Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

3 4 Interpretation
does not simply raise questions about the ontological meaning of political concepts;
he insists that the history of be-ing, and not human action, is the root of
political events. “Self-reliance” is a subjectivist illusion that ignores our
dependence on be-ing. In his view, individual choice has little to do with modern
politics; choices occur on the surface of the impersonal movement of being
as power. Heidegger can be said to have anticipated Arendt’s insight into “the
banality of evil” within the mechanisms of totalitarian regimes: murderous
functionaries such as Eichmann may be driven less by personal malice or
sadism than by abstractions and power relations that they leave unquestioned.
Yet Arendt insists on the importance of rescuing praxis from its reduction to
theory, work, and labor (Arendt 1998). In contrast, Heidegger puts the very
concept of “the ‘active life’” in quotation marks (GA 66, 52). He comes to see
the entire thematic of choice and will as fatally indebted to modern subjectivism.
His entire interpretation of his times, then, is focused not on human
action but on being. Current events are to be grasped not in practical terms,
but in relation to the metaphysical essence of modernity (GA 66, 46–47). To
the objection that “history has to go on, after all; something, after all, has to
happen with man,” he replies that history will go on in any case, no matter what
the philosopher does, and that “knowledge of be-ing” is a rich enough source
of nobility, sacrifice, and inceptiveness (GA 70, 137–38). “To wish to struggle
politically against political worldviews…is to fail to recognize that something is
happening in them of which they themselves are not the masters…[i.e.] the
abandonment of being” (Heidegger n.d., X, 41).
After his brief venture into the cave, Heidegger has come running
back into the light. The events that the public considers significant are
only a “shadow” of the history of be-ing (GA 69, 205). To vary the metaphor,
we can say that be-ing casts the dice, which fall according to the “incline in
which be-ing appropriates itself to beings. Only those who are climbing know
the incline” (GA 69, 213). To anyone who may object that Heidegger is ascending
only toward abstractions—that he is turning his back on real power
relations as he focuses on the essence of power—he replies that power is not an
abstraction at all, and that we will know this when the apparently concrete is
revealed as fleeting and “spectral” (GA 69, 182).
There is a Hegelian flavor in this turn of phrase, which appropriately
warns us that if we focus on the particular while neglecting the essence,
we will lose ourselves in a domain that is ephemeral, unintelligible, and more
“abstract” than any philosophical concept. But for Hegel, the essence too is
abstract, until it is actualized in the concrete. In Heidegger, there is no compa-