As Heidegger himself put it, those who came closest to the ontological Truth are condemned to err at the ontic level. . . err about what? Precisely about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological difference — who warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (God as the highest Entity, for example) — fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of modern man. The standard defence of Heidegger against the reproach of his Nazi past consists of two points: not only was his Nazi engagement a simple persona) error (a ‘stupidity [Dummheit]’, as Heidegger himself put it) in no way inherently related to his philosophical project; the main counter-argument is that it is Heidegger’s own philosophy that enables us to discern the true epochal roots of modem totalitarianism. However, what remains unthought here is the hidden complicity between the ontological indifference towards concrete social systems (capitalism, Fascism, Communism), in so far as they all belong to the same horizon of modern technology, and the secret privileging of a concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with Heidegger, Communism with some ‘Heideggerian Marxists’) as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch.

Here one should avoid the trap that caught Heidegger’s defenders, who dismissed Heidegger’s Nazi engagement as a simple anomaly, a fall into the ontic level, in blatant contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to confuse ontological horizon with ontic choices (as we have already seen, Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates how, on a deeper structural level, ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern universe of technology arc already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject: the ecological critique of the technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads to a more ‘environmentally sound’ technology, etc.). Heidegger did not engage in the Nazi political project ‘in spite of’ his ontological philosophical approach, but because of it; this engagement was not ‘beneath’ his philosophical level — on the contrary, if one is to understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: ‘speculative identity’) between the elevation above ontic concerns and the passionate ‘ontic’ Nazi political engagement.

One can now see the ideological trap that caught Heidegger. when he criticizes Nazi racism on behalf of the true ‘inner greatness’ of the Nazi movement, he repeats the elementary ideological gesture of maintaining an inner distance towards the ideological text — of claiming that there is something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel: ideology exerts its hold over us by means of this very insistence that the Cause we adhere to is not ‘merely’ ideological. So where is the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active engagement in the Nazi movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain the level of its ‘inner greatness’, but legitimized itself with inadequate (racial) ideology. In other words, what he expected from it was that it should legitimize itself through direct awareness of its ‘inner greatness’. And the problem lies in this very expectation that a political movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundation is possible. This expectation, however, is in itself profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to recognize that the gap separating the direct ideological legitimization of a movement from its ‘inner greatness’ (its historico-ontological essence) is constitutive a positive condition of its ‘functioning’. To use the terms of the later Heidegger, ontological insight necessarily entails ontic blindness and error, and vice versa — that is to say, in order to be ‘effective’ at the ontic level, one must disregard the ontological horizon of one’s activity. (In this sense, Heidegger emphasizes that ‘science doesn’t think’ and that, far from being its limitation, this inability is the very motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger seems unable to endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive blindness — as if the moment we acknowledge the gap separating the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic engagement is depreciated, loses its authentic dignity.

Pp. 9-11

¶ 9:04 AM