The South Central Modern Language Association

Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity by Michael ZimmermanReview by: William VaughanSouth Central Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, Reason, Reasoning, and Literature in the Renaissance(Summer, 1993), pp. 119-120Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern LanguageAssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190005 .Accessed: 13/04/2012 15:58

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Reviews

Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. 306 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $18.95.

There were too few readable books about Heidegger's philosophy and its relation to National Socialism published in the period of 1989-1992 that we can afford to overlook even one. Michael Zimmerman's entry deserves attention as a solid sec- ondary source, combining as it does the best features of historical analysis with philosophical exegesis to produce a much-needed overview of the Heidegger-affair and its origins. The book casts new light on this most difficult and seminal of twentieth-century philosophers.

Zimmerman's initial focus is on the social and historical background of Heidegger's thinking. He reconstructs the intellectual milieu from which Heidegger emerged with keen precision, and spells out how the post-imperial German crisis, with its militarism and nostalgia for preindustrial society, left its traces on Heidegger's thought. Zimmerman is particularly good when doing intellectual history-spell- ing out the vllkisch ideology which promoted the idea that scientific rationalism, economic and political individualism, and industrial technology were sapping Ger- many of its spiritual strength. The author's command of the perplexing mixtures at work in the Weimar era is impressive, and he avoids getting bogged down in excessive philosophical exegesis. Of particular value is the focus on the common trajectory of Heidegger's thought with that of Ernst Jiinger. This makes compelling reading, and although the Heidegger-Jiinger relationship has been no secret in Germany, Zimmerman's is the most comprehensive account of it available in En- glish. Readers will have little trouble discerning the impact thatJiinger's invocations of storms of steel and the automized work processes of modernity made on Heidegger's thinking concerning technology. This alone is a valuable and eminently readable achievement.

Zimmerman explains Heidegger's attraction to Nazism first on the grounds that the latter proposed to overcome the alienation of the modem workerby transforming labor into a form of art. Heidegger at first thought only a great work of art could save Germany from the leveling effects of technology, but eventually came to see National Socialism as a means of strengthening and surmounting the technological epoch. The connections between Heidegger's views on art and the general aesthetic accomplishments of German fascism, the glorification and idolization of folk-labor and practices, are presented with great clarity. Zimmerman shows how closely Heidegger's work in this period parallels the attempt by Germany to re-invent itself through self-generated mythification, and how this, combined with the rejection of Enlightenment political ideals, leads to a monumental disaster. The result succeeds both in presenting Heidegger's thoughts accurately, expressing those thoughts with eminent clarity, and giving one insight into the view which saw the Third Reich as an unprecedented amoral and aesthetic phenomenon.

The first few chapters of the second part of the book are also to be commended for their concise analysis of some of the basic issues in Being and Time and their relation to the history of technological metaphysics. Non-Heideggerians especially will benefit from the discussion of the importance Heidegger placed on the Roman translations of Greek terms for being, and the tracing of "technological thought" through medieval Christianity, Descartes, and Nietzche. Explaining Heidegger's views concerning the change of truth from aletheia to certainty, and the change of substance from hypokeimenon to subject is no easy task, but Zimmerman captures

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Heidegger's difficult arguments judiciously and economically, without being reduc- tive.

Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity does have shortcomings. Zimmerman is prone to moralizing when he chides Heidegger for thinking himself beyond good and evil. The point is not whether one is against Heidegger but how one is against him, and how this privileges certain questions and silences others. One might instead deal directly with Heidegger's replacement of the distinction between fact and value with the conception of meaning as found in hermeneutic phenomenol- ogy. The book's later chapters seem to lose exegetical steam. Some throw-away references to feminism and deep-ecology are indications that in places Zimmerman has cast his net too wide.

For some, the virtues I have been pointing out will also be seen as vices. Zimmer- man does not trace the emergence of Heidegger's thought in the shifts and tremblings which characterize the various texts. Thus where the book succeeds admirably with Heidegger's views on technology, it falters on Heidegger's later views on language. To the uninitiated, there will be virtue in Zimmerman's presenting Heidegger to those accustomed to philosophical discussion conducted through contests of view and oppositional argument; but to those already familiar with Heidegger, there may be a problem in Zimmerman's ignoring Heidegger's own indirection, his own "reading into the fissures" of the texts of others. The lacuna is in not pursuing the intimate relationship between technology and the poetic language of the still later Heidegger. This is an area much in need of Zimmerman's explanatory skills.

Zimmerman's work deserves praise for remaining free from the associational, deconstructive commentaries on Heidegger (of which there are too many), yet he fails to address how Heidegger inserts his own destabilizing interpretation of texts into his own text Heidegger is nothing if not aware that the very issue of raising the question of technology is fraught with difficulties; his thought is marked by the trenchant problem in understanding technology of not merely executing its man- date. Cataloging Heidegger is perhaps not the best way to understand the Gestell in earnest, since cataloging is but one of the Gestell's standard moves. Zimmerman does not address this, and in his presentation of Heidegger's thought seems unaware of Heidegger's disruptiveness with respect to the very distinctions between philoso- phy, politics, and history to which Zimmerman makes traditional appeal. Something is lost when, in writing a book claiming to reveal Heidegger's thinking concerning technology, a part of that thinking is thereby concealed as well. Even within as fine a book as Zimmerman's, one needs to indicate by way of something more than what amounts to a mere asterisk that it is the illegitimacy of the very thinking behind the project being undertaken that Heidegger works furiously to reveal.

William Vaughan Ohio Northern University

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Article Contentsp. 119p. 120

Issue Table of ContentsSouth Central Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, Reason, Reasoning, and Literature in the Renaissance (Summer, 1993), pp. 1-122Front MatterReason, Reasoning, and Literature in the Renaissance [pp. 1 - 2]Reasoning with the Senses: The Humanist Imagination [pp. 3 - 19]Dialogical Argument: Scripting Rhetoric (The Case of Guy de Brus's Dialogues) [pp. 20 - 31]Monsters and Modal Logic among French Naturalists of the Renaissance [pp. 32 - 48]The Law of Non-Contradiction and French Renaissance Literature: Skepticism and Negative Theology [pp. 49 - 66]In the Margins of Truth and Falsehood [pp. 67 - 75]"Si les signes vous fchent...": Natural Inference and the Science of Signs in the Renaissance [pp. 76 - 99]Reasoning Away Colonialism: Tasso and the Production of the "Gerusalemme Liberata" [pp. 100 - 114]Reviewsuntitled [pp. 115 - 117]untitled [pp. 117 - 118]untitled [pp. 119 - 120]

Back Matter [pp. 121 - 122]