56

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

For all of the surface similarities between their descriptions of technicity, Spengler
and Heidegger offer very different accounts. Spenglers is a quasi-philosophical
account and he clearly sees himself as indebted to what he views as a Nietzschean
position though one which is simultaneously biologistic. In a way, of course, it is no
surprise to find Heidegger and other critics of technology sharing certain ideas and
perhaps misgivings. To return to the example used earlier, two reports might overlap
in their descriptions of the outward symptoms and ravages of some malady or other,
cancer for example, and yet have very different views as to the cause of and indeed
the appropriate treatment for that same disease! We would appear to be dealing with
something like this in the case of Heidegger and Spengler: they are both looking
at a world which has been significantly affected by technological development. The
symptoms, as it were, are more or less evident. That is not to say that they necessarily
agree either as to the best way to proceed or as to what is responsible for this technological explosion. Spengler argues, for example, that
The unique fact about human technics, on the contrary, is that it is independent
of the life of the human genus. It is the one instance in all the history of life in
which the individual frees himself from the compulsion of the genus. One has
to meditate long upon this thought if one is to grasp its immense implications.
Technics in mans life is conscious, arbitrary, alterable, personal, inventive. It is
learned and improved. Man has become the creator of his tactics of living that is
his grandeur and his doom. And the inner form of this creativeness we call culture
to be cultured, to cultivate, to suffer from culture. The mans creations are the
expression of this being in personal form.29

We simply cannot ignore the fact that Heidegger would never accept that our
relationship with technology is such that we are its creators in the manner that
Spengler suggests. It is not something which has emerged and evolved in a spirit of
inventiveness, it is not simply a tool that we use (almost as a weapon, that is, a mere
extension of our hands in a spirit of hyper creativity, as Spengler suggests) in order
to further our aims as part of our tactics of living. That simply is not something
Heidegger would concur with, or, even worse, advocate! Furthermore, regardless
of how one ends up reading the account of authenticity in Being and Time, one can
hardly suppose that Heidegger would assent to a rampant voluntarism which flew
in the face of his protracted attempts throughout his work to achieve a resolute
non-willing which eventually emerged as the notion of Releasement (Gelassenheit).
Even if one were to argue, and many have, that Heideggers account lapses into a kind
of subjectivism in its own right in Being and Time, that is not to say that he advocates
the rather naked, wilful subjectivism that permeates Spenglers account.
We can identify a fundamental difference in their conceptions of technology/the
technological towards the beginning of Spenglers essay:
Technics is not to be understood in terms of the implement. What matters is not how
one fashions things, but what one does with them; not the weapon, but the battle.30

Spengler then doesnt really distinguish between modern technology and the older
handwork technology of the ancient farmer or hunter-gatherer. Ultimately Spengler