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Hitler the Anti-Nihilist? Statehood, Leadership, and Political Space in Heidegger’s Seminar of 1933-34

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Richard Polt
Richard Polt*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Xavier University, 3800 Victory Parkway, Cincinnati, OH 45207-4443, USA. Email: polt@xavier.edu
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Abstract

This essay considers Heidegger’s 1933–34 seminar ‘On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State’ as an attempt to develop an anti-nihilist political philosophy based on human finitude and qualitative difference. I examine Heidegger’s views on the relation between people and state, the role of a leader, and the nature of political space. Heidegger distinguishes human existence from the natural world and argues that a people can attain its full, distinctively human Being only through its state, which is to be ruled absolutely by the soaring will of a born leader. He also offers an account of political space that distinguishes between the local homeland and the ‘interaction’ that connects it to a broader territory. I relate these ideas to some other texts by Heidegger and sketch an Arendtian critique of them.

Type
Focus: Nihilism
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 231 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

References and Notes

1.Heidegger, M. (1988) Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), Gesamtausgabe (henceforth ‘GA’), vol. 42, ed. Ingrid Schüßler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), pp. 40–41. The present essay began as a paper for the 2012 meeting of the American Political Science Association; I thank Robert Gingerich for inviting me to present the paper and for his comments on it.Google Scholar
2.Heidegger, M. (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press), German, pp. 154–155. I provide the German pagination (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953) so that it may be found both in this translation and in the revised and expanded edition of the translation that is forthcoming from Yale University Press (emphasis in original).Google Scholar
3.On the senses of ‘nothing’ in Heidegger and in the tradition see Polt, R. (2001) ‘The Question of Nothing’. In: R. Polt and G. Fried, (eds), A Companion to Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
4.Heidegger, M. (2013) Nature, History, State: 1933-1934, trans. and ed. G. Fried and R. Polt (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 63–64.Google Scholar
5.A possible rival to the 1933–34 seminar as a statement of Heideggerian political philosophy is the 1934–35 seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (published in GA 86, Seminare: Hegel – Schelling). The Hegel seminar shows Heidegger’s interest in legal theory and in political philosophers (Rousseau, Bodin) who are otherwise neglected in his work; however, it is considerably more exploratory and inconclusive than the 1933–34 seminar. An English translation will appear in Trawny, P., Sá Cavalcante Schuback, M. and Marder, M. (eds), Heidegger on Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: The 1934-5 Seminar and Interpretative Essays (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).Google Scholar
6.The reference to the ‘inner truth’ of Nazism is not unique in Heidegger’s work: in his 1934–35 course on Hölderlin he also uses the phrase. The printed version of that text unfortunately misreads Heidegger’s abbreviation for ‘National Socialism’ as ‘natural science’: M. Heidegger (1989) Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein,’ GA 39 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), p. 195. See Ireland, J. (2012) Heidegger and the ‘Inner Truth of National Socialism’: A New Archival Discovery. In: A. Mitchell, (ed.), The Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Heidegger Circle (Atlanta: Emory University).Google Scholar
7.Heidegger, M. (2010) Being and Truth, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 125 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar
8.Heidegger, M. (2011) Seminare: Hegel – Schelling, GA 86 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), p. 898. For an example of Heidegger’s anti-biologism see his attack on Erwin Kolbenheyer in Ref. 7, pp. 159–162. For an extended attempt to retrieve the original meaning of physis, see Introduction to Metaphysics.Google Scholar
9.See Polt, R. (2013) Heidegger in the 1930s: who are we?. In: F. Raffoul and E. Nelson, (eds), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (London: Bloomsbury).Google Scholar
10.Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row), p. 147 (German p. 112).Google Scholar
11.On this theme cf. Capobianco, R. (2010) Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), Chapter 3. Capobianco shows that Heidegger’s later work emphasizes home over homelessness.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12.Cf. Heidegger, M. (1976) What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 29–30.Google Scholar
13.Schmitt, C. (1995) Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung [written 1941]. In: G. Maschke, (ed.), Staat, Großraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916-1969 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), pp. 317–318. For another translation see C. Schmitt (2011) Writings on War, trans. and ed. T. Nunan (Cambridge: Polity), p. 122. For a clear comparison between Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s views on spatiality and nihilism see J. Wittrock (2014) The social logic of late nihilism. This issue of European Review.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14.Faye, E. (2009) Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, trans. M. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
15.Polt, R. (2007) Beyond struggle and power: Heidegger’s secret resistance. Interpretation, 35(1), pp. 11–40.Google Scholar
16.Heidegger, M. (2009) Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, trans. W. Gregory and Y. Unna (Albany: State University of New York Press), pp. 51–52 (translation modified).Google Scholar
17.Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), especially Chapter V.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18.Heidegger, M. (1997) Besinnung, GA 66 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), p. 52.Google Scholar
19.For my own attempts at such public interventions, see Polt, R. (2012) Anything but human. The New York Times, 5 August; and: Reality is flat. (Or is it?) The New York Times, 16 August.Google Scholar
20.Against Heidegger’s anti-liberalism see Polt, R. (1997) Metaphysical liberalism in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie. Political Theory, 25(5), pp. 655–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar