Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

Frederick A. Olafson

University of California, San Diego

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger’s Nazism derives from his philosophical

thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological

apparatus of Being and Time and any political orientation. The elaboration of the

concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger’s own

reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of

respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi

ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger’s early life – rural,

conservative, and Catholic – and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical

thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between

tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger’ s hatred of that

world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi

thought.

A great deal has been written about Martin Heidegger’s Nazism and its
implications for the interpretation and evaluation of his thought. There are
those who think that everything in Heidegger’s writings is tainted by his
having enlisted himself and his philosophy under Hitler’s banners; others are
equally sure that no such conclusion follows from what is, nevertheless,
conceded to be a terribly discreditable episode in his life. For those who think,
as I do, that Heidegger was a great philosopher, a conception of the central
inspiration of his thought as having a character akin to that of Nazism must be
a gross misrepresentation. Those who argue for such a judgment on him pretty
much dismiss his thought as an obfuscated version of his political views.

To the extent that one can judge, the charge that Heidegger’s properly

philosophical thought was complicit in his Nazism seems to mean that anyone
who held such views would ipso facto have had a motive to join the Nazi
party. There is, of course, the question about what the Nazi party and Adolf
Hitler represented in 1933 and what they had come to stand for by 1945. This
is a distinction that is not usually given a lot of weight when indictments like
those of Heidegger are being handed down; and a Nazi past is usually taken to
imply assent to, if not collaboration in, all the worst horrors for which that
regime was responsible. Those who make these charges typically insist that
the evidence of what Nazism meant was there for all to see from the outset. In
a sense that is true, but one still has to ask how well people who supported the
Nazis understood their intentions. There is also the possibility that in the case
of a thinker like Heidegger his own personal history may have counted for
more than his system of thought for purposes of explaining a political

Inquiry

, 43, 271–88

# 2000 Taylor & Francis

afŽ liation. As thinkers, such people are very likely to claim, as Heidegger did,
that their thought motivated the decisions they made; but their evidence on
this point is not necessarily conclusive. Nor, I think, does a subsequent
refusal, like Heidegger’s, to admit that one was in the wrong make the case for
the prosecution, though it certainly re ects discredit on the person who so
refuses.

These are all-important distinctions and some of them have a clear bearing

on the Heidegger case; but I am not going to try to exonerate him, even
partially, on any of these grounds. I accept the fact that his conduct was
morally indefensible; and my concern will be entirely with the role his
philosophical thought may have played in his becoming and remaining a
member of the Nazi party. The thesis of this article will be that although the
views presented in Being and Time could not have supplied a substantive
motive for becoming a Nazi, there was a connection between the Nazi episode
and Heidegger’s thought – a connection that has to be understood in terms of a
certain counterpoint between his thought and his life. What needs to be
understood is that both his thought and his life were marked by dualities that
undoubtedly generated severe tensions. A fuller exploration of these tensions
may enable us to render a more nuanced judgment on the relation between
Nazism and Heidegger’s philosophical thought. The essential originality and
power of that thought are not put in question by the argument that is made
here.

1

The case against Heidegger tends to go back and forth between Being and

Time

, together with the writings that followed closely upon it, and those that

came during and after the famous ‘turn’ or Kehre through which his thought
passed in the mid-1930s. I will divide my discussion accordingly. In general,
the attempts that have been made to show that the principal theses of Being
and Time

, his Ž rst major philosophical statement, were implicated in his

movement toward Nazism have been weakly supported at best.

2

It simply is

not possible to associate a political message with concepts like those of being-
in-the-world or temporality; and the only result of trying to do so is usually to
obscure their properly philosophical import. Nevertheless, a deep fault-line
does run through the account of human choice and of our relations with one
another that is presented in Being and Time; and when it is located, it may
help us to form at least a rough idea of how it was possible for Heidegger to
see Nazism as somehow converging with his own philosophical position.

Although the later writings have been a happy hunting-ground for those

who want to indict both Heidegger the man and Heidegger the thinker, their
deeper signiŽ cance has, I think, been lost in the midst of this detective work.
Their signiŽ cance is not that they provided a rationale for a totalitarian
ordering of society; it is rather that they mark a reaction on Heidegger’s part
to certain aspects of his own thought as set forth in Being and Time. He
evidently came to feel that the project to which that work was to contribute

272 Frederick A. Olafson

was infected by a kind of Nietzschean hubris. As a result, it had come too
close to the ‘subjectivism’ that he thought was endemic in modern
philosophy.

3

The subjectivism Heidegger had in mind cannot have been the

epistemologically motivated kind that is associated with the names of
Descartes and Kant, since Being and Time had done so much to put that kind
of philosophy out of business. For Heidegger, human being was indefeasibly
being-in-the-world and this meant that it could not withdraw into itself or
adopt a skeptical attitude toward the ‘external’ world. The issue of
subjectivism that is relevant to the turn that Heidegger’s thought took had
to do, instead, with the way in which self and world are associated with one
another within being-in-the-world.

According to Nietzsche, it is the self that sets the seal of being on becoming

and thus on the world; and its life is precisely this appropriative, meaning-
imposing activity. Everything in the address Heidegger delivered on
becoming Rector of the University of Freiburg after the Nazis came to
power indicates that he understood Nazism as just such a hyper-activistic
response to the human (and the German) condition. Nazism was, for
Heidegger, a grandiose enactment of the supremacy of the (collective) self.
That was also what he later wanted to repudiate; and it is his con icting
attitudes toward any such exaltation of the self that are the key to an
understanding of his venture into the political world. Accordingly, the
repudiation just referred to was addressed not in the Ž rst instance to Nazism
as a political movement, but to what it represented in Heidegger’s
philosophical interpretation of it. This reaction took the form of an
extraordinary alienation of all personal responsibility and freedom and it
issued in an extreme quietism. Unfortunately, there is a dimension of human
life – the properly moral one – that is as effectively obscured in this alienated
mode as it is in the assertion of self.

I

The Ž rst fact about Heidegger to which attention needs to be drawn is the very
great antecedent improbability that a book like Being and Time would or
could be written by anyone who had been formed, in his childhood and early
life, as Heidegger was. His upbringing was rural, conservative and Catholic;
and his education was intended to prepare him for the priesthood. In itself,
there is nothing unprecedented about someone’s turning against the beliefs
and values of his family and his birthplace and producing works of thought or
of art that express a very different view of the world. Heidegger does not,
however, conform to any familiar image of the rebel; and there is every
indication that his ties to his birthplace and to the way of life it represented
remained very close. Throughout his life, he was strongly committed to the

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

273

virtues of the little town of Messkirch, where he was born and where he was
buried, by special dispensation, in the Catholic cemetery. The historian, Ernst
Nolte, has even asked rhetorically whether Heidegger ever really left
Messkirch.

4

The answer, I think, is that he did indeed leave it, but on a round-

trip ticket; and in the end, in the only way he knew, he returned there in spirit
as well. Messkirch, and the rural ethos of home and tradition it represented,
remained for Heidegger the great symbolic alternative to the homelessness of
modern life – the urban, industrial world that he detested. He did, however,
reject the Catholicism in which he had been reared. Since it formed the
doctrinal core of the way of life to which he was so deeply committed,
separating himself from it cannot have been easy for such a man.

But separate himself he did; and he did so most emphatically through the

theses he set forth in Being and Time. That incomplete work has been
variously interpreted; but it is clear that it was a radically modern work.
Nothing shows this more clearly than the profound afŽ nity with Nietzsche’s
thought that is everywhere evident in it, if not in the details of its
argumentation then in the moral atmosphere that presides over the work as a
whole. Heidegger had already declared philosophy as such to be committed to
atheism; and Nietzsche’s conception of the death of God was a dramatic
expression of the new situation in which philosophical thought had to do its
work. It is true that Being and Time, in mounting its polemic against the
subjectivism of modern philosophy, harks back to some of the ancient sources
of Christian and Catholic thought. It does so, however, in the context of a
philosophical project of an altogether different kind.

The theses Heidegger developed in Being and Time have been most

commonly understood in terms of the treatment of individual human life that
seemed to be implicit in the prominence assigned to notions like those of
‘authenticity’ and ‘anxiety’. These became the identifying themes – almost
the mood-music – of Heidegger’s thought in the public mind; and the same
could be said of the assignment of everyday life and its ‘values’ to an
anonymous, public mode of selfhood that he called ‘das Man’. ‘Authenticity’
and ‘resoluteness’, by contrast, were existential virtues that consisted mainly
in not claiming any independent or prior form of justiŽ cation for what one
does. What Heidegger objects to is the claim he takes to be implicit in moral
codes – the claim that the ‘values’ they are based on are somehow inscribed in
the world itself and are thus prior to and independent of the choices we make.
From this it follows that if we simply comply with a rule, what we call our
‘choice’ will not express anything that is distinctively ours. By making it
appear that we are choosing when we are, at most, going along with an
anonymous directive that is the choice of no actual person, we introduce an
element of falsity into our lives. In order to live authentically we have to stop
playing delusory games with our lives that are motivated by the aspiration to
confer some specious authority upon them; and if that requires a dismissal of

274 Frederick A. Olafson

all traditional conceptions of moral truth, the Heidegger of Being and Time
seemed to be willing to accept that consequence. This was, in any case, the
message that Being and Time carried to the world; and in its Sartrean version
it was the core of the ‘existentialism’ that Heidegger was later to reject. In
doing so, he seemed to suggest that it had been the result of a simple
misunderstanding by Sartre of what Being and Time was about.

This repudiation itself needs scrutiny. It dates from 1948 and thus from a

time, well into his later period, when Heidegger had set aside many of the
themes of that work that Sartre had appropriated. It is true that there are
signiŽ cant differences between Heidegger’s account of human being as
Dasein and the radically voluntaristic character it takes on in Sartre’s
rendering. Heidegger surely would not have wanted to associate himself with
a position that carried views he had himself largely abandoned to new
extremes. Nevertheless, as it stands, the picture that Being and Time gives us
of human life is centered on the individual human being and on the
alternatives of authenticity and inauthenticity by which that life is deŽ ned. As
far as human society – what people are like and what they do in their
association with one another – is concerned, inauthenticity appears to be the
dominant modality of their common life. As a result, society is understood by
Heidegger principally as a negation of everything that could make what I do
truly mine and thus something for which I would be responsible. The only
principle of authority for what ‘one’ does resides simply in the fact that it is,
anonymously, the done thing. An individual human being who tries to emerge
from this regime of conformism into a form of life in which there is true
choice and thus responsibility and freedom can do so only on the strength of
the call of ‘conscience’ that turns out to be his own voice reminding him that
he is capable of authentic agency in his own right. But why he would do so or
be able to do so remains largely unexplained.

It seems fair to assume that Heidegger must have felt a need to develop a

conception of a possible society in which authenticity would somehow at
least partially replace the inauthenticity that was the signature of the existing
social order. (Heidegger insists, for reasons that need not be discussed here,
that there can be no question of a life, individual or social, that is unalloyedly
authentic.) There is, in fact, one section in Being and Time in which his
thought seems to be moving in this direction and suggests the possibility of a
conception of society as something other than an incubator for inauthenticity.
Heidegger gives a sketch of what he calls Mitsein– the way in which human
beings are with one another in their own shared mode of being.

5

This is a

mode of being that is constituted by the disclosure of other entities – things
and people – as well as self. There are clear indications that in the case of the
disclosure of other like beings such a relation has at least a proto-moral
character as for example when Heidegger says that we are ‘essentially for the
sake of others’.

6

In my judgment, these hints could have been developed into

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

275

a powerful conception of the ground of ethics, but Heidegger did not travel
that route. If he had done so, he would have had to give up his extreme
contrast between authentic and inauthentic modes of human life as well as his
conception of a transition from one to the other that was essentially
unmotivated. Instead, he could have built on the fact on which he in any case
insists, namely, that we always have some understanding of the kind of entity
each of us is even though that understanding is overlaid by very different,
more ‘ofŽ cial’ versions of our natures. All that would have been required was
that that understanding be widened to include other human beings so that it
could become the basis for a reciprocal relation among us that would be based
on mutual recognition of one another as having the same access, in principle,
to the world and thus to truth.

7

By governing the kind of communication that

goes on among human beings, such a form of reciprocity would have an
explicitly moral character. This is not to say that either in one’s own case or in
that of others this relation would be perfectly realized. Doubtless, the
obligations it carries would be honored as much in the breach as in the
observance, as has always been the case. Even so, its authority as the
ontological source of moral distinctions could, in my judgment, have been
compellingly argued.

The signiŽ cance of the fact that there is this account of Mitsein in Being

and Time

is clear. It is that the large design of that work did not stand in the

way of such a concept or require that it not be developed in a way that would
have supplied some of the moral constraints that are missing from the account
Heidegger actually gave of choice and action. It follows that if, as he in fact
did, Heidegger preferred to pass up this opportunity and remain with the stark
contrast between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ as it stands in Being and Time,
this has to be viewed more as a failure that is chargeable to him personally
than as a vice inherent in the style of thought he developed in Being and Time.
There is, moreover, nothing trivial about this failure. If he had been able to
develop further the logic of his conception of Mitsein, he could have avoided
the hazards associated with an authenticity that has no moral limits and there
would have been no need for the subjection of all human choice and action to
a mythically conceived ‘being’ that occurs in the later writings. The concept
of Mitsein could, in other words, have offered a middle ground between the
hyper-activistic and hyper-quietistic versions of the moral life between which
he himself moved. The idea would have been that the possibility of a
reciprocal presentation of one’s choices to other human beings as being
consistent with their interests could supply the basis for moral validity. That
would have required, however, that he accept the fact that such ‘interests’
count for something; and for all his commitment to human Ž nitude, such an
idea of the good may always have seemed a bit too rooted in ‘everydayness’
for his tastes. Although he was the philosopher par excellence of human
Ž nitude, his mind seemed to move, by preference, between much grander

276 Frederick A. Olafson

alternatives. One of those was the distinctively modern project of Being and
Time

, and he was apparently unwilling to amend it in a way that would at least

have acknowledged the principle of mutuality as a basis for moral validity
under conditions of just such Ž nitude.

In spite of the availability to him of these interesting possibilities,

Heidegger’s thinking about society and history moved into very different
channels. More speciŽ cally, he was deeply interested in the thought of Ernst
Junger, the author of a well-known book, Der Arbeiter (1932), that presented
the worker and the technology of which he was the bearer as introducing a
new kind of society that would replace the bourgeois order of the nineteenth
century.

8

Under these new auspices there was to be something like a ‘total

mobilization’ (totale Mobilmachung) of society – a mobilization in which
Germans would put aside the bourgeois mentality and live the life of soldiers
and workers. To Heidegger, this meant that in this new order the German
people would be enabled to transcend its ordinary mode of life by the
resoluteness of the leader to whom it would have subordinated itself, although
how that kind of subordination could count as authenticity was never
explained. In the matter of technology that Ž gured so prominently in Junger’s
writings, one might have expected that Heidegger would be primarily
concerned with the threat it represented to any traditional mode of life and
that his attitude would have been as negative from the start as it was to
become later. That fear was undoubtedly implicit in the attitude he took; but
in the period of his attachment to the Nazi cause there was another more
positive view as well. He appears to have held that technology could
somehow be mastered and turned to good uses by a regime like Hitler’s. In
this way, a matrix would be created within which technology would Ž nd its
proper place in which it would be subject to the will of such a people and not
be the uncontrolled plaything of a consumer society.

With the rise and advent to power of the Nazi party, Heidegger evidently

thought he had identiŽ ed the political instrumentality that could give effect to
these ideas. He was, of course, conspicuously lacking in any actual
experience of the political world; but that fact did not lead him to question
his own judgments in such matters. It is tempting to trace this deeply felt
afŽ nity with the Nazi cause to the fact that it was characterized by a dual
allegiance to the old and the new as Heidegger’s own thought was. In the Nazi
case, there was a marked contrast between a Blut und Boden anti-modernism
and, on the other hand, a deployment of modern technologies and
organizational techniques that were anything but traditional. Indeed,
Heidegger appears to have understood Nazism as a way of having things
both ways. It proposed a drastic reform of German national life that would
replace the unheroic life-style of a bourgeois society with something much
more vital and authentic. At the same time, it would somehow protect the
vo¨lkisch

traditions of Germany – that is, Messkirch – by the military and

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

277

economic power of a modern state that had been placed in the service of those
traditions.

It seems evident that the life of such a society as the one Heidegger

conceived would be one great act of self-assertion – the equivalent at the
social level of the kind of authentic choice on the part of an individual human
being that Heidegger had described in Being and Time.

9

Although it has been

convincingly argued that Nietzsche should not be seen as a Nazi avant la
lettre, there is a clear sense in which such a society would have realized the
kind of ruthless independence from moral constraints that he called for. In the
life of such a society, neither individual human beings within it nor other
nations and peoples would have any rights that could stand in the way of the
collective will. Nor would they have any rights to express their preferences
with respect to the content of that will. The idea of an interest on the part of
such an individual that could be in con ict with the interest of the whole as
expressed in the decisions of its leader would simply not be accepted, and in
that sense individual human beings would count for nothing.

10

It has often been said that Heidegger aspired to be the philosophical guide

of the revolution taking place in his country – to be, in fact, the Fu¨hrer of the
Fu¨hrer. That never happened; and one can only wonder at the magnitude of
the self-delusion that such an ambition betrays. How could Heidegger ever
have imagined that his concept of Dasein or of being had anything to do with
the inspiration or the goals of the Nazi movement? In one sense, one could
even argue that his ‘Nazism’ was the idiosyncratic product of his own thought
and had relatively little in common with the real-world Nazism of Adolf
Hitler. If this were offered as a ground of exculpation, however, it would be a
specious argument since he actively collaborated with that real-world version.
What really counts is the fact that the national community he was himself
imagining was in certain crucial respects just as undeterred by moral
considerations as the real Nazi movement was. It is true that racism and
genocide did not form a part of his vision as it did in the Nazi plan.
Nevertheless, it has become dismayingly evident that he was prepared to
adopt the language of racism on occasion and so this difference can hardly
have re ected principled opposition by Heidegger to the program that led to
the death camps.

11

Can one conclude from this that Heidegger’s thought was compromised

across the board by his afŽ liation with Nazism? What has been shown is that
it was his failure to assign any real place within his thought to the principle of
respect for other human beings, together with a profound dislike for most of
the characteristic institutions of the modern world, that made it possible for
him to associate his thought with the Nazi cause. The real issue, therefore, is
whether that failure itself was a necessary consequence of the other major
elements within the theory of human being he had proposed. As already
noted, no one has been able to show convincingly that the central concepts

278 Frederick A. Olafson

developed in that work – Dasein, world, readiness-to-hand, temporality, or
even being-toward-death – presuppose or require any special political
orientation. Even in the case of concepts like those of fate and historicity that
have Ž gured prominently in efforts to implicate Heidegger’s thought in his
Nazism, there is every reason to think that they are politically neutral.

12

‘Fate’

does sound rather spooky since it may suggest that the conduct of human
affairs is being assigned to some supra-individual force of unknown intent.
Nevertheless, something that might as well bear that name does play a role in
our lives, both individual and collective. It was, for example, in no way part of
the life-plan of young American men in the Ž rst half of this century to have to
Ž ght and sometimes die in two great wars. It was, instead, in a perfectly clear
sense, their fate. Again it was the fate of the Polish people that their country
became the battle-ground between two larger and more powerful neighbors.
What the concept of fate expresses is the undeniable fact that human life must
contend with circumstances that are not only not of its own choosing but can
effectively destroy it. It does not seem at all likely that facts of this kind can
simply be removed from human history and so a concept that acknowledges
them is plainly needed, whatever it may be called.

The answer I would give to the rhetorical question that opens the preceding

paragraph is an emphatic ‘No’. The conception of political society Heidegger
developed in his Nazi period was not dictated by the theses of Being and
Time

. These could have made a place for a principle of reciprocal recognition

among individual human beings and thus for a principle of moral limits. This
would have meant that the ordinary experience of ordinary people as they live
with one another could yield the basis for a strong concept of moral
obligation. This, in turn, could have been understood as the basis for an at
least quasi-authentic society that Heidegger needed. But because he did not
have at his disposal any working conception of a society that would be based
on such a recognition when he turned to questions about society and history in
the early Thirties, he could not conceive leadership as growing out of and
resting on a network of ethical relationships that was already, if imperfectly,
in being. Instead, it would have to be conceived as the resoluteness of some
individual, however achieved, that could somehow raise the mass of the
people up out of their deeply inauthentic mode of life. Needless to say, they
would not be called to any form of social or political life that could be called
‘democratic’ and so that feature of the modern world would be effectively
side-tracked. In its place would be the profoundly illiberal society that seems
to have been the only one that Heidegger could effectively conceive and
subscribe to.

As all these developments show, Heidegger had, in the space of about a

decade, travelled an immense distance from the world into which he was
born. The radical originality of the philosophical achievement that we
associate with his name had emerged once and for all in the pages of Being

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

279

and Time

. One can only guess at how the further development of the central

theses of that work would have proceeded if Heidegger had not been drawn
into the political life of his time. There is, however, as I hope to show, reason
to think that he would have reacted against certain aspects of the position he
had taken in Being and Time even if it had never come to be associated with
political activism. That reaction, when it came, re ected two quite different
sets of facts. There was, Ž rst, the tension between the rejection of the modern
world that came out of his allegiance to Messkirch and the pronouncedly
modern character of his own thought with its Nietzschean afŽ nities.
Somehow, one suspects, that tension would have had to be resolved in some
way that made a larger place for the authority of tradition than does the rather
equivocal discussion devoted to it in Being and Time. There were also purely
philosophical considerations having to do with the status of the concept of
being as such that was originally scheduled to be set forth in Section 3 of Part
I of Being and Time but never in fact appeared. In the next section, it will be
shown that these required substantial qualiŽ cations of the conception of
human being in the published sections of that work. In any case, it was in this
quite unstable condition of his own thought that Heidegger had to deal with
the political realities in his own country that were created by the assumption
of power by the Nazis. As things turned out, the political program of the Nazis
appears to have converged, in Heidegger’s eyes, with his own thinking about
the situation of Germany. The consequences of that apparent convergence
were to be disastrous for Heidegger’s reputation both as a thinker and as a
human being.

II

When one tries to get at the sense Heidegger himself made of the debacle in
which Nazism and his own intellectual and moral investment in it ended, the
best evidence may be the direction his subsequent thought took rather than the
few public statements he made. Those statements were markedly unrepentant
and self-serving. Heidegger not only remained a member of the Nazi Party
from the time of his resignation as Rector of the University of Freiburg in
1934 until the end of the war; he even went so far as to re-print in the 1950s a
passage from his lectures in the 1930s in which he referred to ‘the inner truth
and greatness’ of National Socialism. There was no acknowledgment that he
had associated his own thought with a political movement that carried out the
mass-murder of the European Jews – an event that he equated with the
bombing of Dresden at the end of the war. In a rather different vein, there
have been reports that he blamed Nietzsche for the trouble his views had got
him, Heidegger, into; but even if these are true, they appear to make
Heidegger himself the victim. That is hardly the mea culpa that was surely in

280 Frederick A. Olafson

order. Claims have also been made by Heidegger’s supporters that his lectures
at Freiburg were salted with comments that expressed his alienation from the
actuality of Nazism from 1934 on. If the pense´es that he was setting down at
the time and appeared in his posthumously published Beitra¨ge zur
Philosophie

are a fair sample of what he was saying and thinking at the

time, it seems to have been pretty tame stuff and might easily have eluded the
eye of a censor. Altogether, the claim that Heidegger ever did anything to
rock the Nazi boat appears to lack any real foundation in fact. And there is no
evidence at all that he saw what he had done as re ecting an abysmal failure
of moral understanding as it in fact did.

The evidence offered by his writings from the mid-Thirties onward is

another story. Unfortunately, they too avoid the issue of his personal
responsibility. What they do do is to use the conceptual apparatus of Being
and Time

which was still mostly in place so as to make it serve a signiŽ cantly

different purpose. If there was a failure in Being and Time to acknowledge our
responsibilities to one another as human beings, the later writings remove the
whole issue of human responsibility and freedom from the discussion and
assign all agency to being which is thus conceived, in spite of all Heidegger’s
prohibitions against just this move, as a super-entity. But in order to
understand what Heidegger is doing in this later phase, one has to interpret
Being and Time

itself in a way that goes beyond the kind of philosophical

anthropology discussed above to the deeper priorities of his thought.

There is a strong temptation to view this phase of Heidegger’s thought as

an ideological smokescreen – a disguise for the failure in which his Nazis
adventure had ended. There are, however, serious and recognizably
philosophical issues that are raised in these later writings although it is
extremely difŽ cult for those unaccustomed to Heidegger’s idiom of thought
to understand what he is about. It has already been pointed out that the change
of course they mark re ected both genuine philosophical considerations that
speak against some of the theses of Being and Time and a sense on
Heidegger’s part that the whole idea of a ‘total mobilization’ as a response to
the human condition had been misconceived. This is not to say that he was
moved in any deep way by the human costs entailed by the forms that
mobilization has actually assumed. Instead, what troubled him most seems to
have been the idea that human beings can take their fate into their own hands
and act independently of any signals that may be sent their way by being
itself. Since the idea that something called ‘being’ could play any such role is
likely to strike most people as quite mystifying, the role of being as such in his
later thought must be examined.

This is the concept that expresses what I have called the deeper priorities of

Heidegger’s thought. Although this concern with being is often thought to
have emerged in the course of the turn or Kehre that occurred in the Thirties,
there is every reason to think that Heidegger meant what he said about its

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

281

central place in his thought at the beginning of Being and Time. It does not
follow that the precise status of being as such within that work was clearly
deŽ ned at that time. Indeed, the evidence we have suggests that it may have
been conceived quite differently from the way it later came to be. The
publication of Heidegger’s lectures from 1927 contains what amounts to a
draft of the third section of Part I of that work in which the concept of being
was to be set forth.

13

What strikes one about the treatment of being in those

lectures is how closely it is tied to human being or Dasein. The fact that
during his lifetime Heidegger never published this version of Section 3 of Part
I is surely a strong indication that he was not satisŽ ed with it and therefore
presumably not with its way of relating Dasein to being. His decision not to
go ahead with this account of being is what I take to be the beginning of the
‘turn’ that was to lead his thought into its later phase. It pre-dates the advent to
power of Nazism as well as Heidegger’s own participation in it so a political
motive for this alteration of course does not seem at all plausible. What I am
suggesting is, once again, that the line of thought he was developing in Being
and Time

had brought him too close to formulations concerning being as such

that assimilated it to Dasein as the human mode of being.

The reason why being cannot and must not be assimilated to the mode of

being of Dasein is quite simply that there are many Daseins and no one of
them can own or generate the being that is common to (and a necessary
condition for) them all. How being is itself to be conceived has given a great
deal of trouble, mainly because the answer Heidegger gives to this question –
‘The fundamental character of being is presence (Anwesenheit)’ – is one that
he had appeared to reject in Being and Time.

14

The explanation of this

apparent contradiction is that the presence with which Heidegger identiŽ es
being is not the static tenseless presence that the Greeks had conceived it to
be. It was a tensed being that comprises pastness and futurity as well as the
present as the conditions under which things are and have been and are about
to be. To use a metaphor that Heidegger put to a somewhat different use in
Being and Time

, one could say that being is the Between that, in the language

of Plato, connects knowledge with its object and does so, according to
Heidegger, by enabling the latter to be there for the ‘knower’.

15

The other essential element in the account the later Heidegger gives of

being is the fact that being as presence ‘hides itself’ in the sense that, in
making it possible for entities to be there, it is itself eclipsed so that it is as
though there were only entities. This (dis)appearance of being is what deŽ ned
metaphysics for Heidegger as a systematic confusion of being as such and
entities and thus the presence of entities with their existence. This led him to
conceive something that he calls the history of being which is really the
history of the various disguises in which being as such has (dis)appeared. He
insists that this history is not the history of philosophy or of human thought in
some broader sense and also that it is not in any way subject to the control of

282 Frederick A. Olafson

the thinkers whose names have been associated with these transformations. In
a way, this idea stems from the claim in Being and Time that Dasein – we
human beings – in one sense understands its own mode of being but in another
persistently gets it wrong when it tries to work out a concept of itself. The
relation between Dasein and being has now been reversed and Dasein is a
(necessary) counterpart of being instead of somehow generating it in its
disclosure of entities. Nevertheless, the same difŽ culty still arises when we try
to form a concept of being as such. It eludes us by assuming some other guise
which is always that of a super-entity of some kind – the World-Spirit or the
Will To Power, for example – and the result has been that we live mostly in a
condition of Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by being) in which being
shows itself only by its absence. An understanding of being is thus at once at
the center of our lives and our history and, in a quite radical way, out of our
hands and even invisible to us.

What Heidegger has to say about the modern European period in the

history of being has a special interest. His thesis is that from Descartes
onward the effort of philosophical and scientiŽ c thought has been to achieve
certainty in its grasp of the way the world around it works. This certainty in
turn is instrumental to a determination to control and exploit the natural world
for our own purposes. The goal of this effort is to establish the control of the
human mind as ‘the subject of subjects’ over the criteria for what is to count
as real. Being is in this way effectively designed by human thought and
projected upon things in the world; and any sense we may have had of the
latter as showing themselves to us and of ourselves as the beneŽ ciaries of
their presence has been completely lost. What has just been said and the
active verbs used in saying it may seem to make all of this a chapter in the
history of human thought and human praxis. For Heidegger, however, it is
being as presence itself that is at work here in one or another of its
manifestations as what it is not. One of the guises in which it (dis)appears is
the reiŽ ed ontology that is appropriate to an age of technology; but there, too,
being manifests itself by its absence. For all its vaunted self-sufŽ ciency, the
technological world-view is just as dependent upon what is ‘given’ to it as any
other.

Since Nietzsche played such an important role in Heidegger’s early thought,

the place assigned to him in this history of being deserves particular attention.
Throughout the Thirties Heidegger gave lectures on Nietzsche’s thought and
there is also a major paper from 1943 on his thesis about the death of God.

16

Nietzsche’s stature as a thinker is still as impressive in Heidegger’s eyes as it
ever was; but it is very differently interpreted. Heidegger argues that Nietzsche
completes the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy – the one
inaugurated by Plato and, according to Heidegger, carried forward by
Descartes – that deals only with entities and misses the fact of being as
presence altogether. Nietzsche’s innovation was to introduce an affective and

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

283

volitional element into the way the being of entities is projected upon them.
Being as such, in its properly conceived independence from human praxis for
which it serves as a necessary condition, is reduced to the status of what
Heidegger calls das Gema¨chte – the creature or utensil – of human intelligence
and will. If piety is, as Santayana suggested, a sense of reverence for the deepest
sources of our being (and thus presumably for being itself, however construed),
then the manic self-assertion that is implicit in Nietzsche’s whole conception of
a will to power that sets the seal of being on becoming would have to be judged
to be irreverent and even impious in the highest degree.

What is so extraordinary about the account of being that Heidegger himself

presents is that it removes all agency from human life and attributes it to
being. Being apparently arranges all the scenarios for what we have thought
of as our lives – the lives for which we ourselves had also been thought to be
in some signiŽ cant measure responsible. The original idea of being as
presence was the idea of something that makes possible the being-there for
human beings of things as well as other human beings.

17

The further ordering

of the entities so disclosed was understood to be governed by pragmatic
considerations – the ways in which things might be used. It certainly did not
portray being as itself the imposition of some kind of super-order on this
milieu of presence. To assign it such a function is, as has already been pointed
out, to treat it as though it were an entity of some kind with powers of its own,
among them the power to hide and disguise itself and to make the world at
least seem to conform to its current version of itself. Not only does Heidegger
leave behind the pragmatic themes of his early thought; he even condemns
evaluative judgment as such as a subjectivization of being. This effectively
leaves human beings only the pitifully reduced agency implicit in their having
the option of listening to what being may have to impart to them or going on
blindly in their own way which on this view will not even be really theirs. But
if there is no judgment of the relative value of alternative outcomes, rational
agency itself will be excluded and so the Ž nal message the later Heidegger
leaves us with is something like a Lennonesque ‘Let it be!’

This is a heavy price to have to pay for having overstepped the bounds

within which human beings are evidently, on this view, supposed to remain.
But in any case, the question must be: what do these limits derive from? One
thing about this is clear and that is that if hubris was indeed involved in the
project of Being and Time, it had nothing to do with any violation of
something that may have been owed to other human beings. If Heidegger’s
reaction had been primarily motivated by the horrors of the Nazi period – the
actual and needless harm suffered by the peoples of the world – it would have
marked a true revolution in his attitudes. Unfortunately, other human beings
as well as anything resembling a reciprocal moral relation in which we all
stand to one another remain the great absentees from Heidegger’s thought in
all its major periods.

284 Frederick A. Olafson

It seems clear that it was the distinctly numinous character Heidegger

attributed to being as such that motivated this extreme but morally irrelevant
reaction against certain themes of his own earlier thought. There is, moreover,
no plausible source for his sense of this numinous character within the
structures of his own philosophical thought. Its  avor is markedly religious
and so it is reasonable to assume that it is a transmogriŽ ed version of
something from his religious upbringing and education that had stayed with
Heidegger through all the vicissitudes of his thought. It is not surprising, then,
that he should have come to hold that being as presence, which certainly is not
amenable to any kind of scientiŽ c explanation, is a gift – a gift of God or ‘the
gods’ – and that thinking (Denken) as a response to this gift is a kind of
thanking (Danken).

18

To treat such a gift, as Nietzsche had done and as

Heidegger may have feared he too had done, as though it were something that
we can control and perhaps even generate ourselves was, in his eyes, a grave
violation of a fundamental hierarchical difference embedded in the nature of
things. As such, it activated his deepest religious feelings. One might hope
that these also expressed Heidegger’s reaction to the calamity to which the
whole Nazi adventure had led and to the endorsement he had given it in the
belief that it was a realization of his own idea of a national community. Of
that, however, there was no sign.

III

If one tries to sum up all the elements in this extremely complex situation, it is
difŽ cult not to have the feeling that when Heidegger entered the world of
human affairs and politics with which he had previously had minimal contact,
he did so in a way that intensiŽ ed the con ict in his thought him between
tradition and modernity. He wanted to stand by the Messkirch way of life, but
he could hardly do so while espousing the conception of human being set
forth in Being and Time. There might have been a way of at least attempting
to do justice to the legitimate claims of both traditional forms of human co-
existence and the kind of ethical non-cognitivism Heidegger had espoused in
that work. I have argued that the concept of Mitsein might have made
something of that kind possible; but although Heidegger had developed that
concept, he did not put it to any such use. As a result, he had to alternate
between an extreme activism and an equally extreme quietism, neither of
which could give any satisfactory account of the source of moral authority. I
would also want to argue that, as a result, a historic opportunity was missed –
an opportunity to associate an unambiguously moral character with a
radically modern, non-theistic conception of human being.

When one tries to get a clear sense of the individual, Heidegger, who

moved through all these vicissitudes of life and thought, it is hard to avoid a

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

285

sense that he never truly understood the human reality of the matters that were
at issue in the one and the other. T. S. Eliot once said of Oscar Wilde that he
had been like a child actor; by that he presumably meant that it was as though
Wilde had spoken his lines in a play that he could not really understand.
Heidegger was not a child; but his career gives one a similar sense of someone
who is simply not responding to the central moral facts of the matters he is
ostensibly addressing, perhaps because he is somehow unable to register
them. If that is so, it would be in keeping with his conspicuous failure as a
philosopher ever to conceive our relations with other human beings as
involving a bond and thus a limit on what we may permissibly do in that
relation. That notion of a limit is what is introduced in the later writings, but it
is introduced in a way that does not connect it to other human beings and in
fact erases human agency as such. In Being and Time human choice and
agency were conceived in a way that made no place for anything like
obligation; it was as though Heidegger wanted to set it aside in favor of an
expansive Nietzschean freedom. In the resulting absence of any principle of
moral linkage among human selves, social authority had to derive from
superior natures that impose their will on lesser beings. But when his reaction
to this freedom set in, reinforced no doubt by the disasters to which it had led
in its Nazi exempliŽ cation, it was outsized and extreme. Now it was agency
and choice as such that were treated much as morality and obligation had been
previously. They were condemned because they derogate from the majesty of
being – a being that now takes on many of the attributes of the divine.
‘Instability’ is the most charitable word that can be used to characterize these
strange alternations.

None of this exculpates Heidegger in the matter of his service to Nazism.

What it does suggest, however, is that the drama of Heidegger’s public life is
best understood not so much in terms of some primary identiŽ cation on his
part with the brutal character and goals of the Nazi regime as in terms of an
unresolved con ict within his own thought (and, one may guess, his own life
as well) that concerns the relation between Ego and Alter at its deepest moral
level as well as the principle of moral authority by which that relation is to be
governed. What makes this failure so deeply regrettable is the fact that in
other respects his insights into the distinctive character of human being were
original and profound in a way that is truly rare in philosophy. It is tragic that
they will very likely never get the hearing they deserve because his failure,
both personal and philosophical, to Ž nd a place in his thought for moral
relationships has identiŽ ed his name and his philosophy with the darkest
chapter in modern Western history. In this century he was certainly not alone
in his blindness to this matter. But this signal failure on the part of a thinker
who opened so many doors in philosophy has, if anything, aggravated the
difŽ culties that still surround our whole consideration of the moral dimension
of human being.

19

286 Frederick A. Olafson

N OT E S

1 It may seem as though the thesis of this paper contradicts the claim I have made elsewhere

that there is a continuity in Heidegger’s thought that bridges the Kehre. My argument has

been that there was a shift from a conception of existence, in Heidegger’s special sense of

this term, as the ground of presence to a conception of presence as the ground of existence,

but that the conception of being as presence is not affected by this shift. What I am saying

here is that in neither period of his thought was Heidegger able to integrate an

understanding of moral relations among human beings with his conception of their Mitsein.

That was a grievous failure; but it does not affect the unity of his thought in other respects.

See my essay, ‘The Unity of Heidegger’s Thought’ in The Cambridge Companion to

Heidegger

, ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 9.

2 This certainly holds for two books in English that have tried to establish this conclusion:

Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (University of California Press:

Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1992) and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1990). Both of these writers appear to be much more interested

in politics than they are in philosophy; and neither demonstrates any real understanding of

the aims or the achievements of Heidegger’s philosophical thought.

3 The passage in which Heidegger comes closest to such an acknowledgment with respect to

Being and Time

occurs in his Nietzsche (Neske: Pfullingen, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 194–5.

4 Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin:

Propylaen, 1992). In some ways this is the best appraisal of the whole Nazi episode in

Heidegger’s career.

5 I have given a detailed account and analysis of this whole doctrine of Mitsein and its ethical

import in my book, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge/

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

6 Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer: Tubingen, 1957), p. 123.

7 The idea here is that truth-telling is a moral obligation and that, as such, it governs the

representations we make to other people of the impact, for good or bad, of our actions upon

their lives. For a fuller account, see my Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics, op. cit., ch. 1.

8 One needs to keep in mind the fact that Heidegger’s own background was not at all

‘bourgeois’ and that this may have contributed to his willingness to see the whole bourgeois

world pulled down by the Nazi revolution. When the famous exchange took place in Davos,

Switzerland between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer as the representative of the classical

German tradition in philosophy, there seem to have been some doubts, at least in the mind

of Cassirer’s wife, whether Heidegger was even, in that wonderful German expression,

salonfa¨hig

.

9 It has to be understood that ‘self-assertion’ here is not equivalent to selŽ shness or outright

aggression although it may, of course, take either of those forms. What it does denote is the

absence of any true moral vis-a`-vis for whom some right of equal consideration would have

to be acknowledged.

10 One of the ways in which Heidegger did express his dissent from orthodox Nazi thought

was by criticizing the idea that many ‘selves’ together in a community could, even in the

absence of a proper relation to being, generate a validity for their actions that an individual

self could not. Such remarks occur in his lectures on Nietzsche and in the Beitra¨ge zur

Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)

, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly as Contributions to Philosophy

(Enowning)

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). In the latter, see, e.g., pp.

68, 98–99, 321, 398.

11 These matters have been placed on the historical record in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A

Political Life

, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Victor Farias,

Heidegger and Nazism

, trans. Paul Burrell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

Heidegger himself made two major statements about his involvement in Nazism. One dates

from the time of his appearance before a de-naziŽ cation commission in 1945 and is entitled

Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken

. The other is the famous interview

Heidegger gave Der Spiegel in 1966. Neither one of them offers anything that could be

regarded as an explanation of how his philosophical thought pointed him toward Nazism.

Heidegger’s Thought and Nazism

287

12 It has been suggested, on the basis of a remark made by Heidegger himself, that the concept

of historicity moved Heidegger into Nazism. It may well be that this concept played an

important role in his awakening to the political realities of his time from which he had

previously lived at a very considerable distance. It cannot, however, have provided him

with the view of the German situation in his time that led him into Nazism. As he

formulated it, historicity acknowledges the quite general fact that collective action has as its

context the way a generation understands its own past and responds to the present situation

in which that past has issued and does so in the name of a certain future. Because it is a

quite general feature of human being in its plurality and its historical situatedness,

historicity as such cannot be assigned any particular political complexion.

13 See Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Pha¨nomenologie, Gesamtausgabe , II, vol. 24 (V.

Klostermann: Frankfurt, 1975), p. 318, where Heidegger went so far as to ask in a rhetorical

question whether being itself should not be said to ‘exist’ just as ‘truth’ and ‘world’ had

already been. This is, of course, the word that is reserved for Dasein and to apply it to being

is emphatically to pull being itself into the orbit of Dasein.

14 This statement occurs in Heidegger’s Zollikoner Seminare (V. Klostermann: Frankfurt am

Main, 1987) p. 283. I have discussed it in ‘Heidegger on Presence: A Reply’, Inquiry 39

(1996), pp. 421–6.

15 See Plato’s Republic, book 6.

16 See ‘Nietzsches Wort: “Gott Ist Tot” ’ in Heidegger’s collection of essays, Holzwege (V.

Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1980).

17 See, e.g., the many references to presence (as both Anwesenheit and Pra¨senz) in the lectures

that constitute an early version of Being and Time: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des

Zeitbegriffs

, Gesamtausgabe, II, vol. 20, pp. 252–71.

18 Beitra¨ge zur Philosophie is full of references to ‘the gods’ and to the ‘last god’ whose

‘passage’ (Vorbeigang) is somehow connected to the gift of presence.

19 The charge that Heidegger and Nietzsche were somehow responsible for the moral

relativism of students in American universities was made by Alan Bloom in his book The

Closing of the American Mind

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), but it was attenuated

by an acknowledgement that the version of their views current in the milieux in question

was a crude over-simpliŽ cation.

Received 20 February 2000

Frederick A. Olafson, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla

CA 92093-0119, USA. E-mail: [e-mail]

288 Frederick A. Olafson