Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

69

quite close to what we find in Jngers essay above. Again, the real difference emerges
when one gets to the question of the forces at play in terms of explaining how it is
that everything, including other human beings, could be revealed to us in these ways.
Returning to the earlier essay on total mobilization, we find that Jnger is also
quick to identify the Russian five-year plans as relevant:
For the first time, the Russian five-year plan presented the world with an attempt
to channel collective energies of a great empire into a single current.66

Jngers descriptions of total mobilization in a wartime context are both vivid and
compelling and one can easily see how much of an influence these ideas must have
exercised on Heidegger as he began to consider the notion of technology and its
impact on the twentieth century:
Just as every life already bears the seeds of its own death, so the emergence of
the great masses contains within itself a democracy of death. The era of the wellaimed shot is already behind us. Giving out the night-flight bombing order, the
squadron leader no longer sees a difference between combatants and civilians, and
the deadly gas cloud hovers like an elementary power over everything that lives.
But the possibility of such menace is based neither on a partial nor general, but
rather a total mobilization. It extends to the child in the cradle, who is threatened
like everyone else even more so.67

We can see a clear correlation between what Jnger says in the passage above and the
various descriptions of mass society that we find even in Being and Time as well as
the vivid characterizations of the manner in which Gestell operates as a challenging
revealing such that everything everywhere is governed by the ordinances of this
challenging revealing, where everything is challenged forth to reveal itself as stock,
resource, that is, where everything is restricted to revealing itself in a functional
context. Moreover, Jnger interprets the attempted genocide through the lens of total
mobilization which clearly resonates with what we took to be Heideggers views in his
brief remarks from the Bremen lectures:
From out of this waste of suffering where rise somberly the names of the great
seats of murder where in a last and final frenzy they attempted to root out whole
peoples, whole races, whole classes, and where leaden tyranny in league with
technical efficiency celebrated endless bloody nuptials. These dens of murder will
haunt mans memory to the end of time If ever new pride fills us at the length
and boldness of our flight, at our intellectual wings, our pinions of steel, it should
suffice to cure us for a glance to be cast on the hordes driven like cattle to the
graveyards and cremation ovens where the executioners waited. There they were
stripped of their rags and slaughtered like shorn sheep. They were forced even to
dig their own graves, if their murderers did not fill quarries and pit-shafts with the
corpses which piled too fast.68

Heidegger, as we know, famously described the essence of technology as being

operative when it came to the murder of inmates at the death camps using industrial
means. And, we must concede then that Heidegger, like Jnger, sees technology as