The purpose of this chapter is to uncover the complex relationship of Heidegger’s concept of the state and its justification. Heidegger’s account of state authority is not a scholarly subject of interest to interpreters of his thought. This topical absence is primarily due to Heidegger’s political association of 1933. It is also due to his vehement criticism of Western metaphysics, where he describes state authority for the political regimes of American liberalism and Soviet communism as belonging to the same metaphysical and technological deracination. Heidegger, however, during two semesters in 1933-1934, postulates directly on politics, statecraft, state authority, and the people of a state, compiled as the lecture series On the Essence of Nature, History, State. In these lectures, evident is his complex relationship to the modern state, tracing Being as determinative authority from the ancient Greek polis and transitioning to modernity. It is uncertain whether and to what degree Heidegger is justifying the state to meet the ends of his own regime commitment. Rather, what is clear is that Heidegger’s conception of a nation-state, with its derivation from a people determined and legitimized by Being, is a topic at the forefront of a political-philosophical discourse. To detail Heidegger on state authority is bound to a question of Being, nature, and history. History, as the unfolding of Being, determines all regimes as historically legitimate, as this process is the state of Being for a people. Heidegger leaves us without philosophical criteria to practically judge whether any state is politically beneficial to the people or not. Where a people exist in the site of Being from sheer history, a state is founded to be symmetrical with its historical-spiritual essence.
Chapter 5 · Abstract