In my mid-twenties I went through a philosophy stage. I was not in graduate school and nobody assigned me anything. But after years of studying the Bible, the Talmud and the teachings of the Sages, I could not shake a gnawing feeling. How could I be so confident about the direction of my life without ever reading the works of history’s greatest thinkers? Did the philosophers have something I did not?
So I read them. I was not methodical about it. I worked through an enormous anthology of Western philosophy, skipping the mind-numbing ones while diving deeper into the thinkers I found interesting. Yet every one of them, no matter how brilliant, ultimately left me cold and mentally exhausted.
Before I gave up on philosophy entirely, I tried one last school of thought. The modern existentialists attracted me because of their intensity (a good fit for my type-A personality). Their writing reflected a keen awareness that life is short, and that a man had better understand why he is here and what his life is for.
That is how I came to Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger is widely considered the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and he earned that reputation. His book Being and Time, published in 1927, changed the direction of modern philosophy. He taught many extraordinary students, including Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Karl Löwith. Jean-Paul Sartre built his own work on Heidegger’s ideas. He was the last philosopher whose name an ordinary person on the street might still recognize.
He was also a Nazi.
The faculty of the University of Freiburg elected him rector on April 21, 1933, three months after Hitler took power. He joined the Nazi party the following month. On May 27 he delivered his rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” which bound German scholarship to the Nazi revolution and told the students and faculty of his university to follow Hitler. That November, he issued a public declaration of support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state. He appointed party men to administrative posts and worked to fold Nazi ideology into the life of the university. Germany’s most respected philosopher handed his prestige to Hitler’s regime, which is exactly what the regime wanted from him.
He never issued an apology.
For decades, his defenders argued that his year as rector and his party membership amounted to a brief and naive political misstep, separate from his actual philosophy. The Black Notebooks shattered that defense. These were his private philosophical journals, and when Germany began publishing them in 2014 they revealed that Heidegger’s Jew-hatred was woven directly into his philosophy.
Just one example: “World Judaism, spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere elusive and, with all its power deployment, doesn’t need to participate in military actions, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of our own people.”
How could the most brilliant philosopher of the twentieth century, a man whose entire vocation was the pursuit of truth, sign up with the most evil ideology and government the world has ever produced?
Four hundred years ago, long before anyone could picture a philosopher in a Nazi uniform, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague explained where the greatest thinkers go wrong.
He begins by giving the philosophers their due. They studied the natural world, they saw that it runs according to fixed and precise laws, and they understood that there must be a Creator who brought this world into being.
Modern science has only strengthened their case. Every discovery of the last century has revealed more precision and more design in our world, not less.
The philosophers correctly understood that our universe is not random, and that there must be a Creator. But they refused to take the next step. They agreed that God designed the physical world with intent and awesome precision, but then concluded that God left morality entirely to us. Man would have to create the laws of morality on his own, using his own reason and conscience.
The Enlightenment philosophers built an entire system on this idea. Voltaire looked at the world and never doubted that God made it. “The universe troubles me, and I cannot conceive that this clock exists and has no clockmaker.” But the God he found was a clockmaker who built the machine, set it running, and then left it alone. Voltaire denied that God ever revealed His will to man, and even published a two-volume commentary on Scripture that ridiculed nearly every book of the Bible.
Thomas Paine, whose Age of Reason carried this thinking across Europe and America, insisted that God gave man no revelation whatsoever. Nature is the only scripture a man needs. “The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of his existence and the immutability of his power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.” The Bible is a fraud, and man must work out how to live by studying the world and reasoning it through on his own.
Rabbi Loew demonstrates why this conclusion is absurd. Human intelligence is unreliable. A child is not born with it. He develops it slowly, over many years, and some people become brilliant while others never do. Would God design the miracle of the human body and then leave morality to a process as uncertain as that? As Abraham Livni, the twentieth century French Jewish thinker, writes, “The Creator could not have intelligently ordered the physical world only to abandon it to the moral anarchy of man.”
How is this possible? How could many of the most brilliant thinkers in history reach such a foolish conclusion? Why were they convinced that God went to the trouble of creating an entire universe and then, for no reason anyone can articulate, abandoned it?
Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, one of the great teachers of Jewish thought in the last century, explains that our conclusions do not begin in the mind at all. They begin in the heart.
“There is no intellectual doubt or bias in the world that does not originate from a desire or temptation in the heart which arouses and gives birth to it. A person does not deny the fundamentals of faith unless he has found a desire and temptation in his heart for forbidden actions, which the principles of the Bible prevent him from doing. To quiet his conscience, which torments him for violating biblical law, he searches for and invents doubts and heresies to give himself permission. Such doubts are not the fruit of the intellect, but the fruit of personal bias.”
When the philosophers concluded that God created the world and then left man to his own devices, they believed they were being intellectually honest and speaking the truth. But in reality they were simply justifying their own temptations and desires. By concluding that God did not make any moral demands of men, they granted themselves the freedom to live any way they wanted to without guilt or fear of judgment.
Jacques Monod, the Nobel laureate biologist, fell prey to the very same temptation as Voltaire and Paine. He calculated the odds that life would ever appear on earth and found that they were, in his own words, “next to nil.” The odds that human beings would develop the ability to think logically were just as tiny. “Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero,” he wrote. “Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal.” Clearly, there must be a Creator!
But Monod refused to accept that conclusion. He decided instead that mankind simply got lucky, and that life and human intelligence both appeared by accident. “Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.” Monod preferred to believe in a miracle without God, because believing in God would have forced him to change the way he lived.
Brilliance offers no protection against foolishness like this. In fact, a high IQ often makes matters worse. A brilliant man who wants to escape God’s authority can build a far more convincing case for doing so than an ordinary man can, and the first person he convinces is himself.
Heidegger gave his reasons for joining the Nazi party. He wrote to Herbert Marcuse in 1948 that in 1933 he had expected National Socialism to bring “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety,” along with peace between Germany’s warring classes and deliverance of the West from communism. He claimed he took the rectorship only to keep a party functionary out of the job. He justified his decision using his own philosophical language of destiny, rootedness, authentic community and the struggle against modern nihilism.
But all of Heidegger’s explanations are hogwash. His real reason for joining the Nazis is as clear as day. Hitler held power, the Nazis were ascendant, the philosophy faculties were being purged of Jews, and an ambitious man who wanted to play a leading role in German academia had everything to gain by signing on. Gadamer, his own student, said Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis was opportunistic.
Heidegger did not set out to deceive the world. He deceived himself first, and then his genius went to work manufacturing justifications for what he already wanted, exactly as Rabbi Dessler describes.
God never left morality in our hands. Immediately after creating Adam, He ordered him to live by a moral law.
The Sages teach that with these words, God did not only command Adam regarding the tree. In this moment God gave Adam the foundational laws of human morality: do not murder, do not steal, and establish courts of justice. Thousands of years before God gave the Torah to Israel at Mount Sinai, and long before the philosophers began speculating about the purpose of life, God told the first man how to live. Adam did not work out right and wrong for himself. God gave him the law, and a law that comes from God cannot be bent by what a man desires.
I never finished that anthology of Western philosophy. I finally understood that I was not missing anything, and that humanity’s most brilliant minds often possess an astonishing lack of wisdom.
Yet those years of reading were not a complete waste. They helped me understand the brokenness of the secular modern world. Once men decided that they would write the moral law themselves, everything became permitted, and the ideologies built on that idea left a trail of bodies across the last hundred years. Communism promised paradise and delivered famine and gulags. Fascism promised national renewal and delivered Auschwitz. Philosophy gave me little wisdom, but it showed me how the catastrophes of our age were born.
Little has changed today. The same universities that produced opportunistic Nazis like Heidegger now graduate hundreds of thousands of students who march for the destruction of the State of Israel as their most credentialed and celebrated professors egg them on. Brilliance without God is producing in our own day exactly what it produced in 1933.
Yet humanity has lost its respect for philosophy, even if most people cannot explain why. As Livni writes, “Long the queen of the disciplines, philosophy has now become no more than a poor relative, if not the most scorned relative, ready moreover to scuttle itself for the benefit of any other discipline that is vaguely scientific, sociological, or psychoanalytical.” The reason is simple. Nobody believes anymore that the philosophers possess the truth they claim to have, and after Heidegger, why would they?
Today, the philosophy books are gathering dust on my shelves, and on library shelves all over the world. The Bible remains the best selling book on earth.
