Heidegger’s anti-modernism masked complicity with capitalist acceleration
Evidence
Like Habermas, Adorno criticized Heidegger’s genteel aversion to science, which merely served to confirm its omnipotence. He criticized Heidegger’s aversion to the world of motorways and modern technology, and his way of offering `comfort for the heart’ that relieved him of any need to criticize reality. Adorno, like Habermas, emphasized the way in which Heidegger perpetuated the fatal syndrome that had been typical of the Nazi period: a glorifying of the simple, natural life, combined with ruthless acceleration both of the process of concentrating economic power and of technological development. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2504
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical claim that glorifying the simple natural life pairs with ruthless capitalist acceleration — a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism about how nostalgia and speed cooperate.
- ADDENDUM: Extends the ‘On Sacrifice’ or rather the Frankfurt School’s critique of how ideology and material domination interlock.
- XREF: connects to: Heidegger’s Nazi commitment emerged from the objective structure of his philosophy — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2299; Heidegger’s phenomenology reflects the commodity-structure of modern society — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 582; Heidegger framed national destiny as existential response to modernity’s crisis — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1307 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Heidegger framed national destiny as existential response to modernity’s crisis
#expands(0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1307 - Heidegger’s ontology functioned as a conservative apositivism
#complicates(0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2500 - Marxist judgment of modernism presupposes a personal agency that historical determinism denies
#complicates(0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 398