Heidegger on Americanism: Ruinanz and the End of Modernity

What philosophers are in the habit of doing is adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil ¹

Human beings today no longer know what to do with themselves. They therefore believe everything is at an end and become the fools of what the present day happens to bring.

--Martin Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochmann,
20 December 1931 ²

This exploration of a broadly revealing strand of Martin Heidegger's thinking is intended, at least tangentially, to rehistoricize the debate about the shift from the modern to the postmodern. If ongoing discussions of the postmodern have a central issue at stake--a discernible core rather than a perpetually evasive "uncentering" or diffuse "unfounding" in the cause of ineffable Otherness or unnamable différance--then Heidegger will continue to be invoked there. As Karsten Harries has observed, "postmodern theory is unthinkable without his questioning." ³ French critics Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are even more adamantly encompassing: "The Heidegger controversy merely stands in the foreground of a controversy that has a quite different impact, involving nothing less than the significance attributed to the logic of modernity." ⁴

The "logic of modernity" is a large subject and Heidegger, who did not shrink from the largest and most indefinite of all subjects (Being as such), endowed the otherwise intangible logic of modernity with a palpable shape, historical telos, and easy comprehensibility by associating it with the most venerable, renewable, and clichéd concept in German (and European) thinking about modernity. I am referring to the tandem notions of Americanism and Americanization, which served in Heidegger's thinking to convey the recent phase of mankind's fateful course of Ruinanz--that is, the total but unrecognized ruination of the world through the occlusion of Being by way of putative progress. As both ordinary way of life and blockage of the sense for Being, Americanism came to incarnate modern humanism run lethally amok. In its blind, pragmatic-technological frenzy, it was utterly inhuman and at the same time all-too-human. In a compound logical and eschatological sense that combined fulfillment, perfection, and extinction, Americanism came to stand for the end of human history, as it did for other "classical" thinkers of the twentieth-century posthistoire, including Heidegger's contemporaries Alexandre Kojève, Ernst Jünger, and Arnold Gehlen. ⁵

Heidegger's account of the logic of modernity served his unique ontological aims, but his choice of these particular terms of reference was anything but idiosyncratic; rather the choice was foreordained by received ideas. For over a century before Heidegger's main writings, German thought had characterized the "most modern" by the catchphrases Americanism and Americanization. Over the long term, these prepotent epithets have exerted a deeply formative influence on the German understanding of modernity as a demonic-dynamic trajectory of mass civilization, running automatically amok beyond all proper bounds and measures toward the consummately inhuman. More than all others, these two terms have served to encapsulate the dreaded "common way" of the liberal-democratic, capitalist-industrialist West against which the German "special way" (Sonderweg) was, until 1945, held up as the heroic exception and exalted alternative.

Even today, after the great transformations following upon 1945 and 1989, these twin shibboleths continue to impart the sharpest critical edge to lingering German doubts about most modern (and postmodern) civilization as a potentially inhuman, inverted world of man's own making. These two habitual terms continue to serve as the most compelling master tropes (or commonplace conceits) for distilling the otherwise elusive, self-surpassing dynamic of modernity. They are the ambivalent residue when more innocent conceptions of Promethean progress have been demythified, deconstructed, or even ironically inverted by the searing calamities of the twentieth century. Moreover, as spectral self-clichés of modernity, these twin terms continue to figure at the forefront of almost all attempts to think "beyond the modern," whether to overtake and steer it along different lines or to transcend...