Jeff Morgan, “Human, All too Human (Episode 2: Martin Heidegger)” (1999)
Second in the three-part BBC series on “existential” philosophers, this episode concentrates more on Martin Heidegger’s life and personality, his association with the National Socialists and the way in which his character, background and beliefs might have influenced his support for the Nazis. The film adopts a chronologically determined biographical narrative of Heidegger’s life with the familiar mix of fictionalised dramatisations, interviews with other philosophers and people who knew Heidegger, voice-over explanation, archived materials and visual travelogue of scenes and landscapes both familiar to Heidegger himself and contemporary to draw viewers into the man’s world. While the episode also deals with and explains Heidegger’s philosophy and its importance to modern viewers, this aspect of Heidegger’s life, which is what made the philosopher famous originally, becomes so incidental to the biographical slant that one might well suspect a hidden agenda to denigrate him.
Through works such as “Sein und Zeit”, Heidegger focussed on the relationship between humans and society and addressed issues such as anomie and social pressures on humans to conform and not to discover and stay true to their real natures and personalities. His early philosophy contrasts so strongly with what he did during his life that it’s understandable that the documentary is obsessed with the disparity between thought and word on the one hand and behaviour and action on the other. Heidegger, like Hitler, grew up in a strongly Roman Catholic family in southern Germany and renounced the religion as a young man; their cultural backgrounds which included much casual prejudice against Jews and others considered non-Aryan were similar. As a child, he seems unusually self-centred and as a young man in his thirties, achieving renown globally as a philosopher, he becomes quite convinced of his own importance and this character development led him to becoming a willing pawn and collaborator for the Nazi cause to the extent that he was prepared to inform on work colleagues including his former mentor the philosopher and phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. As a result, Husserl’s reputation was ruined and he died in 1938 from illness.
Heidegger later became disillusioned with the Nazi Party and resigned his rectorship of Freiburg University in 1934. He retired to writing at his Black Forest home, remaining a Nazi Party member. After World War II, Heidegger was arrested by the French, questioned by the victorious Allied forces about his Nazi allegiances and barred from teaching. During the 1950s his reputation as a philosopher was rehabilitated by the efforts of existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and even his former student and lover Hannah Arendt.
Viewers do come away with an impression of Heidegger as vainglorious, arrogant and morally weak. His philosophy, especially his post-war philosophy, certainly is tainted with his Nazi associations. One ends up questioning the motives of other philosophers in championing Heidegger’s work and it is a pity the BBC film doesn’t investigate and compare Heidegger’s early work with the work of these later philosophers to show viewers that these people might have been capable of separating their respect for Heidegger the philosopher from their opinion of Heidegger the man. To learn more about Heidegger’s work and the importance of what he thought, one needs to find out more as the BBC film does not serve well as an introduction to his philosophy.
What the documentary could have demonstrated more clearly is the existential peril that arises for modern humans in being forced to choose values and moral guidelines to live by because old certainties, institutions and structures are no longer adequate to meet the challenges of rapid social, technological and cultural change. This is a minefield that faces everyone as it did Heidegger who indeed was human, all too human. Viewers may come away thinking the makers of this series are perhaps somewhat hostile to philosophy, especially existential philosophy or similar beliefs which call for people to determine their own values and morality and resist conformity.