"Only a God Can Save Us"
June 14, 2021
FOR the first time, I read Martin Heidegger’s famous interview with Der Spiegel, conducted in 1966 but published posthumously, in which he famously says “Only a God can save us.” Much of it is clearly self-serving, with Herr Professor loftily dismissing the notion that he mistreated his mentor Husserl - “Slander,” he calls it.
He insists that his dalliance with the Nazis lasted less than a year and was nothing more than an attempt to resolve the “encounter between global technology and contemporary man.” His lectures about Nietzsche were, he says, a direct confrontation with National Socialism, or as direct as he was allowed to be under a government that routinely locked up and tortured dissidents.
He claims his status in the eyes of the regime can best be illustrated by all the Gestapo spies attending his lectures in order to listen for suspicious anti-Nazi content, and by the fact that he was not included in the list of 500 important intellectuals who had been given an exemption from war service, meaning he was ordered to work on the fortifications over the Rhine in 1944.
It is in 1935 that Heidegger talks about “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism, a year after stepping down as Rektor of Freiburg. It is in the 1953 published version of these lectures that he adds, in parenthesis, that this “inner truth and greatness” lies in that “encounter between global technology and modern man”. Here, in this interview, he concedes that Communism and “Americanism” were also attempts to resolve that encounter, though he never went as far as saying that either of those ideologies were either true or great.
It is telling that at no point does he try to claim that he was naïve and ignorant in the ways of the world, as his post-war advocates would have you believe. It is very clear that his foray into the political sphere was inseparable from his philosophical project, which owed a lot to Nietzsche’s criticism of “European Nihilism” and to the atmosphere of alienation and extreme pessimism that descended on German conservatives like Spengler after the First World War.
But some of the statements Heidegger makes in this apologia are worth looking at closely. He says:
A decisive question for me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would it be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced it is democracy.
I ponder this for a while, and wonder if the answer is China, with its unique combination of high-tech surveillance capitalism, Maoist mobilisation and nationalist revivalism, all carried under the rubric of “socialist spiritual civilisation”. I don’t think Heidegger would have approved: the only way the Chinese Communist Party would try to tackle humanity’s “forgetting of Being” would be to set up a Ministry of Being, which would draw up five-year plans aimed at bureaucratising Dasein to within an inch of its life.
