Overcoming Metaphysics, Overcoming Politics. Martin Heidegger’s Path to and from National Socialism Cover Image

Przezwyciężenie metafizyki, przezwyciężenie polityki. Martina Heideggera droga do i od narodowego socjalizmu
Overcoming Metaphysics, Overcoming Politics. Martin Heidegger’s Path to and from National Socialism

Author(s): Radosław Strzelecki
Subject(s): Politics, Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Sociology of Politics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Martin Heidegger; Politics; Nazism; Evil

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to equally pinpoint the philosophical origins of Martin Heidegger’s entry into the Nazi movement and the thinker’s subsequent break with political involvement. Heidegger’s path to and from National Socialism should be apprehended not only through the philosopher’s biography but, above all, within the broader framework of the process of the development of his understanding of politics as an area of being set apart and accommodated by Western metaphysics, which marks the fulfillment of the essence of metaphysics as a forgetting of being. Heidegger’s philosophy has been repeatedly diagnosed (cf., e.g., Löwith, Adorno) as deeply linked to the fascist worldview; the line of reasoning taken up in this paper insists, on the contrary, on the integrity of the ethical reasoning behind Heidegger’s work, which emphasizes, concerning politics, its character of exploiting being, in the same way as it uniformizes people and transforms them into a resource. The conclusion, therefore, reveals the profoundly anti-fascist overtones of Heidegger’s writings from 1936–1946 and, simultaneously, underscores a worrying indifference to Heidegger’s relationship to totalitarian and non-totalitarian political systems.

  • Issue Year: 2022
  • Issue No: 69
  • Page Range: 57-75
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Polish