CHAPTER 4

Freedom from the Good: Heidegger’s Idealist Grounding of Politics

I. INTRODUCTION

Commentators on Heidegger often note three phases in his thinking as it relates to politics: (1) the analysis of human existence or Dasein, culminating in Being and Time of 1927 and ending in 1933, which is apolitical or at least has only implicit and rather vague political implications; (2) the explicit political engagement with the National Socialist revolution from 1933 to around 1936, in which Heidegger sees the chance to link his philosophical efforts for spiritual renewal of the West to the dominant political forces in Germany; (3) the withdrawal in the middle to late 1930s from an active political approach to the overcoming of Western nihilistic technology, with the adoption of a stance of awaiting the next dispensation of Being in the arrival of new gods, as heralded by Hölderlin, the poet of the German nation who speaks for Germany’s spiritual leadership of the West.

But it has also been claimed that the authentic comportment toward existence described in Being and Time entails, in its account of the resolute affirmation of fate, a radical decisionism that is continuous with Heidegger’s political engagement of 1933, even if specific features of National Socialism, such as its biological racism, are not indicated by, or even compatible with, Heidegger’s existential analysis.¹ Indeed one might discern an underlying continuity to all three phases. Herman Philipse, in his recently published Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, has put forth the interesting hypothesis that the project running through Heidegger’s work is theological: Being and Time pursues a “Pascalian strategy” of characterizing human existence as miserably fallen so as to provoke rejection of the spiritually devastated rationalism of Western civilization and therewith a search for redemption, whose features are essentially Christian;² Heidegger then in the years just following Being and Time (1929–32) attempts to find what Philipse calls the “metaphysical grace” for which the analysis of Dasein was preparation, an effort that ends in failure; Heidegger takes refuge in Nazism, a desperate action that Philipse describes as religious conversion; that too ends in disaster, and Heidegger’s later thought consists in developing what Philipse terms “postmonotheist theology” to save the West.³ Philipse argues that in Heidegger’s later theological or eschatological scheme, Nazism still plays a positive role insofar as it furthers the completion of the technological age through its absolute assertion of the will to power. Since moral criticism of any agent in the fulfillment of the West’s historical destiny is beside the point, Heidegger’s disavowal of Nazism could never be more than equivocal at best.⁴

Philipse’s formulation has helpful features, but it overlooks some explicit statements of the later Heidegger that strikingly show that the political reality of the National Socialist movement held for him, even from the standpoint of utter defeat and personal disgrace in 1945, a promise that he believed that he and others in positions of authority in the early 1930s failed to fulfill. These assertions shed important light on Heidegger’s political thinking; they indicate that Heidegger perhaps never learned the “lesson” that all political engagement on behalf of his philosophic vision is inherently mistaken.⁵ They point to a conception of politics that, paradoxical as it may seem, might be called “idealist.” I want to show that this conception of politics, which surely in the years of Heidegger’s service to the revolutionary regime contains no hint of a basis in traditional revelation, is well grounded in Heidegger’s thought of the period 1929–32. It is philosophically a kind of idealism that drastically rejects theological or “metaphysical” grace, or any turn to an infinite (superhuman) reality.⁶ And it is an idealism in crucial ways descended from the great tradition of German Idealism, by Heidegger’s own avowals. It also contains, I argue, an internal paradox that illuminates the so-called “turn” (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking and that can be viewed as the hidden link between the Kantian idealism of Heidegger’s 1929 Davos disputation with Ernst Cassirer and the post-Kantian idealism of later writings. Philipse’s continuity hypothesis must undergo revision through more attention to this philosophical stratum in Heidegger.

II. HISTORY AS METAPHYSICS

Heidegger penned a remarkable document in 1945, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” which he gave to his son Hermann with the instruction to publish it at “a specified time,” and which appeared with the Rectoral Address of 1933, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in 1983, seven years after Heidegger’s death.⁷ It is a self-serving and in verifiable ways mendacious document, to be sure.⁸ Yet it is not simply dismissive of the National Socialist movement; indeed Heidegger offers what is perhaps his most articulate justification for participating in the revolution of 1933. “I saw at the time in the movement that had come to power, the possibility of an inner gathering and renewal of the people [das Volk] and a way for it to find its historical Western destiny. I believed that the self-renewing university could be called on to work as the standard for the inner gathering of the people.”⁹ In hindsight he does not say that this perception of the movement was a mere delusion, although he does grant that “mediocre and incompetent” persons in the movement stood in the way of achieving higher goals. Instead Heidegger poses a remarkable “what if” question—a sort of question he acknowledges to be risky. “But the question may be put: what would have happened and what could have been prevented if in 1933 all the competent forces [vermögende Kräfte] had aroused themselves and slowly, in secret persistence, purified and moderated the movement that came into power?”¹⁰

Heidegger never anywhere suggests that another regime or movement, actual or possible, had the possibility for such direction from the “competent forces.” Certainly no Western democratic regime could be directed in this way. Thus the Heidegger of 1945 had not broken with the Heidegger of 1933 as to the philosophical rightness of his placing his prestige and talent behind the National Socialist revolution, as rector of the University of Freiburg. His error was only in underestimating the difficulties he would face in his efforts to shape the regime toward higher ends.¹¹ Behind Heidegger’s affirmation of the philosophical rightness of his move is a conception of the relation of philosophy to practical life that persists in his thought from early to late.

Scholarship on Heidegger has lacked the proper terms for describing this relation. It is seldom noted that the hope of shaping the direction of political life through the university, and the project of subordinating political life to higher philosophical or cultural aims, are both well established in the tradition of German Idealist thought.¹² Even when this is noted, the deeper philosophical premises behind this account of the relations of university, politics, and philosophy are not uncovered. This failure is not unrelated to the fact that contemporary scholarship takes for granted the truth of many or most of these premises, in some form. Most basically, this account assumes that philosophy is, or can be, the dominant force in human affairs and that human history is most fundamentally the history of philosophy. Accordingly the principles of ordinary actors in political and social life express, more or less directly, principles arrived at philosophically. This must mean that politics, morality, and religion ultimately are derived from philosophical thought; the ordinary moral actor is thus in possession of a metaphysical principle of morals, as Kant says. The spheres of politics, morality, and religion do not maintain any degree of autonomy from philosophy; but conversely, philosophy does not maintain any degree of autonomy from practical life. Philosophy comes to mean wholly transforming practical life; or rather, it becomes that transformation itself, the historical spirit effecting such transformation. This is not to deny that certain individuals—philosophers, poets, and statesmen—can have central historical roles as the leading spokesmen of that spirit.

Heidegger’s version of this idealism is supported by another assumption bearing an unmistakable Kantian stamp: the core of existence for all human beings is a kind of freedom, a capacity for transcending concerns variously described as empirical, heteronymous, anthropological, or ontic. As Heidegger puts it, the core of human existence is the understanding of Being; the transcendence that makes all human thought and action possible is philosophical transcendence. As thus capable of transcending mere beings (Seienden) toward the whole of Being (Sein), the human essence has the ability to look past the vulgar concerns with comfort, security, and happiness, to face resolutely the totality of existence, which is limited only by death. As becomes evident in the Davos disputation, Heidegger is fully aware of the idealist and more specifically Kantian origins of this account of freedom. It is not possible to argue here how this idealist notion emerged in the eighteenth century in response to the perception that modern scientific naturalism failed to provide an adequate account of the unity and the ends of human knowledge.¹³ It would also be very helpful in this context to show that Heidegger, in his effort to provide the foundation of metaphysics in the analysis of Dasein, saw himself as addressing in the early twentieth century a situation much like that Kant faced: the dominance of mathematico-empiricist philosophies that overthrew the authority of metaphysics as the ground of the unity of the sciences and as the reflection on the highest human telos.¹⁴

Heidegger is much aware of his debt to the German Idealist tradition, and this debt has also been widely discussed in the scholarship. What has not been seen is the full scope of what that debt means. When Heidegger asserts that Kant is the first philosopher since Plato and Aristotle to take a further step in metaphysics,¹⁵ the place of freedom in Kant’s metaphysical thought is present to Heidegger as central to that advance. But with the Kantian account of freedom comes a particular conception of the relation of metaphysics to practical life. I will argue that a version of this conception always underlies Heidegger’s thinking—at times quite plainly, at others more covertly. Heidegger’s version certainly no longer supports Kant’s Enlightenment-universalist idea of human dignity, but instead after 1932 it undergirds a romantic exaltation of particular people or folk (the Greeks, the Germans) who have a universal mission of a philosophical nature.¹⁶ My concern is with showing how Heidegger grounds his völkisch thinking in idealist premises. I begin with the Kantianism of the Davos disputation and then return to later utterances in which the völkisch element is pronounced.

III. THE REVISION OF KANT

The theme of freedom is a crucial link between the writings before and after 1933; a central factor in Heidegger’s thinking on freedom is his study of Kant, which is especially intense in the late 1920s and early 1930s.¹⁷ For the significance of Kant to Heidegger one of the most important documents is the spring 1929 disputation with Ernst Cassirer in Davos, Switzerland.¹⁸ Heidegger was at the time writing Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics; this interprets the Critique of Pure Reason as providing the foundations of ontology in the productive imagination, which provides temporal intuitions as “schemata” for the categories of the understanding.¹⁹ Heidegger saw in Kant’s argument an anticipation of his own account of the temporal openness of human existence as the condition for understanding Being.²⁰ In the dispute with Cassirer, Heidegger defends his interpretation against the Neo-Kantian view of Kant as providing a theory of the natural sciences. Cassirer for his part asserts that he is not a Neo-Kantian as Heidegger defines Neo-Kantian, and that for two reasons: (1) he inquires into the productive imagination for understanding the symbolic as the basis for a general theory of culture; (2) he sees that the central problem for Kant is ethical: How is freedom possible? In this latter inquiry Kant takes a remarkable step into the supersensible, the mundus intelligibilis, wherein he discloses a universal moral law that establishes the reality of freedom. At this point Cassirer challenges Heidegger to make sense of this aspect of Kant on his interpretation. If Heidegger treats Kant as a philosopher of finitude, for whom all knowledge is relative to human Dasein, then what place can Kant have for the move into the infinity of the supersensible and the eternal truths of the ethical?

Heidegger’s reply is impressive and in part convincing. He notes that in the Critique Kant is concerned not with “regional ontologies” of the physical (nature) or the psychic (freedom or culture) but with metaphysica generalis, the basis for any ontological inquiry. Heidegger then denies that the move into ethics is for Kant a move into the infinite; ethical imperatives can hold only for finite beings; the moral is identical with autonomous or self-supporting reason and is not derivable from a higher eternal ground; it is the transcending of the creatural that can be carried out only by a finite creature. But now Heidegger calls ethics itself into question, by claiming it is an error to stress the normative function of the moral law. Through self-legislation Dasein constitutes itself, thus disclosing the ontological significance of the law. Human existence does partake of a certain infinity, the free “self-giving” or exhibitio originaria whereby the transcendental imagination projects Being as a whole. Only a finite creature can have an ontology; God as eternal being has no temporal projection of Being. Thus Heidegger links the moral law to a finite being’s understanding of Being as “thrown project”: Dasein’s projective effort to illuminate Being, which remains fundamentally opaque and mysterious, as simply given to Dasein and not created by it.

Then more radically Heidegger asserts: the truth of Being exists only if a finite human being, such as Dasein, exists. Eternity has meaning only within such a being’s “inner transcendence of time”; there is no eternal “beyond” finite being. He then pronounces the task of his Destruktion of the philosophical tradition: his whole critique of that tradition is that only on the basis of time as the gathering together of past, present, and future is anything like substance, ousia, idea, and the eternal law intelligible; since antiquity the problem of Being has been interpreted in terms of time, which was always addressed to the subject matter in an unintelligible way. Kant made the first step toward uncovering this presupposition, and to this end he raised the question “What is man?” therewith initiating the metaphysics of Dasein. Heidegger says that as with Kant, his raising of the question “What is man?” is not anthropological but metaphysical: it discloses Dasein’s temporality as the condition for metaphysics. And as with Kant, his analysis emphasizes the finitude of Dasein. Accordingly such anthropological themes as anxiety and living toward death are adduced only for illuminating the structure of human temporality.

Heidegger poses at this point the delicate question of the relation of his philosophy to “worldview,” a question that clearly relates to that of the moral significance of freedom. Is Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein pre-ethical, perhaps ethically neutral? He handles this question with ambiguous, not to say obfuscating, formulations. Philosophy does not have the task of providing a worldview, although worldview is the presupposition of philosophizing. This presupposition is not, however, a doctrine, but solely the philosopher’s effort to disclose in the act of philosophizing the highest freedom of human existence. He shows freedom not as an object of theory but as the act of setting free. This at the same time discloses metaphysics as a human happening, as historical. The philosopher pushes human freedom to its limit and forces man to confront at the limit of existence the Nothingness that is inseparable from Being. This exposure of Dasein as free is for Heidegger the terminus a quo of philosophy, and the entire problematic of his thought. He has not formulated the terminus ad quem, which is the first concern of Cassirer, namely, a philosophy of culture. But can Heidegger deny that his renewal of the question of Being is motivated by a view of the worth and end of human existence?

He proceeds to say that the philosophic exposing of the nothingness of human Dasein is “not an occasion for pessimism or melancholy.” Rather one must grasp that an authentic existence needs opposition and that philosophy must “throw man back into the hardness of his fate, away from the lazy aspect of a man who exploits the work of the spirit.” Thus genuine philosophy must be destructive, a radical “bursting open” (Sprengung) of tradition, as in the case of Kant, who in attempting to lay the foundation of metaphysics was pressed toward finding that foundation in the abyss (Abgrund). The foundation of philosophizing never ceases to be questionable; the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem to this extent coincide. The form of life that affirms the inescapable questionability of the starting point is the highest form of existence. Yet man finds himself thrown into Being in a historical, even accidental way. Echoing Aristotle’s remark on the nature of the theoretical life, Heidegger says that man is allowed only a few rare glimpses, at the pinnacle of his possibility, of the totality of existence. Otherwise his life is overwhelmed by the beings (Seienden) in terms of which he tends to view himself: as something “ontic,” an empirically given object, not as the “eccentric” being open to beings as a whole and himself at the same time. Human life ordinarily is either dispersed among beings or withdrawn into itself: the hardest thing is to see that the self is inseparable from Being, openness to which makes possible openness to self.

As an aside, Heidegger remarks that interpreting Kant’s problematic in this way precludes viewing it in an “isolated ethical” sense. The radicality of questioning precludes assuming an ethical end or justification for that questioning. Moreover, it seems for Heidegger to preclude an orientation of radical questioning toward the ethical or political questions, as the subject matter for a thinking that tries to answer the question “What is man?” Here Heidegger strikingly separates himself not only from Kant but from the entire tradition of philosophy since Socrates. Still one discerns a certain indebtedness to Kant, who is the first philosopher to propose that the inquiry into the moral, or the good, can be divorced from the nature of man, and in particular, the human natural concern with happiness. Heidegger advances further in this direction by divorcing freedom from the good entirely.

IV. THE IDEALISM OF THE VOLK

In the memoir of 1945 Heidegger offers a sketch of the philosophic prehistory to his assumption of the rectorate. He mentions first his 1929 Freiburg inaugural address, “What Is Metaphysics?” whose concern, he notes, was to uncover the essential ground of the scattered multiplicity of academic disciplines in a concept of truth.²¹ It thus took the first step toward a philosophic reform of the university on the basis of the questioning of Being and Time, which sought the ground of the possibility of metaphysics in the analysis of human existence as temporal. Heidegger then mentions a seminar and lecture on Plato, and a lecture on the essence of truth, from the period of 1930–32.²² The Plato seminar and lecture are centrally on the cave image of the Republic. One can surmise that Heidegger mentions them because they expound the basis for an anti-Platonic paideia, in which liberation from the cave advances toward the truth not as idea but as the unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of beings that was uncovered by the pre-Socratic philosophers. Plato’s doctrine ambiguously presupposes and conceals that original ground of thinking, with fateful consequences for the West. Heidegger claims that these lectures were censored by the Nazi authorities.²³

The crucial moment in this prehistory of the rectorate is Heidegger’s account of “how he saw the historical situation at that time.”²⁴ In 1930 and 1932 Ernst Jünger published the essay “Total Mobilization” and the book The Worker; Heidegger notes that he discussed these in a small circle with his assistant Brock, and in these discussions Heidegger “tried to show that in these writings an essential understanding of Nietzsche’s metaphysics was expressed, insofar as in the horizon of this metaphysics the history and the present of the West were seen and foreseen.” The circle reflected on what was coming (das Kommende), and later events, Heidegger adds, confirmed what Jünger foretold, namely, the universal domination by the will to power as the planetary destiny. Nietzsche declared the advent of this reality with his pronouncement that “God is dead,” which expresses not just ordinary atheism but the conviction that within the history of humanity the supersensible world, especially Christianity, has lost its moving power (wirkende Kraft). Heidegger quoted this line of Nietzsche in the Rectoral Address of 1933.²⁵ The event of God’s death, Heidegger now states, alone makes intelligible the two world wars. In sum, Heidegger claims that in the period 1930–33 he became aware of nihilism as planetary destiny, an awareness that forced on him a radicalizing of the problem of the search for the ground of the sciences and the renewal of the university.

It made clear to him the need to reflect on the overcoming of the metaphysics of the will to power through a conversation with the Western tradition that returns to its origin.²⁶ This remark refers to Heidegger’s efforts in the same period to go behind Plato, in whom he saw the roots of the metaphysics of the will to power, to the origin of the West in pre-Socratic thinking about Being. And he now asks rhetorically whether the urgency of the problem did not warrant, for the sake of this reflection on the part of the Germans (bei uns Deutschen), awakening and leading into the field (ins Feld zu führen) those places that are considered the seat of the pursuit of knowledge and learning—the German university. “With the assumption of the rectorate I dared to make the experiment to save, purify and secure the positive (in the National Socialist movement).”²⁷

What did Heidegger see as positive in this movement? He asserts that in the Rectoral Address his attempt was to see beyond the “deficiencies and crudities” of the movement, toward its potential “to bring, one day, a gathering of the Western-historical essence of the German.”²⁸ His failures as administrator, he observes, should not distract from the essential: that we stand in the midst of the consummation of nihilism and the death of God, and every “time-space is closed off from the divine.” At the same time “the overcoming of nihilism is announced in German thinking and singing,” although the Germans do not perceive this and instead measure themselves by the standards of the prevailing nihilism. Thus they “misunderstand the essence of a historical self-assertion.” Heidegger’s thought can be reconstructed as follows: only the Germans are capable of leading the West out of nihilism because only they have the capacity to recover the forgotten beginning of the West; if the Germans are to fulfill this mission, they must be led by the spiritual leaders in the universities; the latter must have the support of political authority; only a movement that is both antidemocratic and intent on asserting German superiority among the nations has the requisite authority; such a movement came to power in 1933. Heidegger states that less possibility exists in the present moment of 1945 than existed in 1933 “of opening blinded eyes to a vision of the essential.”²⁹

Whereas Heidegger carefully grounds his 1933 assertion of the world-historical destiny of the Germans in earlier reflections, it is striking that the writings before 1933 lack stress on Germanness. Section 74 of Being and Time briefly connects the resolute affirming of destiny to the history of a people (Volk) as the destiny to be affirmed.³⁰ Yet that work’s analysis of human existence as preparation for raising the question of Being does not give a special role to the Germans in fulfilling that analysis. It seems to characterize the human situation in universal and even timeless fashion. According to Heidegger’s own account of how his eyes were opened, it was Jünger who portrayed the darkness of the present in such terms as to make evident the need for a radical overcoming of the nihilistic age, through a historical recovery of the origins of the West. Such overcoming, since it was to be realized in the world as a whole and not only in exceptional philosophic individuals, would have to be carried out by a people or folk, the modern successors to the Greeks. In no other way, it appeared to Heidegger in 1933, could the original question of Being be raised again.

This national or völkisch grounding of philosophy is found in statements such as this one in the Rectoral Address: “For the Greeks science [Wissenschaft] is not a ‘cultural value’ [‘Kulturgut’] but the innermost determining center of the whole popular-national existence [volklich-staatlichen Dasein].”³¹ For related thoughts one can turn to the lectures of 1935, Introduction to Metaphysics, which Heidegger published as a book in 1953.³² Heidegger writes that philosophy cannot be immediately effective in practical life, or expect resonance quickly, even though it may be in accord with “the inner history of a people.”³³ He speaks of the depth of the connection between Volk and philosophy in the following: “Philosophy opens up the paths and perspectives for the knowing that establishes measure and rank, in which and out of which a people [Volk] grasps its existence [Dasein] in the historical-spiritual world, and brings to completion the knowing that inspires, threatens, and necessitates all questioning and judging.”³⁴ Philosophy fulfills the destiny of a people, not by lightening human burdens, as in securing the foundations of a culture, but through inducing struggle and hardship, since these are the condition for greatness.³⁵ In Heidegger’s account the Germans have already been granted the gift of struggle testing them for greatness, by a historical fate that places them in a pincers between Russia and America.³⁶ These powers embody the technological nihilism of modernity: “The same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.”³⁷ In this situation the Germans, who are the “metaphysical folk,” must decide to move themselves and the history of the West into the primal realm of the powers of Being, or suffer the spiritual annihilation of Europe. The Germans alone can overcome the modern misinterpretation of spirit (Geist) as cleverness, technical skill, and cultural value, by raising anew the question of Being.³⁸

But how can a folk accomplish this; what does it mean to say that a folk thinks metaphysically? Heidegger in another set of lectures quotes approvingly the line of Hegel that “a cultivated people without a metaphysics is like a richly decorated temple without a Holy of Holies.”³⁹ Yet Heidegger asserts that only a few actually philosophize. “Which few? The creative transformers, the converters.” They arouse the folk to gather its forces, teaching it that its destiny is to further philosophical questioning and thereby to assert spiritual leadership in the world. But as in other contexts, Heidegger indicates here a paradoxical character to this effect of the few with respect to the many: the teaching of the thinkers works slowly through imperceptible pathways and detours, until at last their thought is no longer original philosophizing, but “sinks down into the self-evidence of daily existence.” It therefore must always be the task of the thinkers to unsettle the comfortable state of metaphysical certainty that eventually arises out of their own thought, and to expose the people once again to the hard truths of their spiritual destiny.

I conclude this discussion with a general observation: the writings of Heidegger that discuss political matters directly show that these are of interest to him only insofar as they can be brought to bear on the renewal of the question of Being. Heidegger’s political engagements show that the furthering of that renewal takes precedence over any considerations of the good, the moral, and the just, as these have been understood in the philosophic tradition as having some universal articulation, reflecting ends (happiness, perfection, virtue) inherent in human nature or reason.⁴⁰ Indeed for Heidegger the meaning of the renewed question entails a reinterpretation of such concerns as modes of fallenness, to the extent that they tend to be placed ahead of the primary human historical concern of “gathering forces” for the renewing of the question. Such a fall occurs when discussions of National Socialism stress its moral evil rather than inquire about its role in the history of Being’s disclosure. It is wrong to think of Heidegger’s failure to comment on the moral evil of Nazism as merely a personal failure, unrelated to his thought. Nor can one say that Heidegger simply did not get around to discussing moral good and evil, because his concentration was on the preliminary task of uncovering the ground in Being for such discussion. The turn to Being is understood by Heidegger as entailing a complete reevaluation of the meaning and place of “morality” in human affairs, such as very few people are prepared to undertake or accept—as Heidegger himself discovered.

V. IDEALISM WITHOUT FREEDOM

Heidegger in 1929 and after is forced to confront a certain paradox, not unrelated to one in Kant. On the assumption that human beings possess universally a radical kind of freedom, in an openness to Being that transcends all given beings, how is it that human beings are universally “fallen” into the forgetting of Being? And how has the present age emerged as one of an especially deep forgetfulness? How can freedom be gained and lost, if it has no empirical or ontic basis? Heidegger saw that his move from analysis of Dasein’s temporality to Being (Sein) itself, by passing through the “destructive” history of the ontology of time, which he planned as the second half of Being and Time, could not provide him with the answer to that question. The freedom for openness to Being has been occluded by technological domination of the world; this has its roots not in an ordinary “fallenness” of Dasein into beings, but in the planetary-historical fate in which Being withdraws into oblivion. Accordingly Heidegger introduced a new formulation about freedom: man is possessed by freedom, not freedom by man.⁴¹ In the last analysis freedom for openness to Being is a gift of Being, granted to certain peoples in certain epochs.⁴² It was such a gift that, in Heidegger’s view, Germany and therewith the West were granted in 1933, with the ascent to power of Hitler and his revolution—a gift that was misunderstood and improperly used by the Germans. At the same time, Heidegger’s noting the universal fallenness or Seinsvergessenheit of the epoch implies a greater gulf between the philosopher and his milieu than was implied in the analysis of Being and Time. Even as the philosopher would ground his insight more deeply in the folk’s potential for openness to Being, he necessarily separates himself more sharply from its historical actuality. This peculiar combination of identification and distance is possible only on the basis of a transmutation of the folk into the “ideal” such as occurs in Heidegger’s thought.

In sum, the radicality of freedom that has no ground in human nature can appear, or disappear, only at the whim of history, or fate, which demands the proper attunement of mankind for its reception. Indeed the promise of such freedom will appear most forcefully in those moments when ordinary reality, with its ontic or merely “natural” concerns, is most threatened with destruction. In this way nihilism, as the complete immersion in beings, can destroy itself when its negative force is turned against the beings, thus compelling human life to be free for openness to Being. The scourge of the earth is its savior: “Where danger is, there grows salvation.” Since, however, the promise of the 1933 revolution was not fulfilled, and in 1945 the darkness of the American-Soviet imperium descended over the world, mankind must await, indefinitely and indeterminately, in the long convalescence (Verwindung) of the technological world night, for the saving of mankind by other, more efficacious deities than those that appeared in 1933.

Heidegger has a profound grasp of the radicality of philosophical questioning comparable with that of the greatest figures in the tradition.⁴³ But his divorce of questioning from any natural-teleological basis, for which the German Idealist concepts of freedom helped set the stage, has a paradoxical consequence. Such questioning is unable to see clearly the political-moral phenomena that must nourish it; a questioning that cannot see these phenomena cannot gain true distance on them, and so risks becoming their slave. The paradox is not mitigated if the servitude is not unwitting but voluntary, as in the case of Heidegger.