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

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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.
101. Heidegger, Being and Time, 342; Sein und Zeit, 296.
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.
104. Heidegger, Being and Time, 378; Sein und Zeit, 329.
105. Heidegger, Being and Time, 373; Sein und Zeit, 325.
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-