Dasein and Der Fuhrer
Heidegger and the Nazis, yet again
Back in the Paleolithic days of blogging, I got interested in the relationship between philosophical thought and political action particularly in the cases of Hayek and Heidegger and their support for Pinochet and Hitler respectively. I think the evidence is in on Hayek (see here and here, so I won't discuss it further.
In Heidegger’s case, there’s been plenty more evidence on Heidegger’s personal conduct, cumulatively quite damning. But the claim that he was one of the greatest of 20th philosophers remains widely accepted. This seems to imply (via an easy application of modus ponens, that his support for Hitler was not a consequence of his central philosophical ideas. The typical version of this claim attributes Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism to some combination of opportunism and a romantic (in a bad way) German nationalism (now known to include anti-Semitism) that can be separated from his main body of thought.
But in any discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy I’ve seen, his concept of Dasein plays a central role. So, what did he have to say about Dasein and Hitler? According to the Wikipedia article on Heidegger and Nazism[1], this:
The German people has been summoned by the Führer to vote; the Führer, however, is asking nothing from the people; rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it – the entire people – wants its own existence (Dasein), or whether it does not want it. [...] On November 12, the German people as a whole will choose its future, and this future is bound to the Führer. [...] There are not separate foreign and domestic policies. There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Führer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve (italics in original).
The speech isn’t obscure, and this passage is often quoted in relation to Heidegger’s Nazism, but I haven’t been able to find any discussion of his invocation of Hitler as the embodiment of Dasein. And, while I’m no expert, nothing I’ve seen in discussions of the concept of Dasein suggests to me that Heidegger is misinterpreting or misrepresenting his own ideas here.
Has anyone done the work of drawing distinctions between this piece of totalitarian propaganda and works like Being and Time? If so, is it possible to sketch the argument
[fn1] I copied this over to the Wiki article on Dasein, to see if anyone would provide more information, but nothing so far.
Gosh, Heidegger -the old Nazi. Did I read somewhere that he had some sort of intimate relationship with Hannah Arendt? I did a philosophy degree and I found Heidegger impenetrable. I think German is a language that often leans itself to vagueness, but I have heard German speakers express frustration about Heidegger’s impenetrability. In my view Heidegger and a lot of people who seem to have been inspired by his awful style (Sartre in Being and Nothingness) are just trying to conceal a lack of coherent argument behind dense, confusing and ambiguous prose. Zachary Clark argued that Keynes’s General Theory was abstruse and at times impenetrable because he wanted to pitch it to a technical audience that would try to interpret and expand his arguments. Was this the case with Heidegger? Doubtful. He just sat in his little cabin drinking endless cups of coffee and scribbling nonsense.
And while we're at it, someone must know whether Heidegger ever learned about the existence of the reference to him in Monty Python's greatest metaphysical testament: the 'Philosopher's Song,' which appeared on disc three years before Heidegger's death. ('Heidegger, Heidegger / Was a boozy beggar / Who could drink you under the table').