2 - Myth as Antidote to the “Age of Neutralizations”: Nietzsche and Cultural Conflict as Response to Technology

Summary

Martin Heidegger is the most famous philosophical critic of modern technology. Indeed, his critique of technology as well as the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his thought has generated a vast literature. Yet, as I demonstrated in the last chapter and as I would like to continue demonstrating in this chapter, it is actually Heidegger's fellow Weimar conservative and eventual National Socialist, Carl Schmitt, who in the twenties set out most explicitly a cultural-philosophical critique of technology. This chapter examines the Nietzschean elements of Schmitt's Weimar critique of technology and explores the implications of Schmitt's strategy for dissolving the hold of technology on twentieth-century Europe: the promotion of mythic conflict versus Soviet Russia. The Nietzschean image of the Antichrist emerges as central to Schmitt's confrontation with, and proposed solution to, technology in three works spread out across his Weimar career: his 1916 book-length commentary on Theodor Däubler's epic poem “Northern Lights”; Roman Catholicism and Political Form, from 1923; and his influential lecture of 1929, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.” The critical-Hegelian moments of these works were discussed in Chapter 1; here I wish to draw out their more existential moments.

Curiously, Schmitt very rarely mentioned Nietzsche in his work, and little has been written on his debt to the philosopher. This is perhaps due to the fact that the intellectual figure who most influenced Schmitt, Max Weber, is widely acknowledged to be a devotee of Nietzsche's, and thus it is assumed that any trace of Nietzsche in Schmitt's thought was simply passed on to him from Weber.