Actually, I thought it would be pretty clear that Heidegger was anything but a Romantic, however much he retrieves elements from Romantic works/traditions.

Romanticism could be roughly described as follows: the yearning of a subjectivity that feels/finds itself uprooted from the conditions of the world in which it originated and thus withdraws into itself, inflating its subjectivity over against the world,- (irony),- and then in a second movement, seeks to cover over and reattach itself to its originating conditions in that world,- (nostalgia),- an imaginary return to origins out of the imperatives of subjective development.

There are elements of such a scheme in Heidegger's work, but he is crucially separated from it from a Nietzschean refusal of a return to the origin. Rather Heidegger's work is to be correlated with expressionism: in expressionism, the subject is always already in the world, such that it is, as it were, turned inside out and its expression is already a projection of the world. That would accord with the figures of "Befindlichkeit" and "Stimmung" in Heidegger. That should inflect not just how one understands his readings of his Romantic sources, but also his obsession with the return of the origin, which is not a completion, but rather a new beginning.

John,
I recall that Adorno interpreted Heidegger as a romantic. So does Richard Wolin. So does Derrida in On Spirit-- during the 1930's Heidegger fell into a romanticism of both the Greeks and the Germans which ended up being the very kind of metaphysics (a will to power) that Heidegger critiqued in Nietzsche. if I recall Derrida argues that Heidegger's political adventure was the effect of a kind of backsliding into metaphysical subjectivism and assertion of the will.

The more geneeral argument in Anglo-American philosophy is that Heidegger belonged to the romantic revival in Germany. Consider this quote:

According to Kaufmann, the prophetic antirationalism which he cultivated fitted the times perfectly; in particular, his ideas on authenticity and inauthenticity were very much in the air in the 1920s...Heidegger's romanticism was not that of a lonely outsider; he joined in the romantic revival of the Twenties--- and then in the political 'revival' of the Thirties, as soon as Hitler had actually come to power. He was anything but a loner.

This interpretation is quite common, and it is usually made by those who approach Heidegger though his Nazi politics.

The argument appears to be that the romantic stress on rootedness, on the intimacies of blood and remembrance which an authentic human being cultivates with his native ground. Heidegger's rhetoric of 'at-homeness', of the organic continuum which knits the living to the ancestral dead buried close by, fits effortlessly into the Nazi cult of 'blood and soil.

I would question the reading of European Romanticism, as fostering a one-sided rejection of reason with unsavoury political consequences. The turn to art and aesthetics is not a rejection of rationality.

Gary,

There's no doubt that there are Romantic/Neo-Romantic sources in Heidegger's thinking, most especially the master-motif of history as a decline from the origin, but it's a question of how he deals with/reworks those sources and to what effect, The crux would be whether Hiedegger's philosophy is an apotheosis, as it were, of metaphysical subjectivism, or rather, a dismantling critique of metaphysical subjectivism. The former only would entail Romanticism; the latter would entail a rejection of Romantic aestheticism. Of course, there is a question of how successfully Heidegger disentangles himself and "gets shut of" the very "object" of his criticism.

Adorno's dealings with Heidegger are complicated not just by a kind of denegated rivalry over common ground, i.e. a broadly shared underlying problematic, but by Adorno's own purposes or project. Adorno does not just criticize Heidegger on a "pure" philosophical plane, but rather deploys his work diagnostically in an advanced and highly complex form of ideology critique. As such, he must needs see Heidegger as a late form of idealism, rather than a critique of idealism/sujectivism that perhaps does not get entirely shut of it. But then Adorno himself is entangled with a notion of a "collective subject" that he can neither dispense with, nor render passible.

Of course, Romanticism and Nazism are not reducible to each other, as if one could kill off two birds with one stone, and thereby assure oneself of the stable ground of sober rationality. I have little doubt that Heidegger's Nazi affiliation can be traced to core elements of his work/thought, (though that does not mean that his thought can be reduced to Nazism and simply dismissed on that basis), but not because of any trumpeting of an "organic" mythology of "blood and soil". Rather the issue concerns the role of technology in modernity, which disrupts any "organic" wholeness, and the need to reappropriate/rework the conditions of existence/received traditions in the face of that crisis/challenge. "Eigentlichkeit" means "ownness", an appeal to more genuinely own up to the conditions of existence. No doubt, there was much grandious delusion in Heidegger's Nazi commitment, however long one takes it to have lasted, especially in the notion of "fuehren der Fuehrer", which had no realistic basis. But it should be remarked that Heidegger was most likely reading the notion of "der Fuehrerprinzip" in terms of translating the Greek "arche", as firstness, ground, and leading principle, as "die Hauptfrage".

John,
I concur that Heidegger is engaged in a critique of modern philosophy and it subjectivist presuppositions.

But isn't the turn to poets and an organic metaphysics as a way to countervail modernity's technological mode of being (and modern physics depending on technological instruments for its discoveries) a working within the romantic tradition? I recall Holderin's words quoted by Heidegger:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

The emphasis is on what work “art” does in the artwork. And on this view what art does is reveal the truth of Being.

That is the basis for Heidegger's account of art as resisting the modern conception of technology--not that much different from Adorno really. Can we not critically work within this philosophical tradition which did return us to the genius loci of a particular place. A new understanding of the natural world and wild creatures generally lies at the heart of romanticism. It also developed 'the aesthetic' as an autonomous form liberated from the scrutiny of science and the principles of morality.

I do find it ironic that the way neo-positivists such as Christopher Norris, who defends a propositional, observational character of scientific language, interpret Heidegger's critique of episteme and technology has serving to demonize science and rationality, whilst his advocacy of aletheia or revelation has pushed philosophy towards a more solipsistic depth-hermeneutical approach.

Norris implies aesthetics has no rationality, and is solipsistic. This then feeds into the claim that the Heidegger's bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis in his critique of technology betrays a romantic, premodern sentiment that precludes any nuanced account of technologies and results in a one-sided condemnation of technoscience.

What this kind of argument misses is the tacit dialectics: the saving power to form a free relationship to technology arises out of technicity itself. We do not need to follow Freya Mathews and make the romantic (German Naturphilosophie) turn to understanding the planet as a kind of "cosmic self," "a unified, though internally differentiated and dynamic, expanding plenum," which is self-generative, self-realising and self-referential.

Gary,

I suppose the issue here,- (solely in the name of accurate interpretation/understanding, rather than swallowing Heidegger whole hog),- is whether Heidegger opposes an "organic" metaphysics to scientific/technological modernity and whether he counterposes the work of art, aesthetically/subjectivistically conceived, to scientific understanding of the real world, as "universal truth". What is implicated in technological modernity is the loss of metaphysical normativity, which sets limits to human existence in its relation to the world, (and, by implication, other human existences), "nihilism". But metaphysics was the attempt to conceive of the world as a whole as a logically ordered and grounded set of entities, "substances", such that either normative orders emerged from the logically prior order of the world or the order of things was raised up to normative order. (Heidegger approaches his investigation into and dismantling criticism of metaphysics by inquiring into the ground of the metaphysical ground, which may not be the most perspicuous approach and is perhaps prejudicial from the get-go). It's the bursting apart of this fusion of the existent and the normative, together with the tracing of the technological mode of understanding the world to its metaphysical antecedents qua an entitative ordering of the world that constitutes at once the crisis and the opportunity that Heidegger espies. One of the main thrusts of "Being and Time" is that human existence can not truly be conceived in terms of traditional categories of substance, as in Aristotle, i.e. as objectifiable. But, by the same token, the understanding of human beings as subjects traces back by implication to a reflex of the understanding of Being in objectified terms, as ousia, substance, "presence". Heidegger's paradox, if it is one, is that the very "culmination" of the metaphysical understanding of the world in the all-pervasive technological mode of understanding in modernity is precisely what permits a shift to a new, deeper mode of understanding. (I have no doubt that, politically speaking, Heidegger was always ultra-conservative, but, if he was a reactionary, he was the most sophisticated of reactionaries: rather than turning the clock 180 degrees backward, he proposed turning it 180 degrees forward.) One of the basic proposals of his new thinking was to replace the metaphysical notion of the world as subsumable into a logical unity with the notion of "belonging-together". And it is along those lines that I think one should understand his appeal to the work of art, not in an aestheticist/subjectivist sense as a mere and fictive perspective on the world, but as a conjunctural showing forth of the world and the human relation to the world, not as an alternative to or replacement for the scientific/technological understanding of the world, but as a model for the poesis/techne that underlies the human relation to the world/earth and the human responsibility for that relation. However politically obtuse, such an understanding is entirely "modern" and has nothing to do with a reversion to Romantic longing for an integral or "organic" past. Rather what is put into question is the dependency of modernity upon a subjectivist understanding of human existence and understanding and of how the latter relate to encountering/uncovering the world.

Now I myself think Heidegger's account de-differentiates or insufficiently differentiates the emergent distinction between nature and society and offers little insight into the interplay between intra-worldly events/acts/understandings and "ontological" structurings of the world. And likewise I think the imperviousness of his thought to communication and his relative neglect of interhuman relations blinds it to the very ambiguities between "Being" and power from which it would derive its putative critical force. But, by the same token, a reversion to the securement and certification of "subjectivity" over against the world scarcely answers to that force.

As for Norris' concern with relativism vs. objectivism, I would have thought that Wittgenstein's PI put paid to the sort of perceived threat of solipsism and subjectivist relativism that he attributes to "hermeneutics". There is that famous "agreement of judgments" that precedes and underwrites any logic and which rather makes for the possibility of consensual reality. But whether put in terms of Wittgenstein's obsession with the way philosophical theories distort and lead us away from an appreciation of our real and "true" needs or in terms of Heideggerian Angst, consensual "reality" does not suffice to guarantee and secure our existence in the world. Rather objectively existing relativities are just as much a part of the exteriority of our world as any consensual presuppositions and an appeal to the reality of the physical world, which no one, least of all Heidegger, would see fit to deny, does not obviate any need for interpretation, any more than the latter vitiates judgments. Rather "the kind of understanding that makes connections" (Wittgenstein,- and I know no better definition of hermeneutic understanding than that,-) is just as much called forth as sustained by any consensus. We don't "know" how far our connections might take us or when or where they might fail. But just for that reason, the difficulty of thinking is not nugatory, but rather an anticipation of our tasks.