Don’t think this was easy for me. Don’t think it was easy for me to disconnect him from everything that was going on in Germany. I was starting to see Heidegger as a lonely harbinger. Little that he spoke of was related with the real National Socialism. Did he get that?

If we were the center of the West, did we need to extend ourselves as warriors, as conquerors? How to reconcile the rural Heidegger, the philosopher of the provinces, with the solitary, the man from the Black Jungle, the one who smoked his pipe in silence with the peasants, with the disproportionate modernity of the Führer’s militarism? Was the regime’s arms race the genuine expression of man regarding technology? What was the spirit of National Socialism? That of the Krupp steelworks, that of Goering, that of Albert Speer, or that of the philosopher of Being? What were the weapons that Germany built at a vertiginous pace? Were they entities? They were. Wasn’t our nation turned over to them, to their repetitive, mechanical, scientific and industrial fabrication? On doing that, were we opened up to Being or turned over to entities?

Perhaps Rainer Minder would have unsheathed (if you allow me that expression) an answer. If our nation occupies the center of the West, if that center demands that historical and spiritual forces take off, we need, then, entities, objects, weapons, Dieter, weapons for that expansion, for that launch that will save us from the infamous pincers that seek to destroy us. And which will save the world.

This, Martin, which Rainer Minder would have read in the concepts of this course in 1935, there were other, many others, that also read it in this way. It helped that Heidegger turned himself assiduously over to that greatness that he understood as tempest. It helped that he said: “The violence-doers must time and again shrink back from this use of violence, and yet they cannot call a truce.” (Did he say truce, or has memory tricked me? In any case, is suppressing the word “truce” enough to suppress the bellicose warrior spirit from the text? If that word remained with me it is because it was there where I heard the others. Spoken or not, it beat there.) It helps that he said: “In all this, the violence-doer as creator sees only a seeming fulfillment, which is to be despised. In willing the unprecedented, the violence-doer casts aside all help. For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the overwhelming.” Do you need a synonym for overwhelming? Superior, powerful. Now, son, I confer you this basic note. I wrote and underlined it. And, I insist, heard it from his lips, spoken with his translucent diction:

“The overwhelming, Being, confirms itself in works as history.”

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:40 AM