54

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

derivative or to detract from their originality in any way, but in order to designate
the direction out of which an understanding is to be gained and to show where
the place of the confrontation proper lies.24

And, Heidegger will conclude, the prevalence and influence of this type of cultural
diagnosis indicates the emergence of a kind of high journalism as a substitute for the
type of work which needs, so Heidegger believes, to be undertaken:
We now ask anew: What does the fact that diagnoses of culture find an audience
among us albeit in quite different ways tell us about what is happening here?
What is happening in the fact that this higher form of journalism fills or even
altogether delimits our spiritual space? Is all this merely a fashion? Is anything
overcome if we seek to characterize it as fashionable philosophy and thus to
belittle it? We may not and do not wish to resort to such cheap means.25

This may sound conciliatory, but we know from Heideggers frequent pejorative
remarks concerning newspapers and journalism in both his philosophical texts and
indeed in his correspondence, that he was rather chary of the press and journalism
itself as an intellectual medium. In his correspondence with Jnger, for example,
he makes some rather unflattering comments concerning Jean-Michel Palmiers
philosophical efforts suggesting that the author is better suited to journalism than
to thinking and that he has already written far too much for someone so young.26
Heidegger is essentially then rejecting these four interpretations of the contemporary
situation, which have shaped the cultural and literary understanding of the present age
as an age of decline, as weak derivatives of Nietzsches philosophy and, fundamentally,
as based on a misinterpretation of that philosophy:
It does not require many words to see that here in Nietzsche an opposition was
alive that in no way came to light in the four interpretations provided of our
situation, but merely had a residual effect as material passed on, as a literary form.
Which of the four interpretations is the more correct in Nietzsches sense
is not to be described now. Nor indeed can we show here that none is correct,
because none can be correct, insofar as they all mistake the essence of Nietzsches
philosophy, which for its part rests on strange foundations. These foundations
indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically
highly questionable psychology. Yet Nietzsche can afford that. Nevertheless, this
is no carte blanche.27

Oswald Spengler Man and Technics

It would be disingenuous in the extreme, of course, to suggest that Heidegger was
inured to the powerful cultural, political and intellectual influences which were
percolating in Germany following the First World War up to and through the Weimar
period. There was a surge of conservative revolutionary thinking along with a general
sense of disaffection and betrayal characteristic of the Dolchstolegende mentality