"America and Russia are the Same":

Geopolitics in Heidegger's Seinsfrage^

Dean Lauer
Martin Heidegger's interest in world politics extends as far as his
interest in the question of being. Consequently and inasmuch as Heidegger has developed his philosophy of being-there {Dasein), which is necessarily here, i.e., the there of a particular place, being takes shape
according to its place on the earth. The event of being, its disclosure and
withdrawal, is an historical one. Being so disclosed, Heidegger understands as authentic truth.^ But what can being understood this way indicate regarding politics, no less geography? Actually, geography is politics
for Heidegger insofar as truth is a sited, situation specific occurrence. The
evidence in advance of this conclusion lies in Heidegger's pre-Socratic
retrieval of the philosophical concept of truth as disclosure {aletheia)
rather than its modem incamation as correctness {veritas)? In tum, correctness and agreement (uniformity) give way to variation, creative
appropriation and, ultimately, recognition of othemess or the Other.
Heidegger's geopolitics is understood as the question of being (die
Seinsfrage). The question takes focus, more directly, by asking not just
1. Over many conversations, Professor Bernhard Radloff at the Universite
d'Ottawa has been a source of insight and inspiration. Let this acknowledgement also be a
thank 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 Robinson (Oxford: Biackwell, 1962), p. 76. Hereafter BT.
3. Cf Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hohlengleichnis
und Thedtet, ed. by H. Morchen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 2Iff;
and Martin Heidegger, "Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit" in Wegmarken, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostemann, 1978), pp. 201-36. Translated as "Plato's Doctrine of
Truth" by J. Barlow in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, ed. by W. Barrett and
H.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 disclosure of being) takes shape differently. Truth as disclosure emerges by the
structure of the hermeneutic situation. What governs the site of disclosure,
or the hermeneutic situation, i.e., the social/political regime, of course, has
bearing on the interpretation of truth and the fate of those within the space
of truth. The geographical situation, then, arises in concert with the
moment of truth as the decisive political point upon which the question of
being can be asked. This is Heidegger's target in his EinfUhrung in die
Metaphysik {1935): the unfolding of this juncture of place, being and truth.
1. Place: USA o USSR
In 1935 Heidegger observes this juncture within the political situation of Europe from the perspective of sovereign nations and geographical
pressures that are degrading the being-there of Dasein, that is, he sees an
existential deadening of disclosures other than the dominant American
and the Russian ones."* Although, the systems of capital in both countries
appear different or opposed in theory, Heidegger contends that as exercised they are similar because they deny the question of being and, subsequently, ignore the hermeneutie situation to which all beings are tied.
Disregarding the hermeneutic situation denies accord to the place and
variation of the site of emergence of being. This leads to the dislocation of
identity no less than the metaphysics of universal truths. The revolutions
that gave rise to American manifest destiny and Soviet world communism
both mean the ideological spread of one way of life at the expense of
other people and places, of the Other. Of course, the horrors of Stalin's
Russia, which Heidegger was not yet familiar with proved that the Soviet
ideology was the more violent one, while the American proved to be the
longer lasting. When Heidegger talks about both America and Russia
being the same, he must mean this in a practical sense of the time but also
in the abstract sense of what their ideological systems could imply.
In post-World War II, Heidegger sees Europe as caught between the
millstones of American liberalism and Russian Bolshevism.^ Heidegger
4. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, tn by Ralph Mannheim (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Hereafter IM.
5. In On Heidegger (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth: 2000), author Patricia Alterbernd
Johnson claims that Heidegger is targeting the economics of "capitalism and communism," p. 80. Her introductory book assumes the claim as a matter of common interpretation. True enough. Granted, however, that capitalism as conceived by Adam Smith has its
center of interest in the welfare of the community, and that Marx's formulation of communism is a development of human emancipation, it is not obvious that Heidegger would
reject these economics in principle. At the same time, Heidegger would repudiate the
metaphysics of unaccountable liberal economics as well as the imposition by elites (Bolsheviks) of a command economy.

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sees both to be metaphysically the same because they, "Russia and America," are each locked in a "dreary technological frenzy, the same uprooted
organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost comer of
the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic
exploitation."^ As such, the Russian and American systems actively defile
particularity and individuality in exchange for homogeneity since the
guiding truth is a universal (metaphysical) one of economic extraction
and exploitation. The machine of these economic systems demands this
homogeneity because it seeks to maximize the retum on labor for material
consumption (US) and production (USSR). The mono-cultural aim of
these systems means that their economic models will be received anywhere, 'accepted' in any population. Meanwhile, the space of the worker
is rapidly alienated as market and command forces make the workshop as
generic and efficient as possible for maximum quantitative output. Both
the scene of labor and the laborer are then measured in efficiency wherein
the factory typifies increasingly technological life, i.e., the assembly line,
the stamping plant, for the evolving socio-technieal state. In this state, the
Dasein of both countries gets fitted into and, hence, managed by the
industrial protocol, which calls for a certain uniformity that promotes the
efficiency of the comprehensive protocol. In this way, America and Russia are nations only in name for they do not preserve national differences
and identities, much less the natural world. Conversely, they bring about
"the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the
hatred and suspicion of everything creative and free."^
Global economic programs are predicated on the theory of universal
production techniques and accompanying uniform consumption models
that prescind from the situation infelicities of the natural and historical
world such as culture, identity issues, and language differences. These
differences are read as nothing but nuisances, potential errors for stochastic analysis within the mathematical organizing scheme. Henceforth, the
socio-technical ordering of humanity into an economic model is loath to
deal with anything outside the objective norm. Heidegger sees this organization as the objectification of the individual and the environment through
the spatial and historical levelling {Einebnung) of differences that are carried out through industrial economics. The erasure of differences anticipates the incorporation of an unfettered transnational ideological system,
which, of course, both future cold warriors competitively advocated as
6.
7.

Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 37.

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 both
foment their own global objectives, which is essentially the same objective: the economic stamp of a certain generic, undifferentiated populous.
That uniformity is a product of something intemal to the make-up of
the American and Soviet systems, which seek unlimited expansion, suggests the uniformity can be understood as arising from a rejection of the
consideration of being. The rejection of being should be understood here
as a rejection and, subsequently, cancellation of the diversity, variation
and idiosyncratic othemess native to authentic truth disclosure. The rejection places a restriction on being's ability to show itself, which means that
a determined structure of being is placed into appearance at the expense
of others. This appearance places conformity over beings, thereby expropriating the specificity and diversity of appearances organic to the disclosure of being. These appearances subject the disclosure of being to
political forces that demand a given sameness or uniformity that matches
with economic abstraction. These appearances in the form of commercialism, propaganda and re-education are the preparation for the socio-technical constitution of the state, which has arisen from the same sociotechnical, even cybemetic, installation of universal economic applications, which are non-specific with regard to the place or situation. The liberal and Bolshevik economic structures showcase this as a restriction of
being and restriction over the space of disclosure of being in the usual disclosure of truth (truth as sameness, correctness). This restriction is ultimately a rejection of the question of being. These structures are an
overstated modemist manifestation of the positivistic conception of
nature and a general corruption of the question of being. Consequently,
the rationalized/bureaucratic structures of both future superpowers is at
odds with Heidegger's thesis in Sein und Zeit that tries to rekindle the
question of being. The opposition between these structures and Heidegger's ontological inquiry is basically a matter ofthe recognition of being.
2. Being: The Question of Being
Whereas Heidegger is committed to retrieving the Seinsfragefromour
forgetfiilness of being (Seinsvergessenheit), the two global superpowers
are furiously tied up in a race to spread their own economic systems to the
detriment ofthe question regarding being. But the apparatus of economic
imperatives that make up the bi-polar world is merely the ontic expression
of 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 the

question of being so well that, by default, nihilism becomes their common
thread. And notably, "the essence of nihilism is the history in which there is
nothing to being itself"^ This nihilism is evinced as a concealing and subterranean rejection of the integrity and authority of being. Being and its
manifest 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 difference, is made necessary to the structure of expansion and exploitation
because, again, these economic systems are based on objective norms and
uniform techniques that seek global control. But the homogeneity of the
American-Soviet disclosure is in violation of authentic disclosures of
being, which are by definition local, earthy, sovereign events sited within
the context of historical Da-sein; it's dirty, gritty, there of the place.^
In order to provoke a truly global metaphysics, the philosophical
question of being must be rejected in favour of a socio-technical concept
of individual things that conforms to the configurations of production and
consumption. These economic calculations of the world fit with Heidegger's concept of advanced nihilism signalled by the abandonment of
beings by being (die Seinsverlassenheit), which consists in the absence of
the "unconcealing (Entbergung) of being as such."' The forgetting of
and the abandonment by being are related because they both signify the
concealing of being, though from the two different interlocutors of the
Dasein being relationship. The concealing of beings under the veil of
being abandoned leaves us destitute to the thoroughly ugly of humanity
destruction of the earth, the quantification life, the technological constitution of Dasein as given under global economics mandates. This
abandonment is only made more complicated and menacing by our forgetfulness of being, which Heidegger tries to counter with his Seinsfrage.
The veil of forgetting is especially fruitful in the discussion of geopolitics
because it reflects the ontological moment of the ontic manifestation of
forgetting homogeneity, undifferentiated matter, substance. As
Heidegger defines it, the forgetting of being "means: the self-concealing
8. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV: Nihilism, tr. by F.A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: 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 Thatbeing, in favour of the being that lightens beings as beings and remains
unquestioned as being."" The forgetting of being, therefore, implicates a
serious deficiency in the disclosure of being because the differentiation of
being gets artificially perverted into sameness in the light ofthe demand
for presence that appears evenly and constant, a kind of ersatz being configured technologically as undifferentiated substratum. (All life and
beings, for example, as represented by the periodic table of elements are
merely material constructions, which are essentially the same save for
numerical valences.) The appearing of being as undifferentiated and
demonstrably available is the ground for the metaphysical interpretation
of truth as agreement and correctness. In other words, neglecting the
question of being is not just a philosophical issue bome out in refiexion
on the epistemic nature ofthe world, forgetting about being is an individual, social, and political issue because the deficient sense of truth, as correctness, becomes decisive for being-in-the-world. The forgetting of
being shown as tmth under the veil of (mathematical) correctness, therefore, is the precondition of socio-technical thought and the techno-cybernetic conception of life in general under the ideological state. It is only
with a reconsideration of the question of being proper that the restrictive
sense of truth as mere correctness can be rolled back and the withdrawal of
being (the -lethe of a-letheia), its closure and hidden essence, can be
unfolded. Hence, Heidegger's priority on the disclosure of being in the
Einfurhung; for '"disclosure of being' means the unlocking of what forgetfiilness of being closes and hides."'^ This is why Heidegger's thesis that
tmth is disclosure ofthe manifold presence of being rather than correctness
or conformity to representation is undermined when being is forgotten.
3. Truth: Aletheia and Correctness
That the forgetting of being restricts the meaning of tmth to correctness strongly suggests that tmth as an organic movement of disclosure
and withdrawal gets interpreted as chaotic, incorrect. To translate this into
politics means that the intensely modem goveming schemes of the two
economic powers of liberalism and Bolshevism place tmth into the math
of abstraction, which is a metaphysics of representation that founds the
calculation involving correctness. Consequently, the differentiation of
being that reveals itself in the disclosure of tme being is simply reticulated
11.
12.

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

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back into the metaphysics of correctness. It appears, more narrowly, here

as incorrect by virtue of its position in the general context of modem
understanding - mathematical correctness. Because this context of understanding fixes what is correct and incorrect, valid and invalid, other disclosures of being outside of this context are simply found to be false,
invalid. Recall that truth is primordially given as aletheia. That a-letheia
is the first name for both disclosure and withdrawal means that the system
of tmth that privileges the privative (a-) or disclosure of presence as the
condition ofthe possibility of correctness (tmth, veritas) implies that the
withdrawal {-lethe) is systemically occulted by the metaphysics of presence. This kind of presence is also referred to by Heidegger as "constant
presence" {bestdndige Anwesenheit).^^ Constant presence is demanded by
a technological economy because it is only in relief of a context that
stands still and uniform that political and economic instmments can be
effectively applied across borders and populations. Hence, today's rise of
the transnational corporation, the spread of mediocrity through the American monoculture, and the diminution ofthe world's languages.''*
That which does not conform to the principle of constant presence
simply cannot be interpreted as anything other than unrecognized input or
malfunction. Difference, understood as the withdrawal {-lethe) at the
moment of tmth, cannot properly be given significance or rendered relevant. The reconfiguration of tmth within the metaphysics that demands
constant presence now signals the "darkening of the world," the erasure
of difference and the exploitation of nature.'^
4. Place II: Germany and Europe: The Geographical Situation
Of course, the metaphysical conception of being as constant and uniform presence, what Heidegger calls "demonstrable visibility," is not just
a matter of the forgetting of being that belongs to ontology, this conception of being moots implications for civil society as well.'^ As Bemhard
Radloff wisely concludes, "The form ofthe incorporation ofthe lethe into
the polity, as error or errance, as the ritual of sheltering unconcealment or
13. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die philosophie, ed. by H. Tietjen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), p. 60.
14. Cf. Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and
the 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 the
normative implications be that a society or nation, which more authentically understands the movement of truth, might achieve a greater destiny
in world history?
Undoubtedly, Heidegger is aligned with Conservative Revolutionaries
of the Weimar period that opposed globalism and at the same time looked
to restore the German spirit. Yet, Heidegger is under no illusions that the
German polity is not one, like the rest of the West, which is imbued with
the metaphysics of representation and correctness. The "destructive evil"
that Heidegger talks about with respect to Americanism is by no means a
personal 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 and
Oswald Spengler also gave rise to Rudolf Camap and to neo-Kantian legal
positivism. But this does not prevent Heidegger from conceiving Germany
as a counterpoint to this metaphysics because Germany, after all, is not
one of the loud exponents of the evolving new world order. In fact, Germany has ironically become a victim of this Wilsonian world order as a
result of its own aggression and desire to impose a world order. As everyone knows, the dictates of Versailles put enormous burdens on the German
polity, in effect accelerating it to the threshold of national collapse. Under
this pressure, i.e., the millstones of the WWI victors, Germany could be
seen not as a chosen nation privileged with a special understanding of
truth, but as a locus against the prevailing model of economic exploitation,
global integration of technology, and the buming up of nature, all of which
are founded in the metaphysics of truth as correctness and constant presence the preconditions of liberalism and Bolshevism. Under the spell of
global technology, being becomes deracinated into constant presence as
demanded by the mathematics of hemispheric/planetary control. This is
modemity in its advanced form, as will to power. Nature withers away and
is seen only as a sterile vector for asserting domination. The earth reveals
itself merely as positional coordinates within a technological field of
resource availabilities. American and Soviet economics force being into the
service of competitive, strategic advantage. That their conception of being
puts ideology over experience, economics over humanity, technology over
17. Bemhard RadlofF, "Heidegger's Critique of Imperial Truth," in Existentia 10/14 (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 corporate) instruments of the will to power.
The transformation of the earth into a field of resources and labour in
the service of a will to power means that a certain regime or guiding
thread (i.e., metaphysics) has made this conquest possible. This is, as
mentioned, the reduction of truth to simple correctness, which, again, is
derivative of the forgetfulness and loss of effulgent being. During the
1930s Heidegger associates the reduction of truth to calculation with the
proscription of the question of being. Evidently, America and Russia fill
this proscription. The question of being regarded as "being-able no longer
means a wealth of talent, lavishly spent and the command of energies;
rather, it means merely practicing a routine through which anyone can be
trained . . . In America and Russia this development intensified into a
boundless indifference and always-the-sameness - so much so that quantity took on a quality all its own. Since the domination in those countries
of a cross-section of the indifferent mass has become something more of
an onslaught that destroys rank and world-creating impulse of the spirit
and shows these as Hes."^
Loss of creativity, inspiration and spirit, which are the opposite of the
indifferent, are Heidegger's cark. The blanket approach of the liberal and
Bolshevik economic systems advance levelling and indifference, i.e.,
exclusion of eccentricity and difference, which is founded in a fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) to passivity and acceptance that is
ground into the living situation of a people. Marx would call this attunement 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 of
being and, as it tums out, the German circumstance is remarkably receptive to the question, due in part perhaps to its marginalization from the
'truths' being trumpeted by the League of Nations and the emerging global economics of the US and USSR. These truths announce "boundless
indifference and always-the-sameness": the spiritless and banal life
purged of temporality.^' However, the stress overloading central Europe,
which had not yet been assimilated into the program of the world economics, in the 1920s and early 30s could be interpreted as giving rise to existential burdens within the German obloquy. These burdens may likely have
forced the question of being thereby overriding the economic instruments
20.
21.

Ibid., p. 46 - translation altered.

Ibid., p. 46 - translation altered.

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of socio-technical Dasein. Special burdens fated to a country can enlist a

people to a peculiar or great destiny. Heidegger puts it into words this
way, "burdening gives back to things, to beings, their historical weight
(Being). And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and fundamental conditions - attunements one could say for the birth of all
greatness, in speaking of greatness we refer above all else to an historical
people, its works and the destinies of nations."^^ Though "great" may
sound culturally prejudiced in the sense of superior, Heidegger means this
greatness not in the sense of something exclusive but in the sense of
something distinctive. The destiny of Germany could be to trumpet a sense
of the exceptional or othemess, bestowed by asking the question of being,
and this othemess could stand against the incorporation of Europe into the
jejune, debased life of American/Soviet economics. In short, the crisis situation of the German poHs could distinguish itself apart from the homogenizing socio-technical truths, and accompanying all-for-one economic
systems, being broadcast to both the East and West of Europe. There are
others truths, and Germany as well as Europe, unshackled from the sociotechnical tmth associated with the abandonment and forgetting of being
could point to these others. Othemess or the Other, in fact, is a recollection
of being in the sense of a multiplicity of (other) disclosures, as aletheia.
Following the way phenomenology enlightens the thinker, aletheia
must be sited, rooted, and historically reflective of the community, otherwise it is truth already told from someplace else. In other words, the truth
need not necessarily be 'true' for Dasein, being-there(-now). Whereas a
universal metaphysics overlays its truth on a people, thereby dominating
them, authentic tmth under the name aletheia emerges organically as a
common event of the differentiation of being within a community. This
event marks the difference specificity and geography of a people
that share in the historical nature of the event.^-' Consequently, the disclosure appears not as an anaemic, scripted result but rather as a febrile,
inspired event that is mine {eigen) because it pertains to my historical situation and is distinctively mine. This event of truth unfolds itself according to the difference and peculiarity of what is unique to the historical
situation, i.e., to the time and place: to being-here-now! Moreover, the
historical situation founds the relevance and weights of things because
Dasein is by defmition historical, i.e., already 'there.' Recovering the historical situation by now puts a people within a geographical area, or
22.
23.

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

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"landscape," that returns the situation to its lively specificity disallowed

by the anonymity of an external economic regime.^'* The local situation,
that which founds the context for the differentiation of heing in the event
of truth, then, pre-empts the non-specific economic measures that Americanism and Russianism attempt to impose transnationally. This way, the
factual world situation cannot he crossed out by the socio-technical system unless it is sanitized of its errancy {lethe), particularity, and local richness; unless it is robbed of its native, authentic truth {a-letheia). The
givenness of place, the environing world, suborns the entry of an alien,
technological worldview into the primacy of the present situation. Yet
through propaganda and economic coercion, this is just what the sociotechnical systems of America and Russia attempt. Conformity through
industrial, socio-technical economic instruments and scientific hubris
steals the specificity of being and, therefore, the being of a people, in
effect, washing away historical difference and difference itself
That entities in this way can be analyzed through the hygienic scope
of science by means of mathematical analysis, dispossessed of local
markers, ready-to-hand uses, and aesthetic qualities implicates a devaluation of temporal, factual reality. The technical transformation of Dasein
through economic imperatives means that the definitive form ofthe things
for which we have concern {Besorgen) in practical life is compromised in
favor of metaphysical principles that manage the polis. These cerebral
principles effectively pull or remove Dasein from the fulgent "there" of
its situation. The things themselves, as it were, become recalcitrant,
shorn of their relevance and fall mute. Representations and system functions 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, potentially
loses its locus and historical boundary, becoming de-sited, because the situation-at-hand no longer appears individual or relevant. The world of
practical involvements appears temporarily foreign, occurent {Vorhandenheit). This is an instance of breakdown within Dasein's structure of
use, which, again, serves to move Dasein as a whole into an insipid space
wherein surrounding entities appear dull and emptied of their significance.
The natural world fails to resonate or inspire existential Dasein because
the intimacy and specificity of the region of disclosure (truth) has been
occluded by plastic products, socio-technical life, and meta-economic
24,
25,

Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 39,

Heidegger, BT, op. cit., p. 15,

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143

principles. As a result, the possibility for concrete participation in the

political sphere dissolves because the rhetoric of politics is empty and disconnected just as are the daily phenomena that show themselves as superficial and drained.
Heidegger is committed to philosophy in the 1930s as a counterpoint
to the politicizing of Europe by the left and right of Russia and America.
If philosophy, specifically phenomenology, can spell rehabilitation ofthe
historical peoples of Europe, especially the Germans, then the systematic
political/economic devices of Russia and American could be edited out of
the Continent. The organic specificity of cultural differences could save
Europe from the machination of a foreign socio-technical life and economic exploitation. It is in this respect, that Heidegger sees the historical
mission of Germany as saving the individuating power of spirit from the
'millstones' of Americanism and Russianism. This means nothing less
than winning the question of being for the German Volk from the monotony of uncontested ideology and economic manipulation.
As mentioned, Heidegger was allied with the Conservative Revolutionaries ofthe time, especially during his term as rector at Freiburg. But
as a matter of clarification, his thinking, like many of the conservatives,
betrays a philosophy that is opposed to Nazi-party racial superiority. In
reality, Heidegger's concern for the Other could be perceived as a disguised invective against the Hitler's sentiment of blood and superiority.
The sub-point here is not to dispute Heidegger's affiliation with National
Socialism, but simply to note that Heidegger's brief Nazi association was
almost certainly an anti-Hitler one because, in this case, truth {a-letheia)
acclaims the Other, against the hierarchies of race; the Aryan race being a
level or standard for the Volk to constitute its 'truth.'^^ In short, truth is
understood according to its agreement to a prototype of perfection; a true
('correct') German approximates the features of a Nordic ideal. Meanwhile, a-letheia, celebrates differences, including racial difference,
among a Volk thereby constituting the 'truths' of Dasein, which according to Sein und Zeit includes a certain reverence for the Other; in this
kind of pluralistic truth there are no prototypes, only other truths. This is
26, Cf, Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universtdt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1983), p, 13,
27, Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish socialist and nationalist, in fact, first devised 'geopolitics' in 1910 to contain afolkhemmet (people's home) based to some extent on the homogeneity of a people. This is likely inconsistent with Heidegger's formulation of geopolitics that
has its locus of concern in the question of being, i,e,, history, rather than race. See Kjellen's
Staten som livesform [State as Live Form] (Stockholm: Hugo Gerbers Forlag, 1916),

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Heidegger's philosophical confrontation with the Nazis on race, albeit

one that has to be interpreted.
Yet the contemporary reader will want to keep in mind that no one
wanted to suffer the harassment of fellow Nazis that had challenged Hitler's fascist distortion of National Socialism.^^ The persecution of the
brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser was vicious as was the persecution of
those purged by the Third Reich in January 1934 due to internal rebellion. ^ Nazis who spoke out against the regime were treated especially
brutally since their party affiliation gave them added credibility in the
public's eye, Heidegger's reticence should be understood partly in respect
of the atmosphere of tyranny that was developing as Hitler solidified
power. Additionally, it may be that some of Heidegger's rhetoric was a
pragmatic move to satisfy the dictatorship and avoid censure. At the same
time, Heidegger's language about a culture of a people or Volk in no way
should be conftised with the inauthentic Nazi rhetoric ofthe time.-'^ Race
is not an issue for Heidegger, whereas Hitler and the Nazi establishment
unquestionably conceive culture in any context to be subordinate to race.
"A state can be designated as bad if, despite a high cultural level, it dooms
the bearer ofthis culture in his racial composition."^' 'Racial composition' implicates the advancing science ofthe biology of race in sorting out
the correct strains of genetics from the mixtures. As such, the biology of
race, laboratory eugenics, and so on herald the advancement of scientific
techniques in the formation of a valorous and homogenous Volk?^ In fact,
biology and the reproductive sciences take a "living being" and "define it
mechanistically," an observation Heidegger made a decade before Nazi
racism 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 Noir
du Communisme, ed, by Stephane Courtois (Paris: Laffont, 1997), pp, 178-92, Originally
published in Elements, No, 92 (July 1998), pp, 15-24, The author makes the salient point
regarding the vicious nature of Stalinism, Americanism, though theoretically disposed to
ideology like all the West, by no means should be equated with despotism, iniquity, and
cruelty 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 itself
proves 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 Abraham
Foxman (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 Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p, 4,

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145

Quite to the opposite ofthe Nazis in power, Heidegger conceives culture and Volk exclusive of race. In fact, race is not properly an issue within
the Seinsfrage, and in 1934 Heidegger explicitly contradicts the Fuhrer's
priority given over to race in the determination of a Volk, A Volk "does not
mean . . . the racial in the sense of what pertains to blood and heredity . . .
and does not pertain in the first instance, to the corporality ofthe family
and the genders."^"* This statement is not only, perhaps, a moral repudiation
of official party doctrine, but it is also an expression ofthe consistency of
Heidegger's philosophy. Racial investigations rely on everything from
genetics to the discredited science of phrenology to announce the research
and methodological protocols of socio-technical thought precisely the
thought Heidegger is trying to avoid. Thus, race is relegated to a technological determination of a people, which is, consequently, an a-temporal and
representational view of a Volk that is in basic disagreement with the
project ofthe Seinsfrage, even in the conservative Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik?^ The mechanizing of human life through the technical understanding of biology finally makes Hitler's fascism the most sinister illustration
of socio-technical thought, which is to say nihilism.
5. Being and Truth: The Being ofthe Other
The Seinsfrage in the shape of existential phenomenology, however,
needs to subtend the metaphysics ofthe contemporary medical and sociotechnical worldview, which, in this case, underpins the biological purity
of race. Heidegger suggests that it is only through a tum in our comportment {Verhaltung) to being that Dasein can gain an authentic relationship
to being {Seinsverhdltnis). This, notably, comes to pass as affected Dasein
understands its world through the differential ofthe Other. This differential ofthe Other, Heidegger, designates "none too happily as 'empathy'
{Einfuhlung)"; empathy, therefore, is able to "provide the first ontological
bridge 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 Historicity 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 Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Hugo Ott, Heidegger: A Political Life,
tr, by Allen Blunden (New York: Basic, 1993); Jurgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanshauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective," in Heidegger: A Critical
Reader, 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 understanding of the other in empathy is Miteinandersein (being-there-with-others), its most mature sense of Mitsein (being-with). But, crucially, Mitsein
remains only and always being-with in the sense of a casual disengagement
with others, unless Dasein is affectively moved to consciously recognize the
other as Other, genuinely different. In other words, the 'with-world' of Mitsein is, as yet, the unrealized world of being-there-with-others because Mitsein is passive, as it were, in its existential, stmctural ability to move Dasein
into a different disclosure. That Dasein is always within the structure of Mitsein does not mean that it appreciates or thoughtfully considers its potential
to reach the Other. The potential remains latent but this potential is a condition for the very possibility of Dasein since \f "'Dasein is at all, it has beingthere-with-others as its kind of being."^^
Indeed, Dasein is both there-with-others physically in its usual wayof-being and not-there, in the sense that it is tuned-out, as it were, to the
Other. Heidegger remarks that this common mode of being is one of
'unsociability' {"Unumganglichkeit"), which is to be contrasted, for
example, with being-there for the other in authentic care, or solicitude
{Fiirsorge), which is Heidegger's cardinal statement on the ethical potential of Dasein?^ This kind of care and solicitude anticipates Heidegger
conclusion in Section 65 Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of
Care that affected, resolute Dasein is "more authentically 'there' in the
'moment of vision' {"Augenbiicic") as regards the Situation which has
been disclosed."-^^ When Dasein is more 'there,' more fliUy in the situation and, hence, more conscious of others, it, at the same time, is more
authentic because it is more itself, robust in its primordial constitution as
being-there. Consequently, the Other that is unfolded robustly in the
affective, resolute state of being-in-the-world makes Dasein's existential
being an issue and raises Dasein from a 'deficient,' i.e., average everyday,
mode of being-with-others to one of mutual enrichment authentic
being-there-with-others. Recognition of the Other is reciprocally liberating for Dasein and the Other as this recognition makes the enactment of
being-there more real, giving it more existential force, so to speak.
At this point, the Other emerges not from the stale, everyday sense of
being-with but from within the moment of resoluteness {Entschlossenheit)
36.
37.
38.
39.

Heidegger, BT, op. cit., p. 162.

Ibid., p. 161 translation altered.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 376.

GEOPOLITICS IN HEIDEGGER

14 7

to move Dasein to a distinctive mode of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit),

or authenticity.^^ Dasein is literally more itself ('zMe/ge'), able to win its
own identity from the bland masses das Man.'^^ In its ability to distinguish 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 normative
moment of Sein und Zeit that Heidegger introduces the connexion
between the other and resoluteness.
Dasein's resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to
let the Others who are with it 'be' in their ownmost potentiality-forBeing, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps
forth and liberates. When Dasein is resolute, it can become the 'conscience' of others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another - not by ambiguous and
jealous 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 and
respected, if respect can be read into being the '"conscience" of others.'
Meanwhile, it is clear that authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is intimately
related to the disclosure of and respect for the Other.'*'' Ownness and othemess must be structurally related for they unfold reciprocally within the
self-differentiating event of truth (aletheia) authentic disclosure. That this
is the case within the dense text of the existential analytic, presages
Heidegger's enigmatic entry into the political fray ofthe 1930s.
Heidegger's ontological deconstruction of Dasein's authenticity, its
potential-for-being-itself (Seinskonnen), is reflected at the macro-level in
his political intimations in the Einfuhrung, which rejects the socio-technical 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 LIniversity
Press, 1995), p, 294.
43, Heidegger, BT, op. cit., pp, 344-5,
44, With this sense of authenticity, Seren Overgaard is right in asserting that Levinas is incorrect by claiming that Heidegger, and Husserl for that matter, do not have a substantial moral sense of the Other. See Overgaard's "On Levinas' Critique of Husserl" in
Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp, 115-138,

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Bolshevism. Again, that Heidegger there focuses his efforts on the German Volk does not preclude the importance of other world Volk, rather it
highlights the hermeneutie situation: Germany's geopolitical distinction
and 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 as
the 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 the
decision over the future of Europe and other European Volker. Germany is
uniquely situated geographically and historically to contest the glohal
powers of America and Russia hecause, as mentioned, it had heen so isolated, which was due in large part to the allied victory that precipitated the
Treaty of Versailles, Russian might to the East, French revanchism to the
West, and an expanding American commercial culture. If the principle
victors, America and Russia, are the same metaphysically and if the allied
powers in Europe move in tandem with America or Russia means, de
facto, that the only voice of resistance to the new socio-technical world
order, at this time, properly comes from the punished, the marginalized,
the 'other' people ofthe West: the Germans. Hence, the Other enters the
geopolitical scene at this time in the form of that Volk which is wary of
the uniform and homogenizing forces of global economics and industrial
alienation from historical existence.
While the concept of Other cannot properly be expressed in the coercive economics of liberalism and Bolshevism, the impecunious German
Volk is the forum where the other speaks precisely because it has not yet
been smothered by these global economic systems. Like the marginalized
people today in the world's poor stricken nations being cannibalized hy globalization, the German polis felt this disenfranchisement too. And in Spengler'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, particularly economic globalization, and this form was being put in place as
the two global superpowers solidified their strength and ideology (metaphysics) during the interbellum. Globalization means the domination and
global 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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149

vanquishing of the Other in the name of sameness, the erasure of geographical/political difference.
Such a claim may be theoretically consistent but has the Other really
been vanquished in favor of sameness? There appear to be two kinds of
globalization at issue here. On one hand, globalization under the name of
corporate exploitation the ideology of reckless capitalism has the
ancillary effect of chipping away at the world's diversity. For example,
the fast-food industry with all the familiar corporate logos keeps pushing
their brand of salty, high calorie monster meals on the world with an
evangelical-like sales pitch. How can the dried fish snacks eaten for over
a thousand years by Icelanders compete with the marketing of burgers and
fried chicken? This globalization has nothing to do with the question of
being. One the other hand, there is a globalization that, at least in the short
term, actually brings one in touch with othemess and difference. That
immigrant Pakistanis are introducing Norwegians to kebabs and Islamic
traditions and that Norwegians in tum are introducing Pakistanis to social
democracy and lutefisk cannot be seen as having a levelling effect on cultural values and historical traditions. In fact, going for some Pakistani
spice when one gets tired of flshballs is not just refreshing, it opens up a
space for othemess within the traditionally rather homogeneous Norwegian Volk {ox folk). Indeed, there is a sense that just plain exposure to new
and different customs makes one more liberal and tolerant. This globalization practiced as movements of people seems beneficial for the introduction of diversity and new experience. But that it promotes othemess
and diversity now, in the short term, does not imply that this diversity will
be conserved. When populations and cultures assimilate, the specter of
sameness and levelling arises such that othemess gets so incorporated as
to effectively disappear. (Will any French remain in Louisiana in 50
years?) A policy of multiculturalism may help to preserve and enhance
native and migrant population in an increasingly nomadic world. In any
case, the latter form of globalization is one that prompts the question of
being, specifically because it brings the polis into contact with what is different, which leads to the question of history and back to the question of
being. The globalization that threatens to erase differences is announced
most pemiciously in the former sense of economic, i.e., corporate, globalization. It is this same sense of geopolitical economics that Heidegger
sees behind the disenfranchisement and uprooting of Central Europe
because powers in the US and the Soviet Union were in some ways like
corporate powers today looking to expand their influence and markets.

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This meant overlaying a truth, however foreign, onto a people, and managing people through modem bureaucratic efficiency, which, naturally,
assumes that people will accept this truth, incorporate it and become the
same people everywhere else. Herewith is the mobilization of historical
people into a global ideological agenda Heidegger's "gigantic," the
"summation of everything homogeneous."^^ By the definition of phenomenology as the discourse ofthe appearing of being, if the hermeneutical 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 phenomena
that appear will be conceived as ideologically derived of a spiritually vacuous being. This empty sense of being is preparation for the uniform
schema of liberalism and Bolshevism no less than the "gigantic", also
understood as unrestricted domination, destruction ofthe Other, abandonment ofthe earth and technological control/integration of being-there.
The German Volk stood in confrontation to the dispirited sense of
being, this sameness, as something different. A Volk standing in the centre
of truth are a people differentiated from the generic world, if the truth is
one not founded on being's irrelevance. The question of a people
bespeaks the question of being and truth. Could the retrieval of forgotten
being return truth to its authentic sense as disclosure of the genuinely
novel and different, ofthe Other? And if the reorganization of existence
under the mantle of socio-technical "progress" and economic models
dooms the historical specificity of a people, and, therefore, othemess, will
the question of being exempt us from the monotony of sameness, inauthentic truth? Will the Other be saved from today's globalization of economic slavery? . . . "fVie steht es um das SeinT"^^ All Heidegger can do is
keep asking the question.

47, Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr, by Parvis

Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p, 311,
48, Heidegger, IM, op. cit., p. 32,