Heidegger’s ‘Heritage’: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism 59

nation using this structural apparatus but that is an arbitrary move and one which, as we shall see, his own philosophy does not permit.

Spengler celebrates the notions of resolve and individuality in ways which again can easily be aligned with some of Heidegger’s more inflammatory iterations concerning inauthenticity and publicness in Being and Time and Introduction to Metaphysics:

The more solitary the being and the more resolute it is in forming its own world against all other conjunctures of worlds in the environment, the more definite and strong the cast of its soul. What is the opposite of the soul of a lion? The soul of a cow. For strength of individual soul the herbivores substitute numbers, the herd, the common feeling and doing of masses. But the less one needs others, the more powerful one is. A beast of prey is everyone’s foe. Never does he tolerate an equal in his den. Here we are at the root of the truly royal idea of property. Property is the domain in which one exercises unlimited power, the power that one has gained in battling, defended against one’s peers, victoriously upheld. It is not a right to mere having, but the sovereign right to do as one will with one’s own. Once this is understood, we see that there are carnivore and there are herbivore ethics. It is beyond anyone’s power to alter this.34

The first six lines of this passage immediately invite comparisons with similarly intoned invectives against mass society in Heidegger’s work. One can see why critics, then, upon revisiting Heidegger’s ‘early’ work following his shocking ‘apostasy’ in 193335, began to conflate some of that work with the themes of resolve and voluntarism which permeated the conservative revolutionary literature36 and which we find again in this essay. Take for example some of the more ‘suggestive’ passages concerning das Man and publicness in Being and Time:

In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The “they”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (BT: 164)

One can clearly see surface affinities between the sentiments expressed in the two passages. The fact remains, however, that Heidegger simply did not and would not advocate the homage to the ‘Borgian’ picture of predatory prowess proposed by Spengler. The carnivore’s ‘virtù’; a somewhat vulgar, naturalistic appropriation of Machiavellian prowess is at such a remove from anything Heidegger suggests that the tendency among some of his critics to simply lump his early work in with the worst excesses of the conservative revolutionary literature of the time beggars belief.37 A suspicion of mass mentality and a disdain for democracy had smuggled their way