Destiny

Gregory Fried

These are trying times to think seriously about “destiny” in Heidegger’s work. Trying for Heidegger scholars, because after the publication of his Black Notebooks, it has become all the clearer that his conception of historical destiny was tied to his philosophical commitment to National Socialism. Trying also because Heidegger’s critique of modernity and of the historical current of Western thought has proven to be quite prophetic, which is disquieting, given that political episode. Trying, too, and most importantly, because confronting Heidegger on destiny may provide us with the opportunity to make our own what is at issue in the question, die Sache selbst, and as such, this is a necessary trial for us, in our historical situation.

On Heidegger as a prophet of the destiny of the West and the global age, we must address the usual confusion about “destiny.” Heidegger’s “destiny” must not be read ontically as a pre-programmed set of occurrences, foretold by the gods, foreseen by God’s providence, or predictable by the causal chains of natural laws. Instead, ontologically, destiny is a feature of human being’s existential constitution, the way that we are in the world. That is because, existentially, we are a thrown projection in our temporal historicity. We have a world as a meaningful world because we always already find ourselves thrown into a world of meaning that is prior to our own doings and makings. This having-a-past as thrown also has a momentum that casts us forward, projecting into the horizons of possibility as having-a-future. For individual human beings, the momentum of this trajectory projects possibilities that are, as determinate possibilities, “fate” (Schicksal), but because we do not exist as isolated monads, the meaningful momentum of the past, which Heidegger calls “heritage” (Erbe), necessarily encompasses a world of meaning that we share with others in a community, a people, a Volk; this shared momentum that outlines the horizons of futural meaning therefore projects a shared fate, a Ge-schick, “destiny” (SZ §74), that circumscribes the possibilities of Being for a community and the individuals it encompasses.

However, “Being is always the Being of a being” (GA 2: 12/SZ 9), and so the meaning of Being must always manifest in the meaning of historical events. Ereignis makes itself known, or at least felt, in the events that punctuate our existence. Although, during the global economic and political collapse of 1929, Heidegger warns that “the contemporary social distress” (GA 29/30: 243–44/262), or, in 1966, that the proliferation of atomic weapons is nothing compared to the uprooting in the history of Being (GA 16: 670), those ontic events are nevertheless intimations of the deeper ontological crisis. While Heidegger is no Hegelian teleologist, which is to say, no Platonist about the Ideal making itself Real through history, neither is history just one damn thing after another for him. There must be a story to history, otherwise the momentum of existential historicity would instantly disperse and the world become meaningless. The story he tells, of course, is the story of a history of Being with a first inception among the earliest Greek thinkers, a stumble into metaphysics with Plato, a tumble into onto-theological nihilism with Christianity, and a catastrophic turn into the machinational devastation of modernity — a turn that Heidegger thought possible to turn into “an other inception” in the destiny of the West, and so of the world, through his engagement in National Socialism.

This is why Heidegger’s more conventionally prophetic insight into the destiny of our age is so unsettling: that cybernetics would come to dominate commerce, entertainment, business, and politics; that devices (Geräte) would permeate our communications, entertainment, and social interactions; that human beings as much as material nature would be reduced to resources; and that all this would proliferate on a planetary scale in the service of a will to power unhinged by hubris that brooks no finitude and no refuge from its reach. One might say that any sensitive observer of the past century might make such predictions without also opting for Nazism, but that does not excuse us as readers of Heidegger from the trial of our times, because his history of Being is so intimately bound up with his diagnosis of the meaning and effects of “the essence” of technology as a feature of the metaphysical nihilism defined by that history. There is no neat incision that would allow us to excise, simply, his particular narrative of the destiny of the West as determinant for the destiny of the global age from his conception of historicity, fate, and destiny more broadly as features of the existential analytic and of his analysis of the forgetting of the question of Being since Plato. That is not to say it cannot be done, but it is a destiny for Heidegger scholarship to address this.

The even greater trial, though, is not one for Heidegger scholarship, but for us, whoever “we” are, in the Geschick that binds us in a common destiny in this historical moment. The scope of that “we” is precisely what is at issue in the destiny of the Being of our politics in a global age. Heidegger’s diagnosis of the ills of modernity was bound up with his critique of a “Liberalism” that he deemed implicit in the very beginnings of metaphysics, in the universalism, atemporalism, and idealism of Plato. That a resurgent neo-nationalism and ethnocentric atavism is cresting across the globe should give us pause, especially because in Europe, in the u.s., and even in places like Iran, the most implacable enemies of the Western Enlightenment, in its universalist aspirations, are drawing upon Heidegger for their intellectual inspiration. Once again, that should not cause us to turn away from Heidegger, but quite the reverse, to confront what is at issue in and through him all the more rigorously as an avatar of a destiny that involves us all. To risk the more ontic form of thinking about destiny, it is likely that this challenge will become all the starker as the global climate crisis drives migration and conflict at a growing scale and populations fall back on exclusionary identities for solace and security. At issue in the question of destiny is who we think we are and how we will inhabit this earth responsibly.