The politicization of Heidegger exegesis has reached a point that is unparalleled in the history of ideas. And because the political interpretation of Heidegger is no longer content to treat what happened in 1933 as an episode, but often considers it to be the key to his oeuvre as a whole, this isolated incident is supposed to be proof of a total philosophical catastrophe. After the upheavals of the twentieth century, philosophy has lost the privilege of existing in a realm that was somehow above politics. Anyone presuming to speak of “Heidegger’s politics” can assume that it is a real issue and that it has been properly identified, although the findings call for careful interpretation, now more than ever, after the studies of Alexander Schwan, Pierre Bourdieu, Silvio Vietta, Dieter Thomä, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, John Caputo, and Peter Trawny, to mention only a few of the many commentators. Even so, such an approach is at odds with testimonials from numerous colleagues, students, and others who were associated with Heidegger, who have assured us based on first-hand experience that he was “fundamentally” apolitical. To decide that Heidegger was apolitical is not entirely implausible, since we otherwise attribute an inappropriately commonplace or pragmatic conception of politics to him, and because explaining Heidegger’s behavior ad personam, as a typical case of “fallibility in matters outside of his expertise,”1 would have us believe that he was similar to Plato, the failed philosopher-king and reformist pedagogue. On such a view, we would not be surprised if Heidegger were one day to be asked “Back to Syracuse now, my friend?” In what follows, I will explain why we do Heidegger no favors if we try to defend him by claiming that he was “apolitical,” as if a philosopher’s errors or poor decisions should not even be taken seriously, indeed precisely when such errors and poor decisions are suspected to have not been simple oversights, but are rather to be understood as essential elements of his thought.
In what follows, we should read the formulation “Heidegger’s politics” in a threefold way: First of all, it characterizes Heidegger’s own approaches to the political sphere – approaches that could be characterized as actually quite extreme, if not antipodean, which is why a “German mandarin’s” wildly inept attempts at political intervention will here be expressed in the profane dimension of national and ideological conflicts. Next, Heidegger’s role in a scenario from the history of philosophy will be described under the same heading, which includes the qualifications necessary for a philosophy to assume an official position in political theory. Finally, “Heidegger’s politics” also signifies his occasional interventions into political theory in the 1930s, as well as his resignation from a position that he unsuccessfully tried to hold. The concept of politics is thus being employed in a polysemous manner and on a number of levels, in keeping with its contemporary usage, since it includes a programmatic dimension in addition to its practical sense in everyday conversation, so that we finally reach what we might with good reason call its metaphysical and meta-political significance.
The term “Heidegger’s politics” initially indicates that a young Roman Catholic intellectual from the post-First World War era, marked by his origins in the countryside and his academic studies, participated in a great event in the history of mentalities, which I have suggested we call the “apocalypse of the real.”2 This event obviously began long before 1918: we could even say that it became acute after Hegel’s death, when, in a quarrel over the master’s legacy, a metaphysical left was formed, which aimed to popularize philosophy’s profoundest mystery. The Young Hegelians’ overt rejection of religion divulged the best-kept secret of ancient wisdom to a bourgeois audience: the esoteric realization that neither God nor gods exist and that the only true world is the actual one we live in yet fail to properly recognize, because our gaze tends to overlook reality in favor of the transcendental. For millennia, the masses and those who were educated but naive allowed themselves to believe that this supposedly true world was to be found in a higher beyond; but now it was time for the real to reclaim the true. Against this backdrop, post-idealists could make a realism from below the order of the day. The names of the four “dysangelists” (as they were called by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy) – Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud – designate the most important positions of the young-realist literature of exposure: when these authors speak of material production, human animality, the will to power, and the masks of the libido, they teach modern minds to believe in the omnipotence and omnipresence of a reality that is built from the bottom up – and is indeed always built so that subtler superstructures remain more or less directly dependent on massive underlying forces. Physiologists, pragmatists, and anthropologists are teachers of descent and retro-scent: they indulge in doctrines of origins and lines of descent, in genealogies that deem us to have come from hirsute ancestors, and forms of pragmatism that bring us down from false heights. The goal is always to reach the terra firma of facts and forces that establish the new era’s authority. The reality of what is real will henceforth be derived from bodies, money, and the will to power, as well as movements drawn from these fundamental forces.
Perhaps we should trace the “apocalypse of the real” back to the French Revolution, because after the long Christian intermission we once again find a pragmatism clad in neo-Roman fashion as Europe’s prevailing modus vivendi. Its occult center was the naturalistic esotericism of the Marquis de Sade, for whom the ultimate truth of pleasure-giving matter is only revealed to uncommonly free spirits who are willing to become media of nature by professing crime as the most advanced technique for happiness. There is no need to explain why the great majority of new realists avoided such excesses, even if they aspired to be “radical.” What nevertheless links them to de Sade is the basic anthropological view that human beings, as creatures of desire, need help to achieve their worldly satisfaction.
It is not our task here to explain in detail how Heidegger became associated with this young-realist trend. We need not concern ourselves with a young scholastic’s transformation into a young radical. Biographers have pointed to the deep impression that the works of Luther and Kierkegaard made upon the Catholic Heidegger during the First World War. In addition, it seems certain that he benefited from reading Dostoyevsky in the 1920s and borrowed certain motifs, such as anxiety and boredom, from him.
For us it is enough to note that the entirety of Heidegger’s early work, when he left behind his ecclesiastical and scholastic origins, is permeated by a quite idiosyncratic pathos that is both extreme and yet in keeping with the times: he is never closer to the creative source of his conceptual power than when he maps out his exodus from the pseudo-eternity of scholastic knowledge into the turbulent temporality of contemporary existence – an existence entirely lived out beneath the dim light of its own bewilderment [Ratlosigkeit] and restlessness [Rastlosigkeit]. While engaged in this project, Heidegger develops a powerful explicitness that is a striking proof of his genius. The term “existence” seemed to offer a powerful cuttingedge awareness of time, from early on: because the young-realist notion of existence displays a counter-transcendent turbulence and because it pursues de-eternalization with great dedication, coming down from the de-realized heights of disinterested theory, intent on merging with the present moment (in the sense of Lenin’s “becoming concrete”), it is impelled by its own momentum to affirm its belonging to the onward rush of time.
The pathos of de-transcendence [Ent-Jenseitigung] leads to a heroic disquietism – a feature that not only marks the culminating phase of Heidegger’s thought, but is also a prominent characteristic of European philosophy and artistic work between the world wars.3 A thinker who wishes to become the medium of his avant-garde work and transforms into the mouthpiece of an apocalypse of the real embraces his “own time” in two ways. First, he declares himself ready to be pervaded by the epoch’s unrest. Second, he sinks into a solitary disquiet that emanates from an awareness of his own mortality. What makes an existence exposed to this disquiet unique is thus marked by two exercises in expropriation: The first happens through the loss of a firm standpoint toward or outside of the flux of time, a loss that is affirmed, since realism requires that we flow along with such time. The second comes into play with the thinker’s acquiescence in a protracted final self-expropriation that will result in his death. In the course of this self-expropriation, the avant-garde philosopher exchanged the bourgeois academic self with its motto of “I-think-therefore-I-am-I-know-I-exist-for-as-long-as-I-think” for an artistic-heroic self with its attitude of “I-am-dying-but-not-right-at-this-moment-and-want-to-do-some-thing-that-I-deem-thought-provoking.” As the earlier young realists of the nineteenth century had helped to engineer the apocalypse of labor and animality, Heidegger, in his own stormy young realist period, distinguished himself by his apocalypse of existential temporality, in which the meaning of existence is disclosed above all from the standpoint of being-toward-death.
Admittedly, Heidegger struggled to convincingly relate the individual temporalization of being-toward-death (and the completion of the period-of-time-before-death by a project that necessarily includes me) to the collective temporalization of the individual’s membership in historic collectives roused to act. Simply put, his thought begins with precisely this problem, an approach that can with some justification be called “Heidegger’s politics.” Here we are only ever concerned with the question of how I, the individual who has been thrown into a tumultuous world or held into nothingness, “transition” from lapsing into my own death, from my death-span, to the life’s work of an overarching collective world history.
The discoverer of the equivalence between being and time is forced into this kind of transition, because he could not limit the existentialization (one could even say the ekstatic qualification) of being-in-time to individuals. In this regard, Being and Time has merely a preparatory function, as has often been noted. Yet how to think the history of existence’s inclusion in a history of being, indeed how the latter is even to be conceptualized, is something that was by no means clear to Heidegger at that time. In order to make the same decisive opening move (to qualify temporality with the self-enactment or “project” of an ekstatic existence) when thinking through transpersonal historical processes, it was necessary to identify a complex or a collective that would be able to bear essential temporalization on a large scale. This would have to be a collective (in other words, a cultural complex) whose actual existence made it possible to carry out a massively indefensible and undeniable historical task. Having read Dilthey, who pioneered the critique of historical reason, Heidegger knew why the transition from a time of individuals to world-time could not be directly implemented: such a transition can only ever be accomplished indirectly. This is because an individual autobiographical kind of knowing, which illuminates one’s own life story as a “context” that understands and projects itself, inherently has the potential for such a transition. In contrast, no single person can experience, recount, and plan for world history as his or her own biography. One would have to be the world spirit to intuit the whole of being as it has unfolded through history into its current state.
Thus it was necessary to find another route to the key process of trans-individual history. As is well known, Heidegger tried out a number of quite distinct, even contradictory, positions and formulations for determining the bearer of collective temporality – beginning with the German people’s time of awakening and upheaval, to the ripening time of the artwork (which constructs a world), all the way to the quiet countryside’s waiting time, which looks forward to a new revelation or a final god – a god whose manifestation or “passing by” [Vorbeigang] will bring the series of apocalypses here below to an end. In each case, Heidegger tries to bridge both qualitative temporalities: if they are to be linked, they must form a plausible passage from the existential temporality of the individual, who has been appointed to die his or her own death and who has constructive, responsible work to do in advance of this, to a collective’s ontological temporality, which is needed for bringing about or preserving a historical truth, or a world-formative work.
We will note right away that this transition is ironic. To be sure, existential ontology has made it unmistakably clear that individual mortality has a peculiar temporal structure, which, precisely as existential, distinguishes it from physical and cosmological time, as well as from capitalist time toto coelo, no matter the particular civilizing situation (even modern medicine has yet to make very great strides in increasing the natural lifespan). Yet whether similarly clear results will emerge from the temporal structure of historical complexes and collectives remains to be determined. It remains an entirely open question whether further historical missions or “movements” can be formed under all circumstances – or whether “history” as a whole might not have come to an end along with the tasks assigned by it. Who can rule out the possibility that history might at some point transition to another phase that would again be closer to the cyclical temporalities of natural and economic processes than to being tensely stretched to the end in existential-linear fashion? Should this happen, we would lose the “objective” pole of temporal occurrence, and the transition we are looking for, the passage from individual to collective time, would no longer have its bridgehead on the other shore.
In what follows, I would like to argue that all of Heidegger’s logical and political troubles are in fact connected to the decline of the public and collective pole of essential temporality. As early as 1928, he recognized that present-day humans cannot even be sure that they are still living in “history,” however much they are convinced that they will always be mortal. My claim is that the master from Todtnauberg discovered his own version of the “end of history” or at least the possibility of its end (as Alexander Kojève also did, a short while afterwards), and I will indicate how he tried to avoid the consequences of this discovery.
If something like “Heidegger’s politics” really exists, then it would initially refer to the fact that he was a very unconventional participant in the young-realist exodus from the captivation of old Europe by metaphysics, as we have already pointed out. If we recall that philosophy has always aspired to expose the reality of the real and to conceptually articulate it, we can better understand why modern thought must embrace this mission more explicitly than ever before. With unprecedented ferocity, it enters the battle over realism that is just getting underway. Heidegger’s avant-garde temporo-logical realism turns out to be more radical than its competitors because, with his unwavering view that existence is being-toward-death, he restored time’s position as mistress of being in motion, which had otherwise been completely downplayed and marginalized, had indeed been intentionally denied and humiliated by thought’s preference for eternity. A sovereign consignor of fates and a stern transmuter of things, time was thrust into the role of that which is most real of all. Indeed, even all-consuming time, the fury of destruction, now appeared to be even more tragically dark than in Hegel’s talk of history as Calvary.4 Initially, because of time’s authority, only the role of a heroic accomplice was open to the philosopher: what he calls resolute existence [zu sich entschlossene Dasein] designates a way of knowing how to be consumed and transmuted. Yet because, as we have seen, existential time cannot be reduced to the span between the not-yet-now and the terminal now of our own death, Heidegger’s task is to reconstruct a collective temporality superordinate to, and yet integrating, one’s own suspension before death – the very time of “history,” from which it is supposed to follow that history does not merely prove to be the transmuter and destroyer of individuals and generations, but also a creator and a project manager, and even the vessel for a wide-ranging eventuation of truth [Wahrheitsgeschehen]. His later conception of the “history of being” [Seinsgeschichte] helps articulate this desideratum.
It is a testimony to Heidegger’s conceptual creativity during his most advanced lucid phase (which should probably not be dated much past 1930) that he began to work on a dramatic ontology of reality, after the conclusion of Being and Time. Heidegger discovered a striking feature of any present moment in time, which he went on to call moods [Stimmungen]. A mood is a vat for dyeing, into which existence is immersed, so to speak, and indeed so early on, in such a pervasive manner, and in anticipation of everything further, that the mood that is here absorbed will pre-emptively anticipate any other object that later appears to be objectively given. Anything later encountered as a single object, state of affairs, or situation can only come to light tinged by the operative anticipatory mood. Anyone who wishes to address human beings more profoundly than was typical in traditional philosophy and its development into Enlightenment must start at the pre-objective level and there begin to work on moods. This also brings us close to the great pole of historical eventuation, since only a mood can shed light on the state of history (though not on its course and its goal).
In discovering the topic of moods, Heidegger the academic philosopher changes into Heidegger the metapolitical clinician, or more precisely, he changes into a psychagogue and trainer, whose main task is to prepare his patients for treatment by drawing attention to their most extreme and deepest-rooted preconceptions of existence as a whole, their existential moods. The procedure is based on the quasi-homeopathic principle that patients’ symptoms must be intensified to paroxysm before a crisis brings about an end or a recovery.
To put it bluntly, his diagnosis is that contemporary human beings suffer from a generalized diffuseness – a malady that manifests itself in the incapacity to be really convinced by anything, accompanied by the tendency to follow every public uproar and lend an ear to all manner of nonsense. In his new discourse on moods, Heidegger discovers the ontological version of hyperactivity and multiple personality disorder, as it were – which is a rather cursory way to characterize the significance of his findings. Ultimately, moods are only philosophically important because they articulate the first positive link between the individual’s being-in-his-own-time and his being-in-the-epoch. First, moods build the bridge (or at least provide support for a possible bridge) from the individual to the collective, insofar as moods well up in a group of people existing at the same time. Second, they provide an orientation that precedes all theory, as well as every “thou shalt” [Sollen], insofar as moods are supposed to imply a deepening of prescriptive guidelines from what is “merely” logically and ethically evident to what is pervasively evident in an existential sense, in other words, to being gripped [Ergriffenheit]. The term “being gripped,” which becomes more significant for Heidegger beginning in the late 1920s, refers to how we are supposed to conceive of an existence that is carried away by the pole of being. Being consciously overcome by a mood, or being gripped, is knowing how to submit, as it were, to what a situation makes evident, something that can be traced from the past into the future.
By 1928–9, Heidegger begins to believe that his work on the temporalization of being by the world-pole has advanced far beyond the preliminary achievements of Being and Time. He now has a conceptual framework that allows him to offer a promising articulation of existence in the collective space-time complex of the present. Tellingly, it always comes down to concepts that can describe how we inhabit a drab epoch. The first items to be discussed in his own present day are emptiness, boredom, ambiguity, and a dearth of actual events. If we consider Heidegger’s formulations at the end of the 1920s to be fundamental for characterizing the collective milieu, he would have to be considered the genuine discoverer and author of the theory of posthistoire. His descriptions of inauthentic existence in the notorious das Man chapter of Being and Time,5 as well as his analyses of boredom from the Grundbegriffe lectures,6 leave no doubt that we are presented with a superlative diagnosis of time. This diagnosis charts the existential disposition [Befindlichkeit] of human beings who have lost any meaningful history. Heidegger the philosophizing young realist teaches that anyone who exists today is confronted with sheer facticity and ends up in the “haziness” [Diesigkeit] of being as a whole.
In what follows, we can draw on the observations that Heidegger shared in his lecture course during the winter semester of 1929–30, titled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. This lecture course undoubtedly forms the most fascinating advertisement for philosophy since Boethius. At the same time, it contains a quite daunting account of the reasons why Heidegger’s contemporaries will in all likelihood be unable to come close to undertaking what has been advertised without fear and trembling. A dictum of Novalis, which Heidegger approvingly cites, reveals the reason why such an undertaking is virtually impossible in present-day philosophy: “Philosophy is really a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.”7 According to Heidegger, philosophy’s urgent basis has been completely undermined because the contemporary way of life wishes for nothing more than the ubiquitous production of relaxation and satisfaction: thus emerges the progressive human being, without homesickness, who “has raised some mediocre aspect of himself to the status of a god.”8
Under these circumstances, the new introduction to philosophy is condemned to make a strategic detour, in order to first restore the human capacity for the basic metaphysical mood – which can only happen by sending human beings to a preschool of the uncanny. This evocative therapy constitutes the lecture course’s second stage – which may well have lasted until the run-up to Christmas 1929.
This scathing opening salvo sets the stage for a psychagogic maneuver that for the first time can be reasonably called “Heidegger’s politics,” although the term “Heidegger’s exercise” [Exerzitium] would be more apt. Anyone wishing to here emphasize this procedure’s implicitly political or, even better, pre-political or proto-political dimension would have to speak of a politics of awakening – though we have to be careful regarding the connotations of such a term. What is supposed to be roused is the opposite of a political impulse. The philosophical wake-up call “Existence arise!” has nothing to do with typical wake-up calls for mobilizing national or proletarian might. From §16 of his lecture course on, Heidegger is devoted to awakening a philosophical mood that does not aim to reveal the identity of something latently or manifestly resent-at-hand (to reveal the identity of a collective ressentiment or of a national pride, for instance), but to “let whatever is sleeping become wakeful.”9
The irony of this exercise becomes evident as soon as we realize that what is here referred to as “sleeping” is not something valuable, nor is such “sleeping” in anyone’s interests. It is a profound unease, and awakening to it is inconceivable without appealing to the courage of whoever is waking up. To awaken, Heidegger says, means to let something present itself anew by allowing what is “in a peculiar way absent and yet there” to come into the foreground.10 Heidegger’s conscious awareness that awakening is related to the development of a collective, and eo ipso to a proto-political procedure, is revealed by his cautious use of the pronouns “we” and “us.” “The question immediately arises as to which mood we are to awaken or let become wakeful in us. A mood that pervades us fundamentally? Who, then, are we? What do we mean here in referring to “us”?”11 Are we speaking of ourselves as academics? As agents in the history of ideas? As concerned parties in a German, a Western, or, in a wider sense, a European event? From this moment on, Heidegger evidently recognizes that, in future, philosophy must become a discussion of our situation [Lagebesprechung].
If we grant this, then it stands to reason that previous contributions by others in interpreting the situation would be cited in an expedient and collegial manner. With animated abstraction, Heidegger brings order to supposed chaos differently than Karl Jaspers, who mainly emphasizes the impossibility of gaining an overview of the situation, in his 1931 overview of Die geistige Situation der Zeit [Tr. – “The Spiritual Condition of the Age”], published two years later. Four main positions are to be distinguished at present, according to Heidegger. First, that of Oswald Spengler, whose thesis in The Decline of the West essentially diagnoses the decline of a life that had been lived in and through spirit, yet does so in such a way that this decline is to be accepted with a Stoic attitude and lived through as unavoidable fate. A similar diagnosis is offered by the next position, that of Ludwig Klages, whose slogan “Return to life!” advocated the liberation of spirit. Third, we have the position of the later Max Scheler, who preferred to view present-day humans as having already reached an era of balance between life and spirit. Finally, we come to the position of Leopold Ziegler, who proclaimed an imminent new Middle Ages that would end the opposition of spirit and life.
Heidegger does not fail to note that all four positions are rooted in Nietzsche’s account of the antagonism between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He brushes aside these majestic attempts to define our situation by objecting that their authors were talking past the actual condition of contemporary human beings – he thought that they had missed and failed to grasp the fundamental mood of the epoch’s operative “we,” because their statements “do not attack us,”12 but merely provide superficial views of who we are. Cultural diagnoses and grand prognoses of this kind merely provide a snapshot of us strolling like passers-by along a broad avenue on which the drama of world history is supposedly being acted out. According to Heidegger, such philosophy exhausts itself in presentation and observation [Dar-stellung und Fest-stellung], without ever getting through to Da-sein, existence or “being-there.” Such philosophy speaks “from where we stand” and forgets to ask, “How do things stand with us?” All of these inspired and interesting philosophies, which confer grandiose roles upon us in world history, relieve us of ourselves by scripting us into a scenario in which we find ourselves very interesting without having to understand ourselves.
But why do we need to make ourselves interesting in this way? Heidegger asks this question (suggestively), and goes on to answer it himself: because, in the core of our existence, we feel that we are empty, not wholly convinced of anything, and not really gripped by anything, either. When we hearken to the authentic fundamental mood of our time in our own existence, we become profoundly bored with ourselves and with our circumstances. The fundamental feature of our age, which marks us most profoundly, is the absence of every authoritative orientation. We are paradoxically gripped by the fact that nothing that tries to take hold of us really grips us. Awakening to boredom means grasping what it means to not be gripped as such. According to Heidegger, we live in an age where nothing is evident, that is, we live in an age that lacks an authoritative purpose. The arrow of history has overshot its mark and vanished into a post-historical haze. What remains is a confused mixture of agitation and indifference. At bottom, historical time is already at a standstill – and its standstill is reflected in our existential mood.
We thus end up with a bizarre definition of the age’s real collective: to begin with, it consists exclusively of a few honest and bold contemporaries who give our profound boredom the chance to surface in our consciousness – that boredom that we have long felt, even if only in an inauthentic way. The psychagogue Heidegger can initially only invoke this collective of the heroes of boredom with a lyrical question: “Have things ultimately gone so far with us that a profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein?”13 To ask this in another way: are we not beings who are only strung along and ultimately remain empty, regardless of everything that happens with us or through us? Do we not “ultimately” feel condemned to pass the time since, no matter how far we look, we can see no project that seizes hold of us, engages us, and carries us away? These are initially just rhetorical questions, meant to be affirmed (even though an ontological second wind will be speculated about afterwards – when this second wind sets in, such admissions are downgraded into preparatory exercises for more serious and positive things). By affirmatively replying to such questions, we de facto enter our epoch’s essential collective, which has yet to assemble. This collective consists of those who, at present, have not been effectively gripped by an imperative necessity. We may only authentically say “we” for the first time when we include ourselves in this collective of the essentially and knowingly un-gripped. We meet in the silent fog for our constitutive assembly. The historical avant-garde consists of those who are honest enough to admit to each other that history no longer speaks to them.
In this way, what was referred to above as the building of a bridge between the existential temporality of mortal individuals and the historical temporality of a collective that shares the same mood can finally be achieved: the individual resolved for him- or herself, who preserves his or her resolute mortal cogito, from now on can join an authentic collective. They can be recognized as socii by the fact that they have woken up to feel the mood of their deadly boring existence – or, better, they have been subjected to the “strange or almost insane demand … not to let boredom fall asleep.”14
It is not enough to merely realize this, we need to also recognize how bizarre it is: the anonymous collective of the truly and profoundly bored is the prototype for a collective that a short while later will be encapsulated by “National Socialism.” As was to be expected, this encapsulation fell apart relatively quickly. Thus a second, less embarrassing encapsulation soon had to be attempted. It is obvious that we cannot identify those who are aware that they are bored with a nation, neither with the Germans nor any other people. Epochal boredom does not fit the pattern of a national mood, but is rather a kind of world mood – though a philosophically inclined nation such as the Germans or perhaps even the Russians might well be more open to this feeling of boredom than others. Those who bear this boredom form an authentic avant-garde that is called upon to advance into the new and unfamiliar. What is most unfamiliar is admitting to ourselves that we are only still connected to the grand narrative of history to the extent that we feel that history no longer has anything to say to us. In particular, this means that we accustom ourselves to orienting a specific present moment that exists within a greater present time to the characteristic features of not being convinced and not being gripped. There is every indication that an avant-garde of being-with-history-at-the-end here took shape, an unstable avant-garde, admittedly, which due to its untenable position was condemned to regress to some form of ploughing ahead with history.
Having said this, we can now consider the odd question of how this quasi-metaphysical avant-garde International of the empty soon afterwards took on the features of a national movement that was officially represented in the Berlin Reichstag by a party that rhetorically mixed populism and socialism, and violently disseminated their message.
“Heidegger’s exercise,” though not his “politics,” would have already been able to achieve its goal by mobilizing the collective of those who are not gripped. He wanted to do more than merely appeal to us to take up boredom, and indeed for a number of reasons. For one thing, he was not entirely sure of his own evocation of the true mood-collective, because he had been influenced by the nineteenth century’s heroic conceptions of history, and thus still expected the actions of great men and of states from real history – even if they begin by negating their own possibility. For another, he intuitively understood that mobilizing the psycho-political collective of the authentically bored, those who feel empty and not-gripped, does not at all result in a transition to a historically concrete collective, regardless of whether it were to take the form of a party, a nation, or of the “West.” Finally, it would have been clear to him that even his audience would expect more of him than being drafted into a disoriented mood-collective.
We will have to see how a supposed German elite of the profoundly bored in 1930 could turn into the national revolutionaries of 1933, whose slogans the philosopher began to project his ideas onto soon after the conclusion of this lecture course (only to become disgusted by them a short while later when he learned more about his odd allies). Before we do this, however, we will have to explain how the fundamental mood of boredom could have become a general European, and German, state of affairs.
I would like to take up the above-mentioned thesis, according to which Heidegger may be considered the actual founder of the posthistoire-theorem. In view of Heidegger’s reputation as the ontologist of historicity, this claim is outlandish enough to require some explanation. Such an explanation will have to show what premises are necessary for us to be able to think of history as something that can come to an end at all – and how the difference here between end and goal comes into play. The concept of a time “after history” is initially associated with the theological idea that God will one day reclaim the world he created and eo ipso cast into time – and indeed at a moment that is humanly inconceivable, namely when he is finished with the world. If one translates these ideas into the language of secular logic, we find the assumption that history as a whole is pursuing an end, or an estuary, to put it more cautiously, in which the historical process is finished with itself. It could reach such a point if the energies that had impelled it forward until now were used up or if the conflicts that had hitherto rendered it dynamic were completely resolved. Such an end would be humanly conceivable and ascertainable, in distinction to the transcendent conclusion brought about by God. As is well known, these kinds of ideas had previously been part of the Hegelian tradition, which had suggested the establishment of the constitutional state in the Napoleonic era, the cessation of class conflict following the Russian Revolution, and the satisfaction of the human striving for recognition (or rather its hedonistic miniaturization), as possible criteria for admission into post-history.
With that said, the claim that there was also a non-Hegelian route to the posthistoire-thesis should now be plausible, although this was hardly mentioned in the corresponding discussions. According to our interpretation, Heidegger, with his powerful intuitions about the diagnosis of time, followed this alternative path to establishing the end of history, before he was compelled by his neo-heroic imperative to take a detour in order to devote himself to the creation or letting happen of supposedly decisive world-historical actions, works, or events.
The real father of the non-Hegelian theory of the end of history (it would be better to call it a vision or a daydream), which Heidegger occasionally espoused, is acknowledged to be Fyodor Dostoyevsky – particularly in his short novel Notes from Underground, published in 1864. This work has to be recognized as the founding charter of modern ressentiment-psychology, as well the founding charter of anti-globalization sentiment, if such an anachronistic back-dating of the term is allowed. The narrator of the virtuous monologue in the first part of the book (a bitter and comic prelude to philosophical anthropology offered in the first person) is a figure whom we would today call a modernization-loser. He represents a neurotic version of Nietzsche’s last man, a character whose motivation has been undermined, who can only satisfy his desire for self-respect by deviously taking pleasure in his own humiliation. He is someone who contrives his own misfortune and flirts with it. He settles into a “cold, loathsome half-despair,” into a “half-belief,” into an “assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness,”15 which serves as an Archimedean point that he can use to unhinge the world of progressive minds. The narrator in his squalid hole (which is described as a deliberately chosen dingy subterranean dwelling on the fringes of St. Petersburg) presents himself as a vehement critic of the Western way of life,16 an opponent of globalization, in the parlance of our times. He also professes himself to be a man of the present day and argues that the “man of the nineteenth century” is morally obligated to be a “characterless creature” – almost the only claim in the subsequent cascade of words that he really seems to believe in.17 It gives him the greatest satisfaction to act like an anthropologist who marshals evidence that the predominantly pro-Western ideologists of the market, of relaxation, and of universalized humanitarianism have made their calculations without reference to actual human beings or, to put it more precisely, without reference to the ungrateful and rebellious freedom of human beings, which amounts to little more than continually taking it into one’s head to oppose every given order, even one promising universal happiness. In this context, the well-known neo-Cynical thesis is formulated according to which the human being is an ungrateful bipedal animal.18 Nietzsche could rightly remark that Dostoyevsky’s “terrible and cruel work” presents us with the sharpest mockery of the Delphic inscription “Know Thyself!”19 The author of this confession clearly and intuitively understands himself to be a creature of boredom – a witness to an existence without beliefs, responsibilities, and obligations. His stream of words reflects whatever enters its author’s mind, without reaching a standpoint or a truth worthy of being repeated. The rambling talk of the voice from underground thus demonstrates just how impossible it has become to participate in a meaningful history.
I swear to you, gentlemen, that I do not believe a word, not one little word, of all I’ve just scribbled! That is, I do believe, perhaps, but at the same time, who knows why, I sense and suspect that I’m lying like a cobbler. “Then why did you write it all?” you say to me. And what if I put you away for some forty years with nothing to do, and then come to you in the underground after forty years to see how you’ve turned out? One cannot leave a man alone and unoccupied for forty years, can one?20
It is crucial to note that this man without commitments continually refers to those opposed to his own modus vivendi with the clairvoyance of the evil eye: he finds such opposition in the secular anthropology of progressive Western parties. Such progressives, whether liberal or socialist, believe that human beings have needs that can in principle be satisfied. They derived various policies for satisfying needs from this view, but the strategic differences of their policies could not conceal the fact that they were basically after the same thing.
The Crystal Palace of London, erected in 1851, the greatest structure in architectural history at that time, was a public symbol of this belief. It was triumphantly erected in a mere ten months to accommodate the first world’s fair in Hyde Park. It was set up again on an even larger scale in 1854 on Sydenham Hill, near London, as a popular indoor theme park. The Crystal Palace’s articulation of the nineteenth century’s civilizing tendencies had a significance that can only be compared with the World Trade Center in New York, whose collapse in September 2001 was symbolically on a par with it. The megastructure of Sydenham gave the citizens of that time a World Satisfaction Center, in which the ultimate aims of the progressive way of life were completely revealed for all to see. The underground man is quite obviously a contemporary of the Crystal Palace, since he understands why the superb construct was erected: the temple of satisfaction is a house of worship for the anti-metaphysical project of modernity, which aims to dissuade satisfied human beings who have been accounted for, made equal, and discreetly animalized, from the further use of their freedom. Historic tensions [Spannungen] are supposed to achieve a post-historical equilibrium in this grand overarching receptacle [alles überspannenden Behälter].
The Eastern observer is opposed to such pretension and intervenes, drawing upon Christian anthropological motifs to claim that desire is insatiable:
Shower him with all Earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history [P. S. – i.e. to have sex] – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread …21
This challenge to the politics of happiness reveals two clearly distinct modes of post-historicity. In the first mode, human beings participate in systems of satisfaction, but from time to time escape the crystal palace to preserve their honor as human beings, that is, as those who are free to break with given conditions – in the most extreme case, on a whim, they opt for madness and self-destruction. In the second mode, human beings indeed remain excluded from the benefits of existing in the sphere of comfort, but find their own satisfaction in despising the contentment of the palace-dwellers. Even the idle despiser lives in a post-historical situation, though with a twist, namely that such post-historicity contains elements of pre- and extra-historical existence, since it never participated in the struggles for historical satisfaction – and is not subsequently inclined to struggle, either. The first mode results in the comfortable posthistoire of a freedom reduced to absurd whims (half amusementpark culture and half bloodbath), while the second mode results in the uncomfortable posthistoire of ressentiment, which remains condemned to self-satisfaction and otherwise to lethargy, due to its supposedly (or perhaps genuinely) greater depths. While suffering and doubt are eliminated in the system of comfort, or are at least continually reduced (“… what good is a crystal palace in which one can have doubts?”),22 only partisans of ressentiment have the option of intentional suffering.
And yet I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Suffering – why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.23
The observing despiser of the crystal palace does not have an alternative project, as is to be expected. Yet he remains parasitical on the faded historicity of others and shares in their end, insofar as his contempt depends on it. Either human beings in the crystal palace are deluding themselves, and history is not really at an end even for them, or it is in fact concluded, but then its being-at-an-end and the satisfaction provided by the crystal palace would not amount to much, because the human resolution to suffer and to impose suffering has not been extinguished even under post-historical conditions, as the underground man tries to demonstrate. With his will to suffer, he fends off the unreasonable demand that he should admire the accomplishments of the party that has triumphed in history. In his masochistic authenticity, the first opponent of globalization deflects the progressives’ claim to superiority – though he seems to be susceptible to envy. He objects to the world of happiness with the thesis that another world is possible, a world in which there is still enough suffering to give the cold shoulder to history and its tranquillization by universal satisfaction.
Before we explain how Heidegger pursued a similar line of thought fifty-six years later, although with a shift in emphasis and a more profound grasp of the metaphysics of history, we should recall a second Russian thinker, whose work is inextricably associated with the motif of the “end of history.” As early as the beginning of the 1930s, only a short while after Heidegger’s foray into the mood of post-historical boredom, Alexandre Kojève had concluded from his studies of Hegel that human history was in fact over. Along with Dostoyevsky, Kojève shared the anthropological view that human existence represents a series of struggles that arise from the striving for satisfaction. Yet while the novelist interpreted satisfaction, in light of his religious doctrine of freedom, as a narcissistic enjoyment of rebellion that is always on the move and never leads anywhere, Kojève interprets satisfaction to be an attainable goal of the struggle for recognition by the other. The concept of recognition thus becomes the political, psychodynamic, and spiritual key to world history, because the striving for recognition, if unsatisfied, is the main reason for the noncessation of historical struggles. In contrast, if this striving is satisfied, it is reason enough for the cessation of hostilities and thus the conclusion of history. The fulfillment or nonfulfillment of the human demand to be recognized as free subject and sovereign source of negativity determines the difference between the happy and the unhappy consciousness. Historical movement resumes in conflicts in which the unhappy consciousness is utterly eliminated and turned into the happy consciousness.
Kojève views two fictional warring factions as world-historical agents in this drama, the figures of lord and bondsman, whom we are familiar with from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. A completely anthropologized history begins with the initial stages of their contention. Starting with an imaginary primordial duel in which two freedoms grapple with each other, as representatives of a surreal pride, the human realm is divided into victor and vanquished, with the former taking on the role of lord, while the latter ends up in the position of bondsman, who in future must see to the material bases of the lord’s freedom. Here begins the era of labor, with its heteronomy and its struggles against this heteronomy. At the same time, this is also when the unhappy consciousness befalls both sides: The lord’s desire for recognition remains unsatisfied, because the bondsman, with his servile attitude toward the lord, cannot possibly provide equal recognition. Likewise, the bondsman is condemned to non-satisfaction or a substitute gratification in religion, due to the grim realities of his condition.
In describing this struggle, everything hinges on the final position: it is thus characteristic that the bondsman (or the third estate, to put it in historical terms), trained and empowered by the labor he has performed for so long, finally obtains the means to successfully rebel against the lord. These means are systematically codified in the civil constitutional state. And as soon as this state were to reach its universal form, history would arrive at its immanent end as a sequence of struggles for recognition; an era of satisfied consciousness would have dawned. The phrase tutti contenti from the end of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Le nozze di Figaro (after Beaumarchais) is the first word of post-history.
From this point on, human beings must exercise their freedom by laboriously negating the given, that is, they must modify nature through their own labor, in revolting against the lord as an exploiter of servile labor. Human beings are constituted as the fortunately unemployed, that is, as proprietors of a power of negation who no longer find any objects with which to seriously engage, thus becoming the post-historical Homo ludens. The substantive content of post-history is either contemplative or cheerfully animalistic. With the exception of work that is no longer servile (in other words, aided by machines), we are left with art, sexuality, and nonsense to fill the long afternoons of post-history.
Kojève’s model has history come to a standstill in the awareness of achieved satisfaction. Yet the philosopher pays a high price for his blithe thesis: splitting the meaning of the phrase “end of history” into theoretical and empirical versions necessarily leads to ambiguity. If history is to end in theory, whether with the end of Hegel’s Phenomenology, while the thunder of cannons from the Battle of Jena booms in the background, or whether following the Russian Revolution and its violent consolidation by Stalin, we cannot but be embarrassed that the universal and homogenous (socialist) constitutional state has been taking its sweet time arriving on the world-historical stage. History would accordingly come to an end, to be sure, but not reach the goal. Thus Kojève can get no further than a semi-post-history, in which much remains to be done empirically, although everything has been done, in principle. This situation is reflected in the irony of the philosopher’s happy consciousness as he comments on the disturbing fallout from the world’s remaining misfortunes. A philosophical irony that is neither Socratic nor Romantic, but rather post-historical, leads Kojève’s to rely on the concept of the sage, in order to re-legitimate provocatively the ancient fatalistic division of the human collective into the wise and the ignorant. Only in a truly universal state would the sage’s irony be transformed into humor. If end and goal were to coincide, avant-garde sarcasm, which displays elements of impatience with those lagging behind, could be resolved into contemplation and benevolent retrospection.
In conclusion, we will show how Heidegger’s seriousness, by adopting a non-Hegelian theory of the end of history that traces back to Dostoyevsky, develops an alternative program to Kojève’s irony. In fact, Heidegger takes up a position that in many respects is quite close to that of the underground man. The phenomenologist of inauthentic existence and profound boredom is also to some extent an observer of the crystal palace, although he does not call it by this name, instead describing it with such terms as enterprise, mediocrity, inauthenticity, ambiguity, machination, and technology. He is likewise convinced that the lifestyles of a technological, analgesic world oriented to happiness allow “human metaphysical potential” to lie idle, to put it bluntly. In contrast to the Hegelian ironist, Heidegger cannot settle for a politics of the cheerful re-animalization of the human being that would then send the latter off to find amusement: the reason for this is to be found in an interpretation of satisfaction that allows Heidegger to move beyond Dostoyevsky and Kojève. In Heidegger’s world, to be satisfied requires more than merely offering evidence of the inexhaustibility of human negativity, or delighting in occidental and vesperal wisdom. Here it is necessary for you to wake up from ontological complicity and change yourself into a messenger and an outpost of being.
Heidegger ontologizes avant-gardism, by tying the possibility of satisfaction to the possibility of a calling by which you can be sent ahead as a vanguard of being into its own affairs. We have already seen above that temporalized being, which in a mood’s timeliness addresses our respective contemporaries, initially wishes to be immersed in an enveloping boredom-bath. From this bath emerges the bizarre figure of an avant-garde that is called upon to push forward into the heart of boredom, that is, into a most profound having-nothing-more-to-do. At the same time, Heidegger does not want this to be understood as a calling for the Oblomovization of the West. To those who can and wish to hear it in the dialect of boredom, the being of the 1930s says something of this sort: I need you for my newest project, to prepare existence to cease with its previous history-making. You should occupy yourself in our resigned elite by exposing history as, essentially, a collective flight forward and by helping turn it against itself!
To make a long story short, we now wish to show how Heidegger accepted this paradoxically coded assignment and wrongly deciphered it. He succumbed to a misunderstanding, because he obviously had a second voice in his ear that gave him conflicting instructions. What we are here calling a second voice is an ensemble of anthropological concerns that pertain to the human being’s transformation in technological civilization – we find this articulated in the only slightly later anthropological work of Arnold Gehlen. The young Heidegger is involved in a discourse on the essence of modernization as a process of relief: with the utmost presence of mind, he grasps that progressive relief is undermining the basis for its own métier, philosophy as metaphysics. If philosophy is supposed to entail the urge to be at home everywhere, the manner in which this urge is presently diverted into other directions is nevertheless unmistakable: due to its satisfaction with enlightened, touristic, and informative expedients, in Heidegger’s time as well as today, it leaves the stream bed of philosophy behind and trickles away into the institutions and activities that assure existence’s modern welfare. From this perspective, so-called globalization, which has characterized world discourse for decades, forms only the most current mode of the non-philosophical redirection of the urge to be at home everywhere. On this analysis, present-day humans tend to want to be relieved of metaphysics and self-reflection. Heidegger is not prepared to stand back while that happens, without formulating an oppositional manifesto.
This manifesto is rooted in a grand diagnosis of time, in which Fichtean and Kierkegaardian motifs converge: if, in his lectures on The Characteristics of the Present Age (1804) – the birth certificate of the philosophical diagnosis of time – Fichte had defined the present moment as the “age of complete sinfulness” (in other words, as rock bottom, after which we can only proceed upwards),24 and if Kierkegaard, in his polemics of the 1840s against the conformism of the zeitgeist, had portrayed the “public” as a collective non-person – and as the source of all irresponsibility (from which the later portrait of das Man [Tr. – the “they”] in Being and Time is supposed to have come) – then Heidegger, in the era of the Black Notebooks (1931–1948), was devoted to an increasingly in-depth inquisition against the activism of modern technological civilization.
Research into the sources of evil in the world culminates in a serious philosophical reconstruction of communism: as an oligarchic party (that is, as rule by the few), communism embodies the innermost tendencies of modernity. The Russian contribution to an all-consuming techno-pragmatism consists in launching this stillreigning “machination.”25
Ubiquitous “machination” is common to the British Empire, the French Republic, Americanism, Bolshevism, and National Socialism, and sometimes even the Jewish contribution to the mobilization of all things through the intention to use them is evident to the diagnostician. It is also obvious from a few embarrassing reviews of the Black Notebooks that they can easily be reproached for “antisemitism.” It would be wiser to determine the soundness of Heidegger’s diagnosis that the accomplices of machination, metaphysics and technology, really lead fatefully to the devastation of all things, whether the agents of devastation bear the names of concrete historical collectives or not.
The second voice that Heidegger hears demands that he connect philosophy’s concern to that of the burden – and indeed, since relief already represents a fait accompli, that he connect philosophy’s concern to a repeated and reconstituted burden. Thus repetition is also the soul of thought: it aids the thinker in the task of encountering the issues that thought is engaged with, which are always difficult, without false ease. If modern relief per se includes the temptation to forget philosophy, then it is to be identified as the enemy, with the battle against it determining the fate of philosophy. Since it has undeniably occurred and hence radically transformed the premises of thought (even if academic philosophy misses this entirely, due to its prevailing ignorance), it is now a matter of thoughtfully considering the issue of burden. Burden after relief amounts to re-burdening.
I would like to argue that “re-burdening” is essential to what may be called “Heidegger’s politics.” Even the evocation of boredom in the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics can only be appreciated if we understand it to be part of a procedure of re-burdening. The new avant-garde collective will not convene in order to be bored until the end of time, as an elite of the empty (in the manner of a certain Asiatic misunderstanding of Heidegger), but to prove that even today there are still human beings who do not take the easy way out, although most succumb to the temptation of ease. Since the folly of being open to the mood of present truth is the hardest thing to expect of contemporary human beings, the way for “us” to reach our own epoch leads through just such a gauntlet. Being initially requires us to be there and to be willing to bear the burden of the absence of evidence or of being gripped. The reward for this is revealed in “our” awakening to the sense of homesickness for forgotten being. But because our present time is not able to formulate a task in positive terms, the historical project that could grip us must lie ahead of us in a future that is still unclear.
The crucial onto-historical questions are thus: What really lies ahead of us? What will have enough force to carry us away, inspired by a new belief? What exactly is happening today, that we are needed as media? A hint of great things to come is suggested by the pronoun “us” here. The searing advent in the Freiburg lecture hall in 1929 is formally linked to an ontological advent through which we are supposed to allow an imminent sense of being happen to us in positive terms. Of course, Heidegger is just as unsure as anyone as to how a new imperative of being might manifest itself, but he is confident that he has understood how we need to be prepared to go through such an advent – namely, we must be ready to be re-burdened. Hence it is just fine with him if “All that is great stands in the storm,”26 as he puts it at the end of his rector’s address, thanks to a questionable translation of the ancient Greek. Anyone who has joined the avant-garde of boredom and already exposed him- or herself to the truth of the present has met the prerequisites for making a stand at the front line of the raging storm, ready for assignments from the future of truth.
With that said, we should clarify that Heidegger’s interest in introducing the so-called “leader principle” into academic life, which forms the nucleus of his rectorate, was mainly to introduce the principles of trainer and training into existence. Training means structuring our life into a series of exercises that increasingly burden us, and this is precisely how the principle of re-burdening is disseminated among the relieved and disoriented.
“Heidegger’s exercise” remains inscrutable as long as we do not also recognize the entry of sport into post-historical politics. Sport is precisely the form of exertion in which nothing is really at stake and that we nevertheless engage in to restore a sense of what is ultimately engrossing. The political field, too, in its own way makes this turn toward sportification [Versportlichung], whether as democratic “fair play,”27 or as recent forms of serious political sport that demand dictatorship in order to drive off those who have been relieved of burdens.
Mussolini was not entirely wrong when he identified the source of fascismo to be a feeling of horror when confronted by a comfortable life. This should unquestionably be interpreted as the key term for Europe in the 1930s: it articulates the Western-Catholic and martial-sportive response to the objections of the underground man against distracted existence in the crystal palace. In fact, even relieved Western human beings rebel against being surrounded by offers of happiness, but their rebellion does not quite reach the state of willful destruction, as Dostoyevsky suggested, although a few such examples are not lacking. Rather, Western rebellion occurs as an act of freely burdening ourselves, that is, as sport.
By 1933, Heidegger’s idea of leadership already implied a dictatorship of the trainer, who ensures that we remain in shape, as the team for history’s next chapter, although it is quite unclear what particular match history will require us to play. The way in which the ontological advent takes on the atmosphere [Stimmung] of a finals match, in which the team of discomfort is matched against the team of comfort, should now at least be evident. From Heidegger’s perspective, what happens here is always solely a match for the truth of being, which is played in the arena of current universal time. He is now ready to interpret “we” as a national team and thus comes to be associated with Hitler, to whom he is prepared to offer a role as assistant trainer of the national team – although, incidentally, it is clear that Hitler, too, only represents a subordinate medium who can have no idea of how he might contribute to the team effort.
Heidegger actually uses the specific example of the Nazi movement to articulate his expectation that history might not have ended in the silent fog of boredom. He wagers everything on the hunch, indeed the claim, that while those of us who are honest continue to keenly feel that history is at standstill, being is gathering itself in preparation for an epochal leap. And this leap needs us, since it is the gesture by which we collaboratively make history, understood existentially. The leap is precisely the act of moving forward, which is an essential part of mediumistically collaborating with what is coming. It needs us because it will not happen without our boldness. Our boldness follows from the realization that when we are in danger, the only way out is to keep moving forward. Thus to conceptually formulate “Heidegger’s politics,” we would have to demonstrate how a post-historical re-burdening that turns life’s struggles into a kind of sport merges with being horrified by the end of history, which at the same time was interpreted as the end of philosophy.
This convergence does not need to be described in detail here. Its strategic purpose, to compel progress or a new start to history, is all too clear. Anyone who has interpreted being as time would have concede the annihilation of being, if he or she wished to acknowledge the end of history, and this was not something Heidegger could do. He insisted on claiming that he stood in the midst of an advent that was about to reveal something compellingly new and great. History must thus remain open, and its end, although present as a current possibility, is to be postponed again and again. Tant pis for those affected, if nothing more attractive than National Socialism is currently on offer to promote the advent. Yet when was history ever very particular in recruiting its agents?
We should now be able to see that Heidegger’s doctrine of the historicity of being is not intrinsically connected to his membership in the National Socialist movement. As is well known, similar ideas have characterized the behavior of militantly leftist authors such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Like the master from Meßkirch, these thinkers were convinced that we do not stand over and against a world that is historically in motion, but that “the world … in fact … envelops us.”28 At the time, all that Heidegger’s thought could do was to relate to a sufficiently heroic “movement” upon which it could project its positing of recurrent history. This could just as well have been something like Roosevelt’s “New Deal” or the Russian Revolution, had the thinker’s fate been to exist as an American or a Russian in those days. Like so many who were scandalized by that epoch, Heidegger felt compelled to raise the question: Where is great history going here? And when he received the answer that it was heading “for the Brown-Shirt Revolution,” he was ready to devote his energy to that promising hypothesis. Though we repeatedly find the claim that his thought must be National Socialist because he was a member of the party, this position is unjustified, as irksome as his rectoral address must seem in critical hindsight. In any case, we learn more about the intentions of interpreters from such interpretations than we do about the author in question.
What really matters is that Heidegger revised his onto-historical over-interpretation of the National Socialist movement shortly thereafter, because he was able to realize the true nature of the company he was keeping, based on his own experience. He even had to make an objectively ironic about-face when it became evident to him that this very movement represented an explosive form of the world of boredom. It was impossible to see it as a turning point in the history of being. Rather, the will to power’s assault on everything quite clearly revealed an essential feature of a subjectivism that is forgetful of being. If one complements this with the view of the underground man, then the irony of Heidegger’s attempt to participate in the opposite of what he intended becomes quite pronounced: Hitler’s politics, seen from underground St. Petersburg, were simply an attempt to bring the crystal palace under German control and to guarantee the new masters’ comfort by adding a new deck onto the eastern wing. Instead of a new dispensation of the occurrence of truth, what followed was a return to slavery and manhunts as a kind of post-historical power sport. What was supposed to be an escape from the comfortable life turned out to be the cruelest possible establishment of a secure perimeter around the crystal palace.
By 1934, Heidegger knew that he had failed to become a catalyst of the advent. From that point on, he was careful not to further dabble in forced attempts to help along epochal turning points. He began to emphasize the necessity of waiting and to look around for new allies with whom he could form another “we” and make alternative arrangements for a deferred epoch. Poets now become important to him, Hölderlin in particular, because they provide key information on the problems we face in forming the avant-garde of a wretched future. Because emphasis is now placed on the poetic disclosure and arrangement of the world, the concept of the work becomes significant, indeed it occasionally takes center stage in Heidegger’s reflections during the middle stage of his ‘’path of thinking” [Denkwegs]. As hollow as it may have appeared to its first audience, this concept can help us bear in mind that the occurrence of history in a collective is not merely constituted by moods, but even more by works to be accomplished, whether they are works of state or works of art. Both should be thought of as vessels for truth’s emergence-into-the-light. The poetizing of state, the poetizing of art, indeed ex negativo even the poetizing of the crystal palace and its anticipated renovations shifts to a truth-historical perspective through works.
There is a high price to be paid for this alliance with poetry. Heidegger has to acknowledge that even metaphysical philosophy, which he initially wished to advocate, has reached its end. According to him, the epoch of the forgetting of being continually proceeds as the age of technological development. This is the focus of the later Heidegger’s view – an extremely abstract view, in which Bolshevism, fascism, and Americanism amount to merely three versions of the same assault on beings as a whole. We need not emphasize that views like this cannot remain at such lofty heights: what is supposed to be prepared for with anticipation for the future is not only another epoch of being, but also another era of formative thought. Other thinkers are supposed to replace the exploitation of beings with an ethics of conservation. Heidegger’s political excursion comes to an end with his quietistic turn. The rest is damage control.
I would like to conclude by observing that the question of whether we can or should somehow associate ourselves with Heidegger today is no longer urgent, as it was for those who worshiped him in the 1950s and those who condemned him in 1964 (the year in which Theodor Adorno’s polemical text Jargon of Authenticity appeared) or 1987 (the year of the uproar around Farías’ work).29 This is mainly because what used to get people worked up about the philosophy of history is now a distant concern to us in 2015. If a philosopher in 1933 allowed himself to be gripped by the imperative “Forwards to history!,” this hardly still seems to matter to contemporary intellectuals. Philosophy today has little more to say about the phenomenon of history other than that it cannot be completely over. Incidentally, we no longer really know what “history” is supposed to mean when we abandon its narrative form. In any case, we dread the “grand narrative.” The status quo is expressed in the rallying cry “Back to morality!,” which has since come to dictate the agenda – sometimes also in the form of “Back to religion!” The new situation offers the advantage of rendering the seduction of philosophers by an opportunism that goes-along-with-the-times powerless. There cannot be another Heidegger. Outside of the guild, it turns out that opportunism no longer needs the pretense of history and its metaphysics. Office hours and business practices have absorbed so-called being and its history. A post-ontological and post-historical modus operandi is virtually ubiquitous.
The only connection we still have to Heidegger’s era and its agitated forms of thought can be appreciated with a figure of speech: “Time gives us problems, and we have to solve them.” That is the small price we must pay for an engaged life. If Heidegger wished to overpay, we see that as his problem, but no longer ours.
The real cause for concern today is the fact that the current politics of the United States are an alarming sequel to the European and German drama of the 1930s. Having considered Heidegger’s case, we can now better understand the dangers of a forward-charging regression into a time when history was not the right history for the course of the world to come. If Europeans today consider it anachronistic that America is regressing into an avant-gardism that is also at the same time unilateralism, this very regression seems to be the historical mission of the ideologists at work in Washington. A certain speechwriter wrote the following statement for George W. Bush to read in 2001: “The call of history has come to the right country …” And additionally: “We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. A part of history has been written by others – the rest will be written by us.”30
Europeans should know that not much can be said to people who want to make history. Given this, we should try to explain to those of our American friends who can still be reached by arguments that neither God nor being have dictated Bush’s speeches and wars, but rather speechwriters. In light of our experience, we must demand an explanation from these writers and compel them to tell us what exactly they mean.