Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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writings, gleefully netting tropes and motifs which evoke other thinkers and ideas,
they rashly conclude that Heideggers work ultimately reduces to nothing more than
the reproduction of the same ideas, albeit in his own unique philosophical idiom.
On the one hand then, Heidegger is credited with having identified the importance
of context and history when it comes to understanding the nature of interpretation
and yet at the same time he is seen as being incapable of any originality for the very
same reasons. Once again, such strategies serve to conceal more than they reveal
since Heidegger can easily be defended against such crudely formulated criticisms.
The philosophical poverty of such approaches becomes all the more ironic as the
explicit evidence that demonstrates the extent to which Heidegger committed himself
to National Socialism continues to be discovered in recently published texts. And
that same poverty is lamentable in that it fails to see that there are some genuinely
problematic aspirations lurking in Heideggers more important texts (which are rashly
glossed by his critics) that dovetail at significant junctures with some of his most
controversial claims concerning das Volk and rootedness (Bodenstndigkeit). We will
examine these substantive philosophical issues in Chapters 4 and 5.
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One of the issues that tends to jar readers and students of Heidegger, particularly those
who profess to having been one-time enthusiasts when it comes to his criticisms of
modernity (and technology/technicity in particular) is the apparent proximity of that
work to the cultural pessimist/anti-modernist/conservative revolutionary rhetorical
backdrop which they are sometimes less familiar with. I myself remember vividly the
extraordinary impact which Heideggers famous essay on the essence of technology
had on me as a somewhat impressionable philosophy undergraduate. The novelty of
Heideggers approach, the perspicacity of the indictment of the technological mindset,
the power of the insights concerning the alarming and dangerously insidious way
that technology had infiltrated every level of our existence was not so much a breath
of fresh air as a gale that blew through the cobwebbed cupboards of my intellectual
indolence. In time I began to develop an appreciation for the philosophically intricate
architecture of the essay, but that did not diminish the power of the surface rhetoric
and ideas which had made such a profound impression on me as a young student.
One can imagine my dismay then when my attention was drawn to Jnger and
his discussion of total mobilization and Spenglers critique of technicity; I was
initially persuaded by the assessment of Habermas, for example, who gets considerable philosophical mileage out of these associations, connections and resonances.
Habermas dismisses Heideggers confrontation with technology as little more than an
all-too-familiar cultural pessimism and anti-modernism, typical of a class of German
post-First World War mandarins.4 It is a recurring problem with critics of Heidegger:
they point to overlaps between predecessors of Heidegger and some of Heideggers
own work and then suggest that what was putatively original in Heideggers work,
what strikes many as incomparably unique, is after all, nothing more than the
discredited views of others repackaged in an abstruse prose. And this, of course, is