a pair of Heidegger thought experiments

Here are a couple of Heidegger thought experiments to play with. I’ve already published the first one, but just thought of the second one a few minutes ago.

Thought Experiment One

Heidegger is killed in a train crash in August 1930. We would have lost a lot of good books. However:

(a) He would still be considered as great a philosopher as he is considered now; Being and Time is the pillar of his reputation, and it was already a few years old by 1930

(b) We would have expected even greater things from Heidegger than he actually produced by staying alive for another half-century. Let’s face it: nothing else he later wrote is at quite the same level as Being and Time, although much of it is outstanding. We also would have been lamenting the unpublished remainder of his masterwork, because that’s what people really were still expecting in 1930. When a book like Being and Time is published by a 38-year-old, it only makes sense (when speaking of philosophers, who tend to peak intellectually toward deep middle age) to think: “Wow. If he wrote that at 38, imagine what he’ll do at 50!” Personally, I think it’s safe to say that a reader of Heidegger in 1930, if allowed to see the future, would have been not only extremely disappointed by the Nazi period, but also moderately disappointed by the philosophical output that was coming. He could have done a lot better than he did, let’s put it that way.

(c) If Heidegger had died in 1930, we might even (with unconscious perversity) have lamented his absence from the scene as an intellectual counterweight to Nazism. “If only Heidegger had been alive to defend Husserl and speak out against the Third Reich!” If he had died in 1930, that might have been a plausible statement to make in 1950.

In short, death in 1930 would not have hurt Heidegger’s philosophical legacy all that horribly, and it would have drastically improved his legacy as a human being. A few pieces of scandalous personal detail would still have leaked out, but books like Faye’s could not even exist.

We’d have lost everything from the 1930’s, though I’m on record as calling it a relatively overrated decade for him. The 1950’s is a different story.

Thought Experiment Two

In a grotesque overreaction to his public status as a former Nazi university rector, Heidegger is hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. It would never have happened, of course, because there was nothing to warrant it that we know of. But just play along with the scenario, perhaps imagining a bunch of out-of-control “hanging judges” on the Tribunal who decided to make an example of him.

It’s an extremely improbable scenario, but it’s interesting to think of what Heidegger scholarship might now look like as a result. We’d again be losing all the great work from 1949 onward, so the Nietzsche and Hölderlin stuff would be bunched up heavily toward the end of his career. Instead of the “Heidegger and Nazism” volumes we’re used to now, there would be more “Inside the Trial of Heidegger”-type works. Presumably the intellectual momentum in 2009 would be leaning toward: “What a shameful overreaction by the Tribunal! A crime against a philosopher who, though tainted and disgraced, bore no personal responsibility for the crimes for which he was hanged!”

Rorty has that other thought experiment where, I think, Heidegger divorces his wife (and marries Hannah Arendt?), moves to the USA, and returns to Germany after the war as a bulwark of the political Right. But I’ve lost the link. Maybe someone could mail it to me if they know where it is.