Martin Heidegger was one of the most illustrious philosophers of the twentieth century, crucial in defining the cultural and philosophical position inhabited by Western civilization, whose influence has spread to many academic fields. His 1927 book Being and Time, his first major publication, broke the trend of Western philosophy that had dominated thought since Descartes. It set the tone for radically new patterns of thought in a technology-driven age in society and for the reaction to the death of God, as defined at the end of the previous century by Nietzche, in philosophy. But Martin Heidegger was also a Nazi. Although his active involvement with the regime as rector of the University of Freiburg lasted less than a year, he had been a supporter of Nazism, and continued to be, for much of his life. What reactions does this imply about his philosophy: were his politics and his philosophy concurrent with each other or were there distinct and important differences between them? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Hugo Ott, in his biography of Heidegger, subtitles one chapter "The Perpetual Advent," a phrase which also seems to perfectly sum up the character of what might be interpreted as Nazi philosophy. The Nazis attempted to convince the German population that their rise to power represented the beginning of a very different era and culture in their country. The feeling, however, was always that of being on the brink of this fundamental transformation that was miraculously happening, catapulting Germany to world domination, supported militarily by a higher culture than ever before. However, Hitler's entry into government, or rather his assumption of the office of Chancellor in January 1933, dictated as it was by the bourgeois banalities of Weimar liberalism, did not constitute this revolution. Their consolidation of power, through its various phases between 1933 and 1939, was only the preparation for this Germanic resurgence, and even the onset of World War II was only a prelude for fundamentally greater things to come. Perhaps the invasion of Russia with the conquest of Lebensraum and the conquest of the Slavic hordes should have marked the beginning of a new era, but it was here that the Nazis realized that their fate depended on much more earthly terrain. concerns of power and military strategy compared to the mystical dominion and culture of the Germanic people. There was therefore a continuing tension and feeling of anticipation in Germany, particularly among the fanatical Nazi true believers. This anticipation and the conflict between the heady rhetoric and grand designs of the Nazi worldview, and the banal everyday realities of twentieth-century Western politics, were reflected in Heidegger's philosophy, stylistically if not in some of his major theses. The search for authenticity, the need for a fundamental ontological understanding of the world, in competition with the chatter and the average everyday life of Dasein, create in Being and Time a type of typically German feeling that alludes to elitism. Heideggers (and many of the more utopian Nazis) then saw the new regime as a catalyst for the birth of a kind of higher culture. "The question is whether we want to create a spiritual world. If we cannot do this, a kind of savagery will befall us and we will reach the end as a historical people." (From a lecture entitled "The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy", in H. Sluga, Heideggers Crisis, Harvard University Press, 1993 p. 3) This appears to be a highly civilized, optimistic, almost Nietzchian view of the benefits of Nazism in Germany,which was, however, in total contradiction to the reality of the time. How could Heidegger, a brilliant intellectual, speak of the new Nazi regime as the antitheses (at least potentially) of "certain kinds of savagery", when the political unrest of the day expressed itself in mass arrests, oppression and racial violence, to the thugs of the SA in the party's dark shirt was given the legitimacy to wreak havoc across the nation? While the regime may not have yet risen to the level of mass slaughter of the war years, savage would have been an apt description of the time. Heidegger sought “discipline and education” (ibid.) in a regime characterized by confusing chaos in the streets and in government, and by ignorance and naivety in the leadership. These misconceptions were widespread; the Nazi regime was admired in England for its supposedly rigid leadership and social cohesion, which of course was the public face of a regime that in private simply eradicated the elderly, the infirm, the disabled, political dissidents and morally or racially undesirable individuals . create the illusion of a society at ease with itself. Heidegger's shortcomings in his estimate of the regime reflect Sluga's assertion that "philosophy and politics are uneasy bedfellows. Since the time of Plato, their relationship has been complex and troubled, sometimes intimate but often estranged , sometimes familiar although generally governed by mutual suspicion." (H. Sluga, Heideggers Crisis, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. vii) Heidegger however was of the opinion that his philosophy was the perfect complement to Nazi politics, being "a private supporter of Nazism from its inception... he believed that his philosophy was the spiritual parallel to Hitler's leadership. In 1933 he was appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, a position which he hoped would allow him to put his political and social views into practice. He became one of the main instigators of Nazification of German universities, encouraging students to greet him as if he himself were the Führer..." (H. Ott, Martin Heidegger, HarperCollins, 1993) However, Heidegger was not alone among philosophers in his support for the National Socialist cause. Sluga observes that "About thirty German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933; they were joined in the following years by another forty. In 1940 almost half of the German philosophers were members of the Nazi Party. Nazi values, is still a significant percentage for a profession with at least a liberal bent. While there is no reason to suppose that all philosophers would support an explicitly left-wing political position, particularly in Germany with its strong authoritarian legacy, Nazism was probably a significant proportion. inherently anti-academic, denying the freedoms that philosophers should hold dear. It was the confusion over Nazism's attitude towards philosophy in which Heidegger failed to adequately understand the regime towards which he had publicly shown his admiration and desire to work. Although he later described his association with the Nazis as a great mistake, Heidegger believed that "even in the 1950s... despite the outrages and misconceptions of the Nazis, National Socialism still had an inner truth and greatness" (L . Ferry and A. Renaut, Heidegger and modernity, University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 55) The end of the Weimar Republic and the first months of the Third Reich were characterized by great tensions and contradictions, as mentioned above, especially in the relationship between the politics and philosophy of the time. Hitler's rise to power on 30 January 1933 quickly led to various decrees aimed at minimizing opposition to the new regime. In addition to the campaignsagainst Jewish enterprises and the power of power, and the violent mass arrests of hundreds of communists, socialists and liberals, many prominent German academics were revived of their positions. It was moves like this that led to Nazism being considered intrinsically anti-philosophical, anti-social, anti-academic. Much of Nazi rhetoric, its slogans of Blood and Soil and the like, its often knee-jerk, lowest-common-denominator reactionary ideals, seemed to constitute an incomplete philosophy that in reality was anything but a coherent system or ideology. Sluga quotes Nazi historian Gerhard Lehmann from his 1943 review of the country's philosophy in the first half of this century. Lehmann mocks the pluralism of different schools of thought which, according to most philosophers, constitutes the richness and challenge of the discipline. "He attributed the situation to "a process of spiritual dissolution in the last decades before the war", which gave rise to a series of weak and unsuccessful movements marked by "the exaggeration and formlessness which are characteristic of all that is false... an abysmal intellectualism foams in glittering bubbles and accelerates the ideological disintegration of the nation." (G. Lehmann in M. Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell, 1995, p. 13) In essence therefore, at least according to this Nazi, the pursuit of the academic is fundamentally contrary to the ideals of National Socialism. Other protagonists however saw the events of 1933 as quite the opposite, the National Socialist revolution was to represent a great fusion of politics and philosophy, of popular and high culture. In the heady rhetoric of his speech. of the inauguration of the rectorate at the University of Freiberg, Heidegger says: "...if we submit to the distant command of the beginning, science must become the fundamental event of our spiritual being as part of a people in which science is understood ". the Germanic sense, which embraces not only chemistry, biology, physics, etc. as in English, but academic research in general. Philosophy therefore, a science to which Heidegger refers, must take root in society, in the people, if the German revolution (as its supporters called it) wanted to achieve its objectives. This speech for his rectorship marks in some ways a significant change from Heidegger's Being and Time, and raises contradictions and questions about the connection between his philosophy and the political ideas of the Rektorarsrede. Heidegger uses the term spirit abundantly (Geist in German), a term foreign to the vocabulary of Being and Time and in a certain sense foreign to the main theses of the book. The radically anti-Cartesian books address the phenomenology of Heidegger's first mentor, Husserl, who also owes much to ancient Greek philosophy, taking as their basis the assertion that the essence of Daseins (Heidegger's term vaguely meaning humanity, that which makes all human beings human) lies in its existence. Our Being-in-the-world is the a priori condition from which every other interpretation must arise. The spirit, a concept unusually full of connotations for Heidegger, on first reading betrays the philosophy of Being and Time. Heidegger defines spirit in his speech as "neither empty intelligence, nor the vague play of wit, nor the infinite drift of rational distinctions, and above all not the reason of the world; the spirit is primordially attuned, aware of the resolve towards the essence of being". It seems that Heidegger clumsily attempted to incorporate this pseudo-mystical term into his seemingly concrete-based philosophy, which abandoned metaphysics and attempted to connect on a fundamental level with the world. The inclusion of the spirit must surely distort almostcompletely Heidegger, but it could reveal the fundamental weakness of his philosophy which could make it competing with some precepts of Nazism. "Only a spiritual world gives people the certainty of greatness", so Heidegger continues to say. It seems like a typical example of arrogant Nazi rhetoric, as meaningless as it is ridiculous. However, coming from Heidegger we must delve deeper. "And the spiritual world of a people... is the force that most profoundly preserves the strengths of a people, which are tied to the land and blood..." If we understand the concept of spirit as expressed above, vague parallels begin to emerge with Being and Time. Spirit is "knowing resolve towards the essence of Being", which, in the terminology of Being and Time, is constitutive of authentic existence, an understanding of the being of Being. Authentic Being is "essentially futurist so that it is free upon his death." Authentic Being also understands its own throwability, constrained by the demands of temporality, existing beyond itself, continually anxious for the next moment Its is not yet, and, with the crucial looming nature of Death, a non-relational possibility (). which is in any case mine), i.e. that death could plausibly arrive at any moment, Dasein also exists as its end, defined in a peculiar way by the limits of its own temporal nature, but will possess in Heideggers a passionate freedom the flattery of the spirit in his political speeches, apparently synonymous with authenticity, adapted to the politics of the situation, seems like an attempt to Nazify his philosophy, which, upon deeper reflection, has more bearing on politics than previously thought. «Thus exposed to the most extreme questionability of their being (Dasein), this people wants to be a spiritual people». The German people will become great by understanding, as Being and Time encourages, the fact of Dasein as a question for itself and therefore as a fundamentally questioning animal. Heidegger, in his rectoral speech, identified Dasein as a fundamentally questioning Being, but this was far from being concomitant with Nazism, since being a National Socialist inherently meant not questioning but obeying. Here lies the mistake made by Heidegger, typical of a philosopher. Nazism was a political system based on hierarchy, fear and power. His reactionary rhetoric and idealism, which embraced very crude racism and a moral disgust for the unconventional, was an unfortunate mix of conservative antimodernism and beer hall riot converted in extraordinary social and economic circumstances into a political reality. Its ideology was vague and its practice contradictory: assigning an authentic Being towards the world, or the political expression of modernity, meant attributing to the regime much more than it deserved. Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time in other ways lent itself to Nazi Appropriation. Nazism had a particularly religious character; the adulation of God-Hitler, the demand for faith, the extreme suspicion and punishments inflicted on non-believers. Herbert Marcuse sees a similar trait in Heidegger, perhaps a product of his strict Catholic upbringing and early theological dedication. Most noticeably, Marcuse notes in Heidegger a stubborn refusal to understand the influence of the social on any particular Dasein. Despite Heidegger's insistence on Dasein as fundamentally Being – with, “Dasein is for Heidegger a sociologically and even biologically neutral category (sex differences do not exist)” (H. Marcuse, Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, Macmillan , 1988, p. 97 ) Marcuse, although deeply influenced by Heidegger in his early years, rejected the validity of Being - in -world that was "largely a phony, a false concreteness, that in reality his philosophy was just as abstract and just as removed from reality as the philosophies that at that time dominated German universities [which included] positivism." (ibid., p. 96) Could the spirit reveal in Heidegger a weakness that allows his connection with Nazism, an empty idealism wrongly interpreted as authentic Being-in-the-world? Heidegger's support for Nazism was based on his criticism of modernity, and the inability, in his opinion, of liberal-democratic countries to cope with the demands of this cultural reality. Heidegger's criticism of modernity was based on the rising dominance of technology, which amounted, for him, to a complete metaphysics, the scandal of philosophy (lack of a fundamental ontology in the West) expressed at the beginning of Being and Time, having manifested itself as scandal in politics or society. The political representation in liberal democracies of the inauthentic Being - towards technology has created a situation where "everyone is the other and no one is himself", - loss in the self on a large scale. Heidegger interpreted Nazism as having an authentic relationship with the world, whereby the world can be experienced as in itself, echoing Nietzche by admitting that the desire for power is motivated by... power itself, which Nature must be experienced as Nature, not as a means to an end. "Being and Time", in which Heidegger, describing the fall as the advent of the world of absorption [a characteristic of liberal democracies dominated by technology], says that for fallen Dasein the forest is a forest for timber, the mountain a rock quarry, the river a water force... (L. Ferry and A. Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 57) From this the affirmation that the Dasein itself in the technological age is too merely a means to an end, that Dasein is no longer characterized by its being as a matter in itself. “This question has been forgotten today,” says Heidegger in the opening lines of Being and Time. world to Nazism, however, Heidegger was making, as I have said, a fundamental misunderstanding. Nazism, for all its rhetoric, its glorification of nature interpreted by Heidegger as an authentic relationship with the world, was false, the reactionary idealism turned to the past and the brutal realities of the regime were the product of the clash between this void idealism and the technology of modernity. The Nazi regime manipulated both technology and nature to serve its earthly political ends. The Nazi use of radio and elaborate displays at party rallies was the peacetime manifestation of this; the extremes of war and the escalation of their ideology have led technology to go even beyond Heidegger's fear of modern man as the "functionary of technology", forcing large proportions of modern men, women and children to become victims of technology in the 'automated killing of extermination camps. The totalitarian state was supposed to be the political reflection of the technology that dominates modern society. It works like a machine, it would be more suitable for the machine age. The Nazi way of governing (or rather the idealized image of how it should have governed) should have overcome metaphysics, as I said before, understanding the essence of Being as existence, rather relying on abstract concepts such as democracy. Understanding technology not as a neutral, objective, metaphysical force, but as "Being itself as the essence of technology, in other words... inscribing the advent of technology in the destiny of Being, it is therefore a political system based on the Fuhrerprinzip that fits the fate where,.