Abstract
In a recent exchange with Emmanuel Faye, 1 I quoted Heidegger’s letter to Karl Löwith from the early 1920s: ‘I work concretely and factically out of my “I am” – out of my intellectual and, in general, my factical origin – milieu – life context – out of that which is accessible to me from these as the living experience within which I live.’ 2 This I take to be the principal challenge of Heidegger: to philosophize as a situated undertaking, to respond to questions that arise from the pressing concerns of the world within which we live. Failing this, we risk lapsing into mere academicism, a real danger, because the questions are urgent. For Heidegger, the question of Being, as abstract as it may seem, is at bottom a question about how to respond to the given: the very situatedness of our existence. We are passing through a period in which what it means to be human is coming radically into question; it is unclear what will triumph: the universalism of the human rights tradition, the particularism of religion, nation, or ethnicity, or yet some other way of understanding who ‘we’ are.
My research has focused on how Heidegger’s interpretation of polemos (war, confrontation, conflict) in Heraclitus underlies the connection of Heidegger’s thinking to his politics.
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More on this later, but for now, here is the key fragment 53 from Heraclitus:
polemos pantôn men patêr esti, pantôn de basileus, kai tous men theous edeixe tous de anthrôpous, tous men doulous epoiêse tous de eleutherous.
Polemos is the father of all things, and the king of all, and it reveals some as gods, others as human beings; it makes some slaves, others free.
As abstract as this fragment may seem, it is worth underlining that Heidegger applied it concretely to the revolution of 1933. As some of his most troubling works from the Nazi period are now coming to light, we find passages such as the one in the Being and Truth lectures of 1933–4, where Heidegger proclaims that the polemos demands treatment of the enemy along the following lines:
The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it. The struggle is all the fiercer and harder and tougher, for the least of it consists in coming to blows with one another; it is often far more difficult and wearisome to catch sight of the enemy as such, to bring the enemy into the open, to harbor no illusions about the enemy, to keep oneself ready for attack, to cultivate and intensify a constant readiness and to prepare the attack, looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation.
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Although I have quoted and examined these lines elsewhere, 5 they bear repeating, because they are such a shocking prefiguration of the Nazi program of genocide, a prefiguration for whose realization Heidegger was therefore in part responsible: he was an educator declaring such things to lecture halls full of young students, many of whom must have gone on to serve in the German military and state apparatus. But Heidegger never took responsibility for pronouncements such as this, either out of cowardice – or worse, out of an enduring conviction. I now find it impossible to write about him any more in the style of the detached, academic article. Only the essay, in the full French sense of the word – an attempt, a trial, an experiment – makes sense to me now as the way to integrate conventional scholarly rigor with the kind of personal reflection that thinking about these questions and about this author demands.
At stake in the conference title ‘Heidegger and Politics’ is our politics as well, for if we have one thing to learn from Heidegger, it is that the ‘I am’ is never divorced from the ‘We are’: the human being is always already thrown into a world of meaning that is shared with others and granted momentum by a common history. So: at stake is our politics. But who is this ‘us’? At an academic conference on Heidegger, to take what is most obviously and closest at hand, it is all of us – students, scholars, educators – who have freely gathered in this ‘life-context’ to address the topic of ‘Heidegger and Politics’.
But the ‘us’ is more than just those of us gathered together for a conference. If Heidegger was, at least for a time – and that duration is part of what is so controversial – an ardent National Socialist, a Nazi, then not just ‘Heideggerians’ but the entire discipline, more or less, of academic philosophy takes an interest in the question of his politics, in part because of his importance and influence as a thinker, in part for the sheer sport of scandal. For some, that interest extends only so far as to point to Heidegger’s politics as a way of summarily dismissing the challenge of his thought, thereby denying him the very title of philosopher. This is certainly Faye’s position, and it is a point upon which he and I could not agree in our exchange of letters; for Faye, Heidegger represents a complete repudiation of ethics and rationality: ‘What I wanted to show, with the texts to back it up, was that the basis of Heidegger’s work is too deeply grounded in the racist and exterminatory project of National Socialism and Hitlerism to make up a philosophy properly so called.’ 6 At the opposite pole from Faye are those so defensive of Heidegger that they refuse to look the political question in the face and recognize it as part of what we are called to think about in Heidegger; they see all talk of Heidegger’s politics as bad faith, a way to dodge the radical challenge of his thought (which they claim is apolitical at its core) by resorting to the accidents of biography and the short cuts of a moralistic dismissiveness. I seek a middle path between these extremes. Despite his profound failings, Heidegger’s thought still presents us with challenges that we cannot evade, because they go to the heart of the crisis of modernity. Recognizing this does not mean we must agree with Heidegger, only respond to the questions that are not his alone.
Faye’s book has been criticized for its refusal to engage Heidegger philosophically, its tendentious readings of some of his texts, his prosecutorial tone and what seems uncomfortably like a recommendation for censorship. I myself made the latter accusation in my ‘Letter’ to him. In fairness to Faye, he strenuously denies the charge of censorship, and I must take him at his word. 7 When he says things such as, ‘Such a work [as Heidegger’s] cannot continue to be placed in the philosophy section of libraries; its place is rather in the historical archives of Nazism and Hitlerism’, 8 Faye is arguing not for censorship but for a fundamental change in how we catalog Heidegger: he wants Heidegger treated as a propagandist for a barbaric politics, not a thinker entitled to share company with the greats of philosophy. While I cannot go this far with Faye, and while I have disagreed with Faye about some of his readings of specific Heidegger texts, I must also insist that such disagreements do not detract from what Faye’s work does show: Heidegger’s enduring, calculated and devoted allegiance to National Socialism. Whatever its faults, Faye’s book makes it impossible for those of us who take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher to ignore his politics, if only because Faye forces us to make a public accounting.
So then what is the connection between the question of Being and politics? Speaking again from my own ‘I am’ at Boston College, a university named for an American city that helped found our republic, this is a question that not only ‘we’ philosophy professors and Heidegger scholars must take seriously. It is also a question that addresses ‘us’ as Americans, and not just because Heidegger (in 1934) says things like ‘America and Russia, seen metaphysically, are both the same’ and represent a nihilism that must be countered by ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism.
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It is because Heidegger’s interpretation of the grand sweep of the history of western philosophy as the history of nihilism culminating in modernist liberalism impugns the core of the American regime as founded in the notion of ‘inalienable rights’, individualism, contractarianism, mixed government and the rule of law. If we are to take seriously the theme of ‘Heidegger, Politics and Us’, then we must recognize that Heidegger’s condemnation of the kind of liberal democracy that the United States represents is complete and uncompromising, and we must ask if there is anything to learn from such a critique. The following passage, also from the Being and Truth lectures of 1933–4, sums up Heidegger’s condemnation: If we talk of the doctrine of ideas, then we are displacing the fundamental question [of truth] into the framework of ideas. If one interprets ideas as representations and thoughts that contain a value, a norm, a law, a rule, such that ideas then become conceived of as norms, then the one subject to these norms is the human being – not the historical human being, but rather the human being in general, the human being in itself, or humanity. Here, the conception of the human being is one of a rational being in general. In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, this conception achieves a definite form. Here all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root. Opposed to this conception are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings.
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This short passage offers perhaps the single most concentrated expression of Heidegger’s political thinking. The interpretation of the metaphysical basis of liberal politics is one that Heidegger never retracts and from which he never retreats. 11 Note the comprehensiveness of Heidegger’s view: as in Nietzsche’s conception of this history, to which Heidegger is deeply indebted, our nihilism originates with Plato’s ideas and culminates with the universalism of the liberal Enlightenment. This brings us to another point: at issue in the theme of ‘Heidegger and Politics’ is not only ‘we’ Americans but also any polity that in one way or another grounds itself in the egalitarianism and universalism of the Enlightenment tradition. This ‘we’ includes not just ‘the West’ but also much of the world that has embraced some version of the liberal-democratic project. It would be easy to dismiss Heidegger’s critique of liberalism (in his broad sense) as the poor judgment of an academic crank enamored of an extremist politics, except that his critique forms part of a long tradition of hostility to the liberal Enlightenment that has ongoing and perhaps increasing resonance. Furthermore, our republic and liberal-democratic regimes across the globe are facing a grave crisis today, not just in their economic foundations, but also in their very identity as rights-based regimes able to hold together a social contract between all sectors of the populace. 12 In this crisis Heidegger’s challenge may be all the more unavoidable, if only because it may provoke us to think through whom it is that we are and what it is that we face.
So let us delve deeper into that passage from Being and Truth. The context is a discussion of the meaning of truth, which, as usual, Heidegger wants to understand as alêtheia, or unconcealment, rather than the correct representation of the world according to some metaphysical standard. Truth, for Heidegger, is the way that the world is meaningful for us as the human beings who inhabit it and act within that domain of meaning; the ‘truth’ as correct propositions is always at best a derivative of this deeper truth as unconcealment. When Heidegger speaks of Plato’s doctrine of ideas, and calls it a ‘displacing’ of the question of truth, he means this as the most piercing criticism of a pivotal moment in western thought and history. At this point, in Plato, philosophy takes its decisive turn into metaphysics, which attempts to secure the truth by positing a standard by which the truth may be anchored as a final representation of the world; hence the ‘doctrine’ of the ideas, as Heidegger calls it, a dogma to secure the truth according to a metaphysical touchstone: the ideas, Plato’s most brilliant and most catastrophic discovery. For Heidegger, that universalistic dogma has in the modern era reached its nihilistic apotheosis, reigning globally in an age dominated by technology and the forgetting of Being.
The catastrophe lies in the will to secure reality in accord with an idea as ‘a value, a norm, a law, a rule’. This is because the ideas then become the universal and permanent measure for our representation not only of the physical world (through the mathematical-scientific construal of the natural world), but also for the world of human action and community. In other words, the ideas demand that we understand ethics and politics according to norms, or metaphysical standards, and ‘then the one subject to these norms is the human being – not the historical human being, but rather the human being in general, the human being in itself, or humanity’. For Heidegger, this is the decisive point: Platonic metaphysics displaces the actual, situated, ‘historical human being’, and replaces it with a washed-out, abstract substitute. By naming this substitute ‘the human being in general, the human being in itself, or humanity’, Heidegger indicates that the idea of the human being uproots us from historical, situated, actually existing people and makes the standard the abstract person, the person denuded of particular attachments and qualities so as to be made the most accommodating subject for universal norms that supposedly apply to all human beings, wherever and whenever they may be found, as the ‘rational being in general’. When Heidegger goes on to say that ‘In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, this conception achieves a definite form’, he echoes Nietzsche’s damning judgment that modern, rights-based egalitarianism is simply the most advanced, and therefore the most depraved, version of a nihilistic universalism that reaches all the way back to Plato, refracted through monotheistic theology in Judaism and Christianity, and secularized and democratized by the Enlightenment. ‘Here all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root’, proclaims Rector Heidegger to his students, his fellow Germans, the ‘we’ that alone made sense to him for politics. He says this in a lecture course dedicated to making sense of the Nationalist Socialist revolution in the context of the full arc of the crisis of western history. This, then, is Heidegger’s declaration of war, one that he never rescinded, against a modern liberalism rooted as deeply in western history as Plato.
‘Opposed to this conception’ – that is, Plato’s conception of the abstract human being as subject to eternal, universal norms that apply to all people in all times and all places – ‘are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings’. This is Heidegger’s battle cry: Finitude, temporality, historicity! (Admittedly, a bit scholastic compared with, say, ‘Liberté, egalité, fraternité!’) Instead of the human being as the reflection of an idea infinite in its application, we have the human being as defined by finitude, the recognition that we find ourselves always in a bounded world of meaning, one that is often incommensurable (to borrow Rorty’s term) with the worlds of other human communities. Instead of an eternal, transcendent idea serving as the norm for human ethics and politics, we have the temporality of human beings as given over to an existence defined by time as anything but eternal. Instead of universal norms applying to all peoples at all times, we have the historicity of human beings as always embedded in a historical tradition that provides them with the horizons of a meaningful but intensely particular world.
While there are other critiques of the foundations of ‘our’ liberal democratic politics, surely none is more sweeping and uncompromising than this. Heidegger’s declaration of war against liberalism champions a rooted belonging to a particular historical community over and against the impulse to transcend particular communities in favor of universal norms. That declaration entirely rejects the principles of the ‘Rights of Man’ or the Declaration of Independence, which holds that ‘all men’ are created equal and endowed with fundamental rights, and we must recognize this as a thoroughgoing repudiation of what we now call human rights. It is all the more to the point that liberal democracies have critiqued their own faulty traditions in light of the transcendent idea, only in order to reconstruct phrases such as ‘all men are created equal’ as even more abstract and universal, so as to include all persons, no matter what gender or race, in the discourse of human rights. For Heidegger, such ‘progress’ would illustrate all too well the power of the Idea and idealism as the dominant force in the West, a power that he holds must be resisted as the final degeneration of nihilism.
While I would argue that this rejection of liberal universalism in favor of radical particularism prepares the ground for Heidegger’s embrace of the National Socialist version of fascism, I cannot agree with Faye that this fact alone means that the entirety of Heidegger’s thought is simply irrational and deserves to be damned as an anti-philosophical incitement to barbarism. While disagreeing with Heidegger’s radical historicism and particularism, as well as his repudiation of what he takes to be Platonism, I do not think that the rejection of Platonism or universalism is so easy to dismiss as irrational, crazy, or evil. Granted this rejection can lead to a truly terrible politics, as it did with Heidegger; nevertheless, we cannot oppose this politics and the thinking that underlies it by simply dismissing the thought as vile, irrational, or insane. His thought, as idiosyncratic as it may be, makes an argument, one whose pedigree is far deeper than Heidegger alone, and we must meet that argument on the field of philosophy.
For this reason, I find troubling the unwillingness of many Heidegger scholars to take seriously just how profound an assault on our understanding of ethics and politics his thinking constitutes. To be fair, there is an extraordinary range of thinkers in the English-speaking world whose work has been inspired by Heidegger over the last 60 years, and due respect is owed to those who have drawn a thread from the whole to follow their own questions. 13 But given the publication in recent years of Heidegger’s most telling political texts, and given how deeply connected his political thinking is to his entire orientation in rejecting western metaphysics as the matrix of liberal universalism, it strikes me as impossible to continue as if that connection were not there. This does not mean that we cannot address Heidegger’s questions, for, as I have insisted in my letter to Faye, he does not own those; but if we do not recognize that the destruction of Platonism at least carries the risk of Heidegger’s politics, if we do not take seriously the threat to liberal universalism (in the broadest sense of ‘liberal’), we will find that when the day comes that ‘our’ politics comes radically into question in the midst of overwhelming historical forces, there will be little left to defend of the liberal-democratic vision of political life, for we will have contributed to eroding it without providing a decent alternative.
Since so much turns on the identification of Plato and Platonism as the inception of the West’s nihilism, it is worth saying more on this subject. As I have argued elsewhere,
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Heidegger’s insistence on treating Plato’s theory of the ideas as a doctrine is one place to start. If we take seriously the question of Being as a question that Heidegger does not own, having roots reaching back to Plato and beyond him to the Presocratics, we should also see that Plato’s notion of the ideas or the forms presents a response to that question; Heidegger himself knew this, but his treatment of Plato’s response is distorted by his treating it as a doctrinaire one. At issue is meaning: how is it possible that the world is meaningful to us; how are we able to engage the world in thought and perception, to make plans and to take action within it? For all this to happen, for meaning both in thought and in action to be possible, there must be some stability to the world, for otherwise our understanding would be overwhelmed by the world experienced as sheer, undifferentiated chaos – William James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’.
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Heidegger also grasps that our experience needs some organizing principle, or it will collapse into meaninglessness:
But let us once seriously attempt to exist while giving up our understanding of animality, spatiality, thingness and so on – would animals, space, things, or indeed any being whatsoever still be given to us? No. Perhaps some hazy rush of some unbearable confusion – which could only be endured in madness.
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Plato begins with what is already given phenomenologically: that there is meaning, that the world is not mere chaos to us, and he tries to account for how that givenness of meaning is possible. His answer is the ideas, or the forms, but Plato nowhere calls the ideas a theory, much less a doctrine. As I have argued (and I am not the first to do so), 17 Plato always presents the ideas as a postulate, a hypothesis, an attempt to account for how this givenness of meaning might be possible. If there were no Being to Becoming, if, as Heraclitus suggests, everything were constantly changing and formless without any stability and bounded form to individuated beings, then there could be no meaningful experience. The forms or ideas serve as a hypothesis to explain how it might be possible that actual beings, which are in fact undergoing constant change, can nevertheless be seen as this and that – and this rather than that – for otherwise experience would be unintelligible. As Socrates says to Glaucon in the Republic when describing how the dialectic attains the ideas: ‘Whether it is really so or not can no longer be properly insisted on. But that there is some such thing to see must be insisted on.’ 18
When I argue, in ‘Back to the Cave’, that Plato distinguishes between ‘zetetic’ and ‘echonic’ philosophers, and that he identifies Socrates and himself with the former, I mean that Plato upholds a model of philosophizing as seeking (zetein) rather than possessing (echein) the truth. For Plato, the ideas are a zetetic hypothesis, postulated in order to resist nihilism and to account for the possibility of a meaningful understanding of the world, which is indeed already there as a given. As the very existence of a dialogue such as the Parmenides makes manifest, the ideas are not a doctrine, a final answer intended to put an end to philosophical activity. Heidegger himself, of course, would never want to deny that beings perdure, that even if beings are temporal in their coming and going, they nevertheless while away for a time in presence and thereby are intelligible to us in a transitory constancy. Heidegger, too, must account for the stability, however fleeting, of beings, but he cannot make Plato’s move of ascribing this intelligibility to the trans-temporal ideas.
This is why Heidegger turns to the polemos of Heraclitus: as an alternative to the ideas in making sense of the manifest meaningfulness of beings and the world. For Heidegger, polemos (most literally ‘war’) is a name for Being as Becoming. Like the ‘idea’ (in Greek, ‘what has been seen’, an eidos, a form by which we can make sense of something), it is a metaphor for how intelligibility is possible, but in the case of the polemos, it is conflict as part of the temporal flux of Becoming that forces beings to distinguish themselves, to take up opposing ‘fronts’ in con-frontation and to stand out, apart and against one another as separate, determinate things (hence his preferred rendering of the Greek polemos with the frequently hyphenated German Aus-einander-setzung). This allows Heidegger to make sense of temporal meaning without postulating a world of eternal, changeless truths that transcend the lived world as given in its finitude. In the polemos, meaning comes and goes, but it stays for a while, and worlds take shape and decay around this whiling away. The polemos accounts both for the meaning of individual beings, and ialso for the differentiation of historical communities, each of which inhabits differing and often incommensurable worlds of meaning, potentially as enemies. Such communities are radically situated in their own historical traditions, for there is no longer a transcendent, universal realm of meaning to appeal to in order to resolve their differences. We belong most properly not to the universal in us (which, for Heidegger, has always been a distortion at best) but to the rooted particular. To reject the universalism of ideas that transcend our particularity, then, is not to embrace irrationalism but rather to embrace the logos in Heidegger’s sense, the collected belonging-together of the finite, mortal, historical community.
But I want to urge the point that Plato does not ignore or denigrate the finite and the transitory; instead, he seeks to reconcile these with what transcends them. This is the whole problem of the participation of the particulars in the forms, or how the trans-temporal ideas connect to the temporal reality of our experience. Elsewhere, 19 I have called this Plato’s defense of situated transcendence, and while I cannot give it a full treatment here, I can sketch out what is at stake. First of all, it must be underlined that this is indeed a problem in Plato, and Plato himself recognizes it as such; hence the existence of the Parmenides. How can the immanent world of Becoming, flux and change relate to a transcendent one of Being, constancy and the eternal? If there are such things as universal ideas, and if they can provide us with standards for ethical and political life, how do we reach them and apply them, given that the world of our immediate experience is anything but transcendent?
Another way to express the problem is to ask, how do we in fact encounter the universal as phenomenologically given? What is the phenomenal evidence that we transcend the finite? How does the meaning of lived experience ever depend on something like what Plato’s ideas attempt to provide? If life as it is lived does not demand the Platonic ideas, as Heidegger would have it, then the ideas and the whole realm of universal standards, the foundation of what ‘we’ now call human rights, may well be a falsification of human experience and an alien imposition upon it. We can turn to Plato himself for an answer. For all of his talk of facticity, of Being in the world, of the finitude of being human, Heidegger seems remarkably incapable of addressing the concreteness and specificity of life. His discourse is abstract to an overwhelming degree; his examples have little of the texture of a truly situated existence. Heidegger misses how beautifully rich a portrait Plato often draws of the concrete (shall we say factical?) contexts within which ethical and political concerns arise. Consider Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic, two rich and well-born youths, on the cusp of adult political lives, who find the scandalous teachings of Thrasymachus compelling but who are not yet entirely convinced that a life of injustice and tyranny would truly be best for them. Or consider Euthyphro in the dialogue of that name, pressed to make sense of the nature of piety at precisely the moment when Socrates is on trial for his life on charges of impiety.
What such examples show is that an ethical crisis, or any crisis of the understanding, can force us to confront our given beliefs to reconstitute them anew. In Plato’s narratives, we find the characters challenged to transcend themselves in order to bring about this resolution; sometimes they fail (Euthyphro), sometimes they succeed, at least to an extent (Glaucon). Plato’s Socrates frequently attempts to bring about this transformation by making the interlocutors aware of an idea that displaces them from their original views. As readers of the dialogues, we are aware that this move does not always work, but what I think it shows is that in the midst of an ethical crisis, we are driven to seek guidance from ideas that cut through the distortions of our particularism. This is not to say we therefore achieve a disembodied, universal perspective, but only that by positing the possibility of it (as a hypothesis) do we pull ourselves out of our prejudices far enough to reflect upon and amend them in the light of an ideal as best we can make it out. Furthermore, as a zetetic philosophy, this is an ongoing, dialogical and dialectical process, open-ended and subject to revision through both individual reflection and human conversation, in everything from friendship to politics; it is not a claim to possess the final key to the interpretation of all reality.
I alluded to a modern example of this above. Consider the claim of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’: how are we to understand this principle if at the time of the founding of the United States, millions lived in bondage as slaves and women had few civil rights, even if nominally free? Was the social contract of 1776 no more than a tricked-out ‘racial contract’, as Charles Mills has argued, designed to establish the power of property-owning white men? 20 But even if the founders had no intention of proclaiming a principle of universal equality, we today criticize that document and that understanding precisely in the light of the idea of genuine equality which the Declaration in 1776 only imperfectly announced, an idea that is still visible through and despite the imperfections of the wording of that document and the personal failings of its framers. Americans have guided their political reforms in the realm of civil rights precisely by the light of that idea, however imperfectly realized or understood, even (or sometimes especially) by those in the founding generation, who were conduits for this idea and who were unable to realize its full implications in their political and personal lives. By contrast, consider the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who wrote in a wonderfully Platonic mood that ‘Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the capacity and passion for pictures.… Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.’ 21 Douglass argued that the meaning of the American founding must transcend what some or even most of the founders themselves understood by it, and that this philosophical meaning must overthrow both slavery and the subordination of women; he could argue this way because he could appeal to the idea of equality and human rights latent in the founding itself. To seek justice, to be a reformer, is to reflect on an idea as a picture (a what-has-been-seen, an eidos, in the projective power of the mind) of what may and should be, and to attempt to reconstruct the present in the light of that idea. The moral ‘ought’ is not a nihilistic falsification or a hatred of life as it is given, as Nietzsche would have it; the envisioning made possible by the ideas is the only way to remain true to the ethical phenomena of human life.
My point is that the most compelling moral phenomena are unintelligible without something like the idea of the idea. The idea draws us out past the bounds of our givenness – our situated prejudices and beliefs. We do not need to know the idea absolutely or treat it as the object of doctrine for it to serve this role. Indeed, the zetetic reading of Plato suggests that claiming to possess a doctrine of the ideas, like a philosopher-king, would distort the phenomenon of the human struggle between opinion and wisdom, for the latter cannot escape the fact, and the facticity, of human finitude. This is why Platonic zeteticism may serve as a foundation for liberal democracy: because it asserts that human finitude prevents us from full possession of the truth, while still granting intimations of it, zeteticism leaves room for both individual autonomy and communal pluralism in the civic life of seeking the truth in politics, in art, in religion, in science, and in philosophy. 22
Now, Heidegger might reply that we cannot resolve any crisis in understanding, ethical or otherwise, by reference to transcendent ideas. 23 Rather, such crises force us to confront an abyss: all our beliefs, including our ethical views, are grounded on precisely nothing. We are thrown into them, as a field of meaning, by the accident (and the gift) of our particular existence. All we can do is be thankful and come to terms with the radical contingency of our personal and communal destinies as granted by our belonging to a particular historical world. Because there is no transcendent realm to which we may appeal in order to resolve our most pressing moral and political conflicts, all that remains is the crucible of the polemos to decide them, because there is no idea by which we might otherwise resolve opposing views. To borrow from Richard Rorty, deeply opposed ways of making sense of the world are therefore utterly incommensurable, amenable to rhetorical manipulation or outright violence, but not to reason, because there is simply nothing there to serve as a metaphysical foundation for their reconciliation. Such a conception comes perilously close to leaving us with the most extreme version of enmity where the enemy simply inhabits a world of meaning too alien from one’s own and therefore is beyond all possibility of genuine dialogue and reconciliation.
Perhaps phenomenology itself is the problem if we allow it to be just an aesthetic observing or how things show themselves, because then we neglect the need to act. What are the conditions of the possibility of our acting in an intelligible way with others that respects their status as persons? I would say that these conditions are the ideas – as posits, as regulative ideas for the possibility of rational discourse and transcending of our own opinions and prejudices. However imperfectly embodied they may be (and zetetic Platonism argues that they are necessarily so), we need norms, such as justice, and the idea of justice itself, because without them, the phenomenon of ethical conversation, conviction and reconciliation on the basis of argument would not be possible. Ethical action would not be possible. All we would have left would be Machiavelli’s lion and fox: force and fraud in the service of the given. But this cynicism falsifies the phenomena themselves, the experience that the ethical is an essential feature of the human experience.
One scholar, who was in a position to know, expressed his judgment of Heidegger in the following, sardonic way:
To me it is now clear after many years what is actually wrong in Heidegger: a phenomenal intellect inside a kitsch-soul; I can prove this. As I read a statement by him from the year 1934 about himself as a Black Forest peasant, I found the wish rising in me – in me! – to be or to become an intellectual.
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Heidegger wants to think the entirely contingent and the radically temporal, so he despises the abstraction of Platonic universalism and eternal forms. Nevertheless, he is constitutionally unable to think the concrete in its specificity. Instead, Heidegger does something utterly strange: he produces an abstract phenomenology of the particular. Just try reading his poetry. He is simply incapable of focusing in on an individual person, specific event, or concrete experience as this person, this event, this thing; when he tries to do so, he careens off into abstraction. When he reads a Platonic dialogue, all the nuance of character and context drops out of his analysis; indeed, the whole matter at hand as embodied by the questions that arise from the human beings and the narrative context, and not just as a bloodless, philosophical abstraction – all of this is invisible to Heidegger. Likewise, when he discusses the peasant in his supposed rootedness to the majestic singularity of the contingent, he comes up with nothing but banalities.
Kitsch is the universal masquerading as the particular. Kitsch is the pose of loving the particular while actually substituting a cliché (itself a mockery of the Platonic idea) for what is truly concrete and singular, what genuinely challenges us to re-examine our prejudices and to reconstruct how we understand both the world as it is given and the ideas by which we guide our actions within it. The blindness of his abstraction, his inability to reconcile the universal and the particular in an ever-unfolding dialectic (as Platonic zeteticism does), made Heidegger a ready and willing victim for the ultimate horror in political kitsch: National Socialism. Blindness to the interplay between the sublime ideal and the messy real results in the complete atrophy of practical wisdom. Kitsch put into action is wildly imprudent, not merely obscenely vulgar. We can do better, and we must.
Platonic zeteticism serves as a counterweight to kitsch made political. It combines an audacious idealism (namely, positing the possibility of a knowledge that transcends our inherited prejudices) with the moderating recognition of our finitude. It is the marriage of hubris with phronêsis, the wild ambition of philosophy with the practical wisdom of everyday life. The pursuit of knowledge must be tempered by the realization that for human beings, it will always be just that: a pursuit. It begins with the situated belonging of our questions and concerns and displaces them by pushing us beyond the preconceptions that inform them, while always requiring that we return to the world of our everyday opinions to reconstruct our assumptions in the light of a new understanding. That is the idealist polemical dialectic. It is polemical in that it requires a confrontation with the given beliefs, especially the moral and political opinions by which we understand our world, when we find ourselves in the throes of an ethical quandary. Given our finitude, given the radical incompleteness of our understanding, such conflicts are inevitable for us, provided that we are authentically open to the phenomena of ethical life.
Heidegger’s polemos denies the very possibility of transcendence. This risks condemning ethical and political conflict to the profound autism of incommensurable understandings and absolute enmity. By contrast, polemical idealism remains true to the facticity of ethical phenomena by following through with the intuition that with determination and a willingness for self-criticism, ethical questions can at least in principle be addressed, even across great divides of understanding, and that we can attempt to work our way to resolutions in the light of ideas for which we can argue and by which we can readjust our own opinions. This is only a sketch of what a polemology of idealist dialectics would look like. Still, I would venture to say that Plato already provides a rich portrait of how it looks in action when, for example, Socrates leads Glaucon and the other young men away from Thrasymachus and the allure of tyranny by the light of the idea of justice. We see it in the life-work of great reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, who engaged in transformative confrontations with their own traditions by the light of ideals they drew from those very traditions. 25 Far from being the nihilistic falsification of life that Nietzsche or Heidegger would accuse it of being, Platonic idealism, as polemical, as zetetic, is the only way to take active responsibility for the ethical phenomena of life.