60 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

into the mindset of many intellectuals and writers following the perceived catas-trophe of the Weimar Republic. Again, we find in Heidegger traces of such themes, but Heidegger revisits these notions from the context of his confrontation with the history of philosophy. Heidegger flirts then with this aspect of the conservative revolu-tionary literature but very much against the backdrop of a long-standing philosophical concern with the nature of and/or inherent weaknesses of democracy.38 It is in this context that Heidegger elects to interpret Heraclitus’s fragments:

They are incapable of bringing their Dasein to stand in the Being of beings. Only those who are capable of this, rule over the word – the poets and the thinkers. The others just reel about within the orbit of their caprice and lack of understanding. They accept as valid only what comes directly into their path, what flatters them and is familiar to them. (IM: 141)

But Heidegger’s concerns here reflect his growing concerns with the difficulty of linking his philosophical vision with politics. The way beings (including ourselves) are revealed to and through us is something which should be reflected in our approach to politics, for Heidegger at any rate. How this is to be achieved is not something that he ever really manages to come to terms with, despite his enthusiasm in this regard in the early 1930s.39 Heidegger is concerned with the capacity of certain pioneering individuals whose ‘struggle’ allows us to see the interplay of presence and absence and how being comes to presence and is revealed through our finitude/our temporal limits (as opposed to the tendency to simply allow being to be revealed to us as continuous presence) with a certain epochal character; in our epoch, through the ordinances of Gestell. Again, there is a danger here of stooping to apologetics; we have to be able to concede that there were jingoistic elements within Heidegger’s rhetoric which were unfortunate and opportunistically designed to give the wrong impression to the right people. That is, Heidegger was looking for ways to make his philosophy superficially consonant with elements of the conservative revolutionary rhetoric which had been absorbed into the fabric of National Socialism. One doesn’t want to exonerate Heidegger for this in any way; having said that, condemning his entire philosophical output from this period as contaminated to the core is excessive and overlooks the important continuities which knit together Heidegger’s overall project from Being and Time, through this period and beyond.40 One must also bear in mind, and this is something that we shall examine in some detail in subsequent chapters, that Heidegger will look to articulate his own political philosophy which he tries to relate to National Socialism but which is rather different in many respects to anything envisaged by his contemporaries. Our findings will come as cold comfort to those who were hoping to discover something altogether reassuring in the failure of Heidegger’s attempts to combine his philosophy and his political vision; the fact that his philosophy doesn’t reduce straightforwardly to Nazism or to the less salubrious intellectual elements of his day doesn’t mean that what he endorses is something to be embraced. Heidegger’s political vision, understood as the practical enactment of some version of his philosophy is grotesque and pernicious.

Heidegger discusses a number of Heraclitean fragments in Introduction to Metaphysics. For example, he spends some time discussing fragment 53. A conven-tional rendering of this fragment reads as follows: ‘War is the father of all and king of