A Way Out of Nazism? Heidegger and the “Shepherd of Being”

Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi movement in the early 1930s is both a renowned and an extensively debated topic, which has recently been brought into the spotlight once again with the publications of the so-called "Schwarze Hefte", raising new questions regarding well-established issues. The paper addresses the topic of the “shepherd of being” as it recurs in the "Black Notebooks" from the second half of the 1940s, by testing the hypothesis that the shepherd represents a key figure of Heidegger’s philosophical way out of Nazism. This topic not only relates to Heidegger’s own involvement, but also to those peculiar transformations of political power brought about by the spread of totalitarianism, which Heidegger was able to perceive and partly also analyze, and which are still recognizable in our present time, as both Foucault and Agamben have pointed out.