NATELA KHINCHIGASHVILI - Tbilisi State University

university. Way too easily and irresponsibly, the notion of Führer today is
associated with Hitler’s personality, forgetting that in 1933 this word meant not
“Hitler” but “leadership principles” necessarily adhered to at the time of crisis.
In the case of a university, these principles had to signify the voice of academic
society and authentic scholarship not heard under ordinary circumstances due to
the critical situation of that university. Already in 1934, as it became evident
that Hitler and other Führers fanatically following him were discrediting the
notion of Führerprinzip, expressing a pathological will of their own rather than
the voice of the nation, university and scholarship, Heidegger resigned from the
rector‘s post and distanced himself from the Nazi movement once and for all ∗ .
Bearing accusations, maligned and deprived of the right to teach at
university after the war, Heidegger retreated into a sullen silence. Consequently,
this silence was interpreted as a reluctance to admit one’s mistakes or even as a
tacit approval of hitlerism. Heidegger’s recently published text, written in 1946,
explains his actual political views and brings us back to the authentic philosophical
subject – the search for human foundations in being and the grounding
of one’s thought in a more mysterious than rational world of myth: “You
wonder (and you are not alone), why my de-nazification still did not take place.
It is easily explained. To tell the truth, I got demarcated for reasons that do not
have anything to do with Nazism. It is understood that my way of thinking consists
of something troubling, even something distressing, what with pleasure
could be avoided. The fact that at the same time my thinking attracts so much
attention only confirms that it is troubling. Never, not even for a single day, have
I had a slightest influence on any major establishment of the Party (...) With
regards to Russians or, more precisely, European technicism, which Russians
introduce in the form of communism (here I do not refer to Russia itself), they
attack my thought with the same hatred as exhibited by the English and American
technocrats who declared it to be an official enemy “ (Heidegger 2000:
421). Anglo-Saxon technocracy, as well as communism and fascistic Nazism
are the expressions of the rage of technology, the extreme case of rational thinking
and life without gods. Hence, Heidegger’s philosophy did not attempt to
support some political mechanism but rather to direct thinking to where not only
technology but also human salvation stemmed from (Heidegger 1954: 13-44) ∗∗ .
∗ Many sterile disputes regarding Heidegger’s relation to Hitler’s Nazism after 1934 are still
unsettled. It seems that next to malicious slander and unfounded hearsay (out of which the most
wide spread and malevolent is the one claiming that Heidegger forbade Husserl to use the
university library because of his Jewish background), Farrias and Faye can put forward only
one convincing argument in their works: till the very end of the war Heidegger paid the
membership fee to the National Socialist Party. However, the validity of this argument is
challenged if we remember that leaving the Party in Nazi Germany meant horrible repressions
or even death penalty.
∗∗ In one of the most famous speeches of Heidegger, called The Question Concerning
Technology, we will find all the necessary structure concerning the history of being and its
mythical dimension. This is the structure that we aimed to discuss here.
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