Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justifythe High Hand of ViolenceAuthor(s): Geoff WaiteReviewed work(s):Source: Cultural Critique, No. 69, Radical Conservative Thought in Transition: MartinHeidegger, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, 1940-1960 (Spring, 2008), pp. 113-144Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475479 .Accessed: 08/06/2012 11:41

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HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS THE HIDDEN MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO

JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE

Geoff Waite

For Karl Dahlquist and Rick Joines

Law [No/tog], lord of all things, mortals and immortals, holds everything with

high hand, justifying the extreme of violence [ayet diKcucov xo fiimoxaxov

vneqxaxa %eiqi].

?Pindar, Fragments (Boeckh/Donaldson 169[151])

War [TJolepioq] is the father of all things, the king of all, for some he has made

gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others freemen.

?Heraclitus, Fragments (Diels/Kranz 22B53)

There is no way to learn the soul and thought and judgment of a man until he has

been seen in the practice of power and law [agxcug xe Km vofiotoiv].

?Sophocles, Antigone {11175-77)

The same goes for Heidegger:.. .It is necessary to know how to listen to the

silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.

?Althusser, "Du cote de la philosophic"

It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary

things, that are the first to be forgotten... .In the development of leaders, one

premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or

is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of

this division disappears?

?Gramsci, Quaderni del cacere (15[4])

Cultural Critique 69?Spring 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

114 | GEOFF WAITE

INTRODUCTION TO ELOQUENT SILENCE

A dual premise. First, it is primarily in the sphere of military history that "1945" demarcates a radical break between whatever preceded and followed it, by far the most salutary consequence being the ter

mination of the shoah, holocaust, or "final solution." In the capital ist economy and its superstructural effects (which did not produce

necessarily but maximally accelerated the shoah), the termination of

this one manifestation of "the father of all things" necessitated noth

ing less or more than retuning the global distribution of capitalist

power, which ever renders some "slaves, others freemen."

Second, but concomitantly, from the point of view that I?with

much help from Leo Strauss albeit to radically opposed ends1?iden

tify as the transhistorical conservation of esotericism (the almost un

broken philosophical and political tradition dating from archaic and

ancient Greece),2 1945 could effect nothing less or more than the

always already anticipated necessity to retune the exoteric 'form' of

expression of an esoteric 'substance' that forever remains the same.

This 'substance' (or Wesen) is indeed "the intention that there always be rulers and ruled," hereby conserving the version of natural law

or right called "order of rank" (Rangordnung in Nietzschean and Nazi

German, gerachia in Fascist Italian, and with a precise equivalent in

Imperial Japanese) by means of the perpetual retuning necessitated

by tactical and strategic considerations exclusively. Yet, as Spinoza

justly saw in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670): "The application of the word 'law' to things of nature is merely figurative, and the ordi

nary signification of law is simply a human command that men can

either obey or disobey" (Spinoza opera, 3: 38; TPT P4). In the Hobbes

ian variant reaffirmed by Carl Schmitt, "Autoritas, non Veritas facit

legem" (Schmitt, Begriff des Politischen, 122). It is to prevent some

people from disobeying this command and law, understood to be

"the truth about all crucial things," which has been the transhistori

cal (never a-historical) mission of the conservers of esotericism, who

have every right to feel persecuted by us always rambunctious, poten

tially really disobedient men and women.

Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and

therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all

crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

115

is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent

readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication with

out having its greatest disadvantage?that it reaches only the writer's

acquaintances. It has all the advantages of pubic communication without

having its greatest disadvantage?capital punishment for the author.

(Strauss, Persecution, 25)

Accordingly, Martin Heidegger remarks in 1951, "Only once or twice

in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken what

really matters to me [meine Sache]" (Gesamtausgabe, 15: 426), without

saying whether this was one of those only two occasions. As Boethius

wrote in prison just before his brutal execution in 524 CE (for having violated his very dictum), "You are a true philosopher only if you can be silent [si tacuisses]" (Philosophize consolationis, 2: 74-77). As for

capitalism, "You know capitalism is above the law. .. . / Democracy don't rule the world, you'd better get that through your head. / This

world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid" (Dylan "Union Sundown," 1. 38,11. 58-61). With regard to the expression of

the hegemonic Christian rule and law within which Heidegger and

Schmitt (neither of whom unambiguously opposed the shoah, to be

as charitable as possible, at the time or thereafter) wrote (no matter

how reluctantly or enthusiastically), Jesus Christ spoke himself ex

clusively in parables "in order that" (Greek 'iva) some men be saved

and "lest" (\ir\noTE) disobedient people "turn against" them (Mark

4:11-12; see Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 23-47).3?I stand with the

disobedient.

Thus, there are most excellent dual grounds?politico-economic with the conservation of esotericism?for Heidegger to pronounce, also in 1951, the only scandalous-sounding sentence: "This world war

has decided nothing [dieser Weltkrieg hat nichts entschieden]" (Heideg

ger, Was heisst Denken? 65). Schmitt, I will also argue, changed his

mind about both Heidegger and esotericism due in certain measure

to what Heinrich Meier seminally has called Schmitt's "hidden dia

logue" with Strauss (see Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss), but

the Strauss who, in the perennial debate between "Athens and Jeru

salem," ultimately takes the side of the former, albeit prudently. My

appreciation of Meier's thesis is severely qualified, however, inas

much as all three men?Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss?are more prop

erly viewed in terms of their hidden monologue, which is built upon

116 | GEOFF WAITE

bedrock agreement on the necessity of esotericism to conserve order

of rank, including by the high hand of violence. Yet this monologue is

barely audible, written preeminently only between their lines.

STALINGRAD AND THE CONCEALED

STYLE-LAW OF THE GERMANS

Regarding "1945"?which is to say that date when something called

"conservative thought in West Germany" purportedly changed (read:

precisely did not change) from whatever it had been before?we are

reminded that the National Socialist political leaders themselves (e.g.,

Goebbels in his private diaries, Rosenberg in his last public and pub

lished speech, delivered on October 15, 1944 in Weimar at the cen

tennial of Nietzsche's birth) had been preparing the rhetoric most

suitable for the Cold War substantially prior to the impending mili

tary defeat?a rhetoric increasingly attuned against communism even

more than Judaism. Just as Rosenberg asserts, in the 1944 Gotterdamer

ungsstimmung, that Nietzsche earned the right to call himself "a good

European just like us National Socialists," so also Hitler's "fight-to

the-last-bullet" orders to the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the

winter of 1942-43 had declared Germany to be fighting to conserve

no longer just itself but now "European civilization" (see Waite and

Corngold, "Question of Responsibility"). For the conservers of esoter

icism, however, "the peculiar technique of writing" hereby required

had been available since archaic and ancient Greece.

Heidegger's response to the defeat at Stalingrad was thus as in

direct as it was powerful. He had prepared its structure at the begin

ning of his academic itinerary, in the bleak aftermath of World War I,

and it remained intact until his death in 1976. In medias res, recall

his 1942-43 Freiburg seminar on Parmenides and his 1943 lecture

on Holderlin's elegy "Heimkunft / An die Verwandten" (Homecom

ing / To the Relatives). Heidegger's course on Parmenides was begun

shortly after the siege of Stalingrad (August 1942) and was concluded

a few weeks after the surrender of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS at

Stalingrad (February 1943), when the Red Army's massive counter

offensive (with its ally, General Winter, American materiel belatedly

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 117

assisting) had definitively begun repelling the Germans (including

Heidegger's two sons, before their capture) and their allies (Finnish,

Hungarian, Italian, Romanian) back across the 3,000-kilometer front

from the White Sea to the Black Sea towards the fatherland.4

Here is what Heidegger told his students reading Parmenides

(among them disabled veterans) in spring 1943 (I cite the standard

English translation to make two points, marked by [sic]):

He who has ears to hear, i.e., to grasp the metaphysical foundations and

abysses of history and to take them seriously as

metaphysical, could

already hear two decades ago the word of Lenin: Bolshevism [sic] is

Soviet power + electrification. That means: Bolshevism is the "organic,"

i.e., organized, calculating (and as +) conclusion of the unconditional

power of the party along with complete technization. The bourgeois

world has not seen and in part still does not want to see that in "Lenin

ism," as Stalin calls this metaphysics, a metaphysical projection forward

has occurred from out of which in a certain way the metaphysical pas

sion of the current Russian for technology first becomes intelligible, and

out of which it brings the technological world into power. That the Rus

sians, e.g., build ever more tractor factories is not what is primarily deci

sive, but instead that the total technological organization of the world is

the metaphysical ground of planning and of all operations, and that this

ground is experienced from the ground up and unconditionally into the

working completion. Insight into the "metaphysical" essence of tech

nology becomes for us historically necessary, if the essence of Western

historical man is to be saved [sic]. (Heidegger, Parmenides, 86; cf. Gesam

tausgabe 54:127)5

Before showing that Heidegger maintained this position long after

World War II, note two things in this translated passage, in addition

to the facts that the "Russians" (read: Soviets) were forced to build

rather more than farm tractors, and that, for the postwar Schmitt,

too, "Lenin's ideal was the electrification of the earth" (Schmitt, Glos

sarium, 273). First, in "citing" Lenin, Heidegger commits a telling (and

quite common) "lapsus' by substituting "Bolshevism" for Lenin's

original "Communism." In the desperate civil war year 1920, at the

Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Lenin had stated, "Commu

nism is Soviet power plus electrification," adding "of the whole coun

try"?precisely because (pace, Heidegger) he did not intend this to be

a definition applicable generally. Lenin continued:

118 | GEOFF WAITE

Otherwise, the country will remain a small-peasant country, and we

must realize that. We are weaker than capitalism, not only on the world

scale, but also within the country. That is common knowledge. (Collected

Works 31: 461)

In the first and last instance (though not always tactically), commu

nism for Lenin is precisely irreducible to the Bolshevik party. Hei

degger's 'lapsus' is telling not only because one motivation to join his Party (officially on May Day 1934, unofficially by New Year's

eve 1931-32) was his hope to install social and ideological brakes

on runaway technology. 'Even' in 1943, Heidegger remained at least

partially committed to his National Socialist German Workers' Party, and so his lapsus also projects his adhesion to that Party onto Lenin's

specification of an entire political, economic, philosophical, and mili

tary project incepted to combat not only Heidegger's party but the

entire capitalist system at its base, with electrification being a neces

sary but insufficient prerequisite.6 Of course, Heidegger's critique of technology could still stand today, as could Schmitt's. Therefore,

what is more important to note, second, is that the English translation

of Heidegger's phrase at the end of the cited paragraph renders the

German "gerettet bleiben soil" to have him saying that "the essence

of Western historical man is to be saved." In fact, Heidegger is imply

ing, in early 1943, right after Stalingrad, that "we" in Nazi Germany have already begun the process of saving that historical man, and that

this project must be conserved?to fight another day.

Heidegger's lecture on Holderlin's elegy "Homecoming / To the

Relatives," was first delivered in the main auditorium of Freiburg

University on June 6,1943, the centennial of Holderlin's death, dur

ing the definitive German retreat from the USSR. Heidegger's con

cepts of Heimat and Heimkunft now welcome the Wehrmacht and

Waffen SS home as those "relatives" who are hereby readied to fight

another day?if no longer (only) in military battle, then (also) in spir

itual. He asks rhetorically,

Are not then the sons of the Fatherland, who, far from the soil of the

homeland though with their gaze into the gaiety of the homeland shin

ing toward them, and devoting their life for the still reserved find [Fund]

and expending their life for it?are not then these sons of the homeland

the nearest relatives of the poet? Their sacrifice shelters in itself the

poetic call to the dearest ones in the homeland, so that the reserved find

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 119

may remain reserved. ... It is then that homecoming is. This home

coming is however the future of the historical essencing [Wesen] of the

Germans. ("Heimkunft / An die Verwandten," Erlauterungen, 29-30)7

A scant year later, in the even more desperate summer of 1944, the

conclusion of his seminar on Heraclitus finds Heidegger posing the

now less rhetorical question, whether "the Germans, in harmony with the truth of Seyn," are "strong enough, above and beyond the

readiness for death, to save, from the petty mindedness of the mod

ern world, that which begins in its inconspicuous embellishment"

(Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 55:181). Less than two years later, after the

war, in his open letter of 1946 (published in 1949 as Uber den Human

ismus [On Humanism]) to Jean Beaufret, his anti-Semite French lackey, Holderlin is for Heidegger the sole thinker and writer whose "relation

to Greece was something essentially different than humanism"?at

which point Heidegger avers that "the young Germans who knew of

Holderlin thought and experienced when facing death Other [Anderes]

than what the public sphere held to be the German opinion" (Uber den

Humanismus, 30). Presumably, on this same logic, those young German

soldiers also thought and experienced differently when they were forc

ing others to face death, rape, or mutilation.

What matters here is the continuity of Heidegger's thought such

that any mere historical date?"even" 1945?is epiphenomenal com

pared to the task of conserving esotericism. In 1922, Heidegger had

confided to Karl Jaspers the pressing "need" not only for their own

"consciousness of a rare and independent battle action group [einer

seltenen und eigenstandigen Kampfgemeinschaft]" but also, Heidegger

stressed, "for an invisible society [einer unsichtbaren Gesellschaft]" (Hei

degger and Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 29, 42). Still in this 'neo-Pietistic'

regard, two decades after World War II, near the end of the famous

Spiegel interview (1966; published by mutual agreement only post

humously, in 1976), Heidegger's interlocutors recite from the Freiburg seminar on Nietzsche in which Heidegger had spoken of the "oppo sition [Widerstreit] of the Dionysian and the Apollonian [Nietzsche's

terms?G.W.], of holy passion and of sober representation [Holderlin's

terms?G.W.]," adding that this opposition constitutes

A concealed style-law of the historical determination of the Germans

[ein vorborgenes Stilgesetz der geschichtlichen Bestimmung der Deutschen],

120 | GEOFF WAITE

and one day we will have to find ourselves ready and prepared to give it form [und uns eines Tages bereit und vorbereitet finden mufl zu seiner

Gestaltung]. (Heidegger, Antwort, 106-7)

Der Spiegel continues to quote verbatim:

This contradiction is no formula with the help of which we are allowed to

describe mere "culture." Holderlin and Nietzsche, with this opposition,

have erected a question mark on the task of the Germans, to find their

essence historically. Will we understand these signs? One thing is cer

tain: History will take its revenge on us, if we do not understand it. (107)

At this juncture, the Spiegel interviewers look up from their notes to

remark, "We don't know the year when you wrote that; we'd guess it

was 1935." Heidegger had a prodigious (if appropriately selective)

memory and accurately he corrects them: "Presumably that quotation

belongs in the Nietzsche lecture 'The Will to Power as Art,' 1936-37"

(indeed, see Gesamtausgabe, 43:122-23). But then he adds, crucially, "It

could also have been said in the following years." With this shrewd

twist, Heidegger can mean: still today and into the distant future. Over

hearing this innuendo, Der Spiegel tried to press Heidegger on the con

tinuity between a remark made in 1936-37 and reaffirmed in 1966.

To press him, moreover, on his unreconstructed conviction that the

Germans have "a unique historical task," indeed "a specific qualifi cation for a fundamental reversal [Umkehr]" of world history, which

necessarily includes "conversing with Holderlin" (Antwort, 107). What

his interlocutors likewise, but more crucially, ignored was what Hei

degger had and still meant by "a concealed style-law." This law long

predates and postdates any merely historical conjuncture. At stake is

the esotericism that must be perpetually conserved.

With the phrase "concealed style-law," Heidegger was silently and

affirmatively appropriating one of Nietzsche's most programmatic

articulations, viz., of Greek thought and political economy with their

esoteric implementation under modern conditions. In his early and

purloined essay "The Greek State" (1872), Nietzsche had explicitly

promoted at once the modern version of "slavery" (Sklaverei), the

necessity for its "conscious or unconscious" acceptance by "slaves" or

"workers" in their expropriated "surplus labor" (Mehrarbeit), and the

concomitant "anti-Liberal" necessity for an "esoteric writing" (Geheim

schrift) appropriate to "the esoteric doctrine of the relation between

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

121

the State and genius [Geheimlehre vom Zusammenhang zwischen Staat

und Genius]" (Kritische Studienausgabe, 1: 767,777). Whatever his quar

rel with Nietzsche could ever be on metaphysical or ontological

grounds, Heidegger always affirmed, in principle, this complex artic

ulation of "esoteric doctrine" or "concealed style-law of the histori

cal determination of the Germans" with the conservation, today, of

social, political, intellectual, spiritual, and economic order of rank.

No one writing in this transhistorical framework need worry, ulti

mately, about any merely historical phenomenon, since it is epiphe nomenal in relation to esotericism.

SI TACUIS5ES PHIL0S0PHU5 MAN5ISSES

It follows with ruthless logic, in the words of the postwar Heideg

ger cited earlier, that "this world war has decided nothing"?which

appears scandalous only to his mostly uncomprehending readers or

listeners. They should pay attention to Heidegger when, in 1935 and

again in 1953, he states bluntly:

Only when we grasp that the use of violence [Gewaltbrauchen] in lan

guage, in understanding, in educating, in building, co-creates [mit

schafft] the violent-act [Gewalt-tat] of clearing paths into surrounding

being?only then do we understand the uncanniness of all that does

violence. (Einfiihrung, 120-21)

In related, well-nigh Schmittian terms ("for . . . against"), Heidegger

writes to Ernst Junger in 1955 on the occasion of the latter's forty third birthday:

Nietzsche, whose light or shadow every contemporary thinks and poet

icizes "for him" or "against him," heard a calling that demands that

humans prepare for the assumption of a domination of the earth. He

saw and understood the erupting battle for domination. . . . This is

no war, but the noXe\iO(; that first lets gods and humans, freemen and

slaves, appear in their respective essence and leads to a critical en

counter [Aus-einandersetzung] of Being: Compared to this, world wars

remain superficial. They are ever less and less capable of deciding, the

more technological their armaments [Sie vermogen immer weniger zu

entscheiden, je technischer die sich riisten], (Wegmarken, 252)

122 | GEOFF WAITE

In short, Mein Lieber Ernst, if one wants not simply to understand

so-called modernity but to maintain social order of rank, we must

read Nietzsche and, better yet, Heraclitus in Greek. Note, crucially, that the jroX.eu.og (polemos) for the Greeks designated ever-welcomed

(masculine) war against an external adversary, in contrast to ataotg

(stasis), the ever-dreaded (feminized) civil war (see Loraux, Experi

ences, 231-40; Divided City, 9-26; also Tragic Ways, passim), which has

been and mutatis mutandis remains, I say, 'partisan,' 'proletarian,' or 'Spartacist.' Long before World War II, Schmitt was supremely aware of this decisive distinction (see, e.g., Begriff des Politischen,

28-29). After the war, in his U.S.-guarded prison cell, in Ex Captivitate Salus (1946), he writes, "Many quote Heraclitus' sentence: war is the

father of all things. But few dare to think thereby of civil insurrection

[Biirgerkrieg]" (Ex Captivitate, 26; also 56-57).

Four years later, in 1950, Schmitt confides to his diary:

My Nomos der Erde is arriving at the right historical moment. The time

is coming (said Nietzsche in 1881-82), when the battle for the domina

tion of the earth will be waged; it will be waged in the name of funda

mental philosophical doctrines; i.e., an ideological battle for unity. The

Kellog [sic] Pact is creating a free path; war as means of rational politics

is despised, condemned; war as means of global domination of the earth

is the just war. The world becomes an object, says Martin Heidegger.

(Glossarium, 309)

The part of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 Schmitt doubtless still

has in his sights was its stated and quixotic "renunciation of war as

an instrument of national policy" (see also Schmitt, Begriff des Politi

schen, 37-52), but note that, just like Heidegger, Schmitt operates

within a perceived seamless continuity between the Weimar and the

Federal Republics, in the just-cited case from 1928 to 1950. From this

perspective, period dates such as 1933-45 are obviously just as epi

phenomenal as those extending from Heraclitus' sixth century BCE

into any foreseeable future.

Heidegger had already shared the allegedly Heraclitian hope, ex

pressed publicly on Jiinger's birthday in 1955, with Schmitt privately on August 22,1933, in their only extant correspondence, a half-year after they had joined the Nazi Movement. In this letter, Heidegger

thanks Schmitt for sending him a copy of a text (presumably The Con

cept of the Political), "which I already know in the second printing,"

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 123

and lauds Schmitt for not having forgotten "the fiaoikev" (king, ruler)

when citing Heraclitus' Fragment 53 ("War is the father of all things, the king of all, for some he has made gods, others men; some he has

made slaves, others freemen"), which, Heidegger adds, "is solely what gives the entire saying its full meaning" (Gesamtausgabe, 16:156).

Then, as ever, all this is only prudently ever said in public, however,

and then never in its full implications, especially regarding that ulti

mately feared terror, which for both men is stasis.

The continuity of Heidegger's position is evident in his text

"Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit" (Plato's Doctrine of Truth), inas

much as it was written before the war (1930-31) and published dur

ing the war (1942) and thereafter (1947), bound with the "Letter on

Humanism," and again in 1967. Here Heidegger avows: "The 'doc

trine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is

exposed so that he might expend himself for it" (Wegmarken, 109)?

and by "exposed" (ausgesetzt) he means mortally unto death, includ

ing not only killed by others but by killing them.

Detouring and hijacking Strauss's phrase for Machiavelli, all "cap tains without an army" can recruit "only by means of books" (Thoughts on Machiavelli, 154). However, this must be done between the lines,

prudently, in order to recruit the right army and reject the wrong. It must be done "silently," recalling Bcethius' phrase, so crucial for

Nietzsche.8 The importance of Nietzsche to Heidegger and to Strauss

hardly needs reiteration?though rarely in precisely this regard (see

Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e; "Radio Nietzsche"; "Salutations").

PASSING THE COMEBACK TEST

But what, then, about the Schmitt who often asserted, beginning in

Politische Romantik (Political Romanticism) in 1919, that he was not a

follower of the atheist Nietzsche?just another of those "high priests

and, simultaneously, sacrificial lambs of the private priesthood" (Poli

tische Romantik, 21)?and the Schmitt who harbored serious reserva

tions, in this theological regard, about his former Nazi Party comrade,

Heidegger? What was Schmitt's part?with but beyond Strauss's in

tervention?in the hidden monologue to conserve esotericism?

From Glossarium, his posthumously published (and in this sense

124 | GEOFF WAITE

esoteric) intellectual diary, we know that the postwar Schmitt con

tinued both to think fondly of "poor Adolf Hitler" (Glossarium, 155),

but also of Heidegger as "my dear friend and my honored enemy"

(263; em.). The latter distinction, at least, is the highest possible, given the dual axiom Schmitt had penned two years earlier in his prison cell (citing Theodor Daubler): (1) "The enemy is our own question as Gestalt" (Ex Captivitate, 90; also Glossarium, 243); and (2) "the true

enemy does not allow himself to be deceived" (Ex Captivitate, 89). The

fact that "Martin des Heideggers" or "the blind Samson" (Glossarium,

236), as he also dubs Heidegger, would be Schmitt's theological enemy

simpliciter is obvious, assuming that the following two fundamental

positions in the Glossarium are incommensurate:

I know the Psalm and read in my Bible: "The Lord is my shepherd, I

shall not want." I know the modern philosophy and read in Heidegger:

"Man is the shepherd (of Being)." (232)9

Enough said, except that Schmitt adds immediately: "Preferably the

enmity of Adolf Hitler than the friendship of the returning emigrants and humanitarians" (232). This apparent non sequitur is elaborated

and clarified politically in the same diary in reference to Heidegger:

Heidegger passes the Comeback test [die Probe des Comeback] with a

grade of "entirely satisfactory," Gottfried Benn with "outstanding"; and

Ernst Jiinger fails miserably. We will have to wait and see how I will

grade out (You are never capable of making a Comeback, because You

are always changing, never walk through the same river twice). (297)

From this 'Heraclitian' perspective in 1950, but expressed as early as Political Theology in 1922, Heidegger's "shepherd of Being"?or

"bourgeois who wants God, though He must not be active" (Schmitt,

Politische Theologie, 64)?was always precariously close to drifting

off (if he has not irretrievably drifted already) into liberalism (never

mind conservatism) inasmuch as, for Schmitt, the bourgeois is he who

not only fears violent death (as remarked by Hobbes, Locke, Rous

seau, and Hegel)10 but also (following Donoso Cortes) is a charter

member of that clasa discutidora which, when asked, "'Christ or Barab

bas?' responds with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a committee

of investigation"; moreover, "such a position is not by chance, it is

grounded in liberal metaphysics" (Glossarium, 66).11 It is understood

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 125

that, for Schmitt, it was the specifically Jewish rabble that decided

against Jesus Christ for Jesus Barabbas, the h(\crxr\g (thief or insurrec

tionist in stasis).

The resolutely anti-Semitic and Catholic Schmitt privately dis

misses, in 1948, what many liberals and conservatives alike regard as

one of the lapsed Catholic Heidegger's great political-philosophical

strengths: his "ontological-existential method of interpretation" in

Being and Time of "das Man" (Zarathustra's average or last man), of

"das Alltagliche" (the everyday), of "Gerede" (idle chatter), and of "das

Unheimliche" (the uncanny; forget Freud). Schmitt now dismisses all

that analysis in his diary as the "Kitschig-banal" and as pathetically "ethical-characteristic" (Glossarium, 109-10). Not to mention the sac

rilege, pretentiousness, or naivete of a political ontology (as opposed to political theology proper) grounded neither in revealed faith nor in

a theory and practice of Law or Nomos. For, as Schmitt puts it with the

least violence he can muster in camera in 1949:

Power is Being; Being is Power; this is concealed behind every word of

Being [Macht ist Sein; Sein ist Macht; das steckt hinter jedem Wort vom

Sein]. (242)

Not God but the Devil is concealed in the detail.12

Or, as Nietzsche had written in Beyond Good and Evil, for those

with eyes to see, "Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every

opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask" (Kritische Stu

dienausgabe, 5: 234). What, then, could simultaneously make Heideg

ger into Schmitt's "my dear friend"? Not what Heidegger says, Schmitt avows, but what he does not say, his properly philosophical (Bcethian) capacity to be silent. Hence, as distinct from all of Heideg

ger's "Kitschig-banal," Schmitt has found?and by 1949 adopted as

his own?the "very beautiful sentences [in Being and Time], such as

'silence is the essential possibility of speech'" (Glossarium, 109; citing

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 164,296).

In fine silentium ultimately articulates Schmitt and Heidegger and

both of them to the authentically political (and authentically Greek)

conservation of esotericism, and to their rejection a priori of the lib

eral or conservative phantasm that 1945, understood as mere mili

tary defeat, could mark anything like an authentic event. And so it

is Strauss (fortified by his experience of Heidegger and reading of

126 | GEOFF WAITE

Nietzsche) who becomes the catalyst for Schmitt's conversion to join the hidden monologue of the conservers of esotericism.

POTESTAS INDIRECTA, OR, FASCISM

After the war, in 1947, Schmitt condemns Machiavelli?privately? for much the same reasons as will Strauss in the 1950s?publicly and

with infinitely more subtlety. In Schmitt's quasi-Heideggerian for

mulation, the problem is that Machiavelli "spoke at all about power,

making it into an object of idle chatter [Gerede]" (Glossarium, 49; em.).

Whereupon this Glossarium entry concludes with what I suggest is

Schmitt's deepest disagreement with Nietzsche, and simultaneously

his caveat to Heidegger (and Jiinger).

Power is and remains secret. Public power is the most impenetrable

power. He who has power, knows this, and he who wants power, ought

to know it. A consistent and effective Machiavellian speaks like a Tol

stoyan. But an openly expressed philosophy of Will to Power is the sum

mit of most miserable tastelessness and existential stupidity. (49)

Yet Heidegger had expressed the same thought in quasi-inverted

form at Jiinger's birthday in 1955, chiding the recipient:

It belongs to the essence of the Will to Power not to let the actual over

which it gains power appear in the actuality which prevails as the Will

to Power itself. (Wegmarken, 218)

What I now must show is that what is most interesting about Schmitt's

private remark of 1947 contra Machiavelli is not even?though this

is crucial enough?that it tacitly rejects fascism per se by precisely

reversing Schmitt's earlier embrace in the 1920s of the specifically

Mussolinian Fascism that had defined itself as the open, exoteric dis

play of Nietzschean Will to Power. What is most interesting lies (in

both senses) in the brute fact that Schmitt's remark evidences keen

awareness and affirmation of the ancient collaboration of the eso

teric with the exoteric. It is this standpoint, I argue, that logically and

factually precedes his best-known but merely exoteric distinction of

friend and enemy or foe. This is the real "lesson" (pace, Heinrich

Meier) that Schmitt?after "1945"?learned from Strauss in the hid

den monologue.

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 127

The Schmittian critique of the purportedly Machiavellian render

ing exoteric of what ought to have remained esoteric (in the psycho

analytic discourse, "uncanny") and of exposing that aA/r|0eta (truth

qua revealing-concealing) which articulates ontology or theology with the political?this discursive order of rank is ultimately the most

fundamental premise not only of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche but

also of Strauss's critique of Nietzsche and of Heidegger and of Schmitt.

In Schmitt's admission to himself on April Fool's Day, 1950:

Heideggerizing: In the very fact that I "publish" at all, that is, in the fact

that I allow my thoughts to be type set and printed, I am already mis

placed [verstellt], distorted [entstellt], commanded [bestellt] and employed

[angestellt], engage. (Glossarium, 299)

It is with this "lesson" learned from Strauss and from Heidegger that

Schmitt becomes?when properly disguised [verstellt]?a conserver

of esotericism. This one remark irrevocably bound Schmitt not only to Heidegger and Strauss, in that single "battle action group" or "in

visible society" that Heidegger strove to instaurate in the 1920s, but

also to the ancients and to all foreseeable future.

The question whether Schmitt and Heidegger were fascists can

now be answered from the perspective of conserving esotericism.

That both men (unlike Strauss, obviously) were National Socialists?

at least in the sense of being party members in The Movement (Die

Bewegung), as the Nazis called themselves?should go without re

minder. We might quibble about the extent to which they ever left

The Movement, just as we might split hairs about their motivation in

joining, or the role of anti-Semitism in their decisions. On the latter

point, Heidegger is an anti-Semite in some but not all of his interper sonal relationships (Hannah Arendt most notably), if not necessarily in politico-ontological principle. Schmitt is a principled theologico

political and practicing anti-Semite, though perhaps not also a biolog ical racist in the specific Nazi sense. He does loathe, incandescently,

Benjamin Disraeli's sentence that "Christianity is Judaism for the mul

titude, but it is still Judaism" (cit. Meier, Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 157)?

but mainly, I say, because of any insinuation that Christianity plays exoteric handmaiden to Judaism's esotericism.

But we must put the question of National Socialism in phenome

nological brackets, in order to focus on the more germane matter of

128 | GEOFF WAITE

fascism, which was not as explicitly racist, but above all to focus on

the tertium quid of both movements. "Fascism is first and foremost

an ideology generated by modern industrial capitalism"; and?qua "a politics implicit in modern capitalism" is exactly like National

Socialism?racism must not be used to differentiate between the

Italian and the German "cases" (Neocleous, Fascism, xi).13

Crucial here to note is that Mussolini, in his 1921 article in II Popolo d'ltalia (a year before the March on Rome), programmatically and pub

licly defined fascism as the "super-relativist movement [movemento

super-relativista], the end of all scientism, the downfall of the myth of

science (intended as bearer of absolute truths)," and as antiteleologi cal historicism in action. "Nothing proves that capitalism, along with

the type of society it produces, must ultimately end up in socialism,"

and "the succession of economies and cultures, which is thought to be

natural and logical, is instead purely arbitrary." This essay, entitled

"Nel solco delle grandi filosofie: Relativismo e Fascismo" (In the Fur

row of the Great Philosophies: Relativism and Fascism), announced

"the inglorious end of all the so-called democratic achievements."

Mussolini's decisive performative speech act (archaic Greek krainein)u

continued:

Nothing is more relativistic than fascist mentality and mobilism [attivita].

If universal relativism and action are equivalent, then we are fascist, we

who have always boasted that we don't give a damn about the nomi

nalisms to which the bigots of the other parties always cling as bats

on rafters; we, who had the courage to smash all the traditional politi

cal categories and to call ourselves from time to time: aristocrats and

democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti

proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists?we are truly the relativist par

excellence, and our movement calls upon the most current trends of the

European spirit. (Mussolini, Opera omnia, 17: 267-69)15

By these trends, Mussolini (who did not for nothing anticipate "tool

box" philosophy and multicultural relativism and historicism) avers

that his filosofia della form derives directly, he states, from Hans Vai

hinger's neo-Kantian ("As If") interpretation of Nietzsche. II Duce

concludes, "Italian Fascism was and is the most formidable creation

of an individual and national 'Will to Power'" (269). But?and this

will be one of my main theses regarding Schmitt?fascism is all this

openly, in public, exoterically.

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

129

Through this pellucid Mussolinian lens, Heidegger might appear

exactly one-third fascist. As remarked above, he, too, rejected runaway

technology and scientism (though not per se) and hoped that National

Socialism would brake and steer them.16 However, he affirmed esoter

icism and simultaneously rejected philosophical and political relativ

ism. Heidegger makes this sufficiently clear in his Freiburg lectures

on "Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache" (Logic as the

Question of the Essence of Language) in the summer of 1934 (the very moment the postwar Heidegger would have us believe that he had

entered into so-called inner immigration). He tells his charges:

It does not follow from the statement "There is no absolute truth" that

this statement is itself absolutely true. Rather, it is true for us [wahr fiir

uns]. But this new supplement, "true for us" is not itself essentially rel

ativist. (Gesamtausgabe, 38: 80)

He here concludes, as is his politico-ontological wont, by precipitous shift from philosophical to political emphasis:

It is often argued that philosophy as highest science must be standpoint

free. But there must be a standpoint, for without a standpoint one

cannot stand. The essential matter is thus not about being free from a

standpoint, but rather that a standpoint must be fought for. It is a mat

ter of a decision for a standpoint [Es handelt sich um eine Standpunktent

scheidung]. (80)

In other words, just as not all Cretans are liars, many in both camps remain powerful political thinkers, politicians even. Alternatively, we

might say that Heidegger here defends a more refined philosophical version of Mussolini's more explicitly political standpoint and point of attack against scientism and liberalism. But their common front

is "in essence one and the same," to detour Heidegger's key term,

and not just in the obvious matter of their shared antiscientism, that

is, their shared desire for certain social or ideological controls on sci

ence and technology, not to mention smashing parliamentary busi

ness as usual. Mussolini and Heidegger both affirm the "natural" Is

and Ought of Randordnung or gerachia in all spheres with its concomi

tant Fuhrerpinzip (leader principle). The only real difference is that

Mussolini's Fascism is at least in principle exoterically fully open to

view, exoteric, whereas Schmitt's "Tolstoyan" Heidegger is in princi

ple eso/ esoteric?with the upshot being that of these two, Mussolini

130 | GEOFF WAITE

and Heidegger, only the latter can possibly conserve esotericism,

according to the ever-prudent Strauss and now duly warned but still

less prudent Schmitt.

Schmitt's warm embrace of Italian Fascism, in the late 1920s, is

quite explicit and public, and is different from Heidegger's always more lukewarm and implicit relation. As expressed in his extremely

significant review essay in 1929, "Wesen und Werden des fascisti

schen Staates" (Essence and Becoming of the Fascist State), the reason

Schmitt embraces Mussolini's stato totalitario is not only because it

offers the most radically resolute antithesis to scientism or liberalism,

with all its economic monetary interests. Schmitt now embraces this

State on the grounds that it is the antithesis to the dominion of invis

ible, private, and so-called indirect power (potestas indirecta)?in fine, the antithesis to esotericism. In Schmitt's own words in 1929, "With

ancient probity the Fascist State wants to be a State again, with visible

bearers of power and representatives, but not the facade and ante

chamber of invisible and irresponsible rulers and financial backers"

(Positionen, 113; em.). Franz Neumann's thesis in Behemoth (written

during the siege of Stalingrad) holds true then and now:

The fight against banking capital is not anti-capitalism; it is, on the

contrary, capitalism and indeed often fascist capitalism, not only in Ger

many but in almost every other country. Those who do not tire of attack

ing the supremacy of finance capital (by which they always understand

banking capital) thereby play into the hands of the industrial monopo

lists. Whenever the outcry against the sovereignty of banking capital is

injected into a popular movement, it is the surest sign that fascism is on

its way. (Behemoth, 322)

Elsewhere (time is of smallest import), Schmitt makes clear that with

such "backers" he has in his sights "the general situation of the Jew,

based in his parasitic, tactical, and merchant relation to German in

tellectual treasures," and he throws Spinoza into this mix (cit. Meier,

Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 152 with n. 78). Schmitt apparently sought to

foist this anti-Semitism on Jiinger (see 158 with n. 95), though with

apparently inconclusive result. After the war, Schmitt persists in the

Glossarium with his racialist or simply racist spin on the claim that

"Spinoza was the first to subintroduce himself [sich subintroduzierte]"

(Glossarium, 290), in other words, was illicit and remains to be "outed"

qua esotericist by all properly fascist exotericists.

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 131

Schmitt's assertion that "probity" in the sense of exoteric trans

parency is "ancient" is obviously the very opposite of the truth, as

can be read in Plato's Seventh Letter or his defense of "noble lying" in the Republic or in any subsequent raison d'etat, not to mention

virtually anything by Heidegger on the Greeks, if read between the

lines. It was instead Mussolini (i.e., his filosofia delta form) who had

affirmed exotericism in 1921 in his "Relativism and Fascism." What

is finally significant about Schmitt's 1929 essay, "Essence and Becom

ing of the Fascist State," is that he offers his own version of the old

pincer or convergence theory (Europe or Germany clamped in the

Heideggerian "pincers between Americanism and Bolshevism"), for

he argues a la Mussolini that "The fascist state does not decide as a

neutral but as a higher third. Therein lies its supremacy" (Positionen,

113; also Meier, Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 137 n. 40). This higher third?

the high hand of violence?entails for Schmitt, in 1929, "the superiority of Fascism over economic interests, whether those of the employers or of the employees, and, one can say, the heroic attempt to grasp and

assert the dignity of the State and national identity over the pluralism of economic interests" (cit. Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 137).

Regarding the specifically?and violently fascist?economic pre

suppositions and ideology behind Junger's Der Arbeiter (The Worker)

in 1932, behind Schmitt's Der Begriffdes Politischen (The Concept of the Political) in that same year, and behind Heidegger's Recorate Address

one year later: all those texts are in accord (just before and just after

the fact, respectively) not only with the first Nazi Labor Service poli cies but also the policies of the American New Deal (see Patel, Soldiers

of Labour, 328-29). (At this moment, Antonio Gramsci, in his fascist

prison cell, was desperately analyzing this tripartite articulation?

these pincers: Italian Fascism and German National Socialism and Cap italism?from the communist perspective, which remains my own.)

The fundamental difference between Schmitt and Heidegger in

this and any other ultimately important regard was that Heidegger

always holds the esoteric card as close to his chest as possible, except for a year or so ca. 1933-34, and that Schmitt showed his hand, more

than Heidegger did, in 1929 and in 1933-34, and somewhat longer. So it then was, in archaic Greek terms, that Jurist Schmitt confirmed

and even outstripped Rector Heidegger in embodying Creon's dic

tum: "There is no way to learn the soul and thought and judgment

132 | GEOFF WAITE

of a man until he has been seen in the practice of power and law."

Finally, however, none of our clear-sighted troika, in their hidden

monologue, is opposed to violence in principle or tout court. To the

precise contrary, theirs is war (polemos) against our war (stasis)?both

often being violent. It is precisely here that Strauss's voice in the hid

den monologue is crucial.

DECEIVING GENIUS

Strauss's well-known 1932 critique of The Concept of the Political must

now be read as a very friendly amendment (or supplement) because

it exposes the relativistic (or moral) aspect of Schmitt's argument. This amendment is all the more remarkable given that Strauss had

not yet fully discovered esotericism, which apparently occurred while

reading Lessing ca. 1936-37 (see Zank, "Introduction," 34, 43 n. 54),

though his contretemps with Schmitt five years earlier had prepared him well for that discovery, and Strauss had studied Spinoza and

the Spinoziana in depth (partly under Ernst Cassirer's less or more

reluctant guidance). In any event, Strauss's corrective (or "hidden

dialogue") was intended, I argue, to have the dual effect of saving Schmitt from merely current fascism (defined with Mussolini as "super

relativism"), though not necessarily from National Socialist racism

(against which Strauss at the time was not nearly eloquent enough), in order to rescue the shared antiliberal and transhistorical kernel

of Schmitt's project so that it, too, might fight another day. After all is

said and done, and for worse or better, Schmitt was right (never mind

Right, now): "there is a liberal politics qua polemic antithesis to state,

church, or other restrictions on individual freedom, qua commer

cial, ecclesiastic or educational politics, but no liberal politics per se,

but instead always merely a liberal critique of politics" (Begriff des

Politischen, 69), inasmuch as liberalism per definitionem can never have

sovereignty, that is, the "monopoly of decision" over the friend

enemy distinction and hence over who can kill and who must die.

(On this point, Jiinger's much less consequential contribution to our

monologue was to pose the question of how, or if, such sovereignty

could be restored in what he identified, in 1932, as "the transition from

liberal democracy to the Work-State [Arbeitsstaat]" {Arbeiter, 246-81].)

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 133

In an only apparently different register, I am arguing that Strauss

was struggling in 1932 to teach, in "dialogue" with Schmitt, the "les

son" that the legal theorist was an antiliberal or indeed fascist less

by being a relativist against his will than by being excessively exo

teric. Concomitantly, Schmitt was rendering the ground of sover

eignty (which friends must kill, which enemies exceptionally must

die?) excessively exoteric. This is the reason why Schmitt, in the first

months after World War II, condemns Machiavelli?because Machi

avelli could not keep his trap shut?and simultaneously embraces

Heidegger?because Heidegger had provided such a "beautiful"

philosophical defense of silence in the interwar period, in Being and

Time. Strauss duly cautions Schmitt in 1932 regarding The Concept of the Political:

The affirmation of the political as such can therefore be only Schmitf s

first word against liberalism; that affirmation can only prepare for the

radical critique of liberalism. In an earlier text [1922?G.W.], Schmitt

says of Donoso Cortes: he "despises the liberals, whereas he respects

atheistic-anarchistic socialism as his mortal enemy...." (Politische Theo

logie, 55). The battle occurs only between mortal enemies: with total

disdain?hurling crude insults or maintaining the rules of politeness,

depending on temperament?they shove aside the "neutral" who seeks

to mediate, to maneuver, between them. "Disdain" [Verachtung?G.W.]

is to be taken literally [i.e., as ver-achten, not-deigning?G.W.]; they do

not deign to notice the neutral; each looks intently at his enemy; in order

to gain a free line of fire, with a sweep of the hand they wave aside?

without looking at?the neutral who lingers in the middle, interrupting

the view of the enemy. (Strauss, "Notes on Carl Schmitt," 117-18)

This is also an excellent strategy for us communists to retain for a

clear line of fire at capitalists and their apologists, be they so-called

conservative or liberal. To that precise end, however, what we must

not overlook in Strauss's critique of Schmitt is the monologue of con

serving esotericism.

For his part in the (our) monologue, Strauss rightly remarks:

"That Schmitt does not display his views in moralizing fashion but

endeavors to conceal them only makes his polemic the more effec

tive" (111). In other words, Schmitt would better achieve his aim

by following the injunction on Spinoza's signet ring with the rose on

it: "Caute!"?the sub-rosa Spinoza critiqued by Strauss, disdained by Schmitt, and skirted around by Heidegger.17

134 | GEOFF WAITE

Now, little or nothing of what I've argued regarding Heidegger's

appropriation of what the ancient Greeks called sigetics?includ

ing the capacity to use it to tell falsehoods?would have surprised

Heidegger's most attentive students, from the end of World War I

onward. In his Marburg lectures, "Einfuhrung in die phanomeno

logische Forschung" (Introduction to Phenomenological Research) in

1923-24, Heidegger analyzed the sections in Aristotle's Metaphysics

(1024bl7-1025al3) on the multifaceted relation of Xoyog to ipeu5og.

According to Heidegger: "HQay\ia, man, and Xoyoc, are three regards that appeal to a fundamental phenomenon not seen by Aristotle," adding, "in order to understand our analysis, one state of affairs [Tatbestand]

must be maintained." It is this:

The factic Dasein of speaking as such, insofar as it is and simply inso

far as it is as speaking, is the authentic source of deception. This means,

the Dasein of speaking carries in itself the possibility of deception.

(Gesamtausgabe, 17: 5)

Moreover, it is "only in this context of silence," Heidegger stresses, "that

we are to keep in mind that the Greeks see existence as existence in the

polis" (35). Strauss, who had experienced Heidegger's Marburg lectures

in the mid-1920s, would still be driving home Heidegger's political

philosophical point decades later (as in his 1943 essay "The Law of

Reason in the Kuzari"): "The essential purpose of any exoteric teaching is 'government' of the lower by the higher, and hence in particular the

guidance of political communities" (Persecution, 121). Therefore, I add,

Gramsci is precisely right to have reminded us at the outset: "It must

be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary

things, that are the first to be forgotten. ... In the development of

leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there

always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions

in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?"

That "eloquent silence" (Althusser) is indeed absolutely funda

mental to Heidegger should be audible enough in all his lectures

and texts: from 1919, through the Third Reich, and after 1945 until his

death in 1976. One mention of silence bears especial recall here. It

is in the first lecture series (and last) he was permitted to deliver at

the University of Freiburg after the war, Was heisst Denken? (What Is

Called Thinking? or What Is Thinking's Call?), also to be the last such

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

135

lectures before his formal retirement in 1952. Having ostensibly long

ago returned (like Plato before him) from his version of Syracuse, it is

here that Heidegger asks in 1951 (and today) for all with ears to hear:

"What did the Second World War really decide, not to mention its ter

rible consequences for our fatherland, especially the fissure through its middle? [im besonderen vom Rifl durch seine Mitte, zu schweigen?]"

A deafening silence. Germany, once the en-pincered heart of Europe, is now itself ripped through its cardiac middle. Heidegger's afore

mentioned answer is quick to follow and takes no prisoners: "Dieser

Weltkrieg hat nichts entschieden" (Was heisst Denken? 65)?the bedrock

position of all our three deceiving geniuses.

CONCLUSION TO 50PHR05YNE

According to Hermann Heidegger?long since returned from Soviet

captivity, now in his capacity as editor of Gesamtausgabe volume 16

(published 2000)?a handwritten text entitled "Meine Beseitigung" was found, at some unspecified point, among his father's literary remains. The eminently Schmittian phrase meine Beseitigung could

be translated as "my removal," even "elimination" or "eradication."

More literally: "My (being) pushed to one side." This is what always tends to happen to the best conservers of esotericism, by conscious

design, though this text has something else in mind, and Schmitt's

aforementioned asseverations in the Glossarium about his and his

generation's postwar "comebacks" in West Germany are congruent.

Heidegger's text is undated and Hermann Heidegger provides no

reason for asserting that it was written "presumably in 1946." He

thereby implies that the text is reducible to the occasional, which is

a common and big mistake whenever reading his father, or any prac titioner of "the art of writing" under "persecution." The text is four

pages, and his editor son suggests it was the draft of a letter to a now

unknown correspondent, addressed with the familiar "Du." But the

apparent fact that Heidegger supplied it a title indicates that its sig nificance exceeds any one event, any event. The text begins:

You marvel with many others about the fact that my "de-Nazification" is

still not settled. This can be easily explained. My Beseitigung has essen

tially nothing to do with Nazism. One senses in my thinking something

136 | GEOFF WAITE

uncomfortable, perhaps even uncanny [sogar Unheimliches], which one

would like to have disappear. The fact that one is simultaneously inter

ested in it is only proof of this. (Gesamtausgabe, 16:421)

After a few pages of partial, appropriately convoluted elaboration,

Heidegger concludes:

I am silent in my thinking not merely since 1927, since the publication of Being and Time, but instead in this thinking itself and indeed prior to

that, constantly. This silence is the preparation for the Say of what-is

to-be-thought [der Sage des Zu-denkenden], and this preparing is the ex

perience [Er-fahren], which is a doing and acting. To be sure, "existing"

without engagement being necessary. (421-22)

If the rest is silence, as one says, then that silence is eloquent, but we

can read it only between the lines, if at all.

It should now go without saying that our engagement with the

hidden monologue of Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss?their conserva

tion of esotericism and the order of rank that is capitalism?is all the

more necessary for being by design undecidable, if not impossible even.

?And yet. As short-lived Achilles said to much-wandering and

much-deceiving Odysseus:

As detestable in my eyes as the portal of Hades is that man who conceals

[or occludes: xed^t]] one thing in his heart and mind and says another.

Therefore, it is that I shall speak what I think the best. (Iliad, 9: 312-14)

But in that case, we must speak also of the worst.

As Pindar of Boeotia sang over two and a half millennia ago,

"vojiog, the lord of all, mortals and immortals, carries everything with high hand, justifying the extreme of violence." Today, the philo

sophical nucleus of current U.S. foreign and domestic policy?and

hence the Bulldog tail that greater hound wags?is contained in

Strauss's 1970 tendentious translation and affirmation of sophrosyne as

"prudence."

I arrived at the conclusion [in 1925 after hearing Heidegger lecture?

G.W.] that I can state in the form of a syllogism: Philosophy is the attempt

to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in

such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city. In other

words, the virtue of the philosopher's thought is a certain kind of mania,

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS | 137

while the virtue of the philosopher's public speech is sophrosyne. Philos

ophy is as such transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but the

city is and ought to be moral and religious. ("Giving of Accounts," 463)

In duly violent, conclusive response, I hereby enucleate this nucleus

by citing classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on

the originary Greek ritual of sophrosyne:

The young boys had to practice a virtue in silence in the streets, hands

hidden behind their cloaks, never glancing to right or left but keeping their eyes fixed on the ground. They were never to answer back, never

to raise their voices. They were expected to show that, even where mod

esty was concerned, the male sex was superior to the female. Xenophon

reports that they could truly be taken for girls. But in conjunction with

this chaste, reserved, as it were hyper-feminine demeanor, they had to

do things that were normally forbidden: steal from the adult's tables,

plot and scheme, sneak in and filch food without getting caught. In

fierce collective fights in which no holds were barred?biting, scratch

ing, kicking all allowed?they were expected to demonstrate the most

violent brutality, behave as total savages, attaining the extreme limits of

the specifically male virtue known as andreia: the frenzy of the warrior

bent on victory at all costs, prepared to devour the enemy's very heart

and brain, the [warrior's?G.W.] face assuming the frightful mask of

Gorgo: here, hyper-virility, swinging over into animality, the savagery

of the wild beast. (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 198-99)

Notes

A gist of this essay was produced in May 2006 for a Cornell University conference

whose title had been announced as "Conservative Thought in West Germany

after 1945: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jiinger." This essay's cur

rent form is indebted to conversations that summer with the two to whom it is

dedicated, and its ongoing impulse to Francesca Cernia Slovin. Shortly before

the 2006 conference had begun, the titular date was changed to "1940." I retain

1945 as my point of departure for reasons that will be apparent, but still arguing that no historical date is sufficient or necessary to

identify and analyze what I

call conserving esotericism. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted

(refer to Works Cited), including from the Greek and Latin texts, cited here in standard notation.

1. I have recently been called, at the annual meeting of the American Politi

cal Science Association in 2006, "the only Straussian Maoist." This lonesome dub

bing is not my own, but I here before it bow.

138 | GEOFF WAITE

2. For a good (pre-Marxist) discussion of the Straussian brief against his

toricism and relativism and for esotericism, see Melzer, "Esotericism." By archaic

Greece, I designate the period between 750 and 480 BCE, and by ancient Greece that between 480 and 323 BCE. Following the brilliant work of Nicole Loraux, I

date the beginning of occidental democratic politics (as confronted by Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss, and us) from 403 BCE, that is, from the Athenian oath (which

must be continually repeated, on pain of death) "not to recall the misfortunes of

the past," namely, that democracy is ultimately founded on violence, as its ety

mology (demo-kratos) intimates (see Loraux, Divided City, 9-62). 3. As Robert Frost's poem "Directive" (1947) suggests, alluding to Saint

Mark's Jesus, grails are hidden in order that some of us not find them, and thus not

be resurrected (see Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, xv).

4. To get a vague idea of the magnitude of this forced march, imagine

Charles Joseph Minard's classic 1869 carte figurative of Napoleon's disastrous cam

paign in 1812 amplified tenfold (see Tufte, Visual Explanations and Visual Display). As the Hegelian Ruse of Reason and Slaughter Bench of History both dictate, I add, Hitler planned the invasion of the USSR to coincide with the exact date

of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

5. Compare Heidegger's deprecatory use of the mathematical plus sign (+),

to French Fascist Georges Valois's affirmative variant in the 1920s: "Nationalism

+ Socialism = Fascism" (Valois, "Empty Portfolio," 198).

6. Immediately after World War II, in the 1946 "Letter on Humanism," Hei

degger appears to anticipate my criticism when he states that, just as "American

ism" is irreducible to "a specific lifestyle," "communism" is irreducible to "only a

Tarty7 or a 'worldview,'" and that, preeminently in the latter case, "an elemental

experience expresses itself which is world-historical," having just asserted that

"the Marxist view of history [Geschichte] is superior to other historicism [Historie]"

(Wegmarken, 170-71). On this occasion, however, he is addressing a (predomi

nantly anti-American) French intelligentsia debating the relationships among

Marxism, existentialism, and humanism. As I have argued elsewhere, Heidegger

hereby successfully interpellates a Left-Heideggerianism that he can control (see

Waite, "Lefebvre without Heidegger"). His only apparent shift of opinion on

communism (from 1943 to 1946) is anything but opportunism insofar as "the

essential thinkers always think the Same, which however is not to say the identi

cal" (Wegmarken, 193). Unlike Schmitt, occasionally, and contrary to received

opinion, Heidigger and Strauss are opportunists never, and only appear as such

because they consistently speak the esoteric Same exoterically.

7. It is essential whenever reading Heidegger to know that the signifier 'Deutsch' should never be translated as 'German' automatically because the latter

signifier (just like 'Anglo-Saxon,' 'Frank,' or 'Visigoth') is an ethnic designation

merely. By contrast, 'Deutsch' not only is etymologically related to deuten (indi

cate, show, translate, e.g., from Latin into a vulgate) but also derives from Ger

manic *peudo: whence German Volk, English folk. Volk additionally derives from

the sheerly quantitative signifiers viel (many) and voll (full). Middle High German

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

139

vole signified 'a mass of armed men/ The today all-too-commonplace notion that

Volk has to do with ethnicity, language, geography, or nationality is a humanist

deformation. For notable example, the original Spartacists in 74 BCE (revived by

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) consisted of women and men from all

parts of the Roman Empire and yet were a vole because they were a large armed

band (German: Kriegsvolk)?among the most devastating and laudable in recorded

history. The 1871 Communards are among the other most notable examples, and

we communists always with and among them.

8. Nietzsche alluded to this Bcethian precaution in public only once and

indirectly, of course, at the end of the new, 1886 preface to volume one of Human,

All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits?ostensibly his most positivistic, scientific,

and democratic work of 1878. His sibylline conclusion now reads: "my philoso

phy advises me to keep silent and to ask no more; especially in certain cases, as

the saying goes, one remains a philosopher only by?being silent" (Kritische Stu

dienausgabe, 2: 22).

9. A third of a year later, Schmitt writes: "I am really a shepherd of Being.

That Ernst Jiinger can take up Leon Bioy today as his own is, for example, an effect

of my pastoral work. That Theodor Haecker converted to Catholicism has not

happened without me as shepherd" (Glossarium, 264). The symbolist and Catho

lic writer Leon Bioy (1846-1917) had been instrumental in reconciling famous

friends (including the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault,

and the philosopher Jacques Maritan) with Catholicism. Theodor Haecker (1879

1945) was an influential cultural historian, a translator of Kierkegaard and Car

dinal Newman, an opponent of the National Socialist regime (an inspiration for

the White Rose), and a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1921. Heinrich Meier is

thus precisely wrong to aver that Schmitt's contrast of the God of the Psalms to

Heidegger's shepherd of Being in the "Letter on Humanism" exhausts "Schmitt's

attitude towards the solitary inhabitant of the Black Forest" (Lesson of Carl Schmitt,

99 n. 98).

10. See Allan Bloom's introduction to his translation of Rousseau's Emile

(Bloom, introduction to Emile, 5). Ad-usum-delphini Straussian that he is, Bloom

conceals the fact that he is simultaneously plagiarizing and euphemizing Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (see Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 62-63).

11. In his private Glossarium, Schmitt blames some of what he finds exis

tentially at fault in Heidegger on his seduction by "the Holderlin cult" beginning at the turn of the century: "Heidegger interprets Holderlin. The decisive step around 1900 was the transition for the Goethean to the Holderlinian geniality in

which Heidegger remains stuck. What a betrayal of Kierkegaard, of Bruno Bauer,

of the Christianity that was discovered but also recognized anew around 1840!"

(Glossarium, 151). Bruno Bauer, along with Max Stirner especially, were more true

friends than enemies for Schmitt.

12. The finest discussion of this famous phrase or rather phrases (includ

ing the contretemps between Benedetto Croce and Aby Warburg on the matter)

is in Slovin's superb book Obsessed by Art (188-89), wherein she also cites the

140 | GEOFF WAITE

extraordinary remark by Warburg's maternal grandmother, Sara Ginsburg

Warburg: "God has no concern for human sorrow on the day devoted to him"

(Obsessed by Art, 54). 13. In this matter, Neocleous also points out an important difference between

Fascism and National Socialism: "In the Italian case, with its focus on the state

as the unifying mechanism behind the nation and the juridical orientation this

entailed, the institutional thrust took on a corporate form. In Germany, by con

trast, the emphasis on the organic Volk meant that the institutional thrust took

the form of organizing?in the sense of making organic?labor and capital into

a unity" (Neocleous, Fascism, 44). We might glimpse here a certain difference

between Schmitt and Strauss (gravitation towards fascism) and Heidegger and

Junger (gravitation towards National Socialism) in this difference, but we must

not allow it to obscure their similarities with regard to both anticommunism and

the conservation of esotericism. This is hardly the place to enter into discussion

of the third major modern "case," that of the Japanese Empire system (see

Harootunian, Overcome), on which both Heidegger and Schmitt had a substantial

impact; suffice it here to say that it combined features of both fascism and

National Socialism as adumbrated by Neocleous.

14. On which see Detienne's path-breaking book, Les maitres de verite dans le

grece archai'que (passim).

15. In Mussolini's title, solco (wake or furrow) alludes to the Fascist graffito

that then appeared (and is increasingly reappearing, or so Andrea Righi and Anna

Paparcone inform me) on walls throughout Italy: "The plough cuts the furrow,

the sword defends it."

16. In Heidegger's 1936 lecture course on Schelling, in a passage he sup

presses from the first postwar publication in 1971, he writes: "It is also known that

the two men who have launched the countermovements [against nihilism?G.W.]

in Europe based on the political organization of the nation, that is, on the Volk?

Hitler and Mussolini?were, by reaction and in different ways, influenced by

Nietzsche in an essential manner and this, without the specific metaphysical

sphere of Nietzschean thought being directly implicated" (Gesamtausgabe, 43:

40-41). This omission was first noted by one of Heidegger's former students,

Karl Ulmer, in a letter to Der Spiegel in May 1977, but is not mentioned by Joan

Stambaugh in 1985, in her characteristically whitewashing translation. Recently,

Slavoj Zizek has written: "The true problem of this passage lies not where it

appears to lie (Heidegger's all-too-mild critique of Hitler and Mussolini, which

suggests a positive attitude towards them) but, rather, in the question: what

would a politics exposed to the 'authentic metaphysical domain of Nietzschean

thought' be?" (Parallax View, 275; though the endnote to his citation is confused).

Zizek cannot answer his own question, in my view, because he has inadequately

formulated it, that is, cannot read Heidegger's esotericism, his deceptions and

concealments.

17. Schmitt's antipathy to Spinoza clearly has much to do with anti

Semitism, but inflected, I've argued above, by Schmitt's changing relation to

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS |

141

esotericism (which, as we've seen, he calls or relates to what he calls "sub

introduction"). Less clear is the role of Heidegger's anti-Semitism in his engage

ment with Spinoza, which is much deeper than Heidegger ever admits (see, but

only for starters, Balibar, "Heidegger et Spinoza"). Strauss's view of Spinoza?

just like his view of Nietzsche and Heidegger?is duly prudent because it so per

ilously gnaws towards the Straussian bone, spinal cord.

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