Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Heidegger’s politics: from interpersonal life
to new generationality
My brief “beyond ‘God’: danger of authentic life” follows a lot of discussion (unmentioned) where a reader who was interested in political extremism associated that with theologian Judith Wolfe’s article on Heidegger as appar-
ently dangerous to neo-Scholasticism, as if—for the extremist—Heidegger shows solidarity with extremism because he’s supposedly anti-modern
(he isn’t), then also anti-Catholic (he isn’t).
My discussion with the extremist sympathizer evinced for me some constructive themes of Heidegger’s thinking which I want to share here.
These are extracted from comments elsewhere, so some of the passages here may seem to be non sequiturs:
1 | Being and Time was a call to care at an interpersonal level, relative to one’s potential for authentic life, which is integrally communal, in his technical senses of “Mitsein” and “Mitdasein.”
2 | Being with others is integral to his understanding—and understanding of understanding relative to personal disposition (“state-of-mind”) and communicative interaction (“discourse”).
3 | State-of-mind there is relative to situational interaction, not egoistic expression. Understanding is engaged in interaction. Discourse is serving mutual (Mitdasein) interest in gaining shared understanding.
4 | Not only is openness integral to Heidegger’s thinking, but evincing openness—the rhetoric of “showing in saying”—is integral because teaching is always his aim, not expounding a “Heideggerian philosophy” (which he disavowed in his “Seminar on ‘Time and Being’,” 1962).
5. | Though Heidegger’s critical phenomenology is a conceptual therapeutic, it’s no more negate-ive than psychotherapy negates its client’s way of life. Repair relative to the possibilities and deep background of one’s life is not about destruction. Philosophy began as a therapeutic (Socratic teaching), which was disillusional through being pedagogical.
6 | Deconstruction of metaphysicalism is not destruction of real metaphysics, as Heidegger makes clear in “Overcoming Metaphysics” (The End of Philosophy):
7 | philosophy as therapeutic thinking, then as therapeutic teaching. Heidegger was about therapeutic conceptual teaching for the sake of originary inceptions by future conceptual venturing.
8 | He had reformation of higher education in mind, 1920, and that back-
grounds all of his lecture courses throughout the ‘20s. By inference, that could have national implications because reform to philosophy (the encompassing discipline for all others in the university) could mean reform for higher edu-
cation generally, which could have national implications. But there was no national-level interest expressed by his philosophically immanent concerns
for renewing philosophy.
9.1 | However, I’m grateful to Wolfe for discovering something a decade ago: The phrase “inner truth and greatness of the national socialist movement” (cited by Heidegger sarcastically near the end of his 1935 lectures on meta-
physics, to satisfy nazi monitors in his lecture hall) was a phrase used by Rudolf Bultmann (Christian theologian and close friend of Heidegger) in a letter to Heidegger in 1932. That is, the notion of national socialism could be Christian, which gels with the fact that many senses of nationality and socialism were going around. That fact is detailed in a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic.
9.2 | For Heidegger’s part, his sense of national socialism was born from his early Freiburg student years under Paul Natorp, who had a Romantic idea of socialism. Natorp was a disciple of Hermann Cohen at Marburg, who hosted the Marburg School of philosophy. Cohen sought to advance a Kantian conception of socialism (the Categorical Imperative as basis for the moral, universal nature of sociality).
9.3 | Young Heidegger, the future priest, grew up in the Catholic era of Pope Leo XIII (the namesake of the current pope). Leo originated the movement called “Catholic Social Teaching” as overt resistance to the growing appeal of Marxist communism in the late 19th century. Indeed, the origin of Christianity in the region of Antioch was as a social welfare organization.
9.4 | But the notion of nationality which Heidegger taught during the nazi period was Hölderlin’s, which was inspired by the French Revolution, inspired by the American Revolution.
This posting is part of my project on Heidegger and reading political times.
