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Again, we can see how one might be tempted to compare this passage of Spenglers
with passages from Introduction to Metaphysics. Take for example this ostensibly
similar passage from The Restriction of Being:
Doing violence must shatter against the excessive violence of Being, as long as
Being holds sway in its essence, as phusis, as emerging sway. But this necessity
of shattering can subsist only insofar as what must shatter is urged into such
Being-here, thrown into the urgency of such Being, because the overwhelming
as such, in order to appear in its sway, requires the site of openness for itself. The
essence of Being-human opens itself up to us only when it is understood on the
basis of this urgency that is necessitated by Being itself. Historical humanitys
Being-here means: Being-posited as the breach into which the excessive violence
of Being breaks in its appearing, so that this breach shatters against Being. (IM:
1734)
If we study Heideggers passage closely, however, we begin to see that major philosophical differences obtain between Spenglers claims and what Heidegger is arguing
above. Heidegger is wrestling again with a structural question which was to form the
backdrop to nearly all of his work. One finds this notion of the interplay between
Dasein as thrown and simultaneously solicited (as a thrown projector) already in Being
and Time. Heidegger begins to tease out this notion in terms of a human awareness
that finds itself already thrown into and absorbed by a technological, equipmental,
project-oriented and project-disclosed world and, in turn, an awareness that projects
on the basis of those interpretative moorings which are themselves indicative of the
finite throwness of our shared existential situation. Heidegger revisits this structural
constitution of human awareness and interpretation in Introduction to Metaphysics.
The language is certainly recast at times to give it an apparent, and ultimately phony,
affinity with the romantic, heroic nationalism which he identified with. But, at bottom,
superficial resonances aside, the structural elements of Heideggers account of the
thrown/tragic nature of our existence, namely, our finitude (the way it shapes how
we find ourselves and indeed how we can interpret at any given moment) are features
of an ongoing attempt to try and accurately describe the interplay between presence
and absence which first and only manages to emerge or become manifest through
the disclosive activity of Dasein. Of course Heidegger is going to try and find a way
to theoretically justify a valorization of his own particular conception of a German