The German, the Greek, the Jew

This article argues that Heidegger’s nationalist politics and his thinking of race (including his antisemitism) are undergirded by his novel ontology of essence. Beginning in 1930 with the first lecture version of “On the Essence of Truth,” a thinking of essence as relational rather than self-identical became central to his thinking. By explicating this understanding of essence as relational, the article shows that Heidegger’s German nationalism, philhellenism, and antisemitism are all articulated according to the relational structure of essence in his thinking, which clarifies the oft-remarked “ambivalence” toward “the foreign” (das Fremde) in his politics. This not only offers a clearer and more rigorous understanding of Heidegger’s racial politics but also shows that questioning these politics leads to the aporetic core of Heidegger’s thinking: the essential alterity at the core of being itself

Alterity · German · Nationalism · Ontology · Politics · Race (biology) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism