"America and Russia are the Same":Geopolitics in Heidegger's Seinsfrage^

Dean Lauer

Martin Heidegger's interest in world politics extends as far as hisinterest in the question of being. Consequently and inasmuch as Heideg-ger has developed his philosophy of being-there {Dasein), which is neces-sarily here, i.e., the there of a particular place, being takes shapeaccording to its place on the earth. The event of being, its disclosure andwithdrawal, is an historical one. Being so disclosed, Heidegger under-stands as authentic truth.^ But what can being understood this way indi-cate regarding politics, no less geography? Actually, geography is politicsfor Heidegger insofar as truth is a sited, situation specific occurrence. Theevidence in advance of this conclusion lies in Heidegger's pre-Socraticretrieval of the philosophical concept of truth as disclosure {aletheia)rather than its modem incamation as correctness {veritas)? In tum, cor-rectness and agreement (uniformity) give way to variation, creativeappropriation and, ultimately, recognition of othemess or the Other.

Heidegger's geopolitics is understood as the question of being (dieSeinsfrage). The question takes focus, more directly, by asking not just

1. Over many conversations, Professor Bernhard Radloff at the Universited'Ottawa has been a source of insight and inspiration. Let this acknowledgement also be athank you. Additionally, the term "socio-technical" that I use in this paper is his.

2. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by John Macquarrie & Edward Rob-inson (Oxford: Biackwell, 1962), p. 76. Hereafter BT.

3. Cf Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hohlengleichnisund Thedtet, ed. by H. Morchen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 2Iff;and Martin Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit" in Wegmarken, 2nd ed. (Frank-furt am Main: Vittorio Klostemann, 1978), pp. 201-36. Translated as "Plato's Doctrine ofTruth" by J. Barlow in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, ed. by W. Barrett andH.D. Aiken (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 251-70.

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how being stands ("w/e steht es urn das Sein") but why truth (the disclo-sure of being) takes shape differently. Truth as disclosure emerges by thestructure of the hermeneutic situation. What governs the site of disclosure,or the hermeneutic situation, i.e., the social/political regime, of course, hasbearing on the interpretation of truth and the fate of those within the spaceof truth. The geographical situation, then, arises in concert with themoment of truth as the decisive political point upon which the question ofbeing can be asked. This is Heidegger's target in his EinfUhrung in dieMetaphysik {1935): the unfolding of this juncture of place, being and truth.

1. Place: USA o USSRIn 1935 Heidegger observes this juncture within the political situa-

tion of Europe from the perspective of sovereign nations and geographicalpressures that are degrading the being-there of Dasein, that is, he sees anexistential deadening of disclosures other than the dominant Americanand the Russian ones."* Although, the systems of capital in both countriesappear different or opposed in theory, Heidegger contends that as exer-cised they are similar because they deny the question of being and, subse-quently, ignore the hermeneutie situation to which all beings are tied.Disregarding the hermeneutic situation denies accord to the place andvariation of the site of emergence of being. This leads to the dislocation ofidentity no less than the metaphysics of universal truths. The revolutionsthat gave rise to American manifest destiny and Soviet world communismboth mean the ideological spread of one way of life at the expense ofother people and places, of the Other. Of course, the horrors of Stalin'sRussia, which Heidegger was not yet familiar with proved that the Sovietideology was the more violent one, while the American proved to be thelonger lasting. When Heidegger talks about both America and Russiabeing the same, he must mean this in a practical sense of the time but alsoin the abstract sense of what their ideological systems could imply.

In post-World War II, Heidegger sees Europe as caught between themillstones of American liberalism and Russian Bolshevism.^ Heidegger

4. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, tn by Ralph Mannheim (NewHaven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Hereafter IM.

5. In On Heidegger (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth: 2000), author Patricia AlterberndJohnson claims that Heidegger is targeting the economics of "capitalism and commu-nism," p. 80. Her introductory book assumes the claim as a matter of common interpreta-tion. True enough. Granted, however, that capitalism as conceived by Adam Smith has itscenter of interest in the welfare of the community, and that Marx's formulation of commu-nism is a development of human emancipation, it is not obvious that Heidegger wouldreject these economics in principle. At the same time, Heidegger would repudiate themetaphysics of unaccountable liberal economics as well as the imposition by elites (Bol-sheviks) of a command economy.

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sees both to be metaphysically the same because they, "Russia and Amer-ica," are each locked in a "dreary technological frenzy, the same uprootedorganization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost comer ofthe globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economicexploitation."^ As such, the Russian and American systems actively defileparticularity and individuality in exchange for homogeneity since theguiding truth is a universal (metaphysical) one of economic extractionand exploitation. The machine of these economic systems demands thishomogeneity because it seeks to maximize the retum on labor for materialconsumption (US) and production (USSR). The mono-cultural aim ofthese systems means that their economic models will be received any-where, 'accepted' in any population. Meanwhile, the space of the workeris rapidly alienated as market and command forces make the workshop asgeneric and efficient as possible for maximum quantitative output. Boththe scene of labor and the laborer are then measured in efficiency whereinthe factory typifies increasingly technological life, i.e., the assembly line,the stamping plant, for the evolving socio-technieal state. In this state, theDasein of both countries gets fitted into and, hence, managed by theindustrial protocol, which calls for a certain uniformity that promotes theefficiency of the comprehensive protocol. In this way, America and Rus-sia are nations only in name for they do not preserve national differencesand identities, much less the natural world. Conversely, they bring about"the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, thehatred and suspicion of everything creative and free."^

Global economic programs are predicated on the theory of universalproduction techniques and accompanying uniform consumption modelsthat prescind from the situation infelicities of the natural and historicalworld such as culture, identity issues, and language differences. Thesedifferences are read as nothing but nuisances, potential errors for stochas-tic analysis within the mathematical organizing scheme. Henceforth, thesocio-technical ordering of humanity into an economic model is loath todeal with anything outside the objective norm. Heidegger sees this organi-zation as the objectification of the individual and the environment throughthe spatial and historical levelling {Einebnung) of differences that are car-ried out through industrial economics. The erasure of differences antici-pates the incorporation of an unfettered transnational ideological system,which, of course, both future cold warriors competitively advocated as

6. Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 37.7. Ibid., p. 38 - translation altered.

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their economic schemes took shape across the globe as struggle and war.Soviet-state bureaucracy and American-corporate rationalizing bothfoment their own global objectives, which is essentially the same objec-tive: the economic stamp of a certain generic, undifferentiated populous.

That uniformity is a product of something intemal to the make-up ofthe American and Soviet systems, which seek unlimited expansion, sug-gests the uniformity can be understood as arising from a rejection of theconsideration of being. The rejection of being should be understood hereas a rejection and, subsequently, cancellation of the diversity, variationand idiosyncratic othemess native to authentic truth disclosure. The rejec-tion places a restriction on being's ability to show itself, which means thata determined structure of being is placed into appearance at the expenseof others. This appearance places conformity over beings, thereby expro-priating the specificity and diversity of appearances organic to the disclo-sure of being. These appearances subject the disclosure of being topolitical forces that demand a given sameness or uniformity that matcheswith economic abstraction. These appearances in the form of commercial-ism, propaganda and re-education are the preparation for the socio-techni-cal constitution of the state, which has arisen from the same socio-technical, even cybemetic, installation of universal economic applica-tions, which are non-specific with regard to the place or situation. The lib-eral and Bolshevik economic structures showcase this as a restriction ofbeing and restriction over the space of disclosure of being in the usual dis-closure of truth (truth as sameness, correctness). This restriction is ulti-mately a rejection of the question of being. These structures are anoverstated modemist manifestation of the positivistic conception ofnature and a general corruption of the question of being. Consequently,the rationalized/bureaucratic structures of both future superpowers is atodds with Heidegger's thesis in Sein und Zeit that tries to rekindle thequestion of being. The opposition between these structures and Heideg-ger's ontological inquiry is basically a matter ofthe recognition of being.

2. Being: The Question of BeingWhereas Heidegger is committed to retrieving the Seinsfrage from our

forgetfiilness of being (Seinsvergessenheit), the two global superpowersare furiously tied up in a race to spread their own economic systems to thedetriment ofthe question regarding being. But the apparatus of economicimperatives that make up the bi-polar world is merely the ontic expressionof the current refusal to consider that question of being seriously. In fact.

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the metaphysics of the two dominant economic systems conceals thequestion of being so well that, by default, nihilism becomes their commonthread. And notably, "the essence of nihilism is the history in which there isnothing to being itself"^ This nihilism is evinced as a concealing and sub-terranean rejection of the integrity and authority of being. Being and itsmanifest particularity are retrenched by the calculus of global economics,the same monetary formula necessary to the intemal structure of expansion.The character of global economics, its deletion of specificity and differ-ence, is made necessary to the structure of expansion and exploitationbecause, again, these economic systems are based on objective norms anduniform techniques that seek global control. But the homogeneity of theAmerican-Soviet disclosure is in violation of authentic disclosures ofbeing, which are by definition local, earthy, sovereign events sited withinthe context of historical Da-sein; it's dirty, gritty, there of the place.^

In order to provoke a truly global metaphysics, the philosophicalquestion of being must be rejected in favour of a socio-technical conceptof individual things that conforms to the configurations of production andconsumption. These economic calculations of the world fit with Heideg-ger's concept of advanced nihilism signalled by the abandonment ofbeings by being (die Seinsverlassenheit), which consists in the absence ofthe "unconcealing (Entbergung) of being as such."'° The forgetting ofand the abandonment by being are related because they both signify theconcealing of being, though from the two different interlocutors of theDasein — being relationship. The concealing of beings under the veil ofbeing abandoned leaves us destitute to the thoroughly ugly of humanity— destruction of the earth, the quantification life, the technological con-stitution of Dasein — as given under global economics mandates. Thisabandonment is only made more complicated and menacing by our for-getfulness of being, which Heidegger tries to counter with his Seinsfrage.The veil of forgetting is especially fruitful in the discussion of geopoliticsbecause it reflects the ontological moment of the ontic manifestation offorgetting — homogeneity, undifferentiated matter, substance. AsHeidegger defines it, the forgetting of being "means: the self-concealing

8. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV: Nihilism, tr. by F.A. Capuzzi (San Fran-cisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 210.

9. Cf. Heidegger, BT, op. cit., p. 44b.10. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. Ill: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as

Metaphysics, tr. by F.A. Capuzzi, D.F. Krell, and J. Stambaugh (San Francisco: Harper &Row, 1987), p. 155.

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of the provenance of the differentiation of being into What- and That-being, in favour of the being that lightens beings as beings and remainsunquestioned as being."" The forgetting of being, therefore, implicates aserious deficiency in the disclosure of being because the differentiation ofbeing gets artificially perverted into sameness in the light ofthe demandfor presence that appears evenly and constant, a kind of ersatz being con-figured technologically as undifferentiated substratum. (All life andbeings, for example, as represented by the periodic table of elements aremerely material constructions, which are essentially the same save fornumerical valences.) The appearing of being as undifferentiated anddemonstrably available is the ground for the metaphysical interpretationof truth as agreement and correctness. In other words, neglecting thequestion of being is not just a philosophical issue bome out in refiexionon the epistemic nature ofthe world, forgetting about being is an individ-ual, social, and political issue because the deficient sense of truth, as cor-rectness, becomes decisive for being-in-the-world. The forgetting ofbeing shown as tmth under the veil of (mathematical) correctness, there-fore, is the precondition of socio-technical thought and the techno-cyber-netic conception of life in general under the ideological state. It is onlywith a reconsideration of the question of being proper that the restrictivesense of truth as mere correctness can be rolled back and the withdrawal ofbeing (the -lethe of a-letheia), its closure and hidden essence, can beunfolded. Hence, Heidegger's priority on the disclosure of being in theEinfurhung; for '"disclosure of being' means the unlocking of what forget-fiilness of being closes and hides."'^ This is why Heidegger's thesis thattmth is disclosure ofthe manifold presence of being rather than correctnessor conformity to representation is undermined when being is forgotten.

3. Truth: Aletheia and CorrectnessThat the forgetting of being restricts the meaning of tmth to correct-

ness strongly suggests that tmth as an organic movement of disclosureand withdrawal gets interpreted as chaotic, incorrect. To translate this intopolitics means that the intensely modem goveming schemes of the twoeconomic powers of liberalism and Bolshevism place tmth into the mathof abstraction, which is a metaphysics of representation that founds thecalculation involving correctness. Consequently, the differentiation ofbeing that reveals itself in the disclosure of tme being is simply reticulated

11. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol.11 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 402, esp. 3f.12. IMop. c/7., p. 19.

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back into the metaphysics of correctness. It appears, more narrowly, hereas incorrect by virtue of its position in the general context of modemunderstanding - mathematical correctness. Because this context of under-standing fixes what is correct and incorrect, valid and invalid, other dis-closures of being outside of this context are simply found to be false,invalid. Recall that truth is primordially given as aletheia. That a-letheiais the first name for both disclosure and withdrawal means that the systemof tmth that privileges the privative (a-) or disclosure of presence as thecondition ofthe possibility of correctness (tmth, veritas) implies that thewithdrawal {-lethe) is systemically occulted by the metaphysics of pres-ence. This kind of presence is also referred to by Heidegger as "constantpresence" {bestdndige Anwesenheit).^^ Constant presence is demanded bya technological economy because it is only in relief of a context thatstands still and uniform that political and economic instmments can beeffectively applied across borders and populations. Hence, today's rise ofthe transnational corporation, the spread of mediocrity through the Amer-ican monoculture, and the diminution ofthe world's languages.''*

That which does not conform to the principle of constant presencesimply cannot be interpreted as anything other than unrecognized input ormalfunction. Difference, understood as the withdrawal {-lethe) at themoment of tmth, cannot properly be given significance or rendered rele-vant. The reconfiguration of tmth within the metaphysics that demandsconstant presence now signals the "darkening of the world," the erasureof difference and the exploitation of nature.'^

4. Place II: Germany and Europe: The Geographical SituationOf course, the metaphysical conception of being as constant and uni-

form presence, what Heidegger calls "demonstrable visibility," is not justa matter of the forgetting of being that belongs to ontology, this concep-tion of being moots implications for civil society as well.'^ As BemhardRadloff wisely concludes, "The form ofthe incorporation ofthe lethe intothe polity, as error or errance, as the ritual of sheltering unconcealment or

13. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die phi-losophie, ed. by H. Tietjen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), p. 60.

14. Cf. Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity andthe Threat to Our Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and E. M. Quinn,"Can This Language be Saved?," in Cultural Survival Quarterly (Summer 2001).

15. Heidegger, IM, op. cit., pp. 38, 45.16. Ibid., p. 63 - translation altered.

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mere falsehood, will co-determine the nature of the polity."'^ Could thenormative implications be that a society or nation, which more authenti-cally understands the movement of truth, might achieve a greater destinyin world history?

Undoubtedly, Heidegger is aligned with Conservative Revolutionariesof the Weimar period that opposed globalism and at the same time lookedto restore the German spirit. Yet, Heidegger is under no illusions that theGerman polity is not one, like the rest of the West, which is imbued withthe metaphysics of representation and correctness. The "destructive evil"that Heidegger talks about with respect to Americanism is by no means apersonal critique of Americans.'^ Americans are essentially European.'Europe has many identities and many differences within many nations.For instance, the same German polity that gave birth to Emst Junger andOswald Spengler also gave rise to Rudolf Camap and to neo-Kantian legalpositivism. But this does not prevent Heidegger from conceiving Germanyas a counterpoint to this metaphysics because Germany, after all, is notone of the loud exponents of the evolving new world order. In fact, Ger-many has ironically become a victim of this Wilsonian world order as aresult of its own aggression and desire to impose a world order. As every-one knows, the dictates of Versailles put enormous burdens on the Germanpolity, in effect accelerating it to the threshold of national collapse. Underthis pressure, i.e., the millstones of the WWI victors, Germany could beseen not as a chosen nation privileged with a special understanding oftruth, but as a locus against the prevailing model of economic exploitation,global integration of technology, and the buming up of nature, all of whichare founded in the metaphysics of truth as correctness and constant pres-ence — the preconditions of liberalism and Bolshevism. Under the spell ofglobal technology, being becomes deracinated into constant presence asdemanded by the mathematics of hemispheric/planetary control. This ismodemity in its advanced form, as will to power. Nature withers away andis seen only as a sterile vector for asserting domination. The earth revealsitself merely as positional coordinates within a technological field ofresource availabilities. American and Soviet economics force being into theservice of competitive, strategic advantage. That their conception of beingputs ideology over experience, economics over humanity, technology over

17. Bemhard RadlofF, "Heidegger's Critique of Imperial Truth," in Existentia 10/1-4 (2000), p. 58.

18. Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 46.19. Ctibid,p.M.

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nature suggests that both are structurally the same: nihilistic state (or cor-porate) instruments of the will to power.

The transformation of the earth into a field of resources and labour inthe service of a will to power means that a certain regime or guidingthread (i.e., metaphysics) has made this conquest possible. This is, asmentioned, the reduction of truth to simple correctness, which, again, isderivative of the forgetfulness and loss of effulgent being. During the1930s Heidegger associates the reduction of truth to calculation with theproscription of the question of being. Evidently, America and Russia fillthis proscription. The question of being regarded as "being-able no longermeans a wealth of talent, lavishly spent and the command of energies;rather, it means merely practicing a routine through which anyone can betrained . . . In America and Russia this development intensified into aboundless indifference and always-the-sameness - so much so that quan-tity took on a quality all its own. Since the domination in those countriesof a cross-section of the indifferent mass has become something more ofan onslaught that destroys rank and world-creating impulse of the spiritand shows these as Hes."^°

Loss of creativity, inspiration and spirit, which are the opposite of theindifferent, are Heidegger's cark. The blanket approach of the liberal andBolshevik economic systems advance levelling and indifference, i.e.,exclusion of eccentricity and difference, which is founded in a fundamen-tal attunement (Grundstimmung) to passivity and acceptance that isground into the living situation of a people. Marx would call this attune-ment alienation. Hither to, passivity and acceptance are not just alienating,they are the anticipations of nihilism: resignation to incapacity and loss.

In an effort to address this loss, Heidegger retrieves the question ofbeing and, as it tums out, the German circumstance is remarkably recep-tive to the question, due in part perhaps to its marginalization from the'truths' being trumpeted by the League of Nations and the emerging glo-bal economics of the US and USSR. These truths announce "boundlessindifference and always-the-sameness": the spiritless and banal lifepurged of temporality.^' However, the stress overloading central Europe,which had not yet been assimilated into the program of the world econom-ics, in the 1920s and early 30s could be interpreted as giving rise to exis-tential burdens within the German obloquy. These burdens may likely haveforced the question of being thereby overriding the economic instruments

20. Ibid., p. 46 - translation altered.21. Ibid., p. 46 - translation altered.

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of socio-technical Dasein. Special burdens fated to a country can enlist apeople to a peculiar or great destiny. Heidegger puts it into words thisway, "burdening gives back to things, to beings, their historical weight(Being). And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and funda-mental conditions - attunements one could say — for the birth of allgreatness, in speaking of greatness we refer above all else to an historicalpeople, its works and the destinies of nations."^^ Though "great" maysound culturally prejudiced in the sense of superior, Heidegger means thisgreatness not in the sense of something exclusive but in the sense ofsomething distinctive. The destiny of Germany could be to trumpet a senseof the exceptional or othemess, bestowed by asking the question of being,and this othemess could stand against the incorporation of Europe into thejejune, debased life of American/Soviet economics. In short, the crisis situ-ation of the German poHs could distinguish itself apart from the homoge-nizing socio-technical truths, and accompanying all-for-one economicsystems, being broadcast to both the East and West of Europe. There areothers truths, and Germany as well as Europe, unshackled from the socio-technical tmth associated with the abandonment and forgetting of beingcould point to these others. Othemess or the Other, in fact, is a recollectionof being in the sense of a multiplicity of (other) disclosures, as aletheia.

Following the way phenomenology enlightens the thinker, aletheiamust be sited, rooted, and historically reflective of the community, other-wise it is truth already told from someplace else. In other words, the truthneed not necessarily be 'true' for Dasein, being-there(-now). Whereas auniversal metaphysics overlays its truth on a people, thereby dominatingthem, authentic tmth under the name aletheia emerges organically as acommon event of the differentiation of being within a community. Thisevent marks the difference — specificity and geography — of a peoplethat share in the historical nature of the event.^-' Consequently, the disclo-sure appears not as an anaemic, scripted result but rather as a febrile,inspired event that is mine {eigen) because it pertains to my historical sit-uation and is distinctively mine. This event of truth unfolds itself accord-ing to the difference and peculiarity of what is unique to the historicalsituation, i.e., to the time and place: to being-here-now! Moreover, thehistorical situation founds the relevance and weights of things becauseDasein is by defmition historical, i.e., already 'there.' Recovering the his-torical situation by now puts a people within a geographical area, or

22. Ibid,p.\\.23. Cf. "Place belongs to the thing itself in ibid., p. 66.

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"landscape," that returns the situation to its lively specificity disallowedby the anonymity of an external economic regime.̂ '* The local situation,that which founds the context for the differentiation of heing in the eventof truth, then, pre-empts the non-specific economic measures that Ameri-canism and Russianism attempt to impose transnationally. This way, thefactual world situation cannot he crossed out by the socio-technical sys-tem unless it is sanitized of its errancy {lethe), particularity, and local rich-ness; unless it is robbed of its native, authentic truth {a-letheia). Thegivenness of place, the environing world, suborns the entry of an alien,technological worldview into the primacy of the present situation. Yetthrough propaganda and economic coercion, this is just what the socio-technical systems of America and Russia attempt. Conformity throughindustrial, socio-technical economic instruments and scientific hubrissteals the specificity of being and, therefore, the being of a people, ineffect, washing away historical difference and difference itself

That entities in this way can be analyzed through the hygienic scopeof science by means of mathematical analysis, dispossessed of localmarkers, ready-to-hand uses, and aesthetic qualities implicates a devalua-tion of temporal, factual reality. The technical transformation of Daseinthrough economic imperatives means that the definitive form ofthe thingsfor which we have concern {Besorgen) in practical life is compromised infavor of metaphysical principles that manage the polis. These cerebralprinciples effectively pull or remove Dasein from the fulgent "there" ofits situation. The things themselves, as it were, become recalcitrant,shorn of their relevance and fall mute. Representations and system func-tions of the economic superstructure supplant the Other in experience,which is disclosed by the authentic movement of truth.

Displaced from its familiarity among things, Dasein, thus, potentiallyloses its locus and historical boundary, becoming de-sited, because the sit-uation-at-hand no longer appears individual or relevant. The world ofpractical involvements appears temporarily foreign, occurent {Vorhan-denheit). This is an instance of breakdown within Dasein's structure ofuse, which, again, serves to move Dasein as a whole into an insipid spacewherein surrounding entities appear dull and emptied of their significance.The natural world fails to resonate or inspire existential Dasein becausethe intimacy and specificity of the region of disclosure (truth) has beenoccluded by plastic products, socio-technical life, and meta-economic

24, Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 39,25, Heidegger, BT, op. cit., p. 15,

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principles. As a result, the possibility for concrete participation in thepolitical sphere dissolves because the rhetoric of politics is empty and dis-connected just as are the daily phenomena that show themselves as super-ficial and drained.

Heidegger is committed to philosophy in the 1930s as a counterpointto the politicizing of Europe by the left and right of Russia and America.If philosophy, specifically phenomenology, can spell rehabilitation ofthehistorical peoples of Europe, especially the Germans, then the systematicpolitical/economic devices of Russia and American could be edited out ofthe Continent. The organic specificity of cultural differences could saveEurope from the machination of a foreign socio-technical life and eco-nomic exploitation. It is in this respect, that Heidegger sees the historicalmission of Germany as saving the individuating power of spirit from the'millstones' of Americanism and Russianism. This means nothing lessthan winning the question of being for the German Volk from the monot-ony of uncontested ideology and economic manipulation.

As mentioned, Heidegger was allied with the Conservative Revolu-tionaries ofthe time, especially during his term as rector at Freiburg. Butas a matter of clarification, his thinking, like many of the conservatives,betrays a philosophy that is opposed to Nazi-party racial superiority. Inreality, Heidegger's concern for the Other could be perceived as a dis-guised invective against the Hitler's sentiment of blood and superiority.The sub-point here is not to dispute Heidegger's affiliation with NationalSocialism, but simply to note that Heidegger's brief Nazi association wasalmost certainly an anti-Hitler one because, in this case, truth {a-letheia)acclaims the Other, against the hierarchies of race; the Aryan race being alevel or standard for the Volk to constitute its 'truth.'^^ In short, truth isunderstood according to its agreement to a prototype of perfection; a true('correct') German approximates the features of a Nordic ideal. Mean-while, a-letheia, celebrates differences, including racial difference,among a Volk thereby constituting the 'truths' of Dasein, which accord-ing to Sein und Zeit includes a certain reverence for the Other; in thiskind of pluralistic truth there are no prototypes, only other truths. This is

26, Cf, Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universtdt (Frank-furt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1983), p, 13,

27, Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish socialist and nationalist, in fact, first devised 'geopoli-tics' in 1910 to contain afolkhemmet (people's home) based to some extent on the homoge-neity of a people. This is likely inconsistent with Heidegger's formulation of geopolitics thathas its locus of concern in the question of being, i,e,, history, rather than race. See Kjellen'sStaten som livesform [State as Live Form] (Stockholm: Hugo Gerbers Forlag, 1916),

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Heidegger's philosophical confrontation with the Nazis on race, albeitone that has to be interpreted.

Yet the contemporary reader will want to keep in mind that no onewanted to suffer the harassment of fellow Nazis that had challenged Hit-ler's fascist distortion of National Socialism.^^ The persecution of thebrothers Gregor and Otto Strasser was vicious as was the persecution ofthose purged by the Third Reich in January 1934 due to internal rebel-lion. ^ Nazis who spoke out against the regime were treated especiallybrutally since their party affiliation gave them added credibility in thepublic's eye, Heidegger's reticence should be understood partly in respectof the atmosphere of tyranny that was developing as Hitler solidifiedpower. Additionally, it may be that some of Heidegger's rhetoric was apragmatic move to satisfy the dictatorship and avoid censure. At the sametime, Heidegger's language about a culture of a people or Volk in no wayshould be conftised with the inauthentic Nazi rhetoric ofthe time.-'̂ Raceis not an issue for Heidegger, whereas Hitler and the Nazi establishmentunquestionably conceive culture in any context to be subordinate to race."A state can be designated as bad if, despite a high cultural level, it doomsthe bearer ofthis culture in his racial composition."^' 'Racial composi-tion' implicates the advancing science ofthe biology of race in sorting outthe correct strains of genetics from the mixtures. As such, the biology ofrace, laboratory eugenics, and so on herald the advancement of scientifictechniques in the formation of a valorous and homogenous Volk?^ In fact,biology and the reproductive sciences take a "living being" and "define itmechanistically," an observation Heidegger made a decade before Naziracism fully expressed itself in camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.^^

28, Regarding early socialists ambitions arrested by Nazi fascism, see Pierre Krebs,Die europaische Wiedergeburt (Tubingen: Grabert, 1982),

29, Cf, Alain de Benoist, "Nazism and Communism: Evil Twins?" in Le Livre Noirdu Communisme, ed, by Stephane Courtois (Paris: Laffont, 1997), pp, 178-92, Originallypublished in Elements, No, 92 (July 1998), pp, 15-24, The author makes the salient pointregarding the vicious nature of Stalinism, Americanism, though theoretically disposed toideology like all the West, by no means should be equated with despotism, iniquity, andcruelty Stalin's Russia,

30, Further, Bemhard Radloff points out the fallacy of association by language use.That "Heidegger shared a vocabulary with the Right and the National Socialists in itselfproves nothing," See his "Heidegger and the Question of Rhetoric," Existentia 10, 3-4(2001), pp, 437-56, esp, p, 454,

31, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr, by Ralph Manheim with Introduction by AbrahamFoxman (Boston & New York: Houghton MifTlin Company, 2001), p, 395

32, Ibid., pp, 284-329,33, Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr, by The-

odore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p, 4,

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Quite to the opposite ofthe Nazis in power, Heidegger conceives cul-ture and Volk exclusive of race. In fact, race is not properly an issue withinthe Seinsfrage, and in 1934 Heidegger explicitly contradicts the Fuhrer'spriority given over to race in the determination of a Volk, A Volk "does notmean . . . the racial in the sense of what pertains to blood and heredity . . .and does not pertain in the first instance, to the corporality ofthe familyand the genders."^"* This statement is not only, perhaps, a moral repudiationof official party doctrine, but it is also an expression ofthe consistency ofHeidegger's philosophy. Racial investigations rely on everything fromgenetics to the discredited science of phrenology to announce the researchand methodological protocols of socio-technical thought — precisely thethought Heidegger is trying to avoid. Thus, race is relegated to a technolog-ical determination of a people, which is, consequently, an a-temporal andrepresentational view of a Volk that is in basic disagreement with theproject ofthe Seinsfrage, even in the conservative Einfuhrung in die Meta-physik?^ The mechanizing of human life through the technical understand-ing of biology finally makes Hitler's fascism the most sinister illustrationof socio-technical thought, which is to say nihilism.

5. Being and Truth: The Being ofthe OtherThe Seinsfrage in the shape of existential phenomenology, however,

needs to subtend the metaphysics ofthe contemporary medical and socio-technical worldview, which, in this case, underpins the biological purityof race. Heidegger suggests that it is only through a tum in our comport-ment {Verhaltung) to being that Dasein can gain an authentic relationshipto being {Seinsverhdltnis). This, notably, comes to pass as affected Daseinunderstands its world through the differential ofthe Other. This differen-tial ofthe Other, Heidegger, designates "none too happily as 'empathy'{Einfuhlung)"; empathy, therefore, is able to "provide the first ontologicalbridge from one's own subject, which is given proximately as alone, to the

34, Heidegger's words translated by Bemhard Radloff in his "Volk, Work, and His-toricity in Heidegger's 'Logik' of 1934," Existentia 12/3-4 (2002), pp, 318-339,

35, The tone of these lectures has generated much political controversy. See, e,g,,Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, eds,, A Companion to Heidegger s Introduction to Meta-physics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Hugo Ott, Heidegger: A Political Life,tr, by Allen Blunden (New York: Basic, 1993); Jurgen Habermas, "Work and Weltansha-uung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective," in Heidegger: A CriticalReader, Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall eds, (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1992), pp,186-208; Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger(New York: Columbia UP, 1990); and Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Otto Poggeler,eds,, Heidegger und Praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988),

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Other subject, which is proximately quite closed oflf."̂ ^ Dasein's under-standing of the other in empathy is Miteinandersein (being-there-with-oth-ers), its most mature sense of Mitsein (being-with). But, crucially, Mitseinremains only and always being-with in the sense of a casual disengagementwith others, unless Dasein is affectively moved to consciously recognize theother as Other, genuinely different. In other words, the 'with-world' of Mit-sein is, as yet, the unrealized world of being-there-with-others because Mit-sein is passive, as it were, in its existential, stmctural ability to move Daseininto a different disclosure. That Dasein is always within the structure of Mit-sein does not mean that it appreciates or thoughtfully considers its potentialto reach the Other. The potential remains latent but this potential is a condi-tion for the very possibility of Dasein since \f "'Dasein is at all, it has being-there-with-others as its kind of being."^^

Indeed, Dasein is both there-with-others physically in its usual way-of-being and not-there, in the sense that it is tuned-out, as it were, to theOther. Heidegger remarks that this common mode of being is one of'unsociability' {"Unumganglichkeit"), which is to be contrasted, forexample, with being-there for the other in authentic care, or solicitude{Fiirsorge), which is Heidegger's cardinal statement on the ethical poten-tial of Dasein?^ This kind of care and solicitude anticipates Heideggerconclusion in Section 65 — Temporality as the Ontological Meaning ofCare — that affected, resolute Dasein is "more authentically 'there' in the'moment of vision' {"Augenbiicic") as regards the Situation which hasbeen disclosed."-^^ When Dasein is more 'there,' more fliUy in the situa-tion and, hence, more conscious of others, it, at the same time, is moreauthentic because it is more itself, robust in its primordial constitution asbeing-there. Consequently, the Other that is unfolded robustly in theaffective, resolute state of being-in-the-world makes Dasein's existentialbeing an issue and raises Dasein from a 'deficient,' i.e., average everyday,mode of being-with-others to one of mutual enrichment — authenticbeing-there-with-others. Recognition of the Other is reciprocally liberat-ing for Dasein and the Other as this recognition makes the enactment ofbeing-there more real, giving it more existential force, so to speak.

At this point, the Other emerges not from the stale, everyday sense ofbeing-with but from within the moment of resoluteness {Entschlossenheit)

36. Heidegger, BT, op. cit., p. 162.37. Ibid., p. 161 —translation altered.38. Ibid., p. 26.39. Ibid., p. 376.

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to move Dasein to a distinctive mode of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit),or authenticity.^^ Dasein is literally more itself ('zMe/ge«'), able to win itsown identity from the bland masses — das Man.'^^ In its ability to distin-guish itself as different, Dasein is more authentically able-to-be-there(SeinskOnnen). Dasein "means being-able to be-there," which signifies,most authentically, "acting."''^ Now it is in this unavoidably normativemoment of Sein und Zeit that Heidegger introduces the connexionbetween the other and resoluteness.

Dasein's resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible tolet the Others who are with it 'be' in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leapsforth and liberates. When Dasein is resolute, it can become the 'con-science' of others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resolute-ness can people authentically be with one another - not by ambiguous andjealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the "they" and in what the"they" want to undertake.'*"'

In brief, the moment of resoluteness discloses Dasein's ownness,which recall is its authenticity, that allows for the other to be revealed andrespected, if respect can be read into being the '"conscience" of others.'Meanwhile, it is clear that authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is intimatelyrelated to the disclosure of and respect for the Other.'*'' Ownness and oth-emess must be structurally related for they unfold reciprocally within theself-differentiating event of truth (aletheia) authentic disclosure. That thisis the case within the dense text of the existential analytic, presagesHeidegger's enigmatic entry into the political fray ofthe 1930s.

Heidegger's ontological deconstruction of Dasein's authenticity, itspotential-for-being-itself (Seinskonnen), is reflected at the macro-level inhis political intimations in the Einfuhrung, which rejects the socio-techni-cal colonization of a Volk by the economic machination of liberalism and

40, Ibid., p. 60,41, Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr, by T. Malick (Evanston:

Northwestem University Press, 1969), p, 100,42, Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,

Solitude, tr. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana LIniversityPress, 1995), p, 294.

43, Heidegger, BT, op. cit., pp, 344-5,44, With this sense of authenticity, Seren Overgaard is right in asserting that Levi-

nas is incorrect by claiming that Heidegger, and Husserl for that matter, do not have a sub-stantial moral sense of the Other. See Overgaard's "On Levinas' Critique of Husserl" inMetaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries (Dor-drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp, 115-138,

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Bolshevism. Again, that Heidegger there focuses his efforts on the Ger-man Volk does not preclude the importance of other world Volk, rather ithighlights the hermeneutie situation: Germany's geopolitical distinctionand Heidegger's familiarity with it.

Just as Sein und Zeit put the Other within the structure of authenticity,in 1935 Heidegger widens his lens and locates the Other, understood asthe German Volk within "the originary realm of the powers of Being,"^^Germany, by virtue of its position in the center of Europe, is pivotal in thedecision over the future of Europe and other European Volker. Germany isuniquely situated geographically and historically to contest the glohalpowers of America and Russia hecause, as mentioned, it had heen so iso-lated, which was due in large part to the allied victory that precipitated theTreaty of Versailles, Russian might to the East, French revanchism to theWest, and an expanding American commercial culture. If the principlevictors, America and Russia, are the same metaphysically and if the alliedpowers in Europe move in tandem with America or Russia means, defacto, that the only voice of resistance to the new socio-technical worldorder, at this time, properly comes from the punished, the marginalized,the 'other' people ofthe West: the Germans. Hence, the Other enters thegeopolitical scene at this time in the form of that Volk which is wary ofthe uniform and homogenizing forces of global economics and industrialalienation from historical existence.

While the concept of Other cannot properly be expressed in the coer-cive economics of liberalism and Bolshevism, the impecunious GermanVolk is the forum where the other speaks precisely because it has not yetbeen smothered by these global economic systems. Like the marginalizedpeople today in the world's poor stricken nations being cannibalized hy glo-balization, the German polis felt this disenfranchisement too. And in Spen-gler's words it felt like "a decline of life in and through . . . technology,economy, in world trade, and in the entire reorganization of existence."^^

Today, geopolitics increasingly takes the form of globalization, par-ticularly economic globalization, and this form was being put in place asthe two global superpowers solidified their strength and ideology (meta-physics) during the interbellum. Globalization means the domination andglobal spread of one idea everywhere, the triumph of metaphysics, the

45, Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p, 38 - translation altered,46, From Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (Munchen: Beck, 1931),

Translated and quoted in Miguel de Beistegui's Heidegger & the Political: Dystopias:Thinking the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 69-70,

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vanquishing of the Other in the name of sameness, the erasure of geo-graphical/political difference.

Such a claim may be theoretically consistent but has the Other reallybeen vanquished in favor of sameness? There appear to be two kinds ofglobalization at issue here. On one hand, globalization under the name ofcorporate exploitation — the ideology of reckless capitalism — has theancillary effect of chipping away at the world's diversity. For example,the fast-food industry with all the familiar corporate logos keeps pushingtheir brand of salty, high calorie monster meals on the world with anevangelical-like sales pitch. How can the dried fish snacks eaten for overa thousand years by Icelanders compete with the marketing of burgers andfried chicken? This globalization has nothing to do with the question ofbeing. One the other hand, there is a globalization that, at least in the shortterm, actually brings one in touch with othemess and difference. Thatimmigrant Pakistanis are introducing Norwegians to kebabs and Islamictraditions and that Norwegians in tum are introducing Pakistanis to socialdemocracy and lutefisk cannot be seen as having a levelling effect on cul-tural values and historical traditions. In fact, going for some Pakistanispice when one gets tired of flshballs is not just refreshing, it opens up aspace for othemess within the traditionally rather homogeneous Norwe-gian Volk {ox folk). Indeed, there is a sense that just plain exposure to newand different customs makes one more liberal and tolerant. This global-ization practiced as movements of people seems beneficial for the intro-duction of diversity and new experience. But that it promotes othemessand diversity now, in the short term, does not imply that this diversity willbe conserved. When populations and cultures assimilate, the specter ofsameness and levelling arises such that othemess gets so incorporated asto effectively disappear. (Will any French remain in Louisiana in 50years?) A policy of multiculturalism may help to preserve and enhancenative and migrant population in an increasingly nomadic world. In anycase, the latter form of globalization is one that prompts the question ofbeing, specifically because it brings the polis into contact with what is dif-ferent, which leads to the question of history and back to the question ofbeing. The globalization that threatens to erase differences is announcedmost pemiciously in the former sense of economic, i.e., corporate, global-ization. It is this same sense of geopolitical economics that Heideggersees behind the disenfranchisement and uprooting of Central Europebecause powers in the US and the Soviet Union were in some ways likecorporate powers today looking to expand their influence and markets.

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This meant overlaying a truth, however foreign, onto a people, and man-aging people through modem bureaucratic efficiency, which, naturally,assumes that people will accept this truth, incorporate it and become thesame people everywhere else. Herewith is the mobilization of historicalpeople into a global ideological agenda — Heidegger's "gigantic," the"summation of everything homogeneous."^^ By the definition of phe-nomenology as the discourse ofthe appearing of being, if the hermeneuti-cal situation is inadequate with regard to the basic attunement of a Volk,that is if the Volk are under the sway of an ideology, then the phenomenathat appear will be conceived as ideologically derived of a spiritually vac-uous being. This empty sense of being is preparation for the uniformschema of liberalism and Bolshevism no less than the "gigantic", alsounderstood as unrestricted domination, destruction ofthe Other, abandon-ment ofthe earth and technological control/integration of being-there.

The German Volk stood in confrontation to the dispirited sense ofbeing, this sameness, as something different. A Volk standing in the centreof truth are a people differentiated from the generic world, if the truth isone not founded on being's irrelevance. The question of a peoplebespeaks the question of being and truth. Could the retrieval of forgottenbeing return truth to its authentic sense as disclosure of the genuinelynovel and different, ofthe Other? And if the reorganization of existenceunder the mantle of socio-technical "progress" and economic modelsdooms the historical specificity of a people, and, therefore, othemess, willthe question of being exempt us from the monotony of sameness, inau-thentic truth? Will the Other be saved from today's globalization of eco-nomic slavery? . . . "fVie steht es um das SeinT"^^ All Heidegger can do iskeep asking the question.

47, Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr, by ParvisEmad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p, 311,

48, Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 32,