Timothy Berk

This chapter revisits George Grant’s confrontation with Martin Heidegger amid the contemporary resurgence of far-right Heideggerianism among leading figures of the European, Eurasian, and American New Right, including Aleksandr Dugin and Alain de Benoist. It argues that Grant is a timely interlocutor because while he accepts key features of Heidegger’s critique of modernity, he nevertheless attempts to find a path forward that avoids the political and ethical traps that ensnare Heideggerian thinking. Grant does so by defending the centrality of justice and the good, as affirmed by the tradition of Christian-Platonism, against Heidegger’s radical destruction of metaphysics. Grant argues that while the affirmation of the local is indeed necessary, turning to the purely immanent gods of the fatherland—without the possibility of an appeal to the transcendent or eternal—threatens to exacerbate rather than counter the nihilism at the heart of modernity.