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

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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