Losing Friends and Influencing People

Richard Wolin is an intellectual historian with a remarkable gift for upsetting people.

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Richard Wolin, author of Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, on Thursday, January 17, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

His work has annoyed postmodernists, outraged Heideggerians, infuriated scholars of Hannah Arendt, and provoked Jacques Derrida himself into faxing lengthy denunciations and threats of legal action. Such notoriety has its uses: In 2000, after 16 years at Rice University, Mr. Wolin became a distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York's Graduate School and University Center. The corridor buzz is that several prominent academics wrote letters seeking to derail his appointment.

Finding the way to his office, I am on guard, as one might be in approaching some more erudite Tony Soprano. People want him whacked. In person, though, Mr. Wolin is disarming. His manner is quiet, if not exactly reserved -- particularly not when discussing the ideas at stake in the controversies that have flared up throughout his career.

Mr. Wolin's scholarship has repeatedly scraped against one raw nerve in intellectual life: the complex and sometimes intimate relationship between 20th-century European philosophy and totalitarianism. Did some of the era's most important thinkers surrender to the rise of political systems claiming absolute power over their subjects? Or, worse, did they provide those regimes with sophisticated rationales?

Situating a philosophical text in its political context is never a simple matter -- even after a few hundred years have passed. And when the ideas and ideologies are of more recent vintage, the level of passion intensifies.

A lotta continua, as an old radical slogan has it: "the struggle continues." Weaponry from the intellectual battlefield has spilled over into Mr. Wolin's office. On his desk, for example, is a French paperback from three decades ago, written by Jean-Paul Sartre in collaboration with some young gauchiste intellectuals who wanted to transplant the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution onto French soil. Mr. Wolin notes that buying out-of-print books online has made it easier for him to do research on Parisian intellectuals' curious fascination with Maoism.

Also close at hand is a copy of Mr. Wolin's new book, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton University Press, 2001), a work that will only consolidate his reputation as a troublemaker. The figures listed in its subtitle all studied with Martin Heidegger in the 1920s, then went on to become important thinkers in their own right. How did they come to terms with the influence of the philosopher's work? The question is particularly fraught, because all four were German Jews. In 1933, their charismatic teacher proclaimed, "The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law."

As though such topics were not sufficient invitations to controversy, Mr. Wolin has exposed himself to academic censure by first making some of his arguments in nonscholarly publications. The chapter on Arendt in his new book grew out of an article that appeared, in 1995, in The New Republic.

In discussing a book on Arendt's romance with Heidegger, Mr. Wolin suggested that their relationship had clouded her judgment of his work; the woman who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism later published essays that excused her ex-lover's support for the Nazis on the grounds that his mind was too refined and aloof to have grasped the brutality of the movement he had joined. Mr. Wolin's assessment of the personal and the political angered feminist critics, for whom Arendt has become, in recent years, an iconic figure. The fact that he had presented his charges in a magazine of opinion, rather than a peer-reviewed journal, left him open to charges of sensationalism.

Two years earlier, Mr. Wolin had been part of a protracted conflict over Heidegger, fascism, and deconstruction that was conducted in the pages of The New York Review of Books. At one point, Mr. Derrida called Mr. Wolin a "journalist" -- perhaps the most withering characterization one scholar can make of another.

The fights have taken their toll. At times, Mr. Wolin sounds a little rueful. "When I published that essay on Hannah Arendt in The New Republic," he says, "I lost the five friends who were still talking to me." This, while slightly exaggerated, turns out not to be a joke.

Fight the Power

"A polemical, combative sensibility is something I absorbed from the New Left and the counterculture," Mr. Wolin says. "Becoming a university professor never really appealed to me. I always wanted to be a cultural critic, to participate in some kind of meaningful intellectual politics."

An incident during his senior year of high school colored his views for years to come. It was late 1969. The Chicago Seven trial, in which radical organizers stood accused of conspiring to disrupt the Democratic National Convention a year earlier, was under way. Mr. Wolin skipped school one day to attend. The defendants, challenging the legitimacy of the proceedings, had turned the courtroom into guerrilla theater. Mr. Wolin recalls being near a hippie who got a little too much into the spirit of things. "He jumped up to say something --  'Right on!,' probably, nothing too smart but not incendiary either -- and the cops just swarmed him. They must have broken some bones."

Mr. Wolin, already sympathetic to the antiwar movement, was stunned by the brutality. But his subsequent radicalization involved more marches to the library than through the streets. As an undergraduate at Reed College in the early 1970s, Mr. Wolin began a decisive phase of his education, though largely through contact with thinkers seldom found, in those days, on any syllabus. He helped circulate the writings of the Situationist International -- a group of European radicals who combined Hegelian-Marxist theory with avant-garde artistic practice. With friends, he explored the sociological and philosophical work of the Frankfurt School for Social Research from the 1920s and '30s. And after some difficulty in finding an adviser, Mr. Wolin wrote his senior thesis on History and Class Consciousness (1923), the seminal work of dialectical theory by the Hungarian Marxist thinker Georg Lukács.

Few figures in this intellectual pantheon had normal academic careers. That was even more true of Walter Benjamin, about whom Mr. Wolin wrote his dissertation at Canada's York University in the late 1970s. In the 1920s, Benjamin's own dissertation had been rejected as incomprehensible. Until his suicide while fleeing the Nazis, in 1940, he had eked out a precarious existence as a translator and book reviewer while writing essays on philosophy and culture. When Columbia University Press published Mr. Wolin's study Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1982), it was among the first books on the thinker in English. Library shelves groan with them now.

Two years of unemployment were as much of a Benjamin-like, "free-floating intellectual" existence as Mr. Wolin would ever want to experience. He returned to teach history and political science at Reed in 1982.

In 1984, he joined the history department at Rice; two years later, on the strength of his scholarly publications, he won tenure. But finding himself integrated into academe did not squelch Mr. Wolin's desire to be a public intellectual. He started publishing essays in Dissent and Les temps modernes (the journal Sartre had founded), and even wrote articles for the Houston Chronicle, a local newspaper.

Profound Difficulties

Meanwhile, Mr. Wolin worked on a particularly knotty topic in the history of Continental philosophy: whether Heidegger's analysis of Dasein (human reality) in Being and Time (1927) bore any relationship to his later involvement with Nazism. It was at this point that Mr. Wolin started getting into trouble -- particularly with elements of the academic left.

The scholarly literature on Martin Heidegger is vast -- perhaps of necessity, for it is by no means easy to determine what he is saying, sometimes. His work poses a fundamental challenge to the previous 25 centuries of Western philosophy, which Heidegger treats as a steadily unfolding series of approaches to, and evasions of, "the question of Being." Throughout the 1920s, his spellbinding lectures on ontology drew young intellectuals from all over Germany. In his presence, listeners had the sense of hearing philosophy itself being reborn.

While stratospheric in its abstraction, Heidegger's thought can also be unnervingly concrete: Each individual, too, must somehow address the mystery posed by his or her existence. It is extremely easy to avoid the problem, however. For Heidegger, modern life -- with its never-ending march of progress, technological and otherwise -- locks people into a comfortable though clueless state of "inauthenticity." Heideggerian philosophy demands confrontation with an unavoidable (and yet constantly ignored) truth of human existence: the reality of death.

It's a puzzle how the author of such a view of the world, which is severely individualistic, could ally himself with the Nazi party. For a long time, Mr. Wolin, like many scholars, accepted Heidegger's own claim -- that his party membership had been a brief and anomalous episode that had quickly become disagreeable for the philosopher and the Nazis alike.

But by the mid-1980s, a growing mass of evidence proved that Heidegger had sympathized with the movement before joining, in 1933, and had remained a party member until 1945. He had used his authority as a university administrator to persecute Jewish and anti-Nazi scholars. And in numerous public statements, he had used concepts from his own philosophical work to characterize the Nazi regime as legitimate and necessary.

When Mr. Wolin published The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (Columbia, 1990), his close reading of the ideological subtext of Being and Time won the attention primarily of other scholars. But during the 1980s, debates over Heidegger's legacy were a much more public affair in France, where the philosopher's work has influenced generations of intellectuals. Mr. Derrida's term "deconstruction," for example, alludes to Heidegger's "de-struction" of the metaphysical architecture of Western thought. When Mr. Wolin published a selection of those debates as The Heidegger Controversy (1991), also with Columbia, he included an interview that Mr. Derrida had given a French newsweekly.

So began one of the oddest chapters in the culture wars. Mr. Derrida became very upset, complaining, for one thing, that Mr. Wolin's translation was terrible. (Mr. Derrida later published an extensive, annotated list of errors in Mr. Wolin's translation; some are minor, while others do look quite unfortunate.) By 1993, the conflict had spilled over into The New York Review of Books, which published a prolonged and rancorous exchange of correspondence on the matter, now known as "l'affaire Derrida." Columbia let the book go out of print, but it was soon reprinted by MIT Press, minus the offending text. By then, however, several of the most prominent academics in the country -- including Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Gerald Graff, Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White -- had signed a statement criticizing Mr. Wolin's role in the "affaire."

Going Too Far?

Mr. Wolin characterizes lapses in his translation as infelicities, and rejects the idea that they were ever the real issue. With its dismissal of democracy, technology, and Enlightenment values as further manifestations of a primordial "forgetfulness of Being," Heidegger's thought has profoundly shaped postmodernist understandings of culture and society.

Mr. Wolin is troubled by that commonplace rejection of modernity -- the tendency to see universal norms of justice and validity as being (at best) just so many alibis of the status quo. If Heidegger's critique of modernity ultimately led him to end his lectures with "Heil Hitler," that is, Mr. Wolin argues, of more than strictly biographical interest.

With Heidegger's Children, Mr. Wolin carries his project a few steps further, which may mean going just a little too far, at least for some readers. He recounts the philosopher's powerful appeal during the 1920s for four German-Jewish thinkers who later became important figures in American academic life. Hannah Arendt's work shaped the postwar understanding of totalitarianism, while Herbert Marcuse's writings on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and social criticism were a major influence on the New Left. Karl Lowith is best known for his intellectual historiography, while Hans Jonas wrote seminal works on theology and environmentalism.

Heidegger's passionate attention to literary and philosophical works, and his sustained attack on cultural philistinism, resonated with a whole generation of young intellectuals.

But that was perhaps especially the case, Mr. Wolin thinks, among assimilated Jews, for whom an edition of Goethe was a common bar-mitzvah present. At the same time, the philosopher's charisma -- the way his lectures moved toward almost mystical encounters with the problem of Being -- was vaguely messianic. He transformed philosophy into something like a secular theology.

In recounting the thinker's hold on his four students, Mr. Wolin also documents their response to his political turn. In coming to terms with their teacher's influence, each had to confront Heidegger's refusal to discuss the genocidal consequences of what he once called "the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism." But according to Mr. Wolin's analysis -- which is provocative, in all senses -- their later philosophical writings continued to echo Heideggerian themes and implications.

"All accepted, willy-nilly, a series of deep-seated prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity -- democracy, liberalism, individual rights, and so forth -- that made it very difficult to articulate a meaningful theoretical standpoint in the postwar world," writes Mr. Wolin. That did not mean they were Nazis, by any means. But Mr. Wolin argues that, for example, Hans Jonas's reflections on ecology treat environmental destruction as apocalyptic and irreversible by human action -- a continuation of Heidegger's lofty sense that technology itself had taken command of human reality.

Another intellectual historian, Martin Jay, who is a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, says that Mr. Wolin's scholarship sometimes resembles a legal brief. "With each of the figures he discusses, he examines the aspects of their work that support an anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment standpoint. His style of polemicizing can force people to confront things they don't want to confront," Mr. Jay says. "Whether or not that exhausts the meaning for us [of the thinkers in question] is another argument."

Endless Struggle

The doggedness with which Mr. Wolin pursues critics of "bourgeois democracy" (as he might have called it in his New Left days) does not mean that the intellectual historian has become a conservative. Mr. Wolin recalls reaching an "intellectual turning point" 20 years ago, when he attended a series of lectures by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is often considered the last member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist social critics.

Where Heidegger (or, for that matter, Abbie Hoffman) would denounce capitalist modernity as profoundly alienating, Habermasian social analysis stresses what Mr. Wolin calls "the valuable potentials for reform, contestation, and critique residing in existing democratic societies."

Heidegger's Children is dedicated to Mr. Habermas. In November, that favor was returned. Addressing a packed auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center, Mr. Habermas devoted a lecture to the new book. While praising the book's effort to situate thinkers in political history, Mr. Habermas said that the study "is not only contextual, it is an internal history of [their] ideas."

But even Mr. Habermas took exception to Mr. Wolin's emphasis on Heideggerian themes in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. What is interesting about that book, he said, "is what is really original [in it], not what is merely a continuation or remodeling or appropriation of Heideggerian motifs ... I take it as a work in her own right."

Mr. Wolin calls the new book his farewell to "the Heidegger controversy." He has recently finished an essay on Tel Quel, a French avant-garde journal that, during the late 1960s and early '70s, published the work of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and other intellectual eminences. (It was in the pages of Tel Quel that poststructuralist theory underwent its most intense involvement with what young revolutionaries of the day called Mao Tse-tung Thought.)

But Mr. Wolin is not quite through with Heidegger's children, after all. A new German publication, the International Journal for Philosophy, has just devoted a special issue to a discussion of Mr. Wolin's charges concerning Hans-Georg Gadamer, another of the existentialist philosopher's students from the 1920s.

The author of a magisterial treatise on hermeneutic theory, Truth and Method, Mr. Gadamer is one of his country's most respected living thinkers, and certainly its oldest. This month, he turns 102.

The editors have translated Mr. Wolin's recent essay from The New Republic, "Untruth and Method," which contends that Mr. Gadamer has played down his own support for the Nazis, and that his theory of interpretation bears pronounced ideological affinities with right-wing German thought. The issue also includes half a dozen papers contesting Mr. Wolin's arguments. One editor has resigned from the journal in protest.

In Mr. Wolin's corner of the scholarly world, that is, things are about normal. A lotta continua.