Heidegger’s Metapolitics

National Socialism is a barbaric principle. That is its essence and its potential greatness. The danger is not National Socialism itself, but that it becomes disarmed in a preaching of the true, the good, and the beautiful (just as at a training seminar). And that those who want to form its philosophy do nothing more than repeat the accepted “logic” of commonplace thinking and exact science instead of realizing that precisely now “logic” comes anew into distress and needs and must arise anew.¹

HEIDEGGER

Martin Heidegger is a philosopher of the city. He is not devoted to an otherworldly city. He creates no city in speech, no city of God. Heidegger devotes his thought to the city as the site (Stätte) of a history that forecloses and grants certain fundamental creative possibilities. One of those possibilities came to the fore in 1933, and Heidegger chose to seize the moment, to pursue with the utmost energy a thorough and radical program of renewal. Heidegger’s choice was not an aberration, not the blundering of a naive scholar into the rough-and-tumble precincts of political life. To the contrary, this choice made good on a promise that he had not kept hitherto, the revolutionary promise of his own thought as it had developed in the 1920s. For what can one say of a thinking that claims to pose a question—indeed, the question—having lain dormant for more than two millennia while making no corresponding intervention in the life of the city? What kind of attitude to thought might this be, if not one of sardonic derision and dismissal? As we know from his own insistent pronouncements, Heidegger did not see philosophy as so trivial, but rather as sovereign, ruling (Basic Questions of Philosophy). To be sure, he did reject the direct connection of philosophy with action, but he never tired of proclaiming a far more important indirect connection, a grounding one, whereby philosophy opens up the very horizon that proscribes at any given time the possibilities for action or any series of actions: in short, a history or metapolitics in Heidegger’s own words (Überlegungen II–IV, GA 94, 115).

We might then ask why it was that Heidegger chose to intervene in the life of the city under the banner of National Socialism. If Heidegger was not naive nor a mere opportunist, it follows that he must have found some kinship to his own thought in National Socialism. This seemingly simple conclusion has created exceptional controversy for eighty years now. Why, after all, would a thinker of Heidegger’s stature side with National Socialism? The question is a cloying one because it implies that no thinker of stature could have endorsed a movement so fixated on the primitive assertion of inequality, violence, and nationalism. To think against the consensus, stemming from the Enlightenment, about equality, peace, and universality, might seem to be mere folly, an affront to the cherished end of history, that promised land of peace and prosperity whose achievement hangs over us as an unshakable imperative.

But it is precisely Heidegger who challenges this consensus as well as its accompanying imperative. He allies himself with the only stream in modern political thought that affirms this challenge: fascism. Heidegger does in fact much more than that. For Heidegger not only allies himself with fascism, he creates his own brand of fascist political thought. We are not speaking here of the ever exculpatory claims of Heidegger’s “private” National Socialism, or private this or that. We have no interest in the private Heidegger. In this respect, we follow Heidegger’s famous advice to ignore the private life of a thinker. And it is easy to do so, since Heidegger’s thought is and was eminently public, published in books and journals, proclaimed in speeches and in the classrooms of one of Germany’s more notable universities.

To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, we do not seek to show that Heidegger is a National Socialist or that he introduces Nazism into philosophy as Emanuel Faye and his supporters are wont to claim. We find that Faye’s...