Confronting Heidegger

Gerry O’Sullivan

University of Pennsylvania

 

Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 306 pp.

 

In the wake of the “affaire Heidegger,” prompted by the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme, Michael Zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art–how can students of Heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his “postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of Western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery”?

 

Such an inquiry is nothing new for Zimmerman, whose 1981 book, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled “National Socialism, Voluntarism, and Authenticity.” In fact, the seeming novelty of the “affaire” itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants.

 

For years prior to the public debates surrounding the Farias study, many of Heidegger’s own students (among them Otto Poggeler, Heinrich Ott and Paul Huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of National Socialism. Indeed, as early as 1970, Joachim Fest had discussed Heidegger’s outright complicity with the NSDAP in The Face of the Third Reich.

 

But as David Carroll has suggested in his foreword to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “jews”, the most recent French version of the Heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the Farias book as “programmed”– designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

 

While Carroll’s take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the “place” of Heidegger in contemporary scholarship. Given the shape and focus of the discussion in France, it would seem that–in many ways–Heidegger’s ignominious affiliation with the Nazis and his silence on the Holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. In this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional “double-forgetting.”

 

Zimmerman’s book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of Heidegger’s historical and political context written to date, relating Heidegger’s critique of “productionist metaphysics” and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with National Socialism. But Zimmerman, unlike Farias, does not reduce the whole of Heidegger’s writings to a mere expression or reflection of Nazism. While clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, Zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on Heidegger’s part–a kind of “what-is-living, what-is-dead” exercise.

 

To this end, Zimmerman engages the texts of Heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of “the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of Heidegger’s commentators have explained his concept of modern technology” (249).

 

As Zimmerman points out, most of Heidegger’s readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. Zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self- foreclosure by decentering Heidegger as merely “one important voice in a cultural conversation into which Heidegger himself had been ‘thrown’.”

 

This is not to say that Heidegger’s politics are themselves construed by Zimmerman as a manifestation of Geworfenheit or “throwness.” Rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what Jeffrey Herf has described as “reactionary modernism,” the technological-romantic branch of German conservatism which sought to replace the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment with the self-sacrifice and spirit of an individualistic, though properly Germanic, Volkstechnik.

 

Heidegger’s views on technology and industrial society underwent significant changes between the publication of Being and Time and the writings which appeared after the so-called Kehre or “turn.” As Zimmerman points out, the ambiguity of Heidegger’s account of “everydayness” in Being and Time was largely attributable to his unwillingness, or inability, to delineate between an account of everyday life which purported to reveal its timeless, essential and “transcendental” features and one which amounted to a politically charged critique of everydayness under the historically specific circumstances of capitalism and urban-industrial society.

 

Read in this way, then, Being and Time provided a negative evaluation of life in industrial society while attempting to retain its tacit claim to being a work of phenomenological description. It also, in the assessment of Winfreid Franzen, appealed to conservative intellectuals “because it addressed them theoretically, personally, and existentially without calling upon them to do anything specific.” In fact, Heidegger’s thematization of the frailty of individual Dasein in the face of the omnivorous they-self commended total secession as the only possibility of self-assertion.

 

But Zimmerman’s analysis of the reactionary, albeit addled, agenda of Being and Time stops there, and he moves (perhaps too quickly) onto a consideration of Heidegger’s debt to the writings of Ernst Junger. Zimmerman neglects to make explicit the problematic of Heidegger’s “conservative revolution” in philosophy as identified by Pierre Bourdieu in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s attempt to overthrow Kant’s overthrowing of metaphysics was, according to Bourdieu, typical of a strategy peculiar to “conservative revolutionaries” like Junger, a strategy which consisted in “jumping into the fire to avoid being burnt, to change everything without changing anything, through one of those heroic extremes which, in the drive to situate oneself always beyond the beyond, unite and reconcile opposites verbally, in paradoxical and magical propositions.”

 

Hence, says Bourdieu, Heidegger sought to escape historicism by asserting the essential “historicity” of the existing, and then inscribed history and temporality within Being which remains, even in Heidegger, both ahistorical and eternal. Such a seemingly radical overcoming as that accomplished by Heidegger simply “allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing, by joining opposites in a two-faced system of thought, which is therefore impossible to circumvent, since, like Janus, it is capable of facing challenges form all directions at once: the systematic extremism of essential thought enables it to overcome the most radical theses . . . by moving to a pivotal point where right becomes left, and vice versa.” Therefore, there may have been more to the fundamental inaction encouraged by Being and Time than that allowed, or interrogated, by Zimmerman.

 

Zimmerman’s discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the writings of Ernst Junger is, however, both elegant and persuasive. Heidegger, according to Zimmerman, drew upon representations of technology and the machine age contained in the essays and fictions of Junger who, like Spengler, had sought to discover metaphysical principles behind history which were “deeper” than those suggested by Marxism– mythical, elemental and irrational forces beyond the alleged determinism of scientific materialism or bourgeois economism.

 

Between 1934 and 1944, Heidegger developed his own conception of technology in constant and ongoing dialogue with Junger’s work, which argued that the industrial transformation of the earth was the empirical manifestation of a hidden, world-transforming power akin to the Spenglerian version of Nietzsche’s will to power. This power, according to Junger, currently took the form of the Gestalt of the worker (Junger alternately defined Gestalt as a stamping, imprinting, typing, or symbolic “totality” which embraced “more than the sum of its parts”).

 

For Junger, as for Spengler, world history was a spectacle. And the central figure in the then-unfolding drama of “total mobilization” was the worker-soldier, a passionate yet steely character ever willing to surrender to the atavastic will, whether on the factory floor or the battlefield. Junger, like the Futurists, developed a full-blown aesthetics of horror. Writing in War as Inner Experience (1922) and elsewhere, he sought to discover the “truth” of warfare as something done for its own sake, thus justifying both the horrors of modern warfare and Germany’s defeat in World War I as components of the same grand design and the upsurging of primordial will.

 

Heidegger both appropriated and transformed Junger’s masculinist rhetoric. While approving of Junger’s critiques of both Marxism and bourgeois decadence, his affirmation of a new and elite humanity and the necessity for an authoritarian Gemeinschaft, Heidegger rejected his internationalism and saw the dream of the world factory as simply being the final phase of the “productionist metaphysics” inaugurated by the Greeks. In response, Heidegger began to develop his own notions of spiritual work, national work service and the need for an “authentically” German science as early as the famed Rectoral address of 27 May 1933.

 

Heidegger’s later reflections on technology, work and art continued to be influenced by his dialogue with Junger’s writings, according to Zimmerman. Just as Junger had seen the work of the eternal will in the horrors of technological warfare, Heidegger glimpsed the “self-concealing being of entities in the horrifying meaninglessness of entities in the technological era,” whereby everything was reduced to “the same undifferentiated raw material for industrial production.”

 

Likewise, Heidegger responded to Junger’s rhetoric of the irresistable upswelling of primal Will by arguing that the “power” confronting humanity was, in fact, the “overwhelming being or presencing of entities,” the overwhelming force (Walten) of physis as presencing or being. This force, claimed Heidegger, brought about the almost martial struggle to “found” a world, to delimit the overpowering presencing of entities in order to let them “stand forth” as determinate, whether through the handiwork of technology or art, or the intervention of the poet, thinker or–at least prior to the late 1930s–politician.

 

Heidegger’s language in 1935, following that of Junger, was decidedly martial in tone: “To apprehend . . . means to let something come to one, not merely accepting it, however, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself. When troops prepare to receive the enemy, it is in the hope of stopping him at the very least, of bringing him to stand [zum Stand bringen]” (79).

 

Junger’s failure to grasp the nature of this presencing, and his confusion of the “fluid ‘motion’ of the synchronic event of presencing (Anwesen)” with the diachronic “hardening” of this presencing into specific historical modes of “being present” (Anwesenheit), led Heidegger to reject Junger’s notion of Gestalt (as epochal “imprinting”) as yet another master name in the history of metaphysics.

 

So, says Zimmerman, Heidegger’s response to Junger’s essay, “Uber ‘Die Linie‘” in The Question of Being, was to discount the writer’s failure to grasp the nature of the ontological difference while recapitulating many of the same themes found in his works: “While Heidegger spoke of the history of being, and Junger of the history of the Will to Power, both believed that the ‘multifarious transformations’ assumed by being or the Will to Power in different epochs presented ‘the heroic spirit with an engrossing drama.'” Both also believed that they were equipped to bear witness to this historical “play” of transformations while the rest of humanity blindly succumbed to the imperatives of the imprinting of the age of the worker.

 

It was through Junger’s “aesthetics” of history and the Gestalt of the worker, claims Zimmerman, that Heidegger was led to consider Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of art. In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger came to thematize the Greek conception of art as techne, or measure-giving disclosure, in response to the “degenerate” modes of modern art and industrial production.

 

Not surprisingly, Heidegger read the first version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1935, not long after Hitler’s Nuremberg address, “Art and Politics.” Both Hitler and Heidegger stressed the importance of Greek art as a model for a “restored” and authentic aesthetic practice. And insofar as Heidegger believed that the art of the Greek temple opened or disclosed the world of the polis “in which entities could first manifest themselves in their own specific shapes and forms, and in which Greek humanity could make the decisions that would determine its destiny,” writes Zimmerman, both Hitler and Heidegger agreed on the relationship between art and political life.

 

Where Heidegger parted company with Hitler, however, was on the point of art’s relationship to history and eternity. Hitler’s vision of the thousand-year Reich was to be embodied in planned public works of art, totalitarian “temples” attesting to the permanence of the Nazi vision. Zimmerman points out that for genuine art to “work,” according to Heidegger, it must reveal the fragility and mortality of human existence. Hence, Hitler remained, in the estimation of Heidegger, under the sway of foundationalist metaphysics.

 

Against such myths of eternity and pure presence, Heidegger turned to the “originary” Greek conception of art as techne, a work of the hand which resists reduction to a “mere product” by virtue of its self-sufficiency and disclosive power. Such “authentic” production and “freeing” disclosure gave way, eventually, to the distortions inherent in “productionist metaphysics” which, states Zimmerman, casts the world as little more than a “standing-reserve” awaiting subjugation.

 

Like the National Socialists, the reactionaries and fascists, Heidegger was concerned with the inherent or essential relationship between poetry and production. The cure for rootlessness, social fragmentation, nihilism and alienation was not to be found in a workers’ revolution, but rather in a workers’ state transformed by the saving and disclosive power of art as handicraft. In such a situation, the ills and evils of modernity–associated in Heidegger’s mind with the industrialism and rootlessness of Bolshevism (and, concomitantly, “cosmopolitan Judaism”) and the inauthentic freedoms of the liberal welfare state–would be forever swept away by the power of authentic art and authentic technology to disclose new worlds and possibilities.

 

Apart from its political pedigree, Heidegger’s critique of instrumental rationality is appealing to Zimmerman, and for several reasons. His anti-foundationalism, which denies a rational basis for the technological way of life, suggests to Zimmerman that things could be otherwise: “Discovering the groundlessness of the technological era makes possible the openness–and the anxiety–necessary for the arrrival of a new, post-modern era.” Zimmerman also sees continuity between Heidegger’s attention to handiwork and the analysis of “micropractices” in Foucault, both of which, he believes, offer alternatives to the homogeneity of the technological world.

 

Zimmerman concludes Heidegger’s Confrontation With Modernity with a hopeful, though cautious, call for dialogue among feminists, deep ecologists and students of Heidegger’s work, all of whom are involved, according to Zimmerman, in developing new narratives about non-alienated, and non-oppressive, social and ecological relationships. Much can be learned, claims Zimmerman, from the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit and the hermeneutical insistence upon the finitude, and contingency, of knowing. But Heidegger’s failures remain in the foreground: “Sensitive to the dangers of nihilism posed by the dissolution of previous foundations, Heidegger attempted to find a non-absolute, historical ‘ground’ to guide his own people. Unfortunately, this attempt ended in disaster.”

 

This is as comprehensive an overview of Heidegger’s views on modernity, technology, politics and art as one will find anywhere, and an extremely valuable contribution to recent scholarship on Heidegger and the debates occasioned by his commitment to National Socialism. But several questions remain.

 

Zimmerman tends, often in passing, to include Marxism among the various manifestations of “productionist metaphysics” at work in the history of the forgetting or “oblivion” of being–what Heidegger termed the Seinsvergessenheit. At this point Zimmerman himself can be said to succumb to a totalizing or hypostasizing gesture regarding the disputed character of production in Marxist theory. Marx recognized that the capitalist mode of production was a system of multiple determinations, demanding multiple logics. One can read Marx himself against the kind of conceptual identity attributed to him by Zimmerman, via Heidegger.

 

Zimmerman also fails to indicate what it is that he means by “mode of production.” To use shorthand developed by Harold Wolpe in The Articulation of Modes of Production, this could be a “restricted” use, covering only forces and relations of production, or an “extended” use, including forces and relations of production and their conditions of existence. Only the latter tends toward the kind of economic reductionism slighted by both Zimmerman and Heidegger, and assumes that the economy is, always and already, the predetermined site of primary contradiction.

 

Neglected, too, is Marx’s point–underscored by Marcuse –that neither nationalization or socialization alter, by themselves, technical rationality as embodied (often irrationally) in the productive apparatus. A shift in ownership does not bring alienation to an end, as Zimmerman seems to imply in his critique of Marxism. The technological structure itself must change. At this point, one wishes that Zimmerman had included more recent Marxist theory in his dialogue, as it might have added some specificity to the Heideggerian critique.

 

But perhaps specificity remains, and will always remain, the glitch in the Heideggerian machinery. Heidegger’s fundamental inablity to account for social institutions may stem from the reactionary tendencies identified by Bourdieu in Being and Time, including the impulse to always cast “the social” negatively, interms of das Man or the they-self. (Adorno’s underthematization of the social leads to similar problems for his analyses, as Axel Honneth has recently shown). One wonders how and where the world-disclosing, world-transforming power of authentic art and technology can finally work if not across the social field.