Sartre's second century

32 Chapter Two
world. Heidegger's identification with the Nazi Party appears to have
been, at least partially, related to the aspects of his writings just discussed,
beginning with Being and Time (1927) and including The Origin of the
Work of Art (1935) and the important The Question Concerning
Technology (1954). There is little doubt that Heidegger's alliance with the
Third Reich was undertaken in part to struggle against this loss of a world
in which the presence of things and the village life of the community
"flowered". For Heidegger, the Third Reich seems to have represented
precisely that "authentic historicity as resolute fate" mentioned in Being
and Time. As noted above, a people's authentic being-with is defined as its
comprehension of the importance of decision and the futural dimension
of human historical time. To rejoin Phillips's analysis, rather than
misunderstand themselves as a nation-state community, Heidegger's Volk
experiences the decisiveness of historical existence as a form of openness
to the future that precludes being identified with the empirical features of
national, geographic or political characteristics. The Volk is not the nation
state, but a consciousness of the non-repeatability of historical time. On
Phillips's reading, Heidegger is mistaken in identifying the crisis of
Germany as a sign of the decisiveness of the true Volk. National Socialism
turns out to define the German people in categories that are the opposite of
Heidegger's Volk. Although Heidegger was clearly tempted by National
Socialism, the rootlessness of the Volk's radical openness to temporality
and the future clashes with the biologism and nationalism of the Third
Reich. 39
A striking consequence emerges from the confluence of Heidegger's
critique of the world of technology and his reflections on the nature of das
Volk. The Question of Technology suggests that the modern world limits
"being" to use, thereby distancing itself from the possibility of a
potentially new form of poetic disclosure. As is well known, such a
possibility was just what Heidegger seemed to identify with the
"metaphysical" heritage of the German people. Modernity, however,
seems to preclude such a possibility by being identified with the
perspective of technology. At the same time, the true nature of das Volk
appears to be increasingly vacuous, for as a "radical openness to the
future" it appears to collapse into the tautology that the future is simply
what must be awaited. As a consequence, Heidegger's later thought moves
a significant distance from his earlier call for Dasein to exist authentically
by resolutely taking over its heritage. The characterless nature of das Volk
3 A differing view of Heidegger's conception of das Volk and its relationship to
National Socialism can be found in Domenico Losurdo's Heidegger and the
Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West, Chapters 2 and 3.