Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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is interested in tactics, technics, are, for him, secondary. For Heidegger, conversely,
modern technics, as a result of the revealing that holds sway (the essence of technology,
i.e. Gestell, being a type of revealing) insidiously determines and shapes in advance the
manner in which we arrive at goals which we develop tactics to try and secure.
There are numerous instances of that all-too-generic heroic fatalism which many of
Heideggers contemporaries succumbed to in the post-Weimar era. In a way, then, one
can empathize with Karl Lwiths dismay upon witnessing those very motifs cropping
up in Heideggers work.31 Habermas and Bourdieu are suspicious of these tropes as
well since they are plainly evident in some of Heideggers most suggestive writings
from the 1930s. What might appear unique to readers of Introduction to Metaphysics,
for example, doesnt appear nearly so unique when placed alongside passages such as
the following:
But each and every one of us, intrinsically a null, is for an unnamably brief moment
a lifetime cast into that whirling universe. And for us therefore this world-in-little,
this world-history, is something of supreme importance. And, what is more, the
destiny of each of these individuals consists in his being, by birth, not merely
brought into this world-history, but brought into it in a particular century, a
particular country, a particular people, a particular religion, a particular class. It is
not within our power to choose whether we would like to be Sons of an Egyptian
peasant of 3000 B.C., of a Persian king, or of a present-day tramp. This destiny is
something to which we have to adapt ourselves. It dooms us to certain situations,
views, and actions. There are no men-in-themselves such as the philosophers talk
about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend
in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around
them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life life, indeed,
in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power.32

And what is needed in the face of this inexorable destiny is something like resolve,
hardness, a warriors grim defiance in the face of insurmountable odds a willingness
to throw oneself against destiny, to bare ones teeth to destiny with all the menace
and contemptuous disregard of the beast of prey. The martial virtues are constantly
celebrated by Spengler!
Notwithstanding, there are fairly obvious philosophical differences between
Heidegger and Spengler here as well; for Spengler this destiny dooms us to certain
situations. For Heidegger, our destining, the way we are thrown (in our era through
the ordinances of Gestell) is never a fate that compels. One cannot draw a straight line
then from this blustery vision of heroic and predatory man, as envisaged by Spengler,
to the violence-doer as described by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics. These
notions have, apart from the semblance of surface imagery and rhetoric, almost
nothing in common philosophically. It is also worth noting that Spenglers attempts
to recruit Nietzsche as something of an ally here are untenable. Nietzsche clearly sees
his philosophy as one of affirmation and celebration, not one of heroic resignation. In
embracing the dangerous character of life, one is liberated, not doomed. That is the
paradox of Zarathustras gift, the liberation one achieves once one embraces instead of
resisting Zarathustras most abysmal thought.