heidegger's being and time and national socialism - Philosophy ...

HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME 

AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM 

In the fall issue of 2011, Philosophy Today 

published an open letter from Gregory Fried to 

Emmanuel Faye along with Faye’s response. 1 At 

stake was Heidegger’s Nazism and therefore 

also, if not primarily, his chef-d’oeuvre, Being 

and Time. Faye refers to my book (Historical 

Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s 

Being and Time) as one of the two “great studies” 

and “classics” that have recognized “the völkisch 

significance of §74” of Being and Time. 2 Simon 

Critchley similarly acknowledges that I have 

shown “the systematic connection between fundamental 

ontology and national socialism ...in 

extraordinary scholarly detail.” 3 My book, however, 

was published already in the last millennium 

and it was misrepresented in reviews. 4 In 

addition, I have done some further work on the issue. 

Thus I would like to present a synopsis of 

my interpretation in my book and papers, beginning 

with a summary of my interpretation of the 

content of §74, the crucial section of the chapter 

on historicality (in Stambaugh’s translation, historicity) 

(Geschichtlichkeit). Since §74 does not 

come out of the blue but rather is the culmination 

of the entire book, I want to show next how Being 

and Time as a whole leads up to §74. For this purpose 

I shall first present the structure of Being 

and Time and a common feature of all of 

Heidegger’s discussions of the different 

existentials in Division One, and then discuss the 

issues of death, conscience, and the temporality 

of the existentials in Division Two before returning, 

in the next section, to §74 for a summary of 

my interpretation of its decisive sentences. In the 

last two sections, I shall present as confirmations 

of my interpretation the career of the concept of 

historicality after Being and Time and an example 

of Heidegger’s usage of his concept of death 

from Being and Time after Hitler’s “seizure of 

power.” 5 

Johannes Fritsche 

The Drama of Historicality in §74 of Being 

and Time 

A severe shortcoming of most, if not all, of the 

literature on the question of the political aspects 

of Being and Time, in my view, is that not only 

Heidegger’s defenders but also his critics limit 

their analysis to Being and Time, without comparing 

it with contemporaneous texts. In the first 

decades of the twentieth century, there were in 

Germany three major political trends, namely, 

liberals, leftists, and rightists. Liberals and leftists 

shared the idea of progress according to 

which the development of the capitalist economy 

would liberate the humans from the confinements 

of pre-capitalist societies. They differed in 

that liberals claimed that capitalism and parliamentary 

democracy was the end of history while 

leftists did not think so. Social democrats agreed 

regarding parliamentary democracy but held that 

the capitalist economy had to be completed by 

the institutions of social welfare. Communists, 

on the contrary, anticipated a revolution through 

which capitalism would be replaced with a socialist 

or communist society. While for liberals 

and leftists universal reason or the forces of production 

ruled human history, for rightists God, 

providence (Vorsehung), and destiny (Geschick) 

or fate (Schicksal) did so, and they saw an antagonism 

between society and community. Rightists 

regarded universal reason as a mere cover for 

egotism and as a leveling force that suppressed 

individual or regional differences and “positive” 

emotions. Society was nothing but the contractual 

and “artificial” product of individuals as persons, 

concerned only about their egoistic advantages 

and treating everything and everyone else 

as mere means. By contrast, community preceded 

individuals and enabled them to develop 

and entertain commitment, trust, love, etc. to- 

PHILOSOPHY TODAY FALL 2012 

255

ward the community and its members. In addition, 

the equality proclaimed by Enlightenment, 

liberalism, and leftism ignored the essential features 

of human life, namely, hierarchy and authority. 

In the view of rightists, society destroyed 

community, and social democracy and communism 

were merely intensifications of the egotism 

and ungodliness of liberalism, a downward 

plunge that would end in chaos and anarchy. Fortunately 

enough, however, at a time when it was 

not yet too late—for instance, with the beginning 

of World War I—destiny would interfere and call 

upon the humans to destroy society and revitalize 

community. 6 Thus, in terms of temporality, for 

liberals and leftists the future was the dominant 

dimension of time, the future state of society 

toward which history moved. By contrast, for 

rightists the dominant dimension was the past, 

which liberals and leftists denigrated, denied, 

and destroyed but which would be revitalized. 

Conservative or nostalgic rightists wanted to 

re-realize the community the way it had been 

(e.g., without electricity, etc.) before it had been 

pushed aside by society, while revolutionary 

rightists claimed that the re-realized community 

should incorporate phenomena which, temporally, 

had emerged along with society without being, 

in the view of these rightists, essentially societal; 

in the first place modern technology and 

capitalism as a mode of production based on private 

ownership of the means of production on a 

large scale and the accumulation of private profits. 

Capitalism meant for them only parliamentary 

democracy, unions, and the societal mentality 

of many members of society, in particular the 

workers. Once these phenomena were annihilated, 

it would become obvious that the capitalist 

mode of production was necessary for the flourishing 

of the revitalized community. The second 

problem for rightists was which community 

should be revitalized. The first Kaiserreich, the 

second Kaiserreich, the Vikings, etc.? Many 

rightist intellectuals had developed theories of 

community and its different types. Max Scheler, 

for instance, in his famous book Formalism in 

Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values from 

1916 and other writings, distinguished between 

small communities (family, village, etc.) and 

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 

256 

large communities. Large communities are ordered 

in a hierarchy within which each lower 

community has to serve the ones above it. 

Scheler gave four criteria for large communities. 

According to each of them, the love-community 

of the Catholic Church stands at the top of the hierarchy 

of large communities. It is concerned 

with the highest values, encompasses the most 

humans, is a collective person, and acknowledges 

each individual member of the community 

also as a person, a being in her own right, independent 

of her contribution to the wellbeing of 

the community. The Catholic Church is followed 

by the cultural community (e.g., Western Europe) 

and the state. The lowest community is the 

community of the people (Volksgemeinschaft), 

which deals with the lowest values relevant to 

communities and assesses individuals exclusively 

in terms of their functional contribution to 

the welfare of the community. 7 Thus the revolutionary 

rightist Scheler (who saw in Thomas 

Aquinas the first signs of the ethos of society) 

fought for the re-realization of the Catholic lovecommunity 

while the revolutionary rightist Hitler 

fought for the re-realization of the community 

of the people. Since Scheler had sufficient conceptual 

means to distinguish his theory from Hitler’s, 

and since he realized that Hitler would take 

over the entire right, in the last years of his life 

before his death in 1928, he turned not only 

against Hitler but against the entire right, became 

a liberal and social democrat and defended the 

Weimar Republic against its foes. 8 

The political front-lines in Germany at the 

time were clear. There were no disagreements 

about the meaning of the different political positions 

that I have outlined and (leaving aside polemics) 

everyone interpreted his own position 

and the ones of the others in the same way as everyone 

else did. In Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time, 

I presented as examples of revolutionary rightists 

Hitler 9 and Scheler 10 and as an example of a communist 

Georg Lukács. 11 As to liberals and social 

democrats, I referred to the (identical) characterizations 

of these two positions in Hitler, Scheler, 

Lukács, Paul Tillich, and others and adduced, as 

already mentioned, the late Scheler as an exam-

ple. Tillich’s book The Socialist Decision from 

1933 is particularly telling in this context. He 

claimed that the reason for the disastrous losses 

of the leftist parties in the last years of the 

Weimar Republic was precisely that they, just 

like the liberals, ignored the past and the needs 

and desires articulated in the call for community. 

Without blurring the distinction between left and 

right, he called upon the left to revise its policies, 

and he called upon the right to recognize that it 

could realize its own ends only through society 

and the principle of society, namely, the demand 

for justice. 12 

The drama of historicality in §74 of Being and 

Time consists of two parts, the move out of society 

and the return to this society in order to annihilate 

it and replace it with the revitalized community. 

In more detail, it contains nine steps. (1) 

Referring back to earlier passages Heidegger reminds 

readers that we are in society and thus in a 

downward plunge, and that we are about to leave 

it. (2) Having been, up to that point, waiting silently 

in the wings destiny now enters the stage of 

history and raises its voice. (3) While some 

Dasein don’t listen to the call, the authentic ones 

do, and they leave society. (4) The authentic 

Dasein recognize the difference between the ordinary 

possibilities sanctioned by society and the 

authentic ones, and they recognize that the latter 

have already been present but covered up by the 

work of ambiguity of society through which society 

shields itself against critique and alternatives. 

(5) The authentic Dasein take over the task 

that destiny in its call assigns them, namely, (6) to 

destroy society and replace it with community. 

(7) The authentic Dasein recognize that they 

don’t fight for a community that has never existed 

but rather for one that had been alive but was destroyed 

by society. Their fight is for the revitalization, 

or repetition, of community. (8) 

Heidegger makes clear that his concept of 

historicality excludes the nostalgic rightists. 

These eight steps make §74 “as brilliant a summary 

of revolutionary rightist politics as one 

could wish for.” 13 However, Heidegger does not 

leave it at that. As I have indicated, there were 

many different people on the revolutionary right, 

authors as different as Adolf Hitler, already in his 

book Mein Kampf from 1925, the proponent of 

the hegemony of the Aryan race and most rabid 

anti-Semite, and Max Scheler, who (before his 

turn to the centre) wanted to re-realize the worldwide 

love-community of the Catholic Church 

and whose idea of dispensing justice was a court 

in which the voice of every human being would 

be heard. 14 (9) Heidegger inserts into his summary 

of revolutionary rightist politics an option 

for the most radical revolutionary rightists, 

namely, for all those who, like Hitler and his 

NSDAP, fought for the repetition of the 

community of the people. 15 

§74 consists of four parts. In the first part 

(“Dasein factically has its ...asabasic attribute 

of care”), 16 Heidegger performs step (1), 17 

in the second part (“As thrown, Dasein has . . . 

that is to say, authentic historicality”), 18 steps 

(2), (3), (4), (5), and (9), 19 and in the third part 

(“It is not necessary . . . indifferent to both 

these alternatives”), 20 steps (6), (7), and (8). 21 

The remainder of §74 is a summary. 

Heidegger writes here and in §75 sentences that 

confirm pretty directly my interpretation regarding 

the primacy of the past for Heidegger, sentences 

which are rarely, if at all, quoted in American 

interpretations; namely, that in all this 

authentic Dasein “for the first time imparts to 

having-been its privileged position in the historical” 

22 and: 

When, however, one’s existence is inauthentically 

historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a 

“past” which has become unrecognizable, and it 

seeks the modern. But when historicality is authentic, 

it understands history as the “recurrence” 

of the possible, and knows that the possibility [die 

Möglichkeit] will recur only if existence is open for 

it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute repetition. 

23 

As said, in the next two sections I shall show 

how the entirety of Being and Time leads up to 

§74. As to step (9), Heidegger states it without 

any argument, in just one sentence. He determines 

the main actor in history as “destiny” and 

continues: “With this term, we designate the occurrence 

of the community [Gemeinschaft], of 

the people [des Volkes].” 24 This is the only in- 

HEIDEGGER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM 

257

stance of the term Volksgemeinschaft in the entire 

book. Thus it might look farfetched to see here an 

option for the National Socialists. However, 

Heidegger definitely knew Scheler’s book Formalism 

in Ethics, and in his obituary in 1928 on 

him Heidegger praised Scheler as the “strongest 

philosophical force” worldwide and at the same 

time left no doubt that he stoutly disapproved of 

everything related to Scheler’s Catholicism and 

his turn. 25 Heidegger opts in §74 for that type of 

community which, according to Scheler, is the 

lowest and in which the individual is treated 

merely as a means of the well-being of the community. 

In addition, Heidegger most probably 

knew that the National Socialists promoted the 

community of the people as the one and only 

community which everyone and everything had 

to serve. Furthermore, while neither the 

existentials themselves nor much of what 

Heidegger develops regarding them is fascist, 

Heidegger did not develop in Being and Time any 

means to distance himself from National Socialism. 

Nay, he even criticized the means that others, 

say Scheler, had to draw a line between them 

and National Socialism. 26 Finally, in 

1936 Heidegger said in Rome to Karl Löwith 

that the notion of historicality in Being and Time 

was the basis of his engagement with National 

Socialism. 27 Thus his invocation of the community 

of the people was most probably a conscious 

option for the National Socialists. 28 

The Existentials in Division One 

of Being and Time 

Being and Time contains two kinds of investigations. 

Heidegger discovers the existentials that 

make it possible for human beings to be in a 

world and relate to beings in specific ways. He 

assumes that each of these existentials is omnipresent 

in the sense that, whenever and wherever 

human beings exist, these existentials have always 

already been at work. 29 This is thought from 

the perspective of transcendental philosophy, and 

thus it does not come as a surprise that, in his exposition 

of the concept of phenomenon, 

Heidegger adduces as the only example Kant’s 

theory of space as form of intuition. 30 However, 


258 

these existentials can be actualized in two different 

ways, namely, so to speak, in a genuine or 

neutral way on one side and in a fallen way on the 

other, and this difference prepares the way for 

one of the two main topics of Division Two, the 

issue of authenticity and how to achieve it. In 

Historical Destiny and National Socialism in 

Heidegger’s Being and Time, I characterized 

Heidegger’s notion of historicality as a 

“temporalized version of a metaphysics of falling 

and recovering.” 31 There was a state, A, in which 

the origin was properly present. However, a different 

state, B, emerged in which the origin is no 

longer present. Not only is the origin no longer 

present, but B even covers up its relation of dependency 

and deficiency with regard to A and 

claims to be a being in its own right and not dependent 

on anything. What some Heideggerians 

rightly say about the Heidegger of the history of 

Being and his assessment of metaphysics within 

that history already applies to Being and Time, 32 

namely, that Heidegger works with a theory of a 

double fall or a double forgetting. The first is the 

downward plunge that B is in comparison to A, 

the second is B’s work to make invisible its relation 

to A and A itself. However, the origin has to 

be properly present. Thus there will be an event 

in the course of which the origin will reaffirm itself 

and make B properly present the origin. In 

my book, I adduced as examples of this motif 

Heidegger’s concepts of origin, primordial temporality, 

authenticity, wholeness, and the different 

forms of solicitude (Fürsorge; in Stambaugh’s 

translation, concern) before showing 

that the notion of historicality displays the same 

structure. 33 In this section, I present aspects of the 

They and the different forms of solicitude and 

then briefly comment on the other existentials 

that Heidegger discusses in Division One of 

Being and Time. 

Heidegger’s theory of the They is part of his 

theory of the existential Being-with-other- 

Dasein, the second existential in Division One. A 

They regulates the possibilities of behavior in a 

group of humans, it sanctions some and rules out 

other possibilities. 34 In §27 Heidegger presents 

six characteristics of a They. The first is 

“distantiality [Abständigkeit],” the only one on

which he spends more than a short paragraph. 35 

In his widely used commentary, Hubert Dreyfus 

claims that Heidegger talks here about conformity 

and conformism as a trait of every They. 36 

However, for various reasons this cannot be the 

case. 37 Rather, Heidegger just summarizes in his 

own vernacular a well-known feature of social 

philosophy in Germany since Kant and Hegel’s 

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, namely, 

competitive behavior. In a capitalist economy, an 

entrepreneur wants, or has, to “stand out,” that is, 

put as much distance (Abstand) as possible between 

himself and the other entrepreneurs in 

terms of the attractiveness of his products, profit, 

etc., and a worker has to do the same regarding 

his co-workers to increase his chances for promotion 

or not being fired in the next downturn or 

round of downsizing. 38 Thereafter Heidegger deduces—in 

a way that one also already knows 

from Hegel—from distantiality, not conformity 

or conformism, but something like uniformity. 

The market produces regularities regarding production 

and consumption, the competitors imitate 

and improve the products of the frontrunner, 

the followers of fashion imitate the fashion leaders 

with the result that someone develops a new 

product or fashion that anew puts distance between 

him and the others but this distance again 

disappears, etc.—the infinite cycles of products 

and fashions, uniformity ever affirmed and negated 

anew, driven by distantiality. 39 Finally, in a 

paragraph that is either the last one of his discussion 

of distantiality or the first one of the second 

feature of the They, averageness, Heidegger adduces—explicitly 

as a kind of uniformity that 

differs from the cycles of production and fashion—phenomena, 

such as usage of public transportation, 

reading newspapers, adopting public 

prejudgments about literature and art, and distancing 

oneself from the “masses” as everyone 

else does. 40 In §27 Heidegger acknowledges that 

the They varies historically, which means regarding 

distantiality that it was simply absent in precapitalist 

societies, that it was present but in the 

service of another feature, or that it is the fallen or 

“perverted” version of pre-capitalist forms of excellence. 

41 The fact that, in the passage on 

distantiality, Heidegger talks about competition 

is confirmed by the fact that, in the corresponding 

passage in the lecture course in summer 1925, he 

talks explicitly about bankers, shoemakers, etc. 

and uses formulations that are perhaps clearer 

than the ones in Being and Time. 42 

In §26 Heidegger presents four modes of solicitude. 

He calls one the deficient mode and the 

next two positive modes, and says that the two 

positive ones are opposites of each other. At the 

beginning of the chapter on being-with-other- 

Dasein in the lecture course in summer 1925 that 

I just mentioned, Heidegger says that beingwith-one-another 

in a world is “the basis upon 

which this being-with-one-another, which can be 

indifferent and unconscious to the individual, can 

develop the various possibilities of community as 

well as of society.” 43 This sentence shows that 

Heidegger was already at that time aware of the 

issue of community and society. It adds further 

evidence that, in these sections, Heidegger develops 

a conceptual framework to reconstruct historical 

developments. In addition, the sentence 

helps one to recognize what he is talking about in 

§26 even if one does not know the vast literature 

on this topic up to Heidegger’s time and thus cannot 

recognize that, again, Heidegger is just summarizing 

well-known issues. He offers two kinds 

of the deficient mode. The first is the mode in 

which the other Dasein “are indifferent and 

alien,” the mode of “passing one another by, not 

‘mattering’to one another.” 44 This corresponds to 

public transportation in §27. In apartment buildings, 

on the streets and in the subways of modern 

cities one’s default mode, according to 

Heidegger, is that one does not know the other 

and is not concerned about the other either. All 

that matters is, he might add, that the other does 

not interfere with one’s own business. The 

second kind is the following: 

Being with one another is based proximally and often 

exclusively upon what is a matter of common 

concern in such Being. A Being-with-one-another 

which arises from one’s doing the same thing as 

someone else, not only keeps for the most part 

within the outer limits, but enters the mode of distance 

and reserve. The Being-of-one-another of 


259

those who are hired for the same affair often thrives 

only on mistrust. 45 

Here he uses the notion of “distance,” which he 

will explain in §27. This sentence corresponds to 

the part on the economy in §27, and deals either 

with the transition from a pre-capitalist mode of 

business to a capitalist business or only with the 

latter. As I pointed out in my book, the statement 

is in particular in times of high unemployment a 

realistic account of the relations between the different 

individuals and groups in a capitalist company. 

46 In sum, “deficient mode” of solicitude is 

Heidegger’s name for liberalism and the modern, 

liberal life-world. 

Hegel uses the term “negative” (or “exclusive”) 

relation for the competitive relations in a 

liberal capitalist economy and for all those in 

which one treats the other as means. For all those 

in which the other is an end for oneself he uses the 

term “positive” relation. In guilds, unions, and 

institutions of social welfare, in his terminology 

corporations, one relates to the other positively 

inasmuch as one makes the wellbeing of the other 

and the whole corporation one’s own end. According 

to Hegel, the need for social welfare 

arises out of the shortcomings of the working of a 

liberal capitalist economy. 47 Heidegger takes 

over Hegel’s vocabulary and just replaces “negative” 

with “deficient” because, in this way, he can 

immediately indicate that, in his view, liberalism 

is a downward plunge. Social welfare is a manifestation 

of the first positive mode of solicitude 

(“With regard to its positive modes, solicitude 

has . . .”). 48 Like Hegel and any social democrat, 

Heidegger assumes that a liberal economy creates 

the need for social welfare (“For example, 

‘welfare work,’as a factical social arrangement ... 

Its factical urgency gets its motivation in that 

Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the 

most part in the deficient modes of solicitude”). 49 

In contrast to Hegel and social democrats, however, 

Heidegger disapproves of social welfare 

(“It can . . . The other is thus thrown out of his 

own position ...tobecome one who is dominated 

and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit 

one and remains hidden from him . . . and takes 

away care”). 50 The second positive mode of solicitude 

is the opposite of the first, it is practiced by 


260 

authentic Dasein (“determined by the manner in 

which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been 

taken hold of”), 51 frees the other for his care and 

freedom (“frees the Other in his freedom for himself”) 

52 and is quite obviously the one through 

which one gets out of the downward plunge of 

liberalism and social democracy. Heidegger calls 

it being “authentically bound together [eigentliche 

Verbundenheit].” 53 

The deficient mode is deficient in relation to 

something else, to the fourth mode of solicitude, 

a “Being with [that] understands primordially” 54 

and in which the other is disclosed “in concernful 

solicitude.” 55 Heidegger uses in this context for 

the deficient mode the term “subject”; he evidently 

thinks of Husserl’s theory of the Ego and 

Theodor Lipps’ theory of empathy, and probably 

also of other modern theories of the subject. 56 

Since the individuals in the deficient mode of solicitude 

cannot rely on the primordial understanding 

of the other in the fourth mode of solicitude, 

they develop the crutches of empathy to 

reach the other. 57 According to Heidegger, the 

primordial understanding of the other in the 

fourth mode of solicitude is primary, and only on 

its basis does empathy function. According to 

Heidegger, however, the philosophers promoting 

empathy and liberal individuals themselves pervert 

this order and even ignore the primordial understanding 

of the other in the fourth mode of solicitude. 

Rather, they claim that empathy is 

primary and makes possible the being to the other 

Dasein. They also assume that reflection on oneself 

is primary and grounds one’s relations to 

other Dasein. By contrast, Heidegger claims that 

the latter is primary and the former secondary, if 

not superfluous 58 —an instance of Heidegger’s 

usage of the first part of the structure of 

temporalized metaphysics, the motif of double 

forgetting. 59 A corresponding perversion—or the 

same perversion—Heidegger obviously finds in 

Kant’s ethics. According to the second formulation 

of the categorical imperative, one should act 

such that one treats humanity in one’s own person 

and in the person of any other “always at the 

same time as an end, never merely as a means.” 60 

By contrast, Heidegger states—without any argument 

and without any explanation of the pre-

cise meaning of his claim—that, since Dasein is 

essentially being-with-other-Dasein, Dasein 

“‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others.” 61 In the 

primordial understanding, Dasein encounters the 

other with concern; in the deficient mode of solicitude, 

it does not care about the other; in the 

first positive mode of solicitude, it even actively 

takes away care from the other; and in the second 

positive mode of solicitude it gives care “back” to 

the other. 62 Obviously, the second positive mode 

of solicitude restores the concern in the fourth 

mode of solicitude, in the world that was pushed 

aside by the deficient mode of solicitude, and 

Heidegger’s formula of being “authentically 

bound together” is meant as the right-wing counterpart 

to the left-wing notion of solidarity. It fits 

into the content and architecture of §26 that, in its 

summary, Heidegger uses characterizations of 

community and society that were commonly 

accepted by rightists at Heidegger’s time, and he 

even equates the existential of being-with-other- 

Dasein and community. 63 

The fourth mode of solicitude is obviously 

represented, in part at least, by the village-type 

world of the craftsman that Heidegger refers to in 

his presentation of the first existential. 64 

Heidegger develops here readiness-to-hand (in 

Stambaugh’s translation, handiness), which 

makes possible the usage and the production of 

things. The know-how of an experienced craftsman 

constitutes his world within which the items, 

in virtue of their specific usages, refer to others 

and also to other Dasein. 65 There are two deficient 

modes with regard to this existential. One is 

modern technology in which the references to the 

different individuals as individuals are replaced 

with abstract ones or even destroyed and which 

therefore poses a challenge regarding its appropriation 

within the revitalized community. 66 In 

the other deficient mode (which is either just the 

privative mode of readiness-to-hand or an existential 

on its own), one relates to beings theoretically, 

as present-at-hand (in Stambaugh’s translation, 

objectively present). In that attitude, 

entities are encountered as natural things or as 

substances that have properties and that are, in 

principle, isolated from each other. According to 

Heidegger, relating to entities as ready-to-hand is 

primary and reveals the world, while relating to 

them as present-at-hand is derivative. However, 

according to Heidegger philosophers have perverted 

this order, have declared substances, theory, 

mental states, and the intentionality of mental 

states to be primary and have in this way 

missed, or covered up, the phenomenon of the 

world, and Descartes has “intensified” this tendency 

67 —another instance of Heidegger’s usage 

of the motif of double forgetting. 

In Kant, understanding (Verstand) as the capacity 

of producing judgments and reason are the 

primary factors that make experience and its 

unity possible. In Heidegger, reason is wholly 

absent and understanding in Kant’s sense does 

not belong to the primary existentials that open 

up a world for Dasein—a further instance of 

Heidegger’s usage of the motif of double forgetting. 

The next existentials are state-of-mind (in 

Stambaugh’s translation, attunement) (with anxiety 

as the most prominent of these moods), 68 understanding 

(in Heidegger’s sense) (Verstehen), 

and speech or language. Heidegger develops 

them in a first part in a systematic way comprising 

both the genuine and the fallen mode and in a 

second part in their fallenness. In the second part, 

Heidegger develops further concepts for an analysis 

of life in modern cities, 69 uses the pet words 

of rightists for city-dwellers, namely, “lack of 

grounds to stand on [Fehlen der Bodenständigkeit],” 

“groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit],” and 

“uprooting [Entwurzelung]” 70 —Dasein “is constantly 

uprooting itself” 71 —and makes clear that, 

in his view, the fallen Dasein cover up their 

groundlessness and lack of roots. 72 To cut it short, 

also in his presentation of the last existential, the 

super-existential care, Heidegger uses the first 

part of the structure of temporalized metaphysics. 

He distinguishes between the primordial 

temporality of care and the vulgar concept of 

time, and claims that the second is derivative and 

covers up the first. 73 In addition, there are—in the 

order of primacy—truth as disclosedness of 

Dasein made possible by care, truth as the act of 

discovery, and truth as a property of statements. 

Aristotle knew of all three and of their proper order. 

However, since Thomas Aquinas only the 


261

third one has been counted as truth and the more 

primary ones have been covered up. 74 

In sum, in the discussion of each existential in 

Division One of Being and Time Heidegger characterizes 

modern life and modern philosophy as a 

double forgetting, as a formation that is derivative 

and that covers up its relation to its origin and 

claims to stand on its own feet. The mode of understanding 

other Dasein practiced by the modern 

individual covers up a primary understanding 

without which it would not be possible, and the 

modern philosophers interpret everything in 

terms of substances and cover up the dimension 

of the world. In addition, in the discussion of the 

They as well as in the one of truth, the last section 

in Division One, Heidegger indicates that the origin 

was present and acknowledged in the past. 75 

These two features are the first part of the structure 

of temporalized metaphysics and in Division 

Two of Being and Time Heidegger enacts the second 

part, the return of the origin. Already in the 

section on the They Heidegger emphasizes— 

without giving examples but often in a pretty derogatory 

tone—that the They and fallen Dasein 

cover up new possibilities. 76 These sentences 

already address the issue of the return of the 

origin. 

Death, Conscience, and Temporality 

in Division Two of Being and Time 

For liberals and social democrats, there was 

no divergence between the “real” logic of history 

and the individuals’ understanding of the working 

of history, and the individuals assumed that 

their political activities—the promotion of liberalism 

or social democracy—were in line with the 

forward flow of history itself. By contrast, 

rightists and communists assumed that in the 

kairos, in the decisive moment, it became patent 

that the “real” logic of history—its main actor 

and its temporality—differed from what the liberal 

and social democratic followers of progress 

had thought about it. From that moment on, the 

“intention” of history has to be realized by the 

“proxy” of history against the resistance of liberals 

and social democrats (and communists or 

rightists, respectively). 77 As was already said, 


262 

rightists and communists turned in opposite directions, 

communists—like the social democrats 

but with different means and toward an end further 

down the road—toward a new society while 

rightists re-realized in the name of destiny a past 

community that had been pushed aside by society. 

According to Scheler, there is the level of our 

explicit and conscious ethical norms and judgments, 

B, and below it the fundamental and primary 

level of our, often unconscious, ethical feelings, 

A. After its establishment, the ethics of 

liberalism or society on level B had been supported 

for some time by the corresponding feelings 

on level A. However, at some point destiny 

begins to be active. Already before it openly enters 

the stage of history and delivers its command, 

it spreads new feelings on level A and on 

level A renews the ethos of community. From 

that point on, people sense more and more that 

there is something new in the air, and the ethics of 

liberalism and social democracy become beleaguered. 

Liberals and social democrats try to 

ignore and suppress the new, but they will finally 

be washed away when the ethics of community 

will reestablish itself also on level B. 78 

Heidegger’s theory of a double forgetting at 

work in modern philosophy and society corresponds 

to the theories of Scheler before his turn 

and Lukács regarding the discrepancy between 

the assumptions about history and its “real” 

logic. When destiny raises its voice, Dasein recognizes, 

as in Scheler but not in Lukács, destiny 

and community as the main players, and Dasein 

also recognizes that its narrative of progress and 

autonomy falsifies the loss of community as an 

improvement. In his theory of the modes of solicitude, 

Heidegger disapproves of liberalism and 

social democracy, and moves to the right and not 

to the extreme left. With his statements, just mentioned, 

about inauthentic Dasein suppressing 

new possibilities Heidegger repeats Scheler. In 

Division Two, Heidegger treats the way out of 

fallenness—the issue of authenticity—and the 

temporal interpretation of the existentials. I present 

the notions of death, conscience, and the temporal 

interpretation of the existentials before returning, 

in the next section, to §74 for a summary 

of my interpretation of its decisive sentences.

There are basically three interpretations of the 

political aspects of Being and Time, the emptydecisionism 

interpretation, the postmodern one, 

and my interpretation. According to the interpretation 

of empty decisionism, Heidegger led 

Dasein out of the They but into a void, offering 

Dasein no criteria for the choice of its authentic 

possibility. Therefore Dasein collapses into 

conformism, which meant after 1933 into National 

Socialism. The way from the emptydecisionism 

interpretation to the postmodern one 

is very short, for one just reevaluates the supposed 

lack of criteria and claims that the “hero 

Heidegger” liberated us from the domination of 

universals and led us into post-metaphysical 

singularization. 79 Löwith invented in 1939 the 

empty-decisionism interpretation and in 

1948 the postmodern interpretation. 80 The core 

of his interpretation from 1939 is the claim that, 

in Being and Time, individual Dasein (and not, as 

I maintain, destiny) is the center of historicality, 

that there is no authority “above” the individual 

other than its death and that this death leads 

Dasein into empty futurality and worldlessness. 

81 Also in this respect Löwith was a 

postmodernist avant la lettre. He quotes three 

short sentences and isolates them from their contexts. 

For instance, explicating, in §53 of Being 

and Time, that death cannot be outstripped, 

Heidegger says that death discloses to Dasein its 

uttermost possibility, namely, giving itself 

up. Löwith quotes only this sentence without 

even mentioning that Heidegger right before and 

right after it says that anticipation of death makes 

one for the first time authentically understand 

and choose the possibilities before death and that 

anticipation of death singularizes one only in order 

to make one as being-with-other-Dasein understand 

the possibilities of the other Dasein. 82 

Löwith talks as though death gave the authentic 

possibilities. However, care, Dasein, authentic 

Dasein, or the call of conscience does so. 83 In 

addition, as I mentioned, the authentic possibilities 

are already present, though covered up by the 

work of ambiguity of society. To be sure, in anticipation 

of death one singularizes oneself and 

moves out of society. However, this does not 

mean that Dasein moves into a vacuum outside of 

any world. Rather, Dasein reevaluates different 

possibilities within one and the same world or, at 

most, it moves from one world into a different 

one. Death is not the end of a dead-end street but 

rather the eye of the needle, a purgatory at the 

margin of the world, through which Dasein has to 

pass in order to cleanse itself sufficiently from 

the attitudes of society. In fact, as I show in the 

last section, in the 1930s Heidegger used his notion 

of death from Being and Time to explicate 

the transition from society to community. Most 

of the literature on death in Heidegger operates 

on the same premises of singularization and of 

the individual (and not, in the last analysis, destiny 

and community) as the center as in Löwith, 

even if it does not share his assessment of death 

as a dead-end street that leads into National 

Socialism. 84 However, none of the five characteristics 

of authentic being toward death in §53 of 

Being and Time excludes the mentioned “communitarianism” 

of death. The two characteristics 

of being certain and indefinite don’t pertain to the 

issue. In his explication that death cannot be outstripped 

Heidegger emphasizes, as I just mentioned, 

that death makes one understand all the 

possibilities and the possibilities of the other 

Dasein. This does not point into a blind alley but 

rather to a gate, the gate out of inauthentic beingwith-other-Dasein 

into authentic being-withother-Dasein 

or, as he said in the context of the 

different modes of solicitude, being “authentically 

bound together.” 

With death as “Dasein’s ownmost [eigenste] 

possibility” 85 —an unusual formulation inasmuch 

as the adjective eigen normally does not 

take the comparative or superlative—Heidegger 

may mean that this possibility is, as it were, the 

Eigentum (private property) of the respective 

Dasein, 86 eigentümlich (specific or peculiar) to it, 

the geeignetste (best, or ideally, suited) to it, or a 

combination of several, or all, of them. None of 

these meanings excludes the possibility that authentic 

Dasein entertains relations to other 

Dasein, authentic ones. In fact, one expects this 

to be the case after reading in the section on solicitude 

that Dasein is essentially being-with-other- 

Dasein and for the sake of others. Of the nonrelationality 

of death Heidegger says that the 


263


264 

possibility at stake “must be taken over by Dasein 

alone . . . [Dasein] is thus forced by that very anticipation 

into the possibility of taking over from 

itself its ownmost Being, and doing so of its own 

accord.” 87 Since Dasein itself must by itself take 

over its ownmost being, taking care of things and 

solicitude fail in this situation. However, as he 

without delay continues, this does not mean that 

taking care of things and solicitude are irrelevant 

to authentic being. To the contrary, they belong to 

the condition of the possibility of existence in 

general. 88 As is obvious, Heidegger appropriates 

here Kant’s notion of the will and autonomy. As, 

in Kant, one must, at the end, not listen to anything 

other than one’s conscience within oneself, 

Heidegger stipulates that, when it comes to 

achieving authenticity, nothing exterior to oneself, 

nothing outside of oneself can be of 

help. The site of one’s ownmost being is within 

oneself, the impulse to take it over can come only 

from this site and not from outside, and it is only 

the individual Dasein itself that can make the effort, 

which, again, does not exclude that one’s 

ownmost being contains relations to other 

Dasein, authentic relations. As will become clear 

in the next step, Heidegger’s discussion of conscience, 

it must be an autonomous act of Dasein 

itself to give up its autonomy. Finally, as to the issue 

of double forgetting, Heidegger distinguishes 

from the authentic understanding of 

death laid out in §53 the ordinary one, and claims 

that the latter is derivative and covers up the former. 

89 

In the second chapter of Division Two, 

Heidegger discusses the call of conscience and 

the answers of authentic and inauthentic Dasein. 

Authentic Dasein wants to have conscience, and 

obeys the call of conscience while inauthentic 

Dasein tries to evade the call. 90 Inauthentic 

Dasein treats guilt as something from which one 

can cleanse oneself by paying back the equivalent. 

By contrast, authentic Dasein knows that it 

has to accept its nullity and essential being guilty 

without being able or entitled to remove it. 91 As in 

the case of all the existentials in Division One and 

the being toward death in Division Two, also 

inauthentic understanding of conscience performs 

a double forgetting. It presupposes essential 

being guilty but perverts it, 92 and performs “a 

covering up the phenomenon in two ways.” 93 

Heidegger refers to Kant’s notion of conscience 

as a court procedure as the inauthentic understanding 

of the call, 94 and uses for this inauthentic 

understanding formulas, such as “‘trial,’” 

“talk[ing] about,” “a voice which is ‘universally’ 

binding,” “world-conscience,” “reckoning up 

claims and balancing them off [ausgleichenden 

Verrechnens von Ansprüchen],” “that concern in 

which we reckon things up [besorgendes Ausgleichen],” 

“‘Life’ is a ‘business’, whether or not 

it covers its costs,” “concernfully reckoning up 

‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ and balancing them off 

[besorgenden Verrechnens und Ausgleichens],” 

“as if Dasein were a ‘household’whose indebtedness 

simply need to be balanced off [ausgeglichen] 

in an orderly manner so that the Self 

may stand ‘by’ as a disinterested spectator,” and 

the “idea of a business procedure that can be regulated.” 

95 Heidegger is talking here about the normative 

foundations of modernity, and, again, he 

is saying nothing new. In terms of the old distinction 

between proportional justice and arithmetical 

justice, 96 modernity rests on arithmetical justice 

and the implied equality of the different 

actors, in all areas of life and—“‘universally’ 

binding” and “world-conscience”—worldwide. 

In the economy, one receives in return the equivalent 

to one’s service or money, and has no further 

claims on the other thereafter. In politics, everyone 

has equal rights and voting power, and in the 

parliaments the different groups reach, through 

talking, an agreement or a compromise, Ausgleich, 

“with which everyone can live.” As to justice, 

everyone has the right to a hearing in court, 

where both parties have to argue their cause and 

where an impartial judge decides the case, and 

everyone has the right after serving their sentence 

to be re-accepted as someone who is again 

free of guilt and can start all over again. Liberals 

and leftists approved, defended, and fought for 

the application of equality and arithmetical justice 

in all areas while rightists resisted it. Again, 

Scheler is a case in point. Before his turn, he saw, 

as many rightists, in democracy a sign that the 

mentality of society—in his words, “English 

cant”: treat everything as an opportunity for mak-

ing a profit!—had successfully invaded not only 

the economy but also the political sphere. In addition, 

he assumed that humans were unequal. 

Consequently, he fought for the reestablishment 

of proportional justice in politics. 97 After his turn, 

however, he defended the propagation of arithmetical 

justice, equality, and democracy, and he 

did so most spectacularly in a text whose title already 

contains the word that Heidegger uses— 

wholly appropriately—as the general title for the 

phenomena of modern societies, namely, Ausgleich. 

98 Thus Heidegger just repeats here a pet 

topic of rightists, namely, that in advanced modernity 

the “business mentality” has invaded 

more or less all areas of life (and, as Scheler had 

put it, destroyed or perverted the order of values). 

99 With his claim about the authentic understanding 

of guilt he proposes an exit from liberalism, 

and opens the door to the priority of community 

over the individuals in the theories of the 

propagators of community. Heidegger refers 

back to the sections on anxiety, death, and the different 

modes of solicitude, 100 and presents the 

first step of the narrative announced in the section 

on solicitude, namely, the step out of liberalism 

and social democracy. Those who want to have 

conscience and listen to the call become reticent, 

101 and they act according to the second positive 

mode of solicitude—the one that leads 

Dasein out of society, Dasein’s being “authentically 

bound together”—and become the conscience 

of the inauthentic Dasein, which quite 

obviously means that the authentic Dasein can 

lead inauthentic Dasein into authenticity. 102 

Authentic Dasein leads inauthentic Dasein 

not, as in liberalism and on the Left, into the future 

but back into the past. In §58, part of the 

chapter on conscience, Heidegger writes: “In 

calling forth to something, the ‘whence’ of the 

calling is the ‘whither’ to which we are called 

back [zurück] . . . [The call as disclosure] calls us 

back in calling us forth [vorrufender Rückruf].” 

103 One has to take the preposition “back” 

literally, in its temporal sense. Inauthentic Dasein 

is moving forward, into inauthentic futurality. 

The call calls Dasein out of this futurality back 

into the past, having-been, or thrownness, but it 

does so not without first calling Dasein into authentic 

futurality, anticipation of death as the gate 

between inauthenticity and authenticity. 

In the section on primordial temporality, §65, 

Heidegger speaks of a priority of the future in anticipation 

of death. 104 Still, in the same section he 

says that anticipation of death is the gate to the 

past, to having-been, for it leads to “taking over 

thrownness,” that is, to being Dasein no longer 

inauthentically but rather “authentically as it already 

was.” 105 In the following chapter, “Temporality 

and Everydayness,” the last one before the 

chapter on historicality, Heidegger returns to understanding 

(in his sense) and state-of-mind 

(attunement) and interprets both in terms of temporality. 

Already in Division One, Heidegger had 

distinguished between fear and anxiety. Fear is 

related to a specific inner-worldly thing while 

anxiety discloses the world as world, pulls 

Dasein back from its falling prey, and reveals to 

Dasein inauthenticity and authenticity as possibilities 

of its being. In addition, fear is derivative 

and covers up anxiety, another instance of the 

motif of double forgetting. 106 In the chapter 

“Temporality and Everydayness” in Division 

Two, Heidegger relates understanding to the future 

and state-of-mind (attunement) to havingbeen. 

107 Authentic futurality must win itself from 

the inauthentic futurality, which is concerned 

with everyday business. 108 Fear is inauthentic 

futurality, and covers up thrownness. 109 By contrast, 

anxiety does not cover up the fact that stateof-mind 

(attunement) is grounded in havingbeen, 

a having-been that state-of-mind (attunement) 

has not produced but just reveals. As in 

contrast to fear, 

anxiety brings one back to one’s thrownness as 

something possible which can be repeated. And in 

this way it also reveals the possibility of an authentic 

potentiality-for-Being—a potentiality which 

must, in repeating, come back to its thrown 

“there”, but come back as something future which 

comes towards [zukünftiges]. The character of 

having been is constitutive for the state-of-mind of 

anxiety; and bringing one face to face with repeatability 

is the specific ecstatical mode of this character....Thetemporality 

of anxiety is peculiar; for 

anxiety is grounded primordially in having been, 


265

and only out of this do the future and the Present 

temporalize themselves. . . . The future and the 

Present of anxiety temporalize themselves out of a 

primordial Being-as-having-been in the sense of 

bringing us back to repeatability....Anxiety liberates 

him from possibilities which ‘count for nothing’, 

and lets him become free for those which are 

authentic. 110 

Anxiety leads Dasein, via the authentic 

futurality of anticipation of death, out of 

inauthentic futurality back into the past, havingbeen, 

as that which can be repeated. In addition, 

in doing so it opens up for Dasein the prospect of 

authentic existence and of an authentic future, 

which is obviously related to the possible repetition 

of having-been. As I emphasized, while liberals 

and leftists alike were oriented toward the 

future, rightists claimed that the move forward, 

progress, had to be cancelled to re-realize community. 

What Heidegger anticipates here in the 

passage on anxiety from the chapter “Temporality 

and Everydayness” he will explicate in 

§74 and summarize also in the quote from 

§75 that I presented toward the end of section 

one. 

Since right-wing authors assumed that society 

was just a downward plunge, they could not rely 

on any inner tendency of society that might lead 

to a transformation of society. Thus Heidegger 

assumes that the call of conscience and anxiety 

come from outside of society, ultimately from 

destiny, as I summarize in the next section. 

Heidegger’s theory of the call and anxiety is his 

right-wing equivalent to Lukács’ theory of the 

proletariat as the self-consciousness of the commodity. 

111 

§74 of Being and Time 

With the four chapters on death, conscience, 

care, and the temporality of everydayness 

Heidegger sets the stage for §74, and he obviously 

does so in such a way that one cannot but 

expect as the heart of the drama of historicality 

the return of the past, having-been, the actualization 

of the possibility that anxiety opens up. I already 

presented the structure and the content of 

the drama of historicality. In this section, I review 


266 

the decisive sentences of §74 in light of the two 

preceding sections. As was already mentioned, 

Scheler and other rightists maintain that, before 

destiny explicitly steps out into the open and delivers 

its command, it announces itself through 

signs indicating something new, and the authentic 

possibilities are already present, though in a 

fragmented way and covered up by the work of 

ambiguity of the They. In addition, Heidegger 

distinguishes in Being and Time different levels 

of primordiality, and the level of historicality is 

the most primordial one. 112 Furthermore, a phenomenon 

has become as clearly visible as it can 

be only at the end of the way which the 

phenomenological method is. 113 These facts 

combine to make it as unavoidable as, from a 

dramaturgical point of view, desirable that the 

main player in history, destiny, is revealed only at 

the culmination of the entirety of Being and Time, 

in §74. §74 begins with a reference back to resoluteness 

and the reticent Dasein in the chapters 

on conscience and the temporality of care. 114 This 

is followed by a reference to the They (“It understands 

itself . . . made unrecognizable by ambiguity; 

yet ...interms of this interpretation, against 

it, and yet again for it . . .”), 115 which makes it 

clear that authentic Dasein looks through the 

work of ambiguity—the double forgetting and 

the suppression of the new practiced by the 

They—and leaves the They by recognizing the 

suppressed possibilities as the authentic ones. In 

addition, Heidegger already indicates that authentic 

Dasein turns against the They and that it 

does so in order to redeem the They and the 

inauthentic Dasein. 116 Thus the opposition 

between the authentic Dasein and the inauthentic 

ones comes to the fore, the precondition of the 

former becoming the conscience of the latter. 

In the section on conscience, toward the end 

of §58, Heidegger writes: 

Wanting to have a conscience is rather the most 

primordial existentiell presupposition for the possibility 

of factically becoming guilty. In understanding 

the call, Dasein lets its ownmost Self take 

action in itself [in sich handeln] in terms of that potentiality-for-Being 

which it has chosen. Only so 

can it be answerable [verantwortlich]. Factically,

however, any taking-action is necessarily “conscienceless,”. 

. . because it does not avoid [nicht 

vermeidet] factical moral becoming-guilty 

[Verschuldung] . . . Thus one’s wanting-to-haveconscience 

becomes the taking-over of that essential 

consciencelessness within which alone the 

existentiell possibility of being ‘good’ subsists. 117 

These sentences anticipate the major steps to follow 

in §74 after the last one mentioned. Leaving 

the They, authentic Dasein recognizes that there 

is in modernity no way of being good, that goodness 

can come only from the past, and that Dasein 

can become “good” only if it accepts the possibility 

of authentic existence that heritage, in this 

context the first name for the reoccurring past, 

offers (“The resoluteness . . . in terms of the heritage 

. . . If everything ‘good’ is a heritage, . . .”). 118 

In this moment, Dasein recognizes that in resoluteness 

“the handing down of a heritage constitutes 

itself [konstituiert sich],” 119 i.e., heritage establishes 

itself as the main actor in history, and it 

is to this actor and to the slot provided by heritage 

for Dasein—namely, Dasein’s authentic self or, 

as Heidegger calls it here, Dasein’s “fate”—that 

Dasein “hands itself down.” 120 Dasein subjugates 

itself to the past and becomes the missionary of 

that past. 121 In §58, this move is anticipated in the 

sentence that “Dasein lets its ownmost Self take 

action in itself.” Dasein gives up its autonomy, its 

self-understanding as a liberal or autonomous 

subject, and hands over the power of determination 

to heritage and fate, a turn from activity to 

passivity that is already announced in the German 

word for resoluteness, Entschlossenheit. 122 

In the section on the They in Division One, 

Heidegger emphasizes that Dasein is essentially 

with-other-Dasein and for the sake of others, and 

those who practice the second positive mode of 

solicitude are those that have seized their 

ownmost Self. 123 In the section on conscience in 

Division Two, it is Dasein’s ownmost Self that 

calls Dasein out of the They and calls upon 

Dasein to take over that Self, 124 and at that point 

Heidegger says that the caller is not obvious. 125 In 

the moment in which, in §74, Dasein submits itself 

to heritage, it becomes patent that the past 

and that which holds the Self is the community of 

the people: “fateful Dasein ...exists essentially 

in Being-with Others, its historizing is . . . destiny 

. . . the community, of the people.” Heidegger 

continues: “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.” 126 

This is a characterization of community and society—community 

precedes the individuals and is 

a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, 

while society is just the sum of the subjects—that 

was commonly accepted by rightists at Heidegger’s 

time and that Heidegger already adduced in 

the summary of his theory of the different modes 

of solicitude in §26 in Division One. 127 Obviously, 

Heidegger repeats this characterization 

here in §74 to indicate that he has realized the 

program presented in §26 in the fourth mode of 

solicitude and the catchphrase of being 

“authentically bound together.” 

In §58 Heidegger says, as was quoted, that 

“any taking-action is necessarily ‘conscienceless’ 

. . . because it does not avoid factical moral 

becoming-guilty.” This sentence applies to the 

rightist revolutionaries because in fighting 

against society authentic Dasein violates the 

norms of society and its basic ethical principle, 

namely, Ausgleich. 128 In §74 Heidegger continues, 

“Only in communicating [Mitteilung] and in 

struggling [Kampf] does the power of destiny become 

free.” 129 “Become . . . free” means that 

something that has already been present but has 

not yet been active comes out into the open and 

begins to act. 130 “Communicating” is a misleading 

translation, for it suggests a back and fro of 

arguments, initiatives etc. Heidegger’s Mitteilung, 

however, is a one-way-street—destiny 

commands, the authentic Dasein obey and realize 

the command by becoming the conscience of 

the inauthentic Dasein, i.e., forcing them into authenticity. 

131 Already in the section on conscience 

Heidegger emphasized that only 

inauthentic Dasein bargains with the call while 

authentic Dasein obeys it. 132 The Kampf is about 

the destruction of society and the re-realization 

of community. Heidegger makes this point clear 

in the third part of §74, in which he also makes 

clear that he is not a nostalgic but rather a revolutionary 

rightist and whose decisive sentence has 


267


268 

been mistranslated in English, namely, as though 

authentic Dasein distances itself from destiny or 

even destroys it while Heidegger says that 

authentic Dasein obeys destiny. 133 

A phenomenon in Heidegger’s sense shows itself, 

even though unthematically, within the everyday 

appearances. 134 Nonetheless, someone 

for whom the motif of double forgetting is constitutive 

won’t make the validity of his claims dependent 

on the agreement of others. 135 Heidegger 

emphasizes that his theory of guilt must start with 

the everyday understanding of guilt, 136 but his 

justification of his interpretation of the authentic 

understanding of conscience in the light of the 

vulgar one is certainly unconvincing. 137 At the 

end of the chapter on conscience, he says that he 

has existentially deduced “an authentic potentiality-of-being-a-whole” 

for which, however, the 

attestation of Dasein is still lacking. 138 Whether 

he regarded §65 or only the chapter on 

historicality as the required attestation, 139 at the 

beginning of §74 he says that the interpretation 

of historicality is just “a more concrete working 

out of temporality” which was first revealed in 

anticipatory resoluteness. 140 This is certainly the 

case inasmuch as, in §74, he enacts—finally, 

from the perspective of the main agent, destiny— 

the realization of what, in the section on the temporality 

of everydayness, he had announced as a 

possibility opened up in anxiety (and which, in 

turn, he had already anticipated in the passage on 

the different kinds of solicitude in §26). However, 

Heidegger might also say so because he was 

aware that, while in no way everything he had 

developed in Division Two was phenomenologically 

sound, his presentation of the notion of 

historicality could be recognized by everyone interested 

in these matters as “as brilliant a summary 

of revolutionary rightist politics as one 

could wish for.” 141 In fact, not only his notion of 

historicality but also his theory of the four types 

of solicitude, decisive parts of his theory of the 

They, if not the whole theory, his Kant interpretation 

and the theory of modernity in the section on 

conscience, and, as will become clear in the last 

section, also the notion of anticipatory resoluteness—in 

all these theories Heidegger just summarized 

on an abstract level and in his own vernacular 

theories that had been developed in much 

more detail in Scheler’s book Formalism in Ethics, 

Scheler’s other extensive writings on modernity 

and Ferdinand Tönnies’ “classic” book 

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from 1887, but 

also in other texts from the then heated debate 

about community and society. 142 It was his own 

doing that, in his summaries of these texts, he 

cleansed from them elements in virtue of which 

Scheler and other authors could distance themselves 

from the propagators of the community of 

the people; that he combined them with other 

existentials under the super-existential of care; 

that he worked out the temporality of care and anticipatory 

resoluteness more concretely in the 

section on historicality; and that he inserted in 

this section, the culmination of the entire book 

Being and Time, an option for the National Socialists. 

Heidegger has been introduced in the USA 

mainly by Löwith, Hannah Arendt, and Derrida, 

all philosophers of postmodern singularization, 

though in very different ways. 143 In addition, the 

sentence from the third part of §74 that I just 

mentioned is not the only one that has been translated 

falsely or misleadingly. Furthermore, the 

proverbial American self-made man determines 

his fate by himself. 144 Moreover, Americans normally 

don’t know that much about history of 

ideas in other countries and thus are, for example, 

not aware that, at Heidegger’s time, the “German”—i.e., 

conservative and rightist—notion of 

destiny and fate included that only stubborn, 

hubristic, or stupid people try to resist fate while 

prudent ones obey it. 145 Finally, there are the principle 

of charity in hermeneutics and a premium 

on “creative” interpretation in colleges and universities 

in the USA. 146 Thus it is, in a way, no 

wonder that American readers have a hard time to 

recognize the thoroughly rightist character of Being 

and Time. Paul Tillich diagnosed “weariness 

with autonomy” in the background of the political 

events during Weimar Republic. 147 For a 

rightist, to submit to destiny and fate was not fatalism 

or “unmanly” but rather redemption from 

the supposed isolation in society and entrance 

into something common, destiny and community. 

Heidegger uses “a logic not of recognition

or of dialectical mediation but rather one of transfiguration.” 

148 As I will show in the next section, 

after Being and Time he continued using the 

drama of historicality, and he even made it the 

only organizing principle of his philosophizing 

inasmuch as he abandoned the existentials. 

The Career of the Drama of Historicality 

after Being and Time 

Is Being and Time a book in the spirit of modernity? 

John D. Caputo answers this question 

emphatically in the affirmative. Being and Time 

is the consummation of modern philosophy, of 

Kantian and neo-Kantian transcendentalism. 

Correspondingly, Heidegger’s project of a destruction 

of the history of ontology in Being and 

Time is “far from being post-modern or antimodern.” 

Rather, it “is formulated precisely from 

the standpoint of the advantages of modernity” as 

its “aim is to loosen the grip of ancient ideas on 

modern ones.” 149 As Caputo concludes, since Being 

and Time is distinctively modern, it cannot be 

the cause of two of Heidegger’s features in the 

1930s, namely, his Nazism and his preoccupation 

with the Greeks as the origin from which we 

have fallen away and which we have to 

retrieve. 150 

I agree with Caputo that modern philosophy 

does not lead to Nazism and that the National Socialists 

saw in modern philosophy, Enlightenment 

thought, and the modern democratic societies 

their foe who was in no way their origin and 

whom they had to destroy to realize Nazism. I 

also agree with Caputo in that, in the 1930s, 

Heidegger was a Nazi and regarded the Greeks as 

the origin from which we had fallen away and 

which we had to retrieve. I disagree with Caputo 

inasmuch as, in my view, already Being and Time 

is anti-modern and pro-Nazism—with regard to 

the drama of historicality, at any rate. Heidegger 

used this notion of history also for instance in his 

Rectorate Address in 1933 and in his lecture 

course An Introduction to Metaphysics in summer 

1935 to promote the cause of the National 

Socialist revolution, 151 and in 1936 Heidegger 

himself declared, as already mentioned, that the 

concept of historicality was the basis of his 

engagement with National Socialism. 

The drama of historicality concerns different 

modes of being active within the existentials—in 

the first place being-with-other-Dasein and temporality—and 

thus presupposes these existentials. 

Therefore Caputo might be right with regard 

to “philosophy proper,” the discovery of the 

existentials themselves. Indeed, Caputo is right 

regarding the site where to look for the “thing itself,” 

namely, not outside the human beings but 

rather within them, the transcendentalism of Being 

and Time. If one wishes, Caputo is also right 

regarding the basic relation between the “thing itself” 

and the philosopher. In a certain way, the authentic 

Dasein in Being and Time is “humble,” it 

acknowledges its finitude and recognizes that it 

depends on something “higher”—Geschick— 

which opens up for Dasein the avenues of understanding 

the others and itself. Not so, however, is 

the philosopher. At the time of Being and Time 

Heidegger thought of the Greeks as adventurous 

conquerors. They were determined to discover 

the truth, they knew that in doing so they had to 

overcome many obstacles and hindrances. But 

they also assumed that the “thing itself” was neutral 

toward their endeavors. It neither prevented 

them from uncovering it nor encouraged them to 

do so. They were “ruthless” inasmuch as they assumed 

that in the “thing itself” there was nothing 

that demanded their respect for its authority or 

their awe for its “holiness,” and Heidegger 

thought of himself in the same way. As he says in 

Being and Time, for the Greeks truth was always 

a“robbery,” 152 and they were the masters of 

truth. 153 

However, as Heidegger’s notion of his commonality 

with the Greeks as conquerors already 

indicates, the decisive aspect in this context— 

namely, Heidegger’s own understanding of the 

history of philosophy and his position in it— 

shows that Caputo is wrong not only regarding 

Heidegger’s notion of historicality but also regarding 

his “philosophy proper” and the project 

of a destruction of the history of ontology. Until 

the early 1930s, Heidegger assumed that in their 

efforts to discover the truth the Greek philosophers 

made progress and that Plato and Aristotle 


269

had advanced most. He also assumed that Plato 

and Aristotle understood philosophy the way he 

himself understood it, namely, as a transcendentalist 

phenomenology of everydayness. However, 

after Aristotle a decline set in. Thus “we” 

must repeat the Greeks and, as he says in the famous 

lecture course on Plato’s Sophist in winter 

1924–25, liberate them “from the tradition . . . 

that . . . distorts” them. 154 Hence Heidegger 

praises Kant not, as Caputo would have it, because 

Kant liberated us from ancient ideas but 

precisely because he, as Heidegger said in a lecture 

course in summer 1926, “became the first 

Greek again, though only for a short time,” 155 for 

he returned to transcendental philosophy though 

not yet to an analysis of everydayness. Heidegger’s 

lecture courses on the history of philosophy 

up to the early 1930s are, implicitly or explicitly, 

centered on Plato and Aristotle, whose status for 

Heidegger is summarized by the following nine 

aspects. 156 (1) Plato and Aristotle, as Heidegger 

himself does, investigate existentials, phenomena, 

and in particular they start with everyday 

phenomena. (2) Plato and Aristotle, as Heidegger 

himself tries to, investigate the phenomena without 

being caught up in the split between subject 

and object which is, according to Heidegger, 

characteristic of modern philosophy. (3) Plato 

and Aristotle, as Heidegger himself does, ground 

different phenomena in, or try to reach for, a superstructure—in 

Being and Time called care 

(Sorge)—that is not caught up in the subject-object 

split. (4) Plato and Aristotle, as Heidegger 

himself does, approach the phenomena by breaking 

through the prejudgments of other philosophers. 

(5) Because of features 1–4, Plato and 

Aristotle are the most advanced Greek philosophers, 

and they are on the right track concerning 

the proper interpretation of the phenomena. (6) 

Despite features 1–5, however, Plato and Aristotle 

don’t manage to fully break through, for 

they share with the other Greeks some self-evident 

orientations—notably, an interpretation of 

speech as something present at hand and the conception 

of the being of beings as presence—that 

obscure the proper approach to the phenomena. 

(7) Heidegger locates the flaw in Plato or Aristotle. 

(8) Because of features 6 and 7, Heidegger 


270 

has to go beyond Plato and Aristotle and develop 

the proper account of the phenomenon. (9) Since 

philosophy after Plato and Aristotle is a 

downward plunge, we have to repeat the Greeks, 

and this repetition is relevant not only to 

philosophy but to the entire current world. 

As one sees, in a way this looks like the drama 

of historicality for here, too, we have to repeat 

something. However, the difference is that destiny 

and its call are absent. No one calls upon the 

Greeks to discover the truth and no one calls upon 

Heidegger to repeat the Greeks. The truth does 

not reveal itself, and it does not conceal itself either; 

it is simply indifferent toward Dasein’s efforts 

to uncover it. Further advanced on this path 

one could imagine that, in hindsight, the need of a 

return to the Greeks would just be a minor bump 

on the road to the full clarity of the sempiternal 

existentials and that also the drama of 

historicality would somehow have lost its significance. 

Yet, Heidegger turned in the opposite direction. 

On this path, neither Plato and Aristotle 

nor Heidegger himself remained the phenomenological 

fundamental ontologists that they had 

been, and their ways parted dramatically. 

One can well recognize this development with 

regard to Heidegger’s three lecture courses on 

Plato’s Theatetus and the simile of the cave in the 

Republic. In the course in summer 1926, the 

drama of historicality is completely absent. 157 In 

the lecture course in winter 1931–32, Heidegger 

interprets—and this part is probably Heidegger’s 

best course on Plato or Aristotle ever—the 

Theatetus in terms of existentials. However, this 

reading already stands in the shadow of a presentation 

of the simile of the cave as the drama of 

historicality. 158 Also in the lecture course in winter 

1933–34—one year after Hitler’s “seizure of 

power”—Heidegger makes clear from the beginning 

on that we have to repeat the Greeks. History 

after the Greeks is a downward plunge resulting 

in Enlightenment and liberalism in which 

all the powers against which National Socialism 

fights have their roots. Heidegger still talks about 

existentials, but they have become marginal. The 

simile of the cave shows that, with Plato, truth as 

correct statement established itself as the dominant 

truth. Authentic truth had been articulated in

Heraclitus, and this truth was the drama of 

historicality. 159 The drama of historicality has 

shifted from Plato to Heraclitus. It is Heraclitus 

whom we have to repeat and no longer Plato and 

Aristotle. As I already pointed out in Historical 


Being and Time, in the lecture course from summer 

1935, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 

Heidegger’s interpretation of the pre-Socratics 

culminates in an interpretation of Parmenides’s 

notion of logos which reads like an abstract for 

§74 of Being and Time. 160 

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, the 

existentials have completely disappeared, and 

the drama of historicality has entirely emancipated 

itself from its subordination to them. 

Heidegger has become the historian of the history 

of Being and Plato and Aristotle the beginning 

of the downward plunge called metaphysics. 

The history of Being functions like the notion 

of historicality in Being and Time. At the end of 

metaphysics, “we Germans” repeat the community 

of the people, a repetition that includes the 

repetition of the pre-Socratic Greeks. In addition, 

these pre-Socratic Greeks themselves already enacted 

the drama of historicality—an aspect of the 

past to repeat which Being and Time had not addressed. 

The drama of historicality has become 

the absolute monarch, it is everywhere, it is history 

and at the end of history, but it is also at the 

beginning of history, and there is nothing besides 

it. 161 As I mentioned, the existentials themselves 

couldn’t offer any resistance against this universalization 

of the drama of historicality and its 

inherent right-wing extremism or National Socialism. 

Nonetheless, An Introduction to Metaphysics 

is still prior to Heidegger’s famous 

Kehre, which occurred neither between 1931 and 

1934 nor, as Jean Grondin claims (for reasons of 

a change in Heidegger’s understanding of finitude), 

in 1928 but, as Heidegger himself said, 

around 1937–38—as a result of his disappointment 

with empirical National Socialism. 162 

Thereafter, the drama of historicality stayed in 

place, under the name of the history of Being. 163 

However, the pre-Socratics whom we have to repeat 

are no longer the German revolutionaries. 

Rather, they have become pious thinkers, at the 

latest in Heidegger’s course on Parmenides in 

1942–43, shortly after the defeat of huge German 

armies at Stalingrad, the turning point of World 

War II. In Heidegger’s essay “Plato’s Doctrine of 

Truth” from 1942, the Theatetus is completely 

absent and the philosopher no longer leaves the 

cave to return and revolutionize it but just points 

upward to “ennoble” it and its inhabitants, an 

echo of pre-Socratic truth at the beginning of 

metaphysics when, with Plato, truth as the truth 

of judgment established itself as dominant 

truth. 164 

After his Kehre, Heidegger considered National 

Socialism no longer as the “disavowal 

(Widerruf)” 165 of society and the return of community 

but rather as the culmination of society or 

metaphysics. 166 As I pointed out in the section on 

the existentials in Division One, at the time of Being 

and Time the life-world of the village with its 

craftsmen represented for Heidegger in a way the 

community that had been marginalized and destroyed 

by society and that should return—and 

incorporate modern technology. In the existential 

of handiness in Being and Time, Heidegger obviously 

reconstructs Aristotle’s theory of the four 

types of causes—along with the theory of substances 

and their properties one of the two basic 

vocabularies in the history of Western philosophy—or, 

as he put it in lecture courses related to 

Being and Time, Dasein’s “productive comportment 

toward beings.” 167 After the Kehre, productive 

comportment and Aristotle’s understanding 

of the four types of causes became part of the beginning 

of metaphysics, and modern technology, 

not having been mastered by the National socialist 

community, became the last sub-epoch of 

metaphysics, called enframing (Gestell). After 

World War II, in a very short, very kitschy and, 

also amongst non-philosophers, very popular 

text called, Der Feldweg (The Field-path), 

Heidegger promoted his own native village, 

Meßkirch—a site of the presence of the pre-Socratic 

four causes, the Four-Fold (Geviert)—as 

the safe haven against all the dangers of the walk 

of mankind along the brink since the beginning 

of the twentieth century. 168 In the same text, he 

commemorated, and justified as sacrifices neces- 


271

sary for arriving at home, the fallen German soldiers 

of World Wars I and II—without mentioning 

the Jews. 169 Under the reign of enframing, 

whatever happens in modernity—“it is all the 

same.” Still, the deeds of the National Socialists 

had gone by while the nuclear bombs and energy 

plants produced by the USA and the empire of 

the Soviet Union represented an enduring threat. 

Thus, in the talks, between 1949 and 1953, that 

became The Question concerning Technology 

and related texts, he encouraged the Germans to 

focus on the reconstruction of their economy and 

the dangers posed by the USA and the Soviet Union, 

and he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently.” 

170 

“Anticipation of Death” after Hitler’s 

“Seizure of Power” 

His penchant for the dead German soldiers 

goes back to the time between the two wars. As to 

resoluteness, I pointed out already in Historical 


Being and Time that the translators render as “anticipation 

of death” Heidegger’s expression 

Vorlaufen in den Tod, literally translated “running 

forward into death”; that the English translation 

takes out the gist—the peculiar temporal 

and spatial “choreography”—of the German expression; 

that when reading “Vorlaufen in den 

Tod” German readers of Being and Time in the 

1920s could not but think of the so-called “heroes 

of Langemarck”; and that one could take these 

heroes as the methodological ideal type to interpret 

Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness. 171 

World War I was the first war characterized 

largely by trench warfare. The front lines hardened 

quickly. Entrenched, the armies lay opposite 

each other, and this situation could have gone 

on for years and years. According to the legend, 

however, already in October 1914 the “heroes of 

Langemarck”—young German students, most of 

them volunteers—had stepped out of the 

trenches into the open and, with the German national 

anthem on their lips, had run toward the 

French trenches. In terms of military strategy, 

this was sheer suicide and completely counterproductive. 

Nonetheless, or precisely because of 


272 

this, they became the shibboleth of the rightwing 

foes of the Weimar Republic, the shining 

example of the unsurpassable sense of duty, sacrifice, 

and community characteristic of a “true 

German.” The Weimar Republic had to be destroyed 

to make good on the promise of these 

brave German soldiers betrayed by the liberals, 

the social democrats, and the Jews. 172 

In his speech as rector of the university at the 

matriculation ceremony on November 25, 1933, 

Heidegger pointed to the “irresistible process of 

the arrival of a new German reality” and said that 

this fact “causes the German student to line up for 

a new, though bloodless, march of sacrifice. We 

will therefore devote today and in the future this 

celebration to the actuality of Langemarck and 

conduct it under the symbol of Langemarck.” 173 

Most probably, it was his own idea to make the 

students repetitions of the German soldiers at 

Langemarck. He definitely did not follow any 

state order when, in the lecture course on 

Hölderlin in winter 1934–35, he used again the 

notion of sacrifice for the German soldiers. He 

quotes a subordinate clause of an unfinished 

poem by Hölderlin that runs, literally translated, 

thus: “Since we have become a conversation and 

are able to hear from / of each other.” 174 He adds 

to Hölderlin’s subordinate clause a main clause, 

and comments as follows: 

Since we are a conversation, we are placed into, 

and at the mercy of, the being as it reveals itself; it 

is only since then that the Being of the being as 

such can encounter and determine us. The fact, 

however, that the being as to its Being is unconcealed 

in advance for each of us, is the presupposition 

for being able to hear from the other something; 

that is, something about some being, 

whether this being is what we are not—that is, nature—or 

whether it is what we ourselves are—that 

is, history. 175 

In the next paragraph, Heidegger adduces the notions 

of community and society: 

The ability to hear by no means produces the relation 

of the one to the other, that is, the community 

[Gemeinschaft]. Rather, the ability to hear presupposes 

the community. This primordial community 

by no means originates through entering into a re-

lationship; that is how society [Gesellschaft] originates. 

Rather, community is because of the preceding 

bond, a bond that binds each individual to that 

which keeps bound and determines each individual 

in a superelevating manner. 176 

Then Heidegger refers to the German soldiers in 

World War I and their comradeship: 

That which neither the individual by itself nor the 

community as such is, that must become manifest. 

The comradeship of the frontline soldiers was 

grounded neither in the fact that they had to gather 

together with other humans because they needed 

them and could find them only at other places, nor 

in agreeing upon a shared enthusiasm. 177 

Rather, their comradeship was grounded in the 

nearness of death: 

Rather, at bottom it is grounded only in the fact that 

the nearness of death as a sacrifice placed each one 

in advance into the same nullity, so that this death 

as sacrifice became the source of the unconditional 

belonging-to-each-other. It is precisely death—the 

death each human being has to die for himself, and 

which singularizes each individual to the utmost 

extent—it is precisely death and the willingness to 

offer one’s own death as a sacrifice that first and 

foremost and beforehand produces the site of community 

from which comradeship emerges. 178 

Next he adduces anxiety: 

Hence, does comradeship grow out of anxiety 

[Angst]? No and yes. No, if one, like the Philistine, 

understands by anxiety only the helpless quivering 

of a panicky cowardice. Yes, if anxiety is understood 

as a metaphysical nearness to the unconditional, 

a nearness that is given as a gift only to the 

highest self-sufficiency and readiness. 179 

Finally, he concludes with the following statement: 

If we do not compel powers into our Dasein that, 

like death as a free sacrifice, bind and singularize 

unconditionally—that is, powers that catch hold of 

each individual at the root of its Dasein, and which, 

like death as a free sacrifice, stand deeply and 

wholly in an authentic knowing—then no comradeship 

will emerge. Rather, the result will at best 

be a modified form of society. 180 

Obviously, Heidegger lays out here parallels between 

World War I and the situation after Hitler’s 

“seizure of power,” and these parallels pertain 

to the drama of historicality in Being and 

Time as well. In each of these three cases there 

occurred an event—the beginning of World War 

I, the call of destiny in Being and Time, and the 

National Socialist revolution of 1933—in which 

an agent—destiny or Being—that is not identical 

with community but as whose agent community 

operates enters the scene and, as Heidegger says 

in Being and Time, “constitutes itself” 181 as the 

“real actor” in history. In each case, this agent determines 

us and enables us to authentically understand 

the other Dasein and our possibilities. 

We are called upon to make the transition from 

society to community, and in Being and Time,in 

World War I, and in 1934–35, the basic difference 

between society and community is that a 

community precedes the individual members, 

and elevates them while a society is nothing but 

an agreement of subjects for the sake of their mutual 

benefit. In Being and Time Dasein is called 

into the “struggling [Kampf]” 182 for the realization 

of community (i.e., Dasein has to be able to 

risk its own well-being and even life), in World 

War I Dasein offers its own physical death as a 

free sacrifice, and in 1933 Heidegger calls for the 

same spirit of sacrifice without which the revolution 

won’t succeed. If one keeps in mind that 

Heidegger emphasizes also in this lecture course 

that the battle is about repetition, 183 one sees that 

here, too, it is the drama of historicality from Being 

and Time. 184 

Evidently, Heidegger applies here to the death 

of the German soldiers in World War I his notion 

of death in Being and Time. In World War I, in Being 

and Time and in 1934–35 as well, the 

futurality of death does not have primacy, and is 

not a dead-end street but leads into something, 

into community and comradeship. In addition, 

the eye of the needle of individualization as a crucial 

part of the notion of running forward into 

death in Being and Time also applies to the German 

soldiers in World War I and to the situation 

in 1934–35. If there is in Heidegger’s notion of 

death in Being and Time anything that forbids the 

transition into a group, it is the characteristic of 

non-relationality. However, this criterion can be 


273

fulfilled by a soldier inasmuch as the one who ran 

forward into death (and decided to join the army, 

not to desert, and not to disobey the command to 

run forward and storm the trenches of the enemy) 

was no one but the individual soldier himself, no 

matter how easy the call of destiny, the people, 

group-enthusiasm, or other factors made this decision 

for him. In §74 of Being and Time Heidegger 

begins with the notion of running forward 

into death and says in the part on repetition that 

authentic Dasein “chooses its hero.” 185 Probably, 

already when he wrote §74 Heidegger was thinking 

(also) of the German soldiers in World War I 

to whom he devoted the matriculation ceremony 

in 1933. If he did not do so, he obviously wrote 

within a kind of pre-established harmony between 

his thinking and the thinking in the right 

corners of the political landscape in Germany at 

his time. 186 

As I mentioned, communication in Being and 

Time is a one-way-street down with destiny at the 

top. In the lecture course on Hölderlin the chain 

of command is Being, the poet, the thinker, the 

creator of the state, and the latter’s subjects—Being, 

Hölderlin, Heidegger, Hitler, and all the 

other Germans. 187 In his speech at the matriculation 

ceremony, Heidegger subjected the students 

not only to the German soldiers but, in the first 

place, to Hitler. At the end of the speech, he executed 

the matriculation with the following 

sentences: 

I subject you to the will and work of our leader 

Adolf Hitler. I bind you to the law of the Dasein of 

the new German student. I demand of you discipline 

[Zucht] and seriousness and hardness against 

yourselves. I require of you courage for sacrifice 

and an attitude that is exemplary for all members of 

the German people. Heil Hitler! 188 

This was the end of the destruction of autonomy 

in Being and Time. 

Scheler hailed the beginning of World War I 

as the great opportunity, sent by God, to destroy 

society and re-realize the Catholic love-community. 

At that point, he assumed as part of the human 

essence a drive for self-sacrifice. 189 This 

drive had been suppressed by society. In the war 

it could return and enjoy life to the full. 190 In Dialectics 

of Enlightenment from 1944, Adorno and 

Horkheimer interpreted the earliest forms of sacrifice 

and human sacrifice as rational in terms of 

the rationality of means and ends. This was part 

of their claim that, because of the internalization 

of sacrifice and the amalgamation of rationality 

and coercion, National Socialism and rationality 

had fallen behind the level of rationality that enlightenment 

had always already achieved. Despite 

the glorification of sacrifice in National Socialism, 

there was nothing in nature, neither in 

external nor in internal nature, that made sacrifice 

eternal, and a state of society was conceivable 

in which sacrifice would no longer be necessary. 

Scheler and Heidegger confirm the first part 

of this argument. According to Scheler, sacrifice 

is not a means that the humans could abandon as 

no longer necessary but rather something rooted 

in their inner nature, prior to any calculation of 

means and ends. The human urge is to give away 

that which sacrifice was meant to preserve, their 

physical existence. As I mentioned, Heidegger 

claims that Dasein “‘is’essentially for the sake of 

Others,” 191 his counter thesis to Kant. From 

Kant’s perspective, Heidegger’s authentic 

Dasein does indeed act in an utterly irrational 

way. It makes itself the proxy of something that 

treats, as Scheler had already recognized in 1916, 

everyone only as a means of its own existence. 

Heidegger regarded Scheler as the greatest philosophical 

force worldwide. Nonetheless, precisely 

at the time when Scheler, because of Hitler, 

turned away from any rightist politics, Heidegger 

made his case for the National Socialists, and he 

did so at the culmination of his philosophical 

chef-d’oeuvre. 

NOTES 

1. Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” Philosophy 

Today 55 (Fall 2011): 219–52; Emmanuel 


274 

Faye, “From Polemos to the Extermination of the Enemy: 

Response to the Open Letter of Gregory Fried,”

ibid., 253–67. 

2. Ibid., 263; Hassan Givsan, Heidegger—das Denken 

der Inhumanität (Würzburg: Königshausen and 

Neumann, 1998); Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being 

and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1999). 

3. Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann, On 

Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Routledge, 

2008), 150n8. 

4. See below, n. 21. 

5. Due to its nature as a survey, my essay is more like a 

road map. Claims made without references to the 

texts in which I have substantiated them are either 

trivial or have to be validated in other papers. 

6. See below, n. 80, for a relatively small different rightist 

trend. 

7. See Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

136–40. 

8. Ibid., 142–48. 

9. Ibid., 68–87, 127–29 and passim. 

10. Ibid., 87–142 and passim. 

11. Ibid., 149–73. 

12. Ibid., 173–87; for other types of leftists (e.g., 

Benjamin, Tönnies) see ibid., 295n3, 295–97n5. 

13. Ibid., xii. Heidegger presents the concept in §74 in a 

very short and, in the best sense of the word, abstract 

way, which has nothing to do with the “hero 

Heidegger” venturing out into new territories and it 

is not a matter of Heidegger pursuing some “hidden 

agenda” either. Rather, Heidegger could rely on the 

fact that everyone interested in matters of social and 

political philosophy would recognize his presentation 

as an abbreviation, admittedly in part in his own 

vernacular, of the then vast literature on the topic. 

This does not mean, however, that his students knew 

that literature (see below, n. 80). 

14. Ibid., 137. 

15. Hitler is politically astute enough not to bind his 

community of the people to a specific historical state, 

see ibid., 128–29. 

16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John 

Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: 

Harper and Row, 1962), 434–35; “Factically, Dasein 

always has ...ofthis fundamental determination 

of care.” Being and Time: A Translation of Sein 

und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University 

of New York Press, 1996), 350–51; “Das 

Dasein hat faktisch . . . dieser Grundbestimmtheit der 

Sorge versichern.” Sein und Zeit, ninth ed. 

(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972), 382–83. 

17. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

1–7, 129–31. On §§72 and 73 see ibid., 31–32, 

40–43. Heidegger treats “real” history in 

§§72–75 and the science of history in §§76 and 77. 

18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 435–37; “It is true that 

Da-sein . . . fate, that is, authentic historicity, possible” 

(Being and Time: A Translation, 351–52); 

“Geworfen ist zwar das Dasein . . . eigentliche 

Geschichtlichkeit möglich”(Sein und Zeit, 383–85). 


43–67, 131–34. According to American interpreters, 

heritage and destiny is rejected by authentic Dasein, 

or it is a pool that contains many possibilities from 

which authentic Dasein can choose the one that, for 

whichever reason, it likes without that any possibility 

in the past has binding force for Dasein. However, 

this interpretation turns the “German” destiny upside 

down. Up to the moment of the call, destiny has a 

fragmentary existence as the authentic possibilities 

made unrecognizable by the work of ambiguity of 

society. However, destiny “constitutes itself” (see 

below, nn. 119, 181), enters the scene as one unified 

force, raises its voice, and demands that the different 

Dasein obey and submit to its call. 

20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 437–38; “It is not necessary 

. . . indifferent to both of these alternatives” (Being 

and Time: A Translation, 352–53); “Daß die 

Entschlossenheit ...imAugenblick gleichgültig” 

(Sein und Zeit, 385–86). Since Stambaugh’s translation 

contains in the margins the pagination of the 

German edition, in my references in what follows I 

will for the most part leave out her translation. 


7–28, 134–36. Most American interpreters read 

Heidegger’s notion of historicality in the postmodern 

way. The future has primacy, for it is in the name of 

the future and Dasein’s singularization that authentic 

Dasein breaks with the present and past or regards 

the past as a pool of possibilities from which it can 

freely choose. However, this interpretation is wrong 

(see above, n. 19). Probably, the postmodern interpretation 

is so popular in the USA also because it fits 

nicely into the US-American They, the legendary 

self-made man who does not submit but “takes his 

fate into his own hands,” breaks with as many traditions 

as possible and honors only one tradition, 

namely the tradition of being creative and innovative 

(see ibid., 212–15, 332–37n72). The decisive sen- 


275


276 

tence in §74 in Sein und Zeit (“Die Wiederholung 

erwidert vielmehr die Möglichkeit der dagewesenen 

Existenz,”[Sein und Zeit, 386]) has been mistranslated 

in English, namely, as an act of distancing (oneself 

from a command, request, norm etc. issued by 

someone else toward oneself; i.e., as an act of not 

complying with a command, etc.) and not as an act of 

submission (to a command etc.) (on “The repetition 

makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of 

that existence which-has-been-there” [Heidegger, 

Being and Time, 438] see Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 10–28 and passim; on 

Stambaugh’s translation [Being and Time: A Translation, 

352–53], see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and 

National Socialism, 335–36). I point out, already in 

the preface (ibid., ix–x), the importance of this passage 

and discuss erwidern in the dative (ibid., 7–11) 

and in the sense of a counterattack or even, as not 

only Peg Birmingham interprets it, complete rupture 

(as the most intensive form of distancing) (ibid., 

11–2). Immediately thereafter, I introduce, as a further 

sense, erwidern as compliance with a request or 

submission to a command (ibid., 12–13), and I argue 

at length that, in §74, for reasons of the grammar of 

the sentence as well as its context erwidern is used in 

the sense of such a submission (ibid., 13–28). In addition, 

I come back again and again to this topic to 

substantiate and elaborate my claim (e.g., ibid., 

65–67, 83–84, 134–35, 173–74, 327–31n70; see, approvingly, 

Dieter Thomä, “Heidegger und der 

Nationalsozialismus: In der Dunkelkammer der 

Seinsgeschichte,” in Dieter Thomä, ed., Heidegger- 

Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung [Stuttgart: J. B. 

Metzler, 2003], 145–46). I do so because I was aware 

that erwidern as submission (to destiny and fate) is, 

so to speak, the admission ticket to much of the German 

right-wing ideology at Heidegger’s time, and 

that its mistranslation as an act of distancing—as 

which it is interpreted in all postmodern interpretations 

and even by Charles Guignon (see Fritsche, 

Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

9–11 and passim)—is just a sign of how alien to average 

readers in the USA (and to Hannah Arendt’s 

notion of politics; see ibid., 335n72) this ideology 

is— so alien that another reviewer and even Elliot 

Neaman—who publishes on German literature and 

for whom my book is “the best analysis of 

Heidegger’s Being and Time to come along in a long 

time” (Constellations 8:1 [2003]: 155)—has misunderstood 

me and makes me say what Birmingham 

says (ibid., 157), after which what he attributes to me 

in the remainder of the review cannot make much 

sense. Robert Scharff insinuates that by “revolutionary 

rightists” I mean only National Socialists (and 

not also many others, e.g., Max Scheler) and makes 

me say other strange things (Journal of the History of 

Philosophy 38:1 [2000]: 455–56). As to my knowledge, 

so far no one has challenged, let alone refuted, 

any detail of my interpretation. 

As I mentioned, most, if not all, of the literature on 

the political aspects of Being and Time confines itself 

to Being and Time. It is presumably part of the problem—i.e., 

of the unwillingness and incapacity of 

trained philosophers, especially in the USA, to take 

into account as possibly relevant also literature beyond 

the more or less narrow realm of the kinds of 

texts they are trained in—that my book has been 

characterized most often only as an analysis of the 

supposed intricacies of Heidegger’s and German language. 

It is, however, primarily a comparison of the 

political theory in Being and Time with contemporaneous 

political theories. The parts on Hitler, Scheler, 

Lukács, and Tillich take more space than the ones on 

Being and Time. 

22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 438; Sein und Zeit, 386. 

Heidegger labels in Being and Time and later 

“Gewesenheit” (“having-been”) a past that shall be 

repeated and “Vergangenheit” (“past”) a past that has 

no right to be repeated; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 284–85n57. 

23. Heidegger, Being and Time, 444 (replacement of the 

indefinite article in front of “possibility” and insertion 

of the German words mine); Sein und Zeit, 

391–2 (see also Being and Time, 433; Sein und Zeit, 

381; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 40–43). See on the importance of the definite 

article in German ibid., 238–39n17; on the primacy 

of the future see above, n. 21. 

24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436 (replacement of the 

indefinite article in front of “people” and insertion of 

the German words mine); Sein und Zeit, 384. 


87, 146–47. 

26. Ibid., 138–41 (see e.g. below, n. 99). 

27. Ibid., 216–8; Johannes Fritsche, “From National Socialism 

to Postmodernism: Löwith on Heidegger,” 

Constellations 16 (2009): 93. 

28. According to my knowledge, those who, in the 

1920s, promoted the community of the people were 

already members of the NSDAP or—either they 

themselves or, as in the case of Moeller van den

Bruck, their followers—welcomed Hitler’s “seizure 

of power” in 1933. Heidegger joined the NSDAP on 

the 1st of May, 1933. On his enthusiasm for Hitler 

see, e.g., Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 142; see also below, last section. 

29. See, though, Heidegger, Being and Time, 113; Sein 

und Zeit, 82. 



30. 

32. E.g., Caputo; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and 

National Socialism, 203–07. Hubert L. Dreyfus 

writes on a sentence in section 54: “This account of 

selfhood makes being an authentic self an 

existentiell modification of the one-self [Dreyfus’ 

translation of das Man, the They]. Heidegger should 

have left it at this, but, as we have just noted, he also 

says that ‘the one-self is an existentiell modification 

of the authentic self.’ This is an unfortunate thing to 

say, but, as we shall see in the Appendix, Heidegger 

needs it in his discussion of the call of conscience. 

Conscience calls to the hidden authentic self over the 

head, so to speak, of the one-self.” Being-in-the- 

World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and 

Time, Division 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 

1991), 241. 

33. Ibid., 31–40, 274–79n25. 

34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 165, 167; Sein und Zeit, 

127, 129, and passim. 

35. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163–4; Sein und Zeit, 

126–27. 

36. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 153. 

37. Johannes Fritsche, “Competition and Conformity: 

Heidegger on Distantiality and the ‘They’ in Being 

and Time,” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 

24 (2003): 75–107, here 76–77. 

38. Ibid., 78–81, 83–87. As in contrast to Marxists, 

Heidegger does not deduce distantiality from the relations 

of production. 

39. Ibid., 81–83, 87–88. 

40. Ibid., 88–90. 

41. Ibid., 107n18. 

42. Ibid., 105–06n18. 

43. Ibid., 105n18 (see below, n. 99). 


121. 



277–8n25. 

47. Fritsche, “Competition and Conformity,” 95n7. 




51. Heidegger, Being and Time, 159; see “the authentic 

Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken 

hold of in its own way,” ibid., 167; Sein und Zeit, 122, 

129. 


53. Ibid. (“authentic alliance,” Being and Time: A Translation, 

115). 


55. Ibid. 

56. Heidegger, Being and Time, 150–52, 155, 157, 

161–63; Sein und Zeit, 114–16, 119, 120–21, 

124–25. 


124–25. 

58. Ibid. Proper self-understanding of Dasein means that 

it no longer covers up the essential Being-with-other- 

Dasein of Dasein (Heidegger, Being and Time, 162; 

Sein und Zeit, 125). See Heidegger’s reference to 

Scheler for his main claim in his theory of Beingwith-other-Dasein 

(Heidegger, Being and Time, 

152ni, 491ni; Sein und Zeit, 116). 

59. See for the motif in the section on the They also 

Heidegger, Being and Time, 165, 167; Sein und Zeit, 

127, 129. 

60. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of 

Morals, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, 

trans. and ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1996), 80. Kant’s ethics is the best 

ethics for modern and postmodern times that one can 

think of, see Johannes Fritsche, “Agamben on Aristotle, 

Hegel, Kant and National Socialism,” to be 

published in Constellations 19:3 (2012). 



121–2; on “back” see Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 276–77n25. 

63. See below, nn. 99, 126. 

64. Heidegger, Being and Time, 153, 159–60, 160; Sein 

und Zeit, 117–18, 123, 123–24. 

65. Heidegger, Being and Time, 95–121, 119 (the phenomenon 

of the world); Sein und Zeit, 66–88, 86. 

66. Heidegger, Being and Time, 100 (“The work is cut to 

his figure . . . when goods are produced by the dozen, 

this constitutive assignment . . . points to the random, 

the average”), 140 (in the genuine mode Dasein 


277

“does not ‘devour the kilometres’”); Sein und Zeit, 

70–1, 106 (“es ‘frißt nicht Kilometer’”). Kilometer 

fressen was a polemical designation of cars riding on 

highways, Autobahnen (see also below, n. 168). 

67. Heidegger, Being and Time,133 (mistranslated); 

Sein und Zeit, 100. 

68. “State-of-mind” is not a good translation of the word 

“Befindlichkeit” (Sein und Zeit, 134), inasmuch as 

this German word is, at that place at any rate, just a 

more general word for what Heidegger is talking 

about, namely, moods. Inasmuch as moods are normally 

not directed to ends, Stambaugh’s word 

“attunement” isn’t appropriate either. However, inasmuch 

as Heidegger “instrumentalizes” the most 

prominent of the moods that he discusses, anxiety 

(Angst), as a step into authenticity, Stambaugh’s 

translation has a point. 


166–80. For instance, the desire for “the very newest 

thing” (Being and Time, 218; Sein und Zeit, 174) in 

fashion and gossip was regarded as characteristic of 

city-dwellers, and it was “curiosity” (Being and 

Time, 214–17; Sein und Zeit, 170–73) and the desire 

for “distraction” (Being and Time, 217; Sein und 

Zeit, 172) that made one go to the movie theatres to 

immerse in a “far and alien world” (Being and Time, 

216; Sein und Zeit, 172). See Heidegger’s condemnation 

of multiculturalism (Being and Time, 43, 222; 

Sein und Zeit, 21, 178). 


168, 170. 


72. Heidegger, Being and Time, 213–14, 217, 222–23; 

Sein und Zeit, 169–70, 173, 178. 

73. Heidegger, Being and Time, 370–80, 456–80; Sein 

und Zeit, 323–31, 404–28. 

74. Heidegger, Being and Time, 256–73, 268; Sein und 

Zeit, 212–30, 214. Thomas Aquinas (according to 

Scheler before his turn, the one in whom the ethics of 

society began to be active) followed Isaac Israeli (a 

Jew) and Avicenna (a Muslim) (Being and Time, 

257; Sein und Zeit, 214); see Gaëtan Pégny, “Vérité 

et combat selon Heidegger,” to be published 2012 in 

Emmanuel Faye, ed., Heidegger, le sol, la 

communauté, la race (Paris: Beauchesne). 

75. The shortest expression of Heidegger’s conviction 

that the origin to be repeated has never ceased to exist 

one finds in his Rectorate Address in 1933: “The beginning 

exists still”; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 265n33; see ibid., 


278 

269n7 and 318n48 for metaphors of Hitler and 

Caputo for the same assumption. 

76. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163, 212–13, 217–18, 

237–38; Sein und Zeit, 125, 127, 169, 173–74, 193. 


87–92, 162–64 and passim. 

78. Ibid., 106–08, 119–21, 130–32. 

79. See ibid., 207–15, Fritsche, “From National Socialism 

to Postmodernism,” 85, 93 (see above, nn. 19, 

21). 

80. For Löwith, a Jew, who left Germany in 1934 and returned 

in 1952 (ibid., 97n9), Heidegger was always 

the vanguard of modern philosophy and Löwith’s 

empty-decisionism interpretation was, as he himself 

said in 1948 when he reformulated it as the 

postmodern interpretation, an apology of Heidegger 

(ibid., 85, 93). For various reasons, the emptydecisionism 

interpretation is highly improbable. 

However, for Löwith it looked “natural” because of 

the way in which he projected his own right-wing 

politics, active nihilism, onto his teacher Heidegger. 

According to that active nihilism, one had to push the 

supposed disappearance of everything common in 

modern society forward because the return of community 

was possible only after the point zero. As 

Löwith himself said in hindsight, in the 1920s he was 

not at all interested in “mundane” politics and did not 

even read any newspapers before 1933. He read 

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard but most probably not the 

literature on community and society. On all these issues, 

see ibid.; for what follows above ibid., 91–93; 

Johannes Fritsche, “L’historicité et la mort dans Être 

et temps selon Heidegger et Löwith,” to be published 

2012 in Faye, ed., Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, 

la race; Johannes Fritsche, “World War I, 

Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Hitler’s ‘Seizure of 

Power’: Löwith and Heidegger on Death and 

Historicality” (manuscript); and Parts 5 and 6 of 

Johannes Fritsche, Geschichtlichkeit und 

Nationalsozialismus in Heideggers Sein und Zeit (to 

be published 2013; German translation of Historical 

Destiny and National Socialism, with new parts 

5 and 6). 

81. See Karl Löwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, 

trans. S. Bartky, J. Daley, ed. A. Levison 

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 

65–9; Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Sämtliche 

Schriften 8) (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1984), 

85–90.


264. 


267–80. 

84. See e.g. Jean-François Courtine, “Voice of Conscience 

and Call of Being,” in E. Cadava, P. Connor, 

J.-L. Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? 

(New York: Routledge, 1991), 79–93. 

85. Heidegger, Being and Time, 307; Sein und Zeit 263. 

86. On an occurrence of the word Eigentum in Heidegger 

see Fritsche, “On Brinks and Bridges in Heidegger,” 

The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 

18 (1995): 111–86, here 153, 179–81n59. 

87. Heidegger, Being and Time, 308; Sein und Zeit, 

263–64. 



252–55. 

90. Heidegger, Being and Time, e.g., 318–19, 323; Sein 

und Zeit, 274, 278. 


283–89. 


280–89. 


94. Heidegger, Being and Time, 316, 323, 339; Sein und 

Zeit, 271, 278, 293; see below, n. 99. 

95. Heidegger, Being and Time, 318, 319, 323, 323, 328, 

328, 336, 338, 340, 340; Sein und Zeit, 273, 275, 

278, 278, 283, 283, 289, 292, 293, 294. 

96. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V, 1129a3–1138b14. 


88, 102–06, 106–24. 

98. Ibid., 142–48 (“Der Mensch im Zeitalter des 

Ausgleichs”); see also below, n. 128. 

99. Heidegger says: “In such experience the conscience 

is encountered as an arbiter and admonisher, with 

whom Dasein reckons and pleads its cause [rechnend 

verhandelt]. When Kant represented the conscience 

as a ‘court of justice’and made this the basic guiding 

idea in his interpretation of it, he did not do so by accident; 

this was suggested by the idea of moral law— 

although his conception of morality was far removed 

from utilitarianism and eudaemonism. Even the theory 

of value, whether it is regarded formally or materially, 

has as its unexpressed ontological presupposition 

a ‘metaphysic of morals’—that is, an ontology 

of Dasein and existence. Dasein is regarded as an entity 

with which one might concern oneself [das zu 

besorgen ist], whether this ‘concern’has the sense of 

‘actualizing values’ or of satisfying a norm.” 

(Heidegger, Being and Time, 339; Sein und Zeit, 293; 

replace “might” with “has to / can”) Inasmuch as 

besorgen is Heidegger’s term for relating to an entity 

as ready-to-hand, he says here that Kant—and 

Scheler (on his theory of value see Fritsche, Historical 

Destiny and National Socialism, 92–106) and 

any other proponent of a theory of values as well— 

conceptualizes the realm of being-with-other- 

Dasein—ethics or action—in a way that is appropriate 

regarding Dasein’s relation to things but not regarding 

its relation to itself and other Dasein inasmuch 

as the other Dasein “are neither present-athand 

nor ready-to-hand; on the contrary, they are like 

the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are 

there too, and there with it” (Heidegger, Being and 

Time, 154; Sein und Zeit, 118). Hegel claimed that 

only in a modern society—in a capitalist economy— 

can one fully understand the theological dogma of 

original sin, for in such a society original sin has become 

universal: everyone regards himself as centre 

and treats everyone and everything else as means 

or—Verdinglichung (reification) prior to Marx— 

Ding (thing) (see Fritsche, “Competition and Conformity,” 

79–80)—or, in Heidegger’s terminology, 

as something ready-to-hand. In his summary of the 

different modes of solicitude in the section on the 

They, Heidegger says: “So far as Dasein is at all, it 

has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being. 

This cannot be conceived as a summative result 

[summatives Resultat] of the occurrence of several 

‘subjects.’ Even to come across a number of ‘subjects’ 

becomes possible only if the Others who are 

concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are 

treated merely as ‘numerals.’Such a number of ‘subjects’ 

gets discovered only by a definite Being-withand-towards-one-another. 

This ‘inconsiderate’ Being-with 

‘reckons’ [“rechnet”] with the Others without 

seriously ‘counting on them’ [“auf sie zählt”], or 

without even wanting to ‘have anything to do’ with 

them.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 163; Sein und 

Zeit, 125) It is possible that the first instance of the 

word “even” makes this passage for American readers 

unintelligible. At any rate, in the first two sentences 

Heidegger repeats that being-with-other- 

Dasein is essential to Dasein, and he attributes to being-with-other-Dasein 

the commonplace amongst 

the then “communitarians” regarding community, 

namely, that community is prior to the individuals 

and precedes them, while society is posterior to the 

individuals and nothing more than their sum, and he 


279


280 

uses the same vocabulary as Scheler does in the same 

context; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 113 (“principle of summation”). In 

other words, he equates being-with-other-Dasein 

and community; or, he identifies the fourth mode of 

solicitude—the one before liberalism—and community. 

In the following sentences, he summarizes his 

theory of the deficient mode of solicitude, and elaborates 

the commonplace of the then “communitarians” 

regarding society, namely, that it is nothing 

more than the sum of its parts, the subjects, and 

emerges when the individuals relate to the other as 

means within a calculus of maximizing utility or 

profit. Heidegger uses here and, as quoted in the 

body of the text, in his characterizations of the 

inauthentic understanding of the call of conscience 

frequently the word rechnen—again, just a repetition 

of a term of Scheler’s, Rechenhaftigkeit, which 

Scheler uses in his anti-Semitic theory of the genesis 

of capitalism and of the Jewish “vital type” (see ibid., 

118 and context). As was said, Hegel takes seriously 

the universalist promise of classic liberalism and arrives 

at a liberal justification of social welfare while 

Heidegger opposes social welfare. In the last quote, 

rechnen stands for the rationality of maximizing utility, 

auf jemanden zählen is an everyday phrase expressing 

trust, reliance, or, politically, solidarity, and 

the last expression an everyday phrase through 

which, say, bourgeois individuals or white-collar 

workers distance themselves from blue-collar workers. 

Heidegger repeats in the last quote a rightist 

commonplace on capitalism and in the first quote a 

rightist commonplace on Kant. He does not give any 

justification for his claim regarding Kant. Correspondingly, 

he has, as in contrast to Habermas, obviously 

no interest in explicating the different types of 

rationality at work in the different spheres of arithmetical 

justice in modern societies. To say that 

Heidegger criticizes Kant for reducing ethics to 

readiness-to-hand does not contradict my claim that 

readiness-to-hand is in the first place a matter of the 

fourth mode of solicitude, the one before liberalism, 

the one related to community. For Heidegger criticizes 

a category mistake or the supposed “original 

sin” of modernity. In addition, as the quotes in this 

note show, he obviously has in mind the deficient 

mode of readiness-to-hand, the one practiced in liberalism 

and modern technology (see above, n. 66). 

Most probably, when talking about Kant he had in 

mind Aristotle’s claim in Politics I that matters of the 

household are not part of the city. In other words, one 

has here a constitutive part of Hannah Arendt’s theory 

of the political. 

100. Heidegger, Being and Time, 321–22, 334, 342–43, 

344–45; Sein und Zeit, 276–77, 288, 296, 298. 


102. “Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first 

makes it possible to let the Others who are with it ‘be’ 

in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to codisclose 

this potentiality in the solicitude which 

leaps forth and liberates [vorspringend-befreienden 

Fürsorge]. When Dasein is resolute, it can become 

the ‘conscience’of Others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves 

in resoluteness can people authentically 

be with one another—not by ambiguous and 

jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the 

‘they’ and what ‘they’ want to undertake” 

(Heidegger, Being and Time, 344–45; Sein und Zeit, 

298; the second positive mode “leaps ahead 

[vorausspringt] of” the Other and “frees the Other in 

his freedom for himself,” Being and Time, 158–59; 

Sein und Zeit, 122). In the last sentence Heidegger 

rejects in the name of his rightist notion of solidarity 

the liberal notion of consensus and contract and the 

leftist notion of solidarity (see Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 275–76n25). 

103. Heidegger, Being and Time, 325–26, see 312–13, 

337; Sein und Zeit, 280, see 268, 291. 



It is a pity that, in §65, Heidegger did not discuss the 

issue of the two temporalities independent of the issue 

of authenticity and primordiality. In “Ousia and 

Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time” 

Jacques Derrida writes: “Now, is not the opposition 

of the primordial to the derivative still metaphysical? 

Is not the quest for an archia in general, no matter 

with what precautions one surrounds the concept, 

still the ‘essential’ operation of metaphysics? Supposing, 

despite powerful presumptions, that one may 

eliminate it from any other provenance, is there not at 

least some Platonism in the Verfallen? Why determine 

as fall the passage from one temporality to another? 

And why qualify temporality as authentic—or 

proper (eigentlich)—and as inauthentic—or improper 

when every ethical preoccupation has been 

suspended?” Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan 

Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1982), 63. Derrida could not overlook the metaphysical 

character of crucial elements of Being and Time 

also because a few years earlier, in Of Gramma-

tology, he had analyzed the full structure of 

temporalized metaphysics in Rousseau, Saussure, 

and Levy-Strauss (which is, of course, not to say that 

the theories of these authors are national-socialistic). 

Derrida ignores that, in Being and Time, ethical preoccupation 

has by no means been suspended. In addition, 

with the possible exception of Plato in Syracuse, 

metaphysicians never claimed that down here 

on earth in the sphere of opposites one can realize the 

pure, that is, realize one opposite and annihilate the 

other. Heidegger, however, intended precisely this, 

namely, community without society. Furthermore, 

not the quest for an origin constitutes metaphysics 

but rather the specific usage of origins. It is 

Heidegger who revitalized a radicalized or distorted 

version of metaphysics at a time when there was certainly 

no need for doing so. In this sense, it is not the 

case that there is “still” something metaphysical in 

Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger is the only metaphysician. 

One cannot blame metaphysics for Heidegger’s 

theory of historicality, and it does not make sense either 

to regard right-wing thinking in Germany at 

Heidegger’s time as a—more or less tragic—manifestation 

of metaphysics (Fritsche, Historical Destiny 

and National Socialism, 30–31). 


184–91. 


On having-been see above, n. 22. 


Being concerned with everyday business is what society 

is about; see above, n. 99. 


341–42. 


343–44. 

111. See Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

151–69. Dreyfus maintains that, in the section 

on the They, Heidegger does not talk about maxims 

of morality and prudence but rather exclusively 

about social norms, such as the proper pronunciation 

of words and the usage of equipment, including false 

teeth and prescription glasses (Dreyfus, Being-inthe-World, 

152). This interpretation is definitely 

much too narrow (if Heidegger had such things in 

mind, to begin with) as can be seen already from 

Heidegger’s characterization that the They is in 

charge of “the tasks, rules, and standards, the urgency 

and extent, of concernful and solicitous Being-in-the-world.” 

(Heidegger, Being and Time, 312; 

Sein und Zeit, 268) In addition, Dreyfus turns 

“distantiality” upside down and interprets it as conformity 

and conformism and not as competitive behavior 

(see above, n. 36). Thus it does not come as a 

surprise that, according to Dreyfus, the chapter on 

the They “is not only one of the most basic in the 

book, it is also the most confused” (Dreyfus, Beingin-the-World, 

143). Still, Dreyfus acknowledges that 

authenticity involves, so to speak, a reversal of a reversal 

(see above, n. 32; on Dreyfus’interpretation of 

authentic Dasein as kind of a dandy see Fritsche, Historical 

Destiny and National Socialism, 326-7n60). 

As has become clear, society is a reversal of community 

and authenticity a reversal of society to re-realize 

community. Since for rightists society is just a 

downward plunge, the initiative for the reversal of 

society cannot come from within society. Rather, the 

call calls from outside, as also Dreyfus acknowledges 

(see above, n. 32). 


372 (see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 29–33). 


34–9. 




43–50, 130–31. 

117. Heidegger, Being and Time, 334, translation 

changed; Sein und Zeit, 288. 



383–84. Stambaugh mistranslates the sentence and 

turns it upside down (Being and Time: A Translation, 

351; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 263n32). 



50–67, 131–2. 

122. Ibid., 5–7. 


122, 129 (see above, nn. 51, 102). 


267–80. 


274–80. 

126. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436; Sein und Zeit, 384; 

Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

132–42. 

127. See above, n. 99. 


281

128. In the lecture course An Introduction to Metaphysics 

in summer 1935, Heidegger adopts Kurt Riezler’s 

Parmenides interpretation from 1934, in which 

Riezler made his suggestion regarding the question 

who were the Greeks that we were supposed to repeat. 

Riezler used Heidegger’s notion of truth to interpret 

Being in Parmenides as that which holds together 

the opposites and thus maintains, or produces, 

an Ausgleich between right and left (similar to the 

way in which Scheler after his turn and Tillich demanded 

a politics of Ausgleich; see Fritsche, Historical 

Destiny and National Socialism, 142–48, 

173–87). Thereafter Heidegger makes the first chorus 

in Sophocles’ Antigone talk about the conscienceless 

revolutionaries, and uses his Sophocles 

interpretation to turn his and Riezler’s Parmenides 

interpretation upside down and find in Parmenides 

his notion of historicality, according to which the 

sphere of Ausgleich, society, is, as the sphere of 

Schein (seeming), that opposite which has to be destroyed 

in the name of the re-realization of the other 

opposite, community, which includes rank as opposed 

to the egalitarianism of society. See ibid., 

200–01; Johannes Fritsche, “Heidegger in the Kairos 

of ‘the Occident,’” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy 

Journal 22 (1999): 3–19. 



47, 55–60. 

131. Ibid., 134, 349–51n24; see below, last section. 

132. Heidegger, Being and Time, 318–19, 342; Sein und 

Zeit, 273–74, 296. 

133. See above, n. 21. 





289–95. 


139. See the reference to the problem in the first section of 

the chapter on historicality (Heidegger, Being and 

Time, 424–29; Sein und Zeit, 372–77). 



xii. 

142. Heidegger definitely knew Scheler but most probably 

also Tönnies and other texts. 

143. Löwith’s interpretation from 1948 was published 

only in the USA (see Fritsche, “From National Socialism 

to Postmodernism,” 105). 


282 

144. See above, n. 21. 


47, 55–60, 140–42, 289–92n66 and passim. 

146. At Pennsylvania State University in 2002, a graduate 

student who had come there because of John Sallis 

and Charles Scott wanted to write his course paper 

on Aristotle’s theory of knowledge to show, as he put 

it, that Aristotle was not yet entangled in the subjectobject 

split. Especially since he was not particularly 

familiar with Aristotle and had not yet read On Soul, 

I recommended him to be very cautious regarding the 

notoriously dark chapters 4 and 5 of Book III. His 

paper culminated in statements about sentences from 

these very chapters. I explained to him at great length 

that these sentences could mean many things but precisely 

not what he claimed. In the second draft of his 

paper, he had not changed anything except that he 

had added that, at that point, Aristotle had used the 

wrong words. When I asked him whether he knew 

Greek, he answered in the negative. When I explained 

to him that his procedure was not appropriate, 

he began crying and complained that I challenged 

his “academic integrity.” 

147. Ibid., 174–75. 

148. Ibid., 323n57. Even after his reassessment of 

Heidegger’s philosophy, John D. Caputo repeats a 

postmodern interpretation in which the Parisian 

deconstructive mood happily merges with the American 

idol of the self-made man: “Dasein gives itself a 

fate.” Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 1993), 81. 

149. Ibid., 11. 

150. Ibid., 1, 16, 36–38. 


197–203, 216–224. 


see—also for the details of the full quote (“always, as 

it were, a kind of robbery”)—Johannes Fritsche, 

“With Plato into the Kairos before the Kehre: On 

Heidegger’s different Interpretations of Plato,” in C. 

Partenie and T. Rockmore, eds., Heidegger and 

Plato: Toward Dialogue (Evanston: Northwestern 

University Press, 2005), 140–77, here 144–46; even 

and especially in An Introduction to Metaphysics the 

Greeks are adventurous conquerors but now they are 

so because they obey a call (ibid., 148–49). 

153. Ibid., 144–46. 

154. Ibid., 143 (also in §6 of Being and Time the prevalent 

tone is that the tradition between us and the Greeks 

has to be destroyed to release the Greeks and regain

access to them [Heidegger, Being and Time, 41–49; 

Sein und Zeit, 19–27]). 

155. Ibid., 164n3. 

156. Ibid., 155–7. 

157. Ibid., 171n22. 

158. Ibid., 151–55. 

159. Ibid., 157–58, 170n22. 


200–01. 

161. Fritsche, “With Plato into the Kairos before the 

Kehre,” 146–51; see also above, n. 128. In Mein 

Kampf, Hitler encouraged an alliance between the 

Germans and the ancient Greeks and kept the door as 

open as possible (Fritsche, Historical Destiny and 

National Socialism, 270n8). As Dieter Thomä summarizes 

the pertinent research, “the system of the 

ideology of National Socialism was characterized 

precisely by its ‘absence of systematicity’because of 

which it was, propagandistically and politically, particularly 

flexible.” Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit 

danach: Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin 

Heideggers 1910–1976 (Frankfurt am Main. 

Suhrkamp, 1990), 471. 


Kehre,” 160–64. See for Grondin’s blatant mistranslation 

of the decisive sentence ibid., 172–75n24. 


203–07. 


Kehre,” 170–71n22. See Charles Bambach, 

Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, 

and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 

2003). (See my review in American Catholic Philosophical 

Quarterly 79 [2005]: 503–05.) What I label 

the “drama of historicality” Bambach calls 

Heidegger’s “Ursprungsphilosophie,” philosophy of 

origin. 


On the entire sentence, the next right after the one 

with the “reciprocative rejoinder” (see above, n. 21), 

see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

10–11, 21–28, 66–67 and passim. 


Kehre,” 162–63. 

167. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 

trans. by A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press, 1988), 110. 

168. See Johannes Fritsche, “On Brinks and Bridges in 

Heidegger,” 151–56. On the move toward the brink 

and along the brink in a passage in The Question 

Concerning Technology and its English mistranslation 

(which clouds Heidegger’s theory of the subepochs 

of metaphysics as well as the structure of the 

entire essay) see ibid., 121–26, 129–30. On rides on 

the Autobahn and different kind of bridges in Building, 

Dwelling, Thinking, see ibid., 121–28. 

169. Ibid., 153, see also 147–51. 

170. Ibid., 155. See ibid., 129–30 and context on The 

Question Concerning Technology as a ritual in which 

Heidegger leads the audience out of their sorrow and 

feeling of guilt for World War II and for the extermination 

of the Jews into the saving power and the relief 

that they were not responsible for these events, with 

the passage on the USA, the Soviet Union, and (in 

the manuscript) “the manufacturing of corpses in gas 

chambers” and the one on the brink (see above, n. 

168) as the decisive joints. See ibid., 138–42, 

151–54 on Heidegger’s alignment with the Zeitgeist 

of the Adenauer area, the time of the Wirtschaftswunder 

(“economic miracle”). 


1–7. 

172. See, e.g., Wilhelm Ziegler, Verdun (Hamburg: 

Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1936), Vol. 1 of the series 

Das Heldenlied des Weltkrieges: Ein Werk von 

Frontsoldaten (The Song on / of the World War by / 

about the Heroes [of this World War]: A Work of 

Front-line Soldiers). 

173. Martin Heidegger, “Der deutsche Student als 

Arbeiter: Rede bei der feierlichen Immatrikulation 

25. November 1933,” Reden und andere Zeugnisse 

eines Lebensweges: 1910–1976 (Gesamtausgabe 

16) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 199. 

The editor, a historian, does not comment on this passage. 

One is inclined to infer from his silence that 

Heidegger did not follow any instructions of the state 

but that the dedication was his own idea. For more 

details on Heidegger’s speech and the texts and issues 

in the remainder of my essay, see Johannes 

Fritsche, “World War I, Heidegger’s Being and Time, 

and Hitler’s ‘Seizure of Power,’” and Fritsche, 

Geschichtlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus in 

Heideggers Sein und Zeit. 

174. Or, “Since [the point in time when we became a conversation 

and since which] we have been / are a conversation, 

and are able to hear from / of each other.” 

“Seit ein Gespräch wir sind. Und hören können 

voneinander.” Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins 

Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe 

39 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 72). 


283

See already Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National 

Socialism, 194–97. 

175. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und 

“Der Rhein,” 72. 

176. Ibid., 72. 

177. Ibid. 

178. Ibid., 72–73. 

179. Ibid., 73. 

180. Ibid., 73. Probably, only a recording of Heidegger’s 

voice could tell whether this sentence was only a 

threat against all those who were not really National 

Socialists or whether it also expressed skepticism regarding 

the chances to realize National Socialism. 


see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism, 

55–60; see above, n. 119. 



“Der Rhein,” 44 and passim. 

184. One might object that the phrase, “If we do not compel 

powers into our Dasein,” indicates that Dasein 

does not act in obedience to a command of something 

“higher” than Dasein but spontaneously and 

against all existing powers and entities. However, in 

the sentence in question not these powers but rather 

ordinary (or inauthentic) Dasein or society has to be 

forced (to accept within it the powers). Inauthentic 

Dasein or society is the sphere of Schein which has to 

be destroyed (see above, n. 128). 


385 (“sich seinen Helden wählt”). For the “German” 

notion of hero (who does not singularize himself but 

finds fulfillment in his sacrifice of himself for the 

German cause) see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and 

National Socialism, 323–27n60. 

186. For suggestions what he could have written if he had 

wanted to avoid any allusion to World War I see ibid., 

233n7. 


“Der Rhein,” 51 and context. 

188. Heidegger, “Der deutsche Student als Arbeiter: Rede 

bei der feierlichen Immatrikulation 25. November 

1933,” 208. 


122–23. 

190. On Scheler’s hymn on World War I, Der Genius des 

Krieges (The Genius of War), from 1915, a book of 

more than 500 pages, see ibid., 87–92. 


Bog'aziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey 


284

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