Rev Left Radio - Heidegger in Ruins: Philosophy, Fascism, and the Politics of Being

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

In this episode, Breht speaks with Dr. Richard Wolin, author of Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, about the dark entanglement between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and his lifelong commitment to National Socialism. Heidegger is often hailed as the most important philosopher of the 20th century, yet his work was deeply shaped by the reactionary politics of his time. Wolin explains how Heidegger's central ideas -- Being, Dasein, authenticity, rootedness, and the "decline of the West" -- became intertwined with fascist notions of destiny, hierarchy, and belonging. They discuss the long history of attempts to sanitize Heidegger's record, what the Black Notebooks reveal about his true convictions, the interwar period in Germany and the conservative revolution, Heidegger's spiritual racism, and how the same civilizational despair and longing for renewal echo through today's far-right political movements. This conversation explores how the search for meaning and authenticity, when divorced from solidarity and democracy, can turn toward reactionary myth-making, hierarchical exclusion, and fascist authoritarianism. Check out Dr. Wolin's articles in the LA Review of Books HERE   ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Today we're diving into one of the most challenging and revealing questions in modern intellectual history. How do we make sense of a philosopher who reshaped the way we think about existence while also embracing one of the most murderous political movements in history? Martin Heidegger is often described as the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He revolutionized Western thought by shifting philosophy from abstract concepts to lived experience, to our being in the world, our more talented. our historical situation and our search for meeting in a disenchanted age. He influenced existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, postmodernism, political theory, theology,

literature, and even environmental and ecological thought. And yet, Heidegger was also a committed Nazi, not reluctantly or momentarily, but deeply and spiritually. He saw the rise of national socialism as a world historical awakening, a metaphysical renewal, of the German people. And crucially, his fascism wasn't a happenstance or a side hobby. It was intertwined deeply with his philosophy, with his ontology. His emphasis on destiny and rootedness fed into ideas of a chosen vulk or people. His rejection of enlightenment humanism aligned with authoritarian anti-liberalism and fascism. His critique of modernity and technology became a civilizational narrative of decline. His concept of

of authentic belonging shaded into a kind of spiritual racism, an ontology of exclusion. In other words, Heidegger wasn't just wrong politically. He built a philosophical framework where authoritarianism and fascism could appear as authenticity and where reactionary politics could seem like a path to spiritual renewal. Understanding that connection matters today because many of the themes Heidegger leaned on are alive once again. Civilizational decline, nostalgia for lost greatness, hostility to democracy, the longing for rooted identity, and the romanticization of mythic pasts and strong leaders. And so, engaging Heidegger is not simply an academic exercise. Engaging Heidegger is a way of understanding how profound existential questions can be captured and weaponized by reactionary politics.

To help us navigate this terrain, we're joined by Dr. Richard Wolin, distinguished scholar of intellectual history and author of the book Heidegger in Ruins. In this interview, we explore how Heidegger's Nazi politics infuse his philosophical project, the role of the Black Notebooks, which was released in 2014 in revealing that connection, how editorial choices help sanitize his legacy, his relationship with Hannah Arendt, their affair and longstanding relationship, Hannah Arendt eventually became sort of apologist for Heidegger, and how elements of Heidegger's reactionary worldview echo in today's far-right movements.

And in that part, we also discuss the influence of Carl Schmidt explicitly on the Trump administration and major figures in the American Reactionary and Fascist Movement. We touch on figures like Nietzsche and Julius Evela, who we've talked to, about before. And in the show notes to this episode, I'm going to put a bunch of our episodes on those figures. So as we talk through them and after you listen to this interview, if you're so inclined, you can go and listen to those. Particularly the one on Carl Schmidt that Allison and I did is, it comes up throughout this conversation and I think is deeply relevant to a lot of the themes that we explore in this conversation with regard to the relevance of these ideas to modern

reactionary thought. So this is a conversation with a scholar and somebody with a deep sense of history and a keen insight into philosophy. It's a conversation about the dangers and the responsibilities of ideas about how meaning, identity, and crisis can either open us up toward solidarity or drive us toward authoritarianism and myth making. So in this episode, we talk about Heidegger. We talk about his philosophy, his politics, how they're intertwined, how his reputation was attempted to be shorn up after the Nazi catastrophe, how he attempted to distance himself from his actual deep involvement with national socialism, the figures and philosophers who tried to help him with that, and kind of dismantling that

entire thing. And in the process, I think we do a deep philosophical investigation on the core concepts of reactionary politics, of fascism, that we're alive back then and are just as alive and well today. The parallels are quite astounding. But of course, we also never fall into simplistic analogizing. This is just like that. It's never a copy and paste situation, but it's more about exploring these core ideas that animate reactionary politics. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio. We are 100% listener funded. Always have been. Always will be. You can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio in exchange for a community situation rooms where we talk about unfolding global political events as they happen. Bonus episodes

that we put out every single month. Access to our meditation group and much more at Patreon for only $5 a month. You can get access to all of that. But if you just want to shoot us a one-time donation, you can do that at Buy Me a Coffee. forward slash rev left radio links will be in the show notes if you can't support us financially we totally understand leaving a positive review on the podcast on apple or spotify goes a long way and increasing our reach and and you know presenting a good foot forward for people that stumble across us and might not know when you come across the new podcast and you see that they have not only good reviews but thousands of them that helps the reach of the show so if you would

like to do that we would deeply appreciate it all right without further ado here's my with Dr. Richard Wolan on the philosophy and politics of Martin Heidegger. Enjoy. Thanks for having me on, Brett. I am university professor at City University, New York, kind of by default. I don't think I ever had my sight set on becoming a quote-unquote academic, but as it turned out, after having put all this time into a dissertation on Walter B. Benjamin, which I'm proud to say turned into the first book in English way back in the 20th century on Benjamin. I'm not sure I was fit to do anything else. So as it were, one thing led to another. But my sympathies, as I think this is perhaps I'm hoping part of the motivation for having me

have always been with the new left as it emerged in the 60s, and much of what I've tried to do in my so-called scholarly work has been to try to sort up the wheat from the chaff and to preserve what I feel is worth preserving about this political movement. also in opposition to counter-revolutionary political and intellectual occurrence. So I think that's pretty much in a nutshell, the threat I've been tugging on for most of my career. Well, yeah, wonderful. And it's a genuine honor to have you on. I actually just came across Highdigger and Ruins,

the book we're going to be discussing primarily today by happenstance. You know, I'm obviously, I have a degree in philosophy. this show does a lot of philosophy episodes and I'm just deeply personally interested in philosophy, but Heidegger was one of those thinkers that was always sort of obtuse to me. It was hard for me to get into. It was never high on my list of philosophers that I was really interested in. And I've sort of been feeling as of late that I should kind of rectify that and kind of clarify Heidegger's contributions to philosophy and his thought in general. And then I came across to your book and I just found it fascinating, learning more about

his ideas and the way that his reactionary politics are sort of infused into his ontology, into his philosophy, and perhaps the relevance for today, because, and we'll get to at the end of the conversation, the relevance for the far right today, because some of these ideas are certainly present in the reactionary right. And yeah, you coming from a new left background and having this interest in philosophy certainly overlaps heavily with what we do here at Rev. It's wonderful to have you on. And again, the book we're going to be discussing is Heidegger in ruins between philosophy and ideology. And your book argues that, you know, Heidegger's philosophy is not merely tainted by his politics,

but deeply suffused with reactionary ideology. For listeners that are unfamiliar with this debate, maybe unfamiliar with Heidegger more broadly, can you kind of explain what's at stake in this argument and why Heidegger's political allegiance matters for understanding, you know, 20th century philosophy as a whole. Sure. I'd be happy to go into that briefly. For a long time, it's been known that Heidegger was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party beginning in 1933, and shortly after Hitler's seizure of power.

but the documentation really didn't materialize until concerning the extent of Heidegger's involvement, until really the late 1980s, and it broke out as something of a scandal back then. At the same time, the Heidegger Guild, let's call it, has been pretty efficient in separating, let's say, the politics, from the philosopher or the man from the doctrines and ideas. And I think recently this artificial separation, which has always been tenuous, it's been tenuous and unconvincing because if one looks at all these speeches and texts

he wrote in support of the movement in the years, 33 and 34 above all, he uses the lexicon of his existentialism at the time, the philosophy being in time, which his great book, which came out in 1927 just a few years earlier. So he justifies his allegiances to the movement in terms of the categories as philosophy. So right there one has a problem because if Heidegger thought, you know, rightly or wrongly that the political corollary or or outcome of his thinking would be a movement like national socialism. That, of course, causes one to raise one's eyebrows and raises a whole series of questions. But really, there would have been a lot of manuscripts from this period of time,

seminars, he presented, lectures, he presented, and also letters. He was quite a, I think the letters, you know, all told run to about 80,000, something like that. Of course, he lived quite a long life. He was born in 1889 and died in 1976. But these are quite revealing of his, you know, innermost attitudes, one might say. So it's taken a while for, let's say, the pieces. of the puzzle to fit together in a way that's convincing and that that has changed quantity into quality, one might say, so that we now seem to have before us all the correspondences

between his thinking, he called it in German as Denkin, his fundamental ontology, which is another way he referred to his philosophy. and national socialism. And yeah, you argue in the book that it's not just this sort of polyanish notion that there's a separation between his Nazi allegiances and his philosophy or a naivete about these connections that some people have advanced, but actually systematic editorial sanitization of his work to kind of whitewash it in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe, whitewash it of some of its more overt declarations of his alignment with the, you know,

the national socialist ideology. Can you kind of talk about who is behind this systematic attempt to sanitize Heidegger's work, why they were doing it, and maybe the clearest cases of this as an example? Sure. I'd be happy to. In part, it's a long story, but the origins of these efforts are pretty easy to explain because, you know, first of all, one has to appreciate that. In 1945, after the collapse of Nazism, there was a University of Freiburg where Heidegger taught denazification commission, which was fairly common, you know, and widespread at that point, German universities and elsewhere. And Heidegger was deprived of his right to teach. there was a decisive intervention by his sometimes companion du root, the philosopher

called Yaspers, that tipped the scales against him, one might say, against Heidegger. He was allowed to collect his pension for five years and continue to write, but Yaspers said quite pointedly, and the letters available in English as well, that it would be disaster for Heidegger to teach a new generation of German youth after 12 years of Nazism. I mean, we can go into the reasons for that. But so, in other words, the cut to the chase here, Heidegger's philosophical project or intention to present himself as the really the, as some people claim he said, the greatest philosopher in the West.

since Heraclytus, which is going back quite a ways, right? Was jeopardized. And according to one biographer, who's also in Freiburg, Hugo Oort, he had a nervous breakdown in 1945-46 because of the trauma of the denatification process. So that setback resulted in an effort by his supporters to make sure that he would present himself. He was able to present himself in a new light following 1945. So many texts were actually manipulated. The first few volumes of his essays that were published, circa 1950, there's one important. important collection called in German as Holzwega or, you know, technically its forest paths,

etc. Where texts were manipulated to suggest that already in the late 30s, he was opposed to national socialism and then he developed a critique of it as overly indebted to technology and Western technology and had betrayed his expectations, Heidegger's expectations, and it betrayed its potential. I don't know what kind of potential

one could really project on a movement that was so barbaric and genocidal. That's another question, of course. So this effort was quite successful, even though He couldn't continue to teach. He gave a lot of private lectures, at, let's say, right-wing German think tanks and, you know, even some art museums and organizations.

So there was a secret effort on the part of right-wing intellectuals, either Nazi or ultra-conservative, who understood what Heidi was about and tried to support him. And to kind of end this reflection on the way his literary state was manipulated, there was a very conscious and systematic effort to withhold certain texts, especially from this controversial period of the mid-1930s, from publication. The text in question were published very late, basically, in the last, 10, 15 years. And, you know, when you think of it, there's this ridiculously enormous, you know,

quantity of high-deer scholarship in, you know, any major language one can think of. His books have been translated into, you know, most major languages, of course, in Europe, in Asia, et cetera. So there's this voluminous volume of scholarship that didn't have the full dossier at its disposal. So, you know, one is basing what scholars base their judgments on only a partial and very highly selective representation of his corpus. And this is, is, it was intentional. So, you know, one has something of a fet accompli in terms of sympathetic interpretations of his work. And we're, we're still kind of picking up the pieces today in sorting these issues out, I think. Yeah, so my kind of a follow-up there is, did Heidegger himself directly engage in these

attempts to obscure his politics during this time? He lived until the mid-70s, I believe. So did he himself engage in this? Was he ambivalent about trying to hide up his, you know, try to obscure his politics? Was this mostly done on his behalf by others? How do you make sense of that? No, he took final responsibility for all editorial decisions. He oversaw the editions of his work. So anything that was published under his name, including texts of seminars, transcripts of seminars, which we have a record of insofar as students who were in the seminars, transcribed the discourse.

but he signed off on all of this, including the texts I refer to at the outset from the late 40s, circa 1950, where he actually added passages, kind of anti-Nazi passages and backdated them, claiming that he'd already had these criticisms of the movement in the late 1930s. So he was fully involved in the process. Of course, after his death, his literary editors, one of whom was his son, Hermann Heidegger, who only died a few years ago, who was in his 90s, who had a PhD in military history and was highly protective of his father's reputation.

But there were many, you know, manipulations and kind of withholdings of the, sequence of his lectures and other texts related texts that was that was kind of decided on by his editor. So that's another dimension. So at the end of the day, what they were trying, I think they're all trying to do is obviously kind of shore up and protect his philosophical reputation and his legacy still kind of claiming. I mean, you said he was continuing to give talks at think tanks on the conservative right. So, you know, pretty much acknowledge. perhaps. Yeah, I'm conservative. I'm right-wing, but I'm not Nazi. I'm not national socialist and trying to retrofit some of his work to, to, you know, make it seem like that. Is that more or less correct? That's what they were trying to do?

Yeah, there, of course, you know, Germany was occupied the western half of Germany by the Allies and, of course, East Germany was occupied by the Soviets. You know, the Soviets didn't leave until 89, and Germany was occupied by the Western powers, who of course left a substantial number of troops there thereafter, 1995 because of the Cold War. So there was a not-so-covert campaign to undermine the Western occupation and to expose, its illegitimacy, and also, you know, here's the crucial variable. There were approximately 8 to 11 million German nationals who had been driven out of the so-called Eastern territories by Soviet troops at the time of the Red Army's march toward the West in the final stages of World War II.

And this was a very powerful revanchist constituency. radically anti-Soviet, anti-communist. And a lot of them settled in southern Germany in Bavaria, which is still probably Germany's most conservative province. Of course, there are other problems in the former Eastern Germany now with the far right party. But Heidegger, there was a big constituency that supported these ideas and revisionist ideas about national socialism, where, you know, one kind of sorted out,

the tried to sort out, as it were, the wheat from the chaff, the bad aspects of Nazism, from the good aspects of German traditions. And so, and there were many other conservative thinkers who had been compromised. Karl Schmidt, for one, the philosopher Arnold Galen, not so well translated English, but very important, who tried to do something similar, namely, preserve the ideational core of the so-called German Revolution, which is one way to refer to Nazism, against its radicalism. So it went too far in certain respects, supposedly. So this is a very important story, and it remains important because many of these revisionist ideas one finds circulars

circulating among the German far right today, especially among members of the alternative for Germany and the think tanks associated with this right wing political party. And Heidegger's name comes up all the time to justify what they're up to. Absolutely. And to give a sheen of philosophical depth and legitimacy to often very base and vulgar reactionary politics, right? There's several figures in philosophical history that are pulled from by the reactionary right. Not to say that the Rectionary Right doesn't have an intellectual legacy, but there is a sense in which if we can associate ourselves with these giants of Western philosophy, there's an aspect of legitimacy to our ideas, right? Right. That's right. Finally, before we move on to Heidegger's core ideas and the thoughts themselves, which I think are fascinating and in many ways interesting to. to, you know, for somebody that is interested in philosophy, like, you know, you should wrestle

with high diggers ideas because it's, it's a giant, you know, mark on the 20th century philosophical formulations. But before we get to some of those ideas, there's one more question on this front, which is, you know, a part of your book, of course, which is the, the black notebooks that were published in 2014. Can you kind of briefly just describe what the black notebooks were and how they kind of, you know, drive home the main point of, you know, parts of your book. Yeah, this is one of the controversial aspects of Heidegger's literary estate. I think if it had been left up to the, you know, supervisors of his estate, namely his son and his last assistant, you know, or Friedrich von Hermann, who is his name, who was a

senior student who was in charge of his literary estate, they would have suppressed these texts. but Heidegger insisted that they be made available. These are notebooks. They take up the last nine volumes of a collected works edition that runs to right now 103 volumes. In fact, there are more volumes planned now. But they actually make a lot of money for the publisher too, so that's not the least interest in publishing philosophical scraps

that might not intrinsically deserve publication. Be that as it may, he, as of 1931, the first volume is lost for reasons were unable to discern, but as of 1931, for the ensuing four decades, really, he kept a philosophical journal where he would set down his philosophical ruminations, and often he would correlate these with contemporary political and cultural events that he saw relevant.

So they had a quality of spontaneity, but it was also an attempt to relate current events to fundamental themes of his thought. And so now we, when they were published in 2014, the first three volumes were published 11 years ago, and shortly thereafter they were translating to English. We had an entirely new record of how Heidegger himself thought about the relationship between his philosophy and ideas and current events, which at that point were talking about the Nazi seizure of power and the total transformation of Germany along the, and its metamorphosis, into the Third Reich.

Heidegger was, so we also have a record of his philosophical notes and thoughts when he was rector from 1933 to 1934 at Freiburg University and when he tried to really achieve kind of philosophical mastery of the entire movement. So the later volumes might not be as much as interesting for a variety of reasons. The volumes after World War, too, are interesting because they reveal that in certain ways he continued to be interested in the national socialism and to justify it and to continue to propound anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He talks about a conspiracy of world journalism, which is suggestive of world jury. etc. So, you know, this is a very important documentation of Heidegger's self-interpretation at the time.

And it certainly kindled or, you know, set off a re-evaluation of this period, the early 30s of his philosophy. and, you know, was really kind of a watershed in Hydera interpretation for these reasons. Yeah, and one of the core arguments, correct me if I'm wrong, that kind of emerges from your book is basically, you know, you might want to initially say, well, you can, you know, the old cliche of you can separate the art from the artist. You know, you can separate the philosopher from his politics. But the argument that you make and that emerges in things like the Black Notebooks is that there is no actual separations. here, that these ideas are core to his politics. And he was thinking about his ideas in the context of real political events. So these things actually can't be separated out. And I want to kind of move in that direction to kind of get into Heidegger's philosophy. It's an opaque philosophy, right? It's,

it's not easy to get into. Having wrestled with like Hagealian philosophy or, you know, Khan's critique of peer reason, if you had or had to sit down with one of those philosophical tomes and try to work through it. It's incredibly challenging. So I suspect that most listeners will not have directly read Heidegger. But for those who may not know his philosophy directly, can you kind of briefly explain his central project, right? This question of being the notion of Dysane and how did this kind of ambitious attempt to rethink the foundations of philosophy create the conditions for the political and ideological commitments you analyze? Sure. So he, published being in time, the work that really made his reputation in 1927.

As I mentioned, prior to that, he published very little. At the time, he was 38 years old and had a reputation for being a spectacular lecturer. Hannah Arendt, who of course was a hidey or student, speaks of the rumor of hidden king, even prior to the publication of being in time. But the one speaks of being in time as a work of, Heidegger didn't like the term existentialism, but the center piece of being in time is the notion of Da Zine. So this is Heidegger's attempt to break with modern, the legacy of modern. philosophy or what we call epistemology since the time of Descartes that takes its point of departure

from the thinking subject or the you know the Cartesian idea of I think therefore I am ego co-gito sum that is really the sets the pace and precedent for modern transcendental philosophical inquiry. One sees it in Kant. You mentioned Edmund Husserl's ideas from 1914, etc. Heidegger was a philosophical assistant for Husserl in Freiburg initially and then took over Husserl's chair in the late 1920s. But so Dazine can be, it's often kind of translated or understood in English as being in the world, which is a literal translation of the German phrase he uses in Dauvels-Sin. So, you know, rather than start with mind or thought or, you know,

thinking substance as Descartes and his successors did, Heidegger wants to start, claims it's presupposition list, but the only presupposition one has is, as it were, being in the world. So there's Husserl talked about the philosophical bracketing or reduction. It calls it the, uses a Greek word, epoch, to make his transcendental phenomenology presuppositionless. That was a concern of Descartes, too, right? Because if you have presuppositions, your starting point

might not be flawless or pure. That was a desideratum, right? So Heidegger tried to correct that by saying, well, the first thing we know is our existence, our being in the world without

determinate presuppositions about, I don't know, you know, nationality or language, or, you know, social relations, et cetera. It's the bare nature of existing, hence the notion of, in German, it's existence philosophy, philosophy of existence. So by making that initial move,

you suspend or bracket all related presuppositions about the nature of mind, the relationship between mind and body, et cetera, what Descartes called, you know, race cogetantes thinking substance versus extended substance. So, you know, one of the reasons Highdigger's philosophy really caught on later decades among so-called philosophers of mind is because it seemed to be reconcilable with American pragmatism, for example,

where you start off with, you know, not with pure thought, but with, you know, world, let's say world relations. So, and it also, as you can see, it, this pointed departure of being in the world represents a possible solution, if you want to call that, to the most, you know, challenging, and difficult philosophical enundrum inherited since state-cart. That is the mind-body problem, how something, two different substances,

thinking substance and extended substance, mind and matter. How could mind, if it's of a different substance, conceptualize matter? How do we know that we're, you know, aren't we reducing our, aren't our judgment about extended substance or physicality, an expression of our human mental prejudices. Actually, Kant somewhat admits this, and what else can we do? But Heidi, this pragmatic point in departure

of being in the world tends to dismiss this other consideration, mind-body dualism, as let's say, as Wittgenstein says, a pseudo-problem. It's a false start. So this got, you know, this has really been, you know, the American reception of Heidegger has kind of piggybacked on the tradition of American pragmatism of Charles Perse, Dewey, Richard Rorty at a later point, etc. The later Heidegger thinks that this original point in departure in being in time was probably the Dazine being in the world.

Framework was too subjective even for him. He, this is when he really undergoes what he, he himself calls a term in German as Kera, a turn toward the primacy of being. And he becomes closer to the Pesocratics. And he, he elaborates this phrase, the history of being, as an attempt to circumvent the potentially subjective and, and, modern slant of his earlier existence philosophy or existentialism. Yeah. I hope it wasn't more confusing than reading Heidegger. Then it would be self-defeating, I guess.

I have a confusing commentary about someone who's already really confusing. No, not at all. I think that was clarifying and incredibly interesting. And again, we can spend a long time just talking about, the idea of being and how Heidegger wrestles with it. But starting from that position of, you know, what does it mean to actually be instead of dealing with objects or the division of being, the mind-body problem, etc. It's this key innovation. And it does wrinkle down through, you know, all philosophy that comes after existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-structuralism.

And we'll kind of touch on that here in a bit. But suffice it to say, this is a meaningful. full move in philosophy and one that has reverberations through the philosophical canon after Heidegger's contribution. So it's important philosophy. But I want to kind of move to some of his reactionary elements. And, you know, Heidegger often framed his work as a response to the decline of the West. And if you know anything about reactionary politics today contemporaneously, you will constantly hear this idea that, you know, there's the decline. of the West. The West is in decline. Western civilization is coming to an end. We must defend

Western civilization. It's really an obsession of reactionary thinkers and has been for some time. It's not new. What did he mean by this decline? How did he sort of think of what this decline meant or what it was constituted of? And how did that sense of civilizational crisis kind of open the door to right-wing and fascist political hopes? Yeah. I'm happy to talk. I'm happy to about that briefly, and you're absolutely right to correlate the obsession with decline in German, and it has a weighty term. It comes from, literally from Schengler's book, Oswald Schengler from 1918, the first volume of Decline of the West, Undregongis, Avonlandis, that has a very powerful impact among, you know, German intellectuals during the 19th.

And Heidegger, it's not well known, but if you look at the transcripts of his early lectures before being in time and seminar courses from the 1920s, there's, especially in the early 20s, right after World War I, there's a substantial engagement with Spengler. And this means something important, which is that Heidegger, you know, he thinks of his philosophy. his early philosophy in the 20s being in time as not some purely scholastic, otherworldly ivory tower kind of pursuit, but he has a sense of its being in the world. And that the point of departure for considering Da Zine or being in the world is our everydayness. That's the first division of being in time.

It's called everyday being in the world. So it's a point of honor, one might say, in doing philosophy for Heidegger to talk about our rootedness in the historical present, which doesn't mean we accept everything, but for him, it's a, you know, inevitable and unsurpassable point of departure. So the, but to talk about decline, Schengler and, and, and. the whole generation of so-called conservative revolutionary thinkers in the 1920s who were influenced Daesh Bangler figures in addition, Heideur, Carl

Schmidt, and Sjonger, all these figures are making an important comeback among you know disciples of the far right. They're they all think in the wake of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche has a towering influence on this generation and you know in a nutshell Nietzsche declares modernity, liberalism, democracy, socialism. These are expressions of nihilism. These are expressions for Nietzsche of the mass man, mass society. And of course, Nietzsche was in favor of some kind of, sometimes it's called an aristocratic radicalism.

He had a thing for Napoleon. There's actually a good book on this. It's a light motif because Napoleon was a great conqueror and, you know, an emperor. And these are forms of political rule that Nietzsche emulated. And Spengler ends decline of the West with an ode to Caesarism, you know, as the new form of political rule. And, you know, which could be said to coincide with German political traditions. terms of authoritarianism, especially once monarchy is discredited in 1918 with the defeat in World War I. How do you go forward?

A lot of the German right at that time looked toward a new authoritarianism, let's call a secular authoritarianism. They look back to the figure of, you know, Caesarism or Bonapartism or authoritarianism. So these, to, to, you know, bring this to a point, these two aspects of decline on the one hand, nihilism as diagnosed by Nietzsche, as perpetuated by Schengler, there's a phrase in German that captures this whole mentality really well. It's, and the words, it's, you know, in German, you can combine all these words, but they're cognates for the English. it's called Civilizations Critique, Critics of Civilization, and it's a conception of Western civilization, meaning France, England, the U.S., etc.,

that's entirely enamored of technology and mechanics. They don't see anything else going on. Instrumental reason, one might call it using Fongford School, lexicon, and this is the reason for decline. a superficial concern with, you know, economics and industry, etc.

The typical German prejudices during World War I about Manchesterism in England, etc. That's all they see. So, and, you know, the critique as your question began, the critique of democracy

and the idea of political equality that's invoked among representatives of far right today depart from a similar standpoint, really, in terms of their critique of egalitarianism and, you know, any notion that people, the great mass of individuals or citizens would be capable of ruling themselves rather than need a ruler. So, you know, it's come to haunt us today again. Absolutely. And it's really the sentiment of a lot of these tech oligarchs, this idea that, you know, they're openly now hostile to the idea of democracy. This figure who is not intellectually impressive in my estimation, but actually has some purchase on the American Reactionary Right is Curtis Yarvin, who basically advances this techno-oligarchic form of Caesarism, which is just like, you know,

a monarchist in the form of a corporate CEO today. And, you know, one thing that I think is interesting here is that these reactionaries, you know, you're talking about them wrestling with industrialization, alienation, you know, the commodification of everything as the industrial revolution picks up. And, you know, these are things that also left-wing thinkers at the time and to some degree now in a post-industrial society still wrestle with. but there's a fundamental difference, I think, between progressive and revolutionary politics and reactionary politics. And that is that in the face of this change, you know, with the good, the good, bad and the ugly that comes along with it,

the reactionary turn is always to look back into some lost golden era, to see modernity as fundamentally decadent, as a fall from some prior height and an attempt to get back to that height. I think that's an impossible game to play. reactionary politics never succeed because it's always trying to do the impossible recapture what is lost. I think the progressive and revolutionary mindset in the face of often disturbing and disorienting change as well is that the only way out is through, that actually working with the contradictions of the present situation, working through them in a way that attempts to actually resolve them and to see society as an evolving process that must go forward, that there is actually no way to go back. There's no way to make the change.

stop or to halt it, that we have to kind of ride the wave and move forward in a determined and analytical and conscious way to try to, you know, toward the creation of a better society for all. And I see this in Spangler, in Schmidt, certainly in Nietzsche, certainly in Heidegger, this attempt to go back, this attempt to look back. And in all modern reality, I mean, what does make America great again, if not some hope to go back to some previous golden era, right? What do you make of that? Yeah, no, I agree. In the European context,

it's a nostalgia for the Onsen regime or aristocracy or something that resembled the hierarchies of feudalism where you have ruled by aristocrats or notables,

etc. In the American context, of course, you don't have this feudal past, but you have a sense these techno-fascists whom you rightly identify Curtis Jarvin and one of his sponsors and one of, you know, J.D. Vance's sponsors as well, Peter Thiel, who are

enamored of some idea of that that those who are most, it's very, you know, smug and self-satisfied, right, self-interested, that the smartest people should rule or tech, you know, giants should rule. And their great fear is that, you know, tech will be, it's totally self-interest. That tech will be regulated, you know, recently, you know, Peter Thiel, who donated 50, million dollars to Vance's Senate campaign in Ohio three years ago and also

according to those who are informed was the one who really pushed for Vance on the presidential ticket as vice president in spring 2004 Vance

has been going around, I'm sorry, Teal has been going around these days, giving these lectures on the Antichrist which is also a figure in in Carl Schmidt, the Caddacom. And he associates the Antichrist basically with, the Antichrist could emerge in various strange guises. We might never know.

But one definite sign of the Antichrist emergence would be someone who wants to limit tech. And regulate tech and regulate artificial intelligence. This is the nightmare of Peter Thiel and many of his Silicon Valley colleagues. And, of course, the figure you mentioned, who's now the darling of the far-right manosphere and has that all, Curtis Yarvin, you know, his pen name, as you know, when he started writing these blogs, you know, 15, 18 years ago was Mencius moldbug, and the

Mencius comes from, you know, this society of high IQ, you know, et cetera. And so, so, but there's, you know, if one, one did a kind of a social, psychological, Freudian analysis of this mindset, there's a lot of insecurity here. There's an insecurity that, and a paranoia, that, that, that, you know, these people, you know, I don't, I don't mean to, There's no adequate diagnosis from, you know, my study in New York that I can hazard. But there's this projection of a fear of being misunderstood by so-called lesser minds. And this is also the fear of democracy, fear of having some kind of, you know, democratic, legal, juridical, and, you know, parliamentary safeguards against the excess.

of people who don't have a very good sense of politics, but merely see their private game of, you know, private game of, you know, Peter Thiel with Palantar, which is now making money, you know, head over heels in Washington by getting all these defense contracts. So I think if we wanted to really make America great again, We'd have to do some very serious regulation of a few industries in Silicon Valley that have influence well beyond the merits of their ideas and appreciation of even America's democratic traditions and the meaning of those traditions. Yeah, well said, and I'm in complete agreement.

And, you know, my take on these guys, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Andresen, Curtis Yarven to some extent, but especially the big tech oligarchs, is that, you know, capitalism has more kind of arbitrarily, right? A lot of these guys, they had financial backing from the get-go. They caught really big breaks, right? They got into something and sold it at just the right time. It's pretty contingent. It's pretty arbitrary. These are not Uber mentioned, you know, willing to power over society. They kind of caught a lot of breaks.

and capitalism has rewarded them in this incredibly powerful position in society. And then that immediately goes to their head. And their ego kind of convinces them that they are these Uber mentioned, that they got here through peer will to power, that they are inherently superior to all of us, peasants who can't comprehend their internal enormity. They're very smug and self-satisfied. But again, when you really listen to them, and I've listened to long interviews with all of them. They're not incredibly impressive people and it kind of drives home the point that they were

kind of arbitrarily rewarded by this contingent system of capitalism and then it immediately sort of goes to their head and is turned, you know, through their ego into a sense of real superiority. And then they have a political project that, of course, you know, elevates them to the, to the center and to the highest echelons of power. And the irony of going back to Nietzsche, really, the irony of those who believe in this uber mention idea is that you know they rarely truly live up to it in their own in their own lives you know and even nietzsche himself was not the uber mention that he you know articulated as the the goal um for for a human being to strive for which is you know basically stomping on every there is no restraint on you right that any restraints on you is are artificial

and their modern decadence and a real uber mention just blows past them and creates his own values and sets the standard for his own, you know, being and society is just a hindrance on that. And so I don't know. Do you agree with you kind of agree with me that they've kind of been catapulted to these echelons of enormous wealth and power by an arbitrary capitalist system that then goes to their head? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I was just last month, I guess now it's November, at a conference in Berlin at the so-called Einstein. forum is the name of the venue. The theme was other people's fascism. And I wanted to do,

I guess the title of the conference meant, okay, we've heard enough about German fascism. Historically, let's go, let's see what's happening elsewhere these days. So I actually wanted to write on something that was contemporary and something that comes from the U.S. since there was a lot of interest in Trump and Magan and this continuum of techno-fascists. So the subtitle of my presentation was the American rights search for a red Caesar, which is a light motif one

finds among right-wing intellectuals to support Maga and Trump, etc. And I discovered on the internet there's all this imagery of this kind of goes back to the phenomenon of Caesarism. of Musk and Trump and others outfitted in Roman garb. They sell these tokens online of Trump in various poses as, you know, dressed up in, again, in Roman garb or as a Caesar, etc. So it's, it's pretty laughable. I think if you

you show this to people who know something about the history of, you know, the Roman Republic and the transition of the Roman Empire. And they see Trump outfitted in this way. And Musk has a similar fascination with the Roman Republic, or actually instead with the Roman Empire, really, with, you know, Augustus Caesar, who destroyed the Republic. there's a lesson for us all right there that, you know, this is really extremely superficial. But it's a very widespread attitude. I mean, J.D. Vance on Pondcast has said we're living in a late Republican era. What does that mean? He's referring to the Roman Republic and the decline of the Roman Republic as a result. as a result of Caesarism in part, as a result of civil wars after Julius Caesar had seized power,

was of course assassinating the Iads of Marx. But it's quite alarming, to put it modely, because it suggests that the only way we can, this figure of the Red Caesar, of course, it's an allusion to being red-pilled, and Red States, of course. The idea is that we need a dictator to, well, the conflict between red states and blue states and to forestall an American civil war, which of course is a theme that is raised a lot these days about where all this, you know, political, you know, enmity and polarization might, might end. So there's an agenda here. We're seeing it realize before our eyes every successive week with new breaches of rule of law on the part of the Trump administration. Yeah, yeah.

It's fundamentally infantile. It's sort of pathetic in its own right. And these figures never live up to their ostensible standards. They're being set in Trump himself, like as if Trump could be this world historical, great man of history when he's. is just so myopic in every sense of that word. So it's farcical through and through, but it doesn't mean it's not dangerous because they really believe this stuff

and they do have enormous amounts of wealth and power, and already they're causing immense misery around the world and here at home. And another irony of this, you know, under the banner of ostensible renewal is just the acceleration of decline, right? And that's an irony they never seem to fully grasp. Right.

But that actually leads fairly well into this, next question, which is Heidegger's critique of modern technology and how he used that word was a little broader than we might initially think. And it's often praised, I think, you know, rightfully in its own place, as a profound sort of critique of modernity and even ecological thinkers on the left have picked up on some of these philosophical fragments and ran with them. So in your reading, how does Heidegger's critique of technology function within his broader corpus and how does it serve rather than restrain his, you know, authoritarian and anti-democratic commitments? Well, this is exactly a key theme or reference pertaining to the later Heidegger.

It becomes explicit with a couple of essays he writes already in the late 1930s. it bespeaks his philosophical antipathy, or another iteration of this antipathy, to Descart and Western philosophy and the so-called philosophy of the subject, which characterizes not only Descartes, but so many other thinkers in the modern Western tradition. And it becomes the light motif

that he relies on to facilitate his own political rehabilitation in the early 1950s. He becomes a critic of technology. He gives lectures in 1949 at private clubs throughout Germany, or tentiously titled The Question Concerning Technology, these are readily available in English. The important theme here, though, is, of course, it is important to, as you suggest, you know, set limits to technology to examine the kind of overreach. We're having these debates are probably not as much as we should these days about artificial intelligence, etc.

But Heidegger used this phrase or critique of technology basically as a cudgel. with which he could, you know, indict and beat the West as superficial as having accelerated decline and really distoke fear and to declare the illegitimacy of the so-called Western powers who had defeated national socialism and to suggest, and of course America, was in his mind, not really based on any empirical or historical knowledge of American culture or politics. But it was the worst instance of these tendencies, which of course, a prejudice that accorded with many traditional right-wing prejudices about the nature of American civilization and its superficiality, totally circumventing the, you know, and egalitarian aspects of American political culture. Somehow those just don't figure on the radar.

So technology became really this cipher and, you know, signal to the German right that only Germany had the profundity and the cultural historical depth to foster some kind of remedy or antidote to the rise of technology in the modern world. And, of course, with the advent of nuclear weapons and atomic bombs, etc., mutually sure destruction, and, of course, Germany is on the front line in the Cold War. And, you know, East Germany, West Germany, this heats up, of course, course, in the early 80s again, with the debate on middle-range nuclear weapons, et cetera,

implanted on German soil, either in East Germany or West Germany, et cetera, under Reagan and the German chancellor at the time as of 82 was Helmut Cole. So the critique of technology, which is very abstract and generalized anti-political, in many respects, plays on people's fears and is used as kind of an ideological cipher with which to indict political tendencies with which Heide disagreed, such as democracy and republicanism and human rights and so forth. So I think that there's a kind of a new sobriety about the limitations of High Digger's approach. But of course, I think if you look at the American reception of High Digger, beginning in the, let's say, 60s and 70s,

in the aftermath of the horrible war in Vietnam and the use of American technology to batter largely agrarian people into submission with, you know, B-52 bombs. commerce, et cetera, you know, the Heidegger's critique of technology, I think, was an important stimulus for the reception of his work in North America and Western Europe as well. It seemed to be, you know, very, very important and lend weight to these criticisms. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I can see that at the time, you know, that sort of critique taking hold and I mean still we're living in the wake of of that transformation and we live in a hyper evolving technological society there's lots of uncertainty and fear about where it's all leading

I think most people are predisposed these days to have a pessimistic view of where things are going we're at previous iterations of this process there was more optimism I mean early soviet union optimism about the future of human society compared to like modern western pessimism about it's an interesting line to follow. Briefly, before we touch on the conservative revolution, this just occurred to me. You mentioned Hannah Arendt earlier, and of course she's famous for her work on totalitarianism, et cetera. Can you maybe briefly speak to their relationship?

Because I remember something in the past about them having an interesting intellectual or even romantic relationship, but it's kind of fuzzy for me. Can you clarify what their relationship was? Yeah. It's a lot of it was set forth in. this biography of Hannah Arendt by Elizabeth Young Gruel, but now there are just a number of books about it, and even a play,

written by Kate Fodor called Hannah and Martin. But I think it won awards as well. But she was a student, a very young student, 18, in Marburg, Germany in 1924, where Heidegger taught. And, you know, they had an affair approximately two years. And it was, as the French say, liaison dangerous, because had it been found out, Heidegger would have, you know, been dismissed from his teaching position.

He'd yet to receive a permanent full professorship at this point. So it ended after two years, and one of her colleagues, the philosopher Hans Zionis has also told some of the story in his memoirs. And there are letters, their correspondence has been published. Actually, it's mostly his letter since I think it's pretty clear that he destroyed most of her letters, because, again, had they been found out, it would have been the end of his career. But they kept in touch, and she finished a dissertation in the late 20s under Carl Gospers and Heidegger. And they took up contact again, Heidegger and Anna Arendt in 1950 when she returned to Germany.

And they fell in love again. And she wrote to a letter saying that they're being reunited was, she said, used the phrase, the confirmation of an entire life. So they became close again and would see each other during her visits to Europe. And she played a central role in overseeing the translation and publication of many of his works in English and always justified him, especially. she wrote a long

in an commium or you know essay praising him on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1969

is published in the New York Review of books where she again kind of established some important parameters distancing his work as a philosopher from his

political fall from grace in 1935. She compared it. Famously, she compared it to this pre-Socratic philosopher, Heidegger's knowledge of politics. So Thales, this pre-Socratic

philosopher is so busy contemplating the heavens, he fell into a well and died. So, you know, this was so which is to say that Heidegger's succumbing to Nazism was just

pure contingency and that philosophy and politics don't really mesh on any level. It's kind of pre-fit. She called it actually, again, pardon my French, a deformation professional or one of the debilities of being a philosopher and having deep thoughts is that you can't understand, you know, the prosaic nature of things that happen in this world.

But I don't think that holds up very well in that respect, especially in high digger's case. Absolutely. So she's engaging in Apologia. Do you think she's acting in good faith? Is she blinded by her personal relationship? Is she actively trying to protect his reputation? Or is this kind of a, yeah, like a conscious bad faith thing? How do you?

What's your read on that? Very simple. I suppose to some of the other answers. I'm keeping you by my apologies. Love is blind. she saw what she wanted to see. I mean, I don't think she could ever reconcile the adulation. I mean, just think of that.

I mean, she was so young when she met him, and he was supposedly the heir to this great tradition of German philosophy, beginning with Dependium when you want to, you know, start Blibniz and Kant and Hegel, etc., etc. Heidegger seemed to be the, and presented himself as, as the air, of this tradition. And, you know, for her who came from one of Germany's eastern provinces and was Jewish as well, you know, having been, you know, received and approved by this great German thinker, it was an incredible, you know, vote of confidence, got confidence and

source of inspiration. I think that it was very difficult for her to reconcile both her love and her philosophical adulation of Haider and German philosophy in general with what happened in 1933. But she did a courageous job, I think, with her book on Tiltfaltarianism and other works trying to sort this out. She devoted her, you know, her entire intellectual life to probing, you know, how this was possible. She was less convincing when it came to Heidear himself. You know, people can make up their own minds about this. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

This period of time between World War I and World War II in Germany, obviously, is historically rich. You know, you have the rise of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the humiliation of the German loss after World War I and the economic and social difficulties that the German people were burdened with, which became a hotbed of hostility to, you know, the rest of Europe and the world. And, you know, you can't separate World War I from World War II by any means. So your book kind of explores and emphasizes Heidegger's participation in the interwar conservative revolution. Can you talk about that milieu and how Heidegger translated, you know, its themes of destiny, Volk, rootedness, the decline of the West, et cetera, into a philosophical vocabulary?

Yeah, I think this is actually really really. important and I think it's appalling that most English language Heidegger discussions and commentaries related to being in time neglect this aspect of the work, the whole second division of being in time. There are two divisions. The second division centers on the question of historicity, which is a kind of metapolitics. And it's in the second division, the first division is about

every day being the world, which is inauthenticity. Conformity, the mass person or individual math, it's a veiled critique of mass society, not very thinly veiled. The second division is all about historicity.

So, and this is where these, an attempt to solve the problem of mass society or conformity. And that's where all these concepts, or idea calls them existentials, to differentiate them from so-called concepts, to indicate their rootedness in the life world, as it were, of destiny, folk, community generation, decisiveness, which in German is

and Schlossenheit, it has kind of a neutered translation in the English version of being in time as resoluteness. But these are really key words of the conservative revolutionary movement in the 20s. It wasn't as if they got together every fourth Sunday

of the month. to, you know, kind of organize a conspiracy against the Vimer Republic. But it was significant intellectual affinities among the things I mentioned a lot earlier, such as Carl Schmidt and Ains Junger, Oswald Spengler, Schengler, and Heidegger for a short time were in the 30s involved in the Nietzsche archive, in overseeing a new edition of Nietzsche's collected works. before Schengler died in 1936. But so the whole problem and problematic of what I was earlier talking about,

you mentioned the problem of decline. I called it critique of civilization or civilization's critiqu is endemic to this mindset. And Heidegger as someone who philosophizes on the basis of being in the world has a certain, you know, pragmatic orientation that cannot help but factor in, again, if not, because his philosophy is not on the level of, you know, everydayness, but because of fundamental ontology. So it's kind of a, the politics are kind of a meta-politics. But it's there with these concepts of decisive, it's an implicit critique of democracy and Western political ideas.

It's really hard to miss in Division II of being in time. And, you know, he has a voluminous correspondence with Ernst Junger, whom he lionizes and admits in 1930s is the inspiration for his political orientation during this time. Anne Zyunger who wrote in the Storm Osteo, this book that's only recently interested called The Worker in Germanist der Aibiter, which is from 1932,

glorification of a future totalitarian society consistent with this idea of total mobilization. All these expressions recur explicitly in Heidegger's philosophically informed political texts from the 1930s, total mobilization, you know, decisiveness, authenticity, et cetera. So it's really kind of impossible to deny the right-wing ideological valence

of much of his rhetoric and above all in the second half of being in time, but also this very notion of the critique of mass society or, you know, decline or Western nihilism, which he lectures on again in the 1930s. So this is, you know, a veiled critique of the Weimar Republic, critique of Western values, et cetera,

from a proto-fascist perspective because there's no German fascism. I mean, Hitler and his minions are kind of nowhere during most of the 20s, only with the economic crash of 1929, did they achieve their electoral breakthrough the following year in 1930. So to say that he wasn't a Nazi, well, you know, the Nazis were only getting from, you know, three plus percent of the vote until 1930.

So that really isn't the benchmark. But it's the, and it's also significant because the so-called new right after the after World War II, their path to rehabilitating fascism has been through the, you know, ideas of the conservative revolutionaries whom we're discussing at the moment. They're, they're in vogue again. I mean, even figures like, you know, Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign manager and others. I mean, J.D. Vance mentions Kyle Schmidt in an interview with the Times columnist Ross Dothat in June 1924 interview he mentions Carl Schmidt. So these people are clearly being read and lessons are being learned.

Absolutely. And I just want to remind listeners that we have an episode on Carl Schmidt on the concept of the political. I'll link to it in the show notes so people can wrestle with it. We come from, you know, a Marxist, you know, left-wing critical perspective on that book. but we explore it fairly and I think it's it behooves people who are interested in these contemporary dynamics to understand a thinker like Schmidt to see the appeal that he might exert on the right and perhaps as you and I were talking about before we started recording even on the left one of Karl Schmidt's arguments in that book is this this overarching frustration with liberal procedureism that you know in a moment of crisis can kind of appeal to the left and the right like we're all kind of fed up with the stagnancy of our ostensibly liberal parliamentary-ish system, right?

This checks and balances that seems to constantly prevent any forward movement. From a right-wing perspective, you know, you have this reactionary attitude towards it, this disdain for democracy as such, et cetera. From a left-wing perspective, we just see as like this system is unable to rise to the challenges of its time. So I think that explains some of the appeal that a figure like Carl Schmidt might have for figures on the left. as we were talking about.

But the overarching disdain for democracy is really essential for reactionary movements now and in the past. And I think what we have to argue for is the extension of democracy, right, into the workplace, into the economy, to try to make a system that works for people as such and to never back down from our political project, which is, again, the radical extension of democracy, the belief in the human capability of self-governing and a rejection of anybody that wants to come and dismantle democracy in favor of these. Again, pathetic and often infantile and deeply reactionary ideas of Caesarism and dictatorship, et cetera. So, yeah, there's lots to think there.

Do you think that's more or less right with the Karl Schmidt analysis or what are your thoughts on that? Oh, yeah. No, I think that's very, very important. one, especially after, well, there's been a reception of Carl Schmitt, well, as you say, both on the right and left, but on the right, really beginning with the 9-11 terror attacks and this glorification on the right with the Patriot Act during the Second Bush administration of this figure of the state of emergency, or emergency powers, state of exception actually in Carl Schmidt, that, and the justification of a strong executive. So there's been a, you know, a considerable, actually voluminous reception of Schmidt's notion of

unlimited sovereignty on the part of the right, you know, has to do with this notion of the unitary executive, et cetera. And it's, it came back in play. was revived during Trump's first presidency, and now you see so many analyses of Trump's attempt to rule by executive decree

and his tendency to overlook legal decisions that don't go his way, etc. There are a plethora of when commentator, and analysts look for a proper analogy or basis in political thought. Schmidt's ideas are never far away. So it's really skyrocketed, especially the phrase of the state of exception and state of emergency and the way the way that the Trump administration has exploited this notion to argue for, you know, false, deceptively argue for false emergencies in so-called

Democrat-run cities, et cetera, so we could send in the National Guard, which is a response that's totally disproportionate to any of the issues at hand as is fairly self-evident. But it's all performative, right? It's Trump, these, these, these terrible, you know, illegal, you know, destructions by the military of these boats that are supposedly, you know, running drugs in the Atlantic, the Pacific. I mean, how do we know what the boats contain? There's been no evidence.

And even were we to know, that's no excuse for violating international law and engaging in summary executions. So this is really a slippery slope. And, you know, it's not accidental. This is the topic for another podcast, or maybe one you did already on Carl Schmidt's concept of the political, which ironically appeared the same year as being in time, 1927. Wow. And the book I'm writing right now is on a committee called the, from 1934,

the Committee on the Philosophy of Law that was organized by Hitler's personal lawyer Hans Frank, who was a Nuremberg war criminal executed in 1946, called the Committee on Philosophy Law, both Schmidt and Heidegger were members of this committee.

So they were marching shoulder to shoulder, so to speak, to reconfigure the totality of German law according to Nazi precepts. But, you know, it's no accident that Schmidt, with this fetishization, clarification of the state of exception ended up where he did in 1933 supporting Hitler so vociferously.

100%. Yeah, I think that's really interesting and really important to know that this is a conscious strategy that figures in the Trump administration have Red Schmidt and are trying to put that playbook into action. And the attempt to kind of farcically say that Portland and Chicago are war zones. and so we're kind of trying to create the state of emergency around them. But also going into those cities in hopes of provoking a response that they could then more credibly say, you know, rises to the level of a state of exception. These are purposeful tactics. And I think the brutality of the ice raids, you know, Trump is firing many heads of ice right now because he wants it to be more aggressive. And that's certainly, I think, a conscious strategy to provoke. the broadly conceived left or just people in general to fight back to then justify this crackdown.

And another thing I would argue is that Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy is a Schmidian take on the slowness of liberal parliamentary bureaucratic operations. So this flood the zone strategy is Schmidian in that it's saying let's take advantage of this weakness of a checks and balances system that takes time to catch up to what we're doing. So we'll go full steam ahead. We will take advantage of that weakness and we'll make them play catch up while we're five yards ahead constantly. So I think that on Steve Bannon parts is a conscious strategy that he derives from Carl Schmidt. So he's a central thinker in this administration for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's go move into this element of racism, right? And we were kind of touching on it a little bit there. The notions of Volk and rudeness certainly play into this. But you argue that Heidegger's racism was spiritual rather than biological, right? A racism of authenticity and rootedness. You know, and Heidegger would put like Jewish people and liberal cosmopolitans as, you know, these signs of decadence and decline precisely because they were an unrooted people, right?

And he had obvious disdain for that. So could you unpack what you mean by spiritual racism, how his idea. of being of the soil or down-to-earthness lead to exclusionary and hierarchical visions of human worth? Yeah. It seems somewhat counterintuitive to associate anything having to do with fascism with, quote-unquote, spirit. So part of it depends on what one means by spirit.

Of course, in German, it's this, you know, weighty term that appears. in the title of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, the word is geist. If one, you know, Germany, of course, wasn't the only fascist country or country of the fascist movement

in the 20s and 1930s. There were parallel phenomena in most European countries. And Germany, actually, the German version of fascism. I mean, it's interesting to note, you know, I mean, Hitler never he was in competition in part with Mussolini.

Mussolini was a model, but also German national socialism and Nazism were different than Italian fascism. Mussolini basically invented fascism, even though you could say the constituents were there, I don't know, maybe even in Nietzsche and before. But, you know, Muflini is the one who founded the Italian fascist party in 19. 19 and shaped the notion of fascism, et cetera. German national social was much more exclusive. It had to do with the German race, with Aryanism, et cetera. This is very different than Italian fascism, which is Italianist in certain sense, tries to recapture ancient Rome, but certainly has nothing parallel to the emphasis on biological belonging.

that Nazism did. But this can be misleading, too, and I'll just give one example of how this figure of so-called spiritual racism that Heidegger actually touches on works.

I mean, the next to Mind Kampf, which Hitler wrote in prison in 1924, came out the next year, the most important text of Nazi ideology is Alfred Rosenberg's myth of the 20th century, which came out in 1930. Rosenberg, who was a Baltic German, virulent anti-Bulshevik, was very important in the formation of Hitler's worldview back in Munich in the early 1920s during the formative years of Nazi doctrine.

But the important point here is that Rosembourg, Mursomers conception of race, it's, it's, it's mystical racism. Blood has these mystical properties. The, the, he calls it, you know, like he speaks of the race soul. In German, it's Rosin Zela. I mean, what, what is that? I mean, it's obviously, uh, something that's, you know, quite, you know, to be charitable. I mean, conjectural hypothetical. How do you, how do you demonstrate the race soul. Well, it's a question of belief. It's not a question of evidence just like the Nazi concept of race.

Even the so-called biological proponents of racism, there's no plausible genetic correlation between chromosomes and cultural or intellectual capacity. This is

scientifically demonstrated. So they have to you know, reconfigure it for their own purposes of, you know, national grandeur for exclusion, this inflation of, you know, this mythical notion of Aryanism. You know, it's a, it's a kind of a Frankenstein,

a monster, a contrivance that emerges over the course of the 19th century and then especially during the time of World War I. So the Nazi notion of race, it's not scientific at all. And Heidegger was a critic of science and scientism, of positivism, of 19th century thought. His existentialism was meant to be a critique of this scientific attitude, you know, even though. Even, of the end of school logical positivism, et cetera. And so it's meaningful to understand his endorsement of national socialism and national socialist ideology as consonant with that standpoint. I mean, but outside of Germany, this idea in France, it's very widespread to own French, fascist wannabes during the 1930s, this notion that we're going to recover spirit, that the age of

democracy and the third estate has led to France's decline. And we French fascists are going to recover spiritual values that are lost in a mechanistic modern civilization. So it bears reflection. There's some good literature in English these days on Italian spiritual racism, on a confrontation when Mussolini belatedly after the, you know, packed with Hitler and 38, decides to institute race laws as kind of an afterthought. And as an expression of solidarity with Nazism, there's kind of this battle between kind of indigenous Italian spiritual racists, you might call them. Ulius Avala, another fascist thinker who's gotten a new lease on life lately, kind of led this contingent, but vis-a-vis Italian racists who thought they were being more in line with

biological racism. There's this big tension in Italian race thinking between these two factions, too. but so so that's it's i think it's worth reflecting on yeah we also of course did a episode on julius evelace ride the tiger um where we discuss a lot of these ideas and kind of from a deeply critical perspective of course even a mocking perspective um you know go through his his particularly fascist ideals which are deeply reactionary and and he's in one of his core critiques of nazism was that it was too modern It was too much of a mass movement and it was too modern in its articulation and expression. So interesting to understand these figures because they are alive and well on the contemporary right.

I have a couple more questions for you. But briefly, I just want to ask, as we zoom into these last two questions, you know, you're talking about a time in a lot of this book, you know, the inner war period, where the center of politics is in. deep contention and in deep crisis in a lot of ways and in periods like that you see as the center gets hollowed out and loses legitimacy you see the rise of alternative politics right on the left and the right and it's i believe that we're living through something similar in the united states and perhaps across the western world right now where the liberal center um consensus

is weakening and falling apart completely and while it still has the media and the money and the donor classes and still able to survive on its momentum, we see a dissident right on the rise and a dissident left on the rise, kind of grappling with and confronting the two political parties in an interesting way that are supposed to represent those right and left ideals. Do you see particular parallels between, you know, that period in German history, for example, right before World War II and the rise of Hitlerism and fascism and what we're living through today in the United States and the Westmore broadly. Yes, I do, but in a qualified sense.

And I think the, you know, during the first Trump presidency, there was this American fascism debate that played out in the newspapers and, you know, magazines. And I think that the sensible critics at the time paused to point out that major differences too. I mean, the Weimar Republic, it was very short, live from 18 to 1933, Germany didn't have these Republican traditions or traditions of well-developed civil society, and, you know, that's not characteristic of the, you know, Western democracies today, liberal democracies. So I think this is an important difference to point out. Also, you had all these, the human material, these fascist movements, was largely the veterans organizations

who succeeded World War I. Ernst Junger was a primary representative. So these were, you know, demobilized troops who were looking for another battle. And especially, as you indicated in the German case, had strong revanchist motivations and were looking for an opportunity to overthrow the Versailles Treaty and reassert German primacy. And it became even more exaggerated as the decade progressed and the economic crisis took hold.

So I think these differences are important to keep in mind. I mean, you know, the U.S. economy has, you know, been declining under Trump with his fetishization of tariffs and erratic, you know, conduct. and and and uh but you know rates of unemployment in in the western european countries in the u.s in 1930 31 you know you're talking about anywhere from 30% to 35% unemployment people were you know at the bottom of the well and we're almost willing to uh you know sign on with any alternative that promised them a new beginning. So these are very different circumstances. So I think they have to be kept in mind in evaluating the prospects of 21st century Caesarism. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a sober-minded analysis and something worth keeping in mind

to prevent the simplistic analogies that can sometimes emerge at times like this. So there are substantial and significant differences. I do think a total economic collapse. It's not unthinkable at the moment in the next couple of years. And if it happens under a Trump administration, I think it could be catastrophic and perhaps all bets are off at that point. But in lieu of that, I think, I think, yeah, a lot of your points hold quite well. And we could talk about that more. But I want to be respectful of your time. So two more questions here. And then I'll let you go. And I really do appreciate your insight so much. One of your provocative claims in this book is that, you know, Heidegger didn't reject Nazism for its brutality or

or its racism, but because it actually wasn't radical enough in some important ways. It remained mired in machination and vulgar biologism. What does that mean? And how did Heidegger imagine a truer, more spiritual form of national socialism that the Nazis themselves failed to realize? Yeah. I mean, in a way, there's an important parallel with the Italian figure you mentioned a few minutes ago, Ulyssé, Avala, who wrote this book on fascist. as viewed from the right, who refused to have much to do with Mussolini's fascist Italy,

especially after the Lateran accords with the Pope in 1928, he felt that was a compromise that Mussolini had made a series of compromises with the old regime, as it were, that had accounted in Aval his eyes for the inauthentine, of Italian fashion. Actually, he ended up in the 30s spending a lot of time in Germany and hanging out with the SS. And there's correspondence. It's never been translated into English with the leading member of the SS, which he considered, the notion of racial purity and discipline, etc., is something he identified with. In Heidegger's case, I think part of this is a, and after the fact, construct. and rationalization.

I think it's also an expression of his own megalomania, namely the disappointment involved in his own political failure. I mean, he, according to the best accounts we have, he was deluded enough to think in 1933 that his hour had arrived and he could play philosopher King. of the Nazi movement, again suggesting a strong correlation between the nature of his philosophy and what was materializing for his eyes with the Third Reich or aspects of it. This seems to be something he was convinced of as hard as it is for us to believe today.

But I think part of his disappointment the movement was the fact that he was, he lost several political battles and felt that he also recognized that he was a

maladroid in the political sphere. He was a maladroit actor. So this is part of the reason he resigned from the rectorship of Freiburg University in April 1934, but he still remained actually quite an active national socialists after that, which is part of what my next book will be about, the book, having to do with Schmidt and Nazi law. But I think that, you know, he did have this, there were a lot of German

intellectuals, right-wing intellectuals who signed down to the movement in the early 30s, and, you know, let's not forget that, who were disappointed. And part of the reason they were disappointed was because, They had these visions of German rebirth that, and after 36, when Hitler began seriously to rearm in preparation for the war, all these so-called utopian plans for German rebirth having to do with the idea of national socialism and the Third Reich, etc. were put on the back burner. And the entirety of society, there was total mobilization. that's Junger's word that was endorsed by Heidegger, but it was in the service of war. Now, many of these right-wing thinkers aestheticized war in keeping with the ethos of the warrior in World War I, et cetera. But this meant that the dystopian political project of national socialism, and this was part of Hitler's thinking too, was postponed until after the victory,

you know, hope for victory in World War II, when Germany could become, you know, the unchallenged hegemon of the continent and, you know, annex parts of Eastern Europe, conquer the Soviet Union, which is, you know, exactly what it tried. So, you know, I think high digger's just so-called disappointment has to be understood in this sense. All right, well, let's wrap it up with this question. Your title implies a kind of a wider reckoning. If Heidegger's legacy is in ruins, you know, what does that mean for parts of post-war thought that were shaped by him and his philosophy, existentialism, post-modernism,

deconstruction, post-humanist currents, etc. And how should scholars responsibly teach Heidegger now, in your opinion? Well, that's a tall order, right? Not that it's an illicit or invalid question, but actually you've managed to focus or focus on or target kind of the wider thrust of my project. I mean, I wrote this book in 2005 on The Seduction of Unreason, where I treat some of these other thinkers in

Nietzsche and some of the key thinkers of postmodernism and their affinities with Heidegger's thought, either direct or especially kind of French post-structuralism or French theory are

quite evident and important. But I think that there's a framework here. Sometimes it's implicit at other times it's quite manifest of, it's partly a Spanglarian inheritance about decline. There's kind of a Western, you know,

I don't mean to use this term irresponsibly, but self-hatred, a sense that the more we denounce Western traditions and values, including democracy, human rights, you know, and so forth, that we're doing a service for some kind of progressive agenda. But how progressive is it? That's the point. I mean, I'm always fascinated. I mean, in France, you have this figure of so-called left-hydgarianism to encompass the French incredible, you know, rise of Heidegger interpretations and Heidegger's currency in French intellectual life after

World War II, notwithstanding, you know, his support for Hitler and the Third Reich. But I think there's a lot that needs to be demystified and thought through that we are, you know, as quote unquote postmodernness, we're embracing whole hog, this figure of of civilization's critique and notions of decline, and the more radical we are, I mean, the accelerationists and, you know, partisans of dark enlightenment fall into this trap, too. It's a very Heideggerian mode. So I think that in tandem with an appreciation of Heidegger's limitations as a thinker,

one has to really re-examine some of the philosophical movements, the ones you mentioned actually in your question, that are indebted to this framework that really, you know, solidified, consolidated themselves in the 20s and 30s. And often we think we're being radical as critics

or as political thinkers, by embracing these ideas, but I think we need to be a little bit more refined about where these ideas led in their original context to help orient us in the contemporary period. Well said, well said. Well, I know you have so much other work that I'm fascinated with. I mean, I know you did a book on,

I believe it was a full book on the impact, pact of Maoism in France, which I think is super interesting and a lot of your other stuff. So I hope this is not the last time we talk. I would love to have you back on for more discussions. I found this book incredibly illuminating in our interview even more so. So I really, really appreciate your time. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find your work and perhaps you online and what, yeah, if you want to re-talk about some of your other books or the next project you're working on? well

I'm not especially hard to find my my teacher at the Graduate Center City University which is right across from the Empire State Building

so it's hard to miss and you know I think I think it's easy enough to find the books if you want to take the trouble to read them

but I also try to do a lot of I guess what's called a scholarly journalism or, you know, writing for the public sphere. Sometimes I hold back on that a bit if I'm immersed in a longer project or a book project, something like that. But, you know, in the last few years I've written on replacement theory, I've written a couple of articles in the New York

Review of Books. I'm sorry, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I've written an article on French, the swan song of French Nietzscheanism, which is related to some of the themes we discussed this morning. And so I think sometimes I wonder if anyone reads these shorter pieces about contemporary politics and intellectual trends. But if you are interested in my work, I think this is a good place to go. So I consider that an important compliment to the longer books, which understandably you might not have time for. So maybe that's a good place to start.

Wonderful. All right. Well, I really, really appreciate all your work. I'm looking forward to diving into even more of it. And I really hope that we can stay in touch and do this again sometime. Thank you so much. Great. Thanks for having you, Brett.

I enjoyed it.