Zuckert, Catherube H. - Martin Heidegger. His Philosophy and His Politics

Martin Heidegger: His Philosophy and His Politics
Author(s): Catherine H. Zuckert

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 51-79
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191479
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MARTIN HEIDEGGER
His Philosophy and His Politics
CATHERINE H. ZUCKERT
Carleton College
T HE FUROR AROUSED IN FRANCE by the publication of Victor

Farias's Heidegger et le Nazisme has once again raised the question: What
exactly was the connection, if any, between Heidegger's philosophy and his
Nazi politics?' "Was so little known there [in France] about National Social-
ism?" Hans Georg Gadamer mused somewhat rhetorically.2 The question
concerning the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics was
hardly new. It had been debated in France at the end of the war in Les Temps
Modernes; and it has continued to divide commentators ever since.3 Those
who have maintained that there was no necessary connection and that his
involvement represented a temporary aberration have been confounded by
Heidegger's own refusal to repudiate his Nazi allegiance.4 But critics who
urge that Heidegger's entire philosophy was polluted by his politics have
failed to show how the philosopher who maintained that the traditional
Western "metaphysical" notion of "nature" or "Being" was a product of
human historicity could embrace a racist political program.5 (Race is, after
all, a distinction based on birth or "nature," which Heidegger argued itself
represented a misleading Latin translation of the original Greek insight into
the meaning of physis or ousia.6) The connection between Heidegger's
politics and his philosophy is to be found, I shall argue, in his concept of
language.7 The explicitly poetic understanding of the "fatherland" he shared
with Hoelderlin was not racist, but the political implications of his emphati-
cally historical definition of "man" were no more egalitarian or liberal than
was official Nazi dogma.
A UTHOR 'S NO TE: I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart
Foundation for supporting work on this article.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 18 No. 1, February 1990 51-79

? 1990 Sage Publications, Inc.
51
52 POLITICAL THEORY /FEBRUARY 1990
L HE!DEGGER'S POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT
The "facts of the case" are not much in dispute. In 1933, Heidegger
became rector of Freiburg University. He had not previously been actively
involved either in national politics or in university administration. Indeed,
he later reported, he had great qualms about assuming the post because of
his rank inexperience.8 He joined the Nazi party because he thought it would
enable him to work more effectively with the authorities; as a condition of
his joining, he demanded that he not be assigned any further tasks or duties
as a party functionary. On becoming rector, he refused to allow the Nazi youth
organization to post the anti-Jewish placards they had put up at all other
German universities. In his inaugural address on "The Self-Assertion of the
German University," he nevertheless celebrated recent political events in
Germany in terms of his own philosophy. And in other speeches to students,
he supported not only Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations but
also the annexation of other German-speaking peoples.9 Ten months later, he
resigned, however, rather than demand the "resignation" of two "objection-
able" professors at the command of the authorities.'0 His own writings were
subsequently attacked by "official" Nazi "philosophers," Ernst Krieck and
Alfred Baeumler. But "official" Nazi objections to his philosophy were not
strong enough to prevent the authorities from offering him an even more
prestigious position at Berlin a few years later. He did not accept, nor did he
represent the regime, as requested, at several international conferences. The
authorities restricted the publication of some of his writings and monitored
his lectures, but he was allowed to teach. After the war, the deNazification
commission allowed him to retain his university position, but he was not
permitted to offer courses until the early 1950s. Neither before nor after the
war did he resign or renounce his party membership. On the contrary, in the
"fully reworked text" of the series of lectures he delivered as an Introduction
to Metaphysics in the mid-1930s and subsequently published in 1953, he
spoke of "the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy
of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth
and greatness of this movement."''
The somewhat ambiguous history of Heidegger's political involvement
cannot settle the question of the relation between his politics and his phi-
losophy in any case. To determine what the relation was between Heidegger's
philosophy and his politics, we have no recourse but to examine his works.
Zuckert / HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS 53
11. THE RECTOR'S ADDRESS
Heidegger's inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiburg h

shocked many readers, because in it the preeminent philosopher of the
twentieth century appeared to subordinate intellectual endeavor almost en-
tirely to political needs and exigencies. In fact, Heidegger stressed the need
for a new kind of spiritual or intellectual leadership. That leadership would
succeed, he saw, only if the organization and the internal conception of the
university were fundamentally changed.
Heidegger began his address by explicitly recognizing that as rector he
was assuming a position of spiritual (or intellectual -geistig) leadership. To
follow him, students and faculty would have to become rooted "in the essence
of the German university," which he subsequently defined as the "essence of
science."
Heidegger seemed, however, to be subordinating intellectual concerns to
political exigencies when he added that "essence" would gain "clarity, rank
and power only when . . . the leaders [we]re themselves led -led by that
unyielding spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people to bear
the stamp of its history."'2 The new rector did not merely suggest that the
pursuit of knowledge in the university ought be subordinated to the "histor-
ical mission of the German people," moreover. Later in his talk, he also urged
the necessity of questioning and so undermining the independence and
integrity of the individual "sciences" or disciplines. He praised the "new
Student law," which had dissolved all formal structures of university gover-
nance and put the power of making all decisions in the hands of the rector as
the local representative of the Fuehrer, as an embodiment of "the highest
freedom" or self-government, giving law to oneself. That "much celebrated
'academic freedom' . . . [now] being banished from the German univer-
sity . . . was not genuine," he explained, "since it was only negative."'13
Finally, he suggested that university study, or "knowledge service"
(Wissensdienst), was and ought to be parallel and thus (at least implicitly)
equivalent to the "labor service" (Arbeitsdienst) and "military service"
(Wehrdienst) programs already explicitly organized and instituted by the Nazi
party.
Nevertheless, as Heidegger later emphasized, in the Rektoratsrede he did
not actually advocate or endorse direct political control of academic en-
deavor.'4 On the contrary, he stressed the need for intellectual leadership.
54 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1990
The "mission" or "destiny" of the "German people" was itself esse

spiritual or intellectual, the new rector emphasized at the beginning
address. The people themselves did not recognize it, however; they
understand their own fate. How could they, if the only way to discove
fate was to inquire into the "essence of science" -hardly a political or
popular endeavor? To achieve their spiritual historical destiny, the people
thus needed direction from the members of the university community.
In order for the essence of science and therein the spiritual mission of the
German people to be discovered, however, the university would have to be
revolutionized -not simply its organization but more fundamentally, its
self-understanding. Operating still under the influence of the Enlightenment,
universities defined their function simply as the pursuit of knowledge or
"science." To get to the essence or root of science, Heidegger urged, it was
necessary to go beyond science, to ask: Why science? What was science good
for? One could not, as the still-reigning organization of the university into
colleges and departments does, take the legitimacy of the search for knowl-
edge and its various established forms simply for granted. "Academic free-
dom," as currently understood, served primarily to protect the educational
establishment from having to justify itself. If Germans were to inquire into
the "essence of science," they would, therefore, have to give up this notion
along with its institutional forms.
At the beginning of Western science, the Greeks had asked what the source
and purpose of knowledge was. "If we want to grasp the essence of science,"
Heidegger thus urged his auditors, "we must again place ourselves under the
power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence." Because the
beginning consisted in asking the most fundamental question, it had not been
superseded by subsequent investigations. On the contrary, that initial ques-
tion constituted an ever more pressing challenge. By pressing the search for
knowledge to its limits, Heidegger promised, the Germans would rediscover
its limits. And in re-experiencing these limits, they would rediscover the true
character or "essence" of science, which did not consist in the passive
contemplation of "truth" but in maintaining oneself in a knowing confronta-
tion with everything that is, on the basis of the greatest uncertainty.
Although his contemporaries had to re-ask the question of the Greeks in
order to discover not only the essence of science but also, therein, the
fundamental character of their own "spiritual-historical existence," their
intellectual-historical position (or existence, literally, Da-sein) was neverthe-
less fundamentally different from that of their Greek progenitors. The Greeks
had initially experienced the fundamental uncertainty of man's position in
the universe by first raising the question about the source and character of
his knowledge; they asked in the hope and expectation of finding answ
some kind of eternal realm. As Nietzsche had announced, modem people
could no longer act on the basis of such optimistic expectations; they knew
that there were no answers. There were only questions.15 And, Heidegger
promised, this questioning would "create for our people its world." Not
merely the "destiny" but the "world" of the German people lay in the
future - to be realized on the basis of a new understanding of "spirit,"
"science,"1 or "philosophy."
In the Rektoratsrede, Heidegger did not explain, however, why or in what
respect he thought this culmination of the development of Westem philoso-
phy was particularly "German." Nor did he bring out the grounds for the
connection he insisted on drawing between the apparently general "Western,"
if not simply human, historical development of philosophy, on one hand, and
the political events and pressures in his own nation, on the other. By stating
that "the spiritual world of a people . . . is the power that most deeply
preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood," without
explaining what he understood by "people" or "earth" (much less "blood"),
Heidegger encouraged his audience to interpret his words in terms of the
reigning political context.'6 His Nazi critics were not fooled. They saw that
there were important differences. Their denunciations do not enable us to
understand what Heidegger had in mind, however. To discover the grounds
of the connection he announced between the Nazi movement and the histor-
ical development of philosophy in which he explicitly located his own
thought, we have to turn to his properly philosophical works and the devel
opment of thought traced therein.
III. THE ROOTS OF THE REKTORATSREDE IN

BEING AND TIME
As Otto Poeggeler has pointed out, the notions of "fate" and "destiny"
Heidegger employed in his rector's address came directly out of Being and
Time.'7 Heidegger had not made the political implications of his "ontologi-
cal" argument explicit, however, and most readers missed them.'8 They
missed the political implications, in part at least, because in Being and Time,
Heidegger did not explain how "being-in-the-world," "falling" from "au-
thentic" into "inauthentic" existence, and the essential historicity of human
life and knowledge were all rooted in language. Because the connection
among the parts of Heidegger's argument was not clear, commentators who
wanted to apply the analysis of human existence that he offered in Being and
Time to politics felt justified in taking his account of the freeing eff
confrontation with death in abstraction from his subsequent discuss
essential historicity of individual "fate" and national "destiny." 19
The three parts of the analysis of human existence, or Da-sein,
and Time did and were intended to cohere. First, Heidegger observed
beings never actually experienced themselves as abstract, isolated "sub-
jects," bombarded by sensory impressions of external "things," as empiricist
philosophers had argued. On the contrary, as Edmund Husserl had shown,
human beings became aware of themselves and their own existence only in
relation to other things.20 Moreover, they did not experience "things" in
isolation or have impressions of such in unordered, chaotic motion. They
lived in a "world" in which things were initially encountered and understood
as things in terms of their use. Human beings became aware of things as
"things" and asked questions about their nature or purpose only after the
"thing" in question no longer served its ordinary function. As Nietzsche also
argued, the theoretical perspective was derivative from and subordinate to
the needs of life. In the process of fulfilling their needs, human beings were
aware of the difference between things and beings like themselves. They
understood themselves and their existence not simply in relation to things
but in relation to other people.2'
It was, indeed, because human beings understood themselves and their
existence in relation to others that they necessarily fell under the influence
of the "they." Growing up in society, Heidegger pointed out in the second
part of his analysis, human beings acquired opinions not only about things
but also about themselves and their lives from others. The essential external-
ity and superficiality of one's ordinary, "everyday" opinions and concerns
might become clear to a person, for a moment at least, if one fell into a certain
mood. Experiencing a general Angst, or anxiety, which in contrast to fear had
no specific object, one might, on reflection, become aware of the "authentic"
character of one's own existence - it had no necessity. One might die at any
moment. One did not have to live. The first thing that a person learned from
a real confrontation with the ever-present possibility of one's own death was
that the perpetuation of one's existence was fundamentally a matter of choice.
One did not have to persist if one did not choose to; one could simply cease
and desist. One's continued existence was, therefore, in a fundamental sense
a product of one's own essential freedom.
This freedom to perpetuate one's existence did not, however, endow one
with an unqualified ability to choose among an unlimited number of "ab-
stract," undefined "possibilities." On the contrary, the second insight that one
attained from a genuine confrontation with the ever-present possibility of
one's own death was into the essentially temporal and hence historically
delimited character of one's own existence. (This was the step that
Heidegger's "existential" followers missed.) The fact that a person's contin-
ued existence was not necessary did not mean that the terms or character of
that existence was simply or completely under one's control. One might
choose not to die now, but one would have to die sometime. One's existence
was temporally limited, and reflections on those temporal limitations showed
that an individual was even less able to control or determine one's origins,
that is, birth into a given family at a certain place and time, than one was able
to control one's end. Extemally viewed, an individual had been "thrown" into
existence, that is, in time, by powers that were not and never would be under
one's control.
But the historicity of human existence was not simply external. To see that
an individual could and would cease to exist if one did not implicitly choose
or will to persist was to see that human beings lived, essentially, by projecting
their past experience into the future. Because the future was unknown, living
historically meant persisting knowingly in the face of uncertainty. It was
precisely because such "resolution" demanded so much insight and courage,
Heidegger observed, that human beings necessarily "fell" into "inauthentic"
opinions and attitudes. Human societies were generally organized and their
everyday affairs conducted as if human life could be preserved indefinitely.
But social existence was not in itself simply or always "inauthentic" in
contrast to an individual's occasional "authentic"confrontation with the
ever-present possibility of one's own death. The attempt to preserve individ-
ual existence through social, economic, and political organization itself could
not be explained except in terms of the foresight of their own impending
death that distinguished human beings from animals. As Heidegger insisted
in the first part of his analysis, the existence an individual chose to perpetuate
in the face of future uncertainty was, moreover, defined in terms of a "world"
which, as articulated essentially in language, was itself essentially a social
phenomenon. To choose to perpetuate one's own Da-sein (literally, "being-
there," that is, in this particular place and time) was not, therefore, simply to
embrace one's "fate" as an individual. It also required that one recognize
one's essential, unavoidable involvement in the "destiny of his people."22
IV "POETICALLY MAN DWELLS ON THE EARTH"
Heidegger had not explained what exactly he meant by a "people," what

distinguished Germans from others, or why their "destiny" was spiritual as
well as historical in Being and Time, any more than he did in his rector's
address.23 In a series of lectures he gave during the two years following his
resignation as rector, first on Hoelderlin's poetry in 1934-1935, and then as
an Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935-1936, he did offer such an explana-
tion. These lectures appear, at least in part, to have been intended to rectify
the misunderstanding of the Rektoratsrede. Read together, they show that
(a) Heidegger did not expect his thought to have an immediate political
impact; (b) he understood Volk in terms of language, not race; (c) he thought
the "spiritual and historical destiny" of the German people was to replace the
old Greco-Christian understanding of "Being" as eternal presence with a
new, thoroughly historical "dispensation"; (d) this new historical "dispensa-
tion" entailed a new understanding of the basis and character of human life
or community; (e) such a community or "homeland" could only be described
poetically, not scientifically; and (f) Germany's interwar position made it
urgent to realize this new "poetic" understanding in practice. Each of these
points will be discussed now in detail.
Looking to the Future
In dedicating a series of lectures to explicating the poems most obviously

connected to Hoelderlin's understanding of the "fatherland," Heidegger
insisted, he was not basely attempting to give the poet a pernicious currency.
On the contrary, he was trying to raise his auditors to the level of the poet.
Hoelderlin had announced the spiritual-historical destiny of the German
people a century ago, but the Germans had not yet heeded his message.24
By "fatherland" Hoelderlin had not referred to the "dubious greatness" of
some "noisy patriotism." He was speaking rather of the people in its historical
being:25 That historical being was founded by the poet, constituted and made
known by the thinker, and actualized through the work of a political
founder.26 By explicating Hoelderlin's vision, Heidegger was presumably
making known the historical being or "destiny" of the German people, so
that a statesman could then establish a political community on the basis of
the resulting understanding.27
The creators of a historical people did not necessarily work in explicit
conjunction with one another.28 On the contrary, such extraordinary individ-
uals tended to live in isolation and extreme loneliness, misunderstood by the
people around them and separated from all others by time. It often took many
generations for their work to become melded together. One hundred years
had elapsed between Hoelderlin's initial poetic announcement of the spiritual
destiny of the German people and Heidegger's philosophical thinking out of
Zuckert I HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS 59
the basis of that "path" or course.29 It might be many more years bef
statesman would emerge who could organize the people to realize that des
in practice. As Heidegger stated in his Introduction to Metaphysics, philo
ophy never had a direct political effect:
[Plhilosophy always aims at the first and last grounds of the [being], with particul
emphasis on man himself and on the meaning and goals of human [da-sein]. This mig
suggest that philosophy can and must provide a foundation on which a nation will build
its historical life and culture. But this is beyond the power of philosophy.... Philosop
can never directly supply the energies and create the opportunities and methods that brin
about a historical change; for one thing, because philosophy is always the concern of the
few. . . . It spreads only indirectly, by devious paths that can never be laid out in
advance.30
Historical change occurred slowly because it took a long time to prepare

the foundation. People had not understood the significance of Hoelderlin's
work, for example, because they retained the "subjective," "liberal" under-
standing of poetry merely as the expression in beautifully crafted words of a
psychic feeling to which the history of philosophy or "metaphysics" had
given rise. A true appreciation of the meaning of Hoelderlin's poetry required
the critique of the metaphysical tradition that Heidegger provided many years
later.
The Poet as Founder
To understand how a poet could found the historical being of a people, it

was necessary to see poetry as a form of language (Sprache) and language,
in turn, as the distinctive element of matrix of human existence. All the
defining characteristics of human existence, as Heidegger phenomenologi-
cally analyzed it in Being and Time, had their origin in language, he now
explained.3" Without words, human beings could not have general ideas for
types of things or their relations. Without language, there could be no
perception of a "world." And if human existence occurred only as "being-
in-the-world," there would be no asocial human existence, because human
beings developed languages only in association with others. As Heidegger
concluded in Being and Time, human existence was, therefore, always
"being-with-others."
Language did not consist merely of a system of conventionally agreed-on
names or signs for preexisting things, however. On the contrary, Heidegger
observed, the original perception of a kind of thing or "being" as such
occurred simultaneously with its naming. Before the name was assigned,
there was no type or category, but until the type or category was perceiv
there could be no name. It was because "things" revealed their "being" o
to men in language that language was the realm of "truth." Because human
existence was so thoroughly shaped by language and the naming of things
language presupposed the disclosure of the being as such, as Hoelderlin
suggested, human existence ought to be conceived essentially as a conver-
sation (Gespraech) in which people or their poets first had to listen silently
to "things" in order to bring their being to expression in speech.
Although no "thing" or form of being could exist where there was no
word, there was nevertheless a difference between thing and word. This
difference was responsible for the inevitable corruption of the genuine
disclosure of the essence of things in language into the emptiness of everyday
"talk" (Rede) and the consequent externality, superficiality, or "inauthentic-
ity" of everyday life, which Heidegger also described in Being and Time.
Human beings had access to "being" as such, Heidegger concluded, only
because they had language. (Or, conversely, they had language, only because
they had access to being.) Beasts had neither; and Heidegger suggested, the
qualitative difference between human existence and other forms of animal
or vegetable life was so great that they ought to be considered as entirely
different forms of being. "Man" was not merely a zoion echon logon (animal
endowed with speech or reason) as he had traditionally been defined.
Language was not a mere property which distinguished man from other
animals. Man's existence was qualitatively different from theirs, because it
was so thoroughly shaped and defined by the possession of language.
Heidegger's suggestion that the distinctive characteristics of human exis-
tence are rooted in language is reminiscent of Aristotle's argument in the
Politics that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their
logos. There are, however, important differences.
According to Aristotle, human beings first associated to satisfy their
animal needs. Only after they secured the means of self-preservation, for
species as well as individual, could they develop political communities. They
were able to govern themselves, according to Aristotle, not only because they
were not ruled by instinct, like animals, but also because they had the faculty
of logos which enabled them to deliberate about what was just and unjust,
and useful and disadvantageous.32
Where Aristotle explicitly recognized the role the necessity of meeting
the basic, "animal" requirements of self-preservation played in the formation
of human communities, Heidegger appeared to ignore it.33 By defining
human life in terms of its relation to "being" rather than to an "animal" base,
he thought that he had elevated "humanity."34
Heidegger's understanding of the basis of human community was thus

fundamentally different. Usually translated as speech or reason, logos is
obviously closely related to language.35 As Aristotle understood it, however,
logos is a universal faculty possessed by human beings as such (if allocated
and developed to different degrees). Languages differ from place to place,
time to time, and people to people. If human life is fundamentally shaped,
even determined by language, the differences among "nations" or "regimes"
are not, as Aristotle suggested, merely reflections of differences in physical
and economic circumstances, ethnic ties (or race), the practical knowledge
acquired about govemment through experience, and correspondingly differ-
ent notions of justice.36 If the world in which human beings live is constituted
through their language, and languages differ, there is no universal reason or
conception of right.37 Without a natural standard of right, however, it is
impossible to deliberate about what is just or unjust under the circumstances.
Heidegger did not, therefore, analyze peoples or their politics in terms of
right or justice. On the contrary, he suggested that, like individuals, peoples
found the basis of their identity or "destiny" in what was most distinctively
their "own." Both the fact and the significance of the conflict with the
traditional understanding become clear when we recall that in the Republic,
Plato denied his guardians private property and personal family life on the
grounds that undue attachment to one's own is the fundamental source of
injustice.
Insofar as human communal existence was shaped by language, human
communities were emphatically particularistic and distinctive. And in Intro-
duction to Metaphysics, Heidegger suggested that the distinctive "spiritual-
historical destiny of the German nation" was rooted in its language. Investi-
gating the way in which the word "being" had become emptied of all its
original meaning, he engaged in a brief etymology. Where the present and
future Indo-European stems of the verb "to be" could be found in Greek,
Latin, and German alike, he pointed out, the past wes was retained only in
the German Wesen.38 It was no accident that the Greeks developed and the
Romans perpetuated a conception of "Being" as "presence" persisting per-
petually into the future, while the Germans later came to understand the
fundamental character of things historically in terms of how they had been.39
These different understandings or "dispensations" of being were rooted in
the languages of these different historical peoples.
When Heidegger publically supported Hitler's annexation of other German-
speaking peoples, he was thus acting according to his own understanding of
the basis of the nation. It was and ought to be defined by the language.
The Historical Destiny of the German People
According to Heidegger, Hoelderlin's reflections on the "essence of

poetry" enabled him not only to understand the formative character of
language itself but also to articulate the "spiritual-historical destiny of the
German people." As described in his poem, "Germanien," this nation would
not only witness the flight of the old gods, but also announce the emergence
of new divinities.
Just as Heidegger had argued in Being and Time that the fundamental
character of an individual's life was a product of its essential temporality or
historicity, so in his lectures on Hoelderlin Heidegger suggested that a nation
was defined primarily in terms of its "time." Unlike the life of an individual,
however, the time of a nation could not be calculated; it usually extended
over many generations. Unlike an individual, a people could not learn who
they were by contemplating their inevitable end, because that end was not
and could not be known until the people themselves had perished. But,
Heidegger suggested, just as an individual could escape the superficiality of
everyday life and opinions and discover the authentic character of his own
existence by reflecting on the meaning or basis of a particular mood, so a
people could learn who they were by coming to share and then reflecting on
the basis of a fundamental mood first established by the poet.
As in Being and Time, Heidegger emphasized, by "mood" he did not refer
merely to a psychological feeling; he was talking about a fundamental
attitude or stance toward being-as-whole.40 The German people could not
simply "fall" into the Grundstimmung first established by Hoelderlin; they
could only assume, take on, or rise to such a stance at a certain time and place.
Although it was created by a poet, this fundamental attitude was not simply
a product of his fancy. It had a historical foundation, although it was not an
inevitable result of a historical process. On the contrary, it had to be chosen
or "willed."
The mood that Hoelderlin established in "Germanien" was one of "holy
mourning, distressed readiness." By grieving over the departure of the gods,
the poet (and his people insofar as they participated in the spirit of the poem)
showed that they had not lost all sense of the divine. Only a people who
appreciated the beauty and depth which the gods had bestowed on human
life could mourn for them. This sense of loss was, moreover, the source of
their distress (Not)-their need, want, and urgent desire-and hence their
readiness for the emergence of new divinities. As the mourning indicated,
the flight of the gods was not simply a product of human doubt or skepticism.
It was the gods, not the men, who had flown. Nevertheless, Heidegger
observed, the poet did not seek to revive the old divinities. Seeing tha
be not only impossible but also undesirable; he looked forward, rather
emergence of the new.4" The facing of the past was inevitable, but t
was open.
The "time"of the German nation disclosed in the mood set by the poet in
"Germanien" was emphatically temporal or historical as Heidegger analyzed
temporality and historicity in Being and Time. The present "moment" was
defined by the conjunction of what had been in the past with its projection
into an unknown future.42
Hoelderlin's insight into the distinctive character of his own time enabled
him to perceive not only the "essence of poetry" but also the essentially
historical character of all forms of "being." The old gods who had departed
were, of course, the gods of the Greeks; and as originally conceived in the
words of Homer, these "gods" included not only Olympian characters like
Zeus and natural phenomena like the sun (Helios), but also entities like
victory (Nike) and justice (Dike). Where the earthly exemplars of any
particularly type or form of existence perished, Hoelderlin observed, the
Platonic ideas, as it were, persisted. The ideas in terms of which human beings
understood and structured their own existence were not eternal, however.
They were first conceived of and communicated in the words of the poets;
in time, they gradually lost their power to organize and direct human affairs.
Like the Greek gods, they eventually became known and existed only as
"having been." In Andenken, Hoelderlin thus concluded, "what lasts is
founded by poets." But, Heidegger emphasized, what "lasted" was not etemal
in either of the senses in which eternity had previously been conceived in
Westem thought: as unending presence, or as an infinite sequence of present
moments.43
Although he expressed it in poetic terms, Hoelderlin thus shared the
historical understanding of "man" and his "world" that had not only devel-
oped in German philosophy but was also that philosophy's distinguishing
trait or discovery. And in his explication of Hoelderlin's poem "Der Rhein,"
Heidegger suggested that this philosophy provided the Germans with the
self-discipline necessary to carve out their own course of development or
"fate." Like the river that demarcated the boundaries of the German "home-
land," German thought had to tum back and confront its own origins in
Greece in order to develop a distinctive counterthrust and so create its own
"territory" or "space."
Hoelderlin had roomed with both Hegel and Schelling, when they were
all studying theology at Tuebingen. Not merely were they close friends, but
they had studied the same materials. It was not an accident that both
Hoelderlin and Hegel developed their own major works through a confr
tation with the Greeks at almost exactly the same time. Both poet and
philosopher belonged to the same "spiritual world."" Both saw that the o
intellectual order, overall understanding, or "dispensation" of "being" th
had originated in Greece was coming to an end and would, therefore,
eventually go under.
Hoelderlin's poetry should not be interpreted simply in terms of Hegelian
philosophy, however. The differences between the poet and philosopher were
as important as their similarities. In showing how the Greek quest for
knowledge or "philo-sophy" completed itself and so came to an end in the
acquisition of the knowledge or "science" of the "Absolute Idea," Hegel had
suggested that there would be no truly new development beyond that point.
Hoelderlin, on the other hand, suggested that the dissolution of the old order
would necessarily give rise to a new one.
In suggesting that the types of things and their order were historically
constituted, both philosopher and poet affirmed, in effect, that nothing was
"by nature" anything specific in and of itself. Things acquired and maintained
their definitions only in distinction from or in opposition to others.45 Both
philosopher and poet thus developed an essentially Heraclitean understand-
ing of "Being" as "strife." In resuscitating such a Heraclitean view, both
retumed to the source of Western philosophy, the original view in opposition
to which the dominant Platonic strand or "stream" of philosophy had arisen.46
Neither Hegel nor Hoelderlin merely reasserted the old "pre-Socratic" Greek
view, however. Both developed it in an original, historical and hence essen-
tially more dynamic direction by insisting that the truth emerged through the
"strife" or interaction of opposites only in time.4'
The Historical Basis of Community
Where Hegel conceived of the fundamental opposition in terms of nature

and Geist, Hoelderlin presented it primarily in terms of the relation between
mortals and immortals. And the two different definitions of the "poles" of
the "strife" that produced and maintained the overall organization of the
''world" pointed toward fundamentally different understandings of "man"
and his relation to his environment.
By arguing that intelligent existence (or Geist) came to recognize itself as
such only by transforming nature into its own image, as his "left" followers
pointed out, Hegel suggested that man was the locus of intelligence and that
nature merely represented unformed material for man to shape according to
his own needs and purpose. According to Hegel himself, historical change
ended when Geist achieved full self-consciousness. But, later thinkers as

Why should the process of transformation end? Why should man not e
it from the "world" to himself? As modified by Marx and Nietzsche, the
culmination of Western philosophy in Hegel's "science" pointed toward the
technological transformation not only of the "world" but also of "humanity,"
as Heidegger began to argue explicitly four years later.48
In arguing that mortals and immortals existed and could be known only
in relation to one another, on the other hand, Hoelderlin suggested that human
existence would retain its distinctive character only so long as "men" retained
some notion of the "gods" above and beyond them, even though such "gods"
became known only in and through "man." And in a line from "Anmerkungen
zum Oedipus," he suggested that such gods were "nothing but time."49 If
understanding human existence historically meant understanding it funda-
mentally in terms of time, Hoelderlin thus had a more thoroughly temporal
or historical view of human existence than did Hegel. For, as Aristotle
initially pointed out, although time existed only in the minds of men, time
itself was not simply a human projection or creation.50
Because neither mortal nor immortal existed in itself, both could become
manifest only through the mediating work of the poet. Neither was simply a
human creation or projection; both were rooted in the particular character of
the time and place. Poets often expressed their sense that their visions or
creations were not merely products of their own fancy or imagination,
Heidegger observed. Like Homer, they prayed to be inspired by the Muses
or, like Hoelderlin, they put the "bolts of lighting" they received from the
god into words and so communicated them in safer form to the people. In
both cases, the source of poetic insight was rather explicitly temporal.5" The
various conceptions of "immortality" held by different peoples did not
merely represent negations of human limitations (in-finite, im-mortal), as
Nietzsche had suggested. Because the immortal per se had no limitation or
definition, its various possible forms or images could become known only in
opposition or contrast to the limitations of human existence. As the limita-
tions or concrete definitions of human existence differed from time to time
and place to place, so did the gods.
If the order of the cosmos became intelligible only to human beings living
in time, the intelligibility of that order must be associated with, if not
embodied in, some concrete form of human community. Thus Heidegger
observed:
For Hegel the reality of the spirit in history was the state, [which] developed the
utmost opposition of the free independence of the individuals and the free power of the
general community in l iving unity. In section 185 of the Philosophy of Right he

that ancient states . . . went under, because they lacked truly infinite strength, w
only in that unity which allows the opposition of reason complete strength to g
and forth and so fulfill itself.52
If the order of the "world" were not a product of the internal self- d
tiation of the human reason, but arose only through the interaction of
human reason with something beyond its ken, the concrete embodiment of
that "world" could not be the potentially universal, rationalized form of or-
ganization represented by the modern "state." To recognize the limits of
human reason was thus, like Hoelderlin, to see that men dwelt "poetically"
on the "earth."
Just as a people's existence was bounded or defined on top, as it were, by
their conception of the invisible, "immortal" powers that lived in the "sky,"
so, Hoelderlin suggested, a people's life and history was grounded, at bottom,
on the impenetrable "earth." The character of their gods and hence their way
of life were determined not only by the particular time but also by the
particular place in which they found themselves.53 But who could say why
this people had arisen in this place at this time? There was no reason. The
most the poet (or thinker) could do was to present the mystery as such.
Just as the "space" of a people's life was created by the tension or
opposition between earth and sky, so its "time" was demarcated "horizon-
tally" by the tension or opposition between the external pressures exerted by
the giveness or facticity of its past or origin and the internal need or desire
to give its life direction, order, and stable definition by means of the discipline
or culture (Zucht) that people had developed over time. In Germany, that
external pressure resulted from the "flight of the gods" or the dissolution of
the old dispensation, the old understanding of "Being" as that which endured,
in itself, forever, and so provided a foundation for truth. German philosophy
constituted the internal discipline to meet that need; turning back to confront
the origins of their thought (and civilization) in Greece, German philosophers
repeatedly suggested, in different ways to different degrees, that the old
Greco-Christian understanding ought to be incorporated in and replaced by
a new historical conception of man and his world.
The Current Crisis
In the lectures that Heidegger gave the next year as Introduction to

Metaphysics, he briefly explained why Germany's current "geopolitical"
position made it urgent for his homeland to assert its distinctive character in
opposition to the powers that would level and destroy its independence
"Europe . .. lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one
side and America on the other.... Situated in the center, our nation incurs
the severest pressure."54 Fortunately, he thought his nation had the "spiritual
[or intellectual] power" to rise to meet the danger.
"From a metaphysical point of view," Heidegger observed, "Russia and
America are the same, the same dreary technological frenzy, the same
unrestricted organization of the average man."55 Both the USSR and the U.S.
were organized and acted on principles taken directly from modern political
philosophy. These principles were purportedly of universal validity and
application. To be true to their own principles and to show that these
principles were, in fact, true, both nations had to seek to apply them world-
wide. They necessarily came into conflict with each other and put pressure
on all other nations. Insofar as they succeeded, the worked to level all
differences.
To resist that leveling, Heidegger saw, Germany could not merely assert
its "right to self-determination." Such an assertion would, in effect, accept
and absorb the liberal principles of the United States. (He had, therefore,
supported Hitler's withdrawal from the League of Nations.) Simply to assert
itself with no principled basis or foundation would, however, appear merely
(and irrationally) to favor one's own instead of what was rational and right.
To become and maintain themselves as a distinctive people, the Germans had
to resist the pressure of liberal democracy and intemational communism on
principle. They had to show that the understandings of "man," nature, and
right that these powers incorporated were not themselves universally or
etemally valid.
As "the most metaphysical of nations," Germany would "be able to wrest
a destiny from . . . within itself' only if it took "'a creative view of its
tradition." By extending the historical insight characteristic of German
philosophy, Heidegger thought that he had done just that. By showing that
the history of Western philosophy as a whole arose from and was still based
on a conception of "being" as "presence," he had shown that the foundations
of Western philosophy or "metaphysics" were not only essentially temporal
but also emphatically partial. The present was, after all, only a mode of time,
defined by its connection to past and future. Like the German "homeland,"
the roots of both liberal individualism and communist collectivism were
historically specific and partial, although the citizens of these nations did not
yet understand it. "[T]he inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism
was, therefore, to be found in Heidegger's own thought.
V TECHNOLOGYAND HEIDEGGER'S WITHDRAWAL

INTO POLITICAL QUIETISM
When he published Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953, Heidegger added

a parenthesis in which he stated that the "inner truth and greatness of this
movement" concerned "the encounter between global technology and mod-
em man." Critics like Juergen Habermas have suggested that this addition
represented an attempt at "whitewashing."56 But such critics go too far. At
the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger had presented
technology as the major practical problem when he stressed the urgency of
Germany's opposing the powers that represented the "same technological
frenzy" which destroyed all differences in time and space and so leveled all
distinctions among people and things. Heidegger had not, however, explicitly
drawn out the logical as well as the practical conclusions of the observation
he made at the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics with regard to the
gradual emptying out of the meaning of "Being" in the history of Western
philosophy into the most general of all concepts without any specific deter-
minants or properties. As he later argued, this "theoretical" emptying out of
all determinate meaning was finally realized and made evident in practice
through the technological transformation of everything into "standing re-
serve." Just as Heidegger had argued in Being and Time that the confrontation
with the ever present possibility of his death showed an individual that his
Da-sein was not necessary, so he suggested in his later works that the
potential transformation of all things through technology showed that no
particular form of being or intelligible order of beings-as-a-whole necessarily
existed. (The analysis of Da-sein in Being and Time was originally and
explicitly intended to shed light on "the meaning of Being" more generally.)
By "torturing nature in a laboratory," as Francis Bacon put it, the technolog-
ical extension of modem science had disclosed a fundamental truth.
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger was, as he would say, "on his
way" to that truth. He was not yet there. To reopen the question of the meaning
of Being, he argued, it was first necessary to recapture its original richness
of meaning; and in Introduction to Metaphysics he was concentrating on that
recovery. As he had emphasized in the Rektoratsrede, however, that recovery
was only a means or step to another, more "original," thoroughly historical
understanding of "man" and his relation to beings-as-a-whole.
Alexander Schwan erred, therefore, when he took statements that
Heidegger made about the polis in his explication of Sophocles' "Ode on
Man" as part of his eludication of the original Greek understanding as
statements of Heidegger's view of politics simply.57 Heidegger himself did
not endorse the unrestricted use of violence in an attempt to master nature
a whole or to rule other men. He attempted, rather, to show that this

will-to-mastery was inherent in Western metaphysics from the very begin-
ning in pre-Socratic philosophy.58
According to Sophocles (at least as Heidegger read him), "man" was the
strangest of all beings, first, because he found himself estranged or alienated
on the earth. Unlike Adam, who was provided with everything he needed
"ready-at-hand" and was granted the power to name things, Sophocles' man
had to challenge the powers of nature to force them to reveal their true
character, power, or "being" and to create a "space" or "place" in which he
himself could establish a home.
Because the Greeks thought human beings were by nature homeless, they
regarded the founding of the polis to be the highest human achievement:
Polis is usually translated as city or city-state. This does not capture the full meaning.
Polis means rather, the place, the there, wherein and as which historical [Da-sein] is, the
there in which, out of which, and for which history happens. To this place and scene of
history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the
thinkers, the rulers, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the army and the
fleet.59
So understood, the polis is not very "political":60
All this does not first belong to the polis, does not become political by entering into a
relation with a statesman and a general and the business of the state. No, it is political,
i. e., at the site of history, provided there are (for example) poets alone, but then really
poets, priests alone, but then really priests, rulers alone, but ... 61
What is important is the historical place or "space."

By creating order- through language, worship of the gods, or politics -
the individuals whose work opened up the "space" in which a conventional
society could be established covered up the violent origins and character not
only of nature but of their own work. In conventional society, the founders
themselves thus again became "strange" or homeless. In order to re-dis-cover
the true character and foundations of any existing order, later people would
have to use violence to tear through its "everyday" conventions. Human
beings were the strangest beings of all, therefore, not only because they
always lived in opposition or strife with nature but also because they were
always in danger of becoming mastered by their own works. Because the
greatest achievements of the past could be duplicated only through the
destruction of those self-same works, human life was essentially without
issue.
The Greeks called knowledge as that which human beings obtained by

violently challenging nature to reveal her hidden power or potential techne.
Such knowledge was clearly not merely technical. They identified it with
"art," "because . . . through the work of art . . . everything else that appears
and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and
understandable as being or not being."62 To reveal the potential "nature" or
"being" of a "thing" is not the same as showing how it can be transformed
into something else, its potential mutability. Techne was not technology,
therefore; but a line of development from the initial Greek stance toward
nature to the modern begins to emerge.
When, in modern times, being became understood as that which could be
represented "clearly and distinctly" to the mind of a "subject," Heidegger
observed four years later in "The Age of the World Picture," art became a
merely subjective or "aesthetic" experience. It was no longer an arena or
agency for the emergence of "truth." Conceived simply as matter in motion
which could be mathematically calculated, nature could be manipulated to
serve human purposes. The "truth" about "things" came to depend on one's
"position" or "perspective"; human beings consequently struggled to make
their own positions dominant:63
[T]he modern relationship to that which [thus]... becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a
confrontation of world views; and indeed not of random world views, but only of those
that have already taken up the fundamental position of man that is most extreme.64
The struggle between the U.S. and the USSR was the product of this
"metaphysical" development and could only be understood as such:
Only because and insofar as man actually and essentially has become subject is it
necessary for him, as a consequence, to confront the explicit question: Is it as an "I"
confined to its own preferences and freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the "we"
of society; is it as an individual or as a community; is it as a personality within the
community or as a mere group member in the corporate body; is it as a state and nation
and as a people or as the common humanity of modern man, that man will and ought to
be the subject that in his modern essence he already is?65
From Heidegger's point of view, World War 1I did not settle anything: Russia
and America, collectivism and individualism, continued to struggle for
mastery of the world.66
Just as the polis was an expression of the Greek understanding of "truth,"
so the techno-scientific competition of the "superpowers" was a product of
modern "metaphysics" and would last as long as human beings retained a
modern, essentially "subjective" understanding of themselves and their
world. As long as people continued the attempt to remake nature to suit t

own purposes, they would remain essentially "homeless." Only when th
came to realize that there was no reason why human beings themselves
should not become matter for technological manipulation, and consequently
began to ask what distinguished "man" from the rest of nature, would
discover the source and thus be able to overcome their estrangement. They
would, in other words, become ready (prepared) for a new dispensation of
"Being" or fate only when they began to ask the question with which
Heidegger began his critical "destruction" of Westem metaphysics in Being
and Time.
Because the Nazis had not accepted his spiritual leadership, the movement
had been absorbed into the reigning ideological-technological, international,
political competition. Its biologism was perhaps the clearest exemplification
of the disastrous consequences of the inexorable extension of technology to
men. In a now infamous statement made in a lecture he gave in Bremen in
1949, Heidegger observed:
Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing
as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the same thing
as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture
of hydrogen bombs.67
As many of his critics have emphasized, Heidegger steadfastly refused to

admit that anything exceptional had happened to the Jews as Jews at the hands
of Germans as Germans.68 He could not without earlier contradicting himself
or renouncing fundamental positions he had taken in the past. He could not
denounce the injustice, inhumanity, or evil of the death camps without
appealing to moral standards based either on Christian notions of divine right,
in which he no longer claimed to believe, or on a conception of a natural
order he himself had criticized. He could not even wonder at, much less
protest, the monstrous irrationality and gross "inefficiency" of a nation's
dedicating so many resources to eradicating a nonthreatening intemal popu-
lation when it was desperately fighting to preserve its own existence in a
two-front war. "Rationality" and technical "efficiency" were the means by
which the "metaphysical" powers leveled all differences among human
beings. To suggest that there was something extraordinarily or particularly
objectionable about National Socialism in practice would have been to
recognize important differences among the powers contending for world
mastery; they could not simply or uniformly be regarded as embodiment of
the "same technological frenzy." There was all-too-close a connection,
unfortunately, between Heidegger's "politics" and his thought.
By suggesting that there was no essential difference between mechan

agriculture and the holocaust, Heidegger might appear to have denied that
there was any distinctive quality or value in the "human" per se. But he
insisted, such a denial was the consequence of the inexorable technological
extension of Western metaphysics, not of his own "thought." What he had
learned both from his study of the history of philosophy and the outcome of
World War II was the impossibility of checking this technological leveling
with "will" or force. When Ernst Junger urged his readers to oppose the
nihilistic tendencies of modem life, therefore, Heidegger insisted that it was
necessary not merely to think but to live out the logical consequences of
Western "metaphysical" science in order to create an "opening" for a new
historical beginning.69 Until his contemporaries had experienced the destruc-
tive consequences of modern science for themselves, they would not be able
to follow a "founding thinker." They would not see that there was no such
"thing" as a "natural order." They would not come to understand that the
"world" which defined their existence, not only as individuals but also as
members of a "people," was a historical projection embedded in the language
they inherited from their forbears which would necessarily change over time.
Rather than demean humanity, Heidegger insisted, in the "Letter on
Humanism" he wrote after the war, that he was attempting to elevate it. The
traditional definition of "man" as a "rational animal" was inadequate insofar
as it failed to recognize that the possession of language and understanding
made human existence qualitatively different from other forms of life. By
denying the importance of "animal" or "sensitive" commonality, however,
he destroyed "empathy" or "pity" as a basis of social and political morality.
(Heidegger's emphatically intellectual re-definition of "man" would thus
appear to be partly responsible for his astounding lack of compassion for the
victims of the concentration camps.) His explicit rejection of the traditional
bases of morality was even more radical. "Ethics" was a subfield of "meta-
physics," as he saw it; and the "metaphysical" understanding of "Being" as
the "Being of the beings," that is, as a universal "substance" without any
distinguishing properties of its own, led, inevitably, to the realization in
practice that everything was merely material to be transformed at will. To
preserve a sense of the distinctively human, he concluded, the "metaphysi-
cal" view of "humanity" as part of a larger, more encompassing natural order
had to be replaced by an essentially historical view in which "man" consti-
tuted the "open space" in which different views of "being-as-a-whole" were
disclosed in time. In opposition to Nietzsche, Heidegger insisted, these views
were not human "creations." Because the origins or ground of that "truth"
would always be hidden in the process of "disclosure," human beings could
do no more than enunciate what they saw. Whether they articulated a

of the whole and made themselves at home in it depended on whether they
opened themselves to a dis-closure of "Being," that is, whether they asked
what the character of the world in which they found themselves was and so
"let it be," or whether they continued, like Heidegger's contemporaries,
attempting to master the cosmos by transforming it.
Heidegger's historical view of both "man" and "truth" thus led him finally
to a stand that was not only lacking in compassion but also essentially passive.
The only choice that human beings had was either to embrace the view of
the world as it appeared to them at the particular place and time in which they
found themselves, or to lose themselves as a result of the leveling tendencies
of the essentially technological systems of thought and practice that claimed
to be based on universally applicable principles. In light of the political
consequences of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, we cannot but ask
whether a less exclusively geistlich (intellectual and historical), more mixed
view of "human nature" might be not be preferable.70
NOTES
1. Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987). Cf. Robert Julian,
"Heidegger and Hitler," Partisan Review, LV, No. 3, 429-437, for a description of the furi
debates in France. Immediate American reactions included Thomas A. Sheehan, "Heidegger
the Nazis," New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988, 38-47; Richard Rorty, "Taking Philosop
Seriously," New Republic, April 11, 1988, 31-34.
2. Hans Georg Gadamer "Back from Syracuse?" (John McCumber, Trans.) Critical
Inquiry, XV (Winter 1989), 427.
3. Maurice de Gandillac and Alfred de Towernicki, "Deux Documents sur Heidegger," Les
Temps Modernes 1, whole no. 4 (1946), 713-724; Karl Loewith, "Les implications politiques de
la philosophie del 'existence chez Heidegger," LTM 2, whole no. 14 (November 1946), 343-360;
Eric Weil, "Le cas Heidegger," LTM 3, whole no. 22 (July 1947), 128-138. Albert Borgmann
gives a useful summary of some of the subsequent debate in "The Question of Heidegger and
Technology," Philosophy Today, XXXI, no. 2/4 (Summer 1987), 127-138.
4. Weil, "Le cas," 343-360; Rorty, "Philosophy," 31-34; Michael Zimmerman, "Heidegger,
Ethics, and National Socialism," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, V (Spring 1974), 97-106;
Hannah Arendt, "Heidegger at Eighty," reprinted from The New York Review of Books in
Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1978), 293-303; Fred Dallmayr, "Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy,"
Political Theory, XII (May 1984), 204-207.
5. Loewith, "Implications politiques," 343-360; and Henry Pachter, "Heidegger and
Hitler," Boston University Journal, XXIV, No. 3 (1976), 47-55, argue that Heidegger's "exis-
tential" philosophy led him to assert Nazi principles. As Weil ("Le Cas," 128-138) objected,
however, such a reading of Being and Time allowed individuals to assert whatever principles
they chose. If Heidegger's own "choice" reflected his anti-Semitism, it expressed a p

character failing more than an imperative of his thought per se. Leo Strauss has also
that there was a necessary connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his politic
did not specify what he thought that connection was, however. In contrast to Loewith and
he did explicitly state that the connection did not exhaust the meaning of Heidegger's
(Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. by Thomas Pangle (Chicago: Univer
Chicago Press, 1989), 27-46).
6. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1959), 13. Because Heidegger criticized this "metaphysical" tradition,
Jacques Derrida (De L'esprit (Paris: Gallilee, 1987), 63-90) has also argued that Heidegger's
thought was not inherently or intentionally racist. In the Rektoratsrede, Derrida urged, Heidegger
was trying to elevate National Socialism. His thought nevertheless became aligned with racism,
because he had not entirely freed himself from previous metaphysics (which was itself inherently
racist insofar as it was based on a conception of "nature.") (For Derrida's view of the inherent
racism of Western "metaphysics" see "Racism's Last Word," Critical Inquiry, XII (Autumn
1985), 290-299. Heidegger himself understood the political implications of "metaphysics" rather
differently. He thought the "metaphysical" tradition culminated in the "technological frenzy"
and " unrestricted organization of the average man" represented by both the U.S. and the USSR
(Introduction to Metaphysics 37-38). In his lecture on the "The Principle of Reason" (Diacritics,
XIX (Fall 1983), 17-18), Derrida explicitly endorsed Heidegger's analysis of the sameness of
the two "techno-scientific" "superpowers," and concluded that it would be necessary to find a
new foundation for community, if people were ever to escape the totalitarian tendencies of
"power politics." Derrida refused to follow Heidegger in defining community on the basis of
language, however. On the contrary, in De l'esprit, 110-116, he argued that Heidegger's
"privileging" of German and Greek was arbitrary.
7. As Otto Poeggeler observes in "Den Fuehrer Fuehren? Heidegger und kein Ende,"
Philosophische Rundschau, 32, no. 1-2 (1985), 46-47: "Hannah Arendt . . . was right that
Heidegger's thought finally belonged to another tradition than that through which National
Socialism was articulated. It remains to ask, however, whether ... the engagement of 1933 grew
out of Heidegger's way of philosophizing." In a conversation in 1936 that has only recently
come to light, Heidegger told Karl Loewith that his "concept of historicity - Geschichtlichkeit-
was the foundation for his political involvement." Mein Leben in Deutschland vor and nach
1933: ein Bericht (Stuttgart, 1986), 57.
8. Heidegger's accounts of his own activities-both to the de-Nazification authorities at
the end of the war and in an interview he granted to Der Spiegel- were, at his request, published
only posthumously. Cf. "'Only a God Can Save Us': The Spiegel Interview" William J.
Richardson, Trans. in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago:
Precedent, 1981), and "The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thought," Karsten Harries, Trans.
Review of Metaphysics, 38 (March 1985), 467-502.
9. Translated from Guido Schneeberge, Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem
Leben und Denken (Bern: 1961) by Dagobert D. Runes in German Existentialism: Martin
Heidegger (New York: Wisdom Library, 1965).
10. According to Farias, Nazisme, and Hugo Ott, "Martin Heidegger als Rektor der
Universitaet Freiburg i. Br. 1933/34," Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins, 102 (1983),
121-136, and "Martin Heidegger als Rektor der Universitaet Freiburg 1933/34," Zeitschriftfuer
die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 132 (1984), 343-358, Heidegger's letter shows that his resistance
was more prudential than principled. He did not object to firing Jewish professors or the
"cleansing" program per se so much as he worried about foreign reactions.
1 1. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, vi, 199.

12. Karsten Harries, Trans., "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Review of
Metaphysics, XXXVIII (March 1985), 467-480.
13. Heidegger, Rektoratsrede, 475-476.
14. Karsten Harries, Trans., "The Rectorate," 481-502; cf. also Karl A. Moehling, "Heidegger
and the Nazis," in Thomas A. Sheehan Ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago:
Precedent, 1981), 31-43.
15. Heidegger, Rektoratsrede, 474.
16. Ibid., 474-475. As Alexander Schwan points out in Politische Philosophie im Denken
Heideggers (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965), 96-97, both Volk and Erde remain important
terms and concepts in Heidegger's subsequent thought. He does not appeal to connections or
strength of Blut elsewhere. The addition of "blood" thus appears to represent an explicit attempt
on Heidegger's part to bring his own thought closer to Nazi ideology.
17. Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1972), 17, 33.
18. Cf., for example, "Heidegger's Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse," by
Frederick Olafson, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, VI (Winter 1977), 28-39.
19. For example, Arnold I. Davidson, "Opening the Debate," Critical Inquiry, XV (Winter
1989), 417-419. As Karsten Harries has argued in "Heidegger as a Political Thinker," in
Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, 304-328, however, Heidegger's notion of historical destiny
was necessary to give his conception of "resolve" content.
20. Husserl began the Encyclopedia Britannica article on "Phenomenology," which he had
asked Heidegger to coauthor with him, by observing that "consciousness" was always "con-
sciousness of' something. The Cartesian beginning point which had given rise to the unbridge-
able gap between subject and object in modern philosophy represented a fundamental misun-
derstanding because it was, in fact, impossible to be conscious of cognizing without being
simultaneously conscious of an object to which the cognitions were related. Heidegger spoke
pointedly of Da-sein rather than consciousness (Bewusst-sein) to remind his readers that human
life and intelligence was not solely mental but was physically located in space and time.
21. The "sleepy animal" which Jean Jacques Rousseau described as living all by itself in
the "state of nature," without language and hence without much intellectual activity, did not live
a truly or properly human existence as Heidegger saw it.
22. The crucial passage in Being and Time, 436, reads:
If fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with-Others, its

historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny. This is how we
designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that
puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can
be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been
guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our
resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the
power of destiny become free.
For an alternative interpretation, see Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 403-404, n. 41.
23. Heidegger's failure to explain what exactly he meant by "people," the presumed ground
or source of any polity, was one of the main reasons the political implications of Being and Time
were not clear, according to Mark Blitz in Heidegger's "Being and lime" and the Possibility of
Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 205-208. On the basis of the
passage quoted above, Michael Allen Gillespie equates people with generation, in "Tempo
and History in the Thought of Martin Heidegger," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, X
No. 168 (January 1989), 39.
24. Hoelderlin's Hymnen "Germanien" und "Der Rhein, Gesamtausgabe II, Band 39
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 4. In the following analysis, I shall be concentrating solely on
the question of what Heidegger's reading of Hoelderlin shows about Heidegger's own thought
and politics; I shall not address the question of the accuracy of Heidegger's reading of Hoelderlin
per se.
25. "The Fatherland is Being itself, that which carries and joins from the ground the history
of a people existing as one: the historicality of its history" (Hoelderlin's Hymnen, 119).
26. Heidegger, Hoelderliln's Hlymnen, 143.
27. According to Karl Jaspers, at one time Heidegger thought that he could lead "the leader."
Heidegger himself is said to have admitted in private that his greatest blunder had been to believe
that Hitler would leave the party to lead the German people as a whole after he was elected. His
lectures on Hoelderlin seem to embody that realization.
28. "The power of the poetry, of the thought, of the state-creating work, at once in the ages
of unfolding history, are not calculable, forwards and backwards. They can work for a long time
unrecognized, without bridges, next to one another, and still for one another." Hoelderlin's
Hymnen, 143.
29. Heidegger, Hoelderlin 's Hymnen, 7.
30. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 10.
31. Heidegger, Hoelderlin 's Hymnen, 61-75.
32. Aristotle, Politics, 1252b25-1253a25.
33. In Being and Time, Heidegger did, to be sure, argue that human beings initially
encountered "things" in the world as practically "ready-at-hand" to be used rather than merely
as "present" to be contemplated theoretically. If one asked what the primary "use" would be, it
would probably be for self-preservation. Heidegger himself did not explicitly make such a claim,
however, perhaps because he connected the desire for self-preservation with the "inauthentic,"
everyday understanding on which existing polities were based.
34. Cf. Hoelderlin 's Hymnen, 75-76; "Letter on Humanism", Basic Writings, ed. by David
Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 199-207.
35. Heidegger himself argued that legein originally meant to gather and was on that account
originally associated with a perception of being-as-a-whole by pre-Socratic philosophers. Such
"gathering" was not abstract or essentially "logical." Cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, 124-35,
and Early Greek Thinking, trans. by David Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975), 59-78.
36. For a more complete account of Aristotle's understanding of politics, see Catherine H.
Zuckert, "Aristotle on the Limits and Satisfactions of Political Life," Interpretation (Spring
1985), 185-207.
37. Derrida thus argues that if Heidegger had been consistent, he would have been a cultural
relativist. (De l'esprit, 110-130). Derrida suggests that Heidegger's "privileging" of Greek and
German on the grounds of their special relation to "being" (see text below) is arbitrary. He
dismisses the antisubjectivist grounds of Heidegger's concern for "Being," because he thinks
that he (Derrida) has solved the problem of subjectivism through his notion of diffe6rance without
recourse to such a metaphysical concept. Heidegger, I suspect, would regard Derrida's arguments
as essentially subjectivist.
38. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 70-74.
39. Heidegger himself signals the historical character of his own understanding of "things"
like language and truth by speaking of their Wesen. The usual translation of Wesen as essence
Zuckert I HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY AND POLMCS 77
or nature misses his fundamental point which is to contrast the traditional "metaphy
understanding of "what" things "are" in terms of an unchanging "nature" or "essence"
historical understanding of their present existence as the conjunction of what they ha
with what they may become in the future.
40. Heidegger, Hoelderlin s Hymnen, 89-90; Being and Time, 1. 5. 29, 172-179.
41. Heidegger, Hoelderlin's Hymnen, 76-97.
42. Ibid., 107-112.
43. Ibid., 54-55.
44. Heidegger emphasized the priority of "spirit" to "politics," moreover, in the description
he gave of that world in the lectures he gave on Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). In 1808, Heidegger
reported, Napoleon had a conversation with Goethe
about poetry, particularly about tragedy and the portrayal of fate. Napoleon said tragedies
'belonged to a darker period. What do we want with fate now? Politics is fate.' . . . In
1809, Napoleon suffered his first serious defeat.. . . Meanwhile Prussia had begun to
regain its 'firm and certain spirit' (Fichte) . . . Baron von Stein directed the new form of
the administration. Scharnhorst created the spirit and form of a new army. Fichte gave
his addresses to the German nation at the Berlin academy. Through his sermons at the
Trinity Church Schleiermacher became the political teacher of Berlin Society. In 1809,
Wilhelm von Humboldt became the Prussian minister of culture.... All these new
men ... wanted [what] they called the new Prussian state [,] 'the state of intelligence,'
that is, of the Spirit.... The profound untruth of those words that Napoleon had spoken
to Goethe . . . was soon to come to light: Politics is fate, No, Spirit is fate and fate is
Spirit.
And emphasizing his alienation from the Nazi regime, Heidegger concluded: "The transforma-
tion of that spirit into a historical force has not yet come about. It can only come about when we
have once again learned to admire and preserve creative work" (pp. 1-2).
45. In his Logic, Hegel argued that undifferentiated "being" was indistinguishable from
"no-thing," until it was dialectically differentiated into different kinds of beings through
negation. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argued, on the contrary, that "Being"
was not really an empty, meaningless word as the common notion of it as the most general and
therefore least determinate concept would suggest. "Being" had, in fact, historically been
differentiated and defined rather concretely in terms of the opposition between being and
becoming, being and appearance, being and thinking, and the "is" and the "ought." These
oppositions did not have the character of mutually exclusive categories associated with negation.
The opposed pairs existed and were known only in conjunction with one another.
46. Cf. Theatetus, 152d-e, where Socrates observed that all the poets and philosophers
following Homer, except Parmenides, had shared essentially the same view. Arguing that the
"flux' in Heracleitus referred to the definition and ordering of things through opposition,
Heidegger suggested here that the "difference between Parmenides and Heracleitus did not
reside where it is usually thought" (Hoelderlin's Hymnen, 127). Both asserted that day could not
be known without night.
47. In the 1927 lectures he gave on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 119-121, Heidegger argued that
ancient philosophy had been found wanting in two essential respects: It did not distinguish 'man"
as a "who" from the "what" of other, "natural" forms of "being; and it did not allow for innovation
or change. Yet it had become clear over time that the ancients did not know or antici
future developments.
48. Cf. "The Age of the World View," in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt, Trans.; New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
115-154.
49. Heidegger, Hoelderlin 's Hymnen, 54. In fact, Hoelderlin wrote of one god; Heidegger
restated (and so generalized) the point in the plural.
50. Cf. Heidegger's analysis of Aristotle's discussion of "time" in the Physics in Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, Part II, Ch. 1, section 19, a.
51. The "Muses" were said to be the daughters of "Memory."
52. Heidegger, Hoelderlin 's Hymnen, 132.
53. To say that human existence was "earthly" was not, Heidegger emphasized, to say, like
the Christians, that human beings were lower than and dependent on their Creator. Nor was
"earth" merely a piece of land that could be geologically analyzed and geographically located.
The dimensions of a "homeland" could not be scientifically described, because they were not
products of or subject to general laws. Cf. Hoelderlin's Hymnen, 104-105:
The homey earth is not a naked, externally bounded space, natural territory or place of
appearance for what will play itself out. The earth is brought up as the home for the gods.
Through such a production does it first become a home, but it can fall back into a simple
dwelling place.... The becoming of the home does not occur through mere settlement.
54. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 37-38.

55. Ibid., 37.
56. "The Heidegger Controversy," Critical Inquiry, XV (Winter 1989), 431-435.
57. Combining the statements from Introduction to Metaphysics quoted below with
Heidegger's Rektoratsrede, Schwan (Politische Philosophie, 61-91) argued that in the early
1930s Heidegger argued for an activist politics through which leaders created the "space" or
"place" of historical action with violence and demanded absolute obedience from their followers.
Beginning with "The Age of the World View" (1938), Heidegger later began to assume the more
passive stance associated with Gelassenheit (letting be). In one of his later emendations of
Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger later suggested that there was no fundamental change:
He had initially said simply that, "Re-solve is no mere decision to act, but the crucial beginning
of action that anticipates and reaches through all action. To will is to be resolved." In publishing
the lectures, he added: "But the essence of resolve lies in the opening, the coming-out-of-cover
of [Da-sein] into the clearing of being, and not in a storing up of energy for 'action.' See Sein
und Zeit, sect. 44 and 60. But its relation to being is of letting-be."
58. He stated this conclusion explicitly in the series of lectures he began to deliver on
Nietzsche in 1936.
59. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 152. Heidegger had earlier complained about
the inaccurate emphasis on the democracy of the polis.
60. In his lectures on "Parmenides," in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman,
1982). Band 54, 140-141, Heidegger went so far as to declare that the Greeks were an unpolitical
people.
61. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 152.
62. Ibid., 159.
63. Cf. Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History (Chicago
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 124-134.
64. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 134.

65. Ibid., 132-133.
66. In What Is Called Thinking? trans. by Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968),
66-67, Heidegger commented: "What did the Second World War really decide? (We shall not
mention here its fearful consequences for my country, cut in two.) This world war has decided
nothing- if we use 'decision' in so high and wide a sense that it concerns solely man's essential
fate on this earth."
67. Quoted by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, I'art et la
politique (Paris, 1987), 58, from Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik and Gelassenheit (Freiburg,
1984).
68. For example, Emanuel Levinas, "As If Consenting to Horror," Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, "Neither an Accident nor a Mistake," and Maurice Blanchot, "Thinking the Apoca-
lypse," Critical Inquiry, XV, (Winter 1989), 478-479, 481-489.
69. The Question of Being, trans. by Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven, CT:
College and University Press, 1956). At the time of his Rektoratsrede, Heidegger also reportedly
gave private seminars on Junger's DerArbeiter which, he thought, drew out the consequences
of Nietzsche's analysis of the modern condition. And the contrast between Junger and Heidegger
is enlightening. Although the Nazis embraced his work, Junger refused to join the party. He
moved from a Nietzschean contempt for bourgeois life after World War I to a catacylsmic view
of the possible end of the world in the 1940s in The Marble Cliffs. In direct contrast to Heidegger,
in the 1950s, Junger made his peace with technology in The Glass Bees. Under the direction of
men with a broader view, he suggested that technology could be made to serve human desires
without necessarily destroying them or nature entirely.
70. Whereas Heidegger used Geist only in quotations marks and very infrequently in Being
and Time, Derrida points out in De l'esprit that the word appears with increasing frequency and
with no quotation marks in Heidegger's later writings, especially where he concentrates on the
difference between human beings and animals.
Catherine H. Zuckert teaches political theory at Carleton College and is currently in

residence at the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware.

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Martin Heidegger: His Philosophy and His Politics

Author(s): Catherine H. Zuckert

His Philosophy and His Politics

T HE FUROR AROUSED IN FRANCE by the publication of Victor

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 18 No. 1, February 1990 51-79

L HE!DEGGER'S POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT

11. THE RECTOR'S ADDRESS

Heidegger's inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiburg h

The "mission" or "destiny" of the "German people" was itself esse

III. THE ROOTS OF THE REKTORATSREDE IN

IV "POETICALLY MAN DWELLS ON THE EARTH"

Heidegger had not explained what exactly he meant by a "people," what

Looking to the Future

In dedicating a series of lectures to explicating the poems most obviously

Historical change occurred slowly because it took a long time to prepare

The Poet as Founder

To understand how a poet could found the historical being of a people, it

Heidegger's understanding of the basis of human community was thus

The Historical Destiny of the German People

According to Heidegger, Hoelderlin's reflections on the "essence of

The Historical Basis of Community

Where Hegel conceived of the fundamental opposition in terms of nature

ended when Geist achieved full self-consciousness. But, later thinkers as

general community in l iving unity. In section 185 of the Philosophy of Right he

The Current Crisis

In the lectures that Heidegger gave the next year as Introduction to

V TECHNOLOGYAND HEIDEGGER'S WITHDRAWAL

When he published Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953, Heidegger added

a whole or to rule other men. He attempted, rather, to show that this

So understood, the polis is not very "political":60

What is important is the historical place or "space."

The Greeks called knowledge as that which human beings obtained by

world. As long as people continued the attempt to remake nature to suit t

As many of his critics have emphasized, Heidegger steadfastly refused to

By suggesting that there was no essential difference between mechan

do no more than enunciate what they saw. Whether they articulated a

they chose. If Heidegger's own "choice" reflected his anti-Semitism, it expressed a p

1 1. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, vi, 199.

If fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with-Others, its

54. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 37-38.

64. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 134.

Catherine H. Zuckert teaches political theory at Carleton College and is currently in

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