Heidegger’s rhetorical appeals shifted with politics while his authenticity motifs stayed fixed

Evidence

The critical article was written with the bitterness of someone who did not conceal his indebtedness to the person he was now condemning. … Thus the talk today is of caring, remembrance, guardianship, grace, love, listening, yielding, where in 1935 acts of violence were demanded, while eight years before that Heidegger praised the quasi-religious decision of the private, isolated existence as a finite autonomy within the nothingness of a world without gods. The appeal itself has changed its tone at least twice, according to the political situation, but the philosophical motifs of a call to authenticity and a polemic against decay have remained stable. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 567

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A structural claim: the same philosophical vocabulary can be re-tuned to serve radically different political demands — a template for reading philosophical rhetoric as adaptive rather than neutral.