62 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

to Being. If Being is to open itself up, it itself must have rank and maintain it. Heraclitus’s reference to the many as dogs and donkeys is characteristic of this attitude, one that belongs essentially to Greek Dasein. If people today from time to time are going to busy themselves rather too eagerly with the polis of the Greeks, they should not suppress this side of it; otherwise the concept of the polis easily becomes innocuous and sentimental. What is higher in rank is stronger. (IM: 141)

Heidegger is playing a dangerous game here; he is misrepresenting his position in a rather disappointingly disingenuous fashion. On the one hand, he is trying to qualify his attempts to rally to the heroic nationalism of the day with philosophical provisos which point toward what is really at stake, philosophically, in these texts. On the other hand, he is trying to dress his work in the manner of his contemporaries thereby recommending himself as the spiritual leader elect of the movement. Heidegger, as it were, wants the glass to be half full but half empty at the same time (to borrow a memorable phrase from Browning). There is no denying the opportunistic current running through this posturing on Heidegger’s part. Nevertheless, as we shall see in the chapters to follow, Heidegger was willing to make some rather sinister remarks in his analysis of this particular fragment in one of his 1930s seminars which underlines the fact that his own political philosophy had a rather sinister streak running through it.

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There is of course an apocalyptic flavour to some of Spengler’s descriptions and prognoses and again, there are elements of Heidegger’s own criticisms of mass culture and the technological world which would seem in keeping with passages such as the following:

Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing. Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Æschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him – forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not – to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.44

We find echoes of this alarmist rhetoric in Heidegger’s famous 1935 lectures but as we see again, there are important differences also:

This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered techno-logically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, at any