ABSTRACT
When Martin Heidegger, whom many consider to be Germany's leading philosopher, publicly announced his support of National Socialism at the beginning of 1933, he suffered the fate of so many other adherents of victorious yet widely distasteful movements. For at bottom Heidegger's teaching is the philosophy of Nazism, the annunciation, with all the apparatus of modern philosophy, of a new barbaric life-style, closely related to an acute and penetrating critique of the essential 'half-measures of civilisation'. The basic mood, we might say the basic material, of life and existence is, according to Heidegger, fear (Angst). It is not some meaning or value; not God's love, or even the life-giving Eros of the ancient world; not pleasure as such or the empty will 'in itself'; it is simply fear. Human existence — or man himself. For Heidegger mainly understands 'Dasein' to mean man, and always uses it when referring to him.
