Heidegger’s ‘Heritage’: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism 57

is interested in ‘tactics’, technics, are, for him, secondary. For Heidegger, conversely, modern technics, as a result of the revealing that holds sway (the essence of technology, i.e. Gestell, being a type of revealing) insidiously determines and shapes in advance the manner in which we arrive at goals which we develop tactics to try and secure.

There are numerous instances of that all-too-generic heroic fatalism which many of Heidegger’s contemporaries succumbed to in the post-Weimar era. In a way, then, one can empathize with Karl Löwith’s dismay upon witnessing those very motifs cropping up in Heidegger’s work.31 Habermas and Bourdieu are suspicious of these tropes as well since they are plainly evident in some of Heidegger’s most suggestive writings from the 1930s. What might appear unique to readers of Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, doesn’t appear nearly so unique when placed alongside passages such as the following:

But each and every one of us, intrinsically a null, is for an unnamably brief moment a lifetime cast into that whirling universe. And for us therefore this world-in-little, this ‘world-history,’ is something of supreme importance. And, what is more, the destiny of each of these individuals consists in his being, by birth, not merely brought into this world-history, but brought into it in a particular century, a particular country, a particular people, a particular religion, a particular class. It is not within our power to choose whether we would like to be Sons of an Egyptian peasant of 3000 B.C., of a Persian king, or of a present-day tramp. This destiny is something to which we have to adapt ourselves. It dooms us to certain situations, views, and actions. There are no ‘men-in-themselves’ such as the philosophers talk about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life – life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power.32

And what is needed in the face of this inexorable destiny is something like resolve, hardness, a warrior’s grim defiance in the face of insurmountable odds – a willingness to throw oneself against destiny, to bare one’s teeth to destiny with all the menace and contemptuous disregard of the beast of prey. The martial virtues are constantly celebrated by Spengler!

Notwithstanding, there are fairly obvious philosophical differences between Heidegger and Spengler here as well; for Spengler this destiny ‘dooms us to certain situations.’ For Heidegger, our destining, the way we are thrown (in our era through the ordinances of Gestell) is ‘never a fate that compels’. One cannot draw a straight line then from this blustery vision of heroic and predatory man, as envisaged by Spengler, to the violence-doer as described by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics. These notions have, apart from the semblance of surface imagery and rhetoric, almost nothing in common philosophically. It is also worth noting that Spengler’s attempts to recruit Nietzsche as something of an ally here are untenable. Nietzsche clearly sees his philosophy as one of affirmation and celebration, not one of heroic resignation. In embracing the dangerous character of life, one is liberated, not doomed. That is the paradox of Zarathustra’s gift, the liberation one achieves once one embraces instead of resisting Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought.