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

1 8 Interpretation
admires the Romans more than the Greeks. For him, the hardness of Roman
style reflects the hardness of the Roman worldview, which is matched among
the Greeks only by the sophistic and Thucydidean interpretation of human
action in terms of power struggles (Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the
Ancients”). But by the late thirties Heidegger has thoroughly rejected this
standpoint, and he accordingly condemns Nietzsche’s thought for being “un-
Greek” at every crucial point—in its interpretations of being, the good, truth,
and humanity. In short, his thought is “the philosophy of the antiphilosophical
Romans” (GA 67, 102). We need hardly point out that the Nazis borrowed from
Italian Fascism and the Roman Empire in their ideology, organization and
imagery (consider Speer’s plans for Berlin). When Heidegger writes in 1939,
then, that with the Roman translation of energeia as actus, “with one blow the
Greek world was toppled,” he is implicitly criticizing the Nazi worldview
(Heidegger 1998, 218). Energeia is originally the same as physis: the emergence
of what is into enduring self-display, the coming-into-being of beings as such.
But actus misinterprets this coming-into-being in terms of agere, acting and
leading. This understanding sinks to the level of beings and their effective
behavior; at its crudest, it reduces this behavior to the mechanistic impact of an
active thing on a passive thing. Being as emergence into unconcealment has
been forgotten (GA 66, 187, 195–96, 289).
Heidegger makes the political dimension of these thoughts
very clear in the Überlegungen (late 1930s?):
What must in the future be called by the name brutalitas (not accidentally
Roman), the unconditionality of the machination
[Machenschaft] of being…is the mirror image of the essence of
man, of the animalitas of the animal rationale, and thus also and
precisely of rationalitas. That man had to be defined as animal
rationale and that the brutalitas of beings should one day drive on to
its fulfillment—these have the same, single ground in the metaphysics
of being. …[The many] need the romanticism of the
“Reich,” of the people [Volkstum], of “soil” and “camaraderie”…
The brutalitas of being has as a consequence, and not as a ground,
that man himself, as a being, makes himself expressly and thoroughly
into a factum brutum and grounds his animality with the
theory of race…[a theory that] apparently affirms everything “spiritual,”
and even first makes it “effective,” yet at the same time denies
it as deeply as possible in a denial that drives toward the most radical
nihilism; for everything is “in the end,” that is, already at the
start, an “expression” of the race…the predator is the original form
of the “hero”… But the predator equipped with the means of the