Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
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32 Chapter Two<br />
world. Heidegger's identification with the Nazi Party appears to have<br />
been, at least partially, related to the aspects of his writings just discussed,<br />
beginning with Being and Time (1927) and including The Origin of the<br />
Work of Art (1935) and the important The Question Concerning<br />
Technology (1954). There is little doubt that Heidegger's alliance with the<br />
Third Reich was undertaken in part to struggle against this loss of a world<br />
in which the presence of things and the village life of the community<br />
"flowered". For Heidegger, the Third Reich seems to have represented<br />
precisely that "authentic historicity as resolute fate" mentioned in Being<br />
and Time. As noted above, a people's authentic being-with is defined as its<br />
comprehension of the importance of decision and the futural dimension<br />
of human historical time. To rejoin Phillips's analysis, rather than<br />
misunderstand themselves as a nation-state community, Heidegger's Volk<br />
experiences the decisiveness of historical existence as a form of openness<br />
to the future that precludes being identified with the empirical features of<br />
national, geographic or political characteristics. The Volk is not the nation<br />
state, but a consciousness of the non-repeatability of historical time. On<br />
Phillips's reading, Heidegger is mistaken in identifying the crisis of<br />
Germany as a sign of the decisiveness of the true Volk. National Socialism<br />
turns out to define the German people in categories that are the opposite of<br />
Heidegger's Volk. Although Heidegger was clearly tempted by National<br />
Socialism, the rootlessness of the Volk's radical openness to temporality<br />
and the future clashes with the biologism and nationalism of the Third<br />
Reich. 39<br />
A striking consequence emerges from the confluence of Heidegger's<br />
critique of the world of technology and his reflections on the nature of das<br />
Volk. The Question of Technology suggests that the modern world limits<br />
"being" to use, thereby distancing itself from the possibility of a<br />
potentially new form of poetic disclosure. As is well known, such a<br />
possibility was just what Heidegger seemed to identify with the<br />
"metaphysical" heritage of the German people. Modernity, however,<br />
seems to preclude such a possibility by being identified with the<br />
perspective of technology. At the same time, the true nature of das Volk<br />
appears to be increasingly vacuous, for as a "radical openness to the<br />
future" it appears to collapse into the tautology that the future is simply<br />
what must be awaited. As a consequence, Heidegger's later thought moves<br />
a significant distance from his earlier call for Dasein to exist authentically<br />
by resolutely taking over its heritage. The characterless nature of das Volk<br />
3 A differing view of Heidegger's conception of das Volk and its relationship to<br />
National Socialism can be found in Domenico Losurdo's Heidegger and the<br />
Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West, Chapters 2 and 3.