How can any conscientious hermeneuticist discount the sitz
im leben? Heidegger, qua text, arises from a specific historical
context; and ideology (along with sex & religion) is precisely
where the rubber meets the road. To treat H exclusively as
a self-referential text, were indeed to venture into a pathless wood.
Inter-war Germany was a revolutionary context par excellence.
Through default of the traditional ruling classes, (the Wilhelminian discredited
with the first World War, and the bourgeoisie, the Weimar regime)
power, German Destiny, devolved on the popular class, wage earners and
peasants. The inauthentic option was in evading a position: remaining aloof
or emigrating. And the only options were Popular Progressivism
( e.g. Sparticism)or Popular Reactionism (e.g. Nazism). Clearly Germany's true historical
destiny lay with the former, and H's choice was mistaken. However he
was correct in "chosing"; and the rhetoric of German fascism
played on very authentic themes of popular traditionalism, German Dasein.
And it was, surely, these Spenglerian, Jungerian themes that H was chosing,
that he conceived of as "the great truth of the movement", not uber alles,
lebensraum,... genocide.
But then, having made a wrong choice, wrong path, instead of
chosing again (e.g. resistance) he abdicated that part of being,
thereby rendering his ownmost existentially inauthentic - the
famous "turn".
I only offer this as an example of interpretive method, my facts
are certainly subject to correction. The crux is to discover a less
ambivalent reference point from which to productively approach
the text. Perhaps the Arendt correspondence will also prove useful
but it's hard to see how anything could equal the hermeneutical
fruitfullness of his ideological theme.
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