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

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
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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-