Heidegger’s Concept of Nihilism

In 1936, Heidegger describes Hitler and Mussolini to his students as anti-nihilists: these two men are the ones who ‘have introduced countermovements [to nihilism] on the basis of the political formation of the nation or the people.’ He comments that Hitler and Mussolini are both ‘essentially influenced by Nietzsche,’ although in their movements ‘the authentic metaphysical domain of Nietzschean thinking has not directly come to fruition.’Reference Heidegger¹

What could Heidegger mean by calling Hitler an anti-nihilist? What does nihilism signify for him? In the 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger defines it as a condition in which Being is perceived as nothing: it has seemingly lost all meaning, and appears to be empty in contrast to the richness of beings.

Heidegger’s one-upmanship with regard to Nietzsche illuminates a certain reservation in his reference to Hitler and Mussolini the next year: if these men are Nietzscheans, they have not yet understood the ‘authentic metaphysical domain’ of Nietzsche’s thought – that is, the deep essence of nihilism, which is to be found not through Nietzsche’s own categories but through Heidegger’s meditation on Being and Nothing (das Nichts).Reference Polt³ Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, which extend into the 1940 s, end by characterizing Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, who thinks the essence of beings as the will to power; Nietzsche fails to think of Being itself. Nietzsche is ‘the final victim of a long-standing errancy and neglect,’ because he conceives of Being as a mere ‘vapor’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger2, German p. 28). Thus, Nietzsche is a nihilist by the definition presented in Introduction to Metaphysics.

But this is a rather abstruse and ontological definition of nihilism. What does nihilism mean more concretely, as a phenomenon in human life? Another passage from Introduction to Metaphysics brings us closer to understanding:

This passage evidently shares Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism and his admiration for overflowing strength – but in Heidegger, these attitudes are linked to the question of Being. The image of ‘a blind mirror’ suggests that in the late modern world, qualitative differences of depth and excellence are no longer recognizable; all beings are represented as quantifiable objects that are essentially the same, and this representational paradigm is no longer even recognized as such. The paradigm is an impoverished understanding of Being that is taken for granted by individuals and states, which focus their energies on organizing and controlling beings. This mentality has the effect of actually obliterating the qualitative differences that it ignores; it is a devastating worldview, laying waste to people and things. Germany, caught between the ‘pincers’ of American and Soviet nihilism, must find a way to resist (Ref. Reference Heidegger2, German pp. 28–29, 34).

But why would National Socialism have any anti-nihilist potential? According to the following thoughts, the ‘Führer-state’ promises reintegration, ‘actualization,’ and the revival of a meaning of Being:

This passage is taken from the conclusion of Heidegger’s 1933–34 seminar ‘On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State.’Reference Heidegger⁴ The text consists of student protocols that Heidegger reviewed and kept. We cannot count on it as a verbatim transcript of what he said; however, it seems reliable as a record of the train of thought that he developed in this seminar while he was serving as the first National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg. The seminar is indispensable to our reflections on Heidegger’s politics, for it stands as his most concerted attempt to develop a political philosophy and to tie his political commitments explicitly to his fundamental philosophical ideas. Elsewhere, Heidegger reflects on phenomena such as Mitsein (Being-with) and the polis, but these reflections remain on a level of ontological abstraction that prevents them from becoming concretely political.Reference Trawny, Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Marder⁵

The passage above reminds us of Heidegger’s debt to Catholic anti-modernism. This is not to say that in 1933–34 he is still a Christian, or that he wants to return, literally, to medieval conditions – but he clearly feels the loss of the integrated, structured existence of the Middle Ages. Medieval man inhabited a world where things had not sunk into a ‘blind mirror,’ but were rich in significance; qualitative differences were reinforced by bonds that transcended arbitrary, individual choice. What Heidegger hoped for in National Socialism, then – its ‘inner truth and greatness’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger2, p. 162)Reference Ireland⁶ – was the revival of a rooted, hierarchic way of life, against the nihilistic condition in which all beings are reduced to an unquestioned ontological indifference and are evaluated in terms of rootless abstractions.

To combat nihilism, we must set man’s ‘Being back into the roots of his Dasein, into the fundamental domains into which he is thrown as a historical being,’ as Heidegger says in a lecture course from his time as rector.Reference Heidegger⁷ Platonist ethics, the Enlightenment, and liberalism have alienated us from the historically specific, ordered meaning of Being that we must take up as our inheritance: ‘Here [in Platonism] all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root. Opposed to this conception are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger7, p. 129).

Let us look, then, at the major points Heidegger makes in his 1933–34 seminar, as he attempts to develop an anti-nihilist political philosophy based on human finitude and historicity.

People, State, and Leader

Although it seems to have begun in a relatively Socratic fashion, the protocols suggest that the seminar soon became another lecture series by Heidegger, where he attempts nothing less than to lay the foundations of a political philosophy that is in tune with the new regime. This is done by means of a series of characteristically Heideggerian reflections on nature, history, and state. His technique is to propose that standard concepts in these three domains consist of traditional prejudices that have covered up a supposedly more original experience of the ‘essence’ of the phenomena.

The first four of the seminar’s ten sessions seem to have been intended to fend off a naturalistic interpretation of human Being by questioning the essence of nature, providing historical perspective on the concepts of physis and natura, and emphasizing the qualitative differences between historical and non-historical beings. Historical, human time requires decision; in this sense, animals have no time (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 33). Of course, animals change, so they, along with all nature, are in time in the sense that they undergo various processes (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, pp. 28–29). For the ancients this might mean the emergence of the characteristic presence of a self-contained, self-defining entity. For the moderns it might mean only the change of location of a material object, a change that can be measured and calculated. Neither approach, however, captures the distinctively human and historical experience of time. These thoughts fit with Heidegger’s consistent rejection of reductionist and biologistic perspectives on human life. (This is the only aspect of the seminar that he mentions in a circa-1945 retrospective on his teaching: it was a ‘critique of the biologistic view of history.’)Reference Heidegger⁸

Heidegger turns rather abruptly to the state in the middle of the fifth session. He avoids traditional approaches to political philosophy – questions such as, ‘What is the state’s purpose?’ ‘What is its origin?’ or ‘Who will rule?’ – because they do not yield fundamental insights into the essence of the state (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 38). An ontology of the state demands that we reflect on the people, since the people is ‘the supporting ground’ of the state. He mentions the racial concept of the Volk as ‘the tie of the unity of blood and stock,’ but this is only one concept among others (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 43).

Heidegger proceeds to assign an ontological status to the relation between people and state: that is, what it means for a particular people to be must be established through its state. While he leaves open the question of what a people in general is, he claims that the state is not just ‘grounded in the Being of the people’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 46), but is the Being of the people (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, pp. 46, 53, 57). ‘The people that turns down a state, that is stateless, has just not found the gathering of its essence yet; it still lacks the composure and force to be committed to its fate as a people’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 46). A people without a state is not yet, in the sense that it has not yet found fulfillment as a community.

This conception of the state transcends any description on the level of mere beings. This passage from Introduction to Metaphysics may be intend to suggest that just such a move is necessary:

If we follow the reasoning of the 1933–34 seminar, it is a mistake from the beginning to assume that a state is an entity, something that is. Instead, the people is the fundamental entity, and the state is the Being of the people. The concrete acts that are the business of government are incidental, and may even distract us from the state’s ontological essence.

The seminar elaborates on the people-state relation through an analogy to individuals. Because individuals’ own Being is an issue for them, they have consciousness and conscience. They care about their own Being, they want to live, and they love their own existence. In just the same way, the people loves its state: ‘The people is ruled by the urge for the state, by erōs for the state’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 48). This is why we care about the form of the state, or the constitution – which is not a contract or a legal arrangement, but ‘the actualization of our decision for the state; [constitutions] are factical attestations of what we take to be our historical task as a people, the task that we are trying to live out’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, pp. 48–49). The erotic urge and decision for the state is to be distinguished from ‘drive’ as felt by lower animals; bees and termites are instinctively driven into cooperative formations, but this nonhuman phenomenon is not genuinely political (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 48; cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2, 1253a8-9).

Heidegger briefly contrasts his concept of the political to two others. Carl Schmitt’s view that the essence of the political is the friend-enemy relation comes in for some criticism when Heidegger emphasizes that, in Schmitt’s view, ‘the political unit does not have to be identical with state and people’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 46). A group based on solidarity against an enemy is less fundamental than a Volk. Heidegger also criticizes Bismarck’s concept of politics as ‘the art of the possible,’ which depends too much on ‘the personal genius of the statesman’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 46).

But this remark should not lead us to expect an anti-dictatorial point of view, and in fact Heidegger’s views as presented here easily lend themselves to a personality cult: he claims there can be a born leader, an individual who ‘must be a leader in accordance with the marked form of his Being.’ A born leader needs no political education, but he ought to be supported by an educated elite, a ‘band of guardians’ who help to take responsibility for the state (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 45). Heidegger seems to envision something like Plato’s ‘perfect guardians,’ the philosopher-rulers, but here they are in service to a leader who knows what to do not as a philosopher, but as a creator. This leader not only understands, but actually ‘brings about’ what the people and the state are. Notably, these words were penciled in by Heidegger himself on the student protocol (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 45, cf. 46). The born leader drafts the state and people, so to speak: he draws the line between who ‘we’ are and who ‘we’ are not.Reference Polt⁹ The focused will of the leader provides the clear identity that a vague urge cannot.

There is little room for debate and disagreement within Heidegger’s complex of people, state, and leader. ‘Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 49). He envisions ‘a deep dedication of all forces to the people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engagement, endurance, solitude and love. Then the existence and superiority of the leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in this way with originality and passion to the task.’ In this unified whole, which recalls ‘the medieval order of life,’ citizens are ready to sacrifice themselves in order to defeat ‘death and the devil – that is, ruination and decline from their own essence’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 49).

Heidegger raises the question of the nature of the will of the people, but does not resolve it, resorting instead to a disappointingly vague remark: it is ‘a complicated structure that is hard to grasp.’ He prefers to emphasize the inseparable, ‘single actuality’ of people and leader (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 60). To be led is not to be oppressed: the true leader will show the path and the goals to those who are led, rather than forcing them (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 62). ‘The true implementation of the will [of the leader] is not based on coercion, but on awakening the same will in another, that is … a decision of the individual’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 62).

But what about individuals who cannot recognize the path, or who disagree with the goals? Heidegger seems not to care what will become of these dissidents. Instead he looks to the glorious deeds that manifest ‘the soaring will of the leader’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 62). He briefly discusses resistance, or will that is contrary to the leader’s, but seems to see it purely as a negative phenomenon that requires re-education. Education at all levels ‘is nothing but the implementation of the will of the leader and the will of the state, that is, of the people’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 63). Complete unanimity is the ideal: even if community depends on individual decisions, any such decision that contradicts the will of the state, which is identical with the will of the leader, is out of order and amounts to a betrayal of the people.

Political Space and its Implications

In the eighth and perhaps most original session of the seminar, Heidegger focuses on the political meaning of space. In all of Heidegger’s thought, space is meaningful: it is not essentially a geometrical abstraction, but a complex of places where things and human beings belong – or fail to belong. In Being and Time, he describes the spatiality of Dasein and of the things in our environment as a field that comprises qualitative differences in importance, a gathering of appropriate and inappropriate relations. ‘The homogeneous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that the worldly character of the ready-to-hand gets specifically deprived of its worldhood.’Reference Heidegger¹⁰ In other words, space appears to be a qualitatively undifferentiated repository for mere present-at-hand objects only if we disregard the significance and purposes of the things we use.

In the seminar, Heidegger develops two aspects of the space of a people: homeland (Heimat) and territory. (Heidegger indicates the latter with a variety of words: Land, Herrschaftsgebiet, Territorium, and Vaterland. The term ‘fatherland’ is mentioned only one other time in the seminar, on p. 52, where Heidegger implies that it reflects an inadequate relationship to the people.) The immediately familiar homeland, the locality into which one is born, is small, not just in its measurements but in the coziness of its familiarity. The proper relation to it is Bodenständigkeit: groundedness, standing steadfast and rooted in the soil. But there is another impulse, working out into ‘the wider expanse,’ that opens the space of the state, the territory. Only when rootedness in the soil is supplemented by ‘interaction’ (Verkehr) does a people come into its own (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 55).

The passage could be seen as an example of a dialectic between home and homelessness that is at work in many of Heidegger’s texts. In Being and Time, one must experience the uncanniness of anxiety before one can return authentically (eigentlich, ‘own’-ly) to one’s familiar environment. If we were completely ensconced in our surroundings, they would be our habitat and we would be nothing but animals. As Heidegger puts it in 1935, ‘we cannot wholly belong to any thing, not even to ourselves’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger2, p. 22). And yet we do belong partly, finitely, to our home. The key to authentic dwelling is precisely the recognition that this dwelling is finite and contingent. Accordingly, ‘When one is put out of the home … the home first discloses itself as such’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger2, p. 127).Reference Capobianco¹¹ Admittedly, interaction with a wider territory is not the same as the abyss of anxiety, but both involve the readiness to step out beyond the immediately familiar.

What are the concrete implications of Heidegger’s thoughts on political space? He makes two telling remarks. First, Germans who live outside the boundary of the Reich cannot participate in the extended space of state-governed interaction. If the state is the very Being of the people, these groups are being ‘deprived of their authentic way of Being’ – prevented from fulfilling themselves as Germans (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 56). Their politico-ontological erōs is being thwarted. Heidegger does express some reservations about the slogan ‘people without space’ (popularized by Hans Grimm’s nationalistic novel Volk ohne Raum): a people necessarily has some space of its own (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 53). Still, his comments fit all too easily with the Nazi call for Lebensraum and Hitler’s evident ambitions to unify the German people under one state.

Secondly, different peoples have different relations to their spaces and affect the landscape in accordance with these relations. Heidegger contrasts a bodenständig people to a nomadic people that not only comes from deserts, but also tends to lay waste to every place it goes. He adds that perhaps ‘Semitic nomads’ will never understand the character of ‘our German space’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 56).

Heidegger’s remark does an injustice to nomads: nomadic people can be very much at home in the landscape through which they travel, and their practices may well be ecologically superior to those of settled agriculture. But his primary target is surely not traditional nomads, but the Jews, who are represented here as rootless aliens. Heidegger’s comment demonizes German Jews: he implies that they destroy the richness of local life (and thus are ‘demonic’ as defined in Introduction to Metaphysics); they are the ‘devil’ that causes ‘decline from [the German] essence’ (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 49).

Heidegger’s cutting comment thus fits all too easily with the characterization of modern rootlessness that one finds in many of his texts and with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the wandering Jew. But did we not just say that homelessness is a prerequisite for genuine homecoming? Is Heidegger’s own thought not nomadic, in this sense? No, because the nomadic rootlessness that he denounces is an intellectualized mentality that no longer feels any homesickness at all; it takes all things as merely present at hand, as senseless objects to be manipulated in a shallow world where nothing and no one belongs – where the very question of belonging no longer resonates. This is what Heidegger understands by devastation and how he understands the Nietzschean line ‘The wasteland grows.’Reference Heidegger¹²

Heidegger’s statement on Semites and space is a mild formulation of a cliché that Schmitt was to express with full anti-Jewish venom during the war:

Of course, Heidegger’s statement in 1934 antecedes the war and the Holocaust, but we have to juxtapose it with a contemporaneous passage that is the very nadir of his ethical and political thought:

These statements are a despicable legitimation of scapegoating and murder. The remark on ‘Semitic nomads’ identifies the scapegoats more concretely.

Critics such as Emmanuel Faye take such moments as revealing the enduring essence of Heidegger’s thought.Reference Faye¹⁴ This position ignores the evidence that Heidegger later became considerably disillusioned with Nazi ideology, seeing it as a form of Nietzscheanism that, like Nietzsche himself, failed to escape nihilism.Reference Polt¹⁵ It is also unjust to consider only the xenophobic moments in Heidegger at the expense of other texts on themes such as gratitude and dialogue. Furthermore, despite the anti-Semitic edge of Heidegger’s comments, one can argue that there is truth in some of them, and that, when expressed at a certain level of generality, they are not necessarily anti-Jewish. The idea that a people needs a state and a space of its own would, of course, be completely endorsed by Zionists. Heidegger also directly warns his students not to assume that he is referring to measurable territory (Ref. Reference Heidegger4, p. 53), so we should not be too quick to identify specific implications of his remarks on space. Still, it is surely fair to say, at least, that he is experimenting with a philosophical justification of Nazi expansionism and of anti-Semitic notions of what it means to be German.

The Nihilism of Heidegger’s Anti-nihilism

Heidegger’s constant concern was how we find ourselves faced with the question of Being – our own Being and, with it, the Being of everything and everyone in our world. But despite his emphasis on questioning, there is a leveling and oversimplifying tendency in his views. He was right to ask ‘Who are we?’ but too quick to lend a hand to a movement that tried to answer this question by inventing enemies of the people. Are persecution and murder necessary to define who ‘we’ are? Do we have to exclude some of ‘us’ in order to define the rest? Heidegger never thought through the political problem of the multiplicity and multivalence of every community. Both the inner diversity of a community and its diaspora into ‘foreign’ lands raise essential political questions that he does not consider subtly enough.

Heidegger’s failure to reflect in depth on the will of the people is another crucial weak point in his reflections. If we have no account of how the so-called will of the people is to be ascertained, how disagreements are to be expressed and resolved, and when a leader’s will transgresses its proper limits, then we have no philosophical bulwark against tyranny and demagoguery. Heidegger’s attitude in the seminar seems all too typical of the times, when too many were ready to abandon the unruly pluralism of the Weimar Republic and submit to a dictator. The people and state are put in the hands of an absolute leader who is to decide their essence thanks to his inborn superiority and towering will.

Heidegger’s authoritarianism at this time is allied to a quasi-Kierkegaardian inwardness: public utterances and behavior are genuine only if they are supported by the individual’s secret, silent decision to support the new state. This point of view is clearest in a 1934 lecture course: ‘No individual person among you can in any manner ascertain about any individual person how he has decided. … In the decision, each is separated from each, as only a human being can be separated. … Despite the fact that individuals are separated in decision, a concealed unison takes place here, whose concealedness is an essential one.’Reference Heidegger¹⁶ This totalitarian individualism, so to speak, may seem bizarre, but it is in fact necessary: when public discourse does not tolerate dissent, private consciousness becomes a matter of intense interest both to citizens and to authorities.

What has been lost in this situation is a genuine public sphere – neither a private mind nor a governmental system, but an arena where individuals and groups can display themselves. Such a display should not be understood as an expression of a pre-existing inner consciousness; in a vital public sphere, we discover ourselves and become ourselves in our public acts.

As Hannah Arendt argues in a line of thought directly aimed at the totalitarian delusion, the specifically political realm is precisely this public arena of free initiative and self-revelation.Reference Arendt¹⁷ In Nazi Germany, such a realm was supplanted ever more forcefully by orders and propaganda. It is perhaps this destruction of the public sphere that Heidegger failed most egregiously to recognize in 1933–34. His failure means that his seminar is no more than an aborted attempt – a political philosophy that misses an essential dimension of the political.

Politics involves plurality, including a plurality of positions and wills. Heidegger later tried to find a way beyond the will itself, seeing willfulness as a symptom of modern devastation; but this move brought him outside the domain of the political altogether, into a contemplative mentality. Arendt sent Heidegger a copy of The Human Condition, which was published in German under the title Vita Activa in 1960. But her anti-totalitarian argument, which drew on Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of Aristotle in the 1920 s in order to diagnose the error into which Heidegger and others fell in 1933, may have arrived too late for the old Heidegger, who had distanced himself from the very concept of ‘the “active life”’ even before the outbreak of the war.Reference Heidegger¹⁸ The disillusioned Heidegger pointed to poetic dwelling and patience as ways of keeping ourselves open to a possible salvation, which would have to come from a god.

The Arendtian rejoinder to this attitude might be that it is an overreaction and a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding lies in the assumption that politics is a sort of ‘work,’ the architectural construction of a world; Heidegger initially embraced this work, then rejected it as sheer will to power. But instead, politics is the realm of interpersonal self-display and initiative, which are distinct from building; they are not reducible to will or subjectivity in a narrow sense, but are essential to human freedom.

The overreaction in Heidegger’s antipolitical attitude may be due in part to his discouragement in the face of what Arendt calls the disabilities of action (The Human Condition, §32). An act depends on others to carry it forward; its ramifications are unpredictable and usually unsatisfying; its meaning can be discerned, if at all, only in retrospect; and it can never be undone. These disabilities cannot be avoided or remedied; they are intrinsic to action itself. But if we therefore give up on action, we are rejecting a crucial dimension of freedom.

Perhaps it would not be incorrect to call such an attitude nihilistic, if we define nihilism as the refusal or inability to recognize and cultivate elements of the human condition that deserve to be acknowledged as essential. This definition is broad enough to encompass most conceptions of nihilism, including Heidegger’s ontological usage, where nihilism is understood as a tendency for Being itself, including our own Being, to appear as shallow monotony, while its depths fall into oblivion. As we have seen, Heidegger hoped that the Germans could retrieve and revive the depths of Being by supporting a movement based on historical finitude and hierarchically ordered, qualitative distinctions. Nazism would supposedly bring the Germans into their own, allowing the people to be itself in full. However, by destroying any public sphere for genuine plurality and self-expression, Nazism in fact prevented the Germans from thriving and finding themselves. While Heidegger eventually rejected the narrow, manipulative ideology of Nazism, he also went too far and abandoned the essential human need for free action and politics. For this reason, Heidegger never learned to appreciate the virtues of a liberal regime.

To combat nihilism today, we must be prepared to present public philosophical challenges to reductive and impoverished conceptions of the human condition.Reference Polt¹⁹ We must also continue to defend the very existence of a public sphere where such views can be expressed and debated. Anti-liberals will always argue that liberalism employs an empty, ahistorical conception of the human subject (a conception that Heidegger would consider nihilistic). The friends of the public sphere must answer that liberalism does not deny the finite, rooted, and qualitatively diverse character of humanity; to the contrary, it provides the space in which this character can be articulated and developed.Reference Polt²⁰ The most essential ‘space of a people’ is constituted by the cultural and political fora in which individuals and groups can seek their Being.