Phrontisterion: Nietzsche, Eichmann, and Heidegger

~by David Aiken~

In the hallways of history there happened a meeting of minds between a philosophically illuminated poet, a toadying technocrat, and a mystical philosopher given to the arcane. A meeting that gave birth to a catastrophe of all too human proportions.

Nietzsche, in soul and in spirit, is brother in arms to Milton’s Moloc:

“Scepter'd King
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair:
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not….”

The poet-philosopher gave prophetic voice to a foundation myth about the supposed origins, and especially the decline, of morality in the west. Bespeaking an obviously accurate psychological insight, or perhaps it was more truly a philosophical intuition, about the invention and breakdown of morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical myth would subsequently inspire certain knavish and benighted folks who, some 30 years after his death in 1900, would use his philosophical framings as political stage directions for the creation of the German state under the Nazis.

Eichmann, on the other hand, as more recent history seems clearly to be attesting, might appear on the world-stage as the incarnation of Milton’s Belial:

“he seemd
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the ear,”

Eichmann, a servile architect of a state designed according to Nazi ideology, laboured at a particular period in the history of the German people to create a very specific application for Nietzsche’s mytho-philosophical insight, an application whose composition and legacy was the realization of human engineered death on a mass scale.

The last of the protagonists in our all-too-human drama from the hallways of History, Heidegger, the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism and unenlightenment, or obscurantism, continued mulishly to trace his career path within the framework of this technocratic ideology, unhindered. In this, Heidegger the Accommodator is like Milton’s Mammon:

“Let us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so e're
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and indurance.”

We backward-viewers of this dramatic meeting of minds can at least be certain about this, however—which is that Friedrich Nietzsche is in no way responsible for, or causally linked to, Adolf Eichmann’s ideological repurposing of his philosopher’s mytho-poetic explanatory fantasy; nor for another philosopher’s, Martin Heidegger’s, tailspin into a German nationalistic mysticism. Nor would the holocaust of the German period have been avoided had Nietzsche never articulated or published his philo-genealogizing myth.

From the perspective of Nietzsche’s definition of morality, this latter realization would also seem to suggest for our contemporary consideration that, in a world becoming progressively post-“moral,” the reinvention of a supposed Greek ideal/idyll, which occurred at the historico-philosophical juncture of our three actors, is perhaps not only impossible, but also ultimately undesirable. For in the face of those like Eichmann and Heidegger and other ideologues who appear regularly on the world’s stages, and who seek to embody Nation and Race as material and therefore intuitively “natural” moral values, perhaps, when all the cosmic dust has settled, we may be looking at the true face of Nietzsche’s natural, Zarathustrian Man—the fully human animal.

§ NIETZSCHE

On the Genealogy of Morality is a philosophical myth, and neither a critical philosophical analysis nor an argument of any reasoned sort. It is a retroscopic myth, much like Plato’s Republic, which harks back to the putative roots of moral ideas and moral idea-traditions; and the purpose of this myth is to provide a perhaps more than true explanation, albeit of a once-upon-a-time sort, about how western “morality” came into existence. Mythopoetically, Nietzsche conceives of Morality negatively, as a wrong-headed celebration of the values espoused by a priestly caste: of weakness and vulnerability, of other-worldliness, and of the hatred of the body and the this-worldly body-life, such as in Jesus’ “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

In Nietzsche’s myth, these mentally and physically feeble, priestly-minded ones, who were natural-born “outsiders” to the heroic warrior nobility celebrated and valued by the Greeks (think: Homer and the Heroic Code), achieved ascendancy first by separating themselves from the naturally “good” nobility of the Greeks, then by conflating the value of the naturally good, which espoused this-Life with gusto, with the value of the unnaturally “moral,” which, not measuring up to the challenges of this-Life, championed the life to come hereafter—the after-Life.

On this telling there were, once upon a time, The Greeks, an ancient people of Virtue who were ethical (good) in the most natural and innocent sense of that term; they were good and noble; a warrior caste in which one man’s worth, in terms of strength or of intelligence or of oration, was always measured over and against another man’s or a god’s. This was in the pre-moral age of the West. Then, at a certain point in the history of Western Man, the Religious Man, the Priest, the weaker, went to war against the naturally Virtuous Man. Out of a sense of outrage and a desire for revenge (Nietzsche’s ressentiment), the Priest and those inspired by the Priest waged war upon the strong and able. The priestly had understood that not all men are excellent warriors, or cunning, or highly valued contenders on the stage of humanly conceived time; and they understood that they themselves were lacking in these natural qualities. These priestly “others,” who fell outside the natural Greek world of values, were the non-contenders, the vulnerable, the meek, the herd; they are, says Nietzsche, the spiritual ancestors of Western Jewish and Christian thought, and therefore the original nihilists – the naysayers of the vigorous Life.

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is a pseudo-historical reconstruction myth. It is not a philosophy argument “in favour of” the breakdown of moral thought, but rather, a philosophical reflection on the birth of “morals” as a nihilistic redefinition of “virtue”; it is a retelling of a changeling myth, where an after-Life replaces a here-and-now Life, an ex-change that went unnoticed for some 2,000 years until its true character began to tell in this, the period of its final disintegration into an existence tale.

According to the Nietzschean myth, the moralistic nihilism or other-than-this-Life sentiment at the heart of religious thinking, stands in opposition to an entirely human ethic of natural virtue as goodness, as, for example, was articulated in the Greece of antiquity. And Nietzsche prophesies for us in his existential myth a future breakdown of this naysayer “morality.” Nietzsche’s rumination is not an attempt at an applied ethic of any sort; rather, it is the mythical theory of an historical rise, and then the modern fall, of a “moral” system that for lo these many long Christian centuries has been articulating a parallel world that is no world of or for natural men.

§ EICHMANN

Now, what if one were to conceive of the possibility that Nietzsche’s philosophical myth was actually a reasonably plausible genealogical accounting, and that some version of a changeling event occurred in the history of western ideas; and what if one were also to accept the obvious Nietzschean conclusion that the creation of a fully human ethic grounded in the this-worldly experience of the human animal is the future job of men, and that this must especially be a work for philosophers?

Would it not also be conceivable to envision the possible historical rise of a Nazi political ethic, of the sort articulated by Eichmann in Jerusalem—a wedding between an evolutionary—‘struggle for the survival of the most ‘fit’’—worldview as the frame for human action, on the one hand, and the cogency of a prophetic myth, on the other hand, wherein the religious mythological framing for human value is perceived as ultimately unmenschlich because it is decidedly anti-Life? But then comes the Crito moment of incomprehension. Because although the world listened attentively to this wedded philosophical concoction that Eichmann argued for at his trial, that audience slowly came to the realization that Eichmann was no Socratic man of wisdom, for he arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to those drawn by Socrates in Plato’s philosophical drama, Crito.

Plato’s Crito is about the death of Socrates. Just before drinking the hemlock, Socrates is engaged in conversation with his long-time friend, Crito, who tries to persuade Socrates that he must not allow the state to put him to death, that he must live. Crito argues for the survival in the here and now of a valuable human’s life (such as Socrates’ life), while Socrates quietly reminds his friend that the physical life of the body is of little worth when measured against the good life, which is the life lived honourably and justly. And it is on this philosophical question that Eichmann sided with Crito against Socrates. Eichmann argued not only that the physical life of a valuable group—the German nation, is a grounded and worthwhile value, but also that the survival of the preferred group is justified, when historical manifest destiny requires it, by the death of another (in)valuable group—the Jews.

Truly a concatenation of ideas to die for…

But is it really such a stretch to imagine a translation of a philosophical or prophetic myth into a political reality? Is this in fact not absolutely inevitable at some point, and therefore predictable? The “argument” of the Crito is represented by a drama in which Socrates makes the case for the just and honourable life, which is the life of philosophical virtue, but where Crito makes the case simply for the material life of the body. Plato certainly expects his audience to side with Socrates’ reasoning against Crito. But then, enter Eichmann.

In her recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem [Knopf, 2014; original German 2011], the German historian Bettina Stangneth performs two public services. First, she provides a rectification for the myth created by Hanna Arendt concerning the perceived mousy or underwhelming personality of the man Eichmann, by opening up for public perusal all the most recent archives concerning the historical Eichmann and his very personal monument to Nazi thought – the holocaust. And while her historical overhaul of Eichmann does not pose any direct challenge to Arendt’s theoretical notion that evil may be banal in its manifestations, it certainly does abrogate the specific use of Eichmann as an embodiment of that theory. Second, she lays out “in his own words” Eichmann’s philosophical apologia sua vita, which reveals an Eichmann/Crito of horrifyingly insightful philosophical clarity.

Point One in Eichmann’s apology: innocence before the Law, God, and Men (p. 216). “’Without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture, I find that I am not guilty before the law, and before my own conscience; and with me the people who were my subordinates during the war. For we were all… little cogs in the machine of the Head Office for Reich Security, and thus, during the war, little cogs in the great drivetrain of the murdering motor: war.” The oath of allegiance that bound everyone, ‘friend and foe,’ was the ‘highest obligation that a person can enter into,’ and everyone had to obey it. Across the world, leaders had really only given a single order: ‘the destruction of the enemy.’ For Eichmann, the idea that the war had been total and global, in which the goal was to eliminate the enemy, was a simple statement of fact. His radical biologism led to the belief that a ‘final victory’ was imperative: the unavoidable war between the races would leave only one remaining.”

Point Two in Eichmann’s apology: general morality is on Eichmann’s side (pp. 216-217). So ‘What about morality?’ asks Eichmann. […] “’There are a number of moralities: a Christian morality, a morality of ethical values, a morality of war, a morality of battle. Which will it be?’ The leadership of the nation, Eichmann goes on to explain, has always stood above the thought of individuals. To illustrate, he brings in the Old Testament and also modern science: the church, too, recognizes the power of the state as the highest guiding principle on earth….”

Point Three in Eichmann’s apology: Moral thinking in the West leads to the conclusion that the individual must be obedient to authority (p. 217). “…’inner morality’ is all well and good, but the most important thing is always the will of the nation’s leaders—not simply because they have the power to force people to obey, but because they act only on behalf of the people. THEREFORE [emphasis mine] a person should not allow his inner morality to conflict with his orders; he should see that these orders are for the good of the people and carry them out with conviction. […] I found my parallels quite plainly and simply in nature. […] [T]he more I listened to the natural world, whether microcosm or macrocosm, the less injustice I found, not only in the demands made by the government of my people, to which I belong, but … also in the goals of our enemies’ governments and leaders. Everyone was in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.’ In other words: everyone wanted total war, and that fact provided the legitimation of everyone to wage it, using every means necessary, both ‘conventional and unconventional.’”

Point Four in Eichmann’s apology: evolutionary theory as the basis for ethical theory (p. 218-219). ‘Eichmann completely rejected traditional ideas of morality, in favour of the no-holds-barred struggle for survival that nature demanded. […] The struggle among the races was in essence a struggle for resources—a basic idea familiar to many people concerned about future wars over oil and drinking water today. […] The only thing that mattered was one’s own people. […] Philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories and a global orientation, was an error, because it sought universals and did not accept dependence on ethnicity. … As such philosophy has no homeland, but—and it is crucial to realize this connection—to the purveyors of Nazi ideology, philosophy had a people. According to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s tirades, there was one ‘race’ that, having no homeland, had an international bent and revered the unbounded freedom of the mind: the Jews.’”

Point Five in Eichmann’s apology: conclusions about national character (p. 219). ‘Only an ethnic thought makes it possible to build a national character, and humanitarian talk only allows this character to become confused and weakened. In an ideology that sees reconnecting with ‘blood and soil’ as the only means of survival, any international outlook mutates into the ultimate threat. This threat must be destroyed before a global morality destroys concepts of the German ethnic morality and undermines German defences. Or as the head of the NSDAP Head Office for Racial Politics clearly stated in 1939: ‘There can be no possible agreement with systems of thoughts of an international nature, because at bottom these are not truth and not honest, but based on a monstrous lie, namely the lie of the equality of all human beings.”’

According to Stangneth (p. 220), Hannah Arendt, who was a classically trained philosopher, was only able to see an Eichmann who used philosophy as a blunt tool without being guided by its undergirding of moral intentionality; thus the imprudent analysis one finds in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. But what one discovers in Eichmann’s apologia is a surprisingly well-informed “Nietzschean” analysis of his historical circumstances.

As we see in the Crito, there are two sides to the Platonic equation. Heads: Socrates; tales: Crito. So, at the end of the day, Eichmann simply disagreed with Plato’s pro-Socratic conclusion, valuing Crito’s thinking about the life of ‘the good’, instead of Socrates’ dogmatic assertion that “the just life” is better than just life itself.

In his “A Message to the 21st Century,” Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: “[Heinrich Heine] predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.”

Isaiah Berlin’s dying dilemma, of course, also hems us Western thinkers in on every side: “So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?”

And that very wise Oxford philosopher could only offer this consolation: “I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen.”

§ HEIDEGGER

Ruin bubbled up out of this historical meeting of minds—a meeting at which an illuminated German poet-philosopher, Nietzsche, fantasized about an alleged moral battle of ideas in our Western historical past, and then prophesied about a free-thinking future for those with the courage of their philosophical insight. At that same historical meeting of minds was a toadying technocrat, Eichmann, who had delusions of philosophy designing and engineering a eugenic future for the German state, who added his own special ingredient of materialism and tunnel-visioned nationalism to the idea of a state liberated from future morality. And then there was Heidegger—a mystical philosopher given to obfuscation and linguistic camouflage, who pursued his pedantic work of “making straight the way” for the future spiritual and intellectual potential of a very material incarnation of the German people.

Martin Heidegger is the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism and unenlightenment; and in at least one respect he is like Milton’s Mammon – that he picked his tedious way along the woodsy paths and by-ways of his thinking entirely occupied with his own affairs, while the Nazi state was busy erecting a nation of corpses around him. It is obvious that Heidegger is Nietzsche’s post-cursor in terms of method and style; because in an attempt to discover a language vehicle appropriate to articulating un- or anti-rational thought, this thinker who “declare[s] war on rationalism right through to the bitter end,” thought to fuse poetry and philosophy to create a new abode for Thinking.

There are interesting ‘intersections of ideas’ between Eichmann and Heidegger, which may have been indicative of a discourse wafting on l’air du temp as elements of a nationalist zeitgeist, as they may also be intersections of a truer, deeper philosophical persuasion. For Eichmann, this type of thinking seems clearly to be politico-philosophical. For Heidegger, however, whose reflections on the questions of Volk and Nation become progressively more poignant as the war against Germany begins working toward its dénouement, there is a marked numinous quality that shades his words throughout.

Heidegger on total war: 18.05.1940 (p. 167)—“…our enemies, even though they have their aircraft & armored cars, still think along the old lines & have to rethink matters from one day to the next. With us, however, the complete mastery of technology has in advance produced a quite different kind of strategic thought. In addition, the invasions are sufficiently well rehearsed. Now we will see how a breakthrough of this new sort can also be secured & its consequences turned to account differently from 1917 &’18. The ruthless ‘operation’ is in itself also an unconditional commitment to the inner lawfulness of the unconditional mechanization of warfare. The single person disappears as an individual, but at the same time he has the opportunity to be informed of how the whole thing stands in the quickest possible way at any day & any time.”

Heidegger on the deliberate hiddenness of his philo-poetic writings—22.05.1940 (p. 168)—“There’s no knowing when the time will come for my work to have an ‘effect’. But I believe that in the steps it takes & through the realms it enters, it will –one day in the future when ‘philosophy’ is essential again—have an effect, simply in the way ‘philosophy’ does have an effect, invisibly & indirectly;”

Heidegger on das Volk, not necessarily as a literal people, but as a spiritual assembly—9.06.1942 (p. 132)–in the context of German nationalists: “…we want to try to bring together the people who share an inner bond-”

Heidegger on das Volk as a clearly material or essentialist entity—02.02.1945 (p. 185)—“Yet what really wears one down is the fate of this people, especially when thinking beholds it in its western essence & with a destiny such as this.”

Heidegger on das Volk—17.02.1945 (p. 186) –“Over everything there now lies a rubble of incongruity and strangeness, which is all the more disconcerting because it was heaped by one’s own people over the hidden striving of its own essence to grope its way to the truth.”

Heidegger on the Nation—08.4.1946 (pp. 197-198)– “In everything dark & confused about the path a providence is concealed. The unthinkable destiny of our fatherland & the fate still in store for it is where we belong, in the most secret of workshops, gaining ever fresh heart from the growing knowledge.”

Heidegger also leaves us with his version of a veiled NotaBene—When one is anchored into the world-geist, which is the primordial Seyn of the world, then the only means of abiding in that world-geist is through poetry, because it is both essential [radical]—flowing from the wellsprings of the real self, and creative.

It would seem that, at least on one level, the problem with Men and their Ideas and their Technologies, is that Human History is the playground for each and every human experiment, good and bad, right and wrong. History is replete with Frankenstein-type stories—The Garden of Eden, Pandora’s Box, Caligula, Faust, MacBeth, Frankenstein—stories where the kernel revolves around the notion of knowledge gone too far afield too quickly. And Man has not ever demonstrated that he has the spiritual or emotional maturity to keep pace with his knowledge and linked technology.

But then the problem of knowledge has never been whether man should possess tools or processes & methods that allow him to delve into the unknown. Rather, it has always been about spoilage by misapplication – the slow process of taking one ‘piece’ of information and consistently stretching it by application and misapplication until it becomes a knowing of different things entirely, and for different reasons, and for different ends. Knowledge in the hands of Socrates, framed through his vision of the just man, will thrive differently than knowledge in the hands of Crito, who is ready to do just about everything to keep the physical body alive in the world for just a little while longer.

For better and for worse, the ideas of philosophy have never been the problem. Rather, we Men do not seem to have the type of Will to Goodness and Justice, the Character of Virtue, to wrap ourselves around the ideas of the world in a way that consistently yields either Beauty or Kindness.

(Reprised from a blog version posted November 1, 2014)

Phrontisterion on Heidegger:

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-naked-messiah-martin-heidegger.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2018/01/charlie-hebdos-great-heidegger-debate.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/04/heideggers-greek-inversions-reversals.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html