The Sheild of Achilles: Nationalist Seinsvergessenheit and Heidegger's Heimat

Abstract

This thesis concerns the highly contested relationship between Martin Heidegger's articulation of authentic Dasein and the nationalism of some of Heidegger's contemporaries. While granting their shared hostility to liberalism, "levelling down," cosmopolitanism, and materialism, this thesis concludes that Heidegger's pursuit of an authentic temporal and spatial relation to Being is impeded by this nationalism. From this thesis, a Heideggerian conception of authenticity emerges which has certain admirable qualities - leading us away from dishonest or propagandistic historical myth-making and from a chauvinistic deification of one's national inheritance at the expense of curiosity about anything different. However, this thesis also highlights the dangers that are inherent to foundational aspects of Heidegger's thought - in particular an innate tendency towards exclusion, indifference to suffering, apologetics for tyranny, and antisemitism. Heidegger's though is distanced from the primordialist nationalist's conception of origins as foundations of character and situation, their mytho-historical narratives of national greatness, and their promise of eternity through sacrifice in the name of the nation. Instead, Heidegger calls us to a form of authenticity that emerges both from the unfolding of the historical consciousness of one's people and from the temporal unfolding of the experience of Being. One is also compelled to reject the primordialist nationalist conception of the political space, their chauvinistic cultural particularism and their reverential relation to the local. An authentic spatiality, this thesis finds, depends upon being able to balance the need to belong alongside one's fellows in one's home and the capacity of thinking persons to strike out from home and venture into a strange and unnerving conceptual space where the nature of Being is in question. Authentic belonging, we find, depends upon our being able to dwell in the "in-between" of these distinct modalities of Being.