Introduction
If ‘there is a time for every purpose, and a season for every activity’Footnote 1 is there a time for extremism? With a right-wing renaissance grown increasingly aggressive across a number of countries, this question holds special salience for the study of politics. Add in concerns about global ‘existential crises’ wrought by climate change, pandemic, democratic backsliding,Footnote 2 and Russia’s recent invasion and denial of Ukraine’s right to exist, and we might ask additionally whether existential anxieties are driving more extreme times and politics.
In this contribution to the Special Issue, I argue that a conspicuous but mostly overlooked controversy, growing out of the account of time developed by Martin Heidegger, can help us better understand right-wing extremism. This is because the vision of authentic freedom in and against time on which Heidegger based his groundbreaking philosophy not only enables extremism, but encourages it – in his day, and ours. Scrutinising Heidegger’s existentialist magnum opus, Being and Time, and his later writings, I find strong conceptual echoes and concrete links between his thought, his politics, and right-wing extremism more broadly. Given existentialism’s historical influence and resonance with contemporary events, this suggest that our current predicaments are coloured with existentialist hues, for better and for worse. While existentialist resources can help us grapple with contemporary problems,Footnote 3 we must also consider a more troubling possibility. Rather than external or given challenges that existentialism helps us negotiate, today’s extreme times might spring from existentialism itself. If so, any attempts to comprehend such issues or to grasp existentialism’s potential for International Relations (IR) must include a critical engagement with existentialism’s own concepts and logics.
Admittedly, IR does not lack for philosophical or temporal sensibilities. Yet compared with its treatment of numerous other thinkers, IR’s liaison with Heidegger’s existentialism or his account of time remains somewhat muted in several ways. First, scholars traditionally paid little express attention to Heidegger.Footnote 4 Only in the past decade or so have some used him explicitly to theorise international anxiety, collective action, the politics of difference, and the discipline’s ‘temporal turn’.Footnote 5 Second, despite picking up temporal themes, these treatments do not tackle Heidegger’s theory of time directly, nor do they reflect much on the practical import of his temporal politics. Third, IR has barely scratched the surface of an urgent issue in this regard, namely how durable was Heidegger’s affinity for right-wing extremism, how his personal politics interacted with his professional philosophising, and what it all means for his intellectual and political legacy. Finally, while IR now benefits from many incisive analyses of the politics of time,Footnote 6 it has so far paid very little attention to Heidegger’s distinctive theory of time as an existential issue.
These trends take on added importance when we consider Heidegger’s immediate and enduring proximity to IR. First appearing during the ‘twenty years’ crisis’Footnote 7 between two world wars and directly involved in discussions of individual freedom, human existence, national identity, fascism, and war, his prolific writings gained such renown that many read all European thought after as mere ‘footnotes to Heidegger’.Footnote 8 This was especially true of Being and Time (published in 1927, hereafter BT), which reinvented Anglo-European philosophy and, like existentialism more generally, set the terms and direction of discourse in the human sciences for over half a century.Footnote 9 Heidegger’s existentialism pervaded the zeitgeist in which IR emerged and the theoretical resources on which it drew. Heidegger’s influence here is difficult to overstate. His work gave impetus to the wider existentialist movement that emerged in postwar Paris and quickly embedded itself across Western thought and culture. Following their friend Raymond Aron’s advice, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre explored BT at length, finding Heidegger challenging and fascinating in equal measure, and even travelling to Germany to imbibe his intellectual milieu.Footnote 10 Much as IR unconsciously relies on a number of existentialist concepts, logics, and tropes,Footnote 11 so too does existentialism owe a significant intellectual debt to Heidegger in general and BT in particular.
Yet Heidegger was and remains a complicated figure. His personal embrace of Nazism confounded many, even as his scholarly work has inveigled many more. In recent years, some observers have begun to ask pointed questions about whether Heidegger ‘would have endorsed Donald Trump’ or if the former President in ‘an American Heidegger’.Footnote 12 By contrast, IR resigns its analyses of right-wing extremism and Heidegger to separate research streams.Footnote 13 It is, therefore, an enduring and a pressing issue how IR should relate to Heidegger’s existentialism. BT upended philosophy by deriving novel resources for living an authentic, ‘temporal’ existence amid the ‘vulgarities’ of social alienation in modern time. Yet Heidegger’s star had scarcely risen before he embraced National Socialism in 1930s Germany, and this was no personal foible divorced from scholarly labour. Much the opposite, as we will see, Heidegger explicitly invoked the temporal logic of BT to defend Hitler’s fascist politics, remained a Nazi party member until the end of the Second World War, and never really repented beyond a few diffident disavowals, the crux of which had more to do with the Nazi’s overreliance on technology than their vision of political life.
Such public casualness about Nazism is consistent with the more private thoughts that Heidegger recorded later in life, published recently in ‘the Black Notebooks’.Footnote 14 These journals suggest that Heidegger never felt it necessary to decouple his existential thought, or its temporal politics, from the horrors of Nazism. Heidegger had a particular politics, which he understood to comport with the primary arguments of BT about authenticity in time. Far from being epiphenomenal to BT, extremist projects could be derived directly from it, just as Heidegger’s actions could be justified using its distinctive language and logic. For these reasons, any consideration of existentialism in IR must include a discussion not only of BT’s distinctive vision of human existence as a temporal struggle, but also of its involvement in the leading catastrophe of Heidegger’s age.Footnote 15 Doing so allows us to more fully grasp the intellectual consequences that moment holds for today’s existential and extremist crises.
To begin this discussion, in what follows I consider Heidegger’s work as philosophy, that is, as equal parts systematic diagnosis of the human condition and normative reflections on how to live. This comports with one of Heidegger’s primary purposes, which was to theorise how human beings might find agency in each concrete, ‘factical’ situation (§5:38). I am therefore interested in what emerges from the pages of BT itself, rather than what we might reconstruct from it or do with it by synthesising Heidegger with other thinkers and perspectives. More specifically, I highlight what sort of normative and diagnostic resources the text of BT develops and sends out into the world, how Heidegger applied these to his own lived experience, and what this can teach us about the politics of authenticity today.
The article develops through several steps. After summarising IR’s engagement with Heidegger, it presents key arguments from BT, focusing on the relationship between its titular concepts and their implications for political life. It then examines the inheritance BT bequeathed immediately to its author as he rose to public prominence in 1930s Germany. Doing so discloses more than a few concerns about the conceptual foundations and intellectual architecture of BT. The penultimate section uncovers strong Heideggerian echoes in two contemporary instances of right-wing extremism couched in the existentialist vernacular. I conclude by reflecting on the consequences of Heidegger’s legacy for IR and its further engagements with existentialism.
The Heidegger question in IR
Following an uptick in disciplinary interest, IR scholars are beginning to make use of key elements in BT. Most extensively, Louiza Odysseos deconstructs political subjectivity using a Heideggerian interpretation of Being. From the notion of lived contingency, she develops an anti-positivist and more political vision of social science focused on interpenetrating relations and multiple perspectives.Footnote 16 Bahar Rumelili argues that Heidegger’s notion of ‘mood’ can show how ‘ages of anxiety’ might support multiple forms of agency – both conservative and progressive.Footnote 17 And Felix Berenskötter foregrounds the analytical benefits of Heidegger’s temporality – including speculation about how biographies combine possible futures and shared pasts to help communities manage anxiety and uncertainty.Footnote 18 Likewise, others have begun to adapt Heidegger to the needs of a planetary consciousness in the face of climate change, to metatheoretical critique, and to new imaginaries of the international, per se.Footnote 19
These astute engagements exhibit the richness of Heidegger’s thought and advance IR’s understanding of agency, anxiety, and political ontology. Yet with very few exceptions, they do not engage with Heidegger’s account of time, nor do they dwell much on his Nazism. Odysseos focuses more on Being than Time, with the latter inflecting subjectivity but not really standing as an equal theoretical partner. Rumelili links the finitude of death to fear and anxiety, rather than time itself, and turns to other thinkers like Hobbes to unpack temporal agency.Footnote 20 Berenskötter works with Heideggerian temporality most explicitly. But in focusing on temporal visions of the past and future as anxiety management tools wielded by an abstract subject, he overlooks Heidegger’s account of time, per se and how this supports an overly antagonistic response to felt anxiety or existential crisis.Footnote 21 I find much to agree with in Berenskötter’s phenomenology of the national self based less on external Others than autobiography. However, as will become clear, I think there is more to Heidegger’s story here, most notably the import of Heidegger’s distinction between time and temporality, which Berenskötter does not address.Footnote 22
Beyond this uneven treatment of Heideggerian time, IR scholars scarcely touch on the relationship between the philosopher and his politics. Odysseos goes the furthest, spending part of a chapter summarising three dominant positions on Heidegger’s Nazism and reflecting on how BT is ‘at best politically vague, and thus open to conservative revolutionism, and at worst as determining community along nationalistic and racist lines.’Footnote 23 But this is primarily a way of framing her attempt to ‘retrieve out of Heidegger’s discussion an account of how community is constituted without being bound to a homogeneous totality.’Footnote 24 While productive, the exfiltration of Heideggerian thought from its historical context depends on bringing in other sources and intellectual inspirations to re-read BT in a way that prevents its potential for ‘the effacement of heteronomy’.Footnote 25 Others in IR spare fewer words for Heidegger’s politics than Odysseos,Footnote 26 although we can detect hints of this in Rumelili’s and Berenskötter’s concerns about fear, anxiety, and regressive versus progressive forms of agency.Footnote 27 But as with Odysseos, addressing these concerns typically depends on folding other interlocutors into the conversation – a move that implies that Heidegger’s thought on its own might be unsuitable for the work of reconstruction.
Such reticence on Heidegger’s politics of time means that IR has not yet considered the possibility of an intimate link between his writings on time and temporality and the allure of fascism. This matters both intrinsically for IR’s growing interest in Heidegger and existentialism, and for our ability to understand our present political predicaments. The rest of this article begins to consider such a possibility. In doing so, I do not take issue with claims about our era of existential anxiety or about the creative ways in which Heidegger might be appropriated to progressive labours. Instead, I consider what his existentialism offers more directly – namely ways of overcoming time with authentic Being – and whether this may actually be driving the very politics of extremism that many interpreters of Heidegger seek to overcome. Indeed, the most worrisome part of his existentialism and the many philosophical and cultural currents it informs is not that others can adapt them to the call of fascism, but that such ‘calls are coming from inside the building’,Footnote 28 so to speak. To fully apprehend this, however, we first need to introduce BT’s key claims about temporal authenticity and existence in time.
Being and Time
Being and Time first appeared in 1927, with a planned second half left unfinished because Heidegger’s academic promotion case was pending.Footnote 29 The book challenged philosophy on several fronts.Footnote 30 Reflecting Heidegger’s anti-modern brand of Catholicism, it criticised liberal theology, technology, and urbanism. It defended the autonomy of philosophy against modern science. It also sought to overturn philosophy in substance and method, replacing axiomatic and arid systems of thought with rigorous reflection derived from lived experience. To accomplish this, BT proposes to ‘make manifest what we are already familiar with’, thereby transforming not only ‘our very way of being’ but also our understanding of this.Footnote 31 Because secularism has vitiated any necessary design for a human being, Heidegger directs speculation away from ‘ontic’ classes or empirical categories towards the more fundamental, ‘ontological’ question of Being as such (§2:24). Absent a ‘worldless, self-sufficient and masterful “I”’ to show humans what they ‘should become’,Footnote 32 how might we go about realising our ‘essence’? Heidegger’s existentialist response is that this query can be answered only through our own becoming as a concrete, contextual, and contingent unfolding. This is why he calls the particular being that is human Being, Dasein, or ‘there-being’ – the specific, particular being that is there, and not elsewhere, and not everywhere.
However, this response raises the follow-on question: what does it mean for a human being to be? BT’s answer begins by distinguishing Dasein from other beings in two reflexive ways. First, humans are unique in asking about ‘modes of Being … which we, the inquirers, are ourselves’ (BT§2:26–27). Only a human Being ‘reveals ‘“itself to itself”’ through questions like ‘What does it mean for me to be?’ or ‘what does my being require?’Footnote 33 Second, only human beings contemplate death. Other creatures possess instinctual fear but do not dwell on their demise or apprehend how it is simultaneously certain, pending, and unpredictable. These distinctive facts give human Being an intrinsically temporal quality. Phenomenologically, Dasein apprehends or feels ‘“the very temporal intentional movement of finding oneself experiencing experience.”’Footnote 34 Existentially, in contemplating its inevitable death, Dasein grasps its ‘primordial’ temporal orientation as ‘futural’ (§65:372–73) – the only necessary aspect of its existence is its eventual non-existence.
Humans are not born with such capacities. Rather, by the time they begin reflecting on the meaning of death (§38), humans are already immersed in concrete social contexts. In Heidegger’s words, we are ‘thrown’ into the moment when we first apprehend our own ‘being-towards-death’ – that natural, inexorable, yet undirected passage towards nothingness (§29:174; §50:293–96). Anticipating a vibrant existentialist trope,Footnote 35 he describes this as ‘awakening’ to the difference between mere survival and lived existence (§58:332, §65:378). Survival expresses a common, instinctive desire not to die. Going far beyond such biological stimulus, existential death is the nullity that marks Dasein as finite. And because everyone dies at a different point and none can share their experience of dying or being dead as they can lived experiences, death also marks Dasein’s most distinctive or ‘ownmost’ possibility – namely its ‘impossibility’ (its ceasing to exist, see §50 and §53). In death, every being becomes singular, for its experience of this moment cannot be passed on or transmitted.Footnote 36 Death marks the only moment at which our existence must necessarily be uniquely our own.
Prior to death, the situation human beings are thrown into is rife with alienating and indistinct pursuits – that humdrum of daily ‘getting by’ or ‘going on’ in which they barely notice the familiar, experientially ‘near’ world that envelops and guides them. This is the realm not only of ready-made (or ‘ready-to-hand’, §15:99) tools but also all other people, those beings with which Dasein co-exists (mitsein). Such people constitute Das Man, or ‘the They’ (IV:149–50), which provides not only Being’s social setting but also – through ‘public roles, standards, or conventions’Footnote 37 – a baseline norm or way of life. Das Man embodies extant and historical modes of coexistence, through which we might understand ourselves as such or against which we can distinguish our selves.Footnote 38 This is Dasein’s ‘tradition’, ‘historical heritage’, or its ‘fate’ as made by others.Footnote 39 In our ‘thrown’ existence, then, ‘we mostly are partakers and placeholders in … the “They”.’Footnote 40 Yet this heritage also alienates Dasein insofar as ‘everyday’ Das Man is preoccupied with ‘[i]ldle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity’ (§38:219).Footnote 41 ‘Everyday’ signals banal, ordinary, and anonymous. A Dasein ‘absorbed’ in the concerns of ‘the They’ has ‘fallen’ into that ‘world’, becoming ‘lost in the publicness of the “they”’ (§38:220).Footnote 42
Such a being is ‘inauthentic’, a ‘Being-in-the-world … completely fascinated by the “world” and by … Others in the “they”’, ‘absorbed’ in that ‘world’ instead of contemplating its own distinctiveness (§38:220). Heidegger calls this a ‘kind of not-Being’, and it represents an existential failing inasmuch as ‘Dasein maintains itself for the most part’ in precisely this ‘fallen’ way of life (ibid.). Here he deliberately mirrors the ultimate non-being of death with ordinary social anonymity. Finding itself thrown into Das Man’s situation, inauthentic being simply accepts this and lets itself be carried along, passively awaiting death without thinking much about what a more meaningful existence ahead of non-existence might require. For Heidegger, this passive passage towards death constitutes the temporal problem of a being ‘in time’ (§65:375).
Awakening to such thrownness and fallenness brings with it anxiety (§40:233), or ‘dread’ (§30:182).Footnote 43 Anxiety pesters us as ‘uncanny’ feelings that things do not hang together as neatly as we presume, that we are intrinsically ‘abandoned’ to ‘The Nothing’ of social alienation and ultimate death, and with ‘nothing more we can hold onto … we slip away from ourselves’.Footnote 44 However, if Dasein can somehow confront this anxiety without flinching, it may forge an ‘audacious Being’ resolved to choose and act for itself. This potential inheres to anxiety, for even if we do not grasp the first chance for audaciousness, ‘anxiety sleeps, but its breath trembles’.Footnote 45
In choosing audacious Being, Dasein begins to become authentic. It ‘resolutely’ realises its ‘ownmost potentiality for-Being-its-Self’ instead of passively accepting ‘lostness in the “they”’ (§62:354). This is no longer a Being floating along towards death. Rather, authentic Dasein embraces its Being-towards-death by intentionally and purposefully getting ‘ahead-of-itself’ (§44c:271) or actively choosing how to live until the end, no matter when it comes. Authentic Dasein decides to make the most of this span, so that the contingent distinctiveness of its lived existence might become worthy of the necessary singularity of its demise. Heidegger calls this ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ to capture the sense of Dasein apprehending mortality and making the courageous choice to rise above the quotidian concerns of ‘the They’ and become ‘liberated for its uttermost possibility of existence’ (§61:350), which is ‘Being-a-whole’ in an ‘existentiell way’ (§61:350). As a process of lived becoming rather than fixed essence, existential Being is always provisional. Yet in resolute, free action that distinguishes its life ahead of death, authentic Being transcends death by temporarily ‘suspending’ anxiety about it and by forging a symbolic completeness within anonymous social situations.Footnote 46
Temporal authenticity against time
Dasein’s existential challenges flow from its relation to time. Heidegger begins BT asserting that ‘the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time’, that ‘Being itself’ is ‘made visible in its “temporal” character’, and that ‘Being cannot be grasped except by taking time into consideration’ (§5:40).Footnote 47 Crucially, ‘“temporal” can no longer mean simply “being in time”’ but must take on meaning ‘in a positive sense’ (ibid.). The key distinction here rests on the difference between ‘primordial temporality’ and the ‘vulgar’ or ‘ordinary conception of time’ (§65; §81).Footnote 48 The former provides authentic Dasein’s way of solving or confronting the latter. Primordial temporality is no mere succession of instants or homogeneous dimension along which biological life passes. Rather, it takes the form of an ‘ecstatic’ unity (§65:377–78), a self-comprehension or synoptic vision by which Being ‘grasps’ its life experiences ‘together’ as a coherent whole.Footnote 49 Ecstatic temporality requires embracing and seizing creative possibilities to reconfigure the natural passage of survival in time – from ‘before’, through the knife-edge ‘now’, to an unfathomable ‘later’ – into an intelligible whole composed of meaningful past, present, and future experiences.
Emerging through free deliberations and actions, this temporal whole holds vital existential potential. If death poses the all-encompassing instant when Being literally comes to Nothing, then authentic Dasein’s purpose beforehand is to unite its many lived experiences with a decisiveness and distinctiveness worthy of life-and-death commitment.Footnote 50 Heidegger calls this ‘ecstatic’ based on the Greek ἔκστασις, for ‘standing outside’ or ‘alongside’,Footnote 51 which captures the way that Dasein’s unified temporal whole escapes or transcends vulgar time while still being empirically located within it (§65:377).
In addition to its lifespan-comprehensive quality, Heidegger also finds ecstatic potential in each free decision, choice, or action, which may forge a shorter unity communicating the ‘primordial truth of existence’ (§62:355). In every resolute action, Dasein becomes ‘Being-revealed’ (§62:355). Consonant with the ‘futural’ quality of Being-towards-death, Heidegger also insists that in each discrete action or project it is the future, not the past, that matters most: ‘The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-at-hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been determined beforehand’ but instead realises its greatest potential in the way that Dasein commits to the decision, come what may (§62:355). It is this resolve – not planning, deliberation, or reflection – that turns free individual action into an ecstatic temporal unity revelatory of ‘Being-a-whole’ (§61:349–54 and §66:380; §45:277). Authentic Dasein embraces existence, unavoidably bookended by death, through choosing actions and pathways that reinterpret its history and then committing to them so staunchly as to make it fully ‘present in the process of having been’ (§65:374). This closes Dasein’s temporal and hermeneutic circle, authorising its past, which is no longer prologue or determinate but rather bound to present action directed towards future possibilities (§43a:247; §80:470).
Heidegger’s problem with time
In BT, time acts as authentic Being’s key antagonist. In contrast with primordial temporality, ordinary or vulgar time marks the immersive time of the world around us. It is ‘derivative’ of Das Man’s idle involvements and society’s dependence on ‘proximal’, ready-to-hand modes of public coordination (§80:374–79), such as modern time reckoning techniques. In a lengthy discussion mixing history and theory, Heidegger links standardised clocks to the idea of time as a ‘pure sequence of “nows” without beginning and without end’, and without meaningful differences (§80:377). Instantaneous nows ‘level off’ primordial temporality on an endless continuum (§65:377–79) – a being ‘in time’ merely ‘occurs and runs its course’ (§65:375), more like a creature surviving than a properly temporal subject existing.Footnote 52
Heidegger is not the first thinker to describe modern clock time as a ceaseless and pitiless accumulation of homogeneous instants.Footnote 53 His distinctive philosophical move is to theorise modern clock time not as an emergent sociohistorical phenomenon or a political projectFootnote 54 but rather as a matter of fallen being ‘discovering’ the clock to ‘giv[e] itself time’, that is, to number its ‘regular recurrences’ or count its days as a ‘multiplicity of “nows”’ – ‘encountered on each occasion and at any time for everyone as “now and now and now”’ (§80:464–66, 470). Such nows are always everywhere the same. They do not avail of existential possibility or authentic temporality (§81:475 emphasis added). Instead, they embed inattentive beings in an alienation that seems stable only because ‘everything is running smoothly’,Footnote 55 like clockwork. Vulgar time’s ‘tick tick tick’ is analogous to Das Man’s idle chatter. Heidegger charges that this ‘sequences of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ marks ‘the “course of time”’ that will carry us passively to our death if we do not resist its anonymising influence (§80:470, §81:474). Thus, when he describes Being ‘placed before the entirety of beings in every moment’, Heidegger pits Dasein against Das Man, with the latter epitomising those idle, anonymous nows they have discovered and come to depend upon.Footnote 56 If it does not exercise care for itself, Dasein will not only be consumed by society, it will also (then) be whisked along the river of time towards death by clockwork social strictures and quotidian concerns.
Despite promising to rethink both Being and Time from the ground up, Heidegger here deploys a modern variation of a perennial theme – the ‘problem of time’, a tradition of conceptualising time as a part of existence that inextricably confronts human beings and must be overcome.Footnote 57 BT provides a twist on this by ontologically distinguishing primordial temporality from vulgar time, but the latter still divorces humans from their greatest potential and purpose – namely, the ability to freely choose a more authentic life unto death. Vulgar, modern time strips Dasein of ‘all security and standing’ and exposes how ‘all traditional truths and contents of life have lost substance.’Footnote 58 ‘In time’ in BT describes a Dasein ‘abandonned to itself’ and alienated by everything around it.Footnote 59 And in casting anonymous existence in vulgar time as the symbolic partner of nullifying death, Heidegger sets Dasein the ontological imperative of surmounting time’s dissolution through resolute actions and self-understandings symbolic of a more authentic (primordial) temporal unity. This inclines his whole philosophical edifice towards the performance of transcendent temporality in decisive – possibly destructive but always resolute – individual, and discrete actions. In such events, Dasein ‘temporalizes’ (§65:329), rescuing itself from the scrap heap of instantaneity by creating a whole that allows it to ‘be in the Moment of vision for “its time”’ and, further, to ‘choose itself as its own “hero”’ (§74:437).
Heroic Dasein ‘must forge its own path between now and death’, designated as a matter of ‘primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness’ – that is, choosing to live ‘free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen’ (§74:435 emphasis added). What Heidegger means by this is that, upon recognising its mortal finitude and the strictures of its social situatedness, authentic Dasein should creatively appropriate the latter to construct more distinctive and autonomous paths to the former. This ‘snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities’Footnote 60 embodied by vulgar time’s homogeneous instants and their dispersive qualities of ‘comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly’ (ibid.). Such Self-recovery is a labour of freedom that must necessarily take place in a concrete social situation, but it is also a striving that finds ‘unshakable joy’ in dispensing with the ‘“incidentals”’ of the world and the They, in favour of what really matters to one’s true Self (§62:357–58). Here, then, is authentic and ecstatically temporal Dasein: in the world, but resolutely no longer of it insofar as it now chooses for itself and thereby chooses its Self, per se, as a unity existing ‘alongside’ Das Man and its vulgar time. Because this project is so important, in embracing resoluteness as a pathway to authentic temporalities – both small and large – Dasein need not worry about fallibility. While an anticipatorily resolute Being may occasionally need to ‘“take it back”’, this is not for the sake of expressing remorse or admitting mistakes, but rather to allow Being to get beyond such situations so that it might continue resolutely ‘repeating itself’ for the sake of preserving its emerging ownmost freedom (§54:314; §62:355). Retraction is for self-retrieval rather than redress, all in service of ‘authentic resoluteness’ and the primordial temporality it forges in and against vulgar time (§62:355).
The metaphysical stakes of Being versus time
This way of theorising freedom as a practical process might have marked a step towards regrounding philosophy in the common vulnerability of finite existence, absent traditional baselines like infinitude and eternity. However, BT also seeks to get beyond humble, reflective existence, with important consequences for realising Being in and against Time. Inasmuch as it involves first principles, fundamental truths, and primeval phenomena, Heidegger’s temporal Being is metaphysical. We ‘must presuppose’ Being and truth, that both ‘must be’ (§44:257, §44c:271). The ‘question of Being’ holds ‘ontological priority’, stipulating ‘essential’ characteristics of existence (§65:375–76). The foundational meaning of this Being is temporality (see §3:38; §65:374; §70:418). And that temporality has an ecstatic unitary form manifesting ‘primordial’ truth (e.g., §65:378). Such temporality poses a practical challenge for Dasein, but metaphysical speculation underwrites its didactic means of discovery and creation. BT also elevates human beings, as the protagonist of their own story but also as creators and carriers of ultimate meaning. This is a metaphysical recipe for a highly personalised or individuated temporality, which leaves little room for the times of others or for the mixing and mingling of purpose and action that an intersubjective, pluri-temporal experience might involve.Footnote 61
Moreover, by making vulgar social time Dasein’s antagonist, Heidegger sends Being’s engagement with concrete situations into hypertrophy. He loads the mundane starting point – lived momentsFootnote 62 – with weighty questions of primordial truth, of essential existence. Heidegger’s existentialism begins, like most, with the radical claim that ‘existence precedes essence’, but it never stops seeking essence or foundational truth to ground finite life in something greater or more durable.Footnote 63 Being’s confrontation with time emanates in low settings but plays for the highest metaphysical stakes. Each moment of a life becomes potentially ‘all-consuming’, capable of putting us ‘under strain’,Footnote 64 and requiring an essentialising solution epitomised by bold individual action.
Metaphysical stakes reduce possibility. While in much of BT existential situations appear as extended moments when resolute Being might choose from multiple possible futures in a creative and productive way, Heidegger occasionally lets slip the all-or-nothing dichotomy inherent in every choice. Dasein’s ‘potentiality-for-Being … is free either for authenticity or for inauthenticity’ (§45:275).Footnote 65 Either humans choose to realise their metaphysical potential against the vagaries of time, or they resign themselves to the mere survival or persistence of those herd beasts not naturally imbued with primordial authenticity or temporalising power.
Temporal Being, alone
Furthermore, by describing death ‘as the possibility which is non-relational’ (§62:354) and primordial temporality as an ecstatic unity, BT’s metaphysical register negates Being’s relational context and potential.Footnote 66 An authentically existential life must match the singularity and import of our ownmost death, that ‘moment at which all my relations to others disappear’Footnote 67 (see §50 and §53). During life, death is literally for other people, something at most witnessed by those who do not die and as such belonging to the They and thus to no one. To exist as distinctively as we must die, then, means living without recourse to social relations or community, which offer no genuine possibilities but instead only the ‘inauthentic they-self’ that would ‘disburden’ Being of its productive angst and replace this with idleness and triviality (§61:351; §27:165). Heidegger here refers to Dasein’s ‘call of conscience’, which expresses not just any restless need to respond productively or responsibly to anxious, anonymous, and finite situations, but a particular drive that relentlessly ‘individualises’ Dasein so that Being might burrow beneath the surface of social life with ‘unwavering precision … down to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being’ (§62:354 emphasis added).Footnote 68 Just as there can be no I in they, so too there can be no primordial temporality in vulgar time – authentic Dasein must forge this amidst time in a way that places it ‘outside of’ and against time.Footnote 69
This structure of action holds even when situations shift from mundane to dramatic. As Heidegger wrote to his former student, Karl Löwith, ‘one must – in a [time of] radical disintegration … convince oneself firmly of “the one thing that matters”’ without the aid of others.Footnote 70 Another way of characterising this is that authentic choice ‘depends on an ability to “tell time” – that is, to sense the imperatives of one’s factical situation’ and to act upon them with atomistic resolve rather than collective solidarity.Footnote 71
All this makes sense within Heidegger’s system insofar as vulgar time associates closely with the void posed by Das Man. ‘In holding itself in a relation to beings, Dasein holds itself out into the Nothing. In this way, Dasein accomplishes a surmounting of beings as a whole –.’Footnote 72 Temporal authenticity, then, readily becomes a matter of public contradistinction, a performatively staunch confrontation with ‘the Nothing’ of those dispersed concerns and anonymous times found in overcrowded, modern society. And in choosing and acting in this way, authentic Being ‘exemplif[ies] a standard for others as well’.Footnote 73
Yet however much internal coherence BT may achieve, it leaves very little room for social life as a meaningful mode of existence in its own right, or for compromise, provisional steps, the sense of a work in progress. Instead, Heidegger elevates individuated actions, authorised by their agent’s resolve rather than their practical content, over all concerns of the They. As we will see soon enough, loading such existential choices with metaphysical value encourages violent antagonisms. We will also see that, by singling out a Dasein that forges an ecstatic temporality which sets a standard for the crowd, Heidegger paves the bridge from individual Being to collective identity with demagoguery.
To illustrate this, the rest of this article examines two fraught historical moments when the politics of temporal authenticity brought extremist alternatives to the fore. The first moment shows how Dasein’s authenticity corrupted its own theorist and subordinated the possibilities of existential community to the figure of a singularly ecstatic leader. The second shows how easily Dasein’s existence corrupts authenticity itself by attaching existentiell bona fides to a radical individualism which privileges Selfish caprice, distrusts Others, cultivates loud reticence, and revels in spasmodic violence as metaphysically meaningful and politically heroic.
The politics of authenticity, then
The first moment involves Heidegger’s infamous embrace of National Socialism in the early 1930s, fast on the heels of BT’s publication. Heidegger’s Nazism raises a number of troubling and well-covered issues,Footnote 74 but one that has gone relatively unnoticed is how it flows from BT’s politics of time. To see this, we can observe how Heidegger transposed BT’s philosophical arguments about temporal existence into the immediate historical context of Weimar Germany.
Admittedly, with rampant inflation and crushing war debts, widespread unemployment and social dislocation, and a simmering ‘stabbed in the back’ myth about the end of the Great War, Weimar was full of existential concerns. But Heidegger did more than merely reflect the times. Into this zeitgeist he injected a metaphysical discourse of existential freedom struggling against social time, with the express purpose of lending philosophical support to the project of German national rebirth in National Socialism’s cult of personality. He characterised Nazism as a ‘reawakening’ of the spirit harkening back to the dawn of Western civilisation in ancient Greece,Footnote 75 one that would rescue modernity from the nihilism and alienation of societies organised by common conventions and vulgarities like standardised time.
Most notably, Heidegger laid the potential of Dasein’s authentic renewal – of holding itself out into the nothingness of modern life in a way that ‘surmounted’ others and set a standard for them to follow – at the feet of the singular, factical icon of the national ‘Over-self’ – der Führer, Adolf Hitler.Footnote 76 It is worth pausing here to consider how closely Hitler might have exemplified a standard of authentic Being to Heidegger. Hitler’s rise to power unfolded through flagrant actions like the Beer Hall Putsch, the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, or the Reichstag Fire, all of which leveraged insecurity, malice, and violence. His ascension featured an unapologetic iconography of German greatness capped by rousing public speeches delivered from podiums jutting out over huge crowds. Hitler called the masses to national renewal in oratorical performances where unflinching animus, rapturous exaltations, and frothy exhortations frequently crescendoed to an ecstatic frenzy. He also spoke in the vernacular of Heidegger’s existentialism. Hitler decried Germany’s negated ‘freedom’ during a time of ‘disintegration of the unity of spirit and will of our Volk’; he railed at how the ‘unity of the nation vanishes and dissolves in a muddle of political and egotistical opinions, economic interests and differences in Weltanschauung [philosophy or worldview]’; and he referred to a nation filled with ‘burdensome care’.Footnote 77 He framed the present day as a particularly auspicious moment in ‘a two-thousand-year-old inheritance’.Footnote 78 He celebrated the Nazi party’s success as rising ‘to the helm of the Reich, to leadership of the nation and its destiny’Footnote 79 so that the German Volk could ‘overcome the problems of these times’ rather than ‘succumb to them’.Footnote 80 He told ordinary Germans it was a ‘great blessing to be alive at this time and this hour’ but also that in such ‘a critical hour, one man of action weighs more than one thousand sophisticated weaklings.’Footnote 81 These examples show how little interpretive effort was required to map the figure of Hitler onto the ideal of an authentic Being, exemplifying a primordial temporal unity that could solve Germany’s problem of time and set a standard for the masses.Footnote 82 It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger came to view Hitler as the ‘grounder’ of Germany’s ‘abyss’ and restorer of its ‘sacredness’.Footnote 83
In doing so, he realised a dangerous potential embedded in BT’s conceptual framework, skipping over the possibility of intersubjective social responses to postwar anxiety and transposing the ‘“capacity-for-Being-a-whole” of individual authentic existence … to the “totality” of the authentic state.’Footnote 84 As authentic, this could not just be any state, either. For a collective to Be, it could not do so by embracing difference or pluralism, which too readily dispersed subjectivity and diluted the collective commitment that mirrors individual resolve. Instead, a homogeneous volk guided by an unapologetic demagogue exemplified the utmost possibilities of temporal Being, and the philosophical question of ‘how should I act and live with others’ became a more flippant political spur: ‘who are “we” to be?’Footnote 85 The answer lay in the standard set by a lone, resolute figure. Or, as Heidegger maintained long after the Second World War, ‘We have to strive to grasp the whole only on the basis of the few’Footnote 86 – whether this be the renascent German whole on the basis of Hitler, or the future of Europe on the basis of the Third Reich.
Heidegger recognised that such arguments directly impacted the democratic politics of his day. This was a feature, not a bug. In 1933, his rectorship at Freiburg University began by emphasising the ‘Self-assertion of the German University’.Footnote 87 Soon after, he exhorted students to support Nazism and Hitler as the embodiment of German renewal. In the student newspaper, he reduced national elections and the referendum on leaving the League of Nations to a single ‘free decision’ of whether ‘the entire people … wants its own existence’ or not.Footnote 88 Theirs were not votes for or against particular policies or laws, but metaphysical either-or choices, which could signify a resolute, singular, and whole German identity or relegate them to just more idle chattering. Unsurprisingly, since he identified these ‘choices’ with Hitler, Heidegger also found them redolent of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality, lauding how they appropriated the past but also forged a new future through a single Self-contained and Self-disclosing act: ‘This election simply cannot be compared to all other previous elections. What is unique about this election is the simple greatness of the decision that is to be executed.’Footnote 89 As such, it offered a chamber in which German resolve should ‘strike up and resound’, an ‘event in itself’ through which Germany would ‘choose its future’.Footnote 90 Facing such an ‘incomparabl[e] … hour’ and ‘epochal opportunity’, there could be ‘no vacillation and no hesitation’ – voters could defy Hitler and slip into the dispersed time of crisis confronting European Das Man, or they could unite destiny with the future in the ‘simple and ultimate’ act of voting for the Führer’s wishes, which represented a complete whole bearing ‘millennia before itself’.Footnote 91 For Heidegger, democratic participation contained little organic possibility, precisely because it was loaded with metaphysical stakes. Voting was not a means of constructing community, establishing ways of coexisting, or resolving conflicts. It was ‘the most basic demand of all Being’, a chance to ‘preserve and save its own essence’ by aligning the many that might become a whole with a singular, steadfast figurehead.Footnote 92
During this period, Heidegger regularly ‘transpose[d] historical existentialism to contemporary German reality, … positing existential and ontological categories at a specific historical “moment”, in a way that suggest[ed] that their philosophical intentions a priori go hand in hand with the political situation.’Footnote 93 This lent the Weimar crisis the highest existential import. He also helped the Nazis canonise a student who had been executed for sabotaging postwar French occupiers. Heidegger’s ‘Schlageter speech’ transformed the student into an existential martyr whose single resolute act made his life worthy of death: ‘Alone, drawing on his own inner strength, he had to place before his soul an image of the future awakening of the Volk to honor and greatness so that he could die believing in this future.’Footnote 94 The Freiburg martyr thus devoted his death – and through its distinctiveness, his life – to the ecstatic temporal unity of Hitler, for ‘The Führer alone is the German present and future reality.’Footnote 95
In 1930s Weimar, Heidegger’s existentialist question of ‘Who am I to become’ almost immediately became an issue of ‘who are “we” to be?’, with Hitler alone providing the answer. Though crafted with great care over many years, BT’s arguments shifted seamlessly from individual questions to national ideals.Footnote 96 And where such a move might have opened Heidegger to criticism about a lack of social relations or community, he pre-empted this by championing a singular Being’s ability to ‘tell time’, to sense the ‘demands’ of a concrete moment and embrace these resolutely as a ‘Self-choosing’ but also a standard for all would-be Selves, individual and collective alike.Footnote 97 The Weimar ‘They’ was ‘irresolute or inauthentic’, whereas Hitler was ‘recalling the German people back to their “ownmost” possibility – i.e., a way for Germany to constitute itself authentically as an alternative to the political models of the Soviet Union and the United States.’Footnote 98 As Heidegger noted repeatedly, national ‘rebirth’ premised on this standard would necessarily involve ‘strangeness, darkness, [and] insecurity’Footnote 99 because ‘force—submission and breaking and downgoing are the signs of being’, and so ‘will[ing] ourselves’ successfully would entail danger and violence ‘without regard to consequences’.Footnote 100 Courageous, committed, violent action, based on a reading of the times, with the essence of the nation at stake, and devoid of any space for consequential ethics – this was indeed a ‘radicalisation’ of ‘the question of Being’ (§15), but not in the ontological sense Heidegger claimed. Rather, it expressed the political stakes of metaphysicalising temporal challenges and attaching these to the idea of a national Self that realises ‘“ultimate greatness”’ by ‘expend[ing] itself without regard to consequences’.Footnote 101 Years later, reflecting on his Freiburg tenure, Heidegger concluded that what led him to embrace Nazism was ‘thinking purely “metaphysically”’ about Germany’s temporal ‘possibility of a transition to another beginning’.Footnote 102 Conspicuously, he expressed regret mostly over underestimating the alienating effects of technology or the renewed influence of Christianity, rather than about Nazism, per se, or how BT’s antagonism between Being and time provided a ready-to-hand valourisation of Hitler’s project.
The politics of authenticity, now
The second moment is unfolding currently across a number of countries. Why juxtapose these twenty-first-century situations against Heidegger’s age? First, much as he encountered a nationwide existential crisis almost immediately after BT appeared, a number of observers suggest we are now confronting a global existential present full of anxiety, dread, and questions about life, death, and human freedom’s capacity to negotiate urgent problems.Footnote 103 Second, thanks to a century of inroads in multiple knowledge genres, existentialism is today part of the furniture of intellectual and cultural life in many societies, including its temporal antinomy between social alienation and individual authenticity.Footnote 104 This is particularly so in societies where right-wing extremists are waxing through the tactical culture of white power and its violent expression in mass casualty attacks.Footnote 105 Taken together, these considerations open up questions about whether our current predicaments manifest more than just general existential affinities with BT’s historical context, and, more specifically, whether its discourse of authenticity in and against time might be fomenting or exacerbating our current crises rather than helping to resolve them.
White power and paramilitary authenticity
Existential themes suffuse the rise of the white power movement. Much as Great War veterans returned to an aimless, anxious life in Germany and filled it with commitment to ‘whatever unruly cause’ might reward their military skillset,Footnote 106 US Vietnam War veterans ritualised stories of existential crisis in the jungle: ‘constant danger, gore, and horror’ coupled with ‘loss, frustration, and doubt’.Footnote 107 To make matters worse, in their view, the political class and public opinion denied them the freedom to fight with the consequences-free resolve necessary to defeat a racialised enemy.Footnote 108 Raging against such fickle strictures, veterans like Louis Beam determined to ‘bring the war home’ to US soil, targeting non-whites to ‘awaken’ a ‘sympathetic white public’ to the existential stakes of America’s supposed malaise.Footnote 109 This discourse knit various Anglo-European and Christian identity groups into the contemporary white power movement, which combines racist ideology with paramilitary consumerism. Gun culture, war films, recreational tactical training, and magazines like Soldier of Fortune, all find enthusiastic audiences in white power, and these material trappings in turn lend the veneer of deep commitment and meaning to white power’s ‘armchair and weekend warriors’.Footnote 110 In the twenty-first century, ‘forever war’ veterans have often accelerated the trend.Footnote 111
Such tactical ‘training’ symbols, along with a fuzzy notion of ‘preparedness’ for struggle against various ‘existential threats’, spread from veterans to a general populace in thrall to a mass-marketed and relentlessly individuated brand of ‘freedom’.Footnote 112 While nominally about meeting a future threat or privation, the way that ‘preppers’ adopt skills, jargon, and accoutrements also performs ‘real’ commitment without content. White power’s tactical culture embraces these simulacra of authenticity as solutions to those murky anxieties about economic parity, demographic replacement, or normative anachronism which encrust the movement’s core racial hatred and disdain. Taken together, these supposed ‘injustices’ evoke Heidegger’s link between the ultimate nullity of death and the alienation produced in each socially shared present. They pit the ‘authentic’ (white) individual against the debilitating dynamics of the (multiracial) masses. When white power apologists frame such confrontations in the discourse of ‘existential angst’, then, they tap into existentialist logics that go far beyond basic questions of survival.Footnote 113
Furthermore, today’s white power movement links authentic preparedness to ‘telling the time’ in the way it encourages those feeling disquieted by societal change to convince themselves of ‘the one thing that matters’Footnote 114 and to pursue this single-mindedly – in this case, race war. As the ‘White Genocide Manifesto’ claims, arguments from ‘Nature’s Laws, common sense and current circumstances’Footnote 115 call racists to action rather than restraint, for prevailing demographic and social dynamics from the 1970s onward show that instead of waiting for any Christian Identitarian ‘rapture’ or other sort of divine intervention, ‘the faithful would be tasked with ridding the world of the unfaithful, the world’s nonwhite and Jewish population.’Footnote 116 On this view, every committed individual knows within themselves that only resolute action here and now can forge a future more conducive to white supremacy. Indeed, white power’s ‘fourteen words’ slogan – ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’Footnote 117 – propounds the temporal, existentialist logic of a free subject acting resolutely to actualise the future in a way that preserves a vision of authentic identity.
Mass casualties and ‘lone wolves’
These currents coalesce in prominent mass casualty events, replete with tropes reminiscent of Heidegger’s existentialism. Before he killed 77 adults and children in his home country, the 2011 Oslo attacker wrote that ‘the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism).’Footnote 118 The 2015 Charleston church shooter wrote that ‘White culture is world culture’ before attacking a traditionally African-American church.Footnote 119 The 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter recognised ‘America’, New Zealand, and Australia as the last hope for ‘an idealized “white homeland”’, praised Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’, and then livestreamed his killing spree.Footnote 120 In each case, claims of a particular group’s special authenticity – which must be jealously guarded and violently protected – occupied the forefront. Such attacks also exemplify a contemporary variant of existentialist iconography – the ‘lone wolf’. This creative fiction holds great tactical appeal, partly because, compared with larger groups, proponents believe that individual attacks are harder to detect or prevent.Footnote 121 But the allure is also clearly existential.
The ‘lone wolf’ embodies autonomous and resolute action undeterred by worldly norms or idle concerns. In an essay that first broached lone actor attacks to the white power movement, Louis Beam introduced the ‘lone wolf’ as defender of ‘the liberty of the folk’ against federal intrusions and mainstream mores.Footnote 122 As in 1930s Weimar, government and society filled the role of Das Man. Beam described white power lone actors in existentialist terms: ‘this struggle is rapidly becoming a matter of individual action, each of its participants making a private decision in the quietness of his heart to resist: to resist by any means necessary.’Footnote 123 While many less-committed others might offer empty promises or loud vitriol, for the resolved individual, ‘It is enough to know what one himself will do.’Footnote 124
‘Lone wolf’ proponents directly link freedom and alienation to shocking violence. Already feeling abandoned by society, lone attackers learn to embrace social alienation as a space of absolute choice unfettered by normative expectations or ‘condemnatory rhetoric’.Footnote 125 The ‘abandonment of “why” empowers a singular narrative focus on “what” and “how” – the necessity of immediate, violent action and concrete suggestions about how to go about it’.Footnote 126 The 2011 Oslo attacker put his finger on this link by evoking authentic Dasein’s need to look only forward, with little concern for consequences or Das Man’s qualms and even less for ‘taking back’: ‘Do not apologi[se], make excuses or express regret for you are acting in self-defense or in a preemptive manner … Some innocents will die in our operations as they are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Get used (to) the idea.’Footnote 127 On this view, innocents are collateral corners of the They.
Resolve to commit shocking, singular violence distinguishes the ‘lone wolf’ from contemporary variants of Das Man: ‘“the Blob”’,Footnote 128 those who ‘play “let’s pretend” or who are “groupies”’,Footnote 129 ‘the fainthearts and hobbyists – the “talkers”’,Footnote 130 or simply ‘the white masses’.Footnote 131 These descriptions recall Heidegger’s despair that passive groups of people are little more than ‘a gigantic jellyfish, wallowing around in the world in order … to be washed up on the shore of nothingness.’Footnote 132 Moreover, this logic of hyper-individualised violence on behalf of the ‘the freedom of the folk’ echoes Heidegger in Freiburg, deploying BT’s jargon to champion authentic commitment as radical free action by an individual, ‘Alone, drawing on his own inner strength’, killing and dying for the sake of the ‘future awakening of the Volk to honor and greatness’.
‘Lone wolves’ transcend the vagaries of the Blob’s social time through their individual actions’ ability to unite opportunity and resolve in an ecstatic temporal event. ‘Those idealists truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe.’Footnote 133 On this view, white folk have been facing existential threats for years, so the temporality of white supremacist violence is always already resonant and fulsome – in every moment, ‘the hour for action is now’.Footnote 134 In white power dramatisations like The Turner Diaries, telling the time thusly and committing and preparing to act upon it induces an existential ‘dizziness’ or ‘headiness that comes with the freedom to create’ a new future through biting action.Footnote 135 As the narrator recalls, after bombing a government building, ‘we gaped with a mixture of horror and elation’ at the sublime devastation they had wrought.’Footnote 136 The substantive content here concerns white supremacy’s renewal, but the form follows the familiar existential pattern of realising authentic Being through provocative, individual action unmoored from societal consequences. Destructive transgression lends such acts an ‘eventfulness’ – the quality of a discrete temporal whole binding past and future in a meaningful presentFootnote 137 – reminiscent of both Heidegger’s ecstasis and the promise of cultural renewal (§65:373–74). As the 2011 Oslo attacker put it, ‘Now our lives truly belong only to the Order. Today I was, in a sense, born again.’Footnote 138 And should the attacker join the body count, their infamous death marks a booming bookend. It exemplifies living-free-for-death, insures against the threat of future alienation in posthumous anonymity, and manifests in this singular final act their true self – a coherent whole ‘stretched between birth and death’ that rejects the vulgar ‘indefinite series of “nows”’Footnote 139 of life with Das Man. ‘Lone wolf’ logic promises that vicious actions will make the perpetrator ‘beginning and end’, an undeniable symbol of that ‘eternity [in which] each individual is unique.’Footnote 140 According to this way of thinking, living, and dying, someone acting on conviction of the one thing only that matters accomplishes a dual objective. First, they transform their own extended lifespan into a holistic existence. Second, by the ‘temporalising’ standard of authenticity (§65:377) their murder-suicide sets, they help renew or secure a future for authentically white folk.
Conclusion
Heidegger’s influence on Western thought and culture cannot be denied, and has been well documented. Yet, previous deliberations about Heidegger downplay how his impact might be part of the problems that many existentialist treatments seek to solve. If IR is to engage more fully with Heidegger, we cannot ignore the ways in which his proposal that authentic Dasein transcend vulgar time with ecstatic temporality immediately helped him embrace Nazism in the 1930s. Nor can we ignore how loudly Heideggerian themes resonate in today’s racist and fascist renaissances, where white power groups and lone actors deploy the discourse of unbridled freedom as a shield against existential anxiety and wield eventful violence as a cudgel against imagined grievances and threats.
The consequences of the Heidegger affair – how the existential logic of authenticity enabled its creator to embrace an ideology of violent domination – become more pressing when they reverberate in the weaponisation of authenticity today. It is no coincidence that, in addition to slaughtering black churchgoers, the 2015 Charleston church shooter proposed that a ‘mass awakening’ of authentically white civilisation required that ‘we … somehow turn every jew [sic] blue.’Footnote 141 Nor is it coincidental that when confronting particularly anxious moments, existentialist logics indicated to both Heidegger and contemporary racists that their particular present is loaded with metaphysical import, that they alone can reinterpret an idealised past, and that ‘force—submission and breaking and downgoing’ – is the path forward for all who would will themselves to a reborn or reawakened Self.
Heidegger is by no means the first philosopher to pit humanity against time.Footnote 142 But his singular solution, full of aggression, individuated choice, and metaphysical meaning, stands apart from other proposals emphasising the polis or democracy, theology, science, or pure rationality.Footnote 143 While IR has begun to explore Heidegger over the past two decades, it has not yet grappled fully with the temporal or political consequences of his vision of authentic Being in and against vulgar social time. It should. This is partly because the political implications of Heidegger’s life and thought matter as such and as vital historical context if he is to become a more explicit part of IR’s intellectual heritage. But perhaps more importantly, IR should also confront the violent excesses of authentic temporality in Heidegger precisely because they echo so strongly in contemporary events. In the first instance, the sociopolitical tensions in Heidegger’s account of Being and time inflected the possibilities he derived for authentic existence in ways that suborned Nazism and subordinated free society. Reading Heidegger on time more closely helps explain Heidegger in Weimar. In the second instance, Heidegger helps explain twenty-first-century problems by shedding light on the tropes and logics informing today’s right-wing extremists. Crucially, this diagnostic dividend comes from the fact that the intellectual and cultural heritage that BT bequeathed plays a leading role in contemporary extremism. We are only just beginning to apprehend the full consequences of Heidegger’s existential solution to temporal dispersion. For those committed to understanding the politics of right-wing extremism, a crucial part of this will be reckoning head-on with what it means to forge true Being in and against time, and with the dangerous roads that those claiming the mantle of existential authenticity have taken us down, then and now.
Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to Liane Hartnett and Cian O’Driscoll for the earliest prompts and continued discussions about this project, and for reading numerous snippets and drafts. Thanks also to Luke Ashworth, Maja Touzari Greenwood, Iain Hardie, Eileen Hunt, Xander Kirke, Ben Martill, Maša Mrovlje, Rens van Munster, Andrew Neal, Halle O’Neal, Bahar Rumelili, Dahlia Simangan, Brent Steele, Ka Lok Yip, Benjamin Zala, and the Edinburgh International Relations Research Group for offering encouragement and incisive comments on previous versions. Finally, my gratitude to Richard Devetak and Martin Coward for a transparent and efficient review process, and to three anonymous referees for engaging and productive feedback along the way.
Open access
