ON MARTIN HEIDEGGER: POLITICS AND LIFE SEEN THROUGH THE APOLLONIANDIONYSIAN DUALITY

ABSTRACT
This study bears upon the ‘Heidegger case,’ that is, the relation of Heidegger’s philosophizing to
his political involvements as Rector of the University of Freiburg 1933-4, and his subsequent
silences on the subject of the Holocaust. I use the phrase ‘bears upon’ for Heidegger’s political
involvement will serve as the ‘horizon’ for the study, my concern being the genesis of Heidegger’s
position.
Grounded in a musical ‘intuition’ and attunement, I take up the Nietzschean cipher for
understanding proposed by Heidegger himself for the self-understanding of the German people: the
Apollonian-Dionysian duality, which I apply to the ‘being’ of Heidegger’s own philosophizing.
Through this approach I hope to make an original contribution to Heidegger scholarship by showing
that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined, evolving out of both the phenomenological
demand for a rigorous method in establishing fundamental structures of existence and - at the same
time – out of an Apollonian attempt to ‘tame’ Dionysian existence, including Heidegger’s own.
Inextricably interlinked will be the argument that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung, his
‘confrontation,’ with Nietzsche precedes the overt engagement of his ‘Nietzsche’ lectures of the
1930s, and, further, that this more pervasive concern with Nietzsche figures in the
Apollonian-Dionysian strife within Heidegger’s thinking and within his ‘being.’ Heidegger’s
silences in the face of the Dionysian - as well as the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche - will be
seen to precede his ‘silence’ in the face of the actuality and history of the Third Reich. What I
am proposing one might characterize as Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung - through Nietzsche - with

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Heidegger, in a disclosure of the ontic roots of Heidegger’s ontology, an exercise in his own
hermeneutics of facticity.
I will pursue the trace of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality: in the Western philosophical tradition
which Heidegger confronts, using Husserl and Nietzsche as exemplars; in Heidegger interpretation;
in the relation between his texts and his letters; and in the suppressions and intensifications
within Being and Time. And I will propose that the fugue and the mutually generative duality of
suppression and intensification within Heidegger’s academic thinking were conditions of the
possibility of Heidegger’s ‘way’ towards political involvement.