Iain,
Your adherence to the Derridean school of reading Heidegger has blinded you
the connection Heidegger saw between historicity and Nazism. While you are
correct in parts, the whole of your conclusion is misguided, particularly
in your implicit equation of metaphysics and historicity.
You have in your posts consistently followed the *later* Heidegger in
equating metaphysics with a theory of being that holds that being is
constant presence. As my recent posts on Heideggerian science were in part
meant to point out, Heidegger never (well, at least after 1919) believed
that. Being was always potentiality. This was the essence of his new
metaphysics, something he never abandoned his entire life, even if later he
would not call it metaphysics but rather poetic thinking.
Historicity is a way of describing how being is potentiality. Dasein
temporalizes itself as its history (the unity of the three exstaces of
time). History can take on different meanings depending upon the direction
in which Dasein projects itself on its possibilities. Only if being is
potentiality (possibility) can it take on different meanings. Historicity
is merely the possibility that being can be otherwise. A metaphysics that
holds that being is historical (i.e., possibility) cannot be the same as
one that holds that being is constant presence, even if Heidegger will say
that the latter is possible only on the basis of the former. Heidegger's
"Destruktion" of the tradition is meant to allow the ground of being
(possibility) to appear and let it take on a new meaning.
Historicity enacts itself in the resolution of the moment of vision; it
enacts itself as a possible meaning of being. The joke among Heidegger's
early students, which Loewith repeats, is that Heideggerian ethics is "I am
resolved, but upon what I don't know." The "what" of the resolution can
only be answered by the resolution itself. Loewith (and other of
Heidegger's students - Strauss, Jonas) drew the conclusion that historicity
meant to resolve upon one's time, thus Heidegger's "decisionism."
Decisionism follows if one believes that only the resolve alone gives
meaning to being because being itself was essentially possibility and thus
unable to give a definite answer itself.
I do not agree in the whole with Loewith's analysis, in large part because
it cannot explain Heidegger's Nazism as anything but a subjective, willful
resolve, which we are free to ignore (you resolve on one thing, I will
resolve on another). I think the reason is deeper. He wrote in a letter
to Marcuse after the war that he thought he saw in the Nazi revolution a
metaphysical revolution, which is to say, a change in the meaning of being.
He thought National Socialism was the authentic moment of vision which had
reached the historical core of Dasein and could project a new meaning of
being. Why? Without going into much details, the clue lies in Being and
Time. Authentic resolve is projecting oneself on one's ownmost
being-guilty, from which Heidegger concludes it is holding oneself open to
the possibility that being can change. The resolution knows that it is
never complete, and maintains itself in this lack. Of the major political
movement of the time, National Socialism was distinguished in its
milleniarism by beieving itself to be a "1000-year Reich." That's a long
time, but certainly not the end of history, as both liberal progressivism
and Communism in their different ways hold their own truth to be. In
essence, National Socialism knows that its being is finite, and it holds
itself in that being. If Heidegger later came to the conclusion that
Nazism was the worst of metaphysics, it was in part because he felt that
the party and its leaders betrayed that understanding, especially in its
efforts to ground itself in "biologism" and racism, which is antithetical
to being as possibility.
>From this I would say that there is nothing "strange," as you put it, about
the connection Heidegger drew between historicity and his commitment to
National Socialism. It is for this reason I have always found odd
Schuermann's and LaCoue-Labarthe's attempt to "save" Heidegger on the basis
of the historicity of being, as if that could definitely overturn his
"metaphysical entanglement." Heidegger never believed in the metaphysics
>from which Schuermann would wish to free him, and furthermore consistently
held to the historicity of being towards which Schuermann would draw him.
Heidegger did not abandone National Socialism on the basis of a "turn" in
his thinking; National Socialism, the party, abandoned him.
We will stand nowhere, where the flamethrower has not completed through
annihilation the great cleansing. - Ernst Juenger
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