HEIDEGGER’S NAZISM AND THE HYPOSTATIZATION OF BEING
Abstract
Following the publication of Being and Time (1927/1962), Heidegger’s conception of Being underwent a process of progressive deterioration and reification, seen first in his attempt to materialize it in the political sphere by merging it with the Nazi movement, and then, as he distanced himself from the Nazis and increasingly withdrew into isolation, in his hypostatizing Being into something of the nature of a divine force or energy. The present study is an investigation of the salient themes that pervaded Heidegger’s personal psychological world and of how these themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and his version of Nazism. It will be shown that both Heidegger’s life and work were dominated by the quest for individualized selfhood and the accompanying struggle against annihilating aloneness.
HEIDEGGER’S NAZISM AND THE HYPOSTATIZATION OF BEING
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
George E. Atwood, Ph.D.
Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D.
It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness’…. Why does this reifying always keep coming back to exercise its dominion?
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live.
--Martin Heidegger, letter to Karl Lowith, 8/19/21
We regard Heidegger’s (1927/1962) Being and Time as one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, particularly in its devastating challenge to the Cartesian doctrine of the isolated mind. Indeed, in a number of publications (Stolorow, 2006, 2007a; Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002), we have sought to illuminate the relevance and value of Heidegger’s analysis of existence for a post-Cartesian, contextualist perspective in psychoanalysis. Following the publication of Being and Time, however, Heidegger’s conception of Being underwent a process of progressive deterioration and reification, seen first in his attempt to materialize it in the political sphere by merging it with the Nazi movement, and then, as he distanced himself from the Nazis and increasingly withdrew into isolation, in his hypostatizing Being into something of the nature of a divine force or energy. The present article, in which we explicate and attempt to account for this process of deterioration and reification, may be seen as part of a larger project of contextualizing post-Cartesian philosophical thought itself, of which we consider our own psychoanalytic viewpoint to be representative.
In the concluding chapter of a book written by two of us (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993) examining the personal, subjective origins of the metapsychological reifications central to four psychoanalytic theories, we wrote:
Through such reifications, each theorist’s solutions to his
own dilemmas and nuclear crises became frozen in a
static intellectual system that, to him, was an indisputable
vision of objective reality. HIs personal difficulties were
justified, and his solutions to them strongly fortified against
potential challenges, in that both were believed to reflect
impersonal entities and events that universally determine
the human condition. (p. 175)
One of us (Atwood, 1983, 1989) has conducted studies suggesting that such generalizations may hold with equal force for philosophical systems as well.
Some Relevant Themes in Being and Time
In recent debate about a possible connection between Being and Time and Heidegger’s Nazism, typically it is asked whether there are aspects of his philosophy in Being and Time that led to his embrace of Nazism (e.g., Critchley, 2002; Habermas, 1988/1992; Harries, 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Wolin, 1991). In contrast, ours is an investigation of the salient themes that dominated Heidegger’s personal psychological world and of how these themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and his version of Nazism. In this section we highlight two thematic features of Being and Time that point suggestively to central organizing themes of Heidegger’s psychological world. The first such thematic aspect is found in his discussions of authentic and inauthentic existence; the second, in his accounts of authentic relationality or “Being-with.”
The Authentic-Inauthentic Polarity
The central polarity in Heidegger’s analytic is that between authentic or owned existence and inauthentic or unowned existence. Let us briefly locate this polarity in the overall philosophical trajectory of Being and Time and its guiding aim of elucidating the meaning of Being—that is, of the Being of beings. By “the Being of beings” Heidegger means their intelligibility as or understandability as the kind of beings they are. For example, our Being is our intelligibility as distinctively human beings.
Heidegger denotes the human being by the term Dasein, the literal meaning of which is “to-be-there” or “there-being.” Heidegger’s use of this term directs us to the fundamental situatedness or contextuality of our kind of Being. This situatedness is fleshed out in his account of Dasein’s basic constitution as Being-in-the-world, a term whose hyphens indicate an indissoluble contextual whole.
In addition to its irreducible contextuality, what is also distinctive about Dasein is that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 32). Accordingly, claims Heidegger, Dasein always has an understanding of its own Being, of its own intelligibility as a human. In other words, an understanding of our own Being is constitutive of our kind of Being. Heidegger designates this uniquely human, self-interpreting kind of Being by the term existence. Being and Time approaches the question of the meaning of Being by way of an analysis of the fundamental structures of existence (called existentiales), of the human kind of Being. Because the human kind of Being is self-interpreting, the investigation can proceed phenomenologically (Stolorow, 2006), by bringing to light the basic structures grounding our understanding of our own existence.
Heidegger delineates two basic modes of existence—the authentic and the inauthentic—and this central polarity provides the organizing structure of the book. The first half (Division I) is devoted primarily to an elucidation of the inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world, which, according to Heidegger, dominates our “average everyday” understanding of our existence. The second half (Division II) is devoted to authentic existence and its relationship to our temporal constitution and historicality.
Our average everyday understanding of our Being-in-the-world, claims Heidegger, is characterized by what he calls falling—the adoption of the public interpretedness of the “they” (das Man). The “they” is Heidegger’s term for the impersonal normative system that governs what “one” understands and what “one” does in one’s everyday activity as a member of a society and occupant of social roles. The “they” is a normative authority external to one’s own selfhood. Falling into identification with the public interpretedness of the “they” is thus an inauthentic or unowned mode of understanding existence, whereby Dasein, for the most part, is not itself.
Authentic existing for Heidegger has two dimensions—resoluteness and anticipation. In resoluteness, one appropriates, seizes upon, or takes hold of possibilities into which one has been “thrown” or delivered over, including those prescribed by one’s social situatedness, and makes these chosen possibilities one’s own. Anticipation is Heidegger’s term for authentic “Being-toward-death”—the understanding of death as a constantly impending possibility that is constitutive of our existence, of our futurity and finitude. Authentic anticipation of death as our “ownmost” possibility, which is also utterly “non-relational,” individualizes us, tearing us out of our identification with the “they.” Such authenticity or owned existence is disclosed in a mood of anxiety and uncanniness (homelessness).
The prominence of the authentic-inauthentic polarity in Being and Time is in itself highly suggestive of its corresponding prominence in Heidegger’s own psychological world. This suggestion gains further support from the shifting primordiality of the two terms of this polarity in the unfolding of the text.
In Division I, Heidegger portrays the “they-self” as fundamental and essential (i.e., primordial), with authentic selfhood being only a derivative or modification of inauthentic selfhood:
Authentic Being-one’s-Self [is but a] modification of the
“they”—of the “they” as an essential existentiale. (p. 168)
[A]uthentic existence … is only a modified way in which
[falling] everydayness is seized upon…. Falling [into the
“they”] reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein
itself…. [I]t constitutes all Dasein’s days in their
everydayness. (p. 224)
In contrast, in Division II it is authenticity that tends to be primordial, with inauthenticity being derivative:
[I]nauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity.
(p. 303)
[T]he they-self [is a] modification of the authentic self.
(p. 365)
In still other contexts, Heidegger seems to portray authenticity and inauthenticity as “equiprimordial,” conceiving of both, for example, as basic existential possibilities rooted in Dasein’s temporality (p. 401).
Ciaffa (1987) has suggested that the “problem child” (p. 50) responsible for such apparent inconsistencies is Heidegger’s ambiguous concept of falling. We suggest, in particular, that Heidegger’s concept conflates two distinctively different meanings. As an existentiale (i.e., as a necessary and universal structure of existence), falling into inauthenticity pertains to our inescapable embeddedness in a context of social customs, practices, and normativity with which we identify. It is in this sense that we are always already falling. In contrast, Heidegger also uses the term falling to denote a motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into the inauthentic illusions of the “they,” in order to evade the anxiety and uncanniness inherent in authentic Being-toward-death. As one of us (Stolorow, 2007a) has noted, Heidegger’s discussions of such retreats from existential anxiety closely resemble clinical descriptions of the covering over of traumatized states.
This conflation of meanings—falling as an a priori universal and falling as motivated flight1—is quite unusual for Heidegger, whose use of language in Being and Time is for the most part extraordinarily precise and rigorous. This suggests that the authenticity-inauthenticity polarity was a notably problematic one in his own psychological world—i.e., that the struggle for individualized selfhood was an emotionally significant issue for him. A similar inference may be drawn from the enigmatic character, noted by Critchley (2002), of certain expressions that Heidegger uses to describe our kind of Being: Dasein is thrown projection; Dasein is factical existing. These enigmatic expressions suggest that we both have been thrown or delivered over into a factical situatedness over which we have no control and are the masters of our existence as we project ourselves futurally upon possibilities and seize them as our own. Dasein, for Heidegger, is at one and the same time radically determined and radically agentic, once again suggesting that the search for individualized, agentic selfhood was an enormous issue for him. Can it be that the enigma at the heart of Dasein—the enigma of thrown projection, of determined agency, of unowned existence owned—is a mirror of the enigmaticity of Heidegger himself, the philosopher who contributed so much to liberating our view of humanity from the prevailing rule of dehumanizing objectification but who also gave himself over to a mass political movement unmatched in history for its de-individualizing and annihilating objectifications?
Authentic Relationality
A number of commentators (Critchley, 2002; Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Vogel, 1994) have perceived that Heidegger’s conception of authentic relationality seems quite impoverished, being largely restricted to two aspects of what he calls Being-with, which he regards as an existentiale. The first involves what he terms solicitude, which he discusses rather cursorily. In authentic solicitude, we welcome and encourage the other’s individualized selfhood, liberating him or her for his or her “ownmost” authentic possibilities, rather than taking over for the other for our own purposes.
Heidegger proposes another aspect of authentic relationality in the context of his explication of authentic “historizing,” in which Dasein understands itself as “stretched along” between birth and death (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 427)—that is, in terms of its finitude or what he calls its fate:
But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially
in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is
determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the
historizing of the community, of a people [Volk]…. Our fates
have already been guided in advance, in our Being with
one another in the same world and in our [shared] resoluteness
for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and struggling
does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful
destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full
authentic historizing of Dasein. (p. 436)
In this brief but chilling description of the second aspect of authentic Being-with, authenticity as individualized selfhood, suddenly and without Heidegger’s usual rigor, becomes transformed into the unity of a people in a common, resolute struggle to achieve its collective destiny. Equally chillingly, three paragraphs later authenticity becomes “the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps” (p. 437) of a chosen hero. What we wish to emphasize here is that, at first glance,2 neither of the two aspects of authentic relationality that Heidegger postulates seems to include the authentic treasuring of a particular other, as would be disclosed in the mood of love. Indeed, none of us can recall ever encountering the word love in the text of Being and Time. In this work, Heidegger seems to claim that individualized selfhood is to be found in the non-relationality of death, not in the love of another. Such a limited conception of authentic Being-with is highly suggestive of an impoverishment in his personal relational experiences.3
Developmental Themes
We have found little that has been written about Heidegger’s early childhood and formative developmental experiences. Despite this handicap, we have been able to infer that individualized selfhood was an emotionally powerful and problematic issue for him, as shown with particular clarity in his conflictual struggles to separate himself from, and maintain continuity with, the Catholic Church and his family’s Catholic heritage.
Heidegger’s father was a sexton at St. Martin’s Catholic church in the small provincial town of Messkirch, where the family lived “under the Church’s care” (Safranski, 1998, p. 7). Indeed, Heidegger’s boyhood life was pervaded by the customs and practices of the Catholic Church. Safranski, his biographer, writes:
The “sexton’s lads,” Martin and his younger brother, Fritz,
had to help with the church services. They were servers,
they picked flowers to decorate the church, they ran errands
for the priest, and they rang the bells. (p. 7).
Their parents were believers, but without fanaticism …
according to Fritz. Catholic life had so much become part of
their flesh and blood that they had no need to defend their
faith or assert it against others. They were all the more aghast
when their son Martin turned away from the “right road,” the
one that was simply the most natural to them. (p. 9)
Heidegger’s lower-middle-class parents did not have the means to support their children’s higher education, and he was able to attend seminary only with the help of financial aid from the Church. His increasingly ambivalent attachment to the Church was thus complicated by his financial dependence on it, which continued over a thirteen-year period. In consequence of his exposure to philosophy, his thinking began to stray from the Catholic world of ideas. This straying, along with the barrier to individualization posed by the required conformity to Catholic doctrine, are vividly highlighted in a passage, drenched in sarcasm, from a letter he wrote to Englebert Krebs in 1914:
The motu proprio on philosophy [most likely referring to a
papal edict requiring Catholic priests and teachers to sign
a loyalty oath renouncing Modernist ideas] was all we needed.
Perhaps you, as an “academic,” could propose a better
procedure, whereby anyone who feels like having an
independent thought would have his brain taken out and
replaced with an Italian salad. (quoted in Ott, 1993, p. 81)
After citing this letter, Ott comments:
We can readily imagine the inner dilemma in which the young
Heidegger must have found himself: the child of humble
parents, dependent once again on the Catholic Church for
financial support, … well aware that he was expected to toe
the line. (p. 82)
Safranski (1998) further elaborates:
Heidegger remained dependent on the Catholic world beyond
the time when, in his mind, he had already begun to break clear
of the Church. He had to adapt, and that made him ashamed….
(p. 10)
Heidegger’s growing conflict about his attachment to the Catholic Church was, in the end (but only temporarily), resolved psychosomatically. Only two weeks after entering the Society of Jesus as a novice, he was dismissed for medical reasons because he had complained of “heart trouble.” When these pains recurred two years later, he discontinued his training as a priest. It seems evident to us that his emotional conflict about differentiating himself from the Church, and thus from his family of origin, was so wrenchingly intense that his growing unhappiness with Catholicism could only be experienced somatically as a physical heartache, and that he could only seize ownership of his spiritual existence by means of a psychosomatic symptom.
Heidegger and Arendt
An important part of the context of Heidegger’s completing his 1927 masterwork Being and Time was a passionate love affair with his student, Hannah Arendt. We agree with Safranski (1998, p. 140)) that Arendt served as a sustaining emotional support and muse for Heidegger during the period of his greatest creativity. We also believe that her eventual disengagement from their intimacy and emotional withdrawal from him contributed greatly to a psychological disaster for him with lifelong consequences.
Arendt, then 18 years old, met Heidegger in 1924, attending his philosophy seminar at Marburg University. Their affair commenced shortly after Heidegger had invited her to visit him during his office hours. He was 17 years her senior, and married with two sons. His encounter with her, which he later described as “the passion of his life” (Safranski, 1998, p. 136), was from its inception experienced as magically transforming his previously solitary intellectual explorations. He wrote to Arendt of how he was taking her very being into his work, how her presence was dramatically breaking into his life and immeasurably enriching and expanding it, and how their fates had become inextricably intertwined.
…from now on you shall be part of my life and it shall grow
with you. (Letters,4 p. 3)
You will live in my work. (p. 16)
I am coming to my work with a great deal of energy. You have a
part in that. (p. 31)
You and your love are a part of work and existence for me. (p. 37)
Heidegger’s various reactions to Arendt, in addition to showing her function for him in expanding his own sense of self, also reflect his view of himself as serving her need to realize her authenticity, to develop fully and express her “innermost womanly essence” (p. 4). Looking back later on his initial meeting with her during his office hours, he wrote:
…I daydream about the young girl who, in a raincoat, her hat
low over her quiet, large eyes, entered my office for the first
time, and softly and shyly gave a brief answer to each question ….
(p. 9)
This shy young girl he increasingly came to see as someone standing on the threshold of developing and expressing her own true nature, ready to transform the “longing, blossoming, and laughter of girlhood” into a source of “beauty [and] of unending womanly giving” (p. 5). He explicitly and repeatedly formulated his own place in this work of helping Arendt in the emergence of what he saw as the most essential part of her nature as a woman:
my loyalty to you shall only help you remain true to yourself …
[you are finding] your way to your innermost, purest feminine
essence. (p. 3)
I can take care that nothing in you shatters [and] that what is
foreign to you …yields. (p. 5)
Thus we can see in the letters vivid signs of the interweaving of the two themes that pervaded his experience of his relationship to Arendt. One was his reliance on her to mirror his expanding sense of selfhood, and the other was his view of her as replicating his own journey toward authenticity and of himself as assisting her in this journey of actualizing her own essential nature as a woman.
The love affair followed a set of rules dictated by Heidegger. There was strict secrecy maintained. His wife was not to learn of their closeness, nor was anyone in the academic community. They used cryptic notes, coded light signals, secret rendezvous points. Approximately one year into their relationship, with all its difficult arrangements, Arendt sent Heidegger a passage from one of her diaries, a statement of only a few pages that she entitled “Shadows.” In this little essay she disclosed features of her experience that had not been a part of her communications with him before: a sense of an inward detachment, an aloofness removing her from direct contact with her surroundings and with other people. She spoke of how in her life she had been thrown back upon herself, and how she was unable to gain access to her wholeness, having an insurmountable “double nature” (p. 13). She also described an abiding sense of being hunted, of pain and despair, of madness, joylessness, and annihilation. Although these experiences may have been magnified in part by the stress of maintaining a secret affair with her beloved teacher, we believe they also reflect longstanding themes of Arendt’s emotional life arising originally from the tragic conditions of her early youth.5 In sending her diary entry to Heidegger, we believe, Arendt was trying to open up to him a darker side of her nature and her life, a side involving deeply troubled feelings that were the legacy of her early childhood struggles. What was Heidegger’s response to this important communication, one that reflected more of the whole person Arendt actually was? Upon reading her dark musings about herself, he answered:
There are shadows only where there is sun [!]. And that is
the foundation of your soul. You have come straight from
the center of your existence to be close to me, and you have
become a force that will influence my life forever. (pp. 16-17)
I would not love you if I were not convinced that those
shadows were not you but distortions and illusions
produced by an endless self-erosion that penetrated
from outside. (p. 17)
Your startling admission will not undermine my belief
in the genuine, rich impulses of your existence. (p. 17)
Heidegger’s reaction to learning of the “shadows” in Arendt’s life was to say such darkness could only be present where “there is sun,” i.e., he needed to specifically deny that what she was revealing was in any way defining of who she was. He wanted to think of her as “sparkling and free”, as someone leaving him “dazed by the splendor of [her] human essence” (p. 17), as a ”sunshine girl” in the depths of her Being. Believing he had gained contact with the “innermost and purest part of [her] soul,” he also affirmed, in spite of the specific descriptions in her journal entry, that “an unbroken certainty and security resid[ed] in [her] life” (p. 18). As noted above, Heidegger’s idealizations of Arendt included the notion that it had become his responsibility to shepherd the unrealized possibilities of her Being and assist in the realization of her hopes and dreams. It is difficult to avoid an impression that Heidegger needed to deny the chronic feelings of depression Arendt had disclosed, in such a way as to preserve his picture of her as a shining essence in the process of sloughing off externally derived foreign influences and actualizing its truth in a radiant splendor of authenticity. Continuing in a state of elation, he expressed his particular happiness in what he believed was a shared experience of the two of them together “being who we are” (p. 19). Love, as he experienced and described it at this time, was a state that forces the person into his or her “innermost existence” (p. 21)–shared love is a matter of each partner in the romance wanting and helping the other to be who he or she is. Heidegger in subsequent letters to Arendt affirmed again and again that he experienced her as “magically relaxed and entirely [herself]” and in a state of “genuine self-liberation” (p. 23). His picture of her appears relentlessly to be that of a being who has come to herself, who is liberated to be herself, who is throwing off external, penetrating influences causing self-erosion.
…we could only say the world is now no longer mine and
yours–but ours–only that what we do and achieve belongs
to you and me but to us. (p. 19)
Heidegger expressly communicated his philosophy of love:
Only such faith – which as faith in the other is love – can really
accept the “other” completely. When I say my joy in you is
great and growing, that means I also have faith in everything
that is your story. I am not erecting an ideal [!] – still less
would I be tempted to educate you … you–just as you are …
that’s how I love you. (p. 25)
Heidegger summarized his impression of the impact of his love for Arendt by describing how he had helped her come into contact with her own authentic selfhood:
...the new peace spreading across your face is like the reflection
not of a free-floating bliss--but of the steadfastness and goodness
in which you are wholly you. (p. 26)
Heidegger’s need for Arendt to replicate and mirror his own struggle with the issue of authenticity led him to turn away from the intensely personal communication she was trying to give him in sending the little essay on “Shadows.” This turn, together with the continuing stress of the severe limitations he placed on their relationship, led her in late 1926 to begin to withdraw from him. In the ensuing years Arendt informed him of love affairs with others, and entered her first marriage in 1929.
Although Heidegger gave no overt sign of distress at Arendt’s withdrawal from their intimacy, we believe the loss of his muse and lover had a significant impact on his ability to sustain a sense of his own individual selfhood and faith in his own lifework. Let us turn now to a reconstruction of his emotional situation in the years following this loss.
The Crisis of Personal Annihilation
Arendt’s withdrawal from Heidegger roughly coincided with his completion of Being and Time in 1927, a work he described to her as having been so consuming that it was as if “one’s heart is ripped from one’s body” (p. 40). What was his experience of the reception of his book by the larger world in this period? He told Arendt in 1932 that his book “had been met by hopeless incomprehension” (p. 53). Safranski (1998) in addition reports a poignant episode in which Heidegger placed a copy of Being and Time on his mother’s deathbed. Shortly thereafter, she died in a state of deep turmoil and disappointment at her son’s having fallen away from the Catholic Church. In view of his mother’s inability to grasp and appreciate even the most basic aspects of her son’s masterwork, we view the leaving of the book for her as a last effort, futile and pathetic, to justify his existence and find acceptance of the distinctive path to which his life of thinking had led him.
Two themes appeared in Heidegger’s philosophical writings during the period bounded on the one side by the loss of Arendt and on the other by his fall into the enthusiasm he came to feel for Nazism. These themes express the tensions of his struggle in the midst of a deepening crisis of personal annihilation. The first is that of “the nothing,” developed in his essay, “What is metaphysics?” (Heidegger, 1929/1977). In the introductory section of this work, Heidegger poses a question about that from which all positively existing beings are distinguished: nothing. The question is an inquiry into the nature of this nothing from which one distinguishes all things that are. As his essay develops, the nothing begins to acquire a strange existence as an entity in its own right, being described as something we can “encounter,” something possessing its own independent life and properties, and finally achieving the status of being the precondition for the manifestation of the Being of beings. What could it mean, for him personally, that Heidegger, two years following on the loss of his beloved Arendt, occupied himself with such thoughts? A hint as to the emotional context of his thinking he provides himself, in talking about the conditions under which Dasein–the human being–may discover itself as a being among beings, and the contrary circumstance in which the nothing is encountered. According to his argument, the revelation of one’s existence as a being among beings appears in the joy of knowing another person whom we love. Such love provides an experience “in which we ‘are’ one way or another which determines us through and through, lets us feel ourselves among beings as a whole” (p. 102). This statement mirrors, we believe, the exhilarating experience Heidegger had in loving Arendt: a sense of being at home and an intensified correlated feeling of his own Being. Contrast this with Heidegger’s account of the conditions under which the nothing is encountered: the mood of anxiety. This mood, to be distinguished from any common fear of a specific object or situation, concerns nothing in particular, no identifiable object. It belongs to the mood of anxiety, according to this account, that there is nothing one can focus on. Heidegger goes on then to say that in this undefined, unidentifiable state of becoming anxious the nothing itself reveals itself to us:
Anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping
away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves–we
men who are in being–in the midst of beings slip away from
ourselves…. Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as
a whole slip away, so that the nothing crowds round, in the face
of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent…. With the fundamental
mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in human
existence in which the nothing is revealed…. (pp. 103-104)
Love makes possible the revelation of oneself as a being among beings, radiantly alive and participating in a world shared with the beloved. Anxiety suspends the person in midair, the world of beings falls away, and Dasein enters into a “bewildered calm” (p. 105) in which it falls away even from itself. Could these two states–love and anxiety–mirror Heidegger’s own changing emotional experiences as he underwent the loss of Arendt, the love of his life? Did Heidegger become fully aware of the selfhood-sustaining power of Arendt’s love for him only as he was in the process of losing it? As Arendt pulled away from him and gave herself to other relationships, as the prodigious effort to complete Being and Time came to an end and the work met incomprehension, as his mother died in a state of bitter disappointment in and estrangement from him, did Heidegger feel the world itself pulling away from him and a slipping away of his own identity as well?
The second theme in Heidegger’s thought in the period being discussed pertains to an increasingly active role he began to envision for philosophy in shaping society and history as a whole. Drawing inspiration from renewed studies of Plato’s thought, he distinguished between two sorts of philosophizing: (1) philosophy that is an empty chattering having no real effect on life and the world, that has to endure “its own essence to become null and powerless;” and (2) authentic philosophy, which triggers a “truth happening” that, in the proper historical moment, may reach powerfully into “the sphere of prevailing matter-of-courseness” (quoted in Safranski, 1998, p. 221). What was needed, he thought, was for philosophy to become “in control” of its time, an efficacious entity empowered to become an agent of profound change in the human future. We discern in such ideas a reifying trend, wherein philosophical thinking breaks out of its status as a territory of reflection and acquires a causal power to act directly on society in time and space. Such reification, also present in the development of the concept of the nothing as noted earlier, reflects an unbearable tenuousness in Heidegger’s experience, a sense of the advancing danger of becoming “null and powerless” to the point of ceasing to exist as a person. It was within the context of such feelings of self-loss and world-loss that the glory of National Socialism was found. It is our belief that by embracing Nazi ideology and, if only briefly during a period in 1933 and 1934, supporting Nazi policies, Heidegger was attempting to resurrect himself and recover a sense of his own empowered individuality as a person in control of his own destiny. Paradoxically, this attempt also embodied its own opposite, for in joining the Nazi party and representing Nazi interests in the academic world, he was also becoming the pawn of a dictatorial, de-individualizing authority.
Heidegger’s Nazism as Resurrective Ideology
At the turn of 1931-1932, Heidegger became interested in the National Socialist party, believing, reportedly (Safranski, 1998, p. 227), that the Nazis were the only alternative to a takeover in Germany by the Communists. Once Hitler became Chancellor in 1932, assuming absolute power in early 1933, Heidegger was electrified, understanding the advent of the National Socialist revolution in Germany as a “Dasein-controlling event” unprecedented in world history. Assimilating the rise of the Nazis to his own philosophical preoccupations, Heidegger believed the resurrection of Germany under their leadership also included a call to action for philosophy. His idea that philosophy must be “in control of its time” fit well with the opportunity he now saw to participate in the revolutionary changes sweeping over his country. Heidegger agreed to serve as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, formally joining the Nazi party and repeatedly expressing his allegiance to Hitler’s rule. The famous Rector’s Address, entitled “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (Heidegger, 1933/1991) and delivered upon his assuming that office, is dominated by imagery pertaining to the preservation and emergence of authentic, individualized selfhood. We believe in his address that Heidegger was identifying himself with both the German university and the German nation as a whole.
Although Heidegger expressly supported the Nazi power structure during his tenure as rector, a close reading of his comments reveals an almost dreamlike imagining on his part of what the Nazi revolution actually concerned. Indeed, he seems to have understood as little of the actual reality of the Nazi movement as he did of his beloved Hannah Arendt. Assimilating the political upheavals that were occurring to philosophical themes, he interpreted the Nazi takeover of Germany as a “Dasein-controlling event,” an upsurge of Being itself manifesting in historical reality. What he saw as the reassertion of national power and pride brought by the Nazis thus became conflated with the “primal demand” of all Being “that it should retain and save its own essence” (Safranski, 1998, p 260). Heidegger envisioned the possibility of an epochal second beginning in the history of humanity--the first having been that of the ancient Greeks--and he pictured the role of the universities as one of constructing a new intellectual and spiritual world for the German nation and for all humanity.
We agree with Safranski’s conclusion that Heidegger essentially transposed to the national stage what formerly he had understood as a matter of pure ontology. Supporting the German plebiscite in1933 for withdrawing from the League of Nations, Heidegger regarded that withdrawal as a movement into national authenticity. Like the German university, his country was “asserting itself,” being true to its inner essence, and thereby bringing into the human world a concentrated burst of Being itself. The essence of the individual person within this dream is not to be found in an experience of self-authenticating “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit), as had earlier been described in Being and Time. Salvation is rather to be found in joining with others in a collectively shared vision of a glorious future. We again see a paradox and an irony in such formulations, which ultimately depict a pathway toward self-realization involving a surrender to the “We” constituting a totalitarian movement.
Heidegger resigned the rectorship of Freiberg University in 1934, because he thought the Nazi movement was insufficiently revolutionary in its policies, betraying its own “inner truth and greatness” (quoted in Safranski, 1998, p. 289). It appears that even after he withdrew from active political participation, he continued to associate his nation’s political revolution with the dream of Being, with the notion that Being itself in the 1930s was trying to break upon the world as it had not done since the ancient Greeks. Such an idea, we contend, crystallized Heidegger’s own struggle to resurrect his own distinctive selfhood in the midst of an extended crisis of personal annihilation.6
The Hypostatization of Being in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy
After resigning his rectorship and disengaging from political involvement, Heidegger largely withdrew into a life of solitary philosophical reflection, what he called his “cabin existence.” In turning away from politics and back toward spirituality in his effort to restore himself, Heidegger also turned away from his political hero, Hitler, toward a new hero, the poet Holderlin, as his guide to a spiritual reawakening. Concomitantly, the “turn” in Heidegger’s philosophizing (Young, 2002) gained momentum, and his conception of Being became transformed. Instead of referring, as it did in Being and Time, to the intelligibility or understandability of beings, Being became something like a divine force or power. Sein became Seyn.
In the poetry of Holderlin, Heidegger found the powerful theme of returning—returning to being-at-home or being homely, to hearth and home, and to the heavenly and the gods that had disappeared. In Heidegger’s adoption of this imagery we see a vivid expression of his longing to restore the ties lost in his pursuit of individualized selfhood—such as those with his mother and the Catholic family of his childhood. In this context, Being (Seyn) became increasingly theologized, characterized by such terms as “the Origin,” “the Source,” “the holy,” “the divine radiance,” “the unknown God” (Young, 2002).
The title of his lecture, “Time and Being” (1968/1972), in reversing the word order of Being and Time, concretizes the “turn” in Heidegger’s later philosophizing. In this lecture Heidegger repeatedly uses the expressions, “It gives presence,” “It gives Being,” and “It gives time,” wherein the “It” refers to a mysterious “event of Appropriation” (Ereignis) that somehow determines Being, time, and their unity. Man is characterized as “the constant receiver of the gift given by the ‘It gives presence [Being]’” (p. 12), a characterization strikingly reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of grace. Being (Seyn) has become a kind of divine energy, “sent,” as in Catholic mysticism, to the properly receptive human being in a revelatory manner. We believe that the progressive reification and even deification of Being in Heidegger’s later philosophy served as an antidote to the annihilating aloneness into which his quest for authentic selfhood had led him. This move from nonbeing to a reification of Being, which becomes God, is also a distinctively Catholic one. The “turn” in Heidegger’s later philosophizing was thus actually a re-turn to the Catholic heritage of his childhood, a self-restorative dream of returning to being-at-home once again.
Concluding Remarks
It seems to us that the psychological vulnerabilities that contributed to Heidegger’s fall into Nazism and to his progressive hypostatization of Being also contributed to the rich, ground-breaking insights of his earlier philosophizing. Only someone for whom differentiated Being was such a monumental, preoccupying issue could have come up with the understandings of the foundational structures of our intelligibility to ourselves that pervade the pages of Being and Time. His very conception of Being-in-the-world as a primordial contextual whole—a cornerstone of post-Cartesian philosophical thought—can be understood as providing him with reassurance against the constant threat of annihilating isolation, which, for him, was built into the quest for authentic selfhood. Both in Heidegger’s personal experiential world and in the philosophy of Being and Time, authenticity and homelessness, ownmost selfhood and radical non-relationality, were inextricably intertwined.
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live.
--Martin Heidegger, letter to Karl Lowith, 8/19/21
We regard Heidegger’s (1927/1962) Being and Time as one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, particularly in its devastating challenge to the Cartesian doctrine of the isolated mind. Indeed, in a number of publications (Stolorow, 2006, 2007a; Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002), we have sought to illuminate the relevance and value of Heidegger’s analysis of existence for a post-Cartesian, contextualist perspective in psychoanalysis. Following the publication of Being and Time, however, Heidegger’s conception of Being underwent a process of progressive deterioration and reification, seen first in his attempt to materialize it in the political sphere by merging it with the Nazi movement, and then, as he distanced himself from the Nazis and increasingly withdrew into isolation, in his hypostatizing Being into something of the nature of a divine force or energy. The present article, in which we explicate and attempt to account for this process of deterioration and reification, may be seen as part of a larger project of contextualizing post-Cartesian philosophical thought itself, of which we consider our own psychoanalytic viewpoint to be representative.
In the concluding chapter of a book written by two of us (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993) examining the personal, subjective origins of the metapsychological reifications central to four psychoanalytic theories, we wrote:
Through such reifications, each theorist’s solutions to his
own dilemmas and nuclear crises became frozen in a
static intellectual system that, to him, was an indisputable
vision of objective reality. HIs personal difficulties were
justified, and his solutions to them strongly fortified against
potential challenges, in that both were believed to reflect
impersonal entities and events that universally determine
the human condition. (p. 175)
One of us (Atwood, 1983, 1989) has conducted studies suggesting that such generalizations may hold with equal force for philosophical systems as well.
Some Relevant Themes in Being and Time
In recent debate about a possible connection between Being and Time and Heidegger’s Nazism, typically it is asked whether there are aspects of his philosophy in Being and Time that led to his embrace of Nazism (e.g., Critchley, 2002; Habermas, 1988/1992; Harries, 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Wolin, 1991). In contrast, ours is an investigation of the salient themes that dominated Heidegger’s personal psychological world and of how these themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and his version of Nazism. In this section we highlight two thematic features of Being and Time that point suggestively to central organizing themes of Heidegger’s psychological world. The first such thematic aspect is found in his discussions of authentic and inauthentic existence; the second, in his accounts of authentic relationality or “Being-with.”
The Authentic-Inauthentic Polarity
The central polarity in Heidegger’s analytic is that between authentic or owned existence and inauthentic or unowned existence. Let us briefly locate this polarity in the overall philosophical trajectory of Being and Time and its guiding aim of elucidating the meaning of Being—that is, of the Being of beings. By “the Being of beings” Heidegger means their intelligibility as or understandability as the kind of beings they are. For example, our Being is our intelligibility as distinctively human beings.
Heidegger denotes the human being by the term Dasein, the literal meaning of which is “to-be-there” or “there-being.” Heidegger’s use of this term directs us to the fundamental situatedness or contextuality of our kind of Being. This situatedness is fleshed out in his account of Dasein’s basic constitution as Being-in-the-world, a term whose hyphens indicate an indissoluble contextual whole.
In addition to its irreducible contextuality, what is also distinctive about Dasein is that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 32). Accordingly, claims Heidegger, Dasein always has an understanding of its own Being, of its own intelligibility as a human. In other words, an understanding of our own Being is constitutive of our kind of Being. Heidegger designates this uniquely human, self-interpreting kind of Being by the term existence. Being and Time approaches the question of the meaning of Being by way of an analysis of the fundamental structures of existence (called existentiales), of the human kind of Being. Because the human kind of Being is self-interpreting, the investigation can proceed phenomenologically (Stolorow, 2006), by bringing to light the basic structures grounding our understanding of our own existence.
Heidegger delineates two basic modes of existence—the authentic and the inauthentic—and this central polarity provides the organizing structure of the book. The first half (Division I) is devoted primarily to an elucidation of the inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world, which, according to Heidegger, dominates our “average everyday” understanding of our existence. The second half (Division II) is devoted to authentic existence and its relationship to our temporal constitution and historicality.
Our average everyday understanding of our Being-in-the-world, claims Heidegger, is characterized by what he calls falling—the adoption of the public interpretedness of the “they” (das Man). The “they” is Heidegger’s term for the impersonal normative system that governs what “one” understands and what “one” does in one’s everyday activity as a member of a society and occupant of social roles. The “they” is a normative authority external to one’s own selfhood. Falling into identification with the public interpretedness of the “they” is thus an inauthentic or unowned mode of understanding existence, whereby Dasein, for the most part, is not itself.
Authentic existing for Heidegger has two dimensions—resoluteness and anticipation. In resoluteness, one appropriates, seizes upon, or takes hold of possibilities into which one has been “thrown” or delivered over, including those prescribed by one’s social situatedness, and makes these chosen possibilities one’s own. Anticipation is Heidegger’s term for authentic “Being-toward-death”—the understanding of death as a constantly impending possibility that is constitutive of our existence, of our futurity and finitude. Authentic anticipation of death as our “ownmost” possibility, which is also utterly “non-relational,” individualizes us, tearing us out of our identification with the “they.” Such authenticity or owned existence is disclosed in a mood of anxiety and uncanniness (homelessness).
The prominence of the authentic-inauthentic polarity in Being and Time is in itself highly suggestive of its corresponding prominence in Heidegger’s own psychological world. This suggestion gains further support from the shifting primordiality of the two terms of this polarity in the unfolding of the text.
In Division I, Heidegger portrays the “they-self” as fundamental and essential (i.e., primordial), with authentic selfhood being only a derivative or modification of inauthentic selfhood:
Authentic Being-one’s-Self [is but a] modification of the
“they”—of the “they” as an essential existentiale. (p. 168)
[A]uthentic existence … is only a modified way in which
[falling] everydayness is seized upon…. Falling [into the
“they”] reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein
itself…. [I]t constitutes all Dasein’s days in their
everydayness. (p. 224)
In contrast, in Division II it is authenticity that tends to be primordial, with inauthenticity being derivative:
[I]nauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity.
(p. 303)
[T]he they-self [is a] modification of the authentic self.
(p. 365)
In still other contexts, Heidegger seems to portray authenticity and inauthenticity as “equiprimordial,” conceiving of both, for example, as basic existential possibilities rooted in Dasein’s temporality (p. 401).
Ciaffa (1987) has suggested that the “problem child” (p. 50) responsible for such apparent inconsistencies is Heidegger’s ambiguous concept of falling. We suggest, in particular, that Heidegger’s concept conflates two distinctively different meanings. As an existentiale (i.e., as a necessary and universal structure of existence), falling into inauthenticity pertains to our inescapable embeddedness in a context of social customs, practices, and normativity with which we identify. It is in this sense that we are always already falling. In contrast, Heidegger also uses the term falling to denote a motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into the inauthentic illusions of the “they,” in order to evade the anxiety and uncanniness inherent in authentic Being-toward-death. As one of us (Stolorow, 2007a) has noted, Heidegger’s discussions of such retreats from existential anxiety closely resemble clinical descriptions of the covering over of traumatized states.
This conflation of meanings—falling as an a priori universal and falling as motivated flight1—is quite unusual for Heidegger, whose use of language in Being and Time is for the most part extraordinarily precise and rigorous. This suggests that the authenticity-inauthenticity polarity was a notably problematic one in his own psychological world—i.e., that the struggle for individualized selfhood was an emotionally significant issue for him. A similar inference may be drawn from the enigmatic character, noted by Critchley (2002), of certain expressions that Heidegger uses to describe our kind of Being: Dasein is thrown projection; Dasein is factical existing. These enigmatic expressions suggest that we both have been thrown or delivered over into a factical situatedness over which we have no control and are the masters of our existence as we project ourselves futurally upon possibilities and seize them as our own. Dasein, for Heidegger, is at one and the same time radically determined and radically agentic, once again suggesting that the search for individualized, agentic selfhood was an enormous issue for him. Can it be that the enigma at the heart of Dasein—the enigma of thrown projection, of determined agency, of unowned existence owned—is a mirror of the enigmaticity of Heidegger himself, the philosopher who contributed so much to liberating our view of humanity from the prevailing rule of dehumanizing objectification but who also gave himself over to a mass political movement unmatched in history for its de-individualizing and annihilating objectifications?
Authentic Relationality
A number of commentators (Critchley, 2002; Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Vogel, 1994) have perceived that Heidegger’s conception of authentic relationality seems quite impoverished, being largely restricted to two aspects of what he calls Being-with, which he regards as an existentiale. The first involves what he terms solicitude, which he discusses rather cursorily. In authentic solicitude, we welcome and encourage the other’s individualized selfhood, liberating him or her for his or her “ownmost” authentic possibilities, rather than taking over for the other for our own purposes.
Heidegger proposes another aspect of authentic relationality in the context of his explication of authentic “historizing,” in which Dasein understands itself as “stretched along” between birth and death (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 427)—that is, in terms of its finitude or what he calls its fate:
But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially
in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is
determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the
historizing of the community, of a people [Volk]…. Our fates
have already been guided in advance, in our Being with
one another in the same world and in our [shared] resoluteness
for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and struggling
does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful
destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full
authentic historizing of Dasein. (p. 436)
In this brief but chilling description of the second aspect of authentic Being-with, authenticity as individualized selfhood, suddenly and without Heidegger’s usual rigor, becomes transformed into the unity of a people in a common, resolute struggle to achieve its collective destiny. Equally chillingly, three paragraphs later authenticity becomes “the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps” (p. 437) of a chosen hero. What we wish to emphasize here is that, at first glance,2 neither of the two aspects of authentic relationality that Heidegger postulates seems to include the authentic treasuring of a particular other, as would be disclosed in the mood of love. Indeed, none of us can recall ever encountering the word love in the text of Being and Time. In this work, Heidegger seems to claim that individualized selfhood is to be found in the non-relationality of death, not in the love of another. Such a limited conception of authentic Being-with is highly suggestive of an impoverishment in his personal relational experiences.3
Developmental Themes
We have found little that has been written about Heidegger’s early childhood and formative developmental experiences. Despite this handicap, we have been able to infer that individualized selfhood was an emotionally powerful and problematic issue for him, as shown with particular clarity in his conflictual struggles to separate himself from, and maintain continuity with, the Catholic Church and his family’s Catholic heritage.
Heidegger’s father was a sexton at St. Martin’s Catholic church in the small provincial town of Messkirch, where the family lived “under the Church’s care” (Safranski, 1998, p. 7). Indeed, Heidegger’s boyhood life was pervaded by the customs and practices of the Catholic Church. Safranski, his biographer, writes:
The “sexton’s lads,” Martin and his younger brother, Fritz,
had to help with the church services. They were servers,
they picked flowers to decorate the church, they ran errands
for the priest, and they rang the bells. (p. 7).
Their parents were believers, but without fanaticism …
according to Fritz. Catholic life had so much become part of
their flesh and blood that they had no need to defend their
faith or assert it against others. They were all the more aghast
when their son Martin turned away from the “right road,” the
one that was simply the most natural to them. (p. 9)
Heidegger’s lower-middle-class parents did not have the means to support their children’s higher education, and he was able to attend seminary only with the help of financial aid from the Church. His increasingly ambivalent attachment to the Church was thus complicated by his financial dependence on it, which continued over a thirteen-year period. In consequence of his exposure to philosophy, his thinking began to stray from the Catholic world of ideas. This straying, along with the barrier to individualization posed by the required conformity to Catholic doctrine, are vividly highlighted in a passage, drenched in sarcasm, from a letter he wrote to Englebert Krebs in 1914:
The motu proprio on philosophy [most likely referring to a
papal edict requiring Catholic priests and teachers to sign
a loyalty oath renouncing Modernist ideas] was all we needed.
Perhaps you, as an “academic,” could propose a better
procedure, whereby anyone who feels like having an
independent thought would have his brain taken out and
replaced with an Italian salad. (quoted in Ott, 1993, p. 81)
After citing this letter, Ott comments:
We can readily imagine the inner dilemma in which the young
Heidegger must have found himself: the child of humble
parents, dependent once again on the Catholic Church for
financial support, … well aware that he was expected to toe
the line. (p. 82)
Safranski (1998) further elaborates:
Heidegger remained dependent on the Catholic world beyond
the time when, in his mind, he had already begun to break clear
of the Church. He had to adapt, and that made him ashamed….
(p. 10)
Heidegger’s growing conflict about his attachment to the Catholic Church was, in the end (but only temporarily), resolved psychosomatically. Only two weeks after entering the Society of Jesus as a novice, he was dismissed for medical reasons because he had complained of “heart trouble.” When these pains recurred two years later, he discontinued his training as a priest. It seems evident to us that his emotional conflict about differentiating himself from the Church, and thus from his family of origin, was so wrenchingly intense that his growing unhappiness with Catholicism could only be experienced somatically as a physical heartache, and that he could only seize ownership of his spiritual existence by means of a psychosomatic symptom.
Heidegger and Arendt
An important part of the context of Heidegger’s completing his 1927 masterwork Being and Time was a passionate love affair with his student, Hannah Arendt. We agree with Safranski (1998, p. 140)) that Arendt served as a sustaining emotional support and muse for Heidegger during the period of his greatest creativity. We also believe that her eventual disengagement from their intimacy and emotional withdrawal from him contributed greatly to a psychological disaster for him with lifelong consequences.
Arendt, then 18 years old, met Heidegger in 1924, attending his philosophy seminar at Marburg University. Their affair commenced shortly after Heidegger had invited her to visit him during his office hours. He was 17 years her senior, and married with two sons. His encounter with her, which he later described as “the passion of his life” (Safranski, 1998, p. 136), was from its inception experienced as magically transforming his previously solitary intellectual explorations. He wrote to Arendt of how he was taking her very being into his work, how her presence was dramatically breaking into his life and immeasurably enriching and expanding it, and how their fates had become inextricably intertwined.
…from now on you shall be part of my life and it shall grow
with you. (Letters,4 p. 3)
You will live in my work. (p. 16)
I am coming to my work with a great deal of energy. You have a
part in that. (p. 31)
You and your love are a part of work and existence for me. (p. 37)
Heidegger’s various reactions to Arendt, in addition to showing her function for him in expanding his own sense of self, also reflect his view of himself as serving her need to realize her authenticity, to develop fully and express her “innermost womanly essence” (p. 4). Looking back later on his initial meeting with her during his office hours, he wrote:
…I daydream about the young girl who, in a raincoat, her hat
low over her quiet, large eyes, entered my office for the first
time, and softly and shyly gave a brief answer to each question ….
(p. 9)
This shy young girl he increasingly came to see as someone standing on the threshold of developing and expressing her own true nature, ready to transform the “longing, blossoming, and laughter of girlhood” into a source of “beauty [and] of unending womanly giving” (p. 5). He explicitly and repeatedly formulated his own place in this work of helping Arendt in the emergence of what he saw as the most essential part of her nature as a woman:
my loyalty to you shall only help you remain true to yourself …
[you are finding] your way to your innermost, purest feminine
essence. (p. 3)
I can take care that nothing in you shatters [and] that what is
foreign to you …yields. (p. 5)
Thus we can see in the letters vivid signs of the interweaving of the two themes that pervaded his experience of his relationship to Arendt. One was his reliance on her to mirror his expanding sense of selfhood, and the other was his view of her as replicating his own journey toward authenticity and of himself as assisting her in this journey of actualizing her own essential nature as a woman.
The love affair followed a set of rules dictated by Heidegger. There was strict secrecy maintained. His wife was not to learn of their closeness, nor was anyone in the academic community. They used cryptic notes, coded light signals, secret rendezvous points. Approximately one year into their relationship, with all its difficult arrangements, Arendt sent Heidegger a passage from one of her diaries, a statement of only a few pages that she entitled “Shadows.” In this little essay she disclosed features of her experience that had not been a part of her communications with him before: a sense of an inward detachment, an aloofness removing her from direct contact with her surroundings and with other people. She spoke of how in her life she had been thrown back upon herself, and how she was unable to gain access to her wholeness, having an insurmountable “double nature” (p. 13). She also described an abiding sense of being hunted, of pain and despair, of madness, joylessness, and annihilation. Although these experiences may have been magnified in part by the stress of maintaining a secret affair with her beloved teacher, we believe they also reflect longstanding themes of Arendt’s emotional life arising originally from the tragic conditions of her early youth.5 In sending her diary entry to Heidegger, we believe, Arendt was trying to open up to him a darker side of her nature and her life, a side involving deeply troubled feelings that were the legacy of her early childhood struggles. What was Heidegger’s response to this important communication, one that reflected more of the whole person Arendt actually was? Upon reading her dark musings about herself, he answered:
There are shadows only where there is sun [!]. And that is
the foundation of your soul. You have come straight from
the center of your existence to be close to me, and you have
become a force that will influence my life forever. (pp. 16-17)
I would not love you if I were not convinced that those
shadows were not you but distortions and illusions
produced by an endless self-erosion that penetrated
from outside. (p. 17)
Your startling admission will not undermine my belief
in the genuine, rich impulses of your existence. (p. 17)
Heidegger’s reaction to learning of the “shadows” in Arendt’s life was to say such darkness could only be present where “there is sun,” i.e., he needed to specifically deny that what she was revealing was in any way defining of who she was. He wanted to think of her as “sparkling and free”, as someone leaving him “dazed by the splendor of [her] human essence” (p. 17), as a ”sunshine girl” in the depths of her Being. Believing he had gained contact with the “innermost and purest part of [her] soul,” he also affirmed, in spite of the specific descriptions in her journal entry, that “an unbroken certainty and security resid[ed] in [her] life” (p. 18). As noted above, Heidegger’s idealizations of Arendt included the notion that it had become his responsibility to shepherd the unrealized possibilities of her Being and assist in the realization of her hopes and dreams. It is difficult to avoid an impression that Heidegger needed to deny the chronic feelings of depression Arendt had disclosed, in such a way as to preserve his picture of her as a shining essence in the process of sloughing off externally derived foreign influences and actualizing its truth in a radiant splendor of authenticity. Continuing in a state of elation, he expressed his particular happiness in what he believed was a shared experience of the two of them together “being who we are” (p. 19). Love, as he experienced and described it at this time, was a state that forces the person into his or her “innermost existence” (p. 21)–shared love is a matter of each partner in the romance wanting and helping the other to be who he or she is. Heidegger in subsequent letters to Arendt affirmed again and again that he experienced her as “magically relaxed and entirely [herself]” and in a state of “genuine self-liberation” (p. 23). His picture of her appears relentlessly to be that of a being who has come to herself, who is liberated to be herself, who is throwing off external, penetrating influences causing self-erosion.
…we could only say the world is now no longer mine and
yours–but ours–only that what we do and achieve belongs
to you and me but to us. (p. 19)
Heidegger expressly communicated his philosophy of love:
Only such faith – which as faith in the other is love – can really
accept the “other” completely. When I say my joy in you is
great and growing, that means I also have faith in everything
that is your story. I am not erecting an ideal [!] – still less
would I be tempted to educate you … you–just as you are …
that’s how I love you. (p. 25)
Heidegger summarized his impression of the impact of his love for Arendt by describing how he had helped her come into contact with her own authentic selfhood:
...the new peace spreading across your face is like the reflection
not of a free-floating bliss--but of the steadfastness and goodness
in which you are wholly you. (p. 26)
Heidegger’s need for Arendt to replicate and mirror his own struggle with the issue of authenticity led him to turn away from the intensely personal communication she was trying to give him in sending the little essay on “Shadows.” This turn, together with the continuing stress of the severe limitations he placed on their relationship, led her in late 1926 to begin to withdraw from him. In the ensuing years Arendt informed him of love affairs with others, and entered her first marriage in 1929.
Although Heidegger gave no overt sign of distress at Arendt’s withdrawal from their intimacy, we believe the loss of his muse and lover had a significant impact on his ability to sustain a sense of his own individual selfhood and faith in his own lifework. Let us turn now to a reconstruction of his emotional situation in the years following this loss.
The Crisis of Personal Annihilation
Arendt’s withdrawal from Heidegger roughly coincided with his completion of Being and Time in 1927, a work he described to her as having been so consuming that it was as if “one’s heart is ripped from one’s body” (p. 40). What was his experience of the reception of his book by the larger world in this period? He told Arendt in 1932 that his book “had been met by hopeless incomprehension” (p. 53). Safranski (1998) in addition reports a poignant episode in which Heidegger placed a copy of Being and Time on his mother’s deathbed. Shortly thereafter, she died in a state of deep turmoil and disappointment at her son’s having fallen away from the Catholic Church. In view of his mother’s inability to grasp and appreciate even the most basic aspects of her son’s masterwork, we view the leaving of the book for her as a last effort, futile and pathetic, to justify his existence and find acceptance of the distinctive path to which his life of thinking had led him.
Two themes appeared in Heidegger’s philosophical writings during the period bounded on the one side by the loss of Arendt and on the other by his fall into the enthusiasm he came to feel for Nazism. These themes express the tensions of his struggle in the midst of a deepening crisis of personal annihilation. The first is that of “the nothing,” developed in his essay, “What is metaphysics?” (Heidegger, 1929/1977). In the introductory section of this work, Heidegger poses a question about that from which all positively existing beings are distinguished: nothing. The question is an inquiry into the nature of this nothing from which one distinguishes all things that are. As his essay develops, the nothing begins to acquire a strange existence as an entity in its own right, being described as something we can “encounter,” something possessing its own independent life and properties, and finally achieving the status of being the precondition for the manifestation of the Being of beings. What could it mean, for him personally, that Heidegger, two years following on the loss of his beloved Arendt, occupied himself with such thoughts? A hint as to the emotional context of his thinking he provides himself, in talking about the conditions under which Dasein–the human being–may discover itself as a being among beings, and the contrary circumstance in which the nothing is encountered. According to his argument, the revelation of one’s existence as a being among beings appears in the joy of knowing another person whom we love. Such love provides an experience “in which we ‘are’ one way or another which determines us through and through, lets us feel ourselves among beings as a whole” (p. 102). This statement mirrors, we believe, the exhilarating experience Heidegger had in loving Arendt: a sense of being at home and an intensified correlated feeling of his own Being. Contrast this with Heidegger’s account of the conditions under which the nothing is encountered: the mood of anxiety. This mood, to be distinguished from any common fear of a specific object or situation, concerns nothing in particular, no identifiable object. It belongs to the mood of anxiety, according to this account, that there is nothing one can focus on. Heidegger goes on then to say that in this undefined, unidentifiable state of becoming anxious the nothing itself reveals itself to us:
Anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping
away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves–we
men who are in being–in the midst of beings slip away from
ourselves…. Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as
a whole slip away, so that the nothing crowds round, in the face
of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent…. With the fundamental
mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in human
existence in which the nothing is revealed…. (pp. 103-104)
Love makes possible the revelation of oneself as a being among beings, radiantly alive and participating in a world shared with the beloved. Anxiety suspends the person in midair, the world of beings falls away, and Dasein enters into a “bewildered calm” (p. 105) in which it falls away even from itself. Could these two states–love and anxiety–mirror Heidegger’s own changing emotional experiences as he underwent the loss of Arendt, the love of his life? Did Heidegger become fully aware of the selfhood-sustaining power of Arendt’s love for him only as he was in the process of losing it? As Arendt pulled away from him and gave herself to other relationships, as the prodigious effort to complete Being and Time came to an end and the work met incomprehension, as his mother died in a state of bitter disappointment in and estrangement from him, did Heidegger feel the world itself pulling away from him and a slipping away of his own identity as well?
The second theme in Heidegger’s thought in the period being discussed pertains to an increasingly active role he began to envision for philosophy in shaping society and history as a whole. Drawing inspiration from renewed studies of Plato’s thought, he distinguished between two sorts of philosophizing: (1) philosophy that is an empty chattering having no real effect on life and the world, that has to endure “its own essence to become null and powerless;” and (2) authentic philosophy, which triggers a “truth happening” that, in the proper historical moment, may reach powerfully into “the sphere of prevailing matter-of-courseness” (quoted in Safranski, 1998, p. 221). What was needed, he thought, was for philosophy to become “in control” of its time, an efficacious entity empowered to become an agent of profound change in the human future. We discern in such ideas a reifying trend, wherein philosophical thinking breaks out of its status as a territory of reflection and acquires a causal power to act directly on society in time and space. Such reification, also present in the development of the concept of the nothing as noted earlier, reflects an unbearable tenuousness in Heidegger’s experience, a sense of the advancing danger of becoming “null and powerless” to the point of ceasing to exist as a person. It was within the context of such feelings of self-loss and world-loss that the glory of National Socialism was found. It is our belief that by embracing Nazi ideology and, if only briefly during a period in 1933 and 1934, supporting Nazi policies, Heidegger was attempting to resurrect himself and recover a sense of his own empowered individuality as a person in control of his own destiny. Paradoxically, this attempt also embodied its own opposite, for in joining the Nazi party and representing Nazi interests in the academic world, he was also becoming the pawn of a dictatorial, de-individualizing authority.
Heidegger’s Nazism as Resurrective Ideology
At the turn of 1931-1932, Heidegger became interested in the National Socialist party, believing, reportedly (Safranski, 1998, p. 227), that the Nazis were the only alternative to a takeover in Germany by the Communists. Once Hitler became Chancellor in 1932, assuming absolute power in early 1933, Heidegger was electrified, understanding the advent of the National Socialist revolution in Germany as a “Dasein-controlling event” unprecedented in world history. Assimilating the rise of the Nazis to his own philosophical preoccupations, Heidegger believed the resurrection of Germany under their leadership also included a call to action for philosophy. His idea that philosophy must be “in control of its time” fit well with the opportunity he now saw to participate in the revolutionary changes sweeping over his country. Heidegger agreed to serve as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, formally joining the Nazi party and repeatedly expressing his allegiance to Hitler’s rule. The famous Rector’s Address, entitled “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (Heidegger, 1933/1991) and delivered upon his assuming that office, is dominated by imagery pertaining to the preservation and emergence of authentic, individualized selfhood. We believe in his address that Heidegger was identifying himself with both the German university and the German nation as a whole.
Although Heidegger expressly supported the Nazi power structure during his tenure as rector, a close reading of his comments reveals an almost dreamlike imagining on his part of what the Nazi revolution actually concerned. Indeed, he seems to have understood as little of the actual reality of the Nazi movement as he did of his beloved Hannah Arendt. Assimilating the political upheavals that were occurring to philosophical themes, he interpreted the Nazi takeover of Germany as a “Dasein-controlling event,” an upsurge of Being itself manifesting in historical reality. What he saw as the reassertion of national power and pride brought by the Nazis thus became conflated with the “primal demand” of all Being “that it should retain and save its own essence” (Safranski, 1998, p 260). Heidegger envisioned the possibility of an epochal second beginning in the history of humanity--the first having been that of the ancient Greeks--and he pictured the role of the universities as one of constructing a new intellectual and spiritual world for the German nation and for all humanity.
We agree with Safranski’s conclusion that Heidegger essentially transposed to the national stage what formerly he had understood as a matter of pure ontology. Supporting the German plebiscite in1933 for withdrawing from the League of Nations, Heidegger regarded that withdrawal as a movement into national authenticity. Like the German university, his country was “asserting itself,” being true to its inner essence, and thereby bringing into the human world a concentrated burst of Being itself. The essence of the individual person within this dream is not to be found in an experience of self-authenticating “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit), as had earlier been described in Being and Time. Salvation is rather to be found in joining with others in a collectively shared vision of a glorious future. We again see a paradox and an irony in such formulations, which ultimately depict a pathway toward self-realization involving a surrender to the “We” constituting a totalitarian movement.
Heidegger resigned the rectorship of Freiberg University in 1934, because he thought the Nazi movement was insufficiently revolutionary in its policies, betraying its own “inner truth and greatness” (quoted in Safranski, 1998, p. 289). It appears that even after he withdrew from active political participation, he continued to associate his nation’s political revolution with the dream of Being, with the notion that Being itself in the 1930s was trying to break upon the world as it had not done since the ancient Greeks. Such an idea, we contend, crystallized Heidegger’s own struggle to resurrect his own distinctive selfhood in the midst of an extended crisis of personal annihilation.6
The Hypostatization of Being in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy
After resigning his rectorship and disengaging from political involvement, Heidegger largely withdrew into a life of solitary philosophical reflection, what he called his “cabin existence.” In turning away from politics and back toward spirituality in his effort to restore himself, Heidegger also turned away from his political hero, Hitler, toward a new hero, the poet Holderlin, as his guide to a spiritual reawakening. Concomitantly, the “turn” in Heidegger’s philosophizing (Young, 2002) gained momentum, and his conception of Being became transformed. Instead of referring, as it did in Being and Time, to the intelligibility or understandability of beings, Being became something like a divine force or power. Sein became Seyn.
In the poetry of Holderlin, Heidegger found the powerful theme of returning—returning to being-at-home or being homely, to hearth and home, and to the heavenly and the gods that had disappeared. In Heidegger’s adoption of this imagery we see a vivid expression of his longing to restore the ties lost in his pursuit of individualized selfhood—such as those with his mother and the Catholic family of his childhood. In this context, Being (Seyn) became increasingly theologized, characterized by such terms as “the Origin,” “the Source,” “the holy,” “the divine radiance,” “the unknown God” (Young, 2002).
The title of his lecture, “Time and Being” (1968/1972), in reversing the word order of Being and Time, concretizes the “turn” in Heidegger’s later philosophizing. In this lecture Heidegger repeatedly uses the expressions, “It gives presence,” “It gives Being,” and “It gives time,” wherein the “It” refers to a mysterious “event of Appropriation” (Ereignis) that somehow determines Being, time, and their unity. Man is characterized as “the constant receiver of the gift given by the ‘It gives presence [Being]’” (p. 12), a characterization strikingly reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of grace. Being (Seyn) has become a kind of divine energy, “sent,” as in Catholic mysticism, to the properly receptive human being in a revelatory manner. We believe that the progressive reification and even deification of Being in Heidegger’s later philosophy served as an antidote to the annihilating aloneness into which his quest for authentic selfhood had led him. This move from nonbeing to a reification of Being, which becomes God, is also a distinctively Catholic one. The “turn” in Heidegger’s later philosophizing was thus actually a re-turn to the Catholic heritage of his childhood, a self-restorative dream of returning to being-at-home once again.
Concluding Remarks
It seems to us that the psychological vulnerabilities that contributed to Heidegger’s fall into Nazism and to his progressive hypostatization of Being also contributed to the rich, ground-breaking insights of his earlier philosophizing. Only someone for whom differentiated Being was such a monumental, preoccupying issue could have come up with the understandings of the foundational structures of our intelligibility to ourselves that pervade the pages of Being and Time. His very conception of Being-in-the-world as a primordial contextual whole—a cornerstone of post-Cartesian philosophical thought—can be understood as providing him with reassurance against the constant threat of annihilating isolation, which, for him, was built into the quest for authentic selfhood. Both in Heidegger’s personal experiential world and in the philosophy of Being and Time, authenticity and homelessness, ownmost selfhood and radical non-relationality, were inextricably intertwined.