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 blackshirts 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
counterculturals 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 worldwide
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.
