He continued, then, and his words were granite, their solidity was tangible, his concepts wounded or provoked exclamations of shock and fear. There was so much the führer Rektor demanded from us. From the national community he expanded to the services it demanded. Do I need to insist on the continuity between Being and Time and the Rektorat Speech? Being and Time established the need for the national community. And the Rektorat Speech, the imposing year of 1933, granted its factical tasks. Its facticity. Now Heidegger could tell us how to serve the national community. He established three services. Work service. Armed service. Knowledge service. On armed service he said that he "demands the readiness, secured by knowledge and skill and tightened by discipline, to give the utmost in action". Not too far from me and Maria Elizabeth was Rainer. His face was a torch. He squeezed his lips and suppressed a smile that was ready to explode. He was drinking the words of the Führer of Freiburg. Those words: "training", "discipline", "delivery", "limit" were the ones I had gone to listen to. They sounded now like warrior's bugles in those ready ears, in their open spirit. "The very questionableness of Being forces the people to work and fight and forces it into its state", continued Heidegger. And, we knew, he was nearing the end. How would it be? How would he finish off that exemplary piece? That conceptual, bellicose and noisy hymn. His voice did not stop: "All abilities of will and thought, all strengths of the heart, and all capabilities of the body must be unfolded through struggle, heightened in struggle, and pre-served as struggle". It was Nietzsche, Martin. Nietzsche read by Heidegger as he would very soon teach us. Because that's how it is, son: my Nietzsche is Heidegger's. There is no other. Germany's Nietzsche should have been Heidegger's and not Alfred Rosenberg's, with his racial and biological foolishness. I'm getting ahead of myself, I know. But that night, in that speech spoken for eternity, already Heidegger had "his" brilliant version of the gigantic "Madman of Turin", who's madness, for me at least, never reached the sublime.

Heidegger, through Nietzsche, was telling us that the will is struggle, and that to persevere it needs to grow while never ceasing in that struggle. The vital destiny of the will is to grow, and for it, growth is not perseverance but its abomination, growth is conquering, it is dominating, it is to grasp the vital space that it, the will, demands to extend itself. Perseverance and growth define the will to power. It knows, in its infinite vital force, that only by growing can it persevere. How does one grow? By struggle. Only through the struggle does one conquer the space that the will demands, the vital space. In retrospect the word struggle sounded powerful in that raging auditorium. It sounded Nietzschean, as only Heidegger could make Nietzsche sound; sounding as struggle, as conquest, as expansion, as war.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:49 AM