Sartre's second century

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 29
of das Volk: "The Volk that it designates knows neither unity or disunity,
because in the transcendence of its historicising, it has always already
reached beyond the isolation of individual subjects, as well as the isolation
of an individual ethnic group." 29 When Heidegger claims that: "Authentic
Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the
subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an
existentiell modification of the 'they'—of the 'they' as an essential
existential 9 , 30 this modification of the "they" is interpreted by Phillips as
referring to "destiny". The significance of Phillips's discussion resides in
his attempt to identify destiny's defining characteristics, arguing that
Heidegger's notions of destiny and Volk are both inconsistent with the
language of the Nazi Party and ineluctably associated with it.
For Phillips, the core of Heidegger's notions of destiny and das Volk is
"decision". 31 Yet, in Phillips's analysis, ultimately nothing definite is in
place for "decision" to act upon. The core of Destiny becomes an
emphasis upon the pure uncertainty of the future and the "impenetrable
idiocy of time". 32 Phillips has outlined the growing centrality of das Volk
in Heidegger's writings and has pointed out its historical, futural/temporal
nature. In the following discussion, I shall be less concerned to agree or
disagree with Phillips's interpretation than I shall be to offer a complementary
path to understanding Heidegger's post-1930s view of history in
contrast to Sartre's.
The opening sections of Being and Time celebrate the pragmatically
oriented involvement of Dasein with the "world" understood as the totality
of instrumental complexes. Dasein is what it does. Dasein 1 s ultimate aim
in this, Heidegger tells us, is Dasein itself. Being and Time's account of
the "world" is the world of work and pragmatic instrumentality.
As early as the Basic Problems of Philosophy, written one year after
Being and Time, we see an important modification of this somewhat
earlier analysis of Dasein's relationship to the world. In Basic Problems,
worldly things are no longer viewed exclusively in terms of their
instrumentality, but are also to be understood in what I will term their
"embodied presence". Things carry a specific ontological weight as things
above and beyond their pure instrumentality. Heidegger writes: "The
characters of thingness [...] were fixed for the first time in Greek ontology
and later faded out and became formalized. [... the Greek meaning of] to
pro-duce, place-here [...] means at the same time to bring into a narrower
Heidegger's Volk, 13.
30 Being and Time, 168.
31 Heidegger's Volk, 199.
32 Ibid., 204.