Heidegger and the Political

Miguel de Beistegui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134791248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Recent studies of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger's philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement. This has occured often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger's relation to the political. Heidegger and the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to critically assess Heidegger's relation to politics and his conception of the political.
Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger's writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger's ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger's key motifs - his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin's poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis - may tell us about Heidegger's relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger's denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself.
Heidegger and the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.

1
Bordering on Politics

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Dasein’s ways of behaviour, its capacities, powers, possibilities, and vicissitudes, have been studied with varying extent in philosophical psychology, in anthropology, ethics, “politics”. … But the question remains whether these interpretations of Dasein have been carried through with an originary existentiality comparable to whatever existentiell originarity they may have possessed.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

A certain suspicion will perhaps never cease to haunt Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus: given the philosopher’s enthusiastic embracing of National Socialism in 1933, is it not appropriate to look at his earlier thought, and particularly at Being and Time, to find the grounds for his disastrous politics? This suspicion never ceased to taint the otherwise much praised achievement of 1927.¹ More recently, though, and increasingly, Being and Time finds itself under severe attack:² on the European continent as well as in the United States, Heidegger’s text is being submitted to a political “reading” which serves to present his early project as the antechamber of his later massive support for the Third Reich. Rather than attempt to provide such a reading myself, and to trace the “fascistic” elements of Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time, rather than try to decipher a hidden political project or philosophy behind the apparently purely descriptive ontology that this text carries out, I shall try to pay specific attention to some Heideggerian motifs so as to let them resonate within the context of Heidegger’s later works, specifically those works that coincide with his political misadventure. I shall treat Being and Time not as the antechamber that opens onto the unrestricted glorification of Nazism, but as a resonance chamber, where motifs, certainly of a very specific kind, are introduced in a way that is not devoid of political vibrations.

The philosophical project of fundamental ontology that was to culminate in the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927 was to remain devoid of worldviews, metaphysical constructions and anthropological considerations. As such, it was still indebted to the Husserlian demand that a phenomenon be isolated and decribed in its “essence,” and that means regardless of the way in which it is ordinarily viewed by the “natural attitude.” The project of fundamental ontology was to attend solely to the question of what it means to be; it was to address the question of the meaning of the being of all beings and sketch its formal structure. As fundamental ontology, it was also to be sharply distinguished from what Heidegger calls regional ontologies. Such ontologies are characterized by the fact that they investigate a specific kind of beings, or, to be more precise, that they question beings from a pre-given perspective. Thus, biology will have as its field of investigation those beings that can be understood on the basis of a certain concept of bios or life. Similarly, psychology will consider certain beings, most likely human beings, from the perspective of their psychè. Likewise, then, a politology will consider those beings to whom belong the character of living in a self-organized community or polis (or however one might decide to characterize such a community). All regional ontologies presuppose a certain concept of being (being in the sense of life, being in the sense of nature, being in the sense of polis, etc.) in order to operate and be successful. Yet none of them can address the concrete question of what it means to be for all beings. None of them are in a position to address the question of the meaning of the being of all beings, even though each and everyone of them presupposes it. This task can only be reserved for a fundamental ontology, which, for Heidegger, is philosophy proper. In the process of its fragmentation into various fields (ontology, theology, epistemology, psychology, ethics …), philosophy became unable to think the ground common to all such sciences and thus became estranged from its own essence. Specifically, the fragmentation of philosophy into a manifold of sciences and the consequent absorption of philosophy into such sciences, or, to put it yet differently, the becoming-science of philosophy, is due to philosophy’s failure to raise the question of the meaning of being adequately, that is, with time properly understood as its guiding thread. Part I of Being and Time was to raise such a question adequately: it was to show that “the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, if rightly seen and rightly explained.”³

From the perspective of the project of fundamental ontology, it is thus easy to understand that philosophy is not to exhibit views concerning the world, that it is not to engage in either judgments or evaluations. It is only to lay out the fundamental structures of being, and specifically of that being’s being which Heidegger calls Dasein. Philosophy as fundamental ontology ought not be a platform for discussing political issues, for such issues presuppose a certain understanding of the meaning of the being of man, which the “analytic” of Dasein is precisely to examine. One needs to go even further and add that if the project of questioning the meaning of existence in its being is to be successful, then the overall unquestioned definition of man as “the political animal by nature”⁴ is to be suspended, insofar as this definition is indeed such that it only serves to obstruct and impede the investigation by providing an all too hasty answer to a question inadequately raised. The word “politics” itself needs to be altogether avoided, for its use only leads to a concealment of the Sache des Denkens and to the constitution of an anthropology. Like names such as “man” (anthropos), “ethics” and “physics,” “politics” would be in need of its own Destruktion.⁵ Philosophy properly understood should above all not be political in its approach. Thus Being and Time would be radically apolitical: the very project of fundamental ontology would be such that it suspends the privilege traditionally granted to the “political nature” of “man.”

And yet. As fundamental ontology, it is also to lay the ground for the possibility of any such discourse. In other words, it is not simply indifferent to politics, since it precedes it ontologically. The ontological precedence of philosophy over politics, the order of grounding that exists between the two, is perhaps what lies at the very source of Heidegger’s essentially ambiguous and even duplicitous politics. Given the grounding priority of philosophy over politics that is established in the 1920s, and which will only be confirmed by the introduction of the Seinsgeschichte in the 1930s, the way in which the discourse on being will come to be construed will itself become decisive for the way in which Heidegger will analyze and react to the political situation of his time. To put it in yet another way: if we are even to begin to understand the motivations behind Heidegger’s politically most decisive gestures, we shall have to constantly bear in mind the way in which Heidegger never ceased to subordinate the political to the metaphysical. It is the specific way in which the relation of precedence and priority of the philosophical over the political was established and reformulated, but never called into question, that made Heidegger’s support for Nazism possible and, at once and simultaneously, irreducible to it. Because of his philosophical presuppositions, Heidegger was able to see in Nazism a historical mission that was never there (a historico-political response to the essence of our time as dominated by planetary technology) and was never able to see, even after the war, what was really there (a form of terror and a power of destruction hitherto unknown). Not only did Heidegger’s political involvement constitute the “greatest stupidity” (die grösste Dummheit) of his life;⁶ it also and primarily revealed a certain blindness of his thought.

To write the story of this blindness, then, is to follow Heidegger’s own path of thinking. Specifically, it is to go along with the priority in the order of grounding that Heidegger establishes between the philosophical and the political. For if there is to be a radical critique of Heidegger, it can only stem from an engagement with the very philosophical presuppositions upon which his thought rests. The difficulty, then, lies in the necessity to reach the very heart of Heidegger’s thinking without simply reinscribing the philosophical gesture that allowed for Heidegger’s own political blindness. If this angle excludes the possibility of ultimately understanding Heidegger with Heidegger and on the basis of Heidegger, a possibility which can easily evolve into the temptation to understand Heidegger’s Nazism, if not Nazism itself, on the basis of yet another rethinking of history as the history of being, it also refuses to envisage Heidegger’s idiom and politics as the sole symptoms of a reactionary ideology (although it will occasionally point to what it takes to be irreducibly reactionary motifs). If the former approach serves to highlight the specificity of Heidegger’s Nazism, it does so only at the cost of remaining caught within its metaphysical presuppositions; as for the latter approach, it simply misses the specificity of the Heidegger case, which ultimately cannot simply be viewed as a philosophical variation on an essentially ideological theme.

Thus the seeming apoliticality of the project of fundamental ontology cannot be settled so easily. If Being and Time is indeed apparently devoid of political views and opinions, if it displaces the terrain of the philosophical investigation in the direction of an analysis of being, or of the way in which things come to be present for Dasein on the basis of the way in which they are granted with meaning, it also acknowledges the essentially collective and historical dimension of human existence, prior to questions concerning the modes of organization of this being-in-common. In that respect, Being and Time can be said to be pre-political, where the “pre” would need to be thought as the onto-chronological condition of possibility of the political sphere in general. Yet the way in which the collective dimension of human existence comes to be determined in Being and Time provides a specific and decisive orientation towards a possible thematization of the political. Is it this very delimitation of the political on the basis of an ontological thematization of existence that allowed for Heidegger’s own politics in the 1930s?⁷ If so, where is such a delimitation most rigorously articulated?

Karl Löwith recalls how, as he and his former professor met for the last time in Rome in 1936, he suggested to Heidegger that his involvement with Nazism stemmed from the very essence of his philosophy; “Heidegger agreed with me without reservations and spelled out that his concept of ‘historicity’ was the basis for his political engagement.”⁸ One could immediately be surprised by Heidegger’s response, insofar as another, perhaps more directly and obviously political place to look at in the overall economy of Being and Time would be the sections devoted to the being-with of Dasein. Yet the discussion concerning the historicity of Dasein (Division Two, Chapter V) is the one that provokes the most burning questions and calls for the most vigilant reading.

To treat the sections on historicity as marking an opening onto the political is of course a delicate operation, one which requires the greatest care.⁹ Far from assuming that the historical is de facto translatable in political terms, I wish to explore the various ways in which such a translation is suggested by Heidegger. In other words, it is the very bordering of the historical on the political to which I want to pay particular attention. Specifically, I want to mark the passages and emphasize some of the motifs that seem to provoke an irreversible slippage into specific ways of framing the political.

The analysis of history (Geschichte) in Being and Time arises from a difficulty concerning the meaning of Dasein’s being as care (Sorge). Having identified the being of Dasein as care in the last chapter of the preparatory analysis of Dasein, and having then revealed the meaning of care as temporality in section 65, Heidegger proceeds to show how temporality is necessarily presupposed in what Division One revealed as Dasein’s foremost way of being, namely, everydayness. At the end of Division Two Chapter IV, (“Temporality and Everydayness”), then, one would expect the second division of the treatise to reach a conclusion. Was the goal of this division not precisely the “Interpretation of Dasein in terms of Temporality”? Was that goal not achieved in section 65, and made explicit in Chapter IV, through a renewed analysis of everydayness?

Without calling into question either the interpretation of Dasein’s being as care or the meaning of this being as temporality (Zeitlichkeit), Heidegger points to a difficulty regarding such interpretation, only to reaffirm it and consolidate it in the end. The difficulty has to do with the way in which Dasein’s temporality was made manifest, and specifically with an unquestioned orientation with respect to this temporality. Indeed, Dasein’s possibility of being-a-whole, that is, the possibility of grasping Dasein in the totality of its being, was revealed in Dasein’s basic way of being ahead of itself towards the end, or being-towards-death. Insofar as Dasein has the character of being-towards-the-end, the ontological question concerning its totality seems to have found its answer. But is death the only “end” Dasein is confronted with, or are there other ends besides death? What about “birth”? As the “beginning,” is it not also the other end to which Dasein necessarily comports itself? Is the answer of Dasein’s totality not contained in the life that stretches between birth and death?¹⁰

If the task becomes to analyze ontologically the meaning of the being of Dasein as the stretching between two ends, then the analysis does not cease to be temporal. On the contrary: temporality remains what needs to be thought, but in a way that now includes such stretching along as constitutive of Dasein’s being. How are we to understand the birth/death connectedness? Is Heidegger simply suggesting that Dasein is contained within two boundaries, that it enters time, fills up a stretch of life with its experiences, and then steps out of time? Or are we to consider the “between” which relates birth to death in a more originary way, as an ontological-existential structure? Heidegger’s answer is quite clear:

Dasein stretches itself along [erstreckt sich selbst] in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching along. The “between” which relates to birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein. … Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand. … Factical Dasein exists as born; and as born, it is already dying, in the sense of being-towards-death.

(SZ 374/426)

As soon as Dasein is born, it is old enough to die, for it is, from the start, towards its own death. But Dasein is not born just once: understood existentially, birth is facticity, which means that Dasein never ceases to be thrown into the world and into a life which it has to live. As born, Dasein must be, and such being involves being-towards-death. Death and birth are connected in care: “As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.“¹¹

The question of how such a “between” unfolds becomes all the more urgent. What must be Dasein’s temporal constitution so as to allow for Dasein’s stretching-along (Erstreckung)? This question is precisely the way into the question of history:

The specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along [Die spezifische Bewegtheit des erstreckten Sicherstreckens], we call its “histor...