Abstract

Another "reckoning" with Heidegger! Bambach's main thesis is that "authochthonic rootedness" is a "never abandoned ontological myth", it functions as a leading value, and it grounds Heidegger's fundamental ontology and history of being. It survives the turns of Heidegger's philosophical trajectory. Heidegger attributes his principle to the Greeks, but he uses it to legitimate a specifically German rootedness, a major critical tool and antidote to the cultural ills he diagnoses. Heidegger thus asserts German superiority and power in thought, culture, and political mission. Adequate thought and right value need to have chthonic origin. In addition, Heidegger's fundamental ontology and metaphysical history of being are exclusionary: only autochthonously rooted cultures have dignity and are entitled to reign. Heidegger's "originary thinking" excludes from that dignity Russian Communism, American capitalism, modern democracy, the ideas of 1789, Enlightenment rationality, Latinity, Galilean and Newtonian science, calculative thinking, technology, universalizing ethics, Cartesian subjectivity.