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Heidegger and Politics

In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains

Heidegger’s perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger
and Politics argues that Heidegger’s political import is forecast by fun-
damental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought.
Duff explores how in Being and Time as well as earlier and later
works, “everyday” human existence is presented both as irretriev-
ably banal but also as our only tenuous path to the deepest questions
about human life. Heidegger thus points to two irreconcilable attitudes
toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in
an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliv-
erance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is con-
ducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger’s influence tends toward
extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures
from his thought.

Alexander S. Duff was educated in the humanities and history at

Carleton University and received his Ph.D. from the Department of
Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fel-
lowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and
American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the
Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College,
and taught at Skidmore College and College of the Holy Cross. He
writes widely in the history of political philosophy, and his publica-
tions on classical, modern, and contemporary political philosophy have
appeared in both scholarly and popular publications.
Heidegger and Politics
The Ontology of Radical Discontent

ALEXANDER S. DUFF
College of the Holy Cross
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107081536
© Alexander S. Duff 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2015

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Duff, Alexander S. (Alexander Selkirk), 1978–
Heidegger and politics : the ontology of radical discontent / Alexander S. Duff.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 (hardback)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976 – Political and social views. I. Title.
B3279.H49D795 2015
320.092–dc23   2015016104
ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Catherine and Michael Zuckert
One ought to state not only the truth but also the cause of the falsehood.
– Aristotle

There are two types of genius: those to whom the task of forming,
ripening, and perfecting has fallen, and others who have to become the
cause of new modes of life . . . like the Germans?
– Nietzsche
Contents

Acknowledgments page ix
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 1

1 What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and the Problem
of Theory 24
2 Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence 44
3 The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of Theory
from Practice 63
4 The Dictatorship of the They and the Clearing of the Everyday 91
5 Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism 119
6 Heideggerian Politics: The Past Is Not Dead, It’s Not Even Past 152
Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics 185

Bibliography 197
Index 213

vii
Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank those who have been so helpful during the long prepa-
ration of this work. The support of the Earhart Foundation and the Jack Miller
Center was instrumental to the preparation of the manuscript. The University
of Notre Dame and Boston College were my intellectual homes while I pre-
pared, read, and wrote, and provided me with opportunities to present my
work to remarkably receptive and challenging groups.
I would like to thank my friends and colleagues who have assisted, one
way or another, with the preparation of this work: David Azerrad, Robert
Bartlett, Nasser Behnegar, Brian Bitar, Shilo Brooks, Andrew Butler, Rodrigo
Chacon, Jeff Church, Tom Cleveland, Robert Faulkner, Michael Gillespie,
Grayson Gilmore, Stephen Head, Matthew Holbreich, John Hungerford,
Dino Konstantos, Beth L’Arrivee, Robert L’Arrivee, Walter Nicgorski, Robert
Peckham, Danilo Petranovich, Marc Sable, Susan Shell, Ben Storey, Jenna
Storey, Brenna Strauss, and Dana Villa. I would especially like to thank Randy
Newell and Richard Velkley, whose own work on Heidegger has been inspir-
ing, and who have been particularly helpful and encouraging. My family has
been terrifically supportive: Robert and Joanne Duff, Matthias and Andrea
Borck.
I also thank Robert Dreesen and Brianda Reyes of Cambridge University
Press for guiding the manuscript through to publication, and the anonymous
readers for Cambridge University Press for their helpful suggestions.
Most of all I thank my wife, Catherine, for her help and love. Nothing good
here would have happened without her.
This work is dedicated to two of my teachers in gratitude, appreciation, and
friendship.

ix
Abbreviations

References to works of Martin Heidegger are provided parenthetically in the

text. Of these, those indicated “GA” indicate a volume of the Gesamtausgabe
included in the bibliography. Other abbreviations are included below; in the
text, they are followed by the page number, except where indicated.

BH Becoming Heidegger, ed. T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Evanston,

Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
BPP Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. R. Rojcewicz and
D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012.
BW Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, revised edition, New York: Harper
Collins, 1993.
CPE Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz
and D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012.
EG “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. W. McNeill in P, pp. 97–135.
FCM Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill and
N. Walker, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
HCT History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1985.
IM Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000.
KJPW “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,” trans.
J. van Buren, in P, pp. 1–38.
KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft, fourth edition,
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
N4 Nietzsche. Volume IV. Nihilism, trans. David Krell, San Francisco,
Harper & Row, 1982.

xi
newgenprepdf

xii List of Abbreviations

P Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1998.
PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. A.
Gosetti-Ferencei, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
[References in the text are followed by the German pagination from
GA 60, a slash, then the English pagination.]
PS Plato’s Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and André Schuwer,
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
S Supplements, ed. J. van Buren, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002.
SZ Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 17th edition, 1993.
[Translations in the text follow the MacQuarrie and Robinson edition
with minor changes.]
TDP Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. T. Sadler, London:
Athlone Press, 2000. [References in the text are followed by the
German pagination from GA 56/57, a slash, then the English
pagination.]
WM “What is Metaphysics?” in P, pp. 82–96.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge

This book began with a question and a hunch. The question was this: how is
it that Martin Heidegger has had such a peculiar and varied political influ-
ence, when his work is not evidently political, and when his own political
judgments were so noxious? Even if we discount his epoch-making influ-
ence within the academy, in virtually every discipline of the humanities and
social sciences, his practical, political influence is very striking, remarkably
widespread, highly varied, and largely unremarked: Heidegger’s thought has
inspired Iranian revolutionaries; environmentalists and Greens; dissenters
from the Cold War polarity of liberal West and communist East; and, to this
day, European fascists. This is a disparate collection of epigoni for a thinker
whose own work was never straightforwardly political and who was pub-
licly associated with the National Socialists in Germany. Such observations
provoke related questions: if Heidegger himself thought he belonged on the
right, then what to make of his influence on the left? Can we reconcile the
nonviolence, even pacifism, of certain strains of his influence with another
legacy of violence and political revolution? And what of his evident appeal
beyond the borders of the so-called West, among political movements in the
East? Finally, and most importantly, given that there is no necessary con-
nection between his political influence and his work, is there anything in
Heidegger’s thought that should invite this variety, that is friendly to this
form of transformation?
My hunch was that the contradictions and tensions exhibited in the political
opinions of those who were indebted to Heidegger’s thought in fact reflected
something true – however dimmed or darkened – about the political import of
his thinking as such. If this is the case, then for as long as Heidegger may be
read, his thought will continue to receive such political expression. Returning
to Heidegger with this varied influence in mind might help us to understand the

1
2 Heidegger and Politics

predicaments and fundamental character of politics in our time, at the dawn of

the post-Abendland age.

Heidegger presents himself as a philosopher of loss, of absence, of “radical fini-

tude” (GA 3 296; KPM 207), speaking precisely to a time of despondence and
of destitution. In a perverse and roundabout way, then, such a time is an oppor-
tune moment: moment meets philosopher. In his secret, cryptic masterpiece, the
Beiträge, he refers to such an event as a “resonating” (der Anklang), in that such
a moment should allow the thinker of such a time to speak to such a time (GA
65 107–66; CPE 85–131). He, following Nietzsche, characterizes our age as
one of nihilism. For Nietzsche, however, nihilism is a condition wherein “noth-
ing is forbidden.” Nothing is forbidden because nothing is fixed, and what has
been revered has fallen. Heidegger, by contrast, characterizes this as a nihilism
brought to light by the “abandonment of beings by Being,” that is, everything we
thought about the world and the ground of its ordering has been ripped away,
exposing an abyss where we had thought there was solid foundation. The expo-
sure of this abyss manifests itself in various ways, for Heidegger sees our time
as riven with the “phenomena of nihilism.”1 These phenomena include wars of
unprecedented destruction and titanic horror, havoc on a never-before-imagined
scale, whole populations displaced, the entire mechanism of great nations being
sent to do battle with one another, and the technological ravishing of nature.
He begins writing in the shadow of the First World War, a destruction he would
come to see as basically continuous with the Second and its aftermath in the
sundering of Germany and the beginning of the atomic arms race. The phe-
nomena of nihilism also include, however, the vast expansion of rote, mun-
dane, bourgeois tedium and crushing dreariness: mass communication, mass
transit, pseudo-education, urban business, and purportedly cultivated distrac-
tions. Heidegger develops formula for referring to these clusters of phenomena
together, both unprecedented violence and novel forms of monotony: he refers
to technology, to mechanization or machination, to “greatness” as in “bigness,”
as well as anonymity. These phenomena, he contends, cannot be viewed in iso-
lation: not just massive destruction and war, neither just bourgeois nonsense
and inanity, but both together as encompassing and constituting the whole of
human existence in our time. The phenomena of nihilism are not, then, just
open uncertainty, confusion, and wariness; the “abandonment by Being” also
fosters unseemly confidence, swaggering assertiveness, and hasty insistence. As
Heidegger understands nihilism, then, his time is our time.

1
“For whom is the resonating? And whither? The resonating of the essential occurrence of being
in the abandonment by being” (GA 65 108; CPE 85).
  “The final entrenchment of the abandonment by being in the forgottenness of being. / The age
of a complete absence of questioning and an unwillingness to establish any goals. Mediocrity
as status symbol. / The resonating of the refusal – in what sort of sounding?” (GA 65 108; CPE
85–6, emphasis in the original text).
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 3

Heidegger sees his task, therefore, as exhibiting the resonance between his
thought and the impoverishment that stands behind the bluffing and postur-
ing of our age, the supposed pinnacle of a tradition that prizes wisdom.2 He
expresses this enigmatically in the Contributions:
To make appear by way of recollection the concealed power of this forgottenness as
forgottenness and to bring forth therein the resonating of being. The recognition of the
plight.
The guiding disposition of the resonating: shock and diffidence, but each arising out
of the basic disposition of restraint.
The highest plight: the plight of the lack of a sense of plight (GA 65 107; CPE 85,
emphasis in the original text).

Heidegger’s appeal is that he presents himself as a philosopher of finitude to an

age in which, because finitude is mostly forgotten, it may be rediscovered. He is
a reminder of the spirit of tragedy, appealing to both sides of the phenomena of
nihilism. To the war-making, destructive side of contemporary life, his philos-
ophy speaks to the urgent, serious confrontation with destruction and death.
To the bored, tranquilized side, his philosophy resonates with the experienced
meaninglessness of existence announced in boredom and drudgery. To both, it
speaks to a certain contempt for the other side. Heidegger, therefore, can be the
thinker both of stormtroopers and the faculty lounge, of Leni Riefenstahl as
well as Terrence Malick.
Heidegger speaks of finitude in a broad way. It does not simply refer to our
awareness of our mortality or our facing up to death, although that is implied
in the term. Finitude so understood only looks forward into the future and sees
that we are eminently perishable, and that all of our loves, the objects of our
desires, and the promises of permanence that we encounter are only ever prop-
erly grasped through the most certain aspect of our existence: that we will die.
However, Heidegger observes another side of our finitude, our “thrownness.”
We did not choose to be born, choose where or when we would exist as who
we are. We are thrown into existence, into being rather than not-being, and are
given all sorts of “baggage”: people to whom we are related, a community to
which we belong, and a history to which we are submitted. Reason and the life
according to reason are situated in one sense among the practical things we
use and have “handy,” but are more profoundly situated into a whole world

2
Hardt and Negri position Heidegger as a thinker who fails to grasp “poverty” in its most real
iteration, namely, economic deprival. They refer to Heidegger’s 1945 lecture, “Die Armut,” as,
“one pinnacle (or nadir) of the ideological effort to cancel the power of the poor through mys-
tification” (Hardt and Negri 2011, 46). Their position assimilates some of the substance of the
Frankfurt School criticism of Heidegger to the premises of a Derridean appeal on behalf of
global democracy or, as they style it in their appropriation from Spinoza, the “multitude.” For a
recent appropriation of Heidegger for the sake of a new left-wing political economy, see Vattimo
and Zabala 2011.
4 Heidegger and Politics

that we have been thrown into witlessly. To stress our finitude in this fashion
makes Heidegger, by his own lights, “countercultural.” Heidegger thus stands
in a rather aggravated posture toward the civilization of the Enlightenment,
wherein the entire spectrum of human science has been harnessed for the bet-
terment and improvement of humans, “empowering” them and relieving their
otherwise troubled estate. Heidegger in effect testifies to the limits and even the
impossibility of this project’s success.
Tragedy is not meant to be the final word, however. If Heidegger evokes
the spirit of destruction and loss that prevailed, first in the trenches during
the war, then in the capitulation and humiliation of the country in 1919
and the years that followed, he also gives expression to a recollection of unity
and wholeness that persevered through these trauma, which recollection is
itself, he would have it, the surest testimony to its truth and future possibility.
As noxious as the word has become, his allusion to the Volksgemeinschaft in
Being and Time, was meant to summon up the spirit of classless, divisionless
unity, a kind of post-political purity that prevailed at precisely the darkest
times of the war.3 That the time of destitution may achieve a resonance first
in the thought and expression of Heidegger renders it no longer strictly abys-
mal. Heidegger presents the confrontation with nothingness as an event of
unmatched promise, and therefore the time of nihilism as, perversely, a pre-
carious but possibly liberating epoch.4 He quotes Hölderlin to this effect in his
essay on technology: “Yet where the danger is, the saving power also grows.”5
For example, in our time, when nihilism and everydayness are ascendant, we
are given to understand precisely that the tradition of philosophy in the West
has been nihilistic.6 The occlusion of Being by the now global dominion of
the Western tradition of metaphysics is discovered as an event, an event of
unmatched promise.

3
On the meaning of this term prior to the Nazis assumption of power, consult Peter Fritzsche
2009, 38–55.
4
Heidegger on the promise of confronting the nothing: “This nothingness is not the occasion for
pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity
takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man
back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses
the work of the spirit” (GA 3 291–2; KPM 204).
5
See Iain Thomson’s provocative meditation on this point in Heidegger (Thomson 2009). Jerry
Weinberger’s discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the problem of technology is uniquely atten-
tive to this underappreciated element of Heidegger’s thought: the present “dark night of the
world” is deeply promising; it “tells us that it is a ‘danger that saves’ ” (Weinberger 1992, 113;
quoting BW 340).
6
The American Southern writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy both refer in their work
to their characters’ experience of the suffocating dreariness of “everydayness.” These writers give
a Christian sense of hope pervading the rot that Heidegger brings to light, an inflection that it
would be mistaken to assign to Heidegger. On Percy and O’Connor’s relation to Heidegger and
Nietzsche, see the most lucid study by Ralph C. Wood (2004).
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 5

Objections to Reading Heidegger

Two serious objections, however, immediately present themselves if we turn
to Heidegger to understand the challenges of contemporary political life. The
first of these is moral: why should we concern ourselves with the judgment of
someone who revealed the extent of his political sense and humanity by siding
with the National Socialists in the German Revolution in 1933 and then, what
some regard as even more reprehensible, who never recanted or apologized for
the support he gave to the regime?7 The second objection is more strictly intel-
lectual: Heidegger has no comment to offer on political life; he is an ontologist,
a historian of philosophy, perhaps a dabbler in logic or epistemology; he is a
ceaselessly abstract thinker, with nothing to say directly or of importance about
politics.
To the first objection, I express some sympathy. My initial interest in Heidegger
was not friendly, certainly not in the normal sense of that word. I consider his
involvement with Nazism to be a reasonable and, perhaps more importantly for
some readers, authentic expression of his thinking.8 At the very least, it cannot

7
On the latter point, see Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; and Lang 1996. The recent publication of
Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (as GA 94–6) has only confirmed what was long known about
Heidegger’ anti-Semitism.
8
There is, as one would expect, quite a lot of literature on this. I mention only a few high
points. Zuckert 1990 is the indispensible conspectus of the matter. She responds to the failure of
Heidegger’s critics to explain how he, who declined to refer to nature as a standard in politics,
would support a regime that placed so much emphasis on biology and race. She locates the con-
fluence of Heidegger’s philosophy and the ideology of the regime in his lectures on Hölderlin,
exploring political themes of fatherland and, above all, language. Thomson 2005a surveys the
scholarly literature on the matter with great perspicuity and clarity and argues that, when we
see that Heidegger understood his political involvement as an auxiliary of his approach to uni-
versity reform, we can also see that he, in effect, learned from his failure with the Nazis and so
revised his approach to the relationship between philosophy and education. If one wishes to
see “philosophy free itself from the work of Heidegger” (Faye 2009, 316), whatever that might
entail, then a genuinely philosophical, rather than philological-biographical, labor is required.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s remark about a previous generation’s Heidegger scandals still applies: “The
work of the historians has in fact hardly begun. I doubt, however, that it will be able to con-
tribute anything really decisive: it is not in Heidegger’s minor (or major) compromises, nor even
in his declarations and proclamations of 1933 to 1934, that the crux of the matter is located”
(Lacoue-Laberthe 1990, 39 n.1). The work of Gregory Fried and Richard Polt provides perhaps
the soundest general guide to and scholarly treatment of this topic. See Fried 2000, but for a
discussion of the most recent controversies, the latest preface to their translation of Introduction
to Metaphysics is helpful (Heidegger 2014).
  In my view, the matter is clouded by a few misconceptions of the attraction that National
Socialism held for Heidegger. The first is the view that he would support the National Socialist
revolution out of an “aristocratic authoritarianism” (Rockmore 1992, 72) or a kind of
“racial-biological chauvinism” (Dallmayr 1993, 152). As I will try to show in the balance of this
book, Heidegger saw the revolution as one of the outcast versus the privileged. The second mis-
conception sees National Socialism as a principally “conservative” movement. Its core appeal
among the dispossessed marks it as a movement of transformation, not of conservation. The
Nazis did not represent, in either their personnel or their doctrine, the “nobility, the agrarian
6 Heidegger and Politics

be written off as a personal quirk or a temporary stage in his thinking that need
not therefore be taken seriously.9 At the same time, it can hardly be denied that
his intellectual influence has provoked some of the most refreshing attempts to
rethink the very tradition that he diagnoses as nihilistic through and through, and
to respond to the political challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.10
It seems hasty, therefore, to suggest that his Nazism is coextensive with the polit-
ical importance of his work, not least for the further reason that he remained not
altogether satisfied with the character of that movement.11 What is more, if the
political import of his thought reduces, one way or another, to his support for
the NSDAP, he poses no serious challenge to the broad political and philosophic
positions that constitute the basic tenets of Western civilization.12 If Heidegger
is fundamentally indistinguishable from any of the semiphilosophical ideologues
who propped up a temporarily threatening, revanchist regime, then what serious
reason do we have to trouble ourselves with what he thinks about anything?
Dismissing Heidegger by reducing his thought to his political biography lets us

landowners, the military, the church, and the old educated and propertied upper class” (Stern
1999, 161). Whatever his preferences for agrarianism, Heidegger was not a “conservative” as
that term was understood in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. As Hans Sluga has helpfully
demonstrated, there were strong and broad conservative tendencies in German universities, par-
ticularly in the philosophy faculties, but Heidegger did not share in them and regarded them
as impediments to the ontological revolution he envisioned for German Bildung (Sluga 1993).
Harry Neumann’s analysis of the matter is most helpful:

Only real nazism is sufficiently courageous to incorporate the apolitical or anti-political thrust
of science or global technology. As such it has nothing but contempt for all values (any notion
of good and bad, right and wrong, true and false) or wholes or universals (anything political,
anything common or communicable). Since politics always is concerned with such things, true
nazis are radically apolitical . . . science is the simple realization that whatever is experienced –
a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god or anything else – is nothing apart from its
being ­experienced. . . . It is unscientific illusion to believe that any thoughts or words, “scientific”
or unscientific theories, are anything more than empty experiences, empty because nothing –
­including “experience” – is definable or limited by anything. . . . The reality revealed by science
consists quite literally of nothing, of empty, interchangeable nothings. . . . Nothing – and only
nothing – exists in nazism’s scientific reality. Nazism’s will asserts itself in the face of its own
nothingness (Neumann 1985, 226–7, 29; quoted in Ward 1995, 270 n. 11).
9
Gadamer notes of claims that Heidegger’s “political errors have nothing to do with his philos-
ophy” that “wholly unnoticed was how damaging such a ‘defense’ of so important a thinker
really is” (Gadamer 1989, 428; quoted in Thomson 2005a, 33).
10
One need only mention the names of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans
Jonas, and Karl Löwith. If one looks beyond political thought, for ­example – to philosophy
more narrowly defined, theology, psychology, or anthropology – the extent of Heidegger’s influ-
ence is virtually unfathomable.
11
It is difficult to disentangle Heidegger’s mendacity from genuine disaffection. As Richard Velkley
notes, though, with characteristic penetration, “Heidegger never anywhere suggests that another
regime or movement, actual or possible, had the possibility for . . . direction from the ‘competent
forces’ ” (Velkley 2011, 85).
12
This, I think, constitutes the most serious objection to Emmanuel Faye’s recent work (Faye
2009, 2012) on Heidegger. The objection applies similarly to Fritsche 1999.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 7

off the hook for rethinking the premises of our own political arrangements and
the extent to which they may be implicated by his broadly critical assessment of
the nihilism of Western civilization and philosophy.

Heideggerian Political Legacies

As an inoculation against the error of thinking that Heidegger’s political import
is coextensive with his Nazism, it is helpful to consider briefly the political
life of his work beyond this episode. In contrast to his influence in academic
precincts, his political influence is generally underappreciated, but in drawing
attention to it, I do not mean to exaggerate its importance for interpreting
Heidegger. Four areas of influence deserve some comment: his influence among
Iranian revolutionaries, among environmentalists and Greens, among Cold
War dissidents, and among contemporary fascists. Here I stress their points of
continuity, but one should note their evident diversity and differences from one
another. What is more, none of them is a straight Heideggerian in any sense,
but evidently mix Heidegger with other elements.
Several of the intellectual architects and principal ideologues of the Iranian
Revolution were formed by their understanding of Heidegger, drawing on his
thought in their diagnosis of the toxicity of Western civilization, the possibility
of a future-oriented revolution that would repeat something of a lost Islamic
past, and the notion of a recurrent fall necessitating a permanent revolution.
Ali Shari’ati, an influential pre-revolutionary thinker, broke with the tradition-
alist, conservative clerisy by advocating a reinterpretation of the tenets of Shi’ia
Islam that stressed radical freedom as achieved through a futural projection of
social justice that retrieves and reforms, in a spirit of radical freedom, the truth
of Islam.13 He saw this proposed revolution as an alternative to Marxist com-
munism that likewise drew its support from the lower classes. The essence of
Shi’ism is its saying “no” to the established religious and political order for the
sake of justice and truth. As he conceived of it, “Red Shi’ism changes to black
Shi’ism,” a dynamic that he referred to as a permanent revolution. By this he
meant that the locus of social justice and martyrdom shifts as it makes revolu-
tionary claims upon the established order, which as established is never capable
of expressing them adequately and then tends itself to ossify into structures
of oppression. In the process, a new body of the oppressed emerges to make
claims of exclusion upon the new ruling element.14
Ahmad Fardid, teaching at the University of Tehran in the period of the revo-
lution, was even more explicit in his recurrence to Heidegger. In a 1979 lecture
course, called “The Divine Encounter and Illuminations at the End of Time,”

13
On Shari’ati’s relationship to Heidegger, see Mirsepassi 2000, 96–128, 146–55. On his intellec-
tual development generally, see Rahnema 2000.
14
See Ali Shari’ati’s essay, “Red Shi ‘ism vs. Black Shi ‘ism,” at http://www.iranchamber.com/
personalities/ashariati/works/red_black_shiism.php. Retrieved August 2013.
8 Heidegger and Politics

Fardid identifies “Westoxication” (Gharbzadegi – “Weststruckness”),15 which

began with Greek rationality and accelerated in the period of the Renaissance,
as the chief enemy of the Islamic spirit of the Iranian Revolution: “The total-
ity of the post-Renaissance world has fallen completely; the exception was
Heidegger, who diagnosed the problem” (Rajaee 2007, 183). In the world of
“complete darkness,” only the Iranian Revolution, the thought of Heidegger,
and the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini represent a brief moment of pos-
sibility. He feared, however, that Weststruckness would undermine the Iranian
Revolution: “Wherever I see a lack of angered fists and the prevalence of com-
promise, I will be disappointed. . . . I believe in permanent revolution, and today
I am very frightened that the revolution may be undermined and the bourgeoi-
sie will take over” (182, 184). A “permanent revolution” is required to prevent
conservative, counterrevolutionary elements in society from returning Iran to
the Westernized culture of the “modern cave” of “self-founded nihilism” (182).
Fardid’s student, Davari, polemicizes to this day against the reforming, mod-
erating, and modernizing impulses of Soroush and other rationalism-favoring
reformers in terms that also invoke Heidegger: Martin Heidegger, he insists,
can help Iranians understand the “inner essence” of “the prison of the West”
(188–9).16
Heidegger’s influence among Greens and environmentalists draws on dif-
ferent elements of his thought. The Green movement that has developed in
the Western world since the 1970s, in particular that wing of it referred to as
espousing “deep ecology,” is closely tied to Heideggerian notions of the nihil-
ism of rationalist, technological civilization. Beginning with Arnold Naess,
“deep ecology” rejects a human-centered understanding of “shallow envi-
ronmentalism” as utilitarian and essentially selfish, and instead adheres to a
vision of nature wherein there is no hierarchy among the beings, each life form
being connected to every other in a non-dominating process of emergence and
decay.17 In an influential codification of the tenets of deep ecology, Devall and
Sessions identify three distinct contributions that Heidegger made to the intel-
lectual development of deep ecology: they write that Heidegger (1) supplied
for deep ecology a certain intellectual and historical ballast, linking the critique
of the domination of nature to the tendencies of Western philosophy “since
Plato.” He also (2) urged a form of thinking that was more “Taoist” rather than
analytical, and (3) enjoined a form of authentic dwelling on the Earth, “parallel

15
The term Gharbzadeghi can be translated “Westoxication,” “Occidentosis,” or “Westruckness.”
It appears to have been coined by Ahmad Fardid, who did not write, but was popularized by the
journalist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (Al Ahmad 1982).
16
Soroush has been explicitly critical of the intellectual influence of Heidegger on the Iranian right
(Soroush 2006). On Heidegger’s influence on Iranian intellectual life generally, see the extremely
valuable chapter in Mirsepassi 2010, 85–128.
17
See Naess 1973. The locus classicus of the Green Heidegger is Zimmerman 1990; see also 1994,
2005; Thiele 1995, 1999; and Jonas 1984.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 9

to our call to dwell in our bioregion . . . with alertness to the natural processes”
(Devall and Sessions [1985] 2001, 98).
Heidegger has also had a certain influence among prominent dissenters from
the polarity of the Cold War – the Canadian pacifist George Grant, and the
Czech dissident Vaclav Havel – seeking a viable alternative to Soviet collectiv-
ism and American capitalism. These dissidents echoed Heidegger’s insistence
that the United States and USSR were “metaphysically identical.” In the case
of Grant, he hoped that after a period of scourging – when formerly indepen-
dent nations such as Canada had succumbed to the “technological dynamo” of
the “spearhead of liberalism,” the United States – the Christian church could
reemerge as a promised source for human community.18 Similarly, Havel wrote
movingly of the possibility that the “powerless” might “live in the truth” in
defiance of the totalizing oppression of the Soviet satellite system. After the col-
lapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, he also spoke in the West about
the fundamentally similar approach to governing in the West on rationalist,
technological assumptions about the world:
The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different
forms, that the world – and Being as such – is a wholly knowable system governed by
a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own
benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment
to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the industrial revolution to the infor-
mation revolution, was characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking.
This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that
exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that
exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which
there was a cult of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was
amassed and technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered
by the scientific method. It was an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms, and statisti-
cal averages. It was an era of freely transferable, existentially ungrounded information.
It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era where the goal
was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its pros-
perity (Havel 1992).19

The decay of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and political lib-
eration has produced – in both the Soviet and Western blocs – a desiccated

18
George Grant’s “Heideggerianism” is most in play in his Technology and Empire and Technology
and Justice (Grant 1969, 1986), but on Grant as offering a Platonic “rejoinder” to Heidegger, see
Angus 1987.
19
This quotation is from a 1992 address to the World Economic Forum (http://www
.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Havel.htm, retrieved August 9, 2012). See
with it Howard 2011 and Havel’s Letters to Olga (Havel 1989); “Power to the Powerless” (Havel
1985, 10–59); “Living in Truth” (Havel 1990). Havel’s encounter with Heidegger was mediated
by the great Czech phenomenologist and moral philosopher Jan Patocka; for the latter’s critique
of Heidegger, see Patocka 1998. On Havel’s reading of Heidegger, see Pontuso 2004, 20–43.
10 Heidegger and Politics

husk of technological rationality, a mode of relating to the world that tran-

scends the merely political differences of regime.
In addition to these nonviolent dissenters, Heidegger continues to
be influential among fascists – themselves, in a way, likewise convinced
of the interchangeability of communism and liberalism as obstacles to
“metapolitics” – in particular in their attempts to distinguish their politics from
“traditionalism” or the taint of “conservatism.”20 Aleksandr Dugin is perhaps
most remarkable of these figures. He is a Russian advocate for a “Eurasian”
counterpole to Atlanticist, Anglo-Saxon liberalism, an imperialism premised
on “Dasein” and “Ereignis,” the event of being that emerges from the world
midnight of globalization.21
It would be easy to overstate the hermeneutical foothold that these various
political stances and movements could afford in our attempt to understand
Heidegger. But on the evidence of these political connections, I hazard two
provisional claims. First, Heidegger has a certain importance for thinking at
the margins of the Western project – legalistic, secular, technological, capitalist,
socialist, or rationalist – where resistance to this imperative seeks some form
of “intellectual” support or guidance, be it in Iran, in the shadow of Soviet
occupation of Eastern Europe, in the immediate proximity of the “dynamo”
of the American “technological empire,” amid traditional communities around
the globe, or at the level of local and ecological concerns within the borders of
the West. These political movements are unified by a diagnosis of the totaliz-
ing character of rationalist structures – be these bureaucratic, for example, or
technological – which are expressed in the subordination and suppression of
nature, but especially human nature or humanity. The homogenizing impulse
of this universalizing dynamo of the West extirpates anything local, partic-
ular, distinctly individualized, “nonstandard,” or unique in the erection of a
stultifying edifice of scientific control. Second, Heideggerian politics, in addi-
tion to being unified in what it rejects, may permit of exceptional variety as
expressed in the different positive claims made by the figures of these move-
ments: some recur to a particular religion, history, or language; some invoke
“nature,” understood in a very particular, “non-Western” way (i.e., not in the

20
On Heidegger’s influence among fascists, see the very helpful article by Feldman, “Between
‘Geist’ and ‘Zeitgeist’: Martin Heidegger as Ideologue of Metapolitical Fascism,” where he
assimilates Heidegger to early twentieth-century fascist ideologies (a point from which I express
some dissent in the notes to Chapter 1), but then shows his influence on Pierre Krebs and Alain
de Benoist (Feldman 2005). See also the discussion by Graham Parkes (2009) of Heidegger’s
conjectured influence on Japanese fascism. Victor Farias’s recent study Farias 2010 traces
Heidegger’s influence among these diverse groups in considerable detail, even adducing a fascis-
tic Latin American connection.
21
Dugin himself disputes whether his “national bolshevism,” which looks for the “revolution in
archaic values,” can be characterized as fascist. For Dugin’s recurrence to Heidegger as sup-
plying an intellectual ballast for the “Fourth Political Theory,” the successor to the three failed
political theories of liberalism, communism, and fascism, see his The Fourth Political Theory
(Dugin 2012).
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 11

Platonic, Aristotelian, Hobbesian, or Rousseauan way); some refer to “truth,”

as in “living in the truth.” Just as striking as the unlooked-for similarity among
these movements in their broad agreement about what they reject is the incom-
mensurable diversity of their positive claims.

The Ambiguous Place of Politics in Heidegger

In response to the second objection to studying Heidegger – the claim that he
has precious little to say about politics – I insist that this misunderstands the
breadth and profundity of Heidegger’s project. The standing of “the political”
is nonetheless ambiguous in Heidegger.22 One looks in vain for Heidegger’s
Res Publica, his Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City, or Spirit of the
Laws. It is not an objection to this point, but a confirmation of it, to notice that
Heidegger has rather a lot to say about politics and the polis in his Introduction
to Metaphysics. In a similar vein, the course where he is most open about the
political resonances of his work is entitled “Logic” (GA 38). But for a phi-
losopher of sufficient stature, that is, one who purports to comment on every-
thing and the ground of everything, some bearing and therefore at a minimum
implicit comment on politics is entailed.
The point can be sharpened for Heidegger in particular. It is the purpose
of phenomenology to repair the breach left by the erection of the natural sci-
ences and their establishment as the dominant paradigm of knowledge, and
their original derivation from a more primordial “life-world,” in Husserl’s later
phrase of the 1930s, whence the subject matters of the different branches of
science are more organically interwoven with the lives lived by human beings.
The distinctions we accept among epistemology, philosophy of mind, anthro-
pology, biology, and political science are artifacts. In Heidegger’s reformulation
of the problem, the development of the sciences has itself proceeded histori-
cally, resulting in a “cultivated” society in which culture and philosophy itself
are so far removed from grasping the fundamental matters that to abide by
the available distinctions among culture, politics, anthropology, and other dis-
ciplines is to fail to question deeply enough. Such a formulation of the matter
will never lead to any real understanding.23 As we shall see presently, Heidegger
understands the distinction between theory and practice to be a false, or at
least arbitrary, distinction and therefore occlusive of the more primordial unity
of “thinking.”24 In other words, Heidegger’s usual refusal to speak of politics

22
On Heidegger as a thinker of “the political,” see Strong 2012, 263–324.
23
As we shall see in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, Heidegger’s dissent from these formulations
is so radical as even to refuse the merit of the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, a stan-
dard reference point for so many of his conservative revolutionary contemporaries, and indeed
for European philosophy since Rousseau. For an extremely insightful discussion of this matter,
see Velkley 2002, 11–48.
24
As students of Heidegger will already appreciate, the specific designation “thinking” enters
Heidegger’s lexicon later. There are occasionally important distinctions to be made among
12 Heidegger and Politics

as a subject proves to be central to his political import: in Heidegger, the most

essential distinction between theory and practice is deconstructed, leaving all
of the traditional barriers that hove off theory from practical, political import
in shambles.
The disassembly of the distinction between theory and practice surely has
some “practical” result. For Heidegger, this distinction obscured our access to
the most fundamental phenomenon, namely, Being. Disassembling it, therefore,
has the merit of freeing us to confront the question of Being, hence “ontology”
and fundamental ontology. To understand Heideggerian politics, therefore, it
is necessary to see how the question of Being relates to political life. Heidegger
understands politics and culture as epiphenomena that are determined by our
deeper shared understandings of what it means to be, or Being. Thus, through-
out the convulsive political events that rent the Western world in the t­ wentieth
century, Heidegger maintained that the source of our terrible political condi-
tion was our impoverished understanding of “Being.” The “forgetfulness of
Being,” as he terms it – a forgetfulness that dates from the original prejudice
for theoretical philosophy among the Greeks – is the source of the widespread
alienation, crass materialism, and ubiquitous technological destruction that
characterizes our age. This forgetfulness underlies every cultural form and
every political institution, and moreover it informs every currently envisioned
aspiration for social reform. Because the forgetfulness of Being characterizes
not merely our actions, but also our thoughts, every “traditional” category or
concept of political philosophy is, on Heidegger’s terms, inadequate for con-
fronting the political problems of our times. Ethics; natural law; the typology
of regimes and the best regime; rights; social contracts of any description; util-
itarian calculations; categorical imperatives; deliberation concerning the just,
noble, and good: none of these trite formulations can confront the required
rethinking of the question of Being. Without rethinking the meaning of Being,
it will be impossible to free ourselves from the awful mixture of tedium and
horror that constitutes contemporary political life. There is no political solu-
tion to our political problems; for Heidegger, every possibility of beginning
again depends on thinking anew the meaning of Being.

The Challenge of Heidegger

What, then, is the challenge posed by Heideggerian thought and its atten-
dant political ambiguity to the premises of Western civilization? What are
these premises? Stated with a measure of generality, they are that our rational
capacities may be fulfilled in harmony with our practical and collective lives.
thinking, philosophy, metaphysics, phenomenology, and terms Heidegger will employ to refer
to both his own activity and that to which he is referring as the fulfillment of human Dasein.
In the present study, these distinctions are not central, and I will generally refer to philosophy,
thinking, and phenomenology as like matters; when necessary, I will note his varying use of the
term “metaphysics” and make appropriate adjustments to my own usage.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 13

Whatever the tensions between them, our moral, practical, and theoretical
capacities exist in a fruitful rather than purely destructive tension with one
another. In both ancient and modern approaches to the relationship among
morality, theory, and practice, the fundamental strata of reality (characterized
as Being or nature) fundamentally favor such a coordination. In his fashion of
cruelly summarizing great, sweeping historical movements of thought in one
pithy formulation, Nietzsche referred to this hypothesis as “optimism.”25 In its
latest iteration, such optimism favors scientific rationalism, the technological
mastery of nature, an expansionist economy, the rule of law as understood in
the service of individual and group rights, and religion “within the limits” of
reason or possibly none at all. This sketch suppresses internal tensions of con-
siderable profundity, for at its core this civilizational conglomerate is meant to
include a large measure of self-critique. Nonetheless, it is precisely this civili-
zational conglomerate (“metaphysics”) that Heidegger, following Nietzsche,
diagnoses as nihilistic and therefore points us toward surpassing. As this civi-
lization spreads across the globe – whether as a pestilence, as a triumph of
humanity, or as a conquering empire – it meets resistance from within its own

25
Nietzsche faced Socrates as “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history”
within the context of his concern with “the science of aesthetics.” This science as he understood
it is both metaphysical and physiologic-psychological; it is “natural science”; according to the
suggestions of Beyond Good and Evil, it belongs to the context of a historical physiopsychology.
Nietzsche’s concern is not merely theoretical; he is concerned with the future of Germany of the
future of Europe – a human future that must surpass the highest that man has ever achieved
before. . . . Socrates is the first theoretical man, the incarnation of the spirit of science, radically
unartistic or a-music: “In the person of Socrates the belief in the comprehensibility of nature
and in the universal healing power of knowledge has first come to light.” He is the prototype of
the rationalist and therefore of the optimist, for optimism is not merely the belief that the world
is the best possible world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imagin-
able worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best possible world can be rendered harmless
by knowledge: thinking can not only fully understand being, but can even correct it; life can be
guided by science; the living gods of myth can be replaced by a deus ex machina, i.e., the forces
of nature as known and used in the service of “higher egoism.” Rationalism is optimism, since it
is the belief that reason’s power is unlimited and essentially beneficent or that science can solve
all riddles and loosen all chains. Rationalism is optimism, since the belief in causes depends on
the belief in ends, or since rationalism presupposes the belief in the initial or final supremacy of
the good. The full and ultimate consequences of the change effected or represented by Socrates
appear only in the contemporary West: in the belief in universal enlightenment and therewith
in the earthly happiness of all within a universal state, in utilitarianism, liberalism, democracy,
pacifism, and socialism. Both these consequences and the insight into the essential limitation of
science have shaken “Socratic culture” to its foundation: “The time of Socratic man has gone.”
There is then hope for a future beyond the peak of pre-Socratic culture, for a philosophy of
the future that is no longer merely theoretical, but knowingly based on acts of the will or on
decisions, and for a new kind of politics that includes as a matter of course the merciless anni-
hilation of everything degenerating and parasitical.” Nietzsche himself has said that in order to
understand a philosopher one acts soundly by first raising the question of the moral or political
meaning of his metaphysical assertions. Hence it would seem that his attack on Socrates must
be understood primarily as a political attack (Strauss 1966, 7).
14 Heidegger and Politics

borders as well as from without, and the thought of Martin Heidegger gives
succor and nourishment to protest, dissent, and refusal.26
Heidegger does not merely follow Nietzsche in his diagnosis; he means
to surpass and correct even Nietzsche’s understanding of the nihilism of the
West, because even Nietzsche’s protest remains “moral” and thus, incipi-
ently, ­“theoretical.”27 That is, Nietzsche, like Socrates before him, initiated a
moral-political investigation and formulated “physiopsychological” doctrines
on its basis, one that already presumes an understanding of Being (as pres-
ence). Heidegger quarrels with Nietzsche in the following way: it is not the
moralism of the “Socratic culture” that forms the basis of Western civilization,
but the theoretical pretensions of that culture that are the source of nihilism.
Heidegger’s challenge thus targets the rationalist claims at the heart of the clus-
ter of ways of life that makes up Western civilization, “Socratic” civilization.
Both Socrates and Heidegger are distinguished by the priority they give to
questions rather than answers; each is aporetic. But Heidegger stands after
the tradition inaugurated by Socrates. With Socrates, two distinguishable
approaches to thinking are combined: his characteristic question, What is it?
and the interrogation of the moral and political principles of human life, the
just, noble, and good. With the latter, philosophy was called down from the
heavens into the homes and hearths of the cities, initiating what Leo Strauss
came to refer to as “political philosophy.”28 According to Heidegger’s diagnosis,
however, such philosophy, which is inescapably oriented by the beings, is inher-
ently metaphysical – all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – and

26
The premises are what Nietzsche identified as “optimism” – the presumption that theory and
practice may be coordinated, and that practice is amenable to correction or improvement by
theory. As premises, these transcend the distinction between ancient and modern approaches to
thinking about politics, inasmuch as this quarrel takes place on the basis of the assumption that
practice may be ameliorated. Heidegger stands largely outside of these two approaches, then,
though he shares – as I will discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 – elements of each.
27
Valuing as such, even following the revaluation of values, entails an orientation by beings, in this
case the value that is the standard for evaluating whether life is enhanced or not. By so privileg-
ing beings, according to Heidegger, the will to power is still incipiently ontotheological and thus
fails to overcome nihilism (see especially “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead,” GA 5, 209–67;
Heidegger 2002c, 158–99).
28
This is not Heidegger’s own characterization of Socrates. In Was Heisst Denken? Heidegger
remarks that Socrates is the “purest” thinker in the West, because he wrote nothing (Heidegger
1976, 17). In his course on the “Essence of Human Freedom,” Heidegger praises the Socratic
investigation, “What is knowledge,” for in this question, man “places himself in question.
Such questioning brings man himself before new possibilities. The apparently innocuous
what-question is revealed as an attack by man on his own self, on his proximal persistence in
the usual and common, on his forgetting of first principles. It is an attack by man on what he
proximally believes himself to know, and at the same time it is a determining intervention in
what he himself can be, in what he wants to be or wants not to be” (Heidegger 2002d, 114).
Socrates is the initiator of the “What is it?” question, which is reformulated by Aristotle as the
guiding question of metaphysics, “What is the being?”; in this respect, Socrates stands at the
beginning of the Western tradition of metaphysics. On the intellectual relationship between
Strauss and Heidegger, see Velkley 2011; Zuckert 1996.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 15

hence obscures a more primordial openness to the question of Being itself. To

repeat: the problem is not merely the “answers” or the tradition that Socrates
initiated; the problem is more fundamental in that the Socratic questions them-
selves delineate what will suffice as answers to them.29 As Heidegger might
characterize it, the Socratic approach presupposes that the question, “What
is justice?” may be adequately answered with a presupposed understanding
of the meaning of is; it presumes that the question, “What is virtue?” may be
answered with the available understanding of is implied by the question. The
debate that follows in response to such questions – for example, whether virtue
is or is not knowledge, or self-same, or one or many, among other p ­ ossibilities –
overlooks that the debate takes place within a shared understanding of the
meaning of Being. This shared understanding is that Being means presence,
that to be means to be something, and that answers to questions of the “What
is it” variety ought not to be self-contradictory.30 The question of Being and
Time, a question indeed pursued through much of Heidegger’s oeuvre, is
whether or not presence is an adequate conception of the meaning of Being, or
whether presence actually hides the fact that Being happens within the horizon
of time.31 Identifying Being with presence, then, or with permanent presence,
that is, eternity, flattens and renders static an approach to time that is properly
more dynamic. Answering “what is” questions on the basis of such an attenu-
ated approach vastly circumscribes and restricts the possibilities for human
life, possibilities to which we could otherwise be open.
This is not, of course, perfectly fair to Socrates. Investigating such questions
as “What is justice?” and “What is virtue?” led to Socrates’ own hypothe-
ses about the meaning of Being.32 Heidegger’s point, however, is that the very

29
Heidegger: “Every question specifies as a question the breadth and nature of the answer it
is looking for. At the same time it circumscribes the range of possibilities for answering”
(GA 6.2 344; N4 206).
30
Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: “The essence of time as first put forward
by Aristotle in the way that has proven decisive for the subsequent history of metaphysics gives
no answer to this. On the contrary: it can be shown that precisely this analysis of time was
guided by an understanding of Being that – concealing itself in its action – understands Being as
permanent presence and that accordingly determines the ‘Being’ of time from the ‘now,’ i.e., on
the basis of the character of time which is always and constantly presencing, i.e., which strictly
speaking is in the ancient sense” (GA 3 241; KPM 169). Heidegger refers to dialectic as a “philo-
sophical embarrassment (Verlegenheit)” in Being and Time because it overlooks that a dialogue
proceeds on the basis of the fundamental unity of a shared understanding. To presume, then,
that “dialogue” or dialectic will provide more clarity or ascend to a greater insight is mistaken.
This points to the fundamental disagreement between Gadamer and Heidegger, a disagreement
only very rarely pointed to by Gadamer, though see Gadamer’s citation of a 1972 letter from
Heidegger commenting on his studies of Plato and Hegel (Gadamer 1982, 66) and Gadamer’s
correspondence with Leo Strauss (Gadamer and Strauss 1978). On Heidegger’s critique of dia-
lectical argumentation and its source in Plato, see Gonzalez 2009; Zuckert 1996.
31
See Pöggeler 1987, 85–6.
32
See Chapter 2, “Socrates’ Hypothesis,” of Stanley Rosen’s The Question of Being: A Reversal of
Heidegger (Rosen 1993). Rosen’s Nihilism (Rosen 1969) and The Elusiveness of the Ordinary
(Rosen 2002) must also be consulted.
16 Heidegger and Politics

formulation of the matter with reference to the “is,” the copula, privileges a
narrow slice of the temporality of Being and also covers up and forgets the
now “deeper” problem of the finite temporality of Being.33 Socrates, and cer-
tainly the tradition that follows from his initial formulation of these questions,
has forgotten and therefore occluded our access to the rest of the question.
The answers to these questions constitutive of the philosophic conversation
of the Western tradition – answers that are not monolithic in their own terms,
everyone should realize – have all, Heidegger insists, been premised on broadly
similar understandings of the meaning of Being. And these understandings or
presumptions have not themselves been adequately interrogated by this philo-
sophic tradition.
It is necessary, then, to distinguish Heidegger’s starting point from that of
Socrates and, indeed, the “optimistic” civilization that followed in his wake.
Our discontent – disquiet, perplexity, anxiety, nausea, and dread – signals the
felt inadequacy of the results of Socrates’ approach (understood as the West
itself) and call us to attain to a deeper question than those raised by Socrates.
Heidegger’s charge is that these pathê remain unanswered because the theoreti-
cal tradition of philosophy in the West is insufficiently “primordial” to account
for them, given the flight and forgetfulness of Being. In order to provoke a
recollection of the question of Being, Heidegger urges a confrontation with the
inextinguishable finitude of our own existence in its various manifestations.
Our discontent thus opens a path to discovery. This confrontation may concern
several possible phenomena: the unfulfilling, even embarrassed sense of the
poverty of our claims to understand the meaning of Being; the felt inadequacy
of our practice to comport always with our projections of it, that is, the break-
down of what Heidegger refers to as the ready-to-hand; the lived experience
of the oblivion of our heritage; and more broadly, our sense of horror at our
distinctive historical moment, a civilizational project that culminates in the
“phenomena of nihilism” and destitution, exhibited in the disjunction between
our pretensions to be living in the age of Enlightenment when in fact we know
virtually nothing, and make war on one another, on nature, and on ourselves.
Our sense of despondency resonates with the moment in which we live, of the
destitution and abscondence of Being. Indeed, this moment is uniquely attuned
33
“Like understanding and interpretation in general, the “as” is grounded in the ecstatico-horizontal
unity of temporality. In our fundamental analysis of Being, and of course in connection with the
Interpretation of the “is” (which, as a copula, gives “expression” to the addressing of something
as something), we must again make the phenomenon of the “as” a theme and delimit the con-
ception of this ‘schema’ existentially” (SZ 360; emphasis in the original text).
  . . . the analysis of the temporal Constitution of discourse and the explication of the temporal
characteristics of language-patterns can be tackled only if the problem of how Being and truth
are connected in principle, is broached in the light of the problematic of temporality. We can
then define even the ontological meaning of the “is”, which a superficial theory of proposi-
tions and judgments has deformed to a mere “copula”. Only in terms of the temporality of
­discourse – that is, of Dasein in general – can we clarify how “signification” “arises” and make
the possibility of concept-formation ontologically intelligible (SZ 349).
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 17

or disposed to such resonances, and for its destitution is therefore open to

attending to Being as never before in the history of the West. In contrast with
philosophy in the history of the West, the question announced by perplexity or
anxiety, as Heidegger understands the matter, derives from the confrontation
with Nothing. Unlike Socrates, Heidegger does not formulate questions about
a being or a something: the just or the noble, for example. Heidegger thus
refuses the starting point of the constitutive quarrels of the history of political
thought because each of them arose in a less distraught time and therefore has
less purchase on the most disturbing, most profound, question.34
Instead, Heidegger searches for the ground, or Abgrund, manifested by
disquiet. This distressed search in itself constitutes the unifying ground of a
Heideggerian politics of radical discontent, inasmuch as it is not theoretical
and constitutes the basis for human existence as such. Such politics, which
are expressed in two principal inclinations, the one a violent and total rev-
olution (such as envisioned by the Brownshirt faction of the NSDAP, which
Heidegger supported, and Iranian revolutionaries such as Ahmad Fardid and
Reza Davari), the other a quiescent letting be (such as advocated, after a fash-
ion, by George Grant), take as their starting point the position that the present
age is fundamentally bankrupt, that we live in a time of the forgetfulness and
abandonment of Being.35 Prior to quietism or revolution is the profoundest
disquiet, which is retained through both political inclinations as the only testi-
mony we have of the truth of Being. Such profound disquiet in turn provokes
a hopefulness that supersedes all previous optimism.

The Methods and Limits of This Study

This book contends that Heidegger’s focus on and formulation of how the
question of Being relates to human life entail a paradoxical and radically
discontented politics. The Heideggerian position tends toward two political
inclinations. The first is a revolutionary and incipiently violent refusal of the
inauthentic “everyday,” understood as an individual and communal attitude
toward time that privileges stability, regularity, and reliability in all human
endeavors. Everydayness thus consists in the elevation of theory, ­“metaphysics,”
and forms of communal existence that trade in deceit, despotism, and the most
ephemeral and self-satisfied paltriness. The other inclination might be called
quietistic, consisting in “letting be” – letting the current situation of nihilism

34
As Strauss suggested, what came to be an apocalyptic hopefulness in Heidegger, “accompanied
or followed by a return of the gods,” has the character more of a religious openness than of phil-
osophic doctrine (Strauss 1983, 33). See Richard Velkley’s treatment of this topic (2011, 46–7,
55–9). For an interpretation of the politics of Heidegger’s thought that stresses Heidegger’s con-
frontation with Christian sources, see Rickey 2001.
35
Critchley 2008, 132–53; Dallmayr 2010, 67–81; and Schürman 2008, 116, all use the term
“letting be” to express the sort of political stance they see in Heidegger. See Heidegger’s discus-
sion of letting be, Lassen, in the final Le Thor seminar (GA 15 363).
18 Heidegger and Politics

and the ascendecy of inauthentic, “everyday” vapidity be – on the logic that

even the absolute bereavement of meaning is a gift of Being. The attendant politi-
cal stance is, in effect, an endorsement of the status quo rather than revolutionary
violence. The varieties of Heideggerian politics derive from these two plausi-
bly Heideggerian stances toward the question of Being, each of which shares in
Heidegger’s understanding of “everydayness.” I argue that Heideggerian politics
consists not merely in the retrieval of an autochthonous “rootedness beyond all
rootedness,” but also in a formalism and abstraction that supersede the funda-
mentally arbitrary claims of metaphysics or theoretical rationality and so give
expression to a superior universalism. Indeed, when we see that the formal and
abstract character of what Heidegger means by “everydayness” – a category of
existence conceived of so broadly as to include every possible way of life – is
just as integral to Heidegger’s understanding of human existence as the radical
individuation (either of a person or a community) entailed in the “factical ideal”
(SZ 310) of authenticity, we can better explain the evidently broad appeal and
remarkably varied application of his thought. In this characteristic juxtaposition
of the most arid abstraction and the most organic particularity, we can also dis-
cern, however, the coarseness of political judgment that such an analysis must
encourage. The texture of political life – the multifarious selfish and selfless pas-
sions, ambitions and longings for justice, aspirations to nobility and rancorous
jealousies, agony, and glories that populate the histories of great polities and char-
acterize the experience of political life even into our time – is therefore reduced to
the homogeneity and shallowness of “everydayness.” At the same time, this dreary
paltriness needs somehow to be preserved without amelioration for the sake of an
authentic attunement to the dispensation of Being.
The reading offered here stands, then, in tension with some of the more
prominent recent approaches to the question of Heidegger and politics. These
approaches tend to focus on his Nazism either to emphasize it or to downplay
it. To begin with, it is impossible to assess Heidegger’s importance for politics if
we refuse to see that his Nazism was an extension of his thought and not vice
versa. If we look at Heidegger simply as a Nazi partisan and try to construe
his thought on this basis, we cannot finally understand what distinguishes him
from the most vulgar polemicists and hacks who attempted to lend the regime
a veneer of intellectual legitimacy. Heidegger, whatever his failings, was no
fourth-rate ideologue or cheap, coffeehouse intellectual. The frequently contro-
versial body of work presented by such scholars as Emmannuel Faye, Johannes
Fritsche, Victor Farias, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, wherein Heidegger’s thought
is presented as though the key to understanding his thought is his Nazism,
does not, in the end, provide a route to confronting adequately Heidegger’s
thorough and radical philosophic challenge to the premises of Western civili-
zation and philosophy.36 Though this scholarship has brought to light quite a

36
I will engage with these authors as necessary through the notes of the book. For now, their main
contributions may be found in Bourdieu 1991; Farías 1989; Faye 2009, 2012; Fritsche, 1999,
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 19

lot about Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis that was otherwise covered
up or misunderstood, this approach leaves the philosophic sources of his poli-
tics untouched, and therefore Heidegger’s challenge still stands.37 By the same
token, however, it will not do simply to dismiss Heidegger’s own noxious pol-
itics as a personal flaw or another, otherwise disposable element of his work.38
Such an approach to Heidegger overlooks Heidegger’s view that adequate
guidance for the recovery of the deeper currents of radical individuation in
our historical existence requires the most formal abstraction. The “practical”
correlate of such formalism is in Heidegger’s terms a “violent” (gewaltsam)
hermeneutic that wrests us from our everyday complacency, and it is integral to
Heideggerian politics. This book therefore offers a contribution to the holistic
reading of Heidegger’s philosophy and politics that of necessity gives greater
weight to the former.39
To speak to our interest in Heideggerian politics, it is necessary therefore
to apprehend first the problems to which Heidegger understood himself to be
responding. Put another way, in order to understand Heidegger’s relevance for
us, it is necessary first to put his thought in context, where the most important
dimension of that context is the problems and questions that motivated his
work. The question is sometimes asked whether Heidegger should be under-
stood to be offering a moral critique of modernity or Western philosophy more
broadly. As I suggest in Chapters 1 and 2, the answer is a qualified no. More pre-
cisely, these are emphatically not the grounds on which Heidegger accounts for
the philosophic problem he sets for himself. This amoralism, I suspect, is part
of the reason Heidegger’s work is so amenable to appropriation and “applica-
tion” by such a wide and varied set of readers who retain some version of their
own moral commitments. He speaks to the feeling or pathos of moral decay,
degeneration, to the collapse and manifest hollowness of the lofty pretensions
of Western civilization and culture. And yet Heidegger’s diagnosis and account
of these phenomena are muddied if they are rephrased in the language of moral
outrage. For as he seems to emphasize in his earliest courses, the moral issue –
and with politics and culture – is epiphenomenal. Deeper and more serious
are the mistaken premises of Western philosophy, in particular the distinction
between theory and practice. The terminology that Heidegger uses to express
this problem shifts considerably, from his early courses to his first great opus,

2009, 2012. On Richard Wolin, another prominent spokesperson for this school of Heidegger
interpretation, see David O’Connor’s assessment (O’Connor 2002, 200–1 n. 2).
37
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s remark about Bourdieu’s study is apposite: “Bourdieu’s analysis is an
interesting one, but it is based on a presupposition which I can neither grant nor share, namely
that philosophy makes its appearance in the world only as a particular arrangement which soci-
ologists would be able to consider from a critical point of view and all of whose pretensions to
knowledge they could finally and radically expose” (Gadamer 1998, 4).
38
See Dallmayr 2010; Dreyfus 1993.
39
Such holistic readings are explored by several of Heidegger’s interpreters, prominent among
them Karl Löwith (1995), Werner Marx (1973), and Otto Pöggeler (1987).
20 Heidegger and Politics

Being and Time, and throughout the decades following. My purpose here is not
to pick and choose one such formulation and call it decisive – be this one of the
earlier ones, or later, or unpublished – but to try to understand the problems to
which Heidegger was addressing himself with these formulations.
This book presents an argument in several parts that supports this under-
standing of the relationship between Heidegger’s ontology and political life.
I begin by discussing some of Heidegger’s early work where he argues that the
problems that confront us are not moral, political, or cultural at their heart and
cannot be understood by value philosophy or ethics. Instead, what is required
is a fundamental reassessment of such “theoretical” approaches to philosophy
that determines those disciplines in order that we devise a method of reason-
ing about our predicament. A new approach to philosophizing might be able
to grasp the “fundamental experience of the ‘I am’ ” or Existenz at the root
of consciousness, and then on this basis reassemble an approach to the vari-
ous phenomena in the world and reconstruct a more appropriate relationship
between philosophy and culture more generally.
In the next section of the book, I follow Heidegger in exploring why, if the-
ory is such a mistaken philosophical approach, it has been the default in the
West since the Greeks. Why do problems present themselves as moral, political,
or cultural if, as Heidegger insists, they are more properly and fundamentally
existential or ontological? In particular, I look at what Heidegger refers to as
“everydayness,” our constitutive attitude toward temporality that inclines us to
favor regularity, familiarity, and constancy and to cover over the truth. In our
dealings with the articles of use with which we are normally surrounded in the
world, everydayness favors the emergence of theoretical rationality. Politically,
in our dealings with other people, it favors a form of communal life that is shal-
low and deceitful. The concept of everydayness points to another dimension of
Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, however. As Heidegger accounts for
how his own investigation is possible, it emerges that raising the question of
Being follows from the analysis of Dasein, and that Dasein is to be investigated
in its everydayness, that is, how it is “proximally and for the most part.” This is
the doubleness of everydayness: that it both occludes the most important ques-
tion but also thereby points the way toward disclosing it. I argue that seeing
this doubleness is key to understanding Being and Time as speaking to a singu-
lar historical moment when it is possible to gain unique purchase on the role
of Dasein as the “shepherd of Being” among the beings. This moment, nihilism,
is strangely resonant with the need that we apprehend Being as other than a
being, that is, as “the same” as the nothing. As such, the historical moment of
Heidegger’s philosophy, while on the one hand depending on the absolute dis-
solution of the West, on the other hand holds tremendous promise as facilitat-
ing a new understanding of Being as such.
In the final section of the book, I lay out Heidegger’s account of the
authentic communal existence that can give expression to such a radically
reformed understanding of Being. Given, though, the everyday character of
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 21

our disclosedness, in particular our inability to avoid expressing our disclosures

without reference to the beings, and hence our inherent tendency to occlude our
own discoveries, I argue that Heidegger presents an account of the “ideal” form of
existence that includes an awareness of the obscurity in which it will necessarily
be lived. His account of this is given to two forms of political community, one of
which, by means of a total and violent revolution, revives a historically bygone
community, the other of which awaits this possibility in a new, quietist dispensa-
tion of Being.
There are as many paths through Heidegger’s works as he has readers. The
argument presented in the following pages draws from numerous texts, from all
periods of Heidegger’s career, but there are distinctive emphases and ellipses. The
first part of the book tarries with some of Heidegger’s earliest mature thought in
order to formulate properly his understanding of the problems that would pro-
voke his inquiry into the history of Being as apprehended in the greatest thinkers.
While I comment on some of Heidegger’s most important late works, in particu-
lar the essay from the Nietzsche volumes called “Nihilism as Determined by the
History of Being,” and emphasize themes normally associated with the “later”
Heidegger such as letting be, awaiting, and the gift of Being, the weight of the
textual studies here comes from Heidegger’s earlier works. My purpose is not
to undercut the importance of Heidegger’s work after die Kehre, but rather to
emphasize the latency of many of the most important later formulations in his
earlier work and thereby to make sense of the unity of Heidegger’s thought.40
Being and Time occupies a central place in my study. It is not sufficiently appreci-
ated how pertinent this text of Heidegger’s is to the problems and philosophical
disputes that I have just referenced. Moreover, Heidegger’s turn to the history
of Being shares premises with the arguments he lays out in detail in Being and
Time and works published both before and after it; the turn to the history of
Being is required by the matter of thought that he treats throughout his career.41
If we wish to understand the political implications of Heideggerian ontology,
then an encounter, not to say confrontation, with Being and Time is necessary.42

40
I thus dispute Gregory Bruce Smith’s claim that in Heidegger’s later work an excess of “theo-
retical derivation” led him to “abstractions from abstractions” by which he “betrayed his most
profound phenomenological insights” (Smith 2007, 206).
41
See Heidegger’s “Preface” to Richardson 2003, xvii.
42
This book does not concentrate on the works of Heidegger’s most evidently political period, the
1930s. For excellent treatments, see Bambach 2003; Fried 2000; Phillips 2005; Zuckert 1990.
On the one hand, I do not wish to recapitulate the controversies concerning his Nazism any
more than is necessary. These debates have come to obscure the plainest fact, that Heidegger’s
Nazism was in accord with his thought. On the other, I think the essentials of this later period,
and indeed the still later postwar period, are already given expression in Being and Time, and
this needs to be explored. I am rather disposed against the increasingly baroque periodization
of Heidegger’s thought, not least because this appears sometimes to be motivated by a desire
to “rescue” whichever of his texts can be saved from the taint of Nazism (a strategy Thomas
Sheehan describes as, “Admit the Nazism but save the philosophy!” [Sheehan 1993]). More pro-
foundly, I consider the periodization of Heidegger’s thought an inadequate way of confronting
22 Heidegger and Politics

My hermeneutic method is, in some sense, simplicity itself; in subordinating my

­questions to Heidegger’s and then returning to the guiding inquiry of this book,
I follow the argument of Heidegger’s texts as closely as I can. Against any charge
of witlessly preferring the presence of the text to its absence, I follow the judicious
reasoning of James Ward: “While Heidegger’s motto for the Gesamtausgabe is
‘ways – not works,’ the ways of his thinking are and must be exhibited as works,
and these works have an integrity of wholeness as works, a coherence that is
not opposed to their openness or provisionality. . . . We follow a text carefully not
because the text is all we have but precisely because it is the best, or even the only,
guide to what we do not have, to what is not a text” (Ward 1995, xxiv–xxv).

Let me sketch my own position briefly. This book is limited to an inquiry into
the ontological basis of politics in Heidegger’s works. It therefore implies with-
out robustly developing a fuller critique of Heidegger. While I have attempted
to let Heidegger speak first, this book is meant to point toward such a critique.
Socratic political philosophy and Aristotelian political science as rearticulated
in the twentieth century by Leo Strauss and others offer a better grasp of the
fundamental philosophic questions and so a better understanding of the human
situation, in particular our political life. It thereby offers a promising response
to the challenge posed by Heidegger. Strauss suggests that the limits of the
Heideggerian approach to politics emerge from considering the rather qualified
disclosiveness of the passions of disquiet (Strauss 1958, 260). Existenz does
not open us up to everything it purports to; we miss out on important ways

the work of a thinker of such titanic stature. I agree perfectly with James Ward’s remark in his
study of Heidegger’s Political Thinking: “As the volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe con-
tinue to appear, I have become convinced that interpretive questions of precedence and subse-
quence, of precisely when Heidegger first announced a theme or employed a term, should be
given less emphasis than has often been the case. . . . The texts of lectures and unpublished manu-
scripts, then, allow us to ascertain early, perhaps even the earliest, appearances of a thought in
writing but cannot tell us when a thought was first thought” (Ward 1995, xxiii).
  William Blattner (1999, xiv) argues that one should not treat lecture courses as having the
same weight as the magnum opus, when he observes that Heidegger’s audience of students
would have been much more familiar with Husserlian and neo-Kantian “forms of expression
than those that would make up Being and Time” (xv). Hence, “it is likely that it [Being and
Time] is more carefully and directly formulated than classroom lectures.” I agree and retain a
bias for Heidegger’ published over unpublished work, though I make considerable use of the lat-
ter. James Luchte (2008) dissents in the strongest reasonable terms. He frequently characterizes
Being and Time as a “published fragment” (3) and stresses Heidegger’s compulsion to publish
it (2). Indeed, he sees even the recent studies of Heidegger’s 1920s phenomenology as being too
guided by the “archic” place of Being and Time and attributes a kind of “teleology” to Kisiel
(3)! Thus, he writes: “While I am not in any way seeking to diminish the importance of Being
and Time, it would be a vast hermeneutical error to disregard the many contemporary unpub-
lished and published works as mere supplements, when in fact, these seek to ‘go all the way to
the end’ of this project” (3). On the location of Being and Time in Heidegger’s corpus, see Smith
2007, 83–4.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 23

that our “existence” is informed by love and laughter if we only take our bear-
ings by the experiences typified by trauma and loss.
His implication is that we can disagree with Heidegger about which
­phenomena are most primordial. This, I believe, is the correct way to argue
with and ultimately against Heidegger. It is impossible to grasp the full texture
of human existence, and in particular the mixture of deceit, genuine nobil-
ity, and seediness that constitutes political life even at its best if anxiety, for
example, is taken as the privileged locus of disclosure. Such an approach fails
to distinguish between the most baleful tyrannies and humdrum corruption,
let alone actual virtue.
If we admit of a broader palette of disclosive phenomena than the pathê of
discontent – claims to rule, opinions about right and wrong, reasons to com-
promise – we might better understand our summons to admiration or awe in
the face of sacrifice, or our comic amusement at the human condition, rather
than submit to distress at the occlusiveness effected by these aspects of life. This
is as much true for those who would follow the politics of Heidegger’s epigone
as it is for those, liberals or otherwise, who would oppose them.
Political existence is lived out within a matrix of questions about the noble,
base, just, good, and bad, and these need not foreclose meditations on the fini-
tude of Being. Since political life is not altogether subsumed within the total-
izing matrix of technological rationality, indeed, is apparently resistant to the
unchecked rule of reason, it is possible that the consideration of such political
phenomena might be a more fruitful response to the contemporary evidence of
nihilism and therefore call radically into question its diagnosis by Heidegger.
If so, then we need neither uncritically accept miseries nor outlandishly hope
for deliverance.
We do not need to accept Heidegger’s diagnosis of the West in order to
accept his challenge. It is necessary, however, to understand this challenge in
order to respond to it. This book is offered as an essay in understanding the
challenge posed by Heidegger.
1

What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and

the Problem of Theory

Perhaps the chief difficulty in understanding Heidegger’s relevance for politics,

as Tracy Strong among other political theorists has noted, is that Heidegger
does not “speak” political. His thought requires being translated into the lan-
guage of what Aristotle called “practical affairs,” even though it is evidently
resistant to such translation. There is no specific need, however, that the only
political importance of a thinker be his or her remarks expressly about ­politics.1
In the case of Heidegger, whose work makes comprehensive claims about the
very ground of everything that is, some political import is certainly promised,
if not guaranteed. What is more, his numerous remarks on such topics as the
decadence of late-modern culture, the character of the Greek polis as a location
for thinking, and above all the persistent ire of his critique of contemporary
society would seem to ensure that his comprehensiveness indeed touches polit-
ical matters.2

1
Heidegger’s plainest statement of the problem of trying to understand the practical import of his
thought is in the Letter on Humanism: “thinking, when taken for itself, is not ‘practical’ ” (BW
218). Tracy Strong puts it this way: “When one comes to Martin Heidegger, the problem is to
find the politics in his philosophy, or to find whether his politics are in his philosophy, or, better
still, to find whether there is both a concept of the political and a political theory in his philoso-
phy” (Strong 2012, 267). Mark Blitz’s remark, then, that to “confront Heidegger properly and to
place correctly his own explicit remarks about ‘the political,’ we must consider Heidegger’s own
purpose and goal,” is most apt (Blitz 2000, 169).
  On Heidegger’s denial of the applicability of his thought to other “disciplines,” see SZ 16, 50,
and section 10 (45–52) more generally.
2
On Heidegger’s youthful culture critique, see the essay “Per Mortem ad Vitam: Thoughts on
Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life,” in the collection Supplements: From
the Earlies Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (S 35–9) and Van Buren’s discussion of the
“Young” Heidegger in the third chapter of his The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden
King (Van Buren 1994, 51–64). On the Greek city, see Introduction to Metaphysics (IM
162–3). Many of Heidegger’s courses in the 1920s treated Aristotle and other Greek thinkers,
but after the publication of Being and Time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he undertook

24
What’s the Matter with Ethics? 25

Numerous scholars have seen the most promising avenue for understand-
ing the practical, and therefore also political, questions that emerge from
Heidegger in the possibility of deriving an ethics from his thought.3 There is
a certain measure of support for this in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger him-
self frequently refers to his thinking in terms of a retrieval of the notion of
ethos, in what he presents as a Heracleitean sense of dwelling, a deeper mean-
ing of the word that has been obscured by the notion of a science of ethics.4
Moreover, Heidegger’s frequent insistence that he is not providing an ethics
shows that he thought it necessary to clarify this common misunderstanding
of his position. That is, his own project evidently lent itself to such misunder-
standing. After the publication of Being and Time, he occasionally remarked
(amusingly) that it should not be taken to constitute an instruction manual in
practical dealings; as he says in the lectures collected as Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics, the purpose of Being and Time is not to provide instruction in
the use of “knives and forks or . . . the tram.”5 Even so, to see that Heidegger
is not supplying an ethics in Being and Time or in his work is not therefore
to foreclose the possibility of developing an ethics on Heideggerian principles,
as Lawrence Hatab has noted, and certainly this has been emphasized in the

a much broader investigation of Greek piety and cultural practices (see Safranski 1999,
214–19).
3
Several studies that attempt to derive an ethical position based on Heidegger’s work have
appeared in recent years. A sampling of the highlights would include Bernasconi 1993; Greisch
1987; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis 2005; McNeill 1999; Nancy 2002; Olafson 1998; Vogel
1994. Van Buren 1995 and Reid 2005 focus particularly on the notion of ethics in Heidegger’s
early work.
4
Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this view: “Heidegger’s thinking conceived of itself, throughout,
as a fundamental ethics” (Nancy 2002, 67). The Letter on Humanism, drafted in response to
Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that existentialism was humanism, is the locus classicus of these
claims: the discipline of “ethics” only comes into being when “thinking” has come to an end
(BW 219). Prior to the emergence of such an “episteme” in the time of Plato, prior thinkers had
no sense of a distinction among ethics, logic, and physics. Heracleitus gave expression to this
prior unity in the statement “êthos anthropoi daimôn.” From this phrase, Heidegger appropri-
ates the sense of ethos as “abode” or “dwelling,” the place where thinking may summon gods to
presence (BW 256–7). His thinking seeks, not an ethics in the post-Platonic sense, but an ethos,
in a retrieval of the Heracleitean sense. It is the purpose of this and the following chapter to
show that, despite a certain semantic connection to concerns with “ethics,” the ethos to which
Heidegger points entail a denial of ethics as this is normally meant. Herman Philipse expresses
this point forcibly: “there is a crucial difference between Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine
and religious conceptions. Whereas religions provide ethical content to their doctrines of God’s
command by spelling out divine commandments, Heideggerian Being never issues moral pre-
cepts. As a consequence, Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine exterminates ethics by investing a
transcendent non-entity (Being) with a moral monopoly, but without specifying moral rules so
authorized” (Philipse 1999, 441).
5
GA 29/30 262/FCM 117. Karl Löwith remarked on the seeming abandonment in Being and
Time of the suppleness of the “hermeneutics of facticity” that had characterized Heidegger’s
work before the publication of that book (see the exchange of letters between Heidegger and
Löwith in BH 289–303).
26 Heidegger and Politics

Heidegger scholarship.6 This points to the further notion that if Heidegger’s

thought could be used to develop an ethics, then surely it might suggest a polit-
ical teaching as well.7
The plain meaning of Heidegger’s remarks, however, is that he is not pre-
pared to provide something that would be called “ethics.”8 Such giants of
twentieth-century thought as Emmanuel Lévinas and Hans Jonas, each of whom
can trace important elements of their philosophic development to Heidegger,
declaim the poverty of Heideggerian philosophy precisely on the grounds that
it forecloses any ethics worthy of the name. Moreover, they see a direct con-
nection between precisely this lack and the notorious politics to which he com-
mitted himself.9 As Lévinas commented in an interview: “the absence of care
for the other in Heidegger and his personal political adventure were connected.
And despite all of my admiration for the greatness of his thought, I have never
been able to separate this double-aspect of his position.”10
It will be the purpose of this and the following chapter to argue for a ver-
sion of the claim that Heidegger provides no ethics, and in doing so to quar-
rel with a widespread misunderstanding of it. Heidegger’s thought forecloses
any ethics and in doing so articulates an understanding of human existence
that entails profound ethical and political consequences. Some scholars have
imputed Heidegger’s denial or lack of ethics to a prior commitment to explicitly

6
For representative works of this kind, see Freeman 2009; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis
2005; Miyasaki 2007; Olafson 1998. Some readers simply interpret him as providing an ethics
unwittingly. This is Lauren Freeman’s claim (2009, 86).
7
For studies that extend a Heideggerian politics from an ethics, see the classic statement by
White (1990). For examples more clearly sympathetic to Heidegger, see Hatab 2000, 169–94;
Mummery 2002; Vogel 1994, 99–124. The “Green Heideggerians,” as I have styled them, derive
certain political teachings from their construal of a Heideggerian ethics; see Thiele (1995,
79–90) with Michael Zimmerman’s problematization of the relationship between Heidegger
and environmental ethics (Zimmerman 1993; 2003, 94).
8
BW 219. As Tracy Strong notes, “Those who have sought to find an ethics or morality in
Heidegger have grasped at straws or transformed him into a version of Emmanuel Lévinas”
(Strong 2012, 373).
  Gadamer’s comment on the “Letter on Humanism” is helpful. In this writing, Heidegger
attempts to distance himself from the ethical claims being made by French existentialists, pre-
cisely because these are inadequate to the task of his thinking: “It was the theme of ethics that
the French readers missed in Heidegger, as did Jaspers as well. Heidegger defended himself
against this expectation and demand, not because he underestimated the question of ethics or
the social plight of Dasein, but rather because his mission in thinking compelled him to ask more
radical questions” (Gadamer 1994, 11–12).
9
The lead-in to Heidegger’s exploration of the meaning of ethos in the Letter on Humanism is
Heidegger’s remark: “Soon after Being and Time appeared a young friend asked me, “When are
you going to write an ethics?” (BW 255). For Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger, see Lévinas (1969,
passim, but particularly 45–8) and his seminal work, Lévinas 1951. Habermas’ discussions of
Heidegger may be found in Habermas 1977 [1953]; 1989; 1990, ch. 6.
10
Lévinas (1994, 203–10). Quoted in Gordon 2010, 103. “Of course, I will never forget Heidegger’s
relation to Hitler. Even if this relation was only of a very short duration, it will be forever. . . . But
whatever a serious orientation might be, Heidegger would not be absent from it” (Lévinas 2001, 32).
What’s the Matter with Ethics? 27

National Socialist politics. They have not succeeded, however, in showing that
Heidegger’s political commitments actually predate his formulation of the phil-
osophic problems that preoccupy his thought. Emmanuel Faye, for example,
identifies the source of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic Nazism in his encounter with
Count Yorck in 1923.11 Johannes Fritsche has shown in a provocative and
detailed fashion that Heidegger’s Being and Time is steeped in the language
not merely of the revolutionary right in 1920s Germany, but specifically in
the conceptual terminology unique to the National Socialists as expressed by
Hitler in Mein Kampf (published for the first time in 1925–6).12 Each of these
scholars assigns a priority to Heidegger’s Nazi politics, and they argue that his
philosophy merely supplements and is secondary to these commitments. As
others have noted, however, if Heidegger’s thought were really no more pro-
found or challenging than that of such figures as Alfred Baeumler or Alfred
Rosenberg, or any other fourth-rate Nazi ideologue, he would be as easy to
dismiss as they are.13 Because Fritsche and Faye overlook the emergence of
Heidegger’s approach to politics from the philosophic problematic with which
he concerned himself for his entire career, they in fact understate the challenge
and, indeed, the danger of Heidegger’s thought.14 For it is precisely because

11
Faye 2009, 8–15; see also Faye 2012, 257.
12
See Fritsche 1999, 2012.
13
See, for example, Peter Gordon’s review of Faye (Gordon 2010) and Gregory Fried’s “A Letter
to Emmanuel Faye” (Fried 2011). Faye’s essay “From Polemos to the Extermination of the
Enemy: Response to the Open Letter of Gregory Fried,” responds to several of the charges
brought against him in the numerous critical reviews of his important study, Heidegger: The
Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (Faye 2011). Though Faye’s method is not adequate
to the task, he expresses the need for a confrontation with Heidegger in terms similar to those
used here: “The problem of Nazi penetration into all the domains of culture – from philosophy
with Heidegger to law with Carl Schmitt, for example, to theology with Gogarten and others,
but also to medicine, biology, architecture, poetry, history, etc. – has become a planetary prob-
lem, and one that is not solved. It is not by interdicts that we will overcome it, but by a funda-
mental critical investigation without complacency, such as is just now getting underway” (Faye
2012, 262).
14
Emmanuel Faye and Johannes Fritsche are the latest in a series of scholars who take the contro-
versy regarding Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism as the key to understanding
the political import of his thought. The latest iteration of this controversy was begun by the
publication of Faye’s thoroughly researched recent study (2005). See Gregory Fried’s important
response to Faye (Fried 2011). The two other main eruptions of this controversy were the initial
confrontation with this question in the French journal Les Temps Moderne in 1946, including
such interlocutors as Karl Löwith, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Beaufret, and Heidegger himself. With
the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias and in 1988 of Hugo Ott’s studies (Farias 1989; Ott
1988), documenting in still greater detail Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis, the contro-
versy erupted anew. Some of the major contributions to the consideration of Heidegger’s poli-
tics at this period were Altwegg 1988; Bourdieu 1991; Derrida 1989; Ferry and Renaut 1990;
Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; Lyotard 1990; Pöggeler and Gethmann-Siefert 1988; Rockmore 1992;
Sluga 1993; Ward 1995; Wolin 1990; Zuckert 1990. Nolte’s biography of Heidegger should be
read in this context (Nolte 1992); see Sheehan’s review (Sheehan 1993) and Nolte’s response
(Nolte 1993).
28 Heidegger and Politics

the philosophic problems with which Heidegger wrestles are central to the
premises of modern society as such, and bear on the fate of Western civilization
itself, that we cannot simply document his Nazism and dismiss him. An overly
biographical approach fails to grasp the genuine breadth and radicalness of
Heidegger’s political import, an import that far outstrips his own endorsement
of the National Socialist regime in Germany.15 The aim is not to vindicate
Heidegger’s thought by showing it to be separate from his horrible, “personal”
practice, but to show (a) the logical and temporal priority of this thinking to
his practice, and then (b) to understand the political import of that thought.
The clearest way to see this is to look at Heidegger’s early thought, both
because this predates any of the political associations for which he later
became justly notorious and because it shows the continuity of the philosophic
problematic with Heidegger’s later work. In Heidegger’s earliest mature work,
a visceral and absolute refusal of the tenets of late-modern, Western civiliza-
tion and culture – similar in numerous respects to the Kulturkritik of many
of his contemporaries – is articulated as a rejection of the underlying philo-
sophical, rational premises of that civilization, including the worth of the very
concept of culture. Heidegger directs his critique primarily at his philosophic
contemporaries’ incapacity to ground their theoretical principles. Thus, what
distinguishes Heidegger from other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
critics of modern culture – virtually all of whom are much more direct about
the political, cultural, and ethical content of their views – is the combination of
comprehensiveness (in terms of what is being rejected) and logical rigor. One
looks in vain, therefore, for Spenglerian rhetorical flourishes; one finds instead
a rather abstract set of arguments in these early treatments of the impossibility
of ethics.16 One finds meticulous and rigorous assessments of the penetration
of the moral and cultural phenomena by a long and spurious tradition of the-
oretical philosophy, a philosophic tradition that has in fact transformed the
phenomena being considered. Ethics as such, therefore, is determined to be
altogether warped by the motivations and blind presuppositions of theoret-
ical philosophy from which it cannot be disentangled. The deeper problem
is that all claims of value are already influenced by a tradition that privileges
theoretical philosophy, so even to accept “culture” and “value” as meaningful
designations of the different “regions” or fields of human endeavor is therefore
to repeat the distorting prejudices that privilege theory. That is, the prejudice in
favor of theoretical philosophy determines even the distinction between fields,

15
Leo Strauss allows that while Heidegger’s Nazism expresses his thought, it does not exhaust its
political import (Strauss 1983, 29–34). Faye insists that his approach is not biographical, and
that this is a typical means by which defenders of Heidegger’s thought “disqualify” criticism
(Faye 2012, 258). On the unity of Heidegger’s thought, supervening through all periodizations,
see the indispensable Olafson 2006, 97.
16
As Kisiel remarks on the summer semester 1919 course: “There is not one hint of the poignantly
Spenglerian disenchantment with such things as ‘culture’ and ‘value’ prevalent then in postwar
Germany, which Heidegger will invoke in later courses” (Kisiel 1993, 60).
What’s the Matter with Ethics? 29

such as determining what ethics as distinguished from, say, biology, psychol-

ogy, or aesthetics is. Theory, however, as Heidegger diagnoses it, cannot supply
an adequate account of how values might be related to the empirical or histor-
ical world: the resulting condition is what Nietzsche referred to as “nihilism.”17
For this reason, theory as such becomes the principal subject matter of these
investigations.
The relevance of these investigations for the possibility of a Heideggerian
ethics, and by extension politics, is therefore principally and in the precise
sense negative. Heidegger refuses any orientation by “culture,” any consider-
ation of the ethical or political results of his investigations, which were always
and emphatically unconcerned with what appeared to him to be such triv-
ial, peripheral matters. As he understood it, to ask about ethics and culture
or to seek any orientation with regard to these was to forgo interrogating
deeper matters that were the true concern of genuine, that is to say radical,
philosophic thinking. Ethics is superficial; culture is epiphenomenal.18 But as
Heidegger himself repeatedly insists, in phenomenology, in genuinely radical
thought, there are no merely “negative” critiques: any investigation that attains
to the fundament, that apprehends the primordial, will resound with positive
“implications.” The key for understanding Heidegger’s meaning for ethics, and
then for politics, is to see every purported claim to nonrelevance in this light.19
In this and the following chapter, I show that the unique absence of an eth-
ics from Heidegger’s thought, that is, the specific character of that absence, has
the result of demanding an awful neutrality on Heidegger’s part on matters of
the most urgent political and moral character. This neutrality, far from per-
mitting the supplementation of his thought with what Hatab calls a “coordi-
nation of ethics and Heideggerian ontology,” to produce a new form of ethics,
instead expresses the prior consideration and rejection of such sought-after

17
Heidegger appears conspicuously to avoid using this term through this period of his career.
18
As he writes in a letter to Karl Löwith, dated 1920: “My will, fundamentally, aspires to some-
thing else, and that is not much: living in an actual revolutionary situation, I pursue what
I feel to be ‘necessary,’ without caring to know whether it emerges from ‘culture’ or whether
my search will lead to ruin.” Löwith’s gloss on the meaning of Heidegger’s approach is per-
fectly apt: “Instead of devoting oneself to the general seed for cultivation, as one would upon
receiving the command to ‘save culture,’ one must – in a ‘radical disintegration and regression,’
a ‘destruction’ – convince oneself firmly of ‘the one thing that matters’ without bothering with
the chatter and bustle of clever and enterprising men” (Löwith 1994, 29). In another letter
from Heidegger, again denying any orientation by “culture,” Heidegger writes: “The idea has
emerged that our critique must be opposed to something that corresponds in content to that
which has just been denied, or that our work would find its destiny in a school or trend, that
it could be continued and complemented . . . [that work is instead] something apart from and
perhaps out of reach of the bustle of the day” (Heidegger to Löwith, 1924; quoted in Löwith
1994, 30).
19
Such claims by Heidegger express important continuities with some of his later, purport-
edly post-Kehre thought, as in the claim in the “Letter on Humanism” that thought “touches
nothing.” See Hatab on this point (Hatab 2000, 89).
30 Heidegger and Politics

coordination.20 To put this more sharply: any number of philosophical figures

may appear “neutral” on ethical matters, and yet there is no evident cause to
search for the ethical or political import of their thought. Heidegger’s reason-
ing, however, undercuts the very possibility of formulating a rational ethics
that may supply any guidance whatsoever for politics. It is the evident serious-
ness with which he apparently means to treat ethical reasoning itself within
the scope of a comprehensive form of thinking that supplied the remarkable
potency of the officially “negative” meaning of his work for ethics.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I trace out Heidegger’s exploration of the relation-
ship between value philosophy (including ethics) and “formal indication,” the
new mode of philosophizing developed in some of Heidegger’s early works.
This relationship is complicated not merely by the inadequacy of the available
value philosophies, but by the effect they have had, over time, on the phenom-
enon in question, namely, culture. The striking claim that emerges from these
works is this: what announce themselves as moral or cultural problems can-
not be apprehended by moral philosophy or philosophy of culture. They are
problems that are profoundly shaped by the character of our deepest opening
to the world and its occlusion in our impoverished time. From his earliest
period of philosophical maturity, Heidegger is quite clear that we don’t need
a better “science of morals” or “ethics.”21 What we need is a sounder science
of science, a scientific apprehension of our own turn to science. Any prospec-
tive “science of ethics” would depend, therefore, on the possibility of such
a more “primordial” (ursprunglich), “pretheoretical science of experience.”
Thus, when the problem is framed in these terms, it is clear that Lévinas does
not express the difficulty as it presented itself to Heidegger: one cannot “care
for the other” if one is not clear really on who is an other, and more funda-
mentally, who “I am.”

The Natorp Critique and the Priority of Distress

In letters they exchanged in the early fall of 1918, Husserl and Heidegger dis-
cussed Paul Natorp’s critique of (Husserlian) phenomenology. There is evi-
dence that while neither of them considered Natorp a first-rate mind, they

20
According to Hatab, the “coordination of ethics and Heideggerian ontology suggests the pos-
sibility of taking up moral philosophy anew once the ontological structure of finite being-in-
the-world has been articulated” (Hatab, 2000, 1).
21
The question of periodization in the scholarship on Heidegger’s scholarship is enormous, and
I provide only a cursory treatment of the matter in the present study. The reader may consult
Figal 1988, 2007, 2009, and Kisiel 1993. By widespread consensus, Heidegger’s first post–World
War I teaching, in KNS 1919, represents the initial presentation of his “mature” – that is, no
longer youthful – writings. See John Van Buren’s study of the transition from the concerns formu-
lated in Heidegger’s even earlier work to his post–World War I investigations (Van Buren 1994).
  On the need for a pretheoretical science of experience that could be regulative of other
­sciences, see TDP 101/78.
What’s the Matter with Ethics? 31

nonetheless were concerned to address themselves to Natorp’s critique.22

Husserl understands Natorp’s later work to be influenced by his own Logical
Investigations and “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” His judgment of
Natorp’s engagement with these works is expressed summarily: “it is clear
that Natorp was entirely incapable of grasping the clear and readily available
meaning of phenomenology as an analysis of the essence of pure consciousness,
prior to and independent of previous philosophy and science; and in general he
was incapable of allowing for the validity of [phenomenological] seeing and of
what is presented in such seeing” (BH 361).23 Husserl understands Natorp to
hold the opinion that Husserlian phenomenology is an “unclarified prelude” to
Natorp’s Neo-Kantian psychology. But Husserl in turn judges Natorp to have
erected an edifice of suspect psychology on an obscure foundation: “For my
part, I consider his psychology not even as a prelude, but as an extremely vague
­premonition – embellished with philosophical constructs – of one problem-level
in my phenomenology” (BH 361).
Though Husserl is fairly dismissive of Natorp’s critique, Heidegger appears
to have found it more impressive. He discusses Natorp at a critical moment
in “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” his 1919 War
Emergency Semester course. Here Heidegger develops the claim that theory –
including Husserlian phenomenology – is unable to account, on its own terms,
for the generation of theoretical concepts from their experiential motivation.24
As endorsed by Heidegger, the Natorp critique is that all theoretical reflec-
tion, including phenomenological description, generalizes and hence distorts
the true character of the lived, moving experience of life:
Reflection makes something which was previously unexamined, something merely
unreflectively experienced, into something “looked at.” We look at it. In reflection it
stands before us as an object of reflection, we are directed towards it and make it into
an object as such, standing over against us. Thus, in reflection we are theoretically ori-
entated. All theoretical comportment, we said, is devivifying. This now shows itself in

22
Marvin Farber presents Husserl as being more impressed by Natorp than this letter (Husserl to
Heidegger, 10 September 1918) suggests. See Farber 1967, 147 ff.
23
Theodore Kisiel writes of these phrases: “Husserl’s remarks here become a kind of research
program for Heidegger in the first year of his assistantship under Husserl, culminating in a
full-fledged ‘destruction’ – the term is first used in this course – of Natorp’s concept of consti-
tution in Summer 1920. The key to Heidegger’s hermeneutic breakthrough to his lifelong topic
in Kriegnotsemester 1919 is his resolution of Natorp’s double objection against the accessibility
and expressibility of phenomenology’s central topic of description, the immediate pre-theoretical
experience in which we always already find ourselves underway” (Kisiel 2002, 30).
24
Stephen Crowell objects to such a characterization of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl,
emphasizing the continuity between Husserl’s attempts to express the consciousness that is
prior to the subject–object distinction and Heidegger’s understanding of Being-in-the-world (see
Crowell 2001). Crowell notes in particular that it is easy to find numerous places (particularly
in letters to third parties) where Heidegger is dismissive of Husserl’s “sham philosophy,” but that
concentrating on such utterances overlooks the vast amount that Heidegger takes over from
Husserl (Crowell 2001, 265 n. 3).
 Another Random Document on
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But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for
chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of
virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed
beneath her breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang
within her. And there was restored to her her image of her lover as a
beautiful spirit. She had been able to look at him across the tea-
table of their dog kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months,
almost as she had looked across the more shining table of the
cottage near the rectory. The deterioration that she knew Mrs.
Duchemin to have worked in her mind was assuaged. It could even
occur to her that Mrs. Duchemin's madness had been no more than
a scare to be followed by no necessary crime. Valentine Wannop had
re-become her confident self in a world of at least straight problems.
But Mrs. Duchemin's outbreak of a week ago had driven the old
phantoms across her mind. For Mrs. Duchemin she had still had a
great respect. She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a
hypocrite; or, indeed, as a hypocrite at all. There was her great
achievement of making something like a man of that miserable little
creature—as there had been her other great achievement of keeping
her unfortunate husband for so long out of a lunatic asylum. That
had been no mean feat; neither feat had been mean. And Valentine
knew that Edith Ethel really loved beauty, circumspection, urbanity.
It was no hypocrisy that made her advocate the Atalanta race of
chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop saw it, humanity has these
doublings of strong natures; just as the urbane and grave Spanish
nation must find its outlet in the shrieking lusts of the bull-ring or
the circumspect, laborious and admirable city typist must find her
derivative in the cruder lusts of certain novelists, so Edith Ethel must
break down into physical sexualities—and into shrieked coarseness
of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have saints? Surely, alone, by
the ultimate victory of the one tendency over the other!
But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple re-
arrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts at
least temporarily back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of
the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn't have been
brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the
merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the
sexually lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of
some such passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn't arrive at any
other conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now
did, more composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men
being what they are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself
had relieved the grosser necessities of his being—at the expense of
Mrs. Duchemin, who had, no doubt, been only too ready.
And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this
suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards
the Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going
from her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life
stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the
long, hard thing that life is. And on the Thursday two minor, or
major, worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced
himself as coming home for several days' leave, and she had the
trouble of thinking that she would have forced upon her a
companionship and a point of view that would be coarsely and
uproariously opposed to anything that Tietjens stood for—or for
which he was ready to sacrifice himself. Moreover she would have to
accompany her brother to a number of riotous festivities whilst all
the time she would have to think of Tietjens as getting hour by hour
nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in contact with enemy
forces. In addition her mother had received an enviably paid for
commission from one of the more excitable Sunday papers to write a
series of articles on extravagant matters connected with the
hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully—more
particularly as Edward was coming home—that Valentine Wannop
had conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her
mother. . . . It would have meant very little waste of time, and the
£60 that it would have brought in would have made all the
difference to them for months and months.
But Tietjens, whom Mrs. Wannop had come to rely on as her right
hand man in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected
recalcitrancy. He had, Mrs. Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and
had gibed at the two first subjects proposed—that of "war babies"
and the fact that the Germans were reduced to eating their own
corpses—as being below the treatment of any decent pen. The
illegitimacy rate, he had said, had shown very little increase; the
French-derived German word "Cadaver" meant bodies of horses or
cattle; Leichnam being the German for the word "corpse." He had
practically refused to have anything to do with the affair.
As to the Cadaver business Valentine agreed with him, as to the
"war babies" she kept a more open mind. If there weren't any war
babies it couldn't, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote
about them; it couldn't certainly matter as much as to write about
them, supposing the poor little things to exist. She was aware that
this was immoral, but her mother needed the money desperately
and her mother came first.
There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens, for
Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as
would be implied by a good-natured, or an enforced sanction of the
article, Mrs. Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her
connection with the excitable paper which paid well. It happened
that on the Friday morning Mrs. Wannop received a request that she
would write for a Swiss review a propaganda article about some
historical matter connected with the peace after Waterloo. The pay
would be practically nothing, but the employment was at least
relatively dignified, and Mrs. Wannop—which was quite in the
ordinary course of things!—told Valentine to ring Tietjens up and ask
him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at which, before
and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out.
Valentine rang up—as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her
a great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once
more at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and
Valentine gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of
Vienna, the other as to war babies. The appalling speech came back:
"Young woman! You'd better keep off the grass. Mrs. Duchemin is
already my husband's mistress. You keep off." There was about the
voice no human quality; it was as if from an immense darkness the
immense machine had spoken words that dealt blows. She
answered; and it was as if a substratum of her mind of which she
knew nothing must have been prepared for that very speech; so that
it was not her own "she" that answered levelly and coolly:
"You have probably mistaken the person you are speaking to.
Perhaps you will ask Mr. Tietjens to ring up Mrs. Wannop when he is
at liberty."
The voice said:
"My husband will be at the War Office at 4.15. He will speak to you
there—about your war babies. But I'd keep off the grass if I were
you!" The receiver at the other end was hung up.
She went about her daily duties. She had heard of a kind of pine
kernel that was very cheap and very nourishing, or at least very
filling. They had come to it that it was a matter of pennies balanced
against the feeling of satiety, and she visited several shops in search
of this food. When she had found it she returned to the dog kennel;
her brother Edward had arrived. He was rather subdued. He brought
with him a piece of meat which was part of his leave ration. He
occupied himself with polishing up his sailor's uniform for a rag-time
party to which they were to go that evening. They were to meet
plenty of conchies, he said. Valentine put the meat—it was a
Godsend, though very stringy!—on to stew with a number of
chopped vegetables. She went up to her room to do some typing for
her mother.
The nature of Tietjens' wife occupied her mind. Before, she had
barely thought about her: she had seemed unreal; so mysterious as
to be a myth! Radiant and high-stepping: like a great stag! But she
must be cruel! She must be vindictively cruel to Tietjens himself, or
she could not have revealed his private affairs! Just broadcast; for
she could not, bluff it how she might, have been certain of to whom
she was speaking! A thing that wasn't done! But she had delivered
her cheek to Mrs. Wannop; a thing, too, that wasn't done! Yet so
kindly! The telephone bell rang several times during the morning.
She let her mother answer it.
She had to get the dinner, which took three-quarters of an hour. It
was a pleasure to see her mother eat so well; a good stew, rich and
heavy with haricot beans. She herself couldn't eat, but no one
noticed, which was a good thing. Her mother said that Tietjens had
not yet telephoned, which was very inconsiderate. Edward said:
"What! The Huns haven't killed old Feather Bolster yet? But of
course he's been found a safe job." The telephone on the sideboard
became a terror to Valentine; at any moment his voice might . . .
Edward went on telling anecdotes of how they bamboozled petty
officers on mine-sweepers. Mrs. Wannop listened to him with the
courteous, distant interest of the great listening to commercial
travellers. Edward desired draught ale and produced a two shilling
piece. He seemed very much coarsened; it was, no doubt, only on
the surface. In these days everyone was very much coarsened on
the surface.
She went with a quart jug to the jug and bottle department of the
nearest public-house—a thing she had never done before. Even at
Ealing the mistress hadn't allowed her to be sent to a public-house;
the cook had had to fetch her dinner beer herself or have it sent in.
Perhaps the Ealing mistress had exercised more surveillance than
Valentine had believed; a kind woman, but an invalid. Nearly all day
in bed. Blind passion overcame Valentine at the thought of Edith
Ethel in Tietjens' arms. Hadn't she got her own eunuch? Mrs.
Tietjens had said: "Mrs. Duchemin is his mistress!" Is! Then he
might be there now!
In the contemplation of that image she missed the thrills of buying
beer in a bottle and jug department. Apparently it was like buying
anything else, except for the smell of beer on the sawdust. You said:
"A quart of the best bitter!" and a fat, quite polite man, with an oily
head and a white apron, took your money and filled your jug. . . .
But Edith Ethel had abused Tietjens so foully! The more foully the
more certain it made it! . . . Draught beer in a jug had little
marblings of burst foam on its brown surface. It mustn't be spilt at
the kerbs of crossings!—the more certain it made it! Some women
did so abuse their lovers after sleeping with them, and the more
violent the transports the more frantic the abuse. It was the "post-
dash-tristis" of the Rev. Duchemin! Poor devil! Tristis! Tristis!
Terra tribus scopulis vastum . . . Not longum!
Brother Edward began communing with himself, long and
unintelligibly as to where he should meet his sister at 19.30 and give
her a blow-out! The names of restaurants fell from his lips into her
panic. He decided hilariously and not quite steadily—a quart is a lot
to a fellow from a mine-sweeper carrying no booze at all!—on
meeting her at 7.20 at High Street and going to a pub he knew; they
would go on to the dance afterwards. In a studio. "Oh, God!" her
heart said, "if Tietjens should want her then!" To be his; on his last
night. He might! Everybody was coarsened then; on the surface. Her
brother rolled out of the house, slamming the door so that every tile
on the jerry-built dog kennel rose and sat down again.
She went upstairs and began to look over her frocks. She couldn't
tell what frocks she looked over; they lay like aligned rags on the
bed, the telephone bell ringing madly. She heard her mother's voice,
suddenly assuaged: "Oh! oh! . . . It's you!" She shut her door and
began to pull open and to close drawer after drawer. As soon as she
ceased that exercise her mother's voice became half audible; quite
audible when she raised it to ask a question. She heard her say:
"Not get her into trouble . . . Of course!" then it died away into mere
high sounds.
She heard her mother calling:
"Valentine! Valentine! Come down. . . . Don't you want to speak to
Christopher? . . . Valentine! Valentine! . . ." And then another burst:
"Valentine . . . Valentine . . . Valentine . . ." As if she had been a
puppy dog! Mrs. Wannop, thank God, was on the lowest step of the
creaky stairs. She had left the telephone. She called up:
"Come down. I want to tell you! The dear boy has saved me! He
always saves me! What shall I do now he's gone?"
"He saved others: himself he could not save!" Valentine quoted
bitterly. She caught up her wideawake. She wasn't going to prink
herself for him. He must take her as she was. . . . Himself he could
not save! But he did himself proud! With women! . . . Coarsened!
But perhaps only on the surface! She herself! . . . She was running
downstairs!
Her mother had retreated into the little parlour: nine feet by nine; in
consequence, at ten feet it was too tall for its size. But there was in
it a sofa with cushions. . . . With her head upon those cushions,
perhaps. . . . If he came home with her! Late! . . .
Her mother was saying: He's a splendid fellow. . . . A root idea for a
war baby article. . . . If a Tommy was a decent fellow he abstained
because he didn't want to leave his girl in trouble. . . . If he wasn't
he chanced it because it might be his last chance. . . .
"A message to me!" Valentine said to herself. "But which sentence. .
. ." She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the sofa. Her
mother exclaimed:
"He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!" and
turned into her tiny hole of a study.
Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling
her wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist watch; it was
two and twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office by 4.15
—16.15—a sensible innovation!—she must step out. Five miles to
Whitehall. God knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and a half,
diagonally, to High Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a half
miles in five hours or less. And three hours dancing on the top of it.
And to dress! . . . She needed to be fit . . . And, with violent
bitterness, she said:
"Well! I'm fit. . . ." She had an image of the aligned hundred of girls
in blue jumpers and men's ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-
fit. She wondered how many of them would be men's mistresses
before the year was out. It was August then. But perhaps none!
Because she had kept them fit. . . .
"Ah!" she said, "if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts
and a soft body. All perfumed!" . . . But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor
Ethel Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But
they could not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve mile
walk to save a few pence and dancing all night on top of it! She
could! And perhaps the price she paid was just that; she was in such
hard condition she hadn't moved him to . . . She perhaps exhaled
such an aura of sobriety, chastity and abstinence as to suggest to
him that . . . that a decent fellow didn't get his girl into trouble
before going to be killed. . . . Yet if he were such a town bull! . . .
She wondered how she knew such phrases. . . .
The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean
August sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went
quicker; or because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner
you would be up to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next
corner before you noticed anything else.
She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the
poor shops behind. . . . In sham country, with sham lawns, sham
avenues, sham streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the
sham grass. Or no! Not sham! In a vacuum! No! "Pasteurised" was
the word! Like dead milk. Robbed of their vitamines. . . .
If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a larger pile to
put into the leering—or compassionate—taxicabman's hand after he
had helped her support her brother into the dog kennel door.
Edward would be dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi . .
. If she gave a few coppers more it seemed generous. . . . What a
day to look forward to still! Some days were lifetimes!
She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab!
Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and
Edward all the way to Chiswick, and she hadn't felt insulted. She had
paid him; but she hadn't felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched
at the heart by the pretty sister—or perhaps he didn't really believe
it was a sister—and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a
sentimental fellow too. . . . What was the difference? . . . And then!
The mother a dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in
the morning! He couldn't refuse her! Blackness: cushions! She had
arranged the cushions, she remembered. Arranged them
subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep; dead drunkenness! . . .
Horrible! . . . A disgusting affair! An affair of Ealing. . . . It shall
make her one with all the stuff to fill graveyards. . . . Well, what else
was she, Valentine Wannop: daughter of her father? And of her
mother? Yes! But she herself . . . Just a little nobody!
They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty. . . . But her
brother was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking
treason. At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas
couldn't for the moment concern him. . . . That 'bus touched her
skirt as she ran for the island. . . . It might have been better. . . . But
one hadn't the courage!
She was looking at patterned deaths under a little green roof, such
as they put over bird shelters. Her heart stopped! Before, she had
been breathless! She was going mad. She was dying. . . . All these
deaths! And not merely the deaths. . . . The waiting for the
approach of death; the contemplation of the parting from life! This
minute you were; that, and you weren't! What was it like? Oh
heaven, she knew. . . . She stood there contemplating parting from .
. . One minute you were; the next . . . Her breath fluttered in her
chest. . . . Perhaps he wouldn't come . . .
He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him
and said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and
his like responsible! . . . He had apparently a brother, a responsible
one too! Browner complexioned! . . . But he! He! He! He! completely
calm; with direct eyes. . . . It wasn't possible. "Holde Lippen: klaare
Augen: heller Sinn. . . ." Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And
the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn't look at you so, unless . . .
She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged—
more than to any browner, mere civilian, brother!—to her! She was
going to ask him! If he answered: "Yes! I am such a man!" she was
going to say: "Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I
must have a child. I too!" She desired a child. She would overwhelm
these hateful lodestones with a flood of argument; she imagined—
she felt—the words going between her lips. . . . She imagined her
fainting mind; her consenting limbs. . . .
His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings.
Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word
from him. Words passed, but words could no more prove an
established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists. He
might as well have recited the names of railway stations. His eyes,
his unconcerned face, his tranquil shoulders; they were what
acquitted him. The greatest love speech he had ever and could ever
make her was when, harshly and angrily, he said something like:
"Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better"—brushing her aside
as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened
to her!
She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches
said "Pink! pink!" The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing
against her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed. . . . It was
just a problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him. . . . Good
for him was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind
cleared, like water that goes off the boil. . . . "Waters stilled at
even." Nonsense. It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother!
He could save his brother. . . . Transport! There was another
meaning to the word. A warm feeling settled down upon her; this
was her brother; the next to the best ever! It was as if you had
matched a piece of stuff so nearly with another piece of stuff as to
make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! She must be grateful to
this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, never so grateful as to the
other—who had done nothing!
Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps,
the blessed word Transport! "They," so Mark said: he and she—the
family feeling again—were going to get Christopher into the
Transport. . . . By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was
the only branch of the services of which Valentine knew anything.
Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a
sergeant in a line regiment. "Hooray!" he had written to his mother,
"I've been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're
putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest
soft job of the whole bally front line caboodle!" Valentine had had to
read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had
hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details
of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char! She had
had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly
sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily
work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and
superintending the horse-standings. "Why," one sentence ran, "our
O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he
has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b——y hell to the
man who walks across it!" There the O.C. practised casting with
trout and salmon rods by the hour together. "That'll show you what
a soft job it is!" the sergeant had finished triumphantly. . . .
So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a
wall; downright, healthy middle-class—or perhaps upper middle-
class—for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family!
Over her sensible, mocassined shoes the tide of humanity flowed
before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one
always benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on
one side of her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law
with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was
continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella.
As if it had been a knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why
he should want to conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a
minute.
For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost
mathematically symmetrical. Now she was an English middle-class
girl—whose mother had a sufficient income—in blue cloth, a
wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that
she shouldn't have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity.
Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been . . . She could not even
remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly
appeared a town . . . No, she could not think the words. . . . A
raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere
movement of a hand along the table, she would retreat.
It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of
the old man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick. . . .
When the old man came out the old woman went in and it would
rain; when the old woman came out . . . It was exactly like that! She
hadn't time to work out the analogy. But it was like that. . . . In rainy
weather the whole world altered. Darkened! . . . The cat-gut that
turned them slackened . . . slackened. . . . But, always, they
remained at opposite ends of the stick!
Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:
"We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother. . . ."
It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how
little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr.
Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years
ago. Her mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting,
Mr. Tietjens alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it
up to her. He was making it up. In no princely fashion, but
adequately, as a gentleman.
Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came
up to him and said: "Mr. Riccardo!" Mark Tietjens said: "No! He's
gone!" He continued:
"Your brother. . . . Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a
practice, a good practice! When he's a full-fledged sawbones." He
stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his
umbrella handle; he was extremely nervous.
"Now you!" he said. "Two or three hundred. A year of course! The
capital absolutely your own. . . ." He paused: "But I warn you!
Christopher won't like it. He's got his knife into me. I wouldn't
grudge you . . . oh, any sum!" . . . He waved his hand to indicate an
amount boundless in its figures. "I know you keep Christopher
straight," he said. "The only person that could!" He added: "Poor
devil!"
She said:
"He's got his knife into you? Why?"
He answered vaguely:
"Oh, there's been all this talk. . . . Untrue, of course."
She said:
"People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps
because there's been delay in settling the estate."
He said:
"Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!"
"Then they have been saying," she exclaimed, "things against . . .
against me. And him!"
He exclaimed in anguish:
"Oh, but I ask you to believe . . . I beg you to believe that I believe .
. . you! Miss Wannop!" He added grotesquely: "As pure as dew that
lies within Aurora's sun-tipped . . ." His eyes stuck out like those of a
suffocating fish. He said: "I beg you not on that account to hand the
giddy mitten to . . ." He writhed in his tight double collar. "His wife!"
he said . . . "She's no good to . . . for him! . . . She's soppily in love
with him. But no good . . ." He very nearly sobbed. "You're the only .
. ." he said, "I know . . ."
It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle
des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence!
But what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. . . . Two
hundred and forty times five. . . .
Mark said brightly:
"If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. . . . You
say that's ample to give Christopher his chop. . . . And settled on her
three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year. . . . The
capital of it: with remainder to you . . ." His interrogative face
beamed.
She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She
understood Mrs. Duchemin's:
"You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to connive . . ."
Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She couldn't be expected. . . .
She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can't
ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . . It was
only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said—to Mark:
"It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's vice—
to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he burst
in, astonishingly:
"He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and
Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him.
. . . You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to
it. . . . If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like
Dante for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There are couples like that."
She said:
"Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't we
resisted?"
His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away
towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:
"You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ."
She said:—she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.
"I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ."
It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs.
Micawber!
Christopher Tietjens—in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his
best uniform—spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had
approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires
and she had been turned towards Mark on his bench:
"Come along! Let's get out of this!" He was, she asked herself,
getting out of this! Towards what?
Like mutes from a funeral—or as if she had been, between the
brothers, a prisoner under escort—they walked down steps; half
righted towards the exit arch; one and a half righted to face
Whitehall. The brothers grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over
her head. They crossed, by the islands, Whitehall, where the 'bus
had brushed her skirt. Under an archway—
In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other.
Mark said:
"I suppose you won't shake hands!"
Christopher said:
"No! Why should I?" She herself had cried out to Christopher:
"Oh, do!" (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her.
Her brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly. . . . A
surface coarseness!)
Mark said:
"Hadn't you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed
would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the
hand!"
Christopher had said: "Oh . . . well!"
During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had
gripped her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans—or possibly
huts; she never remembered which—to a seat that had over it, or
near it, a weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:
"Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30
from Waterloo."
She had answered:
"Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve. . . . I have to
see my brother home. . . . He will be drunk. . . ." She meant to say:
"Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much. . . ."
She said instead:
"I have arranged the cushions. . . ."
She said to herself:
"Now whatever made me say that? It's as if I had said: 'You'll find
the ham in the larder under a plate. . . .' No tenderness about it. . .
."
She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high
railings, crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a
thin white beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the
grass. He imagined himself the monarch of that landscape.
"That's women!" he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality
of the old and the hardened. "Some do!" He spat into the grass;
said: "Ah!" then added: "Some do not!"

VI
He let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in
the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious
whisperings up the great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If
you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front
of it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was
absurd. He was just a man, returning after a night out. . . . Two-
thirds, say, of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the
night had lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects. . . .
He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the
tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the
stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room
door.
Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut two-
thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and roof-
shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he
ought to reach his round-backed chair, by the left-hand window. He
reached his round-backed chair by the left-hand window. He sank
into it; it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever
been so tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive
sound existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed
one and a half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the
windows of the mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat.
Something alive, at any rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the
room, waiting for him, to see what he looked like. Most likely! It
didn't matter!
His mind stopped! Sheer weariness!
When it went on again it was saying:
"Naked shingles and surges drear . . ." and, "On these debatable
borders of the world!" He said sharply: "Nonsense!" The one was
either Calais beach or Dover sands of the whiskered man: Arnold. . .
. He would be seeing them both within the twenty-four hours. . . .
But no! He was going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre,
therefore! . . . The other was by that detestable fellow: "the subject
of our little monograph!" . . . What a long time ago! . . . He saw a
pile of shining despatch cases: the inscription "This rack is reserved
for . . .": a coloured—pink and blue!—photograph of Boulogne sands
and the held up squares, the proofs of "our little . . ." What a long
time ago! He heard his own voice saying in the new railway carriage,
proudly, clearly and with male hardness:
"I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of
course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her.
And again no talking about it. . . ." His voice—his own voice—came
to him as if from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn
long-distance one! Ten years . . .
If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman. . . . Damn it, he
doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent
fellow. . . . His mind said at one and the same moment, the two
lines running one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:
"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and:
"Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!"
He said:
"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our
hands didn't meet. . . . I don't believe I've shaken hands. . . . I don't
believe I've touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once! . . . Not
the hand-shaking sort. . . . A nod! . . . A meeting and parting! . . .
English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. .
. . On the bank! . . . On such short acquaintance! I said to myself
then . . . Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up!
. . . Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother
was dying. . . ."
He, his conscious self, said:
"But it was probably the drunken brother. . . . You don't beguile
virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at
two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with
intermittent legs. . . ."
"Intermittent!" was the word. "Intermittently functioning!"
At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing
velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street.
When they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black
hanging trees, with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman:
"You're the fellows!" he'd been exclaiming, "who make old England
what she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the
vile excesses. . . ."
Tietjens himself he had always addressed with the voice and accent
of a common seaman; with his coarsened surface voice!
He had the two personalities. Two or three times he had said:
"Why don't you kiss the girl? She's a nice girl, isn't she? You're a
poor b——y Tommie, ain't cher? Well, the poor b——y Tommies
ought to have all the nice girls they want! That's straight, isn't it? . .
."
And, even at that time they hadn't known what was going to
happen. . . . There are certain cruelties. . . . They had got a four-
wheel cab at last. The drunken boy had sat beside the driver; he had
insisted. . . . Her little, pale, shrunken face had gazed straight before
her. . . . It hadn't been possible to speak; the cab, rattling all over
the road had pulled up with frightful jerks when the boy had
grabbed at the reins. . . . The old driver hadn't seemed to mind; but
they had had to subscribe all the money in their pockets to pay him
after they had carried the boy into the black house. . . .
Tietjens' mind said to him:
"Now when they came to her father's house so nimbly she slipped
in, and said: 'There is a fool without and is a maid within. . . .'"
He answered dully:
"Perhaps that's what it really amounts to. . . ." He had stood at the
hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the
sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque
sounds, like the laughter of unknown races from darkness. He had
turned and walked down the path, she following him. He had
exclaimed:
"It's perhaps too . . . untidy . . ."
She had said:
"Yes! Yes . . . Ugly . . . Too . . . oh . . . private!"
He said, he remembered:
"But . . . for ever . . ."
She said, in a great hurry:
"But when you come back. . . . Permanently. And . . . oh, as if it
were in public." . . . "I don't know," she had added. "Ought we? . . .
I'd be ready. . . ." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."
He had said at some time: "But obviously. . . . Not under this roof. . .
." And he had added: "We're the sort that . . . do not!"
She had answered, quickly too:
"Yes—that's it. We're that sort!" And then she had asked: "And
Ethel's party? Was it a great success?" It hadn't, she knew, been an
inconsequence. He had answered:
"Ah . . . That's permanent. . . . That's public. . . . There was
Rugeley. The Duke . . . Sylvia brought him. She'll be a great friend! .
. . And the President of the . . . Local Government Board, I think . . .
And a Belgian . . . equivalent to Lord Chief Justice . . . and, of
course, Claudine Sandbach. . . . Two hundred and seventy; all of the
best, the modestly-elated Guggumses said as I left! And Mr. Ruggles
. . . Yes! . . . They're established. . . . No place for me!"
"Nor for me!" she had answered. She added: "But I'm glad!"
Patches of silence ran between them: they hadn't yet got out of the
habit of thinking they had to hold up the drunken brother. That had
seemed to last for a thousand painful months. . . . Long enough to
acquire a habit. The brother seemed to roar: "Haw—Haw—Kuryasch.
. . ." And after two minutes: "Haw—Haw—Kuryasch. . . ." Hungarian,
no doubt!
He said:
"It was splendid to see Vincent standing beside the Duke. Showing
him a first edition! Not of course quite the thing for a, after all,
wedding party! But how was Rugeley to know that? . . . And Vincent
not in the least servile! He even corrected cousin Rugeley over the
meaning of the word colophon! The first time he ever corrected a
superior! . . . Established, you see! . . . And practically cousin
Rugeley. . . . Dear Sylvia Tietjens' cousin, so the next to nearest
thing! Wife of Lady Macmaster's oldest friend. . . . Sylvia going to
them in their—quite modest!—little place in Surrey. . . . As for us,"
he had concluded "they also serve who only stand and wait. . . ."
She said:
"I suppose the rooms looked lovely."
He had answered:
"Lovely. . . . They'd got all the pictures by that beastly fellow up
from the rectory study in the dining-room on dark oak panelling. . . .
A fair blaze of bosoms and nipples and lips and pomegranates. . .
The tallest silver candlesticks of course. . . . You remember, silver
candlesticks and dark oak. . . ."
She said:
"Oh, my dear . . . Don't . . . Don't!"
He had just touched the rim of his helmet with his folded gloves.
"So we just wash out!" he had said.
She said:
"Would you take this bit of parchment. . . . I got a little Jew girl to
write on it in Hebrew:" It's "God bless you and keep you: God watch
over you at your goings out and at . . ."
He tucked it into his breast pocket.
"The talismanic passage," he said. "Of course I'll wear it. . . ."
She said:
"If we could wash out this afternoon. . . . It would make it easier to
bear. . . . Your poor mother, you know, she was dying when we last .
. ."
He said:
"You remember that . . . Even then you . . . And if I hadn't gone to
Lobscheid. . ."
She said:
"From the first moment I set eyes on you. . . ."
He said:
"And I . . . from the first moment . . . I'll tell you . . . If I looked out
of a door . . . It was all like sand. . . . But to the half left a little
bubbling up of water. That could be trusted. To keep on for ever. . . .
You, perhaps, won't understand."
She said:
"Yes! I know!"
"They were seeing landscapes. . . . Sand dunes; close-cropped. . . .
Some negligible shipping; a stump-masted brig from Archangel. . . ."
"From the first moment," he repeated.
She said:
"If we could wash out . . ."
He said, and for the first moment felt grand, tender, protective:
"Yes, you can," he said. "You cut out from this afternoon, just before
4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented . . . I heard
the Horse Guards clock. . . . To now. . . . Cut it out; and join time
up. . . . It can be done. . . . You know they do it surgically; for some
illness; cut out a great length of the bowel and join the tube up. . . .
For colitis, I think. . . ."
She said:
"But I wouldn't cut it out. . . . It was the first spoken sign."
He said:
"No it wasn't. . . . From the very beginning . . . with every word. . .
."
She exclaimed:
"You felt that. . . . Too! . . . We've been pushed, as in a carpenter's
vice. . . . We couldn't have got away. . . ."
He said: "By God! That's it. . . ."
He suddenly saw a weeping willow in St. James's Park; 4.59! He had
just said: "Will you be my mistress to-night?" She had gone away,
half left her hands to her face. . . . A small fountain; half left. That
could be trusted to keep on for ever. . . .
Along the lake side, sauntering, swinging his crooked stick, his
incredibly shiny top-hat perched sideways, his claw-hammer coat
tails, very long, flapping out behind, in dusty sunlight, his magpie
pince-nez gleaming, had come, naturally, Mr. Ruggles. He had looked
at the girl; then down at Tietjens, sprawled on his bench. He had
just touched the brim of his shiny hat. He said:
"Dining at the club to-night? . . ."
Tietjens said: "No; I've resigned."
With the aspect of a long-billed bird chewing a bit of putridity,
Ruggles said:
"Oh, but we've had an emergency meeting of the committee . . . the
committee was sitting . . . and sent you a letter asking you to
reconsider. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"I know. . . . I shall withdraw my resignation to-night. . . . And
resign again to-morrow morning."
Ruggles' muscles had relaxed for a quick second, then they
stiffened.
"Oh, I say!" he had said. "Not that. . . . You couldn't do that. . . . Not
to the club! . . . It's never been done. . . . It's an insult. . . ."
"It's meant to be," Tietjens said. "Gentlemen shouldn't be expected
to belong to a club that has certain members on its committee."
Ruggles' deepish voice suddenly grew very high.
"Eh, I say, you know!" he squeaked.
Tietjens had said:
"I'm not vindictive. . . . But I am deadly tired: of all old women and
their chatter."
Ruggles had said:
"I don't . . ." His face had become suddenly dark brown, scarlet and
then brownish purple. He stood droopingly looking at Tietjens' boots.
"Oh! Ah! Well!" he said at last. "See you at Macmaster's to-night. . .
. A great thing his knighthood. First-class man. . . ."
That had been the first Tietjens had heard of Macmaster's
knighthood; he had missed looking at the honours' list of that
morning. Afterwards, dining alone with Sir Vincent and Lady
Macmaster, he had seen, pinned up, a back view of the Sovereign
doing something to Vincent; a photo for next morning's papers.
From Macmaster's embarrassed hushings of Edith Ethel's explanation
that the honour was for special services of a specific kind Tietjens
guessed both the nature of Macmaster's service and the fact that the
little man hadn't told Edith Ethel who, originally, had done the work.
And—just like his girl—Tietjens had let it go at that. He didn't see
why poor Vincent shouldn't have that little bit of prestige at home—
under all the monuments! But he hadn't—though through all the
evening Macmaster, with the solicitude and affection of a cringing
Italian greyhound, had hastened from celebrity to celebrity to hang
over Tietjens, and although Tietjens knew that his friend was
grieved and appalled, like any woman, at his, Tietjens', going out
again to France—Tietjens hadn't been able to look Macmaster again
in the face. . . . He had felt ashamed. He had felt, for the first time
in his life, ashamed!
Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party—to go to
his good fortune!—Macmaster had come panting down the stairs,
running after him, through guests coming up. He had said:
"Wait . . . You're not going. . . . I want to . . ." With a miserable and
appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might
have come out too. His black, short beard quivering and his
wretched eyes turned down, he had said:
"I wanted to explain. . . . This miserable knighthood. . . ."
Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs
above him.
"It's all right, old man," he had said—and with real affection: "We've
powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not to . . .
I'm very glad. . . ." Macmaster had whispered:
"And Valentine. . . . She's not here to-night. . . ."
He had exclaimed:
"By God! . . . If I thought . . ." Tietjens had said: "It's all right. It's
all right. She's at another party. . . . I'm going on . . ."
Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning
over and clutching the clammy banisters.
"Tell her . . ." he said . . . "Good God! You may be killed. . . . I beg
you . . . I beg you to believe . . . I will . . . Like the apple of my eye.
. . ." In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could see
that Macmaster's eyes were full of tears.
They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time.
Then Macmaster had said: "Well . . ."
Tietjens had said: "Well . . ." But he hadn't been able to look at
Macmaster's eyes, though he had felt his friend's eyes pitiably
exploring his own face. . . . "A backstairs way out of it," he had
thought; a queer thing that you couldn't look in the face a man you
were never going to see again!
"But by God," he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back
again to the girl in front of him, "this isn't going to be another
backstairs exit. . . . I must tell her. . . . I'm damned if I don't make
an effort. . . ."
She had her handkerchief to her face.
"I'm always crying," she said. . . . "A little bubbling spring that can
be trusted to keep on. . . ."
He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone
with false teeth that didn't fit must be coming along. The street with
its sooty boskage was clean empty and silent. She was looking at
him. He didn't know how long he had been silent, he didn't know
where he had been; intolerable waves urged him towards her.
After a long time he said:
"Well . . ."
She moved back. She said:
"I won't watch you out of sight. . . . It is unlucky to watch anyone
out of sight. . . . But I will never . . . I will never cut what you said
then out of my memory . . ." She was gone; the door shut. He had
wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had
asked her that afternoon to be his mistress?
He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry
that had given him a lift to Holborn. . . .
THE END
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