Mick Hartley

Martin Heidegger remains one of the most significant influences behind the general anti-Western animus of much "radical" philosophy, despite recent revelations that he was an ardent Nazi. It's his critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity" which many find so compelling. If he was a rabid anti-Semite, railed against the influence of "World Jewry", and even believed that the Holocaust was an act of self-destruction by the Jews, well, hey, we all have our little foibles.

What I hadn't realised till now, though, is that Heidegger's brand of anti-liberal mystification has been influential not only in Western academia, but also outside the West, most notably in Iran and in Russia. Here's Alexander Duff:

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been an open question whether any organizing political principle could successfully vie with the liberal consensus of a secular state, limited by democratic accountability and the rule of law. To date, neither the remnants of Soviet-style communism, authoritarian capitalism, reactionary fascism, nor Islamic theocracy have achieved a successful combination of military strength and political legitimacy even among their own citizens, let alone among sympathizers in the world at large. But the political legacy of Martin Heidegger—if the strange and conflicting paths of his influence can be so termed—points to a combination that is sufficiently threatening to liberal democracy to be taken seriously, precisely because of the breadth of its evident appeal abroad and at home.

This is because Heidegger’s thought, while not lending itself to any politically cohesive opposition to the liberal West in a manner that characterized Marxism, recommends itself to virtually every variety of particularist opponent of Western universalism. For those inspired by Heidegger, the universalist claims upon which the liberal order is based are too thin, too weak, and too ignoble to provide tangible and meaningful sources of human identity…

To understand Heidegger’s political influence, it helps to compare him to Marx. Heidegger does not stand as the organizing intellectual figure behind a coherent international political movement, as Marx does to Marxism. Heidegger never had a Lenin, but like Marx, he offers a comprehensive analysis of the dissatisfactions and alienations of late-modern life and points hopefully to their possible remedy. Whereas Marx traces the sources of dissatisfaction to the alienation of labor in the predominant economic system, Heidegger looks to the very character of human reason. This is the source of the anxiety, distress, boredom, and terror that characterize our time. According to Heidegger, rationalist philosophy in the West—and the more-or-less rationalist forms of communal life that followed in its wake—has blinded us to the deepest sources of authentic meaning in human existence….

Several leading Iranian thinkers prior to and following the 1979 Revolution were formed by their understanding of Heidegger, drawing on his thought in both their diagnosis of the toxicity of Western civilization and their aspiration for a future-oriented, permanent revolution that would retrieve something of an Islamic past lost beneath the stomping boots of history.

It was the eclectic sociologist and activist Ali Shariati who first introduced Heidegger’s thought to Iran. Shariati encountered Heidegger’s work in the 1950s and 1960s in Paris, in the revolutionary intellectual milieu of Frantz Fanon’s Third World Marxism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Maoist existentialism. In a self-conscious counterpoint to these Marxists, Shariati propounded an activist social theory that appealed to the “authentic” religion of the people of Iran.1 Shariati’s “Red Shi‘ism” stood for social justice and revolution, in opposition to the politically quietist “Black Shi‘ism” of the established Shi‘i clerisy. Shariati died in the custody of the Shah before the Ayatollah Khomeini made manifest his hopes for a retrieved and transformed political Shi‘ism. He is remembered today as a more benign, open-minded figure than the progenitors of the “official” Heideggerianism espoused by the intellectual organs of the Iranian regime.

The regime Heideggerians draw their intellectual inspiration from Ahmad Fardid, one of the most influential thinkers of the Revolution. Fardid, called “Iran’s Heidegger” by New York University Professor Ali Mirsepassi, taught at the University of Tehran for decades prior to and after the revolution.2 His lectures are legendary, though he never wrote, earning a reputation as an “oral philosopher.” He is the source of the influential concept of Gharbzadegi, though this was popularized in the writings of Jalal Al-e Ahmad. This concept transplants Heidegger’s critique of the rationalist West to the context of Iran.

Gharbzadegi has been variously translated as “Occidentosis,” “Westoxication,” or “Westitis.” In Fardid’s construction, it began with Greek rationality and culminated in the universalistic pretentions of Enlightenment secular, materialist humanism. Fardid identifies this spirit as the chief enemy of the authentic Islamic essence of the Iranian revolution and credits Heidegger for diagnosing this disease. In a 1979 lecture course, Fardid identified three lonely lights in the world otherwise condemned to absolute darkness: the Iranian Revolution itself; the thought of Martin Heidegger, who provided the intellectual means to diagnose Westoxication; and the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. Fardid was haunted, though, by the prospect that Westoxication would undermine the Iranian Revolution, dissolving its revolutionary fervor into the quotidian, bourgeois patterns of life. It was necessary that the revolution, therefore, be “permanent,” in order to keep Iran from returning to the Westoxic culture of the “modern cave” of “self-founded nihilism.”3 So, in a way, Fardid was to Heidegger what Trotsky was to Marx.

Fardid’s Heideggerianism has become something of the orthodox or official “philosophy” of the regime—buttressing the central premises of its theocracy and in particular the still-controversial doctrine of Vilayat-e Faqih. Its most prominent contemporary proponent is the president of the Iranian Academy of Science, Reza Davari Ardakani. Ardakani was Fardid’s student, and has further developed his teacher’s Heideggerian understanding of Gharbzadeghi in his analysis of the “West.” For Ardakani, the “West” is explicitly not a geographic or historical category but a permanent spiritual (that is, not merely political or economic) temptation. Like Fardid, Ardakani invokes Heidegger as having understood the “inner essence” of “the prison of the West.”

 The name of Aleksandr Dugin is well known among those concerned with the role of fascism in the developing political and military situation in Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine. Less well known is his reliance on the thought of Martin Heidegger to supply some intellectual ballast to the creation, or re-creation, of a distinctive Russian political and spiritual identity from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and the tumultuous flirtation with liberalism in the post-Soviet era. Dugin has conceived a post-communist political project of Eurasian Imperialism characterized by a Russian cultural, spiritual, and economic “revolution in archaic values.”

Dugin presents himself as a postmodern intellectual and political figure, at once a learned scholar and television pitchman, both a monk and a militant. An erstwhile professor at Moscow Lomonosov State University, he also professes to be close to numerous Kremlin figures, not least Vladimir Putin himself. Dugin’s relationship to Putin is fraught with all of the intrigue of a Byzantine court drama, but he remains the source of such notions as “Eurasianism,” which is emerging as the ideological veneer of Putin’s opposition to the European Union and the West.

Dugin attempts to use Heidegger’s notions of Dasein and Ereignis to retrieve a Russian identity, buried in the language of Orthodox Church Slavonic, that can rescue the spirit of the country from the damage inflicted by the collapse of international communism and the triumph of Atlanticist, liberal capitalism. He sees Russia as uniquely positioned to carry out the “metapolitical” confrontation between East and West that Heidegger called for in order to correct the errors of Western rationalism, though he never followed through on it himself. Russia would embody, then, a “fourth political theory,” repairing the failures of the three theories of the modern West: liberalism, communism, and fascism.

In concrete political terms, this means a Russian empire, purportedly respectful of the various ethnic identities of the captive peoples over whom it would rule. That is, it would respect these identities by sparing them from the homogenizing, leveling forces of Atlanticist universalism, but at the cost of placing them in their due rank, subject to Russian hegemony. This Russian empire would ally with other opponents of Western universalism to oppose the plutocratic, materialist, atheistic Atlanticist powers, chiefly the United States and its supposed proxy, the European Union.

In other words, philosophy in the service of reaction, theocracy, and Putinism. But, mainly, the mystifications of religion:

For both [Iran and Russia], the discrediting of rationalist universalism points to the revival of certain forms of religious order. The retrieved community is shaped by a purified religion, though the religion is different in each case: Russian Orthodox Christianity and Shi‘i Islam.

Happy associates for our brave "radical" theorists. 

The article goes on (and on), but for me Duff takes Heidegger's philosophy altogether too seriously. As I argued here – citing philosopher Jonathan Glover – Heidegger was always a second-rate thinker who built his reputation on obfuscation:

The moral case against Heidegger the man is obvious. The central moral case against Heidegger the philosopher is easier to get wrong. It is not about a link between his theories and Nazism. It is about undermining philosophy's role in developing a climate of critical thought. His books are an embodiment of the idea that philosophy is an impenetrable fog, in which ideas not clearly understood have to be taken on trust. Karl Jaspers was right in seeing this "incommunicative" mode of thought as linked to being dictatorial.

Deference is encouraged by having to take it on trust that the obscure means something important. And since things not understood cannot be argued about, the critical faculties atrophy. Philosophy could not have served the Nazis better than by encouraging deference and by this softening of the mind.

It's another debt that so many modern theorists owe to the man.