The German Genius

eventually destroy us. Shortly afterward, Günther Anders published Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen ( The Obsoleteness of Man ), in which he too argued that technology had to be deliberately curbed or it would destroy us.
    Heidegger saw technology as a vicious circle: technology breeds more technology, it “challenges” nature, and people live in a Gestell , or “frame,” of technology. In doing so, we lose elements of freedom. With technology so rampant and so ever-present, the original experience of Being, says Heidegger, is lost. We cannot let nature “be,” we are less able to submit, to surrender to that experience of being; the “releasement towards things” is simply unavailable in a technological society: the poetic experience of the world is sidelined and overwhelmed by technology.
    This was reinforced by Heidegger’s views on America. The United States had often been the object of German thought. For Heine, America was the symbol of all that Romanticism detested. After a visit across the Atlantic, Nikolaus Lenau, sometimes called the German Byron, described the country as disfigured by its politics, with its culture imposed from outside. Nietzsche expected America to spread a spiritual emptiness ( Geistlosigkeit ) over Europe and neither Moeller van den Bruck nor Spengler cared much for it, though Ernst Jünger admired America’s ability to involve all the country in World War I. 51 As we have seen, Freud thought America “a mistake” (whatever that might mean). For Heidegger, America was the symbol of the crisis of our age, “which is also the deepest crisis of all time.” It represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of “authenticity,” and it was the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. America reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, all experience to routine—all was trivialized and rendered bland. Americans, said Heidegger, were “totally oblivious” to “man’s encounter with Being.” 52 After the first space probes, Heidegger wrote that “there is no longer either ‘earth’ or ‘heaven,’ in the sense of poetic dwelling of man on this earth.” The age of technology is our fate and America the home of this “catastrophe.” 53
    Heidegger had written about America before the war, and essentially his arguments hadn’t changed, only been updated. And this was partly Theodor Adorno’s point in his celebrated attack on Heidegger, published as a pamphlet in the mid-1960s and titled Jargon der Eigentlichkeit ( The Jargon of Authenticity ). There was, it has to be said, a wider context to Adorno’s uncompromising stance. The developing Cold War in the 1950s had undoubtedly played into the hands of former Nazis. Chancellor Adenauer was keen to have the distinction between “politically impeccable” and the “not-so-impeccable” abolished, and in 1951 a law was passed that allowed “compromised” people to again hold public office, while the Loyalty Law of 1952 helped ensure that some people persecuted under the Nazi regime were now removed from public posts on suspicion of being Communists. Adorno and Horkheimer again became the subject of anti-Semitism.
    The Jargon of Authenticity was important because Adorno felt that the whole idea of the authentic in Heidegger—the rural allusions, the emphasis on the Volk , the hatred of modernity as artificial—was phony, a form of “sacred gibberish…devoid of content…except self-idolisation.” 54 When people use words like “authentic,” Adorno said, they make them sound as if they meant something “higher” than what they had actually said, and Heidegger was especially guilty of this. 55
    Heidegger never replied to Adorno. The latter had scored some telling points, but they hardly affected his target’s long-term reputation. That had more to do with what Richard Wolin has called Heidegger’s Children . Of these, we have already met Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Strauss, all of whom stayed in the United States after their emigration. The other two were Karl Löwith, who returned to Germany in 1952, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who never left it.
    After his return, Löwith was made a professor at Heidelberg and became chiefly known for three highly original works, From Hegel to Nietzsche , an account of the fragmentation of German philosophy, Meaning in History , about the relationship between modern philosophy and its theological predecessors, and Max Weber