not condemn the work on account of the weaknesses of the man. “Why then does Heidegger matter?” concluded Sartre, since one only asked of him “techniques and methods” without there ever having been a question of allegiance.
Although this position was significant to the extent that it corresponded to the prevailing sentiment of the time, it was still not unanimously shared. The communists persisted in speaking of the “Nazi Heidegger,”90 and Camus followed suit, although without hostility.91 Furthermore, very little was known about Heidegger’s political engagement: he had joined the National Socialist party in 1933,92 and then he resigned as rector the following year. This was almosteverything that seemed to have been established at the time, although the communist Henri Mougin tried to sharpen his attacks and began publishing excerpts from the “Rectoral Address.”93 But this is not what mattered: his philosophy was the issue. Although he was a communist at the time, Edgar Morin confirms today that the mood of young people who were interested in philosophy was hardly “punitive” with respect to Heidegger.94 It is true that there were more important matters to attend to and that the immediate political struggles, the internal purge, and postwar reconstruction were much more urgent than the reconstruction of the details of the political engagements of a great philosopher, among other intellectuals in Germany in 1933.
However, as we have seen, the question had indeed been posed. Silent during the Occupation, Sartre had to take a stand, however briefly, on this question, and then organized a debate in the pages of Les Temps modernes. It is worth referencing the debate and reconstituting its essential moments, because the discussion, taken as a whole, was of high quality and quite eventful, which attests that it was responding, as one could imagine, to a genuine concern and expectation.
The first installment concerning Heidegger appeared in January 1946. It contained a brief editorial note bearing Sartre’s signature, and began in the following way: “The French press spoke of Heidegger as a Nazi; it is a fact that he was a member of the Nazi party. If one had to judge a philosophy by the courage or political lucidity of the philosopher, Hegel would not stand up to the scrutiny. It can happen that a philosopher be unfaithful to his best thoughts when he arrives at political decisions.”95
The allusion to the “French press” (attacks were coming from the communists, but also from Christian democrats of the Mouvement républicain populaire) established that Sartre saw himself forced to take on a subject he would rather have avoided. There is no dispute with respect to the factual concession regarding Heidegger’s party membership in 1933. But the sentence that came immediately after considerably mitigated the significance of his party membership: the comparison with Hegel, eminently debatable in itself, from the outset put Heidegger on a pedestal by dissociating the value of a philosophy from the actions of the philosopher. And the short following sentence strongly suggested
90. Simone de Beauvoir confirmed the virulence of these communist attacks: “Soon Les Lettres françaises became sectarian. Action remained more open-minded. . . . We were very surprised when Ponge, who ran the cultural section, told us that a mountain of articles against Sartre was piling up on his desk . . . he was criticized for drawing inspiration from Heidegger: the political position Heidegger had taken did not retrospectively invalidate all his ideas.” Simone de Beauvoir. La force des choses. I. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 20. Sartre’s clarifications did not curb the communist attacks: a few months later (in Action, no. 40 [June 8, 1945]), Henri Lefebvre renewed the attacks, “no longer imputed Sartre ‘with having been a disciple of the Nazi Heidegger.’” Michel-Antoine Burnier, Choice of Action: The French Existentialists on the Political Front Line, trans. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1968), 44.
91. “While walking by the Flore, I caught sight of Albert Camus. . . . He did not have any particular enmity toward Heidegger, but still . . . Heidegger was not his cup of tea and he had been a national-socialist” (de Towarnicki, À la rencontre de Heidegger, 37).
92. Even on this topic, documents and testimonies were not numerous: de Waelhens did not even allude to the fact that Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist Party: “In 1933, Heidegger becomes rector of Freiburg’s university, and his inauguration was marked by a resounding speech: ‘Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität’” (La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger, viii).
93. Henri Mougin, “Comment sauver les intellectuels nazis?,” La pensée, no. 5 (Octo-ber–December 1945): 121–125. This article was mainly aimed at Jünger, but mentioned that Heidegger was “not looked down upon” by the regime, since all the philosopher’s works were sold in bookshops. Mougin renewed his attacks in the same periodical (no. 7 [June 1946]: 111) in these terms: “We have blown the whistle on the tendency of late to attempt to save Heidegger. The campaign has continued: Heidegger’s words have been gathered religiously. It is only natural under these conditions that they became more outlandish. It is therefore useful to remind you of the speech pronounced by the philosopher on May 27, 1933, when he received from the Hitlerian government his position at the head of Freiburg’s university.” This inaccurate comment (since Heidegger was elected by his colleagues) is followed by a few quotes from The Rectoral Address, which Mougin considered quite self-explanatory since he did not comment on them.
94. See our interview with Edgar Morin in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Edgar Morin was not included in the English edition.]
95. Les Temps modernes, no. 4 (1946): 713.