Heidegger's people : from the state to the poetry

This dissertation is an attempt to expound Heidegger' s conception of Volk. Its thesis is that there is but the one conception of Volk behind both Heidegger' s engagement and disengagement with National Socialism. In §74 of Being and Time, Heidegger introduces the word "Volk" in a discussion of the essential historicality of Dasein - the Volk, which is not to be understood as an aggregate of subjects, takes its definition (as much as Dasein itself) from the being-outside-of-itself of ecstatic temporality. Given this definition of the Volk, Heidegger must arguably have welcomed in the "folkish" self-assertion of 1933 the assertion of Being's irreducibility to the static temporality of the present-at-hand. After his withdrawal from university politics in 1934, Heidegger criticised the regime but he did not criticise his own error. The philosophical grounds for this stance towards error can be discerned in his defence of being-outside-of-itself in his confrontation with Hegel (chapter I). With its discussion of the failure of knowledge, the rectoral address is an exhortation of the Volk to the error of its own essence as Dasein (chapter II). Heidegger' s subsequent lectures on art develop the anti-modernist conception of the German people in the context of a reappraisal of the ecstatic character of mimesis (chapter III). Heidegger' s notion of a non-positive, and hence non-imperialistic, Heimat informs his readings of Kant and Holderlin (chapter IV). And in the 1952 essay on Trakl, "Geschlecht" carries the being-outside-of-itself of "Volk" to a contamination with the animal (chapter V)