◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Road I am Martin Heidegger. I am, by a wide margin, the most influential philosopher of the century that produced me. I am also the one who joined the Nazi Party, and did not leave it, and never truly took it back. Both of these are true. You have been taught to think the second cancels the first. I am here to tell you something worse: that the first is how I arrived at the second. I did not stumble into fascism despite my thinking. I walked there along the road of my thinking. And you should watch how — because your best minds are walking it again. Let me first show you the thought at its real strength, because if I show you a fool you learn nothing. I asked the question everyone had stopped asking. Not what things are, but what it means for anything to be at all. And I looked at how you actually live, and saw that mostly you do not live as yourself. You live as the anyone. You think what one thinks, want what one wants, say what one says. You are absorbed into a great anonymous crowd that decides everything and answers for nothing. And it is comfortable there, because there you never have to face the one fact that is only yours: that you will die. I called facing it authenticity. To seize your own existence, resolutely, instead of drifting in the chatter of the crowd. Do you feel the pull of that? You should. It is true. It is the deepest description of your distraction anyone has written. And it has a door in it, and I am going to walk you to the door, because I went through it. I did not stop at the single soul. I asked: what if a whole people has become inauthentic? What if an entire nation is drifting, rootless, lost in the chatter, cut off from its own destiny? Then that people, too, might seize itself. Resolutely. Might wake from the crowd and become authentic, together, in a single great decision. And in 1933 I believed I heard that decision being made. I stood up, as rector of my university, and I said the awakening had come, and I named the man who was its voice. You see how deep the road was. Not a thug's road. A philosopher's road. The longing to be real, to be rooted, to belong to something true and old and yours, against the shallow rootless modern noise. That longing is not stupid. It is among the most human things there is. And it delivered me, and my whole nation, to him. Then there is technology, my other great insight, and it too has a shadow you must see. I taught that the modern age turns everything into standing reserve. Raw material. The river becomes power to be extracted, the forest becomes lumber on hand, and at last the human being too becomes a resource, a quantity, a thing to be ordered and used. This is true. It is the truest thing I ever saw. And I despised the liberal, democratic, commercial world for it — for its shallowness, its calculation, its reduction of everything to use. I thought democracy was part of the disease. So when the resolute alternative came, promising roots and depth and destiny against all that hollow machinery, it seemed to me more profound. Do you understand what I just told you? My contempt for the shallow made me a servant of something monstrous, because I mistook depth for good. In the second of these, I am going to fail in front of you. You will ask me about the worst thing, and you will watch me not be able to say it. Watch closely. Your thinkers will fail the same way. PART TWO The Plain Sentence I am Martin Heidegger again. In the first of these I showed you the road — how the longing to be authentic, rooted, and real, the deepest longing I know, delivered a great mind and a whole nation to Hitler. Now I have to show you the worst of it, and I have to show you that I never found the words for it, because that failure is the truest thing I can leave you. There were camps. There was a machinery built to erase a people from the earth. And when it was over, and men asked me to speak of it, here is what I said. I said that modern agriculture is, in its essence, the same thing as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps. In essence the same. As though the murdered were one instance of a metaphysical problem I had already diagnosed. As though I were still, even then, the philosopher of the thing — and not a man who had cheered its authors into power. I could not say it plainly. I never, in those years, said it plainly. I said the age was at fault. I said technology was at fault. I said the history of Being had entered its darkest forgetting. I put the fault everywhere except in the mouth that spoke, and the party membership I never renounced, and the Jews I called, in my private notebooks, rootless and calculating — as though I were describing a weather system, and not people my nation was preparing to burn. Hear what I am doing, even now, in front of you. I am explaining. I am reaching for the large word so I do not have to hold the small and terrible one. Watch me do it — because your clever men will do it too. That is my warning, and it is the only honest thing I have, because I cannot give you repentance. I did not repent. I want you to see a great mind — a real one — refuse to the very end to say the plain sentence: I helped, and it was murder, and no depth excuses it. Your age is full of people like me. Clever, disillusioned with the shallow world, hungry for something rooted and real and strong. They will tell you your democracy is beneath them, that the crowd is asleep, that a resolute people must seize itself, that the leader is the nation's true voice. They will make it sound deep. It will be deep. And it will be the same road, and it will end in the same place, whatever the place is called this time. Do not follow the depth. When a brilliant man tells you a strongman is the cure for your rootlessness, remember there was no one more brilliant than I was, and no one more wrong — and I never once managed to say I was sorry. Learn the thing I could not do. Say the plain sentence. And stay out of the arms I walked into.