more Bultmann-Heidegger

Now finished with the correspondence part of the volume. There remain 60 or so pages of appendices, and I’ll read those when I get back.

It’s a different sort of friendship from Heidegger’s others. A few thoughts…

*As stated earlier, Heidegger ends up the dominant partner in every human relationship he’s ever in. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t just mean that he was such a towering figure that no one in the vicinity could equal him. Einstein’s letters don’t read like this, and neither do Kant’s, and they were at least as far above their peers in achievement terms as Heidegger was.

No, I recognize this personality type, and it’s found well beyond the range of great thinkers. It’s a sort of energy-miser type, basically lacking in warmth. “You come to me, I don’t come to you. You respond to the things that I say, but I respond to things that you say only when it suits me to do so. At times you do pretty good work, but I will be the judge of that.” I can imagine the corrosive effect Heidegger had on the morale of those near him.

*The Heidegger/Bultmann distancing is much different from the Heidegger/Jaspers distancing. There is a rupture in both cases, but it is far more violent in the Jaspers friendship.

This can be partly explained by the far graver situation of Jaspers under the Nazis (with his Jewish wife) than the situation of Bultmann during the same period (I know he spoke out against them somewhat, but I don’t recall stories of Bultmann being in serious danger as Jaspers was).

But even prior to that, Jaspers seemed significantly more wounded by Heidegger than Bultmann ever was.

There is no doubt, after reading these letters, that the very close relations of Bultmann and Heidegger in the 1920’s were destroyed by Heidegger’s Nazi Rectorate. The frequency and intensity of the letters never recovers from 1933.

Nonetheless, they send friendly, even sentimental messages back and forth during old age. Bultmann had an especially tough time during that period; his wife was hospitalized for lengthy periods with severe depression, and he engages in repeated laments about his old age that are moving even if a bit self-pitying. They send each other lots of nice photos, apparently (most of them not reproduced in the book, though a few of them are).

Of course, there was also an asymmetry in the intellectual friendship. Bultmann is a very significant figure, but while he was deeply influenced by Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, there is no equivalent reciprocal influence.

Bultmann certainly comes off as the more likable figure of the two, but I’m afraid that’s almost always the case when Heidegger is one of the two people involved. There’s been plenty of consideration of the Nazi question. What has been less discussed is the unfortunate fact that Heidegger had one of the more unpleasant personalities in the history of philosophy.

Who was worse? Schopenhauer was prickly. Giordano Bruno was extremely rude.

According to some sources, Francis Bacon may have been the worst human being of the lot, happily torturing for the Queen, turning on his benefactor as a hostile witness in a capital trial, and supposedly keeping a pre-teen boy “companion.”

But all incidents aside, I always feel strangely drained of energy after spending much time with Heidegger’s correspondence, even though I think it is underrated in terms of quality. He’s a good letter-writer, just a domineering personality of a markedly selfish sort.