Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously
experience an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony
concert in Tokyo; when time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples;
when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at
mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over
all this uproar the question: what for? where to? and what then? [T]he spiritual
decline of the earth has progressed so far that people are in danger of losing
their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the
decline and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with
cultural pessimism nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening
of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction
of human to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has
already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish
categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable. (IM: 401)45

Heidegger then concurs with the likes of Spengler insofar as the symptoms they
catalogue indicate the presence of a serious underlying malady. But that seems to
be as far as their accord goes. Indeed Heidegger explicitly distances himself from
cultural pessimism in the passage above and Spengler is a clear target for some of
his derogatory remarks here, dismissing pessimism, understood as a response to the
contemporary situation, as laughable.46 Heidegger is thinking here of the levelling
influence of Gestell simply bemoaning a decline is utterly inadequate. Rather,
Heidegger wants to get at the issue of how things are revealed to and by us in these
ways through the ordinances of Gestell.
There are also descriptions of the effect which technology has had on our landscape
which, as one might expect, sound rather similar to those we find in Heidegger:
The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered. In a few
decades most of the great forests have gone, to be turned into news-print, and
climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy
of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished, or
nearly so, like the bison; whole races of humanity have been brought almost to
vanishing-point, like the North American Indian and the Australian.47

Spengler goes on to lament our current predicament whereby

We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally
turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing
cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply; we cannot
look at the beautiful old handwork of an unspoilt primitive people without
wishing to replace it by a modern technical process.48

Compare this with Heideggers descriptions of equipmentality and our equipmental

interpretation of nature and the world around us as early as Being and Time:
The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is waterpower, the wind is wind in the sails. As the environment is discovered, the
Nature thus discovered is encountered too. (BT: 100)49