Chapter Three
Recovering Politics
As Heidegger remarks, not only is there is no “Sophocles in himself,” but Sophocles would find our attempts to formulate the essential Sophocles insufferably dull (GA 39: 145/127). His point is not that we can assign any meaning we like to a text, but that our inherited meanings keep appealing to us to draw new possibilities from them. Likewise, there is no Heidegger in himself; there is the letter of what he said, but the sense, truth, and falsehood of the words operate within a range of darker and brighter possibilities that his texts make available. The question is which of these possibilities remain worth pursuing, and which are dead ends.
Heidegger’s sympathies for Nazism are certainly a dead end from a moral point of view, and so is his increasingly ambiguous attitude toward Nazi ideology as “counter-essence.” When it comes to tyranny and genocide, ambiguity is no virtue. But a phenomenological critique may get us farther than a moral one: we can learn by thinking through his visions of political founding, language, power, and the political, deciding where these visions have some validity and where they fall short. For Heidegger’s most dedicated enemies, even considering that there may be some truth in his political thought of the thirties amounts to crypto-fascism, but this attitude is unfair. No matter how misguided a political decision may be, it is not normally undertaken in sheer blindness; those who support tyrants do so in reaction to some tension or problem that is not mere illusion, even if they misinterpret this problem or propose a false solution to it. As Heidegger rightly argues, even a false appearance is an appearance, a case of something showing itself— as something that it is not (SZ 28–29). If we cannot accept a point of view, the question is what phenomena were glimpsed, but misinterpreted, in that view.
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