Abstract

Heinz Sproll:
The mimetic machine “kat’exochen”:
Rome’s Universal Hegemony of Interpretation as a Central Object of Reference in Martin Heidegger
(FKTh 2013-2, p. 94–109)

On the basis of his myth of a beginning characterized by the history of being in the works of Heraclitus and Parmenides, especially in his Parmenides’ lectures during the winter term 1942/43, Heidegger cannot see anything else in Rome than a mimetic machine laying an imperial claim to the discourse hegemony, which was firstly transformed and distorted in favour of a metaphysics of the essent with its bottomlessness and then passed on by the pre-Socratic ontology as theory of being. According to Heidegger the reason not only for Rome’s juridicism but also for the Western culture oblivious of the being with its Humanism and Technicism, which administrates the essent in the modus operandi of the Roman organisation, can be found in the Roman translatio of the aletheia revealing itself in veritas. Hence, the Roman Catholic Church would administrate technically the veritas generated in “the imperial entity sphere„ (Heidegger) with an absolute, unappealable claim of validity and thus make its decisions. With his intention to think of a fundamental-ontological “other beginning„ pursuing Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger follows not only the anti-Roman fervour created by the German Idealism, but also something more: His intellectual-political struggle against Rome makes him fall into the trap of a “godless theology“ (Karl Löwith) and of a esoteric Gnosticism, which the Catholic Church has rejected with extreme resoluteness since its beginnings being faithful to the depositum fidei.