58 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

We continue to find in Spengler’s essay a surfeit of examples of that heroic fatalism and figurative martyrdom which were so in vogue:

That is his “world-history,” the history of a steadily increasing, fateful rift between man’s world and the universe – the history of a rebel that grows up to raise his hand against his mother. This is the beginning of man’s tragedy – for Nature is the stronger of the two. Man remains dependent on her, for in spite of everything she embraces him, like all else, within herself. All the great Cultures are defeats. Whole races remain, inwardly destroyed and broken, fallen into barrenness and spiritual decay, as corpses on the field. The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet – it will be fought out to the bitter end.33

Again, we can see how one might be tempted to compare this passage of Spengler’s 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 humanity’s 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: 173–4)

If we study Heidegger’s passage closely, however, we begin to see that major philo-sophical differences obtain between Spengler’s 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 Heidegger’s 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