Heidegger's Reading of Hegel and Schmitt on Gewalt

7/25/2019 Heidegger's Reading of Hegel and Schmitt on Gewalt

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R e s e a r chi n

Phenomeno logy

The Misinterpretation of Violence: HeideggersReading of Hegel and Schmitt on Gewalt

Robert BernasconiPennsylvania State University

Abstract

In the winter semester 193435 Heidegger used the occasion of an introductory semi-

nar on HegelsPhilosophy of Rightas the context for a sustained confrontation with the

legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In this paper, I establish the context for Heideggers con-

frontation with Schmitt from 1933 to early 1935; I explain why Heidegger chose Hegel as

the context for his discussion; and above all, I demonstrate how their various attempts

to make sense of the seizure of power by the Nazis was combined with a systematic

neglect of the pervasive violence of the times.

Keywords

division of powers liberalism national socialism violence Georg Hegel Martin

Heidegger Carl Schmitt

I

What do we choose to see of violence in a world saturated with it? What meansdo we have at our disposal to recognize violence when it is hidden within insti-tutions and cloaked by claims to legitimacy? To what extent are we each impli-cated in the violence of those with whom we are associated? Whereas theoristslike Sartre and Fanon focused on exposing the violence inherent in colonial,capitalist, and fascist systems, theorists such as Hobbes, Hegel, and Schmitt

sought to legitimate and even conceal systemic violence by convincing peo-ple that the violent regime under which they lived was protecting them fromreal or worse violence. Schmitt is an especially interesting case. He denedthe political in terms of the relation of friend and enemy and in such a way


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that the political is more intense to the degree that the antagonism betweenfriend and enemy becomes more intense. He also argued that in order to limitthe violence between states, a measure of violence would be necessary within

any given society. There were occasions when he quite clearly sought to con-vince his audience that measures that appeared to be violent should not beregarded as such. This led him into frequent dialogue with both Hobbes andHegel, who attempted to do the same. In this essay, I show how Heideggerthrough his reading of Schmitt was drawn back to HegelsPhilosophy of Right,and that it was in his engagement with both of these authors that we get theclearest insight into how he approached philosophically the political events ofthe decisive years 19321935.

In the remainder of this section I will examine Hegels use of the term Gewaltso as to highlight the ambiguity of the term. In the second part of this paperI take up Carl Schmitts The Concept of the Politicalthrough the central, butoften neglected, discussion of violence to be found there. In the third part ofthe paper, I outline Heideggers argument against The Concept of the Political.Schmitt would have known about the critiques of his approach by some of

Carl Schmitt, Der Begrif des Politischen (1932), 1417, hereafter cited as ; translated by

George Schwab as The Concept of the Political 2629, hereafter cited as . For completebibliographic information, see the Abbreviations list at the end of this essay.

On Schmitts relation to Hobbes, see Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des

Thomas Hobbes(Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938); translated by George Schwab

and Erna Hilfstei as The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, :

Greenwood Press, 1996), and also John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism,

(Cambridge, : Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24989. On Schmitts relation to Hegel,

see Jean-Franois Kervgan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt. Le politique entre speculation et positivit

(Paris: , 2005), and with special reference to The Concept of the Political, Udo Tietz,

Anthropologischer Ansatz politischer Theorien, in Carl Schmitt. Der Begrif des Politischen.Ein kooperativer Kommentar, ed. Reinhard Mehring (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 12338.

There are a number of useful essays on Heidegger and Schmitt: Bernhard Radlof, Heidegger

and Carl Schmitt: The Historicity of the Political, Heidegger Studies20 (2004): 8399, and

21 (2005): 7594; Dieter Thom, The Diculty of Democracy: Rethinking the Political

in the Philosophy of the Thirties (Gehlen, Schmitt, Heidegger), in Nazi Germany and the

Humanities, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinach (Chicago: One World, 2007), 75100;

Georg Waite, Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss, Cultural Critique 69 (2008), 11340; and Peter

Trawny, Heidegger und das Politische, Heidegger Studies 28 (2012): 4766. Of these, only

Trawnys essay was published late enough to address Heideggers text on Hegels Philosophyof Right, which, now that it is available, is the best source for our knowledge of Heideggers

critique of Schmitt. See now also the essays by Peter Trawny, Susanna Lindberg, and Michael

Marder in On Hegels Philosophy of Right: The 193435 Seminar and Interpretive Essays ,

hereafter cited as .


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Heideggers former students, but he would not have been aware of Heideggerspolemic against him, which was conned to lectures, seminars, and privatemanuscripts, which found their way into print only recently. There was the

lecture courseBeing and Truthfrom 193334 which was rst published in 2001,the seminar Nature, History, State from the same semester, which was notpublished until 2009, and the seminar Hegels Philosophy of Right from thesemester 193435, which rst appeared in 2011. The last two texts in particularpresent signicant hermeneutical challenges because they consist largely ofreports written by students. However, in the same volume that published thestudent notes deriving from Heideggers seminar on thePhilosophy of Rightarealso included Heideggers notes for his own private use. These are especially

valuable; many of these notes relate to a text that Schmitt wrote at the endof 1934, State, Movement, People, in order to justify constitutionally the Nazitakeover. I will consider Heideggers response to that text in the fth part, butbefore doing so, I will, in the fourth part, present Schmitts argument in thistext in some detail as a way of contextualizing their discussion. In the sixthand nal section of my paper, I will examine why Heidegger decided to con-front Schmitt in the context of a few select passages from Hegels Philosophyof Rightand what emerges from his decision to do so. The fact that Heideggerconducted his main confrontation with Schmitt through a reading of parts ofHegelsPhilosophy of Rightenables us to see how reference to Hegel, far fromclarifying the situation for him, promoted a certain inability to see the violencetaking place around him for what it was.

For an overview of these critiques, see Reinhard Mehring, Formalisme, dcisionnisme,

nihilism. Les tudiants juifs de Heidegger critiques de Heidegger et de Schmitt (Strauss,

Kuhn, Lwith, Arendt), inLa dette et la distance, ed. Marie-Anne Lescourret (Paris: ditionsde lclat, 2014), 87113.

Martin Heidegger, ber Wesen und Begrif von Nature, Geschichte und Staat inHeidegger

Jahrbuch 4, pp. 5388 (hereafter ); translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as

Nature, History, State, 1364 (hereafter ); Mitschrift Wilhelm Hallwachs (hereafter

Hallwachs) and Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie 34/35 Protokolle (hereafter Protokolle), in

Seminare Hegel-Schelling, vol. 86 of Gesamtausgabe (hereafter 86), 549611 and 613655,

respectively.

Martin Heidegger, Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie (hereafter ), in 86: 55184/ , 101200.

Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, hereafter cited as ; translated by Simona Draghici asState Movement, People, hereafter cited as . I have also consulted the French translation

by Agns Pilleul, tat, Mouvement, Peuple(Paris: ditions Kim, 1997). Heidegger seems to

have thought that the themes of should be juxtaposed with those of his seminarNature,

History, State. See the diagram at Heidegger, ( 86: 121)/ , 147.


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We often talk as if Gewaltwas the German word for violence. Of course,it sometimes is. There are cases when Gewaltis translated as force but couldbe translated as violence equally well, if not better. So, for example, in the

Science of LogicHegel wrote: Die Gewalt ist die Erscheinung der Macht, oderdie Macht als usserliches: which has recently been translated as Violenceis the appearance of power, or power as external. Hegel also wrote in the

Encyclopedia, and it is a passage cited by Heidegger, that For although thestate may arise by forceit does not rest on force; force, in producing the state,has brought into existence only what is justied in and for itself, the laws, theconstitution. Nevertheless, it is not an error that the English word violenceappears scarcely at all in translations of Hegels Philosophy of Right, even

though much of the discussion is about Gewalt. In that book Gewalttends tomean something much more like force or power. Hannah Arendts strictdistinction between violence (Gewalt) and power (Macht) has had the efectof encouraging commentators to see a clearer diferentiation between thesetwo terms, but it has rightly been described as an original departure fromthe meaning of the word as previously understood, and we must be carefulnot to read it back into earlier texts. Whereas the term Gewaltis too broadto be translated as violence in most cases, the term Gewaltttigkeit can betranslated more reliably as violence, even though its strong connotations ofbrutality and arbitrariness make it narrower than the English word violence.

G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objective Logik (1812/13), ed.

Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 11 of Gesammelte Werke(Hamburg: Felix

Meiner, 1978), 405; translated by George di Giovanni as The Science of Logic(Cambridge,

: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 501 (Hegels emphasis).

G. W. F. Hegel, Encyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Dritter Theil. Die

Philosohie des Geistes, Bd. 7.2 of Werke(Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1845), 278, 432;

translated by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, revised by M. J. Inwood as Philosophy of Mind(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159, cited by Heidegger, ( 86: 123)/ , 149.

Marc de Launay, Macht, Gewalt, in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 608. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence(New

York: Harcourt and Brace, 1970); translated by Gisela Uellenberg as Gewalt und Macht

(Munich: R. Piper, 1970).

Heidegger explains that the word Gewaltttigkeit ordinarily means mere brutality

[Roheit] and arbitrariness (Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, vol. 40 of Gesamtausgabe

[Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983], 159; translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt

asIntroduction to Metaphysics, rev. ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014], 167). Onthis passage, see Gregory Fried,Heideggers Polemos(New Haven: Yale University Press,

2000), 14244. Elsewhere Heidegger identies Gewaltttigkeit with the wordBrutalitt

(Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, vol. 69 of Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt a.M.:

Klostermann, 1998], 195), hereafter 69.


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For this reason, the word serves Hegels purpose well when he wants to denythe presence of violence in the relation of the state to its subjects, which hedoes in paragraph 219 of the Philosophy of Right. While rejecting Carl Ludwig

von Hallers account of courts of law as a gracious but capricious act on the partof monarchs, on the grounds that it failed to look at these institutions from thepoint of view of reason, Hegel there dismissed as crude the view according to

which the administration of justice represents an improper use of violence[Gewaltttigkeit], a suppression of freedom, and a rule of despotism. That

was the perspective of the liberal individual. Hegels own position was thefollowing: The administration of justice should be regarded both as a dutyand as a right on the part of the public authority (Macht), and as a right, it is

not in the least dependent on whether individuals choose to entrust it to anauthority (Macht) or not. Such sentiments lent themselves to appropriationby the Nazis.

II

Scholars of Schmitts The Concept of the Political have tended to focus on thediscussion of friend and enemy in its opening pages, but the largely neglectedconclusion of the book makes the claim that the future, and certainly thefuture of Germany, depended on how one understood the German wordGewalt. Schmitt tells his readers that liberals understand every encroachment,every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competitionis called repression and is eo ipsosomething evil. The word George Schwabtranslated as repression was Gewalt, although the word violence might haveserved better. It should be noted that this passage cannot be found in the rst

version of Carl Schmitts The Concept of the Political, which appeared in 1927 as

a twenty-six-page article. It was included only in 1932 when the article wasexpanded to form the short book or pamphlet that in this version became hisbest known work.

G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Bd. 14.1 of Gesammelte Werke,

183, 219, hereafter abbreviated as 14.1; translated by H. B. Nisbet asElements of the

Philosophy of Right, 252, hereafter cited as(trans. modied).

Ibid. Schmitt, , 57/ , 71.

Carl Schmitt, Der Begrif des Politischen,Archiv Fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik

58 (1927): 133. This version was reprinted the following year in Probleme der Demokratie

(Berlin: Grunewald-Rothschild, 1928), 134.


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Schmitt used the 1932 version of The Concept of the Politicalas the occasionto reject liberalisms critique of the power of the state (Staatsgewalt). Insteadof understanding Staatsgewalt as state power, liberalism understood it as state

violence: The word Gewaltis utilized in liberal theory as a reproach againststate and politics. In liberalism, as Schmitt saw it, the notion of Gewalthadbeen demilitarized, depoliticized, and replaced by a perspective in whichethics and economics ruled. His response was not to defend that power as suchbut to argue that the way liberalism perceived what it called Staatsgewaltwasin error. Or, more precisely, it belonged to a time that was over: liberalism hadreached its historical end and no longer had anything to do with the world asit then existed. Schmitt must have felt in some way vindicated in his historical

judgment when, during 1933, the Weimar Constitution was suspended, but hehimself was under suspicion from the Nazis because of his close associationwith the now discredited general, Kurt von Schleicher.

For this reason Schmitt quickly issued a revised edition of The Conceptof the Political clearly designed to make the text more attractive to the NaziParty. The revised edition was printed in Fraktur, but there were further,more important changes. For example, in the 1932 edition, which Heideggerclaimed to be familiar with and which is the text most often read today, theethnic was included alongside the religious, the moral, and the economic.In the 1933 edition, which Schmitt sent to Heidegger on its publication in thesummer of that year, the term ethnic (ethnisch) was changed to vlkisch aspart of a general efort to rewrite the book in a form more in line with Nazisensibilities. Nevertheless, Heidegger continued to use the 1932 edition,

Schmitt, , 37/ , 70.

Schmitt, , 60/ , 73.

George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception, 2nd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press,1989), 1517 and 97100.

Carl Schmitt,Der Begrif des Politischen(Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933).

Schmitt, , 25/ , 37. Martin Heidegger, Letter to Carl Schmitt, 22 August, 1933, in

Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, vol. 16 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.:

Klostermann, 2000), 156; translated as Heidegger and Schmitt: The Bottom Line, Telos72

(Summer 1987): 132.

Schmitt, , 25/ , 37. There is a misprint so that in the translationethnischis translated

as ethical, not ethnic. Compare Der Begrif des Politischen (1933), 20. According to

Reinhard Mehring, the contact between Heidegger and Schmitt began when the formersent the latter a copy of his Rectoral Address and they met in September 1933 in Berlin

(9 September 1933 im Kaiserhof? Zur scheiternden Kooperation von Martin Heidegger

und Carl Schmitt in Berlin, in Kriegtechniker des Begrifs. Biographisce Studien zu Carl

Schmitt[Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 99109).


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which was more philosophically developed. So in 1933 Schmitt omitted therst two sections of the book, where the claim that [t]he concept of thestate presupposes the concept of the political was to be found. This sentence

had served as Heideggers invitation to pursue the ontological problems ofSchmitts account. In 1933 Schmitt also dropped the sentence in which Schmittdescribed the political enemy as the other, which Heidegger related backto Hegels dialectic of self-recognition by saying Enemy (according to CarlSchmitt) a being-otherwherein the entire threat of the other in regards tobeingis anot-recognizing[Nicht-anerkennen]the struggle againstthedis-qualifying[Ab-erkennen]of the mightiness of beingthe presupposition here

with friend and enemycare. Here and elsewhere Heidegger was at pains

to insist that Schmitt had failed to root his concepts ontologically and that,had he done so, he could have taken advantage of Heideggers own account ofDaseins self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung), an indication that even after he hadresigned the Rectorate, he had not yet abandoned one of the central terms ofthe Rectoral Address.

Schmitts attempt to pander to Nazi sensibilities in the 1933 edition wasmost apparent in an addition made to one of the key passages on violence,part of which I have already quoted. In 1932, he polemicized against the liberalunderstanding of violence: All liberal pathos turns against Gewalt and lackof freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and pri-

vate property and free competition is called Gewaltand iseo ipsosomethingevil. In 1933, at this point in the text, Schmitt added an additional sentencein which he indicated that if one follows state law and economic regulationsthen the state must not interfere even when thousands of peasants are driveninto poverty by the usurers bailif. In the context of the time, the intentionseems clear: to indicate that Jewish usurers were a threat to the very backboneof German society. Although Schmitts anti-Semitic tendencies have often

been discussed, I do not believe this early instance of it has been noted, andit is signicant that it occurs in the context of a rejection of the liberal under-standing of violence.

Heidegger, ( 86: 174)/ , 186.

Heidegger, Hallwachs (86: 6089), and Protokolle ( 86: 655).

Schmitt, , 5758/ , 71. In the 1927 version the sentence continues or indeed, as Locke,

the authentic founder of the Rechtstaat, liked to say, something animal-like (Schmitt,Der Begrif des Politischen [1927], 28).

Schmitt,Der Begrif des Politischen(1933), 51.

Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000); translated by Joel

Golb as Carl Schmitt and the Jews(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).


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III

Heidegger began his confrontation with Schmitt in the 193334 lecture course

Being and Truth, taking his lead from a claim that he made during the previ-ous semester that the ethnicity and language of the Greeks and the Germansshared a common provenance (Herkunft). Heidegger set himself the taskof bringing to mastery the fundamental possibilities of what he here calledour proto-German [urgermanisch] ethnic essence [Stammeswesen]. In thecontext of an interpretation of Heraclitus fragment 44 concerning ,Heidegger set about establishing his Nazi credentials with a radicality thatexceeded Schmitts attempt to do the same. Heidegger embraced Schmitts

language of friend and enemy but set it in his own framework to the pointwhere he could say that the enemy has attached itself to the innermost rootsof the Dasein of a people. However, he continued by insisting, in a phrasethat would still have been absolutely scandalous even if it was not so over-determined by the context, that more burdensome than coming to blows withthe enemy was bringing the enemy into the open so as to prepare the attacklooking far ahead into the goal of total annihilation (Vernichtung). Followingan interpretation of Platos allegory of the cave in which Heidegger empha-sized the violence of the liberation described there, he insisted that the mean-ing of National Socialism lay not in a doctrine but in a total transformation ofhuman Dasein, one that would transform the German world and perhaps theEuropean world as well.

At this point in the text, Heidegger attacked those Nazis who vociferouslyopposed liberalism but at the same time promoted what amounted to a lib-eral form of National Socialism. It is likely that he was already thinking ofSchmitt, as in the following year Heidegger did not hesitate to call the friend-enemy relation typically liberal in spite of Schmitts own conviction that he

was a critic of liberalism. Although Schmitt was against liberalism, not least

Martin Heidegger, Die Grundfragen der Philosophie, in Sein und Wahrheit, vol. 36/37 of

Gesamtausgabe, 6 (hereafter 36/37); translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as

Being and Truth, 5 (hereafter).

Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in ( 36/37: 89)/, 71.

Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit(36/37: 91)/, 73.

Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit ( 36/37: 14344, 119, and 225)/, 113, 93, and 17172.

Heidegger had made a similar point about liberation in the context of the allegory of thecave in his lectures from 193132, adding that in this context violence (Gewalttigkeit) did

not mean brutality or arbitrariness (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, vol. 34 of Gesamtausgabe

[Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1988], 42 and 8182).

Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit(36/37: 119)/, 94.


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because it took its starting-point in the interests that the individual maintainsin private property and personal freedom, Heidegger considered Schmitt aliberal because from his perspective Schmitt adopted the standpoint of the

individual with the result that he misunderstood the notion of the state andthought of politics as a sphere.In the same semester that Heidegger was delivering the lecture-course

Being and Truth, he also held the seminar recently published asNature, History,State. He observed there that Schmitts account of the friend-enemy relation

was grounded in the view that the possibility of the struggle for decision,which can also be fought out without military means, sharpens present oppo-

sitionsbe they moral, religious, or economicinto radical unity as friend

and enemy. This reading seems to be Heideggers interpretation of Schmittsclaim about the necessity of a pluralism of a world of states, a pluralism thatexcludes the possibility of a world-state. He wrote: Political unity [Die politische

Einheit] presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistencewith another political unity. Heidegger added correctly that in Schmitt this

political unity does not have to be identical with the state and the people,and this would seem to be in line with Heideggers own conception that onecannot found the political on the state. But Heidegger was also explicitlydiferentiating Schmitts concept of the political from his own, according to

which the political is a way of Being of human beings and what makes thestate possible, where the state is the way of Being of a people. Heideggersobjection was that Schmitt had failed to tie his account of the political into anaccount of the Being of the state and of the people of the kind that he himselfgave when he argued that [t]he Being of the state is anchored in the politicalbeing of the human beings who, as a people, support this statedecide for it.In the following semester, the summer of 1934, Heidegger would enrich theaccount he had already given of the state with an account of the Being of the

people. Heidegger accused Schmitt of not thinking suciently deeply about

Heidegger, ( 86: 174)/ , 186.

Heidegger, , 74/ , 46.

Schmitt, , 41/ , 53 (my translation). The sentence about the pluralism of a world of

states is missing from , the translation.

Heidegger, , 71/ , 52.

Heidegger, , 74 and 72/ , 46 and 43.

Heidegger, , 73/ , 45. Martin Heidegger,Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, vol. 38 of Gesamtaus-

gabe, 15166 (hereafter 38); translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna

as Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 12537 (hereafter ). See

also Robert Bernasconi, Who Belongs? Heideggers Philosophy of the Volk in 193334, in


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the nature of a people. Although it is is not clear precisely when Heideggerread Schmitts State, Movement, People, when he did he found there an accountof the people that was richer than the one he had found in The Concept of

the Political. This led him to adopt a diferent approach during the semester193435 in a seminar on HegelsPhilosophy of Right.

IV

Heideggers interest in Hegels political philosophy seems to have been a resultof the constitutional crises of 1933. It was widely believed that the so-called

liberal separation of the executive and legislative imposed by the WeimarConstitution had contributed to the inability of successive governments toaddress Germanys economic crisis that had opened the door to communism. It

was that perspective that had led many of the German people to look to Hitleras, in the words of the famous poster, Unsere letzte Hofnung. Hitler usedthis support to concentrate power in his person. Schmitts main pre occupationin State, Movement, Peoplewas to legitimate the repeal of the liberal consti-tutional separation of the executive from the legislative that had taken placethrough a series of laws enacted during 1933. He highlighted a number of thelaws from that time, and in his notes Heidegger listed three of them as if it washis intention to consult them. The rst and most important piece of legisla-tion was the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People, also sometimes knownas the Enabling or Empowerment Act (Ermchtigungsgesetz). It was passed on24 March 1933 and contained a provision according to which the Reich Cabinet

was also authorized to pass laws. The second piece of legislation recordedby Heidegger from Schmitts text was the Reichsstatthaltergesetz, the SecondLaw for the Coordination of the Federal States under the Reich. It was passed

on 7 April 1933 with the aim, which would not reach full fruition until thefollowing year, of concentrating power centrally. Schmitt himself played a role

, 10925. In 193334 Heidegger had explicitly postponed the question of the people

(, 74/ , 46).

Heidegger, ( 86: 75)/ , 11213). Reichsministerium des Innern, Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich

Vom 24 Mrz 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt(Berlin, Reichsverlagsamt), Teil 1, nr. 25 (1933): 141;

translated as The Ennabling Law, inDocuments on Nazism 19191945, ed. Jeremy Noakes

and Geofrey Pridham (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 195.


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in writing it. The last of the three laws noted was designed to secure the unityof the party and the state and was supposed to be accomplished in part byincluding the deputy of the Fhrer and the Chief of Staf of the Sturmabteilung

(i.e., the or Brownshirts) as members of the Reich Government. Thedominant idea behind this piece of legislation from 1 December 1933 was thatthe Nazi Party was the bearer of the concept of the German State. Schmitt,applying his threefold schema, interpreted this law as saying that the NationalSocialist Party was the leading body and that it underlay both the State andthe People. In consequence, neither the Nazi Party, including the , nor theFhrer principle to which it held, was to be understood as subject to the courts,and Schmitt recognized that this meant that the Party had to set its own stan-

dards from within itself: The courts are just as little permitted on any pretextto interfere in the internal problems and decisions of the Party organization,and violate its leader-principle from without. The internal organization anddiscipline of the Party, carrier of State and People, are its own business. It mustdevelop its own standards on its own strictest responsibility. Schmitt reaf-rmed this formulation later at a time when the vicious nature of the newregime was even clearer, but even at this early point he understood that withthis conception the whole danger of the political was in play.

Because the Enabling Law had been passed by a Reichstag parliamentelected according to the old rules, Schmitt was concerned that it might seemthat the Weimar Constitution was the source of the legitimacy to the NationalSocialist State. Schmitt wanted to resist this conclusion, not least becausethis would suggest that the Weimar Constitution was still in force, especiallyas the Empowering Law was only temporary and needed to be rearmedafter three years. For Schmitt it was inconceivable that the National SocialistState could be derived from the liberal-democratic framework that from hisperspective had already collapsed. The Enabling Law had to be shown to be

a bridge from the old foundation (Grundlage) to a new one, through which

Reichsministerium des Innern, Zweites Gesetz zur Gleichschaltung der Lnder mit dem

Reich. Vom 7 April 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt, 1, 33 (1933): 173; translated in Documents on

Nazism, 23940. Schmitts role is discussed at William L. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt. The

End of Law(Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1999), 15.

Reichsministerium des Innern, Gesetz zur Sicherung der Einheit von Partei und Staat

Vom 1 Dezember 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt , 135 (1933): 1016; translated inDocuments onNazism, 233.

Schmitt, , 20/ , 21.

Schmitt, , 22/ , 23.

Ibid.


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the Weimar Constitution had been overcome (berwinden). The idea of eth-nic identity was foundational for the new order and the Weimar Constitutiondid not allow for any distinction between the friends of the state and for-

eigners (Artfremde). Schmitt insisted that without the principle of ethnicidentity (Artgleichheit), the German National-Socialist State cannot exist.He repeated the same point in the pamphlets last sentence: all the questionsand answers ow into the exigency of an ethnic identity (Artgleichheit) with-out which a total leader-state could not stand its ground a single day. This

was a clear endorsement of Hitlers racial policies at that time, such as theLaw for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service of 7 April 1933, according to

which ocials of non-Aryan descent were to be retired. Nevertheless, even

if he now specied the homogeneity was to be understood in terms of kind orvariety (Art), the argument in favor of homogeneity was not new and so can-not be understood simply as another part of his attempt to ingratiate himself

with the Nazis. In 1930 Schmitt already expressed a concern with the need forunity to balance the pluralism of races and peoples, of religions and cultures,of languages and legal systems. This unity could come either from abovethrough power and command or from below from the substantial homogene-ity of a people, or more likely from both. Even earlier, in 1926, citing the exam-ple of the expulsion of the Greeks by the Turks and Australias restrictions onimmigration to the right type of settler, he insisted that democracy requiresrst homogeneity and secondif the need ariseselimination or annihila-tion (Ausscheidung oder Vernichtung) of heterogeneity. There is no reason tobelieve that Heidegger knew this text, but it is not by accident that they wereboth drawn to the word Vernichtungas they tried to develop an account of theVolk. To be sure, Schmitt did not distance himself from biological understand-ings of the Volk in the way that Heidegger did, even though at one of the places

Schmitt, , 78/ , 67.

Schmitt, , 56/, 4.

Schmitt, , 42/ , 48.

Schmitt, , 46/ , 52.

Schmitt, , 44/ , 50.

Carl Schmitt, Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat, Kant-Studien25, no. 1 (1930): 3537;

translated by David Dyzenhaus as Ethic of State and Pluralistic State, in The Challenge of

Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Moufe (London: Verso, 1999), 2034. Carl Schmitt, Vorbemerkung, in Die geistesgeschichtlichen Lage des heutigen

Parlamentarismus(Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), 14; translated by Ellen Kennedy

as The Crisis of Parlamentary Democracy(Cambridge, : Press, 1988), 9 (translation

modied).


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where he joined in discussion with Schmitt, he referred to the historical Daseinof a people as a stock (Stamm), or a tribe (Sippe).

Schmitts argument was that although the Ennabling Law was passed

by the parliament, this was the new parliament put in place following theGerman federal elections of 5 March 1933, and so it was, in efect, the resultof a plebiscite. Overlooking the fact that the results of the election wereinuenced by the burning of the Reichstag and the consequent purging of theCommunist Party, Schmitt argued that it was not the Weimar Constitution butthe people who legitimated the new measures. He cited the principle enunci-ated by Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party: Alle Gewalt geht vom

Volke aus. All power comes from the people. But the Party was still the lead-

ing body. Hence, for Schmitt, the issue was not the relation of the state to thepeople, which is how Heidegger saw it, but the relation of state, movement,and people, where the state is the total state conceived qualitatively, notquantitatively, where the movement was the Nazi Party conceived dynami-cally, and where the people was the German people considered in terms of ahomogeneity based on ethnic identity.

The new question that these events provoked was that of how the triadicorganization of political unity into state, movement, and party impacted thetraditional division of powers (Gewaltenunterscheidung) into the legislative,the executive, and the judiciary. The division had been introduced within lib-eralism to allow the non-statal society to rule and efectively control the Stateexecutive, that is, the reality of the State command, which it did through par-liament as a representative body whose task was to protect the basic rightsand freedoms of society conceived of as composed of free private individuals.That is to say, on Schmitts account, liberalism is organized around a directconfrontation between the state and private individuals and a belief in theneed to erect a whole edice out of the protective legal means and institu-

tions, in order to protect the helpless and defenceless, poor and isolated

Heidegger, Hallwachs ( 86: 608). On Heideggers use of the termsStammandSippe,

see Robert Bernasconi, Race and Earth in Heidegggers Thinking during the Late 1930s,

The Southern Journal of Philosophy48, no. 1 (2010): 4966, esp. 5758 and 6364.

Schmitt, , 7/ , 5.

Rudolf Hess, Der Kongress des Sieges, in Reichstagung in Nrnberg 1933, ed. Julius

Streicher (Berlin: Verlag C.A. Weller, 1933), 32, cited at Schmitt, , 9/ , 7. As Schmittobserved, this was almost identical to a formulation found in the rst article of the Weimar

Constitution: Die Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus,Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs

vom 11. August 1919(Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, n.d.), 7.

Schmitt, , 23/ , 25.


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individual person from the powerful Leviathan, the State. Schmitt rejectedthis account because it seemed to him that it did not accord with the facts:the non-statal and apolitical sphere is occupied not by individuals but by

strong collective formations or organizations such as people, society, freecitizenry, productive proletariat, public opinion. They occupy the non-stataland apolitical sphere of freedom, but they are not themselves apolitical andso they represent a challenge to the state. This confusion was avoided insofaras under the new arrangements state, movement, and people were broughttogether in the Fhrer, and the old liberal division between the executive, thelegislative, and the judicial were thereby transcended.

Heidegger followed closely Schmitts attempt in State, Movement, Peopleto

rethink the new unity of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial underthe Fhrer. A brief note under the title Legislative Power (GesetzgebendeGewalt) reads:

How today?The possibilities of legislation.Cf. Carl Schmitt, p. 10They lie in governing as leadership.Legislative and executiveno longer severed.

This was not Heideggers own position but his step-by-step reconstruction ofSchmitts argument from State, Movement, Power, according to which the lib-eral severing of the executive from the legislative has been overcome throughthe political leadership exercised by Adolf Hitler. Heidegger did not acceptSchmitts solution in part because he did not consider the terms state, move-ment, and people as metaphysically established in the way Schmitt usedthem. Nevertheless, Heidegger agreed with Schmitt that only strong leader-

ship could resolve the problems focused by the Weimar governments wherethe executive and legislative powers had been at war with each other.

In 193334 Heidegger had embraced the idea of the Fhrer bringing the peo-ple into unity: Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together toonefate and ght to actualizeoneidea does true order arise. In the notes for

Schmitt, , 24/ , 26.

Ibid. Heidegger, ( 86: 72)/ , 110.

The reference is to Staat Bewegung Volkand not, as the editor of the volume suggests, to

Legalitt und Legitimitt. See Heidegger, ( 86: 72)/ , 195n4.

Heidegger, , 77/, 49.


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his seminar, the following year Heidegger asked specically what precedencecould mean in Schmitts claim that the precedence of political leadershipis the basic law within the new law of the state. Furthermore, he rejected

Schmitts idea that this leadership could arise in a self-grounding, in favorof a grounding back into the people that is a grounding ahead into its histori-cal sending (Sendung). Nevertheless, Heidegger continued to celebrate the

Fhrerprinzip, albeit in an abstract way, as if focusing on the principle ratherthan the man occupying the oce. He wrote about aFhrerwho is in thinkingking and lord, but in action a servant. He continued his idealized portrait asfollows: The leader thus not leader through his persuasive personality (lib-eral-aesthetic) or through cunning and violence (Gewaltttigkeit)rather on

the basis of ametaphysical correspondencewhich occurs groundinglywhere the people attain to such a being (Sein) andthoroughly shape itasstate. This statement could be read as a criticism of Hitlers constant use of

violence to secure his leadership, but before jumping to that conclusion onehas to ask whether Heidegger followed Schmitt in refusing to see the use offorce by the state as violence.

V

The specic question that united Schmitt and Heidegger, beyond their sharedrejection of liberalism and failure to question the regime, was that of whether

what the Nazis were doing constitutionally and politically could be assimilatedto familiar modes of thought or whether their actions called for new ways ofthinking, or even, as Heidegger argued in the summer of 1934, a transforma-tion of Dasein. It was this question that led them both to return to Hegel,although Schmitt had already introduced Hegels doctrine of the division of

powers in an addition to the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Politicalthatbelonged to a part of the text that was dropped in the following year. ThereSchmitt referenced a brief discussion by his friend Rudolf Smend, who hadsuggested that Hegels discussion of the division of powers (Gewaltenteilung),on Treschers interpretation of it, provided a valuable model that could be used

Schmitt, , 9/ , 89.

Schmitt, , 22/ , 23. Heidegger, ( 86: 170)/ , 183.

Heidegger, ( 86: 169)/ , 182. The word king could be a reference to Heraclitus

.

Martin Heidegger,Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache ( 38: 57)/ , 50.


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to help to save Germany from the chaos of Weimar. The important point hereis that Smend had already in 1928 alerted Schmitt to the possibility of havingrecourse to Hegel in justifying a wholesale rejection of the Weimar constitu-

tion. Smend had given the name integration theory to the approach thathe found reected in Hegel, but Schmitt associated it with the relatively newlabel of the total state. The meaning of the phrase total state is a great dealmore complex than is usually recognized. Not all Nazis embraced the idea.Schmitt himself accepted the idea in its minimal sense but rejected it in itsmore common usage. Whether one should associate Hegel with the total stateand, more generally, what one should mean by the Hegelian state is in playin trying to understand Schmitts famous proclamation that with Hitler Hegel

had died.Schmitts claim in State, Movement, People was that on 30 January 1933,the day President Paul von Hindenburg swore in Adolf Hitler as Chancellor

Schmitt, , 13/ , 25. Rudolf Smend relied on Hildegard Treschers account of Hegels

approach to the division of powers in Stephan Geidel, Montesquieus Einuss auf

die philosophischen Grundlagen der Staatslehre Hegels (Inaugural-dissertation zur

Erlangung der Doktorwrde bei der hohen philosophischen Fakultt der Universitt

Leipzig, Altenburg, 1917), 98105. See Smend, Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht(Mnchen:Duncker und Humblot, 1928), 9697. For a more recent interpretation, see Ludwig Siep,

Hegels Theorie der Gewalteinteilung, in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie in Zusammenhang

der europischen Verfassungsgeschichte(Stuttgart-Bad Constant: Frommann-Holzboog,

1986), 387420. Heidegger also referenced Montesquieu, but it seems unlikely he went

back to Trescher ( 86: 71/ , 109).

In fact, the Nazi State may not have been a total state in the full sense (Ernst Fraenkel, The

Dual State, trans. E. A. Shils [New York: Oxford University Press, 1941]). Similarly Alfred

Rosenberg, in the 9 January 1934 issue of the Vlkischer Beobachter, rejected the model

of the total state as a way of thinking what the Nazis were attempting to create, becausehe associated it with the absolutist state of 1871 and 1918 and because under the Nazis

the state had been reduced to an instrument of the National Socialist Weltanschauung

(Totaler Staat?, in Gestaltung der Idee, ed. Thilo von Trotha [Munich: Franz Eher,

1936], 21).

Schmitts hesitation before the idea of a total state is most clearly reected in Die

Wendung zum totalen Staat, Europische Revue 7, no. 4 (April 1931): 24150, and in

Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staates in Deutschland, in Positionen und Begrife im

Kampf mit WeimarGenfVersailles, 19231939(Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlasanstalt,

1940), 18590. See also Schmitts discussion of a quantitatively total state in terms of itsareas of interventions, which is nevertheless fragmented and pluralist in terms of political

parties: Legalitt und Legitimitt (Mnchen: Duncker und Humblot, 1932), 9394,

translated by Jefrey Seitzer as Legality and Legitimacy(Durham: Duke University Press,

2004), 9293.


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of Germany, Hegel died. The protocols for Heideggers seminar on HegelsPhilosophy of Rightshow that he responded to Schmitt by saying that Hegel hadnot yet lived. On closer examination things are more complicated. Schmitt

specied that Hegels idea of a political leadership standing above the selsh-ness of societal interests and much else remained intact in the new form.It seems that when Schmitt said that Hegel died, he meant only that the formsof the Hegelian state of civil servants that corresponded to the nineteenth-century state were at an end. In other words, what had died was the liberal-democratic state, and furthermore, this was necessary if the German State wasto nd the strength to crush Marxism, its enemy. Heidegger contested thisreading of Hegel: If one takes Hegel in terms of the philosophy of the state as a

metaphysics of the bureaucratic state (the state is spiritbecause the ocialsare learned and scientically educated (gebildet)), then everything becomessenselessthis is a mistaking of the essential motif of the Hegelian idea of thestate with the facts. In other words, Schmitt might well have been factu-ally right that the bureaucratic state, with which Hegels name had come to beassociated, had lost its vitality but that was not what Hegel meant by the state,

which Heidegger was at pains to understand in terms of a richer conceptionof spirit, spirit as knowing will. But this is not all Heidegger meant when hedeclared that the announcement of Hegels death was premature. Heideggersown notes for his seminar on Hegel explain: On 30.1.33 Hegel diedno! hehad not yet lived!there he has rst come alivejust as even history comesalive, i.e. dies. This enigmatic claim could be understood as an early form ofthe idea that Hegels philosophy fullls itself only in a completion that opensup the possibility of what Heidegger would in 1935 begin to call another begin-ning. Hegel came into his own for Heidegger who at this time presented Hegelas the completion (Vollendung) of philosophy. For Heidegger, a confrontation

with Hegel was a confrontation with the whole of Western philosophy and,

even more importantly, an opportunity to demonstrate what a metaphysical

Schmitt, , 32/ , 35. On the interpretation of this sentence as a lament, see Gnther

Rohrmoser, Der Hegelsche Staat ist tot, in vol. 6 of Schmittiana (Berlin: Duncker &

Humboldt, 1998), 15152.

Heidegger, ( 86: 606).

Schmitt, , 32/ , 35. Schmitt, , 3132/ , 3536.

Heidegger, ( 86: 85)/ , 120.

Heidegger, ( 86: 85)/ , 119.

Heidegger, Hallwachs ( 86: 550 and 569), and Protokolle ( 86: 644).


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examination of the state would look like, an observation clearly intended asa contrast to Schmitts account that did not rise to the level of metaphysics.

In any event, Schmitt and Heidegger could agree that what had died deni-

tively was a misreading of Hegel. Schmitt still went to Hegel for help in address-ing liberalisms dualism of a bureaucratic machine, on the one hand, and a freecivil society, on the other. Specically, he turned to Hegels account of the cor-porations as the transition from civil society to the state. Even so, Heidegger

would criticize Schmitts reading of Hegel on this point, because Schmitt didnot think dialectically: Cf. how Hegel searches for something essentialin thecorporationsnot simply here the individual and here the state, but ratherdialectically and that means here however the return into the originary

essence of both. Heideggers objection against Schmitt was thus that he toowas still far too external in his approach. Perhaps this was what he meantwhen he complained that Schmitt thinks liberally.

Schmitt was aware of the conceptual obstacles to thinking state, movement,and people in such a way that each was distinguished from the others withoutbeing severed (getrennt), linked but not fused. The requirement to do so cameout of an attempt to describe their interaction within the context of the newregime: Three formations move side by side in their own order, meet in cer-tain decisive points, particularly at the apex, have distinctly diferent contactsand direct links with each other, which however are not allowed to cancel thedistinctions, and as a whole, efected by the carrying series, all shape the con-stitution of the political unity. This perhaps can be understood as Schmittsattempt to formulate an alternative to Smends appeal to Hegels account ofthe division of powers. Heideggers response seems to have been to argue thatHegels conception provided the better model when thought with dialecticalrigor. Heidegger agreed with Schmitt that the three powerswhich he nowidentied as the legislating, the administrating, and the judicialshould not

be seen as severed, as in liberalism, but Heidegger insisted that they were notfused but sublated. We do not know if Heidegger was fully aware of Schmittsnuanced position on the total state, but when he accused Schmitt of being far

Heidegger, Hallwachs ( 86: 6078), and Protokolle ( 86: 644).

Schmitt, , 28/ , 31.

Heidegger, ( 86: 73)/ , 111.

Heidegger, ( 86: 74)/ , 111. Heidegger, ( 86: 174)/ , 186.

Schmitt, , 21 and 32/ , 22 and 36.

Schmitt, , 12/ , 11.

Heidegger, ( 86: 71 and 73)/ , 109 and 111.


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too extrinsic and then went on to criticize those who thought of the total statein terms of the addition of forces, rather than starting from the whole, suchthat the parts could be said to partition themselves from the totality, he again

probably had Schmitt in mind.

VI

We have seen how Heidegger rejected the idea of a Fhrer who led throughcunning and violence, but he also seems to have supported Hegel in his beliefthat conict (Widerstreit) is necessary for the sublation that releases the stric-

tures that advance the individual to true freedom and selood. There isfurther evidence that he, like Schmitt, was willing to turn a blind eye to the vio-lence of the regime on philosophical grounds. In his reading of thePhilosophyof Right, Heidegger encountered Hegels rejection of the liberal conceptionof violence in terms that echoed the similar rejection of violence by Schmittin The Concept of the Political. Commenting presumably on paragraph 219 ofHegels Philosophy of Rightwhere Hegel rejected the crude view accordingto which the administration of justice represents an improper use of vio-lence (Gewaltttigkeit), a suppression of freedom, and a rule of despotism,Heidegger wrote: Force [Gewalt]in the misinterpretation of violence(Gewaltttigkeit) namely as unjustied interventionimpairment of per-sonal freedom, of private property and its interests of free competition. Heunderstood very well Hegels rejection of liberalisms tendency to see whateverinterferes with the individuals wish to be aloneeven if it takes the form ofwild impulse, licentiousness, or addictionas violence against the individ-ual, whereas these misuses of the will in fact run counter to the higher will.Heidegger commented that the peoples licentiousness together with their

indolence can be overcome only if mastery (Herrrschaft) over them is assertedand orders of rank imposed. This interpretation of Hegel was presentedin terms that very clearly recall Schmitts attack on the liberal conception of

violence. He wrote: And since this is the good (liberal), that is the evil anddespicable, becausein accordance with the individuated wish to be alone,

Heidegger, ( 86: 7374)/ , 11112. Heidegger, ( 86: 131)/ , 154. See also ( 86: 120)/ p. 146.

Hegel, (14.1: 183)/, 252 (trans. modied).

Heidegger, ( 86: 72)/ , 110.

Heidegger, ( 86: 73)/ , 11011.


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through this a counter will against every higher will occurswhich thus nec-essarily appears as violence.

It is important to understand the context in which Heidegger held his

seminar on Hegel. The situation had changed a great deal between the timeSchmitt wrote State, Movement, Peopleand the beginning of Heideggers semi-nar on Hegel, which had its rst meeting on 7 November 1934. Heidegger hadresigned as Rector of Freiburg University on 1 April 1934, but this did not stophim from joining with Schmitt, among others, in signing a letter supportingthe proposal, put to a plebiscite on 19 August 1934, to bring together the oceof Chancellor and that of President, which had been held by Field MarshallPaul von Hindenburg until his death. Even more telling, the so-called Night

of the Long Knives had taken place, which began on 30 June 1934, when the crushed the , assassinating its leader and Hitlers Deputy, Ernst Rhm,among many others. Karl Jaspers, when assessing Heideggers involvement

with National Socialism, argued that any change of heart that might haveplaced him in the anti-Nazi camp meant little unless it occurred immediatelyand decisively after the events that day. The evidence of the seminar is thatit did not.

Even in the face of the Night of the Long Knives, Schmitt continued withhis attempt to make the violence associated with Hitlers attempts to main-tain power appear legitimate and thus disappear as violence. In The FhrerProtects the Law [Recht], an essay that included a long defense of Hitlersactions during the Night of the Long Knives on the grounds that in momentsof danger he was the highest leader (oberster Gerichtsherr), Schmitt quotedextensively from his own account in State, Movement, People, in the contextof his own insistence that the Party and the Fhrer were not governed by thecollective responsibility article of the Weimar Constitution. He repeatedthe argument that This mighty (gewaltige) task, in which is concentrated the

The letter is reprinted in Victor Farias,Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus(Frankfurt:

S. Fischer 1989), 26162, translated by Paul Burrell asHeidegger and Nazism(Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1989), 19192. It is worth noting that Nicolai Hartmann, who is

sometimes praised for not having compromised himself, was also a signatory.

Paul R. Maracin, The Night of the Long Knives(Guilford: Lyons Press, 2004), 114.

Karl Jaspers, Letter to Friedrich Oehlkers, 22 December 1945, in Hugo Ott, Martin

Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie(Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), 317; translated by

Allan Blunden asMartin Heidegger. A Political Life(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 340. Carl Schmitt, Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht, in Positionen und Begrife im Kampf mit

WeimarGenfVersailles, 200; translated by Timothy Nunan as The Fhrer Protects

the Law, in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 66.


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entire danger of the political cannot be taken away from the party or the by any other institution least of all by a juridically proceeding civilian court.Here the task stands by itself. That is to say, Schmitt had already, in State,

Movement, People, drawn the clear conclusion that the Party was not subject tothe state, with the clear consequence that the state no longer had a monopolyon legitimate violence, a conclusion that some have argued could already bedrawn from the claim that the concept of the state presupposed the concept ofthe political. It is quite possible that Heidegger did not know Schmitts textpublished in Deutsche-Juristen Zeitung on 1 August 1934, but he should havebeen able to see the implications of the argument that Schmitt had used inState, Movement, Power, and one of his notes suggests that he possibly did so.

Addressing the topic of the powers [Gewalten] in the national-socialist stateand leadership and asking the question of what it meant to talk about thedistribution of the legitimate authority of the government, Heidegger wrote,Responsibility precisely the reversenow there is gathered and originallypreservedin leadership; not used up.

Was this Heideggers own view at this time? Or was he just paraphrasingSchmitt? There are indications that it was Heideggers view. According to theseminar protocol, Heidegger embraced obedience to the state when con-ducted within the necessary limits of our German essence. Each defection[Abfall] from the essence of the people is a betrayal of the constitution andof the state even if this is not graspable juridically. He continued by makingthe argument that where the constitution of the state no longer functionedas the ethical bond in the life of the individual, state and people are exposed todecline and consigned to history. For all their disagreement on other mattersincluding how the balance of powers was to be thought, on this central ques-tion about violence it seems most likely that they agreed.

Subsequently the tenor of Heideggers reections on Gewaltwould change.

His question about the origin of forceWoher die Gewalt selbst?waspursued inIntroduction toMetaphysics, and texts from the late 1930s attempted

Schmitt, , 22/ , 22, quoted in Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht, 200/The Fhrer

Protects the Law, 66.

Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy. An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso,

2000), 186. Heidegger, ( 86: 171)/ , 183.

Heidegger, Protokolle ( 86: 640).

Heidegger, Protokolle ( 86: 641).

Heidegger, ( 86: 71)/ , 109.


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to transform the way in which the term Gewaltis heard. But the evidencethat I have presented here suggests that Heideggers conception of violencein the crucial period from 1933 to early 1935 is the same as that to be found in

Schmitt. It was a rejection of the liberal conception of violence, and it served toconceal the violence of the Nazis. In the context of 1933 in Nazi Germany, howone understood violence determined who was liberal and who was genuinelyNazi, and in that context Schmitt and Heidegger employed Hegel in supportof the Nazis.

Abbreviations

Works by G. W. F. Hegel

Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

14.1 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Vol. 14.1 of GesammelteWerke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2009.

Works by Martin Heidegger

Being and Truth. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

36/37 Sein und Wahrheit. Edited by Hartmut Tietjen. Vol. 36/37 ofGesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2001.

38 Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. Edited by GnterSeubold. Vol. 38 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann,1998.

69 Die Geschichte des Seyns. Edited by Peter Trawny. Vol. 69 ofGesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998.

86 Seminare Hegel-Schelling. Vol. 86 of Gesamtausgabe. Edited byPeter Trawny. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2011.

Hallwachs Mitschrift Wilhelm Hallwachs. In 86: 54961. On Hegels Philosophy of Right. Edited by Peter Trawny, Marcia

S Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder. Translated byAndrew J. Mitchell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

For example, Martin Heidegger,Die Geschichte des Seyns, vol. 69 of Gesamtausgabe, 8. See

Krzysztof Ziarek, The Nonviolent Enjunction of Being: Heidegger on Ge-walt, The New

Centennial Review14, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 6578.


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Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language.Translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna. Albany: Press, 2009.

ber Wesen und Begrif von Nature, Geschichte und Staat. InHeidegger Jahrbuch 4,Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus :Documente. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2009.

Nature, History, State. Translated by Gregory Fried and RichardPolt. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Protokolle Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie 34/35 Protokolle. In 86: 61355.

Works by Carl Schmitt

Der Begrif des Politischen. Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1932. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlag, 1935. State, Movement, People. Translated by Simona Draghici. Corvallis,

: Plutarch Press, 2001.