Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 18:00:56 +0100
Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 11 December 1998

bob scheetz schrieb:
> Michael Eldred writes:
>
> >I don't read Heidegger as talking in the passage in question about certain
> >people, social classes, groups, or the like but of an historical necessity
> >corresponding to a (metaphysical) way of thinking. The cultivation of race
> is
> >one way (it does not seem to me to be historically necessary) of
> constituting a
> >collective subjective embodying the will to power.
> >
> >The opening sentence in the paragraph from which you quote runs:
> >"Conversely, where ideas of race and a reliance (counting) on racial forces
> >arises, this must be seen as a sign that the pure power-essencing of being
> has
> >been set loose by being itself into the abandonment of beings by being."
> >
> >Power, the will to power has been set loose by being in its abandonment of
> >beings and a sign thereof is a counting on racial forces. Heidegger is here
> >suggesting a link between the will to power and ideas of race. He is even
> >claiming that being itself is responsible for this abandonment.
>
>
> Michael,
>      isn't this (pure power-essencing) a fetishized, bogey, conception of
> "racism"?  according to k heiden the h s chamberlain  conception
> was a determination of spiritual affinity, a collective subject unified
> by enculturation, paideia...compassing  jesus as well as
> caesar,  st francis as well as faust ?   why would heid's usage
> be the naive rosenberg version, and not chamberlain's, spengler's...
> or even holderlin's?

I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Bob.

To take your first sentence nevertheless: According to the Marxian conception of 
fetishism, a thing (money, commodity) is fetishized insofar as it is taken in 
itself to have powers inhering within it which are in truth only the resultant 
of social relations. This means, the thing is what it is only by virtue of a 
deeper-lying essence (in Marx' case: social relations) which must be brought to 
light by way of thinking (for Marx: the value-form analysis in the first chapter 
of Capital Volume I). 

To take the phenomenon of racism, according to which a biological race appears 
in itself (by dint of _physis_) to be inferior/superior to another, this is 
indeed a fetishized conception in the broad sense. Heidegger proposes that the 
essence of this phenomenon (whose 'reality' certainly cannot be denied) lies not 
in race itself (in biological make-up or the like), but elsewhere. For 
Heidegger, this elsewhere is the metaphysics of subjectivity with its historical 
culmination in the will to power (of which Darwin's theory of evolution is an 
unwitting expression). 

Darwin's theory itself is a fetishism (and not 'objective scientific truth' 
verified by observation and logic) insofar as it knows nothing of its roots in 
the metaphysics of the will to power, according to which all beings strive to 
enhance their 'reach' or power over beings. 

Michael
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