10.1177/0090591703260496
REVIEW
POLITICAL THEOR / August
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 2004
Y
A (POLITICAL) PHILOSOPHER
BY ANY OTHER NAME
The Roots of Heidegger s Thought
MAPPING THE PRESENT: HEIDEGGER, FOUCAULT AND THE
PROJECT OF A SPATIAL HISTORY by Stuart Elden. London: Continuum,
2001. 217 + xiv pp.
CRISIS THEORY AND WORLD ORDER: HEIDEGGERIAN
REFLECTIONS by Norman K. Swazo. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002. 289 + x pp.
THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM: AN INTRODUCTION TO
PHILOSOPHY by Martin Heidegger, trans. Ted Sandler. London: Contin-
uum, 2002 (1982). 216 + xiv pp.
REVOLUTIONARY SAINTS: HEIDEGGER, NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND
ANTINOMIAN POLITICS by Christopher Rickey. University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 2002. 296 + xvi pp.
HEIDEGGER S POLEMOS: FROM BEING TO POLITICS by Gregory
Fried. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 302 + xvi pp.
In a 1955 address delivered at his birth town of Messkirch, Heidegger dis-
cussed the significance of  homeland. Avoiding nationalist overtones but
focused on place, Heidegger was revisiting a concern for Bodenständigkeit,
or  rootedness, that occupied him since the early 1920s and rose to political
prominence the following decade. Homelessness, Heidegger continued to
lament after the war, was becoming the global destiny of humankind.
Technology and its socio-political handmaid, liberal cosmopolitanism,
were depicted as the chief threats. A recovery from the enframing grasp of
technology was to be gained, if it was to be gained, only through a
(re)discovery of our capacity for rootedness and releasement (Gelassenheit).
Releasement a  letting-be and a bearing witness would serve along with
rootedness as antidotes to the will to mastery over space and time that was
tightening technology s grip.
To the extent that moral systems remain characterized by the willful order-
ing of the world, they were depicted as (just) another form of enframing. In
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 4, April 2004 570-579
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260496
© 2004 Sage Publications
570
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 571
their stead, Heidegger asked that we shift our attention back to the Hera-
clitean notion of ethics as ethos or dwelling place. The alternative to human-
istic ethics in a cosmopolitan age of technology is an  originary ethics
marked by the rediscovery of our potential for dwelling in place, poetically
and politically.
Stuart Elden s Mapping the Present is a lively discussion of the impor-
tance of place in the writings of Heidegger and Foucault. Though the least
compelling of the books examined here, Mapping the Present is rightly
directed in its recommendation that theorists  spatialize history and not sim-
ply historicize space (p. 153). Elden argues that Heidegger shaped
Foucault s historical approach, and, more specifically, helped him develop a
concern for spatial history, understood not in terms of physical extension
through a series of chronological moments (Ä… la Descartes), but as a concern
for a place of dwelling that is experienced historically, which is to say,
authentically. As Elden observes, Dasein is the point of collision of a histori-
cal being with a futural orientation in a situated present. In the Augenblick, an
authentic grappling with the space-time of Dasein, one effectively maps the
present. Heidegger s effort to overcome metaphysics chiefly constituted the
rejection of a modern understanding of time and space, an understanding
Heidegger deemed fit only for world domination. In Hölderlin s tributes to
journey and place, Heidegger found the voice for a new, or rediscovered, rela-
tionship.
Elden argues that Foucault s concern with space demonstrates his indebt-
edness to Heidegger. This assertion is thinly documented, notwithstanding
Foucault s own high estimate of Heidegger. To be sure, Foucault analyzed the
geography of power. He investigated the policing of modern spaces, whether
these were the collective places of surveillance madhouses, prisons, and
clinics or the compartments of the soul where discipline becomes internal-
ized. But describing Foucault as a thinker interested in the exercise of power
within and between bodies, psyches, and social networks does not go very far
in demonstrating his Heideggerian roots.
Norman K. Swazo s Crisis Theory and World Order uses Heidegger to
promote authentic planetary dwelling while unsettling the assumptions of the
World Order project, a  systems approach that theorizes a homeostatic
world of enduring peace, justice, economic well-being, and ecological bal-
ance, secured by some form of unitary global governance or a global federal-
ism grounded in international law.
The first seventy pages of Swazo s book are devoted to an exposition of
the World Order project. This may be off-putting to Heidegger scholars. In
turn, Swazo s exegesis of Heidegger, I suspect, will be obscure to World
Order theorists. For those who have an abiding interest in global politics and
572 POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004
some background in Heidegger, however, Swazo s medley may strike a
chord.
Like Nietzsche, World Order scholars resist the objectification of individ-
uals and cultures. And, like Nietzsche, they fail to realize that combating
objectification by means of a heightened (global) subjectivity only further
enmeshes them in metaphysics. The way out, Heidegger demonstrated, was
to leave metaphysics alone and attempt to gain greater release from subjectiv-
ism in all its forms, including its liberationist guises.
All of Heidegger s later thinking, Swazo asserts, is a meditation on how
humanity might prepare itself for global governance while escaping the sub-
jectivism that inhibits authentic dwelling and caring. Swazo shares the prag-
matic concerns of World Order scholars and he endorses their  prudential
recommendations, such as demilitarization, developmental assistance for the
South, and increased powers for the United Nations and the International
Court of Justice. But when these  strategies of transition are placed within
an Enlightenment-style blueprint for world order, something vital is lost.
What gets neglected is the opportunity for authentic politics.
World Order theory, Swazo asserts, is best described by what Heidegger
called  calculative thinking. It is opposed to the  meditative thinking that
marked Heidegger s own ontological explorations. Swazo grants that think-
ing globally requires some calculative foresight. But he warns that it must not
be limited to reckoning and representation, lest we become the victims of our
own plans, forever kept from truly dwelling and caring by means of our
 technocratic futurism. World Order scholars must desist from asking  what
must be done long enough to pose the more essential question  how must we
think. Meditative thinking, Heidegger admitted, can appear quite useless
when compared to its calculative counterpart. But ontological reflections
also constitute fundamental historical forces, forces that Heidegger believed
bore the potential to (re)define entire epochs.
At this point, Swazo dips his cup deeply into Heideggerian waters, insist-
ing that the  basic words we employ in our meditative thought and speech
prepare the way for the  world occurrence of a politics that takes us beyond
the state (p. 233). The basic word that Swazo fixes upon is autarcheia.
Autarcheia, or autarchy, refers to the self-government of Dasein, the integra-
tion of ruler and ruled in the individual. The autarchos does not simply forge
her own laws. Rather, she  lets Being rule i.e., lets Being grant the  stan-
dard by which she acts. Therefore, she transcends, as it were, the formal rule
of law of this or that particular politeia, attending instead always and every-
where to justice as the ordo of Being (p. 219). Adopting Heidegger s pen-
chant for pure beginnings, Swazo maintains that only with Plato s depiction
of ruling as a skill, a kind of fabrication, does the separation of ruler and
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 573
ruled, the one and the many, occur. Autarcheia, therefore, is  the original way
to be political (p. 217).
The historical status of autarchy as an original politics is certainly debat-
able. But it is chiefly against Swazo s notion of the revolutionary power of
 essential words that I want to lodge a complaint. Swazo writes, in vintage
Heideggerian fashion, that  We stand before the possibility of an  originary
advent if but only if we are prepared to experience the saying of these
words as the task reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy . . .
autarchology is the name for that essential thinking of the political experi-
enced under the sway of the second beginning (p. 233). Swazo admits that
he risks, as did Heidegger, a certain  immodesty in claiming that he has
(re)coined the basic words whose enunciation will usher in a global politics
of authentic dwelling (p. 229). He also risks transforming terms meant to
stimulate questioning into narcotic chants a pitfall for many Heidegger
scholars.
Swazo accepts Heidegger s assertion that  apart from the truth of Being
man does not matter (p. 174). His point is that unless we let Being be, we
cannot hope to learn how to let humanity be in a way that does not deploy it as
just another component of the standing reserve. The problem is that the
inspiring effort to nourish our political lives with philosophical insight
becomes perverse and tends to create victims precisely when we believe
we have wholly captured philosophic truth in word or deed. Anxieties are
heightened by Heidegger s own linkage of ontological thinking to the way a
Volk pursues its world-historical destiny a linkage Swazo does not confront.
An ontological mantra will not redirect the historical trajectory of socio-
economic, technological, and cultural forces on a global scale. Nonetheless,
Swazo gives us food for thought as we ponder the need for (self) government
in a world where authentic dwelling fails to make the agenda of both World
Order scholars and their state-centric opponents.
One of the best ways to grapple with the importance of politico-philo-
sophical concepts like autarchy is to explore their relationship to freedom.
Heidegger s own The Essence of Human Freedom contains the lion s share of
his thoughts on the matter. The work, a translation of volume 31 of the
Gesamtausgabe, originally formed the basis of a lecture course offered in
1930. As the subtitle suggests, Heidegger understood the investigation of
freedom to sit at the core of the philosophical enterprise. The book presents a
detailed consideration of Kant s practical philosophy, with a focus on his
understanding of freedom in the context of causality. It also relates the ques-
tion of freedom to the nature of being in Greek metaphysics, with a particular
focus on Aristotle. For Heidegger, all philosophic roads lead to Athens
even if that destination can be reached only via Freiburg.
574 POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004
Heidegger addresses the common understanding of freedom as autonomy
and independence, the freedom from compulsion commonly known as  neg-
ative freedom. He notes that its counterpart,  positive freedom, is best
understood as a form of self-determination or self-mastery. Here Heidegger
simply follows Kant. He goes on to observe that for Kant, positive freedom
bears within it the problem of causality, as it bespeaks a spontaneous, self-
origination of events.
Kant, Heidegger contends, provided the most  radical understanding of
freedom available. But Kant s approach is not the most  primordial possi-
ble. That is because causality is only  one ontological determination of
beings among others. The causal connections we draw between things and
events is only one way for those things and events to be revealed (p. 205). In
contrast, freedom is the prerequisite for any and all disclosures of being.
Freedom is and should remain, therefore, the fundamental question for phi-
losophers. This is a startling claim for Heidegger to make, given the near-
complete absence of the topic in his previous and subsequent writings. Yet he
writes,  The essence of freedom only comes into view if we seek it as the
ground of the possibility of Dasein, as something prior even to being and
time. . . . Freedom is not some particular thing among and alongside other
things, but is superordinate and governing in relation to the whole. . . .
Human freedom now no longer means freedom as a property of man, but man
as a possibility of freedom (p. 93). It is because man is free that he can
become the singular  site where beings can  announce themselves (p. 94).
By participating in the freedom to witness what is, Dasein achieves its
greatness.
Dasein can escape the narrow egoism of a  bourgeois understanding of
(positive and negative) freedom, understood as mastery of the self and its
world, only by bearing witness to its thrown finitude. Thus is Dasein s spa-
tially and temporally limited nature transformed, philosophically speaking,
into cause for celebration. Freedom, paradoxically, emerges in and through
rootedness and releasement.
In Revolutionary Saints, Christopher Rickey observes the centrality of
freedom to Heidegger s thought. Rickey mistakenly assumes that Heidegger
 anticipates Isaiah Berlin in his use of the term  negative freedom (p. 244).
Both Heidegger and Berlin borrowed this term (as well as  positive free-
dom ) from Kant, with Berlin probably doing so via T. H. Green. Rickey is
on better ground when he states that Heidegger s radical understanding of
freedom is distinct from both ancient and modern conceptions. He also con-
tends that  Heidegger s own radical politics grew out of his understandingof
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 575
freedom (p. 99). But it is not with the concept of freedom that Rickey is
chiefly concerned. His focus is Heidegger s appropriation of phronesis.
Rickey attempts to understand the relationship between Heidegger s phi-
losophy and his involvement with National Socialism by investigating
Heidegger s response to the query  How should we live? Heidegger answers
the question by depicting the authentic life. The opportunity for an authentic
existence chiefly occurs in the Augenblick. This moment of vision, Rickey
proposes, is understood by Heidegger as an exercise of phronesis or practical
wisdom. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rickey contends, Heidegger s
reading of Plato s Republic convinced him of the indispensability of strong,
phronetic leadership and cemented his  political resolve (p. 238). Rickey
writes that  one cannot truly recognize the philosophical extent of
Heidegger s relation to Nazism without understanding how his revision of
phronesis, so central to his philosophy, demanded the most radical and
extreme political action (p. 61). Rickey likens Heideggerian phronesis to
 divine revelation.
Aristotle declared sophia the highest form of life, owing to its concern
with the eternal and unchanging. Heidegger pushes phronesis onto the pedes-
tal. Aristotle understood phronesis to meld practice with principle, allowing
one to act prudentially in specific situations because one saw the parts in the
context of the (good life as a) whole. For Heidegger, the  whole in question
is less an ethical vision than an ontological-world historical one. When
inauthentic, we confront particulars (specific entities or relationships) with-
out appreciation of the whole of Being (the Being of beings, in its historicity).
Heideggerian phronesis effectively relates the parts to this whole. The
phronetic individual displays an inspired relationship to Being in the face of
the everyday. As such, phronesis remained for Heidegger in radical dis-
tinction to Aristotle wholly untethered to ethics. While Aristotelian practi-
cal wisdom is always and everywhere directed toward the good (life),
Heideggerian phronesis stands beyond good and evil.
What is said here about phronesis, however, must also be said about
authenticity. Rickey finds  Heidegger s concept of politics rooted firmly in
his notion of authenticity, for authenticity is the criterion for distinguishing
what is superior or better in human existence (p. 42). That is a common (and
almost defensible) reading. Yet in discussing authenticity, Heidegger rejects
the terminology of  superior or  better. In turn, inauthenticity bears no
pejorative connotation. As a distinct, essential, and inevitable mode of
human being, inauthenticity is neither deplorable nor regrettable.  The
inauthenticity of Dasein, Heidegger writes,  does not signify any  less
576 POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004
Being or any  lower degree of Being. 1 Authentic speech and action are not
superior or better than everyday talk and activity. They are, at once, less for-
getful of Being and, for that very reason, less adequate to our everyday trans-
actions.
It follows that inauthentic existence should not be disparaged.  On the
contrary, Heidegger writes,  this everyday having of self within our factical,
existent, passionate merging into things can surely be genuine, whereas all
extravagant grubbing about in one s soul can be in the highest degree coun-
terfeit or even pathologically eccentric. 2 In short, inauthenticity and authen-
ticity are ontological, not ethical, categories. By ignoring this distinction,
Rickey facilitates his effort to depict Heidegger as involved in a politico-
religious crusade to rid the world of inauthenticity.
At times, Rickey reads Heidegger with the same interpretive latitude that
Heidegger employed when reading other thinkers. Rickey asserts not merely
the importance of phronesis but its central role in Being and Time as well as in
Heidegger s philosophy as a whole (pp. 40, 61, 116, 160). Textual evidence
does not support this claim. As the reader of the two most popular transla-
tions of Being and Time may easily determine, phronesis does not even
appear in the very extensive English and Greek indexes. The significance of
phronesis to Heidegger s thought may be argued, but its centrality is doubt-
ful.
Richard Bernstein observes that Heidegger drops his interest in phronesis
as a form of knowledge that has its locus in praxis, and focuses instead on
techne as a form of knowledge that has its locus in poeisis.3 Heidegger makes
the switch after his political escapade in 1933, Bernstein speculates, when he
retreated into the hope that thinking and art, rather than politics and praxis,
might provide a better means of forging a new relationship to Being. Rickey
agrees that poeisis comes to take the place of phronesis as the chief means of
revealing for Heidegger. Yet Rickey ingeniously equates poeisis with a
 phronetic mode of work (p. 160), thus underplaying the extent to which
phronesis and praxis are ignored by the later Heidegger.
These questions of interpretive judgment notwithstanding, Rickey dis-
plays a keen sense of the developmental shifts in Heidegger s thinking. Revo-
lutionary Saints is a work of insight and extraordinary erudition.
Like Rickey, Gregory Fried worries that Heidegger s effort to combat the
ills of modernity through a radical, politico-existential philosophy of praxis
illustrates the old adage of the cure being worse than the disease. Like Rickey,
Fried appeals to the better alternative of  political prudence in its Aristote-
lian sense (p. 247). Like Rickey, Fried counsels us not to underestimate the
political import of Heidegger s philosophy and justifies writing another book
about the topic, after scores of similar works have already found their way
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 577
onto bookshelves, by developing a theme in Heidegger s corpus that has
received relatively little attention.
That theme is polemos, the Greek word for  war. Fried assesses the role
of polemos in Heidegger s work as a whole and demonstrates how it bears
upon the relationship between his thinking and his politics. Fried asserts that
polemos is the best word to describe truth as unconcealdness or aletheia. We
also learn that  Polemos is a name for Being (p. 16). In turn, we read that
 Dasein is polemos and polemos is Dasein (p. 87). Polemos is doing a lot of
work.
Heidegger translates polemos as Auseinandersetzung, or  confrontation.
Most fundamentally, polemos refers to confrontation that goes beyond con-
flict such that the parties involved are stimulated to a rediscovery and self-
assertion of their essential natures. Fried states that polemos best describes
how Dasein approaches Being. The polemos of the thinking Dasein is always
a questioning that reveals difference. Polemos, in this sense, is another word
for difference, or rather, for the tensioned relationship between things that
fosters and safeguards difference. Notwithstanding its martial origins, pole-
mos is decidedly not a force that would deny, destroy, or assimilate the other.
As such, polemos is most needed to redress contemporary technology, which
homogenizes the world by challenging everything to reveal itself as standing
reserve.
Like Rickey, Fried dismisses the view that Heidegger s encounter with
Nazism is best described as a naïve and stupid misstep that was soon regretted
and retracted. Heidegger did come to see National Socialism as a manifesta-
tion of the technological nihilism that was gaining global dominance. Yet
Heidegger retained a belief that Nazism with better leadership might
have fulfilled its promise of helping the German people achieve a proper rela-
tionship to technology in the face of world capitalism and liberal cosmopoli-
tanism. In this regard, Fried argues that Heidegger s ontological understand-
ing of polemos  contributes directly to his option for National Socialism
(p. 137). Heidegger s self-appointed task was to serve as a conduit for the
polemos between  Being and the spirit of the Volk (p. 185).
Heideggers Polemos is at its best in its critique of postmodernism. Here
Fried leaves behind the exegesis that characterizes earlier sections of the
book to take postmodern Heideggerians to task. In their rejection of an order
of rank (embraced by Heidegger and Nietzsche), postmodernists not only
deplore the injustices of social hierarchies but dismiss all judgment of rival
 ways of Being and  ways of life (p. 229). Of course, many postmodernists
would insist that one may say  different without saying  better or  worse.
And they are right to a degree. But Fried is also correct to assail as a dodge
578 POLITICAL THEORY / August 2004
the postmodernist celebration of difference that neglects the indispensability
of (ethico-political) judgment.
In turn, Fried bristles against postmodernists who decry Heidegger s
metaphysical backsliding into chauvinism without, at the same time, admit-
ting the extent to which liberalism provides the chief safeguard against such
chauvinism. The best defense against the lure of  exclusionary belonging,
Fried argues, is liberal institutions and principles. To cast them aside without
supplying viable substitutes is to court reactionary responses from those who
are unable to live without foundational beliefs and values. Postmodernists
radical but largely apolitical critique, Fried holds, remains parasitic upon the
liberal foundations it dangerously undermines.
Fried lucidly defines the postmodern condition as that extension of
modernity wherein the tools designed by science to master nature have
increasingly come to master the wielders of those tools. We find ourselves
marching, or rather sprinting, to the quickening beat of the technological
drum. But the topic of technology is largely absent from Fried s account.
This is strange because Heidegger s polemos with technology structured
much of his later life as a thinker. The lacuna is also problematic because lib-
eralism has very little to say about technology, and in this regard proves itself
ill-equipped to confront the quandaries of the postmodern age.
Fried wonders whether liberalism might strengthen itself by incorporat-
ing polemos into its very core. He counsels us to  appropriate the history of
liberal political philosophy through the question of Being, yet without
Heidegger s dismissive prejudices (p. 254). The chief task ahead, then,
might be one that Fried largely ignores: a confrontation with technology that
goes beyond talk of rights, one that addresses the question of human beings
rootedness in the  natural world and the extent to which we can and should
let this world and relationship be.
Fried identifies himself with those scholars drawn to liberal democracy
who find much merit in a respectful yet unsparing confrontation with
Heidegger. In effect, Fried is engaged in his own polemos, and he wages a
worthy battle.
If, for Fried, polemos is another word for most everything of importance
in Heidegger s thought, then the same may be said of phronesis for Rickey,
autarcheia for Swazo, and mapping the present for Elden. One worries about
what gets lost in such reductive exercises. But, we know, this interpretive tac-
tic was often fruitfully employed by Heidegger himself, as displayed in The
Essence of Freedom.
 Leslie Paul Thiele
University of Florida
Thiele / REVIEW ESSAY 579
NOTES
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), 68.
2. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 60.
3. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/
Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
Leslie Paul Thiele is a professor of political science at the University of Florida. His
works include Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul (1990), Timely Medita-
tions: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics (1995), Environmentalism for a New
Millennium (2001), and Thinking Politics (2nd ed., 2003). He is currently working on a
book manuscript titled A Question of Judgment: Practical Wisdom in Contemporary
Society.