FREEDOM’S RACIAL IMPERATIVE
A Heideggerian Argument for the
Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent
Michael O’Meara
They’re killing us with their freedom.
Every dissolution of social order, every assault on the family, the unrelenting denigration of authority and heritage, and now our biological replacement by the wretched refuse of the Third World—all justified, legislated, and celebrated in freedom’s hallowed name.
But what kind of freedom threatens the most permanent of tyrannies: extinction?
The short answer is that it’s the false freedom of liberals, cosmopolitans, globalists, and New Class agents indifferent or hostile to peoples of European descent. The philosophical answer is more complex and requires somewhat more of us.
LIBERALISM AS THE IDEOLOGY OF CONSUMMATE MEANINGLESSNESS
That the prevailing “freedom”’s system of rights and procedures has made a small number of people, many not of European origin, very well off and very engaged in keeping us under their thumb explains much of its dominance. But there is also something in the history, culture, and declining Being of our people that disposes them to seeing themselves in ways that leave them indifferent to their survival as a race and a culture.
Most symptomatic of this identity-destroying disposition is liberalism. As an ideology, it rejects all collective, historically formed, and blood-based identities, for it privileges an individual disconnected from history, heritage, and kin—an individual who first demands to be treated in respect to his accomplishments rather than his birth—but who, eventually, becomes simply an abstract individual, neither white nor black, male or female, young or old—who exists entirely for himself, cut off from those that came before and those that might come in the future—“an atom without connection.” On the basis of this individualistic fiction, liberalism rejects affiliations of all kind, positing a world of unrelated but homogenous private ego-subjects situated in a realm of unrestricted circulation, a market, where each—in the name of rationality—behaves according to his immediate benefit. Alien to every ancient and medieval concept of communal decision-making or self-rule, liberal freedom comes to favor what John Gray calls “an assured space of individual independence,” which is devoted to personal, not family or ethnoracial, rights.1
The liberal concept of freedom was born in opposition to “despotic” rulers—to monarchical regimes obstructing the development of those individualistic social forms favored by the “rising bourgeoisie.” With the Enlightenment, it assumed a scientistic guise, premised on the notion that life is to be led according to reason, unhampered by tradition’s “deforming” effects or nature’s irrational ascriptions. From this rationalizing abstraction, it was but a step to identifying freedom with a condition in which “each lives as he likes,” irrespective of “authority and majorities, custom and opinion” (Lord Acton). Liberal freedom became thus more than a political principle—it became a totalizing way of Being, whose values, assumptions, and implicit modes of existence dismiss all that has traditionally animated European life.2
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At this point, Martin Heidegger can help us understand something of liberalism’s ontological ramification. Against the main currents of modern thought, he argues that “the leading philosophical question” is not about the subjectivist imperatives of liberal individualism, but about Being—with the question that asks why is there something rather than nothing.3 This question of Being is admittedly an impossible one: In the one hundred volumes of Heidegger’s collected work, he never actually answers it. But if the question is not posed—if the difference between beings and nothing goes unexamined and if ontology gives itself over to the prevailing world view—it will lead (it has led) to indifference and from indifference to oblivion. For questioning, this “piety of thought,” “unlocks the essential in all things” and the question of Being is “the question of all questions.”4
To avoid it, then, is tantamount to avoiding the essence of existence. Even those who scoff at it, dismissing it as an empty abstraction, all wind and water, usually already work within a set of assumptions about it. For however unanswerable, it awakens in us something of the mysteries and demands of existence—putting all else in perspective. The important thing, therefore, is less the answer than the question, given that everything follows from it—everything, perhaps, except our recognition of its primacy. Beginning with Plato and assuming a qualitatively more categorical character with modernity, the question gets ignored or sidetracked, as concern with beings (entities in the world) crowds out more fundamental issues of beings as a whole (i.e., Being).5
Because the question of Being—the question of what it means “to be” or to exist—is a question of meaning, the failure to address it speaks to the meaninglessness of the modern world. Not coincidentally, the preeminent exemplar of liberalism’s inherent meaninglessness is the founder of the modern philosophical project, René Descartes, who ignored the question entirely. In his work, an altogether different issue is addressed: that of how the individual mind (ego cogito) comes to know and to establish an accurate knowledge of the world “outside” it. Historically, Descartes’s quest for a reliable epistemology arose in reaction to the breakdown of medieval Christianity—and to the crisis this created in the European consciousness. The alternative epistemology he founded was to serve as “the self-posited ground and measure for all certitude and truth.”6 In this new system—where the “consciousness of things and of beings as a whole [refers] back to the self-consciousness of the human subject as the unshakable ground of all certainty”—heaven’s sacred, but no longer believable, authority ceded to an abstract reason whose authority derived from certain mathematical principles.7
As traditional pre-reflective principles and Church doctrine retreated before a system that was to provide a new “foundation of knowledge and…of the truth of what is knowable,” Descartes helped lay the metaphysical foundation of the modern age.8 an age that would lead not just to a reevaluation of Christian values, but to their eventual dethronement and to the onset of a nihilism whose stupefying and inescapable meaninglessness now poses the most devastating threat ever made against European Being. Ivan Turgenev, the first to popularize the term, defined this “nihilism” as the offshoot of a scientific positivism that pits experience (understood as sensuous perception) against every other thing, especially everything “grounded on tradition, authority, or any other definite value.”9 For Heidegger, nihilism is the condition in which “there is nothing to Being itself”—as immersion in beings (objects) obliterates an awareness of Being and of the higher values.10 For both, nihilism’s “falling away of Being” is seen as seeping into and assailing the rank, spirit, and identity of European peoples.
Key to Descartes’s epistemology is his model of subject-object relations, which categorizes worldly entities as either res cogitans (conscious substance) or res extensa (extended, divisible, spatial substance) —that is, as mind or matter. The guiding philosophical problem for Descartes is to determine how the subject’s conscious mind, presumed separated from and unrelated to external reality, including the body housing it, is able to know—and achieve certainty of—the world “outside” it. Truth in this model becomes a matter of establishing an accurate correspondence between a statement (whose ideal form is mathematical) and the substance this statement endeavors to represent. Methodologically, this reduces beings to percepta or objects, with the assumption that the subject (whose domain is pure cognition) is unrelated to what it represents and that the “truth” conveyed in its mirroring representations is essentially a matter of accuracy and objectivity.
Knowledge in Descartes’s world (this realm of objective substances) is thus associated with the “factually” verifiable or quantifiable designations of its attributes, which are formulatable in the precise and certain language of mathematics. 11 But like naturalistic rationalism (science) and political rationalism (liberalism), Cartesian or philosophical rationalism “proceeds mathematically in this way only because, in a deeper sense, it is already itself mathematical.”12 That is, the world for it is assumed to be (projected as) mathematical. Truth as adequation subsumes thereby the logical positing of the concept at the expense of the extralogical character of existence, which means the world for it is “experienced” not as it actually is, but as it is assumed to be. Cartesian representations are thus hardly impartial, even when numerically formulated, for they reflect the quantitative, objectifying, homogenous standards of a representing subject uprooted from the temporal event structure in which life is lived and from the qualitative designations that distinguish human being from other life forms.13
That Descartes’s world is an extended, divisible, spatial substance knowable through its quantifiable properties makes it an objectifiable, measurable, calculable world. Its truths, like mathematical premises, are universal, timeless, unconditioned. If anything doesn’t fit in its scheme, it simply gets swept into the “swamp of the irrational.”
In contrast, then, to our ancestors’ world, Descartes’s world of res extensa is a flattened one, devoid of human beings whose differences are destining and whose past, present, and future are ready at hand and beyond representation. In its world, the subject regards everything and everyone as an object of calculation, a means to mensural or materialist ends. The subject as such absorbs everything objective and vice versa, just as all its thought is reduced to a calculation heedless of “the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”14
Human beings are thus seen as “mind-matter conglomerates with peculiar causal properties,” not as life-stories that fail or succeed in realizing the possibilities inherent to the world into which they have been thrown.15 “What is” accordingly becomes “what is present right now,” not “what has been” or what is in the process of being.16 Similarly, ascriptive or qualitative attributes (family, race, religion, culture, etc.) are treated as distractions from reason’s capacity to clearly and impartially represent the objective reality situating the subject. For this reason, Descartes’s method endeavors to free the subject from all such attachments, as if they were of secondary importance.
Descartes’s calculating rationality would play a leading role in empowering modern science with its often miraculous facility over “the things of nature,” but this technoscientific prowess came at a cost, for once its mathematical system of reason (whose preontological impetus is perfectly appropriate to the investigation of material or living substances) was extended to man and society, it became scientistic, leading ultimately to an understanding of human beings that is analogous to the biologist’s understanding of plant and animal organisms (which are devoid of ontological significance) and thus to an understanding devoid of meaning.
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Immanuel Kant, the first to philosophize the “question of freedom,” approaches the world like Descartes. He begins with Cartesianism’s dehistoricized, peopleless subject, which is seen as an “end in itself,” something that is to be “freed” for the sake of its “self-assured self-legislation.” This prompts Kant to treat freedom as a problem of eliminating whatever obstructs the subject’s ends. He thus defines freedom as a form of autonomy or independence that liberates the subject from the objective realm situating and restraining it—a “freedom from.” More positively, he defines it as a form of self-determination, by which the subject realizes itself in its own terms—a “freedom for.”17 In either the negative or positive case, freedom for Kant is the autonomy of a reasoning, self-legislating subject, liberated from “every casual nexus.”18 Because his subject has the “power to act according to concepts”—concepts (ideas) being the Cartesian representations man makes of his objective world—freedom for him is rooted in reason and linked to will, insofar as the latter is exercised in accordance with its knowing representations. This makes Kantian freedom the willing of a pure “ought” unconditioned by contingency, a willing that lets the subject’s alleged essence determine itself, irrespective of the heritage, horizon, and possibilities situating it. What counts here is not the specific ends the subject chooses for itself (which implies something about the world and the significance of human life), but the capacity to choose.
Moreover, by making the subject independent of both nature and of history, Kantian subjectivism legitimizes the egoistic individualism—the “freedom of choice”— made by an “I think” indifferent to race, nation, and one’s own progeny—that Revilo Oliver claimed was “the real fulcrum of power in our society.”19 For no one in the rationalist grips of this subjectivist metaphysics “stands with anyone else and no community stands with any other in the rooted unity of essential action.”20
Kantian freedom is purely individualistic, identified with “self-determination in the sense that what is free itself gives the law of its own being in terms of itself.”21 Reason here imbues the individual with the capacity to act regardless of everything else since everything else has been divested of Being and submitted to a subjectivism fi xed on its on own ontologically diminished ends, goals, and purposes. This gets us to liberalism’s inherent meaninglessness, for in dismissing Being for a world of flattened, subjectivized representations that are to be measured, planned, and calculated, the presencing, unfolding, and projected essence informing man’s Being is also dismissed. Despite, therefore, the ostensibly rigorous forms of liberalism’s modern representations, they are oblivious to Being’s “arising and abiding” truth—and to the fact that man is not an atomized, de-historicized, utterly subjectivized object. Truth in the Kantian sense simply reduces “the essentiality of essence (that is, beingness) to an object of calculation.”22
The absence of meaning implicit in this quantifying subjectivism becomes, in turn, “the ‘meaning’ of beings as a whole,” for the unquestionability of Being now decides what beings are to be. Henceforth, humanity must not only “’make do’ without a ‘truth,’ but the essence of truth itself is dispatched to oblivion.”23 More seriously, the certitude that comes when the truth of Being is confused with an “accurate” picturing of entities in one of their momentarily verifi able appearances inevitably deprives beings of the truth (the meaning) that Being alone possesses. Life as a consequence is handed over to a subjectivist disposability or machination that replaces the truth of Being with its own goals and use-values. “All that is left,” Heidegger writes, “is the solitary superficies of a ‘life’ that empowers itself to itself for its own sake.”24 Aimlessness, it seems to follow, becomes the aim and meaninglessness the meaning.
The Kantian conception of freedom undergirding the liberal project, Heidegger argues, owes more to the particular social-historical influences of the eighteenth century Enlightenment than to Kant’s elaborate metaphysics— for the Enlightenment’s rationalist exaltations held that human freedom was possible only by elevating reason (reason being the essence of subjectivity) to the pinnacle of human affairs.25 In his counter-argument, Heidegger contends that the subject’s will wills nothing other than its own existence and that freedom lies not in transcendence from causality, but in Being itself, as man endeavors to be who he is.
THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM
Rather than Descartes’s world of representing subjects, Heidegger posits a life-world, whose preexisting structure of cultural and historical references transcends the subject’s monadic parameters, encompassing those temporal states that inform the different facets of human existence—as man appropriates his past, projects himself toward future goals, and comports himself toward other beings in the present. Whenever Heideggerian man becomes who he is, past, present, and future become equally immediate to him. This makes his world more than the quantifying spatial expanse of Cartesian rationalism. It becomes one in which time lets things appear in their proper place and then takes them back, as projection, care, and decision affect man’s relationship to himself and to all manifestations of Being —which here is seen not as a substance but as the possibility native to all destining.26
As Heidegger deconstructs the contrived atemporal world of liberalism’s self-contained subjectivities and objectivities, he shifts philosophy from knowledge to Being, from epistemology to ontology. His world, as such, is not a realm of unrelated, decontextualized objects, which a detached, conscious subject attempts to know through its representations, but a meaningful totality in which the “subject” is situated as both a constitutive and constituting part.27 Relatedly, he sees Being’s contingent, evolving truths not as universal, immutable certainties that can be plotted on a grid and referenced mathematically, but as occurrences whose unfolding presence is intermittently concealed and unconcealed in time.
This makes Heidegger’s human being a Being-there, a Dasein, a “field of concern” opened to the world not just in terms of the meanings already laid out in advance by the pre-existing heritage of Being, but in terms of the specific time and place situating it. Unlike modernity’s subjectivist epistemology, which orients to the subject’s various decontextualized “now” moments, Heidegger claims there is no subject outside of history, no subject whose identity is independent of its experiences and relations with others, no subject unaffected by the world whose givenness encompasses whatever is opened to it. Indeed, only in disregarding the specifically fi nite character of man’s world and fl attening out its dense historicity is it possible, he argues, for liberal thought to
see man in terms of its rationalist caricature.
“The essence of truth,” Heidegger writes, “is not a mere concept, carried about in the head…[It] is alive…It is what is sought after, what is fought for, what is suffered for. The essence of truth is a happening.”28 Its arising and abiding essence lies as such in advance of particular things and at their foundation. It is something which lets “the true be the true that it is.”29 Whenever Being’s self-emerging, self-showing, and asserting essence is lost, truth becomes mere representation, a generalization of a crystallized presence devoid of possibility—and thus of Being. Thought and knowledge are therefore gained by Heidegger not in abstraction from Being or through a logical ordering of its alleged attributes—but in the depths of its unconcealing truths, which are reached whenever existence engages the possibilities distinct to what “belongs” to it.30
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In ancient and medieval philosophy, “to be” meant to be an enduring presence, the eternal being being God. For moderns, it becomes a being, an object, in time and space or else a self-conscious subject. Both approaches, Heidegger argues, neglect that human being is neither an enduring presence nor a subject fixed in the present, but une ouverture, an opening, never complete in itself and always in the process of becoming. That Dasein (the “being for whom Being itself is at issue”) is situated in a polychronous stream of meanings and purposes within which Dasein acts and encounters other beings makes it more a process than a substance—a process conditioned by its “there” (da), the context of meaning opening and situating it in the world into which it has been thrown. Only in this context, he argues, is it possible for conscious being to understand and realize itself for what it is. How man responds to his world is thus always a question for him.
Two major consequences follow this condition. First it is a source of anguish, for once human being is divested of foundation and handed over to contingency, “Dasein fi nds itself face to face with the nothing of the possible impossibility of its own existence.”31 Second, the uncertainty at the root of this anxiety is also a source of freedom—in that man is always free to choose or will the possibilities inherent in his various openings to Being. Who we are, therefore, is always a question for us: We have no choice but to decide which of the possibilities bequeathed by our destiny to pursue and whether to do so in ways faithful to “who we are.”
Because Being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon (with the world and our Being-in-it making up a constituent whole), its entities are never independent of one another, as Descartes or Kant held. Everything “present-at-hand” (i.e., objects seen as detached substances) belongs actually to a single humanly constructed totality of relations, just as the individual is not the basic unit of society but its offshoot. Similarly, Dasein’s ouverture happens only within the existentially constituted nexus of relations formed by the heritage distinct to it, the heritage that lights up the objects of its world and infuses them with meaning. But however marked by previous practices and meanings, an individual’s world nevertheless remains one of concern, for Dasein is necessarily future-directed and purposive, as it confronts the evolving context situating it. Existence, Heidegger writes, is “what emerges from itself and in emerging reveals itself.”32
Situated and situating, Dasein’s passive aspect constitutes its essence, the active its existence. Essence here implies that we are thrown—that the life we live is predetermined by the world in which we are born. But though our essence is fixed in this general way, we still retain the ability to make choices about the possibilities inherent in our particular “there.” Man’s active aspect, existence, consequently comes from human being always being “ahead-of-itself,” as it projects itself toward a future of its own choosing: projecting itself beyond itself, as it pursues the possibility of becoming “what it is.” This active side is premised on our freedom to make something of our lives (within the confines of the “factical” situation into we are thrown). “Projection,” Heidegger writes, “is…[an] occurrence that lets the binding character of things spring forth as such, insofar as such an occurrence always presupposes a making-possible.”33
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Freedom, it follows, is never a matter of independence—of “freedom from” the binding character of things—but something inherent to the nature of Dasein. It is “the ground of the possibility of man’s existence.” Its essence, though, comes into view only if sought as the ground of the possibility of our Being-in-the- world. For Heidegger freedom is what breaks through in man and takes him up into himself as the possibility of his existence. “The contexture and perspective for the problem of freedom,” he writes, “is the question of what beings are.”34 In respect to man, this is never a question of causality, detachment, or an objective, present-at-hand state. The essence of freedom has nothing fixed or static about it, but is an occurrence that happens whenever Dasein opens itself to and appropriates its own Being. (What he calls the enowning of Ereignis.) It is what allows Dasein’s possibility to be taken up and realized. It is what summons man to his possibilities. In a word, it “lets beings be,” for it is “the groundless grounding of a ground…that grants itself the law of its essence.”35 It is more primordial even than man’s Dasein. Heidegger calls man “freedom’s administrator”: For he only lets be the freedom which is accorded to him. As such, it is not a property of man—but a condition for existence, a condition which makes possible his Being-in-the-world, his Dasein. This distinguishes him from other entities, opens him to the possibilities distinct to his existence, and affects his relationship to Being. Just as truth is not the same thing as an “accurate” representation, but something that appears or becomes manifest in man’s world, freedom is not independence per se, but the condition by which beings are allowed to be.
Because man exists as the being in whom the Being of beings is revealed, knowledge of what man is and what he can become never falls directly into his lap: He must fi rst place himself in question, must comport himself to himself as that being who is asked about, and who, in asking, becomes uneasy and self-questioning. “Who man is” is knowable, then, only if man endeavors to become who he is. We thus understand the question “Who is man?” as asking: Who are we insofar as we are? For Heidegger: “Human freedom is the freedom that breaks through in man and takes him up into itself, thus making man possible.”36
Given that human freedom opens man to Being’s dominion, Heidegger conceives of it as the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the Being of beings. To understand the truth of Being in this ontological sense is to project in advance the possibility of one’s being. For liberation is real only when man is free for himself.37 There’s nothing egocentric or subjective in this: Man is only the specific, situated manifestation of Being that he is. And there is no escaping this. The arbitrary individual freedoms posited by liberalism exist only in the shadow world flickering on its cave walls. Born to a mutilated concept of beings that ignores Being, liberal freedom takes no cognizance of Dasein as a thrown, time-bound, situated entity whose previous choices are inevitably the basis of man’s future choices and whose future choices affect his understanding of past ones and hence his understanding of who he is. In a word, it takes no cognizance of man’s place in the world and attributes no meaning to it. For Heidegger, liberation “is only genuine when he who is liberated…becomes free for himself, i.e., comes to stand in the ground of his essence.”38
RACE AND ITS IMPERATIVE
Since the Cold War’s end, Heidegger has been the target of an ongoing campaign of stigmatization and quarantine, for it is now clear that he was not only an ardent supporter of the National Socialist revolution of 1933, but a convinced (though idiosyncratic) National Socialist himself.39 That the greatest philosophical mind of the twentieth century was a Nazi is a scandal, of course. But especially revealing is that the inquisitional forces deconstructing the suspect forces animating Heidegger’s thought stress that there is “no spoor of biological racism” (George Steiner) in his published works and that the most cursory examination of his thought reveals a distinct “antibiologism.” 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.40 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 German twenties (of which National Socialism was an offshoot) had fought against.
Is it contradictory, then, to argue that Heideggerian freedom has a racial imperative? Against a good deal of contemporary commentary, it must be insisted that Heidegger’s antibiologism was not that of a nationalist indifferent to racial issues, 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.41 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.”42
Even though a man’s body can be the subject of a purely biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.”43 This other belongs to man’s Dasein 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.”44 Only in this way does biology enter history and become historically signifi cant. 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 that make up his world and which no science can successfully or adequately reduce to an empirical representation. For the antiscientistic 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.45 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. 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.46
Heidegger doesn’t say so explicitly, but the turn of his thought suggests that a people’s blood may be basic to its biological formation, but its determinants as a people, even genetically, reside elsewhere, outside of biology, in that inexplicable force of Being that 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 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 Arno Breker’s The Torchbearer or Burne-Jones’s 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, but 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 “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.”47 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 deracinated conception of human being, but he is hardly indifferent to Europe’s racial heritage, for though emphasizing a Volk’s spiritual or destining character, he nevertheless sees that this entails a specific bodily expression of being.
In the historical world of European man, human biology and human being are one, with the biological, the ontic, subsumed to the ontological realm of self-assertion— like the material subsumed in the artist’s vision.48 They comprise the Dasein of both 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 is 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.”49 Human biology, for this reason, is more ontological than zoological, more a product of Being than a facet of nature, 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 other words, 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.50 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” (that is, the purely biological understanding of 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 fi rst to see man as a special kind of animal—the rational animal (zoon logikon). With the eighteenth 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., the decontextualized substance of a science indifferent to a being’s specifi c qualities). As Being in this scientistic conceptualization withdraws from human being, the latter is depleted, reduced to a one-dimensional ontology fi t 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.
I think 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 now threatens us.51 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.52 Natural science, the inspiration for scientific racism, treats the body abstractly, objectifying, decontextualizing, and uprooting it from all that is native to human being. Vitalism, the naive biologism animating this racism, is for the same reason just as misleading.53 Against the naturalist conception, Heidegger holds that the human body is not 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.54
Accordingly, the Dasein of a Volk, like that of an individual, is not manifested in biology (at least not directly), but in the decisions it makes and the goals it sets for itself. How it exists in the world into 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.”55 Because an individual’s fate, like a nation’s destiny, is shaped by its 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 to Being 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. Everything else is fiction, inauthenticity, or negation.
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. A people’s essence, in a word, transcends the purely “organic,” as it pursues the destiny that defi nes it and asserts its Dasein as a distinct destiny. Otherwise it ceases to be in any meaningful sense.
THE BEGINNING THAT STANDS BEFORE US
The entire organization of the former white homelands (with the possible exception of Russia and Belarus) now rests on principles hostile to white existence. Hence: The multiculturalism that delegitimizes millennia of European culture; the Third World invasion of the white biosphere that crowds out European life; the hate laws, quotas, and anti-discrimination policies that subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites; the forced congregation that balkanizes white schools, communities, and patterns of social intercourse; and all the concerted forces that compel education, entertainment, fashion, and ideas to disparage white life and its historic foundations. Much of this is owed, of course, to the utopian or predatory schemes of world-reforming liberals, to Jews bent on turning the goyim to their purpose, to globalists looking to augment their already fabulous wealth and power, and to New Class managers and ideologues charged with making such dreams come true. But our enemies, admittedly, would not be able to do this—or at least do it so easily—if it weren’t also the case that the prevailing metaphysics had not at some profound level taken whites in its grip, so that they no longer know who they are or what is happening to them. Eric Thomson touches on this when he stresses: “All rackets require the cooperation of their victims.”56
The metaphysics undergirding liberalism’s moribund pseudocivilization makes this especially the case, having “formed and created for itself in technology, economy, in world trade, and in the entire organization of existence…[a spirit that] is now turning against the soul, against life, overwhelming it and forcing [it] into decline and decay.”57
During the Götterdammerung that followed Stalingrad, Heidegger observed that: “The danger in which stands the ‘holy heart of the peoples’ of the West is not that of decline [per se], but instead that we, ourselves bewildered, yield to the will of modernity and drive it on.”58 That is, the anti-ontological premises of modern liberal civilization, which we have absorbed, distort the way we see ourselves and the way we choose to live, preventing us from being who we are—“from glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment.”59
The terrifying darkness now descending on the white world speaks to the question of Being. As I argue above, this epochal question is at root a question of freedom. And the question of freedom is not about freedom “from any standpoint”—not “freedom from,” as liberals argue when defending the private space of bourgeois connivance that passes for individual autonomy. Freedom in Heidegger’s upright German sense is making “the right choice of standpoint, the courage to a standpoint, the setting in action of a standpoint and the holding out within it.”60 Such a standpoint comes from knowing that man and Volk, individual and collective Dasein, are free only when they “belong to the realm of destining”—which is everywhere repressed by the globalist, New Class, and neocon forces now ruling and plundering the white world.
To retrieve the guiding thread of our destiny, to submit to the power of “the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence,” to become free to be who we are, cannot for Heidegger but entail an irreparable—a revolutionary—break with liberalism’s nihilistic metaphysics.61 Such a revolutionary rupture ought not to be confused with the left’s superficial project—as it dreams of wiping the slate clean for the sake of an entirely new regime. Nor is this revolution to be envisaged as some sort of Nietzschean act of will. Least of all has it anything to do with conservatism’s timid defense of what is now a thoroughly violated and corrupted heritage. A successful opposition to the prevailing assault on European Being, if we follow Heidegger, will come only from the greatest reflection and the most uncompromising self-examination—as we get back to the beginning, to where Being was in its fullness, and we were still men willing to assert our existence not for profit’s calculating sake, but for that of our Greco-Aryan destiny. “The beginning,” and every true revolution is a return to the beginning, “precedes and determines all history.” It doesn’t reside “back in the past but lies in advance of what is to come.”62 The beginning that “orders us to recognize its greatness” is not, then, the past per se, but that future faithful to who we are.
The argument here is not for returning to the old days and the old ways (though our inceptive past is the basis of all we can be). Rather, it is for going forward by getting back to what has occurred and can occur—it’s an argument for recalling what has been forgotten for the sake of what might be.63 Nothing less than a categorical rejection of the freedom-killing metaphysics dominating the white world, a heeding of Being’s claim on European Man, and a resolute self-assertion of Europe’s destiny will return us to this ground that grounds us in who we are and what we are destined to be. The white revolution implicit in Heidegger’s thought implies thus a self-assertion that “will ground history all the more originally, as it overcomes radically what has gone before by creating a new order in the realm where we have our roots.”64
Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales and modern European history at the University of California. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004).
ENDNOTES (see *)
* http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v6n3/TOQOMearaV6N3.pdf