Chapter 7 - Heidegger’s Politics

Summary

By analysing material from and slightly after Heidegger’s brief time as rector of Freiburg University, I show that he conceives of the state and the educational system as means to sustaining a communal commitment to a philosophically inflected nationalism. Although it relies on a distinctly Heideggerian conception of the state, Heidegger’s nationalism is by most measures rather trivial. He does, however, try to philosophically justify his nationalism and antisemitism by recourse to what has become known as the history of being. I show that this period of Heidegger’s thought is marred by several assumptions and inferences that contradict his earlier and much more convincing social ontology. I thus find myself in a position to criticise Heidegger’s politics from within. More specifically, I criticise Heidegger for inconsistently attributing an exceptional type of world-disclosure to the Führer; for confusing ontic and ontological senses of community and the shared world; and, finally, for giving methodological priority to a radical form historicism over and above transcendentalism.