Heidegger During the War

It is well known that Heidegger actively supported the Nazis during the first years of their power. In 1933 he became rector of the university in Freiburg, and a party member. He issued statements supporting Hitler. He engaged then (and earlier) in several anti-Semitic actions against students and teachers. He taught seminars from 1933-1935 in which he severely questioned liberal democracy and justified German expansion and separating Jews from the German people.[1] Although he resigned the rectorate after less than a year, he remained close to leading Nazi academics, and he participated in several public events.[2] Heidegger’s sons fought for Germany on the Eastern front, and there is no sign that he considered leaving Germany. He never repudiated the regime or faced up to the murder of countless Jews, but he did distance himself from the Nazi’s biological racism and from some of their acolytes’ scholarly views, especially concerning Nietzsche.[3] He published little during the war years–his major activity was teaching and lecturing, and he was forced or allowed himself to drop Being and Time’s dedication to his teacher Husserl, who was Jewish.[4] His differences from the regime did not mislead the occupying authorities after the Allied victory, and they banned Heidegger from teaching for five years.[5]

Heidegger’s support for the Nazis was not an accident, nor (at least primarily) a function of his dislike of Jews, or of fear or opportunism.[6] Rather, it followed most immediately from his diagnosis of the current situation.[7] Something radical, was needed to deal with this, not something half-hearted. More fundamentally, Heidegger’s support stemmed from his thought, which is grounded on an analysis that makes much of resolve and decision, that concerns itself with the “people,” that criticizes the dominance of individual subjectivity, and that finds a common core in all modern spheres of action. Illiberal politics is its unsurprising consequence.

These political facts do not mean that Heidegger’s thought was caused by or even more loosely determined by them. Heidegger emphasizes the historical, but by that he does not mean that one’s thought and actions are caused by one’s time and place. Rather, he means that we are always thrown into a world that run ahead of us as we project our possibilities and as we decide or determine who we are. The meaning and power of the past and present cannot be separated from each other or from the future. In any event, the past does not cause our actions as if we were mere bodies or objects of science. Thought is not relative to its time, although it begins from and cannot simply outrun its time. Nor, however, is it absolute, as if our mind could be separated from our being temporal.[8]

II

Of the many lectures and manuscripts that Heidegger produced from 1933-1945, several stand out, among them various discussions of the German poet Friedrich Holderlin (a friend and contemporary of Hegel and Schelling), and the 1935 course, later published in 1953 as Introduction to Metaphysics. Especially significant, given its length and its discussion of thought from the classics to the present, are the courses he gave on Nietzsche from 1936-1940, which he published in 1961.[9] The seeming importance of Nietzsche for the Nazis and their followers and their erroneous view of him may have been one reason Heidegger examined Nietzsche so carefully. But, his final view, namely, that Nietzsche was the last of the metaphysicians, the last of the Platonists (if in reverse) means that Nietzsche did not attain the radical position Heidegger seeks.

Especially significant intellectually is the Beitrage zur Philosophie, written from 1936-1938 but not published until 1989, and its companion volumes.[10] The Beitrage is the first comprehensive radical product of the so-called turn in Heidegger’s thought, a turn that governed his work from then until his death. I will briefly discuss its major points, and then concentrate on his discussions of matters that one might consider especially relevant to politics or political philosophy.

Heidegger left incomplete or undiscussed in Being and Time what he announced there as his goal: how temporality is the horizon for understanding being. He would have elaborated this discussion in the third division of Being and Time’s first part, but this division was never published and Heidegger apparently destroyed whatever existed in manuscript.[11] He also did not write or publish the second part of Being and Time, in which he would have examined Aristotle, Descartes and Kant’s views of time. Elements of this part do appear in what is published in Being and Time, but something closer to the overall discussion is present primarily in Nietzsche, with summaries in the Beitrage. What is especially significant in the Beitrage is Heidegger’s approach to (and the substance of) the area that he would have discussed in the third part of Being and Time’s first division, that is, how temporality is the horizon for understanding being. He tries to indicate to us and spell out this region and its elements, as he is finally able to approach and elaborate it. I will now discuss this.

Heidegger works to differentiate the focus of his questions from traditional philosophical or ‘metaphysical’ thinkers. He, not they, is concerned with the meaning of being. This concern, however, does seem similar to his predecessors’ concerns. Do not Plato’s ideas or natures, or Aristotle’s categories and his discussion of energeia and dunamis try to tell us what truly, fully, or generally is, as opposed to the merely apparent, partial, or fleeting? Heidegger argues more clearly than in Being and Time that such views, perhaps especially Plato’s, which he joins Nietzsche in claiming are the root of all metaphysics, are about being as (or the being which is) the ground or essence of beings, and are therefore oriented to beings.[12] They are not about being itself.[13] Indeed, the source and truth of what is, is seen by the philosophical tradition as the highest entity, the one that is most in being. This view is most visible when, by means of Christianity’s essential Platonism, the creator God is thought to be the highest entity and the source of the being of the other entities.

What is missing in these earlier discussions, however, is an exploration of what being itself means or “is.” Consequently (or also) what is missing is a discussion of the horizon in terms of which this meaning is given or understood.[14] In order to clarify matters terminologically, Heidegger begins to call the philosophers’ “being” beingness, and what he himself seeks, namely, being in terms of its meaning or horizon, not its (sole or immediate) orientation to entities as their source, ground, or cause, beyng.[15] The different words help us to keep Heidegger’s focus in mind, although the standpoints for understanding beyng (being), beingness, and beings must be linked – just how is one of Heidegger’s central themes. One question is precisely why the philosophers took for granted a certain meaning of being – namely, constant presence–and why they overlooked that they took this for granted.

What I have said so far shows that Heidegger’s terms and the clarity of his distinctions may have changed from Being and Time but not that his approach or direction varies fundamentally. And, indeed, because what comes to be called Heidegger’s “turn” always remains within the same circle of questions and phenomena, this unity of direction is present to a substantial degree throughout the phases of Heidegger’s work, once he poses his initial questions. To see this unity requires what Heidegger in the Beitrage calls a “leap” into the domain of being as such. So, although Heidegger in Being and Time speaks of the meaning of being, in the Beitrage of the truth of being, and, later, of the place of being, he also makes clear that these terms all point to the same matter.[16] Moreover, the issue of truth, or, at least, of truth as unconcealing beings as they stand in being was already central in Being and Time.

III

Nonetheless, despite the unity in Heidegger’s thought before, during, and after his turn, the Beitrage does have elements that are newly expressed, approached, and emphasized, while still standing within Heidegger’s basic direction. Moreover, to emphasize Nietzsche (and Holderlin’s poetry) in the 1930s is as we said to stress authors important to the Nazis and some circles around them.[17] None of this, however, is easy to connect directly to Heidegger’s support and experience of the Nazi government, or of the war, or to any distancing from the Nazis. He claims to have begun his turn in 1930 with his continuing examination of truth. And, he introduced a basic term in the Beitrage, and one basic from that time forward, namely, Ereignes, in 1919. Still, it is indeed possible that his disappointment with the regime (that it did not ultimately counter technological modernity), the failure of whatever expectations he had for his own rectorship, or even his attempt to see more clearly the grounds on which he was attracted to the Nazis contributed to his works during their regime.

One fresh element visible in the Beitrage is Heidegger’s unrelenting attempt to make clear the novelty of the being whose truth he is questioning. However much preparation can lead us to understand it, we still require a leap into its domain. It is not on a line with other reflections, as if we seek to know what beings are, what grounds them, and what grounds this ground, all the while pushing things out one more step, while still having in mind the same direction and type of grounding. Rather, the truth of being must be newly seen and directly discussed.[18]

Another change is that Being and Time’s discussion of being’s “horizon” fades, as does the formalistic discussion of temporality we see in the Grundprobleme. One must leap into the experience that is connected to one’s understanding, and not manipulate already present concepts, such as already present notions of time and space. Indeed, the realm of being is now its “play space.” Moreover, a kind of space seems equivalent to, or at least not derivable from, time, even when Heidegger is discussing constant presence as the implicit meaning of being hitherto.[19]

Still another fresh element is how the essence or “essencing” of truth and other phenomena come to the fore. There are, moreover, new emphases on simplicity, on being and the clearing for being as standing “between,” and, above all, on the event (the appropriation, what is its own) and on the unity of Dasein and event. Projective understanding, thrownness, the importance of dispositions, concealment, and Dasein – human openness to and immersion in being and its truth – remain central in both the Beitrage and Being and Time, but the discussion of these phenomena is now focused on our revealing being and its meaning as such, not on being and its meaning as grounding entities. Much of what Heidegger had written earlier is seen as a transition to this new standpoint, which was not then clearly enough described.

Another matter that Heidegger now emphasizes is the phenomenon of need or “plight.” The question of being has been forgotten, he argued in Being and Time, and, indeed, needed to be ignored in order for philosophy or metaphysics to proceed. But, modern philosophy and technology has led to its being almost completely obliterated. “Being” is now a vaporous generality and the only things thought truly to be involve mathematical objectivity, machination, and technology. We do not even recognize the loss. So, our plight today is that we no longer even see or feel what we lack. Truly following this need and its source, namely, our openness to being, and the necessity it presses upon us, moreover, overcomes the arbitrariness one might ascribe to Heidegger’s discussions.[20]

Need also belongs to Heidegger’s complex characterization of the gods, another newly discussed element of his thought. Heidegger was always concerned with religion, and early in his career Heidegger’s teacher Husserl thought that a phenomenology of religious life would be Heidegger’s focus. He taught and examined works from Augustine and Luther early in the 1920s, sought to distinguish the religious life or experience he ascribed to them (and to the prophets) from mere theological reflection, and (as he does in the Beitrage) understood Christian doctrine to be essentially metaphysical. But in the Beitrage his emphasis is not on Luther and Augustine, or even on what is holy. And it is not on organized religion. Rather, his concern is with the “last god,” or the absence of god and gods. His concern is with our forgetting or blocking the site where a decision about the gods can be made. This forgetting proceeds throughout the history of philosophy, where what is highest is conceived in terms of a thinker’s understanding of beingness.

Heidegger’s point of reference for understanding gods and their absence is Holderlin.[21] The gods need being and Dasein, who is the site of being (although they do not need man in his usually understood characteristics): the gods are not above us, or being. Heidegger does not describe systematically or step by step the characteristics gods might have if we were to see them through an appropriate understanding of being. But, we can nonetheless describe the major elements in his thought about them. The gods concern what is or is revealed as holy (godly), and simple; experiencing this requires the appropriate disposition; the gods or their site belong to what calls us to our seriousness or authenticity as the ones who reveal beings and beings in their being; there is presumably a link between the “last” god and what Heidegger describes in Being and Time as the last or final or uttermost in ourselves, the possibility of dying; and, the absent gods help show us the importance of absence in letting us see what being and our being are, as, for example, we are exposed to being through anxiety, guilt, and the call of conscience.[22]

IV

In addition to these points there are others Heidegger makes in the Beitrage and other works he produced in the Nazi period that are relevant to politics and political philosophy, and that elaborate (or–less clearly–modify) earlier material. It is difficult here too to connect these directly with his experience during the Nazi’s dominance.

The overall basis of Heidegger’s political analysis is his understanding of the “people.” In Being and Time we can understand the people as the authentic analogue to the public. In the seminars from 1933-1935, this discussion is elaborated, and the unity with Nazi speech and deeds is clear.[23] The being of a people is the state. This, not the teachings of, say, Locke, shows us the truly philosophical state. To call the state the people’s being is to say that a state is not, as it is in liberalism, merely one unit among others, indeed, a unit subordinate to the economy and other institutions of society. Heidegger’s view of the polis also focuses on its comprehensiveness, its being the pole around which other existence turns.[24]

The state is connected to but not simply rooted in the soil: a people’s destiny, indeed, the German people’s destiny, may exist in expansion, but no “nomadic” people can set roots. The core of the state and its actions is the leader’s existence, although it requires some political knowledge from all, and labor and tradition are significant. States have enemies whom they should recognize and even annihilate.

Heidegger does not essentially modify these views later in the 1930s or during the war. In the Beitrage he claims that “a people first becomes a people when its most unique members appear and when they begin to experience a presentiment [which he connects to basic dispositions such as shock, restraint and diffidence.] In that way a people first becomes strugglingly free for its law as the last necessity of its highest moment. The philosophy of a people is that which makes [them] people of a philosophy, grounds them historically in their Da-sein, and destines them to stewardship of the truth of beying” “Only from Da-sein can the essence of a people be grasped…To hold the opposite opinion is merely a ‘popular’ expansion of both the ‘liberal’ thought of the ‘I’ and the economic idea of the conservation of ‘life.’”[25]

Although (or because) Heidegger does not modify these views essentially, what he does do during this period is to question, or let us question, whether the leader or leaders (hence of the Germans too) perform genuine or authentic deeds or, rather, whether they prove to belong to the same dominance of technology in which Marxism and Americanism reside. This is a dominance in which everything is merely a resource for the continuing, and even massive, but pointless and formless activity that ignores being itself, modes of being other than technology, and human openness to them. Heidegger did not argue in favor of limitless expansion, and his discussion of enemies ranged from confrontation to annihilation, but his disappointment with Hitler and the Nazis stemmed from their being insufficiently radical, and not from the fact that they were too extreme.

Another point to discuss is freedom, mastery, and power. Heidegger’s view of freedom is important in many of his works. As his gaze turns more unrelentingly to the truth of being as such and Dasein’s openness to it, so too does he locate freedom in this realm. Our freedom is our openness to being and our ultimate lack of grounding in beings. Our freedom is not in the last analysis rooted in reason or in having some view of beingness, or in dealing with beings. It involves “the restrained awaiting of an encounter and an intimation.”[26] It is “belonging to the owned [the property] of beying,” to “truth essencing as the clearing of concealing.”[27] Mastery is the fully free knowing one’s way around a realm. “Mastery is the necessity of the free toward what is free. Mastery is exercised, and essences, as the unconditionality in the domain of freedom, and its greatness consists in the fact that it needs no power and thus no violence. Yet it remains more effective than these, although in its own particular type of constancy (the continuity, with apparently long interruptions, of the self-related moments). Power and violence are the mere manipulation of beings that in fact master us.” “Power – the capacity of securing a possession of violent possibilities. As a securing, power is always related to a counter-power and for that reason is never an origin. Violence – powerless incursion into beings of a capacity for change without a leap ahead and without a view toward possibilities. Wherever beings are to be changed by beings (not out of being), violence is necessary.”[28]

In a manuscript from 1939-1940, Koinon, which is related to and was later published together with the History of Beying, Heidegger elaborates his discussion of power at greater length, and connects it to his understanding of the unified course of modern metaphysics through Nietzsche and contemporary machination or technology. To grasp matters in terms of power is to see all things in terms of goalless over-powering. It is to grasp beings first of all in a certain way, however else one might later appear to control or direct them. Modern politics, and, in Heidegger’ discussion here, communism in particular, is discussed in this manner. The central point is that the dominance of power and ultimately of technology must be seen as a metaphysical understanding of beingness, of the being of beings, that pushes aside all other understanding. Power and technology however, as is true of all metaphysics, are rooted in our forgotten projection of and standing within beying and its truth, and in our human characteristics as centered on the way we make a place for beyng and our understanding of it.[29]

Heidegger also develops his discussion of individuality, clarifying even more crisply than in Being and Time the difference between the soul and what he has in mind with the self. The true self is not “the ‘self’-certainty of the ‘I’ that would be carried out precisely for the sake of ‘certainty’ and not for the sake of the truth of beyng…[T]he exposition of this ground reaches back into a still more original realm than is the realm which had to be broached in the transition by the initial determination of Da-sein in the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Being and Time…” Such a self [Dasein] also differs from the traditional notion “that a human being ‘consists’ of body-soul-spirit [which] does not say much, since the question of the being of this unitary compound is thereby avoided, quite apart from the fact that these ‘components’ and their postulation as determination of the human being indeed presuppose quite peculiar historical experiences of humans as well as of their relation to beings.” Heidegger does not develop the elements of the self here, or just what the differences might be with the view of Being and Time. What he suggests is that “the selfhood of the human being – of their historicality as a people – is a realm of occurrences, a realm in which they are appropriated to themselves only if they themselves reach the open time-space wherein an appropriation can occur. The most proper ‘being’ of humans is therefore grounded in a belonging to the truth of being as such, and this is so, again, because the essence of  being as such, not of human being, contains in itself a call to humans, as a call destining them to history…”[30]

Heidegger also in the Beitrage expands or clarifies his view of beings’ relation to being, and of the range of beings. It is not only that he attempts freshly to see being itself, its truth, and the event of appropriation in which they and Dasein belong together. It is also that beings themselves are more originarily grasped. They are for beyng’s sake. “Only in Da-sein does beyng attain the grounding of that truth in which all beings exist solely for the sake of beyng, beyng which lights up as the trace of the path of the last god. The grounding of Da-sein transforms the human being (seeker, preserver, steward.) This transformation creates the space of the other necessities for the decision regarding the nearness and remoteness of the gods.”[31] The truth of beyng is sheltered or protected in beings, which are seen in terms of this sheltering, rather than in other ways: “…knowledge as preservation of the truth of what is true (of the essence of truth in Dasein) distinguishes the future human being (vs. the rational animal of heretofore) and elevates him to the stewardship of beyng…”[32]

In connection with Heidegger’s exposition of what he believes to be this more fundamental realm, he lists a greater number and wider variety of types of beings than he had previously, and statesman’s deeds now belong among the possibilities. This sheltering of beings, “which authentically preserves the clearing-concealed [beyng’s truth]” is “carried out in and as Da-sein.” Such “care-taking” “abides in various mutually requisite modes: the fabrication of implements, the instituting of machinations (technology), the creation of works, stateforming acts and thoughtful sacrifice,” and not only in “modes of production but just as originally in the mode of reception in encountering the lifeless and the living: stone, plant, animal, human. The being taken back in to the self-secluding earth happens here.” Philosophy itself is finding and making “appear the simple sights and native [heimischen] forms in which the essencing of beyng is sheltered and taken to heart.”[33] “Preservation of beyng (preservation in the historicality of the event.) Why? So that the gods, in self-accord, might come to truth in beings and beyng might smolder and not yet burn out.[34] This does not mean, however, that beings will vaporize if beyng, its truth and meaning is altogether forgotten. “Beyng (as event) needs beings so that it might essence. Beings do not so need beyng. Beings can still ‘be’ in the abandonment by being; under                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          the domination of this abandonment, the immediate graspability, usability, and serviceability of every sort (e.g., everything must serve the people) obviously constitute what is a being and what is not.”[35]

In addition to these points we also see the manner in which Heidegger frames in fundamental ontological terms what in others might be called cultural criticism. This tendency is clear throughout his works but is less visible in Being and Time than in the works such as the Beitrage that he produces after it. Such criticism also helps us see how Heidegger differentiates himself from some of the understanding of the Nazis and their followers. “Wherein the abandonment by being announces itself: 1. The complete insensibility to the ambiguity in that which is held to be essential; ambiguity as effecting an incapacity and unwillingness to carry through the actual decisions. For example, everything that is meant by a people: the communal, the racial, the inferior and lower, the national, the permanent; or, for example everything called ‘godly.’ 2. The disappearance of the knowledge of what is a condition…Idolizing the conditions of historical beyng, for instance, of the ethnic with all its ambiguity. 3. The remaining caught up in the thinking and establishment of ‘values’ and ‘ideas;’ therein, without any serious questioning, the structural form of historical Dasein is seen as if were in something unalterable; corresponding to all this is ‘worldview’ thinking…4. As a consequence, everything is incorporated into a concern with ‘culture,’ and the great decisions such as Christianity are not set forth radically but are avoided instead.  5. Art comes under the subjection of cultural utility, and its essence is mistaken; blindness to its essential core, to its way of grounding truth…”Similarly, there is “misestimation with respect to the unfavorable and the negative,” as well as the “not,” “ignorance of the essence of truth,” a “dread of questioning,” “the inability to wait,” “All of these are merely emanations from an intricate and obdurate dissimulation of the essence of beyng…the fact that uniqueness, rarity, momentariness, contingency and befalling, restraint and freedom, preservation and necessity do pertain to beyng, which is not the emptiest and most common but the richest and highest…”[36]

Also even more visible in Heidegger’s thought in the Beitrage than earlier is his split from the view that what is most fundamental is the eternal in the sense of the never-ending (or ‘sempiternal’) and the always present, what is everywhere and always. To see the allure of the eternal one must remember that being implicitly means presence and constancy: what is most in being in entities, what makes them truly beings and not mistakes, errors, semblances, and mere appearances is their reflection or participation in what is constantly present. “The aei of the Greeks is not the historiologically conceived duration of progressive and endless continuance, but the constancy of the presencing of the inexhaustible essence.”[37]

Heidegger also discusses the origin of the basic metaphysical distinction between what beings are and that they are in these terms. “Beings…are already determined in their beingness and specifically as idea, the look, which is itself determined as constant presence,” and this incudes “both temporal-spatial determinations.” “Presence (t) as gatheredness of what shines forth, of the look—what. Constancy (t) as persistence and duration—that the look does not disappear. Constancy (s) that which fills up, that which constitutes the constant. Presence (s) giving space, the wither of the replacement, that the being stands firm.” This “doubling in temporalization and spatialization” comes “from their fundamental essence as transporting [projection] and captivating [thrownness] and this rooted in the essence of truth.”[38]

When beingness is grasped basically as what is always present, the highest being, the one that most is, is considered to be eternal – most obviously the eternal god who creates the other entities. Heidegger finds the true source of the meaningfulness or truth of what is ‘eternal’ or constantly present in beyng’s being revealed in a clearing, a time-space that needs human openness, and in the moment when beyng, truth and Dasein come together. “If the ‘what’ and the ‘that’ as determinations of beingness, as well as this latter, are not questioned with respect to their truth (time-space), then all discussions of essential and existential remain, as happened in the Middle Ages, an empty wrangling over uprooted concepts.”[39]

None of this analysis is intended to rest on time (or, consequently, what is eternal) in the usual sense of a never-ending sequence of nows. The meaning of constant presence in any such sense rests on what is not constantly present in this usual sense. It rests on a temporalization and spatialization that reveal or send forth more than constant presence and permanent causes. It is in conjunction with termporalization’s connection to being that man and being are historical, or belong together with historical truth. Indeed, such time-space may even involve its own sense of the ‘eternal,’ one that belongs together with beyng. “The eternal is not the incessant. It is instead that which can withdraw in a moment so as to recur later. What can recur: not as the identical but as the newly transforming, the one and unique, i.e., beyng, such that it is not immediately recognized, in this manifestness, as the same!”[40] In the traditional philosophical or metaphysical sense, therefore, “beyng is neither ‘always’ (sempiternum), nor is it ‘eternal,’ nor is it ‘temporal,’ ‘for a time,’ from time to time. When and how long being ‘is’ cannot be asked. Such a question passes ‘by’ beyng in its questioning.”[41]

Our presentation of Heidegger’s discussion of constant presence in terms of ideas and looks is not accidental, but stems from the central place he accords to Plato and Platonism in the history of metaphysics, and therefore in the history of Beyng. Heidegger’s discussion of the History of Beyng becomes especially central in his works during this time, visible both in the Beitrage and in Nietzsche. In the Beitrage this is especially clearly discussed when he traces the significance, and continued dominance from Plato through Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, of some variation of the “ideas” seen as common and general, truth seen as pertaining to correct statements about beings, the soul and, later, the subject and consciousness (all ignored in their being), and not understanding transcendence as transcendence to being as such. Perhaps especially relevant to students of political philosophy is Heidegger’s contention that although Plato sees that being is not fully grasped in beingness (for Plato, the ideas), his “task is to advance along the same path, the path characterized by a grasp of presencing, and proceed beyond beingness…Because this questioning asks only about beings and their beingness, however, it can never detach itself from beings and strike up against beying itself. The epekeina [the beyond or transcendent] can therefore be determined only as something that henceforth characterizes beings in terms of its relation to the human being [“happiness”] as the agathon, the useful, the ground of all usefulness, thus as the condition of ‘life,’ for the psyche, and accordingly as the very essence of the psyche. Thereby the step is taken over to ‘value,’ to ‘meaning,’ to the ‘ideal.’ The guiding question of beings as such is here already at its limit and likewise at a place where it relapses and henceforth values beings, instead of grasping it in a more original way, and values it such that value itself is declared to be what is highest.” Whether the Platonic understanding that Heidegger tries to overcome can, if suitably attentive to Heidegger’s questions, separate what is compelling in his thought from what must be rejected in his politics is, of course, a central issue.[42]

 

Notes

[1] See Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 1933-1935, translated and edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Bloomsbury, 2013, first published in German in 2009. See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Indiana University Press, 2010, which compiles a course from 1933 and one from 1933-1934, and Martin Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna, State University Press of New York, 2009, The German original was published in 1998, and the course was given in the summer semester of 1934.

[2] See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated by Allen Blunden, Basic Books, 1993, first published in German in 1988, and Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, translated by Michael Smith, Yale University Press, 2009, first published in French in 2005. Heidegger appears to have resigned formally from the rectorate after just over a year, but claims (in an interview in Der Spiegel conducted on September 23, 1966 and published on May 31, 1976, after his death)  to have in fact resigned after 10 months.

[3] Heidegger grounds his view of race (and of territorial expansion) in the human openness to being, or “Dasein.” One could argue that this is more dangerous than rooting race in biology, because it connects race not to humans’ animality, but to what is most distinctive about us. See Mark Blitz, Heidegger’s Being and Time and the Possibility of Political Philosophy, with a new afterword by the author, Paul Dry books, 2017 (first published in 1981 by Cornell University Press.)

[4] Heidegger’s tries to explain this in his interview in Der Spiegel.

[5] See Ott and Faye.

[6] Consider Blitz, pp. 276-286. See too Martin Heidegger, The History of Beyng #61 (and footnote 12), translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell, Indiana University Press, 2015.

[7] Seer the discussion below, and Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy #274, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, 2012. The book (in German, Beitrage zur Philosophie) was first published in German in 1989. I will refer to it in the body of the text as Beitrage.  I occasionally make minor modifications to the translation.

[8] See, for example, The History of Beyng #s 74-88.

[9] See Mark Blitz, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” Political Science Reviewer, 1993 (Part I), and 1994 (Part II.)

[10] These include Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Continuum, 2006, The Event, translated by Richard Rojcewicz, Indiana University Press, 2013, and The History of Beyng, translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell, Indiana University Press, 2015.  Mindfulness (Besinnung) was first published German in 1997 The Event was first published in German in 2009, and The History of Beyng was first published in German in 1998. These works were written originally from 1938-1942.

[11] Parts of Heidegger’s Grundprobleme indicate what at least some of his analysis would have covered. See Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982. This was originally published in German in 1975, from a course given in 1927

[12] I will sometimes say entities, and use it equivalently to beings, to avoid excessive confusion, and I will not capitalize being or beyng except when they appear at the beginning of a sentence or in the title of a book.

[13] In Being and Time he also differentiates his view of being from that of earlier thinkers, and he also emphasizes that they overlook and must overlook the being and meaning of being he is attempting to discuss. But that their “being” is so exclusively oriented to beings, and is itself a being, is not elaborated thematically there.

[14] Heidegger argues that in all previous thinkers being has meant presence. They thus implicitly think of what most is, of being strictly, as constant presence, and, thus, of the fullest beings as those that are constantly present, and of the being in things as what is constantly present in them. This is most obvious in Plato’s ideas and their connection to their bodily instances, but one can also see this in Descartes and his followers, in Kant, in Hegel and German idealism, and even in Nietzsche. Showing this is an important part of Heidegger’s discussions of them. What no previous thinker sees, however, is that he is implicitly understanding being as constant presence. The horizon in terms of which it has this meaning is therefore unquestioned and unseen as such, as are the connections among this horizon, being, and man, and what our (i.e., “Dasein’s”) characteristics are when we are seen in terms of our projecting and standing within this meaning.

[15]None of this is to claim, however, that beings do not have their meaning from or within Beyng. Beyng as a term translates Heidegger’s German term, Seyn, which is an older spelling of the usual German for being, Sein.

[16] See Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, translated by Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul, Indiana University Press, 2003. The seminars took place from 1966-1973, and were first published in French in 1977.

[17] Heidegger began to teach Holderlin’s poetry in 1934, and it is important for some elements of his turn. Heidegger was also a member of the group that edited Nietzsche’s works.

[18] See the self-criticism in Four Seminars, p. 57.

[19] See Beitrage #150. In Being and Time Heidegger attempted to derive spatiality from temporality.

[20] See Beitrage #204. See also Beitrage #s 17, 129, 189, and 193 and History of Beyng #s 22, 70, 174, and 177.

[21] His other point of reference here is Greek tragedy.

[22] See Beitrage #s 252, 259, and 267, and The History of Being #126. One should also look at Mindfulness, and at the discussions of anxiety, guilt, and conscience in Being and Time.

[23] See Nature, History, State; Being and Truth; and Logic, as well as Blitz, Heidegger’s Being and Time.

[24] See Mark Blitz, “Heidegger and the Political,” Political Theory, Volume 28 No., 2, April, 2000, pp. 167-196, and Martin Heidegger, Holderlin’s Hymn, Der Ister, translated by William McNeil and Julia Dreyfus, Indiana University Press, 1996, first published in German in 1984. The lectures were first delivered in the summer of 1942

[25] Beitrage #s 15, 196.

[26] Beitrage #252.

[27] The History of Beyng, #174.

[28] Beitrage, #159. On freedom see also Beitrage #104 and Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Ohio University Press, 1985. This was first published in German in 1971, and was delivered in the summer of 1936.

[29] See The History of Beyng, pp. 154-167 (Koinon) and #s 57-68.

[30] Beitrage #19. See also History of Beyng #140.

[31] Beitrage #117.

[32] Beitrage #26.

[33] Beitrage #32.

[34] Beitrage #275.

[35] Beitrage #10, The History of Beyng, #141.

[36] Beitrage #56. See also #44.

[37] Beitrage #278.

[38] Beitrage #150. See also #s 98, 242.

[39] Beitrage #150.

[40] Beitrage #238.

[41] The History of Beyng #133. See also #20.

[42] See Beitrage, #110.

 

This was originally published in The Political Science Reviewer 42.1 (2018): 72-88.