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spirit, I am currently reading Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935.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
