Review: Michael Millerman’s “Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political”

“However, its veneration of far-right thinking (sometimes qualified but always in the most intellectualized vein) undermines its claims to genuine seriousness.”

Introduction

“If we will the essence of science understood as the questioning, uncovered standing one’s ground in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of what is, then this will to essence will create for our people its world of innermost and most extreme danger, i.e. its truly spiritual world. For “spirit” is not empty cleverness, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the boundless drift of rational dissection, let alone world reason; spirit is the primordially attuned, knowing resoluteness toward the essence of Being. And the spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture any more than it is an armory filled with useful information and values; it is the power that most deeply preserves the people’s earth- and blood-bound strengths as the power that most deeply arouses and most profoundly shakes the people’s existence. Only a spiritual world guarantees the people greatness. For it forces the constant decision between the will to greatness and the acceptance of decline to become the law for each step of the march that our people has begun into its future history.”

Martin Heidegger, “Rectoral Address” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”), 1933

In his essay “On Heidegger’s Nazism,” Richard Rorty declared that “Heidegger was a Nazi, a cowardly hypocrite, and the greatest European thinker of our time.” Rorty might have added “an evil man.” This last point was, until very recently, deeply unpopular and widely denied. For many, Heidegger’s status as an undeniably brilliant philosopher made it simply unacceptable that he could have given his wholesale support to the most monstrous political movement of the 20th (and indeed any other) century. This had led plenty of commentators to follow Rorty and Arendt in downplaying the significance of Heidegger’s Nazism to his broader thinking, typically by chalking it up to a combination of instinctive conservatism and ruralism, bad practical judgement, and, if we are being candid, an admittedly swollen ego. When it comes to the first, plenty of great German philosophers whose names were not Kant or Marx took a dim view of liberalism and democracy. On the second, since at least Plato’s ill-advised dalliance with Dionysius I of Syracuse, plenty of us have accepted the irony that otherwise swell political philosophers are not always good at making nitty-gritty judgement calls. And, of course, who could deny the “greatest European thinker” of the age an ego?

Recent scholarship has increasingly turned against this view, as the publication of Heidegger’s notorious Black Notebooks showcased the thinker directly linking his philosophy to anti-Semitism and Nazism. Beyond that, historians such as Emmanuel Faye and political theorists like Ronald Beiner have published significant works reemphasizing the depth of Heidegger’s far-right convictions and examining his ongoing influence on figures like Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, and President Vladimir Putin fanboy and the self-described “post-modern” conservative Alexandr Dugin. The latter has been in the news lately, with op-eds examining his influence on President Putin and his rhapsodic support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Less known is Dugin’s status as a cult figure in the North American and European far-right. One of the figures who has done the most to make his work available is Michael Millerman, who was responsible for translating several of Dugin’s major writings into English. More recently, in 2020, Millerman published a book Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, and Dugin with Arktos Media, based on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Toronto.