Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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nuanced one. There is no doubt that Heidegger has been influenced by and has
absorbed the responses of people like Spengler to the technological advances which
had begun to gather momentum at a frightening pace and, if we are to be fair, he is
clearly sympathetic to elements of anti-modernism and a glorification of the bucolic
in ways which resonate with some of the more unsavoury rhetoric of the day. But
again, Being and Time itself can, if presented a certain way, seem like a carefully
embroidered patchwork of threads from Aristotle, Luther, Kant, Dilthey, Husserl
and Kierkegaard; that is certainly not to say that Being and Time reduces to such a
patchwork. Heideggers work eludes any such heavy-handed reductionism. Again,
these interpretative strategies miss the real problems and, unwittingly, make it rather
easy to get Heidegger off the hook.

Ernst Jnger
In his preliminary remarks introducing Jngers essay (Total Mobilization) in The
Heidegger Controversy, Richard Wolin notes that In the late twenties Jnger published
over 100 essays in leading organs of Germanys conservative revolutionary movement
thus establishing himself, along with figures such as Moeller van der Bruck and
Oswald Spengler, as one of the movements most celebrated and influential figures.52
Wolin is not alone in this conviction that Jnger exercised the greatest influence of all
on Heidegger in terms of how Heidegger conceived of the effect of technology on the
contemporary age.53 In particular Der Arbeiter and Total Mobilization are understood
as proof positive of Heideggers essential accord with Jngers views on the technological age and, as Wolin explains, the essay
represents a distillation of the argument of his book-length study of two years
hence, Der Arbeiter a work which enjoyed a tremendous commercial success
and which, along with Total Mobilization, represents a remarkable prefiguration
of totalitarian rule.54

Wolin goes on to argue that

The two works by Jnger, Total Mobilization and The Worker, had an indelible
impact on Heideggers understanding of modern politics. In fact, it would not be
much of an exaggeration to say that his option for National Socialism in the early
1930s was based on the supposition that Nazism was the legitimate embodiment
of the Arbeitergesellschaft (society of workers) that had been prophesied by Jnger
and which, as such, represented the heroic overcoming of Western nihilism as
called for by Nietzsche and Spengler.55

Wolins subsequent claim, however, having attested to the enormity of the influence
that Jnger exercised upon Heidegger (as he sees it), involves a gross misreading:
In his lectures of the late 1930s, Heidegger would critically distance himself from
Nietzsches metaphysics. In the early 1930s, however, his relation to Nietzsche was
far from critical. Instead, at this time, he clearly viewed the historical potentials of