From Mann’s “Magic Mountain” to Heidegger’s Kehre: the Decline of Kultur and the Shadow of Techno-Logic
Der Zauberberg, published in 1924, is perhaps the quintessential novel of the twentieth century, for it anticipates the West’s arrival at the worldview that still underlies our contemporary age.
The book recounts the seven years spent by Hans Castorp in the Davos sanatorium, where he stayed among other tuberculosis patients. Its narrative unfolds through profound and refined expositions of humanistic, philosophical, and psychological ideas, embodied in the various characters of the novel.
But the reason why The Magic Mountain is a pivotal and decisive text for political and social thought is that, during its composition, Mann makes a radical turn—from Kultur to Zivilization. He turns away from Nietzsche and Wagner, horrified by the exacerbated nationalist fervor and unbridled populism of the years following the First World War, intuiting how these tendencies would soon erupt into the murderous and repulsively brutal excesses of Nazi Germany.
In his early phase, Mann had been a champion of a distinctly German, though not exclusively German, conception centered on the values shaped over centuries of domination of the individual by social custom: fatherland and vital space, religious and superstitious sentiment, chivalric ideals that had become bourgeois in their attachment to wealth, honor, and family. On this staunch defense of traditional values (“traditional” in the lowercase sense, not to be confused with the knowledge of the Tradition, which is something wholly different—the Sacred Science) Mann built his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (published in 1918 and repudiated by him in 1922), a work animated by a spirited and nostalgic defense of Kultur against the rise of a progressive and inclusive outlook—an outlook championed, among others, by Mann’s own brother Heinrich.
This shift in perspective, from Kultur to Zivilization, occurs precisely during the writing of The Magic Mountain: the philosophical discussions of Nietzschean stamp give way to a violent parody of the overman in the figure of the Dutchman Peeperkorn. The turn took place because Mann realized that the values of Kultur had begun to nourish the aggressions of the masses inflamed by the postwar crisis and were being exploited by uncontrollable and malign nationalist forces—while also serving to justify the cowardice of the compliant.
Mann, perhaps the most profound intellectual of the twentieth century, had to reconsider his convictions when confronted with the nauseating forces exuding pestilently from the heart of Europe. No one can fault him for his Kehre—his Reversal.
Those who read Heidegger encounter an even deeper and more significant Kehre. Heidegger’s Reversal, matured in the 1930s, was a crucial moment for the German thinker—and for the entire history of philosophy. He shifted from reflecting on Dasein, the being-there of man immersed in reality, to reflecting on Being itself, Sein, which later became Seyn, once he realized that Western thought—from Plato to Nietzsche—had never truly thought Being as such, but only as a being, an object.
Heidegger is mentioned here because he is today so often condemned for his compromise with Nazism, owing to certain crypto-Nazi and antisemitic passages in his Black Notebooks, published after his death. Yet those who thus judge him, I contend, have misunderstood the very essence of his thought. Heidegger’s saying stands on this side of representation: not merely the condemnation, but the very necessity of the overcoming of representation is the crucial—and indeed the sole—theme running through his hundred-volume Gesamtausgabe.
He accuses, in certain passages, the Jewish mindset of having created theo-logy, just as throughout his entire Work he constantly accuses the Greek mindset of having created onto-logy—the union of these two modes of thought being onto-theo-logy, the intrinsic structure of the Western world as it has been constituted. This does not absolve his antisemitic remarks (notably, his critique of the Jewish 'mindset' often extends to the people themselves, whereas his critique of Greek thought typically addresses specific thinkers or philosophical traditions), but it frames them within his larger, systematic critique of Western metaphysics, prompting the question of how distinctions between philosophical critique and racial prejudice are made in such contexts, and how their historical impacts differ profoundly.
The so-called crypto-Nazi accusation against Heidegger rests, at a deeper level, on his failure to have explicitly condemned Nazism. The absurdity of this charge lies in the inability to perceive that Heidegger’s entire philosophy is itself a critique of phenomena such as Nazism, for Nazism is nothing other than the culmination and triumph of the techno-logical mindset that underlies Western thought.
It is true that—tastelessly, and ultimately inadequate as a full moral response, one must admit—Heidegger once compared the extermination camps to mechanized agriculture; yet anyone who truly understands his work should recognize that this deliberately excessive statement, intensified by the depression following his denazification (to which he, unlike many Wehrmacht generals, was actually subjected), was a crude yet exact reiteration of his conviction that Nazism was nothing but the triumph of the aesthetic logic of Hegelian rationalism.
While many correctly view Nazism as an embodiment of absolute evil on a moral plane, Heidegger's intent was to force a raw, philosophical confrontation with its roots in the techno-logical mindset, arguing that failing to analyze it solely as a moral aberration risks obscuring the systemic conditions that allow its seeds to sprout—again and again.
As Plato, through the voice of Socrates in the Euthydemus, cautioned that it is inappropriate to respond to a critique with an argument external to it, it is nonetheless useful to draw a parallel between Heidegger and C.G. Jung. It is well known that Jung, often in interviews, expressed admiration for Hitler as a shaman. Yet—quite rightly of course—this fascination never led to his being definitively branded as an antisemite or crypto-Nazi, nor did it invalidate his rationalistic interpretation of the portions of the unconscious mind he encountered.
The watershed of Western philosophy is Descartes, who identified and named representation: the external world exists insofar as it is represented in my mind. Not only all later philosophers, but even modern neuroscience, rests upon this same notion of representation. Before Descartes, representation was simply taken for granted: things are, and I am; implicitly, both things and the self exist only insofar as they are represented.
This cognitive structure, which to us seems self-evident, is for Heidegger an illusion. Before Heidegger, Nietzsche had already said as much; and before both of them, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato—misunderstood by nearly all later philosophers. Contemporary thinkers and self-styled intellectuals wish to erase Heidegger because they cannot conceive how thought might proceed without the dichotomy of subject and object (so it is with his “disciple” Gadamer and the nouveaux philosophes, while Anglo-American philosophy cannot even imagine such a movement). Yet it must be known that the overcoming of representation, for the doctrines of the East—from the Ṛg-Veda to Srī Aurobindo, passing through the Upaniṣad, the Buddha, and the Bhagavad-Gītā—is an evident necessity for anyone endowed with intellect. In India, overcoming representation is merely the starting point—everyone says so—and the real discussions concern how one accomplishes this intermediate goal, and how one proceeds beyond it. Heidegger, then, after more than two millennia of ever more rationalistic philosophies, came to rethink a beginning other than representation—the same beginning that has always been the only beginning for the Tradition of Sacred Science.
Thus, if Heidegger felt sympathy for Nazism, that must of course be condemned; it goes without saying. But equally self-evident should be that it would be horrific to throw out the baby with the bathwater. To put it plainly: the Letters of Saint Paul instituted the theological root of Christian antisemitism—necessarily so, one might say, for they sought to usurp the very same God from one religion to another. By contrast Dante’s Comedia and Bach’s vocal works are far more intrinsically antisemitic than Heidegger’s few remarks—made worse by the fact that Paul, Dante, and Bach were men of overtly religious and Christian inspiration.
This digression on Heidegger serves as a counterpoint to Mann’s Reversal in The Magic Mountain. Just as Heidegger, in his celebrated Rectoral Address The Self-Assertion of the German University (1933), had, for a brief period (lasting only a few months), made himself complicit with the times by lauding Hitler as an homo novus– only to recant the following year, resigning due to an irreconcilable clash with the Nazi administration and never again associating with the regime–so too Thomas Mann, initially swayed by the pervasive, insidious currents of sovereign nationalism, later repudiated them. The subtle, yet crucial, difference between these two Kehre lies in their understanding of Nietzsche (and Wagner). Heidegger, we contend, in his critical reassessment, particularly during his directorship at the Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, saw clearly that Nietzsche was a misunderstood prophet, never a proto-Nazi. Mann, conversely, based his own intellectual shift and subsequent repudiation of those times – and consequently his rejection of Nietzsche and Wagner – on what we believe to be an erroneous reading: initially idolizing them as pre-nationalist champions, and then, for the very same mistaken reasons, casting them aside. To reiterate, Nietzsche’s Übermensch has nothing whatever to do with Nazism. If the Nazis appropriated Nietzsche and Wagner, they also appropriated Beethoven.
From his youthful essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense onward, Nietzsche repeats like a mantra that one must transcend subject and object. If one reads a text from Tibetan Buddhism, or from the Bön tradition that long predates Buddhism, one finds the same obvious necessity—literally expressed—of transcending subject and object. The Tibetan people are the paradigm of nonviolence, and yet yogin and lama proclaim the same truths Nietzsche proclaimed—in essence, of course, for Nietzsche was indeed possessed and unconscious of the depth of what he said, beyond doubt; but his Übermensch is he who ascends to a dimension beyond representation, and as such is alien to all violence: “Man is a rope stretched between the brute and the over-man”.
The same misunderstanding applies, in another sense, to the all-too-human Wagner. It's curious how vociferously his personal antisemitism is condemned, a condemnation I do not dispute, yet the intrinsically antisemitic elements of Bach's vocal works, or Dante's Comedia, often pass unremarked, almost as if the severity of the perceived transgression depends more on the historical context of its reception than on its intrinsic nature. Parsifal, as well as the conclusion of the Ring of the Nibelung, if one sets aside the Marxian exegeses propagated by Adorno and his followers and instead listens to what they say, express—transcending them—two concepts (the first of which, moreover, is Wagner’s only Grundmotiv since The Flying Dutchman): compassion and hope.
Hegel, on the other hand, was, at least in my view, the formal cause of the various totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, for he established the claim of Reason—as such, and thus of whatever is at any given time believed to be Reason—to act as the measure and judge of good and evil. From there, the enthusiastic acceptance of the deliria of Hitler and Stalin was but a very short step. Marx, for his part, theorized violence and the killing of persons as the means to establish the dictatorship of whatever Reason was deemed right, whit consequences that are still visible today—while Western democracies, for all their ups and downs, remain such precisely because they mediate among diverse reasons and interests (only in golden ages are men free from attachment).
The Magic Mountain, beyond being one of the most beautiful and psychologically profound novels ever written, is a fundamental text because it lays bare the inner workings of Western thought—a thought that, even when confronted with its own prophets (for Nietzsche was indeed one, though confused and unaware of the depth of what he uttered), refuses to recognize them and instead condemns them. (By “prophet” I mean, of course, in its original etymological sense—one through whom a higher Consciousness speaks, untainted by Christian theology.)
Nihil sub sole novum: hasty judgments—or, to use Nietzsche’s favorite term, prejudices—and morality are always bad counselors, for they are rooted in egoisms and born of egoisms, that is, of the belief that reality consists of one subject, the “I”, and a multitude of objects.