Heidegger’s decision

Rudigert Safranski ( Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil ) makes it clear that Heidegger saw his Nazi affiliation as an application of his philosophical stance. For Heidegger, “Decision as a ‘pure’ act is the primary aspect, that jerk that man gives himself in order to jump out of his customary track. The ‘wherefore’ of the decision is, by comparison, no more than the trigger releasing the emergence of the force of the upturn of the entire Dasein . For Heidegger it is the They that asks the concerned questions about the ‘wherefore,’ that is afraid of the decision and therefore tarries at the weighing of the ‘possibilities,’ reduces them by talk, and ‘has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision.’ . . . This shying away from decision is, to Heidegger, ‘guilty’” (p. 237).

Many of these themes from Sein und Zeit reappear in Heidegger’s first public speech after his appointment as Rector of Freiburg.

The occasion was a memorial ceremony for the World War I German soldier Leo Schlageter who “had performed bombing outrages against the French occupying forces in the Ruhr and had therefore been court-martialed and executed.” For nationalist Germans Schlageter was a martyr. And Heidegger was a nationalist.

Safranski summarizes Heidegger’s speech: Heidegger “depicts Schlageter as a figure who reveals what it means, in terms of concrete history and politics, to encounter the mysdter of Being, of that which is . . . Schlageter, Heidegger argues, suffered the ‘most difficult’ death. Not in common combat, not carried and shielded by a community, but alone, wholly ‘thrown back’ upon himself, in ‘failure . . . . Schlageter realizes the existential ideal of Being and Time, he ‘accepts’ death as ‘that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped.’”

He gained strength for this death from the mountains and trees of the Vaterland . Shlageter “followed the destiny he had chosen and that had chosen him. As Heidegger expressed it, “Put up helpless to face the rifles, the hero’s inner gaze soared up above the rifle muzzles, over to the day and to the mountains of his homeland, in order that, with his gaze on the Alemannic land, he might die for the German nation and its Reich” (p. 242).