Martin Heidegger’s politics have become a minor academic obsession. This preoccupation is understandable. After all, how could one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century have for some time enthusiastically backed the Nazi Party? Answers have often polarized into two camps: those seeking to disentangle Heidegger’s thought from fascism (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Lawrence Hatab) and those viewing that task as impossible (e.g., Richard Wolin, Georg Lukács). The controversy has been further complicated by the undoubted obscurity of Heidegger’s writings on this topic.
Into this arena of heated debate and confusion steps Alexander Duff with one of the best book-length treatments of Heidegger’s politics published to date. Duff combines careful scholarship with admirable clarity, engaging Heidegger’s key concepts without succumbing to overreliance on jargon (rarer than one might hope in Heidegger scholarship). Although he focuses heavily on Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time, Duff also dexterously draws from across his published works and lectures.
Yet Duff’s greatest strength is an interpretation of Heidegger that identifies a form of political thought that is not completely reducible to a single ideological position. Indeed, Duff opens with an illuminating discussion of how Heidegger has inspired otherwise ideologically incompatible political actors—from Iranian revolutionaries and radical Greens to Cold War dissidents and contemporary fascists (pp. 7–10). This is philosophically possible, according to the author, because Heidegger’s politics are chiefly dispositional (a point I will return to) and thus highly malleable when it comes to content. In this way, Duff’s interpretation of Heidegger captures what so many on both sides of the debate miss: namely, the considerable ideological pluralism that is possible within his framework of thought.
This is not to say that Duff’s Heidegger is completely relativistic or bereft of political commitments. To the contrary, the author argues that Heidegger’s philosophy justifies two basic and ostensibly opposing sensibilities: radical revolution and quietest discontent (pp. 17, 186–93). This argument is carefully constructed over the course of six chapters.
The first chapter begins by unpacking Heidegger’s rejection of traditional ethics as a form of theory building. Duff helpfully situates Heidegger in various neo-Kantian debates of the time. But the larger upshot of his discussion for politics centers on Heidegger’s extreme philosophical radicalism—his rejection of the use of theoretical categories and divisions typical of the history of philosophy. He sees Heidegger as profoundly hostile to theory. This hostility to theory will undergird his politics.
The second chapter introduces Heidegger’s appropriation of Karl Jasper’s notion of “limit situations” (especially death) as crucial for revealing the question of Being (pp. 44–52). If Heidegger is a philosophical radical—rejecting the entire tradition of thought that came before him—he is also a thinker who places a central importance on discontent, anxiety, and facing one’s mortality. Dissatisfaction and “radical discontent” are central to authentic thinking in a way that not only colors Heidegger’s political sensibility but also subsequently appeals to outsider movements “thinking at the margins of the Western project” (p. 10).
The next two chapters develop Heidegger’s deep unease with quotidian human culture and politics through an analysis of his famous concept of “everydayness.” Duff rightly argues that for Heidegger, the “everyday” is both an obstacle and the necessary starting point of authentic thinking about being (both “occlusive” and “disclosive” in Heideggerian language). Everydayness is the inescapable existential tendency of human beings to favor the “stable, visible, reliable, publically discerned aspects” of reality in such a way that covers over the true finite and ephemeral nature of Being (p. 71). Limit situations like distress, discontent, and especially anxiety about death disrupt this human tendency to dwell in a false eternity of present customs, ways of thinking, talking, and associating that happen to characterize their historical world.
Heidegger’s way of breaking out of the dominance of everyday modes is individual and communal apprehension of Being and its dialectic with “the nothing” (pp. 141–42). Only then can humans resolutely and authentically grasp their existential conditions. The last two chapters argue that Heidegger’s philosophy is inherently political insofar as the release from the everyday is a communal task requiring a radical philosophical skepticism and rejection of common ideas of polity and time among both ancients and moderns, the Left and the Right (pp. 177–82).
Duff concludes Heidegger and Politics by restating his initial thesis in light of his prior analysis. What emerges is a view of Heidegger’s politics as two stances both equally discontented with any stable, everyday political order. They are both politics of “radical suspicion” (p. 186). Heideggerian politics either generates a radically revolutionary mode of “perpetual . . . rejection of the tranquility, stability, and sham permanence of the settling-in everyday” or else leads to a “quietist awaiting” that views regimes as different as Soviet communism and liberal democracy as equally fallen away from proper existential awareness (pp. 190, 192). The former was presumably the path of the young National Socialist Heidegger, the latter of the reticent philosophical eminence discontentedly biding his time in Cold War Europe.
What both of these seemingly contradictory stances share is a radical rejection of all the ideas, concepts, thoughts, and traditions of prior philosophy and its metaphysics of presence. Rights, social contracts, virtue, justice, humanism, conservative traditionalism, libertarian markets, socialism—all the major ideas and concepts of past political thought are viewed as hopelessly implicated in the mistakes of theoretical thinking. Quietism and radical revolution are the consequence of Heidegger’s philosophical radicalism, centered on discontent and anxiety. Thus, central to Duff’s case for Heidegger’s politics is his view that his philosophical radicalism entails the disavowal of everyday theoretical concepts.
This leaves Duff’s Heidegger in a deeply strange spot. For it means his politics becomes utopian in the strictest etymological sense of the term—either demanding a kind of permanent revolution that is hard to see translated into any kind of real-world politics or vanishing into private quietism regardless of regime type.
It is here that certain questions emerge for Duff’s admirable study. First and foremost: Does Heidegger’s critique of theory really entail the rejection of theoretical concepts? After all, Heidegger is not typically read as rejecting absolutely all the fruits of theoretical reflection—scientific, technological, or otherwise. Instead, he is frequently read as demanding a thinking that grounds everyday concepts beyond the categories of theory. If Heidegger’s principle animus toward theory involves the problem of grounding, then it is not so clear that a Heideggerian might not appropriate later theoretical concepts from science, politics, ethics, religion, and other arenas, albeit now properly grounded in ontology. The debate would then shift to what form these theoretical concepts might retain after deep ontological reflection.
This at least opens the possibility that Heidegger’s philosophical radicalism does not entail such a narrowing of politics. Specifically, I wonder if the very political pluralism that Duff so lucidly sees as possible in Heidegger’s thought has been sufficiently radicalized. Duff frequently wrestles with how existentially abstract Heidegger’s basic concepts are (pp. 167–70). This points to the possibility that his entire philosophical framework is so abstract that it can legitimately house possibilities beyond quietism and revolution. I believe that this is because Heidegger’s thought is, in important respects, relativistic or at least prepolitical. Regardless, any such future case ought to grapple with Duff’s impressive work.
