From Practice to Politics

Heidegger insists on the importance of mood. We can summarize Heidegger's own mood in the waning period of the Weimar Republic, as revealed in this text, as follows: Obviously, human being is in trouble and the ordinary solutions seem not to have taken hold. Yet the problematic nature of contemporary life is finally due to the turn of human being away from its ownmost possibilities of being, which can only be understood in terms of the problem of Being. For this reason, Dasein must be forced to listen to that which it has refused to hear, to be forced to take up a burden in order to be free. For only in this way can Dasein reach its so-called inner greatness.

The problem of Dasein's inner greatness as an authentic possibility in its moment of need is a precipitating factor in Heidegger's Nazi turning. Everything points to a convergence at this point in Heidegger's development of his concern with the problem of Being as supposedly manifest in the contemporary German social context, the various influences arising through the decline of the Weimar Republic and the strengthened appeal of Volk ideology, the reflection of these themes in Heidegger's own philosophical theory, which necessarily provokes a turn to practice, and the practical instantiation of similar themes in National Socialist politics. There is an obvious, profound link between Heidegger's interest in authenticity, the romantic Volk idea of the realization of the individual in the state as the true reconciliation of the spirit of the people, and the Nazi idea of the identity or essential unity of the German state and the so-called Aryan race. The idea of the Volk , which is not precisely translated as "people," is difficult to define but is important to an understanding of German ideology and Heidegger's attraction to Nazism. One of its main characteristics, which connects it to the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment as an alternative solution to the problems of alienation and reconciliation, is the union, or making whole, of the individual or group with its transcendent spirit, or essence.^[114]

This view of the overcoming of alienation through effective historical realization of the spirit of the Volk provides a clue to Heidegger's turn to

Nazism. It is not necessary to claim that Heidegger subscribed to a biological theory of race to perceive that for reasons internal to his philosophy, his analysis of the contemporary situation was conducive to acceptance of the conservative Volk perspective and the much more extreme National Socialist program. It is, then, no accident that in the rectoral speech Heidegger strongly stresses the concept of spirit. For the concept of the spirit of the people, or Volksgeist , of the essence of the German people, provides the link between Heidegger's view of Dasein in the light of his comprehension of Being, the conservative völkisch response to the situation of human being in modern society, and the Nazi program.