Race and Rootedness

Charles Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots is an attempt to trace the roots of Heidegger’s affinity for Naziism. The “roots” of the title have a double meaning – both the intellectual background to Heidegger and Heidegger’s formulation of Bodenstandigkeit, “rootedness.”

Early on, Bambach summarizes Ernst Bloch’s “caustic and penetrating” response to National Socialism (in Heritage of our Times, 1935). Block scratched Bodenstandigkeit and found “a dangerously political ideology of oppression, exclusion, violence, and terror that he identifies as belonging to an Alemannic-Swabian-Bavarian form of National Socialism. In a present essay written in 1929, Bloch employs the openly oxymoronic term ‘pastoral militans‘ to capture the jarring effect of this violent conjoining of pastoral and militant themes. For Bloch, the language of the homeland and of an Alemannic rootedness in the soil betrays a political longing for ‘a myth that has its fantasy not in the distance but embedded beneath the soil as it were.’ This mythic attraction of German fascism for ‘blood and soil’ rhetoric ‘constitutes the chloroform practice of Hitlerism’” (4).

This meant that rootedness was not “an innocently bucolic affinity for hearth, field, and homeland” but instead “an encoded discourse about political exclusion, repression, and racial intolerance that serves to gird a regime ultimately bent on terror and extinction” (5).

Heidegger adopts much of the perspective Bloch criticizes, with his “pastoral language of field paths, native soil, pathmarks, fertile ground, and folkish rootedness” which “betrays a fundamental unity with the language and axiomatics of his ‘other’ paramilitary discourse about heroism, sacrifice, courage, will, struggle, hardness, violence, and self-assertion’” (5).

This doesn’t mean that Heidegger simply gives a philosophical gloss to Nazi ideology. For philosophical reasons, he rejects Nazi biologism since “Nazi scientific-ethnological categories of blood and genetic inheritance are wholly at odds with the existential categories of Being and Time” and because it denies “the essential historicity of a Volk by maintaining a positivist metaphysics of scientism and anthropologism in its place” (5). 

Bambach isn’t trying to get Heidegger off the hook: His “critique is counter-racial, yet racial nonetheless, because it is still a version of German rootedness as a form of political metaphysics” (5). That Heidegger’s metaphysics were autochthonous rather than sanguine doesn’t keep him from turning rootedness into a support for Nazi ideology.