Vanguard News Network

by Michael O’Meara

Note: The following is an excerpt from a longer,
heavily footnoted article titled “Freedom’s Racial
Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self
Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” which
appeared in the fall 2006 issue of The Occidental
Quarterly. Minor changes have been made for the sake of
this format. Thanks to Dave Cooper for the idea.
-M.O.

Since the Cold War’s end, Heidegger has been the
target of an on-going campaign of stigmatization and
quarantine, for it’s now clear that he was not only an
ardent supporter of the National Revolution of 1933,
but a convinced (though idiosyncratic) National
Socialist. That the greatest philosophical mind of
the 20th century was a Nazi is a scandal, of course.
But, surprisingly, the inquisitors deconstructing the
suspect forces animating Heidegger’s thought stress
that there is “no spoor of biological racism” (George
Steiner) in his published works.

It is, in fact, a matter of record that Heidegger
opposed what Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey,
along with Leon Trotsky, called the “zoological
materialism” dominant in Nazi ranks. Like the Italian
and American prophets of Europe’s imperium, Heidegger
believed the philistine, positivist, even liberal
modernist character of this scientistic doctrine was
symptomatic of all the Conservative Revolution of the
1920s (of which National Socialism was an offshoot)
had fought against.

Is it contradictory, then, to argue that the
Heideggerian concept of freedom has a racial
imperative?

Against a good deal of contemporary commentary, it
must be insisted that Heidegger’s anti-biologism was
not that of a nationalist indifferent to race, but
rather that of one who subsumed the nation’s spiritual
and demographic aspects within a single notion of
Being — a notion that may have privileged the former
at the latter’s expense, but nevertheless one that
presupposed the spirit’s manifestation within a
specific biocultural community or Volk. Emphasizing
the history, destiny, and line of descent that makes a
people a nation, the nationalism latent in Heidegger’s
thought is reminiscent of what Walker Connor calls
“nationalism in its pristine sense,” in that it
designates “a people who believe they are ancestrally
[i.e., biologically] related.”

Even though a man’s body is subject to a purely
biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never
simply biological, but “something essentially other
than an animal organism.” This “other” belongs to
man’s Dasein [i.e., to his quality as a situated
expression of Being] and thus has “a fundamentally
different way of Being to that of nature.” “Living,
our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos
— it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the
world.” Biology in this way enters history and
becomes historically significant. Man’s body as such
is not equivalent to a plant or animal organism, but
part of man’s Being-in-the-world, situated in that web
of meanings, relationships, and histories which make
up his world and which no science can successfully or
adequately reduce to an empirical representation or
valuation.

For the anti-scientistic Heidegger, the essence of a
nation (or Volk) lies not in genetics, but in the
destiny born of its collective experience of Being and
time — or what in Contributions to Philosophy he
describes as that belongingness to a god who commands
a people to go beyond itself to become the being
inscribed in its destiny. A people’s essence lies
thus less in its organic manifestations (life) than in
the being that makes it what it is (living): It lies
in the being that forges blood and spirit into an
identity defined by a specific destiny. By contrast,
a purely biological construal reduces a “race” of men
to one of Descartes’ abstract, becomingless objects —
to something understandable factually or empirically,
as if human races were analogous to those of the lower
life forms.

Heidegger doesn’t say so explicitly, but the turn of
his thought suggests that though a people’s blood may
be basic to its biological formation, its determinants
as a people, even genetically, reside elsewhere,
outside of biology, in that Being whose inexplicable
force molds a body of kindred human beings into a
destining entity. To contemporize a bit, one might
say that for Heidegger man’s biological constitution
(heredity) disposes him to certain cultural and other
potentialities, but the latter are never mere
offshoots of nature. For history, he argues, is not
biology and culture is not applied zoology — except
to a scientistic consciousness oblivious to all that
distinguishes man from animal.

An analogy here might help. One wouldn’t claim the
essence of Breker’s The Torchbearer or Burne-Jones’
Dream of Lancelot is the material from which it was
sculpted or painted. The essence of the German Volk
— or any of Europe’s nations — is likewise not the
DNA constituent of its genotype. Instead, it is the
spirit animating it, making it a people with a
history, an origin, and a destiny. In compelling it
to experience the world in a way all its own, this
spirit is not the cultural superstructure familiar to
the anthropologist or sociologist, but something akin
to “the power that comes from preserving at the most
profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil
and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly
and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”
It is this spirit that nourishes the soul of a people
and infuses its blood with a will to destiny.
Heidegger’s ontological defense of European man may
therefore reject the scientific racism of bourgeois
materialism, with its abstract and deracinated concept
of human being, but he’s hardly indifferent to
Europe’s racial heritage, for though emphasizing a
Volk’s spiritual or destining character, he also sees
that this entails a specific bodily expression of
being.

In the historical world of European man, human biology
and human being are indeed one, with the biological,
the ontic, subsumed to the ontological realm of
self-assertion — like the material subsumed in the
artist’s vision. Together, they comprise the Dasein
of man and Volk, the blood and heritage of a people.
For like the “and” in Being and Time, the “and” in
“blood and heritage” is not additive but unitary. The
two differ as terms, standing for different things,
but there’s no heritage outside a specific blood group
and no blood group without a heritage. “Everything
merely ‘organic’ is foreign to the law of history, as
foreign as what is ‘logical’ in reason.”

Human biology is consequently more ontological than
zoological, more a product of Being than a facet of
nature. This is evident in such terms as “descent,”
“lineage,” “heritage” — along with related notions of
“breeding,” “upbringing,” “development,” “education,”
“refinement,” and “culture” — terms evoking not
animal instinct or even human consciousness, but
rather a specific biocultural transmission of
existence. A people, in a word, is not an autonomous,
self-contained, ahistorical biological object, it’s
not even a specific gene pool, but a way of Being
whose origin, history, and particular
self-understanding is essential to what it is — even
physiologically. In order not to be misunderstood,
let me stress that this doesn’t negate the importance
or even the primordiality of race as a zoological
category, but it does subordinate our understanding of
it to philosophy’s larger ontological appreciation of
its significance.

What Heidegger calls the “naturalist conception of
human being” (i.e., the purely biological
understanding of human race) has been integral to both
liberal modernity and the history of the white man’s
decline. The roots of this conception are admittedly
ancient. Aristotle was the first to see man as a
special kind of animal — the rational animal (zoon
logikon). With the 18th-century Enlightenment and the
advent of liberal modernity, when “reason attained its
full metaphysical rank,” this “humanist” concept
became hegemonic, introducing an era which confused
man, a Being-outside-himself, with something
“present-at-hand” (i.e., with the decontextualized
substance of a quantifying science indifferent to a
being’s specific qualities). As Being in this
scientistic conceptualization withdraws from human
being, the latter is depleted, reduced to a
one-dimensional ontology fit for an animal that moves
about on all fours — not for an upright assertion of
Being capable of producing Homer, the Greek temples,
or the invincible Hoplites.

It’s pertinent here to point out that “scientific
racism,” especially its Darwinian distillation,
originated as an offshoot of liberal thought and that
the zoological “metaphysics” of this racism (in
understanding human existence at the animal level)
played a not insignificant role in getting us into the
predicament that threatens us today. In this sense,
it seems hardly coincidental that the liberals’
understanding of the “highest animal” excludes any
understanding that humans differ from animals not just
in their reason or consciousness, but in their caring
for the Being of their being. Natural science, the
inspiration for this scientific racism, treats the
body abstractly, objectifying, decontextualizing, and
uprooting it from all that is native to human being.

Against the naturalist conception, Heidegger holds
that the human body is not simply a vehicle of drives
and instincts, but something linked to the human
striving for Being. Science may have the power to
manipulate the world’s physical properties, but for
Heidegger it ignores man’s “peculiar transposedness
into the encompassing contextual ring of living
beings.” It consequently misses what is most distinct
and essential to him.

Accordingly, the Dasein of a Volk, like that of an
individual, is not manifested in biology (at least not
directly), but rather in the decisions it makes and
the goals it sets for itself. How it exists in the
world in which it is thrown, how it appropriates the
past it is bequeathed, the possibilities it pursues as
it approaches the future, the call of destiny it heeds
— these are what make a Volk what it is. There is,
moreover, nothing arbitrary or subjective in this.
Dasein is not only Being-there, but Being-with
(Mitsein). For the most radical individualization of
Dasein is always situated within a larger collective
context — of history and culture, to be sure, but
also of kin, community, and Volk. “Each man,”
Heidegger writes, “is in each instance in dialogue
with his forebears and perhaps even more, and in a
more hidden manner, with those who come after him.”

Because an individual’s fate, like a nation’s destiny,
is shaped by its specific heritage, individual Dasein
is invariably a co-happening with a community or
people, even if it should rebel against the dominant
social trends or disavow its beliefs. Unlike the
quantitative, atomizing impulse of liberal modernity,
which separates “I” from “we” and treats the former as
if it were a monadic ego shorn of the history and
heritage situating and defining it as a distinct way
of Being, Heidegger’s approach dissolves individual
boundaries. The individualization of an individual
consequently becomes a co-historicizing with a people.
Though potentially a force for conformity, Mitsein is
a necessary condition for Dasein’s authentic
realization. Man and nation, Dasein and Mitsein, it
follows, are free only to the degree they open
themselves to what is inherent in their common
heritage — to what constitutes the history of their
related experience of Being — to what forms their
destiny.

If a Volk exists as a Volk, then blood group, history,
and destiny are one, for ontologically they constitute
a single, encompassing experience of time and Being.
In this sense, a people’s essence transcends the
purely “organic,” as it asserts its Dasein as a
distinct destiny. Otherwise, it ceases to be in any
meaningful sense.