I listened to a presentation on Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and his alleged attempt to redo his image without really renouncing his involvement. The suggestion often is that there is a connection between his actual philosophy and this involvement worries me since I take seriously his 1) affirmation of the transcendence of Being relative to the human horizon and 2) our capacity to receive authentic disclosures, though never absolutely. 3) language as the house of being. I can see how some could see this as irrational. My feeling is that what is missing in Heidegger, besides more clarity in his writing, is an orientation to goodness. Love plays little role. I don’t think you need to reduce Heidegger’s philosophy to Nazism in order to recognize that something in the philosophy may have lacked moral substance. How to preserve what is illuminating in his thought while confronting both his political involvement and certain dangerous ambiguities internal to the philosophy itself.
What I importantly owe to Heidegger. Being
transcends our conceptual grasp; reality is not exhausted by technological
manipulation or representational thinking. Truth is essentially disclosure
(aletheia), an event in which beings can show themselves authentically, though
never absolutely or from nowhere. Human beings are receivers before they are
sovereign; we dwell within language rather than master it completely. We are
conditioned by all the elements of our finitude. Language as “the house of
Being” points toward the depth, historical situatedness, and revelatory power
of speech, poetry, and tradition. None of this is irrational in itself. It
functions as a corrective to reductionism, positivism, technological
domination, and modern forgetfulness of mystery.
. . .
What does Heidegger mean by disclosure or truth as uncovering or unconcealedness? I am not a Heidegger scholar but as a student taking a test for my Heidegger professors, Ronald Bruzina and Ted Schatzki. I would explain it this way, focusing not on Being and Time but Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Of the Essence of Truth).
The standard correspondence theory of truth understands truth primarily as a relation between a statement and a fact. A proposition is true if it correctly represents reality. “Snow is white” is true if snow actually is white. Truth here is mainly correctness, accuracy, correspondence between thought and object. Heidegger does not deny this but he thinks it rests upon a deeper, more primordial phenomenon that philosophy since Plato and especially modern philosophy forgot. Before a statement can correspond to reality, reality must first already be "disclosed" or "unconcealed" to us. Beings already show themselves within a meaningful world. Heidegger calls this more original truth Aletheia, which he paraphrases as unconcealment. For example, before a scientist can make correct statements about a tree, the tree must already appear within a world of significance: as something encountered, usable, visible, meaningful, situated within practices, language, and forms of life. That is how it is real to us, before we even try to theorize about it. Truth is therefore originally an event of disclosure in which beings become accessible at all, I would say more in the sense of a x being a real tree, a real friend, real gold - and you could substitute a true tree, friend, gold, etc. True and real are given in experience prior to any theorizing. But Heidegger wouldn't go that far. Because Heidegger feared that the entire metaphysical tradition from Plato onward increasingly interpreted Being in terms of stable presence, essence, fixed intelligibility, or permanent structure. He thought this ultimately culminated in modern technological metaphysics, where beings become objects fully graspable by conceptual thought. So Heidegger tries to avoid saying: truth = correspondence to essence. Instead he emphasizes truth = the event in which beings come into unconcealment at all. This means he rejects claims that beings have fully determinable “true natures” accessible through metaphysical adequation.
This shifts philosophy. Correspondence theory asks: “Does the statement match the object?” Heidegger asks first: “How does the object come into openness or intelligibility in the first place?” In other words, how do we come to have ideas about trees in the first place? Or not quite that, that is still too superficial. Before we ever form explicit “ideas” about trees, we are already living in a world where trees matter and appear meaningfully and as real. We encounter them as shade, obstacles, beauty, lumber, living things, part of landscapes, symbols, homes for birds, and so on. The tree is already disclosed (real, existing) within a practical and meaningful world before it becomes an object of detached cognition. So Heidegger’s deeper question is something like: How is it possible for beings such as trees to appear meaningfully to us at all? What is the openness in which anything can show itself as something? What makes it possible for anything to appear meaningfully to us at all? What must already be in place for us to encounter something as something? What allows beings to become intelligible in the first place? What is the underlying condition that lets reality disclose itself to us? How is it possible for the world to show up as meaningful rather than as mere chaos? What allows us not merely to see things, but to recognize and understand them? What makes possible the experience of encountering something as a tree, a person, a tool, a danger, or a work of art? What allows reality to come into presence for us at all? – These are Heidegger-like questions that go beyond the logical version of truth.
The “openness” (the world?) is what he connects with Being and aletheia. This is why he emphasizes everyday involvement over detached theorizing. A carpenter does not first perceive meaningless sense-data and then infer a “tree” or “hammer.” He is already immersed in a meaningful world of use, practice, language, and concern. Only later do we abstract and form explicit conceptual or scientific representations. So Heidegger is trying to uncover the pre-theoretical conditions that make ordinary and scientific knowledge possible in the first place. And this is also why “language is the house of Being.” Language is not merely labels pasted onto pre-given objects. It partly opens a world in which things can appear under meaningful aspects at all. Thus truth becomes historical, world-related, and tied to human existence (Dasein) rather than merely logical correctness.
Being (Sein) for Heidegger is not a
highest object or thing. It is the “clearing” or openness within which beings
can appear as meaningful at all. Being is not another entity alongside
entities; it is the condition for entities becoming intelligible. This is why
Heidegger says Western philosophy forgot the “question of Being.” It focused on
beings (objects, substances, causes) while overlooking the more fundamental
mystery that beings appear at all within intelligibility.
This view goes beyond the flat picture of knowledge as a detached subject mechanically representing external objects. Human beings are always already involved in a meaningful world prior to abstract theorizing. This primordial level of openness or disclosure is where Being (Sein) reveals itself to us, i.e. reality has its roots, though never completely or finally. Not Being as a thing or object, but Being as the meaningful presencing of beings. A tree is not first encountered as a neutral object to which we later add meaning. It already appears within a world: as shelter, beauty, wood, life, sacred grove, ecological being, scientific specimen, and so forth. The deeper question is: what is the openness that allows anything to appear meaningfully at all? That openness is what Heidegger associates with the disclosure of Being. And because this disclosure is historical, linguistic, and finite, no disclosure exhausts reality completely. Every revealing also conceals. A scientific worldview reveals certain truths about the tree while concealing others. A poetic experience reveals dimensions hidden from technical analysis. A commercial attitude reveals economic value while perhaps concealing beauty or sacredness.
Compare to Kant. “What are the transcendental conditions that make experience and knowledge possible for a rational subject?” Kant’s related question. For Kant the center remains the knowing subject, even if he complicates naive subjectivism. Heidegger thinks this still remains too trapped within modern subject-object metaphysics. He shifts the question radically: not “What structures does the subject impose?” but “How is there already an open world in which subject and object can appear at all?” For Heidegger, openness is not primarily a structure inside consciousness. It is the reality of a world in which we already dwell. Thus he replaces the isolated epistemological subject with Dasein – human existence as always already “being-in-the-world.” Kant begins from cognition; Heidegger, like a good Thomist, begins from existence. Kant asks about the conditions for possible experience. Heidegger asks metaphorically about the clearing in which beings can show themselves meaningfully before theoretical cognition even begins. i.e. about about the lived world in which beings already matter to us and are real for us before we treat them as objects of study. And while Kant’s transcendental structures are universal and relatively stable (space, time, causality, substance, etc.), Heidegger historicizes openness itself. Different epochs disclose reality differently. Greek physis, medieval creation, modern technological enframing – these are not merely different theories imposed upon the same neutral reality or different world versions in Goodman's sense ("constructions"), but different ways Being becomes intelligible. Thus Being is not possessed once and for all through concepts. Human existence is a continual participation in partial disclosures of reality. This is what many readers find so powerful in Heidegger: he tries to recover wonder before intelligibility itself. Not merely “What exists?” but “How does anything come into meaningful presence at all?”
. . .
But it gets intense
when we move from beings like trees or human beings to Being as a limited
whole. Heidegger doesn’t begin with “Being as a whole,” but with concrete
encounters with beings: trees, tools, people, death, work, language, anxiety,
beauty, boredom, home, technology. Heidegger’s thought starts
phenomenologically, with the way beings show themselves within lived experience.
But he thinks that in these encounters there is always already an implicit
understanding of reality as a whole operating in the background. Every
meaningful encounter presupposes a world. For example, a tree can appear as raw
material, as sacred, as ecosystem, as commodity, as divine creation, as
biological organism, as object of scientific analysis, or as poetic presence. These
are not merely different “opinions” about one neutral object. They reflect
different ways in which reality as a whole is unconcealed. A technological age
tends to reveal everything from rivers, forests, animals, and even people primarily
as resources to be optimized and controlled. A religious world discloses beings
differently. A Homeric Greek world differently again.
So Heidegger moves from beings to Being
by asking what kind of world must already be open for beings to appear in these
characteristic ways? What understanding of reality as a whole is silently
governing what counts as meaningful, real, important, usable, sacred, or true? This
background horizon is never usually thematic. We live within it before we think
about it. It is more like an atmosphere or clearing.
And this is where “pictures of the world”
arise. Not first as explicit theories, but as comprehensive ways reality
becomes intelligible: for example, modern technological enframing, Christian
creation, Greek physis (nature), nihilistic absurdity, fascist destiny, liberal
individualism, Platonic participation in the Good, and so on. Each is a
disclosure of Being as a whole.
Now is where my anxiety begins. If all
comprehensive worldviews are disclosures of Being, then what distinguishes profound
truth from catastrophic distortion, such as Heidegger’s own life exemplified? Heidegger
often resists returning to stable metaphysical standards outside disclosure
itself. That is why his critics fear relativization or historical fatalism. I
think our understanding of beings depends upon deeper disclosures of Being as a
whole. But some disclosures are spiritually truer because they disclose reality
under the light of the Good. The issue is not whether all worldviews disclose
something but whether they disclose reality adequately or deformingly. And thus my appeal to the sublime. Certain
experiences seem to break open egoistic or reductive horizons and reveal
dimensions of reality that feel not merely perspectival but intrinsically
higher: love, beauty, goodness, sacrifice, reverence, the dignity of persons
these are sublime (privileged) openings. My idea is to preserve Heidegger’s
insight into disclosure while recovering a Platonic hierarchy of disclosure.
Some unveilings deepen participation in reality; others narrow, flatten, or
corrupt it.
. . .
So there is something missing. In Heidegger, disclosure itself almost has a quasi-sacred authority without a sufficiently developed criterion of moral orientation. If Being “sends” historical disclosures, how does one distinguish genuine disclosure from destructive intoxication, collective frenzy, or idolatrous destiny? Heidegger lacks a sufficiently robust account of the Good by which disclosures are judged.
That is where Plato, Christianity, Murdoch,
Gaita, and Weil think differently. For Plato, truth is ultimately illuminated
by the Good. Disclosure without orientation toward the Good is dangerous
because intelligence can serve tyranny as easily as wisdom. The soul must be
morally ordered to apprehend reality rightly. For Iris Murdoch, attention must
be purified through unselfing and love. Mere openness to “disclosure” is
insufficient because the ego can mythologize itself collectively and
historically. For Raimond Gaita, our deepest disclosures occur through love,
reverence, and acknowledgment of persons as absolutely significant. And for
Christianity, disclosure divorced from love becomes spiritually perilous. “The
spirits” themselves must be tested. Heidegger could write profoundly about
dwelling, mystery, rootedness, poetry, and destiny while remaining morally
obtuse regarding Nazism. Historical destiny and ontological disclosure
sometimes carried greater weight for him than the concrete suffering of
persons. That absence of love is what strike me most about his writings, at
least the ones I know. There is care (Sorge), anxiety, authenticity, historical
destiny, openness, listening, Gelassenheit. But no compassion, mercy, goodness,
forgiveness, or the moral transformation of vision through love. I have read
that Emmanuel Levinas criticized Heidegger for giving priority to Being over
the ethical relation to the Other. That hits the nail on the head. Levinas from what I have read about him feared
that ontology without ethics could become spiritually dangerous because the
concrete person risks being subordinated to historical or ontological
abstractions.
If truth as Heidegger understands it is fundamentally Aletheia, disclosure, unconcealment, the partial revealing and concealing of Being, then even distorted or destructive worldviews may appear to possess a certain truth. They disclose something. They are not simply arbitrary fantasies. Vincent in Collateral sees something real about anonymity, death, indifference, urban isolation. House sees something real about self-deception, fragility, suffering, hypocrisy. Even true nihilism derives its force from genuine disclosures of abandonment, absurdity, mortality, or alienation. This is why they can be authoritative for some people. Pure falsehood rarely grips intelligent people deeply. The danger lies in partial truths absolutized. Once disclosure itself becomes primary, a terrible ambiguity emerges: by what criterion do we distinguish profound disclosure from spiritually catastrophic disclosure? If God or the Good become merely “one perspective among others,” then metaphysics risks collapsing into competing world disclosures or “world versions,” each revealing some aspect of reality, none possessing decisive authority.
This is where Nazism becomes
philosophically terrifying, not merely politically evil. Because Nazism
was not experienced by many of its adherents simply as a set of empirical
claims. It functioned as an ontological disclosure, an entire interpretation of
Being: struggle, rootedness, destiny, blood, sacrifice, hardness, heroic
authenticity, contempt for weakness, overcoming bourgeois pity, fusion into
historical peoplehood. It carried quasi-religious and quasi-sublime dimensions.
The rejection of pity – the Nietzschean On the Genealogy of Morality-style
inversion of values – can appear within this framework not as moral evil but as
an alternative disclosure of existence. This is the abyss many critics fear in
Heidegger. Because if there is no transcendent Good by which disclosures
themselves are judged, then one risks becoming unable to distinguish between authentic
transcendence from collective intoxication, reverence from mythic fanaticism, greatness
from domination, destiny from idolatry, sublimity from brutality. Everything becomes potentially a “sending
of Being.” Heidegger himself fell into that trap, proving the point.
. . .
I want to keep returning to the Good, love, pity, reverence, uncondescending attention, the sublime purification of ego-consciousness. I do not experience all disclosures as equal. I want to appeal to a moral phenomenology deeper than what happens to be take as authentic disclosure at any particular time in history. Can evil disclose reality truly if it simultaneously diminishes or blinds the soul’s capacity to perceive what is most real? This is where Plato, Thomas, Murdoch, Gaita, Weil, and even Wittgenstein part company from Heidegger. For them, moral corruption is not simply one disclosure among others. It is also a deformation of vision. I would add even if the deformed vision is of some aspect of Being. Evil may reveal partial truths: mortality, conflict, weakness, hypocrisy, cruelty, tragedy, finitude, fallibility, etc. But it also obscures intrinsic dignity, love, goodness, mercy, the sacredness of persons, genuine transcendence. Thus Nazism may contain disclosures of modern alienation, technological uprootedness, spiritual emptiness, or civilizational crisis while being fundamentally false because it falsifies the meaning of human being itself. Not every disclosure is equally truthful because the condition of the soul affects what can be seen.
This is why I keep emphasizing the sublime linked to goodness rather than merely intensity or ontological shock. The sublime alone is ambiguous. Fascism can produce counterfeit sublimity: mass unity, sacrifice, destiny, ecstatic transcendence of individuality. The decisive issue is whether transcendence is ordered toward love and truthful acknowledgment of reality, or toward domination, ego-mythology, and sacrificial violence. Indeed, pity is philosophically decisive. Not sentimental pity, but the capacity to perceive another person as absolutely real and morally irreducible. That capacity is a condition for genuine disclosure of Being rather than ideological possession. Which is to say that truth cannot be separated from morals or at bottom love. Not because truth is subjective, but because selfishness and cruelty darken apprehension, reason itself.
. . .
Many liberal, Enlightenment, or socialist critics fear Heidegger because they see him as undermining the universal rational subject that grounds liberal democracy, objective norms, procedural reason, scientific discourse, and emancipation from myth or authority. From that perspective, Heidegger’s emphasis on historical situatedness, disclosure, destiny, language, and pre-conceptual belonging can appear dangerously irrational, tribal, or politically volatile. If reason is historically conditioned and there is no neutral standpoint, then what protects us from fascism, nationalism, mythic politics, or authoritarianism?
That critique has force. But it often misses what draws people like me to Heidegger in the first place. I am certainly not attracted to irrationalism. I am attracted to Heidegger’s critique of reductionism: the insight that reality exceeds calculative reason, that human beings are not detached Cartesian spectators, that truth involves disclosure and participation, that language shapes worlds of meaning, that modern technological consciousness flattens being into manipulable objects. But my criticism comes from an older metaphysical and moral tradition rather than from procedural rationalism. Heidegger rightly criticizes modern reductionism and the illusion of purely detached rationality. But because he severs disclosure from the transcendent Good, he lacks an adequate criterion for judging disclosures themselves. That is a Platonic/Thomist criticism.
For Plato, participation in truth is
inseparable from orientation toward the Good. Not every unveiling is equally
revelatory. The condition of the soul matters. Moral and intellectual virtue
are intertwined. For Aristotle, practical wisdom (phronesis) requires rightly
ordered desire. Reason alone does not guarantee goodness because corrupted
desire distorts judgment itself. For Thomas Aquinas, intellect is naturally
oriented toward being and truth, but the will and moral character profoundly
affect one’s capacity to perceive and love the good rightly. Evil darkens
understanding. So for me the problem with Heidegger is not that he rejects
“objective rationality” in the Enlightenment sense. It is that he lacks a
sufficiently developed account of the Good, moral virtue, love, the
purification of attention, the normative hierarchy of disclosures, the moral
conditions for truthful perception – all the things I find in Weil, Pieper, Murdoch,
and Gaita. This is why Heidegger’s thought can express ambiguity about destiny,
rootedness, historical revelation, and collective identity. Heidegger recovers
transcendence without adequately recovering moral transcendence. He recovers
the mystery of Being without sufficiently distinguishing between higher and
lower participations in reality. That is different from the liberal criticism
that simply wants to restore neutral rational procedures.
And thus my emphasis on the sublime linked
to goodness. I want neither a flattened procedural rationality nor sheer
historical disclosure untethered from moral reality. I, like the thinkers I
just mentioned, want a conception of transcendence in which reality genuinely
exceeds us, while also preserving a hierarchy grounded in goodness and love
rather than merely in intensity, destiny, or power.
It was Alan Bloom’s critique of Heidegger
in The Closing of the American Mind that first got me thinking of these things
in the late 1980’s. Bloom recognizes Heidegger as perhaps the deepest critic of
modernity and also regards him as dangerous. Bloom’s claim is that Heidegger
exposed genuine weaknesses in Enlightenment rationalism, liberalism,
positivism, and technological civilization but did so in a way that ultimately
undermined confidence in rational truth itself. For Bloom, modern liberal
education had already collapsed into relativism: students no longer believed in
truth, only in “perspectives,” cultures, values, or historical conditioning.
Bloom thinks Heidegger radicalized this tendency philosophically by historicizing
reason itself. The danger, as Bloom sees it, is that if all thought is
historically situated disclosure, if philosophy is inseparable from epochs of
Being, if there is no stable human nature accessible to rational inquiry
independent of historical horizons, then philosophy loses its classical
orientation toward permanent truth. This is where Heidegger becomes, together
with Nietzsche, Bloom’s philosophical enemy.
Bloom always starts with Plato. For Plato,
despite human finitude, there remains an intelligible order of reality toward
which reason can genuinely ascend. Philosophy aims at truth about nature,
justice, the soul, and the good. The philosopher may never possess exhaustive
certainty, but the distinction between truth and historical interpretation
remains fundamental. Bloom claims Heidegger dissolves this distinction. Instead
of asking “What is justice?” one now asks “How has justice historically
disclosed itself within a horizon of Being?” Instead of asking “What is human
nature?” one asks “How does humanity understand itself within a historical
epoch?” For Bloom, this shifts philosophy from rational inquiry into
contemplative historicism.
And politically, Bloom fears that once
rational universality collapses, people become vulnerable to historical
destiny, collective identity, mythic belonging, and charismatic movements. In
his reading, Heidegger’s Nazism was not an accidental biographical error but
connected to this deeper anti-rational tendency. If he were alive today, he
would see himself confirmed in this diagnosis.
Importantly, Bloom does not think
Heidegger was a vulgar irrationalist. Quite the contrary. Heidegger was too
profound for that. The danger is deeper: namely, reason itself becomes
subordinated to pre-rational historical disclosure. Thus philosophy ceases to
judge history from the standpoint of truth and instead listens for “sendings of
Being.” Bloom believes this leaves human beings spiritually defenseless against
powerful historical moods. He thinks philosophy requires eros toward stable
truth, not merely receptivity to historical disclosure. The Platonic ascent
toward the Good becomes replaced by ontological listening. In my terms, Heidegger
recovers mystery but loses moral and rational hierarchy.
. . .
I still don't
know what to think of Heidegger as a human being, not wanting to be judgmental,
but I guess what I think about him is not that important. I would like to
believe the Hannah Arendt picture and not the picture of an unregenerate nazi
who hurt people without remorse and doctored his texts later.
There is strong evidence, so far as I can
judge, that Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism was morally serious
and not merely a brief accidental political mistake. His rectoral address, some
administrative actions, later silences, and especially portions of the Black
Notebooks make it impossible simply to dismiss the issue. He clearly hoped, at
least for a time, that the movement represented some kind of
spiritual-historical renewal for Germany. And his later refusal to offer the
kind of explicit repentance many expected understandably troubles people
deeply.
At the same time, the caricature of
Heidegger as simply a lifelong monster or secretly unchanged Nazi also feels
inadequate to many who knew him personally or studied the complexity of his
life and work. Hannah Arendt is important because she knew both his greatness
and his blindness intimately. She did not excuse him, but neither did she
reduce him to his political failure. She saw a man capable of extraordinary
philosophical insight combined with astonishing moral obtuseness and
susceptibility to historical illusion. Profound ontological insight does not
guarantee moral clarity. A person may perceive dimensions of Being, language,
finitude, and transcendence while remaining morally compromised, self-deceived,
vain, ambitious, frightened, or historically blinded. In fact, one danger in
Heidegger is that his philosophy does not sufficiently humble disclosure before
goodness, which is evidence of this moral obtuseness. If one becomes fascinated
by destiny, hiddenness, historical revelation, rootedness, or “greatness,” one
may become vulnerable to confusing intensity with truth. Philosophers often see
some things with extraordinary depth while remaining blind to other aspects of
reality. Plato would likely say that intellect severed from moral purification
becomes unstable. One can ascend very high intellectually while remaining
spiritually disordered. The danger is not merely theoretical error but
distorted eros.
One
can acknowledge Heidegger’s philosophical gifts, the lasting importance of many
of his insights, the darkness of aspects of his political involvement, the
insufficiency of some of his later responses, and the possibility that these
things are connected in partial and complicated ways. Indeed, I constantly try to
understand how truth, blindness, disclosure, ego, history, love, and moral
failure intertwine within finite human beings, like myself.
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