Heidegger and The Occlusion of the Political
By
SACHA GOLOB (King’s College London)
Forthcoming in
Geschichte, Politik, Ideologie: Heideggers ,Schwarze Hefte‘ im Kontext, Espinet, Figal,
Keiling and Mirkovic (eds.), Mohr Siebeck.
Penultimate Draft – Please Cite the Published Version
Abstract
This paper aims to advance our understanding of Heidegger’s politics as it is laid bare within
the ‘Schwarze Hefte’. Yet my interest is not in Heidegger’s first order political views, but
rather in his conception of the political sphere per se. Beginning from a close analysis of the
earliest volume of the notebooks, Gesamtausgabe Bd.94, I suggest that the dominant
characterisation of the political space within Heidegger’s text is as a threat - to philosophy
and to ontology. Underlying that characterisation, however, it is simultaneously possible to
identify another pattern, one on which the political is itself gradually suppressed or occluded
by the ontological. This tacit occlusion has, I suggest, a number of deeply problematic
consequences. I close by indicating how the argument might be extended to the question of a
Heideggerian ethics.
1
My aim in this paper is to advance our understanding of Heidegger’s politics as it is laid bare
within the so-called ‘Schwarze Hefte’. But my interest is not in his first order political views
nor in his prejudices, which seem to me as predictable as they are repulsive. Rather, my
interest is in his conception of the political sphere per se, and in his understanding of the
relationship between philosophy and politics as two fields of discourse or action. I want to
approach the topic with the help of a figure that is, I hope, useful, although provocative.
Figure A
(I) Ontology
(II) Politics
(III) Morality and/or Ethics
I am going to use this diagram to think through the relationship between the concepts located
at each corner.1 The figure is provocative because the diagram is obviously utterly vague –
one’s immediate response is to ask what is meant by the terms listed. But that is also why the
figure is helpful – it triggers a demand for clarification within a context orientated around the
interaction of the three points. For all its crudity, such a diagram thus serves to highlight a
philosophically vital dimension. Consider, for example, the case of Kant. The Kantian system
employs a number of highly sophisticated devices to manage the interaction between the
triangle’s points. At the macro-level, there is the distinction between theoretical and practical
reason, which is designed to mediate the interaction of (I) and (III).2 There is also the
ceaselessly rearticulated distinction between virtue and right – this is designed to
simultaneously separate and yet connect (II) and (III), and one of the distinctive features of
the Metaphysics of Morals is its continual, non-equivalent, attempts to spell this out.3 At the
micro-level, the interaction of the points is handled by projects such as Kant’s idiosyncratic
manual for pedagogy, with its complex choreography of question and silence.4 In the case of
1
The very geometry of this figure is, of course, an almost intolerable echo of the history at stake in this debate;
but that is a discussion for another paper.
2
IMMANUEL KANT, Kritik der reinenVernunft. Kants gesammelte Schriften, Akademieausgabe (hereinafter:
AK) Bd.3, Berlin 1911, Bix-x. Throughout all translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
3
IMMANUEL KANT, Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Kants gesammelte Schriften, AK6, Berlin 1914, pp. 218-221;
380-1; 390; 406-7.
4
IMMANUEL KANT, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, AK6, p. 479.
2
other thinkers, different aspects of the triangle and its intra-relations will come centre stage.
For example, consider the tradition running from Hegel through Foucault which seeks to
rethink the conjunction or disjunction at (III), and to go on from that to transform the
connections between (II) and (III). Here the issues will in part be those of translation in the
deepest sense: how, for example, does the distinction between “Moralität” and “Sittlichkeit”
map to one between “la morale” and “l’éthique”?
My purpose in this essay is to use first volume of the so called ‘Schwarze Hefte’,
published as Gesamtausgabe Bd.94 and covering 1931-1938, to shed some light on how
Heidegger himself understood this triangle. I confine my analysis to this single volume for
two reasons. First, it covers the period of his most overt political involvement, the Rectorship.
Second, I want to pay close attention to the dynamics of Heidegger’s text – to include the
later volumes of the notebooks, I would need not only to dilute that focus but also to digress
into discussion of the broader changes within Heidegger’s philosophy during the 1930s and
1940s. So my focus will be largely on GA94. My aim is to use that text in order to analyse
Heidegger’s conception of the political and his understanding of how the political interacts
with ontology and with ethics. In other words, how does point (II) of my diagram relate to
points (I) and (III)? Once that is done, I will close by discussing briefly the relationship
between points (I) and (III) themselves.
Three remarks on scope and definitions before proceeding. First, as in the paragraph
preceding this, I will talk of “ethics” rather than “morality” when discussing (III) in a
Heideggerian context. By “ethics” I mean those general normative considerations, whatever
they may be, that define the good life; I prefer this to “morality” since the latter term often
calls to mind specifically deontological or rule-based normative systems.5 Second, whilst any
examination of Heidegger’s conception of the political ultimately needs to be embedded
within a broader treatment of Sein und Zeit’s views on “Öffentlichkeit” or “Das Man”, a
direct engagement with that text is beyond this piece.6 Third, I will use “ontology” broadly to
mean any philosophical reflection on appropriate and inappropriate views of being. I will
mark Heidegger’s own distinctive take on being, whether that be “Sein” or “Seyn”, by use of
an initial capital letter: “Being”. I am not going to discuss exactly how Heidegger tries to
cash the relevant notions of ‘the appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ in this period; that would
I began by including the reference to “morality” in order to allow me to discuss Kant, a thinker who provides a
useful illustration of the triangle’s importance.
6
For my own views on those concepts, please see SACHA GOLOB, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and
Normativity, Cambridge, 2014, Ch. 6.
5
3
require close analysis of concepts such “Ereignis” and “Anfang”. My interest is rather in how
Heidegger construes the relation between an appropriate stance on Being – whatever exactly
that should be – and the question of politics. As I will discuss, Heidegger also often uses
“‘Ontologie’” in scare quotes to mark misguided views on the topic.
(1) Politics as a Threat to Ontology within GA94
The question I want to begin with is a deceptively simple one: “what is the political?”.7 As
noted, my concern is not with Heidegger’s first order politics, but with his understanding of
the political sphere per se. What if anything, for example, marks the boundary between a
political conversation and a philosophical one? I will now argue that GA94 primarily
characterises the political in terms of threat. This can be seen at both a general and a more
specific level, and I will take each in turn.
Whatever else it may be, the political sphere is necessarily a public sphere – one can
then gloss that public sphere in terms of power, management of competing interests, giving
and exchanging reasons, and so on depending upon one’s further views. What is immediately
striking in GA94, however, is its repeated focus on the negative dynamics of the public
sphere, and on the attendant problems facing action or discourse within it. In short,
Heidegger’s view of the basic architecture of the political in GA94 is a negative one. His
worries are articulated simultaneously along aesthetic, epistemological and sociological lines:
the public sphere is noisy,8 quick and busy,9 posturing [Getue],10 superficial and deceptive, a
place of figleaves and veneers [Deckmantel;Anstrich]11, misled and stubborn,12 and
characterised by the consumerist logic of the marketplace.13 These predicates are, of course,
in large part simply the reverse image of those which Heidegger himself valorises:
contemporary politics is defined by the “loudspeaker”, whereas Heidegger himself valorises
silence.14 The result is a discourse on politics that interweaves first order cultural gripes with
7
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938), Gesamtausgabe (hereinafter GA) Bd.
94, Frankfurt am Main, 2014, p. 58.
8
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, pp. 163-4; 245.
9
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 122; 159-160; 170.
10
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 146.
11
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 147; 133.
12
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 174.
13
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 140.
14
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 245. Compare MARTIN HEIEGGER, Sein und Zeit,
Tübingen, 1957, p. 273.
4
Heidegger’s own systematic, philosophical, concerns. So, for example, whilst he is excited by
the energy with which students have engaged in the ‘new politics’, he is worried than his own
ability to guide debate, will be blocked by a political climate that privileges youth and that
demands rapidly implementable policies when genuine progress takes decades or even
centuries.15 The temporal dynamics and rhythms of the political sphere are thus inherently at
odds, he suggests, with those of philosophy. This same worry is clearly visible even at the
zenith of his own political intervention, in the Rekoratsrede
But if the Greeks took three centuries just to put the question of what knowledge is
upon the right basis and on a secure path, we have no right to presume that the
elucidation and unfolding of the essence of the German university could take place in
the current or in the coming semester.16
Heidegger’s basically negative presentation of the political sphere in GA94 is further
articulated along three axes, and it is to these I now want to turn. First, he identifies a series
of sites and institutions which sustain and concentrate the problematic tendencies just
sketched. Many of these are the standard targets of the period, such as democratic decisionmaking bodies or newspapers.17 Journalism, for example, figures as both driving the
degeneration of philosophy and as an endpoint to which philosophy risks being reduced.18
Second, the public sphere is in an important sense incorrigible: it absorbs and
redirects any attempt to correct it. Within GA94, this underlying worry, building on
Heidegger’s early work on “idle talk” [Gerede], becomes enmeshed with the problematic
reception of his own thought. Whatever philosophical innovation is introduced, public
discourse simply appropriates it, sloganizes it and thus robs it of significance and power to
change the status quo. Heidegger gives as examples of this trend everything from current
discussions of “Existenzphilosophie” to “‘Ontologie’” (note the scare quote as mentioned
above).19 To introduce a biological metaphor that will prove important later, Heidegger sees
the public sphere and the political acts and discourses that take place within it as both
diseased and yet as protected by a perverse immunity: all attempts at a cure are simply coopted by the target.
15
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 158; 122.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, The Self-Assertion of the German University, translated by Karsten Harries in: The
Review of Metaphysics 38/3 (1985), pp. 467-502, here p. 478.
17
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 151; 22-3.
18
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, pp. 222-3; 380.
19
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 19; 22; 10; 44 .
16
5
The third axis shaping Heidegger’s discussion concerns the scope of his misgivings.
Whilst many philosophers assume some form of distinction between what the early moderns
called the “vulgar” and the “learned”, Heidegger sees the same negative political dynamics at
play in the academy as in the public square. So, for example, he views scholarly exegesis of
Sein und Zeit’s links to Kierkegaard as a derailment device, a form of the perverse immunity
just sketched by which academics serve to distract both themselves and the public from the
book’s real import.20 Again, this reflects a longstanding trend within Heidegger’s thought –
GA20, the lecture course from 1925 entitled “Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs”, presents academic
conferences per se as devices for “covering up” ideas through parroting them out.21
My aim so far has been to outline the structurally negative view of the public sphere,
and thus of politics, which characterises the first volume of the ‘Schwarze Hefte’. I want now
to introduce the more specific dimensions of the threat Heidegger sees politics as posing. In
doing so, I am going to begin to introduce the question of the relationship between ontology
and politics, points (I) and (II) of the diagram with which I began.
Throughout GA94, Heidegger worries about the relationship between the
contemporary political scene and the demands of philosophy. The danger comes from “the
ceaseless ‘politicization’ of all ‘sciences’”.22 Elsewhere, he talks of the pernicious “new
‘slogan’” that science must be practical, rather than ‘mere talk’, and he links this with the
broader programme pushed by the Party.23 The threat is that politics will increasingly
reconfigure philosophy in terms of its own agenda; this will take place, Heidegger suspects,
under the banner of promoting “lebensnaher” research.24 Within such a framework,
philosophy would be reduced to “a mere tool” [Werkzeug], to be measured by its ability to
generate socio-economic “impact” [Wirkung].25 In short, such politics risks “a blind
infantilization of the university” and the “destruction of every genuine knowing”.26 It is a
“path to barbarism”.27
20
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 74; see similarly p. 39.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA20, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p.
376.
22
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 302 [“die restlose <Politisierung> aller
<Wissenschaften>]”.
23
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 175; 188.
24
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 222; 183.
25
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 222; 64.
26
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 183. As one can clearly see from the remainder of this
passage, Heidegger is using Wissen and Wissenschaft here as positive terms - they alone support the right
relationship to “Seyn”.
27
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 116.
21
6
For Heidegger this specific threat is ultimately a symptom of the broader trend
towards technologization, and the construal of everything as a potential resource.28 But it is
striking how vividly the political comes to symbolise this underlying current. Consider, for
example, the way he returns to newspapers, one of the key sites of the problematic political
discourse. Within a technological framework, GA65 suggests:
The historical human sciences become newspaper science. The natural sciences
become machine science. ‘Newspaper’ and ‘machine’ are meant essentially as the
dominant ways of ultimate objectification.29
Journalism thus both enacts and exemplifies the process of objectification.
I have focussed so far on the threat posed by the political to philosophy. But what
exactly is it that is so under threat? What special role fulfilled by philosophy stands at risk?
This is a question which Heidegger explicitly thematises throughout GA94. The issue is quite
simply: “[w]hy is philosophy necessary and what are its limits?”.30 Heidegger’s answer is
absolutely clear – the fundamental task of philosophy is to sustain, articulate and empower
[ermächtigen] a distinctive relationship to Being [“Sein” or “Seyn”].31 At its proper end,
exactly as at its beginning, philosophy remains “the question of the truth of being [Wahrheit
des Seyns].32 By extension, humanity must become the “guardian of the truth of Being” [der
Mensch der Wahrer der Wahrheit des Seyns werden muss].33 There are, of course, numerous
changes over the period from 1931 to 1938 in how exactly Heidegger thinks about Being.
Many of these are exemplified in the switches between the modern and the archaic spellings
of the term: for the reasons which I gave in the introduction I cannot trace them here.
Furthermore, he is undoubtedly suspicious of “ontology” in at least some senses of that term,
and of the way ontology has been tied to a certain kind of theory: as noted, he typically marks
the point by using scare quotes to talk of “‘Ontologie’”. But I think that if one is willing to
allow, as Heidegger himself has done since the early 1920s, a certain breadth to the term
“ontology” we can now make an important point. The fundamental characterisation of the
political in GA94 is as a threat; a threat manifest at both a general and a specific level. What
it threatens is the distinctive role of philosophy, a role which centres on philosophy’s
28
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 295; 472.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA65, Frankfurt am Main, 2003, p.
158
30
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 221.
31
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 29; 31; 36; 39; 54; 92; 221; 232; 272; 332.
32
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 119.
33
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 332.
29
7
connection to Being. This point holds irrespective of the changing details of how exactly
Heidegger construes this connection: for example in terms of Seinsgeschehnis or Ereignis.34
To return to our diagram, philosophy is aligned with ontology, at least that is ontology
properly practised, and politics is treated as a threat to such ontology. We have, in short, an
initial account of the relationship between points (I) and (II).
(2) Heidegger’s Response to the Threat of the Political
I argued above that the dominant presentation of the political within GA94 is as a threat – at
both a general and a specific level, Heidegger presents the political as threatening philosophy,
and the unique relationship to Being which philosophy sustains. Before developing this point,
I want to briefly sketch the three strategies employed by GA94 to deal with the danger posed
by the political
The first strategy is one of disengagement from the public sphere. Perhaps, Heidegger
muses, “thinking within another beginning” simply cannot occur in a public space regulated
by the type of self-immunising banality I sketched above.35 After all, given what he sees as
the utterly blinkered reception of his own earlier work, its typecasting simply as
“‘Existenzphilosophie’”, it may be “time to withdraw from the public sphere”.36 This mood
also finds expression in his attempts to valorise the “uselessness” of philosophy, its utter
inutility for the type of quantitative ‘resource-calculus’ that he opposes.37
The second tactic is more aggressive. Here Heidegger uses the hermeneutic
methodology articulated in Sein und Zeit to go on the offensive against the ideology behind
the political fantasy of a “‘lebensnah’” ” or “‘wirklichkeitsnah’” philosophy: his point is that
the advocates of such an approach have failed to think through the ideas of life or impact
which their rhetoric assumes.38 The result is these ideas are crudely inchoate: he talks
mockingly of a “Jedermannswirklichkeit”.39 Furthermore, the politician’s emphasis on
practice, rather than theory, does not mean that his position is free of philosophical
34
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 29; 217.
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 429.
36
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 398.
37
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 277; compare pp. 43-4.
38
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 44; 64; 302.
39
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 450.
35
8
assumptions; it simply means that these assumptions are allowed to go unarticulated and
unquestioned. In this sense, such practice is “indeed the purest and worst ‘theory’”.40
Heidegger’s third, and most infamous, strategy for dealing with the threat posed by
the political is to try to co-opt it, to relocate it within his own metaphysical framework.
Within GA94, the text that is the focus of this article, this is manifest in several ways. There
are, particularly in the period immediately before the Rectoral appointment, excited remarks
in which he reimagines his own place in the political order: with the advent of the Führer,
“the literary existence is at an end”.41 He also tries to redescribe the political in a way more in
tune with his own system. At the aesthetic level, he seeks to align National Socialism with the
reticent silence stylised in Sein und Zeit.42 Likewise, he attempts to embed concepts like Volk
within his preferred apparatus: just as authentic Dasein required individualization
[Vereinzelung] so now does the Volk.43 Similarly, new terms, such as the “mass” [Masse] are
introduced to bear the negative features which Heidegger associates with the public, thus
allowing Volk to acquire a positive valence, representing at least the possibility for a
profound and yet still public relationship to Being.44 By extension, the true measure of a
people is, in line with his privileging of ontology, the establishment and cultivation of the
right relationship to Being.45
(3) The Occlusion of the Political in GA94
We now have two elements in play. One is Heidegger’s presentation of the political as a
threat to philosophy and to ontology – this was covered in section (1). The other is an
overview of the strategies he uses to negotiate the interaction between the political and
philosophy – this was covered in section (2). I now want to press the issue of the relation
between philosophy and politics further. I am going to argue that, in important sense,
Heidegger presides over an occlusion or suppression of the political, a development which
has deeply problematic consequences.
40
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 117; similarly p.134.
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 111; similarly p. 116; 124.
42
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 114.
43
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 98. On Sein und Zeit see HEIEGGER, Sein und Zeit,
Tübingen, 1957, p. 266.
44
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 114. Compare HEIDEGGER Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom
Ereignis), GA65, p. 279.
45
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 136.
41
9
In the Parmenides lectures of 1942, published as GA54, Heidegger makes the
following remark.
Because the Greeks are the utterly apolitical people [das schlechthin unpolitische
Volk], apolitical by essence, because their humanity is primordially and exclusively
determined from Being itself, i.e. from ἀλή ε α, therefore only the Greeks could, and
precisely had to, found the πόλ ς, found abodes for the gathering and conservation of
ἀλή ε α. (GA54:142)
Two things are immediately striking here. First, the Greeks are presented as “utterly
apolitical”. What allows Heidegger to make this extraordinary claim is his belief that the
πόλ ς is best understood in ontological terms. As he puts it a few pages earlier:
The πόλ ς is neither city nor state and definitely not the fatal mixture of those two
inappropriate characterisations…The πόλ ς is the abode, gathered in to itself, of the
unconcealedness of beings. (GA54:133)
The Greeks are thus apolitical because what might seem to be a contribution, perhaps the
contribution, to political theory is really an ontological structure: the site of unconcealedness.
Second, it is because the Greeks are utterly apolitical that they are able to exhibit what is, if
not an ideal relationship to Being, certainly a better one than Heidegger thinks modern
society possesses. We thus see here first a suppression of the political and second the
valorisation of this suppression. Within GA94, Heidegger is happy to project these lessons
directly onto the contemporary political landscape. Thus National Socialism must submit to
philosophy and to the higher task of sustaining a new stance on Being.46 By extension, the
Party’s attempt to promote a “politicized science” is to “put the cart before the horse”: it is
science, construed in its most primal form as philosophy, which must determine politics.47
Taken by themselves, these remarks call to mind views familiar since Plato, on which
philosophers are somehow uniquely equipped to guide the state. But the reality of
Heidegger’s position is more complex. The view manifest in both GA54 and GA94 is not one
on which philosophy should direct politics, but more one on which philosophy eclipses it or
occludes it. Indeed, it is a view on which the political collapses into the ontological. Let me
explain.
46
47
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 190.
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 191.
10
GA94 is a work written by Heidegger at the height of his public political involvement.
It is also, as shown in (1), a work fretfully concerned with the dangers of contemporary
politics. Yet what is perhaps most striking about it is the utter lack of any sustained reflection
on the political. Whilst, as in other texts such as the transcripts of his 1933-4 Hegel seminars,
Heidegger clearly sympathises with a rudimentary authoritarian political philosophy, he is
stunningly disinterested in the key questions that in a period as febrile as the 1930s will shape
society.48 What form of government should be in place? Which economic structures? Who
should control the security forces? What legal restrictions on individual speech or choice
should there be? What guarantees should individuals have against state action? Is political
authority in any sense dependent on consent? To what degree should the state intervene in
markets? What role, if any, do non-state bodies such as trade unions have? Who controls the
press and how? Who sets wages and how? None of these questions or any like them are in
any way visible. In this sense, what I want to highlight in GA94 is an absence as much as
anything.49 It is not so much that Heidegger subjugates political choice to philosophical
wisdom, as in the familiar Platonic paradigm. Rather, it is that the distinctive questions which
the political should raise are not there. Presciently writing long before the availability of texts
such as GA94, de Beistegui makes a similar point – here he is discussing the economic
example and the Rektoratsrede in particular.
As for labour, Heidegger had a no less idealized and partial view of what he failed to
recognize as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, a view that was informed by
Jünger’s Der Arbeiter more than by Marx’s Das Kapital. Idealized, first of all, to the
extent that Heidegger saw in labor an “obligation” and a “service,” not a reality with a
logic and a law of its own (the law of Capital), a reality that is itself productive of
ideologies; second, partial insofar as labor is seen as a power of political unification
disconnected from its concrete material and economic conditions of existence, and
transcending the boundaries of class and the imperatives of production. This raises the
question regarding the possibility of taking any political responsibility, or making any
political choice, without linking, from the very start, politics with a concrete situation,
one which is as economically and materially mediated as it is historically decisive.50
48
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Über Wesen und Begriff von Nature, Geschichte und Staat. Übung aus dem
Wintersemester 1933/34 in: Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4, Freiburg,
2010, pp.53-88.
49
Page 113 of GA94 contains a few lines on the recognisably political issue of authority and legitimate power,
but these remarks are as brief as they are unusual.
50
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 56.
11
It is this failure to recognise the economic and indeed the political more broadly as “a reality
with a logic and laws of its own” that I want to highlight. This failure is important because
that logic will often prove disruptive to the conceptual scheme within which Heidegger
instead operates. To take the most pointedly specific of the possible questions which I listed,
any sustained reflection on wages, on the labour market, and on its attendant power relations,
whether from a capitalist, Marxist or other standpoint, would automatically call into question
the use of binary concepts like Volk.
We need, however to go further: it would not be correct simply to speak of a gap or
emptiness, an absence of the political. One important step in challenging Heidegger, I think,
is to try to disrupt the metaphorical chains which characterise and bind together his work. So,
drawing on both the biological metaphors I introduced above and on Heidegger’s own
preference for images of opening and closure, we might call the phenomenon in play in
GA94 an “occlusion” of the political. This occlusion has two dimensions to it. On the one
hand, because, the political is cast primarily as a threat, Heidegger is reluctant to even engage
with its categories and questions: how, for example, can he grapple with the intersection of
economics and power without entering into the supposedly technological conceptual
frameworks that he opposes? Thus, as with the remarks from the Parmenides course,
ontological purity requires the suppression of the political, just as the Greeks were able to
establish an abode for Being only because they were “utterly apolitical”. On the other hand,
within the vacuum created by the lack of any sustained interest in political questions,
individual concepts float free from their natural context and are drawn into the gravitational
field of Heidegger’s ontological apparatus. So, for example, what defines a Volk is a certain
relation to Being.51 The most important aspect of this process is normative. For Heidegger,
humanity’s fundamental goal is an ontological one in the broad sense of ontology I used
above: the task is to preserve the truth of Being.52 So if we now turn back to the triangle with
which I began, the conclusion is clear. Prima facie, the political figures in GA94 both as a
threat to the practice of a philosophical relationship with Being and as an opportunity which
might be appropriated by that practice. But as the point is pressed, what becomes more
striking is the fact that there are few concepts, no questions and no legitimate norms which
derive directly from the political sphere in GA94. Instead, it is philosophy and ontology
which frame the discourse, the conceptual palette and the acceptable goals. In that sense, I
51
52
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 318.
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 59; 322.
12
would suggest we need to speak of the collapse of point (II) into point (I), of a dominance of
ontology over politics. To introduce, quite deliberately another metaphorical chain and one
which Heidegger would have abhorred, we might say that the political functions only as
distribution channel [Vertriebskanal] for the ontological.
I want now to consider three objections to the reading advanced.
First, one might object that I have said nothing about how Heidegger’s prejudices, for
example the anti-Semitism clearly visible in the other notebooks and indeed in Heidegger’s
personal correspondence more broadly. This is problematic, the objection continues, because
those prejudices feed into and partly determine his ontology: consider for example, his
rhetoric, surrounding Bodenlosigkeit, simultaneously a technical term in his epistemology and
yet plugged into the same ancient rhetorical circuits that depict Jews as rootless parasites.53 I
think there is undoubtedly an important and exegetically highly complex story to be told
about the interaction between Heidegger’s personal bigotries and his philosophy. Yet my
position is entirely neutral on how that story plays out. This is because my concern is not with
prejudice, but with politics; and the former is not sufficient for the later.54 An exact
formulation of the point would require a discussion of prejudice beyond the scope of this
piece, but the basic idea is best seen if we operate with the standard ‘negative’ picture of
prejudice.55 Consider a misogynist who has a violent prejudice, framed in sexual terms,
against women. As a result, the world is manifest to him in the familiar categories of this type
of bigotry: he sees those around him as ‘whores’ etc. This prejudice may be kept simmering
beneath the surface or it may become openly manifest in the public sphere; and depending
partly on how widespread the prejudice is, it may require political action to alleviate it. But
none of that is enough to make the prejudice itself political in the sense which is relevant
here. Rather, the internal logic, language and drive of the prejudice, how it hangs together,
what scenes spark it, what symbols, words, images and categories it uses to interpret the
world – these are all sexual: indeed, part of the problem is that salient political categories
such as ‘citizen’ are continually overwritten in favour of a taxonomy derived from the
For an excellent discussion of these issues and of autochthony in Heidegger’s work more broadly see
CHARLES BAMBACH¸ Heidegger’s Roots, Ithaca, New York 2003.
54
Depending on how one thinks about prejudice, for example whether within a broadly Gadamerian framework,
it may or may not be necessary.
55
Within a Gadamerian framework emphasising the inescapability and potentially positive role of prejudice, the
point would need to be framed slightly differently: there the omnipresence of prejudice in all cognitive domains
would mean that it cannot be sufficient to render something political.
53
13
language of sexual slurs.56 The case of Heidegger is similar in that what we see is the absence
of those concepts, terms, and norms which are necessary if one is to see things in political
terms. The result, within texts like GA94, is that the political is construed using the concepts
and values of ontology. The result, within the later ‘black notebooks’, will be that
Heidegger’s own prejudices become framed in the same terms: the Jews, not as racial threats,
but ontological ones. In this sense I largely agree with Trawny’s view that we are dealing
with a “seinsgeschichtlicher Antisemitismus”.57 What I have tried to show is the structural
roots of that – how one ends up with that form of prejudice as opposed, say to, the sexuoracial anti-Semitism of someone like Julius Streicher.
Second, one might object that Heidegger was simply not a political philosopher, and
thus that it is unfair or tendentious to make such play out of his lack of interest in detailed
political questions. This is a useful objection because it highlights the complex interplay of
explanatory levels and evasions within Heidegger’s text. As I see it, the claim that he was not
a political philosopher is in one sense wrong and in another right. It is wrong because the
question of the political, of how to understand it, how to protect philosophy from it, how to
control it, is the dominant question of texts such as GA94. If one reflects on the analysis of
section (1), it becomes untenable to claim that GA94 is simply disengaged from political
issues, in the way that a treatise on pure mathematics might be. Yet, on the other hand, the
explanatory apparatus which which Heidegger approaches the political is essentially drawn
from ontology. To put it paradoxically, GA94 is an non-political book about politics, one
which relentlessly raises political issues only to then thematise them using values and
concepts drawn from ontology. Thus, Heidegger is a political thinker insofar as he is
discussing politics; yet the hermeneutic situation out of which he does so is articulated in a
radically non-political vocabulary. It is this delicate balance that I want to mark by talking of
the “occlusion” of the political.
Third, one might raise the concern that I end as an apologist for Heidegger; by
stressing the ontological base of his theory, am I guilty of downplaying his culpability for its
political consequences? I think the answer here should is simply “no”. Heidegger is culpable
for the standard hermeneutic and moral reasons: he is engaging in discourse about a topic,
politics, where he has failed utterly to think through his assumptions. Furthermore, it seems
56
Another way to put the point. The prejudice may be manifest in the public sphere; but the public sphere,
whilst necessary for the political as argued above, is not equivalent to it.
57
PETER TRAWNY, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Frankfurt am Main, 2014, p.
11.
14
to me no accident that, deprived of any systematic reflection on the political per se, his
thought lacked any corrective to either his own prejudices or to the crude and inflexible
vision of society that resulted from a myopically ontological focus. I spoke above about the
serious consequences of the occlusion I have sketched; this is the most weighty of them.
I want to bring the results together. I have claimed that there is significant sense in
which Heidegger collapses point (II) of the triangle, the political, into point (I), the
ontological. This is a highly distinctive move. Consider again the example of Kant whom I
used when introducing the diagram at the start of this article: it would be untenable to make
the same move within a Kantian framework, since that would be precisely to breach, or at
least to unacceptably blur, the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy.
Alternately, take the other case I mentioned: Foucault. One can imagine a reading of Foucault
on which the ontological is reduced to the political, but is hard to see how the converse could
be conceivable. Of course, Heidegger, Kant and Foucault are very different thinkers – and it
is precisely that which I want to stress, the distinctiveness of the strategy visible in
Heidegger’s case, a strategy in which the political is systematically suppressed or occluded in
favour of the ontological.
(4) Beyond Politics: Ethics and Ontology
I now want to say something about the broader application of these claims by bringing in the
third point of the triangle. As mentioned at the start, I will talk about this in terms of “ethics”
in order to avoid the narrower deontological associations of “morality”: my concern is very
broadly with the issue of the good life.
Perhaps the most direct way to approach the point is via Heidegger’s own remarks in
the 1946 letter to Beaufret. One of the main aims of that text is to displace the triangular
geometry I have used in favour of some deeper structure. Thus he claims that “the thinking
that inquires into the truth of Being…is neither ethical nor ontological”.58 This is the
culmination of a long-held conviction that he has identified a set of originary structures prior
to such distinctions. Thus GA26, the 1928 course on Leibniz talks of identifying “common
root” of both “theoretical” and “practical” intentionality.59 But to what degree can we take
58
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Wegmarken, GA9, Frankfurt am Main, 2004, p. 357.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA26, Frankfurt am
Main, 2007, pop. 236–7. Similarly; HEIEGGER, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, 1957, p. 193; 358.
59
15
these remarks at face value? The issue is a complicated one, closely tied to developments
within Heidegger’s thought during over the 1930s, and I cannot address it fully here. But a
few remarks may be helpful in the context of what has gone above.60
There are very good grounds on which to argue that, just as Heidegger reduced
politics to ontology, he does the same with ethics. Take, for example, his early work on
authenticity: why does Heidegger regard authenticity, as he plainly does, as a valuable state?
Crudely put, why ought one to be authentic? Within both Sein und Zeit itself and in its
subsequent reworking in the lecture courses of the late 1920s and early 1930s, two answers
emerge. The first is a form of perfectionism: only in authenticity does Dasein fully realise or
“liberate” its own essence.
The most extreme demand [Zumutung] must be announced to man, not some arbitrary
demand, not this or that one, but the demand pure and simple that is made upon man.
And what is that? It is that Dasein as such is demanded of man … To what therefore
does Dasein have to resolutely disclose itself? To first creating for itself once again a
genuine knowing concerning that wherein whatever properly makes Dasein itself
possible consists …to liberate the humanity in man, i.e. the essence of man, to let the
Dasein in him become essential.61
As Sein und Zeit puts it, one thereby “becomes ‘essentially’ Dasein in that authentic
existence” so fulfilling the ancient injunction to “become what you are”.62 The same idea is
clearly present in the opening pages of GA94 itself with its injunction that “Der Mensch soll
zu sich selbst kommen”.63 Furthermore Heidegger returns to it throughout, in particular to the
possibility of a “future man” who in fully realising his ontologico-historical essence will be
unrecognisable when compared to current caricatures of man as subject.64
But this, of course, simply postpones the issue – why is such a self-realisation
important? After all, there is panoply of other goods: why should I pay particular heed to the
demands of authenticity as opposed to power or desire? The worry here is one that Heidegger
60
I discuss these issues in more depth elsewhere: see SACHA GOLOB, Martin Heidegger: Ethics, Freedom,
Ontology in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.), The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy,
Cambridge, 2017.
61
MARTIN HEIDEGGER Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, GA29/30, Frankfurt am Main, 2004, pp. 246–8
(original emphasis); similarly pp. 254-5.
62
HEIDEGGER, Sein und Zeit, p. 323; 145. As I read it, the single inverted commas around “wesentlich” in the
first remark cited reflect Heidegger’s long-standing suspicions about that term and the ideas traditionally
connected to it; I do not think that they indicate any hedging on the basically perfectionist approach to which
Heidegger subscribes.
63
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 2; 45.
64
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 334; 481; 491.
16
would have been well aware; it is precisely this concern that motivates thinkers like Kant to
reject perfectionism as heterogeneous.65 This brings me to the second answer which
Heidegger offers, namely that authenticity is uniquely valuable because personal authenticity
is a necessary condition on doing good philosophy.66 This is because authenticity alone
“guarantees that we are coining the appropriate existential concepts”, that we have not been
misled by the prejudices and misconstruals fostered by ‘the one’.67 As Heidegger himself puts
it in 1928:
Only he can philosophise who is already resolved to grant free dignity to Dasein in its
most radical and universal-essential possibilities.68
Or in 1929:
What philosophy deals with only manifests itself at all within and from out of a
transformation of human Dasein.69
But one might worry that the question is still being begged. If authenticity is valuable as a
necessary condition on doing philosophy, that simply postpones the difficulty – why should I
care about doing philosophy, as opposed to seeking any of the other goods available?
Heidegger’s answer is as clear as is it is revealing: philosophy is an activity in which
we are all inescapably involved. As GA27 puts it:
To be a human means already to philosophise. Already and according to its essence,
not opportunely or inopportunely, the human Dasein as such stands in philosophy.70
In short, “to exist means to philosophise” (GA27: 214). Of course, Heidegger’s conception of
what exactly philosophy is is subject to frequent and complex changes. But the one
dominating strand is the need to maintain an appropriate relationship to Being, be it Sein or
Seyn – this underlying assumption endures, as tracked in section (1), even as the definition of
precisely what is ‘appropriate’ changes radically from texts such Sein und Zeit through to the
Beiträge and beyond. Bringing these points together, I want to make the following
suggestion: Heidegger’s treatment of authenticity exemplifies a process whereby what are
loosely ethical norms, norms on the good life, become gradually reinterpreted as ontological
norms, norms which are a function of our relationship to Being and of our ability to sustain a
65
IMMANUEL KANT, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. AK4, Berlin 1911, p. 443.
HEIDEGGER, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, 1957, pp. 232-3.
67
HEIDEGGER, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, 1957, p. 316, 178.
68
HEIDEGGER Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA26, p. 22.
69
HEIDEGGER Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, GA29/30, p.423, original emphasis).
70
MARTIN HEIDEGGER Die Einleitung in die Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main, 2001. GA27, p. 3.
66
17
philosophy that cultivates that relationship. This is because insofar as Sein und Zeit offers a
picture of the good life, it is surely through authenticity. Yet as we have pressed on the value
of that goal, it has become clear that the whole chain of justifications which lies behind
authenticity gradually and systematically elides it with ontology – to be authentic is both to
liberate our own essence and to enable a philosophy properly orientated towards Being. In
short, the triangle with which I began is becoming eclipsed, as, beneath the surface of the
text, points (II) and (III) collapse into point (I).
At this juncture, there are several ways to continue the line of thought. First, my
suspicion is that one could easily add other points to the diagram with which I began and
watch as they too are simultaneously suppressed and co-opted in favour of the ontological.
Consider, for example, the status of the empirical sciences. At times the privileging of
philosophico-ontology over them is straightforward: “the sciences first get their ground,
dignity, and entitlements from philosophy”.71 At others it is more subtle: for example, GA41
effectively argues that Galilean physics has failed to map entities properly, instead tacitly
imposing an unquestioned and unverified quantificational framework which leads it to “skip
over the facts”.72 What is striking here is the assumption that the best index for the “facts” is
not experimental replication or predictive power, but the deliverances of Heideggerian
ontology: as GA94 puts it, “[p]hilosophy is the science”.73 This may sound unproblematic if
watered down to platitudes such as the importance of thinking through the conceptual
framework used in a science, rather than simply blindly experimenting away.74 Yet, of
course, science as actually practiced frequently does that. What makes Heidegger’s claim
controversial and interesting is the assumption that he, despite his non-empirical method of
inquiry, is better suited to do that, and even to evaluate the accuracy of those conceptual
frameworks, than the scientists themselves. It is worth stressing that I do not think this aspect
of Heidegger’s work is entirely problematic. Consider the familiar charge, stemming from
Tugendhat, that Heidegger fails maintain a distinction between correct and incorrect access to
entities.75 On my account this criticism is fundamentally misplaced. This is because I think
that Heidegger has an elaborate and subtle account of how to draw this distinction; the
71
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 60. Compare HEIDEGGER,
Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p. 17; 33; 71.
72
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Die Frage nach dem Ding, Frankfurt am Main, 1984, GA41, p.93.
73
HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p.33 (original emphasis).
74
Heidegger himself sometimes suggests this picture – see HEIDEGGER, Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938, GA94, p.
252
75
ERNST TUGENDHAT Heidegger’s Idea of Truth’, in B.R. Wachterhauser (ed.) Hermeneutics
and Truth . Evanston, Illinois, 1994.
18
problem is rather that it is framed entirely using the methods and vocabulary of ontology as
he understands it.76
Second, one could look at how the taxonomy I have used – ethical, ontological,
political – lines up with some of the other taxonomies in play in Heidegger’s discussion, such
as that between theory and practice. The complexities of Heidegger’s account of “theory” in
particular lie beyond this piece. Here I want simply to stress that I am not claiming that
Heideggerian ontology will necessarily be theoretical – even if you think, with obvious
justification, that philosophy for Heidegger is in an important sense lived, my concern
remains over the framing of that lived sphere in terms of concepts drawn from ontology,
rather than from other sources such as politics.
These are potential lines for development. But I want to close by briefly making a
different, more modest point. The point is this. As noted above, Heidegger returns to these
issues, in particular the relation between philosophy, ontology and ethics, in 1946 in the
Letter on Humanism. What is striking is that collectively the Schwarze Hefte serve to
undermine the closest thing he offers there to a response to the charge that he allows ontology
to occlude ethics and politics. In the Letter, Heidegger suggest that thinking rightly has
priority over other forms of action since it “it cares for the light”, for the clearing within
which all other behaviour become possible.77 The idea here is that thinking on Being – a lived
philosophical ontology – has explanatory priority because it concerns those conditions under
which entities can show up in the first place, and thus under which activities such as politics
can get started. But the problem with this type of transcendental move is that if a given state
is really a transcendental condition of this type, it is hard to make sense of the idea that some
agents lack it. Thus, Kant was unable to understand the possibility that Spinoza’s statements
on religion genuinely reflected his beliefs– after all, they seemed to diverge radically from
the practical postulates whose transcendental necessity Kant had just defended.78 Yet one of
the recurring themes of Heidegger’s notebooks is that certain groups, such as the Jews, do in
a very important sense lack the relations to Being which thought supposedly makes
possible.79 The result is that the privileging of ontological relations – being a “Wahrer der
Wahrheit des Seyns” – cannot, by his own logic, be a function of a transcendental argument
76
For details see GOLOB, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity, pp. 184-88.
HEIDEGGER, Wegmarken, GA9, p.361.
78
IMMANUEL KANT, Kritik der Urteilskraft, AK5, Berlin 1913, pp. 452-3. The authority of these postulates
within the Critical system is of course different from that of the categories. But the point stands: they should not
be as easily disposable as a Spinoza seems to find them.
79
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941), GA96, Frankfurt am Main, p. 243.
77
19
insofar as there are groups whom he presents as essentially incapable of participating in those
relations, and yet who can nevertheless clearly participate in politics. One option here – the
one I suspect Kant would apply at least to Hume, if not also to Spinoza – is to claim that at
some level his opponents do and must have the relevant beliefs: they are simply deluded
about this. But that surely is not Heidegger’s position; one cannot be a guardian of Being
whilst caring not a jot about it. Another option, with a more obviously Heideggerian
pedigree, is to claim that some basic relation to Being is a transcendental condition on all
experience, and that even those he despises have this. But if that is the case, then the
privileging of the very sophisticated and specific relation to Being which thought alone offers
cannot itself have any transcendental necessity. I have argued that GA94 sees an occlusion of
the political by the ontological; ironically, it is Heidegger’s anti-Semitism that makes that
occlusion all the more visible, by depriving him of any prospect of a transcendental
justification for it.80
80
I am very grateful to Günter Figal, Tobias Keiling, Denis McManus, Nikola Mirkovic, Dieter Thomae,
Morten Thaning and to all the participants at the 2016 Freiburg Conference for their comments and suggestions
on earlier versions of this paper.
20