Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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and Heidegger, for his part, was clearly sympathetic to elements of the conservative
revolutionary movement. Indeed, when it suited his rather naked political ambitions
and careerist objectives, he amplified any surface affinities with these movements,
particularly in the early 1930s, as part of a concerted effort to ingratiate himself to
the powers that be in the hope of scaling the ladder of university politics in Germany.
Nevertheless, Heidegger steadfastly refused to embrace any of these movements in any
kind of theoretically determinate fashion and, philosophically speaking, was clearly
unimpressed with much of what they represented. Indeed, he often took a rather
dim view of the philosophical capacities of the most prominent members of those
movements. That is not to say that Heidegger didnt envisage a kind of political regime
which would be compatible with his notion of an authentic historical community in
ways which he was already trying to gloss in Being and Time, the inevitable failure of
that endeavour notwithstanding. But Heideggers views in this regard simply do not
reduce to the views of the conservative revolutionaries!
In the case of Spengler, we already know that Heidegger was not overly enamoured
with his philosophical vision in The Decline of the West. There are simply too
many obvious problems with that text for Heidegger to have taken it seriously.
It is, for many, the definitive German manifesto concerning cultural pessimism.
However, the difficulties involved in trying to compare this work with any aspect
of Heideggers philosophy are innumerable and largely insurmountable. First and
foremost, Heidegger would have been intellectually and philosophically appalled at
Spenglers sprawling, inchoate, biologically deterministic outlook. One can readily
identify surface elements of Spenglers text which opportunists might use in order to
draw comparisons with some of the high-blown, rousing appeals for violence-doers
in Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, but such comparisons could never amount
to anything more than interpretative cheap-shots; the distance between Heideggers
notion of pioneering individuals contending with the dynamic they find themselves
thrown into and Spenglers advocacy of a kind of testosterone laced Machiavellian
virt28 could hardly be greater. Spenglers subscription to an underlying biological
determinism of sorts as part of his attempts to chart a steady decline is simply not
compatible with Heideggers philosophical vision in any of its evolving guises. In short,
The Decline of the West is simply too unwieldy to lend itself to a ready comparison with
Heideggers work; it is, for the most part, philosophically incompatible.
We have to look elsewhere for something more amenable to comparison with
Heideggers work; the lesser-known volume, Man and Technics, which Spengler
himself saw as performing something of a synoptic function for The Decline of the
West, can serve our purpose more effectively. There are, in fact, a number of passages
concerning technics which anticipate Heideggers characterizations of the technological landscape; then again, some of Heideggers passages regarding standing reserve
and Enframing recall much of what was, after all, a fairly prevalent anti-modernist
suspicion of technology among a whole host of early twentieth-century European
intellectuals. Nevertheless, Heideggers extraordinary meditation on technologys
essence doesnt neatly reduce to Spenglers musings in Man and Technics any more
than it reduces to those complaints typical of a post-First World War German
mandarin class.