At the Existentialist Café (29 page)

Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself. To alter the metaphor, there would be no room for beings to emerge from their shell.

The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series
Cosmos
by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘
a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘
The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one
the young
Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.

This is the sort of thing that enthralled me when I read Heidegger as a student — and I was most impressed by this post-‘turn’ Heidegger, difficult though he was to grasp. The more pragmatic
Being and Time–
era material about hammers and equipment was pretty good, but it didn’t have this deeper, more perplexing beauty. The late Heidegger is writing a form of poetry himself, although he continues to insist, as philosophers do, that this is
how things are
; it is not only a literary trick. Rereading him today, half of me says, ‘What nonsense!’ while the other half is re-enchanted.

Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable
person
. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature. There is glamour in thinking of oneself as a botanical or geological formation, or a space in the landscape — but can Dasein still put up a set of bookshelves? In the very period when Sartre was becoming
more
concerned with questions of action and involvement in the world, Heidegger was retiring almost entirely from consideration of those questions. Freedom, decision and anxiety no longer play much of a role for him. Human beings themselves have become hard to discern, and this is particularly disturbing coming from a philosopher who had not yet convincingly dissociated himself from those who perpetrated the twentieth century’s worst crimes against humanity.

Besides, even the keenest Heideggerians must secretly feel that, at times, he talks through his hat. An oft-cited section in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ concerns, not a hat, but a pair of
shoes. To convey what he means by art as
poiēsis
, Heidegger describes a Van Gogh painting which he claims depicts shoes belonging to a peasant woman. He goes off on a flight of fancy about what the painting poetically ‘brings forth’: the shoe-wearer’s daily trudge through furrowed earth, the fields’ ripening grain, the land’s silence in winter, and the woman’s
fears of hunger and memories of the pains of childbirth. In 1968, the art critic Meyer Schapiro pointed out that the
shoes were probably not a peasant’s at all but Van Gogh’s own. Schapiro kept investigating and, in 1994, found evidence that Van Gogh may have bought them second-hand as smart urban shoes in clean condition, only to then distress them with a long walk through the mud. He capped off his research by citing a note in Heidegger’s own hand, admitting ‘we cannot say with certainty where these shoes stand nor to whom they belong’. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but it seems clear that Heidegger read a great deal into the painting with very little justification, and that what he read in was a highly romanticised notion of peasant life.

It may be a personal matter: either Heidegger’s thoughts on Van Gogh’s painting speak to you, or they don’t. To me they don’t, yet there are other passages in the same essay which do move me. I always loved his description of an ancient Greek temple that seems to call forth the very earth and sky:

(Illustrations Credit 8.2)

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.

I’m prepared for the possibility that someone else will find this boring or even odious. But Heidegger’s idea that a human architectural construction can make even the
air
show itself differently has stayed somewhere behind my perceptions of buildings and art ever since I first read the essay.

I happily accept that it may have influenced me as a piece of literature rather than as philosophy but, if so, it must be said that this was not Heidegger’s intention. He did not expect his readers to treat his work as an aesthetic experience, or to go away like visitors from an art gallery saying, ‘I liked the temple — didn’t think much of the shoes, though.’ His work was supposed to bring us to what the young Karl Jaspers had called ‘a
different thinking
, a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me’. Besides, since Heidegger now saw all language as poetry, or even as the
‘house of Being’, he would think it totally infra dig to worry about whether a particular piece of language is best classified as poetry or philosophy.

Reading the late Heidegger requires a ‘letting-go’ of one’s own usual critical ways of thinking. Many consider this an unacceptable demand from a philosopher, even though we are willing to do it for artists. In order to appreciate Wagner’s
Ring
cycle or Proust’s fiction one has to subscribe temporarily to the creator’s own terms of entry or not attempt it at all. The same may be true of Heidegger’s late works — and I have only quoted some relatively approachable sections here.

The greater difficulty may be to emerge from it intact afterwards. Heidegger himself found it hard to leave his own philosophical universe. Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked that he had seen Heidegger remain closed up in himself, seeming unhappy and unable to communicate at all until the other person ‘
came onto the way of thinking he had prepared’. That is a severely limited basis for conversation. Gadamer did add, however, that he became more relaxed after formal lessons were over and everyone enjoyed a glass of fine local wine together.

Several admirers who had previously followed Heidegger’s path now turned away from him, appalled by both his Nazi past and the qualities of his late philosophy. Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers from America in 1949 describing Heidegger’s post-‘turn’ lectures on Nietzsche as a ‘quite awful’ form of ‘
babbling’. She also disapproved of his hiding out in Todtnauberg to grumble about modern civilisation, safely remote from potential critics who did not bother to climb up a mountain just to reprimand him. ‘Nobody is likely to climb 1,200 metres to make a scene’, she claimed.

A few people did just that, however. One was his former student Herbert Marcuse, formerly an impassioned Heideggerian and now a Marxist. He made the journey in April 1947, hoping to get an explanation and an apology from Heidegger for his Nazi involvement. He did not get either. In August, he wrote asking Heidegger again why he would not make a clear disavowal of the Nazi ideology, when so many people were waiting for just a few words from him.
‘Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?’ he asked. But Heidegger refused to oblige. He wrote on 20 January 1948 to thank Marcuse for a package he had sent, presumably of much-needed supplies, adding that he had distributed its contents only ‘
to former students who were neither in the Party nor had any other connections to National Socialism’. He then turned to Marcuse’s questions, adding, ‘Your letter shows me precisely how difficult it is to converse with persons who have not been in Germany since 1933.’ He explained that he did not want to issue a facile statement of
repudiation, because so many real Nazis had rushed to do just that in 1945, announcing their change of belief ‘in the most loathsome way’ without really meaning what they said. Heidegger did not want to join his voice to theirs.

One of the few ever to express sympathy for this response was Jacques Derrida, the great philosopher of deconstruction: in a talk of 1988, he turned the question of Heidegger’s silence around by asking what would have happened if he
had
made a simple statement along the lines of ‘Auschwitz is the absolute horror; it is what I fundamentally condemn.’ Such an announcement would have satisfied expectations and closed the Heidegger file, as it were. There would be less to discuss and puzzle over. But then, said Derrida, we would feel ‘
dismissed from the duty’ of thinking the question through and asking what Heidegger’s refusal implied for his philosophy. By remaining silent, he left us a ‘commandment to think what he himself did not think’ — and for Derrida, this was more productive.

Marcuse was not willing to accept such an elaborate justification, and in any case Heidegger did not try to win him over. He ended his last letter to Marcuse with what sounds like a deliberate provocation, comparing the
Holocaust to the post-war expulsion of Germans from Soviet-dominated zones of Eastern Europe — a comparison made by many other Germans at the time, but also a dig at Marcuse’s Communist sympathies. Marcuse was so disgusted that he addressed his reply almost entirely to that point. If Heidegger was capable of presenting such an argument, did that not mean he must be considered ‘
outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible’? If Heidegger could not speak or reason, Marcuse could not see a way of attempting to speak or reason with him. With that, another silence descended.

Heidegger’s philosophical ‘turn’ also brought a critical response from his old friend Karl Jaspers, with whom he had been out of contact for years.

Karl and Gertrud Jaspers had somehow managed to survive in Heidelberg throughout the war, in their cautious way, with Karl neither
teaching nor publishing. It was a close thing, for it emerged later that their
names were on a list of people due to be deported to concentration camps in April 1945; the US Army had occupied Heidelberg in March, just in time to save them. For now, the couple continued to live in Heidelberg, although in 1948 they came to the belated conclusion that they could no longer feel comfortable in Germany, and they moved to Switzerland.

In 1945, the denazification authorities at Freiburg University had approached
Jaspers for his opinion on Heidegger: should he be allowed to resume teaching at the university? Jaspers submitted a characteristically thoughtful and balanced report that December. He concluded that Heidegger was a philosopher of the greatest importance who should be given all the university support he needed to pursue his own work — but who should
not
yet be allowed to teach. He wrote, ‘
Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, would have a very damaging effect on students at the present time.’

While drafting the report, Jaspers re-established contact with Heidegger himself for the first time since before the war. Then, in 1949, he pointedly sent him a copy of his own 1946 book
Die Schuldfrage
(translated as
The Question of German Guilt
). Written in the context of the Nuremberg trials, this discussed the awkward question of how Germans should come to terms with their past and move towards the future. For Jaspers, the outcome of the various trials and denazification inquests was less important than the need for a change of heart in the Germans themselves, beginning with full acknowledgement of responsibility for what had happened, rather than turning away or making excuses as he felt many people were doing. Every German, he wrote, must ask the question
‘how am I guilty?’ Even people who had defied the Nazis or tried to help their victims still shared in some deep ‘metaphysical’ guilt, he thought, for, ‘
if it happens, and if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive’.