Martin Heidegger: Nature, History, State
Martin Heidegger: Nature, History, State
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
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
www.bloomsbury.com
“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
eISBN: 978-1-4411-6852-8
Editors’ Introduction 1
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
Notes 171
Index 195
vi CONTENTS
ABOUT THE
CONTRIBUTORS
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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,
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
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?
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.
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,
SESSION 4 33
SESSION 5 1
January 12, 1934
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
SESSION 5 39
SESSION 6 1
January 19, 1934
SESSION 6 43
SESSION 7 1
February 2, 1934
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
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
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
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]
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
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]
SESSION 10 63
3 Descartes carries out the sharp separation between mind and
body.
INTERPRETIVE
ESSAYS
1 V OLK AND FÜHRER
Investigations of Heidegger’s
Seminar On the Essence and
Concept of Nature, History,
and State
Marion Heinz
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]
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;
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
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
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
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
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)
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”:
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
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
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
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”:
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
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
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
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
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).
“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
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 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
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:
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,
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
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]
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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