Gregory Fried

Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.

Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.

This essay examines the role of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in the ideology of what the author calls the “Nationalist International,” a loosely affiliated international network of “New” Right, nationalist, alt-right, and neo-fascist groups. The author argues that thought leaders of this movement, from the relatively obscure to politicians and organizers in major political parties, such as Steve Bannon in the MAGA movement in the United States or Marc Jongen of Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, have drawn upon Heidegger to articulate their principles and aims. More openly neo-fascist thinkers, such as Greg Johnson in the United States and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, have produced sophisticated readings of Heidegger to support their causes. Such figures use Heidegger’s critique of Plato, as the onset of a metaphysical nihilism that culminates in modernity, to condemn liberalism as a facet of a rootless universalism that deprives a people of its history and identity. The repudiation of classical liberal democracy in many militant alt-right organizations and online communities played a role in assault on Congress on January 6, 2021 and Donald Trump’s attempted coup that day. The conclusion addresses the question of how educators and others can engage a new generation vulnerable to radicalization and argues for a form of “absolute welcome” as a response to increasing polarization.

Martin Heidegger’s _Introduction to __Metaphysics_, first published in 1953, is a highly significant work by a towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy. The volume is known for its incisive analysis of the Western understanding of Being, its original interpretations of Greek philosophy and poetry, and its vehement political statements. This new companion to the _Introduction to Metaphysics_ presents an overview of Heidegger’s text and a variety of perspectives on its interpretation from more than a dozen highly respected contributors. In the editors’ introduction to the book, Richard Polt and Gregory Fried alert readers to the important themes and problems of _Introduction to Metaphysics_. The contributors then offer original essays on three broad topics: the question of Being, Heidegger and the Greeks, and politics and ethics. Both for readers who are approaching Heidegger for the first time and for those who are studying Heidegger on an advanced level, this _Companion_ offers a clear guide to one of the philosopher’s most difficult yet most influential writings.

Classical liberalism stipulates that individuals may only reliably escape a state of war by joining a body politic whose unity is consolidated and preserved by the formation of a sovereign government. Frederick Douglass, through his own experience of slavery and then as a radical abolitionist critiquing the racialized laws and society of the United States, shows that there is an inherent scandal, a schism in the very idea of a body politic. This scandal cannot be overcome, but Douglass enacts a treatment for it through a polemical ethic that endeavors to reconstruct political community, expansively and inclusively understood, by ever again bringing the ideal, as a regulative idea, into confrontation with the real. By putting Douglass and the historical situation of his time into dialogue with the natural law tradition of Aquinas, Locke, and the American Founding, this essay argues that Douglass’s thought and example provide a fresh way to address the crisis of liberal democracy in our time. This requires understanding the instability of the body politic as a source of strength rather than weakness, if properly confronted in a polemical ethics.

In this lucid and engaging book focusing on the early Heidegger, James Reid argues that Heidegger sets the foundations for a "phronetic ethics". As Reid later says, "Sein und Zeit could be said to make substantial contributions to 'meta-ethical' reflection on the source of our sense of why, on what basis, we take ourselves to be bound by one thing rather than another". Reid's early Heidegger provides the hermeneutical tools for an ontological meta-ethics that can illuminate "normative questions and questions about the status of normativity as such".Gleaning a meta-ethics from Heidegger depends on arguing that the existential analytic of Dasein proceeds from what Reid calls Heidegger's "ethical...

While Žižek is right to assert both that Heidegger’s political engagement must be confronted as a genuine philosophical challenge and that our modern predicament demands new thinking, I argue that Žižek is wrong to claim that Heidegger made the right step in 1933, even if in the wrong direction. Using the same story as Žižek, G. K. Chesterton’s “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” I argue that Žižek’s sword is also broken, because in the absence of a “big Other,” it is not possible to give an orientation or direction for political action. Furthermore, given that absence, I claim that Žižek’s call for an enthusiastic politics that merges self with society is particularly dangerous: rather than fulfill a Dionysian moment in politics, it threatens to unleash what I call a priapic politics. I end by suggesting that Žižek’s argument heralds the death of the binary distinction between “Left” and “Right,” and I argue for a return to a politics of prudence

This essay applies elements of Heidegger thought to ethics as a practical discipline. The radical finitude of human existence is not only an ontological matter; it is also located in the moral life, in the ways we come to "be" ethically. Moral values are shown to be responses to finite limit-conditions and to be finite themselves in their appropriation and performance. The notion of being-in-the-world is used to show that the moral sphere cannot be understood as an "objective" or a "subjective" condition, but rather as a mode of "dwelling." Other themes: human nature, being-with, compassion, courage, and decision.

To be human is to be in the world with others, and so what it means to be goes to the root of ethical and political life. One would have to be exceptionally obtuse not to recognize that this age, which we now share as a planetary humanity, is indeed in crisis, despite all our apparent progress if not because of it: the economic and political upheavals that threaten to throw whole regions into uproar, the shifts in climate that threaten the entire globe with unparalleled disruption, the “advances” in technology that threaten to lay waste to entire cities and reduce human beings to “human resources.” Despite these ongoing or potential disasters, what Heidegger’s work challenges us to think is that the most fundamental disaster is a failure to think what it means to be human, that these other dangers can only be addressed if we confront this question first. My argument here is that Heidegger misreads a form of thinking vital to ethical–political life, phronêsis, so-called practical wisdom, because his radical historicism prevents him from seeing the intersection of principled norms with life as we find it