I argue against the consensus that the publication of Heidegger’s “Reflections” (the Black Notebooks, 1932-1941) has proven a substantial link between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism. First, many of the most notorious remarks have precedents in prior volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, in reports of personal interactions, and in class notes. Second, the new remarks in the “Reflections,” including the most notorious ones, do very little to link his philosophy to Nazism. Third, his political remarks, as typically oblique and ambiguous as they are, are far more typically anti-Nazistic or anti-modern than Nazistic or anti-Semitic. Fourth, the lion’s share of his remarks here as everywhere else in his work concern the abandonment of radical questioning and the forgetting of truth and being. On my account, Heidegger’s selective affirmation of Nazism transformed it largely into his own philosophy and dispensed with much of the concrete racial, political, and economic doctrines that characterize it. What seems most Nazistic about his philosophy is Nietzschean, but there are very substantial differences between Heidegger’s Nietzscheanism and the official Nietzsche of Nazi Party theoreticians.

Among the Black Notebooks, the one entitled Considerations and Hints III, gives us Heidegger’s thoughts from his time as the rector of Freiburg University, April 21, 1933–April 28, 1934. In it we find Heidegger proposing and defending his own peculiar conception of a “spiritual National Socialism [geistige Nationalsozialismus]” (GA 94: 135). Insofar as “National Socialism” is a political determination and “spirit” an ontological one, Überlegungen III presents us with Heidegger’s “political ontology,” what I will term a thinking of “mediation,” properly understood. Delving into this ontology shows that mediation, the condition of being “in the middle,” of being “between,” is no stable state at all, but one prone to collapse and cancellation. This paper explores three factors in the Notebook that are antagonistic to mediation, and thus to spiritual National Socialism. Two of them Heidegger himself identifies—mediocrity and forgery—the third he does not: enmity. Spiritual National Socialism is doomed to failure, but not for the reasons Heidegger decries. It fails due to the antagonism that necessitates an enemy as Heidegger construes it. Among the Black Notebooks, the one entitled Considerations and Hints III, gives us Heidegger’s thoughts from his time as the rector of Freiburg University, April 21, 1933–April 28, 1934.159 The bulk of the notebook consists in the central section “From the Time of the Rectorate,” which includes entries dated from the very last day of the rectorate, attempts at the wording of a farewell speech, mottos, titled assessments, and retrospective glances over the year just past. In it we find Heidegger proposing and defending his own peculiar conception of a “spiritual National Socialism [geistige Nationalsozialismus]” (GA 94: 135). Insofar as “National Socialism” is a political determination and “spirit” an ontological one, Überlegungen III presents us with Heidegger’s “political ontology,” what I will term a thinking of “mediation,” properly understood. Delving into this ontology shows that mediation, the condition of being “in the middle,” of being “between,” is no stable state at all, but one prone to collapse and cancellation. Today I wish to explore three factors that are antagonistic to mediation, and thus to spiritual National Socialism. Two of them Heidegger himself identifies—mediocrity and forgery—the third he does not: enmity. Spiritual National Socialism is doomed to failure, but not for the reasons Heidegger decries. It fails due to the antagonism that necessitates an enemy as Heidegger construes it.

Drawing on Heidegger’s account of Mitsein and “the fourfold,” I argue that the worldly significance that defines us is rooted in our constitutive openness to others. To own up to such significance, we must take responsibility for our involvement in its realization, which occurs through our involvement in shared institutions. However, we tend to experience ourselves as incapable of altering the nature of our involvement in institutions. Countering our sense of irrelevance requires a recognition of ourselves as agents, and of “agency” as the ability to contribute to the significance of our world through our very recognition of one another.

In the 1970s onward, feminism uncovered pornography’s harms to women. They center on the inferior ways that pornography usually presents women, its effects on many consumers to thus see and treat women, as well as abuses that go into making some pornography. Yet as Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Rae Langton have variously observed, the more pervasive pornography becomes the harder it is to recognize its harms as harms. Insights from Heidegger’s analysis of modern technology can help explain this difficulty. He argues that today’s technology has a distinctive power imperceptibly to alter norms by driving out other ways of engaging and understanding the world besides how technology mediates that relationship. Pornography’s intersection with Internet-age technology likewise imperceptibly alters norms by driving out alternatives to some form of pornography’s picture of women and sexuality. Against this new backdrop, pornography’s harms become less discernable as such.

While Heidegger decried ethics as a distinct area of philosophical inquiry, a steady stream of secondary literature over the last three decades has mined his corpus for ethical insights. This literature tends to draw on his early or middle work and contrast his views with canonical normative theories. I bring Heidegger into conversation with philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy by focusing on the role of relationality and ability expectations. In section one, I provide a schematic of the dominant concept of ability in modernity: ability as personal power. Through the Bremen lectures, I then develop a Heideggerian concept of ability: ability as access. I conclude by discussing the stakes—ethical, philosophical, and political—of interpreting the question of the meaning of being as a question of ability as access to meaning.