Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 27

How, then, do things stand with Heidegger’s engagement? Was it, in contrast to Foucault’s, not just a mistake, but a mistake grounded in his philosophy? There is something profoundly symptomatic in the compulsion of many liberal-democratic critics of Heidegger to demonstrate that Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation was not a mere temporary blunder, but in consonance with the very fundamentals of his thought: it is as if this consonance allows us to dismiss Heidegger as theoretically irrelevant and thus to avoid the effort to think with and through Heidegger, to confront the uneasy questions he raised against such basic tenets of modernity as “humanism,” “democracy,” “progress,” etc. Once Heidegger disappears from the picture, we can safely carry on with our common concerns about the ethical problems opened up by biogenetics, about how to accommodate capitalist globalization within a meaningful communal life—in short, we can safely avoid confronting what is really new in globalization and biogenetic discoveries, and continue to measure these phenomena with old standards, in the wild hope of a synthesis that will allow us to keep the best of both worlds.

But this, of course, in no way means that we should rehabilitate the standard defense of Heidegger’s Nazi episode, which, unsurprisingly, follows yet again the borrowed-kettle formula: (1) Heidegger was never really a Nazi, he just made some superficial compromises in order to save whatever could have been saved for the autonomy of the university; when he realized that this tactic would not work, he consequently stepped down and withdrew from public life. (2) Heidegger was, for a limited period, a sincerely committed Nazi; however, not only did he withdraw once he become aware of his blunder, but the acquaintance with Nazi power precisely enabled him to gain an insight into the nihilism of modern technology as the deployment of the unconditional will-to-power. (3) Heidegger was a Nazi, and there is nothing to reproach him with for this choice: in the early 1930s, it was a perfectly legitimate and understandable choice. This final position is Ernst Nolte’s, and it is worth recalling here his book on Heidegger, which brought fresh wind to the sails of the endless debate on “Heidegger and politics”—far from excusing Heidegger’s infamous political choice in 1933, it justifies it, or, at least, de-demonizes it, rendering it a viable and meaningful choice. Against the standard defenders of Heidegger whose mantra is that Heidegger’s Nazi engagement was a personal mistake of no fundamental consequence for his thought, Nolte accepts the basic claim of Heidegger’s critics that his Nazi choice is inscribed into his thought—but with a twist: instead of problematizing his thought, Nolte justifies his political choice as a justifiable option in the late 1920s and early 1930s, given the economic chaos and the threat of Communism:

Insofar as Heidegger resisted the attempt at the [Communist] solution, he, like countless others, was historically right … In committing himself to the [National Socialist] solution perhaps he became a “fascist.” But in no way did that make him historically wrong from the outset.²⁹

And here is Mark Wrathall’s model formulation of the second position:

Heidegger’s work after the war did go some way towards overcoming the political naivete that led to his disastrous involvement with National Socialism. He did this by, first, getting much clearer than he had been about the dangers of the modern world—the dangers which led him to think we need a new world disclosure. Once he was able to articulate the danger of modernity in terms of technology, it became clear that National Socialism was just another modern technological movement (even if it employed technology for reactionary goals).³⁰

This passage tells much more than may appear at first glance—the key words in it are the innocuous “just another”: is the underlying premise not “even the best of political projects, the most radical attempt to oppose nihilism, remained just another nihilistic movement caught in technology”? There is no horror of Nazism here, Nazism is “just another” in the series, the difference is ontologically insignificant (which is why, for Heidegger, the Allied victory in World War II really decided nothing). Here Heidegger’s reference to Hölderlin’s famous lines enters: “where the danger is rising, that which can save us—das Rettende—also grows…”—in order to overcome the danger, one has to push it to the extreme—in short, in order to arrive at the ontological truth, Heidegger had to err ontically. So when Wrathall writes apropos Heidegger’s Nazi engagement: “It is disconcerting, to say the least, that Heidegger, who purported to have a unique insight into the movement of world history, proved to be so terribly blind to the significance of the events that played out before his eyes”³¹—a Heideggerian could easily turn this argument around: the “ontic” blindness to the truth of the Nazi regime was a positive condition of his “ontological” insight. However, when defenders of Heidegger claim that his acquaintance with the Nazi exercise of power precisely enabled him to gain an insight into the nihilism of modern technology as the deployment of the unconditional will-to-power, does this line of defense not sound a little bit like the attitude of the proverbial prostitute-turned-preacher who, after her conversion, ferociously attacks carnal sins, claiming that she knows from her own experience how destructive they are? Steve Fuller writes:

Ironically, Heidegger’s intellectual stature may even have been helped by the time-honored practice of “learning from the opponent” in which victors indulge after a war. In this respect, Heidegger’s political “genius” may lie in having stuck with the Nazis long enough for the Americans to discover him during de-Nazification without ending up being judged an untouchable war criminal whose works had to be banned. As committed anti-Nazis ensconced in Allied countries, Heidegger’s existentialist rivals never underwent such intense scrutiny nor subsequently acquired such a mystique for depth and danger.³²

There is truth in these lines, but it is more complex than Heidegger’s mere luck in striking the right balance in the depth of his Nazi engagement: the difficult truth to admit is that Heidegger is “great” not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement, that this commitment is a key constituent of his “greatness.” Imagine a Heidegger without this passage, or a Heidegger who, after World War II, had done what many colleagues expected of him: namely, publicly renounce his Nazi engagement and apologize for it—would this not somehow have occluded the radicality of his insight? Would it not have constrained him to humanitarian political concerns which he so bitterly despised? Miguel de Beistegui makes a perspicuous observation on the fundamental ambiguity of Heidegger’s disillusionment with Nazism: it was his “resignation and his disillusionment with what, until the end of his life, and with a touch of regret at not having seen it develop its potential, he referred to as ‘the movement’.”³³ Is, however, this not the reason why Heidegger’s later withdrawal from political commitment also cannot be conceived only in the terms of his insight into the nihilism of contemporary politics? De Beistegui concludes his book with the statement that Heidegger

will not be caught out in [a belief in the redemptive power of political engagement] twice: having burned his fingers in politics, and lost his illusions in the failure of Nazism to carry out a project of onto-destinal significance, his hopes will turn to the hidden resources of thought, art and poetry, all deemed to carry a historical and destinal power far greater than that of politics.³⁴

But is Heidegger’s refusal to be caught twice in the act of political engagement and thus burning his fingers again not a negative mode of his continuing melancholic attachment to the Nazi “movement”? (His refusal to engage again in politics was thus similar to a disappointed lover who, after the failure of his relationship, rejects love as such and avoids all further relationships, thereby confirming in a negative way his lasting attachment to the failed relationship.) Is the premise of this refusal not that, to the end of his life, Nazism remained for Heidegger the only political commitment which at least tried to address the right problem, so that the failure of Nazism is the failure of the political as such? It never entered Heidegger’s mind to propose—say, in a liberal mode—that the failure of the Nazi movement was merely the failure of a certain kind of engagement which conferred on the political the task of carrying out “a project of onto-destinal significance,” so that the lesson to draw was simply a more modest political engagement. In other words, what if one concludes from the failure of Heidegger’s political experience that what one should renounce is the expectation that a political engagement will have destinal ontological consequences and that one should participate in “merely ontic” politics which, far from obfuscating the need for a deeper ontological reflection, precisely open up a space for it? What if even the very last Heidegger, when he expressed his doubts as to whether democracy was the political order which best fitted the essence of modern technology, had still not learnt the ultimate lesson of his Nazi period, since he continued to cling to the hope of finding an (ontic) political engagement which would fit (be at the level of) the ontological project of modern technology? (Our premise, of course, is that the liberal engagement is not the only alternative: Heidegger was right in his doubt about liberal democracy; what he refused to consider was a radical leftist engagement.)

Therein resides the importance of the link between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt: what is at stake in the difficult relationship between Heidegger and Arendt is Heidegger’s much-decried aversion to liberalism and (liberal) democracy, which he continuously, to his death, rejected as “inauthentic,” not the idiosyncrasies of their personal liaisons. Arendt was not only opposed to Heidegger along the double axis of woman versus man and a “worldly” Jew versus a “provincial” German, she was (which is much more important) the first liberal Heideggerian, the first to try to reunite Heidegger’s insights with the liberal-democratic universe. In a closer reading, of course, it is easy to discern what enabled Arendt to support liberalism while maintaining her basic fidelity to Heidegger’s insights: her anti-bourgeois stance, her critical dismissal of politics as “interest-group” politics, as the expression of the competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie. She shared the great conservatives’ dissatisfaction with the lack of heroism and the pragmatic-utilitarian orientation of bourgeois society:

Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age and subsequent attempts at restoring it (from Nietzsche to Sorel to Pareto, from Rimbaud and T.E. Lawrence to Juenger, Brecht and Malraux, from Bakunin and Nechayev to Aleksander Blok) is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie.³⁵

The opposition Arendt mobilizes here is the one between citoyen and bourgeois: the first lives in the political sphere of public engagement for the common good, of the participation in public affairs, while the second is the egotistic utilitarian fully immersed in the process of production and who reduces all other dimensions of life to their role in enabling the smooth running of this process. In Aristotelian terms, this opposition is that between praxis and poiesis, between the “high” exercise of virtues in public life, and the “low” instrumentality of labor—the opposition whose echoes reverberate not only in Habermas’s distinction between communicative action and instrumental activity, but even in Badiou’s notion of the Event (and in his concomitant denial that an Event can take place in the domain of production). Recall how Arendt describes, in Badiouian terms, the suspension of temporality as the defining ontological characteristic of ontic political action: acting, as man’s capacity to begin something new, “out of nothing,” not reducible to a calculated strategic reaction to a given situation, takes place in the non-temporal gap between past and future, in the hiatus between the end of the old order and the beginning of the new which in history is precisely the moment of revolution.³⁶ Such an opposition, of course, raises a fundamental question formulated by Robert Pippin:

how can Arendt separate out what she admires in bourgeois culture—its constitutionalism, its assertion of fundamental human rights, its equality before the law, its insistence on a private zone in human life, exempt from the political, its religious tolerance—and condemn what she disagrees with—its secularism, its cynical assumption of the pervasiveness of self-interest, the perverting influence of money on human values, its depoliticizing tendencies, and the menace it poses for tradition and a sense of place?³⁷

In other words, are these not two sides of the same phenomenon? No wonder then, that, when Arendt is pressed to provide the outline of the authentic “care of the world” as a political practice that would not be contaminated by utilitarian pragmatic calculation of interests, all she can evoke are forms of self-organization in revolutionary situations, from the early American tradition of town-hall meetings of all citizens to revolutionary councils in the German revolution. Not that she is not politically justified in evoking these examples—the problem is that they are “utopian,” that they cannot be reconciled with the liberal-democratic political order to which she remains faithful. In other words, is Arendt with regard to liberal democracy not the victim of the same illusion as the democratic Communists who, within the “really-existing socialism,” were fighting for its truly democratic instantiation? Arendt is also right when (implicitly against Heidegger) she points out that fascism, although a reaction to bourgeois banality, remains its inherent negation, that is, remains within the horizon of bourgeois society: the true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exerting total power, but that it did not go far enough, namely, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised. (However, Heidegger would also have been right in rejecting Arendt’s Aristotelian politics as not radical enough to break out of the nihilist space of European modernity.)

Arendt would thus have been justified in countering Pippin’s all-too-easy version of a contemporary political Hegelianism; his basic claim is that while, of course, from today’s perspective, Hegel’s notion of a rational state no longer works, its limitations are evident, and these very limitations should be addressed in a Hegelian way:

In some fairly obvious sense and in the historical terms he would have to accept as relevant to his own philosophy, he was wrong. None of these institutional realizations now looks as stable, as rational, or even as responsive to the claims of free subjects as Hegel has claimed, even though such criticisms are often themselves made in the name of such freedom. But the nature of that wrong is, I am arguing, also Hegelian, a matter of being incomplete, not wholly wrong-headed.³⁸

In short, it is a matter of an Aufhebung, of the immanent self-critique and self-overcoming, of these solutions, not of their outright rejection … However, what cannot but strike the eye is the “formalist” character of Pippin’s formula: he does not provide any concrete examples that would render it operative. The question is, of course, how far do we have to go in this Aufhebung if we are to bring Hegel’s project of a rational state of freedom up to today’s conditions—how “deeply” is irrationality inscribed into today’s bourgeois society so that its critique can still be formulated as a defense of bourgeois society? Do we have to stay within capitalism or risk a move beyond it? These, however, are not Heidegger’s concerns: his fundamental move apropos our critical historical moment is to emphasize the underlying sameness of the (ideological, political, economic …) choices we confront:

from the point of view of their onto-historical origin, there is no real or fundamental difference between the Christian doctrine and Bolshevism, between the biologism and imperialism of Nazism and the forces of capital (which, today, have permeated all spheres of life), and between vitalism and spiritualism. This, I believe, is at once the strength, and the extraordinary weakness and limitation of Heidegger’s position. For on the one hand it allows us to establish continuities and complicities where we thought there were incompatibilities, and to shift the weight of difference to a different terrain (that of the “meaning” or the “truth” of being). On the other hand, though, by revealing such differences as pseudo-differences, he also neutralizes the decisions and choices they often call for, thereby erasing the traditional space of politics and ethics.³⁹

Unfortunately, de Beistegui’s solution to this deadlock remains all too commonsensical—a balanced approach which takes into account the legitimate demands of both levels:

whatever our commitments to the deconstruction of metaphysics, and to the struggle for new possibilities of thought and action beyond it, or perhaps on its margins, we continue to live within the metaphysical, technical framework, and so must remain committed to taking seriously, and discriminating between, the many differences, choices and situations we are faced with at the historical, political, religious and artistic level. […] The free relation to technology Heidegger advocates may, after all, also involve an active participation in intra-metaphysical processes, and not just a meditation of its essence. For within technology, there are differences that matter, and to which we cannot—and must not—remain blind. With one critical eye, and the other deconstructive, we may be better equipped to navigate the often treacherous waters of our time.⁴⁰

But what if there is a fundamental discordance between the ontological and the ontic, so that, as Heidegger put it, those who reach ontological truth have to err in the ontic? What if, if we are to see with the ontological eye, our ontic eye has to be blinded?