Heidegger on Work

(Thomas Corbin and JP Deranty)

The previous newsletter documented the entries around Ernst Jünger and in particular his 1932 Der Arbeiter, a book that had a huge impact on German culture and politics at the time. The book was one of the main intellectual soundboards for totalitarian ideas, one that was specifically focused on work. Jünger is interesting in his own right. As we noted in the last post, Der Arbeiter is a key document in the dark genealogy of European ideas, which, once they were translated into real policies, led to some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. Jünger, however, is also important because of his influence on Martin Heidegger. Before, during and after the war, Heidegger continuously went back to Der Arbeiter, which he saw simultaneously as the most perceptive development of Nietzsche in the present, and as a significantly flawed attempt to heed Nietzsche’s diagnosis of European nihilism.

In this post, we turn to Heidegger himself.

We have now entered 95 citations from Heidegger’s writings, and listed 162 references discussing him, which demonstrate the relevance of his writings for debates on work.

As the references we’ve entered testify, the many passages in Heidegger’s writings where work is discussed entail many, highly paradoxical lessons for contemporary debates on work. Three main axes can be delineated.

Work as “duty and service of the Volk”

During his rectorate at the university of Freiburg from April 1933 to April 1934, Heidegger appeared to endorse key aspects of the National-Socialist ideology of work, which he reformulated through a mixture of earlier Dasein ontology and his emerging history-of-Being narrative. The most significant texts of that period for us include speeches, letters, and lecture courses. The speeches can be found in volume 16 of the Gesamtausgabe, and a selection in English in The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin. The most relevant lecture course is the seminar of summer 1933 on “Being and Truth” and the summer semester lecture of 1934 on “Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language”.

Historians of the period have shown how central work was in Nazi ideology and policy thinking. They have highlight the centrality of work in Nazi ideology by studying the manifestos and pamphlets of ideologues who directly influenced the NSDAP platform, as well as some of Hitler’s most important speeches and indeed his infamous 1925 autobiography. The Nazi conception of work articulates a racist and anti-Semitic vision of nationalism as defence and assertion of the community of blood relatives (Volksgemeinschaft), with a “socialist” emphasis on service to the collective. It portrays a normative vision of “German work” (Deutsche Arbeit), as sacrifice and being in service (Dienst) of the Volk. This is grounded in a historical narrative that explains how the cultural superiority of the Germans is reflected in their work ethic: less evolved peoples do not consider work as a duty; and some peoples, one in particular, even embodies a form of “anti-work”. This is a form of work that is a threat to the Volk- and Dienst-based nature of authentic work, the supposedly selfish, frenetic, speculation-oriented activity of the people that has no attachment to any soil or earth. This paranoid vision of “anti-work” adds decisive elements to the general trope of an “internal enemy”, a trope Heidegger explicitly endorses and broaches, notably in the 1933 lectures on “Being and truth”. Historians have shown that the racist and anti-Semitic elements active in the Nazi conception of work played a direct part in the plan to exclude and ultimate to destroy those who were construed as an existential threat to the German people’s essence.

Heidegger’s writings of the early and mid-1930s retrieve and re-articulate all these themes in his own philosophical idiom.

How closely Heidegger followed the Nazi ideology of work can be verified in the famous lecture he delivered as he began his office as rector, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”. In it, Heidegger delineates three forms of service and duty to be performed by the student body of his university, which are to ensure they fully contribute in their own capacity, to the realisation of the German people’s essence and destiny. These three forms of service and duty are “knowledge service”, “military service” and “work service”. Work service, in fact, is the one on which the other two depend:

The first bond is the one that binds to the ethnic and national community (Volksgemeinschaft). It entails the obligation to share fully, both passively and actively, in the toil, the striving, and the abilities of estates and members of the Volk (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”, in The Heidegger Controversy, 35)

As rector of the university of Freiburg, Heidegger was particularly eager to implement this vision. He sought to introduce a compulsory “work service duty” (Arbeitsdienstpflicht) in the university, two years before it became a policy that was universally applied across Germany.

The summer lecture course of 1933 unfolds the narrative providing the background for what Heidegger had in mind by “"the toil” and the “striving of the Volk”. The following passage, for instance, shows how Heidegger connected work to other aspects of Nazi politics as they were being implemented that same year, linking work to State, leadership and Kampf (struggle, or indeed war as he translates it in the seminar):

rule and authority together with service and subordination are grounded in a common task. Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise. Then spiritual superiority and freedom develop as a deep dedication of all forces to the people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engagement, endurance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and superiority of the leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in this way with originality and passion to the task. And if the people feels this dedication, it will let itself be led into struggle, and it will love struggle and will it. It will develop and persist in its forces, be faithful and sacrifice itself. In every new moment, the leader and the people will join more closely in order to bring about the essence of their state, that is, their Being; growing with each other, they will set their meaningful historical Being and will against the two threatening powers of death and the devil—that is, ruination and decline from their own essence (Nature, History, State, 49)

Underpinning this metaphysical expatiation on Nazi politics is the grand vision of the special destiny of the German people, to retrieve the call of Being and salvage Western civilisation from decadence and nihilism. This vision translates in the idea that the current generation faces a particular “mission”, one it needs to embrace with “resoluteness”, beyond the strictures of Judeo-Christian morality, by aiming for the “total annihilation” (Being and Truth, 73) of external and internal enemy, and standing ready for ultimate sacrifice. In the speeches and seminars of the 1930s, Heidegger explicitly links the duty to work with the present mission of the German people.

A passage from the summer seminar of 1934 gives a good sense of how work features centrally in this idea of German mission and destiny, such that there is a specifically “German” form of work (Deutsche Arbeit), one that entails more than just a particular kind of work ethic:

Determinateness in this sense means [a] forming and fitting-together of our entire comportment and our bearing from that which is mission and mandate for us. To effect our determination (Bestimmung), to set to work (ins Werk setzen) and to bring to work (ins Werk bringen), in each case, according to the sphere of the creating-that means to labor. Labor is not any occupation that we attend to out of calculation, need, pastime, boredom, but labor is here the determination that has become the determinateness of our essence, the form, and the jointure of the execution of our mission and the effecting of our mandate in the respective historical moment. Labor is the present of the historical human being, in such a manner that in labor and through it the work comes to presence and to actuality for us. (Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 107).

In the seminar on logic of 1934, Heidegger proposes his own version of the “socialism” of labour, which strikingly echoes how the Nazis understood the term themselves, as it featured in the name of their own party:

The Volk is neither that spongy and jelly-like sentimentalism, as how it is today offered around often in a prosy manner, nor is the State only the present shut down form of organization, as it were, of a society. The State is only insofar and as long as the carrying out of the will of rule happens, which originates from mission and mandate and, conversely, becomes labor and work… All overcoming of the genuine and non-genuine tradition must [go] in the crucible of the critique of historical resoluteness. That applies last but not least to the title that shall characterize the formation of our historical being, of "socialism." It means no mere changing of the economic mentality; it  does not mean a dreary egalitarianism and glorification of that which is inadequate. It does not mean the random pursuit of an aimless common welfare, but it means the care about the standards and the essential-jointure of our historical being, and it  wills, therefore, the hierarchy according to occupation and work, it  wills the untouchable honor of every labor, it  wills the unconditionality of service as the fundamental relationship with the inevitability of being. The questioning concerning our self-being originates from the essence of historical being as futurality, as care (Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 136, our emphasis)

What is the significance of this particular period in Heidegger’s thinking for contemporary debates on work? After all, however sinister and repulsive the “case for work” might be that Heidegger made at the time, it is also highly dated, and it might not have very much to say to us today. Or, as the previous post asked in relation to Jünger, should we follow Hamacher in concluding that because work was at the heart of Nazi ideology, and Heidegger’s conception of work in 1933 -1934 presents a philosophical articulation of this ideology, therefore modern work as such, in its defining conceptual traits, remains an intrinsically fascistic concept? To what extent is the gruesome motto that featured at the entrance of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, “Arbeit macht frei”, a sign of our times, today still? If someone today wants to make a “case for work”, how much of the murderous yet very real conception of “Deutsche Arbeit” that was prevalent in the 1930s are they unwittingly buying into? How do they ensure their own conception of work repels all that was destructive in it?

Work in the era of Machenschaft

A startling paradox about Heidegger’s writings on work is that, whilst in the early 1930s he made a vocal “case for work”, which we’ve just succinctly outlined, a few years later, his position shifted and he formulated one of the strongest philosophical cases against work. This change occurred as a result of his shift in the appraisal of nihilism, its symptoms and the ways to overcome it. There is more to this than just a change of mind, however, because the shift occurred on the basis of a strong underlying thematic and conceptual continuity running through his writings. No other concept makes this paradox, this tension in Heidegger’s position on work, clearer than that of Machenschaft, which translators render as “machination”.

As is well-known, Heidegger’s later writings have become a strong source of inspiration for critical views of modern technology and its destructive impacts on human culture and natural environments. In these broad critiques of modern technology, work is directly implicated. The repository lists many studies that have specifically highlighted this place of work in Heidegger-inspired critiques of technology.

Many critical theorists of modern technology refer to a 1949 conference that was titled “The Question concerning Technology”. In it, work is directly implicated even though it is not thematised strongly:

What is modern technology? It too is a  revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on  this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us. And  yet  the revealing that holds  sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a  chal­lenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand  that it  supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in  order to  store it. In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a  coal mining dis­trict, the soil as  a  mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to  set in  order still meant to  take care  of and to maintain. The work of  the peasant  does not challenge the soil of the field. In  the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of  another  kind of  setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature. It  sets  upon it  in  the sense of  challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to  yield nitrogen, the earth to  yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is  set upon to yield  atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peace­ful use. (“The Question Concerning Technology”, 14)

The link between technology as the ultimate stage in the history of the forgetting of Being, and the critique of work, is most obvious in the writings where this ultimate stage of metaphysics, the peak of nihilism, is designated as Machenschaft (machination). Machenschaft is a term directly forged on Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht. By making visible the “machen” (making) in Macht, Machenschaft suggests through the term itself the reduction of all beings to calculability and utility. As machen implies, however, this age of universal utility is also the age of productivism, the time when work becomes the central value. Many passages in the Nietzsche lectures and the Contributions to Philosophy, written during the late 1930s and early 1940s, establish the narrative, leading from the Greek attempts to name Being properly, to its gradual covering over, until the final abandonment of humanity by Being in the age of technology, connecting it to an explanation of the rise of instrumental, industrial thinking. The following extract is a good example:

the name machination [Machenschaft] should immediately refer to making [Machen] (ποίησις, τέχνη), which we assuredly know as a human activity. This latter, however, is itself possible precisely only on the grounds of an interpretation of beings in which their makeability comes to the fore, so much so that constancy and presence become the specific determinations of beingness. The fact that something makes itself by itself and consequently is makeable in a corresponding operation: the making itself by itself is the interpretation of φύσις carried out in terms of τέχνη and its outlook on things, in such a way that now already the emphasis falls on the makeable and the self-making, which is called, in brief, machination... The medieval concept of actus already covers over the primordial Greek essence of the interpretation of beingness. Connected to this is the fact that the machinational now thrusts itself forward more clearly and that, through the coming into play of both the Judeo-Christian thought of creation and the corresponding representation of God, ens becomes ens creatum… the cause–effect connection comes to dominate everything (God as causa sui). That is an essential deviation from φύσις and is at the same time the transition to the emergence of machination as the essence of beingness in modern thought. The mechanistic and the biologistic modes of thinking are always only consequences of the concealed machinational interpretation of beings (Contributions to Philosophy, 100).

In “Overcoming Metaphysics”, a text published in the 1954 Aufsätze, and republished in volume 7 of the Gesamtausgabe, which is a compilation of notes written between 1936 and 1946, the link between the grand perspective of the history of metaphysics and the thematic role of work is made very clear:

The fact that man as animal rationale, here meant in the sense of the working being, must wander through the desert of the earth's desolation could be a sign that metaphysics occurs in virtue of Being, and the overcoming of metaphysics occurs as the incorporation of Being. For labor (cf. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, 1932) is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the unconditional objectification of everything present which is active in the will to will. If this is so, we may not presume to stand outside of metaphysics. Collapse and desolation find their adequate occurrence in the fact that metaphysical man, the animal rationale, gets fixed as the laboring animal. This rigidification confirms the most extreme blindness to the oblivion of Being. But man wills himself as the volunteer of the will to will, for which all truth becomes that error which it needs in order to be able to guarantee for itself the illusion that the will to will can will nothing other than empty nothingness, in the face of which it asserts itself without being able to know its own completed nullity.(Overcoming Metaphysics, 86)

In words that not unsurprisingly anticipate Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the animal laborans, Heidegger here directly connects the phase of ultimate, planet-wide loss of meaning for self and reification of the world, to the triumph of work as central value.

Work as clearing

A second great paradox regarding Heidegger on work is that other writings, some very close, if only chronologically, to the sinister writings of the early 1930s, can be used to make an altogether different case about work. This is a different kind of a case for work, one no longer tied to the paranoid vision of Germany’s special destiny. In these writings, some forms of work are discussed by Heidegger as a paradigm example of human activity in which and through which a “clearing” occurs, that is, a space of meaningfulness, a rich and consistent perspective onto the world, through which the connections between beings and their potential meanings are revealed.

This side of Heidegger has been famously picked up by Hubert Dreyfus and scholars working on skill and expertise, notably following Dreyfus’ influential reading of Being and Time. The workshop example in Division I of Being and Time is the paradigm case of a place in which the human person finds herself inserted into a multi-layered network of meanings that give direction and purpose to her activities, to the objects, persons and world surrounding her, and in the end help to anchor her selfhood:

The work produced refers not only to the "towards-which" of its usability and the "whereof" of which it consists : under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he 'is' there along with it as the work emerges... Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein's kind of Being- entities for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-hand ; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours… Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering ; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those entities within-the-world which are brought along [beigebrachte] in the work and with it (that is to say, in the assignments or references which are constitutive for it) remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying circumspective penetration. (Being and Time, 100)

Heidegger repeats similar analyses a few years later, notably in the 1934 seminar on logic already quoted. This text is typical of the great ambiguity of Heidegger as a philosopher. Whilst many passages in it seem to fit neatly alongside his other attempts at aligning his philosophy with national-socialist thinking and policies, in the same volume, other passages can be found that provide unique philosophical characterisations of the indispensable role of work for human subjects. In the first such passage, Heidegger goes as far as making work a form of “clearing”, a space and time where beings can authentically encounter beings and world because it is the opportunity for genuine manifesting. Unemployment as a result, which of course was a massive issue at the time, is diagnosed as an ontological condition, a severing of the individual from the capacity to belong to a world and relate to objects meaningfully.

In work and through it beings first become manifest to us in their determinate regions, and as worker the human being is  transported into the manifestness of beings and their jointure. This transporting is nothing supplementary, grafted onto the I,  but this transporting belongs to the essence of our being. This transportedness into things belongs to our constitution. For that reason, one is correct in saying that unemployment is not only the privation of a merit, but it is  a mental shattering-not because the lack of work thrusts the human being back to the individualized isolated I, but because the lack of work leaves empty the being-transported into things. Because work carries out the relation to beings, therefore unemployment is  an emptying of this relation to being. The relation remains, to be sure, but it is unfulfilled. This unfulfilled relation is the ground of the desolation of the one who is without work. In this desolation, the relation of the human being to the whole of beings is as lively as ever, but as pain. Therefore, unemployment is impotent being-exposed. Work is correspondingly a transporting into the jointures and forms of the beings that surround us. That is why the enjoyment of one's work is so important. It is not a mood that only accompanies our work; it is no addition to work, but joy as fundamental mood is the ground of genuine labor, which in its execution first makes human beings capable of existence. In labor as the present in the sense of making-present, the making-presence of beings happens. Work is the present in the original sense, in that we attend toward beings and thus let them come over us in their historicity, in that we submit ourselves to their superior strength and administer them in the great mood of the battle, of astonishment and of reverence, and increase it in its greatness. We can now unfold the essence of work in its wholeness and full-ness just as little as the moods in their great eruptions. What matters here is only to make visible in a  first reference the exposedness of Dasein by virtue of the attuned transporting into work, in order to give guidance for the experience of our Dasein with this.  (Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 127)

This echoes strikingly Marie Jahoda’s famous analysis of the ills of unemployment, as involving in particular a loss of what work provides, namely a “tie to reality”. Or we could also mention Christophe Dejours’ strong claim that work has a “transcendental” function, namely, to put us in touch with the real by forcing us to face its challenges.

A few pages later, Heidegger makes work the vector of true intersubjectivity:

The being-with-one-another of human beings is not in virtue of the fact that there are several human beings, but several human beings can only be in community, because being-human already means: attuned being-with-one-another, which is  not lost, if a  human being is alone. The exposedness creates for itself every time its form, its breadth, and its limits through work, which, according to its essence, transports us into exposedness to the jointure of being liberated for work. Work is not subsequently, for purposes of a better execution, dependent on the work of others, but conversely, work as fundamental comportment of the human being is the ground for the possibility of the being-with-one-another and being-for-one-another. Work as such, even if it is done by one individual, transports the human being into the being-with-and-for-another. (Logic as the question concerning the Essence of Language, 129)

This seems again a unique philosophical characterisation of some of the “goods of work” associated with the division of labour. In the midst of the most troubling epochal speculations, Heidegger’s writings contain those inspiring passages, which make it difficult to abandon him altogether.

Thomas Corbin and JP Deranty

Image

Heidegger, 1960. Photograph by Willy Pragher, Landesarchiv Baden-Würtemberg.