This collection, a record of seminars that Heidegger gave in the 1933–34 semester, is an important document in the battle for determining Heidegger's legacy as either one of the most profound minds of the 20th century, or a charlatan abusing his philosophical credentials to provide intellectual justification for Nazism. With this accessible translation re-published in paperback form, English audiences can read the primary text and wade into this important debate in Heidegger scholarship for themselves.
The text is not of Heidegger's making, though it was subject to his scrutiny, with him having made very minor amendments to the text.
The text begins in a manner familiar to Heidegger's works, namely, the distinction between ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’, expressed here in his distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘concept’, the purpose of which is to return to the ‘prescientific beginning’ of how the essence of ‘nature, history and state are given to us’ as triadic fields of Dasein (page 15, my italics). This question of how nature is given directs Heidegger into the question of language and its effect on framing a domain. The Greek word for nature, physis, indicates growth; here Heidegger flirts with teleology in linking growth with process, as a development which ‘cannot be some arbitrary motion’ (21).
In this sense Heidegger asks if we ‘have a right’ to remain ignorant of time, the fundament of his phenomenological method, when we attempt to determine the essence of nature (28). Tied to this ignorance, Heidegger discusses the ‘modern’ tendency to think time ontically; he disavows both Newtonian and Kantian descriptions of time as able to be taken seriously ‘as a mathematical theory, but not philosophically’ (32), i.e. as an ontic (conceptual) theory, rather than Dasein's ontologically ‘essential’ relation to time which Heidegger wishes to explore. With an implicit nod to the Greek kairos, Heidegger ties every ‘Now’, each moment, as an essential means of grounding each decision historically. Crucially here, Heidegger oversteps the analytic's reminiscences of Being and Time, to declare that ‘The Now requires the We’ (34), the first sign of setting his analytic within a collectivist context.
Heidegger now questions the essence of the state, and ‘whether there is any history without a state’ (37), thereby extending the ontic versus ontological distinction to the state. The state can be materially understood, but Heidegger's concern is the way it is essentially understood by the way of Being of the beings which belong to it, namely, ‘“the people” [das Volk]’ (38). What of the way of Being that the people orders itself in the state? Heidegger identifies order with ‘mastery, rank, leadership and following’ (38) and claims that the first step of determining the essence of the state is deciphering ‘who rules, or is permitted to rule’ (ibid.).
Session 6 addresses this question. Significantly, it also contains the first mention of race by Heidegger in these seminars (43); but it is the historical community of the Volk that determines Heidegger's racism, as opposed to biological motivations. The capacity for questioning the essence of the state is made possible by Heidegger's claim, alien to that of Being and Time, that ‘the Being of human beings is political’ (42) inherently. Heidegger sets himself in opposition to the rampant individualism dominant (as he sees it) from the Renaissance onwards, for which ‘everything was supposed to exist purely for the sake of the great individual’ (42). An important qualification to make here (which we can presume Heidegger wishes to make to avoid explicitly contradicting himself later) is that Heidegger is not attacking the promotion of the great individual per se, rather a narrow, individualized conception of them. It is against this narrow ideal that he characterizes the political sphere as an ontological dimension of Dasein's being, and makes the state the supporting ground of the Volk while reciprocally making the Volk the supporting ground of the state, tying each to the common will of the other.
There must exist a leader to bind this reciprocity. Heidegger conceives this leader in essentialist terms, one who requires no political education, but rather leads ‘in accordance with the marked form of his Being’ (45), binding together the willing-Staat and the willing-Volk via his own will. Via the leader's implementing will, the state is, in a metaphysically essential way, the Being of the people. This implementation, Heidegger contends, doesn't require coercion, but rather ‘awakens’ a common will in each individual; each Dasein affirms their place amidst the common will itself by a resolute decision (62). In an inversion of the analytic of Das Man in Being and Time, Heidegger contends that individuals whose will directs them contrariwise to that of the common will have not attained a precursory step for attaining authenticity, but rather are hurdles that stand in need of re-education in the service of the Volk.
While the leader is accorded the essentialist metaphysical privilege of knowing how to lead, Heidegger bestows responsibilities of supportive governance to a ‘band of guardians’ (45). The Platonic overtones in Session 7's discussion of this ‘band of guardians’ complements the Nietzschean overtones concerning the leader of the state's fated capacity to lead. That the leader in question is Hitler in Heidegger's discussion here is worth keeping at the forefront of one's mind while reading; Heidegger simply must bear responsibility of this idealization, given that page 45 and page 46 are noted as being Heidegger's only two personal interferences with the record of the seminars.
We find in this chapter Heidegger's politicization of the care structure (sorge) featured so crucially in the analytic of Being and Time, emphasizing Dasein's ‘fundamental relation to the state’ as being paramount to Dasein's ‘Being-human’ (48). The erotic aspect implicit in Dasein's sorge too is given this political dimension within this session; because each Dasein cares about their own Being (they love their own existence), so too the people feel ‘eros for the state’ (48). In the same way, the common will of the Volk is one that ‘will love struggle’ (49).
One can, at a stretch, attribute Heidegger's comments this far to ivory tower naivety, applying abstract metaphysics to a political utopianism that was doomed to failure. However, one cannot deny Heidegger's justification for German expansionism. In his remarks on the volk’s ‘relatedness to space’ in Session 8, he describes those ‘Germans who live outside the borders of the Reich’ as ‘deprived of their authentic way of Being’ (55). His description of Bodenstandigkeit as the proper relation of human belonging emphasizes yet another politicization of Being and Time's analytic, this time with reference to ‘homelessness’ and the anxiety that acts as a prerequisite for authentic belonging.
Heidegger's 9th and 10th sessions discuss the dynamics of the common will, and the means to its implementation, as grasping the ‘whole fullness of time’ demands the ‘resolute decision’ of each individual constituting the Volk. In turn this common will transcends the will of each individual, becoming ‘a whole that has its own, originary characteristics’ (60). The distinction between oppression and subordination that Heidegger attempts to make here is questionable in its success, but through a retrospective lens reads as dangerously blinkered to the reality of the National Socialist political movement. Session 10 sounds off with a return to the teleological discussions in the earlier seminars, with Heidegger ending the seminars characterizing the ‘Fuhrer-state’ as the ‘completion of the historical development’. (64).
The seminars are supplemented by five contributed essays. The first four essays of these five are excellent contributions, providing further clarification of either the seminars themselves, their wider context within Heidegger's biography, the politics of the era, or indeed the philosophical comparisons and influences to be drawn from the content of the seminars.
Marion Heinz, to whom we owe thanks for the discovery of the text of the seminars themselves (as mentioned in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried's introduction to this collection), provides the first essay. She offers prescient insight into Heidegger's appropriation of the analytic of Being and Time in the service of the political commitments of the seminars. Although other essays in this collection touch upon similar ground, its position as the first essay is well-placed as an introduction to these topics. The role of destiny for the individual Dasein's ‘being-in-the-world’ is given a central role towards the political affirmation of the state, which supplants the imperative in Being and Time for individual authenticity with the seminars’ emphasis affirming a particular form of community. Heinz notes that the characteristic terminological tools of the analytic of Being and Time ‘lose their formal character’ (75) in the service of providing philosophical legitimacy to the Third Reich. As mentioned above, the indebtedness to Nietzsche is obvious in the seminars, and Heinz further argues for this, drawing upon the prospect of nihilism as providing the potential for Dasein's resoluteness (with an inherently politicized character) as well as the nullification of all values in the face of a nihilistic historical epoch. In the seminars Heidegger's solution to the anxiety felt in the face of the Nothing serves to appropriate aspects of his own analytic to justify Nazism.
The essay by Peter E. Gordon discusses whether the seminars, and by extension Heidegger's National Socialist commitments, should have philosophical, as well as moral, implications for how we view his larger thought. His conclusion is that they should not, largely for the reason that Heidegger's ‘pretense’ (101) that the seminars are genuinely philosophical in content fails, owing to the absurdly clumsy implementation of the political into the analytic, which Gordon argues is ‘merely the result of an ideological preference that has been mystified with an ontological aura’ (92). Appropriating the role of the guardians from Plato's Republic, the Fuhrer‘s status in Heidegger's politicized analytic as essentially above knowledge means that affairs of state fall to a ‘band of guardians’ to rule while the leader leads. Gordon provides a telling piece of biography in Karl Jaspers's claim concerning Heidegger's personal aspirations for such a role within the structure of the Reich (94).
Gordon is right to identify this clumsiness, and to question the philosophical legitimacy of Heidegger's analytic in the seminars; it too is questionable whether Heidegger himself bought into these claims, aside from his biographical opportunism. But perhaps one could argue that his commitment to solving the central philosophical and existential problems that he saw as very real and ominously looming was justified, even if his positive programmes in response to them are dubious. After all, Heidegger continued attempting to solve these problems for the remainder of his life, through the numerous shifts, or ‘turns’, in the methodology of his thinking.
The nature of Heidegger's alleged ‘racism’ is addressed in Robert Bernasconi's essay on Heidegger's conception of the Volk, and his distancing himself from the biological foundations of racism that underpinned much Nazi ideology. While Heidegger characterizes Bodenstandigkeit as a necessary condition for accounting for the way of Being of a Volk, it is not a sufficient condition, Bernasconi argues (117); the decision is Heidegger's foremost tool for existentially binding a community, rather than being determined by scientific means. Later in the 1930's after his resignation from the rectorate, Heidegger comes to equivocate the biological racism of National Socialist ideology with the overtly subjectivist line of metaphysical thinking that liberalism and social contract-based conceptions of the state are characterized as within the seminars.
Bernasconi's essay contains an informative detailing of Heidegger's excursus on Holderlin in relation to the topography (the ‘rootedness in the soil’) of the state and its political grounding as ‘site’. Within this he ties his notion of guardianship with the role of the Fuhrer. Discussing the essential character of a number of roles Heidegger identifies as having creative power within the state (mentioning poets, thinkers, priests, and rulers), he contends that what they ‘are’ (144) is to somehow transcend the bounds of the Volk, in order to provide grounding for the state. Bernasconi is surely correct to define this as a creative engagement of an agonistic character (145).
Theodore Kisiel's essay expands upon the Platonic influences on Heidegger's political thinking within the seminars. Kisiel documents Heidegger's conceptions of the leader and statesmen, as well as the ‘educational state’ (130) and the role of the university in its capacity to provide such education in the direction of the Fuhrer-staat’s common will. While some have argued that Being and Time possesses only superficial resemblances to the communitarian character of the seminars, Kisiel identifies Heidegger generating a concrete ‘path out of the levelling, impersonal anonymity of the masses’ or das Man into authentic being identified at a communitarian level.
But while Kisiel argues that Dasein's ownmost authentic being is what allows for authentic being-with in Being and Time (128), it is difficult to see how this works in the same manner in the seminars, with respect to Being and Time’s encouraging the individual Dasein to seek self-authenticity as a preliminary to authentic being-with, even if Kisiel argues as such (129). The spectre of individuality lingers over Being and Time’s analytic, which sets it at odds with the thrust of the seminars.
The final contribution is an essay by Slavoj Žižek which, while peppered with bursts of brilliance, is often dangerously unqualified in its argumentation, and morally troubling in its central tenets. Žižek argues that Heidegger's proclamations, supporting an authentic mode of politically grounded Being ontologically rooted in a common will, take the ‘right step [but] in the wrong direction’ (152) in arguing for a ‘radically emancipatory politics’ (153). Žižek argues that renouncing the possibility of a Heideggerian politics is limiting, in the same way that Heidegger's metaphysics of Gelassenheit in the years following his disillusionment from the Nazis throws away the importance of a metaphysics of subjective willing. Claiming to offer a Heideggerian critique of Heidegger, Žižek argues that the affirmation of the will in the seminars and Heidegger's commitments at large creates the space for a ‘subjectivist-decisionist’ political ontology (162) along the Marxist lines of class struggle, which Žižek sees as the authentic political commitments which should be the outcome of Heidegger's analytic of the will of the Volk (163), rather than Heidegger's own National Socialist commitments.
But it is not a given that Žižek is at all right when he assumes the answer to his own question that Heidegger's notion of the state's order regarding the dynamics of domination and servitude ‘recall[s] the classical Marxist notion of the state as something that is strictly speaking linked to class division’ (ibid.). Heidegger's terse acknowledgement of class interactions need not commit him to a Marxist analytic of the state. Worse still, with Žižek's proposal for a more radical ‘Heideggerian’ subjectivist-decisionism comes the dangerous statement ‘Hitler did not go far enough…his violence was not “essential” enough’ in respect of the conditions for an authentic state bound by the struggle and will of the Volk: namely, Heidegger's willing-Dasein in the service of Nazism was a waste when it could have been utilized for Marxist ends. While Žižek sees class antagonism as the true hindrance to the authentic state as opposed to, to put it crudely, Jews, these appropriations from Heidegger for communist ends appear no more morally better than for National Socialist ends. As Heidegger's seminars culminate in a blinkered utopianism to the political reality of what he sought to justify, Žižek's call for renewed commitments along Heideggerian lines demonstrates a similarly blinkered view to the horrors that would arise from the practical implementation of these recommendations for communist ends. There is much of importance in Žižek's essay, but this is obscured by the questionable and even dangerous rhetoric that comprises its central argument.
Perhaps it is optimistic to think that the publication in English of these records of Heidegger's seminars will, perish the thought, change anyone's mind in whichever direction that the arguments at work in the debate over Heidegger's legacy assume. But this publication does a service in filling a vital part of the picture to Heidegger's Nazi commitments.
