Fascism
is a word that many say but fewer understand and explain. The word
Fascist comes from fasces, a tied bundle of rods or sticks. One stick
can be easily broken, but many bound together cannot. The ancient
Romans used a bunch of rods and an ax tied together as a symbol of Rome,
and rulers would often have such a bundle carried in front of them and
symbolically present in halls and during speeches. The Italian fascists
identified with and glorified Roman power and empire, and they named
themselves after the bundle and put it on their flag. These were the
first “fascists”, followed soon by German Nazis under Hitler and Spanish
fascists under Franco.
The
definition and philosophy of fascism is highly debated.
Industrialization is typically identified as a necessary condition for
fascism, and as we have seen political philosophy in Europe is
profoundly concerned with industry, technology, and capitalism rising
along with these two. Right wing authoritarianism and nationalism, with
patriotic support of war and empire and conservative taste in culture,
tends to be the weak consensus among theorists, but does that make all
conservatives or nationalists fascists? The tempting answer from the
left is a simple yes, but there were a great variety of philosophies and
policies that supported fascism before WWII and still today, and
fascists want to transform society even if they often celebrate
traditional culture, masculinity, discipline and patriotism. There were
left wing and right wing factions among Italian fascists, and fascists
were influenced by ideas from both wings.
Consider
that Mussolini supported Jewish rights before adopting Hitler’s
antisemitism. Consider that the Nazis said many anti-capitalist
pronouncements that sound identical to those made by communism, calling
themselves national socialists before accepting corporate backing soon
after they started to become successful and dropped all anti-capitalist
rhetoric and policies long before Hitler gained power (Nazis believed
that Jews controlled the world economy and were ruining Europe during
the great depression, so they were angry at capitalism as a Jewish
device before they allied themselves with corporate interests in
Germany, Britain and America). Consider that there were Christian Nazis
and anti-Christian Nazis. Consider that there were Neo-Kantians as
well as existentialists like Heidegger who joined the Nazi cause on both
sides of the dogmatism/skepticism spectrum in philosophy.
We
could try the opposite approach, and say what fascism ISN’T by looking
at its triadic hate relationship with communism (or international
socialism) and anarchism. Fascists do not like anarchist ideas like
getting rid of war, the police state, national borders, or free love.
They do not like communism because even if communists believe in
imposing an authoritarian structure in the name of revolution they
argue, in theory, for a dismantling of authoritarianism by process.
Anarchists, as we have seen, argue that communism is authoritarianism
in the name of anarcho-syndicalism, so an anarchist might say that there
is no difference between the two. Fascists would argue that anarchism,
communism and libertarian capitalism are all the same, as they lack the
strength and discipline of authoritarianism. Like communism, fascists
argue that the time of crisis requires authority and order, but unlike
communists they do not argue for a more bottom-up democratic future.
One could say that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” approaches
fascism, but even still evolution is expected.
Italy Under Mussolini
Mussolini
was the first fascist dictator, as the Italians coined the term fascism
from the Roman symbol. His glorification of violence inspired Hitler,
who imitated Mussolini and then surpassed him with the superior power
and technology of Germany. World leaders praised both Mussolini and
Hitler for standing up and viciously smashing communists, but then when
Italy and Germany expanded their empires, Italy first in Africa and then
Germany in Eastern Europe, the British, French and Americans amongst
others declared war for cutting in on their action (since they
themselves wished to maintain control and exploitation of Africa as well
as everywhere else). The Pope said that Mussolini was sent by divine
providence. Churchill said Mussolini was the Roman genius whose
triumphant struggle against communism had rendered a service to the
entire world. Italy hoped for an empire in Africa and thus a seat at
the table with other powerful European nations, but they banded together
to eventually defeat both Italian and German ambitions.
With
the Great Depression of the 1920s, despair was everywhere and one had
to ask how to rebuild and thrive. Communism offered a way forward, and
their numbers exploded. In reaction against communism’s anti-religious,
anti-elite, anti-authoritarian internationalism, many on the right but
some on the left joined the fascist cause. After Russia, and then again
after WWII with China, many national leaders were deeply afraid of
communism and were willing to give full support to right wing brutality.
After WWII, when communism again threatened to take Italy by storm,
the OSS (precursor of the CIA) worked with Italian fascists and the
Italian mafia to crush the movement, just as America supported right
wing dictatorships (some of whom called themselves fascist by name) in
Central America to prevent communism there. The upper and middle class
feared that their property would be seized, so many celebrated Mussolini
and Hitler’s rise to power. Both Mussolini and Hitler had socialist
views in their early years, but through intense nationalism at a time of
crisis abandoned socialism for capitalism as the strength of their
nations was bound up with corporations, industry and technology,
particularly military technology.
In
Italy in the 1920s, fascists fought against peasant, worker and
Catholic unions that rallied under the red flag and set up co-ops.
Mussolini’s fascist black shirts, that later inspired Hitler’s brown
shirts, set out to destroy the communist threat through open violence
often with the full support of the police, the military, the king, and
the pope. The fascists, in military style black uniforms, were thus a
paramilitary group that had the full support of the authorities without
official office.
In
both Italy and Germany, first fascists started getting elected to
office, then they began gaining seats but remained in the minority, and
finally Mussolini and Hitler, who were made the heads of parliament,
declared wartime emergency powers and dissolved parliament such that
their minority became the totality. The population of both countries
accepted the emergency dictatorial decrees in the name of protecting
family, faith and nation.
Mussolini
was careful to give the king and Pope whatever they wanted. The
Catholic Church was given the Vatican as an independent country and it
remains so today. The communists and socialists wanted the Church
removed from Italian politics, but Mussolini strengthened the Church’s
presence. In return, the Church invested heavily in government bonds
and continued to do so in wartime.
Those
who spoke out in Italy against Mussolini’s dictatorship, either in
conversation or in print, were beaten by black shirts, often to death.
Schools were ordered to teach fascist conservative values. Little boys
were given black shirts and toy wooden rifles. The salute, the raised
palm open towards the saluted, became common in greeting (the Nazi
salute, with open palm and arm straight and at a sharp angle, is more
notorious). The military adopted the Roman salute of raising swords
vertically in the air as the leader passed, but for a modern army this
meant military issued knives raised instead.
When
Libya, in North Africa, revolted against Italian control, Italy under
Mussolini viciously pacified it. It is important to consider that
fascist brutal and glorified warfare, including the first fascist
concentration camps, started in Africa and were influenced not only by
economic but also racist tyranny. Italy used torture, camps, chemical
weapons, targeting civilians and refugees with bombs, and destroyed
mosques. At first, Mussolini ridiculed Hitler’s racial theories while
remaining quite racist himself, as he did not believe that Germany was a
racially pure nation. Then, when Hitler seized Jewish property and
bank accounts and used them to finance the party and warfare, Mussolini
followed, arguing that the Italians had to learn to become hard and
brutal like the Germans to become masters. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia,
bombing civilians and using chemical weapons. The wars were popular in
Italy, but the British and French began to feel that their hold on much
of Africa was threatened. As Franco rose in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler
welcomed and supported his fascist regime as they believed Spain would
be a powerful ally should war break out. Mussolini seized Albania,
Hitler seized Poland, and Britain, France, America and others declared
war.
As
the Italians and Germans began losing to the allied powers, both
Mussolini and Hitler blamed their troops and nation for being weak and
not strong enough to overcome the challenge of crisis. Fascism does
stand for unity, but it seems that in times of failure they blame each
other as much as they blame foreign nations and religions for their
problems in times of success. If the rods start breaking, it seems the
axe gets angry at the arrangement. In the same way, with repeated
failures in the war including a failed invasion of Greece, the Italian
king imprisoned Mussolini and changed sides in the war. Hitler invaded
Italy, dividing the country, and Mussolini was given puppet control of
Northern Italy before Germany eventually lost the war.
Germany Under Hitler
Since
everybody likes calling each other Hitler in America today, including
the religious and the anti-religious (“Nazi’s were essentially
religious” vs. “Nazi’s essentially anti-religious”) and the progressives
and conservatives (“Bush is Hitler” vs. “Obama is Hitler”), let us be
clear:
Nazi
Germany was art and artists, health and doctors, truth and philosophy,
science and scientists, religion and religious, technology and
engineers, poetry and poets, environment and volunteers, exercise and
instructors, order and peacemakers, business and investors, pest control
and exterminators, the group and helping your neighbor, life and the
living, and, at the same time, death and the killers.
Doctors
opened the gas caps to euthanize the mentally ill to give it scientific
legitimacy. Athens, Sparta and Rome, the origin of the supposed West,
were Hitler’s Mecca, the source and model of legitimate culture. Hitler
wrote that the European and German forefathers were the Greeks, and if
the Nazis could create a synthesis of these three cultures that the Nazi
German state would never perish. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans,
Nazis glorified the human body, nature, and warfare through art and
literature. Other cultures were diseases, the Jews microbes that had to
be eradicated or made servile. The gas Zyclon B was first developed to
kill insects and rodents before being used in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz and elsewhere. Antisemitism, racism and murder were called
hygiene, medical and scientific. The gas chambers were considered a
humane alternative to firing squads, more effective and efficient.
In
Germany during the Great Depression communists, many of the leaders
Jewish, gained many members and for a brief period took over the city of
Munich. The right wing, including the military, corporate leaders of
industry, and traditional authority leaders, organized the Freicorps as a
paramilitary group for fighting communists, many to join the Nazis as
they rose to power. Hitler and the Nazi party began mobilizing,
marching, demonstrating, and street fighting against communists in this
period. As in Italy, in the hard times communism and fascism were the
radical options and sources of hope and renewal.
Adolf
Hitler, a failed painter and architect, found that he had a talent for
giving impassioned speeches, and he rose quickly to leadership of the
group and attracted many new members. After he and other Nazis were
given extremely light sentences after beating a communist, they
attempted the Beer Hall Putsch (or coup) in 1923. Marching into a
traditional beer hall where many right sided drinkers were socializing,
Hitler announced that the revolution had come and they were taking the
city. Hitler hoped that the police would join them or at least look the
other way as the police did often for fascists in Italy and Germany,
but in the ensuing fight 4 cops and 16 Nazis were killed. Hitler was
given, by the same judge who sentenced him to one month in prison
before, the lightest sentence possible, 9 months in prison, during which
time he wrote Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a political autobiography and
polemic.
Disturbingly,
Hitler writes that as a boy he saw nothing in antisemitism and that
there was a Jewish boy in his class (who may or may not have been the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) who was strange but not frightening,
and that it was only in the Depression and reading anti-semetic works
that Hitler began to see that the Jews controlled both capitalism and
communism to control Germany and the world. In this work, he argues
that Jews should be removed from German society, stripped of citizenship
and public positions (including professorships), and expelled from the
country for the Treaty of Versailles and the communist takeover of
Munich. Hitler argued for Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the
law of nature. He believed that leaders, including those within the
Nazi party, should take over by force and charisma, not by being
appointed or elected.
While
the Nazis were a fringe party in 1929 with 3% of the vote, the
worsening depression brought them members and power. Banks were
crashing, and the middle and upper class were beginning to suffer like
the poor who could be sufficiently ignored. The Nazi message stayed the
same, but the audience began to grow, such that in 1930 they had 25% of
the vote. The communists were also picking up voters and members as
the people polarized. Hitler began making plane trips to various cities
to make speeches that were enthusiastically embraced by many. In 1932,
the Nazis had 37% of the vote, the largest party but still a minority
(the “majority minority” as some have said of white Americans living in
diverse areas such as the Bay). Businessmen wrote to Hindenburg, the
chancellor of Germany, arguing Hitler should be made chancellor to stop
communism. By this time, the Nazis had received full corporate backing
and had ceased to speak out against capitalism and support socialist
policies that benefited workers such as union rights. The army was
worried it would not be able to hold the borders if both clashed in a
time of crisis. In 1933, Hindenburg resigned and Hitler went from
vice-chancellor to chancellor. The communists waited, thinking Hitler
would fail miserably and they would have a chance to take control.
After
setting the Reichstag Fire and blaming the communists, Hitler declared a
state of emergency and rounded up communists and other opposition
leaders. A boycott of Jewish businesses and book burnings were
organized. Storm troopers, the brown shirts who followed the Freicorps
and the Italian black shirts of Mussolini, engaged in random beatings
and killings. Concentration camps were established, but since the
average German believed such things were inevitable under communists it
was all seen as unfortunate but inevitable evil. At first, the
concentration camps were temporary prisons where dissidents and
communists would be sent for a year or two. It was only as Germany
began to lose WWII in 1941 that the slave labor camps became
extermination camps for the Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals and counter-culturals imprisoned.
Hitler
was terrible as a political leader, preferring to not interfere with
the work and projects of his highly disorganized underlings. Hitler
would have visions, often architectural monuments to Nazi power. If an
officer had enough power, they would approach Hitler with an idea for a
project and Hitler would either approve and the officer would gain favor
and try to stay close to Hitler and the top brass or Hitler would
ignore the suggestion. The decision to make the concentration camps
death camps came in just this fashion. This is strangely similar to
bottom-up yet top-down arrangements of capitalism communism,
anarcho-syndicalism, and other systems and thinkers we have studied.
Under
Hitler’s regime, many Germans did much better than they had during the
depression, as did many French, Polish and others under Nazi occupation.
Through military industrialization, slave labor and seizure of Jewish
businesses, jobs were created, consumerism supported and property
maintained. This created many job opportunities, as it did for
Heidegger in universities cleansed of numerous Jewish professors
including Heidegger’s old master Husserl. There were new opportunities
for doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even actors. If one was the wrong
sort of person, one faced imprisonment and death, but because this was
kept out of sight it was easy for those with money in their pockets to
ignore. Synagogues were destroyed to make parking lots, marriage to
Jews and foreigners outlawed, citizenship revoked and Jim Crow style
laws imposed. Having Jewish or communist friends was enough to be sent
to the camps.
Hitler
was a great admirer of Britain and American power. He wrote in Mein
Kampf, that Germany had lost WWI because they did not have the
propaganda of Britain and America that demonized Germany such that the
harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed. Next time, he wrote, would be
different. It was the British who invented the modern concentration
camp fighting the Dutch. Hitler admired how Britain, a small island,
maintained a world-wide empire, and believed that this was proof
positive that the Aryan race, though a fraction of the world population,
could truly become the master race. He wrote, “What India was for
England, Russia will be for us”. Hitler hoped for an alliance with
Britain and America that would dominate the globe, and many
anti-communist authorities and corporations in the UK and US supported
this.
Hitler,
as he did in all areas, allowed economic experts and business leaders
to do whatever they wanted as long as they were successful and supported
his own visionary projects. Hitler liked radical ideas, and German and
foreign economists were astonished at how well Nazi control was for
business and industry. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are vast
freedom for the powerful and successful, all the while slavery and death
for the oppressed. Looking at British success, Hitler believed that
Germany needed colonies and expansion to create an empire. As the Nazis
had victory after victory in war, and the UK and US said nothing,
Hitler told his generals to “Germanize” the new regions and no questions
would be asked. In Poland, one general used a campaign of horror to
break the spirits of Polish slave labor, while another general simply
declared 80% of the population to be German. When rival factions
complained about each other’s methods, Hitler often did nothing.
This
would be remarkably existentialist, if it happily supported transparent
self-questioning rather than brutally suppressing all questioning and
dissent. Heidegger is strikingly like Trotsky. Both believed that they
supported a regime that would lead to a new era of continuous
revolution and questioning, but both came to see that even as power is
renewed by new ideas and perspectives it learns to silence opposition
and stifle transparency like the overthrown regime it replaces. In
front of the Denazification Committee in 1945, Heidegger said that he
truly believed Hitler would evolve beyond his views and policies, but by
1938 his dream had become a nightmare. Heidegger, like many in
Germany, Britain and America, believed that communism was the death of
Western civilization and individual thought, and it took him seven years
to realize that fascism, like communism, fails to evolve toward
freedom.
Heidegger, his Use of Nietzsche and Support of the Nazis
For
a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of
the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and
supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took
authoritarian control. Though he eventually came to doubt the party,
spoke critically of its development and was for this under surveillance
by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced
their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several
cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western
civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because
I myself am into and influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well
as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three,
and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (Eurocentrism, the birth
of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and
realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of
Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of
death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me
Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer
to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems
aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices
of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger
wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, Being and Time (1927), that
authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are
ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a
concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime
enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent
chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger
argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial
of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather
than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the
religious and anti-religious, joined the Nazi cause.
Let
us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of
Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of
self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient
Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West
apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger,
Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and
philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves
through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking
they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his
German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country.
I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient
Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In
the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth
of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this
glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler
and Nietzsche though he was far more critical and cynical, that one
should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion
that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as
countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily
with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The
Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did
his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many
feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European
civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an
anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more
glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced
Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like
Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York,
wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger
for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is
ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music is over after
Beethoven.
Heidegger
originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but in studying
Neoplatonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on
Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as
his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by
focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose
to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and
followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical
criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel.
Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is
always directed toward something or away from something by intention.
Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive.
Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor
is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.
Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in
our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel
but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world
and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship.
Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a
new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work
snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death.
Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and
took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms
his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl.
Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s dasein, or
being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being
and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
Heidegger
argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the
way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. We
are thrown into the world, called “thrownness”, as a being-there, or
there-being, in German, “dasein”. Heidegger is famous, some would say
infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this
jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101.
Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange
it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values?
The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are
“being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects
either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and
miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the
world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and
truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when
things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in
philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of
dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons
disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become
conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing
after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call
attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis.
This
tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can
become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in communism and
anarchism (especially among artists such as the Dada who believe we can
reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes). Nietzsche,
an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and
struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning
as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite.
While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an
individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and
perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and
declares that our being-there is always a they as much as it is an “I”.
As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the
world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as
much as one is thrown against it. While I am in favor of this view, we
must note that Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is
in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and
denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger
famously argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both
gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. Being and
beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously
gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always
historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s
great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as
historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time,
and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. As
time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute
judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a
multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a
single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as
much as for another who never fully arrives, just as we never reach the
horizon as we walk.
For
Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is
denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being,
the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical eternal
truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic
state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as
we are afraid of particular people and objects. Nietzsche gives
Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the
void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find
no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create
our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an
individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social
movements. Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute
being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially
becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist
as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a
role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the
basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a
variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing
this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing
ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to
truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt
to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free
to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off
into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at
home. As for Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that
new truths can freely grow in their place.
