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

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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-