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AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER

As with Guénon I don't see that Heidegger translates easily into practical politics (and, also as with Guénon, since there is more to life than practical politics this doesn't particularly bother me). Heidegger of course famously joined the Nazi Party when Hitler came to power in 1933. In the first issue of the Heidegger Review, John Minahane gave what seems to me to be a very convincing account of what Heidegger might have hoped from the Nazis at least in their early days in power:

'The un-happened history of Martin Heidegger was this: the German intellectual elite, including the Nazi elite, were gripped by his [Heidegger's] thinking with the force of a new revelation; the Germans came to accept that their national resurrection required them to take up where the ancient Greeks had left off; without “dis-inventing” or forgetting anything, the Germans ceased to allow the uncontrolled spread of technology regardless of its social effects, and so they saved the German rural communities (the heart of the nation), with the flight from the land being stemmed and actually reversed; there was no World War II (and therefore, of course, no Holocaust), but the spiritual force of the German revival affected Russia, so much so that in due course the grotesque, production-fixated, hyper-liberal Bolshevik dictatorship collapsed and Russia became Russia again.'

Given that saving German rural communities and disciplining the growth of industry was a large part of Hitler's programme outlined in Mein Kampf such hopes were not wholly unreasonable. But again we can see the paradox. Hitler believed that saving the German peasant and restraining the growth of urban life required more land, therefore an expansion eastward. Which required a military capability. Which required industrialisation. Heidegger, like Guénon, had to accept that his role was to assert a principle and an initiative which remained individual without being able to reduce it to practical politics.

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