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

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
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
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,