Buy these books

Tim Black
posted 10 January 2007

'The oft-voiced supposition that Heidegger will throw his shadow over late twentieth-century thought as did Nietzsche over sensibility at the beginning of the century, does not seem baseless' (1). So concludes George Steiner's 1978 introduction to Heidegger's thought. By the late nineties, with the number of publications devoted to Heidegger matching those on Plato or Aristotle, Steiner's 'supposition' seemed justified (2). Where Steiner erred, however, was by circumscribing Heidegger's influence in time. For if the rise in cultural chatter is any guide, his is a star that continues to wax.

Such claims, however, have to be balanced against the fascination exerted by Heidegger's personal trajectory (3). Indeed, his membership of the Nazi party, faithfully renewed every year from 1933 until 1945, coupled with evasive, disingenuous retrospection, has contributed in no small way to his fame, inspiring reams of rebuke, defence, and diatribe. If his thought intrigues it does so in conjunction; Heidegger and 'the Jews'; Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism; The Politics of Martin Heidegger. And whilst such titles proliferate, a glut of academic primers is forced to combine pedagogy with melodramatic disclaimers advising students of 'the serious consequences of his thought' (4). As ugly a bedfellow as Nazism is, Heidegger's work is made to seem lonely without it.

But flippancy, as always, misleads. His political involvement would not vex had his thought itself not been so influential. One measure of this, as Mark Wrathall suggests, is the sheer number and variety of other philosophers who have drawn substantially from his work. Hannah Arendt or Jean Paul Sartre, for example, never ceased to pay their dues. Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, though often at odds, are united by their shared Heideggerian inheritance. And one of his former students, Leo Strauss, who has since emerged as the 'intellectual Godfather' for the so-called Neocons, owes Heidegger his assault on the privations of modernity (5). (Even George Bush, it seems, does not escape untainted.) In his recent introductory work, How to Read Heidegger, Mark Wrathall notes that, '(t)heorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science have turned to Heidegger for inspiration' (6). However, what neither publishing figures nor his sphere of influence can tell us is why precisely Heidegger has proved so inspiring.

Wrathall hazards an explanation: '(He) did more than any other thinker of the twentieth century to develop a coherent way of thinking and talking about human existence without reducing it to a natural scientific phenomenon or treating it as a ghostly mind haunting the physical world.'(7) This does catch upon something. Heidegger's 'way of thinking and talking about human existence,' his vision, no less, of what it is to be human addresses us directly, immediately, making all previous attempts seem factitious. In this regard, Wrathall is right to characterise this vision as sui generis: it does avoid recourse to a ghost in the machine, a retreat into biological reductivism, not to mention a whole host of other recogisable positions. But its siren's call does not lie squarely in Heidegger's philosophical virtuosity. Rather, to use the words of Adorno, Heidegger's thought gives voice to 'an emphatic need, a sign of something missed' (8).

Heidegger's appeal is not that he is able to resolve this profoundly modern sense of loss, of dislocation, of estrangement, but that he puts it at the centre of his thought. His starting point is a sense that the societies in which modern man lives lack meaning, something to believe in. And it matters not whether these societies are liberal-democratic, socialist, or some other variation on a rational, self-governing theme. For Heidegger's target, to borrow Weber's melancholy phrasing, is the 'iron cage' of rationality itself. Those critics who simply dismiss his work as specious irrationalism and his legion of admirers as easily seduced therefore miss the point: it is precisely Heidegger's irrationalism, or rather, his anti-rationalism, that constitutes the substance of his appeal. This, as Allan Bloom argued, is why 'Heidegger's teachings are the most powerful intellectual force of our times' (9).

Anti-rationalism as 'the forgetting of Being'

Having enjoyed several years as 'the secret king of thought', to use Arendt's epithet, Heidegger's vision of human existence broke upon the wider world in 1927 with his second published work, Being and Time (BT). At its heart lay the Seinsfrage: the question of Being, Heidegger felt, was the question, the original stimulus for all thinking. What is it to be? Or: why is there something and not nothing?

Unfortunately, having reached its apogee before Socrates, this stimulus - the lucid wonder at the sheer 'is' of existence, its quiddity - was gradually displaced by 'the theoretical stance,' to use Wrathall's term, a derivative form of thinking marked by its dualistic rationalism. Whether mind and matter, or subject and object, the former tyrannises over the latter as the knower over that which is known. The condition of the relationship, that which makes it possible - Being - has been 'forgotten.' The Enlightenment, the culmination of this rationalistic approach to nature and society, has left man with a impoverishing mode of Being towards Being assumed as the only way to be.

The effacement of the Seinsfrage goes hand in hand, it seems, with the enthronement of man as the 'animale rationale' and the concomitant reification of 'nature' as the object of his knowledge and mastery. This is indicative, argues Heidegger, of how Western civilisation has 'grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself,'(p41 BT) a self-understanding 'thoroughly coloured by the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world' (p74 BT). Heidegger's objection to the transformation of Being into a set of noun phrases, be it 'man,' and 'nature,' or something more arcane like 'the historical dialectics of spirit', indeed, his near pathological aversion to all forms of reification or, if you prefer, essentialism, arises from his conviction that we tend to interpret ourselves and the world around us in terms of pre-existing conceptual frameworks, leading us to forego the Seinsfrage. In response Heidegger seeks to show how reifying concepts, such as 'humanity,' 'subject' and 'object,' or in Descartes' case, 'nature,' (pp122-131 BT) are not prior to human existence, but its bi-products. Here at least Sartre's paraphrase holds good: Existence precedes essence.

Heidegger's name for each individual human being, Dasein (Being there), defining us in terms of always existing specifically, in a particular environment, reflects the attempt to find a syntax adequate to an existential rather than essential portrayal of being human. Dasein, 'the Being for whom Being is an issue' might carry a residue of the traditional grammar - it is still the universal, the part that knows the whole, the Being in whose terms Being is understood - but it has no pre-determinate content. It is neither 'animale rationale' nor 'Geist'. Rather, it designates the simple possibility of thinking, of understanding that with which I am concerned, that is, the stuff of one's life.

Furthermore, Dasein is not separate from that which it understands. Hence the basic state of Dasein, indeed, of being there, is Being-in-the-world. This proposition, as opposed to a dualism of mind and matter, emphasises the integral unity of human existence. 'One of Heidegger's most innovative and important insights,' Wrathall gushes 'is that human existence is grounded in our always already finding ourselves in a world.' (10) 'World' here is not to be thought of as a self-contained object towards which Dasein bears a contemplative relationship. Rather, it emerges through our practical existence. This means that our sense of the 'world' as such, our understanding and knowledge, is formed through our dealings with the entities that concern us, ie. our use of things. One knows the hammer best, Sartre glossed, when one uses it to hammer. These entities are characterised by Zuhandenheit, their 'readiness-to-hand.' Heidegger states:

'Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also the public world. Along with the public world, the environing nature [die Umweltnatur] is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads, streets, bridges, our concern discovers nature as having some definite direction' (p100 BT)

The 'definite direction' infusing our experience of nature derives from the purpose for which we use things. One does not use a hammer for hammering's sake, but in order to achieve something else, the laying of a floor board for instance. And one does not lay a floor board for its own sake, but, again, for some further end. And so on. Heidegger extrapolates from this domestic situation, and applies the same instrumental structure to the social world. The meaning with which our world is inscribed, indeed, the precondition for it to be meaningfully experienced as a 'world,' derives, therefore, from socially pursued ends or, as he puts it, the 'for-the-sake-of-which' that structures not just an individual's involvement with things, but their existence as a whole.

As his description of 'Being-in-the world' implies, 'Being-in is Being with Others.' (p155 BT) In the public world then, a world not just of work, but of duties, of responsibilities, of values, in short, the world through which one understands oneself and one's existence, Dasein encounters Others, or as Heidegger puts it, 'das Man'. Variously translated as 'the They' or 'the One' this term is meant to designate, as the pronoun 'one' suggests, the anonymous agency manifest in the social world. Moreover, this social agent, attributable to no-one but encompassing everyone, mediates every aspect of Dasein's everyday existence. It 'prescribes that way of interpreting the world and Being-in-the-world which lies closest' (p167 BT) even to the extent that it 'prescribes one's state-of-mind, and determines what and how one "sees"' (p213 BT)

Subsumed by the received wisdom and social praxes of the public world, this mode of being-in-the-world-with-others characterises Dasein in its state of 'fallenness', a word so replete with theologically pejorative connotations that Heidegger's claim that Being and Time is 'not a moralising critique' (p341 BT) appears sarcastic. In How to Read Heidegger, however, Wrathall prefers the ingenuous platitudes of the social constructivist, stating: 'At stake then is the role that social relations play in making us who we are' (11). Despite the anodyne phrasing, Wrathall captures something of Being and Time's animus. For it is through man's social existence, his Mitsein, or rather, his Being-in-the-world-with-others, that Dasein falls into the hopelessly rationalised mode of Being that Heidegger holds responsible for the forgetting of the Seinsfrage.

Modernity, it would seem, is the logical culmination of such forgetfulness: human interests and needs have become the measure of all things. Consequently, our thought and activity is restricted to the rationale inherent in the subjective mediation of the objective world. To lead the life of the 'they' is to suffer from this humanist myopia, identifying social-being with Being itself, conflating our use of natural resources with their Being, and confusing ourselves with the roles with which society furnishes us. The citizen is damned: his self-consciousness amounts to no more than the 'common sense of the "they"' and consequently he 'knows only the satisfying of manipulable rules and public norms and the failure to satisfy them.' (p334 BT) The real might well be rational, as Hegel surmised, but only because the individual has given himself up to its anonymous instrumentality, allowing it to inform his existence, 'as something that gets managed and reckoned up. "Life" is a business whether or not it covers its costs.' (p336 BT)

The parallels with Marx's theory of alienation are striking. Under the rule of private property, the collective productive activity of society does confront each of its individual members as an alien power, holding sway over his life as the gods once did. But just as Heidegger's perspective is not that of alienated labour, his approach is not socio-economic. Rather, his is a spiritual reflex, and as such, dematerialises any concrete social analysis. In consequence, Heidegger's critique of modernity, interpreting a particular social experience as an ontological predicament, actually presupposes and perpetuates what Marx grasped as alienation. For while he denigrates social being as 'inauthentic,' he fetishises the 'authenticity' of the alienated individual.

His definition of the latter begins innocuously enough. Dasein, he states, is 'in each case mine' which, although a little precious, as an assertion of one's selfhood does not necessarily lead to a full-blown rejection of social being. However, socially '…it is not "I" in the sense of my own self that "am," but rather the Others whose way of life is that of the "they.'" (p167 BT) Despite some critics' best efforts (12), Heidegger's stand against the tyranny of the social is no liberalism, not least because, admitting nothing positive of the social bond, liberty itself loses its meaning. Rather, Heidegger's notion of authentic individuality assumes what Georg Lukács called 'the ontological dogma of solitary man.' This involves taking the fact of an individual human being's finitude, strung out between the point at which one is 'thrown-into-Being' and one's death, and attributing to it a normative dimension. If one is ontologically solitary and if the relation one has with others is purely contingent, then one ought not to identify oneself with the rationale prevalent in the social world. To be aware of one's finitude, or, to put it another way, to live in anticipation of one's death, liberates. Or, as Forster put it, 'the idea of death saves (man).' But from what does it save or liberate him? In Heidegger's case, it is the fallen mode of social being and the alienating rationale that pertains to it. And for what is the individual free? Well, nothing much.

The nihilism nascent in the rejection of the social world is apparent in Heidegger's famous description of Angst. Differentiating it from 'fear', which is always fearful before some entity 'within the world,' he writes:

'(t)hat which anxiety [Angst] is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself. In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world. The world can offer nothing more and neither can the Dasein-with of Others. Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the "world" and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about - its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualises Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world' (p230 BT)

Anxiety here is conceived almost virtuously. It brings man, literally, to himself, liberating him 'from possibilities which "count for nothing [nichtegen]" and (letting) him become free for those which are authentic'. (p395 BT) As a view counter to the current (reifying) medicalisation of an individual's moods and behaviour, Heidegger's is refreshing. Unfortunately, the purpose 'anxiety' serves is equally debilitating: It reveals the putative groundlessness of human reason. An individual's immediate experience of estrangement, the sense, perhaps, that one does not fully identify with the rationality institutionally embodied, political, legal or otherwise, becomes, for Heidegger, proof of one's intrinsically solitary nature. Moreover, Heidegger's particular disaffection with liberal democracy and the rational principles it sought to embody has become a universal distrust of rationality per se. Man in society is in thrall to reason as to an alien force. Whereas Marx, from the theoretical perspective of alienated labour, sought to grasp alienation as a social process, from the perspectives available in Being and Time it is transformed into an ontology, a frozen, untranscendable opposition between the individual and his social being. As Lukács argued: 'in capitalist society, public life, work and the system of human relations are under the spell of fetish making, reifications and dehumanisation. Only revolt against actual foundations... leads to a clearer appreciation of these foundations and thence to a new social perspective. Escape into inwardness is a tragi-comical blind alley.'(13) Born of alienation, Heidegger's unmediated rejection of the way of the world in fact replicates its structure.

Much critical energy has been expended on the supposed 'turn' in Heidegger's later work towards a more careful, almost poetical exploration of the question of Being. His Letter on Humanism (1946), a veiled corrective to Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism, evinces well the changed tone:

'Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this "less"; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the Throwness of Dasein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. Man is the neighbour of Being.' (p245 Basic Writings)

Gone is talk of authentic Dasein, with its seemingly subject-centred implications. In its stead, 'Being' is to the fore, an effectively contentless concept which, in its very indeterminacy, delineates the cognitive limits of human reason. Many talk favourably of this shift, thankful, perhaps, that Heidegger's objection to the modern world has shed its (counter-)revolutionary leanings in favour of some sort of rustic sagacity. As Wrathall euphemistically observes, this is Heidegger overcoming his 'political naïveté' (14).

However, from the 'massive voluntarism' (15) of Being and Time to the neo-Thomist wisdom of these later circumlocutions, the object of his critique remains the same: the rationality prevalent in the social world. In an essay of 1953 entitled 'The Question Concerning Technology' what Heidegger's assault on human reason lost in voluntaristic meat was made up for in environmentally friendly packaging. Technology here is conceived as the archetypally modern way of Being towards Being, that is, of relating to our environment. Tracing the etymology of the Greek techne to poiesis, and then, in turn, to aletheia, which means something like 'bringing forth,' 'making present', or, as Heidegger mostly refers to it, 'revealing,' he notes that something has changed in the 'essence' of the word. Having lost its roots in poiesis, modern technology has become coercive, not so much harmoniously revealing but manipulating and maiming, conquering and mastering:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the windmill as well? No, the sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.' (p320 BW)

This challenging and ordering of the world according to the demands of technological rationality he calls 'enframing [Gestellen]'. A will to challenge and order, which is effectively what Heidegger, following Nietzsche's lead, has reduced human reason to, does not stop at nature though. Man himself becomes a 'standing reserve' (p332 BW), a mere object to be used by the alien necessity modern society passes off as its reason to be. Heidegger, it turns out, has not shifted positions, merely emphasis.

That those of a conservative bent to have found much to seize upon here is not very surprising. That such a virulent anti-modernity should have made greater headway with men of the left is perhaps more so. To grasp the dynamic underpinning Heidegger's ascent, however, it is this leftist assimilation that needs understanding. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in France.

The French Connection

Heidegger's work runs like a red thread through the intellectual life of the post war French left. No-one, from the avowed, like Sartre or Derrida, to the less so, like Louis Althusser, was untouched (16). When Derrida talked of 'an authority, a legitimacy' (17) that clung to Heideggerian discourse during the 1950s and 1960s, he touches upon a significant intellectual experience: Heidegger's thought just felt right. Hanging in the air like a fug of veracity, it affected, almost imperceptibly, how the world ought to be understood. Or, more precisely, criticised.

The reasons are not hard to fathom. With Khrushchev's confession, the French Communist Party's support for colonial action in Algeria, and the left's impotence as the Fourth Republic imploded two years later, in 1958, a generation of intellectuals discerned either in Heidegger's writings or, more often, in their whispered dissemination, a critique of the modern world that made sense of the disorientation, encompassing not only the capitalist reality of their present, but the Communism that had once been their future. The problem that now loomed into view was not so much the irrationality of socialised production under conditions of private appropriation, but rationality itself. In the shorthand of Holocaust and Gulag, reason stood accused. Heidegger - as did Nietzsche, Freud, and to a less voguish extent, Weber - served as a touchstone for those groping beyond the old ideological perspectives in search of a critique that addressed modernity as a whole. Heidegger's, as we have seen, fitted that bill. In an account of his influence on modern French thought Ferry and Renaut conclude that '(t)he pay off is the chance to condemn no longer on the basis of Marx but of Heidegger the economic exploitation of the world, the false values of industrial culture.' (18)

Heidegger's rejection of human reason, and consequently, societies founded upon rational, and therefore universal principles, was seen not in its authoritarian guise, as a proclivity for the sublime, awful, and inspiring, or, as Weber would have it, 'the charismatic leader,' but as a way beyond the ideological bankruptcy of left versus right. His adoption, and often surreptitious use by some of the most influential figures in contemporary French thought is indissociable from this post-ideological aspiration.

This was not a phenomenon restricted to the Left Bank of the Seine. The reason Allan Bloom saw 'Heidegger's teachings as the most powerful intellectual force of our times' lay in a similarly anti-rationalist turn on the American left during the 60s, or, as he puts it, its 'Nietzscheanisation.' Arguments about civil rights or relations of production were being outflanked by a new radicalism whose 'master lyricists were Nietzsche and Heidegger.' Where Marx felt old hat, too behoven to science, to 'truth' even, this new lexicon of 'commitment,' 'values,' and 'self-creation' seemed vital. Liberal capitalism was still under attack but now on the basis of its restrictive rationality. Rights themselves, universal and 'natural', became suspect. There was no truth, just a will to power. This was nihilism but nihilism American-style, indeed, 'nihilism without the abyss' as Bloom put it. Hence its smug counter-cultural form, where the absence of truth was taken as an opportunity for self-expression, the will-to-power fused with a woolly notion of tolerance. The left may have lost the economic battle, but, as an Americanised 'kulturkritik,' it won the culture wars. Bloom's diagnosis might be slightly overdone but it does hit upon the central shift. Where once the left opposed liberal capitalism on the basis that it wasn't rational enough, that its universality was undercut by particular economic interests, it now did so on the basis that it was too rational, that particularity was oppressed by universality.

It is this post-ideological moment that is crucial to understanding why Heidegger continues to find a receptive audience. Severed from a collective political project, indeed, an aspiration to universality, Heidegger's portrait of the senseless rationality at work in the social world touches the alienated nerve. It is of little surprise that he now finds himself at home within environmentalism, arguably the greatest post-ideological movement of all. In his 1978 introduction, Steiner argued that Heidegger 'anticipates' the 'penitent ecology' of 'our' time. (19) In Michael Watts more recent, unabashedly admiring primer, this theme is developed:

'Heidegger demonstrated remarkable ecological awareness for his time. He expressed strong concerns over, and was highly opposed to, many components of the modern industrial society, with its overemphasis on technology and mass culture, and he spoke strongly against the mistreatment of livestock and the abuse if the planet's resources. With superb clairvoyance he prophetically warned of the coming destruction of the environment that would lead to planetary ecological crises.' (20)

There is clearly a connection but both Steiner and, especially Watts, have it the wrong way round. Rather than asking what environmentalism tells us of Heidegger, we should ask what Heidegger tells us of environmentalism. It ceases then to be a matter of anticipation, prophesy, or clairvoyance and becomes instead a matter of the intellectual tradition to which environmentalism belongs.

Notes

(1) p145, George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1992)
(2)Times Literary Supplement, 29 January 1999
(3)Heidegger's life is rich in grisly irony. As his lifelong student and one-time paramour, Hannah Arendt, the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism spent much of her fame extolling the former Nazi's genius. And Paul Celan, unrelenting in his rendering of the Shoah, found a kindred spirit in Heidegger's writings. Indeed, the latter's journey to meet Heidegger at his Black Forest chalet and the undisclosed conversation that took place has been the subject of much speculation (eg. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Rudiger Safranski (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002)). It was even the subject of John Banville's BBC Radio 4 drama, Todtnauberg, broadcast last year.
(4) p86, Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger, (Granta Books, 2005)
(5) p74, J. Micklethwait & A. Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Why America is different, (Penguin, 2004)
(6) p1, M. Wrathall , How to Read Heidegger, (Granta Books, 2005)
(7) pp5-6, ibid.
(8) p61, T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, (Tr. EB Ashton), (Routledge: London, 1996)
(9) pp311-12, A. Bloom The Closing of the American Mind, (Simon & Schuster, 1988)
(10) p10, M. Wrathall , How to Read Heidegger, (Granta Books, 2005)
(11) p52, ibid
(12) See Young, J Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (C.U.P, 1997)
(13) pp252-253, Lukács, G., Marxism and Human Liberation, (Tr. H Mins), (Dell Publishing: New York, 1973)
(14) p87, M. Wrathall , How to Read Heidegger, (Granta Books, 2005)
(15) p37, J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger, (Tr Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby), (Univ.of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1989)
(16) In 1980 Althusser admitted that Heidegger's Letter on Humanism 'influenced my arguments concerning theoretical antihumanism in Marx.' p176, L. Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, (Tr Richard Veasey), (Vintage, 1993)
(17) p191, J. Derrida 'Politics and Friendship,' included The Althusserian Legacy, (eds.), E Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, (Verso: London, 1993)
(18) pp86-87, L. Ferry, & A. Renaut, Heidegger & Modernity, (Tr Franklin Philip), (Univ. Chicago press: Chicago, 1990)
(19) p131, G. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1992)
(20) pIX, M. Watts, Heidegger: A Beginner's Guide, (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)