Alexander Duff - Heidegger and Politics_Ontology of Radical Discontent (2015)

Heidegger and Politics
In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains

Heidegger’s perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger
and Politics argues that Heidegger’s political import is forecast by fun-
damental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought.
Duff explores how in Being and Time as well as earlier and later
works, “everyday” human existence is presented both as irretriev-
ably banal but also as our only tenuous path to the deepest questions
about human life. Heidegger thus points to two irreconcilable attitudes
toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in
an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliv-
erance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is con-
ducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger’s influence tends toward
extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures
from his thought.
Alexander S. Duff was educated in the humanities and history at

Carleton University and received his Ph.D. from the Department of
Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fel-
lowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and
American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the
Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College,
and taught at Skidmore College and College of the Holy Cross. He
writes widely in the history of political philosophy, and his publica-
tions on classical, modern, and contemporary political philosophy have
appeared in both scholarly and popular publications.
Heidegger and Politics
The Ontology of Radical Discontent
ALEXANDER S. DUFF
College of the Holy Cross
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© Alexander S. Duff 2015
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First published 2015

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Duff, Alexander S. (Alexander Selkirk), 1978–
Heidegger and politics : the ontology of radical discontent / Alexander S. Duff.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 (hardback)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976 – Political and social views. I. Title.
B3279.H49D795 2015
320.092–dc23 2015016104
ISBN 978-1-107-08153-6 Hardback
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For Catherine and Michael Zuckert
One ought to state not only the truth but also the cause of the falsehood.
– Aristotle
There are two types of genius: those to whom the task of forming,
ripening, and perfecting has fallen, and others who have to become the
cause of new modes of life . . . like the Germans?
– Nietzsche
Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 1

1 What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and the Problem
of Theory 24
2 Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence 44
3 The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of Theory
from Practice 63
4 The Dictatorship of the They and the Clearing of the Everyday 91
5 Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism 119
6 Heideggerian Politics: The Past Is Not Dead, It’s Not Even Past 152
Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics 185
Bibliography 197
Index 213
vii
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank those who have been so helpful during the long prepa-
ration of this work. The support of the Earhart Foundation and the Jack Miller
Center was instrumental to the preparation of the manuscript. The University
of Notre Dame and Boston College were my intellectual homes while I pre-
pared, read, and wrote, and provided me with opportunities to present my
work to remarkably receptive and challenging groups.
I would like to thank my friends and colleagues who have assisted, one
way or another, with the preparation of this work: David Azerrad, Robert
Bartlett, Nasser Behnegar, Brian Bitar, Shilo Brooks, Andrew Butler, Rodrigo
Chacon, Jeff Church, Tom Cleveland, Robert Faulkner, Michael Gillespie,
Grayson Gilmore, Stephen Head, Matthew Holbreich, John Hungerford,
Dino Konstantos, Beth L’Arrivee, Robert L’Arrivee, Walter Nicgorski, Robert
Peckham, Danilo Petranovich, Marc Sable, Susan Shell, Ben Storey, Jenna
Storey, Brenna Strauss, and Dana Villa. I would especially like to thank Randy
Newell and Richard Velkley, whose own work on Heidegger has been inspir-
ing, and who have been particularly helpful and encouraging. My family has
been terrifically supportive: Robert and Joanne Duff, Matthias and Andrea
Borck.
I also thank Robert Dreesen and Brianda Reyes of Cambridge University
Press for guiding the manuscript through to publication, and the anonymous
readers for Cambridge University Press for their helpful suggestions.
Most of all I thank my wife, Catherine, for her help and love. Nothing good
here would have happened without her.
This work is dedicated to two of my teachers in gratitude, appreciation, and
friendship.
ix
Abbreviations
References to works of Martin Heidegger are provided parenthetically in the

text. Of these, those indicated “GA” indicate a volume of the Gesamtausgabe
included in the bibliography. Other abbreviations are included below; in the
text, they are followed by the page number, except where indicated.
BH Becoming Heidegger, ed. T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Evanston,

Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
BPP Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. R. Rojcewicz and
D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012.
BW Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, revised edition, New York: Harper
Collins, 1993.
CPE Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz
and D. Vallega-Neu, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012.
EG “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. W. McNeill in P, pp. 97–135.
FCM Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill and
N. Walker, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
HCT History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1985.
IM Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000.
KJPW “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,” trans.
J. van Buren, in P, pp. 1–38.
KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft, fourth edition,
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
N4 Nietzsche. Volume IV. Nihilism, trans. David Krell, San Francisco,
Harper & Row, 1982.
xi
newgenprepdf
xii List of Abbreviations
P Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1998.
PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. A.
Gosetti-Ferencei, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
[References in the text are followed by the German pagination from
GA 60, a slash, then the English pagination.]
PS Plato’s Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and André Schuwer,
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
S Supplements, ed. J. van Buren, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002.
SZ Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 17th edition, 1993.
[Translations in the text follow the MacQuarrie and Robinson edition
with minor changes.]
TDP Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. T. Sadler, London:
Athlone Press, 2000. [References in the text are followed by the
German pagination from GA 56/57, a slash, then the English
pagination.]
WM “What is Metaphysics?” in P, pp. 82–96.
Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge
This book began with a question and a hunch. The question was this: how is
it that Martin Heidegger has had such a peculiar and varied political influ-
ence, when his work is not evidently political, and when his own political
judgments were so noxious? Even if we discount his epoch-making influ-
ence within the academy, in virtually every discipline of the humanities and
social sciences, his practical, political influence is very striking, remarkably
widespread, highly varied, and largely unremarked: Heidegger’s thought has
inspired Iranian revolutionaries; environmentalists and Greens; dissenters
from the Cold War polarity of liberal West and communist East; and, to this
day, European fascists. This is a disparate collection of epigoni for a thinker
whose own work was never straightforwardly political and who was pub-
licly associated with the National Socialists in Germany. Such observations
provoke related questions: if Heidegger himself thought he belonged on the
right, then what to make of his influence on the left? Can we reconcile the
nonviolence, even pacifism, of certain strains of his influence with another
legacy of violence and political revolution? And what of his evident appeal
beyond the borders of the so-called West, among political movements in the
East? Finally, and most importantly, given that there is no necessary con-
nection between his political influence and his work, is there anything in
Heidegger’s thought that should invite this variety, that is friendly to this
form of transformation?
My hunch was that the contradictions and tensions exhibited in the political
opinions of those who were indebted to Heidegger’s thought in fact reflected
something true – however dimmed or darkened – about the political import of
his thinking as such. If this is the case, then for as long as Heidegger may be
read, his thought will continue to receive such political expression. Returning
to Heidegger with this varied influence in mind might help us to understand the
1
2 Heidegger and Politics
predicaments and fundamental character of politics in our time, at the dawn of

the post-Abendland age.
Heidegger presents himself as a philosopher of loss, of absence, of “radical fini-

tude” (GA 3 296; KPM 207), speaking precisely to a time of despondence and
of destitution. In a perverse and roundabout way, then, such a time is an oppor-
tune moment: moment meets philosopher. In his secret, cryptic masterpiece, the
Beiträge, he refers to such an event as a “resonating” (der Anklang), in that such
a moment should allow the thinker of such a time to speak to such a time (GA
65 107–66; CPE 85–131). He, following Nietzsche, characterizes our age as
one of nihilism. For Nietzsche, however, nihilism is a condition wherein “noth-
ing is forbidden.” Nothing is forbidden because nothing is fixed, and what has
been revered has fallen. Heidegger, by contrast, characterizes this as a nihilism
brought to light by the “abandonment of beings by Being,” that is, everything we
thought about the world and the ground of its ordering has been ripped away,
exposing an abyss where we had thought there was solid foundation. The expo-
sure of this abyss manifests itself in various ways, for Heidegger sees our time
as riven with the “phenomena of nihilism.”1 These phenomena include wars of
unprecedented destruction and titanic horror, havoc on a never-before-imagined
scale, whole populations displaced, the entire mechanism of great nations being
sent to do battle with one another, and the technological ravishing of nature.
He begins writing in the shadow of the First World War, a destruction he would
come to see as basically continuous with the Second and its aftermath in the
sundering of Germany and the beginning of the atomic arms race. The phe-
nomena of nihilism also include, however, the vast expansion of rote, mun-
dane, bourgeois tedium and crushing dreariness: mass communication, mass
transit, pseudo-education, urban business, and purportedly cultivated distrac-
tions. Heidegger develops formula for referring to these clusters of phenomena
together, both unprecedented violence and novel forms of monotony: he refers
to technology, to mechanization or machination, to “greatness” as in “bigness,”
as well as anonymity. These phenomena, he contends, cannot be viewed in iso-
lation: not just massive destruction and war, neither just bourgeois nonsense
and inanity, but both together as encompassing and constituting the whole of
human existence in our time. The phenomena of nihilism are not, then, just
open uncertainty, confusion, and wariness; the “abandonment by Being” also
fosters unseemly confidence, swaggering assertiveness, and hasty insistence. As
Heidegger understands nihilism, then, his time is our time.
1
“For whom is the resonating? And whither? The resonating of the essential occurrence of being
in the abandonment by being” (GA 65 108; CPE 85).
“The final entrenchment of the abandonment by being in the forgottenness of being. / The age
of a complete absence of questioning and an unwillingness to establish any goals. Mediocrity
as status symbol. / The resonating of the refusal – in what sort of sounding?” (GA 65 108; CPE
85–6, emphasis in the original text).
Heidegger sees his task, therefore, as exhibiting the resonance between his
thought and the impoverishment that stands behind the bluffing and postur-
ing of our age, the supposed pinnacle of a tradition that prizes wisdom.2 He
expresses this enigmatically in the Contributions:
To make appear by way of recollection the concealed power of this forgottenness as
forgottenness and to bring forth therein the resonating of being. The recognition of the
plight.
The guiding disposition of the resonating: shock and diffidence, but each arising out
of the basic disposition of restraint.
The highest plight: the plight of the lack of a sense of plight (GA 65 107; CPE 85,
emphasis in the original text).
Heidegger’s appeal is that he presents himself as a philosopher of finitude to an

age in which, because finitude is mostly forgotten, it may be rediscovered. He is
a reminder of the spirit of tragedy, appealing to both sides of the phenomena of
nihilism. To the war-making, destructive side of contemporary life, his philos-
ophy speaks to the urgent, serious confrontation with destruction and death.
To the bored, tranquilized side, his philosophy resonates with the experienced
meaninglessness of existence announced in boredom and drudgery. To both, it
speaks to a certain contempt for the other side. Heidegger, therefore, can be the
thinker both of stormtroopers and the faculty lounge, of Leni Riefenstahl as
well as Terrence Malick.
Heidegger speaks of finitude in a broad way. It does not simply refer to our
awareness of our mortality or our facing up to death, although that is implied
in the term. Finitude so understood only looks forward into the future and sees
that we are eminently perishable, and that all of our loves, the objects of our
desires, and the promises of permanence that we encounter are only ever prop-
erly grasped through the most certain aspect of our existence: that we will die.
However, Heidegger observes another side of our finitude, our “thrownness.”
We did not choose to be born, choose where or when we would exist as who
we are. We are thrown into existence, into being rather than not-being, and are
given all sorts of “baggage”: people to whom we are related, a community to
which we belong, and a history to which we are submitted. Reason and the life
according to reason are situated in one sense among the practical things we
use and have “handy,” but are more profoundly situated into a whole world
2
Hardt and Negri position Heidegger as a thinker who fails to grasp “poverty” in its most real
iteration, namely, economic deprival. They refer to Heidegger’s 1945 lecture, “Die Armut,” as,
“one pinnacle (or nadir) of the ideological effort to cancel the power of the poor through mys-
tification” (Hardt and Negri 2011, 46). Their position assimilates some of the substance of the
Frankfurt School criticism of Heidegger to the premises of a Derridean appeal on behalf of
global democracy or, as they style it in their appropriation from Spinoza, the “multitude.” For a
recent appropriation of Heidegger for the sake of a new left-wing political economy, see Vattimo
and Zabala 2011.
that we have been thrown into witlessly. To stress our finitude in this fashion
makes Heidegger, by his own lights, “countercultural.” Heidegger thus stands
in a rather aggravated posture toward the civilization of the Enlightenment,
wherein the entire spectrum of human science has been harnessed for the bet-
terment and improvement of humans, “empowering” them and relieving their
otherwise troubled estate. Heidegger in effect testifies to the limits and even the
impossibility of this project’s success.
Tragedy is not meant to be the final word, however. If Heidegger evokes
the spirit of destruction and loss that prevailed, first in the trenches during
the war, then in the capitulation and humiliation of the country in 1919
and the years that followed, he also gives expression to a recollection of unity
and wholeness that persevered through these trauma, which recollection is
itself, he would have it, the surest testimony to its truth and future possibility.
As noxious as the word has become, his allusion to the Volksgemeinschaft in
Being and Time, was meant to summon up the spirit of classless, divisionless
unity, a kind of post-political purity that prevailed at precisely the darkest
times of the war.3 That the time of destitution may achieve a resonance first
in the thought and expression of Heidegger renders it no longer strictly abys-
mal. Heidegger presents the confrontation with nothingness as an event of
unmatched promise, and therefore the time of nihilism as, perversely, a pre-
carious but possibly liberating epoch.4 He quotes Hölderlin to this effect in his
essay on technology: “Yet where the danger is, the saving power also grows.”5
For example, in our time, when nihilism and everydayness are ascendant, we
are given to understand precisely that the tradition of philosophy in the West
has been nihilistic.6 The occlusion of Being by the now global dominion of
the Western tradition of metaphysics is discovered as an event, an event of
unmatched promise.
3
On the meaning of this term prior to the Nazis assumption of power, consult Peter Fritzsche
2009, 38–55.
4
Heidegger on the promise of confronting the nothing: “This nothingness is not the occasion for
pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity
takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man
back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses
the work of the spirit” (GA 3 291–2; KPM 204).
5
See Iain Thomson’s provocative meditation on this point in Heidegger (Thomson 2009). Jerry
Weinberger’s discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the problem of technology is uniquely atten-
tive to this underappreciated element of Heidegger’s thought: the present “dark night of the
world” is deeply promising; it “tells us that it is a ‘danger that saves’ ” (Weinberger 1992, 113;
quoting BW 340).
6
The American Southern writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy both refer in their work
to their characters’ experience of the suffocating dreariness of “everydayness.” These writers give
a Christian sense of hope pervading the rot that Heidegger brings to light, an inflection that it
would be mistaken to assign to Heidegger. On Percy and O’Connor’s relation to Heidegger and
Nietzsche, see the most lucid study by Ralph C. Wood (2004).
Objections to Reading Heidegger

Two serious objections, however, immediately present themselves if we turn
to Heidegger to understand the challenges of contemporary political life. The
first of these is moral: why should we concern ourselves with the judgment of
someone who revealed the extent of his political sense and humanity by siding
with the National Socialists in the German Revolution in 1933 and then, what
some regard as even more reprehensible, who never recanted or apologized for
the support he gave to the regime?7 The second objection is more strictly intel-
lectual: Heidegger has no comment to offer on political life; he is an ontologist,
a historian of philosophy, perhaps a dabbler in logic or epistemology; he is a
ceaselessly abstract thinker, with nothing to say directly or of importance about
politics.
To the first objection, I express some sympathy. My initial interest in Heidegger
was not friendly, certainly not in the normal sense of that word. I consider his
involvement with Nazism to be a reasonable and, perhaps more importantly for
some readers, authentic expression of his thinking.8 At the very least, it cannot
7
On the latter point, see Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; and Lang 1996. The recent publication of
Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (as GA 94–6) has only confirmed what was long known about
Heidegger’ anti-Semitism.
8
There is, as one would expect, quite a lot of literature on this. I mention only a few high
points. Zuckert 1990 is the indispensible conspectus of the matter. She responds to the failure of
Heidegger’s critics to explain how he, who declined to refer to nature as a standard in politics,
would support a regime that placed so much emphasis on biology and race. She locates the con-
fluence of Heidegger’s philosophy and the ideology of the regime in his lectures on Hölderlin,
exploring political themes of fatherland and, above all, language. Thomson 2005a surveys the
scholarly literature on the matter with great perspicuity and clarity and argues that, when we
see that Heidegger understood his political involvement as an auxiliary of his approach to uni-
versity reform, we can also see that he, in effect, learned from his failure with the Nazis and so
revised his approach to the relationship between philosophy and education. If one wishes to
see “philosophy free itself from the work of Heidegger” (Faye 2009, 316), whatever that might
entail, then a genuinely philosophical, rather than philological-biographical, labor is required.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s remark about a previous generation’s Heidegger scandals still applies: “The
work of the historians has in fact hardly begun. I doubt, however, that it will be able to con-
tribute anything really decisive: it is not in Heidegger’s minor (or major) compromises, nor even
in his declarations and proclamations of 1933 to 1934, that the crux of the matter is located”
(Lacoue-Laberthe 1990, 39 n.1). The work of Gregory Fried and Richard Polt provides perhaps
the soundest general guide to and scholarly treatment of this topic. See Fried 2000, but for a
discussion of the most recent controversies, the latest preface to their translation of Introduction
to Metaphysics is helpful (Heidegger 2014).
In my view, the matter is clouded by a few misconceptions of the attraction that National
Socialism held for Heidegger. The first is the view that he would support the National Socialist
revolution out of an “aristocratic authoritarianism” (Rockmore 1992, 72) or a kind of
“racial-biological chauvinism” (Dallmayr 1993, 152). As I will try to show in the balance of this
book, Heidegger saw the revolution as one of the outcast versus the privileged. The second mis-
conception sees National Socialism as a principally “conservative” movement. Its core appeal
among the dispossessed marks it as a movement of transformation, not of conservation. The
Nazis did not represent, in either their personnel or their doctrine, the “nobility, the agrarian
be written off as a personal quirk or a temporary stage in his thinking that need
not therefore be taken seriously.9 At the same time, it can hardly be denied that
his intellectual influence has provoked some of the most refreshing attempts to
rethink the very tradition that he diagnoses as nihilistic through and through, and
to respond to the political challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.10
It seems hasty, therefore, to suggest that his Nazism is coextensive with the polit-
ical importance of his work, not least for the further reason that he remained not
altogether satisfied with the character of that movement.11 What is more, if the
political import of his thought reduces, one way or another, to his support for
the NSDAP, he poses no serious challenge to the broad political and philosophic
positions that constitute the basic tenets of Western civilization.12 If Heidegger
is fundamentally indistinguishable from any of the semiphilosophical ideologues
who propped up a temporarily threatening, revanchist regime, then what serious
reason do we have to trouble ourselves with what he thinks about anything?
Dismissing Heidegger by reducing his thought to his political biography lets us
landowners, the military, the church, and the old educated and propertied upper class” (Stern
1999, 161). Whatever his preferences for agrarianism, Heidegger was not a “conservative” as
that term was understood in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. As Hans Sluga has helpfully
demonstrated, there were strong and broad conservative tendencies in German universities, par-
ticularly in the philosophy faculties, but Heidegger did not share in them and regarded them
as impediments to the ontological revolution he envisioned for German Bildung (Sluga 1993).
Harry Neumann’s analysis of the matter is most helpful:
Only real nazism is sufficiently courageous to incorporate the apolitical or anti-political thrust
of science or global technology. As such it has nothing but contempt for all values (any notion
of good and bad, right and wrong, true and false) or wholes or universals (anything political,
anything common or communicable). Since politics always is concerned with such things, true
nazis are radically apolitical . . . science is the simple realization that whatever is experienced –
a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god or anything else – is nothing apart from its
being experienced. . . . It is unscientific illusion to believe that any thoughts or words, “scientific”
or unscientific theories, are anything more than empty experiences, empty because nothing –
including “experience” – is definable or limited by anything. . . . The reality revealed by science
consists quite literally of nothing, of empty, interchangeable nothings. . . . Nothing – and only
nothing – exists in nazism’s scientific reality. Nazism’s will asserts itself in the face of its own
nothingness (Neumann 1985, 226–7, 29; quoted in Ward 1995, 270 n. 11).
9
Gadamer notes of claims that Heidegger’s “political errors have nothing to do with his philos-
ophy” that “wholly unnoticed was how damaging such a ‘defense’ of so important a thinker
really is” (Gadamer 1989, 428; quoted in Thomson 2005a, 33).
10
One need only mention the names of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans
Jonas, and Karl Löwith. If one looks beyond political thought, for example – to philosophy
more narrowly defined, theology, psychology, or anthropology – the extent of Heidegger’s influ-
ence is virtually unfathomable.
11
It is difficult to disentangle Heidegger’s mendacity from genuine disaffection. As Richard Velkley
notes, though, with characteristic penetration, “Heidegger never anywhere suggests that another
regime or movement, actual or possible, had the possibility for . . . direction from the ‘competent
forces’ ” (Velkley 2011, 85).
12
This, I think, constitutes the most serious objection to Emmanuel Faye’s recent work (Faye
2009, 2012) on Heidegger. The objection applies similarly to Fritsche 1999.
off the hook for rethinking the premises of our own political arrangements and
the extent to which they may be implicated by his broadly critical assessment of
the nihilism of Western civilization and philosophy.
Heideggerian Political Legacies

As an inoculation against the error of thinking that Heidegger’s political import
is coextensive with his Nazism, it is helpful to consider briefly the political
life of his work beyond this episode. In contrast to his influence in academic
precincts, his political influence is generally underappreciated, but in drawing
attention to it, I do not mean to exaggerate its importance for interpreting
Heidegger. Four areas of influence deserve some comment: his influence among
Iranian revolutionaries, among environmentalists and Greens, among Cold
War dissidents, and among contemporary fascists. Here I stress their points of
continuity, but one should note their evident diversity and differences from one
another. What is more, none of them is a straight Heideggerian in any sense,
but evidently mix Heidegger with other elements.
Several of the intellectual architects and principal ideologues of the Iranian
Revolution were formed by their understanding of Heidegger, drawing on his
thought in their diagnosis of the toxicity of Western civilization, the possibility
of a future-oriented revolution that would repeat something of a lost Islamic
past, and the notion of a recurrent fall necessitating a permanent revolution.
Ali Shari’ati, an influential pre-revolutionary thinker, broke with the tradition-
alist, conservative clerisy by advocating a reinterpretation of the tenets of Shi’ia
Islam that stressed radical freedom as achieved through a futural projection of
social justice that retrieves and reforms, in a spirit of radical freedom, the truth
of Islam.13 He saw this proposed revolution as an alternative to Marxist com-
munism that likewise drew its support from the lower classes. The essence of
Shi’ism is its saying “no” to the established religious and political order for the
sake of justice and truth. As he conceived of it, “Red Shi’ism changes to black
Shi’ism,” a dynamic that he referred to as a permanent revolution. By this he
meant that the locus of social justice and martyrdom shifts as it makes revolu-
tionary claims upon the established order, which as established is never capable
of expressing them adequately and then tends itself to ossify into structures
of oppression. In the process, a new body of the oppressed emerges to make
claims of exclusion upon the new ruling element.14
Ahmad Fardid, teaching at the University of Tehran in the period of the revo-
lution, was even more explicit in his recurrence to Heidegger. In a 1979 lecture
course, called “The Divine Encounter and Illuminations at the End of Time,”
13
On Shari’ati’s relationship to Heidegger, see Mirsepassi 2000, 96–128, 146–55. On his intellec-
tual development generally, see Rahnema 2000.
14
See Ali Shari’ati’s essay, “Red Shi ‘ism vs. Black Shi ‘ism,” at http://www.iranchamber.com/
personalities/ashariati/works/red_black_shiism.php. Retrieved August 2013.
Fardid identifies “Westoxication” (Gharbzadegi – “Weststruckness”),15 which

began with Greek rationality and accelerated in the period of the Renaissance,
as the chief enemy of the Islamic spirit of the Iranian Revolution: “The total-
ity of the post-Renaissance world has fallen completely; the exception was
Heidegger, who diagnosed the problem” (Rajaee 2007, 183). In the world of
“complete darkness,” only the Iranian Revolution, the thought of Heidegger,
and the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini represent a brief moment of pos-
sibility. He feared, however, that Weststruckness would undermine the Iranian
Revolution: “Wherever I see a lack of angered fists and the prevalence of com-
promise, I will be disappointed. . . . I believe in permanent revolution, and today
I am very frightened that the revolution may be undermined and the bourgeoi-
sie will take over” (182, 184). A “permanent revolution” is required to prevent
conservative, counterrevolutionary elements in society from returning Iran to
the Westernized culture of the “modern cave” of “self-founded nihilism” (182).
Fardid’s student, Davari, polemicizes to this day against the reforming, mod-
erating, and modernizing impulses of Soroush and other rationalism-favoring
reformers in terms that also invoke Heidegger: Martin Heidegger, he insists,
can help Iranians understand the “inner essence” of “the prison of the West”
(188–9).16
Heidegger’s influence among Greens and environmentalists draws on dif-
ferent elements of his thought. The Green movement that has developed in
the Western world since the 1970s, in particular that wing of it referred to as
espousing “deep ecology,” is closely tied to Heideggerian notions of the nihil-
ism of rationalist, technological civilization. Beginning with Arnold Naess,
“deep ecology” rejects a human-centered understanding of “shallow envi-
ronmentalism” as utilitarian and essentially selfish, and instead adheres to a
vision of nature wherein there is no hierarchy among the beings, each life form
being connected to every other in a non-dominating process of emergence and
decay.17 In an influential codification of the tenets of deep ecology, Devall and
Sessions identify three distinct contributions that Heidegger made to the intel-
lectual development of deep ecology: they write that Heidegger (1) supplied
for deep ecology a certain intellectual and historical ballast, linking the critique
of the domination of nature to the tendencies of Western philosophy “since
Plato.” He also (2) urged a form of thinking that was more “Taoist” rather than
analytical, and (3) enjoined a form of authentic dwelling on the Earth, “parallel
15
The term Gharbzadeghi can be translated “Westoxication,” “Occidentosis,” or “Westruckness.”
It appears to have been coined by Ahmad Fardid, who did not write, but was popularized by the
journalist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (Al Ahmad 1982).
16
Soroush has been explicitly critical of the intellectual influence of Heidegger on the Iranian right
(Soroush 2006). On Heidegger’s influence on Iranian intellectual life generally, see the extremely
valuable chapter in Mirsepassi 2010, 85–128.
17
See Naess 1973. The locus classicus of the Green Heidegger is Zimmerman 1990; see also 1994,
2005; Thiele 1995, 1999; and Jonas 1984.
to our call to dwell in our bioregion . . . with alertness to the natural processes”
(Devall and Sessions [1985] 2001, 98).
Heidegger has also had a certain influence among prominent dissenters from
the polarity of the Cold War – the Canadian pacifist George Grant, and the
Czech dissident Vaclav Havel – seeking a viable alternative to Soviet collectiv-
ism and American capitalism. These dissidents echoed Heidegger’s insistence
that the United States and USSR were “metaphysically identical.” In the case
of Grant, he hoped that after a period of scourging – when formerly indepen-
dent nations such as Canada had succumbed to the “technological dynamo” of
the “spearhead of liberalism,” the United States – the Christian church could
reemerge as a promised source for human community.18 Similarly, Havel wrote
movingly of the possibility that the “powerless” might “live in the truth” in
defiance of the totalizing oppression of the Soviet satellite system. After the col-
lapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, he also spoke in the West about
the fundamentally similar approach to governing in the West on rationalist,
technological assumptions about the world:
The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different
forms, that the world – and Being as such – is a wholly knowable system governed by
a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own
benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment
to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the industrial revolution to the infor-
mation revolution, was characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking.
This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that
exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that
exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which
there was a cult of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was
amassed and technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered
by the scientific method. It was an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms, and statisti-
cal averages. It was an era of freely transferable, existentially ungrounded information.
It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era where the goal
was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its pros-
perity (Havel 1992).19
The decay of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and political lib-
eration has produced – in both the Soviet and Western blocs – a desiccated
18
George Grant’s “Heideggerianism” is most in play in his Technology and Empire and Technology
and Justice (Grant 1969, 1986), but on Grant as offering a Platonic “rejoinder” to Heidegger, see
Angus 1987.
19
This quotation is from a 1992 address to the World Economic Forum (http://www
.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Havel.htm, retrieved August 9, 2012). See
with it Howard 2011 and Havel’s Letters to Olga (Havel 1989); “Power to the Powerless” (Havel
1985, 10–59); “Living in Truth” (Havel 1990). Havel’s encounter with Heidegger was mediated
by the great Czech phenomenologist and moral philosopher Jan Patocka; for the latter’s critique
of Heidegger, see Patocka 1998. On Havel’s reading of Heidegger, see Pontuso 2004, 20–43.
husk of technological rationality, a mode of relating to the world that tran-

scends the merely political differences of regime.
In addition to these nonviolent dissenters, Heidegger continues to
be influential among fascists – themselves, in a way, likewise convinced
of the interchangeability of communism and liberalism as obstacles to
“metapolitics” – in particular in their attempts to distinguish their politics from
“traditionalism” or the taint of “conservatism.”20 Aleksandr Dugin is perhaps
most remarkable of these figures. He is a Russian advocate for a “Eurasian”
counterpole to Atlanticist, Anglo-Saxon liberalism, an imperialism premised
on “Dasein” and “Ereignis,” the event of being that emerges from the world
midnight of globalization.21
It would be easy to overstate the hermeneutical foothold that these various
political stances and movements could afford in our attempt to understand
Heidegger. But on the evidence of these political connections, I hazard two
provisional claims. First, Heidegger has a certain importance for thinking at
the margins of the Western project – legalistic, secular, technological, capitalist,
socialist, or rationalist – where resistance to this imperative seeks some form
of “intellectual” support or guidance, be it in Iran, in the shadow of Soviet
occupation of Eastern Europe, in the immediate proximity of the “dynamo”
of the American “technological empire,” amid traditional communities around
the globe, or at the level of local and ecological concerns within the borders of
the West. These political movements are unified by a diagnosis of the totaliz-
ing character of rationalist structures – be these bureaucratic, for example, or
technological – which are expressed in the subordination and suppression of
nature, but especially human nature or humanity. The homogenizing impulse
of this universalizing dynamo of the West extirpates anything local, partic-
ular, distinctly individualized, “nonstandard,” or unique in the erection of a
stultifying edifice of scientific control. Second, Heideggerian politics, in addi-
tion to being unified in what it rejects, may permit of exceptional variety as
expressed in the different positive claims made by the figures of these move-
ments: some recur to a particular religion, history, or language; some invoke
“nature,” understood in a very particular, “non-Western” way (i.e., not in the
20
On Heidegger’s influence among fascists, see the very helpful article by Feldman, “Between
‘Geist’ and ‘Zeitgeist’: Martin Heidegger as Ideologue of Metapolitical Fascism,” where he
assimilates Heidegger to early twentieth-century fascist ideologies (a point from which I express
some dissent in the notes to Chapter 1), but then shows his influence on Pierre Krebs and Alain
de Benoist (Feldman 2005). See also the discussion by Graham Parkes (2009) of Heidegger’s
conjectured influence on Japanese fascism. Victor Farias’s recent study Farias 2010 traces
Heidegger’s influence among these diverse groups in considerable detail, even adducing a fascis-
tic Latin American connection.
21
Dugin himself disputes whether his “national bolshevism,” which looks for the “revolution in
archaic values,” can be characterized as fascist. For Dugin’s recurrence to Heidegger as sup-
plying an intellectual ballast for the “Fourth Political Theory,” the successor to the three failed
political theories of liberalism, communism, and fascism, see his The Fourth Political Theory
(Dugin 2012).
Platonic, Aristotelian, Hobbesian, or Rousseauan way); some refer to “truth,”

as in “living in the truth.” Just as striking as the unlooked-for similarity among
these movements in their broad agreement about what they reject is the incom-
mensurable diversity of their positive claims.
The Ambiguous Place of Politics in Heidegger

In response to the second objection to studying Heidegger – the claim that he
has precious little to say about politics – I insist that this misunderstands the
breadth and profundity of Heidegger’s project. The standing of “the political”
is nonetheless ambiguous in Heidegger.22 One looks in vain for Heidegger’s
Res Publica, his Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City, or Spirit of the
Laws. It is not an objection to this point, but a confirmation of it, to notice that
Heidegger has rather a lot to say about politics and the polis in his Introduction
to Metaphysics. In a similar vein, the course where he is most open about the
political resonances of his work is entitled “Logic” (GA 38). But for a phi-
losopher of sufficient stature, that is, one who purports to comment on every-
thing and the ground of everything, some bearing and therefore at a minimum
implicit comment on politics is entailed.
The point can be sharpened for Heidegger in particular. It is the purpose
of phenomenology to repair the breach left by the erection of the natural sci-
ences and their establishment as the dominant paradigm of knowledge, and
their original derivation from a more primordial “life-world,” in Husserl’s later
phrase of the 1930s, whence the subject matters of the different branches of
science are more organically interwoven with the lives lived by human beings.
The distinctions we accept among epistemology, philosophy of mind, anthro-
pology, biology, and political science are artifacts. In Heidegger’s reformulation
of the problem, the development of the sciences has itself proceeded histori-
cally, resulting in a “cultivated” society in which culture and philosophy itself
are so far removed from grasping the fundamental matters that to abide by
the available distinctions among culture, politics, anthropology, and other dis-
ciplines is to fail to question deeply enough. Such a formulation of the matter
will never lead to any real understanding.23 As we shall see presently, Heidegger
understands the distinction between theory and practice to be a false, or at
least arbitrary, distinction and therefore occlusive of the more primordial unity
of “thinking.”24 In other words, Heidegger’s usual refusal to speak of politics
22
On Heidegger as a thinker of “the political,” see Strong 2012, 263–324.
23
As we shall see in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, Heidegger’s dissent from these formulations
is so radical as even to refuse the merit of the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, a stan-
dard reference point for so many of his conservative revolutionary contemporaries, and indeed
for European philosophy since Rousseau. For an extremely insightful discussion of this matter,
see Velkley 2002, 11–48.
24
As students of Heidegger will already appreciate, the specific designation “thinking” enters
Heidegger’s lexicon later. There are occasionally important distinctions to be made among
as a subject proves to be central to his political import: in Heidegger, the most

essential distinction between theory and practice is deconstructed, leaving all
of the traditional barriers that hove off theory from practical, political import
in shambles.
The disassembly of the distinction between theory and practice surely has
some “practical” result. For Heidegger, this distinction obscured our access to
the most fundamental phenomenon, namely, Being. Disassembling it, therefore,
has the merit of freeing us to confront the question of Being, hence “ontology”
and fundamental ontology. To understand Heideggerian politics, therefore, it
is necessary to see how the question of Being relates to political life. Heidegger
understands politics and culture as epiphenomena that are determined by our
deeper shared understandings of what it means to be, or Being. Thus, through-
out the convulsive political events that rent the Western world in the t wentieth
century, Heidegger maintained that the source of our terrible political condi-
tion was our impoverished understanding of “Being.” The “forgetfulness of
Being,” as he terms it – a forgetfulness that dates from the original prejudice
for theoretical philosophy among the Greeks – is the source of the widespread
alienation, crass materialism, and ubiquitous technological destruction that
characterizes our age. This forgetfulness underlies every cultural form and
every political institution, and moreover it informs every currently envisioned
aspiration for social reform. Because the forgetfulness of Being characterizes
not merely our actions, but also our thoughts, every “traditional” category or
concept of political philosophy is, on Heidegger’s terms, inadequate for con-
fronting the political problems of our times. Ethics; natural law; the typology
of regimes and the best regime; rights; social contracts of any description; util-
itarian calculations; categorical imperatives; deliberation concerning the just,
noble, and good: none of these trite formulations can confront the required
rethinking of the question of Being. Without rethinking the meaning of Being,
it will be impossible to free ourselves from the awful mixture of tedium and
horror that constitutes contemporary political life. There is no political solu-
tion to our political problems; for Heidegger, every possibility of beginning
again depends on thinking anew the meaning of Being.
The Challenge of Heidegger

What, then, is the challenge posed by Heideggerian thought and its atten-
dant political ambiguity to the premises of Western civilization? What are
these premises? Stated with a measure of generality, they are that our rational
capacities may be fulfilled in harmony with our practical and collective lives.
thinking, philosophy, metaphysics, phenomenology, and terms Heidegger will employ to refer
to both his own activity and that to which he is referring as the fulfillment of human Dasein.
In the present study, these distinctions are not central, and I will generally refer to philosophy,
thinking, and phenomenology as like matters; when necessary, I will note his varying use of the
term “metaphysics” and make appropriate adjustments to my own usage.
Whatever the tensions between them, our moral, practical, and theoretical
capacities exist in a fruitful rather than purely destructive tension with one
another. In both ancient and modern approaches to the relationship among
morality, theory, and practice, the fundamental strata of reality (characterized
as Being or nature) fundamentally favor such a coordination. In his fashion of
cruelly summarizing great, sweeping historical movements of thought in one
pithy formulation, Nietzsche referred to this hypothesis as “optimism.”25 In its
latest iteration, such optimism favors scientific rationalism, the technological
mastery of nature, an expansionist economy, the rule of law as understood in
the service of individual and group rights, and religion “within the limits” of
reason or possibly none at all. This sketch suppresses internal tensions of con-
siderable profundity, for at its core this civilizational conglomerate is meant to
include a large measure of self-critique. Nonetheless, it is precisely this civili-
zational conglomerate (“metaphysics”) that Heidegger, following Nietzsche,
diagnoses as nihilistic and therefore points us toward surpassing. As this civi-
lization spreads across the globe – whether as a pestilence, as a triumph of
humanity, or as a conquering empire – it meets resistance from within its own
25
Nietzsche faced Socrates as “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history”
within the context of his concern with “the science of aesthetics.” This science as he understood
it is both metaphysical and physiologic-psychological; it is “natural science”; according to the
suggestions of Beyond Good and Evil, it belongs to the context of a historical physiopsychology.
Nietzsche’s concern is not merely theoretical; he is concerned with the future of Germany of the
future of Europe – a human future that must surpass the highest that man has ever achieved
before. . . . Socrates is the first theoretical man, the incarnation of the spirit of science, radically
unartistic or a-music: “In the person of Socrates the belief in the comprehensibility of nature
and in the universal healing power of knowledge has first come to light.” He is the prototype of
the rationalist and therefore of the optimist, for optimism is not merely the belief that the world
is the best possible world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imagin-
able worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best possible world can be rendered harmless
by knowledge: thinking can not only fully understand being, but can even correct it; life can be
guided by science; the living gods of myth can be replaced by a deus ex machina, i.e., the forces
of nature as known and used in the service of “higher egoism.” Rationalism is optimism, since it
is the belief that reason’s power is unlimited and essentially beneficent or that science can solve
all riddles and loosen all chains. Rationalism is optimism, since the belief in causes depends on
the belief in ends, or since rationalism presupposes the belief in the initial or final supremacy of
the good. The full and ultimate consequences of the change effected or represented by Socrates
appear only in the contemporary West: in the belief in universal enlightenment and therewith
in the earthly happiness of all within a universal state, in utilitarianism, liberalism, democracy,
pacifism, and socialism. Both these consequences and the insight into the essential limitation of
science have shaken “Socratic culture” to its foundation: “The time of Socratic man has gone.”
There is then hope for a future beyond the peak of pre-Socratic culture, for a philosophy of
the future that is no longer merely theoretical, but knowingly based on acts of the will or on
decisions, and for a new kind of politics that includes as a matter of course the merciless anni-
hilation of everything degenerating and parasitical.” Nietzsche himself has said that in order to
understand a philosopher one acts soundly by first raising the question of the moral or political
meaning of his metaphysical assertions. Hence it would seem that his attack on Socrates must
be understood primarily as a political attack (Strauss 1966, 7).
borders as well as from without, and the thought of Martin Heidegger gives
succor and nourishment to protest, dissent, and refusal.26
Heidegger does not merely follow Nietzsche in his diagnosis; he means
to surpass and correct even Nietzsche’s understanding of the nihilism of the
West, because even Nietzsche’s protest remains “moral” and thus, incipi-
ently, “theoretical.”27 That is, Nietzsche, like Socrates before him, initiated a
moral-political investigation and formulated “physiopsychological” doctrines
on its basis, one that already presumes an understanding of Being (as pres-
ence). Heidegger quarrels with Nietzsche in the following way: it is not the
moralism of the “Socratic culture” that forms the basis of Western civilization,
but the theoretical pretensions of that culture that are the source of nihilism.
Heidegger’s challenge thus targets the rationalist claims at the heart of the clus-
ter of ways of life that makes up Western civilization, “Socratic” civilization.
Both Socrates and Heidegger are distinguished by the priority they give to
questions rather than answers; each is aporetic. But Heidegger stands after
the tradition inaugurated by Socrates. With Socrates, two distinguishable
approaches to thinking are combined: his characteristic question, What is it?
and the interrogation of the moral and political principles of human life, the
just, noble, and good. With the latter, philosophy was called down from the
heavens into the homes and hearths of the cities, initiating what Leo Strauss
came to refer to as “political philosophy.”28 According to Heidegger’s diagnosis,
however, such philosophy, which is inescapably oriented by the beings, is inher-
ently metaphysical – all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – and
26
The premises are what Nietzsche identified as “optimism” – the presumption that theory and
practice may be coordinated, and that practice is amenable to correction or improvement by
theory. As premises, these transcend the distinction between ancient and modern approaches to
thinking about politics, inasmuch as this quarrel takes place on the basis of the assumption that
practice may be ameliorated. Heidegger stands largely outside of these two approaches, then,
though he shares – as I will discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 – elements of each.
27
Valuing as such, even following the revaluation of values, entails an orientation by beings, in this
case the value that is the standard for evaluating whether life is enhanced or not. By so privileg-
ing beings, according to Heidegger, the will to power is still incipiently ontotheological and thus
fails to overcome nihilism (see especially “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead,” GA 5, 209–67;
Heidegger 2002c, 158–99).
28
This is not Heidegger’s own characterization of Socrates. In Was Heisst Denken? Heidegger
remarks that Socrates is the “purest” thinker in the West, because he wrote nothing (Heidegger
1976, 17). In his course on the “Essence of Human Freedom,” Heidegger praises the Socratic
investigation, “What is knowledge,” for in this question, man “places himself in question.
Such questioning brings man himself before new possibilities. The apparently innocuous
what-question is revealed as an attack by man on his own self, on his proximal persistence in
the usual and common, on his forgetting of first principles. It is an attack by man on what he
proximally believes himself to know, and at the same time it is a determining intervention in
what he himself can be, in what he wants to be or wants not to be” (Heidegger 2002d, 114).
Socrates is the initiator of the “What is it?” question, which is reformulated by Aristotle as the
guiding question of metaphysics, “What is the being?”; in this respect, Socrates stands at the
beginning of the Western tradition of metaphysics. On the intellectual relationship between
Strauss and Heidegger, see Velkley 2011; Zuckert 1996.
hence obscures a more primordial openness to the question of Being itself. To

repeat: the problem is not merely the “answers” or the tradition that Socrates
initiated; the problem is more fundamental in that the Socratic questions them-
selves delineate what will suffice as answers to them.29 As Heidegger might
characterize it, the Socratic approach presupposes that the question, “What
is justice?” may be adequately answered with a presupposed understanding
of the meaning of is; it presumes that the question, “What is virtue?” may be
answered with the available understanding of is implied by the question. The
debate that follows in response to such questions – for example, whether virtue
is or is not knowledge, or self-same, or one or many, among other p ossibilities –
overlooks that the debate takes place within a shared understanding of the
meaning of Being. This shared understanding is that Being means presence,
that to be means to be something, and that answers to questions of the “What
is it” variety ought not to be self-contradictory.30 The question of Being and
Time, a question indeed pursued through much of Heidegger’s oeuvre, is
whether or not presence is an adequate conception of the meaning of Being, or
whether presence actually hides the fact that Being happens within the horizon
of time.31 Identifying Being with presence, then, or with permanent presence,
that is, eternity, flattens and renders static an approach to time that is properly
more dynamic. Answering “what is” questions on the basis of such an attenu-
ated approach vastly circumscribes and restricts the possibilities for human
life, possibilities to which we could otherwise be open.
This is not, of course, perfectly fair to Socrates. Investigating such questions
as “What is justice?” and “What is virtue?” led to Socrates’ own hypothe-
ses about the meaning of Being.32 Heidegger’s point, however, is that the very
29
Heidegger: “Every question specifies as a question the breadth and nature of the answer it
is looking for. At the same time it circumscribes the range of possibilities for answering”
(GA 6.2 344; N4 206).
30
Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: “The essence of time as first put forward
by Aristotle in the way that has proven decisive for the subsequent history of metaphysics gives
no answer to this. On the contrary: it can be shown that precisely this analysis of time was
guided by an understanding of Being that – concealing itself in its action – understands Being as
permanent presence and that accordingly determines the ‘Being’ of time from the ‘now,’ i.e., on
the basis of the character of time which is always and constantly presencing, i.e., which strictly
speaking is in the ancient sense” (GA 3 241; KPM 169). Heidegger refers to dialectic as a “philo-
sophical embarrassment (Verlegenheit)” in Being and Time because it overlooks that a dialogue
proceeds on the basis of the fundamental unity of a shared understanding. To presume, then,
that “dialogue” or dialectic will provide more clarity or ascend to a greater insight is mistaken.
This points to the fundamental disagreement between Gadamer and Heidegger, a disagreement
only very rarely pointed to by Gadamer, though see Gadamer’s citation of a 1972 letter from
Heidegger commenting on his studies of Plato and Hegel (Gadamer 1982, 66) and Gadamer’s
correspondence with Leo Strauss (Gadamer and Strauss 1978). On Heidegger’s critique of dia-
lectical argumentation and its source in Plato, see Gonzalez 2009; Zuckert 1996.
31
See Pöggeler 1987, 85–6.
32
See Chapter 2, “Socrates’ Hypothesis,” of Stanley Rosen’s The Question of Being: A Reversal of
Heidegger (Rosen 1993). Rosen’s Nihilism (Rosen 1969) and The Elusiveness of the Ordinary
(Rosen 2002) must also be consulted.
formulation of the matter with reference to the “is,” the copula, privileges a
narrow slice of the temporality of Being and also covers up and forgets the
now “deeper” problem of the finite temporality of Being.33 Socrates, and cer-
tainly the tradition that follows from his initial formulation of these questions,
has forgotten and therefore occluded our access to the rest of the question.
The answers to these questions constitutive of the philosophic conversation
of the Western tradition – answers that are not monolithic in their own terms,
everyone should realize – have all, Heidegger insists, been premised on broadly
similar understandings of the meaning of Being. And these understandings or
presumptions have not themselves been adequately interrogated by this philo-
sophic tradition.
It is necessary, then, to distinguish Heidegger’s starting point from that of
Socrates and, indeed, the “optimistic” civilization that followed in his wake.
Our discontent – disquiet, perplexity, anxiety, nausea, and dread – signals the
felt inadequacy of the results of Socrates’ approach (understood as the West
itself) and call us to attain to a deeper question than those raised by Socrates.
Heidegger’s charge is that these pathê remain unanswered because the theoreti-
cal tradition of philosophy in the West is insufficiently “primordial” to account
for them, given the flight and forgetfulness of Being. In order to provoke a
recollection of the question of Being, Heidegger urges a confrontation with the
inextinguishable finitude of our own existence in its various manifestations.
Our discontent thus opens a path to discovery. This confrontation may concern
several possible phenomena: the unfulfilling, even embarrassed sense of the
poverty of our claims to understand the meaning of Being; the felt inadequacy
of our practice to comport always with our projections of it, that is, the break-
down of what Heidegger refers to as the ready-to-hand; the lived experience
of the oblivion of our heritage; and more broadly, our sense of horror at our
distinctive historical moment, a civilizational project that culminates in the
“phenomena of nihilism” and destitution, exhibited in the disjunction between
our pretensions to be living in the age of Enlightenment when in fact we know
virtually nothing, and make war on one another, on nature, and on ourselves.
Our sense of despondency resonates with the moment in which we live, of the
destitution and abscondence of Being. Indeed, this moment is uniquely attuned
33
“Like understanding and interpretation in general, the “as” is grounded in the ecstatico-horizontal
unity of temporality. In our fundamental analysis of Being, and of course in connection with the
Interpretation of the “is” (which, as a copula, gives “expression” to the addressing of something
as something), we must again make the phenomenon of the “as” a theme and delimit the con-
ception of this ‘schema’ existentially” (SZ 360; emphasis in the original text).
. . . the analysis of the temporal Constitution of discourse and the explication of the temporal
characteristics of language-patterns can be tackled only if the problem of how Being and truth
are connected in principle, is broached in the light of the problematic of temporality. We can
then define even the ontological meaning of the “is”, which a superficial theory of proposi-
tions and judgments has deformed to a mere “copula”. Only in terms of the temporality of
discourse – that is, of Dasein in general – can we clarify how “signification” “arises” and make
the possibility of concept-formation ontologically intelligible (SZ 349).
or disposed to such resonances, and for its destitution is therefore open to

attending to Being as never before in the history of the West. In contrast with
philosophy in the history of the West, the question announced by perplexity or
anxiety, as Heidegger understands the matter, derives from the confrontation
with Nothing. Unlike Socrates, Heidegger does not formulate questions about
a being or a something: the just or the noble, for example. Heidegger thus
refuses the starting point of the constitutive quarrels of the history of political
thought because each of them arose in a less distraught time and therefore has
less purchase on the most disturbing, most profound, question.34
Instead, Heidegger searches for the ground, or Abgrund, manifested by
disquiet. This distressed search in itself constitutes the unifying ground of a
Heideggerian politics of radical discontent, inasmuch as it is not theoretical
and constitutes the basis for human existence as such. Such politics, which
are expressed in two principal inclinations, the one a violent and total rev-
olution (such as envisioned by the Brownshirt faction of the NSDAP, which
Heidegger supported, and Iranian revolutionaries such as Ahmad Fardid and
Reza Davari), the other a quiescent letting be (such as advocated, after a fash-
ion, by George Grant), take as their starting point the position that the present
age is fundamentally bankrupt, that we live in a time of the forgetfulness and
abandonment of Being.35 Prior to quietism or revolution is the profoundest
disquiet, which is retained through both political inclinations as the only testi-
mony we have of the truth of Being. Such profound disquiet in turn provokes
a hopefulness that supersedes all previous optimism.
The Methods and Limits of This Study

This book contends that Heidegger’s focus on and formulation of how the
question of Being relates to human life entail a paradoxical and radically
discontented politics. The Heideggerian position tends toward two political
inclinations. The first is a revolutionary and incipiently violent refusal of the
inauthentic “everyday,” understood as an individual and communal attitude
toward time that privileges stability, regularity, and reliability in all human
endeavors. Everydayness thus consists in the elevation of theory, “metaphysics,”
and forms of communal existence that trade in deceit, despotism, and the most
ephemeral and self-satisfied paltriness. The other inclination might be called
quietistic, consisting in “letting be” – letting the current situation of nihilism
34
As Strauss suggested, what came to be an apocalyptic hopefulness in Heidegger, “accompanied
or followed by a return of the gods,” has the character more of a religious openness than of phil-
osophic doctrine (Strauss 1983, 33). See Richard Velkley’s treatment of this topic (2011, 46–7,
55–9). For an interpretation of the politics of Heidegger’s thought that stresses Heidegger’s con-
frontation with Christian sources, see Rickey 2001.
35
Critchley 2008, 132–53; Dallmayr 2010, 67–81; and Schürman 2008, 116, all use the term
“letting be” to express the sort of political stance they see in Heidegger. See Heidegger’s discus-
sion of letting be, Lassen, in the final Le Thor seminar (GA 15 363).
and the ascendecy of inauthentic, “everyday” vapidity be – on the logic that

even the absolute bereavement of meaning is a gift of Being. The attendant politi-
cal stance is, in effect, an endorsement of the status quo rather than revolutionary
violence. The varieties of Heideggerian politics derive from these two plausi-
bly Heideggerian stances toward the question of Being, each of which shares in
Heidegger’s understanding of “everydayness.” I argue that Heideggerian politics
consists not merely in the retrieval of an autochthonous “rootedness beyond all
rootedness,” but also in a formalism and abstraction that supersede the funda-
mentally arbitrary claims of metaphysics or theoretical rationality and so give
expression to a superior universalism. Indeed, when we see that the formal and
abstract character of what Heidegger means by “everydayness” – a category of
existence conceived of so broadly as to include every possible way of life – is
just as integral to Heidegger’s understanding of human existence as the radical
individuation (either of a person or a community) entailed in the “factical ideal”
(SZ 310) of authenticity, we can better explain the evidently broad appeal and
remarkably varied application of his thought. In this characteristic juxtaposition
of the most arid abstraction and the most organic particularity, we can also dis-
cern, however, the coarseness of political judgment that such an analysis must
encourage. The texture of political life – the multifarious selfish and selfless pas-
sions, ambitions and longings for justice, aspirations to nobility and rancorous
jealousies, agony, and glories that populate the histories of great polities and char-
acterize the experience of political life even into our time – is therefore reduced to
the homogeneity and shallowness of “everydayness.” At the same time, this dreary
paltriness needs somehow to be preserved without amelioration for the sake of an
authentic attunement to the dispensation of Being.
The reading offered here stands, then, in tension with some of the more
prominent recent approaches to the question of Heidegger and politics. These
approaches tend to focus on his Nazism either to emphasize it or to downplay
it. To begin with, it is impossible to assess Heidegger’s importance for politics if
we refuse to see that his Nazism was an extension of his thought and not vice
versa. If we look at Heidegger simply as a Nazi partisan and try to construe
his thought on this basis, we cannot finally understand what distinguishes him
from the most vulgar polemicists and hacks who attempted to lend the regime
a veneer of intellectual legitimacy. Heidegger, whatever his failings, was no
fourth-rate ideologue or cheap, coffeehouse intellectual. The frequently contro-
versial body of work presented by such scholars as Emmannuel Faye, Johannes
Fritsche, Victor Farias, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, wherein Heidegger’s thought
is presented as though the key to understanding his thought is his Nazism,
does not, in the end, provide a route to confronting adequately Heidegger’s
thorough and radical philosophic challenge to the premises of Western civili-
zation and philosophy.36 Though this scholarship has brought to light quite a
36
I will engage with these authors as necessary through the notes of the book. For now, their main
contributions may be found in Bourdieu 1991; Farías 1989; Faye 2009, 2012; Fritsche, 1999,
lot about Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis that was otherwise covered
up or misunderstood, this approach leaves the philosophic sources of his poli-
tics untouched, and therefore Heidegger’s challenge still stands.37 By the same
token, however, it will not do simply to dismiss Heidegger’s own noxious pol-
itics as a personal flaw or another, otherwise disposable element of his work.38
Such an approach to Heidegger overlooks Heidegger’s view that adequate
guidance for the recovery of the deeper currents of radical individuation in
our historical existence requires the most formal abstraction. The “practical”
correlate of such formalism is in Heidegger’s terms a “violent” (gewaltsam)
hermeneutic that wrests us from our everyday complacency, and it is integral to
Heideggerian politics. This book therefore offers a contribution to the holistic
reading of Heidegger’s philosophy and politics that of necessity gives greater
weight to the former.39
To speak to our interest in Heideggerian politics, it is necessary therefore
to apprehend first the problems to which Heidegger understood himself to be
responding. Put another way, in order to understand Heidegger’s relevance for
us, it is necessary first to put his thought in context, where the most important
dimension of that context is the problems and questions that motivated his
work. The question is sometimes asked whether Heidegger should be under-
stood to be offering a moral critique of modernity or Western philosophy more
broadly. As I suggest in Chapters 1 and 2, the answer is a qualified no. More pre-
cisely, these are emphatically not the grounds on which Heidegger accounts for
the philosophic problem he sets for himself. This amoralism, I suspect, is part
of the reason Heidegger’s work is so amenable to appropriation and “applica-
tion” by such a wide and varied set of readers who retain some version of their
own moral commitments. He speaks to the feeling or pathos of moral decay,
degeneration, to the collapse and manifest hollowness of the lofty pretensions
of Western civilization and culture. And yet Heidegger’s diagnosis and account
of these phenomena are muddied if they are rephrased in the language of moral
outrage. For as he seems to emphasize in his earliest courses, the moral issue –
and with politics and culture – is epiphenomenal. Deeper and more serious
are the mistaken premises of Western philosophy, in particular the distinction
between theory and practice. The terminology that Heidegger uses to express
this problem shifts considerably, from his early courses to his first great opus,
2009, 2012. On Richard Wolin, another prominent spokesperson for this school of Heidegger
interpretation, see David O’Connor’s assessment (O’Connor 2002, 200–1 n. 2).
37
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s remark about Bourdieu’s study is apposite: “Bourdieu’s analysis is an
interesting one, but it is based on a presupposition which I can neither grant nor share, namely
that philosophy makes its appearance in the world only as a particular arrangement which soci-
ologists would be able to consider from a critical point of view and all of whose pretensions to
knowledge they could finally and radically expose” (Gadamer 1998, 4).
38
See Dallmayr 2010; Dreyfus 1993.
39
Such holistic readings are explored by several of Heidegger’s interpreters, prominent among
them Karl Löwith (1995), Werner Marx (1973), and Otto Pöggeler (1987).
Being and Time, and throughout the decades following. My purpose here is not
to pick and choose one such formulation and call it decisive – be this one of the
earlier ones, or later, or unpublished – but to try to understand the problems to
which Heidegger was addressing himself with these formulations.
This book presents an argument in several parts that supports this under-
standing of the relationship between Heidegger’s ontology and political life.
I begin by discussing some of Heidegger’s early work where he argues that the
problems that confront us are not moral, political, or cultural at their heart and
cannot be understood by value philosophy or ethics. Instead, what is required
is a fundamental reassessment of such “theoretical” approaches to philosophy
that determines those disciplines in order that we devise a method of reason-
ing about our predicament. A new approach to philosophizing might be able
to grasp the “fundamental experience of the ‘I am’ ” or Existenz at the root
of consciousness, and then on this basis reassemble an approach to the vari-
ous phenomena in the world and reconstruct a more appropriate relationship
between philosophy and culture more generally.
In the next section of the book, I follow Heidegger in exploring why, if the-
ory is such a mistaken philosophical approach, it has been the default in the
West since the Greeks. Why do problems present themselves as moral, political,
or cultural if, as Heidegger insists, they are more properly and fundamentally
existential or ontological? In particular, I look at what Heidegger refers to as
“everydayness,” our constitutive attitude toward temporality that inclines us to
favor regularity, familiarity, and constancy and to cover over the truth. In our
dealings with the articles of use with which we are normally surrounded in the
world, everydayness favors the emergence of theoretical rationality. Politically,
in our dealings with other people, it favors a form of communal life that is shal-
low and deceitful. The concept of everydayness points to another dimension of
Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, however. As Heidegger accounts for
how his own investigation is possible, it emerges that raising the question of
Being follows from the analysis of Dasein, and that Dasein is to be investigated
in its everydayness, that is, how it is “proximally and for the most part.” This is
the doubleness of everydayness: that it both occludes the most important ques-
tion but also thereby points the way toward disclosing it. I argue that seeing
this doubleness is key to understanding Being and Time as speaking to a singu-
lar historical moment when it is possible to gain unique purchase on the role
of Dasein as the “shepherd of Being” among the beings. This moment, nihilism,
is strangely resonant with the need that we apprehend Being as other than a
being, that is, as “the same” as the nothing. As such, the historical moment of
Heidegger’s philosophy, while on the one hand depending on the absolute dis-
solution of the West, on the other hand holds tremendous promise as facilitat-
ing a new understanding of Being as such.
In the final section of the book, I lay out Heidegger’s account of the
authentic communal existence that can give expression to such a radically
reformed understanding of Being. Given, though, the everyday character of
our disclosedness, in particular our inability to avoid expressing our disclosures

without reference to the beings, and hence our inherent tendency to occlude our
own discoveries, I argue that Heidegger presents an account of the “ideal” form of
existence that includes an awareness of the obscurity in which it will necessarily
be lived. His account of this is given to two forms of political community, one of
which, by means of a total and violent revolution, revives a historically bygone
community, the other of which awaits this possibility in a new, quietist dispensa-
tion of Being.
There are as many paths through Heidegger’s works as he has readers. The
argument presented in the following pages draws from numerous texts, from all
periods of Heidegger’s career, but there are distinctive emphases and ellipses. The
first part of the book tarries with some of Heidegger’s earliest mature thought in
order to formulate properly his understanding of the problems that would pro-
voke his inquiry into the history of Being as apprehended in the greatest thinkers.
While I comment on some of Heidegger’s most important late works, in particu-
lar the essay from the Nietzsche volumes called “Nihilism as Determined by the
History of Being,” and emphasize themes normally associated with the “later”
Heidegger such as letting be, awaiting, and the gift of Being, the weight of the
textual studies here comes from Heidegger’s earlier works. My purpose is not
to undercut the importance of Heidegger’s work after die Kehre, but rather to
emphasize the latency of many of the most important later formulations in his
earlier work and thereby to make sense of the unity of Heidegger’s thought.40
Being and Time occupies a central place in my study. It is not sufficiently appreci-
ated how pertinent this text of Heidegger’s is to the problems and philosophical
disputes that I have just referenced. Moreover, Heidegger’s turn to the history
of Being shares premises with the arguments he lays out in detail in Being and
Time and works published both before and after it; the turn to the history of
Being is required by the matter of thought that he treats throughout his career.41
If we wish to understand the political implications of Heideggerian ontology,
then an encounter, not to say confrontation, with Being and Time is necessary.42
40
I thus dispute Gregory Bruce Smith’s claim that in Heidegger’s later work an excess of “theo-
retical derivation” led him to “abstractions from abstractions” by which he “betrayed his most
profound phenomenological insights” (Smith 2007, 206).
41
See Heidegger’s “Preface” to Richardson 2003, xvii.
42
This book does not concentrate on the works of Heidegger’s most evidently political period, the
1930s. For excellent treatments, see Bambach 2003; Fried 2000; Phillips 2005; Zuckert 1990.
On the one hand, I do not wish to recapitulate the controversies concerning his Nazism any
more than is necessary. These debates have come to obscure the plainest fact, that Heidegger’s
Nazism was in accord with his thought. On the other, I think the essentials of this later period,
and indeed the still later postwar period, are already given expression in Being and Time, and
this needs to be explored. I am rather disposed against the increasingly baroque periodization
of Heidegger’s thought, not least because this appears sometimes to be motivated by a desire
to “rescue” whichever of his texts can be saved from the taint of Nazism (a strategy Thomas
Sheehan describes as, “Admit the Nazism but save the philosophy!” [Sheehan 1993]). More pro-
foundly, I consider the periodization of Heidegger’s thought an inadequate way of confronting
My hermeneutic method is, in some sense, simplicity itself; in subordinating my

questions to Heidegger’s and then returning to the guiding inquiry of this book,
I follow the argument of Heidegger’s texts as closely as I can. Against any charge
of witlessly preferring the presence of the text to its absence, I follow the judicious
reasoning of James Ward: “While Heidegger’s motto for the Gesamtausgabe is
‘ways – not works,’ the ways of his thinking are and must be exhibited as works,
and these works have an integrity of wholeness as works, a coherence that is
not opposed to their openness or provisionality. . . . We follow a text carefully not
because the text is all we have but precisely because it is the best, or even the only,
guide to what we do not have, to what is not a text” (Ward 1995, xxiv–xxv).
Let me sketch my own position briefly. This book is limited to an inquiry into
the ontological basis of politics in Heidegger’s works. It therefore implies with-
out robustly developing a fuller critique of Heidegger. While I have attempted
to let Heidegger speak first, this book is meant to point toward such a critique.
Socratic political philosophy and Aristotelian political science as rearticulated
in the twentieth century by Leo Strauss and others offer a better grasp of the
fundamental philosophic questions and so a better understanding of the human
situation, in particular our political life. It thereby offers a promising response
to the challenge posed by Heidegger. Strauss suggests that the limits of the
Heideggerian approach to politics emerge from considering the rather qualified
disclosiveness of the passions of disquiet (Strauss 1958, 260). Existenz does
not open us up to everything it purports to; we miss out on important ways
the work of a thinker of such titanic stature. I agree perfectly with James Ward’s remark in his
study of Heidegger’s Political Thinking: “As the volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe con-
tinue to appear, I have become convinced that interpretive questions of precedence and subse-
quence, of precisely when Heidegger first announced a theme or employed a term, should be
given less emphasis than has often been the case. . . . The texts of lectures and unpublished manu-
scripts, then, allow us to ascertain early, perhaps even the earliest, appearances of a thought in
writing but cannot tell us when a thought was first thought” (Ward 1995, xxiii).
William Blattner (1999, xiv) argues that one should not treat lecture courses as having the
same weight as the magnum opus, when he observes that Heidegger’s audience of students
would have been much more familiar with Husserlian and neo-Kantian “forms of expression
than those that would make up Being and Time” (xv). Hence, “it is likely that it [Being and
Time] is more carefully and directly formulated than classroom lectures.” I agree and retain a
bias for Heidegger’ published over unpublished work, though I make considerable use of the lat-
ter. James Luchte (2008) dissents in the strongest reasonable terms. He frequently characterizes
Being and Time as a “published fragment” (3) and stresses Heidegger’s compulsion to publish
it (2). Indeed, he sees even the recent studies of Heidegger’s 1920s phenomenology as being too
guided by the “archic” place of Being and Time and attributes a kind of “teleology” to Kisiel
(3)! Thus, he writes: “While I am not in any way seeking to diminish the importance of Being
and Time, it would be a vast hermeneutical error to disregard the many contemporary unpub-
lished and published works as mere supplements, when in fact, these seek to ‘go all the way to
the end’ of this project” (3). On the location of Being and Time in Heidegger’s corpus, see Smith
2007, 83–4.
that our “existence” is informed by love and laughter if we only take our bear-
ings by the experiences typified by trauma and loss.
His implication is that we can disagree with Heidegger about which
phenomena are most primordial. This, I believe, is the correct way to argue
with and ultimately against Heidegger. It is impossible to grasp the full texture
of human existence, and in particular the mixture of deceit, genuine nobil-
ity, and seediness that constitutes political life even at its best if anxiety, for
example, is taken as the privileged locus of disclosure. Such an approach fails
to distinguish between the most baleful tyrannies and humdrum corruption,
let alone actual virtue.
If we admit of a broader palette of disclosive phenomena than the pathê of
discontent – claims to rule, opinions about right and wrong, reasons to com-
promise – we might better understand our summons to admiration or awe in
the face of sacrifice, or our comic amusement at the human condition, rather
than submit to distress at the occlusiveness effected by these aspects of life. This
is as much true for those who would follow the politics of Heidegger’s epigone
as it is for those, liberals or otherwise, who would oppose them.
Political existence is lived out within a matrix of questions about the noble,
base, just, good, and bad, and these need not foreclose meditations on the fini-
tude of Being. Since political life is not altogether subsumed within the total-
izing matrix of technological rationality, indeed, is apparently resistant to the
unchecked rule of reason, it is possible that the consideration of such political
phenomena might be a more fruitful response to the contemporary evidence of
nihilism and therefore call radically into question its diagnosis by Heidegger.
If so, then we need neither uncritically accept miseries nor outlandishly hope
for deliverance.
We do not need to accept Heidegger’s diagnosis of the West in order to
accept his challenge. It is necessary, however, to understand this challenge in
order to respond to it. This book is offered as an essay in understanding the
challenge posed by Heidegger.
1
What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and

the Problem of Theory
Perhaps the chief difficulty in understanding Heidegger’s relevance for politics,

as Tracy Strong among other political theorists has noted, is that Heidegger
does not “speak” political. His thought requires being translated into the lan-
guage of what Aristotle called “practical affairs,” even though it is evidently
resistant to such translation. There is no specific need, however, that the only
political importance of a thinker be his or her remarks expressly about politics.1
In the case of Heidegger, whose work makes comprehensive claims about the
very ground of everything that is, some political import is certainly promised,
if not guaranteed. What is more, his numerous remarks on such topics as the
decadence of late-modern culture, the character of the Greek polis as a location
for thinking, and above all the persistent ire of his critique of contemporary
society would seem to ensure that his comprehensiveness indeed touches polit-
ical matters.2
1
Heidegger’s plainest statement of the problem of trying to understand the practical import of his
thought is in the Letter on Humanism: “thinking, when taken for itself, is not ‘practical’ ” (BW
218). Tracy Strong puts it this way: “When one comes to Martin Heidegger, the problem is to
find the politics in his philosophy, or to find whether his politics are in his philosophy, or, better
still, to find whether there is both a concept of the political and a political theory in his philoso-
phy” (Strong 2012, 267). Mark Blitz’s remark, then, that to “confront Heidegger properly and to
place correctly his own explicit remarks about ‘the political,’ we must consider Heidegger’s own
purpose and goal,” is most apt (Blitz 2000, 169).
On Heidegger’s denial of the applicability of his thought to other “disciplines,” see SZ 16, 50,
and section 10 (45–52) more generally.
2
On Heidegger’s youthful culture critique, see the essay “Per Mortem ad Vitam: Thoughts on
Johannes Jörgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life,” in the collection Supplements: From
the Earlies Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (S 35–9) and Van Buren’s discussion of the
“Young” Heidegger in the third chapter of his The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden
King (Van Buren 1994, 51–64). On the Greek city, see Introduction to Metaphysics (IM
162–3). Many of Heidegger’s courses in the 1920s treated Aristotle and other Greek thinkers,
but after the publication of Being and Time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he undertook
24
What’s the Matter with Ethics? 25
Numerous scholars have seen the most promising avenue for understand-
ing the practical, and therefore also political, questions that emerge from
Heidegger in the possibility of deriving an ethics from his thought.3 There is
a certain measure of support for this in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger him-
self frequently refers to his thinking in terms of a retrieval of the notion of
ethos, in what he presents as a Heracleitean sense of dwelling, a deeper mean-
ing of the word that has been obscured by the notion of a science of ethics.4
Moreover, Heidegger’s frequent insistence that he is not providing an ethics
shows that he thought it necessary to clarify this common misunderstanding
of his position. That is, his own project evidently lent itself to such misunder-
standing. After the publication of Being and Time, he occasionally remarked
(amusingly) that it should not be taken to constitute an instruction manual in
practical dealings; as he says in the lectures collected as Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics, the purpose of Being and Time is not to provide instruction in
the use of “knives and forks or . . . the tram.”5 Even so, to see that Heidegger
is not supplying an ethics in Being and Time or in his work is not therefore
to foreclose the possibility of developing an ethics on Heideggerian principles,
as Lawrence Hatab has noted, and certainly this has been emphasized in the
a much broader investigation of Greek piety and cultural practices (see Safranski 1999,
214–19).
3
Several studies that attempt to derive an ethical position based on Heidegger’s work have
appeared in recent years. A sampling of the highlights would include Bernasconi 1993; Greisch
1987; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis 2005; McNeill 1999; Nancy 2002; Olafson 1998; Vogel
1994. Van Buren 1995 and Reid 2005 focus particularly on the notion of ethics in Heidegger’s
early work.
4
Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this view: “Heidegger’s thinking conceived of itself, throughout,
as a fundamental ethics” (Nancy 2002, 67). The Letter on Humanism, drafted in response to
Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that existentialism was humanism, is the locus classicus of these
claims: the discipline of “ethics” only comes into being when “thinking” has come to an end
(BW 219). Prior to the emergence of such an “episteme” in the time of Plato, prior thinkers had
no sense of a distinction among ethics, logic, and physics. Heracleitus gave expression to this
prior unity in the statement “êthos anthropoi daimôn.” From this phrase, Heidegger appropri-
ates the sense of ethos as “abode” or “dwelling,” the place where thinking may summon gods to
presence (BW 256–7). His thinking seeks, not an ethics in the post-Platonic sense, but an ethos,
in a retrieval of the Heracleitean sense. It is the purpose of this and the following chapter to
show that, despite a certain semantic connection to concerns with “ethics,” the ethos to which
Heidegger points entail a denial of ethics as this is normally meant. Herman Philipse expresses
this point forcibly: “there is a crucial difference between Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine
and religious conceptions. Whereas religions provide ethical content to their doctrines of God’s
command by spelling out divine commandments, Heideggerian Being never issues moral pre-
cepts. As a consequence, Heidegger’s heteronomous doctrine exterminates ethics by investing a
transcendent non-entity (Being) with a moral monopoly, but without specifying moral rules so
authorized” (Philipse 1999, 441).
5
GA 29/30 262/FCM 117. Karl Löwith remarked on the seeming abandonment in Being and
Time of the suppleness of the “hermeneutics of facticity” that had characterized Heidegger’s
work before the publication of that book (see the exchange of letters between Heidegger and
Löwith in BH 289–303).
Heidegger scholarship.6 This points to the further notion that if Heidegger’s

thought could be used to develop an ethics, then surely it might suggest a polit-
ical teaching as well.7
The plain meaning of Heidegger’s remarks, however, is that he is not pre-
pared to provide something that would be called “ethics.”8 Such giants of
twentieth-century thought as Emmanuel Lévinas and Hans Jonas, each of whom
can trace important elements of their philosophic development to Heidegger,
declaim the poverty of Heideggerian philosophy precisely on the grounds that
it forecloses any ethics worthy of the name. Moreover, they see a direct con-
nection between precisely this lack and the notorious politics to which he com-
mitted himself.9 As Lévinas commented in an interview: “the absence of care
for the other in Heidegger and his personal political adventure were connected.
And despite all of my admiration for the greatness of his thought, I have never
been able to separate this double-aspect of his position.”10
It will be the purpose of this and the following chapter to argue for a ver-
sion of the claim that Heidegger provides no ethics, and in doing so to quar-
rel with a widespread misunderstanding of it. Heidegger’s thought forecloses
any ethics and in doing so articulates an understanding of human existence
that entails profound ethical and political consequences. Some scholars have
imputed Heidegger’s denial or lack of ethics to a prior commitment to explicitly
6
For representative works of this kind, see Freeman 2009; Hatab 2000; Hodge 1995; Lewis
2005; Miyasaki 2007; Olafson 1998. Some readers simply interpret him as providing an ethics
unwittingly. This is Lauren Freeman’s claim (2009, 86).
7
For studies that extend a Heideggerian politics from an ethics, see the classic statement by
White (1990). For examples more clearly sympathetic to Heidegger, see Hatab 2000, 169–94;
Mummery 2002; Vogel 1994, 99–124. The “Green Heideggerians,” as I have styled them, derive
certain political teachings from their construal of a Heideggerian ethics; see Thiele (1995,
79–90) with Michael Zimmerman’s problematization of the relationship between Heidegger
and environmental ethics (Zimmerman 1993; 2003, 94).
8
BW 219. As Tracy Strong notes, “Those who have sought to find an ethics or morality in
Heidegger have grasped at straws or transformed him into a version of Emmanuel Lévinas”
(Strong 2012, 373).
Gadamer’s comment on the “Letter on Humanism” is helpful. In this writing, Heidegger
attempts to distance himself from the ethical claims being made by French existentialists, pre-
cisely because these are inadequate to the task of his thinking: “It was the theme of ethics that
the French readers missed in Heidegger, as did Jaspers as well. Heidegger defended himself
against this expectation and demand, not because he underestimated the question of ethics or
the social plight of Dasein, but rather because his mission in thinking compelled him to ask more
radical questions” (Gadamer 1994, 11–12).
9
The lead-in to Heidegger’s exploration of the meaning of ethos in the Letter on Humanism is
Heidegger’s remark: “Soon after Being and Time appeared a young friend asked me, “When are
you going to write an ethics?” (BW 255). For Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger, see Lévinas (1969,
passim, but particularly 45–8) and his seminal work, Lévinas 1951. Habermas’ discussions of
Heidegger may be found in Habermas 1977 [1953]; 1989; 1990, ch. 6.
10
Lévinas (1994, 203–10). Quoted in Gordon 2010, 103. “Of course, I will never forget Heidegger’s
relation to Hitler. Even if this relation was only of a very short duration, it will be forever. . . . But
whatever a serious orientation might be, Heidegger would not be absent from it” (Lévinas 2001, 32).
National Socialist politics. They have not succeeded, however, in showing that
Heidegger’s political commitments actually predate his formulation of the phil-
osophic problems that preoccupy his thought. Emmanuel Faye, for example,
identifies the source of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic Nazism in his encounter with
Count Yorck in 1923.11 Johannes Fritsche has shown in a provocative and
detailed fashion that Heidegger’s Being and Time is steeped in the language
not merely of the revolutionary right in 1920s Germany, but specifically in
the conceptual terminology unique to the National Socialists as expressed by
Hitler in Mein Kampf (published for the first time in 1925–6).12 Each of these
scholars assigns a priority to Heidegger’s Nazi politics, and they argue that his
philosophy merely supplements and is secondary to these commitments. As
others have noted, however, if Heidegger’s thought were really no more pro-
found or challenging than that of such figures as Alfred Baeumler or Alfred
Rosenberg, or any other fourth-rate Nazi ideologue, he would be as easy to
dismiss as they are.13 Because Fritsche and Faye overlook the emergence of
Heidegger’s approach to politics from the philosophic problematic with which
he concerned himself for his entire career, they in fact understate the challenge
and, indeed, the danger of Heidegger’s thought.14 For it is precisely because
11
Faye 2009, 8–15; see also Faye 2012, 257.
12
See Fritsche 1999, 2012.
13
See, for example, Peter Gordon’s review of Faye (Gordon 2010) and Gregory Fried’s “A Letter
to Emmanuel Faye” (Fried 2011). Faye’s essay “From Polemos to the Extermination of the
Enemy: Response to the Open Letter of Gregory Fried,” responds to several of the charges
brought against him in the numerous critical reviews of his important study, Heidegger: The
Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (Faye 2011). Though Faye’s method is not adequate
to the task, he expresses the need for a confrontation with Heidegger in terms similar to those
used here: “The problem of Nazi penetration into all the domains of culture – from philosophy
with Heidegger to law with Carl Schmitt, for example, to theology with Gogarten and others,
but also to medicine, biology, architecture, poetry, history, etc. – has become a planetary prob-
lem, and one that is not solved. It is not by interdicts that we will overcome it, but by a funda-
mental critical investigation without complacency, such as is just now getting underway” (Faye
2012, 262).
14
Emmanuel Faye and Johannes Fritsche are the latest in a series of scholars who take the contro-
versy regarding Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism as the key to understanding
the political import of his thought. The latest iteration of this controversy was begun by the
publication of Faye’s thoroughly researched recent study (2005). See Gregory Fried’s important
response to Faye (Fried 2011). The two other main eruptions of this controversy were the initial
confrontation with this question in the French journal Les Temps Moderne in 1946, including
such interlocutors as Karl Löwith, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Beaufret, and Heidegger himself. With
the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias and in 1988 of Hugo Ott’s studies (Farias 1989; Ott
1988), documenting in still greater detail Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis, the contro-
versy erupted anew. Some of the major contributions to the consideration of Heidegger’s poli-
tics at this period were Altwegg 1988; Bourdieu 1991; Derrida 1989; Ferry and Renaut 1990;
Lacoue-Labarthe 1990; Lyotard 1990; Pöggeler and Gethmann-Siefert 1988; Rockmore 1992;
Sluga 1993; Ward 1995; Wolin 1990; Zuckert 1990. Nolte’s biography of Heidegger should be
read in this context (Nolte 1992); see Sheehan’s review (Sheehan 1993) and Nolte’s response
(Nolte 1993).
the philosophic problems with which Heidegger wrestles are central to the
premises of modern society as such, and bear on the fate of Western civilization
itself, that we cannot simply document his Nazism and dismiss him. An overly
biographical approach fails to grasp the genuine breadth and radicalness of
Heidegger’s political import, an import that far outstrips his own endorsement
of the National Socialist regime in Germany.15 The aim is not to vindicate
Heidegger’s thought by showing it to be separate from his horrible, “personal”
practice, but to show (a) the logical and temporal priority of this thinking to
his practice, and then (b) to understand the political import of that thought.
The clearest way to see this is to look at Heidegger’s early thought, both
because this predates any of the political associations for which he later
became justly notorious and because it shows the continuity of the philosophic
problematic with Heidegger’s later work. In Heidegger’s earliest mature work,
a visceral and absolute refusal of the tenets of late-modern, Western civiliza-
tion and culture – similar in numerous respects to the Kulturkritik of many
of his contemporaries – is articulated as a rejection of the underlying philo-
sophical, rational premises of that civilization, including the worth of the very
concept of culture. Heidegger directs his critique primarily at his philosophic
contemporaries’ incapacity to ground their theoretical principles. Thus, what
distinguishes Heidegger from other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
critics of modern culture – virtually all of whom are much more direct about
the political, cultural, and ethical content of their views – is the combination of
comprehensiveness (in terms of what is being rejected) and logical rigor. One
looks in vain, therefore, for Spenglerian rhetorical flourishes; one finds instead
a rather abstract set of arguments in these early treatments of the impossibility
of ethics.16 One finds meticulous and rigorous assessments of the penetration
of the moral and cultural phenomena by a long and spurious tradition of the-
oretical philosophy, a philosophic tradition that has in fact transformed the
phenomena being considered. Ethics as such, therefore, is determined to be
altogether warped by the motivations and blind presuppositions of theoret-
ical philosophy from which it cannot be disentangled. The deeper problem
is that all claims of value are already influenced by a tradition that privileges
theoretical philosophy, so even to accept “culture” and “value” as meaningful
designations of the different “regions” or fields of human endeavor is therefore
to repeat the distorting prejudices that privilege theory. That is, the prejudice in
favor of theoretical philosophy determines even the distinction between fields,
15
Leo Strauss allows that while Heidegger’s Nazism expresses his thought, it does not exhaust its
political import (Strauss 1983, 29–34). Faye insists that his approach is not biographical, and
that this is a typical means by which defenders of Heidegger’s thought “disqualify” criticism
(Faye 2012, 258). On the unity of Heidegger’s thought, supervening through all periodizations,
see the indispensable Olafson 2006, 97.
16
As Kisiel remarks on the summer semester 1919 course: “There is not one hint of the poignantly
Spenglerian disenchantment with such things as ‘culture’ and ‘value’ prevalent then in postwar
Germany, which Heidegger will invoke in later courses” (Kisiel 1993, 60).
such as determining what ethics as distinguished from, say, biology, psychol-

ogy, or aesthetics is. Theory, however, as Heidegger diagnoses it, cannot supply
an adequate account of how values might be related to the empirical or histor-
ical world: the resulting condition is what Nietzsche referred to as “nihilism.”17
For this reason, theory as such becomes the principal subject matter of these
investigations.
The relevance of these investigations for the possibility of a Heideggerian
ethics, and by extension politics, is therefore principally and in the precise
sense negative. Heidegger refuses any orientation by “culture,” any consider-
ation of the ethical or political results of his investigations, which were always
and emphatically unconcerned with what appeared to him to be such triv-
ial, peripheral matters. As he understood it, to ask about ethics and culture
or to seek any orientation with regard to these was to forgo interrogating
deeper matters that were the true concern of genuine, that is to say radical,
philosophic thinking. Ethics is superficial; culture is epiphenomenal.18 But as
Heidegger himself repeatedly insists, in phenomenology, in genuinely radical
thought, there are no merely “negative” critiques: any investigation that attains
to the fundament, that apprehends the primordial, will resound with positive
“implications.” The key for understanding Heidegger’s meaning for ethics, and
then for politics, is to see every purported claim to nonrelevance in this light.19
In this and the following chapter, I show that the unique absence of an eth-
ics from Heidegger’s thought, that is, the specific character of that absence, has
the result of demanding an awful neutrality on Heidegger’s part on matters of
the most urgent political and moral character. This neutrality, far from per-
mitting the supplementation of his thought with what Hatab calls a “coordi-
nation of ethics and Heideggerian ontology,” to produce a new form of ethics,
instead expresses the prior consideration and rejection of such sought-after
17
Heidegger appears conspicuously to avoid using this term through this period of his career.
18
As he writes in a letter to Karl Löwith, dated 1920: “My will, fundamentally, aspires to some-
thing else, and that is not much: living in an actual revolutionary situation, I pursue what
I feel to be ‘necessary,’ without caring to know whether it emerges from ‘culture’ or whether
my search will lead to ruin.” Löwith’s gloss on the meaning of Heidegger’s approach is per-
fectly apt: “Instead of devoting oneself to the general seed for cultivation, as one would upon
receiving the command to ‘save culture,’ one must – in a ‘radical disintegration and regression,’
a ‘destruction’ – convince oneself firmly of ‘the one thing that matters’ without bothering with
the chatter and bustle of clever and enterprising men” (Löwith 1994, 29). In another letter
from Heidegger, again denying any orientation by “culture,” Heidegger writes: “The idea has
emerged that our critique must be opposed to something that corresponds in content to that
which has just been denied, or that our work would find its destiny in a school or trend, that
it could be continued and complemented . . . [that work is instead] something apart from and
perhaps out of reach of the bustle of the day” (Heidegger to Löwith, 1924; quoted in Löwith
1994, 30).
19
Such claims by Heidegger express important continuities with some of his later, purport-
edly post-Kehre thought, as in the claim in the “Letter on Humanism” that thought “touches
nothing.” See Hatab on this point (Hatab 2000, 89).
coordination.20 To put this more sharply: any number of philosophical figures

may appear “neutral” on ethical matters, and yet there is no evident cause to
search for the ethical or political import of their thought. Heidegger’s reason-
ing, however, undercuts the very possibility of formulating a rational ethics
that may supply any guidance whatsoever for politics. It is the evident serious-
ness with which he apparently means to treat ethical reasoning itself within
the scope of a comprehensive form of thinking that supplied the remarkable
potency of the officially “negative” meaning of his work for ethics.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I trace out Heidegger’s exploration of the relation-
ship between value philosophy (including ethics) and “formal indication,” the
new mode of philosophizing developed in some of Heidegger’s early works.
This relationship is complicated not merely by the inadequacy of the available
value philosophies, but by the effect they have had, over time, on the phenom-
enon in question, namely, culture. The striking claim that emerges from these
works is this: what announce themselves as moral or cultural problems can-
not be apprehended by moral philosophy or philosophy of culture. They are
problems that are profoundly shaped by the character of our deepest opening
to the world and its occlusion in our impoverished time. From his earliest
period of philosophical maturity, Heidegger is quite clear that we don’t need
a better “science of morals” or “ethics.”21 What we need is a sounder science
of science, a scientific apprehension of our own turn to science. Any prospec-
tive “science of ethics” would depend, therefore, on the possibility of such
a more “primordial” (ursprunglich), “pretheoretical science of experience.”
Thus, when the problem is framed in these terms, it is clear that Lévinas does
not express the difficulty as it presented itself to Heidegger: one cannot “care
for the other” if one is not clear really on who is an other, and more funda-
mentally, who “I am.”
The Natorp Critique and the Priority of Distress

In letters they exchanged in the early fall of 1918, Husserl and Heidegger dis-
cussed Paul Natorp’s critique of (Husserlian) phenomenology. There is evi-
dence that while neither of them considered Natorp a first-rate mind, they
20
According to Hatab, the “coordination of ethics and Heideggerian ontology suggests the pos-
sibility of taking up moral philosophy anew once the ontological structure of finite being-in-
the-world has been articulated” (Hatab, 2000, 1).
21
The question of periodization in the scholarship on Heidegger’s scholarship is enormous, and
I provide only a cursory treatment of the matter in the present study. The reader may consult
Figal 1988, 2007, 2009, and Kisiel 1993. By widespread consensus, Heidegger’s first post–World
War I teaching, in KNS 1919, represents the initial presentation of his “mature” – that is, no
longer youthful – writings. See John Van Buren’s study of the transition from the concerns formu-
lated in Heidegger’s even earlier work to his post–World War I investigations (Van Buren 1994).
On the need for a pretheoretical science of experience that could be regulative of other
sciences, see TDP 101/78.
nonetheless were concerned to address themselves to Natorp’s critique.22

Husserl understands Natorp’s later work to be influenced by his own Logical
Investigations and “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” His judgment of
Natorp’s engagement with these works is expressed summarily: “it is clear
that Natorp was entirely incapable of grasping the clear and readily available
meaning of phenomenology as an analysis of the essence of pure consciousness,
prior to and independent of previous philosophy and science; and in general he
was incapable of allowing for the validity of [phenomenological] seeing and of
what is presented in such seeing” (BH 361).23 Husserl understands Natorp to
hold the opinion that Husserlian phenomenology is an “unclarified prelude” to
Natorp’s Neo-Kantian psychology. But Husserl in turn judges Natorp to have
erected an edifice of suspect psychology on an obscure foundation: “For my
part, I consider his psychology not even as a prelude, but as an extremely vague
premonition – embellished with philosophical constructs – of one problem-level
in my phenomenology” (BH 361).
Though Husserl is fairly dismissive of Natorp’s critique, Heidegger appears
to have found it more impressive. He discusses Natorp at a critical moment
in “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” his 1919 War
Emergency Semester course. Here Heidegger develops the claim that theory –
including Husserlian phenomenology – is unable to account, on its own terms,
for the generation of theoretical concepts from their experiential motivation.24
As endorsed by Heidegger, the Natorp critique is that all theoretical reflec-
tion, including phenomenological description, generalizes and hence distorts
the true character of the lived, moving experience of life:
Reflection makes something which was previously unexamined, something merely
unreflectively experienced, into something “looked at.” We look at it. In reflection it
stands before us as an object of reflection, we are directed towards it and make it into
an object as such, standing over against us. Thus, in reflection we are theoretically ori-
entated. All theoretical comportment, we said, is devivifying. This now shows itself in
22
Marvin Farber presents Husserl as being more impressed by Natorp than this letter (Husserl to
Heidegger, 10 September 1918) suggests. See Farber 1967, 147 ff.
23
Theodore Kisiel writes of these phrases: “Husserl’s remarks here become a kind of research
program for Heidegger in the first year of his assistantship under Husserl, culminating in a
full-fledged ‘destruction’ – the term is first used in this course – of Natorp’s concept of consti-
tution in Summer 1920. The key to Heidegger’s hermeneutic breakthrough to his lifelong topic
in Kriegnotsemester 1919 is his resolution of Natorp’s double objection against the accessibility
and expressibility of phenomenology’s central topic of description, the immediate pre-theoretical
experience in which we always already find ourselves underway” (Kisiel 2002, 30).
24
Stephen Crowell objects to such a characterization of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl,
emphasizing the continuity between Husserl’s attempts to express the consciousness that is
prior to the subject–object distinction and Heidegger’s understanding of Being-in-the-world (see
Crowell 2001). Crowell notes in particular that it is easy to find numerous places (particularly
in letters to third parties) where Heidegger is dismissive of Husserl’s “sham philosophy,” but that
concentrating on such utterances overlooks the vast amount that Heidegger takes over from
Husserl (Crowell 2001, 265 n. 3).
the case of life-experiences, for in reflection they are no longer lived but looked at. We
set the experiences out before us out of immediate experience; we intrude so to speak
into the flowing stream of experiences and pull one or more of them out, we “still the
stream” as Natorp says (TDP 100–1/78).
Phenomenology thus cannot be merely descriptive, Heidegger claims.

Description of particulars as such is always guided by general laws. Indeed,
it would be unintelligible if it were not: “For description also already pro-
ceeds via concepts: it is a circumscription of something into generali-
ties, it is ‘subsumption’ (Natorp); it already presupposes a certain kind of
concept-formation and therefore ‘abstraction’ (Natorp) and theory, i.e. ‘medi-
ation’ (Natorp)” (TDP 101/78). To privilege theory, then, is to introduce the
mediation of generalities and laws between oneself and the singular experi-
ence of the things themselves: “Description is nothing immediate and unmedi-
ated, but has a necessary relation to knowledge of laws” (TDP 101/78). The
quest, then, for an unmediated “pre-theoretical science of experience” (TDP
95/74) appears doomed, for concepts or laws will always obtrude, distorting
one’s access to real experience: “there is no immediate apprehension of expe-
rience” (TDP 101/78). To theorize is to obtrude mediating, static concepts
(“rules,” “generalities,” or “laws”) between the vital motion of experienced
life and the observer. Theory cannot then apprehend the genuinely primordial
because the “fundamental experiences” always evade their merely theoretical
description.25
A true phenomenology needs to apprehend what Heidegger calls “the pri-
mordial.” It needs to account both for the subject and the object, and so to
expose the genuine (i.e., “primordial” or “original”) connection between the
flux and motion of the world and the reckoning attempted by the investiga-
tor, conceptual or otherwise. While Heidegger adopts Natorp’s critique of
Husserlian phenomenological description, he judges Natorp’s alternative as
inferior to it, for phenomenology has the resources within it to meet the Natorp
critique: “The fundamental demand of phenomenology to bracket all stand-
points is everywhere overlooked . . . . When the proper fundamental attitude
to phenomenology is lacking, all objections to it, however sophisticated and
significant they might be, are fallacious” (TDP 109/83).26 In his adoption of
the Natorp critique, then, Heidegger signals a shift in the task of phenomenol-
ogy: not “to the things themselves!” but “bracket all standpoints!” “Bracket all
25
Heidegger’s philosophic relationship to Husserl is a vast topic, and I provide only a cursory
treatment of it here. In addition to Crowell 2001, who stresses the continuity between these
two phenomenologists, see also Carman 2003, 53–100, and Dahlstrom 2001, 103–30, on
Heidegger’s critique of Husserl. To see the extent to which Husserl’s thought relates to questions
of political philosophy, see the indispensable Velkley 1987.
26
For further consideration of Heidegger’s response to Natorp, consult Heidegger’s statement
upon the Natorp’s death, the “Nachruf auf Paul Natorp,” in Platon: Sophistes GA 19:1–5.
Additionally, letters published in Kisiel and Sheehan 2007 show some of the complex personal
and intellectual relationship among Heidegger, Husserl, and Natorp, which revolved for a time
standpoints,” or as Heidegger rephrases this goal in his “Comment on Karl

Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews,” a small work that represents his most
polished and complete piece of work from this period, “thinking without pre-
suppositions” then requires that the presupposition to equate “thinking” with
“theorizing” be suspended.27
Thus, the key to genuine thinking, thinking that grasps the “primordial,”
is ceaseless, radical, and thoroughgoing critique; it requires what Heidegger
refers to as a program of “radical suspicion” of every inherited or received
notion. In the “Comment,” he expresses this with particular clarity: “An inces-
sant enactment of our concern [or “distress” – Bekümmerung] for achieving
primordiality is what constitutes primordiality” (KJPW 4).28 Thus, the very
distress caused by refusing to relax one’s refusal of any standpoint or presup-
position is the only worthwhile evidence that one has begun to think. This,
then, is the original meaning of Heidegger’s repeated emphasis on anxiety, dis-
turbance, distress, and “anxious concern.” Such pathemata are the markers of
an appropriate rejection of theoretical stasis and, implicitly, comfort, and are
evidence that the investigator is genuinely attaining to a primordial thinking.29
This approach entails a distinctive attitude to the surrounding commu-
nity, which has already been shaped by the cultural ascendance of theoretical
around Husserl and Heidegger’s interest in having the latter assume Natorp’s chair at Marburg
upon his retirement, a scheme in which Natorp ultimately concurred. Heidegger and Natorp
engaged in a fruitful exchange on Aristotle, culminating in Heidegger’s “Phenomenological
Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”
(BH 372–411). On Natorp and Husserl, see Luft 2010.
27
“In seeing the lectern I am fully present in my ‘I’; it resonates with the experience, as we said. It
is an experience proper to me and so do I see it. However, it is not a process but rather an event
of appropriation [Ereignis] (non-process, in the experience of the question as a residue of this
event). Lived experience does not pass in front of me like a thing, but I appropriate [er-eigne] it
to myself, and it appropriates itself according to its essence. . . . A science of experiences would
have to objectify experiences and thus strip away their non-objective character as lived experi-
ence and event of appropriation” (TDP 75/60).
28
Parenthetical citations are to Heidegger’s “Comment on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of
Worldviews” in Pathmarks (Heidegger 1998), translation occasionally modified with reference
to GA 9. Kisiel and Sheehan write: “Its precursors [Sorgen] are the biblical Bekümmerung
(1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438). Of Bekümmerung, trans-
lated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write: “This term is used in the 1920 and 1922
essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original motivation to philos-
ophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction that ‘angst reveals
care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 430).
29
John Van Buren remarks of the term Bekümmerung, in the context of Heidegger’s summer 1923
course on ontology: “In the present section of Heidegger’s course, Bekümmerung is used not
only in connection with Dasein’s “caring” (Sorgen) about itself (i.e., about its ‘existence’ or ‘pos-
sibility’) and with its ‘unrest’ (Unruhe), but also in connection with its ‘wakefulness for itself,’ . . .
contrasted to the ‘carefreeness’ in which ‘care is asleep.’ However, in this course Heidegger
is already in the process of replacing Bekümmerung with the perhaps less clumsy and more
sophisticated Kierkegaardian term Angst (‘anxiety’ or ‘anxiousness’), which eventually becomes
a central term in Being and Time” (Heidegger 1999, 113).
philosophy. A philosophy that is not radically suspicious enough of the cul-

ture amid which it finds itself will be determined by this culture. This includes
determining what philosophy is, how it relates to other areas of human life,
and therefore how it philosophizes about these areas – including (in particu-
lar) philosophy of value. Moreover, the extent to which these other areas have
been shaped by the influence of theoretical philosophy makes their influence,
in turn, on a mode of philosophizing that is insufficiently “suspicious” all the
more determining.
Thus, Heidegger writes that “when phenomenology first erupted onto the
scene” – that is, in its earlier, Husserlian form – it was too oriented by other,
already theoretically modified spheres of life in its formulation of the aim of
philosophy. Husserl’s retention of the theoretical attitude in his pursuit of “an
unspoiled seeing” similarly depended on misunderstanding both the character
of philosophy and the extent to which the “phenomena” it was looking at had
already been modified by a long cultural and philosophic history (KJPW 30).
For Heidegger, contrary to Husserl, philosophy must refuse the understanding
of it shared by the other domains of human life, cultural, political, and reli-
gious, in order to be truly revolutionary and faithful to its task: “But if we are
to understand the philosophical sense of the tendencies of phenomenology in a
radical manner, and appropriate them genuinely, we must not merely carry out
research in an ‘analogical’ fashion on the ‘other’ ‘domains of experience’ (the
aesthetic, ethical, and religious domains) that we, following one philosophical
tradition or another, have partitioned off from one another” (KJPW 30). The
very distinction among these domains already privileges objectifying theory
and obscures the more fundamental task of philosophy. At this point, the cor-
rect philosophic response is not description, but destruction. Any philosophy
less radical than what Heidegger proposes would only reinforce the ethical
and cultural status quo because it has begun from and takes its bearings by its
cultural milieu.
Heidegger thus sketches an approach to philosophy that deliberately refuses
an ethical or cultural mission. A genuine “bracketing of all standpoints” will
refuse to take its bearings from any established understanding of the character
and task of philosophy. Though any “earlier form of intellectual industrious-
ness” (KJPW 5) might have confused trivial matters of culture for fundamental
problems, such a mistake will now be avoided. In particular, the accepted cul-
tural and educational responsibilities of philosophy – “an unspeakable hustle
and bustle in our concerns for the preservation of culture” (KJPW 5) – will
distract philosophy from its true task. Only an insistence on “taking firm hold
of the most important questions” and refusing “peripheral matters” will pre-
serve the philosophic enterprise, which “is neither mere sport nor prophetic
pageantry that promises the salvation of the world” (KJPW 5). The concern of
other philosophers to satisfy the “hustle and bustle of an avant-garde culture”
leads them to mistake what should possess the philosopher (KJPW 24–5). This
is not to say, to be clear, that philosophy will have no effect on culture, but that
it should not, prior to the most searching, radically thoroughgoing critique,

take its bearings by the established culture, above all with respect to the very
purposes and character of philosophy. Heidegger refuses the commission that
philosophy should be responsible for supplying guidance for the accepted or
perceived needs of society because he judges it impossible that philosophy can
properly do this and still remain philosophical.
Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Value

What, then, is the relationship between philosophy so understood, on the one
hand, and the philosophy of value, on the other? In Heidegger’s summer semes-
ter course in 1919, “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,”
he works out the relationship between “philosophy of value” – that is, the
branch of philosophy that includes ethics (and aesthetics, culture) – and the
task and character of philosophy as understood by Heidegger.30 He shows that
the same problem with theory manifests itself in the attempt to understand
ethics and value philosophy more generally. Theoretical approaches to ques-
tions of value – such as are characteristic of every contemporary philosophic
position, according to Heidegger – are insufficiently “original” or primordial
to be able to capture the real connection between the investigating “subject”
and the realm of values under consideration. That is, in the absence of such a
primordial understanding, the reason for distinguishing between values and for
ranking some higher than others is altogether obscure.
This increasingly prominent character of the problem of form. . . the transcendental
consideration of form, leads to the problem of categorical divisions into regions. Efforts
in the philosophy of history, culminating in the philosophy of culture, make obvious the
necessity of a cultural whole and its possible total interpretation. Interpretation is pos-
sible only in and through the totality of cultural values; their connection and rank-order
becomes problematic (TDP 124/94–5).
In Heidegger’s estimation, his contemporaries’ expression of the way that eth-

ical problems, or factual questions concerning the “ought,” may be systemat-
ically formulated was inadequately “original” (ursprünglich) in the sense of
reaching the roots of the problem, the “primordial” (Ursprung). In Heidegger’s
understanding, any primordial formulation needs to understand not merely the
materials being considered (the object), but the very motivations of the subject
30
Kisiel treats this course very briefly (Kisiel 1993, 60–3) and expresses what is perhaps the con-
sensus view of the course (explaining its only very rare discussion in the literature): “The sub-
sequent exegesis of the texts of Windelband and Rickert displays some moments of depth and
insight, but is by and large shallow and pedestrian. . . . In this first of many courses which we
have from Heidegger on the history of philosophy, he outlines a new and powerful method of
‘critique’ which promises to go more deeply into intellectual history than the old-fashioned
factual history of surface ‘influences,’ and then by and large gives us precisely that!” (Kisiel
1993, 60).
conducting the investigation. To be primordial, an investigation must consider

that something about the matter or topic must already be connected to the
investigator, must be moving the investigator in the first place; the subject, at
some level, must already be connected to the object.31 In the case of the study
of ethics, Heidegger insists, the problem of value must motivate the investiga-
tor, and therefore any properly philosophical understanding of ethics needs to
include an understanding of this motivating connection. In the absence of an
apprehension of the primordial, then, a science of value is impossible.
Heidegger’s attention to the history of the philosophy of value appears,
therefore, very different from a mere catalogue of errors in understanding. He
introduces his treatment of the history of the philosophy of value by insist-
ing on the fundamental identity of historical investigations and phenomeno-
logical investigations. His point may be put this way: if genuine study seeks
and reaches the primordial, that is, the ground from which both the “object”
of study and the “subject” conducting the study (the investigator) emerge,
then an understanding of the primordial must also inform our appreciation
of previous philosophic attempts to grasp the same supposed “object.” Other
philosophic attempts – from the “history” of philosophy – will express a rela-
tionship, even if a confused one, to the primordial and may therefore assist
us in coming to our own adequate understanding. A further implication of
Heidegger’s approach to history, developed more extensively in the “Comment
on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldview,” is that earlier theoretical phi-
losophies that have not adequately apprehended the primordial have, in turn,
affected later and current attempts to do the same. Indeed, they may well
have impeded subsequent attempts by bequeathing a too “meager conceptual
inventory” (KJPW 4) for understanding the primordial from which each of our
failed attempts to understand the matter, the matter itself, and any success-
ful attempt to understand the matter emerges. That is, by investigating failed
attempts from the history of thought, we may come better to understand, in
their detritus, the inherited presuppositions and confusions that immediately
confront us. The historical and phenomenological modes of investigation
are identical, according to Heidegger, because they each need to apprehend
the primordial from which they and the matter for study emerge, namely, “the
history that we ourselves are.”32
As Heidegger understands it, his contemporaries’ approach to the phi-
losophy of value is determined by nineteenth-century ideas about ethics and
culture. This approach could be characterized as the superintendence of theo-
retical rationality over all aspects or regions of life – by force of analogy – and
the corresponding impossibility of including within such a theoretical order or
31
Heidegger characterizes the hermeneutic circle at SZ 152–3. On the circularity of Heideggerian
phenomenological science, see Crowell 2001, 132–3.
32
“No genuine historical understanding can occur without returning to the original motivations,
nor is such a system scientifically possible” (TDP 125/96).
system the “theorizer” – the investigating subject or consciousness – itself.33

“The historical effect of the philosophy of value was a strong emphasis on the
idea of value in all spheres of life, a broadening of the axiological by analogy
to theoretization, partly also a prevalence of both in variegated penetration”
(TDP 124/95). As such, the concept “culture” (Kultur) has come to “func-
tion in a vague and multivalent ferment of ideas to guide all general reflec-
tion [Besinnung] on the totality of particular life-regions and on life as such”
(TDP 129/101). Culture thus refers to the cultivation of each region or sphere
of human endeavor in accordance with the dictates of theoretical rational-
ity or “reflection,” or following the model of theoretical rationality. Culture
is – c ontrary to the wishes or claims of its counter-Enlightenment boosters –
indistinguishable from civilization!
In its theory-privileged definition, culture means both history and accom-
plishment, signifying the historical progress out of the natural condition of
savagery as well as the assumption of the various attributes of a technologi-
cal society (TDP 130/101–2). In the Enlightenment, among the likes of Pierre
Bayle, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and the Baron de Montesquieu, culture really
does mean “civilization,” standing for “the perfection of history on its way
out of barbarism, superstition, deception, and disorder” (TDP 132/103). This
notion of culture, however, is too oriented by theoretical objectivity and over-
looks the need to understand the problematic from which ethics emerges: the
consciousness or investigating subject, that is, the real individual, and its rela-
tion to values that give ranking or order to the world. The Enlightenment
“regards the individual as but an instance of the species,” and thus altogether
lacks the needed first-person, empirical, or historical subject. German Idealist
thinkers thus correct, in Heidegger’s estimation, the understanding held by
the Enlightenment by attending more to the distinctive uniqueness of the
individual. Herder introduces the category of “ownness” (what we know as
authenticity – Eigenheit); makes it “meaningful and . . . related to all forma-
tions of life, i.e., these for the first time become visible as such” (TDP 134/
104); and prepares for the accomplishments of Schlegel, Niebuhr, Savigny,
and Schleiermacher. This individual-apprehending trend reaches its apex in
Fichte and Schelling: “The historical in its individual multiplicity and unique-
ness is now seen in terms of the creative deeds and activity of the subject, the
self-worth of the person” (TDP 134/105).
As Heidegger presents it, the speculative enthusiasm of German Idealism
provoked a more “tangible” countermovement of scientific empiricism, on
33
Heidegger’s earliest treatment of the inadequacy of analogy is in his Habilitation, published
first in 1916, and available as Harold J. Robbins, “Duns Scotus’s Theory of the Categories
and of Meaning” (Robbins 1978). In summer semester 1931, he restates the problem: “The
analogy of being – this designation is not a solution to the being question, indeed not even an
actual posing of the question, but the title for the most stringent aporia, the impasse in which
ancient philosophy, and along with it all subsequent philosophy right up to today, is enmeshed”
(GA 33, 44/Heidegger 1995a, 38).
the one hand, and historicist empiricism, on the other. Among Ranke and his
successors, who attend to the “ever accumulating empirical material of histori-
cal life,” and among whom “empirical mastery gains its priority and rank,” the
formation of the conditions for the notion of culture as progressively refined,
technologically competent individuals accelerates. The “philosophers . . .
dedicate themselves to history, the tangible reality,” and in the correspondingly
empirical natural science there is “a turning away from philosophy and an
immersion in experience, the tangible reality” (TDP 135/105). Almost imme-
diately, as Heidegger accounts for it, upon the philosophic development of
the historical consciousness, the “first moment of the culture concept,” a second
moment emerges, characterized by “the orientation of modern life to particular
achievements in the area of practical empirical life, the development of technol-
ogy in the widest sense” (TDP 136/106). This second moment is characteristically
more practical, more empirically minded, and “scientific” in the sense of techno-
logical. In England and France, it received, according to Heidegger, expression in
an especially “brash kind of metaphysical materialism” (TDP 136/106).
The Neo-Kantian Acceptance of the Problem

The problem, then, that confronted Neo-Kantian philosophers of value was how
to reconcile the insight into the priority of the individual attained by German
Idealism with the accomplishments of the scientific and historical schools that
succeeded them. As more and more was accounted for by empirical sciences and
historicism, there was less reason to be confident in the distinctiveness of the
individual as such. The work, then, of the Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and
Wilhelm Windelband may be understood as an attempt to relate coherently the
empirical, material content of the natural and historical sciences to the theoretical,
speculative insights of German Idealism. It was with a view to accomplishing this
that they looked to Kant and his various critiques. Between them they inaugu-
rated what Heidegger identifies as two strands of Neo-Kantianism.34
Heidegger credits Cohen with rediscovering the proper significance of Kant’s
First Critique, which is to see that the problem of knowledge is not concerned
with the physiological-psychological process by which a subject gains knowl-
edge, nor with the external world, but with “the structures of objectively given
mathematical natural science,” that is, “logical foundations” (TDP 142/110).
Objectivity can be seen as the connection between the elements that constitute
objectivity, “as the unity of the multiplicity of appearances” (TDP 142/110).
As such, it cannot simply be reckoned by the accretion of more and more
34
Much of the most recent literature on Heidegger and Neo-Kantianism focuses on his debate
with Cassirer and the related Kant book of 1929: see Peter Gordon’s major study (Gordon
2010), Carman 2010, and the response of Schwarz 2010. The relation to Neo-Kantianism is an
important theme in Kisiel 1993; Crowell reads Heidegger as joining Husserl in a response to the
Neo-Kantianism of Lask in the first several chapters of Crowell 2001, 23–114.
empirical data, whether that be external stimuli or internal biochemical brain

reactions. Objectivity cannot be reduced to an overwhelming preponderance
of evidence. Its unity, in turn, is identified by Cohen as “nothing other than
the law, the rule of consciousness” (TDP 142/110). Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism,
however, remained “exclusively occupied” with the theoretical foundation of
the natural sciences, rather than value philosophy as such, and did not develop
a systematic ethics.35
Windelband’s strand of Neo-Kantianism thus distinguishes itself from
Cohen’s by applying the logical rigor of the foundations of the natural sci-
ences in Cohen to value philosophy and thus construing an ethics on this basis.
Windelband, taking inspiration from Fichte, interprets critical reason as “in
essence practical” (TDP 143/111). That is, he follows Fichte as he understands
him in shifting the “ethical motive” to the center of all philosophy, and con-
ceives of the laws of thinking (i.e., the “rule of consciousness” in Cohen’s ter-
minology) as laws “which thought should conform to, if it wants to become
knowledge” (Heidegger quoting Windelband, TDP 144/111). Thus, the logical
law has, in itself, an ethical dimension of “normative apriority” (TDP 144/111).
Theoretical philosophy is thus construed to have a practical, ethical imperative;
it is “no longer to be a copy of the world, its task is to bring to consciousness
the norms which first lend thought its value and validity” (Heidegger quoting
Windelband, TDP 144/112, emphasis added). Validity itself becomes the basis
for an ethics that is grounded in logic. Theory, having assumed unto itself now
the practical, ethical norm of validity, assumes a certain leadership in a wide
range of human endeavors, “regions” as Heidegger usually refers to them, des-
ignated now collectively as “culture”:
In the totality of spiritual life philosophy has a specific task that cannot be disputed by
any empirical science, a task that fits into the character of nineteenth-century cultural
consciousness, i.e. which avoids all exaggerated metaphysical speculation and seeks its
firm foundation in experience. In universally valid values it possesses the systematic sci-
entific framework, the field from which culture can be interpreted and obtain its own
meaning. Philosophy of value is the authentic scientific philosophy of culture, which
does not have the presumptuous ambition of creating new values, but interprets factu-
ally existing culture in terms of universally valid values (TDP 146/114).
35
Heidegger’s treatment of Cohen, most strikingly, does not consider Cohen’s development of a
transcendental philosophy of ethics, which Leo Strauss would later note formed the “center”
of Cohen’s system of philosophy (Strauss 1989, 28). Heidegger limits his discussion to Cohen’s
Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871) and says nothing about Cohen’s further development of
Kant’s Foundations of Ethics (1877). At this juncture in Heidegger’s argument, he instead shifts
to discuss Windelband’s appropriation of Fichte’s – “the greatest of all Kantians,” in the words
of Windelband’s student, Heinrich Rickert – critical interpretation of theoretical reason “as in
essence practical” (TDP 143/111). That is, ethics is implicitly treated as merely derivative from
practice, i.e., as a region that has no free-standing dignity of its own, or as underlain by the more
fundamental problem of the distinction between theory and practice as such. This is consonant
with Heidegger’s approach to ethics as such.
Thus, in Windelband, the gap between the empirical-historical sciences and the
speculative enthusiasm of the philosophy of German Idealism purports to be
bridged by understanding theory as essentially practical and thus inherently
involved with and indeed regulating the empereia of history and the materi-
alist, technological sciences. Culture thus constitutes the development of the
various regions of human life along the lines of the theoretical sciences, or anal-
ogously to theory. Theory, by supplying a logical grounding to both the natural
sciences and to value philosophy, assumes the spiritual leadership of “culture.”
On the Breakdown of Neo-Kantian System

As Heidegger develops this account, however, he shows the inadequacy of
Windelband’s position, which establishes the limits of the problem as inher-
ited first by other Neo-Kantians such as Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask, but
then also as confronted by Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger himself.
Windelband and his successors must establish – but prove unable to establish –
the connection between the formal and rationalistic, on the one hand, and the
empirico-historical, on the other hand, in the unity of consciousness.
In order to secure the vision of philosophic leadership of culture and eth-
ics against “the growing penetration of empirical psychology” (TDP 113),
Windelband found it necessary to establish more clearly the difference between
judgment (Urteil) and evaluation (Beurteilung).36 That is, it is necessary to
establish value philosophy separately from the encroachments of the empir-
ical sciences, which, as is particularly evident in the field of psychology, make
ever more bold presumptions about the derivation of all value claims from
empirical, factual bases. According to Heidegger, Windelband was looking to
secure more than simply the rules of logic that the empirical sciences necessar-
ily employ (and which cannot simply be derived from empirical experience),
namely, “judgments” (Urteil), but also such “judgments” as actually make
claims about the worth, for example, of science or philosophy, or the worth
or goodness of anything (such as making valid rather than invalid scientific
statements). Such “judgments” of worth or value are of a different order than
assessing the soundness of scientific logic, hence their designation “evaluations”
36
This, of course, is very similar to the problem motivating Husserl’s phenomenology: the
encroachment of what he referred to as “naturalism,” or the power of the positive sciences,
into the domain of logic, thus threatening the soundness of both science and philosophy. His
critique is developed in several works: the Logical Investigations (1900/01), where the target is
more specifically psychologism; “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (1911); and the Crisis of
the European Sciences (1936). Heidegger takes up the theme in another course from the sum-
mer semester of 1919, “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” and again, rather
more famously, in both his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929, “What Is Metaphysics?” and
his Rektratsrede in 1933, “On the Self-Assertion of the German University.” On the importance
of the theme of education for understanding the relationship of Heidegger’s thought to politics,
consider the superb study by Ehrmantraut (2010).
(Beurteilung). It needs to be shown that evaluations cannot simply be derived

from empirical experience.
Is there a logic that can secure both of these types of statements, judgment
as well as evaluations? Judgments, according to Heidegger, statements such
as “the thing is white,” express the “belonging together of two representa-
tional contents” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). The predicate (white)
is a “ready-made determination taken from the content of the objective repre-
sentation” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). Thus judgments are objective
statements, whose content is taken from the object. Evaluations, statements
such as “the thing is good,” express, on the other hand, a “relation of judging
consciousness to the represented object (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116).
That is, they contain within themselves in a hidden fashion an apprehension of
intentionality; the predicate of the evaluation (good) is a “relation referring to
a goal-setting consciousness” (quoting Windelband, TDP 151/116). Evaluative
statements about the object thus include the subject – the “consciousness”
referred to – implicitly in their claims about the object: “In evaluation there is
expressed the feeling of approval or disapproval, ‘with which the judging con-
sciousness relates to the represented object’ ” (TDP 152/116). Evaluations thus
express a feeling, either of approval or disapproval. As subjective statements of
feeling, they do not, therefore, “widen objective knowledge” (TDP 152/116).
Objective knowledge must, therefore, be “finished” for such statements to be
meaningful and not merely arbitrary preferences. The evaluation, to make
any sense, must presuppose a measure of purpose with respect to which it
expresses its feeling of approval or disapproval. Such statements, in turn, are
meaningful only to those who share this sense of purpose. The implication here
is that prior to any affirmation’s being meaningful – including the “goodness”
of validity – the nonevaluative dimension of philosophy, all of its truth claims,
must be “finished,” that is, be shown to be true. The paradox is that their valid-
ity would seem to depend on the “goodness” of truth.
What is or should be the relation between the empirical sciences and phi-
losophy, on this basis? In fact, all propositions of knowledge are combinations
of judgment and evaluation; they “are representational connections whose
truth-value is decided by affirmation or denial” (TDP 152/116). The sciences –
mathematical, descriptive, and explanatory – have as their task “to establish
the entire range of content of what is to be affirmed” (TDP 152/116, empha-
sis in original). Philosophy, however, being neither mathematical, descriptive,
nor explanatory, is seemingly left without a field. Windelband suggests that,
whereas most evaluations simply result in facts – such as, “I feel this thing is
good,” or, “We like this thing” – which may then become objects of the empiri-
cal sciences, such as psychology or the history of culture, some evaluations
make claims to being “absolutely valid” regardless of whether they are univer-
sally accepted, or even accepted at all. The province of philosophy, then, is the
possibility and coherence of such claims. Claims to “absolute validity,” that is,
claims that purport to be universally true – as distinct from the “hedonistic”
evaluative claims derived from feelings of pleasure or displeasure that “no one”
supposes should be universally applicable – necessarily imply nolens volens an
absolute standard. Such claims to absolute validity come in three forms, cor-
responding to which there are then three basic philosophic disciplines: logic,
ethics, and aesthetics.
It is at this point that Heidegger thinks the incoherence of Windelband –
and successive Neo-Kantian positions – shows through. Heidegger thus adum-
brates the problem in the form in which he would inherit it:
Philosophy has to “establish” the principles of logical, ethical, and aesthetical judgings
(thus to “test” critically the claim, the criteria of statements of validity). But one does
not discover “a criterion of what is supposed to be valid” (unclear!) through research
of psychology and cultural history into factually existing evaluations. On the other
hand we are all convinced, “we all believe. . . that. . . there is an entitlement of what is
necessary in the higher sense, which should be valid for all”. Everywhere, accordingly,
where empirical consciousness “discovers in itself” this ideal necessity of the ought, “it
comes upon a normative consciousness”. Philosophy is “reflection [Besinnung] on this
normative consciousness as the scientific investigation into which particular determi-
nations of content and forms of empirical consciousness have the value of normative
consciousness.” As the science of normative consciousness, whose recognition is its pre-
supposition, it “researches” (?) “empirical [!]‌consciousness in order to establish [!] at
which points that normative universal validity emerges.” “Consciousness in general” is
therefore a system of the norms which first make possible universal valid evaluations
(TDP 154/117–18, punctuation in Heidegger’s original).
It is necessary that philosophy derive standards that may plausibly apply to

evaluations, in order to be critical of actual, empirical evaluative statements.
Such standards, however, may not themselves be derived from any empirical
research, no matter how broad or discerning. Such a reliance on empereia would
forfeit all of philosophy’s claims to be critical, and indeed, since philosophy does
not have the attributes of science – being neither mathematical, descriptive, nor
explanatory – it would have no function whatsoever. Here is Windelband’s chief
deficiency or error. His recurrence, to solve this problem, to “researches” into
“empirical” instances of consciousness in order to discern the general norms
(oughts) that could orient a universally valid philosophy of value is, Heidegger
indicates, a dead-end as well as a shocking error. It amounts to a collapse into
scientific empiricism and forfeits the needed critical, formal basis for evaluating
such researches. As he confesses earlier in his elucidation of Windelband’s posi-
tion, in a profession of hermeneutical modesty, “I cannot make Windelband’s
account more intelligible than he has himself” (TDP 151/ 115).
According to Heidegger, Windelband is correct to see that the unity of the
empirical and the normative must be sought in the consciousness – this is the
necessary point of contact between the empirical sciences and the normative
function of any philosophy of value. In Heidegger’s reckoning, however, nei-
ther Windelband nor his philosophic successors Heinrich Rickert and Emil
Lask have got the philosophic resources to develop this insight. This returns,
therefore, to the problem with which Heidegger began, namely, the problem
of form, whence it might be discerned whether it may not be derived from its
empirical instances (TDP 94–5).
The philosophic task for any ethics is to apprehend the motives that impel
the investigator to take up the problem. Only in the understanding of these in
consciousness may one see the intersection of the “empirical” – the real-world
facts and problems that demand “evaluative” judgment of which ethics treats –
and the “formal” – the normative or critical criteria by which these facts are
ranked, categorized, and valued. These criteria cannot, however, be appre-
hended merely at the level of the “general consciousness,” but must be under-
stood in their application to each particular consciousness for itself, as the
motives for each will be quite radically individual and particular. The further
problem that this poses, as Heidegger diagnosed it in the KNS 1919 course, is
that theory itself is incapable of grasping its own motivating impulses and so
cannot attain a sufficient grasp of the motivated consciousness. The impossi-
bility of doing so dashes any possibility whatsoever of any ethics on the basis
of theoretical philosophy.
The historical development that Heidegger traces has led to the current
condition, the difficulties of which are as follows: (1) Values are seen in
everything, or in every field of human achievement, so understood analogi-
cally to theory. (2) Values are thus understood formulaically, but they in
fact need empirical content. (3) To understand the relationship between the
formal values and their empirical content, it is necessary to have an under-
standing of consciousness. (4) Such an understanding is not available, how-
ever, on the model of theoretical philosophy. What would be required is a
grasp of the motives that drove the consciousness in question to undertake
a study and to arrive at formal values, and this primordial connection can-
not be apprehended by theory. (5) Any adequately philosophic apprehen-
sion of this would entail calling into question all of the accepted categories
and rank ordering of values, as these have permeated and saturated the
culture at large, including even the categorization of philosophy and kinds
of philosophy.
2
Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence
Heidegger’s Contemporaries and the Problem

of Theory
The main finding of Heidegger’s 1919 summer semester course on value
philosophy is the requirement that a philosophic ethics have an account of
the consciousness in order to connect the subject pole of the subject–object
divide to the objects of study.1 In his “Comment on Karl Jaspers’ Psychlogy of
Worldviews,” Heidegger restates his critique of his Neo-Kantian contemporar-
ies and also applies it to life philosophers and certain other nonhistorical phe-
nomenologists (such as Husserl and Scheler) in terms of their incapacity of
apprehending the “I am” at the root of “consciousness” thanks to their “prej-
udice” for theoretical or objectifying philosophy.2 The “I am” is the “fun-
damental experience,” that is, the primordial that needs to be apprehended.
Jaspers is different, though. Like Heidegger’s other contemporaries, he misses
1
The priority of the study of consciousness emerges clearly at SZ 212 as well in a crucial passage
that Heidegger later reflects on in the Letter on Humanism (BW 237–9).
2
In the early 1920s, the “Comment” circulated among Heidegger’s colleagues and students, and
before the publication of Being and Time in 1927 it was the most polished written work of his
philosophical maturity. For years it was the only widely available document from this part of
Heidegger’s career. It is distinctive among the written texts of this period – mainly consisting of
courses prepared for delivery – for its unique deployment of “existentialist” language that oth-
erwise is absent from his work until the final draft of Being and Time. (Kisiel [1994, 232, 275,
316, 489] has shown that that the existentialist language that does appear in these early courses
consists mainly of later interpolations; see also Crowell 2001, 116 on the “slovenly editorial
policies of the Gesamtausgabe.”) Jaspers, who was included in the small group among whom
the piece was initially circulated, found it nearly incomprehensible, so little concerned is the
“Comment” with the book he actually wrote (Heidegger 2002b, 179 n. 16). See David Farrell
Krell’s splendid essay on the “Comment” (Krell 1986, 11–26). Kisiel reasons that Heidegger’s fre-
quent reference to “situation” as the fundamental substratum of life in KNS 1919 might be owed
to the influence of an initial reading of Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldview (Kisiel 1994, 64).
44
Surpassing Ethics 45
the basic inadequacy of theory, but in Heidegger’s reading, his Psychology of

Worldviews does suggest a way to grasp the problem. Jaspers’s book shows
how to apprehend the fundamental experience of the “I am” by pointing to
those experiences of the “subject” that distinguish it from the ceaseless experi-
ential flow of everything else, in Jaspers’s terminology, “life.” Heidegger, appro-
priating the term from Jaspers, refers to such experiences as “limit-situations”
(Grenzensituationen), moments where the ceaseless flow of “life” folds back
on itself or is interrupted, such as death, antinomy, or contradiction. Heidegger
sees that if such situations are made central – which cannot be done within a
theoretical approach to philosophy – then one can begin to understand the dis-
tinctiveness of the experience of the “I am” at the root of consciousness. Such
a philosophic approach would necessarily be resistant to inherited cultural
understandings. Indeed, Heidegger expects that it is so resistant to the sur-
rounding cultural milieu that it cannot orient itself to this milieu. He repeatedly
insists that he cannot say what effect an investigation such as his would have
on society and culture. To refer to the results of such a philosophic undertaking
as an “ethics” would be to obscure the character of the underlying thought.
Perhaps the principal defect of Heidegger’s contemporaries’ reliance on the-
ory is their blindness, as he sees it, to the massive role of history in shaping their
philosophical prejudices. As in his assessment of Cohen, Windelband, and oth-
ers in “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,” Heidegger
sees other schools of thought as being hopelessly determined by their histori-
cal antecedents precisely because they fail to see that thinking is historically
determined (TDP 91–152). To put this another way, the confident reliance on
theoretical objectification blinds Heidegger’s contemporaries to the extent to
which theory itself – and its attendant subject–object divide – is determined by
its own historical inheritance, the conceptual detritus of millennia of Western
philosophy. They are left blind to “the history that we ourselves are” (KJPW 4).
In identifying the urgent need to comprehend the consciousness by adequately
limning the primordial experiences from which both the subject and object
emerge, Heidegger is also pointing to the need for historical excavation of
the “self” (such as he himself performed in the “Value Philosophy” course
in attending to the “motivations” in play at each juncture in the history of
ideas which he surveyed). As Heidegger emphasized in the “Value Philosophy”
course – and as Husserl himself was later to consider in his doctrine of “desedi-
mentation” – phenomenological and genuinely historical investigation are, at
root, identical.3
Heidegger’s contemporaries, in his assessment, simply do not appreciate
the extent to which there is a screen of uncomprehended, conceptual distor-
tions between themselves and the phenomenon for which they purport to
3
See Husserl 1970. Comparing Husserl and Heidegger on this point, see Rosen 2002, 69–70. On
the concept of desedimentation in Husserl as further developed by Jacob Klein, see Hopkins
2011; and Cosgrove 2008.
be accounting. In his “Comment” on Jaspers, Heidegger expands on his ear-

lier critique of Neo-Kantianism. As he puts it in a brief critique of Heinrich
Rickert, Neo-Kantianism depends for its assessments on the premise of a “fin-
ished philosophy,” but it lacks both sufficient purchase on what Heidegger
terms the “fundamental experiences,” which are the only sufficient source of
rigor. As such, it cannot account for the genesis of “concepts, about the way
in which philosophical concepts get their structure, and about the basic inten-
tion of conceptual explication in philosophy” (KJPW 11).4 It cannot account
for itself; surely, then, it is not finished. Lebensphilosophie, in turn, lacks
the aspiration to rigor of the Neo-Kantians and relies instead on an “indul-
gent” syncretism of the various but all too “meager inventory of concepts”
(KJPW 4). It cannot, therefore, separate itself from the currents of its time
and so it too fails to make adequate claims about the “fundamental experi-
ences” that are the measure of primordiality (KJPW 4). Lebenphilosophie is
thus in the same troubled position as the supposedly “finished philosophy”
of Neo-Kantianism, in that it is too uncritical of the pedigree of its own con-
cepts, and so is altogether saturated in the residue of what Heidegger here
calls, derisively, the “history of ideas” (KJPW 3). The principal deficiency of
these two approaches is their adoption of “standards” or “concepts” without
subjecting them to a critical interrogation of their own history, that is, of
the motivations that generated them and that must be accounted for in any
attempt to refer to them.
The investigator’s own history influences the judgment of what standards
apply, and so “presuppositions” influence even the most rigorous “objectivity.”
Nonhistorical phenomenology – such as that of Husserl or Scheler, to whom
Heidegger appears to be referring here – aspires to avoid such errors by
employing the rigors of the phenomenological method in service of “essential
intuition,” but Heidegger is doubtful that this succeeds.5 He objects to “the
excessive liberties taken recently by many phenomenologists in their use of
essential intuition” (KJPW 4) because its claims to transcendence are themselves
unwittingly historical. One of the aspirations of such theoretical phenomenol-
ogy is that it shed itself of presuppositions in its quest for immediate access
to the thing itself. In Heidegger’s view, however, the shedding of unreflective
perceptions obscures the phenomenologist’s own motivations and presupposi-
tions. The method of nonhistorical phenomenology (i.e., Scheler or Husserl) is
4
“This . . . cannot but meet with approval whenever they in principle affirm the need for the rig-
orous ‘formation’ of concepts, i.e., whenever they see it from the vantage point of an ideal of
philosophical knowledge that is incontestable in the formal sense that it stresses the importance
of rigorous conceptuality” (W 11).
5
Heidegger treatment of his interlocutors here is highly allusive. He appears, though, to be refer-
ring critically to Max Scheler, the phenomenological “fellow traveler,” and his doctrine of “essen-
tial intuition” as applied to the development of an ethics where love of persons is most funda-
mental. See his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Scheler 1973).
thus inadequate insurance against attributing the status of the “thing in itself”
to whatever happens to be nearby, because “one turns what is immediately ‘on
hand’ in one’s objective historical intellectual situation into the in-itself of the
‘things themselves’ ” (KJPW 4). Such phenomenologists mistake what provi-
sional access they have to things at all with genuine access to the things them-
selves. All theoretical “intuition” as such is beset by the problem that its claims
to immediacy actually, though accidentally, fasten upon the merely proximate;
the mediate is confused for the immediate. Without understanding the his-
tory constituting its own motivation, theory – essential intuition here refers to
theoretical intuition – fails to see that this colors the perception of the things
themselves, that is, mediates their apprehension. Theoretical intuition always
takes place within a context unaccounted for, as such, by theory.6
As with the problems Heidegger diagnosed in the Neo-Kantian value
philosophy, a turn to the subject thus appears as the necessary route to the pri-
mordial. Here, though, Heidegger amplifies the interference posed by history.
An unmediated “turn to the subject” is no more available than is any unme-
diated, presuppositionless access to the “objects” or the “things themselves.”
What is needed to approach the subject is a “genuine confrontation” with or
a “radical destruction” of “the history that we ourselves are” (KJPW 4).7 This
is the source, then, of the historical dimension of Heidegger’s phenomenol-
ogy: the deconstruction of the subject conducting philosophical investigations,
“ourselves,” in order to apprehend the root of consciousness. But even such a
study of the self, as suggested by Heidegger’s critique of Neo-Kantianism and
Lebensphilosophie, must be guided by some “fore-conception” of a standard.
That is, it is necessary that an initial apprehension of what is being sought
after supply the standard that guides the historical deconstruction. Given the
6
Heidegger writes: “one’s intuition can all too easily fall prey to a certain blindness regarding
the fact that its own motivational basis is itself in the end not primordial” (KJPW 4). He does
not “name names” in any of these three implicit critiques. On Heidegger’s relationships with his
contemporaries, see the very insightful Smith 2007, 15–34; on his critique of Neo-Kantianism
and engagement with life philosophy, see Bambach 1995.
The failings Heidegger diagnoses in his fellow phenomenologists are shared by the other two
approaches as well: theory cannot grasp the motivation of the theorizing subject, and so cannot
make adequately primordial claims. Essential intuition can be misled in its assessment of the
“things themselves” – its objects – by the very motives of the investigator – the subject. And this
is so despite an ostentatious claim to be investigating “without presuppositions” (KJPW 4–5).
The Neo-Kantian and Lebensphilosophe positions are likewise driven to apprehend the things
themselves as though in isolation from the distortions of the subject’s role in the investigation.
Far from being “established on some secure foundation,” the “fixed standards” adopted by
Neo-Kantianism are derived from “a long, degenerate, and spurious tradition” (KJPW 2–3).
Lebensphilosophie, for its part, is attentive to the history of philosophy as a source of useful
concepts, but it selects from this conceptual array uncritically and thus expresses its “basic
motive” only in a “hidden manner” (KJPW 3–4). Like Neo-Kantianism, it remains blind to the
role of the subject in pursuing a complete, supposedly objective, account.
7
Heidegger speaks of a “radical kind of deconstruction and reconstruction, i.e., a genuine con-
frontation with the history that we ourselves ‘are’ ” (KJPW 4).
inadequacy of theory for supplying or discerning such a standard, what might

guide the deconstructive excavation of our consciousness, “the history that we
ourselves are”?8
What, then, betokens the primordial? How can one tell that “all stand-
points have been bracketed” or that “thinking without presuppositions” has
been achieved? The very distress caused by refusing to relax one’s refusal of
any standpoint or presupposition is the only worthwhile evidence that one has
begun to think. In the “Comment,” he claims that the “meaning of primordial-
ity does not lie in the idea of something outside of history or beyond it; rather,
it shows itself in the fact that thinking without presuppositions can itself be
achieved only in a self-critique that is historically oriented in a factical manner.
An incessant enactment of our concern (Bekümmerung) for achieving primor-
diality is what constitutes primordiality” (KJPW 4). The principal evidence that
primordiality is being achieved is the bare but recurrent sense that one exists,
which Heidegger refers to as the “fundamental experience” of the “I am” as
apprehended in the condition of anxiety, or as it is styled here, in “the enact-
ment of our distress.”9 The “I am,” the fundamental experience Heidegger is
seeking to retrieve from behind the theory- and objectivity-privileging legacy
of Western philosophy, consists in its own recurrent, incessant disquiet about
its very being.
Heidegger turns to Jaspers, therefore, with this suite of philosophical prob-
lems: (1) A philosophic ethics requires an account of consciousness that can
reconcile the empirical-historical with the critical-formal, but (2) none of the
available philosophic schools have the wherewithal to understand the subject
or consciousness, because (3) being theoretically oriented, they (a) are unwit-
tingly determined by their historical situation, and (b) cannot grasp the experi-
ential motivations that constitute the “I am,” that is, bare existence. Heidegger
is in the position of undertaking a radical deconstruction and reconstruction
of the self, but one that cannot take its bearings by theory. He finds in Jaspers
the promptings to a philosophic orientation that does not “still the stream,”
and that may, therefore, provide the needed orientation for the historical
investigations.
8
James D. Reid likewise identifies the difficulty in apprehending what the standard is by which
historical excavations may be oriented: “what sorts of experiences provide the measure? How
are they to be approached and criticized and under what description? What guarantees their
‘originality’? Where does the phenomenologist discover the criteria that guide concrete studies
of an extant philosophy?” (Reid 2005, 35).
9
Kisiel and Sheehan write in their annotated glossary: “Its precursors [Sorgen] are the bibli-
cal Bekümmerung (1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438). Of
Bekümmerung, translated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write: “This term is used in
the 1920 and 1922 essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original
motivation to philosophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction
that ‘angst reveals care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan
2007, 430).
Jaspers and Limit-Situations

Jaspers, Heidegger claims, presses as far as possible from within the theo-
retical, objective philosophic framework. Jaspers’ indispensable contribu-
tion is the insight that one senses one’s subjectivity – experiences one’s own
self-possession – in experiences of antinomy, such as chance, contradiction,
and facing death. That is, in such situations one is uniquely capable of dis-
tinguishing oneself as an existing “I am” – emphasis on the “am” rather than
the “I” – distinct from any other sense of the ceaseless flow and flux of “life.”
Because it is impossible to give a theoretical account of the subject that reliably
distinguishes it from the swirl of flux and motion that makes up the whole of
life, as such, the subject is typically not distinguishable from the vital currents
in which it is submerged. And yet, Jaspers points out, in “limit-situations,” the
flow of life itself seems to hold out the subject as a separate unit, as a point dis-
tinguishable from everything else. Such situations illuminate, for Heidegger, the
radical finitude of the subject and therefore of all of the subject’s apprehensions
of the objective. What is needed is a philosophic method that does not mask
this finitude or ignore it – thus, which breaks with the theoretical tradition of
“generalization” and every other object-oriented approach – but which seizes
this finitude in its radical particularity and makes such finite particularity cen-
tral to the self-understanding and therefore the task of philosophy.
If the primordial, fundamental experiences that need to be apprehended
are moving events, too radically particular to be grasped by the generalizing,
hence static, objectifying character of theory, then Jaspers’ method of zeroing
in on limit-situations, moments where the flow of life itself comes briefly to a
stop, is a most promising development. In limit-situations, Jaspers proposes a
unique avenue to the primordial source of the subject–object distinction. The
life of the human soul is described as a vital process. Our existence (Dasein)
arises when this vital process has its boundaries established, as happens in the
encounter with “limit-situations” (KJPW 6). This focus of Jaspers’ discussion
is identified by Heidegger as the “solid core that sustains the whole work”
(KJPW 10). Following Jaspers, he calls them “antinomies,” such as arise “as
soon as human beings attempt to attain certainty about the totality of the world
and life, [when] they find themselves faced with ultimate forms of incompat-
ibility” (KJPW 10). They are junctures in the flow of life itself where the subject
emerges distinctly from objects, and thus where subjective experience gives rise
to the concepts that apprehend the objective “fundamental reality” (KJPW 15).
The principal incompatibility with which Heidegger is concerned is the inevi-
table failure of any attempt to provide a complete account of both the objective
and the subjective at once, “our Dasein,” that is, “the world and we ourselves”
(KJPW 10). The “subjective” side of this failure is experienced as struggle,
death, chance, and guilt. In such experiences, our finite existence attempts to
extend past such oppositions to apprehend what is just beyond them in analo-
gous terms: “Antinomies destroy and bifurcate, and our experience of them
amounts to standing within limit-situations, only because all this is initially

viewed from the vantage point of our approach to the flowing stream of life as
a whole. Regarding the genesis of meaning, even concepts have their origin in
the whole of life” (KJPW 11). Thus the primordial shows itself in those situ-
ations of antinomy where the ceaseless flow of life interrupts and contradicts
itself, and the genuine source of the distinction between the subject and the
object, and therefore the existence of the “I am,” shows up.
Heidegger finds, however, that Jaspers has not adequately developed his
notion of limit-situations to elucidate the primordial experiences because he
has retained a prejudice in favor of theory. Jaspers presents limit-situations as
antinomies or oppositions, but they appear as such “from the point of view of
the Absolute” which is the whole of life (KJPW 22 – emphasis in original).10 The
whole – life – is thus regarded as the primal or greatest object (KJPW 18). From
this perspective, limit-situations are contradictions of the whole: “death con-
tradicts life” and “chance contradicts necessity as well as meaning” (KJPW 22).
Heidegger juxtaposes such experiences as seen with respect to the “Absolute”
object with the encounter with such experiences in the course of a human
life: “struggle, death, and chance are . . . limit-situations; i.e., we can experience
struggle and death as limits in our consciousness of that whole which somehow
exceeds life” (KJPW 22). Owing to his “observational” orientation, Jaspers
makes an analogy between human finitude and the finitude of objects or things
that “break forth into the light of day from out of this whole, pass through it,
and return to it” (KJPW 18). Heidegger insists, however, that there is no such
analogy, that the finitude of human existence, as experienced, is radically dis-
tinct from what is observably finite.
The difference between Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s use of limit-situations shows
itself, for example, in their difference approaches to death. There is no analogy
between death as a universal instance of the finitude of objects emerging from
and receding into the moving flux of life, on the one hand, and the first-person,
experienced approach of one’s own death: a “ ‘lived relation to death’ is not to
be confused with ‘universal knowledge about death’ ” (KJPW 22). Neither its
ubiquity nor its general familiarity is what is uniquely disclosive about death.
The experience rather than observation of death is radically particular, and
so the latter is a reflective generality that brings phenomena to a stop which
otherwise remain in motion, whereas the former is a promising moment in
10
Here again Heidegger is critical of Jaspers’ ad hoc adoption of a variety of intellectual motives
from his immediate intellectual tradition: “This concept [the Absolute] represents a syncre-
tism in which the Kantian doctrine of antinomies and its guiding concept of infinity are com-
bined with Kierkegaaard’s concept of the Absolute, which has been ‘cleansed’ of its specifically
Lutheran religious sense and its particular theological meaning in this regard . . . transplanted
into that vagueness that arises from the concept of life we described above” (W 23). Heidegger’s
implication is that one cannot adopt concepts from another thinker without apprehending the
problem that they were initially devised to respond to, and therefore without apprehending the
experiential motivation that is expressed in that problem.
the torrent of life where life itself stills itself. This is true not just of individual
humans, but of “experiences, individual human beings, a people, a culture – all
of these fall prey to death” (KJPW 22); in this sense, death is a universal.11
Heidegger’s objection is not simply that Jaspers is mistaken; it is that his fun-
damental approach to the phenomena, guided by the “observational forecon-
ception” of theory, is wholly unsuited to them. Jaspers retains the prejudice – in
Heidegger’s precise terms, the “fore-conception” – to treat life theoretically.
Strictly speaking, prior to his investigation of life, he foreconceives of it as
an object which will be observed, “looked” or “gazed” at, that is, “theorized”
about. When Heidegger refers to this as an “aesthetic” orientation, he means to
emphasize the original meaning of “theory,” which understands it as a sort of
looking, or an ocular attitude toward the thing looked at: “The actual motiva-
tional basis from which this preconception thus arises is a fundamental experi-
ence of the whole of life in which we keep this whole before our gaze in the
form of an idea. In a very formal sense, this experience can be defined as a
‘fundamental aesthetic experience’ ” (KJPW 20). Such a foreconception implies
a distance between the “object” being observed and the “subject” doing the
observing. That is, it already presumes the subject–object distinction and so
cannot, therefore, apprehend that very distinction. The implication of Jaspers’s
position is that life exists, “is there” (Dasein), as something that “we have”
only or especially when we look at it, that it is the sort of thing that is in such
a way as we have it principally or exclusively by gazing upon it.
Since it retains the theoretical prejudice, Jaspers’ work thus also repeats
the error diagnosed by Natorp and fails, therefore, to provide the basis for a
pretheoretical grounding for philosophy. Because Jaspers treats “life” as an
object, he cannot fully account for the distinction between the motion of life
and the static concepts he employs to understand it: “Every attempt to under-
stand life is forced to turn the surge and flux of the aforementioned process
into a static concept and thereby destroy the essence of life, i.e., the restlessness
and movement (again understood more as an occurrence [Ereignis] than as
a directedness to something) that characterize life’s actualization of its own-
most [eigentlich] qualities” (KJPW 16). Life in Jaspers is treated as a flowing
whole, but this whole is exterior to the concept-forming person, who stands
outside the flow and observes it as a region. This leaves unanswered how it is
that concepts that “still the stream” of life either emerge from flowing life and
11
Their respective understandings of death illuminate an important difference between Heidegger
and Hegel. For Hegel, the fear and therefore contemplation of death are instrumental for the
introduction of human existence to the universal (PhG 148); similarly, in politics, the occasional
recurrence to war reintroduces the universal to human life (see Taylor 1975, 155). That is, death
is a universalizing element of human existence, that illuminates our shared, general humanity.
For Heidegger, and from his earliest remarks on the theme, death is unshareable and radically
particularizing. There is no analogy between one’s own death, anticipated in the first-person,
and another’s death, seen in the third-person.
connect to the observer or how they emerge from the observer and connect
to life.12 Jaspers, despite his promising insight into limit situations, like the
other contemporary philosophers discussed by Heidegger cannot resolve the
problem of motive. He too, therefore, succumbs to the Natorp critique: theory
cannot understand the phenomena because it is static and the phenomena are
in motion. Another approach is required.
Jaspers’s aesthetic foreconception is thus actually hostile to his own inten-
tion, as understood by Heidegger. The foreconception at work treats life as
something out there, a region to be observed, rather than as something that
flows from within, or that includes the “observer” and the observer’s moti-
vations and experience. This puts the “understanding” at a remove from the
intended “phenomenon of existence,” which cannot be formulated or classified
in “regional” terms (KJPW 32). Moreover, the orientation of this foreconcep-
tion does not allow “the self’s anxious concern [Bekümmerung] about itself
to emerge” as a clue to the genuine mode of grasping the experience of life
(KJPW 32). Because theoretical observation is blind to the subject’s motiva-
tions, Heidegger attempts to appropriate Jaspers’ intention and “free” it up,
by making Jaspers’ own insight into the importance of limit-situations central
rather than peripheral to his own investigation of the fundamental experiences
and allowing “the self’s anxious concern about itself to emerge” as a precious
clue to the primordial question of the “I am.”
Formal Indication
Jaspers’ suggestion that limit-situations might be moments inviting the appre-
hension of the “I am” is taken by Heidegger and made central in his method
of “formal indication,” thus supplying the sought-after means of apprehend-
ing “the self’s anxious concern about itself,” that is, the “consciousness” or
subject as required for an ethics. Formal indication is Heidegger’s method
for thinking philosophically outside the constraints of the objectifying, theo-
retical tradition.13 He presents the “formal indication. . . [of] Existenz” as his
12
Heidegger writes: “The other features exhibited by Jaspers’s method, namely, the treatment of
the question of conceptual expression and the question of ‘systematics,’ are also based on his
underlying preconception, i.e., on the initial approach to life as a region and the observational
attitude toward this region. Life is an infinite flowing whole, but since concepts are forms that
bring life to a standstill, it is impossible to grasp life and truly understand it” (KJPW 34).
13
The preeminent Heidegger scholar, Theodore Kisiel, has reconstructed the central importance of
formal indication for Heidegger’s philosophy in his masterful The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being
and Time (Kisiel 1993). In that work, he reconstructs from sometimes misleadingly edited mate-
rials the importance of “formal indication” in Heidegger’s early lecture courses and publications.
Kisiel’s scholarship has made formal indication a focus of Heidegger scholarship, in partic-
ular for its role in distinguishing Heideggerian phenomenology from Husserl. On formal indi-
cation, see also Dahlstrom 1994, Gadamer 1994, Kisiel 1994, Pöggeler] 1987, Streeter 1997.
For critiques of Kisiel, see Burch 2010; McEwen 1995; Sheehan 1995. In the following discus-
sion of formal indication, I deemphasize – as against, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer – the
appropriation of Jaspers’ most fundamental intention and the superior way

to reference the phenomenon referred to by Jaspers as “life” (KJPW 9). The
formal indication is superior because, unlike theoretical observation, the for-
mal indication provisionally “points out” the subject matter while still includ-
ing the “subject” in the disclosure. It includes the fundamental experience of
the “I am,” obscured by the theoretical legacy. Though he refers to it in the
“Comment,” and as crucial as it clearly is to his thinking, formal indication
is not fully elucidated there.14 In Heidegger’s lecture course on “Introduction
to the Phenomenology of Religion” (Winter Semester, 1920–1), he supplies a
fuller account of formal indication (PRL 57–65/39–46). Looking at this course
is necessary to see how formal indication both appropriates Jaspers’ insights
into the centrality of limit-situations while responding to the Natorp critique
and refraining from “stilling the stream.” As such, formal indication can supply
the needed guidance for the deconstructive, historical excavation of the self.15
“pointing” element of formal indication, and stress instead Heidegger’s use of this method to
reinvolve the “subject” in philosophy: “The inheritance of phenomenology’s concepts of ‘seeing’
or, respectively, of ‘evidence,’ and the ‘fulfillment’ towards which phenomenology, working the
way it does, is under way, takes a new turn here into the ‘existentiell’ as well as the historical.
Plainly, the expression ‘indication’ tells us that here no claim is being made to have found a
concept, to have grasped something conceptually. The concern, then, is not eidetic universality
in Husserl’s sense. An indication [Anzeige] always stays at the distance necessary for pointing
something out [Zeigen], and this, in turn, means that the other person to whom something
is pointed out must see for himself” (Gadamer 1994, 33). Also, see Hatab on formal indica-
tion, who misses the inclusion of the “subject” in the formalization (Hatab 2000, 12–13). As
Heidegger remarks, “The formal is something relational” (TDP 63/43). A recent study that
surveys and helpfully categorizes the discussions of formal indication is MacAvoy 2010.
14
Heidegger writes: “Using formal indication (a particular methodological level of phenomeno-
logical explication that will not be dealt with further here, though some understanding of it will
be gained in what follows)” (KJPW 25). See Dahlstrom 1994, 780.
15
Cf. Reid 2005. Dahlstrom’s discussion of the course Phenomenological Introduction to
Aristotle draws out Heidegger’s adumbration of two dimensions of formal indication: its
“referring-prohibitive” function and its “reversing-transformative” function. He reads the
former as Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl’s bracketing, the latter as “theological”
(Dahlstrom 1994, 783). The latter function is what provides guidance through the obscuring
“ruinance” that characterizes Heidegger’s attitude to contemporary culture. Gadamer sketches
the role of formal indication in guiding the historical deconstruction: “Here we detect traces of
the basic attitude in phenomenology which Heidegger amplified with his concept ‘destruction.’
Taking down whatever covers something up, whatever has rigidified, whatever has become
abstract – this was the great passionate appeal in Heidegger’s beginnings and his defense against
that ‘ruination’ of life which he was later to call the proclivity to decadence and fallenness
[Verfallenheit] in our being-there. The task is to resist the tendency to turn something into
dogma. Instead, we are called upon to grasp in our own words, to put into words, that which
we are shown when we are given an indication of something. The ‘formal indication’ points us
in the direction in which we are to look. We must learn to say what shows up there and learn to
say it in our own words. For only our own words, not repetitions of someone else’s, awaken in
us the vision of the thing that we ourselves were trying to say. . . . But when we have immersed
ourselves in these things and taken to heart that what formal indication is describing in this way
is itself a formal indication, then what was important to Heidegger comes into view; namely,
For Heidegger, formal indication avoids the distorting effects of being ori-
ented by objectivity. He argues that this method is appropriate to the matter
being studied, of which the most that should initially be said is that it relates to
the bare existence of the investigator. The differences between Heidegger’s and
Jaspers’ approaches to the same, as it were, subject matter, lead Heidegger to
claim that the “object actually investigated in Jaspers’ work [life] can be defined
in formal indication as our existence [Existenz]” (KJPW 9).16 The different termi-
nology points to the importance of the “subject” undertaking the investigation,
the “I am”: “Having such a formally indicated meaning, this concept is intended
to point to the phenomenon of the ‘I am,’ i.e., to the sense of being in this ‘I
am’ that forms the starting point of an approach to a context of fundamental
phenomena and the problems involved there” (KJPW 9). “Life” is out there, an
object of sorts, whereas Existenz, formally indicated, includes in the indication
the claim that “I am.” The claim being an “indication,” Heidegger emphasizes
its non-final, provisional, but therefore also disquieting character: “the question
of how we should enact our initial approach and access will constantly stand
before us in the starting point of our approach to this problem of existence
whenever we have understood it in a genuine way” (KJPW 31). Formal indica-
tion thus keeps the question of the appropriate initial approach in view, satisfy-
ing Heidegger’s insistence that the search for primordiality be characterized by
the perpetually renewed anxious distress about achieving primordiality.
Shortly before aborting the methodological introduction to a course of
study on Paul’s letters at the behest of disgruntled students (see PRL 65/45;
Kisiel 1993, 171–2), Heidegger sketched what he intended by formal indica-
tion by distinguishing it from theoretical generalization. In generalizing, the
intellectual procedure that typifies theoretical philosophy, one is, as Heidegger
puts it, bound to a certain “material domain” (Sachgebiet), the “what” under
investigation (PRL 59/40). This means that one’s thinking is always deter-
mined, at least in part, by the matter about which one thinks. Generalizing
always generalizes with respect to one direction or another, and remains within
the “material region” in question. That is, it is oriented by what comes to be
referred to as the “object.” Formalization, on the other hand, “is not bound to
the particular ‘what’ of the object to be determined” (PRL 61/42). Thus one’s
thinking is freed from the thing (Sache) being thought. In formalization,
I see the determination of its “what” not from out of the object; rather I read the deter-
mination “off’ ”the object. I must see away from the what-content and attend only to
the fact that the object is a given, attitudinally grasped one. Thus, “the formalization
that it remains for each and every one of us to carry out individually our own fulfillment of the
thing of which we are given an indication” (Gadamer 1994, 33–4).
16
Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time is continuous with this theme: “Only if we take our
orientation from existentiality as interpreted in an ontologically positive manner, can we have
any guarantee that in the factical course of the analysis of ‘consciousness’ or of ‘life’, some sense
of ‘Reality’ does not get made basic, even if it is one which has not been further differentiated”
(SZ 212).
arises out of the relational meaning of the pure attitudinal relation itself, not out of the
“what-content as such” (PRL 59/40).
Formalizing, then, is not determined at all by the “content” or “what” the way
that generalizing is; it refers to the relation between the thing and the person
knowing the thing. Not being ordered by the thing (Sache), the formal indica-
tion is wide open in terms of meaning, and “meaning only in relation to the
phenomenological explication” (PRL 44). Formal indication takes place within
this disclosure without the distance between subject and object implied by gen-
eralizing. Thus, in a formal indication, it is given that the “I am” is within the
disclosedness that includes the “object”: “The formal is something relational”
(PRL 43). Formal indication is therefore, in principle, universalizable in a way
that no generalizing method truly is. As Heidegger implied in his critique of
the Neo-Kantians, Lebensphilosophers, and nonhistorical phenomenologists in
the “Comment,” in theorizing they happened merely to privilege that aspect of
whatever occurred most proximately to them and determine that this was its
“essence,” not realizing that they were privileging accidental qualities. Formal
indication is not less abstract than generalizing, but in fact so abstract as to
include every possible particular without distortion.17
What Heidegger envisions is a nontheoretical, thus nonobjectifying, sort
of philosophizing that is able to understand the motives of the investigator
because it does not succumb to the narrowing falseness of objectifying general-
izations. Objectifying generalizations fasten onto one aspect of a thing (Sache),
its whatness or content, and on this basis abstract to the rank of species, then
to the rank of generalities, without allowing that it was a peculiar quality of
the thing and a peculiar foreconception of the investigator that allowed it to
be treated like an object. As such, the generalizing was always governed by the
objectivity – by one narrow aspect – of the thing. This, in turn, is determined
by the subject’s motivation to look at this one narrow aspect of the thing, the
subject’s preference for objectivity. Formalization answers the problem of theo-
retical motivation by including motivations in the disclosure. Thus, formalizing
aspires to be, in a sense, even more abstract than generalizing, but by doing so
it avoids being determined by any qualities of the thing and any prejudicial
foreconceptions of the investigator. It can thus more properly claim to be free
from determinations and thus to “bracket all standpoints.”
17
Cf. Dahlstrom 1994, 785: “Heidegger’s emphasis on the formality of philosophical concepts
is somewhat misleading. Philosophical concepts are clearly not understood by him as being so
devoid of content that they are unable to preclude errant presumptive determinations of their
meaning” (1994, 785). Heidegger’s purpose, though, is to devise a philosophic method that is
sufficiently “formal” as to supply a nonarbitrary account of the primordial, i.e., that is more
universal than any generalization. In Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, he charac-
terizes formal indications as empty: “The empty content in its sense-structure is at the same time
that which provides direction toward the actualization” (GA 61 33/Heidegger 2001b, 26; see
MacAvoy 2010, 85).
In the “Comment,” formal indication allows Heidegger to make Jaspers’

limit-situations central and thereby to respond to the problem of theoreti-
cal motivation. Heidegger refers to “the formal indication of Existenz” as his
appropriation of what Jaspers refers to objectively as “life.” By so indicating
Existenz, he purports to take his orientation from the bare “thatness” of the
“I am” as opposed to the false analogy between its thatness and the whatness
of finite objects in the flow of life. Existenz thus refers to the unsurpassable
first-person orientation of the investigator as revealed not by object-oriented
theory, but by situations that expose the perilous, tenuous life – or, more pre-
cisely, Existenz – of the existing inquirer, namely, “limit-situations.” Antinomies
such as struggle, death, and chance reveal more transparently the “I am” by
enflaming the “self’s anxious concern with itself,” finally allowing only this
anxious sense of self-possession as the marker of primordiality.
Whereas theory could not guide the historical excavation that Heidegger
sees as the necessary response to our historical situation, formal indication
supplies the needed grasp of the primordial phenomena, the “fundamental
experiences” and the “fundamental question.” It may therefore, in turn, ori-
ent a historical deconstruction. Heidegger’s philosophic method has as one of
its results the claim genuinely to apprehend each distinct, unique “subject,”
without falsifying each of them as an instance of a species, but as a discrete,
self-possessed “I am.” In refusing the traditional orientation by the object, for-
mal indication does justice to the unique character of “subjects,” namely, that
they possess themselves distinctly.
In this context, then, the prospect of a theoretical ethics emerges clearly as
an affront to the radical particularity of each “I am,” indeed as a frightened
flight from such facticity that entails the denial of the distinctiveness of each
particular person in each particular situation. The “consciousness” sought for
in order to satisfy the problems bequeathed by value philosophy has been dis-
covered, but as radically distinct and untouched in its distinctness by anything
like the general rules or norms of ethics. Its formal qualities are apprehended so
abstractly as to transcend any ethical rules or norms whatsoever. A theoretical
ethics would appear, then, to provide an illusory gloss on those in fact most
revealing experiences that constitute our existence, based on generalizations
that cannot, in either the first or final analysis, account for themselves. This
much may be true, but it leaves the question, indeed it reinvigorates the ques-
tion, What ought we to do?
History and the Future Past

In formal indication, Heidegger has found a philosophic method that fulfills
the task he set for himself in his programmatic courses of 1919: the adum-
bration of a nontheoretical (KNS) mode of philosophically apprehending the
unity of both the historical-empirical consciousness and the formal conscious-
ness (SS), or as he put it in the “Comments,” the fundamental experience of
the “I am,” the location of the generation of concepts from within history.
The philosophic procedure for grasping the “I am,” however, and its essence
as recurrently disturbed, anxious grasping for its own self-possession, make it
impossible that the procedure should be the basis for a philosophic ethics. Any
ethics that deserves the name requires the coordination of more-or-less formal
rules of conduct with particular experience. The decisive characteristic of the
“I am,” however, is that its self-possession is impeded and obstructed by any
of the necessarily theoretical attempts to formulate such rules, no matter their
level of generality. This is not, however, to say that Heidegger’s formulation of
the matter is without “practical” consequences. Though what he lays out in the
“Comment” (and elsewhere) is not a philosophy of ethics, the deconstructive
hermeneutics he outlines do require a reorientation toward the most particular
material of history that is inescapably “practical,” or nontheoretical; his own
term for it is “enactmental.”
Contrary to a common reading of Heidegger, the summoning up of the past
that he has in mind is shaped most fundamentally by the future. The approach
to history that he develops is not simply a backward-looking, nostalgic tra-
ditionalism, attempting to re-create a lost moment of communal heritage.
Heidegger’s recurrence to the past is not primary, but is first prepared by for-
mal indication. This most thoroughgoing abstraction allows for the appropri-
ation of the most radical particularity sought by Heidegger’s deconstructive
historical investigation. Heidegger’s rejection of theory is prior to and guides
his turn to history. It is undergirded, however, by the conviction that the indi-
vidual is more primordial than the genus, not just ontically, but ontologically. It
is not sufficiently appreciated, however, by either his critics or his epigoni that
the practical effect, more than simply choosing a preferred moment from the
past to relive, is potentially much more totalizing and revolutionary.18 This is
not to say that the future is an open field, to be determined in its content by the
will or free choice of each “I am.” The future is indeed limited by the past, but
it is not determined by the past.
Rethinking the “I am” and understanding the priority of the “am” has con-
sequences for orienting ourselves with regard to what “is,” that is, with regard
to everything that is. Heidegger urges a “radical suspicion” of all foreconcep-
tions, concepts, and accounts of the generation of such concepts that privilege
objects, regions, objectivity, or classification in their thinking in order to avert
the tendency of thinking of the “I” as an “object that can be ascertained and
classified by inserting it into a region” (KJPW 26, emphasis in original). The
18
Pace Fritsche, who provides the most detailed argument for the priority of the past to Heidegger’s
political understanding (See his 1999, as well as follow-up adumbrations of the claim in 2009
and 2012). Wolin (1990) and Faye (2009) each develop versions of this argument. Nolte (1992),
ironically, provides a structurally similar interpretation of Heidegger – where the past is, in the
decisive sense, primary – in defense of Heidegger’s politics. Each of them misses the priority of
the future and the necessary role of philosophic abstraction in apprehending it.
very formulation of the verb, “to be,” falls under such suspicion: “When it has
the sense of ‘is,’ the sense of being [Seinsinn] has developed from objectively
oriented experiences that have been explicated in ‘theoretical’ knowledge, and
in which we always somehow or other say of something that it ‘is something’ ”
(26). That is, with the development of the sense that something “is” rather than
that something “am” – so to speak – the requirement is already such that one
must be theorizing objectively, thinking of the thing in question as being of
something else, a region or field. Already this is to privilege the objectifying,
theoretical, observational foreconception. One can have an “am” as a thing
uniquely irreducible, but something “is” only as something in common with
other things. The classical formulation, traceable to the Socratic school, that “to
be is to be something” is already, on this account, a deviation from the original,
in the sense of more primordial, sense of being, the sense that “I am.”19 The
fundamental experience that Heidegger is pointing to, marked by having one-
self in an anxiously concerned manner [bekümmert], is prior to its formulation
in terms of the third-person.20 To approach knowledge of the ‘is,” objectifying
knowledge, one necessarily comports oneself in an observational attitude, and
thus sets oneself at a remove from “existence and from a genuine having of it
(anxious concern)” (KJPW 26).21
The approach to history Heidegger has in mind is designed to uncover the
radically particular and unique “history” of each, existing “I am,” to retrieve it
in its particularity from beneath an objectively oriented historical residue. Once
objective-theoretical regions and prejudices are rejected as suspect, the possible
meaning of what is being sought in the “I am” really flourishes. Therefore, it
may be emphasized, the “I am” being sought is not a radically isolated individ-
ual in either the Lockean or Cartesian sense; rather, Heidegger characterizes
the “I am” as being related in its essence to itself, to its world, and to others.22
19
Stanley Rosen (1993, 70–1) develops a Platonic riposte to Heidegger that argues for the primacy
of the claim that “to be is to be something.” Remi Brague, Aristote et la question du monde
(Brague 1988) explores how the Greeks missed the phenomenon of “world.”
20
Heidegger writes: “this having is enacted prior to whatever knowledge about it we might later
acquire by objectifying it with the ‘is,’ and such knowledge is in fact inconsequential for this
enactment” (KJPW 26).
21
Kisiel and Sheehan (2007) write in their work’s annotated glossary: “Its precursors [Sorgen] are
the biblical Bekümmerung (1920) and Augustine’s cura (1921)” (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 438).
Of Bekümmerung, translated “anxious” or “troubled concern,” they write: “This term is used
in the 1920 and 1922 essays as well as in the courses held in this period to convey the original
motivation to philosophize in the face of the very facticity of life. It is replaced by the distinction
that ‘angst reveals care’ as the development approaches Being and Time” (Kisiel and Sheehan
2007, 430).
22
This is also true of Being and Time, contrary to certain prominent misconceptions that it pres-
ents a radically isolated “individual” as the locus of Being. Cf. Habermas 1977, 161: “the
quasi-religious choice of the private, self-individuated existence”; Adorno 2003: “To be sure,
Dasein is constituted in Historicity, but Heidegger focuses on individuals purged of the hidden
and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged of the injuries they
suffer from their society” (Marcuse 1977, 32).
What is uncovered there is not “the ‘I’ as something located in a region, as an

individuation of a ‘universal,’ or as an instance of something.” The “I” discov-
ered there is “mine,” directly; “this experience is the experience of the ‘I’ as a
self” (KJPW 25). In a very important sense, then, it is one’s own past.
The past of each “I” is interpreted relative to the possibilities of its own
particular future. Because the past is not a region or field to be apprehended
objectively, the content of each past is highly relative and variable, dependent
on the particular circumstances toward which each “I” is directed. Recurring
to one’s past self, then, on this scheme, is not a revival of a lost age, or a simple
repetition of a past version of “oneself” – say, from the age of the Greeks,
or of a lost, Germanic, völkisch communal Gemeinschaft – but depends on
the future being faced currently: “This past is not like an appendage or bag-
gage that the ‘I’ drags along with itself; rather, it is experienced as the past of
an ‘I’ that experiences it historically within a horizon of expectations placed
in advance of itself and for itself” (KJPW 27, emphasis added). The content,
so to speak, of what is being retrieved and reenacted is changeable. As each
“I” orients itself toward the finite horizon of its future, this sets the boundar-
ies for reconsidering its history. History and historical studies, on this model,
are established within the task of hermeneutical phenomenology and become
“the task that is most important for us in the whole complex set of problems
we face concerning phenomena of existence” (KJPW 27).23 Historical study
aims perpetually – in a condition of recurrent distress or anxiety regarding
its primordiality – to attain to the deepest phenomenon, as required by the
ever-shifting possibilities of each future.
Heidegger designates the material uncovered by such future-oriented histor-
ical studies “facticity” (Factizität).24 Facticity refers to the movement from the
“am” to the “is,” which is not genuinely susceptible to theoretical accounting.
The reason for focusing on this set of early works is to show that prior to and determining his
excavation of Aristotle, Heidegger is alive to these concerns. The character of the problem and there-
fore what would be required to respond to it determines the character of Heidegger’s investigations
of Aristotle. For a challenging alternative account of Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle, see Chacon 2010.
23
As Heidegger elaborates in Being and Time, history rather than knowledge of nature provides
the appropriate means of navigating the hermeneutic circle (SZ 152).
24
This term owes its first usage to Fichte and was adopted by Neo-Kantians to refer to the “brute,
irrational” underside of transcendental structures, having their source in the “unexplainably
new, unprecedented, and creative” entry into history, associated with both the work of the indi-
vidual genius as well as divine, miraculous intervention (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 433–4; Kisiel
1993, 28). In post-Kantian philosophy, it is the “irrational hiatus” between the a priori and the
a posteriori. Heidegger appropriated it from Emil Lask’s study of Fichte around the time of writ-
ing this review. In Heidegger’s usage, differing importantly from the employment of the term by
Neo-Kantians, who distinguished it from Logizität, Faktizität is characterized as having its own
hermeneutic “logicity”; the Neo-Kantian distinction is thus collapsed (Kisiel 1993, 496–9). In
Heidegger’s own autobiographical recollections, he connects Faktizität with his studies of Duns
Scotus, and Scotus’ attention to what he called haeccitas (“thisness”) (see Kisiel 1993, 19, citing
a 1927 letter from Heidegger to LöwithFacticity is the “pretheoretical primal something” (Kisiel
1993, 23), ever resistant to adequate theorization and objectification.
It expresses the articulation of the world in which human life occurs, which
is apprehended by means of what Heidegger calls “enactmental history,” as
opposed to “object history” (Wirkungsgeschichte and Objektgeschichte).
History so understood is not oriented by the standard “objects” of history –
dates, events, timelines, and such – but rather by the intention to apprehend
the radical particularity of each acting “I am”: “the ‘historical’ is here not
the correlate of theoretical and objective historical observation; rather it
is both the content and the ‘how’ of the anxious concern of the self about
itself, from which the former certainly cannot as such be detached” (28). The
enactment-historical, in its intention of grasping the motivations in play, is
not a record of or simply a description of the “history of ideas,” but rather an
appropriative “reenactment,” so to speak, of the generation of those very ideas.
Only such a study can satisfy the possibility opened up by formal indication to
include the radical particularity of the investigating subject in the study itself.
The Sources of Heideggerian Politics

in His Early Thought
How then does Heidegger’s formal indication of Existenz and its attendant
reconsideration of history – that is, his philosophic method of apprehending
the fundamental experience of the “I am” – resonate with the possibility of a
philosophic ethics? Is there an ethics or a politics of facticity, historically exca-
vated, actively appropriated, oriented by the horizon of the future? To respond
on the basis of these early works requires extrapolating some from Heidegger’s
intimations and suggestions, but these give sufficient warrant to follow out his
argument.
Ethics involves, in its broadest sense, the relationship of one thing to
another: either the relation of one person to another; or the relation of one
person to the things around one, and these in turn to another person; or the
relation of oneself to a standard or an ought. In Heidegger’s terms, it is there-
fore inherently “theoretical,” as it requires espying these other things in order
then to relate to them. Heidegger implies that knowing how to act in a situation
requires having a grasp, in advance, of what these things are, what I am, what
the things are in their relation to me and to the other person or people involved.
To put it this way, though, is already to restrict the breadth of the Being of the
things under consideration, for we must apprehend not only what they are, but
how they are and that they are. That is, Heidegger implies, understanding how
to get along in the world, in life, implies a prior understanding of the Being of
the beings or somethings one encounters, including what one’s own Being is.
Existenz thus needs to be grasped as bare existence, that point at which one
(barely) is rather than is not and so in which being or existing is stripped of
all adornment and accoutrement. It is exposed in moments when the aspects
by which we normally orient ourselves break down, such as when theoretical
rationality is shown to be inadequate. This anodyne formulation understates
the shocking, intentionally bracing character of what Heidegger is trying to

communicate: taking our bearings by an ethical grasp of or relation to other
beings is to presuppose an understanding of those beings. What really exposes
to us the truth of our genuine relations to these others is the grievous, anxious
sense of our own bare existence as communicated to us in a broader context
of impoverishment or destitution. That is, in such an experience of trauma and
disruption, the world is revealed to us as it genuinely is. As such, “ethics” that
orients itself by presuppositions about what other things are prior to evaluat-
ing their desert will never apprehend the real meaning of anything, and will
therefore provide no real guidance at all.
In order to discern what other things are prior to a consideration of their
desert, Heidegger insists on the necessity of the “radical suspicion” of every
available concept or preconception, in other words, the customs or opinions of
the surrounding community. This is what establishes the fundamentally “neg-
ative” attitude toward society, both in refusing its available orientations but
also, therefore, in calling radically into question the likely effect of Heidegger’s
“pointing out.” In calling for such radical suspicion, Heidegger repeats a mode
of relating to society that was previously urged by the founders of early mod-
ern political philosophy (Hobbes, Spinoza), and repeated by nineteenth-century
figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In advocating, therefore, such a
“hermeneutic of suspicion,” to use Ricouer’s apposite term, Heidegger reiter-
ates what can be called a “modern” approach to the relation between thinker
and society, as opposed, for example, to the Socratic orientation by “opinion.”
Heidegger also takes over the Enlightenment notion that the philosopher is
the paradigm for aesthetic and ethical judgment. That is, in Heidegger’s devel-
opment and presentation of this line of thought, his philosophy retains what
he attributed to the Neo-Kantians of a fundamentally practical character. As
such, the praxis of the philosopher himself (one need not say Heidegger per-
sonally, though a certain dimension of this is implied) becomes the paradigm
of practice. Thus, one receives the impression from Heidegger’s Neo-Kantians
that to be ethical one must be a philosopher. Heidegger carries this over into
his own consideration of the matter.25 This dimension of Heidegger’s thought is
thus, wittingly or otherwise, continuous with another important dimension of
the Enlightenment project. The purpose or goal of practice is to serve “truth.”
For Heidegger, philosophy is no longer theoretical, but it continues to lead if
25
As Richard Velkley has remarked of Heidegger’s thought from the 1930s, in seeking to have
philosophy provide educational and political leadership to the country, Heidegger in fact echoes
Fichte and later German Idealists who saw the prospect of philosophy assuming a national
pedagogical role as salutary. Here in Heidegger’s early thought we see anticipations of this
aspect of the Fichtean relationship between theory and practice, where “theory” is nonetheless
demoted in priority. This dimension of Heidegger’s thought is sometimes erroneously referred
to as “Platonic,” as in “philosopher kingly” (Rockmore 1991, 56). The continuities between
Heidegger and the German tradition of philosophy have, in this respect, been generally under-
emphasized (though see Bambach 2003; Newell 1984; Sluga 1993; Velkley 2011; Villa 1995).
only initially in redetermining what is and the attendant boundaries of the

community as such. Heidegger himself refers to his activity in the “Comments”
as a “calling something to the attention of others” (KJPW 5; see 36).26
The strictly political, as distinct from ethical or practical, implications of
this early work remain obscure. It is worth stating what Heidegger is not doing
at this point. He simply is not propounding a specifically Nazi vision of poli-
tics, pace Johannes Fritsche and Emmanuel Faye. What he lays out in his earli-
est mature thought has the potential for political radicalism, no doubt. Indeed,
as Heidegger treats it, political-practical radicalism is very possibly a corre-
late of the nontheoretical philosophic radicalism he calls for. So it is certainly
plausible to claim that Heidegger’s earliest thought on such matters is broadly
compatible with an idealized form of Nazism, but not identical to and certainly
not, in its political implications, exhausted by it. More prominent in these writ-
ings, however, is a disdain for politics as such. Heidegger’s contempt for the
“hustle and bustle” of culture, and the culturally accepted understanding of
how a philosopher ought to relate to the surrounding community, is expressed
in his conviction that the most he can expect of his own work is that it “point
out,” not that it enjoin, direct, or deliberate out of a concern for any moral or
political matters.
26
Cf. Van Buren 1994, 159, who emphasizes the Kierkegaardian sources of this approach.
3
The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of

Theory from Practice
The question to which the discussion in Chapters 1 and 2 points is, Why are we
seemingly presented with moral, ethical, or cultural problems, to be treated in the
manner that Heidegger characterizes as “theoretical,” when according to him they
are more properly understood as “existential,” in the sense of relating most pro-
foundly to our Existenz in its facticity? Restated: Why are we inclined to theoret-
ical “solutions,” such as devising an ethics or a more comprehensive philosophy
of value, if this is so misleading?1
In Being and Time, Heidegger articulates a response of sorts. In this, his pro-
fessedly incomplete magnum opus, he treats at numerous junctures the emergence
of the theoretical from the practical, or in the specific terms of this treatise, the
present-at-hand from the ready-to-hand.2 Being and Time frequently describes
how the present-at-hand, our comportment toward the other things in the world,
the beings, as though they relate to us principally by means of knowledge as
communicated by reflecting on their stable essences or “looks,” emerges from
our otherwise prior, pragmatic involvement with them, as instruments of use to
which we relate by our shared interest in their functions and purposes as these are
illuminated by our intentions. The “astonishing torso” never supplies – at least to
Heidegger’s satisfaction – an adequate or complete account of this emergence.3
1
“One ought to state not only the truth but also the cause of the falsehood” (Aristotle, EN
1154a22–6).
2
On the difficulties with assimilating “theory” to Vorhandenheit or (especially) “practice” to the
Zuhandenheit, it is worth consulting Schürmann’s sound mediation of the differing positions of
Pöggeler and Tugendhat (Schürmann 2008, 126–7).
3
Theodore Kisiel frequently quotes this remark of Herbert Spiegelberg’s (Kisiel 1993, 1).
Heidegger concludes the book by remarking that his account so far has not yet settled the
matter: “It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that
there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness.’ But what does this ‘reifying’ signify? Where does it
arise? Why does Being get ‘conceived’ ‘proximally’ in terms of the present-at-hand and not in
terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us? Why does this reifying always keep
63
Of the treatments Heidegger gives of the emergence of theory from prac-

tice in Being and Time, his discussion of what he refers to as “everydayness”
(Alltäglichkeit) is the most germane to our understanding of both the political
import of his thought, and inasmuch as everydayness is the medium within
which the analytic of Dasein takes place, his thought as such.4 The word
alltäglich means “everyday” in something like the sense of “prosaic” or “quo-
tidian,” even “normal” or “ordinary.” Everydayness is the way we are “proxi-
mally and for the most part,” and is typified, Heidegger says, by its average,
fallen mediocrity. In the portions of Being and Time where he draws nearest
to political matters, Heidegger details our “everyday,” easy submission to the
dominance of our collective self-understanding identity as “the They” or “any-
one” (das Man). As such, we in our everydayness privilege the comforting,
reliable, and easily communicated clarity of theory at the expense of holding
ourselves together as beings who more “authentically” (eigentlich) exhibit our
own true essences as the being among the beings that is open to the question
of Being. This most easily overlooked way that Dasein exists in fact typifies
it so completely that it is the declared starting point for the instauration of
genuinely philosophic thinking represented by raising again the question of the
meaning of Being.
As Heidegger presents it in Being and Time, therefore, everydayness is both
a philosophic obstacle – that is, it privileges theory of the kind validated by
Neo-Kantians and his other contemporaries at the expense of a deeper form
of thinking – as well as the necessary starting point for philosophic thinking.
This dual character of everydayness assumes political consequences for two
reasons. The first is that in our everydayness, we are so thoroughly “in thrall”
to das Man, ourselves in the aspect of our relating to the public community at
large, that it determines our entire existence. The second is that, as he devel-
ops the matter more fully in other writings, but implicitly even in Being and
Time, philosophic thinking itself is not strictly an “individual” activity; to some
coming back to exercise its dominion? What positive structure does the Being of ‘consciousness’
have, if reification remains inappropriate to it?” (SZ 437).
4
In this and the following chapter, I concentrate on “everydayness” rather than the concept he
develops in greater detail in the years immediately following the publication of Being and Time
(GA 24, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, for example) and after, “presence” (Präsenz), despite
the latter being retained through several of Heidegger’s other works as a more comprehensive
mode of Being that includes both the “presence” of theoretical and the “presence” of practical
(ready-to-hand) objects. The tradition of metaphysics, so understood, privileges “presence” over
against “absence.” See Mark Blitz’s very helpful discussion of this matter in relation to Being
and Time (Blitz 1980, 185–187). As I interpret it, the incomplete character of Being and Time
prevented Heidegger from developing his argument that what is initially given to us as two sep-
arate modes of Being, the present (vorhanden) and the handy (zuhanden), in fact both presumes
a deeper sameness in their Being, namely, presence (Präsenz). In the present study, my focus is
on “everydayness” as the comportment of human Dasein with respect to time that invites or
privileges the orientation by presence in this larger sense, and that constitutes the way of Dasein’s
Being by which Heidegger conducts the Daseinanalytik.
The Ambiguous Everyday 65
extent but inextinguishably, it is a possibility of a community, and indeed rep-

resents the most precious expression of the community.5 That the community
at large in its normal doings is characterized as such as das Man, everydayness
is, then, both an obstacle to authentic communal existence as well as a neces-
sary dimension of authentic communal existence.
In this chapter, my intention is to establish, on the basis of the text of Being
and Time, occasionally supplemented by other relevant texts when illumi-
nating, Heidegger’s understanding of the character of everydayness as both
occlusive, and therefore a kind of obstacle to genuine philosophy, and also
as disclosive, and therefore the necessary starting point for such philosophy.
In Chapter 4, I will turn to a consideration of the more broadly communal
dimensions of everydayness and das Man and there flesh out more broadly
the political implications of Heidegger’s analysis. The reading I propose takes
these two preliminary iterations of everydayness that Heidegger lays out in
Being and Time – represented by the image of the craftsman in his workshop
and the social existence of das Man – and shows how Heidegger means for
both of them to be understood as functions of time, that is, as expressions
of our everyday attitude to temporality and the meanings of Being that this
temporality favors. In addition, I read the treatment of everydayness in light
of Heidegger’s own account of its place in the philosophic project in Being
and Time proper. That is to say, I emphasize two dimensions of Heidegger’s
account of everydayness, each of which occupies an important place, it is fair
5
See GA 36/37 3–8 for an astonishingly forthright presentation of this. A recourse to baroque
periodizations of Heidegger’s thought should not obscure that a fundamentally similar account
is present in Being and Time, as well, though the terminology of the presentation is rather more
technical. This is the plain meaning of Heidegger’s clear statement that Dasein “is” Dasein-with,
and therefore the implication that the understanding and thinking of Dasein involves its com-
munal character. The details of this are explored further in Chapter 6.
The interpretation I develop in this study, then, disputes the soundness of one of the main
tenets of the Frankfurt School’s critique of Heidegger, common to the otherwise rather distinct
critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. This tenet, to speak gen-
erally, is the claim that Heidegger treats principally of “individuals” in his discussion of Dasein,
either to the exclusion of a consideration of the social situatedness of human existence (as in
Habermas’s assessment of “the quasi-religious choice of the private, self-individuated existence”
[1953, 161]) or else rendering it so abstractly as to be meaningless (see Marcuse 1977, 30–1: “As
to Heidegger himself, he seems to use his existential analysis to get away from the social reality
rather than into it . . . this philosophy cannot provide a conceptual basis for a social and political
theory . . . . To be sure, Dasein is constituted in Historicity, but Heidegger focuses on individuals
purged of the hidden and not so hidden injuries of their class, their work, their recreation, purged
of the injuries they suffer from their society. There is no trace of the daily rebellion, of the strinv-
ing for liberation. The Man [the Anonymous Anyone] is no substitute for social reality.”) Though
I dissent from their interpretive emphasis on the “individualism” of Heidegger’s thought (in the
period of Being and Time), these interpreters nonetheless offer a wealth of perspicuous insights.
In this connection, see Günther Stern’s superb study from 1947, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness
of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” which is the clear antecedent to the interview with Marcuse, cited
previously. See Adorno 2003 [1964].
to say, in the literature on Being and Time, but both of which are not usually
read together.6 These two dimensions may be expressed as its “disclosedness”
and its “occlusiveness.”7 In Heidegger’s understanding, our everydayness is the
necessary starting point for the interrogation of Being which he sets as his own
task (its disclosedness), and it is also precisely that which has blocked off or
occluded our openness to this most fundamental question, indeed, to the deep-
est possibilities of our existence.8
A word on occlusiveness and politics. In Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total
Revolution, an account the German thinkers who follow Rousseau and the
6
A remarkable and – despite my several disagreements with him, which I will note – most illumi-
nating exception is the scholarship of Hans Bernard Schmid. See his 2005, 2004. Whereas I read
Heidegger’s account of the practical and social dimensions of everydayness as mutually illumi-
nating, Schmid contrasts them, and sees a “division of labour” between the “positive” (meaning
favorable) practical aspect of it and the negative, deprecatory treatment of its social form (2005, 4).
He proposes to “reformulate” Heidegger’s account of the sociality of everydayness in order to
rehabilitate Heidegger’s discussion (2005, 15).
7
As such, I disagree with Schmid, who associates the craftsman image, the account of practice or
the ready-to-hand, with the “disclosive” and the account of sociality with occlusion. My point
is that each of these treatments share in the ambiguous duality of everydayness.
8
My reading stands at odds with the main discussions of everydayness in the literature on
Heidegger’s thought, therefore. Hubert Dreyfus (1991), perhaps most prominently, but also
Mark Okrent (1991), John Haugeland (2013), and Robert Brandom (1983) have developed an
account of Heidegger’s everydayness that virtually elides the distinctions between the ready-to-
hand, Being-in-the-world, and everydayness, strictly emphasizing the disclosive qualities of every-
dayness. Everyday practices are thus understood as the “background” against which a theoretical
apprehension of the world takes place and from which it is derived. As Schmid ably details,
however, these “normative pragmatist” Heideggerians do not account for Heidegger’s evident
“deprecation” (Schmid’s terms: 2005, 3) of everydayness, what I refer to as its occlusiveness. On
this understanding of everydayness, see the still pertinent critique by von Schoenborn (1972). The
reader should also consult Robert Dostal’s exploration of Heidegger’s ambiguous usage of the
term Indifferenz and its sometime coordination with everydayness (Dostal 1982, 43–58).
Heidegger’s evident disdain for everydayness as the location of inauthenticity – despite his
avowals that this is not a moral category (see SZ 43) – is central to the most prominent inter-
pretations of him as a conservative revolutionary. For references to “inauthentic everydayness”
(uneigentlichkeit Alltäglichkeit), see SZ 178, 313; reference to the “proximately and for the most
part” inauthentic, SZ 326; emphases on the connection between everydayness and inauthen-
ticity, SZ 232, 252; reference to “the inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein as it falls,”
SZ 424. See Wolin 1990, 44–53 for a representative discussion of everydayness as the realm
of inauthenticity. Figal identifies the They-self as the “basic concept of unfreedom” in Martin
Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit (Figal 1988, 141–53; reprinted in Polt 2005, 105–16).
The They, das Man, will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, as will the considerable
debate in the literature on the character of inauthenticity and its relationship to authenticity.
The chief political expression of the reading of Heidegger offered by Dreyfus and Haugeland,
where the everyday supplies the pragmatic background texture of our meaningful existence,
as Schmid notes, is developed more explicitly by such philosophers as Charles Taylor and
Richard Rorty. See Taylor’s “Overcoming Epistemology” (in Philosophical Arguments 1995,
1–19), “Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger” (2006, 202–21), “Interpretation and
the Science of Man” (1985, 15–57); to see Taylor’s assimilation of the “Heideggerian” position
revolutionary violence engendered by that tradition of thought, he argues that

it is necessary to see the importance of their conceptualization of an obstacle
as a source of social discontent rather than any specific goal.9 He identifies
three attributes of the obstacle that point toward “total revolution”: (1) that
the full humanity of human beings be understood as an achievement rather
than a natural endowment (Yack 1992, 20–2);10 (2) that this achievement be
blocked by an obstacle which itself had come into being historically, that is,
that it be seen as changeable (Yack 1992, 22–5); and (3), that this obstacle be
seen as “subpolitical” or in some sense suprapolitical and so not being amena-
ble to a “merely political” revolution in order to remove or to change it, but
a “total revolution,” to put an end to its frustration of the achievement of the
full flourishing of our promised common humanity in the immediate future
(Yack 1992, 25–7).11 When the obstacle is understood as having these three
characteristics, it does much to explain the unrestrained, chiliastic violence that
characterized movements influenced by such thinkers as Marx and Nietzsche.
The revolutionary impulse was motivated by the destruction of a profoundly
frustrating obstacle that touched all aspects of life, not just the narrowly polit-
ical – such as the capitalist mode of production, in the example of Marx (Yack
1992, 252) – rather than by a (confused) pursuit of a shared and frequently
vaguely articulated goal.12
to his own, consult Taylor 2007, 558–9. For a felicitous discussion of these themes in Taylor that
sheds light on the connection to Heidegger, see Abbey 2000, 151–194. On Rorty’s pragmatic
appropriation and critique of Heidegger, see Rorty 1991, 9–26, 27–49.
9
“Most attempts to characterize and account for the social discontent of modern philosophers
and the intellectuals they have influenced have focused on new ideals rather than on new obsta-
cles. This approach has proven somewhat problematic with regard to the figures studied here,
especially Marx and Nietzsche, since they have so little to say about the content of the good
life. How could such a weak and undeveloped image of the good life inspire such intense long-
ing?” (Yack 1992, 6). Likewise, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, Heidegger specifically prohibits
considerations of the good life in his refusal of a philosophic ethics, a prohibition that carries
through to the thought of Being and Time as well.
10
Yack allows that there is considerable variety in the definition of what constitutes such human-
ity. As is well known, Heidegger denies that his thought should be considered a “humanism,”
i.e., focused principally on human concerns rather than Being as such. It is nonetheless the case,
however, that his analysis of “human Dasein” (see GA 64, 4–5) can be more or less “itself,” i.e.,
“authentic” (SZ 42–3), and therefore as the being that discloses Being, Being itself is ministering
to the disclosure of Being.
11
“The obstacle to the overcoming of the dehumanizing spirit of modern society is located by
these social critics in some fundamental, sub-political sphere of social interaction which shapes
human character. The removal of this obstacle requires a total revolution: a revolution which
transforms the whole of human character by attacking the fundamental sub-political roots of
social interaction” (Yack 1992, 9).
12
“Total revolution thus designates in this study a revolution in what is perceived as the defin-
itive sub-political sphere of social interaction, rather than a comprehensive and simultaneous
attack on all social institutions. All who long for total revolution recognize that political institu-
tions are secondary obstacles to human satisfaction” (Yack 1992, 10; emphasis in the original
text). The thinkers he studies did not, Yack is at some pains to show, simply adopt a political
The occlusiveness of Heidegger’s everydayness may be contrasted with Yack’s

understanding of the role of the obstacle in these other thinkers.13 Heidegger
himself invites such a reading because of (1) the way he characterizes everyday-
ness as inherently occlusive of philosophic thinking, (2) his understanding of
the task of philosophy as not exclusively but essentially communal, and there-
fore (3) everydayness constituting an “obstacle” to bringing into being the sort
of community that would be most conducive to the flourishing of philosophy.
Unlike the obstacles as diagnosed by Yack, in Heidegger’s account everydayness
is “constitutive” (Verfassung) of our Being. There is some ambiguity about this
in the text of Being and Time, inasmuch as the transhistorical, “transcenden-
tal” claims he makes about Dasein stand in some tension with the profoundly
historicist character of his thought.14 Does everydayness, then, characterize all
of Dasein’s dealings and doings? Or is it more in force at some times than at
others? As we shall see, Heidegger understands everydayness to be constitutive
of Dasein as such, but it is more or less ascendant in our make-up at different
times. The present age, however, is characterized by the dominance of every-
dayness, but along with the alienation and distress that this entails, this domi-
nance also allows us to have a particularly keen insight into its character, into
that of Dasein, and therefore into re-raising the question of Being.
What Is Everydayness?
To understand how everydayness is an obstacle to authentic communal exis-
tence, it is necessary first to see the privileged place it occupies in Heidegger’s
argument in Being and Time.15 That the stated aim of Being and Time is to
reopen the question of the meaning of Being implies not only that the ques-
tion has been forgotten, but also that something has drawn our attention to
messianism or a secularized Christian hope of transforming the world (pace Löwith 1949).
Yack disposes quite ably of misleading religious analogies to modern discontent (10–18), such
as Norman Cohn, Jacob Talmon, and Karl Löwith.
13
Yack is not arguing anything so coarse as that these are the only or necessary political “results”
of the thought of these thinkers: “I do not mean to suggest that the longing for total revolution
is a necessary consequence of the new concepts I examine. Every new conceptual perspective
opens up far more lines of inquiry than can possibly by actualized. That some possibilities rather
than others are actualized often depends on factors external to the concepts themselves” (Yack
1992, 18).
14
This is a tension on which he remarked in some of his later comments on the limits of Being
and Time. See GA 9, 328 f., on the constraints of the metaphysical language of Being and Time,
with, e.g., the title of Part One of the whole work, “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of
Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of
Being” (SZ 41); see also Heidegger’s remark on the anthropological, subjectivist, and individu-
alistic shortcomings of the work, where he comments, “and yet the opposite of all that was in
my sights” (GA 65, 295).
15
Heidegger expresses his developing understanding of the everyday and everydayness through
the series of courses he offers in the 1920s at Freiburg and Marburg. The pertinent courses are
published as GA 61, GA 62, GA 63, GA 64, and GA 20.
this forgetting, and furthermore that it is possible to re-raise such a question.

Heidegger identifies a widespread perplexity (Verlegenheit – “embarrassment”)
about Being as that which has drawn our attention to the need to renew the
investigation of the question (SZ 1). Heidegger’s “perplexity,” Verlegenheit, is
his translation of Plato’s Greek, d’êporêkamen (the verbal form of the noun,
aporia, which means without a path, or more literally, without a bridge).16 We
begin, then, with a profound sense of waylessness, as engendered by the aware-
ness that the meaning of Being is purportedly widely understood, and yet we
are gripped – embarrassingly – by a sense of ignorance: “Do we in our time
have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’?
Not at all” (SZ 1). Here at the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger surveys
three current definitions of Being, none of which is satisfying: that it is the most
universal concept, that it is indefinable, and that it is self-evident (SZ 3–4).17
In a parallel discussion in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger
glosses this provoking perplexity with an illustration. We regularly refer to
being in a variety of ways that we cannot reconcile either to one another or to
the obvious fact that we go around acting on apparently sound understandings
of what Being means. We cannot square the different meanings of our use of
the verb To Be, on the one hand – of What-Being (Wassein – i.e., what some-
thing is, or what we refer to as essence), with That-Being (Dassein – i.e., that
something is, or what we refer to as existence), with True-Being (Wahrsein –
i.e., a claim that x is y, such as, “this coffee is hot,” or what we refer to as the
copula) – with, on the other hand, our obvious grasp of the unified meaning
of Being evidenced in, for example, the cry, “Fire!” (KPM 159). Being is uni-
versally, “really” (eigentlich), understood in its meaning, yet sufficiently elusive
that we have now become perplexed (SZ 1): this is the experienced impulsion
to re-raise the question of Being that orients Heidegger’s investigation in Being
and Time.
Our very perplexity is our only, or at any rate, the most reliable, clue to the
meaning of Being. As such, the investigation in Being and Time takes the form
of a Daseinanalytik: “We are ourselves the being to be analyzed” (SZ 41). The
investigation has as its topic the being that worries about its own Being, that
has a “comportment,” therefore, “toward Being,” as Heidegger often puts it.
Perplexity, aporia, thus appears perversely as a kind of openness: it betokens
that Being is “an issue” for us. Confusion is, if only most tenuously, an expres-
sion of interest. It is our marker of our own Being and therefore it connects us
to Being.18 We, then, are the openness to Being, or we are where Being opens
16
See Robert Denoon Cumming’s elegant, rigorous interpretation of the opening of Being and
Time in Phenomenology and Deconstruction: The Dream Is Over (Cumming 1991, 79). See
also Michael Davis’s discussion of this opening section of Being and Time in the first chapter of
The Autobiography of Philosophy (Davis 1999, 13–29).
17
Compare Heidegger’s related discussion at BPP 180–96.
18
See Heidegger’s discussion of the hermeneutic circle, SZ 152–3.
into the world, however obscurely, however strangely. Therefore, Heidegger

refers to us, each, as Da-Sein, “There-Being,” or Being-there.19 Dasein is the
being that is open to Being. As it happens, we are quite closed off at present,
but we are sufficiently possessed of disquiet that we may take our bearings
by this.
The only being that is open to Being – us, Dasein – is the one that is least
well-accounted for, least well-understood, by the available definitions of the
meaning of Being. The failure of our self-accounting, on this score, is the chief
evidence of our finitude, but this should not be reckoned as principally a matter
of “ignorance” in the Socratic sense.20 Rather, this finitude is our way, our pore,
by means of which we may approach the question of Being. Heidegger singles
out two dimensions of our finitude, already anticipated, as we have seen in the
previous chapter, in his earlier “Comment on Jaspers”: Our existence is prior
to our essence, and our Being is “mine,” or has the character of “mineness”
(Jemeinigkeit) (SZ 42).21 First, our openness characterizes us to such an extent
that to speak of an essence prior to our existence is to foreclose altogether the
meaning that Being has for us. Thus, we choose our “to be” on the basis of our
Existenz. Our essence – what we shall be – is a function of our possible choos-
ing, given that we already and continue to exist. Second, for us, our Being is
not “a matter of indifference,” but is something we are invested in, we might
say; we care about it, in Heidegger’s terms. It is not, therefore, apprehensible
in the same manner that the Being of any other sort of being is apprehensible.
Heidegger accounts for these two dimensions of the finitude of the being
who is open to Being (viz. Dasein) by focusing on its temporality. Dasein is
the being that is concerned for its own (mineness) continued being (Existenz)
itself as itself, from beginning to end, stretched out through time for a finite
spell, from birth to death (SZ 373). As a result, Dasein is the root and source of
time as such, being the one thing for whom its Being (its being itself, its being
in existence) is deeply bound up with its own continuous stretching along in
time. Being is a function of temporality, and Being’s finitude is rooted in our
temporality (SZ 335). Finitude has multiple forms of expression (KPM 154),
meaning not just our death, or our awareness of our death, but our (sometimes
19
See William Richardson’s discussion of Being as “manifesting” in his magisterial study,
From Phenomenology to Thought (Richardson 2003 [1963], 20–1). See Olafson on unity of
Heidegger’s thought in the singular importance of Dasein (Olafson 2006, 98–9, 101–2, 106–8).
20
On the various expressions of our finitude, see KPM 15 and especially 154: it is not “the sum of
all human imperfections.”
21
We see here, then, the evident continuities between Heidegger’s formulation of this problematic
and his formal indication of the existence of the “I am” in the Jaspers review: “Because Dasein
has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a personal pronoun when one
addresses it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are’ ” (SZ 42; emphasis in the original text). This being said, the char-
acter and nature of the continuities between Heidegger’s earliest work and Being and Time are
much disputed. Compare Kisiel’s emphasis on the developmental continuity (1993) with Van
Buren’s claims of a sclerosis in Being and Time (Van Buren 1994).
perplexed) sense of ourselves as particular individuals (in one sense or another –

mineness) whose mortality (death) is, to be sure, the future end of our perishing
finitude, but for whom such mortality makes any sense only when it is seen
to be connected, looking backward along our once-chosen path toward our
unchosen beginnings.22 Because, then, Being and Time takes the being Dasein
as the only available clue to understanding anew the question of Being, and
because Dasein is the being who, at root, is time, then we can understand why
Heidegger’s “provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible hori-
zon for any understanding whatsoever of Being” (SZ 1, author’s italics).
Temporality and Everydayness

Heidegger’s discovery of everydayness emerges along with his attention to
Dasein’s temporality. Dasein is the being that cares about its finite existence as
itself, stretched out temporally from birth to death. Yet it never sees itself this
way, or almost never: occasionally our obscurity to ourselves is interrupted by
some momentary clarity, which is then immediately obscured again. Obscured
by what? Why is this so? Dasein typically understands itself, Heidegger claims,
as a being like all the other beings, the other beings whose existence is a matter
of indifference, for whom time is not an issue. It does this because in its every-
dayness (Alltäglichkeit), it (a) privileges the stable, visible, reliable, publically
discerned aspect of the beings it encounters, and (b) understands itself in the
light of these aspects of the beings. Heidegger characterizes this self-concealing
of Dasein from itself, its rendering itself a stranger unto itself, as a “flight” and
our condition of being in flight “first of all and most of the time” (zunachst und
zumeist) is “everydayness” (SZ 16, 184).23 It is “first of all,” zunachst, or near-
est, Heidegger says, in its publicness (SZ 16). That is, this is what is accessible,
visible, to others, in the first place or initially. It is zumeist, “for the most part”
or “most of the time,” “usually,” meaning, “as a rule” (SZ 370). The everyday
is the way of Dasein that is regularly “dominated through and through” by the
public (SZ 370). So far from being a distortion of the normal human way of
22
Death or our awareness of our death should not be mistaken for what Heidegger means by “fini-
tude” simply. Death, in Heidegger’s understanding, is the one, given, future, certain testimony
of finitude on our part, and for this reason has what might be called an existentially heuristic
function in alerting us to our finitude as such: it can bring us up short, and inasmuch as it can-
not be shared with anyone else, or shirked in any respect, having it brought to our attention in
this way might alert us to the real character of our “individuality,” and thus to other dimensions
of our finitude. And an awareness of our own finitude, moreover, is the key to apprehending
the finitude of Being. On the place of death in Heidegger’s thinking about finitude as such, see
Gadamer 1975, 124–5. On the distinction between death and demise, see Smith 2007, 129–30,
though Smith’s account is muddied by his introduction to Heidegger’s position an alien distinc-
tion between the “philosophic few” and the non-philosophic “many.”
23
See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Preface, sec. 1. Macquarrie and Robinson iconically ren-
der zunachst und zumeist in their translation of Being and Time, “proximally and for the most
part.” Joan Stambaugh renders it “initially and for the most part” (see her SZ 16).
being, this distorting tendency is the “normal” way of being, which is to give a
certain privilege to the publicly visible in its regularity and incipient stability.
As Heidegger discusses it late in Being and Time, the very term “everyday-
ness” designates a measure and therefore a sense of time that is comfortable
with regularity.24 From the perpetual diversity of events, it culls a soothing,
familiar uniformity. Heidegger vividly depicts it as a tomorrow of eternal yes-
terdays (SZ 371), consisting in a “pallid lack of mood” (SZ 345). Anything
shocking or novel today will be old news tomorrow, immediately assimilated
into an averaging regularity. Time in everydayness is made familiar and issues
in nothing but “the comfortableness of the accustomed” (or “pleasantness
of the customary,” Behagen in der Gewohnheit – SZ 371; Stambaugh calls it
“being comfortable in habit”). This comfortable familiarity, however, hides an
enigma. In its regularity, it suppresses the very character of Dasein as a finite
stretching along in time. It disguises the identity of the open possibility of the
future and the seemingly completed past by subsuming them both within a
seemingly ever-present present. It proffers the sense that Dasein is now as it will
be tomorrow and always has been, a tedious eternity.
This attitude toward time determines the being, as in the character, of
Dasein. “Who” Dasein is, in Heidegger’s preferred formulation of the question
of its identity, who each one is, is not simply who I am now. Dasein is a unified
stretching along, with its identity constituted by its past, present, and future as
a unity of sorts (an “ecstatic unity”). Therefore, because it is “proximally and
for the most part” inclined to see its future possibilities in terms of pallid, com-
fortable regularity, an eternity of yesterdays, then this attitude becomes more
than an inclination; it becomes determinative! Dasein remains its past, present,
and future, but its shall be in the future is open and not yet completely deter-
mined. Dasein, the choosing, open being, determines itself with reference to its
future possibilities, by choosing what the being will be, and therefore, what it
will become. These possibilities, in their turn, are limited by the particular past
of each Dasein. In privileging the temporal “present,” everydayness privileges
that aspect of things which is present to us, that is, the stable “looks” of the
other beings in the world.25 Indeed, inasmuch as (a) these “looks” are also how
other people see the beings, and (b) we tend to project our futures with regard
to these beings, so understood, then everydayness inclines us to be “ourselves”
with regard to how we are understood or would be understood by others. It
inclines us to project ourselves into the future – otherwise quite open and free
(though finite) – in such a way as would be comprehensible and indeed reli-
ably comforting to others. The publicness of everydayness consists in what
24
“ ‘Everydayness’ manifestly stands for that way of existing in which Dasein maintains itself
‘every day’ . . . what we have primarily in mind in the expression ‘everydayness’ is a definite
‘how’ of existence by which Dasein is dominated through and through ‘for life’ ” (SZ 370).
25
For a detailed and sound treatment of the theme of temporality in Being and Time, see Blattner
2005, in particular the conclusion (277–310).
is commonly, constantly shareable between others. As such, it occludes the

distinctive and possibly individuated character of each Dasein.26
Everydayness and the Traditional

Beginning of Philosophy
In orienting the project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time by inter-
rogating Dasein in its everydayness, Heidegger is not repeating the classical
orientation of philosophy, which begins with opinion, but is instead trying to
distinguish his approach from the entire tradition of philosophy that extends
from Aristotle (and earlier) to Husserl.27 He is also, though, trying to account
for the source of its error as well.28 This intention comes out both in Heidegger’s
contrast of the traditional concept of “category” with his own designation,
“existential” (existentiale), and also in his dispute with Husserl over what
really is “present” to us.
In attempting to discuss Dasein, a being unique among the beings in that
its Being cannot be captured by theoretical accounts of the meaning of Being,
26
The differences between Heidegger and Arendt are cast into sharpest relief here, where Heidegger
completely assimilates the public and publicness to the everyday preference for familiarity, con-
stancy, and routine. Arendt, of course, identifies it as the location of the new, and therefore as
the location of liberation and individuation of the actor from the means-end calculation of
work, which Heidegger would think of as characterizing theoretical rationality and publicness
both (see Arendt 1958). For a detailed and thorough treatment of the intellectual relationship
between Heidegger and Arendt, see Villa 1995.
27
There are numerous comparisons of Heidegger to Socrates that refer to both as practicing a phi-
losophy that starts with the human being, as Graeme Nicholson put it, “the pathway followed
by Socrates, Plato, and Heidegger” (Nicholson 2005, 48). One prominent Heidegger scholar
even draws parallels between Socrates’ trial for impiety and Heidegger’s political activity (Kisiel
2002, 1–35). On Heidegger’s “Socratic hermeneutics,” see Gonzalez 2009; Kirkland 2007. For
an extremely illuminating account of the relationship between Heidegger and Socratic philoso-
phy, see Chacon 2009.
By reading Heidegger’s everydayness as an expression of the “comfortableness of the accus-
tomed,” I emphasize, instead, a “counter-Socratic” dimension in Heidegger. Heidegger is thus,
in an important way, much closer to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of “Socratism” being a moralizing
expression of the desire for comfort. See c hapters 17 and 18 of the Birth of Tragedy. For an
excellent, though brief, consideration of the contrast between Heidegger’s philosophic approach
and that of classical, Socratic political philosophy, see Ehrmantraut 2010, 21, 165–6. Richard
Velkley (2011) makes the relationship between Heidegger and the revival of Socratic philosophy
by Leo Strauss the central theme of his superb recent study.
28
The relationship of Heidegger’s own thought to this “tradition” is more clearly thematic
in the several courses Heidegger devoted to the study of such figures as Aristotle and Kant.
Nonetheless, as has been widely noted by Heidegger scholars, Being and Time expresses some
of this explicitly and a great deal more implicitly. Moreover, the intended argument of the work
as a whole was to have an element that deconstructed the history of philosophy, with major
treatments of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. There are numerous fine works of scholarship
relating Heidegger to individual figures from the history of thought. The best single discussion
of Heidegger’s relation to the Western philosophic tradition remains Werner Marx’s Heidegger
and the Tradition (Marx 1973).
we are, Heidegger says, in “a peculiar phenomenal domain” (SZ 43). As such,

he will not speak of “categories” when accounting for Dasein, but rather
of “existentials” (existentialia), because Dasein is the being with Existenz
(SZ 42). As with his critique of Jaspers and contemporaries, “formal indica-
tions” and “existentials” are meant to be supracategorial, avoiding the theoret-
ical prejudices implied in the use of “categories.” We, in our everydayness, have
heretofore privileged the categorial and so understood the human in terms of
our general qualities. This generalizing, categorial approach has obscured the
very existence of existentials. No wonder we are perplexed!
By contrast, everydayness, unlike any set of opinions, has no determi-
nate content that may be taken as an intimation or reflection of the truth.
Everydayness might be thought of as the condition of all opinions. It does
not express or reflect any particular opinions about the just, the noble, or the
advantageous, and thus no implicit (or explicit) accounts of the best way of
life. It is sufficiently formalized to account for the way human beings are every-
where and always, meaning that the determinate content is sufficiently drained
of particulars as to be capable of accounting for every possible human setting
and way of life:29
At the outset of our analysis it is particularly important that Dasein should not be inter-
preted with the differentiated character [Differenz] of some definite way of existing, but
that it should be uncovered [aufgedekt] in the undifferentiated character which it has
proximally and for the most part. This undifferentiated character of Dasein’s everyday-
ness is not nothing [nicht nichts], but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity.
Out of this kind of Being – and back into it again – is all existing, such as it is. We call
this everyday undifferentiated character of Dasein “averageness” [Durchshnittlichkeit]
(SZ 43).
But as in his elaboration of the nontheoretical, nongeneralizing method of for-

mal indication, Heidegger here does not mean to assimilate each particular
within a more general rule, as would be characteristic of a science of sociology
or politics. The everyday tendency to elevate and secure the most general or
universalizable is not to be followed, but rather refused in order to be appreci-
ated precisely as the typical tendency of everydayness.30
29
“The Dasein is not to be taken by setting some sort of aim and purpose for it, neither as ‘homo’
nor even in the light of some idea of ‘humanity.’ Instead, its way to be must be brought out in its
nearest everydayness, the factic Dasein in the how of its factic ‘to-be-it.’ But this does not mean
that we now give a kind of biographical account of a particular Dasein as this individual Dasein
in its everyday life. We are reporting no particular everyday life but we are seeking the everyday-
ness of everyday life, the fact in its facticity, not the everyday of the temporally particular Dasein
but to be the everydayness for its particular while as Dasein is what matters to us” (GA 20, 208/
HCT 154–5; emphasis added).
30
“Dasein in its everydayness, a highly complicated phenomenon, regards and defines it more
authentically when a life is more differentiated. When we analyze Dasein in its everydayness and
its being in everydayness, this should not be costrued as saying also that we want to derive the
remaining possibilities of the being of Dasein from everydayness, that we want to carry out a
In distinguishing existentials from categories, Heidegger displays some of

the etymological dexterity he employs as a means of retrieving long-obscured
possible understandings and for which he would become famous. Given that
its own Being is a concern for Dasein and that it comports itself with respect
to this Being, its characteristics need to be understood as possible ways to be,
not as properties of a thing.31 Moreover, because the existence in question “is
in each case mine,” then it is not to be grasped in its being a member of a spe-
cies or genus, for whom Being cannot be an issue (because in such a case, Being
is properly located in the genus). As such, the characteristics of Dasein are
not properties, designated according to categories, but possible ways to be, or
existentials (SZ 42). Categories, by contrast, are characteristic of beings that, in
Heidegger’s distinctive argot, “do not have the Being of Dasein,” that is, every
sort of being except for humans. They apply to beings for which Being is not
an issue, for which their Being is already settled, and about which their Being
is really never a question.
For Dasein, however, such things are always “up in the air;” even when they
purport to be settled, they are not. Heidegger derives the term “category” from
its Greek, katêgoreîsthai. It signifies “making a public accusation, taking some-
one to task for something in the presence of everyone” (SZ 44). In the ontology
of the ancients, a logos is premised on such a katêgoreîsthai, though it is not
“someone” who is accused, but rather a being that is accused of “whatever it
is as a being . . . that is to say, letting everyone see it in its Being. The katêg-
oreîsthai are what is sighted and what is visible in such a seeing” (SZ 44–5).
Category reinforces the everyday tendency of Dasein to understand itself in
terms of the things of the world as they are presently and publicly. It privileges
the visible, the present, the publicly evident, and the general over the partic-
ular. All of the sciences of man – anthropology, political science, ethics – that
take their bearings by such categories mistake the character of Dasein and
thus forfeit from the outset its purchase on the only distinction worth attend-
ing to, the distinction between Dasein and every other being (SZ 45–51).32
genetic consideration on the assumption that every other possibility of the being of Dasein could
be derived from everydayness. Everydayness persists everywhere and always every day; each is
a witness as to how Dasein has to be and how it is in everydayness, even though in a different
way. It is easy to foresee that everydayness is a specific concept of time” (GA 20, 209/HCT 156;
31
Blitz 1981, 45.
32
This is what Olafson emphasizes in his account of the “unity” of Heidegger’s thought through
all its stages and periodizations (Olafson 2006). Heidegger thus saw the other sciences as more
meritorious to the extent to which they had begun to suffer “crises.” Heidegger saw, for example,
the developments in physics in the early part of the twentieth century that called the premises
of Newtonian science into question as extremely hopeful, and so regarded the work of Einstein
and Heisenberg as promising developments (see Heidegger’s discussion of Heisenberg (GA 41);
Heidegger later changed his mind about Einstein, reading him instead as remaining within the
Galilean framework (a view that he had expressed earlier, in his 1915 Habilitationschrift).
Heidegger’s intention was that upon laying out the “foundations” of a fundamental ontology
Our constitutive, everyday privileging of regularity and stability is what stands

behind the ascendence of the categorical sciences of generalization, including
the human sciences.33 Heidegger’s discernment of existentials is done in oppo-
sition to this everyday tendency.
The predominance of categories in philosophical thinking over the
never-before-discovered existentials returns us to the situation from which
Heidegger began in perplexity. Categories are indicative of the tradition of
theoretical philosophy in the West. They altogether disguise, however, the role
of everydayness in their very formation, to say nothing of their propagation.
Their very dependence on our predisposition to see time as a homogeneous, sta-
ble continuum is utterly incomprehensible on their theoretical basis. Aristotle
stands at or near the beginning of this tradition, as Heidegger indicates by
appropriating the characteristic phrase “proximally and for the most part”
to refer to how Dasein is in its everydayness. For Aristotle, the correspond-
ing phrase expresses his taking for the basis of theoretical metaphysics that
which appears to be so “generally and for the most part,” hôs epi to polu.34 Yet
these phrases should be taken less as equivalents than as showing the differ-
ence between Heidegger’s approach and Aristotle’s, and therefore Heidegger’s
in Being and Time, they would be able to supply a new basis upon which the now formerly
categorical sciences could be redeveloped. This is the meaning of his references to fundamental
ontology “running ahead” of the other sciences in Being and Time (which language is echoed,
furthermore, in his account of authenticity as consisting in “anticipatory,” that is, “running
ahead,” resolution, and his account of the positive mode of circumspective Being-with being a
“leaping ahead”). In his inaugural address at Freiburg University, “What Is Metaphysics?” he
proposed a version of this “leadership” of the other sciences. Likewise, notwithstanding its noto-
rious political connections, the ambition to supply the needed leadership to the sciences is given
expression in the 1933 Rectorial Address. As R. Philip Buckley has argued, Heidegger saw the
university as supplying something of a “middle step” between the philosopher and the authen-
tic community (Buckley 1992, 218). Thomson (2005) and Ehrmantraut (2010) both develop
this theme, that is, Heidegger’s vision for education as the key to his politics; Thomson argues
that Heidegger’s retreat from the expectation that philosophy should lead the university sci-
ences, and therewith also the political community, constitutes a clear and discreet lesson that he
learned from his foray into political activity. On the political context of the German universities
in Weimar, and the tension between “conservative” and “progressive” approaches to education
(Heidegger fit into the latter camp), see the indispensable Sluga 1993.
33
“The fundamental character of this entity, that it is in my ‘to be it in each particular instance,’
must be maintained. In what follows, an abbreviated form of expression will be used for it. The
theme is the Dasein in its way to be – the being of Dasein – the constitution of the being of
Dasein. By way of abbreviation, we shall speak of the constitution of Dasein and always mean
by it “in its way to be” (GA 20, 209/HCT 155; emphasis in the original text).
34
Aristotle frequently refers to this, the “as a general rule,” as the correct orientation of cer-
tain philosophic inquiries. References may be found in the Posterior, the Prior Analytics, the
Topics, De Gerneratione et Corruptione, the Parts of Animals, the Ethics, the Politics, and De
Interpretatione. What happens “as a general rule” is distinct from the “universal” (ta katholou)
and the “necessary” (ta ex anangkês), on the one hand, and the “particular” (ta kath’ hekaston)
or “the contingent” (to sumbebêkos). What happens “as a general rule” refers to claims that,
though given to exceptions, usually hold true. See Michael Winter’s discussion (Winter 1997)
and the helpful survey of Aristotelian usages in G. E. M. Ste Croix (1992, 24–7).
imputed critique of Aristotle. Heidegger says “proximally,” zunachst, meaning

what is nearest; Aristotle, on this view, mistook what was nearest, or his initial
and determining impression, for what was most general. That is, the theoretical
approach pioneered by Aristotle anticipates the error Heidegger attributed to
Scheler’s recurrence to “essential intuition” in the “Comment on Jaspers.” Mere
looking gives what has come to be as what “is” present and misses the hidden,
temporal dimension. This comes out more in the second part of Heidegger’s
phrasing. The expression “for the most part,” zumeist, refers emphatically to
time: “most of the time.” In Aristotle’s case, the determining place of temporal-
ity is obscured: polu refers to what is many or multiple, hence “generally.” In
Heidegger’s phrasing, he brings out the temporality that underlies regularity.
He thus underlines the highly provisional basis of the traditional approach –
derived as it is from Greek, “ancient ontology” (SZ 26) – to what is most per-
manent and the ineluctably temporal root of our involvement with the world.35
Heidegger’s attention to the everyday, and his peculiar understanding of it,
is also a correction of Husserl. Some, including at times Husserl, have read
it as a rebuke. The dispute concerns, in Heidegger’s terms, the relationship
between presence and everydayness. In Husserl, the natural horizon is vorhan-
den, a word that in German means “present.” Philosophy then consists in
“describing” it. Husserl is trying to dismantle the subject–object distinction
by describing what is present to our consciousness. That is, there is no gulf
between interior and exterior; things are “present” to us, are there to our con-
sciousness.36 Phenomenology thus consists in describing the consciousness of
what is present. The word in German, vorhanden, could not be more innocu-
ous or inconspicuous. For Heidegger, however, this “natural horizon” is only
“seemingly self-evident” (SZ 371, emphasis added); the true horizon is “every-
dayness.” By distinguishing presence from everydayness, Heidegger is saying,
in effect, that the starting point is not what is present (vorhanden), as such, but
the predilection of humans to refer themselves first to, to orient themselves by
means of, the present.37 Prior to presence is our privileging of presence. The
everyday is full of accounts and understandings that privilege the present-at-
hand (vorhanden), but to identify everydayness with presence (vorhanden) is to
misconstrue something as such with the conditions that must obtain for some-
thing to be something. Dasein draws its “pre-ontological way of interpreting . . .
Being” (SZ 130) from everydayness. This is the source of the elevation of
the present-at-hand as the predominant interpretation of Being. Hence, most
“ontological” interpretations of Being mistake the character of everydayness
and are themselves oriented by the tendency to favor stability and permanence
given such varied expression in everydayness: Heidegger would number both
35
Heidegger takes up his critique of Aristotle’s conception of time in Basic Problems of
Phenomenology, his summer semester 1927 course (GA 24).
36
See Husserl 1931, section 31, 56–9.
37
See Cumming’s discussion of Heidegger’s objections to Husserl (Cumming 2001a, 165–9).
Aristotle and Husserl among this group. Such “present-at-hand” interpreta-

tions understand Dasein as a being like other beings in the world (SZ 130),
yet in doing so pass over the phenomenon of everydayness and misunderstand
their own beginnings in everydayness. The present-at-hand “proximally misses
itself and covers itself up” (SZ 130; emphasis in the original text).38
Heidegger begins Being and Time disquieted, “perplexed,” at the end of the
tradition of “ancient ontology” that began in everydayness, elevated the cat-
egorial account of things, privileged the present-at-hand and theoretical meta-
physics, and disguised having done so. The principal doctrine of this tradition
with which Heidegger is concerned in Being and Time is the subject–object dis-
tinction as attributed to Descartes: the sense that objects are “out there,” in the
world of res extensa, whereas subjects are “in here,” in the mind. Some inter-
preters of Heidegger take this narrative as evidence that Heidegger urges us to
dispose of the rationalist dead-end of Cartesian objectivity and instead recover
our more primordial involvement with instruments and tools with which we
“cope” pragmatically. What Heidegger shows us, according to these interpret-
ers, is that we are better understood when we see that we are not separate
from the world, but are immersed in it in an involved “engaged agency,” “cop-
ing” with pragmata.39 Authentic communal existence, as an extension of this
reading, may be found by jettisoning our theoretical, cognitive prejudices and
simply “dwelling” in our place.40 According to this view, the obstacle to our
authentic communal existence is the present-at-hand as such or the attendant
doctrines of theoretical metaphysics. Such interpretations point to a redemp-
tion or retrieval of the invisible and overlooked, pragmatic background, which
they identify as the “everyday,” as the key to a more wholesome flourishing, a
more connected way of Being with one another and with nature.
Everydayness, though, is not our promised hominess among the pragmata
in our dwelling. It misleads us; it is occlusive. Everydayness is expressed in
our inclination to privilege the reliability at work in our use of articles of use,
a reliability that is not as certain as it seems in the light of theoretical clarity
about the purposes toward which we direct ourselves. Seeing the distinction
between everydayness and the present-at-and, and indeed seeing everydayness
as our inclination to privilege the present-at-hand, we are now in a position to
see how these interpreters fundamentally mistake its character. They overlook
38
To put this in terms of the phenomenological debate about the character of the “given,” we
could say that what is given is not presence, but a prior perplexity or confusion about what
really is present and a corresponding inclination to privilege the stable and regular as “present.”
See Jean-Luc Marion’s engagement with and critique of Husserl and Heidegger in Being Given
(Marion 2002).
39
“Engaged agency” is a reference to Charles Taylor (2006). “Coping” is Dreyfus’s term (see
Dreyfus 1991). Dreyfus, of course, explicitly refers to Heidegger’s work as a hermeneutics of
everydayness.
40
For an especially clear statement of this approach, see Nicholas Dungey, “The Ethics and Politics
of Dwelling” (Dungey 2007).
the distinction between readiness-to-hand – our pragmatically heterogeneous

situation among articles of use, “equipment” (Zeug) – and our temporal every-
dayness. Dreyfus, for example, refers to the use and handling of equipment as
the “background of everyday practices into which we are socialized,” which
must be retrieved (Dreyfus 1991, 3). This causes them to misconstrue the very
role played by the occlusiveness of these “everyday practices” themselves.
Indeed, they miss the role that everydayness plays as an obstacle, and the role
that the ready-to-hand plays in the elevation of the present-at-hand as the pre-
dominant interpretation of Being.
The Everyday Emergence of the Present-at-Hand

from the Ready-to-Hand
In the argument of Being and Time, Heidegger spends the first part of the
book showing how the Cartesian distinction of the subject “I” from the res
extensa is in fact derivative from our initial involvement with things of vari-
ous descriptions – not just Things or Objects, but articles of use (to which we
relate practically and purposively) and other people (“Dasein”) more or less
“like” us in their Being. Our involvement is with articles of use that are for
us with reference to meaningful purposes inherent (in a sense) to them inas-
much as they relate through us to the rest of the world. Such articles always
“manifest,” to use William Richardson’s apt term, themselves to us within a
“world” of more-or-less coherent meaning or sense, and into which we “fit”
as well.41 Dasein is thus in the world, immersed within and party to the very
organizing structures with regard to which we sense meaning. Dasein “is,”
therefore, Being-in-the-world (SZ 54). That is, Dasein is in some sense all of its
The “existential” of world is central to Heidegger’s thought, as noted by Gadamer referring

41
to “his exceedingly unconventional and profoundly revolutionary lectures. There he used the
phrase It is worlding [es weltet], for example. Now we recognize that that was a magnificent
anticipation of his later thinking. At the same time, one could not hear such things from a
Neo-Kantian – or from Husserl. Where is the transcendental ego? What kind of word was that?
Is there such a word at all? Ten years before the so-called turn, when Heidegger overcame his
own transcendental conception of the self and his dependence on Husserl, he had found here his
first word, one that did not assume a subject or transcendental consciousness at all. Worlding,
expressed like an early herald of the event of the “clearing’ ” (Gadamer 1994, 169).
What principally distinguishes “world” in Heidegger’s sense from the natural cosmos
of classical philosophy, to speak broadly, is that the purposes – the “toward-which,” and
“for-the-sake-of-which” – as construed by Heidegger are not natural but “Daseinish,” as he
puts it in Basic Problems (GA 24, 237/BPP 166), that is, free and undetermined by causal neces-
sities. In the classical vision of the natural cosmos, purposes are either teloi or are intelligible in
the light of the good. This is not without qualification, but should stand as an appropriate initial
point of contrast for understanding Heidegger’s intention. As he remarks in one of his lecture
courses: “Nevertheless – the world is not nature and it is certainly not the extant, any more than
the whole of all the things surrounding us, the contexture of equipment, is the environing world,
the Umwelt . . .” (GA 24, 235/BPP 165).
employment and navigation of things in the world. By contrast, in Heidegger’s

characterization of Husserl, humans are essentially consciousnesses to whom
the things of the world are present, and only subsequently are the things used
or employed. For Heidegger, human Dasein’s immersion in its use of articles for
future purposes, with reference to the past and what has come to be, exhibits
our fundamental temporality.
Our primary way of Being-in-the-world, Heidegger says, is “everydayness”:
this is how we “operate preeminently” in the world. And since we never cease
to be “Being-in-the-world,” everydayness can be said to be “constitutive” of
our Being. In our normal (or “proximal and for the most part”) involvement
with the articles of use, “handy” tools or instruments “ready-to-hand,” we priv-
ilege the temporality of everydayness and its attendant elevation of the stable,
regular, and publicly visible. Such an inclination toward the regular and stable
is reinforced by the reliability evinced by our use of tools and instruments: they
accord with our purposes, and so our present is brought into alignment, as it
were, with our chosen future. Moreover, when the path between present and
future in our use of handy articles “breaks down,” even in these moments,
Heidegger claims, we remain oriented by the possibility of regularity or reli-
ability, perhaps even more so in these moments.
Heidegger thus lays out two routes by which everydayness elevates
presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) as the determinate meaning of Being from
within the context of our immersion in the world of tools and things-of-use
that Heidegger refers to as Zuhandenheit, “handiness,” or readiness-to-hand.
I will refer to these two routes as breakdown and comfort. Numerous schol-
ars have discussed, and it is now perhaps one of the best-known motifs of
Heidegger’s thought, that when the articles of use with which we are concerned
fail, we are confronted with a moment of distress in which we are then tempted
to “see” the world more theoretically; Hubert Dreyfus aptly refers to this as
the “breakdown” story.42 The other route, however, by which the vorhanden
assumes a priority over our otherwise closer situation among the pragmata
is in our simple habituation to the basic coherence of our purposes and our
means, the easiness of our relationship to the world and the things in it, in
light of the mainly coherent, intelligible goals by which we are usually ori-
ented. While in the deepest sense we are uncanny – not at home in and among
the items of use in the world – in a broader and much more common way, we
are at home, we are cozy in and among things, comfortable using them, and
familiar to ourselves in light of these things and their utility. This is why we,
“proximally and for the most part,” are happily absorbed in our doings in the
world, as well as in the considerate reflection upon these doings that emerges
from them “naturally.”
42
Dreyfus 1991, 70–83. See Gerald Prauss, Knowing and Doing (Prauss 1999) and again Robert
Denoon Cumming’s account of “relational analysis” (Cumming 2001a, 137–74).
Dasein at Home in the World

In attempting to provide a broader, more formal account of the relationship
between humans and their worlds than is possible within the restrictive con-
ceptual legacy of the subject–object distinction and the present-at-hand lan-
guage of the Western philosophic tradition, Heidegger claims that man is
“Being-in-the-world,” In-der-Welt-sein. This is the “basic state of Dasein” in
which Dasein “operates (bewegt) . . . pre-eminently (vorzüglich) in the mode of
everydayness” (SZ 59, 366). The precise character of our “in-ness,” or in-hood,
requires, however, clarification. It, as it turns out, is the source of our being at
home in the world. Man is not in the world the way that oranges are in a bowl,
or chocolate chips are in a cookie. Heidegger stresses the purported etymologi-
cal connections between “in” and “inn,” conjuring something of a cozy sense of
the belongingness of people within their environment. Men dwell in the world,
making it their home, and making their home there.43 Dasein makes a home,
dwells “inn” the world, but next to or alongside, bei, other stuff there. Thus,
the world is not made up of a subject set at some remove from a collection
of strange, alien objects – “thrown out” there – but an environment that one
inhabits, within which one fits comfortably where one belongs.44
The mistaken line of thought that would locate man elsewhere than in the
world – either an isolated mind or a soul fallen into a body – fails to appreciate
that man is in the world as a series of engaged, involved, and practical set of
attachments. Husserl had argued against the subject–object distinction through
his concepts of consciousness and intentionality. For Husserl, the thinking sub-
ject is not separated (inside) from an object (which is outside), but conscious-
ness is always consciousness of something that it intends. Something is thus
present (vorhanden) to the mind as a mind. In Heidegger’s telling, however
(and as he intimated rather directly in the “Comment on Jaspers”), Husserl
is still too accommodating of the traditional privileging of theory and thus
unwittingly retains the subject–object distinction. One important consequence
of this privileging is the failure to solve the question of practice or the manner
in which practice is joined to theory. Heidegger expresses the engaged, involved
43
The “in” that is characteristic of beings that are not Dasein – that is, other things – is a cate-
gory (SZ 54) and is correctly applied to beings that are present-at-hand. Our in-hood, however,
is an existential. The existential “in” clearly designates something of the how in which Dasein
might be anywhere. That is, Dasein is “in” the world; it is not “elsewhere.” Heidegger’s stress on
in-the-world is meant partly to circumvent false lines of questioning prompted by the detritus
of the theoretical tradition. Man is not elsewhere like a soul in the heavens or a being some-
how separated from the world. He is not principally a mind or spirit and then only secondarily
stuck in this material world. Even if this were the case, Heidegger argues, one would still have
to account for the Being-together of the soul or spirit and the material body, and the Being-in of
the soul-body (SZ 56).
44
Dasein’s spatiality is itself based on its Being-in-the-world. On the relationship between Dasein
and things present at hand, the commercium, see SZ 132; also, §69.
orientation of Dasein’s involvement with the world with the term besorgen,
“concern.” The term expresses Dasein’s Being as it relates to the multiplicity of
practical matters, the manifold of dealings, with which man is occupied: “hav-
ing to do with something, producing something, attending to something and
looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it
go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discuss-
ing, determining . . . leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest”
(SZ 56). These are just examples of the way that man fundamentally is in the
world, tied up in a dispersion of dealings and undertakings. It is not that man,
as an isolated consciousness, and then as an extra, has a variety of relationships
to things in the world. Man is not a “mind” somewhere else, that needs to be
directed toward his dealing with some motley assortment of less mindly things.
Rather, the Being of man fundamentally is these “relationships”; in concern,
human Dasein is in this multiplicity of connections.
Heidegger’s deploys the striking term Zuhandenheit, “handiness” or
readiness-to-hand, for this array of technico-practical involvements in the
world.45 Humans always already find themselves in an environment sur-
rounded by things, produced or not, inviting use or further production. Such
“things” must not be confused for Cartesian res, objects thrown at a distance
from a subject (SZ 363). Rather, in our concern, the beings are not “present”
to us, they are handy (Zuhanden), to hand, in their possible utility. Heidegger
recurs to the Greek term pragmata in order to summon up primordial, pretheo-
retical use-interaction (SZ 68). He calls such items “equipment,” Zeug, nicely
capturing the sense of both of tools and supplies. And the thoughtfulness, the
thinking, that guides our concern with these pragmata is “circumspection”
(Umsicht), a generalized, pragmatically oriented savvy, the location of “com-
mon sense.” Circumspection is a sort of technico-practical reasoning and the
source, Heidegger insists, of other, derivative forms of reasoning; indeed, this
45
I say technico-practical as simply a gloss on Heidegger’s appropriation of this terminology from
Aristotle. I will also at times simply refer to “practice,” in particular when drawing the contrast
between theory and practice. In his lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which of course begins
with hundreds of pages of exegesis of book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger
lays out the connections between his own distinctive terminology and Aristotle’s: “Technê is
know-how in taking care, manipulating, and producing, which can develop in different degrees,
as for example with the shoemaker and the tailor; it is not the manipulating and producing itself
but is a mode of knowledge, precisely the know-how which guides the poiêsis. Epistêmê is the
title for what we call science (Wissenschaft). Phronêsis is circumspection [Umsicht] (insight)
[Einsicht], Sophia is genuine understanding [Verstehen], and nous is a discernment [Vermeinen]
that discerns by way of perception” (GA 19, 22/PS 15–16). In his own work, in Being and Time,
Heidegger assimilates both technê and phronêsis to the ready-to-hand, as is indicated by his
designation of Umsicht, the form of sight that he designates as providing practical knowledge,
as it were, to concern (Besorgen) in our ready-to-hand use of things. In his “Martin Heidegger’s
Aristotelian National Socialism,” Michael Gillespie argues that Heidegger rereads Aristotle to
extract pronêsis as against sophia as the principal faculty of wisdom, but reads it as precisely the
apprehension by Dasein in the Augenblick of our historical temporality and thus not, as I claim,
subsumed within the Zuhanden as such (Gillespie 2000).
is his gloss on Aristotle’s phronêsis.46 Circumspection guides Dasein’s engage-

ment with ready-to-hand things and affairs, from tool usage to deliberation about
political questions (SZ 359–60).
The ready-to-hand is the kind of Being characteristic of Dasein’s equipment
usage in the course of its concernful, circumspective dealings. Heidegger sketches
a picture of a craftsman absorbed in the activity of his work, employing a thought-
fulness about it – circumspection – and simply immersed in the task at hand. His
classic example is that of a hammer, which is known more appropriately through
its employment in the activity of hammering than as an object to be “looked”
at with a kind of reflective, theoretical distance (SZ 69, 360–2). Circumspection
apprehends not just the narrow use of equipment ready-to-hand, but also grasps
the connections between various articles of equipment, to the point of appreciat-
ing the entire complicated, in Heidegger’s terms, set of assignments and references.
As Heidegger stresses, before any individual article of equipment shows itself as
distinct, it is preceded by a circumspective awareness on the part of Dasein of this
network of tools, materials, work, and users, the “totality of equipment” (SZ 68).
In and among this network, Heidegger distinguishes the true purposiveness
of human undertakings, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. That is,
nature itself does not give purposes to human activity, and so we are not really
at home in nature.47 Though circumspection governs the handling of tools,
it would not be strictly accurate to say that circumspection is interested in
tools: a carpenter qua carpenter in the midst of his work is never fixated on
his nail gun or piles of sawdust in isolation. Rather, circumspection envisions
the end of the job in the future; it looks toward the work, the finished prod-
uct, from within the present working and orders the array of minor or more
immediate tasks with this longer view in mind. Considerations include the
materials from which the work might be composed or which the tools might
require, further purposes implied by the character of the finished work, and
the fittedness of the product for its further purpose or future users. Whatever
echo there is here of Aristotle’s four causes, Heidegger distinguishes the end
46
“By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in the understanding (the circumspection of
concern is understanding as common sense [Verständigheit]), we have deprived pure intuition
[Anschauen] of its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand
in traditional ontology. ‘Intuition’ and ‘thinking’ are both derivatives of understanding and
already rather remote ones” (SZ 147).
47
On the place of nature in Being and Time, Heidegger would later write this: “Yet if nature is
apparently missing – not only nature as an object of natural science, but also nature in an origi-
nary sense (cf. Being and Time, p. 65 below) – in this orientation of the analytic of Dasein, then
there are reasons for this. The decisive reason lies in the fact that nature does not let itself be
encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general primarily as some-
thing toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is originarily manifest in Dasein through
Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned in the midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself
[Befindlichkeit] (thrownness) belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the
unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for the problem of nature can first
be attained” (EG 370 n. 59).
toward which circumspection aims, and therefore the form that it takes, from
a function of nature.48 Rather, Heidegger singles out the products of work as
indicating or, in a manner of speaking, discovering nature inasmuch as they
protect against nature or render it more usable.49 Additionally, nature appears
as a principal source of the materials that circumspection might light upon
in the pursuit of the task at hand. In Heidegger’s language of assignments,
nature is never a “toward which” (Wozu), and certainly not a “for-the-sake-of-
which” (Worumwillen), it is only ever a “whereof” (Woraus). It is initially dis-
covered in a ready-to-hand manner, not as something present-at-hand. It is
characterized neither by the formalism of the ancients, the matter in motion of
the early moderns, nor – inasmuch as it is useful rather than sublimely beauti-
ful – the overwhelming force of the Romantics (SZ 70). Assignments and refer-
ences are free from nature. They are, in a certain precise sense, transcendent
of nature, in that they belong to what Heidegger refers to as the world and
therefore share in the character of Dasein. That is, the goals “toward which”
or “for-the-sake-of-which” Dasein works are not of a fixed, permanent, “other-
worldly” c haracter – that is, “natural” or “objective” – but are ends that, inas-
much as they are shared by Dasein, have the same kind of existence as Dasein.
If man is most typically involved to the point of saturation with a mean-
ingful, rich network of technico-practical, “pragmatic” undertakings among
handy things with purposes and wherefores, then why is it that the world is
not constituted exclusively by such a plenum of busy, satisfied Dasein? There
48
A full treatment of Heidegger’s interpretation of and relationship to Aristotle would require
multiple volumes in its own right, and is well beyond the scope of this book. I emphasize
Heidegger’s intention of reading Aristotle in order to depart from him. Gadamer’s critique of
Strauss, that he mistook Heidegger’s extremely vivid interpretations of Aristotle for evidence
of the possibility of reviving Aristotle (as though Strauss were trying to emulate the work of
Heidegger on this point), though perhaps misplaced in the case of Strauss, is apt as a critique of
a possible misreading of Heidegger (Gadamer 1993, 251).
Walter Brogan presents a reading of Aristotle focused on EN which stresses the elevation of
possibility and potentiality in Aristotle’s account of virtue. In a very elegant reading, he argues
that in Aristotle virtue very largely consists in holding oneself together as a distinct whole in
the face of possible choices, activities, and pathe. In my view, the limits of Brogan’s reading of
Aristotle are shown in the necessity of his concentrating on courage as exemplary of virtue in
Aristotle, to the exclusion of the several other ethical virtues. As illuminating as the example
of courage is, particularly as deployed by Brogan, it is necessary to understand that part of
Aristotle’s purpose in enumerating and breaking down the virtues in his analysis is to show that
courage is not the whole of virtue, or that virtue as a whole is not identical to courage (Brogan
2005, 141–8). By praising Heidegger for appropriating Aristotle’s courage and fashioning it
into the whole of his own account of the individual’s resoluteness in the face of death, Brogan
in fact credits Heidegger for approaching Aristotle where he most illuminatingly departs from
Aristotle. For studies that see something of a Heideggerian Aristotle, in addition to Brogan
2005, see Sadler 1996; see also McNeill 1999.
49
Nature in this sense is ready-to-hand, possessed of motions and directions of its own: “the
environing nature [die Umweltnature] is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads,
streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction”
(SZ 71).
are two ways this comes out. First, the articles of the world and the relations
between them “break down.”50 In such a situation, Dasein’s characteristic
immersion in its technico-practical involvements is interrupted when these
involvements – the equipment on which they depend – break down. Second,
and more importantly, Dasein is simply not satisfied by activity in accordance
with the tools and instruments that it is capable of using, as familiar, comfort-
ing, and constant as this activity is, precisely because we are more profoundly
perishing, finite, beings. Comfort is somehow discomfiting for a being unlike
all the other beings.
Dasein and Breakdown

Heidegger discusses three ways that the web of pragmatic dealings that con-
stitute the ready-to-hand is interrupted and therefore breaks down: conspic-
uousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. By conspicuousness, Heidegger refers
to the ordinary experience of circumspectively navigating among pragmata –
handling tools and so forth, executing one’s tasks – and then being brought up
short by coming upon a damaged or otherwise unsuitable piece of equipment.
In such a moment, Heidegger says, we “see” the missing tool distinctly because
it has interrupted our otherwise smoothly functioning work. This, then, is a
juncture between the theoretical and the practical. Heidegger stresses that the
unusable, “conspicuous” tool was originally discovered as such “not by look-
ing at it and establishing its properties,” but rather in the mode of its being
used circumspectively. In conspicuousness, however, circumspection presents
the once handy equipment as somehow “un-ready-to-hand” (SZ 73). In not
being used, the broken equipment “just lies there.” In this capacity to see equip-
ment in such a removed way, Heidegger identifies one location of the genesis
of the present-at-hand: “it shows itself as an equipmental Thing (Ding) which
looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has
constantly been present-at-hand too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in
such equipment” (SZ 73). In the interruption of the normal mode of use, the
slight jarring or distance created brings the thing before one’s eyes to be looked
at. In this moment, theory emerges.
The two other modes of breakdown follow this pattern. “Obtrusiveness”
is when concernful dealings yield to the circumspective discovery that some-
thing is missing,: “The more urgently we need what is missing, and the
more authentically it is encountered in its un-readiness-to-hand, all the more
obtrusive does that which is ready-to-hand become” (SZ 73). Unlike con-
spicuous things, obtrusive things lose their readiness-to-hand altogether,
and become completely – in the mind’s eye, so to speak – present-at-hand
(“Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more”). The third mode is “obstinacy,”
something that is encountered in one’s concernful absorption in one’s task as
50
See Dreyfus 1991, 71.
an obstruction to the performance of the task. It thus interrupts the task and
attracts one’s attention to something that is standing the way.
Each of these modes brings the present-at-hand out of the ready-to-hand.
The ready-to-hand loses its usefulness; it slips out of the realm of concern: “It
does not vanish simply, but takes its farewell, as it were, in the conspicu-
ousness of the unusable” (SZ 74). In the emergence of the present-at-hand,
the ready-to-hand is obscured from being seen. But Heidegger also claims
that in this moment, where the distinction between the two kinds of Being
announces itself, something of the real character of the ready-to-hand, which
as such is not to be known in the mode of circumspection, is also discerned.
Breakdown points toward the present-at-hand occluding our more primordial
technico-practical involvement with things of the world, but it also points to
a still more profound grasp of the character of the world as such. The break-
down shows that our relation to the things in the world is not exhausted by
readiness-to-hand.
While breakdown does open Dasein up to the “worldliness” of the world,
the exposure of our perishingness does not then “undo” our everydayness. The
shocking realization that the world is not altogether amenable to our inten-
tions and projects still happens “within” the basic state of Being-in-the-world,
and this “basic state” is still “operated” within “in the mode” of everydayness.
Everydayness absorbs and comprehends and thus coopts the shock in question.
Not finding your keys in the morning or having your car quit on the way to
work does not change your life altogether: you still have to show up for work;
indeed, you might need to make and follow better plans for making sure you
can do so. The breakdown in our use of articles in the world telegraphs and
forecasts our own mortality, and thus illuminates the basic unfittedness of the
world for our calculations and planning, but our response to this is not to
give up living in the world; we plan more, we calculate more carefully. As ever,
being-in-the-world remains our basic state, and everydayness is how we oper-
ate there preeminently. Thus even moments that expose our true situation as
finite beings amid a finite world, thanks to our everyday privileging of regular-
ity and stability, are immediately occluded.
The Priority of Comfort to Breakdown

The superintendence of everydayness even through moments of breakdown
shows that instances of breakdown are not the most important way that
Dasein comes to privilege the present-at-hand as a disclosure of the mean-
ing of Being. Most importantly, and governing both the breakdown route and
the comfort route, Dasein in its everydayness comes to understand itself as
reflected in the world.51 The multifarious attachments and undertakings, the
51
“Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in
terms of that world by its reflected light” (SZ 21).
very busyness of concern, give some hint of the manner in which the structure
of Being-in-the-world makes itself liable to be misunderstood. Dasein handles
and deals with things in the world; these become the terms in which Dasein
understands itself, and indeed, supply an “ontological foothold” for reflections
about Being (SZ 59). More precisely, Dasein begins to understand itself and
the world in the narrow terms of its own reflections on its relationship to
the world. Dasein does not cease to be itself, nor is it more in Being, when its
involvements with the world function smoothly, nor when they are disrupted.
The world is all there is, and for this reason it remains Dasein’s “ontological
foothold,” the only initial clues to which Dasein has access by which it may
make any sense of Being.
The “breakdown route” shows that Dasein’s tends to respond to disruption
by overlooking everydayness as an “ontological foothold.” In disruption or
trauma, when the seemingly tight, secure fabric of the busy world shows signs
of tearing, we, in our everydayness, respond by reinforcing the fabric by recur-
ring to by the present-at-hand: planning, organizing, coordinating, and so on.
Our everydayness obstructs our openness to Being by shutting it up at even its
initial appearance in such disturbances as conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and
obstinacy. Even amid breakdown – especially, all the more amid breakdown –
we seek everyday comfort and regularity.
The present-at-hand does not just emerge and secure itself through disrup-
tion, however, but also by subtler, easier means. Heidegger illustrates this by
showing the genesis of the present-at-hand notion of the subject–object distinc-
tion. As Heidegger accounts for it, Dasein’s familiarity with the world becomes
knowledge, which in turn becomes the subject–object distinction. He denotes
this shift through his use of the language of knowing (kennen). Emerging out
of our homey familiarity with the world, “knowing” and “addressing one-
self to” the world come to be Dasein’s primary modes of Being-in-the-world.
Being-in-the-world is already cozy and familiar (bekannt) to Dasein. Dasein is
“in” the world as though it were an inviting “inn,” after all. Familiarity slips
into presumed knowledge, in particular as what becomes known (erkannt) is
one’s connection to the world, which is taken as paradigmatic for knowing
the world (Welterkennen). One looks, on the one hand, to one’s self or soul,
and on the other hand, to the world for the source of the relationship between
the two. In doing so, they both stand out as objects present-at-hand while
Being-in-the-world recedes into the background, becoming “invisible” (SZ 59).
Our initial nontheoretical immersion just dissolves, and what is left is the now
“obvious,” even commonsensical, distinction between a subject and an object,
somehow “next to” each other.
Everyday familiarity thus eases us into taking knowledge (Kenntnis) as the
primary mode of our relating to the world. In the mode of knowing the world,
we begin from the split between the subject and the object. This modification
and narrowing of Being-in-the-world becomes the seemingly self-evident start-
ing point: the subject and the object. Elevating knowledge in this way signifies
a determinate stance toward the world.52 In this attitude, objects stand out
according to their stable, permanent aspects, discernible in theoretical reflec-
tion. The most distinctive object among objects, and in a sense the totality of
objects, is then referred to by the designation, “nature.” Nature can be grasped
by thought, but does not itself think. The thing that thinks is the subject. The
subject stands out as the being with thoughts; that is, as that being among the
beings that are thought about, which seems thus to have an interior. Being
the active source of thinking rather than something that is merely grasped
by thought is what distinguishes the subject from nature or the collectivity of
objects. By this means, Heidegger shows the bewitching transition from habit-
ual familiarity to knowing, from knowing to the easy elevation of knowing as
the principal mode of relating to the world, from such elevation to the separa-
tion of the subject from the world, and from the separation of the subject and
object to the representation of the world as nature. Familiarity and knowing
beget interiority and the seeds of alienation. In one small etymological analysis,
Heidegger sketches the origin of Western philosophy, beginning with the pref-
erence for knowing as the privileged way of relating to the world and leading
to the stark separation of the subject from the object and theory from practice.
Heidegger characterizes this theory-privileging, derivative attitude as a
“holding back” from one’s normal engaged involvements in the world and
from “any kind of producing, manipulating and the like.” It is a “tarrying
alongside” (SZ 61, 361). Heidegger describes the attitude that produces such a
tarrying as not merely a “fixed staring” but a “fascination” with the world of
one’s concern. Such tarrying is not initially a direct removal of oneself from the
world of one’s dealings or a “looking away” (SZ 361 – absehen), but is rather
an overdone absorption in a single aspect of those dealings. In particular, tarry-
ing absorbs itself in that aspect that remains stable through the regular patterns
or rhythms of activity and change: “This kind of Being towards the world is
one which lets us encounter beings within-the-world purely in the way they
look (eidos), just that” (SZ 61). That is, the present-at-hand tarrying emerges
from an absorbed engagement with the world, not simply from its collapse or
breakdown.
The Emergence of Theory from Practice

Let us pause at this juncture to review Heidegger’s claims so far, before
turning in the next chapter to the social, communal aspect of everydayness.
Everydayness does not merely consist in our “background” practices such
as coping with articles of use whose meaning and purposes are determined
by our social embeddedness. Everydayness has two functions in Being and
Time, what I have referred to as its disclosedness and its occlusiveness, or
52
This stance is what Heidegger calls, “Being-already-amid” (Schonseinbei) or “Being-by”
(Seinsbei) the world.
in other words, it is both the necessary starting point for philosophy and it
tends to represent an obstacle to philosophy. To expand, everydayness at
its most elementary is the way that Dasein is “proximally and for the most
part,” that is, usually or normally. The way Dasein is normally, though, is
in the way of closing itself off to the truth of its existence. It does this by
privileging a false regularity in time, which in turn leads it to privilege the
beings in their stable, visible aspect. In practice, this means thinking of our-
selves primarily as we relate to tools and the purposiveness that they exhibit
while blinding ourselves to the fact that we are the source of that purposive-
ness. Furthermore, as we shall explore in the next chapter, our everydayness
inclines us to a shallow and ephemeral form of sociality, relating to other
people as though they too should be understood in light of the tools and
things of the world. Thus, everydayness is occlusive in that it prevents us
from understanding our true place in the world in our relation to things and
other people. But this ignorance and paltriness points to the way that every-
dayness is disclosive, as well: the fact that Dasein is “usually” like this is the
indispensable clue to the meaning of Being, however, because Dasein “is” the
way that Being is in the world. Being is in the world through the confused,
covered-up, theory-privileging, inauthentic sociality, and occlusiveness of
Dasein.
To characterize everydayness as our practice is not, it should be emphasized,
to provide a neutral “phenomenological” description of what might be called
our “normal,” “ordinary,” or “pretheoretical” life. It is, rather, to claim (1) that
what is “normal” or “ordinary” about our life is to disguise our finitude by
privileging that aspect of our life that is most comforting, namely, the habitual
preference for regularity and stability that inclines to refer to the passage of
time as “every day.” Pretheoretical existence is characterized by the preference
for comfortable habituation, according to Heidegger. It is also to claim (2) that
the more genuinely disclosive approach to life is one that privileges our tempo-
rary, openly perishing, finite, radically particular and nothing-attuned, anxious
Existenz as our-radically-distinct-from-everything-else-selves. That is, if what
is “normal” or “ordinary” is the privileging of homogeneity and regularity,
philosophic investigation such as Heidegger is undertaking in Being and Time
is abnormal and extraordinary, in the precise sense of being radically finite.
These two claims are inseparable.
Heidegger begins Being and Time in perplexity, and indeed insists that
this is the appropriate beginning for raising the question of Being because
he positions himself in opposition to the everydayness that he argues Dasein
has in so many ways and for so long privileged. Perplexity, aporia, and
embarrassment are avatars of a profound sense of waylessness. They ensue
from the misdirected civilizational elevation of accounts of the most fun-
damental matter, the meaning of Being, that privilege the clarity, reliability,
and presence of theoretical reflection at the expense of an apprehension of
our finitude as the key to Being. Everydayness covers itself over and cannot
then adequately satisfy the extent of our perplexity. We remain anxious, or

potentially anxious, despite and throughout the elevation of the reliable and
visible, and purportedly exhaustive, account of the beings of the world. As
such, our anxious perplexity, variable as this must be in each case, remains
to disclose the inadequacy of prevailing, everyday accounts of our existence
and Being. As in the “Comment on Jaspers,” our own anxious, disquieted
sense of the incompleteness or inadequacy of available accounts of the mat-
ter remains our most illuminating path to the most primordial matters, and
requires a “ruthless skepticism” of such presentations. As he put this later:
Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend]
and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunder-
standing if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of
philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so
bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and
so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy.
We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes
manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the
philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack –
driven out of everydayness and driven back to the ground of things. Yet the attacker is
not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in
philosophizing the Dasein in man launches the attack upon man (GA 29/30 31; FCM
21; emphasis in the original text).
We must now examine how our understanding of everydayness informs our

“social” or communal essence.
4
The Dictatorship of the They and the

Clearing of the Everyday
In our everydayness, our handling, use, and manipulation of tools within a

coherent, meaningful world of goals, purposes, and accomplishable intentions
conduce to the tools being understood as a field of objects confronted by a
more or less isolated subject. That is, the subject–object split emerges from our
practical, handy immersion in the world. Such a vision of the world both alien-
ates and numbs us, Heidegger suggests, as the effect of the everyday ascendance
of theory is at once soothing, disturbing, and tranquilizing. Similarly, sharing
the world with other humans – other Dasein – is prior to relating to each other
as individuals; we share together a world of meaningful and richly constituted
social patterns. And yet, as in the case of our use and manipulation of “beings
that do not have the Being of Dasein,” the very functioning of our getting along
with these others dulls our awareness of our own profound distinctiveness
from them.
The chapter that follows will extend the analysis of Heidegger’s complex
account of the duality of everydayness from Dasein’s relationship to the articles
of the world to Dasein’s relationship to other Dasein. In its everyday exis-
tence, the full breadth of Dasein’s communal possibilities tends to collapse
into a diminished commerce of, at best, peaceful, mutual suspicion and, at
worst, open hostility. As with our relationship to tools, theoretical rationality
encroaches on other ways of relating to people and reckons the instrumental
relationship of each Dasein to Dasein. Hence, as Heidegger puts it in the intro-
duction to Being and Time, we are not only inclined to understand ourselves
rationalistically in terms of the “objects” in the world, but also in those terms
that are ratified by our fellow human Dasein, which Heidegger refers to as
“tradition”:
Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to inter-
pret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light, but also that Dasein simulta-
neously falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or less explicitly taken hold. This
91
tradition keeps it from providing its own guidance, whether in inquiring or choosing
(SZ 21).1
In both of these respects, Dasein tends in its everydayness toward seeing itself
as a determined, unfree being with a nature, either formed by its surround-
ings or else in need of mastering them, rather than as a thrown, open, free
project, capable of being true “to its ownmost self” in community with other
Dasein.2 Moreover, in each of these respects, “everydayness” covers itself over,
exhibiting its character as what Heidegger would later refer to as “concealed
unconcealedness.”
Everyday “community” is thus founded on mutual suspicion, deceit, and
misanthropy, composed of ill-disposed, dull, catty, cruel, bored individuals, all
yoked to one another by means of “tradition.” Tradition, however, does not
attach them meaningfully to the shared origins from which they collectively
emerge, but rather functions primarily to ensure that the world and the things
in it are disclosed in a fashion that is hostile to inquiry and thoughtfulness. By
means of tradition, the whys and wherefores into which one might otherwise
inquire are presented as already settled and decided:
When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it “transmits”
is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes con-
cealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it
blocks our access to those primordial “sources” from which the categories and concepts
handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget
that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going
back to these sources is something which we need not even understand. Dasein has had
its historicity so thoroughly uprooted by tradition that it confines its interest to the mul-
tiformity of possible types, directions, and standpoints of philosophical activity in the
most exotic and alien of cultures; and by this interest it seeks to veil the fact that it has
no ground of its own to stand on (SZ 21).3
Tradition – “lies agreed upon,” as Napoleon referred to history – supplies the
main content informing our everyday sociality either to be superficially accepted
1
In the interview “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger offers a rather contradictory assessment
of tradition: “From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know
that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were
rooted in a tradition” (Heidegger 1991b, 106). His characterization of being “rooted” in a tra-
dition in the 1966 interview bears more resemblance to his account of “heritage” in Being and
Time, rather than his disparagement of “tradition” there. More on this in Chapter 6.
2
Günter Figal accounts for das Man as the primary locus of “unfreedom” in Dasein’s existence
(Figal 1988).
3
This is an important element in Heidegger’s broader political influence. He is critical both of
conservatism-traditionalism as well as progressive-rationalist positions. Ali Shari ‘ati and Ahmad
Fardid, for example, distinguished their retrieval of an authentic Shi’ism from the traditionalism
of the conservative clerisy as well as from liberal and Marxist elements in Iran. See Mirsepassi
2011. Aleksandr Dugin makes favorable references to “tradition,” but his emphasis is on refusing
every recent variation on tradition, and even recurring to premonotheistic religion as the true
source of tradition (Dugin 2012).
The Dictatorship of the They and the Clearing of the Everyday 93
or shallowly rejected. I will argue, then, that on Heideggerian p rinciples, both

conservatism, as the preserver of tradition, and any progressive orientation to
politics are oriented by the everyday elevation of security, conformity, com-
fort, stability, and regularity. Both of these attitudes toward community are
premised, in Heidegger’s analysis, on a fundamental alienation from one’s fellow
Dasein. In fully reckoning with Dasein’s everydayness, it emerges that none of
the available political forms bestowed by the history of political philosophy in
the West can break out of the homogenizing conformity diagnosed by Heidegger.
The Structure of Being-with

Just as Heidegger understands Dasein to be not merely an isolated subject con-
fronted with a world of objects, but instead as a tool-using being, situated amid
articles of use (pragmata) that it is in the business of getting along with, so he also
understands Dasein to be other than an isolated individual, but situated amid
and with other beings like itself, other Dasein; Dasein is an essentially communal
being. So much is this so that Heidegger expresses it with the formulation, Dasein
is Mitsein: Being-there is Being-with (see SZ 114, 121). Just as the subject–object
distinction constitutes a misleadingly partial and derivative account of the rela-
tionship between Dasein and the beings with which it finds itself in the world,
Heidegger rejects its social-theoretical correlate – namely, the individual subject or
self, the “I” – as a basis for understanding the roots of community. The rationalist
conception of the self, defined in the everyday understanding as “what maintains
itself as something identical throughout changes in its experiences and ways of
behavior, and which relates itself to this changing multiplicity in so doing,” is
rejected as excessively disconnected and disconnecting (SZ 114).4 In the very con-
stitution of its being (Seinsverfassung), Dasein “is” with other Dasein.5 As with
our relationship with articles of use, both authentic and inauthentic forms are
possible: both authentic communal existence and everyday communal existence
are possible ways of Being-with.
Whatever the potential for authentic communal existence implied by the fact
of our being Being-with, in our main involvements with other people we fail to
distinguish them from the “tools” and the “work” with which we are usually
absorbed. Dasein first really encounters “others” as they become distinguished
from the background of the world in which Dasein is busy working. Just as
Dasein does not really notice even itself as Dasein at first – it initially understands
4
The source for such an understanding of the self is usually claimed to be Locke, the continuity
of consciousness discussed in Essay II. 27.12, who influenced Hume and Kant. For a penetrating
and politically astute discussion of the difficulties in retaining notions of the individual in later
modern thought, focusing on Hegel and Nietzsche as paradigmatic cases, see Church 2012.
5
Whether or not it happens to be the case that a person is proximate to another person in any
given “ontic” situation (as Heidegger would put it), it is nonetheless more profoundly the case
that we are essentially bound to others (“ontologically”) (SZ 121); i.e., even being alone “in fact”
is a definite derivative modification of Being-with.
itself in its work, as a working-thing – similarly it does not really notice other
Dasein distinct from their own participation with itself in the work environment.6
Other Dasein are initially encountered, not presumably as tools in their own right,
but as intimately bound up with, unseparated from, the work that they do or that
is done to them; initially in the environment (Umwelt), “they are what they do”
(SZ 126). Handicrafts may be “cut to [the] figure” of the expected recipient of an
article (SZ 71). They constitute part of a well-fitted whole: “when material is put
to use, we encounter its producer or ‘supplier’ as one who ‘serves’ well or badly.
When, for example, we walk along the edge of a field ‘outside it,’ the field shows
itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him” (SZ
117–18). It is not simply that others are discovered as a ready-to-hand coat rack
or hay baler – their distinct kind of Being shows itself, too: “Thus along with the
work, we encounter not only beings ready-to-hand but also beings with Dasein’s
kind of Being – beings for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-
hand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users
live, which is at the same time ours” (SZ 71). This is all to reiterate that Dasein
encounters the world as something shared with other Dasein and as more or less
orderly, which accommodates Dasein’s technico-practical purposes fairly seam-
lessly and includes the placement of other Dasein within the world as part of that
well-fittedness.
As with Dasein’s normal immersion within the cycles of work and the use
of ready-to-hand tools, Dasein’s normal way of Being-with-others is more-or-
less comfortable and easy. Hence, our initial encounter with others is not with
a hostile “not-I,” but with something roughly similar to ourselves: “They are
rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself”
(SZ 118; emphasis in the original text). The Being of Dasein is not, then, prin-
cipally an isolated “I,” but includes, in its deepest roots, the existential “with”
of Being-with and the too of Being-there-too (Auch-da-sein) in our shared exis-
tence with others. Thus, what is formally indicated with the term “I” (SZ 116)
refers equally to each Dasein’s shared identity with others. Thus Heidegger –
like Rousseau, for instance, and unlike Locke and Hobbes – understands the
beginnings of human sociality to be an unreflective similarity of groupings
with other people. In the case of Rousseau, however, this beginning condi-
tion is given a much more precise (though imagined) historical location, and it
becomes important to locate the timing and character of the deviation from it,
and entrance into a society of atomized individuals.7 It therefore continues to
stand as a model or ideal of sociality throughout his account of human history,
6
“Others are encountered environmentally . . . even one’s own Dasein becomes something that it
can itself proximally ‘come across’ only when it looks away from ‘experiences’ and the ‘centre
of its actions,’ or does not as yet ‘see’ them at all. Dasein finds ‘itself’ proximally in what it does,
uses, expects, avoids – in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally
concerned” (SZ 119).
7
See Rickey 2001, 267–8, who argues for the moment of vision as the basis for Heidegger’s
“communitarianism.”
whereas for Heidegger our essential sociality does not, of its own accord, pro-
vide a model. A similar contrast with Aristotle is warranted: for Aristotle, our
essential communality derives from our political “nature,” which includes
within it a specific, purposive goal. For Heidegger, Dasein’s essential sociality is
a “transcendental” ontological condition, and overlaps totally and always with
the more familiar, “fallen” everydayness. For Heidegger, even though social
wholeness may be completely obscured ontically, its condition in ontological
possibility, Mitsein, is never altogether vanished in a past epoch, but character-
izes Dasein as Dasein even at its most socially deprived. Social wholeness is
therefore an ever-attainable potential achievement, but it does not itself refer
to a specific model or form that would actualize it.
Modes of Solicitude
Heidegger also signals the extent of his departure from the models of social
and political structures proffered from within the tradition of political philos-
ophy in his description of care.8 Heidegger argues that the Being of Dasein is
“care” or “trouble” (Sorge), which is open to being involved with other things
and people in the world in a quasi-passionate way. Our reflecting on and think-
ing about the world follows the pathways or possibilities opened up in care.9
Care is structured, moreover, such that we care differently, in modes appropri-
ate to the different ways that things and people “are.” To wit, our care for tools
as they relate to purposes that we share is discussed as “concern” (Besorgen).
Our care for other people, and thus our inherent openness to the possibil-
ities of community, is referred to as “solicitude” (Fürsorge).10 He identifies
two extremes of what he calls “positive” modes of solicitude and a “deficient
mode.” The deficient mode is characteristic of everyday Being-with-one-another
(Miteinandersein).11 But as his slightly complicated discussion brings out, one
8
“Concern is a character-of-Being which Being-with cannot have as its own, even though
Being-with, like concern, is a Being-towards beings encountered within-the-world. But those
beings towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which
belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These beings are not objects of
concern, but of solicitude” (SZ 121). See GA 21, 225f for an expansion of this point.
9
This is the context for Heidegger’s standing interest in such Christian figures as Luther, Pascal,
Kierkegaard, Augustine, and St. Paul, as expressed only indirectly in Being and Time (and, obvi-
ously, in the Kierkegaardian terminology that infuses that work). His students at Marburg, and
scholars of his courses, have long known of his extensive and profound interest in Christian
theology and mysticism. See the chapter “The Marburg Theology” in Gadamer 1994, 29–44.
10
In addition to his discussion of it in Being and Time, Heidegger treats Fürsorge at considerable
length and detail (and with some helpful examples) in his courses Prolegomena to the History of
the Concept of Time (GA 20) and Logic: the Question Concerning Truth (GA 21). To say that
Heidegger conceives of care as articulated with different modes that relate differently to tools, to
people, and so forth is to speak to the difficult matter of Heidegger’s “idealism” versus “realism”
(and to give this a realist emphasis). I will discuss this matter further in Chapter 5.
11
Johannes Fritsche speculates that the meaning of the “negative” mode of solicitude is to be dis-
covered by seeing that Hegel referred to liberal, as in capitalist, society this way (Fritsche 2012,
of the “positive” modes is quite definitely implicated in our everydayness as

well.12 Examining Heidegger’s detailed account of solicitude points to the ten-
dency of everydayness to elevate more regular and familiar, but also more rigid,
ways of relating to the world.
In its normal, indeed “everyday,” German usage, Fürsorge designates the
state-run welfare systems of pensions and poor relief, that is, care for the poor.
This usage, according to Heidegger, and by implication the normal bureau-
cratic politics to which it refers, represents deficient modes of Being with one
another, characteristic of the entrenchment of the everyday. The deficient modes
of solicitude follow the pattern of the deficient modes of ready-to-hand con-
cern. Whereas deficient solicitude is “Being . . . against or without one another,
passing one another by, not ‘mattering’ to one another” (SZ 121), so deficient
concern is “leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest,” where “the
possibilities of concern are kept to a bare minimum” (SZ 57).13 In normal,
everyday social life and political arrangements, an unremarkable inattention
characterizes deficient solicitude and deficient concern. Deficient modes privi-
lege anonymity over intimacy, inattention rather than attentiveness.14
Heidegger suggests that a certain “urgency” attends Fürsorge in its nor-
mal, everyday usage, implying a kind of hastiness or busyness. Such urgency is
owed, it must be understood, to an underlying mixture of inconspicuousness
and obviousness (Unauffälligkeit and Selbstverstandlichkeit), where the needs
and cares of fellow Dasein are so obvious as to be always passed over and
passed off to the available institutionalization of “deficient and indifferent”
modes of solicitude. In this respect, everyday solicitude is continuous with our
initial encounter with others in our work. In such a mode of solicitude, other
Dasein, Heidegger implies, are as unobtrusive and, quite literally, uncared for
as equipment or tools, which are always functioning and thus never noticed.
Everyday “solicitude,” as in welfare, seems urgently to be caring, but this only
seems so because caring for others is typically so deficient. Dasein, who is
Being-with-others, is genuinely capable of much fuller interactions with others,
but in the fecklessness or indifference that is afforded by everyday orderliness
and familiarity, it passes off the care of its fellows to someone else. Our every-
day solicitude of others involves basically not noticing them, passing them over,
feeling busy with regard to them but not really attending to them. Inasmuch
as Heidegger calls this “everyday,” this inclination to inattention typifies our
260). He tries to count four modes of solicitude, even though Heidegger explicitly refers to
three (259).
12
Heidegger’s text here is notoriously complex and arguably confused. Dostal’s treatment of the
(possible) confusion within the context of the whole argument of Being and Time is very helpful
(Dostal 1994 with Dostal 1982 on “indifferenz” and everydayness).
13
“Only where there is care is there neglect” (GA 21, 225). Cf. 223, on Fürsorge.
14
Though Freeman errs in deriving an ethical, normative meaning from Heidegger’s account,
her attention to the possible place of “love” in this part of Heidegger’s account is helpful
(Freeman 2009).
dealings with other human beings “always,” or “proximally and for the most
part,” that is, this is the mode of Being-with in which we “pre-eminently”
(vorzüglich) operate (bewegt). Both authentic and inauthentic modes of com-
munal Being-with are characterized by this undertow of deficient, inattentive
overlooking and not-noticing. That is, once again, authenticity is not an escape
from everydayness.
In contrast to this deficient mode of solicitude, Heidegger sketches two “pos-
itive extremes” of solicitous Being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein), only
one of which merits approval.15 One of the positive “extremes” involves one
Dasein solicitously taking over or coopting the concerns of another. Precisely,
it means that one Dasein replaces another – “leaps in” (einspringt) – in the
other Dasein’s ready-to-hand circumspective activity. Here it is well to recall
that by ready-to-hand concerns, Heidegger does not only mean such mundane
activities as brushing one’s teeth, mending a shoe, fashioning barrels, or pilot-
ing a ship. The ready-to-hand also includes what traditionally would be under-
stood as political activity such as deliberation (SZ 359). In the second “positive
extreme,” one Dasein “does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of
him [ihm vorausspringt] in his existentiell potentiality for Being, not in order
to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically for the
first time” (SZ 122). That is, unlike leaping in solicitude, where one takes over
the circumspective (besorgen) concerns of the other Dasein, “helping” him by
relieving him of any “trouble” or “care” (Sorge), here one clears a path for
the other Dasein and assists him in assuming his cares authentically. In his
course Logic: The Question Concerning Truth, Heidegger illustrates this sort
of solicitude with the example of a lecture: “Communication and directing
towards the seeing of a matter is never a taking-care, insofar as the seeing of
the matter cannot actually be produced by the lecture, but can instead only be
awakened, released.”16 Leaping-ahead solicitude is not oriented by the worldly
15
Though he refers to them as “positive,” this should not be taken to mean that they are both “good”;
they are positive in the sense that they do not lack and are not characterized by inattention as in
the case of the deficient modes. Kathleen Freeman simply refuses to follow Heidegger’s strictures on
reading the obviously less appealing “positive” mode in a moral sense (Freeman 2009).
Johannes Fritsche (1999) reads these passages differently from me. Of the three modes of
solicitude – one indifferent, and two positive extremes (one dominating and one liberating) –
Fritsche reads my description of the indifferent mode as a description of one positive mode of
domination, and thus reads Heidegger’s allusion to state welfare Fürsorge as an example of an
indifferent, domineering mode of solicitude. Fritsche thus sees the political lines of Heidegger’s
reading here as being much closer to the surface. See Fritsche 1999, 25. In a later reconsideration of
these passages, Fritsche (2012) discerns a fourth mode of solicitude. I take his discovery as evidence
of the difficulty in maintaining his initial position in the face of Heidegger’s complex account.
16
GA 21, 222; Heidegger 2010 187. Quoted in Figal 2000, 145. Figal identifies this as Heidegger’s
account of “the art of Socratic dialogue.” One need not accept Figal’s characterization in order
to approve of Heidegger’s understanding of the example: a Socratic dialogue is oriented pre-
cisely by the “what” of the “thing” being discussed, not the “existence” of the interlocutor qua
Dasein.
“what” of concern (the object, to speak loosely) but by the existence of the
other, by the future possibilities of that person’s Being: “it helps the other to
become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (SZ 122;
emphasis in the original text). In short, whereas the first “positive” mode of
Fürsorge expresses an instrumental “concern” for people, by treating them like
pragmata, so to speak, and amplifying the everyday inclination to think of the
people we customarily treat as tools or even objects, this extreme of solicitude
does not mistake solicitude for concern.17 Rather, this solicitude treats other
people as equally open to disclosing the world, co-ministers to Being.
These various modes of Fürsorge – positive and deficient – relate to each
other much as the present-at-hand emerges from the ready-to-hand. Heidegger’s
point may be expressed as a ratio: the “leaping in” solicitude is to the “leaping
ahead” solicitude as the present-at-hand is to the ready-to-hand. The everyday-
ness of Dasein provokes the drift toward theoretical stability, purposive order,
tradition, and a more predictable and regular mode of Being-in-the-world in
both cases. In the case of solicitude for other Dasein, our everyday inattention
and obliviousness inclines us toward treating our fellow Dasein as problems
to be solved, toward treating them “instrumentally” in light of their concerns,
that is, their practical dealings and the goals toward which these are oriented.
For Heidegger to say, as he does, that “leaping in” signifies this degradation of
the solicitude of Being-with into ready-to-hand concern raises the prospect of a
further narrowing and sclerosis of the present-at-hand coming to predominate
altogether. This is altogether different from that mode of solicitude that treats
other Dasein with respect to their very existence, their standing out freely from
the beings like us and with us, and jointly tending our shared responsibility for
disclosing Being among the beings. An authentic communal existence would
involve the solicitous “leaping ahead” of one another for the sake of the shared
existence of each.
Models for Community

Heidegger takes these deficient and positive modes of solicitude to delineate
the ontological bases of two different sorts of community.18 In one, consti-
tuted by leaping in (einspringen), the other Dasein are handled with a view
17
Freeman sees in the mode of Fürsorge that facilitates the authentic existence of the other a trans-
figuration of Hegelian “recognition,” following to some extent upon the reading of Honneth
and Brandom, wherein the dignity of each person is acknowledged and given the respect owed
to another human being. What such a reading fails to apprehend, however, is that even treating
other Dasein as belonging to the species “human being” is to subsume each particularity within
a theoretical whole that does not give proper appreciation to the unique difference of each. For
a similarly “Kantian” reading of Heidegger that acknowledges its departure from Heidegger’s
own texts, see Vogel 1994, chapter 4. Nancy 2002 is a critique of Heidegger’s insufficiently
robust formulation of the “we” in his doctrine in Being and Time of Mitsein.
18
This comes out more definitely in the lecture course History of the Concept of Time (GA 20).
to another end or purpose: “In such solicitude the other can become one
who is dependent and dominated (Abhängigen und Beherrschten), even if
this domination (Herrschaft) is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.
This kind of solicitude . . . is to a large extent determinative of Being with
one another, and pertains for the most part to our concern with the ready-to-
hand” (SZ 122). Sharing instrumental concerns – other ends or purposes, the
worldly whats – is not an adequate nor is it a fulfilling basis for community.
So oriented, Being-with-one-another “is based proximally and often exclu-
sively upon what is a matter of common concern in such Being” (SZ 122).
Heidegger’s reference to the “what” with which leaping in solicitude is con-
cerned should be taken as a reference to the models of community favored by
the theoretical tradition that takes its orientation from the “what,” the visible
object, rather than from the existing Dasein.19 Heidegger does not specify the
matters of “common concern,” but when they are defined so as to account
for the broadest circumspection, they would include contracted agreements
of the sort by which Hobbes and Locke envisioned humans establishing civil
society; prudential deliberations about questions of justice and nobility, as
in Aristotle; and political calculations of better and worse with regard to the
common good, as in Plato. Indeed, Dasein in communities oriented by such
“circumspective” purposes, are only one small move away from slitting each
other’s throats: “a Being-with-one-another which arises [entspringt] from
one’s doing the same thing as someone else, not only keeps for the most part
within the outer limits (Grenzen), but enters the mode of distance (Abstand)
and reserve (Reserve)” (SZ 122).20 Communities based on contract, such
as modern rights-oriented civil societies and markets, are particularly hos-
tile: “The Being with one another of those who are hired for the same affair
often thrives only on mistrust” (SZ 122). In understanding the foundations
19
Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the world of work is an appropriate point of comparison
here, where work is seen in light of the product, the ends toward which it aims; work is thus
distinguished from action, which takes place in public and is, in quasi-Aristotelian fashion, an
end in itself (Arendt 1958). In Heidegger’s characterization of leaping-in solicitude, however, it
is precisely publicity and its alignment with theoretical reasoning that constitutes the domina-
tion (on the further connection to publicity, see SZ 126, 169). As Heidegger characterizes it,
at precisely the point where Aristotle would refer to the distinction between dominating or
“despotic” forms of rule, as typified by the master–slave relationship, and genuinely “political”
forms of community in the first book of the Politics, Heidegger denies the very possibility of the
distinction, subsuming publicity and political forms to the rule of domination. Likewise – and
the explorations of Brandom 1992, Freeman 2009, and Honneth 2012 notwithstanding – at
precisely the moment in the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel would discern the beginning
of the dialectic of recognition, wherein the master and slave begin struggle as the first step to
rational self-consciousness, a journey that ends in mutual recognition of the equal dignity of the
other, Heidegger denies that reason so construed is capable of discerning the other in its genu-
ine, full individuality as distinct from its membership in a theoretically reified class or category,
namely, a “what” rather than a “who.”
20
Fritsche reads this as a reference to capitalist competition (Fritsche 1999) as against Dreyfus
(1991, 143, 154, 157).
of such communities this way, Heidegger recasts the bases on which all of
the major debates within the history of political thought have taken place as
being exclusively one form of inauthentic pseudo-mastery quarreling with
another for dominance.
Heidegger indicates only a sketch of what genuine community might consist
of within the section on Fürsorge. This model of community rests on a joint
sharing in “leaping ahead” on the part of several Dasein: “when they devote
themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the
manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of.
They thus become authentically bound together [eigentiliche Verbundenheit],
which frees the other in his freedom for himself” (SZ 122; emphasis in the
original text). That is, the community is not oriented by the shared object of
its members, but by the members’ attention to each other. The affinities vis-
ible here between Heidegger’s two modes of positive solicitude and Tönnies’
notions of Gesellschaft (“society”) and Gemeinschaft (“community”) are often
noted.21 The deracinated, commandeering, “leaping-in” community of calcula-
tion, means-end reckoning, and goal-oriented striving echoes Tönnies’ sketch
of a self-interested “society” of heartless schemers, particularly in Simmel’s
appropriation of it for his account of urban, as opposed to rural, life. Likewise,
the Gemeinschaft of holistic belonging, where the corporate body (the term
Gemeinschaft originally referred to the congregation of a church) takes pre-
cedence over the individual, seems to parallel Heidegger’s framework of a
“leaping-ahead” form of community based on solicitude for the existence of
others.22 In a “leaping-ahead” community, one’s own devotion to the group
prepares that of another Dasein, which in turn reinforces one’s own commit-
ment. However, the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft distinction fails to capture
what is at stake for Heidegger in the distinction between “leaping in” and
“leaping ahead,” inasmuch as it is possible to conceive of (indeed, the main-
stream of ancient political theory is usually oriented by) a form of community
where the common good of the whole is prior to the individual. An orientation
by the common good, as goal- or end-oriented, would still be a “leaping-in”
community. That is, ancient modes of community might well satisfy the notion
of a Gemeinschaft, inasmuch as the whole is prior to the parts, but they are still
21
Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which distinguished between the organic,
customary morality of tightly knit “communities” and the contractual, more impersonal forms
of “society,” was first published in 1887, and is perhaps the foundational document of German
sociology. The likely more proximate source of Heidegger’s association of Gesellschaft-type
existence with urban, metropolitan life is Simmel’s reconstruction of Tönnies’ theory. On these
two as intellectual sources for some of Heidegger’s formulations, see de Beisteigui 1998, 21;
2005, 167; ; Fritsche 1999, 296; Safranski 1999, 168.
22
Though Christopher Rickey does not draw the connection to “congregation,” see his study,
Revolutionary Saints (Rickey 2001). Rickey provides the account of Heidegger’s politics that
draws on his development and transformation of Christian themes in his work, hence “revolu-
tionary saints.”
far too oriented by means-end instrumental rationality to satisfy the truly radi-
cal notion Heidegger lays out as the basis for communal existence in “leaping
ahead.” Crucially, the “leaping-ahead” community describes the shared libera-
tion of one Dasein by another without reference to a purposive, means-end
orientation. Thus, “leaping ahead” offers a deeper source of the bonds of com-
munity than the mere calculation of gain either ancient or modern political
philosophy describes (even as elevated by a sense of the noble) and likewise
promises a richer freedom than merely being relieved of concerns (or liberated
to satisfy one’s desires).23
It is nonetheless not altogether clear on the basis of Heidegger’s extremely
formal characterization of solicitude what such a “leaping-ahead” polity
would look like.24 He suggests a rejection of the orienting principles of both
ancient and modern modes of political association: the subject or isolated
individual, so essential as a correct premise of political reasoning to mod-
ern political thought and deliberative reasoning about the common good,
justice, and nobility. There appears to be absolutely no room in his thought,
given his premises, for any of the calculation of institutional design that has
preoccupied modern political theorists such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith,
James Madison, and even Hegel. Heidegger’s models of community offer a
riposte to modern political orders premised on the subject-oriented rational-
ism of Spinoza, Hobbes, or Locke – where inner rationality corresponds to
the sensation of exterior stimuli and the political correlate is rights-bearing,
contract-making individuals – and to the Romantic alternative of a deeper,
pre- or subrational, passionately felt belonging that attaches subjects to their
community, such as in Rousseau, Schiller, Herder, and Dilthey. In place of
these subject-centric models, Heidegger interrogates the possibility of a more
primordial connection between the individual and community, parallel to
his dismantling of the present-at-hand subject–object distinction in favor
of exposing Dasein’s more rooted hominess in the ready-to-hand world of
pragmata.
Yet no more than Heidegger’s invocation of pragmata signals a return
from Descartes to an understanding of Being as primum mobile or a meta-
physics of substance does his search for a more primordial communitarian
root to social life signal his return to ancient modes of political practice.25
Classical political philosophy takes its bearings by the opinions, doksa, held
by citizens, in particular the highest opinions, the law.26 It emerges from
rational discussion or deliberation about the content of opinions concerning
23
Leslie Paul Thiele quite rightly distinguishes Heidegger’s understanding of freedom from both
“positive” and “negative” conceptions (Thiele 1994).
24
Compare again Bernard Yack on the priority of the obstacle to the goal in certain forms of rev-
olutionary political thought (Yack 1992).
25
See Blitz 1981 on Heidegger’s relation to classical political philosophy.
26
See Strauss 1961, 19–21.
the noble, just, and good things. From Heidegger’s point of view, however,
classical political philosophy proceeds blissfully unaware that opinion is
already oriented by the everyday preference for stability, clarity, and visibil-
ity, and that such a philosophic orientation is already disposed simply to reify
the given as the discovered. A community oriented by virtue as construed by
Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero – to refer only to pre-liberal, non-individualist
examples – which sees in the mutual regard of dutiful citizens the resources
for sustaining a political community characterized by ruling and being ruled
in turn and deliberation about the just and the noble, is altogether too con-
strained by everyday notions of stability, circumspective means-ends cal-
culations, and doctrines of the perfection of the soul to satisfy Heidegger’s
expectations of a politics of profound, unfathomable communal belonging
(viz. authentic communal existence). That is, beginning with “opinions”
about the proper orientation of our lives, and then deliberating about which
of these is best, overlooks that the initial content of these opinions is shaped
by our everyday preference for stability, constancy, and familiarity. That is,
a politics that consists in rationally clarifying our confused desires for the
noble or the good has already acceded to an attenuated understanding of
human existence that is closed off to our more disclosive capacities for anxi-
ety, distress, and disquiet.
If this much should be said of Heidegger’s formal critique of the theoret-
ical reasoning of the major figures from the history of political philosophy,
what may be discerned in this discussion of any positive vision of communal
existence? The relationship between Dasein implied by the authentic, positive
mode of leaping-ahead solicitude is not given much concrete detail. It is implic-
itly nondominating, inasmuch as Heidegger explicitly describes the “leaping
in” mode of solicitude as “mastery.” Given the temporal priority of the present
that informs circumspective activity, it stands out here that leaping-ahead solic-
itude consists precisely in opening up each fellow Dasein’s ownmost futural
possibilities for itself. In what respect are these shared between Dasein? The
weight of Heidegger’s discussion emphasizes that nothing common or public,
no properties, are so shared.27 Heidegger’s treatment appears to privilege a
radical diversity of sorts, a “community” of ownmost particular and distinct
possibilities, but these in turn share in a perfect, formal identity. The com-
munity envisioned comes to resemble an association premised on a profound
but nondeliberative, nontheoretical identity – hidden, as it were, from sight –
attentive to a shared past that may be enacted or reached through a solicitous
accompaniment or attendance with respect to the future.
27
Blitz notes the obscurity of the unit in Heidegger between an “individual” Dasein and a group.
What size group? City, country, nation, religion, language? (Blitz 1981, 206–7). Zuckert 1990
points to Heidegger’s later (1930s) work on language as the answer to this question, but
Heidegger’s initial formulation of it would seem to allow for considerable variety, or at least
ambiguity.
Everyday Dictatorship: das man
Perhaps the most misunderstood part of Heidegger’s account of communal

existence is that it is precisely the “success” of authentic community that pushes
us toward the everyday forms of inauthentic community. This is because of
the totalizing character of everydayness. Our dwelling with other people who
are, in the profoundest sense, like us is the source of the (eventual) oblivion
of authentic communal existence. The seeming similitude of our existences
obscures the “ownmost” and Jemeinigt – the “mine” – character of each of
those existences. Even the formally authentic mode of solicitude – “leaping
ahead” – will tend toward and approach inauthenticity. Being-with-others
exhibits Dasein’s tendency – already evident in the emergence of the present-at-
hand from the ready-to-hand – to take its bearings by something other than
our own existence, that is, by something in the world in its most stable, reliable
aspect. It is not simply an excessive focus on what is handy and its purposes
that leads Dasein to see itself “proximally and for the most part” in terms of
things other than itself. This tendency of Dasein is likewise exhibited in com-
munal life, as it is in fact other Dasein who endow the articles of use that one
encounters in the world with significance. That is, the purposes – in Heidegger’s
terminology, “towards-whiches,” and “for-the-sakes-of-whiches” – according
to which one uses, manipulates, and deliberates are fixed in their aims by the
other Dasein with whom one shares the world. Whether an article – a bench,
say – is for sitting on or an altar for sacrificing, whether a cup is for drinking
or a chalice, is decided by the existential togetherness of the others who we are
with, not simply by the character of the things themselves (are those decorative
hand towels, or not?).28 These others set the terms, then, for what is ready-to-
hand and what is not. More precisely, we, inasmuch as we are with these oth-
ers, set such terms.29 The articulation of the world is thus social in its roots.
One thinks of oneself with reference to the articles and things of use in the
world; one still more insidiously thinks of oneself with reference to people in
the world, the other Dasein who determine the very limits of what constitutes
28
“With their Being-with, their disclosedness also goes to make up significance (Bedeutung) –
that is to say, worldliness. And significance, as worldliness, is tied up with the existential
‘for-the-sake-of-which’ ” (SZ 123).
29
Heidegger is not perfectly clear in Being and Time that our sociality obscures more than our
theorizing. The passage quoted in the previous note from SZ 123 is the most certain basis for
such a reading: that meaning (Bedeutung) is principally derived from our Being-with, and that
this is the source of the evident purposiveness in the world. This would then seem to be the basis
of Dreyfus’s emphasis on the conformism of our sociality determines what things are. In the
reading I develop here, I stress Heidegger’s suggestion that everydayness is first of all an attitude
toward time, and therefore a determination of the Being of both our involvement with articles
of use that tends toward theorizing and our situation with other people, which tends toward
occlusive traditionalism and instrumental calculation.
the world itself.30 Heidegger gives the sense that in thinking of oneself with
reference to the articles of ready-to-hand use, one is in danger of thinking one-
self a tool; the still greater danger is that one think of oneself, not as a tool, but
as a “duplicate” of the others (SZ 124).
In thinking of oneself as being like others, or seeing oneself as one of the
others, Heidegger understands us to be submitting to the “domination,” not
strictly speaking of these others, but to an aspect of our own Being, namely, das
Man, “the They.”31 The rule of this dimension of ourselves, which Heidegger
rather ominously refers to as “the dictatorship of the They,” consists precisely
in not being ourselves, that is, occluding rather than disclosing the truth of
Being, which cannot be gotten “through” other beings, even if those other
beings are also Dasein.32 The remainder of this chapter treats the occlusive-
ness of our existence with others in three sections, first considering Heidegger’s
description of the They and the public, second reviewing the central place of
communication and “chatter” in constituting this everyday community, and
third discussing the ensuing “fall” of Dasein into an orientation by the beings
rather than by Being.
The They and the Absorption of the Public

We derive our predominant interpretations of the make-up of the world,
and the meaning that suffuses all of our involvements and encounters, from
Being-with-one-another. Given, then, that that way we are with one another,
“proximally and for the most part,” is typified by a facile indifference tending
toward mastery, this also determines the barrenness of meaning that saturates
our everyday existence: “Dasein is for the sake of the ‘they’ in an everyday
manner, and the ‘they’ itself articulates the referential context of significance.
When beings are encountered, Dasein’s world frees them for a totality of
involvements with which the ‘they’ is familiar, and within the limits which
have been established with the ‘they’s’ averageness” (SZ 129). The comfort, the
familiarity, of the They establishes what all of our governing purposes, what
the regnant meaning of our involvements with the world, will be. Furthermore,
inasmuch as we submit to the They in how we understand ourselves now,
30
“As a Being-in-the-world-with-others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to
Dasein-with and to itself; and in this thralldom it ‘belongs’ to these” (SZ 163).
31
The proper translation of this term remains contentious, several Heidegger scholars insisting
that “the They” is inferior to “anyone” or “the one.” Taylor Carman insists that “the They” is
the worst possible translation: “Unfortunately, the fact that ‘they’ is a personal rather than an
impersonal pronoun has the disastrous implication of excluding you and me, whereas Heidegger
clearly intends it to include us all” (Carman 1994, 222 n. 5). Quite true. I retain it here, how-
ever, for the spooky, disturbing connotation that it conveys, which is certainly also part of
Heidegger’s intention in using this strange term.
32
“When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern – that is, at the same time, in its Being-with
towards others – it is not itself” (SZ 125).
this submission therefore determines what we shall become, that is, what we
can be in the future. Our involvement with these others, an involvement that
privileges our presently agreed-upon purposes and meanings, and that then
reinforces and imposes these agreed-upon meanings – explicitly or implicitly –
profoundly limits our openness to future possibilities that are not so endorsed.
In the self-understanding that is permitted by the They, we privilege sta-
bility and reliability, what Heidegger refers to in this context as “constancy”
(SZ 128). The principal way that we are given over to emphasizing a stable
constancy is to imagine that the They is “others,” and not us. The crown-
ing adornment of Western civilization – the individual “self,” clearly distin-
guishable from “others” in society, deserving of dignity and respect – is a
self-gratifying, self-deluding fiction. Our evaluation of “others” as other than
us distinguishes them in their averageness, regularity, and stability and locates
them in the aspiration to permanence and stability of the world. The others
are simply those who “are there” proximally and for the most part in everyday
Being-with-one-another: “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself,
not some people, and not the sum of them all . . .” (SZ 126). That we refer to
them as “others” disguises from ourselves our own intimate belonging to them.
Far from being really free from “them,” we indeed belong to them. We are
“they,” because we establish “them” as the standard by which to evaluate our-
selves and everything else.33 Inasmuch as we typically encounter the others of
the They in our doings, our affairs, business, handling of worldly articles –
namely, the circumspective ready-to-hand – we tend toward evaluating our-
selves relative to them, what Heidegger refers to as “distantiality.” We compare
ourselves to them in their work, or judge whether we are behind or ahead by
looking at them.34 In so evaluating ourselves, we subject ourselves to them in
their average, leveled-down normalness. We thus allow the They to mediate
the future as it opens up in our work, allow the They to shape the possibilities
that emerge from our present engagement in the world. The They’s capacity to
mediate and shape our future, Heidegger claims, is the essence of “publicness,”
another integral element of everydayness. In the notion of everyday publicness,
Heidegger assimilates all notions of the common good, social contract, rights,
and community into a broad, totalizing dullness of the nonidentifiable, ambi-
ent “they” who determine the future by flattening everything into its dimmest
aspect as a regularized constancy.
33
“One belongs to the others oneself and enhances their power” (SZ 126).
34
Johannes Fritsche claims that Dreyfus misses here Heidegger’s employment of a standard “social-
ist” critique of capitalist liberalism (Fritsche 2003) in Dreyfus’s interest in emphasizing the con-
formist element of Heidegger’s critique of the They (Dreyfus 1991). No doubt there is something
to Fritsche’s point. I would emphasize, though, that as Heidegger sees it, the amour propre of
competitive economic activity – such as is being glossed in the discussion of “distantiality” – is
itself derivative of a presumed likeness, i.e. conformity, that would permit the comparisons in
question. That is, both capitalism and socialism are oriented by the ephemera of the They, nei-
ther of them attaining the freedom or independence they claim for themselves.
Dasein’s absorption in the They is, paradoxically, both comforting and dis-
sipating. Evaluating oneself and one’s possibilities with reference to the average
undertakings of the They is “disturbing” (SZ 126), but such evaluation is suf-
ficiently subtle or unobtrusive in its own right that the “disturbance is hidden”
(SZ 126). One is dissolved into the others in such a way that they vanish the
more we accommodate ourselves to them or understand ourselves in light of
them and their Being:
In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is
unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and
judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the
“great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The
“they”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes
the kind of Being of everydayness (SZ 126–27).
In this manner, Dasein is “disburdened” by the They; the trouble (Sorge) of

existing is eased. That life is easier thanks to the They is how they reinforce
their “stubborn dominion” (SZ 128). Being disburdened, Dasein is no longer
confronted with anything profound, difficult, exceptional, or primordial;
there is no need to struggle to gain anything. What can be seen in the uniform
light of the public is the familiar and accessible; differences of level and genu-
ineness, anything that cuts to the heart of the matter, are ignored and missed
(SZ 127).35
Chatter, Ambiguity, and the Masquerade

of Everyday Community
What is at stake in our communal existence, according to Heidegger, is our dis-
closedness, our character as the being that is open to Being, and that in being
open in fact “discloses” Being in and among the beings in the world. Perhaps
the primary way that we do this is by properly being ourselves, our “own-
most,” authentic selves, which includes a reference to our communal essence.
We are not being who we really are if we deny or disguise that we are com-
munal. So the problem with the dictatorship of the They is not really moral; it
is a problem with our exhibition of the meaning and truth of ourselves, and of
Being inasmuch as we are Being-There. The further complication of the matter
is that, while we are the disclosers of Being, we are also the principal occluders
35
Heidegger echoes Nietzsche in equating the public with the common, as in vulgar, and thus
imputing to that which remains undiminished by the glare of the public the distinction of being
rare and unique. Heidegger’s consideration of the seductiveness and easiness of the ascendance
of the They has summoned occasional comparisons to Tocqueville’s concept of “soft despotism.”
On this, see Dostal 1994 and the searching meditation by Ralph Hancock (Hancock 2012).
Julian Young pushes this comparison rather far (1997, 63–4) seeing, of all things, the possibility
of enthusiastic, wholehearted support for liberal democracy in Heidegger’s positions.
of Being, and this element of our Being, our occlusiveness, needs also to be
manifested or disclosed.
As Heidegger accounts for everydayness, it is in the first place an attitude
toward time that privileges regularity and stability, and therefore in our deal-
ings with articles of use, privileges the stable, visible aspect of the beings in its
relation to the purposes that govern our use of them. Everydayness privileges
stability, therefore, but is not itself stable or at rest.
This is important to keep in mind for Heidegger’s discussion of everyday
existence under the dominion of the They-self, because he frequently empha-
sizes the turbulence and business of such an inauthentic existence. The point
is not that rest, tranquility, idleness, or peace are themselves to be preferred
as, by contrast, “authentic,” but that the “hurly burly” (as he put it in the
“Comment on Jaspers”) of everyday existence encourages a false and ulti-
mately self-defeating form of such stability, one example of which is tradi-
tion. Thus, everyday existence is so turbulent that “tranquility,” rest, comfort,
“habituation,” “constancy,” and “familiarity” are unduly privileged as ideals.
Being-with-one-another and communicating with one another are the source
of this misplaced elevation of rest, tradition, and theoretical rationality.
Gerede, “chatter” or “idle talk,” occupies the most prominent place in
Heidegger’s brief treatment of the characteristics of Dasein’s disclosedness
under the aptly named “dictatorship” of the They.36 “Idle talk,” he says, “is the
kind of Being that belongs to Being-with-one-another itself” (SZ 177). That
is, it belongs not merely to the way we are when we are already inauthentic;
Gerede is at all times and places characteristic of humans being together, in
authentic as well as inauthentic communities.37 The Greeks inordinately privi-
leged speech as the medium of disclosure, to the exclusion, Heidegger implies,
of means by which the profounder relationship to Being might have been
apprehended.38 When with other Dasein, we are simply immersed in speech –
idle, chattery, gossipy, braying cant – to the point where every disclosure occurs
36
It is first in his presentation of the everyday modes of Being-in, followed by curiosity (the every-
day iteration of Verstehen) and ambiguity (the everyday version of Auslegung).
37
This is the correlate of the priority Heidegger assigns to hearing and hearkening as modes
of disclosure even despite his appropriation from the theoretical tradition of the language of
sight and illumination: “Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which
Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 163). The connection between hear-
ing and community comes through in the sequel: “. . . as in hearing the voice of the friend whom
every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears, because it understands. As a Being-in-the-world with
Others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with and to itself; and in its
thralldom it ‘belongs’ to these. Being-with develops in listening to one another” (SZ 163).
38
“Among the Greeks, their everyday existing was largely diverted into talking with one another,
but at the same time they ‘had eyes’ to see. Is it an accident that in both their pre-philosophical
and their philosophical way of interpreting Dasein, they defined the essence of man as zôon
logon echon? The latter way of interpreting this definition of man in the sense of the animale
rationale, ‘something living which has reason,’ is not indeed ‘false,’ but it covers up the phenom-
enal basis for this definition of ‘Dasein’ ” (SZ 165).
through this medium.39 It is truly the vehicle by which the They dominates; its
“dictatorship” really works by dictating:
There are many things with which we first become acquainted in this way, and there is
not a little which never gets beyond such an average understanding. This everyday way
in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first
instance, with never a possibility of extraction. In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine
understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating
anew, are performed. In no case is a Dasein, untouched and unseduced by the way in
which things have been interpreted, set before the open country of a “world-in-itself”
so that it just beholds what it encounters. The dominance of the public way in which
things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of hav-
ing a mood – that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world “matter” to it.
The “they” prescribes one’s disposition, and determines how one “sees” (SZ 169–70).
Our thinking and reasoning, our moods and feelings: all of this is established
in advance by our immersion in the dominant opinion of our time and place.
Despite its ubiquity and totality, however, Gerede leaves us neither soothed
nor peaceful, but restless and confused. “Discourse” (Rede) as such refers to the
articulation of the world as this may be apprehended and expressed by Dasein.
By chatter (Gerede), however, Heidegger refers to a derivative, narrowed form
of articulation that is uprooted from any speech that would be genuinely dis-
closive of the articulated structure of the beings themselves. Discourse (Rede)
as such is meant to be “about” the Being of beings, such that what is said in
the talk is the Being of the being. It is, after all, supposed to be disclosive; it
discloses the Being of things inasmuch as they are related to each other. Chatter,
however, is not “about” the beings at all; it happens at a further degree of
removal from the things supposedly being discussed and just glosses over them
(SZ 168). It is thus the source of averageness, as in “average everydayness.”40
39
Interpreters of Being and Time differ on the meaning of this “through” and therefore on the
thoroughness of the dominance of the everyday. The question is this: in Heidegger’s under-
standing, is everydayness a way of being in which we are “proximally and for the most part”
immersed – as I along with, for example, Ernst Tügendhat (1967) argue – or is it a way of being
“in light of which” we must consider other, authentic modes of existence. The scholarship of
Günter Figal (1988, 150–2) and Steven Crowell (2008) presents a case for the latter. In see-
ing everydayness as merely the normal mode of Dasein’s dealing in the world, they understate
or overlook, I think, Heidegger’s emphasis on its “falling” character and its occlusive power
to cover even itself up. The point of emphasizing this is not to stress some sort of moral dis-
approval on Heidegger’s part; the reason it is necessary to emphasize it is that the obscurity
and occlusiveness of the phenomenon is precisely what Heidegger is trying to point out about
human existence. This point becomes particularly important when trying to draw contrasts
between Heidegger’s position and those of other figures in the history of thought, for example,
Husserl and Aristotle, who overlook the initial obscurity of phenomena as essential to their
very Being.
40
In Heidegger’s discussion of “statement” or “assertion” (Aussage), the derivative, present-at-
hand form of discourse, he says that it still discloses the Being of beings; it is not, like chatter,
totally removed from the disclosure of the beings.
Chatter is not “about” the thing talked about in the talk, but about the aver-
age understanding of that thing, which is “the same” among those commonly
hearing it: “We do not so much understand the beings which are talked about;
we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such” (SZ 168). The
sameness of what is publicly so understood represents no original claims to
understanding, but only an “undifferentiated kind of understandability” (SZ
169). This “undifferentiated kind of understandability” does not return to the
ground of anything; it only closes off rather than opens up (SZ 169). The aver-
age, generalizable medium of communication expressed in chatter (Gerede)
cuts Dasein off from every distinct or unique “relationship-of-Being” toward
the beings of the world, toward other Dasein, even toward its own Being-in, by
means of a hidden, “ever-increasing, uncanny groundlessness” (SZ 170). The
public veneer of general and average regularity disguises an uncanny, uncom-
fortable uprootedness of each particular Dasein.
The busyness and oppressive motion of chatter is a reminder that the every-
day community is not itself calm or peaceful, but a dizzying swirl of motion
and activity. This vortex of shallowness and superficiality makes stability and
rest – tarrying and leisure – seem attractive, but perversely offers them as goals
to be restlessly pursued. Everyday community thus privileges “curiosity” over
any broader or more measured form of intellectual activity. Curiosity so under-
stood is a way of “seeing” that lusts and chases sight after sight, not for the
sake of the thing being looked at, but for the sake of an insatiable desire for
novelty. It is goaded on, so to speak, by its accomplice, chatter. Chatter and
curiosity, thus, as a mutually reinforcing homelessness, restrict the horizon of
understanding. Each of these ways-to-be, Heidegger says, “drags the other one
with it” (SZ 173; emphasis in the original text).41
In this depiction of the “everyday” relationship between thinking and speak-
ing, “curiosity” and “chatter,” Heidegger thus skewers the original understand-
ing of philosophy defined as the attempt to replace opinions about the whole
with knowledge of the whole. All this ever amounted to was the immersion in
chatter (opinion) and the formulation, on that basis, of dissatisfying theoretical
attempts to give expression to our unquenchable “fascination” with the world
(SZ 176). In treating curiosity, Heidegger gives a genealogical account of how
it arises from our initial involvement, even “absorption,” in our concernful
tasks within the world. The first step occurs when concernful circumspection
comes to rest, that is, when we take a break from our labors or rest satisfied
with them. In these circumstances, when “freed” from its tasks, circumspection
will rest, “tarry,” and try to see the “ ‘world’ merely as it looks,” that is, in its
stable aspect (SZ 172; emphasis in the original text). Heidegger deliberately
echoes the Platonic and Aristotelian language of theoretical philosophy. Such
circumspection “de-severs” the being from itself, and wherever it is spatially,
41
“Chatter controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one ‘must’ have read
and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to chatter” (SZ 173).
it brings it near: “Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it
close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along solely by
the looks of the world; in this kind of Being it concerns itself with becoming
rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongside that which, in
the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand” (SZ 172). Heidegger is glossing
here in the classical elevation of schole, leisure, and tranquility in the desire to
apprehend Being by means of the present-at-hand looks (the Platonic eide) of
a being.
The philosophic rendering of the world as a static picture of visible pres-
ence, however, cannot satisfy the “lust of the eyes” that motivates the initial
fascination with visibility that elevates the “looks” of the beings (SZ 171). This
prompts the second step. Curiosity does not seek to understand the beings,
even in the limited fashion of thaumazein in the presence of the beings that
emerge out of ready-to-hand circumspection at rest, but pursues the experience
of seeing after seeing, desire after desire. Heidegger characterizes it as a sort of
restlessness, specifically “non-tarrying” (SZ 172, 347), which culminates in a
total or perpetual distraction and a “never dwelling anywhere” (SZ 172, 347),
ever in quest of “novelty” and distraction.
The uprootedness of chatter and the spurious, specious guidance it supplies
to our intellect in inflaming curiosity provokes a prevailing sense of meaning
that is not, in Heidegger’s description, absurdity or meaninglessness so much
as “ambiguity,” Zweideutigheit. This term, in Heidegger’s technical German
usage, plays on the term significance or meaning – Bedeutigkeit – which refers
to the aims and purposes toward which one’s pragmatic dealings are directed.
In Heidegger’s terminology, the toward-whiches and for-the-sake-of-whiches
are envisioned by concernful circumspection in one’s ready-to-hand manipula-
tion of pragmata in the world. The meaning refers to the sense given by being
assuredly goal-oriented. Yet the English translation, “ambiguity,” referring to
unclear or blurred meanings, perhaps, does not quite capture the German,
which stresses duality: Zwei-deutigkeit, the double-signified. The doubleness
stems from the gloss on everything supplied by chatter, which obscures the par-
ticular and profound, and pretends that the general is deep when it is really the
most superficial: “Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genu-
inely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does
not look so, and yet at bottom it is” (SZ 173). The doubleness of ambiguity
refers to the unmoored meaning, current and up-to-date among the They, and
the genuine meaning, almost completely obscured.
Ambiguity interferes with the cohesion and therefore the collective under-
takings of any community. What appears to be a collective project is revealed
to have no one responsible for it; something that everyone seemed to support
collapses in failure with everyone (das Man) rhyming off his or her suppos-
edly long-standing criticisms of it. Heidegger describes the generality as though
they are each privy to a secret insight. This is because in ambiguity every-
thing genuinely unique and profound is obscured, and so instead everyone,
mistaking trivialities for profundity, assumes the attitude of being sophisticated

and canny, “on the scent” of something deep. Meanwhile, no one is genuinely
responsible for any decisive action. Therefore, those who were once “in on it”
are now critical: “When confronted with the carrying-through of what ‘they’
have surmised together, chatter readily establishes that ‘they’ ‘could have done
that too’ – for ‘they’ have indeed surmised together . . . chatter is even indignant
that what it has surmised and constantly demanded now actually happens”
(SZ 174; emphasis in the original text). In ambiguity, talking about things
seems more real than genuinely acting on them, hence the They is “constantly
going wrong” in its understanding of its own projects: “This ambiguity . . . gives
chatter the semblance of having everything decided in it” (SZ 174; emphasis in
the original text). Ambiguity obscures the network of significance that would
otherwise bind Dasein to shared meanings of articulated purposes; these being
obscured, Dasein is turned over, as we have seen, to its endless capacity for vol-
uble, loquacious chatter, ever and endlessly abstracted from even the thinnest
disclosure of beings.
Being is thus not shared between members of the community in a joint dis-
closure. Chatter interferes with, “slips itself in between,” relations between peo-
ple (SZ 174). A “secret and reciprocal listening-in” then characterizes relations
that are suspicious and “watchful” (SZ 175). Here Heidegger appropriates ter-
minology from Simmel’s use of Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft in referring to the condition of a “for one another” (Fureinander)
disguising an “against one another” (Gegeneinander) (SZ 175).
The upshot for community is suspicion and deception masquerading behind
congeniality. In the ambiguous network of interpretations that make up the
everyday community of the They, the common understanding of what is, and
what means what taken from chatter, and is thus abstracted from even the thin-
nest representation of the Being of what is at stake and what is being handled.
Falling and the Everyday

Ultimately, Heidegger groups the different elements of the disclosedness of
everydayness – curiosity, chatter, and ambiguity – in their shared exhibition
a particular relationship to time, which he refers to as “falling.” Falling (ver-
fallen), a “basic kind of Being that belongs to everydayness,” encapsulates the
disclosedness of this motion (SZ 175). The term, as with all other such terms
in Being and Time, is not intended to express moral disapproval. Nonetheless,
it captures a sense of the decadence – a virtual cognate – but also a sense of
motion, a “crash” or a “plunge” (Absturz) into the world. Our “absorption”
in the tempting, tranquilizing, alienating, entangling world is – despite the
comfort and familiarity sought and in some mistaken sense promised – not
as smooth as it might appear. It is, indeed, “turbulent.” The motion of falling
captures the character of everydayness as a tendency. That is, it is not simply
a state in which one either does or does not find oneself. Everydayness is the
tendency to “move” in the direction of inauthenticity, whether one is currently

authentic or inauthentic. We fall toward inauthenticity “proximally and for the
most part.”
Falling entails an emphasis on the temporality of the present at the expense
of both the past (having been) and the future. The motion of falling is a “leap-
ing away” from our “ownmost” future, a refusal of it in favor of a permanent
present (Gegenwart). The present, as understood in falling, is not without a
past and future,42 but it submits these ecstases of time to the predominance of
the present moment: “The craving for the new is of course a way of proceeding
towards something not yet seen, but in such a manner that the making-present
seeks to extricate itself from awaiting. Curiosity is futural in a way which is
altogether inauthentic, and in such a manner, moreover, that it does not await
a possibility, but, in its craving, just desires such a possibility as something that
is actual” (SZ 347).43 The passion to urge on ourselves an immediately “pre-
sent” future, and to force this to relate to an immediately present “past,” does
violence to ourselves. It consists in ripping ourselves away from a genuinely
pertinent future potentiality by submitting it to the strictures and demands of
“right now”; this, in turn, allows for no genuine connection to the past into
which we’ve been thrown, and leaves us uprooted and disconnected from it
(SZ 347).44 By falling into the present, we obscure from ourselves our finite
existence as beings stretched through time, and come to understand ourselves
only as a being like the other beings for whom time is not an issue. This can
only be disorienting and disturbing, though, precisely because this is not who
we are in our Being.
The Clearing of the Everyday

Heidegger’s characterization of the temporality of falling and the prevailing
confusion of everydayness as ambiguity indicates, then, the historical moment
to which the inquiry of Being and Time is addressed. There is some resolu-
tion here of the apparent paradox in Heidegger’s account of everydayness,
where it seemed on the one hand to exhibit very particular, late-modern, even
specifically Weimar elements, and on the other hand to be a fundamental ele-
ment in the constitution of Dasein.45 The elements of Heidegger’s account that
42
“In every ecstasis, temporality temporalizes itself as a whole” (SZ 350).
43
“The present leaps away from its authentic future and from its authentic having been so that
it lets Dasein come to its authentic existence only by taking a detour through that present”
(SZ 348).
44
“The more inauthentically the present is – that is, the more making-present comes towards
‘itself’ – the more it flees in the face of a definite potentiality-for-Being and closes it off; but in
that case, all the less can the future come back to the being which has been thrown. In the ‘leap-
ing away’ of the present, one also forgets increasingly” (SZ 347).
45
On Heidegger’s pedagogical rhetoric, see Ehrmantraut 2010. This superb study reads the
sequence of courses following Being and Time as a successive working out of (one of the) theses
seem to date specifically to Weimar – the references to public transportation,

the welfare system, newspapers, and the like – are shown to be expressive of
a latent tendency in the everydayness of human Dasein. In some sense, these
late-modern elements are the completion or adornment of civilization qua civ-
ilization. Heidegger thus after a fashion echoes Nietzsche’s cruel diagnosis that
the end of history as sketched by Hegel is but a “banker’s night out in Berlin.”46
But it must also be noted that Heidegger’s everydayness is not an accomplish-
ment, like Hegel’s end of history, that was won through a history of struggle
against brute nature and the lower elements of human character and society.
The ascent of everydayness is a way of existing that we have relaxed into, sti-
fling or numbing, at each step, our qualms or regrets.
The foregoing analysis of Heidegger’s account of everydayness has uncov-
ered and emphasized the intimate relationship between it and the “primordial”
markers of Existenz – as discussed in the analysis of Heidegger’s earlier works
in Chapters 1 and 2, Bekümmerung or distress at the question of whether
one has attained the primordial. Theory emerges from practice thanks both
to the ease and comfort of practice and as a comforting response to the dis-
turbance of the breakdown of practice. Our everyday orientation by habitual
custom, stability, regularity, and “constancy” elevates the visible – and there-
fore “public” – aspects of the beings of the world. It is not the case, then, that
our habitual practices are straightforwardly a more “primordial” or basic form
of our understanding or grasping Being of pragmata: indeed, the fluency and
general reliability of such practices occlude from us a deeper finitude beto-
kened by moods of distress, anxiety, or disturbance generally.47 What is “given”
cannot thus be understood as the beings that are “present” (vorhanden) to us,
rather the given is apprehended in both the distressed, finite, manifesting of the
nothing, the null basis of existence, and so on, as well as our privileging and
therefore elevation of the stable and secure, theoretically apprehensible aspect
of the beings.
There is a social-communal correlate to the privileging of stability that
expresses itself as the emergence of theory from practice: this is the inauthentic,
of that book, namely, that “the very possibility, necessity, and direction of philosophic question-
ing (i.e., its passage through fundamental ontology) essentially belongs to a distinctive moment
in the ‘History of Being’ ” (Ehrmantraut 2010, 45). The claim I develop here is that this insight is
already present in Being and Time, though it is not made as explicitly as in the courses to come.
46
Nietzsche is quoting Edward von Hartmann, Untimely Meditations 2. 9 (Nietzsche 1997, 109).
47
In a memorable passage, Heidegger puts it this way: “It is precisely when we see the ‘world’
unsteadily and fitfully in accordance with our moods, that the ready-to-hand shows itself in its
specific worldliness, which is never the same from day to day. By looking at the world theoret-
ically, we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at-hand,
though admittedly this uniformity comprises a new abundance of things which can be discov-
ered by simply characterizing them. Yet even the purest theoria has not left all moods behind it;
even when we look theoretically at what is just present-at-hand, it does not show itself purely as
it looks unless this theoria lets it come towards us in a tranquil tarrying alongside . . ., in rastonê
and diagogê” (SZ 138).
everyday mode of Being-with that privileges a particularly “instrumental” form

of relating to other people and again reinforces a limited, sclerotic way of
manifesting in all of our dealings with the beings. Again, Heidegger’s mean-
ing is illuminated by seeing it in the light of his claim that everydayness is our
inclination to privilege stability, familiarity, and constancy in the face of our
temporally finite existence. This tendency, when expressed in our dealings with
other beings like us, that is, other people, inclines us to understand ourselves
in stable terms comprehensible to them, as well as then to construe our future
possibilities on this most constrained, indeed severely curtailed basis. In other
words, the prospect of getting along smoothly in a community with our fellow
human beings dulls our sense of what our own truest, most fulfilling possibili-
ties are. At the same time, therefore, this prospect tempts us to relate to this
community on an ill-formed basis, where we are doomed to exist “inauthen-
tically” in a so-called community of craven deceit and self-dealing precisely
because neither we nor our fellows have a sound grasp of who we really are.
The “original” problem then is the occlusion of the truth: such occlusion mani-
fests itself, again, misleadingly as moral or ethical phenomena, but the root
problem is truth. Moreover, the entire superstructure of the history of political
philosophy and the defining quarrels of this tradition – ancient versus modern,
individual versus community, virtue and passion, rights and duties, calculation
and sacrifice – have been premised on an altogether shallow and inadequate
understanding of (a) the sort of beings having the quarrel and (b) the Being that
is therefore characteristic of them and rest of the beings in the world.
To put the inadequacy of previous political philosophy more precisely, and
in terms of Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time, Heidegger’s argument
suggests that both modern and ancient philosophy are premised on the “leap-
ing in” rather than “leaping ahead” forms of solicitude for others. The orien-
tation of traditional political philosophies, be it the classical form that begins
in “opinions” concerning the just and noble, or the modern form that is con-
cerned with the objects of the passion and their similitude, are both oriented
by a pragmatic “concern” with an object that is not Dasein: in the case of the
classical orientation by opinion, the implicit objects are justice “in itself” or the
noble “in itself,” which “solicit” more deference and attention than the Dasein
with whom we are involved. Or, to put this another way, we orient our involve-
ment with these other Dasein in the light of these non-Daseinish objects. In the
case of modern political philosophy, to speak with a similar degree of general-
ity, the rationality that informs political life is properly oriented by the objects
of desire common to the human species as a whole. Hobbes famously speaks of
the “similitude of the passions” and the reliability, therefore, of political com-
munities designed with this most reliable generality in mind. Kant, to select an
example from whom it is important to distinguish Heidegger, likewise orients
political questions around universal qualities of human nature and the dignity
that these impart to us. The problem, according to Heidegger’s reasoning on
the character of Mitsein and solicitude, is that these ways of relating to other
Dasein are oriented by beings – objects of passions, passions, virtues, the dig-
nified qualities of the human species – that “do not have the Being of Dasein.”
They cannot therefore express a “leaping-ahead” solicitude that intends to help
another Dasein come into its “own” authentic existence. Understanding and
relating to others with respect to generalizable qualities that may somehow
refer to them is not “solicitously” tending to their Being; it is effectively mas-
tering and dominating them by submitting them to the rule of an instrument or
object, wittingly or otherwise. “Leaping-in” solicitude, thus, as is perhaps now
clear, has the character of “theoretical” ethics, as diagnosed by Heidegger in his
earlier courses. The form of such ethics is that it relates humans to and evalu-
ates them with respect to standards from which we are removed, and therefore
grasped by “looking” at or theorizing about. “Leaping-in” solicitude, like the-
oretical ethics, fails to have an adequate appreciation for the character of the
being at the center of the inquiry, the human consciousness, that is supposedly
being related to such theoretically apprehended beings.
Heidegger’s recurrence to Dasein in its everydayness as the necessary start-
ing point for the investigation of the meaning of Being is sometimes compared
to Aristotle’s claim that we may approach an understanding of the first things
by way of appreciating what is first for us, that is, Aristotle’s recapitulation
of the orientation of Socratic philosophy by way of opinion.48 The forego-
ing interpretation, however, illuminates the profound differences between this
Aristotelian or Socratic approach and that of Heidegger. Everydayness is not
opinion; turning to everydayness in order to apprehend the meaning of Being
is in fact a rejection of the prospect of discerning such meaning in the contra-
dictory opinions that people hold about such matters. Why? In Heidegger’s
characterization, Socrates’ turn to opinion misses the first step in thinking. It
overlooks our inherent preference for the visible, stable, reliable, and habitual
by turning, indeed, to our “habitual” or “customary” opinions and seeking
to clarify the stable, present content of these opinions in their “looks.” The
Socratic turn lives out Heidegger’s claim that everydayness covers itself up. It
is already incipiently “theoretical,” occlusively moralizing and thus blind to
our Being. Opinion, in Heidegger’s schema, is chatter, Gerede. The reflection
of “what’s what” to which we have access in opinion is stripped of any genu-
ine openness to our “ownmost” existence: the predominant meanings in this
medium are zweideutig, ambiguous, current, and gripping at one level of mean-
ing, but altogether untethered from any worthwhile purchase on the meaning
of Being. Whereas the Socratic thesis is that “dialogue” can lead us to the truth,
that the juxtaposition of one opinion or set of opinions against another in the
light of mutual contradictory claims can lead us, step by step or dialogically,
toward greater clarity and stability with reference to “what’s what” or the
meaning of Being as such, Heidegger’s characterization of the predominance
of “ambiguity” in Gerede is that there simply is no such path or openness
48
Graeme Nicholson is just one example (Nicholson 2005, 47–8).
available; each seeming path is indeed governed by our “everyday” preferences

for stability, and what appears as “contradiction” or, after a manner of speak-
ing, a “breakdown” in the argument merely points us to another grasping after
serenity by way of clarity. Heidegger’s lifelong refusal of dialogue, a “philo-
sophic embarrassment” (or “perplexity,” Verlegenheit, SZ 25) as a path to the
genuine openness to the truth of Being is fully present in Being and Time.49
Indeed, the very inquiry of the book as a whole is premised on acknowledging
the perplexity that the Socratic tradition of Western philosophy has obscured.
Heideggerian philosophy is, in the decisive respect, counter-Socratic.
Seeing this contrast with opinion and therefore with the starting point
of Socratic political philosophy should dispel the mistaken notion that by
everydayness Heidegger means simply how we are in our “pretheoretical” or
“prescientific” way of existing. Heidegger’s everydayness does not provide
a “neutral” or presuppositionless phenomenological account, if there were
such a thing, of the way human life is lived before the deforming influence of
theoretical rationalism.50 Instead, understood in the context of the intimate
relationship between everydayness and our primordial disquiet, anxiety, and
disturbance, the error of this reading should have been exposed. By contrast, as
I have argued, everydayness most essentially expresses our temporality, namely,
that aspect that privileges a possible future of regularity and stability, “an eter-
nity of yesterdays.” Its essential temporality – of which its relationship to the
theoretical is derivative – is of decisive importance for Heidegger’s account of
everydayness and therefore of greatest importance for understanding its place
in the wending argument of Being and Time. Everydayness, so understood,
expresses an aversion to our perishing finitude and finite temporality as such.
Such an understanding of everydayness yields both (1) a grasp of the connect-
edness of its social aspects (the dominance of the They-self as the main source
49
Here, then, is the principal difference with Gadamer, who retains the conviction that dialogue
will conduct us, even in a time of destitution, to the understanding of Being. Gadamer even
maintains that this is true of Heidegger, even though Heidegger denies it (see Gadamer 1994,
194). On his difference with Heidegger on this point, see Zuckert 1996, 102–3, and Robert
J. Dostal, “The World is Never Lost: The Hermeneutics of Trust” (Dostal 1987).
50
I have mentioned previously the influence of this reading by Hubert Dreyfus on such thinkers as
Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty. It might also be noted that Gregory Bruce Smith’s interpreta-
tion of Heidegger offers another version of this reading (Smith 2007). Smith finds that the merit
of Heidegger’s “early” work is in the phenomenological acuity exhibited in his attentive account
of “everydayness,” as in the way things normally are, and that his later work is compromised by
“metaphysical” flights that abstract from the granular, detailed phenomenological” treatments
of our pretheoretical existence to be found in his earlier work (the period in the vicinity of Being
and Time and slightly afterward). Smith, in my view, understates the extent to which Heidegger’s
account of everydayness includes an account of what it is about how things are “proximally and
for the most part” that obscures the phenomena, and hence an appreciation that an important
dimension of the given phenomena is what Heidegger refers to as “Nothing,” i.e., the given is
in a certain respect absent and the primordial condition is hence, in some respect, confused.
Heidegger’s later work, on such a reading, should therefore be seen as continuous with these
early insights and read as a way of giving some sort of expression to our profound finitude.
of meaning in the world) and its theoretical aspects (the emergence of theoreti-
cal presence [vorhandenheit] out of practical handiness) and (2) a sense of this
happening within a historical moment in which the present (Gewartigen) has
come to predominate in our understanding of and relationship to everything in
our existence. “Everydayness” is not self-evidently, by any means, the necessary
way to reckon how we are “proximally and for the most part.” Heidegger’s
claim is only tenable in the context of other elements of his thought, most
importantly his argument that the “fundamental experience” is Existenz –
that Dasein is “mine” and projected futurally as “care” for its “existence” – as
claimed in the early work discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, and in Being and
Time. Only if our Being is most illuminated in the perilous and fraught experi-
ence of Existenz does it become plausible to say that the principal obstacle to
our own apprehension of our Being as such is our constitutional inclination to
privilege stability and regularity.
By correctly appreciating the complex duality of everydayness, Heidegger’s
proposition that his work in Being and Time starts in perplexity (Verlegenheit)
can now be understood more precisely and contemplated in its tenuousness.
Perplexity appears as one of these moods or experiences that breaks through
the ersatz tranquility and persistent ambiguity to announce the finitude of
existence. Perplexity is provoked not merely by the magnitude or grandeur of
the topic to be considered but by the sensation of the vast discrepancy between
the adequacy of available accounts of the matter and their pretensions to coher-
ence. A contrast with the beginning of Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology
is warranted. That series of Husserl’s lectures, given in Göttingen in 1907, pur-
ported to explain the source of the “perplexity” and “discomfort” that obtained
in the field of epistemology:
Natural thinking in science and everyday life is untroubled by the difficulties con-
cerning the possibility of cognition. Philosophical thinking is circumscribed by one’s
position toward the problems concerning the possibility of cognition. The perplexities
[Verlegenheiten] in which reflection about the possibility of a cognition that “gets at”
the things themselves becomes entangled: How can we be sure that cognition accords
with things as they exist in themselves, that it “gets at them”? . . . Absurdity: to begin
with [zunächst], when we think naturally about cognition and fit it and its achievements
into the natural ways of thinking which pertains to the sciences we arrive at theories
that are appealing at first. But they end in contradiction or absurdity – Inclination to
open skepticism (Husserl 1999, 1).51
This is from “The Train of Thought in the Lectures,” published with the lectures themselves. The
51
German text is as follows:

“Natürliches, um die Schwierigkeiten der Erkenntnismöglichkeit unbekümmertes Denken
in Leben und Wissenschaft – philosophisches Denken, bestimmt durch die Stellung zu den
Problemen der Erkenntnismöglichkeit.”
“Die Verlegenheiten, in die sich die Reflecxion über die Möglichkeit einer die Sachen selbst
treffenden Erkenntnis verwickelt; wie kann Erkenntnis ihrer Übereinstimmung mit den an
sich seienden Sachen Gewiss warden, sie ‘treffen’? Was kümmern sich die Sachen an sich um
In Husserl’s account, the currently felt “perplexity” needs to be overcome

or removed by returning or reviving a clarity and unconfusion that is pres-
ent either (a) in life or (b) according to nature or the natural horizon. For
Heidegger, by contrast, perplexity remains our only clue, the golden thread
that leads from our present miasma of confused, embarrassed, dulled, numb
pretensions back to the primordial, genuine Being of things, which is itself
disturbing, anxiety-inducing, and troubling. If Jacques Taminiaux is correct
that for Husserl, “phenomenology has its origin in a perplexity regarding the
very possibility of cognition, and that phenomenology was designed by Husserl
as a method for overcoming once and for all the discomfort and perplexity
that were prevailing at the time in the field of knowledge,”52 then Heidegger
may fruitfully be seen as attempting to undertake an investigation where the
initial experience of our poverty and destitution, our “perplexity,” is retained
throughout as the only perilous link we have with the profoundest currents
of Being. The principle at work is that expressed in the famous hermeneutic
circle, where one must already have an apprehension of what is being sought
in order to sense when or if one has found it: perplexity, the ghastly sense of
the inadequacy of our pretensions to knowledge, even the most basic sense of
the meaning of the most ubiquitous and apparently important matter, namely,
Being, is the only thin purchase we have on the question of Being and must
therefore be tended most carefully.53
unsere Denkbewegungen und um die sie regelnden logischen Gesetze? Sie sind Gesetze unseres
Denkens, psychologische Gesetz. –Biologismus, psychologishe Gesetze als Anpassungsgesetze.”
“Widersinn: man gerät zunächst, natürlich über die Erkenntnis relecktierend und sie mit
ihrer Leistung in das natürliche Denksystem der Wissenschaften einordenend, in ansprechenede
Theorien, die aber jederzeit in Widerspruch oder Widersinn enden. –Neigung zucm offenen
Skeptizismus” (Husserl GS 2, 1 ll. 1–17).
52
Taminiaux 1991, 2.
53
I thus take a broader view of the importance of perplexity to the investigation than de Beistegui.
De Beistegui comments on perplexity in Being and Time, which he notes “is left unanalyzed,”
that it contributes to Being and Time remaining “sheltered from the questions that begin to be
articulated in the lecture course from 1929–30 and from the unresolved tension which charac-
terizes it” (de Beistegui 2003, 69).
5
Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism
In Being and Time, Heidegger writes from and for a moment in which every-
thing has been oriented and reoriented according to the prominence we give to
beings – handling them, understanding this handling in the clarity available to
theoretical reflection, and sharing these reflections as a basis for the ordering
of communal life – and according to the comfort, even solace, that comes from
this orientation. And yet this “everything” inadequately soothes or quells our
disquieted perplexity about what it all means. We have arrived at this point,
Heidegger suggests, because human Dasein initially and usually prefers to be
oriented by “constancy” and regularity. This attitude toward our finite tempo-
rality conceives of time as “the moving image of eternity,” as first expressed
in Plato’s Timaeus (37d), or with different emphasis, conceives of time as an
eternity of yesterdays (SZ 371).1 In the case of our involvement with the prag-
mata amid which we are “always already” involved, this attitude toward time
privileges their visible aspect as a token of their character. In the case of our
shared existence with other beings like us – other people, other Dasein – this
attitude toward time results in a self-deceiving submission to a broadly shared
articulation and understanding of the world that again takes a false constancy
as guide, but which is more tangibly expressed in various forms of mastery
and domination, sometimes, but not necessarily, subtle. The constant search
for constancy leaves us numb to our disquiet and confusion, but not for that
reason less disquieted or confused.
Being and Time announces this disquiet and raises the prospect of its appro-
priation as the clue to our existence. Our awareness of this condition is com-
municated to us through perplexity, the distressed, aporetic sense of confusion
and dissatisfaction with the prevailing and available accounts of the most
1
George Grant frequently compared the notion of time as the moving image of eternity to
the notion of “time as history,” which he argued reached its fullest expression in Heidegger
(Grant 1995).
119
fundamental matter, the meaning of Being, not least our own Being, our exis-
tence as ourselves. Heidegger refers variously to the historical moment in which
this perplexed awareness may be granted as the time of nihilism, the hegemony
of technology, the “forgetfulness of Being,” the abandonment of beings by
Being, the death of God, the “world-midnight.”2 Again, these refer to that time
in which the prevailing, theoretically inflected, “metaphysical,” understandings
of the very meaning of To Be are apprehended to be exhausted: the time of des-
titution, when what stood now falls.
Given, then, that our age is littered with the conceptual detritus and civiliza-
tional wreckage of the epoch of “metaphysics,” that is, the tradition in the West
that privileged theoretical rationality as “our only star and compass,” to quote
one important formulation of the principle, how are we to understand our
possibilities both for ourselves and with respect to the political community?3
What, then, are the possibilities for human life and, in particular, the political
community now that we have been shown to be so alienated from Being?
Heidegger’s new philosophical proposition in Being and Time is that our
possibilities for community are fundamentally determined by our way of Being,
that way being uniquely distinct from that of all the other beings. We are the
only ones that are concerned about Being, that are at all open to the question of
Being. This openness, this questioning, is the primary means by which Dasein –
as the locus of Being among the beings of the world, the “there” (da) of Being
(viz. Da-Sein) – discloses Being. In our time, when every available doctrine of
Being from the history of thought has been shown to be destitute, Dasein does
this most fundamentally by raising the question of Being. That is, Being comes
to us not in the fullness of an overflowing endowment, a Plotinean emanation,
or the fulfilled speech of Hegel, but reveals itself in our perplexed distress as
the impoverishment of a question, even a forgotten question. The impoverished
2
Michael Ehrmantraut notes the relationship between the moment of perplexity and the charac-
terization of the inquiry into Being as historical: “In Being and Time, Heidegger had treated the
crisis of science as a re-emergence of perplexities which concern the character and accessibility of
the basic objects of science, objects designated by ‘fundamental concepts’ like ‘nature’ and ‘life’
(SZ 9–10). Heidegger moves beyond this narrower determination of the crisis as a perplexity
about conceptual foundations when he now treats the crisis of science as one that concerns the
‘position [of science] in the whole of historical actuality’ (GA 27, 40) and presents this compre-
hensive crisis as determinative of the historical situation of the question of Being. Here one can
say that the treatment in Einleitung stands within a movement of thinking from Being and Time
to the works of the late 1930s (the Nietzsche lectures in particular) in which the implications of
the thesis (of Being and Time) that the questioning of Being is essentially historical are gradually
and ever more comprehensively unfolded. According to this thesis, the very possibility, necessity,
and direction of philosophic questioning (i.e., its passage through fundamental ontology) essen-
tially belongs to a distinctive moment in the ‘History of Being.’ In the course of this unfolding,
the contemporary crisis of science appears as merely one aspect of a deeper and more pervasive
‘crisis,’ an even variously described in more comprehensive terms: the ‘death of God’ or the
‘darkening of the world’ ” (Ehrmantraut 2010, 45).
3
Locke, First Treatise I58.
Disclosive Occlusion and the Promise of Nihilism 121
disclosiveness fundamentally constitutive of our Being must be retained in any

conception of our political possibilities. Incidentally, our destitution comprises
the fuller meaning of our “finitude.”
Inasmuch as Being comes to us as a confused, perhaps barely recalled ques-
tion, the key to understanding Being – and any communal possibilities that
might follow from such understanding – is to understand Nothing. In a quali-
fied way, that is, with respect to the beings, (somethings), Being is the “same”
as Nothing. For Dasein to think Being as Nothing – that is, to think Being not
only as the Being of the beings but Being as such, free from comparing it to or
somehow “as” a being – is both a liberation from the millennia-long sojourn-
ing of human existence in its alienation from Being and a true homecoming.
The character of communal existence complicates Dasein’s liberating
thought of Being as Nothing. Our disclosedness consists not merely in “under-
standing,” but also in “articulating” or speaking this understanding. Heidegger
argues that whereas our understanding of Being expresses an openness to the
finitude of Being in its grasp of the Nothing, articulation or our discursiveness
(Rede in the terminology of Being and Time) is always oriented by beings, by
“somethings.” Any articulated account of Being as such recurs to referencing
beings and occludes, therefore, the openness in question. The necessary pro-
paedeutic of grasping the sameness of Nothing and Being is constrained by our
Being. Such constraint attains communal, political resonance because those
capacities of our Being that permit our existing in communities – Mitsein – are
rooted in our powers of communication (Mitteilung) or speech. Existing with
others involves necessarily relating ourselves to these other beings: it requires
the “articulation” of somethings rather than nothings. And the articulation of
“somethings” carries with it the relapse into the orientation by the presence of
beings that characterized the epoch of metaphysics.
The fraught tension of our disclosive possibilities is particularly resonant
in a time such as ours, a time of destitution. The promise of nihilism, then,
is as follows: given the unique purchase on the distinction between Being
and beings afforded by the acquaintance with the experience of the Nothing,
our time, the time of nihilism, offers a genuinely unique opportunity to con-
front the question of Being and, as such, to orient our existence by Being as
such. The peculiar, topsy-turvy promise of our time, where the forgetfulness
and abandonment of Being leaves us open finally to grasping our impover-
ished finitude, and therein the truth of our relation to Being, is always being
obscured from us by our persistent, occluding involvement with beings, with
somethings, not least the “somethings” that are other people! This occlusion,
therefore, is especially troublesome for communal or political life, which by its
nature involves relating, at a minimum, one Dasein to another. Our communal
existence in a time of nihilism promises nothing, but perhaps that is too much.
Characterizing such human possibilities with regard to Being without
relapsing into the categories and language of the theoretical, metaphysical
tradition poses exceptional challenges for Heidegger. He deliberately strikes
a different tone than Nietzsche, for example, in his evocation of what may be
expected: he stresses the poverty, the weakness, and the incapacity of philos-
ophy. Philosophers are not commanders and legislators: they are woodsmen
or farmers; they do not master, they submit.4 In “The Word of Nietzsche, God
is Dead,” Heidegger evocatively compares the task of philosophy to that of a
farmer or gardener, who does not even plant a seed, but who tills the soil with
no confidence that he will live to see the fruit of his labor. Being might, in time,
reveal a new dispensation; in the meantime, we till. This should not be taken as
altogether gentle or pastoral, however. In an earlier lecture course (referred to
in Chapter 3), he remarks:
Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend]
and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunder-
standing if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of
philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so
bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and
so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy.
We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes
manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the
philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack –
driven out of everydayness and driven back to the ground of things. Yet the attacker is
not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in
philosophizing the Dasein in man launches the attack upon man (GA 29/30 31; FCM
21; emphasis in the original text).
Philosophy submits to terror in a time bereft of order, weathers the attack;

indeed, philosophy itself, in this presentation, is the attack on man for the sake
of releasing the essence of man.5 Heideggerian philosophy is not “optimistic,”
as in Nietzsche’s accusation against Socrates, but still, in a time of destitution,
of the abscondence by Being where we are left perplexed and distressed in the
midst of beings, in the acknowledgment of such loss we find ourselves released
into a moment of unsurpassed hopefulness, because for the first time since the
dawn of the West, it is possible to confront our genuine place with respect
to Being.
Neither Ancient nor Modern

In stressing the submission of Dasein to the beings in order to grasp Being,
Heidegger may appear to recapitulate something of the classical or ancient
4
Without giving a full account of Heidegger’s great Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, it may
nonetheless be said that he emphasizes the will in his account of Nietzsche, possibly with the
result that he downplays the “Dionysian” dimension and the notion of play in Nietzsche’s
thought. This is argued in Eugene Fink 2003. See also Gillespie 1984; Lampert 1986, 149–50;
Newell 1990. For a discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche that sets it in the context of
Heidegger’s Nazism, see Bambach 2003.
5
On Heidegger and “terror,” see Mitchell 2005.
approach to philosophizing as opposed to the emphasis on, for instance,

torturing Nature in order that she “give up her secrets,” that more generally
characterizes the moderns. The difference between Heidegger and the ancients,
therefore, ought to be stressed.
Our everyday orientation to temporality inclines us to see ourselves as look-
ers upon beings that are out there, the beings that initially we had been involved
in using and manipulating. Everydayness inclines us to relate to the world in the
media of theory and practice as though these are a well-coordinated whole, or
as though they could, with only a little fine-tuning, be such a well-coordinated
and -constituted whole. As this plays out in the history of Being, what begins as
the restful, theoretical gaze upon the order of the beings becomes a preliminary
step to the “mastery and possession” of these beings. That is, seeing the beings
as objects separate from ourselves is the necessary first step to seeing them as
objects to be controlled.
From Heidegger’s point of view, the two primary modes of coordinating
the theoretical and practical within the history of thought – for simplicity’s
sake, the ancient and modern – both fail to get at the root of the problem. The
ancient mode privileges a restful, tranquil submission to the beings in their
given order: theory goes together (initially) with idleness and leisure. It submits
to the beings in their given order as “Nature.” Practice, which preceded the
emergence of theory in Heidegger’s account, may be reformed to accord with
the insights discovered by theory or not, if it is deemed incapable of reform –
but the principle at work in either case is the same: theory submits to the order
of Nature; it is subordinate to it.
The modern mode rejects this principle of submission to Nature in favor
of a new principle of the control of Nature, reconstruing theory and practice
in light of this new principle. The modern mode does not submit to the given
order of beings, but interferes with this order and improves it – as “masters
and possessors,” in Descartes’ phrase – for the purpose of securing perilous
human existence in the face of a hostile nature: to establish the equal dignity
and freedom of humanity; to ennoble the human situation. The principle of
submitting Nature to our control is inseparable from the new or revived appre-
ciation of human freedom and the possibility of human will. Practice – the free
use and manipulation of the beings upon the beings for the sake of purposes
and wherefores of our own devising – is, in a sense, liberated from the submis-
sive constraints and rules initially discovered by the ancient version of theory.
Indeed, it appropriates and uses a transformed, “repurposed” theory for its
own ends. These ends, however, are themselves derived from that which is no
longer submitted to – the order of the beings, or Nature – and in short order
evaporate as a governing principle of practice. What remains, as Heidegger
argues, is the purified will to master, freed from any constraints, which itself
submits human beings to its imperatives. The result is a regime of the ascen-
dency of technology, wherein instrumental rationality governs the institutions
and practices of everyday human life.
The submission Heidegger has in mind takes from the moderns a refusal of
the given order of nature as the key to Being and from the ancients the princi-
ple of submitting to the beings, but is therefore to be distinguished from both. In
Being and Time. he combines, in a fashion, the “realism” of the ancients with an
“idealism” that gives purposes to the beings among the moderns. In the former
case, Dasein apprehends Being by submitting to the beings; in the latter, Dasein
gives Being to the beings. The key to understanding how he does this, I argue, is
his emphasis on the sameness of Nothing and Being.
Consciousness and Understanding

Heidegger locates our possibility for existing in the world both among the beings,
“ontically,” and as the being that is open to Being, “ontologically,” in “conscious-
ness,” or more precisely, in understanding. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2,
his contemporaries, in particular the Neo-Kantians, failed properly to identify
consciousness in their object-oriented, theoretical accounts of ethics and value
philosophy. Traditional analyses of the consciousness fail because they are insuf-
ficiently ontological; what is required is an ontology of the consciousness, not an
anthropology or psychology. The necessary task, then, is the “ontological analy-
sis of consciousness itself” (SZ 207), as called for in the “Comment on Jaspers”
and provided in the Daseinanalytik of Being and Time.6 A sufficiently ontological
account of consciousness leads to the understanding: “Only because Being is ‘in
the consciousness’ – that is to say, only because it is understandable in Dasein – . . .
are ‘independent’ beings, as encountered within-the-world, accessible to circum-
spection” (SZ 207–8, emphasis added).7
Heidegger situates his own brief ontology of the consciousness in Being and
Time within a debate between realist and idealist forms of philosophy.8 His
6
See Heidegger’s critical remarks on Kant regarding the subjectivity of the subject (SZ 24).
7
Heidegger remarks judiciously: “If what the term ‘idealism’ says, amounts to the understanding
that Being can never be explained by beings but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every
entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so,
Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. But if ‘idealism’ signifies tracing back every being to
a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its
Being and is best characterized negatively as ‘un-Thing-like’, then this idealism is no less naïve in
its method than the most grossly militant realism” (SZ 208). Also: “Being ‘is’ only in the under-
standing of beings. . . . Beings are to be understood” (SZ 183).
8
Peter Gordon argues that throughout Heidegger’s early period (leading up to the Davos debates
with Cassirer in 1929), he repeatedly came close to an idealist, subjectivist position because he
could not reconcile his existential ontology with the “serious challenge” of the objective claims to
“real” and objective knowledge on the part of the natural sciences (Gordon 2010, 226–9, 232).
Gordon overstates Heidegger’s perception of the challenge he saw in modern natural science
(227). Since his earliest days studying with Husserl, he was well acquainted with the fallacies of
biologism, naturalism, psychologism, and so forth. Gordon also misses the connection between
the “transcendental” arguments Heidegger presents in Being and Time and their connection to,
not abandonment in favor of, the Seinsgeschichte (233). The “ground” of the transcendence or
“surpassing,” as Heidegger explains in “On the Essence of Ground,” is in surpassing the beings
presentation has elicited some confusion as to whether and how Heidegger

might be understood either as a realist or as an idealist. The question, as
framed, turns on whether the beings have their Being independently of Dasein
(realism) or whether Dasein gives Being to the beings (idealism). This discus-
sion has political implications because, on the one hand, the realist interpreta-
tion would greatly favor communal forms that defer or submit to the order
of the beings, that is, a form of “conservative” politics, at least inasmuch as
this is concerned with our inherent potentialities. An idealist interpretation,
on the other hand, would give more emphasis to a constructivist, despotic,
or mastering dimension to communal life, where the Being and therefore the
fuller meaning and purpose of the beings are understood not to inhere in “the
things themselves,” but to derive from the freely chosen ends or purposes
determined by Dasein.
Heidegger’s presentation of the matter in Being and Time presents interpret-
ers with difficulties because it has elements of both the standard realist and
idealist positions. One passage captures this ambiguity nicely:
Beings are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the
acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is
ascertained. But Being “is” only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being
something like an understanding of Being belongs. Hence Being can be something
unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood (SZ 183; emphasis in
the original text).9
Beings are independently of their manifestation to us, but Being “is” only in
our understanding, that is, only in its manifestation to us. In other parts of
the work, Heidegger states a realist position. He claims, “the world is dis-
closed essentially along with the Being of Dasein” (SZ 203; emphasis in the
original text) and so he shares with the realists the conclusion that “beings
within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed” (SZ 207). That is,
the impression we have of things or the beings is not fashioned by us; we are
not the producers or makers of the world and the things in it.
This realist point needs to be acknowledged, Heidegger suggests, without
making the traditional error of realism. This error is simply taking the beings
as our “hermeneutical foothold” for understanding Being. This is precisely
the error that in Heidegger’s view characterizes the entire history of Western
metaphysics is what he would later term “ontotheology,” that is, the mis-
take of thinking of Being principally and ultimately only with respect to the
into the nothing. Heidegger can make claims that surpass the beings and therefore science by
transcending them in the confrontation with nothing, and is uniquely able to do this, as he devel-
ops the point further in the Nietzsche volumes, in the historical epoch of nihilism.
9
Taylor Carman uses a reading of this passage to support his “ontic realist” interpretation of
Heidegger against the temporal idealism of Blattner. See Carman 2003, 157; on Blattner 1999,
168–75.
beings – that is, as the Being of beings – and consequently thinking of Being
as a being.10 If we let our narrow involvement with the beings determine our
understanding of Being, as we are drawn to do given the tendencies of every-
dayness, we erringly treat pragmata as things (res in the Cartesian sense) and
then think of Being (Sein) as a being.
In the attempt to avoid this error, then, Heidegger’s complete position
is more idealist than realist. He agrees with the idealist, “in principle,” that
“Being cannot be explained through beings,” but resides somehow “in the con-
sciousness” (SZ 203). In retaining the “primordial phenomenon” of Being-in-
the-world (SZ 206), Heidegger examines Dasein not just as an isolated subject
among objects present-at-hand, but as the being whose existence among the
other beings is the source of their Being. Without being understood by Dasein,
the beings would not have any Being.11 But while Being is communicated to the
beings through Being-in-the-world, Dasein is not for that reason anything like
the “master and possessor” of the beings.
The nuances of Heidegger’s position come out in a comment on Being and
Time that Heidegger provides in the “Letter on Humanism.” In an attempt
to respond to the existentialist reading of his work, he points to a passage
in Being and Time where he writes that only insofar as “Dasein is (that is,
only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) ‘is there’ Being
[‘es gibt’ Sein]” (SZ 212; emphasis in the original text).12 That is, Being only
“is given” if Dasein, Being-There, “is,” that is, is understanding Being. In the
“Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger contrasts his formulation with the antique
statement of Parmenides: esti gar einai, “for there is Being.” Heidegger remarks
on Parmendies’ statement that the “primal mystery for all thinking is concealed
in this phrase” (BW 238; emphasis in the original text). In claiming that “Being
is,” Parmenides obscures the difference between Being and beings. Heidegger,
in his formulation of the understanding of Being, stresses the donative charac-
ter of Being – the essence of Being is the “gives,” the “self-giving into the open,
along with the open region itself, is Being itself” (BW 238) – in order to avoid
the error of thinking Being in terms of the things of the world. Heidegger’s
“idealism” is contained in his emphasis on the sense of giving Dasein’s relation
to the beings or Dasein’s position between Being and the beings. The key here
is to grasp how Heidegger sees the idealist position, which he condenses as
“the understanding that Being can never be explained by beings but is already
that which is ‘transcendental’ for every being,” and yet insists on submitting to
rather than in imposing something on the beings.
10
There is some anticipation in Being and Time, as when Heidegger identifies the following as an
error: “Even where the issue is not only one of ontical experience but also one of ontological
understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the
Being of beings within the world” (SZ 201).
11
See Carman 2003, 16, and the disagreement he indicates with Okrent 1991, 225; Blattner
2005, 5–6.
12
In Being and Time, Heidegger’s marginal notation here is “Ontological Difference.”
Understanding: Thrown Projection and Clearing

Heidegger’s discussion of understanding as it functions in our existence as
Being-in-the-world is helpful for grasping the submitting character of under-
standing as well as the interplay of nothingness – which is how he characteriz-
ing our thrownness – and projection.13
Understanding gives purposes (for-the-sakes-of-which) to the beings of the
world as pragmata. Heidegger’s first discussion of understanding in Being and
Time is in the context of his consideration of the genesis of, on the one hand, the
distinction between theory and practice and, on the other hand, the distinction
between the subject and the object. The latter emerges in the technico-practical,
ready-to-hand world of the workshop. It is not that the circumspective aims
and purposes of the craft activities undertaken by Dasein are “understood.”14
Rather, the circumspective knowledge of pragmata – proto-practical handy
implements in the world – occurs within whole context, which is already
grasped or understood. Understanding grasps the whole context and situation
beforehand, in advance, meaning, for example, the workshop in which one
works, the network of clients for whom one works, and the suppliers who pro-
vide material for one to work upon. Understanding receives the articulated net-
work of possible connections, uses, and purposes of the useful things, namely,
equipment. The reference point for all of this is Dasein, which remains at the
center.
This contextual understanding does not exhaust the role of understanding
in Heidegger’s thought, to be sure, but it should be illustrative. In order to
use a tool, we must already be possessed of an understanding of how and
for what possible purposes, and on what possible materials, it might usefully
be employed. We submit to these possibilities by choosing one of them or a
purposively connected series of them. For example, we understand in a given
situation that a hammer is useful on nails – metal nails, not plastic nails or
ceramic nails that might shatter – which might be driven into wood – hard or
soft wood, but not rotten, punky wood – and not into clay (SZ 86–7). This is
obviously not, at least not initially in its root sense, “theoretical” knowledge.
In its wider sense, understanding understands not just the particular situ-
ation or complex of purposes and assignments, but understands purpose and
assignment as such. Indeed, it is because understanding grasps worldliness as
such that it is able to “make sense of” any particular set of references. In under-
standing worldliness, what is understood is the “structure of the world,” what
is called “significance” (Bedeuten, SZ 87; emphasis in the original text). What
is grasped is the occasionality of how the
13
“If Being-in-the-world is a kind of Being which is essentially befitting to Dasein, then to under-
stand Being-in-the-world belongs to the essential content of its understanding of Being” (SZ 86).
14
Though, as we shall see, Heidegger establishes that circumspection [Umsicht] is derived from
understanding (Verstehen – SZ 146–7).
“for-the-sake-of-which” signifies an “in-order-to”; this in turn, a “towards-this”; the lat-

ter, an “in-which” of letting something be involved; and that in turn, the “with-which”
of an involvement (SZ 87).
Heidegger’s distinctive, countertraditional terminology for the complex of ref-

erences and assignments, the for-the-sakes-of-which and so forth, means the
“relational totality of . . . signifying” (SZ 87). In non-Heideggerian language, this
refers to the possible uses, purposes, materials, and aims of technical-practical
undertakings. But this must not be conflated with the circumspective, ready-to-
hand grasp of these possibilities: the circumspective grasp of possibilities is, in
a sense, interior to the possibilities and does not see them as possibilities but
as ends, whereas understanding holds the possibilities forth “as possibilities.”
Understanding is not simply “know-how,” or technical competence. It would
thus appear to grasp these networks in their multiplicity, variability, and occa-
sionality, whereas circumspection has a more interior, singular grasp of any
particular possibility.15
Heidegger is at pains to present this pre-given, articulated world as neither
altogether determined in a rational, causally dictated, necessary way, nor as
being completely undetermined as though an open field for the willful, creative
exertions or assertions of Dasein. The former points toward a natural, ratio-
nal teleology, and the latter toward the ontical world as merely disguising a
void of formless flux, awaiting the masterful imposition of free human agents.
Heidegger’s distinctive response to this quandary is communicated in his
emphasis on understanding as always a thrown understanding, primordially
bound together with a disposition, and further, that the possibilities with which
understanding deals are given determinately by the fact of Dasein’s thrown
existence. They are finite possibilities. As such, the context in which Dasein is
situated is constituted in part by the residue of its earlier existence, by what is
disclosed in moods as “having been”: “In the act of understanding [Verstehen] . . .
the relations indicated above must have been previously disclosed; the act of
understanding holds them in this disclosedness” (SZ 87; emphasis in the orig-
inal text). And again, these possibilities “must have been disclosed beforehand
with a certain understandability” (SZ 86). In a sense, Dasein accepts and par-
ticipates in its own thrownness when it assigns to itself “the kind of Being that
belongs to involvements. . . . And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns
itself is what makes up the worldliness of the world” (SZ 86; emphasis in the
original text). This acceptance has the character not of Dasein electing to fulfill
natural teloi, eternally established, but of Dasein freely choosing for itself one
possible, temporary, or passing Um-zu that in turn supplies the purpose of the
15
See Kisiel 2005, 197: “In a summary of the prepositional nexus of Being and Time, Heidegger
had already emphasized that the relations of the in-order-to can be understood only ‘if the
Dasein understands something of the nature of the for-the-sake-of-itself’ (295). An in-order-to
(present) can be revealed only insofar as the for-the-sake-of- (future) that belongs to a
potentiality-for-being is understood.”
things in the world. Dasein accepts the occasionality of its possibilities not by
selecting the narrowest, most universalizable aspect of what has been, but by
throwing them again in projection.
Understanding Projected Possibilities:

Thrown Projection
The foregoing goes some way to explaining the apparent paradox in Dasein’s
understanding being at once neither receptive (realist) nor essentially donative
(idealist) in is character of granting Being to the beings. Understanding under-
stands possibilities, possibilities, that is, that extend beyond what is actual.
Dasein is what it can-Be, what it is possible that it be; it is most decisively in its
orientation to the future, toward what is beyond the presently actual, toward
possibility. Moreover, the Being of these possibilities is understanding. Here
some preliminary but important clarification is in order. First, Heidegger does
not mean by possible the “merely possible” but not actual.16 For “higher than
actuality stands possibility” (SZ 38; emphasis in the original text). Possibility
is, in this sense, not to be understood as a category of the present-at-hand, not
as “a free-floating potentiality for Being in the sense of the ‘liberty of indiffer-
ence’ (libertas indifferentiae)” (SZ 144). Second, that possibility stands higher
than actuality is not a generality; every possibility is particular. Every actual,
particular situation of Dasein is such that possibilities extend beyond it. This
means, third, that in terms of temporality, what can-Be is not exhausted by
what actually is. Every actual present is superceded by its particular possible
futures. The present as it actually exists does not exhaust the past that led to
it. The future stands ahead of and above both; every past contains as yet unex-
pressed resources of possibility that may be summoned up for the sake of the
future. The standard of this is not the present-at-hand, but rather future possi-
bilities pointing forward into non-Being, quite literally, transcending what is in
the direction of Nothing.
Possibilities are thrown possibilities (geworfen Möglichkeit). They belong to
a particular, existing Dasein, in a particular time, place, environment, and ontic
world. Correspondingly, possibility is never infinite, but always limited, and
defined relative to this particular, existing Dasein. Possibilities are as particular
as each Dasein, each of which is, in a sense, its possibilities: “Dasein is the pos-
sibility of Being-free for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 144).17 Dasein
16
“The Being-possible which Dasein is existentially in every case, is to be sharply distinguished
both from empty logical possibility and from the contingency of something present-at-hand, so
far as with the present-at-hand this or that can ‘come to pass.’ As a modal category of presence
at hand, possibility signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary. It char-
acterizes the merely possible” (SZ 143; emphasis in the original text).
17
“Understanding is the Being of such potentiality-for-Being, which is never something still
outstanding as not yet present-at-hand, but which, as something which is essentially never
present-at-hand, ‘is’ with the Being of Dasein, in the sense of existence” (SZ 144).
itself is always, implicitly or otherwise, understood along with its possibilities,

because the possibilities would not really be possibilities without being related
somehow to the Dasein in question. Thus, Dasein’s understanding is these pos-
sibilities, in particular, that possibility that is its own potentiality-for-Being.
It “knows” this not cognitively and not through self-examination, but from
the very Being of the “there,” the essence of which is understanding (SZ 144).
Whereas Dasein is its disclosedness, and the There of Dasein is disclosed in dis-
position, understanding, and articulation, the Being of the There “is essentially
understanding” (SZ 144). Understanding, more than the other components of
the there, is the there; or otherwise put, the there “is essentially understanding,”
because understanding is possibilities that stretch determinedly into the future.
The Being-There of Dasein is made up, therefore, of what Dasein can-Be: what
it can do, what it can see, what is exposed to Dasein as possibilities for Being
itself and for Being in relation to other beings in this particular clearing. This
particular openness is the Being of each Dasein.
Dasein actively stretches toward the future in projecting its understanding
upon possibilities. Heidegger calls the “existential structure” of understand-
ing “projection.” The German, Entwurf, has a perfectly explicit repetition of
the “thrownness,” Geworfenheit (from throw, Wurf). Dasein is thrown into
“the kind of Being which we call ‘projecting’ ” (SZ 145); it is thrown-into
throwing-forward. Heidegger stresses that this should not be thought of as
bringing a plan, cognitively conceived, which will then be acted upon. Projection
does not grasp that upon which it projects “thematically,” that is, theoreti-
cally. Such an approach would reduce the upon which to what was “in mind”
already, as though it were material upon which to plan. Instead, understanding
as projection, “in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility,
and lets it be as such.” Indeed, in this way, understanding is its possibilities as
possibilities (SZ 145). This may helpfully be thought of in connection with his
earlier discussion of understanding – with reference to the Umwelt – in which
Heidegger said of understanding that “the act of understanding holds them in
disclosedness” (SZ 87). The understanding is given with possibilities, thrown
into a sort of Being that consists in, in turn, throwing itself into the possibilities
with which it is confronted; the understanding thus does not, on its own “open
up” possibilities – Dasein is not such a master of the world as to do this –
but Dasein may elect to, in a sense, repeat its own thrownness (a) by holding
open and continuing to hold open the possibility that it remain itself, as it is,
a thrown being moving forward into open possibilities, and (b) by projecting
that opportunities that are open be held open.
Projection is a projection into the future. It is “basically futural” (SZ 336).
In being its projections, Dasein is thus constantly more than it “factually,”
currently is; this is signified both by it being constituted by what it “factically
is,” referring to the horizon of the past, and by Dasein’s existentiality, that is,
it “is existentially that which, in its potentiality for Being, it is not yet” (SZ
145; emphasis in the original text). Understanding “means to be projecting
towards a potentiality for Being for-the-sake-of-which any Dasein exists” (SZ

336; emphasis in the original text). Dasein understands, is understandingly,
what it is capable of, not by discovering a fact, but by “maintaining itself in
an existentiell possibility.” Underlying this understanding is the future, which
“does so as a coming-towards-oneself out of that current possibility as which
one’s Dasein exists” (SZ 336). That is, it is not The Future! that approaches,
but a particular future respective to the particular, “existentiell” possibility
in which Dasein maintains itself as Being itself. As such, “understanding is
grounded primarily in the future (whether in anticipation or in awaiting)” (SZ
350; cf. 408).
Understanding as LICHTUNG
As a projection that ventures from the past into the future, extending beyond
and thus around itself and the beings with which it is currently involved,
understanding forms a “clearing,” a temporal clearing, in its pressing forward
as projecting possibilities, and in holding them open as possibilities. Heidegger
characterizes the temporal clearing with the freighted term, “sight” (Sicht).
With this term, he reiterates its connection to the clearedness, the lighting
of the There, “With the disclosedness of the ‘there’, this sight is existentially
[seiende existenzial].” Dasein “is in such a way as to be its ‘there’. To say that it
is ‘illuminated’ [erleuchtet] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [geli-
chtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the
clearing. . . . Dasein is its disclosedness” (SZ 133; emphasis in the original text).
The clearing, which is made up of possibilities as possibilities, is a “nothing”
that surrounds the beings:
The being which bears the title “Being-there” is one that has been “cleared”. The light
which constitutes this clearedness [Gelichtetheit] of Dasein, is not something ontically
present-at-hand as a power or source for a radiant brightness occurring in the entity on
occasion. That by which this being is essentially cleared – in other words, that which
makes it both “open” for itself and “bright” for itself – is what we have defined as
“care”, in advance of any “temporal” Interpretation. In care is grounded the full dis-
closedness of the “there” (SZ 350; emphasis in the original text).
To say that the clearing is made up of possibilities is to say that the clear-
ing is temporal: “Because temporality is ecstatico-horizonally constitutive for
the clearedness of the ‘there’, temporality is always primordially interpret-
able in the ‘there’ and is accordingly familiar to us” (SZ 408; emphasis in the
original text).
In employing the language of sight, Heidegger deliberately invokes the tra-
ditional designation for the faculty that is granted access to Being. But once
again, the invocation is countertraditional, for Heidegger does not intend a
notion of the lumen naturale that illuminates with reference to eternity, but
rather a clearing that opens up temporally, through which passes the future,
having been, and present as moments of the ecstases of temporality.18 As with

his argument for understanding how the attitude of tarrying and awaiting
explained the genesis of theory from the busy undertakings of the Umwelt – as
we saw in Chapter 3 – here again Heidegger’s argument is juxtaposed against
the tradition as inaugurated by Aristotle and extending to Husserl:
By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in understanding (the circumspection of
concern is understanding as common sense) we have deprived pure intuition [Anschaue]
or its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand in
traditional ontology. “Intuition” and “thinking” are both derivatives of understanding,
and already rather remote ones (SZ 147; emphasis in the original text).
The temporal clearing of understanding is the foundation of such deriva-

tive modes of knowledge as noetic intuition, eidetic intellection of form, and
Wesenschau.19
Irruption
As Heidegger details it in a series of writings from shortly after he published
Being and Time, the understanding of Being has certain structural similarities
to the understanding of Being-in-the-world laid out in Being and Time. He
expresses the finite, nonmastering emergence of Being into the world through
the understanding as an “irruption,” an implicitly violent “break-in.” The irrup-
tion follows from the submission to the beings exhibited in the sciences and
surpasses them. In thus submitting to the beings, the understanding gives Being
to them, fulfilling Heidegger’s qualified idealist position in Being and Time that
the understanding is the source of the Being of the beings.
What is irruption?20 The word, Einbruch, means literally a break-in (less in
the sense of a cat burglar and more in the line of crashing through the door). It
also has the sense of a collapse or cave-in and, less frequently, the meaning of
18
See Theodore Kisiel: “This is the ultimate reorientation of possibility dictated by the extro-
vertive thrust of ex-sistence which turns human being ‘inside out,’ as it were: facultative pow-
ers, once possessed by the rational animal, become empowering contexts (later, the clearing of
Being itself) in which and by which the human being is ‘out for’ its being, in order to be” (Kisiel
1993, 441).
19
This is admittedly provisional on Heidegger’s part. In lieu of a full explanation early in Being
and Time, Heidegger remarks: “The existential meaning of this understanding of Being can-
not be satisfactorily clarified within the limits of this investigation except on the basis of the
Temporal Interpretation of Being” (SZ 147).
20
He employs the term twice in Being and Time (SZ 369, 432), though clearly he has not yet fixed
any particular terminological importance on it at that point. The usage at 369 is interesting,
though, in that it anticipates the meaning Heidegger later derives from the term: “Only on the
basis of its ecstatico-horizontal temporality is it possible for the irruption of Dasein into space
possible” (SZ 369). In his first lecture courses after returning to Freiburg University, he develops
this sense of the term in more detail, and connects it, in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
(GA 28/29), to the irrupting nihilation of the difference between Being and beings.
“slack,” as in sails that have loosened in a calm or an easing of the wind. Being
comes as Dasein in a billowing, falling gust that rolls through the beings.21 In
“What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger discusses the special status that science
(Wissenschaft) has for human existence (menschliche Existenz).22 The various
fields of science give the impression that science is too manifold to be unified,
and furthermore that any notion of the rootedness of the sciences in a uni-
fied ground has “atrophied.” But, in fact, the sciences in their variety share in
a “trinity” of “radical unity”: a relation to the world (Weltzug), a “stance of
human Existenz,” and an irruption. First, the relation to the world shared by
all the sciences “lets them seek beings themselves (die Seiende selbst) in order
to make them objects of investigation and to determine [Bestimmung] their
grounds – in each case according to their particular content and manner of
being [Seinsart]” (WM 83). The unity of the sciences comes from their relating
to the world by seeking the beings themselves.
Second, that there is a “relation to the world” (Weltzug) implies a preex-
isting stance, a position from which one relates. As Heidegger explains, the
relation to the world is “guided” by a “freely chosen stance of human exis-
tence [Existenz].” This stance is one of “submission to the beings themselves.”
Moreover, it is a “position of service” (Dienstellung – “official position”) that
“evolves in such as way as to become the ground of the possibility of a proper
though limited leadership [Führerschaft] in the whole human existence.” The
seeking of the beings themselves is guided by the initial submission to them –
as opposed, for instance, to any attempt to master or control them – which is
characterized as an office or duty, the assumption of which provides a certain
title to rule in human affairs. Science thus leads by submitting.
Third, these two elements that make science distinctive among the avail-
able determinations of Dasein – the unique attention to the beings themselves
and the stance of free submission to those beings – are “fully grasped only
when we see and comprehend what happens in the relation to the world thus
attained.” In the free submission of human existence to the beings themselves,
the relation between the world and the human being changes: Being, in the
Dasein of human existence, emerges for comprehension: “nothing less tran-
spires than the irruption [Einbruch] by one being called ‘the human being’ into
the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this collapse
[Einbruch] beings break open and show what they are and how they are. The
irruption that breaks open, in its way, helps beings to themselves (Seienden . . .
zu ihm selbst) for the first time” (WM 83). Heidegger describes the “radical
21
For a discussion of this and other key terms – Durchbruch, Bruch, Aufbruch, Ausbruch – see the
work of Frank Edler 1990, 1993. Edler situates Heidegger appropriation of these terms in the
context of their connection to the German Revolution in 1933. The discussion of Einbruch that
follows refers mainly to Heidegger’s published essays, but his courses from this period may also
be consulted: GA 27, 136–7, 393–8; GA 28/29.
22
“Our Dasein – in the community of researchers, teachers, and students – is determined
[bestimmt] by science [Wissenschaft]” (W 82).
unity” of irruptive submission to the beings as bringing a “luminous simplicity

and aptness of Dasein to scientific existence” (WM 83). The irruption brings
the beings into being themselves and humans into being themselves: humans
become Dasein with the beginning of scientific submission to the beings.
Heidegger takes Wissenschaft as his point of departure because it so
completely characterizes the Dasein of himself, his audience in this lecture,
and indeed our epoch. The undertaking of Wissenschaft, inasmuch as the
questioner takes “explicit possession of the Dasein illuminated in this way for
[itself]” and addresses himself to the nothing along with the beings satisfies
the requirements established by Heidegger of a metaphysical inquiry at the
beginning of this essay.23 A metaphysical question, according to Heidegger,
must “be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is also there
within the question, that is, is placed in question” (WM 82). According to this
definition, a metaphysical question is the same as what Heidegger had ear-
lier designated a “formal indication.” Metaphysical inquiry must call the very
Being – the Dasein – of the questioner into question. In clarifying the unified
root of the various sciences – the irruption of Dasein in a submission to the
beings – Heidegger has pressed the question of science to the point where it is
authentically a metaphysical question.
The essentials of this account of Dasein’s situation among the beings are con-
firmed in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Moreover, this book clearly
establishes that the irruption of Dasein takes place on the “original” ground
of the understanding (Verstehen) of Being. What Heidegger describes as a pre-
conceptual, undeveloped, universal, but therefore unquestioned understanding
of Being thoroughly saturates man’s existence [Existenz]. In his example, the
what-Being, that-Being, and true-Being of the exclamation, “Fire!” are so well
understood as to be unquestioned, to be beyond question (KPM 159). That
is, everyone knows what it means when someone shouts, “Fire!” Heidegger
insists that some understanding of Being must be at work in every situation in
order for man to be distinctively man. The root of this unquestioned, noncon-
ceptual understanding of Being is man’s very Existenz, which consists in the
awareness – easily befogged or obscured – that he as man is different from all
the other non-man beings: “man is a being in the midst of beings in such a way
that for man the being which he is himself and the being which he is not are
always already manifest” (KPM 159). Now we see the extent of the reversal
contemplated by Heidegger: Being may be understood as a crashing, collapsing
submission, not as an addition in fullness and power to the beings, but as their
sharing in their own demise.
Heidegger isolates the experience that brings man’s Existenz to clarity. It is
the twofold realization that (1) “he already finds the being (Seiende) as that
23
As Christopher Rickey points out, Heidegger’s use of the term “metaphysics” changes during his
career. In its usage here, Heidegger employs it in the manner with which he will later associate
the overcoming of metpahysics (Rickey 2001, 141).
from which he is supported, as that on which he has depended, as that over

which, for all his culture and technology, he can never become master” (KPM
159–60); and (2), that he therefore “is at the same time not master of the being
which he himself is” (KM 160). Heidegger identifies this realization with the
irruption of Being into the beings:
With the existence of human beings there occurs an irruption [Einbruch] into the total-
ity of beings, so that now the being [Seiende] in itself first becomes manifest, i.e., as
being [Seiende], in varying degrees, according to various levels of clarity, in various
degrees of certainty. This prerogative, however, of not just being among other beings
which are also at hand without these beings becoming manifest as such to themselves,
but rather [of being] in the midst of the beings, of being surrendered to it as such, and
itself to have been delivered up as a being – for this prerogative to exist harbors in itself
the need to require the understanding of Being (KPM 160; emphasis added).
As the beings “become manifest” to Dasein, Dasein becomes aware that it is not
by means of its own power that the beings – their characteristic what-Being,
we may infer, and their that-Being and true-Being – have been revealed to him.
Man did not make the beings, did not make himself, and did not cause them
to manifest themselves to him. The fact of their being manifest – in different
degrees of clarity, Heidegger specifies – communicates to Dasein that he is not
responsible for them. In not being responsible for them, not having caused
or created them, Dasein further apprehends his dependence on them. What is
more, in addition to being subservient to – that is, in addition to his nonmas-
tery of – the beings, Dasein is shown to be not even master of himself: Dasein is
thrown among the beings, as the being to whom the other beings are manifest
in their Being, as beings.
This is the paradox that Heidegger is trying to illuminate: Dasein gives Being
to the beings not by mastering them, but by understanding them. Yet if under-
standing is not simply endowing Being and therefore, implicitly, mastering and
controlling (idealism), it would seem that it should be submissive and receptive
(realism). In other words, the beings would inform Dasein of their Being; Being
would be communicated from the beings to Dasein. Yet Heidegger insists on
this point: understanding is not receptive but donative; Heidegger inverts these
formulations by holding that because Dasein submits to the beings out of its
finitude, and in this submission Being manifests itself, then the understanding
of Being – which is “the most finitude in what is finite” (KPM 160) – though it
is essentially powerless, can still be said to grant Being to the beings. For Being
is also finite, indeed, most finite: from this perspective, Being is the same as
nothing.24
For the beings to be disclosed to the understanding of Dasein – that is,
for Being to be – Dasein must choose to submit to the beings, must remain
dependent on them. Heidegger describes this as Dasein “repeating” its own
24
On Being as manifesting, see Richardson 2003, 43–4.
thrownness or participating in the throw. Having already been thrown into

Being and being among the beings, Dasein must now elect To Be a being among
the beings; having been drafted, it must now enlist: “In order to allow the being
[Seiende] to be what and as it is. . . the existing being [i.e., Dasein] must already
have projected that it is a being on the strength of what has been encountered”
(KPM 160). Here Dasein’s projection of understanding constitutes the repeti-
tion of it being a thrown, existing being among the beings.
As long as Dasein remains finite – and the most finite within Dasein is
understanding – Being will manifest: “There is and must be something like
Being where finitude has come to exist” (KPM 160). Why? Because finitude
implies the realization that one being is dependent on another. This realization
by the first being that it is dependent on the second implies that something
about the second has been discovered or revealed to the first. At a minimum,
this entails that it (the second one) is, and possibly also an intimation of what
it is (what-Being); and the awareness of the possibility of its true-Being, that
is, that it is something of such and such a kind or appearance. The minimal
discovery that another being is – that is, that this other being is not me and has
not been created by me as though by an omnipotent God – implies the anteced-
ing understanding of Being. This is so even if the understanding is only ever in
a condition of perplexity or ignorance, as in its ignorance of the sense of Being.
This foregoing understanding of Being thus underlies any encounter or dealing
with the beings that Dasein might have: “On the grounds of the understanding
of Being, man is the there [das Da], with the Being of which occurs the open-
ing irruption into the being so that it can show itself as such for a self. More
original than man is the finitude of the Dasein in him” (KPM 160; emphasis
in the original text). As the understanding of Being precedes, in a manner of
speaking, every interaction between Dasein and the beings, then understanding
is the ground of the There of Dasein.
Understanding Nothing
Our normal, everyday orientation is to think of the beings, to think with
respect to the beings, to be absorbed in the beings. Heidegger proposes that
if we submit to the beings, we will encounter our finitude, that is, we will be
drawn to or discover their limits, and that these limits are constituted by noth-
ingness. His insistent claim is that encountering and thinking this nothing is
the key to genuine freedom from our orientation by the beings, which enslaves
us, he says, to thinking of ourselves as being “like” the beings. The way to
really understand Being as distinct from the beings – what Heidegger refers
to as the “ontological difference” – is first to see, from the perspective of the
beings by which we are initially oriented, the “sameness,” then, of Being and
Nothing. Heidegger is perfectly direct and explicit about this in the famous
Davos disputation with Cassirer: “It is only possible for me to understand
Being if I understand the nothing or anxiety. Being is incomprehensible if the
nothing is incomprehensible” (KPM 199). In his Kant book, this formulation

is varied only slightly, to clarify that understanding the nothing is preliminary
to – but still necessary for – understanding Being: “The Being of the being,
however, is in general only understandable – and herein lies the profoundest
finitude of transcendence – if in the ground of its essence Dasein holds itself
into the nothing” (KPM 166–7).
Trying to think either Being or the nothing induces perplexity. In Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, he asks rhetorically, “Is Being then not something
like the nothing [das Nichts]? In fact, no less a person than Hegel said: ‘Pure
Being and pure nothing are thus the same’ ” (KPM 158–9). In the 1949 pref-
ace to his 1929 essay “The Essence of Ground,” Vom Wesen des Grundes,
Heidegger discusses the seeming identity of Being and nothing with more detail
and precision. Here he compares the discussion of the ontological difference
in “The Essence of Ground” with the discussion of the nothing in the lecture
“What Is Metaphysics?”, both of which were prepared at the same time. Each
piece, he says, treats a nihilative “not.” The nots “are indeed not identical, yet
they are the same in the sense of belonging together in the essential prevailing
of the Being of beings” (EG 97). He briefly characterizes each “nihilative ‘not’.”
In “What Is Metaphysics?” the nothing is how Being appears from the perspec-
tive of the beings: “The nothing is the ‘not’ of beings, and is thus Being, expe-
rienced from the perspective of beings.” The challenge laid out by Heidegger
in this preface is to think this “not” together with the “not” of “The Essence
of Ground,” the “not” of the ontological difference that occurs between Being
and beings.
To grasp the sameness of the nothing and Being, it is helpful to recall that
Sein, Being, is a verb. Thus, the be-ing of a thing – what brings it into being,
keeps it in being as what it is (true-Being), keeps it existing (i.e., that it is,
that-Being), supplies the ground of its character and attributes (what-Being) –
this is not itself a “thing” or a something. Not being a something: what else
can be said but that it is a nothing? Someone could object that it is not nothing
that keeps all these things together, but an array of somethings: the things that
cause it, its causes. That is, what if it were a something that held something in
Being? Heidegger’s point is that even if this were a “something,” and that some-
thing in turn were held in Being by something, and so on, this regression could
not be infinite, and we would eventually have to ask why these somethings are
held together by some-not-thing all the way down. Heidegger is not denying
the ontic role of causation among things. What he is denying is that causality
so conceived supplies a sufficient answer to the question of Being. Causality
fails adequately to approach nothingness. In this sense, the causes are beings,
somethings, which must themselves – lest it be turtles all the way down25 –
be accounted for in their Being. Heidegger’s typical formulation thus sees the
25
Michael Davis recounts Stephen Hawking’s version of this story in the first chapter of his
Autobiography of Philosophy (Davis 1999, 16).
nothing as what lies beyond the “totality of being” or all their ontic causes as
well. In Leo Strauss’s lucid illustration, he compares Heidegger question of
Being to seeking a noncausal account of causation: “I can begin to understand
it in the following manner: ‘Sein’ cannot be explained by ‘das Seiende,’ as cau-
sality cannot be explained causally.”26
In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger characterizes science (Wissenschaft)
as that human endeavor preeminently characterized by a submission to the
beings. Such submission prompts the irruption of Being among the beings. But
inasmuch as manifestation implies that in addition to something doing the
manifesting, there must also be something that is manifested to; thus it is apt
to characterize the submitting of Dasein to the beings as “causing” the irruption
of Being among the beings.27 Science is the mode of human existence that submits
to the whole of beings: “What should be examined are beings only, and besides
that – nothing; beings alone, and further – nothing; solely beings, and beyond
that – nothing” (WM 84). With regard to the totality of the beings to which sci-
ence submits, the nothing is what is left over when the sciences are done. That is,
it is not another something to be accounted for by the science of nothingology, but
rather the boundary or limit beyond which Dasein extends itself in meta-physics,
or transcendental philosophy, by surpassing.28
“What Is Metaphysics?” shows the nothing “from the perspective of
beings,” in which verstehen is limited to Verstand, the understanding.29 The
nothing assaults the limits of the understanding, as the nothing is both given
26
Leo Strauss 1989, 44. See Velkley 2007 253 n. 12.
27
Thus, even the notion that the emergence of Being in Dasein among the beings should be char-
acterized as an Einbruch, a cave-in or an irruption, anticipates the sameness of Being and noth-
ing. Cave-in signifies the collapse or emptying of something that was otherwise stable, much as
the notion of clearing signifies an open, i.e., nothing-filled, space. Einbruch signifies that crater
where there is not or is no longer something.
28
This reverses the traditional understanding of metaphysics in the tradition deriving from
Aristotle, where what surpasses is the most actual, the most real (as opposed to the nothing),
and where distinctions are made in light of eternity or actuality rather than possibility.
29
Heidegger’s term Verstehen needs to be understood as deliberately counterposed to the traditional
philosophic meaning of Verstand, to which it is terminologically related. The term Verstand was
introduced to the German philosophical vocabulary by Paracelcus, as a translation of the Latin
intellectus (corresponding to the Greek, nous); at the same time, Vernunft, reason, translated ratio
(corresponding to dianoia). Through the early Enlightenment, up to Wolff, Verstand was under-
stood to be “higher” than Vernunft; the former was characterized by clarity and mathematical
rigor, the latter associated with the conceptualization of sensory material (my discussion here
follows Inwood 1992, 243). Wolff led a reversal of the “ranking” of these faculties, in which
reversal he was followed by the luminaries of the German Idealist Enlightenment: Kant, Goethe,
Jacobi, Schiller, Schelling, and eventually Hegel. On this reversed understanding, Verstand was
taken to be the source of conceptual thinking and judgments, with the implication that it minis-
tered to the practical spirit. It was subordinate to, or subsumed within, Reason, Vernunft, which
reconciled the opposites as analyzed by the abstract understanding. In Schiller’s evocative formu-
lation: “Nature (sense) everywhere unites, the understanding separates everywhere, but reason
unites again” (Letters on the Aesthetic Education, XIX; quoted in Inwood 1992, 243). (See also
to the understanding and likewise confounds it. Inasmuch as the nothing is at

least given to the understanding as a question – Wie steht es um das Nichts?
(WM 84 – “How stands it with the nothing?”) – then the understanding is not
altogether without some apprehension of the nothing. But the nothing also
defies understanding. It is inadmissible to treat the nothing as a something,
as an object of inquiry in the normal sense, or as something to which such a
question might be put, since, as Heidegger observes, “the question deprives
itself of its own object” (WM 85). According to the normal canons of logic
and grammar – both operations of Verstand, “in the usual sense,” according
to Heidegger’s later marginal notation – the “nothing” is just a function of
logical and grammatical negation, the “not,” “a specific act of the understand-
ing (Verstand)” (WM 85). The confounding of the understanding by the noth-
ing as presented by Heidegger in this lecture seems to occur because here he
treats understanding (Verstehen) not with its fuller breadth as presented in
both Being and Time and in the contemporaneous essay “On the Essence of
Ground.” Rather, in this lecture he presents the understanding (Verstand) as
it has been traditionally conceived, in particular, as it has been conceived by
scientifically oriented philosophy from Kant to Husserl. In Heideggerian terms,
the understanding is presented as having been determined by the world.30 This
Frederick C. Beiser’s remark: “Schiller, unlike the romantics, never understood the imagination
to be an extra-rational power. Synthesis is ultimately the function of reason. If it is the task of
the understanding [Verstand] to divide what is given to sense, it is the task of reason to reunite
what the understanding has divided. Such is the unmistakable purport of his famous adage in the
Asthetik Briefe: ‘Nature [the senses] unites everywhere, the understanding separates everything,
but reason unites once again’ [NA XX, 368n.]” Beiser 2008, 266.) This reversal reached a cul-
mination in Hegel, where Verstand represents the analytical lucidity and fixity of Enlightenment
rationality. It is understood to provide clarity without depth and characterizes deductive reason-
ing, as well as performing the necessary abstraction required for the initial steps of thinking: “the
thought-determinations or concepts of the understanding make up the objectivity of the cogni-
tions of experience” (Hegel, Encyclopedia of Logic, § 40; Hegel 1991, 153). Nonetheless, this is
only the first moment of thought, which needs to be subsumed within the higher rationality of
Vernunft in order to be truly rational.
Heidegger jettisons Vernunft (he only mentions it in Being and Time when he is quoting or
talking about Kant or Hegel), its function being occupied, one could argue, by Rede. Verstand
remains the principle of abstract, deductive rationality, but is shown to be derivative from ver-
stehen: “understanding” rather than “the understanding,” supplies the ground of human rea-
soning. The “reconciliation” of analytical division and distinction is shown not to happen at a
“higher” level of Reason (Vernunft) or synthesis, but through a return to the primordial ground
that understanding (Verstehen) shares with the world and from which the hypostatizing, objec-
tive understanding (Verstand) emerged only as an occasion. Thus, encompassing both Verstand
and Vernunft is Verstehen.
30
Since the lecture was given to scientists, Heidegger uses a roughly traditionally “scientific”
understanding of Verstand. This emphasis in the lecture – which was in many cases the first
work of Heidegger’s to be translated into other languages – probably contributed to the
widespread understanding of Heidegger as being hostile to reason as such, particularly in the
English-speaking world. For an influential early artifact, see Ryle 1928.
worldly orientation is what Heidegger means in the 1949 Preface to “On the
Essence of Ground” by “from the perspective of beings” (EG 97).
As the understanding is depicted in “What Is Metaphysics?” the nothing
is not really apprehended directly by the understanding (Verstand) at all, but
through the disposition of a mood or attunement. However, what is at stake
is whether or not the nothing is merely a derivative of the grammatical-logical
not. Heidegger “assert[s]‌that the nothing is more originary than the not of
negation” (WM 86). His reasoning returns to the very availability of the noth-
ing as a question. However seemingly “illogical,” the issuance of the nothing
as a problem is evidence of its questionability independent of the formal
impossibility of such: “If the nothing itself is to be questioned as we have been
questioning it, then it must be given beforehand. We must be able to encounter
it” (WM 86). Yet its impenetrability to the understanding (Verstand) persists.
If “the nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings,” and our
understanding is sufficiently finite that the totality of beings in themselves are
inaccessible to our reasoning, then how can we think the nothing? “As surely
as we can never comprehend (Erfassen) absolutely the whole of beings (Ganze
des Seienden) in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the
midst of beings that are unveiled somehow as a whole. In the end an essen-
tial distinction prevails between comprehending (Erfassen) the whole of beings
in themselves and finding oneself (Sichbefinden) in the midst of beings as a
whole” (WM 87). The finite intellect (Verstand) cannot, as a preliminary to
thinking beyond the beings into the nothing, summon all the beings that there
ever were, are, or will be before itself to give them its reasons. A completed sci-
ence of the whole, all that ever was and will be, is not available. In Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger reiterated Kant’s point that to have
unlimited knowledge, infinite knowledge, would be to assume the status of cre-
ator of the beings (KPM 27). Nonetheless, certain moods disclose the sense of
the totality of beings as that among which Dasein finds itself as being thrown,
and so in this fashion Dasein might apprehend the totality of beings and thus
confront their surpassing opposite, the nothing.
Heidegger specifies three moods in which Dasein “finds itself” disposed, as it
were, among the totality of the beings: boredom, joyful love, and anxiety. Each
of these moods brings out Dasein’s disposedness among the beings in their
totality. The first is boredom. The “as a whole” of beings comes over Dasein in
everyday, “authentic boredom.” Authentic boredom “breaks out” (bricht auf)
not when one is bored with this undertaking or that project, or when one is
without occupation here or there. Authentic boredom “removes all things and
human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference.” It
drifts “here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog” (WM
87). In its overlap with everyday existence, boredom removes the difference
between Dasein and not-Dasein – “all things and human beings and oneself” –
in a dull homogeneity that is neither wonderous nor solicitous of our atten-
tion or attraction, but also not oppressive, monstrous, terrible, or perplexing.
Boredom is the mood of the end of scientific enlightenment, where the moti-
vation to investigate has given way to the presumption that what will be dis-
covered has already been anticipated or accounted for by gray concept-nets,
easily deployed and collected. Boredom accompanies or presents the totality of
beings in its dull confidence that there is no being – known or unknown – that
would disrupt this mood, that would rattle it to the foundations and awake
any awe, terror, fear, reverence, or love.31
The second mood that Heidegger says disposes us before the “as a whole”
of the beings is the joy in the company of a beloved. His exact phrasing –
as throwaway as this example may seem to be – is worth attending to. He
says: “Another possibility of such manifestation is concealed in our joy in the
presence of the Dasein – and not simply the person – of a human being whom
we love” (WM 87). In this particular mood – joyful love – the “totality of the
beings” are disclosed, but in a concealed fashion. That is, as in boredom, they
are brought before us, but we have no interest in them. Joyful love would seem
to reveal the world as a rapture, a limitless eternity of horizons, all based on
sharing in the Being-There of the person who one loves. Heidegger stresses the
shared Being-There, notice, and not simply the proximity to the person; this
would perhaps imply a shared, intimate privacy as opposed to a public meet-
ing, and likewise also would entail a shared participation in joy. The loving
couple are so enchanted with one another that the totality of beings is sum-
moned, in a manner, by being revealed as totally other than the blissful couple,
and therefore is meaningless. The beings are brought “before” the couple in
their joint and total indifference to the rest of the world.
Though boredom and love summon up beings in their totality, they nonethe-
less fail to disclose the nothing. Of boredom and joyful love, Heidegger says the
following: “But just when moods of this sort bring us face to face with beings
as a whole they conceal from us the nothing we are seeking. We will now come
to share even less in the opinion that the negation of beings as a whole that are
manifest to us in attunement places us before the nothing” (WM 86–7). What
is needed is a sufficiently “originary attunement,” a “fundamental mood.” The
mood he is looking for is anxiety.
The nothing is apprehended only in the mood of anxiety. First, as we
have already seen, anxiety should be distinguished from fear. In “What Is
Metaphysics?” Heidegger expands on a point of contrast between anxiety
and fear. Fear has a worldly, being-oriented character that anxiety does not
have. Anxiety separates Dasein from the world. Unlike boredom, where the
“muffling fog” makes the difference between Dasein and world indistinct and
obscure, and unlike joyful love, where the beings perhaps fade away, leaving
31
Heidegger discusses boredom at much greater length in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
GA 29/30. L. P. Thiele (1997) treats Heidegger on boredom and the “routinization of novelty”
(Thiele 1997). Giorgio Agamben (2004) interrogates Heidegger’s account of boredom as the
mood that distinguishes humans from animals.
the shared Dasein of lover and beloved together, anxiety is individuating.32 It

cuts off one Dasein from the world:
. . . we ourselves – we humans who are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from
ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel uncanny; rather it is
this way for “one.” In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there
is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that is still there (WM 88–9).
In anxiety, the beings retreat from Dasein uncannily, leaving Dasein alone and
“homeless.” The totality of being is exposed but not as a present whole, rather
as a retreating collectivity: “it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole”
(WM 88). Indeed, “beings as a whole become superfluous” (WM 90). What
remains and what opens up to Dasein is the chasm of the nothing. In reem-
ploying the structural formulation that Heidegger applied with such prolix
verbosity to fear in Being and Time, he says of anxiety that Dasein is anxious
“in the face of . . .,” anxious “concerning . . .,” leaving the ellipses, signifying the
nothing: anxious in the face of nothing; anxious concerning nothing.
As in Being and Time, the effect in “What Is Metaphysics?” of the discussion
of anxiety is to expose the uncanniness, the Unheimlichkeit or homelessness,
of Dasein. Whereas Heidegger’s approach to these phenomena in Being and
Time is not especially evocative, in this essay he attempts to generate this mood
in his audience, summoning his reader to anxious uncanniness. Uncanniness
is basically unpleasant, unappealing, disquieting; Heidegger describes it as
oppressive: “All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however,
not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in their very receding, things
turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole closing in on us in anxiety,
oppresses us” (WM 88). To be sure, “The nothing itself does not attract; it is
essentially repelling” (WM 90). The onset of the nothing in anxiety, to repeat,
is disclosive. Anxiety discloses some of the truth about the beings, but it is not
for this reason satisfying, but finally strange and disturbing: “Nihilation is not
some fortuitous incident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward beings as a
whole in their slipping away, it manifests these beings in their full but hereto-
fore concealed strangeness as what is radically other – with respect to the noth-
ing” (WM 90). Anxiety exclaims the lostness of Dasein in the world among the
beings, the foreign alienness of such fate.
It must be stressed again that the response envisioned by Heidegger of
anxiety is not like fear. As he accounts for it in Being and Time, fear is typified
32
In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that anxiety is the mood that “individuates” Dasein (SZ
184–90) because it is the singular mood that is not responsive to beings, but to Dasein’s own
Being as Being-in-the-world. Safranski argues that Heidegger’s lectures, and after the publica-
tion of Being and Time his writings, were rhetorically formed to summon anxiety in his students
and readers (Safranski 1998, 178). Capobianco’s careful and measured study traces the develop-
ment of Heidegger’s conception of anxiety from its fairly technical account in Being and Time
to the more evocative treatments of it as a steely “calm” (Ruhe) in “What Is Metaphysics?”
(Capobianco 2010, 82–3).
by a bewildered, confused flight, provoked by its being mixed up among

the beings; he cites Aristotle approvingly on this point (SZ 342). In anxiety,
Heidegger means to conjure more the sense of a cool, calm steeliness. Anxiety
is not simply worry or fretfulness. In contrast to fear: “Anxiety does not
let such confusion arise. Much to the contrary, a peculiar calm pervades it”
(WM 88). It is in this self-possessed apprehension of the finitude and frailty,
the irretrievable occasionality of everything actually existing, that “anxiety
makes manifest the nothing” (WM 88), and from here that the nothing may
be “interrogated” (WM 89).
Anxiety is the experience of transcending or surpassing the beings in
the direction of the nothing. This condition of surpassing is the experience
of Dasein comporting itself as such toward the beings. As well as stressing
its manifesting of the nothing, Heidegger also identifies anxiety with Being-in-
the-world as such. It is anxiety that lurks beneath every comportment toward the
beings in the world. Heidegger equates the extension of Dasein into the nothing
and the accompanying surpassing of the beings with metaphysics. Indeed, he iden-
tifies metaphysics with the very essence of Dasein:33
Human Dasein can comport itself toward beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing.
Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics
itself. . . . Metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence in our Dasein. It is that Dasein itself.
Because the truth of metaphysics dwells in the abyssal ground it stands in closest proximity
to the constantly lurking possibility of deepest error. For this reason no amount of scientific
rigor attains to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the
standard of the idea of science (WM 96).34
Indeed, as he puts it more forcefully, “Da-sein means: being held out into the
nothing” (WM 91). Heidegger regularly defines this as transcendence, for
this holding out into the nothing is passing beyond beings (WM 91). In “On
the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger argues that transcendence means essen-
tially surpassing, as in passing beyond (EG 107). We may think here of the
original meaning of metaphysics, the beyond (meta) of nature (physis; nature
33
The term “metaphysics” is one of the trickiest in the Heideggerian corpus to pin down, for the
simple reason that Heidegger altogether changes what he means by the term at a certain point
in his career. In the years following the publication of Being and Time, up until sometime in
the 1930s, he referred to his own thinking as “metaphysics.” Here, for instance, he described
metaphysics in terms nearly identical to those in his earlier accounts of formal indication. In his
later work, Heidegger will refer to metaphysics as the form of thinking that was possible in the
“age” of metaphysics, extending from the pre-Socratics to the contemporary period, whereas
Heidegger seeks in his own “thinking” to “overcome” or “surpass” metaphysics. See Rickey’s
helpful note, Rickey 2001, 87.
34
This is an explicit rejection of the fundamental aims of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, that
philosophy so understood should approach the rigor of science. Taylor Carman plausibly shows
that Heidegger was quite veiled in his utter contempt for Husserl until he had secured Husserl’s
support for the chair at Freiburg. See Carman 2003, 57–63, 98. It is at this point in his career
that he no longer refers to his project as “phenomenology.” See FCM 1–2.
understood as the “totality of beings” in Heidegger’s sense). Heidegger else-

where draws etymological parallels to existence, as in Ek-sistensce: from the
Greek, ek, out, and histêmi, to stand: standing out. Dasein is the existing being,
the being that by holding itself out into the nothing stands out from beings in
having a comportment toward them (P 252).
Understanding the Ontological Difference

The conditional character of the equation of Being and nothing should not be
overlooked. In the 1949 preface to “The Essence of Ground,” when Heidegger
says that “experienced from the perspective of beings,” the nothing is Being.
Being is elusive in the utmost.35 As such, even to be able to remark on some-
thing as outrageous as its occasional sameness with the nothing clarifies its
question for us. This, to repeat, is similar to how the nothing is available to
our understanding – as a fathomless question. By way of illustration, consider
this: if one were looking for the sun in a daylight sky where it shone so brightly
as to be indistinguishable from the fully illuminated firmament, it would be
helpful if the moon were to pass before it, casting a shadow over everything,
for in the moment of eclipse, one might then discern in its absence the real
location of the sun.
We can understand the problem of the ontological difference by thinking
through the sameness of nothing and Being, to which anxiety leads our under-
standing. Understanding nothing and Being together allows one to understand
the “origin.” In the 1949 preface to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger echoed
the contemporaneous preface to “The Essence of Ground” in expressing the
relationship of the nothing to Being as that one that “veils” the other:
One of the essential sites of speechlessness is anxiety in the sense of the horror to which
the abyss of the nothing attunes human beings. The nothing, as other than beings, is the
veil of Being (P 238).
The nothing is between beings and Being such that from the perspective of
the beings, Being appears only as nothing, is veiled by nothing. Thinking this
requires, however, thinking the difference between nothing and Being; it requires
transcending the beings and then thinking Being and nothing together: “The
nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but unveils itself
as belonging to the Being of beings” (WM 94). This allows, Heidegger says,
35
In Heidegger’s late lecture “Time and Being,” he attempts to think Being beyond even the onto-
lological difference, that is, to think Being as “event” (Ereignis) without reference to beings. See
Gonzalez 2009, 293–307. Whereas Gonzalez emphasizes this as representing a break with the
initial thinking of the ontological difference, my interpretation here emphasizes the continuity,
inasmuch as they are each on the path of thinking Being as other than beings. That is, if con-
fronting the nothing is introductory to the ontological difference, I present the latter as introduc-
tory to thinking Being as such.
for the thinking of the “origin” (Ursprung), which is expressed in the question,
Why is there something and not nothing?36
To be able to formulate the difference between beings and nothing is to
think the question of why there is something and not nothing. Heidegger iden-
tifies this as the question of Being, as in, Why is there something and not noth-
ing? (The “is” in the question expresses the verb, “to be”). With this question,
we begin to think Being differently from the beings, or without Being being
totally mediated by the beings. The question raises the issue of why beings are
and nothing is not. The nothing here gives us a purchase on Being different
from that offered by thinking the beings. Apprehending this difference between
the beings and nothing is to think the ontological difference because Being is
not beings, nor yet is it nothing. Indeed, in later formulations that apply to
our understanding of these texts, he sometimes puts it that Being is the differ-
ence between beings and nothing, the “not” between something and nothing,
namely, to be something is to be not nothing (EG 105 n.).
Thinking of Being as the ontological difference itself is the logical conclu-
sion of the attempt to think the finitude of Being as such. The finitude of Being,
properly so-called, requires to be thought without any mediation by beings,
without even being thought in relation to the beings. This is at once the great
ambition of Heidegger’s thought and its ultimate humility. Thinking Being
relative to the beings implies a being-oriented measure of “generosity” in an
accounting of Being, which, in its overflowing bounty, “provides” something
rather than nothing, which leads to the well-known and -understood error
of ontotheology (thinking of Being as a being and implicitly, therefore, as the
greatest of the beings). The culmination of thinking Being submissively without
regard for the beings is apparently the most genuine faithfulness to its finitude.
Heidegger gives some expression to this line of interpretation in the marginalia
he wrote to “On the Essence of Ground.” In a comment on his discussion of the
ontological difference, Heidegger describes thinking the ontological difference
in these slightly oracular terms:
Here the essence of truth is forked in terms of the “distinction” as a fixed reference
point, instead of the contrary approach of overcoming the “distinction” from out of the
essence of the truth of Beyng, or of first thinking the “distinction” as Beyng itself and
36
Heidegger expresses this question in both the Davos sessions and the lecture “What is
Metaphysics?”: “And only in the unity of the understanding of Being and nothing does the
question of the origin [Ursprung] spring up [springt. . . auf] from the why. Why can man ask
about the why, and why must he ask? These central problems of Being, the nothing, and the
why are the most elementary and the most concrete problems” (KPM 199 – Davos). And: “In
the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they
are beings – and not nothing. But this ‘and not nothing’ we add in our talk is not some kind
of appended clarification. Rather, it makes possible in advance the manifestness of beings in
general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the
first time before beings as such” (WM 90).
therein the beyngs of Beyng (das Seyende des Seyns) – no longer as the being of beings
(EG 105 n.; emphasis in the original text).
Here Heidegger is urging that Being (Beyng, or Seyn, in this later formulation)
be thought not as the genetive of beings, that is, not in relation to beings, but
as the not between beings and Being, as the distinction itself.37
The Promise of Nihilism

Does thinking Being in the way described in the preceding promise us a more
fulfilling existence, one attuned to our own deepest identity and to who we
most fundamentally are, either alone or in a community? Heidegger’s response
is highly ambiguous: we live in a time of unique possibility and, perverse as
it is, promise; yet Heidegger also remains deeply pessimistic. The ambiguity
he articulates in Being and Time, as well as in passages from a later essay,
“Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” stems from our own very
“constitution of Being” (Seinverfassung) because from Being itself. Our alien-
ation, estrangement, and detachment from Being happens by Being abscond-
ing, abandoning us, and concealing this abandonment in our own attention to
the beings.
In Being and Time, Heidegger frequently characterizes our “understand-
ing” as only one of the means of our disclosive “there,” regularly referring
to our discursiveness (Rede, articulateness or “speech”) and our disposition
(Befindlichkeit, expressed as moods), as well.38 These elements of our dis-
closedness are, in Heidegger’s distinctive argot, “equiprimordial.” Each is as
important and fundamental to our manifesting what is what and manifest-
ing Being as the others: discourse is equiprimordial with understanding; all
of our understandings are articulated understandings. The discursive element
of our disclosedness is necessarily oriented by beings, “somethings,” rather
than by nothing, and poses a problem for our possibility of abiding authen-
tically in a new age of repaired alienation from Being. Heidegger envisions
an open struggle with the nothing as a genuine possibility of our understand-
ing, that is, our understanding is capable of surpassing the beings and think-
ing, however tenuously, Being as such. However, because our disclosedness is
always discursive, we are never given to thinking in a way that can attain to
such a grasp of the nothing that does not also refer to somethings. The world
is given to us both as an articulated potential whole of beings with which
we are involved and as a possible unity for this articulation drawn from our
37
Joan Stambaugh, in the introduction to her translation of Identity and Difference, offers Nicolas
of Cusa’s definition of God as the “non-other” as a way to help think of what Heidegger
means: “as nothing other than himself and as nothing other than the world” (Heidegger
2002a, 9).
38
In division two of the extant text of Being and Time, Heidegger begins to replace this trinity with
understanding-mood-fallenness. See Schürmann 2008, 112.
understanding. The irruption of Being into the world through our opening
up a possible and futural purpose gives this unity; but the unity is always,
Heidegger suggests, the unity of a manifold of beings. What we understand the
Being of is always several “some-things.” We also manifest these “some-things”
in talk or discourse (Rede): we communicate with and to other Dasein, that
is, we refer an understanding from one being (ourselves) to another one. As
Heidegger puts it, “Talking is talk about something” (SZ 161). Something is
always said in the talk; the talk is always about something and addressed to
something (i.e., someone). “In this ‘something said,’ discourse communicates”
(SZ 162). Discourse thus relates (a) the talker and (b) the Dasein being talked
to, to (c) the thing to which the talk is addressed: “Listening to . . . is Dasein’s
existential way of Being-open as Being-with for others. . . . Being-with develops
in listening to one another” (SZ 163). Such communication inherently relates
to the essence of community, requiring that the potentialities for communal
existence be intimately bound to the occlusiveness of discourse: the “with” of
communication, Mitteilung, announces the fundamental connection between it
and community, rooted in Being-with, Mitsein.
The Occlusion of Being by Beings

Heidegger describes the history of Being as a “withdrawal” of Being from the
“site” of Dasein – meaning not just us humans, but us and the world in which
we exist and with which we are concerned. In this withdrawal, Being leaves
the “beings” ta onta “in the light” as beings. That is, Being gives itself to, as,
in, or through the beings. The ensuing “metaphysics” takes the “What is it?”
question (the characteristically Socratic question) as the guiding question, and
construes a series of responses that Heidegger calls “ontotheology.” This hap-
pens, according to Heidegger, not because of any wickedness of one thinker or
another, but above all because “Being as such” has concealed itself as though it
were the same as “the Being of the beings.”
The occlusion of Being comes from having our attention drawn to the
beings as occupying an especially exemplary place in “Being” what is. This
realization allows for an insight unique to our time, according to Heidegger.
His presentation of the matter in “Nihilism as Determined by the History of
Being” supplies a helpful way to situate Being and Time in and as a product
of our time. In that essay, he argues that Western metaphysics begins with the
question “What is the being?” directed to the whole of the beings and to the
collective things that are. The question – which, like all questions determines in
advance what may and what may not be offered in response – establishes the
fateful course of thought for the entire epoch to come. It “intends” to ask about
Being, Heidegger allows, inasmuch as it enquires about what is, but “Being
as such” is “passed over” as attention is directed to the beings themselves
(SZ 207). Being is passed over as “unthought.” Being unthought, it is only
a matter of time before it should be discovered that all of our doings and
dealings with the beings, which presume to be rooted in Being and thus to
flourish or fail according to our understanding of Being, are in fact not. The
history of our orientation by the beings has never been attached to or expres-
sive of Being: this is the meaning of nihilism. What we have heretofore thought
is in fact is not. Metaphysics, which for ages was understood to be, in effect,
our rescue from nihilism, our guardian against the horrors and tribulations
of nihilism, is nihilistic. In the formulation of the virtual koan from this writ-
ing: “Metaphysics as metaphysics is nihilism.” If the understanding of Being
that perdured through the history of the West – that To Be means to be pres-
ent – is now shown to be an error, what, then, is Being?
Being as such must be distinguished from the Being of the beings, and in
the metaphysical line of thinking proceeding from the question, “What is the
being?” Being as such is never thought. The asked about, the interrogated (das
Erfragt), is thought about; but this question, Being as such, is not interrogated
(N4 207). It is thought, to be sure, with respect to the beings. Beings are implied
or assumed “on the basis” of Being, but Being is passed over. Metaphysical
thinking transforms Being into a being – such as the cause of the beings, or
as the ground, or the a priori conditions for possibility, and so on – and so
passes over being or thinks of Being as a being (this is the “ontotheological”
error). The very structure and character of the initial, “guiding question” of
metaphysics ensures both that Being as such will be passed over, but inasmuch
as Being is intended in this and subsequent formulations of the question, the
absence of Being will have remained determinative for metaphysical thinking
(cf. N4 210).
Heidegger’s discovery of the initial error in the guiding question of meta-
physics deepens the critique previously suggested in his account of the
ascendency of theoretical rationality. If the guiding question of metaphysics
intends Being, why should it be that it misses it altogether? Conspicuously,
Heidegger fails to attribute the nihilism of metaphysics to the work of any
thinker, neither Nietzsche nor even Plato. Whatever sense of loss or decline
he evokes in his varying accounts, strictly speaking, he assigns no blame
in his history of the West. Metaphysics is nihilism because it thinks Beings
with respect to the beings; it asks after the beings and passes over Being as
nothing. Heidegger surmises that metaphysics asks about the being because
its Being is concealed. That is, it would never have been a question if it were
not initially concealed.
How should this concealing be understood? Heidegger points to two ways.
First, as we have seen, Being “as such” is concealed by the beings, covered
up by them; our openness to it is blocked, as it were, by the presence of the
beings. Second is the concealment of the “as such” in the beings. The origi-
nal metaphysical question asks, “What are the beings as such?” “but never
ponders the ‘as such’ itself” (N4 212). Yet the “as such” designates that the
being, as itself, in existing as what it is, is unconcealed: “The hei in on hei on,
the qua in ens qua ens, the ‘as’ in ‘the being as a being,’ name unconcealment,
which is unthought in its essence” (N4 212). In sum, Heidegger raises the
possibility that the two passed-overs in metaphysics, the as such and Being,
might be the “selfsame” and together account for metaphysics as nihilism.
Being would then “be” unconcealment, or more precisely, concealed uncon-
cealment: “the unthought unconcealment of the being would be unthought
Being itself” (N4 212). The guiding question of metaphysics would then
arise because (a) the being is set forward to be asked about as Being with-
draws (unconcealment), and (b) the withdrawing of Being (unconcealment)
is disguised by the presence of the being (concealed). Metaphysics is not
neglectful of Being, on such an account, but determined by the abscondence
of Being:
Metaphysics asserts and knows itself as a thinking that always and everywhere
thinks “Being,” although only in the sense of the being as such. Of course, metaphys-
ics does not recognize this “although only.” And it does not recognize it, not because
it repudiates Being itself as to-be-thought, but because Being itself stays away. But if
that is so, then the “unthought” does not stem from a thinking that neglects some-
thing (N4 213).
Being itself stays away, leaving the being in the light to be asked about
Nihilism obtains when Being both withdraws and conceals its withdrawal,
leaving “nothing” behind. “The essence of nihilism proper is Being itself in
default of its unconcealment, which is as its own ‘It,’ and which determines
its ‘is’ in staying away” (N4 216). Heidegger refers even more strongly to the
“default” (Ausbleiben) of Being, the staying away of Being. This “default”
implies that “something” (for lack at present of a better term) is being stayed
away from. But what? Not the being, “which dwells in Being” (N4 217). The
implication is that Being is staying away from a place:
Rather, in staying away there comes to be a relation to something like a place, away
from which the staying away remains what it is: the default of unconcealment as such.
That place is the shelter in which the default of unconcealment essentially persists.
But if it is precisely concealment that remains in the staying away of unconcealment
as such, then the staying of concealment also retains its essential relation to the same
place. The location, the place of the “abode,” the “shelter” of being is the “essence of
man” (N4 217).
The essence of man is the location of the “advent” of Being where both “the
staying away of unconcealment” (i.e., the withdrawal of Being that leaves
beings unconcealed) and “the staying of concealment” (i.e., the presence of the
concealment of the withdrawing unconcealment of Being) occur together in a
shelter. Being stays, is, still in the beings; it has both flown from us and uses us
for cover.
We find ourselves, then, in the position that Heidegger evokes at the begin-
ning of Being and Time. Again, Being issues through man: “Being bestows
itself by betaking itself into its unconcealment – and only in this way is It
Being – along with the locale of its advent as the abode of its default. This
‘where,’ as the ‘there’ of the shelter, belongs to Being itself, ‘is’ Being itself and is
therefore called being-there (Da-sein)” (N4 218). The default of Being is inher-
ently misunderstood by metaphysical thinking because Being “leaves itself
behind” only in the beings. When man, therefore, attempts to give an account
of the Being of beings, he cannot but be confronted with a perplexing finitude.
Our finitude, therefore, our impoverished perplexity, our everyday covering
over this perplexity, our fundamental ignorance: these, Heidegger claims, are
the real “promise” of Being. Nihilism can be a “gift” of Being, because “while
withholding itself in default, Being is the promise of itself” (N4 226; emphasis
in the original text). The essence of nihilism is therefore quite different from the
phenomena of nihilism. These latter are Heidegger’s gloss on the ghastly events
of the twentieth century. The essence of nihilism, however, will be misunder-
stood only if it is taken as a moral or political phenomenon:
What is essential to the inauthenticity of nihilism is not something base or deficient. The
essential occurrence of the nonessence in essence is nothing negative. The history of the
omission of the default of Being itself is the history of the preservation of the promise –
in the sense that such self-preservation is concealed in what it is. It remains concealed
because it is occasioned by the self-concealing withdrawal of Being itself and in that
way is imbued by Being with its preserving essence (N4 226).
Concealed in the inauthenticity of nihilism is what Heidegger calls the “mys-

tery,” which is preserved by the disguise, so to speak, of inauthenticity: “In the
inauthenticity of the essence of nihilism, the mystery of the promise occurs,
in which form Being is Itself, in that it saves itself as such” (N4 226–7).
Metaphysics, therefore, or in the terms of the earlier chapters of this book, the-
oretical rationalism and the ascent of everydayness, has borne through history
a gift of Being, a promise that can be discovered as what it is: “The essence of
metaphysics consists in the fact that it is the history of the secret of the promise
of Being itself” (N4 227; emphasis in the original text). Even a lie presupposes
the truth and is thus not completely overtaken by falsehood; by this logic, the
worst lie is the most promising of all.
Thus Heidegger envisions what might be called the redemption of nihilism.
Nihilism – in the open in our time as it was not before, as the mature efflores-
cence of metaphysics, but always having been implicit in metaphysics, from its
first question – points to Being beyond the beings. In the thought of Nietzsche,
and as the violent phenomena of the contemporary world, it shows that Being
is nothing in its concealing withdrawal:
In the meantime, it has become clearer that Being itself happens (occurs essentially) as
the unconcealment in which the being comes to presence. Unconcealment itself, how-
ever, remains concealed as such. With reference to itself, unconcealment keeps away,
keeps to itself. The matter stands with the concealment of the essence of unconcealment.
It stands with the concealment of Being as such. Being itself stays away (N4 213–14).
Nihilism thus reveals that Being is so radically other than itself that it should
not even be called “Being.” Nihilism shows that Being “even ‘is’ not” (N4 215).
The advent of nihilism is accompanied, then, by a cautious but deep hopeful-
ness, as it bears no essential resemblance to the cascade of atrocities normally
invoked by the term: “the essence of nihilism in the history of Being still does
not reveal those features that usually describe what one means by the familiar
term nihilism: something that disparages and destroys, a decline and downfall.
The essence of nihilism contains nothing negative in the form of a destructive
element that has its seat in human sentiments and circulates abroad in human
activities” (N4 221). Heidegger claims that the destructive phenomena of nihil-
ism should not be overlooked. Nonetheless, the essence of nihilism allows for
or assists through a passage “into the free region” (N4 250).
6
Heideggerian Politics: The Past Is Not Dead,

It’s Not Even Past
The politics that issue from Heidegger’s thought – his teaching on community,
as well as the impetus his thinking gives beyond or in spite of this teaching –
derive from his formulation of the problem of Being and its presentation to us
as a perplexing, anxiety-inducing, disintegrating question. Given that our finite
understanding has us apprehend Being as distinct from the beings when we can
see its “sameness” with the nothing, then a time when we are surrounded by
the phenomena of nihilism may be a uniquely disclosive moment in the history
of Being.
Heidegger evaluates the possibilities of our communal existence in the light
of how they conduce to the re-raising and -posing of the question of Being: can
a human community inquire into Being? In what respect may a community
contribute to the Being of the beings? Heidegger explores this question in Being
and Time by adumbrating a “factical ideal,” a specific way of life that, on the
one hand, forms the basis for precisely the relationship to Being that Heidegger
urges, and on the other hand, shows how this way of existing might relate us
to our fellow Dasein in the community. Anticipatory resoluteness designates
a precise form of openness that it is necessary for Dasein to affect in order to
join in the interrogation of Being. This form of openness includes that we ori-
ent our discursive capacities in such a way that our communal life favors the
interrogation of Being as well. That is, because we are essentially communal,
it follows that the orientation that permits us to pursue the question of Being
has a communal element as well. (Heidegger is not proposing a solitary walker
type of response to the problem of Being in the world: no monks need apply.)
Anticipatory resoluteness is meant to be an orientation with respect to beings,
including other Dasein in community, that facilitates the proper resonance of
Being in the world. Inasmuch as it responds to our involvement with beings,
however, it shares in our constitutive inclination to be oriented by beings, and
thus to fall into thinking of ourselves and then Being as “like” the beings.
152
Heideggerian Politics 153
That is, even the “factical ideal” is caught up in our characteristically human
tendency to privilege the beings in their presence, and hence to occlude the
“concealing unconcealing” of Being as time or nothingness.
Prominent interpreters of Heidegger such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and
John Caputo insist that there is no “existentiell ideal” to which the argument
of Being and Time points that might be taken as suggesting a practical and
therefore political purpose in the work. Caputo claims that “Being and Time
attempted to keep the existential analytic free of privileging any concrete, facti-
cal way to be, like Christian or Greek life.”1 Gadamer remarks: “The existen-
tial analytic does not, with respect to its own intention, contain any existentiell
ideal and therefore cannot be criticized as one (however many attempts may
have been made to do so).”2 There is half a point here, and in the present chap-
ter, I want to grant it. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, it is mistaken to see in
Heidegger’s thinking – as exhibited there in his earlier work, but as is also
true of Being and Time – the establishment of a philosophic ethics or a moral
stance that should provide guidance, “existentiell” guidance or otherwise. To
the extent that this is what Caputo and Gadamer are emphasizing, I concur.
However, in the text of Being and Time, Heidegger simply does refer to a “fac-
tical ideal,” and it occupies a necessary position in his argument.3 Just as there
are numerous ways of existing that close us off to the inquiry into Being, like-
wise there is a mode of existence that opens us up to the inquiry into Being.
(Indeed, and as the present study has emphasized, according to his own rea-
soning, Heidegger’s own investigation in Being and Time testifies to this neces-
sity.)4 One mode of existence constitutes the “factical ideal” in Heidegger’s
1
The passage continues: “There is no suggestion at this point in Heidegger’s writings that Greek
existence was any more or less ‘primordial’ than Christian existence, no myth of the Great Greek
Beginning. On the contrary, both Greek and Christian alike represented “existentiell ideals”
upon which the existential analytic drew in order to bring them to the level of ontological for-
mality” (Caputo 1993, 173).
2
Gadamer 1975, 263. Catherine Zuckert notes that Gadamer is likely defending Heidegger
against the sort of accusations made by Heidegger’s students Karl Löwith and Eric Weil (Zuckert
1996, 84).
3
“Is there not, however, a definite ontical way of taking authentic existence, a factical ideal of
Dasein underlying our ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence? That is so indeed. But
not only is this Fact one which must not be denied and which we are forced to grant; it must also
be conceived in its positive necessity, in terms of the object which we have taken as the theme
of our investigation” (SZ 310). As Karsten Harries notes, this passage would seem to contradict
Caputo’s insistence that there is no such existentiell ideal (Harries 1994, 34 n. 20).
4
Reiner Schürmann concludes his study of Being and Time with a compatible claim: “Heidegger,
from the beginning of the book onward, makes a certain state of existence the condition for
thinking. This state of existence, in the quote from Plato’s Sophist, was thaumazein, wonderment.
In the context of temporality, to exist fully in the now-moment of anticipatory resoluteness is
the condition for the understanding of temporality. ‘Dasein becomes “essential” in authentic
existence, which constitutes itself as anticipatory resoluteness’ (SZ 323). It is true that Heidegger
never explicitly says that to understand anticipatory resoluteness as the essence of authentic exis-
tence one has first to exist in anticipatory resoluteness oneself. Such a reversal of transcendental
terms, or the “existentiell ideal” in Gadamer’s. The ideal is simply that we be

open to the meaning or truth of Being, and inasmuch as it constitutes a mode
of existence for Dasein (rather than, say, a propositional truth), it has a charac-
teristic mood, a way of speaking, and an understanding. In short, this “factical
ideal” is authenticity, or what Heidegger refers to more specifically as “antici-
patory resoluteness.”
As Caputo emphasizes, Heidegger’s presentation of the factical ideal is
indeed a radical abstraction from every possible world, but this does not mean
that it has no concrete expression.5 Heidegger is articulating a mode of exis-
tence that is radically individuated or particular. To do so, however, it is nec-
essary for the basis of his claim to be, in some sense, “universal” in scope.6
priorities is worked out only in later texts, and in another vocabulary. But returning to the
beginning – thaumazein as the condition for the retrieval of the question of Being – we can con-
clude that authentic existence as an alternative way of understanding our death is the condition
for the understanding of Being as time” (Schürmann 2008, 126–7). I disagree that this state of
existence is thaumazein and stress instead the connection Heidegger draws between aporia and
Verlegenheit, perplexity (see Cumming 1991, 79).
5
Waller R. Newell makes this point (though employing the terminology of theory): “an abstrac-
tion from every possible world. It explains only the most general way in which worlds come into
being, and nothing concrete about what they become – French, German, Russian, or American.
These considerations help to explain the notoriously abstract quality of Heidegger’s many neolo-
gisms (such as being-with-one-another-in-the-world’). For the very abstractness of fundamental
ontology is necessary so as not to impinge upon the unique ‘destiny’ which shapes each world
and people from its origins with false universalizations about substantive human nature or his-
torical progress. . . . Like Nietzsche, whose precedent he came increasingly to ponder, Heidegger
tries to elaborate a theory of particularity, of the minimal conditions for mutually exclusive
horizons” (Newell 1984, 777).
6
James Phillips has identified this problem precisely and framed it very elegantly: “Heidegger’s
nationalism is the nationalism of the rootedness of the Volk. It is not, however, an insurrection
of the particular against the universal, if only because such an insurrection is always doomed to
failure. Heidegger should not be seen to be translating Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian individualism
for the NSDAP. A Volk that insists on its singularity, on its condition as ‘this’ Volk, is in the end,
as Hegel had shown in his analysis of sense-certainty, always betrayed to the universal by its very
‘thisness,’ by the abstractness of singularity as such. A reprise of the nominalist cult of the partic-
ular does not describe Heidegger’s reaction to Hegel’s panlogism, since his critique of the univer-
sal pursues a different course from the beautiful soul’s pathos-laden avowals of the particular’s
independence. Heidegger’s rejection of cosmopolitanism and his engagement with a nationalistic
political movement are grounded in his treatment of the universal within the question of Being”
(Phillips 2005, 6). Phillips insists that Heidegger is not an insurrection of the particular against
the universal, and in his argument that follows, recurs to Heidegger’s reference to the transcen-
dence of Being and the individuation of Dasein. My disagreement with Phillips may be crystal-
ized by noting (1) that the purpose of developing the method of formal indication, which method
is repeated in the recurrence to “existentials” in Being and Time, depends on making claims that
are so particular and limited as to retain a universal validity that exceeds generalization; (2) the
possibility of making such claims depends on them being made in a time when Being as presence
is breaking down, and the phenomenologist or thinker is confronted with distress, perplexity,
anxiety, or the phenomena of nihilism, which each in its way communicates the nothing that
exists “beyond” the beings as a whole; and (3) that the insurrection is “doomed to failure” does
As in the case of his development of the method of formal indication, the

“existential” of authenticity (and its more refined specification in anticipa-
tory resoluteness) depends on a claim that is, in principle, more universal than
theoretical generalizations. It depends on an apprehension of the “concealed
unconcealment” of the gift of Being, which gift first announces itself to us as
distressed, perplexed anxiety.7 Consequently, the account of radical individua-
tion, of a way of Being rooted beyond all rootedness, is necessarily articulated
in a conceptual language of abstraction virtually unprecedented in the his-
tory of Western philosophy. Moreover – as is crucial for grasping the political
import of Heidegger’s thought – the extreme universalism of this articulation
entails that this most radical individuation entails the most widespread, in
principle unlimited, application.
Our historical communal existence is the necessary elaboration upon and
correction of the abstraction of the presentation of anticipatory resoluteness.
History allows us to confront the finitude of Being, that is, its occurence with
respect to time by living or reliving it. Heidegger therefore proposes an orien-
tation to history that can ground a community in its own particular openness
to Being, including therefore a confrontation with nothing. As becomes clear
from even his brief and allusive treatment of the matter in Being and Time,
however, it is not clear that the particular form of community that Heidegger
locates as most promising for the distinction between Being as presence and
Being as time, the Volk, is able to resist our constitutive tendency to settle into
an everyday orientation to the beings discursively.
Anticipatory resoluteness fulfills the need that we orient ourselves to the
beings by submitting to them and so confronting their limit in the nothing. The
vulnerability of such an orientation, however, is not expressed as gentleness.
In this chapter, I want to draw out this important element in the character of
anticipatory resoluteness in its relation to history in order to see the inherent
violence of Heideggerian politics, either as active destruction or as a streak of
neutrality or indifference. Understanding the place and meaning of “herme-
neutical violence” is essential both (a) for understanding the precise content of
the “openness” of resoluteness, how it is limited and does not simply express a
contentless indifference; and (b) for seeing that it is not contrary to Heidegger’s
emphasis on a disposition of submission and vulnerability, but precisely out
of the need to tend and preserve such a disposition in the face of recurrently
occlusive and threatening everydayness that“violence” emerges.
not disqualify it from being true, in the first place, and yet ceasing to be recognized as such at a
possible future moment.
7
In this connection, consider Leo Strauss’s insight that the position of the “radical historicist,” by
which he means Heidegger, depends on the premise of an “absolute moment”: “According to his-
toricism, therefore, the absolute moment must be the moment in which the insoluble character of
the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest or in which the fundamental delusion of the
human mind has been dispelled” (Strauss 1953, 29). On this aspect of Strauss’s understanding of
Heidegger, see Zuckert and Zuckert 2006, 94, with Velkley 2011, 112, 139.
Anticipatory Resoluteness
As we have noted, according to Heidegger, everydayness characterizes Dasein’s
existence all the time. It will be more ascendant in different times and places,
but as a tendency of Dasein’s, it is always constitutive. As such, this is what
is closest to Dasein; this is where Dasein must begin in order to reopen the
question of being. This reopening is not a “merely” theoretical undertaking,
but involves a complete reorientation of Dasein as such. Authentic anticipa-
tory resoluteness consists first in apprehending the permanence and character
of this condition of fallenness. Authenticity is thus not a condition, not a state
of purity, but a reappropriation of Dasein’s fallen everydayness. Hoping that
this should be otherwise is inauthentic. Such an attitude toward its own fallen-
ness is what Heidegger means when he refers to resoluteness. In resoluteness,
Dasein reacquaints itself with its own finitude, its existence as a “null nullity”
thrown into a world for which it is not responsible. It is most thoroughly itself,
that is, authentic, as anticipatory resoluteness, which entails its apprehension
of its fallenness (resoluteness) in the light of its own certain death (anticipa-
tion). That is, Dasein does not “rush ahead” in the expectation that it will be
or become a “something,” a kind of apotheosis or salvation; on the contrary,
anticipatory resoluteness expresses the full awareness of the paltriness, the gen-
uine finitude of what we have been thrown into by resolving even upon our
certain mortality. Dasein resolves upon caring for its fallen, everyday condi-
tion in view of its certain death – even though it is a fallen worthlessness, even
though it is going to die soon, and cease to be anything at all, even anything
worthless. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein remains itself through time, and
thus supplies the true occasion for political liberation, by exhibiting and abid-
ing in the truth of our situation. In this apprehension of itself as a thoroughly
finite null nullity, Dasein rips itself from any immersion in the total, comfort-
ing, but stultifying occlusion of Being in the everyday and begins to fathom the
full mystery of the possible connection of Dasein to one another in their joint
apprehension of their Being as nothingness. This in itself requires each Dasein
to rip itself away from that aspect of its existence that allows others to deter-
mine what everything is and what it means, from itself as the they-self, in order
to be a part of the world as it is ordered according to the wholeness of Dasein
as finite thrown understanding. This apprehension entails, necessarily, a radical
revision, a revolution, in its own character as Being-with-others, and thus nec-
essarily its relation to any community of which Dasein is a part.
The Silence of Authentic Discourse

In everydayness, Dasein’s orientation by the beings comes to dominate its dis-
closedness: our understanding is expressed as shallow curiosity; our discur-
sivity is expressed as idle chatter; and our mood is expressed as a satiated
but shallow satisfaction. Our disclosedness becomes absorbed in the beings,
“somethings,” and fails to understand the distinctiveness of Being as such.

Anticipatory resoluteness entails a complete reform of our disclosedness, of
the way we manifest what we are and therefore how Being is, so to speak. This
entails, as we have to some extent discussed in the previous chapter, being anx-
ious before the nothing and so coming to understand “nothing.” Can we give
voice to nothing, though? Can we articulate or speak nothing?
The confusion and din of chatter amid the They cover over any possibility
for genuine disclosedness. In this condition, the passage of time is so chaotic
and hurried that it implies an essential stasis by way of contrast, hence the
inclination to establish the present-at-hand as the meaning of Being. This con-
dition and inclination contributes to the dissipation, the unfocused distribution
of Dasein amid the beings, and erodes any sense of itself as a disclosing being
with a kind of Being other than the present-at-hand. In terms from Heidegger’s
other writings, human existence as the shepherd of Being – dwelling amid the
beings, sheltered by the earth – is ever more ground beneath the juggernaut of
technical mastery, massification, and machinization: our everyday flattering of
our fascination with the “looks” of the beings is consummated in the nihilistic
discovery that the beings “are” not what, how, and as we thought they were.
These tendencies of everydayness are in the first place grasped, and in the sec-
ond place resisted in what Heidegger refers to as the “factical ideal” of antici-
patory resoluteness. Anticipatory resoluteness is reticent rather than chattery,
slow rather than busy or frozen, and centered on the death-induced finitude of
Dasein, and therefore not divided into its flittering interest in and attraction by
the many and various beings it encounters.
The contrast between the chattery din of the everyday, where discursivity
dominates, and anticipatory resoluteness is perhaps most clearly seen by look-
ing at reticence or discretion (Verschwiegenheit). Anticipatory resoluteness is
a modification of Dasein’s disclosedness, one that is authentic and cares par-
ticularly for the maintenance of Dasein as its “ownmost” (i.e., authentic) self,
that is, as a self that cares for Being, for the disclosedness of the world. As such,
each element of the “there,” the elements of care – disposition, understanding,
and discourse – have an authentic orientation that contributes to the make-up
of anticipatory resoluteness. The mood that discloses nothingness to Dasein,
and therefore shows Dasein and the beings of the world for what they are, is
anxiety; anxiety thus “individualizes” Dasein. Similarly, understanding that is
oriented by the nothing of beings is in a position to understand the absolute
finitude of Being as the not of the ontological difference, indeed, as the prevail-
ing essence of nihilism in our time, that is, to free itself from thinking Being
with reference to the beings and think it just as difference. As we concluded
in the previous chapter, such a thinking of Being would truly amount to a
liberation – into the “free region” – from what Heidegger discerns to be the
dominating characteristic of philosophic approaches to the thinking of Being
since the Greeks, namely, the thinking of Being if not as a being, then still
through the beings or with regard to the beings, the essence of what he comes
to refer to as ontotheology. Reticence is the mode of discourse that Heidegger

suggests as the counterpart to these two nothing-oriented, authentic modes
of disposedness and understanding. We have also already seen, though, that
Dasein’s disclosedness in discourse is always mediated by the beings. Even in
silent reticence, what is disclosed is a “something,” not a nothing. As such,
Dasein’s discursive articulation is intimately connected to Dasein’s fallenness.8
Silent reticence is the mode of discoursing that insulates Dasein from the
chatter of the They. In the everydayness of the they-self, “talking extensively
about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity,
the unintelligibility of the trivial” (SZ 164). Reticence does not mean anything
like simply having nothing to say or being drowned out by the din: “Keeping
silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep
silent, Dasein must have something to say, that is, it must have at its disposal
an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself” (SZ 165). This authentic and rich
disclosedness of itself is supplied by reticence: “one’s reticence makes some-
thing manifest, and does away with ‘chatter’ ” (SZ 165). It “articulates the
understandability of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to
a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another
which is transparent” (SZ 165). The manifestness of reticence is quiet in that
it does not announce itself in any prattling on. It is meant to communicate its
own silent dignity without public fanfare. In so disclosing oneself by reserv-
ing from public discussion and display one’s most characteristic features, one
contributes to the truth of one’s self-presentation. To a public characterized
by noisy “somethings,” the silence of reticence testifies to one’s “nothingness.”
Reticence thus corresponds to the discursive presentation of Dasein where-
upon Dasein’s understanding approaches finitude as nothingness and senses
the nothingness exposed in anxiety.
Since community, as Heidegger conceives of it, is rooted in communica-
tion and thus the discursive dimension of Dasein’s there, reticence is particu-
larly important for understanding the relation of authentic Dasein to politics.
Heidegger sees reticence as supplying a “potentiality-for-hearing” that is so pri-
mordial as to be genuine and thus to supply a “Being-with-one-another which
is transparent” (SZ 165). Reticence, as a function of disclosedness, particularly
related to the discursive articulation of the world, “makes something mani-
fest” (SZ 165). That is, reticence supplies the ground of genuine community, in
contrast to the uncanny rootlessness of the chattery, everyday they-self, which
is completely cut off from Being. This points to the absolutely crucial respect
in which reticence is different from the other two elements of authenticity –
anxiety and understanding – which is that reticence continues to be oriented
8
Reiner Schürmann suggests something similar in his interpretation of Being and Time. He notes
that Heidegger refers to understanding, disposition, and discourse together as the equiprimordial
modes of disclosedness in the first division, only to refer regularly to understanding, disposition,
and fallenness together in the second division of the published text (Schürmann 2008).
by beings rather than by nothing. It is surely true that silent reticence resem-
bles nothing, in a certain sense, and particularly in contrast to the incessant
blather of everyday chatter. But reticence “makes something manifest,” that
something being Dasein as a self. And in reticence Dasein makes itself manifest
to other Dasein; it supplies a “potentiality-for-hearing” as the source of a gen-
uine “Being-with-one-another.” In manifesting Dasein to Dasein, it articulates
beings and somethings. Reticence, as a mode of discourse, is still, therefore,
subject to the “fatal” character of discourse, which is that it is inescapably ori-
ented by the beings and thus seems to trap Dasein in continuing to understand
Being as mediated by beings.
Open Nothingness as the Source of Dasein’s

Potential Wholeness
The full authentic disclosedness of Dasein, of which reticence is only one
dimension, is resoluteness. Resoluteness, as a mode of Dasein’s disclosedness,
therefore expresses a mood (anxiety) and an understanding projection (the
distinction between Being and beings), as well as the silent discursiveness of
reticence. Indeed, Heidegger claims that “in resoluteness we have now arrived
at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic” (SZ
297). Here, then, we have the culmination of Heidegger’s view that the truth
is not correspondence, but an active disclosure performed by Dasein in its care
for Being. That is, truth is not a property but almost an action, an uncovering.
Authenticity as resolute openness is being true, or being truly one’s self when
the “who” of one’s self is the open region where the beings are illuminated by
Being. In resoluteness, Dasein can be authentic because it holds itself truly as
being the nothing, the cast-into-the-world nothing that it is. It is not a thing, but
the place – a clearing, a “nothing” – where things (Seiende) show themselves. In
the terms used in Being and Time, resoluteness is “Being-guilty, a self projection
in which one is reticent and ready for anxiety” (SZ 301); “a way of reticently
projecting oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and exacting anxiety of
oneself” (SZ 305); “a projecting of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty –
a projection which is reticent and ready for anxiety” (SZ 382). It would divert
us from our main point to examine Heidegger’s Kierkegaardian-Christian ter-
minology of guilt and conscience in detail. Let it suffice to say that in this con-
text, “Being-guilty” (Schuldigsein) means being a thrown, fallen nullity, thrown
into everydayness, who is where and what it is by no account of its own pow-
ers. In “wanting to have a conscience,” however, such a nothingness assumes
responsibility for itself, for its nothingness, by projecting from where it has
been thrown, into the nothing of the future. This is what is entailed by resolute-
ness: resolving to be oneself – and nothing else – as such a thrown nothingness.
Resoluteness is thus a guard against the total dispersal of Dasein amid the
whole field of “somethings,” the totality of beings present in everydayness, and
so it is the guarantor of Dasein’s wholeness. That is, in resoluteness, Dasein
holds itself together as not being dispersed in the nothingness of the everyday,
as not joining in the occluding falseness of the everyday:
Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent res-
oluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keeps silent, authentic
Being-one’s-self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying “I”; but in its reti-
cence it “is” that thrown being as which it can authentically be. The self which the ret-
icence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question
as to the Being of the “I” (SZ 322–3; emphasis in the original text).
In resoluteness, Dasein holds itself as itself – “the primordial phenomenal basis

for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’ ” – back from the self-obliterating rush
and turmoil of the everyday.9 Resoluteness does not freeze or fix the “I” as a
point around which everydayness revolves, as though the “I” were present-at-
hand; instead, it slows down, as an open being stretched out in time.
What Heidegger means by what we have characterized as holding oneself
back or holding oneself together should not be read as a hermetic removal
from the fallen world, a retreat in the direction of a more authentic “location”
elsewhere more pure or less fallen. The authentic nothingness of resoluteness
is precisely what makes it so primordially true: it does not pretend that Dasein
is anywhere but lost in the They; it does not regretfully long to be somewhere
else. It instead appeals to its own lostness in the They as the truth of Dasein’s
situation. This does not accomplish, nor does it seek to accomplish, a removal
to another world:
The irresoluteness of the “they” remains dominant notwithstanding, but it cannot
impugn resolute existence. . . . Even resolutions remain dependent upon the “they” and
its world. The understanding of this is one of the things that a resolution discloses, inas-
much as resoluteness is what first gives authentic transparency to Dasein (SZ 298–9).
Resoluteness thus reinvolves Dasein with all of the beings surrounding it,
consequently transforming their very disclosedness: “this authentic disclos-
edness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the ‘world’
is discovered (and this is founded upon that disclosedness) and the way in
which the Dasein-with of others is disclosed” (SZ 297; emphasis in the orig-
inal text). New possibilities for the very world inhabited by Dasein and the
beings Dasein is with open up. The “content” of the world – pragmata as
well as people – acquires now “a definite character in terms of their own-
most potentiality-for-Being-themselves” (SZ 298). As such, resoluteness is not
isolating, but “as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than
Being-in-the-world”; it brings itself into concernful Being-amid the ready-to-
hand beings, and “pushes” itself into solicitous Being-with-others (SZ 298; ital-
ics in the original text).
9
Consider also: “But when Dasein goes in for something in the reticence of carrying it through or
even of genuinely breaking down on it, its time is a different time and, as seen by the public, an
essentially slower time than that of chatter, which ‘lives at a faster rate’ ” (SZ 174).
Liberation and Authentic Being-with

Resoluteness, far from isolating an individual from the world, provides the
disclosedness that permits the only true source of Being-with-one-another,
Being-in-the-world-with-one-another, or genuine community. Heidegger is per-
fectly explicit about this and directly implies its political consequences. The lib-
eration of Dasein brings with it the freedom of the things in the world. Dasein
“frees itself for its world” in choosing its own for-the-sake-of-which, rather
than that dictated by the They. Thus, Dasein’s “resoluteness toward itself” is
what first frees up other Dasein. Others with it can thus “ ‘be’ in their ownmost
potentiality-for-Being” (SZ 298; emphasis added).
This authenticity-begetting authenticity is the culmination of the positive
mode of solicitude described by Heidegger as consisting in “leaping ahead,”
discussed in Chapter 4. The first Dasein is able “to co-disclose [Miterschliessen]
this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates (der
vorspringend-befreienden Fürsorge)” (SZ 298). Thus, because resoluteness is
not isolating, and so does not entail a separation from the world and other
Dasein, one Dasein may lead another Dasein to the latter’s own “ownmost”
potentiality. This is the source of the genuine community that dissolves the
contractual, suspicion-fostering structures of the everyday they-self.10 If this
is to make sense as an authentic appropriation of the fallen they-self, it must
be the case that, in some sense, the distance between the Dasein persists, but
is no longer “alienating,” or generative of distrust and suspicion. So, although
the genuine community envisioned here is not “individualistic” or composed
of isolated individuals, what distinguishes it from the publicity of the they-self
is its nurturing tending of each individualized Dasein by other Dasein, each in
its ownmost, that is, authentic, particularity. It is difficult to construe concrete
details about the import of this based on Heidegger’s rather formal account of
authentic solicitude here, but it would seem to entail open differences among
members of the community, manifold roles constituting the distinct identity of
each Dasein, and therewith implications of rank and leadership. It is formally
anti- or non-homogeneous.11
The notion of a political community that openly accepts its fallenness,
deception, and falseness as its very own truth is most difficult to grasp. To
restate this line of interpretation with maximum concision, Dasein’s existence
with others is shot through with falsehood, deceit, dispersal, and confusion;
it is essentially fallen into everydayness, literally, decadent; it always has been
10
“Only by authentically Being-their-selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one
another – not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the ‘they’ and
in what ‘they’ want to undertake” (SZ 298).
11
As we shall see, Heidegger’s construal of the genuine Gemeinschaft of the Volk in §74 may
be understood to ameliorate this problem. His formulation of the matter there, however, is
similarly terse.
and always will be so. Resoluteness is not the elimination or flight from this,
nor its amelioration, but an active acceptance of it, therefore, as resoluteness,
the holding open of the truth of this. Such an interpretation is required in order
to make good sense of Heidegger’s claims that Dasein is primordially “in the
truth” and equally “in untruth.” There is always a fallen dimension of untruth,
therefore, in the disclosedness of resoluteness:
Disclosed in its “there”, it maintains itself both in truth and in untruth with equal
primordiality. This “really” holds in particular for resoluteness as authentic truth.
Resoluteness appropriates untruth authentically (SZ 298–9).
That Dasein should, in its most primordial disclosedness, be equally in truth

and untruth has the consequence that it thus remains ever subject to – if not the
dominance, then the shadow – of the they-self. Resoluteness discloses even this.
Resoluteness seizes on the irresoluteness of the They, to which it had once been
totally surrendered and will be again soon. A political community of resolute
Dasein caring for other Dasein and helping them be resolute is in no way ele-
vated, then, from its fallen, decadent condition. It is merely more openly, truly,
resolutely what it is.
Anticipation
Resoluteness, taken on its own, still perhaps gives the impression that Dasein’s
possibilities are more undetermined than Heidegger means to communicate.
This leads to the mistaken view that the near-contentlessness of Heidegger’s
description of resolution – stressing the form of its open revelation but not the
details of what is uncovered – implies that it is highly transferable in terms of
what it may resolve. Heidegger’s students in the twenties, it is reported, used
to joke with each other, saying “I am resolved . . . but I just don’t know about
what!” On the contrary, resoluteness, as such, is not strictly speaking authen-
tic; authentic resoluteness is anticipatory resoluteness, that is, Dasein’s open
disclosure of its own nothingness as a thrown, everyday being. Authenticity
requires that Dasein “own up” to the nothingness of where it is headed (the
anticipation of death) as well as the nothingness of where it came from (where
it was thrown into).
The content of Dasein’s resoluteness is given by its confrontation with death.
Dasein’s possibilities are always shaped by “the possibility of the impossibil-
ity of any existence at all” (SZ 262; emphasis in the original text), namely, the
certainty of death. Heidegger enumerates the characteristics of death, which
are taken over in anticipation: it is Dasein’s ownmost, nonrelational, not to be
surpassed, certain, true, and indefinite possibility. Anticipation is the proper
attitude toward death; in this distinctive possibility, Dasein is wrenched away
from the They. Anticipation is a temporal “running ahead,” an attitude toward
the future that stretches toward it rather than awaiting its arrival. This antici-
patory “running ahead,” however, is sensitive to the most certain but indefinite
truth about Dasein’s future, the unsurpassibility of each Dasein’s own – as in

particular, “nontransferable” potentiality – death. As “unsurpassable,” then,
anticipation “runs ahead” to it, but not past it. In doing so, it illuminates every
other possible possibility, none of which are as certain as death. To be clear,
Heidegger is not imagining anticipation as a visit to the fortune teller; the
details of one’s death are, to be sure, still obscure. But death is a certain possi-
bility as nothing else is.
It is the active confrontation with death that supplies the “content” of any
otherwise seemingly “contentless” resoluteness. Authentic resoluteness must
anticipate, that is, must run ahead of itself in its appropriation of Dasein’s finite
possibilities to apprehend them in relation to the unsurpassable, certain but
nonetheless indefinite possibility of Dasein’s own death. As such, possibilities
that do not account for the particularity of each Dasein, which are governed by
the prejudices and whims of the they-self in its seeming perpetuity, nonrespon-
sibility, transferability, and ambiguity, are not authentic and, however much
Dasein is thrown in to them, cannot be authentically resolved upon by Dasein.
In anticipatory resoluteness – running ahead and keeping oneself together
and open amid the temptations and tendencies of everyday dissipation and
settling-in fixity – two kinds of nothingness are combined, however improb-
ably. These are the nothingness of the fallen, thrown everyday (guilt) and the
nothingness of death. Anticipatory resoluteness is resoluteness “modalized” by
anticipation. This then forms the capstone of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein.12
The nothingness with which resoluteness is concerned is what Heidegger
refers to as guilt, the fact of Dasein’s fallenness. The “Christian-existentialist,”
Kierkegaardian terminology is extended in the formulation that “wanting to
have a conscience” refers to the acceptance of “responsibility” for one’s guilt.
Such responsibility is assumed in resoluteness: Dasein assumes responsibility for
its thrown nothingness (guilt) by projecting, rethrowing that this should be so.
Hence the characteristic formulation that resoluteness is a reticent projection
of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty (thrown nothingness) and exacting
anxiety of oneself. This is the nothingness into which Dasein is thrown without
choosing, the everyday nullity of Dasein’s whys and wherefores: “Being-guilty
belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity”
(SZ 305). Resoluteness responds to this nothingness by refusing to refuse it,
by choosing to project one’s continued Dasein upon such a nothingness with-
out any false hope of escaping it. Thus Dasein assumes responsibility for its
nothingness, though not in the search for any forgiveness or penitential alle-
viation of it, in full awareness of its “permanence.” The corollary of this is
Dasein’s non-retreat, nonflight, from the everyday; authenticity does not leave
12
Gregory Bruce Smith’s interpretation of Being and Time arrives at a similar reading of antici-
patory resoluteness (Smith 1996). He reads it as the final weaving together of Heidegger’s ontic
and existentiell categories with the ontological and existential categories, both threads coming
together in anticipatory resoluteness.
the everyday behind, it seizes on it.13 The true constancy of Dasein that is
summoned up and maintained by resoluteness is Dasein’s nothingness, its
“null Being-the-basis of a nullity” (SZ 305); what is constant is that Dasein
is a nothing. This, however, can only be genuinely disclosed as a “constant” if
Dasein has, in fact, checked all the way from beginning to end, as it were. That
Dasein’s nothingness should be authentically disclosed requires, then, that its
death – its end – be anticipated.
Resoluteness, to resolve truly, must anticipate the end of Dasein’s nothing-
ness in its confrontation with the termination of this nothingness in another
nothingness, death. Only in anticipatory resoluteness is the full intersection of
past and future, fallenness and existentiality, disclosed:
When Dasein is resolute, it takes over authentically in its existence the fact that it is
the null basis of its own nullity. We have conceived death existentially as what we
have characterized as the possibility of the impossibility of existence – that is to say, as
the utter nullity of Dasein . . . but Dasein, as care, is the thrown (that is, null) basis for
its death. The nullity by which Dasein’s Being is dominated primordially through and
through, is revealed to Dasein in authentic Being-towards-death. Only on the basis of
Dasein’s whole Being does anticipation make Being-guilty manifest. Care harbours in
itself both death and guilt equiprimordially. Only in anticipatory resoluteness is the
potentiality-for-Being-guilty understood authentically and wholly – that is to say, pri-
mordially (SZ 306; emphasis in the original text).
That is, when anticipated, death exposes the nothingness – nullity – that char-
acterized Dasein’s fallenness, and thus the everyday, the nullity of the everyday,
all along.
Violence
To revolutionize one’s life in anticipation of death and thereby both expose
its nothingness at the same time as we resolve to keep living as such, a “null
nullity” is, to employ judiciously a double negative, not nonviolent. Readers
of Heidegger are often disposed to associate “violence” with a politics of mas-
tery, domination, imperialism, or control. Thus, when they read Heidegger
and see that he associates domination and control with inauthenticity, with
the solicitude of concernful “leaping in,” with Dasein dominating Dasein in
an instrumental, technical fashion, they correctly note Heidegger’s strong
preference for freedom and see his vision of authenticity as entailing a sub-
mission to Being rather than its domination. However, they mistakenly think
13
“To project oneself upon this Being-guilty, which Dasein is as long as it is, belongs to the very
meaning of resoluteness. The existentiell way of taking over this ‘guilt’ in resoluteness, is there-
fore authentically accomplished only when that resoluteness, in its disclosure of Dasein, has
become so transparent that Being-guilty is understood as something constant. But this under-
standing is made possible only in so far as Dasein discloses to itself its potentiality-for-Being,
and discloses it ‘right to the end’ ” (SZ 305; emphasis in the original text).
authenticity is peaceful because it is obviously not dominating, controlling,

or mastering.14
Heidegger, however, repeatedly characterizes the investigation of Being and
its corollary modifications for the existence of Dasein as violent. The textual
support for this should be carefully distinguished from his other claims about
violence. Some of his references to violence mean hermeneutical violence in the
narrow sense, referring to more or less intrepid interpretations of texts and the
obstacles associated with them.15 Heidegger also implies that from the perspec-
tive of everydayness, anything that does not conform to the narrow bounds
of common sense is understood as being “violent,” as in shocking or épatant
les bourgeois.16 Additionally, Heidegger gives the sense that ontological inter-
pretation as such violates any settled interpretation, and so is “violent,” in a
sense. He refers to “the violence of this projection amount to freeing Dasein’s
undisguised phenomenal content” (SZ 313; emphasis in the original text) when
referring hypothetically to an ontological interpretation that is not fundamen-
tal ontology, that is, an ontological interpretation that was in harmony with the
tendencies of everydayness. Most important for the purpose of understanding
the implications of Heidegger for politics is that Heidegger characterizes the
breadth of human existence as circumspectively hermeneutical, through and
through, from the most banausic tasks to political deliberation (SZ 359). This
requires that “hermeneutical violence” be understood as important beyond the
confines of the merely intellectually daring and as applying to the breadth of
the ready-to-hand, thus to communal, political existence.
The hermeneutical appropriation of Dasein’s circumspective concern amid
the ready-to-hand beings in the world tends toward falling everydayness.
Interpreting otherwise requires a wrenching transformation on the part of
Dasein: “Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing
violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation,
or to its complacency and tranquilized obviousness” (SZ 311). Even though
anticipatory resoluteness is not expressed as a mastering domination, as an
overflow of Being that fills Dasein and then determines the rest of the beings
14
See Dallmayr 1993, 152; Figal 2005, 105–16; Rockmore 1992, 72; Thiele 1994, 283.
15
“In spite of this, even the ontical approach with which we have tried to interpret Dasein onto-
logically as care, may appear far-fetched and theoretically contrived, to say nothing of the act
of violence [Gewaltsamkeit] one might discern in our setting aside the confirmed traditional
definition of ‘man’ ” (SZ 182–3).
“In terminology delimiting the primordial and authentic phenomena which correspond to
these, we have to struggle against the same difficulty which keeps all ontological terminology in
its grip. When violences are done in this field of investigation, they are not arbitrary but have a
necessity grounded in the facts” (SZ 326–27).
16
“Common sense concerns itself, whether ‘theoretically’ or ‘practically’, only with beings which
can be surveyed at a glance circumspectively. . . . Common sense misunderstands understanding.
And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the
reach of its understanding, or any attempt to go out so far” (SZ 315; emphasis in the original
text).
in the world, it is nonetheless disruptive, and quite literally totally so. The
“crashing-in” irruption among the beings of nothingness as appropriated by
Dasein attempts to restrain its own diffusion, to remain its own vulnerable
self as an uncoverer of the Being of beings. In doing so, it repeatedly uncovers
truth – “again and again,” Heidegger says – in an act of thievery undertaken in
the shadow of death. This work of Dasein’s is disruptive in the highest extreme;
it is violent. Heidegger’s talk of violence is not merely metaphorical but extends
from the very logic of fundamental ontology.
Heidegger points to this in his account of Dasein’s necessarily involved
role in the exhibition of truth. Truth is understood not as the correspondence
of a theoretical statement with a given state of affairs, but as an uncover-
ing, a gloss on the Greek aletheia. The truth, so understood, and in the con-
text of the covering-over inherency of our everyday orientation by the beings,
must be torn, violently ripped, from untruth, not once but “again and again.”
What has already been uncovered needs to be seized by Dasein: it is “essential
that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered”
(SZ 222). And it must be seized repeatedly, for truth is not such that in seizing
it once it might then be “established” as true, but rather it must be reappro-
priated again and again. Truth is vulnerable; its appropriation is its defense
against “semblance and disguise,” the falling covering over that is equally char-
acteristic of it. “Uncovering” is a verb, not a condition; for it to be at all what
it “is,” it must always be in tension with covering over. Making something
true, reenacting its uncovering, is thus a violation, a crime against what is set-
tled and what is immediately becoming settled: “The factical uncoveredness of
anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery” (SZ 222). The truth is not
static, and thus, to “remain” true, needs to be re-appropriated, -expressed, and
-interpreted at every turn; remaining true is an activity, not a state. Here, then,
is an intimation of what Heidegger means by authenticity and resoluteness.17
The reason why violence extends beyond the textual-hermeneutical to
the full hermeneutics of facticity is the total and thoroughly social charac-
ter of Dasein’s hermeneutical involvement and therefore disclosedness. The
radical reorientation entailed in anticipatory resoluteness and the ontologi-
cal investigations that take it as the guide to Dasein’s wholeness is violent
because (a) everydayness itself is so totalizing and (b) “hermeneutics” refuses
to admit a separation between theory and practice. Everydayness shapes our
very situatedness both concernfully amid the things of the world and solici-
tously among our fellow Dasein. It determines the interpretation of everything
theoretically and practically (including what constitutes theory and practice).
17
“The Being of truth is connected primordially with Dasein. And only because Dasein is as con-
stituted by disclosedness (that is, by understanding), can anything like Being be understood;
only so is it possible to understand Being. Being (not beings) is something which ‘there is’ only
in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is. Being and truth ‘are’
equiprimordially” (SZ 230, emphasis [italics and the weird spacing] in the original text).
Thus the radical disruption of one entails the radical disruption of the other.
On Heidegger’s account of the derivation of theory from the technico-practical
realm of the circumspective ready-to-hand, the “transformation” effected by
anticipatory resoluteness and ontological investigation necessarily entails the
whole disclosedness of Dasein and is not restricted to the “merely” theoretical.
Hermeneutical violence thus has as much to do with the full panoply of every-
day personal and instrumental encounters with the world, from tool usage to
practical deliberation. Anticipatory resoluteness – the “factical ideal” in which
Dasein’s for-the-sake-of-which is manifest and therefore Dasein’s wholeness is
available to Heidegger’s philosophic project – entails a “total revolution” sur-
passing the limited spheres of mere theory and practice.18
On the Meaning of Anticipatory Resoluteness

Many of the disputes about the political import of Heidegger’s thought turn
on how anticipatory resoluteness is understood. These disputes derive from
two sorts of misinterpretations of Heidegger, each of which amplifies certain
ambiguities in Heidegger’s own account. For the purposes of this discussion,
we designate the first of these positions the abstract-formalist reading (AFR),
the second of these the awaiting-letting-be reading (ALB).19
On the Meaning of Resoluteness: The

Abstract-Formalist Reading (AFR)
The abstract-formalist reading of anticipatory resoluteness does not give due
credence to the element of anticipation in this factical ideal and thus under-
states the radicalness implied in Heidegger’s understanding of a community
or politics based on a finitude that approaches nothingness. In this regard,
the Abstract-Formalist Readers are following through Heidegger’s own highly
formal, thus “abstract,” account of resoluteness, which is the consequence of
his own procedure of “formal indication.” As discussed in Chapters 1 and
2, the dismantling of the distinction between theory and practice entailed in
Heidegger’s approach to existential categorization or formal indication is so
abstract – intentionally so – that it accounts for both one phenomenon and its
ontic opposite. The radical degree of formality allows for a vast multiplicity of
related phenomena to be “categorized” together. So, for instance, both anxiety
and hope are “dispositions.” Thus both may be accounted for as moods that
18
On “total revolution,” see generally Yack 1992.
19
Disputes about the character and place of authenticity in Heidegger’s thought are numerous.
For some of the high points in the literature, consult Carman 2000, 2003; Guignon 1984, 2000,
2004, 2006; Scott 2010; for a prominent critique of authenticity, see Adorno 2003. In the dis-
cussion that follows, I bring out certain characteristic readings of Heidegger for the purposes of
emphasizing ambiguities in his account.
reveal something of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, and neither is, on ontological

grounds, preferable or “better.” Similarly, both authenticity and inauthenticity
are ways for Dasein to be – as Being-in-the-world, as Being-with-others –
though neither has a more privileged ontological status, and so Heidegger
refuses the language of better and worse in accounting for these ways of Being.
Heidegger’s approach is meant to avoid the reductive, ocular biases that have
distorted every traditional account of Being, beginning with the Greek identifi-
cation of “category” with what might be publicly accused of a thing.
As applied to the question of resoluteness, the resulting account is so abstract
as to allow for any content to the resoluteness whatsoever. Heidegger says as
much directly: “Resoluteness, by its ontological essence, is always the resolute-
ness of some factical Dasein at a particular time” (SZ 298). Each Dasein is
resolute in its own way, at its own time, with respect to its own situation and
surroundings. The “content” of any particular instance of resoluteness, that is,
what it might resolve upon, is variable in the highest degree:
On what is it to resolve? Only the resolution itself can give the answer. . . . The resolution
is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at
the time. To resoluteness, the indefiniteness characteristic of every potentiality-for-Being
into which Dasein has been factically thrown, is something that necessarily belongs.
Only in a resolution is resoluteness sure of itself. The existentiell indefiniteness of res-
oluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution; yet it has, all the same, its
existentiell definiteness (SZ 298; emphasis in the original text).
Resoluteness might be called the “active acceptance” of the condition Dasein

has been thrown into, whichever fallen situation, wherever it finds itself, and
the claiming of it as Dasein’s own: Dasein inhabits this world, it dons it, stakes
its own claim to it. As in the vernacular exhortation: Own it! The existential,
formal structure of resoluteness, however, does not on its own decide what
existentiell content definitely will not or definitely will satisfy the criteria of
resoluteness.
The apparent contentlessness of resoluteness has led some prominent
Heidegger interpreters, both friendly and critical, to see resoluteness as a nearly
infinitely transferable (and thus malleable) structural component of Heideggerian
politics. It thus permits of a surprisingly wide political application.20 One of
See Safranski 1998, 170, for example. Likewise, Charles Guignon, the highly-regarded existen-
20
tialist interpreter of Heidegger, so construes this important dimension of Heidegger’s thought

(Guignon 1983, 139–42), as does William Blattner (2006, 160–7). Rockmore has a similar view
(1997, 45–8, 64–7).
My analysis of these two misreadings of Heidegger bears some important similarities to
Johannes Fritsche’s assessment of the ongoing debates about Heidegger. I should like, then, to
clarify my disagreements with Fritsche on this point:
1. Heidegger is more future-oriented than Fritsche allows. Heidegger is indeed, as he diagno-

ses, a “revolutionary rightist,” but I stress the future orientation of the right rather than the
content of what is retrieved from the past. In my view, Fritsche still interprets Heidegger
the striking features of this interpretation of resoluteness is how quickly any

“hardness” may be bled away from Heidegger. Paradoxically, this highly for-
malized reading of him allows for “extremely” gentle views to be plugged, with
all possible sincerity, into the structural characteristics of Heidegger’s thought,
and laden with the “jargon of authenticity.” This interpretation lends itself to
appropriating Heidegger as a supporter of a politics of vegan animal rights as
much as of national resolve and struggle; such a Heideggerian is as likely to be
a Green as a venture capitalist, a pacifist as a Nazi.21
Such a reading misunderstands Heidegger’s formalism, however, which is
so amplified in order to liberate the particular from the publicness, general-
izations, and false pretentions to universality in the everyday. This is accom-
plished, paradoxically enough, by yoking the particular to existentials that are
so abstract and “transcendent” as to contain each particular in its finite totality
without distortion. This maximum scope is premised on the dissolution of tra-
ditional philosophical distinction between theory and practice. The result in
Heidegger is the amplification of violence, not its arbitrary relaxation or lessen-
ing. This is so because the confrontation with death so wrenchingly transforms
the possibilities and thus the Being of the world. The “practical” consequence
of violence in Heideggerian politics is intextricably linked to its philosophi-
cal radicalism. In moderating the former, the abstract-formalists diminish the
latter.
The fundamental error of the AFR is to overlook the decisive role of antic-
ipation in authentic resoluteness. Heidegger clearly states that “resoluteness
in a less-radical fashion than his philosophic transformation of the bases of theory and
practice warrant, hence my stress on the “contentlessness” of the future versus Fritsche’s
emphasis on the retrieval of a past form of life. As I read Fritsche, his Heidegger is still
bound by empirical particulars, and thus “conservative,” whereas I think Heidegger is
radicalized by the attempt to incorporate the most extreme particularity – approaching
nothingness – into his thought. I, thus, grant that the interpreters in the AFR group have
more to their position than Fritsche allows, inasmuch as I agree that the “contentlessness”
of resoluteness is the source of Heidegger’s violent radicalism.
2. In general, I think the ambiguities of Heidegger’s actual doctrines in Being and Time give a
certain warrant to the AFR (what Fritsche refers to as the “empty-decisionism” interpreta-
tion of Heidegger). I agree with Fritsche that Being and Time (more or less) “stands on its
own” regarding political interpretation, but I disagree that this means it is unambiguous.
For example, §74 does not provide all the necessary content for resoluteness. I insist that
the political implications of Being and Time are not exhausted by Heidegger’s endorse-
ment of National Socialism (whether this is found in §74 or not, and here I think Fritsche’s
claims are exaggerated; for instance, there is no actual use of the term Volksgemeinschaft
[though both Volk and Gemeinschaft are on the same line, admittedly], the crucial term,
the sine qua non, for Fritsche’s linkage of Heidegger and Hitlerism).
3. Thus, given the ambiguities genuinely present in Being and Time, the ALB interpretation
(what Fritsche might identify with the “post-modern interpretation”) also has warrant
from the text of Being and Time, though it rests on a fairly partial and, indeed, “violent”
interpretation.
21
Cf. Thiele 1994, 285–6. See Zimmerman 1983.
is authentically and wholly what it can be only as anticipatory resoluteness”

(SZ 309). Failing to see the importance of anticipation, the AFRs tend to take
the “throw” of Dasein as final. This inadvertently privileges the present at
the expense of the future. Thus they imagine a Dasein who is thrown into an
everyday situation where, once the misunderstandings are scraped away, what
would be authentic would be to be resolutely a fisherman, or to be resolutely
a corporate lawyer, or to be resolutely an astronaut, true to one’s ownmost
self, perduring through adversity. Taking one’s orientation by anticipation,
however, one runs ahead to compass one’s virtually imminent death and sees
the nothingness of not merely the everyday into which one is thrown, but the
nothingness to which that which one has resolutely fastened oneself amounts
to. One’s life is nothing through and through: not merely where one comes
from (the fallen everydayness into which one is thrown), but where one is
going (the certain possibility of the end of one’s possibilities, still fallen, in
death). The effect this has on resoluteness is to enforce that resoluteness must
include complete reversals and ontic transformations in response to the antic-
ipation of one’s death.
The certainty of nothingness in one’s death exposes one’s current commit-
ments, even the seemingly most “resolutely” fastened upon of commitments, as
arbitrary. There is no necessary connection between one’s desires, and therefore
the life one has elected to lead in order to fulfill them, and what the bracing
anticipation of one’s own death will reveal to be true of oneself. The ontical
consequences of anticipatory resoluteness point not merely to the steadfast
defense of one’s own (resoluteness). They also point to the eviscerating recon-
sideration and transformation of what truly is one’s own and the consequent
abandonment any “content” that is familiar or sound in order to refuse any
closing-down fixity implied by the adherence to already established orders. As
in the “Comment on Jaspers,” Heidegger points to the need for the most “rad-
ical suspicion” and skepticism. The certainty of the complete obliteration of
“what” one has resolutely been permits its complete abandonment as much as
it instructs that it be determinedly clung to.
On the Meaning of Anticipation:

The Awaiting Letting-Be Reading (ALB)
The second important interpretation of anticipatory resoluteness might be
called the awaiting-letting-be reading. Whereas the AFR reading stressed res-
oluteness in isolation from anticipation, and as a result privileged the present,
the ALB reading emphasizes an attitude toward the future that Heidegger des-
ignates as the inauthentic counterpart to anticipation, “awaiting.” Whereas the
imperative in the AFR was for Dasein to be what it is, where it is, when it is, the
imperative in the ALB reading is to let others and other things be what they are.
In a different way than AFR, then, ALB also privileges the present, adopting an
attitude toward things and people that takes what they are now as the guide
to what they shall be, vastly underemphasizing Dasein’s contribution to their

revelatory manifestation of their being what they are and, like AFR, undervalu-
ing the transformation effected by Dasein’s confrontation with its own death.
The most illuminating account of the ALB interpretation of Heidegger is sup-
plied by Fred Dallmayr, culminating in his latest publications on Heidegger.22
Dallmayr argues that Heidegger’s thought offers fruitful lines of thinking about
politics and genuinely free praxis, nonteleological and yet not bound by the
narrow contractual, agent-centered modes of liberal political theory. Praxis – in
the terminology of Being and Time, circumspective concern – on this account
takes place before the distinction between theory and practice.23 It begins in
and completes or fulfills the actor, and yet also displays a “peculiar passivity or
receptivity” by “encountering and letting things and beings ‘be.’ ”24 Here we see
the distinctive dimension of “letting-be,” where any notion of resoluteness that
stresses its hardness rather than its truth-disclosing openness is destabilized.
The openness of Dasein is emphasized: “This receptivity implies openness and
a kind of ‘self-surrender’ (Sichfreigeben) in favor of beings so that they can
show themselves how they are.”25 Letting-be is extended to the communal as
well, suggesting that Dasein engage in a process of sharing with others: “This
sharing, Heidegger stresses, provides a common ground (ein Gemeinsames)
that is not instrumentally fabricated or engineered but is a corollary of the
‘Ürhandlung’ of letting-be: ‘The ‘with’ of being-with-others discloses a com-
monality that derives from the fact that self and others are equally projected
or catapulted [toward truth]’ ” (Dallmayr 2010, 76).26 One lets others “be” in
their own sojourning approach to disclosing the truth along with one’s own in
process appropriation of oneself:
. . . human beings are oriented toward something shared “in common” (ein Gemein
sames, ein Selbiges) that does not at all coincide with “sameness” or identity; thus,
it is possible and even assumed that “several people relate in quite different ways to
commonality.” . . . this thought is also expressed in the statement that human orienta-
tion toward Being is neither identical nor purely relativistic but “relational.” Given that
care for Being is also defined as “primordial praxis,” commonality can be described as
diversified participation in the disclosure (or letting-be) of truth (Dallmayr 2010, 77).
22
Dallmayr 2010, 67–82. For other accounts of Heideggerian politics that explore the sources
in Heidegger of a politics of “letting be,” consult Thiele 1995; White 1991. The former may be
read as a prelude of sorts for further consideration of the relationship between a Heideggerian
recovery of phusis from beneath the occlusive screen of “Nature” in Latin Christianity and
modernity; see Thiele 1999, 2011, 2013. The latter should be taken as part of White’s ongoing
exploration of a postmodern citizenship; see White 2009.
23
Dallmayr 2010, 74.
24
Dallmayr 2010, 74.
25
Dallmayr 2010, 74–5.
26
Dallmayr is quoting Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie (GA 27), a course taught in
1928–9. The richness of Dallmayr’s attention to the political resonances of Heidegger’s work
should cast suspicion on Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that Heidegger failed to think the “with” in his
account of Being-with (Nancy 2002).
Read thus, Heidegger supplies an ontological support for a politics that is at

once inclusive and respectful of difference.
As with the AFR interpretation, the ALB interpretation derives considerable
support from ambiguities or problems in Heidegger’s own thought. The lat-
ter view begins from Heidegger’s account of resoluteness, that in resoluteness
Dasein sets itself free and solicitously assists its fellow Dasein to “be” them-
selves: “Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let
the others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to
co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates”
(SZ 298). This passage is central to the ALB interpretation, as it is here that we
see Heidegger suggesting a fruitful interplay between the resoluteness of one
Dasein and its care for, solicitude for, the freedom of other Dasein.27 The poli-
tics of the ALB respond to this account of solicitous Being-with-others.
This being said, Heidegger’s explicit (and only) discussion of letting-be in
Being and Time is in the context of his consideration of awaiting, which he
singles out as the orientation toward the future that is the inauthentic coun-
terpart of authentic anticipation. As Heidegger presents it in Being and Time,
awaiting is a more tentative, cautious, or receptive orientation to the future –
its “ahead-of-itself” – than anticipation. In anticipation, resoluteness concen-
trates on each “item of modalization” from Dasein’s death because it “tends
of itself” toward these: ownmost, nonrelational, not to be outstripped, cer-
tain, indefinite, true (SZ 309; emphasis in the original text). That is, despite
the exaggerated separation between them implied by the AFR, resoluteness,
when it is really being itself, points toward anticipation (hence, “resoluteness
is authentically and wholly what it can be only as anticipatory resoluteness”
[309]). Resoluteness is thus an active stretching out, a stretching itself along,
forward in time. Anticipation shapes the future by means of the appropriation
of that possibility of Dasein’s that is its ownmost, nonrelational, not to be
surpassed, certain, and yet also indefinite. In anticipatory resoluteness, under-
standing considers and “maintains itself in an existentiell possibility” (SZ 336).
In doing so, it is “coming-towards-itself out of that current possibility as which
one’s Dasein exists” (SZ 336). Anticipation is not the mastery and possession of
its self, but it is the mastery and possession of the possibility of its Not-Being.
This, however, is not the normal, inauthentic attitude toward the future.
Dasein’s irresolute, “not [yet] individualized” (SZ 336), closed-off, “ahead-of-
itself” (SZ 337) is called awaiting. In awaiting, the future is not individuated
as run-toward (vorlaufen), but is accepted or received passively. The future is
allowed to come toward Dasein, not vice versa. Dasein “awaits this concern-
fully in terms of that which yields or denies the object of its concern” (SZ 337;
italics in the original text). In expectant awaiting, one’s possibilities for the
27
See Dallmayr’s reference to and explication of this point in Being and Time in his Polis and
Praxis (Dallmayr 1985, 115 f.) Hatab alludes to this passage in the only reference to resolute-
ness in his book (Hatab 2000, 175).
future are shaped by one’s present concerns, by one’s worldly, ready-to-hand

involvements. That is, one approaches the future as it is, in a sense, received
from the beings with which one is involved. Oriented by such a general array
of things, the future that determines them lacks the certainty of that individu-
alized future of authentic Dasein.
Anticipation and awaiting have a different relationship to the beings that
Dasein finds itself currently amid and thus to letting them be. Anticipation
runs ahead to compass a for-the-sake-of-which relative to the certain though
indefinite, unsurpassable possibility of Dasein’s ownmost death, providing an
indefinite but nonetheless certain future point around which every current
involvement must be forcibly made to orient itself. Awaiting is oriented by
Dasein’s discovery of the beings in their ready-to-hand aspect as Zeug, prag-
mata. In submitting itself to the beings, Dasein receives, in a sense, its “pur-
pose” from them, from these “things in themselves” or from their “nature.” It
submits itself to them by “letting them be involved” (SZ 353, emphasis added),
that is, by allowing them to interact with one another according to their char-
acter, separate from or undetermined by any imposition from Dasein’s Being.
The awaiting sees the telos of the beings with which it is concerned by let-
ting them be: “letting something be involved is constituted in the unity of a
retention which awaits, and it is constituted in such a manner, indeed, that
the making-present which arises from this, makes possible the characteristic
absorption of concern in its equipmental world” (SZ 353–4). Awaiting thus
submits to beings; anticipation, in submitting to Being (as the nothingness of
its own finitude), challenges, wrests, and violates beings for the sake of their
sharing also in the finitude of Being.
Heidegger’s depiction of awaiting resembles an attitude toward the future
more characteristic of classical philosophy, which sees it in light of the eternal
present, the present-purposive orientation by the beings. Awaiting the future
means that one’s attitude toward beings in the present is a self-forgetting
letting-be. That Dasein would submit itself to the beings and thus derive its
own purposes from them glosses the Platonic-Aristotelian derivation of human
nature from the order of the natural cosmos.28 This “conservative” or realist atti-
tude, where the beings are allowed to show themselves in the light of their own
ends, should be contrasted with a modern, “subjective,” or idealist approach
whereby the beings are submitted to the human will in order that they might be
used for more narrowly human ends or purposes. By emphasizing awaiting at
the expense of anticipation, the ALB interpretation of Heidegger misconstrues
a point that Heidegger treated with considerable precision in Being and Time.
Anticipatory resoluteness can be read as the culmination of Heidegger’s
account of human authenticity, where existential inquiry meets the existentiell
ideal in which it is necessarily grounded by exhibiting the truth of Being-there.
Dasein, recall, as the source of its own world, is the revealer, the dis-coverer of
28
See Dallmayr 2010, 71–2, 78–9.
its own primordial truth. Anticipatory resoluteness is the most true, in a man-
ner of speaking; Dasein is most truly “itself” when it manifests the finitude of
Being in and among all the other beings. When Dasein is being anticipatorily
resolute, it is being most itself by stretching out toward the future, in the full
“anticipation” of its ownmost certain death, and from this sharpened sense of
its own finitude, the world and the beings of the world are more luminously
cleared in their true character and relation to Dasein. What is more, by resisting
the assimilation of itself to this manifold array of things and their characteristic
way of being, by “resolutely” withholding itself in its own thrown null ground
from being closed off in the fashion of the everyday things in the world, Dasein
remains open (erschliessende), “unlocked” (aufgeschlossen), and in this sense
decided (beschlossen) against the fixity of sham, everyday stability as elevated
under the dictatorship of the They. This involves a wrenching, tearing, violent
dislocation of oneself from the everyday and one’s own tendency toward dwell-
ing there. To downplay the violence of this dislocation is to mistake the present
“normal” situation – its conventions and prejudices – into which Dasein has
been thrown for the “content” that must be employed to supply the otherwise
contentless, formal, and abstract resolution. Similarly, to minimize the forceful,
energetic dimension of anticipatory resoluteness’s striding and leaping into the
future and its role in determining the individuated Being of the beings in favor
of Dasein’s letting beings be as they are in their present Being is to mistake the
full import of Heidegger’s rethinking of community based on his rethinking of
the relationship between theory and practice.
Authentic and Inauthentic Historicity

Given that Heidegger’s accounts of Being-with (discussed in Chapter 4) and
anticipatory resoluteness are highly formal, it is necessary, as other schol-
ars have done, to look to Heidegger’s discussion of historicity to appreciate
more fully its political import as delineated in Being and Time.29 As Heidegger
says: “the interpretation of Dasein’s historicity will prove to be, at bottom,
just a more concrete working out of temporality” (SZ 382). In his discussion
of historicity, Heidegger comes closest to giving clear expression to what he
means by authentic community in his references to a Volk that seeks to retrieve
its own “heritage” according to the dictates of its “destiny.” In developing his
account of historicity, in showing that historiology (the science) derives from
it, in outlining an authentic approach – an activist, “enactmental” approach,
recalling elements of his “Comment on Jaspers” – to history and in situat-
ing this within the communal lives of people, Heidegger supplies the outline
of what by any other name is a prescriptive political teaching. As we shall
see, this does not mean that his “prescriptions” are without ambiguity, yet he
29
Newell 1984 provides a reading of Being and Time that shows its conceptual continuities with
Introduction to Metaphysics.
nonetheless shows the limits within which this ambiguity must be worked out
by his interpreters.
Tradition and Heritage

Inauthentic historicity is the everyday inhabitance by a community of its nor-
mal understanding of itself and its past, namely, tradition. Tradition is the
medium within which a community understands itself and its possibilities for
the future.30 Tradition is everyday inauthentic history. History, in turn, is based
on Dasein’s historicity, whereby it is “stretched along and stretches itself along”
(SZ 375) from the birth into which it is thrown and its death, each of which
is as constitutive of Dasein as the other. The study of history, however, as it is
ordinarily and thus inauthentically interpreted as a science whose objects are
present-at-hand, covers over Dasein’s genuine historicity (SZ 375–6). In such
a view of history, the past tends to dominate, but Heidegger insists that there
is no clear reason why this should be so (SZ 379, 381). What makes some-
thing “past,” as he analyzes it, is that the “world” to which it belonged has
ceased to be, is no longer (SZ 381). Heidegger’s contrary view is that Dasein
cannot be “past,” because it is never present-at-hand: “A Dasein which no
longer exists, however, is not past, in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather
‘having-been-there’ [da-gewesen] (SZ 380). Thus, he contends that “what is
primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is
what we encounter within-the-world – not only equipment ready-to-hand, in
the widest sense, but also the environing Nature as ‘the very soil of history’ ”
(SZ 381). The ordinary view of history then appears to have taken its bearings
by the interplay of worldly present-at-hand “Things,” objects and their coming
into being and passing away, without accounting for Dasein itself, its temporal
constitution as the stretching-along and world-opening being, as the root of
history.
Against this, Heidegger deploys his own alternative mode of historizing
(and indeed shows how standard-issue tradition is derivative from it) that
is oriented by the future and only thus retrieves the covered-over past, dis-
torted and obscured to the point of unrecognizability by the normal, every-
day medium of traditional history. This understanding of history draws on his
accounts of everydayness, resoluteness, and anticipation. In Heidegger’s under-
standing of authentic historizing – and as we have already seen in anticipatory
resoluteness – everydayness is not dissolved; it does not disappear. Instead, it
is seized upon: the ordinary, public everydayness into which each Dasein has
been thrown is thus transformed into the stuff of which we are made: “The res-
oluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possi-
bilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which
30
“It becomes plain that Dasein’s inauthentic historicity lies in that which – under the title of
‘everydayness’ – we have looked upon, in the existential analytic of Dasein, as the horizon clos-
est to us” (SZ 376).
that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. In one’s coming back resolutely to

one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities
that have come down to one, but not necessarily as having thus come down”
(SZ 383). In coming back to itself, resoluteness appropriates its tradition as its
own heritage and thus opens up new possibilities for the future. When Dasein
resolutely anticipates its ownmost, certain death – the nothingness in which it
meets its end – when it faces the future in this fashion, then its apprehension
of its own past – the history into which it is thrown – is purified of extraneous,
inessential elements: for “only by the anticipation of death is every accidental
and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out” (SZ 384). The inherited, traditional
past is burned away and only the covered-over, now-exposed core that con-
tributes the nonaccidental, nonprovisional future possibilities remains. In thus
facing death, Dasein ceases to flee into the comfortable history of tradition as
ordered by the reassuring stability of the present-at-hand. Heidegger designates
this as Dasein’s acceptance – not passive, but active – of its fate:
Only Being-free for death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its
finitude. Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from
the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one – those
of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly – and brings Dasein back into the
simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]. This is how we designate Dasein’s primordial historiz-
ing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself,
free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen (SZ 383–4;
Oriented and thus freed by our certain death, we seize on where we are – what
we were born into, the everyday traditions we did not initially choose – in
their least comfortable, least superficial core: this is the heritage into which we
are fated. It is this that we pass on to ourselves, by remaining ourselves and
remaining situated in this fated heritage by actively, not passively, accepting
it, by choosing what was not initially chosen, and thus, as it were, rethrowing
ourselves into this most particular future, projecting upon this finite possibility.
Repetition
Heidegger’s formulation of “handing oneself down to oneself” points to
the core of his understanding of Dasein’s authentic historicity: repetition.
Repetition is the authentic response of Dasein to its having-been. Heidegger
does not mean that in repeating, one is endorsing the status quo. In “choosing
a hero,” Heidegger’s arresting formulation for bucking the orthodox history of
the They (SZ 371, 385) and retrieving a model to emulate, he does not mean
that Dasein should just reactualize the past.31 Rather, “the repetition makes a
31
Karsten Harries emphasizes, plausibly, that in “choosing a hero,” Heidegger is specifically
opposing the notion of a community oriented by “recognition” (Harries 1994, 20). Contrast
Freeman 2009.
reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility in a resolution, it is made in a moment

of vision, and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the
‘today,’ is working itself out as the ‘past.’ Repetition does not abandon itself to
that which is past, nor does it aim at progress” (SZ 386; emphasis in the orig-
inal). In repetition, resoluteness exposes the truth of the past as certain, where
“certain” is understood with maximum flexibility:
. . . it simply cannot be rigid as regards the situation, but must understand that the res-
olution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must he held open and
free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signifies that one
holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back – a possibility which is factically
necessary (SZ 307–8; emphasis in the original text).
That is, what is repeated, strictly speaking, need bear absolutely no ontical
resemblance whatsoever to what has happened as might be understood in any
other situation; in resoluteness, one must be prepared – “hold oneself free” – to
reverse oneself, to “take back” what has been resolved upon.
Repetition “begins,” so to speak, in a future possibility.32 It is a response –
“reciprocative rejoinder” – to this possibility that then retrieves a former pos-
sibility, as if in answer to a futural question. That this happens in the notional
present is referred to in the “moment of vision,” the blink of an eye, which
as such refuses (“disavows”) the everyday, orthodox, encrusted, closed- and
closing-off now, the crystallization of the past. Heidegger’s appropriation of
the term Augenblick from Luther’s Bible refers to St. Paul’s apocalyptic sense of
the total reversal and transformation of the world upon Christ’s return. Thus,
in coming toward oneself authentically in historical anticipatory resoluteness,
one is also coming back to one’s authentic self, the self that has been thrown
into a particular history (SZ 338–9). The alternative is inauthentic forgetting,
when one is oriented strictly by the objects of one’s present concern and with-
out regard for who one has been or where one is from (SZ 339). The difference
is whether one is oriented by the future or the present.
Repetition is thus perfectly indifferent to the political “right” – which sub-
mits the present and future to the past as tradition – and the political “left” –
which aims at progress. Neither, however, may it be located in the squishy
middle: in repetitively choosing a hero, it is more radically future-oriented than
any progressive, and more securely rooted in a past so bygone that it never
actually was: “As a way of Being for Dasein, history has its roots so essentially
in the future that death . . . throws anticipatory existence back upon its facti-
cal thrownness, and so for the first time imparts to having-been its privileged
position in the historical” (SZ 386; emphasis in the original text). That is, “for
32
Johannes Fritsche (1999, 11–24) reads Heidegger’s understanding of “repetition” as a conser-
vative defense of tradition. He disputes that Heidegger gives priority to the future, but does not
seem to notice Heidegger’s attention to the evident failure of tradition to supply the resources
for preserving itself.
the first time,” Dasein apprehends the true meaning of what has been; mere
conservatism (traditionalism) is shown up as privileging the present in its take
on the past.
To sum up, repetition takes its bearings by the future possibility in which
Dasein is most itself as clarified in anticipatory resoluteness, and with a view
to this seizes the elements of its past that are most responsive to this authentic
future. This necessarily sets it at odds with traditionalist history according to
the they-self. The stakes are, to repeat, the identity of Dasein through “history.”
Its loss of identity is a genuine possibility in the dissipation of the they-self. The
possibility of it remaining itself depends on its resolute acceptance of “who”
it has been thrown into being, its “null” nothingness in this respect being
accepted, and this being done authentically because it is being done in full
awareness of Dasein’s ownmost, ineluctable, un-out-runnable, certain death;
in full awareness that Dasein’s mortal nothingness is terminated by further
nothingness. Thus, each authentic Dasein is born into its history, and as con-
stituted by temporality, stretches along as what it is unto death. It then takes
up the full weight of the genuine, truthful essence of its history, the “baggage”
with which it has been saddled by birth, and carries this – but nothing else, no
edifying lessons, no load-lightening hope – through as itself, without shirking,
unto death. When Dasein does this, it actively accepts its fate by transmitting
it as its own heritage.
On this presentation, repetition supplies a genuine source of steadiness,
as opposed to the false constancy of the everyday privileging of the ocular
present-at-hand. Heidegger arrives at this characterization not by searching for
the “unity of connectedness” among experiences, but rather by interrogating
the refusal of dispersion within the lostness of the everyday They, as this char-
acterizes the repetitious Dasein (SZ 390). The dispersal and lostness is a clue
to the priority of death. When Dasein faces up to this properly, it is resolute in
“the repetition of the heritage of possibilities by handing these down to oneself
in anticipation” (SZ 390). In this sense, “resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of
existence to its own self” (SZ 391; emphasis in the original text). It thus passes
on itself – in the form of the details of its thrownness, the particulars of its
own heritage – to itself, by ensuring that the possibilities that compass Dasein’s
particular future are informed by the most essential core of Dasein’s particular
past: “The Self’s resoluteness against the inconstancy of distraction, is in itself
a steadiness which has been stretched along – the steadiness with which Dasein
as fate ‘incorporates’ into its existence birth and death and their ‘between’ and
holds them as thus ‘incorporated,’ so that in such constancy Dasein is indeed
in a moment of vision for what is world-historical in its current situation” (SZ
390–1; emphasis in the original text). Again, it is mistaken to think of this
steadiness as comforting or secure; indeed, it is precisely in tearing itself away
from false comfort in public everydayness that this steadfastness may be found.
The steadiness of authentic historicity derives from collapsing the everyday
orientation according to the present. Inauthentic historicity summons the past
before the todayness of the present, “repetitiously,” in a sense, in that every day
this is done anew. Dasein’s being stretched along from the history into which
it is born toward the death that lies ever before it is obscured in a horizon of
sham certainty and regularity, which in turn obscures the need for choice and
decision.33 In the present “today,” the “comfortableness of the accustomed”
(“pleasantness of the habitual,” 370–1) sits in judgment and awaits a tomor-
row that is “eternally yesterday’s,” and the total homogeneity of which is
mistaken for regular diversification (SZ 370–1). Authentic historicity denies,
forcibly denies, the tyranny of “todayness” over the present, future, and past:
. . . the temporality of authentic historicity, as the moment of vision of anticipatory
repetition, deprives the “today” of its character as present, and weans one from the
conventionalities (Üblichkeiten) of the “they.” . . . But when historicity is authentic, it
understands history as the “recurrence” of the possible, and knows that a possibility
will recur only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute rep-
etition (SZ 391–2; emphasis in the original text).
When the currently present “leavings” of history are scraped away, the false
political alternatives of conserving a status quo or progressing beyond it are
shown as such, and the possibility of genuine steadiness “presents” itself in a
“moment of vision” as the possibility of choosing a recurrent possibility.
Repeating a possibility does not look like doing the same thing that was
done before. Here at the meeting of the existentially open and the existenti-
ell there is a strong sense of violent confrontation with the past, a wresting
of something covered over, once passed-over possibilities smothered and sup-
pressed by official history, by accepted traditional dogmas about the past. The
steadiness of resolute Dasein allows it to be open, genuinely open, to the possi-
bility of the total reversal of its ontic-historical circumstances:
In resoluteness lies the existentiell constancy which, by its very essence, has already
anticipated vorweggenommen every possible moment of vision that may arise from it.
As fate, resoluteness is freedom to give up some definite resolution, and to give it up
in accordance with the demands of some possible situation or other. The steadiness of
existence is not interrupted thereby but confirmed in the moment of vision. This steadi-
ness is not first formed either through or by the adjoining of “moments” one to another;
but these arise from the temporality of that repetition which is futurally in the process-of-
having-been – a temporality which has already been stretched along (SZ 391; emphasis in
the original text).
33
“In inauthentic historicity. . . the way in which fate has been primordially stretched along has
been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self Dasein makes present its ‘today’. In await-
ing the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one. The ‘they’ evades choice. Blind for
possibilities, it cannot repeat what has been, but only retains and receives the ‘actual’ that is left
over, the world-historical that has been, the leavings, and the information about them that is
present-at-hand. Lost in the making present of the ‘today,’ it understands the ‘past’ in terms of
the ‘present.’ . . . When . . . one’s existence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the
legacy of a ‘past’ which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern” (SZ 391).
Thus, what might appear as the least constant, most fickle eagerness to “give
up some definite resolution” and immediately adapt to any possible present –
“some possible situation or other” – is, in truth, the token of genuine steadiness
and resoluteness that has already anticipated – not intellectually, but existen-
tially – every possible historical transformation. As Heidegger presents it, the
They-sanctioned, static, everyday interpretation of things is so ephemeral, relative
to the profundity and manifoldness of Being, that the existentiell orientation that
most f aithfully relates Dasein’s fallenness and thrown, historical nothingness to a
genuine, steady, and loyal openness to Being is itself, from the perspective of such
trivialities, highly changeable and seemingly capricious in its characteristics. As
we can see, the repetitive steadiness of Dasein is such that it remains itself through
complete reversals of its ontic situation. The radicalness of this should not be
understated: what Heidegger is presenting is a historicity that is just as faithful to
itself when its ontic content undergoes a complete transformation as when it is
“steady” in any more conventional sense.
The foregoing assumes political import because Heidegger takes historical rep-
etition as a model not just for “individual” life, but for the collective existence of
a community of Dasein. The characteristics of Dasein’s historicity are thus trans-
posed directly to Dasein in their Being-with. In characterizing Dasein’s authentic
historicity, Heidegger is fleshing out the positive mode of solicitude, which takes
the shape of leaping ahead. Historizing, thus, as co-historizing is determinative for
Dasein not merely as fate, but as what Heidegger refers to as “destiny” (Geschick).
Heidegger insists that destiny is not composed as the sum of multiple fates, but
guides them in advance, as an authentic alternative to the they-self’s determina-
tion of a collectivity of Dasein’s for-the-sake-of-which.
Destiny is the “historizing of a community, of a people (Geschehen der
Gemeinschaft, des Volkes)” (SZ 384).34 Heidegger says very little about what
34
In Johannes Fritsche’s reading of Being and Time (Fritsche 1999) Heidegger’s employment here
of the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Volk” should be read as a signal of his complete adherence,
in 1927 when Being and Time was published, to the political program of the NSDAP. That is,
he reads this allusion to Volksgemeeinschaft as demonstrating not merely that Heidegger was a
rightist, but that more specifically he adhered to Hitlerism. He claims that the use of this term
was unique to the NSDAP program. One should consult the historical work of Peter Fritzsche,
Life and Death in the Third Reich, for a corrective; it is not a specifically Nazi term:
The enduring popularity of the Nazis rested on the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s
community. It was not a Nazi idea, and it was not perceived as something imposed or strange.
On the contrary, the Nazis were credited with finally putting into place the national solidarity
that Germans had long yearned for. This is an important point because many of the achieve-
ments of the “national revolution” in 1933 were cherished by citizens who did not necessarily
identify with National Socialism. The legitimacy that Hitler and his regime enjoyed rested on a
wider basis of goodwill. The national revolution came before the Nazis, even if the Nazis were
the indispensable means for its realization.
Since World War I, the people’s community had stood for reconciliation among Germans who
had long been divided by class, region, and religion. Already the “August Days” of 1914, when
precisely this might mean. It would be plausible to conjecture that destiny

corresponds to fate as authentic, solicitous co-being corresponds to authentic
anticipatory resoluteness. If so, then Heidegger is here considering the possibil-
ity of a community, a people (Volk), seizing upon its thrownness into its own
traditions, and in view of its impermanence, that is, the certainty that it, as a
community or people, will cease to be, will cease to have future possibilities.
Presumably, the community correlate to anticipatory resoluteness is sketched in
the positive mode of “leaping-ahead” solicitude, and the community consists in
myriad Dasein, each “caring-for” one another by assisting others in seizing on
and transforming the comfortable conventions of the dictatorship of the They.
As repetitive anticipatory resoluteness is necessarily violent, so the corre-
sponding authentic community of Dasein attains its freedom through “strug-
gle” (Kampf). These passages from §74 are some of the most freighted with
political significance in the entire work; this possibly owes more, however, to
the Wirkungsgeschichte of the book than to the actual intentions of the author.
The full passage reads: “Only in communicating (Mitteilung) and struggling
(Kampf) 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”
(SZ 384–5).35 In this passage, Heidegger reiterates the role of communication
thousands of Germans rallied in the streets to support the national cause in time of war, revealed
extraordinary emotional investment in the promise of national unity. Of course, German pol-
itics did not dissolve into collective harmony, and “1914” was always more a manufactured
image than an experienced reality. Nonetheless, the idea of national solidarity resonated because
it seemed to offer more social equality. It showed a path to integrate workers into national
life, to break down the caste mentalities of middle-class Germans, and to disarm the deference
demanded by the country’s elites. Its democratic or populist quality was crucial to its appeal.
The people’s community was also always a statement of collective strength. It expressed “the
peace of the fortress” that enabled Germans to mobilize against their external enemies in World
War I. This martial aspect became more important after Germany’s defeat in 1918. The calam-
ity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” redrawn in the postwar settlement at
Versailles, and the overwhelming chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-
ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible. During the Weimar years, the
people’s community denoted the beleaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the
political unity necessary for national renewal. As a result, there was always something dramati-
cally embattled about the Volksgemeinschaft (Fritzsche 2008, 38–9).
My point in disputing the soundness of Fritsche’s interpretation is not to deny a fundamental

sympathy on Heidegger’s part for the Nazis, but to insist that this connection not be drawn with
a misplaced precision.
35
Gregory Fried has proposed that the theme of struggle or war, as in Kampf and polemos, may
be taken as the central concepts for interpreting Heidegger (Fried 2000). On the connections
between these passages and Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis in the years after writing
them, see Altman 2012; Bambach 2003; de Beistegui 1998; Dostal 1992; Edler 1990, 1993,
Phillips 2005.
Fritsche joins Thomas Rockmore in reading §74 of Being and Time as representing the
peak or “resolution” of the “drama” of the book (Fritsche 1999, xi), where it “as a whole
culminates” (Fritsche 1999, ix; quoting Rockmore 1992, 47). This is possible only if one has
in community at the same time as recognizing the consequent and necessary

decline – fall – entailed in being so constituted and thus the need for perpetual
struggle. Such a struggle – a Kampf – aspires not to maintain or to retain the
“sharing” (Mitteilung) but to repeat or reestablish the character of a commu-
nity by authentically reappropriating its destiny, that is, its futural possibilities.
In sharing out and struggling, a people frees itself to seize upon its own history
and pass itself down to itself as a communal heritage in its own generation.
These brief, allusive passages on the political import of Dasein’s historicity
are frustratingly bereft of clear explanations as to how one Dasein’s confronta-
tion with its own death, its confrontation with its fate, its choosing of a hero,
and its repetitious passing this on to itself can be simply transferred to a com-
munity of Dasein or Volk. If destiny is not a collection of fates, then what is it?
Does a Volk relate to other Volke the way that Dasein relates to other Dasein?36
Conclusion
Despite the ellipses in Heidegger’s presentation of the possibility of an authen-
tic communal existence in a Volk summoned to its destiny, it is possible to
reconstruct something of the dynamic of the argument given the connections
Heidegger draws to other parts of his discussion that are worked out more
fully, in particular anticipatory resoluteness and Being-with as well as what he
says about the disclosive character of discourse.
The “purpose” of the factical ideal in Being and Time is not to establish
an ethical or political model in the normal sense, but to discuss precisely that
mode of existence – Schürmann says “state of existence” – that is the neces-
sary “ontic” ground for the inquiry into Being. It occupies a place in the argu-
ment of Being and Time that is parallel, then, to the “disquiet” (Bekümmerung)
determined beforehand that Heidegger’s motivating questions concern German politics in the
1920s exclusively. James Phillips’ evaluation of such an approach cannot be improved upon:
Since Heidegger himself in the Leipzig address declares his allegiance to both Hitler and the
question of Being, the prehistory of his political engagement is but sketchily reconstructed by
commentaries that fasten on the lone instance of the word “Volk” in §74 of Being and Time. It
is within the question of Being that Heidegger addresses the notion of Volk in 1927, just as it is
within the question of Being that he confesses his loyalty to Hitler in 1933. To clarify the sense
of “Volk” in Being and Time by its sense in National Socialism is hence reductive and of dubi-
ous worth polemically. An interpretation of the use of “Volk” in Being and Time that does not
simultaneously consider the question of Being is, irrespective of its intention, even apologetic,
because it isolates a suspect lexical element in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole and delivers it up
on its own to judgment. The step from Volk to Hitler is certainly one that Heidegger took, but
schematized in this way, Heidegger’s engagement ceases to be a scandal for philosophy, because
the distance between his thinking and the intellectual squalor of the regime has been minimized.
The question of the relation between nationalism and fundamental ontology is thereby settled
without having first been examined (Phillips 2005, 5).
36
On these questions, see Blitz 1981, 206–8.
Heidegger refers to in the “Comment on Jaspers” and the professed “perplex-

ity” from which the investigation in Being and Time begins. The inquiry itself
is not a theoretical matter; it is clearly an “existential” event, summoning up
and referring to every element of human existence and promising a certain
transformation of human existence. Indeed, as Heidegger formulates it with
apposite clarity in the Nietzsche lectures, thinking is neither merely theoretical
nor practical; it is thus in a sense both. The purpose of the “factical ideal” of
anticipatory resoluteness is to think the meaning or truth of Being.
Given, though, that the being doing the thinking is Dasein, and that Dasein
are essentially communal beings, there is a social or communal component
to this factical ideal. That is, there is a necessary relationship, according to
Heidegger, between the kind of existence that opens us up to the question of
Being and how we exist with others. We “normally” relate to other Dasein
in the fashion of the “everyday,” according to tradition, in a manner that
suppresses the finitude of our existence and even of our existence together.
Heidegger’s depiction of heritage, however, is that we might seize upon the con-
tent of the tradition within which we share our existence with other members
of our community – more specifically, the Volk – and so repeat the coming
into and remaining in Being with them that we share as fellow members of a
community.
As Heidegger accounts for it, though, the relationship within us, in the very
constitution of our Being as Da-Sein, is fraught with a tension between relating
to other beings, such as other Dasein, and to Being as such. Our communal
life, therefore, is especially compromised or contributes especially to our cov-
ering over our own apprehension of Being. More particularly, anticipatory res-
oluteness includes “reticence,” a mode of discourse that is characterized most
especially by silence and attentive listening. It is not, however, possible that it
should be altogether determined by the “nothing,” inasmuch as it, as is the case
with discourse in principle, refers always to a “something,” and indeed refers
this something to another “something.” Discourse, communication, is always
oriented by the beings.
Community is itself rooted in communication, a specific modification of
discourse. Community, therefore, would seem to be immovably oriented by the
beings, and therefore the prospect of a community that properly confronts the
nothing would seem, according to Heidegger’s own principles, to be ruled out.
The orientation by the beings is not exclusive to “communities,” though: it is
inherently a part – “constitutive” – of Dasein as such. Disquiet, perplexity, and
anxiety: these are in their way provoked not merely by the pure experience of
nothing, but by the sense that what is, the beings, are themselves joined with
and limited by nothing, and that our frequent, indeed everyday, perception to
the contrary is mistaken or erring.
Our authentic communal existence, therefore, would seem to entail the reg-
ular uncovering of our heritage in accordance with our true destiny, as a peo-
ple and as this is revealed in “communication and struggle.” But it would also
appear, again, according to Heidegger’s own conceptual grasp of the matter,

that our heritage would ever be tending toward reification as tradition, that
our communal wresting with Being by means of confrontation with nothing
would tend toward privileging beings and therefore the present. Community
would, on this reading, be an ever-evanescent moment, always being occluded
by the very powers of disclosure that express it.
Conclusion: The Paradox of Heideggerian Politics
This book has presented an argument in support of the position that the
Heideggerian soul is divided against itself in a fashion that produces an unsound
approach to politics: the Heideggerian is confronted initially by an understanding
of his surrounding world in the grip of its evident meaninglessness, a condition
that is diagnosed as a bereavement of Being, or the abandonment by the funda-
mental, infusing principle of reality that renders everything that is what it is and
holds it as such. In its place, he is confronted with an abundance of beings and
accounts, and an overflow of claims to knowledge and competence. Among these
claims is a cacophony of political doctrines, teachings, and opinions, each refer-
ring to a network of shared problems.
The source of this situation is what Heidegger refers to in Being and Time
as the “everyday” preference for comfort, constancy, and familiarity of the only
being that is open to Being. More profoundly, the constitution of that being, and
indeed of Being as it gives itself, entails that it discloses Being with reference to
the beings, that is, discursively. What is more, the way this being relates to other
beings like it is also discursive. The flight of Being is thus, in the decisive sense, the
doing or work of Being. Nihilism is the gift of Being.
The Heideggerian is thus torn: how should one think and act out a politics in
accordance with Being, a politics that ministers to Being inasmuch as we – we
Dasein – are the beings that are open to Being, a politics therefore that consists in
an authentic communal existence? The Heideggerian is drawn first in one direc-
tion: revolution. The minister to Being should annihilate the moment and time
of nihilism (of non-Being), should expose the truth of Being by peeling away the
occlusions and obstructions that obscure it, and do so in the service of a pos-
sible communal existence that tends to Being.1 The Heideggerian is also drawn
1
The revolutionary moment is now; an authentic existence is just over the horizon, provided
we uproot and destroy the encrusted traditions surrounding us, shed the desiccated husk of
185
in another direction: stay put. Even the contemporary situation of nihilism, the
culmination of a history of the presence-favoring tendencies of our constitutive
everydayness is a gift of Being: “What is essential to the inauthenticity of nihilism
is not something base or deficient. . . . The history of the omission of the default of
Being itself is the history of the preservation of the promise” (N4 226).2 In what,
then, does the political existence of such a soul consist?
Particularist Revolution
Heideggerian politics abjures form; there are no Heideggerian regimes.3 The
political “form” that corresponds most closely to the revolution in historiz-
ing is sometimes referred to as a “conservative revolution” (Bourdieu 1991;
Fritsche 1999), but this term overstates the similarities between Heidegger and
other figures, parties, and movements on the right, and in doing so, again,
understates his outlandishness. This is not to limit the radical violence implied
by Heideggerian politics, but to clarify its extent and nature. Heideggerian
politics are not deferential in the slightest to established – that is, merely ontic
and, indeed, everyday – forms or regimes, to throne or altar.4 Heideggerian
politics are not backward looking in the sense of trying to revive a forgotten
or dying way of life, or even of trying to take such as a model to be followed.
Instead, Heideggerian politics consist in “radical suspicion,” driven by the ini-
tial attempt of anticipatory resoluteness to loosen up possibilities from the
layered-over, rationally ordered, or traditionally determined – in other words,
everyday – present. From this perspective, both the right and the left are impris-
oned by everyday formulations of ontic possibilities, the right being oriented
by tradition, the left by progressivist attempts to “liberate” the individual or
society from the shackles of particularist traditions in favor of universal, ratio-
nal, and thus implicitly measurable goals. Heideggerian politics aim, thus,
at “freedom” and may be well understood as a radical modification of the
Kantian sense implying freedom from both natural causal determination, on
the one hand, and cultural-conventional authority, on the other.5 Heideggerian
Western rationalism, and revive the desert it has made of late-modern existence – thus, Shariati,
Fardid, and Davari look to revitalize concealed, authentic Shi’ism whereas Aleksandr Dugin
summons a lost community of “archaic values” to be retrieved by means of a bloody purge of
“Westoxication” or “Americanism.” Heidegger himself envisioned the “inner truth and great-
ness” of National Socialism.
2
Thus the near-quietism, at times, of certain post-Heideggerians, such as Havel’s diagnosis of the
impersonalizing, dehumanizing character of technology that transcends the former distinction
between the Soviet East and capitalist West. Likewise, George Grant sees the dynamic rootless-
ness and violence of American liberal capitalism as perhaps more characteristic of the modern
project than communism.
3
Though compare Ceasar 2000, 205–10.
4
In this connection, notice Shariati’s resistance to the traditionalist clerisy in pre-revolutionary
Iran (Rahnema 1999).
5
Richard Velkley (2011) develops the connections between Kant and Heidegger.
politics do not, however – in the “Left Kantian” tradition of Marx – aim at the
universal and homogeneous condition, the political correlate of the universal
and apodictic veracity of reason. This is because, as Heidegger would see it, the
Left Kantian tradition is oriented by an understanding of reason that is for-
feited to the publicness of the everyday.6 Authentic politics on the Heideggerian
model retrieves and rescues the individuated particular from the homogeniza-
tion of such rational, generalizing everydayness. Heideggerian politics are as
particular as the manifestation of Being shared by the members of a commu-
nity in their moments of authentic, resolute anticipation of the possible future.
In the first place, Heideggerian politics are a politics of particularist revolution.
The seeming “conservatism” of Heideggerian politics comes from its radical
particularity, that is, its finitude that approaches nothingness. The recurrence
to the past takes place in response to, in furtherance of, the excavation of
covered-over future possibilities. These are “nontraditional” in the extreme,
stripping away every settled or conventional social arrangement in service to
the purest, simplest individuation of existence, nothing more than Dasein’s
existence. As Heidegger understands it, they will thus bear little resemblance
to the content of any conservative tradition, but they are not for this reason
utterly unmoored and creative. Here we see the “revolutionary” dimension
of the particularist revolution.7 As much as Marx, Heidegger envisions the
melting away and destruction of currently prevalent – “everything actually
existing” – political forms and structures.8 Heidegger calls the grounding of
established political orders, and therefore their legitimacy, into question, not
simply by referring to a higher standard that they fail to meet, but by deny-
ing the validity of every “actually existing” standard as such. The character of
historicity and the prospects for resolute, authentic historicity practically for-
bid any even notionally comforting return to recognizably legitimate sources
of political authority. This includes “progressive” standards as well. In reject-
ing empirically established orders, on the one hand, and rational standards by
which they might be evaluated, on the other, Heidegger does away with the
“means” by which the “progress” of any actual, factual political reform might
be empirically evaluated. When every everyday regime is thus as immeasurably
inauthentic as every other, gradual improvement or slight ameliorations are
impossible.
The characteristic elements of a radically particularist political ontology can
be enumerated:
1. There is no textual warrant for restricting Heidegger’s revolutionary
hermeneutical violence to a sanitized literary exercise, when what he
intends is the total theoretical-practical transformation of the everyday.
6
For a reading of Marx as a Left Kantian, see Yack 1992.
7
Aleksandr Dugin is likewise contemptuous of both the left and the right.
8
Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, “For a Ruthless Critique of Everything Actually Existing.”
Hermeneutics, as we have seen, refers to the use of tools and the elements
of encounters with others as much as it does to reading a book. Thanks
to the destruction of the division between the theoretical and the practi-
cal, politics cannot be understood as a distinct sphere, and neither can
theory be separated off as though to minimize its influence on practical
affairs.
2. Moderate, piecemeal reform of and compromise with existing institu-
tions and political arrangements are not adequate. A total rejection of
the currently dominant order of the everyday is necessary because the
everyday itself is so total and so completely shapes every disclosure of
Dasein, both, as we have seen, theoretical and practical. Compromise
in any degree entails submitting to the forsworn standards and orders
of the They and begets a recurrence of the dispersal and tranquilizing
confusion of everydayness. Thus, notice Fardid’s wariness of the Iranian
Revolution resolving into a new traditionalism (Rajaee 2007, 184).
3. In order to prevent any relaxation back into the comfort of everyday-
ness, revolutionary hardness must predominate over the softness of
compromise or moderation. This is the plain meaning of resoluteness –
anxious, reticent projecting – and corresponds to the sidelining of leisure
as tarrying, an inadequate response to the hustle and bustle of the They’s
chatter. To say this is not to forget or deny that resoluteness also means
openness or that it is most important to Heidegger’s thought for its
truth-disclosing character, but to clarify further exactly what Heidegger
thinks is involved in showing the truth and holding it open: hard, hard
toughness.
4. The first target in the particularist revolution is not a “foreign” enemy.
Instead, it calls for revolution within, a civil war which contests the char-
acter of one’s own heritage – “hermeneutical violence” – with (a) conser-
vative defenders of tradition and the status quo, and (b) progressives who
take their bearing by the very status quo and tradition they aim to surpass
and measure it according to present-at-hand standards. In this context,
what emerges as most striking in the documents where Heidegger’s own
Nazism is clearest is the extent to which he concerns himself with argu-
ing against his fellow Nazis’ interpretation of the German Revolution.9
The opening campaign is thus an “interpretive argument” with one’s
fellow hermeneuts, fighting over the text of one’s most distinctive past in
perpetual “communication and struggle” in order to pass on one’s heri-
tage to the future project to which the Heideggerian is in service.
5. In this fight, the future assumes a more important position than the past,
that is, the currently dominant understanding of the past. The genuine
past will be retrieved in its dynamism, in its possibilities before they
were inauthentically covered over. This past dynamism is shared by the
9
See especially the Introduction to Metaphysics and GA 94, 115, 135.
“present” throw into the future, a “reciprocative rejoinder.” To compare

this version of forward-leaping revolution to that envisioned by Marx, it
is important to stress that the Heideggerian revolution is just as radically
progressive, but it is more particularist than Marxism. It does not aim at
the universal and classless society, but instead summons a particular past
and leaps into a particular future over or beyond the occlusive present.10
6. In “repeating” a particular past possibility and so “choosing a hero,” one
does not endorse any iteration of existing political orders, but chooses an
unrealized possibility from the past to emulate. Adherence to this choice
is more important than the instantiation of any precise political form,
particularly as this is understood traditionally. In emulating such a hero,
one may follow him in a solicitous leap ahead of others into the noth-
ing. Repetition such as this charges beyond – and helps others follow
for themselves beyond – the everyday false clarity of regimes, parties,
and classes, past the normal horse trading and deal making of politics
and gutless, time-serving politicians, past administrative tedium, dismal
economics, and plutocracy. Authentic politics such as this is not based
on rights, entangled as they surely are with reflective, reifying rationality
that treats Dasein as though it were something present-at-hand.11
7. As a corollary of the foregoing refusal of normal party and group pol-
itics (as opposed to post-partisan group politics), Heideggerian politics
are not a class revolution. Such empirically rooted divisions as the dis-
tinction between the rich and the poor, the few and the many, or repub-
licans versus monarchists are irrelevant to the particularist revolution.
Every traditional political form that gives shape to the political prob-
lems is inadequately attuned to the dispensation of Being summoned by
Heidegger. The revolutionaries will enact a thorough rejection of prior
or existing political order, class structures, and their ontical alternatives.
They will be made up – in their essence – of the “nothings” of society,
not simply the lower class (either peasant or proletariat), but the essen-
tially déclassé. Those rejected from or otherwise disposed of by the social
order, the hardest of the hard, are the “nothings,” so to speak, with noth-
ing to lose. Heideggerian politics elevates those with none of the extrane-
ous, conventionally valued paraphernalia of normal, everyday life (jobs,
reputations, money, prospects, or concern about not having them). That
is, this is not a revolution led by the officer class, business elites, capital-
ist interests, dispossessed nobility, social democrats, or traditional clergy
of established religions. Neither, however, is it a proletarian revolution
in the sense envisioned by Marx, still too formed is this class by actually
10
Alexander Dugin exhibits this tendency rather clearly; consider his sympathy for “National
Bolshevism” after the fall of the Soviet Union (Dugin 2012, 136–7).
11
Consider in this connection the position that has been called “hermeneutic communism” by its
adherents (Vattimo and Zabala 2011).
existing arrangements and institutions. Anyone who is “something” has

no place in this vanguard of “armed bohemians,” in Konrad Heiden’s apt
and felicitous phrase.12
8. Perpetual instability is the mark of authentic politics. This is the final and
crucial point, and the juncture at which the second major inclination of
Heideggerian politics appears. The everyday is never dissolved; it does
not vanish at the first onset of authenticity. Rather, authenticity derives
its character from its perpetual – not permanent, but perpetual, ongoing,
and repetitious – rejection of the tranquility, stability, and sham perma-
nence of the settling-in everyday. Ever-present and thus ever-tempting,
the everyday might at almost any point, without constant vigilance,
assume once again its dominance. Dasein as Dasein is fallen, a fallen,
thrown existence; what is uncovered in authenticity is not the transfor-
mation or elimination of this, but its simple exposure.
One should therefore expect that “following” the revolution, the reestablish-
ment of order is the reestablishment of the conditions of the everyday. However,
a politics that genuinely exhibits the “factical ideal” of anticipatory resolute-
ness will again uncover unappreciated or misunderstood possibilities from the
papered-over vision of the future and will again summon up the authentic
undercurrent of the purportedly settled “official history” or leap again into the
future, violently deposing the former vanguard, now settling in to the upper
tiers of the new “officially revolutionary” regime. Here, then, is the reason for
distinguishing between the so-called conservative revolutionaries and the par-
ticularist revolution of Heideggerian politics. To the extent that the revolution
ends and settles into established forms (or makes bargains with elements, con-
servative or otherwise, of the previous regime), then to this extent the move-
ment is “conservative” and inauthentic.
The logic of this inclination of Heideggerian politics entails something akin
to perpetual revolution.13 The perpetual revolution is different from Trotsky’s
in that the “future” being aimed at is not merely a distant but nonetheless
universal and ostensibly rational condition, but is an ontic possibility that is
ever being transformed by being reappropriated to a radically particular, non-
generalizable future dispensation of Being, ontically informed by successive
different reappropriations from the once foregone but now vital past. Again,
the Heideggerian revolution does not aim, is not measured by, its instantiation
of any inherently generalizable principles – the exit from the state of nature
into civil society, the bestowal of rights equal to the dignity of every person,
or the struggle unto death of the incipient master and incipient slave, or, for
that matter, the legitimacy of descent from divinely sanctioned monarchs – but
12
Heiden 1969.
13
As noted in the introduction, this is a distinctive feature of the Iranian revolutionaries who draw
on Heidegger in their reinterpretation of Shi’ism, particularly Ahmad Fardid and Ali Shariati.
Compare Trotsky’s understanding of permanent revolution (Kolakowski 2005, 683–5).
rather constantly wrestles against the current and recurrent dominance of the
everyday by retrieving elements of the bygone, and essentially particular and
unique, past, thus determining their Being with reference to previously unex-
pected future possibilities. The Heideggerian revolution is perpetual because it
is, in its essence, hostile to the misplaced formalism inherent in the very notion
of regime, contract, and universalizability in general. To the extent that any
political, therefore ontic, order takes such a shape, the Heideggerian revolution
is committed to destroying it for the sake of liberating a communal existence
that ministers to Being rather than beings.
Quietist Awaiting
Quietist awaiting sets in when everydayness is seen to comprehend not just
“normal” politics but “revolutionary” politics as well. The everyday, though
fallen, is not “separated” from Being. Its fallenness is part of the constitutional
make-up of Dasein (along with thrownness and existence) and allows both
for the perpetuity of the revolution on Heideggerian grounds and for its dis-
solution in favor of a particularist, quietist awaiting. The latter constitutes the
second distinctive inclination of Heideggerian politics. The quietist awaiting
is a response to the following problem inherent in the perpetual revolution: if
the normalization of politics requires everyday means – that is, the discursive
communication of Dasein among Dasein – and thus is inevitably fallen, then
why should the same not be said of the revolutionary, violent, and destruc-
tive means by which the revolution is conducted? Is there no prospect of the
everyday “routinization” (to import a congenial term from Max Weber) of
revolutionary violence? Is this not precisely what the nihilistic domination of
technology entails? The creativity of destruction gives way – thanks to the
necessity of Dasein’s constitutional fallenness – to the banality of destruction?
Thanks to the hard logic of Heidegger’s “formal indications,” the structure of
which is so contentlessly formal as to allow or permit numerous contradictions
to exist within it, the nothingness of the everyday is the route to the interroga-
tion of Being.
This exposes the truth that in Heidegger, the inauthentic is prior to the
authentic.14 The authenticity of anticipatory resoluteness does not wipe away
inauthenticity. If the “hermeneutical violence” in play is a cleansing fire, then
the phoenix of this tale is everydayness. Authenticity can only “be” because
it “seizes upon” inauthenticity.15 It needs it. Because authenticity abjures oth-
erworldly ressentiment, it does not refuse the nothingness that pervades the
meaningless everydayness; it grabs on to it in order to apprehend the truth
14
See Simon Critchley’s recasting of Heidegger with a view to eliminating the Nazi elements of his
thought – a forthright transformation of certain parts of Heidegger, not simply a willful denial
of unpleasant elements (Critchley 2008).
15
See Carman 2000, 13–28; 2003, 264–314.
of Being. Authenticity does not consist in the return to a prelapsarian state of

goodness; it is as fallen as inauthenticity. This, again, is the hidden promise of
nihilism.
The politics of a quietist awaiting have certain distinct features that may
also be enumerated:
1. The politics of particularist, quietist awaiting begin with the sense that
the revolutionary violence that destabilizes regime after regime is partici-
pating in the fallen, goal-oriented, incipiently teleological politics of the
everyday circumspective technico-practical. It thus sees political violence
as being just as technically manipulative as toolmaking or craftsman-
ship. Given the incapacity of authentic politics to resist such domination
by any political means other than sharing in it, and given the impossibil-
ity of authentically “measuring” and so rationally limiting such sharing,
a Heideggerian politics of apolitical, quietist pacifism or indifference fol-
lows. The quietist retreats from the violence of inauthentic politics to
await such a dispensation of Being that the technico-practical need not
succumb to the mastery and domination of beings, should this ever be
possible.
2. When the everyday is already so fallen that revolutionary violence is
equally inauthentic but not infinitely worse, then the Heideggerian will
refuse to indict one everyday regime in preference for another on the
question of oppression or domination. In the homogenizing glare of pub-
lic everydayness, political orders constructed on the basis of the preser-
vation of contract are just as oppressive as regimes modeled on bringing
about the final equality of humanity in its species-being. Likewise, indus-
trial agriculture is essentially the same as killing people in gas chambers.
The differences between regimes are so obscured as to permit the quietist
Heideggerian to think of liberal democracy as being on a par with totali-
tarian communism, to say nothing of other regimes.
3. Quietist awaiting discerns that the collusion of the everyday
technico-practical use of articles and the present-at-hand is universal in
potential and thus global in scope. Though it is neutral as to regime
type, the quietist retains a preference for localist and other expressions
of particularism that resist incorporation into the juggernaut alliance
of the theoretical present-at-hand and the technico-practical ready-to-
hand. Quietist awaiting thus hopes for replenishment in the encounter of
West with East, and in the meantime nourishes localist redoubts, refuges
against the universal and homogeneous tide.
A politics of quietist awaiting is as authentically Heideggerian as a politics of
perpetual revolution and is similarly a response to the permanent condition
of Dasein’s fallenness. Quietist awaiting recoils in horror from the means of
revolution as much as it does from the means of everyday politics, seeing in
both the “gorgon’s face” of the worst excesses of rationalist mastery and domi-
nation, prefigured in the circumspective technico-practical (see Grant 1969,
111).16 Revolution itself proves incapable of slipping the noose of everyday-
ness and succumbs to the grisliness of fallen humanity. Quietist awaiting is
an authentically apolitical response to inauthentic politics in the absence of
authentic politics.
Both of these inclinations share a characteristic double-take on everydayness.

Everydayness is, in the first place, radically inconsequential, worthless, and
dreary. It represents everything that is to be despised about human existence.
But in the second place, it stands for the only fragile path available to Dasein for
reopening the question of Being. It is, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, both the
necessary starting place for philosophy and the chief obstacle to its undertaking.
This peculiar doubleness begets, eventually, the two political inclinations char-
acteristic of the Heideggerian. First, the paltriness and evident meaninglessness
of everydayness encourage the expectation that it may be somehow purged,
swept aside, done away with. Its nothingness goads Dasein to destroy it in favor
of a more authentic existence. Yet everydayness also invites resigned contempt,
a quietist endorsement of the status quo. It cannot be done away with, Dasein
discovers. What is more, it remains our only altogether backward access to the
most important questions as Being may be apprehended first through the noth-
ing. Everydayness cannot, with a view to these most important questions, be
meaningfully improved, even through a total revolution.
Is one of these inclinations more Heideggerian than the other? Does one
comprehend the other? As we have seen, the quietist inclination seems to com-
prehend the revolutionary inclination. It follows the revolution and thus com-
prehends the limits of revolution. Might one not, then, just skip the revolution?
Possibly, but the quietist inclination cannot decry the revolution, inasmuch as
the current order is in no ontologically meaningful sense “better” than the rev-
olutionary condition or the goals at which the revolution aims. Moreover, the
quietist inclination without being preceded by the revolutionary inclination
might be indistinguishable from a mere conservatism, a mere instinct to pre-
serve what is, the way it is.
Heidegger and Political Thought

The principal representatives of the tradition of political philosophy – Plato,
for example, or Aristotle, Machiavelli, or Locke, just to mention a few – the
16
Heidegger’s quietist legacies are perhaps still more varied than his revolutionary influences and
include more self-conscious critiques of Heidegger, or at least parts of Heidegger. Vaclav Havel,
George Grant, Christian Heideggerians, and Heidegger’s American influence more broadly fit
into this group (on the latter, see Woessner 2010).
great thinkers, present doctrines that have both cosmological and psychologi-
cal elements, along with extensive discussion of prudential considerations that
speak to the possibilities and character of civic life, human happiness, human
excellence, statesmanship, and the practice of philosophy itself. These bodies of
thought, in addition to their disquisitions on the nature of reality, are full of
nuanced, subtle, and penetrating analysis of the psyche in numerous permuta-
tions and political settings, its longings, revulsions, and glories. While Heidegger’s
teaching is similarly comprehensive in its claims, the rich chiaroscuro of psycho-
logical breadth and acuity to which the tradition of political philosophy and
its accompanying poetic auxiliaries gave expression is rendered in the starker
hues of the dichotomy of disquiet and everydayness. The entire contexture of
“everyday” life – its joys, pleasures, longings, ambitions, deceptions, cruelties,
and varieties of scope and scale – is reduced to the broad pathos of the desire
for comfort, specified as familiarity, constancy, or publicness. Conversely, this
dreary, numbing whole by which we are ordinarily dominated is escaped from,
in a manner of speaking, in our passionate confrontation with “limit situations,”
moments of reversal, contradiction, or confusion, what Heidegger would express
as the Nothing.
Heidegger, though, is expressly limiting his investigation into human exis-
tence with a view to the broader ontological inquiry; that is, he does not pro-
fess to be offering a comprehensive account of human life. The psychological
dimension in Heidegger is contracted to that element that is relevant to the
all-consuming question, the question of Being, experienced as the confronta-
tion with the Nothing in its guise as the acolyte of Being. This is why it is so
important to appreciate Heidegger’s insistence that he is not providing an eth-
ics, philosophical anthropology, or political philosophy: it is only by seeing
the limits he places on his own investigations and claims that we can grasp his
relevance for politics.
The plausibility of Heidegger’s approach depends, however, on the initial
diagnosis that the cause of our civilizational calamity – the vapid decadence
of the fin de siècle, the ghastly horror of the First World War, the economic
ruin of the years following, the terror of the Holocaust, the total collapse
and partitioning of Germany in the Second World War, and the peace settle-
ment entrenching “bourgeoicracy” forever in an atomic twilight – is our alien-
ation from Being understood as other than presence. Restated, it depends on
the grasp of anxiety, distress, disquiet, perplexity, or terror as the disclosive
moods, the human experiences that most illuminate Being. How can this claim
be anything other than self-grounding? To what prior apprehension does it
refer itself in order to be grasped as true? Nothing: there can be no such
prior reference. It needs to be argued for persuasively. All of Heidegger’s onto-
logical claims depend on their reference to this level of our shared experi-
ence, to our grasp of what has manifested to us. The requirement to refer
back to us as Dasein holds regardless of whether we are considering so-called
early Heidegger, when his investigations are more evidently oriented by the
analytic of Dasein, or late Heidegger, where the Seinsgeschichte attains more

prominence.17
The priority of disquiet needs to be assessed along with the claim that our
normal immersion in the world is dominated by “everydayness,” namely, the
orientation toward time that privileges the comfort, reliability, regularity, con-
stancy, and familiarity of the “present” above all. Again, this claim needs to
be distinguished from the general purport of phenomenology, Heideggerian
phenomenology included, to refer scientific and other theoretical claims back
to the lived world or pretheoretical activity (practice, praxis, dealings, what
have you). Heidegger’s claim is more specific than this; his claim is that the-
ory is derivative from these other currents and dealings of our technical and
practical activities inasmuch as it is oriented by the presumed fluency of our
ends with our practices that is betokened by “familiarity” and “constancy.” Is
this true? Again, the point is not to assess whether Heidegger has provided an
adequate “anthropology” of “a central phenomenon in man,” but whether his
proposition, that human life is normally inclined toward comfort because we
are disguising the truth of our existence from ourselves, explains obstacles to
relating to Being tolerably well.
The foregoing discussion points to what is perhaps the deepest ambiguity in
Heidegger’s ontology, or more precisely, in the meaning of Heidegger’s ontol-
ogy for human life. This ambiguity may be posed as a question: are we or are
17
Heidegger writes in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, reflecting back on the fundamental
ontology of Being and Time:
Every page in this book was written solely with a view to the fact that since antiquity the
problem of Being was interpreted on the basis of time in a wholly incomprehensible sense and
that time always announced the subject. With a view to the connection of this question to time,
with a view to the question concerning Being in general, it is first a matter of bringing out the
temporality of Dasein, not in the sense that is now worked out with any theory, but rather in
the sense that, in a wholly determined problematic, the question concerning human Dasein will
be posed. – This whole problematic in Being and Time, which treats Dasein in man, is no philo-
sophical anthropology. For that is much too narrow, much too preliminary. I believe that there
is a problem here of a kind which hitherto has not been brought up as such, a problem which
has been determined by means of the question: If the possibility of the understanding of Being is
itself to be possible, and with it the possibility of the transcendence of man, and with it the pos-
sibility of the formative comporting toward beings and of the historical happening in the world
history of man, and if this possibility has been grounded in an underworld history of man, and
if this possibility has been grounded in an understanding of Being, and if this ontological under-
standing has been oriented in some sense with respect to time, then the task is: To bring out the
temporality of Dasein with reference to the possibility of the understanding of Being. And it is
with respect to this that all problems are oriented. In one direction, the analysis of death has
the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, but not of producing an altogether
final and metaphysical thesis concerning the essence of death. The analysis of anxiety does not
have as its sole function the making-visible of a central phenomenon in man, but instead it has
the function of preparing the question: On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein
itself is it possible that the human being in general can have been placed before something like
the Nothing? (GA 3 283–4; KPM 198–9).
we not at home in the world?18 For example, even in anxiety, which discloses
the nothing, we are in fact conducted to Being, which initially from our per-
spective, the perspective of beings, is not a thing, that is, is nothing. That is,
even in our confrontation with the most disturbing, at our most uncanny, we
find ourselves in the “draft” of Being, as Heidegger refers to it in Was Heisst
Denken? The problem, such as it is, is that even when we are not at home in
our surroundings, say, or in our contemporary age abandoned by Being, we are
the being that thinks Being, and so cannot but be distinguished by this. And
such distinction is, whether Heidegger likes it or not, at least slightly “com-
forting” or pleasing, and at some level it testifies to a “correspondence” that
we cannot refuse for any good reason. Even anxiety “resonates” in a time of
anxiety and destitution. There appears to be no getting around the original
Parmenidean insight that being and thinking are somehow the same: and this
is the original source of what Heidegger calls “everydayness” and identifies as
the privileging of presence.
18
Capobianco considers this matter in a discussion that ranges from Being and Time through to
Heidegger’s later work, finding that Heidegger resolves on a more “homey” understanding of
Dasein’s situation in the world (Capobianco 2010, 52–69).
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Index
Adorno, T., 58n22, 65n5, 167n19 Frankfurt School, 3n2, 65n5

Agamben, G., 141n32 Fried, G., 5n8, 21n42, 27n13, 27n14, 181n35
Arendt, H., 73n26, 99n19 Fritsche, J., 6n12, 18, 18n36, 27n12, 27n14,
Aristotle, 73, 76, 78, 83, 95, 99, 102, 115, 27–28, 57n18, 62, 96n11, 97n15, 99n20,
132, 143 100n21, 105n34, 169, 177n32, 180n34,
Augustine, 33n28, 95n9 181n34, 181n35, 186
Blitz, M., 24n1, 64n4, 75n31, 101n25, Gadamer, H.-G., 6n9, 15n30, 19n37, 26n8,
102n27, 182n36 53n13, 54n15, 71n22, 79n41, 84n48,
Bourdieu, P., 19n37 95n9, 116n49, 153n2, 153–54
Gillespie, M., 82n45
Chacon, R., 59n22, 73n27 Grant, G., 9n18, 119n1, 186n2, 193, 193n16
Cohen, 39n35
Habermas, J., 26n9, 58n22, 65n5
Dallmayr, F., 171–72 Havel, V., 9, 9n19, 186n2, 193n16
Davari, R., 8, 17, 186n1 Hegel, G., 15n30, 51n11, 95n11, 98n17, 99n19,
Derrida, 27n14 101, 113, 120, 137, 139n30, 154n6
Descartes, 78, 101 Heracleitus, 25
Dilthey, W., 40, 101 Herder, J., 37, 101
Dostal, R., 66n8, 96n12, 106n35, 116n49, Hitler, A., 27, 169, 180n34, 182n35
181n35 Hobbes, T., 61, 94, 99, 101, 114
Dreyfus, H., 19n38, 66n8, 77n37, 79–80, Hölderlin, F., 4, 5n8
80n42, 85n50, 99n20, 103n29, 105n34, Husserl, E., 31, 32n25, 33n26, 33–34, 38n34,
116n50 40n36, 40–41, 45n3, 44–46, 52n13, 73,
Dugin, A., 10n21, 92n3, 186n1, 187n7, 189n10 78, 79n41, 79–80, 82, 108n39, 118, 132,
139, 143n35
Fardid, A., 8n15, 92n3, 186n1, 190n13
Farias, V., 10n20, 18, 27n14 Jonas, H., 8n17, 26
Faye, E., 5n8, 6n12, 18, 18n36, 27, 27n11,
27n13, 27n14, 28n15, 57n18, 62 Kant, I., 38, 73n28, 93n4, 114, 124n6, 124n7,
Fichte, G., 37, 39 138n30, 139n30, 138–40, 186n5, 186–87
Fichte, J., 39n35, 59n24, 61n25 Kierkegaard, S., 95n9, 154n6
Figal, G., 30n21, 66n8, 92n2, 97n16, 108n39, Kisiel, T., 22n42, 28n16, 31n23, 35n30,
165n14 52n13, 70n21
213
214 Index
Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 5n7, 5n8 Riefenstahl, L., 3

Lask, E., 38n34, 40, 42, 59n24 Rorty, R., 66n8, 67n8, 116n50
Levinas, E., 26, 26n9, 30 Rosen, S., 15n32, 45n3, 58n19
Locke, J., 58, 94, 99, 101, 193 Rousseau, J.-J., 11n23, 66, 94, 101
Löwith, K., 19n39, 25n5, 27n14, 29n18,
59n24, 68n12, 153n2 Schelling, F., 37, 138n30
Luther, M., 95n9, 177 Schiller, F., 101, 138n30, 139n30
Shariati, A., 7n13, 186n1, 186n4,
Machiavelli, N., 193 190n13
Malick, T., 3 Socrates, 13n25, 14n28, 13–15, 17, 73n27,
Marcuse, H., 58n22, 65n5 115, 122
Marx, K., 61, 67, 187, 189 Spinoza, B., 61, 101
Marx, W., 19n39, 73n28 Stern, G., 65n5
Montesquieu, C.-L., 37, 101 Strauss, L., 13n25, 13–14, 14n28,
15n30, 17n34, 22, 28n15,
Naess, A., 8, 8n17 39n35, 84n48, 101n26, 138,
Nancy, J.-L., 25n3, 25n4, 98n17, 171n26 138n26, 155n7
Natorp, P., 33, 33n26, 51–53 Strong, T., 11n22, 24, 24n1, 26n8
Newell, W., 61n25, 122n4, 154n5, 174n29
Nietzsche, F., 2, 13n25, 13–14, 61, 67, 71n23, Taminiaux, J., 118
73n27, 93n4, 106n35, 113, 122, 122n4, Taylor, C., 51n11, 66n8, 77n37, 116n50
148, 150, 183 Tocqueville, A., 106n35
Tugendhat, E., 63n2, 108n39
O’Connor, F., 4n6
Ott, H., 27n14 Van Buren, J., 25n2, 30n21, 33n29, 62n26,
70n21
Pascal, B., 95n9 Velkley, R., 6n11, 11n23, 14n28, 17n34
Patocka, J., 9n19 Villa, D., 61n25, 73n26
Percy, W., 4n6
Plato, 8, 15n30, 25n4, 69, 73n27, 99, 102, Weber, M., 191
110, 119, 148, 193 Weinberger, J., 4n5
Pöggeler, O., 15n31, 19n39, 27n14, Windelband, W., 38–41, 43
52n13, 63n2
Polt, R., 5n8 Yack, B., 68, 101n24, 167n18, 187n6
Rickert, H., 40, 42, 46 Zuckert, C., 5n8, 14n28, 15n30, 21n42,
Rickey, C., 17n34, 94n7, 100n22, 134n23 27n14, 102n27, 116n49, 153n2

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Heidegger and Politics

In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains

Alexander S. Duff was educated in the humanities and history at

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

First published 2015

Introduction: Heidegger’s Challenge 1

References to works of Martin Heidegger are provided parenthetically in the

BH Becoming Heidegger, ed. T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Evanston,

xii List of Abbreviations

P Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

predicaments and fundamental character of politics in our time, at the dawn of

Heidegger presents himself as a philosopher of loss, of absence, of “radical fini-

Heidegger’s appeal is that he presents himself as a philosopher of finitude to an

Objections to Reading Heidegger

Heideggerian Political Legacies

Fardid identifies “Westoxication” (Gharbzadegi – “Weststruckness”),15 which

husk of technological rationality, a mode of relating to the world that tran-

Platonic, Aristotelian, Hobbesian, or Rousseauan way); some refer to “truth,”

The Ambiguous Place of Politics in Heidegger

as a subject proves to be central to his political import: in Heidegger, the most

The Challenge of Heidegger

hence obscures a more primordial openness to the question of Being itself. To

or disposed to such resonances, and for its destitution is therefore open to

The Methods and Limits of This Study

and the ascendecy of inauthentic, “everyday” vapidity be – on the logic that

our disclosedness, in particular our inability to avoid expressing our disclosures

My hermeneutic method is, in some sense, simplicity itself; in subordinating my

What’s the Matter with Ethics? Ethics and

Perhaps the chief difficulty in understanding Heidegger’s relevance for politics,

Heidegger scholarship.6 This points to the further notion that if Heidegger’s

such as determining what ethics as distinguished from, say, biology, psychol-

coordination.20 To put this more sharply: any number of philosophical figures

The Natorp Critique and the Priority of Distress

nonetheless were concerned to address themselves to Natorp’s critique.22

Phenomenology thus cannot be merely descriptive, Heidegger claims.

standpoints,” or as Heidegger rephrases this goal in his “Comment on Karl

philosophy. A philosophy that is not radically suspicious enough of the cul-

it should not, prior to the most searching, radically thoroughgoing critique,

Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Value

In Heidegger’s estimation, his contemporaries’ expression of the way that eth-

conducting the investigation. To be primordial, an investigation must consider

system the “theorizer” – the investigating subject or consciousness – itself.33

The Neo-Kantian Acceptance of the Problem

empirical data, whether that be external stimuli or internal biochemical brain

On the Breakdown of Neo-Kantian System

(Beurteilung). It needs to be shown that evaluations cannot simply be derived

It is necessary that philosophy derive standards that may plausibly apply to

Surpassing Ethics: The Formal Indication of Existence

Heidegger’s Contemporaries and the Problem

the basic inadequacy of theory, but in Heidegger’s reading, his Psychology of

be accounting. In his “Comment” on Jaspers, Heidegger expands on his ear-

inadequacy of theory for supplying or discerning such a standard, what might

Jaspers and Limit-Situations

amounts to standing within limit-situations, only because all this is initially

appropriation of Jaspers’ most fundamental intention and the superior way

In the “Comment,” formal indication allows Heidegger to make Jaspers’

History and the Future Past

What is uncovered there is not “the ‘I’ as something located in a region, as an

The Sources of Heideggerian Politics

the shocking, intentionally bracing character of what Heidegger is trying to

only initially in redetermining what is and the attendant boundaries of the

The Ambiguous Everyday: On the Emergence of

Of the treatments Heidegger gives of the emergence of theory from prac-

extent but inextinguishably, it is a possibility of a community, and indeed rep-

or shallowly rejected. I will argue, then, that on Heideggerian p rinciples, both