Heidegger’s “Private Nazism”

Heidegger’s “Private Nazism” A review of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The introduction of Nazism into Philosophy By Teed Rockwell Sonoma State University December 2014 It is more than a little frustrating that a book as badly flawed as Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The introduction of Nazism into Philosophy will probably be unavoidable for future Heidegger scholars. It is a chimerical hybrid of three very different books, two of which are seriously marred by their entanglement with the third. 1) A study of the lectures Heidegger presented at Freiburg from 1933-35, immediately after he resigned from the rectorship 2) A study of Heidegger's immediate predecessors and contemporaries, and how they influenced and were influenced by him. These two "books" contain important information, not easily available anywhere else, about Heidegger's relationship to various odious intellectual trends that were linked with Nazism. This information should not be dismissed or ignored by anyone who is interested in evaluating the truth of Heidegger's vision, and for far too long it has been. Unfortunately this information is organized into 3) a paranoid tangle of very bad arguments claiming that A) Heidegger is nothing more or less than a Nazi apologist, and that consequently, B) the only way we can protect ourselves from a Nazi revival is to expunge all of Heidegger's greatest insights from modern academia and return to a reactionary neo-Cartesianian. Faye has undeniably discovered some ideas in Heidegger's 1933-35 lectures which appear to be genuinely dangerous and stupid, at least initially. Some of those ideas can be explained away by two interpretations that are far more charitable than Faye's. 1) Faye admits that these lectures were being closely monitored by the Nazis, and consequently it seems plausible that Heidegger was often saying things that he did not mean to placate the Nazi thought police. This undeniable fact easily exonerates the rest of Heideggerian philosophy from any taint of Nazism, regardless of what it may reveal about the cowardice and hypocrisy of the man. 2) Many of us have concluded that Heidegger's big character flaw was not cowardice, but hubris. We believe that he was sincere when he called himself a Nazi but that his personal interpretation of Nazism had little do with Nazism as practiced by the Nazis in power. Faye's book actually contains substantial evidence that supports this view. Faye admits that Heidegger saw himself as the Nazi's leading thinker, whose calling was to transform Nazism into something different. He quotes Heidegger as saying "In sixty years, our state will surely no longer be led by the Fuhrer, therefore what it becomes then will depend on us. That is why we must philosophize "(p.220) and "today no one knows who the state is. A state is in the process of becoming..." (p.222) Consequently, when Heidegger used certain Nazi slogans, such as "hardness" or "race" or "blood and soil", he was deliberately trying to give them a meaning that was importantly different from the meaning utilized in mainstream Nazi propaganda. This attempted transformation was a doomed and delusional project, and the fact that Heidegger couldn't see this reflects badly on his character and common sense. But it is extremely misleading to argue, as Faye does, that Heidegger's use of this jargon proves that he is a Nazi in the ordinary sense of the term. Heidegger had his own private Nazism, which needs to be understood on its own terms before we can decide to condemn or tolerate it. Heidegger had a very special gift for reinterpreting the great classic texts of western philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratics. He believed that he was uncovering the true meaning of these texts that had been lost for centuries. The rest of us who admire this work usually see these re-interpretations as brilliant original creations, and don't worry about how accurate they might be. Heidegger had an interpretation of Nazism that was as original and idiosyncratic as his interpretations of Parmenides and Heraclitus, which apparently made Nazism look pretty good. He was at least somewhat aware of Nazism's innumerable evils, but believed that eventually he could purge those out and come up with a more essential Nazi ideology that was humane and decent. This is not as preposterous as it would be for you or me to believe. Heidegger really was one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and he had a profound effect on the minds of thousands of people. This particular delusion is also not a problem when you're reinterpreting the ideas of someone who has been dead for thousands of years. But Marty, when Hitler is alive and his troops are marching across Europe, you don't get to decide what Nazism is. It's his ball, so you have to play by his rules. Surprisingly, Heidegger never seemed to have grasped this obvious point. Apparently he believed to his dying day that he was the only person who really understood what Nazism was, (or at least could have been) and that is why he never apologized for being a Nazi. He felt that he had stood up for his beliefs, and therefore he had nothing to apologize for. However, to understand why he felt this way, you have to give a meaning to Nazism shared by no one but him, and also believe that this idiosyncratic interpretation is the only one that mattered. This interpretation of Heidegger's behavior is far from flattering, but it is nowhere near as damning as the one that dominates Faye's book. Faye claims to offer evidence that Heidegger "uses the loftiest words of philosophy to exalt the military power of Nazism and justify the most homicidal discrimination" (p.317). He further infers from this claim that there is no significant moral difference between Heidegger's Nazism and that of Goering or Himmler, and that Heidegger's philosophy is as delusional and bigoted as that of Rosenberg or Hitler himself . These are strong claims, and they need strong evidence to support them. The problem with Faye's argument is that, although he quotes lofty words aplenty, his connections between those words and Nazi war crimes are extremely dubious. To support his conclusions, it is not enough to show that Heidegger uses expressions like "Blood and Soil" or "Volkisher Stadt." The more charitable theory proposed above would predict that he would continue to use these terms but try to reinterpret and transform their meanings. To disprove that more charitable interpretation, and show that Heidegger was a Nazi in any morally repellent sense, Faye must show that Heidegger used those terms as a way of justifying some immoral policy or action that fostered homicidal discrimination, such as the Night of the Long Knives, or the Extermination Camps, or Krystal Nacht, or the laws that forbade Jews to own land. Faye has numerous such quotations from people who associated with Heidegger, such as Rudolph Stadelman or Carl Schmitt. (Schmitt wrote an entire paper on the legal justification of the Night of the Long Knives.) Faye also gives anti-semitic quotes from earlier writers that influenced Heidegger, such Count Yorck and Spengler. All of these quotes use jargon co-opted by the Nazis to justify morally monstrous policies, and Faye intermingles them with quotes from Heidegger using similar jargon. However, Faye gives us NO examples where Heidegger himself agreed that this jargon justified any specific criminal Nazi actions. A careless reader could easily infer from Faye's juxtapositions that Heidegger is endorsing these same actions. Faye, however, provides us with no evidence that this is true. Faye shows that these other authors use terms very similar to Heidegger's in ways that are clearly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi, which is a very important scholarly point. However, none of this research supports Faye's inference that Heidegger himself must be anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. Faye criticizes Heidegger for lacking "the ability to make clear distinctions" (p.59) but his own arguments are logically fallacious. When Heidegger condemns factory farming by comparing it to the Nazi death camps, Faye sees this as an exculpation of the death camps. When Heidegger says that people do not authentically die in the death camps (p.305), Faye sees this as a claim that the Jews were not really human--a mistake that shows an ignorance of Heidegger's concept of authentic being-towards-death. Faye's most common fallacy takes the form "Some Nazis use phrases like 'blood and soil'. Heidegger used phrases like 'blood and soil'. Therefore, Heidegger is a Nazi" which is logically equivalent to "some dogs weigh five pounds, my suitcase weighs five pounds. Therefore my suitcase is a dog." Besides the logical problems with this argument, however, a look at the facts shows it has things exactly backwards. Faye correctly says that during this time Heidegger was "thinking of himself as a--if not the--spiritual Fuhrer of the movement". (p. 146) However, Faye does not see the most plausible implication of this assumption--that Heidegger would see his calling as correcting the misunderstandings of the essence of National Socialism that would appear in other Nazi-inspired writings. Consequently, the fact that Heidegger doesn't include the anti-Semitic points should be taken as evidence that anti-Semitism is NOT an essential part of his philosophy. There are, admittedly, a very small number of quotes in Faye's book that advocate general principles which are uncomfortably close to some of the more unsavory general principles of Nazism. These principles could lead us to justifications of Nazi crimes with relatively few steps, even though Heidegger does not take those steps. These quotes are, however, so few in number that I am going to list them all in this paragraph. 1) Heidegger apparently had a private conversation with a student prior to 1933, in which he said that Democracy was incapable of protecting Germany from Communism, and that consequently it would probably be necessary to overthrow the Weimar republic, possibly even by force. 2) in the 1934-35 lectures, Heidegger says some people, such as "negroes, the Kaffirs, for example" are incapable of having a history. (p.102) (Ugh! This is as bad as the many racist comments made by Kant, Hume, Locke etc.) 3) Heidegger says disparagingly of "Semitic Nomads" that they may never understand "the nature of our German space." (p. 144 ) 4) Heidegger said in conversation with Karl Jaspers that he believed there was "a dangerous international collusion of the Jews."(p.283) This widely quoted remark, along with the recently released Black Notebooks, strongly indicates that, like T.S. Eliot, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney, Heidegger was not above the widespread anti-Semitism of his time. Nevertheless, this suspicion of Jews in the abstract did not stop him from having many Jewish friends, including two brilliant Jewish mistresses. Some of these friends and acquaintances he protected during the Nazi era, others he betrayed. 5) In a letter on Dec 20 1933, Rector Heidegger sent a letter to his Deans and Faculty, saying that in a National Socialist state " the individual, wherever he may be, counts for nothing. The destiny of our people in their state counts for everything." (p.176)(I'm inclined to think this was one of those boiler plate propaganda letters Heidegger probably signed but didn't write, which eventually pricked his conscience enough to make him resign his rectorship.) 6) Faye provides disturbing evidence that Heidegger continued to be a great admirer of Hitler even after he resigned his rectorship. When Heidegger finally does criticize Hitler in 1939, it is for "indigence of thought"(p.284) rather than for crimes against humanity. Hitler's charisma, was legendary, of course, enabling him to delude people as smart as Mahatma Gandhi, Errol Flynn, Charles Lindbergh, and Neville Chamberlain. Heidegger's particular species of delusion was to blame minor functionaries for Nazi crimes and vulgarities, and to express the hope that Hitler would eventually "get rid of that fellow". (p. 207) 7) To save the worst for last, from the courses of 1933-34: Faye does manage to find one passage where Heidegger unambiguously says that a people must commit itself to finding and flushing out the enemy at the innermost root of its existence "with the goal of total extermination." (p. 168) Heidegger does not mention the Jews by name, but it is hard to think of anything but Nazi paranoia when reading passages like "The enemy may have grafted himself on the innermost root of the existence of a people. . .it is often much harder and more exhausting to seek out the enemy as such, and to lead him to reveal himself, to avoid nurturing illusions about him, to remain ready to attack. . . and to initiate the attack on a long term basis" (ibid). Can anyone who knows the history avoid thinking of the millions of Jewish Germans who suddenly discovered that their fellow Germans where now seeing them as enemies "grafted on" to the only homeland they had ever known? Faye quotes the passage at length, in both translation and the original German, and it seems at first that there is no way to interpret this passage that renders it innocuous. Even worse, Heidegger suggests that it might even be advisable to create an enemy where none exists " in order that. . . existence not become apathetic." (ibid.) How could any decent person justify treating any group of people this way? A skillful defense attorney could point out that Heidegger nowhere says that a group of people should be exterminated just because of their religion, race or ethnicity. Heidegger could be referring to a group that was defined totally in terms of voluntary acts of sedition against the state. If this is the case, this passage is making the uncontroversial claim that a country at war must defend itself against spies and terrorists. What about the phrase “create an enemy where none exists?” Doesn’t this mean “lie about innocent people so we can justify exterminating them?” Not necessarily. “Creating an enemy” could mean taking a stand on some matter of principle that would put you in conflict with someone who would otherwise be neutral. Martin Luther’s confrontation with the Catholic Church could be seen as an example of this. Nevertheless, the majority of Heidegger’s students almost certainly interpreted these passages as justifying the persecution of the Jews. That was how I interpreted them when I finished the first publically available version of this article, even though I wanted very much to find some other interpretation. I would speculate that Heidegger justified these passages as a way of placating his Nazi superiors. Perhaps he congratulated himself on writing something that they could misinterpret as justifying actions that he himself did not approve of, while at the same time satisfying his own convoluted conscience. I doubt that many of the rest of us will exonerate Heidegger for numbing the consciences of the young men who accepted, and perhaps even collaborated on, the Holocaust because of these “inspiring” words from the great professor. Nasty stuff, but not enough to fill up 400 pages. Consequently Faye pads the book with arguments using fallacious inferences structures which are unworthy of serious rational consideration. Unless one reads Faye's book carefully, this is not an easy thing to notice, especially because the quotes from orthodox Nazi thinkers are so emotionally disturbing. A truly rigorous scholarly critique would demonstrate this for all of Faye's Heidegger quotes, but I doubt if anyone would have the patience to read, let alone write, such a critique. I will limit myself to a few passages, but I assure my readers that these are unfortunately typical of the rest of the scholarship in the book. 1)Faye devotes five pages to a vile anti-Semitic speech by Rudolf Stadelman before he reveals the alleged connection with Heidegger--the fact that in a letter 15 years later Heidegger said to Stadelman "I was pondering over historical self consciousness....and thought of you in the process" ( p. 124-128) From this brief note he concludes that "The two men shared the same conception of human history as finding its meaning in the advent of the Hitlerian Reich". This is a fairly typical example of another of Faye's most frequently used inferences when talking about other thinkers. "Heidegger once said something nice about X. Therefore he agrees with everything X ever said or wrote." 2)Faye devotes a page and a half to a section entitled "Heidegger's anti-Semitism in 1944" which gives only this reason for the title. Heidegger quotes the following saying from Nietzsche and adds his own comment immediately afterwards. "'Germany has produced only one poet, besides Goethe: that is Heinrich Heine--and he is a Jew into the bargain...'. This saying casts a strange light on the poet Goethe. Goethe--Heine, 'the poet of Germany'. What happened to Holderlin?" (p. 300) In other words, Nietzsche thinks Goethe and Heine are Germany's greatest poets, and Heidegger disagrees, saying Holderlin is every bit as good. Suppose I responded to the claim that Sandy Koufax was the world's greatest baseball player by asking "What about Babe Ruth?" Would Faye accuse me of being Anti-Semitic? 3)The last passage I will consider appears on pages 139 and 140. Faye quotes it in full because he claims that it "best reveals the intensity of Heidegger's Hitlerism". Because Faye claims that this is one the strongest piece of evidence he has, I will also quote this text in full, with one small but important change. Although Faye writes in French he leaves the German word "Fuhrer" in the original German, and the English translation does the same. For non-German speakers, this comes across as a synonym for Hitler, but it is the ordinary word for any sort of leader in German. Consequently, I intend to translate "fuhrer" as "leader". Faye would no doubt point out that Germans in 1934 would have thought of Hitler when they heard the word, but that would be a connotation of the word, not its denotation. Furthermore, as we showed before, Heidegger believed correctly that his ideas would continue to be discussed long after Hitler had died. The bond of the order of the state is also part of this knowledge. Order is the way of being of man and thereby also of the people. The order of the state expresses itself in the delimited field of duties of specific men and groups of men. This order is not just organic, as one might suppose, and did suppose, based on Menenius Agrippa's fable; rather it is something which is spiritual/human, i.e at the same time voluntary. It is grounded in the domination/servitude relation of men to one another. Like the medieval order of life, so also today the order of the state is sustained by the free' pure will to loyalty and leadership, that is to combat and faithfulness. For when we ask: "What is domination? In what is it grounded?" then in a true essential answer we hear nothing of might, servitude, oppression, force. We hear rather that domination, authority, and service, subordination, are grounded in a common task. Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny, and fight for the realization of one idea, does true order grow. Then spiritual superiority and freedom respond in the form of deep dedication of all powers to the people, to the state, in the form of the most rigid training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and the superiority of the leader sink down into being, into the soul of the people, and thus bind it authentically and passionately to the task. And when the people feel this dedication, they will let themselves be led into struggle, and they will want and love the struggle. They will develop and persist in their strength, be true and sacrifice themselves. With each new moment the leader and the people will be bound more closely, in order to realize the essence of their state, that is their Being; growing together, they will oppose the two threatening forces, death and the devil, that is impermanence and the falling away from one's own essence, with their meaningful, historical Being and Will. Being raised as an American Hippie, my own breeding and traditions cause me to rankle at all this talk about the necessity of the domination/servitude relation. But I submit that whether you agree with this passage or not, it has no particular connection to Hitler or Nazism once it is shorn of the word "Fuhrer" and taken out of the context of Faye's heated diatribe. The same ideas can be found in John Kennedy's phrase "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.", In Nelson's "England expects every man to do his duty" and in the battlefield orations in Shakespeare's Henry V. This passage is not a nihilistic overthrow of traditional western values, it js a reaffirmation of tired old military cliches. It leaves me with no desire to read the entire lecture, but also with no reason to reject the great wisdom in Being and Time. Faye tries his usual trick of pointing out that both Schmitt and Hitler referred to the Jew as the Devil, and therefore concludes that the final paragraph contains " a particularly odious anti-Semitic allusion" (p.141). But as you can see, there is nothing whatsoever in this supposedly most damning of texts that actually mentions Jews at all. In fact, there is a specific mention of an alternative definition for "Devil"--the falling away from one's own essence. I should add that in several places Faye also argues that Heidegger's frequent use of the German word for "essence" indicates a connection with Nazism. Someone who has been caught up in Faye's rhetoric might find this convincing, but I can't help thinking that this is only one slight step from seeing Hitler's face in a burnt taco or in television static. In short, I see nothing in Faye's book to revise my original assessment: Heidegger's idiosyncratic Nazism was foolish, but not criminal. There are, in fact, other sources that claim that Heidegger heroically distanced himself from orthodox Nazism, at least on occasion. Faye provides some evidence that appears to weaken some of these claims, but not decisively so, in my opinion. He does not deal with all of them at the level of detail that should be expected from a scholarly book on this subject. However, I won't go into this issue in any depth here, (there is an excellent list of links and citations at the Wikipedia page entitled "Martin Heidegger and Nazism" ) because all of these arguments are to some degree besides the point. I think Faye's conclusions about Heidegger's character are badly supported, but they would be irrelevant to evaluating Heidegger's philosophy even if they were true. Even if we found that there was an undeniable strain of Nazism in Heidegger's philosophy, this would not justify Faye's claim that Heidegger's philosophy as a whole should be rejected. Berkeley is recognized as a great philosopher by those of us who believe in physical matter, and Kant is recognized as great by those of us who reject the idea of an unknowable Ding an Sich. Even Marx, who was far more responsible for a political evil arguably as bad as Nazism, is still read critically and sympathetically by serious academics. Consequently, even if these lectures were as insidious as Faye says they are, it would not justify throwing out the Heideggerian baby with the Nazi bath water. Faye is described on the dust jacket as "an authority on Descartes", and he argues that Heidegger's rejection of Descartes was one of the things that lead to his Nazism. Faye certainly has the right to position himself on the opposite side of this debate from us post-Cartesians. But to dismiss all of us who build on Heidegger's legacy with a single argument is seriously out of touch with the realities of the actual debate. One example among many: Heidegger has had a tremendous impact on the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, thanks to the work of Dreyfus, Clark, Haugeland, Lakoff, etc. All of these thinkers are highly critical of the reactionary Cartesianism that Faye says we must embrace in order to avoid slipping into the moral abyss. I know these people, and I can assure you that, even though "Heideggerian AI" heavily criticizes the Cartesian assumptions of the symbolic systems hypothesis, it is not a secret breeding ground for Nazism. In Rockwell 2005, I've argued that most of these anti-Cartesian ideas can also be found in the writings of John Dewey. If you can make yourself believe that Dewey is a Nazi, you can believe anything. Faye sees Nazism as a kind of dialectical virus, which leads to the acceptance of death camps by a chain of undeniable inferences once its first premises are accepted. In fact, Nazism was a mishmash of contradictory positions, which are easily separated from each other because they never belonged together in the first place. In Julian Young's memorable phrase "Nazism was a body without a head" (Young 1997, p. 7). Germany was full of conflicting ideologies at that time, and the Nazi's formula for political success was to embrace all of these contradictory ideologies simultaneously. It may seem like a crazy strategy today, but it worked. This is why it is usually possible to find a quote in Nazi propaganda literature that makes anyone's favorite enemy look like a Nazi. Libertarians point out that the Nazis called themselves National Socialists. Nevertheless, many people forgave the Nazis their other failings because they were so virulently anti-Communist. There are also leftists who argue that the Libertarians are themselves Nazis because they advocate rulership by an elite of capitalist supermen. The concept of 'blood and soil' also included an endorsement of organic food and the preservation of forests, which is sometimes used to show that modern environmentalists are Nazis. Another popular Nazi slogan was "Strength through Joy"', which sounds like the basis for a 1970's human potential workshop. Former pope Benedict compared the SDS protestors at Columbia in the 60s to Nazi student demonstrators, because of their emphasis on youth and their violent protests, even though the students themselves called the police "Fascists". The so-called "New Atheists" like to point out that Hitler said he was a good Catholic, and that the Nazis used crosses and pictures of Jesus in their propaganda posters. And yet the Nazis also embraced Nietzsche, who wrote an entire book attacking Jesus. They also angered the Catholic church by advocating Free Love, and attacking monogamy as “bourgeoisie morality. The recent anti-evolution movie Expelled found paraphrases from Darwin in Nazi literature, and yet Faye argues that Nazi thought was anti-Darwin. This kind of promiscuous rhetorical abuse has become so popular recently that it has been given the name argument Ad Hitlerem. It may seem fair to apply this argument to someone who was actually a member of the Nazi party. Nevertheless, it is just too easy to find analogies between Nazism and everything else for us to assume that such analogies are useful or insightful. Philosophy, both good and bad, operates at a level of abstraction that permits multiple interpretations. Faye says "there is. . . no place' in the doctrine of Being and Time, for individual freedom" (p.135). Emanuel Levinas interprets the same text as implying "the primacy of freedom over ethics". (Levinas 1969 p. 45) I think that part of Heidegger's greatness as a thinker is that he offers an alternative to both extremes that cannot be dismissed by merely collapsing it into one or the other-- a form of Being which is both irreducibly social and in each case mine. Which one of us is right? Because no one can decisively answer that kind of question, it is absurd to say that any philosophical text inevitably leads to any particular conclusion whatsoever. The Devil can always quote a variety of scriptures for his own purposes, but this does not prove that the quoted scripture is itself devilish. Great evil is only possible in people who also possess formidable virtues (Hitler would not have been dangerous if he hadn't been charismatic, a gifted organizer, etc.). Similarly, the only truly dangerous lies are half-truths. Separating the truth from the lies in half-truths is essential, perhaps especially with big dangerous lies like Nazism. Let's consider the one passage in Heidegger I do consider unforgivable: The claim cited above that a people has a right to pursue "total extermination" of its enemies. Is there any grain of truth in this expression of vituperative bile? Suppose we took that attitude not towards human individuals, but towards ideas and attitudes? Suppose we separate Heidegger's attack on "rootless cosmopolitanism" from the pseudo-biology of Nazi racism (as Heidegger frequently did), and say that Heidegger's call for "total extermination" could be seen as a call to every individual, both Jew and Gentile, to change how they live and think? Even if Heidegger didn't mean this, there's no reason we can't formulate our own principle inspired by this passage. That's how philosophy builds on its past. Would this new principle resemble any philosophical position that we could tolerate, or even embrace? I submit that when Faye speaks of "the vital necessity of seeing philosophy free itself from the work of Heidegger" (p. 316) it is hard to avoid thinking that Faye thinks this principle of total extermination should be applied to Nazi thought, if not to the Nazis themselves. In some places, he even subconsciously evokes the rhetorical flavor of Heidegger's hateful passage. Sometimes it is hard to avoid turning into the thing you hate the most. Once we have understood that {Heidegger's} work constitutes the continuation of Hitlerism and Nazism in thought, either we decide to resist it with the same determination that was necessary in the recent past to resist Nazism, or we allow ourselves to be pervaded, possessed and dominated by it. On a question this vital, there can be no possible arrangement or half measure. (p.308). Faye's transformation of Heidegger's principle is far superior morally to the original. Nevertheless, I would say that even in this more abstract, purified form, this principle is not acceptable. No one could rationally use Faye's passage to justify the burning of human beings, but a zealous acolyte might interpret it as justifying the burning of books. (I'm sure Faye himself meant to imply no such thing.) So I say: This is one passage where Heidegger completely blew it. Perhaps he wrote it to placate the Nazi thought police, as he later claimed. Perhaps, being surrounded by murderous lunatics, he drifted dangerously near lunacy himself. At the very least, he lacked the courage to stand up and resist such lunacy. But whatever happened, there is no reason we can't throw this passage out and still keep the numerous profound insights in Heidegger's other work. This willingness to pick and choose beliefs is what Faye dismisses as "arrangements and half measures", but that flexibility is essential to the enlightenment principle of free inquiry and critical thinking that Faye claims to be defending. Do I have the right to say that Faye is a Nazi because I found this connection between his ideas and Heidegger's? That is basically the argument structure that Faye uses to connect Heidegger to orthodox Nazism. We can avoid that absurdity by critically analyzing both Faye and Heidegger, so we can in each case separate their insights and important facts from their fallacies and confusions. Bibliography Faye, Emmanuel (2009) Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. (all references are to this volume unless otherwise stated). Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne University Press. Rockwell, Teed (2005) Neither Brain Nor Ghost Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, Julian (1997) Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.