Every few years, somebody notices that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi -- and it all starts up again: the polemics, the professions of shock, the critiques of his philosophy’s insidious role in the humanities. At times the denunciations have a rather generic quality, as if a search-and-replace macro had been used to repurpose a diatribe again John Dewey or Jacques Derrida. Calls for a boycott of Heidegger’s writings are made, issued by people who cannot name two of them.

The Heidegger bashers tend to be the loudest, but there are counterdemonstrators. Besides the occasional halfhearted search for mitigating circumstances (the Weimar Republic did not make for clear thinking, after all, and the man’s thought was normally pitched at stratospheric levels of abstraction rather than the grubby domain of party politics) there is the sport of itemizing the anti-Heideggerians’ lapses in scholarship. Every line of argument on either side of the dispute was established during the controversy provoked by Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism (1987), yet l’affaire Heidegger has been recycled on at least three or four occasions since then. It’s as if the shock of the scandal was so great that it induced amnesia each time.

The most recent episode (Heidegger Scandal 5.0?) followed the publication in Germany, last year, of the first batch of the philosophical and political musings that Heidegger began recording in notebooks from 1931 onward. An English translation is forthcoming, so count on the outrage to renew in about six months. In the meantime, let me recommend a sharp and succinct overview of the Heidegger matter that may be of interest to anyone who hasn’t caught the earlier reruns. It appeared in the interdisciplinary journal Science & Society under the title “Notes on Philosophy in Nazi Germany.” The author, V. J. McGill, was for many years a professor of philosophy and psychology at Hunter College. “In the midst of the disillusionment and insecurity of postwar Germany and emerging fascism,” he wrote:

“Heidegger saw in care (Sorge) and anxiety (Angst), the basic substance of man. Instead of offering a rational solution of some kind he devoted himself to fine-spun philological distinctions, to an analysis of the pivotal concept of ‘nothing’ and to a subtle exploration of ‘death’ of which he says that we experience it only in the mode of ‘beside’ -- that is, beside death. History, culture, freedom, progress are illusory. He finds our salvation in the recovery of a primordial sense of coexistence with other beings, that is, a bare feeling of togetherness, deprived of all the amenities and hopes which make social life worth while ….

“The hundreds who flocked to Heidegger's very popular lectures in Freiburg learned that anxiety is the final, irremedial substance of man, and left with such esoteric wisdom as their main reward. Heidegger's philosophy was not distasteful to the Nazis, and when he was made rector of the University of Freiburg, he gave an address praising the new life which animated German universities. In recent years a rift has occurred. But philosophers can fall out with the Nazis on other grounds than their ideas and doctrines.”

McGill’s article was published in 1940. Over the intervening three quarters of a century, additional details have emerged, including documentation that Heidegger was not just an ally of the Nazi Party but also a full member from 1933 to 1945. And interest in his work on the part of several generations of philosophers who never showed the slightest bent towards fascism has meant much debate over the validity of reducing Heidegger’s philosophical concepts to their political context. But for all the anger that simmers in McGill’s discussion of Heidegger as an academic lackey of the Third Reich, his account is matter-of-fact and nonsensationalist, and little of the recent commentary can be said to improve upon it.

The Black Notebooks, as Heidegger’s private ruminations are known, sound ghastly on a number of fronts. The volumes published so far cover the years 1931 through 1941. Those covering the rest of the war years are being edited, and Heidegger is reported to have continued keeping the notebooks until his death in 1976. Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University and a translator of Heidegger’s work, identifies 19 passages (out of about 1,200 pages) that attack Jews in terms that might as well have come from an editorial by Joseph Goebbels. After the war Heidegger claimed to have become disillusioned with the Nazis within a couple of years of joining the party -- and the notebooks show this to have been true, strictly speaking. But his objections were to the boorishness and careerism of men who didn’t share his lofty understanding of Hitler’s ideology.

As with the anti-Semitism, this does not come as a revelation, exactly. His reference to “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” in a lecture from 1935 remained in the text when he published it in 1953. Beyond defiant, it was a gesture indicating a certain megalomania: Heidegger hadn’t betrayed the Fuhrer’s vision, the Nazis had!

But as David Farrell Krell, a professor emeritus of philosophy at DePaul University, suggests in a recent issue of Research in Phenomenology, the Black Notebooks reveal not just disappointment with the regime (combined with perfect callousness towards its brutality) but levels of rage, bile and despair that keep him from thinking. Heidegger cannot challenge himself, only repeat himself. “From day to day and day after day,” Krell says, Heidegger “entirely forgets that he has written the same things over and over again with the identical amount of dudgeon.”

Heidegger loathed Freud and psychoanalysis, which only makes it tempting to subject him to a little armchair diagnostics. But Krell's point, if I understand him correctly, is that the repetitiveness is more than symptomatic; the Black Notebooks document Heidegger not as a philosopher seduced by totalitarian politics, but as someone who has quit blazing a pathway of thought and instead become trapped in a maze of his own fabrication. Unfortunately, he is not the only one so trapped:

“At least part of the allure of the ongoing Heidegger scandal,” writes Krell in a passage that lights up the sky, “is that it distracts us from our own appalling national stupidities and our galling national avarice -- our own little darkenings, if you will. It is so much easier to fight battles that have already been decided and so lovely to feel oneself securely moored in the harbor of god’s own country. Not the last god but the good old reliable one, who blesses every stupidity and earns interest on every act of avarice. … The irony is that Heidegger’s Notebooks themselves reflect this dire mood. Perhaps by condemning him and them, we hope to gain a bit of space for ourselves, some impossible space for ourselves? That is the shadow these Notebooks cast over those who are so anxious to condemn. And that would be the Notebooks’ most terrible victory: it is not that the last laugh laughs best, for there is no joy and no laughter in them, but that their helpless rage recurs precisely in those who rail against them.”

Remember that next spring, when the controversy starts up once more.