Retailer of Rejuvenating Violence

“When Heidegger laments modernity’s reluctance to exercise the ‘will to mastery,’ it should be remembered that his lament is being expressed in a University of Freiburg lecture hall in 1935, at the height of Germany’s Nazi frenzy. Given that historical setting, how is one to assess Heidegger’s grandiloquence, delivered to those whose ears were ringing with the bombast of Hitler’s rally speeches? We must place Heidegger’s Olympian prose in precisely this setting in order to feel its darker implications. ‘The violent one, the creative man,’ writes Heidegger, ‘must risk dispersion, in-stability, disorder, mischief.’ The ‘violent one knows no kindness and conciliation.’ Like Nietzsche before him, Heidegger sensed how dependent humanity has always been on the structures of sacred violence, and, like Nietzsche, he felt that a return to these structures was imperative and that it was the biblical tradition that stood in the way of this important revival. What is missing in Heidegger’s subtile and evocative discourse is the suffering of the victims who are at the receiving end of all the culture-rejuvenating violence. For someone of Heidegger’s genius, this oversight is not likely to have been inadvertant. He was, after all, retailing Nietzsche’s will to power to the world, and everything depended on the ability of the superman to override the moral misgivings with which the Judeo-Christian tradition had burdened him . . . When all the metaphysical mists fade away, at the heart of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian project is the hardening of the human heart” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 255-256).