Derrida on Heidegger

Of Spirit begins with the observation that although Heidegger twice cautioned his readers to avoid the term Geist, spirit, and its adjectival forms, geistlich, and geistig, he nevertheless continued to speak of spirit until 1953, in contexts of tremendous political relevance. The book is Derrida’s attempt to think through this call to avoidance and the use nevertheless of the terms to be avoided. The main sign of his double action is that Heidegger places the word spirit in quotation marks when he uses it, simultaneously using it and distancing himself from it. How Heidegger uses the word matters, because his work is “magnetized…from its first to its last word” by spirit. Before Derrida, no one had regarded spirit as among Heidegger’s principal themes. So, Derrida tries to “follow modestly the itineraries, the functions, the formations and regulated transformations, the presuppositions and the destinations” of the language of spirit in Heidegger.

In doing so, he makes three arguments: (A) that “what remains unquestioned in the invocation of Geist by Heidegger is, more than a coup de force, force itself in its most out-of-the-ordinary manifestation”; (B) that the language of spirit “is regularly inscribed in contexts that are highly charged politically, in the moments when thought lets itself be preoccupied more than ever by what is called history, language, the nation, Geschlecht, the Greek or German languages”; and (C) that “the thinking of Geist and of the difference between geistig and geistlich…perhaps decides as to the very meaning of the political as such” or at least “situate[s] the place of such a decision, if it were possible.” The question of spirit in Heidegger is thus for Derrida a question of force, politics, and the meaning of the political.

This question arose for Derrida from research into “philosophical nationality and nationalism” and especially from his study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl. In that interpretation, he “[encountered] a distinction which Heidegger would like to be of decisive importance, between geistig and geistlich, and then a singular divide right inside the word geistlich.” At the same time, through a reading of the Timaeus, Derrida came to doubt Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of chora and thereby “the general interpretation of the history of onto-theology.”

On the basis of these two discoveries, Derrida advances a hypothesis concerning the place of Geist or spirit in Heidegger. Spirit is a “knot” that gathers four “threads,” four “guiding threads,” which Derrida regards as uncertain in Heidegger’s writings. These threads are the following: (1) the “privileging of questioning,” (2) the “contamination of the thought of essence by technology, and so contamination by technology of the thinkable essence of technology – and even of a question of technology by technology,” (3) the “discourse of animality and the axiomatic…which controls it,” and (4) the “thinking of epochality,” or Heidegger’s historicism.

Spirit’s role in gathering each loose thread together is as follows: (1a) it is “perhaps the name Heidegger gives, beyond any other name, to [the] unquestioned possibility of the question”; (2a) it “names what Heidegger wants to save from any destitution” or contamination; (3a) it sets the human apart from the animal in an “authoritarian” manner; and (4a) it orders “epochal discrimination” as the counterpart to the “Platonic-Christian, metaphysical or onto-theological determination of the spiritual (geistig),” as “another thinking of the spiritual…the geistliche, now withdrawn…from its Christian or ecclesial significance.” In this chapter, I focus on the themes of contamination and epochality, setting aside the question and animality.

After an overview of Of Spirit, I discuss and contest Derrida’s three main arguments, emphasizing the themes of contamination and epochality. Although Derrida is basically right about Geist as a gathering-point for the aforementioned threads, he is wrong in the conclusions he draws about force, politics, and the essence or ground of the political. Indeed, rather than Heidegger’s attempt at a thinking beyond metaphysics being contaminated by metaphysics, as Derrida claims, it is Derrida’s listening to and analysis of Heidegger that is “contaminated.” As a result, Derrida fails to give us access to the phenomenon of a “fundamental ontological politics.” In the next chapter, I turn to Alexander Dugin’s reception of Heidegger, which succeeds where Derrida fails.

1.

Taking Sein und Zeit as his starting point, Derrida begins his analysis of the problem of spirit in Heidegger by observing that although for Heidegger the term “spirit” belongs together with other terms, like “person,” “subject,” and “consciousness,” to a series of phenomenologically inadequate, metaphysical determinations of the human being, Heidegger nonetheless uses the term in quotation marks to characterize “Dasein,” i.e. human being interpreted otherwise than metaphysically.

Heidegger first uses the word in quotation works when describing Dasein’s spatiality. Dasein is not a thing-in-the-world, like a cup of coffee, for instance, because it is not essentially a thing: it is “‘spiritual.’” He uses it again when discussing Dasein’s temporality, on the basis of which being is to be interpreted in Sein und Zeit. The second use opposes Hegel’s view that the spirit “falls into time,” with Heidegger’s own view of “spirit” as time, and the “fall” as fall from “originary and proper temporality” “into a temporality that is…inauthentic.”

There is nothing exceptionally interesting in the first stage of Derrida’s analysis of the avoidance of the term spirit in Heidegger. Without quotation marks, the term is to be avoided as metaphysical, and hence as phenomenologically inadequate. In quotation marks, however, it is imbued with post-Destruktion phenomenological adequacy and thus indicates something proper to the phenomenon Dasein, but it does so as a term that is unfitting for the task if taken in its customary sense. We shall see, however, that for Derrida, the “doubling” of spirit even at this stage bespeaks a “contamination” of fundamental ontology by metaphysics.

So far, however, nothing is elucidated about force, politics, and the meaning of the political in the concept of spirit in Heidegger, as presented by Derrida.

Next, however, Derrida turns to Heidegger’s 1933 Rectoral Address, Heidegger’s first major public speech as a member of the National Socialists. In this way, Derrida sets us immediately before these three issues. In 1933, at the time of the Address, there is a “sudden inflammation and inflation of Geist,” in Heidegger’s works, Derrida observes. “Each word of the title” of Heidegger’s address, die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität is “traversed, steeped, illuminated, determined…called for, by spirit.” For instance, self-assertion requires that a leader, himself led by a spiritual mission, lead the university, so that spirit may become properly itself. Spirit’s becoming properly itself, in turn, means becoming “properly German”; for the spiritual mission, as Heidegger writes, “imprints the destiny of the German people with its specific historical character.”

In the address, spirit “writes…the hyphen between the world, history, the people, the will to essence, the will to know, [and] the existence of Dasein in the experience of the question.” That is, spirit is linked intimately with political issues, in a highly charged political context, just as Derrida had set out to show.

According to Derrida, it seems that Heidegger “spiritualizes Nationalism Socialism” in this address. And by taking the risk of spiritualizing Nazism, he might have been trying “to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation (spirituality, science, questioning, etc.).” But this strategy is a failure: “[…] one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form.” Spirit, that is, necessarily “doubles,” such that even in its opposition to metaphysics – including the metaphysics of biologism, etc. – it reproduces metaphysics, through, for instance, “unilateral subjectivity”: contamination.

“The constraint of this program” of spiritualization, Derrida continues,

remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and to this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic – for example, that of democracy or “human rights” – which, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity. All the pitfalls of the strategy of establishing demarcations belong to this program, whatever place one occupies in it. The only choice is the choice between the terrifying contaminations it assigns.

In short, Derrida sees two fatal errors in Heidegger’s strategy: “the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical.” “Metaphysics always returns…and Geist is the most fatal figure of this revenance [return, haunting].” Spirit “is its double”: “it is still [in 1935, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, which Derrida discusses next] in the name of spirit, the spirit which guides in resolution toward the question, the will to know and the will to essence, that the other spirit, its bad double, the phantom of subjectivity, turns out to be warded off by means of Destruktion.”

In the Introduction to Metaphysics, Derrida sees another attempt by Heidegger to distance himself “from all biologism and even all philosophy of life (and thus from all political ideology which might draw its inspiration more or less directly from them)” by “marking an absolute limit between the living creature and the human Dasein.” Here, too, the strategy “founder[s] on essential difficulties,” since “everything…still comes down to what the word ‘spirit’ means, to the semantics which regulates the use of this term.” By differentiating human beings from animal beings and other beings on the basis of the extent to which they have “world,” and making “spirit” the criterion for world Heidegger brings in “hierarchization,” and by referring to levels of extent in terms of privation and impoverishment, “evaluation.” Taking man as the standard, Heidegger implies a “humanist teleology,” one that “in spite of all the denegations or all the avoidances one could wish…has remained up till now (in Heidegger’s time and situation, but this has not radically changed today) the price to be paid in the ethico-political denunciation of biologism, racism, naturalism, etc.”

Derrida sees no way to avoid the “terrifying mechanisms of this program,” in either “’Heideggerian’ or ‘anti-Heideggerian’ discourses.” He does, however, see the problematic mediate position of the animal – between human being and thing-being – as unsettling “the whole deconstruction of ontology,” which in Sein und Zeit proceeded through the distinction between thing-being and Dasein, without explicating animal-being. For Derrida, this is a symptom of the “obscurity of what Heidegger calls spirit.” In this way, the issue of animality is derived from, rather than at the source of, the problem of spirit.

Derrida asks whether the obscurity of the concept of spirit is not intimately bound to the obscurity of spirit itself, thus to epochality and the history of being. He pursues this question through a passage in the Introduction to Metaphysics that links spirit with world and the “darkening of the world” with the “destitution (Entmachtung) of spirit.” Derrida comments as follows: “If Entmachtung dooms spirit to impotence or powerlessness…what does this mean as far as force is concerned? That spirit is and is not a force, that it has and has not power.” Spirit is only spirit if it is the potentiality for having power, so that “each of the concepts: world, force, spirit” is “double[d] up” or “haunted,” haunted by a “destructive malignity” that as foreign to it, is nevertheless foreign in it: “All…which accepts lie and destruction, is evil, the foreigner: foreign to spirit in spirit.”

“The destitution of spirit,” Derrida concludes, “is thus a self-destitution, a resignation. But it must be that an other than spirit, still itself however, affects and divides it.” This haunting of spirit by a destructive malignity both foreign to it and yet present in it should be distinguished from the contamination thesis. The latter maintains that spirit is inevitably doubled up, such that the foreign malignity necessarily prevails in the attempted unfolding of the authentic. The former, however, does not go beyond the statement that spirit, and man, has two determining possibilities for being, as shall become clearer in the discussions that follow. The question may be whether the epochality of spirit, or the history of being is identical with Derrida’s notion of contamination. I am suggesting that they must be distinguished.

The self-resignation of spirit, Derrida continues, “produces, and produces itself as…difference or interpretative mutation, and also as misinterpretation of the meaning of spirit, of spirit itself.” Among the forms of resignation are the resignation of spirit to into “intelligence, understanding, calculation, mass distribution, the reign of the literati and the aesthetes, of what is ‘merely spiritual,’” “the instrumentalization of spirit” and its “transformation…into superstructural or powerless intellect, or…the organization of the people as a living mass or a race,” “culture or civilization,” and “cultural propaganda or political maneuver.” In closing this chapter of his discussion, Derrida calls into question Heidegger’s own “political” tactics of “moving from a deconstruction to a celebration of spirit.” Later, I ask whether Heidegger’s celebration of spirit is properly characterized as “political.”

The next point Derrida calls to attention is Heidegger’s privileging of Greek and German as languages of being, and then eventually his ultimate privileging of German over Greek, when he decides that the proper and true meaning of Geist is flame, on the basis of an etymology that does not hold in Greek. For Heidegger, according to Derrida, “German is...the only language, at the end of the day, at the end of the race, to be able to name this maximal or superlative (geistigste) excellence in which in short it shares, finally, only up to a certain point with Greek.” Derrida supports this thesis further by noting Heidegger’s interpretations of Schelling, and especially Hölderlin, the latter of whom emphasizes, in connection with spirit, the motif of fire, indicating “a thinking of Geist which would be other and more originary [than the Greek or Christian ‘determination of pneuma or spiritus’].”

What is spirit, for Heidegger? “In its most proper essence,” Derrida writes of Heidegger’s notion of spirit, on the basis of Heidegger’s 1953 interpretation of Trakl, “Geist is neither Christian Geistlichkeit nor Platonic-metaphysical Geistigkeit,” but is an enflaming flame. For Derrida, besides the aforementioned point that this view of spirit as fire privileges the German in an “irreducible way,” the most important implication of this definition is that “the internal possibility of the worst is already lodged” in spirit as flame: “Evil has its provenance in spirit itself…[and] this duplicity affects all the thinking up to and including that of ash, that whiteness of ash which belongs to destiny consumed and consuming, to the conflagration of the flame which burns itself up.” “Is ash,” Derrida asks, “the Good or the Evil of flame?” More than simple contamination, Derrida is worried here about the contamination specific to the notion of fire.

Toward the end of his analysis, Derrida informs us that “since the beginning of this lecture, we have been speaking of nothing but the ‘translation’ of these thoughts and discourses into what are commonly called the ‘events’ of ‘history’ and of ‘politics,’” and “talking about past, present, and future ‘events,’ a composition of forces and discourses which seem to have been waging merciless war on each other (for example from 1933 to our time).” Derrida then envisions two paths available to traverse after Heidegger. They are the path following Heidegger’s thought beyond the onto-theological or metaphysical to its source, and the path, promoted by “certain Christian theologians…and all those they might represent” that “appeal[s] to [the] entirely other in the memory of a promise or the promise of a memory.” Consonant with “translation” into what are called the events of history and politics, though simplifying the matter and hence perhaps distorting it, we may say that Derrida is offering us a choice between a haunted metaphysical politics of fire, ash, and destruction, on one hand, and the promise of an ethical remembrance of those destroyed, on the other.

2.

Let us return to Derrida’s three principal arguments, as he initially states them in his opening remarks. First, force in spirit is unquestioned by Heidegger. Second, spirit is invoked in highly charged political contexts, together with a set of terms such as resolve, fate, destiny, history, language and nationality or peoplehood. Third, a decision as to the meaning of the political, or the space in which should a decision about the political could be made, is bound up in the distinction between the two adjectival forms of Geist: geistig and geistlich, and within geistlich itself, interpreted, on one hand, as Christian, and, on the other, as more original than that history to which Christianity belongs.

To begin with the second point, Derrida does, I think, satisfactorily show that spirit-talk is yoked together in Heidegger with the language of history, nationality, force, decision, fate, destiny, and so on. Although the evidence is not compelling in the case of Sein und Zeit as Derrida presents it, it is clear that beginning with the Rectoral Address and its call “to will science, in the sense of willing the spiritual historical mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its State” and ending twenty years later with the German word that spirit is fire, passing through the Introduction to Metaphysics, with its talk of the danger to the German people of a loss of spiritual forces and the need for a “’great decision’ which will engage the destiny of Europe,” something not indifferent to politics and the political, and ambiguous only in its specific relation thereto, is invoked, at stake, decided. Below, I shall contest the claim that for Heidegger “spirit is fire” can only be said in German (Heidegger’s onto-chauvinism). But a preliminary word about the first and third arguments, concerning force and the essence of the political, is in order.

Does Heidegger leave force “in its most out-of-the-ordinary manifestation” unquestioned, as Derrida claims? What would it mean for him to do so? What is the “most out-of-the-ordinary manifestation” of force, for Derrida? The preceding summary remarks on Of Spirit suggest that Derrida has in mind the “evil” of spirit as the most extraordinary manifestation of force in spirit. As he writes, “[s]pirit – in flames – deploys its essence (west), says Heidegger, according to the possibility of gentleness…and of destruction… Evil and wickedness are spiritual (geistlich) and not simply sensible or material, by simple metaphysical opposition to that which is geistig.” For Derrida, this view of spirit seems to belong “to that metaphysics of evil and the will which at the time he was trying to delimit rather than accept.” Heidegger’s formulas about spirit’s two possibilities “confirm a metaphysics of evil, a metaphysics of the will.” According to Derrida, Heidegger “never went back on” this metaphysics. The crucial proof-text for Derrida, though it is “one among so many other possible examples” is from Heidegger’s Schelling lectures, where Heidegger writes that man, in contrast to animals, “is that being who can overturn the elements which compose his essence, overturn the ontological fit (die Seynsfuge) of his Dasein and disjoin it (ins Ungefüge)… The ground of evil thus resides in the primordial will (Urwillen) of the primary base.” The similarity of this text to the text in which Heidegger asserts that spirit is fire, as well as the similarity Derrida finds to the entire trace of spirit in Heidegger, leads him to conclude that Heidegger never overcame metaphysics. Thus, force as the expression of a destructive possibility of spirit, intended to be thought beyond metaphysics, but actually thought metaphysically, is what remains unquestioned in Heidegger, according to Derrida.

What about the political? In his initial remarks, Derrida said that “the thinking of Geist and of the difference between geistig and geistlich…perhaps decides as to the very meaning of the political as such” or at least “situate[s] the place of such a decision, if it were possible.” Derrida was evidently not sure of his understanding of the relationship between the thinking of spirit and the question of the political.

I do not find evidence in Derrida’s text for a clear articulation of his position on this question. However, there are at least three plausible elaborations of his position: (1) the attempt to distinguish between geistig and geistlich is a doomed strategy, because it fails to take proper account of the metaphysical contamination of the gesture beyond metaphysics; (2) to decide to speak from within the semantic matrix of either geistig or geistlich is to implicate oneself on, on one hand, an onto-theological politics or, on the other, a fundamental-ontological politics, where what is distinct about these two is more important and more decisive than whatever contaminates one through the other, if anything; (3) to think Geist as Heidegger does is to decide that the meaning of the political consists in rootedness, homecoming, being homely, authenticity, historicity, and the embrace of a communal destiny, among other phenomena. The evidence shows that Derrida holds (1) and (3), and, what is more, raises a warning about (3) on the basis of (1), as we saw in his remarks about the failed strategy to save national socialism by decoupling it from biologism.

By contrast to Derrida, I wish to defend, as a more accurate presentation of Heidegger’s thought, the following claims: first, that Heidegger does not regard spirit-as-fire as irreducibly German; second, that although Heidegger does not say as much as there is to say about the destructive potential of spirit-as-fire, his thoughts on spirit-as-fire do not come from the language of metaphysics and do not belong, therefore, to the first inception of philosophy in the West, but are a saying belonging to the other inception; third, that what is most important for the political in thinking Geist and the difference between geistig and geistlich is not the contamination of one by the other, but rather the distinct character of an onto-theological constitution of the political, on one hand, and the authentic, fundamental-ontological opening of the ground of the political, on the other.

3.

Heidegger does not regard spirit-as-fire as irreducibly German.

Derrida claims that, by linking Geist with gheis, Heidegger “appears to make the semantics of Geist depend on an ‘originary meaning’…entrusted to the German idiom.” For Heidegger, as Derrida reads him, “the flame of Geist, for better or worse, burns in the hearth of one language only.” “Heidegger does not disqualify the immense semantics of breathing, of inspiration or respiration imprinted in Greek or Latin,” Derrida writes, but merely relegates them to a history of being that is less original than the disclosure spoken in German. For Derrida, the closure of the “historial triangle” of languages that shape the structure of Western metaphysics – German, Greek, and Latin – comes apart, as does the being-historical narrative, together with it – when we turn our attention to “what the Greek and then Latin had to translate by pneuma and spiritus, that is, the Hebrew ruah.”

Bracketing the question of the Hebrew ruah and the place of Hebrew in the history of being, we can still challenge Derrida’s claim that Heidegger regards the non-Platonic, non-metaphysical Geist as thinkable only in German. Surprisingly, the strongest evidence against Derrida’ claim is found in the very work he adduces last as evidence in support of it, before turning to Trakl: Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin’s The Ister.

In discussing the motif of fire in Hölderlin, Derrida briefly isolates two passages and a phrase from a letter. The first passage is the opening line of Hölderlin’s poem, which reads: “Now come, fire!” The second consists of the lines: “Our flowers enchant and the shadows of our woods / He who consumes himself. He would be almost ash the animator.” The phrase from the letter speaks of the Greek “fire of heaven.” Together with some passages from Schelling, these passages are meant to draw our attention to spirit-as-fire in Heidegger and “to recognize in it, in its very equivocation or indecision, the edging or dividing path which ought, according to Heidegger, to pass between a Greek or Christian – or even onto-theological – determination…and a thinking…which would be other and more originary.” As noted, Derrida maintains that Heidegger fails to mark out such a dividing path, because of the contamination by the metaphysical or onto-theological of any strategy of seeking the originary, i.e. because of the doubling or haunting of spirit. In the language of a previous chapter, the semantics of Seyn (the origin inception, the fundamental ontological) are always marred by the semantics of Sein (the first beginning, metaphysics).

The attempt to demonstrate phenomenologically the primacy or proximity to the origin (to Seyn) of the Greek word, through the notion of spirit-as-fire, is thus inevitably linked, for Derrida, through contamination and politicization, with German onto-national chauvinism, and, as it would seem, with the onto-political significance of spirit-as-fire-and-ash after the holocaust. If, however, it is possible to think spirit-as-fire, according to Heidegger, in another language, and to do so essentially, then the consequence of German onto-national chauvinism does not follow, at least not at this junction. So let us turn now from Derrida’s presentation of Heidegger on Hölderlin to Heidegger’s own musings on Hölderlin.

Although “Now come, fire” is the first of Hölderlin’s lines that Heidegger examines in The Ister, it is remarkable how little he has to say about “fire” in his opening remarks: most of the initial discussion revolves around the word “now” and the words “Now come.” Heidegger does ask, “what is ‘the fire’ that is invoked” in the opening line of Hölderlin’s poem, but his discussion in response to that question is extremely brief, when compared to everything that follows:

The coming fire is to make visible the day. The fire gives rise to the day, lets this day arise. If ‘the day’ here is the day that is familiar to us daily, then the fire that is called upon in its coming must be the sun. The sun rises day after day. Were it not for this most everyday event, then there would be no days.

What is the fire, then? If “fire” is said in the familiar way, then what is meant must be the sun. We cannot, of course, leave it at that: Heidegger’s entire examination of Hölderlin shows that the latter does not speak “in the familiar way,” either in the sense of everyday familiarity, or in the sense of philosophical, metaphysical familiarity, such that the fire, like the rivers Hölderlin poetizes, would be an “image” or “symbol” of something, as the philosophical, metaphysical discipline of aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, might suppose.

Yet, unlike in the case of the “rivers,” which Heidegger explicates over hundreds of pages, he says almost nothing more here at all of “the fire” in Hölderlin, except to note that “if it is the sun,” this fire “not only comes of its own accord but comes unceasingly, unstoppably, uncontainably, day in, day out” and “designates an ever recurring, temporally self-deferring, yet otherwise uniform point in time, a ‘now’ that has also been forgotten and fallen into indifference with the break of day.” The “now” from which Hölderlin calls the fire “names the time of calling of those who are of a calling, a time of poets.” “Such a time,” Heidegger continues, “is determined from out of that which the poets are called upon to poetize in their poetry.”

What does Heidegger say Hölderlin is poeticizing in his poetry? The essence of rivers, “as the locality of human abode.” The relation between the rivers and the poets as thought by Heidegger proves to be that “The poets, as poets, are these rivers, and the rivers are the poets,” though to understand this properly requires “a transformation in our ways of thinking and experiencing, one that concerns being in its entirety.” “Poet” and “river” “name poetically the one and singular ground of the becoming homely of human beings as historical and the founding of this ground by the poet.”

Of course, for Heidegger, nothing here is to be thought psychologically or metaphysically. Thus, he writes that, “[a]ll ‘psychological’ dissection of creative poetic activity, all historiographical reportage on the many types of poet, all idle talk concerning the vocation of poetry and of poets that remains extrinsic, all ‘aesthetic’ enjoyment of poetry, remain forever banished from that realm in which alone the answer [concerning the destiny of the poet] can be properly given.” In other words, the challenge here is that the poet is to be thought from the semantic matrix of Seyn, rather than from within Sein and all that belongs to it.

The poet names and speaks “the holy,” that which “appears as what is to be poetized.” The poet lets “first appear that which is to be show,” by saying. The poet can do so “only because [the poet] has before this already been shone upon by that which thus appears as what is to be poetized. [The poet] must therefore be struck and blinded in the face of the ‘fire.’” The poet “bears everything originarily in mind in such a way that, in naming the holy, [the poet] lets the heavenly show itself – the holy as the fire that ignites the poet.” What is this fire? The holy? Heidegger writes that for the gods to feel, “a relation to being is required (i.e. to the ‘holy’ that is ‘beyond’ them), being as shown to them through the Other who is [the poet].”

Here, we have the clearest evidence that Heidegger thinks spirit-as-fire in Hölderlin in terms of the “beyond being,” or Seyn. “Now come, fire” is thus the anticipatory call toward the semantic-ontological matrix of Seyn.

Thus far, I have only given a more complete account than Derrida had done of spirit (Seyn)-as-fire in the first line of Hölderlin’s Ister, as Heidegger sees it. This preliminary elaboration is necessary for the next part of the argument. Between his two discussions of Hölderlin in The Ister, Heidegger presents a reading of a choral ode in Sophocles’ Antigone. What emerges from his reading is that Antigone is the highest presentation of what is essential to the human being, namely “being unhomely-homely in the midst of beings.” This is the same theme that he finds Hölderlin presenting as of the highest importance through his river hymns. The formulation “being unhomely-homely in the midst of beings” names the essence of the human being from the semantic matrix of Seyn, i.e. from “beyond being,” or from being as thought and spoken in fundamental-ontology, rather than onto-theology.

In Antigone, Sophocles poetizes what is “perhaps” the highest. This, “[t]hat which is essentially and necessarily to be poetized[,] lies concealed in something that can be never be identified or found anywhere or anything or in any way as something actual that is, something among actual beings.” Instead, [w]hat is essentially to be poetized is that which can never be found amid beings as beings…but is a supremely pure finding of a supremely pure seeking that does not restrict itself to beings. Poetizing is a telling finding of being.” Both Sophocles and Hölderlin poetize from the being (Seyn) beyond being (Sein):

Perhaps what is essentially and only to be poetized in this way, namely, the potential of human beings for being homely [for belong as Daseyn to or together with Seyn,] is even the highest thing that the poet must poetize. If this is the case, then Sophocles in the Antigone tragedy poetizes that which is in the highest sense worthy of poetizing. […] And if, accordingly, this choral ode is the supreme poetic work of what is supremely worthy of poetizing, then this might well be the reason why this choral ode came to speak ever anew to the poet Hölderlin during the period of his poetizing of the hymns.”

We have seen that “fire” names being-beyond-being in Hölderlin, for Heidegger. It does so without recourse to etymology, but on the basis of “poetic thinking” alone. Moreover, Heidegger identifies being and fire in Greek, precisely in his remarks on Antigone, and in supplementary remarks concerning Hestia or the hearth in Philolaos: “The hearth is…the middle of beings, to which all beings, because and insofar as they are beings, are drawn in the commencement. This hearth of the middle of beings is beings. Being is the hearth. For the essence of being for the Greeks is [physis] – that illumination that emerges of its own accord and is mediated by noting else, but is itself the middle. The middle is that which remains as commencement, that which gathers everything around it – that wherein all beings have their site and are at home as beings.”

Even in Plato’s Phaedrus, “[t]he heart, the homestead of the homely, is being itself, in whose light and radiance, glow and warmth, all beings have already gathered.” In Antigone, “[t]he hearth is the word for being,” not as “some thing that is actual, but that which determines especially the potential for human beings to be.”

To review, I have made two arguments against Derrida’s onto-chauvinist reading of Heidegger. First, Heidegger explicates fire-as-spirit in Hölderlin without recourse to etymology, on the basis of a listening and thinking that are not bound by the limitations of the onto-theological tradition and are explicitly on guard against it. This stands in contrast to Derrida’s view that Heidegger was only able to think spirit-as-fire on the basis of an etymological link between Geist and gheis. Second, I showed that in both the Hölderlin reading and the Antigone reading, fire (or hearth) stands for (if it does not “symbolically represent”) being-beyond-beings, or what I have called Seyn, as opposed to Sein: hearth, fire, and gheis all name “the same thing,” being-beyond-being (Seyn). It is not true, then, that for Heidegger, what is most originary (Seyn, spirit-as-fire), can only be thought in German.

To these arguments, I add a third. Heidegger writes that “[i]f becoming homely belongs essentially to historicality,” as he thinks it does, “then a historical people can never come to satisfy its essence of its own accord or directly within its own language.” Rather, “[a] historical people is only from the dialogue between its language and foreign languages.” It is true that this dialogue is “for the sake of appropriating one’s own language,” and especially for coming to “honor it as the concealed shrine that, in belonging to being, preserves within it the essence of human beings,” but the examination of Sophocles shows, as perhaps an examination of the Hebrew “poets” would, too, that although encounter, appropriation, and honor occur within a native language, each language, when thought poetically, is, at least potentially, a “shrine that, in belonging to being, preserves within it the essence of human beings.”

“The choral ode from Sophocles and the river poems of Hölderlin,” Heidegger writes, “poetize the Same, and for this reason there is a poetic and historical dialogue between Hölderlin and Sophocles. Yet it is because both poets poetize the Same that they precisely do not poetize something identical; for the same is truly the Same in that which is different.” Different peoples or “humankinds…are in each case historical in a different way, that is, must become homely in a different way” and “are unhomely in different ways in the beginning,” for the “singular reason” that “being in the midst of beings in different ways, they comport themselves toward these beings and maintain themselves in them.”

On the basis of these passages, we are entitled to say that Heidegger does not regard access to “the Same” (Seyn) as limited to German. “The Same” is accessible to poetic thought as poetic thought, whatever the language, though it will never found or ground “identically,” since poetic thought is always “historical” in its own way.

Without entering into a more complete discussion of the consequences of this position, I reiterate my main point: a variegated “poetizing the Same,” i.e. being beyond being, taken in Hölderlin as fire and in Antigone as hearth, without recourse to etymology – all of this together does not give the impression of onto-chauvinism. To the contrary, it holds forth the promise of a non-identical, but essentially similar homecoming, through poetic-thinking, for those “humankinds,” whose historical being is founded and grounded through an encounter with the holy, with fire, ultimately with being-beyond-being.

As noted above, Derrida refers to three passages in Heidegger’s The Ister. We have discussed the first: “Now come, fire.” The second reads, in the English translation of Of Spirit, as follows: “Our flowers enchant and the shadows of our woods / He who consumes himself. He would be almost ash the animator.” The English translation in The Ister runs: “Our flowers and the shades of our woods gladden / the one who languishes. The besouler would almost be scorched.” [Unsere Blumen erfreun und die Schatten unserer Wälder den Verschmachteten. Fast ware der Beseeler verbrandt.]

“The flowers,” Heidegger explains, “are ‘the reflection of the day,’ and…also ‘the flowers of the word,’ and ‘of thoughts’”; they “refer to the poetizing of the poet.” “The shades,” for their part, “bring coolness, gentle protection from the excessively intense glow of the foreign fire.” The “foreign fire” is Heidegger’s term for “the Same” that Hölderlin encountered in Sophocles. “The flowers and the shades of the words…are ‘ours,’” Heidegger continues; they are “the German ones, the native ones that point toward the homely and that release the one languishing in the foreign fire from the threat of being scorched.” “The journeying into the unhomely,” that is, the encounter with the foreign, “must go ‘almost’ to the threshold of being annihilated in the fire in order for the locality of the homely to bestow its gladdening and rescuing.”

According to Heidegger, with these words Hölderlin “enunciates historically and poetically, for the singular history of the Germans, the law of being unhomely as the law of becoming homely,” which is to say, as I take it, the law of fundamental-ontology for the German people. For the Greeks, this law required that to appropriate what was their own, namely “the light and glow of that which determines the arrival and proximity of the gods,” they had “to pass through something foreign…the ‘clarity of presentation,” such that “out of the rigor of poetizing, thoughtful, formative grasping, they were first able to come to encounter the gods in a lucidly ordered presence.”

The Germans have to traverse a reverse path. They begin with “that with which they are endowed as their own…the clarity of presentation, being able to grasp oneself, the formation of projects, enclosures, and frameworks,” which “cannot properly become what is their own for the Germans so long as this ability to grasp has not been made to confront the necessity of grasping the ungraspable and of grasping themselves in the face of what is ungraspable.”

Heidegger offers this explanation of the passage on flowers and shades using the phrase from the letter Derrida referred to as the third mention of fire in Hölderlin, where Hölderlin writes that, “precisely the clarity of presentation is originarily as natural to us [Germans] as was the fire from the heavens to the Greeks.” Heidegger interprets the “fire from the heavens,” then, as that which the Germans must be “struck by” in order “to be impelled toward the correct appropriation of their own gift from presentation,” i.e. “to freely use what is their own.” According to Heidegger, Hölderlin has been struck by this fire. To put it in our words, he has had the experience of Seyn. As a poet, one struck by fire, he is a “besouler.” As one who has journeyed into the foreign, he “languishes.” “He is on his return from the journey to the ‘fire.’ He is the ‘languishing besouler.’” He has “[learned] to say the ‘fire’ in order then to experience what the word of his poetry must be,” the poetizing of “‘the holy.’ […] [that] which, beyond the gods, determines the gods themselves and simultaneously, as the ‘poetic’ that is to be poetized, brings the dwelling of the historical human beings into its essence.”

The theme of fire in these remarks is through and through rooted in the beyond-being. I have argued that (1) spirit-as-fire is present in Hölderlin, for Heidegger, even without an etymological link between Geist and gheis; (2) spirit-as-fire is present in Antigone, for Heidegger, both through the hearth as beyond-being and, more directly, through the idea, just discussed, that Hölderlin passed through a “foreign fire” in order to become the poetic besouler, that fire taken as the being-beyond-being; (3) spirit-as-fire, or the experience of Seyn, is not an onto-chauvinistic notion, because in the domain of Seyn, the interplay is between “the Same” (Seyn, as I take it, and its structures and moments) and the historical units that encounter it, the poets and thinkers of a historical people.

These arguments are offered to oppose the onto-chauvinist reading that German alone has access to Seyn, spirit-as-fire.

The second response to Derrida I want to make is, to repeat, that while Heidegger does not say as much as there is to say about the destructive potential of spirit-as-fire (to a listener who has not yet made the transition to fundamental ontology and to whom he may be said at the same time to owe an explanation), his notion of spirit-as-fire does not belong to the first inception but to the other inception, and it is therefore a mistake to look for the metaphysics of evil here.

Derrida has failed to make the case that fundamental ontology is contaminated by ontology, the other inception by the first inception. Everything I have discussed above is, in addition to being an argument against the view that Heidegger is onto-chauvinist, an argument in support of the claim that spirit-as-fire belongs to or is rooted in being-beyond-being, Seyn, or the semantic matrix of the other beginning. What remains to assess in this connection is the question of the destructive potentials inherent to Seyn.

Derrida’s work gives the clear impression of linking spirit-as-fire, taken as contaminated by the “metaphysics of evil,” to horrors perpetrated by Hitler’s Germany against the Jews. The metaphysics of fire, for Derrida, is intimately bound to the politics of “deportation,” “furnace,” “ash” and the “decomposing dead.” It is, however, a mistake, though an understandable one, to trace spirit-as-fire through a metaphysics of evil to the annihilation of the Jews. Spirit-as-fire belongs to the thinking of the other inception. “Evil” is accordingly not the correct term which with to begin to think about the destructive or negative potentials of Seyn.

In the Contributions, Heidegger formulates something about Seyn metaphysically, only then immediately to say that this very operation degrades Seyn:

If one wanted to attempt the impossible and grasp the essence of beyng [Seyn] with the help of the ‘modalities’ of ‘metaphysics,’ then one might say: refusal (the essence occurrence of beyng) is the highest actuality of the highest possibility as possibility and is thereby the first necessity… This ‘clarification’ of beyng tears it from its truth…and degrades it to a pure and simple objectively present thing in itself. That is the worst devastation which can befall a being. And here it is transferred to beyng itself.

If we have situated ourselves in the movement toward or in the space of the new inception, or are trying to do so, then we should prefer to speak not of evil, without any sense of how to interpret that outside metaphysics, but rather of devastation, interpreted as the degradation to mere presence, in our case, of Dasein, Da-sein, or Daseyn, names Heidegger uses as counterparts, so to speak, of “human being”:

To someone who has grasped the history of the human being as the history of the essence of this being, the question of who the human being is can only signify the need to question this being outside the sphere of the previous metaphysical residence of humans, to refer the human being to another essence in this questioning, and to overcome thereby the question of who the human being is.

In his remarks on Hölderlin, Heidegger refers to the “ultimate act” of “self-devastation” among Americans: their “entry into this planetary war.” The “Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism,” he writes, “has resolved to annihilate Europe…the homeland, and that means: the commencement of the Western world.” To regard as “devastation” the displacement of a historical essence by an ahistorical “decision in favor of that which is without commencement,” as Heidegger regards America’s decision to wage war against Germany, all of this thought “poetically,” and not instead to see that decision as the act of Good against the threat and reality of Evil nearly demands the impossible. And yet we know from Heidegger, and may agree with him, that once we have begun to think beyond metaphysics, we are compelled to reevaluate or at least to withhold certain customary interpretations in domains that may or may not be regarded as less consequential or impossibly fixed than this one; for instance, the interpretation of negativity in terms of sin – “in the Greek world there is no sin whatsoever, since sin is simply the counterpart of faith understood in a Christian way” – or in terms of the Greek ME, such that with Heidegger we say that “[t]he metaphysics that begins with Plato within Greek thinking itself was not up to the essence of the ‘negative.’”

For Heidegger, “[t]he most powerful ‘catastrophes’ we can think of in nature and in the cosmos are nothing in terms of their uncanniness compared to that uncanniness that the human essence in itself is, insofar as human beings, placed among beings as such and set in place for beings, forget being.” Humans “in their essence are a [katastrophe, in Greek in the text] – a reversal that turns them away from their own essence. Among beings, the human being is the sole catastrophe. Yet here it is at once necessary to remark that we fail to recognize this essential determination of human beings if we devalue the catastrophe as the ‘disastrous’ and evaluate this in turn according to the standards of a pessimistic worldview.”

In Of Spirit, Derrida himself fails to think “evil” on the basis of fundamental ontology and succumbs to the inclination to evaluate spirit-as-fire and its devastating potentials in terms of the metaphysics of evil. Heidegger’s thought is not “contaminated” by the metaphysics of evil, as far as my analysis shows. It does expose the “negative” in Seyn, the “catastrophic” in man, but it also shows how thinkers and poets can “besoul,” ground, and gather in its history a people, a people that also is “devastated” when it is thought “metaphysically.” Moreover, despite a language of deportation, ash, and death linking Heidegger’s spirit-as-fire to the holocaust, nothing in the passages and themes we have looked at in Heidegger precludes the possibility of a fundamental-ontological gathering together and becoming homely of the Jewish people; everything demands it.

4.

If, as Derrida argues, the language of spirit in Heidegger runs along the junction between onto-theology and fundamental ontology, and if on either side of that junction there lie principally different notions of and attitudes towards man, history, community, among other phenomena, and if, finally, we regard these latter phenomena, or our ideas about them and dispositions toward them, as “political,” then it is clear that a decision concerning spirit is a decision concerning the very essence of the “political” and that indecision concerning spirit constitutes the space for a decision about that essence.

Derrida has failed to show that the very distinction between geistig and geistlich, between the onto-theological and the fundamental ontological, is untenable. Consequently, I have rejected the “contamination” argument that that distinction is inevitably doomed, through a sort of auto-metaphysicizing, merely to give the impression of the possibility of a fundamental ontological politics, which if pursued, however, is fated to be marred by traces of the metaphysical. Because fundamental ontology circles around themes of becoming homely, national languages, history and destiny, contamination, for Derrida, is bound to take dangerous, destructive forms and to descend into onto-chauvinism, if not fire and ash. Derrida may be right to be suspicious, but he has not justified his suspicion on the basis of his analysis of the use of the terms Geist, geistig, and geistlich in Heidegger, as I hope to have shown.

It follows from two considerations – that spirit straddles the onto-theological and the fundamental ontological and therefore opens up a space for decision concerning the essence of the “political,” and that it is not inevitably marred by the logic of contamination – that it may yet be possible to contribute to thinking through what a choice in favor of fundamental ontology means for the essence of the political, without a prior accusation or suspicion of contamination. Perhaps the most interesting work to be done on Heidegger as a “political” thinker becomes possible precisely here. In any case, right in the lectures on Antigone, and hence in a place we have already justified looking to and drawing on, Heidegger begins to discuss, admittedly briefly, the transformation of the concept of the political in the crucible of fundamental ontology.

Of course, we will have presupposed the thesis of contamination and thus begged the question if we interpret Heidegger’s discussion of history, language, and so on, and especially, in this context, of the gathering-place of the polis as “political,” i.e. in terms belonging, according to Heidegger, to the language of metaphysics, not to fundamental ontology. We shall permit ourselves some leniency in this regard, however, but only with the simultaneous, exacting awareness that it is precisely a matter of leniency, i.e. with the recognition that we are making an exception for the benefit of our ability to listen and to examine, tracing any suspicion of contamination not to Heidegger’s word, but to the fact that we still are not practiced in hearing it and engaging with it from out of the semantic matrix of fundamental ontology.

Unsurprisingly, Heidegger is critical of the scholarship of his time in just this regard. He writes of the “overenthusiasm on the part of academics,” who make “the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists,” i.e. who project a Nazi understanding of “the political” onto the Greeks and fail to let the specific world of the latter show itself in terms fitting to it. “We think we are educated as to what the world polis means,” he notes; “For whatever the polis is must ‘naturally’ be determined with respect to the ‘political.’ […].” But “[t]o proceed in this way would merely be to explain that which conditions in terms of the conditioned, the ground in terms of the consequence, that is, to explain nothing at all but rather merely to confuse the essence of explanation.” In short, “[t]he polis cannot be determined ‘politically’” and is “not a ‘political’ concept.”

Heidegger discusses the polis because of the phrase upsipolis apolis in Antigone, in this passage, which I will give in English: “Towering high above the site [polis], forfeiting the site / is He for whom non-beings always are / for the sake of risk.” Heidegger had previously commented on the phrase pantoporos-aporos, noting that poros “is the passage or passage through to something, a passage the leads to something and to nothing,” and hence that pantoporos “tells us that human beings everywhere get through and everywhere ‘get’ something within their power.” He sees polis as “a particular realm of poros, as it were, one field in which the latter emphatically comes to pass.”

“Perhaps,” Heidegger muses, “the polis is that realm and locale around which everything question-worthy and uncanny turns in an exceptional sense…the pole…in which and around which everything turns.” “The polar,” for its part, “concerns beings in that around which such beings, as manifest, themselves turn. The human being is then related in an exceptional sense to this pole, insofar as human beings, in understanding being, stand in the midst of beings and here necessarily have a ‘status,’” a word which “means the ‘state.’” Of course, as we can by now predict, “[w]e are already on a path of errancy once more, however, if thinking polis as state, we knowingly or thoughtlessly stick to ideas that have to do with modern state formations.” Instead, the polis is a field in which beings are determined in a specific way, human beings standing in the midst thereof. Thus, “what is essential in the historical being of human being resides in the pole-like relatedness of everything to this site of abode, that is, this site of being homely in the midst of beings as a whole.”

The polis is “what is properly worthy of question, that which, on account of such worthiness, prevails in permeating all essential activity and every stance adopted by human beings.” “The pre-political essence of the polis,” Heidegger continues, “that essence that first makes possible everything political in the originary and in the derivative sense, lies in its being the open site of that fitting destining from out of which all human relations toward beings – and that always means in the first instance the relations of beings as such to humans – are determined.” In accordance with the uncanny essence of the human being, “it is the essence of the polis to thrust one into excess and to tear one into downfall, and in such a way that the human being is destined and fitted into both these counterturning possibilities and thus must be these two possibilities themselves.”

“In the midst of beings, the polis is the open site of all beings, which are here gathered into their unity because the polis is the ground of such unity and reaches back into that ground. The polis is not some special or isolated region of human activity”; it is the ground of the possibility of human activity: a clearing openness toward comportment with beings. “Yet,” and this touches directly on the contamination thesis and the threat of referring fundamental ontological thinking back too quickly to the onto-theological, “the fact that all activity and occasioning undertaken by human beings as historical has in every respect the polis as its site, as the locale to which it belongs, is not to be conflated with the modern ‘totality’ of the ‘political,’ which historically is quite different in kind.”

Let us pause. The decision concerning spirit is a decision for fundamental-ontology, on one hand, or onto-theology, on the other. When this decision is constituted for us as an alternative, it gives rise to the space in which a decision concerning the essence of the political can be made. The “essence of the political,” however, is a phrase that already draws on the language of onto-theology or metaphysics and is thus not adequate to the issue. The decision seems rather to concern choosing “the political” or the “pre-political,” i.e. the polis, regarded essentially. In either case, a specific comportment toward beings, an interpretation of them, and of the human being, history, the gods, and other beings, is at stake. This is what Derrida’s third argument amounts to, when interpreted properly.

5.

There may be reasons, other than those given by Derrida, to be suspicious of fundamental ontology’s “political” consequences, even once the contamination argument has been bracketed, if not refuted. High demands are placed on us here, in thinking this problem through. Contamination is more likely, it seems, to come not from the essence of the fundamental-ontological itself, but rather from a listening that is still too metaphysical and has not yet learned to think, to say, or to hear what is spoken from beyond metaphysics.

If Heidegger was warranted in challenging his contemporaries not to find “national socialism” in Plato, not, that is, to put the cart of the political before the horse of the polis, those with any sympathy for the task of thinking through and past metaphysics are warranted, too, in cautioning themselves and others not to find “fascism” in fundamental ontology hastily. It is one thing really to discover, and another merely to posit or assert, that Heidegger fails, as Derrida thinks he does, to remove himself from the language of metaphysics, which means, in Of Spirit, from the realities of metaphysical politics.

To this point, we have examined two receptions of Heidegger as a “political” thinker: Strauss’s and Derrida’s. We saw that Strauss has ultimate recourse to the interpretation of being as idea – an interpretation that for Heidegger does not belong to the other inception, but rather marks the beginning of the end for the Western tradition. As the argument showed, Strauss’s recourse to the idea, and his “political” definition, or presentation, or philosophy as primarily concerned with “the ideas,” with the “natures” of “all the beings,” and not with the beyond-being, was meant to “save the phenomenon” of natural right, a measure or standard of what is just that does not vary from time to time or place to place, however much time and place impact how close a given political community can come to the standard. Strauss denied the possibility of a philosophical politics for the principal reason that philosophical thought, by its nature, calls into question the very things most needful for political communities.

Derrida’s critique is a different one. For Derrida, a clear line cannot be drawn between philosophy and politics. Politics and the political are already immersed in philosophy, because they are constituted at their roots by a decision concerning philosophy. There is no recourse here to “the idea,” but rather caution against the notion that a “pre-political” fundamental ontology can avoid, bypass, surpass, or spiritualize the mechanics and elements of the political, especially will, evil, destruction, violence. There is a caution against failing to recognize the doubling and haunting of spirit. In both cases, however, Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology is regarded as a problem for “politics.”

What does it mean “politically” to decide in favor of fundamental ontology, rather than against it? Must such a decision imply “nazism,” “fascism,” etc., as it is supposed to have done in the case of Heidegger? In the following chapter, I examine the reception of Heidegger by Alexander Dugin as a case study, meant to throw light on this question, for Dugin’s is an explicit decision for fundamental ontology, resulting in experimental thought concerning the very issue of the implications of this decision for “politics.”

Note: This is the first version of the Derrida chapter in the dissertation that became Beginning With Heidegger. I ended up scrapping it and starting from scratch with a new approach. But maybe there's something interesting here, too...