The Flight of the Gods: A Comparative Study of Martin Heidegger and Oskar Goldberg

The article argues that Martin Heidegger and Oskar Goldberg share a common gnostic motif of the “flight of the gods from the earth” and that both thinkers seek to prepare their people (the Germans, the Jews) for a “second beginning” of metaphysics that would restore the relationship between the people’s god and the earth. Both thinkers also reject the Darwinian concept of the “state as organism” in the new academic study of human geography known as Geopolitik. Both thinkers embrace a neovitalist concept of animal life as it was developed in the work of Jakob von Uexküll. Despite these commonalities, Heidegger and Goldberg differ in how they understand the place of human animality once this renewal takes place. Heidegger calls for the sacrificing of the people’s animality in their readiness to die for the “last god,” whereas Goldberg envisions the increasing power of the transcendental life force in the human species as a whole.