Deciding the Fate of the State: Heidegger, Thucydides and the Boden of Ontology

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relation between philosophy and politics in Being and Time (1927) starting from Heidegger’s suggestion that we can understand some of the linguistic and conceptual difficulties in his investigation by comparing Thucydides’ narrative prose with two texts by Plato and Aristotle. Far from simply signalling Heidegger’s proximity to Plato and Aristotle and an apolitical disdain for human affairs, carrying out and contextualizing this exercise within his interpretations of ancient philosophy shows the difficulties lie in formulating an ontology of historical, political existence. I then argue that Heidegger’s reference in Plato’s Sophist (1924-5) to a political speech in Thucydides elucidates the kind of existentiell situations underlying his understanding of authentic historicality. Situating this reference within Heidegger’s discussions of the possibilities of political speech reveals marked similarities to both phenomena thematized existentially in Being and Time and the most violent expressions of his völkisch politics in the 1930s.

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Notes

1 See Ott, Martin Heidegger, 134.

2 For recent presentation of his argument that the term Boden has essentially nativist and anti-Semitic connotations in Being and Time that draws on an array of documentary evidence, see Faye, “Das Sein als Mythos oder als Begriff”, 67-112. Lee has argued that the political usage of the term Boden by Heidegger in his lectures and seminars in the mid-1920s can be traced back to his reading of Yorck von Wartenburg in late 1923. See Lee “Heidegger en 1924”, 24-48. Contrary to this, Sheehan has argued that Boden means a “basis” for philosophy, thus a “ground” and Bodenlosigkeit “refers to the ‘groundlessness’ of an argument, its lack of any reasonable foundation”. See Sheehan, “L’affaire Faye”, 506 and his “Emmanuel Faye”, 383.

3 See Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's “Being and Time” which claims a strong proximity between the terminology of Being and Time and then contemporary far-right discourse and argues for the centrality of a völkisch politics to Being and Time. See also the first chapter of Faye, Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Kellerer has argued that Heidegger employs a strategy of strategic ambivalence in his use of politically loaded, far-right terminology and has contextualized this within anti-Semitic, far-right discourse of the early 20th century. See Kellerer, “Philosophy or Messianism?”, 179–208. Sheehan interprets Heidegger’s discussions of Schicksal (usually translated as ‘fate’) as an individual freeing up of past possibilities and Geschick (usually translated as ‘destiny’) as referring “to the common future, the Ge-schick, that a community freely choses for itself (for example, in ratifying the U.S. Constitution of 1789), whether or not things work out the way they were originally projected.” See Sheehan, “L’affaire Faye”, 493, cf. Making Sense of Heidegger, 178-183.

4 H. 38–9. Translation modified, Macquarrie and Robinson have “presented” rather than “pre-given” for “vorgegebene”.

5 Taminiaux claims this distinction is intended to bring out Heidegger’s proximity to Plato, that it “echoes Plato’s disdain for human affairs” and shows Heidegger’s “disdain for Thucydides.” See Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, 130, 133. I will argue that considered in its wider context the citation indicates an important proximity of Heidegger to Thucydides and neither a disdain for human affairs nor for Thucydides himself.

6 This is a limited construal of the exercise. A fuller treatment would also have to consider the grammatical as well as the terminological innovations found in Plato and Aristotle. However, carrying out the exercise in this simpler sense is justified, I think, because it sheds significant light on the relation between philosophy and the pre-philosophical, factical – and political – Boden of philosophy as Heidegger understands it. Note that in his 1933–4 lectures Heidegger will use a similar procedure himself, appealing to Thucydides’s text (2.49) to clarify the Greek understanding of λήθη and of concealment. See GA 36/7: 228-9/ 173-4.

7 In this paragraph I first give the translation by Hobbes and then that of Hammond. The Greek citations are from Thucydides, Historiae in two volumes.

8 This and all subsequent Plato English language citations are from Plato, Collected Works, the Greek from the revised Schleiermacher edition.

9 Such a marking out does not necessarily constitute a full definition in Plato. See Gorgias 470b and Cornford’s discussion of this point in his Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 238-9. In Metaphysics VII. 4 Aristotle characterizes the primary sense of ὁρισμὸς as stating precisely what something is by virtue of being the kind of thing it is (1029b 1-25). Both senses draw upon the pre-philosophical sense of delimiting, staking out.

10 The problem of talking of what is not is also raised in the very different ontological contexts of Plato’s Sophist, Aristotle’s Metaphysics VII.4 and Being and Time as well as in a speech in Thucydides (3.37-40) that Heidegger refers in Plato’s Sophist, discussed below (GA 19: 629/ 437).

11 See Cornforth, Plato and Parmenides, 226–7.

12 The verbs ὑπόκϵινται and ὑπόκϵιται are the third person plural and third person singular forms respectively of the present indicative middle ὑπόκϵιμαι. This is not so much a technical use of the term as a metaphorical use in a technical philosophical context.

13 This and subsequent Aristotle English language citations are from McKeon’s edition of Aristotle’s Basic Works, the Greek from Ross’ edition of the Metaphysics.

14 Both McKeon and Ross read the “some say” as an allusion to Plato’s Sophist 237, 256 ff. As we saw, the problem is also discussed in a different context in Plato’s Parmenides.

15 Sheehan has rightly stressed this sense in the expression the “soil from which basic ontological concepts developed” in antiquity (H. 3). See “L’affaire Faye”, 506. My point here is that this existential stance has political conditions for its possibility as indeed the claim that Greek everydayness, the horizon in which ancient ontology implicitly moved, “was largely diverted into talking with one another” would lead us to expect (H. 165, cf. GA 24: 155-8/110-2).

16 This is not so much the sight that belongs to production as seeing “the producedness of the produced [die Hergestelltheit des Hergestellten] in the sense of things disposably present at hand” (GA 24: 153/109, my emphasis).

17 GA 22: 254/197, cf. 99/81.

18 GA 18: 49/35. Lee has rightly emphasized the political dimension of the term Boden in this lecture course but neglects the wider context of Heidegger’s critique of Greek everydayness. See his “Heidegger en 1924”, 25-48, especially 38-42.

19 In Being and Time, authentic Dasein draws upon the shared heritage of possibilities whose “‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible” (H. 383, cf. GA: 26 137–8/184-5). Its individual Schicksal, fate, always takes place within a shared social space with its generation, its contemporaries and concerns the Geschick, the destiny of the community, the people. Heidegger’s hostility to possibilities, drawn from “the most exotic and manifold cultures and forms of Dasein” (H. 52) and to “understanding the most alien cultures and ‘synthesizing’ them with one’s own” (H. 178) is not the expression of a philosophically unimportant chauvinism as on his account such modes of understanding are free-floating, uprooted from the intelligibility of the shared social space and possibilities of understanding it enables.

20 This discussion is not included in GA 80.1 but an English translation can be found in Heidegger, Kisiel, and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, 229-232, here: 232, my emphasis.

21 GA 81.1: 58/216.

22 Becoming Heidegger 216. The version of this lecture published in GA 80.1 does not contain this line but formulates the following similar sentiment: “entweder uns selbst in den Fundamenten unseres Sehens und Fragens durchsichtig zu werden und so den Kampfplatz für ein echte Auseinandersetzung zu gewinnen – oder aber beliebig äußerlich und zufällig von den alten Begriffen Gebrauch zu machen” (GA 80.1: 57).

23 This philosophical treatment of Dasein’s historicality will involve a repetition of the key concepts of Greek ontology that transforms their meaning, a topic that falls outside the scope of the present article.

24 See von Ranke, Weltgeschichte i. 2, 42–52 for his praise of Thucydides.

25 Grethlein emphasizes how Thucydides uses a range of devices – “graphic description, tense, internal focalization, speeches and composition” - to make the past present, to bring the reader within the experiential horizon of the protagonists caught up in the unfolding events, including their emotions and deliberations, the possibilities that went unrealized, the interruption of plans by unexpected events. See Grethlein, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography, 29-52, here: 32.

26 On the parallels drawn by German Hellenists in the aftermath of the First World War between the Germany of 1918 and the Athens of 404 BCE and the privileged place of Thucydides in coming to terms with the German defeat, see Andurand, Le Myth grec allemande, 313–317.

27 GA 19: 629/437. The placing of this citation in the appendix to the lecture course was an editorial decision made with a view to producing a fluid, readable text. See Ingeborg Schüßler, “Editor’s Epilogue” to Plato’s Sophist, GA 19: 654-668/457-466, here: 665/464. While I cannot rule out the possibility that the note was a later addition to the original manuscript, the wider hermeneutic context strongly suggests that it was written contemporary with the course.

28 See von Ranke, Weltgeschichte i. 2, 49–52.

29 I agree with Kisiel that “Of the three life-styles that Aristotle examines [of pleasure, contemplation and politics], only the political life manifests the full temporality of the unique human situation in its momentous decision that is the ultimate focus of Heidegger’s protopractical ontology of historical being, of that be-ing ‘which can also be otherwise’” See Kisiel, “Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger’s Protopractical Ontology”, 185-208, here: 200.

30 See Heidegger, Nature History State, 62 and Heidegger, “Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat”, 86.

31 This and the following Thucydides citations are from Hammond’s translation.

32 Hornblower argues that over and above literal violence, the term βιαιότατος in this context has connotations of being “persuasive”, of “rhetorical effectiveness.” See Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, 1, 420.

33 These claims bear more than a passing resemblance to the anti-Semitic stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory propagated in the aftermath of First World War.

34 GA 19: 629/437. I have changed the English translation by rendering “Schicksal” as “fate”. The original German reads: “Im Ganzen genommen: ‘Ihr schwelgt im Genuß des Zuhören (Korrelativ zu Reden!) und gleicht eher solchen, die dasitzen und Sophisten begaffen als solchen, die über das Schicksal des Staates sich entscheiden sollen.’” Heidegger refers to “Thukydides, Geschichte des peloponnesischen Krieges.” Note that the πόλις, the concrete form of being-with-one-another, becomes the “state”.

35 The 1852 Greek-German edition Thukydides' Geschichte des peloponnesischen Krieges translates the phrase as: “das Staatswohl berathenden Männer.” The German language 1920 edition renders this phrase as “Männer, die über Staatsangelegenheiten verhandeln”.

36 Heinz details how such a conception of the relation between people and state is central to Heidegger’s political education seminar of 1933-4: “Otherwise than in Being and Time, philosophy no longer has the role of calling the particular Dasein to authentic, finite existing by means of existential projections; the task of philosophy is now to interpret the historical moment and to bring Dasein before its historical decision as a political being.” See Heinz, “Volk and Führer”, 67-84, here: 72–3. My point here is that it is plausible to see such considerations as informing the ontological analyses of § 74 on the ontic level.

37 I am thinking especially of the notorious passage from the 1933–4 lecture course: “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.” GA 36/7: 91/73.

38 Heidegger also provides other examples of being-with-another-another that are not so amenable to a political interpretation, for instance, of a silent being-with-one-another in the face of what evokes awe (GA 27: 86). Similarly, Heidegger also refers to the historical happening [Geschehen] of certain moments of the history of philosophy (Heraclitus and Kant) (GA 26: 272/211). While these examples show that the discussions of Being and Time, § 74 do not exhaust the meanings of being-with and historicality in Heidegger’s work in the mid and late 1920s, neither, I believe, is capable of shedding much light on § 74.

39 Existential structures become manifest within singular ontic possibilities, meaning the latter also condition what is disclosed in the former. This unavoidably gives rise to the danger of transcendentalizing singular experiences, of falling prey to the “illusion” that what “is in each case seized upon as wholly singular” is “the one and only necessary path” (GA 26: 201/158).