BOOK REVIEW FEBRUARY 22, 2022

The Destructive Impact of Cultural

Heideggerianism
david p. goldman

Martin Heidegger promised to make man the Master

of Being. Perhaps we should blame Heidegger, not
Marx, for putting our culture on the path to decline.

T he irish critic vivia n mercier fa mously ca lled

Waiting for Godot a play in which nothing happens twice. The
same might be said of Martin Heidegger’s career in philosophy.
In this case, to be sure, “Nothing” is a loaded word, but more on that later.
Heidegger was the only philosopher of the first rank to support Hitler, a
position he never retracted.
Was Heidegger a great philosopher? Samuel Johnson’s quip comes to
mind: “The part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is
not good.” From St. Augustine (as the great Thomist Etienne Gilson
observed), Heidegger took the idea that time is not a succession of
moments but a superposition of memory and anticipation. From
Kierkegaard he borrowed the concept of dread, acknowledged in a single
begrudging footnote. From his teacher Edmund Husserl he grasped the
concept of “adopted intentionality”; our knowledge of objects is
conditioned by their purpose. And now we learn from Peter Hanly how
deeply Heidegger drew from the poisoned well of German Romanticism.

Eric Voegelin, Ralph McInerny, and other critics abhorred Heidegger as a

Gnostic, a purveyor (in Voegelin’s words) of “a purported direct,
immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical
reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite.” This
interpretation gains credence, albeit unintentionally, from Peter Hanly’s
study of Heidegger and the Romantic visionary Novalis (Friedrich von
Hardenberg, 1772-1801). Gnosticism re-entered Western thought through
the circle of Romantics at Jena in the late 1790s, including Ludwig Tieck
and the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Despite his early
death, Novalis remained enormously influential.

A Failed Experiment in Ontology

When Heidegger published Being and Time, philosophy was in crisis. The
neo-Kantian project that dominated late-nineteenth-century German
philosophy was in shambles. Ludwig v. Wittgenstein and the positivists of
the Vienna Circle portrayed metaphysics as literal nonsense. Heidegger
promised a path out of the cul-de-sac of the old metaphysics. His student
and mistress Hannah Arendt wrote that Heidegger sought “to make Man
the ‘Master of Being,’” and to “put man in exactly the same place that God
had occupied in traditional ontology.” His evolving understanding of
Being turned the concept into a secular substitute for God.

So enticing was the promise of a secular philosophy that could incorporate

the sensibility of religion without any of its responsibilities that a large
part of the philosophy profession clung to him, even after the self-
confessed failure of his project—and despite his scandalous Nazi politics.
The publication of his “Black Book” diaries starting in 2014 removed any
doubt that Heidegger backed Hitler out of conviction. Heidegger might
have been an unworthy vessel with putrid contents, but he dared to put
man in the place of God, and promised to unveil a Gnosis that would
make man godlike.

Heidegger became a prophet to left-wing acolytes such as Herbert

Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. So-called cultural Marxism
might better be blamed on Heidegger, Marcuse’s dissertation adviser. His
influence on the secular right, e.g., Arendt and Leo Strauss, hasn’t faded.

Heidegger in his hubris believed he could solve philosophical puzzles that

had perplexed metaphysicians for millennia. Being and Time could be
read as his failed attempt at an ontological magnum opus. The concept of
“Being” has entailed a paradox since Parmenides, who asserted that
change and differentiation were impossible because they imply the
juxtaposition of non-Being, something which we can neither think nor
utter. Being in classical ontology is composed of Essence and Existence.
The fact that we know what a phoenix is, Aquinas said, tells us nothing
about whether a phoenix exists in the real world. The trouble is that when
we ask what Existence is, we appear to be speaking about an Essence. This
leads into an infinite regress.

Meanwhile, as Aristotle told us, “Being is said in many ways.” I can say
that “the cat is black” or that “the cat exists,” and in each case the “is”
seems to mean something rather different. These applications of the
concept of “Being” are different but nonetheless analogous, as Aquinas
observed, but the analogy of Being is only a place-marker for a solution.
The analytic philosophers dismissed this problem by dismissing these
metaphysical questions as literally meaningless. Their logic-oriented
approach soon proved to have its own limitations. Kurt Gödel proved in
1931 that mathematical systems cannot prove their own premises. In
short, these paradoxes have persisted in philosophy from Parmenides
through Gödel, and philosophical investigation has only succeeded in
sharpening them.

The signature idea of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) was that man’s
Being-There, or Dasein, arose from mortality, in what he called Being-
unto-Death. Because “Being” cannot be defined directly, Heidegger
defines it by what is not Being, or rather our own ceasing to be. From the
standpoint of religious philosophy that was hardly new (Franz Rosenzweig
began his 1921 masterwork The Star of Redemption with the assertion
that “from death—from the fear of death—comes all of our knowledge of
the All”). Heidegger’s innovation was to secularize mortality, with a new
terminology that replaced sin and redemption with “care” (Sorge) and
“resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit).

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger attempted his own solution,

resituating the concept of Being (“Being-there,” or Dasein) as a field in
“ecstatic” time, that is, a conjoining of past and future into a moment born
of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). But Heidegger never published the
promised conclusion of Being and Time, and in 1949 he announced that
he had given up the effort to ground Being in ecstatic Dasein.

Heidegger first sought to ground Being in Dasein, that is, in Being-unto-

Death that makes man “free for death.” But in his 1929 essay “The Essence
of Cause,” he asserted instead that Being is to be found only through
“transcendence.” He wrote, “The discussions of ‘Sein und Zeit’ that have
been published until now set themselves no other task but to reveal
concretely a sketch of transcendence.” Being is not something that man
possesses, Heidegger wrote in the later essay The Essence of Truth. Rather,
that “revelatory Da-sein possesses man.” “Transcendence” to Heidegger
was ineffable, to be sought in poetry rather than metaphysics.

Finding Gnosis Through Poetry

After abandoning the conclusion of Being and Time, Heidegger tried to

recast the problem of Non-Being (in the 1929 lecture “What is
Metaphysics?”) as a kind of Nihilism. “Profound boredom, like a silent fog
insinuating itself in the depths of existence, pulls things, others and
oneself into it with remarkable indifference. Such boredom reveals being
as a whole,” Heidegger offered. As he explained in a 1947 essay, Heidegger
“reversed” the program of his 1927 book by turning to “the fundamental
experience of the oblivion of Being.” Here he channels not Novalis but
rather Goethe’s Mephistopheles in the first Study scene of “Faust” (“I am
the Spirit that always negates, for everything that comes to be goes rightly
to its ruin. And so it were better that nothing came to be. Everything you
call destruction, sin, in short, evil, is my actual element.”). We heard all of
this before from Goethe’s devil, and again from Nietzsche, just as we
learned of Dread (Angst) from Kierkegaard long before Heidegger adopted
the notion.

Hanly begins with Heidegger’s 1936 notes-to-self entitled “Contributions”

(Beiträge zur Philosophie). “The instability, or inadequacy of expression
that attends the writing and the deciphering of these texts can be
understood as an indication of a particular attention that is being paid,
not just to the coordinates of the configuration, but to the space opened
up between them,” Hanly writes. The between-ness Heidegger seeks, in
Hanly’s account, is not a Hegelian dialectic between well-defined
hypotheses, for that “would merely reassert the claims of a moribund
metaphysics. This thought of the between, then, is consistently withdrawn
from subordination to the polarities that it would separate.”

Rather than transform the old metaphysics with recourse to Augustine’s

theory of time, Heidegger sought a peek at Being through the poetry of
Friedrich Hölderlin, declaring that poetry could reveal what was veiled to
philosophy. The term gnosis does not appear in Hanly’s book, which is a
pity; Heidegger’s attempt to perceive through immediate intuition what
was hidden to philosophical analysis fits Voegelin’s definition of gnosis
precisely.

The “between” in the title of Prof. Hanly’s book refers to a “between-ness”

that somehow evades the antinomies of classical metaphysics and the
paradoxes of modern logic. Hanly writes:

Heidegger when he claims, toward the close of the Freiburg Lectures, that
“we remain settled upon this earth in relationality”. This “relationality”
clearly says something other than “being in relation with.” To be “in
relation with” implies polarities, an otherness, the distinct otherness of
that with which we are “in relation.” To be “settled in relationality”
implies by contrast a state of betweenness, the discomfort of operating
continuously from within a field of relation.
This sounds obscure, but Hanly’s intent (like Heidegger’s) is
straightforward: He is searching for a path in between the antinomies
that inevitably appear in any philosophical framework that draws a bright
line between truth and falsity, or between Being and Non-Being.
Ingeniously, Hanly interprets Heidegger’s later fragments with the aid of
Novalis, who died at 29, leaving behind two unfinished novels, some
philosophical “fragments,” a few poems, and a deep impression on later
Romantic standard-bearers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
Novalis adopted the notion of an ecstatic state from the Neoplatonic
philosopher Plotinus. His teacher Fichte had posited an “intellectual
intuition” independent of experience; Novalis identified Fichte’s
somewhat nebulous concept with Plotinus’ “inner light,” a state of
enlightenment (in his willful misreading of Plotinus) evoked by sensual
stimulus rather than reason.

Hanly picks up the story in medias res, with the Heidegger of the mid-
1930s, after his so-called “turn” away from his Being in Time project. A
perhaps stronger case for Heidegger’s dependence on Novalis can be made
in my view ab ovo. Ten years earlier, Heidegger had revived Novalis’
concept of “ecstasy” (Ekstase) that figures so pivotally in Being and Time.
If that is so, we may add Novalis to the long list of the philosophers’
predecessors whom Heidegger appropriated with little or no
acknowledgment, ranging from St. Augustine to Kierkegaard.

If our Dasein (Being-there) is merely Being-towards-Death, as the

Heidegger of Being and Time argues, our only “authentic” response is to
embrace death. Heidegger wants the resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) to
accept death. Authenticity means simply to be “free for death.” He wrote
in Being and Time that resoluteness “takes over the heritage…that has
come down to us.”

This means that in anticipating death it understands itself unambiguously

in terms of its ownmost distinctive possibility the more unequivocally
does it choose and find the possibility of its existence… This is how we
designate Dasein’s primordial historizing, which lies in authentic
resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for
death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen.
That is a commonplace of the old paganism, not an ontological
innovation, and it explains why Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger
the Nazi functionary at the University of Freiburg were the same person.
“Authentic Being-towards-death—that is to say, the finitude of
temporality—is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality,” Heidegger
wrote. For millennia, the peoples of the world have fought and died for
their “heritage” in the “historizing” circumstances in which they found
themselves, and eventually become extinct. This “resoluteness” comes to
us in a “moment of vision,” or Ekstase.

We perceive this grim connection between our dull inevitability of the

past and our ineluctable demise in a “moment of vision,” of Ekstase, or
standing outside ourselves. Heidegger avers, “Only an entity which, in its
Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can be in the
moment of vision for ‘its time.’ Only authentic temporality which is at the
same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say,
authentic historicality.” Heidegger found this “freedom for death” in
Nazism.

Compare this to Novalis (in “Hymns to Night”): “What pleasure, what

enjoyment does your life offer that outweigh the delights of death?
Doesn’t everything that inspires us wear the color of night?…I feel the
rejuvenating flow of death/My blood is transformed into balsam and
ether/I live by day full of faith and courage/And die at night in a holy
glow.”

Heidegger’s account of time is a paraphrase of Novalis, who wrote (for

example): “…In decisive moments the process comes to a head in a
comprehensive look backwards and forward, which brings together all
times. Through dreams, feasts, delirium, pleasure, love and poetic
inspiration, every consciousness breaks its boundaries and is lifted up
over continuous time.” Heidegger channels Novalis when he writes in
Being and Time: “Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself ’ in-and-
for-itself. We therefore call the character of the future, the character of
having been, and the Present, the ‘ectases’ of temporality.”

Novalis denounced Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as

“unpoetic,” and undertook his own novel (unfinished) Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, with its quest for the blue flower, as a riposte. I suspect that
Goethe devised Faust’s wager with Mephistopheles (in which Faust’s soul
is lost if he attempts to hold onto the passing moment) as a response to
Novalis. Novalis’ Ekstase, Goethe argued in so many words, is a satanic
trick. Heidegger surely proved him prescient.

The substitution of feeling for thought is what Heidegger took from

Novalis, Hanly reports. In Das Ereignis, what Heidegger calls Stimmung
(disposition or mood) precedes thought. “Stimmung is an attunement to
the voice of the unmooring of these polarities, an intimation of the
fundamental instability of the between,” Hanly tells us. To get to “a
beyond of metaphysics,” we cannot “return to the sensible.” The “twisting
free” of metaphysics involves “a reconfiguration of the between-space of
these two, such that the intelligibility of the concept no longer mediates
the sensible.” It is mood (Stimmung) “which renders unneeded the
sensible [and] leaves behind its vicissitudes.”

Hanly adds: “It is, too, in a sense very close to Heidegger’s that Novalis
understands Gefühl [Feeling] as the domain of the in-between, the
between-space that binds the movements of real and ideal, intertwining
and conjoining them—a mode of thought that entirely presages
Heidegger’s foregrounding of Stimmung.”

According to Hanly, Heidegger’s rebooted Being-there, namely Da-sein,

“will occur as a ‘splitting apart’ and will belong intimately to the fissuring
that, time and time again, is mobilized to articulate Heidegger’s sense of
event. Pulled apart across this fissuring, Da-sein is the restless and fragile
occasion, the Zwischenfalls [sic], the incidence of the between into which
the human must be dis-lodged.”

Often Hanly is hard to follow, in part because he doesn’t know German.

The text is full of elementary errors. Evidently, he meant “der
Zwischenfall,” the “case in between” (“Zwischenfalls” occurs in German
only as the male genitive singular, and here the accusative clearly is
meant).
Elsewhere he mistranslates the plain meaning of texts. He renders a line
from the poet Georg Trakl nonsensically, “And gently stirs an ancient
stone, ” rather than “An old stone gently moves you” (“leise rührt dich ein
alte [sic] Stein,” where “alte” appears instead of the correct “alter.”
Heidegger’s often fey word games are hard enough to translate even when
one knows the language. Here, pace Gertrude Stein, there’s no “there” in
Hanly’s “being-there.” Joseph S. O’Leary, Thomas Sheehan, and others
have dealt with the same material with greater clarity.

The Instability of Imagination

Assigning philosophical pride of place to the irrational surely is the single

most reckless act undertaken by intellectuals in modern history. Novalis
and his comrades among the Jena Romantics revolted against Kant’s
attempt to set limits to the pretensions of pure reason. Fichte was the first
to challenge Kant’s insistence that the operations of reason must be
grounded in experience, positing instead a faculty of “imagination” that
gives rise to “intellectual intuition” freed from the limits of the senses.
Hanly emphasizes Fichte’s use of the term schweben: “Lodged
indecisively, uncomfortably, somewhere between passivity and activity,
schweben—a hovering, wavering, or oscillating—comes to be the unstable
point around which transformations and reconfigurations of the
imagination occur at the close of the eighteenth century.”

But Fichte did go far enough for his student Novalis, who declared, “Fichte
doesn’t understand the hypostasis, and for this reason he lacks the other
half of the creative mind. Without Ekstase—gripping, all-displacing
consciousness—you can’t get anywhere with all of philosophy.”

Kant had left Reason in a precarious balance, too weak to penetrate into
the true nature of things or to overcome the antinomies of metaphysics,
but powerful enough to sustain the autonomy of the individual. That left
philosophy with two main alternatives. One was to elevate reason, as did
Hegel, in a dialectic that took the antinomies as markers for the
generation of new hypotheses. The other was to eschew reason along with
the Romantics. The fact that Heidegger reenacted the Romantic rebellion
against reason tells us something about the limited choices available to
philosophy. As Arendt observed, it is an easy lope from Romantic
irrationalism to Heidegger’s ascent to rector at the University of Freiburg.
Just what sort of Nazi Heidegger was will be debated for some time. Victor
Farías argues persuasively that the decline of his political standing after
1934 was due to Heidegger’s affinity to the Ernst Röhm wing of the
NSDAP, which Hitler crushed in the Night of the Long Knives.

Novalis was the first of the Romantics to embrace the irrational, with
baleful consequences. National Socialism had its roots in Romantic
irrationality, according to Hannah Arendt. She wrote in a 1944 critique of
Heidegger, “The ruthless individualism of Romanticism never meant
anything more serious than that ‘everybody is free to create for himself
his own ideology.’ What was new in Mussolini’s experiment was the
‘attempt to carry it out with all possible energy.’…Romanticism provided
the most excellent pretext in its unlimited idolization of the ‘personality’
of the individual, whose very arbitrariness became the very proof of
genius.” In fact, the Nazis embraced Mueller’s 1807 tract The Idea of the
State, with its emphasis on authenticity (Eigenheit) that anticipates
Heidegger’s concept of the authentic (eigentlich) through “integration of
the individual into the organism of the whole.”

Arendt observed in a 1946 essay, “Heidegger’s whole mode of behavior has

exact parallels in German Romanticism, so that one can scarcely believe
the coincidence is accidental. Heidegger is, in fact, the last (we hope)
romantic—as it were, a tremendously gifted Friedrich Schlegel or Adam
Mueller, whose complete irresponsibility was attributed partly to the
delusion of genius, partly to desperation.” Arendt saw the origins of
Nazism in the Romantics, and saw Heidegger’s affinity with Nazism in his
Romantic roots.

Secular philosophers cannot easily dispense with Heidegger because they

want the same thing that he wanted, namely “to make Man the ‘Master of
Being,’” as Arendt noted. That is also what Arendt wanted, and she helped
de-Nazify Heidegger in full knowledge of what he was. Arguably,
Heidegger’s influence now is greater than ever; through his doctoral
student Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger is the
inspiration for today’s endemic belief that identity is a matter of self-
invention. Heidegger is the grandfather of identity politics, of radical
subjectivism, and rampant irrationality. As in Unreason now runs amok.
This is Heidegger’s inheritance.

Heidegger also retains a high standing among secular conservative

intellectuals. “I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort to
find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help
us in our intellectual plight. But here is the trouble: the only great thinker
in our time is Heidegger,” said Leo Strauss. But Heidegger wasn’t a great
thinker. He just played one in the Theater of the Absurd of twentieth-
century philosophy.

REVIEWED

Between Heidegger and Novalis

by Peter Hanly

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David P. Goldman is president of Macrostrategy LLC, a Senior Writer at

Law & Liberty, and a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s
Center for the American Way of Life. He writes the "Spengler" column for
Asia Times Online and the "Spengler" blog at PJ Media, and is the author
of You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-Form the World
(Bombardier Books) and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying
Too)(Regnery).
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