University of California Santa Cruz Heidegger
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ HEIDEGGER: ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS TO TECHNOLOGICAL POLITICS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in PHILOSOPHY by Javier Cardoza-Kon June 2014 The dissertation of Javier Cardoza-Kon is approved: ____________________________________ Professor David C. Hoy, chair ____________________________________ Professor Abraham Stone ____________________________________ Carlos A. Sanchez, Ph.D. _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Javier Cardoza-Kon 2014 Table of Contents Abstract. iv Dedication. v Introduction. 1 Chapter 1: Cultural Identity and Two Politics. 14 Chapter 2: Polemos, Auseinandersetzung, and Unconcealment. 50 Chapter 3: Auseiandersetzung, Nietzsche, and the Politics of Nihilism. 77 Chapter 4: Technology and We Late-Moderns. 113 Conclusion: Heidegger’s in the Contemporary World. 160 Bibliography and Abbreviations of Cited Material 173 iii Abstract Heidegger: Ontological Politics to Technological Politics. By Javier Cardoza-Kon As Heidegger himself has done with Nietzsche in claiming that he will articulate what Nietzsche meant but never said metaphysically, I also do with Heidegger in terms of politics. On my reading there are two kinds of politics in Heidegger’s middle and late thought that are, for the most part, murky and confused. There is a politics of ontology the deals with the encountering and articulating of what beings are and what Being itself is. There is also a politics on the more familiar level of societies and the policies that different groups establish and follow. It is in terms of the second type of politics that Heidegger is most often attacked, and for good reason. My dissertation will motivate an understanding of Dasein and Heidegger’s thought beyond Dasein in terms of these two types of politics. This will serve to bring Heidegger’s “turning” and eventual ruminations on technology into focus. I examine what it was in the confused and unarticulated relation between the two types of politics that not only allowed for his foray into Nazism, but also informed his Machiavellian views on technology. I conclude with an examination of contemporary issues in politics by putting Heidegger into a dialogue with Gianni Vattimo concerning the issues of violence, liberty, and the proliferation of 3-D printed firearms in the U.S. iv Dedication. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Xenia Gilg, David Hoy, Carlos Sanchez, and my mother Linda for believing in me and helping to make it possible for me to pursue this noble path. Thank all of you from the bottom of my heart. Acknowledgements Abraham Stone for your help with language translations, reading Heidegger’s Nietzsche, and your comments and support. Hans Sluga for working on a paper with me on Greek politics and Heidegger, which became part of this dissertation. Gopal Balakrishnan for encouraging me to find the “space” of Heidegger’s thought and for reading Heidegger’s Nietzsche with me. Daniel Guevara and Paul Roth for your continual support, suggestions, and encouragement throughout my time at UCSC. Bert Dreyfus for allowing me to sit in on your courses. v Introduction “When we understand thinking to be the distinctive characteristic of man, we remind ourselves of a belonging together that concerns man and Being. Immediately we find ourselves grappling with the questions: What does Being mean? Who, or what, is man?” (I&D, 30) Following the seminal work Being and Time Heidegger is said to go through a “turning” (die Kehre) that sees him leaving behind the project he calls “fundamental ontology,” or the question of the “meaning of Being.” Through his so-called middle period in the 1930s and through the early 1940s, Heidegger’s ontological engagement becomes centered on what he calls the “truth of Being,” which is articulated as a history of Western metaphysics. Ultimately, this history of metaphysics manifests itself in Heidegger’s “late period” as “technology.” It is also during the middle period that Heidegger struggles with his unfortunate foray into Nazi politics. This is a popular theme in Heidegger scholarship with spirited arguments on all sides. Some interpretations attempt to separate Heidegger’s philosophy from his Nazi involvement while others seek to dismiss Heidegger’s post- Being and Time work altogether, while still others wish to defend Heidegger and still others have just wanted to explore and 1 document his involvement.1 While Heidegger’s political involvements with Nazism remain inexcusable, his political views and involvements are integral to understanding the “turning” and his later thought on technology as the manifestation of the final metaphysics of the Platonic legacy, which he calls the history of Being. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that even the lauded and controversial essay “The Question Concerning Technology” is rich with political overtones and criticisms that reframe the circumstances under which the truth of Being presents itself. As Heidegger himself has done with Nietzsche in claiming that he will articulate what Nietzsche meant but never said metaphysically, I also will do with Heidegger in terms of politics. On my reading there are two kinds of politics in Heidegger’s thought that are, for the most part, murky and confused. There is a politics of ontology the deals with the encountering and articulating what beings are and what Being itself is. There is also a politics on the more familiar level of societies and the policies that different groups establish and follow. It is in terms of the second type of politics that Heidegger is most often attacked, and for good reason. In the following I will motivate an understanding of Heidegger’s middle and late 1 For condemnation see, first, the most controversial and, arguably, most one-sided reading of Heidegger, Heidegger and Nazism by Victor Farias. A close second is Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism to Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars 1933-1935, Herman Phillipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. Jürgen Habermas offers perhaps the most compelling criticism of Heidegger and his engagement with Nazism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. There is also the compelling criticism levied by Levinas. See Entre Nous for example. There are those who wish to defend: Julian Young Heidegger: Philosophy, Nazism. Those who “defend” via the claim that Heidegger had no choice in the matter of National Socialism, Iain Thomson Heidegger On Ontotheology. And there are those who wish to explore and inform the discussion: Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis and Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader and Hugo Ott, Heidegger: a Political Life. Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity. 2 thought in terms of these two types of politics. This will serve to bring Heidegger’s turning and eventual ruminations on technology into focus. In the end I will examine what it was in the confused and unarticulated relation between the two types of politics that not only allowed for his foray into Nazism, but also informed his Machiavellian views on technology and what might be done to counterbalance them. This will allow for an inquiry in to the relevance of Heidegger’s political thought in today’s situation. At the beginning of Heidegger’s middle period (roughly 1928 to 1946) Heidegger begins to understand that his work up to that point falls within the selfsame modernist framework that he is struggling to free his thought of. At this time he also becomes the first National Socialist Rector of Freiburg University.2 This is the initial intersection between his politics and philosophy. In fact, it is in the “Rectoral Address” that we find Heidegger explicitly identifying the importance and task of philosophy as intertwined with politics.3 As Heidegger moves through this period his fundamental questioning about Being shifts to that of the “truth of Being.” This shift begins with a series of essays between 1929-1931 following Being and Time in which he begins to understand the history of metaphysics since Plato as the history of an “error” – echoing Nietzsche in his understanding of Plato’s categories of “truth” as relegated to the “supransensory” world. This contrasts the pre-Platonic notion of truth as a-lētheia that describes the categories of Being based on the encounters 2 Heidegger tries to deny this in the posthumously published Der Spiegel interview. 3 For an extensive discussion on this see Richard Wolin’s Politics of Being and Karl Löwith’s “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” 3 (“uncovering” “unconcealing” or “revealing”) of mankind with his surroundings, which has been displaced by the Platonic forms.4 This marks the beginning of Heidegger’s attempt to find a way to abandon the modernist categories of truth in terms of objective “correctness” and to recall the early conception of Greek “truth” as alētheia – a recollection that he sees as important in his overall project of articulating how mankind might come back into an open relationship with Being. This is expressed by Heidegger in his 1935 lectures that were later published as An Introduction to Metaphysics. At this time Heidegger noted a metaphysical “heritage” that begins with the Greeks and is expressed in terms of the polis. This philosophical and political work is an attempt to examine the historical metaphysical “inception” of the West in an examination of the Greeks and their ontological understanding. Essentially, an examination of the beginning of Western metaphysical understanding as the bedrock upon which all Western history has followed would inform Heidegger’s project to “reground” the ontologically depraved West that he finds himself in. For Heidegger the question of what the truth of Being is forms the key to understanding the history of metaphysics that he sees as the foundation of the catastrophic technological and political machinations of mid-twentieth century world politics and events.