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stance of the term Volksgemeinschaft in the entire book. Thus it might look farfetched to see here an option for the National Socialists. However, Heidegger definitely knew Scheler’s book Formalism in Ethics, and in his obituary in 1928 on him Heidegger praised Scheler as the “strongest philosophical force” worldwide and at the same time left no doubt that he stoutly disapproved of everything related to Scheler’s Catholicism and his turn. 25 Heidegger opts in §74 for that type of community which, according to Scheler, is the lowest and in which the individual is treated merely as a means of the well-being of the community. In addition, Heidegger most probably knew that the National Socialists promoted the community of the people as the one and only community which everyone and everything had to serve. Furthermore, while neither the existentials themselves nor much of what Heidegger develops regarding them is fascist, Heidegger did not develop in Being and Time any means to distance himself from National Socialism. Nay, he even criticized the means that others, say Scheler, had to draw a line between them and National Socialism. 26 Finally, in 1936 Heidegger said in Rome to Karl Löwith that the notion of historicality in Being and Time was the basis of his engagement with National Socialism. 27 Thus his invocation of the community of the people was most probably a conscious option for the National Socialists. 28 The Existentials in Division One of Being and Time Being and Time contains two kinds of investigations. Heidegger discovers the existentials that make it possible for human beings to be in a world and relate to beings in specific ways. He assumes that each of these existentials is omnipresent in the sense that, whenever and wherever human beings exist, these existentials have always already been at work. 29 This is thought from the perspective of transcendental philosophy, and thus it does not come as a surprise that, in his exposition of the concept of phenomenon, Heidegger adduces as the only example Kant’s theory of space as form of intuition. 30 However, PHILOSOPHY TODAY 258 these existentials can be actualized in two different ways, namely, so to speak, in a genuine or neutral way on one side and in a fallen way on the other, and this difference prepares the way for one of the two main topics of Division Two, the issue of authenticity and how to achieve it. In Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time, I characterized Heidegger’s notion of historicality as a “temporalized version of a metaphysics of falling and recovering.” 31 There was a state, A, in which the origin was properly present. However, a different state, B, emerged in which the origin is no longer present. Not only is the origin no longer present, but B even covers up its relation of dependency and deficiency with regard to A and claims to be a being in its own right and not dependent on anything. What some Heideggerians rightly say about the Heidegger of the history of Being and his assessment of metaphysics within that history already applies to Being and Time, 32 namely, that Heidegger works with a theory of a double fall or a double forgetting. The first is the downward plunge that B is in comparison to A, the second is B’s work to make invisible its relation to A and A itself. However, the origin has to be properly present. Thus there will be an event in the course of which the origin will reaffirm itself and make B properly present the origin. In my book, I adduced as examples of this motif Heidegger’s concepts of origin, primordial temporality, authenticity, wholeness, and the different forms of solicitude (Fürsorge; in Stambaugh’s translation, concern) before showing that the notion of historicality displays the same structure. 33 In this section, I present aspects of the They and the different forms of solicitude and then briefly comment on the other existentials that Heidegger discusses in Division One of Being and Time. Heidegger’s theory of the They is part of his theory of the existential Being-with-other- Dasein, the second existential in Division One. A They regulates the possibilities of behavior in a group of humans, it sanctions some and rules out other possibilities. 34 In §27 Heidegger presents six characteristics of a They. The first is “distantiality [Abständigkeit],” the only one on
which he spends more than a short paragraph. 35 In his widely used commentary, Hubert Dreyfus claims that Heidegger talks here about conformity and conformism as a trait of every They. 36 However, for various reasons this cannot be the case. 37 Rather, Heidegger just summarizes in his own vernacular a well-known feature of social philosophy in Germany since Kant and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, namely, competitive behavior. In a capitalist economy, an entrepreneur wants, or has, to “stand out,” that is, put as much distance (Abstand) as possible between himself and the other entrepreneurs in terms of the attractiveness of his products, profit, etc., and a worker has to do the same regarding his co-workers to increase his chances for promotion or not being fired in the next downturn or round of downsizing. 38 Thereafter Heidegger deduces—in a way that one also already knows from Hegel—from distantiality, not conformity or conformism, but something like uniformity. The market produces regularities regarding production and consumption, the competitors imitate and improve the products of the frontrunner, the followers of fashion imitate the fashion leaders with the result that someone develops a new product or fashion that anew puts distance between him and the others but this distance again disappears, etc.—the infinite cycles of products and fashions, uniformity ever affirmed and negated anew, driven by distantiality. 39 Finally, in a paragraph that is either the last one of his discussion of distantiality or the first one of the second feature of the They, averageness, Heidegger adduces—explicitly as a kind of uniformity that differs from the cycles of production and fashion—phenomena, such as usage of public transportation, reading newspapers, adopting public prejudgments about literature and art, and distancing oneself from the “masses” as everyone else does. 40 In §27 Heidegger acknowledges that the They varies historically, which means regarding distantiality that it was simply absent in precapitalist societies, that it was present but in the service of another feature, or that it is the fallen or “perverted” version of pre-capitalist forms of excellence. 41 The fact that, in the passage on distantiality, Heidegger talks about competition is confirmed by the fact that, in the corresponding passage in the lecture course in summer 1925, he talks explicitly about bankers, shoemakers, etc. and uses formulations that are perhaps clearer than the ones in Being and Time. 42 In §26 Heidegger presents four modes of solicitude. He calls one the deficient mode and the next two positive modes, and says that the two positive ones are opposites of each other. At the beginning of the chapter on being-with-other- Dasein in the lecture course in summer 1925 that I just mentioned, Heidegger says that beingwith-one-another in a world is “the basis upon which this being-with-one-another, which can be indifferent and unconscious to the individual, can develop the various possibilities of community as well as of society.” 43 This sentence shows that Heidegger was already at that time aware of the issue of community and society. It adds further evidence that, in these sections, Heidegger develops a conceptual framework to reconstruct historical developments. In addition, the sentence helps one to recognize what he is talking about in §26 even if one does not know the vast literature on this topic up to Heidegger’s time and thus cannot recognize that, again, Heidegger is just summarizing well-known issues. He offers two kinds of the deficient mode. The first is the mode in which the other Dasein “are indifferent and alien,” the mode of “passing one another by, not ‘mattering’to one another.” 44 This corresponds to public transportation in §27. In apartment buildings, on the streets and in the subways of modern cities one’s default mode, according to Heidegger, is that one does not know the other and is not concerned about the other either. All that matters is, he might add, that the other does not interfere with one’s own business. The second kind is the following: Being with one another is based proximally and often exclusively upon what is a matter of common concern in such Being. A Being-with-one-another which arises from one’s doing the same thing as someone else, not only keeps for the most part within the outer limits, but enters the mode of distance and reserve. The Being-of-one-another of HEIDEGGER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM 259
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