Trust: was Heidegger molested as a boy?

14 Feb, 1950  Martin Heidegger to Elfride Heidegger

[...]   My disposition and the manner of my early upbringing, instability and cowardice in being able to trust & then again inconsiderateness in the abuse of trust, these are the poles between which I swing & thus only too easily & only too often misjudge & overstep the measure with regard to Hera and Eros.

Heidegger's deceitfulness and dishonesty were remarked upon some of those closest to him: Karl Jaspers from the late 1920's to early 1930's, Hannah Arendt much later to Jaspers and Elfride in various places.

One simple practicality was that his mistresses not become pregnant. If we accept that Hermann was this child of Friedl Caesar a picture begins to form which suggests that Heidegger may have been abused as a child.

For years he was dependent on Catholic charity and at the time of his breakdown, he, an ardent anti-Catholic, turns to the archbishop for protection. What this suggests is that this man had once failed to protect him and now in extremis Heidegger is owed this.  This is not Heidegger the penitent but Heidegger seeking protection - for his home, his library, his livelihood.  This is not the behavior of the hero embracing his destiny - which would have taken Heidegger to Argentina or Paraguay.  Heidegger was not being asked to renounce and to commit to some renewal. Even his pension was at risk. He has been undermined at the end of a career, his dreams for Germany dashed - just as he was undermined as a boy.

At various points he is reported as athletic and as a robust skiier and hiker, but he has palpitations and "asthma" preventing him from military service.

Late in life he is preoccupied that physics is leaving nothing "object-like".  His preoccupation is to feel at home - to have gratitude (he often mentions gratitude) - but he is utterly unable to be truthful to his wife about his infatuations.  He requires "womanly" understanding for his ideas - not the understanding of males (see his letter of Jan 1922.)

Heidegger uses his marriage to Elfride to escape the Church. She does not come to Catholicism: he abandons it. He is prepared to take Luther instead of Aquinas.  His later preoccupation that instruments are more fundamental to the secular view than theoria - that what is actually done and how it is done and whether it respects a tradition - is more basic than cultured talk - all this hints at an instability, fears.

Even after the war, Heidegger remains tied to Juenger, von Weizsäcker, Heisenberg - all of them tainted.  He never makes an apology, never acknowledges that wrong was done.

It does not require much imagination to see this troubled man as having been injured, harmed - if not physically, then at least emotionally.  He does not leave his wife, but instead gives her constant occasion to find fault with his unreliability.

While there are various hints in Heidegger's published work and his published letters as to his erotic inclinations, his erotic orientation, there are much stronger indications that he is unable to come to terms with what is: he rejects ethics, values, permanence. Everything of importance is fated, temporalized, fluid.  While he cannot deny the defeat of Germany, it is only a foreshadowing of an even greater conflagration. Everything about the victors is false - and everything that happened can be relativized.

Consider what befell Hoelderlin - denied the woman he loved by the moralizers (marriage) and then losing his Diotima to death - and then the loss of most of his life, while he yet goes on living with the self-educated carpenter. Kierkegaard, denying himself even a word with his Regina.  Nietzsche, who most likely never knew intimacy with Frau Lou.  Nietzsche falling back on eternal recurrence. And the constant repetition by Heidegger of failing to confess to Elfride that he has again confided something.

Heidegger was unable to speak the truth about some acts by some persons in confession. This would seem to open a view of how he came to tell Husserl that you must not commit - you must wait to see where things are going. Something will happen.  There will be some unveiling.

Heidegger did not have an "open marriage" with Elfride.  That is not how he speaks of it and that is not what she reproaches him for - he has an ambiguous relationship with her - and she passes this on to Hermann, feeling the need to have this secret with her son, that he is not Martin's boy. There is almost a mirror in this drama.

When Heidegger talks about what one might be able to find in the Church - but then there are all the falsehoods of those in authority. As long as those liars are there, he cannot dwell in the historical Church.

I am constantly wondering why Heidegger had no interest in Philo of Alexandria or Stoic alternatives to Jeshua of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus.  He must be true to his homeland, to what he has left behind back home, but he will reject Latin and embrace Greek. But there is Alcibiades. And Martin's preference for the pre-Socratics.

One radical possibility is that Heidegger was troubled in his gender, and for this reason was in need of repeat daliance - the disclosure of yet another nakedness.  Heidegger is not unaware of embodiment.  He speaks to Jaspers of the hands of Hitler - and yet he cannot see through Hitler's bombast, the blood read, the perverted crosses.

Heidegger's certainty that he has a path - despite the setbacks, the disillusionment - and this very certainty suggests that very early on when he thought he was "on his way" something disrupted this - he had left home and now he was utterly not at home, unable to dwell in what could have been a stable new home.  Everything has still not happened. Circumstances become unfathomable. The war is lost, but there he is with royalty and a mistress! Fabelhaft! Nicht wahr!

Somewhere at sometime Heidegger was left ill at ease with idle chatter, seeming "culture", he must endear himself to Husserl who has lost a son - and he absorbs Husserl's orientation but cannot take it as his own, further it, embrace it, even in modest ways - he must instead overcome, undermine - and in the end he will not even attend his mentor and sponsor and benefactor's funeral - he, Heidegger, occupying Husserl's chair in the Catholic university of Freiburg im Briesgau. Was it Husserl's God of the quasi-totality of transcendental ego's that offended Heidegger? Or the falseness that he could not but feel, himself a Catholic masquerading as a Protestant with a Lutheran mentor whom he, Heidegger, considered to be a Jew (there is no question that the Freiburg faculty viewed the converted Husserl as a Jew - after all, he had merely converted to Lutheranism!)

Heidegger's need for young followers always shifts his attention to some woman among them - he is even unaware that Werner Brock is a Jew - so it may come down to this: Heidegger's embrace of the SA and SS is some curious denial of some gender inappropriate conflict in his past.

Heidegger at various places seems to suggest that not all end of life is a "death" ( he himself will die in his sleep) - not all unavowed liasons should undermine a family bond, of husband to wife - these are only the hints that he leaves other than the more obvious strains of his philosophizing in his distant traipsing about Eros, as if he is always lurking there, furtive, camouflaged.

We do not have the foundation we thought we had - all grounds are in question - all outcomes are ultimately irrational, fated. Yet he yearns for the real, the genuine, to remove the scare quotes from 'culture', 'science' and 'history'. What is it that we are forgetting, might forget, must not forget, confide, hint at, moving around and about in circles, never direct.

When Jaspers encounters Van Gogh, Heidegger embraces Van Gogh, but like Merleau-Ponty, meditates on Cezanne.  Where are the nudes of Cezanne. Van Gogh? Those of Cezanne only appear to be in a clearing and unveiled: they are murky, outlined, lacking in any detail - but did he ever see the nudes of Van Gogh?

The future arrives, and it is false. Even the past is false - it is not what they are saying. The American future, the Russian future, both will be negated in a confrontation.  At some critical moment in Heidegger's early life something was true, was unexpected, was accepted, will not be mentioned, did not happen, this is the way it is and this is not the way it is. Does someone care?  Does he tell his mother?  Did his father blame him?

Was it not unreal? He finally ends up at war, but then it is over, he has survived. Was it not unreal, the posting to Marburg, the call to Freiburg?  Was it not just unbelievable, Elfride stays after the session on Kant, Hannah comes to his office - does she take off her hat? Will she take off her coat?  He takes a risk with each. And now he has insight, deep. a thinking that does not even belong to him - and now it is all unfathomable.

Heidegger's breakdown is characterized by withdrawal and paranoia.  But not so much so that he is unable to be helped, he is open to being helped - von Gebsattel is nobility, he is later almost a colleague and Heidegger, from one breakdown, from mere conversations with Jaspers, goes on to advise psychiatrists. What could be more false, more preposterous, more unreal. The Germans are defeated, but he is putting his faith in Jean Beaufret.  The French are controlling Baden, Sartre is a travesty, but his faith in Beaufret is unwavering. Beaufret the denier, the belittler of what  of what everyone else views as absolutely essential!

How else explain Heidegger's confidence in his own lies, his own pretentions, his infidelities, his complete lack of political realism.  Heidegger, a nobody, replaces Husserl the trained mathematician. It is almost as if Heidegger became a Cardinal without first having been even a priest. The forester, the farmer, the steward, the shepherd. Anything but the priest.