Philosophy and Nazism in Heidegger

‘The struggle for being’

Abstract

The objective of this research is to deepen into the testimony of Karl Löwith about his meeting with Heidegger in Rome in 1936, where the latter confirms that his affiliation to Nazism is narrowly vinculated to his philosophy. We intend here to show two basic points: 1) that Heidegger was involved with the Nazi movement before his rectorship; and that his philosophy or thought cannot be divorced from the analysis that the ‘young conservatives’ are making of the historical and political problem that Germany, Europe and the West represent before the clear horizons of civilizing globalization the world presents since the First World War. For us, the revision of the entire Western thought that Heidegger has carried on cannot be disjoined from its own time. In addition, we will explain that Heidegger’s criticism of the illustrated modernity and its fundamental ontological and metapolitical problem, or ‘struggle for the being’, belongs essentially to the political order of his basic thought. His philosophy cannot be dissociated from his politics. We also point out that there is a pronounced confusion between ‘cultural nation’ and ‘political nation’. In fact, Being and time is the magisterial work of the ontological reduction of the political nation to the cultural nation, having beginning this reduction of the infinite to the finite, of the universality to the being-there, with the philosophical and political criticism to the modern subjectivity, to the individual, to the person and to the liberty, in order to make an expedited room for the Reich...