52

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

In short, Heidegger believes that the negative views of Spengler, similar to the views
of others he examines from the same period, are correct insofar as they recapitulate
the negative side of Nietzsches assessment, a view he reiterates much later in What
is Called Thinking; but, as is often the case in Heideggers critiques, the designation
correct is not meant to indicate approval on Heideggers part; Spengler is correct, but
merely correct. We can see this even in the very passage that Zimmerman adduces
from What is Called Thinking where Heidegger supposedly recapitulates the position
Zimmerman attributes to him at the end of the 1920s:
That people today tend once again to be more in agreement with Spenglers propositions about the decline of the West, lies in the fact that (along with the various
superficial reasons) Spenglers proposition is only the negative, though correct,
consequence of Nietzsches word, The Wasteland grows. We emphasize that this
word is thoughtful. It is a true word.20

Heidegger is clearly not suggesting that Spengler has offered us a true word. Rather,
Spengler has a derivative, one-dimensional take on Nietzsches true word and it
is Nietzsches true word that interests Heidegger. This is a reprisal of his criticism
in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics at the end of the 1920s. Zimmerman
more or less acknowledges as much at the outset (almost as a throwaway remark)
before stridently insisting that thoroughgoing overlaps obtain between the thought of
Spengler and Heidegger concerning technology:
For Heidegger, however, the decline of the West from the great age of the Greeks
occurred not for biological or racial reasons, but for metaphysical and spiritual
ones. By way of contrast, Spengler influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and Darwin argued that the Wests original drive for technological control
and the subsequent decline of the West were related cycles in the struggle for
life. Heidegger countered that such naturalistic interpretations of human life
were products of the misguided metaphysical conception of man as the rational
animal.
Despite disdaining Spenglers propositions and methods, early Heidegger
began to conceive of his own work as an attempt to provide a philosophically
sound account for the symptoms of decline popularized by Spengler.21

Already then, we can see an unwitting concession to the effect that the similarities
between Spengler and Heidegger are superficial at best. After all, if two doctors simultaneously looking at the same symptoms in a given patient could only agree that they
were actually looking at a patient with certain unmistakable symptoms but disputed
the cause of those symptoms, we would, presumably, characterize these physicians
as having conflicting views. For Heidegger as for many other twentieth century intellectuals, the impact of technology on society is plain for all to see. What is not so
obvious are the actual causes of these various symptoms/effects and if Heidegger
completely rejects Spenglers causal account, that is, his account of the genesis of the
modern technological age, then they are in fundamental disagreement. It is with these
fundamental differences granted that we can begin to examine the affinities between
Spenglers account and aspects of Heideggers criticisms of technicity with a view to