Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 29

There are two of Heidegger’s seminars which clearly disturb the official picture of a Heidegger who only externally accommodated himself to the Nazi regime in order to save whatever could be saved of the university’s autonomy: Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat (On the Essence and Notion of Nature, History, and State, Winter 1933—34, protocol conserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar); Hegel, uÈber den Staat (Hegel, on the State, Winter 1934—35, protocol also conserved in the DLA). Significantly, the first of the two is not included in the official Gesamtausgabe by Klostermann Verlag—a fact that renders problematic its designation as a “complete edition.” These two seminars are the closest one can get to the proverbial smoking gun, since they enact precisely what, according to the official Heideggerian doxa, did not, could not, and should not have taken place: full-bodied support for Nazism formulated and grounded in Heidegger’s innermost philosophical project. (It is nonetheless wrong for a philosopher to invest too much into finding smoking guns: they only confirm what is already there in the formal structure of a thought.) However, one should not lose one’s nerve too fast here and let oneself fall into the standard liberal condemnation: Heidegger’s failure is not as easy to locate as it may appear. The atmosphere of Heidegger’s political references in his texts and courses from the 1930s (the examples he uses, etc.) is, as expected, ominous—suffice it to recall the beginning of the paragraph which questions the being of a state: “A state—it is. In what consists its being? In that the state police arrests a suspect […]?”⁴⁴ The very example he uses to illustrate what Hegel means by his claim about the speculative identity of the rational and the actual is, again, ominous: “The treaty of Versailles is actual, but not rational.”⁴⁵

Heidegger’s starting point is a defense of Hegel against the famous proclamation by Carl Schmitt that Hegel died in 1933, when Hitler took over: “It was said that Hegel died in 1933; quite the contrary: it was only then that he first began to live.”⁴⁶ Why? Heidegger endorses Hegel’s thesis on the state as the highest form of social existence: “The highest actualization of human being occurs in the state.”⁴⁷ He even directly “ontologizes” the state, defining the relationship between the people and the state in terms of ontological difference: “The people, the existing, has a fully determined relationship towards its being, towards the state.”⁴⁸

However, in what follows, it soon becomes clear that Heidegger only needs Hegel in order to assert the emerging Nazi “total state” against the liberal notion of the state as a means to regulate the interaction of civil society; he approvingly refers to Hegel’s deployment of the limitation of the “external” state, the “state of necessity,” the “state of Understanding,” the system of civil society:⁴⁹ “[…] we cannot grasp what Hegel understands as freedom, if we take it as an essential determination of a singular I. […] Freedom is only actual where there is a community of ‘I’s, of subjects.”⁵⁰ But Hegel understands by “freedom” also this: he insists on the “modern” principle of the individual’s “infinite right.” For Hegel, civil society is the great modern achievement, the condition of actual freedom, the “material basis” of mutual recognition, and his problem is precisely how to unite the unity of the state and the dynamic mediation of civil society without curtailing the rights of civil society. The young Hegel, especially in his System der Sittlichkeit, was still fascinated by the Greek polis as the organic unity of individual and society: here, social substance does not yet stand opposed to individuals as a cold, abstract, objective legality imposed from outside, but as the living unity of “customs,” of a collective ethical life in which individuals are “at home,” recognizing it as their own substance. From this perspective, cold universal legality is a regression from the organic unity of customs—the regression from Greece to the Roman Empire. Although Hegel soon accepted that the subjective freedom of modernity has to be accepted, that the organic unity of polis is forever lost, he nonetheless insisted on a need for some kind of return to renewed organic unity, to a new polis that would offer as a counterpart to individuals a deeper sense of social solidarity and organic unity over and above the “mechanistic” interaction and individualist competition of civil society.

Hegel’s crucial step towards maturity occurs when he really “abandons the paradigm of the polis ”⁵¹ by way of reconceptualizing the role of civil society. First, civil society is for Hegel the “state of Understanding,” the state reduced to the police apparatus regulating the chaotic interaction of individuals each of whom pursues his egotistic interests—such an individualistic-atomistic notion of freedom and the notion of legal order as imposed on individuals as the external limitation of their freedom are strictly correlative. The need thus arises to pass from this “state of Understanding” to the true “state of Reason,” in which the individuals’ subjective dispositions are harmonized with the social Whole, in which individuals recognize the social substance as their own. The crucial step occurs when Hegel fully develops the mediating role of civil society: the “system of multilateral dependence” whose ultimate modern form is the market economy, the system in which particular and universal are separated and opposed, in which every individual pursues only his private goals, in which organic social unity decomposes into external mechanic interaction, which is in itself already the reconciliation of the particular and the universal in the guise of the famous “invisible hand” of the market, on account of which, by pursuing private interests at the expense of others, every individual contributes to the welfare of all. It is thus not simply that one has to “overcome” the mechanical/external interaction of civil society in a higher organic unity: civil society and its disintegration play a crucial mediating role, so that the true reconciliation (which does not abolish modern subjective freedom) should recognize how this disintegration is in itself already its opposite, a force of integration. Reconciliation is thus radically immanent: it implies a shift of perspective as to what first appears as disintegration. In other words, insofar as civil society is the sphere of alienation, of the separation between subjectivity persisting in its abstract individuality and the objective social order opposing it as an external necessity that curtails its freedom, the resources of reconciliation should be found in this very sphere (in what, in this sphere, appears “at first sight, as the least spiritual, as the most alienating: the system of needs”⁵²), not in the passage to another “higher” sphere. The structure of this reconciliation in the mature Hegel is, again, that of the Rabinovich joke: “There are two reasons modern society is reconciled with itself. The first is the interaction within civil society …” “But that interaction is constant strife, the very mechanism of disintegration, of ruthless competition!” “Well, this is the second reason, since this very strife and competition makes individuals thoroughly interdependent and thus generates the ultimate social bond …”

The whole perspective thus changes: it is no longer that the organic Sittlichkeit of the polis disintegrates under the corrosive influence of modern abstract individuality in its multiple modes (the market economy, Protestantism, and so on), and that this unity should somehow be restored at a higher level: the point of Hegel’s analyses of Antiquity, best exemplified by his repeated readings of Antigone, is that the Greek polis itself was already marked, cut through, by fatal immanent antagonisms (public–private, masculine–feminine, human–divine, free–slaves, etc.) which belie its organic unity. Abstract universal individualism (Christianity), far from causing the disintegration of Greek organic unity, was, on the contrary, the necessary first step towards true reconciliation. With regard to the market, far from being simply a corrosive force, it is market interaction which provides the mediating process which forms the basis of true reconciliation between the universal and the particular: market competition brings people really together, while organic order divides them.

The best indication of this shift in the mature Hegel concerns the opposition of customs and law: for the early Hegel, the transformation of customs into institutionalized law is a regressive move from organic unity to alienation (the norm is no longer experienced as part of my substantial ethical nature, but as an external force that constrains my freedom), while for the mature Hegel this transformation is a crucial step forward, opening up and sustaining the space of modern subjective freedom.⁵³

It is in total opposition to these Hegelian insights that Heidegger deploys his notion of a “total state”:

We are talking about a total state. This state is not a particular domain (among others), it is not an apparatus which is here to protect society (from the state itself), a domain with which only some people have to deal.⁵⁴

[. . .] the people thus wills and loves the state as its own way and manner to be as a people. The people is dominated by the striving, by eros, for the state.⁵⁵

This Eros, of course, implies personification: love is always love for the One, the Leader:

The Führer-State—the one we have—means the accomplishment of the historical development: the actualization of the people in the Fuührer.⁵⁶

It is only the leader’s will which makes others into his followers, and community arises out of this relationship of following. The followers’ sacrifice and service originate in this living connection, not in their obedience to the constraint of institutions.⁵⁷

The leader has something to do with the people’s will; this will is not the sum of singular wills, but a Whole of a primordial authenticity. The question of the consciousness-of-the-will of a community is a problem in all democracies, which can only be resolved in a fruitful way when one recognizes the leader’s will and the people’s will in their essentiality. Our task today is to arrange the founding relationship of our communal being in the direction of this actuality of people and leader, where, as its actuality, the two cannot be separated. Only when this basic scheme is asserted in its essential aspect through its application, is true leadership possible.⁵⁸

This, of course, is again totally opposed to Hegel, for whom the head of a rational state should not be a leader, but a king. Why? Let us take a look at Hegel’s (in)famous deduction of the rational necessity of hereditary monarchy: the bureaucratic chain of knowledge has to be supplemented by the king’s decision as the “completely concrete objectivity of the will” which “reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.”⁵⁹