Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

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Heidegger, the Pólis, the Political and Gelassenheit

Tracy B. Strong

To cite this article: Tracy B. Strong (2016) Heidegger, the Pólis, the Political and
Gelassenheit , Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 47:2, 157-173, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2016.1145888

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 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY, 2016
VOL. 47, NO. 2, 157–173
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2016.1145888

Heidegger, the Pólis, the Political and Gelassenheit

Tracy B. Strong
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK, UCSD Distinguished Professor, emeritus

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. (Nietzsche,
The Gay Science, #370)

[Heidegger’s attraction to Nazism might be] internal to understanding Heidegger’s work. …

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The terrible fact, one that the picture of simple separation may wish to deny, is that Nazism
has its philosophical as well as political attractions. (Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know1)

The recent publication of the so-called “Black Notebooks” has once again brought to a
polemical forefront the question of the importance of Heidegger’s Nazism for his philoso-
phical thought. Yet in the swirling controversy, the question of Heidegger’s understanding
of the political – that is, of a particular form of relations between human beings – has
tended to be obscured by his apparent endorsement of the Nazi regime. I make here the
distinction made easily in French between “le politique” – the political – and “la politique”
– politics – and argue that Heidegger has a serious understanding of “the political” that is
not necessarily coincident with his appreciation of politics – although he may have either
thought or hoped it was.
A few preliminaries are necessary as ground-setting. The point – one of the points – of
Heidegger’s essay on “The Question Concerning Technology” is to show that in the
making of something the making takes place or rather can take place not in and by the
imposition of form on matter, but in allowing an entity to disclose itself to and in and
as a world. Heidegger’s word for this is Gelassenheit, which he defines as “openness to
the mystery” of that “which shows itself and at the same time withdraws”.2 In art one
might think of Michelangelo’s remark that in sculpting all he did was to remove what
was not the statue: he allowed the statue to come to appearance. Notably Heidegger’s
major discussion of Gelassenheit occurs in a “Conversation” – for it is in and by conversa-
tion that understanding emerges rather than being imposed by one figure or another.3
(Hence, Plato’s dialogues must be understood as conversations that allow understanding
to emerge). The valorization of Gelassenheit makes the point that human beings are in
danger of living such that their understanding is consisted only in and by the categories
they impose on that which is, categories that have a particular human origin. Paradigmatic
of this danger for Heidegger is technology, which for him consists primarily in an attack
on the world in order to make it known by bringing it under the control of categories that
manifest the imposition of existing human structures. Heidegger would agree with Bacon

CONTACT Tracy B. Strong [email protected]

1
Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know, 502. On the political attractions see Michael Mann, Fascism, 78–91.
2
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 55.
3
See Barbara Dall Pezze, “Heidegger on Gelassenheit”.
© 2016 The British Society for Phenomenology
 158 T.B. STRONG

that (a certain kind of) “knowledge is power” and finds that this is precisely what is not to
be willed. If we can refrain from that, he claims, “we can use technical devices and yet with
proper use also keep ourselves so free of them that we may let go of them any time.”4
(There are obvious manifestations of this: one has less and less the sense that a large
portion of the population is able live without operating ear-buds.)
Elsewhere, Gelassenheit is similarly defined as “the spirit of availability before What-Is
which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their
mystery”. Key here is the notion of “uncertainty”: there is no reason that anything is. It
is no accident that in the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger starts by asking “why
are there beings at all rather than nothing” – a modification of Leibniz’s question in
“On the Ultimate Origin of Things” as to “why is there any world at all?” Heidegger’s ques-
tion is the first line in a book that introduces the reader to metaphysics. He will assert two
pages later that this is the “broadest … and also the deepest [question]”. In my reading, he
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will seek to show that such a question is itself fundamentally metaphysical for it presup-
poses that the world is there for humans to take control of, that there might be a “why”, i.e.
something beyond (meta) this world (physis). Rather, Heidegger calls for a thinking
without willing, without imposition on the world.5 While we can construct the world
(as constructivists tell us we do), what we get is our world and not the world. The
theme recurs in Wallace Stevens’ jar on a hill and is one of which Hannah Arendt will
make much in her volume Willing.

What Political Role for Knowledge and the University?

So much for preliminaries. In 1933, Heidegger joins the Nazi Party and is chosen Rector of
the University of Freiburg. In his inaugural Rectorate address, he argues that through Wis-
senschaft (“science” – but in a very broad sense6) the German university “educates and dis-
ciplines the leaders and guardians of the destiny of the German people”.7 He then relates
Wissenschaft to knowledge and thus to philosophy. Calling on an old story that Pro-
metheus was the first philosopher, he cites a line from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound
(514): “τέχνη δ᾽ ἀνάγκης ἀσθενεστέρα μακρῷ – tekne d’anagkes asthenestera makro”,
which he translates as “Wissen aber ist weit unkräftiger denn Notwendigkeit. – Knowing
however is far less powerful than necessity.”8 What is striking is his rendering of tekne
as Wissen – knowledge. Science is a making. Of what? Heidegger says that knowing is help-
less before fate (after all, this is the point of a tragedy). It must therefore develop its
“highest defiance [or disobedience – Trotz]” and this defiance will call for “all the
power of the hiddenness of what is”. The key is then this: “Just in this way, what is
opens itself in its unfathomable inalterity and lends knowing its truth.” The result,
4
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 54.
5
Ibid., 79–80.
6
Germans speak of, e.g., Kunstwissenschaft (“Art Science”) and Theologisches Wissenschaft (“Theological Science”).
7
Heidegger, “Self Assertion of the German University”, 3.
8
Tekne generally means “knowledge of principles with intent to making something”. James Scully’s Oxford translation gives:
“Art is far feebler than Necessity.” It is worth noting that the previous line and a half is “μυρίαις δὲ πημοναι ̃ς δύαις τε
καμϕθεὶ ς ω͑ ̃ δε δεσμὰ ϕυγγάνω” which gives “Only when I have been bent by pangs and tortures infinite am I to
escape my bondage.” Scully gives: “Ten thousand sorrows must wrench me. That’s the way I escape my chains.” 514
is a much discussed passage. See Stephen Daitz, “A Re-interpretation of Prometheus Bound 514, 13–17, who reads
tekne as referring to the craftsmanship of Hephaestus (and not to Prometheus) and anangke to a universal necessity
beyond the power of Zeus. Prickard’s Oxford edition of 1878 has the same reading.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 159

however, is, one may say, political in the sense he attributes to the pólis9: “For the Greeks
science is not a ‘cultural good,’ but the innermost determining center of the entire manner
in which humans are a people and the philosophers are to become ϕúλαχες – guardians.
Control and organization of the state is to be undertaken by philosophers, who set stan-
dards and rules in accordance with the deepest freely inquiring knowledge, thus deter-
mined the general course which society should follow.”10
In 1932, the question of who would be Reichkanzler and what course he might follow
pressed heavily on Germany. It is not pushing too hard to say that 1932–3 seemed to Hei-
degger to present the possibility that he could become a guardian to the new regime, the
leader of the leader. Hence, when he became Chancellor, his insistence on the title of
Führer (and not the usual designation of Magnifisenz) was not an aping of the Nazi
usage but an assertion of superiority, even if it seeks to draw energy from the more
popular use of that word in Germany of the time. Heidegger repeatedly sought to take
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over and give a philosophical meaning to what Graeme Nicholson has called the
“street-vocabulary” of the Nazis.11 Being a “guardian” was a logical development of his
thought; it also betrays in 1933 an assurance about the present and future actuality of
events in Germany that is quite astonishing.12
In 1932, reflecting on the Cave allegory, Heidegger argued that liberation did not consist
simply in the ascent from the cave to the sun. “Rather genuine freedom means to be a lib-
erator from the dark: True freedom is realized in the descent back into the cave and the
freeing of those who are there.”13 Heidegger is also clear that this return to the cave
exposes the philosopher to death – not necessarily an actual death but rather the death of
being unable to overcome “prevailing self-evidences”; such failure will render him “harm-
less and unthreatening”. Only “by laying ahold of [the cave-dwellers] violently and dragging
them away” is there any hope for success.14 Indeed, the philosopher does not “despair”, but
“remains firm”, and “will even go over on the attack and will lay hold of one of them to try to
make him see the light in the cave”.15 It is not clear exactly how far Heidegger might extend
what he means here by violence, although the use of the term is in line with his discussion of
pólemos [war, battle]. It is likely, though, that he thought that the violence associated with
the installation of a new regime was not unrelated to what the philosopher had to do.

The “State” and the Pólis

As we shall see, after the war Heidegger was to modify his position on the task of the phi-
losopher. At this point, however, one needs to explore Heidegger’s understanding of what it
was that was to be guarded such that liberation might occur. In the above passage he refers to
the “State”, indicating that this is not an adequate translation of pólis. Starting in 1935, Hei-
degger returned several times to a discussion of the pólis – to some commentators it has
9
I retain the diacritical mark to signal the difference between the pólis and the “city-state”.
10
Ibid., 73.
11
Carl Schmitt claimed to be doing the same for jurisprudence.
12
See Otto Pöggeler’s essay “Den Führer führen; Heidegger und kein Ende”, 26ff.
13
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 66. I am informed and assisted in this paragraph by the excellent discussion in Mary-Jane
Rubenstein, Strange Wonder. The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, 51–54. See the discussion of freedom
below.
14
Heidegger, idem., 61, 62.
15
Idem., 65.
 160 T.B. STRONG

seemed, and not without reason, that he was trying to distance his own sense of the political
from that which was becoming apparent in National Socialism. These texts include An
Introduction to Metaphysics, the lecture course on Hölderlin’s poem Das Ister (the
Danube), the course entitled Parmenides. It is important to remember, however, that he
had already raised a question about the adequacy of rendering pólis as “city-state” in The
Essence of Truth: Plato’s Cave-allegory and the Theatetus (1932), thus before Hitler’s
appointment as Chancellor, albeit during the time of the rise of National Socialism.
What is the pólis? What brings it into being? A first clue comes from the word “state” –
Staat. One derivation is from the Latin stare – to stand. Another derivation, however, is
from a set of Teutonic words meaning a defined place. The English version of these is
“stead” – as in “homestead” – and as noun it pretty much disappears by the seventeenth
century. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that it means not only “an inhabited
place” but also “a place as designated by the context”. In Middle Low German, the Han-
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seatic cities were referred to as de Steden. It also carries the meaning of “to be in the place
of” as in our “instead of [anstatt]”. Heidegger refuses the Latin derivation in favour of the
Greek–Teutonic understanding.
The pólis is thus not “state” or even “city-state” – Heidegger sneers at people who think
to solve the question by stringing predicates together. It is “rather in the first instance
… ‘the stead’ [die Sitte], the site [die Stätte] of the abode of human history that belongs
to humans in the midst of beings”.16 Earlier he had asserted that the pólis is the polos17
– he calls it both a pole and a vortex (Wirbel) “around which everything turns”. (Polos
is the word that Plato uses in the Timaeus (40c) for the axis of the universe around
which everything turns).
The pólis thus determines the political, and not the other way around. In this sense, the
pólis is at the heart of Heidegger’s teaching. As Heidegger remarks in An Introduction to
Metaphysics: “the pólis is the site of history, the here, in which, out of which and for which
history happens. To this site of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the cel-
ebrations, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly
of the people, the armed forces, and the ships”.18 The list is important: it includes religion,
honour, competition, art, philosophy, politics, commerce and warfare – all the elements of
the Antigone choral ode. The pólis is thus the space of Gelassenheit, not immediately of
politics, but that from which all that is human takes place (which is what history is),
including and especially that which we call politics. Thus our understanding of the politi-
cal presupposes the pólis and not the other way around.19 One might say that in order for
there to be politics humans must live in the pólis – not all relations are political: Weber, for
example, writes that bureaucracy has “nothing to do” with politics. The pólis, as the space
of human Dasein, thus comes into being by that which is unbound by Sein, by that which,
in the words of the Antigone ode, is hupsipólis apólis – above the city, without a city.20

16
Martin Heidegger, Das Ister, 82.
17
See the discussion in Mark Blitz, “Heidegger and the Political”, esp. 182–86.
18
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 162–63.
19
See the similar conclusion in Elden, “Rethinking the Polis”, 416.
20
Antigone 370: α῎ λλοτ᾽ ἐ π᾽ ἐ σθλò ν ε῞ρπει, /νόμους γεραίρων χθονò ς θεω̃ ν τ᾽ ε῎νορκον δίκαν, /ὑψίπολις: α῎ πολις o῞ τω̨ τò μὴ
καλò ν / ξύνεστι τόλμας χάριν. Most translations give little sense of “above the city: without a city”. A rendering of Hei-
degger’s translation gives: “Rising high over the site, losing the site is he for whom what is not, is, always, for the sake of
daring.” There is a parallel here to the discussion of übersehen in chapter eight of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: one is both
above the “world of culture” and without it.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 161

His discussion of art, starting at some time in the middle 1930s,21 leads him to elaborate
his concern with the Dasein of a people, of a collectivity that knows itself to be one. (The
importance of collectivity, though not of a people, was already in Being and Time.) Much
of this exploration takes full form in his lectures on Nietzsche. He criticizes Nietzsche for
giving a Schopenhauerian reading of the beautiful. His reading accepts Kant’s claim that
the aesthetic experience is “without interest” and implies that the “the will is put out of com-
mission”. Into this space he claims, however, Nietzsche wishes to put rapture or Rausch –
Dionysian intoxication that would be the opposite of Kant’s “disinterested delight”. Impor-
tantly, however, Heidegger goes on to say that Nietzsche erred here in being too Schopen-
hauerian. Had he avoided this allegiance, “he would have had to recognize that Kant alone
grasped the essence of what Nietzsche in his own way wanted to comprehend concerning
the decisive aspect of the beautiful”. The decisive aspect of the beautiful – for Heidegger
and in his reading for Nietzsche – is the honouring of what is of worth in its appearance.
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The difference between Kant and Heidegger would then be that Heidegger and Nietzsche
(in Heidegger’s corrected reading) “expand[s] the meaning directly to all historical signifi-
cance and greatness”.22 (Kant’s understanding was not historical.) Although Heidegger is
not explicit about the matter here, it is the case that this reading implies the possibility of
what Kant calls an “enlarged mentality”, thus of a collective aspect to human Dasein. Hei-
degger’s consideration of the pólis is thus an extension of his analysis of the temple in the
“Work of Art” essay. There he had asserted that the temple established a relation
between earth and the gods; in a similar manner, the Van Gogh painting opened us to
and to us the world of the wearer of shoes. The pólis is the space in which humans are
opened up or rather set on their way as and to their historical being as what they are – it is
the space of the political. As Heidegger notes: “Truth happens in the temple’s standing
where it is … what is as a whole is brought into unconcealedness and held therein …
Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something is correctly por-
trayed but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes that which is as
a whole – world and earth in their counterplay – attains to unconcealedness.”23 J.M. Bern-
stein properly calls our attention to the importance of the following passage from the Work
of Art essay: “The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a
subject, but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity into that which is, to the
openness of Being. … In this way, standing-within is brought under law.”24 The move
from the focus in Being and Time to that of the work of the 1930s is a move from individuals
and their relation to each other to the collective (law is always of a collective), a move,
however, that in no way stands in contradiction to his earlier focus on individual relations.
(Hence Heidegger is correct in saying that “Heidegger II” is contained in “Heidegger I”.)25

21
The Origin of the Work of Art is written in 1934; the same year, Heidegger summarizes his views on art in Nietzsche I,
section 12.
22
Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 111 (German: N I 130–31). See the remarks (to which I am indebted) in Jacques Taminiaux, “On
Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art”.
23
“Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 56.
24
Idem. See J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 125–29. My italics.
25
In his introductory letter to William J. Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought. Being and Time is not about the
single individual as Heidegger’s discussion of Mitsein [being-with] and Fürsorge [solicitude] makes clear. See on this the
forthcoming chapter by Babette Babich in her Heidegger et la solicitude. Being and Time starts from the individual and sees
him or her as necessarily in a world with others. The later considerations deal with how a collectivity comes into being
and as such is set on its way. See Hamilton, Federalist paper, # 1 and below.
 162 T.B. STRONG

I have elsewhere averted to the affinity between the political and the aesthetic.26 Both
the political and the aesthetic seek to move from the first person singular to the first person
plural. This is not a move from subjectivity to universality – it is a recognition that the
political claim, like the aesthetic, is constituted by the making available of that which
(in a given set of circumstances) is common to each individual and vice versa. That it is
like the aesthetic is, I think, neither an aesthetization of the political, nor a politicization
of the aesthetic.27
The implication – indeed, the conclusion here – is that the pólis must be understood as
an origin as a work of art. Indeed, in the closing pages of The Origin of the Work of Art,
Heidegger is specific.
Whenever art happens – that is whenever there is a beginning – a thrust enters history,
history either begins or starts over again. History means here … the transporting of a
people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment … Art is historical,
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and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry.
Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding and beginning. Art as founding
is essentially historical.28

The Question of Collectivity: A “People”

Key here is the notion of beginning. Art shows us what a founding (as of a people, a
country, a declaring of independence and autonomy) is and why it is in and of
history.29 He concludes the essay with: “The origin of a work of art – that is, the origin
of both the creators and the preservers – is art. This is so because art is by its nature an
origin: a distinctive way in which the truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.”30
Just after this passage he asks if “we [are] in our existence historically at the origin?” and
suggests that the origin lies in the future – that our founding is to come.31 Such would be
the destiny of a people.
This can sound bad, but it is worth noting that the idea of a historical destiny is not
unique to Heidegger or Germany. Take this well-known passage.
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this
country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies
of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice,
or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident
and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with
propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election
of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of
mankind.

Here we have Hamilton in the first of the Federalist Papers invoking not only a particular
historical mission for the new United States of America but also, much as Heidegger does
26
See Strong, “Politics without Vision”, esp. chapter one.
27
Thus I disagree here with Bernstein, op. cit, 130 and distance Heidegger from Walter Benjamin.
28
“Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 77. My italics.
29
See Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence” and Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and
Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic”.
30
“Origin of Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 78.
31
Hannah Arendt takes up this theme. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl
Schmitt and Hannah Arendt.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 163

in the Rektoratsrede, suggesting that what happens in his particular country is tied to (what
Heidegger was to call) the “spiritual strength of the West”, or at least the general fortunes
of mankind. Note that Hamilton’s “the people of this nation” is precisely what is meant by
Volk.32 Nations, for Heidegger (and indeed Hamilton), come into existence with a destiny
(what Heidegger calls Geschick) and they are aware of their Geschick when they acknowl-
edge the fate (what is “reserved to the people of this country”) that is that of the people of
their nation.33 The Geschick of the Greeks is summarized in the great choral ode from the
Antigone on which Heidegger spends much time in An Introduction to Metaphysics:
sailing and navigation, agriculture, hunting, animal husbandry, speech, ruling, the polis,
dwelling.34 This becomes their Geschichte – their history, told to and by them.
These considerations cast light on, even if they do not mitigate, the much-discussed com-
ments on Weltjudentum in the “Black Notebooks”. For Heidegger, “self assertion” meant
that Germany had to be free to follow its own destiny, a destiny he conceived of as
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linked to National Socialism – and hence should resign from the League of Nations.
About that choice he writes: “This is not a turning away from the community of peoples,
but on the contrary: Our people, with this step, sets itself under the essential law of
human Being to which every people must render allegiance if it is to remain a people.”35
Note that “remaining a people” requires “allegiance” to the “essential law of … Being”.
Heidegger is quite clear in 1933–34 (in the “Black Notebooks”) that National Socialism
has “not fallen as an accomplished eternal truth from the sky – to take it as such would be
an error and a stupidity” (GA36 94: 114–15). Several pages of GA 94 are filled with ques-
tioning [e.g. “Ist das der rechte Weg?”; “Soll unserer Volk?” (pp. 121–22).] Heidegger actu-
ally manifests more questioning about what might count as the “success” of National
Socialism than did many others at the time (see e.g. GA 94: 190, 196). For instance,
David Lloyd George, the first British Prime Minister of working-class origin, sent a
signed picture of himself to Hitler in December 1933 inscribed “To Chancellor Hitler
with admiration for his brilliant gift of courage” and in a September 1935 article in the
Daily Express wrote that Hitler was the “greatest living German” and the “George
Washington of his people”. The point is not that Lloyd George was misled by his experi-
ences in Hitler’s Germany, but that in the early 1930s a judgement such as his was easily
possible at that time. He was to oppose Chamberlain’s appeasement policies in 1938.
The question here, however, is not about hopes for and doubts about National Social-
ism in 1933, but has to do with the status of “völkisches Dasein”. Is there such a thing? We
do speak with no problem of “French Cuisine”, the “American Dream” (whether realizable
or not), or “German Engineering”. Hamilton, above, saw a particular destiny to have been
reserved to the people of the USA (which some will hold responsible for recent foreign
adventures and think better if given up). There clearly is something called “American
history” or “British history” – can one think of this Geschichte as the working out of a
Geschick? (Note that “American history” is not the same as “history by Americans”.)
To some considerable degree in response to political Zionism, Heidegger found “world-

32
One already found much the same thing at the end of “A Modell of Christian Charitie”, the sermon that John Winthrop
preached on board the Arabella to the settlers arriving in New England in 1630.
33
See similar remarks in Graeme Nicholson, “Justifying Your Nation”.
34
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 156–57. Nicholson makes the same link.
35
Cited from Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, 149.
36
GA = Gesamtausgabe [volume #] (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014).
 164 T.B. STRONG

Jewry” to be antagonistic to his notion of a German Volk. It is clear from the material in
GA 94 that Heidegger thought that National Socialism might be the vehicle for bringing
the Volk to its destiny, but that he also had serious questions as to whether or not it would
accomplish that. (“We today can already speak of a ‘vulgar National Socialism” – GA 94,
p. 142.) As significantly, he had real doubts as to the possibility of the Germans realizing
their Volk. “The folk! This is the decisive matter – all must be put to its service.” Then a
paragraph break in the same entry and: “The folk – good – but whitherto the folk. And
why the folk: Is it only a giant jellyfish … ?” (GA 94, p. 195).
So: what about “world-historical Judaism”? An important preliminary remark is that it
is explicitly not for Heidegger a biological concept. The matter is more complex and more,
can one say, philosophical, which does not make it less serious. He writes: “The question of
the role of world-Jewry is not racial, but rather the metaphysical question as to the kind of
humanity that quite unattached can assume as a world historical ‘task’ the uprooting of all
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beings from Being”37 (GA 96, p. 245). If I read this correctly, Heidegger is making a much
deeper accusation than run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism. He is not making an accusation
against any individual Jew – and we know that Heidegger had many students who were
Jewish (some Zionist) and of who he gave no sense of mistreating as Jews. He is asserting
about “world-Jewry” that it is in contradiction to the idea of a Volk. (Zionists want to be a
people but in the 1930s they lack a polis: hence they are “unattached”.) In the lecture
course of 1933–34, he will close one session saying that “our German space would defi-
nitely be revealed differently [for a Slavic people] from the way that it is revealed to us;
to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all. This way of being embedded
in a people, situated in a people, this original participation in the knowledge of a
people, cannot be taught; at most, it can be awakened from its slumber”.38 There is
some caution here (“differently”, “perhaps”), but the direction of his thought is clear.
The ice is thin here, but there is no other way to another shore. It is the case that as
Hitler comes to power the official line of the Zionist Federation and of its paper the
Jüdische Rundschau was to recognize openly the importance of fundamental national
differences, in other words to use rising German anti-Semitism as a Zionist resource.
Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who was to emigrate to the USA in 1937 and become
the president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in 1934 in Wir Juden: “We want
assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish
nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and
race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own
kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a
state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to
their nation.”39 I am aware of the controversies surrounding Prinz’s early work and
that he is cited by Holocaust deniers: I share nothing with that fallacious position. The
point, however, has to be that in the 1930s it was not meaningless to perceive that there
was in the world a movement of something one might name “World-Jewry”, which had
37
“Die Frage nach der Rolle des Weltjudentums ist keine rassische, sondern die metaphysische Frage nach der Art von
Menschentümlichkeit, die schlechthin ungebunden die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als weltgeschichtliche
»Aufgabe« iibernehmen kann.”
38
Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 56. The same idea occurs at the end of Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite: rex
quondam, sic futurus. Kantorowicz might also have found affiliation with National Socialism except for the fact that he was
Jewish. See the highly critical account in Norman Cantor, inventing the Middle Ages, 79–117.
39
Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden, 155.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 165

as its aim the foundation of a state by and of and for Jews. [One would point to the foun-
dation of the Zionist movement in the 1890s, to the Balfour Declaration after World War I
(a letter from Foreign Secretary Balfour to Baron Rothschild for transmission to the
Zionist Federation),40 the fact that two of Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisors (Louis Bran-
deis and Felix Frankfurter) were strong Zionists, the 1920 Mandate of Palestine establish-
ing a “Land of Israel”, the several Aliyah’s from 1882 until 1948]. These are facts that can
be approved of, acknowledged, condemned or applauded. These facts also do not mean
that someone holding this opinion would or should think that every Jew was a fervent pro-
ponent (any more than one should think – as some do – that every “real” American is
white or every “real” German was a Nazi, or that, as President Truman said, the Japanese
were “beasts”), but it does mean that one could find credible that there was a broad pol-
itical movement aiming at the establishment of a Jewish state.
Where Heidegger seems to me wrong is not then on the notion of “world-historical Jewry”
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but, taking no account of the historical and actual anti-Semitic policies, in the more or less tacit
assumption that, considered collectively, Jews were likely to find themselves with at best
divided loyalties in relation to Germany. His experience with Jews like Arendt, Marcuse,
Strauss, Hirsch, Jonas (a strong Zionist) appears to have been a separate matter for him.41

The Pólis as the Historical Realm of Freedom

For Heidegger, the pólis is the historical realm of freedom in that it is where human beings
disclose that which they are with each other – their “historical being”, as Heidegger calls it.
Heidegger here equates being-in-the-world with being-with-others and calls this “histor-
icizing”. Such historicizing is, he says, a destiny and this destiny, consequent to “commu-
nicating and … struggling” is “free”.42 History is here understood not in anthropological
terms, but in ontological ones. He brings together Geschichtlichkeit [historicity] and
Geschicklichkeit [fatedness, but also skillfulness] – one might understand what Heidegger
means by “historicity” both here and in the Rector’s address as “being sent on one’s way”
with the willingness to take this sending on oneself.43 The pólis is thus the space of the
encounter of beings with Being, which encounter in turn sends them on the way that is
their own. (So Weber’s notion of Beruf is reborn, but now as a beginning with others.)
The refusal or failure of such an encounter is what is meant by homelessness – increasing
the condition of modern human beings.
To repeat: most importantly, historicity is for Heidegger ontological and not anthropolo-
gical.44 As Hannah Arendt was to put it: “The polis, properly speaking is not the city-state in
40
“His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and
will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, … ” (http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/
peace/guide/pages/the%20balfour%20declaration.aspx). Balfour and Lloyd George were also responding favourably to
urgings from Chaim Weizmann, a British Zionist chemist who had developed a way to synthesize acetone, then despe-
rately needed for munitions.
41
On this see Babich, “Heidegger et ses juifs” in Babich, op. cit., chapter three.
42
Being and Time §74, 436 (also cited in a different translation by Bernstein).
43
I am assisted here by Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Thought”, esp. 432. I note that Luther’s
word for “vocation” is Schickung. I think there is an echo here of Weber’s understanding of “vocation” except that this is
with others rather than by oneself.
44
See my discussion of a similar distinction in the work of Stanley Cavell between “horizontal” and “vertical” understandings
in Joseph Lima and Tracy B. Strong, “Telling the Dancer from the Dance: On the Relevance of the Ordinary for Political
Thought”.
 166 T.B. STRONG

its physical appearance … It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word,
namely the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not
merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. The
space does not always exist, and … most [men] do not live in it. No man can live in it all
the time.”45 Along similar lines, Heidegger asks in An Introduction to Metaphysics:
What if the fault is not our own, we of today, nor that or our immediate or most distant fore-
bears, but rather is based in a happening that runs through Western history from the incep-
tion onwards, a happening that the eyes of historians will never reach, but which nevertheless
happens – formerly, today, and in the future. What if it were possible that human beings, that
peoples in their greatest machinations and exploits, have a relation to beings but have long
since fallen out of Being, without knowing it, and what if this were the innermost and most
powerful ground of their decline?46

“Falling out of Being” has been the lot of the West from very early on and it is manifest
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as falling prey to the temptations of (the technologically rational) control of nature. Hei-
degger’s question will be if it is possible to rectify that situation (but what would rectifica-
tion mean?). Two important matters follow from this consideration. First, the encounter
with Being was and is in no ways absolute – it is the encounter of a particular people. In
Being and Time, Heidegger says: “We have left the arrogance of all Absolutes behind us.”47
Hannah Arendt remarks: “This means that the philosopher has left behind him the claim
to be ‘wise’ and to know eternal standards for the perishable affairs of the City of men, for
such ‘wisdom’ could only be justified from a position outside the realm of human affairs
and thought legitimate only by the philosopher’s proximity to the Absolute.”48 It is the
nature of modernity to meld the primacy accorded to reason in the Western tradition
since Plato with the pursuit of technology-based domination, and to conclude that this
is all there is. What is needed for Heidegger is what Nietzsche had called for – a critique
of science itself.49
Secondly, if one takes on oneself that one is sent on one’s own way (as an individual,
as a people) in the encounter with Being (which is what the pólis is), then one is obeying
one’s own law and one is thus in the realm of freedom. This importance of one’s eigenes
Weg [c.f. Kant] was again something on which Heidegger had placed emphasis in the
Rectorate address. This freedom, however, is understood neither in a positive nor a
negative sense.50 However one construes “own” in the Kantian formula for autonomy,
the central matter is that the law be one’s own. In extending this to a people, Heidegger
rejects any sense that this is democratic or that the democracy that was Athens in the
fifth century might have encouraged such an artistic development. The flourishing of
art in fifth century Athens is for Heidegger a mere historical coincidence with its demo-
cratic politics. In a letter to Wolfgang Petzel, he cites approvingly a letter of Jacob Burc-
khardt’s from which he draws the following quote: “As I [i.e. Burckhardt] grow older, I
am increasingly one-sided in certain convictions. For example, that the day of decline

45
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 298–99.
46
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 39.
47
Being and Time §44 (229/272). This is one of the reasons that Richard Rorty found affinity with Heidegger.
48
Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 432.
49
That Nietzsche went much further in this pursuit than he is generally given credit for, indeed that this was Nietzsche’s
central enterprise, is established in Babette Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science. Reflecting Science on the Ground of
Art and Life.
50
See Thiele, “Heidegger on Freedom”.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 167

begins with democracy in Greece. The great force that was accumulated continued to
exist for a few more decades, long enough to create the illusion that this force was
the work of democracy.” Heidegger adds to this passage the following: “Our Europe
is disintegrating under the force of a democracy that comes from below against the
many above.”51
This hostility to all aspects of democracy continues, even if Heidegger tried in the latter
part of his life to downplay it. Already in the Introduction to Metaphysics, he had insisted
on the centrality of the order of rank in the polis.52 When the lecture courses of 1936–37
on Nietzsche were printed in 1961, Heidegger excised a certain number of passages. In the
first volume, he removed from the discussion of Nietzsche on nihilism the sentence “For
Nietzsche, Christianity is just as nihilistic as Bolshevism, and consequently just as nihilistic
as mere socialism.”53 In the original version, “mere” socialism was presumably to be con-
trasted to “national” socialism. More importantly, a lengthy passage is omitted after a cita-
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tion of Nietzsche‘s ‘God is dead.’ That passage ends as follows:

Europe still wants to cling to “democracy” and does not want to learn to see that this would
be historical death. For as Nietzsche clearly saw, democracy is just a derivative of nihilism,
that is, the devaluation of the highest values, in such a way that they are henceforth just
and only that – “values” – and no longer form giving powers. [There follow citations from
Will to Power 864] Therefore “God is dead” is not an atheistic formula, but rather the for-
mulation for a grounding experience of an event in Western history.54 I took up this
phrase in full awareness in my 1933 rectoral address.

It is of significance that in winter 1936 he chose to relate his Nietzsche lectures to his
Rektoratsrede. He had resigned from the rectorate in 1934. While after the war Heidegger
points to these lectures as examples of his resistance to National Socialism, the text of the
time makes clear that he associated them with whatever position he took as Rektor. (And I
have argued that his position was related to National Socialism even though it was his own
“Privatnationalsocialismus” and foresaw a “guardian” role for philosophers.) It is worth
noting here that while Heidegger excludes neither violence nor hierarchy from the
human practices that take place in the pólis (those named above are some of them), he
does think that the essence of the political (the pólis) is itself centrally characterized by
conflict potentially unto death, much as did Schmitt. For Heidegger, however, the
polemos is deeper, more ontological than it is for Schmitt, who tends to see the political
in a closer relation to politics.55
51
Heidegger in Petzel, Encounters and Dialogues, 222. I do not hold, however, as does Dominik Finkelde (“Gegen die poli-
tische Philosophie”, that this means that Heidegger is “against” all political involvement, although he clearly played his
cards carefully as when in the Letter on Humanism, for instance, he warns against political involvement. In What is Called
thinking? (New York. Harper, 1968), 66–73, Heidegger asserts that World War II decided nothing and cites favourably
Nietzsche’s distress about the “decline of the state”.
52
Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 141/102.
53
I owe these references to Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos 259–61. The omission comes after the end of the first paragraph of
page 36 of the 1961 German edition and on page 27 of the English edition (after first paragraph).
54
Contrary to what Fried asserts (op. cit., 259), this particular sentence is not omitted in 1961. The next one is. See the
German text without this paragraph in Nietzsche I, 183 and in English in Nietzsche I and II, 156.
55
Although Heidegger certainly shared with Schmitt the sense of the importance of polemos. See Fried, op. cit. and Faye,
Heidegger, op. cit., esp. chapter six. Faye argues that Heidegger is a further radicalization of Schmitt’s radicalization of
Hegel and refers to Heidegger’s discussion of the “total state” in seminars from 1933 to 1934 for which he has notes.
See Faye, 228–37. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 134, has convincingly argued for the difference between Hegel
and Heidegger, arguing that “Heidegger’s concept of the Leader confounds” the objective aspect of governing with
the subjective one (whereas Hegel keeps them separate.). For a critique of Faye, see Thomas Sheehan, “Emmanuel
Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy”.
 168 T.B. STRONG

What is the relation between this site of Being and that which humans do? In the
Summer Seminar of 1924 on “Basic concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy”, Heidegger
argued that rhetoric is “the discipline that most comfortably lays out possibilities for con-
crete being”.56 Rhetoric for Heidegger is here much the same as what Arendt would later
mean by speech – a space of human interaction in which human activity constitutes the
world in which those actions have meaning and where those actions are themselves subject
to the world they have constituted.57 What is important is that Heidegger here follows and
implements Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric: “It thus appears that rhetoric is an offshoot of
dialectic and also of ethical studies. Ethical studies may fairly be called political … ”
(Rhetoric 1356a 29). Rhetoric is “speaking-to-others” and this is the essence of the pólis
and “being-in-the-pólis” is the fundamental possibility of being human.58 This permits
Heidegger 18 years later in his course on Hölderlin’s poem Das Ister to assert that Aristotle
shows that humans are zõon politikòn – “political animals” – because they are ζῷον λόγον
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ἔχον – zōon lógon ékon: “animals possessed with speech”. He writes: “Aristotle’s statement
that the human being is zõon politikòn means that humans are those beings capable of
belonging to the pólis: yet this entails precisely that they are not ‘political’ without
further ado.”59 Being “political” is not something beings like ourselves necessarily do,
like breathe – Weber had made the same point.
It is thus not, I think, the case that “[l]ater and after the fact, as it were, Heidegger has
drawn upon mythologized and muddled concepts like ‘folk’ and ‘earth’ in an effort to
supply his isolated Selves with a shared, common ground to stand on”.60 In drawing
this conclusion, Hannah Arendt sought to distance the post-1933 Heidegger from the Hei-
degger of Being and Time. She had argued, quite correctly I think, that for Heidegger, “the
character of man’s being is determined essentially by what man is not, his nothingness”.61
Rather he found in these concepts (all of which derive from his notion of the pólis) an
account of the recurring if never realized possibility of the encounter of Sein by Dasein.
That the Sein of Dasein is no-thing, as Arendt pointed out, means that any attempt at
expressing it will necessarily be wrong and deceptive. When Heidegger says that the “sub-
stance of man is not ‘spirit’, [but] is rather existence”,62 he is saying that all one can prop-
erly say about human beings embodies only the fact that they are. The question of Being
that Dasein raises about itself will never have an answer but there are more and less right-
ful ways of raising it. (Here we see why Heidegger understands truth as αλήθεια – as
unconcealment, openness.) This means that there can be, so to speak, degrees of distance
from Sein, depending on the questioning itself. His hope for the German University had
been that it would raise the question in such a way as to find itself on its own way. In Hei-
degger’s recognition that there are what I might call degrees of the thought of Being and
that therefore it is possible for there to be a world in which Being has been completely for-
gotten implies that existence is not necessary. Our world is poorly made – indeed in The

56
Daniel Gross, “Introduction”, 9. This paragraph follows Gross’s analysis.
57
Thus, contrary to what Dana Villa argues (Arendt and Heidegger) there is, prior to Being and Time, an affinity between
Heidegger and Arendt. She remembers to her last days Heidegger’s seminar on the Statesman.
58
See Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 78–81.
59
Heidegger, Das Ister 83.
60
Hannah Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy”, 181. This is her first-major English language publication and is her most
overtly anti-Heideggerian.
61
Ibid., 180.
62
Heidegger, Being and Time §25, 110/Sein und Zeit, 117.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 169

Question Concerning Technology he indicates that humans are actively pursuing the
unmaking of the world. As George Kateb noted: “To the Heideggerian thought that it is
an accident that there is not nothing … it now depends on human choice whether, one
day, there will be nothing.”63

Our Ontic World

When Heidegger comes to discuss these ontic actualities, he emphasizes, as we have seen,
two elements. First is the element of strife; second is the hostility to democracy as a mani-
festation of the nihilism besetting and infected Europe and the West. As in contemporary
discussions of “agonism”, the understanding of strife has much to recommend it. His
vision of democracy is, on the other hand, thin, although not unrelated to similar anxieties
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in Mill and Tocqueville.

The pólis for Heidegger is the locus of humans’ historical relation to Being. The pólis
makes the political possible and the political is thus the instantiation of the possibility
of a human relation to Being. For Heidegger, the pólis has, as noted, an ontological
status. The ontic qualities of the political, that is, of the active concern for that which
will be “politics”, are those he detailed in the Introduction to Metaphysics (“To this site
of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the celebrations, the games, the
poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the
armed forces, and the ships”) – and are all made possible by the pólis/pólos/pólein –
which is the space in which human Dasein reveals itself as history and destiny.
For Heidegger, the political task for Germany is different from what it was for the
Greeks. For the Greeks the task was to maintain the space of Dasein in the presence of
Being. For modern Europeans – the Germans in particular – the task is to recover the
engagement with Being in an age that has forgotten it, that is, to recall, recover, recollect
what one is as an individual or a people. All seems to divert us: he instantiates as silly dis-
tractions the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in France, the 1936 boxing
victory of Max Schmeling over Joe Louis64 and, notably, the Party rallies – these are “diver-
sions” that inhibit the raising of the questions “what for? where to? And what then?”65 Like
Schmitt and Weber before him (and indeed like Habermas after him), Heidegger thinks
that Europe is in a very precarious space, or lack of space.
This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today
in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and
America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the hopeless frenzy of unchained technol-
ogy and the rootless organization of the average man … We lie in the pincers. Our people
(Volk), as standing in the center, suffers the utmost pressure – our people, the richest in
neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical
people. We are sure of this vocation; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only
when it creates in itself a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and
grasps its tradition creatively. All this implies that this people, as a historical people, must

63
George Kateb, “Thinking About Extinction: (I) Nietzsche and Heidegger”, 24.
64
An article in the SS journal Das schwarze Korps said: “Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige
for our race.” Schmeling lost the 1938 re-match in the first round. See Clarence Lusanne, Hitler’s Black Victims: the His-
torical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African-Americans in the Nazi Era, 202–03.
65
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 40.
 170 T.B. STRONG

transpose itself – and with it the history of the West – from the center of the future happen-
ings into the originary realm of the powers of Being.66

Germany’s destiny to Europe is as Hamilton’s vision of America’s destiny to mankind. The

question that now confronts us is if the only path out of Heidegger’s ontological under-
standing of the political (the pólis) is the anti-democratic one that he took and if that
which is democratic is as necessarily problematic as he asserts. I do not think that one
can simply overlook this question. I do not think that this is a case of a “political misad-
venture”, as Miguel de Bestegui puts it.67 I have argued that his political positions have a
clear relation to his philosophical understanding. Thus if his ontological understanding of
politics is fatally and necessarily linked to, and only to, his political pronouncements and
his political activity then there are grounds for rejecting it and his thought. If, however, the
steps that Heidegger takes can open paths, albeit ones that he did not travel on, then that
thought is of great import.
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In Heidegger, the essential character of human being is determined precisely by the

fact of taking upon oneself this fact: to have existence in the world – Dasein – is in its
deepest sense to deny, to be guilty to, to be indebted to Being. If as he says in the
Letter on Humanism what is essential in the determination of humanity in man is not
man but Being, then, because Being is no-thing, man is determined by no-thing. Heideg-
ger’s emphasis on the central quality of death leads to the realization that in the end each
is radically separate from each other. Contrary to Nietzsche, for Heidegger, individua-
tion is the last word – and not the first – about human beings. We know by loving
that we live alone. To this one might say that Heidegger still needs to account for –
to provide a possibility for – a common ground. When he sought to do so in the
early 1930s, he came, I think, to regret the results without, however, ever seeing
another possibility.68

What Role for a Guardian?

In the 1930s, flush with possibilities for philosophical rebirth that he thought revealed by
National Socialism, Heidegger had delineated a central role for the philosopher: the return
to the Cave presaged a potentially violent re-grounding of human existence. By the end of
the war, doubt has set in. In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth he writes:
[T]he one who has been freed is supposed to lead these people too away from what is unhid-
den for them and to bring them face to face with the most unhidden. But the would-be lib-
erator no longer knows his or her way around the cave and risks the danger of succumbing to
the overwhelming power of the kind of truth that is normative there, the danger of being
overcome by the common “reality” to be the only reality. The liberator is threatened with
the possibility of being put to death …
The return to the cave and the battle waged within the cave between the liberator and the
prisoners who resist all liberation … [is where] the story comes to conclusion.69

66
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 41.
67
Miguel de Bestegui, Heidegger and the Political, 8.
68
Žižek (op cit., 151–52) argues almost perversely that the problem with the Nazis is that they did not go far enough to
“disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space” and that Heidegger never managed to transcend this
limitation.
69
Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”, 171. Mary Jane Rubenstein, to whom I am indebted here, [Strange Wonder
(New York. Columbia, 2011), 54] makes the same point and quotes this same passage.
 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 171

The interpretation of this passage is difficult. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” was first
written in 1942, but not published until 1947. On the one hand the language is of
struggle: “battle”, the need to “tear away”, to “wrest from”, to “steal”. Change will be dif-
ficult. On the other hand, the passage expresses doubt as to the possibility of success on
the part of the “liberator”. This is close to a declaration of the irrelevance of philosophy
to politics. The tone is different from his discussion of the Cave in The Essence of Truth:
On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theateatus in 1931 and not published until 1943. There he
asserts that “Whoever comes out of the cave only to lose himself in the ‘appearing’
[Scheinen] of the ideas would not truly understand these … He would regard the
ideas themselves as just beings of a higher order. Deconcealment [Entbergsamkeit]
would not occur at all. It is clear from this that liberation does not achieve its final
goal merely be ascent to the sun. Freedom is not just a matter of being unshackled,
not just a matter of being free for the light. Rather genuine freedom means to be a lib-
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erator from the dark. The descent back into the cave is not some subsequent diversion on
the part of those who have become free, perhaps undertaken from curiosity about how
cave life looks from above, but is the only manner through which freedom is genuinely
realized.”70
One reading of the juxtaposition of these two passages would hold that whereas in
1931 Heidegger saw himself as a liberator, but 1943 he despaired of such.71 As such he
would have been mistaken in his adherence to National Socialism. And there is cer-
tainly some truth to this in terms of his biography. However, in the earlier text he
goes on to complicate the question. In the discussion of the return to the cave he
notes, thinking no doubt of Socrates, that in contemporary times “people no longer
get killed”.72 What death in the cave means now is that “philosophy is powerless
within the region of prevailing self-evidences. Only insofar as these themselves
change can philosophy have its say”.73 So the problem is the nature of world in
which the philosopher must live and teach. He is, however, not to leave the cave:
“Being free, being a liberator, is to act together in history with those to whom one
belongs in one’s nature.” However, “[t]he philosopher must remain solitary, because
this is what he is according to his nature. His solitude is not to be admired. Isolation
is nothing to be wished for as such. Just for this reason must the philosopher,
always in decisive moments be there [da sein] and not give way. He will not misunder-
stand solitude in external fashion, as withdrawal and letting things go their own way”.74
Heidegger, it would seem, chose Nazism because it would change “prevailing self-evi-
dences”, something the philosopher cannot do; he remained with it for the Germans
were those to whom he belonged “in his own nature”. He was always there, solitary,
quondam sic futurus, a once and future philosopher-king. Whatever one makes of
this stance, it is not that of Socrates. The expectation, however, that “prevailing self-
evidences” can be changed was certainly a reasonable if very dangerous understanding
of Nazism.

70
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theateatus, 65–66.
71
This is, if I read correctly, Rubenstein’s reading, op. cit., 47–56.
72
This is incidentally also Rousseau’s complaint about modernity in the Discourse on Arts and Sciences: instead of requiring
Socrates (i.e. Rousseau) to drink hemlock he is invited to a salon.
73
Heidegger, op. cit., 61 (my italics).
74
Ibid., 62, 63.
 172 T.B. STRONG

Conclusion as Questions
Heidegger thus leaves us with questions that need exploration. Some have obvious
resonance for our world. (1) What are the uses and abuses of the idea of a
“people”? (2) Is the conception of a people essentialist and if so how and what
are the consequences? (3) Is Heidegger’s conception of Geschick essentialist? If so,
what do we make of it? If not, what is it? (4) What is the proper relation of philo-
sophical thought to its actualization? Does the philosopher have a country? Does
philosophical thought?75 At what price?
Heidegger’s thought on the political leaves us with more to do. And for that he should be
read. This is no longer the place or the space to begin to think about what understanding of
the political might come from such reflections. But it is important that one engage in them.
Portions of the last third of this essay are revised from my contribution to Ingo Farin
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and Jeff Malpas, eds. Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA.
MIT Press, forthcoming 2016).

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