Heidegger's Political Roots.pdf

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POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004

Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY

A (POLITICAL) PHILOSOPHER

BY ANY OTHER NAME

The Roots of Heidegger’s Thought

MAPPING THE PRESENT: HEIDEGGER, FOUCAULT AND THE

PROJECT OF A SPATIAL HISTORY by Stuart Elden. London: Continuum,

2001. 217 + xiv pp.

CRISIS THEORY AND WORLD ORDER: HEIDEGGERIAN

REFLECTIONS by Norman K. Swazo. Albany: State University of New

York Press, 2002. 289 + x pp.

THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM: AN INTRODUCTION TO

PHILOSOPHY by Martin Heidegger, trans. Ted Sandler. London: Contin-

uum, 2002 (1982). 216 + xiv pp.

REVOLUTIONARY SAINTS: HEIDEGGER, NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND

ANTINOMIAN POLITICS by Christopher Rickey. University Park: Pennsyl-

vania State University Press, 2002. 296 + xvi pp.

HEIDEGGER’S POLEMOS: FROM BEING TO POLITICS by Gregory

Fried. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 302 + xvi pp.

In a 1955 address delivered at his birth town of Messkirch, Heidegger dis-

cussed the significance of “homeland.” Avoiding nationalist overtones but

focused on place, Heidegger was revisiting a concern for Bodenständigkeit ,

or “rootedness,” that occupied him since the early 1920s and rose to political

prominence the following decade. Homelessness, Heidegger continued to

lament after the war, was becoming the global destiny of humankind.

Technology and its socio-political handmaid, liberal cosmopolitanism,

were depicted as the chief threats. A recovery from the enframing grasp of

technology was to be gained, if it was to be gained, only through a

(re)discovery of our capacity for rootedness and releasement ( Gelassenheit ).

Releasement—a ‘letting-be’ and a bearing witness—would serve along with

rootedness as antidotes to the will to mastery over space and time that was

tightening technology’s grip.

To the extent that moral systems remain characterized by the willful order-

ing of the world, they were depicted as (just) another form of enframing. In

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 4, April 2004 570-579

DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260496

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their stead, Heidegger asked that we shift our attention back to the Hera-

clitean notion of ethics as ethos or dwelling place. The alternative to human-

istic ethics in a cosmopolitan age of technology is an “originary ethics”

marked by the rediscovery of our potential for dwelling in place, poetically

and politically.

Stuart Elden’s Mapping the Present is a lively discussion of the impor-

tance of place in the writings of Heidegger and Foucault. Though the least

compelling of the books examined here, Mapping the Present is rightly

directed in its recommendation that theorists “spatialize history and not sim-

ply historicize space” (p. 153). Elden argues that Heidegger shaped

Foucault’s historical approach, and, more specifically, helped him develop a

concern for spatial history, understood not in terms of physical extension

through a series of chronological moments (à la Descartes), but as a concern

for a place of dwelling that is experienced historically, which is to say,

authentically. As Elden observes, Dasein is the point of collision of a histori-

cal being with a futural orientation in a situated present. In the Augenblick ,an

authentic grappling with the space-time of Dasein, one effectively maps the

present. Heidegger’s effort to overcome metaphysics chiefly constituted the

rejection of a modern understanding of time and space, an understanding

Heidegger deemed fit only for world domination. In Hölderlin’s tributes to

journey and place, Heidegger found the voice for a new, or rediscovered, rela-

tionship.

Elden argues that Foucault’s concern with space demonstrates his indebt-

edness to Heidegger. This assertion is thinly documented, notwithstanding

Foucault’s own high estimate of Heidegger. To be sure, Foucault analyzed the

geography of power. He investigated the policing of modern spaces, whether

these were the collective places of surveillance—madhouses, prisons, and

clinics—or the compartments of the soul where discipline becomes internal-

ized. But describing Foucault as a thinker interested in the exercise of power

within and between bodies, psyches, and social networks does not go very far

in demonstrating his Heideggerian roots.

Norman K. Swazo’s Crisis Theory and World Order uses Heidegger to

promote authentic planetary dwelling while unsettling the assumptions of the

World Order project, a “systems approach” that theorizes a homeostatic

world of enduring peace, justice, economic well-being, and ecological bal-

ance, secured by some form of unitary global governance or a global federal-

ism grounded in international law.

The first seventy pages of Swazo’s book are devoted to an exposition of

the World Order project. This may be off-putting to Heidegger scholars. In

turn, Swazo’s exegesis of Heidegger, I suspect, will be obscure to World

Order theorists. For those who have an abiding interest in global politics and

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some background in Heidegger, however, Swazo’s medley may strike a

chord.

Like Nietzsche, World Order scholars resist the objectification of individ-

uals and cultures. And, like Nietzsche, they fail to realize that combating

objectification by means of a heightened (global) subjectivity only further

enmeshes them in metaphysics. The way out, Heidegger demonstrated, was

to leave metaphysics alone and attempt to gain greater release from subjectiv-

ism in all its forms, including its liberationist guises.

All of Heidegger’s later thinking, Swazo asserts, is a meditation on how

humanity might prepare itself for global governance while escaping the sub-

jectivism that inhibits authentic dwelling and caring. Swazo shares the prag-

matic concerns of World Order scholars and he endorses their “prudential”

recommendations, such as demilitarization, developmental assistance for the

South, and increased powers for the United Nations and the International

Court of Justice. But when these “strategies of transition” are placed within

an Enlightenment-style blueprint for world order, something vital is lost.

What gets neglected is the opportunity for authentic politics.

World Order theory, Swazo asserts, is best described by what Heidegger

called “calculative thinking.” It is opposed to the “meditative thinking” that

marked Heidegger’s own ontological explorations. Swazo grants that think-

ing globally requires some calculative foresight. But he warns that it must not

be limited to reckoning and representation, lest we become the victims of our

own plans, forever kept from truly dwelling and caring by means of our

“technocratic futurism.” World Order scholars must desist from asking “what

must be done” long enough to pose the more essential question “how must we

think.” Meditative thinking, Heidegger admitted, can appear quite useless

when compared to its calculative counterpart. But ontological reflections

also constitute fundamental historical forces, forces that Heidegger believed

bore the potential to (re)define entire epochs.

At this point, Swazo dips his cup deeply into Heideggerian waters, insist-

ing that the “basic words” we employ in our meditative thought and speech

prepare the way for the “world occurrence” of a politics that takes us beyond

the state (p. 233). The basic word that Swazo fixes upon is autarcheia .

Autarcheia , or autarchy, refers to the self-government of Dasein, the integra-

tion of ruler and ruled in the individual. The autarchos does not simply forge

her own laws. Rather, she “lets Being rule—i.e., lets Being grant the ‘stan-

dard’ by which she acts. Therefore, she transcends, as it were, the formal rule

of law of this or that particular politeia , attending instead always and every-

where to justice as the ordo of Being ” (p. 219). Adopting Heidegger’s pen-

chant for pure beginnings, Swazo maintains that only with Plato’s depiction

of ruling as a skill, a kind of fabrication, does the separation of ruler and

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ruled, the one and the many, occur. Autarcheia , therefore, is “the original way

to be political” (p. 217).

The historical status of autarchy as an original politics is certainly debat-

able. But it is chiefly against Swazo’s notion of the revolutionary power of

“essential words” that I want to lodge a complaint. Swazo writes, in vintage

Heideggerian fashion, that “We stand before the possibility of an ‘originary

advent’ if— but only if — we are prepared to experience the saying of these

words as the task reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy . . .

autarchology is the name for that essential thinking of the political experi-

enced under the sway of the second beginning” (p. 233). Swazo admits that

he risks, as did Heidegger, a certain “immodesty” in claiming that he has

(re)coined the basic words whose enunciation will usher in a global politics

of authentic dwelling (p. 229). He also risks transforming terms meant to

stimulate questioning into narcotic chants—a pitfall for many Heidegger

scholars.

Swazo accepts Heidegger’s assertion that “apart from the truth of Being

man does not matter” (p. 174). His point is that unless we let Being be, we

cannot hope to learn how to let humanity be in a way that does not deploy it as

just another component of the standing reserve. The problem is that the

inspiring effort to nourish our political lives with philosophical insight

becomes perverse—and tends to create victims—precisely when we believe

we have wholly captured philosophic truth in word or deed. Anxieties are

heightened by Heidegger’s own linkage of ontological thinking to the way a

Vo l k pursues its world-historical destiny—a linkage Swazo does not confront.

An ontological mantra will not redirect the historical trajectory of socio-

economic, technological, and cultural forces on a global scale. Nonetheless,

Swazo gives us food for thought as we ponder the need for (self) government

in a world where authentic dwelling fails to make the agenda of both World

Order scholars and their state-centric opponents.

One of the best ways to grapple with the importance of politico-philo-

sophical concepts like autarchy is to explore their relationship to freedom.

Heidegger’s own The Essence of Human Freedom contains the lion’s share of

his thoughts on the matter. The work, a translation of volume 31 of the

Gesamtausgabe , originally formed the basis of a lecture course offered in

1930. As the subtitle suggests, Heidegger understood the investigation of

freedom to sit at the core of the philosophical enterprise. The book presents a

detailed consideration of Kant’s practical philosophy, with a focus on his

understanding of freedom in the context of causality. It also relates the ques-

tion of freedom to the nature of being in Greek metaphysics, with a particular

focus on Aristotle. For Heidegger, all philosophic roads lead to Athens—

even if that destination can be reached only via Freiburg.

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POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004

Heidegger addresses the common understanding of freedom as autonomy

and independence, the freedom from compulsion commonly known as “neg-

ative freedom.” He notes that its counterpart, “positive freedom,” is best

understood as a form of self-determination or self-mastery. Here Heidegger

simply follows Kant. He goes on to observe that for Kant, positive freedom

bears within it the problem of causality, as it bespeaks a spontaneous, self-

origination of events.

Kant, Heidegger contends, provided the most “radical” understanding of

freedom available. But Kant’s approach is not the most “primordial” possi-

ble. That is because causality is only “ one ontological determination of

beings among others. The causal connections we draw between things and

events is only one way for those things and events to be revealed” (p. 205). In

contrast, freedom is the prerequisite for any and all disclosures of being.

Freedom is and should remain, therefore, the fundamental question for phi-

losophers. This is a startling claim for Heidegger to make, given the near-

complete absence of the topic in his previous and subsequent writings. Yet he

writes, “ The essence of freedom only comes into view if we seek it as the

ground of the possibility of Dasein , as something prior even to being and

time....Freedom is not some particular thing among and alongside other

things, but is superordinate and governing in relation to the whole ....

Human freedom now no longer means freedom as a property of man, but man

as a possibility of freedom ” (p. 93). It is because man is free that he can

become the singular “site” where beings can “ announce themselves ” (p. 94).

By participating in the freedom to witness what is, Dasein achieves its

greatness.

Dasein can escape the narrow egoism of a “bourgeois” understanding of

(positive and negative) freedom, understood as mastery of the self and its

world, only by bearing witness to its thrown finitude. Thus is Dasein’s spa-

tially and temporally limited nature transformed, philosophically speaking,

into cause for celebration. Freedom, paradoxically, emerges in and through

rootedness and releasement.

In Revolutionary Saints , Christopher Rickey observes the centrality of

freedom to Heidegger’s thought. Rickey mistakenly assumes that Heidegger

“anticipates” Isaiah Berlin in his use of the term “negative freedom” (p. 244).

Both Heidegger and Berlin borrowed this term (as well as “positive free-

dom”) from Kant, with Berlin probably doing so via T. H. Green. Rickey is

on better ground when he states that Heidegger’s radical understanding of

freedom is distinct from both ancient and modern conceptions. He also con-

tends that “Heidegger’s own radical politics grew out of his understandingof

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