In France Heidegger's star rose as Marx's declined. His philosophy caught on during the 1960s among disenchanted leftists who belatedly realized that the Soviet Union was not the "radiant utopian future" they had sought. Heidegger's French disciples concluded that Marxism, rather than being the solution, was part of the problem. They dismissed Marx's theory of the proletariat as another failed variant of Western humanism. The working class was merely another incarnation of the "metaphysical subject" writ large. In this respect Heidegger's growing popularity corresponded to the widely sensed social and political paralysis of De Gaulle's "presidential dictatorship" (1958-1969)--a justification pro vita sua for a generation of French thinkers who had abandoned the barricades for the platitudes of 1920s German Kulturkritik.

By vilifying subjectivity and consciousness, concepts that Sartre prized, the French Heideggerians had fully imbibed the master's crippling political passivity--a passivity dictated by the idea that all human action is ultimately fruitless. According to Heidegger, Being determines everything. The contribution of individual men and women is epiphenomenal and, for the most part, pointless. Hence, the only thing we can do, as Heidegger once claimed, is patiently wait for God, who "can save us."

When French philosophers unwisely traded Marx for Heidegger, they simultaneously consigned the project of human emancipation to the dustbin. They exchanged "freedom" for the mysteries of "Being." Heidegger's philosophy is predicated on a radical criticism of reason and metaphysics. He once observed that "Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought."

But by rejecting reason, Heidegger and his French followers simultaneously severed the pivotal link between insight and emancipation. Socrates famously claimed that "knowledge is virtue." In other words: Insight and reflection are the keys to a life well lived. As Socrates declared, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Without the association between insight and emancipation, neither the doctrine of Marx nor of Freud would be possible. For, like that of Socrates, their theories are predicated on the idea that knowledge and human freedom are intrinsically related.

As a recovering Heideggerian, Sartre understood the problem better than anyone. He realized that a philosophy like Heidegger's, which demands unquestioning obedience to nameless, higher powers such as Being, the gods, fate and so forth, is a warrant for human bondage. By preaching submission, it is latently authoritarian. As Sartre astutely observed, a philosophy that "subordinates the human to what is Other than man...has hatred of man as both its basis and its consequence.... Either man is primarily himself, or he is primarily Other than himself. Choosing the second doctrine simply makes one a victim and accomplice of real alienation."

By the late 1980s the moral vacuity of Heidegger's philosophy stood fully exposed. Above all, it lacked an ethics. For Heidegger's French disciples, ethics had seemed superfluous, redolent of the antiquated framework of Western humanism. Ethics implied the necessity of a return to "man." It remained wedded to the paradigm of "subjectivity," which both the structuralists and their Heideggerian allies had sought fervidly to negate.

Levinas's philosophy provided Heidegger's French disciples with exactly what they were looking for: a powerful ethical doctrine that was fully consistent with the premises of the antihumanist critique. Thus did a Jewish academic from Kovno become the improbable savior of a tradition founded by a former Nazi.

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