“Letter on Humanism” and the Ethical Bond

Specialists and non-specialists alike often assume that Heidegger dismissed the very possibility of ethics.Footnote ¹² Readers might wonder then as to whether we are on something of a fool’s errand scouring through Heidegger’s philosophy looking for ethical views or a thinking that could inform or contribute to ethics. However, a close reading of Heidegger’s well-known settling of accounts with Sartre, existentialism, Marxism, Christianity, as well as Roman and Renaissance humanism (“Letter on Humanism”) shows that his treatment of the notion of ethics is not nearly so straightforwardly negative as is sometimes supposed. What we find, in fact, is quite a careful and nuanced discussion of the relevance of his thinking for what it might be to approach the dual questions of humanism and ethics.

Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is an important document in terms of understanding the development of his thinking. It offers important clarifications on what he may have meant by the notion of ‘the turn’ (die Kehre), on how his thinking diverged from some key principles of Sartre’s existentialism, on the continuing relevance of Being and Time and the questions he addressed in that work, on why he was not anti-humanist, along with what he saw as problematic about conventional approaches to morality and/or value thinking commonly construed. Without straying too far away from our central topic, it’s worth mentioning that this text repays a careful rereading if only to dispel the misguided view that ‘the turn’ signals a ‘turn away’ from what he took to be the dead-born project of Being and Time in favour of a different project in his later work.Footnote ¹³ Heidegger could hardly have been more explicit that that is not what he meant by the notion of ‘the turn’ and that Being and Time remained a touchstone for all of his later thought. He underlines again in this essay the fundamental continuity of his thinking from Being and Time onwards but also, crucially, he discusses how his own thinking is relevant to questions concerning how we should live and what he takes the very notion of ethics to mean.

In response to Beaufret’s question concerning the need for ontology to be supplemented by ethics, Heidegger relates a story concerning an acquaintance who wondered when he was going to write an ethics and offers a sustained meditation on the question of ethics that spans the final pages of the essay. When we consider how Heidegger responds to Beaufret and the anecdote recounted, it is remarkable that so many people still assume that Heidegger’s views on ethics are entirely dismissive:

The question concerning the meaning of being ignited a lifelong philosophical project for Heidegger; and the being of the human being remains essential to that undertaking (contrary to what advocates of the discontinuity thesis suppose). In terms of the claim that this letter itself is a statement of Heidegger’s abjuration of the project undertaken in Being and Time in favour of his subsequent efforts to seek the truth of being, he again undermines the plausibility of that thesis since what he is concerned with is to think the “essence of the human being … essentially, i.e., solely from the question concerning the truth of being, and yet without elevating the human being to the center of beings”. However, not elevating the human being to the ‘center of beings’ is not to disregard Dasein or the human being in favour of the truth of being altogether. That was never what Heidegger suggested or intended. What Heidegger further suggests is that the need to revisit the very possibility of ethics presses upon us all the more urgently in the technological age, an age where we are faced with unprecedented challenges in terms of the influence of mass society and Gestell. It is difficult to reconcile what Heidegger states here with the view that he dismissed the very possibility of engaging with ethical questions. By ‘ethical bond’, Heidegger clearly does not mean a series of concrete rules to govern conduct and regulate our lives. He is thinking at a more originaryFootnote ¹⁴ level as to how we should think of ethos, a way to be and live that is consistent with our essence as human beings. Heidegger’s criticisms of conventional morality, as his comments concerning the need to carefully attend to the question of our ethical bond show, should not be understood as an eschewal of the very possibility of ethical thinking. Ethics has traditionally involved the search for a first principle of some kind (e.g., the categorical imperative, the greatest happiness principle) and/or a source for our moral obligations (e.g., divine command, the state). These approaches do not begin with or recognise the importance of the essence of the human being (as Heidegger conceives it) and are therefore to be resisted. We cannot begin to think ethically, for Heidegger, until we have first considered the essence of the human being, and this necessitates that we think outside of the metaphysics of presence, which has failed to ask the being question and relies on a sense of beings as a whole that Heidegger vigorously resists. The source and force of our ethical bond relate to how things matter to us as human beings. And, in seeing how meaning and significance emerge for us in our own lives, by considering our essence as human beings, Heidegger is shining a light on how we feel the pull of recognition and obligation to others who we see as people who are grounded in a world that emerges as meaningful and significant in the same way. We are exhorted to acknowledge the dignity of human beings as ‘siblings’Footnote ¹⁵ standing out into the nameless and experiencing and valuing their lives, projects, relationships and ‘home’ against that backdrop. This avoids the neutralising indifference of a categorical rule and thus the possibility of an ethics of the inhumane. It further acknowledges how traditions and values emerge in specific contexts, which cannot be accounted for from a context-free, ahistorical perspective. Our ‘situation’ needs to be recognised as playing a crucial role in how we feel commitments and obligations.

Heidegger begins his essay on humanism with a discussion of one of Beaufret’s questions that most people are by now familiar with: how are we to restore some sense or meaning to the word ‘humanism’? And, as the essay unfolds as an extended answer to this and other questions attributed to Beaufret, we note that the supposedly pejorative remarks concerning ethics are in fact very heavily qualified. Heidegger is critical of the various ‘isms’ of his day (including Marxism and existentialism); he is similarly wary of the fact that ethics, logic and metaphysics, as they currently hold sway, emerged in and belong to the realm of public opinion, the marketplace of ideas, which he is very much critical of.

Nevertheless, these critical remarks hardly deny the very possibility of ethics – rather one has to ask the question concerning the meaning of being, if not before, then at least in tandem with the question concerning our ethical bond. Conventional morality has already assumed something about beings as a whole which betrays a failure to account for what distinguishes human beings, namely, their capacity to distinguish between being and beings, to realise that being itself is not a thing and is thus no-thing, i.e., nothing. To that extent Heidegger believes that conventional morality and other forms of humanism (including existentialism and Marxism) are metaphysically the same insofar as they share fundamental presuppositions about the meaning of being which amount to a failure to properly think through or ask the being question and what it entails in terms of the meaning of human being.Footnote ¹⁶ Existentialism, for instance, adheres to a Cartesian subjectivity that Heidegger rejects. Everything in turn is understood as somehow the achievement of the subjectivity of the subject, and the extreme existentialist vision of human freedom that Heidegger rails against emerges in this context. Even when it comes to the notion of God (e.g., as prima causa), we again begin with constantly present, actual things. God is then thought simply as a cause of things taken to be actual and present without ever wondering about the notion of the being of those things thought to be in being, or the being of god itself. This, for Heidegger, simply reduces the notion of god to an object of our ‘reckoning’ and our causal reasoning. In asking the Leibnizian question of beings and nothing (Heidegger’s version of the question reads: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” [GA40: 1]), we fail to see that we have yet to consider the notion of being itself and/or the notion of nothing as something other than the negation of some present thing.

Heidegger’s thinking is often characterised as anti-humanist. Indeed, Vogel, while trying to reconstruct what he takes to be a positive account of morality or ethics, insists that his reconstruction necessitates that we think with Heidegger against Heidegger. Vogel frames his reconstruction in this quasi-adversarial way as a result of the pejorative nature of remarks that Heidegger makes about conventional morality in Being and Time. Heidegger makes similar observations in “Letter on ‘Humanism’”:

Heidegger is concerned here with what he takes to be superficial forms of ethics and humanism. He is interested instead in rethinking the idea of being ethically bound and our essence as human beings in the context of the truth of being. He is not trying to disqualify the very possibility of ethics from the outset.

Heidegger next begins to weave his concerns with language into the essay and goes on to bemoan the debasement and decline of language, which “arises from a threat to the essence of humanity” (GA9: 318/243). Thinking, language, the question of being, and its relation to our essence as human beings, all emerge jointly as part of Heidegger’s concerns, clearly giving the lie to the idea that the truth of being is thought at the expense of what Heidegger deemed to be the excessively ‘Dasein-centric’ or overly subjectivist approach of Being and Time. He argues that

Heidegger exhorts us to learn to exist in the “nameless”. This, at first, may seem like a rather cryptic remark. However, to be nameless, to be without name, is to be without meaning, that which is not meaningfully present, the abyss which is the correlate of any emergence of meaningful presence. This is the self-effacing backdrop against which meaning emerges in Heidegger’s view, that is, against the backdrop of the nothing and nowhere. Adding further weight to the claim that Heidegger is not anti-humanist, he insists that human beings must let themselves be “claimed again by being”. We need to see language and meaning as emerging from this ‘claim’, affording us a home to dwell in “the truth of being”. With explicit reference to the analysis of care in Being and Time, he argues that in this ‘claim’, and in helping to ready human beings for this claim, there is “implied a concern about human beings”. The notion of ‘care’ is concerned with bringing human beings back to their essence.

Heidegger is at pains again to distance his understanding of humanism from some of the traditional forms of humanism. His point here echoes the qualifications he made concerning conventional morality. Humanism as simply another ‘ism’ is something Heidegger disavows, but that is not to say that he is advocating the inhumane. Rather, Heidegger insists that all previous forms of humanism operate with “an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of world, that is, of beings as a whole”. Any attempt to determine the essence of the human being “that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical” (GA9: 321/245). The point is a familiar one. Humanism, in all of its forms hitherto, has failed to ask the question concerning the meaning of being. It presupposes that the meaning of being is self-evident and thus unquestioningly both perpetuates and operates within the ambit of the metaphysics of presence. Heidegger makes the further point that because these metaphysical humanisms do not consider how the human being essentially belongs to the truth of being, they fail to think properly the being of the human being. Instead, they tend to look on the human being as one particular being among others and, indeed, from the perspective of animality, as a rational animal, a bio-anthropological entity with ‘properties’ like ‘reason’ or ‘logos’. By contrast, Heidegger questions whether the essence of the human being lies in animality at all.Footnote ¹⁷ To think of human beings in terms of animalitas (instead of humanitas) is, Heidegger adds, to think metaphysically. In this way metaphysics closes itself from the simple essential fact that human beings occur in their essence only where they are claimed by being. Heidegger insists that previous attempts to deal with the human being operate with the same metaphysical presuppositions and fail to touch on the essence of the human being. And, the essence of the human being lies in its ‘ek-sistence’, a claim that Heidegger traces back to Being and Time and reaffirms here. By hyphenating terms and alternating the spelling (ex-ist/ek-sist) Heidegger is signalling the etymology of the word ‘exist’. The Latin origin of the word exist is ‘ex(s)istere’, which means “to stand out, be perceptible, hence to exist, f. ex- out + sistere reduplicated form of sta- to stand”.Footnote ¹⁸ (He sometimes uses the Greek prefix ‘ek’, which also means ‘out of’.) Ek-sisting or Existing, for Heidegger, is a standing-out of or from and is to be distinguished from the traditional notion of ‘existentia’. A way to render this somewhat idiomatically in English is to describe Dasein as the ‘out-standing’ being. He had looked to clarify this again in the Beiträge in the 1930s and it is crucial to an understanding of Being and Time as well: “ek-sistence thought in this way is not identical with the traditional concept of existentia, which means actuality in contrast to the meaning of essentia as possibility” (GA9: 325/248). Note again that Heidegger invokes an earlier discussion in Being and Time, this time where he emphasised that the ‘essence’ of Dasein “lies in its existence”, insisting that he is not concerned with the “opposition between existentia and essentia” since “neither of these metaphysical determinations of being, let alone their relationship, is yet in question”. Neither is this a “universal statement about Dasein” as a traditional “name for ‘object,’ intending to express the metaphysical concept of the actuality of the actual”. Rather, for Heidegger, the claim is that the human being is in such a way that they are “the ‘there’ [das ‘Da’], that is, the clearing of being” (GA9: 325/248). Heidegger is keen to move us away from the idea that we are simply one living creature among others. True, “plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments”, but that is not to say that they “are placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is ‘world,’ they lack language”.Footnote ¹⁹ This involves a very particular conception of language, however, one peculiar to Dasein. Language is not simply “the utterance of an organism” or “the expression of a living thing”. It is not to be thought of (essentially) as a collection of symbols or “even in terms of the character of signification”. Rather, language is to be understood as “the clearing-concealing advent of being itself” (GA9: 326/248–249).

Again, it’s important to bear in mind that Heidegger is trying to answer the question as to the essence of the human being. The human being ‘ek-sists’, that is to say, we live towards the future – we stand out into the ‘not now’. We ourselves are as an interplay of presence and absence, and meaningfulness emerges for us as beings who are thrown into historical worlds set against the nothing and nowhere. We are not ourselves constantly statically present; we are not objects or things that can be understood as actual in that way. As ‘there’, we are not present in the way that a table might be thought to be ‘actually’ there in front of us. Indeed, the table itself is not really ‘there’ in the way that the tradition has suggested either; it is rather the table that we intend and is itself in terms of its possibilities, its meaningful presence is not exhausted in actuality.Footnote ²⁰ We are rather a dynamic, ecstatic awareness, and allow things to emerge as meaningfully present in historical contexts in ways that exceed the notion of pure presence. When Heidegger writes the ‘the human being ek-sists’, as he explains again here, he is not answering a question as to “whether the human being actually is or not”.Footnote ²¹ Rather he is saying something about the essence of the human being:

Let’s try to unpack some of this, since at times it can appear as though Heidegger simply states and restates ideas in variations of his own unique idiolect. For one thing, Heidegger is certainly not anti-humanist or inimical to the very possibility of ethics. Rather, what he is trying to determine is how we might first think of something like ethical obligation that accords with our essence as human beings, which in turn is to realise that our thrownness into historical, meaningful times and places occurs against the constant backdrop of self-concealing, abyssal nothingness. To be ‘ecstatic’ (Ecstasis/Ekstase), to ‘ek-sist’ (how we are essentially), is (literally) to not be ‘static’; rather, we ‘stand out’ (into the nothing). We are never present or actual in the way the tradition might have us think. We are more than what appears as actually present at any given moment; we are out beyond the present, with the shadow of our past hovering, as we lurch forward towards and anticipate the future. There is always something outstanding for Dasein and we in turn are ‘out-standing’ beings. We ‘are’ as beings that are ‘towards’, we are ourselves a constant interplay of presence and absence. Our experience is always tinged with an awareness of the finitude that runs through the emergence of meaningful presence for us. What it means for us to be and the source of meaningfulness and significance, the way things both mean something and matter to us is shaped by how we ourselves are as a clearing for the emergence of meaningfulness, our irreducibility to any idea of a moment that might capture us in our totality – a fantasy of eternal or constant presence. We find meaning, meaning finds us, as identities that are not reducible to the present or actual, but that constantly stand out into the nothing and the nameless.

The foregoing considerations have further particular implications for how we think of ourselves as the beings that have language. Instead of construing human beings simply as living creatures who possess language along with other capacities, Heidegger regards language as “the house of being in which the human ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of being, guarding it” (GA9: 333/254). Meaningfulness, the linguistic utterance, word – these always bear the trace of more than what they ostensibly signify, and they carry the silent echo of that in the face of which they emerge. They point to the ineffable and remind us of the fact that impermanence, void, or absence (in short – the abyssal) is the constant correlate of any occasion or event of meaningfulness. Meaningfulness can only be understood as emerging from out of concealedness and meaninglessness. There is no permanent principle underlying all accidents and contingency, no constant in view of which we understand change or make sense of things. To say that something ‘is’ is not to say that it is simply present understood as fully actualised.

Heidegger has gone to some lengths in previous work to demonstrate that the notion of being as constant presence belongs to a metaphysics that he is trying to overcome. He underlines again the importance of recognising the ontological difference, that is, that “being ‘is’ precisely not ‘a being’” (GA9: 334–335/254–255). The consequence of not keeping this in view is that “being is all too easily represented as a ‘being’ after the fashion of the familiar sorts of beings that act as causes and are actualized as effects” (GA9: 334–335/254–255). Heidegger complains, and not for the first time, that the implications of his claims to this effect in Being and Time and elsewhere were misunderstood, leading to the belief that “the attempt in Being and Time ended in a blind alley” when, in fact, “the thinking that hazards a few steps in Being and Time has even today not advanced beyond that publication” (GA9: 343/261). That is not to say that there is no progress or that his thinking hasn’t evolved, but his project revolves around an attempt to make clear what he was first approaching in Being and Time. What he didn’t quite manage at that time was to allow “the truth of being come to language and that thinking attain to this language” (GA9: 343/261). He repeats what he takes to be a shortcoming in his own earlier efforts towards the end of the essay. He had held back the third division of part one of Being and Time; at the time of publication, he had not as yet found a way to proceed without the aid of the language of metaphysics (metaphysics of presence), which made it difficult to avoid misinterpretations (GA9: 327–328/249–250). What we begin to see more clearly now is that Heidegger conceives of his project in Being and Time as directly related to the attempt here to articulate a non-metaphysical humanism. Originary ethics then is related to the very core of his thinking.

Heidegger is trying to articulate something fundamental, in a way – simple, but which evades description in our ordinary language. When we think of anything emerging for us as meaningfully present, when we say that something ‘is’ in that context, what do we mean by ‘is’? Heidegger teases out the questions of being and nothingness that he had famously raised in the 1929 inaugural lecture. He remains adamant that nothingness is not derived from the ‘not’ of negation since that negation is a negation of something already taken to be present, to be actual, to be the case. But beyond presence there is absence that is not the negation of something already present. How do we express this ‘nihilation’? It is not the negation of being understood as something present. Moreover, being is not itself ‘a being’, and therefore is not itself some-thing, any-thing, it is not itself ‘a thing’ and is therefore ‘no-thing’. We ourselves are as the beings that ‘stand-out’ into the nothing, we are ec-static, ek-sistent. Nothing, as Heidegger understands it here, does not annul something already taken to be present.

But how do we find a way to express this? We are truly here in the domain of the nameless, the abyssal. How does language emerge from the wordless, the nameless? We ‘are’, essentially, only in so far as we have recognised ourselves as the beings that stand out into the nothing. We are, furthermore, beings that are thrown into historical epochs where meaningfulness is ordained in accordance with the specific destinal sending of our day. (We will discuss this in more detail in the section that follows.) To live in the light of this awareness is key to understanding how we come to be bound ethically. This may seem excessively vague and underdetermined to some readers, but this is ultimately where we need to begin according to Heidegger. In thinking of nothingness in this context, the domain of the nameless, we enter that region where we can genuinely think about the nature of God, divinity, the holy – notions understood in the historical sense invoked by Heidegger in his response to Max Mueller (Safranski, Reference Safranski1998: 432–433). He fulminates against ideas such as God as the highest value since that is to think of God in such a way that it becomes an achievement of subjectivity rather than as a notion that resists any attempt to turn it into an object of our ‘reckoning’, something that we can ‘calculate’.Footnote ²² Here and elsewhere he criticises the idea of God as first cause.Footnote ²³ The metaphysically couched language of the tradition remains a necessary starting point – we cannot begin from ‘nowhere’. Nevertheless, Heidegger rues the fact that, even though he repeatedly highlighted his use of terms in very specific and particular ways, he failed to make clear that he was not trying to operate from within the confines of traditional metaphysics. In Being and Time he is trying to make its themes understandable for existing philosophy but believed that that was possible “only within the horizon of that existing philosophy and the use of its current terms” (GA9: 357/271). He subsequently came to realise that the use of traditional conceptual language was doomed to fail. Readers approached the key questions “according to the established terminology in its customary meaning” (GA9: 357/271). Thus, Heidegger’s attempts to think through a non-metaphysical humanism are not reducible to ethics and ontology ordinarily construed. However, that is not to say that Heidegger disallows the very possibility of ethical thinking any more than he thinks that one cannot undertake ontological inquiry. Rather, what is needed is a new approach. Furthermore, Heidegger’s approach to the most basic of ontological questions has ethical implications, since it concerns what it means for the human being to be and the essence of the human being. Living in accordance with our essence as human beings is, Heidegger believes, an ethical enterprise. Meditating on ontology and ethics, Heidegger resists the traditional notions in order to avoid the pitfalls of using metaphysically ‘loaded’ concepts (as he had done in Being and Time). But that is not to say that Heidegger favours what he calls here the ‘valueless’, the ‘inhumane’, or ‘irrationalism’. The conventional ways that values, humanism, and logic or reason have been handled by the tradition have failed to ask the more originary question that concerns Heidegger; they share presuppositions that Heidegger is not willing to grant. They operate within the metaphysics of constant presence and thus block our access to the true essence of the human being and the historical worlds we reside in. In that sense, they block our access to our true abode and lead to a kind of ‘homelessness’. What he means by homelessness here is related to the idea that ‘dwelling’ properly in our world is to live in full awareness of how we are thrown into an historical world and the nothingness that borders each emergence of historical presence, that is, the particular way that meaningfulness ‘comes to pass’ in any given epoch. The only constancy, in terms of how each of these epoch-defining ways through which everything emerges as meaningfully present hold sway, is the utter lack of anything underlying as constant, the nothingness that nihilates at the edges of each event or occasion. The thinking that tries to express this is not a thinking that issues in rules or directives – it is neither theoretical nor practical; instead, it “comes to pass [ereignet sich] before this distinction” (GA9: 358/272). Finding our essence as human beings means being able to exist once more in the ‘nameless’ – to see the role that absence plays in our lives, the ‘nihilation’ that “occurs essentially in being itself” as opposed to something that we see “in beings”: “The nihilating in being is the essence of what I [Heidegger] call the nothing. Hence, because it thinks being, thinking thinks the nothing” (GA9: 360/273).

A little earlier in the essay, Heidegger briefly discusses the notion of ethos understood as abode. It emerges in the context of Heidegger’s recounting of a story where some visitors happened upon Heraclitus engaged in the mundane activity of warming himself at his stove. Struck by their dismay at the banality of the scene, Heraclitus welcomes the passers-by into his home with the words: “For here too the gods are present” (GA9: 355/270). Our interpretation has come full circle: when pressed by Mueller upon observing certain religious gestures at a country chapel, Heidegger explains to his companion that the divine is present in a special way in these places, where local communities gather together in the world they share. In this story, of a person warming themselves at a simple stove, ‘even here’:

In this region of the familiar and the everyday, if we attend properly to how we are historically thrown into the place and time of our ‘home’, we can pay heed to how the familiar is prefigured by the unfamiliar, how the meaningful is prefigured by the meaningless, the named by the nameless. In the familiar, where we are surrounded by the manifold ‘things’ that have emerged as familiar, that is, as meaningful, we at once have a glimpse of the unfamiliar, the meaningless, the nameless, the nothing and nowhere – when such is our abode, we are truly ‘at home’; here too, the gods come to presence.Footnote ²⁵ To be at home in what is at once a site for the self-concealing revealing of ‘the unhomely’, to welcome the unhomely and unfamiliar, and to dwell in the interplay between the familiar and unfamiliar – that is the source of the originary ethics that Heidegger wishes us to think. Thus, to fully understand the essence of the human being is the gateway to identifying our ethical bond:

Heidegger urges us to find a way to an “abode in the truth of being”. In attending to “the clearing of being”, thinking “puts its saying of being into language as the home of eksistence”. As sense-making creatures, thrown into worlds where things emerge meaningfully against the backdrop of the nothing and nowhere, we find ourselves bound to the time and place of our own meaningful existence. As dynamic sites for the emergence of meaning, we ourselves belong to a world that is set against the abyssal. Heidegger’s originary ethics is not a matter of ‘valuing’ or ‘reckoning’ according to the subjectivity of the subject or the calculative reckoning of ‘value thinking’. Meaning is something that happens to and through us; our basic affectivity itself attests to our attunement to the nothing that announces itself through each occasion of meaningful presence. Thus, we are exhorted to become what we already are, to live in accord with our essence, which is to exist once more in the nameless. Recognising how we respond to the call/claim of being as our way of standing out into the nothing and sharing in meaningful historical worlds with others (caring for ourselves and others as co-respondents to this call/claim) is to understand what it is to be part of a community, to be ‘at home’ in a world, to have an ethos, to dwell together as a fragile community with a dignity that we share through our shared human essence. If we don’t begin with an understanding of our true human essence, then our attempts to understand what it is for us to be, how and why things matter to us, and how we feel the pull of obligations that respect and preserve this dignity of a shared humanity are bound to go awry. Instead, we are liable to think ‘inhumanly’ – for instance, according to the logic of ahistorical principles, categorical imperatives, necessary definitions, what have you.

Many a reader is likely to conclude at this point that these considerations are all too vague and/or hopelessly impoverished, leaving us with little to go on in terms of helping us determine what it would be to live a good life or how this extends to how we live together as communities and societies. We will return to this question in more detail in what follows. For now, however, we will try to sketch something that will hopefully seem more positive or less indeterminate than what many interpreters of Heidegger have previously offered in this context. Heidegger insists that we urgently need to consider how we are to be bound ethically given the dangers of the technological age. Ethics in turn can only be addressed from the perspective of our essence as human beings, which is something that traditional forms of humanism and morality have failed to do. The essence of the human being is what he tries to determine during the course of his essay on humanism. Our essence lies in our ‘ek-sistence’; that is, we are the beings that stand out into the nothing. How we find ourselves thrown into a particular epoch, how we find ourselves as beings-in-the-world, happens against the backdrop of the nothingness that precedes and shadows each meaningful, historical emergence for Dasein. As we shall see again in what follows, the implications of Heidegger’s claims to this effect are such that our interactions with others should therefore be oriented and guided by a reverence for and recognition of how they themselves are historicised, bound and placed in similar ways – ways that give meaning and depth to our own lives, to the lives of ‘our own’ communities such that we find ourselves to be properly ‘at home’ in our worlds.

A perennial challenge for philosophers concerns the kind of footing or grounding our ethical commitments have. One way of reading Plato’s dialogues is to see Plato as continually looking to subvert the Socratic (Socratic understood here as referring to the views expressed by a fictional character in the dialogues) insistence on absolute definitions (first principles) when it comes to questions concerning virtue, justice, what have you, as he tries to show us how the attempt to proceed with ethical questions as we do in geometry is destined to end in aporia.Footnote ²⁶ Plato can thus be read as a critic of that kind of approach to what Aristotle in turn refers to as the ‘science of human affairs’. Aristotle, for his part, insists that we cannot demand or expect the same level of precision in the science of human affairs that we expect from the exact sciences. Kant famously insisted that precisely what we need is a grounding for a metaphysics of morals so that we can rationalise our ethical lives in such a way as to be able to identify categorical (as opposed to conditional) imperatives. Nietzsche, in a stunning attack on Kantian metaphysics, ponders the challenge faced as we try to articulate ethical views without the support of a metaphysics of any kind.Footnote ²⁷ We can think of Heidegger then as coming to this question on the back of his own attempts to revitalise the being question and to rewind back through the history of Western philosophy to the very inception of the metaphysical tradition and to think anew the joint questions of being and nothing. The despair and reactive absurdism of the existentialist response (personified by Nietzsche’s madman for exampleFootnote ²⁸) ignore the possibility that meaningfulness might still emerge, even if our metaphysical constants turn out to be illusory. In terms of ethics, people can still feel obliged and dutybound despite there not being timeless laws or commandments derived from some universal reason to which everyone must submit.Footnote ²⁹ Now someone might counter that we often act as though our imperatives are unconditional. We do not take ourselves to be stating something conditional or historical, they may argue, when we say that certain things are absolutely wrong. Nevertheless, do the force of those convictions or the strength of those obligations mean that they are any less conditional, and, therefore, historical? We must not confuse the strength of our sense of obligation and compulsion with arguments for indubitable, categorical necessity. Wanting or needing something to be the case has never been an argument or reason for something being the case – desiderata are not arguments. After all, what would be considered heinous to many of us today was considered perfectly reasonable or acceptable to previous societies. Would we really want to insist that any and all of those societies were inherently morally odious or evil? We must try to understand that place and time ground us – that is part of how we are bound. We share places and times with others who are similarly bound. We are affective beings standing out into the nothing and find ourselves as thrown into these times and places. That is a key to understanding the beauty of the world we live in, how precious our times and places are, and it is the key to understanding the dignity of ourselves and other human beings. Demanding that our sense of obligation should transcend and sit outside of time, place, in short – history, is to demand too much. Indeed, to ignore the situatedness of our obligations may well result in us having to accede to views (and actions) that are patently counter-intuitive. As Williams contends, the demands imposed on us may well prove inhuman. We will continue to have disputes and dilemmas. We must allow for the fact that there will be genuine moral dilemmas and disagreements. What we need in that case is a basis for dialogue and discussion, which, if we are to go along with this reading of Heidegger, can be found in our shared essence as human beings.

Things as Things

In order to understand the way Heidegger introduces his concerns with the essence of modern technology and the dangers faced by humanity, we need to zero in on his extended meditation on the notion of the ‘thing as thing’ as part of the constellation of ideas that he explores. With this in mind, a brief excursus into the background to Heidegger’s phenomenological approach might be of use, simply by way of orienting the reader with discussions and ideas that might otherwise appear overly abstract and/or abstruse. Heidegger’s meditation on ‘things’ is related directly to phenomenological seeing and, in this, more than perhaps anything else, Heidegger never forswore his indebtedness to Husserl’s breakthrough in terms of phenomenological ‘seeing’:

Seeing a thing as a thing remains key for Heidegger. In “Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger explains his version of phenomenological seeing with refreshing clarity:

We can already see in this perspicuous passage from the mid 1930s how Heidegger employed the phenomenological method to advance his philosophical aims. The things that ‘are’, their ‘being’, what it is that we mean when we say that there ‘is’, for example, a storm whistling in the chimney, or that we hear a neighbour’s Mercedes in the driveway outside – does not in fact neatly reduce to the scientific account. We don’t hear bare sensations. Our hearing is intentional. We ‘hear’, for instance, a specific car whose sound we recognise even though all that we have access to are sound waves operating on our aural apparatus. That is what Heidegger means when he says that ‘the things themselves’ are much closer to us ‘than all sensations’. To ‘experience’ a ‘bare’ sensation, we have to move away from the experience, we have to ‘abstract’, to ‘listen away’ from ‘things’. What we hear is much more than a bare sensation, we hear and see things as things, even though the interplay of presence and absence involved is often concealed from us as something emerges as meaningfully present within the context of the world we live in. What we mean when we see or hear some ‘thing’ in each of these cases, if we pay attention, goes much further than what the reductionist, scientific account of that same ‘thing’ or ‘state of affairs’ suggests. In the earlier passage, Heidegger had suggested that we need to bring the world ‘near’ in the ‘thinging of the thing’. In other words, our capacity to see the thing as a thing involves the interplay of presence and absence.

Indeed, what makes any particular thing a thing is not its constant presence and actuality, or its physical composition. In a 1935 lecture course Heidegger considers the example of a nearby building; where is the ‘being’ of that building? What does its being consist of? The building ‘is’ for us in terms of its past as well as its future, its possibilities. It cannot be reduced to its actuality or some illusory notion of it being constantly present or actual, or its material composition (GA40: 25–26/35–36). This in turn points to the fact that when things emerge as meaningfully present, it always takes place within the context of the nothing and nowhere that precede and follow them. The specific way that that meaningfulness can emerge from concealedness is something that evolves and shifts from one epoch to the next in epoch-specific ways – what might be characterised as ‘ordinances of revealing’ or ‘destinal sendings’ or the ‘worlding of the world’. What remains vital is that we stay ‘near’ to the way the thing emerges as thing within this constant historical interplay of presence and absence and that we are not derailed by the manner in which the metaphysics of constant presence has shifted everything into the sphere of the achievement of human subjectivity and what it deems to be constantly present or its negation. Heidegger’s grave concern in this series of lectures (which has profound ethical implications) is that the current way that meaningfulness emerges (as that process conceals itself – leaving us to simply see ‘reality’ in this ‘current’ way) threatens the very possibility of seeing things ‘as’ things any longer, threatens, that is, the possibility of any other kind of revealing and blocks us from our access to ‘world’. At the same time, it bears recalling in this context that what makes us human is precisely that being, the being of things and other beings, is given to us. Hence, the inability to see things as things, in their being, keeps us removed from our essence as human beings and blocks our capacity to see humans as humans.

Heidegger considers the example of an empty jug in the Bremen lectures to elaborate on this insight in more detail.Footnote ³⁶ He explains that science fails to account properly for the emptiness of the jug – the “physical sciences assure us that the jug is filled with air and with all that constitutes the compound mixture of air” (GA79: 8–9/8–9). Heidegger’s point is quite a simple one. Nevertheless, once one grasps his insight in the context of his concerns with the influence of a certain kind of scientistic prejudice pervading the technological age, then the implications, not least the ethical, are profound. Let’s imagine then that I see an empty jug on the kitchen table the morning after a dinner party. Part of what makes it a jug, my ability to see the jug ‘as’ this jug involves its capacity to be ‘empty’. Now the scientist will tell us that what we actually see is an object that isn’t in fact ‘empty’ at all. They might tell us that what I see is an object composed of various materials, forming a cavity that is currently filled with a combination of (for the most part) nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, argon, and carbon dioxide – ‘the compound mixture of air’. But that is not at all what I ‘see’. I ‘see’ instead a jug that is ‘empty’, the same jug – made from clay (earth) that was filled with wine last night (sky), wine (the divine gift formed of earth and sky) that we drank with our guests (mortals). It is the empty jug that will be filled with soapy water shortly, scrubbed clean, emptied, and left to dry on the draining board. It is the empty jug that will be filled with wine again the next time we entertain guests to celebrate, perhaps, some event or milestone in our lives (mortals). The jug reminds me of an empty jug that was used recently at my niece’s Christening. The empty jug was immersed in a font and used to pour a little water over her head as part of a blessing (divinity). The scientist, Heidegger believes, will dismiss all of this claiming that we have “let ourselves be deceived by a semi-poetic manner of observation” when we invoke the emptiness of the jug (GA79: 8–9/8). And, the danger, for Heidegger, is that the current way that coming to presence/meaningfulness takes place is such that we are losing our very capacity to see things as ‘things’ any longer – and, we have to add, mortals as mortals. Everything is reduced to constant presence in quite an extreme and potentially irreversible way, a result that was already set in motion at the beginning of the history of Western metaphysics as we fell into oblivion as to what we mean when we say that things ‘are’, what the ‘being’ of things means. Heidegger is deeply alarmed at the extent and pace of the rampant and eliminative way everything is ‘revealed’ or rendered as ‘real’ for us in the technological age. We are at the point that we may no longer be able to see things as things or humans as humans, as everything dissolves into a coherence of forces, resources, atoms, molecules, what have you:

The influence of the Gestell – technology’s essential “enframing” or “imposition” – is so pervasive and consumptive as to have eliminated every other possibility of revealing and equalises and ‘positions’ everything under its levelling gaze. It threatens the very essence of the human being and our capacity to dwell historically in worlds.

The Fourfold

The reader will have noticed in the previous section that the jug (and the liquid it pours) have the terms earth, sky, divinities, and mortals in brackets after various instances of the use of the term [jug]. These four terms are collectively referred to as ‘the fourfold’ and come to occupy an important place in Heidegger’s discussion of ‘the thing’. The discussion of the fourfold has a direct impact on the ethical bond that Heidegger wants us to consider. However, we can only really begin to appreciate that impact once the meaning of the fourfold has been unpacked. In what follows then, we will try to explain why Heidegger discusses this ambiguous notion of the fourfold in the context of what he describes the ‘thinging of the thing’, that is, our experience of the thing as thing.

In the penultimate lecture in the Bremen series (“The Danger”), Heidegger describes ‘world’ as

Heidegger’s language and imagery become notoriously abstruse as he continues to pursue his path of thinking in the decades following Being and Time. The issue of the fourfold has given rise to a good deal of abstract and complex discussions in the literature.Footnote ³⁷ And yet, for all of that ‘industry’, the challenge remains to try and state as simply as possible what Heidegger might be driving at in the context of our discussion of the ethical exigencies of the technological age.Footnote ³⁸

Human beings are mortal; that is, we are the only creatures that are ‘able’ to die, that can be-towards-death. Recognising our finitude brings us before the nothing or nothingness; this in turn allows us to see how the nameless/the limitless/the abyssal (divinities) are the constant self-concealing backdrop to any instance of meaningful presence. This is the ineffable, inarticulable background to and future of any historical existence – the self-effacing, infinite correlate of all experience. To think god/divinity in an appropriate way is to think being and the nothing. There is a constant non-oppositional strife (i.e., a striving together) between that which refuses or resists presence and that which comes to presence for us. Our very ability to be is an ability also not to be, this is our utmost possibility, and each and every instance of significance in our lives is shaped by this possibility. We are a being-towards, we are futural, and we face the ‘divine’ understood as the nameless, the unfamiliar, the abyssal. This is the situation that we find ourselves in collectively. The earth is the dark, hidden ‘stuff’ from which our ‘things’ are made, and it is where our places are placed. It is the irreducible source of the material from which all of our ‘things’ are fashioned, but which will never itself be a thing and to which, in a way, all things return (Edwards, Reference Edwards, Dreyfus and Wrathall2005: 461–462). The sky is stretched like a high, vaulted canopy over the earth. It lights up and darkens the earth where we reside. It nourishes the earth with rain and sun. It brings night, darkness, and wintry cold – withering. Night gives way to day, and vice versa. On the earth and underneath the sky the day can lengthen and shorten depending on the passing of the seasons and days according to our measure. The very measure echoes with reminders of how earth and sky are not reducible to our measure even as they are conditions for how we experience things meaningfully. Sky grants us the measure of time with our passing hours, days, months, seasons, and years, while also reminding us of the fact that this granting of measure will outstrip our own time of measure. It points further to the possibility of what Edwards refers to as the numbing possibility of “pure, pointless time: time that is not history” (Edwards, Reference Edwards, Dreyfus and Wrathall2005: 464), the time of meaninglessness and namelessness which is the ultimate possibility of all history, of all that is meaningful and named – a time, in effect, which is untimely.

This striving together of ‘out-standing’ human beings, facing the abyss, on the earth, underneath the sky is gathered in the unified appearance of thing as thing. And the way this unifying takes place in the thinging of thing emerges in the specific way the world worlds for us in any given era. That is, the appearance of things as things happens through a particular epoch-defining ordinance which governs the way everything appears or emerges meaningfully. This is what Heidegger refers to as “the worlding of the world”. Again, the point here is that Heidegger is interested in meaningfulness, the experience of things as things. He is interested in the conditions or source of that meaningfulness and how it itself (the source – which is not to hypostasise ‘it’ or to treat it as a cause) is not a product of our own sense-making or subjectivity. Each occurrence of meaningful presence is a gathering of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals; and, as something shines forth as a thing, it carries the silent echo of the abyssal, the nothingness which is part of its possibilities (as opposed its actuality), which in turn points to the ultimate possibility of all meaningfulness, that is, meaninglessness.Footnote ³⁹

If we go back to the example of the jug – the potter makes the jug from clay (earth), we fill the jug with wine to share with friends on a summer’s evening (sky), perhaps to mark something significant in our lives (mortals), and the event we celebrate or mark might be a birth, marriage, blessing, death or commemoration (divinity). The wine that we pour is the fruit of the vine that has ripened, been harvested, crushed, fermented, and bottled, that we have bought for an occasion or celebration, that is decanted into the jug, and that we now imbibe with friends following a toast or perhaps some commemorative words (Earth, Sky, Mortals, Divinity). The empty jug is lying ready to be filled with wine or water to be poured on some occasion or other. The pouring of the wine from the once empty and now refilled jug is a gathering and unifying of the fourfold in the appearance of the jug as jug. The emptiness involved is not properly understood as simply incapacity. As Heidegger explains, the ‘scythe’ and ‘hammer’ are not incapable of pouring wine or water in the same way that the empty jug is. In the act of pouring, we see the thinging of the thing, we see the jug as jug. The scientific description of the empty jug as a cavity filled with air does not capture any of this and it certainly does not render the notion of the empty jug obsolete.

If we draw the strands together here and understand the inter-relationship of world, being and the nothing, the truth (unconcealedness) of being, the fourfold, the thing as thing, and the history of how things emerge as things from one epoch to the next, we can hopefully begin to see how and why Heidegger’s subsequent remarks concerning people murdered in the concentration camps are part of his more general concern with how we might discover our ethical obligations in the technological age. In the way that we take everything to ‘be’, the way everything is ‘revealed’ for us today, that is, through Gestell, we are blocked from ‘nearness’ to ‘world’ – “In the standing reserve [which is how everything is revealed/reduced through Gestell] objects are no longer permitted, much less the thing as thing” (GA79:45/44). Instead of seeing things as things, we see stockpiles of resources, composites of atoms, forces to be harnessed and controlled – and that extends, of course, to us mortals. Indeed, we have Human Resources departments anywhere that people work together (GA7: 18).

It’s worth noting that Heidegger insists that while we are on the precipice in terms of falling ourselves into the standing reserve, in the original published essay at least, he nevertheless insists that we cannot ourselves merely become part of an inventory, simply reduced to resources. We remain the being through which this coming to presence of what is taken to be real at any given moment takes place, after all. This adds further weight to the claim that in the Bremen lectures (see the next subsection) Heidegger cannot be dismissing the claims to humanity of people in the death camps. In the same way that perishing cannot be attributed to the self-experience of the inmates and refers rather to the attitude of the perpetrators who have dehumanised people in the camps, seeing the same people as items of an inventory cannot be a description of the self-experience of the inmates. Rather, Heidegger is describing the attitude of the perpetrators who had dehumanised the people they murdered to the point that they were simply items in an inventory, and ultimately waste to be disposed of.

The Danger

Where we lose the capacity to see things as things “the refusal of world” takes place. The world still worlds “But the worlding of world is not … properly experienced and correspondingly thought” (GA 79: 47/45). The way that we experience the real at any given moment has always and ever depended on the “still-concealed mirror-play of the fourfold” (GA 79: 47/45). It is this mirror-play of earth and sky, divinity and mortals which, in “the uniting whole of its presence … guards everything that thingingly presences and absences between the four”. In other words, we see what has emerged as thing and forget how the ‘presence’ of the thing involves the interplay of presence and absence within the historical world we are thrown into. World is what allows things to emerge as things; as a result of the worlding of the world, things emerge as meaningfully present. However, for the most part, our attention is drawn merely to the presence of what is currently present, while the worlding of the world conceals itself. We tend to overlook or forget the worlding of the world, it remains concealed from us.Footnote ⁴⁰ The way that this worlding takes place has evolved from one epoch to the next culminating in the unique form of unconcealment taking place in the technological age, which, as noted earlier, Heidegger names Gestell. The happening of unconcealment, and thereby ‘every way of being’ (every kind of presencing), conceals itself, and this leads to forgetting or oblivion. This is what the so-called ‘forgottenness of being’ (Seinsvergessenheit) means at bottom: “that both the essence of being, presencing, and its essential provenance in Ἀλήθεια as the event of the essence of this, as well as Ἀλήθεια itself, all lapse into forgetfulness” (GA79: 48/50–51). As a result, this ‘dynamic process’ is unavailable to human perception and representation, which only appears to have access, in terms of direct perception and representation, to the actual, what is ‘representable’. “For this reason, human thinking is unable to think the essence of unconcealment or the presencing in it … human thinking from the outset has forgotten the essence of being” (GA79: 48/50–51). The backdrop to this constant disclosure conceals itself, refuses itself. Part of how the real has revealed itself in successive epochs has been as constant presence; however, there is a dimension which has been forgotten since it conceals itself as each type of unconcealing takes place (as constant presence) and holds sway – to the point that this forgetting currently threatens to terminally block access to that other dimension. Heidegger now wants us to see how we are blocked from even having access to the thing as thing in the age of modern technology where Gestell governs the emergence of what appears as ‘present’ at any given moment. It is das Gestell that

This is the great danger that threatens us, and it is in this context that Heidegger sees the urgent need to revitalise ethics. Humanism and ethics, thought anew, are therefore very much at the heart of Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger sees our current situation as an emergency – we need to awaken genuine distress among human beings such that they recognise the devastation that is both on our doorstep and indeed has already taken place. It is in this specific context that Heidegger makes the following infamous remark about “the fabrication of corpses” in camps, which I accordingly cite in full.

Further context for this passage is found in the analysis of death in Being and Time where Heidegger distinguishes between three different kinds of death: perishing (Verenden), demise (Ableben), and dying (Sterben) (SZ: 247). He is adamant that Dasein can never perish. The human being can ‘demise’ and the human being can ‘die’ in the sense of being-towards-death (‘death’ in the second sense then is dispositional, what Heidegger describes as ‘a way to live’). However, perishing is a biological occurrence, and Dasein is not to be understood as a biological entity or a bio-anthropological thing for Heidegger.Footnote ⁴¹ Dasein is mortal, that is, we are ‘able to die’. The moment we are no longer ‘able to die’, we are no longer Dasein, we are no longer a ‘not yet’, a being towards the future.

The background to and occasion for these remarks is also crucial here if we are to forestall wayward interpretations: Heidegger prepared these remarks for a series of public lectures on the topic of the essence of modern technology. This is often overlooked by commentators who loudly proclaim Heidegger’s moral bankruptcy and accuse him of neutralising, minimising, or indeed denying the Holocaust. What further need do we have of interpretation? After all, you can read it for yourself; he compares Auschwitz to farming in another passage!Footnote ⁴² In other work, I have offered a series of extended reflections on this issue where I argue for a rather different, context-sensitive interpretation of this and other related passages. In my view it is clear, not least from the passages we have examined that prefigure these remarks, that Heidegger is condemning what has happened to people in the camps along with millions of other people who have died from famine in China. Heidegger warns that in the current destinal sending of meaningful presence, we no longer have any trace of the thing as thing – and are further guilty, at times, of not seeing mortals as mortals. The way everything is revealed now involves their dis-integration, reduction, and dis-solution into standing reserve. As he states again in the published essay on the essence of technology: when we no longer experience anything anymore as ‘objects’, when everything is ‘objectless’ standing reserve, we are in a perilous situation.

When considering earlier how we no longer experience even objects, only a standing reserve and stockpiles, and how everything is positioned and ordered for us so as to appear that way, Heidegger uses the term ‘inventory’. We see things from the standpoint of their position in an inventory or as a resource to be disposed of as one sees fit. In the “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger urges, as noted earlier, that, in this predicament, that is, in the emergency that he associates with the age of modern technology, “the greatest care must be fostered on our ethical bond”, as it accords with our essence as human beings. He is not, to be clear, making the category mistake of reducing genocide to agriculture (as is sometimes suggested – see footnote 42), rather he is highlighting the way everything emerges as meaningfully present in the age of Gestell. It is not that war, agriculture, and genocide are ‘the same’. They share the same ‘essence’ – that is, they are coming to presence in the same way (i.e., through Gestell). That does not mean that Heidegger is claiming that there is no difference between tillage farming and the Holocaust. What he is drawing our attention to is the influence that Gestell exercises in every aspect of our lives. Granted, that does not alter the fact that he should have said something specific about the horrors of the Holocaust beyond this philosophical point. That is an undeniable failing. However, it is important to acknowledge that Heidegger is trying to think through these problems in a proto-ethical way.

Conversely, a number of critics read Heidegger here as arguing that some human beings are not fully Dasein (i.e., authentically human), that they didn’t in fact ‘die’ in the camps because they are not properly human, and that this is the logical extension of some of his remarks in the 1930s.Footnote ⁴³ However, even if one wanted to take the view that it’s possible to understand him this way, by way of response we can reproduce some of the ideas we examined earlier to the effect that we are all bound by our finitude to times and places and that this can and should be the basis for an originary ethics. As I have argued elsewhere,Footnote ⁴⁴ I do not believe that Heidegger was extending his exclusionary vision of the 1930s to the specific remarks in Bremen and claiming that the Jewish people did not die because they were not really human beings to begin with. There is a way of construing things such that it can look like the remarks in Bremen, taken out of context, chime with some of his comments about the historylessness and worldlessness of various groups of people (including the Jewish people) in a series of lectures, texts, and notebooks from the 1930s. However, that simply doesn’t strike me as a plausible reading of the passages here, where he is clearly warning us about the dangers of the technological age. He underlines the horrifying and distressing nature of these crimes against humanity, describing how mechanically and dispassionately these factories of death ‘liquidated’ human beings. ‘Undying death’ is a clear reference to the outlook of the perpetrators since human beings (understood as Dasein), for Heidegger, cannot perish in this way. The fact that Heidegger returns to the precise terminology of Being and Time is also telling, and he makes clear again within this series of lectures that while the animal can perish, the human being (understood as Dasein) can never perish. Hence, this is not, in my view, best understood as a reference to the self-experience of the victims. Furthermore, in the face of what he characterises as an emergency, Heidegger stresses the need to rethink ethics and humanism, to restore humanity by allowing us to see again the essence of what it is to be human. Heidegger sees all of this as distressing and horrifying, and as part of a planetary emergency that requires us to think carefully about how we are and should be ethically directed and bound. Even if one believes this to be entirely insufficient, it at least gives the lie to the idea that Heidegger is a Holocaust denier.

Granted, even if we accept the line of reasoning just elaborated, we might still have reservations. Why did Heidegger fail to name? Why not speak specifically about ‘the Jews at Auschwitz’, for example? Why ignore the shocking singularity of the Shoah? This is an extremely fraught and complicated issue. Given Heidegger’s complicity as a member of the Nazi party; given that he was an avowed, vocal, and influential supporter of Nazi policy while rector of Freiburg University, and, given his gushing admiration for Hitler in the 1930s, many of his Jewish friends, students, and colleagues, quite reasonably, expected a word of contrition, an apology – at the very least, an unequivocal statement or admission. If Heidegger was going to venture anything at all in public, then this was the very least that one might have expected. Even if there are some compelling insights concerning the horrors of the Holocaust in the Bremen lectures, we have to acknowledge that there is a failure on Heidegger’s part as well. Heidegger might well be correct in seeing death camps as, in some ways, an expression of Gestell; but that is not enough! One can acknowledge the singularity of this wound in human history without treating it as ahistorical – to be singular does not mean to be beyond comprehension or history. This was an opportunity to state unambiguously how our ethical bond should specifically bar us from dehumanising whole swathes of people in this way and to name the places and the peoples he was alluding to. Heidegger could further have openly confessed his gross error in proclaiming repeatedly in the 1930s that Jewish people, even though historically bound like him through place, time, and language, were not his German ‘siblings’.

That Heidegger was horrified by what had happened under the Nazi reign of terror is clear from his post-war correspondence with Jaspers. We find no trace of the apologetics or equivocations that befoul his correspondence with Marcuse here,Footnote ⁴⁵ and it contains an important series of admissions in the context of assessing his remarks on the death camps in Bremen. Below are some telling excerpts from that correspondence:

Authenticity and Ethics

Describing authenticity in Heidegger as a non-normative notion may seem rather perverse and/or confusing. Nevertheless, in Being and Time, it is clear, for example, that our lives are, even when lived authentically, a mixture of authenticity and inauthenticity. To live authentically is to live a life among other people, with their various social roles and functions, while also understanding the disclosive role of our temporality. Thus, the authentic life is a mixture of authentic and inauthentic modes of existence. However, that is not to say that Heidegger does not have concerns about what kind of inauthentic life we may be forced to live due to the way the history of the metaphysics of presence has culminated in the age of technology. It is certainly true that a life lived exclusively in the mode of inauthenticity and publicness, not least in the technological age, would fail to live up to the requirements of authenticity for Heidegger. It is further true that this kind of inauthenticity is described in what can sound like moralistic terms at times.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that an inauthentic life would not necessarily be ‘immoral’ (in the conventional sense) or ‘dissolute’. One could be living a perfectly ‘moral’ life and be entirely inauthentic. Indeed, even those who hold themselves to the strictest applications of absolute, universal principles, who refuse to succumb to the demands of the crowd, behaving entirely as non-conformists when faced with moral obligations, may well, themselves, be acting or living inauthentically. Heidegger believes that morality, ordinarily construed, is itself an entirely inauthentic notion. It is either something embraced as a ‘norm’ by das Man or it is something that anyone/everyone should do, regardless of one’s particular situation, and is thus a forsaking of the demands of personal responsibility in favour of an abstract universal principle.

Morality, in both senses, is an entirely anonymous enterprise, it is not one’s ‘own’ response to a situation and, therefore, cannot be authentic (‘eigentlich’, with the stress on ‘eigen’ here). Instead, one acts or is directed by what ‘anyone’ should do at any time; that is, one acts according to what one thinks ‘everyone’ should do or according to what one thinks everyone else already thinks one should do. To challenge this approach to ethical reasoning is not to valorise voluntarism or egocentrism or to suggest that we have no way to proceed. Rather, we need to get clear on how we should think ethically and in ways that involve authentically responding to situations and understanding the proper ground and nature of the claims that a genuine ethical bond can place on us. Ethics in the sense that Heidegger wants to think about it is operating at a level prior to conventional normativity.

Existentialist Interpretations of Authenticity

Commentators who read Heidegger’s account of authenticity and being-towards-death through the lens of what they take to be orthodox existentialism are guilty of a common mistake. Vogel discusses this in some detail under the umbrella of what he sees as existentialist misreadings of Heidegger’s account of authenticity and the discussion of being-towards-death in particular. The mistake made is to assume that once the idea of abstract, universal moral principles or ideals is discredited, that there is nothing left to generate ethical commitments apart from extreme subjectivity. We are radically free and can ‘justify’ any kind of behaviour whatsoever. Anything and everything ‘is’, quite literally, ‘permissible’.

Leaving to one side the question as to whether all existentialists would accept this caricature of their position, one thing that Vogel and I agree on is that this cannot be the kind of view that Heidegger would espouse. For one thing, the notions of freedom and autonomy involved are simply irreconcilable with anything we find in Heidegger. Indeed, this is clearly part of why Heidegger rejects the appellation [existentialism] as appropriate to his thinking. If we think again of Nietzsche’s account of the Madman in The Gay Science, we might be able to clarify where things go wrong here. Nietzsche is not himself ‘the Madman’; the Madman is rather more like the clichéd existentialist caricature that everyone is familiar with, reeling from what he takes to be the Black Hole left by the death of God and the inevitable consequence that everything must now be permissible. For Nietzsche, the Madman has been disabused of an illusion, and he is experiencing extreme disillusion at the sudden realisation that the eternal, universal principles of metaphysics and morals have been discredited. He cannot see anything but chaos and devastation as a result. However, to embrace absurdity, or to resign oneself to moral nihilism (or any other kind of nihilism) as a consequence is unwarranted. What both Nietzsche and Heidegger are exploring is the nature of the challenge faced. In Heidegger’s case, he is asking how we can secure some sense or meaning for both humanism and ‘the ethical bond’, not in terms of metaphysical constants, but in accord with our human essence.

Cosmopolitanism versus Provincialism

We live in an era where the term ‘cosmopolitan’ is, for many, a byword for inclusivity and tolerance. For those of us with liberal and/or left-leaning sensibilities, we can scarcely imagine it as anything other than an outlook to be commended and indeed recommended. Now, I do not for one moment want to suggest that the cruder and more bigoted elements of Heidegger’s anti-cosmopolitan provincialism are justifiable or anything other than offensive. However, it is worth remembering that the idea of a global citizen or citizen of the world was looked on with considerable suspicion and often resisted by those witnessing the increasing pace of globalisation in the twentieth century. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter 1916 rising, for example, the then Irish President Eamon de Valera warned people against an ‘amorphous cosmopolitanism’:

De Valera was a staunch nationalist, having been a prominent member of Ireland’s armed resistance to British rule before embarking on a political career in the new Republic where he had roles as Taoiseach (prime minister) and later president of the Republic of Ireland. It’s worth noting that 1966 was the year of Heidegger’s infamous interview with Der Spiegel. Are de Valera’s remarks as problematic as Heidegger’s exhortations to the German people at various junctures? Are they on some kind of continuum? Or are they different in kind? Obviously, we don’t hear anything as repugnant as the antisemitism and ethnic chauvinism we find in Heidegger’s private notebooks or indeed some of the speeches and seminars from the 1930s. Nevertheless, is there still a certain continuity here? Is there necessarily a kind of exclusionary vision involved? Or are we simply dealing with sentiments that are, while perhaps jarring to those of us with the more liberal and inclusive sensitivities we associate with left-leaning or even centrist political outlooks today, not inherently problematic? Perhaps the balance to be struck involves an acknowledgement of our historical and cultural specificity that allows for the possibility of intercultural dialogue and integration.Footnote ⁵⁸

What then are we to make of the hugely problematic nature of Heidegger’s attempts to put some of his thinking concerning Dasein, authenticity and the notion of an authentic Dasein of a people in the service of an abhorrent political vision? Heidegger’s entrenched adherence to a Germanophilic provincialism is very disturbing at times. He tries to deflect with revisionist retrospectives in texts such as “Letter on Humanism”. Nevertheless, his thinking clearly suffered from a certain shortcoming or blindspot (for a period of time, at the very least) in that he failed (or refused) to discern how his rigid adherence to an exclusionary provincialism was simply incompatible with the philosophical ideas he looked to connect it to. After all, human beings in general are thrown, historical beings whose worlds are run through by the constant interplay of presence and absence. This is already clear in Being and Time, even if he tries to renege on the theoretical necessity of this very thought at times.

We find an instance of Heidegger’s revisionism in this context in “Letter on Humanism” where he adds some nuance and qualifies his comments on Germans and the German language and insists that he is not advocating nationalism or jingoism. This is very obviously a retreat from the rather more militant and exclusionary stance he took before the war, when he insisted that the German people needed to first be on their own and non-relational, before then looking outwards to be with other nations. His qualifying of these views in some later texts appears to be far more permissive. In other words, he examines our existence as members of historical communities, conditioned by our time, place, and language, while allowing for our capacity to see other communities as ‘like’ us and as ‘humanised’ in similar ways:

This more nuanced and qualified approach is clearly an attempt to revise and/or sanitise the more extreme views that he had peddled in the 1930s. It is impossible to read this passage from the late 1940s and not recall Heidegger’s appeal to the German people to support Hitler’s 1933 plebiscite:

Heidegger makes similar remarks at a rally in support of Hitler the following day. Leaving to one side our revulsion at the fact that Heidegger acts as apologist for Hitler’s dictatorial designs and ignores the naked menace already obvious in his foreign policy, we are forced again to consider the obscene attempts to put his own thinking in the service of Nazism. This is related to Heidegger’s attempts to articulate something like an authentic Dasein of a people in a number of places, which in turn is an extrapolation from authentic Dasein to something like Dasein ‘writ large’ as a community or ‘people’.

In Being and Time, conversely, Heidegger had gone to considerable lengths to underline the fundamental relationality of Dasein. This relationality is a feature of our identity and constitution that we cannot get behind. There is no prior state that Dasein occupies before its relational identity.Footnote ⁶¹ However, there are times where Heidegger appears to equivocate on this crucial insight.Footnote ⁶² He repeats these equivocations (having moved now to the notion of an authentic Dasein of a people) in some of his speeches and texts from the 1930s, in order to bolster his political views and to establish continuity between his philosophical views and his valorisation of the German people. As we can see in the passage from “Letter on Humanism” above, there is a definite softening of the earlier more extreme outlook in favour of a much more nuanced understanding of what it might be to be a German person in this context. Heidegger makes a similarly qualified claim in one of the Bremen lectures:

This is an attempt to bring his thinking back in line with his views on the essence of the human being and the concomitant idea of an authentic community, but without the chauvinist aspirations he subscribed to in the 1930s in particular. The use of blubo terminology again here is, of course, extremely problematic given Heidegger’s full-throated support for Nazism for a period of time. Nevertheless, the theoretical story we can tell concerning an authentic community living in accord with our essence as human beings is one that underwrites the need to acknowledge how other peoples, cultures, and communities are ‘grounded’ in similar ways. What is needed is a way of acknowledging and preserving our specificity, our ability to be at home in time and place, to resist the dissolution of difference, without succumbing to the idea that inclusivity or cultural diversity are inherently problematic.

A View from Some-where (and When)

Seamus Heaney tirelessly excavated the way identity can be rooted and nourished in the rural and the agrarian. He frequently reflects on how he is both from and of the land of his childhood. However, he doesn’t meditate only on the fields, hedges, meadows, trees, woods, rivers and streams of his childhood; he is rooted through time and place with and, in part, by ‘people’ as well.Footnote ⁶³ The people in Heidegger’s celebrated ‘place’, conversely, are very sparingly described. There is a severity, an austerity to his description of them, which is telling in its own way. The account of the irreducibly relational character of Dasein is rather anaemic in its own right when left undeveloped. That is not to say that Heidegger is debarred from doing so as a result of any theoretical necessity or inadequacy. However, when he has occasion to add some flesh to the bones of the people he lives among and with, we hear little of the intimacy of the ties of kinship, of family, of friendship.Footnote ⁶⁴

And yet, ‘if self is a location’, a self that finds itself in and of a time and place, what of ‘love’?Footnote ⁶⁵ What of the people who mark place? The ties of love, friendship, and community that bind are not exactly powerfully conveyed through depictions of dour, pipe-smoking cohorts, sporadically sharing clipped platitudes concerning the day’s toil – joyless, and celebrated for their joylessness, their silence and severity, their austere economy of word, gesture, dare I say even, intimacy. For Heaney, the farmer is “hooped to where he planted (Heaney, 1988)”, we find ourselves hooped to place – but does place hold for us in such profound ways simply because it is place? What makes it place? Do we only hear the ‘silent call of the earth’ and its seasons? Or is it a space and place we share with others – through ties of language, family, friendship, and indeed the tacit alliances formed through ties to place. Heidegger opens the door for these insights but does little in the end to furnish them or flesh them out.

Venturing out one autumn morning from the apartment I was renting in Lewes, a small town in the South Downs in the south east of England, not long after I began working at the University of Sussex and heading for the train to campus, my nose was filled with the unmistakable odour of a farmyard. The brisk air that rasped against my cheeks and swished through my nostrils with its sweet yet pungent fragrance immediately conjured up the image of my Grandfather, my father’s father, a farmer from the South of Ireland, moving through the farmyard in the direction of the milking parlour and past a row of old stables and outhouses, while the waft of cattle, horses, the granary, silage, hay, and dung, all somehow magically distilled into one simultaneously heavy yet vibrant scent on the air, came back to me as well. I could see my grandfather (‘the Bossman’, as he was known by all and sundry) stooped slightly and shuffling along in front of me as a I made my way down the steep lane towards the train station. The smell alone had the capacity to transport, to reignite a sense of belonging and communion, with a family and an agricultural community in Ireland, of course, but also suddenly with people in this part of the world who work the land, who keep horses – people whom I only ‘know’ from the distant view of farmyards, walled meadows, and the busy smell of farming cutting through the chill morning air. The arc of this community widened to include not just people engaged in the husbandry of land stretching back at least a century in Ireland but also now in the south-east of England. Such is the potency of these experiences.

In other work I have pitched the insights and inclusivity of a number of Irish writers against some of Heidegger’s most problematic texts from the 1930s in particular.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, I would submit that these writers embrace a view that comes closer to the position that Heidegger underwrites in “Letter on Humanism”, one that better fits the accounts of Dasein and death that he first ventures in Being and Time than some of his own more problematic work in the 1930s. Patrick Kavanagh, for instance, knew only too well the inner tensions of an identity forged in a rural village before relocating to pursue a literary life in the bustling city. Kavanagh nurtured his ‘voice’ while farming the land in a rural setting in Ulster until his poetic and literary ambitions brought him to Dublin. And yet, while he does not scruple to valorise and exalt his rural existence and what he learned there – his vision does not blind itself to what detracts from that same vision; his depictions, as always, are warts and all. True, he exalts certain experiences of his country life to the status of epiphanies at times, but he does not succumb to romantic excess; he concedes shortcomings (sometimes savagely) – for instance, the astonishing claim that his farming neighbours “cannot perceive Irony or even Satire”. And yet, he protests in a poem called “Living in the Country”:

In “Epic” – a wonderful poetic distillation of the inner tensions he experienced – Kavanagh imagines Homer conjuring the Iliad from out of something akin to a local row that he witnessed between farmers in Ireland over a plot of land:

Regardless of whether Kavanagh’s poem is a genuine, earnest attempt to rehabilitate his fascination with the local (though I would argue that it is), even the surface meaning of the poem reinforces something vital to our argument. The local gravity through which we find ourselves grounded as human beings of a time and place is often the most immediate access we have to something like, in this instance, conflict. A quarrel between local farmers over a plot of land in Monaghan shares something with the clash of nations for people in other parts of the world. That row was at the centre of affairs in Kavanagh’s world at one time, his understanding of everything was tied to a place and time, and in this local conflict, there was access to conflict in a different place, on a wider scale. Otherwise, the ‘Munich bother’ would be remote and inaccessible. That is the point of the interjection from Homer’s ghost.

Moreover, the use of the term ‘Gods’ here clearly echoes something we have been trying to unlock in Heidegger’s account (see Heidegger’s discussion of Heraclitus above) – the way the world worlds for an historical people will happen in ways specific to that people with their gods. Its meaning and importance emerge in that way for that people, with their godly narratives. What is more, that is the gateway to our recognition of the world worlding for other people in other times and places. Where Heidegger spends so much time exclusively trying to prospect and delve deeper ‘within’ the world he identifies with, these writers plumb familiar depths in search of other frequencies and currents, passageways to other worlds, and then explore both the continuity and the productive tensions between them, that is, between the local, national, and international.Footnote ⁶⁷ One can simultaneously be nourished and claimed by all of them in different yet interweaving ways. We can exist as intelligible palimpsests, multi-layered ‘texts’, bearing the cultural and historical marks and traces of a unique identity.

Perhaps the advantage of both Heaney and Kavanagh over Heidegger here is that they have experienced the dual sense of exile and belonging such that they are less inclined to artificially foreclose the avenues of recognition and understanding. Kavanagh saw himself as an inner émigré in the hectic urban life of Dublin and describes the epiphanies that he continually experienced while immersed in a rural, agricultural life in Monaghan. Nonetheless, he still managed to connect these epiphanies to frequencies and traditions that pulled him out of that familiar landscape. Indeed, he celebrates his ability to grow “with nature again as before” (Kavanagh. Reference Kavanagh2018: 50) along a city canal bank – memorialised forever now in a famous poem (“Canal Bank Walk”).

The fanaticism that characterised Heidegger’s attempts to mobilise some of his philosophical views in the service of his politics betokened, to some extent perhaps, the urgency of his own place and time. Even so, while calling for revolution, he oversteps the bounds of his own thought. There is, as a consequence, a lack of the conciliatory, a rigidity in outlook and disposition, which looks to exclude and include in the same stroke. Heidegger allows his thinking, in a way, to be radicalised or to posture as though it should be. He looks to disqualify all ‘city-folk’, for example, from having any business in coming to the countryside:

In a letter to his wife, dating from his time on active military duty, the depth of Heidegger’s enmity to urban life is unmistakable – a sectarianism of sorts which is most disquieting:

Heinrich Petzet, in a perverse and self-defeating attempt to paint a sympathetic picture and convey the sensitivity of Heidegger, confirms Heidegger’s enduring aversion to urban life:

What are we to make of this rustic provincialism (not to mention the antisemitism which I have discussed at length elsewhere)?Footnote ⁶⁹ It is in many ways indefensible – that much is presumably obvious from our analysis. But how does this fit with our attempts to discover an originary ethics in Heidegger? What if we were to strip away or excise the ethnic chauvinism and the exclusionary aspects of Heidegger’s vision, laced as it is with so much animus to city life? I warrant that, for many of us, the fact that our capacity to understand is shaped by the people and places that we take our bearings from is not in itself something we would recoil from. That is often how we find our bearings, after all; and we navigate accordingly. We do not have to embrace Heidegger’s insistence on a radical discontinuity between the bearings of a mud-larking city-dweller and a country ruffian gambolling through the meadows. In other words, we (human beings) face a temporal horizon which orients all of us in similar ways, ways that converge and intersect as much as they divide and distinguish, so long as we look for commonality and do not treat as alien those who, despite other differences, bleed, die, love, laugh, and find themselves ‘thrown’ very much as we do. Why should verisimilitude be exclusively a quality of rural life when that type of existence will be touched by technology every bit as much as the city? Gestell is not the preserve of the city, and it is naïve (and needlessly divisive) to suppose that the appropriate response is to build an invisible wall around rural communities to protect them from the ravages of urbanisation and the toxic influence of cosmopolitan aliens. In his monocular focus on rural life in Southern Germany, Heidegger at once appears to see it as a haven from the deleterious influence of Gestell while acknowledging already that the countryside is feeling its effects. The dangers of the technological age are ones that we collectively face – the effects are felt everywhere and by everyone. As John Healy observes in his memoirs, reflecting on the changes that swept through the landscape of his childhood in the West of Ireland:

Adorno ridicules what he sees as the pretentious solemnity of Heidegger’s attempts to characterise his own work as directly comparable to that of the peasant farmers he so admires.Footnote ⁷⁰ And yet, we find echoes of these sentiments expressed in ways that don’t appear to be quite so farcical or unctuous in Heaney:

The issue is ultimately one of exclusion versus inclusion. The writers I have mentioned here appear to see the local as a gateway to a wider world. Heidegger explicitly looked to block any form of universalism as though it were tainted with the metaphysics of presence. In this, he appears at times to have suppressed some of the implications of his own thought. To avoid confusion, perhaps, we should try to limit our use of terms like ‘universal’ or ‘cosmopolitan’, since they clearly carry the baggage of anonymity and a metaphysics that Heidegger is allergic to. To poach (and repurpose) a phrase from Gregory Fried, we could say that we are dealing with a “situated transcendence”, and a productive strife between the local and the ‘foreign’.Footnote ⁷¹ Either way, and more importantly, we must avoid the tendency to valorise or privilege one kind of groundedness in place and time, in tradition, as though it were superior or ‘more authentic’ to another. We should instead look for ways to facilitate recognition and inclusion, as opposed to exclusion, prejudice, ethnic chauvinism, what have you. To not recognise ‘others’ in these ways is to fail in our ethical obligations to them, to dehumanise them, to not see them as ‘out-standing’ beings with their own gravities of time and place. Indeed, it is this failure to see other human beings as ‘mortals’ that Heidegger, as we saw in Section 2, condemns as an ethical failing in some of his remarks in Bremen.Footnote ⁷²