The South Central Modern Language Association

Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity by Michael Zimmerman

Review by: William Vaughan
South Central Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, Reason, Reasoning, and Literature in the Renaissance
(Summer, 1993), pp. 119-120
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language
Association
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Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontationwith Modernity. Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. 306 pp. Cloth, $39.95;paper, $18.95.
There were too few readable books about Heidegger's philosophy and its relation
to National Socialism published in the period of 1989-1992 that we can afford to
overlook even one. Michael Zimmerman's entry deserves attention as a solid secondary source, combining as it does the best features of historical analysis with
philosophical exegesis to produce a much-needed overview of the Heidegger-affair
and its origins. The book casts new light on this most difficult and seminal of
twentieth-century philosophers.
Zimmerman's initial focus is on the social and historicalbackground of Heidegger's
thinking. He reconstructs the intellectual milieu from which Heidegger emerged
with keen precision, and spells out how the post-imperial German crisis, with its
militarism and nostalgia for preindustrial society, left its traces on Heidegger's
thought. Zimmerman is particularly good when doing intellectual history-spelling out the vllkisch ideology which promoted the idea that scientific rationalism,
economic and political individualism, and industrial technology were sapping Germany of its spiritual strength. The author's command of the perplexing mixtures at
work in the Weimar era is impressive, and he avoids getting bogged down in
excessive philosophical exegesis. Of particular value is the focus on the common
trajectory of Heidegger's thought with that of Ernst Jiinger. This makes compelling
reading, and although the Heidegger-Jiinger relationship has been no secret in
Germany, Zimmerman's is the most comprehensive account of it available in English. Readers will have little trouble discerning the impact thatJiinger's invocations
of storms of steel and the automized work processes of modernity made on Heidegger's
thinking concerning technology. This alone is a valuable and eminently readable
achievement.
Zimmerman explains Heidegger's attraction to Nazism first on the grounds that
the latter proposed to overcome the alienation of the modem workerby transforming
labor into a form of art. Heidegger at first thought only a great work of art could
save Germany from the leveling effects of technology, but eventually came to see
National Socialism as a means of strengthening and surmounting the technological
epoch. The connections between Heidegger's views on art and the general aesthetic
accomplishments of German fascism, the glorification and idolization of folk-labor
and practices, are presented with great clarity. Zimmerman shows how
closely
Heidegger's work in this period parallels the attempt by Germany to re-invent itself
through self-generated mythification, and how this, combined with the rejection of
Enlightenment political ideals, leads to a monumental disaster. The result succeeds
both in presenting Heidegger's thoughts accurately, expressing those
thoughts with
eminent clarity, and giving one insight into the view which saw the Third Reich as
an unprecedented amoral and aesthetic phenomenon.
The first few chapters of the second part of the book are also to be commended for
their concise analysis of some of the basic issues in Being and Time and their relation
to the history of technological metaphysics.
Non-Heideggerians especially will
benefit from the discussion of the importance Heidegger placed on the Roman
translations of Greek terms for being, and the tracing of "technological
thought"
through medieval Christianity, Descartes, and Nietzche. Explaining Heidegger's
views concerning the change of truth from aletheiato
certainty, and the change of
substance from hypokeimenonto subject is no easy task, but Zimmerman
captures

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South CentralReview

Heidegger's difficult arguments judiciously and economically, without being reductive.

Heidegger'sConfrontationwith Modernitydoes have shortcomings. Zimmerman is
prone to moralizing when he chides Heidegger for thinking himself beyond good
and evil. The point is not whether one is against Heidegger but how one is against
him, and how this privileges certain questions and silences others. One might
instead deal directly with Heidegger's replacement of the distinction between fact
and value with the conception of meaning as found in hermeneutic phenomenology. The book's later chapters seem to lose exegetical steam. Some throw-away
references to feminism and deep-ecology are indications that in places Zimmerman
has cast his net too wide.
For some, the virtues I have been pointing out will also be seen as vices. Zimmerman does not tracethe emergence of Heidegger's thought in the shifts and tremblings
which characterize the various texts. Thus where the book succeeds admirably with
Heidegger's views on technology, it falters on Heidegger's later views on language.
To the uninitiated, there will be virtue in Zimmerman's presenting Heidegger to
those accustomed to philosophical discussion conducted through contests of view
and oppositional argument; but to those already familiarwith Heidegger, there may
be a problem in Zimmerman's ignoring Heidegger's own indirection, his own
"reading into the fissures" of the texts of others. The lacuna is in not pursuing the
intimate relationship between technology and the poetic language of the still later
Heidegger. This is an area much in need of Zimmerman's explanatory skills.
Zimmerman's work deserves praise for remaining free from the associational,
deconstructive commentaries on Heidegger (of which there are too many), yet he
fails to address how Heidegger inserts his own destabilizing interpretation of texts
into his own text Heidegger is nothing if not aware that the very issue of raising
the question of technology is fraught with difficulties; his thought is marked by the
trenchant problem in understanding technology of not merely executing its mandate. Cataloging Heidegger is perhaps not the best way to understand the Gestellin
earnest, since cataloging is but one of the Gestell'sstandard moves. Zimmerman does
not address this, and in his presentation of Heidegger's thought seems unaware of
Heidegger's disruptiveness with respect to the very distinctions between philosophy, politics, and history to which Zimmerman makes traditional appeal. Something
is lost when, in writing a book claiming to reveal Heidegger's thinking concerning
technology, a part of that thinking is thereby concealed as well. Even within as fine
a book as Zimmerman's, one needs to indicate by way of something more than what
amounts to a mere asterisk that it is the illegitimacy of the very thinking behind the
project being undertaken that Heidegger works furiously to reveal.
William Vaughan
Ohio NorthernUniversity