Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Conclusion: The Fragmented Legacy of the Philosophy of Freedom.
Michael Millerman: Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political. London: Arktos, 2020.
Notoriously, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy had not only philosophic but political consequences. Its political consequences are more notorious than its philosophic consequences, thanks to Heidegger’s endorsement of the Nazi Party in Germany and his refusal entirely to repudiate Nazism, even after its genocidal murderousness had been fully exposed. After examining the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics, Newell turns to his philosophic consequences as seen in the doctrines of critical theory (as urged by Jürgen Habermas), postmodernism (Michel Foucault), and hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer). Beginning not with Heidegger’s antecedents but with Heidegger himself, Michael Millerman examines a somewhat larger selection of thinkers, including Leo Strauss, who rejected Heidegger’s philosophy and politics ‘root and branch.’
Newell observes that Habermas accepts the doctrine of historicism while rejecting Hegel’s historical teleology. There has been, and will be, no ‘end of history’ in which the longing for wisdom becomes wisdom itself. Habermas confines himself to “a formal or procedural ethic,” the “ideal speech situation,” which retains Hegel’s esteem for rationality, for “discursive coherence,” with the “practical pluralism” that allows everyone his say, so long as one follows the procedural ethic. In practice, this has “amounted to a politically moderate social-democratic stance”—albeit, rather more notoriously with the addition of an administrative state that curtails citizen self-government. The recent offshoot of Hegelianism, Critical Theory, aims at “salvag[ing] what can be useful taken away from Hegel, Kant and Marx without succumbing to their totalizing claims.” Absent a historical telos, one must ask, useful for what? Evidently, useful for the avoidance of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny but, beyond that, no clear end but an end to be constructed ad hoc as humanity putters along, freely but with political purposes that are likely to shift with whatever the ‘critiques’ of the moment discommend and commend (the latter, if only by a sort of inertia). Critical Theory’s most prominent thinker, Jürgen Habermas, expects the several “horizons” of doctrines to “fuse” into one horizon (rather like Hegel) but without the eventual permanency of an End of History. It is ruling by consensus—the “consent of the governed” phrase of the Declaration of Independence with all that pesky stuff about unalienable rights subtracted. [1]
By contrast, Foucault’s postmodernism radicalizes the post-rationality of Nietzsche and even Heidegger, completely “uncoupling…the rational and irrational dimensions of the Philosophy of Freedom; the uncoupling of a historical dialectic from the underlying ontological premise of sheer self-origination.” If, as Foucault claims, society consists of nothing but “a field of power centers,” then all previous doctrines of political legitimacy are mere tools “by which the dominating power coerces the subordination of the others.” Although he hopes to win freedom from all of these tyrannies by encouraging “the growth of dissenting powers” to counteract all such monopolies of morality, politics, and thought, why does this lead not to liberation but simply to new arrangements of powers, with every shake of the philosophic and political kaleidoscope? If “Habermas would have concluded that Foucault’s postmodernism supplies no structure for public debate and the emergence of consensual norms from currently conflicting groups,” would Foucault reply that he wants a sort of permanent revolution (a comprehensive Trotskyism) whereby the shaking goes on forever, to no other end but freedom? Leaving us the question: Why freedom?
Since Habermas never engaged Foucault, we cannot know what they would have said to one another. But he did engage Gadamer. Gadamer’s hermeneutical school of interpreting ‘texts’ remains even more vague than the agenda of Critical Theory, “entertain[ing] no political project,” “not even general principles of legitimacy.” Why engage ‘texts’ at all? Because Gadamer wants “liberal learning and aesthetic taste to cushions against the transmission of traditions of liberal learning and aesthetic taste, opening up havens of reflection within the prevailing horizon of technology.” (As Newell notes, in this he resembles not Hegel but Schiller.) This is a civil-social project of sorts, “relying on a renaissance of liberal education to offset the modern emphasis on economic self-interest while avoiding any revolutionary political crusades (which he had witnessed firsthand under the Third Reich).” Gadamer does borrow Heidegger’s “notion that we are always already engaged with the past and with past texts and art,” an engagement whereby they change us, and we change them, as the texts both reveal themselves to us and conceal themselves from us.
Foucault demurs, vehemently, charging Critical Theory as Habermas conceives it too conducive to complacency, too optimistic in its hopes for gentle social and political change. Foucault goes so far as to abandon the modern state “as the most reliable and successful vehicle for achieving modern freedom both of individuals and of society as a whole.” So does his fellow postmodern, Jacques Derrida, who “called for a new global civil society of the marginalized and dispossessed” to be located beyond states’ sovereign powers. In this, he recurs to a Marxism-Leninism without the proletariat, or at least without it alone, as the revolutionary class, and without the iron laws of history that Marxists imagine will bring about communism after the modern state withers away.
Newell rightly remarks the several attempts to combine neo-Marxism with Heideggerian existentialism. “Under the influence of Heidegger’s existential analytic of everyday life, our alienation from modern bourgeois capitalist society is expanded in meaning beyond the socioeconomic dimension stressed by orthodox Marxism to include psychological, spiritual, erotic and aesthetic varieties of alienation, nothing less than what Heidegger termed our ‘alienation from Being’ as such.” The Left needed this expansion of its political base, given the decline in numbers and power, to say nothing of the embourgeoisement, of the industrial proletariat Marx had expected to lead humanity to socialism under the guidance of the vanguard Communist Party. This had been understood as early as the 1920s by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci—the same decade when Heidegger came to prominence. By the late 1960s, the New Left, spurred by the Freudo-Marxian Herbert Marcuse and the socialist of ‘Third Worldism,’ Frantz Fanon, were more influential among intellectuals in the democratic-republican regimes than the now moribund hacks in the Kremlin.
Today, the most important theorist internationally among the Heideggerians is the Russian Alexander Dugin, who has “basically transferred Heidegger’s notion of the German people as the ‘people of destiny’ caught between the pincers of West and East in the 1930s, capable of making a stand for its destiny that would redeem all mankind, to the position of Russian today, which Dugin envisions as leading a revolution of ‘archaic values’ against the bourgeois world headed by the United States”—although evidently not located between the “pincers” of the United States and China. Exactly how “archaic values” comport with the Russian taste for high-tech weaponry remains as much of a question as it was for Heidegger when he looked back at the Nazis after World War II.
Michael Millerman rather likes Dugin. Dugin “begins with” Heidegger in four ways. Heidegger’s notion of “inceptual thought,” of returning to original, pre-Socratic philosophy “seen from the end of the philosophical tradition” does in fact begin with the beginning insofar as anyone not present at the beginning can do. Second, the four thinkers he has selected for discussion—Strauss, Richard Rorty, Derrida, and Dugin—all “began their own activity as political theorists in response to the challenge of Heidegger.” Third, Socrates’ new beginning, his turn to political philosophy, embodies “the sometimes troubling relationship between philosophy and the political.” Heidegger “is perhaps the main case of that strange relationship” in the modern world. Finally, “taking all these three meanings together,” “from the standpoint of a prejudice in favor of inceptual thinking, four responses to Heidegger that begin from a recognition of his philosophical-political priority are considered, the better to grasp issues associated with the theme of the philosophical constitution of the political.” Modern politics has indeed been decisively inflected by notions derived from philosophic thought and, Millerman rightly observes, “since the beginning of the twentieth century, the rational foundations of liberal democracy have been attacked and undermined by anti-liberal philosophers.” Many previous anti-liberals had criticized liberal democracy from the religious standpoint of ‘throne and altar,’ although of course Hobbes had criticized modern republican regimes more or less avant la lettre according to his own natural-rights philosophic criteria. But the major philosophic assault did indeed begin with Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century, his influence advancing into the twentieth and, now, beyond. Since Heidegger responded to, and radicalized, Nietzsche (as Newell has shown), Heidegger makes sense as the starting point for examining “the post-Heideggerian left and right as well as the liberal center” today, thus “bring[ing] into relief the theoretical issue of competing philosophical constitutions of the political.”
Heidegger claims that “the major concepts from the Western philosophical tradition are historically constituted, rather than universal or timelessly true.” Millerman goes so far as to claim that Heidegger “showed how such concepts arise from finitude and history, and even from the inauthentic relationship of man to his own true self” as a historical being (emphasis added). That is, while philosophy constitutes (modern) politics and politics may well influence philosophic concepts, both of these actions are ‘historical’—that is, changeable over time and necessarily so, since Being itself is ‘historical.’ Millerman’s forthrightly admitted “prejudice” in favor of Heidegger’s inceptual thinking provides, he says, “more fundamental access to a broader spectrum of philosophical-political topographies than another starting point might.” For example, while “it is possible to reconstruct an argument for natural right as a response to Heidegger, but comparatively difficult on the basis of natural right to make sense of inceptual thinking,” the prejudice is justified. It must be remarked, however, that these are two different tasks. To make an argument for a doctrine isn’t the same thing as making sense of an opposing doctrine. To make sense of inceptual thinking “on the basis of” natural right would indeed be difficult, since the underlying assumption of the natural right teaching contradicts inceptual or historical thinking, but to make an argument for natural right in response to historicism need not, must not, take natural-right concepts as axiomatic when defending them—as indeed the term “concepts” already concedes something to the historicist principle of ‘man-as-maker.’
Millerman recounts his own ‘beginning’ in philosophy, his road to Heidegger. He developed “a prejudice in favor of Heidegger’s inceptual thinking well before I knew what that was,” have been “interested in beginnings” and initially approaching them through “theological thought,” through the teaching of God as creator. He saw that this teaching begs the question of “the origin of the creator himself,” which might be answered, faithfully, that God’s origin simply cannot be explained or, alternatively, that God had no origin, that God is eternal. To this, an atheist will respond that if so, “why can we not say the same about the universe and save ourselves the trouble of positing God?” Millerman replies that God and the universe are “different sorts of being”: God is “not manifold, material, or extended”; the universe is. This comports with “Heidegger’s distinctions between being and beings, and between original being (“beyng”) inceptually understood and later, ‘metaphysical’ interpretations of being as ‘essence,’ ‘idea,’ ‘actuality,’ etc.”
Moreover, the mystics’ practice of non-rational ascent to the origin of Being also interested Millerman. Eastern Orthodox spirituality, heavily influenced by neo-Platonism but rejecting Platonism’s rationalism, adopted the philosophic term, theoria, to denote the light manifested to Jesus’ disciples at the Tranfiguration; theoria lights the way to theosis, “in which one beholds God—evidently the spiritual equivalent of the philosophers’ noesis. “It has been my tendency to read theory as theosis, and hence political theory as mystical political theology. If that is an error,” he cheerfully concedes in a sort of philosophic prayer, “may it at least prove to be a fruitful one.” When he encountered Hegel he therefore took him as a rational mystic, that is, as a thinker who proceeded on a path to enlightenment, albeit without the aid of the Biblical God.
Leo Strauss’s writings introduced him to the political, raising the question of how his “initial interest in theology, mysticism, ontology, and phenomenology” intersected with politics. It was Strauss who taught him that philosophic empiricism wedded to the principle of infinite progress not only informs much of modern politics but grounds politics on “the belief that being is irretrievably mysterious,” the future into which we are ‘progressing’ being a thing unknown. That is, much of modern rationalism has unwittingly opened itself to the rationally unknowable. This, too, built up a prejudice in favor of Heidegger’s thought.
Given this this bundle of similar yet disparate interests, Millerman wanted to understand the criteria for judging among several “philosophical-political topographies.” And “what would it take to displace one from a commitment to or prejudice in favor of one approach to an alternative,” e.g., to replace a commitment to Straussian natural-right teaching to Derrida’s deconstructionism? Natural right or history? Considered as a political question, the criterion might be an aversion to the Nazism espoused by Heidegger; his radical historicism did not prevent, and in some sense led him to, sympathy with Nazism. But (as Millerman doesn’t recall) Strauss himself mocked the argumentum ad Hitlerum as an insufficient criterion for philosophic or even political judgment, inasmuch as even an “insane tyrant,” as Strauss described Hitler, might have some sane notions kicking around in his crazed and vicious head—an esteem for public health, for example, limited though it was to his fellow ‘Aryans’ and malignant though it was towards everyone else.
“Strauss wants to protect politics from both excess and lack of philosophy and to protect philosophy from political persecution and corrupting influences.” This is commendable, in Millerman’s estimation, but it doesn’t prove that natural right as opposed to historicism is true. At the same time, insofar as one philosophizes one leads a philosophic life, that is, a way of life that is not some other way. The question of the soul’s conversion or ‘turning around’ at the prompting of the love of wisdom raises the question of “sovereignty”—both the question of Socrates’ philosopher-king who rules his City in Speech and the question of undertaking a way of life, a regime of the soul, a ruling spirit that may well not be the same as the spirit which faithfully obeys the ruling Spirit of the Bible. In Millerand’s Heideggerian formulation, “Philosophical conversion effect existential transformation.” This new being, what “Heidegger sometimes names ‘Da-Seyn,'” implies that “the compelling sovereignty of the primordial refers to the fact that one’s star is the highest law.” In this beginning, this “existential conversion,” there “occurs the emergence, birth, or inception of philosophy from the chaos of one’s Dasein“—that is, from the competing and contradictory “interests” the pre-conversion human person has entertained. It should be noted that by Millerman’s own testimony his pre-conversion ‘self’ was not entirely chaotic. It featured certain homologies, albeit in the form of prejudices. He did not replace chaos with order, but what he takes to be a less comprehensive and coherent order of thinking and of soul for a more comprehensive and coherent order.
Such an altered sovereignty within the ‘self’ “should result in the reconfiguration or reconstitution of the field of the political,” inasmuch as the philosopher is perforce a member of a political community and his thoughts about that community will change as a result of his conversion. As Newell has observed and Millerman confirms, “it is hard to say in advance precisely what that might look like in practice, particularly because Heidegger did not give many indications along these lines” about “the possible shape of ‘Da-Seyn politics.'” It might be thought that the conception of inceptual thought, with its emphasis on the seemingly infinite possibilities available at the inception of Being itself, might make any such projection more or less impossible, potentially leading to catastrophic misjudgments about, say, Nazism.
‘Be’ this as it may, Millerman contends that Strauss, for all his political sobriety, does not adequately address the matter of philosophic conversion. “Strauss does not describe the becoming-philosopher of the philosopher from the perspective of the philosopher: Heidegger, however, does.” This charge, however, ignores Strauss’s emphasis on Platonic political philosophy, which addresses exactly the issue of philosophic conversion, explicitly or implicitly, in (one is tempted to say) every one of the dialogues.
At any rate, as an unconverted-to-Socratic-philosophy Heideggerian, Millerman identifies several “becomings or conversions” philosophers experience: becoming-philosopher; being-a-theorist (hypothesizing and then perceiving noetically); and becoming the bearer of an essential claim or doctrine about what one has perceived. This does not imply “static thinking”—an oxymoron in any case?—or “something stable, unchanged, pre-constituted, known, predictable, objective, and dogmatic about a single thing, called ‘the relationship’ between two pre-constituted realms”—he may well be thinking of Strauss’s distinction between the philosophic and the political, among others—but rather a historicized, ever-changing, fluid relational kaleidoscope in which what all such concepts mean “varies as a function of the transformative potentials of inquiry.” Here, he avails himself of Foucault’s distinction between “truth,” a simple act of knowledge possessed by the knower, and “spirituality,” which takes the possession of knowledge to transform the knower. “Philosophy,” in Millerman’s estimation, “aims at knowing the nature of the political” but nature itself is historical, ever-transforming and ever-transformative. “Regimes of political life and regimes of political thought and theory can be traced back to the ‘shelterings’ or existential embodiments and elaborations, of these ‘grantings,’ or conversion-encounters”—encounters, that is, in which Being reveals or grants access to itself, as a transforming and transformative agent. In this way, Heidegger takes philosophic conversion to be an analogue to Christian religious conversion. As the Apostle Paul avers that his old ‘self’ is crucified with Christ, that “not I but Christ liveth in me,” so too the Heideggerian convert crucifies his ‘I,’ his “individual subjectivity” and yet opens himself to the revelation of Being and is transformed by it from Dasein, the being who questions, to Da-seyn, a reborn being. Da means “localization,” within oneself; Seyn means the revelation of some hitherto concealed aspect of Being, in time and not ‘for all time,’ since both Being and the being granted noesis of Being change over time. Indeed, as a result of the revelation both the being and Being are changed by their encounter with one another.
Since, as Millerman remarks, Heidegger never wrote a Republic or a Laws, and indeed wrote no dialogues at all—as Newell says, he deploys little if any irony, unlike Plato’s Socrates— since he “presents his profound meditations on being and truth directly,” his directly expressed “philosophy of resoluteness and German rebirth” has made many observers understandably nervous about his “involvement” with the Nazi Party. Some try an equally direct tactic, cutting the Gordian Knot by either by dismissing Heidegger’s philosophy as self-contradictory or by resolving the supposed contradiction by treating his Nazism as epiphenomenal. The Straussian Harry V. Jaffa argues that to say all truth is relative to a time is to make a universal and atemporal and therefore self-contradictory claim. Millerman objects that while this argument refutes any facile relativism it “fails to deal” with Heidegger’s notion of “being as time.” (While this may be true, Heidegger’s claim itself requires some convincing evidence that being is time, as distinguished from the evidence that time is one aspect of being.) The Nazi deniers, on the other hand, either sacrifice “the claims of theory to the exigencies of practice” or transfigure “practice in theory’s all-consuming fire.”
The latter, theory-dominated defenders of Heidegger have been convinced that “key concepts of the philosophic tradition have been destabilized and uprooted in Heidegger’s writings, revealing them as unauthentic incrustations formed over a long-forgotten original experience.” Being is temporality. While the first philosophers, the pre-Socratics, “underwent a fundamental experience of being as emergence and concealment,” Plato and subsequent philosophers overemphasized what had emerged at the expense of considering what remained concealed, setting forth Being as if what is visible to the eye and to the ‘mind’s eye’—nature and ideas, “presence”—as if it were Being tout court. Platonism and subsequent philosophies “forgot” the original experience of Being. Owing to this crucial misunderstanding, “Being withdraws itself from constant presence into concealment” and, in doing so, brings on the modern attempt to conquer what remains visible by the means of modern science. But this means nihilism, the attempt to dominate all Being. At the same time, nihilism may produce a reaction against itself, “another inception of philosophy from out of its most original and concealed wellsprings,” an eschewal of ‘Platonism’ in the broadest sense in favor of not a simple return to the pre-Socratics—philosophy has experienced Socrates, since then—but to the Heideggerian transformation of “the human being” into Da-Seyn and the consequent “ground[ing] and shelter[ing] [of] the truth of beying amidst beings.” Some Heidegger-influenced thinkers (Derrida, Rorty) stop short of that new beginning; others (most prominently, Dugin) “leap into” it. The timid ones won’t jump, eyeing the dangerous political-historical consequences of Heidegger’s philosophic radicalism. The bold ones do jump but in a different direction, seeing that Heidegger didn’t elaborate a fully articulated political theory, one that might have prevented him from his entanglement with Nazism. This brings Dugin, for example, to “criticize Nazism as incompatible with inceptual thinking, following Heidegger’s own muted theoretical criticisms of Nazism” but unmuting them and elaborating upon them. In this, he does not abandon reason (and thus the political limits reason more than suggests) but urges human beings to “situate our self-understanding on a level that precedes the division between rationality and irrationality,” moving beyond our self-understanding of the human being as the rational animal and toward Da-Seyn, a being which “transforms our understanding of reason.” With Heidegger (and Nietzsche), Dugin abandons the idea of human rights, one of the many ideas or “worldviews” that “block access to a genuine grasp of our authentic existence.” But this, he insists, will lead us not to tyranny, not to the rule of unreason, the rule of an insane tyrant, but to a philosophy which is “primarily questioning,” not doctrinaire (liberal, fascist, communist).
If so, such a philosophy, like the philosophy of the pre-Socratics, cannot be political, except insofar as its ‘politics’ is the politics of the permanent revolution, a never-ending quest in action parallel to the never-ending questioning in thought. Millerman evidently sees this, or something like it, quoting Heidegger as writing that philosophy is both “immediately useless” and “nevertheless sovereign.” “There,” Millerman adds, “is the rub.” Philosophy rules in the sense that it has the capacity “to reconfigure other fields essentially”—to turn contemplative philosophers into nature-conquering scientists, for example—but other fields cannot reconfigure philosophy; only philosophy can reconfigure philosophy. “It is our task here to explore some of the ways in which [Heidegger’s] philosophical reflections configure or threaten to reconfigure the constitution of the political.” In this, he follows Sergey Horujy, an Eastern Orthodox thinker influenced, oddly enough, by Foucault, who supplements Heidegger’s philosophy of Being with what he calls “synergic anthropology,” or “post-humanity.” After all, if Being transforms itself, if human being transforms itself, might human being not transform itself out of its humanity altogether? “By the conclusion of this study, it will become clear that Heidegger alone is not enough.” This is the final meaning of “beginning” with Heidegger.
Somewhat perplexingly, Millerman invokes the tarot deck as an image of political philosophy, in the sense that one ‘card’ alone will not suffice. The Strauss card, the Rorty card, the Derrida, Dugin, “and even” the Heidegger card are “spokes in the ‘wheel of tarot’ that ‘speaks’ both ‘law’ and ‘love.'” “Rota Taro Orat Tora Ator: thus the strange axiom of this study.” Strange, indeed: the phrase (itself a compound of words taken from several languages) means “The wheel [or cycle] of Tarot speaks [or teaches] the law [Torah] of Hather.” The Tarot-Torah pun associates the Book of Thoth, the Egyptian moon god and equivalent of Hermes, god of knowledge, with Biblical law. But this law isn’t God’s law, since Hather is another Egyptian deity, the goddess of love or (for the Greeks) Aphrodite. So, the Tarot teaches the law of erotic love. This is quite in keeping with the man who invented the Tarot cards (Heidegger points us to origins, so the point is fair): the Germanophiliac English mountebank, occultist, and probable Satanist, Aleister Crowley, an insatiable libertine and lifelong scoundrel. One hopes Millerand is having a bit of fun.
Millerman offers an overview of Heidegger’s thought, beginning with his 1925 lecture, History of the Concept of Time: A Prolegomena to a Phenomenology of History. In it, Heidegger distinguishes the natural sciences, which investigate the “domain” of nature, from the human sciences, which investigate the domain of history. (It is of course noteworthy that in this early writing Heidegger signals a ‘historicist’ orientation in so describing the human sciences.) The problem faced by both sciences is simple: “there is no guarantee that the thematized domains provide access to ‘the actual area of subject matter out of which the thematic of the sciences is first carved'”—the word “carved” signaling the assumption that the sciences are ‘made,’ that we know what we make. After all, the sciences as presented in universities may be conventional categories unrelated to “the authentic reality of history,” unable to enable us “to see history in its historicity.” What is more, there may be an “original and undivided context of subject matter” common to both sciences, which their division obscures. What is the genesis of these sciences in “pretheoretical experience”?
Nature and history: from what did these categories originate? Human beings conceived of them at some point in time. What, then, is time? One can investigate the various conceptions of time that have prevailed in the past, but, as Heidegger says, “it is precisely the understanding of the phenomenon of time, worked out in advance, which permits us to understand earlier concepts of time.” We need to know what we’re looking for before we can go looking for it. (Is this true? One might, after all, consider the opinions about what people have called ‘time’ as those people understood the idea. That would be Socrates’ approach, which Heidegger will reject.)
Heidegger instead points to the pre-scientific notion of time, and thus of both ‘nature’ and ‘history,’ by “an analysis of that being for whom the meaning of being is or can become a question, namely Dasein.” He surveys the discoveries of the phenomenologists, particularly Husserl. There were three basic discoveries: intentionality, “categorial intuition,” and a new conception of the a priori.
Dasein is “intentional,” that is, self-directed toward something. I direct my attention toward a chair. Initially, I perceive the chair as an “environmental thing,” as this chair and none other; I will also perceive it as a “natural” thing, not of course in the sense that is not man-made but in the sense that it falls when lifted and released, consists of a certain material, etc. I can also perceive the chair “in its very ‘thingness,'” thinking of qualities it shares with all other material objects—materiality, extension, coloration, local mobility, and so on. And (still pre-scientifically), I can think of the chair in terms of my intentions regarding it, whether I like it or dislike it. Phenomenologists do not limit this understanding of things to material things; a thing may be a thought or an image.
How do I know if my perceptions are true? Precisely because Dasein is an intentional being he needs to know that he cannot eat that wooden chair. This necessity leads him to think in categories of things. Phenomenologists identify three “concepts of truth”: “demonstration fulfillment,” the intuitive envisaging of a thing, seeing it in ‘the mind’s eye’; sense perception; and the fulfillment of both of these in noesis (theosis in religious thought). If I say, “this chair is yellow and upholstered,” I am saying something more than what sense perception tells me; the words “this,” “is,” and “and” register nonsensory perception, giving me the full, or at least a fuller, perception of the chair and its properties. (In this, one might observe, Heidegger tracks Hegel’s short essay, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”). What we call an ‘objective’ description of a thing is much more than what we perceive through our senses alone. Heidegger says that these “categorial forms,” which are not “made by the subject and even less something added to the real objects…actually present the entity more truly in its ‘being-in-itself.'” The pre-Socratic philosophers aimed at exactly this; phenomenology has “arriv[ed] at the form of research sought by ancient ontology,” as “scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology.” In Heidegger’s estimation, phenomenologists have returned philosophy to it origin, before the ‘Socratic turn’ toward political philosophy.
The third basic discovery of phenomenology is its new understanding of the a priori, the structure of knowing in the subject, in the one who knows. This is not necessarily ‘subjective’ in sense of biased, emotive, partial. Rather, “a sense of being is presupposed in the notion of the a priori,” quite apart from the philosophical doctrines (most notably those of Plato) which have attempted to explain being. Philosophers want to know what ‘being’ means; it is in this question, this quest, that what’s now called ‘ontology’ arises, and this quest can be renewed only if philosophers recover that original notion, now buried beneath philosophers’ doctrines. Dasein is the entity that questions; our own being even questions itself. What is our own ‘a priori’?
Heidegger continues this quest in his best-known book, Being and Time. There, Heidegger seeks to clarify what being means by interrogating “the privileged being, Dasein,” the one which, “in its being is concerned about its being.” He addresses this interrogation on two levels, the “ontic” and “existentiell,” which consists of particular cases, and the “ontological” and “existential,” which concern the constitutive structures of Dasein. Ontically, Dasein’s “essence lies…in the fact that in each instance it has to be its being as its own”; each individual Dasein has potential beings. Each individual “can show itself to itself on its own terms.” But these terms typically find themselves obscured by entanglement in the world and its readymade categories, which tempt the individual to “interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light.” An additional layer of obscurity comes from tradition, which Dasein often accepts as a set of givens, instead of seeking “the original ‘wellsprings’ out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn.”
Heidegger presents two parts of a “preparatory analysis” of Dasein. Dasein is in the world. What is “being-in-the-world”? He argues that this is a “unified phenomenon,” not a dichotomous ‘me’ separate from a world ‘out there.’ Dasein is in the world. I encounter the world beyond my own body as a set of “useful items,” a status that makes them meaningful to me. I don’t ‘add’ their usefulness to them; they are intrinsically useful to me, related to me, relevant to me. Dasein is the only being which has no utility; the world Dasein finds useful is thus crucially related to “Dasein’s self-understanding.” If Dasein fails to understand itself in relation to the world it will misuse the world. This is the basis of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology.
There is also a ‘Who’ of Dasein, its relation to other Dasein-beings as part of the world. “Dasein is essentially being-with” other Dasein-beings; we alienate ourselves from them if we pass one another by, treat one another with indifference, as ‘theys.’ This is the basis of Heidegger’s critique of both modern democracy, which “flattens” other individuals as if we knew them, and of modern bureaucracy, which claims to make everyone manageable, robbing each of his responsibility for himself. Such a relationship is “inauthentic.”
To overcome these deficits, to reach self-understanding, Dasein can draw upon its ability to introspect. If we do so, we sense that we have been “thrown” into the world, but we can become “attuned” to it. We can also come to the condition of “understanding,” that is, seeing ourselves as beings capable of “being-possible.” Dasein “is always being projected,” always exploring multiple possibilities for itself. Among such projections are political regimes; a people, a group of ‘who’s,’ has several to choose from. In Heidegger’s words, “Only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless,” authentic or inauthentic, choosing among the ready-to-hand things that can serve the purposes “projected in understanding.” “Interpretation” of the world makes this understanding explicit. I am in the world, but I am also constantly ‘thinking ahead,’ weighing my own possibilities. Care is integral to Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
Constantly, but not forever. Dasein is limited by death, by the fact that someday I will no longer ‘be here.’ We are thrown into the world, then eventually thrown out of it. I should therefore anticipate death as an act of self-knowledge, not flee from my mortality, the non-being intrinsic to my being, into “the everydayness of entanglement and the they.” This is what links Heidegger to what Newell calls the philosophy of freedom—in Heidegger’s case, freedom from everydayness and from indifference to other Dasein-beings. Freedom is resoluteness. “Upon what does Dasein resolve itself in its resoluteness? To what should it resolve itself?” he asks. “Only the resolution itself can answer this,” in the concrete situation Dasein finds itself at the moment it resolves. Only in confronting its own finitude in having been born and eventually to die, in its thrownness, can Dasein resolve itself “authentically.” This is Dasein’s “historicity”; “Dasein is existentially historical.” It chooses its “fate.”
Being and Time is incomplete, lacking the projected analysis of time itself in relation to being. Millerman accordingly turns to Heidegger’s later writings, beginning with his 1941 lecture, “Basic Concepts.” Elaborating on his account of historicity, Heidegger explains that history vulgarly understood defines old and new superficially, by the time of its appearance. Yet what seems new, what is ‘new to us,’ may be old; only its revelation may be new. More, as Heidegger puts it, “The earliest…can also be the first according to rank and wealth, according to the originality and bindingness for our history and impending historical decisions.” He calls such phenomena “the incipient,” and they carry with them a “Call,” a beckoning to us, insofar as we have wandered from this architectonic beginning. For Europeans, the inquiries of the pre-Socratic Greeks—philosophers and poets—provided this archē. “The ‘earliest’ is accessible to us when we are ‘transported into the essential’ by being called back to our ownmost relation to being, out of our everyday falling prey to beings in the world.” This is at far remove from mere antiquarian curiosity about ‘the ancients.’ Heidegger writes, “The measure of whether remembrance of the inception is genuine can never be determined from an interest in reviving classical antiquity but only from a resolve to attain and essential knowledge that holds for what it to come.” The essential past, and the essential, architectonic past alone, deserves to be carried into the future, as the authentic, inceptual thinker experiences “being-embraced-into the ‘essence’ of the ground,” thus “standing in an abode laid out be being itself.
To convey something of the radical character of his project, Heidegger invents some novel vocabulary. Being conceived inceptually becomes “beyng”—an appropriately more archaic spelling. The Dasein who so conceives beyng becomes “Da-Sein” or even “Da-Seyn,” to “mark that he is no longer dealing with an analytic of the given Dasein, but rather with something to be earned in a fundamental ontological transformation.”
In his later work, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Heidegger provides an overview of his project, careful to describe it not as a system (which would smack of Hegelian rationalism) but a “conjuncture” consisting of six junctures. They are: “the resonating”; “interplay”; “the leap”; “the grounding”; “the futural thinkers”; and the “Last God.” The resonating and the interplay prepare for the leap; grounding, futural thought and thinkers, and the Last God follow from the leap.
What resonates with us today is the crisis of modernity. In this age, “in which humans dominate beings as objects,” in which beyng has concealed itself from us so thoroughly, our alienation has become so acute that we have been unwittingly prepared for a new revelation of beyng, one comparable to the architectonic revelation experienced by the preSocratic Greeks. Science means knowledge, but modern science has become so entangled with the attempt to conquer nature that it has buried the true meaning of science, which is knowledge—specifically, the quest for the knowledge of beyng, not the chasing after profit that has made modern science a sort of “business establishment,” ensconced in universities that subsist on corporate and government grants, all aimed at progress toward the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Millerman rightly observes that Heidegger’s remarks here “are not insignificant for an understanding of the fields of political philosophy and political science,” themselves inhabiting ‘departments’ in ‘the university system.’ Beyng has abandoned us; hence our alienation, our foreignness to the roots of our own being as Dasein.
By the “interplay,” Heidegger means the history of metaphysics, that is, the wrong turn taken by Plato and all subsequent philosophers until Heidegger, who intends to overcome metaphysics “out of its ground” by reviving the question of being on the inceptual level, recovering “a primordial sense of being,” “confronting and passing beyond Platonism.” By Platonism, Heidegger means the interpretation of beings in terms of the Idea, “the ‘constant presence’ that makes a thing a thing.” For Plato, the Idea is “the most beingful being”; among the many ideas, the supreme idea is the idea of the good.” Heidegger rejoins: Plato’s “questioning asks only about beings and their beingness” and therefore “can never detach itself from beings and strike up against beyng itself.” For Plato, beings and being are visible, the ideas visible to the mind’s eye. But beyng conceals itself (rather like the Biblical God, one must note).
“The interplay prepares the decision to leap.” Why a “leap”? Because to abandon the visible, the rational, the noetically perceptible conceived ‘ideationally,’ takes daring. It takes daring because we do not, and cannot, see what we are leaping into. The leap, necessitated by our crisis, is a leap of faith, not the rational philosophic ascent from the ‘Cave’ of a given regime’s opinions and customs described by Plato’s Socrates.
Once we have made that leap, Heidegger avers, the human becomes Da-sein, “the site for the grounding, preservation, and stewardship of beyng.” In the stage of the grounding, Da-Sein is beyond humanity, the “highest possibility” human beings can attain, a condition of life which can endure “the truth of beyng,” first and foremost human mortality, the very opposite of Plato’s eternal ideas or the Bible’s promise of eternal life. The “future ones,” the “futural thinkers,” are the few “who linger in what is most questionworthy.” Concurring with Nietzsche’s judgment that the Biblical God is dead, Heidegger plays off Nietzsche’s satirical portrait of the Last Man, positing the “Last God” as the god of the futural thinkers, “the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history.” The Last God “awaits the grounding of the truth of beyng and thus awaits the leap of the human being into Da-Sein.”
Why is this good? Heidegger claims that “being itself has a history, or ‘is’ as history.” “The history of Being is something is something essential to Being itself,” not “a product of human thought, but as it were the producer of human thought about being.” In this, Heidegger recalls not Platonism but the thought of Heraclitus, for whom ‘everything flows,” for whom nothing is eternal except change itself. “Heidegger tries to let Being speak though him,” regarding “his speaking as not his own, but as Being’s speaking in him”—rather as a Biblical prophet understands the work of the Holy Spirit. If Heraclitus is the Moses of Being, Heidegger is the vessel of “Being’s second beginning,” its second coming-into-view. Beyng originates Being, Being the beings (including ideas). “What must be noticed” by the Heideggerian ‘archaeologist’ is that Beyng and all that flows from it “has a history,” and (therefore) “truth, too has a history, inseparable from the history of Beyng.” Truth always changes, along with Beyng; truth must be “wrested from” self-concealing Beyng. The good for Da-Sein, the being that questions Being, is Da-Seyn, the manifestation of Beyng in Da-Sein. This is a historical event, “a movement, an essential occurrence.” ‘The good’ is no idea but that which “lends to the knower the power of knowing”—knowing in what once again must be described as a quasi-Biblical sense of intimacy, union, and transformation.
According to Millerman, Leo Strauss gets it all wrong. In addressing Plato, Heidegger considers the Theaetetus and the Sophist, but Strauss insists on including the Statesman. “What does it mean to say that the ‘statesman’ belongs to the study of philosophy? For Strauss, it would seem to mean that the horizon that opens up the question of Being is fundamentally the political horizon: the question of Being passes through or is raised on the basis of the question of the city, i.e., of law.” But Heidegger regards the ‘cave’ of political law and custom to be “the philosophic tradition itself, rather than the political cave.” Indeed he does, but Strauss does in fact understand that the “philosophic tradition” has become partially integrated into modern politics. To ignore this is to allow oneself to contend, as Millerman does, that “Strauss’s treatment in his book on natural right [Natural Right and History] does not rise to the level of philosophical analysis.” If Millerman’s Heidegger rises through to the level of philosophical analysis by his critique of the philosophic tradition, and Strauss also offers a critique of the philosophic tradition, albeit one that sharply differs from Heidegger’s, then Strauss at least might be philosophizing, too.
Millerman observes that Strauss centers philosophic inquiry on the distinction between phenomena that are natural and phenomena that are conventional. “Heidegger would retort, or would have grounds to retort, that the very concept of ‘nature’ is already ‘historical’ or already an interpretation of the more fundamental ‘event,’ occurrence, or happening (unfolding, unfurling, temporalizing) of ‘Beyng.'” Yes, he would so retort, but at this level the retort is mere assertion. Straussian political philosophy looks first at the forms of political life, working up from them Socratically, by showing the contradictions of the legal and customary assertions regime partisans make about the beings they suppose lend the regime its authority—typically, the gods. Finding such claims dubious, the Socratic philosopher only then considers what Strauss calls the “natural articulation” of the whole, the cosmos that has arisen out of “the roots out of which the completed whole…has grown.” He attends to the forms, the results of change, the ‘looks’ of things. The roots of things, which Heidegger so ardently seeks, are highly unlikely ever to be discovered; hence the ‘Socratic turn’ away from philosophy that attempted to discover those roots by observing the cosmos directly to political philosophy. Millerman quite rightly quotes Strauss’s remark in The City and Man: “Socrates conceived of his turn to the ‘what is’ questions as a turn, or a return, to sanity, to ‘commonsense,’ as refuge from the stupefying study of the mysterious and ‘hidden’ roots of the whole.” But in claiming that this turn is “subphilosophical” because “it fails to respond adequately to Heidegger’s movement beyond Plato and the ideas to the truth of beyng” equates political philosophy with “the political rhetoric needed to serve philosophy’s interests.” But is it only that?
Strauss considers political philosophy to be immoderate in its quest but measured in its expectations—zetetic or skeptical, not assertoric. To attempt to uncover the roots, the origins of nature, is precisely to take a sort of leap of faith; it hopes for certainty without claiming to know exactly what certainty it will find, while at the same time asserting that what it will find is historical, not eternal. Millerman claims that “Strauss regards classic natural right as precisely ‘political philosophy’ not because it deals with a ‘political’ topic, ‘right,’ but because in sticking to the idea, i.e., to the look, to ‘the surface of things,’ it preserves the politically necessary characteristic of moderation, lost, with disastrous political consequences, when one’s emphasis shifts ‘beyond being’ to the ‘roots.'” Whereas “Heidegger regards the idea-interpretation of Beyng as fatefully, philosophically erroneous,” Strauss “regards it as the correct and prudently deliberate marking of the boundary between the study of the part (being/idea) and the study of the whole (beyond being), straddling the boundary between the political or the moderate and the philosophical, which exceeds the immoderate.” Millerman dislikes this because “at most,” Strauss’s “‘refutation’ of Heidegger is the…’refutation’ on the plane of political philosophy.” But it clearly is not, since Strauss in effect challenges Heidegger to prove that ‘Beyng’ is what he says it is. Heidegger asserts that Beyng is historical. Does Strauss really fail to address this question?
At this point, one must turn not to Natural Right and History, which concerns itself primarily with the distinction between classic natural right and modern natural right, only introducing the modern shift to historicism near the end of the book, to what Strauss actually wrote about Heidegger, particularly in his 1956 lecture, “Existentialism.” [2]. Strauss clearly identifies the disagreement between Platonism, which contends that “pure thought, being ‘anonymous,’ transcends every dynamic context”—that is, ‘history’ or change—whereas historicism contends that “at least all concrete or profound thought essentially belongs to a concrete dynamic context.” Existentialism contends that “all principles of understanding and of action are historical, i.e., have no other ground than groundless human decision or fateful dispensation” of that decision. “There is no room for politics in Heidegger’s work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by gods or the gods,” that is, by the rationally unknowable. Hitlerism is intimately connected “with the core of his philosophic thought” because the supposed “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism consisted of the existential leap from the rationally knowable whole of measured, articulated political life within a measured, articulated cosmos to the rationally unknowable origins of the cosmos, tyrannically (if incoherently) embodied in Nazism’s attempts to invoke the roots, the archaic origins, of Germanness. Strauss soberly but also philosophically regards these as “fantastic hopes.” He sees that Heidegger must assume that he lives at an “absolute moment in history,” a moment in which Beyng has revealed himself through himself. But he sees no reason to believe him.
This doesn’t mean that existentialism has no philosophic value. It “has reminded many people that thinking is incomplete and defective if the thinking being, the thinking individual, forgets himself as what he is.” Insofar as it has done this, it has helpfully repeated “the old Socratic warning” against the nature-philosophy of the preSocratics, who could not explain themselves by their investigations of the cosmos. [3] Modern science is no better, in this regard, having “increased man’s power in ways that former men never dreamt of” yet nonetheless “absolutely incapable to tell men how to use that power.” The question of what or who I am “cannot be answered” by science, and if it cannot answer that question, it cannot tell me what the good is, what good the power won by modern science should serve. Heidegger further understands that “the inner time belonging to the pure consciousness cannot be understood if one abstracts form the fact that this time is necessarily finite and even constated by man’s mortality.” That Plato’s Socrates understands this as well as Heidegger may of course be seen in the Apology. Politically, although modern tyranny has led to disaster, the regime of liberal democracy has its own problems, and “it would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy even if they are enemies of democracy—provided that they are thinking men and especially great thinkers and not blustering fools” like Mussolini and Hitler.
Strauss tellingly observes that Heidegger himself came to see difficulties in his own ‘existential’ stance. Heidegger rejected Christianity while appropriating such Christian concerns as mortality, anguish, and conscience (one might add the ‘absolute moment’ in which the mysterious God reveals Himself, the “Call” to a leap of faith). He worried that his insistence on the existential “choice” was too arbitrary. How do articulated beings arise from inarticulate Beyng? And “how can finiteness be seen as finiteness if it is not seen in the light of infinity?” Finally, does his “synthesis of Platonic ideas and the biblical God,” a synthesis “as impersonal as the Platonic ideas and as elusive as the biblical God,” really cohere, or is its brilliance more dazzling than clarifying? Heidegger’s “historical consciousness” itself amounts to an interpretation of phenomena that were interpreted quite differently by the Socrates one meets in Plato and Xenophon. It is the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, who demote nature into the realm of matter in motion, rightly ruled by purposeful human beings, who prepare “historical consciousness,” which seeks to recover a sense of the noble denied by thinkers who reject nature as the standard for human conduct, which is what ‘natural right’ is. For historicists, nature has been still further demoted, the idea of nature now regarded as only one nomos or law/custom among many. For them, all of being, natural and conventional, changes constantly; change is the only ‘constant.’ For earlier historicists, this change was rational, ‘dialectical.’ Not so, for Nietzsche or Heidegger. And, in Heidegger’s estimation even Nietzsche’s will to power operates within the eternal return and therefore lacks pure historicity. For Heidegger, “the leap through which Sein is experienced is primarily the awareness-acceptance of being thrown, of finiteness, the abandonment of every thought of a railing, a support”; the eternal return is yet another mental crutch. Heidegger claims that “out of nothing every being as being comes out.” “This could remind us of the Biblical doctrine of creation,” except that “Heidegger has no place for the Creator-God.”
This is why Strauss repeats the Socratic turn. Plato departs from pre-Socratic nature philosophy because the stars of the cosmos are “mute riddles,” Strauss writes to Karl Löwith. [4] Modern experimental science, one might add, amounts to a mute dialectic, torturing stubbornly mute nature to compel her to reveal her secrets wordlessly, in action. This mute dialectic has indeed wrested far more truth from the cosmos than the pre-Socratics could discover by their investigations guided by reason informed by the ‘naked eye.’ But being mute, it still cannot tell us what the good is, especially since it conceives of nature as non-teleological. The philosophers of freedom have attempted to recover humanity’s moral and political bearings by substituting custom (Hume), the categorical imperative (Kant), utility (Bentham), the Absolute Spirit (Hegel), dialectical materialism (Marx), the will to power cum eternal return (Nietzsche), and now Beyng (Heidegger). Each of these attempts has resulted in a moral and political dead end. This suggests to Strauss that the overcoming of modernity cannot be overcome with “modern means” but only insofar as we understand that “we are still natural beings with natural understandings,” even as ‘the ancients’ understood themselves to be. To Löwith’s reply—that there (a) can be no return to nature because Christianity has “fundamentally modified ancient ‘naturalness'”; that (b) history is “deeply anchored” in man; and that (c) all political orders or regimes are contra naturam, Strauss observes that Socratic philosophy “is the attempt to replace opinions about the whole with genuine knowledge of the whole,” whereas for you, Löwith, “philosophy is nothing but the self-understanding or self-interpretation of man” as “historically conditioned,” dependent upon ever-changing “culture.” But “the fact that [the polis] is institutional is still not proof that it is contra naturam: some institutions assist natural tendencies.” Plato and Aristotle indicate how a “surveyable, urban, morally serious society, based on an agricultural economy, in which the gentry rule” is “the most reasonable and the most pleasing” form of life for most men, even if I, Strauss would not necessarily want to live in “such a polis,” since “for philosophers moral-political considerations are necessarily secondary” although not for that reason inconsiderable. For this reason, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle themselves preferred the Athens’ democratic regime to Sparta’s aristocratic regime. In weighing the ways of life of different political regimes against the way of life of the philosopher’s way of life, the philosopher’s personal ‘regime,’ his own rightly ordered soul, one begins to think philosophically precisely by not undertaking the leap of faith into the unknowable, in either politics or in the whole.
Strauss remarks to Löwith that the later ‘moderns,’ beginning with Rousseau, needed to “learn to see again from Plato the problem with ‘science-politics,'” namely, that it cannot discover justice and therefore cannot fully account for human nature, which requires justice in order to survive and flourish. In reviving the pre-Socratics, Heidegger sparks the same crisis Socrates and Rousseau saw in the philosophic teachings of their times and places, illuminating once again the need for political philosophy.
Millerman identifies Heidegger’s most cogent contemporary follower as Alexander Dugin of Russia, author of four books on the German. In Dugin’s words, “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society” is the study of Heidegger as “the key to the Russian tomorrow.” For his part, Heidegger himself wrote, “The history of the earth of the future is reserved within the essence of the Russian world, an essence that has not yet been set free for itself.” How this might happen, given his prior claim that one can only philosophize adequately in ancient Greek or modern German, is difficult to assess; Millerman doesn’t try.
Dugin understands that the impasse stems from the Westernizing and modernizing reforms of Peter the Great. All attempts to graft Western ideas and practices onto the Russian tree must fail; such attempts only engender “bizarre monstrosities,” not happy Hegelian ‘syntheses.’ From Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the Russian soil itself, the archē of Russia rejects the West—including, finally, Marxism. As Millerman puts it, “There can be no possible adequate compromise between the two poles” of East and West.
It may seem odd that a thinker intent on establishing a uniquely Russian ground for philosophy would turn to a German thinker for guidance, but Heidegger’s insistence on returning to the archē invites this move anywhere. As in Heidegger, Dugin points to the ‘archaic’ not as something merely ‘ancient’ but a beginning; this beginning has been obscured by subsequent overlays from foreign sources. Dugin calls for a new beginning for Russian thought, one “correlated with the West in a radically opposite way like truth is correlated with deceit.” More radically, Heideggerian post-metaphysics can provide Russian thinkers with the philosophic means of uprooting the fundamental Western deceit, which is philosophy itself. Heidegger harkens back to the pre-philosophic roots of the West, to its “conception of being.” “In the Russian context,” Millerman observes, “the task is the destruction of not metaphysics, which Russia never had, but Archeomodernity”—the futile attempt to graft modernity onto Russia—in “the service of a fundamental ontology of Russia’s first beginning.”
What do we know about the Russian archē, prior to further ‘archaeological’ inquiry? “The Russian person is always integrated into a whole and perceives himself as part of the whole,” the narod or people, Dugin teaches. The parallel to Heidegger here is the German volk. As with the Heideggerian (and in this case the National-Socialist) volk, “the Russian person exists not by himself. but through the narod.” No modern-Western ‘individualism’ can make sense for the Russian Dasein.
In Western religion, speaking metaphorically, the ruling sense is hearing, listening to God’s revelation. In classical Western philosophy, the ruling sense (as it were), the metaphor for knowledge, is sight, standing for the noetic insight achieved after rational inquiry. In modern philosophy, and in Machiavelli explicitly, the ruling sense is touch, which both perceives empirically and seizes, controls, shapes what it so perceives. But for Russians the ruling sense is taste; being is “so close for the Russian” that he need not have faith or reason or even experimental science. “It is not we who must study and strive toward understanding,” Dugin writes, “but rather we are to be studied and attempted to be understood.” Slavs have no philosophy and need none “because we differ principally from other Indo-European peoples in how we regard ourselves in relation to being”—intimately, with immediacy. Europeans experience being as division, dialectic, conflict, tragedy (hence Nietzsche’s tracing of the pre-philosophic West to the ‘birth of tragedy). As Heidegger shows, Western Dasein “always hangs over an abyss,” anxious about death, which it typically attempts to overcome by the will to power. In diametrical contrast with Western care and thrownness, identified by Heidegger, the Russian Dasein has no such tensions because “Russian Dasein is entirely inclusive.” Millerman worries that this might provide the foundation for a vast imperial project, which Russian history itself more than suggests, but Dugin will deny this.
Dugin asserts that a Russian Heideggerian would title his book not Being and Time but Being and Space. (And it is at least true that Russia is a spatially impressive place.) Time suggests mortality, but space conceived as territoriality, as ‘country,’ suggests continuity, even immortality, one that is pre-rational. This provides no ‘ground’ for imperialism, however, because each country has its own being, within its own “horizon.” Like languages, being is “local.” This notwithstanding, these various territorial beings converge “in the depths of the earth,” as each territory on the earth’s surface ‘points down’ to the earth’s core. Thus, as Millerman paraphrases it, “whereas from the perspective of logos and order, chaos”—the archaic core of being—seems “to be ir-rational, dis-order, and the opposite of what is regarded as good, from the perspective of chaos itself, chaos includes logos, rationality, and order in its bosom.” In this, too, Millerman shows, Dugin follows Heidegger exactly. In the Western sense, he writes, there is not and should not be philosophy in Russia, but the true, all-inclusive, “Russian philosophy as the philosophy of chaos” is indeed possible. Or, as Millerman elaborates, “the new beginning of chaotic philosophy in the Russian Dasein is not only the liberation of Russia for itself, but also the salvation of the West from itself.”
In theological language, this means that in Western religion Dasein yearns for God, but “in the Russian case it is God who intends and the Russian people who are intended”; they are the new Chosen People. In accepting Christianity in the form of Russian Orthodoxy, Russians “accepted it in accordance with their inner structure.” The Russian need not think because “God thinks for him, and, what is more, he is himself a thought of God, not as a person and all the more not as individual, but as the Russian people, as the Russian church.”
To understate the matter, this is a long way from politics as ordinarily understood. Dugin aspires to “the Seyn-Political,” which he defines as “simultaneously meta-politics and even contra-politics, since it does not raise and does not resolve any of the task and problems that politics deals with,” while simultaneously serving as the ground of politics. The Seyn-Political, then, takes the place of divine right and natural right and even historical right as (mis)understood by Western rationalists like Hegel, Marx, and Dewey, which leads to the technocratic politics of Western modernity, despised by Heidegger and Dugin alike. To take the Heideggerian “leap” into the Seyn-Political future will be to surpass time, to break free of time, and to achieve life in accordance with the archē, which exists in the past, present, and future. True, Dugin writes, to make the leap will bring on “suffering, anxiety, horror, fear, adversity and catastrophes,” but it will end in “triumph, victory, the descent to Earth of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the universal revealing of eternity and the abolition of death.” The task of “conservatism” is “to fight on the side of the coming-to-be” against the “coming-forth” of the Anti-Christ in the form of those miseries.
“At heart, Dugin proposes to apply to anthropology the operation that Heidegger applied to questions of being.” By aggregating “all individuals past and present,” then “abstract[ing] what is common from the aggregate, that gives us what Dugin calls “the broadest, most acceptable, well-known, and universal model of anthropological thought.” This so-to-speak horizontal move precedes a ‘vertical’ one, whereby the individual overcomes himself through his nation’s “national genius.” As already established, one national genius or “Angel” differs from another; Russians, for example, “need to be with the King, for him to rule over us.” Finally, every people, led by the Russians, will constitute the “existential City,” but many among those peoples will be excluded, inasmuch as “all those who do not philosophize at all or philosophize poorly are excluded from the projection called the existential City.” Thus, Dugin gives a vigorous nod to Plato’s ‘republic,’ after all. “Man can ‘be-with’ only with those who exist. He who exists intensively dwells fully in being-with only with those who exist as intensively. The philosopher lives alone, as though surrounded by animals, until he sees another philosopher; then Mit-Sein begins, then the politeia begins.” Millerman cites Dugin’s distinction between his own philosopher-kings and those of Socrates; in Plato’s Republic, the politeia follows ‘from above’; it is deduced from the Idea of justice. For Dugin, the existential City “is projected from below through Dasein’s authentic existence, whereby the Heideggerian leap or decision may find an affirmation from “being itself.” This affirmation is the Last God. “Man can create a political system; he is able to organize a cosmos; but by himself he will never be able to replace the Theopolis, Heavenly City, with himself and his constructs.” But “nothing guarantees the last god’s arrival,” unlike Plato’s politeia, which consists of an imitation of a noetically ‘seen’ Idea.
Millerman caution his readers not to jam Dugin into an ideological classification. He is neither liberal, leftist, nor fascistic. Nor is he a vulgar relativist, inasmuch as each people, with its own ‘gods,’ to be sure, nonetheless aims at truth or unconcealment. Millerman recommends “withhold[ing] judgment” on this point “until it has been better understood,” especially since Dugin himself “is exploratory, not dogmatic, on the issue of existential plurality” of nations. Zeteticism, after all, then?
Inceptual thinking eschews Platonism, returning in a sense to pre-Socratic thought but replacing the nature-philosophy of the pre-Socratics and the creationism of the Bible with the historical archē of Being. Yet the problem remains in crucial respects just as Socrates found it. The origin of Being not only provides no serious guide to political life, to the condition of reciprocal ruling and being ruled, but offers an extraordinarily vague and indeterminate beginning for rigorous thought of any kind. The refusal of Heidegger to anticipate where his ‘leap’ would land him suggests as much. And his followers have in fact leapt into all manner of things.
Note
- Almost predictably, when in spring 2022 the South Dakota Commission on Social Studies Standards included learning the Declaration as an important feature of the draft Standards, one of the first attempts to alter the Commission’s document was to excise the first sentences of initial sentences of the Declaration and to begin with “the consent of the governed.”
- Leo Strauss: “Existentialism.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1995.
- See also Leo Strauss: “The Problem of Socrates.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1995.
- Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss: “Correspondence Concerning Modernity.” Independent Journal of Philosophy. Volume IV, pp.105-115.
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