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ALESSANDRO SALUPPO

MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM1

In his Freiburg lecture course, Einleitung in die Phenomenologie der Religion (1920-1921), Heidegger

referred to the “factical-historical experience” and to the “full temporal actualization of factic life”, as it is

expressed in the letters of the Apostle Paul. In these early lectures, which also include “Augustinus und der

Neoplatonism”, we find -as Kisiel notes- the “in-depth development of 1) Bekummerung of life (care and

concern), previously introduced at the end of Sommersemester 1920, and now re-introduced to its patristic

and biblical roots; 2) and of the dimension of history, which as Schleirmacher and Dilthey had already taught

Heidegger, was absolutely central to the religious life. This distinction between object-historical and

actualization historical will prove to be an indispensable “formal indication” for the latter problematic of

Being and Time2”. The emphasis on the self-world in the factic experience of life, in its actuality, takes its

starting point from Heidegger’s critique of medieval Scholasticism, which was identified as the rationalistic

conquest of the mystical a-theoretical sphere. In reviving the scientific, naturalistic and theoretical

metaphysics of being of Aristotle and its radical exclusion of the influence of Plato’s problem of values,

Scholasticism severely jeopardized the immediacy of religion and “forgot religion for dogma”. This tendency

toward theorizing and dogmatizing, toward Ent-leben (un-living), was exercised by Church authorities and

statutes, creating a theoretical system divorced from life and completely alien to the religious subject. In

antagonism with this system, Heidegger looked for a return to the “living spirit” in the fullness of its

accomplishments and to the primal sense of spirituality in its experiential and motivational context. This

“primal sense of spirituality in its vitality” was found in the “structure of the subject of mysticism”, and in

1 In this study I analyzed Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism, underlining the intimate relationship between his philosophy and his subsequent “political Resolve”. Leading from the concept of facticity (“factical-historical experience” and “full temporal actualization of factic life”) as it is expressed in his theo-logical beginnings, I retraced the political “undertone” and significance of Dasein’s ontological categories (existence, facticity, potentiality for Being, resoluteness, Angst, Being-toward-death, fate etc.) and how they absorbed the “spirit of the age” (European Crisis). From this point, I correlated Heidegger’s philosophy with Schmitt’s decisionism and Junger’s “active nihilism”, emphasizing the “kairotic” temporality of the “German hour” (the moment of ‘epochal” decision), the attack against normativism and the reaction against techno-modernity, which was responsible for alienating the subject (to destroy and to “secularize” the Volk), imposing an “inauthentic existence”. At that point I explained that Heidegger saw, in National Socialism, the possibility to recover an “authentic life”, characterized by “eventfulness”, in which Dasein lives intensely the pathos of resoluteness and projects itself on the historical moment. In conclusion, it emerges that Heidegger’s thinking represented an attempt to respond with philosophy to the historical crisis whose outward sign laid in the “advent” of Nihilism.

2 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 154.

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Heidegger’s initial readings of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, Teresa D’Avila’s

Interior Castle, Deismann studies on Pauline mysticism, and, above all, Meister Eckart’s “unio mystica3”.

The genesis of Heidegger’s “Christian facticity”, however, is already retraceable in his

Habilitationsschrift, Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehere des Duns Scotus (1916). Although, still close to

the neo-Kantian and transcendental value-philosophy of religion of Windelbald and Troeltch and the

speculative Catholic theology of Mohler, Kuhn and Staudenmaier, Heidegger asserted that “philosophical

problems repeated themselvels in history” and that “the philosophy of the active mind, of the productive

love, of the reverent indwelling of God, is faced with the great task of a fundamental confrontation with the

system of historical Weltanschauung4”. At the end of Habilitationsschrift’s introduction, Heidegger suggests

three specific areas of investigation: 1) the history of scholastic logic, 2) an history of scholastic psychology

focused on the medieval discovery of intentionality, and 3) a phenomenology of the “full spectrum of

religious experience”: “it is by such means that we shall first penetrate into the vital life of medieval

scholasticism and see how it decisively founded, vitalized and strengthened a cultural epoch5”. In this earlier

investigation, Heidegger still “devoted” to the scholastic “intellectus principiorum”, argued that medieval

scholasticism was not simply an “emptied” and dogmatic system, because “the very existence of a theory of

speech significations within medieval scholasticism manifests a refined disposition toward a direct

attunement to the immediate life of the subjectivity and its immanent contexts of meaning without, however,

arriving at the sharp concept of the subject6”. In Scotian texts, indeed, Heidegger singles out a “modus

essendi activus”, “an act character on the level of immediacy”, which re-problematizes the relationship

between object and subject within the Eckartian mysticism. The need for such investigation (the relationship

object/subject), as the conclusion clarifies, arises from the assumption that for the medieval lifeworld, the

“form of inner existence” was anchored in “the transcendent primal relationship of the soul to God”, and thus

“scholasticism and mysticism in essence belong together for the medieval worldview” and cannot exist

without each other: “philosophy as a rationalistic system detached from life is powerless, mysticism as an

irrationalistic experience is aimless7”. This “apparent” reconciliation between Scotian Scholasticism and

Eckartian mysticism did not resolve, though, “the problem of Scholasticism”, still perceived by Heidegger as

a “rationalistic structure divorced from life”. In fact, a few months later, in the middle of his “religious crisis”

(1917) and in conjunction with his feverish studies of Holderlin, Nietzsche, Trakl, Rilke, Dilthey and the

translations of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Heidegger reiterated the critique against scholasticism, and

3 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 71-80. 4 M. Heidegger, Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehere des Duns Scotus, (JCB Mohr, Tuebingen, 1916), p. 16 and 232f. quoted in O. Poggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of thinking, (Humanities Press International, 1987), p. 15. 5 Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehere des Duns Scotus, (JCB Mohr, Tuebingen, 1916), p 14-15, quoted in T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 71. 6 Ibid. p.81. 7 Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehere des Duns Scotus, (JCB Mohr, Tuebingen, 1916), p. 241, quoted in T.Kisiel, p.82.

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looked to the mystical experience to define a complete different “motivational context in the experiencing

subject”, which would have disclosed “the structural character of the unity of the object and subject” and the

immediacy of religious experience in its unrestrained dedicative submission to the holy.

In this period, Heidegger’s religious thought seems characterized by an abiding belief that “holy” cannot

be investigated as a “theoretical noema” but, rather as a correlate of an act character “faith”, which can be

interpreted only in relation to its own experiential context and to its related historical consciousness. This

belief, which Heidegger draws on from Bernardo of Clairvaux’s opening sentence “Hodie legimus in libro

experience”, as well as Reinach’s “experientially immanent knowledge”, Lutheran fiducia, and Eckart’s

“naked intuition of the first truth, marks his “fundamental” approach to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “felt

intuition”, and his attempt to detach religion from its association with values and morality, or its

identification as a form of thinking the world (which culminates inevitably in metaphysics). Leading from

Eckhart’s concept of “Abgeschiedenheit”, which indicates the formation of the mystical subject by means of

a return to its “ground”, to its intimate roots and to its inner life, Schleiermacher tells us to listen to ourselves

in the original “unity and very becoming of consciousness” and to “descend into the inmost sanctuary of

life”, where we can understand the original relation of feeling and intuition (this concept can be also read as

divination or immediate awareness of the divine)8. In returning to the “first beginning of consciousness”, we

disclose its “original unity”, that of feeling, when religion finds itself. From this assumption, religion is

neither theoretical knowledge nor morality (in terms of moral obedience of the Kantian types which

generates a disjunction between subject [I am] and object [God]), but is feeling; a feeling of “absolute

dependence”(Hingabe) or dedicative submission, that Heidegger re-conceives as “allowing oneself to be

stirred by the originally unrestrained influx of fullness9”. From this concept of “dedicative submission”,

Schleiermacher maintained that religious life consisted of two elements: “that man surrender himself to the

Universe and allow himself to be stirred by the side turned toward him, and that he internally transmit this

stirring, which is only one particular feeling and incorporate in the inner unity of the life and being. The

religious life is nothing but the constant renewal of this process10”. Therefore, religious life, which is

dedicative submission and which displays the unity and continuity of personal consciousness (the inner unity

and sense of personal existence), demands that one does “everything with religion, not from religion.

Without interruption, like sacred music, the religious feelings should accompany the “active life11”.

Consequently, it is in this inner unity of life and in the empirically given reality of Christianity, that we can

understand the richneness, concreteness, and fullness of religious life. In this context, history “is the richest

source for religion, not because it governs and hastens the progressive development of humanity but because

8 F. Schleiermacher, On religion: speeches to its cultured despisers, (New York, 1893), p. 41-42. 9 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 91. 10 On religion: speeches to its cultured despisers, (New York, 1893), p. 58. 11 Ibid.

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it is the greatest and most universal revelation of the innermost and holiest. But surely in this sense, religion

begins and ends with history (and vice versa12)”. As a result, according to the German theologian, history is

always religious and religion is always historical. Heidegger’s emphasis on this Schleiermacher passage

(Kisiel), reveals his fascination with Dilthey’s hermeneutic and its critique of historical reason. In his

influential Introduction to the Human sciences, Dilthey introduced a fundamental epistemological reflection

on “human sciences” (and how they differ from natural sciences) and a theoretically and methodologically

reflective historicism. Whether for Herder, Von Savigny and Von Ranke there is a metaphysical-religious

dimension, safeguarding against historical relativism, Dilthey’s historicism rejected all ahistorical values,

norms, and “eschatologism(s)”, recognizing the relativity of all historical phenomena. More than relativistic

historicism, however, Heidegger was interested in Dilthey’s theories on factical life and his related emphasis

on the “essential historicality of existence". In fact, according to Dilthey, life, in its obscurity and

unintelligibility, is the basis of our experience and cannot “itself” be explicitly and wholly conceived. Since,

“knowledge cannot go beyond life”, only life itself can attempt to grasp life and understand itself, and, thus,

within the process of understanding, it is life that understands life. In this way life becomes a process of self-

interpretation of life itself. From this perspective, Dilthey’s hermeneutical approach was to grasp life in the

objectified form of cultural life and to investigate the forms of objectification of the spirit within culture and

society. Hermeneutic understanding, therefore, means to revive and to re-experience an original experience,

“bringing forth” the authentic “experiential” and emotional context of an historical moment. In two chapters

on Christianity and Augustine, Dilthey writes that what really characterized Christian experiences was the

emphasis on 1) “the inner self”, 2) on lived experience, and 3) on that “historical consciousness, which

served to breach the limitations of Greek cosmological categories”: “God’s essence, instead of being grasped

in the self-enclosed concept of substance of antiquity was now caught up in historical vitality, and so

historical consciousness, taking the expression in its highest sense, first came into being13”. From Dilthey’s

Introduction to the Human Sciences, Heidegger quotes a passage on Paul’s basic experience, synthesizing the

previous three emphasis:

“The struggle of religions with one another in the Christian life fulfilled by historical reality had produced the historical consciousness of a development of the entire life of the soul. For the perfect moral life cannot be represented to the Christian community in the conceptual formula of a moral law or a highest good; it was experienced by the community as an unfathomable living element in the life of Christ and in the struggle of one’s own will; it referred not to other propositions but to other figures of the moral-religious life who existed before it and among whom it now appeared. And this historical consciousness found a fixed external framework in the genealogical context of the history of humanity created within Judaism14”.

12 F. Schleiermacher, On religion: speeches to its cultured despisers, (New York, 1893), p. 80. 13 W. Dilthey, Introduction to the human sciences, 1883 (published by Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 197. 14 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 102.

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At this point, Heidegger’s relationship to modern historical thinking, raised by Dilthey to philosophical

reflection, is surpassed by a more primordial historical thinking, that is the experience of history manifested

by primordial Christian faith, which was revealed only in this “unfathomable living moment” and in the

struggle of “one’s own will”, which in turn disclosed a new ecstatic-horizontal temporality.

In platonic terms, the temporal world was: 1) a mimesis of the supratemporal (the temporal was just an

image or copy of the supratemporal); 2) the temporal participated in the supratemporal through methexis; 3)

the supratemporal manifested “its presence” in the temporal (Parousia), i.e. in every case historical

“temporality” is secondary. In his religion courses (1920-1921), Heidegger reiterated that philosophy should

have returned to the historical-factical situation in its unique actualization and to the original historical reality

– the temporal – detached from its relation to the supratemporal realm of ideas. In this context, the primordial

Christian religiosity was precisely a factical and historical experience, an experience of life in its actuality,

because “it saw life’s dominant structure in the significance of performance rather than in the significance of

content” (Poggeler). In the first “Letter to the Thessalonians” Paul said: “But it is not necessary to write you,

beloved brothers, about times and hours; for you yourselves certainly know that the day of the Lord will

come like a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:1). In this sentence actualization involves a peculiar kairotic

“moment of illumination”, a moment of full alertness and watchfulness, which calls for a new “parousia”,

emptied of chiliastic or apocalyptic tones but determined exclusively by faith and by “the how of my self-

comportment”, and, in turn, “by the actualization of my factic life experience in and through every

moment15”:

“But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you as a thief. For all you are the children of light and children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, as others do: but let us watch, and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night; and they that are drunk, are drunk in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, having on the breast plate of faith and charity, and, for a helmet, the hope of salvation (1 Thess. 5: 4-8)

In Paul, the concept of Parousia loses its Platonic-Aristotelian and Septuagint sense of “presentness” of an

actual event that merely remains outstanding as a future occurrence; but it refers, instead, to a coming “as a

thief in the night”, which advent requires “wakefulness” (dread). This concept of Parousia determines a mode

of existing - living in “wakefulness” for the advent of the day of the Lord and in the ecstatic hope of the new

creation- founded on “working of faith”, “labor of love”, and “patience of hope”. This futural orientation in

Paul is combined with a sense of the past as operative in the present, a past that Heidegger indicates as

“having become”. Paul experienced the Thessalonians as “having become” (followers of Christ) – “having

thus a fond affection for you we were willing to share not only the gospel of God, but also our own lives with

you because, you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:8) - and “knowledge of their having become”,

15 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 186.

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which arises in their factical experience. This knowing, Kisiel underlines, is “not merely occasionally known;

knowing makes up its very being and it makes up the very being of that knowing […] this knowing emerges

directly from the situational context of the Christian life experience16”. Therefore, “having become”, as

constantly co-experienced, represents that “anticipatory wakefulness”, which characterizes the facticity of

being Christian and determines its becoming or genesis – its ecstatic temporality. Needless to say that from

Pauline Christianity, Heidegger receives the concept of timeliness as “ekstatisch” – a stepping outside itself-

where its “extemporizing” consists in expansion into three Ekstates: Future, Past and Present. In Being and

Time, temporality discloses itself as an entity “which first emerges from itself” and “its essence is a process

of temporalizing in the unity of Ekstases17”. Accordingly primordial and authentic temporality (not a pure

sequence of “nows”) “temporalizes itself in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that in having

been futurally, it first of all awakens the present18”. Correspondingly, the peculiar nature of Christian

“becoming” is apprehension and restless vigilance “in the present” of an imminent Parousia. The “believer”

serves and awaits God in constant trepidation in the threat of the future, thus taking from God, with “joy and

enthusiasm”, the Word of Salvation. Here this waiting for God is not related with an objective time, but to a

persistent and irreducible element of hope and to a moment of “fateful” decision before “our Lord Jesus

Christ in his coming”. This tremendous responsibility, residing in the individual freedom “to resolute unto its

own salvation”, to resist against worldly temptation, brought by the “angel of Satan”, (Corinth 12, 1-10),

embodies the “absolute affliction” and tribulation lived by Christians:

“The experiencing is an absolute affliction […] which belongs to the life of the Christian itself. The taking upon oneself […] is a putting oneself in a situation of need. This affliction is a fundamental characteristics, it is the absolute concern on the horizon of the Parousia, of the second coming at the end of time19”

In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Heidegger repeated that the temporality of Christian facticity,

which actualizes itself “all alone before God”, became the time of fateful decision, the kairotic moment when

humans decide whether to receive “the love of the truth” or to embrace the “seduction of iniquity”.

Regarding this “kairotic decisionism” of Christianity, Paul Tillich has written some illuminating passages:

“the believer stands in nature, taking upon oneself the inevitable reality; not to flee from it; either into the

world of ideal forms or into the related world of super-nature, but to make decisions in concrete reality. Here

the subject has no possibility of an absolute position. It cannot go out of the sphere of decision. Every part of

its nature is affected by these contradictions. Fate and freedom reach into the act of knowledge and make it a

16 T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (University of California – Berkeley, 1993), p. 182. 17 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 329. 18 Ibid. 19 M. Heidegger, Phenomenologie des religiosen Lebens, vol. 60 of Gesamtausgabe, vol.60, (Frankfurt a./M.:Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p.97-98, quoted in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, (John Hopkins University, 1999), p. 203.

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historical deed (history exists where there is decision): the Kairos determines the Logos20”. The penetration

of historical thinking into the sphere of “super-nature” (and into the sphere of nature through humanism) is

evident when Paul writes that the persecutions and tribulations that Christians are enduring is “a clear

indication that God’s judgment is just, so that you may be deemed worthy of the kingdom of God, for which

reason you suffer […] with this in mind, we constantly pray for you that our God may consider you worthy

of this calling”. It was for this glory, Paul continues, that “he called you through our Gospel, that you might

earn the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess.1: 4-8). Also he warns that those “who know not God and

who obey not the Gospel” will suffer “eternal punishment in destruction”; while those who will “not

withdraw from every brother walking disorderly and [behave] according to the tradition which they have

received of us” will enjoy the grace of Jesus Christ. For Paul, therefore, the “waiting of God” imposes an

authentic everydayness in the imminence of a new Parousia, which ask to remain always “awake and sober”

and to not becoming “caught up in the en-theos, which transports us out the world”, but instead to take a

“fateful” and rightful decision in order to receive “the love of the truth”, which enables the saved to resist the

temptation of the Anti-Christ, whose “deluding influence” the others will inevitably succumb. On this

peculiar Pauline’s Christian (historical) facticity, in which the “when of a new Parousia” is reduced to the

how, Heidegger states the following:

“Time and moment [Augenblick] pose a particular problem for the explication. The “When” is no longer grasped originally, to the extent that is grasped in the sense of a suspended and fixated objective time. Neither it is the time of “factical life” in its falling, unaccentuated, non-Christian meant. Paul does not say “when”, because that word is inadequate for what has to be expressed, because it does not suffice. The whole question is for Paul not a matter of knowledge […] he does not say “then and then does the Lord come again” nor does he say, “I don’t know when he will come again” – rather, he says “you know very well […] This knowledge must be a very peculiar one, for Paul refers the Thessalonians back to themselves and to the knowledge that they have as those who have become what they are. From this mode of answering, it follows that the decision of the “question” depends on their own lives21”

In this “fateful decision”, Heidegger found that Christian factical-temporality still not distorted by

neoplatonic concepts, arose exclusively from this context of actualization before God (in Augustine, the

quietism of the fruitio Dei and his saying “Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te” misses the

factical life experience of primordial Christianity, even though in the Confessions Augustine thinks factical-

religious life in terms of performance). Primordial Christian faith experiences life in its actuality - in its

factical experience-, which is historical and “lives not only the time, but lives time itself22”. Also Christian

becoming, through serving and waiting, is characterized by a “knowing” knowledge of their having become;

this “awareness” demands a sudden decision. Kierkegaard interpreted this “suddenness” (“exphaines”) as the

20 P. Tillich, The interpretation of history, part one translated by N. A. Rasetzki; parts two, three and four translated by Elsa L. Talmey, (New York, C. Scribner's sons; London, C. Scribner's sons, ltd., 1936), p.34. 21 M. Heidegger, Phenomenologie des religiosen Lebens, vol. 60 of Gesamtausgabe, vol.60, (Frankfurt a./M.:Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p.97-98, quoted in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, (John Hopkins University, 1999), p.191. 22 O. Poggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of thinking, (Humanities Press International, 1987), p.24-25.

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unique moment, the Kairos of Christian eschatology, using St. Paul expression “ripe ophthalmou”: “In a

moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised

incorruptible, and we shall be changed (Cor. 15.52). The concept of Kairos and its political content is

extremely important for the original purpose of this paper. We know that Kairos means time, “not empty

time”, neither the quantitative time (Chronos) - the mere duration - but rather qualitative fulfilled time, the

moment that is creation and fate, the right time “which indicates that something has happened which makes

an action possible or impossible”:

Here is an appointed time (Kairos) for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven 2 A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up.4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. 5 A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing.6 A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away.7 A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak.8 A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace (Ecclesiastes, 3:1).

In the thinking of early Christianity and its historical consciousness, the meaning of Kairos moved from its

Aristotelian ethical character (“phronesis”) and its rhetorical-linguistic forms, to a deeper and prophetic

eschatological “substance” (Paul). Kairos, as fulfilled moment of creation, “the moment of time approaching

us as fate and decision” -opposed to the timeless Logos, (and later to Lutheran transcendentalism) –

announces, in its “fullness” and “resoluteness”, the right time, when the eternal breaks into the temporal and

that a new beginning can take place. This new !"#"$%&' (Katabole), under the chiliastic forms of a new

()*#+,, in which Kairos (the right time) “actualize” the most authentic moment of vision , and in which the

meaning of “revelation” assumes a new historical consciousness, breaks through the structures of human

existence, disclosing itself anew for knowledge and action. Whether, for Christian Faith, the appearing of

Jesus as the Christ is the absolute and unique Kairos, in its general sense – for the philosopher of history –

Kairos represents an “historical” turning point”, the moment which occurs the coming of a new “revelation”

“on the soil of a secularized and emptied autonomous culture” (Tillich). Kairos as !"#"$%&' and “moment

of authentic vision” is always grounded in a time of tension and conflict, a time of “crisis”, which implies

that the course of events poses a fundamental question, which calls for an unconditioned and resolute

decision. In this ecstatic time - the German hour23 -the consciousness of the crises take a living historical

23 In German philosophy, Scheler describes this “kairotic moment”, which emerged through the “first European war” as the event which could be either the beginning of Europe’s re-birth or its final demise: “the sacrifice of all shared investment in ethical measures and principles for making judgments about the kind of terrible events in the moral world, which this war has brought with it, seems no longer capable of being overcome. At no time in the history of Western Europe subsequent to the decline of the medieval papacy, which was the last form of such universally revered authority, did it become as terribly clear as during this war what it means fro Europe no longer to possess any supranational, commonly recognized authority – and this does not refer simply to the deplorable transgression against every limit imposed by international law. But with this it becomes equally clear that so-called presuppositionless […] science’s claim to take the place of the kind of spiritual European authority which contributes its moral weight and its sanctified tradition, has become so ephemeral, so unreliable and empty […] expressions of every kind, the various

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form, and the Being, grasped by its fate and destiny, suspends the ethical (the universal) in order to faithfully

and intensely live the “new Revelation” – the moment of ecstatic vision (Augenblick).

In Being and Time, Heidegger inspired by Stefan George’s poem Entruckung, translates ekstase with the

German entrucken (o Entruckung), which indicate rapture, transport and also an heightened emotional state –

an authentic Augenblick. In this rapture, the being of Dasein which finds its meaning temporally comes

towards itself futurally “for the sake of itself” and project itself upon its potentiality-for-being, that is, its

“Being free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself24”. Temporal existence is the place

for problem of history and the condition for the possibility of historicality (In this context, the problem of

history must be intended in terms of the unity of the existential analytic of Dasein). Heidegger sustains that

Dasein historicality depends on its happening (or historizing) in the peculiar way that it “stretches along

between birth and death”, since “factical Dasein exists as born; and as born it is already dying, in the sense of

Being toward the death25”. Yet “as long as Dasein exists “both the ends and their between are, and they are in

the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s being as care” and “only in temporality the

constitutive totality of care has a possible basis for its unity26”. Hence, it is within the happening of Dasein,

in its temporal constitution, that Heidegger approaches the ontological clarification of the “connectedness of

life” – the stretching along, the movement and the persistence of Dasein. The question of Dasein’s

connectedness results “the ontological problem of Dasein historizing27”. As a result “to lay bare the structure

of historizing and the existential temporal conditions of its impossibility signifies that one has achieved an

ontological understanding of historicality28”. By historicality, Heidegger means primarily that existential

awareness of one’s self through which one understands oneself as being in history and has a historical sense

by which the “facts”, “artifacts”, and other Dasein (s) are made relevant and “historically” significant. What

is primarily historical, according to Heidegger, is Dasein as Being in the world; subsequently historical are

“beings” that we encounter “within the time”, “within the world” and which are historical by reason of

“belonging to the world” (world-historical entities). Whether historicality represents “that” existential-

ontological ground which makes history possible, world-historical beings/entities/events are historical only

exchanges of letters among the learned of the different European nations concerning war and warfare, indicated an intellectual and moral nadir, a clouding of judgment, a seeing of all things from the standpoint of emotions of the masses; this was all nourished by a press which in part just plain lied and in part suppressed all truth, and it was pushed to the point of grotesqueness by an inability to secure basic principles in the exchange of ideas which would be commonly recognized at least in Western Europe […] that at this time in Europe there is no man, no place, and no authority which possesses the inner worth and moral weight to place it above the danger of partisanship and which also enjoy sufficient general respect and recognition that is pronouncements regarding the national obligations of spirit would touch the heart of Europe. This is the outlook of our time: every aspect has become dubious, in connection with each there prevails an unlimited number of conflicting opinions – and it is only the masses and the power that confer some meaning (Der Genius des Kriege, p. 322-323). An other splendid example of this “historical time” is found in Rilke’s Letters from 1914 to 1926 and in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essays, Die Beruhrung der spharen [The touching of the spheres], 1931. 24 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 189. 25 Ibid. p. 374. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. p. 374-375. 28 Ibid.

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to the extent that they take place in the happening of the worldly Dasein. Hence, what is historical is not

simply present at hand existence, but primarily the existential involvement in the world, which means that

Dasein’s being-in-the-world that is historical.

In the fifth chapter of Division Two of Being and Time, the analysis for the existential construction of

history became Dasein’s project of an authentic “capacity-to-be-a-whole”, which is “unrelated to “others”

and “inescapable” because death is its highest instance of a free existing. Indeed, Dasein, which is always

one’s own, can be a whole only when it anticipates death and bring itself into authentic existence. Heidegger

underlines that Being-towards death is the anticipation of a potentiality for Being and “in the anticipatory

revealing of this potentiality-for-Being, Dasein discloses itself to itself as regards its uttermost possibility29”.

Anticipation, therefore, turns to be “the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost

potentiality for Being – that is to say the possibility of authentic existence30”. Thus, Dasein becomes

authentically itself “only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it

projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather upon the possibility of they-self31”.

Consequently, in anticipation, which discloses to existence its uttermost possibility, Dasein becomes free for

one’s own death (Dasein’s ownmost possibility), and anticipation “reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-

self, and brings it face to face with possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude,

but of being itself, rather in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARDS DEATH – a freedom which has been

released from the illusions of the “they” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious32”. In Being-free-

for death, what matters is not physical demise, but one’s attitude to one’s death during the life - “Dasein too

can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish33”. This

concept appears, eloquently, in Rilke: “Oh Lord, give to each his own death/ the dying that comes from the

life,/ in which he had love, sense and want./. For we are just the husk and the leaf. / The great death that each

has in himself/ that is the fruit, around which all resolves”34. Remembering that temporal existence is the

locus of history and the condition for the possibility of historicality, Being-toward-death becomes inevitably

not only the primary ground of primordial temporality but also historicality, and Being-free-for-death gives

to Dasein its “goal outright”, pushing existence into its finitude. Additionally, factical Dasein, which exists

authentically as anticipatory resoluteness and comes toward itself futurally, is constantly “ahead of itself”

and awaiting its potentiality-for-Being (Dasein is either authentically or inauthentically disclosed to itself as

regards its existence and project itself towards its potentiality for Being, which are disclosed in

understanding). Whether, in everyday concerns Dasein understands itself only in terms of the potentiality-

29 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 263. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. p. 264. 32 Ibid. p. 266. 33 Ibid. p. 247. 34 Rainer M. Rilke, The book of hours: prayers to a lowly God, trans. by Annemarie Kidder, (Northwestern Press, 2001), p. 173.

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for-Being “with regard to whatever its object of concern may be” (living an inauthentic future awaiting),

Heidegger sustains that exists a “special way” of Being-alongside in the Present – the waiting towards

(authentic future awaiting). This ecstatic mode reveals itself in resoluteness, which gain its authenticity as

anticipatory resoluteness, and where “the Present is not only brought back from distraction with the objects

of one’s closest concern, but it gets held in the future and having been35; a “running ahead” toward the still

outstanding end (death) where Dasein has grasped the finitude of its existence and is now able to understand

itself in terms of its ownmost possibility. This “present”, which is held in authentic temporality and “which

thus is authentic itself” is called the “moment of vision”, which means the resolute rapture with “which

Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities of concern and circumstances encountered in the Situation as

possible objects of concern, but a rapture which is held in resoluteness36”. Resoluteness, by its ontological

essence, is “the particular resoluteness of particular factical Dasein at a particular time. In resoluteness (the

moment of resolving), Dasein comes back to itself, “disclose current factical possibilities of authentic

existing, and disclose them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over37”:

“In one’s coming back resolutely to one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to one, but non necessarily as having thus come down. If every good is a heritage, and the character of goodness lies in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness. The more authentically Dasein resolves – and this mean that in anticipating death it understand itself unambiguously in terms of its ownmost distinctive possibility – the more unequivocally does it choose and find the possibility of its existence […] Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and “possibility” driven out […] One has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate38”.

In the resoluteness of the factical Dasein, where resoluteness “runs ahead” toward the end, free for death, and

Dasein “hands down its inheritance to itself and takes its over” that Heidegger places the concept of fate –

the “destiny” of the resolute individual- as authentic temporality. In accordance with this ‘displacement”,

Lowith argues that: “Heidegger no longer wants to be in terms of the moment of vision for his time, on the

basis of his own resoluteness; instead he wants to attune his resoluteness toward fate into the “essential path”

of a world destining and into the “world-moment-of-vision” of a world need39”.

In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes fate from destiny, a word –the latter- that indicates a

“collective destiny” (Being with others): “The power of destiny first becomes free in communication and

struggle. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its “generation” makes up Dasein’s full, authentic

happening40”. On the contrary, fate indicates that “individual” awareness of one’s limited possibilities and

35 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 337. 36 Ibid. p. 338. 37 Ibid. p. 384. 38 Ibid. 39 K. Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 78. 40 Being and Time, p. 384f.

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the following attribution of significance of one’s decision adopted in the change and variations of these

possibilities. Resolute anticipation and Being-free-for death, which have “imported death” into Dasein

existence, emphasizes its finitude, and disclosing its ownmost possibility, brings Dasein face to face with its

own “situation” and transformed it (Dasein) into the artificer of its own fate. Consequently, “to exist in the

mode of fate” and to exist in resoluteness, means “to be historical in the very ground of one’s existence”. In

Heidegger’s ontological analysis, resoluteness, “self-determined fate”, and historical context represent a

“unitary structural whole” irrevocably linked with Being-free for death:

“Only an entity which, in its being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical “there” by shattering itself against death – that it is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handling down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own throwness and be in the moment of vision for “its time”. Only authentic temporality, which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate – that is to say authentic temporality41”.

Fate is the decisive time of a pure moment of vision, the moment of self-determination, but also the kairotic

moment of decision, when Dasein, free towards its death, lives intensely the pathos of resoluteness and

project itself on the historical moment. In this concept, Heidegger, which has in the meanwhile lost faith in

Christ, emphasizes the “capacity-for Being, which is always one’s own” and the “existentiell confinement to

one’s own historiological facticity”, identifying this capacity of “Having to” (“unus quisque robustus sit in

existencia sua”) with the historical fate of “German” Dasein. On the relationship between Dasein and its

“having to” (resoluteness) with the “universal movement of German existence” Karl Lowith writes:

“Whoever looks ahead from this standpoint (concept of fate) to Heidegger’s support of Hitler’s movement, will find already in this earliest formulation of historical existence an intimation of its later link with political decision. It requires only one step beyond the still half-religious notion of individuation, and one step beyond the application of one’s own Dasein and its “Having to” to the proper “German Dasein” and its historical fate, in order to carry over the energetic idling of the existential categories (“resolve upon oneself”, “stand alone in face of the Nothing”, “will one’s fate” and “give oneself over to oneself”) into the universal movement of German existence and then to destruct these categories upon political ground […] The principle behind [this identification] is always the same namely facticity”, i.e., what remains of life when one does away with all life content42”.

As a distinctive determination of Dasein’s existence (from the non-existential fact of Being-present at hand),

facticity indicates Dasein’s thrownness into its “there”. It is also the basis for the projection-character of

Dasein, which as existence embodies a factical possibility, a capacity for Being. To exist Dasein projects

possibilities on the basis of its understanding, that is “a pressing into possibilities”. This projection, which

“understands”, is together with Dasein, a factically thrown projection and “thrown possibilities ahead itself”.

Dasein is always ahead itself, beyond itself, it has always projected itself on definitive possibilities of its

existence, and this self-projection on the “For the sake of itself” is grounded in “blind” facticity. In a letter to

41 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 385. 42 K. Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 215.

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Lowith (1921), Heidegger wrote” I do only what I must and what I consider to be necessary, and I do this as

I’m able to – I do not slant my philosophical work toward cultural tasks for an universal present. I also do not

have Kierkegaard’s tendency. I work out of “I am” and my spiritual, indeed factical heritage. With this

facticity, existence rages43”.

In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger interrogates the problem of facticity to all beings as whole by asking

“Why are there beings at all and not rather nothing?”. In this text, Heidegger assumes that science is

concerned only with “real” beings and “it wishes to know nothing of nothing […] but when science tries to

express its own proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help44. Differently, Metaphysics offers the

opportunity to question beyond natural things, to investigate the Not-Being (the Nothing). From this

assumption, Heidegger underlines that a metaphysical question has two fundamental characteristics: 1) it

concerns “the whole”. In fact if science deals with a specific field, metaphysics “goes beyond” any particular

Being, since “no matter how fragmented everyday existence may appear, it always deals with beings in a

unity of the whole” (world and being itself); 2) Metaphysics also interrogates its own questioner since “it is a

being stationed in the midst of beings that are unveiled somehow as whole”. This metaphysical “goes

beyond” result in dealing with Being and Not-Being (Nothing). Heidegger starts his analysis with a

“negative” use of the Nothing as the complete negation of the totality of beings. Gradually he moves toward

a “positive” use of the word asserting that only on the ground of the original “manifestness” of the nothing

can Dasein approach and penetrate “beings”, because to exist as Dasein, it cannot simply deal with real

entities, but “it must transcend the world, since without transcendence it could never adopt a stance toward

beings, nor even towards itself45”. Consequently, he construes that the experience of the nothing first opens

up access to the experience of Being and “let the strangeness” of beings overwhelm us. Leading from the

Hegelian remark that “Pure Being and Pure nothing are the same” (Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Werke III, 74),

Heidegger argues that “being and nothing belong together” because Being itself is “essentially finite and

reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein, which is held out into Nothing46”. In this concept, a de-

theologized “EX NIHILO OMNE ENS QUA ENS FIT replaces the Christian proposition “CREATIO EX

NIHILO”, and the Nothing seem to arise out of the death of the Christian God. This ‘inner nihilism’

characterized by the “advent of Nothing” announces an historical moment of destitution (where all things

come from nothing), which stands “in the longer of the gods who have fled and the not-yet of the one to

come” (Holderlin). For Heidegger, nihilism is that “historical process whereby the dominance of the

transcendent” becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning. Nihilism is the history of

being itself, through which the death of the Christian God come slowly and inexorable to light. In his

43 K. Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 236. 44 M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.84. 45 Ibid. p.94-95. 46 Ibid. p. 95.

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recognition of the ongoing process of nihilism, the history of being, and metaphysics itself comes to an

end47”. This means that what really happens in the entire history of metaphysics is a relentless nihilistic

occurrence, namely the destining of Being that “the supra-sensible world, the Ideas, God, the Moral Law, the

authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the many, culture, civilization, and their formative energy

forfeit and become null. We call this essential decay of the supra-sensible its decomposition48”. Nevertheless,

the ends of metaphysics which “disclose itself as the collapse of the reign of the transcendent and the “ideal”

that sprang from it”, does not mean the cessation of history, but represents the beginning of a serious concern

with that “event”: the death of God. The loss of transcendence symbolized by the death of the Christian God

and “the concern with that event” stands in the middle of Nietzsche “political” thought, in which the concept

of will replaces the “Thou shalt of Christian faith and “great politics” re-invigorates that “sickness of the

willing”, which derives from the “spiritual” decadence of Europe. In The birth of Tragedy49, the “transition”

from Christianity to Will and “fateful decision” is expressed with unsurpassed clarity:

“Christianity was essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an ”other” or better life. Hatred of the world, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the Sabbath of Sabbaths – all of this, along with Christianity’s unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a “a will to decline”, at the very lest a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. In face of morality […] life must be felt to be undesirable, valueless in itself […] a “will to denial of life”, a secret instinct of annihilation. […] for this reason an affirmative instinct for life, turned against morality and invented a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life, purely artistic and anti-Christian […] I called it Dionysiac. […] From this doctrine let us imagine a rising generation with such an undaunted gaze, with such an heroic proclivity for the tremendous. Let us imagine the bold stride of those dragon-slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their backs on all the weaklings’ doctrines that lie within that optimism, in order to l ive reso lute ly in all they do50”. This movement toward the Dyonisiac, (the craving for ugliness), intended as “de-responsabilization”

(Patocka51) and the following replacement of the Apolline-Socratic (with its Schopenauerian’s principium

47 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4 , trans D.F. Krell (San Francisco, Calif., Harper & Row, 1984), quoted in Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, (Temple University, 1992), p. 219. 48 M. Heidegger, The word of Nietzsche: God is dead, p. 65. Quoted in K. Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 83. 49 Someone could criticize my decision to choose The birth of tragedy, as a work that indicates the transition from “Christianity to Will” (above all if one considers more “explicit” existential and “political” Nietzschean works). Nevertheless, if we assume the concept of Nazi aestheticization of politics and the belief that the new Germany would be a self-producing work of art (Lacoue Labarthe), the following passage from “The birth of tragedy” unveils an important and decisive political content: “Insofar as the subject is the artist […] he has been already been released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance. For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education, nor is we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections of the true author [the WILL], and that we have our highest dignity of our significance as works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified – while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented it”, p.52. This passage make clear that art, in National Socialism, is not “an aesthetic achievement, but a fundamental fact of metaphysical existence, which will decide the future (Gottfried Benn). Therefore, for National Socialism, polit ics is art and art is a dynamic “ lived experience” (Erlebnis). 50 F. Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy. Out of the spirit of music, (New York 1993), p. 8-9 and 88. 51 In Heretical essay in the philosophy of history, Patocka writes: “Human comportment aimed at the development of openness and its ream, perhaps its tradition, is not […] contained solely in language, in propositions and their formations. There are modes of

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individuationis52 and its tendency to “contemplative understanding” and mechanic rationalization of the

realm), represents an attempt to escape the eternal agonizing drama of existence and its “aestheticized” form

(NIHILISM) through a new existential and political “decisionism” (Will to Power). This calling for

resoluteness presupposes the recognition of the crisis of Western Civilization and Christian tradition, but also

the necessity to define anew the fate of Europe, (a fate) in which Zarathustra will be the “conqueror of God

and NOTHING”.

From within the perspective of fundamental ontology, Heidegger asserts, the Nothing and its nihilating

are given in experience as ANGST, which is a further important “political” clue for an existential analysis of

post WWI Germany. This assumption is valid only if we assume that Heidegger saw the “mood of the age”

through the same eyes of that “Nietzscheanism” which in Spengler, Scheler, Klages, and Leopold Ziegler

problematizes the relation between life and spirit. In anxiety, Dasein realize to “being in the world as such” -

thrown in the world- and it finds “face to face with the nothing of the possible impossibility of its own

existence […] Anxiety is anxious about the ability to be of the thus determined entity and discloses in this

way the most extreme possibility […] Beings-towards death its essentially anxiety53. As thrown in the world,

Dasein “has been delivered over to itself and to its potentiality for Being, but as being in the world”.

Furthermore it has been “submitted to a world” and exists factically with others. Leading from the concept of

“Abstandingkeit” (distantiality), Heidegger underlines how the self becomes completely absorbed in Das

Man, which is fundamentally the socially constitute normative framework of Dasein’s understanding, i.e.

Distantiality is based on our daily concern. In its everyday life, Dasein always observes what others are doing

and how they are doing it. In its absorption in Das Man, distantiality introduces its attitude toward

averageness and, consequently, towards levelling off by means of the systematic elimination of reciprocal

differences. Distantiality, averageness and levelling off constitute the “pubblicness”: the public control over

the interpretation of Dasein and its world. In this ‘alienating” absorption, the self of everyday life Dasein is

the They-self, and consequently “Dasein is “for the sake of the they” in everyday manner, and they itself

articulates the referential context of significance54”. On the contrary, in anxiety, Dasein becomes

individualized and thus “disclosed as solus ipse”. But “this existential solipsism”, Heidegger asserted, “is far

development and transmission of openness in religion, myth and sacrifice […] each of these activities, each such comportment, contains a special mode of unconcealment of what there is or perhaps of being (p.9). Later he asks “[I]s there not a history of religion in a rich differentiation of religious experience long before the emergence of the Greek Polis and the Ionian historia? […] is there not a whole range of evidence that precisely in the sphere of religion it is conversion, something like death and re-birth, that is finding a fundamentally new meaning, that is the focus of all experience? History may be at its core a history of the world in the sense of an antecedent complex of our human possibilities, but then it will be primordially an history of religion (p.139-140) […] “Religion is not the sacred, nor does it arise directly from the experience of sacral orgies and rites; rather it is where the sacred qua demonic is being explicitly overcome. Sacral experience passes over the religious as soon as there is an attempt to introduce responsibility into the sacred or regulate the sacred thereby (p.101). 52 The principle of individuation indicates the way in which all our experience come to us parceled up, especially including our awareness of ourselves 53 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 310. 54 Ibid. 129.

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from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-thing into the innocuous emptiness of a wordless

occurring, that in extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world,

and thus bring it face to face with itself as being-in-the world55. When anxiety, however, brings Dasein back

from its absorption in the world, everyday familiarity collapses, taking away from Dasein the possibility to

understand itself and “how the things have publicly interpreted56”:

“In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which finds itself alongside in anxiety, come proximally to expression: the nothing and the nowhere. But here uncanniness means also “not-being-at-home” [188] Anxiety discloses the “nihil” and groundless of the world and of Dasein’s Being-in-the-World. Dasein,

stripped of all security, can get no hold on things and stand alone in face of NOTHING. In the slipping away

of beings only this “no holds of things come over it”, eliminating all kinds of support. Anxiety, Heidegger

wrote, is “anxious about naked Dasein as something that has been thrown into unsettledness. It brings one

back to the pure “that it is” of one’s ownmost individualized throwness57”. From this point, it emerges that

anxiety, the basic mode of “indeterminateness”, “uncanniness”, and “not feeling at home” manifestly shows

the nothing of its Being-in-the-world. This “showing” of nothing strips the world of its significance, its

involvement-totality, bringing back Dasein in its bare ability to be on the ground (Nothing). This “basic

mood”, disclosing the insignificance of the world, thus reveals “the nullity of that with which one concern

oneself”, and which, in turn, determines the impossibility of projecting oneself upon a potentiality for being.

The temporality of Angst is grounded in its “having been”58and its reminiscent of a de-theologized form of

Pauline apprehension, but in this case the “believer” has been divested of the redeeming power of salvation

and stands solitary towards its death and towards a world that has lost every significance. But, at this point,

that Angst defined, until now, as an “evasion” from ourselves into the nullity and insignificance of everyday

life, became for Heidegger a naked and “kairotic” moment of decision, where Dasein “have to” resolute

towards its ownmost potentiality for Being, and toward those disclosive projection and determination of what

is factically possible or impossible in its historical time. In this context, Angst, taken away from Dasein the

possibility to understand itself through the world, individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-World,

making manifest its being toward its uttermost potentiality-for-being – that is, its Being free “for the freedom

to choose of choosing itself and taking hold of itself59. Yet, keeping in mind that death is Dasein’s ownmost

possibility, we consequently assume that anxiety is “authentically” Freedom toward death, a freedom that

“has been released from the illusions of Das Man”. Some sentences, from Rilke’s letters, once more, could

clarify this point. In Briefe (1914-1921), Rilke wrote that the bourgeois world (Das Man) has forgotten the

55 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, English Translation by Ralph Manheim, (Yale University Press, 1959), p.188. 56 Ibid. p.187. 57 Ibid. p.343. 58 Ibid. p.344. 59 Ibid. p.188.

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“ultimate instances” of human life, i.e. “That it has been once and for all surpassed by death and by God60”.

Assuming “the death of God”, and that Dasein’s death is the nothingness that reveals the finitude of its

temporal existence, we may easily argue that resoluteness, disclosing current factical possibilities of

authentic existing, must be conceived as a pure Resolve in face of nothingness . This pure Resolve

implies a Kairotic decision, where the ethical after the “death of God” is suspended, and Christian

responsibility is brutally replaced by the orgiastic. In this “suspension” of the ethical, where Dionysus

murders the Crucified, the inner nihilism of resoluteness finds its political forms and its tragic aesthetics. In

this way, “aesthetic” resoluteness and “freedom toward death”, on the basis of which Dasein achieves its

capacity-for-being-whole, corresponds undoubtedly to the Nazi mystique of “la terre et le morts”, and the

heroic sacrifice of one’s life for the total state. In this sacrifice, “the Man”, does not recognize any God, but

instead itself become God, embracing the innermost and tragic “monstrosity” of its fate. This is how

Holderlin describes the ecstatic moment, when “the Man” turning away from God, turns back toward the

earth to live its “finite” existence:

“At such moment, the man forgets himself and the God, and turns around, admittedly is a holy way, like a traitor. At the extreme limit of suffering, nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time and space. At this point, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful. Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical turning away and that thus, as a consequence, he can simply no longer be as he was in the beginning61”.

This tragic moment is, Lacoue Labarthe notes, “an empty or zero moment – the moment of the very nullity

[…] The God presents himself immediately as the abyss, the chaos of his withdrawal […] and this is the

tragic cut, the advent of nothingness, the pure event”, in which the man who is to succumb its fate and “can

no longer be as he was in the beginning62”. Indeed, from the death of God, “what remains is that I will”,

which implies, in Nietzschean terms, that a new “beginning” can take place. In this “new beginning” marked

by the repudiation of Christian moral-values and the negation of “God as the eternal truth”, humankind

“could create only by destroying”, because “one should also dethrone that which is falling (Will to Power,

127)”. In his critique of Bauer’s Trumpet, Stirner attributes to the Germans the role of “annihilator par

excellence”:

“It is first of all and exclusively the German who reveals the world-historical calling of radicalism; now he alone is radical, and he alone is without wrong. None is as relentless and inconsiderate as he; for he does not just overthrow the existing world so that he himself can remain standing; he overthrows – himself. Where the German tears things apart, a God must fall and a world must perish. For the German, annihilating – creating and crushing the temporal – is his

60 Quoted in Karl Lowith, The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism, published in The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin (Columbia University Press, 1991), p.167. 61 Friedrich Holderlin, Ammergukungen, Section 1, Gesammelte Werke (Frankurt/Main, Inself Verlag, 1969), p.730. 62 Philippe Lacoue Labarthe, Heidegger, art and politics, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), p.44.

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eternity. It is the decline of Christianity and its morality that Nietzsche wants to promote, since one should also dethrone that which is falling63”.

In this “historical time”, in which “the gods have fled and of the god to come” and nothingness represents a

new desperate “Parousia”, Dasein, stripped of all security, must “stand on one’s own” and keep its existence

at its peak”, asserting with inexorable will and abiding “faith” its own fate. In a speech that Heidegger gave

as rector in memory of Albert Leo Schlagater, concepts such as existence and “naked” resoluteness, Being

and capacity-for-Being, and “standing alone” in face of death, were applied, no more on a individuated and

“universal” Dasein, but on a specific and bellicose “German” Dasein. Schlagater, who was shot for acts of

sabotage against the French occupation army in the Ruhr (on May 26, 1923), “died the hardest and greatest

death”. In his “most difficult hour, he had also to achieve the greatest thing of which man is capable. Alone,

drawing on his inner strength, he had to place before his soul an image of the future awakening of the Volk

to honor and greatness so that he could die believing in the future. With “clarity of heart and firmness of

will”, Schlagater “stood defenseless facing the rifles […] his inner gaze soared above the muzzles to the

daylight and mountains of his home that he might die for the German people and its Reich with Alemannic

countryside before his eyes64”. “Alone he had to look to himself and to die in the faith of this vision, present

in his soul, of the new future, the upsurge of his Volk toward honor and greatness”. In this speech

Schlagater’s relationship to one’s own death, “the relationship to own finality”, was one of the forces that

throws Dasein back to its authenticity, and, for Heidegger, authentic existence is founded in resoluteness,

where Dasein comes back to itself and see those opportunities to resolve upon oneself as they are given by

historicity. In accordance with this “whole structure”, Hans Jonas has written some important notes, which

deserve to be quoted in full:

“In January 1933, when the moment had arrived, history offered the opportunity for resoluteness. One should thrown oneself into this new destiny. One should finally take the leap away from the whole compromising, weak, generalized, subdued negotiations of the intellect at the German universities, and leap into the events of a new beginning. Suddenly the tremendous questionability of Heidegger’s entire approach, indeed became clear to me. If he accused idealistic philosophy of a certain idealism – forms of thinking were studied, the categories in which the world is organized, and all studied from a certain distance – he himself could be accused of something much more serious: the absolute formalism of his philosophy of decision, in which the decision in itself is the greatest virtue. Purely hypothetically, it could be said that it would have been possible to decide against it. And then it would indeed have been a very formidable decision to swim against the tide. But in Hitler and in National Socialism and in the new departure, in the will to begin a new Reich, even a thousand year Reich, he saw something he welcomed. Somehow, for a time he identified this with its own endeavors to find a beginning to return from this track, this downhill track of philosophizing that distanced itself ever further from the origins, toward something that would allow a new start. He identified the decisiveness and resoluteness as such. When I realized, appalled that this was not only Heidegger’s personal error but also somehow set up in its thinking the questionability of existentialism as such became apparent to me: namely the

63 Bruno Bauer, Die Posaune des jungsten Gerichts uber Hegel, 1841, quoted in Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p.206-207. 64 This speech is reprinted in The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin (Columbia University Press, 1991), p.40.

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nihilistic element that lies in it. That went together with what I had recognized as an essential feature of the Gnostic agitation at the beginning of the Christian age, which also contained a strongly nihilist element65”. In this passage, Jonas underlines some important points which stand behind Heidegger adhesion to Nazism:

1) the emphasis on the moment - the Kairos, which is !"#"$%&' and an authentic moment of vision; 2) the

“active nihilism” of the movement, which can be translated as “readiness for NOTHING” (self-annihilation;

sacrifice, death) and 3) the political decisionism (resoluteness) which is the “highest court of appeal” for a

new secularized essence of politics, or better a new political (de)-theology. This new secularized “essence”

of politics, which emphasizes the “moment of decision”, finds an accomplished elaboration in Carl Schmitt’s

Political Theology66. In the preface of the second edition of this volume Schmitt explains:

“Whereas the pure normativist thinks in terms of impersonal rules, and the decisionist implements the good law of the correctly recognized political situation by means of a personal, institutional legal thinking unfolds in institutions and organizations that transcend the personal sphere. And whereas the normativist in his distortion makes of law a mere mode of operation of a state bureaucracy, and the decisionist, focusing on the moment , always runs the risk of missing the stable content inherent in every great political movement, an isolated institutional thinking leads to the pluralism characteristic of a feudal-corporate growth that is devoid of sovereignty. The three spheres and elements of the political unity – state, movement and people – thus may be joined to three juristic types of thinking in their healthy as well as in their distorted forms. Not resting on natural right or the law of reason, merely attached to factually “valid” norms, the German theory of public law of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, with its called positivism and normativism, was only a deteriorated and therefore self-contradictory normativism. Blended with a specific kind of positivism, it was merely a degenerate decisionism, blind to the law, clinging to the “normative power of the factual” and not to a genuine decision. This formless mixture, unsuitable for any structure, was not match for any serious problem concerning state and constitution67”. Against this neutralization and de-politicization of normativism, Schmitt asserted that the essence of the State

resides in the “absolute decision”, which is “created out of Nothing”. The nihilistic ground of this “absolute”

decision that “is not bound by anything beyond itself” becomes completely clear in the concept of the

political. Whereas Hobbes’ “realistic pessimism” establishes that the “protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo

sum of the State”, from which the mutual relation between protection and obedience decrees potential

restriction on the state of nature, Schmitt sustains –in contrast with Hobbes - that this “state of nature” is

precisely for being a status belli:

65 Hans Jonas, Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, edited by Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, (New York, 1990), p. 202-203. 66 “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state [Staatslehre] are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the almighty God became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries. For the idea of the modern state based on the rule of law [Rechtsstaat] triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in the valid legal order [Rechtsordnung]. The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form. Conservative writers of the counterrevolution who were theists could thus attempt to support the personal sovereignty of the monarch ideologically, with analogies from a theistic theology, Carl Schmitt, Political theology, p.36-37. 67 Carl Schmitt, Political theology, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985), preface Second Edition (1934) p. 3-4.

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“To the State as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e. the real possibility of deciding in concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity […] The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies68”. The authority to decide, in the form of a verdict on life and death, the jus vitae ac necis, unveils that

readiness for the Nothing, namely death, understood as the sacrifice of one’s life for a State whose own

“presuppositions” become nothing other than “a decision in favor of decisiveness” and, above all, “freedom

toward death”. This politically conceived “freedom toward death” finds its authentic meaning only in the

“extremus necessitates casus”, in the kairotic moment of decision, i.e. “Sovereign is he who makes a decision

about the exceptional situation – the exception”. Indeed, in reading Kieerkegaard, Schmitt places exclusive

emphasis on the “Kieerkegaardian” apparent apology for “exceptions” (in Repetition):

“A protestant theologian (Kierkegaard) who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: “the exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion69”. The emphasis on the moment of decision, posing the most extreme contrast to the ”eternal conversation of

the romantics” and to parliamentary discussion, become actualized in the “Ernstfall” (state of extreme

emergency) of war, which demands “readiness to die”. Presupposing that states confront one another in a

hostile manner, this decisionism must be conceived exclusively in the “enemy-friend distinction”:

“the phenomenon of the political can be grasped only in relation to the real possibility of groupings of friend and enemy, irrespective of what kind of religious, moral, aesthetic, or economic evaluation of the politics results from these […] a war need not to be something pious, something morally good, or something remunerative; today it is probably none of these. The simple knowledge is generally obscured by the fact that religious, moral and other oppositions can become intensified into political oppositions and give rise to the decisive grouping in a war in terms of friend and enemy. But if it should come to such a grouping in a war, the authoritative opposition is no longer purely, religious, moral, or economic, but instead is political. Then the question is always simply whether or not such groupings of friend and enemy are present as a real possibility or actuality, irrespective of which human motives are sufficiently strong to bring them about70”. This specific political distinction, to which actions and motives can be reduced to the antithesis friend-enemy

(the utmost degree of intensity of potential commitment and division), and where the enemy is “something

different and alien” (the negation of a foreign Being) that endangers “Dasein’s naked existence” (my own

Being), discloses the political-existential ground of Schmitt’s decisionism. The “ontological assertion” of

68 Carl Schmitt, The concept of the political, (University Chicago Press,1996, trans. based on the edition 1932 of Begriff des Politischen), p 49-50. 69 Carl Schmitt, Political theology, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985), p. 15. 70 The concept of the political, (University Chicago Press, 1996), trans. based on the edition 1932 of Begriff des Politischen), p. 35.

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one’s own existence against “the Other”, which demands the sacrifice of one’s life in the supreme case of

war, corresponds to Heidegger’s preservation and affirmation of one’s own authentic Dasein, which is “free

for one’s own death”, and only in the anticipation of death, it discovers its uttermost “potentiality-for-Being-

a-whole” (authentic existence). But, if nothingness represents the ultimate horizon before which the meaning

of Being manifests itself, the assertion of one’s own existence into the “totality” of the authentic state

(Schmitt) represents merely a kind of “active nihilism” – a pure resolve in the face of nothingness.

This active nihilism is also characteristic of the early writings of Ernst Junger. In “The adventurous heart”

from 1929, we can read the following statements:

“One may never find out one’s reason for existing, as all so-called purposes can me mere pretenses for the sake of definition; but that one exists […] is what matters. “Thus it happens that our time demands one virtue above all others: that of decisiveness. It is a matter of being able to will and to believe, quite apart from the particular content in terms of which this willing and believing presents itself. This is the way today’s communities are; the interplay of the extremes is more vehement than ever”. “But what is going on today in all struggle over flags and symbols, over laws and dogmas, and over order and systems, is simply sham. You very aversion to these squabbles […] betrays the fact that it is not answers but rather more pointed questions, not flags but rather fighters, not order but rather uprisings, and not systems but rather human beings, of which you are in need”. “For a few years we worked in a rigidly nihilistic manner with dynamic forces and, dispensing with even the slightest traces of authentic questioning, we attacked the foundations of the nineteenth century, i.e., our own foundations; and only at the very end did the means and the men of the twentieth century become apparent. We declared war to Europe – as we were good Europeans gathered harmoniously with the others around a roulette wheel with only one color, namely the color fro zero, which always lets the house win. We Germans did not give Europe any chance to lose. But because we gave no chance of losing, in an essential sense we also offered nothing to win inasmuch as we played against the house with its own funds”. This position of the basis of which something can be accomplished. To take measure in this way from the secret standard of civilization, a standard was preserved in Paris – for us means to lose the lost war at its end, i.e. it means the consistent carrying out of a nihilistic act up to its necessary end point. For along time we have been marching toward a magical reference point which can be gotten beyond only by those who have at their disposal different, invisible sources of power. Our hope is tied to whatever is left over, left over because it cannot be measured in terms of what is European but instead provide the measure for itself71”. Deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of European Nihilism, Junger sustained that “the energies”

unleashed by the Great War could have generated an heroic countermovement to save Europe from its

spiritual decadence. In his lyrical description of trench warfare, soldiers experienced a primordial

confrontation with death, horror and primitive forces. He viewed the war as an empirical manifestation of a

metaphysical force (the Will to Power) but also an aesthetic phenomenon that symbolizes the “eternal and

primeval” mystical power of the Will in the awakening of a new heroic human Being: “the enthusiasm of

manliness burnt beyond itself to such an extent that the blood boils as it surges through the veins and glows

as it foams through the heart [….] [War] is an intoxicated beyond all intoxication, an unleashing that breaks

all bonds. It is frenzy without caution and limits, comparable only to the forces of nature. There the

individual is like a raging storm, the tossing sea, and the roaring thunder. He has melted into everything. He

rests at the dark door of death like a bullet that has reached its goal. And the purple waves dash over him. For

71 Ernst Junger, Das Abenteuerliche Herz, 1942, p.81-82.

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a long time he has no awareness of transition. It is as if a wave slipped back into the flowing sea72”. This

mystical rapture, into the obscure and still unexplored meander of the “death”, generated a “mystic sense of

communion”, but also that the “community of the trenches” was the basis of a new order under a new heroic

elite that would have eliminated the “anemic”, de-spiritualized and emptied bourgeois mentality. This

interpretation of the war as the eruption of “primitive forces” and “spiritual awakening” that purged the

German spirit from its “secularized” bourgeois trappings shaped the opinions of an entire generation (see

Moller Van der Bruck, Von Salomon, Niekish, Schmitt etc.).

In 1932, Junger, influenced by Spengler and Nietzsche, exposed (in Der Arbeiter and related works) his

notion that each particular epoch is characterized and governed by a specific “Gestalt”, “a metaphysical

stamp of the eternal Will to Power” that marks the character of an age73. Junger claimed that this era was,

specifically, that of the worker who mobilizes humanity and the earth in accordance with technological

imperatives. This “Total mobilization” was the authentic character of technological Gestalt and “the

expression of the mysterious and compelling claim to which this life in the age of masses and machine

subjugates us74”. In this context of total mobilization, in which a new elites of “Workers” emerged from the

carnage of the war to lead the masses into the “age of machine”, the concept of technology became a

“nihilistic” aesthetic phenomena:

“The ways and means by which the Gestalt of the worker mobilize the world. The degree to which man stands decisively in relation to technology and is not destroyed by it depends on the degree to which he represents the Gestalt of the worker. In this sense technology is the mastery of language that is valid in the real of work. This language is no less important nor profound than any other since it possesses not only a grammar but also a metaphysics. In this context the machine plays as much a secondary role as does man; it is only one of the organs through which this language is spoken […] the last possibilities for human achievements are not excluded from our age. This is attested by sacrifices, which must be valued all the more highly as they offered on the brink of meaninglessness. At a time when values disappear behind dynamics laws, behind the compelling force of motion, these sacrifices resembles those who fall in an attack and quickly disappear from sight, but to whom nevertheless is hidden a higher existence, the guarantee of victory. Our time is rich in unknown martyrs; it possesses a depth of suffering whose bottom has not yet been plumbed. The

72 Ernst Junger, Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, (Berlin, 1922), p. 57. 73 In a passage from Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe: “today the “worker” and the “soldier” determine the view of reality in a thoroughgoing way. These two names are not meant as names for a class of people and an occupational guild; they characterize in a unique fusion the kind of humanity which is authoritatively taken into claim by the current world-convulsion for its carrying out, and gives direction and instruction for relationship to the entity. The name “worker” and “soldier” are thus metaphysical titles and name the human form of the carrying out of the being of the entity, which has become manifest, which being Nietzsche has conceived pre-thinkingly as the Will to Power”, Gesamtausgabe, edited by Vittorio Klostermann, p. 51:18. 74 In a “paradigmatic passage”, Fritz Ringer evokes the disintegration and decomposition of the “subject” in the machine age: “We are surrounded on all sides by the destructive and the low-mindedly iconoclastic, the arbitrary and the formless, the leveling and mechanizing of this machine age, the methodical dissolution of everything that is healthy and noble, the ridiculing of everything strong and serious, the dishonoring of everything godly, which lifts men up in that they serve it. As the masses plod along the daily treadmill of their lives like slaves or automatons, soullessly, thoughtlessly, and mechanically …., all events in nature and in society appear shallowly mechanized to their techicized and routinized manner of thinking. Everything, they believe, … is a mediocre and average as the mass products of the factory; everything is the same and can be distinguished only by number. There are, they think, no differences between races, peoples, and states, no hierarchy of talent and achievement, no superiority of one over the other, and where living standards are still different in fact, they seek – envious of nobility of birth, education, and culture, to create a fully equal place.” Quoted in Pierre Bordieau, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, (Stanford University Press, 1991), p.14-15.

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virtue appropriate to this situation is that of an heroic realism unshaken even by the prospect of total annihilation and the hopelessness of its efforts75”.

In The Rectatorship 1933-34: facts and thoughts (1945), Heidegger readily admits the importance of

Junger’s influence on his “political resolve76”:

“In the year 1930, Ernst Junger’s article on “Total Mobilization” had appeared; in his this article the basic features of his book The Worker, which appeared in 1932, announced themselves. Together with my assistant Brock, I discussed these writings in a small circle and tried to show how they express a fundamental understanding of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, insofar as the history and present of the Western world are seen and foreseen in the horizon of this metaphysics. Thinking from these writings and, still more essentially, from their foundations, we thought that was coming that is to say, we attempted to counter it, as we confronted it […] Later in the winter 1939-1940, I discussed part of Junger’s book The worker one more with a circle of colleagues; I learned how even these thoughts still seemed strange and put people off, until “the facts” bore them out. What Ernst Junger thinks with the thought of the rule and shape of the worker, and sees in the light of his thought, is the universal rule of the will to power within history, now understood to embrace the planet […] was there not enough reason and essential distress to think in primordial reflection towards a surpassing of the metaphysics of the will to power and that is to say, to begin a confrontation with Western thought by returning to its beginning77?”.

In the mid-Thirties, Heidegger became increasingly convinced of the essential nihilistic tenor of Western

technocracy that represented, in his thought, the “metaphysical” erosion of authentic Being and the

devastating process of annihilation of the subject78. He saw the modern-instrumental and rationalized society

75 Ernst Junger, Der Arbeiter: Herrshaft und Gestalt (1932), in Werke, Vol. 6, Essays II, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1960), p. 165, 187-188. 76 In his political speeches (1933-1934), Heidegger significantly employs Jungerian language of the Gestalt, using words such as: work and the worker, imprinting and stamping sacrifice, hardness, courage, manliness, decision, surrender to a higher destiny. In November 1933, Heidegger gave a lecture in support of National Socialism, in which the new order of German Dasein is configured on the necessity of the Arbeiter:[The New German Student] enrolls himself consciously in the worker front. Followership wins comradenship, which educates those nameless and unofficial leaders, who do more because they bear and sacrifice more; they carry the individuals out beyond themselves and stamp on them the imprint of a wholly proper stamp of young manhood [Jungmannschaft; my empasis]. With the new reality, the essence of work and of the workers has also changed. The essence of work now determines from the ground up the Dasein of man [my emphasis]. The state is the self-forming articulation [das…sich gestaltende Gefuge], in work and as work, of the volkisch Dasein. The National Socialist state is the state of work. And because the new student knows himself joined for the carrying out of the volkisch claim to knowing, accordingly he studies; he studies, because he is the worker; and he marches into the new order of the national Dasein and its volkisch knowing such that he himself must co-form [mitgestalten] on his part this new ordering. The immatriculation is no longer the mere admission in a present-at-hand corporation; it becomes decision [Entscheidung], and every pure decision displaces itself into acting within a determinate situation and environment”. Quoted in Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, The Heidegger case, p. 437. 77 M. Heidegger, Das Rektorat 1933-1934, p. 24-25. See also “The Rectorate 1933-34”, p. 484-485. 78 In “The question concerning technology” (published in 1954), Heidegger asserted that “the essence of technology was not technological” (p.1). and technology was a mode of revealing and “comes to presence in the realm where revealing and “unconcealment” take place, where aletheia, truth happens”: What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer everything. For every bringing forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning – causality – and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belong instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology (p.12). Technology, therefore, has a relation to the way in which things are revealed, in the way truth is thought. However, Heidegger recognized that this definition did not fit modern machine powered technology, but “at best it might be applied to the techniques of the handicraftsman” (p.13). He argued that modern technology was something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it was based on modern physics as an exact science (“Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of apparatus.”, p.14) The mutual relationship between technology and physics provoked that the revealing “that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supplies energy that cab be extracted and stored as such” (p.14). Thus, according to Heidegger, modern technology makes nature an energy supply, a standing reserve , and “revealing has the

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in perspective of a catastrophic fragmentation and “de-substantialization” - a breakdown of the community

(Volk) and, subsequent genesis of false consciousness. Furthermore, Heidegger emphasized the critique of

dehumanization at the hands of machine, and above all, a vision of modernity as a motor of alienation and

instrument of abstract self-assertion through domination of nature (techne). In an important passage the

concept of technology is linked with the contemporary historical moment:

“The essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology, about which much has been written but little has been thought. Technology is in its essence a destiny within the history of Being and of the truth of Being, a truth that lies in oblivion. For technology does not go back to the techne of the Greeks in name only but derives historically and essentially from techne as a mode of aletheuein, a mode, that is, of rendering beings manifest. As a form of truth technology is grounded in the history of metaphysics, which is itself distinctive and up to now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being. No matter which of the various positions one chooses to adopt toward the doctrines of communism and to their foundation, from the point of view of the history of Being it is certain that an elemental experience of what is world-historical speaks out in it. Whoever takes “communism” only as a “party” or a “Weltanschauung” is thinking too shallowly, just as those who by the term “Americanism” mean, and mean derogatorily, nothing more than a particular lifestyle. The danger into which Europe as it has hitherto existed is ever more clearly forced consists presumably in the fact above all that is thinking – once is glory – is falling behind in the essential course of a dawning world destiny which nevertheless in the basic traits of its essential provenance remains European by definition. No metaphysics, whether idealistic, materialistic, or Christian, can accord with its essence, and surely not in its own attempts to explicate itself, “get a hold on” this destiny yet, and that means thoughtfully to reach and gather together what in the fullest sense of Being now is79”.

In Introduction to metaphysics, Heidegger underscores that the catastrophic enfeeblement of the “Western”

spirit was provoked by the rise of a “totalitarian” technological civilization, which was responsible for “the

darkening of the world, the flight of the Gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a

character of a setting upon, in the sense of a challenging forth. This “challenging forth” determined that “the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing” (p.16). The revealing never comes to an end and “neither does it run off into the indeterminate” (ibid.), because regulation, security and systematic rationalization become fundamental characteristics of the challenging revealing. In this way the subject treated the world as a standing reserve, the universe completely instrumentalized and the Man itself is transformed in objects for use. Indeed man, Heidegger argued, does not have control over “revealing” in which ‘at any given time the real show itself or withdraws’ (p.18). Modern technology as an ordering revealing is no merely human doing, but “that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing reserve”, exists only “in accordance with the way in which the [real] shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering, “this gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing reserve” (p.19). Heidegger defined this challenging “claim”, which gathers man to instrumentalize nature and himself: Gestell [Enframing]:“Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which hold sway in the essence of modern technology, and which is itself nothing technological” (p. 20).In this way, man transformed itself in object of use, challenged to set upon all things, and to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve. All whole reality becomes instrumentalized and the man loses awareness of his essence. Therefore the essence of modern technology, which lies in Enframing, endangered freedom and the “essence of human being”: “The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call for a more primal truth, (p.28). For Heidegger, the only path to defeat “Enframing” resided in a pre-technological era: “there was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearing was also called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts was called techne.” (p.35). 79 Martin Heidegger, Basic writings (Routledge, 1978), p. 220-221.

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mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative80”. In modern “technological civilization”,

therefore, individuals perceived the most extreme alienation, isolation and anxiety, and National Socialism

offered them, not only the possibility to become member of a mystical “Volkgemeinschaft”, committed with

the spiritual mission of the German people, but also (and more importantly), to experience the authentic

moment of decision in its own historical context. To elaborate, I am stating that Heidegger perceived the

Hitlerian movement as an affirmation of “authentic existence”, which gave back to alienated subjects that

“Kairotic eventfulness”, where “history is all the present in the act of its construction”. This notion of

historic eventfulness (that I derived from Giovanni Gentile’s actualism), in which the philosophical dogma of

absolute immanence merges with the Latin Catholic notion of representation as imago, describes exactly that

“kairotic” time of self-determination, in which Dasein, lives intensely the pathos of resoluteness and self-

projects itself on the historical moment. In National Socialism, the subject recovers that “pathos”, which

resides in the possibility to generate its own fate, and to perceive the uniqueness and intensity of an historical

moment in its tragic actualization. In this actualization, "history belongs to the present" of consciousness and

is therefore "entirely immanent in the act of its construction”. This means that every act in the present

become immediately historiographical, and actualization invokes a temporality that correspond exactly to the

Pauline “Having become” (in which Dasein’s futural orientation is combined with a sense of the past as

80 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 38. In this work Heidegger investigating the meaning of Being and the history of man’s understanding of Being, carried out a ferocious critique against the whole Western thought. He argued that the disorientation of modern thought and existence was rooted in “forgetfulness of being”, and in the inexorable decline of spirituality: “This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo can be experiences simultaneously; when time has ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the lives of people; when a boxer is regarded as a nation’s great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as triumph – then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter: what for? - Whiter? And what then? (p.38). This spiritual decline , Heidegger asserted, was so advanced that the nations were in danger of losing “the last bit of spiritual energy that made it possible to see the decline, and to appraise it as such.” (p.38). This metaphysical crisis meant “emasculation of the spirit, the disintegration, wasting away, repression and misinterpretation of the spirit. The process of decadence may be described briefly in four aspects: 1) reinterpretation of the spirit “as intelligence, or mere cleverness in examining and calculating given things and the possibility of changing them and completing them to make new things; 2) the spirit falsified into intelligence falls to the level of a tool in the service of others (as in Marxism or Positivism); 3) the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion are, in according to standard of production and consumption, reduced to cultural values; 4) the spirit as utilitarian intelligence become a mere “holiday ornaments. (p.45-49). Therefore this “progressive dissolution of the spirit and the invulnerable rise of modern “technology” symbolized the failure of National Socialism’s promise to rescue the authentic being from its spiritual decadence. In a controversial and enigmatic passage, Heidegger wrote: What today is systematically touted as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has nothing in the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter of a globally determined technology with the man of the new age), darts about with fish like movements in the murky waters of these “values” and “totalities” (p.151). Hence, Heidegger has lately and unconvincingly explained that the Nazi movement was a symptom for the tragic collision of man and technology and as such symptom it had its greatness because it affected the entirety of the west and threatened to pull it into destruction. Therefore, Nationalism Socialism sought a monstrous greatness on the basis of a total control of humanity and nature through conquest and technology. In a few words National Socialism had been perverted by technology and its irrational appeal to the Volkgemeinschaft, and the hoped “resurrection” an authentic Being turned in a political force that fostered further rationalization.

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operative in the present) and “knowledge of their having become”, which arises in their factical experience.

Heidegger’s appeal to support the upcoming plebiscite concepts of “historical eventfulness” and

“actualization” are displayed in all their magnitude and intenseness:

“German Men and Women! The German people have been summoned by the Fuhrer to vote; the Fuhrer is asking nothing from the people. Rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it – the entire people – wants its own existence [Dasein] or whether it does not want it. The election simply cannot be compared to all other previous elections. What is unique about this election is the simple greatness of the decision that is to be executed. The inexorability of what is simple and ultimate [des Einfachen und Letzten], however, tolerates no vacillation and no hesitation. This ultimate decision reaches to the outermost limit of our people’s existence. And what is this limit? It consists in the most basic demand of all Being, that it preserves and save its own essence. A barrier is thereby erected between what can be reasonably expected of a people and what cannot. It is by virtue of this basic law of honor that a people preserve the dignity and resoluteness of its essence. It is not ambition, not desire for glory, not blind obstinacy, and not hunger for power that demands from the Fuhrer that Germany withdraw from the League of Nations. It is only the clear will to unconditional self-responsibility in enduring and mastering the fate of our people. That is not a turning away from the community of nations. On the contrary, with this step, our people is submitting to that essential law of human existence to which every people must first give allegiance if it is still to be a people. It is only out of the parallel observance by all peoples of this unconditional demand of self-responsibility that there emerges the possibility of taking one another seriously so that a community can be affirmed. The will to a true community of nations is equally far removed both from an unrestrained, vague desire fro world brotherhood and from blind tyranny. Existing beyond this opposition, this will allows peoples and states to stand by one another in an open and manly fashion as self-reliant entities. The choice that the German Volk will now make is – simply an event in itself, and independent of the outcome – the strongest evidence of the new German reality embodied in the National Socialist State. Our will to national [volkisch] self-responsibility desires that each people find and preserve the greatness and truth of its destiny. This will is the highest guarantee of security among peoples; for it binds itself to the basic law of manly respect and unconditional honor. On November 12th, the German Volk as a whole will choose its future. This future is bound to the Fuhrer. In choosing this future, the people cannot, on the basis of so-called foreign policy considerations, vote “yes” without also including in the “yes” the Fuhrer and the political movement that has pledged itself unconditionally to him. There are not separate foreign and domestic policies. There is only the one will to the full existence [Dasein] of the State. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single Resolve. No one can remain away from the polls on the day when this will is manifested. (Freiburger Studentenzeitung, November 10, 1933)81.

For Heidegger, “historical eventfulness”, which reveals “authentic existence” as “happening”, and as a

“clearing” directed toward the spiritual re-awakening of the German people, alienated by technological

mechanization and humiliated by political indecisiveness, embodies the “inner truth and greatness” of

National Socialism. The calling for an heroic existence in opposition to the secularized and deteriorated

condition of ordinary life, corresponds to “an essential will to power”; a “Wesenswillen zur Macht”, which

symbolizes the more “authentic” will of the Volk, and in which the Volk decides for its own “historical

actualization” and its own fate into the obscure wander of an “epochal” destitute time. In this context, the

Volk must live the manifesting energeia and -./"µ+, of the historical moment (Kairos) that disclose the

uttermost possibilities to forge its own fate “by placing its history into the openness of the overpowering

might of all world shaping forces of human existence and by struggling ever anew to secure its spiritual

81 This speech is reprinted in The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin (Columbia University Press, 1991), p.49.

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world82”. In the “manifesting energeia and -./"µ+, of the historical moment” and in the awareness of the

“nihilistic” ruination and decline of Western Civilization a new “beginning” can take place in its destructive

power. In this new !"#"$%&', where “nothing is true any more, but instead everything is permitted” and

“what remains is that I will”, Dasein perceives the “ultimate greatness” of its destiny in face of Nothing and

“lives history in the act of its construction”. In this “historical eventfulness” and “Kairotic moment of

decision”, where Dasein lives the drama of its historical existence, stripped of all security and standing to

nothing other than itself, (the revelation of its authentic existence), Heidegger’s political adhesion to National

Socialism finds its more profound philosophical implication. Ontological categories of Dasein such as

“naked facticity”, existence, Resolve and Potentiality for Being, the introduction of this “capacity-to-be-a-

whole” in the concept of fate and destiny, absorbed and “actualized” the Zeitgeist (the ”spirit of the age”).

This Zeitgeist, centered on the phenomenon of nihilism”, produced the awareness of an epochal crisis, a

turning point between epochs, which obliged to confront questions whose nature was too radical, and whose

“ full significance” could not have been explained through “enfeebled” belief of progress and culture, which

characterized the nineteenth century. Heidegger was completely aware that this age would have required a

radical negation of the past - a pure Resolve in the face of Nothingness – marked by the complete

annihilation of the Christian concept of “sophrosyne” and by the implementation of a new existential and

radical political “decisionism”. This “naked resoluteness”, imbued with the “devastating” energeia and

-./"µ+, of the historical moment of crisis, “unconcealed” and radicalized the finitude of Dasein (its inner

nihilism), and demanded from politics an emotional “historical eventfulness” to compensate the vanishing of

the “Divine pathos” and the, subsequent departure of God from human history. For this reason, Dasein

(Heidegger), turned its devotion toward a new “secularized faith” – which paradoxically incarnated the last

and supreme act of nihilism - in order to achieve its salvation from the senseless, monotonous and empty

essence of modern/mechanic life. In accordance with this interpretation, therefore, we assume that

Heidegger’s political Resolve was not born as a “regrettable miscue”, but it resided in his very conception of

existence, which absorbed the pathos and suffering of its time and from this sufferance understood the

authentic sense of its tragedy.

82 M. Heidegger, The Self Assertion of the German University (1933), in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, (Columbia University, 1981), p. 35.

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Tillich, Paul, The interpretation of history, part one translated by N. A. Rasetzki; parts two, three and four translated by Elsa L. Talmey, (New York, C. Scribner's sons; London, C. Scribner's sons, ltd., 1936). Wolin, Richard The Heidegger Controversy, (Columbia University Press, 1991).