Dasein’s ways of behaviour, its capacities, powers, possibilities, and vicissitudes, have been studied with varying extent in philosophical psychology, in anthropology, ethics, “politics”. … But the question remains whether these interpretations of Dasein have been carried through with an originary existentiality comparable to whatever existentiell originarity they may have possessed.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
A certain suspicion will perhaps never cease to haunt Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus: given the philosopher’s enthusiastic embracing of National Socialism in 1933, is it not appropriate to look at his earlier thought, and particularly at Being and Time, to find the grounds for his disastrous politics? This suspicion never ceased to taint the otherwise much praised achievement of 1927.1 More recently, though, and increasingly, Being and Time finds itself under severe attack:2 on the European continent as well as in the United States, Heidegger’s text is being submitted to a political “reading” which serves to present his early project as the antechamber of his later massive support for the Third Reich. Rather than attempt to provide such a reading myself, and to trace the “fascistic” elements of Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time, rather than try to decipher a hidden political project or philosophy behind the apparently purely descriptive ontology that this text carries out, I shall try to pay specific attention to some Heideggerian motifs so as to let them resonate within the context of Heidegger’s later works, specifically those works that coincide with his political misadventure. I shall treat Being and Time not as the antechamber that opens onto the unrestricted glorification of Nazism, but as a resonance chamber, where motifs, certainly of a very specific kind, are introduced in a way that is not devoid of political vibrations.
The philosophical project of fundamental ontology that was to culminate in the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927 was to remain devoid of worldviews, metaphysical constructions and anthropological considerations. As such, it was still indebted to the Husserlian demand that a phenomenon be isolated and decribed in its “essence,” and that means regardless of the way in which it is ordinarily viewed by the “natural attitude.” The project of fundamental ontology was to attend solely to the question of what it means to be; it was to address the question of the meaning of the being of all beings and sketch its formal structure. As fundamental ontology, it was also to be sharply distinguished from what Heidegger calls regional ontologies. Such ontologies are characterized by the fact that they investigate a specific kind of beings, or, to be more precise, that they question beings from a pre-given perspective. Thus, biology will have as its field of investigation those beings that can be understood on the basis of a certain concept of bios or life. Similarly, psychology will consider certain beings, most likely human beings, from the perspective of their psychè. Likewise, then, a politology will consider those beings to whom belong the character of living in a self-organized community or polis (or however one might decide to characterize such a community). All regional ontologies presuppose a certain concept of being (being in the sense of life, being in the sense of nature, being in the sense of polis, etc.) in order to operate and be successful. Yet none of them can address the concrete question of what it means to be for all beings. None of them are in a position to address the question of the meaning of the being of all beings, even though each and everyone of them presupposes it. This task can only be reserved for a fundamental ontology, which, for Heidegger, is philosophy proper. In the process of its fragmentation into various fields (ontology, theology, epistemology, psychology, ethics …), philosophy became unable to think the ground common to all such sciences and thus became estranged from its own essence. Specifically, the fragmentation of philosophy into a manifold of sciences and the consequent absorption of philosophy into such sciences, or, to put it yet differently, the becoming-science of philosophy, is due to philosophy’s failure to raise the question of the meaning of being adequately, that is, with time properly understood as its guiding thread. Part I of Being and Time was to raise such a question adequately: it was to show that “the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, if rightly seen and rightly explained.”3
From the perspective of the project of fundamental ontology, it is thus easy to understand that philosophy is not to exhibit views concerning the world, that it is not to engage in either judgments or evaluations. It is only to lay out the fundamental structures of being, and specifically of that being’s being which Heidegger calls Dasein. Philosophy as fundamental ontology ought not be a platform for discussing political issues, for such issues presuppose a certain understanding of the meaning of the being of man, which the “analytic” of Dasein is precisely to examine. One needs to go even further and add that if the project of questioning the meaning of existence in its being is to be successful, then the overall unquestioned definition of man as “the political animal by nature”4 is to be suspended, insofar as this definition is indeed such that it only serves to obstruct and impede the investigation by providing an all too hasty answer to a question inadequately raised. The word “politics” itself needs to be altogether avoided, for its use only leads to a concealment of the Sache des Denkens and to the constitution of an anthropology. Like names such as “man” (anthropos), “ethics” and “physics,” “politics” would be in need of its own Destruktion.5 Philosophy properly understood should above all not be political in its approach. Thus Being and Time would be radically apolitical: the very project of fundamental ontology would be such that it suspends the privilege traditionally granted to the “political nature” of “man.”
And yet. As fundamental ontology, it is also to lay the ground for the possibility of any such discourse. In other words, it is not simply indifferent to politics, since it precedes it ontologically. The ontological precedence of philosophy over politics, the order of grounding that exists between the two, is perhaps what lies at the very source of Heidegger’s essentially ambiguous and even duplicitous politics. Given the grounding priority of philosophy over politics that is established in the 1920s, and which will only be confirmed by the introduction of the Seinsgeschichte in the 1930s, the way in which the discourse on being will come to be construed will itself become decisive for the way in which Heidegger will analyze and react to the political situation of his time. To put it in yet another way: if we are even to begin to understand the motivations behind Heidegger’s politically most decisive gestures, we shall have to constantly bear in mind the way in which Heidegger never ceased to subordinate the political to the metaphysical. It is the specific way in which the relation of precedence and priority of the philosophical over the political was established and reformulated, but never called into question, that made Heidegger’s support for Nazism possible and, at once and simultaneously, irreducible to it. Because of his philosophical presuppositions, Heidegger was able to see in Nazism a historical mission that was never there (a historico-political response to the essence of our time as dominated by planetary technology) and was never able to see, even after the war, what was really there (a form of terror and a power of destruction hitherto unknown). Not only did Heidegger’s political involvement constitute the “greatest stupidity” (die grösste Dummheit) of his life;6 it also and primarily revealed a certain blindness of his thought.
To write the story of this blindness, then, is to follow Heidegger’s own path of thinking. Specifically, it is to go along with the priority in the order of grounding that Heidegger establishes between the philosophical and the political. For if there is to be a radical critique of Heidegger, it can only stem from an engagement with the very philosophical presuppositions upon which his thought rests. The difficulty, then, lies in the necessity to reach the very heart of Heidegger’s thinking without simply reinscribing the philosophical gesture that allowed for Heidegger’s own political blindness. If this angle excludes the possibility of ultimately understanding Heidegger with Heidegger and on the basis of Heidegger, a possibility which can easily evolve into the temptation to understand Heidegger’s Nazism, if not Nazism itself, on the basis of yet another rethinking of history as the history of being, it also refuses to envisage Heidegger’s idiom and politics as the sole symptoms of a reactionary ideology (although it will occasionally point to what it takes to be irreducibly reactionary motifs). If the former approach serves to highlight the specificity of Heidegger’s Nazism, it does so only at the cost of remaining caught within its metaphysical presuppositions; as for the latter approach, it simply misses the specificity of the Heidegger case, which ultimately cannot simply be viewed as a philosophical variation on an essentially ideological theme.
Thus the seeming apoliticality of the project of fundamental ontology cannot be settled so easily. If Being and Time is indeed apparently devoid of political views and opinions, if it displaces the terrain of the philosophical investigation in the direction of an analysis of being, or of the way in which things come to be present for Dasein on the basis of the way in which they are granted with meaning, it also acknowledges the essentially collective and historical dimension of human existence, prior to questions concerning the modes of organization of this being-in-common. In that respect, Being and Time can be said to be pre-political, where the “pre” would need to be thought as the onto-chronological condition of possibility of the political sphere in general. Yet the way in which the collective dimension of human existence comes to be determined in Being and Time provides a specific and decisive orientation towards a possible thematization of the political. Is it this very delimitation of the political on the basis of an ontological thematization of existence that allowed for Heidegger’s own politics in the 1930s?7 If so, where is such a delimitation most rigorously articulated?
Karl Löwith recalls how, as he and his former professor met for the last time in Rome in 1936, he suggested to Heidegger that his involvement with Nazism stemmed from the very essence of his philosophy; “Heidegger agreed with me without reservations and spelled out that his concept of ‘historicity’ was the basis for his political engagement.”8 One could immediately be surprised by Heidegger’s response, insofar as another, perhaps more directly and obviously political place to look at in the overall economy of Being and Time would be the sections devoted to the being-with of Dasein. Yet the discussion concerning the historicity of Dasein (Division Two, Chapter V) is the one that provokes the most burning questions and calls for the most vigilant reading.
To treat the sections on historicity as marking an opening onto the political is of course a delicate operation, one which requires the greatest care.9 Far from assuming that the historical is de facto translatable in political terms, I wish to explore the various ways in which such a translation is suggested by Heidegger. In other words, it is the very bordering of the historical on the political to which I want to pay particular attention. Specifically, I want to mark the passages and emphasize some of the motifs that seem to provoke an irreversible slippage into specific ways of framing the political.
The analysis of history (Geschichte) in Being and Time arises from a difficulty concerning the meaning of Dasein’s being as care (Sorge). Having identified the being of Dasein as care in the last chapter of the preparatory analysis of Dasein, and having then revealed the meaning of care as temporality in section 65, Heidegger proceeds to show how temporality is necessarily presupposed in what Division One revealed as Dasein’s foremost way of being, namely, everydayness. At the end of Division Two Chapter IV, (“Temporality and Everydayness”), then, one would expect the second division of the treatise to reach a conclusion. Was the goal of this division not precisely the “Interpretation of Dasein in terms of Temporality”? Was that goal not achieved in section 65, and made explicit in Chapter IV, through a renewed analysis of everydayness?
Without calling into question either the interpretation of Dasein’s being as care or the meaning of this being as temporality (Zeitlichkeit), Heidegger points to a difficulty regarding such interpretation, only to reaffirm it and consolidate it in the end. The difficulty has to do with the way in which Dasein’s temporality was made manifest, and specifically with an unquestioned orientation with respect to this temporality. Indeed, Dasein’s possibility of being-a-whole, that is, the possibility of grasping Dasein in the totality of its being, was revealed in Dasein’s basic way of being ahead of itself towards the end, or being-towards-death. Insofar as Dasein has the character of being-towards-the-end, the ontological question concerning its totality seems to have found its answer. But is death the only “end” Dasein is confronted with, or are there other ends besides death? What about “birth”? As the “beginning,” is it not also the other end to which Dasein necessarily comports itself? Is the answer of Dasein’s totality not contained in the life that stretches between birth and death?10
If the task becomes to analyze ontologically the meaning of the being of Dasein as the stretching between two ends, then the analysis does not cease to be temporal. On the contrary: temporality remains what needs to be thought, but in a way that now includes such stretching along as constitutive of Dasein’s being. How are we to understand the birth/death connectedness? Is Heidegger simply suggesting that Dasein is contained within two boundaries, that it enters time, fills up a stretch of life with its experiences, and then steps out of time? Or are we to consider the “between” which relates birth to death in a more originary way, as an ontological-existential structure? Heidegger’s answer is quite clear:
Dasein stretches itself along [erstreckt sich selbst] in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching along. The “between” which relates to birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein. … Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand. … Factical Dasein exists as born; and as born, it is already dying, in the sense of being-towards-death.
(SZ 374/426)
As soon as Dasein is born, it is old enough to die, for it is, from the start, towards its own death. But Dasein is not born just once: understood existentially, birth is facticity, which means that Dasein never ceases to be thrown into the world and into a life which it has to live. As born, Dasein must be, and such being involves being-towards-death. Death and birth are connected in care: “As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.“11
The question of how such a “between” unfolds becomes all the more urgent. What must be Dasein’s temporal constitution so as to allow for Dasein’s stretching-along (Erstreckung)? This question is precisely the way into the question of history:
The specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along [Die spezifische Bewegtheit des erstreckten Sicherstreckens], we call its “historical happening” [Geschehen].12 The question of Dasein’s “connectedness” is the ontological problem of Dasein’s historical happening. To lay bare the structure of historical happening, and the existential-temporal conditions of its possibility, signifies that one has achieved an ontological understanding of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit].
(SZ 375/427)
What is now required from the analysis is an exposition of Dasein’s historical character and of its temporal conditions of possibility. The historicity presupposed in Dasein’s being as care is now to become an object of investigation. This is not to say that the analysis needs to become historiographic. Rather, it must remain ontological through and through, so as to reveal the basic phenomenon of History (Geschichte) necessarily presupposed in Dasein’s ordinary understanding of history as well as in the science (Historie) that is based on this ordinary understanding.13 In fact, the existential-ontological interpretation of History must be grasped in spite of and almost against the way Dasein’s historical happening is ordinarily interpreted. Why does Dasein’s ordinary historical self-interpretation serve to cover up its fundamental historicity? If Dasein’s historicity is rooted in the meaning of care as ecstatic temporality (as the temporalizing of temporality) as established in section 65 then how is it that by “History” Dasein usually understands something that belongs to the past? Why is the dimension of the past privileged in the concept of History (a dimension which would reveal itself in ordinary language when, referring to a particular event, or a particular person, we say that “It/He/She is now history)? Why, if not because Dasein, proximally and for the most part, understands itself not from itself but from the beings present-at-hand in the world and in time? Why, if not because for Dasein time is a space within which things happen and pass, thereby allowing for a concept of “History” that serves to define that which has passed and which is no longer?
If the ordinary conception of History described in sections 73 and 75 is based on Dasein’s fallen interpretation of its own historicity, does it not become necessary to outline the basic constitution of historicity on the basis of Dasein’s own way of being? This is he task ascribed to section 74. Heidegger takes up the basic structure of care once again, but this time with a view to answering the question concerning Dasein’s historicity: To what extent does the temporality revealed in authentic existence as anticipatory resoluteness imply an authentic historical happening of Dasein? It is in the wake of this question and in the analyses attached to it that a discreet yet decisive shift takes place.
Section 74 starts off by stating that if Dasein has a history, a personal history, as it were, it is because Dasein is essentially historical. Historicity belongs to the very being of Dasein: it is an existential. Hence the problem of history is primarily an ontological one. Since the being of Dasein as care is grounded in temporality, the nature of Dasein’s historicity is to be sought in temporality itself as it has been so far interpreted. Needless to say, then, the question of the historical happening of Dasein is in perfect accord with the overall project of clarifying the meaning of Dasein’s being as time. It is a further step in the elaboration of such meaning. Or, as Heidegger puts it, “the interpretation of Dasein’s historicity will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality.”14
In order to address the question of Dasein’s Geschehen, Heidegger suggests that we look further into the constitution of temporality as it is revealed in the authentic phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness. Let us simply mark, at this stage, that the phenomenon of history is derived, or rather “deduced” from Dasein’s ability to face its own death as its ownmost and unsurpassable possibility, as its ability, in other words, to come face to face with itself, independently of the way in which it is with others. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein is made present to its own being in such a way that it can take it over wholly and be free for it. This means, in other words, that Dasein understands itself as this being which is both projected against its own end and thrown into a world. Through anticipatory resoluteness, the “there” or the situation of Dasein is made transparent to Dasein. The existential choices and attitudes that would follow from such a resolution are not discussed: they do not belong in the existential analysis. So, once again, Heidegger maintains his analysis at the fundamental ontological level, without introducing anthropological considerations that would illustrate the basic structure laid out. If an ethics or a politics could indeed unfold from this fundamental existential constitution, Heidegger refuses to consider it. Dasein’s resoluteness remains empty. Such is the reason why, at least within the context of Being and Time, I cannot identify anticipatory resoluteness with the heroism and the decisionism with which it has often been charged, even though, of course, the very possibility of proper existence hinges on the decision with respect to the taking up of one’s existence as finitude.
But do those possibilities of existence, which have been disclosed in anticipatory resoluteness, unfold from death itself, or are they already “there”, along with Dasein’s own facticity? Or does resoluteness reveal them in a new way? In other words: what is the relation between projection and thrownness, between those possibilities that are opened up on the basis of Dasein’s authentic projecting against its own death and those possibilities in which Dasein seems to be thrown and which it inherits? Resoluteness, Heidegger says, is the way in which Dasein comes back to itself, back to its original site, from the dispersion in everydayness into which it is for the most part thrown. But such coming back, such gathering is not an inward movement whereby Dasein would cut itself off from the world so as to enjoy the peace and depth of some precious inner life. Rather, it is a movement of disclosure, of clearing, where Dasein authentically ek-sists its own essence, and this means confronts its own facticity. In coming back to itself, Dasein comes back to its own ecstatic yet finite essence. In the movement of such coming back, Dasein discloses authentic factical possibilities, those very possibilities that constitute its own heritage. In other words, it is only on the basis of the anticipation (the running ahead, Vorlaufen) of its own death that Dasein can hand down to itself the possibilities that were already his. Such, then, is the paradox of appropriation, of the becoming-proper (of what is inappropriately referred to as “authenticity”): Dasein gives itself to itself, it gives itself what from the start is its own, and yet what is its own is also its gift, its heritage, which, as resolute, it takes over. A more traditional way of putting it would be to say that Dasein is free for its own necessity, that its authentic freedom is revealed in its ability to take up and take over the necessity of its own condition. It should be of no surprise, then, that the word Heidegger uses to define such ability is the philosophem that traditionally (at least since German Idealism) serves to designate the unity of freedom and necessity, namely, “fate” (Schicksal):
Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one — those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly — and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate.
(SZ 384/435)
Snatched back from its fascination for a world that distracts it from its ownmost call, that dulls it and lulls it by way of a never ending production of cheap fantasies, petty satisfactions and good conscience, Dasein comes face to face with its own finitude, with its fatal outcome. It is no longer for Dasein a matter of indulging in the facile (das Leichte)15 and of taking things lightly (Leichtnehmen). It is now a question of embracing the hard and the heavy, and of embracing it in the way in which one embraces a destiny. The time of the fatum and of its overpowering power (übermächtige Macht) has begun to strike. One halts, shrieks and finally wonders: must the opening to the essential finitude of existence take the form of an appeal to the hard and the heavy, Härte und Schwere? Cannot existence find its meaning in the affirmation of lightness — lightness of the feet and of spirit, of the mind and of destiny? Must we all embrace our fate like an armour? Is this our fate? Is this fate?
Fatal Dasein, historical Dasein. History is fate, fate is history. It is only insofar as Dasein makes this destiny its own that it can become free for its own history, that it regains its tradition and its inheritance. Thus fate designates Dasein’s originary historical happening, which, Heidegger writes in a recapitulative sentence, “lies in proper resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen.”16 But for this stroke of fate, for this piercing arrow, Dasein would err anonymously amongst the no less anonymous mass of schwärmende busy bees.
It is at this point of the analysis, toward the middle of the section, that the text, head on, blind to the consequences, precipitates itself, all too hastily, all too carelessly, in the abyss of steely and völkisch rhetoric. It will never quite recover from this journey. Could this have been avoided? Every text — every great text, paradoxically — escapes at a decisive moment, trembles and opens onto an abyss. A text is never a master in its own house. The author is not a shepherd, and yet responsibility always befalls him. Such is the fate of the thinker: absolute responsibility. This is how the much discussed passage runs (I cite it in its entirety, so as then to unravel it):
But if fateful Dasein, as being-in-the-world, exists essentially in being-with-Others, its historical happening is a co-historical happening and is determinative for it as communal fate [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historical happening of a community [Gemeinschaft], of a people [or a nation: Volk]. 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 communication [Mitteilung] and in struggle [Kampf] does the power [Macht] of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its “generation” [Generation] goes to make up the full, proper historical happening of Dasein.
(SZ 384/436)
This passage calls for at least three remarks:
1. On the Schicksal and the Geschick. Until now, the historical character of Dasein, what Heidegger designates as the Geschehen of Dasein, referred to the destiny of Dasein, and that meant to Dasein’s ability to run ahead of itself toward its own death so as to disclose the whole of its being to itself. As Heidegger suggested in the beginning of the analysis, “history” appears to be a concrete working out of Dasein’s originary temporality. Now since Dasein is essentially in the world with others, as section 26 established, and since Dasein is essentially fateful or historical, it follows that Dasein’s fate is a co-fate (ein Geschick) and its history is a co-history (a community).
Yet are things as straightforward as Heidegger seems to suggest? Given the way care has been described so far, how easy is it for it to incorporate Dasein’s historicity, particularly as communal fate? What happens in the apparently innocent and legitimate move from Dasein’s resoluteness as fate to the common resoluteness whereby a people would constitute itself as destiny? Despite what section 26 established, despite the fact that the world of Dasein is a world shared by others, it is not possible to simply equate Dasein’s historicity with a common fate. Why? Because the world that is shared by others is the world of everydayness, the world of the One (das Man), that world from which Dasein was precisely to cut itself off if it ever were to grasp itself as a potentiality-for-being-a-whole.17 For the most part, Heidegger insists, being-with-one-another is a fallen mode of being for Dasein. This means that in being with other entities that have Dasein’s own way of being, Dasein is not according to its own being, but according to the being of this somewhat anonymous and yet all pervasive (“dictatorial,” Heidegger says) identity referred to as “the One.” In everyday life, one goes by the way things are ordinarily considered, thought, dealt with; one is actually absorbed in such things, in such a way that one becomes oblivious of the fact that one exists on the basis of one’s own being and this means, ultimately, of one’s own nullity. The world in which we are thrown, and in which we are thrown with other Daseins in the way of a concernful absorption, is not in a position to reveal Dasein to itself as this being which has its being to be and which understands its own being as what is most its own. In other words, everyday life, although an ontologically positive phenomenon, does not reveal Dasein in its singularity (in its “mineness”); it does not make Dasein transparent to itself in its totality. The phenomenon that is to attest Dasein’s being-a-whole is not everydayness, not Dasein’s daily engagement with others, but Dasein’s coming face to face with its own finitude and transcendence. This happens not in everydayness, where Dasein is with others, but in anticipatory resoluteness. There, Dasein is revealed in its originary temporality. Dasein’s historicality arises precisely out of Dasein’s abstraction from its life with others, as an essential modification of that everyday life. “Authentic” temporality is not within-timeness; it is ecstatic temporality.
The question, then, holds: given that authentic temporality and historicality as such emerge from Dasein’s breaking loose from the average possibilities of everydayness (with the only way in which Being-with-one-another was described) and facing its ownmost, unsurpassable possibility, how can we move from this solipsistic encounter with one’s self to a shared temporality, a co-history? Does resoluteness open onto another way of being with others, a more authentic way, one that would be captured under the names “community” and “people”? Do such words imply a shared resoluteness, in which a given community would exist qua community or people? Does this mean that a people comes to be constituted as such only in the anticipation of death as its ownmost possibility? But how can a community face its own death as its ownmost possibility without imposing a peculiar kind of closure upon its singularities? From the moment at which death is inscribed as the horizon that constitutes the community as such, a certain logic is already under way: it is a logic of totalization and immanence, where the existing singularities are projected against a heroic-tragic understanding of their destiny. It is a logic of sacrifice, where the plurality of existences is absorbed into the immanence of the Same.18
Two remarks follow from this. First, if Heidegger’s conception of destiny indeed presupposes the possibility of death as a horizon for the contitution of authentic commonality, one should point out the tension that such conception introduces with respect to the analysis of death explicitly developed in sections 46–53. For was death not then described as this unsurpassable possibility that is always mine and unappropriable? Did such a description not insist on the peculiar emptiness attached to the phenomenon of death as possibility? Second, it would seem that my reading is an attempt to retrieve the ontic signification of what is presented as a purely ontological exposition. To this objection, I would argue that, paradoxically, Heidegger’s analysis is ontically overdetermined because it is ontologically too vague and too quick. To put it differently: because Heidegger’s concept of history as destiny is not secured ontologically, it is from the start politically oriented. One finds further indication of Heidegger’s slippage in this sentence from the passage quoted earlier: “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.” As such, “being-with-one-another in the same world” does not suffice to conclude to the possibility of a living-together in the sense of a community. Once again: to-be-with-one-another in the same world is primarily to exist improperly. What is truly history-creating, then, is “our resoluteness for definite possibilities.” More precisely: it is the “our” and the “we” underlying the resoluteness that accounts for the destinal possibility. But how is this “we” constituted? Who is/are “we”? On what basis can Heidegger use the first person plural in the context of the analysis of Dasein? Where does the unity of the “we” lie? Can we say “we” in the same way in which Dasein speaks its own singularity through the “I”? Can “we” be at once singular and plural? “We” are precisely insofar as we resolve ourselves for definite possibilities. Whatever such possibilities may be — and it is not the task of a fundamental ontology to reveal them — they must be rooted in anticipatory resoluteness. And this, once again, brings us to our aporia: what does resoluteness mean for the “we”? Must a community or a nation presuppose death as its own horizon so as to exist qua community? Must a community consist in the sharing of such a horizon? Must it perpetuate the model of the communion around a founding sacrifice? And does such a conception not bring Heidegger back to a very common understanding of death: death as that which binds, brings together, works, produces, death as negativity and poiesis?19
The being-with-Others that is destinal is a community, a people. The community or the people is itself defined in terms of its destinality. Yet destiny is not the sum of individual fates. It is itself something that we inherit, something that befalls us. Since Dasein is from the start with other Daseins, its individual fate is given to it as a common fate, which is tantamount to saying that there is no (purely) individual fate. The destiny of a community is freed through communication and struggle. This means that a people is not simply given, but is constituted through communication and struggle, through efforts and decisions, through a common resoluteness. What this suggests is that there is no such thing as a completely isolated Dasein, that each Dasein is always historically rooted, and that its choices are limited by its historical situation. On the other hand, it also suggests that destiny is not to be equated with some kind of fatum that descends upon Dasein from the skies, but that it stems from Dasein’s ability to relate to its own historical situation and to other Daseins. There is a certain circularity in history, then, between singularity and commonality, between necessity and freedom, a circularity which Heidegger captures in the notion of Geschick.
2. On the Gemeinschaft and the Volk. One cannot emphasize enough the consequences linked to the identification of history with destiny, of Geschichte with Geschick. For it is this very identification that gives a political orientation to Heidegger’s discussion. To be more specific, the very way in which Heidegger construes history predetermines a specific conception of the political. Indeed, on the basis of Heidegger’s destinal interpretation of history, the political comes to be apprehended not as a free association of singularities bound by a contract based on a common interest (“destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates”), but as a “community” (Gemeinschaft) or a “nation” (Volk). Not as a Volksgemeinschaft, though. At least not yet.20 Why Gemeinschaft and Volk? Why not Gesellschaft and Staat? In early twentieth-century Germany, these words (Gemeinschaft, Volk) were freely circulating amongst the various academic disciplines and scientific milieus, and were always contrasted with what appeared as their complementary yet often antithetical modes of social organization, society (Gesellschaft) and State (Staat). Thus, one finds versions of this Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft divide in the works of historians, sociologists and philosophers such as Spengler, Weber or Scheler.21 Yet all such versions can be traced back to the publication in 1887 of Ferdinand Tönnies” Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,22 the reprinting of which in 1912 was to become decisive for an entire generation of Geisteswissenschaftler. Although one could easily argue that Tönnies’ work is in no way original, insofar as most of its fundamental concepts can be related to much of the tradition’s basic motifs, and specifically to Aristotle’s Politics, there nonetheless remains a distinctly German quality to the book, due to its Germanic rootedness and to what can only be interpreted as a certain romanticized vision of the country life and the Middle Ages, as well as a skepticism with regard to the effects of the industrial revolution on the traditional modes of social organization. These are the traits that will become the focus of concern for many at the turn of the century and that will eventually serve to feed a certain reactionary ideology, often referred to as the conservative revolution or the völkisch movement.
According to Tönnies, the history of the West is marked by the combination of two types of social organizations, communities and societies, each type being characterized by basic geographical, economic and sociological patterns. Communities are characterized by ties of blood, place and spirit: they are thus limited to the family and to the village, which is itself the place where agricultural labor, natural and customary law as well as the worship of deities are gathered. The community’s economy is domestic and rural, its spiritual life is one of friendship and of religion. As an organic and natural unity, it is a Volk and the whole of its spiritual life is identified as Kultur. Unlike the Gemeinschaft, the Gesellschaft is an artificial association based on a free contract motivated by interest. As the platform for the development of commerce and trade, the society’s place is the city. Its ties are purely practical and conventional, and its law is one of contracts. The life of the city is spiritless, since it is governed by public opinion, calculative thinking and essentially cosmopolitan newspapers. Where passion, sensuality, courage, genius, concord, piety and imagination prevail in the community, lust for pleasure and power, greed, self-interest, ambition, calculation, thirst for knowledge, vanity and spiritlessness prevail amongst societies. Where the community appears as a harmonious totality governed by need and mutual interest, the society appears as a mechanistic and anonymous organization (the state) governed by money, profit and exploitation. Since with the development of capitalism societies have tended to dislocate and dissolve traditional communities, Tönnies concludes his book in the following way: “In the course of history, the culture of the people (die Kultur des Volkstums) has given rise to the civilisation of the state (die Zivilisation des Staatstums).”23 And we have now reached the point where “the entire culture has been transformed into a civilisation of state and Gesellschaft, and this transformation means the doom of culture itself if none of its scattered seeds remain alive and again bring forth the essence and idea of Gemeinschaft, thus secretly fostering a new culture amidst the decaying one.”24
A further elaboration of Tönnies’ fundamental thesis regarding the decay of culture in civilization can be found in Spengler’s Years of Decision and in his famous The Decline of the West.25 Even if not through a direct reading of Tönnies, Heidegger was exposed to the motifs of Gemeinschaft, Volk and Kultur at least through Spengler, whom he was reading and lecturing on in the 1920s.26 The following passages must have caught Heidegger’s attention:
[M]an is not only historyless before the birth of the culture, but again becomes so as soon as a civilisation has worked itself out fully to the definitive end which betokens the end of the living development of the culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence.27
If the Early period is characterised by the birth of the city out of the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the period of civilisation is that of the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form-language that reproduces every trait of its essence. … Not now destiny, but causality, not now living direction, but extension rules.28
In a way that is very similar to what one finds in Tönnies, Spengler associates the word “civilisation” with the emergence of the cosmopolitan, the city, capitalism, profit, intellectualism (what one could call the avant-garde); “culture,” on the other hand, serves to define traditional modes of life and social organization, characterized by a fundamental and natural relation to the soil, to one’s family and one’s rural and religious community.
I am not suggesting that Heidegger is directly borrowing his concepts of Gemeinschaft and Volk from Tönnies or Spengler. Neither am I suggesting that it is the use of such a vocabulary that made Heidegger’s political involvement with Nazism possible (if only because of the fact that some of the most prominent figures of the conservative revolution, like Jünger or Spengler, refused to embrace National Socialism), although I would certainly see it as laying the ground for a positive interpretation of the “movement.” Rather, I want to suggest that the very use of such words within the intellectual context of the time is not an incidental one, and that it is made as much in favour of a specific understanding of the nature of our being-in-common as it is made against the view — associated with liberalism, capitalism and intellectualism — which articulates the meaning of communal life in terms of Gesellschaft and Staat.29 This unthought ideological background of Heidegger’s will become easily mobilized in favor of an affirmation of the Deutschtum, the links of blood and soil, the essential sacrifice, and the necessity to reconcile science with the German Dasein.
Two testimonies regarding Heidegger’s ideological attitude with respect to his time in the late 1920s seem to confirm the scarce indications revealed in Being and Time. This is the way Max Müller describes Heidegger in Freiburg in 1928/9:
Heidegger cultivated an entirely different style with his students than the other professors. We went on excursions together, hikes and ski trips. The relationship to national culture [Volkstum], to nature, and also to the youth movement were, of course, talked about then. The word national [völkisch] was very close to him. He did not connect it to any political party. His deep respect for the people [Volk] was also linked to certain academic prejudices, for example the absolute rejection of sociology and psychology as big-city and decadent ways of thinking.30
The second testimony is also collected in Heidegger and National Socialism, this time by Hans Jonas, a former student of Heidegger’s:
[Y]es, a certain “Blood-and-soil” point of view was always there: He [Heidegger] emphasised his Black Forest-ness a great deal; I mean his skiing and the ski cabin up in Todtnauberg. That was not only because he loved to ski and because he liked to be up in the mountains; it also had something to do with his ideological affirmation: one had to be close to nature, and so on. And certain remarks, also ones he sometimes made about the French, showed a sort of (how could I say it?) primitive nationalism.31
3. On the Kampf. Still in Being and Time, one reads the following: “In communication and in struggle the power of destiny first becomes free”. History as the power of a common fate is thus freed through communication and through struggle: in der Mitteilung und im Kampf. One might be surprised to see “communication” (Mitteilung) and “struggle” (Kampf) so closely associated. We have established that the community or the people is defined in terms of a common resoluteness for definite possibilities. Resoluteness is the commonality of the community. Thus resoluteness is the object of both the communication and the struggle. What is communicated is precisely what is shared: it is communicated through its very sharing (Teilung).32 And such sharing, far from being passive and strifeless, is the object of a struggle. How are we to interpret such struggle? What is the ontological validity of Kampf? This is a difficult question, since Heidegger does not feel compelled to justify the use of this word, which only appears four times in the whole of Being and Time,33 and does not even provide us with a hermeneutical clue. We must be careful, then, not to jump to conclusions hastily (such as the ones privileging a political overdetermination of the Heideggerian text) nor to overinterpret the two pages where the word appears.
With or against whom or what does the struggling occur? Over what? And what is being communicated?
Does the struggle refer to the attitude of the fateful Dasein expressed a few lines before, that attitude of Dasein which consists in breaking loose from the offhandedness of everydayness when confronted with the finitude of existence and the anxiety attached to it? Is the struggle the struggle of existence itself, the struggle that is required sometimes to bear the weight of existence? Is authentic existence an effort, a struggle? To live one’s life as fate, does that not imply a combat with oneself? This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by what Heidegger writes at the beginning of the paragraph immediately following the one I have just quoted from, which reveals Dasein’s historical happening as a striking combination of power and abandonment, of might and distress:
Fate [Schicksal — and not Geschick: we have now returned to the fate of the singular Dasein] is that powerless overpower [die ohnmächtige … Übermacht] which puts itself in readiness for adversities [Widrigkeiten] — the power of projecting oneself upon one’s own Being-indebted, and of doing so reticently, with readiness for anxiety.
(SZ 385/436–7)
The struggle, then, seems to refer primarily to Dasein’s confrontation with its own fate, the fate of ex-istence (of finitude, anxiety, conscience and guilt). It is an explicit characteristic of fate, but nothing at this point seems to suggest that it constitutes destiny in any substantial way.
A few lines down, the word Kampf occurs for a second time. This time, it is not introduced as a substantive, but as an adjective that suggests both an ongoing action and a relation to something else: the “following” (Nachfolge) and the “fidelity” (Treue). One follows and is faithful to someone or something that can be repeated, to what Heidegger himself calls a “hero” — be the hero Jesus Christ, Gengis Khan, Michael Jordan or Hitler. One pauses and shudders: Could Heidegger have really chosen the latter as his hero? Could Nazism have been bis struggle? At this point, the struggle appears in a context that seems to be marked no longer by the individual fate alone, but by the way in which the resolute existence relates itself to its own time and history:
The resoluteness which comes back to itself and hands itself down [sich überliefernde], then becomes the repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to us. Repeating is handing down explicitly [die Wiederholung ist die ausdrückliche Überlieferung: the repetition is the explicit tradition] — that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there. The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been — the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero [seinen Helden] — is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the following and the fidelity that struggle [die kämpfende Nachfolge und Treue] for that which can be repeated.
(SZ 385/437)
The context within which one finds the second occurrence of the word Kampf is marked by a rigorous delimitation of what a tradition is. The word “tradition” serves to translate Heidegger’s Überlieferung. The latter use of the word tradition is to be sharply distinguished from the Tradition Heidegger refers to in section 6 of Being and Time.34 There, the tradition (“metaphysics”) is interpreted as a fallen mode of Dasein’s understanding of its own being, and hence as an obstacle to the completion of the task ascribed to fundamental ontology. The tradition is thus to be appropriately deconstructed. The Überlieferung Heidegger introduces in section 74 is an attempt to retrieve a more original, a more positive and hence constructive comportment toward one’s history. Tradition is to be understood on the basis of what Heidegger calls a Wiederholung, a repetitio. To repeat is to claim anew. But one can claim something anew only insofar as that thing has been handed down in such a way that it can be claimed. And such is the reason why the tradition is an Über-lieferung, a handing down. Such handing down is made possible only by Dasein’s very historicity, that is, by the fact that Dasein can come back to something that has been (can have a past, a history, a heritage) only on the basis of its own projection, and that means on the basis of the existential-ontological phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness. It is only on the basis of Dasein’s own temporal self-projection, then, that something like a tradition is first made possible. Thus, a tradition, a past, a “history” in the ordinary sense is not something that is simply delivered over to Dasein, and to which Dasein simply belongs. Rather, the very possibility of a tradition is marked by a peculiar process of repetition, where Dasein, on the basis of its ownmost future, “goes back” to a given situation, but in such a way that this situation is thus disclosed, illuminated in a new way, revealed as a unique historical possibility, and not repeated in the sense of a simple reiteration or a passive obedience. In this process of repetition, it is not a question of remitting one’s freedom and ability to decide to the hero one has chosen; it is not a question of abdicating one’s own existence for the benefit of another existence in the name of a fidelity to some possibility contained in the past: “The repeating of that which is possible does not bring again something that is ‘past’. …”35 Rather, Heidegger insists, the repetition is marked by a specific comportment toward the possibility of that existence, a comportment of Erwiderung. The translation of that word (die Wiederholung erwidert…) is anything but obvious. Erwiderung suggests a response, yet a response in which the strifely is inscribed; hence something like a retort or a rejoinder. The counter-ness or the opposition that belongs to the ad-versities which fate must face, and which Heidegger mentioned earlier,36 is thus confirmed. Is it not in the context of such a strifely or adverse attitude of Dasein in the face of its own historical situation that we must understand the use Heidegger makes of the word Kampf?37 Does the “struggle” not refer to Dasein’s ability to engage with its own time in a strifely dialogue — a polemic, in the most literal sense38 — on the basis of a confrontation with its ownmost future? Is it not on the basis of a thinking of time as ecstasis that Heidegger is in a position to throw a new light onto the nature of the historical present, a nature such that the “today” is neither the stake of a nostalgia for a time past nor the opening toward a bright future, but a constant back and forth, and indeed a struggle, between past and future, between an originary self-projection and a return to one’s having-been, in which historical possibilities are disclosed and a heritage is made manifest?39 Is this not what Heidegger means when he writes that:
Repetition does not abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the instant [the instant is the moment of decision that follows from resoluteness] authentic existence is indifferent to both these alternatives.
(SZ 386/438)
What better illustration of what is meant here by repetition do we have than Heidegger’s own relation to the philosophical tradition, and to the need to repeat its long since forgotten question? Yet is the task of repeating the question of being a mere illustration of what a repetition can be, or is it the historical task, that is, the task in which the historical present is most at stake? One cannot but reflect Heidegger’s discourse on repetition back onto the very project of fundamental ontology itself as it is exposed in section 1 of Being and Time, thereby giving it a more precise historical dimension. One recalls that section 1 states the “necessity for explicitly repeating the question of being,” since “this question has today fallen into forgottenness.”40 The today, then, the historical today is marked by a peculiar forgottenness, the forgottenness concerning the question of being, which is now in need of its own repetition.41 In other words, from the very start, the historical is attached to the power of the ontological; the present is defined in terms of a peculiar deficiency with respect to a question to which it has already responded without ever having raised it, a question, then, which it fails to address as a question. If it has become necessary to repeat the question that has fallen into oblivion, it is not with a view to returning to some sheltered origin, to a beginning that would have remained untouched by the process of forgottenness itself. It is not a question of returning to those days when the question was alive and well, as if one could simply leap back into the past and thus suspend the very unfolding of history. Nor is it, for that matter, a question of lamenting the loss of some ontological paradise. Rather, it is a matter of acknowledging the question as that question to which belongs the very covering up of the question, that question which is characterized by a peculiar self-effacement. The history of that self-effacement is the history of metaphysics, ontology proper. Such is the reason why the task in working out the question of being includes not only the interpretation of the meaning of being in general, but also the Destruktion or Abbau of the history of ontology. Since Heidegger’s de(con)struction is often charged with being anti-metaphysical and against the tradition (while also found guilty of reactionary tendencies), and since such a stance as regards the tradition is often considered (at least by the representatives of that tradition) as the source of his political affiliation, it is of the utmost importance to clarify the stakes underlying the deconstructive project.42
Why does the very task of raising anew or repeating the question of being entail that peculiar relation to the history of philosophy which Heidegger describes as deconstructive? And why translate Destruktion as deconstruction, and not destruction? The repetition can be carried out only in and as the deconstruction of the history of ontology, since that history is precisely the how of the forgottenness of the question. The repetition, and that is the concrete working out of the question, cannot be carried out independently of the historical inquiry of the question, and that means the inquiry concerning its effacement. That history itself may be defined in terms of an effacement, an effacement that leaves traces, is precisely what is at the origin of the need for deconstruction. In that respect, deconstruction is to be understood as an exhibition of the process of self-effacement. It is a retrieval, a clearing of those traces which are inscribed in the movement of the self-effacement of the question. To destroy, then, does not mean to efface the traces, to scorch the philosophical earth so as to fertilize it anew. To destroy means to reveal the history of ontology as that field of traces, the tracing of which belongs to a peculiar effacement. Thus, it is a construction, insofar as it retrieves, reveals and isolates an otherwise confused phenomenon (in that respect, the project of fundamental ontology remains phenomenological throughout):
In thus demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an investigation in which their “birth certificate” is displayed, we have nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. But this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition.
(SZ 22/44)
Heidegger’s relation to the tradition, to his own time and to the historical possibilities of Western metaphysics are thus far from simple. On the one hand, the tradition is viewed as the history of a Verfallen, a fall, yet a fall characterized as the forgottenness and the covering over of a question that is necessarily presupposed and to some extent already answered.43 Later on, in a series of decisive moves that will need rigorous critical examination, Heidegger will identify the history of such forgottenness with the history of nihilism.44 On the other hand, history itself, that is, historicity, is rooted in the existential phenomenon of ecstatic temporality, which is itself properly revealed in anticipatory resoluteness. Dasein’s very historicity, then, lies in its futurity, in such a way that its past will be revealed to it according to the way in which it comports itself toward its own future. And the reason why, according to Heidegger, the tradition has been oblivious of its own ground is because, proximally and for the most part, it understands existence and what it means to be improperly, that is, in a way that does not correspond to Dasein’s proper way of being; as something that is present-at-hand and in the world like other beings, and not as that being which comports itself toward the world and toward its own being ecstatically. The historical present, in turn, appears as a particular way of being open to one’s ecstatic essence, as a particular way of responding to one’s historicity: to respond inappropriately or improperly to one’s historicity is still a way of being historical, it is still a mode of openness. Fallenness belongs to Dasein as an essential existential and historical possibility of Dasein. Such is the reason why, Heidegger writes, “we cannot do without a study of Dasein’s improper historicity if our exposition of the ontological problem of history is to be adequate and complete.”45
What conclusions can we draw from our reading of those sections of Being and Time devoted to the question of history? Can we draw a political profile on the basis of Heidegger’s supposedly ontological analyses? Are we now in a position to affirm that such analyses made Heidegger’s political engagement possible, or at least to what extent they did not make such an engagement impossible?
In the light of what we have revealed concerning the historical and ideological context surrounding the motifs of the Gemeinschaft and the Volk, can we conclude that Heidegger’s use of such notions in the potentially most political moment of Being and Time reveals what sociologists would call a “social fantasy”? Are they indications of völkisch and conservative revolutionary tendencies? They at least reveal an affinity, a family resemblance with some of the most easily identifiable conservative revolutionary motifs. Furthermore, to think of history as destiny, community, people, struggle, decision, heroism is to prepare philosophically the terrain for an ulterior political decision. Yet in no way can this affinity be put forward as the sole or even major ground for Heidegger’s subsequent affiliation with National Socialism. Also, if Heidegger’s text seems to inscribe and integrate such reactionary motifs, it also and simultaneously exceeds them in a direction that is proper to Heidegger’s very project and that cannot simply be identified as a version or a variation of an ideology. This logic of integration and excess, of the most easily identifiable reactionary tendencies and of their uncompromising transgression governs the entirety of Heidegger’s political gesture, and accounts for the fact that, while glorifying the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism till the very end, while dismissing Bolshevism and American capitalism as two forms of planetary nihilism, Heidegger will develop an immanent critique of Nazism that is nowhere to be found amongst any of the Nazi ideologues. It is this essentially ambiguous logic, a logic that never allows us to quite corner Heidegger, that has made the Heidegger affair so passionate and virulent. Two examples should suffice to illustrate my point:
1. With respect to the motifs of the “people” and the “nation.” Even though these notions are neither subordinated nor even explicitly attached to questions of blood, soil or race, they do seem to presuppose a certain Deutschtum based on the possibility of a common resolve for a common history, the origin of which is the phenomenon of death. It is death as the constitutive horizon of the people as such that allows for the heroictragic overtones of the passage. Yet, as we have tried to show, such a horizon can only be inscribed in the general economy of Heidegger’s project at the cost of a tension with respect to the peculiarity of the analysis of death originally developed at the beginning of the second division. More specifically: what was gained in the first chapter of the second division, namely the status of death as a possibility (and not an actuality) that is in each case mine (and not the other’s or the people’s), seems to be called into question in the context of history. Death is suddenly folded back onto a very traditional (sacrificial and tragic) conception. The political risk attached to this conception is one of fusion and of communion, one, I should add, that will run through the entirety of Heidegger’s writings.46 The common resolve that is argued for thus itself falls short of the radicality of the analysis of Dasein in its finite and irreducible singularity, and serves to reintroduce a very traditional conception of the people, where the “we” underlying it is united in voluntarism and heroism. This fundamental aspect of historicity will become most manifest in the Rectoral Address.
2. With respect to the notion of repetition. This notion, and particularly the ecstatic conception of temporality that underlies it, seems to undercut two traditional political comportments: reactionism, on the one hand, which is nourished by a thinking of the return (to the origins, to God, to values, to meaning, etc.) and progessivism, on the other hand, whose conception of history as the arche-teleological unfolding of a meaningful process is rooted in a certain appropriation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. While Heidegger’s alleged anti-humanism, so often pointed out by his detractors as the source of his involvement with National Socialism and his inability to speak up against the final solution, can at first glance be derived from his suspicion regarding the universal values of the Enlightenment and the liberal tradition inherited from Rickert, Wildenband and Dilthey, his stand with respect to reactionary thinking seems to be overlooked. Although the reasons and the circumstances for Heidegger’s political engagement remain to be addressed within this study, it seems already clear, on the basis of the nature of Dasein’s temporality and historicity, that they cannot be derived from what could be seen as a purely reactionary tendency of Heidegger’s thought. In order to understand Heidegger’s relation to history, to the past and to the tradition, it does not suffice to consider superficially his remarks concerning the necessity to deconstruct the history of ontology. It is of the utmost importance to understand that such a deconstruction is aimed at retrieving a constructive relation to the past, based on a proper (eigentlich) understanding of historicity as originary temporality. And if something is to account for Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, it is certainly not some “nihilistic” dimension of Heidegger’s thought, one that would be the direct consequence of the “deconstructive” project. Rather, it is to be found in the truly positive historical possibilities that Heidegger saw in the “movement.” But the ontological possibility of such historical possibilities is itself laid out in Being and Time. For what the repetition allows for, if not calls for, is nothing other than a revolution. In that respect, the task of repeating the question concerning the meaning of being, and that also means the task of destroying the history of ontology, can be seen as political from the very start. The Kampf is that which opposes the giants on the question of being, and this struggle is historical and destinal from the start: it carries the political in its wake, it shapes it and molds it. Is it surprising, then, that Heidegger entered the political scene through the gates of the university, that the university was chosen by him as the place where the revolution was to take place? If a revolution is essentially a freeing, if it is a wresting that liberates, then is the repetition of the Seinsfrage not essentially revolutionary? Can one not go even further and say that every revolution, as a freeing, is essentially ontological? And is not Heidegger’s failure with respect to National Socialism to have thought of it as a revolution, indeed as the revolution that was to allow for a freer relation with being and with the history it commands, when in fact it meant nothing but the sheer destruction of that history?47 What is implicitly at work in the problematic of the repetition in Being and Time is perhaps best expressed and economically recaptured some ten years later, in the 1937/8 winter semester lecture course, at a time when Heidegger had become disenchanted with the actuality of Nazism:
The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning, that which — withdrawing itself constantly — reaches back the farthest and at the same reaches forward the farthest. … Therefore, in order to rescue the beginning, and consequently the future as well, from time to time the domination of the ordinary and all too ordinary must be broken. An upheaval is needed, in order that the extraordinary and the forward-reaching might be liberated and come to power. Revolution, the upheaval of what is habitual, is the genuine relation to the beginning. The conservative, on the contrary, the preserving, adheres to and retains only what was begun in the wake of the beginning and what has come forth from it.
(GA 45, 40–41/38)
And Heidegger adds on the following page:
What is conservative remains bogged down in the historio-graphical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here mere subversion and destruction but an upheaval and recreating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured. And because the original belongs to the beginning, the restructuring of the beginning is never the poor imitation of what was earlier; it is entirely other and nevertheless the same.
(GA 45, 41/39)
Is this not Heidegger’s mistake, then: to have mistaken National Socialism for a revolution in the most genuine sense, to have misjudged it to the point of seeing it as an authentic relation to the power of the origin? To say that underlying Heidegger’s thought, then, is a revolutionary concern, is not an overstatement. Yet Heidegger’s definition of what a revolution is, and by that we mean the temporality and the ontology that underlies it, is irreducible to any traditional model, including the fascistic or otherwise conservative one. To be sure, Heidegger did at some point see in the reality of National Socialism the upheaval necessary to reawaken the German people and possibly the West as a whole to its forgotten and abandoned essence. Yet the peculiar logic of the repetition that calls for the revolution, the way in which this revolution is bound to the beginning of philosophy and to the task of thinking, exceeds and, to a lesser extent, even suspends the model into which too often Heidegger’s thought is forced. What remains to be seen, then, is how this genuine mis-take actually took place, how, in other words, the truly revolutionary project of repetition was able not only to accommodate itself to National Socialism, but also to be one of its most enthusiastic supporters, if only for a certain period.