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Heideggers Nazism and theHypostatization of Being

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.,George E. Atwood, Ph.D., andDonna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D.

Following the publication of Being and Time (1927), Heideggers conceptionof Being underwent a process of progressive reification, seen vividly in his at-tempt to materialize it in the political sphere by merging it with the Nazimovement and then, as he distanced himself from the Nazis and increasinglywithdrew into isolation, in his hypostatizing Being into something of the na-ture of a divine force or energy. This study is an investigation of the salientthemes that pervaded Heideggers personal psychological world and of howthese themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and his version of Na-zism. It will be shown that both Heideggers life and work were dominated bythe quest for individualized selfhood and the accompanying struggle againstannihilating aloneness.

Keywords: annihilation; authenticity; being; Heidegger; hypostatization;Nazism; resurrective ideology; trauma

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International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 5:429450, 2010Copyright The International Association for Psychoanalytic Self PsychologyISSN: 1555-1024 print / 1940-9141 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15551024.2010.508211

We are grateful to Heidegger scholar, William Bracken, whose encouragement and guid-ance contributed invaluably to the development of this article.

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is Founding Faculty Member, Institute of Contemporary Psy-choanalysis, Los Angeles, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity,New York. George E. Atwood, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University, NewBrunswick, NJ. Donna M. Orange, PhD., Psy.D., is affiliated with the Institute for the Psy-choanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York, and the Instituto di Specializzazione inPsicologia Psicoanalitica del Se Psicoanalisi Relazionale (Institute for Specialization in SelfPsychology and Relational Psychosis) in Rome, Italy.

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 domin-ion [Heidegger, 1921, quoted in Kisiel, 2002, p. 13]?

I work concretely and factically out of my I am, out of my intellec-tual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever isavailable to me from these as a vital experience in which I live [per-sonal communication, M. Heidegger (in a letter to Karl Lowith), Au-gust 19, 1921].

Heidegger was a man stamped by Catholicism who sought Godhis entire life [Gadamer, 2003, pp. 122123].

We regard Heideggers (1927) Being and Time as one of the most im-portant philosophical works of the 20th century, particularly in its devas-tating challenge to the Cartesian doctrine of the isolated mind. Indeed, in anumber of publications (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002; Stolorow,2006, 2007a), we have sought to illuminate the relevance and value ofHeideggers analysis of existence for a post-Cartesian, contextualist per-spective in psychoanalysis. Following the publication of Being and Time,however, Heideggers conception of Being underwent a process of progres-sive reification, seen vividly in his attempt to materialize it in the politicalsphere by merging it with the Nazi movement and then, as he distancedhimself from the Nazis and increasingly withdrew into isolation, in hishypostatizing Being into something of the nature of a divine force or energy.This article in which we explicate and attempt to account for this process ofreification, may be seen as part of a larger project of contextualizingpost-Cartesian philosophical thought itself, of which we consider our ownpsychoanalytic viewpoint to be representative.

In the concluding chapter of a book written by two of us (Atwood &Stolorow, 1993) examining the personal, subjective origins of the meta-psychological reifications central to four psychoanalytic theories, we wrote:

Through such reifications, each theorists solutions to his own dilem-mas and nuclear crises became frozen in a static intellectual systemthat, to him, was an indisputable vision of objective reality. His per-sonal difficulties were justified, and his solutions to them strongly for-tified against potential challenges, in that both were believed to re-

430 Robert D. Stolorow et al.

flect impersonal entities and events that universally determine thehuman condition [p. 175].

One of us (Atwood, 1983, 1989) conducted studies suggesting thatsuch generalizations may hold with equal force for philosophical systems aswell.

Some Relevant Themes in

In recent debate about a possible connection between Being and Time(Heidegger, 1927) and Heideggers Nazism, typically it is asked whetherthere are aspects of his philosophy in Being and Time that led to his embraceof Nazism (e.g., Habermas, 1988; Harries, 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990;Wolin, 1991; Critchley, 2002). In contrast, ours is an investigation of thesalient themes that dominated Heideggers personal psychological worldand of how these themes left their imprint on both his philosophy and hisversion of Nazism. In this section, we highlight two thematic features of Be-ing and Time that point suggestively to central organizing themes ofHeideggers psychological world. The first such thematic aspect is found inhis discussions of authentic and inauthentic existence; the second, in hisaccounts of authentic relationality or Being-with.

The AuthenticInauthentic Polarity

The central polarity in Heideggers analytic is that between authentic orowned existence and inauthentic or unowned existence. Let us briefly locatethis polarity in the overall philosophical trajectory of Being and Time(Heidegger, 1927) and its guiding aim of elucidating the meaning of Beingthat is, of the Being of beings. By the Being of beings Heidegger means theirintelligibility as or understandability as the kind of beings they are. For example,our Being is our intelligibility as distinctively human beings.

Heidegger (1927) denotes the human being by the term Dasein, theliteral meaning of which is to-be-there or there-being. Heideggers useof this term directs us to the fundamental situatedness or contextuality ofour kind of Being. This situatedness is fleshed-out in his account of Daseinsbasic constitution as Being-in-the-world, a term whose hyphens indicate anindissoluble contextual whole.

In addition to its irreducible contextuality, what is also distinctiveabout Dasein is that in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it

Heideggers Nazism 431

(Heidegger, 1927, p. 32). Accordingly, claims Heidegger, Dasein always hasan understanding of its own Being, of its own intelligibility as a human. Inother words, an understanding of our own Being is constitutive of our kindof Being. Heidegger designates this uniquely human, self-interpreting kindof Being by the term existence. Being and Time approaches the question ofthe meaning of Being by way of an analysis of the fundamental structures ofexistence (called existentiales), of the human kind of Being. Because the hu-man kind of Being is self-interpreting, the investigation can proceedphenomenologically (Stolorow, 2006) by bringing to light the basic struc-tures grounding our understanding of our own existence.

Heidegger (1927) delineates two basic modes of existencethe au-thentic and the inauthenticand this central polarity provides the orga-nizing structure of the book. The first half (Division I) is primarily devotedto an elucidation of the inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world, which,according to Heidegger, dominates our average everyday understandingof our existence. The second half (Division II) is devoted to authentic exis-tence and its relation to our temporal constitution and historicality.

Our average everyday understanding of our Being-in-the-world,claims Heidegger (1927), is characterized by what he calls fallingtheadoption of the public interpretedness of the they (das Man). The theyis Heideggers term for the impersonal normative system that governs whatone understands and what one does in ones everyday activity as amember of a society and an occupant of social roles. The they is a norma-tive authority external to ones own selfhood. Falling into identificationwith the public interpretedness of the they is, thus, an inauthentic or un-owned mode of understanding existence, whereby Dasein, for the mostpart, is not itself.

Authentic existing for Heidegger has two dimensionsresolutenessand anticipation. In resoluteness, one appropriates, seizes upon, or takeshold of possibilities into which one has been thrown or delivered over,including those prescribed by ones social situatedness, and makes thesechosen possibilities ones own. Anticipation is Heideggers term for au-thentic Being-toward-deaththe understanding of death as a con-stantly impending possibility that is constitutive of our existence, of ourfuturity and finitude. Authentic anticipation of death as our ownmostpossibility, which is also utterly non-relational, individualizes us, tearingus out of our identification with the they. Such authenticity or ownedexistence is disclosed in a mood of anxiety and uncanniness (homeless-ness).


The prominence of the authenticinauthentic polarity in Being andTime (Heidegger, 1927) is in itself highly suggestive of its correspondingprominence in Heideggers own psychological world. This suggestion gainsfurther support from the shifting primordiality of the two terms of this po-larity in the unfolding of the text.

In Division I, Heidegger (1927) portrays the they-self as fundamen-tal and essential (i.e., primordial), with authentic selfhood being only a de-rivative or modification of inauthentic selfhood:

Authentic Being-ones-Self [is but a] modification of the theyofthe 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 es-sential ontological structure of Dasein itself. [I]t constitutes allDaseins days in their everydayness [p. 224].

In contrast, in Division II, it is authenticity that tends to be primor-dial, 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 (1927) seems to portray authentic-ity and inauthenticity as equiprimordial, conceiving of both, for example,as basic existential possibilities rooted in Daseins temporality (p. 401).

Ciaffa (1987) suggested that the problem child (p. 50) responsiblefor such apparent inconsistencies is Heideggers (1927) ambiguous conceptof falling. We suggest, in particular, that Heideggers concept conflates twodistinctively different meanings. As an existentiale (i.e., as a necessary anduniversal structure of existence), falling into inauthenticity pertains to ourinescapable embeddedness in a context of social customs, practices, andnormativity with which we identify. It is in this sense that we are always al-ready falling. In contrast, Heidegger also uses the term falling to denote amotivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into the inauthentic illusions ofthe they to evade the anxiety and uncanniness inherent in authentic Be-ing-toward-death. As one of us (Stolorow, 2007a) noted, Heideggers dis-


cussions of such retreats from existential anxiety closely resemble clinicaldescriptions of the covering-over of traumatized states.

This conflation of meaningsfalling as an a priori universal and fall-ing as motivated flight1is quite unusual for Heidegger (1927), whose useof language in Being and Time is, for the most part, extraordinarily preciseand rigorous. This suggests that the authenticityinauthenticity polaritywas a notably problematic one in his own psychological world (i.e., that thestruggle for individualized selfhood was an emotionally significant issue forhim). A similar inference may be drawn from the enigmatic character,noted by Critchley (2002), of certain expressions that Heidegger uses to de-scribe our kind of Being: Dasein is thrown projection; Dasein is factical exist-ing. These enigmatic expressions suggest that we both have been thrown ordelivered over into a factical situatedness over which we have no controland are the masters of our existence as we project ourselves futurally uponpossibilities and seize them as our own. Dasein, for Heidegger, is at one andthe same time radically determined and radically agentic, once again suggest-ing that the search for individualized, agentic selfhood was an enormous is-sue for him. Can it be that the enigma at the heart of Daseinthe enigmaof thrown projection, of determined agency, of unowned existenceownedis a mirror of the enigmaticity of Heidegger himself, the philoso-pher who contributed so much to liberating our view of humanity from theprevailing rule of dehumanizing objectification but who also gave himselfover to a ghastly mass political movement unmatched in history for itsde-individualizing and annihilating objectifications?

Authentic Relationality

A number of commentators (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Vogel, 1994;Critchley, 2002) have perceived that Heideggers (1927) conception of au-thentic relationality seems quite impoverished, being largely restricted totwo aspects of what he calls Being-with, which he regards as an existentiale.The first involves what he terms solicitude, which he discusses rather curso-rily. In authentic solicitude, we welcome and encourage the others individ-ualized selfhood, liberating him or her for his or her ownmost authenticpossibilities, rather than taking over for the other for our own purposes.


1The term falling is strongly suggestive of Heideggers Catholic heritage, and the distinc-tion between a priori falling and motivated falling parallels the distinction between originalsin and actual sin.

Heidegger (1927) proposed another aspect of authentic relationalityin the context of his explication of authentic historizing in which Daseinunderstands itself as stretched along between birth and death (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 Be-ing-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinativefor it as destiny. This is how we designate the historizing of the commu-nity, of a people [Volk]. Our fates have already been guided in ad-vance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our[shared] resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicat-ing and struggling does the power of destiny become free. Daseinsfateful destiny in and with its generation goes to make up the full au-thentic historizing of Dasein [p. 436].

In this brief but chilling description of the second aspect of authenticBeing-with, authenticity as individualized selfhood, suddenly and withoutHeideggers (1927) usual rigor, becomes transformed into the unity of a peo-ple in a common, resolute struggle to achieve its collective destiny. Equallychillingly, three paragraphs later, authenticity becomes the struggle of loy-ally following in the footsteps (p.437)ofachosenhero.Whatwewishtoem-phasize here is that, at first glance2, neither of the two aspects of authenticrelationality that Heidegger postulates seems to include the authentic trea-suring 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 andTime. In this work, Heidegger seems to claim that individualized selfhood isto be found in the non-relationality of death, not in the love of another. Sucha limited conception of authentic Being-with is highly suggestive of an im-poverishment in his personal relational experiences.3


2A closer look (Stolorow, 2007b) reveals that Heideggers (1927) conception of authenticsolicitude can be shown to entail a much richer account of relationality, but what is impor-tant for our purposes here is that he did not himself flesh-out these implications.

3As we shall see, in certain other contexts, both personal and philosophical, Heidegger(1929) did write quite eloquently of love. However, the love of which he wrote seems awholly narcissistic affair, concerned more with the enhancement of selfhood than with thevaluing or even the recognizing of the other. From the perspective of Heideggers conceptionof both authentic solicitude and love, traumatic loss could only be a loss of the others self-hood-enhancing function, not a loss of a deeply treasured other. As shown later, it was pri-marily the loss of such a function that Heidegger experienced when he lost his relationshipwith his lover and muse, Hannah Arendt.

Developmental Themes

We have found little that has been written about Heideggers early child-hood and formative developmental experiences. Despite this handicap, wehave been able to infer that individualized selfhood was an emotionallypowerful and problematic issue for him, as shown with particular clarity inhis conflictual struggles to separate himself from, and maintain continuitywith, the Catholic church and his familys Catholic heritage.

Heideggers father was a sexton at St. Martins Catholic church in thesmall provincial town of Messkirch, where the family lived under theChurchs care (Safranski, 1998, p. 7). Indeed, Heideggers boyhood lifewas pervaded by the customs and practices of the Catholic church.Safranski, his biographer, wrote:

The sextons lads, Martin and his younger brother, Fritz, had to helpwith the church services. They were servers, they picked flowers todecorate the church, they ran errands for the priest, and they rang thebells [p. 7].

Their parents were believers, but without fanaticism according toFritz. Catholic life had so much become part of their flesh and bloodthat they had no need to defend their faith or assert it against others.They were all the more aghast when their son Martin turned awayfrom the right road, the one that was simply the most natural tothem [p. 9].

Heideggers lower middle-class parents did not have the means tosupport their childrens higher education, and he was able to attend semi-nary only with the help of financial aid from the Church. His increasinglyambivalent attachment to the Church was, thus, complicated by his finan-cial dependence on it, which continued over a 13-year period. In conse-quence of his exposure to philosophy, his thinking began to stray from theCatholic world of ideas. This straying, along with the barrier to individual-ization posed by the required conformity to Catholic doctrine, are vividlyhighlighted in a passage, drenched in sarcasm, from a letter he wrote toEnglebert Krebs in 1914:

The motu proprio on philosophy [most likely referring to a papal edictrequiring Catholic priests and teachers to sign a loyalty oath renounc-


ing modernist ideas] was all we needed. Perhaps you, as an aca-demic, could propose a better procedure, whereby anyone who feelslike having an independent thought would have his brain taken outand replaced with an Italian salad [as cited in Ott, 1993, p. 81].

After citing this letter, Ott commented:

We can readily imagine the inner dilemma in which the youngHeidegger must have found himself: the child of humble parents, de-pendent once again on the Catholic church for financial support well aware that he was expected to toe the line [p. 82].

Safranski (1998) further elaborated:

Heidegger remained dependent on the Catholic world beyond thetime when, in his mind, he had already begun to break clear of theChurch. He had to adapt, and that made him ashamed [p. 10].

Heideggers growing conflict about his attachment to the Catholicchurch was, in the end (but only temporarily), resolved psychosomatically.Only 2 weeks after entering the Society of Jesus as a novice, he was dis-missed for medical reasons because he had complained of heart trouble.When these pains recurred 2 years later, he discontinued his training as apriest. It seems evident to us that his emotional conflict about differentiat-ing himself from the Church, and thus from his family of origin, was sowrenchingly intense that his growing unhappiness with Catholicism couldonly be experienced somatically as a physical heartache, and that he couldonly seize ownership of his spiritual existence by means of a psychosomaticsymptom.

Heidegger and Arendt

An important part of the context of Heideggers completing his 1927 mas-terwork, Being and Time, was a passionate love affair with his student,Hannah Arendt. We agree with Safranski (1998, p. 140) that Arendtserved as a sustaining emotional support and muse for Heidegger during theperiod of his greatest creativity. We also believe that her eventual disen-gagement from their intimacy and emotional withdrawal from him contrib-uted greatly to a psychological disaster for him, with lifelong consequences.


Arendt, then 18 years old, met Heidegger in 1924, attending his phi-losophy seminar at Marburg University. Their affair commenced shortly af-ter Heidegger had invited her to visit him during his office hours. He was 17years her senior, and married with two sons. His encounter with her, whichhe later described as the passion of his life (Safranski, 1998, p. 136), was,from its inception, experienced as magically transforming his previously sol-itary intellectual explorations. He wrote to Arendt of how he was takingher very being into his work, how her presence was dramatically breakinginto his life and immeasurably enriching and expanding it, and how theirfates had become inextricably intertwined4:

from now on you shall be part of my life and it shall grow with you[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 inthat [p. 31].

You and your love are a part of work and existence for me [p. 37].

Heideggers various reactions to Arendt, in addition to showing herfunction for him in expanding his own sense of self, also reflect his view ofhimself as serving her need to realize her authenticity, to develop fully, andexpress her innermost womanly essence (Ludz, 2004, p. 4). Looking backlater on his initial meeting with her during his office hours, he wrote:

I daydream about the young girl who, in a raincoat, her hat lowover her quiet, large eyes, entered my office for the first time, andsoftly and shyly gave a brief answer to each question [p. 9].

This shy young girl he increasingly came to see as someone standingon the threshold of developing and expressing her own true nature, ready totransform the longing, blossoming, and laughter of girlhood into a sourceof beauty [and] of unending womanly giving (Ludz, 2004, p. 5). He ex-plicitly and repeatedly formulated his own place in this work of helpingArendt in the emergence of what he saw as the most essential part of her


4From Letters: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger 19251975 (Ludz, 2004).

nature as a woman: My loyalty to you shall only help you remain true toyourself [you are finding] your way to your innermost, purest feminineessence (p. 3); I can take care that nothing in you shatters [and] thatwhat is foreign to you yields (p. 5).

Thus, we can see in the letters vivid signs of the interweaving of thetwo themes that pervaded his experience of his relationship to Arendt. Onewas his reliance on her to mirror his expanding sense of selfhood, and theother was his view of her as replicating his own journey toward authenticityand of himself as assisting her in this journey of actualizing her own essen-tial nature as a woman.

The love affair followed a set of rules dictated by Heidegger. Therewas 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, and secret rendezvous points. Approximately 1 yearinto their relationship, with all its difficult arrangements, Arendt sentHeidegger a passage from one of her diaries, a statement of only a few pagesthat she entitled Shadows. In this little essay, she disclosed features of herexperience that had not been a part of her communications with him be-fore: a sense of an inward detachment, an aloofness removing her from di-rect contact with her surroundings and with other people. She spoke of howin her life she had been thrown back upon herself, and how she was unableto gain access to her wholeness, having an insurmountable double nature(Ludz, 2004, p. 13). She also described an abiding sense of being hunted, ofpain and despair, of madness, joylessness, and annihilation. Although theseexperiences may have been magnified, in part, by the stress of maintaining asecret affair with her beloved teacher, we believe they also reflect long-standing themes of Arendts emotional life arising originally from the tragicconditions of her early youth.5 In sending her diary entry to Heidegger, webelieve Arendt was trying to open up to him a darker side of her nature andher lifea side involving deeply troubled feelings that were the legacy ofher early childhood struggles. What was Heideggers response to this im-


5Arendts biographer, Young-Bruehl (1982), described these conditions, involving her be-loved father becoming ill (syphilis) when she was 2 years of age, and over the next 5 years herwitnessing his gradual mental and physical deterioration and, finally, after great suffering,his death. The trauma involved in this distressing family situation was largely disavowed anddissociated, as Arendts developing identity crystallized around an outward style of joy andoptimism, a sunshine girl who never showed any grief or pain in relation to the familystragedy.

portant communication, one that reflected more of the whole personArendt actually was? Upon reading her dark musings about herself, he an-swered:

There are shadows only where there is sun[!]. And that is the founda-tion of your soul. You have come straight from the center of your exis-tence to be close to me, and you have become a force that will influ-ence my life forever [pp. 1617].

I would not love you if I were not convinced that those shadows werenot you but distortions and illusions produced by an endless self-ero-sion that penetrated from outside [p. 17].

Your startling admission will not undermine my belief in the genuine,rich impulses of your existence [p. 17].

Heideggers reaction to learning of the shadows in Arendts life wasto say such darkness could only be present where there is sun (i.e., heneeded to specifically deny that what she was revealing was in any way de-fining of who she was). He wanted to think of her as sparkling and free, assomeone leaving him dazed by the splendor of [her] human essence(Ludz, 2004, p. 17), as a sunshine girl in the depths of her Being. Believinghe had gained contact with the innermost and purest part of [her] soul,he also affirmed, despite the specific descriptions in her journal entry, thatan unbroken certainty and security resid[ed] in [her] life (p. 18). Asnoted earlier, Heideggers idealizations of Arendt included the notion thatit had become his responsibility to shepherd the unrealized possibilities ofher Being and assist in the realization of her hopes and dreams. It is difficultto avoid an impression that Heidegger needed to deny the chronic feelingsof depression Arendt had disclosed in such a way as to preserve his pictureof her as a shining essence in the process of sloughing-off externally derivedforeign influences and actualizing its truth in a radiant splendor of authen-ticity. Continuing in a state of elation, he expressed his particular happinessin what he believed was a shared experience of the two of them togetherbeing who we are (p. 19). Love, as he experienced and described it at thistime, was a state that forces the person into his or her innermost exis-tence (p. 21)shared love is a matter of each partner in the romancewanting and helping the other to be who he or she is. Heidegger, in subse-quent letters to Arendt, affirmed again and again that he experienced her


as magically relaxed and entirely [herself] and in a state of genuineself-liberation (p. 23). His picture of her appears relentlessly to be that of abeing who has come to herself, who is liberated to be herself, and who isthrowing off external, penetrating influences causing self-erosion:

we could only say the world is now no longer mine and yoursbutoursonly that what we do and achieve belongs to you and me but tous [p. 19].

Heidegger expressly communicated his philosophy of love:

Only such faithwhich as faith in the other is lovecan really ac-cept the other completely. When I say my joy in you is great andgrowing, that means I also have faith in everything that is your story. Iam not erecting an ideal[!]still less would I be tempted to educateyou youjust as you are thats how I love you [Ludz, 2004,p. 25].

Heidegger summarized his impression of the impact of his love forArendt by describing how he had helped her come into contact with herown authentic selfhood:

the new peace spreading across your face is like the reflection notof a free-floating blissbut of the steadfastness and goodness inwhich you are wholly you [Ludz, 2004, p. 26].

Heideggers need for Arendt to replicate and mirror his own strugglewith the issue of authenticity led him to turn away from the intensely per-sonal communication she was trying to give him in sending the little essayon Shadows. This turn, together with the continuing stress of the severelimitations he placed on their relationship, led her in late 1926 to begin towithdraw from him. In the ensuing years, Arendt informed him of love af-fairs with others, and entered her first marriage in 1929.

Although Heidegger gave no overt sign of distress at Arendts with-drawal from their intimacy, we believe the loss of his muse and lover had asignificant impact on his ability to sustain a sense of his own individual self-hood and faith in his own lifework. Let us turn now to a reconstruction ofhis emotional situation in the years following this loss.


The Crisis of Personal Annihilation

Arendts withdrawal from Heidegger roughly coincided with his comple-tion of Being and Time in 1927, a work he described to her as having been soconsuming that it was as if ones heart is ripped from ones body (Ludz,2004, p. 40).6 What was his experience of the reception of his book by thelarger world in this period? He told Arendt in 1932 that his book had beenmet by hopeless incomprehension (p. 53). Safranski (1998), in addition,reported a poignant episode in which Heidegger placed a just-publishedcopy of Being and Time on his mothers deathbed. Shortly thereafter, shedied in a state of deep turmoil and disappointment at her sons having fallenaway from the Catholic church. In view of his mothers inability to graspand appreciate even the most basic aspects of her sons masterwork, weview the leaving of the book for her as a last effort, futile and pathetic, tojustify his existence and find acceptance of the distinctive path to which hislife of thinking had led him.

Two themes appeared in Heideggers philosophical writings duringthe period bounded on the one side by the loss of Arendt and on the otherby his fall into the enthusiasm he came to feel for Nazism. These themes ex-press the tensions of his struggle in the midst of a deepening crisis of per-sonal annihilation. The first is that of the nothing, developed in his essay,What is Metaphysics? (Heidegger, 1929). In the introductory section ofthis work, Heidegger poses a question about that from which all positivelyexisting beings are distinguished: nothing. The question is an inquiry intothe nature of this nothing from which one distinguishes all things that are.As his essay develops, the nothing begins to acquire a strange existence asan entity in its own right, being described as something we can encounter,something possessing its own independent life and properties, and finallyachieving the status of being the precondition for the manifestation of theBeing of beings. What could it mean, for him personally, that Heidegger, 2years following on the loss of his beloved Arendt, occupied himself withsuch thoughts?: a hint as to the emotional context of his thinking he pro-vides himself, in talking about the conditions under which Daseinthe hu-man beingmay discover itself as a being among beings, and the contrary


6During the period of writing Being and Time, Heidegger (1927) looked into the abyss ofnothingness, but he had his sustaining muse at his side as he looked. After he lost her, he wasleft confronting the abyss unbearably alone, without a relational home for his existentialAngst.

circumstance in which the nothing is encountered. According to his argu-ment, the revelation of ones existence as a being among beings appears inthe joy of knowing another person whom we love. Such love provides anexperience in which we are one way or another which determines usthrough and through, lets us feel ourselves among beings as a whole (p.102). This statement mirrors, we believe, the exhilarating experienceHeidegger had in loving Arendt: a sense of being at home and an intensifiedcorrelated feeling of his own Being. Contrast this with Heideggers accountof the conditions under which the nothing is encountered: the mood ofanxiety. This mood, to be distinguished from any common fear of a specificobject or situation, concerns nothing in particular, no identifiable object. Itbelongs to the mood of anxiety, according to this account, that there isnothing one can focus on. Heidegger goes on then to say that in this unde-fined, unidentifiable state of becoming anxious, the nothing itself reveals it-self to us:

Anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of be-ings as a whole. This implies that we ourselveswe men who are inbeingin the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. Anxietyrobs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that thenothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the isfalls silent. With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrivedat that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing is re-vealed [pp. 103104].

Love makes possible the revelation of oneself as a being among beings,radiantly alive and participating in a world shared with the beloved. Anxi-ety suspends the person in midair, the world of beings falls away, and Daseinenters into a bewildered calm (Hedegger, 1929, p. 105) in which it fallsaway even from itself. Could these two stateslove and anxietymirrorHeideggers own changing emotional experiences as he underwent the lossof Arendt, the love of his life? Did Heidegger become fully aware of the self-hood-sustaining power of Arendts love for him only as he was in the pro-cess of losing it? As Arendt pulled away from him and gave herself to otherrelationships, as the prodigious effort to complete Being and Time(Heidegger, 1927) came to an end and the work met incomprehension, ashis mother died in a state of bitter disappointment in and estrangementfrom him, did Heidegger feel the world itself pulling away from him and aslipping away of his own identity as well?


The second theme in Heideggers thought in the period being dis-cussed pertains to an increasingly active role he began to envision for phi-losophy in shaping society and history as a whole. Drawing inspiration fromrenewed studies of Platos thought, he distinguished between two sorts ofphilosophizing: (a) philosophy that is an empty chattering, having no realeffect on life and the world, which has to endure its own essence to be-come null and powerless (as cited in Safranski, 1998, p. 221); and (b) au-thentic philosophy, which triggers a truth happening that, in the properhistorical moment, may reach powerfully into the sphere of prevailingmatter-of-courseness (as cited in Safranski, 1998, p. 222). What wasneeded, he thought, was for philosophy to become in control of its time,an efficacious entity empowered to become an agent of profound change inthe human future. We discern in such ideas a reifying trend, wherein philo-sophical thinking breaks out of its status as a territory of reflection and ac-quires a causal power to act directly on society in time and space. Such reifi-cation, also present in the development of the concept of the nothing asnoted earlier, reflects an unbearable tenuousness in Heideggers experi-ence, a sense of the advancing danger of becoming null and powerless tothe point of ceasing to exist as a person. It was within the context of suchfeelings of self-loss and world-loss that the glory of National Socialism wasfound. It is our belief that by embracing Nazi ideology and, if only brieflyduring a period in 1933 and 1934, supporting Nazi policies, Heidegger wasattempting to resurrect himself and recover a sense of his own empoweredindividuality as a person in control of his own destiny. Paradoxically, thisattempt also embodied its own opposite, for in joining the Nazi party andrepresenting Nazi interests in the academic world, he was also becomingthe pawn of a dictatorial, de-individualizing authority.

Heideggers Nazismas Resurrective Ideology

At the turn of 1931 to 1932, Heidegger became interested in the NationalSocialist party, believing, reportedly (Safranski, 1998, p. 227), that the Na-zis were the only alternative to a takeover in Germany by the Communists.Once Hitler became chancellor in 1932, assuming absolute power in early1933, Heidegger was electrified, understanding the advent of the NationalSocialist revolution in Germany as a Dasein-controlling event unprece-dented in world history. Assimilating the rise of the Nazis to his own philo-sophical preoccupations, Heidegger believed the resurrection of Germany


under their leadership also included a call to action for philosophy. His ideathat philosophy must be in control of its time fit well with the opportunityhe now saw to participate in the revolutionary changes sweeping over hiscountry. Heidegger agreed to serve as rector of Freiburg University in 1933,formally joining the Nazi party and repeatedly expressing his allegiance toHitlers rule. The famous Rectors Address, entitled The Self-Assertion ofthe German University (Heidegger, 1933) and delivered upon his assum-ing that office, is dominated by imagery pertaining to the preservation andemergence of authentic, individualized selfhood. We believe that in his ad-dress, Heidegger was identifying himself with both the German Universityand the German nation as a whole.

Although Heidegger expressly supported the Nazi power structureduring his tenure as rector, a close reading of his comments reveals an al-most dreamlike imagining on his part of what the Nazi revolution actuallyconcerned. Indeed, he seems to have understood as little of the actual re-ality of the Nazi movement as he did of his beloved Hannah Arendt. As-similating the political upheavals that were occurring to philosophicalthemes, he interpreted the Nazi takeover of Germany as a Dasein-con-trolling event, an upsurge of Being itself manifesting in historical reality.What he saw as the reassertion of national power and pride brought bythe Nazis thus became conflated with the primal demand of all Beingthat it should retain and save its own essence (Safranski, 1998, p. 260).Heidegger envisioned the possibility of an epochal second beginning inthe history of humanitythe first having been that of the ancientGreeksand he pictured the role of the universities as one of construct-ing a new intellectual and spiritual world for the German nation and forall humanity.7

We agree with Safranskis (1998) conclusion that Heidegger essen-tially transposed to the national stage what he had formerly understood as amatter of pure ontology. Supporting the German plebiscite in1933 for with-drawing from the League of Nations, Heidegger regarded that withdrawalas a movement into national authenticity. Like the German university, hiscountry was asserting itself, being true to its inner essence, and therebybringing into the human world a concentrated burst of Being itself. The es-


7Thomson (2005) commented on the grandiose and authoritarian aspects of Heideggerscall for university reform, embodying his ambitions to become the spiritual leader of theuniversity, and, thus, the nation and to restore philosophy to her throne as the queen ofthe sciences (p. 116).

sence of the individual person within this dream is not to be found in an ex-perience of self-authenticating mineness (Jemeinigkeit), as had earlierbeen described in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927). Rather, salvation is tobe found in joining with others in a collectively shared vision of a gloriousfuture. We again see a paradox and an irony in such formulations, which ul-timately depict a pathway toward self-realization involving a surrender tothe we constituting a totalitarian movement.

Heidegger resigned the rectorship of Freiberg University in 1934 be-cause he thought the Nazi movement was insufficiently revolutionary in itspolicies, betraying its own inner truth and greatness (as cited in Safranski,1998, p. 289). It appears that even after he withdrew from active politicalparticipation, he continued to associate his nations political revolutionwith the dream of Being, with the notion that Being itself in the 1930s wastrying to break upon the world as it had not done since the ancient Greeks.Such an idea, we contend, crystallized Heideggers own struggle to resur-rect his own distinctive selfhood in the midst of an extended crisis of per-sonal annihilation.8

The Hypostatization of Being inHeideggers 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 backtoward spirituality in his effort to restore himself, Heidegger also turnedaway from his political hero, Hitler, toward a new hero, the poet Holderlin,as his guide to a spiritual reawakening. Concomitantly, the turn inHeideggers philosophizing (Young, 2002) gained momentum, and his con-ception of Being became transformed. Instead of referring, as it did in Beingand Time (Heidegger, 1927), to the intelligibility or understandability of be-ings, Being became something like a divine force or power. Sein becameSeyn.


8After the war, according to Safranski (1998), apparently in reaction to facing theDenazification Committee and being barred from university teaching, Heidegger had aphysical and mental breakdown and underwent psychosomatic treatment (p. 351).Were Heideggers deplorable silence and lack of contrition about his participation in theNazi movement an effort to protect his crumbling selfhood from further annihilation by thecritical attacks being leveled at him?

In the poetry of Holderlin, Heidegger found the powerful theme of re-turningreturning to being-at-home or being homely, to hearth and home,and to the holy and the gods that had disappeared (Heidegger, 1984). InHeideggers adoption of this imagery, we see a vivid expression of his long-ing to restore the ties lost in his pursuit of individualized selfhoodsuch asthose with his mother and the Catholic family of his childhood.9 In thiscontext, Being (Seyn) became increasingly theologized, characterized bysuch terms as the Origin, the Source, the holy, the divine radiance,and the unknown God (Young, 2002).

The title of his lecture, Time and Being (Heidegger, 1968), in re-versing the word order of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927), concretizes theturn in Heideggers later philosophizing. In this 1968 lecture, Heideggerrepeatedly used the expressions It gives presence, It gives Being, and Itgives time, wherein the It refers to a mysterious event of Appropriation(Ereignis) that somehow determines Being, time, and their unity. Man ischaracterized as the constant receiver of the gift given by the It gives pres-ence [Being] (Heidegger, 1968, p. 12), a characterization strikingly remi-niscent of the Catholic doctrine of grace. Being (Seyn) has become a kind ofdivine energy sent, as in Catholic mysticism, to the properly receptive hu-man being in a revelatory manner. We believe that the progressive reifica-tion and even deification of Being in Heideggers later philosophy served asan antidote to the annihilating aloneness into which his quest for authenticselfhood had led him. This move from nonbeing to a reification of Being,which becomes God, is also a distinctively Catholic one. The turn inHeideggers later philosophizing was, thus, actually a re-turn to the Catholicheritage of his childhood, a self-restorative dream of returning to be-ing-at-home once again.

Conclusion

It seems to us that the psychological vulnerabilities that contributed toHeideggers fall into Nazism and to his progressive hypostatization of Beingalso contributed to the rich, ground-breaking insights of his earlier philoso-phizing. Only someone for whom differentiated Being was such a monu-


9This longing seems already to have been motivating Heideggers philosophizing in a lec-ture course on metaphysics that he gave in 1929 through 1930 in which he wrote, Philoso-phy, metaphysics, is a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere (Heidegger, 1983,p. 6).

mental, preoccupying issue could have come up with the understandings ofthe foundational structures of our intelligibility to ourselves that pervadethe pages of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927). His very conception of Be-ing-in-the-world as a primordial contextual wholea cornerstone ofpost-Cartesian philosophical thoughtcan be understood as providinghim with reassurance against the constant threat of annihilating isolation,which, for him, was built into the quest for authentic selfhood. Both inHeideggers personal experiential world and in the philosophy of Being andTime, authenticity and homelessness, ownmost selfhood and radicalnon-relationality, were inextricably intertwined.

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Translations of Abstract

Despus de la publicacin de Ser y tiempo (1927), la concepcin de Heidegger sobre el Sersufri una reificacin progresiva, que se puede observar vvidamente en su intento dematerializarla en la esfera poltica al mezclarla con el movimiento nazi, y luego, a medida quese distanciaba de los nazis y caa en un mayor aislamiento, en su reificacin del Ser como algoque tiene la naturaleza de una fuerza o energa divina. Este estudio es una investigacin delos temas relevantes que impregnaron el mundo psicolgico de Heidegger y cmo estostemas dejaron su huella tanto en su filosofa como en su versin del nazismo. Se mostrarcomo la vida y el trabajo de Heidegger fueron determinados por su bsqueda de unaidentidad individualizada a travs de su lucha contra la soledad aniquiladora.

la suite de la publication de Being and Time (1927), la conception de ltre chez Heideggera subi un processus de rification progressive, tels que le dmontrent vivement ses effortspour la matrialiser dans la sphre politique en la joignant au mouvement nazi, etventuellement, quand il a pris ses distances des nazis et quil sest retir de plus en plus danslisolement, son hypostase de ltre en quelque chose de la nature dune force ou dunenergie divine. La prsente tude est une exploration des thmes saillants qui imprgnent lemonde psychologique personnel de Heidegger et de comment ces thmes ont laiss leurempreinte la fois sur sa philosophie et sa version du nazisme. Il sera dmontr que la vie etle travail de Heidegger ont t domins par la qute dun soi individualis et ses effortsassocis pour lutter contre une solitude annihilante.

Dopo la pubblicazione di Essere e Tempo (1927), la concezione dellEssere di Heidegger subun processo di reificazione progressiva; lo si pu chiaramente notare, dapprima, neltentativo di applicarla alla sfera politica declinandola allinterno del movimento nazista, e,in seguito, una volta prese le distanze dal nazismo ed essersi ritirato sempre pi in una sortadi isolamento, nellipostatizzazione dellEssere quale forza o energia di natura divina. Ilpresente studio unindagine dei temi salienti che pervasero il mondo psicologico personaledi Heidegger e della loro influenza sulla filosofia e sulla versione del nazismo dellAutore. Sicercher di dimostrare che tanto la vita di Heidegger quanto il suo lavoro sono statidominati dalla ricerca di un senso individuale del s (individualized selfhood) unitamente allalotta contro una solitudine annichilente.

Nach der Verffentlichung von Sein und Zeit (1927) durchlief Heideggers Konzept desSeins einen Prozess der progressiven Verdinglichung, wie man deutlich an seinem Versuchsehen kann, dieses Konzept in der politischen Sphre zu materialisieren, indem er es mit derNazi Bewegung vermengte, und dann, als er sich von den Nazis distanzierte und sichzunehmend in die Isolation zurckzog, indem er Sein hypostasierte zu etwas von der Arteiner gttlichen Kraft oder Energie. Die vorliegende Studie ist eine Untersuchung derbedeutsamen Themen, die Heideggers persnliche psychische Welt durchziehen unddavon, wie diese Themen ihre Spur sowohl in seiner Philosophie als auch in seiner Versiondes Nazismus hinterlassen haben. Es wird gezeigt, dass Heideggers Leben und Werk von derSuche nach individuellem Selbstsein und dem zugehrigen Kampf gegen vernichtendeGefhle von Einsamkeit geprgt war.


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