Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West

Abstract

Losurdo, Domenico. Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West. Translated by Marella and John Morris. Amherst: Prometheus, 2001. 256 pp. $50.00 hardcover. Losurdo's study can be read as an attempt to write the 20th century Critique of German ideology. Its 19th century model's critique of idealistic German philosophers of capitalism is replaced with a critique of 20th century German philosophers' concept of modernity. The philosophical theories of German master thinkers such as Husserl, Weber, Jaspers, Simmel, Spengler, Klages, Schmitt and, above all, Heidegger, are subjected to a political reading. German philosophy, in opposition to its image and self-interpretation as non-political theoria, is interpreted as political theory in disguise. Losurdo makes the attempt to unveil the political character of fundamental categories in theories of phenomenology and philosophers loosely associated with this school. While at the outset of their Critique, Marx and Engels define basic categories such as reality, consciousness and relationship, the framework of Losurdo's critique is narrow in terms of both epistemological scope and historical expansion. The basic contention is that the philosophers, to a greater or lesser degree, contributed to a theory of modernity that has its origin in a decisive event ofthat period. It was World War or, more precisely, the ideologia della Guerra, which, in Losurdo's interpretation, provided the basic ideas and conceptual framework for the German ideology of the 20th century. The Ideology of War did not disintegrate with the end of the war. The leitmotiv of Losurdo's study is that the influence of the Kriegsideologie continues to be felt, though reshaped and transformed and, in a certain sense, even radicalized (55) throughout the century. The uninterrupted continuity of German philosophy, once subjected to a political reading, will reveal the Ideology of War as its matrix. Even philosophers and writers who are partially exempted from the verdict of creating and maintaining the war ideology, such as Freud, Husserl, Bloch or the later Thomas Mann, are examined in this context. The opening chapter makes an attempt to define the Ideology of War as roughly identical with the Ideas of 1914, invented at the time as ajustification for Germany's war and conceived in opposition to the ideas of 1789. Among its major elements, Losurdo refers to a metaphysical experience of unity, a reverence for death and sacrifice, renewal of romantic ideas of Volk and olkisch, contempt for the city and the antagonism of civilization and Kultur. Losurdo paints a homogenous image of this ideology of war joined together by its anti-liberalism, anti-western and anti-universalist sentiments, which recur in 1933. These two historical moments are not separated, Losurdo argues, by a distance, but they are the exposed moments of an uninterrupted continuity that leads from 1914 to 1933, to the second World War and beyond to the end of the century. In opposition to any attempt to read Sein und Zeit as a contribution to pure philosophy, it is Losurdo's intention to demonstrate that theoretical categories are deeply intermeshed with political ideology. Heidegger's image of death, he argues, is a reconstruction of the 1914 ideas of sacrifice and his destabilizing and decentering of the world's constitutive I is linked to the Nazi ideology of community rather than interpreted as a fundamental turn in philosophical theory. He tries to demonstrate how the category of historicity, in its various formulations and through manifold and complex mediations, has an important role first in the Kriegsideologie, then in the 'conservative revolution', and finally in Nazism and its circles (76). It prepared the ground for a new war against western democracies, liberalism, reason, idolatry of money and capitalism. …