As for the anti-Jewish passages in the Black Notebooks, it would be a mistake to minimize them—to emphasize their ambiguities, their relative mildness for the times, and finally to be left with a handful of assertions that we can dismiss as part of a personal journal that has nothing to do with Heidegger’s “real philosophy.” This would be an error because his comments on Jews (and Americans, Englishmen, and Christians) are part of a whole. It is not a mathematically deductive system, but more like an ecosystem: it may well survive if one element is removed, but only in a changed form. In Heidegger’s thinking, suspicion of rootless, calculating, nomadic, cosmopolitan, “Jewish” ways of life goes hand in hand with his emphasis on thrownness, rootedness, and historicity. His hostility to rationalism, universalism, and all things global— such as “world Jewry”—fits with his attempt to think of Dasein and being as radically finite. As Robert Bernasconi puts it, “ideas hunt in packs.”1
But it would also be a mistake to maximize the anti-Jewish passages by representing them as the capstone or cornerstone of a Heideggerian edifice, or assuming that it is impossible from the start to find fruitful insights in his thinking that can contribute to our own philosophical ecosystems. “The strength of a work is measured by the extent to which it refutes its creator— i.e., grounds something altogether different from that in which its creator himself stood and had to stand” (GA 94: 438–39/318 tm).
The time for childlike admiration of Heidegger is long gone. No part of his thinking stands as a settled, proven body of assertions, but it all endures as a provocation that can inspire us to think more attentively. For a mature appropriation of his thought, we need a different kind of maximization of its disturbing elements. We must take them as welcome opportunities to think as hard as we can about his limitations and our own—about errancy, finitude, and responsibility. If we find these elements morally unacceptable, we can take this as an invitation to reflect on his hostility to moral points of view and on the basis of our own moral positions. If we find them politically obtuse, we can take this as a chance to rethink politics in a productive struggle with him, the kind of struggle he called an Auseinandersetzung—a confrontation that sets the opponents apart and clarifies their positions as they learn from each other.
This is just what Heidegger, at his best, would have us do. He wants a fight, not followers. “I still do not have enough enemies” (GA 94: 9/8 tm). “Perhaps even my errors still have a power to provoke in a time overloaded with correctnesses that have long lacked truth” (GA 94: 404/295 tm).
REASON AND ITS CONDITIONS
Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment, antirationalistic political thought is one key issue to consider. Is there a way to acknowledge whatever insights he achieves