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Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism

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An introduction makes clear that Karl Lowith was wounded in World War I and held as a prisoner of war by the Italians for a few years. Lowith heard a famous Max Weber lecture in 1919, "Science as a Vocation" in Munich and followed Martin Heidegger from Freiburg, Germany, to Marburg in 1924. For hundreds of years, great thinkers have been hoping Europe will produce an outstanding advance on an intellectual level to match higher living standards. For many of these thinkers, the way in which governments have used military strategies has been a big disappointment. Nietzsche was studied by Martin Heidegger, but the way in which Heidegger attempts to be creative on his own concerns avoids how Nietzsche "calls into question the applicability of the concept of values to the total character of life," (p. 121).

Jakob Burckhardt is mentioned on totaltitarian states arising by "centralization without right" (P. 185) and a few pages later, I find:

The universities, Bauer continues, have become insipid; their philosophy teachers simply recount antiquated systems and do not advance even one new idea that could, as before, move the world. (p. 188).

General studies have been declining since students flocked to technical specialties. Anyone willing to generate criticism might be hounded from any position that would have the attention of millions of people. According to Burckhardt, the system we now have:

results in a boundless augmentation of military power and of the national debt which such an augmentation requires, and these are considered to be national necessities. The state has learned from the industrialists how exploit credit, and it defiantly maintains that the nation cannot cause credit to go bankrupt--"alongside all the swindlers there now stands the state as the greatest swindler." Ever since an economic order has ceased to exist in Europe, the state has suppressed foreign groups within the population, and nationality has been misused as the sole means for establishing associations. (p. 185).