According to my notes, the master said: “We lie in the pincers. Our people… (Here my handwriting turns illegible even to myself) [as standing in the center, suffers the most intense pressure] — Our people, (he repeated) the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people.” (I can’t read my writing here either. Don’t worry, I’ll transmit the essential.) “All this implies that this people, as a historical people, must transpose itself— and with it the history of the West — from the center of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers of Being.” [I’m using Fried and Polt here. P. 41] Read well what I now transcribe for you, son. It is Heidegger. It was his most genuine thinking at that moment of history: 1935. “Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation — precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, historically spiritual forces from the center.” This development was that of our nation. Only the unfurling of the German nation could save Europe from its annihilation. I offer you another dispersed, but clear, note: “the historical mission of our people, [is to be] the people of the center of the West”.

What if we try to understand him? And what if we truly made an effort? Or perhaps it is not worth doing with the major philosophical thinker of our time? What did I offer in my dispersed note? A concept: the center of the West. What did Descartes put there in the 17th century? The Ego, the subject, man. Man wasn’t the center of it all for the Greeks. Being was. Man opened himself up to Being and this state of openness made truth possible. Truth was unconcealment. Starting with Descartes, starting with that conquering subject that puts itself in the center of entities in order to dominate them, techno capitalism surges and the earth begins to be razed. Heidegger, later, would say: “the world is transformed into standing-reserve”. This mistake (the mistake of man who has forgotten being so as to, from his center, dominate and raze the earth) should have been corrected by National Socialism. From here we ought to be with complete coherence, the new center. The center of the West. The center (no longer a subject but a national community) that would take man to a creative, and not destructive, encounter with science and nature. Remember the Master, that day, in the senior common room, alone, buried in dark thoughts. Do you remember? Of course. Me too, thirteen years later, in this distant country of the world, I remember and I see him and feel the strength of his hand, of his claw, taking over my arm. “There is still time.” You know in time for what. He said it: “National Socialism is the only movement capable of reconciling man with technology. If that is achieved, we'll have saved ourselves."

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

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