Heidegger as a Colonial Thinker: Puritanism and Germany’s Errand into the Wilderness

Introduction: The quest for an authentic national “we”

In the summer of 1934, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture on Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language [hereafter Logic]. The timing of this lecture is of special interest since its delivery falls in the period right after Heidegger’s resignation from his rectorship at the University of Freiburg. This resignation is often treated as a marker of Heidegger’s disillusionment with de facto Nazism and as an indicator of the philosopher’s nascent recovery from his political misgivings (Zaborowski 2010, 351, 369, 371-383). However, as commentators like Reinhard Mehring, Gregory Fried, and Matthew Sharpe have convincingly argued, the continuity of Heidegger’s thought—especially his recurrent invocation of “mythic beginnings” (Mehring 2018, 47-59) and his persistent adherence to a specific form of cultural nationalism (Fried 2000; Sharpe 2018)—speaks against the thesis of any such wake-up moment; and the ongoing controversy sparked by the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks has added further layers of complexity to the textual situation (Gordon 2014; Heinz and Kellerer 2016; Mitchell and Trawny 2017).

It should be noted that the first available version of Heidegger’s Logic was published in 1998 as volume 38 in the Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe [hereafter GA]), based on a student protocol by Wilhelm Hallwachs and edited by Günter Seubold. Recently, in 2020, another version based on the original manuscript has been released as volume 38A. This last edition in German differs in some formulations from the former 1998 edition, but in terms of philosophical content they are fairly congruent. For the purposes of this article, I am focusing on GA38A. In a few select places, I have also engaged the older edition for which an English translation is available (Heidegger 2009 [hereafter LEL]) to underscore similarities or point out particular discrepancies. Whenever the older edition is considered, parallel page references to the manuscript version are provided to allow for easy comparison.

Overall, the Logic lecture is organized around a central distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, a contrast which Heidegger pursues in several directions. First, Heidegger sets his understanding of logic apart from its common rendering in terms of “thought laws” (Denkgesetze) (GA38A, 10, 112). Specifically, he recasts logic as logos construed as the essence of language, which brings humans into their own by assigning different “spirit-historical” (geistig-geschichtliche) (GA38A, 8-9) mandates to different peoples as the sole passageway to an authentic national “we” (GA38A, 43, 105, 110-112, 128-129). Such historical calling unfolds above the mundane level of oral or written communication, including historiographic documents. Thus, Heidegger posits a distinction between Nachricht and Kunde (GA38A, 85, 91, 158-159, 166). The former term is associated with superficial reports of historical facts which are causally linked in chronological order (GA38A, 97, 114). The latter term refers to a special kind of enunciation that alerts those who pay close attention to the stakes of their current situation, beckoning them to commit to the calling of their nation beyond the confines of scientific objectivity and pragmatic reasoning (GA38A, 90, 93, 101-103). Second, Heidegger discerns an ominous gulf that separates world-historically significant peoples like the Germans, and “human groups—like a Negro village in the jungle—who have no history” (GA38A, 79). In a related passage, these human groups are specified as “Negros and Kaffirs” (GA38A, 81; cf. GA38, 81, 83; LEL, 69, 71).

In a recent apologia for Heidegger, Laurence Paul Hemming (2022) revisits a point made by Robert Bernasconi (2000, 51) to the effect that “in his lectures on language, Heidegger repeated the longstanding idea that the Negro has no history” as a “familiar trope of European racism.” As Bernasconi (1998, esp. section III) examined on a previous occasion, specific elements of such European racist thought can be discerned in Hegel’s writings, including the infamous dictum from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History that Africa “has no history in the true sense of the word” (Hegel 1975, 190), of which Heidegger’s formulation appears reminiscent. Upon noting this detail, and contrary to Bernasconi’s evaluation, Hemming (2022, 241, 248) then takes a different tack when he argues that Heidegger’s indirect reference to Hegel is made in staunch opposition to the latter’s brand of racism, for which Heidegger’s own thought is meant to furnish a philosophical antidote. This is not convincing. To begin with, it is misleading when Hemming (2022, 247) asserts “Anyone who takes the trouble to read beyond the notorious geschichtslos passage in the volume of the 1934 Logic lectures discovers in nearly one hundred pages following, an excoriating critique of Hegel’s view of history, coupled with an only thinly disguised attack on the Nazi view of the state.” As far as I can tell, Hegel’s name is mentioned only three times, and each time merely in passing (GA38A, 6-7, 100, 144). Signaled by the last reference in particular, Heidegger finds Hegel complicit in Western subjectivism and its tendency to sugarcoat history’s eruptive potential. However, Hegel is not rebuked for any particular misconceptions related to race. Instead, the fleeting critique of Hegel in Logic reiterates a stance already familiar from Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures, namely, his long-standing opposition to philosophical conceptions of universal history (GA60, 31-54, esp. 45, 48) construed as an all-engulfing, singular process of humanity’s social progression based on reasoned self-organization. This raises the crucial question: Is there a direct link, conceptually or otherwise, between endorsing universal history and being racist?

Bernasconi, for his part, already emphasized that the Western philosophical tradition may be pervaded by racism much more than has previously been acknowledged, and Hegel’s writings can be considered an instructive, albeit painful reminder of that. Yet, from this it does not follow that Hegel has a monopoly on universal history, even if his particular version of it could be seen as philosophically among the most ambitious. As far as Hegel’s racism is concerned, the problem seems to lie not with universal history per se, but with the specific “goal” Hegel posits for it, according to a nationally coded vision of a German-Protestant apotheosis. As Hemming (2022, 240) himself summarizes Hegel’s outlook: “World history is universal, it is absolute Geist, realizing itself. For Hegel, German Protestantism represents the end and goal of history from the land, race, political state, and religion within which humanity, the ‘human essence,’ is fully realized as free and capable for subjectivity realizing its absolute form.” This shows that Hemming’s line of argument amounts to a twofold non sequitur. If Hegel’s metaphysical racism did not directly or inevitably flow from his commitment to universal history, then Heidegger’s critique of the latter does not ipso facto demonstrate his opposition to the former. What is more, even if we were to grant, for the sake of argument, that Heidegger was opposed to both Hegel’s general commitment to universal history and, independently, Hegel’s particular brand of racism, this still does not warrant the claim that Heidegger’s own position is above racial thinking. For it leaves open the possibility that Heidegger, in opposition to Hegel, simply opted for a different kind of metaphysical racism, namely, one that adheres to spiritual ranking among different peoples without imposing any universal-historical, narrative frame.

Pace Hemming, the keen analysis in a recent study by Sonia Sikka (2018) points to undetected difficulties that underscore the need for exploring alternative interpretations. Incidentally, Hemming (2022, 228-229) briefly acknowledges Sikka’s work, only to dismiss it soon after as beside the point since Sikka, just like other prominent commentators, fails to “address what Heidegger himself understands by the category of race” (230; cf. 237). Such glib dismissal does not do justice to Sikka’s nuanced treatment of precisely this issue, as she engages three interlocking themes: Heidegger’s working notion of race in relation to his conception of authentic community, both of which are methodologically framed by his philosophy of history. Sikka’s commentary offers what is arguably the best critical synopsis of the current scholarship on this thematic triad; and considering select details from her discussion is helpful for delineating the specific challenge taken on in this article, namely, to bring out and critically evaluate the implications of Heidegger’s intriguing, yet elusive notion of cultural-national “descent” (Abstammung) (GA38A, 57). As we shall see, Heidegger’s perspective on descent appears promising, initially, insofar as it provides a starting point for spelling out his anti-biologistic understanding of race, at a pronounced distance from Nazi racist ideology. However, upon further inspection, Heidegger’s rendering of descent seems to cancel his concomitant assertions about the historical materiality of authentic community formation. In this respect, one gets the impression that he gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

To clarify this perceived tension, I focus on the notion of “colony” as part of Heidegger’s Hölderlin-inspired exposition of poetic dwelling. Under the title Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine,” the first of Heidegger’s lectures concerned with this poet was given during the 1934/35 winter term—right after the Logic lecture in the summer of 1934—with subsequent Hölderlin lectures extending into the 1940s. If we read Heidegger’s claims about “descent” and “blood” in Logic together with the account of “colony” in his Hölderlin discussion, I argue, we can begin to see Heidegger’s profile as a colonial thinker of a special ilk, who construes colony as a spiritual enclave: a site for retrieving and guarding a country’s cultural essence. In effect, Heidegger doubles the self-image of Germany as a culture nation (in the sense of Kulturnation; cf. Trommler 2014) by portraying colony as a nation’s spiritual heart, an idealized historical locus that exceeds any physical coordinates and formal boundaries of the nation state. As the projected mirror image of the nation, colony functions as a regulative ideal for authentic community. Along these lines, I propose to critically situate Heidegger within a colonial discourse that was prevalent among his contemporaries, notably Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber (Norton 2021, 158-169; Hübinger 2019, ch. 17; Harrington 2016, chs. 4-5; Steinmetz 2014; Pearson 2008, 108-111, 147-155), but has not received any sustained attention in the extant Heidegger literature.

The Problem of “Descent”

In chapter 6 “Was Heidegger Racist?” of her study Heidegger, Morality and Politics, Sikka examines several lacunae left by the now commonplace observation that Heidegger was not a biological racist. To fill these gaps, Sikka’s own approach proposes that Heidegger’s notion of race remains tied to considerations pertaining to ethnicity as a rich amalgam of cultural and regional (including landscape-related) factors that predetermine the historical horizon in which people can perform acts of “self-identification,” namely, acts of embracing or neglecting their “descent” as members of a particular national community (Sikka 2018, 179). Nationality in this context is not limited to comprehending the nation state as a geopolitical entity with fixed boundaries, just as membership is not limited to formal or legal aspects of citizenship. Sikka (2018, 172) notes that Heidegger already put forth this idea in a 1933/34 seminar “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State” (2015) which is included in Part One of Nature, History, State [hereafter NHS]. In the Logic lecture, Heidegger elaborates on this idea in the following passage:

The “state”—not as an abstraction and not as derived from an invented right related to a timeless human nature in itself—but the state as the essential law of historical being through whose decree [Fügung; lit. ordering with connotations of ordaining] the Volk alone secures genuine historical duration, and that means the preservation [Bewahrung] of its mission and the struggle [Kampf] over its mandate. The state is the historical being of the Volk. (GA38A, 163)

This formulation is hard to pin down in its exact meaning insofar as a people’s relation to its “mission and . . . mandate” is described in language that traverses the active and passive modes of human behavior. In the present case, “the struggle over its mandate” sounds more active, while the phrase “preservation of its mission” (instead of “carrying out its mission” or “completing its mission”) sounds more passive and strangely attenuated. What kind of comportment does “preservation” imply, and how does this amount to “securing” an entire Volk’s “historical duration”? A possible answer, Sikka submits, may be found in the aforementioned notion of descent which in the Logic lecture is expounded thus:

Yet it is not left to our discretion whether we belong to a Volk or not; that is not decided by way of passing a resolution. Rather, that has been decided already, without any choosing on our part, on the basis of our descent [Abstammung], over which we, retrospectively, never exert control ourselves, at all. In certain states and forms of state, citizenship may be optional, but never belongingness to a Volk. (GA38A, 57)

This passage, Sikka (2018, 178) notes, echoes the philosophical idiom of “thrownness” familiar from Being and Time, and it also illustrates how Heidegger is walking a thin line between fatalism and decisionism. Preserving or securing what is essential about the historical being of the Volk is an effort we can resolve to make, while membership in the Volk is not. This is because we cannot choose to be born into a certain family, milieux, or area (like Heidegger’s native Black Forest region in Swabia) within a preexisting national community. It is a matter of chance or fate, a throw of the dice we cannot influence. Moreover, although Heidegger’s comments on this point are not as explicit as one might wish, his notion of Abstammung seems to imply a certain degree of “intergenerational continuity” (Sikka 2018, 179) so that children born to (naturalized) immigrant parents, for instance, may not meet the standard of full-fledged cultural ancestry. In fact, one wonders whether this emphasis on protracted lineage is bound to render the notion of Volk-membership a matter of degree, such that seventh-generation Swabians are “more Swabian” and by extension “more German” than fifth-generation Swabians. Heidegger doesn’t pause to answer this question, though one may speculate that he would not be fond of such generational bean counting and would deem it as too formal (procedural or numerical) a criterion. Still within the context of race, the main problem with Heidegger’s sketch of völkisch belonging is that his account of descent seems to reintroduce biology through the backdoor. In this respect, Heidegger’s notion of cultural ancestry appears not reducible to, but also not clearly separate from biological ancestry, since both remain connected to the underlying motif of privileged birth.

Moreover, when it comes to cultural ancestry, Heidegger’s central claim in Nature, History, State about the significance of a given region’s concrete materiality appears undercut by his equally central claim in Logic about historical space being different from physical space. On one hand, Heidegger declares “every people has a space that belongs to it,” for “persons who live by the sea, in the mountains, and on the plains are different” (NHS, 55). On the other hand, he posits that a people’s historical space must not be confused with any geographically preexisting environment. Instead, “making history means: first to create the space and soil ” (GA38A, 83). The last assertion (to which I will return in my conclusion) seems to render any landscape-related aspects irrelevant. Heidegger seems aware of this problem, which is not to say that he provides a straightforward solution to it. Thus, the peculiar tension between emphasizing and de-emphasizing the materiality of a national community’s historical embeddedness resurfaces in a set of subsequent statements from Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” which engages Hölderlin’s conception of homeland via poetic dwelling, while invoking the “power of the Earth” as the key to genuine historical existence. The crucial passages, to which Sikka (2018, 161) also draws attention, read as follows:

Homeland [Heimat]—not as a mere birth place, nor as a mere landscape familiar to us, but as the power of the Earth upon which the human being “dwells poetically,” in each case in accordance with his historical Dasein [lit. being there]. (Heidegger 2014a, 80; GA39, 88)

Here, Heidegger’s diction is as tantalizing as ever. After introducing “Earth” as the designator for the site of poetic dwelling, the assurance that Earth and homeland are “meant historically” does not provide any helpful information for dealing with the problem of descent. In the last part of this triple quotation, the reference to the “land of the fathers” (put in scare quotes) again bears connotations of ancestral lineage. At the same time, it is still unclear who the “state founders” or “state founder” (Heidegger uses the singular) of the Earth might be, and where their agency could be witnessed, if neither Earth nor homeland are geographically identifiable domains. While the professed distancing from “noisy patriotism” sounds encouraging, the actual source and meaning of a people’s abode in “historical space” is still a mystery, as Heidegger himself concedes. Yet, there is one additional clue contained in the first item of the aforesaid triplet. Notice that Heidegger links but doesn’t fully equate homeland and Earth. Instead, he refers to homeland “as the power of the Earth” (als die Macht der Erde). Taken together with the remark about the “agency of the state founder,” this implies that, for Heidegger, homeland means an action-guiding impulse or vision rather than a place in the usual sense of that term. To my knowledge, the closest Heidegger will ever come to concretely fleshing out the dynamic constitution of such an abode is in his account of a people’s “mission” as the spiritual journey between fatherland and colony. This journey can be traced through a co-engagement of Heidegger’s Logic and his lecture on Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”.

Covenantal thinking: Three Puritan themes

With the previous considerations pertaining to the problem of descent in mind, we can begin to see how Heidegger’s Logic expounds a form of covenantal thinking guided by the broadly Puritan motif of an “errand into the wilderness.” This formulation is taken from Perry Miller’s eponymous essay collection. Miller, in turn, adopted this title phrase from a sermon by Samuel Danforth, delivered on May 11, 1670: A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness (Miller 1984, 2). Heidegger connects this motif with a twofold notion of the elect. On one hand, historically alert Germans are called to resist their bourgeois counterparts, whom Heidegger denigrates as Spießbürger (GA38A, 89, 161), a pejorative label for parochial middle-class citizens who are prone to miss the decisive moment and let Germany’s presumed destiny slip into oblivion. On the other hand, Germany’s “self ” (GA38A, 106) has to stand up against foreign others in an existential competition that will determine who gets to leave their mark on world history (GA38A, 95, 110). Thus, it can be shown how Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric of national revival hovers between an inner pole of domestic resistance and an outer pole of colonial conquest, while challenging his listeners with a sense of entitlement that transcends the accustomed duality of historical progress and regress (GA38A, 118, cf. 93, 98-99).

As a first approximation, it is expedient to attend to the way Heidegger’s emphasis on the endurance needed for “overcoming deep-seated and far-reaching obstacles” (GA38A, 120) intimates the kind of frontier ethos shown by the New England settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the charismatic leadership of John Winthrop (1588-1649) as its founding governor. The challenging as well as eye-opening quality of “unanticipated wilderness” [ungeahnte Wildnis] is signaled in a Black Notebooks entry from the second half of 1934, shortly after the termination of Heidegger’s rectorship (GA94, 173). Moreover, the “wilderness” motif comes to the fore in Nature, History, State where Heidegger declares “History teaches us . . . that human beings who are rooted in the soil have known how to make a home for themselves even in the wilderness” (NHS, 55). In keeping with Sikka’s analysis of the problems adhering to Heidegger’s notion of descent, it is clear that the still-to-be-cultivated “soil” of the wilderness, and the “soil” in which people already have ancestral roots cannot be the same. Rather, Heidegger’s remark on “wilderness” bespeaks the struggle to make a home away from home.

To bring out the Puritan-like principles at work in Heidegger’s Logic, we can follow the lead of Stephen Prothero who identifies three key themes operative in Winthrop’s address “A Model of Christian Charity.” To avoid getting off on the wrong foot, Prothero emphasizes that charity for Winthrop and his listeners “meant not so much giving to the needy” but rather referred to Christian love construed as the “social glue required to bind this new community together” (Prothero 2012, 36). Accordingly, neighborly love is a catalyst for a community whose efficacy has nothing to do with personal romance or feelings of pity. By the same token, charity’s capacity to act as social glue is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by individual psychology. Such distancing from psychology also plays a prominent role in Heidegger’s account of authentic sociality (GA38A, 91, 127). With this qualification regarding the meaning of charity in place, Prothero (2012, 37-38) discerns the following three interconnected themes in Winthrop’s speech:

• the idea of the conditional covenant

The first theme informs Winthrop’s admonition to his fellow colonists that God, in contractual fashion, has bestowed on them an ideal for communal living, namely, the church as the social body of Christ. In terms of political organization, this implies a merger of civil and ecclesiastical governance, which has prompted some critics to view Winthrop as an advocate of theocratic rule with a potential for suppression (LaPlante 2004). Moreover, this God-given blueprint for community came with salvific strings attached, since there would be punitive consequences, i.e., damnation dealt by God’s wrath, if the colonists as enlisted witnesses to His revelation were to stray from this model.

The second theme signals the colony’s self-understanding as a beacon to the Old World, captured by Winthrop’s famous metaphor of a “city upon a hill,” inspired by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14) and deliberately echoed much later in Ronald Reagan’s presidential rhetoric which slightly tweaked the wording and broadened the scope of this verbal image by referring to America as a “shining city upon a hill.” Without getting bogged down in any details pertaining to Reagan as the harbinger of a new wave of American neoconservatism and his skillful deployment of the “God strategy” (Domke and Coe 2010), it is important to note that this shift from colony to nation introduces certain complications when it comes to our guiding question concerning Heidegger’s take on the enabling conditions as well as the limits of authentic community. In a way to be explained, Heidegger cannot be seen as a direct precursor of Reagan. That is, Heidegger’s account of Germany’s “errand into the wilderness” does not simply project the model of the colony onto the level of the nation state. Instead, Heidegger’s brand of cultural nationalism is marked by a peculiar, open-ended interplay between the old fatherland (or motherland) and its new colonial satellites.

The third theme of a chosen people singled out by divine providence for playing a special role in world history looms large in Heidegger’s Logic lecture where it is explicated as Germany’s “mandate and mission” (Auftrag und Sendung) (GA38A, 125, 153, 163). Also, what stands out in Heidegger’s discussion is the vital importance he assigns to the notion of “work” (ch. 7 in Wolin 2001). To a large extent, this thematic orientation was guided by Heidegger’s critical reaction to Ernst Jünger’s widely received book The Worker published in 1932 (Zimmerman 1990; Bullock 1992; Morat 2007). Yet, to gauge why Heidegger took exception to Jünger’s metaphysical rendering of the figure of the worker (GA90, 226-247, 263-266), it is helpful to observe how Heidegger’s philosophical commentary on work in the context of national destiny (GA38A, 126, 151) shows more than a little resemblance to Winthrop’s Puritan conception of work as “service” to the body polity of the faithful (Prothero 2012, 41).

“Love” for the colony

The previous section contained the suggestion that Heidegger’s cultural nationalism comes into its own through an idiosyncratic interplay between the motherland and its colonies. The most direct, if not conclusive, formulation regarding this dynamic can be found in the lecture Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (summer semester 1942) in a passage where Heidegger comments on select verses from Hölderlin’s sketch for the concluding stanza of the elegy “Bread and Wine.” This sketch, Heidegger relates (GA53, 156-157; cf. GA52, 189-190), became available only in 1933 through the work of Friedrich Beißner, and it reads as follows.

namely at home is spirit

not at the commencement, not at the source. The homeland consumes it.

Colony, and bold forgetting spirit loves.

Our flowers and the shades of our woods gladden

the one who languishes. The besouler would almost be scorched.

(Heidegger 1996, 126) [translation modified]

Focused on the third line, in particular, Heidegger offers the following commentary:

“Colony”—this does not mean whatever is merely foreign in the sense of the alien and exotic, that which the adventurer sets out in search of in order to settle his conscience. Spirit is not befallen by some arbitrary desire for the foreign. Spirit “loves” colony. Love is the essential will for what is of the essence. “Colony” is always the land of the daughter [Tochterland] that is related and drawn back to the motherland.

Here, however, Hölderlin names forgetting together with the love of colony. . . . “Bold forgetting” is the knowing and mindful courage to experience the foreign, an experiencing that, in the foreign, steadfastly gives thought to one’s own. The boldness of forgetting in the love of colony is the readiness, while in the foreign, to learn from the foreign for the sake of what is one’s own, so as to defer what is one’s own until it is time.

Comparable to Winthrop’s non-romantic, non-sentimental rendering of love, Heidegger follows Hölderlin’s lead here in setting up a correlation between “love” for the colony and “bold forgetting” of the homeland or Heimat, which yields an overarching learning effect such that what is truly “one’s own” can only be recognized by passing through “the foreign.” This may sound less than profound, at first. In a literary vein, we might feel reminded of contemporary self-discovery novels. Closer to Heidegger’s concern and more interesting in its literary complexity would be Franz Kafka’s unpublished fragment The Hunter Gracchus written between December 1916 and April 1917, to which John Zilcosky has drawn attention in chapter 7 of his study Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (Zilcosky 2003).

Here I cannot do justice to the depth of Zilcosky’s inquiry. For instance, one of his crucial findings, which invites further exploration, pertains to Kafka’s engagement with the popular colonialist fiction and travel literature of his day, including the Little Green Books series (Grüne Bändchen) published in Cologne by the Schaffstein Verlag (Zilcosky 2003, 231-232, 242). This connection is intriguing because it offers a window to the colonial imaginary of the reading German public inside and outside the academy, which would also encompass Heidegger’s target audience. For now, I merely wish to single out one of Zilcosky’s observations, which speaks to Heidegger’s programmatic exposition of love for the colony as intertwined with the bold forgetting of Heimat. Thus, Zilcosky notes that Walter Benjamin in 1934—the same year Heidegger delivered his Logic lecture—offered a clever interpretation of Gracchus, the hero in Kafka’s aforementioned fragment, as he turned to the question why Gracchus’s enigmatic journey (like an Odyssey without redemption) fails for reasons that Kafka leaves disconcertingly obscure (Benjamin [1934] 1968, 131-132, 138). Benjamin’s answer is focused on the notion of blasphemous amnesia, and Zilcosky (2003, 176) elaborates:

For Benjamin, Gracchus’ guilt… results from his having “forgotten” the mythical world of his ancestors. This notion of blasphemous amnesia becomes foundational for later critics… who emphasize the aspects of Benjamin’s reading that are connected to Judeo-Christian mythology. In such readings… Gracchus is found guilty—as a descendant of Adam and Eve—of forgetting God: Gracchus (like all of us) is guilty of “original sin.”

After his break with Catholicism, Heidegger writes in a post-Christian idiom (Wolfe 2014, 36-37). Importantly, this doesn’t mean that he is no longer involved with religious sensibilities or theological figures of thought (ch. 5 in McGrath 2008). As a case in point, the “spirit” (Geist) that loves colony is not placed within the theologically intricate structure of the Trinity. At the same time, the idea of original sin survives in modified form in Heidegger’s protracted commentary on Germany’s mission and mandate. In this vein, Heidegger’s thought carries some of the same “Calvinist baggage” (Berlet 2008, 232) as the Puritan settlers of New England did on their way into the American wilderness.

Calvinist baggage: When the saints go marching in

The present reference to Calvinism is no mere analogy but is grounded in the discursive constellation to which Heidegger belonged at the time. The key figure in this constellation is Ernst Troeltsch who is often portrayed as one of the most prominent, albeit controversial representatives of “liberal theology” in Germany after the previous turn of the century (Chapman 2001). Already in his 1920/21 Freiburg lecture Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, Heidegger had engaged Troeltsch’s approach to philosophy of religion in the specific sense of Religionsphilosophie (Camilleri 2010; Danz 2009). In a telling passage, Heidegger remarks critically:

A driving motto of Troeltsch’s philosophy of religion is found in his view of the reformation [Auffassung der Reformation]. He sees nothing new in the Reformation; rather he thinks that it progressed from within the sense-structure of the Middle Ages. What is new is thought to arrive, then, in the eighteenth century and in German Idealism. Troeltsch took up many medieval and Catholic elements in this manner in his philosophy of religion. One rightfully accuses that he, similarly to Dilthey, had no understanding of Luther. (Heidegger 2010, 19; GA60, 27)

This comment by Heidegger is only partially accurate. It is true that Troeltsch diagnosed certain limitations for Luther’s role in the Reformation and its socio-political aftermath, limitations which according to Troeltsch were largely due to Luther’s lingering attachment to medieval church structures. However, Troeltsch did not argue that nothing new was ushered in until the eighteenth century. Rather, he (see, e.g., Troeltsch 1910, 11) made the provocative claim that among the different strands of the Reformation, it was Calvinism and not Lutheranism that generated more innovative as well as subversive societal impulses (Pearson 2017; Graf 2014, 241-265). In this respect, Troeltsch adopted a transatlantic perspective when he placed special emphasis on the community model of the “Puritan sects,” as did Max Weber ([1920] 1988) in his Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion I (Goldstein 2014; Graf 2002). One of the few Heidegger scholars who have pointed in the direction of this theme complex is Christopher Rickey (2002, 104).

This is not to say that Luther’s legacy was unimportant for Heidegger’s intellectual development. However, Troeltsch’s intervention does cast a different light on Heidegger’s relation to the so-called Luther Renaissance (Assel 2017, 2020) in Germany which, it should be emphasized, was not just about Luther but about Luther vis-à-vis other reformers such as John Calvin and the types of Calvinism that emerged subsequently (Fischer 2006; Rota 2017, 901-907). In this regard, the all too familiar formula of the “two Martins” (Heidegger and Luther) is in need of partial revision (cf. Van Buren 1994; Crowe 2007). In critiquing Troeltsch, Heidegger’s first reference (GA60, 25n.6) is to Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (translated as The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches), which contains some of Troeltsch’s most succinct as well as most controversial claims about the relation between Lutheranism and Calvinism, and about the characteristic features of Puritanism, including the latter’s New England variety (Troeltsch 1912, 605-651, 773-780, 789-794). This confirms that Heidegger was familiar with the topic by the early 1920s if not before. Thus, Heidegger’s criticism of Troeltsch as a means to position himself in the context of philosophy of religion points to the center of a transatlantic debate over alternate models for authentic community, which warrants further examination—especially since Heidegger’s treatment of the historical aspects of communal life in the Logic lecture adds much needed detail to his previous remarks on this subject matter in section 74 of Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] 1962, 436; cf. Nelson 2007).

For the Puritans of New England, the primary challenge was to preserve the “body of the saints” (Miller 1984, 159). Their Calvinist baggage or burden consisted in the increasingly difficult task of maintaining the integrity of the covenant as the spiritual heart of the congregation (Wiley 1990; Wood 1989). Differently put, they confronted the puzzle of how to negotiate the relation between the visible church, that is, the overall congregation with its more or less institutionalized practices, and the invisible church, that is, the core group of saints whose actual identity was known only to God, but whose presumed identity—viewed by human lights—was marked by profound existential experiences of spiritual rebirth, especially in the face of political adversity in England followed by the harrowing conditions in the American wild (cf. Troeltsch 1912, 632-633). As Perry Miller (1984, 157) remarks, “[t]he founders were never so foolish as to suppose that everybody who pretended to be a saint was a saint, but they believed that a rough approximation of the membership to the covenant of grace could be worked out.” In keeping with the Calvinist doctrine regarding original sin—that is, Adam’s apostasy as transmitted to all of his descendants, as well as God’s foreknowledge of who would eventually be saved from this “fallen” condition—genuine saint status versus incorrigible sinfulness was predestined for each person, and no causal link could be forged between someone’s good deeds and their being placed on the right side of God at the end of days. In other words, the privilege to partake in God’s salvation could not be earned but only be received by God’s grace alone (Zachman 2009, 366-367).

This theological frame for human existence in terms of predestination generated an ethos of ecclesiastical activism rather than individual resignation. “For the Puritan mind it was not possible to segregate a man’s spiritual life from his communal life,” and this resulted in a special Puritan brand of social theory that co-emphasized the law of God as the ultimate standard for authority and the voluntary submission of the citizens (Miller 1984, 147; Schaar 1991). According to Miller, it was once again John Winthrop who gave this social theory its pithiest expression in his speech on liberty delivered to the General Court in 1645. Winthrop argued that humans in their postlapsarian state will always gravitate toward corrupt behavior. However, as Miller summarizes Winthrop’s point, “when men become regenerate they are then at “liberty” to do only what God commands.... Regenerate men, therefore, by the very fact of being regenerate, come together, form churches and a state upon explicit agreements, in which they all promise to live with one another according to the laws and for the purposes of God” (Miller 1984, 148-149).

If we replace “God” with “Being,” the Puritan model for divinely authorized social order becomes a fairly close match for Heidegger’s account of authentic community insofar as both are centered on a theo-political ideology of the chosen few. To be sure, insisting on a clear distance between his thought and organized religion, Heidegger himself was adamant that his philosophical rendering of Being, that is, ultimate reality, must not be conflated with any figure of a personal creator god. Frequently quoted in this regard is an entry in volume 15 of Heidegger’s Collected Works (GA15, 436-437). This passage refers to a reported statement by Heidegger on the occasion of a colloquium titled “Aussprache mit Martin Heidegger” (Open Dialogue with Martin Heidegger) hosted by a student committee at the University of Zurich on November 6, 1951. The text is commonly referred to as the “Zurich Seminar.” Here, Heidegger starts with a clear contrast between his philosophical conception of “Being” and any theologically informed notion of “God,” but then proceeds to attenuate this contrast in elusive language. An English translation of Heidegger’s statement can be found in Jean-Luc Marion’s study God Without Being (Marion 2012, 61-62). At crucial junctures in key texts from the 1930s such as Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger resorts to formulations that are just as open-ended as his diction during the Zurich Seminar (see, e.g., Heidegger 2012, 206).

Thus, astute commentators like Sean McGrath (2006, 2008), Judith Wolfe (2014, 2019), and Peter Dillard (2020, 8-9, 124-128) have pointed out that Heidegger’s roundabout disavowal of organized religion and institutionalized dogma is not enough to demonstrate his independence from theistic assumptions altogether. As long as Heidegger vests Being with communicative powers through which it can give special action-guiding assignments to particular peoples, it is not clear how he can maintain at the same time that Being must not be viewed as a communicator, which would imply a certain sense of personal agency (Caputo 2000, 89-90). What we find in Heidegger’s account of Being’s ability to give directives, then, is a curious conception of authority without authorship. That is, Heidegger remains strictly opposed to any analogy between the way Being issues commands, on one hand, and the way humans receive and act upon these commands, on the other. As David Bentley Hart (2017, ch. 1) has argued with great acumen, Christian theology may well be sympathetic to Heidegger’s position that Being’s primordial creativity is not bound by the chains of cause and effect within the spatiotemporal grid of any particular worldly context or social setting. However, this assertion leaves open the question how humanity may meaningfully respond to Being’s capacity to stimulate new beginnings in history. If Being unfolds as a thoroughly impersonal dynamism, which merely stabilizes and destabilizes certain historical structures, one wonders how such oscillation of revealing and unraveling could keep from collapsing into random motility (cf. Hart 2017, 13-17, 24-25). From this vantage, one could accept Heidegger’s claim that Being does not “act” like a divine watchmaker, while still holding out hope that Being’s dynamism is not completely blind and, by the same token, not completely impersonal (see the excellent discussion in Pfau 2019, sec. III, 33-37).

Accordingly, Heidegger’s lingering proximity to broadly theistic thinking leaves enough room for instructive comparison with particular religious collectives such as the historically situated faith community of the Puritan settlers, without going so far as to profile Heidegger either as a traditional Christian or a full-fledged “five points” Calvinist (cf. Muller 2012; and the chapter on “John Calvin” in George 2013). With this proviso in place, the two Calvinist elements that form the crucial link between the New England colonists’ errand into the wilderness and Heidegger’s account of Germany’s “mandate and mission” (GA38A, 125, 153, 163, cited above) are a staunch spiritual elitism and a philosophically unabashed account of freedom as willed submission.

We noted how Winthrop’s speech on liberty highlighted the figure of the “regenerate man” as someone who wants to do God’s will after God has opened his eyes through the gift of faith. In the last instance, the “liberty” to submit to God’s will is a matter of covenantal alignment, not of solitary initiative. Humans are properly “free” if and only if they want what God wants, not when they spontaneously make decisions on their own. In this sense, human freedom can never rival or limit God’s sovereignty as the ultimate planner of the unfolding of creation. Or, with Heidegger, human freedom is not really a man-made achievement, since any radically new beginnings in history can only happen through Being’s intercession. This was already intimated in his 1930 seminar “The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy.” In this text, Heidegger lambasted people’s ambition to bring about fundamental changes of their own accord—as if they could step out of history and start fresh—as an “absolutely bourgeois” fantasy, which he didn’t hesitate to denigrate as an idolatrous fabrication (Heidegger 2002, 94). Yet, upon exposing bourgeois fake freedom in such religiously fueled language, Heidegger was less forthcoming in tracing the contours and possible manifestations of genuine freedom. Only in subsequent writings like Logic and his various philosophical commentaries on Hölderlin’s hymns did he begin to flesh out the positive meaning of non-bourgeois freedom.

In these texts, freedom is explicated as liberation from our original sin in Heidegger’s sense, that is, from our ubiquitous forgetfulness of Being. Overcoming such oblivion requires that we abide by Being’s directive to move “back ahead” into the origin of our culture’s spiritual purity. Construed as a journey of the spirit, this movement is essentially different from physical motion, and is better understood as a process of intensification or distillation. In short, freedom happens by way of pilgrimage. The latter can involve literal travel, the hardships of which may indeed serve as a powerful spiritual acid test by alerting the travelers to the “greatness of finitude” that pervades their existence (Heidegger 2002, 94). However, as explicated with a nod to Benjamin’s comments on Kafka’s Gracchus character, the mere act of covering geographic distance is never sufficient for reaching our faith-bound destination, which is a state of awakening that cannot be pinpointed on any world map.

Underway to pure “Germanness” (Deutschtum)

As Daniel Dahlstrom (2002) has shown, one of the first to comment on Heidegger’s leaning toward a “kind of Neo-Calvinism” was Max Scheler (1976, 295, 260). Yet, Scheler died in 1928 so he didn’t get to see Heidegger’s intellectual trajectory in the 1930s and after. Hence, Scheler’s diagnosis is perceptive but somewhat limited, for it is primarily aimed at Heidegger’s breakthrough work Being and Time. To complement Scheler’s observation, we need to heed Heidegger’s covert participation in German colonial discourse during the years of the Weimar Republic and beyond. And with Benjamin’s insight into blasphemous amnesia regarding the mythical world of one’s ancestors in mind, it becomes apparent how Heidegger transmutes the topos of original sin into a historical drama of cultural-national fatalism. His story is not one of Christian universalism but of Germany’s unique destiny which ought to be embraced reverently and must not be forgotten blasphemously.

From this vantage point, love for the colony manifests itself in a strenuous effort to retrieve Germany’s “origin” (Ursprung) understood as the fountain of its cultural essence or “Germanness” (Deutschtum). The latter was championed by different groups associated with the so-called völkische Bewegung or movement of the German people (Puschner 2016; Schumann 1996). Promulgated around the previous turn of the century by authors like Paul de Lagarde ([1878] 1920) and carried on by the journalist Friedrich Lange ([1893] 1904) next to Dietrich Eckart who founded the anti-Semitic weekly Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German), the ideological currency of Deutschtum gained considerable momentum during the years surrounding the Great War (Sieg 2009, 2013; Tourlamain 2014). At that time, even advocates of “humanistic idealism” like the Nobel prize laureate Rudolf Eucken were swept along by nationalist euphoria that often bordered on unfiltered chauvinism (Sluga 1993, 77-78).

In the Puritan context of colony as covenant, the main point I wish to make about Heidegger’s rendering of Germany’s “origin” as an urgent mandate of spiritual retrieval, in contrast with the objective data gathering and the chronological narratives ratified by historical science, is the following. In Logic, Heidegger’s plea for a newly invigorated Deutschtum is riding on a very specific notion of tradition in the sense of Überlieferung which, in turn, rests on a distinction between what has been and what is past:

Just don’t think of what has been [das Gewesen; in standard German, das Gewesene with an “e” at the end would be more common; this may be a deliberate idiosyncrasy on Heidegger’s part] as something past [Vergangenes].... That what is essencing [das Wesende] from earlier on essences as tradition [als Überlieferung]. The latter does not mean a standing reserve [vorhandenen Bestand] of reports, knowledge items, and exercises about past and previous [things]. Rather, it means the event [Geschehen] which carries our already essencing destiny [Bestimmung] off over ourselves and delivers [ausliefert] it to the future. (GA38A, 114-115)

The last sentence belongs among Heidegger’s most radical formulations when he equates authentic “we”-ness with recognizing ourselves as the temporalizing of time itself. Taken out of context, such pronouncement must seem cryptic. However, using the Puritan ethos of the New England colonists as a heuristic key for unlocking Heidegger’s philosophy of history makes the textual situation less puzzling. In keeping with this approach, one can say that authentic “we”-ness comes about by way of “bold forgetting.” The latter takes place when an uncanny social atmosphere of growing discontent—which bears a certain resemblance to what Sigmund Freud named Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) (commonly translated as Civilization and its Discontents, but closer in meaning to “the restless unease in culture”)—prompts some of us to depart from our homeland in order to (re)discover our true cultural-national essence in a foreign environment.

Conclusion: Heidegger and the German colonial imaginary

Heidegger’s account of the spirit’s love for the colony as a summons to boldly forget one’s Heimat opens out a vision for covenantal community animated by a Puritan ethos of disciplined spiritual labor. The crucial point not to be missed is that the “daughter” colony emerges not as a mere miniature copy or geographic appendix, but actually as the more original version of the motherland. Consider Heidegger’s pivotal claim that historical space is not physical space:

Peoples [Völker], for their part, do not enter into history either, as if that were a readily available space [fertig stehender Raum] in which they find lodging, a path somehow present-at-hand, which they only would have to traverse. In this regard, making history means: first to create the space and soil. (GA38A, 83)

This implies that the colony spiritually exceeds the motherland by projecting a past that never was (what Heidegger calls das Gewesen, GA38A, 114, cited above) into the future, that is, by releasing heretofore unrealized possibilities from Germany’s cultural heritage. Such outlook puts Heidegger in the vicinity of an earlier generation of völkisch-colonial thinkers and activists who promoted the idea of founding “new Germanies.” This idea rose to prominence among Friedrich Nietzsche’s contemporaries, including his brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster (1843-1889). Förster was a member of the circle around Richard Wagner and married Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth on Wagner’s birthday (May 22) in 1885, before moving with her to Nueva Germania in Paraguay the next year. As Robert Holub (2018, 220-221) relates:

For Förster, the Germany of his time was too Jewish, too urban, and too materialist; his ideology, which is part of a larger reaction to the advent of modernity… is thus simultaneously conservative in many of its tenets and utopian in its tenor.... Important for him was not that the German government in Berlin controlled a colony, but that the colony be thoroughly German in its constitution.... Förster’s need to escape Germany was therefore a peculiar type of self-exile,… undertaken not so much as a rejection of German nationalism and the German nation as an affirmation of a more authentic nationalist spirit that could no longer be realized within the boundaries of the Second Reich.

Holub’s characterization of Förster’s colonial aspirations (Förster 1883; 1886, 194, 205-213; cf. Salmi 2020, 181, 197-198; Sieg 2019, 125-163; Davis 2014, 234-235) as centered on a “more authentic nationalist spirit” provides an interesting reference point for comparison with Heidegger’s own colonial mentality. What their views have in common is a strong emphasis on (re)cultivating genuine Germanness. This objective may be compatible with, but is not reducible to, the kind of expansionist agenda that is primarily concerned with obtaining new geopolitical territory, witnessed by Heidegger’s aforementioned distinction between historical and physical space. Yet, this qualified reservation toward “classical” imperialism does not render Heidegger’s view immune to discriminatory tendencies. Even though he refrains from defining Germanness in plainly biological terms, he seems to be courting a species of eschatological racism, as we might call it, by staking the claim that the colonial quest for a new covenant is not only the sole passageway to völkisch authenticity but even to truly being human. In his interpretation of Hölderlin’s hymn “Remembrance,” which in my judgment can be read as the philosophical flipside of the Logic lecture’s account of “bold forgetting,” Heidegger writes:

The poetic work of the poets is, then, the founding of a staying. The essence of such staying comes forth as remembrance in its origin.... This staying prepares the historical abode where the human-ness of the Germans [das Menschentum der Deutschen] still has to learn to feel at home; so that, when the time is right, it will be able to remain for a while in the span of a balanced fate. (GA4, 149-150)

In the context of völkisch writing, the suggested label of eschatological racism applies to Heidegger’s texts under consideration insofar as the ideological category of race is not tied to a biological doctrine of genetic codes, but to a morphological doctrine of cultural essences. In a crucial passage, Heidegger addresses the issue explicitly:

Race [Rasse], then, means not only that which is racial [das Rassische] as the blood-governed and hereditary drive to live, but means, at the same time, that which is racy [das Rassige]. The latter is not confined to corporeal qualities. For example, young boys nowadays speak of a racy car. That which is racy embodies [verwirklicht] a specific rank and, at the same time, provides a lawlike standard [maßgebendes Gesetz; lit. standard-setting law]; it does not solely or primarily concern the corporeality of individuals, of the family, or of the lineage. What is quite genuine in a racial sense [rassisch ganz echt] does not by a long shot need to be racy—on the contrary: it can be very drab [sehr unrassig], while, on the other hand, that which is racy is co-dependent [mitberuht] on specific racial conditions. (GA38A, 61)

The last subclause in this passage (starting with “while, on the other hand, …”) is missing from the 1998 edition of Heidegger’s text (cf. GA38, 65; LEL, 57). In this respect, the recently published manuscript version makes it even clearer that, for Heidegger, meeting certain racial qualifications is not sufficient, but remains a necessary requirement for being genuinely racy. As Peter Trawny (2015, 39) notes, the “not only” in the first sentence of the aforementioned block quote (which occurs in both editions) already signals that Heidegger aims to broaden the meaning of “race” without abandoning the discourse of blood and bloodlines altogether (cf. Bernasconi 2015, 117; Sikka 2018, 166-167, 179). Keeping these nuances in mind is important for assessing related passages such as, for example, Heidegger’s dismissal of “a barren and dull “biologism”” [einen öden und groben “Biologismus”] (GA94, 233).

As an embodiment of “rank,” Heidegger’s conception of “raciness” yields a morphology that divides humanity into different castes, each of which is governed by the essential shape, that is, by the spiritual contours of their culture (cf. Caputo 2000, 98-99; Varshizky 2019; Puschner 2015). Specifically, in a passage that puts his philosophical rhetoric of spiritual revival close to Paul de Lagarde’s as well as Alfred Rosenberg’s respective effort to marshal a new national religion (Sieg 2009, 8; Stern 1974, 61; Steigmann-Gall 2003, 91-101; Vondung 2008, 112), Heidegger sublates the literal meaning of blood as a carrier of DNA into the poetically inflected “voice of the blood”:

What we ascertain as “body” [“Leib”]—like something present-at-hand— is in our being’s originality [Ursprünglichkeit], as it were, hovering and suspended from the power of the moods.... The frequently invoked blood and bloodline would be nothing at all, if the blood [Geblüt; specifically, ties of blood or kinship] were not in advance carried and pervaded by the spirit [Gemüt; spiritual state of mind]—by the power of mood: a primordial belonging-together in the unity of a destiny. The voice of the blood comes from the fundamental mood of Dasein. (GA38A, 150-151)

Taken together with the previous quotations, this last dictum implies that the alpha and omega is not the same for everybody. About a year after the Logic lecture, Heidegger does not mince his words when he declares in Introduction to Metaphysics ([1935] 2000, 142): “The true is not for everyone, but only for the strong.” In keeping with Heidegger’s axiomatic assumption that mood-bound attunement spells destiny (GA38A, 153-155; GA39, 72; 2014a, 66), some people(s) are providentially barred from reaching full-fledged human status because the “voice of the blood” does not resonate with them.

For Heidegger, we saw, answering Being’s call and striving to enact one’s historical mission as a Volk is the single most important way for humans to find meaning in their lives, which requires partaking in the self of their nation construed as a unique cultural community. Only by grasping how the spiritual essence of their nation supersedes their personal egos and subject positions can people achieve ultimate fulfillment in Heidegger’s post-Christian sense of salvation. Accordingly, for groups “who have no history” (GA38A, 79, cited above), the gate is closed to the eschaton as the highest order of things, the definitive state of being. These groups are too marginal to even count as serious contenders for historical victory or defeat in its most fundamental sense. It is only among select peoples that the real battle is fought, which will decide who gets to “conquer the original relation to time” (GA38A, 129).

Based on the covenantal principles of his cultural nationalism, Heidegger’s eschatologically framed philosophy of history places large factions of humanity in a salvific lose-lose situation, while creating a strategic win-win for himself. Whenever there is revolution in the air, that is, a widely shared sense that the moment is ripe for radical change or redress—as in post-Versailles Germany during the 1930s—the philosopher can confirm that the spiritual body of the Volk is leaning toward greater authenticity. If, however, subsequently things go downhill, the philosophical commentator can just as confidently declare that the time has come to “boldly forget” the motherland and reach for a “new past” in the colony. As a diagnostic device for holistic social criticism, the logic of providence always works both ways.

ORCID iD

Markus Weidler https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6030-0553