Both Heidegger and Evola rejected attempts to validate race thinking via appeals to natural science. Both insisted that “spiritual fascism”—or, to employ Heidegger’s expression, “Volk as Spirit”—represented a valuable corrective to this widespread misapprehension. In a recent article, one scholar has helpfully summarized these intellectual affinities as follows: “For Heidegger, as for Evola, the world was facing an apocalyptical decision. In Evola’s case, it was the struggle between the traditional and the modern world that was at issue. In Heidegger’s case, it was the struggle between the ‘preeminence of Machenschaft and the authority of Being.’ For Evola, the modern world had to perish in order for rebirth to occur; for Heidegger, history culminated in the ‘self-annihilation of man.’ However, far from being a misfortune, according to Heidegger, this situation paved the way for a ‘purification of Being from the deep-seated disfigurations of beings [das Seiende].’”230


Following Steve Bannon’s banishment from the White House in August 2017—in the heat of the 2016 election campaign, Bannon famously quipped that he wanted to make Breitbart News a “platform for the alt-right”—Trump’s former chief political strategist had ample time to reflect on other European thinkers whose ideas might be serviceable for the ends of the transatlantic New Right. In a 2018 interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, he revealed that Heidegger’s name had risen to the top of his list. In the words of the Der Spiegel journalist Christoph Scheuermann, “We sit down at the dining room table and [Bannon] picks up a book, a biography of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. ‘That’s my guy!’, Bannon says. Heidegger, he says, had some good ideas on the subject of Being, which fascinates him. . . . [Bannon] jumps from the depths of politics to the heights of philosophy, from the swamp to Heidegger in five seconds. What sets us apart from animals or rocks, Bannon asks? What does it mean to be human? How far should digital progress go?”231


Seinsgeschichte as Heilsgeschichte


Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte embodied a profane, quasi-mystical version of Christian Heilsgeschichte, one in which Deutschtum, instead of Christ, had been elevated to the role of Erlöser, or “redeemer.”


Heidegger in Ruins by Richard Wolin page 164