Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism

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nation using this structural apparatus but that is an arbitrary move and one which, as
we shall see, his own philosophy does not permit.
Spengler celebrates the notions of resolve and individuality in ways which again can
easily be aligned with some of Heideggers more inflammatory iterations concerning
inauthenticity and publicness in Being and Time and Introduction to Metaphysics:
The more solitary the being and the more resolute it is in forming its own world
against all other conjunctures of worlds in the environment, the more definite and
strong the cast of its soul. What is the opposite of the soul of a lion? The soul of a
cow. For strength of individual soul the herbivores substitute numbers, the herd,
the common feeling and doing of masses. But the less one needs others, the more
powerful one is. A beast of prey is everyones foe. Never does he tolerate an equal
in his den. Here we are at the root of the truly royal idea of property. Property
is the domain in which one exercises unlimited power, the power that one has
gained in battling, defended against ones peers, victoriously upheld. It is not a
right to mere having, but the sovereign right to do as one will with ones own.
Once this is understood, we see that there are carnivore and there are herbivore
ethics. It is beyond anyones power to alter this.34

The first six lines of this passage immediately invite comparisons with similarly
intoned invectives against mass society in Heideggers work. One can see why critics,
then, upon revisiting Heideggers early work following his shocking apostasy in
193335, began to conflate some of that work with the themes of resolve and voluntarism
which permeated the conservative revolutionary literature36 and which we find again
in this essay. Take for example some of the more suggestive passages concerning das
Man and publicness in Being and Time:
In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services
such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another
dissolves ones own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of the Others, in
such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more
and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship
of the they is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man]
take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and
judge; likewise we shrink back from the great mass as they shrink back; we find
shocking what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite, and
which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.
(BT: 164)

One can clearly see surface affinities between the sentiments expressed in the two
passages. The fact remains, however, that Heidegger simply did not and would not
advocate the homage to the Borgian picture of predatory prowess proposed by
Spengler. The carnivores virt; a somewhat vulgar, naturalistic appropriation of
Machiavellian prowess is at such a remove from anything Heidegger suggests that the
tendency among some of his critics to simply lump his early work in with the worst
excesses of the conservative revolutionary literature of the time beggars belief.37 A
suspicion of mass mentality and a disdain for democracy had smuggled their way