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

128. In the lecture course An Introduction to Metaphysics
in summer 1935, Heidegger adopts Kurt Riezler’s
Parmenides interpretation from 1934, in which
Riezler made his suggestion regarding the question
who were the Greeks that we were supposed to repeat.
Riezler used Heidegger’s notion of truth to interpret
Being in Parmenides as that which holds together
the opposites and thus maintains, or produces,
an Ausgleich between right and left (similar to the
way in which Scheler after his turn and Tillich demanded
a politics of Ausgleich; see Fritsche, Historical
Destiny and National Socialism, 142–48,
173–87). Thereafter Heidegger makes the first chorus
in Sophocles’ Antigone talk about the conscienceless
revolutionaries, and uses his Sophocles
interpretation to turn his and Riezler’s Parmenides
interpretation upside down and find in Parmenides
his notion of historicality, according to which the
sphere of Ausgleich, society, is, as the sphere of
Schein (seeming), that opposite which has to be destroyed
in the name of the re-realization of the other
opposite, community, which includes rank as opposed
to the egalitarianism of society. See ibid.,
200–01; Johannes Fritsche, “Heidegger in the Kairos
of ‘the Occident,’” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy
Journal 22 (1999): 3–19.
129. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436; Sein und Zeit, 384.
130. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
47, 55–60.
131. Ibid., 134, 349–51n24; see below, last section.
132. Heidegger, Being and Time, 318–19, 342; Sein und
Zeit, 273–74, 296.
133. See above, n. 21.
134. Heidegger, Being and Time, 54; Sein und Zeit, 31.
135. Heidegger, Being and Time, 219; Sein und Zeit, 175.
136. Heidegger, Being and Time, 326; Sein und Zeit, 281.
137. Heidegger, Being and Time, 335–41; Sein und Zeit,
289–95.
138. Heidegger, Being and Time, 348; Sein und Zeit, 301.
139. See the reference to the problem in the first section of
the chapter on historicality (Heidegger, Being and
Time, 424–29; Sein und Zeit, 372–77).
140. Heidegger, Being and Time, 434; Sein und Zeit, 382.
141. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
xii.
142. Heidegger definitely knew Scheler but most probably
also Tönnies and other texts.
143. Löwith’s interpretation from 1948 was published
only in the USA (see Fritsche, “From National Socialism
to Postmodernism,” 105).
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
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144. See above, n. 21.
145. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
47, 55–60, 140–42, 289–92n66 and passim.
146. At Pennsylvania State University in 2002, a graduate
student who had come there because of John Sallis
and Charles Scott wanted to write his course paper
on Aristotle’s theory of knowledge to show, as he put
it, that Aristotle was not yet entangled in the subjectobject
split. Especially since he was not particularly
familiar with Aristotle and had not yet read On Soul,
I recommended him to be very cautious regarding the
notoriously dark chapters 4 and 5 of Book III. His
paper culminated in statements about sentences from
these very chapters. I explained to him at great length
that these sentences could mean many things but precisely
not what he claimed. In the second draft of his
paper, he had not changed anything except that he
had added that, at that point, Aristotle had used the
wrong words. When I asked him whether he knew
Greek, he answered in the negative. When I explained
to him that his procedure was not appropriate,
he began crying and complained that I challenged
his “academic integrity.”
147. Ibid., 174–75.
148. Ibid., 323n57. Even after his reassessment of
Heidegger’s philosophy, John D. Caputo repeats a
postmodern interpretation in which the Parisian
deconstructive mood happily merges with the American
idol of the self-made man: “Dasein gives itself a
fate.” Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 81.
149. Ibid., 11.
150. Ibid., 1, 16, 36–38.
151. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
197–203, 216–224.
152. Heidegger, Being and Time, 265; Sein und Zeit, 222;
see—also for the details of the full quote (“always, as
it were, a kind of robbery”)—Johannes Fritsche,
“With Plato into the Kairos before the Kehre: On
Heidegger’s different Interpretations of Plato,” in C.
Partenie and T. Rockmore, eds., Heidegger and
Plato: Toward Dialogue (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2005), 140–77, here 144–46; even
and especially in An Introduction to Metaphysics the
Greeks are adventurous conquerors but now they are
so because they obey a call (ibid., 148–49).
153. Ibid., 144–46.
154. Ibid., 143 (also in §6 of Being and Time the prevalent
tone is that the tradition between us and the Greeks
has to be destroyed to release the Greeks and regain