"Politics and Ontological Difference in Heidegger"

by de Sá, Alexandre Franco (2014)

Abstract

This is the first English translation of the seminar Martin Heidegger gave during the Winter of 1934-35, which dealt with Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This remarkable text is the only one in which Heidegger interprets Hegel's masterpiece in the tradition of Continental political philosophy while offering a glimpse into Heidegger's own political thought following his engagement with Nazism. It also confronts the ideas of Carl Schmitt, allowing readers to reconstruct the relation between politics and ontology. The book is enriched by a collection of interpretations of the seminar, written by select European and North American political thinkers and philosophers. Their essays aim to make the seminar accessible to students of political theory and philosophy, as well as to open new directions for debating the relation between the two disciplines. A unique contribution, this volume makes available key lectures by Heidegger that will interest a wide readership of students and scholars.

Key Passage

During the 1930s, Jünger talked about a new relationship between human beings and the world, and, in this context, about a new meaning of work. For Jünger, the consequences of the First World War had shown that a new and posthumanist world was emerging. Liberal and Marxist thought understood human being as the fundamental value and the center of all human activities. According to them, work implies a transformation of the world in order to place it at the behest of humans, rendering it more and more comfortable and livable. However, for Jünger, the tragedy of the World War had shown that the essence of the world’s transformation through work did not put it at the service of human freedom and security. Far from having human being as its goal, Jünger argued, work consisted essentially in the unstoppable development of an automatic process of dominating the world. In this process, humanity increased its power only by placing itself at the service of the world’s mobilization through work. By doing so, the human became the “worker.” Th e worker, therefore, is not an individual anymore, but the singular actualization of the form of the worker ( Gestalt des Arbeiters ). In a world more and more determined by the “total character of the work” ( totaler Arbeitscharakter ), humans become workers in their essence, that is to say, they become the expression of the world’s increasing domination through work.
Jünger baptizes the increasing domination of the world through work, the world’s “total mobilization”, with the term coined by Nietzsche: the “will to power.” Th e Nietzschean “will to power” is not the human will, but an automatic and endless will for increasing power. Work, in its turn, is the expression of this “will to power,” an elemental force that does not belong to humans, but rather appropriates and mobilizes them. Human freedom resides not in extricating ourselves from “total mobilization” but in belonging to the elemental force that constitutes our essence as workers and in taking part in it. Th e more a human being becomes “the worker,” the more he or she becomes free and empowered. It is precisely our belonging to the form of the worker that interests Heidegger most. For Heidegger, too, the human is no longer a substance, which could be considered either as an individual or as a collective subject, but a relationship, a belonging to a mobilizing process that appropriates us. In his adhesion to National Socialism, Heidegger clearly tries to interpret the Nazi movement from the standpoint of Jünger’s notion of the work, which also entails an explicit refusal of ethnocentric politics and biologist racism. In 1933, the references to Jünger’s conception of the worker are constant in Heidegger’s texts. In his rectorship address of May 1933 titled “Th e Self-Assertion of the German University,” alluding to Plato’s Republic without mentioning it, Heidegger exhorts the students to lend themselves to three essential services: the labor service, the military service, and the knowledge service. Th ese services exhort those who join them to assume the impotent and fi nite essence of Dasein, as well as its belonging and exposure to the “superpower” of Being. In his address as a rector, Heidegger speaks about the service (especially, at the university—the knowledge service) as an appeal to the students to assume their fi nitude and deliver themselves to a belonging: their belonging to the superpower of science. Science should mean for students the mobilizing elemental force, to which they should deliver themselves, assuming, as Jünger’s workers, their belonging to the superpower of Being. Aft er his inaugural address, Heidegger gave another speech before a student audience in Freiburg under the title “Th e German Student as Worker.” In it, Heidegger insisted on the idea that work did not mean the exposure of the world to human domination, regardless of the consideration of human being as an individual or a collective substance, but the belonging of humans, as a fi nite essence, to a world, a will, and a mobilizing process that comes over them as a “superpower.” As Heidegger put it: “Man places himself, as worker, before the whole of Being. [. . .] Work displaces the people and articulates it with the fi eld of action of all the powers of Being. Th e articulation that appears in work and as the work of ethnic existence [ völkisches Dasein ] is the state. Th e National Socialist state is the state of work.” 11 It is mostly in his seminars on Jünger’s Th e Worker that Heidegger explicitly rejected ethnocentric thought as a way of thinking that proceeds from liberal individualism, i.e. a way of thinking that is based on subjectivity and that places the world before the “subject” as an object to be dominated. “Human being,” Heidegger states, “is not less of a subject, but becomes it more essentially when it is conceived as a nation, a people, a race, as a self- established humanity. Particularly, we should note that racial thinking becomes also and especially possible on the basis of subjectivity.” 12 “Th e subject,” Heidegger adds, “can also be a people, a ‘nation’ that establishes its own vital interests and its ‘patterns’ [. . .] Th e subject can also be the humankind of the whole planet, a new race. Race: a purely subjective concept.” 13 Based on Jünger, Heidegger unequivocally rejects ethnic- and race- centered thought. He appropriates Jünger’s description of the human as worker precisely in order to reject the nationalist establishment of the people as the center of beings, or the racist establishment of the race as the highest value. It is by doing so that he characterizes the nationalist and racist worldview as the extreme possibilities of the modern metaphysics of the subject and, therefore, of liberalism. Nevertheless, if Heidegger takes Jünger as the basis for the development of his political thought, in the search for an alternative politics that would not rely on the liberal social contract and on the ethnic- and race- centered society, this does not mean that he does not depart from Jünger and starts to see his concept of the worker in a more distant and critical way. Jünger’s thought largely depends on Nietzsche. And one might say that, according to Heidegger, Jünger should be placed side- by-side with Nietzsche, occupying the same metaphysical position. Nietzsche symbolizes the reversal of Platonism, inverting its dualism while remaining committed to the dualist structure of metaphysics. According to Heidegger, Jünger, in line with Nietzsche, rejects both liberal individualism and nationalist and racist collectivism, but remains bound to their common essence (the metaphysics of subjectivity) insofar as he puts the worker in the place of a sovereign subject as the mobilizing force of the totality of beings. By doing so, Jünger still dwells in the dualist metaphysical scheme of subordinating the totality of beings to an absolute sovereign being whose mobilizing power occupies the place left empty by Being. (p.57)

Links to Reference

• https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=u_20mwEACAAJ
• https://books.google.com.au/books?id=u_20mwEACAAJ&dq=on+hegel's+philosophy+of+right&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjR0M2kg8vuAhUzguYKHYgzDOkQ6wEwAnoECAIQAQ
• https://books.google.com.au › bookshttps://books.google.com.au › books

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