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.

The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s metaphilosophical investigations. They result in two different versions of a postmetaphysical philosophy of finitude. For Nietzsche, metaphysics puts forward ideas of the absolute and of absolute value, such as goodness or freedom per se. The qualities and qualifications that specify human beings, however, are provisional and relational, in short: finite. They are, in fact, instances of one unique force that feeds them all, viz the will to power. Even our thoughts and values seem to supervene on actual power relations. Metaphysics completely misses this point, Nietzsche argues; hence, we should abandon it. Heidegger, too, wants to dismiss metaphysics because it fails to accommodate human finitude. For him, metaphysics initially dealt with the question of the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) but, unfortunately, has forgotten about Being altogether. Focusing on the understanding of beings as beings instead, metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, has been occupied with fleeing from Being. Yet,for us humans, our very Being (as well as the meaning of Being in general) is always an issue about which we most deeply care, even though it entails nothing but time, transience, and, ultimately, death.