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Martin Heidegger: Nature, History, State

Nature, History, State: 1933-1934 presents the first complete English-language translation of Heidegger's seminar 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and State', together with full introductory material and interpretive essays by five leading thinkers and scholars: Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel and Slavoj Žižek.

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100% found this document useful (6 votes)
718 views212 pages

Martin Heidegger: Nature, History, State

Nature, History, State: 1933-1934 presents the first complete English-language translation of Heidegger's seminar 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and State', together with full introductory material and interpretive essays by five leading thinkers and scholars: Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel and Slavoj Žižek.

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Sextus Empiricus
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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NATURE, HISTORY,

STATE
NATURE, HISTORY,
STATE
1933–1934

Martin Heidegger
Translated and edited by
Gregory Fried and R­ ichard Polt
With essays by Robert Bernasconi, Peter E. Gordon,
Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel, and Slavoj Žižek

Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway


London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

“Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat”. Übung aus dem
­Wintersemester 1933/34 (pp. 53–88) taken from Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4 –
Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus I, Dokumente edited by Alfred Denker
and Holger Zaborowski © 2009 Verlag Karl Alber part of Verlag Herder GmbH,
Freiburg im Breisgau

Marion Heinz, Volk und Führer. Untersuchungen zu Heideggers Seminar Über


Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat (1933/34) (pp. 55–75) taken from
Heidegger-Jahrbuch 5 – Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus II, ­Interpretationen
edited by Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski © 2010 Verlag Karl Alber part of
Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau

‘Heidegger in the Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will, and Gelassenheit’ adapted


from Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012),
pp. 878–903. Reproduced with permission from Verso.

This English translation and editorial material


© Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2013
Individual Essays © Contributors, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or


transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting


on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-4411-6852-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India


CONTENTS

About the Contributors  vii

Editors’ Introduction  1

PART ONE  ON THE ESSENCE AND


CONCEPT OF NATURE, ­HISTORY,
AND STATE  13

Session 1  15
Session 2  23
Session 3  27
Session 4  31
Session 5  35
Session 6  41
Session 7  45
Session 8  51
Session 9  57
Session 10  61

PART TWO  INTERPRETIVE ESSAYS  65

1 Volk and Führer  67


Marion Heinz
2 Heidegger in purgatory  85
Peter E. Gordon
3 Who belongs? Heidegger’s philosophy of
the Volk in 1933–4  109
Robert Bernasconi
4 The seminar of winter semester 1933–4 within
Heidegger’s three concepts of the political  127
Theodore Kisiel
5 Heidegger in the foursome of struggle,
historicity, will, and Gelassenheit  151
Slavoj Žižek

Notes  171
Index  195

vi   CONTENTS
ABOUT THE
CONTRIBUTORS

Gregory Fried (Suffolk University) is the author of Heidegger’s Polemos:


From Being to Politics and (with Charles Fried) Because It Is Wrong:
­Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror.
Richard Polt (Xavier University, Cincinnati) is the author of Heidegger:
An Introduction and The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s
“Contributions to Philosophy.” Together, Fried and Polt have trans-
lated Heidegger’s ­Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth
and edited A ­Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Meta-
physics.”
Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at
Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Question of
Language in Heidegger’s History of Being, Heidegger in Question:
The Art of Existing, and How to Read Sartre. The topics of his pub-
lished essays include Kant, Hegel, Levinas, and critical philosophy
of race.
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at the Cen-
ter for European Studies at Harvard University. His books include
Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philoso-
phy and Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. He has also
­co-edited several books, including The Cambridge Companion to
Modern Jewish Philosophy, ­Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy,
and The Modernist Imagination.
Marion Heinz (Universität Siegen) is the author of Zeitlichkeit und
­Temporalität: die Konstitution der Existenz und die Grundlegung
einer temporalen Ontologie im Frühwerk Martin Heideggers and
Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheorie
des jungen Herder (1763–1778). She is the editor of volume 44 of
the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe and has also edited and co-edited
a variety of volumes on German philosophy, feminism, and gender
theory.
Theodore Kisiel (Northern Illinois University) is the author of The Genesis
of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Heidegger’s Way of Thought:
Critical and Interpretive Signposts. He has translated Heidegger’s
History of the Concept of Time and published numerous articles on
­Heidegger.
Slavoj Žižek (University of Ljubljana) is the author of books on topics
including Lacan, Marxism, and contemporary culture, including The
­Sublime Object of Ideology, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Parallax
View, Living in the End Times, Less Than Nothing, and The Year of
Dreaming Dangerously.

viii   ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS


EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Richard Polt and Gregory Fried

Martin Heidegger’s support for the Nazi regime has long been a matter
of public knowledge, but only recently have we gained a clearer picture
of the details of his political activities and positions. Together with other
documents from Heidegger’s tenure as the first National Socialist rector
of the University of Freiburg in 1933–4, the seminar in this volume is an
essential piece of evidence for those who wish to assess the degree to which
he was intellectually committed to Nazi ideology.1 In the light of this text,
Heidegger’s postwar attempts to minimize the extent of his support for
Nazism are no longer credible, and any interpretation that makes a simple
distinction between his philosophy and his politics is no longer tenable—for
in this seminar, Heidegger sketches a political philosophy, consistent with
his views on the historicity of Dasein or human existence, that explicitly
supports Hitlerian dictatorship and suggests justifications for German
expansionism and persecution of the Jews.
This is not to say that the text necessarily renders Heidegger’s thought as
a whole bankrupt. We still must ask whether we can disentangle the truer
or more promising aspects of his philosophy from the pernicious ones. We
still must try to diagnose the errors in Heidegger’s views and understand
the merely ideological or culturally conditioned elements in them, while
remaining open to the possibility that they can provide insights that
transcend the dark circumstances of this seminar. We still must judge this
text in the larger context of Heidegger’s thought. The five essays by leading
thinkers and scholars in this volume take up these philosophical challenges,
offering us distinctive ways to read the seminar from appropriately critical,
yet not dismissive perspectives.
The seminar
Heidegger held his seminar “On the Essence and Concept of Nature,
History, and State” in ten sessions from November 3, 1933 to February 23,
1934. We do not have Heidegger’s own notes or text for the seminar, if such
existed; instead, the text consists of student protocols or reports on the
seminar sessions. These protocols were reviewed by Heidegger himself, as
confirmed by two interpolations he makes in the text. The protocols also
generally sound like Heidegger; readers familiar with his lecture courses
will recognize typical trains of thought and turns of phrase. The first
protocol provides one student’s perspective on the discussions that took
place during the opening session of the seminar; it is valuable as a glimpse
of the atmosphere in Heidegger’s classroom and his practice as a teacher.
To judge from the remaining protocols, the subsequent nine sessions must
have proceeded more like a lecture course, for only Heidegger’s voice is
present, and he develops a fairly continuous line of argument. Thus, while
we cannot rely on this text as a verbatim transcript of what Heidegger
said, it is reasonable to take it as good evidence of the essential content of
the views he developed during this seminar.
The text of the protocols forms part of Heidegger’s papers in the
Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (item DLA 75.7265). The text
was generally unknown until Marion Heinz accidentally discovered it in
1999, as she explains in her essay in this volume. It then circulated among
some scholars, and Emmanuel Faye relied on it in his controversial study
of Heidegger’s politics.2 The seminar protocols were finally published in
German in 2009.3 With our translation, English-speaking readers have the
opportunity to draw their own conclusions about this remarkable text.
In a retrospective on his teaching written around 1945, Heidegger
refers to the seminar as developing a “critique of the biologistic view
of history.”4 It is true that Heidegger consistently rejects the reduction
of human beings to the biological, including biological racism, but
Heidegger’s most distinctive concern in the seminar, and its primary point
of interest for most readers today, is the development of the rudiments
of a communitarian and authoritarian political philosophy. For a detailed
analysis of the seminar, we refer the reader to Marion Heinz’s essay. It may
be useful, however, to present a brief summary of each session here.
Session 1: This is the only protocol that gives us a sense of the personality
of its author, Karl Siegel. Siegel blames both the students and the professor
for the rather confusing and unproductive first session of the seminar, but
he helpfully identifies Heidegger’s general strategy of trying to undercut

2   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


traditional concepts of nature, history, and state, along with scientific
and epistemological prejudices, for the sake of a fresh encounter with the
“essences” of these phenomena.
Session 2: Heidegger investigates the essence of nature and provides
historical perspective on the concepts of natura and physis, emphasizing
that physis originally referred not just to a particular domain of beings, but
to all beings in their very way of Being.
Session 3: There is a deeper connection between history and time than
there is between nature and time, even though all natural processes occur in
time. Furthermore, time cannot be understood merely through quantitative
measurements of the duration of events.
Session 4: The Kantian and Newtonian conceptions of time cannot
do justice to historical, human time. These conceptions take time as an
objective or subjective dimension with a uniform linear structure, but in
human existence we must make decisions about which times are significant.
In this sense, animals have no time, since they are not able to “decide both
forwards and backwards.”
Session 5: Time is the “authentic fundamental constitution of human
beings” as the beings who “can have and make history.” Heidegger now turns
to the state, rejecting traditional ways of practicing political philosophy
by asking about the state’s origin or purpose; he seeks an ontological
understanding of the connection between state and people.
Session 6: Heidegger seeks to restore the political to its rightful status as
the unifying essence of a community. The state fulfills this essence, so that
the state is “the way of Being of a people” while the people is “the ground
that sustains” the state. A people can be understood in various ways,
including through racial concepts, but perhaps most fundamentally it is “a
kind of Being that has grown under a common fate and taken distinctive
shape within a single state.”
Session 7: A born leader can decisively affect the Being of the state and
people. Such a leader must be supported by an educated elite or “band of
guardians.” Since a people without a state is unfulfilled and lacks its Being,
the people properly loves its state and binds itself together with the leader
to a single destiny, ready for sacrifice.
Session 8: The space of a people has two aspects. The immediately familiar
homeland calls for rootedness in the soil. But there is another impulse,
“working out into the wider expanse,” that calls for “interaction.” Germans
who live outside the boundary of the Reich are denied the opportunity
to participate in the extended space of state-governed interaction, while
rootless people such as “Semitic nomads” may never understand “our
German space.”

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION   3
Session 9: State and people are bound together through the
“implementation” of the will of the leader. Heidegger raises the question of
the essence of the will of the people, and of will in general, distinguishing
will from wish, drive, and urge. “An animal cannot act, because it cannot
will.”
Session 10: A true leader will not use coercion, but will awaken a
harmonious will in the led. This may require education as “the implemen­
tation of the will of the leader and the will of the state, that is, of the people.”
Heidegger ends by praising the “Führer-state” as the culmination of a
historical development that has reconstructed community after the Middle
Ages were dissolved by modernity.

Context
The seminar is distinctive as Heidegger’s most concerted attempt to
develop a political philosophy. But of course, it is not a self-contained work
that can be understood purely on its own. It stands within the context of
Heidegger’s voluminous writings over many decades, the complex history
of German political thought, and the violent struggles of the twentieth
century. The contributors to this volume address these contexts in a variety
of ways. Here we will simply draw attention to a few texts by Heidegger
that are particularly important to forming a well-rounded judgment on
his political thought, before we return to some distinctive concepts in the
seminar and consider their implications.
Being and Time (1927) generally appears to operate on a level of
ontological abstraction that rises above particular political views, and
the text emphasizes individual more than communal existence. Still, the
climactic section 74 sketches a communal authenticity that would involve a
generation’s discovery of the people’s destiny through communication and
struggle (Kampf).5
After assuming the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in April
of 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural Rectoral Address, “The Self-
Assertion of the German University,” on May 27, 1933. In this speech,
Heidegger delineated three forms of service to the state: military, labor, and
knowledge service. He claimed that the traditional concept of academic
freedom was only a negative form of freedom, and that true university life
must involve a will to a self-assertion in which leader and follower, teacher
and student, together forge a bond in the pursuit of knowledge in the
service of the people’s destiny. During this period, Heidegger made other

4   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


pronouncements to both the university and the broader public in support
of the National Socialist regime, including speeches in favor of the plebiscite
of November 12, 1933, in which Hitler called on the German people to
ratify his domestic and foreign policies.6 For a discussion of the Rectoral
Address, see Theodore Kisiel’s essay in this volume.
Heidegger delivered two lecture courses during his year as rector, which
are collected in the volume Being and Truth. Particularly striking is the
introduction to the course “On the Essence of Truth,” which appears to
celebrate polemos or “struggle” as the essence of Being. In a particularly
disturbing passage, Heidegger explains struggle as standing against the
enemy, and comments that the internal enemies of the people have to be
rooted out without mercy, “with the goal of total annihilation.”7 (For the full
passage, see Slavoj Žižek’s essay, p. 164.) In conjunction with the remark on
“Semitic nomads” in the 1933–4 seminar, these thoughts seem to anticipate
and endorse a possible Holocaust. The same lecture course notably includes
a ferocious attack on Erwin Kolbenheyer, a novelist and Nazi ideologue
who had presented a “biological” account of the purpose of art in a speech
at Freiburg.8 For Heidegger, the destiny of a people has to be understood in
distinctively historical, not biological terms.
After stepping down as rector, Heidegger delivered a lecture course
in 1934 on Logic as the Question of the Essence of Language that explores
what it means to be a people.9 While marked by its contemporary political
context, the lecture course adopts a tone that is rather more questioning
than the 1933–4 seminar and less dogmatic. For further discussion of
this course we refer to the reader to Robert Bernasconi’s essay in this
volume.
Heidegger’s 1934–5 seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right explores
a variety of themes including sovereignty, law, and freedom, showing an
attraction to a right-Hegelian point of view but also raising numerous
questions, particularly in Heidegger’s private notes for the seminar.10
With his 1934–5 lectures on Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “The Rhine,”
Heidegger embarks on an exploration of this poet as a figure who recognizes
the difficulty of “the free use of the national”11 and points the way to a
deeper, less immediate encounter with German destiny.
Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) develops a confrontational
understanding of the relation between Being and human beings and
criticizes various supposedly half-hearted political developments of the
time for missing the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.12
By studying Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger, Heidegger evidently hoped
to come to grips with this “inner truth”—the metaphysical basis of the
Nazi movement. Heidegger’s various lectures and writings on Nietzsche

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION   5
(1936–42) were revised and published after the war in two volumes,
where Heidegger cut some of the more political passages.13 These texts
evolve from an initial fascination and enthusiasm to a rather negative
view of Nietzsche as trapped in a metaphysics of the will to power and
eternal recurrence. Through an intensive study of Jünger’s 1932 work Der
Arbeiter (The Worker), Heidegger concluded that Jünger was an exponent
of a one-sided Nietzscheanism.14
The private writings of the late thirties and early forties offer evidence
of Heidegger’s disillusionment with Nazi ideology: drawing on his
critique of Nietzschean will to power, he criticizes the Nazi celebration
of violence and insists that Being transcends power and manipulation;
he also denounces willful assertions of the primacy of the Volk that fail to
understand that the people must look beyond itself to recognize its destiny
within the history of Being. These critiques do not bring Heidegger any
closer to liberal or leftist points of view, however; instead, he seems to
distance himself from all political positions.15 In a dialogue composed at
the very end of the war, Heidegger rejects the moral judgments that are
being passed on Germany and attributes evil to a nonmoral “devastation”
at work in Being itself.16
The Bremen lectures of 1949 are an example of how Heidegger drew
on his account of Western metaphysics to position himself in the postwar
period as a critic of all modernity, including Nazism. The most famous
passage here presents “the production of corpses in the gas chambers and
extermination camps” as “in essence the same” as mechanized agriculture
and nuclear bombs.17 Readers must decide whether passages such as this
point out deep roots of modern nihilism, whether they are reductive and
pose false equivalencies, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between.
We can find anticipations of Heidegger’s political engagement in the
1920s, and echoes of it in the 1940s and thereafter; the careful reader must
determine whether those resonances are enough to condemn Heidegger’s
thought as a whole, or whether he succeeded in thinking through his own
errors. In either case, his support for Nazism in the 1930s, and in 1933–4 in
particular, is a critical point in his life and thought. The seminar on “Nature,
History, and State” is essential reading if we are to form a judgment on this
crucial episode.

The politics of the seminar


Let us return to the seminar itself and to what we take to be some of its most
notable features as a study in political philosophy.

6   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


First, Heidegger assigns an ontological status to the relation between
people and state: that is, what it means for a particular people to be must
be established through its state. While he leaves open the question of what
a people in general is, he claims that the state is not just “grounded on the
Being of the people” (p. 46 below), but is the Being of the people (46, 52,
57). “The people that turns down a state, that is stateless, has just not found
the gathering of its essence yet; it still lacks the composure and force to be
committed to its fate as a people” (46). A people without a state is not yet, in
the sense that it has not yet found its unique fulfillment as a community.
Heidegger elaborates on the people-state relation through an analogy
to individuals. Because individuals’ own Being is an issue for them, they
have consciousness and conscience. They care about their own Being,
they want to live, and they love their own existence. In just the same way,
the people loves its state: “The people is ruled by the urge for the state, by
erōs for the state” (48). This is why we care about the form of the state, or
the constitution—which is not a contract or a legal arrangement, but “the
actualization of our decision for the state; . . . constitution and law . . .
are factical attestations of what we take to be our historical task as a
people, the task that we are trying to live out” (48–9).
The erotic urge for the state is to be distinguished from “drive” as felt by
lower animals; bees and termites are instinctively driven into cooperative
formations, but this is a nonhuman phenomenon and not genuinely
political (48; cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2, 1253a8–9). The vagueness of an
urge also separates it from will, which is clearly focused on a particular
goal (58).
Heidegger briefly distinguishes his concept of the political from two
others. Carl Schmitt’s view that the essence of the political is the friend-
enemy relation comes in for some criticism when Heidegger emphasizes
that in Schmitt’s view, “the political unit does not have to be identical with
state and people” (46). Heidegger implies that a group based on solidarity
against an enemy is less fundamental than a Volk—whatever that may
be. Heidegger also criticizes Bismarck’s concept of politics as “the art of
the possible,” which depends too much on “the personal genius of the
statesman” (46).
But this remark should not lead us to expect an anti-dictatorial point of
view, and in fact, Heidegger’s views as presented here easily lend themselves
to a personality cult: he claims there can be a born leader, an individual
who “must be a leader in accordance with the marked form of his Being.” A
born leader needs no political education, but he ought to be supported by
an educated elite, a “band of guardians” who help to take responsibility for
the state (45). Heidegger seems to envision something like Plato’s “perfect
guardians,” the philosopher-rulers, but here they are in service to a creative
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION   7
leader who knows instinctively, not philosophically, what to do. This leader
not only understands, but actually “brings about” what the people and the
state are. It is noteworthy that these words were penciled in by Heidegger
himself on the student protocol (45; cf. a similar insertion on 46). The born
leader drafts the state and people, so to speak: he draws the line between
who “we” are and who “we” are not. The focused will of the leader provides
the clear identity that a vague urge cannot.
There is little room for debate and disagreement within Heidegger’s
complex of people, state, and leader. “Only where the leader and the led
bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does
true order arise” (49). He envisions “a deep dedication of all forces to the
people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engagement, endurance,
solitude and love. Then the existence and superiority of the leader sinks into
the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in this way with originality
and passion to the task.” The citizens are ready to sacrifice themselves in
order to defeat “death and the devil—that is, ruination and decline from
their own essence” (49).
In the eighth and perhaps most original session of the seminar, Heidegger
focuses on the political meaning of space. In all of Heidegger’s thought,
space is meaningful: it is not a geometrical abstraction, but a complex of
places where things and human beings belong—or fail to belong. Here
he develops two aspects of the space of a people: homeland (Heimat) and
territory. (Heidegger indicates the latter with a variety of words: Land,
Herrschaftsgebiet, Territorium, and Vaterland. The term “fatherland” is
mentioned only one other time in the seminar, on p. 52, where Heidegger
implies that it reflects an inadequate relationship to the people.) The
immediately familiar homeland, the locality into which one is born, is
small, not just in its measurements but in the coziness of its familiarity. The
proper relation to it is Bodenständigkeit: groundedness, standing steadfast
and rooted in the soil. But there is another impulse, which Heidegger calls
Auswirkung in die Weite, working out into the wider expanse. The space
of the state, the territory, requires this extended “interaction” (Verkehr).
Only when rootedness in the soil is supplemented by interaction does
a people come into its own. What is the most important element of this
“interaction”—is it war? Commerce? Travel? Or something else?
While Heidegger does not answer this question, the passage could be
seen as an example of a dialectic between home and homelessness that
is at work in many of Heidegger’s texts. In Being and Time, one must
experience the uncanniness of anxiety before one can return authentically
(eigentlich, “own”-ly) to one’s familiar environment. If we were completely
ensconced in our surroundings, they would be our habitat and we would

8   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


be nothing but animals. But as Heidegger puts it in 1935, “we cannot
wholly belong to any thing, not even to ourselves.”18 And yet we do belong
partly, finitely, to our home. The key to authentic dwelling is precisely
the recognition that this dwelling is finite and contingent. Accordingly,
“When one is put out of the home  . . . the home first discloses itself as
such.”19 Admittedly, interaction with a wider territory is not the same
as facing the abyss of anxiety, but both involve the readiness to step out
beyond the immediately familiar.
What are the concrete implications of Heidegger’s thoughts on political
space? He makes two telling remarks. First, Germans who live outside the
boundary of the Reich cannot participate in the extended space of state-
governed interaction. And if the state is the very Being of the people, these
groups are being “deprived of their authentic way of Being”—prevented
from fulfilling themselves as Germans (56). Their politico-ontological
erōs is being thwarted. Despite his reservations about the slogan Volk ohne
Raum, “people without space”—a people necessarily has some space of its
own (53)—Heidegger’s comments fit all too easily with the Nazi call for
Lebensraum and Hitler’s evident ambitions to unify the German people
under one state.
Secondly, different peoples have different relations to their spaces
and affect the landscape in accordance with these relations. Heidegger
contrasts a bodenständig people to a nomadic people that not only comes
from deserts, but also tends to lay waste to every place it goes. He adds
that perhaps “Semitic nomads” will never understand the character of “our
German space” (56).20 The implied characterization of Jews as aliens is
obvious. We should also note that Heidegger does an injustice to nomads:
nomadic people can be very much at home in the landscape through which
they travel, and their practices may well be ecologically superior to those of
settled agriculture.
When he returns to the relations among state, people, and leader,
Heidegger raises the question of the nature of the will of the people, but
does not resolve it, resorting instead to a disappointingly vague remark: it
is “a complicated structure that is hard to grasp.” He prefers to emphasize
the inseparable, “single actuality” of people and leader (60). To be led is not
to be oppressed: the true leader will show the path and the goals to those
who are led, rather than coercing them (61). “The true implementation of
the will [of the leader] is not based on coercion, but on awakening the same
will in another, that is . . . a decision of the individual” (62).
But what about those who cannot recognize the path, or who disagree
with the goals? Heidegger seems not to care what will become of these
dissidents. Instead he looks to the glorious deeds that manifest “the soaring

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION   9
will of the leader” (62). Heidegger does briefly discuss resistance, or will
that is contrary to the leader’s, but he seems to see it purely as a negative
phenomenon that requires reeducation. Education at all levels “is nothing
but the implementation of the will of the leader and the will of the state, that
is, of the people” (63). It seems that Heidegger envisions complete unanimity
as the ideal. Even if community depends on individual decisions, any such
decision that contradicts the will of the state, which is identical with the will
of the leader, is out of order and amounts to a betrayal of the people.

The essays
It should be clear from this overview that in the seminar Heidegger was
ready to put the ontological and existential concepts of Being and Time
into the service of an authoritarian, expansionist, and exclusivist political
program—in short, the program of National Socialism. How are we to judge
this use or abuse of Heideggerian thought? How does the seminar relate to
Heidegger’s other work and to his way of pursuing philosophy? How does
it relate to others’ attempts to theorize Nazism? And does it contain any
insights that might still be illuminating for us today? The five contributors
to this volume offer a range of perspectives on such questions, from close
readings to broad philosophical and historical contextualizations.
Marion Heinz’s “Volk and Führer” investigates Heidegger’s methodology
in the seminar, compares his account of human existence there to the
account in Being and Time, and explicates the connections among people,
state, and leader according to the seminar. Reflecting on the philosophical
basis for Heidegger’s attraction to the Hitlerian dictatorship, Heinz points
to his conception of historicity, his appropriation of Nietzsche, and his
rejection of a politics based on rational principles.
In his essay “Heidegger in Purgatory,” Peter E. Gordon argues that
Heidegger’s way of pursuing phenomenology through concrete illustrations
leaves it highly susceptible to bathos and ideological contamination
by the jargon Victor Klemperer called the lingua tertii imperii (“the
language of the Third Reich”). Gordon directs our attention to crucial
points in the seminar where Heidegger deploys a strategy of analogy to
disguise political claims as ontological insights. This is especially true of
Heidegger’s anti-Semitic attack on the “nomad.” Gordon ends with the
suggestion that philosophy itself is nomadic and that even Heidegger’s
philosophy therefore remains open to new appropriations that escape the
crude reductions of this text.

10   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


Robert Bernasconi’s “Who Belongs? Heidegger’s Philosophy of the Volk
in 1933–34” juxtaposes the seminar with the Logic lecture course of the
following semester in order to show how, in a complex political competition
for intellectual leadership in the party, Heidegger takes a decisive turn
in his own philosophical understanding of what constitutes belonging to
the people, by connecting that belonging to historically situated, resolute
decision rather than the pseudo-science of race.
Theodore Kisiel’s essay emphasizes the broader evolution of Heidegger’s
political thought, which he interprets in terms of Heidegger’s “three
concepts of the political.” For Kisiel, the seminar is typical of the middle
phase of Heidegger’s political thought, where Heidegger focuses on humans
as beings who must collectively decide their own way of Being. Kisiel also
points out Heidegger’s indebtedness to the tradition of German conservative
thought that sought a distinctive national mode of combining freedom and
responsibility through proper education.
Slavoj Žižek’s contribution, adapted from his book Less Than Nothing,
reads the seminar and related texts in terms of class struggle, will, and drive
and regrets Heidegger’s later turn away from will to Gelassenheit. Žižek
admires Heidegger the revolutionary activist, although not the particular
direction that his political engagement took. For Žižek, Heidegger was right
to seek authenticity by engaging in the historical tangle of attachments and
interests that constitute us.

The translation
In translating the protocols we have aimed at a readable text that also
provides consistent renderings of key concepts. The reader may therefore
trace how Heidegger employs salient words and phrases throughout the
seminar. As compared to Heidegger’s more intricate texts, the seminar
is couched in relatively accessible terms and uses little specialized or
experimental language, as is appropriate for a teaching situation that does
not presuppose any familiarity with Heidegger’s publications or private
writings. We have endeavored to reproduce the extemporaneous quality of
the seminar protocols, without sacrificing rigor.
Readers may find the German words that correspond to major English
terms by consulting the index. The senses of the central terms “beings” (das
Seiende or Seiendes), “Being” (das Sein), and “Dasein” emerge naturally
in Heidegger’s discussions. A few other words call for some commentary
here.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION   11
The term bodenständig, which features prominently in Session 8, literally
means “standing on the soil,” and echoes the nationalist cliché Blut und
Boden, “blood and soil.” Heidegger uses the term in a variety of texts to
connote a well-grounded attitude, an attitude that is not “free-floating” but
remembers its roots in concrete experience. We render the word here as
“rooted in the soil.” For further discussion of the concept, see the end of
Theodore Kisiel’s essay.
The same session refers to the need for Verkehr, which we translate as
“interaction.” The term is built on the root kehren, “to turn,” and could thus
be rendered most literally as “circulation.” It is the common German term
for traffic, both in the narrow sense of vehicular traffic and in the broader
sense of exchange, interchange, or intercourse.
When seeing the terms “leader” and Führer, readers should remember
that Führer is the ordinary German word for “leader,” which of course
became the title for Hitler as Germany’s supreme leader.
The term Volk, related to our “folk,” is translated as “people.” All National
Socialists focused their efforts on promoting the Volk, which they often but
not always understood in racial terms. As Robert Bernasconi explains in his
essay, Heidegger attempted to stake out a distinctive philosophical position
on what constitutes a people.
Bracketed numbers in the seminar refer to the printed German
edition of the text in Heidegger-Jahrbuch IV. In the interpretive essays,
parenthesized page numbers refer to pages of this translation unless
otherwise indicated.
Marion Heinz provided us with detailed criticisms and suggestions
for our translation, and we have gratefully adopted many of them. We
would also like to thank Theodore Kisiel for his characteristically generous
assistance; his expertise with Heidegger’s texts, as well as his acumen for
solving particularly difficult translation problems, has been a great help to
us. In addition to helping us improve our word choices at many points,
Profs. Heinz and Kisiel were able to resolve some uncertain readings in the
printed version of the text by comparing it to the original manuscript and
to a transcription prepared by Klaus Stichweh.

12   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


PART ONE

ON THE ESSENCE
AND CONCEPT OF
NATURE, HISTORY,
AND STATE
SEMINAR, WINTER
SEMESTER 1933–4
[53]

SESSION 1 1
November 3, 1933

I. Our seminar director began by drawing our attention to the two sides of
the question that we will consider: the theme of the seminar is the essence
and concept of nature, history, and state.
He explained the relation between the two questions—the question
of the essence of a thing or domain, and the question of its concept—as
follows:

1 the two questions should not be confused, and


2 we must get acquainted with the essence of the domain in question
before we think about its concept.

For it is not absolutely necessary to grasp the essence of a domain such as


nature in a concept, and it may even turn out to be impossible in the end.
This simple reminder of the difference between the question of the
essence of a domain and the task of grasping it conceptually—a task that
should be taken up only later—was explained no further. As the session went
on, this reminder proved too weak to force our discussion in the direction
of the question of essence and keep it there. So for most of the first session
of the seminar, an older natural scientist and an older student of philosophy
began with number two—the concept—after all. These two older gentlemen
first had to be drawn in, so to speak, to the primary question that faced us,
and brought back to it. But the available time was too short to really lead
the two “advanced” minds back to the simple, prescientific beginning of
the question of the essence of the domains at hand, which consists in the
plain, uncomplicated, quite naive expression of how nature, history, [54]
and state are given to us; there was not enough time for the two gentlemen
not only to be convinced that it was fair for them to be stopped and turned
back in their thinking, but also to take active steps in the other direction.
So that the first session would not end in confusion, Professor Heidegger
himself then had to give us a simple presentation of two basic differences
in the way nature is given to us (the difference between the material and
the formal concept of nature—see below). This may have surprised some
participants who no longer clearly remembered the course of the seminar
from its beginning.
This was how the seminar as such took place. As it seems to the author
of this protocol, our director could not have been very happy about this
development, since the watchword he had set for our questioning was not
taken up and followed at all, or only very poorly. The two main speakers
could not have been satisfied, since at the end they may well have had the
feeling that the seminar had passed over them, and that something had
been coerced from them that they could not understand so quickly and
whose implications they could not anticipate. And above all, the real and
proper “beginners” among the seminar participants, and all who prefer a
slow, considered, and truly step-by-step approach to the question, must
have been very unsatisfied, if not completely confused.
Now, on this point one must make an observation that is obvious in
an experienced and cooperative philosophical circle, where everyone has
the sure feeling that he can rely on the others and can really speak openly
without any worries—but here, in a freshly convened beginners’ seminar,
the point may need to be made explicitly. Obviously, negative judgments
such as the ones the author of this protocol has had to make about the far
too rash and hasty speculations of the two main speakers are meant neither
“morally” nor pedantically. For surely there were more students in the room
who had just the same attitude as these two gentlemen and would have
said the same thing—if they had been able to speak so readily. So in this
regard, the way our first session went was simply typical, and the obstinacy
of the two gentlemen was fully in order. Nevertheless, I would again like to
point out and emphasize the strangeness of the situation: it was the director
of this philosophical seminar, who was a professor of philosophy, for whom
the two gentlemen were speaking too “philosophically,” too “theoretically,”
too deeply, too exaltedly, and not naively and naturally enough—and it
was  the students who began with the second part, whereas usually this
would have been the right and customary thing to do, and many may well
have expected it from a seminar in philosophy.
[55] II. But this course of our first session, which has been sketched in its
general character, took place on the basis of a particular question, and we
now have to specify and draw out this point more precisely.

16   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


After the reminder and warning, reported above, about the difference
between the question of essence and the “later” task of grasping a concept,
which presupposes that the question of essence has been carried through,
the director took up the second part of the announced theme of the seminar
and drew our attention to the triad of nature, history, and state, what they
are for us, and whether the sequence in which they are listed is arbitrary.

1 On the first question: the expression with which a participant tried


to sum up all three, “life domain,” was rejected as a term, and it
was stipulated that in the context of the seminar, in order to avoid
confusions, we should restrict the word “life” to the Being of plants
and animals, and reserve the word “Dasein”2 for human Being. We
must say, then, that nature, history, and state belong in the domain
of our Dasein, and that they are essentially fields (the only ones?
the most important ones?) in which our Dasein plays itself out and
maintains itself.
2 The result of the short, preliminary discussion of the sequence
in which they are listed was that the order must not be arbitrary.
Instead, the three fields have been ordered consciously and
intentionally so that each successive one is narrower: history and
state are incorporated in nature, and the state in turn belongs
within history—it is a historical actuality. Here, as an aside,
Professor Heidegger also asked the opposite question: whether
every historical actuality involves a state just as much as the state
belongs to history or is historical.

As brief as this first stage of the interpretation was, our reflections on


nature, history, and state, understood together in their essence, got
underway in an easy and relaxed manner. When Professor Heidegger
finished this stage with the remark that we “now” had a certain idea of
each of the three fields, this seemed to me to indicate that we should now
turn to one of the three fields in particular, in the same calmly focused
spirit and with a view to the two topics of inquiry that we had established
in the first phase: (1) the question of nature’s relation to our Dasein, what
nature has to do with our human Dasein, and (2) the problem of sequence,
that is, the question of how nature is connected to the other two domains,
history and state, so that at the end of the seminar we could turn back to
the unified essence that encompasses all three fields.
But instead of the cheerful progress that we were expecting along
the indicated path, we suddenly got stuck in our discussions. A certain
artificiality and affectation came over the speakers, while a certain lack

SESSION 1 17
of restraint and individualistic self-indulgence came over some others,
[56] and everything that was brought up by the different sides from then
on no longer fit together properly, but ran off in different directions. The
seminar director reacted primarily in two ways: first, he tried using humor
to bring certain speakers who had fallen into such linguistic artificiality
and narrowness back to reason, so to speak; secondly, he took the other
group, which was speculating all too freely, blithely and loosely and starting
to ramble, and, by interrogating them sharply, forced them to take a stand
and formulate things more precisely. They will all still remember vividly, for
example, how the professor forced the gentleman who wanted to insist that
everything was interior to him to accept even the lectern into his interior;
but then the gentleman did not take the bait and admitted that he had the
lectern before him, not within him (if he was not to falsify the sense of his
representation of the lectern). Nevertheless, our discussion kept wavering
up to the end of the session and did not get over the disturbance that has left
our discussion at the point where we now stand.
In a philosophical conversation there are no accidents, and there should
be none. This is why the main question for the author of this protocol was
how this blockage, artificiality, and affectation could suddenly have arisen,
after the discussion had started off in such a flexible way.
To begin with, in what did the disturbance consist? In the rise and
domination of a certain principled reflectiveness, or maybe it would be
better to call it a reflective adherence to principle, which, once it had had its
say, got mixed into nearly all the assertions and brought a hasty impatience
into the speaking and thinking of the participants in the seminar—or it
brought conflict into our thought and speech by destroying the innocence
and naiveté of the plain, “simple” expression of what is given to us and
how it is given. Above all, in our reflections it hindered thought itself—the
process of slowly pacing off and pacing around the domain in question and
then exploring it carefully, step by step.
Now, this reflective adherence to principle was not somehow generated
within the seminar itself or awakened by it; it was already there, and it
simply took control when it got the first opportunity to have a word. But
how could this happen? If I may express my personal view, the door through
which it burst into our discussion was the seminar director’s instructions for
questioning, which were somewhat too indefinite in their formulation and
left too many possibilities open. After he briefly presented nature, history,
and state in their unitary meaning for human Dasein and indicated the
problem of how the three fields are to be ordered, he asked what we should
do next; this was probably just meant to rouse us, so to speak, so that we
might make a new, greater effort and proceed along the path we had begun,

18   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


in the same way—but not that we should put the path itself into question
“in principle.” But he posed the question in such a strong tone that [57]
the author of this protocol himself was startled for a moment and had the
feeling that now something quite new would follow, namely, that we should
first reflect on how we were to proceed in principle in our philosophizing.
The seminar director’s later question about how nature is given could
also be taken wrongly in this sense, and in fact it was: it was not understood
as a challenge to take up a concrete and actual reflection on the essence of
nature, starting with one of the factually accepted attitudes and relations to
nature, but instead it was misunderstood as bringing up the epistemological
problem of the givenness of such a thing as nature, history, or state.
The first to reply to the seminar leader’s question of what we should do
next was the natural scientist, and the second was the gentleman with the
interiority that generated everything and had everything inside it.
Both gentlemen began with number two (if we distinguish between
essence and concept), that is, they took as their point of departure certain
preexisting and preconceived concepts and theories. The other possible way
in which one could have begun with number two, namely by starting right
away to construct the concepts, was not proposed or even considered by
any participant in the seminar.
The natural scientist began with the concept of nature as an exact
lawfulness, and then immediately emphasized without further argument
that the three domains of nature, history, and state “must” have a common
principle. He imagined that the philosophical seminar should proceed in
such a way that its only goal was to exhibit the common laws that, so to
speak, ran through all three domains.
It was conceded to him that one can find and produce a connection
between the question of the essence of nature and the exhibition of laws
in the natural sciences. But this is a very difficult undertaking. And in no
case is it a matter of merely coming up with some imprecisely conceived,
indefinite, preexisting, and preconceived scientific concepts, and then
without testing them, carrying them over to the domains of history and
the state—and in this way leaping over the fundamental fact that nature,
history, and state are given to us as fields of Dasein.
Then, using a concrete object available in the classroom (the chalk), we
briefly explored how difficult it is to find the exact character of the givenness
of even such a small and inconspicuous thing as a piece of chalk and to
come really close to it in language.—Regarding our question of the essence
of nature, history, and state, the seminar director also brought our attention
especially to the fact that, in this little example of the chalk, we could already
see how things stand with nature, history, and state in general. It is not just

SESSION 1 19
humanity that is related to nature, history, and state; even the simple chalk
stands in relation to them.
[58] But now it must be said, regarding this interlude in the seminar,
that the participants were not aware of it as such. No one, as it seems to
the author of this protocol, caught onto it and was in a position—after the
course of the seminar to this point, and particularly after the reflective
adherence to principle had been expressed so strongly—to pay attention
to the very concrete How of a thing such as a piece of chalk in the way that
was desired (although we were not directly challenged and instructed to
do this).
The effect of this conflict was then that all the formulations that had
been introduced were taken too far and, although they did not lose their
grip on what stood nearby and was at hand, as it were, they became forced
and artificial. After what had happened, we were all making a more or less
conscious effort to turn our formulations and even our simple statements
in the direction of the universal and first principles, which was precisely
what we were supposed to set aside.
So, after two attempts at dialogue had failed to break through to the
simple question of essence and to the necessary reflection this question
first requires on what is given to us and how, the seminar director erased
everything that had been said so far, so to speak, and set out once again
from the beginning. He alerted us again to the question of essence and to
the fact we had ascertained that nature is given to us; then he asked clearly
and unambiguously how nature is given to us.
The question had hardly been asked, and there was no chance for
anyone to proceed from the question to reflection, before—one must say—
the second main speaker let fly with his theory to which, as he said, he
had resigned himself after extensive thought, his theory of the interiority
that generates everything and has everything inside it (nature and the
lectern).
He was finally forced to concede that before all “philosophizing,” he had
to ascertain the actual state of affairs, what is given and how, and that he
must hold on to this state of affairs quite independently of epistemology
if he wished to approach the essence of a thing and say something correct
and significant about it. — This was without doubt the strongest point in
the session, and there could be no doubt anymore about what the seminar
director wanted.
Now, then, the discussion slowly went in the right direction, and a
whole series of important points about actual natural givens, their ways of
givenness, and ways in which we relate to nature were introduced. But, as I
have said, the time was too short to develop them all properly and fully, to

20   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


collect them, and to gather them together into their decisive, fundamental
possibilities.
So in conclusion, the seminar director offered his own clarification,
which pointed to the difference between the material and formal concepts
of nature.
[59] The material concept of nature takes nature, logically speaking, as
the sum total of all the things that have the characteristics of natural things;
that is, it takes nature as a whole, as a domain.
The formal concept of nature, in contrast, aims at the Being of things
that belong to the domain of nature, and more precisely at what their
kind of Being highlights as nature. — If we bring this difference back to
our initial distinction between essence and concept, it means that I can
conceive of the whole as nature only if I already have a formal concept
of nature, a deeper knowledge of nature’s kind of Being. The distinction
between domain and kind of Being should also apply to history and the
state, and we should pay attention to it there.

SESSION 1 21
SESSION 2 1
November 17, 1933

We closed our first session with the distinction between the formal and
material concepts of nature. We did not want to run the risk of talking about
such a split and division of nature without clearly knowing the meaning
of this word. It is not a coinage of the moment, but stands at the end of a
historical sequence.
So what does natura mean? “Getting born.” Birth occurs in the realm
of living things; getting born indicates a relation to what is alive. But what
about heaven and earth, mountain and valley, which are nature for us just as
plants and animals are? What made the word natura capable of undergoing
such an extension of its reference that today we can encompass as nature
not only what gets born, but what does not get born?
The Latin word gives us no solution. It is not the beginning of the
Western conception of nature. Before it there stands the Greek word physis,
growth. What does that mean? Does it get us any further?
Both the Latin “getting born” and the Greek “growth” indicate a process.
What is going on when something grows? A development, we think, since
something is getting bigger. But how so? Getting bigger is not the essence of
development. Maybe something is altering in growth. How does alteration
happen? When the light goes out in the classroom, has it altered? No, a
change has taken place. So what is that? Does the chalk lit by the light
change if, losing its whiteness, it turns blue? No, it is altered, because its
color has become—other.
We have not yet experienced whether, in growth, there is alteration or
change, development or becoming other. But the processes that we [60]
believe we see in growth are ultimately motions. So growth, too, is ultimately
a motion. This cannot be some arbitrary motion. There must be something
special that distinguishes the motion of physis. For the concept of “growth”
has undergone that extension whose origin we are seeking. What is special
about the motion of growth that lets us include the “non-living,” such as
storm and clouds, in the sphere of nature?
In order to find what is distinctive about this motion, we will consider
its opposite so that it can come into relief. What is it that, as such, opposes
the motion of growth? Is it death, since death is rest and not the movement
of the living? What is rest? The condition of being unmoved is not rest; a
triangle is unmoved, but does it rest? Only what can be moved can rest. Rest
is a limit case of motion, and death perhaps a limit case of life. Movement is
exhausted in rest, and rest gives birth to motion.
In this way we cannot find what is distinctive about the movement in
growth. We distance ourselves from it in a conceptual construct, and the
essence of growth slips away from us. How do we stand, then, in front
of something that is growing? How does the tenderness of a blossom
originally touch us? How does the flower by the fence affect us? We say
that it has “grown naturally,” whereas the wire fence is “manmade.” What
is the flower’s having grown naturally? It too is something made, but
something that created itself. Being-from-itself; coming-forth-from-
itself; being-moved-by-itself; this by-itself is the essence of growth.
The Greek physis is what, without human intervention, coming from
itself, streams around human beings, gives them rest or unrest, calms or
threatens them.
Now we know the origin of the conceptual extension. For physis is
everything that creates itself. The blowing winds come from themselves,
and so does the roaring sea. Man too comes from himself, as do his
works and his history. For the inception of Greek philosophy does not
distinguish between “nature” and non-natural “growth.” It sees all beings
creating themselves; for it, the whole of Being presents itself as By-Itself.
This is why physis is the totality of Being for the first Greek philosophers,
whom Aristotle calls the physiologoi: those who seek the logos of physis
as the whole of Being. We should not call them “nature philosophers”;
they do not distinguish between what we call “nature,” “history,” and so
forth.
Now, what about the “nature” that we divide conceptually into the
material and the formal? How is it that we managed to determine the
material domain of things that have a natural character?—We must know
about a thing’s kind of Being, that is, the sort of way in which it is, if we
want to assign it to some domain. The material concept thus presupposes the
formal; it encompasses what satisfies the formal concept. How does nature
relate to these two concepts?

24   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


The formal and material concepts of nature are grasped as one through
[61] physis—natura—nature, which is what creates itself. Nothing can
produce itself without being a something; nothing grows that is not a
thing. Nature tells us something both about what its things are and about
how they are. The miracle of language harbors such a doubling that comes
together as one.
Now if we ask about the “nature” of a human being, we want to get
behind the “nature” of a thing, and we mean the “essence.” What does that
mean? What does it mean that “nature” has yet a third sense when we seek
what a thing is—to ti esti? If physis—natura—nature grasps as one:

the what-Being of a being, as


something that belongs to a domain, and
the Being-such of a being,
then it says what a being is: to ti esti, the what-Being of a being as a
whole.

If we follow the historical development of physis as the whole of Being,


we will notice its restriction as a concept. Physis finds its counterpart in
thesis—what is posited, positing, making in accordance with positive law.
“Nature” is opposed to what is made, or “art”; nature now signifies only what
produces itself. As such, it is revealed most strikingly where it creates itself
in the realm of the “living.” But the interpretation of nature’s characteristics
has shifted to the “nonliving”: Today, atomic physics believes it can yield
knowledge of the miracle of living Being.
After considering nature, we will try to grasp history in a similar way.
What does “history” mean? The past, we think, what has happened. But
is history only the past? No. History is everything that happens at all: history
is what happened, but also what is happening and will happen.
The triad of what happened, what is happening, and what will happen is
encompassed by the material concept of history. It means the realm of all
things that have the characteristic of happening. But thanks to the unifying
doubleness of language, “history” also contains this formal concept:
happening as such, which expresses the Being-such of a being. What is the
formal happening as such related to? Which being is determined by it in its
kind? Only currently happening activity? Is history only what is happening?
No, because what has happened and what will happen in the future are a
“happening” to the same degree. So the formal concept of history grasps
the three realms of the material as one, relating itself equally to each. But
“history” means happening in its totality, in general. The happening of what
has happened “is” no less than the happening of what is happening now and

SESSION 2 25
of future happening. Historians for whom history is not such a totality of
happening must fail.
[62] This consideration of history brings us to a concept of Being that
is essentially distinct from that of nature. We must sketch the difference
between the two.

26   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


SESSION 3 1

First we supplemented what we had said about physis. How could it be


possible that physis, for the Greeks, meant beings as a whole—physis, which
in our language means what grows, what comes from itself? Why does the
word originally mean what is, for the Greeks?
In order to answer this question we must clarify what the Greek einai
and on mean. They always mean a Being-present, Being-in-the-light-of-
day, pareinai. What is absent has no Being, it is concealed. But kryptesthai,
being concealed, is the concept that the Greeks oppose not only to Being
or ousia, but also to physis; for physis, as what grows and emerges, is at the
same time what comes to light, what offers itself. Here we can clearly see
the common meaning of physis and ousia. It consists of growing, coming
up, taking form. What is, is what is unconcealed. Heraclitus speaks of this
connection between physis and unconcealment when he says hē physis
kryptesthai philei, that is, beings endeavor to conceal themselves, or more
clearly: not to be there. Thus, for the Greeks, growth, Being, and Being-
unconcealed are bound together in a unity. With this knowledge we have
gained something essential for the understanding of Greek Being.
Now let us briefly review the course of our questioning, so that we can
stay aware of the point where we stand in our consideration of the essence
and concept of nature, history, and state. We had first established that nature,
history, and state are in some way domains of our Dasein, and that they are
connected somehow. In order to know this connection, we must first try to
get clear on what nature, history, and state are. We grasped nature on the
basis of physis as what produces itself by itself, and here we showed the two
ways the word physis can be interpreted—formally and materially. Then we
explained history as happening—in present, past, and future—and we also
clarified the material and formal concepts of history.
[63] This is where our investigation began last time. According to the
usual way of speaking, history means something past: one says, “That
belongs to history.” History can also mean something that comes from
somewhere and has developed, as when we say, “Something has a long
history.” When we assert that history includes not only what has happened,
and not only (as contemporary history) what is happening now, but also
what will happen in the future, we have expanded the usual concept of
history in a certain respect, namely, with regard to time. We can grasp the
essence of history only on the basis of time, but we completely ignored time
when we were determining the essence of nature. Do we have a right to
such a procedure?
Does not time have something to do with nature, then? After all, a plant
that develops between spring and fall needs time to do so. The times of
the year, the seasons, are important for natural life, and we also speak of
an incubation time or period. All growth occurs in time. How is it then,
that we can leave time out of the picture when we determine the essence of
nature? Let us look more closely at the role that time plays in nature.
The modern conception of nature is determined by men such as Galileo
who believed that they could come closer to what nature is by using
mathematical methods. We call this the mathematization of the concept
of nature—when one thinks that mathematical laws provide access to
the understanding of nature. Natural processes are simply explained
mechanically as changes of position of a particular material element in time.
In this way, they can be calculated. But with the calculation of a process, do
we really get an understanding of its essence, or of the essence of nature?
Motion is a change of place in time. Changing place means traversing a
path. What is a path? A path is not just any arbitrary distance, but one that
actually is or should be measured. This requires time. Time must, therefore,
be included in the definition of a path, and in fact it has a particular
function: with the help of time, the path is divided. The definition of the
path is d = vt, distance = velocity × time. That is how simply time in nature
is conceived mathematically. The path is taken only as an example; every
fundamental definition of nature includes time—time conceived in this
manner. One considers natural processes only as something mathematical,
and fails to see much of what constitutes the essence of natural process, or
sees it inadequately.
From all this there follows—and this is important at the moment for our
investigation—that all natural processes are somehow in time and linked
to time. How? The mechanical conception of nature does not clarify this
issue in a way that satisfies our question. Instead, our question arises once
again: if time is really everywhere in nature, in some way, then why is it not

28   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


expressed in our definition of the essence of nature, as it is in our definition
of the essence of history? Does not time have the function, [64] in nature as
well as in history, that we calculate and count with it? So it must seem, after
all, that we have been on the wrong path. No—it is just that, when we ask
about the essence of nature and history, our way of posing the question must
relate time, too, to this essence. Our question is now: how far does time
determine every being as a being, in the realms of nature and history?
To answer this question, we must first solve two preliminary questions.
How do we grasp time in natural and historical processes? And what is
time? Within a certain time, I achieve a certain goal. Where is time there?
I can measure it with a clock. But even if my clock is not running, time is
still there. Is it a part of motion? Maybe it is true that it has something to do
with motion, if we also include rest as a limit case of motion—but this is not
what concerns us at the moment. Is it perhaps something that we think up,
with whose help we can put processes in order? A measure, in other words?
How about that—is time actually the measure? Do we not measure, instead,
with the help of the sun?
Finally, one claims that “time is the duration of natural processes”—but
that too, in the end, brings us back to time as measure. This does not get
us any further with our question. We keep taking time as a mathematical
quantity, as in physics, where one operates with time as something
measurable and calculable.
Now someone answers the question of the essence of time by pointing
out that time is a differential, that is, a limit value of the present. This opens
new possibilities for knowledge. Time is only in the moment, so right away,
time no longer is; and what will come is not yet. So time is constricted to the
point of the present now-Being. Everything earlier and later is excluded. We
must see that on this path, although we have come farther, we will not find
what we are seeking. For in this way we cannot grasp and hold time, since it
always no longer is anymore. In general, when we are asking about time, we
cannot answer—as we do with other things, such as a tree, a house, and so
forth—what it is, where it is, and how it is. Time is, in principle, something
completely different from the other things we ask about. On the one hand it
is only the current now, but on the other hand, as we rightly believe we can
assert, it comprises past, present, and future.
Now we have to take what we have discovered about time into our posing
of the question. What evidence justifies us in grounding the historical as
such through time in particular? We must bring this together with the
other question: why is time of fundamental significance for the essence of
history, quite otherwise than for the essence of nature?
[65]

SESSION 3 29
SESSION 4 1
January 13, 1934

In the last session we occupied ourselves with time. So that we could reveal
over the course of our further sessions just how untenable it is to bifurcate
the world into subjectivity and objectivity, and so that we could adopt the
right fundamental orientation to time, we first examined the two most
important theories of time, the Newtonian and the Kantian, both of which
proceed on the basis of a partition of the world into the subjective and
objective.
Newton, known along with Leibniz as the great inventor of differential
calculus, conceived of time in the way his calculus required: as a temporal
stream continuously flowing in one direction, in whose intervals all events
in space can be unambiguously ordered. This Newtonian time was supposed
to be an independent occurrence outside of our subjective understanding
and therefore was supposed to become, like all other objects, the content of
our experience. This concept of time is objective, in contrast to the Kantian
one, which is known to us as the subjective concept of time.
For Kant, time is no longer a content of experience; rather, time is
the form of sensory intuition. Time is form, because it is the subjective
condition “by which alone intuitions can take place in us.”2 Time is a form
of intuition and not of the understanding, because I can think of only
a single time, never different times at once. But what one can represent
only singly is an intuition. And furthermore, time is the form of inner
intuition,  because  time is the manner in which the mind intuits itself.
Time, as our intuition, is therefore characterized as the faculty by which the
mind looks inwards and is distinguished from appearance in space, which
is not oriented inwards and is therefore called external intuition. But should
the fact that spatial intuition does not point inwards in the same sense as
time provide a reason to distinguish between inner and outer intuition?
Least of all can we draw such a distinction merely because with the help of
spatial intuition we go forth into space and understand the juxtaposition
of things. If we were entirely cut off from the outer world, we would still
have an experience of space, presumably: the feeling of having a body.
Space, understood as an intuition, becomes one-sidedly geometrical and
is therefore treated too one-sidedly. We must not ask: how must space be
constituted so that it satisfies the axioms of geometry? Rather, we must ask:
how is space constituted so that a science such as geometry is possible?
A response to the philosophical question about space and time should
not proceed according to the standpoint of science, and especially not
according to mathematical physics [66], as has been attempted. A theory
in physics, such as the theory of relativity, should not presume the right
to refute or confirm a philosophical doctrine of space-time. So when,
on the basis of purely physical relationships, time is treated as the fourth
dimension of space, we can take this seriously as a mathematical theory,
but not philosophically.
To come to grips with the essence of time, we have to free ourselves from
every theoretical presupposition, place ourselves into the world, and ask
ourselves how we relate to time.
We are familiar with expressions from everyday life that have to do with
time, such as: we need time; we gain time; we lose time; and so on. From
such manners of speaking, it is clear how seriously we take time: after all,
the time that we have at our disposal is bounded by death. We therefore see
ourselves as compelled to divide up our time in a precise way.
The necessity of dividing time leads us to the question of the reckoning
of time. Our time is oriented to the sun. That we measure our time by the
sun in particular is not a matter of necessity but rather depends upon an
agreement. In order to carry out a division of the day into hours, minutes,
and seconds, we have built ourselves our clocks. We coordinate particular
positions of the sun with particular positions of the clock. The connection
between sun and time is the We. We coordinate them because we have to
deal with time. With this coordination, we make the tacit assumption that
the sun obeys the same mechanical rules (acceleration, etc.) as the gears
of our clock, for if this were not the case, then any coordination would be
absurd.
But let us look away from the reckoning of time and turn to the question
of how it stands with time itself. Where is time when we look at a clock
and say it is such-and-such o’clock? When we say, “It is seven o’clock,” why
is there something more to this than the naming of a number? For not
just any statement can say this, but we are saying it in this particular way,

32   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


and we emphasize the “now” that appears in the sentence, “Now it is seven
o’clock.” In the Now time gets its meaning for us. This is why the Now has
precedence over the After and the Before, and from the perspective of the
Now, Before and After even appear to be nothing. For only the Now really
is; the Before is no longer and the After is not yet. We cannot hold on to
the Now, because in every moment another Now is the Now. The Now thus
seems to have fundamental significance for calculus as the limit transition
or infinitesimal that dissolves the contradiction that lies in the essence of
the continuum. For one has to view the ordered Nows as a continuum,
that is, as a region in which no one point is exceptional. But we have just
seen that one now, the now, is in fact exceptional. Only through the limit
function inherent to the differential calculus does this contradiction get
resolved. Through the infinitesimal, one Now becomes distinguished and
every other Now becomes subordinated to it.
This Now is there and does not necessarily need to be oriented to
another occurrence. But since no occurrence is a Now, every Now can be
oriented to something else. Our time is specified by the date. Time must
be datable. This means that it must be possible for something to be given
to which our now may be oriented.
The Now requires the We. For it is we who say, “Now it is seven
o’clock.” The Now obliges us to decide both forwards and backwards. The
animal does not stand under this obligation to decide, because otherwise
it would have to be able to order things, as we know from the lecture
course.3 The animal therefore has no time.
Because of this, we already see that the Kantian–Newtonian concept of
time must lead into error and is a violent abstraction. In the subsequent
sessions we plan to examine how this concept is inadequate for the time of
nature and history.
[67]

SESSION 4 33
SESSION 5 1
January 12, 1934

At the beginning of the session, we returned to the Kantian understanding


of time in order to expand on what we had said on this topic.
We had said that time, for Kant, was the form of inner intuition, that is,
intuition directed inwards.— But what does “form” mean?
The essential character of form is grasped as “determination.” Form
thus determines the content, or what can be determined; time as form
determines the experiential contents of inner intuition.
Now, how do we determine intuition? The protocol said that intuition
was something singular, in contrast to a concept. This did not satisfy us.
We realized that intuition and concept have something in common:
both are modes of representation. — Nevertheless, in intuition I represent a
singular This, while in a concept I represent something that applies to many
things, something that is nonintuitive and universal. Intuition is further
characterized by the fact that in it I sense or perceive, while in a concept I
think and construct creatively and spontaneously.
For the Kantian way of discussing time, this means that every individual
thing given to me in my mental processes is determined by time. I perceive
the processes of my thinking, feeling, and speaking only in the succession
of time.
In contrast, space as the form of outer intuition means that everything
external presents itself to me in the spatial order of the next to each other,
behind, and in front.
[68] But now, how are we to understand that for Newton, time appears
as a determining factor in space?
We do not grasp occurrences in space as such; rather, we grasp them.
The cognitions of physics, as cognitions, as psychological processes in our
consciousness, stand within the form of time, and thus so do the contents
that are thought in them. This answer of Kant’s is an artificial theory—so
it was said—and is contradicted by the fact that we immediately sense
temporal succession and do not first get it through reflection.
After these supplemental thoughts on time in Kant, we reconstructed the
context in which we are asking about time, so that we might be completely
clear about how we are proceeding.
To begin with, we were speaking about nature, but then we distinguished
history from it because we essentially understand history on the basis of
time. On the basis of some suggestions, we understood history, naturally
enough, as the past, but then we moved beyond these preliminary stages.
In any case, time immediately played an essential role in our discussion of
history, whereas we had neglected it in nature, even though the “t” does not
play an unessential role in nature either.
Why do we speak in this way about nature and history? This question
drove us to further questions about time.
In asking about time, we began with particular theories in order then
to understand time in contrast to them, apart from every theory. We
then determined that we grasp time in the “here and now” and that the
presupposition for this is that we have something like time in the first
place.
But if we say “now,” and try to comprehend this “now,” we experience
that it has always already disappeared. What has happened to the “now,”
where has it gone? It is gone as the “now” and yet it is still there, as a past
“now.” I still have it. As it slips away, what character does this disappearing
“now” have on its way? Is it a “then, when,” a “previously”?—Only insofar
as I am already reflecting on this. Neither is it something general such as
“not-now.” It is a “just happened.” The singular “now” is now always already
a “just happened,” and as having such a structure, it has a relationship that
reaches into the present, although it is flowing away into the past. Likewise,
every “now” has a relation to the next “now”: the “about to happen.” Thus—
it was said—there is basically no “now” anymore, no present; instead, we
stand between “just happened” and “about to happen,” in a double relation
to future and past.
Now, how is it possible for me to stand in this temporal horizon? How is
it possible that “just happened” and “about to happen,” as horizon, give me
the immediate knowledge of the “now”?
What makes it possible for me to grasp the vanishing “now” as what just
happened? An experience?—A representation?
No, a retention. I retain the “now” in its change because I go along with
it into the “just happened,” I live in the “just happened.” This past that does
not slip away is what makes it possible for me to remember.

36   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


[69] In turn, the relation to the “about to happen” is expectation. Thus,
human beings stand in their distinctive way of waiting and retaining
that makes it possible for them to reflect, to free themselves from being
delivered over in an eternal “now” to what faces them in each case. Insofar
as we are presencing in expecting and retaining, we can speak of a “now,” a
“just happened,” an “about to happen,” an “at that time,” a “right away,” and
a succession of time.
We refer to this fundamental constitution of human beings as authentic
time. As human temporality, it is the condition for the time of which we
commonly speak.
So there are two things that we understand as “time”:
First there is the time with which we are used to reckoning, that
time between 5 and 7 o’clock, the time in which the processes of
nature and history occur. But then there is a temporality in which man
himself is.
This is why in our consideration of history we “quite spontaneously”
introduced time. This does not mean the time that the historian can use to
determine (and test) that in AD 800, Charlemagne was crowned emperor.
No, we are talking about history as our past, as what was the fate of our
ancestors and thus is our own. We do not understand time as a framework,
but as the authentic fundamental constitution of human beings. And only
an entity whose Being is time can have and make history. An animal has
no history.
With this understanding, we emerged from our perspective so far, in
which we were taking nature and history as equally objective processes.
Instead, history is now the distinctive “term” for human Being.
Now, we have to say regarding this reflection that it was spoken from
our own historical Dasein in this moment and thus must be subject to a
certain intelligibility, like all statements and truths about human beings,
which always have to be attained in one’s own decision. We must keep this
in mind as we now ask about the nature of the state.

The state
We had begun by saying that the domains of nature, history, and state are
progressively narrower—that history is embedded in nature, and the state
as a historical phenomenon is embedded in history. Now we want to see
whether this characterization is in fact correct; for now, we simply asked
whether there is any history without a state.

SESSION 5 37
If we now ask about the state, we are asking about ourselves.
[70] Now, how can we tackle this issue with our questioning, in order to
display the essence of the state?
One can ask about the purpose of the state. This approach assumes
that the state is a human institution and that there was a condition of man
before a state, a condition that forced him to found a state. It was remarked
that this sort of question is asked at a particular time, in a state in some
particular condition. This was meant to help us see how important it is to
get clear on where we have to stand.
At bottom, the question of the purpose of the state is also the question
of its origin, and it is in this form that the question of its essence usually
appears. But the question of origin is not at all an original questioning
about the state, for I can construct a theory of the beginnings of the state
or interpret available sources informing me about its beginnings only if I
know what a state is. But behind this knowledge there already stands yet
another very particular decision.
State—what does this “term” express?
As we did when we considered nature, we can take the state (1) materially:
just as substances and living things belong in the realm of nature, citizens,
officials, tax offices and the like belong in the realm of the state. (2) We can
take the state formally: then we ask how, in what way, something is. We
then understand by “state” a way of Being in which humans are.—It is in
this way, then, that we primarily want to grasp the essence of the state, and
not as an area of history.
Now, which being belongs to this state?—“The people” [das Volk]. We
must then ask what we understand by “people,” for in the French Revolution
they gave the same answer: the people.
This answer is possible only on the basis of a decision for a state. The
definition of the people depends on how it is in its state.
To begin with, we established formally that the people is the being that
is in the manner of a state, the being that is or can be a state. We then asked
the further formal question: what character and form does the people give
itself in the state, and what character and form does the state give to the
people?
The form of an organism? Impossible, because when we ask about the
state we are asking about the essence of man, and not about the essence of
an organism.
The form of order? That is too general, since I can order everything—
stones, books, and so on. But what hits the mark is an order in the sense of
mastery, rank, leadership, and following. This leaves open the question of

38   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


who is master. In Aristotle and Plato, the question of the essence of the state
begins with the question: who rules, who is permitted to rule?
But we should strive to gain a genuine knowledge of the state, so that the
state may form our essence and thus come to power.
[71]

SESSION 5 39
SESSION 6 1
January 19, 1934

At the beginning we noted in regards to our conception of temporality


that we see the future as the fundamental characteristic of time and that
for us the future is connected directly with the past. We persist from the
past into the future, and only in this way do we persist in the present.
This conception is contrasted to the first presentation of the concept of
time in Aristotle’s physics, where the Now is considered the fundamental
phenomenon of time, the present, while past and future are understood as
no–longer–now or not–yet-now.
Then we turned to the concept of the state and clarified the meaning of
the word: status means condition, it means a mode of Being, and so state,
that is, status rei publicae, literally means the mode of Being of a people.
One customarily describes politics as every practical and theoretical
occupation in the state and having to do with the state. Now, this word
“politics” comes from the Greek polis, which means the state as community,
which, in Greece, was the sole site where all the state’s Being took place—
it was where everything happened that we characterize as the state. If
Aristotle then coined the well-known expression that the human being is
a zōon politikon, that does not therefore mean that we must be communal
beings—or, as the Romans translated it, an animal sociale—simply because
we cannot survive alone or because, for better or worse, from our first day
of life onwards we are naturally surrounded by other people. Rather, quite
apart from such biological considerations, human beings are truly the zōon
politikon because to be human means: in a community, to carry in oneself
the possibility and the necessity of giving form to and fulfilling one’s own
Being and the Being of the community. Human beings are a zōon politikon
because they have the strength and the capacity for the polis, and here
the polis is not conceived as something already subsisting in advance, but
rather as something to which human beings can and must give form. But in
this sense, the human being certainly “belongs to the polis” or is politikos—
as the living being, that is, which has the possibility and the necessity of
existing in the polis.
But state and politics in this genuine sense are related in such a way that a
state is possible at all only on the grounds of the fact that the Being of human
beings is political. And if it is widely believed that it is the reverse, that the
state is the precondition for politics, then that is due to the ascendancy of
a false and vulgar concept that there is nothing more to politics than the
business of the state, according to which politics certainly depends on the
existence of a state.
[72] But to proceed, the word politics was subjected to still further
narrowing:2 it was made into a circumscribed3 domain, one among many
others, such as private life, the economy, technology, science, religion.
Politics was set next to all these others as one area within culture, as one
said. And one even believed it possible to establish this philosophically by
assigning the values of the true, the good, and the beautiful to each and
every one of these cultural areas. And so the realm of the political became a
markedly inferior one: it went so far that “political” could be equated with
“slippery,” and a politician meant someone who knew how to twist things
with parliamentary tricks.4
The development began in the Renaissance, when the individual
human being, as the person, was raised up as the goal of all Being—the
great man as the two ideals: homo universalis and the specialist. It was
this new will to the development of the personality that brought about the
complete transformation according to which, from then on, everything was
supposed to exist purely for the sake of the great individual. Everything,
and therefore politics too, now gets shifted into a sphere within which
the human being5 is willing and able to live to the fullest. Thus politics,
art, science and all the others degenerate into domains of the individual
will to development, and this all the more as they were expanded through
gigantic accomplishments and thus became specialized. In the times that
followed, all the domains of culture were allowed to grow ever farther
apart until they could not be kept in view as a whole,6 up to our own day,
where the danger of such behavior displayed itself with elemental clarity
in the collapse of our state.
We therefore recognized it as an urgent task of our time to counter
this danger in order to attempt to give back to politics its proper rank,
to learn to see politics again as the fundamental characteristic of human
beings who philosophize within history, and as the Being in which the

42   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


state fully develops, so that the state can truly be called the way of Being
of a people.
And with this we come to the entity that belongs to the state, its
substance, its supporting ground: the people [das Volk]. Here too, we
began with the question of what the word Volk means, and we found that
with this word we shed light on the most diverse sides of what the people
comprises. If, for example, we say “folk song,” “folk customs,” then we say
the word Volk in a way that alludes to the life of sentiments and feelings; by
this we mean a certain naive,7 unspoiled, fresh originality of mores. This is
different from turns of phrase such as “the crowd of people scattered”: here
we see an aggregation of subordinates, of the uneducated “rabble,” which is
supposed to be numerically superior and shut off from so-called “higher”
goods; this way of speaking, then, emphasizes the social differentiation of
the people.
By contrast, an expression such as “taking the census of the people”
[Volkszählung] certainly means neither counting the “unspoiled” people
as described above, nor something like the counting of a rabble; rather, it
encompasses those who belong as citizens to a single state. So here we are
selecting as the boundary and definition of the people [73] the characteristic
of belonging to the state. But closely related to this is a term such as “public
health” [Volksgesundheit], in which one also now feels the tie of the unity
of blood and stock, the race. But in the most comprehensive sense, we use
the term Volk when we speak of something like “the people in arms”: with
this we mean nothing merely like those who receive draft notices, and also
something other than the mere sum8 of the citizens of the state. We mean
something even more strongly binding than race and a community of the
same stock: namely, the nation, and that means a kind of Being that has
grown under a common fate and taken distinctive shape within a single
state.

SESSION 6 43
SESSION 7 1
February 2, 1934

The political as the fundamental possibility and distinctive way of Being


of human beings is, as we said, the foundation on which the state has
its Being. The Being of the state is anchored in the political Being of the
human beings who, as a people, support this state—who decide for it.
This political, that is, historically fateful decision requires us to clarify the
original, essential connection between people and state. An understanding
and knowledge of the essence of the state and people is needful for every
human being. This knowledge, the concepts and cognition, belong to
political education, that is, what leads us into our own political Being; but
this does not mean that everyone who gains this knowledge can or may
now act politically as a statesman or leader. For the origin of all state action
and leadership does not lie in knowledge; it lies in Being. Every leader is
a leader; he must be a leader in accordance with the marked form of his
Being; and he understands, considers, and brings about2 what people and
state are, in the living development of his own essence.
A leader does not need to be educated politically—but a band of
guardians in the people does, a band that helps to bear responsibility for
the state. For every state and all knowledge about the state grows within a
political tradition. Where this nourishing, securing soil is lacking, even the
best idea for a state cannot take root, grow from the sustaining womb of the
people, and develop. Otto the Great based his empire on the prince–bishops
by obliging them to service and knowledge in political and military matters.
And Frederick the Great educated the Prussian nobility into guardians of
his state. Bismarck oversaw this process of rooting his idea of the state in
the firm, strong soil of political nobility, and when his sustaining arm let
go, the Second Reich collapsed without any support. We may not overlook
the founding of a political tradition [74] and the education of a political
nobility. Every individual must now reflect in order to arrive at knowledge
of the people and state and his own responsibility. The state depends on our
alertness, our readiness, and our life. The manner of our Being marks the
Being of our state. In this way, every people takes a position with regard to
the state, and no people lacks the urge for the state. The people that turns
down a state, that is stateless, has just not found the gathering of its essence
yet; it still lacks the composure and force to be committed to its fate as a
people.
This is why we have to be especially ready to try to clarify further the
essence of people and state. We begin, again, by clarifying the political as
a way of Being of human beings and what makes the state possible. There
are other concepts of the political that oppose this approach, such as the
concept of the friend-enemy relation that stems from Carl Schmitt. This
concept of politics as the friend-enemy relation is grounded in the view that
struggle, that is, the real possibility of war, is the presupposition of political
behavior; that the possibility of the struggle for decision, which can also be
fought out without military means, sharpens present oppositions—be they
moral, religious, or economic—into radical unity as friend and enemy. The
unity and totality of this opposition of friend and enemy is the basis for all
political existence. But a decisive aspect of this view is that the political unit
does not have to be identical with state and people.
Another conception of the political is expressed in Bismarck’s saying,
“Politics is the art of the possible.” Possibility here does not mean an
arbitrary possibility that can be dreamed up accidentally, but what is solely
possible, the only thing possible. Politics, for Bismarck, is the ability to
see this and to bring it about [?],3 which must essentially and necessarily
arise from a historical situation, and at the same time the technē, the skill,
to make actual what one knows. With this, politics becomes the creative
project of the great statesman who can survey the whole happening of
history, and not just the present—who, in his idea of the state, sets a goal
that he keeps firmly in view despite all accidental changes in the situation.
This view of politics and the state is tied closely to the personal genius
of the statesman upon whose essential vision, strength, and attitude the
Being of the state depends; when his power and life stop, the state begins
to lose its power.
Again we see that a state that is to endure and mature must be grounded in
the Being of the people. The people, the being, has a very particular relation
to its Being, the state. We now have to consider how these relations between
people and state, and beings and Being, are essentially linked. We should
follow two paths here: first we should draw a distinction between beings

46   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


and Being in general, [75] and then we want to ask about the distinction
between state and people, starting with our own state and people.
Is there a difference between Being and beings? If so, in what does it
consist and how far can it be clarified? The distinction between Being and
beings has often been explained by saying that beings are the content, or
what can be determined, and Being is the form, which determines. This
does not capture the essence. On the other hand, there seems to be a close
connection between Being and beings. One does not seem thinkable—
much less distinguishable—without the other. Being is the condition for
beings, and beings in turn are the condition for Being. Here we cannot get
a clear view. Maybe we are already asking wrongly when we ask about the
difference. In any case, our failure must at least then show us why we cannot
ask in this way, and how a genuine question would have to get started here.
But for now, let us ask concretely: What is a being? What is Being?
The chalk is a present-at-hand being. We see it and assert something
about it: the chalk is white. When we do so, we can detect the chalk and
the whiteness of the chalk in experience, with our own eyes. But where
is the “is,” the form of the auxiliary verb “to be” that we constantly use in
our assertions? We cannot see “is.” What is the “is”? We use “is” in various
senses. In the sentence “The chalk is white,” the “is” expresses a quality,
a property, a how-Being. The “is” means something else in the sentence
“The chalk is present at hand,” for presence at hand is not a property but
rather a kind of Being, what-Being. But with this distinction we really
have not yet clarified what the essence of the “is” and Being is. Being is
in no way visible, we cannot have any image of it. And still, we constantly
say “is” and understand right away, without any theory, this “is”—but we
cannot say what we mean by it. As self-evident as this “is” seems to be,
it becomes just as obscure, difficult, and puzzling when we ask about it.
We cannot ask about Being with the question: what is Being? Are we
supposed to recognize the “is” only if it “is not,” that is, on the basis of
the Nothing? If this were so, would not the whole world, we ourselves,
and everything become null? This is outrageous and confusing. Within the
self-evident there suddenly opens an abyss, unsurveyable and dangerous,
but unavoidable for whoever truly questions. Human beings, who in
accordance with their essence have to question, must expose themselves
to the danger of the Nothing, of nihilism, in order to grasp the meaning of
their Being by overcoming nihilism.
We cannot explain the question of Being further here; we simply see
that there is an essential difference between Being and beings, and that this
difference is completely other than the difference between one being and
another, such as the book and the chalk.

SESSION 7 47
But we must still indicate the ambiguity that Being has: the chalk is; a
dog is; a human is. In all three assertions we specify that [76] something is,
something that is not nothing. But in each of these three situations, Being is
something different: chalk as chalk is an object, while to be a dog is to be an
animal, and thus, as living, to have a different kind of Being from present-
at-hand objects. And Being-human is quite different and distinct in its way
of Being. How so? What is it that distinguishes human Being?
We say that humans are conscious of their Being and of the Being of
other beings; they have consciousness. This human consciousness is not
only something knowable, which one can either know or not, but is a
fundamental capacity of human Dasein. Human beings’ own Being is an
issue for them, and thanks to consciousness they can concern themselves
with it. The height of human consciousness harbors in it the possibility
of the deep fall into unconsciousness. In the constant powerlessness of
unconsciousness and lack of conscience, man sinks beneath beast. The animal
has no relation to Being; it cannot be unconscious, derelict, or indifferent.
But when human beings lose their consciousness and conscience, they lose
their most proper worth. Without consciousness, the knowing and caring
about the height and depth, greatness, and powerlessness of their Being in
the whole of the world, they are no longer human beings, and since they
cannot be animals or plants or objects, at bottom they are nothing at all.
With the loss of consciousness, human Being becomes null.
Just as human beings are conscious of their Being-human—they relate
to it, they are concerned with it—in the same way, the people as a being
has a knowing fundamental relation to its state. The people, the being,
that actualizes the state in its Being, knows of the state, cares about it,
and wills it. Just as every human being wants to live, wills to be here as
a human being, just as he keeps holding on to this and loves his Dasein
[Being-here] in the world, the people wills the state as its way to be as a
people. The people is ruled by the urge for the state, by erōs for the state.
But inasmuch as erōs is something distinctly human, this will to a state
cannot be conceived biologically, or even compared to the drive of bees
and termites to their “state.” For the life (zōē) of animals is fundamentally
different from human life.
The people’s love for the state, its wish and will for it, expresses itself as
taking a position, rejection, dedication—in short, as concern for the essence
and form of the state. So the form or constitution of the state is then also an
essential expression of what the people takes to be the meaning of its own
Being. The constitution is not a rational contract, a legal order, political
logic, or anything else arbitrary and absolute; constitution and law are the
actualization of our decision for the state—they are factical attestations

48   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


of what we take to be our historical task as a people, the task that we are
trying to live out. Accordingly, knowledge of the constitution and law is
not just the province of so-called “politicians” and jurists, but as thinking
and consciousness of the state, it belongs to the Dasein of every individual
human being who takes upon himself the struggle and responsibility
for his people. Our task at this [77] historical moment involves the clear
development and transformation of thinking about the state. Each and
every man and woman must learn to know, even if only in a vague and
unclear way, that their individual life decides the fate of the people and
state—either supports it or rejects it.
This knowledge also includes commitment to the order of the state.
Order is the human way of Being, and thus also the way of Being of the
people. The order of the state expresses itself in the delimited field of tasks
of human individuals and groups. This order is not merely organic, as one
could suppose and has supposed on the basis of the fable of Menenius
Agrippa,4 but is something spiritual and human, which also means
something voluntary. It is based on the relations of human beings in ruling
and serving each other. Like the medieval order of life, the order of the
state today is sustained by the free, pure will to following and leadership,
that is, to struggle and loyalty. For if we ask, “What is rule? What is it based
on?” then if we give a true and essential answer, we experience no power,
enslavement, oppression, or compulsion. Instead what we experience is that
rule and authority together with service and subordination are grounded
in a common task. Only where the leader and the led bind themselves
together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise.
Then spiritual superiority and freedom develop as a deep dedication of all
forces to the people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engagement,
endurance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and superiority of the
leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in this
way with originality and passion to the task. And if the people feels this
dedication, it will let itself be led into struggle, and it will love struggle and
will it. It will develop and persist in its forces, be faithful and sacrifice itself.
In every new moment, the leader and the people will join more closely in
order to bring about the essence of their state, that is, their Being; growing
with each other, they will set their meaningful historical Being and will
against the two threatening powers of death and the devil—that is, ruination
and decline from their own essence.

SESSION 7 49
SESSION 8 1
February 16, 1934

Last time, before we got into our main topic, we still had to add some
supplemental points to the session before last.
The Greeks had two words for what we call life: bios and zōē. They used
bios in a twofold sense. First, in the sense of [78] biology, the science of
life. Here we think of the organic growth of the body, glandular activity,
sexual difference, and the like. For most of our scientists today, biology
seems suspicious from the start, because beyond the experimental table
and the microscope, it seeks a direct relation to life—and to human life in
particular, our life, which to these scientists often seems less important as
a research topic than the physiology of the frog. This is why we do not find
any real biology, even in our universities. If we wanted to occupy ourselves
with it anyway, we would need just one thing: we would have to make use of
the relevant findings of zoology, botany, and physiology while staying open
to biological ways of posing problems. Biology is the name for a natural
science in the broadest and most universal sense.
Another sense of bios for the Greeks is the course of a life, the history of a
life, more or less in the sense that the word “biography” still has for us today.
Bios here means human history and existence—so there can be no bios of
animals. Bios, as human bios, has the peculiar distinction of being able either
to stand above the animal or to sink beneath it. In the Nicomachean Ethics
([Book I] Chapter 3, 1095b), three bioi, three fundamental forms of human
existence, are distinguished: the bios apolaustikos, the life of enjoyment,
whose standard for things is enjoyment, pleasure, hēdonē; the bios politikos,
in which everything is decided on the basis of ambition, repute, and renown;
and the bios theōretikos, the highest fundamental form of human existence,
the life of one who authentically contemplates—the philosopher. Of course,
this does not refer to people like our scientists today.
In addition to bios, the Greek language also has the word zōē. To
begin with, it is life as a purely physiological process; yet the meanings of
bios and zōē are intermingled. In the New Testament, zōē means the life
of blessedness, the life bound to God. But when the Greeks say that the
human being is a zōon logon echon, they mean a living being (in the sense
of zoology) that can speak.
We also had to add something about the inner reasons for the failure
of Bismarck’s politics. We heard that a people, in addition to needing a
leader, also needs a tradition that is carried on by a political nobility. The
Second Reich fell prey to an irreparable collapse after Bismarck’s death,
and not only because Bismarck failed to create this political nobility. He
was also incapable of regarding the proletariat as a phenomenon that was
justified in itself, and of leading it back into the state by reaching out to it
with understanding. But the main reason is probably that the Volk-based
character of the Second Reich was exhausted in what we call patriotism
and fatherland. These elements of the union of 1870–1 are not [79] to be
judged negatively in themselves, but they are completely inadequate for a
truly Volk-based state. They also lacked an ultimate rootedness in the Volk,
the people.
Before we got into our main topic, we briefly connected it to what came
before. We saw that the question of the state cannot be posed in isolation,
that the state cannot be projected by a political theorist, but that it is a way
of Being and a kind of Being of the people. The people is the entity whose
Being is the state. So we can consider things in two ways. The first point of
view, which we have already considered, comes from above, in a certain
sense—from the universal, from Being, and what is. Now, this universal
point of view should not be confused with the attempts to deduce the state in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rousseau, for instance, believed
that the state was a contrat social that was based only on each individual’s
striving for his own welfare. This state would no longer be the state in the
sense of the political as the fundamental character of Western man, who
exists on the basis of philosophy; it would be a subordinate means to an
end, in service to the development of the personality in the liberal sense,
one domain among many.
The second possible point of view comes from below, in a certain sense,
from the people and the state, from us ourselves. This procedure forces us
to distinguish two paths we can take. We want to feel our way forwards first
by considering the people in isolation, and then by considering the state
in isolation. This distinction, of course, can only be methodological, since
it is after all impossible to consider the people without a state—the entity
without its Being, in a certain sense. The first question, the question of the

52   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


people, which is the first topic that concerns us, must be directed in such a
way that we will reach the state.
Now, we might put forward the following line of thought: since the
state, as the Being of the people, is evidently historical, we could ask about
the people and its historical character on this basis. But since at this point
we have not yet decided whether or not every activity of the people has
something to do with the state from the start, we want to take another tack
in our work for now.
We already saw earlier that natural processes and the happening of
history occur in space and time. Now we want to try to comprehend the
people on this basis as well. Space and time have long been [understood as]
aspects that determine beings in their singularity, uniqueness, individuality.
They are principia individuationis, principles of determination. Through
these principles, one can determine beings or realities in their concretion,
or at least help to determine them—and the people too, in particular.
If we ask about the people in space, we must fend off two misconceptions
from the start. When we hear these two words, we think to begin with of
a contemporary slogan: “a people without space.” If by this we mean living
space [Lebensraum], then without a doubt we have said too much. Perhaps
one could say: a people without adequate living space, without sufficient
[80] living space for its positive development. We must always know that
space necessarily belongs to the people in its concrete Being, that there is
no such thing as a “people without space” in the most literal sense. — The
second error consists in taking the space of the people or the state, following
geography or geopolitics, as a bounded geometrical surface that we can
measure precisely in terms of square kilometers—that is, as a measurable,
extended area. Even if we just consider this notion from a purely geometrical
point of view, it contradicts the sense of the word “space,” which is, after all,
three-dimensional and as such is measured not with plane measures, but
cubically.
Now, since we at least know what “space” does not mean—this
measurable, extended area—we can question further. We do not want to
simply count up and arrange what we know about the relations between a
people and space, but we want to continue our reflections by comparing the
way human beings and a people relate to space and the way dead matter,
plants, and animals relate to space.
To begin with, we will ask about matter in space. The science that
concerns itself with the relationship of merely material beings to space
is physics. In the latest results of its research, concerning atoms, atomic
nuclei, and electrons, physics has shown that bodies do not simply stand in
space in a purely geometrical way, that space is not an indifferent medium

SESSION 8 53
that surrounds the bodies in question, but that these bodies are oriented
into space in a very particular way. The position of a body in space is
fundamentally non-arbitrary; it stands in a completely definite reciprocal
relation to its surroundings. This linkage of things to space and to fields
is part of their essence and their kind of Being. Quite new possibilities for
scientific method are provided by this atomic or field physics. Today there
are already physicists who, in principle, are expressing the idea of solving
biological problems with the help of field physics. True, this attempt would
be a regression to materialism, but all the same, it indicates a possibility of
taking up the question in a fundamentally new way. — By the way, these
thoughts are not at all as new as they may seem to us. Aristotle, in his
theory of the spheres, already sees cosmic space as something that is not
indifferently empty. He assigns every matter to its appropriate place.
Now let us ask how the relation of dead matter to space differs from
that of living things. Is it that animals can move around in space, and
mountains apparently cannot? (Actually, they do move, and in fact move
constantly, but their way of moving is different.) The difference in the
manner of moving does not yet change anything in the relationship to
space. The decisive difference is that the animal somehow has to deal with
space, that it operates in space and is in turn marked by it. For instance,
for a fish, dwelling in water is not an arbitrary condition, but a necessity;
it is precisely what gives the fish living space and the possibility of life. It
is also a fact that [81] crabs that live in pools grow when they are put into
a larger body of water. They orient themselves to the space in which they
find themselves at the time. Zoology and botany decline to investigate such
things; they consider them frivolous. In most cases, these sciences are not
open to such questions and have no feel for them. The questions are alive, in
a very broad sense, in ecology, the theory of the locale of individuals. But so
far, ecologists have simply determined where plants and animals live; they
have not asked in a fundamental way about locale. Biology is more open to
this particular problem. It calls the relation between living being and space
the “environment.” This word is meant to indicate that the limit between
space and living being is not the surface of the living body, that the living
being does not simply take up a section of indifferent space; the living being
rules space over and above the body, it possesses a Being that is oriented
beyond the body.
Since human Being, as we have already seen, is essentially different
from animal Being, presumably human Being in space is also completely
different from that of the animal. For the Being of the people, as a human
way of Being, space is not simply surroundings, or an indifferent container.
When we investigate the people’s Being-in-space, we see that every people

54   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


has a space that belongs to it. Persons who live by the sea, in the mountains,
and on the plains are different. History teaches us that nomads have not
only been made nomadic by the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but
they have also often left wastelands behind them where they found fruitful
and cultivated land—and that human beings who are rooted in the soil
have known how to make a home for themselves even in the wilderness.
Relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming marked
by space, belong together with the essence and the kind of Being of a people.
So it is not right to see the sole ideal for a people in rootedness in the soil,
in attachment, in settledness, which find their cultivation and realization in
farming and which give the people a special endurance in its propagation, in
its growth, in its health. It is no less necessary to rule over the soil and space,
to work outwards into the wider expanse, to interact with the outside world.
The concrete way in which a people effectively works in space and forms
space necessarily includes both: rootedness in the soil and interaction.
Only on this basis can we start moving in the direction of the state.
The people and the state have a space that belongs to them. But it has not
been decided whether the space of the people coincides with the space of
the state. So the state cannot be an intellectual construct, or a sum of legal
principles, or a constitution. It is essentially related to space and formed
by space. Its space is, to a certain extent, the space of the people rooted in
the soil, insofar as it is grasped in terms of the will to work out into the
expanse, in terms of interaction, in terms of power. This space we call land,
sovereign dominion, territory; in a certain sense, it is the fatherland. The
homeland is not to be confused with the fatherland. The homeland will in
[82] most cases, from a purely external point of view, be a narrower region
of the space of the state. But it is never this in principle; it need not have
anything to do with the state. There are completely different relations at
work in the two. We can speak of the state only when rootedness in the soil
is combined with the will to expansion, or generally speaking, interaction.
A homeland is something I have on the basis of my birth. There are quite
particular relations between me and it in the sense of nature, in the sense
of natural forces. Homeland expresses itself in rootedness in the soil and
being bound to the earth. But nature works on the human being, roots him
in the soil, only when nature belongs as an environment, so to speak, to
the people whose member that human being is. The homeland becomes
the way of Being of a people only when the homeland becomes expansive,
when it interacts with the outside—when it becomes a state. For this reason,
peoples or their subgroups who do not step out beyond their connection
to the homeland into their authentic way of Being—into the state—are
in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perishing. This is also

SESSION 8 55
the great problem of those Germans who live outside the borders of the
Reich: they do have a German homeland, but they do not belong to the
state of the Germans, the Reich, so they are deprived of their authentic
way of Being.— In summary, then, we can say that the space of a people,
the soil of a people, reaches as far as members of this people have found
a homeland and have become rooted in the soil; and that the space of the
state, the territory, finds its borders by interacting, by working out into the
wider expanse.
In this connection, at the end of our last session we still made a few brief
remarks on the significance of folklore for the life of a people. We heard
that people and space mutually belong to each other. From the specific
knowledge of a people about the nature of its space, we first experience
how nature is revealed in this people. For a Slavic people, the nature of
our German space would definitely be revealed differently from the way
it is revealed to us; to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed
at all. This way of being embedded in a people, situated in a people, this
original participation in the knowledge of the people, cannot be taught;
at most, it can be awakened from its slumber. One poor means of doing
this is folklore. It is a peculiar mishmash of objects that have often been
taken from the customs of a particular people. But it often also investigates
customs, mores, or magic which no longer have anything to do with a
specific people in its historical Being. It investigates forces that are at work
everywhere among primitive and magical human beings. So folklore is
not suited to ask about what belongs specifically to a people; often it even
does the very opposite. This is why it is a misunderstanding and an error
to believe that one can awaken the consciousness of the Volk with the help
of folklore [Volkskunde]. We must above all guard ourselves against being
overly impressed by the word “folk.”
[83]

56   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


SESSION 9 1
February 23, 1934

Looking back over the previous sessions, we keep this firmly in view:
people and state are not two realities that we might observe isolated, as it
were, from one another. The state is the preeminent Being of the people; we
will leave open the question of whether and how a people is also possible
in a condition before it has a state. But at the same time, the people in its
Being is not bound to the state insofar as the state appears in this or that
form, the people can outlast the state in a certain way—although this point
should not be misunderstood. So the Being of the people and the Being of
the state are in a certain sense separable.
What is a people? This question about the essence of the people per se
is one we simply cannot pose, because the people is always already seen
from the perspective of a particular Being of a state, and so is always
already politically determined. We can never clearly establish the Being
of a people in itself because in such an undertaking a particular state-
consciousness always already plays a role. The same is the case if we want
to get clear about the concept of “the state.” For this reason, one cannot
establish a theory of the state that is not already built upon particular ties
to the Being of a people. Thus political-philosophical questioning about
one or the other [i.e. people or state] is always played out within a certain
polarity, within the difference between people and state as a being and its
Being.
Once again we ask, what is the state? As we have already said earlier,
a general characteristic of the state is “order.” On the face of it, this is a
purely formal category that in itself does not yet have any connection to
a definite region of Being. We see order everywhere; I can put stones and
the like in order. This abstract concept of order as a purely formal direction
for thinking easily leads reflection about the state astray, as is proven by
nineteenth-century theories of the state.— For this reason we ask more
pointedly: what is being claimed about this order in the state? How is order
meant here? Order in the sense of the order of rule, of superordination and
subordination, of leadership and following. And yet, what does order of
mastery, order of power, mean?—The will of one gets implemented in the
will of others, who thereby become the ruled. But this tells us nothing about
how this implementation happens. Nor is anything said about whether and
to what extent the will of those ruled coincides with the will of the ruler,
which surely is of fundamental importance for the relation of the one to the
other and above all for the relation as a whole. And yet already this notion
of ruler and ruled suggests the view that necessarily and from the start
takes the people as “the mastered” in the real sense of the word, thereby in
principle denying to the people a will of its own.
[84] Here we have a mastery that recognizes nothing higher than itself;
here mastery becomes sovereignty, where the supreme force is taken as the
essence and expression of the state. This condition, in which the state as
this supreme power pertains to only one or a few, explains the tendency
to assign this sovereignty to the other partner, the people, which then
necessarily leads to the other extreme. Only on the basis of the notion of
sovereignty as absolutism can we really understand and explain the essence
of the French Revolution as an opposing phenomenon.
Therefore we said that mastery is power in the sense of implementation
of the will. But this presumes a certain powerfulness and governing force
that first guarantee an implementation. Because mastery and sovereignty are
modes of Being of the people, the question of the origin and the foundation
of power can always be raised only on the basis of a particular way in which
the people has its Being in a state, and so the question is always already
politically defined. The will of the state implements itself in various definite
ways, for example, in administration. Through its various intermediaries,
this implementation of the will is admittedly attenuated and no longer fully
manifest to us as what it is, especially after we have gotten used to seeing the
state as one region among many, one reality among many, and in this way
we have lost a direct, living relation to the state.
But what is will?—We distinguish willing from wishing. Both are a
certain kind of striving. This tells us nothing yet, though; animals also
strive, if only by following a drive. By contrast to wish, will is the striving
that engages in action; wish lacks engagement. But will is more than
mere urge. Urge does indeed aim at something, but this “something”
is, in contrast to willful striving, not sharply delineated, not clearly seen
and recognized. Will aims at an individual thing, urge aims at a whole

58   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


complex of possibilities. We cannot declare absolutely that will aims at
the definite and important, and wish at the indefinite and unimportant.
Otherwise we could not say, on the one hand, “He does not know what
he wills to do,” while on the other hand, one could not wish a sick person
“health,” which surely is a particular good, and a high one. We will not
get into the question of well-wishing. What is characteristic for the
distinction [between willing and wishing] and thereby for the essence
of willing is therefore engaged striving on the one hand and, on the other,
disengaged longing.
Will aims at a goal. But the one who is striving willfully does not
recognize and grasp this goal blindly and on its own; rather—and this is
essential—it is seen in connection and in combination with the ways and
means. So the goal is always already grasped together with the possibility of
its actualization. Will grasps the situation, the whole fullness of time; in the
will works the kairos that demands resoluteness and action. This involves
deliberation, in which I run through the field in which particular laws are
at play.
[85] Now, what should I call this willful striving? Initiative?  —No,
initiative does not pertain to every willing, or, to put it better, to everyone
who wills. Initiative pertains only to someone who makes a beginning of
something. Energy?  —Not this either. Energy is a particular heightened
and sustained activity of the will. What, then? “Action.” An animal cannot
act, because it cannot will. This activity determined by the will is what
Aristotle named praxis, and he distinguished it according to the properties
of what the will strives for and according to the modes of its realization in
technical-practical and moral-practical activity.
The first mode has to do with the actualization of an object. For example,
“It is my will to build a house.” What I am willing here is an object that is
related to nature. The accomplishment and ordering of this actuality “house”
is essentially determined by nature; it happens through technology in the
widest sense. What is willed is a being that is based on particular natural
relations and laws. The architect must already accommodate himself to
certain factors in making his plan, and even more so in making it actual:
when he digs the foundation and comes across this or that unanticipated
obstacle, and then when in his handling of the building materials he is
entirely dependent on their laws and must also take this or that possibility
into consideration.
Things are different with the activity that is directed to the will of an
individual or a whole group in order to elicit this or that action or attitude
in them. Here we have a community of will. What the one who acts wills
is a willing Being among others. Kant calls this activity moral-practical.

SESSION 9 59
Moral, because it is related to human beings, who are free according to
their essence and therefore moral.
So much for a clarification of the concept of “will.” We should never
equate the will of an individual with the will of a people. Both display
entirely specific structural relations. The will of a people is not free in
the sense of the freedom of the individual will, and this fact is of great
importance for the implementation of the will. The will of the people is
a complicated structure that is hard to grasp. The leader has to deal with
this structure, not with free individuals. The will of the people is not the
sum of individual wills but rather a whole that has its own, originary
characteristics.
The question of the consciousness of the will of the community is a
problem in all democracies, a question that can really become fruitful
only when the will of the leader and the will of the people are recognized
in their essence. Our task today is to direct the fundamental attitude of our
communal Being toward this actuality of people and leader in which both
as a single actuality are not to be separated. Only when this fundamental
schema is achieved by way of essential transformation is a true ­leader-
education possible.
[86]

60   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


SESSION 10 1
Report on the last session
of the seminar of Winter
Semester 1933–34, on
February 23, 1934

Following up on the previous session of the seminar, we again spoke about


the fact that a people always outlasts its form of state. But this point is
not to be understood to mean that a people can alter its current form of
state arbitrarily; the change of a state and the form of a state in general are
connected to a people’s disposition and will, either to decline or to build
itself up.
The character of the state as an order of rule led us to explain the
relation between rulers and ruled. First we had to reject the simple
equation of the ruled and the oppressed. Ruling involves power, which
creates a rank order through the implementation of the ruler’s will,
inasmuch as he is actually powerful—that is, he shows paths and goals
to the ruled. Under this true rule, there are ruled people who are not
oppressed.
We then added to the argument over the essence of the will. In contrast
to wish, it was said, will characterizes engagement on behalf of a particular
goal. It became clear that this definition was insufficient, since there can
be engagement in some arbitrary goal, as in the case of adventurers. There
is a further form of behavior in which one “knows” the goal without
being engaged at all—but true knowledge this cannot be. True knowledge
involves both an understanding of the goal and engagement—that is, a leap
into the accomplishment of the goal—along with persistence, which makes
the engaged person develop.
But now—and with this question, we reached back to where we
got started in our question about the will—what is going on when one
implements one’s own powerful will that is directed at the whole?
Before we actually asked the question, we got to talking about the form
of implementation. One can distinguish two forms or ways: first persuasion,
and then coercion.
Persuasion can happen (1) through speech, and (2) through action.
For the Greeks, speech was a preeminent means to political power. Their
political instinct recognized the persuasive force of speech in an exemplary
manner; we know this unforgettably from Thucydides. It is an unconscious
recognition of the power of speech that in our own day, the speeches of
the Führer made an impression that came to be expressed by the term “the
drummer.”2
However, the effective will is most urgently “persuasive” in acts. The
great effective actor is at the same time the “powerful” one, the “ruler,”
whose Dasein and will becomes determinative—through “persuasion,” that
is, when one knows and recognizes the soaring will of the leader.
[87] But the will can also be implemented by coercion, where commands
are a form of carrying out the will. This form is not creative. Still, a command
can trigger conviction, as in 1914.
This point led us to ask whether coercion can generate a will, and
what the attitude of the “coerced” is in an action that is performed under
coercion. It became apparent that mere compliance is inadequate, and
this helped us reach a more precise definition of the unwillingness that
comes into play here: unwillingness is a particular form of willing (not
a not-willing, but itself a kind of willing). This willing-in-unwillingness
is the privative relation here, a distinctive negative relation. This was
clarified by contrasting the examples of a blind man and the supposed
idea of a blind stone: while a blind man lacks something that belongs to
being human, seeing does not belong to the stone as stone, so we cannot
speak privatively of a blind stone, as if it lacked some part of its particular
Being as a stone.
The true implementation of the will is not based on coercion, but on
awakening the same will in another, that is, the same goal and engagement
or accomplishment. The implementation of the will, in this sense,
transforms people in proportion to the greatness of the effective will. This
implementation is not a matter of a momentary yes-saying, but a decision
of the individual. The crucial factor here cannot be the sum, as precise
as it may be, but only the qualitative value of the individual decision,
the degree of comprehension and penetration. It is in this sense that we
must understand the current demands for “political education”: not a

62   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


memorization of sentences and opinions and forms, but the creation of a
new fundamental attitude of the will.
The will of the leader first transforms the others into a following, and
from the following arises a community. Their sacrifice and service comes
from this living connection, not from mere obedience and the force of
institutions.
A particular and distinctive form of the implementation of the will is
education (and school education, as the education of knowledge, is part of
this): at bottom it is nothing but the implementation of the will of the leader
and the will of the state, that is, of the people. We merely alluded in this
connection to other forms of implementation of the will of the state, such
as governmental administration and the justice system.
Finally, we emphasized the characteristic form of our current state
formation as a coming-to-be of the people, and with this we explained one
of the essential concepts of the modern theory and formation of the state: the
concept of sovereignty. Johannes Bodinus3 first recognized and formulated
this concept with great precision in his Republica (1576), defining it as
summa in cives ac subditos legibusque soluta potestas [supreme and absolute
power over the citizens and over those subject to the laws]. For Bodinus,
this power stands [88] only under the higher bond to God. Today one often
says “people” where formerly one said God, and defines this ultimate bond
accordingly. The higher bond creates the highest freedom, whereas lack of
commitment is negative freedom. One has sometimes understood political
freedom in this latter sense, and thus misunderstood it—a phenomenon
that is supposed to have led to the sovereignty of the people, just as the
omnipotentia Dei was secularized into the sovereignty of the state.
This train of thought led us to discuss three great disintegrations that have
occurred many times since the dissolution of the universal commitments
and obligations of the Middle Ages:

1 The collapse of dogmatic-ecclesiastical faith, of the concept of


creation, occurred in the wake of the first dissolution of a great
bond: man became a self-legislating being that wills to, and must,
found his own Being himself. This is the source of Descartes’ search
for a fundamentum absolutum, which he found in the conviction
ego cogito, ergo sum. The Being of man is based on reason, that is,
mathematical ratio, which is elevated to the decisive power of the
world.
2 The second disintegration consists in the disintegration of the
community—the fact that the individual in himself is the final
court of appeal.

SESSION 10 63
3 Descartes carries out the sharp separation between mind and
body.

The concept of sovereignty developed in the context of this movement.


Of the three domains that we touched upon in the course of our
explanations and questions—nature, history, and state—the state is the
narrowest, but it is the most actual actuality that must give all Being new
meaning, in a new and original sense. The highest actualization of human
Being happens in the state.
The Führer state, as we have it, means the completion of the historical
development: the actualization of the people in the leader. The Prussian
state, as it was completed with the cultivation of the Prussian nobility, is
the precursor of today’s state. This relation testifies to the elective affinity
between Prussianism and the Führer. From this tradition stems the saying
of the great royal elector, spoken in the spirit of Luther—and we too stand in
this tradition, if we acknowledge its meaning: Sic gesturus sum principatum,
ut rem populi esse sciam, non meam privatam.4 [I will exercise leadership
knowing that it is an affair of the people, not my private matter.]

64   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


PART TWO

INTERPRETIVE
ESSAYS
1  V OLK AND FÜHRER
Investigations of Heidegger’s
Seminar On the Essence and
Concept of Nature, History,
and State
Marion Heinz

Heidegger’s seminars On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and


State from Winter Semester 1933–4 and Hegel on the State from Winter
Semester 1934–5 have provided the fuel for the debate that Emmanuel
Faye has rekindled on the question of the nature and extent of the infection
of Heidegger’s thinking by National Socialism. As one can already gather
from the title of Faye’s book—Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism
into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–351—the
author wants to fortify the widespread (though very controversial) thesis
that it was not only in 1933 that “Heidegger devoted himself to putting
philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing the very bases
of Nazism and Hitlerism.”2 There are good reasons why Faye places the
seminars of 1933–4 and 1934–5 in the center of his investigations: these
are texts—or more precisely, student transcripts of seminar sessions
from the period of Heidegger’s rectorate, with corrections by his own
hand—which were accessible to only a few Heidegger scholars until
1995 and that were published only recently.3 Thus an analysis of these
texts can be brought to bear in a project of unmasking the true form of
Heideggerian thought, a project that might even manage to persuade the
not inconsiderable number of apologists for Heidegger. For the content of
these seminars provides nearly seamless support for Faye’s central thesis
that the substance of Heidegger’s philosophy consists in justifying and
politically and propagandistically validating the Führer state, the ideology
of blood and soil, and other core elements of the Nazi worldview.4
For Faye, the seminar of 1933–4 ranks as “the main text: the one in
which we see the total identification of Heidegger’s teaching with the
principle of Hitlerism itself.”5 While Faye claims these transcripts as the
decisive evidence for the propagandistic use of thought, we should keep
in mind that the texts were not published by Heidegger himself. This does
not mean that the content of the transcripts does not in a general way
reflect what transpired in these seminars—after all, they were corrected by
Heidegger and thus, in a certain sense, authorized. Nonetheless, they do
not have the same status as published texts as regards the trustworthiness of
their wording and the exact patterns of argumentation. For instance, these
transcripts are not free of contradictions and self-corrections of greater
or lesser significance. But this also means that they constitute important
documentation of Heidegger’s academic instruction during his rectorate and
should be valued as such. So even if there are good reasons not to approach
these pieces of evidence by means of classic textual analysis, one should
at least review and interpret the course of the seminars and their essential
contents, in order to then, in a second phase, consider the relevance of these
new discoveries for the assessment of Heidegger’s thinking as regards his
support for National Socialism. In what follows I will concentrate on the
Winter Semester 1933–4 seminar On the Essence and Concept of Nature,
History, and State.
As traditional as the title of the seminar may seem at first, the
protocol for the first session already makes it clear that Heidegger’s
discussions are devoted completely to his own philosophical approach.
Here nature, history, and the state are understood as the essential
domains “in which our Dasein plays itself out and maintains itself ” (17).
Their order in the title of the seminar corresponds to their objective
order, in which nature is the inclusive domain in which history has
its place, and the state in turn belongs within history—so that we are
dealing with successively narrower domains of Dasein. This order in
which one domain is included in another, or belongs within another, is
not a logical and conceptual order, even if the title speaks explicitly of
“essence and concept.” As domains of existence, their characteristics are
not to be developed from epistemological points of view. Instead, they
must be conceived in their essence on the basis of the factual positions
and attitudes of Dasein toward them (cf. Session 1). What is at stake,
then, is a phenomenological investigation that must ascertain what is
given and how it is given. In other words, the essence is nothing other
than the thing in the How of its original givenness; here, since we are
beginning with Dasein, it is clear in advance that the primary access to
68   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE
the essence of a thing is not made possible by the logical functions of
the concept or judgment, or by cognitions determined by these logical
forms. The protocols are full of indications by the “seminar leader” that
we must avoid theoretical and epistemological prejudices. Nevertheless,
Heidegger uses the term “concept.” But the “concept” named in the title
of the seminar is never defined here in its general meaning (as, say,
existential concepts are defined as a type in Being and Time). No general
phenomenological concept of the concept is developed, but kinds of the
concept are introduced: with regard to all three domains, a formal and a
material concept are to be distinguished. By formal concept, Heidegger
understands the “way of Being” of something, and by material concept,
the totality of what belongs to a certain domain in accordance with this
formal concept. Heidegger gives an ontological intepretation to the
conceptual relation between intension and extension, in such a way that
the formal concept of a thing means the way of Being that determines
the thing, a way of Being that is to be exhibited in its own sense and
distinguished from others; this way of Being permits us to understand
beings as having a certain Being (Session 2). The sum total of the beings
that are determined by a particular way of Being is what Heidegger wants
to understand in this seminar as a domain or realm. This ontological
interpretation of the concept of concept goes hand in hand with a
depreciation of logic as the basis of knowledge and an appreciation of
language. For according to Heidegger, language is responsible for the
connection between way of Being and domain, that is, the formal and
material concepts. Here the ontic-ontological function of articulative
discourse in Being and Time, which is manifested in the hermeneutic
“as,” returns in a new form.
Nature cannot be understood adequately in terms of the meaning of
the Latin word natura (being born), a meaning that has been sedimented
in the German Natur and English nature. Instead, we have to go back to
the inception of the Western conception of nature, which is manifest in the
Greek word physis. The Greek understanding of nature does not yet treat
nature as a special domain separate from art; nature, understood formally
as a special kind of movement—a “coming-forth-from-itself,” a “being-
moved-by-itself,” or a “growth” in the broadest sense—is seen materially
in Greek thought as the whole of beings, included in this “conceptual
extension” (24). Accordingly, beings as what grows and emerges have the
sense of “Being-present,” “Being-in-the-light-of-day”; as such, they are
opposed to what is concealed. “Thus, for the Greeks, growth, Being, and
Being-unconcealed are bound together in a unity” (27).
History is understood analogously to nature, with regard to its material
and formal concept. Materially, history is the entire domain of past, present,
VOLK AND FÜHRER 69
and future happening. Formally, Heidegger defines history as happening, in
order to make a transition to the theme of temporality as the phenomenon
that comes to expression in the essence of history (25–6). Here too, theory
interferes with our access to the phenomena. The Newtonian and Kantian
theories of time, which grew on the soil of modern philosophy, must be
irrelevant to defining time; instead, we must determine the essence of time
on the basis of our relation to time. Unlike Being and Time, the seminar
begins with the now-time that is accessible in our use of clocks in order to
display the original phenomenon of time—temporality as the fundamental
constitution of human beings, which in turn is the condition for the everyday
experience of time (cf. Session 4). This authentic time is what is decisive for
the understanding of history: “we are talking about history as our past, as
what was the fate of our ancestors and thus is our own” (37). In accordance
with Being and Time, Heidegger explains the priority of the future in
authentic temporality, but draws a conclusion that emphasizes the past: “We
persist from the past into the future, and only in this way do we persist in
the present” (42). It is decisive for all of Heidegger’s further remarks that
this definition of happening is itself indebted to human historical self-
understanding—that is, it is “spoken from our own historical Dasein in
this moment” and, like all propositions and truths about human beings,
“which always have to be attained in one’s own decision,” it is “subject to
a certain intelligibility” (37).
These preliminary considerations on the status of the claim to truth
of philosophical statements, such as statements on the concept of history,
prepare for the explication of the state as the third and narrowest domain
of existence. Methodologically, the preliminary considerations serve to
legitimate the procedure that Heidegger observed in what follows—namely,
to derive the truth about the essence of people and state from historical
considerations. For Heidegger, this is justified because knowledge of the
state arises from historically motivated decisions (cf. Session 5). As we
will see in detail below, Heidegger’s appeals to historical circumstances
are fundamental elements of what he conceives as political education.
Heidegger categorically rejects the attempts to found the state rationally
as a structure of sovereignty by means of the figure of the social contract,
which are definitive for modern theories of the state: for Heidegger, the
state is not to be understood as an arrangement created by human beings
for a particular end (cf. Sessions 5 and 8). Applying the distinction between
the formal and material concept to the conception of the state, Heidegger
defines the state, as regards its material concept, as Volk: “the people is the
being that is in the manner of a state” (38). Thus the state can be approached
formally as “the way of Being of a people” (43).

70   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


Nevertheless, it is apparent that Heidegger’s method of defining the state
departs significantly from his definition of the other domains of existence:
because with the disclosure of authentic temporality and historicity we have
reached the foundation of the historical truth that is definitive here, the
state cannot be treated using the procedure that has been employed so far to
define the essence of a domain—namely, using the formal concept to yield
the material concept. The phenomenon under consideration demands the
opposite procedure, that is, by reflecting historically on one’s own present,
one should bring the definition of the essence of the state into the decisive
situation of the moment. In other words, if the concept of the state is
approached as a human way of Being, then it is the historically existing
human being who puts his own historical truth up for decision with the
formal definition of the state. Because the domain of the state is materially
the people, and because human beings who have been unified into a
people must define themselves on the basis of their particular historical
truth, the essence of the state must be derived from its material concept,
that is, from historically existing human beings; in contrast, a theory of
the state cannot be used to define the entity that has this way of Being.
Accordingly, Heidegger embarks on a historical reflection on how the
Renaissance and its guiding idea of great men could eventuate in a decline
of the political, so that politics could end up as one domain of the will to
individual development, alongside other domains such as science and art.
The dynamic of specialization of activities and dissociation of the domains
of life, set in motion by the will to individual achievement, culminates
in the collapse of “our state” that we can ascertain today (42). Heidegger
interprets the Renaissance as the beginning of a distortion that extends to
the present: the individual human being now becomes the end of Being, and
this defines the meaning of all the domains of human life. In Heidegger’s
perspective, the liberation of the individual that occurred in the Renaissance
corresponds to the liberal concept of the state, which conceives of the state
as a means to the end of “the development of the personality in the liberal
sense” (52). Like Carl Schmitt, Heidegger sees liberalism as the cause of the
decline of the state (although his understanding of liberalism differs from
Schmitt’s). The liberal picture of the world and humanity, and the inherent
dangers of this picture, must be opposed by philosophy today inasmuch as
philosophy seeks to win back the proper rank of politics, understood as the
“practical and theoretical occupation . . . having to do with the state” (41).
Politics must be enabled to take its place as “the fundamental characteristic
of human beings who philosophize within history, and as the Being in
which the state fully develops, so that the state can truly be called the way
of Being of a people” (42–3).

VOLK AND FÜHRER 71


This requires us to take up the Aristotelian doctrine of the human being
as zōon politikon. With this return to Aristotle, Heidegger initially rejects a
purely biologistic foundation of people and state through the theory of race,
yet at the same time he presents his own attempt to found the antidemocratic
Führer state in terms of existential ontology as the legitimate continuation
of the Greek inception. Heidegger interprets the Aristotelian definition of
the human being as the political animal as meaning that human beings have
the possibility and necessity of forming and completing their individual
and communal Being in a community (Session 6). He thus lays out a
path to authorizing his own position: for Heidegger, grounding the Being
of the state in human Being means founding it in a “historically fateful
decision” (45). This appeal to Aristotle, which is decisive for everything that
follows, is hardly as innocuous as it may seem at first. Aristotle’s definition
of the human being as a political animal is undergirded by a conception of
the human being as a rational, speaking animal whose telos, eudaimonia, is
to be realized in the common deliberative praxis of free and equal citizens;
but this conception plays no role in Heidegger’s thought. He simply adopts
the formal notion of the teleological orientation of human beings to life
in a community, but founds it on his own concept of temporal Dasein.6
This philosophical amalgam interprets the essence of the political in a
completely new way, which is incompatible with Aristotle, as “historically
fateful decision”; furthermore, the state is now newly defined as the human
way of Being that springs from this decision, a way of Being that is to be
founded and formed by the historical essence of humanity. Heidegger also
introduces the concept of the Volk on this basis: the people is “something
other than the mere sum of the citizens of the state. We mean something
even more strongly binding than race and a community of the same stock:
namely, the nation, and that means a kind of Being that has grown under
a common fate and taken distinctive shape within a single state” (43). So
what is constitutive for the people is not its natural Being, nor is it a political
community that emerges from a social contract among the citizens.
Instead, “the Being of the state is anchored in the political Being of the
human beings who, as a people, support this state—who decide for it” (45).
Accordingly, people and state are based on the historical Being of humanity,
whose fundamental possibility and distinctive way of Being is the political.
With this definition of the human being as a political animal, the
fundamental traits of existence in Being and Time, as well as the relation
between individual existence and people in that text, are fundamentally
transformed.
For the existential ontology of Being and Time, the happening of
Dasein is “defined as destiny. With this we designate the happening of the

72   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


community, of the people” (Sein und Zeit, 384). These statements from
§74  of Being  and Time, which remain unclarified in their ontological
conditions of possibility, namely their temporal sense, but which have been
repeatedly identified as the point of departure for Heidegger’s adoption
of National Socialism, are taken up and transformed in this 1933–4
seminar. In Being and Time, the happening of the people is grounded in
the happening of the particular, individual Dasein, which is essentially a
happening-with as a consequence of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, which
is determined as a Being-with; but in this seminar, Heidegger implements
the political as a central ontological determination of human beings. The
conception of the essential relatedness of the particular existing individual
to beings that lack Dasein’s type of Being and to beings as Being-with—in
such a way that the entirety of these meanings of beings disclosed by one’s
own individual Dasein is the world—is now narrowed down to care for
Being within the community of the Volk and for this community itself.
We could sharpen this point by saying that while in Being and Time the
measure of existing consists solely in whether the particular Dasein
grasps itself in its “essence” as a finite domain of projection, in order as
such to take decisions on particular matters, Dasein is now conceived as
directed teleologically in advance to a particular possibility: existing in
the political community. The way in which this highest end is realized
now decides how Dasein is. The state as telos of Dasein’s Being now
becomes the authentic founder of the meaning of Being: the state is “the
most actual actuality that must give all Being new meaning, in a new and
original sense. The highest actualization of human Being happens in the
state” (64).
This also means a shift in the temporal foundations of existing: who
Dasein is, is not based on the way in which temporality temporalizes, but
instead, a historical reflection on the situation of the people leads to a sort
of appeal to the particular Dasein; in response, the individual Dasein can
either show that it is fit for the appeal, or fail. Otherwise than in Being and
Time, philosophy no longer has the role of calling the particular Dasein
to authentic, finite existing by means of existential projections; the task of
philosophy is now to interpret the historical moment and to bring Dasein
before its historical decision as a political being.
The formation of the political as a fundamental possibility of Dasein
cannot, then, simply be left to the existentiell resolve of the particular
Dasein. Instead, it needs “political education, that is, what leads us
into our own political Being” (45), or in other words, “the creation of
a new fundamental attitude of the will” (63). The task of philosophy
is to prepare a  knowledge of the essence of the state and people that is

VOLK AND FÜHRER 73


intrinsically oriented to praxis, or as Heidegger says, to the “leap into
the accomplishment of the goal” (61). This knowledge—which is also
communicated concretely in the situation of this seminar—can “now”
address itself only to individuals: “Every individual must now reflect
in order to arrive at knowledge of the people and state and his own
responsibility” (46). It is not accidental that Heidegger presents this
imperative, as well as the essential contents of this knowledge, as the result
of reflections on the present political situation as the moment in which
a Third Reich is being founded. In a new historical reflection that now
concentrates on the fate of the Reich, Heidegger considers the continuities
and ruptures between the first and second German Empires and tries to
define the present situation as marked by the collapse of the Second Reich,
a collapse partly due to Bismarck.7 In accordance with the insight into
the essential historicity of truth, it is in such a historical consideration
of the fate of the German Reich that the fundamental insights into the
construction and structure of the state are to be gained—insights that
are supposed to be definitive for philosophical education in the present,
which is understood as a moment of decision. As befits the historicity of
the truth of the knowledge that Heidegger is seeking here, after critically
evaluating the subjectivism that is set free in the Renaissance, he reflects
historically on the concrete situation of human beings existing here and
now; the function of this reflection is to determine the contents and the
addressees of philosophical education, in order to prepare the historical
moment of decision for the new Third Reich.
We can sum up Heidegger’s philosophical reflections on the state in the
following sketch:
Unlike in Plato’s Republic, the educators, the philosophers, should
not also be the rulers of the state. “For the origin of all state action and
leadership does not lie in knowledge; it lies in Being. Every leader is a
leader; he must be a leader in accordance with the marked form of his
Being; and he understands, considers, and brings about what people and
state are, in the living development of his own essence” (45). “A leader
does not need to be educated politically—but a band of guardians in the
people does, a band that helps to bear responsibility for the state. For every
state and all knowledge about the state grows within a political tradition.
Where this nourishing, securing soil is lacking, even the best idea for a
state cannot take root, grow from the sustaining womb of the people, and
develop” (45). So according to Heidegger, the state is constituted in such a
way that it is led by a Führer, a leader qualified by his own Being, who must
rely on a political nobility as the guardians of the political tradition. But
because the Second Reich under Bismarck, unlike the First Reich under

74   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


Otto the Great and Prussia under Frederick the Great, “overlooked” the
need to root the state in a political nobility, this tradition was cut off with
the collapse of the Second Reich, a collapse that was due in no small part
to this neglect. And this break is the reason why “now” every individual is
challenged to develop knowledge about the state and take responsibility for
the state. “The state depends on our alertness, our readiness, and our life.
The manner of our Being marks the Being of our state” (46). So according
to Heidegger, philosophy must reflect historically on the “fate” of the
German Reich and thus disclose its own present as a historical moment
in which philosophy can carry out this “development and transformation
of thinking about the state”; this development will put individuals in a
position to learn “that their individual life decides the fate of the people
and state—either supports it or rejects it” (49). Accordingly, philosophy
itself must ground itself historically on a “reflection” on the fate of the
German Reich, for its task of developing thought about the state is
determined by the historical moment (Session 7). And the philosophy
that thus grasps itself in its own momentaneity prepares the ground for
individuals to be in the moment, in the sense that they will decide the
Being of the people.
Even the temporal ontology of Dasein in Being and Time did not
understand itself as having the task of ascertaining facts about Dasein,
but of bringing Dasein before the truth of its existing so that it might
decide on its own whether it corresponded as an entity to this way of
Being (Sein und Zeit, 315). Now this evocative understanding of truth
is decisively transformed: on the basis of the temporal conception of
Dasein,  Heidegger develops a sort of meta-reflection on political history
whose intention it is to bring Dasein, understood as a political being, into
the situation of deciding for a particular form of community-building. The
temporal determination of Dasein is saddled with these considerations
on political history as a second level of temporal interpretation. Now
philosophy is put into the position of identifying particular, concrete
possibilities of existing—which according to Being and Time can arise
only from the individual Dasein that grasps itself within the limits
of its Being; these possibilities are to be identified as decisive for a
particular historical-political human situation and elevated to the rank
of the tribunal that should decide on the momentaneity of existing. The
existential characteristics of individual Dasein lose their formal character
and are instituted as concretely determined, philosophically authorized
standards for the political situation of Heidegger’s time when he demands
that the present be determined on the basis of the future, so that by
taking over the fate of the German Reich, one should grasp the founding

VOLK AND FÜHRER 75


of  a  Third Reich that overcomes the collapse of the Second Reich but
preserves its essence.
These preliminary clarifications of the addressees and contents of
political education are carried forward with an explicit explanation of the
relation between people and state. This relation is defined more precisely
as a reciprocal one: the people forms and characterizes [prägt] itself in the
state, and the state gives the people its form and character (Session 5). If it
is furthermore the case that the people is the entity that relates to its state as
to its own Being (Session 7), we must explicate the relation between people
and state further by way of the relation between entity and Being. Being
is said in many ways, and what is distinctive of human Being consists, as
Heidegger says here, in that the human being has consciouness of his own
Being and the Being of other beings; consequently, he can be concerned
with his own Being (cf. Session 7). But with this, human beings—unlike
animals—are also in danger of becoming “unconscious, derelict, or
indifferent” in relation to their own Being, and thus losing “their most
proper worth” (48). Through their knowing and caring relation to Being,
human beings are confronted with the Nothing in a twofold way: they can
themselves become null through lack of consciousness, and they have to
“expose themselves to the danger of the Nothing, of nihilism, in order to
grasp the meaning of their Being by overcoming nihilism” (47). Obviously
two different thoughts are linked here.
On the one hand, Heidegger refers to the initially trivial state of
affairs that the human being, as Dasein, understands Being—and thus
is confronted with the Nothing inasmuch as Being is a nonentity, and so
in a certain sense a Nothing. Only on the basis of the analysis of anxiety
does the condition that we are held out into the Nothing—a condition
that is intrinsic to the understanding of Being—gain a voice: the relations
to beings that we rely on become null so that we can experience the
uncanniness of the world as world. “Within the self-evident there suddenly
opens an abyss, unsurveyable and dangerous, but unavoidable for whoever
truly questions” (47). The meaninglessness of beings at the same time
opens up the possibility and necessity of Dasein for it to project itself in
its own Being. This bold move [Zumutung] is decisive for understanding
Heidegger’s decisionism: without an orientation to rational principles,
Dasein is resolved upon itself as an entity that understands Being and
decides upon particular, concrete possibilities of existence. The choice of
these possibilities is based solely on the undisguised realization [Vollzug]
of Dasein’s finite, temporal existing.
On the other hand, nihilism here is also probably to be understood in
Nietzsche’s sense, as a historical movement that brings to light the nullity

76   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


of all values. It is not accidental, then, that there are echoes of the last man,
from the prologue to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, when Heidegger speaks of a
lack of consciousness that makes man himself null. Only if man is defined
as Dasein—as Heidegger will openly say—can this half-hearted nihilism be
countered, for Dasein cannot have recourse to values or rational principles.
In its understanding of Being, Dasein exposes itself to nihilism and at
the same time overcomes it by taking itself over in its own nullity. Thus,
the connection between politics and philosophy that has already been
articulated in the definition of the political essence of the human being is
now invoked again. Only the philosophically existing human being who
faces the abyss of the understanding of Being can escape the danger of
his own nullity by grasping the meaning of Being in the overcoming of
nihilism.
To further clarify the relation between people and state, Heidegger
repeatedly draws an analogy to the relation between an individual and
his own Being. Just as the individual has a caring, knowing relation to
his Being, “the people as a being has a knowing fundamental relation
to its state”; just as the individual “loves his Dasein in the world, the
people wills the state as its way to be as a people” (48). The existential-
ontological grounding of the state by way of this analogy culminates in the
interpretation of constitution and law as the actualization of “our decision
for the state,” as “factical attestations of what we take to be our historical
task as a people, the task that we are trying to live out” (48–9). The
“constitution of the state is . . . an essential expression of what the people
takes to be the meaning of its own Being (48). It is superfluous to say that
every form of a rational grounding of the state, or a rational system of law,
is eliminated here: Without being able to indicate more precisely what
we are to understand by the will of the people (cf. Session 9), Heidegger
surrenders state and law to a collective decisionism that can hardly be
concealed by the appeal to historical roots. The desperate pathos of
this decisionism as the founding of meaning in the confrontation with
nihilism is nothing but embarrassing.
The modern idea of the state fundamentally conceives of it as an order
of rule grounded contractually by free and equal citizens; for Rousseau
and Kant this is an order of freedom, so that the state must preserve the
freedom and equality of those who submit to the social contract. Heidegger
abandons this idea in favor of the medieval idea of a state order grounded in
the relations of rule and service among human beings. “Like the medieval
order of life, the order of the state today is sustained by the free, pure will to
following and leadership, that is, to struggle and loyalty” (49). According to
Heidegger, rule (Herrschaft) has nothing to do with “power, enslavement,

VOLK AND FÜHRER 77


oppression, or compulsion”; here rule is defined positively as subordination
to a “common task”:

Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together to one
fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise. Then spiritual
superiority and freedom develop as a deep dedication of all forces to
the people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engagement,
endurance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and superiority of the
leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in this
way with originality and passion to the task. And if the people feels this
dedication, it will let itself be led into struggle, and it will love struggle
and will it. It will develop and persist in its forces, be faithful and sacrifice
itself. In every new moment, the leader and the people will join more
closely in order to bring about the essence of their state, that is, their
Being; growing with each other, they will set their meaningful historical
Being and will against the two threatening powers of death and the
devil—that is, ruination and decline from their own essence. [49]

This harmonizing interpretation of the relation between the people and


the individual to the state, and of the leader to the people, depends on
affirming a common fate and serves all the clichés of heroic nihilism.
The harmony he depicts does not restrain Heidegger at all from taking
the further step, when he clarifies the nature of ruling, to answer the
question of power wholeheartedly in favor of the leader. “Mastery is power
in the sense of implementation of the will” (58). What distinguishes
willing from wishing is that will always grasps the end with a view
to the means and ways of its realization. “Will grasps the situation,
the whole fullness of time; in the will works the kairos that demands
resoluteness and action”  (59). the will of the Führer is directed to the
will of the Volk, “in order to elicit this or that action or attitude” in this
community of wills (59). Heidegger has no qualms about misusing Kant
to characterize this action of the leader as moral-practical action, rather
than instrumental action, because of its relation to human beings as
free and moral; he goes on to describe those who are subject to this will
euphemistically as the ruled, but will not qualify them as oppressed (61).
The philosopher Martin Heidegger teaches, in February 1934, that it
is time to establish such an order of rule, that “our task today is to direct
the fundamental attitude of our communal Being toward this actuality
of people and leader” (60). His account of the state in general, in terms
of Being and beings, is finally supplemented by a view “from below, in a
certain sense, from the people and the state, from us ourselves” (52).

78   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


From this perspective, the spatiality of the people is understood as a
leading principle of individuation. Reacting critically to Hans Grimm’s
slogan “people without space,” Heidegger explicates his own notions of
“people in space”:

Relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming


marked by space, belong together with the essence and the kind of Being
of a people. So it is not right to see the sole ideal for a people in rootedness
in the soil, in attachment, in settledness, which find their cultivation and
realization in farming and which give the people a special endurance
in its propagation, in its growth, in its health. It is no less necessary to
rule over the soil and space, to work outwards into the wider expanse,
to interact with the outside world. The concrete way in which a people
effectively works in space and forms space necessarily includes both:
rootedness in the soil and interaction. [55]

Heidegger defines the relation between the two aspects of a people’s


relation  to space by explaining that rootedness as the expression of the
homeland determined by birth can become the way of Being of a people
only if it is supplemented by working out into the expanse, by interaction.
Thus he distinguishes between the space of a people and the space of its
state. “In summary, then, we can say that the space of a people, the soil of
a people, reaches as far as members of this people have found a homeland
and have become rooted in the soil; and that the space of the state, the
territory, finds its borders by interacting, by working out into the wider
expanse.” (56). The political implications of these existential-ontological
interpretations of “people in space” become manifest, first, as regards so-
called nomads, and secondly, as regards Germans living outside the borders
of the Reich. History teaches us about nomads in general that they “have not
only been made nomadic by the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but
they have also often left wastelands behind them where they found fruitful
and cultivated land” (55). This means, then, that the specific living-space of
a people marks it with a sort of essence that it also displays in quite different
spaces. This sets up a criterion of exclusion in accordance with which
certain peoples do not fit into, or belong to, certain living-spaces. Thus
Heidegger not only adopts the Nazi ideology of blood and soil (even if it is
transformed in terms of existential ontology), he also links it ideologically
to an overt antisemitism when he says that “the nature of our German
space . . . will perhaps never be revealed at all” to Semitic nomads (56). In
plain language, the Jews as nomads are a danger to the German people in
that they tend to devastate the living-space of this people. And they stand

VOLK AND FÜHRER 79


outside the possibility of experiencing the kind of revelation of nature that
belongs to this space, for “this original participation in the knowledge of
the people cannot be taught” (56); thus they are essentially marked as non-
Germans. In the place of biologistic theories of the worthlessness of the
Jewish people, Heidegger affirms a racism founded on existential ontology
with his theory of the Jews as aliens and enemies of the life of the German
people.
By way of the second aspect of a people’s relation to space, working
into the expanse, Heidegger tries to explain why the ethnic Germans who
live outside German territory are suffering from a sort of essential lack:
they do have a German homeland, but because they do not belong to the
German state, the Reich, they are deprived of “their authentic way of Being”
(55). Every participant in the seminar can easily infer in what way such an
essential lack should be remedied.
In this consideration of people and state “from below,” the relation of the
three domains of nature, history, and state presents itself as follows: “nature
works on the human being, roots him in the soil, only when nature belongs
as an environment, so to speak, to the people whose member that human
being is. The homeland becomes the way of Being of a people only when the
homeland becomes expansive, when it interacts with the outside—when it
becomes a state” (55).
This means that the natural influences on human beings become a way
of Being that determines them as historical beings only through the state. If
the Being of man as a political entity is fulfilled in the state, every domain
of Dasein is also teleologically oriented to the state; that is, as domains of
Dasein they must be defined in their sense on the basis of the state.
As the narrowest domain of human Dasein, the state is also the “most
actual actuality,” “the highest actualization of human Being” (64). In his
reflections based on the concrete spatiality of people and state, Heidegger
goes so far as to identify the state as the most actual actuality, in the sense of
the essential completion of the human being, with the really existing Führer
state of National Socialism: “Our task today is to direct the fundamental
attitude of our communal Being toward this actuality of people and leader
in which both as a single actuality are not to be separated” (60). But what is
the justification for this Hegelianizing notion of the unification of essence
and actuality in the recognition of the actual state as the essential fulfillment
of the German people? The definition of the state in general must evidently
be brought together with the concrete characterization if we are to bring
the justifying connections into view: the leader has the most powerful at
his disposal—a will that comprehends “the situation, the whole fullness of
time” (59); the “implementation of the will [means] awakening the same

80   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


will in another, that is, the same goal and engagement or accomplishment.
The implementation of the will, in this sense, transforms people in
proportion to the greatness of the effective will” (62). Thus, “The Führer
state, as we have it, means the completion of the historical development: the
actualization of the people in the leader” (64). The Volk, which has already
been constituted by its relation to space as homeland, is first formed into
a people in the highest and authentic sense, as a community of will, by
the Führer and his powerful will. If the state is not to be understood as
a contractually established arrangement for the securing of law, but as a
destined community, then the community of the state can be founded
only by the will of the leader. The leader’s will—bound to nothing, freed
of all values and rational principles, exposed to the pure Nothing—is what
creates the political community by transforming the will of the individual.
In resolute obedience to the leader, Dasein can complete itself both as a
being that understands Being and as a being that belongs to a community.
Heidegger’s Being-historical legitimation of the Hitler state thus depends
decisively on the thought that in the Being of the Führer the historical truth
of Being is grasped in such a way that by the transformation of individual
will a political community can arise in which “all Being” can receive a new
meaning (64). With the affirmation of the will of the leader, the individual
does not subordinate himself to an alien will, but finds the highest
actualization of his essence, insofar as his historical and political Being are
brought into convergence: Dasein brings itself into the historical truth of its
existence, so that from this truth there simultaneously springs the true form
of political community. Being political in this way, as historical existence,
and existing historically as a political being, means being involved in the
truth-happening of the creation of a new meaning of Being. And with this,
the true rank of politics as the “fundamental characteristic of human beings
who philosophize within history” (42) is restored.
Thus, the characterization of historicity as the fundamental constitution
of the Being of Dasein has proved to be the basis of Heidegger’s political
doctrines. This justifies the historicity of all truth, so that it becomes
imperative to prepare a moment in which the political future will be
decided, and to reveal by means of historical considerations which
tasks and particular contents are the issues that must be decided at this
moment. This philosophy of history does not just define the role and task
of philosophy in general as an authority that evokes historical decisions, it
also defines the particular task of philosophy in this historical situation—
philosophy must work against the decline of the political that is evident in
the present, as a result of individualization, specialization, and dissociation,
by winning back the rank of politics. At the end of his seminar Heidegger

VOLK AND FÜHRER 81


names three great “disintegrations” that have determined modernity: the
disintegration of Christian faith and the self-grounding of humanity in
reason; the disintegration of community and the elevation of the individual
as the final court of appeal; and finally, the separation of mind and body
(63–4). Heidegger sees the distinctive character of the historical situation
of his time—again, in a Hegelianizing perspective—in the fact that we
must supersede these modern oppositions. But this is to be achieved not
by reason, but on the basis of Dasein as defined by its understanding of
Being. The truth of existing that consists in grasping the meaning of Being
by overcoming nihilism is to be brought into effect as the principle of
constitution for all human relationships. Only in this way does Heidegger
think that any future can be secured for Western man, who exists on the
basis of philosophy (Session 8). In the National Socialist Führer state,
Heidegger recognizes the actuality that fulfills or can fulfill this demand, if
it can successfully be transformed into the essential (Session 9).
There is no doubt that this seminar proves that Heidegger used his
philosophy from Being and Time to legitimate National Socialism, the
Führer state, obedience, sacrifice, and struggle—as well as antisemitism and
the particular mission of the German people in the ideologically invoked
history of the West. He rejects law and democracy and declares that reason
and criticism are obsolete, by appealing to existence and its historicity. The
Third Reich, which he proclaims as the salvation from all the dangers of
modernity, is grounded both as a whole and in all its elements on existential
ontology and the history of Being: The Führer legitimates himself as such
through his Being; the Volk has an existentiell relation of care to its state and
its Führer; rule is a community of fate under the will of the Führer. All these
relations are carried by decisions whose end is established by analysis of the
factical—of history or the actual Führer state.
This seminar also validates the clear-sighted diagnosis of Heidegger’s
student Herbert Marcuse from 1934. Marcuse recognized existentialism as
the philosophical basis for the totalitarian concept of the state.8 Marcuse
relied on Carl Schmitt to demonstrate the intrinsic connection between the
totalitarian concept of the state and existentialism, but the text of this 1933–4
seminar now proves that Heidegger himself transferred his philosophy of
Being and Time into a political existentialism whose points of agreement
with Carl Schmitt would need to be investigated in a separate study.9
Marcuse sees Heidegger as a thinker who betrayed his own origins and
ended in existentiell opportunism, while Faye interprets Heideggerian
thought as the “deliberate introduction of the foundations of Nazism
and Hitlerism into philosophy and it teaching.”10 We must raise the
question of whether Marcuse’s interpretation of the doctrine of Being

82   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


and Time is too conciliatory. Marcuse blames Heidegger’s deviation on
a subjective error, and Marcuse himself initially took up Being and Time
as a promising attempt to develop a conception of the concrete subject.
In my own view, neither this occasionalist view nor Faye’s notion of a
seamless continuity between Being and Time and the political philosophy
and propaganda of the Nazi period is correct. Under the influence of
Nietzsche’s philosophy, which Heidegger confronted intensively starting
in 1929, the doctrines of Being and Time are put into the perspective
of the history of Being; in this perspective, they are built up into the
philosophical potential of overcoming nihilism, and only then do they
become serviceable for a justification of National Socialism.11 The
confrontation with the breaks and losses of modernity and with Nietzsche’s
radical diagnosis of nihilism forces Heidegger to stop emphasizing only
the meaning-potential of individual Dasein. Only the ambition to give
Being as a whole a new meaning, which develops from his intensive
engagement with Nietzsche beginning in 1929 and which cannot even
be formulated in terms of Being and Time, promises the possibility of
overcoming the epochal crisis. Against the disappearance of all greatness,
against the anxiety in the face of the collapse of philosophizing Western
man into unconsciousness, Heidegger deploys the doctrines of Being and
Time as a decisive reservoir of salvation.
Heidegger’s approach in terms of man understood as Dasein allows
him a twofold connection to Nietzsche. First, by establishing pre-
rational structures of understanding of Being as the human essence,
Heidegger satisfies Nietzsche’s critique of reason. Heidegger agrees with
Nietzsche that reason is in no position to get a grip on the epochal crisis
of meaning. Secondly, the understanding of Being as such is qualified in
such a way that it both exposes itself to nihilism and in itself offers the
possibility of overcoming nihilism. The understanding of man as Dasein
thus proves to be the only philosophical position that is up to the level
and radicality of Nietzsche’s thought and is to be developed on the basis
of a different conception of the overcoming of nihilism than the one
offered by Nietzsche—the self-affirmation of will in knowledge and the
greatest burden, the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same.12 If
the understanding of Being as such is thought as nihilistic yet at the same
time as a capacity that can overcome nihilism, everything depends on
directing human relations as a whole toward founding a new meaning of
Being. The historical crisis of meaning cannot be brought under control by
an appeal to the individual to exist authentically; for it requires a collective
to be directed toward a new meaning of Being—and this means, for
Heidegger, toward the leader as the highest potency of the understanding

VOLK AND FÜHRER 83


of Being and of the implementation of a new meaning of Being that
originates in his own Being. The Führer as the figure that links Nietzsche’s
overman and the resolute Dasein of Being and Time is a creator in a double
sense: he projects a new meaning of Being and also makes this meaning
dominant by transforming human will. A turning of need,13 in the sense
I have sketched, is thus possible only when philosophy becomes political
and politics is brought by philosophy into its true essence as the destinal
founding of Being. The presumption of a salto mortale that perverts the
“autonomy” of individual existence into following the Führer must be
understood as the ultima ratio of a thinking that believes it can counter the
abyss of world history only by implementing a new, supra-individual way
to establish meaning, which renounces rational principles. The complete
disempowerment of reason forces this philosophy to resort to the factical,
to elevate the actual charismatic leader himself as the “principle” that
promises the turning of need. Heidegger’s affirmation of the “Führer
principle” arises neither from some banal political opportunism nor
from mere decisionism, but from the philosophical conviction that only a
philosophy based on the concepts of temporality and historicity can offer
an adequate answer to the challenge of nihilism by setting free the kairos
in the shape of Adolf Hitler. The notion of demanding submission to the
Führer’s will and using philosophy for its legitimation is revealed as the
paradoxical figure of thought, which bears Christian features, of winning
oneself by giving oneself up—an auto-da-fé of philosophy in decline,
staged as an ultimate rescue and revolt. In an unparalleled perversion,
while displaying the pathos of extreme radicality, Heidegger makes his
thinking abet the fulfillment of the factical.

84   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


2 HEIDEGGER IN
PURGATORY
Peter E. Gordon

“History is always written from the sedentary point of view [. . .].


What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.”
gilles deleuze and félix guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

At this late date, it may seem there is little more that could be said
concerning l’affaire Heidegger. That Heidegger was not merely a political
naïf but an ideologically committed partisan of the Third Reich can no
longer count as scandalous news but should be obvious to anyone who
confronts the documentary evidence with open eyes. Nor can we take
comfort in drawing a clean line between his politics and his philosophy.
All too often in the early 1930s Heidegger mobilized the intrinsic terms of
his own philosophy (Dasein, Being, and so forth) to express his political
support for the regime. No less troubling, however, is that even in the
postwar era Heidegger never offered an unambiguous explanation for
either his actions or his readiness to justify his Nazi commitments with
philosophical appeals.1 Even sympathetic readers have felt troubled at the
possibility of a “positive implication” between Heidegger’s politics and his
philosophy.2
For many years, the response of critics to this situation could be
located on a spectrum, from totalizing condemnation to apologetic
containment. At one pole lie the critics who find the evidence so
damning they no longer feel Heidegger’s works merit inclusion in the
philosophical canon at all. At the other pole are readers who wish to
salvage whatever they can and thus cleave to a prophylactic distinction
between Heidegger’s philosophical ideas (in which they see enduring
value) and the ideological deployment of those ideas (which they are
free to condemn). For more than half a century scholars have staked out
a variety of political-interpretative stances between these two extremes,
their contributions ranging across all the possible genres: the stubborn
defense, the paradoxical deconstruction, the detective story, the manifesto,
the exposé. The irony of our current impasse is that the more we know
concerning the facts of the case the less we can hope that scholars will
ever come to an agreement as to what these facts mean. Those baby-
with-the-bathwater critics who already condemn Heidegger as a Nazi
ideologue tout court will surely welcome this book as further evidence
for the prosecution. Those who are still faithful devotees of Heidegger the
philosopher will persist in appealing to the distinction between thought
and history, even if this demands allegiance to a metaphysical dualism
the philosopher wished to dismantle.3 What remains unclear is whether
additional documentation could ever suffice to prompt those who have
written about this matter to modify their views. At issue, in other words,
is a question of interpretative schemes: not the fact that Heidegger was a
Nazi but the meaning we assign to this fact.
I will return to this question toward the end of my essay. As a
preliminary matter, however, it is important to recognize just how
difficult it is to sustain a strong distinction between thought and history
when we consider the transcripts and protocols of Heidegger’s seminars
from the early 1930s. The difficulty is chiefly due to what we might
call a mutual entwinement of philosophy and ideology. Any reader of
these seminars who possesses even the most rudimentary knowledge
of National Socialism cannot help but notice how the conversations
participate in the barbarous linguistico-metaphoric structure that
Victor Klemperer called the LTI, his own acronym for Lingua Tertii
Imperii, or the language of the Third Reich.4 The protocols of the winter
1933–4 seminar are especially distressing in this respect insofar as they
demonstrate a readiness to traverse the imaginary line that should have
separated genuine questions of philosophy from crude affirmations of
National Socialist doctrine. In the protocols of the seminar this line is
not only broken, it is utterly erased. Our task here is to understand the
nature of the transgression. The following essay is divided into three
sections. First, I offer a brief summary of some of the more salient facts
concerning Heidegger’s political activities during the period 1933–4;
second, I examine the seminar protocols themselves to determine the
strategies by which philosophy and the LTI become mutually entwined;

86   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


finally, I return to the more urgent question: Does this seminar reveal
anything essential about Heideggerian philosophy, or will the conflicts
of scholarly interpretation proceed as they did before?

Historical background
Heidegger offered his advanced seminar, “On the Essence and Concept of
Nature, History, and State” at the University of Freiburg during the winter
semester of 1933–4.5 It convened for the first time on November 3, 1933
and concluded for its tenth and final session on February 23, 1934. Before
turning to the contents of the seminar itself, we should recall that it was
during precisely this period that Heidegger’s political activity in support
of the Third Reich reached its zenith. He was elected Rector Magnificus at
Freiburg University on April 21 (assuming the actual post the next day)
and he officially joined the Nazi party on May 3. He delivered his inaugural
address as rector, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” on
May 27 before an assembly of university faculty and students. Even in
private gatherings he let his ideological assent be known. On June 30,
at the home of Karl Jaspers, he warned of a “dangerous international
alliance of Jews,” taking little care to moderate his opinion even though
he knew Jaspers’ wife was Jewish. In more public venues he confirmed
his administrative and ideological commitment to the new regime. On
July 12 he wrote to the Ministry of Education indicating his support for
anti-Semitic policies (identified in the rhetoric of the time as “cleansing”
or Säuberung) that were designed to expel Jews from the civil service. It
is also reported that in conformity with these policies he discontinued his
official role as director for all dissertations of students of Jewish descent.6
On November 3, Heidegger issued an official statement as rector that
ratified the “cleansing” legislation specifically for students enrolled at
Freiburg: economic aid would be forthcoming for student members of
the SA and SS (or other such groups) but would be withheld from “Jewish
or Marxist students” and anyone who according to regime classification
was identified as “­non-Aryan.”7
Long after the war Heidegger sought to explain his official acts as rector
as attempts to preserve the relative autonomy of the university against
more zealous colleagues who would have been far more aggressive in the
application of Nazi policy.8 But the evidence suggests that Heidegger’s
posture during his term as rector was not merely defensive but rather
bespoke a readiness to reinforce the ideological aims of the regime even

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 87
beyond what was officially required. On December 16, 1933, he wrote
a letter, unprompted, to Dr.  Vogel, the director of a National Socialist
professors’ association at Göttingen University, in an effort to prevent the
appointment of Eduard Baumgarten because of his apparent connections
with the “liberal-democratic” circle in Heidelberg and his associations with
“the Jew Fraenkel.” He also warned that because Baumgarten had spent some
time in the United States he had grown “Americanized.” Four days later, on
December 20, Heidegger wrote a colleague that “from the very first day of
my assumption of the ‘office’” he had striven for a “fundamental change
of scientific education in accordance with the strengths and the demands of
the National Socialist State.”9 His zeal for denouncing suspected enemies
of the regime is evidenced perhaps most of all by the case of the Freiburg
professor of chemistry Hermann Staudiger (later a Nobel recipient): on
September 29, 1933 Heidegger told the regional minister of education that
during the Great War Staudiger had been a pacifist, and on February 10
1934, he recommended Staudiger’s dismissal without pension.
It is not possible to interpret such behavior as the merely public
conformity of a scholar who feared for his safety and career. On the
contrary, Heidegger’s record of official calumny and secret denunciation
demonstrates that throughout his tenure as rector he was not merely a
passive witness to Nazi seizure of power but an active participant in the
process of Gleichschaltung that brought the universities into administrative
and ideological alignment with the regime. Indeed, certain sessions of
the seminar convened during weeks when Heidegger offered his most
unambiguous statements of support for the NS-State. On November 10,
1933, he issued a statement in the Freiburg student newspaper (“German
Men and Women”) in anticipation of the November 12 plebiscite that was
meant to affirm Hitler’s unlimited authority. In this text Heidegger explains
that the Führer is “giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the
highest free decision of all: whether it—the entire people—wants its own
existence or whether it does not want it.” The following day (November 11,
1933) Heidegger repeated these words at a meeting of university professors
in Leipzig.10
But if Heidegger showed a commitment to the Third Reich in both
word and deed during the early 1930s, then it is permissible to ask whether
this commitment also revealed itself in his philosophical instruction. One
coincidence of dates should not escape our notice: Heidegger issued his
official statement as rector to ratify the policy of “cleansing” amongst the
Freiburg student body on November 3, 1933. That same day he also delivered
a speech to “German Students,” published in the Freiburger Studenten
Zeitung, that ended with an explicit endorsement of the Führerprinzip: “Let

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not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being (Sein). The Führer
alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever
more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and
every action responsibility.” He concluded with the customary exhortation:
“Heil Hitler!”11 As it happens, Professor Heidegger issued the ratification
of cleansing policies and gave the address to the German Students on the
very same day that he met with students for the first session of the advanced
seminar on “Nature, History and the State.”

The ideological saturation of the


winter 1933–4 seminar
It would be gratifying to imagine that Heidegger’s seminar remained a
space for intellectual inquiry free from ideological contamination; but any
such hope would be wildly counterfactual. Instead we confront a near-
total saturation of what was supposed to be a philosophical exercise by a
political language consonant with the new regime. When one considers the
enormous prestige Heidegger enjoys in the canon of Continental philosophy
what is perhaps most stunning is the thoroughgoing unoriginality of this
language. This should be stated clearly and without decorum: much of
the content of the seminar is vacuous and is only interesting because of
the association with Heidegger. How it is transfigured into “serious” and
ostensibly “philosophical” language as found elsewhere in his corpus is one
of the mysteries we need to explain.
So infused is the seminar with the Lingua Tertii Imperii that it is
tempting to characterize the ten-week protocols as evidence of a political
indoctrination rather than as transcripts of a course in philosophy. We
could speculate that among the students following the seminar some might
have been already more committed to the objectives of the Nazi state than
the professor who was their guide. But even this circumstance would hardly
diminish the overall impression that Heidegger approved of the language
and themes of the seminar. The general manner of inquiry in the seminar
bears many of the familiar characteristics of seminars and lectures that
Heidegger had offered, both at Freiburg and Marburg, since the early 1920s
(a resemblance in method to which we will ultimately return). To this we
must add that Heidegger apparently read the protocols his students had
prepared, and in a few minor cases he penciled in his own corrections. This
practice suggests, at the very least, that he did not find the contents of the

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 89
seminar objectionable. The question of indoctrination is indeed worrisome.
The fact that at the time Heidegger was not merely a professor but also
rector of Freiburg should prompt us to ask whether students would have felt
at liberty to offer objections or critical alternatives to the language in which
they were being trained.
To appreciate the extent of the seminar’s saturation with the LTI we might
isolate three major facets for analysis: politics, prejudice, and method. These
move progressively, from the self-evident to the speculative, and from the
concrete to the highly abstract.

Politics
When we consider the seminar only at its most explicit and straight­
forwardly political level, its proximity to the official language of the
Third Reich is self-evident. For a seminar that presents itself as a purely
philosophical inquiry into “the state,” it poorly disguises the thorough­
going banality of its ideological affirmations with the illusion that they
have emerged only from the laborious search for “essence” and “ground.”
The seminar obeys the Heideggerian custom of historical philology but
injects its linguistic discoveries with the ideology it wants to find.
The word “politics” comes from the Greek polis, “which means the state as
community [Staatsgemeinschaft]” (41). This definition already turns politics
towards an expression of communal unity (Gemeinschaft) and silences
questions of modern society (Gesellschaft) or the liberal-legislative idea of
the polis as a Rechtsstaat. The community gains its unity and “substance”
only because it enjoys the people (das Volk) as “its supporting ground” (43).
We are informed of this political lesson as if it were a neutral truth of
ontological insight: “. . . the people [Volk] is the being that is in the manner
of a state, the being that is or can be a state” (38). In place of philosophical
argument we are told that this ontological truth extends back to the Greeks,
for whom the Staatsgemeinschaft was “the sole site where all the state’s Being
took place.” But why the sole site? This already implies a favorable view of
the total state, since it was there, in the polis, that “everything happened that
we characterize as the state” (41, my emphasis). This is ostensibly a truth
not only in ancient Greece but also for the present, a point affirmed in a
later session: “The highest actualization of human Being happens in the state
[Die höchste Verwirklichung menschlichen Seins geschieht im Staat]” (64).
Also familiar is the Heideggerian narrative of historical decline, which
here gains ontologico-political density: since the time of the Greeks, we are

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told, the very term “politics” suffered a deterioration when “it was made
into a circumscribed domain, one among many others, such as private life,
the economy, technology, science, religion.” This is the well-worn narrative
of Seinsvergessenheit, which now takes on a political meaning correlative to
the rise of liberalism, which robbed politics of its total and communitarian
role and made it merely “one area within culture” (42). The ninth session
of the seminar (February 23, 1934)  will make this anti-liberal polemic
explicit as a rejection of individualism: “The will of a people is not free in
the sense of the freedom of the individual will.” The people’s will “is not
the sum of individual wills but rather a whole that has its own, originary
characteristics” (60). As an historical illustration the protocols mention
Rousseau, whose contrat social “was based only on each individual’s striving
for his own welfare” (52) (a statement that openly conflicts with Rousseau’s
view that the volonté générale is not merely the aggregate of individual wills).
The genuine state as theorized in the protocols should not have been
a “subordinate means to an end [dedicated to] the development of the
personality in the liberal sense” (52). But it is this atomistic and liberal-
instrumentalist state that is apparently responsible for the crisis of German
modernity:

The development began in the Renaissance, when the individual human


being, as the person, was raised up as the goal of all Being—the great man
as the two ideals: homo universalis and the specialist. It was this new will
to the development of the personality that brought about the complete
transformation according to which, from then on, everything was
supposed to exist purely for the sake of the great individual. Everything,
and therefore politics too, now gets shifted into a sphere within which
the human being is willing and able to live to the fullest. Thus politics,
art, science and all the others degenerate into domains of the individual
will to development, and this all the more they were expanded through
gigantic accomplishments and became specialized. In the time that
followed, all the domains of culture were allowed to grow ever farther
apart until they could not be kept in view as a whole, up to our own day,
where the danger of such behavior displayed itself with elemental clarity
in the collapse of our state [Zerfall unseres Staates]. (42)

The significance of the above passage, in sum, is to read liberalism as


the final stage in a political-metaphysical crisis: the disintegrating forces
of individualism first emerge in the Renaissance and give birth to the
“specialist” whose corrosive effects terminate in the fall of the Wilhelmine
Reich.

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 91
But we should not rest content with exposing merely the most obvious
political references that are scattered throughout these protocols. The
political meaning of this ostensibly “philosophical” inquiry begins at a
far deeper level of argumentative strategy, where the relation of politics to
Being is established through analogy. The relation appeals to the formal
principles of fundamental ontology as laid down at the very opening of
Being and Time, where the human being is said to have always and already
(as a matter of “ontical priority”) a certain understanding of Being:
“Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.”12
This ontological understanding (or Seinsverständnis) belongs to the very
Being of the human being as a constitutive mode of existence itself, and it is
the task of the existential analytic to take up this preliminary or provisional
grasp (Vorgriff) for thematic exposition.13 In the Winter 1933–4 seminar
this antecedent feature of Dasein’s ontological constitution becomes the
occasion for analogy: “Just as [So wie] human beings are conscious of their
Being-human—they relate to it, they are concerned with it—in the same way
[so hat auch], the people as a being has a knowing fundamental relation to its
state” (48, my emphasis). The analogy extends well beyond the ontological
relation itself into the broader field of existential comportments—care,
decision (even, and this is interesting: eros)—all of which taken together
give the bond between people and state a certain solidity and affective
depth: “The people, the being, that actualizes the state in its Being, knows of
the state, cares about it, and wills it.” This is justified through analogy: “Just
as every human being wants to live, wills to be here as a human being, just as
he keeps holding on to this and loves his Dasein [Being-here] in the world,
the people wills the state as its way to be as a people. The people is ruled by
the urge for the state, by erōs for the state” (48, my emphasis on “just as”).
The analogical gesture evident in such a passage is repeated countless
times throughout the seminar: through an illicit anchoring of political
facts in existential conditions, determinate ideological positions take
on a profundity that resists criticism or revision insofar as these facts
ostensibly have their roots in the a priori terrain of Being: “The political as
the fundamental possibility and distinctive way of Being of human beings
is, as we said, the foundation on which the state has its Being” (45). Such
phrases have a superficial appearance of plausibility. With noteworthy
echoes of Carl Schmitt (whose concept of the political receives an explicit
acknowledgement in Session 7)  the seminar awards “the political” an
ontological status that is presumably distinct from the business of actual
politics. One might have been tempted to say that politics is ontologized,
except that this appearance of ontological priority is actually an illusion: it is
only thanks to an arbitrary and ideological decision that any set of political

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arrangements gains the ontological prestige of ontological priority (as “the
political”) over and against the rest of politics. Heidegger disguises this
decision as a foundational step in the ontological drama of “political being.”
What he calls a decision for the state is merely the result of an ideological
preference that has been mystified with an ontological aura.
The result is a rather unimpressive repetition of nationalist and
statist truisms, all of which assume merely the illusion of philosophical
sophistication thanks to a series of political analogies: just as an individual
Dasein in Being and Time always confronts the possibility of persisting
in its average-everyday condition of inauthenticity (leveling, ambiguity,
idle talk) or modifying this everydayness for the sake of its ownmost
(eigenste) or authentic manner of existence, so too in the seminar the
collective Dasein of the people is faced with a decision as to whether
and how it will embrace the state for which it furnishes the ontological
ground. “The Being of the state is anchored in the political Being of
the human beings who, as a people, support this state—who decide
for it”  (45). The entire flow of analogy aims to reinforce “the original,
essential connection between people and state.” This connection is both
realized and fortified in a “historically fateful decision [geschichtlich
schicksalhaften Entscheidung]”: the decision for a political existence (45).
Such language resembles Heidegger’s public statements of November 10
and 11, 1933, when he indicated that the plebiscite on Hitler’s rule would
be an occasion for “the highest free decision of all: whether it—the entire
people—wants its own existence or whether it does not want it.”14
Perhaps the most revealing statement of political authoritarianism
occurs in Session 7 (February 2, 1934) when the student protocol adopts
language of nearly erotic fusion between Führer and Volk, a unity that allows
the people to be led into a “struggle” it will both “will and love” (Kampf
wollen und lieben). The people “will develop and persist in its forces, be
faithful and sacrifice itself. In every new moment, the leader and the people
will join more closely in order to bring about the essence of their state,
that is, their Being; growing with each other, they will set their meaningful
historical Being and will against the two threatening powers of death and
the devil—that is, ruination and decline from their own essence” (49).
As the seminar proceeds, the fateful analogy between ontology and
politics initiates a movement from ostensibly neutral affirmations of the
human “way of Being” to specific affirmations of the Führer, whose style
of leadership becomes a major theme for exposition. Invoking a quasi-
Aristotelian polemic against the fruitless politics of mere theoria, the
protocols describe the Führer as a man of practical virtue, of worldly-
ontological phronesis: for true leadership “does not lie in knowledge; it lies

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 93
in Being” [“nicht im Wissen, sondern im Sein.”] (45). The distinction bears
a close resemblance to the exhortation from Heidegger’s November  3
rectoral speech to German Students: “Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be
the rules of your being (Sein). The Führer alone is the present and future
German reality and its law.” Animating all of these remarks is what we
might characterize as a specific antipathy to politics as conceived as a
technique (the instrumental-rational or administrative-managerial style
associated with the modern-liberal state). In place of technique the
protocols celebrate the leader as a man gifted with a mystified species of
political understanding that is grounded in nothing other than ontological
intuition: “For the origin of all state action and leadership does not lie in
knowledge; it lies in Being. Every leader is a leader; he must be a leader
in accordance with the marked form of his Being; and he understands,
considers, and brings about what people and state are, in the living
development of his own essence” (45).15
This species of ontological-political understanding also serves as the
groundwork for a kind of political education. It is a noteworthy sign of
candor that the protocols are ready to acknowledge leader’s limitations in
formal education. But what may seem a deficit turns out to be an advantage:
“A leader does not need to be educated politically” (45). What the leader
lacks in official learning he receives as a gift of ontological constitution
or “essence.” The emptiness of this category is evidenced in the ritual
affirmation of an analytic truth: “Every leader is a leader” and every leader
“must be a leader” because this identity conforms to “his Being” and “the
living development of his own essence.” All of these truisms adopt the
familiar strategy of silencing any complaints regarding the leader’s lack of
intelligence or education by appealing instead to qualities such as “gut” or
“charisma” that resist analysis.
If all of this has a familiar ring for readers today it is not only because
the strategy remains a commonplace of authoritarian legitimation. We also
know from Jaspers’ memoirs that during Heidegger’s visit to the Jaspers’
home (the previous May, 1933)  the host had asked how someone as
uneducated (ungebildet) as Hitler could rule Germany: “It’s not a question
of education,” Heidegger responded. “Just look at his marvelous hands.”16
At issue is a gesture of anti-intellectualism that inverts the conventional
relation between theory and practice: the preeminence of the mind gives
way to the body and more specifically to the artisanal, embodied mode of
skilful coping with entities that appear in Being and Time under the name
of the “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden).17
But even if the protocols acknowledge the leader’s intellectual deficiencies,
these are counterbalanced by a mysterious “band of guardians” who (like

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the guardians in Plato’s Republic) possess the higher knowledge prerequisite
for directing affairs of state, presumably alongside of or possibly behind the
leader (45).18 It is this band that will be entrusted with the task of “political
education” which will involve “not memorization of sentences and opinions
and forms” but instead “the creation of a new fundamental attitude of the
will” (63). This notion of the guardian-class may reflect Heidegger’s own
ambitions at the time to “educate the leader” (den Führer erziehen), a
phrase Karl Jaspers used to characterize the philosopher (often quoted as
“den Führer führen,” although this is not what Jaspers wrote).19 We might
speculate that Heidegger was entrusting the members of his seminar
with a sacred responsibility of sharing in his ex officio role of political
theorist or philosopher-king to the new regime. In his inaugural address
as rector Heidegger anticipates this argument when he recommends that
members of the academic community consider themselves responsible for
“knowledge service” (Wissensdienst) as one of the three modes of service
to the state, alongside labor-service (Arbeitsdienst) and military service
(Wehrdienst). The German university would be recreated into “a place of
spiritual legislation” and “the center of the most disciplined preparation
for the highest service to the people.”20 The closing lines of the seminar’s
penultimate session on February 23, 1934 make an explicit reference to
“leader-education” (Führerschulung), which suggests that Heidegger wished
to prepare students for assuming this “knowledge-service” at the highest
level (60).21

Prejudice
This entire discourse of political authoritarianism devolves into manifest
absurdity when the seminar turns to the conventional phenomenological
topic of space. Any reader who has devoted careful attention to Heidegger’s
existential analytic, (whether in Being and Time, or Basic Problems of
Phenomenology, or other works from the 1920s) will know that the
phenomenology of space plays a crucial role in the broader analysis of
Dasein.22 To be human is to find oneself always-already situated in an
environment or Umwelt. To this existential space there corresponds a mode
of englobed or contextual vision (Umsicht) which attends the engaged
understanding of Dasein as being-in-the-world. Neither the Newtonian
model of space as a mere container nor the Cartesian model of space as
mathematized extensio will prove adequate for thematizing the embedded
spatiality that is constitutive of Dasein’s world. The Kantian theory of

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 95
space (as a pure form of intuition alongside time) must also be deemed
insufficient since it resides only on the side of the transcendental subject
and cannot explain the ontologically prior phenomenon of the environment
(Umwelt).23
All of this is familiar terrain for Heideggerian philosophy. What is
perhaps most distressing in the protocols is the way this phenomenological
inquiry into “primordial space” is transformed via analogy into a fairytale
about natives and nomads: “For the Being of the people, as a human way
of Being, space is not simply surroundings, or an indifferent container.
When we investigate the people’s Being-in-space, we see that every people
has a space that belongs to it [zugehörigen Raum hat]” (54–5). Lurking
in this somewhat anodyne formulation is a political verdict that a given
people either “belongs” to a certain space or it does not. But this is already
a shift in register and it involves a misunderstanding or an abuse of what
should have been a phenomenological insight. After all, the claim that a
certain kind of spatiality is constitutive of human existence has no obvious
bearing on the factual question of whether a specific human group enjoys a
proprietary attachment to a distinctive piece of land. The protocols record
this shift in argumentation—from phenomenology to politics—as if it
were wholly uncontroversial. More distressing still is the way the protocols
seek to ratify the misunderstanding with a vacuous piece of anthropology:
“Persons who live by the sea, in the mountains, and on the plains are
different” (55).
With this observation we have passed well beyond philosophy into a
region where any piece of absurdity is permissible. Enter the nomads:

History teaches us that nomads have not only been made nomadic by
the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but they have also often left
wastelands behind them where they found fruitful and cultivated land—
and that human beings who are rooted in the soil have known how to
make a home for themselves even in the wilderness. (55)

Should there be any doubt as to the identity of these “nomads,” the


protocol soon takes care to note that they are “Semitic nomads” (56). It
is a chilling phrase and all the more so when we recall that the previous
spring Heidegger had indicated his official support for policies leading to
the expulsion of Jews from Freiburg University. But the language is not
unfamiliar: already in October, 1929 Heidegger had warned in a letter
that “we are faced with a choice, either to provide our German intellectual
life once more with real talents and educators rooted in our own soil
[bodenständige], or to hand over that intellectual life once and for all to

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the growing Verjudung [literally, ‘Jewification’] in the broad and narrow
sense.”24
Indeed, it is worth noting that the nomad was a frequent visitor in
the LTI bestiary. Although Hitler and Goebbels typically preferred to
expatiate upon the sins of “the Jew” (a creature who usually made his
entrance after an unflattering adjective such as cunning, wily, deceitful,
cowardly, etc.), Klemperer reminds us that other descriptions such as
“parasitic” and “nomadic” were available “for the more educated palate.”25
The reference to Semitic nomads is especially convenient insofar as it
delivers a poisonous caricature in the guise of academic erudition. But
Dr.  Goebbels (Ph.D, Heidelberg, 1921, for work on nineteenth-century
drama) took great pride in his own academic credentials. In January of
1945 he published an essay in the Reich newspaper entitled “The Authors
of All the Misfortune in the World” that inveighed against the Jews, who
“are driving millions of people to their death out of repulsion at our culture
which they sense is far superior to their own nomadic conception of the
world.”26 The nomads who (in the language of the seminar protocol) had
“left wastelands behind them” were the very same creatures who were kind
enough to reappear a decade later when Goebbels needed a scapegoat for
Germany’s impending military defeat.
Within the context of the seminar, however, the nomad is born from
a specific exercise in political analogy. The exercise begins with the
innocence of a phenomenological axiom: “People and space mutually
belong to each other.” But this axiom is injected with a particular empirical
content: “From the specific knowledge of a people about the nature of
its space, we first experience how nature is revealed in this people. For
a Slavic people, the nature of our German space would definitely be
revealed differently from the way it is revealed to us; to Semitic nomads,
it will perhaps never be revealed at all [den semitischen Nomaden wird
sie vielleicht überhaupt nie offenbar]” (56). The unfortunate conclusion
is that Semitic nomads are exceptions insofar as they belie the truths of
phenomenology: nomads may not experience German space because
they have no space that belongs properly to them at all. Outsiders to any
Umwelt, it is their essential nature to remain wanderers and exemplars of a
philosophical anomaly: every Dasein belongs properly to a space, but not
this one. It is therefore unsurprising that they fail to comprehend the neo-
romantic intuition of spatial belonging.27 Indeed the protocols make it
clear that this intuition can never be acquired through mere theory: “This
way of being embedded in a people, situated in a people, this original
participation in the knowledge of the people, cannot be taught; at most, it
can be awakened from its slumber” (56).

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 97
The analogy connecting phenomenological spatiality to geopolitical
space ultimately assumes a concrete and ideological purpose of justifying
Germany’s colonization of lands to the East, an effort that will presumably
require farming (here dignified with a martial sobriquet, “rule over the
soil.” As in the 1929 letter warning of a Verjudung of the German spirit,
Heidegger again contrasts the nomads to those fortunate enough to enjoy
Bodenständigkeit or “rootedness in soil”:

Relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming


marked by space, belong together with the essence and the kind of Being
of a people. So it is not right to see the sole ideal for a people in rootedness
in the soil [Bodenständigkeit], in attachment, in settledness, which find
their cultivation and realization in farming and which give the people a
special endurance in its propagation, in its growth, in its health. It is no
less necessary to rule over the soil and space, to work outwards into the
wider expanse, to interact with the outside world. The concrete way in
which a people effectively works in space and forms space necessarily
includes both: rootedness in the soil and interaction. (55)

It is hardly necessary to observe that these encouragements to farming and


settlement do not emerge with logical necessity from the phenomenology
of space as adumbrated in Being and Time.

Method
All of the above exercises in political analogy should prompt us to ask
whether something already built into the very method of existential
phenomenology has invited such a transformation. In other words, is
Heidegger’s philosophy especially vulnerable to its political deployment?
Is there something about his particular manner of thinking or method
that already reveals its readiness or its susceptibility? The question is no
doubt troubling especially for those who are invested in the endurance
and promotion of a “Heideggerian method.” Although I will refrain from
offering any decisive answer to this question, it is worth noting that, at least
in this seminar, the stratagem of political analogy already begins to work its
effects at the level of phenomenological method itself.
To appreciate the extent of the contagion we might begin by looking
more closely at the opening moments of the seminar when the rigorous
practice of phenomenological inquiry is nearly sabotaged by two misguided

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participants: the first protocol (November 3)  records the presence of “an
older natural scientist” and “an older student of philosophy,” both of whom
express a misguided preference for beginning the phenomenological
exercise with concept rather than essence. These men are “far too rash” and
their speculations are “hasty” (16). Even more distressing is their penchant
for “preconceived concepts and theories.” The natural scientist is especially
guilty insofar as he thinks of nature as “an exact lawfulness” (19). The
protocol (written by Karl Siegel) complains that “a certain artificiality and
affectation” took over the seminar (17). Some of the students betrayed “a
hasty impatience” (eine hastige Ungeduld) and a “reflective adherence to
principle” (18). But the attitude of these two gentlemen already commits a
transgression against phenomenology, since this is a practice that demands
one begin “naively and “naturally” or (as Husserl would have said) with
one’s attention directed squarely “to the things themselves.” The two men in
question are responsible for an initial disruption which effectively destroys
the “innocence” of the phenomenological task: The simple “expression of
what is given to us [Aussagen dessen, was uns wie gegeben ist]” (18).
Heidegger himself therefore feels compelled to intervene: these
gentlemen are speaking “too philosophically” and their contributions
are too “theoretical.” The great challenge of the seminar will be “to take
up a concrete and actual reflection [als Aufforderung zur konkreten und
wirklichen Aufnahme der Besinnung]” (19). Abstraction must be avoided
at all costs. If the seminar is to investigate the three phenomena—nature,
history, and the state—precisely as they are given to us (which is to say,
qua phenomena) then this will call for the naiveté of a phenomenological
method that could take up any phenomenon at all. A welcome and familiar
example presents itself: the chalk. Chalk is of course an obvious and reliable
object to which any professor will turn when they need a handy illustration,
and it is especially serviceable for phenomenological experimentation:
Heidegger appeals to it in several places, including the 1935 Introduction
to Metaphysics.28 But here we can see how the everyday can take on the
illumination of the miraculous: “Such a small and inconspicuous thing as a
piece of chalk” presents the seminar with a tremendous challenge but also a
pedagogical opportunity. For just as nature, history, and the state are “given
to us as fields of Dasein” so too is the chalk. From this we come to the more
striking insight that “even the simple chalk stands in relation” to nature,
history, and the state (20; my emphasis).
At play in this opening session is an astonishing romanticism of the
everyday. The preference for the concrete and the familiar is anticipated
in Being and Time itself where Heidegger interrogates Dasein in its mode
of “average everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit).29 But in the protocols of the

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 99
seminar we can see how this preference imposes a virtual ban on critical
reflection, the errors of which are either “hasty” or “abstract.” Haste is never
wise for a philosopher, but it is especially bad when the ethos of the times
favors profundity. (A philological note: even in contemporary German
dictionaries one is still confronted with the injunction to avoid Jewish
haste: “nur keine jüdische Hast!”). But for Heideggerian phenomenology in
particular it is abstraction that must be avoided at all costs. In the seminar’s
first session the natural scientist commits the error of appealing to a
“concept” of nature as an “exact lawfulness.” But laws and precision are the
stuff of modern mathematics, and so they fail to grasp nature as it is first
unconcealed: that is, as physis (a theme explored in session three). The second
transgressor is not a natural scientist but a philosopher, therefore accused
of “philosophizing.” Both men have committed the sin of abstraction that
will serve throughout the seminar as the negative counterpoint to genuinely
philosophical interrogation. This is also true of politics: the state cannot be
“a sum of legal principles, or a constitution.” Most of all it cannot be “an
intellectual construct [keine Konstruktion des Geistes]” (55). But it is also
true of the most fundamental themes in phenomenology: the Kantian and
Newtonian concept of time “must lead into error and is a violent abstraction
[eine gewaltsame Abstraktion]” (33, my emphasis).
We can therefore observe over the course of the entire seminar a quasi-
logical train of argumentation that leads from methodology to political
ideology. It begins with a primer in phenomenological method as devotion
to the concretely given, and it therefore shuns two alternatives (conceptual
epistemology and natural science) that would only lead students astray. It
then inquires into the understanding of time and space as it is given in the
very temporality of Dasein itself. This exposition leads to an affirmation
of both historical time (“history is now the distinctive ‘term’ for human
Being”) and historical space (i.e. the space to which each people must
belong) (37). The spatio-historical character of collective Dasein gains
further specificity as the existence of a people who must decide upon its
own historical existence or otherwise suffer an ignoble decline.
Throughout the seminar the political significance of its argument
emerges chiefly through analogy. The leader understands the political just
as Dasein understands Being. The people belongs to its geopolitical terrain
just as Dasein belongs to its own region of space. Such analogies are
deceptive because the comparative term belongs to the more “respectable”
elements of Heidegger’s work: after all, the proposition that the human
being finds itself always already situated in a distinctive space appears
to be little more than a formal discovery of phenomenology. It even
recalls the exposition of existential space in Being and Time according

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to which Dasein always experiences space as a definitive region (Ort)
or environment: Dasein establishes as a condition of its own being-in-
the-world a kind of phenomenological intimacy that Heidegger calls
Ent-fernung (the annulment of distance).30 But this formal insight into
the constitution of existential space serves as the license for a politics of
colonization. In their final pages the protocols assume an overtly political
meaning that is now unmistakable: it is necessary “to rule over the soil
and space, to work outwards into the wider expanse, to interact with the
outside world” (55).

A political susceptibility?
If one considers the terrific ease with which the seminar effects a constant
movement from phenomenological inquiry to political ideology, one
may feel tempted to ask if this movement is wholly accidental. Is there
perhaps some susceptibility in Heidegger’s philosophy that made this
movement possible? Or is there even (to consider a graver possibility)
a certain anticipation of the movement that is embedded already in the
formal gestures of Heideggerian phenomenology itself? It is important
to recognize that merely by raising this question we find ourselves in an
unsettling proximity to a certain style of anti-intellectualism: to scrutinize
a philosophy for its politics can too quickly turn into an exercise in
anti-philosophy or the negation of philosophy in the name of political
responsibility. While the risks in such an exercise are considerable, the
question in itself cannot be deemed illegitimate: what is it that permits this
seminar to adopt even the pretense that it serves as a forum for genuinely
philosophical inquiry?
Such questions confront us with the possibility that Heideggerian
phenomenology as such remains especially vulnerable to political analogy,
precisely insofar as it prides itself on its precarious status as a philosophy
that remains faithful to the non-conceptual and the concrete, a mode
of thinking, in other words, that hovers just above the world it wants
to describe. We should recall that antipathy for abstraction is itself an
essential feature of the LTI. Klemperer observes that Nazism sustained a
linguistic war on “the system” as anything “assembled  .  .  .  according to
the dictates of reason.” The disadvantage of a system from the National
Socialist perspective is that “the word is used to refer almost exclusively to
abstractions. The Kantian system is a logically structured network of ideas
to grasp the world in its entirety; for Kant—for the professional, trained

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 101


philosopher as it were—to philosophize means to think systematically.
And it is this very way of thinking which the National Socialist rejects
from the innermost core of his being.  .  .  .”31 This antipathy also extends
to “intelligence” and “objectivity,” both of which evoke a species of cool
and distanced knowledge that is the very opposite of phenomenological
insight. According to Klemperer the LTI therefore dislikes conceptuality
and prefers intuition, or Anschauen, “a way of seeing which discerns more
than simply the surface of a given object, which in a strange way also
grasps its essence, its soul.”32
In the lexicon of phenomenology, of course, the term “intuition” does
not carry the sense of irrational or mystical insight that Klemperer hears
in the LTI. On the contrary: phenomenology in its classical phase makes
intuition the very ground of a “rigorous science.” It is true that in Husserl’s
work we can already witness the philosophical attempt to draw near to what
is given in nonrational intuition. But Husserlian phenomenology typically
(though with Husserl qualifications are always in order) advertised itself
as a transcendental phenomenology that required a principled withdrawal
into essence via the method of epoché. An intuition for Husserlian
phenomenology should always be a pure intuition (reine Anschauung).
Heideggerian phenomenology, by contrast, disallows this withdrawal as a
metaphysical error and wishes to draw as near as possible to the world about
which it hopes to offer philosophical insight, without, however, plunging
so completely into the world that its formal descriptions of existential
modalities (care, language, history, and so forth) would dissolve into
positivistic descriptions of the world that is merely there. It is almost as if the
Heideggerian necessarily operated in a kind of limbo, between everydayness
and abstraction, between the world as he found it and the world as it is seen
with the ambiguous instrumentality of “formal indication.”33
We know how Heidegger was riven with ambivalence about the very
practice of “philosophy,” a term he eventually disowned. The 1964 essay
“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” announces the turn
against the technical discipline of philosophy as if its abandonment were
not an intellectual preference but the sign of a quasi-objective movement
in world history. Implicit in this contrast—between “philosophy” and
“thinking”—is a verdict against philosophy as still-too-conceptual and thus
still-unfaithful to the world it means to describe. But this abandonment
had been in preparation for many years. We know from memoirs that even
before Heidegger had published any of his major works, students already
revered him for his skill in thinking the concrete. It was Hannah Arendt
who described this as a revolutionary capacity to use “think” as a transitive
verb: “Heidegger never thinks ‘about’ something; he thinks something.

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In this entirely uncontemplative activity, he penetrates to the depths, but
not to discover, let alone bring to light, some ultimate, secure foundations
which one could say had been undiscovered earlier in this manner. Rather,
he persistently remains there, underground.”34
The technical term for this capacity is phenomenology. It is a tool,
however, that in the 1920s Heidegger takes up with the added proviso
that it can only do its proper work within the bounds of the existential
lifeworld. From this point forward the residence of the philosopher will
not be the transcendental standpoint arrived at through bracketing but
instead the native space to which the philosopher always-already belongs.
As Heidegger explains in the famous 1921 letter to Löwith, the analytic of
Dasein becomes a kind of existential autobiography:

I work concretely and factically out of my “I am”—out of my spiritual


and thoroughly factic heritage, my milieu, my life contexts, and whatever
is available to me from these, as the vital experience in which I live. This
facticity, as existentiell, is no mere “blind existence”—this Dasein is one
with existence, which means that I live it, this “I must” of which one
speaks.35

With this circular movement, authorized by the name of hermeneutics,


Heidegger not only signals his leave-taking from the intellectualist
ambitions of his teacher Husserl, he transforms phenomenology into a
technique of worldly devotion. Like the tailor who cuts his cloth or the
farmer who knows his field (both metaphors for the artisanal mise-en-
scène Heidegger admired), the phenomenologist just is the philosophizing
Dasein who throughout Being and Time remains attached to his workshop
and remains always as faithful as possible to the things themselves (die
Sachen selbst). The remarkable metaphors of intimacy in Being and Time
culminate in the portrait of Dasein as a being whose very understanding
is contingent upon the logic of what “belongs” (gehört zu) a given region
or environment. This is true not only on the grand scale as a proprietary
relation between distinct peoples and their environment (sea, mountains,
or plains, as detailed in the 1933–4 Winter seminar). It is true already
in the logical sense that it is only in virtue of belonging that any object
whatsoever first earns its everyday intelligibility.
But this is a faith that also recognizes the meaning of any lapse. The
famous “breakdown” of the hammer (in Being and Time section 16) serves
as a cautionary tale about the dangers of conceptual distance. The Cartesian
epistemologist who retreats too far for the sake of analysis gains conceptual
clarity but loses felt contact with the world. From this inaugural moment

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 103


in seventeenth-century natural-scientific metaphysics, humanity will
commence its efforts in the mathematization and ontological deracination
of an objective nature that will culminate with what Heidegger describes
as a “loss” of existential space itself, or the deworlding of the world (die
Entweltlichung der Welt).36
Phenomenology, in other words, is the name for Heidegger’s attempt to
undo this drama of metaphysical forgetting by recalling philosophy to the
prelapsarian world, the world in which it was born and to which it claims
an attachment. All of the themes associated with authenticity—the eigenste
or ownmost understanding that remains for Dasein the only normative
aspiration of its being—are strategies for recommending this restoration,
and this remains true even if (or precisely because) Dasein cannot hope to
evade the uncanny or not-at-home truth of its ungrounded condition.37 It
is this aspiration most of all that explains the charge that Heideggerianism
is ultimately an Odyssey homeward.38 We might even say that existential
phenomenology was originally conceived as a philosophy against philosophy:
a Wittgensteinian therapeutic for the pathology of reflective distance by
which we have forgotten our native world and ensnared ourselves in the
εἶδος or ἰδέα. This ambivalence concerning the purposes and very meaning
of philosophy belongs to the deepest patterns of Heidegger’s work. The
broader condemnation of the entire metaphysical tradition as an Irrweg
or path of error may strike some readers as a scandalous overstatement,
but it is merely a radicalized repetition of the earlier phenomenologist’s
expression of discomfort at the classical attempt to draw back from reality
for the sake of conceptual understanding. Metaphysics is merely the generic
name in Heidegger’s writing for the species of reflective distance whose
modern supremacy he condemns.
But this means that his particular manner of philosophizing operates
with a constant and constitutive risk of falling out of its own intellectual
purgatory into the banality of the everyday. The appeal to everydayness is
still an appeal to an abstraction—“everydayness” is after all still a theme or
category as signaled by the suffix of abstract quality, Alltäglichkeit. But it is
an abstraction that operates in an intimate conspiracy with the phenomena
it wants to name. To be sure, it could be argued that every instance of
figurative language carries the comparable risk that one could conflate
metaphor and idea. But a philosophy that undertakes a war on abstraction
renders this risk especially acute insofar as it eschews the unrealized idea
and invites its appearance in concrete form. In Heidegger’s own technical
language we might call this the illicit movement from the ontological to
the ontic. The Greek term is bathos, as theorized by Alexander Pope in his
1727 essay, “Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry.39 But whereas

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Pope wished to identify a comic effect, the bathetic in Heidegger is rarely
amusing because it is a sinking into political barbarism.

Conclusion
The temptations of political analogy are temptations that might afflict
any philosophy that is notoriously uncomfortable with its own status as
philosophy. But it is only with a political motive that the analogies are
realized. If we are trying to understand how Heidegger could have willfully
committed his ideas to the bathos evident in the Winter 1933–4 seminar, we
need to appreciate its peculiar vulnerability to gestures of political analogy.
This is true not only of the Winter 1933–4 seminar. In the rectoral address
of the previous spring, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,”
Heidegger catalogues the various misunderstandings of the term “spirit”:

For “spirit” is not empty cleverness, nor the noncommittal play of


wit, nor  the boundless drift of rational dissection, let  alone world
reason; spirit is the primordially attuned, knowing resoluteness toward
the essence of Being. And the spiritual world of a people is not the
superstructure of a culture any more than it is an armory filled with
useful information and values; it is the power that most deeply preserves
the people’s earth- and blood-bound strengths as the power that most
deeply arouses and most profoundly shakes the people’s existence.40

The striking thing about this passage is not (as Derrida proposed) its
appeal to “spirit” as such.41 While it is obvious that the term is freighted
with metaphysical significance, it is no less obvious that Heidegger feels
authorized to use it only because he aims to dismantle the metaphysical
meanings it has acquired in the course of history. Knowing its heritage,
he hastens to provide an inventory of the many things spirit is not: it is
not “empty cleverness,” “wit,” “rational dissection,” or “world reason.”
(Needless to say this list runs together social physiognomy and high
philosophy: who after all are the social types most often accused at the time
of “empty cleverness”?) The consequence is a perfect specimen of bathos
that embraces earth and blood and nationalistic belligerence as the only
genuine manifestations of spirit. Pace Derrida, the rectoral address is not
the occasion for a reprisal of “spirit” in the metaphysical sense. It is the
more public occasion for a war on abstraction that Heidegger has been
waging in the name of phenomenology since his earliest years.42

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 105


What conclusions might be drawn from the arguments above? It is
my good fortune that I am not a Heideggerian, which means I feel no
complicities, whether professional or doctrinal, that would oblige me
to defend the pristine reputation of Heidegger’s philosophy against its
more zealous critics. Yet  all the same I believe, for reasons of moral and
intellectual principle having little to do with Heidegger, that we must
continue to distinguish between philosophical argument and the politico-
ideological ends to which such argument is deployed. That Heidegger may
have betrayed this principle is to his eternal discredit, but his own failure
to observe the boundary line between philosophy and ideology should not
give us license to trespass the boundary ourselves. Animating this principle
is a strong conviction that the life of the mind has its own standards of
judgement that are not wholly commensurate to the standards by which we
judge political action: if we find value in a certain philosophical perspective
we may very well feel something like regret that the philosopher who
developed this perspective was politically odious. But we would be rash to
reject his perspective solely on these grounds.
The final and most troubling question is where the boundary between
philosophy and ideology is properly to be drawn. If we attempt to cordon
off a particular set of philosophical arguments and ideas as wholly free
of ideological contamination we indulge a fantasy: the dream of sacred
contemplatio, once associated with the Latin templum (a place of ius augurium,
or divination with birds). Such a fantasy is merely the photographic negative
of the polemicist’s view that a given philosophy can never be anything
other than ideology. To these extremes the only response is to draw the
boundary within philosophy itself, recognizing the political deployment
of ideas as a potentiality that inheres within thinking itself.43 We should
recall that during a 1936 meeting with Heidegger in Rome, his student Karl
Löwith offered the opinion that “his taking the side of National Socialism
was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.” Heidegger agreed
“unreservedly” and added that “his idea of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]
was the foundation for his political involvement.”44 From this confession
it would be wrong to conclude that the idea of historicity is merely a non-
philosophical fragment of the LTI. It would be more consonant with our
concepts of both philosophy and politics to conclude that historicity, like
other ideas in Heidegger’s work, remains open for interpretation both now
and in the future. It is susceptible, in other words, to a range of political
and ideological possibilities whose meanings are neither determined nor
foreclosed by any distinct occasion of historical realization.
To see any given philosophical text as open rather than closed in its
interpretative possibilities—and to see any ideological deployment under

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the aegis of susceptibility—permits us to avoid semantic determinism by
appreciating all of the various ways such a text can be used. To speak of
susceptibility does not imply that Heidegger’s philosophy was somehow
already and nothing but an erudite incitement to Nazism. Unlike scholars
who wish to find a distinctive political attitude built-in to Heidegger’s
philosophy, it seems to me a matter of intellectual urgency that we deny the
determinism this implies. That political analogies are possible does not make
them inevitable. Nor are all political analogies illicit. They become illicit
because of the interpretations they encourage and the policies they thereby
help to promote. In its philosophical mode, Marxism, too, bears within it
a concatenation of themes that have proven vulnerable to political analogy
(e.g. the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or the necessitarian apology for
“immiseration”). But it would be wrong to conclude that the philosophy
as such must be judged only by each and every worldly movement it has
inspired. Not every Marxist is responsible for the gulag, although anyone
who endorses Marxism today should feel moved to explain why this
affirmation is resistant to Stalinism.
One can still be a “Heideggerian” today, but this should allow space for
a criticism of Heidegger’s politics. We may find it instructive to revisit the
question as to whether there is something distinctive about Heidegger’s
philosophy that made it especially vulnerable to such a trespass. But the
question remains: should such a vulnerability move us to reject anything
and everything that is found in Heidegger’s corpus? The accumulation of
facts has now reached the point that Heidegger may seem to have damned
himself beyond any possible appeal. But if the life of the mind holds any
promise, it is the hope that new insight may be derived even from what
we thought was already understood. Strict determinism is refuted in the
very instant of discovery. This is something Heidegger in his chauvinistic
preference for “groundedness” did not understand: ideas themselves are
nomadic. Uprooted from their land of origin, they escape the authoritarian
determination of a unique realization in historical time that would contain
all their possibilities. Heidegger may have believed he knew the full
political implications of his work. But we can continue to sustain the hope
of reading him otherwise, even while we condemn the man who willingly
offered up his own ideas to the inferno.

HEIDEGGER IN PURGATORY 107


3 WHO BELONGS?
HEIDEGGER’S
PHILOSOPHY OF THE
VOLK IN 1933–4
Robert Bernasconi

I
It is clear that Heidegger was a committed Nazi during 1933–4, the
period primarily under consideration here. But although there has been
a great deal of debate about the relation of his politics to his philosophy,
the discussion of his adherence to National Socialism has, with relatively
few exceptions, tended to rest on the false unstated assumption that
National Socialism was a largely uniform movement. As Christopher
Hutton explains, there is a “considerable communication gap” between
specialist studies on Nazi Germany and the wider academic public when
it comes to exploring the competing understandings of German identity
within National Socialism.1 This communication gap is especially in
evidence in the debate about Heidegger’s Nazism. It is not enough to
examine what Heidegger said in order to compare it either with our
preconceived notions of National Socialism or even with his subsequent
accounts of what he understood by the Nazi movement at that time. If
we are to understand what Heidegger was saying and why he was saying
it in the way he was, then at very least we need to have an understanding
of the debates within the Nazi party so as to figure out his place in them.
To be sure, because Heidegger’s defense after the war partly rested on his
claim that in company with many intellectuals he worked to transform
some of the essential formulations of National Socialism (GA 16: 398),
there is always a suspicion that asking “what kind of Nazi” he was is
simply an exercise in apologetics.2 But that would be a poor excuse for
not pursuing the difficult scholarly task of trying to locate Heidegger
within the ongoing debates among his contemporaries on the meaning
of National Socialism so as to read him more rigorously. I will show
that Heidegger’s account of the Volk at the beginning of the Nazi period
marks a decisive step in his philosophical itinerary and that it does so in
an overdetermined political context. Understanding this step is crucial
to the interpretation not just of his politics, but also of his philosophy,
given—and I here confirm what others have long believed—they cannot
always be neatly separated.
National Socialism was fractured from beginning to end but, because
of the unique value that the Nazis placed on the unity of the German
people, they can frequently be found in pursuit of biological community
as well as psychic and spiritual conformity, or both, however those were to
be understood. Frequently the emphasis was placed on the biological. As
Alfred Rosenberg put it in 1934, the task of National Socialism was to turn
the German nation into “one huge block of seventy millions suffused with
the same blood,”3 but whatever weight was placed on the biological, it was
never all that mattered in a context of extreme antagonism with neighbor
turning on neighbor. Appeals to unity were admissions of disunity, and by
a remorseless logic that is not peculiar to National Socialism, but which that
movement can be said to have taken to the limit, this led to a disciplining
of the population and to violent purges not only against those whom they
thought of as biologically alien, but also against those whom they recognized
as like themselves in everything except ideology. The banning of all political
parties with the exception of the Nazi Party on July 14, 1933 only served to
internalize the strife for unity further. Divisions continued to multiply as
individuals and factions fought for preeminence.
The universities were at the forefront of debates about the meaning of
National Socialism and about the vexed question of the basis for claims
about the unity of the German Volk. According to Heidegger himself, when
he joined the Nazi Party and assumed the rectorship of Freiburg University,
it was both to defend “the interest of the university” and to participate in the
deepening and transformation of some of the positions of the Nazi movement
(GA 16: 398). That is to say, he sought to establish a claim to leadership,
initially within the reform of the universities, but soon more broadly. This
put him in direct competition with other, more powerful figures who were
also seeking to shape higher education in the new Germany, people like

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Ernst Krieck, Alfred Baeumler, and Alfred Rosenberg.4 They had at their
disposal tools with which to exercise influence. Krieck had begun his own
journal Volk im Werden, in 1933, in which he attacked Heidegger, albeit
not as often as Heidegger maintained (GA 16: 391). In 1929 Rosenberg
founded the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, which became increasingly
established: for example, in 1932 Joseph Goebbels had written an essay
under that very title promoting the idea of culture.5 The philosopher Alfred
Baeumler was a member of the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur from
the start, and this helps to account for his influence. Within Rosenberg’s
bureau, known as the Rosenberg Amt, a number of ideologues engaged in
an ongoing campaign to establish a notion of the Volk that was based in
biology.6 This was especially true of the division headed by Walter Gross, and
it was in part on this basis that Gross in 1938 challenged Ludwig Ferdinand
Clauss, who at one time rivaled Hans F. K. Günther for the title of the most
popular race theorist in Nazi Germany. Clauss, who had been an assistant
of Edmund Husserl at the same time as Heidegger, had a conception of race
that, on phenomenological grounds, cut across any distinction between
nature and culture and was based on the soul.7 Heidegger would have been
an even more appropriate target for Gross had he known and understood
Heidegger’s position on the Volk, given that Heidegger, even more than
Clauss, tried to distance himself from Rassenkunde and from all biological
conceptions of race strictly conceived.8 But the fact that certain Nazis would
have objected strenuously to his rejection of biologistic notions of race does
not make him any less Nazi.9 When Heidegger attacked the role of Jews in
German universities, the objection was not a biological one, but the impact
was nevertheless catastrophic for those thus targeted.10
The scholarly work which would establish in detail how Heidegger
understood himself as opposing figures like Baeumler and the other
ideologues mentioned above, while he at the same time proclaimed what he
saw as, to use his famous phrase from 1935, “the inner truth and greatness
of the movement” (GA 40: 208), still largely remains to be done.11 Heidegger
was fully aware that his conception of it was very different from that of many
of his contemporaries, but he was hardly alone in that, given the plurality
of views. In this paper I make a provisional attempt to show two largely
unrecognized ways in which Heidegger’s philosophical engagement with
the question of the Volk in lectures, speeches, and seminars from the crucial
years 1933 and 1934 was driven by the polemics of the time: His attacks
on the Lamprecht Institute and on Volkskunde. In the course of doing so I
show what a valuable document the reports of Heidegger’s 1933–4 seminar
“Nature, History, State” are to anyone attempting to address the question of
the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to his politics. The seminar belongs to

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 111


the semester prior to the lecture course now known under the title Logic as
the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, and it shows very clearly
the close relation of Heidegger’s philosophical commitments to his political
commitments.12 These two texts should always be read in tandem because
of their overlapping themes, even though much had changed in the break
between the two semesters when they were held, not least the political shift
that enabled Hitler to persuade top officials of the army and navy to support
his assuming the Presidency of Germany, and, at a more personal level,
Heidegger’s resignation from the rectorship of Freiburg University.13

II
The importance of Heidegger’s 1934 Logic for an understanding of
Heidegger’s concept of the Volk is not in dispute.14 Heidegger himself chose
to draw attention to the 1934 logic course in a letter he addressed to the
Rector of Freiburg University in November 1945 as part of his self-defense
after the war. He said in effect that every student with a head on his shoulders
would have understood these lectures and their fundamental, presumably
critical, intent (GA 16: 401). For good measure he suggested that the spies
whose task it was to report back to Krieck and Baeumler about what he
was saying in the lecture course also understood the intent of the lectures
(GA 16: 402).
But what were the people who attended the course supposed to have
understood? As I will show, his claim in 1945 that he had in this course
rejected both any attempt to reduce language to a form of expression
and any attempt to conceive the human being in biological and in that
sense racial terms can be sustained, whereas his claim that in its place
he advocated the idea of the essence of man as based in language as the
fundamental actuality of spirit (Geist) has to be rejected (GA 16: 401). After
the war’s end Heidegger repeatedly suggested that he had appealed to spirit
to counter the widespread focus on the racialized body, but the fact is that
this was not the case in the logic course, although it is true of some of his
more popular writings from this period and also true of Introduction of
Metaphysics.15 I take this as evidence that the 1934 course represents a more
serious philosophical effort on his part to theorize what it meant to belong
to a Volk along the lines already developed in Being and Time, where the
notion of spirit was called into question (SZ 48, 117). Heidegger sought to
show that Being and Time, which from the beginning tended to be read as
an account of the individualization of Dasein on the basis of the account

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of being-toward-death, could accommodate belongingness to the Volk.
To some commentators this constitutes prima facie evidence that in 1934
Heidegger distorted his philosophy to place it at the service of National
Socialism, whereas others appeal to the single use of the word Volk in
Being and Time, when he attempted to explain Geschick in terms of “the
historicizing of the community, of a people” (SZ 384) as confirmation that
the roots of his Nazism are already in evidence in 1927.16 Because we now
know a great deal more about what Heidegger was saying in this period,
we can pass beyond these speculations, especially if our knowledge of the
context informs us as to what to look for.
It should be noted at the outset that Heidegger lowers our expectations
as to what we might find when, in this same self-serving letter to the Rector
of Freiburg University from November 1945, at the very point where he
appealed to the Logic lectures of 1934, he made only a limited claim on
his own behalf. He suggested that it was unnecessary for him to attack
Rosenberg’s crude biologism because philosophical questioning was
itself a form of opposition: “Given that the National Socialist worldview
was becoming increasingly rigid and less inclined even to enter into a
philosophical confrontation, the fact that I was active as a philosopher was
resistance enough” (GA 16: 401). As an attempt to excuse himself, it is a
model of self-deception. One can hardly count as an act of resistance an
activity that one concedes is completely irrelevant to those one is allegedly
resisting. And yet he seemed to be suggesting that it was his pursuit of
philosophical questioning that made him suspect to the Nazi regime, rather
than his isolated attacks on, for example, Rosenberg in his Hölderlin lectures
(GA 39: 26) or Baeumler in his Nietzsche lectures (e.g. GA 43: 24–26).17
So how might we locate Heidegger’s alleged philosophical resistance,
for example in this 1934 lecture course or in the seminar “Nature, History,
State,” if it exists there at all? One is struck by Heidegger’s reluctance—
whether it be from prudence or cowardice—to name any specific targets in
the 1934 course in spite of the fact that at every turn one gets the impression
that it is, like many of his lecture courses, intended to be richly polemical.
Just how polemical in tone Heidegger’s 1934 logic course is can easily be
illustrated by contrasting it with his lecture in November of the same year
delivered under the title “The Present Situation and Future Task of German
Philosophy.” The latter presents many of the same ideas, albeit now integrated
into a discussion of truth, while nevertheless omitting the negative polemics
and replacing them only with an attack on the League of Nations that, of
course, was orthodoxy to the Nazis (GA 16: 320). In other words, there
is a rich dynamic to the lecture course that the subsequent lecture lacks.
Nevertheless, in spite of the critical tone of Logic, Heidegger named only

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 113


two specific targets there. He singled out Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the
West for criticism and at the same time criticized the widespread attempts
to refute him. But given that he acknowledged that Spengler’s standing in
Germany itself was already in decline, it is clear that there was no pressing
reason to make Spengler a major target of the lectures (GA 38: 92; L 78).18
The other target that bears a proper name is the Lamprecht Institute, which
he described as based on “a grotesque idea” (GA 38: 99; L 83).
What was the Lamprecht Institute? In 1909 Karl Lamprecht had
opened the Königlich-Sächsischen Institut für Kultur- und Universalges­
chichte at the University of Leipzig in order to promote his ideas. He had
expounded these ideas in his multi-volume Deutsche Geschichte and in
an essay on historical science where he tried to explain how psychology
could be used in cultural history to penetrate the functional breadth
of the soul of nations.19 Even at that time Lamprecht was a hugely
polarizing figure and many of the ideas associated with the Institute
failed to attract much support beyond his immediate circle.20 But he was
not entirely forgotten, and in the summer of 1920 Heidegger referred to
Lamprecht as one of the philosophers who had most influenced Spengler
(GA 59: 16). Later in this essay I will follow the trail opened up by this
remark about the grotesque idea behind the Lamprecht Institute in order
to show where it leads us, but first I shall try to set the context for this
remark in the lecture course by focusing on “Nature, History, State.”
Although the protocols of “Nature, History, State” are difficult
documents for the historian to assess, precisely because they are protocols,
they offer a unique insight into how Heidegger positioned himself vis-à-
vis his contemporaries in a way that the lecture course on logic does not.21
He seems to have been less constrained in this less open setting and, in
addition, one should not forget that the political situation was more fluid at
this time, in late 1933 and into 1934. His attempt there to differentiate his
position from that of Carl Schmitt is a clear example how philosophical and
political debate were intertwined for him. He insisted that whereas Schmitt
approached the political through the friend–enemy relation, which placed
struggle in the sense of the possibility of war at its heart, Heidegger saw
the political “as a way of Being of human beings and what makes the state
possible” (46).
One of Heidegger’s main preoccupations in the seminar “Nature,
History, State” was to redefine the phrase “the Führer-state” (Führerstaat)
(64). This is perhaps why in the seminar he passed from the state to the
people, whereas in the subsequent lecture course the progression was
from the people to the state. In any event, he insisted in the seminar that
a Führer-state cannot be based on coercion, and even though at that time

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Heidegger saw a role for political education, he rejected it in this context if
it meant memorizing what one is supposed to think.22 Political education,
properly understood, was a way in which a people “becomes a people”
(87 and GA 86: 177) and it can take place only through persuasion, which,
it emerges, is the basis of what, at the end of the previous seminar, he
called Führer-education (Führerschulung) (60). There is no mention of the
Führer-state as such in Logic, but in both contexts he was clear that what
was at issue was the “coming-to-be of the people,” because for a state to
endure it must be rooted in the being of the people (63).23 Nevertheless,
the relation of the state to the people is rendered more precise insofar as
it is only in Logic that the historical aspect, already indicated in the title of
the 1933–4 seminar, is fully developed. This is reflected in the fact that in
the seminar he said that the state is grounded in the being of the Volk (74),
whereas in the lecture course he explained that “the state is the historical
being in the Volk” (GA 38: 165; L 136). This is again an ontological claim:
Volk and Staat can only be understood as belonging to historical being
(GA 38: 68, L 59).
In the next part of this paper I will seek to clarify the fundamental
philosophical thrust of the 1934 logic lecture course when reread in the
light of certain hints from “Nature, History, State” before focusing in
the final part on the polemical component of Heidegger’s account of the
Volk.

III
As was so often the case in his courses, in Logic in 1934 Heidegger led
his students down a path along which they were supposed to experience
a transformation in relation to the question posed (GA 12: 149).24 The
fundamental transformation of the question here was one he frequently
posed in his lectures and publications: the transformation was from the
question of what “we” are to that of who “we” are. But on this occasion
it was performed in the lecture hall. As he had already explained during
the seminar in the previous semester, “original participation in the
knowledge of the people cannot be taught; at most, it can be awakened
from its slumber” (56). It was this transformation that he sought to enact
during the 1934 lecture course when he brought the question closer to
home by addressing the students directly about their political involvement
(GA 38: 58; L 51). He described two students, one who became involved
in politics to avoid studying and another who studied in order to avoid

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politics. It is noteworthy that in neither case was there a description of a “we”
(GA 38: 50. L 44). Rather it seems that a “we” was formed among the people
in the lecture-hall in their joint recognition of what was being described
and they expressed their unity by stomping their feet on the floor. As usual,
a “we” had been formed by isolating an “us” from a “them,” but that was not
Heidegger’s point. He explained in a clear evocation of Being and Time that
“we submitted ourselves to the moment” and that this led to a “quite other
determination of the we” (GA 38: 57; L 50, translation corrected). They
were not united by meeting some common criteria, although, of course,
the fact that they were members of the same class and shared certain views
about political involvement was a precondition of this transformation. All
of that could be judged from the outside, whereas Heidegger was evoking
the experience of community, the further conditions for which he went on
to elaborate (GA 38: 51; 445). These could only be fully elaborated on the
basis of an understanding of the being of historical Dasein, including the
place of moods which Heidegger had brought to the fore in the lectures.
He repeated the point at the end of the course when he claimed that in the
process of asking the question of the essence of the human being, “we”—his
student audience—had been changed (GA 38: 167; L 139).
The important lesson that Heidegger was trying to convey to his
students was that science ultimately does not determine who does and
does not belong to a people. Science might play a role in determining
who is eligible to belong to a given Volk in the sense of establishing the
necessary conditions of membership, and at times this might be conceived
biologically, but it is through resoluteness that the belonging to historical
being characteristic of Volk and the state was to be accomplished (GA 38:
68; L 59): “In resoluteness the human being is engaged in the future
happening” (GA 38: 77; L 66, trans. modified). He insisted that each
individual had to make the decision to belong singly (GA 38: 58; L 51).
He was clear that only that individual himself or herself was in a position
to ascertain what and how he or she had decided (GA 38: 58; L 51). In
other words, he explicitly renounced any idea that what was specific to
his account could be used by others as another way of determining who
ultimately belonged to the Volk and who did not. As the example by which
Heidegger transformed the students attending his course into a “we”
shows, he was not focused on formal conditions of membership that on his
account had the status of necessary but not sufficient conditions. That is
why he insisted that what had happened in the lecture room had “nothing
to do with science” (GA 38: 58; L 51). He meant that one could not leave to
the scientists the decision as to who belongs to the Volk. It was a decision
each individual had to make once they had met the other conditions.

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By dethroning scientific approaches to the constitution of the Volk, he
rejected the argument that descent (Abstammung) ultimately determines
whether or not someone belongs to the Volk. Heidegger introduces that
idea only to dismiss it (GA 38: 60; L 52).25 Descent is not determinative
because even if I meet the formal or preliminary conditions of membership,
belonging is nevertheless ultimately a matter of my decision (GA 38: 60;
L 50). In the lecture course contemporaneous with “Nature, History, State”
Heidegger made the same point in a way that left unambiguous how his
approach differed from those National Socialists who rooted everything
in biology and he did so using the language of necessary and sufficient
conditions that I employed above: “Today, there is much talk of blood and
soil as forces that are frequently invoked. The literati, who are still around
today, have seized upon these forces. Blood and soil are indeed powerful
and necessary, but they are not sufficient conditions for the Dasein of
a people.”26 So, for example, in “Nature, History, State” he denied that
rootedness in the soil was sufficient to account for the way of Being of a
people when there also must be interaction with the wider world (55). In
Logic he went even further by arguing that the range of approaches that
he was rejecting extended far beyond biology to any account of the “we”
that relied on an external viewpoint. So he excluded any answer given in
terms of “forms of life, races, cultures, and Weltanschauung” (GA 38: 32;
L 30). That is to say, he rejected almost all of the dominant terms in which
his contemporaries were addressing the question. This was because they
all missed the human being in his or her being (GA 38: 60, 63, and 68;
L 53, 55, and 59). It is this ontological point that explains the reference
to bloodline in Logic; bloodline has to be understood in terms of moods,
which in turn means one has to abandon any account in terms of a human
subject. Moods share in our relation to things in the world (GA 38: 152;
L 126). He also dismissed all attempts to circumscribe the “we” in terms
of astronomical time, geographical place (GA 38: 56; L 49), characterology
(see also GA 38: 99; L 83),27 and skull measurements (GA 38: 54 and 63;
L 48 and 53). Heidegger repeated this rejection of racially based accounts
especially powerfully in 1937–8 when he attacked those who continued “to
ramble on blissfully in the previous philosophy, that is, misuse it recklessly
and mix it all up, provided we now only apply the racial to it and give the
whole a correct political face” (GA 45: 143).28
In the 1934 course Heidegger saw liberalism as the enemy: “Our everyday
mode of thinking is still stuck through and through in the foundations of
liberalism that have not been overcome” (GA 38: 149; L 124). The attack on
liberalism included explicitly all attempts to reduce the “we” to a plurality
of individuals as in social contract theory. At their root lay Cartesianism.29

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 117


Heidegger’s point was that he saw Cartesian subjectivity at work within
much Nazi ideology. Later in the decade he took the point further when
he characterized racial selection “as springing from the experience of
Being as subjectivity” (GA 69: 70), but he had already made subjectivity
and I-ness (Ichheit) the target of his polemic precisely in the context of the
discussion of Volk in 1934. Both are “blasted” by temporality, that is to say,
by the fundamental ontology to be found in Being and Time (GA 38: 163;
L 135).30 According to the account of Dasein’s temporality given there, the
past comes to us from out of the future. Or, as he said in 1934, “That which
essences from earlier on determines itself from our future” (GA 38: 117; L
97). In other words, at this time Heidegger’s “resistance,” specifically as a
philosopher, was to insist against the bulk of his contemporaries, especially
among the Nazis, that any attempt to address the question of who we are
in terms of a Volk would be inadequate unless it was accompanied by an
effort to comprehend the human being as an historical being along the lines
already developed in Being and Time.
The rejection of Cartesianism in Being and Time was conducted
under the rubric of a destructuring of the history of ontology, where
destructuring means tracing the categories we habitually take for granted
back to the originary experiences that shaped them (SZ 22).31 Given
that in Logic “customary modes of thinking” are referred to originary
experiences, as when he referred the widespread account of astronomical
time to the experience of original temporality from which it arose, it seems
that the same operation he had earlier called Destruktion was still taking
place (GA 38: 131–2; L 109–10. Nevertheless, the word Destruktion is not
used in Logic, and this raises the question of whether he was already on
the way to transforming this approach or even abandoning it in favor
of the overcoming (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In Being and Time he
described the Destruktion of the tradition as directed negatively against
the present and positively produced as a going back to the Greeks in order
to go forward. Destructuring the history of ontology is directed against
the tradition understood as what holds one back. (SZ 22). But in Logic the
overcoming (Überkommen) of both genuine and non-genuine tradition is
said to take place not under the guidance of the Greeks but in the name of
“socialism,” where the term “socialism” as the title for the formation of our
historical being must enter the crucible of historical resoluteness (GA 38:
165; L  136). Socialism is not to be understood in terms of a changed
economic mentality, a “dreary egalitarianism,” or “an aimless common
welfare.” Rather socialism wills hierarchy, the dignity of labor, and the
unconditional priority of service (GA 38: 165; L 136–7). The students
attending the course would have been in no doubt that Heidegger meant

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National Socialism. The hope that Heidegger still invested in National
Socialism is apparent in this gesture, which also shows the extent to which
he gave it extreme philosophical significance that went beyond its political
significance.
In “Nature, History, State” Heidegger located the Führer-state at the
completion of a historical development (64). I see no indication that
Heidegger at that time was looking beyond that completion. Nevertheless,
it is clear that a few months later, in the winter semester 1934–5, Heidegger
was already questioning how that was to be understood. One sees it when
he responded to Carl Schmitt’s suggestion that the Hegelian state had on
January 30, 1933 been replaced by another kind of state. Schmitt wrote: “One
could say that on that day Hegel died.”32 Heidegger responded: “No! He has
not yet ‘lived’!” (GA 86: 85). Or, more precisely, Hegel first began to live at
that time (GA 86: 606). Heidegger seems not just to have been saying that the
theorization of the Nazi seizure of power that Schmitt and others attempted
was philosophically inadequate. It implies that there was still a potential
within the history of Western metaphysics that the Nazi movement was in
a position to fulfill. The Nazi state was not at the completion of Western
metaphysics, still less was it beyond it. It was located within the history
of Western metaphysics and could be understood in its terms. Heidegger
would never budge on that point, so that as he became disillusioned with
National Socialism, he at the same time recognized the need to overcome
Western metaphysics. He repeatedly came to say in a gesture that confirms
the ineffectiveness of his form of resistance that the Nazi state belonged to
the destiny of Western metaphysics. Strangely enough, Ernst Krieck in the
early summer of 1934 criticized Heidegger for lacking a concept of destiny
(Schicksal).33 It is tempting to see this as betraying a thorough ignorance of
the fifth chapter of the Second Divison of Being and Time or of the Rectoral
Address (GA 16: 108–9), but it is possible that what Krieck meant by destiny
was racial determinism, in which case he was correct.
In 1935 Heidegger would introduce the title “another beginning” (GA
40: 29; IM 41—trans. modified) for what in 1934 he referred to as an
event that can “only be compared to the change at the beginning of the
intellectual history of the western human being in general” (GA 38: 132;
L 110). He did so in the context of a discussion of “our people” as “the
most endangered people” and also “the metaphysical people” (GA 40:
42; IM 41). These two references suggest that the project that came to be
known under the title of “the overcoming of metaphysics” was initially
developed in this context of a questioning of the Volk, thereby making it
harder to separate Heidegger’s philosophy from the political context in
which it was formed.

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 119


IV
Heidegger’s questioning of the notion of the Volk has not always been
well  understood. Just as the young Heidegger had been faced with
the manifold senses of Being, so the mature Heidegger was faced
with the manifold senses of Volk found in the literature of the day. It is
from his merely descriptive account of the linguistic usage of the day
that Heidegger’s harshest critics try to find something with which to
compromise him, because they imagine that he is underwriting certain
uses of these terms when he is in fact merely listing them.34 The error can
easily be demonstrated by observing the context in which Heidegger offers
other uses of the word Volk that are incompatible with this one. Similarly,
in the lecture course he is simply showing that there is no uniform notion
of Volk, albeit this time employing a customary, almost hackneyed, way
of organizing his presentation of these usages by dividing them between
body, soul, and spirit (GA 38: 65–7; L  56–58). In the 1933–4 seminars
he offered the warning: “We must above all guard ourselves against being
overly impressed by the word ‘Volk’” (82). He was equally direct in the
lecture course when he announced that the phrase “We are the Volk” is
questionable as long as Volk is understood as body, soul, spirit (GA 38:
109; L 91). That blanket statement covered almost everyone writing about
the Volk in Nazi Germany at that time and is a further indication of the
fact that Heidegger was ready to move far from most of the dominant
understandings of the term among his contemporaries in the effort to
approach the Volk philosophically.
Although Heidegger renounced most of the ways his contemporaries
thought about the Volk, he nevertheless had recourse to other words that
were readily associated with National Socialism, albeit while trying to give
them his own meaning. This was no doubt because, as I showed, at this
time he still sought to put the framework developed in Being and Time at
the service of National Socialism, at least as he conceived it. This happened
most clearly when he introduced the terms “mandate,” “mission,” and
“labor” as part of his attempt to reconceive temporality. He offered this
set of equivalents: “mandate—future; endowment—mission—beenness;
labor—present” (GA 38: 153; L 127). The mandate is the task; the mission
is that which is handed down (GA 38: 155; L 128); but the most important
of these words is “labor.” Sometimes critics of Heidegger highlight a word
for its Nazi resonances when the word is so widespread that the connection
should not be drawn. On the surface the word “labor” seems to be like that,
but I would argue that the context forces us to see him building a bridge

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to National Socialism.35 Another instance of the same gesture of showing
how Being and Time could readily accommodate the issues most dear to the
Nazis was in the semester following the logic course, when he addressed
care (Sorge) in a note written under the title “The Metaphysical Basic Power
of the Coming State” (GA 86: 162).
Nevertheless, Heidegger never succeeded in convincing his
contemporaries that his philosophy, at least insofar as it was known outside
his close circle within Freiburg, could meet the demands of National
Socialism. Oskar Becker had been one of Husserl’s assistants in Freiburg
at the same time as Clauss and Heidegger were, but even he engaged in
an ongoing polemic that included the accusation that Heidegger lacked
the resources to account for the notion of a Volk, or a race, or a state. It
was at that time standard practice for academics to accuse their fellow
academics of lacking a word or idea that was an important part of the Nazi
vocabulary.36 Nevertheless, in the heavily politically charged atmosphere of
1938 when the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia was a powerful
issue, Becker’s rejection of Heidegger’s philosophy on the grounds that
it was unable to take into consideration, as his philosophy could, the
solitude of those who felt the emptiness of being away from the Heimat
was especially vicious.37 We now know that Heidegger had addressed
“the great problem of those Germans who live outside the borders of the
Reich” early in 1934 in “Nature, History, State,” just as he had addressed the
related notion of a people without space (52–6).38 Nevertheless, whereas
in 1934 he was still intent to show that his philosophy could be of value to
the National Socialist movement, by 1938 he had renounced any hope of
being taken seriously by the Nazi regime and he made no effort to respond
to Becker.
Even though he had already resigned the rectorship by the time he
delivered the lectures known as Logic, Heidegger still seems to have had
some hope of influencing the direction in which Germany was going,
and one way in which he sought to do so was by rejecting the regime’s
promotion of Volkskunde. It is important for my argument here that in
“Nature, History, State” Heidegger dismissed Volkskunde as inadequate to
the task of awakening a Volk from its slumber: “It is a peculiar mishmash of
objects” that often has nothing to do with a specific people in its historical
being (56). Given that the word Volkskunde does not appear anywhere in
the summer 1934 course, not even when Heidegger was listing common
uses of the word Volk, the fact that already in his seminar in February he
had been dismissive of Volkskunde lends support to my claim that when the
inquiry into the Volk passed into the discussion of lore (Kunde), Volkskunde
was being evoked in order to be attacked discreetly.39 Most people when

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 121


they think of folklore in the German context would think of those things
listed by Heidegger in his account of the determination of the Volk as soul:
“folk songs, folk festivals and folk customs” in which “the emotional life
of the Volk shows itself ” (GA 38: 66; L 57), but political considerations,
including race considered in terms of anatomical properties and language,
were also considered part of Volkskunde.40 It was already becoming clear
in 1934 that Rosenberg’s office was planning to use Volkskunde as an
instrument of policy, particularly through the figure of Matthes Ziegler,
the folklorist whom Rosenberg appointed director of the “Main Office for
Weltanschauung” in April 1934.41 Rosenberg was not personally active in
Volkskunde, but it seems that he saw its potential as an instrument of control.
When Heidegger was Rector he would have learned about the growing wars
within the field of Volkskunde. John Meier, Professor at Freiburg University,
had long been a leader in the so-called liberal tradition of Volkskunde
and found himself under attack from Ziegler and the Amt Rosenberg.42
Heidegger never seems to have reconciled himself to this development. He
attacked Volkskunde in a number of places in the late 1930s, for example,
when in “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft” he characterized it in terms of
self-stupefaction and stupidity.43
However, in 1934 Heidegger had a more specific target in mind than
Volkskunde, and he named it when he announced that in the nineteenth
century it was claimed that historical research should be based in
psychology, characterology, and sociology. That was the idea behind the
foundation of the Lamprecht Institute in Leipzig and it is most likely
what he meant by “the grotesque idea” that he referred to in Logic. On
his understanding, those disciplines sought to reduce the understanding
of history to the study of causal connections, a program foreign to his
understanding of destiny (GA 38: 106–8; L 89–91). What Heidegger said
about the Lamprecht Institute may be vague, but it was sufficiently specific
to suggest that something determinative was meant when he said that “In
spite of that [the foundation of the Lamprecht Institute], this grotesque
idea [the claim that historical research should be based on psychology,
characterology, sociology] could not last, although with a wider public, this
position was still recently championed” (GA 38: 99; L 83). This mention of
the revival of the ideas behind the Institute seems to be a reference to the
revival of the Lamprecht Institute with the appointment late in 1933 of Hans
Freyer to its Directorship. Freyer, who had been a student of Lamprecht
at the University of Leipzig some 20  years earlier, had in the meanwhile
established a reputation as a strong proponent of National Socialism.44
His assumption of the Directorship to replace Walter Goetz, who was
Lamprecht’s immediate successor, was seen by many as a restoration

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of the Institute’s original interdisciplinary vision, which Freyer hoped
to bring about by highlighting “sociology.”45 Furthermore, Freyer leant
heavily on the notion of “culture,” and this can be seen as a continuation
of Lamprecht’s project.46 Heidegger seems to have been as opposed to the
enthusiasm for sociology and culture among some of his contemporaries as
he was opposed to those among them who promoted biologistic notions of
race. This is an indication of the degree to which Heidegger’s position at this
time was, in his terms, philosophical and, from our perspective, completely
misconceived because it missed the political realities unfolding before him.
In spite of his ambitions to transcend academia and have a broader impact,
Heidegger seems to have been unable to leave behind academic politics, and
it is hard not to see his polemic against Freyer and the Lamprecht Institute
as in large part motivated by the kind of petty jealousy that is especially out
of place in moments of political crisis.
The appointment of a successor to Goetz gave the Nazis in the Ministry
of Education an opportunity to politicize the Institute. However, before
long Freyer too would be subject to scrutiny; one of the accusations leveled
against him was that he gave some of his students the impression that the
Nazi leadership was not unified thereby confirming the extreme sensitivity
of Nazi officials to any questioning of their unity, even though all attempts to
enforce the impression of unity confirmed its absence.47 Freyer had much in
common with Heidegger. They both wanted to contribute to the ideological
formation of the Third Reich and, in company with Carl Schmitt, they
questioned the place of technology in modern society and employed the
language of decision in a political context.48 For example, in the context of
a response to Eduard Spranger, Freyer saw technology as posing a problem
for the unity of the Volk.49 Indeed, some commentators have wanted to
stress what Freyer and Heidegger have in common at the expense of their
differences.50 But if one looks at what Freyer says, for example, about race,
then there is a clear contrast. According to Freyer, “The blood of the race is
the holy material from which alone the structures of people can be shaped.”51
Heidegger never foregrounded race to the same degree. Equally striking
are their contrasting educational views. Freyer was considered a rising
star of the conservative movement, especially within educational circles,
and in a series of essays in Die Erziehung he emphasized the need for the
university to come under the rule of the state.52 The rhetoric of Heidegger’s
“The Self-Assertion of the University” was significantly different, as the
title already indicates.53 And, most especially, Freyer engaged in practical
political debate, of a kind absent from Heidegger.54 Freyer’s manifesto,
Revolution vom Rechts, a prominent text of the time, had a very different
tone and rhetoric from anything to be found in Heidegger. Even more than

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Heidegger, and on a very different basis, Freyer insisted that “the People
must be exclusive.”55
If we now return to Heidegger’s attack on Volkskunde in the knowledge
that at the same time he was also opposing Freyer and the Lamprecht
Institute, we can understand that Heidegger’s attacks were in the service
of his own kind of Geschichtskunde, historical lore. This was radically
distinct from the kind of science of history promoted by Lamprecht
and his school, which attempted to understand history on the basis of
causal connections (GA 38: 106–8, L 89–91). For Heidegger, the lore of
history is not an object of study. In it and through it “world rules” in the
event of language (GA 38: 168; L 140). Heidegger was calling for a radical
transformation away from Volkskunde toward lore. Lore announces.
Die Kunde kündet. It announces itself as that which is concealed and is
“given only to those who stand in resoluteness” (GA 38: 160–1; L 132–3).
More specifically, the lore of history announces “the entire happening
and the situation of its moment” (GA  38  159: L 132). This, Heidegger
explained, happens in poetry. Indeed the essence of language announces
itself (kündet sich) in “true poetry” (GA 38: 170; L 141). In this way the
focus on language pointed the way to the lecture course for the following
semester on Friedrich Hölderlin (GA 39).
At the end of the course on logic, when Heidegger tried to explain his
claim that poetry brings the rule of Being to the original word, he could not
resist attacking what should probably be identified as Rosenberg’s advocacy
of discipline (Zucht).56 Heidegger wrote: “the Germans who talk so much
today about discipline must learn what it means to preserve that which
they already possess” (GA 38 170; L 142). In other words, the discipline
of the Rosenberg Amt was to be replaced by dialogue with Hölderlin, who
wrote in a letter to Böhlendorf: “We learn nothing with greater difficulty
than the free use of the national.”57 This cannot be interpreted as a retreat
from politics to poetry. Discrimination on the basis of language has long
served as a useful tool in the hands of those committed to exclusion, and
this was especially true for the Germans, in part because it was believed
that the German language tied together the German people across a certain
diaspora. And yet at the same time it was the attempt to employ language
as a unifying force that fed anxiety in the face of those who spoke German
but who—Jews or gypsies—nevertheless brought with them ideas thought
of as alien to the German Volk.58
I have not in any way called into question the idea that the seminar
“Nature, History, State” and the lecture course Logic are the work of someone
committed to the National Socialist revolution. Instead, I have attempted,
first, to begin the task of identifying some of the targets of Heidegger’s

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polemics in the years 1933–4. He was clearly against Cartesianism and
liberalism, but he was equally clearly against what was known to his
contemporaries as Rassenkunde and Volkskunde. The fact that on the rare
occasions when he chose to name publicly his opponents specifically he
tended to limit himself to relatively powerless targets like Carl Schmitt,
Oswald Spengler, the Lamprecht Institute, and Hans Freyer conforms with
his claim after the end of the war that his main form of resistance was as
a philosopher. This not only exhibits lack of courage on his part, it also
shows a lack of understanding: it is clear, at least in retrospect, that his
focus was misplaced. He was not alone in imagining a National Socialism
that he wanted in place of the reality he was already witnessing, but it was
the height of hubris on his part to imagine he could influence the ongoing
policy debates among senior Nazis. Secondly, I have argued that the mere
fact that Heidegger did not rely on a crude biological reductionism in order
to establish who belonged to the Volk, as some of his critics maintain, did not
somehow separate him from National Socialism, as some of his apologists
maintain. It is true that there were Nazi ideologists around Rosenberg,
like Walter Gross, who wanted to insist on a strictly biological conception
of German identity, but when Heidegger conceived of Blut und Boden as
necessary but not sufficient conditions of the existence of the German Volk
he still gave those considerations a significant place, even though in using
this language he was attempting to distance himself from racial science
narrowly conceived. What is most sinister about Heidegger’s approach is
that the focus on decision and resoluteness placed him among those who
sought to introduce new, more tenuous, standards by which to determine
who did and did not belong to the Volk. As we saw, Heidegger acknowledged
that someone’s decision and resoluteness could not be determined from the
outside (GA 38: 58; L 51), but he did not emphasize the point sufficiently if
his intention was to reject this tendency of engaging in the question of who
truly belonged to the German Volk, a tendency he himself indulged in when
challenging the place of Jews within German philosophy departments.
Heidegger had thus found his own way of contributing to the seductive
but sinister logic by which attempts to unite a people only served to divide
them further, and to the extent that he embraced National Socialism and
was equipped to understand that Germany’s new leaders lacked any sense of
restraint, it is impossible to excuse him. Heidegger may have known better
than most of his contemporaries the flaws of biologism, but he succumbed
to a logic every bit as dangerous, a logic whose employment, in the wrong
hands, could be even more arbitrary.

WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK 125


4  T HE SEMINAR OF
WINTER SEMESTER
1933–4 WITHIN
HEIDEGGER’S THREE
CONCEPTS OF
THE POLITICAL
Theodore Kisiel

Heidegger’s three concepts of the


polis and the political1
The seminar entitled “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History,
and State,” from its dating, clearly falls within the purview of Heidegger’s
metontological concept of the political. In the seminar, Heidegger develops
his metontological concept of the political by way of a focus on the “ontological
difference” between the people and the state. In point of fact, Heidegger’s
discussion of how a people authenticates itself by uncovering its historical
self-identity already occurs in ovo in Sein und Zeit (SZ), in an application
of his fundamental ontology in the direction of what he variously called a
metontology, metaphysical ontic, and metaphysics of existence, where “the
[ontic] question of ethics [and so of politics] can first be posed” (GA 26:
199/157)2 along ontological lines. In SZ, this metontology is intertwined
with the rhetorical concept of the political, where the authentic dimension
of rhetoric as an unconcealing process is obscured by the all-pervasive
predominance of the existential category of das Man, according to which I
am one-like-many in an average being-with-one-another. The true bearer
Period Basic text Basic concepts

Phenomenological 1923–7 Aristotle, Rhetoric Pathos, ethos,


logos of doxic
speech situation
Metontological 1927–34 Plato, Politeia Leader of people,
guardians of state,
3-leveled service
Archaic-Poietic 1934–54 Sophocles, Antigone Pole-mos of
thinker, poet,
and statesman
as pre-political

of the peculiar universal of averageness called the Anyone is our language,


in the repetitive prevalence of “what one says” that circumscribes the self-
evidence of public opinion. As many readers of SZ like Pierre Bourdieu have
long suspected, das Man, the Anyone, hoi polloi, “the many” understood
not as a loose sum of individuals but as a public kind of power of apathy and
indifference built into the repeatability of language, is the base-line category
or “existential” of Heidegger’s properly political-rhetorical ontology. But
what “many” have not noticed is that Heidegger also formally outlines a
path out of the leveling, impersonal anonymity of the masses whereby a
“being-with-one-another in the same world . . . in communication and in
struggle [Kampf]” (SZ 384, my emphasis of these two rhetorical dimensions
of political education) finds its way to an authentic grouping by actualizing
the historical uniqueness and self-identity of its community. In the leveling
of its essentially general—and so generic—state (SZ 300), the Anyone
“itself ” is not historical, just as the “masses” are rootless, homeless, and
stateless, stripped of all uniqueness and credentials of historical identity.
The everyday Dasein is infinitely scattered in the average with-world and
in the multiplicity of the surrounding world (SZ 129, 389). The groupings
of the Anyone are endlessly dispersed and manifold—businesses, circles,
classes, professional associations, political parties, bowling clubs, robber
bands—“such that no one stands with anyone else and no community stands
with any other in the rooted unity of essential action. We are all servants
of slogans, adherents to a program, but none is the custodian of the inner
greatness of Dasein and its necessities. . . . The mystery is lacking in our
Dasein” (GA 29/30: 244/163). The authentic grouping of being-with-one-
another can never arise “from the ambiguous and jealous conspiracies and
the garrulous factions of clans in the Anyone. . . . Authentic with-one-another

128   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


first arises from the authentic self-being of resolute openness” (SZ 298). The
passage to authentic co-existence “in the rooted unity of essential action”
proves to be a historical rite of passage by way of a concerted historical
action in first finding that one’s own unique fate is inextricably rooted in
the historical destiny of a unique historical people acting in community.
“The fateful historical happening of unique Dasein as being-in-the-world is
thereby a co-happening which is defined as destiny. This is how we define
the happening of the community, of a people. . . . Only in communicating
and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful
destiny in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes its full and proper happening”
(SZ 384–5).
It is noteworthy that the lecture course of WS 1933–4 once again
gathers the existentials of SZ that are essential for the political maturation
of a people, a We, in realizing its unique historical self-identity. “Man is a
self . . . a being that in advance decides about its own be-ing [Sein], in this
or that way. . . . Only because man is a self can he be an I and a you and a
we. . . . This self-character of man is at once the ground for the fact that he has
his history. . . . Historicity is a ground moment of his be-ing. This demands a
completely new relationship of man to his history and to the question of his
be-ing. Terminologically, I have designated this distinctive characteristic of
man with the word ‘care’ . . . this fundamentally human way of be-ing on the
basis of which there are such things as resoluteness, readiness for service,
struggle, mastery, action as an essential possibility” (GA 36/37: 215/163–4).
“This care . . . designates the fundamental characteristic of the self, that its
be-ing is an issue for it. How—this is left to the choice and mission of man.
Only insofar as be-ing is care does a way of be-ing become possible such as
resoluteness, labor, heroism, and so on. . . . Only on the basis of this be-ing
(as care) is man a historical being. Care is the condition of possibility for
man’s ability to be a political being” (GA 36/37: 218/166–7). “In contrast
[to categories], tradition, decision, struggle, insight,3 are determinations
that pertain to existence: existential concepts” (GA 36/37: 219/167). “Care
is the condition of possibility for resoluteness, readiness, engagement,
labor, mastery, heroism. . . . Care and historicity. Care as the condition of
possibility of the political essence of man” (GA 36/37: 293/220).
“Who are we then? Do we know who we are? Who are we ourselves? Are
we in fact a community and a people?” This fateful question of definition
of the historical uniqueness and self-identity of the community that is
the German people is first posed by Heidegger in the microcosm of the
university lecture hall toward the end of 1929 (GA 29/30: 103/69), with
the world financial crisis in full swing, and finds its first public political
denouement in the rectoral statement of the “Self-Assertion of the German

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 129


University” in 1933: “But do we know who we ourselves are, this corporate
body of teachers and students of the highest school of the German people?”
(RA 9/5, GA 16: 107).4 The communal circle of the we becomes ever
more comprehensive as Heidegger thinks more nationally: a teacher and
his students engaged in their common study, the “fighting community”
(Kampfgemeinschaft = struggle in common, a more benign translation)
of the university, the German state-university system, the German people
among the Occidental peoples, each struggling for its historical self-identity
usually by way of statehood. In the logic course of SS 1934, the question
“Who are we?” is answered by “We are a people” and the selfhood of a people
is defined in terms of decision, mission and vocation, historical character,
common tradition, and language, since this selfhood, the unique character
proper to a people, is eventually the proper-dom of the properizing event
of be-ing, das Eigen–tum des Er–eignisses (GA 65: 319–20). In the Hölderlin
course of the next semester, the German people discover their original time
of tradition in the poetic words “fatherland” and “home,” the native senses
of the “national.” In SS 1935 German Dasein, the metaphysical people
landlocked and squeezed in Europe’s middle, is called upon to assume the
mission of saving the West from its impending demise. In these contexts,
Dasein no longer refers to the individual human situation, as in SZ, but to
the unique historical situation of a people, German Dasein, Greek Dasein.
For Heidegger and for Germany, it is now the “time of the we” (Wirzeit) of
national socialism and not the time of the I characteristic of democratic
liberalism (EM 53/74).5 The characteristics of Dasein are thus transposed
from the individual to the communal unit, the polis. Just as a generation
is thoroughly temporal and historical and thus mortal, so is a people and
a community. Like a mortal generation, a people also undergoes a rise, a
peak, and a fall (GA 39: 51). Pushed to its extreme by “total” worldviews like
capitalism and communism, the perspective of finite Dasein (erroneously)
makes the people itself and not God “the aim and purpose of all history”
(GA 65: 24, 40f.).
The content of Heidegger’s middle concept of the political is first
introduced in his Rectoral Address, where the Platonic polis of paideia,
the “educational state” (Erziehungsstaat) outlined in Plato’s Republic, is
made the paradigm for the structure of the German university. For the
German university is the institution of higher learning “that, grounded in
science and by means of science, educates and disciplines the leaders and
guardians of the destiny of the German people” (RA 10/6, GA 16: 108).
But what is the destiny of the German people among the nations of the
world? Nothing less than the development of the educational state itself as
the highest expression of the German community and as a model for the

130   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


rest of the world. To cite the opening pages of Paul Natorp’s “war book,”
Deutscher Weltberuf: “To cultivate the new order of such a community:
that is Germany’s ‘world-mission,’ learned from the war; it is in the name
of its culture for which it enters the lists against the ‘equalizing and leveling
“civilization”’ that is now spanning the globe, in order to represent it as
‘world culture’” (DWB 1, 2).6
Hence the provincial minister’s complaint to Heidegger immediately
following his Rectoral Address, that he was promoting “a kind of ‘private
national socialism’ that circumvents the perspectives of the [Nazi] party
program” (RA 30/23, GA 16: 381). But Heidegger’s position was hardly
private, although it did in fact circumvent the strict party line. Heidegger’s
brand of “national socialism” had been overtly part of the German
public domain, from scholarly essays to the political tracts of right-wing
political parties, at least since the emergence of the “Ideas of 1914” and
the wide currency given to a uniquely “German socialism” of prominent
figures like Natorp, Friedrich Naumann, and Werner Sombart. After Fritz
Ringer,7 Heidegger’s more “private” brand might be called the “mandarin”
socialism of an educational state that the social pedagogue Paul Natorp,
by way of a hybridization of Plato with Pestalozzi and German idealism,
had been promoting from the 1890s into the postwar years. It is this
idealistic socialism centered in the moral and mental/spiritual will of
the community that Heidegger seeks to promote in the “new German
reality” of 1933, in his laudations of the national socialist “movement”
and “revolution” during the rectoral period.
In the aftermath of the cultural propaganda wars that erupted shortly
after the outbreak of the “Great War” in 1914, Paul Natorp defends
the superior ideals of German culture over against the materialistic,
utilitarian, libertarian, and plutocratic Western civilizations being
increasingly leveled by technology. “The peculiarly German goal of
‘culture’ . . . wants to cultivate and develop humanity out of the inner roots
of its inherent growth-potential, on the ancestral, religiously preserved,
and faithfully prepared ground of a people’s individuality. It is out of
the genuinely German and humanized state that the human state is to
grow, as the state of humanity’s ‘culture,’ where only human beings dwell
upon the earth. This is what we have been seeking: the world mission of
the Germans” (DWB 2, 55–6). This home-grown community cultivated
into a state is thus a moral-pedagogical totality that is at once a state of
economy, a state of law, a state of education [Wirtschaftsstaat, Rechtsstaat,
Erziehungsstaat], which do not constitute three competing and conflicting
goals but instead three perspectives that together define the unified single
possible goal of the state as the state of human culture, the genuinely

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 131


human state (DWB  2,  195–6). The last and highest perspective is that
of education. Humans do not work in order to work, let themselves be
governed in order to be governed, “but in order to live the genuine human
life of the spirit and the heart, for the sake of their humanity” (196).
In order to develop the inherent strengths of a people and to attain its
common goals, one requires not merely an economic and political, but a
much more comprehensive and deeply grounded education, a “spiritual/
intellectual, moral, artistic, religious education of the entire nation” (197).
The communism of the upper-class aristocracy of Plato’s educational
state is displaced by the socialism of universal education of a national
community, as the “Swiss-German” Pestalozzi developed it, beginning
with the working class, “out of the depths of the philosophy and religion
of German idealism” (131–2). The idea of the state finds its high point
in a social pedagogy grounded in a social economy and a social law, in a
uniquely German socialism based on the Kantian categorical imperative
that respects all persons as ends and resists treating them as means.8 In
this “kingdom of ends,” education is the self-cultivated formation, that
is, the shaping from within, of each individual and through it the internal
shaping of the community itself into a genuine individuality, into a self-
composed interiority.9 In this communal individuality, the individual and
the community are no longer separated, “but rather condition each other
in freedom” (180). For freedom does not mean a lack of all restraining
bonds, but rather internal self-binding and assumption of responsibility
for the community and one’s duty toward it (DWB 2, 132, 130). It is the
freedom that Kant finds to be correlative with obligation and duty and
regards as the sole transcendental fact of pure practical reason. German
freedom is binding obligation (Bindung), and the individual’s bonds in
and with a community constitute a whole (Bindungsganzes) which is the
human world (GA 26: 247/192).
“And where there is freedom, there is Germanness, there is a fatherland
in the German sense, an internally grounded and free community of
the free” (DWB 2, 110). This is the German socialism (in which “we will
ourselves”) that Natorp in his social pedagogy makes into an ideal and an
infinite task of the Germans, years before August 1914 and the spontaneous
unification of all Germans concentrated on the war effort in a solidarity
that already in these war years was called a uniquely “German socialism”
(Natorp, Naumann, Sombart) and even a “national socialism” (Plenge,
from a more economic perspective). In the reciprocal relation between the
individual and the community, German socialism is a social personalism
whose motto is “all for one and one for all and yet each is entirely himself.”
It is precisely the opposite of Western individualism, whose commonality

132   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


is regarded as a plurality of abstract atoms of equal and “private” individual
persons (DWB 2, 20).
Heidegger’s reception of the neo-Kantian Natorp’s German socialism
is, to be sure, not without qualification. We get a sense of this as well as
a remarkable summation of Heidegger’s motivations at this time from
a revealing letter to Elisabeth Blochmann written exactly two months
after the Machtergreifung, on March 30, 1933. Here, even before the very
prospect of the rectorship that would empower him to implement his own
long-incubating ideas on university reform for the Third Reich, Heidegger
expresses his enthusiasm over the sudden surge of historical events on the
political front, to the point of regarding it as an ontological Ereignis full of
opportunity and potential, a veritable kairos:

The current events have for me—precisely because so much remains


obscure and uncontrolled—an extraordinarily concentrative power. It
intensifies the will and the confidence to work in the service of a grand
mission and to cooperate in the building of a world grounded in the
people. For some time now, I have given up on the empty, superficial,
unreal, thus nihilistic talk of mere “culture” and so-called “values” and
have sought this new ground in Da-sein. We will find this ground and
at the same time the calling of the German people in the history of the
West only if we expose ourselves to be-ing itself in a new way and new
appropriation [Aneignung]. I thereby experience the current events
wholly out of the future. Only in this way can we develop a genuine
involvement and that in-stantiation [Inständigkeit] in our history which
is in fact the precondition for any effective action. . . . To be sure, we
ought through misgivings neither to minimize the momentousness of
today’s events nor to take them as assurance that our people has thereby
grasped its hidden commission—in which we believe—and has found
the ultimately effective powers for its new course.10

Heidegger is thus already busy deconstructing neo-Kantian concepts like


“culture” and “value,” which he regards as “unreal” and “nihilistic,” and at
the same time reconstructing a Kultur- und Erziehungspolitik in terms of
his own ontology of Da-sein and temporal-historical be-ing. This is clearly
evident in the Rectoral Address, where the Da-sein of the German people
is described in terms of the fateful communal decision that it must make
over the critical historical situation in which it finds itself in Europe’s
middle. A people deciding for the state appropriate to its be-ing: this is the
[met]ontological essence of the political for Heidegger during these trying
times, which he is regarding not in terms of a calculative Realpolitik but as

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 133


a potential Bildungspolitik to guide the self-determination of the university
community on its way to reforming itself, indeed revolutionizing itself into
and for the future “educational state,” understood as a Teutonic polis of
paideia.
The ontological deconstruction of the neo-Kantian concept of culture
(paideia) into the ontological categories of Dasein is in full swing in the
Rectoral Address. The traditional divisions of human “culture,” deliberately
listed in somewhat haphazard yet incomplete detail to exemplify the
confusing variety of their division into “rigidly separate [scientific]
specialties” (cf. Session 6)  among the university faculties, and so “their
endless and aimless dispersal into isolated fields and niches  .  .  .  such as:
nature, history, language; people, custom, law, state; poetizing [art],
thinking, believing; disease [medicine], madness [psychiatry], death;
economy, technology,” are instead re-identified as “world-shaping powers
of human-historical Dasein” (RA 13–14/9, GA 16: 111). It is the task of the
uni-versity, in its basic will to know (which Natorp likened to the Platonic
eros), to bring this diversity of domains together under a single will to know,
traditionally called science, which in turn creates the singular spiritual
world of a historical people. This unifying science must be understood in
the original Greek sense of philosophy, “not as a ‘cultural asset’ but as the
innermost determining center of the entire Dasein of a people and its state”
(12/7, GA 16:110). Science in this radical sense is the “passion to remain
close to and pressed by beings as such,” “the questioning stance that holds
one’s ground in the midst of the ever self-concealing beings as a whole”
(12/8, GA 16:110), “the questioning and exposed standing of one’s ground in
the midst of the uncertainty of beings as a whole” (14/9, GA 16:111). This
stormy questioning of the meaning of be-ing by and for Greek Dasein or
German Dasein “will create for our people its world, a world of innermost
and most extreme danger, that is, its truly spiritual world.  .  .  .  And the
spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture, no more
than it is an arsenal of useful information and values; it is the power that
most deeply preserves the people’s strengths tied to their earth and blood;
as such it is the power that most deeply arouses and most profoundly moves
the Dasein of a people” (14/9, GA 16:111–12). To counter the idealistic flight
into superstructures which the term “spiritual” is prone to take, Heidegger
must repeatedly emphasize that we are dealing with the indigenous spirit of
a native people ensconced in its unique historical infrastructure, contrary to
Natorp’s quasi-cosmopolitan account of the situation. The “spiritual world”
is in fact the thoroughly historical world of an earthbound historical people,
which, like an individual life, comes into being, enters into its maturity,
only to decline and pass away. In coming to its maturity, the Dasein of a

134   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


people, like an individual Dasein, has its moments (kairoi) of crisis of self-
definition, in which it must contextually “size up” its holistic situation in
its historical sense (Be-sinnung) and direction, becoming responsive to the
directive demands exacted by that unique situation in order to determine
an appropriate course of action-in-crisis that would be true to its historical
be-ing in context and direction. Aristotle called this responsiveness to the
protopractical situation of action phronesis, and Heidegger, drawing on
his analysis of Dasein’s self-authentication in SZ, calls it Ent-schlossenheit,
resolute openness, and equates it with “spirit” in this quasi-idealistic context
of promoting “The Self-Determination of the German University.” “Spirit is
the originarily attuned, knowing resoluteness toward the essence of be-ing”
which is “empowered by the deepest vocation and broadest obligation” (RA
14/9, GA 16:112) to be found in the Dasein of a people. In other contexts at
this time, Heidegger describes resolute openness, again in quasi-idealistic
terms, as the will to question, will to learn, and will to know. But to offset
the activistic thrust of such formulations of willfulness, which are in
keeping with the call for the “self-assertion of the university,” it should be
recalled that the “primal action” (Urhandlung), the action that underlies all
actions, of the “virtue” of phronesis, resolute openness, is that of letting-be,
Gelassenheit.

The Platonic-Teutonic
educational state
And what resolute openness lets be in this context is the singular historical
opening and unique “leeway of freedom” granted the German people to act
historically, understood as the “space of play” (Spielraum) or leeway in which
its indigenous “spiritual” powers are granted free play and full amplitude
both on the domestic and larger European scene. This “temporal playing
field” (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) of freedom is the educational state of national
socialism, articulated “platonically” into the three levels of work service,
defense service, and science service. Since this freedom that is granted to
us from our historical opening is “of the essence of truth” (Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit), Heidegger identifies such a state (and the university modeled
after it) as the “place of truth” (locus veritatis) and the “clearing of be-ing,”
where the great powers of be-ing to which human being is exposed—nature,
history, art, technology, economy, indeed the state itself—are gathered into
their possibilities and bound into their limits (GA 16: 200f, 767f).

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 135


The Rectoral Address thus begins with the question of the essence of
the university, which it provisionally grounds in the essence of science and
eventually traces back to the originating ground of the “essence of truth,”
understood as the ever unique historical unconcealment of be-ing from
which errant humans, individually and communally, must recover their
equally unique historical opening, their “spiritual world.” Noteworthy in
the talk “On the Essence of Truth,” which Heidegger delivered on several
occasions in 1930–2, is the “German-conservative” emphasis on freedom as
binding obligation, an emphasis that is muted in the published versions of
the forties.11 In the 1930 talk, the manifestive behavior operative within and
through the truth of statements, in opening the leeway of a world, at once
establishes a hold in the world. Thus, freedom as the letting-be of a world is
sometimes described as letting oneself become bound, which in its binding
obligation (Bindung) measures itself to the obligation (Verbindlichkeit)
of the world. The world: a communal whole of binding obligations and
playing field of freedom in the development of their possibilities, which
constitutes the “cultivation of the world” (Weltbildung). “The two characters
of any comportive behavior, manifestive opening and letting-itself-be-
bound, are not at all double but one and the same.” The note of necessity
invested in such a freedom is in fact the state of “turning in the need” (Not-
wendigkeit) between ex-sisting in the mystery and in-sisting in the errancy
of untruth. “Freedom is nothing but the need that must take a first and last
measure and bind itself to it.”
The “Ideas of 1914”—“Socialism is freedom as binding obligation”—in
their contrast with the “Ideas of 1789” are especially evident in Heidegger’s
notorious polemic in the Rectoral Address against academic freedom.
Underlying the attack is the association of academic freedom with the
“liberty” and “equality” of abstract individuals liberated from the old bonds
of religion, natural necessities, and provincial communities, who then bind
themselves artificially (“the social contract”) in cosmopolitan “fraternity,”
the solidarity of which only thinly disguises liberalism’s anarchy of “equal”
individuals (GA 16: 290). Academic freedom is a purely negative “freedom
from” abstracted from any binding context and all limitations, and thus
is prone to arbitrary caprice, “arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations,
lack of restraint in what was done and left undone.” The German student
body, on the other hand, in its resoluteness to will the essence of the new
university, “through the new Student Law places itself under the law of its
own essence and thereby first determines and defines this essence of being-
students. To give the law to themselves is the highest freedom. [. . .] The
concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its

136   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


truth. Henceforth the bond and service of the German student will unfold
from this truth” (RA 15/10, GA 16:113).
This freedom of the German university students, preparing themselves
to become the leaders and guardians of the nation, develops a triple bond
(Bindung) of obligation to the educational state in its articulation into three
services of equal rank and necessity.

1 The bond to the community of the people is cultivated by means of


work service. “It obligates to help support the community by active
participation in the struggles, strivings, and skills of all classes and
elements of the people” (RA 15/10, GA 16: 113).
2 The bond to the honor and destiny of the nation among other
nations is established through the defense service. It demands the
readiness to give one’s all, to make the ultimate sacrifice for one’s
nation, and to acquire the necessary military knowledge, skills, and
discipline.
3 The bond to the spiritual mission of the German people is
cultivated by the service to science, the knowledge service. Once
again, it is the people who, especially in its various professions,
wills to be a spiritual/intellectual people at the vanguard of
the ever renewed struggle for its spiritual world. It does so “by
putting its history into the openness of the overwhelming power
[Übermacht] of all the world-shaping powers of Dasein,” thereby
becoming “exposed to the most extreme questionability of its
Dasein” (RA 15/10, GA 16: 113). And extreme questions demand
extreme answers. Therefore, such a people “demands of itself and
for itself that its leaders and guardians attain the strictest clarity of
the highest, broadest, and richest knowledge” (16/10, GA 16: 113).
This extreme knowledge of the basic questions “is not the calm
cognizance of essences and values in themselves; rather, it is the
keenest threat to Dasein finding itself at the very center of the
overwhelming power of beings. The very questionability of be-ing
compels the people to work and struggle and forces it into its state,
to which the professions belong” (16/11, GA 16: 114). “Because the
statesman and the teacher, the doctor and the judge, the minister
and the architect guide and lead the Dasein of a people in its state,
because they guard and keep this Dasein keen in its fundamental
relations to the world-shaping powers of human being, these
professions and the education for them are the responsibility of
the knowledge service” (16/10–11, GA 16: 114, my emphasis),

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 137


the service that has traditionally come to be expected from the
university. But this does not mean that knowledge must serve the
professions. On the contrary, “the professions [are called upon to]
execute and administer this highest and essential knowledge of
the people that concerns its entire Dasein” (16/11, GA 16: 114).
This presumably applies especially to the statesman, who thereby
assumes some of the traits and virtues of Plato’s philosopher-ruler.

“These three bonds—through the people to the destiny of the state in its
spiritual mission—are equiprimordial for German being. The three services
that arise from it—work service, defense service, knowledge service—are
equally necessary and of equal rank” (RA 16/11, GA 16: 114). To summarize
the triple bond of obligation and service assumed by the German university
student in the Third Reich:

Bond to Service
Community of people Work
Honor and destiny of nation Defense
Spiritual mission of people Knowledge

Political education
And clearly, the motivational preparation of the German university student
for this manifold service to the people and the nation is the task of the
German university. “The German university for us means the institution
of higher learning that, grounded in science and by means of science,
educates and disciplines the leaders and guardians of the destiny of the
German people. The will to the essence of the German university is the
will to science as will to the historical and spiritual mission of the German
people as a people that knows itself in its state” (RA 10/6, GA 16: 108).
Instilling a deep understanding and clear knowledge of the original and
essential connection between the people and its state is precisely the task of
political education, which in these days is assumed by the state university,
which prepares the academic youth to become leaders of the people and
guardians of its destiny as a state. From the above, it is clear that the new
German university student is to engage in work service and defense service
as well as in the main service of the university, the service of knowledge and
science, which as the “work of the brain” does not differ in kind from, and
so is no higher than, the two levels of the “work of the hand and fist.” All

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work is intellectual or “spiritual,” a knowledge-laden deed and action that
incorporates a craft know-how and an ordered understanding of its place
in the world. The new university now models itself after the worker-state
projected by the National Socialist German Workers Party (GA 16: 239),
thereby modifying the ideality of the university to accommodate a uniquely
German folk ethos, its vaunted “work ethic.” The new university student
is now called upon to be exemplary in this work ethic, to which we might
also add the prized German trait of Gründlichkeit, thoroughness, and even
a related word then current in Nazi jargon, the “hardness” (Härte) needed
to overcome almost insuperable obstacles. These traits carry over into the
defense service and the knowledge service, which are after all “equiprimordial
for German being” and “are equally necessary and of equal rank” (RA
16/11, GA 16: 114). Note that Heidegger’s account of the knowledge service
exposes Dasein to a situation of extreme questioning which dictates that
it struggle mightily and even violently with the overwhelming power of
be-ing: “The very questionability of be-ing compels the people to work and
struggle and forces it into its state” (RA 16/11, GA 16: 114).
How is it that the state university must now assume the responsibility of
politically educating the cadre of guardians needed for the furtherance of
the state? Session 7 of the seminar traces Germany’s political tradition back
to the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire, when “Otto the Great based
his empire [Reich] on the prince-bishops by obligating them to political and
military service and knowledge” (45, my trans.). The Second Reich took root
when “Frederick the Great educated the Prussian nobility into guardians of
his state. Bismarck oversaw this process of rooting his idea of the state in
the firm, strong soil of political nobility,” but the Second Reich went into
demise after he left office. The historical pattern is clear on Germany’s way
of founding and sustaining a political tradition and its need to educate a
political elite. But with the demise of the monarchy, this elite can no longer
be the aristocratic nobility but rather falls to the “mandarin” class being
educated by the university (cf. Note 7). Heidegger finds his model at a
critical turning point in German history, at the turn from the eighteenth to
the nineteenth century, when three great powers converged to work together
in shaping Germany’s destiny and articulating its historical identity and
modern self-image: the new German poetry of Klopstock, Herder, Goethe,
Schiller and the Romantics; the new German philosophy of Kant, Fichte,
Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Hegel; the new German political will of the
Prussian statesmen and soldiers, including Freiherr vom Stein, Hardenberg,
Humboldt, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and von Clausewitz (GA 16: 291).
The interplay of poets, thinkers, and statesmen now assumes center stage
in Heidegger’s model of Germany and German education and the shaping

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 139


of Germany’s identity. It might be noted that this is also the beginning of
the tradition of bestowing seasoned German professors with the honorific
title of Geheimrat, privy councilor, which became more than honorific for
notables like Dilthey, Weber, and Scheler. (I am not aware of any instance of
Geheimrat Husserl ever being consulted by German statesmen).
The Platonic basis woven into the metontological concept of the political
indicates that the mantle of philosopher-ruler or supreme statesman of the
national socialist worker state would fall upon Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler.
Heidegger in 1933 in fact adjudged Hitler to be a phronimos or statesman
capable of rising above narrow party interests to become a leader sensitive
to the needs, desires, and tendencies of the German people as a whole. “Any
statesman or leader is a leader . . . [insofar as] . . . he understands, considers,
and actualizes, in the vital unfolding of his own being, what a people and
state are” (45, translation amended). But Heidegger at once insisted that
it is the people itself who must decide for a leader-state (Führerstaat) as
the kind of state that is in keeping with the tradition of the previous two
German Reichs and thus most appropriate for the German people. In short,
the crux and core of Heidegger’s metontological concept of the political is
that the people itself decide on the kind of state most appropriate at this
point in German history and at once resolutely will to sustain and support
that state through its service and sacrifice. Hitler, in his very popular rise
to power, thus cleverly devised a series of plebiscites (Volksabstimmungen),
notably on the decision to withdraw from the League of Nations, along with
the well-publicized public rallies (Volksversammlungen), to evoke a sense of
public cooperation in at least some of the “state-founding deeds” of the new
regime. But Heidegger sees the university as the ultimate educative force
in convincing the people to decide for the leader-state at this crossroads in
its history. He thus places his reformed state university in the service of the
Third Reich precisely to fill the traditional role of educating a political elite,
a cadre of guardians of the destiny of the nation who would be charged with
awakening the German people to its grand historical mission, still by and
large hidden from it, instilling in the heart and will of the people a clear
knowledge of its mission. “The new university has to be the connecting
link and bridge between the people and its leadership.”12 This awakening
of the people to its mission constitutes the education and re-education of
the people to becoming a unified people of and for the state. “The national
socialist revolution is therefore not an external takeover of an existing state
apparatus by a party become powerful enough to do so, but the internal re-
education of an entire people to the task of willing its own unification and
unity. [. . .] The basic character of the new spiritual and political movement
which passes through the people is that of an education and re-education

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of the people to the people through the state. And when it is a matter of the
deepest and broadest education, is this not the task of the highest school in
the land? [. . .] Education of the people through the state to the people—that
is the meaning of the national socialist movement, which is the essence of
the new national education. Such an education in the highest knowledge is
the task of the new university. Through this education the people comes to
true self-responsibility” (GA 16: 302, 304, 307).

The disenchantment
Heidegger resigns his rectorship soon after the conclusion of this seminar
of WS 1933–4, but continues to promote his national socialism of the
educational state until mid-year in residual duties related to the rectorate,
in introducing foreign students to the new German university and in
evaluating the organization of a school for instructors. It gradually recedes
into the background in favor of Heidegger’s third concept of the political,
the pre-political interplay between poets, thinkers, and statesmen. In the
meantime, as his hoped-for educational state became more and more
a totalitarian police state, plans were announced for a new “scientific
university [Hochschule],” for the political education of the next generation
of leaders under the auspices of the party and the leadership of Robert Ley,
who was head of the German Labor Front, a Hochschule which the now
mere Professor Heidegger regarded as a threat not only to the university
but also to the very concept of science (10–11).13 But it would take Hitler’s
announcement of the “Four Year Plan” in September 1936 and the impact
that this “total mobilization” of the German military-industrial complex,
tacitly in preparation for a total war in four years, would have on the
universities before we find the first real evidence of wholesale, albeit (as
usual) discreet, resistance to state policy and planning on the part of
Heidegger. Consternation over the Four Year Plan, especially among the
younger faculty at Freiburg, led to a series of working meetings among
them, independent of the party-sanctioned discussions of the matter.
Heidegger’s notes for and from these working meetings turn again and
again on the political constellations that relate science to the National
Socialist “worldview” (and no longer to the “movement,” as in 1933–5!).
Some choice examples from the intra-university debate, in Heidegger’s
own words: “There is not even a transformative will for this new
organization [of science as a spiritual/intellectual power]. The farcical
550 jubilee celebration at Heidelberg University: forced and inflated

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 141


without  ground and background. And the Führer? Stays away! Instead,
on August 16 [1936] he closes the Olympic games in Berlin; on the same
day, he organizes the preparations for the Tokyo games! [. . .] The Olympic
games are better suited for foreign propaganda. The sports greats from all
lands are courted for their approval—one is more among one’s own kind!
‘University people’ of the old style also know too much” (22). One of his
greatest mistakes in the rectorate: “that I did not know that the ministry
cannot be approached with creative projects and large goals” (24). Now
that the “coarse and nonsensical and naive outburst of a ‘new folkish
science’ has totally gone awry,” the pendulum has swung the other way.
In demanding undisturbed quiet for supra-temporal science, one finds
a new common ground for compromise: from the side of science, one
concedes that there is no such thing as pure theory, that there is room for
a worldview. From the side of the folkish representatives, one concedes
that one must concentrate work on the “matters themselves,” but also that
the demand for a worldview is indispensable. Both sides are now saying
the same thing, but the compromise thereby diffuses all the forces of
questioning that would bring us to “the moment of true inception and
a real change” (24). What to do in this stalemate? Running away solves
nothing. Best to remain and exploit the possibility of meeting like-minded
individuals. “This not to prepare the university—now hopeless—but to
preserve the tradition, to provide role-models, to inspire new demands
in one or another individual—somewhere, sometime, for someone. This
is neither ‘escape’ nor ‘resignation’ but the necessity that comes with the
essential philosophical task of the second inception” (24–5). The university
is at its end and so is science, “but this is precisely because philosophy
has its second essential inception before itself. That what we have called
science is running its course and technologizing itself, perhaps for a whole
century, proves nothing to the contrary!” (26). In view of its uselessness,
philosophy’s positions and chairs are being reduced or cancelled. “But with
the abolition of philosophy, the Germans—and this with the intention of
fulfilling their essence as a people!—are committing suicide in world history”
(27, my emphasis).
With this entry into the industrial arms race in preparation for total
war, National Socialism, purportedly in search of geopolitical “living
space” and scarce natural resources, has unequivocally placed itself on the
same plane as capitalism and communism. The “movement” in search of its
uniquely German roots has become, like them, a technological worldview.
At this point, Heidegger abandons his fading hope in a difference in the
decisions made by narrow-minded party functionaries and those by Hitler
himself, the statesman whose originative deeds create a new state and

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a higher order. After he develops a more refined sense of the essence of
technology as completed metaphysics, Heidegger will characterize Hitler
as the supreme technician of a System as much being imposed upon him as
manipulated by him, by way of a shrewd calculative thinking totally devoid
of any vestige of the meditative thinking required of the statesman.14
“Early in 1938,” Heidegger is purported to have already concluded that
Adolf Hitler was “the robber and criminal of the century [der Räuber und
Verbrecher des Jahrhunderts].”15 In a discussion of Nietzsche’s will to power
at about the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Heidegger
observes that the planetarische Hauptverbrecher (global arch-criminals),
whose “capacity for brutality” in their exercise of power is boundless, are an
exclusive group whose number “can be counted on one hand” (GA 69: 78).

The archaic concept of the polis


and the political
The transition from the second to the third concept of the political like­
wise shifts attention from a sole focus on the statesman, philosopher-ruler,
or political leader of the Führerstaat to the ruler’s reliance on the advice
of the various “guardians,” in founding dialogues that thus take place on a
level that precedes purely political action. The shift constitutes a dilution
and counter-thrust to the totalitarian direction that Nazism in fact took.
The regress to German-Greek Da-sein that founds the third concept of
the political, the archaic (poietic, seynsgeschichtlicher) concept, is facilitated
especially by Hölderlin’s poetic German translations of Greek tragedy. It is a
return to the great beginning and first inception of ontology in the Western
language which, “next to German, is at once the most powerful and the
most spiritual of languages (in regard to its possibilities of thought)” (EM
43/60). In the example that we shall now quickly track in its historical sense
(Be-sinnung), it is a matter of restoring the originative power of one of the
most influential words in the Greek language, polis, the root of the political,
its politics, polity, policy, police, etc. in so many Western languages and
overly exploited in the politicized time of 1935 (EM 102/141). In the
context of the tragic fate of humanity drawn in the foreboding lines of
the chorus of Theban elders in Sophocles’ Antigone, Heidegger finds that
polis is not merely a geographically located state (Staat) or city (Stadt) but,
more basically, a historical site (Stätte: EM 156/220) virtually identical with
the ontological site of Da-sein in which a unique humankind (e.g. Greek

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 143


being-there, German being-here) “takes place” (statt–findet, statt–hat), is
“granted stead” (gestattet = permitted), and in this “leeway” (Spielraum) of
allotted time and historical place makes its unique “homestead” (Heimstatt)
befitting its historical destiny.

The polis is the site of history, the Here in which, out of which and
for which history happens. To this site of history belong the gods, the
temples, the priests, the celebrations, the games, the poets, the thinkers,
the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the armed
forces, and the ships. All this does not first belong to the polis, is not
first political, because it enters into a relationship with a statesman and
a general and with the affairs of state. Rather, what we have named is
political, that is, at the site of history, insofar as, for example, the poets
are only poets, but then are actually poets, the thinkers are only thinkers,
but then are actually thinkers, the priests are only priests, but then are
actually priests, the rulers are only rulers, but then are actually rulers.
Are: but this says, to use their power as violence-doers and to rise to
eminent stature in historical be-ing as creators, as doers. Rising to a
supreme stature at the site of history, they also become apolis, without
city and site, alone, without a home, with no way out amidst beings as a
whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and
fittingness, because they as creators must in each of their situations first
ground all this. (EM 117/162–3)

Thus, the creators of the political are not only the politicians, but also the
apolitical ones. Poets and thinkers, statesmen and priests are gathered
together in unity and lonely, untimely, tragic, and contentious dialogue
at this core of history, Da-sein. The very example, Heidegger’s choice
of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone itself illustrates this
unity and peculiar interchange among the creators of the polis. To be
truly political is to be at the site of history, Da-sein in its root facticity
and possibility, which in each of its epochal instantiations is ours here-
and-now. In each instantiation of Da–sein, “the human being is then
related in an exceptional sense to this pole16 [of the pole-mos of the polis],
insofar as human beings, in understanding be-ing, stand in the middle
of beings and here necessarily have a ‘status’ in each of their historical
instantiations, a stance in their states and their circumstances. Such a
‘status’ is the ‘State’” (GA 53: 100/81). Geopolitics is now to be regarded
neither geographically nor metaphysically, but in its purity as a “site”
within the seynsgeschichtliche Urpolitik of Da-sein as it instantiates
itself in the epochal history of archaic be-ing, now on the verge of the

144   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


revolution to a new and radically different inception. This “‘politics’ in the
supreme and authentic sense” (GA 39: 214), what Nietzsche called “grand
politics” that transcends the petty politics of narrow nationalisms, takes
place at the supreme site of radical historical transition displayed by the
Greek tragedy, which glosses the oxymoronic status of the tragic heroine
(Antigone) as hupsipolis apolis, at once far beyond and without home
and site, unhomely, lone-some, un-canny, singled out for lofty greatness
by creating a new home for her people, as well as for the precipitous
destruction which was also the fate of Heidegger’s more contemporary
heroes: Hölderlin, Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Schlageter. Throughout this
“Greek-German mission of transmission [Sendung]” (GA 39: 151) across
the history of be-ing by way of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophoclean
tragedy, Heidegger repeatedly alludes to the counter-essence of the tragic
hero, his hubris in arrogating power (GA 53: 116/93), but without ever
truly confronting the inhuman possibilities of this lonesome superiority
and uncanny “greatness” that yields another kind of hero, or anti-
hero (Creon, Hitler). The Greek-German mission focuses instead on a
repetition of Hölderlin’s transmission of a poetic sense of the “fatherland”
and the “national” and “home” that Heidegger had originally hoped to
find resonating in the folkish mythos of a uniquely German national
socialism, guiding the decisions of its statesmen in the “land of poets
and thinkers.” Politics (or better, statesmanship) here finds its origins
and inspiration in poetizing and thinking. “It is from these two prior
activities that the Dasein of a people is made fully effective as a people
through the state—politics” (GA 39: 51).
From this archaic vantage of Da-sein, Heidegger now criticizes the
Nazi claim of the totalitarian character of the political (which he himself
promoted in 1933!). “These [Nazi] enthusiasts are now suddenly discovering
the ‘political’ everywhere. . . . But the polis cannot be defined ‘politically.’
The polis, and precisely it, is therefore not a ‘political’ concept. . . . Perhaps
the name polis is precisely the word for that realm that constantly became
questionable anew, remained worthy of question, and necessitated certain
decisions whose truth on each occasion displaced the Greeks into the
groundless or the inaccessible” (GA 53: 98–9/80). Aristotle saw clearly that
man was a political animal because he was the animal possessed by speech.
But he did not see the full uncanniness that membership in the polis brings,
far outstripping the rhetorical as well as the political (GA 53: 102/83) of
a people’s state. Hölderlin’s poetic words, “Since we are a conversation/
and can listen to one another” refer to the thoughtful dialogue among
solitary creators (poets, thinkers, statesmen) at the very abysses of be-ing.
Language here is the original institution of be-ing in the violent words of

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 145


poetic origin and not just a means of communication for the sake of quick
and easy agreement, rhetoric. The community of creators is a combative
community of agonistic struggle over the extreme issues of archaic
be-ing, Seyn. Hearing from one another, listening to one another,
reciprocally involves radically placing each other in question over the
radical issues at stake. Rapprochement here is contention, contestation,
pole-mos, war, a war of agonistic spirits. Coming to an understanding is
combat. “Conversation here is not communication, but the fundamental
happening of radical exposure to the thick of beings” (GA 39: 73). It
is precisely this pre-political Geisterkrieg between great and solitary
individuals that Nietzsche called grand politics (große Politik) done in a
grand style, and that Heidegger now turns to in order to launch a new and
other beginning that would serve to arrest the “decline of the West.”
The statesman is often left out in later accounts of this grand conversation
between poets and thinkers since, in the language of the seminar (in its
conclusion, 64), the Führer of the Third Reich broke with the tradition
of the previous two Reichs by not remaining true to the grand tradition
of leadership of the Prussian nobility, expressed succinctly in the maxim
of the royal elector “spoken in the spirit of Luther”: Sic gesturus sum
principatum, ut rem populi esse sciam, non meam privatam (to assume
the mantle of leadership is to understand that the affairs of the people
are not my own private affair). It is the classic political problem with
Plato’s Politeia and its philosopher-rulers already expressed by the Roman
Quintilian: “But who will guard the guardians?” Heidegger never publicly
conceded the need for the political institution of “checks and balances” to
guard against the errancy of absolutist arrogations of power. He continues
to promote the still elitist pre-political Geisterkrieg of grand politics with
great thinkers like Nietzsche in trying to come to terms with the planetary
meaning of the Second World War. The upshot of this historical Besinnung
in the spirit of Nietzsche is the call, not for democracy, which continues to
be a “form of decadence of the state,” but for a new “rank-order” of a ruling
class of a kinder and gentler Übermensch, “poorer, simpler, gentler and
harder, more reticent and self-sacrificing, slower in making resolutions
and more sparing in speech,” in short, a “Caesar with the soul of Christ”17
rather than villainous natures like the Cesare Borgias of Western history
that Nietzsche had earlier preferred. Is this not a continued expression
of hope for enlightened despots who would exercise their will to power
at least instinctively according to the meditative measures of the artist-
tyrants and philosophical legislators that Nietzsche hoped would emerge?
But is this “gentler and harder” guardianship adequate to the task of
preventing the emergence of future “global arch-criminals”?

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On the rhetorical-phenomenological
concept of the political and its
language
The seminar makes virtually a passing reference to the rhetorical sense
of the political and the political power of speech in acknowledging the
ancient Greeks as its source—with Thucydides as the prime example—
and then bringing the discussion up to date by pointing to the power
of the “speeches of the Führer” in acting like a “drummer” to forcefully
drum his points across (62). But the topic of the context is persuasion
“(1) through speech, and (2) through action” and the discussion quickly
focuses on the latter and proclaims that a leader persuades especially
by his deeds, clearly suggesting an admiration of Hitler as a man
of action and doer of deeds, and an acknowledgment of the superior
governing will of the Führer, his vaunted willpower as well as will to
power, which at once grants him the right to rule. “The effective will
is most urgently ‘persuasive’ in acts. The great effective actor is at the
same time the ‘powerful’ one, the ‘ruler,’ whose Dasein and will becomes
determinative—through ‘persuasion,’ that is, when one knows and
recognizes the soaring will of the leader” (62).
So no attempt is made here to analyze the means of persuasion in the
“speeches of the Führer” themselves. But another context suggests that
Hitler had established himself as a master in not only reading, but also
evoking and accentuating the fundamental moods (Grundstimmungen)
of the German people to gain their active cooperation (Zustimmung) in
the grand historical mission (Be-stimmung, Sendung, Auftrag) that he only
gradually revealed to them (GA 38: 129–30/109–10).18 And pathos is one
of the three classical means of persuasion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, along with
the demonstrative power of the words (logos) and the character (ethos) of
the speaker himself, which is essentially coupled to his attunement to the
deeper ethos (custom, usage, tradition) of the indigenous community to and
for which he speaks and his capacity to draw on that ethos insightfully and
wisely in appropriate speech situations in order to motivate that community
to timely and appropriate action. For the final characteristics of the orator
who would win our confidence and trust are the triad of phronesis kai arete
kai eunoia (Rhetoric II, 1378a10), “good sense, goodness/excellence, good
will,” or, more idiomatically, “savvy, solid, and politic.” More elaborately,
our orator must be thoroughly familiar with the subject matter, trustworthy
as a person, and well-disposed toward the audience.19

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 147


As to the deeper ethos of the community, Aristotle compiles and
critiques a series of gnomai (maxims and proverbs, in Rhetoric II, 20–2)
from which the native orator can draw to appeal to his native audience, a
kind of “folk wisdom” built into the doxa of his native language. He also
observes that the kind of demonstrations in the oratorical speech situation
are not a matter of logical proof or scientific procedures. They are instead
enthymemes, the abbreviated syllogisms of rhetoric, literally curt speech
that goes directly “to the heart” (en-thumos): striking examples, memorable
punch lines (what are currently called “sound bites”), emotionally charged
but pithy tales (“the November betrayal,” one of Hitler’s favorites, the “stab
in the back” that led to Germany’s defeat in WWI), narrative “arguments”
that hit home quickly and powerfully. Opinion formation is sometimes
opinion creation, giving currency to a new view, which, however, is never
out of keeping with the prevalent public opinion, doxa. The public speaker
draws upon the way one on the average thinks about things, upon popular
prejudices and suspicions, from which he selects the seldom stated major
premises that found his abbreviated but striking conclusions about how
things look and what seems to be the case, doxa. For the thinking of the
crowd is short-winded, having absolutely no interest in the lengthy process
of getting “at the things themselves.” The Greeks, who loved to talk, had a
strong sense of this most immediate phenomenon of speech, of being with
one another in common gossip, chatter, and idle talk. The human being
even for Aristotle is first of all not the rational animal, but rather the living
being dwelling in ordinary language and idle talk, who has neither the time
nor the inclination to speak primordially about the things themselves.
But getting “back to the things themselves” is precisely what Heidegger
the phenomenologist is especially interested in. We therefore conclude with
a deliberation on a rather unusual and little noted source of the language
needed to get back to the matters themselves, or better, what truly matters
itself, that is in fact alluded to in this seminar. In Session 8, the point is
made that it is necessary for, say, an agrarian people that finds its sustenance
in its rootedness in the soil, its Bodenständigkeit, to expand its space by
interacting with the outside world, thereby expanding its homeland into
the territory of the fatherland, the German state. Through rootedness and
interaction, Bodenständigkeit und Verkehr, such a people achieves its fullness
of being in the state. But years before Bodenständigkeit became tainted from
its usage in Nazi propaganda, Heidegger was using it rather frequently in
a very different sense.20 In his course of SS 1924 on the Basic Concepts of
Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger describes Aristotle’s way of philosophical
concept-formation through reshaping terms that are charged with a certain
experiential meaning in his native language into his more philosophical

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terminology. The most telling example is Aristotle’s word for being, ousia,
which in the Greek language ordinarily means property, possessions and
goods, real estate. This customary meaning is constantly present and
simultaneously accompanies its terminological meaning. As property and
possessions, the how of being here is being in its being-available. In living
in the native language that imparts intelligibility to his world and all that
is experienced within it, Aristotle draws on that natural intelligibility of
experience to form his basic (i.e. root) concepts that accordingly remain
indigenous (bodenständig) to that intelligible world wherein they are
rooted and from which they are drawn (GA 18: 15/13, 18/15, 24/19, 40/29,
270/184, 340/229–30, 354/240). A decade later, Heidegger finds that same
Bodenständigkeit of his native language operative in Hölderlin, the most
German of poets thoroughly possessed, and even obsessed, by his native
language, even as he eavesdrops in the conversation instituted by the early
Greeks and translates their words into the Germanic world.21
Heidegger’s and Hölderlin’s Bodenständigkeit has little to do with Nazi
Bodenständigkeit and a lot to do with getting at the roots of our native,
indigenous, experiential language phenomenologically—getting back
to the matters themselves. Even the 1933–4 seminar moves away from
hard-core Nazi Bodenständigkeit by insisting on its essential linkage to
interaction and thus moderating any attempt to over-exaggerate the
indigenous, native, rooted elements of a people’s way of being.

THE SEMINAR WITHIN THREE CONCEPTS OF THE POLITICAL 149


5 HEIDEGGER IN
THE FOURSOME
OF STRUGGLE,
HISTORICITY, WILL,
AND GELASSENHEIT
Slavoj Žižek

The time between Being and Time and the Nietzsche seminars of the
late 1930s1 is Heidegger’s most productive period of inquiry when, upon
becoming aware of the ultimate failure of the original Being and Time
project, he was looking for a new beginning. With the conclusion of this
work in the Nietzsche seminars, Heidegger established his “great narrative”
of the history of the West as the history of the oblivion of Being, and it
is only at this point that he historicized Will as the defining feature of
modern subjectivity and its violent nihilism. (In his Ereignis-book written
in the mid-1930s, which is usually taken as the beginning of his “mature”
late thought,2 Heidegger still speaks of the “will to Ereignis,” an expression
unthinkable a couple of years later.) It is against this background that
accounts are usually given for Heidegger’s Nazi engagement, which is
most palpable in “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and
State,” Heidegger’s seminar of the Winter semester of 1933–4: he was still
captured by the nihilist decisionism of Will.
The axiom of our reading is that a certain dimension which opened
up another potential path got lost with the elaboration of what one is
tempted to call Heidegger’s late orthodoxy—it is thus urgent to return to
Heidegger’s texts between Being and Time and the Nietzsche seminars and
treat them not just as works of passage, but as works containing a potential
which became invisible with the establishment of Heidegger’s orthodoxy.
True, in some sense, these texts remain Heidegger’s “lowest point,” more
or less coinciding with his Nazi engagement. However, our thesis is that
these same texts open up possibilities which point in an entirely different
dimension, towards a radical emancipatory politics. Although not pursued
by Heidegger himself, these possibilities haunt his texts of the 1930s as an
ominous spectral shadow. In the US presidential elections of 2000, Al Gore,
who was generally taken as the next President, unexpectedly lost to Bush
(as the result of the Florida mess); in the years after, Gore often ironically
referred to himself as “the guy who was once the future US President”—a
case of the future logged into the past, of something that was to-come
and which unfortunately did not come. In the same way, Heidegger of
the mid-1930s “was a future Communist”: Heidegger’s Nazi engagement
was not a simple mistake, but a “right step in the wrong direction,” that is,
Heidegger cannot be simply dismissed as a German Volks-reactionary.3
Let us then take a closer look at “On the Essence and Concept of Nature,
History, and State.” His starting point is an immediate transposition
of the ontological difference between an entity (Seiendes) and its Being
(Sein) onto the relationship between a people and its state: the state is “a
way of Being and a kind of Being of the people. The people is the entity
[Seiendes] whose Being [Sein] is the state” (52). This gesture may appear
problematic within Heidegger’s own field: is “state” really a name for the
Being of a people, for the ontological horizon of how a meaning of Being is
disclosed to a people? Is the state not rather a set of ontic institutions and
practices? If the state is the Being of a people, then “it is after all impossible
to consider the people without a state—the entity without its Being, in a
certain sense” (52). Does this mean that people who do not have a state
are excluded from the history of Being? It is interesting to note here how,
in contrast to the usual perception of him as an advocate of provincial
life, Heidegger clearly opposes homeland as the provincial environs to
fatherland:

The homeland is not to be confused with the fatherland.  .  .  .  We can


speak of the state only when rootedness in the soil is combined with
the will to expansion, or generally speaking, interaction. A homeland
is something I have on the basis of my birth. There are quite particular
relations between me and it in the sense of nature, in the sense of natural
forces. Homeland expresses itself in rootedness in the soil and being
bound to the earth. But nature works on the human being, roots him in
the soil, only when nature belongs as an environment, so to speak, to the
people whose member that human being is. The homeland becomes the

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way of Being of a people only when the homeland becomes expansive,
when it interacts with the outside—when it becomes a state. For this
reason, peoples or their subgroups who do not step out beyond their
connection to the homeland into their authentic way of Being—into the
state—are in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perishing.
This is also the great problem of those Germans who live outside the
borders of the Reich: They do have a German homeland, but they do not
belong to the state of the Germans, the Reich, so they are deprived of
their authentic way of Being. (55–6)

Remember that these lines were delivered in 1934—do they not imply
that the way to resolve this “great problem” is to annex to the Reich the
homeland of the Germans living outside the German state, and thus to
enable them to fully participate in their “authentic way of Being” (what
Hitler was doing a couple of years later)? Heidegger then goes on with
his analysis: what happens to a people (Volk) when it decides to form
a state? “We must then ask what we understand by ‘people,’ for in the
French Revolution they gave the same answer: the people” (38). (Note the
negative tone of this specification: we should inquire further, since it is for
sure that we don’t mean “people” in the sense of the French Revolution.)
In the “decision for a state,” a people determines itself by way of deciding
for a certain kind of state, or, to paraphrase the well-known proverb: tell
me what kind of a state a people has, and I will tell you what kind of
people it is. Humans have consciousness, they do not only interact with
things like animals; they care about them, they knowingly relate to them.
Members of a people thus know and care about their state, they will it. For
a people, their state is not just an instrument of their welfare, but a thing
that matters, a thing they love and are ready to sacrifice for, an object
of their erōs. The constitution of a state is not just a matter of rational
consideration and negotiation, of a social contract which regulates the
welfare of the individuals, but a commitment to a vision of shared life.
If, then, the people is the entity which is in the mode and way of the
state, we should further specify the question: “what character and form
does the people give itself in the state, and what character and form does
the state give to the people?” (38). Heidegger rejects the first answer, the
shape of an organism, as missing the specifically human dimension; the
same holds for the general answer—“order”—since any objects, books,
stones can also be arranged in an order. “But what hits the mark is an
order in the sense of mastery, rank, leadership and following. This leaves
open the question of who is master” (38–9). In its authentic mode, the
relationship of domination and following is grounded in a common will,

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 153


in a commitment to a shared goal: “Only where the leader and the led
bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does
true order arise” (49). Without this shared commitment, which grounds
the readiness to fight, domination turns into exploitation and order is
enforced, externally imposed upon the people. This is what happens in
the modern liberal epoch: state order is reduced to an abstract notion of
order; the state becomes Hobbes’s Leviathan imposed onto the people as
the agent of absolute sovereignty which, instead of expressing the deepest
will of the people, monopolizes all violence and acts as the force of law
constraining the will of individuals. It is only after domination is reduced
to sovereignty that the French Revolution becomes possible, in which
sovereign power is transferred to the opposite pole of the social order, to
the people: “Only on the basis of the notion of sovereignty as absolutism
can we really understand and explain the essence of the French Revolution
as an opposing phenomenon” (58).
In Germany itself, the living unity of the state and the people started
to disintegrate with Bismarck: “We heard that a people, in addition to
needing  a leader, also needs a tradition that is carried on by a political
nobility. The Second Reich fell prey to an irreparable collapse after
Bismarck’s death, and not only because Bismarck failed to create this
political nobility. He was also incapable of regarding the proletariat as a
phenomenon that was justified in itself, and of leading it back into the state
by reaching out to it with understanding” (52). To the obvious counter-
argument that, in Bismarck’s Germany, the nobility continued to play a
much larger public role than in other European states, and, furthermore,
that Bismarck precisely did “reach out” to the proletariat with the
first elements of the welfare state (retirement plans, etc.), Heidegger
would have probably answered that Bismarck’s Germany was a modern
authoritarian-bureaucratic state par excellence. In absolutism as well as in
liberal democracy, the unity of the will between the leader and the people
is thus lost: the state moves between the two extremes, the sovereign
absolute power experienced by the people as an external authority, and
the service or instrument of civil society, fulfilling tasks necessary for the
smooth social life in which individuals follow their interests. In both cases,
the authentic people’s will expressed by their leader is unthinkable: “The
question of the consciousness of the will of the community is a problem in
all democracies, a question that can really become fruitful only when the
will of the leader and the will of the people are recognized in their essence.
Our task today is to direct the fundamental attitude of our communal
Being toward this actuality of people and leader in which both as a single
actuality are not to be separated” (60).

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What is there to add to these lines, spoken in 1934, which explain why
Heidegger endorsed the Nazi takeover? Are we not getting here a rather
simplistic conservative-authoritarian vision which is not even very original,
since it fits perfectly the standard coordinates of the conservative-national
reaction to the Weimar Republic? Indeed, the only open question here
seems to be where, precisely, one should locate Heidegger on the spectrum
delineated by the two extremes of direct Nazism and political naïveté: was
Heidegger (as Emmanuel Faye claims) a full Nazi, did he directly “introduce
Nazism into philosophy,”4 or was he simply politically naïve and got caught
in a political game with no direct foundation in his thought? I nonetheless
propose to follow a different line: neither to assert a direct link between
Heidegger’s thought and Nazism, nor to emphasize the gap that divides
them (i.e. to sacrifice Heidegger as a naïve or corrupted person in order
to save his thought), but to transpose this gap into the heart of his thought
himself, to demonstrate how the space for the Nazi engagement was opened
up by the immanent failure or inconsistency of his thought, by the jumps
and passages which are “illegitimate” in the very terms of this thought. In
any serious philosophical analysis, external critique has to be grounded in
immanent critique: one should show how Heidegger’s external failure (Nazi
engagement) reflects the fact that Heidegger fell short measured by his own
aim and standards.
Such an immanent critique of Heidegger has a long history, beginning
with Habermas’s early attempt to think “Heidegger against Heidegger.”5
There are many pertinent attempts on this road—suffice it to mention
Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation that, already in Being and Time, Heidegger
strangely leaves out the analytic of Mitsein as a dimension constitutive of
Dasein.6 Our starting point will be a different one, something that cannot
but strike the eye of a reader of Heidegger’s texts of the 1930s, especially of
the seminar “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State”:
the preponderance of the topic of Will. The distinction between homeland
and fatherland is that only the latter implies state, while the former is a
mere “province,” and this distinction relies on the fact that “province”
stands for passive rootedness in a particular soil and set of customs, while
state implies active will to expansion and confrontation with neighboring
peoples (Session 8). The province thus lacks political will proper, in contrast
to the state, which is grounded in political will (Session 9). Heidegger’s (in)
famous short text from 1934 “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” grounding
his refusal to accept a university post in Berlin by a reference to a rather
ridiculous figure of the “subject supposed to know,” a simple farmer who
just silently refused by shaking his head when Heidegger asked him for
advice,7 receives thus an unexpected prophetic dimension, pointing towards

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 155


Heidegger’s later advocacy of the province as the site of authentic being
over the state as the domain of the will to power and domination.
How, then, should we interpret this strange persistence of Will which
continues to haunt Heidegger not only through the 1930s, but even
later, when its overcoming becomes the very focus of his thought? In his
detailed study on this topic, Bret Davis8 proposes a twofold reading of this
persistence: first, as a sign of “Gelassenheit as an unfinished project,” an
indication that Heidegger did not succeed in thoroughly “deconstructing”
the Will, so that it is up to us, who continue in his path, to accomplish the
job and draw all the consequences from Gelassenheit; second, as something
that necessitates the distinction “between (1) what Heidegger calls ‘the
will’ of subjectivity, a fundamental (dis)attunement that has risen up and
prevailed in a particular epochal history of metaphysics, and (2) what we
have (interpretively supplementing Heidegger) called ‘ur-willing,’ a non-
historical dissonant excess which haunts the proper essence of non-willing”
(HW 303). Recall how, in his reading of the fragment of Anaximander on
order and disorder, Heidegger considers the possibility that an entity

may even insist [bestehen] upon its while solely to remain more
present, in the sense of perduring [Beständigen].That which lingers
persists [beharrt] in its presencing. In this way it extricates itself from
its transitory while. It strikes the wilful pose of persistence, no longer
concerning itself with whatever else is present. It stiffens—as if this
were the only way to linger—and aims solely for continuance and
subsistence.9

Davis’s thesis is that this “rebellious whiling” refers to a non-historical ur-


willing, a willing which is not limited to the epoch of modern subjectivity
and its will to power.10 One should raise here a more fundamental question:
Is Will the proper name for the “stuckness” which derails the natural
flow? Is the Freudian drive (death drive) not a much more appropriate
name? The  standard philosophical critique of the Freudian drive is that
it is another version of the post-Hegelian “will” first developed by the late
Schelling and Schopenhauer and then reaching its highest formulation in
Nietzsche. Is, however, the Freudian drive really a sub-species of Will?
While Will is the substance of life, its productive presence, which is in
excess over its representations or images, drive is a persistence which goes
on  even when the Will disappears or is suspended: the insistence which
persists even when it is deprived of its living support, the appearance which
persists even when it is deprived of its substance. One has to be very precise
here if we are not to confuse desire and drive: drive is not an infinite longing

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for the Thing which gets fixated onto a partial object—“drive” is this fixation
itself in which resides the “death” dimension of every drive. Drive is not a
universal thrust (towards the incestuous Thing) braked and broken up, it is
this brake itself, a brake on instinct, its “stuckness,” as Eric Santner would
have put it.11 The elementary matrix of drive is not that of transcending all
particular objects towards the void of the Thing (which is then accessible
only in its metonymic stand-in), but that of our libido getting “stuck” onto
a particular object, condemned to circulate around it forever. The basic
paradox here is that the specifically human dimension—drive as opposed
to instinct—emerges precisely when what was originally a mere by-product
is elevated into an autonomous aim: man is not more “reflexive”; on
the contrary, man perceives as a direct goal what, for an animal, has no
intrinsic value. In short, the zero-degree of “humanization” is not a further
“mediation” of animal activity, its re-inscription as a subordinated moment
of a higher totality (say, we eat and procreate in order to develop higher
spiritual potentials), but the radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of
a minor activity into an end-in-itself. We become “humans” when we get
caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and
finding satisfaction in it. We all recall one of the archetypal scenes from
cartoons: while dancing, the cat jumps up into the air and turns around its
own axis; however, instead of falling back down towards the earth’s surface
in accordance with the normal laws of gravity, it remains for some time
suspended in the air, turning around in the levitated position as if caught
in a loop of time, repeating the same circular movement on and on. (One
also finds the same shot in some musical comedies which make use of the
elements of slapstick: when a dancer turns around in the air, s/he remains
up there a little bit too long, as if, for a short period of time, s/he succeeded
in suspending the law of gravity.12 And, effectively, is such an effect not
the ultimate goal of the art of dancing?) In such moments, the “normal”
run of things, the “normal” process of being caught in the imbecilic inertia
of material reality, is for a brief moment suspended; we enter the magical
domain of a suspended animation, of a kind of ethereal rotation which,
as it were, sustains itself, hanging in the air like Baron Munchhausen,
who raised himself from the swamp by grabbing his own hair and pulling
himself up. This rotary movement, in which the linear progress of time is
suspended in a repetitive loop, is drive at its most elementary. This, again, is
“humanization” at its zero-level: this self-propelling loop which suspends/
disrupts linear temporal enchainment.
When one aims at designating the excess of drive, its too-muchness,
one often resorts to the term “animality”: what Gilles Deleuze called
the “becoming-animal” (le devenir-animal) of a human being, which is

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 157


rendered in an exemplary way in some of Kafka’s stories. The paradox is
that one uses the term “animality” for the very fundamental movement
of overcoming animality, the working of animal instincts—drive is not
instinct but its “denaturalization.” There is, however, a deeper logic in this
paradox: from within the established human universe of meaning, its own
founding gesture is invisible, indiscernible from its opposite, so that it has
to appear as its opposite.
For Heidegger, striving based on drive (Trieb) is animalistic, while
human striving is higher because it takes the form of will and action: “An
animal cannot act, because it cannot will.” He also contrasts focused will
to unfocused urge (Drang): “Urge does indeed aim at something, but this
‘something’ is, in contrast to willful striving, not sharply delineated, not
clearly seen and recognized. Will aims at an individual thing, urge aims
at a whole complex of possibilities” (58). Heidegger, then, misses two key
facts: drive too is focused, indeed stuck on a particular object; and this very
stuckness is distinctively human, not animal.
This, then, is—to put it in somewhat simplified terms—the basic
difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that
the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a
properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies
this dimension as that of (specifically (in)human) sexuality, of the “undead”
drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality
the very force which drags humans toward animality and prevents access
to immortality. Therein resides the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis:
not in emphasizing the role of sexuality as such, but in rendering visible the
“meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. The paradox of Christianity
is that, in order to sustain its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-
physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words,
the “truth” of the Christian elevation of human spirituality is the violent
de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human. Unfortunately,
Hegel does the same in his theory of marriage—and Heidegger also:

The Greeks had two words for what we call life: bios and zōē. They
used bios in a twofold sense. First, in the sense of biology, the science
of life. Here we think of the organic growth of the body, glandular
activity, sexual difference, and the like. [. . .] Another sense of bios for
the Greeks is the course of a life, the history of a life, more or less in the
sense that the word “biography” still has for us today. Bios means here
human history and existence—so there can be no bios of animals. Bios,
as human bios, has the peculiar distinction of being able either to stand
above the animal or to sink beneath it. [Session 8, 51]

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If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that sexual difference belongs
to the domain of bios as history, not to the domain of glandular activity,
etc. Far from providing the natural foundation of human lives, sexuality
is the very terrain where humans detach themselves from nature: the idea
of sexual perversion or of a deadly sexual passion is totally foreign to the
animal universe. Once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not
only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very
substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that
gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes
into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion. The becoming-cultural
of sexuality is thus not the becoming-cultural of nature, but the attempt
to domesticate a properly un-natural excess of the meta-physical sexual
passion.
The next, crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just our human
deficiency due to our limitation or finitude, our inability to grasp pure
Being from our partial perspective (where, then, the solution would have
been a kind of Oriental self-effacement, immersion into the primordial
Void): this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife in the very heart of Being
itself. Gregory Fried13 already did a lot of work in his deeply pertinent
reading of Heidegger’s entire opus through the interpretive lenses of his
reference to Heraclitus’ polemos (struggle—in German, Krieg, Kampf, or,
predominantly in Heidegger, Auseinandersetzung) from the latter’s famous
fragment 53: “War is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods
on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand,
the free on the other.” It is not only that the stable identity of each entity
is temporary, that they all sooner or later disappear, disintegrate, return
back to the primordial chaos; their (temporary) identity itself emerges
through struggle, that is, stable identity is something one should gain
through the ordeal of struggle—and even “class struggle” is already here,
in the guise of the struggle which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free
on the other.”
There is, however, one step more to be made with regard to polemos: it
is easy to assert struggle as “father of all” and then to elevate this struggle
itself into the highest harmony, in the sense that Being is the very hidden
concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the struggling
opposite poles harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it in blunt and
simplified terms, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more
radical discord, something which derails the very Harmony of Being?
As Davis perspicuously notices, Heidegger remains here ambiguous and
oscillates between the radically open “strife” of Being and its re-inscription
into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving.14

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 159


Here we arrive at a vertiginous question: what if there is stricto sensu
no world, no disclosure of being, prior to “stuckness”? What if there is no
Gelassenheit which is disturbed by the excess of willing, what if it is this
very excess-stuckness which opens up the space for Gelassenheit?
The primordial fact is thus not the fugue of Being (or the inner peace
of Gelassenheit), which can then be disturbed/perverted by the rise of ur-
willing; the primordial fact is this ur-willing itself, its disturbance of the
“natural” fugue. To put it in yet another way: in order for a human being
to be able to withdraw itself from the full immersion into its life-environs
into the inner peace of Gelassenheit, this immersion has first to be broken
through the excessive “stuckness” of the drive. What if will is not just an
irreducible obstacle, but a positive condition of Gelassenheit?
What we confront here is the problem of historicity at its most radical:
a historicity which goes “all the way down” and cannot be reduced to
the deployment/revelation in history of a non-historical Absolute.15 In a
way, the true Kehre from Being and Time to the late Heidegger is the shift
from ahistorical formal-transcendental analysis to radical historicity.16
This radical historicity reaches its definitive formulation with the shift
from Being to Ereignis. This shift thoroughly undermines the idea of
Being as a kind of super-subject of history, sending its messages/epochs
to man. Ereignis means that Being is nothing but the chiaroscuro of these
messages, nothing but the way it relates to man. Man is finite, and Ereignis
also: the very structure of finitude, the play of Clearing/Concealment
with nothing behind. “It” is just the impersonal it, a “there is.” There is
an un-historical dimension at work here, but what is un-historical is the
very formal structure of historicity itself. It is this radical historicity that
forever separates Heidegger from so-called Oriental thought: in spite
of the similarity of Gelassenheit to nirvana, etc. the attainment of the
zero-level of nirvana is meaningless within the horizon of Heidegger’s
thought—it would have meant something like doing away with all shadow
of concealment.17 Like Kafka’s man from the country who learns that the
Door of the Law is here for him only, Dasein has to experience how Being
needs us, how our strife with Being is Being’s strife with itself.
A closer analysis renders visible how this radical historicity resolves a
deadlock which already haunts the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time,
in which two couples echo in each other without fully overlapping. First,
there is the opposition between zuhanden (ready-to-hand) and vorhanden
(present-at-hand), between being engaged in the world and adopting
towards it an attitude of a disengaged observer, which is an ontologically
secondary mode (we assume theoretical distance when things malfunction,
when our engagement ends in a deadlock). Then, we have the opposition

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between authentic Dasein and its Verfallenheit (fallenness) into das Man,
between choosing one’s project through assuming one’s mortality and the
non-authentic obedience to the anonymous “one does it.” How, exactly,
are these two couples related? Obviously, they form a kind of semiotic
square whose terms are disposed along the two axes of authentic versus
inauthentic and engagement-in-the-world versus withdrawal-from-the-
world: there are two modes of engagement, authentic being-in-the-world
and inauthentic das Man, and there are two modes of withdrawal, authentic
assuming of one’s mortality through anxiety and inauthentic distance of
the subject towards the objectivized “reality.” The catch is, of course, that
the two inauthentic modes overlap (partially, at least): the inauthentic
engagement is the one of technological manipulation in which the subject
stands opposed to “external reality.”
Heidegger sometimes hints at a link between das Man and the
reduction of things to vorhanden objects of theory; this, however,
implies a doubtful presupposition that our most common Verfallenheit
into das Man is structured by the metaphysical categories—almost a
kind of the Hegelian infinite judgment, a coincidence of the opposites:
of the most vulgar and superficial following the predominant trend/
fashion of what “one” is supposed to do and think, and of the high
speculative metaphysical effort of the greatest traditional Western
thinkers from Plato to Hegel. The most succinct definition of modern
technology is precisely that it paradoxically unites Verfallenheit,
immersion into worldly affairs, the will to dominate, with a theoretical
distance: objects of technology are not zuhanden, they are vorhanden,
that is, technological Reason is theoretical, not practical.
The first task of Being and Time is to provide a phenomenological
description of the “immediacy of everyday Dasein,” not yet contaminated by
the traditional metaphysical categorical apparatus: where metaphysics talks
about objects endowed with properties, a phenomenology of everyday life
sees things which are always-already ready-to-use, part of our engagement,
components of a meaningful world-structure; where metaphysics talks
about a subject who relates to the world, opposed to objects in the world,
phenomenology sees a human being always-already in the world, engaged
with things, etc. The idea here is that traditional metaphysics (which
is to be “de(con)structed” by phenomenology) is a kind of secondary
screen, an imposed network obfuscating, covering up, the true structure
of everyday life. The task is thus to drop the metaphysical prejudices and
describe phenomena the way they are in themselves; however, since, in our
predominant philosophical attitude which is already deeply infected by
metaphysics, such a pure phenomenological description is the most difficult

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 161


task, it requires the hard work of getting rid of traditional metaphysics.
Heidegger is looking for the conceptual apparatus that would sustain such
a description in different sources, from the Paulinian early Christianity to
the Aristotelian phronesis.
Heidegger’s own life offers an ironic comment on this tension between
the immediacy of everyday life and its metaphysical misreading: it seems
that, in his last years, he returned to Catholicism, since he gave orders to
be buried as a Catholic, with the Church funeral. So while, in his thought,
he theorized about the immediacy of pre-metaphysical life, in his own
everyday life, he remained faithful to Christianity which, in his theory,
he dismissed as the result of the Roman misreading of the original Greek
disclosure of Being, as the key step in the onto-theological forgetting
of Being, that is, as a metaphysical-ontological screen obfuscating the
immediacy of life. It is thus as if the terms changed places: his immediate
life was metaphysically structured, his theory opened up the structure of
the immediacy of everyday life.18
The problem with Heidegger here is that, paradoxically, he is not
“subjectivist-decisionist” enough: his early “decisionism” is all too much
the obverse of responding to—following—a pre-ordained Destiny. Radical
“subjectivism” (the insistence on the decision—and responsibility for it—as
absolutely mine) and universalism are not opposed, they are two aspects of
the same position of singular universality; what they are both opposed to
is the particular historical Destiny of a community (people). This is where
the possibility of following Hitler enters: when we recognize in him not the
voice of universal Reason, but the voice of a concrete historical Destiny of
the German nation.
The big shift that gradually occurs from the late 1930s onwards
resides in the radical historicization of this opposition between the
universal and the concrete: traditional metaphysics is no longer a false
screen covering up the structure of everyday life, but the elaboration
of the epochal, historically-specific, fundamental “attunement” which
provides the structure of our lives. All great metaphysics ultimately is
a phenomenological ontology of the historical “immediacy of everyday
Dasein”: Aristotle provided the ontology that structured the everyday
experience of Greek citizens; the philosophy of modern subjectivity
provides the structure of willing, domination, and “inner experience,”
which is the structure of our daily lives in modern dynamic capitalist
societies. Stepping out of metaphysics is thus no longer just destroying
the obfuscating network and perceiving the true functioning of the
extra-theoretical everyday life, but a matter of historical change in the
fundamental attunement of the everyday life itself. The turn in philosophy

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from traditional metaphysics to ­post-metaphysical phenomenology is
part of the world-historical turn (Kehre) in Being itself.
The naïve question is to be asked here with all force: how are figures like
Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and Hölderlin, possible, how are their
intimations of a non-metaphysical dimension (of Gelassenheit, of ohne
Warum, of the essence of poetry) possible in the space of such radicalized
historicity? Do they not suggest “the possibility of a non-historical excess to
the history of metaphysics, an excess which both critically calls into question
the seamless rule of its epochs and affirmatively suggests the possibility of
participating in a transition to an other beginning beyond the closure of
metaphysics in the technological will to will”?19
But if being is nothing but the movement of its revealing/disclosure,
then the “forgetting of being” is also and above all self-relating, that is,
the forgetting/withdrawal of this very historical play of revealing and
withdrawal. And if we take this into account, then, as Davis writes, “the
other beginning would not be a complete eradication of the problem of
willing, but rather a vigilant opening to it, a watchful recognition of the
finitude of our selves caught between this problem of willing and the
possibility of non-willing.”20 To avoid paradoxes, we have to make a choice
here: either we perceive the “impulse to persistence”21 as a kind of eternal
temptation of the human mind, akin to the Kantian “radical evil” as the
tendency to the “fall” inscribed into the very human condition, or we fully
assert this “fall” as the grounding gesture of being-human. With regard to
politics, this changes everything.
The first change concerns the status of polemos as constitutive of
politics. Does not Heidegger’s idea that the order implied by state is the order
of domination and servitude strangely recall the classical Marxist notion
of the state as something that is strictly linked to class division? So when
Heidegger, in his reading of Heraclitus’s fragment 53, insists on how the
“struggle meant here is originary struggle, for it allows those who struggle to
originate as such in the first place,”22 is, within the political, the name of this
struggle constitutive of those who struggle, and not just a conflict between
pre-existing social agents, not class struggle? Recall here the lesson of Louis
Althusser: “class struggle” paradoxically precedes classes as determinate
social groups, that is, every class position and determination is already
an effect of the “class struggle.” (This is the reason why “class struggle” is
another name for the fact that “society doesn’t exist”—it does not exist as
a positive order of entities.) That is to say, one should always bear in mind
that, for a true Marxist, “classes” are not categories of positive social reality,
parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle
which cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization.”

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 163


However, Heidegger ignores such a reading of polemos as the struggle
between those who dominate and those who serve them: if homeland
“becomes the way of Being of a people only when the homeland becomes
expansive, when it interacts with the outside—when it becomes a state” (82;
emphasis added), then it is clear that polemos is primarily the strife with the
external enemy. No wonder that, when Heidegger elaborates the essence of
the political, he sympathetically compares his notion of the political with
two other notions: Bismarck’s idea of politics as the art of the possible (not
just opportunistic strategic calculation, but the leader’s ability to grasp the
“essential possibility” offered by a historical constellation and mobilizing
the people for it), and Carl Schmitt’s idea of the antagonistic relationship
friend/enemy, that is, the tension with the external enemy, as the defining
feature of the political.
However, do we here not directly contradict a text by Heidegger which
not only also admits the internal enemy, but explicitly posits it as more
dangerous than the external enemy? Here is the key passage:

An enemy is each and every person who poses an essential threat


to the Dasein of the people and its individual members. The enemy
does not have to be external, and the external enemy is not even
always the more dangerous one. And it can seem as if there were no
enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to find the enemy, to
expose the enemy to the light, or even first to make the enemy, so that
this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may
not lose its edge.
The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein
of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act
against it. The struggle is all the fiercer and harder and tougher, for the
least of it consists in coming to blows with one another; it is often far
more difficult and wearisome to catch sight of the enemy as such, to
bring the enemy into the open, to harbor no illusions about the enemy,
to keep oneself ready for attack, to cultivate and intensify a constant
readiness and to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of
total annihilation.23

First, one cannot but note the ominous implications of this passage—not
only the mention of “total annihilation” of the enemy as the goal, but,
maybe even more, the requirement to “find the enemy, to expose the
enemy to the light, or even first to make the enemy, so that this standing
against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may not lose its edge”
(italics mine). Does this not imply that, if there is no enemy out there to be

164   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


discovered, we are justified in “making” (fabricating) it so that our people’s
movement will not “lose its edge,” that is, so that it will be able to assert its
will and program in contrast to the enemy? Did Hitler not do exactly this
when he “made the enemy” out of Jews? Did Stalin not do exactly this in
fabricating ever new enemy plots to sustain the unity of the Party?
However, it is much more important to bear in mind the radical
difference between this mode of polemos and the authentic (not Stalinist)
notion of class struggle. Even if, in Heidegger’s polemos, the enemy is
“internal,” it remains a foreign intruder who penetrated the very heart of
our people’s Dasein, sapping its innermost possibilities, posing a threat
to its unity. In other words, Heideggerian polemos relates to an enemy (in
this case, the Jew) who is a threat to the hierarchic/organic unity of the
leader and the people, while, from the Marxist perspective, there is no such
unity, that is, every such unity is an ideological fake: polemos is the class
antagonism which cuts across the very heart of a people.
Anti-Semitism “reifies” (embodies in a particular group of people)
the inherent social antagonism: it treats Jewishness as the Thing which,
from outside, intrudes into the social body and disturbs its balance. What
happens in the passage from the position of strict class struggle to the
Fascist anti-Semitism is not just a simple replacement of one figure of
the  enemy (bourgeoisie, the ruling class) with another (Jews); the logic
of the struggle is totally different. In the class struggle, classes themselves
are caught in the antagonism which is inherent to social structure, while
the Jew is a foreign intruder which causes social antagonism, so that all we
need in order to restore social harmony is to annihilate Jews. That is to say,
in exactly the same way Freud’s Wolfman as a child resuscitated the scene
of the parental coitus in order to organize his infantile sexual theories, a
Fascist anti-Semite elevates the Jew into the monstrous Thing that causes
social decadence.
It is worthwhile to recall here Ernst Nolte’s book on Heidegger: the
merit  of Nolte is to approach seriously the task of grasping Nazism as a
feasible political project, of trying to re-create “the story the Nazis were
telling themselves about themselves,” which is a sine qua non of its effective
criticism; the same has to be done for Stalinism. Nolte also formulated the
basic terms and topics of the “revisionist” debate whose basic tenet is to
“objectively compare” fascism and Communism: Fascism and even Nazism
were ultimately a reaction to the Communist threat and a repetition of its
worst practices (concentration camps, mass liquidations of political enemies):
“Could it be the case that the National Socialists and Hitler carried out an
‘Asiatic’ deed [the Holocaust] only because they considered themselves and
their kind to be potential or actual victims of a [Bolshevik] ‘Asiatic’ deed?

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 165


Didn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ precede Auschwitz?”24 Reprehensible as it
was, Nazism was thus temporally what appeared after Communism; it was
also, with regard to its content, an excessive reaction to the Communist
threat. Furthermore, all the horrors committed by Nazism merely copied
the horrors already committed by Soviet Communism: the reign of the
secret police, concentration camps, genocidal terror. . . . Nolte’s conclusion
is thus that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and
that the difference concerns only the empirical agents which fill in the same
structural places (“Jews” instead of “class enemy,” and so on and so forth).
One should fully concede Nolte’s central point: yes, Nazism was in fact a
reaction to the Communist threat; it did indeed just replace class struggle
with the struggle between Aryans and Jews—the problem, however, resides
in this “just,” which is by no means as innocent as it appears. We are dealing
here with displacement (Verschiebung) in the Freudian sense of the term:
Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and thereby obfuscates
its true site. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism
is the form, and it is in this change of the form that the Nazi ideological
mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalized into the racial
conflict, the (class) antagonism inherent to the social structure is reduced
to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of
the Aryan community. The difference between fascism and Communism is
thus “formal-ontological”: it is not (as Nolte claims) that we have in both
cases the same formal antagonistic structure, where only the place of the
Enemy is filled in with a different positive element (class, race). In the case
of race, we are dealing with a positive naturalized element (the presupposed
organic unity of Society is perturbed by the intrusion of the foreign body),
while class antagonism is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social
field—fascism thus obfuscates antagonism, translating it into a conflict of
positive opposed terms.
Let us take Stalinism at its most brutal: the de-kulakization of the early
1930s. Stalin’s slogan was that “kulaks as a class should be liquidated”—
what does this mean? It can mean many things—from taking away their
property (land), to forcibly removing them to other areas (say, from
Ukraine to Siberia), or simply into gulag—but it did not mean simply to kill
them all. The goal was to liquidate them as a class, not as individuals. Even
when the countryside population was purposefully starved (millions of
dead in Ukraine, again), the goal was not to kill them all, but to break their
backbone, to brutally crush their resistance, to show them who was the
master. The difference—minimal, but crucial—persists here with regard to
the Nazi de-Judaization, where the ultimate goal effectively was to annihilate
them as individuals, to make them disappear as a race. In this sense, then,

166   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


Ernst Nolte is right: Nazism was a repetition, a copy of Bolshevism—in
Nietzsche’s terms, it was a profoundly re-active phenomenon.
As in the case of sexual difference, then, Heidegger ignores the properly
ontological status of class struggle: class struggle is a strife/antagonism
which cannot be reduced to an ontic conflict, since it overdetermines the
horizon of appearance of all ontic social entities. It is class struggle (social
antagonism), not state, which is the mode of Being of a people—state is
here to obfuscate this antagonism. Such a radicalized notion of polemos
as class struggle brings us to the “question of the consciousness of the will
of the community” as “a problem in all democracies” (60). Heidegger’s
idea of political commitment is the unity of people and their leader, who
mobilizes them in a shared task of struggle against the (external) enemy,
bringing them all together (“accepting” even the proletariat). If, however,
we assert class struggle as the polemos constitutive of political life, then the
problem of the common political will appears in a radically different way:
how to build the collective will of the oppressed in the class struggle, the
emancipatory will which brings the class polemos to its extreme. (And was
this will not at work already in the Ancient Greek democracy, was it not
operative at the very core of the Athenian polis?) This collective will is the
crucial component of Communism that “seeks to enable the conversion of
work into will. Communism aims to complete the transition, via the struggle
of collective self-emancipation, from a suffered necessity to autonomous
self-determination. It is the deliberate effort, on a world-historical scale,
to universalize the material conditions under which free voluntary action
might prevail over involuntary labor or passivity. Or rather: communism
is the project through which voluntary action seeks to universalize the
conditions for voluntary action.”25 The exemplary case of such activity is
given by

people like Robespierre, Toussaint L’Ouverture or John Brown:


confronted with an indefensible institution like slavery, when the
opportunity arose they resolved to work immediately and by all
available means for its elimination. Che Guevara and Paulo Freire would
do the same in the face of imperialism and oppression. Today Dr. Paul
Farmer and his ‘Partners in Health’, in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere,
adopt a somewhat similar approach when confronted by indefensible
inequalities in the global provision of healthcare. In each case the basic
logic is as simple as could be: an idea, like the idea of communism, or
equality, or justice, commands that we should strive to realize it without
compromises or delay, before the means of such realization have been
recognized as feasible or legitimate, or even ‘possible’. It is the deliberate

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 167


striving towards realization itself that will convert the impossible into
the possible, and explode the parameters of the feasible.26

Such collective activity—which does not belong to the same space as


technological Gestell (enframing)—realizes “this actuality of people and
leader in which both as a single actuality are not to be separated” (85). Along
these lines, Badiou recently27 proposed a rehabilitation of the Communist-
revolutionary “cult of personality”: the real of a Truth-Event is inscribed
into the space of symbolic fiction through a proper name (of a leader)—
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara.  .  .  .  Far from signaling the corruption
of a revolutionary process, the celebration of the leader’s proper name is
immanent to the process: to put it in somewhat crude terms, without the
mobilizing role of a proper name, the political movement remains caught
within the positive order of Being rendered by the conceptual categories—
it is only through the intervention of a proper name that the dimension of
“demanding the impossible,” of changing the very contours of what appears
as possible, arises.
What if this “essential possibility” of Communism, ignored by Heidegger
himself,28 and not his continuing hidden fidelity to Fascism, is the truth
of his ill-famed doubt about democracy from his posthumously published
Spiegel interview: “How can any political system be coordinated to the
technological age, and which political system would that be? I know of no
answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.”29 How are
we to read this statement? The obvious way seems to be that, for Heidegger,
a more adequate political response to the technological age than liberal
democracy is probably a kind of “totalitarian” socio-political mobilization
in the Nazi or Soviet style; the no less obvious counter-argument to such a
position is that it ignores how liberal-democratic freedom and individualist
hedonism mobilizes individuals much more effectively, turning them
into workaholics: “One can wonder as to whether Heidegger was right to
suggest, as he did in the Der Spiegel interview, that democracy is perhaps
not the most adequate response to technology. With the collapse of fascism
and of soviet communism, the liberal model has proven to be the most
effective and powerful vehicle of the global spread of technology, which
has become increasingly indistinguishable from the forces of Capital.”30 But
it would also be easy to reply that the rise of the so-called “capitalism with
Asian values” in the last decade unexpectedly justifies Heidegger’s doubt—
this is what is so unsettling about today’s China: the suspicion that its
authoritarian capitalism is not merely a remainder of our past, the repetition
of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, but a sign of the future. What if it

168   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


signals that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and
motive force of economic development, but its obstacle?
But what if we take the risk of reading Heidegger’s statement on
democracy in a different way: the problem he is struggling with is not simply
which political order fits best the global spread of modern technology;
it is, rather, if anything can be done, at the level of political activity, to
counter the danger to being-human that lurks in modern technology. It
never entered Heidegger’s mind to propose—say, in a liberal mode—that
the failure of the Nazi engagement is merely the failure of a certain kind
of engagement which conferred on the political the task of carrying out
“a project of onto-destinal significance,” so that the lesson of this failure
is simply that we should endorse a more modest political engagement.
Therein resides the limitation of what one may call “liberal Heideggerians”
(from Hubert Dreyfus to John Caputo): from the failure of Heidegger’s
political engagement, they draw the conclusion that one should renounce
the prospect of a political engagement with destinal ontological pretensions
and engage in “merely ontic,” modest, pragmatic politics, leaving destinal
questions to poets and thinkers.
The answer of traditional Heideggerians to such a reading would
have been, of course, that, in advocating the Communist radicalization
of Heidegger’s politics, we are falling into the worst trap of the modern
subjectivist decisionism of Will, replacing one (Fascist) totalitarianism
with its Left mirror-image which is in a way even worse, since, in its
“internationalism,” it endeavors to erase the last traces of “provincial”
homeland, that is, to render people literally rootless (a feature it shares with
capitalist liberalism). However, the core of the problem does not reside
here, it rather concerns the sphere of capitalist economic life: crazy, tasteless
even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent
enough, that his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really
act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, that is, he acted so that
nothing would really change, he staged a big spectacle of pseudo-Revolution
so that the capitalist order could survive. Hannah Arendt was right when
(implicitly against Heidegger) she pointed out that Fascism, although a
reaction to bourgeois banality, remains its inherent negation, that is, within
the horizon of bourgeois society: the true problem of Nazism is not that it
“went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exerting total power, but
that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting out
which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.
Hitler’s grand gestures of despising the bourgeois self-complacency, etc.
were ultimately in the service of enabling this complacency to continue: far
from effectively disturbing the much despised “decadent” bourgeois order,

STRUGGLE, HISTORICITY, WILL, AND GELASSENHEIT 169


far from awakening the Germans from the immersion into its complacency,
Nazism was a dream which enabled them to go on.
The fact remains that, as we tried to indicate apropos the status of
polemos and collective will, Heidegger does not follow his own logic to the
end when he endorses the Fascist compromise. To put it in the terms of
the well-known metaphor, Fascism wants to throw out the dirty water (of
liberal-democratic individualism that comes with capitalism) and keep the
baby (of capitalist relations), and the way it tries to do this is, again, to throw
out the dirty water (of a radical polemos which cuts across the entire social
body) and keep the baby (of corporatist unity of the people). What one
should do is the exact opposite: throw out both babies (capitalist relations
as well as their corporatist pacification) and keep the dirty water of radical
struggle. The paradox is thus that, in order to save Heidegger from Nazism,
we need more will and struggle and less Gelassenheit.31 This, then, is our true
choice when we are reading Heidegger’s “pro-Nazi” seminars from 1933–4:
do we engage in sanctimonious criticism and gloat in the Besserwisserei
of our later historical position, or do we focus on the missed potentials
in these seminars, raising the difficult question of how to resuscitate them
in our era when, after the big failure of the twentieth century Communist
project, the problems to which Communism tried to answer (radical social
conflicts, collective will) are still here.

170   NATURE, HISTORY, STATE


Notes

Introduction
1 The official documents and speeches produced by Heidegger as rector
have been published in Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse
eines Lebensweges, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (henceforth
GA) vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000) and
in Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski, eds, Heidegger und der
Nationalsozialismus I: Dokumente, Heidegger-Jahrbuch IV (Freiburg: Karl
Alber, 2009). The two lecture courses that he delivered in 1933–4 have
been published as Sein und Wahrheit, ed. Hartmut Tietjen (GA 36/37,
2001), translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as Being and Truth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
2 Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the
Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye’s book was originally published
in French in 2005. His interpretation of the seminar, in the context of
Heidegger’s other writings and activities of the time, takes it as evidence
of the irredeemably Nazistic character of Heidegger’s lifelong views,
which in Faye’s opinion do not even merit the title of philosophy.
3 “‘Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat’: Übung aus
dem Wintersemester 1933/34,” in Denker and Zaborowski, eds, Heidegger
und der Nationalsozialismus I, 53–88.
4 Seminare: Hegel—Schelling, ed. Peter Trawny, GA 86 (2011), 898.
5 Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 384; Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), 436; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis
J. Schmidt (Albany: SUNY, 2010), 366. It is possible to read Being and
Time as an essentially political work in an ontological guise. See Johannes
Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s “Being
and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and William
H. F. Altman, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: “Being and
Time” as Funeral Oration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012).
6 The Rectoral Address and some political texts of the period are translated
in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 2nd
edn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
7 Being and Truth, 73.
8 E. G. Kolbenheyer, Lebenswert und Lebenswirkung der Dichtkunst in
einem Volke (Munich: Albert Langen-Georg Müller, 1935). Kolbenheyer
argues that literature must contribute to the “self-assertion of a people”
(5), for each people must form its specific “life-domain” (7) based on
communal realities that “constitute the sense and value of our existence”
(16). Art must be judged in terms of whether it supports the “struggle
for existence” of the nation to which the artist owes his life (20). The
“struggle of life against inferior humanity” requires us to suppress
“devastating art” (21).
9 Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, ed. Günter Seubold
(GA 38, 1998); Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language,
trans. Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna (Albany: SUNY Press,
2009).
10 Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder,
eds, Heidegger on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”: The 1934–5 Seminar and
Interpretative Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). The German text is
included in GA 86.
11 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” ed. Susanne Ziegler
(GA 39, 1980), 290–4.
12 Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 152;
Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2nd
edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
13 The original lecture courses on Nietzsche are Der Wille zur Macht als
Kunst, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (GA 43, 1985); Nietzsches metaphysische
Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des
Gleichen, ed. Marion Heinz (GA 44, 1986); Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen
zur Macht als Erkenntnis, ed. Eberhard Hanser (GA 47, 1989); and
Nietzsche: Der europäische Nihilismus, ed. Petra Jaeger (GA 48, 1986).
The version of these and related texts published in 1961 can be found in
Nietzsche I, ed. Brigitte Schillbach (GA 6.1, 1996) and Nietzsche II, ed.
Brigitte Schillbach (GA 6.2, 1997); these volumes have been translated
as Nietzsche, 4 vols, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row,
1979–87). For examples of the depoliticization of the Nietzsche lectures
in their postwar form, see the Appendix to Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s
Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000).
14 Zu Ernst Jünger, ed. Peter Trawny (GA 90, 2004).
15 Richard Polt, “Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret
Resistance,” Interpretation 35:1 (Fall 2007): 11–40.
16 “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a
Younger and an Older Man,” in Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret
W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

172   NOTES
17 Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic
Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2012), 27.
18 Introduction to Metaphysics, German p. 22.
19 Ibid., German p. 127. On this theme cf. Richard Capobianco, Engaging
Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), Chapter 3.
Capobianco shows that Heidegger’s later work emphasizes home over
homelessness.
20 Heidegger’s statement is a mild version of a cliché that Schmitt was
to express with full anti-Jewish venom during the war: “The real
misunderstanding of the Jewish people with respect to everything that
concerns soil, land, and territory is grounded in its style of political
existence. The relation of a people to a soil formed by its own work of
settlement and culture and to the concrete forms of power that arise from
this is incomprehensible to the mind of the Jew. He does not, moreover,
even wish to understand this, but rather only to dominate these
relations conceptually in order to set his own concepts in their place.
‘Comprendre c’est détruire,’ as a French Jew once betrayed of himself.
These Jewish authors have of course as little created the hitherto existing
spatial theories as they have created anything else. But they were, here as
elsewhere, an important fermenting agent in the dissolution of concrete,
spatially determined orders”: Carl Schmitt, “The Großraum Order”
(1941), in Writings on War, trans. and ed. Timothy Nunan (Cambridge:
Polity, 2011), 121–2, translation modified.

Session 1
1 The original consists of 19 unnumbered pages in Latin script. The protocol
was written by Karl Siegel. [Notes are by editors Alfred Denker and Holger
Zaborowski, except translators’ notes, which are enclosed in brackets.]
2 [Dasein, literally “Being there,” usually means “existence” in general. In
Heidegger it refers to the distinctively human way of Being. We follow
most translators in leaving the word in German.]

Session 2
1 The original consists of eight unnumbered pages in German script. The
protocol was written by Wolfgang Feuerschutze.

NOTES 173
Session 3
1 The original consists of ten unnumbered pages in German script. The
protocol was written by Marliese Kremer (?).

Session 4
1 The original consists of seven numbered pages in German script. The
protocol was written by Fritz Kaulbach.
2 [Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A33/B49. Kant writes “all [alle] intuitions,”
not “alone [allein] intuitions”; the allein is found only in the text edited by
Benno Erdmann (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1878).]
3 [Perhaps a reference to Heidegger’s contemporaneous lecture course “On
the Essence of Truth,” where earlier in the semester he had argued, “The
animal does not speak because it cannot speak. And it cannot because it
does not need to speak . . . .  it is not compelled by need”: Being and Truth,
trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010), 80.]

Session 5
1 The original consists of 14 unnumbered pages in German script.
The author is not indicated.

Session 6
1 The original consists of six pages in Roman script. The protocol was
written by Ital Gelzer.
2 [Reading Verengungen, with Klaus Stichweh’s transcription, for
Abweichungen in the Heidegger-Jahrbuch text. We have relied on the
Stichweh transcription as well as Marion Heinz’s reading of the original
manuscript to correct some passages in the Heidegger-Jahrbuch text in the
remainder of this session.]

174   NOTES
3 [Reading begrenzten for bevorzugten.]
4 [Reading daß “politisch” gleichgesetzt werden konnte etwa mit “gerissen,”
und Politiker einen bedeutete, der verstand, mit parlamentarischen Kniffen
etwas anzudrehen.]
5 [Reading Mensch for Kampf.]
6 [Reading und das um so ausgesprochener, je mehr sie durch gewaltige
Leistungen erweitert wurden und somit eben spezialisiert wurden. In den
Folgezeiten aber ließ man die sämtlichen Kulturgebeite nur immer weiter
ins Unübersehbare auseinanderwachsen.]
7 [Reading naive for gewisse.]
8 [Reading nur die verstehen, welche den Stellungsbefehl erhalten, und auch
etwas anderes als die bloße Summe.]

Session 7
1 The original consists of 12 2/3 pages in Latin script. The protocol was
written by Ingeborg Schroth.
2 The last three words were added in pencil by Heidegger.
3 The last five words were added in pencil by Heidegger.
4 [Roman consul in 503 BC. According to Livy’s history of Rome (2.32),
Menenius calmed a plebeian rebellion by citing Aesop’s fable in which
the members of the body rebel against the belly, but then realize they
are starving. See also Shakespeare, Coriolanus 1.1; Marx, Capital, vol. I,
chap. 14, sec. 5.]

Session 8
1 The original consists of 21 unnumbered pages in Latin script. The
protocol was written by Helmut Ibach.

Session 9
1 The original consists of ten numbered pages in Latin script. The protocol
was written by Emil Schill.

NOTES 175
Session 10
1 The original consists of 12 numbered pages in Latin script. The author is
not indicated.
2 [Hitler was known as “the drummer” (der Trommler) in the early years of
the Nazi party.]
3 [Jean Bodin, 1529/30–96.]
4 The reference is to the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I of Brandenburg
(1620–88). The sentence quoted was inscribed over the portal of the royal
palace in Berlin. Cf. G. Oestreich, “Calvinismus, Neustoizismus und
Preußentum,” in Otto Büsch and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds, Moderne
Preußische Geschichte 1648–1947: Eine Anthologie (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1981), 1268–93, 1283.

1. Volk and Führer


1 Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. Autour des
séminaires inédits de 1933–1935 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). I will cite
the English translation by Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009). For the debate around Faye’s book, cf. Jürg Altwegg,
“Wirkt sein Gift bis heute? Frankreich debattiert über Heidegger als
Hitlers Philosoph,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 21, 2005, 31;
Emmanuel Faye, “Der Nationalsozialismus in die Philosophie: Sein,
Geschichtlichkeit, Technik und Vernichtung in Heideggers Werk,” in
Hans J. Sandkühler, ed., Vergessen? Verdrängt? Erinnert? Philosophie
im Nationalsozialismus (Bremen: University of Bremen, 2008), 53–73;
Emmanuel Faye, “Wie die Nazi-Ideologie in die Philosophie einzog,”
Zeit Online 34/2005 (www.zeit.de/2005/34/AntwortHeidegger,
accessed April 16, 2009); Anton M. Fischer, Martin Heidegger: Der
gottlose Priester, Psychogramm eines Denkers (Zürich: Rüffer und Rub,
2008); Kurt Flasch, “Er war ein nationalsozialistischer Philosoph,”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 14, 2005, 16; Hassan Givsan, Heidegger –
das Denken der Inhumanität: Eine ontologische Auseinandersetzung
mit Heideggers Denken (Würzburg: Königshauser & Neumann, 1998);
Walter Hanser, “Eine Wurzelbehandlung,” Junge Welt, May 27, 2005, 12;
Reinhard Linde, Bin ich, wenn ich nicht denke? Studien zur Entkräftung,
Wirkung und Struktur totalitären Denkens (Herbolzheim: Centaurus,
2003); Reinhard Linde, “Devil’s Power’s Origin: Zur Problematik
der ‘Einführung des Nazismus in die Philosophie’ durch Heidegger,”

176   NOTES
Aufklärung und Kritik 2/2008, 175–92; Gabriele Meierding, “Die Sucht
nach Größe,” Spiegel Online, November 6, 2005 (www.spiegel.de/kultur/
literatur/0,1518,383197,00.html, accessed April 16, 2009); Thomas
Meyer, “Denker für Hitler?” Zeit Online 30/2005 (www.zeit.de/2005/30/
Heidegger, accessed April 16, 2009); Henning Ritter, “Aus dem eigenen
Dasein sprach schon das deutsche,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
October 29, 2005, 45; Bernhard H. F. Taureck, “Martin Heidegger
und das Ende einer Hermeneutik der Unschuldigsprechung,” Freitext:
Kultur- und Gesellschaftsmagazin, April 2006, 41; Dieter Thomä, “Alle
zwanzig Jahre wieder: Eine neue französische Debatte über Heidegger
und den Nationalsozialismus,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 30, 2005;
Robin Celikates, “Heidegger and National Socialism: New Contributions
to an Old Debate,” H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
March 2006.
2 Faye, Heidegger, xxiv. On the various interpretations of Heidegger’s
engagement in National Socialism, see Thomä’s concise survey in Dieter
Thomä, ed., Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart/
Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2003), 141–62, 159ff. Cf. also Marion Heinz and
Goran Gretić, eds, Philosophie und Zeitgeist im Nationalsozialismus
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006): on Heidegger, see Marion
Heinz, “Die Politisierung der Philosophie: Heideggers Vorlesung ‘Welt,
Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit’ (WS 1929/30),” 269–90; Theodore Kisiel, “The
Essential Flaw in Heidegger’s ‘Private National Socialism,’” 291–311;
Beate Obst, “Heideggers seynsgeschichtlicher Antikommunismus,”
313–26.
3 Heidegger’s papers continue to be only partially available for research:
texts that have already appeared in print may be used without further
ado; in order to inspect other manuscripts one needs special permission
from the administrator of his Nachlass, who must also agree to any use of
these manuscripts with the purpose of publication. When I was visiting
the Marbach Literary Archive in May 1999, I was mistakenly handed
a folder containing the protocols of the seminar on Nature, History,
and State. This is notable because until then, this folder was completely
unknown to scholarship. In the reading room I began to prepare a
handwritten copy of the text—a photocopy could not be made. Shortly
thereafter I sent a typed version of this copy to my colleagues Theodore
Kisiel and Alfred Denker. As far as I know, my partial copy was then
supplemented by Klaus Stichweh, and this completed text circulated
among a few scholars. It was difficult to publish about this seminar in
Germany for legal reasons. It is all the more gratifying that the text could
finally appear in 2009.
4 Cf. Faye, Heidegger, xxiv–xxv.

NOTES 177
5 Ibid., 113.
6 This makes it clear that the bios politikos can no longer be taken as
the entelecheia of the human being qua rational animal, and that the
character of political community can no longer be defined on the basis
of this human essence. If Heidegger substitutes his concept of temporal
Dasein for the concept of the rational animal, this replacement of essentia
by temporal existence permeates the essence of the political community
in which Dasein is supposed to be fulfilled. Just as individual existence in
Being and Time comes to a resolution by taking over itself in its past on
the basis of its future, resolving on particular possibilities of existence in
the moment of vision, now we must decide on the essence of the political
community as telos of Dasein on the basis of the historical moment that is
grounded in future and past.
7 Faye notes that Heidegger’s reflections on political history rely on
Stadelmann: Faye, Heidegger, 123–8.
8 Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian
View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968). Cf. Sabine Doyé, “Deutsche Philosophie und
Zeitgeschichte,” in Heinz and Gretić, eds, Philosophie und Zeitgeist im
Nationalsozialismus, 215–31.
9 Heidegger himself distinguishes himself in this seminar from Carl
Schmitt’s understanding of the political on the basis of the friend-enemy
relationship with the following remark: “a decisive aspect of this view is
that the political unit does not have to be identical with state and people”
(Session 8, 46).
10 Faye, Heidegger, xxv.
11 See Marion Heinz, “‘Schaffen.’ Revolution der Philosophie. Zu Heideggers
Nietzsche-Interpretation (1936/37),” in Alfred Denker and Holger
Zaborowski, eds, Heidegger und Nietzsche, Heidegger-Jahrbuch 2
(Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 2005), 174–92; Heinz, “Politisierung
der Philosophie,” in Heinz and Gretić, Philosophie und Zeitgeist im
Nationalsozialismus, 269–90.
12 See Heidegger’s lecture course of 1937 Nietzsches metaphysische
Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr
des Gleichen, ed. Marion Heinz, Gesamtausgabe vol. 44 (Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986). A translation of the postwar
edited version of the text is available as Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal
Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1984).
13 [Wende der Not: a play on Notwendigkeit, “necessity.” See Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, “On the Great Longing.” Cf.
Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, 207. —Translators]

178   NOTES
2. Heidegger in purgatory
1 See, for example, Heidegger’s postwar exchange with Herbert Marcuse,
available in translation in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy:
A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 152–64.
2 On the distinction between positive and negative implication, see Julian
Young, Heidegger, Nazism, Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
3 A noteworthy example is Hannah Arendt, whose portrait, “Martin
Heidegger at Eighty,” combines an admiring encomium to Heidegger
as a teacher with a highly ambivalent assessment of Heidegger as an
other-worldly Platonist whose absorption with philosophical matters
distorted his understanding of this-worldly political events. For a
summary of this verdict, see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger:
The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995),
esp. 230 and ff.
4 Victor Klemperer, LTI-Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines
Philologen, 2nd edn (originally published in 1947) (Berlin: Aufbau
Verlag, 1949); in English as The Language of the Third Reich: LTI-
Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady
(London: Continuum Press, 2006); also see Anke Sißmeier, Der
Eingriff in die sprachliche Alltagswelt . . . Propagandistische Sprache im
Nationalsozialismus als erfolgsorientierte Kommunikationsform (GRIN
Verlag, 2003).
5 Hereafter cited with reference to the pagination of the translation in this
volume.
6 See Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin
Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 5.
7 Quoted from Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New
York Review of Books 35:10 (June 16, 1988), who takes this from Guido
Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und
Denken (Bern, 1962), 137.
8 See Heidegger’s claim from his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, where
he says: “My judgement was this: insofar as I could judge things, only
one possibility was left, and that was to attempt to stem the coming
development by means of constructive powers which were still viable.”
Quoted from “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten: Der Philosoph Martin
Heidegger über sich und sein Denken,” in Der Spiegel, as translated in
English as “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin
Heidegger (1966),” in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 91–116; quote
from 92.

NOTES 179
9 As quoted by Hugo Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins (1984),
116; cited by Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis.”
10 Martin Heidegger, “German Men and Women!” in Wolin,
The Heidegger Controversy, 47.
11 Ibid.
12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), hereafter abbreviated as
BT. German citations from Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1967), hereafter abbreviated as SZ. Quoted here from BT, 32;
SZ, 12.
13 BT, 191–2; SZ, 150–1.
14 See my remarks on these statements, above.
15 Note that the last three words “and brings about” were added in pencil by
Heidegger when he read the student’s protocol.
16 Heidegger’s original phrase was: “Bildung ist ganz gleichgültig, sehen
Sie nur seine wunderbaren Hände an!” As quoted by Karl Jaspers,
Philosophische Autobiographie. Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Munich: Piper,
1977), 101.
17 For Zuhandenheit see esp. the section on “Involvement and Significance”
in BT, 114–22; SZ, 76–83.
18 See the account of the guardians in Plato, Republic 371e and ff.
19 Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, ed. Hans Saner (Munich:
Piper, 1978), 183.
20 Martin Heidegger, “The Self Assertion of the German University,” in
Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds, Martin Heidegger and National
Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 5–15.
21 For Heidegger’s ambition to transform education, see Iain Thomson,
Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
22 See esp. BT, 135–48; SZ, 102–13.
23 See, for example, BT, 91–5; SZ, 63–6.
24 For the text and analysis, see Ulrich Sieg, “Die Verjudung des deutschen
Geistes,” Die Zeit, December 22, 1989, Feuilleton, 52.
25 Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 166.
26 Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 167, my emphasis.
27 It is worth noting that such a view of intuitive belonging ignores
Heidegger’s own philosophical view that collective identification is
conditional not merely upon thrownness (Geworfenheit) but also upon
projection (Entwurf). Because Dasein is a being that necessarily takes
a stand on its own existence, its communal-historical being is available
only insofar as it has resolved upon the heritage into which it is thrown.
The seminar betrays this requirement and endorses a portrait of
Dasein that is far too passive and objectivistic. On the requirement of
resoluteness, see, for example, BT, 438; SZ, 386.

180   NOTES
28 See Graham Parkes, “Thoughts on the Way: Being and Time via Lao-
Chuang,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 105–44.
29 BT, 16.
30 BT, §23, 138ff.; SZ 104ff.
31 Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 92.
32 Ibid.
33 On the method of formal indication, see, for example, Heidegger’s
nuanced effort to explain how the first-person pronoun “I” can be used
even in an ontological inquiry that purports to work out its meanings
prior to any metaphysical commitments regarding the ontic self: BT,
151–2; SZ, 116–7.
34 Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review of
Books, October 21, 1971.
35 Heidegger, “Letter to Karl Löwith on His Philosophical Identity” (August
19, 1921), in Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, eds, Becoming
Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2007), 99–102; quote from 99–100; my
emphasis on “this Dasein is one with existence.”
36 For Heidegger’s idea of “deworlding”, see my essay “Science, Realism, and
the Unworlding of the World,” in Mark Wrathall and Hubert Dreyfus,
eds, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), 425–44.
37 On the themes of homelessness and homecoming, see Richard
Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2010), esp. 52ff.
38 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); see, for
example, the remark on philosophy as an adventure homeward like that
of Ulysses, “Preface,” 27.
39 Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous, or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry,” in The
Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Wilson Croker, vol. 10. (London: John
Murray, 1886), 344–409.
40 Heidegger, “The Self Assertion of the German University,” 4.
41 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991).
42 For another contemporary illustration of this interrogation of “spirit” see
the summer semester 1933 lecture course, “The Fundamental Question
of Philosophy,” in Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), esp. 3–6.
43 For more on this theme, see my critical review of Emmanuel Faye,
Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of
the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–35, trans. Michael B. Smith (New

NOTES 181
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), published online in Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews, March 12, 2010, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24316/
44 Karl Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome,” in Wolin, The
Heidegger Controversy.

3. Who belongs? Heidegger’s


philosophy of the Volk in 1933–4
1 Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2005), 3. This book should be required reading for anyone writing
on Heidegger and the Volk.
2 See Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003), xv.
3 Alfred Rosenberg, Krisis und Neubau Europas (Berlin: Jünker und
Dünnhaupt, 1934). Quoted in Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West
(New York: Viking Press, 1938), 522.
4 The rivalry between Krieck and Heidegger should not be
underemphasized. See Gerhard Ritter, “Die Universität Freiburg im
Hitlerreich,” in Die Freibürger Philosophische Fakultät 1920–1960
(Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2006), 782.
5 Joseph Goebbels, “Fighting League for German Culture,” in The Weimar
Sourcebook, eds, Anton Kaess et al. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 143.
6 On the Rosenberg Amt, see Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg
und seine Gegner. Zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen
Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1970). As soon as Walter
Gross was appointed to the dictatorship of the Office of Racial Policy
(Rassenpolitisches Amt des NSDAP) he placed Heidegger under
scrutiny. Erich Jaensch obliged with a vicious report. See Hugo Ott,
Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus,
1988), 240–6; trans. Alan Blunden, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 253–360. See also Michael Grüttner’s
correction of Ott in “Das Scheitern der Vordenker,” in Geschichte und
Emanzipation. Festschrift fur Reinhard Rürup, eds, M. Grüttner et al.
(Frankfurt: Campus, 1999), 460–1.
7 See Peter Weingart, Doppel-Leben (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), 137–48.
Also Robert Bernasconi, “Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss and Racialization”
in Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon, eds, Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2013), 55–70. For Walter Gross’s racial views, see, for example,

182   NOTES
Heilig is das Blut. Eine Rundfunkrede (Berlin: Vom Rassenpolitischen
Amt, 1935).
8 Although there are one or two places where Heidegger appears to
accept the term Rasse, it is not the biological conception of some of his
contemporaries. On Heidegger’s relation to the biological in this context
see Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Alleged Challenge to the Nazi
Concepts of Race,” in James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall, eds,
Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
50–67. See also Sonia Sikka, “Heidegger and Race,” in Race and Racism
in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 74–97.
9 The reduction of National Socialism to biological or somatic racism is
attacked by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Die Faschisierung des bürgerlichen
Subjekts (Hamburg: Argument, 1987), 55–69.
10 Ulrich Sieg, “‘Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes.’ Ein unbekannter
Brief Heideggers,” Die Zeit, December 22, 1989, 50.
11 Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as Introduction to
Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. Henceforth
IM. On the meaning of this phrase and its textual history, see Theodore
Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Philosophical Politics in the Third Reich,” in Richard
Polt and Gregory Fried, eds, A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction
to Metaphysics” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 241–2. Frank
Edler’s work on Heidegger’s relation to Baeumler is a fine example of
the kind of close reading we need more of: Frank H. W. Edler, “Alfred
Baeumler on Hölderlin and the Greeks: Reflections on the Heidegger-
Baeumler Relationship,” www.janushead.org/jhspg99/edler.cfm, accessed
December 4, 2012.
12 Translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna as Logic as the
Question Concerning the Essence of Language (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2009). Henceforth L.
13 Of course, Hitler did not in fact assume the Presidency until Hindenburg
died on August 2, 1934.
14 Emmanuel Faye describes it as “the text in which the control axis of
Heidegger’s doctrine—namely, his idea of the people—appears the
most clearly,” Heidegger. L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 164; trans. Michael B. Smith, Heidegger.
The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 99. Nevertheless, Faye devotes only four pages
to the course and by mining the work for incriminating quotations
fundamentally misreads it, as will be clear from a comparison between
his discussion and mine here. Most of the mere three pages Holger
Zaborowski dedicates to this course in a book of almost 800 pages
seem designed to answer Faye, but by failing to offer his own reading
the critique is incomplete: “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?” Martin

NOTES 183
Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
2010), 467–9. The most sustained treatment is by Bernard Radloff in
Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2007), 173–209. He provides a good summary of the
ideas of some Nazi theorists with whom Heidegger can be compared
(111–72), but this is then left behind when he begins his dense account
of Heidegger’s own ideas.
15 For more on this complex issue which Jacques Derrida brought to
the fore, see Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Alleged Challenge to the Nazi
Concepts of Race,” 55–6.
16 Perhaps the most extreme proponent of this view is Johannes Fritsche.
See his Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and
Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 126–42, and
“Heidegger’s Being and Time and National Socialism,” Philosophy Today
56:3 (2012), 255–84.
17 On Heidegger’s relation to Baeumler’s account of Nietzsche, see my
essay “Heidegger, Nietzsche, National Socialism” in Eric Nelson and
François Raffoul, eds, The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 47–53.
18 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Vienna and Leipzig:
Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918 and Munich: Oskar Beck, 1922).
19 Karl Lamprecht, Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft (Freiburg: Hermann
Heyfelder, 1905), 85; trans. E. A. Andrews, What is History? (London:
Macmillan, 1905), 150–1. See also Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 166–7.
20 Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1993), 352–66.
21 It should also be noted that there are even more problems with the
editing of Heidegger’s 1934 Logic course than is usual for volumes of
the Gesamtausgabe. At the time that the Gesamtausgabe volume was
prepared Heidegger’s own notes for the lectures could not be located.
I am grateful to Richard Polt for providing me with a copy of Silvio
Vietta’s essay which includes a brief comparison between organization of
the lectures as published and of the manuscript which had been found
in the possession of members of his family: “Wandel unseres Daseins.
Eine Unbekannte Vorlesung Martin Heideggers von 1934,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine, November 9, 2006. The text subsequently appeared in an
auction catalogue but was withdrawn before the sale and, so far as I
know, its current location is unknown.
22 In a speech to German scholars in November 1933 Heidegger called for
a “folkish science” (völkische Wissenschaft) (GA 16; 191). He associated
it with courage for “a total transformation of our German existence” that
would happen though decision and responsibility (GA 16: 191–2). See
the insightful comments by James Phillips on Heidegger’s subsequent

184   NOTES
withdrawal from this phrase early in his book, although I am less
convinced about what he has to say about it later in the book: Heidegger’s
Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 3–4 and 111–2.
23 One should beware any temptation to understand the fact that, for
Heidegger the Volk is always to come, as a form of resistance to Nazi ideas
of the Volk, which are often assumed to be backward looking and more
essentialist than that. For many prominent Nazis, including Rosenberg,
the Volk was also in the process of becoming, just as for Baeumler in an
essay from 1934 it was futural: Alfred Rosenberg, “Die Volkwerdung der
Deutschen,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, 4 Jg., Heft 39, June 1933,
241–4; Alfred Baeumler, “Der politische Volksbegriff,” in Politik und
Erziehung (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1939), 48.
24 Translated by Peter D. Hertz as On the Way to Language (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 57.
25 Although Heidegger dismissed the idea, he did not do so as forcefully
as Hans Freyer did in Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (Leipzig:
B.G. Teubner, 1930), 252.
26 Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as Being and Truth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 201. The phrase Blut und
Boden was already formulated in the nineteenth century, but it gathered
new momentum in 1930 with Richard Walther Darré’s Neuadel aus Blut
und Boden (Munich: J.F. Lehmann, 1930). See especially p. 68, where
the close proximity of the two terms is made clear. Darré represents a
clear example of the biological conception of the Volk that Heidegger
was opposing. See also R. Walter Darré, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell
der Nordischen Rasse (Munich: J.F. Lehmann, 1929), esp. 353–423. The
extent to which Blut und Boden was part of the ideology of Volkskunde
is clarified by Wolfgang Emmerich, Zur Kritik der Volkstumideologie
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 122–31.
27 This is most likely a reference to Ludwig Klages. See Der Geist als
Widersacher der Seele (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), 395–412. The book
was originally published in 1929. On Klages’ reputation during the
Third Reich, see Tobias Schneider, “Ideologische Grabenkämpfe,”
Vierteljahrshefte Zeitgeschichte 49:2 (2001), 275–94. See also GA 67: 122.
28 Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Basic Questions
of Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 124.
29 Franz Böhm is often cited as someone offering a parallel attempt to break
from Cartesianism, but Böhm’s embrace of race and breeding would have
been seen by Heidegger as still under the sway of Cartesianism in spite
of its author’s intentions: Anti-Cartesianismus. Deutsche Philosophie in
Widerstand (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1938), 245.
30 Heidegger had not yet drawn the distinction we find at GA 48: 212
between Subjektivität and Ichheit. Both terms are used interchangeably

NOTES 185
at GA 38: 163; L 135. However, it should be noted that Emmanuel Faye,
who drew attention to this distinction, misinterpreted its significance,
as part of a more systemic distortion of these texts, by insisting that the
first term is used “positively” whereas the second is used “negatively.” See
Emmanuel Faye, “Subjectivity and Race in Heidegger,” Philosophy Today
55:3 (Fall 2011), 271.
31 For my understanding of the difference between these two
approaches, see Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in
Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1985), 87–9.
32 Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1935), 32.
33 Ernst Krieck, “Germanischer Mythos und Heideggersche Philosophie,”
Volk im Werden 2:3 (1934), 249.
34 Faye could not be clearer. Or more wrong. He falsely claims that when
Heidegger says in the seminar that in the term Volksgesundheit, public
health, “one also now feels the tie of the unity of blood and stock, the
race” (43; see also GA 38: 61; L 53–4), he is underwriting this as the
meaning of the Volk. Faye, Heidegger. L’introduction du nazisme dans
la philosophie, 190–201; Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into
Philosophy, 115–21.
35 The significance of Heidegger’s adoption of the language of labor (Arbeit)
from National Socialism at this time should not be underestimated. See
Christopher Rickey, Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger, National Socialism,
and Antinomian Politics (University Park. PA: Penn State University
Press, 2002), 201–8.
36 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 196.
37 Oskar Becker, “Nordische Metaphysik,” Rasse: Die Monatsschrift der
Nordischen Metaphysik 5 (1938), 88. See Robert Bernasconi, “Race and
Earth in Heidegger’s Thinking During the Late 1930s,” Southern Journal
of Philosophy 48:1 (March 2010), 53–4.
38 See Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich: Albert Langen, 1926).
This novel drawing extensively on the author’s time in South Africa was
heavily influential.
39 Already since the 1920s Heidegger had appealed to the word Kunde in a
positive sense. Indeed he used it in his translation of hermeneia from at
least 1923 to 1959 (GA 63: 10 and GA 12: 122). Wanda Torres Gregory
and Yvonne Unna’s translation of Kunde as lore is inspired, whereas
the French translation of it by Frédéric Bernard as la mise au fait is
misguided. See La logique comme question en quête de la pleine essence du
langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), passim.
40 Karl von Spiess, Deutsche Volkskunde als Erchliesserin deutscher Kultur
(Berlin: Herbert Stubenrauch, 1934), esp. 31. For the broader political

186   NOTES
sense of Volkskunde, see Karl von Spiess and Edmund Mudrak, Deutsche
Volkskunde als politische Wissenschaft (Berlin: Herbert Stubenrauch, 1938).
See also Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, “Volkskunde—die völkische Wissenschaft
von Blut und Boden,” in Die Universität unter dem Nationalsozialismus, ed.,
Heinrich Becker (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1987), 313–20.
41 Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German
Volkskunde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 32; Bernard
Mees, The Science of the Swastika (Budapest: Central European Press,
2008), 228–33.
42 Anka Oesterle, “Letzte Autonomieversuche: Der Volkskundler
John Meier. Strategie and Taktik des Verbandes deutscher Vereine
für Volkskunde 1933–1945,” in Die Freibürger Universität in der
Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, eds, E. John et al. (Freiburg: Ploetz,
1991), 151–62, and “The Office of Ancestral Inheritance and
Folklore Scholarship,” in The Nazification of an Academic Discipline,
eds, James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 189–205; Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore
and Fascism, 22–5; see also Hannjost Lixfeld, “Die Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft und die Dachverbände der deutschen
Volkskunde im Dritten Reich,” in Helge Gerndt (ed.), Volkskunde
und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Münchner Vereinigung für
Volkskunde, 1989), 69–82.
43 Martin Heidegger, “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,” in Dietrich
Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler, eds, Zur philosophischen Aktualität
Heideggers, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 23. See also GA 46:
60 and 281 as well as GA 52: 132.
44 Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the
Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987), 237–45. For an appreciation of Freyer’s relation
to Lamprecht, see Roger Chickering, “Comment: Hans Freyer,” in Paths
of Continuity, eds, H. Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 231–7.
45 Freyer’s role as one of the leading spokespersons of sociology is
apparent in Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft and Einleitung in
die Soziologie (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1931). Heidegger rejected
sociology at GA 38: 68; L 59.
46 Hans Freyer, “Ethische Normen und Politik,” Kant-Studien 35 (1930),
196 and 114, and “Typen und Stufen der Kultur,” in Handwörterbuch
der Soziologie, ed., Alfred Vierkandt (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke,
1931), 294–308 with its numerous references to Lamprecht. See also
Elfriede Üner, Soziologie als “geistige Bewegung.” Hans Freyers System
der Soziologie und die “Leipziger Schule” (Weinheim: VCH, Acta
Humaniora, 1992), 153–65.
47 Muller, The Other God That Failed, 286.

NOTES 187
48 Hans Freyer, “Die Universität als hohe Schule des Staates,” Die Erziehung
7 (1932), 674. Also Hans Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig: Fritz Rechfelden,
1925), 153.
49 Hans Freyer, “Zur Philosophie der Technik,” Blätter für deutsche
Philosophie 3 (1927–8), 201. For more on technology, see Hans Freyer,
Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft, 141–2 and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary
Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 121–9.
50 Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Werke 9 (Berlin-Spandau:
Hermann Luchterhand, 1962), 564; trans. Peter Palmer, The Destruction
of Reason (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 648. Radloff,
Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism, 132.
51 Hans Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig: Fritz Rechfelden, 1925), 153.
52 Hans Freyer, “Die geistige Gestalt der Gegenwart und die
Volkshochschule,” Die Erziehung 4 (1929), 283–300; “Zur Bildungskrise
der Gegenwart,” Die Erziehung 6 (1931), 597–626; “Die Universität als
hohe Schule des Staates,” Die Erziehung 7 (1932), 520–37 and 669–89.
53 See Volker Böhnigk, Kulturanthropologie als Rassenlehre (Würzburg:
Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 143–4.
54 Hans Freyer, “Arbeitslager und Arbeitsdienst,” Studentwerk, May/June
1932. Reprinted in Gespräch und Aktion in Gruppe und Gesellschaft
1919–1969, eds, Walter Grieff, R. Rudolf Jentsch, and Hans Richter
(Frankfurt: dipa, 1970), 148–55.
55 Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1931), 63.
56 For example, Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrunderts, 485; trans.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 335. The linguistic distance
between the idea of “discipline” and “breeding” is misleading because
it conceals the easy transference between Zucht and Züchtung in
German. Discussions of Zucht can very easily be exclusively about
breeding programs. See, for example, Georg Usadel, Zucht und Ordnung
(Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935), 15.
57 Hölderlin to Böhlendorf, December 4, 1801. Frequently cited by
Heidegger, for example, at GA 39: 290; GA 52: 131; and GA 53: 168.
58 Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich (London:
Routledge, 1998), 1–5.

4. The seminar of winter semester


1933–4 within Heidegger’s three
concepts of the political
1 This schema (revised) as well as a detailed account of Heidegger’s
three concepts of the political is to be found in Theodore Kisiel, “In

188   NOTES
the Middle of Heidegger’s Three Concepts of the Political,” in François
Raffoul and David Pettigrew, eds, Heidegger and Practical Philosophy
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 135–57. The present essay incorporates
portions of Theodore Kisiel, “On the Purported Platonism of
Heidegger’s Rectoral Address,” in Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore,
eds, Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2005) and “The Essential Flaw in Heidegger’s ‘Private
National Socialism,’” in Marion Heinz and Goran Gretić, eds, Philosophie
und Zeitgeist im Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2006).
2 This essay will use the following conventions to refer to Heidegger’s
collected works (Gesamtausgabe), published by Vittorio Klostermann
(Frankfurt am Main); when a translation exists, it will be listed
after the German edition: GA 16 = Reden und andere Zeugnisse
eines Lebenweges, 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (2000);
GA 18 = Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark
Michalski (2002), Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans.
Robert D. Metcalf and Mark Basil Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009); GA 26 = Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, ed. Klaus Held (1978), The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984); GA 29/30 = Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik:
Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(1983), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995); GA 36/37 = Sein und Wahrheit,
ed. Hartmut Tietjen (2001), Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried
and Richard Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010);
GA 38 = Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, ed. Günther
Seubold (1998), Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of
Language, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2009); GA 39 = Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien”
und “Der Rhein,” ed. Susanne Ziegler (1980), Hölderlin’s Hymns
“Germanien” and “Der Rhein,” trans. William McNeill (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, forthcoming); GA 53 = Hölderlins Hymne
“Der Ister,” ed. Walter Biemel (1994), Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,”
trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996); GA 65 = Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom
Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1989), Contributions
to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela
Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); GA 69 =
Die Geschichte des Seyns, ed. Peter Trawny (1998).
3 Instead of “insight”, Arnold Bergstraesser’s transcript here names “state”
as an existential concept.

NOTES 189
4 RA (Rectoral Address) = Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung
der deutschen Universität (1933; 9–19) and Das Rektorat 1933/35:
Tatsachen und Gedanken (1945; 21–43), ed. Hermann Heidegger
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983). English translation by Lisa Harries,
“The Self-Assertion of the German University” (5–13) and “The
Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts” (15–32), in Gunther Neske
and Emil Kettering, eds, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism:
Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon, 1990). In GA 16, 107–17
and 372–94.
5 EM = Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1953), English translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt,
Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000).
6 DWB 1 & 2 = Paul Natorp, Deutscher Weltberuf. Geschichtsphilosophische
Richtlinien. First Book: Die Weltalter des Geistes; Second Book: Die Seele
des Deutschen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1918).
7 Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German
Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969).
Ringer defines the mandarins “as a social and cultural elite which owes
its status primarily to educational qualifications, rather than to hereditary
rights or wealth” (5, my emphasis). They include doctors, lawyers,
ministers, government officials, gymnasium teachers, and university
professors, precisely the “professions” that Heidegger identifies in the
Rectoral Address as the “leaders and guardians of the state.”
8 Paul Natorp, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Sozialpädagogik. Erste
Abteilung: Historisches (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag [E. Hauff],
1907), 23–4, 36, 70, 282.The first essay in the collection is “Platos Staat
und die Idee der Sozialpädagogik,” 1–36.
9 Ibid. 132, 95.
10 Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918–1969, Joachim
W. Storck (ed.) (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft,
1989), 60. Translated by Frank W. H. Edler in “Selected Letters from the
Heidegger-Blochmann Correspondence,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy
Journal 14/2–15/1 (1991): 557–77, esp. 570–1.
11 The most accessible transcript of these unpublished talks, the one
delivered by Heidegger in Freiburg on December 11, 1930, is to be found
in the Helene Weiss Archive at Stanford University.
12 Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger. Dokumente zu seinem Leben
und Denken (Bern: private circulation, 1962), 214. Comments made on
February 21, 1934.
13 Martin Heidegger, “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft: Arbeitskreis
von Dozenten der naturwissenschaftlichen und medizinischen
Fakultät (November 1937)—(Auszüge),” in D. Papenfuss and O.
Pöggeler, eds., Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 1;
Philosophie und Politik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991), 5–27. Page

190   NOTES
references here are mostly to a set of loose “notes on the working
circle” that was held privatissime since the Fall of 1936, which the
editor (Hartmut Tietjen) has entitled “Philosophie, Wissenschaft und
Weltanschauung” (14–27).
14 Martin Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” Vorträge und
Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 71–99, esp. 94 and 96. English
translation by Joan Stambaugh in Martin Heidegger, The End of
Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp 84–110, esp. 105
and 107; reproduced in the Wolin edition, The Heidegger Controversy,
“Overcoming Metaphysics (1936–1946),” 67–90, esp. 85 and 87;
references are to no. XXVI of this collection of notes, a note that was
written not earlier than late 1942.
15 Silvio Vietta, Heideggers Kritik am Nationalsozialismus und an der
Technik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 47, cites a diary notation of the
pedagogue Heribert Heinrich on a “private” conversation in which
Heidegger observes that “most Germans came to see Adolf Hitler as
the robber and criminal of the century only with the catastrophe at
Stalingrad and the disaster of the air war.” But for Heidegger, “1938
was a turning point in my life. 1938! That was even before Hitler’s great
triumphs!” beginning with the Anschluß of Austria.
16 “The polis is polos, that is, the pole, the vortex in which and around
which everything revolves. In both words, the essential is named, what
in the second verse of the chorus the verb pelein says: constancy and
change” (GA 53: 100/81).
17 Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954), 67.
English translation by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, What is Called
Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 69. One aphorism (No.
983) in the published version of Wille zur Macht speaks of “the Roman
Caesar with the soul of Christ.”
18 In the recent film “The King’s Speech,” the stuttering King George VI,
in viewing a newsreel of a Hitler speech with his children, one of whom
asks, “What is he saying?,” replies: “I don’t know, but he seems to be
saying it rather well.” This is a step back from the usual Western parodies
of Hitler speaking, as in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”
19 Moving from the Athenian democracy of Aristotle’s time to our own
democratic polis, it is worthy of note that all of the rights and freedoms
granted by our Bill of Rights are more or less “rhetorical” in nature:
freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, and the right to
petition the government to redress our grievances.
20 Cf. Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism,
and the Greeks (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2003). In this most
thoroughgoing account of Bodenständigkeit in Heidegger’s sense and
in the NS sense, Bambach nowhere notes its relationship to a native or
indigenous language.

NOTES 191
21 Cf. Theodore Kisiel, “The Siting of Hölderlin’s ‘Geheimes Deutschland’
in Heidegger’s Poetizing of the Political,” Heidegger-Jahrbuch 5 (2009),
145–54, esp. 152.

5 Heidegger in the foursome of


struggle, historicity, will, and
Gelassenheit
1 See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (New York: HarperOne, 1991).
2 See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 40; Contributions to
Philosophy (Of the Event) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2012), 46.
3 Even at the superficial political level, Heidegger followed with great
sympathy the student revolt of the late 1960s (as told to me by Wolfgang
Schirmacher, who visited Heidegger in 1968 as part of a student
delegation). After World War II, he more or less consistently voted for
the Social Democrats or SPD; this was reported to me by Karl-Heinz
Volkmann-Schluck when he visited Slovenia in the early 1970s, and is
confirmed by Heidegger’s letter to his wife of November 11, 1966. “Let’s
hope the SPD & FDP stick together so the conservatives don’t make any
headway”: Letters to His Wife, ed. Gertrud Heidegger, trans. R. D. V.
Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 299.
4 See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la
philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005); Heidegger: The Introduction
of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of
1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009).
5 See Jürgen Habermas, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken. Zur
Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.7.1953, published as “Martin Heidegger: Zur
Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935,” in J. Habermas,
Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971),
67–75.
6 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996).
7 “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Manfred
Stassen, ed., Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings
(London: Continuum, 2003), 18.
8 See Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2007).

192   NOTES
9 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1977), 355.
10 For a closer analysis of the vicissitudes of Will in Heidegger’s
development, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
(London: Verso, 2008).
11 See Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).
12 Michael Jordan was also known as “Air Jordan” because his jumps
seemed to defy the laws of gravity.
13 See Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
14 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 294.
15 Heidegger’s relation to Schelling and Hegel is crucial here. See Slavoj
Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(London: Verso, 2012), 887–90.
16 Attentive interpreters noticed the multiplicity of meanings of Heidegger’s
Kehre. The three main ones are: 1 the shift in Heidegger’s thought
from Being to Ereignis; 2 the shift in the world-history of Being from
technology to Ereignis; 3 the strife in Ereignis itself between Ereignis and
its Unwesen, Ent-eignis.
17 When Heidegger speaks of the “concealment of concealment itself ” or
“oblivion of oblivion,” one should not reduce it to a double movement
of first forgetting Being in our immersion in beings and then forgetting
this forgetting itself: Forgetting is always also a forgetting of forgetting
itself, otherwise it is not forgetting at all—in this sense, as Heidegger
put it, it is not only that Being withdraws itself, but Being is nothing but
its own withdrawal. (Furthermore, concealment is a concealment of
concealment in a much more literal way: what is concealed is not Being
in its purity but the fact that concealment is part of Being itself.)
18 Of great interest here are Heidegger’s attempts to “repeat” Kant. See
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 894.
19 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 145.
20 Ibid., 279.
21 Ibid., 286.
22 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 47.
23 Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 73.
24 Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger—Politik und Geschichte im Leben und
Denken (Berlin: Propyläen, 1992), 277.
25 Peter Hallward, “Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will,”
in The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), 117.
26 Ibid., 112.

NOTES 193
27 At his intervention at the conference “On the Idea of Communism,”
organized by the School of Law, Birkbeck College, London, on March
13–15, 2009.
28 Heidegger’s qualifications of Soviet Communism as “metaphysically
the same” as Americanism, that is, as another version of the total
technological mobilization, are well known: for example, Introduction to
Metaphysics, 40, 48.
29 “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s interview with Martin Heidegger,”
in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1993), 55.
30 Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political (London: Routledge,
1998), 116.
31 Against Davis’s sympathies for Zen Buddhism, one should bear in mind
that Japanese militarism perfectly fitted Zen warriors who killed with
Gelassenheit.

194   NOTES
Index

Absolute  160 Basic Problems of Phenomenology  95


absolutism  58, 154 bathos  104–5
abstraction  6, 33, 99–102, 104–5 Baumgarten, Eduard  88
abyss  9, 47, 76–7, 84, 145 Becker, Oskar  121
action (Handlung)  59, 128–9, 133, beginning, other  119, 146, 163
135, 147 Being (Sein)  21, 46–8, 76, 149, 193
actuality  17, 60, 64, 73, 78, 80, 82, animal  54
112, 168 and beings  46–7
agriculture  6, 9, 55, 79, 98 and Ereignis  160
Althusser, Louis  163 forgetting of  162–3
analogy  10, 92, 98, 100–1, 105, 107 for Greeks  27
Anaximander  156 historical truth of  81
animals  3–4, 7, 9, 17, 33, 37, 48, 51, history of  82, 152
54, 59, 153, 157–8, 174 human  37, 41, 54, 64, 76, 117,
annihilation  5, 164 157–8, 163, 169
anti-intellectualism  94, 101 of the leader (Führer)  74
anti-Semitism  10, 79, 82, 87, 96–7, meaning of  84
165 see also Jews; Semites oblivion of  151
anxiety (Angst)  8–9, 76, 124, 161 of the people  41–3, 52–4, 75–6,
Anyone (das Man)  127–8, 161 79, 167
appropriation, properizing event as physis  24–5
(Ereignis)  130, 133, 151, pure  159
160, 193 of state  41–3, 45, 52, 64, 76
Arendt, Hannah  102, 169, 179 strife of  159–60
Aristotle  7, 24, 39, 41, 54, 59, 72, 93, turning in  163
135, 145, 147–9, 162 understanding of  82, 92
Aryan  87, 166 way of  69
attunement  see mood Being and Time (Sein und Zeit)  4,
Auschwitz  166 8, 10, 69–70, 72, 75, 80, 82–4,
Auseinandersetzung  159 92–5, 99–100, 103, 112, 116,
Austria  121, 191 118, 120–1, 127–9, 135, 151,
authenticity  4, 11, 80, 93, 104, 161 155, 160–1, 171, 178
Being and Truth  5, 129
Badiou, Alain  168 being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-
Baeumler, Alfred  111–12, 183–5 sein)  73, 95, 129, 161
beings (das Seiende)  24, 27, 46–7, 53, communism  130, 132, 142, 152,
69, 76, 134, 137, 144, 146, 152 165–9
being-toward-death  113 community (Gemeinschaft)  41, 43,
see also death 63, 81–2, 113, 128–32, 178
being-with (Mitsein)  73, 127–8, 155 concealment  27, 160, 193
biologism  2, 5, 110–13, 116–17, concept (Begriff)  15, 19, 23–6, 35, 69,
123, 125 99–100, 148
biology  51, 54, 111, 117 formal and material  16, 21, 23–5,
bios  51–2, 158–9, 177 27, 38
birth  23, 55, 79, 152 conscience (Gewissen)  7, 48
Bismarck, Otto von  7, 45, 52, 74, consciousness (Bewußtsein)  7, 35,
139, 154, 164 48–9, 56–7, 60, 76–7, 83,
Blochmann, Elisabeth  133 153–4, 167
blood  43, 105, 110, 117, 123, 186 constitution (Verfassung)  7, 48–9,
blood and soil (Blut und 55, 77, 100, 153
Boden)  12, 68, 79, 117, 125, 134 crisis  83, 91, 123, 129, 135
Bodinus, Johannes (Jean Bodin)  63 critique, internal and external  155
body (Leib)  51, 54, 94, 120, 158 culture (Kultur)  42, 91, 97, 105, 111,
Böhm, Franz  185 117, 123, 131, 133–4, 173
Bolshevism,  165, 167 Czechoslovakia  121
Borgia, Cesare  146
Bourdieu, Pierre  128 Darré, Richard  185
bourgeoisie  165, 169 Dasein  1, 17, 19, 27, 48, 61, 68, 73,
breeding (Züchtung)  49, 78, 75, 77, 80, 82–4, 92, 95,
185, 188 97, 99–100, 104, 128–30,
Brown, John  167 133–5, 137, 143–5, 155, 160–1,
Bush, George  152 164, 180
Davis, Bret  156, 159, 163, 194
calculus  31, 33 death  8, 24, 32, 49, 78, 93, 113, 134,
capitalism  130, 142, 162, 168–70 156–7
Caputo, John  169 decision (Entscheidung)  33, 37–8, 46,
care (Sorge)  73, 82, 121, 129, 153 48, 62, 71–5, 81, 92–3, 100, 116,
cartoons  157 125, 130, 133, 140, 153
Catholicism  162 decisionism  76–7, 84, 151, 162, 169
China  168 decline  8, 49, 61, 71, 78, 81, 84, 90,
Christianity  82, 84, 158, 162 93, 100, 114, 134, 146
class struggle  159, 163, 165–7 Decline of the West  114, 146
Clausewitz, Carl von  139 defense service  137–9
Clauss, Ludwig Ferdinand  111 Deleuze, Gilles  85, 157
clocks  29, 32–3, 70 democracy  60, 72, 82, 88, 130, 146,
coercion (Zwang)  4, 9, 62, 114 154, 167–70, 191
comedy, musical  157 Derrida, Jacques  105, 184
communication (Mitteilung)  4, Descartes, René  63–4, 95, 103,
128–9, 146 117–18, 125, 185

196   INDEX
destiny (Geschick)  72, 119, 122, expectation (Erwarten)  37
129, 162 exploitation  154
destructuring (Destruktion)  118
devil  8, 49, 78, 93 facticity (Faktizität)  103, 144
“Die Bedrohung der faith  49, 63, 78, 82, 93, 103
Wissenschaft”  122 fall  48, 130, 163
Dilthey, Wilhelm  140 fallenness (Verfallenheit)  161
discipline (Zucht)  124, 188 Farmer, Paul  167
discourse  69 see also language farming  6, 9, 55, 79, 98
discrimination  124 fascism  165–6, 168–70
domination  153–4, 156, 162–3, 164 fate (Schicksal)  37, 43, 49, 74–5,
Dreyfus, Hubert  169 78, 129
drive (Trieb)  4, 7, 48, 58, 156–8, 160 fatherland  8, 52, 55, 130, 132, 145,
148, 152, 155 see also homeland
earth  23, 55, 105, 131, 134, 152 Faye, Emmanuel  2, 67–8, 82–3, 155,
ecology  9, 54 171, 183, 185–6
education  4, 10–11, 45–6, 60, 62–3, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  139
70, 73–4, 76, 88, 94–6, 110, 115, finitude  160, 163
123, 128, 130–3, 137–41, 180 First Reich  74 see also Reich
emancipation  152, 167 folk  12, 43, 56, 122, 139, 148
enemy  5, 164–6 see also friend- see also people
enemy relation folklore (Volkskunde)  43, 56, 122
engagement (Einsatz)  49, 58–9, following  38, 49, 58, 63, 162
61–2, 78, 81, 129, 160–1, 169 formal indication  102, 181
environment (Umwelt)  54–5, 80, Frederick the Great  45, 75, 139
95–6, 101, 103, 152 freedom  4–5, 11, 49, 60, 63, 77–8,
epistemology  3, 19–20, 68–9, 91, 132, 135–7, 168, 191
100, 103 Freiburg University  1, 4–5, 87–90,
Ereignis  see appropriation 96, 110, 112–13, 121–2, 141
erōs  7, 9, 48, 92–3, 134, 153 Freire, Paulo  167
essence (Wesen)  3, 15, 17, 19–21, French Revolution  38, 58,
24–5, 29, 38–9, 46, 48–9, 54, 68, 136, 153–4
71, 79, 90, 94, 99, 102, 136 Freud, Sigmund  156, 165–6
eternal recurrence of the same  6, 83 Freyer, Hans  122–5
ethics  127 Fried, Gregory  159
eudaimonia  72 Friedrich Wilhelm I of
everydayness  32, 93, 99, 102, 104, Brandenburg  176
128, 161 friend-enemy relation  7, 46, 114,
evil  6, 163 164, 178
existence (Existenz)  42, 46, 49, 51, Führer principle  84
68, 70–3, 76, 81–2, 93, 129 Führer–state (Führerstaat)  4, 64, 68,
existential ontology  72, 79–80, 82 72, 80–2, 114–15, 119
existentialism  82 Fundamental Concepts of
expanse  8, 55–6, 79–80, 98, 101 Metaphysics  128–9

INDEX 197
fundamental ontology  92, 118, 127 hermeneutic “as”  69
future  25–9, 36, 41, 70, 75, 81–2, 89, hermeneutics  103
94, 116, 118, 120, 133, 152 historicity (Geschichtlichkeit)  1,
10, 71, 74, 81–2, 84, 106, 129,
Galileo Galilei  28 160, 163
Gelassenheit (releasement, letting- history (Geschichte)  3, 17, 25–9,
be)  11, 135, 156, 160, 170, 194 36–8, 69–70, 86, 100, 122, 129,
generation  4, 129–30 133, 144
German idealism  131–2, 139 Hitler, Adolf  1, 5, 9–10, 12, 62, 84,
German language  124 88–9, 93–4, 97, 112, 140–3, 145,
Germans  3, 9, 56, 79–80, 82, 110, 147–8, 153, 162, 165, 169, 176
121, 124–5, 142, 153, 162, 170 Hobbes, Thomas  154
Gestell (enframing)  168 Hölderlin, Friedrich  5, 113, 124, 130,
Gneisenau, August von  139 143–5, 149, 163
God  52, 63, 130 Holocaust  5–6, 165
Goebbels, Joseph  97, 111 home  8–9, 130, 145, 173
Goethe, J. W. von  139 homeland (Heimat)  3, 8, 55–6,
Goetz, Walter  122–3 78–80, 121, 152–3, 155, 164, 169
Gore, Jr., Albert  152 see also fatherland
great men  42, 71, 91 horizon, ontological  152
Greek language  51–2, 143, 149, 162 horizon, temporal  36
Greeks  24, 27, 41, 62, 90, 118, 145, How, the  68, 149
158, 167 Husserl, Edmund  99, 102–3, 111,
Grimm, Hans  79 121, 140
Gross, Walter  111, 125 Hutton, Christopher  109
growth  23–4, 27–8, 51, 55, 69, 79,
131, 158 ideology  1, 6, 68, 79, 82, 85–90,
guardians (Hüter)  7, 45, 74, 94–5, 100–1, 106, 110, 117–18, 123,
137–40, 143, 146, 180 125, 165–6
Guattari, Félix  85 immortality  158
Guevara, Che  167–8 inauthenticity  93, 161
gulag  107, 166 individual  42, 52, 60, 62–3, 71, 73,
Günther, Hans F. K.  111 75, 77–8, 81–3, 91, 112, 116,
gypsies  124 130, 132, 153–4
individualism  91, 132–3, 136,
Habermas, Jürgen  155 168, 170
happening (Geschehen)  25–8, 53, 70, I-ness (Ichheit)  118
72–3, 129 intension and extension  69
Hardenberg, Karl August von  139 interaction (Verkehr)  3, 8–9, 12, 55,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  5, 79, 98, 117, 148, 152
80, 82, 119, 139, 158, 161 Introduction to Metaphysics  5, 99,
Hegel on the State  67 112, 130, 143–4
Heraclitus  27, 159, 163 intuition (Anschauung)  31–2, 35, 94,
Herder, Johann  139 96–7, 102

198   INDEX
Jaspers, Karl  87, 94–5 logic  68–9, 103, 148
Jews  1, 9, 79–80, 87, 96–7, 111, Logic as the Question of the Essence
124–5, 165–6, 173 of Language  5, 11, 112–13, 115,
Jünger, Ernst  5–6 118, 124, 130, 183–4
L’Ouverture, Toussaint  167
Kafka, Franz  158, 160 love  3, 7–8, 48–9, 77–8, 92–3, 153
kairos  59, 78, 84, 133, 135 see also erōs
Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur  111 Löwith, Karl  103, 106
Kant, Immanuel  3, 31, 35–6, 59, 70,
77–8, 95–6, 100–1, 132, 139, 163 Marcuse, Herbert  82–3, 179
Kehre (turning)  160, 163, 193 marriage  158
Klages, Ludwig  185 Marxism  87, 107, 163, 165
Klemperer, Victor  10, 86, 97, 101–2 mastery (Herrschaft)  38–9, 58, 78,
Klopstock, Friedrich  139 129, 153
knowledge service  137–9 materialism  54, 131
Kolbenheyer, Erwin  5, 172 mathematics  28–9, 31–3, 53, 63,
Krieck, Ernst  111–12, 119 100, 104
kulaks  166 mechanism  28, 32
Meier, John  122
labor  4, 95, 118, 120, 129, 167, 186 Meister Eckhart  163
see also work Menenius Agrippa  49, 175
Lamprecht Institute  111, 114, “Metaphysical Basic Power of the
122, 124–5 Coming State, The”  121
Lamprecht, Karl  114, 122 metaphysics  5–6, 104–5, 118–19,
language  19, 25, 69, 89, 112, 127, 130, 143, 156, 161–3
124, 128, 130, 145–6, 148 method  28, 52, 54, 70–1, 89–90,
see also discourse 98–9, 100, 102, 181
Latin  23, 41, 69, 106, 162 metontology  127–8, 133, 140
law  7, 48–9, 77, 154 Middle Ages  4, 49, 63, 77
leader (Führer)  3–4, 7–9, 12, 38, mission  82, 120, 129–31, 133, 137–8,
45, 49, 58, 60, 74, 78, 81–2, 84, 140, 145
88–9, 93–5, 110, 137–8, 140, Mitsein  see being-with
143, 146, 167 modernity  4, 6, 28, 63, 70, 77,
League of Nations  113, 140 82–3, 91
Lebensraum  see living space mood (Stimmung)  116–17,
Leibniz, G. W. von  31 147, 162
Ley, Robert  141 morality  6, 16, 46, 59–60,
liberalism  52, 71, 91, 117, 125, 130, 78, 131–2
136, 154, 168–9 motion (Bewegung)  23–4, 28–9
libido  157 movement (Bewegtheit)  24, 54, 69
life (Leben)  17, 24, 28, 48, 51–2, 162
lifeworld (Lebenswelt)  103–4 name, proper  156, 168
living space (Lebensraum)  9, 53–4, Nancy, Jean-Luc  155
79, 142 nation  43, 73, 137–8

INDEX 199
National Socialism  1, 5–6, 10, 12, overman (Übermensch)  84
67, 80, 82–3, 85–90, 101–2,
106–7, 109–10, 118–19, 125, past  25, 27–9, 36, 41, 70, 118, 152
130–2, 135, 139–42, 145, 148–9, people (Volk)  3, 5–8, 12, 38, 41, 43,
165–7, 169–70 45–6, 48, 52–7, 61, 63, 70, 72–3,
nationalism  145 78–9, 82, 96, 100, 110–11, 113,
Natorp, Paul  131–4 115–17, 120, 125, 127, 129, 133,
natura  3, 23, 69 138, 144, 164, 167, 185
nature  3, 15, 17, 20–9, 36, 69, 80, 104 people without space (Volk ohne
see also physis Raum)  9, 53, 186
Naumann, Friedrich  131–2 persuasion  62, 115, 147
negative freedom  63 perversion  159
neo-Kantianism  133–4 Pestalozzi, Johann  131–2
New Testament  52 phenomenology  10, 95–105, 148–9,
Newton, Isaac,  3, 31, 70, 95, 100 161, 163
Nicomachean Ethics  51 philosopher  7, 24, 51, 74, 95, 100–3,
Nietzsche, Friedrich  5–6, 10, 76–7, 106, 113, 118, 125, 138, 140,
83–4, 113, 143, 145–6, 151, 143, 146
167, 172 philosophy  1, 4, 10, 24, 52, 67, 73,
nihilism  6–7, 47, 76–8, 82–4, 133, 75, 77, 81–2, 84, 86, 101–2,
151, 169 104–7, 121, 125, 134, 142, 181
nirvana  160 philosophy of history  81
nobility  45–6, 52, 64, 74–5, 139, phronesis  93, 135, 140, 147, 162
146, 154 physics  25, 29, 32, 35, 41, 53–4
Nolte, Ernst  165–7 physis  3, 23–4, 27, 69, 100
nomads  3, 5, 9–10, 55–6, 79, 85, see also nature
96–8, 107 Plato  7, 39, 74, 95, 130–2, 134, 140,
Nothing (das Nichts)  25, 47, 76, 81 146, 161, 180
now  29, 33, 36–7, 41, 70 Plenge, Johann  132
poetry  124
obedience  63, 81–2, 161 polemics  113, 121
objectivity  31, 37, 102, 104 polemos  5, 144, 146, 159, 163–5,
“On the Essence of Truth”  5, 136 167, 170
ontological difference  127, 152 polis  41–2, 90, 130, 134, 143–5, 191
ontology  72, 75, 79–80, 82, 92–3, political animal  72, 145
118, 127–8, 133, 143, 162 politicians  42, 49, 144
oppression,  9, 49, 61, 78, 167 politics  1, 7, 41–6, 57–8, 71, 77, 81,
order (Ordnung)  8, 38, 49, 57–61, 68, 90–6, 100–1, 105–6, 114, 127,
77–8, 154, 156, 163, 169 129, 144–6, 163, 178
organism  38, 49, 153 Pope, Alexander  104–5
Otto the Great  45, 75, 139 power  6, 46, 48–9, 55, 58, 61–3,
ousia  27, 149 77–8, 105, 133–5, 137, 139,
overcoming (Überwindung)  47, 143–8, 154, 156, 169, 173
76–7, 82–3, 118–19, 156, 158 praxis  59, 72, 74

200   INDEX
prejudice, epistemological  68 Ringer, Fritz  131
presencing (Gegenwärtigen)  37, 156 Robespierre, Maximilien de  167
present (Gegenwart)  27, 29, 36, 41, Romans  see Latin
46, 69–71, 74–5, 118 Romanticism  139
present-at-hand (vorhanden)  160–1 rootedness in the soil
“Present Situation and Future Task of (Bodenständigkeit)  3, 8–9, 12,
German Philosophy, The”  113 54–5, 79–80, 98, 117, 148–9,
principle  18–19 152, 155
projection (Entwurf)  73, 180 Rosenberg, Alfred  110–11, 113, 122,
proletariat  52, 107, 154, 167 124–5, 185
province  155–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  52, 77, 91
Prussia  45, 64, 75, 139, 146 rule (herrschen, Herrschaft)  39, 49,
psychoanalysis  158–9 54–5, 58, 61–2, 77–8, 82, 92, 98,
psychology  114, 122 124, 143–4, 146–7

Quintilian  146 sacrifice (Opfer)  3, 49, 63, 78, 82, 93, 137
salto mortale  84
Race (Rasse)  2–3, 11–12, 43, 72, 111, Santner, Eric  157
122–3, 166, 185 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von  139
racism  80 Scheler, Max  140
rank order (Rangordnung)  38, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm
61, 146 Joseph  139, 156
ready-to-hand (zuhanden)  94, 160 Schiller, Friedrich  139
reason (Vernunft)  63, 82–4, 101, 105, Schlageter, Albert  145
161–2 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  139
Rectoral Address  4–5, 94–5, 105, Schmitt, Carl  7, 46, 71, 82, 92, 114,
119, 123, 129–31, 133–8, 190 119, 123, 125, 164, 173, 178
rectorship  4, 110, 112, 121, 133, 141 Schopenhauer, Arthur  156
Reich  3, 9, 56, 74–5, 79–80, 91, 121, science  32, 42, 51, 53, 100, 116–17,
140, 153 see also Second Reich; 130, 134, 136, 138, 141–2
Third Reich Second Reich  45, 52, 74–6, 139, 154
relativity, theory of  32 see also Reich; Third Reich
Renaissance  42, 71, 74, 91 self  129, 181
Republic, Plato’s  74 “Self-Assertion of the German
resistance  113, 118, 125 University, The”  see Rectoral
resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), Address
resolute openness Semites  3, 5, 9, 56, 79, 96–7
(Ent-schlossenheit)  11, 59, 78, sexuality  158–9
81, 84, 105, 116, 118, 124–5, Silesius, Angelus  163
129, 135–6, 140, 178, 180 Slavs  56
retention (Behalten)  36–7 social contract  48, 52, 70, 72, 77, 91,
revolution  124, 144–5, 168–9 117, 136, 153
Revolution vom Rechts  123 socialism  118, 131–3, 136
rhetoric  127–8, 145–8 sociology  122–3

INDEX 201
soil (Boden)  155 see also blood, “there is” (es gibt)  160
blood and soil; rootedness in Third Reich  74–6, 79, 82, 123
the soil see also Reich; Second Reich
Sombart, Werner  131–2 thrownness (Geworfenheit)  180
Sophocles  143–5 Thucydides  62, 147
soul, mind (Seele)  8, 31, 49, 78, 102, time (Zeit)  3, 28, 31–3, 36–7, 41, 53,
111, 114, 120, 122 70, 100
sovereignty  5, 58, 63–4, 70, 154 totalitarianism  82, 141, 143, 145,
space (Raum)  3, 8, 32, 35, 53, 79, 166, 168–9
95–8, 100–1, 148, 173 tradition  118
Spengler, Oswald  114, 125 tragedy  143, 145
Spiegel interview  168 truth (Wahrheit)  70–1, 74–5, 81–2,
spirit (Geist)  98, 103, 105, 112, 120, 90, 135–7
132, 134–5, 181
Spranger, Eduard  123 uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit)  8,
Stalin, Joseph  165, 168 76, 145
Stalinism  107, 165–6 unconcealment
state (Staat)  7, 17, 37–49, 52–3, (Unverborgenheit)  27, 136
52–8, 61, 63–4, 71, 80, 131, 133, universalism  162
135, 137–8, 143–4, 152, 155 university  4–5, 51, 87, 110–11, 123,
as Being of people  7, 9, 41, 43, 52, 129–30, 133–42
55–8, 127 unwillingness  62
Staudinger, Hermann  88 urge (Drang)  4, 7–8, 46, 58, 92, 158
struggle (Kampf)  4–5, 46, 49, 77–8,
82, 93, 114, 128–30, 137, 139, values (Werte)  42, 46–7, 133, 137
146, 159, 163–7, 170 van Gogh, Vincent  145
stuckness  156–60 violence  6, 144, 154, 169
subject  117, 161 Volk im Werden  111
subjectivism  74, 117–18, 162, 169 Volkskunde  56, 111, 121–5, 185
subjectivity  31, 118, 151, 156, 162, vom Stein, Baron  139
185–6
subordination  49, 58, 78 war  46, 114, 141–2, 146, 159
We  8, 33, 115–17, 130
task  7–8, 15, 42, 49, 60, 73, 75, Weber, Max  140
77–8, 80–1, 120, 132, 134, Weimar Republic  155
138, 140–2 welfare state  154
technē  46 “Why Do I Stay in the
technology (Technik)  42, 59, 94, 123, Provinces?”  155
131, 142–3, 161, 168–9, 193, 194 will (Wille)  4, 8, 11, 58–60, 93, 95,
teleology  72–3, 80, 159 133, 135, 140
temporality (Zeitlichkeit)  37, 41, to expansion  54
70–1, 73, 84, 100, 118, 120 implementation of
territory  8–9, 55–6, 79–80, 148, 173 (Durchsetzung)  62, 80–1

202   INDEX
of the leader  9–10, 49, 81, 84, 147 work  132–3, 135, 137–9, 167
of the people  9, 48–9, 60, 61, 63, see also labor
78, 91, 154 world (Welt)  104, 129, 133–4, 181
political  167 World War I  62, 131, 148
to power  6, 143, 146–7 World War II  146, 192
and subjectivity  151, 156, 169
transformation of  84 Ziegler, Matthes  122
and unwillingness  62 zōē  51–2, 158
wish (Wunsch)  4, 48, 58–9, 61, 78 zōon logon echon  52
Wittgenstein, Ludwig  104 zōon politikon  41, 72

INDEX 203

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