Richard Wolin seeks not to destroy Heidegger but to show that he lies, already, in ruins. In part, this is because the Heidegger estate, Wolin claims, has shadow-edited his oeuvre. This raises difficult questions: Can one meaningfully engage with Heidegger's writing when one cannot guarantee the authenticity of what is written? And to what extent does this matter to the public meaning of Heidegger's works? Sadly, Heidegger in Ruins does not answer these questions. Instead, the strongest chapters of this book challenge common arguments of scholars who place a “cordon sanitaire” between Heidegger's philosophy and politics (2). Wolin then confronts “New Right” appropriations of Heidegger's thought, but at 53 pages this treatment is too attenuated to add to the work of Julian Göpffarth. Ultimately, one laments spending so many pages with Dugin and Evola—to say nothing of Bannon and Trump—rather than with Heidegger.
Wolin pre-empts the critique that he has added nothing new (22), but this charge only sticks insofar as there are no “bombshells” regarding the well-covered matter of Heidegger's actions during the Third Reich. Wolin's great contribution lies in his confrontation with purportedly untainted elements of Heidegger's thought, such as his understanding of work and care, which Wolin links to a dichotomy, with distinct Nazi resonances, between “planetary technology” (172) and communities of blood and soil (279). Wolin also challenges the image of a political quietist more concerned with poetry than politics, arguing that this constitutes an irrationalism and a chauvinistic embrace of myth (86–88) that, in fact, connects Heidegger to Nazism (289–91). In these chapters, Wolin undermines intuitively convincing defences of Heidegger and characterizes purportedly “clean” parts of his oeuvre as thoroughly fascistic, while challenging, for example, the separation of Heidegger's “metaphysical” antisemitism from the antisemitism of the Nazis (76–94).
Wolin believes that “textual approaches to Heidegger's work must yield to new interpretative paradigms” (20) and thus gives priority to contextual proofs. Any expectation that Wolin will deal comprehensively with counterarguments arising from Heidegger's works will be disappointed. For example, Wolin skims over a passage from What Is Called Thinking? (365) where Heidegger identified ahistorical mythmaking with Seinsvergessenheit, but rather than reconciling this with his association of Heidegger's poetics with Nazi propaganda, he provides a lengthy treatment of Nazi ideologue Alfred Baeumler (295–301). This is illustrative of a tendency to leap from provocative interpretative claims to disquisitions upon Heidegger's contemporaries, with the result that Wolin's intriguing arguments will not convince many Heidegger scholars.
Wolin's approach invites familiar charges of guilt-by-association tactics, especially when linking Heidegger to Nazism via Oswald Spengler (61, 172, 176) and Hans Zehrer (14)—who had an antagonistic relationship with Nazism—or via broadly held beliefs in the special calling (164–66) and virtue (271–27) of one's country. Wolin also invites criticism with his division of the secondary corpus according to a Manichaean dichotomy between noble realists and shamefaced apologists. While Donatella Di Cesare and Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei can rightfully object to their representation in these pages, Ingo Farin, who is charged with being a “Heidegger loyalist” (83) and diagnosed (in a lamentable ad hominem) as a “classic example of Freudian wish-fulfillment” (84), can feel particularly aggrieved. Farin's conclusion—that Heidegger “makes room for anti-Semitic content,” but it is not a “systemic, essential, or inevitable component of his philosophizing” (Farin, Reference Farin2016: 311)—is both narrower and less obsequious than Wolin allows.
Wolin has opened new battlefronts against Heidegger's defenders and compromised the fortifications to which they have retreated, such as the “safe ground” of Heidegger's antibiologism and political quietism. At the same time, a scattered organization and overly broad contextual argumentation prevent Wolin from mounting a sustained assault against these redoubts. On the whole, Wolin's book represents a fascinating contribution to the scholarly literature on Heidegger but tries to do too much at once and, as a result, falls somewhat short of its lofty ambitions. Sadly, the titular metaphor does not reverberate throughout this work. Wolin states that Heidegger “opened up significant new pathways and possibilities” (22), but quite what we are to do with Heidegger's ruins where the very material is corrupted is unclear. Wolin's metaphor holds many possibilities, for there are many ways in which ruins enlighten. Are we to look upon Heidegger's ruins in search of signs of lost wisdom? Are we to seek the cause of their fall? Are we to look upon them, like the feet of Ozymandias, as a warning to overmighty philosophers? Are we to cannibalize the ruins to build something else? Or, if nothing else, should we simply use them for target practice? Wolin leaves us in suspense.
Heidegger in Ruins is, ultimately, an effective piece of counter-apologetics, one that will arm any critic of Heidegger's defenders with new, effective weapons but will not greatly satisfy those who hope for substantial engagement with the ambiguities of Heidegger's thought.
