60

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

into the mindset of many intellectuals and writers following the perceived catastrophe of the Weimar Republic. Again, we find in Heidegger traces of such themes,
but Heidegger revisits these notions from the context of his confrontation with the
history of philosophy. Heidegger flirts then with this aspect of the conservative revolutionary literature but very much against the backdrop of a long-standing philosophical
concern with the nature of and/or inherent weaknesses of democracy.38 It is in this
context that Heidegger elects to interpret Heraclituss fragments:
They are incapable of bringing their Dasein to stand in the Being of beings. Only
those who are capable of this, rule over the word the poets and the thinkers. The
others just reel about within the orbit of their caprice and lack of understanding.
They accept as valid only what comes directly into their path, what flatters them
and is familiar to them. (IM: 141)

But Heideggers concerns here reflect his growing concerns with the difficulty of linking
his philosophical vision with politics. The way beings (including ourselves) are revealed
to and through us is something which should be reflected in our approach to politics,
for Heidegger at any rate. How this is to be achieved is not something that he ever
really manages to come to terms with, despite his enthusiasm in this regard in the early
1930s.39 Heidegger is concerned with the capacity of certain pioneering individuals
whose struggle allows us to see the interplay of presence and absence and how being
comes to presence and is revealed through our finitude/our temporal limits (as opposed
to the tendency to simply allow being to be revealed to us as continuous presence) with
a certain epochal character; in our epoch, through the ordinances of Gestell. Again,
there is a danger here of stooping to apologetics; we have to be able to concede that
there were jingoistic elements within Heideggers rhetoric which were unfortunate and
opportunistically designed to give the wrong impression to the right people. That is,
Heidegger was looking for ways to make his philosophy superficially consonant with
elements of the conservative revolutionary rhetoric which had been absorbed into the
fabric of National Socialism. One doesnt want to exonerate Heidegger for this in any
way; having said that, condemning his entire philosophical output from this period
as contaminated to the core is excessive and overlooks the important continuities
which knit together Heideggers overall project from Being and Time, through this
period and beyond.40 One must also bear in mind, and this is something that we shall
examine in some detail in subsequent chapters, that Heidegger will look to articulate
his own political philosophy which he tries to relate to National Socialism but which
is rather different in many respects to anything envisaged by his contemporaries. Our
findings will come as cold comfort to those who were hoping to discover something
altogether reassuring in the failure of Heideggers attempts to combine his philosophy
and his political vision; the fact that his philosophy doesnt reduce straightforwardly to
Nazism or to the less salubrious intellectual elements of his day doesnt mean that what
he endorses is something to be embraced. Heideggers political vision, understood as
the practical enactment of some version of his philosophy is grotesque and pernicious.
Heidegger discusses a number of Heraclitean fragments in Introduction to
Metaphysics. For example, he spends some time discussing fragment 53. A conventional rendering of this fragment reads as follows: War is the father of all and king of