purity, thereby revealing the extent to which his Denken had become entangled in the “cleansing fantasies” of Nazi race doctrine.43
Heidegger fused Nietzsche’s vision of imminent apocalypse with the dystopian perspective of contemporary Zivilisationskritiker such as Spengler and Jünger. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger reaffirmed Spengler’s “diagnosis of the times,” declaring at one point, “We cannot find the most trifling reason or occasion to oppose Spengler’s findings.”44 Heidegger’s admiration for Jünger’s allegory of political totalitarianism, Der Arbeiter (1932), has been copiously documented. As Heidegger acknowledged in 1945, by the early 1930s, Jünger’s glorification of a “totally mobilized” Arbeiter-Soldatengesellschaft had become the template or prism through which he interpreted contemporary politics.45
In the discourse of central European Kulturkritik, the specter of “decline” has consistently played a pivotal ideological role. However, as a diagnostic tool or concept, it had little empirical or objective value. As Michel Winock has shown in “The Eternal Refrain of ‘Decadence,’” the principal elements of the worldview in question are existential revulsion of the historical present, nostalgia for a Golden Age, anti-individualism, a longing for authority and a new elite, and fear of genetic degeneration.46
Heidegger’s appropriation of the conservative revolutionary standpoint not only influenced his “political formation,” narrowly construed but also significantly impacted the existential ontology of Being and Time. The “conservative revolutionary critique of modern technology, rootless capitalism, and political liberalism” suffused Heidegger’s critique of “average, everyday Being-in-theworld” in Division I.47 As Jürgen Habermas concluded in a retrospective evaluation of Heidegger’s work that was published on the occasion of Heidegger’s seventieth birthday, “Under the label of the everyday mode of being of das Man, one finds the current concepts of cultural criticism from Oswald Spengler down to Alfred Weber, reconceived as ontology.”48 Heidegger’s dark portrayal of the “fallen” (verfallen) nature of “society” (Gesellschaft) consistently reprised the central elements of “reactionary modernist” Zivilisationskritik that was so widespread among radical conservative intellectuals.49
Heidegger was, first and foremost, a philosopher of “temporality” and “historicity.” He was equally a philosopher of “Being-in-the-world.” He held traditional philosophy’s preoccupation with eternal verities in low esteem.
A cursory glance at the existential analytic of Being and Time—especially, those sections devoted to a critique of “everyday Being-in-the-world”—indicates