produced essential works especially for our times, when authoritarianism shows its claws in fanaticized crowds. Your book The Myth of the State it feeds reflection, instructs politically and theoretically. It is a liberal guide for those who avoid radicalism. Jaspers, physician and philosopher, was a friend of Heidegger until the moment when the author of Being and Time He embraced Nazism in exchange for a certain university rectory. A conversation between the two colleagues shows how far academic dignity can go. Jaspers asks Heidegger: “How can a man as cultureless as Hitler govern Germany?” ("Wie soll ein so ungebildeter Mensch wie Hitler Deutschland regieren?"). Heidegger's reply: “Just look at his wonderful hands!” (“Sehen Sie nur seine wunderbaren Hände an!”). The cult devoted to Heidegger is implacable towards Jaspers. In France, the chapter where he narrates his perception of his colleague was censored. Whoever doubts, compare the volume of the Philosophical Autobiography by Jaspers with the French edition (Ed. Aubier, 1963). The entire tenth chapter of the book was cut. And there Jaspers narrates the Heideggerian enchantment through the wonderful hands of Hitler. The episode is covered by many commentators and also by Antonia Grunenberg who exposes the conflicts between those close to Heidegger, including the most vile situations carried out by the philosopher who still follows multiple ideologies today.
Jaspers' break with Heidegger did not just deal with an aesthetic point, the dictator's manual beauty. When the then friend was appointed university president, the freedom of teachers to teach without repression or denunciations was compromised. Says Jaspers about Heidegger's “academic policy”: “At the first moment it was clear to me that freedom of teaching was at stake. It is also destroyed at its roots when teachers are allowed to be audited for their opinions.” The section is the same Philosophical Autobiography. Other interesting points can be seen in the dealings between the two colleagues. After assuming the rectorship of the University of Freiburg (21/04/1933), Heidegger joined the Nazi party (member number 3.125.894). In the short time he was at the rectory he followed the Hitlerian recipe for fields. After the war, he writes to Jaspers: “I ended up in the machine of office, of influences and struggles for power and partisanship, so that, even if only for a few months (...) I lost myself and found myself intoxicated by power” ( Letter to Jaspers, 8/04/1950). The research group on the case, established by the university after the German defeat, concludes in a similar way: “Mr. Heidegger was fascinated by power (...) what attracted him was the prospect of exerting a strong influence”.
Antonia Grunenberg follows the romantic and theoretical approach of H. Arendt and Heidegger. Treason is the constant term in the philosopher’s texts. Not so much love betrayal. Heidegger was known, especially to his wife, as a persistent philanderer, what the French delightfully call runner of women or jupons. One of his sons even denied his father's obvious anti-Semitism, claiming that he had dated several women of Jewish origin. No. Arendt's disenchantment is of an ethical, political and moral nature. The focus of his indignation comes from the Heideggerian practice at the head of the University. His actions are endorsed by the famous “Inauguration Speech” at the rectory. There he assumes the principle of intellectual leadership (Tour Operators with) similar to other totalitarian camps. A similar control technique inaugurated the practice of following ideology, plastically displayed in the wonderful Hitlerite hands. And soon came “the ban on Jewish student associations, the corporate inclusion of organizations in the university's self-administration, the introduction of proof of Aryan ancestry and community work, the suspension of the veto on duels between students, the burning of books following the example of Berlin, mandatory classes in military sports and ideological instruction for students and teachers, a student sector in charge of racial issues, closure of a republic for Jewish students, the Hitler salute (...) the conception according to which the university should follow the guidelines on one Leader, cleaning to remove 'elements hostile to the State' from higher education institutions, dismissal of teachers for racial reasons, revocation of the teaching license of Jewish teachers, the German salute in teaching activities and demonstrations of loyalty to the Leader".
In his last conversation with Jaspers, Heidegger confesses that his position allowed him to “renew” his fields along the lines of National Socialism. In the same dialogue he railed against the university, especially its “high salaries”. And he ended by proclaiming to his colleague: “There is a dangerous international association of Jews.” The phrase thus leaked in Goebbels' worst style came as a reply to Jaspers' strangeness and repudiation of the lies contained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But suspicions regarding Heidegger do not only come from liberal colleagues. Eric Voegelin, a lucid and shrewd conservative, says the following about the author of Being and Time: “he is very classical and conservative (platonic) from what I had realized; and at the same time it is uniquely German and weird. I now tend to believe that his National Socialism rests on motives similar to those of Carl Schmitt, or Laski's racism: an intelligent anticipation of political elements at the level of intramundane and historical elements – more intelligent than the 'decency' of many others whose obstinacy protects them from dangerous adventures – but whose intellectual stature is too small to free themselves from the nonsense of worldly seduction – this is never fully enough for a 'periagogy' (turn, change) along the Platonic lines.” (Letter from Voegelin, 20/05/1950).
The rapprochement made by Voegelin between Heidegger and Schmitt has good biographical and academic reasons, as well as political ones. I just mark a strong coincidence. Schmitt embarked on the controversial path in favor of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich and was challenged by many jurists, for example Hans Kelsen. The Head of State would be the only one in charge of guarding the Constitution because his way of acting would not suffer from the slow way of acting of parliaments and judicial courts. He would be fully able, when deciding vital issues of the State, to maintain the validity of the constitutional text. This is another way of exposing the doctrine of the Leader who holds sovereignty and decides on the exception, without owing anything to the legal norm. Your book still exists today Der Hüter der Verfassung inspires coups d'état in the name of salus populi. It was no different in Brazil from 1964 onwards with its Institutional Acts written by another cultivator of political authoritarianism, Francisco Campos.
Like Schmitt and his protector of the Constitution, Heidegger saw university students committed to the Nazi camp as “the guardians of thought.” (Letter to Jaspers 22/06/1949). It is also no coincidence that Schmitt and Heidegger had to deal with the issue of guilt during the Nazi regime. The first pointed (in a perverse Weberianism) to the German bureaucratic spirit and the second tried to hide his political option under the layer of a certain metaphysics and criticism of technology. As our author Heidegger says, like Schmitt, “he did not see himself as responsible, but as a victim. Imagining a future in which the Russians would take over Europe, which at the time worried many people, he also feared reprisals from the socialist bloc.” This excuse is now part of the arsenal of European and German revisionism, just open books like the one dedicated to Ernst Nolte (Fascism & Totalitarianism in the French edition). Jaspers again sees the Hedeiggerian solution as an evasion, nothing more.
Arendt shared with Jaspers the feeling of ambivalence in the excuses offered by Heidegger. Before meeting him after the War “she characterized him with words such as lack of character, falsehood, profanity, dishonesty, mendacity” (Letter from Arendt to Jaspers, 29/09/1949). Even so, she managed the translations of Heidegger's texts in the United States. But the theorist maintained her critical spirit. “Yesterday I was reading Heidegger's last text on identity and difference, which is highly interesting, but he quotes himself and interprets himself as if it were a text from the Bible. I just can't take it anymore. And he is truly genius and not just highly talented. So why does he need it? In these extremely bad ways?” (Letter to Blumenfeld, 16/12/1957). Despite criticizing the philosopher's bad manners and his narcissistic writing practice, H. Arendt agrees with him on a strategic point, which is also assumed by several writers on the left.
Let's start with Arendt's judgment on Nazism. The latter she says, “is the product of that hell that is called liberalism and in whose abyss both Christianity and the Enlightenment were lost” (Letter to Gurian, 4/3/1942). Such analysis, says Grunenberg, “coincides with a large part of what Heidegger thinks as well as with the judgments of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and many others. Heidegger also thought that modern mass democracy (as the foundation of modern liberalism) would have prevented human beings from accessing what would be essential for them. Both agreed that Modernity had produced this rupture within itself.”
Despite all the drawbacks to Heidegger's thinking, the group mentioned above (the supposed Frankfurt School) assumed an attitude close to his in dealing with modernity. But the most withering invective launched against the philosopher came from Hans Jonas, a disciple unhappy with his master's attitudes. “A philosopher should not be fooled by Nazism. He shouldn't be. And the fact that this failed in the case of the greatest philosopher of the time, that a life in the service of truth had not had the effect of elevating people, that this proximity to truth or this search for truth had not resulted in a compassionate humanity – I felt this beyond all personal disappointment, as a debacle of philosophy itself”. (Jonah, Ernkentnis und Verantwortung.
The question of responsibility to be fulfilled by thinkers and politicians follows Arendt's entire theoretical path, as well as Jonas's. His big question is summed up by Grunenberg: “How do you deal with the disappearance of responsibility under total domination? How can responsibility be reconstructed when its bearers have become recipients of orders devoid of will? What is the difference between personal and political responsibility?” Finally: “people give up responsibility when they are not able or willing to evaluate the situations they find themselves in or the actions they encounter or that they themselves carry out”. The theme runs through Arendt's writings and appears burning and misunderstood in the analyzes of Eichmann's trial. There she maintains the terrible results of Being and Time sobre or To be there immersed in the cowardly anonymity of “if”, in “what is done, what is said, what is judged” like “everyone else”. From such a modern swamp grow the poisonous plants of totalitarianism whose flowers appear in the “banality of evil”. However, to the detriment of philosophy, “the greatest German philosopher” of the period fell on all fours on similar viscous ground, which does not differentiate him from a murderous bureaucrat who killed thousands of human beings.
As Luciano Canfora says, philosophy is a risky profession. She can fall prey to power or flee from the powerful who threaten her cultivators. Today, more than ever, in the world and in Brazil, philosophical dangerousness must be observed. There is a great temptation among many intellectuals to assume positions in order to, taking advantage of unlimited command, impose catastrophic directions on thought and action. Prudence, an old friend of philosophy, advises caution. Today Hitler rules the palaces and, with his beautiful hands, signs the death penalty for millions. Tomorrow his ashes will lie in front of the Bunker in which he hid with his tragic and caricatured court. Today the Palácio do Planalto houses defenders of dictatorship, torture, exiles, black and indigenous genocide. Our president doesn't have great manual skills. However, in common with the dictators of the 20th century, he proudly displays his lack of culture and complete hatred of knowledge. Are we willing to assume our responsibility and refuse such ways of acting? Only time will tell, in the predictable trials that, like Nuremberg, will hear the most unlikely excuses in the form of law, philosophy, morals. Let's hope.
