Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

8 Interpretation
sophical contemporaries, however much he and they may differ in the account
they give of what it means to be human and what it means to be an essence.
Heidegger’s Dasein, as thrown project, is essentially different from other kinds
of beings. Husserl’s transcendental ego cannot be understood as a part of the
world studied by the empirical sciences. In the case of Kojève one can even
speak of a whole characterized by noetic heterogeneity, provided one bears in
mind that the whole in Kojève’s case is the Hegelian Concept which comes into
being only at the end of historical time. None of these thinkers, however, are
adherents of “scientific naturalism” or “scientific materialism.”
Late in life Strauss appeared together with his life-long friend,
Jacob Klein, at a public gathering at St. John’s College during which both spoke
about the development of their thought. Both described their encounter with
the thought of Heidegger, whom both found impressive. What Strauss has to
say about his encounter should be remembered when one tries to understand a
later remark he makes, during the question period, about the status of morality.
What I could not stomach was his [Heidegger’s] moral teaching, for
despite his disclaimer he had such a teaching. The key term is “resoluteness,”
without any indication as to what are the proper objects of
resoluteness. There is a straight line which leads from Heidegger’s resoluteness
to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933. After that I
ceased to take any interest in him for about two decades. (1997, 463)
For the weightiest decisions, according to Heidegger, no reason can be given
nor should any be required. It would seem that Strauss is not indifferent to
moral teachings.
In his “German Nihilism” lecture, Strauss describes what
made Heideggerian “resoluteness” so appealing to young German nihilists of
the 1930s. They believed that all rational argument would favor communism
whose ultimate goal they abhorred. “They opposed to that apparently invincible
argument what they called ‘irrational decision.’’’ Moreover, they thought
that not only all rational argument but the present world itself was moving
inevitably to a “communist-anarchist-pacifist future” and therefore had to be
destroyed. Their No was unaccompanied by any Yes. Anything would be better
than the approaching future, according to them,“literally anything, the nothing,
the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbian state of nature” (1999, 360).
“Moral teaching” is an ambiguous expression. Taken broadly,
any thought through answer to the question “How should one live?” can be
called a moral teaching. In this sense even the shockingly immoral views of a
Thrasymachus or a Callicles are moral teachings because they supply answers