Being true

Like other controversial figures in the intellectual history of modernity, such as Nietzsche and Freud, Heidegger is too frequently credited, particularly by literary theorists, with fundamental innovations that had actually already been initiated by others. ¹ The fact is that Heidegger, far from carrying out a final break with the past, actually follows many of the paths we have already investigated, although he radicalises some of the ways of exploring them. We shall see later that the continuities between Heidegger and the figures we have considered so far belie the temporal distance between them. Indeed it is clear that, because of its refusal to give the natural sciences a privileged role in philosophy, some of Heidegger’s best work is closer in certain ways to that of the Romantics than to much of the intervening philosophy. The Romantic approaches to the problems of grounding the truth which ensue from Kantian philosophy and Jacobi are once again the key issue here, and Heidegger’s work is thoroughly continuous with much that we have investigated in this respect. That this continuity now connects to the dark side of ‘Romanticism’ which follows from the perversion of supposedly ‘Romantic’ ideas in Nazi and other right-wing ideology will be a crucial topic, especially when we move in Chapter 7 to an examination of Heidegger’s conception of art and truth, and in the following chapters to Walter Benjamin’s and Adorno’s contributions to Frankfurt School critical theory. ² Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno all owe much to the Romantic heritage in sometimes remarkably similar ways, which means that the reasons for their political divergences will become as important as their common attachment to philosophical conceptions that emerge from Romanticism. It should already be clear from the preceding chapters that I think it is impossible to convert the cosmopolitan anti-foundationalism of Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher into Nazi ideology, and the Nazis themselves thought the same, having no time at all for the early Romantics. Given the convergence of some of Heidegger’s ideas with those of the Romantics, one way of understanding aspects of his politics will be to consider how he departs from Romantic 139ideas, rather than seeing both the Romantics and Heidegger as potential or real contributors to Nazi ideology.