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The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger

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On the misinterpretation of this book, Bourdieu writes in the preface: "All of this was there in the text, waiting to be read, but it was rejected by the guardians of orthodox interpretation, who have felt their privileges threatened by the unruly progress of the new sciences, and so have clung like fallen aristocrats to a philosophy of philosophy, whose exemplary expression was provided by Heidegger, erecting a sacred barrier between ontology and anthropology."

Surprisingly enough, the seeds of this book was written nearly a decade before the "Heidegger contoversy" that swept through the French academy in the late 1980s. Rather than denouncing Heidegger as a Nazi or defending Heidegger's philosophy as exempt from his political miscues, Bourdieu offers another route: forget the singularity of the discourse on Heidegger, rather, we must look at the historical, cultural, social, and political context that made Heidegger's involvement with Nazism possible. Forget the "man" and let us examine the context...

This is a brilliant insight: we focus on the merits of the individual, even as great as Heidegger, and forget that individuals are actors in a larger matrix of culture, politics, economics and history. To this, Bourdieu discusses the homology of the three fields of production: philosophical, academic, and political. In this, Bourdieu argues that there is no possibility of reducing the discourse on Heidegger to any specific field. We must look to the ways in which Heidegger's activities and writings both reflect and are determined by the constructs of the three fields. By "political ontology," Bourdieu challenges the statements of pure ontology that have been circulated by both Heidegger and his commentators. "Pure ontology" is contrasted with "political ontology." Despite Heidegger's claims, and despite his enormous philosophical insights, can we ever claim to notions of the "pure"? In this, is not Bourdieu making a stake for himself as a faithful Heideggerian by virtue of opposing the pure?

Beyond the discourse on the Heidegger controversy, Bourdieu strongly contends that we must give up notions of "pure" disciplinary studies whether they be a pure reading of philosophy or a pure political or social reading of an event. In the end, as Bourdieu suggests, this book isn't necessarily about Heidegger in any sense; rather, this book is a practical exercise--that is, a preliminary exercise for a possible method, which must always remain reflexive and changing.

French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has composed an investigation into the political-socio context of the revisionist Germany in which Martin Heidegger was imbedded, to attempt to explain how the great philosopher could have been involved in such a pathological political enterprise as National Socialism. Bourdieu does not excuse Heidegger's involvement, but he does allow him the necessary failings of `being-in-the-world.' This book might have been re-titled `the political ontics of Martin Heidegger. Bourdieu writes, "no single ideologue mobilizes all of the available schemata, which, for this reason, neither fulfill the same functions nor have equal importance in the different `systems' in which they are inserted" (25). Each thinker (even the greatest), operates within an amorphous politico-socio context, the context has no center, rather the center is "everywhere and nowhere" (ibid.), at the same time in history. But does this excuse Heidegger's silence? I think not. Bourdieu writes that "the frontier between politics and philosophy is a genuine ontological threshold: the notions relating to practical, everyday experience, and the words that denote them, undergo a radical transformation which renders them barely recognizable in the eyes of those who have agreed to make the magical leap into the other universe" (36). There is a necessary will to remove oneself from the everyday world if one is to engage in metaphysical thinking, and Heidegger removed himself to perhaps a greater degree than any other thinker of his era. Yet Bordieu believes that Heidegger's ontological project is, despite all appearances, political to the core. He relates the conceptualization of `resoluteness' in Being and Time, to the resoluteness of the nihilism inherent in National Socialism. Perhaps he is playing a bit lose with Heidegger's concrete descriptions. Additionally, on the question of Heidegger's possible anti-semitism, Bourdieu is slightly ambiguous. He argues that Heidegger participated in anti-semitic discourse, but that it was on account of his immersion in an anti-semitic cultural atmosphere (which he undeniably was living). Bourdieu writes that "To fully understand the discreetly anti-semitic over-determination of the whole Heideggerian relation to the intellectual world, it would be necessary to recreate the whole ideological atmosphere with which Heidegger was inevitably impregnated" (120, fn.19), unfortunately, Bourdieu only undergoes a preliminary recreation. Never the less the Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger is a fascinating and enormously helpful read.