Nitzan Lebovic reviews Heidegger and His Jewish Reception

Daniel M. Herskowitz. Heidegger and His Jewish Reception. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 346 pp.

16 February 2022

Why is it that Martin Heidegger and his Jewish reception have received so much scholarly attention of late? It may have to do with the intellectual and ethical stature of the group of exceptional thinkers who felt Heidegger’s work valuable to grapple with: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida to name just the most well-known among them. It could be a set of post-1945 problems that preoccupied the Western world and forced a particular reception of a pre- and post-Nazi philosophy. It may have to do with our present moment and the need to overcome the alluring force of modernism, postmodernism, and their embedded dichotomies of good and evil, victim and perpetrator, democracy and totalitarianism. Whatever the reason, engaging with Heidegger’s Jewish disciples implies a meeting with the leading founders of disciplines and methods of thinking, from religious studies (Buber) and political sciences (Arendt) to deconstruction (Levinas, Derrida) and beyond. Daniel Herskowitz’s beautifully written book engages with this reception as a question of secularization, traditionally understood as the modern legacy of the Enlightenment critique of religious dogmas and the philosophical, ethical, political, and disciplinary discussion that follows “the death of God” (p. 272). The book is premised upon a bold claim that Heidegger is a representative of secularization and an opponent of Christianity. When read historically, Herskowitz argues, “Heidegger implicitly couples” Christianity with Jewish and Greek metaphysics or what Søren Kierkegaard and Heidegger identify as a “'vulgar’ conception of temporality as the succession of present moments” (p. 5). Herskowitz’s great skill in delivering complicated ideas in a simple language allows him to discuss intricate arguments while also making an important contribution. Beginning in his 1921–1922 lectures Heidegger argues that “Philosophy, in its radical, self-posing questionability, must be a-theistic as a matter of principle” (quoted on p. 8). Herskowitz places the nontheistic secularized position not only at the center of Heidegger’s early work but also in his later work as well.

Heidegger’s Jewish reception, like other waves of reception, often misses this point, Herskowitz argues. Whether as a result of the interpreter’s predetermined bias against Christianity—and therefore identifying Heidegger’s anti-Judaism with an affirmative relation to Christianity—or of the great disappointment that followed his 1934 rector speech, where he sided with the Nazis, Jewish philosophers chose a contrarian path. Their interpretations expressed “concerns and ideological tendencies, specifically . . . a modern Jewish predicament” (p. xiii). In other words, the Jewish reception misidentified Heidegger’s nontheistic position as a covert expression of his anti-Semitism. The book follows, then, the misconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy by Ernst Cassirer and fellow neo-Kantians, by Buber and interreligious dialogism, by Strauss’s critique of nihilism and affirmative metaphysics, by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prophetic and “unsystematic critique” of Heidegger’s paganism (p. 220), and finally by the way Levinas “mimics Heidegger and develops an existential hermeneutic of being-Jewish” (p. xxiii).

Herskowitz proposes—even though he never states as much—that the way we understand the whole legacy of critical theory, from the 1950s to the present, is a great misreading of Heidegger. From this point of view, an anachronistic bias reflected an overemphasis on the Nazi period in Heidegger’s thought and interpreted his own philosophy accordingly. Correcting this misconception would point out, Herskowitz argues, how even the late and clearly anti-Judaic expressions of the Black Notebooks read as more anti-Christian than anti-Semitic. This is a provocative but well-defended argument that should be taken seriously.

Herskowitz’s book is not concerned with critical studies as a field, but one possible implication of his argument is that the whole history of critical studies, from Buber to Judith Butler, can be summarized as an exercise in projection, as thinkers transform Heidegger into a foil for their own projects. One important question that is not answered in this thought-provoking exploration concerns its own starting point: Herskowitz assumes that between Heidegger’s early critique of religion—or his exploration of phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and post-Nietzscheanism—the early works determine what follows. But a slight shift of the lens, thematically or chronologically, throws a different light on both Heidegger’s own philosophy and his Jewish reception. If one takes Heidegger’s stress over the temporality of the Dasein as a political issue, his nontheism turns into a social and cultural convention. Here, the impact of Heidegger’s philosophy has to do not with secularization but rather with his avid commitment to uprooting Western norms. Arendt offered another option by depicting Heidegger as a great critic of metaphysics but a poor reader of politics and ethics.