With that assumption in mind, I have spent considerable time reading many influential thinkers of the early twentieth century: Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and others. One of the more important, and troubling, discoveries has been the realization that some of these thinkers can, in varying degrees, be regarded as having planted intellectual seeds that later contributed to profound historical tragedies.
I am not suggesting that all of them bear equal responsibility. Their biographies, intentions, and philosophical trajectories differ greatly. Yet it is difficult to ignore the fact that many recognized the nature of the evil only too late, or failed to recognize it fully at all.
In that spirit, I am currently reading Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935.
See the quote about Being and Time:
"... the developments on the historicality of existence (and therefore of existence, and therefore of the entire work, since everything converges on the sections concerning historicality), the ideas that are at the very foundation of National Socialist doctrine are already present, namely, those of a community of destiny and of a community of the people: the Gemeinschaft understood as Schicksalsgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft."
At the same time, I am reading Jung's Red Book, where one can also discern signs of what was to come, although Jung's intellectual and personal journey differs profoundly from Heidegger's.
There is much more to say on this subject....
Poland, June 4, 2026
Quotes from Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger ...
"Claus had shown the racist thumbprint of his doctrine as early as 1923, with the publication of The Nordic Soul. That work is a major factor. It allows the reader to see how, before Heidegger, a phenomenologist formed by Husserl was able to claim he was using Husserl's method in proposing as early as 1923 a description of what is at the very basis of Nazism - namely, the communal destiny of a people united by blood. Because of this circumstance, a meticulous comparison of Claus's Nordic Soul with Heidegger's Being and Time would be worth pursuing. "
" ... Rothacker twice identifies Clauß closely with Heidegger, and the racial doctrine of The Nordic Soul with the existentialism of Being and Time, apropos of the “correlativity between world and man,” according to which “the world in which a man lives is in a strict relation of exchange with his being.” This thesis leads Rothacker to speak of “struggles for life,” for “we not only in each instance have our world: we affirm our world.” Thus what is at stake here is affirmation (Behauptung) in combat, a central motif shared by Rothacker, Baeumler, and Heidegger, which is one of the commonplaces of Nazi doctrine."
