Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections (Suny Series in Global Politics)

Crisis Theory and World Order

SUNY series in Global Politics

James N. Rosenau editor

Crisis Theory and World Order

Heideggerian Reflections

Norman K. Swazo

S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Jennifer Giovani-Giovani

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swazo, Norman K., 1954– Crisis theory and world order : Heideggerian reflections / Norman K. Swazo. p. cm. — (SUNY series in global politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5493-2 (hbk. : alk. paper) — (ISBN 0-7914-5494-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. International relations—Philosophy. 2. World politics. 3. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. I. Title. II. Series. JZ1305 .S92 2002 327.1'01—dc21 2002017725

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix 1

PART ONE: THEORETICAL CRITIQUE 1

Crisis Theory: The Challenge to Peace Research

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2

The Problem of World Order: Overcoming the Logic of Statecraft

39

The Metaphysical Ground of World Order Thinking

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3 4

Planetary Politics and the Essence of Technology

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PART TWO: ESSENTIAL POLITICAL THINKING 5

A Pathway to Essential Political Thinking

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The Essence of Political Being

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Conclusion: Projecting-Open [Entwurf] with Heidegger Notes Index

227 241 281

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Preface

While Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisbau in 1943, Heidegger lectured on the topic of “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’,” in which he had something to say about “preparatory thinking.” Given Heidegger’s pronouncements, I believe that a reflection of the sort attempted here is a matter of “preparing for a simple and inconspicuous step in thought.” Such is preparatory thinking, in which what matters is “to light up that space within which Being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship.” The problem for the thinker, of course, as Heidegger himself noted, is to proceed in “an unpretentious way,” all the while conceding that we shall all of us share in this thinking, “clumsy and groping though it be,” with the hope that this sharing “proves to be an unobtrusive sowing—a sowing that cannot be authenticated through the prestige or utility attaching to it—by sowers who may perhaps never see blade and fruit and may never know a harvest. They serve the sowing, and even before that they serve its preparation.” Heidegger’s metaphor appropriately distinguished between the sowing and the plowing, the latter “making the field capable of cultivation.” In this work I expect that my contribution is first and foremost one of “having a presentiment of, and then finding, that field,” of contributing to its cultivation, and only secondly one of sowing that field. And, insofar as “to each thinker there is assigned but one way, his own, whose traces he must again and again go back and forth that finally he may hold to it as the one that is his own— although it never belongs to him—and may tell what can be experienced on that way,” this book constitutes an invitation to all who would share in a preparatory thinking and to sow the field.

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Acknowledgments

A work such as the present one owes an immeasurable intellectual debt to so many formative influences. Each whose name and work is invoked here is a contributor to a dialogue along a pathway of thought I have been following for over two decades. The text of this work is but a rough outline of this dialogue, leaving much unthought and unspoken as the silent yet omnipresent context. Heidegger, of course, is my principal interlocutor, and thus it is to him that I owe the greatest debt and with whom my philosophical friendship most abides. Yet, there are so many interpreters and commentators on the Heidegger corpus whose works, while unmentioned and uncited, have helped to prepare me. I am no less indebted to these Heidegger scholars. I acknowledge specifically Bernard P. Dauenhauer, until recently University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. Dauenhauer, as friend, teacher, and colleague, has always given generously of his time and effort to assist my understanding of Heidegger and the implications of Heidegger’s thought for political philosophy in general. I am and remain immeasurably grateful for his fruitful guidance, and trust that this present work honors his place as my most consistent teacher and interlocutor. My engagement of Heidegger’s thought in world order perspective is due in large part to the abiding formative influence of Richard A. Falk, until recently Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. This present work attests to the need for a personal response to the phenomenon of planetary crisis, a response that Professor Falk provoked in me as an undergraduate student that I have been working out slowly since then and that I now entrust to him and the community of world order scholars. Of the latter I mention Saul Mendlovitz, Rajni Kothari, Ali Mazrui, and R. B. J. Walker—one and all colleagues who encouraged and supported my early efforts to address world order issues. I mention also Professor

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Hwa Yol Jung of Moravian College, political theorist of the first rank, who has ably spoken of “the crisis of political understanding” and whose analysis has contributed to my frame of thinking. I hereby also express my gratitude to the following for permission to use previously copyrighted material in epigraph to chapters: Basil Blackwell Publishers, HarperCollins Publishers, Yale University Press, Vittorio Klostermann GMBH. I am grateful also to the editors/directors of the journal Dialogos for permission to adopt, revise, and expand the version of chapter 4 printed in the July 1997 issue of that journal. Finally, but not least, I express my gratitude to colleagues of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for their sustained philosophical and personal friendship and inspiration in the course of completing this scholarly work. Fairbanks, Alaska August 2001

Introduction

In this work I speak principally to political philosophers and world order scholars, the latter being primarily social scientists and specialists in international law. I juxtapose philosophical discourse and world order scholarship by considering one way in which recent European philosophy may have something to add to discussions about the future of the world political order. In this book I juxtapose the philosophical discourse of Martin Heidegger to world order studies in the hope of eliciting further attention to the foundational questions of world order thinking. Thereby, I hope to bring both sets of discourse into an effectively historical dialogue. Inasmuch as I speak in this book primarily to world order scholars, I have labored considerably to make Heidegger’s thought accessible, yet without committing the interpretive failure of oversimplification. In working toward this end, I cannot but present Heidegger’s thought according to an understanding of those texts to which I am at present committed. Obviously, Heidegger scholarship will show that other readings of Heidegger are plausible. What follow are Heideggerian meditations, my meditations on the contemporary discourse of world order informed by my reading of Heidegger. I say “my reading of Heidegger” to set up the contrast to Derrida’s/Foucault’s/LaBarthe’s/etc. reading of Heidegger. Such are the more consciously political readers of Heidegger, granted; and, so, one would think it appropriate to bring them into the discussion. However, I am not persuaded either of the need or the desirability to do so in the present context. Having appropriated the Heidegger corpus for the critical task ventured here, I recognize all too well that Heidegger’s work requires significant “interpretive struggles.” For better or for worse, however, I have decided not to frustrate world order scholars with the pedantic strategy of a philosophical method that examines the interpretive debates internal to Heidegger scholarship. This more demanding task must come after the introductory juxtaposition

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of discourses I venture here. Such is my invitation to others insofar as my modest accomplishment here is only to open up an avenue of inquiry. By world order thinking (a concept explained more fully in chapter 2 for the benefit of my philosophical audience unfamiliar with the history of the world order movement) I understand that thinking which has for its thematic concern sociopolitical/socioeconomic affairs, analyzed in terms of possibilities and strategies of transition from the currently prevailing logic of statecraft to a logic that would establish global institutional structures and corresponding patterns of behavior. In this sense, world orderism would be considered an advance beyond the deficiency of international relations theory and practice, inasmuch as the latter sustains the nation-state system. Peace research (discussed specifically in chapter 1) is, in my view, a species of social science practice which contributes to the more comprehensive world order agenda in the latter’s concern for the problem of war and conflict resolution in the twofold context of international relations and civil society. Understanding world order studies thus, one who studies the philosophy of social science may reasonably come to ask what legitimates world order inquiry conceived as a species of social science. This is a question to be distinguished from that of what motivates world order inquiry. The former query puts into question, renders doubtful—one may even say, subverts—the world order comportment in its challenge to the modern international relations approach. Why would one do so? Clearly, one would do so not because one challenges the motivation of world order thinking. World order scholars seek a good, a common good, whether their approach to international society is grounded in legal positivism, natural law tradition, contractarian thought, cosmopolitanism, or ideological agnosticism. They seek to preserve and secure for human posterity a planetary commons and a planetary existence, both of which are now starkly threatened by our sustained commitment to the logic of statecraft, the governing frame of political thought and practice in our day. Given this programmatic quest, it would seem odd deliberately to render such an enterprise doubtful, although obviously one may do so on the basis of a committed defense of the status quo. This is not the point of departure for the theoretical critique of world order thinking I advance in this book. To engage in critique in the manner employed here is to engage in an act of clarification. It is to disclose the hidden, the tacit, the presupposed, and then to question yet further in the manner of questioning foundations. To ask what legitimates world order inquiry, even whether it can claim legitimacy in contraposition to the logic of statecraft, is to seek clarification of the prejudices, the presuppositions, that inform such inquiry, i.e., tacit if not explicit

Introduction

3

commitments about the nature of human reality, the role of language, the possibilities of human knowledge, the meaning and status of fact and value— what in the jargon of philosophy is comprehended by the terms ontology (theory of being) and epistemology (theory of knowledge). Such critique would demonstrate that to proceed in a programmatic way in world order inquiry, with attention to the urgency of finding and implementing solutions to global problems, is but one way of conceiving the world order quest. I wish to demonstrate (specifically in chapters 3 and 4) that there is also a philosophical dimension to the problem of world order that must be taken seriously even if the programmatic return on such inquiry seems negligible. World order scholars have from time to time acknowledged that the task of global transformation must include attention to the problem of transforming philosophical orientations and value preferences. Such is the avowedly normative feature of the world order project. However, a more or less systematic engagement of this dimension of reform is a significant lacuna in world order discourse. Especially problematic in this omission is that specific ontological and epistemological difficulties are at issue, not just value preferences. Indeed, value preferences, value thinking itself as an expression of a thoroughly modern ontological commitment, is part of what is for me fundamentally at issue. This dimension of critique is not immediately discernible to world order scholars, especially to the extent that the methodological commitments of social science research are barriers to recognition of those difficulties. My argument in this book is that unless ontological and epistemological commitments of world order studies and peace research are clarified and put into question, otherwise noble ends may suffer in the long term from inappropriate means. A critique of world order thinking thus may be said to seek discipline in such inquiry, in the positive sense of eliminating suspect metaphysical dogma or doctrine and establishing more securely the bases of an inquiry that may then proceed with its task with warrant in hand. Only a theoretically grounded critique can issue such a warrant, if indeed there may be one. Fundamentally at issue in such a critique is how and why we today speak of crisis, a planetary crisis demonstrated by the objective conditions of planetary life, certainly, but also—and more significant—a crisis of Western philosophy and science. This is the sense of crisis that is really of foundational import even for world order discourse, even though this research community remains largely unengaged by this philosophical problematique. Such crisis includes political philosophy and political science in their structural dependence upon philosophy qua first philosophy (prote philosophia), i.e., metaphysics. This structural dependence is all too often unacknowledged and

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even denied by social science in its effort to declare its liberation from the excesses of speculative discourse. What is essential in the crisis of Western philosophy and science is that it bespeaks much more fundamentally a crisis of ‘Western humanity’ in its self-understanding. It is this feature of crisis that determines the world order movement in what I, following Heidegger, will call its essential configuration. This Heideggerian concept can be understood only in the context of that structural dependence (mentioned above) which shapes Western humanity as it “broadens out” into world history, giving that world history an essentially Western determination. Western humanity has its history, the content of which cannot but be understood in terms of one or another philosophy of history (e.g., Aristotelian natural teleological process, Christian divine providence and eschatology, Enlightenment conceptions of the inevitable progress of reason, the Hegelian theodicy or self-justification of “God” qua self-unfolding Spirit (Geist), the Marxist materialist evolution of the world towards stateless communist society, the Nietzschean eternal recurrence of all things, etc.). All historiography either explicitly or implicitly presupposes such a philosophy of history, precisely inasmuch as the fundamental categories and methods of conceptualization and inquiry of historical discourse are inevitably ontological and epistemological commitments. In this century the thought of Heidegger about the crisis of Western philosophy, i.e., the “crisis of reason,” and, thereby, the crisis of European humanity, has sought to respond in some measure to what has been called the Nietzschean subversion of Platonic idealism, Aristotelian teleology, and Christian eschatology, each of which in its own way and historical domain has served to legitimate Western morality. Questions of morality are inextricably linked to questions about reality inasmuch as ontological and epistemological commitments either tacitly or explicitly inform and determine ethical (and political) discourse in its problems and methods. Heidegger’s thought confronts the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s subversion of Western morality, not by explicitly engaging in a defense of the Western tradition of ethical discourse, but by locating Nietzsche himself within the Western tradition of metaphysics. (Nietzsche had understood himself to be an anti-metaphysician and his project to be anti-metaphysical.) It is Heidegger’s claim (and the power of his thinking compels our attention) that the history of Western metaphysics has developed on the basis of an “inner logic” that covertly determines the course of Western history. Such a notion is admittedly strange, especially to social scientists whose empirically grounded methodological prejudices preclude such explanatory conceptions. Nevertheless, this fundamental history, says Hei-

Introduction

5

degger, achieved its “completion” or “closure” at the turn of the century with Nietzsche’s thought, such that the twentieth century is characterized by a fundamental breach with tradition, i.e., a breach with Platonic idealism, Aristotelian teleology, and Christian eschatology. In this claim Heidegger is not speaking of an end, a cessation, to metaphysical inquiry. Rather, ‘completion’ or ‘closure’ bespeaks what has been called “a concluding process now underway.” There are both theoretical and practical consequences to such a closure. Philosophy becomes self-reflective, examining the meaning of the history of that tradition in which reason—once held in primacy—is dislocated. Correlatively, political philosophy or moral philosophy, which has sought to provide justification for ethical and political practice, loses its warrant along with the loss of authority hitherto accorded to metaphysics as first philosophy. The crisis of reason is, in short, a crisis of understanding and includes, as Hwa Yol Jung rightly noted some years ago, “the crisis of political understanding.”1 Or, as Fred Dallmayr put it, we stand “precariously at the crossroads of polis and cosmopolis” as a result of “the decentering of the dominant position of European nation-states.”2 World order scholars have not undertaken the kind of self-examination that would clarify the extent to which world order discourse is involved in this fundamental crisis of understanding. Yet, as I have said, unless they become aware of the more fundamental features of crisis, the community of world order researchers may unwittingly pursue their quest in a way that is philosophically suspect. Heidegger’s thought confronts the entire tradition of Western metaphysics and especially engages in a critique of modernity. This is precisely the kind of context for critique that, in my view, liberates world order thinking from flawed metaphysical presuppositions steeped in metaphysical positions of modernity. For this reason in particular I choose Heidegger’s thought as the basis for a theoretical critique of world order thinking. One may, of course, for a variety of reasons question my choice of Heidegger for this critical task. Surely, for example, it may be objected that Heidegger’s thought as a whole is morally suspect given his entanglement with National Socialism in the 1930s. In this book I leave this issue aside, although I have engaged it elsewhere and refer my current readers to those discussions if they wish to pursue that question.3 My point in leaving the issue untreated here is not to dismiss it as irrelevant, for surely “the Heidegger affair” adds to the burden of justifying any serious effort to appropriate and extend Heidegger’s thought in the context of political discourse. However, if my analysis in this book is more compelling than not in the issues discussed,

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then this book should show the positive critical power and weight of Heidegger’s thought for world order thinking despite his entanglement with National Socialism. Heidegger’s thought, I submit, is not depreciated by his entanglement. Rather, one should see (as Derrida, I think rightly, observed) that Heidegger in 1933–34 was unavoidably “caught up” in a political commitment bound to the metaphysics of modernity, despite his own philosophical critique of modernity and his effort to overcome the categorical commitments of modern metaphysics. It is thus that Heidegger could be unwittingly “committed” to National Socialism in 1933–34, i.e., to nationalism and to statism, insofar as these are metaphysically grounded categorical commitments. Yet, the later Heidegger could see both nationalism and statism, and especially “the total state” of the twentieth century, as inseparable from the metaphysics of modernity. He could see the need for a political system that would come to grips with what he called “the planetary domination of technology” and all that this implies for the technological determination of practically every feature of planetary life. As William Spanos puts it, . . . Heidegger’s ontologically situated destruction of the Western philosophical tradition . . . can be—indeed, has been transcoded—into a profound interrogation of the Eurocentric and hegemonic/imperial implications of the technological superstructure of modern democratic/capitalistic societies. However limited as such by its generalized ontological focus, Heidegger’s interrogation has become acutely essential to an oppositional discourse that would counter the prevailing representation of contemporary Western history in the aftermath of the “end” of the Cold War. I mean the representation that grossly mystifies the epochal events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe as the “fall of socialism” or, conversely, the “triumph of the principles of democracy,” which projects these events sensationally as the “end of history” or, alternatively, as the advent of a “new world order” presided over by the spirit of the “free subject.”4

It is in this feature of confrontation with the planetary domination of technology that Heidegger’s thought may profitably buttress the world order comportment in its challenge to the logic of statecraft even while serving simultaneously as a basis for theoretical critique. Specifically, the discussion I provide in Part 2 of the book initiates a positive employment of Heidegger’s thought in the context of a global political discourse no longer committed to technocratic futurism and the technological order it would impose. Yet another objection could be raised to my choice of Heidegger. Surely, it may be said, there are equally powerful—and less morally suspect—

Introduction

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thinkers in this century (or earlier) whose thought could be enlisted into the service of a theoretical critique of contemporary world order thinking. I cannot undertake a critical review of analytic or Anglo-American philosophers whose work may be said to provide an alternative basis for theoretical critique, certainly not if the book is to remain within a manageable frame. Moreover, it is not my purpose to engage in a comparative study. However, some brief comment may be helpful in defending my choice of Heidegger. To this end, I mention Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Rawls. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are alike in their philosophical projects in that they were concerned with foundational questions of the discipline, with meaning and language, yet neither wrote a political philosophy per se. Wittgenstein’s relevance to political theory lies in the manner in which language analysis assists in conceptual clarification. As Hanna Pitkin puts it, Wittgenstein has to offer “something like a new perspective, a new way of seeing what has always been visible, what has gone unnoticed precisely because of its familiarity.”5 That perspective is one of examining our language—“questioning, examining, and coming to terms with our own assumptions and commitments.” Such concern with language, Pitkin notes, is “central to almost every theoretical issue in social and political study,” precisely because “language lies at the heart of the problem of membership—in a group, in a culture, in a society, in a polity.”6 Thus, “Wittgenstein allows us to investigate the nature of political discourse, and of the political.”7 This contribution of Wittgenstein is not merely methodological, i.e., one of manipulating techniques of language analysis. His perspective, as Pitkin aptly reminds us, instructs us that wherever there is conceptual work being done there is philosophy in use, “but in blind, fragmented, distorted forms” which are at once “controlling” and “imposing,” preventing rather than promoting our perception of reality.8 At issue here is nothing less than “implicit metaphysical presuppositions” at work in our discourse. Awareness of these presuppositions leads us to recognize that “shifts of assumptions” are essential to intellectual progress. (To use a Kuhnian notion, what is at issue is the difference between normal science and a shift of paradigm, the latter occurring in a time of crisis in the discipline.9) Thus, for Wittgenstein “philosophizing is the attempt to get clear about the most significant and fundamental and inescapable features of the world and ourselves, not by gathering new facts but by reinvestigating the facts we already have. But that necessarily means getting clear about our concepts, their limits, and their implications.”10 In the domain of political theory, then, the concern for fundamentals is paramount when the historical situation is one of crisis. Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, hoped that the work “might have some small

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impact on ‘the darkness of this time’” in which we live, and in this respect Wittgenstein and Heidegger are in accord concerning the task at hand.11 Both schools of thought that follow these two thinkers see the importance of “breakthroughs from received presumptions to true objectivity, to the true experienced reality,” and all that such presumptions portend for political life: “On the social and political level, we think in terms of ‘social engineering’, manipulatively; we see the problem as one of channeling men by neutral, administrative measures. Feeling that we know the real, objective courses of others’ actions and social condition, we no longer need to listen to their views; feeling that we can determine their needs scientifically, we become impatient with their wants. Both individually and socially, human relations are resolved into technical problems.”12 Yet, it is this emphasis on “objectivity” and the framework of “the technological” that must be questioned in our concern with the foundations of social science. The “Wittgensteinian” position on the status of the social sciences is similar to the Heideggerian recognition of foundational crisis. John Danford treats this question in a work published in 1978.13 Danford’s work is particularly relevant because he is familiar with the question of crisis as it is discussed in the continental philosophical tradition of Edmund Husserl. In his discussion of the issue, Danford claims that “our science of politics, as it is now constituted, is radically defective.” Taking note of the empirical methodology of the social sciences and the distinction of fact and value, Danford observes that while “a social science has normative implications because it can indicate to us the proper course of action to achieve the ends we seek,” nevertheless “We cannot discover, empirically, how man ought to live, because empirical science is concerned with facts and not values.”14 Yet, the more fundamental problem is that of “the relationship between scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and the actual and concrete world in which human beings live and act, on the other.” Thus, the question at issue is: “what is the foundation of political science’s claim to be in touch with the reality which precedes it and which it seeks to comprehend?”15 This question Danford rightly sees to be approachable via a Wittgensteinian critique of Hobbes’s concept of political science. Hobbes, as antagonist to classical political science (Plato, Aristotle) and as advocate of mathematical method in modern political science, had a view of language in relation to scientific method which is challenged by Wittgenstein’s language philosophy. As Danford puts it, “The possibility that Hobbes and Locke were wrong about language forces us to wonder if they were right in their account of the proper method for political science.”16 Moreover, Wittgenstein’s concern with epistemology is significant given that “Political philosophy is today

Introduction

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subordinate to epistemology,” and so we may ask, as Danford does: “Why has epistemology replaced political philosophy as the queen of philosophy?”17 Wittgenstein’s investigations are profitable in understanding this issue in that they permit us “to question what has to many of us seemed unquestionable, namely, the idea that the only knowledge one should be willing to stand behind is scientific knowledge in the strict sense.”18 Danford’s effort to relate Wittgenstein’s corpus to the problem of foundational crisis in philosophy and the social sciences is important as far as it goes. However, it has its limitations, as he himself notes in conclusion: “We do not have sufficient grounds to reject the side taken in this controversy by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.”19 My appropriation of Heidegger is such that I believe his critique of modernity to be the “sufficient grounds” for rejecting the ontological and epistemological commitments of the moderns, and, therefore, also that political philosophy which is either derivative of or structurally dependent upon those more basic categorical commitments. It is in this sense that, for me, Heidegger rather than Wittgenstein presents the philosophical resources for theoretical critique of world order thinking. John Rawls is another prominent thinker worthy of some comment in light of my present project. Rawls’ work has received considerable attention because of its bearing upon questions of institutional reform relative to the requirements of a well-ordered and just society, albeit in the American social context. Practically all of that discussion has been concerned with principles of morality within the context of domestic society rather than international society. Where there has been attention to the problems of international distributive justice, the discussion has been such as to sustain, rather than to challenge, the logic of statecraft.20 Only recently, in the work of Thomas Pogge, have we seen some effort to “globalize” Rawls, i.e., to appropriate and extend his theoretical scheme to the requirements of global justice.21 Rawls himself, in contrast to Pogge, excludes questioning the nation-state itself as a major social institution subject to critique: “Rawls follows tradition in treating national borders as moral watersheds. Only within a national territory and the population it defines does he view the focus on the least advantaged as appropriate.”22 Yet, as Pogge rightly points out, Rawls “thereby circumvents a crucial moral question, which his theory ought to answer, namely whether the institutionalization of national borders really has this magical force of shielding us from (or reducing the force of) the moral claims of ‘foreigners’. The practical importance of this question is enormous, seeing that the institution of the nation-state is a crucial contributor to the current institutional production of extreme deprivations and inequalities.”23

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It is this “conservatism” of Rawls that leads me to reject his work as an alternative basis for theoretical critique of world order thinking. Pogge’s work, on the other hand, is commendable in that it takes up the challenge of correcting for that conservatism.24 Nevertheless, I hasten to note that Pogge is concerned with the institutional dimension of global reform, and with reform achieved through value thinking. Furthermore, Pogge favors what he calls “international pluralism”—“the idea that knowledgeable and intelligent persons of good will may reasonably favor different forms of (national) social organization.” In this regard, Pogge does not engage in a fundamental critique of the logic of statecraft—even accounting for his desire to transcend the modus vivendi framework of the nation-state system. Thus, Pogge’s work (which, on its own terms, I do not wish to depreciate in the least) does not quite perform the kind of critical task I seek to accomplish here via an appropriation of Heidegger’s thought. At least for now, I am not persuaded that there is either an equally powerful or morally innocent alternative to Heidegger, whether of the continental or analytic persuasion. The crisis of Western humanity seems irresolvable within the framework of the speculative rationalism or naïve empiricism of modern philosophy. The merely empiricist methodology of the social sciences likewise lacks the resources for critical self-examination, precisely because such methodology is blind to its own metaphysical commitment. In European philosophy, Heidegger is, perhaps, the most important thinker of the twentieth century, notwithstanding recent French thought. All too many who know of Heidegger without having seriously engaged his philosophical corpus fail to appreciate the full import of that thought. Yet, it is important to see, as Charles Scott puts it, how and why the question of ethics—thereby also the question of politics—functions in Heidegger’s thought “with exceptional force”: “In it we meet one of the most persistent attempts in Western thought to confront the determination of patterns of thought by which we have established and maintained our ideals for living.”25 Heidegger questions concerning the meaning of being in general and also of the distinctly human way to be. Despite its appearance to the contrary, such questioning is not merely speculative or esoteric. It stands inextricably concerned with the status of ethico-political conduct in a situation of foundational crisis. It is precisely because of his concern for the pattern, for the frame, of our thinking—including that pattern determining our modern ethical and political thinking—that Heidegger’s thought can be employed in the service of fundamental critique and reorientation. Precisely because Heidegger’s questioning brings the Western pattern of “ethical thought and judgment” into question, his thought offers a basis for critique in a way that recent

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analytic philosophy does not. “The tension in Heidegger’s thought between the search for a normative basis for thought and the discovery of a ‘basis’ that puts that search in question arises directly out of the fear to which our tradition responds by supporting its ideals and highest hopes with a combination of axioms, authorizing disclosure and careful judgment, be that disclosure God’s, reason’s, nature’s, or humanity’s.”26 It is in Heidegger’s thought that one is forced to ask: “Do our axiomatic values at their best constitute a blindness to who we are and what we do? Does the disclosure of our being and its appropriation, along with the pain and disruption that constitute it and follow it, make possible a profound and thoroughgoing uncertainty that itself reveals the limits of ethics?”27 Unlike any other philosophical corpus, Heidegger’s thought confronts us squarely with the question of what we must do at the closure of moral/political philosophy. In this respect, R.B.J. Walker points out that the challenge being posed by world order studies is “the need to reopen . . . questions about who ‘we’ are, about what it is that constitutes a political community, and about how such communities can be established and sustained in space and time.”28 If the argument I present in this book is compelling, we should come to see how it is that world order discourse and peace research indeed sustain a normative framework that keeps us blind to who we are and what we do. Only theoretical critique begins to show how this ontological-ethical blindness is constituted, in what essential-historical context it is instituted, and by what manner of categorical transformation such blindness may be overcome. We must come to see that world order thinking, like all social science research, works within a pattern of ontological and epistemological commitment. This is true of world order thinking taken as a whole and understood as a general rubric of discourse, notwithstanding the diversity of views in the internal debate that concerns either preferences about global institutional structures, strategies of transition, or the pace of reform and transformation. The strategy of critique I employ here focuses on the beginning of the contemporary world order movement, accounting meanwhile for a continuity of comportment in the developing debate without engaging the diversity of views specifically. There is a principle of analysis manifest here: Beginnings, for all their theoretical and practical shortcomings, are disclosive of an essential configuration. By this I mean that there is an essential pattern or structure of thought that governs and determines the movement as it departs from its beginning. So it is with the world order movement. Insofar as one acknowledges the existence of such an essential configuration, one then needs to disclose what is problematic in the relation of an avowedly normative discourse to an otherwise hidden ontological and epistemological commitment.

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Such philosophical work is a focus clearly different from what political theorists may expect in their concern with specific world order issues (“a world capitalist economy, forms of militarization, global inequality, economic degradations,” etc.). But, then, if I may employ a Heideggerian response here, at issue is not whether we can do something with such philosophical understanding, but rather what such an understanding will do to us. A successful disclosure of the essential configuration governing contemporary world order discourse can be expected to open up the way to an alternative fundamental comportment and conception concerning the world order quest. Such is the indispensable contribution of a Heideggerian basis for theoretical critique. The significance of my choice of Heidegger may be posed in yet another way, i.e., in a way that accounts for the unique power of European existential philosophy to speak to the problem of crisis in contrast to an American analytic philosophy that does not, indeed cannot. As William Barrett puts it, “The philosopher [and one must think here, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher] cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.”29 Thus, “It is Europe that has been in crisis, and it is European thinkers who have brought the existential problems to a focal expression, who have in fact dared to raise the ultimate questions. . . . Its significance is for the world and for this epoch of the world.”30 Heidegger certainly falls centrally within this philosophy of existential concern in a way no Anglo-American analytic philosopher can. In line with the above thought, I have noted that world order scholars are genuinely concerned about the manifold dimensions of planetary crisis— war, both conventional war and the post-Cold War threat of thermonuclear war; social and economic injustice, especially between the industrialized North and the developing South of the globe; conditions of extreme poverty, especially in Africa, the subcontinent of Asia, and Latin America; and escalating ecological decay across the face of the planet. I submit that this “pragmatic” concern is really a manifestation of an existential anxiety in the face of a prospect of death through global catastrophe issuing from one or a combination of these global problems. Such anxiety in the face of death is fully consonant with Heidegger’s concern for the human way to be during the global reign of technology, that way in which modernity in its extreme configuration determines human life for better and for worse. With this in mind, it is not sufficient merely to contrapose the logic of world order to the logic of statecraft in the manner of straightforward normative disputation. It is necessary, rather, that this existential anxiety be experienced in an essential way; i.e., such that all ethical and political logic

Introduction

13

and thinking come into question, and such that we come to see that even the logic of world order can have hidden prejudices that must be put into question. This “putting into question” is not a nihilistic move, such that we would come away from this questioning justifying anything or nothing at all. Rather, the fragility of our inherited and then transmitted justifications within the Western valuation comes into clear relief against the background of the human way to be that Heidegger seeks to clarify. We must remember, after all, as Charles Scott observes, that . . . anything has been justified in our history by appeal to universal values and meanings, including the most severe repressions, torture, violent cruelty, war, and the morbid enslaving and destructive segregation of vast groups of people. The proliferation of ‘universal’ norms whereby we justify certain values and contend against other values mirrors our fear of what the world would be like if we lacked an adequate basis for justifying our values and realizing the best possibilities of ourselves. . . . The tension in Heidegger’s thought . . . puts in question the combination of axioms, authorizing disclosure and judgment, as well as the belief that with a proper normative basis for our values we can hope to overcome the destructive proliferation of violently opposing ways of life.31

Having said that world order scholars essentially manifest an existential anxiety in the face of threatened planetary catastrophe, I must say that with this book I, too, disclose my own existential anxiety as I, like them, am situated in a crisis of understanding. Insofar as I philosophize, my mind is European. This is the personal dimension of this project that cannot be eliminated. As such, I concede that this work has its own hermeneutic prejudices and critical deficiencies. It is my hope that both will be laid bare in the prospective dialogue I seek to engender through publication. To the extent that the book is self-disclosing of my own existential anxiety, it challenges both the logic of statecraft and the logic of normative and technocratic futurism with a view to the resonant demands of authentic selfhood. This challenge looks beyond the structural/institutional possibilities of transformation to the possibilities of popular empowerment that cannot but begin with transformation of philosophical orientations.32 For me, as for Heidegger, “The struggle for proper selfhood puts the individual at odds with its normal world in which it has its possible roles and identities set for it. To be a proper, self-authenticating self, an individual must take its fundamental cues for living from its being, not from the standards of communal normalcy. . . . The first interruption takes place as an individual finds cultural and social awareness to be without ontological foundation, to be, rather, concerned reactions that

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have led our Western ethos away from its own being.”33 Such fundamental understanding, it seems to me, is what is essential if world order discourse is genuinely and historically-effectively to assist us in “realizing the best possibilities of ourselves.” That, after all, is really what all world order theorizing, all political theorizing, must seek to accomplish if it is to be truly historically effective in its quest to create a just world order.

PART ONE

Theoretical Critique

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CHAPTER ONE

Crisis Theory: The Challenge to Peace Research

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BOULDING’S SCIENTISM

In framing a question concerning the meaning of the twentieth century, one must inevitably acknowledge a hermeneutic prejudice with respect to both content and boundary, declaring “our time” to be a time possessed of its own most proper significance. Thus, in the domain of sociopolitical inquiry as it bears upon the study of peace, we have a representative work in Kenneth Boulding’s widely read The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964). In this work Boulding discloses, as the meaning of the century, the fact of “a great transition” from civilization to “postcivilization.” Today, this distinction may well be termed the modern-postmodern transition as we re-examine the structural possibilities of civil society. Boulding recommends, as the appropriate comportment and strategy, “critical acceptance”; and, rather than understanding the transition as itself an ideological position, he sees the great transition from the perspective of one having “no desire to plant a standard other than truth itself.” Thus, given the evident relationship in our time between the assertion of ideology and conflict, and, thus, the possible degeneration of ideological conflict into war, Boulding (in a spirit of fidelity

17

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Theoretical Critique

to truth) concludes: “Therefore, an understanding of ideologies, of man’s need for them, and of the circumstances under which they can be modified, is a crucial component in the achievement of the great transition.”1 The practical issue here, of course, is that of the very character of war, both waged and yet threatening, in this century—as Boulding puts it, “a revolution in the art of war which makes the whole existing political structure of the world dangerously obsolete.”2 Indeed, remarks Boulding, “A strong case can be made for the proposition that war is essentially a phenomenon of the age of civilization and that it is inappropriate both to precivilized and postcivilized societies.”3 If the meaning of the twentieth century is that “civilization is passing away,” and war, in its genesis and prosecution, is inextricably linked with civilization, then the passing of civilization heralds the passing of war. There is, however, nothing inevitable in this process of human evolution—the transition itself is, somehow, increasingly improbable and certainly not a fate that compels. So the problem remains for us to know whether the practical issue of war at the point of transition is moved by principle or consequence or both—whether war is to be rejected in principle (then the task is to articulate that principle or those principles), or whether, given the currently ominous technological face of war (where “the limit of destructiveness,” i.e., total destruction, is more than merely conceivable), therefore war is unacceptable. It is noteworthy that, for Boulding, the passing of war does not entail the elimination of conflict. Rather, “post-civilization” calls for the management of conflict in international relations in such a way as to overcome the prevailing calculus of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma with its mutually diminishing desiderata of welfare and security. It is said that through processes of integration of social relationships and mediation of dispute (third party intervention), the degeneration of conflict into war may be effectively preempted. Further, to the extent that social science may itself contribute to the task at hand, observes Boulding, “calculation, even bad calculation, is the enemy of the irrational.” Thus, “If ideological struggles can be transformed even partially into conflicts of scientific theory, we have a much better chance for their resolution.”4 In short, peace research is, in this view, essentially a matter of understanding ideologies, their genesis and, especially, “the circumstances under which they can be modified.” The guiding concept here is that of peace qua negative peace. For Boulding, “negative peace is much more important [than the idea of positive peace], that is, just the prevention of war.”5 Thus, it is in no way surprising to see contemporary peace “research” developing the intricate socioscientific calculi of conflict resolution, decision theory, and just war

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theory—all of which work (at least implicitly) with the negative peace orientation; but also with the implicit (contradictory?) understanding that the ground of the jus ad bellum is intact, hence the need for just war theory to articulate the criteria for the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello.6 Yet, one is struck by the perception that there seems to be something fundamentally out of joint here. If I might give a summary statement of the problem as I see it, it may be articulated thus: Peace research lacks a genuinely reflective comportment and, thus, lags behind the more fundamental movement of thought and being that determines our time. It is this fundamental problem that I seek to illuminate here, without intending mere polemic. The hermeneutic prejudice involved in this thesis is Heideggerian, the content of which shall become clear in due course.

BOULDING ON IDEOLOGY

Peace research, it has been said, is essentially a matter of understanding ideologies, with special attention to the circumstances under which they can be modified in the interest of preventing war. Discourse on ideology is today abundant. Here I shall take Boulding’s description of ideology as the focus of my remarks, precisely because Boulding has been such an influential figure in peace studies and because this understanding of ideology remains a guiding orientation in his persistent advocacy of the negative peace agenda. By ‘ideology’ Boulding has in mind “an image of the world [that has] power over a man’s mind and that leads him to build his personal identity around it.”7 Central to this “world-image” is the creation of “a drama”—“an interpretation of history sufficiently dramatic and convincing so that the individual feels that he can identify with it and which in turn can give the individual a role in the drama it portrays.” Such an interpretation of history, however, is derived from “some view of the nature of reality and the sources of knowledge.” Included in this world-image is “a value-system capable of developing principles of moral action and a standard for the criticism of behavior.”8 From this description it becomes immediately clear that every ideology is inextricably linked to a metaphysics and an epistemology, indeed that every ideology has its metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions. In this sense, every ideology is explicitly a philosophical anthropology situated within a general ontological commitment that apparently has its grounding content and more or less delimited temporal sway. Ideologies, thus, are themselves essentially historical phenomena; and it is because they are essentially historical that they are subject to modification in the course of their encounters with rivals.

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Boulding’s approach to ideology is perhaps best captured by the rubric he himself uses, “normative science.” As he remarks in his work Stable Peace, “peace research is a loosely defined subset of a much larger area of inquiry which I shall call normative science. This is inquiry, by the methods and the ethic of the scientific community, into human valuations and their coordination, into such questions as what do we mean by things going from bad to better rather than from bad to worse and, if we can come to some limitation of this meaning, what processes in society actually move things from bad to better rather than from bad to worse?”9 While he includes among the subject matter of normative science “things like poverty, oppression, the illegitimate use of power, defenses against the abuses of power, distribution and equity,” Boulding nevertheless still sees peace research concerned with the problem of negative peace. Also, while recognizing that peace research is a fledgling science, Boulding nonetheless claims that a “textbook stage” is nigh, insofar as “there is actually a considerable body of theory which exhibits at least a moderate amount of coherence.” Presumably, peace research may be expected legitimately to develop into “a single, universally recognized, internally coherent body of theory.”10 Boulding’s epistemological orientation is essentially one that postulates a correspondence or structural isomorphism between the “real world” and the “image” we may have of it, coupled with both coherentist and pragmatist criteria of “truth value.” Presumably, alternative images are commensurable, each subject to “testing” which then yields judgments about the “success” or “disappointment” of the theoretical content of these images. The task for normative science is a “reduction of error,” “‘error’ being a lack of correspondence between our images and the ‘real world’.”11 Boulding expresses this epistemological orientation more fully in the following passage from his work Human Betterment (the conflation of correspondence, coherentist, and pragmatist criteria is evident): A very important question in regard to human valuations is whether there is anything in human valuations that corresponds to “truth” in our images of the state and nature of the world. Our image of the world, of space, time, things, relationships, and so on, is “true” if it “maps” onto a real world—that is, has the same basic structure and pattern as the real world itself. We can never compare our image with reality. We can compare one image only with another image. But we can test our images of the world by deriving expectations from them—that is, images of the future—and then seeing if these expectations are realized as time passes and the future becomes past. . . . A “success”—that is, a fulfillment of expectations—reinforces our existing image. We don’t learn anything new from it, except that our original image

Crisis Theory

21

of the world was confirmed and we feel more secure about it. If we have a failure or disappointment—that is, if our image of the future is not fulfilled—then either we have to revise our image of the world, or perhaps reexamine our expectation to see if it was legitimate, and there is a good probability that our image of the world will change in the direction of truth.12

Implicit in Boulding’s description is a sense of a relationship between theory and practice that is manifest in ideology, not simply in the sense that praxis is derivative of a spectatorial, detached theoria, but in the sense that theory and practice are united from the outset. This, it is to be noted, is itself a consequence of that more fundamental movement of Western reason in which philosophy at its completion gives place to the beginning of ideology in just the sense captured by Boulding’s description. Philosophy at its completion is generally acknowledged by students of recent European philosophy to be represented by the system of Hegel with its grand phenomenology of Spirit (Geist), which comprehensively accounts for reality, and Hegel’s corresponding speculative philosophy of right (Recht), which articulates “the rational core” of the political. This “completion,” however, as is well known, was subsequently confronted by both the critical philosophy of Marx and the Fursprache of Nietzsche with its anti-Platonist project of transvaluation. Marx’s challenge to the legitimacy of the Hegelian theodicy contraposed a philosophy of action to that of philosophy qua theory, the former from the outset envisioning a world-historical project of social reform and human emancipation in contrast to the latter’s spectatorial or detached commitment to an understanding and interpretation of reality which in the same moment legitimate the extant order. But, then, the Marxist project so represented is no inconsequential event in recent intellectual history that is now merely past. Neither is it merely what has been called a “rupture with traditional ideas” that remains limited to the domain of ideas. Notwithstanding the “practical crisis of Marxism” experienced with the collapse of the former USSR and the ethnic fragmentation of Eastern Europe, what happened here remains quiescent in the sense of “what is still happening even if it seems to be past,” such that the “quiescence of happening is not the absence of history, but a basic form of its presence.”13 Thus, what is problematic in the practice of peace research is that there is now a methodological commitment to the understanding of ideological conflict without an adequate reflection upon the fundamental questions yet at issue here. One must ask: Is it at all significant for peace research that the beginning of ideology is itself basically meaningful only in the context of

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Theoretical Critique

that historical event in which philosophy attains to its completion? In its self-understanding, does the transdiscipline of peace research find itself committed, tacitly if not explicitly, to one or another world-image that has lost its legitimacy? If one accounts for the Marxist critical philosophy with its critique of religion and politics and the quest to reform that “false” consciousness which corresponds to these “sacred” and “secular” modes of human self-alienation, the whole of philosophy from Plato to Hegel is more or less rendered impotent. Thus, the traditional ground of just war theory (as articulated by Augustine) falls away, and one must ask what in principle legitimates its contemporary discourse. In the absence of a transcendent account of political obligation, such as is to be found in the concept of a jus gentium, it would seem that the jus ad bellum is effectively reduced to a wholly conventiondependent discourse, now forming the content of legal positivist conceptions of international law. The idea of a jus gentium, as Roscoe Pound noted in a still instructive essay published in 1949, in its origin is linked with both the idea of universal reason and its correlative ideal of universal or natural law discovered or demonstrated by reason.14 But, as Pound reminds, “the philosophical theory, on which the law of nature and nations rested, gave way at the end of the eighteenth century. The juristic theory lapsed in the nineteenth century and the moral-legal jus gentium of the seventeenth century [i.e., that developed by Hugo Grotius] lost its force.”15 Thus, when formerly transcendent principles are displaced by homocentric rationale, it is unclear that some Neo-Thomism or Neo-Idealism may be called upon to legitimate an international legal order and the jus ad bellum that is bound up with the logic of statecraft. It is true that with Thomism the Augustinian definition of true political society “as inseparably bound up with a Christian Commonwealth” is altered so that political society can be said to have “its own right of existence.” But, even then, Aquinas found “the ultimate meaning of political activity to be in conformity to a higher universal law.”16 Likewise, if one accounts for the Nietzschean subversion of both Platonism and Christianity, the hitherto transcendent legitimation of “the moral world order” and corresponding doctrines of truth and justice are rendered wholly problematic. Atemporal, permanent first principles (in the classic sense of some fundamentum absolutum et inconcussum) are at once demoted and supplanted by the very different principle common to both Marx and Nietzsche that there is no summum ens (supreme being) except man himself, hence the manifold and various insurrections in our time of the ego volo (i.e., humanity in the mode of self-assertion, the “I will”). “Plato (and Aristotle)

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vs. Nietzsche,” “Augustine (and Aquinas) vs. Marx”—herein, presumably, is the seat of contemporary moral and political disputations that can be said to be genuinely historical (in contradistinction from disputations that pay attention only to surface phenomena of international political history). Where now, one may reasonably ask, is that standard of “truth itself” which is said to claim our fidelity in the great transition to post-civilization and according to which ideology receives its measure? Are peace studies not likewise situated in the fundamental philosophical crisis of our time wherein one is compelled to ask: “Whose justice? Which rationality?”17 The basic question I am posing, then, is this: How is one to understand peace and legitimate its agenda in the midst of nihilism, when there are apparently no privileged positions in the Western philosophical tradition; when even Western reason itself is confronted with a “discourse of dissent” from representatives of “Third World” cultures not at all inclined to share in “the crisis of European humanity,” and even less inclined to acquiesce in explicit or covert assertions of the hegemony of Western reason?18 Whether the operative concept is negative peace or positive peace (or both), the ontological and epistemological context that is said to legitimate these conceptual commitments is now fully ambiguous. Peace research may very well proceed with substantive empirical investigations that are wholly consistent with the methodological commitment to “a ‘scientific ideology’ itself applied to society.” But this very commitment betrays something of what has been called “the Enlightenment pretension to construct a science of society modeled on natural science,” the very pretension “unmasked” by both Marx and Nietzsche and challenged in this century by the phenomenological critiques associated with Husserl and Heidegger, not to mention the various critiques by analytic philosophers.19 Thus, in the absence of a reflective questioning that acknowledges that the present suffers from an insidious “skepticism toward all inherited concepts,” and that, therefore, would attend to yet unresolved ontological and epistemological difficulties, peace research cannot but contribute to and sustain a measure of self-deception.

RESPONDING TO CRISIS THEORY

The stance from which I am posing these questions, clearly, is that which is now known by the rubric crisis theory. Anyone who adequately apprehends the situation of crisis is faced, all too suddenly, with something like paralysis. When the ground (all grounding) falls away, one stands (?) at the abyss—the whither and the how are lacking. Yet, it is to be noted that this itself is but one

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Theoretical Critique

interpretation of crisis, what has been termed by Allan Megill the “posttheological notion” which “comes out of the continental philosophical tradition and out of the theology connected with that tradition. Typically, interpreters in this tradition tie crisis to the collapse of the ‘God of the philosophers’ and of the ‘God of the Bible’ which they see as occurring in Kant’s first critique and in the Biblical criticism of David Friedrich Strauss and other nineteenth century practitioners of historical criticism. In this view,” continues Megill, “the loss of the transcendent dimension, prompted by the notion of Kritik as a pervasive power, leads to modern man’s homelessness in the world. This is the crisis. It is the loss of authoritative standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful to which reason has access, coupled with loss of the Word of God in the Bible.”20 The second interpretation of crisis, which Megill himself advances, is not post-theological with its recognition of a loss of transcendence, but, rather, “post-historicist” with its different (though related) focus upon “the collapse of historicism.” In this view, “crisis arises not out of the early but rather out of the late nineteenth century . . . [and is] connected with the collapse, circa 1880–1920, of historicism and of the faith in progress that was the widely diffused, vulgarized form of historicism.” Thus, whereas “In the theological reading of crisis, historicism is the product of crisis,” in the second view “historicism is the precondition of crisis.”21 Accordingly, if one is at all moved to respond to the philosophical challenge to peace research that issues in crisis theory, it seems that one must do so in this dual context of recognition (loss of transcendence and collapse of historicism) and thereby situate oneself in the midst of the modernist-postmodernist debate. The voices in this debate are now legion, and hardly harmonious—this itself being affirmation of crisis. Indeed, there is such a cacophony that one is either thoroughly intimidated or thoroughly convinced that to listen at all is foolhardiness rather than the better part of valor. The danger here is essentially twofold: “A sense of crisis can lead one to wash one’s hands of action, on the grounds that every action will become part of the present’s degradation. But it can also translate itself into an unending action, whose point is not to bring into being a new present but rather to undermine any and all extant orders, past, present, and future.”22 Neither quietism nor radical activism is an appropriate strategy, for each either sustains or enhances a destructive nihilism. It is incumbent upon us to think and to think hard, mustering even a Herculean effort to stand though we stagger. I cannot but echo Heidegger, who, in his later work, says that what matters today is that we ask the question “What ought we to do?” from the perspective of the more fundamental question “How must we think?” In this spirit,

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then, let us consider (albeit briefly) a few possible strategies of response: (a) defense of modernity, (b) recovery of the pre-theoretical world, (c) restoration of Neo-Aristotelianism, (d) appropriation of a postmetaphysical thinking, and (e) dismissal of crisis theory.

A. DEFENDING MODERNITY One may proceed to attempt a defense of the political project of the Enlightenment on the tails of a more general apology which speaks for the legitimacy of the modern age, such as that advanced by Hans Blumenberg.23 According to Blumenberg, the inherent contradictions of the ongoing dialectic of synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology that was basic to the Middle Ages could lead only to some positive articulation of human autonomy, without this being a “secularization” of Judeo-Christian eschatology manifest in a philosophy of optimism about history. “The Middle Ages came to an end,” asserts Blumenberg, “when within their spiritual system creation as ‘providence’ ceased to be credible to man and the burden of self-assertion was therefore laid upon him.” By ‘self-assertion’ Blumenberg means “an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him.”24 Such a positive articulation of human autonomy could occur only in terms of “two fundamental positions”: “hypothetical atheism, which poses the question of man’s potential under the condition that the answer should hold ‘even if there is no God’; and rational deism, which employs the ‘most perfect being’ to guarantee this human potential—the ‘most perfect being’ that is functionalized by Descartes as the principle of the deduction of the dependability of the world and of our knowledge of it.” Thus, observes Blumenberg, “The double face of the Enlightenment, on the one hand its renewal of a teleological optimism and on the other hand its inclination to atheism, loses its contradictory character if one places it in the context of the unity of the onset of human self-assertion and the rejection of its latemedieval systematic role.”25 The basic position that Blumenberg offers as an apology for modernity entails for peace research the programmatic orientation that follows from hypothetical atheism or rational deism. What we are to determine about peace research in principle and in consequence would have to be consistent with this guiding value orientation: The way to peace is essentially to be pursued

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without any introduction of transcendent claims upon the conduct of human affairs. Indeed, such claims would be banally intrusive rather than legitimate in whatever they might say about political obligation; for, according to Blumenberg, the concept of rationality that matters now is “neither that of an agency of salvation nor that of a creative originality” but, rather, that of a “sufficient rationality” (einer zureichended Vernunft): “It is just enough to accomplish the postmedieval self-assertion and to bear the consequences of this emergency self-consolidation. The concept of the legitimacy of the modern age is not derived from the accomplishments of reason but rather from the necessity of those accomplishments.”26 Peace research, thus, would be in principle homocentric, guided by a human autonomy grounded upon a sufficient rationality; and whatever expectations we are to have from human conduct would depend upon conceptions of “human nature” so derived or, alternatively, upon an existentialist ethos of human freedom which rejects the universal in deference to the uniqueness of the particular. Yet, while there could be no legitimate appeal to a transcendent account of political obligation, it would be likewise questionable merely to advocate a political absolutism which is “mirror-image” to an abandoned theological absolutism.27 That is, while becoming “un-Hobbesian” (i.e., by rejecting Hobbes’s “assumption that the unity of a state religion, as a way of neutralizing the effect of religious energies on political reality, was not only possible but also enforceable”) neither can we defensibly move in the direction of one such as Pierre Bayle, who “by the end of the [seventeenth] century . . . already saw religion as the state’s insoluble problem” and therefore claimed that “only a state made of atheists could be a good and a satisfactorily functioning one.”28 The “indefensibility” of the latter strategy lies in the consequences which are today less acceptable than they were then: “the intolerability of the factionalization of absolute positions within the state was counteracted by the transfer of the category of the unconditional friend/enemy relation to the conflicts between the national states that were in the process of integrating themselves. This was why it could become a special feature of the modern age as seen by historians that the acuteness of an internal crisis could be overridden by the absoluteness of an external one.”29 For us today, it is precisely this issue of identity and difference in the logic of statecraft that sustains the agonistic character of contemporary international relations. As Blumenberg himself observes, “Three centuries after the national state took on the pseudomorphic qualities of the absolute authority, it becomes evident that the projection of the category of enmity onto the relations between states is no longer a viable procedure. . . .”30

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When all is said and done, the comportment that issues from a defense of modernity is essentially one that abandons the notion of crisis. That is, what is abandoned is the expectation of some fundamental moral resolution: “When it is no longer possible to believe that the decision between good and evil is going to occur in history and is immediately impending, and that every political act participates in this crisis, the suggestiveness of the ‘state of emergency’ (Ausnahmezustand) as the normal political state disappears.”31 But, thereby, the stance taken toward the future becomes significantly relaxed, perhaps too relaxed if this is to mean merely “muddling through” while, somehow, progress is nevertheless the product. What remains arguable, ultimately, in an apology for the modern project—even for an orientation that recasts rationality as a sufficient rationality legitimating the accomplishments of modernity—is the extent to which the idea of progress remains relevant. In an important essay the contemporary political philosopher Leo Strauss defines the idea of progress succinctly in terms of five key elements: [1] the development of human thought as a whole is a progressive development, certainly the emergence of modern thought since the seventeenth century makes an unqualified progress beyond all earlier thought. [2] There is a fundamental and necessary parallelism between intellectual and social progress. [3] There are no assignable limits to intellectual and social progress. [4] Infinite intellectual and social progress is actually possible. [5] Once mankind has reached a certain stage of development, there exists a solid floor beneath which man can no longer sink.32

As Strauss himself observed, however, “all these points have become questionable.” It seems we must conclude that the outcome of a strategy that sanctions “human autonomy” is ambiguous and seems unpromising in view of the historical events of the first half of the twentieth century, events that call into question the ideological appropriations of both science and technology. Thus, it is to be noted that Boulding’s recommendation that ideological struggles be transformed into conflicts of scientific theory is premised upon something like a sanitized view of scientific rationality, even and especially when he allows for “bad calculation” as “the enemy of the irrational.” In the course of an unfolding unholy alliance of science and technology grounded upon the metaphysics of modernity, scientific rationality and technological rationality become nearly, if not wholly, indistinguishable; and here one is faced not only with “the metaphysics of the modern age,” but also with what has been called “the apex of homocentrism whose ‘banality of evil’ is domination in the realms

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of the natural environment and the social order.” Calculative thinking harbors its own irrationality in leading to a “cybernation of man and society”— “the irony of technological rationality is its irrationality.”33 Thus, ideological conflicts transformed into conflicts of social science theory end up as so many affirmations that “knowledge is power” and, correlatively, that politics is to be “‘manufactured’ as ‘power’,” this as the inevitable consequence of a doctrine of radical human autonomy.34

B. RECOVERING THE PRE-THEORETICAL WORLD An alternative to the foregoing strategy is to concede closure to the modern project, reject both objectivism for the “ontological illusion” that it is and scientism for the “epistemological error” that it is, and then reorient socialscientific inquiry on the basis of a phenomenology of the life-world (Lebenswelt). This would be a strategy consistent with Husserlian phenomenology, which “show[s] the rootedness of science in the life-world” and, thereby, “rediscover[s] the telos of science and philosophy for human existence.”35 In this view, philosophy as rigorous science may enable a political philosophy that recovers the pre-theoretical social world. As Hwa Yol Jung puts it, The relevance of the phenomenology of the life-world to the theory of politics is twofold. First, the life-world is the basic matrix of all theoretical endeavors, including political theorizing. It has a privileged status in the sense that all conceptual activity is founded on the pre-conceptual world called the life-world. Husserl himself regarded this everyday life-world as the most universal problem of philosophy and as the foundation of all theoretical enterprises. Second, the life-world is a historical, social, and cultural world that encompasses the whole of political reality as the object of political theorizing. The phenomenology of the life-world is a philosophy of social reality in the broadest sense of the term social.36

In the course of time, a recovery of preconceptual political reality would bring about what Jung calls a “new humanism” or the “politics of civility.” The foundation of this new humanism is a “social or dialogical principle” or “ecological conscience” which “is concerned with the question of how to dwell rightly on earth,” which thus affirms “an inextricable nexus of relationships both between man and man and between man and nature.” The “basic existential character of man” can be properly understood only thus: “In the end, to dwell on earth with care is to belong together (i.e., appropriate) and to cel-

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ebrate the sacrament of planetary co-existence among all beings and things.”37 The task, of course, remains to articulate the fuller content of this “politics of civility.” It should be noted at this point that Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt are two contemporary political philosophers whose thought moves in the direction of reappropriating the pre-theoretical life-world of politics. This is not the occasion to expound their thought beyond brief comment related to the present discussion. Strauss’s concern is with the contemporary tendency to understand the political in terms of science, thus with that understanding which is scientistic.38 One interpreter of Strauss has characterized Strauss’s project in terms of a “re-birth of classical political rationalism,” and to this extent Strauss’s critique of political science qua scientism reasserts the political understanding of the ancients against the moderns and, thus, champions classical political philosophy.39 Accordingly, in his work entitled The City and Man (which title already bespeaks “the theme” of classical political philosophy), Strauss points the way out of the “ideology” that has replaced political philosophy: “We contend that that coherent and comprehensive understanding of political things is available to us in Aristotle’s Politics precisely because the Politics contains the original form of political science: that form in which political science is nothing other than the fully conscious form of the common sense understanding of political things. Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.”40 It goes without saying here, of course, that Strauss’s assertion of the superiority of the classical understanding of politics allows for the reintroduction of transcendent claims, given the possibility of “trans-historical” and “trans-cultural” knowledge of the good. In like manner, Hannah Arendt sees the way out of the crisis in terms of a return to the ancients and their understanding of the political and of action (praxis) in particular. In opposition to “the social realm” which in modern life comes about as a result of “the invasion of politics by economics”—thus from a conflation of public and private realms—Arendt would rehabilitate “the public realm” which suffered its final assault “in the theories of Karl Marx.”41 Against the Marxist call to violent revolutionary action, Arendt stresses the Aristotelian understanding of the affairs of the polis as “conducted . . . by means of speech through persuasion (peithein) and not by means of violence, through mute coercion,” so that obedience to governing authority . . . [is] obtained by persuasion and not by force.”42 In reasserting the autonomy of politics, Arendt would have us see that “The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts

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have lost their power over the minds of men.” Indeed, what is positive about the crisis of modernity, says Arendt, is “the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman civilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought.”43 Putting it slightly differently, Arendt claims the way is opened up “for a re-examination of the whole realm of politics in the light of elementary human experiences within this realm itself and it implicitly discards traditional concepts and judgments, which have their roots in altogether different kinds of experience.”44 Such direct seeing is necessarily different from the seeing of modern scientific “theory”; for whereas the former concerns “a system of reasonably connected truths which as such had not been made but given to reason and the senses,” the latter is “a working hypothesis, changing in accordance with the results it produces and depending for its validity not on what it ‘reveals’ but on whether it ‘works’.”45 Moreover, the very concept of political action as Arendt defines it (“the beginning of something new whose outcome is unpredictable”) stands in contrast to the methodological commitment of empirical science to predictive power in its theoretical constructions. Clearly, the foregoing remarks show the existence of a united front against the epistemological commitment of contemporary empirical political science. As Hwa Yol Jung observed, “Strauss is in sympathy with Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘rigorous science’ whose rationality goes back to the Greek notion of theoria and the common sense rationality of political man as the basis of conceptualization in political science.”46 With respect to ontology it is to be noted that Strauss is committed to an “ontological objectivism” or “ontological determinism,” to a “version of ‘human nature’ which is predetermined, unchanging, and universal,” for “to know that man is (thatness or existence) must presuppose what man is (whatness or essence).”47 The point of unity with Husserl is in the latter’s early development of phenomenology “as a theory of essence (Wesen) which is capable of extending itself from individual facts to general essences or ideal entities concerning the entire spectrum of human culture (Geist) whether it be religious, aesthetic, ethical, political, legal, or technological.”48 The later Husserl, however, accounts for the life-world in a way in which Strauss does not. As Jung notes, Philosophical rigor changes its accent by focusing on the archaeology of the knowing subject rooted in the everyday life-world as the ultimate and most comprehensive horizon of meaning that constitutes the foundation of theoria. Like Heidegger in Being and Time, Husserl comes forthrightly to terms with

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history and the historicity of theoretical consciousness by way of transcendental subjectivity as intersubjectivity. . . . Husserl attempts to show and justify the everyday life-world as the ultimate horizon of meaning which is presupposed in all theoretical activity both philosophical and scientific. The life-world is the universal founding soil upon which all praxis is based—not only the praxis of everyday life but also the praxis of cognition and judgment. The primary task of phenomenology is to discover and show the genesis of meaning in the lifeworld as it is related to the “natural attitude,” to the experiential infrastructure of theoria.49

The key point of difference between Strauss and Husserl is that for Strauss the “pre-scientific world” is a historic concept, so that “we cannot identify the pre-scientific world with the world in which we now live,” hence his return to the ancient world of the Greek polis; whereas “for Husserl the everyday life-world is primarily an analytic rather than a historic concept.” Thus, “to discover the structure of the life-world it is not necessary for us to go back to the ‘primitive’ or ‘pre-historic’ conditions of man or to engage in what Strauss calls ‘hypothetical anthropological studies’ . . .”50 Clearly, a compelling phenomenological account of the political is yet to be articulated. Strauss and Arendt argue forcefully for the return to the ancients for insights into the political that are yet relevant to contemporary problems. In this respect, their counsel is pertinent and timely. The status of conceptual categories, however, is yet to be decided. Especially at issue is the concept of the life-world in terms of the differing orientations of Strauss and Husserl, i.e., whether the concept is analytic or historic.

C. RESTORING NEO-ARISTOTELIANISM Yet another avenue of response to crisis would be along the lines proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre, whose central thesis in his book After Virtue is “that the Aristotelian moral tradition is the best example we possess of a tradition whose adherents are rationally entitled to a high measure of confidence in its epistemological and moral resources.”51 MacIntyre argues that “the cogency of the Nietzschean rejection of modern moralities of rules, whether of a utilitarian or of a Kantian kind, did not necessarily extend to the earlier Aristotelian tradition”; that “against that tradition the Nietzschean polemic is completely unsuccessful”; and that “it is from the perspective of that tradition that we can best understand the mistakes at the heart of the Nietzschean

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position.”52 If his account is compelling, then, contends MacIntyre, “the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other”: The differences between the two run very deep. They extend beyond ethics and morality to the understanding of human action, so that rival conceptions of the social sciences, of their limits and possibilities, are intimately bound up with the antagonistic confrontation of these two alternative ways of viewing the human world.53

MacIntyre, of course, is aware of the Marxist dimension of modernity’s problematic, and thus aware that some critics “will deny not only that the Aristotelian tradition is a viable alternative, but also that it is in terms of an opposition between liberal individualism and that tradition that the problems of modernity are to be approached. The key intellectual opposition of our age, such critics will declare, is that between liberal individualism and some version of Marxism or neo-Marxism.”54 MacIntyre’s reply here is essentially that “the claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history.” Simply, “When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy (i.e., as in ‘Lukacs’s ideal proletarian’ and ‘Leninism’s ideal revolutionary’)”—in short, Marxism’s own “versions of the Übermensch.”55 Notwithstanding, the radical school in peace research may yet have justification in its analysis if not in its expectations from practice. There remains some truth in Marx’s insight advanced in his general critique of civil society that it is “the sphere of egoism,” that such egoism is “the essence of differentiation” in civil society which enhances the bellum omnium contra omnes (contrary to “the essence of community”), and that the quest for security as the “supreme social concept of civil society” is problematic precisely because it remains for civil society “the assurance of its egoism.” Of course, as MacIntyre himself notes, his arguments presented in After Virtue “presuppose a systematic . . . account of rationality,” an account left unstated in the first edition of the book and touched on in comments given in postscript to the second edition. MacIntyre acknowledges that in morality, as in natural science, “there are no general timeless standards.” In his view, competing and incompatible claims adduced by rival moralities are to be judged, it would seem, by the outcome of their mutual confrontation in rational argument, one party being able “to identify and to transcend the limitations of its rival or rivals” so that the rational superiority of that particular moral philosophy and that particular morality emerges.”56

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MacIntyre reaffirms this view in his later work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? At the outset of his remarks, MacIntyre observes that “rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history.” Thus, “since there are a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will turn out that there are justices rather than justice.”57 In short, “there is no set of independent standards of rational justification by appeal to which the issues between contending traditions can be decided.”58 In observing as much, MacIntyre does not yield before either a relativist or a perspectivist refutation. “The relativist challenge,” notes MacIntyre, “rests upon a denial that rational debate between and rational choice among rival traditions is possible”; whereas “the perspectivist challenge puts in question the possibility of making truth-claims from within any one tradition.”59 Against the relativist, MacIntyre argues that there can be good reason to give one’s allegiance to the standpoint of one tradition rather than to that of another, that traditions can defeat or be defeated by other traditions: . . . genuinely to adopt the standpoint of a tradition thereby commits one to its view of what is true and false and, in so committing one, prohibits one from adopting any rival standpoint. . . . The multiplicity of traditions does not afford a multiplicity of perspectives among which we can move, but a multiplicity of antagonistic commitments, between which only conflict, rational or nonrational, is possible.60

The lesson for peace research that issues from MacIntyre’s account of rationality, I believe, is clearly articulated in the following passage: . . . our education in and about philosophy has by and large presupposed what is in fact not true, that there are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equally available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they may happen to find themselves in and whether or not they inhabit any tradition. When this false belief is rejected, it becomes clear that the problems of justice and practical rationality and of how to confront the rival traditions contending with each other in the agon of ideological encounter are not one and the same set of problems for all persons. What those problems are, how they are to be formulated and addressed, and how, if at all, they may be resolved, will vary not only with the historical, social, and cultural situation of the persons whose problems these are but also with the history of belief and attitude of each particular person up to the point at which he or she finds these problems inescapable.61

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D. TOWARD ESSENTIAL POLITICAL THINKING Yet another strategy (which follows from Heidegger’s critique of modernity)—a strategy as yet undeveloped and ambiguous with respect to both point of departure and outcome—is to move beyond philosophy in any sense of first philosophy or rigorous science to a postmetaphysical thinking. That is, presumably the end or completion of philosophy leads not to a total cessation of the Western quest or to a Nietzschean transvaluation that is itself an extreme form of the metaphysics of modernity; but, rather, to another mode of thinking (Denken), to what for Heidegger is an “essential thinking” (wesentliche Denken)—also called “originary thinking” (anfängliche Denken) or “meditative thinking” (besinnliches Denken). Such thinking is, as it were, attuned to that fundamental movement or “essential history” of the West which is manifest in and as the history of metaphysics, what Heidegger calls the “history of Being” (Seinsgeschichte).62 Here an “essential political thinking” takes over where political philosophy (derivative of or structurally dependent upon first philosophy) attains to its completion. To the extent that technological rationality is itself historically determined by the historical sway of the modern metaphysical dispensation, which attains to its closure, the future opens up to a possibility of a world order in which a planetary thinking and a planetary existence leave behind modern subjectivity and its correlative political principle of “sovereignty” which sustains the logic of statecraft. Heidegger’s thought enables a fundamental comportment concerned with planetary dwelling, in which the “fourfold of Being” (das Geviert des Seins)—what he calls the essential unity of “earth and sky, mortals and divinities”—grants the measure of order (jointure) and justice, and, thus, a preserve of peace. Heidegger’s philosophy of history is what is essential in thinking the possibility of a future world order. It is his conception of history that leads (if only implicitly) to a conception of the unity of the threefold of planetary thinking, planetary building, and planetary dwelling as inextricably bound up with the destiny of Western history, which itself is determined in a fundamental sense by philosophy qua metaphysics. For Heidegger, “the end of philosophy” means “the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.”63 Heidegger is not presenting us with a normative judgment and thereby himself asserting the superiority of Western reason in the interplay of traditions of discourse. Rather, for him this statement bespeaks the essential configuration of what is now happening as world history. Inasmuch as “each epoch of philosophy has its own necessity,” then the present epoch or dispensation (what Heidegger calls das Ge-stell as the “coming to presence” of Technology; in other

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words, what Heidegger sees as the technological way in which all things are disclosed and determined) has its own necessity. To the degree that philosophy has a “legitimate” completion, this completion is determined by “the development of philosophy into the independent sciences.” But what seems likewise determined for our epoch, claims Heidegger, is that “the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and guided by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics.” In this way, technology all the more definitely “characterizes and regulates the appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it.” Thus, remarks Heidegger, “the end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientifictechnological world and of the social order that is proper to this world.”64 But Heidegger’s sense of the essential movement of history leads him to pose the crucial issue that at once calls into question any unreflective engagement of (or commitment to) a technocratic order: Is the end of philosophy in the sense of its development to the sciences also already the complete realization of all the possibilities in which the thinking of philosophy was posited? Or is there a first possibility for thinking apart from the last possibility which we characterized (the dissolution of philosophy in the technologized sciences), a possibility from which the thinking of philosophy would have to start out, but which as philosophy it could nevertheless not experience and adopt? If this were the case, then a task would still have to be reserved for thinking in a concealed way in the history of philosophy from its beginning to its end, a task accessible neither to philosophy as metaphysics nor, and even less so, to the sciences stemming from philosophy.65 What Heidegger presents as a supposition is for him actually decided: There is a task reserved for thinking (Denken). Given that there is yet the promise of a “turning” (Kehre) from the present epochal dispensation of Technology, then the future need not be (though it may be) determined by the scientific attitude of cybernetics. Thus, especially the future of the world political order need not be so determined: We are thinking of the possibility that the world civilization which is just now beginning might one day overcome the technological-scientificindustrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn. This may happen not of and through itself, but in virtue of the readiness of man for a determination which, whether listened to or not, always speaks in the destiny of man which has not yet been decided. It is just as uncertain whether world civilization will soon be abruptly destroyed or whether it will be stabilized for a long time, in a stabilization, however, which will not rest in something enduring, but rather establish itself in a sequence of changes, each of which presenting the latest fashion.66

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What peace research may yet consider, therefore, is that from a Heideggerian perspective of critique (a) the systems approach to world order is not the same as essential political thinking; (b) world system consciousness is not the same as planetary thinking; (c) global homeostasis is not the same as planetary dwelling. To think these propositions through is part of the preparation for the “turning” from the (sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit) presupposition or prejudice of systems theory that the future is inevitably and unalterably technocratic.

E. DISMISSING “THE PROPHECY OF EXTREMITY” Finally, one may take up a strategy such as that of Allan Megill, who directly confronts the alleged legitimacy of crisis theory. According to Megill, crisis theory logically undermines itself inasmuch as the postulates of crisis or turning in history presuppose a “directionality” in history—“the idea of history as a continuous process, history with a capital H”—which is precisely the premise of the historicism to which crisis theory responds. On “rhetorical” grounds, suggests Megill, one may argue further that “the historicist context is hardly ours” and that the notion of crisis is mere “thought-cliche,” a “stale platitude” which obscures rather than clarifies our experience. Finally, observes Megill, on pragmatist grounds one may adopt the tactic of supposing a crisis and then ask the relevant question: “What difference does it make?” For Megill, the presence of crisis “makes no difference whatsoever— at least not a helpful difference.” It is to be said that “quite possibly” the fact of the continual outbreak of war and the generally sorry state of the world “have nothing to do with the death of God, the crisis of values, the eclipse of authority, or the breaking of the tradition. And even if they are connected with these supposed events, the question remains what the practical significance of this connection would be.”67

CONCLUDING REFLECTION

My purpose in the foregoing sections has been to pose for the community of peace researchers a question and to outline its contour. In posing the issue I simultaneously risk my own hermeneutic prejudice in dialogue with and partly against the methodological commitment of contemporary peace research. Since philosophers are notorious for raising the grand questions that elicit a young girl’s laughter (as is said of Thales), the academy of peace

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researchers may, in this sense, well find just cause to meet my questioning here with a bit of levity which nevertheless has its own seriousness. I have in mind the “ambiguous joke” long familiar to peace researchers, to wit: . . . about the drunk who drops his housekey near a telephone pole on his way home one dark night. Seeing a lamppost nearby, he goes to it and hunts carefully around it. When a passerby, stopping to help him, asks why he is looking under the lamppost rather than around the telephone pole, he replies: “The light is better here.”68

As Berenice Carroll observes in relating this joke: The joke is ambiguous because, as any scholar or scientist knows, one has indeed a much better chance of finding something, of getting results, by looking where the light is, even if one is not likely to find what one has set out for. Peace research has in large measure followed the same pattern of looking where the light is, regardless of whether one is likely to find peace, or any way to peace, there. . . . [To] turn away from the light, to look instead into the dark, where one lost the key carries a high risk that one will find nothing at all.69

In a way, my counsel is to look into the dark, though not to exclude looking in the light, if that is what peace research is doing. I do not at all diminish or depreciate most of such empirically-oriented contributions (so long as they are received with some philosophical awareness as well), for they are moved by something like the always prudent Augustinian ethos which holds that “it is a higher glory still to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.”70 From my present “Heideggerian” prejudice, I remain persuaded of the reality of crisis and of a promising direction opened up by Heidegger’s thought. I must confess that I am, however, simultaneously affected by the unsettling thought that ultimately a Hedeggerian strategy may merely advance a new mythology. (This question I leave to my readers to decide after they have sufficiently weighed the validity of the Heideggerian critique I advance in the following chapters.) Whatever the appropriate strategy, it is clear that we cannot responsibly engage in peace research without taking up some position on the issue of absolute cultural crisis. Articulation of these positions must issue not only from American and European representatives of the peace movement; but also from those in the developing world, whose discourse of dissent challenges the hegemony of Western reason and its “universalist aspirations.”71 Only then, I believe, can we begin to articulate a

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meaningful planetary thinking in the interest of genuinely humane governance and the creation of a just world order. I submit that our fidelity to the future is demonstrated in the proportion to which we confront the “modern thoughtlessness” highlighted by the epigraph to this chapter. For me, as for Heidegger, “Questioning is the piety of thinking.”72 This is all the more so in the midst of nihilism.

CHAPTER TWO

The Problem of World Order: Overcoming the Logic of Statecraft

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Each of the above epigraphs gives expression to a claim made upon the present by the future. In each case the context is at once diagnostic and normative, concerned both to assess and to transcend what is now understood as “the problem of world order.” Each issues from a work that is, as it were, at once a work of the mind and of the heart. In each work past, present, and future have their respective weight. In each case there is a sober awareness of a task which today claims us—a task at once ambiguous, precarious, and uncertain. LeGuin’s words issue in a novel published in 1974. Her genre, her “artwork,” is science fiction. But her insights are intensely and profoundly philosophical; and, thus, her genuine work is one of disclosing a world—a world by no means merely imaginary. It is “truth happening in a work” (as Heidegger would say), and thus an invocation of the political in the fullness of its primordial indeterminateness. Here, in the mutual claim of distance and proximity, what is remote and what is near interplay. The spoken word of the above epigraph by LeGuin is that of Keng, Ambassador from Terra to an interplanetary Council of World Governments. Keng speaks of a time past. LeGuin speaks of a time yet future, insofar as the fate of Terra—a “crucible of tragedy and catastrophe”—is one path the Terrans whom we are could yet take, given some indeterminate strife of rationality and animality bearing upon our present comportment. But LeGuin also speaks, like Keng, of a time past—of the future experienced from the vantage point of our present and which ever so quickly becomes the past: “As surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future”; “as surely as the past becomes the future, the future becomes the past”—therein lies LeGuin’s entreaty. In her scenario projected into the distant future, LeGuin holds out hope against that fact which most essentially defines the present historical moment, viz., “knowledge is power.” LeGuin’s writing is uniquely powerful and poignant, not because “science fiction is the mythology of the modern world” and, thus, symbolic; nor because “myth is an attempt to explain, in rational terms, facts not yet rationally understood.” Rather, LeGuin’s power to move one lies in her own sensibilities that “realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.”1 Therein lies her per-

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spicacity. The “illusion of normalcy” that pervades the modern temperament is so captivating that it can be effectively dissipated only by a work of art as penetrating and provocative as that of LeGuin. It is precisely the incredible realities of our existence today—the heightened possibility of a crucible of tragedy and catastrophe—that motivate the work of world order scholars such as Mendlovitz and Falk. Each, at least as expressed by the above passages, gives expression to the form and content of the world order quest—Mendlovitz to the institutional dimension, Falk to the personal. The task of world order, thus, is to be understood as one of transforming prevailing institutional structures and patterns of behavior, as well as one of transforming values, i.e., the philosophic orientation that underlies and informs contemporary international relations.

THE PLANETARY CRISIS

To juxtapose LeGuin and Mendlovitz here is to indicate what I shall call the two conceptual poles of the world order quest, viz., global anarchy and world government. That is, while there tends to be agreement about the dimension of the planetary crisis, there is wide-ranging diversity about what counts as a legitimate response to it. Much depends on the assessment or diagnosis of the objective conditions characterizing the crisis, the methodological orientation involved in prescriptions, and, of course, on what is understood by ‘world order’. Assessments of the objective conditions are advanced with a tone of urgency, sometimes with the “rhetoric of apocalypse” and thus in terms of doomsday scenarios. Richard Falk perhaps best states the issues in a measured way in his yet relevant book This Endangered Planet. In this work Falk indicts the “old political consciousness” as having become “a false political consciousness because it has not adapted to the new objective circumstances of the present situation.”2 Says Falk: We are living now in the first stages of a planetary crisis. It is the first such known crisis in the history of the planet. . . . The crisis is planetary because the danger is not confined to any part of the planet; the patterns of behavior that generate the crisis are created by the scale of production and lifestyle in the most advanced industrial societies, and therefore especially by the principal nuclear and space states.3

In short, continues Falk, The argument, then, is very simple. Mankind is endangered by a crisis of planetary proportions. This crisis has emerged mainly out of the interplay

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What is important about the threats to the planet’s “carrying capacity” is the “cumulative challenge” of the arms race, nuclear war, population pressure, resource depletion, and ecological imbalance. That is, the cumulative character of these global problems is such that it “exceeds the individual problem areas separately considered.” The notion of carrying capacity is a central concept of world order analyses. Lester Brown explains the concept in the context of the desideratum of “a sustainable society,” i.e., a society that “satisfies its needs without diminishing the prospects of the next generation”—a criterion which, by many measures, contemporary society fails to meet, argues Brown: The concept of carrying capacity . . . focuses on interactions between a population, its activities, and the surrounding environment, and it highlights natural thresholds that might otherwise remain obscure. . . . If the numbers depending on these forms of biological support become excessive, the systems will slowly be destroyed: When herds grow too large, livestock decimate grazing lands. When the fish catch exceeds a fishery’s capacity to replace itself, stocks dwindle and the fishery eventually collapses. Where forest cutting exceeds regrowth, the forest cover diminishes.5

When the concept of carrying capacity is applied to the planet as a whole, we can understand that “If societal demands are far below the sustainable yield of natural systems, then slowing population growth is sufficient. But when they have passed these thresholds, the failure to halt population growth leads to a deterioration of support systems.”6 Indeed, it is the claim of the State of the World 1987 report that “Never before have so many systems vital to the earth’s habitability been out of equilibrium simultaneously.” The 1994 report, which focused on the issue of the Earth’s carrying capacity, claimed further that “Together, population growth, high rates of resource consumption, and poverty are driving the global economy toward ecological bankruptcy—a process that can only be reversed if their root causes are eliminated.” Hence is there a need for a concerted response to problems at the global level.

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE

Awareness of the global crisis became most apparent in the 1960s and 1970s. During this time a variety of works was issued, among them: R. Buckminster

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Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Jungk and Galtung’s Mankind 2000, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal’s The Challenge of World Poverty, Falk and Mendlovitz’s multivolume The Strategy of World Order, Meadows’ The Limits to Growth, Mesarovic and Pestel’s Mankind at the Turning Point, and Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect. Whether the subject was understood as world order studies, global policy analysis, or futurology, a sense of the problem and the need for drastic global reform came of age. The report of the first phase of the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind perhaps served most to generate awareness of the imminent crisis. Concerned with “five basic factors that determine and therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet—population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution,” this research group constructed a world model “built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern—accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.”7 The main conclusion of the report is that “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached some time within the next one hundred years.”8 Scenarios of the future, as I have noted, depend on methodological orientations, on whether the analysis is concerned with empirical norms primarily or some balance of empirical norms with moral norms. Futures research concerned more with empirical norms tends to concentrate on quantitative methods and computer analysis, producing “hard” models or scenarios of alternative futures. Robert Clute describes such efforts thus: International futures research attempts to examine current interrelated global issues in order to project or forecast the future consequences of past and present trends and to suggest alternative scenarios in an attempt to avoid undesired consequences. This work has become known as futurology, which, according to Victor Ferkiss, “combines the knowledge of the scientist, the will of the utopian and the imagination of the writer of science fiction.” The policy aspect of international futures is in essence an attempt at long-term planning.9

The problem with futures research, however, notes Clute, is that the most visible works which “purport to be global in approach are, in the main, biased toward scenarios that are concerned with maintaining the systems and values of the market economy, developed states. . . . Indeed, many of the major futures studies are extremely ethnocentric and are therefore resisted by much of the world.”10

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Developing countries, in particular, have resisted policy implications of futures research (such as The Limits to Growth model) “since it would perpetuate their underdeveloped status” through imposition of “limits on demographic, industrial, and technological growth in order to achieve a state of global equilibrium.” For the less-developed or developing countries who articulated ideological positions in the latter decades of the twentieth century, what matters is moving “beyond dependency,” exercising “national autonomy” with respect to political and economic affairs (e.g., “permanent sovereignty over natural resources”), and achieving “self-reliance” in the context of a restructured international economy, i.e., what was the agenda of a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO). Here moral norms and empirical norms are linked, developing countries voicing a moral claim upon the socioeconomic performance of the industrialized North. As Jagdish Bhagwati put it in 1977, North-South economic relations, three decades after the decline of colonial empires and the emergence of new developing countries, have come to the forefront of international economics and politics. The concerted demands of the South for a new international economic order (NIEO), and the problems they raise for the North in setting the stage for negotiations on concrete proposals related to NIEO, now define the agenda, as well as the political climate, of the numerous conferences and intergovernmental negotiating groups on international economic matters.11 The basic position of the time was articulated in the “Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” from the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 1 May 1974. In this document Third World countries expressed their concern for promoting international economic cooperation “on a just and equitable basis” in light of “the disequilibrium” and “widening gap” between the industrialized North and the developing South: The benefits of technological progress are not shared equitably by all members of the international community. The developing countries, which constitute 70 per cent of the world’s population, account for only 30 per cent of the world’s income. It has proved impossible to achieve an even and balanced development of the international community under the existing international economic order.12

Controversial provisions of the Declaration and Action Program included the demand by developing countries for permanent sovereignty over natural resources and economic affairs, the right to restitution and full compensation resulting from exploitation, depletions, and damage to natural

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resources, regulation and supervision of transnational corporations, and extended development assistance from the North. Developing countries reaffirmed the NIEO agenda in December 1974 with a UN resolution proposing a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which “like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would . . . constitute a set of standards that would become a part of international law.”13 In short, it is by way of a demand for significant economic reform—based on a “critique of the value system underlying theoretical and applied economics in Western countries”—that the developing countries have sought to challenge the present world order. It is today clear that the NIEO proponents of a global redistributive justice basically failed in their quest. Global market forces affecting mineral resources (primarily in reaction to OPEC cartel behavior), the mounting debt of developing countries, and reductions in international finance options all contributed to a marginalized NIEO agenda in UN discussions and bilateral and trilateral international cooperative arrangements.14

DEFINING ‘WORLD ORDER’

It is such a linkage of the descriptive and the normative that has contributed to the shape of the world order quest, in particular to how the problem of world order is to be addressed so as to respond effectively to the host of global problems. At the Conference on Conditions of World Order held June 12–19, 1965, in Bellagio, Italy, five possible meanings of ‘world order’ were operative: (a) order as any arrangement of reality, (b) order as the relations between the parts, (c) order as the minimum conditions for existence, (d) order as the minimum conditions for coexistence, and (e) order as the conditions for the good life.15 Here conceptions of world order are, as Stanley Hoffmann notes, “descriptive,” “analytical-partly descriptive,” “analyticalpartly normative,” or “normative.” What is at issue here is whether empirical norms, moral norms, or both are required for world order.16 Since 1965 the possible responses advocated in world order literature tend to be considered along these main lines of thought. The “extreme” possibilities of global anarchy and world government are more often than not readily dismissed. The former is dismissed because it is “naive,” “innocent,” or, quite simply, “an absurdly romantic gesture of nihilistic sentiment whose only consequence is to strengthen the case for governmental repression.”17 LeGuin, however, as one who creatively imagines the future in her The Dispossessed, views the possibility of global anarchy as “an ambiguous utopia.”

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Drawing on Taoism, Kropotkin’s philosophical anarchism, and Jungian psychology, LeGuin is far from naive or innocent about anarchy. She presents us not with an answer but with a question. She knows that it is the inescapable burden of every individual to acknowledge “his own profound relationship with evil”—the inextricable involvement of evil with good—or, failing that, to “undo” and “unmake” reality and any genuine possibility of true community. LeGuin does not neglect, but rather accents, a fundamental tension in political life. What matters to LeGuin is the permanent need in the individual for equilibrium, balance, integration of ego and shadow, i.e., Jungian individuation. Thus LeGuin, in The Dispossessed, could write: “. . . though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life.” It is the permanent in the human condition that denies us any legitimate demand for certainty, for a guarantee, about the future. What matters in “the landscape of time,” where “fulfillment is a function of time,” is that we understand the purpose of the human journey: “to fulfill an end that is always changing, yet which is forever rooted in the same demands.”18 For LeGuin the “city of fidelity” constructed in the landscape of time remains ever dependent on moral persons answering to “the imperatives of the inner self.” This means that “the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.”19 The “most ethical” are those guided by human solidarity and the principle of mutual aid, those who live “the permanent revolution,” who must not forget that “the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is,” and who thus recognize that the impulse to mutual aid “has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation.” This impulse has its basis not in “love” but in pain, in human suffering. It is this impulse which is the basis for human solidarity. Thus, LeGuin has Shevek, the central character of The Dispossessed, say: “We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand.” In short, for LeGuin anarchy entails an ethic of responsibility: “To be free, after all, is not to be undisciplined.” The possibility of world government, on the other hand, is dismissed, if not because of the usual apprehension about totalitarian structures and the repressive patterns of behavior—“tyranny at the global level”—then (viewed negatively) because of its infeasibility in the face of heightened nationalist fervor and the intractability of the modern nation-state with its monopoly on power, or (viewed positively), because “it is desirable to preserve political autonomy and cultural diversity.” Within the range of these two poles of global anarchy and world government falls a variety of constitutional-insti-

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tutional solutions, functionalist approaches, international organizational strategies (governmental and nongovernmental), regional solutions (regional political and/or economic integration), international legal arrangements, instruments of cultural convergence, emphasis on grassroots social movements, and so on. What this means is that to speak of “the world order agenda” accurately—in terms of the range of strategies lying between the conceptual poles of world government and global anarchy—is to distinguish between global government and global governance. “Humane” governance remains the desideratum—structure and pace (gradual or drastic reform) remain at issue. The most elaborate proposal for world government—for “a genuine regime of enforceable world law”—was issued in 1956 by Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn in their World Peace through World Law.20 Clark and Sohn presented two alternative plans—one proposed “thorough-going revision” of the Charter of the United Nations; the other, establishment of a World Disarmament and World Development Organization. In his revised introduction of 1973 Sohn wrote: The preparation of the two alternative plans rested upon the premise that sooner or later the governments of the major powers will recognize the need for a serious and persistent effort to achieve total national disarmament, the abolition of war, and a more equitable world-order. The demand for such an effort will be due to the following factors: the ever-increasing number of nuclear powers and the danger of acquisition of nuclear weapons by a widening circle of nations; the existence of critical situations around the world which continually threaten to escalate into a global conflict; and the wasteful diversion to the arms race of resources which are desperately needed to reduce the widening gap in living standards between the “have” and “have-not” areas of the world.21

Commenting on the fundamental premise of their proposals, viz., that there can be no peace without law, Sohn wrote: In this context the word “law” necessarily implies the law of a world authority, i.e., law which would be uniformly applicable to all nations and all individuals in the world and which would definitely forbid violence or the threat of it as a means for dealing with any international dispute. This world law must also be law in the sense of law which is capable of enforcement, as distinguished from a mere set of exhortations or injunctions which it is desirable to observe but for the enforcement of which there is no effective machinery.22

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As mentioned, this constitutional approach to world order has received renewed attention in more recent time. Falk et. al. state the issue of its relevance this way: “Just as the world order thinking of the 1950s and 1960s committed the fallacy of a premature optimism in relation to global constitutionalism, the world order thinking of the 1970s and 1980s can also be said to have committed the opposite fallacy of premature pessimism about the normative potential of a global constitutional order. At no time since the end of World War II has the notion of a new global constitutional order seemed more urgent, promising, and open-ended than in the aftermath of the Cold War . . .”23 It is notable, however, that in this renewed attention to global constitutionalism pains are taken to distinguish this latest effort from “traditional world federalism.” As Falk clarifies, “The successful realization of democratic global constitutionalism, in contradistinction to traditional world federalism, does not necessarily entail any further centralization of world authority, and may indeed work in the opposite direction by affirming tendencies toward the emergence of a global civil society from below.”24 In making this distinction, Falk and others rethinking global constitutionalism point out questionable assumptions in the Clark-Sohn proposals. Samuel Kim, in particular, notes, “The fundamental premise is based on the Hobbesian either/or dichotomy of world governmental authority versus world anarchy—either there is world peace based on a world authority (and world law) or there is world anarchy and ‘war of all against all’. . . However, the absence of government does not ipso facto negate the influence of norms and laws, nor does the presence of a government ipso facto guarantee law and order in any society.”25 In light of these recent statements, then, let us review the earlier history of the world order movement.

THE WORLD ORDER MODELS PROJECT

One of the more interesting and visible groups participating in the world order quest (and initially linked to the Clark-Sohn effort) was the World Order Models Project sponsored by the former Institute for World Order, now the World Policy Institute. Basically, WOMP was a project of enlightenment—“a first step toward the creation of a planetary collegium”—creating “the basic instructional materials needed for a worldwide educational movement whose ultimate thrust would be global reform.” Saul Mendlovitz, director of the nine transnational research groups contributing diverse perspectives, has noted that “WOMP was initially conceived in response to

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pedagogical needs related to the study of the problem of the elimination of war as a human institution.”26 However, “it became increasingly clear that while peace, in the sense of the elimination of international violence, might have a very high priority with individuals in the industrialized sector of the globe, economic well-being and social justice received a much higher rating in the Third World.”27 This interchange resulted in a general agreement among WOMP participants “that humankind faced five major problems: war, poverty, social injustice, environmental decay and alienation.” “We saw these as social problems,” writes Mendlovitz, “because we had values—peace, economic well-being, social justice, ecological stability and positive identity— which no matter how vaguely operationalized, we knew were not being realized in the real world.”28 It is basically in accordance with these “world order values” that the various transnational research teams advanced “relevant utopias,” that is, “world-order systems that make clear not only alternative worlds but the necessary transition steps to these worlds.”29 While Mendlovitz considers world government to be necessary, more or less along the lines of the Clark-Sohn proposals, other WOMP participants are skeptical.30 As Falk puts it, “The WOMP outlook, which Mendlovitz’s entrepreneurial energy helped create and sustain, was generally quite antithetical to the idea of a global constitutional order with a governmental center. . . . In general, contrary to Mendlovitz’s constructivist conceptions, most world orderists felt more drawn to critical and diagnostic perspectives (what’s wrong) and, later on, to a bottom-up radicalism with a special focus on salient and attainable next steps (e.g., anti-apartheid movement; Palestinian self-determination).”31 Consider positions articulated by Mazrui, Kothari, Lagos, and Falk in particular. Ali Mazrui, stating the “African” perspective, advances the position that positive change toward global reform is preconditioned by “a substantial measure of global cultural integration.” In short, world culture is to be preferred over world government, and the rationality of change is that of “cultural engineering.” Advancing his position on the basis of “a theory of normative convergence” and “a theory of dependency,” Mazrui remarks: A postulate of our approach is that the transmission of ideas and their internalization are more relevant for world reform than the establishment of formal institutions for external control . . . Thus, even though the transmission of ideas may require some institutions, it is more concerned with process than with structure. When we talk of transition stages, we should be thinking of stages in the evolution of human values and human opinion rather than stages in the evolution of

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Theoretical Critique human organization.The main ambition should be to promote the right values and consolidate the right inhibitions in the behavioral orientations of human beings. The controls we should be aiming for are internalized control emerging from our human inclinations, rather than external controls applied by organizational mechanisms.32

It is significant that in speaking of the process of global cultural integration (steps of this process being coexistence, contact, compromise, convergence, coalescence), Mazrui takes “the revolt against Europe’s domination of the world” as a given, despite acknowledging that “The world is a multicultural entity but seems to have chosen for the time being overwhelmingly Western culture as the established cultural church of the human species.”33 Thus, argues Mazrui, inasmuch as “the new post-imperial world was in any case born out of a special kind of egalitarian revolution,” “Further cultural convergence on a global scale must therefore carry with it the seeds of counterassertion and the possibility that the underprivileged will not be acquiescent.”34 The task ahead, claims Mazrui, is “to substitute the principle of an established church with a principle of cultural ecumenicalism.” Mazrui seeks to overcome both structural and cultural dependency—the former being understood as “a lack of symmetry in power relations, captured in an institutional framework,” and the latter understood as the Third World’s captivity by the West such that ambitions of elite groups, the directions of their aspirations, and the boundaries of their tastes and desires reinforce dependent structures and promote social stratification.35 To achieve global cultural convergence yet redress “the evil of dependency,” Mazrui advances the cause of regional autonomy. This cause makes normative appeal to a principle of “continental jurisdiction,” which principle “simply asserts that there are certain African problems which should only be solved by Africans themselves, ‘Africans’ being defined as citizens of member countries of the Organization of African Unity.”36 Continental jurisdiction, in short, is expected to counter the present global stratification in which the Occident has primacy. Such jurisdiction would permit formerly colonized societies “to protect more effectively their own cultural heritages” and would help make the global pool of shared culture “less Eurocentric and more diversified” insofar as “non-Western” or “indigenous” values infiltrate Western culture as a direct consequence of parity in continental power relations. From an “Indian” perspective taking into account “prevailing doctrine” concerning the North-South hiatus and socioeconomic trends that promise to exacerbate it, Rajni Kothari has taken note also of “countervailing trends” such as movements toward “regional” and “national” autonomy as against a

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bipolar view of the world which gives primacy to superpower roles. Kothari observes, “In the mood that is spreading over these nations, progress towards world peace and a stable world-order is closely linked with the struggle for national autonomy and equality among states.”37 Accordingly, Kothari speaks of the need for goal fulfillment at the level of the individual, nation, and world. Regional integration is considered a viable means of the less powerful and poorer nations to achieve real autonomy: It is necessary to start organizing along regional lines and engage in a federalizing process in these regions, beginning with economic unions and gradually leading into a more comprehensive process of integration. . . . In our preferred world we would like a smaller number of nations (or “communities” of nations), and each large and efficient enough in carrying out economic and political functions to realize the twin conditions of autonomy and equality that we have postulated.38

Beyond the nation-state level of goal-fulfillment, Kothari focuses on a functionalist institutional system responsible for technical and welfare needs; political institutional structures beyond the nation-state which would provide sanctions and resources for the work of the technical bodies; regional planning and development agencies; a world security system and institutions of justice. Transition is to occur by way of consolidation of smaller states, enhancing socioeconomic solidarity of Third World regions through economic unions, loose confederations, and then through regional federalization. In later writing Kothari has emphasized the more fundamental character of global transformation, speaking of the “unfolding dialectic of world history” as a “process of mutation in the history of the human species, with far-reaching changes in the arrangement of human affairs: in the structuring of global power relations, in the encounter of civilizations, in several other areas such as class, region, ethnicity, and religion.”39 Yet, notes Kothari, “few, if any, seem to have a clue to the real nature of this transformation.” It is not to be disputed, however, that the present phase of world history is experiencing a “conflict between tradition and modernity,” says Kothari, which he reads as itself inverted—“with modernity, the creed of the establishment, having become an orthodoxy against which older civilizations and so-called traditional societies struggle to provide radical critiques and alternatives, and to propel movements of revolt.”40 Such is the inherent condition of the present encounter between civilizations, and a precarious paradox of this encounter is that “the battle for alternative universals is turning into a series of particulars.” The key question, then, is whether our thinking has not merely “changed the world beyond

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recognition,” but whether it has “produced a world beyond redemption.” As far as Kothari is concerned, “nothing short of fundamental rethinking about the human enterprise will redeem man from these crises . . . and such rethinking will have to address itself to the world as a whole.”41 In a “Latin American” image of the future, Gustavo Lagos begins with a concern for a new development strategy in the face of international stratification and the dependent and inferior status of Latin American countries visa-vis the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. Lagos claims that “a revolution of being” is needed that overcomes the deficient value orientation of the powerful capitalist and socialist societies. Lagos states the philosophic orientation thus: The revolution of being implies a new conception of modernity, inspired neither in capitalism nor in socialism, both of which have meant in historical terms the revolution of having, the expression of the acquisitive spirit, the predominance of money, of trade, of business, that is, of economic motivation as the driving force of human activity, incarnated in the religion of GNP. Being modern, in our view, is not living to have but living to be.42

The goals are “biological” and “educational”—“a minimal amount of material goods and services” and “the establishment of a teaching-learning society.” This is the requisite structure for being, i.e., “an economic base of goods and services” necessary for “the development of a sound mind” and “the practice of virtue.” Lagos emphasizes “a self-managed society in which a maximum of government is combined with a minimum of state” and “a self-managed economy, given the constant interaction between the juridico-political structure of the state, the law, and the forms of consciousness, or ideologies, on the one hand and the economic base on the other.”43 This presupposes a general commitment to the elimination of economic underdevelopment and external dependence. Economic planning, national ownership of the means of production, and worker-management of industry are considered essential. Lagos desires a constitutional structure achieving checks and balances of power, sovereignty to remain popular and exercised through plebescite or referendum. He expects, however, that nation-states would “delegate part of their sovereign powers to supranational integration agencies,” such a supranational institutional structure being constituted also with appropriate checks and balances. Thus, national and regional autonomy or “a polycentric structure” is expected to be consonant with global institutional restructuring. Richard Falk represents the “WOMP/USA” perspective as reconciling “world-order gradualism” and “world-order radicalism.” The former position

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holds that “there is no alternative to the state system this side of catastrophe and that therefore its safety and fairness depend on grasping its dynamics as clearly as possible to identify potentialities for reform with precision.”44 The latter position is one that regards “the displacement of the state system as necessary as well as desirable.” Falk’s model emphasizes “a new arrangement of power/authority relations” and “correlative domestic reorientations of state actors,” transformation in both cases conditioned by WOMP values. The institutional arrangement proposed is highly differentiated, combining “considerations of efficiency arising from specialization” with a diffusion or allocation of authority between global and regional levels. Domestic reorientations, though expected to proceed “unevenly” among state actors, nonetheless are envisaged to establish “a minimum degree of coercion and bureaucratization and a maximum degree of spontaneous solidarity, participation, and discipline.”45 In his conception of transition, Falk expects the existing system to “come to an end in the next 50 to 100 years, at the most, by virtue of its own internal contradictions” and hence seeks to accelerate this “natural process of disintegration” and assure “a constructive and progressive world-order sequel,” i.e., a planned transition of consciousness-raising concerning problems, changing value-orientations, and mobilization and transformation in various arenas—domestic, transnational/regional, global, within various specific time-frames. More recently, Falk has considered the role of social movements in global reform and speaks favorably of their restructuring potential, especially when compared with more conventional actors. Falk remarks: A focus on social movements with restructuring agendas itself incorporates a political judgment on how drastic global reform can best be achieved at this stage of history. Implicit in this judgment is the view that conventional party politics, even in functioning democracies, have lost their restructuring capabilities, and further, that violent forms of revolutionary politics are not likely to enhance the overall realization of world-order values. In this regard, the new social movements seem at present to embody our best hopes for challenging established and oppressive political, economic, and cultural arrangements at levels of social complexity, from the interpersonal to the international.46

And again: The new social movements, and the theorizing that accompanies their emergence and evolution, change our understanding of “the political” and

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Theoretical Critique “the global”. . . Both by enlarging our sense of “the political” and by insisting that everyday practices are an element of “the global,” the new social movements are dramatically altering our sense of what the pursuit of a just world-order entails in a variety of concrete situations.47

These concrete situations that enlarge our sense of the political are manifestations of a profound crisis in our political understanding. Indeed, if we situate contemporary world order discourse historically, we realize that its avowedly normative posture carries forward a problematique in political understanding which has been gathering momentum especially since the eighteenth century: The normative character of this discourse is essentially the final and most comprehensive manifestation of “the specific reply to the Absolutist system” that Europe (the West) has been experiencing since the assertion of Enlightenment bourgeois philosophy. That is, just as bourgeois philosophy challenged the ordering principle of absolutism (“the subordination of morality to politics”) and agitated in the direction of subjecting the absolutist conception of the political to a “moral judiciary,” so world order thinking challenges the same ordering principle of sovereignty in the contemporary nation-state system. This contemporary moral challenge to sovereign authority itself attests to the necessary closure to the effective sway of the principle ordering political modernity. This challenge, viewed in the context of Reinhart Koselleck’s interpretation of “the pathogenesis of modern society,” is the unfolded consequence of that “latent political crisis” posed as “the question of the pre-eminence either of the State or the ‘spirit’ of society.”48 Thus, as Mansbach and Vasquez have observed, the French Revolution of 1789 and its expressed ethos in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” reintroduced transcendent stakes into politics, thereby challenging the “rules of Westphalia” which “were for the most part obeyed” up to that point.49 This event may be said to mark the explicit beginning of the demise of the principle of sovereignty, effectively characterized by absolutism’s yielding to political liberalism as an assertion of participant politics, by the structural shift from the State to the nation-state, and, thus, by the shift from ruler sovereignty to popular sovereignty. More fundamentally, however, not only is the historical period characterized by the demise of this ordering principle; the very appeal to principle, to principium per se, is steadily eliminated, such that the principle of popular sovereignty and the ‘legitimacy principle’ at the basis of the subsequent “Concert of Europe” succumb to “the rule of force” manifest in “a veritable explosion of transcendent ‘isms’ . . .—nationalism, liberalism, conservatism,

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and finally socialism.”50 Hence, in its proximity to the nineteenth century, the twentieth century basically defined itself in that very persistence of crisis which, as Koselleck observes, Rousseau had already identified as the crucial factor of the eighteenth century viewed as the century of revolutions.51 But, then, all of this points to what is fundamentally at issue in this continuing tension between the claims of morality and the claims of politics and in the yet problematic unity/difference of man and citizen, viz., the as yet undetermined or enigmatic character of politics itself. In short, with the emergence of the world order movement, the question “What is politics?” arises anew, with all the power of its origin behind it, compelling us to a more fundamental path of questioning, i.e., a path along which the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of modernity come under intense scrutiny.

PHILOSOPHICAL CAUTIONS

It is significant that in both the Bellagio Conference of 1965 and WOMP nearly a decade later, obviously cautionary, more “philosophical,” voices were present. On the former occasion it was philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer; on the latter it was physicist-philosopher Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Gadamer poses fundamental questions in view of the “victorious course of modern science” and “the development of scientific methods to guide the life of society,” i.e., the pervasiveness of scientific thinking in “all aspects of social praxis.”52 Observing (a) that the application of science in many areas of social praxis “gives expertise a commanding position in the economy and society” and (b) that there has been a shift from “simply understanding the existing order of things” to “the difficulties of planning and creating an order not yet in being,” Gadamer asks: Should something that does not yet exist be planned and implemented? . . . Does talk of creating a world-order still make sense if, from the start, we are faced with irreconcilable ideas on the constitution of a right order? Can one plan according to a standard of world-order if one is ignorant of the end towards which all mediating and possible steps proceed? Does not all planning on a world scale depend on the existence of a definite mutual conception of the goal?53

Gadamer’s concern in this writing is with what is held to count as “a meaningful standard” for politics when politics “presupposes the changeability of conditions.” Thus, when speaking of politics at the world scale the

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question is: According to what criteria is correctness of a universal political order to be measured? To the extent that scientific precision underscores planning for the future, Gadamer is concerned that precise political arrangements may rather “provoke all the very opposite ideas of world-order.” He (a) contends that “there exists no rational basis for believing that the expansion of those areas in which rational planning and administration is successful would bring a reasonable world-wide political system any closer to realization,” and (b) considers that it may rather be “the overdependence on science” that “has increased the uncertainty regarding the intended goals, the content of a world-order as it should be, by first subjecting the design of our world to scientifically informed and guided planning, while obfuscating the uncertainty which surrounds the standards.”54 In short, Gadamer thinks the task to be wrongly posited, for here is “an ideal of administration . . . which does not specify its content” and in which “the issue is not which order should rule, but that everything should have its order.” This is nothing less than “the idea of a superior techne”—as Gadamer puts it, “the political techne,” “the ultimate expertise.” The key question, then, is: “Does the ideal of techne, the teachable and learnable expertise, satisfy the demands confronting man’s political existence?”55 The philosophic issue here is that between the moderns and the ancients concerning the nature and purpose of politics, between science applied to society, i.e., techne, and practical knowledge or phronesis. This, for Gadamer, is the real antinomy confronting world order thinkers: The question we pose goes completely against the grain of the unquestioned belief in science so characteristic of our age. It has to be asked because it goes further back in time. The problem must be viewed in a more general context, as a broader question posited with the inception of modern science in the seventeenth century and unresolved since then. All reflection about the potential ordering of our world must proceed from the deep tension which exists between the asserted authority of science and the ethics and customs of national forms of life transmitted by religion. . . . It seems to me less urgent to find ways of reconciling occidental civilization with alien traditions in distant lands and bringing them to a fruitful symbiosis, than to evaluate the significance of the civilizing progress, made possible by science, in terms of our own cultural heritage and to discover ways of reconciling such progress with our moral and religious traditions. For that in truth is the problem of world-order which occupies us at present, because, by virtue of the civilizing achievements of European science, the problem has been raised to a uniform level of importance throughout the world.56

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Like Gadamer questioning the legitimacy of the “scientific” planning and implementation of a world order, von Weizsäcker raises the quid juris question: “With what concepts are we to think into the future, and with what right do we think towards it?” In asking this question von Weizsäcker expresses concern for what he calls the uncanny phenomenon of “ambivalence”—“that frightening phenomenon that we have all seen and experienced in our own actions, namely that a position taken which then acquires a radical form destroys itself and produces its own negation.”57 Despite the desirability of the world order values and the rationality of assent to them, von Weizsäcker notes that “insight into ambivalence simultaneously shakes the naivete” of this set of values, inasmuch as there remain vital questions having to do with the process of “self-enlightenment” which cannot be answered or resolved by means of a “program.” It is von Weizsäcker’s insight that “What this world cannot master are the realities in man that are not present in his expressed ideas. These show themselves in the phenomena . . . described under the name ambivalence.”58 Given his views on human nature, von Weizsäcker believes that the “actual task” towards which world order thinking must contribute, “on whose success the possibility of a true world peace stands or falls, is the realization of the human self.”59 Only thus can it be expected that “a whole society should come of age.” Yet, this possibility, as the possibility of living together, requires a “communal truth.” Here lies a fundamental difficulty. As von Weizsäcker observes: There is a pluralism of truths and forms of peace. Traditional societies lived by a religious truth and by the peace it made possible. The modern world lives by the truth of science and the technocratic peace it makes possible. But in the face of this pluralism what does truth mean?60

Again, as with Gadamer, the authority of tradition in contradistinction to that of modern science is at issue here. If world peace is a principal desideratum of the world order quest, is technocratic peace the fitting response? That is, if a process of self-enlightenment is what is essential, does a whole society come of age when technocratic peace prevails? For von Weizsäcker, to think the possibility of self-realization is to understand that only the great traditions of religious thought pose and answer the question in depth.61 The JudeoChristian tradition which belongs to European culture, observes von Weizsäcker, yields its “answer” in its ethic of nonviolence—but in a distinction between what men can bring about and what only God will bring about, thus in comprehension of what is and is not achievable:

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Theoretical Critique The actual overcoming of violence can occur only where its roots are, in the human soul. Society will always give cause enough for acts of violence; I can overcome the violence in myself only when I can renounce the unquestionable right I have to hit back, can “turn the other cheek!” The overcoming of violence must always originate in myself. Here the ethic of nonviolence has its basis in truth. Only he who finds peace with himself, and that means peace with God, can radiate peace. But the peace that arises from a group of such men is no possible target of a plan any longer, no “preferred world” for intellectual activists. But it is impossible that a genuine, everlasting world peace will be secured without this force. Scientifically speaking this is no political programme, but psychology, in exact form.62

In short, the world that claims us out of the future in which world peace is achieved is for von Weizsäcker not “a world of will and understanding,” i.e., of Western reason. To understand the phenomenon of ambivalence is to understand that “the sphere of the will and understanding has the character of the empty boundlessness of power.” Yet, this is so “only when the other realities in man are not developed, realities that set limits to this sphere and give it content.” Von Weizsäcker’s concern for the phenomenon of ambivalence is consonant with what cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, in his meditation on the ineradicability of evil from the human order, has called the phenomenon of enantiodromia. Says Thompson, “the most perplexing form of evil, and especially so for all idealists, is that kind of evil which comes out of our efforts to do good.”63 Like von Weizsäcker who speaks of the phenomenon of love as that which is essential to self-fulfillment, i.e., to the overcoming of individual and group egoism, and which remains “completely incomprehensible in terms of expedient rationality,” Thompson speaks of love in the context of those egoistic motivations to do good which result in enantiodromia: There can be no love in one who does not love himself, and one can only love himself if he has the compassion that grows out of the terrifying confrontation with one’s own self. To look into one’s shadow is to learn compassion for the shadow of others, and if one has no compassion for himself, then he can have no compassion for others. If you hate yourself with a fierce loathing, you may try to run from your own shadow in a campaign to do good, not for love, but to rescue your ego and convince yourself that you are not evil. In the eyes of how many world-transforming activists do we see dissonance, anxiety, fear, and self-loathing? They would reform the world, but they cannot even reform themselves.64

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We can see from the foregoing how there is what Mendlovitz calls a “creative tension” in contemporary world order thinking, how there is concern for both the institutional and the personal dimension of global reform, and how singleness of purpose concerning the world order quest nevertheless combines with a diversity of approaches. This diversity notwithstanding, it is important to recognize what is fundamentally at issue in the quest for global reform.

CHALLENGING THE ORDERING PRINCIPLE

The point of departure for the present world order quest, we have noted, is an assessment of the dominant structural features of the prevailing system of international relations. At issue is the adequacy of the logic of statecraft to confront a “planetary crisis” and, therefore, also the adequacy of the nationstate, the dominant actor, to undertake the world order task, to minimize the dangers, and to pursue opportunities in good faith. The point is that, given the present crisis, there is ample moral and legal warrant to alter the prevailing structure of international relations and to subordinate geopolitical national interests to the human interest. In short, what is at issue, ultimately, is the ordering principle of the present system of world order, viz., the sovereignty of the modern nation-state. Consider the following remarks by F. H. Hinsley concerning this principle: Sovereignty is a concept by which men have sought to buttress older forms of legitimation and accountability or on which they have hoped to base new versions of these means by which power is converted into authority. Its function in the history of politics has been either to strengthen the claims of power or to strengthen the ways by which political power may be called to account. It has been first summoned into existence at a stage in the history of societies when changes in the relationship between the community and the system of rule have made existing claims and existing checks inadequate or out of date.65

And, the idea of sovereignty was the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community; and everything that needs to be added to complete the definition is added if this statement is continued in the following words: “and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere.”66

It is important to understand the historical context pertinent to Hinsley’s observation that the concept of sovereignty emerges during the changing relationship between the community and the system of rule. The historical period

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pertinent to the modern concept of sovereignty is that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the period during which Europe underwent its structural transition from the feudal order to that of independent, secular, sovereign states. Concerned to answer questions such as what constitutes the basis and legitimate derivation of governmental authority, two principal possibilities were adduced at this time, articulated by J. W. Allen thus: “One asserted that real authority can exist only under a special Divine grant. . . . On the other hand, it was maintained that a real right to command may be and is created by man out of his own need of it; God being concerned only in that he created the need and sanctions the means.”67 The first possibility is obviously theocratic and indebted to medieval thought; the second already poses a challenge to the specifically theological or religious features of the political thought and practice of the time, although without fully abandoning these. Thus, “Much of sixteenth-century thought about the state was . . . religious rather than strictly political: concerned that is, mainly with the function of government in relation to another world than this.”68 The principle of state sovereignty in force in the modern period is traditionally situated in the political philosophy of Hobbes, and properly so; indeed, world order scholars often express concern to abandon aspects of interstate relations reflecting the Hobbesian interpretation of political society. But Hobbes is not the only, or even the primary, source of the principle of sovereignty during the time generally identified as the period of transition from the medieval to the modern political structure. In the history of the idea of sovereignty, according to Hinsley, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is perhaps the first “to state the theory behind the word,” in his Six livres de la republique (1576). Speaking of souverainete, Bodin “based the legality of sovereign power on the character of the political community, and not on the claims of raison d’etat,” as had Machiavelli in his Il Principe (1532).69 Bodin argues in this work “that there has to be a single supreme authority in the state in which are united the legislative, executive and judicial powers. ‘The principal mark of sovereign majesty and absolute power is essentially the right to impose laws on subjects generally without their consent’. Bodin holds law to be ‘nothing other than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his power’.”70 Already at work here is an abandonment of the former authority of a universal order, whether Christian or classical (Aristotelian) and, thus, an effectively novel distinction of positive law from divine and natural law. The full idea of sovereignty, such that no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere, here already begins to undermine the prior, theocratic order. The notion of ruler sovereignty thus ultimately gave way to that of state sovereignty.

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World order scholars accordingly take account of the relation of legal theory to state formation and practice at the emergence of the modern period. From the legal point of view, it is Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) who at this time advanced the quest “to blend disparate moral, legal, and political perspectives into a coherent conception of world-order.”71 Grotius attempts to do this in his De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625). In this work, remarks Hinsley, Grotius consciously attempts “to reconcile Bodin’s precise statement of sovereignty with the prevailing dualistic conception of political society,” that is, with the shared or double sovereignty of the ruler and the people.72 Hailed as the father of international law, “Grotius was the first man to insist on the need for a body of positive international law, separate from the natural law and deriving from the will and practice of states; and since Bodin had not proceeded far beyond pointing out this need, the De Jure Belli ac Pacis was the first systematic treatise on this law.”73 It is the basic thesis of Grotius’s quest that is said to have informed the Peace of Westphalia undertaken by European rulers at the end of the Thirty Years War—“that occasion most often selected to mark the formal beginning of the modern state system” which “signified the victory of secular princes over the imperial pretensions of Pope and Holy Roman Empire,” and thus which “brought to a close an era of civil strife, dominated by transcendent stakes,” in effect declaring the religious “to be outside the boundary of political discourse.”74 Concerning the logic of statecraft instituted by the Peace of Westphalia, Richard Falk writes: The basic coordinates of the present world-order system are contained in the Peace of Westphalia which brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648. According to Westphalia logic, the world-order system is constituted exclusively by the governments of sovereign states. These governments have complete discretion to rule national space (or territory), and can also enter into voluntary arrangements (e.g., treaties) to regulate external relations and interconnections of various sorts. But these governments are sovereign and equal by juridical fiat, rather than by virtue of some higher authority within the world order system.75

The “logic of Westphalia,” thus, is the logic of statecraft yet holding sway over relations between nation-states. The principle of sovereignty, its gradual demise notwithstanding, has permitted the development of a “system” of relations between states such that a situation of international anarchy prevails. More specifically, problems reflecting the interdependence of state actors now pose a grave threat to the greater human interest, thereby more than suggesting the inadequacy of the present system and

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the need for some form of global governance. Such is the world orderist assessment against the adherents of statecraft. These problems, we have noted, can be understood in one view to be those of war, social and political injustice, poverty, and ecological decay (not to mention the host of specific problems subsumed by these broad categories).76 The interdependence to which these problems attest makes it clear that the dimension of the world order problem extends beyond the national space—the public domain—which is the bailiwick of the modern nation-state. When assessed with reference to the magnitude of the problem and on the basis of philosophical critique such as is presented in the following chapters, the logic of statecraft is not only anachronistic but itself a principal factor exacerbating the planetary dilemma. If there is to be progress beyond the disvalues of war, social and political injustice, poverty, and ecological decay across the planet, it is said, then the logic of Westphalia must be superseded by another, avowedly normative, logic governing international society. Accordingly, the new philosophic orientation is one of adducing values (e.g., peace, social and political justice, economic well-being, ecological balance) capable of guiding action. Here the rationale is at once prudential and moral insofar as the concern is for harmony among humans as well as between humans and nature—for preserving the human species and for safeguarding the life-support systems of the planet. Thus, claims of “collective security” are advanced as overriding claims advanced from the perspective of some putatively “national” interest.

FUTURISM: NORMATIVE AND TECHNOCRATIC

Of course, it is to be understood from the foregoing discussion that there are varied and contending approaches to the problem of world order, differing in terms of both the assessment and the strategies by which a transition to an alternative system is to be accomplished. Falk and Kim have suggested two broad orientations by which these approaches can be reasonably categorized, viz., “normative” and “technocratic”; the former is “based on the altered frameworks of comprehensive value-realization,” i.e., a globalist approach to world order values, while the latter “finds ‘fixes”’ (e.g., space colonies, nuclear fusion energy) to solve problems “within existing economic, cultural, political, and ecological frameworks.”77 Of course, the technocratic approach is not devoid of all value. Rather, here the values are such that the logic of statecraft is more or less sustained, although in the direction of “the management of interdependence,” “technocracy,” “the scientific estate,” etc., where relevant expertise—applied science—is expected to be efficacious. Here, too, however, it is expected that the relations

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among states would be subject eventually to some “central guidance system” or supranational authority capable of enforcing global policy. A specific form of the technocratic approach to world order reform is that which adheres to systems theory. In systems philosophy the paradigm of the natural sciences determines both orientation and expectations. Understood as a merger of the natural and the social sciences, systems science seeks exactness in social theory on the presupposition of “isomorphy of concepts, laws, and models.” Here systems philosophy and applied science are one and the same. As Ervin Laszlo (a systems philosopher who has examined the problem of world order) puts it, . . . the meaning of applied science has been vastly enlarged. . . . Applied science has come to include the “software” of social technologies as well, including the principles of administration and management, policy sciences, and the behavioral applications of individual and group psychology.78

Laszlo is concerned with the possibility of “a consistent application of systems principles to global conditions” for the express purpose of discovering norms for a desirable world order. While noting that a scientific conceptual synthesis afforded by systems theory “need not mean a universal worship of science,” nevertheless Laszlo finds it necessary to advance “guidelines for action” which have their basis in “empirically tested knowledge” and its presumed “reduced error-tolerance.” Implicit in the systems theory approach is the expectation of a fully scientific conceptual synthesis, “if many phenomena now recalcitrant to quantitative measurement and prediction become accessible to scientific treatment.”79 Here—despite disclaimers to the contrary—expectations of social engineering are central insofar as “social organization is more akin to the work of human engineers than to the workings of nature: not theories of evolution, but concepts of engineering—more specifically social engineering—would apply.”80 The possibility of applying societal technics to global conditions, it is to be noted, is grounded on two important conceptual presuppositions: (a) “The specific contribution of general systems theory derives from its deemphasis on traditional concepts of matter, substance, idea or spirit, and its explicit orientation toward grasping phenomena in terms of organization. . . . Not what a thing is, what it is made of, or for what purpose it exists, defines it, but how it is organized.” (b) “There are neither epistemological nor ontological difficulties connected with the move from the nation-state to the world level of analysis.”81

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Precisely these presuppositions of systems theory, however, are subject to critique; and, indeed, chapters 3 and 4 shall be especially concerned to demonstrate how world order thinking is fundamentally flawed, to the extent that its approach is technocratic. There I shall consider Laszlo’s orientation and, thereby, question the legitimacy of the systems approach to world order. It is to the credit of world order scholarship since the time of Laszlo’s contribution that this approach has not received renewed attention. However, as I noted before, beginnings are disclosive of an essential configuration. Systems philosophy is now closely linked to developments in epistemology and logistics. The latter are, if only tacitly, developing in the service of a technocratic futurism. Furthermore, the recent effort by some world system theorists to link their concerns to those engaged in the comparative study of civilizations is hardly innocuous.82 This latter effort portends a move epistemologically to secure a cultural hegemony consistent with historical determinants of Western modernity. My critique is consonant with Falk’s recent remarks: “If the emergent world order is to be integrative and benevolent, then it is essential to stimulate concerned scholars and social activists to form a broad, global united front, that develops plausible and, above all, preferable alternatives to the mindless implementation of a technocratic ethos.”83

IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORIES

World order approaches can also be classified in terms of ideological orientations such as “realist,” “liberal,” and “socialist,” each subsuming various features of the normative and technocratic outlooks. When ideology becomes the measure, then assessments of the status quo and expectations concerning alternative political structures tend to be decided by the abiding framework. The liberal orientation (identified with the United States and Western Europe), for example, is viewed by its critics as an “imperial ideology” and, thus, as a geopolitical strategy aimed at preserving Western hegemony in the face of the self-assertion of developing countries (against “the interest structure of colonial powers”).84 By and large, the principle of state sovereignty remains central to the Third World perspective on world order and, thus, national “autonomy” and “self-reliance” remain important expectations in any depiction of an alternative world order. Kothari, for example, rejects “interdependence” scenarios of the future because this projected model of globalism “seeks to perpetuate international hegemonies, class exploitation within and between nations, and structures of governance that are repressive and inhumane.” To Kothari, a coalition of

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interests—“a combative self-assertion by exploited nations”—in opposition to the status quo is what is necessary if the future is to avoid “management of the globe through an oligarchy of elites.”85 Accordingly, the requirements of justice are contraposed to the requirements of order in the quest for the creation of a future world political system. That is, the question at issue is whether the task is one of (a) at least maintaining or, better, enhancing order in the interest of a derivative, more comprehensive justice; or, (b) enhancing justice through adequate redress of grievances between and among spheres of geopolitical hegemony (exercised, for example, by the industrialized North vis-a-vis the developing South), order being either coincident with or consequent to such redress. For scholars such as Kothari, “It is only when an impact has been made on the world political processes such that it leads to the emergence of a new coalition of interests powerful enough to reorder the structure of authority and power in the world that a just world-order will have moved from the realm of utopia to the realm of action.”86 A just and humane world, in short, presupposes the legitimacy of national self-determination and regional self-reliance in the developing world. The quest for “justice” as opposed to “order,” of course, is generally identified with Marxist ideology and linked, in particular, with the Marxist emphasis on socialism “at the expense of nationalism.” Order is, indeed, to be coincident with or consequent to the distributive redress made possible by socialism. But as Elliot Goodman Notes, what structural form this was to take remained ambiguous: “In fact Marx and Engels had no theory for the way to the evolution of a higher unity of nations, no consistent policy for the liberation of subject nations to bring them to a status of independence, and no program for their further integration, as nations, into a world society.”87 We are aware, of course, that Marx and Engels believed in a “withering away” of the state as the proletarian revolution performs its mission; but this does not address the issue of structure that faces such a revolution in the transition. How to understand structural features of transition from the “bourgeois” to the “proletarian” state and then to the “administration of things” is not readily evident.88 It is of note that a specifically “Marxist” view on world order was articulated by Soviet academics, thus providing at the time a “Second World” perspective (although this must be construed now with some skepticism in light of the collapse of the former USSR).89 This is not to say that Soviet ideologues have not had some conception of “world” order since the inception of the Bolshevik revolution. Goodman presents ample evidence that a communist world state was an explicit goal of both Lenin and Stalin, precisely inasmuch as the USSR itself was merely a means to the greater end of a “world

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union” of socialist republics.90 The governmental machinery of this “means” to that greater good was to be capable of both “attack” and “retreat,” in accordance with the changing constellation of social forces in the international arena. In short, an epoch of heightened nationalism requires a temporary conciliation, but without abandoning the longer-range goal. The contribution on world order by Soviet academics suggests their adoption at that time of yet another such conciliatory stance, basically one of trying to anticipate the possible outcome of the challenge to nationalism that is manifest in world order discourse and spurred by “First World” dissent. In the aftermath of the breakup of the USSR and the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, tension between nationalist and communist choices is yet to be decided, both as a matter of structural change for the former Soviet republics and as a matter of their participation in and contribution to world politics and the shape of the immediately near-term post-Cold War order. It is not surprising, then, that world order discourse should be co-opted into the general theory of scientific communism, i.e., by the traditional Marxist-Leninist theoretical focus on “objective processes of social development and the correlation of social forces in each historical epoch.” The problem of world order, in this view, is not one of crisis (although there certainly is a recognition of global problems qua global). Rather, it is one of enduring the evolutionary dynamic of a world social structure that emerges from “international class warfare.” As Goodman observes, “Since Marx viewed society as a dynamic, constantly changing organism, nations would have an end, just as they had a beginning. The material forces of history, not nations, were sovereign.”91 Thus, the concept of world order may be “new” insofar as it forms a part of recent political discourse. Nevertheless, for academics in the former USSR the substantive features are not new, given that world order structure is ever to be understood in terms of objective laws operative in social processes: “. . . the formation of world order is a process which develops as a result of the changing correlation of forces between the main actors participating in the international arena.”92 Accordingly, discourse concerning the future world order, it is said, “must certainly include an assessment of the correlation of class forces in the world”: . . . overcoming a particular world order and establishing a new one is seen as a long historical process, connected on the one hand with a radical transformation of the social and political structures of society, and on the other with scientific and technical progress. From this point of view the requisites for a new world order (or more accurately, the explosive material which will sweep away the old order to clear the ground for building new international relations) have been accumulating throughout modern times.93

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Thus, world order is understood as constantly undergoing transformation in accordance with changing historical epochs, but it is nevertheless foreseen as “the more distant prospect of establishing communist society throughout the whole world,” i.e., a communist world order. This “ideal” includes a definite arrangement of nation-states in relation to some central administrative unit, i.e., “the voluntary establishment of a single planning center.” What the structural features of this “center” may be remains ambiguous. However, from the then Soviet perspective, national sovereignty and world government are compatible structural features of a world order system: “From the point of view of dialectical logic, it is possible to be in favor of sovereignty and of world government simultaneously. And if one takes the logic of history into account at the same time it is impossible not to be, for world government (or state, or a universal system of social self-government) is an aim which can only be attained in the course and as a result of prolonged historical development and the liberation of nations from the yoke of capitalism.”94 How these views will work themselves out in the postCold War era remains to be seen.

QUESTIONING ‘WORLD-CRAFT’

It is clear from the above discussion that the various approaches to world order have their basis in some conception of history and of humanity’s ability to shape it. Where the orientation is normative, values are the guide to action; where the orientation is technocratic, applied science is central; where the orientation is ideological, a normative and technocratic conceptual synthesis abides and an implicit logic of power relations matters. In all cases, attention is to practical or programmatic questions, with emphasis on the possibility of rational design of some more or less central guidance capability and the avoidance of imminent cataclysm. The probabilities, we have seen Mendlovitz claim, are not at all high that the “best practicable” form of global governance will be instituted. These questions undertaken by world order scholars are questions, one might say, proper to a “strategic rationality,” a calculative thinking properly concerned with the relation of means to ends. Indeed, it could be argued, as Mark Blasius has put it, that by and large “the discourse of world order is cybernetic. It constitutes a plan of governance (strategy), grounded in truth (theory), which is self-sustaining through various means of persuasion and dissuasion.”95 Blasius elaborates this remark as follows:

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It is important to attend closely to several features of Blasius’s remarks, for they point to more essential questions which world order studies have yet to take up in a thematic way. Consider the following key phrases: “a strategy of creating the real”; “constituting a world order”; “discursive practice” (Blasius here has also noted with reference to Wittgenstein and language-games: “. . . the discourse by which we talk about the practice is the practice itself”); “grounds governance in truth.” In these phrases, an unarticulated philosophical (ontological and epistemological) commitment abides, calling forth a host of compelling questions: How are we to understand strategic rationality, strategic thinking, and its relation to thinking in general? Is there a thinking other than strategic thinking which can be brought to bear upon the world order problem? What do we understand “creating the real” to mean? Does this have its roots in the classical Greek understanding of techne, in producing and making, or in the self-blossoming (phusis) of “the real”? Does this distinction of techne and phusis matter as we consider what it means today to be political? What is “the real” or, in this case, “things political” that constitute the political domain? What is this “world” that is being constituted, and what is the human relation to world per se? What is this “truth” that is the ground of governance? What concept of truth matters today as we conceive the world order quest? What is the import of this ground as ground? What is the origin of governance, and what is the claim of this origin upon contemporary humanity? Answers to these questions are already implicit in world order discourse understood as discursive practice or as cybernetic thinking. But these questions, I shall argue, are not questions that can be taken up by a “calculative” thinking. For these questions another thinking is needed. Indeed, I submit, it may well be that the problem of world order, in its essence, is a problem precisely because this other thinking has been abandoned or relegated to the periphery and made subordinate to a strategic reason. But even then, this would not be the witting doing of world order scholars seriously concerned with an urgent predicament. It may be, rather, that the dominance of strategic rationality, of calculative thinking, is but a symptom of a more primordial, even if tacit, unfolding of Western history which, by and large, affords no

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public consciousness of what really holds sway over thinking and doing. In this case, what would matter most of all is our relation to thinking itself as the possibility of an authentic doing, of thinking itself as deed, such that Heidegger’s admonition becomes compelling: viz., that we ask the question ‘What ought we to do?’ from the perspective of the more decisive question ‘How must we think?’ Here, then, this other thinking, viz., meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken), illuminates in a way that calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) is unable to and, thereby, prepares in thinking for what ultimately (because primally) matters. Consider the following thought-provoking passage taken from Heidegger’s commentary on Friedrich Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom: . . . what law demands that thinking follow its time? Or is thinking untimely, always and necessarily? But what if the untimely were just the reversal of the timely, a still fiercer dependency on “time”? How is “an age” to be determined in order to be determinative for thinking? What if essential thinking first determines an age in what is most its own and does this without the age having or being able to have a public consciousness of its own historical essence? But then this decisive thinking must, after all, be so primordial that it cannot get lost in a past epoch and calculate in it what is necessary for the present and make it compatible with the present. That calculating is the essence of “historicism,” this making compatible is the essence of “actualism.” Both belong together. They are enemies, sometimes openly, sometimes hiddenly, of decisive thinking.97

It is in the force of Heidegger’s insights articulated in the above passage, I shall argue, that we must seek to discern the tacit dimension of contemporary world order thinking. This passage, in all that it asks and anticipates, makes a claim upon us for a more fundamental assessment of the promise of world order thinking qua strategic rationality. To accomplish this it is necessary that we attempt to disclose the metaphysical ground of this thinking. Thereafter, we can begin to see how, as Heidegger says, essential thinking (wesentliche Denken) is already determining our age, and doing so without our age having a public consciousness of its own historical essence.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Metaphysical Ground of World Order Thinking

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In the preceding chapter I have discussed briefly various approaches to world order thinking and have characterized this thinking (speaking generally) as normative, technocratic, and ideological.1 Most important is the observation that this thinking is calculative or, said otherwise, a strategic rationality. Moreover, I have stated that my concern here is with world order thinking as a phenomenon in the fundamental history of the West and, in this sense, with what can be said to be the tacit dimension of Western history insofar as the destiny of the West is determined by metaphysics. Thus, my task is to disclose the metaphysical ground of world order thinking insofar as Heidegger’s thought enables the disclosure of this ground. There is much here that already calls for clarification: What is meant by ‘phenomenon’? In what sense is world order thinking a phenomenon? What is “fundamental” to history—in this case, to the history of the West? What is meant by “the tacit dimension” of this history? What is meant by “the destiny of the West,” and how is it that this destiny is “determined by metaphysics”? What is meant by ‘metaphysics’, and how is this “determination” to be understood? What do we understand by ‘ground’ in this relationship between world order thinking and metaphysics, such that metaphysics is “the ground” of this thinking? Finally, why should these questions matter to us,

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such that we should take a “step back” from calculative thinking to that other thinking the task of which it is to pose such questions? I shall attempt to answer these questions in the course of this chapter. To this end I have organized my remarks into two major sections. Section 1 is essentially preparatory, insofar as I explicate relevant concepts as they are understood by Heidegger. On the basis of the conceptual clarification of section 1, I advance in section 2 my main argument concerning the metaphysical ground of world order thinking.

SECTION ONE

THE ‘STEP BACK’ FROM CALCULATIVE THINKING In a memorial address delivered in 1955 in commemoration of composer Conradin Kreutzer, Heidegger makes a distinction between calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) and meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken).2 The former has as its unique mark the trait of “reckoning”—of investigating, planning, and organizing with reference to given conditions and specific purposes. Such thinking counts on specific results and profits us in the performance of practical affairs. The possibilities with which such thinking is concerned are more or less “promising,” i.e., more or less realizable as ends, given appropriate means. This thinking is, in a word, efficacious. It has its own need and justification in the very nature of human affairs and associations. World order thinking, I have said, is a calculative thinking. It reckons with given conditions, viz., those global conditions (war, poverty, social injustice, ecological decay, etc.) characterizing a datable point of departure (e.g., the “state of the world” in 1990). It investigates these conditions in accordance with the overarching specific purpose of correcting structural deficiencies in the world political system. Thereby, it is “value thinking.” Indeed, world order thinking is calculative thinking most of all because it concerns itself with values, for ‘value’ means “that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say, reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else.”3 World order thinking aims at the elimination of war, at the preservation of the human species, at the elimination of social injustice, and at safeguarding the life-support systems of the planet. This it would do through reorientation of values and public policy, as well as through institutional transformation at various levels of governmental and nongovernmental action and initiative. It is concerned with possibilities of political practice and social organization in general, always with a

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view toward feasibility of intervention and with awareness that specific strategies can be system-diminishing, system-maintaining, system-reforming, or system-transforming.4 In this sense, then, world order thinking is diagnostic and prescriptive, concerned overall with the process of transition from the present system of international relations to a more preferable structure of governance and planetary dwelling. The element of preference is indicative of an operative distinction, viz., that a world order that comes about through rational design is better than one that comes about by the mere drift of events, whether this order be benign or imposing (totalitarian). As Heidegger points out, of course, calculative thinking is but one mode of thinking, having as its necessary complement that thinking which he calls “meditative.” Heidegger does not mean by this word a thinking that “finds itself floating unaware above reality,” a thinking that “loses touch” and that is “‘above’ the reach of ordinary understanding”—though it may seem to be all of this, and seem so especially when it is “worthless for dealing with current business” and “profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs.” To the extent that these latter properly matter to us and we are concerned with action, with doing, meditative thinking often appears as wholly inconsequential or useless. Meditative thinking, nevertheless, has its own justification and need, inasmuch as “what is useless can still be a force, perhaps the only real force”—indeed so fundamental a force that it “imposes its measure upon its epoch’’.5 Moreover, such thinking is, in its own manner of being, a doing—indeed, it is an authentic doing. In contrast to calculative thinking, meditative thinking stops and collects itself rather than races from one prospect to the next. It does not show results immediately—or even results as such—but “must also be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen.” Here Heidegger introduces the metaphor of farming, of cultivating and tending to a field and awaiting its self-emergent yield. He contrasts this sharply with the metaphor of an expressway in all that here speaks of busyness and hurried movement, even frenzy. Said positively, meditative thinking “contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”6 In saying this Heidegger is concerned with “what really is happening in our age,” with that by which this age—indeed, any age—is characterized, and which characterizes it such that it reigns over or governs both thinking and doing. What governs thinking and doing determines humanity’s relation to the world and our place in it—determining our understanding of our own individual being and the being of all that constitutes our world. Meditative thinking, then, seeks to provide a reflective insight into the present age and,

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thus, to understand its fundamental features (Grundzüge). It is in this sense that meditative thinking is in its own manner of being an authentic doing; for “Reflection on the essence of the modern age puts thinking and decision into the sphere of effective working that belongs to the genuinely essential forces of this age.”7 The import of meditative thinking, thus, issues from the recognition that (a) there is “a profound change taking place in man’s relation to nature and to the world,” but more important, that (b) “the meaning that reigns in this change remains obscure.” To the extent that world order studies are steeped in a strategic rationality, in calculative thinking, they do not concern themselves with the task of having a reflective insight into the fundamental features of the age. They do not concern themselves with the ground that enables any thinking and doing such as is pursued by a science, natural or social. Yet, it is this enabling ground that is really determinative of that science, inasmuch as all positing of a domain of inquiry presupposes an ontology. World order studies, as a development of contemporary social science, likewise are dependent upon one or another ontological commitment. Specifically, I shall argue, they are determined by the ontological positions that prevail in the modern period of Western philosophy; for these are the positions fundamentally decisive for the profound change taking place in humanity’s self-understanding, in our conception of all that is content of our world, and our relation to this world. About this I shall concern myself in section 2. Before doing this it is important that this relation between a positive science and ontology be stated in broad outline. For this I turn to Heidegger. “All non-philosophical sciences,” remarks Heidegger, “have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences.”8 Continuing, Heidegger writes: They are posited by them in advance; they are a positum for them. All the propositions of the non-philosophical sciences, including those of mathematics, are positive propositions. Hence, to distinguish them from philosophy, we shall call all non-philosophical sciences positive sciences. Positive sciences deal with that which is, with beings; that is to say, they always deal with specific domains, for instance, nature. Within a given domain scientific research again cuts out particular spheres: nature as physically material lifeless nature and nature as living nature. It divides the sphere of the living into individual fields: the plant world, the animal world. Another domain of beings is history; its spheres are art history, political history, history of science, and history of religion. . . . The beings of these domains are familiar to us even if at first and for the most part we are not in a position to delimit

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them sharply and clearly from one another. We can, of course, always name, as a provisional description which satisfies practically the purpose of positive science, some being that falls within the domain. . . . We can always bring forward and picture ourselves some being belonging to any given domain. . . . A being—that’s something, a table, a chair, a tree, the sky, a body, some words, an action.9

World order studies are, properly speaking, nonphilosophical. While concerned with a number of domains—political, economic, historical, etc.—it is the political domain that is central to these inquiries, presupposing the classical architectonic claims of the science of politics for thinking and doing.10 Insofar as the political domain is primary, world order studies deal with beings that are said to be political, however explicitly or ambiguously this denomination is to be understood. Such beings are things of various kinds: humans qua citizens, office holders, rulers, legislators; words such as public or official documents, codes of law, treaties of reciprocal obligation, spoken discourse; actions in all modes of public being-with-one-another; things more or less familiar but not so well delimited—regimes, states, constitutions, organizations, associations; in short, things that have their being in thought, word, and deed. All beings of the political domain become the proper concern of this thinking qua world order studies, despite the division of this domain into particular spheres (domestic politics and international relations) and individual fields (foreign policy, legislation, public law, public administration, state and municipal or provincial and local government, party politics, etc.). For world order studies, politics presents itself as global. Politics so conceived, as well as patterns of behavior and practice between levels of government, matter insofar as they bear upon and contribute to the overall condition of our common planetary existence. Indeed, properly speaking, where global identity and global interdependence are determinative of outlook concerning political existence, the distinction of domestic and international spheres becomes rather anachronistic, remaining useful only for purposes of analyses and investigations proper to the science of politics in its present empirically-oriented methodology. It is important to understand that political science posits in advance the various political things that constitute its objects of investigation. In this posit, an ontology—what these things are, how they are, their way of being— is implicit, if not explicit. This ontology, insofar as it is the ontology of the specific domain or region of beings that politics is, grounds the science of politics. That is, political science can be said to be dependent on, or to derive from, a regional ontology, viz., political ontology. Ontology as such is a theoretical inquiry, i.e., inquiry “explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities,”

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this meaning being articulated by way of basic concepts. Political ontology, too, is a theoretical inquiry devoted to the meaning of those entities that provide the subject matter of empirical political science qua positive science. Consider Heidegger’s following comments concerning such a relation: Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of Being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The ‘basic concepts’ which thus arise remain our proximal clues for disclosing this area concretely for the first time. . . . Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding. Only after the area itself has been explored beforehand in a corresponding manner do these concepts become genuinely demonstrated and ‘grounded’. But since every such area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary research, from which the basic concepts are drawn, signifies nothing else than an interpretation of those entities with regard to their basic state of being.11

It is in taking the “step back,” so to speak, from the positing of a domain and the research undertaken by a positive science to the ontology implicit in this “demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter” that one begins to make the move from calculative thinking to meditative thinking. Inasmuch as meditative thinking is concerned with the “meaning” that reigns in things and thus with the ground that enables scientific inquiry, the orientation of such thinking is primarily ontological rather than positive (scientific). Here we have the distinction between philosophy and science— specifically, between philosophy qua metaphysics and science. We can now begin to make our way through the questions initially set forth at the beginning of this chapter, and to clarifying the need for and justification of meditative thinking as it bears upon contemporary world order thinking.

FROM METAPHYSICS TO THE ‘ONTOLOGICAL HERMENEUTIC’ OF HUMANITY By ‘metaphysics’ we understand (in Heidegger’s words) “the truth concerning beings as a whole.”12 Its “guiding question” is: “What is the being as such and

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as a whole?” Properly speaking, metaphysics is concerned with answering two questions: What are beings as such? What is the highest or supreme being among beings? Thematic inquiry concerning the former is designated ontology; concerning the latter, theology. In this sense, metaphysics is said to be “onto-theo-logical.” Metaphysics, understood thus, is what Aristotle denominated prote philosophia or “first philosophy.”13 Insofar as it is concerned with first principles and first causes, metaphysics is the highest science, to be distinguished from the positive sciences which are subordinate to it. Metaphysics investigates beings qua being, in their being or way to be as such, what and how they are essentially; whereas a positive science investigates a being only with respect to specific purposes demarcated by that science (e.g., physics investigates beings with respect to their motion, geometry with respect to their form and measure, biology with respect to their life processes, psychology with respect to mind or mental activity, and so on). Thus, said otherwise, metaphysics questions concerning the intrinsic composition or constitution of beings as such as well as their way to be qua something possible, actual, or necessary. Metaphysics is a theoretical activity in which the human being engages—in the above sense, it is the fundamental activity. Insofar as metaphysics is concerned with beings qua being, with the first principles and first causes of these beings, it is more fundamental than the inquiry of the positive sciences, natural and social. All metaphysical inquiry, however, is determined by four “essential moments,” according to Heidegger, none of which can be conceived apart from the others and each of which “characterizes the whole of a basic metaphysical position from a single perspective.” Heidegger puts it thus: A fundamental metaphysical position may be determined: 1. 2. 3. 4.

By the way in which man as man is himself and thereby knows himself; By the projection of beings on Being; By circumscribing the essence of the truth of beings; By the way in which each respective man takes and gives “measure” for the truth of beings.14

That is, these four moments taken together—“the selfhood of man, the concept of Being, the essence of truth, and the manner of standard-giving”— constitute metaphysics as such, whether such a position is articulated by Plato or Aristotle at the explicit beginning of the science of metaphysics in classical antiquity, by Aquinas or Suarez in the medieval or scholastic period, or by Descartes, Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche in the modern period. These four

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moments articulate a stance toward being as a whole, inclusive of the human relation to this whole, i.e., the human place in this whole.15 The importance, the need, and the justification of the “step back” from positive science to ontology and, thus, from calculative thinking to meditative thinking is clarified: A positive science is what it is, does what it does, through the enabling power of a fundamental metaphysical position. It is in the elaboration of such a position that one comes to know humanity’s location in the whole of beings. If one is to understand properly the profound change taking place in the human relation to nature and to the world, and if one is to discern the meaning that reigns or governs throughout this change, then one must understand the fundamental metaphysical position that holds sway over thinking and doing. World order studies, as an expression of contemporary social science, are today enabled by a fundamental metaphysical position. World order studies are understood properly only with respect to what is permitted and denied to thinking and doing by such a position. Herein is to be found that “essential configuration” within which world order studies move. Metaphysics is philosophy proper. Philosophy (hearing here the Greek philosophia) is essentially Western, having its “implicit inception” in the preSocratics and its “explicit beginning” in the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. Metaphysics is that human activity by which we seek to “go beyond” (meta-) the things present at hand (ta phusika). Insofar as humans are all too often said to be one of these beings present at hand, while being that entity who in each case nonetheless accomplishes this “going beyond,” this “trans-cending” of ta phusika, then human beings are metaphysical in nature. It is of the essence of the human being to transcend, to surpass in outlook, that which is present at hand. That is, “man” is that being who is here but also there, there but also here—the Da-sein or “being-here” who is transcendent in his/her way to be. As Heidegger puts it, Going beyond what-is is of the essence of Da-sein. But this ‘going beyond’ is metaphysics itself. That is why metaphysics belongs to the nature of man. It is neither a department of scholastic philosophy nor a field of chance ideas. Metaphysics is the ground-phenomenon of Da-sein. It is Da-sein itself.16

Thus, it is of the nature of the human to be the metaphysical being: A human being is herself always transcending, surpassing in outlook, what-is as such and what is not herself. The human being stands out—or, as Heidegger says, the human being ek-sists. The word ek-sists is so written to contrast it with the word exists and, thus, to point to what is unique to the human being as a temporal being, standing out in time; whose being is thereby not merely governed

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by a concept of presence, therefore is not a being merely present-at-hand in the way, say, a tree is. This self-transcendence, this “ek-sistence,” is the human essence. It is this ek-sistence that already speaks of human temporality, of the human standing-out in time in the unity of past, present, and future. Indeed, insofar as one speaks of the meaning of entities and, thus, of the meaning of the being which the human is, this meaning is understood in the word temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Thus, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.’’17 Here Heidegger makes the pertinent distinction. ‘Existence’ here means ‘ek-sistence’ rather than ‘existentia’, the basic concept of scholastic metaphysics. The latter “is tantamount to Being-present-at-hand [Vorhandensein], a kind of being which is essentially inappropriate to entities of Dasein’s character.” As the metaphysical being, as (a) that being who questions concerning the first principles and first causes of beings, and, thus, (b) who is himself ek-sistent, the human is the being for whom time is the especially proper standpoint for the understanding of being. In fact, as Heidegger is at pains to show, all understanding of being, of beings as such severally and as a whole, is meaningful only with regard to some concept of time: “. . . the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time.’’18 The very concept of ‘Being’—one of the four moments essential to a fundamental metaphysical position—is itself meaningful most of all when related to the given concept of time. Temporality is the meaning of Dasein, of the human way to be; or, said otherwise, “Dasein’s being finds its meaning in temporality.”19 This is to say: humanity’s meaning is to be found in our temporality, in the temporality that belongs to the human essence qua ek-sistence. Both concepts—temporality and ek-sistence—bear upon our familiar conception of the human as a historical being, as a being capable of having a history. What, then, is the relation between temporality and history, between the human essence and history? Heidegger claims that temporality is “the condition which makes historicality possible as a temporal kind of being which Dasein itself possesses, regardless of whether or how Dasein is an entity ‘in time’. Historicality, as a determinate character, is prior to what is called ‘history’ (world-historical historizing).”20 In other words, human beings have the capacity for being-historical (historicality) only because they are essentially temporal. Historicality is itself a temporal kind of being. One might say, humans possess historicality, possess the possibility of history. Inasmuch as humans possess (or, better, are constituted by) historicality, this is a determinate feature of the human way to be. Man as historical being-there, as historical Dasein, is the determination that belongs to the temporal kind of being which historicality is.

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That is, historicality has its proper determination in the human being who is historical in his/her way to be. Thus, human beings are always historical, i.e., they historize, and so there is such a phenomenon as history. It follows that “only on the basis of such ‘historizing’ is anything like ‘world history’ possible or can anything belong historically to ‘world-history’.”21 Insofar as the human essence is its ek-sistence, such that its existence is temporal, humans have a potentiality for being: “As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be.”22 In other words, precisely because the human essence is its existence, that existence is an issue for the human being. Thus, what (better, who) man is is always being worked out, being decided, in and for his existence: “It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled.”23 What is at issue, still to be settled, is its being or way to be in a historical situation. As Heidegger puts it, “For Dasein, to exist means to behave toward being while situated in the midst of being. It means to behave toward being that is not like Dasein, toward itself and toward being like itself, so that what is at issue in its situated behaving is the way Dasein can be.”24 Insofar as temporality is the ground of historicality (the possibility of history) and humanity is thereby so determined such as to have a history, the decision concerning this existence is always historical and worked out in and as history. It is at this point that we may articulate the connection between (a) a human’s concept of himself and of his involvement with other humans and things present-at-hand (nature) or things ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit, i.e., equipment, tools, gear), and (b) human historicality. We must recall the “moments” determinative of a fundamental metaphysical position (concept of selfhood, concept of being, conception of truth, the manner of standardgiving) and which locate humanity historically. What is significant here is that in existing as historical humans understand not only their own being but also that of other entities: “Disclosing and interpreting belong essentially to Dasein’s historizing.”25 Insofar as they exist as historical, insofar as they historize, human beings disclose and interpret not only themselves but that which for them is their “world” and that which is “within the world.” That is, the meaning that entities have is dependent on the human disclosure of these beings and the interpretation of what and how these beings are. Indeed, insofar as the human is the properly historical being among beings, entities other than humans are historical only in a secondary or dependent sense— “such entities are historical only by reason of their belonging to the world. But the world has an historical kind of being because it makes up an ontological attribute of Dasein.”26 “World” is, properly speaking, an ontological attribute of the human way to be.

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What is this phenomenon that we call “world” and that is a historical kind of being? “Ontologically,” says Heidegger, “‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein essentially is not; it is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself.”27 Although ‘world’ is understood in many ways, the phenomenological sense of the word is what matters here.28 At one point in his thinking Heidegger understands ‘world’ in its primary meaning thus: “The ‘wherein’ of an act of understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements: and this ‘wherein’ is the phenomenon of the world.”29 “World” is what it is vis-àvis a human act of understanding. Thus, ‘world’, in the primary sense intended here, is the relational or referential totality of involvements familiar to and disclosed and interpreted by the human in his understanding of being as a whole. Because the individual human being has understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) and because such an act assigns or refers itself (i.e., discloses things as meaningful, as significant), world is not merely the totality of entities present-at-hand or the realm of such entities. Rather, world is the constitutive context of significations. Signification, then, is what most of all remains constitutive for world qua world. Heidegger makes this especially clear in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Since the Dasein exists as a being which is occupied in its being with its can-be, it has already understood the like of the “for the sake of itself.” Only on the basis of this understanding is existence possible. The Dasein must give its own can-be to itself to be understood. It gives itself the task of signifying how things stand with its can-be. The whole of these relations, everything that belongs to the structure of the totality with which the Dasein can give itself something to be understood, to signify to itself its ability to be, we call significance (Bedeutsamkeit). This is the structure of what we call world in the strictly ontological sense.30

Understood in terms of signification, and understood as essentially connected with the human can-be or potentiality-for-being, ‘world’ as such is inseparable from the human essence as metaphysical being and as historical being. As the metaphysical or transcending being, the human is related to (or comported toward) other human beings and other entities of various kinds by way of understanding. This understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) which is constitutive of human ek-sistence is, properly speaking, a projection upon a possibility, says Heidegger. “A can-be, a possibility as possibility, is there only in projection, in projecting oneself upon that can-be.31 It is important to see that for Heidegger the understanding of projection is “not a mode of cognition but the basic determination of existing,” i.e., of the human being standing out

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(ek-sisting) in time.32 That is, Heidegger speaks here of the understanding of projection as the fundamental and authentic mode of human action, as our “happening,” and thus as our happening in our history. It is in this sense that Heidegger speaks of existence “temporalizing itself” and of the human being’s transcendence of the world as having a temporal foundation: “The Dasein becomes what it is in and through this understanding; and it is always only that which it has chosen itself to be, that which it understands itself to be in the projection of its own most peculiar ability-to-be.”33 It is the future, thus, which most properly speaks of history: “History has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the ‘today’ and its ‘connection’ with the past, but in that authentic historizing of existence which arises from Dasein’s future.”34 History is given its determination in the human projection of a potentialityfor-being. Hence, authentic history arises from the future manifest in that projection of a human way to be. By now it should be clear what is fundamental to history, viz., that historizing of human being—that “happening” of human history—in the working out of our most proper essence (ek-sistence) and in the disclosure and interpretation of a world. What is fundamental, thus, is the human transcendence or surpassing of beings in an act of understanding. This is metaphysics in the most proper sense, such that it is only on the basis of the metaphysical nature of the human being that the “science” of metaphysics becomes the foundational theoretical activity, i.e., that attempt to make explicit the human understanding of being or reality that the human possesses. At this point it is necessary that we be clear about metaphysics in a still more essential manner, however. This may sound odd given what has just been said. But this is, nevertheless, necessary (a) insofar as it is meaningful to speak of metaphysics as philosophy proper, (b) insofar as philosophy is itself a phenomenon peculiar to Western history, and (c) insofar as this history experiences what are denominated to be fundamental metaphysical positions. On the basis of this more essential understanding of metaphysics, I can then begin to advance the thesis concerning the metaphysical ground of world order thinking.

METAPHYSICS AS ‘FUNDAMENTAL HISTORY’ At the beginning of the preceding section I noted that metaphysics is philosophy proper and that philosophy (philosophia) is essentially Western. Its “birth certificate,” as Heidegger puts it, issues from classical Greece. Thus, to speak of the history of philosophy is to speak of the history of metaphysics and also

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to speak of a history proper to the West. Insofar as metaphysics qua theoretical science has been articulated by various philosophers since classical antiquity, such that these philosophers address its guiding question in one form or another, we can thereby speak of the Western “tradition” of metaphysics. The question arises, however, whether this manner of speaking of metaphysics apprehends the phenomenon which metaphysics is—not simply as a discipline of inquiry within which doctrines are articulated, nor as the fundamental way of being which the human is and as the fundamental praxis of the human which metaphysics is qua disclosure and interpretation of whatis. For Heidegger the answer to this question is “No”; for, he claims, “what actually happens in metaphysics and as metaphysics itself remains hidden by metaphysics and for metaphysics.”35 In saying this Heidegger anticipates the possibility of bringing to language the “hidden” or “tacit” dimension of the history of metaphysics, and thus what remains also as the tacit dimension of Western history. Heidegger’s statement is, of course, obscure. The obscurity is especially to be expected because Heidegger is attempting to say what has hitherto remained unsayable—and cannot be said—in the language of metaphysics. Pressing against the limits of language, Heidegger seeks entrance into “another” thinking by which the essence of metaphysics and the meaning of Being in general are to be brought to language. What is needed, Heidegger claims, is nothing less than “the transformation of the language which contemplates the essence of Being”; and this includes surrendering the language of metaphysics “because metaphysical conception forbids thinking the question as to the essence of Being.”36 Here Heidegger is distinguishing between Being (Sein) in the sense of the meaning of being in general, and beings (Seienden)—the former remaining unthought by metaphysics, the latter being the concern of all metaphysical discourse. Heidegger’s statement is made no more intelligible merely to note that he has in mind the “self-withholding” (Ansichhalten) of Being (Sein) in favor of beings (Seienden). That is to say, the historical fact that our metaphysical discourse concerns beings of various kinds is due not to the failure of the metaphysician but to the hidden way in which reality “opens up,” gives yet withholds itself, to the human understanding. This is the “mystery” of Being, the incomprehensible character of reality such that humans stand in awe of that reality, awed that there is anything at all rather than nothing. While the notion of “Being” (Sein) is admittedly obscure, it is clear, nonetheless, that Heidegger has something in mind such that metaphysics is not to be understood first and foremost as a discipline in the history of philosophy and, thus, not to be understood simply as a series of more or less connected philosophical positions which have been established historiographically. For Heidegger,

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to apprehend the phenomenon that metaphysics itself is is to speak of its essence. Such thinking of the essence of metaphysics is itself not metaphysics but another thinking—what Heidegger denominates at different times “essential thinking” (wesentliche Denken), “meditative thinking” (besinnliches Denken), or “originary thinking” (anfängliche Denken). The denominations are appropriate insofar as Heidegger tries to speak of the essence of metaphysics and, thus, of the origin of metaphysics—of what gives rise to, and of that from which emerges, metaphysics. As an avenue of entrance into Heidegger’s meaning, let us consider the following passage: . . . metaphysics is thought as the truth of what is as such in its entirety, and not as the doctrine of any particular thinker. Each thinker has at any given time his fundamental philosophical position within metaphysics. Therefore a particular metaphysics can be called by his name. However, according to what is here thought as the essence of metaphysics, that does not mean in any way that metaphysics at any given time is the accomplishment and possession of the thinker as a personality within the public framework of creative cultural activity. In every phase of metaphysics there has been visible at any particular time a portion of a way that the destining of Being prepares as a path for itself over and beyond whatever is, in sudden epochs of truth.37

From the above passage it should be clear that Heidegger seeks to get beyond an anthropological conception of metaphysics. That is, the phenomenon that metaphysics is since its beginning is not man’s doing first and foremost, notwithstanding his participation in the progression of metaphysical inquiry. Rather, metaphysics is the doing of Being itself: Metaphysics, first and foremost, is the history of Being, the history that belongs to Being itself. This history, as the above passage says, is that path along which Being destines sudden epochs of truth. The ideas here are multiple: destining as sending; epochs as temporal periods, roughly delimited; truth as configuration of meaning in word, thought, and deed. The essence of all history, Heidegger claims, is determined out of destining (Geschick).38 That the thinking of Being constitutes Western history most essentially Heidegger makes clear in the following passage: Since the beginning of Western thought the Being of beings emerges as what is alone worthy of thought. If we think this historic development in a truly historical way, then that in which the beginning of Western thought rests first becomes manifest: that in Greek antiquity the Being of beings becomes worthy of thought is the beginning of the West and is the hidden source of its destiny.39

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To understand the destining of which Heidegger speaks, it is necessary to appreciate what Heidegger understands here by “truth” as well, insofar as “truth” is related to this history proper to Being itself and, thus, to what is tacit in the history of the West. In an essay entitled “Recollection in Metaphysics,” Heidegger speaks of history as “the arrival, always remote, of the perdurance of truth’s essence.” For Heidegger there is an essence to truth, and the essence of truth is to be understood in relation to the conception of ‘being’. “Being,” he continues, “occurs primally in this essence.”40 Being occurs, “happens,” gives of itself, primally, in the essence of truth, occurring so by destining or “dispensing” (giving) that truth in sudden epochs. Only because there are these epochal dispensations is there metaphysics in the various senses already mentioned. It is important to understand, however, that Heidegger does not think this destining by way of causality: “Being,” he says, “never at any time runs its course within a cause-effect coherence. Nothing that effects, as Being, precedes the mode in which it—Being itself—takes place so as to adapt itself; and no effect, as Being, follows after. Sheerly, out of its own essence of concealedness, Being brings itself to pass into its epoch.”41 Thus, Being gives of itself out of its essence as concealedness, giving of itself in epochal dispensations such that then there is the possibility of a fundamental metaphysical position being articulated by the metaphysician who is concerned to understand the “moments” of that dispensation. It is in the course of these epochal dispensations that it makes sense to speak of: “that and how Being determines the truth of beings in each case; that and how Being opens out a realm of projection for the explanation of beings in terms of this determination; that and how such a determination first attunes thinking to the claim of Being, and compels a thinker to speak of Being in virtue of this attunement.”42 In short, all of this is Being’s doing such that the human being qua metaphysical being is then “attuned” to that doing. We should note here the emphasis given to “Being itself”: (a) It is Being which determines the truth of beings (what and how they are) in each case. This truth in each case is what it is only on the basis of this originating determination. (b) It is Being which opens out a realm of projection, i.e., which unconceals the open region or horizon in which beings may appear (show themselves) in accordance with the originating determination. Only insofar as there is this originating determination and opening for the self-emergence of beings is any explanation or ontological hermeneutic (interpretation of being) possible. One may then ask: What/where is this “opening” for the disclosure of being? In the unique insight which is his, Heidegger answers: The human being is this opening. The human being is the topos, the place or site,

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for the disclosure of Being. (c) It is Being, thus, which lays claim to the human essence as the there (Da-) of Being (Da-sein), laying claim to language and thus to thinking, for the articulation of the metaphysical outlook, and compelling a thinker to co-respond (or attune) to this claim in word, thought, and deed. Only in correspondence or attunement to this claim does a thinker affirm the human fidelity to the human essence as the topos of Being. In this manner, human and Being “belong together.” The metaphysical outlook articulated in a fundamental metaphysical position is nothing less than the manifest response to that “call” or “claim” of Being upon the human being in this epochal disclosure of reality. No doubt, the foregoing discussion remains somewhat obscure especially to the social scientist whose empirical orientation makes all talk of “Being” suspect, even nonsensical. Heidegger, of course, is aware of the difficulty attaching to any discourse about “Being itself,” of the apparent lack of intelligibility or, for others, the self-evidence (not to mention the error of reification) of the word Being since the historical period of classical metaphysics. Already in Being and Time Heidegger seeks to overcome the “dogma,” as he puts it, “which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect.” In his introductory remarks on the necessity of restating the question of Being, Heidegger confronts three presuppositions concerning ‘Being’ which contribute to the dogma: (a) that ‘Being’ is the “most universal” concept, (b) that the concept of ‘Being’ is “indefinable,” and (c) that ‘Being’ is of all concepts the one that is “self-evident.” The problem with the metaphysical interpretation of Being is precisely that the possibility of ‘Being itself’ as meaningful is alien to metaphysics, given the precedence given to beings, that is, the determination of ‘Being’ (Sein) as ‘being’ (Seiende), as an entity, as this or that thing. The manner in which the guiding question of metaphysics is formulated makes this abundantly clear.43 Heidegger is not prepared to surrender to metaphysics this determination as final because (a) “the ‘universality’ of ‘Being’ is not that of a class or genus,” but indeed “‘transcends’ any universality of genus”; (b) Being cannot be conceived as an entity and cannot have the character of an entity—if one defers to the traditional logic of definition which, since classical ontology, has it that “definitio fit per genus proximum et differentia specificum” [definition is given by stating the genus and species difference, e.g., “man is a living being (zoion) capable of speech (logon echon)], and “enti non additur aliqua natura” [being adds nothing to the nature of a thing, is not a predicate]; and (c) the “average intelligibility” attaching to the purported self-evidence of ‘Being’ points to an a priori enigma.44

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Furthermore, there is the enduring problem of comprehending the origin of the theoretical distinction of Being into “whatness” and “thatness” at the beginning of metaphysics in classical Greek antiquity. These are modes of Being understood as presence: “Presence (ousia) in the primary sense is Being which is expressed in the hoti estin: that something is, existentia. Presence in the secondary sense is Being, to which we trace back in the ti estin: what something is, essentia.”45 “Being,” in this view, is understood in terms of existence (that something is) and essence (what something is). The unity of this distinction, as well as the concealment of its “essential provenance,” remains unquestioned, yet bears examination: “The origin of the distinction of essentia and existentia, for more so the origin of Being thus divided, remains concealed, expressed in the Greek: forgotten.”46 It is this “oblivion” or “forgetfulness”of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) that most of all claims us for a rethinking of the meaning of ‘Being’. This oblivion, it is to be noted, is Being’s doing and not merely an omission on the part of the human qua metaphysician. “It is an affair of Being itself, governs the fate of its essence.”47 Oblivion of Being in favor of the understanding of beings, as Being’s doing, is what governs or holds sway in the destining of itself in and for the history of metaphysics, i.e., in the history of metaphysics as a tradition of ontological understanding and for the possibility of any such history in the first place. It is in once again raising the question of Being that Heidegger seeks to overcome or restore metaphysics in the forgetfulness of the origin of the distinction of Being into essence and existence. Such an overcoming or restoration requires a return to the original epochal dispensation with which metaphysics is established. Thus, writes Heidegger in his essay “Metaphysics as History of Being”: “In the beginning of its history, Being opens itself out as emerging (phusis) and unconcealment (aletheia). From there it reaches the formulation of presence and permanence in the sense of enduring (ousia). Metaphysics proper begins with this.”48 There is an important distinction here between ‘origin’ and ‘beginning’ that is pertinent to the history of Being: The determination of Being as presence (ousia) in the distinction between essentia and existentia marks the beginning of metaphysics as such in the positions of Plato and Aristotle. Prior to this distinction, ‘emergence’ (phusis) and ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia) mark the origin from which metaphysics enters upon its path. The understanding of Being as emergence and unconcealment is more original than the understanding of Being as presence. Phusis speaks of self-emergence; aletheia speaks of unconcealment. The two belong together in speaking the primordial destining of Being, the original way in which Being gives of itself to the human understanding. Thus does Heidegger say that Being “opens itself out” as emerging and unconcealment.

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This opening itself out as emerging and unconcealment bespeaks the essence of truth (aletheia, truth as unconcealment) in which Being occurs primally out of concealment, out of hiddenness. “Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself.”49 Thereby, and only insofar as there is this originary occurrence, this disclosure as the primal phenomenon (Urphänomen), is the truth of beings granted such that the being (Seiendheit) of beings is intelligible and, thus, also that that thinking is intelligible which questions concerning this truth of beings. In short, Being gives itself to the human being precisely because this entity alone has understanding of being and, thus, participates in—and is needed by—Being for its disclosure. The human being and Being belong together, Being (Sein) claiming the human being as Dasein, as the site of disclosure, as the being whose way to be is to disclose the real. Here the epistemological-ontological concept of truth as correspondence (homoiosis, adaequatio, and certitudo)—as the truth of beings (Seienden)—is dependent on the more originary truth of Being (Sein) as unconcealment, aletheia. There can be the truth of correspondence (whether of the intellect to the real or the real to the intellect) only on condition that there is first of all a disclosure, a dispensation, an unconcealment, thus a primordial truth. That is, correspondence is dependent on “the opening of presence,” for “there is presence only when opening is dominant,”50 in the same manner in which the opening or clearing in a forest lets much come to presence, but also lets much remain absent. Here, in this “opening up” or “clearing,” there is the original freedom to be, to emerge from concealment into the open region for disclosure, as well as to abandon that region.51 In this opening, Being gives itself, doing so seemingly historically insofar as one can speak of the historical transformations in the understanding of ‘Being’ understood as presence (ousia) and given to thinking qua metaphysics: hen, logos, idea, ousia, energeia, hupokeimenon, substantia, subiectum, actualitas, certitudo, perceptio, monad, objectivity, will, will to power, will to will, machination (Enframing) or Technology.52 Each of these words is a word of Being, an articulation of the metaphysical outlook in its understanding of reality in its fundamental sense. It is important to take note of the emphasis given to ‘seemingly historically’ here. While speaking of a “history” of Being, Heidegger, we have noted, has removed any such understanding from being subject to notions of causality, i.e., a causally related progression in which something is cause and something is effect. He also says: “The development of the abundance of transformations of Being looks at first like a history of Being. But Being does not have a history in the way in which a city or a people have their history. What is history-like in the history of Being is obviously determined by the way in which Being takes place and by this alone. . . . [T]his means the way in which It gives Being.”53

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Here again we encounter something of the mystery that belongs to Being (Sein), to what is intelligible and, thus, brings us to the limits of our language in the effort to say the unsayable, the ineffable. What is this “way” in which “It gives Being”? The history of Being is an unfolding in sudden epochs, and not in causal progression, and only thus can the word history be understood. The suddenness that Heidegger intends to express here is perhaps captured by the analogy of a folded cloth, such that in a given moment of unfolding an entire fabric is disclosed all at once in what is there and how it is there. However, what Heidegger means by “epoch” must also be clarified: The history of Being means destiny of Being in whose sendings both the sending and the It which sends forth hold back with their self-manifestation. To hold back is, in Greek, epoche. Hence, we speak of the epochs of the destiny of Being. Epoch does not mean here a span of time in occurrence, but rather the fundamental characteristic of sending, the actual holding-back of itself in favor of the discernability of the gift, that is, of Being with regard to the grounding of beings. The sequence of epochs in the destiny of Being is not accidental, nor can it be calculated as necessary. Still what is appropriate shows itself in the destiny, what is appropriate shows itself in the belonging together of the epochs. The epochs overlap each other in their sequence so that the original sending of Being as presence is more and more obscured in different ways.54

Heidegger here mentions not only beings but also Being, not only the gift but the giving, not only what is present but the presencing—in short, the twofold or duality of Being and beings. ‘History’, understood “thoughtfully,” means “the destining of the duality” which is designated by the term “ontological difference”: “It is the revealing unfolding bestowal of luminous presencing in which what is present appears.’’55 Both luminous presencing (the opening, the clearing) and what is present (the things, beings) are bestowed in the self-revelation or self-disclosure of Being. From these two passages it is clear that Heidegger’s understanding of aletheia governs his thinking, insofar as aletheia, unconcealment, and lethia, concealment, belong together. The epoche of Being is, first and foremost, its self-withholding, its self-concealing, in favor of its emergence in beings and as the ground of beings (which metaphysics knows as hen, One). Self-concealing and self-emergence, holding-back and sending, belong together in characterizing the destining of Being in a sequence of epochs in which Being as presence (ousia) is transformed. The sequence of epochal formations of Being is a “free sequence,” yet each epoch or grant of philosophy in its history of fundamental metaphysical positions has its own necessity.56 That is, that these epochs are sudden in their arrival speaks against arbitrary (accidental) as well as necessary epochal transformations of

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Being as presence. Yet, once given, each epoch has its own necessity attaching to word, thought, and deed; and this is the way in which a fundamental metaphysical position comes to govern or hold sway over word, thought, and deed for the duration of that age. Every such epochal formation is signaled by a ruling understanding of Being as presence which is given to thinking (hen, logos, Idea, ousia, etc.). The beginning of these epochs has its locus in Greece, we have noted. This means not merely that the words marking the beginning are Greek and, thus, that what matters is that we can name the original language of the words by which Being is understood. Rather, to focus on the Greek as the locus of the formative words is to focus on “the people, the creative force of that people which in its poets, thinkers, statesmen, and artists brought about the greatest formative attack on the whole of Being which ever occurred in Western history.”57 The words of Being are “essential words,” observes Heidegger, and these “are not artificially invented signs and marks which are pasted on things merely to identify them. Essential words are deeds which happen in those moments where the lightning flash of a great enlightenment goes through the universe.”58 It is in this sense that a given metaphysical position is fundamental, founding a historical situation in those essential words that speak of the concept of man, the concept of being, the concept of truth, and the manner of standard-giving. Such a happening is the doing of the human being only insofar as Being first claims this being and lets language be the preserve of Being in its self-disclosure for the determination it gives to beings. Such a happening is “enlightenment” in the primordial sense of the lightning flash of Being’s unconcealment of itself in the “lighting-opening” it thereby grants for the emergence of beings. In this manner, with every sudden epochal transformation of Being as presence, a world comes to be. Here, once again, we come to understand the import of essential thinking as opposed to calculative thinking; for where it is essential, says Heidegger, thinking is a world occurrence: “and this not only in the sense that something is happening within the world which has significance for the world, but also in the sense in which and through which the world itself arises anew in its actual origins and rules as world .”59 A world in all its basic features (Grundzüge), thus, is granted as the dispensation of Being: “When Being keeps to itself in its destining, world suddenly and unexpectedly comes to pass.”60 What is revealed is a multiplicity (as well as a totality) of beings present in a coherent unity: What is present coheres in unifying presencing, as everything becomes present to everything else within its duration; it becomes present and lingers

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with the others. This multiplicity (as well as a totality) is not a muster of separate objects behind which something stands, embracing them as a whole. Rather, presencing as such is ruled by the lingering-with-oneanother of a concealed gathering.61

Therein lies the suddenness of an epochal dispensation. Manifold entities emerge out of concealment, illumined together as if by a lightning flash. But what lingers between becoming (genesis) and perishing (phthora) is not only the multiplicity of things present but also their gathering, i.e., that which rules or governs their lingering-together and, thus, their “jointure.” “To presencing as such jointure must belong,” and “Presencing comes about in such a jointure.”62 What comes into being does so into a totality of involvements that are effectively structured as and for the belonging together of this multiplicity of entities. Thus, what comes into being and remains between genesis and phthora does so always under the sway of the enjoined order of Being. The jointure and order that hold sway are such that what has presence “is sent on its fated way,” i.e., “is kept in its place and on its way.”63 The jointure of Being is at once unity and individuation. Each thing is bound with others; yet, each is sent on its own way, enjoined to attain to what is most its own. This is true of all beings—those of nature (Vorhandensein), of artifice (Zuhandensein), and of history (das Dasein). Thus, the truth (i.e., overtness or manifestness) of beings, whether of nature or artifice, and the transcendence of Dasein on the basis of understanding of Being, have their origin in what Being itself grants as the history of Being, the history belonging to Being itself in its unconcealment. This history is, in short, the “worlding” of worlds—the opportunity for beings (Dasein, Vorhandensein, Zuhandensein) to emerge out of concealment into a contexture of involvements by which and for which they have their being. This grant of Being is the most primordial “freedom” insofar as “freedom alone can let a world govern and ‘world’ Dasein,” and insofar as “There is no way that being, or nature in the widest sense, might become manifest if it could not find the opportunity (Gelegenheit) to enter a world.”64 It is this by and large tacit history (Geschichte) that lies at the origin as the destining of all history (Historie), but which Geschichte is also eclipsed by the latter Historie insofar as history becomes a matter of thinking and, thus, a matter of record (historiography).65 That the insight into this tacit dimension of Western history now comes to the language of the West in the thinking of Heidegger is a significant event in the history of Being. It is significant first and foremost because essential thinking as the thinking of Being itself—as that which has been withheld in the entire course of Western history hitherto

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(insofar as this history has been determined by metaphysics)—now becomes possible. Essential thinking, to be distinguished from metaphysical thinking, becomes historically possible, with all the difference this entails for thought, word, and deed, for the way in which world comes to be. It is significant also insofar as Being has addressed a thinker, viz., Heidegger, (a) at that time in which “Technology” is the epochal dispensation of Being holding sway (about which more in the next chapter); (b) at that time which, in the history of metaphysics, is experiencing the end or completion of philosophy qua metaphysics, and thus (c) at that time in which the first beginning of Western history as the oblivion of Being possibly gives way to a new beginning, a new beginning for thought, word, and deed. This would be a second beginning in which Western history may be claimed by the recollection of Being (Sein), thereby to overcome the metaphysical ground of its history in which Being is forgotten, and to be determined anew from out of its most primal ground. The possibility of a new beginning in thinking and doing, however, would entail overcoming that fundamental metaphysical position that holds sway as “modernity.” It is this position, I shall argue, which is the implicit, if not explicit, ground of world-order thinking as it has thus far been articulated. To accomplish this I turn to Heidegger’s critique of modernity in its course from Descartes to Nietzsche, concentrating on the “essential connection” between the metaphysical positions of these two philosophers.

SECTION TWO

In section 1 we have come to understand Heidegger’s claim that metaphysics determines the history of the Western era. Metaphysics, we have observed, governs thinking and doing, determining the human relation to the world and our place in it. That is, metaphysics determines our understanding of our own being and the being of all that constitutes our world, thereby determining all manner of involvement we have with these beings.66 We must consider that world order thinking, qua calculative thinking, is a manner of involvement that humans have with beings. It is a unique comportment or orientation expressing the contemporary human relation to a world and the place of humanity in it. The uniqueness of world order thinking rests in the very act of having a world in view unlike earlier historical times, such that thinking now takes on a “planetary” dimension in the full sense of the word. What we must come to see, however, is that this act has its authentic historical ground in the metaphysics that first makes such an act possible.

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The determinative positions of contemporary time—those which hold sway over modernity and, thus, even over world order thinking—are articulated as “public” doctrines by Descartes and Nietzsche, the former beginning the modern dispensation, the latter completing it.67 The metaphysical positions of Descartes and Nietzsche are, of course, a part of philosophy’s past and, thus, a part of its own historical record. Accordingly, one might think that what had its time and place in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is unlikely to have any lasting influence in our day, least of all any governing influence. One might readily think as much especially now that the former principle according to which philosophy is sovereign is yet confronted by that critique which advances the converse thesis of the theory of ideology, viz., that philosophy is “not the sovereign but [rather] the servant of worldly concerns.”68 However, the position advanced by the theory of ideology is untenable precisely insofar as its conception of history is inadequate. Marx, for example, argues that “Ideas can never lead beyond an old world-order but only beyond the ideas of the world-order.”69 The theory of ideology is untenable insofar as it accepts Marx’s preceding claim, which is a version of his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it.”)—which thesis is not without its presuppositions. As Heidegger remarks concerning Marx’s thesis (by extension, also concerning the related theory of ideology), by adhering to this thesis one overlooks the fact that a world change presupposes a change of world idea and that a world idea is only to be obtained by a sufficient interpretation of the world. That means, Marx rests on a specific interpretation of the world to claim his “change” and thereby he shows that this statement is not established. He gives the impression that he has decidedly spoken against philosophy, while, in the second part of the statement, the unspoken demand for a philosophy is tacitly assumed.70

Moreover, we have seen why it is that this conception of history (Historie) is subordinate to the essential history (Geschichte) of the West which happens as the history of metaphysics qua history of Being. It is only from the latter perspective that one questions historically. As Heidegger puts it: We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening so that it can really develop. . . . What appears to us as though past, i.e., simply as a happening that is no longer going on, can be

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We shall want to illuminate what of Descartes’ and Nietzsche’s positions, in their essential features and inner connection, is quiescent and, therefore, present in a governing way even for world order thinking. Given its own methodological prejudices, world order thinking is largely oblivious of that quiescent governance. Yet, only by overcoming this ignorance can we gain a reflective insight into what is happening in our age. That is, only then can we discern the profound change that has been taking place in the relation of human being to nature and to the world, and which—I hope to show—is manifest fully by world order thinking, understood metaphysically. In brief, I shall argue that world order thinking is grounded in a conception of human freedom that enables political thinking to adopt a planetary comportment as such and a value-positing of which humanity is source in a preeminent way. The necessary consequence is a technocratic conception of world order, a consequence rendered suspect by Heidegger’s critique of modernity.

THE DOMINANCE OF THE ‘SUBJECT’ IN THE MODERN AGE The question that urges itself upon us is: How does the modern world qua modern first become possible? That is not a trivial question. It should be a philosophically interesting question for world order scholars precisely insofar as they engage in a critique of modernist assumptions about politics. Of course, depending upon one’s conception of modernity as an historical and sociopolitical phenomenon, this question may or may not be immediately intelligible. Properly to understand the question, however, we must take notice of the words qua modern and also recall the thesis that metaphysics determines the human relation to the world as well as our place in it. All other ways of understanding the modern world and the place of the human being in it, including political understanding, become possible only on the basis of the metaphysics of modernity, the metaphysical discourse that founds modernity as an epochal dispensation and historical formation different from what precedes it. Thus, the question really being asked is properly formulated thus: How does the modern world become metaphysically possible?

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Like the classical and medieval epochs which have preceded it, the modern age is constituted by a fundamental metaphysical position which articulates a stance that the modern human being takes toward reality, toward beings as a whole. This stance includes (a) a conception of the selfhood of man, (b) a conception of being, (c) a conception of the essence of truth, and (d) a conception of a manner of standard-giving. The modern epochal dispensation in the history of Being in which this stance is initially articulated is the metaphysics of Descartes. It is in Descartes’ metaphysics that there appears what Heidegger calls “an emphatic positing” of the subject (subiectum), such that it becomes meaningful to speak of the dominance or preeminence of “the subject” in the modern age. In saying this Heidegger is taking notice of a significant, even radical, reassignment of the concept of subject as understood by classical and medieval philosophy. The locus of this reassignment and, thus, this essentially new interpretation is none other than the human being himself (as opposed to any thing or entity—e.g., a stone, a plant, an animal—that up to then had been said to be its own proper subject).72 With Descartes’ metaphysics man himself becomes the preeminent subject underlying all things. Let us consider how this is to be understood. In a singular quest to secure the possibility of a complete and perfect system of knowledge, Descartes undertook a program of systematic doubt which abandoned the authority of all opinions and beliefs, all example and custom or tradition formerly received, much as one would raze to the ground “a badly constructed edifice whose foundations are not solid.” Such an edifice was to be radically abandoned by Descartes in favor of a work of reconstruction and acquisition of knowledge “certain enough to deserve the name of science,” the foundation of which was entirely his own; that is, grounded in an “unaided” power of reason or “light of nature” (lumen naturale) most properly his own, and especially neither to be assisted by nor yielding to the former teaching and authority of religion and philosophy. This program led Descartes eventually to the formulation of his well-known “first principle”— Ego cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)—a principle more certain than the principle of noncontradiction preeminent for all prior metaphysics. On the basis of this self-evident principle or axiom, as “first and highest in rank,” all other knowledge concerning the physical world and morals was said to be deducible, given a “right method” of conducting one’s reason or, said otherwise, given “rules” for the direction of the mind. In short, what had primacy for Descartes (as he stated in The Search after Truth) was the consideration anew of things “in so far as they are in relation to us,” i.e., insofar as things are the objects of our meditations, or “cogitationes” or “repraesentationes.”

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This conventional understanding of the role of Descartes’ first principle is correct but superficial, claims Heidegger. What matters is that we understand that with this principle “a new definition of the essence of ‘ground’ and principium is first given.”73 Heidegger’s focus is on the metaphysical, rather than the epistemological, function of the principle, such that the uniquely principial character of the ‘Ego cogito, ergo sum’ issues in the altered conception of fundamentum or ground of truth. Inasmuch as “the highest and most perfect moral science” is, for Descartes, commonly bound with his metaphysics consequent to the unity of science and knowledge, this altered conception of fundamentum and principium (understood metaphysically) is not without its implications for praxis. Accordingly, the principial character of Descartes’ first principle manifests itself in praxis most of all, such that—as I seek to demonstrate—politics itself receives a new basis and a new mode of engagement. By articulating Descartes’ fundamental metaphysical position, I can begin to illuminate this last point. As with any fundamental metaphysical position, so for Descartes metaphysics can be summarized in terms of the four elements mentioned earlier (the selfhood of man, the concept of being, the essence of truth, and the manner of standard-giving). Heidegger articulates Descartes’ position with respect to these four elements, thus:74 1. Man is the distinctive ground underlying every representing of beings and their truth, on which every representing and its represented is based and must be based if it is to have status and stability. . . . 2. The beingness of beings now means the representedness of the representing subject. . . . Beingness is representedness secured in reckoning representation, through which man is universally guaranteed his manner of proceeding in the midst of beings, as well as the scrutiny, conquest, mastery, and disposition of beings, in such a way that man himself can be the master of his own surety and certitude on his own terms. 3. Knowing as percipere and cogitare in Descartes’ sense has its distinctive feature in that it recognizes as knowledge only something that representation presents to a subject as indubitable and that can at all times be reckoned as something so presented. . . . [Only] what is secured . . . as representing and presenting-to-oneself is recognized as a being. That alone is a being which the subject can be certain of in the sense of his representation. The true is merely the secured, the certain. Truth is certitude. . . . 4. [Man] now has disposal over the whole of beings as such in an essential way, for he provides the measure for the beingness of every individual

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being. The essential decision about what can be established as a being now rests with man as subiectum. . . . The standard of measure is the presumption of measure, through which man is grounded as subiectum in and as the midpoint of beings as a whole. What the above four elements of Descartes’ metaphysical position make abundantly clear is that the human being is preeminently subiectum insofar as all being, all truth qua certainty, is “referred back” to that “unshakable ground” which representation is in its essence as the full essence of human being. The point of this reference, the ground of reference against which all beings are understood, is the human being in his act of representing beings to himself as being in this and that way. The human being, as thinking thing (res cogitans), is the “representing” being. In representing all that is in being to himself and on the basis of himself, even world is thought on this basis and in these terms. In short, the human being of modernity appropriates to himself the claim to what all prior metaphysics desired as a “fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis” (absolute and unshakable foundation of truth). The human being as subiectum becomes this fundamentum in a decisive manner, the decisiveness of which issues in the praxis dictated by that binding of princeps (ruler) to principium (principle) and which is enabled by the reformation of the essence of human freedom that is corollary to this appropriation: Why and how does this claim acquire its decisive authority? The claim originates in that emancipation of man in which he frees himself from obligation to Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine to a legislating for himself that takes its stand upon himself. Through this liberation, the essence of freedom, i.e., being bound by something obligatory, is posited anew. But because, in keeping with this freedom, self-liberating man himself posits what is obligatory, the latter can henceforth be variously defined. The obligatory can be human reason and its law; or whatever is, arranged and objectively ordered from out of such reason; or that chaos, not yet ordered and still to be mastered through objectification, which demands mastery in a particular age.75

The essence of freedom, says Heidegger, is to be bound by something obligatory. Up until Descartes, Western humanity was bound by a legislation either divine or natural which determined our place and our relation to the whole of being (thereby our “rank” in the order of being). Divine or natural law entailed an “all-inclusive social order” assigning the human being place as well as canons of conduct as set forth by ecclesiastical authority or by an appeal to nature (e.g., as in Thomistic cosmology). Human reason itself

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remained subordinate to “sacred doctrine,” despite the “independence” of philosophy vis-à-vis the theology of faith and despite the distinction of powers by canon law and civil law; for there could be no fundamental disagreement between the two, given their pre-established harmony in God’s authorship of nature.76 With the liberation of the human being to himself, humanity becomes author of its determination: Self-liberation has as its corollary self-determination in the mode of self-legislation grounded in unaided human reason. Insofar as the human being is subiectum in a preeminent way, the essence of freedom as the positing of what is obligatory—in all its variety—thus becomes something radically subjective. All “fundamental positions of subjectivity,” i.e., modes of “subjective egoism,” are thereby enabled: individual human being asserting his radical autonomy, “man” grasped as a nation, “man” who wills himself as a people, “man” who fosters himself as a race, and “man” who empowers himself as lord of the earth.77 But with this enablement comes the consequence of having to legislate in one or another such mode. Enablement is empowerment, and the human is effectively sovereign only in the domain of the political, in all that here speaks of the hegemony and architectonic status of the political. That is, in the binding of principium (principle) and princeps (ruler), in the binding of metaphysics and morals, self-liberation finds its realization in political self-determination. Accordingly, self-determination is effectively dominated by the “strife” that arises among competing modes of subjectivity. This strife is the unavoidable consequence of a self-posit of what is obligatory, for the principium must also issue in a legitimation of princeps—and this in all the multiplicity associated with subjectivity. This legitimation is granted in answering the practical question that becomes necessary for the subject qua practical or moral being: “Is it as an ‘I’ confined to its own preferences and freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the ‘we’ of society; is it as an individual or as a community; is it as a personality within the community or as a mere group member in a corporate body; is it as a state and nation and as a people or as the common humanity of modern man, that man will and ought to be the subject that in his modern essence he already is?”78 In short, with Descartes’ metaphysical position all fundamental positions of subjectivity are enabled and initiated, having their effective manifestation in the political domain (notwithstanding the role traditionally assigned to Machiavelli and Hobbes as “founders” of modern political philosophy). Already with Descartes there is posited the metaphysical ground of a subjective egoism having the world for its proper object; and it is the Cartesian metaphysic that enables a universalist politics coordinate with the

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self-given task of scrutiny, conquest, mastery, and disposition of the whole of being (hence the Enlightenment practical philosophy of Kant and the philosophes—and the rational project of the Enlightenment itself as a political project).79 The metaphysical dispensation inaugurated by Descartes effectively transforms the conception of world order from the medieval “order of creation” to that of the modern “order of reason” having its basis in “the subjectivity of man’s essence”: It is on this basis that, as Heidegger said in the “Letter on Humanism,” all objects may “be planned by means of worldly reason (Weltvernunft) which supplies the law for itself and thus also claims that its procedure is immediately intelligible (what is considered logical).” We can now understand—in the context of world order thinking—Heidegger’s remarks cited earlier concerning “the quiescence of happening” that belongs to the essential history of the West as the history of Being epochally given in the history of metaphysics. Specifically, we can see how a “basic form of its presence,” viz., Descartes’ fundamental metaphysical position, yet governs today. In Descartes’ fundamental metaphysical position, as the articulation of an epochal formation or configuration of thought, word, and deed, in the history of Being, ‘being’ as ‘representedness’ is that ruling understanding of being which is given to thinking. Things in general are understood to be what they are according to their delimitation as represented beings. This ruling understanding holds true in its employment with respect to the conception of human being understood as res cogitans and to the conception of the totality of things that make up the external world, understood in the category of res extensae. The human being as preeminent subject, being as representedness, truth as certitude, and man as measure—these basic metaphysical categories inform thinking and doing in the historical period of which Descartes is the essential thinker (its “herald,” as it were). To use Heidegger’s words, we must understand Descartes’ metaphysics as the ground of the “essential formation” (Wesensgestalt) taking place. The Cartesian metaphysical position serves to articulate a fundamental “repetition” of a formative attack on the whole of being. This means that the creative force of this “formative” orientation is not limited to Descartes himself as a public personality, i.e., as one among others participating in “cultural activity.” Rather, the full creative force of this repetition is expressed in the word and deed of poets, thinkers, statesmen, artists, etc., who are more or less contemporary in the “transition” from the medieval to the modern dispensation. It is through the fullness of this creative force that the repetition is at the same time a transformation of the world. Thus, the world that comes into being, the essential formation, is manifest in the contemporaneous expression of all such figures—precisely in

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the manner in which there is involvement with beings and their designation is secured in a way consonant to the Cartesian metaphysical comportment. It is not surprising, then, that for political thinking immediately prior to Descartes (i.e., the sixteenth century) and continuing beyond him (say, through Kant and Hegel), the dominant political concept is that of sovereignty (attributed to the “law,” to the “ruler,” to the “people,” or to the “state”—but always as that which is posited by autonomous man in his power to so designate). The political concept of sovereignty, as the ordering principle with respect to the conception of things political, is fundamentally consistent and possible conjointly with the dominant metaphysical conception of the human being as preeminent subiectum and auctor.80 Heidegger implies this in his observation of what happens “when the ecumenical office loses the sole power as the first and real source of truth.” That “the idea of ‘sovereignty’ brings a new formation of the state and a new kind of political requirement” is inextricably bound with “the liberation of man to himself,” i.e., with “a change of European existence in terms of a ground”: “. . . what man is as himself, wherein his being a self should consist, is determined only in his liberation and by the definitely oriented history of this liberation. Human ‘thinking’, which here means the forming powers of man, becomes the fundamental law of things themselves. The conquest of the world in knowledge and action begins.’’81 Thus, Descartes’ metaphysics expresses in a fundamental manner what the political theory and practice of his “contemporaries” express: The ordering principle of sovereignty assumes prominence in the structural transition (of Europe, initially) from the feudal order to that of the modern nation-state precisely insofar as the human role as auctor is invested with greater power.82 In the political domain, this “formative attack” is manifest in the basic orientation of such figures as: Machiavelli (II Principe, 1513), who posits—in the autonomous interest of the princeps—the legitimacy of expediency and the primacy of means over ends for “absolute rule” (in this doctrine he speaks contrary to Greek and Christian conceptions of virtue, and thus effectively abandons the former authority; as Machiavelli wrote in the Discourses, chapter 26, “A new prince . . . must make everything new”); Bodin (Six livres de la republique, 1576), who speaks of “the true attributes of sovereignty” such that sovereignty is “the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic, that is to say the active form and personification of the great body of a modern State” and such that “all the force of civil laws and custom lies in the power of the Sovereign Prince”; Suarez (De Legibus, 1612), who concedes the valid political authority of the state, conceiving it as a “perfect community” (communitates perfectae) while adhering to “the moral unity of mankind”; Bacon (New

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Atlantis, 1624), who conceives of the best political order dependent on the advancement of science, progress made in the conquest of nature, and the general “duty of imperialism”; Grotius (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625), whose law of war and peace acknowledges the sovereignty of states while asserting the obligation of states to internationally binding rules of law, especially with respect to the conduct of war; Hobbes (The Elements of Law, The Citizen, Leviathan, 1640, 1642, 1651 respectively), who seeks to establish political philosophy on a scientific basis and sets the stage for the mathematicization of politics qua science; Pufendorf (Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis, 1660, and De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672), who sought to establish jurisprudence and politics on scientific reason, treating both mathematically under the influence of Bacon and Hobbes; and so on.83 The point of this brief review is to understand what is fundamental to history in terms of the essential formation holding sway over the phenomena of the modern age. Thought and practice are modes in which the domain of the political is manifest. The essential formation holding sway is that of subjectivity. Accordingly, one would expect political thought and practice to be subjectivistic; and, indeed, the foregoing works confirm what is expected: What is articulated essentially by Descartes is manifest not only in the political thought of his contemporaries, but also ultimately in the political practice derivative of the basic concepts. It is the whole of this essential formation which informs contemporary world order thinking as its tacit, if not explicit, ground. We can now understand how it is that a planetary order having its basis in rational design promises to be the outcome of a fundamental strife among the competing subjective egoisms which are metaphysically enabled and which are expressed in one or another of the now prevalent antinomies in political theory and practice. In particular, the “pluralist” logic of state-craft (and the correlative guiding insistence on national “self-reliance,” “independence,” and “autonomy”) would now presumably yield to the heightened power of a more “universalist” logic of world-craft (with its correlative insistence on “human solidarity,” “global interdependence,” and “global governance”).84 We say ‘presumably’ inasmuch as there is much that yet remains ambiguous and amorphous in the dialectic by which a transformed world order is to be instituted. It is precisely this ambiguity and amorphousness that allows the present to be characterized as a “crisis”—a time of decision in a most fundamental manner. It is at this point that we can seek to comprehend the essential connection that world order thinking has not only with Descartes but also with Nietzsche. Specifically, it is in the essential continuity of the metaphysical

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positions of Descartes and Nietzsche that world order thinking as a mode of subjective egoism can issue not only in the manner of calculative thinking and, thereby, value thinking; but also in the manner of a determinative willing that goes beyond any mere indeterminate striving or compulsion towards global governance. Let us review the Nietzschean position to see what is involved here.

NIETZSCHE’S ‘CLOSURE’ OF METAPHYSICS Nietzsche, we have said, completes the modern dispensation in the history of Being, articulating its “extreme” possibility.85 To speak of Nietzsche in this manner is to presuppose—as Heidegger puts it—“that Nietzsche’s thinking proceeds within the vast orbit of the ancient guiding question of philosophy, ‘what is being?”’.86 That Nietzsche should be viewed as having a part in the history of metaphysics is, of course, from another view objectionable. Nietzsche, after all, speaks of the need for “the cessation of the metaphysical outlook,” of the task of “overcoming metaphysics”—and this on the basis of the “insight” that the metaphysical outlook is a deception having its origin in primeval dream.87 Indeed, so Nietzsche claims, the metaphysical concepts— ’unity’, ‘thinghood’, ‘substance’, ‘permanence’, ‘being’—are all “lie,” “fable,” the mere “prejudice of reason which forces the posit of all such concepts, thereby compelling us into error.”88 In short, the origin of metaphysics is selfdeception, and any protracted preoccupation with metaphysics serves merely to sustain and enhance this deception. What sense, then, it may be asked, does it make to speak of Nietzsche— he who understands himself as “anti-metaphysician”—not only as “the last metaphysician” but as a metaphysician at all? After all, it is only when the latter is understood that one can speak meaningfully of Nietzsche’s essential connection with Descartes and, thereby, of Nietzsche’s closure of both modern philosophy and the entire tradition of metaphysics. More important for our purpose here, however, as Heidegger remarks, unless we engage Nietzsche’s thought as a fundamental position within the Western tradition, unless we acknowledge Nietzsche to be a metaphysical thinker first and foremost, “we will comprehend nothing of the twentieth century and of the centuries to come, nothing of our own metaphysical task.”89 Let us, then, consider what is to be understood here. It is now more or less commonplace to understand the essential features of Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms of five rubrics: (a) will to power, (b) eternal recurrence of the same, (c) revaluation of all values, (d) the Overman,

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and (e) nihilism. These doctrines must be seen to be inextricably intertwined insofar as Nietzsche is to be understood to have a fundamental metaphysical position. The essential connection of these doctrines, however, has its basis or impetus in Nietzsche’s confrontation with nihilism as “the covert basic law of Western history,” expressed by Nietzsche in the words “God is dead.” “Nihilism stands at the door,” Nietzsche wrote in 1885–1886 as the opening line of Book I of The Will to Power (Book 1: European Nihilism, note 1), his planned magnum opus. He asks: “whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” With the words “God is dead,” Nietzsche articulates the closure of the whole of Western philosophy, i.e., the end of metaphysics, insofar as these words speak of “the collapse of the reign of the transcendent and the ‘ideal’ that sprang from it”—all that for metaphysics has passed as the transcendent as above, beyond, or after (meta-) the physical—what have presided as ideals, norms, principles, rules, ends, and values. In short, the central tenets of Platonic idealism, Aristotelian teleology, and Christian eschatology have lost their meaning and thus their hegemony, their power to govern and to determine the world which is familiar to us. This, for Nietzsche, is an event of incomparable significance and consequence: “The greatest recent event,” wrote Nietzsche in 1882 in The Gay Science (Book V, note 343), “—that ‘God is dead’, that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadow over Europe.” What we do not yet comprehend, observes Nietzsche, is “what has really happened here,” viz., “what must collapse now that this belief has been undermined—all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality. . . .” The “for example” here is misleading, however; for European morality is for Nietzsche what is ultimately at issue. “Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism” (Will to Power, Book I, note 1). In short, not only is the old world order undermined, but also any notion at all of a world order as “moral.” The full effective force of Nietzsche’s insight is manifest in note 10 from The Antichrist. There Nietzsche understands “the conception of morality” to be “the essence of the world,” of world qua world. The collapse of the moral world order, then, means the transfiguration of the very essence of the West—all that it conceives as world, all that it understands as being. This transfigured essence becomes the ground of all future decisions, that which determines all future history in its basic features. In his intensive preoccupation with nihilism as the covert basic law of Western history, Nietzsche clearly understands metaphysical doctrine to be inseparable from moral doctrine. It is precisely this inevitable bond between

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metaphysics and morality that distinguishes nihilism. The bond is such that, viewed retrospectively (i.e., from the vantage point of our time as that decisive moment in which past and future have their import), “the consequence of metaphysical nihilism is moral nihilism”: “The denial of an eternal God or Being entails the destruction of all fixed or immutable standards of good and evil or noble and base and hence the destruction of the basis for either a universal moral law or natural standards of human excellence. In this light, all standards are revealed as historically relative, as mere prejudices or ideologies serving to maintain the explicit power of some group, race, caste, or class.”90 Nietzsche articulates this consequence in his discussion of the “Decline of Cosmological Values” (Will to Power, Book 1, note 12[A]), i.e., of the loss of meaning: “This meaning could have been: the ‘fulfillment’ of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness. . . .” It is only the vantage point of the present in our inevitable concern for the unfolding future that allows us to say that moral nihilism is the consequence of metaphysical nihilism, however; for the metaphysical outlook is for Nietzsche that initial will to nothingness—that will to a “true” world that is no world—which is the essence of morality. That is, the very conception of a beyond is moral, insofar as the human being, in this way, immerses himself in that which is true and good and, thus, gives value to himself. Thus, in this sense moral nihilism is the root of metaphysical nihilism; moral nihilism is that which ultimately and inevitably would require the latter as it confronts those of us who live in the twenty-first century. Precisely insofar as morality is the criterion of truth, moral nihilism is the means to that fundamental disappointment which metaphysical nihilism is. Each of the rubrics that articulate Nietzsche’s philosophy—will to power, eternal recurrence of the same, revaluation of all values, the Overman—represents Nietzsche’s positive response to the “pathology” of nihilism. Nihilism understood in terms of the prevailing categories of reason, without making these categories questionable, results in despair of knowledge and life, i.e., it results in both theoretical and practical nihilism. Such despair can be confronted and overcome only if traditional morality (which was “the great antidote” against these modes of nihilism) is transvalued.91 A wholly new outlook on life, one that abandons traditional moral and metaphysical doctrines on the insight of the transitional character of nihilism, is the injunction that history itself imposes upon Nietzsche. Thus, in the “Preface” to The Will to Power (note 3), Nietzsche refers to his most proper task as a “countermovement”— a movement that is to overcome and, thus, replace “perfect nihilism.” The

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task in the face of that perfect nihilism which says that “Everything lacks meaning” is to insure against the extreme of theoretical nihilism, viz., the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false, and against the extreme of practical nihilism, viz., the realization that existence is absolutely untenable. Inasmuch as theoretical and practical modes of nihilism are interdependent, the antinomy intrinsic to this interdependence (“Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence”) is to be surmounted only by challenging (devaluing) the prevailing categories of Western reason: Once the categories according to which the world has been interpreted are devalued, “the demonstration that they cannot be applied to the universe is no longer any reason for devaluating the universe” (Will to Power, Book 1, “Decline of the Cosmological Values,” note 12[B]). In short, what was conceived as the apparent world in opposition to the true world can now be seen to be “the one authentic ‘true’ world,” the only reality. In the coherence of the rubrics that articulate Nietzsche’s “philosophy,” both metaphysics and morality are, presumably, overcome and the ground of all future history established anew. In all this it is clear that Nietzsche is thinking metaphysically, despite his opposition to metaphysics. Inasmuch as Nietzsche views metaphysics morally, as valuative thought, his countermovement is also valuative: By “values” Nietzsche does not mean arbitrary circumstances, not something that occasionally and in some respect is valued in this or that way at a particular time. “Value” is the name for the essential conditions of what lives. “Value” is here synonymous with “essence’’ in the sense of making possible, possibilitas. “Value-estimations” thus do not mean the values posited in the scope of our everyday calculation of things and in human efforts to reach accordance. Rather, they mean those decisions that occur in the ground of what lives—here, man—concerning the essence of man himself and of all nonhuman beings.91

Thus, the Nietzschean philosophy which is this countermovement to theoretical and practical nihilism conceives life itself from the perspective of “value”: In the face of perfect nihilism “the value for life is ultimately decisive” (Will to Power, note 493). Life affirms itself always—necessarily, for life is will to power (Beyond Good and Evil, “What is Noble,” note 259). “If will to power is the fundamental characteristic of all beings, it must, so to speak, be ‘ecountered’ by the thinking of this thought in every region of beings: in nature, art, history, politics, in science and in knowledge in general.”93 Every such region of beings must be “a configuration of will to power”: Nature is will to power; art is will to power; history is will to power; politics is will to power.

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Consistent with the statement that life is will to power, Nietzsche understands the history of metaphysics as a history of valuations, as that which serves as the posit and preservation of conditions of human life. That is, valuation is “the fundamental occurrence” of human life, in the sense of bringing the essence of humanity to fruition and fulfillment.94 Thus, Nietzsche can speak of the history of metaphysics as a history of valuations, as that “history of error” the utility of which lies in making life possible for a particular type of human—humanity as s/he has been so far, thus also for the contemporary human who, in metaphysical continuity with the past, is under the “compulsion” to arrange a world in which “meaningful” existence is possible (Will to Power, note 521). All such compulsion to “arrange” or “create” a world which is “calculable” and “comprehensible,” says Nietzsche, is nothing other than the will to power. “The innermost essence of being is will to power” (Will to Power, note 693), and philosophy as “the most spiritual will to power” is a “tyrannical drive” to the creation of the world (Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudice of Philosophers,” note 9). Insofar as all philosophy is valuation, then, every valuation is a special case of the will to power (Will to Power, note 461). But insofar as philosophy gives rise to the positive sciences (sciences that “posit” their domains and the ways in which the beings of these domains ‘are’), the natural and social sciences are further instances of the “spiritual” will to power. Accordingly, the transformation of philosophy into the sciences must itself be viewed as a configuration of the will to power. For the twenty-first century this means: “The question of knowledge as such, and of science in particular, is now to assume priority, not only because ‘science’ determines our most proper area of work, but above all because knowledge and knowing have attained an essential power within Western history.”95 In this notion of will to power we have the governing principle of Nietzsche’s “new valuation” and the basis for his “new world conception” which links will to power and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all events.96 In the coherence of these two doctrines Nietzsche is a metaphysician: His is the metaphysics of will to power. In the closure of metaphysics that occurs with Nietzsche, despite Nietzsche’s expressed opposition to metaphysics, a fundamental metaphysical position is articulated. The elements of this position (concept of human being, concept of being, the essence of truth, and the manner of standard-giving) are expounded by Heidegger thus: 1. Man is subject as that multiplicity of drives and affects which is the body. [Subjectivity is now understood vitally, as opposed to being understood rationally.]

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2. The proper character of the Being of the real as becoming is will to power. [Will to power is the concept expressing the beingness of beings, their essence.] 3. Truth is equivalent to taking-for-true, i.e., perspective. The true is defined by what man makes of the being and what he takes as being. Taking-fortrue is the making-fast of becoming, a fixation through which something permanent is secured for a living creature both in himself and in his surroundings. [Truth is conceived in terms of the multiplicity of perspectives rather than in terms of the unity of objectivity and the deductive certainty of objective rationality.] 4. Man is measure not only insofar as what is represented is a product of man, but inasmuch as every shaping and minting of any kind is the product and property of man as absolute lord over every sort of perspective in which the world is fashioned and empowered as absolute will to power.97

At this point one can appreciate Nietzsche’s essential connection with Descartes and, thereby, appreciate the metaphysical ground which, as the metaphysics of subjectivity, today gives determination to all thinking and doing (thus even to contemporary world order thinking). At first sight it would seem that it is incorrect to speak of continuity between Descartes and Nietzsche, especially since the latter says much in opposition to the former: Where Descartes speaks of human being as thinking thing, as soul or mind, Nietzsche speaks of body; in the place of beings distinguished into res cogitans and res extensae, Nietzsche speaks of becoming of life as will to power; in the place of the ‘subject’ as unitary, Nietzsche speaks of a multiplicity; in the place of certainty, Nietzsche speaks of perspective, of interpretation rather than knowledge. The ego is, for Nietzsche, “a logico-metaphysical postulate” and the ‘subject’ as ‘substance’ a “fiction.” Yet, observes Heidegger, “behind Nietzsche’s exceedingly sharp rejection of the Cartesian cogito stands an even more rigorous commitment to the subjectivity posited by Descartes.”98 Notwithstanding his conception of the human being as “as yet undetermined” (Beyond Good and Evil, “What is Religious,” note 62), Nietzsche assigns to the human the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. The human remains for Nietzsche a being in whom there is both rationality and animality, the former remaining in the service of the latter insofar as (a) “consciousness is a surface” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” note 9) and (b) instinct has authority over reason (Beyond Good and Evil, “Natural History of Morals,” note 191). Indeed, claims Nietzsche, “by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities” (Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudice of Philosophers,” note 3). This

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means that Nietzsche’s intensified commitment to subjectivity lies in the principle of his metaphysics, i.e., will to power: “Nietzsche refers the ego cogito back to an ego volo and interprets the velle as willing in the sense of will to power, which he thinks as the basic character of beings.”99 Nietzsche’s conception of the ego as ego volo is grounded in Descartes’ cogito insofar as Nietzsche accepts the fundamental conception of human being as subject while transforming the concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘thinking’: Though the human is not subject as unitary thinking substance, nevertheless, the human is subject as multiplicity of affects which is the ego volo; further, the human being is still delimited by thinking which, while not a means of knowing, is a means of “describing an event, ordering it, making it available for our use.”100 Here representation is in the service of ordering, arranging, for human disposition over things. Moreover—and most significant—although for Nietzsche the ego is as body rather than soul/mind, as Heidegger points out, this is a wholly Cartesian move: “The body is to be placed first ‘methodologically’. It is a question of method. We know what that means: it is a question of a procedure for defining what everything is referred back to.’’101 Nietzsche can make this Cartesian move because he appreciates the principial role of Descartes’ first principle: “. . . the ‘ego’ as a substance, as the sole reality from which we ascribe reality to things in general” (Will to Power, note 487). Nietzsche’s metaphysics of will to power thus retains, while intensifying, the principial role of the human being as preeminent subiectum, as fundamentum, as the ground of representation. The “practical” significance of this metaphysical move is elucidated by Heidegger thus: No matter how sharply Nietzsche pits himself time and again against Descartes . . . he turns against Descartes only because the latter still does not posit man as subiectum in a way that is complete and decisive enough. The representation of the subiectum as ego, the I, thus the “egoistic” interpretation of the subiectum, is not subjectivistic enough for Nietzsche. Modern metaphysics first comes to the full and final determination of its essence in the doctrine of the Overman, the doctrine of man’s absolute preeminence among beings. In that doctrine, Descartes celebrates his supreme triumph. . . . the will to power unfolds its pure powerfulness without restraint in man—that is to say, in the figure of the Overman. . . .102

We can now elucidate in more specific terms the manner in which contemporary world order thinking is under the sway of the metaphysics of subjectivity and is itself evidence of the closure of the Western tradition of political philosophy.

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THE ‘QUIESCENCE’ OF WORLD ORDER THINKING

In section 1 of this chapter it was remarked concerning the epochal transformations of Being as presence (ousia) that, once given, each epoch has its own necessity attaching to word, thought, and deed. That is, thinking and doing have their bounds insofar as every such transformation at once grants and constrains possibilities of thinking and doing. The metaphysics of subjectivity initiated by Descartes and completed by Nietzsche in the metaphysics of will to power articulates those possibilities of thinking and doing which are modern in character and which have held sway over the actual political history of the West since then. Inasmuch as we are here concerned with those possibilities of thinking and doing which are political, we have noted the preeminence of the concept of sovereignty as the ordering principle with respect to the conception of things political in the modern epoch. This political concept, we have noted, is fundamentally consistent and possible conjointly to the dominant metaphysical conception of the human being as preeminent subiectum and autor. With this metaphysical conception of the human being, sovereignty as the sole and proper prerogative of humanity dominates in such a way that the essentially equivalent and antecedent medieval concept of maiestie which belonged to God is abandoned. Obligation enjoined by the divine is supplanted by obligation enjoined by human self-legislation.103 Sovereignty becomes thoroughly anthropocentric in the modern epoch, its ultimate form being articulated in Nietzsche’s figure of the Overman. “Dead are all gods: now we will that Overman live!” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We cannot, of course, now say that the type of human being which Nietzsche casts in the figure of the Overman is something actual or extant. But one can, nevertheless, appreciate the signification of this type as the acme of political sovereignty consistent with the acme of subjectivity in which the human essence is that of will to power and man himself is measure. The Overman remains as an imminent practical possibility, however, precisely to the extent that the metaphysics of subjectivity in its extreme form begins to be sublimated in contemporary political practice. Nietzsche’s insights are instructive in appreciating how such sublimation emerges as part of the ‘quiescence’ that belongs to world order thinking. Nietzsche anticipates the twentieth century as a time of decision owing to that need for another self-examination of humanity (Beyond Good and Evil, “The Free Spirit,” note 32) which theoretical and practical nihilism impose upon the age. Our time is the threshold of an imminent “extra-moral” history insofar as humanity undertakes the task of overcoming the former, but now

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defunct, obligations of Christian morality. One of the features of this process, Nietzsche observes, would be a compulsion to “large-scale politics” over against “petty politics.” The time for petty politics (i.e., the democratic and socialist politics of “splinter-states” with their “splinter-wills”) would inevitably yield to “the fight for the dominion of the earth” (Beyond Good and Evil, “We Scholars,” note 208): “Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall “man” as a whole—and no longer as a people, a race—be raised and trained?” (Will to Power, note 957) The inevitability of such a fight issues from the pathology of nihilism— all political thought and practice in our time cannot but be “pathologically conditioned” (Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,” note 10). The attraction to “rational design” of the world order is today motivated by a sense of imminent catastrophe and, thus, by the human impulse to selfpreservation. Here, however, it is life itself that compels; and precisely in this attraction to rational design of the world order is there betrayed what Nietzsche recognizes in Western moralism: It is pathologically conditioned. And what is this pathology? It is nothing other than the strife of subjective egoisms as yet unmastered. Such is the essence of power-politics. But this, presumably, is life (will to power); and, as Nietzsche puts it, “life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values” (Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” note 5). In world order thinking, I submit, the West discharges the energy of its moral essence, doing so as author of the prevailing morality and as the locus of the dominant subjective egoisms which have been inevitably diffused to determine all political cultures, the latter of which are now bound to the West’s hegemony over world political culture. The contemporary world order in structure and value orientation is instituted on the basis of Western reason, and as such it is characterized by an “order of rank” in which European values have primacy, i.e., are hegemonous vis-à-vis all “other” (Asian, African, Latin American, etc.) plausibly autochthonous valuations. World order thinking, thus, compelled by life itself in all its prevalent pathology, posits its values—peace, justice, economic well-being, ecological balance—over against all that shows itself as the contemporary pathology of “petty politics” and all that is countervaluation in the strife motivated by the requirements of global hegemony. In this positing of primacy to the Western valuation, the Occident reveals its near exhaustion, if not its desperation, in the face of competing modes of subjectivity as manifest by a fragmented and antagonistic “system” of nation-states, each with its “splinter-will.” Given that this world order movement is transnational, the West co-opting sympathetic forces in

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the developing world, neither this exhaustion nor this desperation is restricted to the West: The “crisis” is effectively planetary. Nietzsche was not amiss in his articulation of the great task that would define the twentieth century, i.e., the problem of global governance. Neither was he amiss in appreciating its hesitant approach, despite its inexorability. That is, Nietzsche recognizes the persistent, though declining, influence of the Christian ideal with respect to the problem of global governance, anticipating that this ideal would yet issue in the call for a moral world order: Notwithstanding the death of God, Christian value judgments would be transmuted into the political domain. The twentieth century’s emerging order would be a “hybrid” of sickness, the will to power heightening the demands of modern man’s self-determination, the Christian conscience yet restraining—in short, a “fettered” moment in humanity’s movement toward total self-affirmation, total sovereignty in the absence of God and transcendent norms. “They are rid of the Christian God,” writes Nietzsche in his Twilight of the Idols (“Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” note 5), yet “now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” It is not yet realized, observes Nietzsche, that “when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Accordingly, the contemporary world order movement expresses a commitment to transforming the philosophic orientation (values) as well as transforming institutional structures and patterns of behavior. World order thinking is, thus, normative. That world order thinking is value thinking is evidence of its essential debt to the Nietzschean metaphysic, to thinking the world order from the vantage of subjectness, for it is only with Nietzsche that value thinking comes to predominate in the twentieth century.104 As Heidegger puts it, “Values stem from valuation; valuation corresponds to the will to power.” That is, insofar as the creation of secureness is grounded in value-positing and world order thinkers on their own essential authority (understood metaphysically, not personally) seek to secure a world order, then world order thinking cannot but be so grounded. It is precisely this ground, i.e., a self-grounded value-posit, that entails the technocratic conception of world order and, thus, eliminates a meaningful distinction between the normative and technocratic approaches. How so? Heidegger answers in words that indict all value thinking: “thinking in terms of values is a radical killing. It . . . strikes down that which is as such, in its being-initself. . . .” Everything which is “is transformed into object” and “swallowed up into the immanence of subjectivity.”105 Commensurate with this subjectivity is that objectivity which, in the essence of the technological, is total, and which finds its instrument in technocracy.

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Understood yet further, the avowedly normative posture or position which world order thinking assumes is, in its essence as Western valuation, characterized by a viewpoint which serves as a gauge of conditions of preservation at the least and of conditions of enhancement at best with respect to the world order. Through a posit of values it is possible to assess, to reckon, to calculate, the degree to which the prevailing world order system is diminished, maintained, reformed, transformed. But this is an essentially Western situation, notwithstanding its planetary dimensions. That is, what is at issue is the preservation of the West, hence the issue of the latter’s enhancement on the basis of its valuational hegemony: A world political order grounded in Western categories of reason is an enhancement of what Nietzsche calls a “construct of domination”—a configuration of power (Will to Power, note 715). Thus, the very notion of a “world federation of cultures,” as one possibility of global governance, bespeaks Nietzsche’s insight into the problem of ‘value’, i.e., “the determination of the order of rank among values.” The resistance of the developing world to the hegemony of Western reason and the insistence of the developing nations on justice rather than order, constitute a sublimation of that temperament (which Nietzsche anticipated) which says, “There are moralities which are meant to justify their creator before others” (Beyond Good and Evil, “Natural History of Morals,” note 187). Here there is the explicit recognition of the West’s venture to secure for itself mastery of its destiny as well as that of the world. Thus, in his essay Towards a Just World, Rajni Kothari rightly and insightfully distinguishes between “the newer conception of universalism” which is “expansionist” and “imperialist” in extending “its normative framework to cover almost the entire globe,” and “the old universalistic conceptions— found in China, India, the ancient Greece and Turkey, in the thinking of the Buddha and the Zoroastrian teachers.” The latter “were all, despite their considerable diversities, based on the transcendence of the immediate, the local and the temporal through the cultivation of the mind and a search for comprehension and meaning in an admittedly mysterious and complex reality, and led to a moderation and containment of selfish and expansionist drives in the human personality.” Kothari adds: “Indeed, modern European imperialism represents the first major effort at unifying the entire globe under the dominion of a single regional center. “106 Kothari, however, believes that we are now observing the end of Western domination: When we conceive of contemporary historical change as emanating from the end of Western domination, we have in mind more than a mere shift in

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the regional balance of power. The end of the era of Western dominance must also mean an end of the dominant Western world-view based on the theory of progress and the ethic of individualism. It also means the abandonment of the related assumptions on the relationship between knowledge and power, on the ends of economic activity, and on the structure and management of politics and the nature of the end. Here, too, the basic point is not simply that the dominant Western paradigm, and the praxis based on it, violates the values stated above; it is also that they have ceased to be workable and are no longer valid.107

Much of what Kothari says is important. But Kothari’s focus on “the dialectic of historical process” is not sufficiently fundamental to apprehend the extent to which the metaphysics of subjectivity holds sway not only over ‘the West’ but also over the rest of the ‘Westernized’ world. That is, even the developing world is swayed by a metaphysics of subjectivity, hence its aspiration to political forms consonant with the correlative ordering principle of sovereignty. Western categories of reason govern political discourse and practice thoroughly, both in the pattern and content of the response to the West. It is only now that the West firmly establishes its dominion through a scientifictechnological civilization that embraces the globe.108 Globalization is an essentially Western phenomenon of incipient hegemony. Johan Galtung has recognized the way in which technology transfer is the central assurance of this incipient hegemony: Culturally, the transfer of technology (and this means in almost all cases the transfer of the technology that has been developed recently, primarily in Western countries) is at the same time a transfer of the hidden social code, the social cosmology behind that technology. . . . [This] transfer effects a more effective Westernization of the world than would colonialism and neocolonialism, under which the Third World by and large could retain its cultural and cosmological orientations as long as economic factors could be provided for the First World.109

Galtung’s views are consonant with the analysis rendered by Samuel Huntington in recent time. Offering “an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War,” Huntington argues that “the central and most dangerous dimensions of emerging global politics” is “conflict between groups from differing civilizations.” His interpretation leads him to conclude that “clashes of civilization are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.”110

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For Huntington this international order does not entail Westernization of the world given the cultural affirmations of “non-Western societies.” However, Huntington’s analysis is troubling insofar as it at times explicitly and at times tacitly advances in the context of the archaic “friend/enemy” distinction in political thought. This operative distinction leads him to assert that “The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.”111 This mode of politics of identity is for Huntington unavoidably agonistic: “We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.” Thus, Huntington claims that in the post–Cold War world, “local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilizations. The rivalry of superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.” But here Huntington is mistaken on fundamentals, for the clash of civilizations is itself the mode of power-politics in which values are the means of self-assertion, and the domain in which Nietzsche’s anticipated grossen Politik now seek settlement in the ranking of rival moralities. In this “clash of civilizations” the West manifests its concern for both conditions of preservation and conditions of enhancement. One must consider, moreover, that the normativity of world order thinking is Christian in essence and, in the Nietzschean view, “herd morality” comprised of the two dominant configurations of subjective egoism, viz., liberal democracy and socialism. In the quest for a moral world order the West abandons the institutional authority and dogma of Christendom while appropriating its ideal: though “God is dead,” humanity may yet be master of the earth and may yet strive with all its power for “a universal green-pasture happiness on earth” (Will to Power, note 957). As Nietzsche puts it, “Since the belief has ceased that a God broadly directs the destinies of the world . . . man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth” (Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” note 25). “In the place of the authority of God and Church looms the authority of conscience, or the domination of reason, or the God of historical progress, or the social instinct.’’112 World order thinking qua normative thinking, then, is an inaugural phenomenal configuration of the metaphysics of will to power marked by a hesitant selfaffirmation in tension with the religious instinct which yet seeks satisfaction. Self-affirmation—which self-liberation enjoins—is hesitant at the outset of the modern subject’s movement towards global governance. Notwithstanding, this hesitant self-affirmation is transient—it is destined to give way; for, “the same conditions that hasten the evolution of the herd animal also hasten the evolution of the leader animal” (Will to Power,

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note 956). Which conditions?—that strife of liberal democracy and socialism which, in conformity with the “seduction” of the “mediocre spirit,” advances “the mastery of the mediocre.” The “homogenization of European man,” produced as a consequence of herd morality and effectively extended to the whole of the planet through the hegemony of the Western valuation, promises a “multifarious” type of human being. Multifarious humanity (the type secured by both liberal democratic ideology and socialist ideology) is mankind adapted “to a special utility,” insofar as “the consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the ‘machinery’ of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately” (Will to Power, note 866)—to wit, the international economic order, the world economy, the world as market.113 The “economic valuation of ideals” institutes maximum exploitation of humanity; the multifarious human being would be made “as useful as possible” and approximated “as far as possible, to an infallible machine”: “Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy. . . .” (Will to Power, note 866). It is Nietzsche’s insight that such a situation is but the necessary preparation for what the total sovereignty of man requires. Maximum exploitation of the human being presupposes the emergence of “a higher type” of human. The European valuation is in the employ of a more profound impulse such that “the destinies of the earth” are incipiently subordinated to its hegemony and, thereby, to its self-overcoming: In this way, i.e., in a worldwide homogenization of European humanity, the preconditions for “more comprehensive forms of dominion” are secured. This occurs in two fundamental modes of domination, one normative and the other technocratic. With the extension of the Western valuation to the whole of the planet via liberal democratic and socialist ideologies, a pluralist political culture undergoes subtle convergence so as to coalesce into a world political culture which, for all effective purposes, is nevertheless Western.114 This phenomenon is especially manifest in what world order scholars describe as “globalization from above” with its corresponding sense of “global citizenship.” This particular “reformist perspective,” as Richard Falk puts it, tends to “reflect the cultural and political outlook of the political community in which the person making the proposal happens to live. . . . Often this kind of vision unconsciously involves a mixture of pragmatism and idealism, implying that a person can promote a better world by enlarging the framework of their own political reality until it encompasses the world.”115 But what is pertinent in this reformist perspective is its universalization of a valuation

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via the instrument of elitist solidarity, thereby conceiving of global citizenship yet again primarily in terms of “the globalization of economic forces.” Economic management, “making the planet sustainable for current middleclass lifestyles,” becomes the ordering task, as world political order is in this view inextricably structured by the world economic order. Thus, despite current academic attention to “comparative political systems”—even to “comparative world order systems”—the essence of comparison is as Nietzsche understood it: “There is . . . now taking place a selecting out among the forms and customs of higher morality whose objective can only be the elimination of the lower moralities” (Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” note 23). Once a rational foundation for morals is undermined, and morality thus becomes a matter of preference rather than “truth,” an age of comparison seeking to surmount theoretical nihilism cannot but enjoin a typology of morals and an institution of an order of rank not only between this and that human being but between this and that morality. The whole of this is effectively quiescent in contemporary political theory and practice, however hesitant for now. Having treated the normative aspect of world order thinking vis-à-vis Nietzschean insights of Western hegemony, we can now examine the technocratic dimension of this movement as an extreme of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Before doing so, the following outline should be clear concerning the metaphysical ground of world order thinking: Enablement and empowerment for disposition of the whole of being are a basic feature of the modern epoch. This feature is not without its political implications. Where “the will of the master” as author, as source, assumes preeminence, there praxis itself is transformed and effectively subordinated to poiesis, to fabrication. Politics, thus, is dominated by techne, by fabrication or craftsmanship, and becomes “architecture.” Political thinking, thus, is conceived as craft. For modernity it is expressed as the logic of statecraft. Inasmuch as theoretical mastery seeks its completion in practical mastery qua technical mastery, the “highest practical art of legislation” of which Descartes spoke would achieve its highest mastery in “legislation of the greatest magnitude,” viz., the rational design, the blueprinting or architecture, of a planetary order coordinate with man’s lordship of the earth—the ultimate product of “reason in the service of the will.”116 The possibility of world order, as the intentional arrangement of a world having its source in the preeminent subiectum, thus is but the ultimate manifestation and confirmation of a subjective egoism that culminates in technical mastery—hence the techno-cratic conception of world order. It is in the technocratic conception of world order that subjectivity “gains in power” for its own enhancement while under the sway of the plan-

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etary domination of technology (the current epochal dispensation of Being— about which more in the next chapter). World-craft thereby is effectively conducted into the domain of objectivist-scientism and the “new philosophy” of systems theory in the mode of applied science employing social engineering technology. As Heidegger puts it, In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., technological, rule over the earth. The modern freedom of subjectivity vanishes totally in the objectivity commensurate with it.117

We are now ready to consider that quiescence of world order thinking now being sublimated in the technocratic comportment per se. It is in this comportment that the metaphysics of subjectivity moves yet further towards its acme and gives determination to the political in a way such that the distinction between normative futurism and technocratic futurism collapses.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Planetary Politics and the Essence of Technology

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Political theory and practice are ever dependent upon at least an implicit ontology; that is, they necessarily presuppose a commitment with respect to the nature of political phenomena. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, this ontology is part of a metaphysical position which, according to Heidegger, articulates in a coherent manner a concept of human being, a concept of being in general, a concept of the essence of truth, and the manner of standard-giving. Following Heidegger, we can say that the ontological commitment that pervades the modern epoch and holds sway over political thinking and doing begins with the metaphysics of subjectivity initiated by Descartes and is completed by Nietzsche in the metaphysics of will to power. There are three significant implications of this claim: (a) sovereignty, as the ordering principle of political thought and practice in the modern period, is fundamentally consistent and possible conjointly with the dominant metaphysical conception of the human being as preeminent subiectum and autor; (b) selfliberation and self-legislation enable and give rise to fundamental positions of subjectivity (or modes of subjective egoism) which are manifest in the political domain in that strife characterizing such basic antinomies as individualism versus collectivism, pluralism versus universalism; (c) in the absence of compelling transcendent norms, and as the movement towards

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human self-determination abandons its ‘hesitant’ character, the Nietzschean anticipation of the Overman remains imminent as that “type” of human being ultimately required by the acme of subjectivity. That is, lordship of the Earth—global governance instituted by and for humanity on its own authority in response to an “age of meaninglessness”—is the acme of political sovereignty consistent with the acme of subjectivity in which the human essence is taken as will to power and man himself is taken as the measure. As Heidegger puts it: The age of consummate meaninglessness is therefore the era in which “world views” are invented and promulgated with a view to their power. Such worldviews drive all calculability of representation and production to the extreme, originating as they do essentially in mankind’s self-imposed instauration of self in the midst of beings—in the midst of mankind’s unconditioned hegemony over all sources of power on the face of the earth, and indeed its dominion over the globe as such. Whatever beings in their individual domains may be, whatever used to be defined as their quiddity in the sense of the “Ideas,” now becomes something that the self-instauration can reckon with in advance, as with that which gauges the value of every productive and representative being as such (every work of art, technical contrivance, institution of government, the entire personal and collective order of human beings). Calculation on behalf of this self-instauration invents “values” (for our culture, and for the nation). Value translates the essentiality of essence (that is, of beingness) into an object of calculation, something that can be estimated in terms of quantity and spatial extension.1

In short, whether one advances the cause of individualism or collectivism, pluralism or universalism, the metaphysics of subjectivity holds sway over contemporary political theory and practice. Thus, contemporary world order thinking, too, unavoidably remains steeped in subjectivism. In recognizing that world order thinking has its ground in the metaphysics of subjectivity, we nevertheless take note of Heidegger’s thesis of closure to the Western tradition of metaphysics. This means that the West is today claimed simultaneously by the metaphysics of subjectivity and another thinking that is not metaphysical. That is, the history of the West as the history of Being’s self-unfolding in epochal configurations or formations of thought, word, and deed is today characterized by a precarious and ambiguous tension—between (a) the first beginning inaugurated by Plato and now in its extreme possibility in the metaphysics of will to power, and (b) a new or second beginning whereby metaphysical thinking and the possibility of essential thinking (wesentliche Denken) initially are in tension. However,

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what is critical in this historical moment, i.e., fundamentally decisive, is that the closure of metaphysics (the completion of philosophy understood as metaphysics) means that Western history “broadens out” into world history, giving that world history determination in thought, word, and deed via the hegemony of the Western valuation: “The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.”2 The determination of world civilization by Western European thinking, by Western categories of reason, is also scientific in character: “The development of philosophy into the independent sciences . . . is the legitimate completion of philosophy. Philosophy . . . has found its place in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity.”3 In the scientific attitude, calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) sustains and enhances its power to interpret and to order various regions of being or reality. But all the sciences, natural and social, are positive sciences in the sense that their respective regions or domains are posited by them in advance. In this posit, the beings of these domains are categorized in terms of what and how these beings are. In short, each such science is explicitly or implicitly committed to an ontology, to a conception of being. Indeed, what is significant about the sciences today is that they “are now taking over as their own task what philosophy in the course of its history tried to present in part, and even there only inadequately, that is, the ontologies of the various regions of beings (nature, history, law, art).”4 It is in this sense that the sciences are said to be independent of philosophy. Modern science, however, is fundamentally different from earlier science. Whereas the latter was consistent with philosophy as “the queen of the sciences” in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, modern science is operationally oriented in its research enterprise. The fundamental feature of modern science as “the theory of the real,” observes Heidegger, is its mathematical project, wherein method “decides in advance what truth we shall seek out in the things,” and in such a manner that the thingness of things (the being of beings) is determined axiomatically.5 It is this mathematical project that gives evidence of something other reigning in or holding sway over all the sciences. This other is modern technology. Modern science is technological in essence. Accordingly, the legitimate completion of philosophy in terms of (a) its development into the independent sciences and (b) the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking “proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientifictechnological world and of the social order proper to this world.”6 It is in terms of this latter “fact” that it is meaningful to say that the Western tradition of political philosophy attains its completion in world order

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thinking.7 More specifically, it is in the technocratic conception of world order that this completion finds its place: World order thinking thus (a) manifests the “triumph” now taking place of Western reason qua scientific-technological reason, and (b) thereby establishes the acme of subjectivism which Heidegger has characterized as “the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man.”8 This means that political thought and practice become planetary only insofar as subjectivism first is enhanced in the direction of its acme of lordship of the Earth, i.e., global governance. In that moment in which the actuality of the first beginning of Western thought is held in tension with the possibility of the second or new beginning, planetary politics and the planetary domination of technology belong together. The former is the most intense phenomenal configuration of the latter as an essential formation (Wesensgestalt). Only insofar as the historical moment is in essence that of the planetary domination of technology is there ‘planetary’ politics.

THE PLANETARY DOMINATION OF TECHNOLOGY

To speak of the planetary domination of technology as Heidegger does is to speak of the way in which Being today holds sway over beings—the reach of technology is global. In this manner Heidegger emphasizes the perdurance and endurance of technology as the essential formation characterizing the twentieth century. We are today situated in the precarious transition between first and second beginnings in the history of Being, between (a) metaphysics in its extreme dispensation of the planetary domination of technology and (b) the possibility of a thinking no longer held captive by that categorical dispensation. Properly to understand this point, therefore, one must understand by ‘technology’ not just this or that example of technology but the essence of technology.9 The word essence is what is significant here. Thus, Heidegger says: “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”; that which is technological or “the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” as “the human activity” of “productive manufacturing” is not what fundamentally characterizes technology. Rather, technology essentially understood is a possibility that “lies in revealing,” observes Heidegger. It is “revealing” (Entbergung) that fundamentally characterizes technology. Surely that is a strange conception of technology. Yet, Heidegger seeks to get us to see something here in a new way. By way of insights from the Greek meanings from which the word technology stems, Heidegger notes that “Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis” and, thus, that “Techne is a mode

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of aletheuein,” i.e., a mode of unconcealment: Techne “reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another.”10 Bringing-forth and revealing or unconcealment, bringing things into view, into the open, in a certain manner of being, this defines “the essential domain of technology.” This idea of essential domain speaks at once of a place and a way in which something happens, a way in which things are exhibited, made present. However, there is a manifest difference between the technologies of ancient and medieval eras and modern technology: “[The] revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology,” says Heidegger, “does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis.” Rather, “the revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth.’’11 Here the distinction is between bringing forth and setting upon. The former has a sense of a cooperative happening, the latter a sense of antagonism. Thus, modern technologies challenge nature— impose upon it—to yield to their demands, expediting (unlocking and exposing) it and setting it in order (i.e., transforming and rearranging it). It is this unlocking and exposing (as in “unlocking the secrets of nature” and “exposing the hitherto unknown,” as in nuclear energy) that modern technology reveals, unconceals. In short, regulating and securing nature—making nature “behave” according to values posited by the human—are the chief characteristics of modern technology thus understood. The human being is the principal participant in this happening, insofar as we accomplish this activity in our relation to nature. (Thus, the instrumental and anthropomorphic definition of technology, according to which technology is the human activity of productive manufacturing, is “correct” but not complete.) Indeed, it would seem “as though technology were a means in the hands of man.” But, says Heidegger, something more significant and fundamental is going on here: “in truth, it is the coming to presence of man that is now being ordered forth to lend a hand to the coming to presence of technology’’.12 That is to say, the manner of being human, in thought, word, and deed, is itself made subject to the requirements of the epochal dispensation that technology is, and so both human discourse and human action are enlisted into the service of the planetary domination of technology. Thus, “man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws,” observes Heidegger. This means: Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. . . . [Man] drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the

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Heidegger speaks here of the “realm” through which man is already passing every time he as subject relates to an object. This realm, of course, is the open realm of Being, the site of unconcealment, in which beings come to presence, show themselves (are brought forth, revealed), and pass away or withdraw. It is within this realm that modern technology qua orderingrevealing is driven by the human being, who is himself nevertheless subordinated to the claim or sway of this realm. Thus, human beings drive modern technology forward inasmuch as we are claimed in advance by this realm for the possibility of disclosure of beings of whatever kind. For this “challenging claim” Heidegger uses the word Gestell, Enframing—his name for the essence of modern technology: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.”14 Enframing, thus, is not a thing, but a happening, the happening expressed by the words setting upon. It is a happening that sets about ordering reality, ordering beings. It is a happening that orders beings in general as things standing in reserve. This mode of revealing, of course, governs public and private activity and governs everywhere precisely insofar as Being gives of itself, shows itself, as Enframing. It is the basis upon which our history is now essentially formed. Thus, all beings in their being, including human beings, are understood in their manner of being in terms of technology—they are as something technological. Thus, nature is understood as “natural resources,” humanity as “human resources” and “manpower”—standing-reserve available for “disposition” according to the calculations of instrumental reason. Inasmuch as every epochal dispensation in the history of Being governs thinking and doing, the contemporary dispensation of Enframing governs such that contemporary thinking and doing are technological in essence. This holds for the natural and social sciences and, indeed, also for philosophy as it is now dominated by logic and epistemology, and as it is transformed into the activity of logistics.15 In short, Enframing, understood essentially as ordering-revealing, provides the standards on the basis of which the sciences are developed—and that means the conceptual framework and methodological commitment which in each science is posited in advance as “the theory of the real.” Thus, the question of truth is involved here insofar as method

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describes in advance what truth is to be sought out in things, i.e., how things are to be revealed: “The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass.”16 Today, we noted, philosophy finds its completion in the independent sciences. The sciences, in turn, in accordance with the demands of instrumental reason, move toward unification of knowledge. The ascendancy of systems philosophy is a prime example of this process. In fact, it is in systems theory, in its formative influence upon the methods of scientific research, that the standards operative in the sciences are given over to the technological without there being a public consciousness of what is happening, of how “the real” of the respective domains is being revealed. “The modern conception of what is real,” remarks Heidegger, “the objectification in comprehending which moves from the start, always remains an attack on the real in so far as the latter is challenged to put in an appearance within the horizon of the concept.’’17 One should recall here something of the Copernican hypothesis or thoughtexperiment which transforms the manner of conception of truth. Whereas once it was said veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus (truth is the agreement of the real and the intellect), now the intellect qua representational thinking which has primacy as the real must conform to the concept of the real which the human mind has in advance. Without attention to the essence of technology as Heidegger would have it understood, we cannot fully appreciate the significance and the consequences of the modern conception of the real. W. L. Hollist and J. N. Rosenau are clear that with the advent of systems theorizing the field of international studies is immersed in “a new round of epistemological controversy.”18 Indeed, as D. P. Rapkin puts it, “The central issue here concerns the kinds of knowledge that world system theory is in principle capable of producing.”19 We will not understand why it is that the sciences cannot but move forward with the “epistemological task” of concern to systems theory “to derive and validate the basic principles and metaprinciples that commonly govern physical, biological, social, ecological, and artificial systems.”20 The domain of the political and the revealing of political things are not excluded from this happening, as is to be seen in the application of systems philosophy to the conception of world order. Albert Bergesen has put the matter rather succinctly: “Since the advent of modern science the basic unit of analysis has been the societal, whether as social formation, mode of production, nationstate, or simply society. World-system theory, conversely, suggests not only networks on a scale larger than a single society, but also implies that the motor of historical change operates at this distinctly world level.”21 What is

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significant about this methdological commitment is that “the debate on the origin/length of world history’s systemic tendencies represents an effort at formulating distinctly global theory.”22 It is only because our moment in the history of Being is that of Enframing that something like systems theory can come to the fore to provide ostensibly suitable canons for the unification of modern science: Enframing, the dispensation of Technology, is what first grants the possibility of system as systems philosophy and contemporary positive science understand and employ it; Enframing is what first grants all that attends systems theory in its emphasis on isomorphy of conceptual “frame-work.” Hence, the planetary domination of technology claims the human being to conceive the world order as a world system—as “structured image” (Gebild)—in accordance with the governing constellation of being as presence.23 Thus is it that Enframing lays claim to political thinking and doing in the service of a technocratic world order and a technocratic peace. Through such a world order, fabricated by man, “man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is’’.24 This he can do by transforming, yet continuing, the metaphysical task: “Traditionally defined as the science of being qua being, ontology in systems philosophy becomes the general theory of system qua system.”25 What matters, however, is that the technocratic conception of world order be understood not merely as a human activity but, rather, in terms of the essence of technology. That is: “If Enframing is a destining [Geschick] of the coming to presence [Wesen] of Being itself, then we may venture to suppose that Enframing, as one among Being’s modes of coming to presence, changes.”26 This is of utmost significance for world order thinking inasmuch as Technology, as an essential determination of Being, underlies “the structure of relationships of a certain type of humanity to beings as a whole,” yet every change in the understanding of Being brings about “a transposition of another type of humanity to the whole of beings,” i.e., a different historical determination of human being.27 Thereby, one comes to see that a future world order qua technocratic is not a course either inevitable or unalterable.

THE TECHNOCRATIC CONCEPTION OF WORLD ORDER

“Not what a thing is, what it is made of, or for what purpose it exists, defines it, but how it is organized.”28 This is the key premise of the systems approach to world order. Its import is twofold: (a) in the ontological commitment it expresses; and (b) in the political practice enjoined by that commitment. In

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this conception, (a) all phenomena are understood and grasped in terms of organization, rather than in terms of matter, substance, idea or spirit, or purpose; (b) the political practice enjoined is that of steering and control, with emphasis on maintaining and enhancing the viability of the system over against pathological threats to its viable operation. In short, what has primacy is the regulatory machinery of the system, and politics is a matter of managing physical and human resources—what is present in the manner of technical inventory, standing-reserve—and subject to human disposition. The ontological commitment that sees phenomena in terms of organization and as elements of a system (as standing-reserve) is the requisite of systems philosophy consistent with its orienting theoretical concept of system: “. . . in any hierarchical situation, the norm for parts-performance is system-performance.”29 But what is tacit here is nothing other than the modern freedom of subjectivity which vanishes in the objectivity commensurate with it, as Heidegger points out. A manifest objectivity hides the subjectivity correlative to it. Thus, “man makes secure for himself material, bodily, psychic, and spiritual resources, and this for the sake of his own security, which wills dominion over whatever is—as the potentially objective—in order to correspond to the Being of whatever is, to the will to power.”30 In the historical moment of Technology’s reign, the human being’s concern for security is such as to demand an order of rank among beings in which the human being has primacy with respect to the disposition of beings. It is in terms of the above conceptual framework that political science today takes over from political philosophy the task of presenting an ontology of that domain or region of being which politics is. This conceptual framework expresses a theory of political phenomena (in Heidegger’s sense of theory of the real) in a manner consistent with what Heidegger calls the fundamental characteristic of the scientific attitude, viz., its cybernetic or technological character. Insofar as “the central reality of the cybernetic approach is organization,” political science manifests the precedence of method, being operationally oriented in its research enterprise. Conceiving politics in its problematic to be a matter of organization, control, and steering, political science thereby gives evidence of that ‘something other’ which governs and holds sway such that it is correct to say that political science is technological in essence.31 The “conceptual fit” of systems theory to world politics—and to world order theory specifically—has been explored by Ervin Laszlo.32 Such seminal conceptual work is never dated, and so merits consideration even today. From the perspective of systems philosophy, it is Laszlo’s diagnosis that instability of the contemporary world order is due to an imbalance between “material

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technics (the various technologies of environmental control and resource use)” and “societal technics (the technologies of social organization and control).” On the basis of this diagnosis, Laszlo speaks of the need to evolve “new, more adequate regulative mechanisms.” “Since reversing twentieth century technologies to the level of earlier centuries appears unrealistic, there is no other choice but to lift the level of societal technics to a corresponding level. This means, in fact, the globalization of the decision-making organization and control processes which are currently vested in national governments.”33 Laszlo speaks of a “world authority” evolving insofar as it can be expected to “grow out of societal processes where the purposes and motivations of the participating systems are gradually harmonized and prove amenable to coordination and control by a governing body.”34 Presumably, it is the test of time that makes it appropriate to speak thus of sociocultural evolution. Yet, antecedent to this test of time is the social engineering premise: governmental frameworks and principles can be and are to be designed—they issue from “the drawing boards of social engineers,” whether they remain utopian (on the one hand) or (on the other hand) they are implemented “by coercion” or as a consequence of having “created the conditions which elicit the relevance of the theoretic conceptions.” To create conditions that elicit the relevance of the theoretic conceptions, to institute a “functional global steering process” in the interest of a “central guidance system” which is the realization of a “theoretical ideal in global practice,” is to adhere to social engineering precepts—despite the presumed “benevolence” of such conceptions when contrasted to the “imposition” associated with “the global transplant of the national government concept” or “world government.” Laszlo’s systems approach to world order remains one of “globalization-from-above,” scientific and technological expertise engaged in its service. In later published work Laszlo continues his commitment to systems science applied to world order. Laszlo remains committed to an empirical approach to conceptualization of the world. For him, “the single continuously tested and critically constructed empirical world concept comes from the theories of the contemporary empirical sciences.”35 While he has noted in such work that it was not possible (at that time) “to argue with cogency either for or against a systems concept of mankind,” Laszlo nevertheless conceives of “mankind” as “a dynamic open system possessing cybernetic mechanisms that tend to reduce deviations from its norm.”36 This “norm” presumably is to be articulated in terms of what empirical science discloses to us. Thus, for Laszlo technology qua applied science properly can be expected to “bring about states of environment which, when sensed, match the intrinsic codes of a human being.” “Intrinsic codes” are “normative organism-envi-

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ronment transactional states” and include “cognitive and aesthetic standards.”37 More telling, Laszlo speaks of an ongoing process of “evolutionary restructuration” that applies to social systems as well. “A human society is . . . culturally coded. Society’s codes are mores, values, customs, practices, laws, regulations, and the like.”38 The conceptualization of human society as “culturally coded” is then linked to the new task of systems philosophy given over to social engineering. Laszlo exhibits a questionable confidence and deference to “the technicians of the new knowledge,” technicians who “would replace Plato’s philosopher-kings, if not as philosophers turned engineers, then as engineers turned philosophers.”39 Here “instrumental” or “strategic” reason intervenes with societal technics, “consciously speeding up the processes of societal reorganization” (e.g., controlling and steering information flow globally, systematically instilling certain values, “cultural codes,” and establishing and enhancing “deviationreducing mechanisms” within subsystems). Laszlo ultimately concedes what he ostensibly disclaimed by rejecting the assumption of “the sui generis nature of society”: “Vast societal processes are not the products of human engineering, but can nevertheless be guided by engineered institutions. . . . Thus only the regulatory element of the world will be subject to social engineering, and only this element needs to be purposely designed.”40 This, for all practical purposes however, is everything, inasmuch as this element regulates subsystems, securing their functional harmony with the values or cultural codes of the world system (i.e., determines what is legitimate, what is to be permitted, and what is deviant, what is to be denied). The systems approach to world order is clearly committed to social engineering as a matter of principle as well as practice, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Indeed, it does so in a manner that is wholly problematic, despite claims by proponents of this approach that a consciously engineered instrument of global homeostasis is transient.41 Strategic intervention in the process of transforming values and designing cultural codes as well as in the process of transforming institutional structures and patterns of behavior seeks to be solicitous of individual and group action. But genuine solicitude is precisely what systems science and social technology so understood negate to the extent that individuals are, quite literally, counted as human resources (standing-reserve) and are assigned the ontological status of “entities present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit). It is precisely this theoretic conception, this metaphysical category, that distorts the ontological status of human being and that Heidegger had sought to overcome through his thinking the ontological constitution or structures of human Dasein in Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Under the sway of traditional metaphysics, the human has been conceived in a way such

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as to be subsumed by the existentia-essentia distinction which understands entities as things extant, present-at-hand (nature) or ready-to-hand (equipment). With the intensification of subjectivity and its commensurate objectification of the whole of being, humanity succumbs to this insurrection by being transformed into an object and counted as inventory subordinate to technical goals. The other to the self qua subject is first reduced to the status of a “person-Thing present-at-hand” and understood with respect to a mode of time (viz., the present) and then manipulated as a “person-Thing ready-tohand” in accordance with its assigned value. But, thereby, all entities, human beings included, are “passed over” in their most proper being (in how they are) and suffer a loss of being insofar as they are thus ‘’revealed’’.42 The ontological commitment of systems science thus far considered can be expected to become further entrenched if it should appropriate ‘exact philosophy’ as its formally articulated ground. Exact philosophy is itself a methodological transformation of traditional philosophical discourse according to the requirements of formal method, or what I believe Heidegger would call “logistics.” I refer briefly to the work of Mario Bunge by way of example in making my point.43 Mario Bunge’s ‘exact’ treatment of ‘things’ in answer to the question “What is a thing?” is exemplary of what is happening as representational, calculative thinking broadens its sway within philosophy itself. From there it promises to have a decisive effect on subsystems of concern to the positive sciences, and thus on empirical political science in its move to more encompassing quantification, hence by extension on world order theorizing. In exact philosophy one has not the overcoming of metaphysics but its mathematicization in the extreme. As an example of this process, Bunge provides formal elucidation of basic concepts of what he calls “a certain metaphysical system in the course of construction.” Bunge adheres to two rules of exact philosophy: (a) “every philosophical concept should have a definite logical or mathematical status (set, function, algebraic structure, or what have you) as well as a definite interpretation in factual terms”; and (b) “every philosophical doctrine should be a theory, i.e., a hypothetico-deductive system, or a part of a theory.” One cannot miss what is essential here—formal logic, mathematics, theory construction in the sense of axiomatic system. Following these rules, Bunge articulates precisely such a hypothetico-deductive (axiomatic) system—postulates, definitions, theorems, corollaries—giving formalized conceptions of ‘substantial individuals’, ‘the world’, ‘form’, ‘properties’, ‘attributes’, ‘things’, ‘system’. The basic thesis of exact philosophy has its implications for the political domain in the conception of political things and in the presumed legitima-

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tion given to their disposition. Insofar as (a) the principles of exact philosophy hold sway and (b) this exactness is appropriated by systems science as its formally articulated ground (i.e., its foundation), and (c) the positive sciences, in turn, appropriate the method of general systems, then the ontologies under development by the positive sciences cannot but be mathematicized in the extreme. Political science under the influence of systems science with its appeal to isomorphy of conceptual frameworks thereby succumbs to a fully theoretic orientation and reveals or discloses political phenomena accordingly. Thus, to the extent that it appropriates the systems approach so understood, world order thinking cannot but conceive of the future world order in a wholly theoretic manner. World order thinking thus becomes global political ‘theory’ in the strict sense of the word. In such mathematical or axiomatic disclosure of the political, Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon celebrate their triumph; for these three founding thinkers of the modern period gave precedence to method and, hence, to a project which sought to give political science certainty such as is experienced in mathematics. It is thus that the subjectivity of modernity is effectively absorbed into the objectivity supposedly correlative to it, i.e., into the objectivity ostensibly belonging to the project of mathesis universalis. Consider Heidegger’s clarification of this: The metaphysical essence of subjectivity is not fulfilled in “I-ness,” much less in the egoism of man. The “I” is always only a possible, and in certain situations the proximate, occasion in which the essence of subjectivity professes itself and seeks an accommodation for its profession. Subjectivity, as the Being of any particular being, is never merely “subjective” in the pejorative sense of being the random opinion of an individual. Therefore, if with regard to subjectivity so understood we wish to speak of the subjectivism of modern thought, we must completely reject any notion that it is a question here of something “merely subjective,” of egoistic and solipsistic opinion and affectation. For the essence of subjectivism is objectivism, insofar as everything becomes an object for the subject. . . . All objectivity is “subjective.” This does not mean that being comes to be a mere point of view and opinion set down by some casual and arbitrary ‘I’. That all objectivity is “subjective” means that what encounters us comes to be established as an object standing in itself. “Beingness is subjectivity” and “Beingness is objectivity” say the self-same thing.44

Let us consider, moreover, what is involved here by way of Heidegger’s critique of the epistemological project which modernity inaugurates and which has prominence in contemporary philosophical practice. It is important first

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to understand that Heidegger’s quarrel is not with the theoretical attitude in itself but, rather, with its tendency “to generalize itself in a certain way, and to take all Being as presence-at-hand, or to claim that this is the fundamental way in which entities ‘really’ are.”45 Insofar as the human way to be is not that of mere presence-at-hand, the theoretical attitude operative in systems science—and applied to the political domain in general and thus to conceptualization of the world order—must be seen to be fundamentally at issue. The sway of the subject-object relation in the theoretical attitude is what remains questionable; for “this beginning with a subject-object relation obstructs access to the real ontological question regarding the mode of being of the subject as well as the mode of being of the entity that may possibly but does not necessarily have to become an object.”46 That is, insofar as we acknowledge the intentional structure of human existence—the human Dasein’s always already being with other beings in the disclosure of a world—neither human Dasein nor the entities among whom human Dasein finds itself are originally given in the relation of subject to object. Rather, this relation comes about only as a consequence of both “a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully” and an insurrection on the part of one entity (namely, the human being) to preeminent subjectness and its objectification of another entity (e.g., things of nature) which it understands by way of an overarching concept of being as extantness. Extantness, or presence-at-hand, is not the fundamental way in which human Dasein and other things have their being. We understand this—in a way systems science does not—if we recall that (a) to conceive of extant entities as present-at-hand is to overlook or decontextualize their equipmental character, i.e., their involvement in a referential totality, and (b) to conceive human Dasein as such is likewise to overlook or decontextualize its manner of being as ek-sistent, i.e., as being in the world “by way of disclosing it or originally opening it up” and not merely as being within the world in the way a tool or a tree is. John Richardson’s remarks on the human ontological constitution of Being-in-the-world, as articulated by Heidegger, are particularly salient in pointing out an “inevitable failure” of the theoretical attitude: . . . Being-in-the-world . . . has a ‘temporal stretch’ to it. We are in our world by virtue of the way we project towards ends, have been thrown into moods, and absorb ourselves in the entities about us. In the first Division of Being and Time these three aspects of Being-in are referred to as existentiality, facticity, and falling. In the second Division they are identified as the three dimensions of our temporality, being correlated respectively with the future, the past, and the present. Heidegger calls these dimensions “the ecstases” [die Ekstasen] of temporality . . . meaning by this that they are the ways in

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which we ‘stand outside’ ourselves. And they also constitute the sense in which we are ‘stretched along’ temporally. As fundamentally ‘ecstatic’ in this temporal way, we reach ahead towards our ends, from out of a rootedness in what we have been, and through (or by means of) the entities with which we are preoccupied. Our future, grasped at this fundamental level, does not consist in some span of moments that have not yet become present and that therefore have no relevance to the way in which we currently exist; our future is given as the ‘horizon’ towards which we are already projecting, and only because the future is given in this way is any present experience of entities possible. Similarly, the past of our temporality is not that sequence of nows which we have left irrevocably behind, but that which we understand ourselves to have been, and out of which all our current projects and actions arise. And the present, finally, is not some detached instant of internal experience, but an encountering of entities ‘outside’ ourselves, held within the context of those ecstases into past and future.47

It is the whole of this “temporal stretch,” in all its context of significance, that is lost whenever human Dasein is conceived as something merely present-at-hand. The full ecstatic or temporal context of the political must always mean first and foremost an individual human Dasein’s being-political in his temporality, in his politicality. This being-political must be understood in terms of the Dasein’s existentiality (projection of self toward ends), facticity (thrownness into moods), and falling (absorption in things about us), thus, in terms of concerns that are futural, past, and present. But it is precisely this ecstatic or temporal context of being-political which is unencompassable by the theoretical attitude which insists on conceiving being-political in presence-at-hand terms. The content of the political encountered and represented by the theorist in his conceptual framework is, thus, necessarily narrowed. The systems science conception of the political in a wholly theoretic manner and, thus, by extension, its conception of the future world order, therefore cannot but be (a) fundamentally distorting, (b) prematurely orienting, and (c) constraining of the authentic possibilities of political being. Much of the broader phenomenal domain of the political as it is disclosed actively in the lived concrete projects and actions of the individual political Dasein cannot but be trivialized by a systems approach to world order, no matter how expansive its input-output and feedback schemes are. “Under the aegis of the metaphysical Vorstellung [representation], therefore, the temporal world at large becomes . . . a flattened-out or depthless representation of the world in miniature, an inclusive ‘world picture’ (Weltbild), in which everything, including human being, has been reduced to the derived—timeless and ‘worldless’—mode of present-at-handness (Vorhandenheit). This means

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that the differential ‘things as such’ are in fact seen as a systematized totality at a distance from their lived context—as located (identified and permanently fixed) within a hierarchized grid of mathematically or geometrically determined coordinates.”48 Yet, it is the broader domain of temporal-ecstatic being political which is the genuinely creative origin of all that is vital to the creation of a just world order. That is, the systems approach to world order ignores both the horizon and the rootedness vital to the individual political Dasein’s self-understanding. Yet, it is precisely this ecstatic context of political understanding which determines the co-disclosure of the political by human Daseienden in all aspects of praxis, hence which conditions in advance every possibility of global identity and planetary dwelling. Neither these horizons nor these traditions can be legitimately ignored or dismissed without effectively disburdening the individual political Dasein of the task which is ever properly his and hers. It is noteworthy that some world system theorists recognize the “totalizing” character of the systems approach to be a theoretical problem. Barry Gills, for example, concedes, “on close inspection, there is still a certain kind of ‘totalizing notion’ lurking within the present formulation of the world system concept.”49 According to Barry in his “autocritique of world systems analysis,” such analysis involves “oversystematicity,” i.e., “(over)determining system outcomes in all of the parts of the world system.” Noting that this problem parallels the methodological controversy “generated by structural realism in international relations theory,” Gills remarks: . . . an attempt at elegant theory construction that emphasizes overarching system-level causality risks deemphasizing ‘unit level processes’ such that they become either insignificant or are conceptualized as mere epiphenomena of the system itself. Oversystematicity thus implies that system structure (over)determines the behavior of all the constituent elements thereof. It is, therefore, criticized as being reductionist.50

All of the foregoing reminds one of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of the world order task: All reflection about the potential ordering of our world must proceed from the deep tension that exists between the asserted authority of science and moral and religious traditions.51 In the case of world order thinking, the tension is between (a) the asserted authority of the theoretical attitude of contemporary political science in its delimitation of the political and (b) the preconceptual and everyday having-to-do with the political proper to every human Dasein prior to (and even despite) such ‘theory’. To acknowledge this tension is not to accord primacy or preference to science or to tradition, however. This is not the dilemma, for science as the

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West’s cultural offspring is itself part of the West’s intellectual tradition. The self-understanding of political science likewise cannot but be situated in the historical tradition of political philosophy. Yet, this tradition, determined by metaphysics as the fundamental history of the West, is itself now at issue insofar as orthodoxy and orthopraxis obfuscate “a genuine phenomenological openness” to the political. Consider Heidegger’s following remarks in Being and Time: [Not only is Dasein] inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light, but also . . . Dasein simultaneously falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or less explicitly taken hold. This tradition keeps it from providing its own guidance, whether in inquiring or in choosing. . . . When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed, it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.52

Thus, any ontology of the political which informs contemporary political understanding from out of metaphysics demands not merely critique but also the positive phenomenological activity of deconstruction, i.e., gaining access to the primordial sources of the political, allowing political phenomena to show themselves in and from themselves.53 If, as Heidegger claims, “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible,” then it is only as a phenomenology of the political that political ontology is possible—possible in contradistinction from the theoretical project, but also in contradistinction from the everyday, ambiguous understanding of the political upon which empirical political science seeks to improve. In short, the foregoing observations make it clear that systems science is yet prey to a metaphysics of substantiality as informed by an existentia-essentia distinction and does not appreciate the limitations of ancient, medieval, and modern ontologies under the rule of substance (ousia, substantia, res). Things, including man, are to systems science as technical inventory (things present-at-hand) and are in the mode of organization (system). Assignment of position and the value of things issue from the human being as preeminent subject in the manner of will to power (self-assertion) and as the privileged Archimedean point (measure, metron) for the reckoning of beings. This is the

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mostly tacit standpoint of a political techne to which systems science subscribes. But this is a wholly Cartesian move yet under the sway of the Cartesian ontology of the world and its categories of res as cogitans (thought or mind) and extensae (extension or body), such that (notwithstanding modifications) Cartesian conceptions of space and time define the grounding coordinates of the world system.54 Systems science, in its presumed ‘access’ to entities, thus in its presumed objectivity, is conceptually consistent with Descartes in confirming “the opinion that to know an entity in what is supposedly the most rigorous ontical manner is our only possible access to the primary Being of the entity which such knowledge reveals.”55 But this is tenable only if (a) there is nothing objectionable in Descartes’ “narrowing down” of the question of the world “to that of Things of Nature [Naturedinglichheit] as those entities within-the-world which are proximally accessible” and (b) the only genuine access to beings is to be found in mathematical knowing (intellectio). In his conception of substance and of our knowledge of substances, Descartes must understand substances to be self-sufficient. That is, “a substance should be fully comprehensible in its own right; to understand why it is as it is, one need not introduce references to any other entities, nor speak of its relations to such entities. This defining feature of the Cartesian concept of substance thus fits nicely with one of the motivations . . . leading toward the present-athand: the intent to discover entities in themselves, apart from any context. In claiming that such substances are what there most basically are, and in attempting to bring all his explanations down to ground in just these, Descartes already displays that guiding feature of the theoretical attitude.”56 Precisely this decontextualizing, which systems theory perpetuates, testifies to the untenability of the Cartesian ontology of the world.57 Here we can see how the alleged self-sufficiency of objective knowing implicit in the Cartesian ontology undermines the political even in its conventional sense, i.e., how it is that this ontology decontextualizes political being and thereby presents us with a paradox consequent to the metaphysical discovery of man as res cogitans, as thinking thing. Jean-Pierre Cavaillé puts it thus: Cartesian philosophy establishes its first principle in the autofoundation of the thinking subject. It is not possible to understand this identity of thinking and being other than in the first person, in the individual’s reflection on himself: I think, therefore I am. The systematic calling into question of every truth received from others (breaking down the shaky walls of common opinion and of authority), to the sole benefit of the use of individual reason, is the precondition for the metaphysical foundation of the structure of

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knowledge. The metaphysical discovery of man is only possible by abstraction from his social being: to comprehend the true nature of man, which is to think, we must begin by separating him from those accidents in him that are history, politics, cultural heritage, social life. In other words he must be stripped of all conviviality.58

In what sense is an intellectual and moral autonomy—and, thus, intellectual/cognitive self-sufficiency of the ego—posited by Descartes? Cavaillé continues: At the beginning of the Recherche de la verité, Descartes sets as his objective “to open to everyone the means for finding in himself, and, without borrowing anything from any other person, all the science that is necessary for him to lead his life.” The other person thus remains the one from whom the ideal is not “to borrow anything,” to whom I refer myself only if I wish to: because to be I do not need the other person to be, but only to think that I think. Even if I share with others the universality of reason and the infinity of liberty (twofold condition for the communication of knowledge and for moral practice), others are ontologically foreign to me. Each one “can by thinking exclude from him-self . . . every other substance that thinks or that is extended.” And this separation of thinking substances seems to make it a priori impossible to have a consistent theory of collective action which, in order to develop, must postulate the irreductibility [sic] of collective being to individual being, in other words requiring an intersubjectivity inhibiting precisely the Cartesian concept of subjectivity. By conceiving of himself as a separate substance, the thinking subject cuts himself off in other ways from the natural world. Cartesian metaphysics opens up an ontological break between individuals, making it impossible to constitute a theory of political action.59

The “ontological break” to which Cavaillé refers is uncannily carried over into the orientation of systems science in its attempts to delimit (i.e., socially engineer) the political—and this in spite of Descartes’ own disapproval of political reform. What I have in mind is system science’s tacit entanglement in what Cavaillé understands as “the dialectic of utopia.” Cavaillé refers to a certain “textual ambiguity” in Descartes’ Discourse insofar as there Descartes employs a “political utopia” as “analogy of philosophy”: Considering this double analogy (urbanistic and political) in itself, it seems that we are able to deduce from it that Descartes aspired to an ideal society, utopian and autocratic, governed by unchangeable laws instituted once and for all by a single legislator. Replaced in its historical context, it would in fact be a sort of rationalist idealization for absolutism which, almost

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Cavaillé adds, however, that Descartes himself “returns to this analogy to affirm in substance that it is impossible to derive good politics from true science and that nothing in the political realm is more detestable than utopia. In short, that philosophy and politics, whatever analogical relationships may be possible, are incommensible.”61 Yet, as Cavaillé remarks concerning “the dialectic of political utopia” in interaction with “the specifically Cartesian attitude”—and here we must think systems science—there is in Descartes’ analogy an illumination of “certain fundamental aspects of the relationships that modern science since its origins has maintained with politics.” Thus: Philosophical discourse creates a space for political utopia, as a correct analogy for science, even if this space for political utopia in the Cartesian text is immediately filled in, rejected, covered over by the utopia of science. The disavowed utopia remains one of the potential results of Cartesian science, first of all because it is an integral part of the referential apparatus through which the modern episteme acquires its definition. Utopia, in other words, is one of the founding myths of science. Once it has been established, science rejects the images and dreams out of which it was born (and the Cartesian text is exemplary from this point of view), but utopia reappears recurringly in history, as a political project justified through science. Because political utopia is itself one of the models for nascent science, it can then take as model victorious science. . . . [T]he specifically Cartesian attitude, which aims at rejecting utopia a priori and with it every form of politics as a production of science, is even more paradigmatic of modern scientificity. For the true utopia of science consists, perhaps, in its secret desire to supplant politics, to substitute itself for it . . . [emphasis added]62

Systems theory, and thus in particular the systems approach to the future of the world order, viewed in its continuity with “the specifically Cartesian attitude,” becomes nothing less than a tacit “denegation of politics”—an attempt “to dissolve it into the quantitative uniformity of its mathematical universality.” Cavaillé speaks all too aptly when he says: “The arrival of the utopia of science necessarily coincides with the end of politics.” Thus, I conclude that the subject-object dichotomy and the substance ontology governing the conceptual framework of systems philosophy have the consequence of illegitimate manipulation rather than ‘authentic solicitude’ with respect to entities in general, but especially with respect to human

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being. The difference between illegitimate manipulation and authentic solicitude is, in the first instance, one of comportment and conception—the former being that of extantness and person-Thing present-at-hand, the latter that of the human Dasein as ek-sistent being and its corresponding ontological structural concept of care (Sorge) as its kind of being. Consider Heidegger’s following remarks on ‘care’, ‘concern’, and ‘solicitude’ in the context of his discussion of the human Dasein as Mitsein (Being-with) and Mitdasein (Being-with others): If Dasein-with remains existentially constitutive for Being-in-the-world, then, like our circumspective dealings with the ready-to-hand within-theworld (which, by way of anticipation, we have called ‘concern’), it must be interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care; for as “care” the Being of Dasein in general is to be defined. . . . Concern is a character-of-Being which Being-with cannot have as its own, even though Being-with, like concern, is a Being-towards entities encountered within-the-world. But those entities towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude.63

Solicitude, as the manner in which the human Dasein comports itself with other Dasein (other human beings), can be deficient, indifferent, or positive. Indeed, as Heidegger notes, insofar as “Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in the deficient modes of solicitude,” we can then understand why the conceptual framework of systems science has the consequence of manipulation. That is, the human Dasein “gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters ‘within’ the world, and from the Being they possess.” In other words, indifferent and deficient modes of solicitude are inextricably tied to the misleading ontological interpretation of the human kind of being as a Being-present-at-hand within-the-world, i.e., as a thing of nature. Insofar as such things are subject to human dominion, they are thus subject to a manipulative disposition as mere objects present-athand. But, not only are things so distorted. So is the world as such distorted in being conceived as system. To cite William Spanos here, “this reification of existence [as presence] is a spatialization of time. As the etymology suggests, it constitutes a willfully coerced metamorphosis of temporality into simultaneous image or picture.”64 In short, at best the abiding ontological comportment of systems science only approaches a solicitude the mode of which, however, is deficient or

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indifferent. That is, concern for others—human beings and beings of nature—which is presumably manifest in a deliberate restructuring of sociopolitical arrangements with a view to calculated effectiveness and efficiency of a world system is yet deficient insofar as these others are categorized as present-at-hand, and indifferent insofar as these others are reckoned as human and natural resources (i.e., brought within, and subjected to, a calculus as units of inventory, as standing-reserve). It may be said that a systems approach to world order theorizing can overcome such an ontological orientation and move in the direction of positive solicitude. Assuming such a possibility, however, I believe that the conceptual framework inherent in this approach would yet be constrained to avoid what Heidegger has called a “leap-in” (einspringen) form of solicitude which “dominates” rather than liberates the individual qua political being to authentic care: This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern himself. The Other is thus thrown out of his own position; he steps back so that afterwards, when the matter has been attended to, he can either take it over as something finished and at his disposal, or disburden himself of it completely. In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him. This kind of solicitude, which leaps in and takes away ‘care’, is to a large extent determinative for Being with one another, and pertains for the most part to our concern with the ready-to-hand.65

That is, the only solicitude of which systems science is capable is one which ‘takes over’ for the individual political Dasein the achievement of world order which is his and her proper concern. Systems science, through steering and control, ‘throws out’ the political Dasein from his and her own position of co-disclosing a future world order by way of his and her resolute projects. By blueprinting, engineering, and then implementing a world political system in which systems-performance is the standard for parts-performance, systems theory requires that the individual political Dasein step back in deference to the social engineer, to the theoretical project of those possessing political techne. Yet, it is in this way that technocratic futurism and the systems approach to world order dominate, rather than liberate political Dasein to authentic care. In short, contrary to Laszlo and to those who would pursue the systems approach to world order, I claim that ontological and epistemological difficulties are what remain most at issue in the move from the nation-state to the world level of analysis—which movement Laszlo does not understand fundamentally enough, hence his claim. Ontology and epistemology, both in gen-

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eral and particularly with respect to political things, remain at issue. The systems approach to world order must, therefore, be seen to be an ontologically questionable undertaking. The Cartesian ontology of the world, as we have seen, is at the heart of the technocratic conception of world order, i.e., it holds sway essentially even if unacknowledged by its proponents. This ontology, in its general conception of things and in its implicit conception of political things, is objectionable. To the extent that it adheres to the technocratic conception of the future world order—and does so especially under the influence of systems philosophy—world order thinking cannot but rest on flawed metaphysical presuppositions. The task of thinking about a future world order, of course, cannot be wholly free of the influence of the technological. That much is clear given the essence of technology as the epochal dispensation yet governing word, thought, and deed in our day. But it is one thing to say that calculative thinking has its place (which I am prepared to grant) and quite another to conceive of all relevant or coherent world order thinking as theoretic, axiomatic, hypothetico-deductive, etc., (which I cannot grant). To surrender world order thinking to the track of such a calculus is to forgo what is essential and what claims us today for possibilities of planetary thinking and planetary dwelling in a mode other than technological. Insofar as it is in thinking and speech that phenomena are disclosed to and for a public, it is critical to concede that calculative thinking is but one way in which the relation of word and thing is expressed. Calculative thinking is but one way in which political phenomena can be understood. Here language—that phenomenon through which the relation of word and thing is disclosed—is what matters in clarifying political phenomena. This means we must come to see that ‘word’ rules in that it is not “just a name-giving grasp reaching for what is present and already portrayed, it is not only a means of portraying what lies before us. On the contrary, the word first bestows presence, that is, Being in which things appear as beings.”66 Such is the power of the word in its disclosure of reality. Political science under the sway of an isomorphy of conceptual frameworks already, i.e., from the inception, bestows presence to political things in a way that must distort. Inasmuch as it is the theoretic conception that holds sway here, determining in advance what truth is to be revealed in things, there is here already a failure. That is, what matters in genuine disclosure is “fulfilling the requirement . . . to take the phenomena as they offer themselves as against all firmly rooted theory and even despite it, that is, the requirement to align theory according to the phenomena rather than the opposite, to do violence to the phenomena by a preconceived theory.”67 Yet, in the absence of any heed to what is happening

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in this manner of revealing the political, it is precisely this distortion which rules in contemporary political thinking and doing as if it were a fate that compels without exception. In short, political science as swayed by the theoretic conception and systems science never lets political things be as they are, never lets human beings be in their most proper politicality. Consequently, for all that political science says in its theoretic conceptions, the domain of the political and the essence of being-political remain enigmatic. It is this enigma which calls for another thinking, an essential (wesentliche) or originary (anfängliche) thinking, indeed an essential political thinking in which the presumed self-evidence of tradition is rendered questionable. Despite the urgency of the world order crisis which solicits answers to questions and solutions to global problems, a reflective insight into “the crisis of political understanding” insists on renouncing representational saying, i.e., discourse steeped in subjectivity such that the thingness of things issues from representation by the human subject. “Renunciation commits itself to the higher rule of the word which first lets a thing be as thing.”68 This is no mere negation. On the contrary, it is affirmation, openness to the original claim of the political and political beings, to what this claim vouchsafes to a thinking attuned to the ecstatic-temporal character of being-political. Only along this way can thinking prepare what may endure. Thus must an essential thinking concerning the future of the world order pit itself against a calculative thinking largely inattentive to the need for reflective insights. Hence, one is led to conclude: (a) The systems approach to world order is not the same as essential political thinking; (b) world system consciousness is not the same as planetary thinking; (c) global homeostasis is not the same as planetary dwelling. The former conceptions are yet under the sway of modern metaphysics and, moreover, manifest an extreme possibility of metaphysical thinking which, as I have tried to make clear, is ontologically questionable. Heidegger’s insights as I have tried to articulate them provide reasons for being wary of world order thinking qua technocratic reason. Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology, over against the instrumental definition of technology and the presupposition that the future is inevitably and unalterably technocratic, requires that one reject the legitimacy of the systems approach to world order theorizing.

BEYOND TECHNOCRATIC FUTURISM

According to Richard Falk and Samuel Kim, world order thinking can be categorized under the rubrics normative futurism and technocratic futurism.69 World

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order thinking in the latter mode has been found to be an ontologically questionable undertaking precisely insofar as its ground is the Cartesian metaphysic operative in systems philosophy. Of course, those in the camp of the technological futurists who have explored the relation of technology to the world order have indicated something correct about the character of the future. The future promises to be technological—necessarily so, for as long as Being holds sway in the mode of Enframing and, thus, so long as the metaphysics of modernity in its extreme configuration holds sway over thought, word, and deed. Technocratic futurism, however, falls amiss in its projection of the future inasmuch as it does not see beyond the technological dispensation, i.e., to Being’s turning from Enframing, thus to a turning from metaphysical categories to essential thinking. The normative dimension of world order theorizing must also be considered problematic to the extent that value thinking tacitly has its basis in the Nietzschean metaphysic. Those in the camp of the normative futurists who explore the prospect of a transformed philosophic orientation—of a new posit of values grounded in human subjectivity—also can be said to indicate something correct of the character of the future. That is, the contemporary crisis, viewed metaphysically, has for its horizon the possibility of a revaluation ultimately consistent with the Nietzschean devaluation of formerly transcendent values. To the extent that the human being remains the preeminent subject, he cannot but participate in the unfolding of this horizon of self-legislation and self-determination. Yet, this metaphysical horizon of thinking and doing promises total conquest of the Earth along the path of technologically organized humanity—a path coordinate with the hegemony of Western reason qua scientific-technological reason. From the vantage of the history of the West conceived as the history of Being, this manner of thinking must necessarily lag behind the possibility to which humans are summoned from out of the future, i.e., in Being’s turning from Technology/Enframing and, in that turning, to the corresponding transformation of the human essence in yet another historical possibility of being. The question, then, is: What of world order theorizing is to be salvaged after being confronted with a Heideggerian critique? I believe that much of the basic impetus of the world order movement is sustained. Indeed, the basic position of world order thinking is buttressed as a result of this Heideggerian meditation. Let me elaborate. Consider, first, the remarks of Mark Blasius: “It is possible that ‘world order’ is becoming a ‘sign’ in public consciousness for the political itself. The existing world order increasingly constitutes the contemporary problematique for political analysts, and the idea of a world order is becoming a historically

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significant way of ordering our understanding of the nature of politics, as the polis was for the Greeks and the state has been for modern theorists.”70 Heidegger’s view that the history of metaphysics as a history of Being constitutes the fundamental history of the West lends major support to Blasius’s suggestion that the idea of world order is becoming a historically significant way of ordering our understanding of the nature of politics. Indeed, on the basis of Heidegger’s thought one can say that political thinking attuned to “the age” must be global in orientation, for to the world history which now emerges as the broadening out of Western history belongs necessarily the task of practicing planetary politics and establishing global governance. The dispensation of Enframing, as the planetary domination of technology, confronts the human being with this challenge unavoidably. The problem, as Richard Falk correctly puts it, is to find ways to express and understand the complex substance of politics on a global scale.71 What is especially appealing about the intellectual history of the world order movement, as Falk appropriately observes, is that this history has been characterized by a “spirit of tentativeness,” advanced as “one of search rather than of mechanical promotion of a given pattern of normative solution.” Clearly, given this element of quest, the world order studies focus on the global problems of war, poverty, social and political injustice, and ecological decay is unassailable. Clearly, from the perspective of prudential action the world order movement is wholly justified to point out the dimensions of the planetary crisis and to assert the legitimacy of transnational efforts to safeguard the life-support systems of the Earth. This is wholly congruent with this spirit of tentativeness. Notwithstanding, the Heideggerian critique carried out here makes it incumbent upon world order scholars to address more fundamental questions in addition to those concerning more or less urgent and practical problems of transition. In this respect, R.B.J. Walker is entirely correct to point out the need for sustained critical attention to the philosophical and metatheoretical difficulties involved in a world order orientation and in the corresponding methodological issues.72 This means that both ontological and epistemological questions implicit in the human sciences are central to the world order quest. Even more fundamentally, the legitimacy of political techne and the scientific enterprise applied to the problem of world order remains most at issue. Given that the world order orientation per se is unassailable, the Heideggerian critique also makes it clear that the world order movement’s challenge to the logic of statecraft and its ordering principle of sovereignty is wholly legitimate. This logic and its principle are part of a metaphysical epoch in the history of the West now undergoing closure. Accordingly, con-

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sistent with the requirements of prudential action, strategies of transition characterized as reforming—e.g., work towards demilitarization of international relations, enhancement of developmental assistance from the industrialized North to the developing South, augmentation of the authority of institutional structures of the United Nations (such as the International Court of Justice)—are to be encouraged. It is essential, however, that such augmentation of institutional and structural processes retain the distinction between global government and global governance (about which I shall have more to say shortly). National policies characterized as system-diminishing and system-maintaining are to be considered objectionable on philosophical grounds (such as what has been presented here), despite the apparently unwavering primacy of the modern nation-state in world politics. This is to be considered compelling even with respect to claims to sovereignty made by developing countries, where there is especially at issue the problem of confronting what Rajni Kothari has called the new ideology of “technologism,” i.e., “the growing autonomy of the technological estate.” Given the “dominion of technology and its pervasive impact on politics” such that the latter “has become vulnerable to its design,” Kothari states the task: We need to re-examine our assumptions about the state and its presumed role as the liberator, equalizer, “modernizer” and mobilizer. . . . The State and its relationship to the people comes through in this analysis as not just a relationship between classes and the masses, but also between the principal carrier of modern capitalism and technology and the social order. This relationship . . . marginalizes a large part of the social order.73

Indeed, observes Kothari: The State in the Third World, despite some valiant efforts by dedicated leaders in a few countries, has degenerated into a technocratic machine serving a narrow power group that is kept in power at the top by hordes of security men and a regime of repression and terror at the bottom. It is kept going by millions of hard-working people who must go on producing goods and services for the “system,” for if they do not, everything would collapse.74

Thus, intellectual activists of Third World countries seeking a reform or transformation of the international order cannot legitimately avoid confronting the degree to which their own position on world order enhances the metaphysics of subjectivity diffused from ‘the West’ and now holding sway there. The concept of sovereignty and the “imaginative geography” that

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belongs to it, we must understand, at once include and exclude arbitrarily, often in violation of a people’s properly historical Dasein. What matters now is that there be allowance for the realization of the historical Dasein of a given people while attending to the shared destiny of each in the current dispensation of planetary technology. That is, the pursuit of a people’s most proper historical Dasein in our day requires the renunciation and overcoming of its egoism in the direction of an acknowledged “belonging to the destiny of the Western world.” Thereby, each people, in its historical Dasein, becomes world-historical and contributes to the essential formation of a world community (to be distinguished from world society). Notwithstanding all of the above, the prevailing twofold focus of world order thinking, on transformation of (a) institutional structures and patterns of behavior and (b) the philosophic or value orientation, is insufficient. The distinction between ‘government’ and ‘governance’ yet requires careful elaboration, yet every indication is that such elaboration is inseparable from a thinking of the political that is other than time-honored and prevailing orthodoxy. Traditional distinctions of public-private, ruler-ruled, etc., are inevitably open to reexamination given the need to give substance to a political identity that is global (i.e., “Terran” as opposed to the multiplicity of national identities—American, Russian, Indian, etc.), yet which must preserve and enhance the possibilities of authentic being proper to each political Dasein. Kothari, for example, could not be more right in noting that among the modernist assumptions that are now obsolete are (a) “the benign nature of government and bureaucracy in mediating societal affairs” and (b) “the broader and culturally crucial assumption about the territorial structuring of human loyalties and identities.”75 Thus, governance is unthinkable without rethinking the essence of the political, and especially the essence of political Dasein even over against the primacy given hitherto by political philosophy to ‘the regime’ (politeia) as such. If Heidegger is right that a world comes to be (is constituted or disclosed) when “essential words” are spoken, then world-order-future of necessity has its basis in a different discourse. The real potency of the world order project, then, lies in ‘essential political thinking’.76 The distinction between global ‘government’ and global ‘governance’ is especially important with respect to transformation of fundamental comportment and the achievement of what earlier I called “authentic solicitude.” It is to the credit of recent discussions about the world order quest that this distinction is being sounded with increasing frequency, despite renewed attention to the ‘constitutional foundations’ of world peace.77 I have in mind, for example, the volume Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order.78 The var-

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ious contributors to this volume articulate a challenge to that view of world order conceived as globalization-from-above with its emphasis on elitist economic solidarity and geopolitical hegemony. Included in this discussion is a challenge to the recent appropriation of world order language by principal state actors (such as by the first Bush administration in the United States) as part of a post–Cold War rhetoric that pursues state interests under the guise of a global agenda dubbed “collective security.” Thus, the “New World Order” of George H. Bush turns out to be what Richard Falk rightly characterizes as a self-serving use of international law, such that international law turns out to be a mask for geopoliticians seeking a post–Cold War settlement about the status of state power.79 In my view the distinction between global government and global governance accounts for a difference of comportment and agency. Global government is an idea linked to the paradigm of political philosophy with its distinction of ruler and ruled. In this view, the prerogative and right of change in political practice rests with the ruler qua official of the political regime. Thus, globalization-from-above is the comportment concomitant to conceptions of global government. The strategies of reform, to the extent that they are system-reforming as opposed to being merely systemmaintaining, are dependent on state actions within traditional governmental institutional settings. Agents of change remain functionaries of the nation-state and tend to sustain the principle of sovereignty according to the requirements of geopolitical hegemony. Participation in the world order quest is restricted: “Unfortunately, much of the debate in academic and policy circles seems to assume that the world’s centers of wealth and power constitute a privileged ‘core’ position from which to view the globe, and that only this small part of the world be included in the dialogue about the world’s future.”80 In contrast to the above, global governance is an idea that seeks to move beyond the political practice enjoined by conceptions proper to political philosophy, conceptions that I have claimed to be under the sway of metaphysical categories. The notion of governance seeks to capture the fully participatory dimensions of individual action in being with others in common concern for the task of planetary dwelling. In this respect, global governance and globalization-from-below are fully consonant themes. James Rosenau has profitably engaged this question in limited scope, with attention to both theoretical and empirical factors at work in distinguishing between the concepts of global government and global governance. For him, “governance connotes a system of rule” that is “not sustained by organized government.”81 He writes:

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Theoretical Critique . . . governance is not synonymous with government. Both refer to purposive behavior, to goal-oriented activities, to systems of rule, but government suggests activities that are backed by formal authority, by police powers to insure the implementation of duly constituted policies, whereas governance refers to activities backed by shared goals that may or may not derive from legal and formally prescribed responsibilities and that do not necessarily rely on police powers to overcome defiance and attain compliance.82

As Rosenau rightly asks, the question becomes one of “Who makes and implements the rules?” The question signals a critical turn in the way in which individual agency relates to the collective forms of rule that are both engendered and sustained by political modernity. “Citizenship in a globalizing world,” notes Rosenau, “is not the same as citizenship in a world that venerated the territorial principle.”83 Thus, Rosenau rightly projects, on theoretical grounds, the emergent situation in which “individuals” are located “at the core of the transformation processes.” This is, as he notes, a view that is in contrast to analyses that “normally treat macro collectivities and institutions as the bases for whatever form the order may take”; as well as in contrast to realist and neo-realist analyses which “tend to treat the micro level as composed of constants, of citizens who comply with the directives and requirements of the macro collectivities.”84 However, today the micro level is a source of empowerment and achievement. There are signs, observes Rosenau, of “a worldwide alteration of the criteria of political legitimacy and authority: where people once complied habitually and automatically with the directives of authorities, today they are much more inclined to assess the performance of authorities before attaching legitimacy to and complying with directives.”85 In the call for global governance is a solicitude that invites and liberates, rather than excludes or dominates, individual agency. In my view, the principal task of global governance is the achievement of authentic selfhood. It is in authentic selfhood that moral and intellectual virtue find their unity; and it is in the coincidence of intellectual and moral virtue that individual human beings achieve the condition and origin of world order, viz., self-governance. So conceived, global governance is concerned with the realization of an authentic mode of political being. ‘Authentic’, deriving from the Greek authentikos, bespeaks what is most one’s own. Self-governance, or self-rule, is a concept spoken in the classical Greek term autarchos. Thus, in my view, the authentic mode of political being (where authentikos and autarchos are one and the same) is that mode in which one appropriates one’s own most proper potentiality to be the origin of action (the arche of praxis), in which one seeks to be self-sufficient (einai autarches) with respect to the demands of moral virtue

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in particular, and thus, in which one is self-ruling (einai autarchos) in living contradiction to the postulate of inherited political doctrine which sustains the distinction of ruler and ruled. As I put it elsewhere, “Resolutely to pursue this ‘empowerment’ is to release the individual to his fidelity to self and to others, which fidelity issues in the proper burden of self-rule. Political thought and practice, so long as the principle of the distinction between ruler and ruled is externalized, disburden the individual of this possibility and responsibility to be self-ruling; for the real claim of this principle is upon the spiritual constitution or regime which every individual is ‘by nature’ enjoined to establish and resolutely sustain.”86 Ultimately, then, a Heideggerian critique of world order theorizing strengthens it and promises to enrich it by illuminating precisely the sort of metatheoretical and philosophical issues R.B.J. Walker has raised. Such a critique, in its basic impetus, “assures detachment from the realm of immediacy” and is “definitely liberating.” Heidegger’s thought promises to enrich world order thinking to the extent that one may articulate more fully what is involved in global governance, in essential political thinking, in planetary thinking, and in planetary dwelling. The latter are, in a unitary manner, part of that comportment which pays heed to the claim of Being in its turning from Enframing, anticipating a transformation in language and a corresponding transformation in the historical essence of the human being. The decision to which we are summoned is that concerning which language of “basic words” (Grundworte) we are going to speak. This is not merely a matter of exchanging terms, but of letting oneself be addressed by a primordial claim, of remaining open to “the mystery of Being” as it claims us from out of the future. Openness to the advent of this decision acknowledges that “what is said is bound by the highest law.”87 The whole of Heidegger’s project, from the fundamental ontological hermeneutic of human Dasein in Being and Time to his later essays on the history of Being and the nature of language, manifests a comportment entirely other than that of systems science or exact philosophy which leaves undeveloped or ignores basic questions. At this point Heidegger’s thought-provoking questions (raised in the course of his commentary on Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom) compel world order scholars all the more to reflection in their thinking about a future world order: . . . What law demands that thinking follow its time? Or is thinking untimely, always and necessarily? But what if the untimely were just the reversal of the timely, a still fiercer dependency on “time”? How is “an age” to be determined in order to be determinative for thinking? What if

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The “law” that demands that thinking follow its time is “the hidden rule” (einer verborgenen Regel) of the destining of Being. It is the sudden epochal grant of Being that gives to “an age” its historical essence. In light of the history of Being it is clear that an age, i.e., its historical essence, is first determined by Being in its epochal dispensation in order then to be determinative for thinking. In light of the history of Being and Being’s claim on the human Dasein, it is clear that essential thinking, as the authentic doing of the human Dasein participating in Being’s unconcealment, first determines an age, i.e., gives it its historical essence. Accordingly, what matters now is this: Insofar as world order thinking qua technocratic reason belongs to the destining of Being as Enframing, which itself changes, world order thinking may yet take a “turn” which obtains its legitimacy from Being’s own “turning” from Enframing. Such thinking would be essential precisely inasmuch as such thinking, necessarily preparatory, assists the essence of Being, i.e., its advent in yet another mode. Thereby, such thinking gives evidence of this essence “bringing itself to utterance in language.”89 As Heidegger put it in an essay entitled “The Nature of Language”: We must first turn, turn back to where we are in reality already staying. . . . The step back into the sphere of human being demands other things than does the progress into the machine world. To turn back to where we are (in reality) already staying: that is how we must walk along the way of thinking which now becomes necessary.90

The way of thinking that now becomes necessary is that pathway along which essential thinking co-responds (is attuned) to the claim of Being signaled by Being’s turning from Enframing, in that turning determining an age in order then to be determinative for thinking. World order thinking, in calling us to make the “necessary journey” from geopolitics to humane governance, may thereby become that planetary thinking which, as essential political thinking, grants the possibility of planetary dwelling.91 To grant the possibility of planetary dwelling is to assent to an injunction that appeals to human being out of a ‘jointure of Being’, i.e., out of the harmonious unity and relational order of reality. Thereby, human and Earth are secured in their proper preserve. To secure humanity and Earth in their proper preserve is to free each to its most proper nature, to its most proper way to be:

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To free really means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we “free” it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving.92

Thus it is that planetary dwelling must have its ground in a planetary thinking attuned to the claim which Being makes in ‘the things themselves’, each out of its proper preserve. Part of the task of world order thinking informed by essential political thinking includes learning what it means to grant to the individual political Dasein its “preserve of peace.” Only thus can humane governance find its fulfillment in a manner that is something other than the “technocratic peace” of modern science and, thus, which promises to be enduring, rather than merely fashionable.

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PART TWO

Essential Political Thinking

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CHAPTER FIVE

A Pathway to Essential Political Thinking

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A TASK RESERVED

• The development of philosophy into the various sciences does not realize all the possibilities in which it was posited. • The technological character of the world is not the sole criterion of humanity’s world sojourn. • At the end of philosophy (i.e., the completion of metaphysics) there is a task reserved for thinking accessible neither to philosophy (metaphysics) nor to science. These fundamental insights Heidegger shares with us in a lecture entitled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” For us the task of thinking reserved since the explicit beginning of philosophy is modest in scope: It is “only of a preparatory, not of a founding, character. It is content with awakening a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose coming remains uncertain.”1 The “awakening” at issue here

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is dependent on humanity’s readiness to persist along a pathway of thought, respondent to the claim of a question more compelling than the question “What ought we to do?,” viz., “How must we think?” Yet, insofar as thinking is itself a doing, and given that it is the human essence to be a meditative being, then thinking is the authentic doing. Clearly, however, the question “How must we think?” concerns a possibility of thinking which “overcomes” both metaphysics and science. It is a manner of thinking in which the relationship between thought and action is transformed. Inasmuch as Being’s turning from Enframing is a possibility whose contour remains obscure and whose coming remains uncertain, this transformed relationship between thought and action is by no means transparent. Throughout the history of philosophy there has been a determinate relationship between thought and action, between word and deed, between thinking and doing, expressed variously—in terms of a relationship between first philosophy and practical philosophy, between pure reason and practical reason, between theory and practice. Given a particular metaphysical position, it is to be said that the latter of these correlates receive legitimacy from the former, that the latter are derived from, or are at least dependent on, the former “for their scheme and articulation” (using here the words of Reiner Schürmann). Given this dependence, the completion of metaphysics thus entails the completion of practical philosophy in the possibilities opened up at its explicit beginning by Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, we have seen how it is that world order thinking in its technocratic form especially attests to this completion. Yet, following Heidegger’s insights we are compelled to say: The development of political philosophy into empirical political science does not realize all the possibilities of political thinking; the technological character of the world so prominent in the technocratic conception of the world order is not the sole criterion of humanity’s future world sojourn; at the end of political philosophy there is reserved for political thinking a task accessible neither to political philosophy nor to empirical political science. Our question, then, is this: What task is reserved for political thinking at the end of political philosophy? In thinking through this question, we must remember what was said in the preceding chapter: The domain of the political remains enigmatic. One implication of this statement is the need to ask a grounding question (Grundfrage) which since antiquity has been abandoned in favor of a guiding question (Leitfrage). Here, of course, I am thinking parallel to Heidegger to speak a distinction between the questions “What is politics?” and “What is the best form of government?” In recalling this distinction, however, it is clear that in

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Heidegger’s view we must be careful to avoid both historicism and actualism, in both of which there is “a semblance of happening.” Decisive thinking, says Heidegger, “must, after all, be so primordial that it cannot get lost in a past epoch and calculate in it what is necessary for the present and make it compatible with the present.”2 Historicism and actualism cannot but give rise to an inauthentic future—“the future must first win itself, not from a Present, but from the inauthentic future.”3 Decisive thinking that is ‘primordial’ must take its cue not from the present or past, neither from orthodoxy nor from orthopraxis, but from the future and from humanity’s historical essence: “The thinking which has become necessary,” says Heidegger, “is historical thinking”—not “historiographical (historisch) explanation” but “historical (geschichtlich) thinking” qua thinking attuned to the destining of the human essence bound to the unfolding of Being.4 Political thinking concerning the future world order, then, can be genuinely decisive—essential and, thus, authentic rather than historicist and actualist—only to the extent that it pays heed to humanity’s historical essence decided from out of the future and which speaks in the advent of Being in a mode other than what it has been throughout modernity (indeed, throughout the history of metaphysics). Such is the orientation, the comportment, belonging to the task reserved for political thinking at the end of political philosophy. This orientation necessarily transforms the grounding question abandoned by political philosophy; for this question, in becoming necessary in its historical essence, speaks with a difference. “In the history of man,” observes Heidegger, “essential things are never overcome by turning one’s back and apparently freeing oneself in mere forgetfulness. For what is essential comes back again and again. The only question is whether an age is ready and strong enough for it.”5 In the question “What is politics?” is that which is essential and which has, indeed, come back again and again throughout the history of political philosophy. But the question was surrendered from the outset to the guiding question concerned with theoretical and empirical investigations of forms of government—as if this were the sole and chief concern of political inquiry. The grounding question claims us today in the historical moment of philosophy’s completion. It cannot but claim us out of the authentic future and, hence, in a transformed manner: Metaphysical thinking asks and hears “what is . . .”; essential thinking asks and hears “what calls for. . . .” The grounding question properly formulated, then, is not merely “What is politics?” but, rather “What calls for politics?”6 In this question we have a pathway for essential political thinking. It is incumbent upon us to understand the question, to hold out the question as a possibility of thinking without presuming to answer

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forthwith. Obscurity, uncertainty, and precariousness hold sway along this pathway of transition; to think otherwise is to surrender the authentic future to that inauthentic future in which historicism and actualism give determination to the political. To think along the pathway of this question is to understand the relation between planetary thinking and planetary building in new light. Inasmuch as there is an essential connection between planetary politics and the planetary domination of technology, the question of the relation of planetary thinking and planetary building must first be understood in terms of “a preparation of man for taking over a world-domination.” We must recognize, however, that both the manner of preparation and the character of this world-domination are problematic, especially to the extent that modern subjectivity drives humanity towards this goal. Nietzsche is the first thinker to recognize our historical moment as just such a preparation, notes Heidegger: “Nietzsche is the first thinker who, in view of a world history emerging for the first time, asks the decisive question and thinks through its metaphysical implications. The question is: Is man, as man in his nature til now, prepared to assume dominion over the whole earth?”7 Bernard Dauenhauer’s comments on this issue are illuminating. Following Heidegger’s reflections, Dauenhauer claims that the “decisive question” as posed by Nietzsche is “not well formulated” inasmuch as “it is still asked from the standpoint of metaphysics,” i.e., from a standpoint yet having to overcome “metaphysical vengeance.”8 In the preceding chapter, we have considered how a “fundamental metaphysical position” is articulated by Nietzsche. We have also understood something of the relationship between this metaphysics and the normative and technocratic dimensions of contemporary world order thinking, insofar as quiescent in this thinking is the Nietzschean appeal to that autonomous creativity which posits new values on the basis of humanity’s self-affirmation. With this in mind, Dauenhauer’s remarks are especially pertinent: Heidegger tells us that Nietzsche was the first to see that both to come to his own essence and to be prepared to rule the earth, man must be healed of vengeance. . . . Vengeance . . . is that response to what is other than oneself which debases the other in order to place oneself in a superior position and thus to maintain that the only thing which counts is one’s own importance. In . . . his reflections on technique, Heidegger has pointed out the vengeance involved in the technocratic reduction of nature first to an object of research and ultimately to mere raw material to be disposed of at man’s pleasure. The logic of this movement eventually engulfs man himself so that he, too, is only raw material. Vengeance culminates, then, in nihilism.9

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In short, says Dauenhauer, “The man of vengeance cannot protect the earth. Since he would debase it to raw material for his own purposes, he cannot rule the earth. Rather, he destroys it as earth.” Thus, both the normative and technocratic dimensions of world order thinking, grounded as they are in a subjectivist metaphysics, entail a world-domination wholly indefensible: Global dominion under the sway of metaphysical vengeance—in which the human himself succumbs to the enhancement of his power—ultimately entails precisely that crucible of tragedy and catastrophe about which world order scholar Richard Falk has warned. It is in recognition of this imminent consequence that Heidegger asks: But, how could man accede to rulership over the earth, how can he take under his protection the earth as earth, if and for so long as he debases what is terrestrial, in permitting the spirit of vengeance to determine his meditation? If it is a question of saving the earth as earth, it is necessary from the outset that the spirit of vengeance disappear.10

It may be said that, despite the lack of an explicit thematic treatment of the political in his thought, Heidegger concerns himself with the same decisive question raised by Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger seeks to overcome the spirit of vengeance. Heidegger’s “solution” (to use the word loosely), however, is unlike Nietzsche’s insofar as Heidegger does not think ontologically in terms of values or a mere reversal of Platonism.11 The whole of Heidegger’s later thinking, as a meditation on this preparation of humanity for global governance, attends to the decisive question in a way that is no longer metaphysical but essential. Heidegger is the first to think this decisive question essentially inasmuch as he thinks this question in terms of the history of Being. Only thus is it possible to overcome metaphysical vengeance, for in questioning concerning the meaning of Being in general the tension between a ‘transcendent-permanent’ and an ‘earthly-temporal’ is transformed. Through this thinking Heidegger vouchsafes to us a significant possibility—that of assisting the advent of humanity’s global governance in an authentic manner, precisely insofar as humanity is receptive to Being’s claim in its dispensation of a new criterion of world sojourn. It is in appreciation of this possibility that Heidegger’s thought is compelling in orienting us towards essential political thinking.12 To say that Heidegger is the first to think this decisive question essentially is to say that Heidegger transforms the question. Dauenhauer recognized as much in observing the need to reformulate the question, to wit: The decisive question should rather be formulated thus: Is man as man, in his being as thus far revealed, prepared to save the earth? If not, what must

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We may, therefore, consider (albeit all too briefly) what it means to be a dweller. Heidegger teaches that the fundamental character of dwelling is “sparing” in the positive sense of safeguarding each thing in its essence, in short, letting each thing be in its what and how—but “each thing” only inasmuch as the human first preserves “the Fourfold” (das Geviert) in its essential being, i.e., sustains and enhances its coming to presence. The Fourfold is the “primal oneness” of “earth and sky, divinities and mortals.”14 This notion of das Geviert is especially significant in speaking to the problem of overcoming the spirit of vengeance. Heidegger’s characterization of the Fourfold already bespeaks a “spirit of devotion”: The earth is not mere planet and raw material; the sky is not space, the final frontier subject to mankind’s arbitrary disposal; the divinities are not mere creations of the human, not idols; mortals are not preeminent among beings, boundless in power and presence. Rather, Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. . . . The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of days, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. . . . The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. Out of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment. . . . The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed constantly, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities.15

Nietzsche’s solution involves affirming that “God is dead” and a “selfovercoming”—an enhancement of human life, of humanity’s “essence” as will-to-power—assuming one’s capacity for self-legislation as the essence of self-affirmation. For Nietzsche all future historical possibilities are given in and through this self-legislation (revaluation), and given in an eternal recurrence of the same—“eternally the same house of being is built” in a recurrent transvaluation that has its source in the human will (ego volo). In contrast, Heidegger’s notion of the Fourfold calls for a spirit of devotion determinate of humanity’s meditation precisely because the future (its historical possibili-

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ties) is ever dependent on the changing manner in which Being suddenly destines itself, now revealing, now concealing, and on humanity’s (Dasein’s) corespondent/attuned relation to these epochal transformations. In Dasein’s attunement to Being’s claim, thinking discloses its piety. The primal oneness of the Fourfold always obtains historically, notwithstanding the transformed manner of presencing of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. When we say “earth,” when we say “sky,” when we speak of “divinities,” when we speak of “mortals”—“we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.”16 In contrast to Nietzsche, Heidegger’s confrontation with “the death of God” goes to the root of the problem, understanding nihilism as the consequence of Western metaphysics in its forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), as opposed to understanding nihilism “mediately as a history in which something happens with beings as such.”17 “The essence of nihilism,” says Heidegger, “is the history in which there is nothing to Being itself.”18 Thus, “before any overcoming, it is necessary to have the kind of confrontation with nihilism that will for the first time bring to light the essence of nihilism.”19 The problem is not that the transcendent has lost its meaning and hegemony, that such belief has been undermined. The concept of the Fourfold speaks neither in the sense of Plato’s ontology which distinguishes “the truly real,” “another” world, from “semblance,” “this” world, nor merely in the sense of a reversal of that ontology. The history of Being is not the eternal recurrence of the same, not “a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again,” all ever “alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 3, “The Convalescent”). Nihilism does not have its source in a human “ill will” against time and its ‘it was’. “The essence of nihilism contains nothing negative in the form of a distinctive element that has its seat in human sentiments and circulates abroad in human activities. The essence of nihilism is not at all the affair of man, but a matter of Being itself, and thereby of course also a matter of the essence of man, and only in that sequence at the same time a human concern.”20 The history of Being as manifest by the history of metaphysics is a history of Being’s self-withholding while destining beings epochally—all that occurs historically is determined by Being itself: “Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the lighting of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being.”21 Forgetfulness of Being, thus, is not the consequence of a failure in human thinking or the human will, but is Being’s doing insofar as to metaphysical thinking is conferred that which it thinks.

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With the completion of metaphysics in the position Nietzsche articulates, nihilism proper finds its fulfillment. Nihilism is coterminous with the history of metaphysics. Closure to metaphysics and, thus, to nihilism means that thought of Being itself now becomes possible: From self-withdrawal Being commissions itself. As before, yet in a transformed way, Being lays claim to the essence of the human as “the shepherd of Being.” Thought of the Fourfold is nothing less than thought of Being itself and of the historical essence of the human to which we are enjoined. Upon the human is enjoined a historical essence which finds its concrete expression in “dwelling”: “Dwelling preserves the Fourfold by bringing the essence of the Fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the Fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their essence.”22 In this “letting be,” as preserving of the Fourfold coming to presence of Being itself, the human accedes to the claim of a receptive comportment. ‘Comportment’ speaks of orientation; ‘receptivity’ speaks of a mode of engagement. The Fourfold of Being can be what and how it is in its unitary emergence and historical sway only through Dasein (the correspondent essence of the human ‘way to be’) acceding to the claim of this unitary presence in receptive comportment. Earth and sky, divinities and mortals—each and all are in that unitary emergence which worlds a world. Here jointure of Being as jointure of the Fourfold is already spoken. ‘Jointure’ speaks of the manner in which earth, sky, divinities, and mortals are gathered into oneness so that this oneness is sustained and so that each may be, i.e., declare its essence. In jointure there is arrangement of topos, and thus is there assignment of each to place. In jointure, in arrangement and assignment, humanity receives that directive according to which he and she are as mortals. In short, from the oneness of the Fourfold humanity receives the criterion of our world sojourn—the standard for being and acting, for thinking and doing. If mankind is today “homeless,” alienated from the Earth as earth, from the sky as sky, from the godhead as godhead, and from ourselves as mortals, then the human does not ‘dwell’ on the earth, however much we are nevertheless encountered on this planet. This—how to dwell—we must learn again. In our very homelessness is there the summons to homecoming, to oikousis. Here we have an originally telling word which found its import in Greek antiquity and which, in its authentic speech, speaks a primordial experience. The word oikousis is perhaps unfamiliar to us, and so—begging the reader’s indulgence—a brief etymological excursus may be illuminating. It is related to a word likely to be familiar to us, oikoumene, by which we understand ‘the inhabited world’. One who ‘inhabits’ a world is an oiketes, a ‘dweller’. His is the act of dwelling, oikesis, which has its ‘place’, oikema, a

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‘dwelling’. Oikesis, the act of dwelling, speaks of intimacy, friendship (oikeiotes), of friends and relations (hoi oikeios). But this intimacy is possible on the basis of a relation one first has to oneself: The act of dwelling connotes what is ‘proper to’ one who dwells, what is ‘fitting’ or ‘suitable’ (oikeios), thus the sense of ‘one’s own’ (idios) present in the equivalent word to oikeion. Understood essentially, the act of dwelling is an ‘appropriation’, a ‘taking as one’s own’ (oikeiosis), as in oikeiopragia, ‘a minding of one’s affairs’, with attention to ‘safekeeping’ or ‘guarding’ (oikouros) and the intimate belonging together (oikeios) of friendship which speaks of ‘affinity’ as opposed to ‘estrangement’. In all that is here understoood, oikos and polis are not distinct phenomena in the Greek experience: One who founds a polis is known as oikistes as well as polites. The polites, properly speaking, ‘is’ as dweller, and the polis ‘is’ as oikos. Insofar as humanity’s essence is to be a dweller (oiketes), this essence must find its historical concretion in essential political being. But essential political being is today dependent on mankind’s homecoming understood not in terms of the Greek city-state, the medieval kingdom, the modern nation-state, or even a “universal state.” Oikousis, coming into our essential home, as Heidegger teaches, is coming into nearness to Being. Nearness to Being is the most proper dwelling. But nearness to Being, as the most proper dwelling, is to be ordered in the preserve of das Geviert. In Being’s commissioning of itself in and for the preserve of the Fourfold, the closure of metaphysics articulated in Nietzsche’s reversal is overcome: It is not in denial of God or “as god himself” that the human dwells; rather, as Heraclitus understood, ethos anthropoi daimon—“Man dwells, insofar as he dwells, in the nearness of god.” Insofar as ours is a time of darkness, a time of need in the sense of a “double Not”—the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming—observes Heidegger, Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.23

In nearness to earth, sky, and divinities the human finds his and her essential home. It is in acknowledgment of his and her being ordered in the preserve of the Fourfold that the human may accede to rulership of the Earth. In short, the task of global governance is not to dominate and exploit the earth, but rather to preserve and cultivate it. The spirit of vengeance that

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belongs to metaphysics must yield to a “spirit of devotion” that belongs to essential political thinking. Only by way of the latter can humanity remain faithful to a primordial claim that appeals to us in our proper essence. Yet, how properly to articulate this essence is what is now at issue for the human being. It may be tentatively articulated, however, to the extent that we are able to make sense of the contour of our task of thinking. The task before us has the following contour (again, thinking here parallel to Heidegger): 1. The guiding question (Leitfrage) of political philosophy must be surrendered to the essentially recurrent claim of the grounding question (Grundfrage). 2. The grounding question of political thinking must be thought in the transformed manner of originary or essential thinking which thinks the question of the meaning of Being in general and, thus, the history of Being. This means also that the history of political philosophy must be subjected to a phenomenological deconstruction.24 3. Inasmuch as thinking is today planetary unavoidably, and inasmuch as world order thinking is that political thinking which is planetary, world order thinking must—if it is to be enduring, authentic—surrender the technocratic conception of the world order to that possibility of planetary dwelling which comes from planetary building. This means that we must see that world-building is not an act of production in the first instance, but an event of disclosure, thus that planetary dwelling is impossible without our appropriation of a spirit of devotion. In what is thus stated is an implicit awareness of the transforming power of essential words. “Essential words,” we have learned from Heidegger, “are not artificially invented signs and marks which are pasted on things merely to identify them. Essential words are deeds which happen in those moments where the lightning flash of a great enlightenment goes through the universe.”25 Moreover, where it is essential, i.e., where it is established in essential speech, thinking is “a world occurrence, and this not only in the sense that something is happening within the world which has significance for the world, but also in the sense in which and through which the world itself arises anew in its actual origins and rules as world.”26 Thus, we must now be prepared to hear essential words which, in being disclosed in authentic speech, herald the arising of world anew. If it is true that a world occurrence comes with essential thinking and thus transforms word, thought, and deed for the establishment of the world anew, and if humanity’s historical essence in and for a future world order is therefore being

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decided now by what is always determinative for an age (viz., essential thinking), then might it not be that just such a lightning flash has already gone through the universe? How might such a possibility of “world occurrence” have begun to appropriate us today? How are we to experience the authentic speech of this dispensation?

POLITICALITY AND THE FACTUAL POLITICAL

We are interested in exploring the contour of a thinking through which the world arises anew in its actual origins and rules as world, i.e., governs in word, thought, and deed. This means a thinking that is, in short, ‘an occurrence of Being’. Yet, this occurrence of Being depends on the vigilance of mortals who, through essential thought, take up their “residence in a co-responding which, appealed to in the world’s being by the world’s being, answers within itself to that appeal.”27 A first step in the direction of essential political thinking has been taken by Clyde Pax, who takes his “general orientation” from Heidegger and loosely follows “the order of reflection suggested by him.”28 (In what follows I take note of Pax’s insights and attempt a “second” step in chapter 6.) Pax’s concern is not with “the factual political” but with the possibility of the political—what I shall term humanity’s politicality. Notwithstanding, it is to be noted that Pax’s reflections are not merely formal and abstract. In concerning himself with human politicality Pax is inclined to think that there is “a hidden depth and dimension of the political which first makes it possible for man to dwell on this earth and which, in its own way, is thus commensurate with man’s dwelling.”29 Pax is here insightful—I submit that only if humanity thinks this dimension of the political, such that our practice is thereby transformed, can the spirit of vengeance be overcome and the human recover that manner of being which is dwelling. Pax’s orientation is already partially situated within the claim of the Grundfrage of essential political thinking rather than the Leitfrage of political philosophy, hence the pertinence of his ‘step’.30 Pax notes that involvement in the activity of politics presupposes, “without questioning it, the presence of the factual political.” The sort of thinking “which seeks to uncover the political as such” will treat “the actual manifestation of the political as . . . something to be questioned rather than taken for granted. In this line of reflection,” observes Pax, “the possibility of the political not only precedes the actuality of the political but is the essence-ing of the political.”31 Let us consider Pax’s remarks somewhat more at length:

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Pax distinguishes between the multiple forms of the factual political— this and that form of being political such as democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, etc.—and that to which every such form is indebted insofar as it arises, comes into being, or, in a word, presences. It is through this distinction that Pax claims that there is a tacit dimension to humanity’s being-political. The “political as such,” says Pax, is concealed by the very political activity which it nourishes and makes possible, that is, by the on-going affairs of the political order. The political as such is above all concealed by that thinking which calls itself political philosophy and which seeks to explain the political in terms of human freedom understood as a possession of man, or in terms of the dialectical character of matter, or the rights of man, or the social contract, etc. All such thinking basically accepts the political order as something present without questioning it in its underlying possibility, i.e., it takes the form of the political as the essence of the political. By thus taking the factual political as an obvious fact and limiting its concern to this fact, this traditional political philosophy neglects to raise the question of the possibility of the political.33

Let us consider this passage more closely. First, Pax speaks of “the political as such” and distinguishes this from “the on-going affairs of the political order.” We understand by the latter all that is today the object of investigation of empirical political science and by which we tend to identify the political domain—forms of government (democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, etc.); modes of participation in political process (parties, interest groups, coalitions, social movements, etc.); offices of administration, legislation, and adjudication (presidency, prime ministry, diplomatic corps, parliament, congress, civil service, courts of law, etc.); and so on and so forth as we may understand “domestic” and “foreign/international” political activity. All of this is made possible by ‘the political as such’—that which for now remains tacit.

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Second, Pax takes note of a shortcoming, failure, or impossibility of political philosophy as that discipline of inquiry presumably concerned to disclose fundamental features of the political: For all it has to say concerning issues such as justice, freedom, power, authority, government, sovereignty, statecraft, etc., political philosophy nevertheless inadvertently or unwittingly conceals ‘the political as such’. Political philosophy does not grasp the distinction between the ‘form’ of the political and the ‘essence’ of the political. Indeed, political philosophy, steeped as it is in ‘the factual political’ such that it speaks to issues of justice, power, authority, etc., in the context of this factuality, neglects a question always prior to these issues: What is it that allows the political to arise at all? Thus, the essence of the political is not accessible to political philosophy or, for that matter, to empirical political science which is further removed. To think this essence is to engage in another order of reflection. In this sense we can appreciate yet further the distinction between the question “What is politics?” (answered by political philosophy under the sway of the question “What is the best form of government [politeia]?”) and the question “What calls for politics?” Pax’s reflections proceed along Aristotelian lines, such that he thinks the “essenc-ing” (substantive and verbal senses) of the factual political by way of Aristotle’s fourfold conception of causality (material, efficient, formal, and final causes). Thinking in this way, Pax is able to say that mankind alone of all species of being is the “material possibility” of the revealing of the political: “The political arises only in the human world, among persons. . . . The human is the place of the political, the housing of the political.”34 This is no trivial observation. Pax here gives further (one might say: “categorical” as opposed to “contingent”) meaning to Aristotle’s delimitation of the human as “political animal” (zoion politikon): “What is revealed and comes to stand is man, but no longer as natural but precisely as political.” In other words, “in his political being he is distinguished formally and in his telos (i.e., in his further possibilities) from nature.”35 This means that in being-political, as an essential possibility, humans belong together in a way other than and beyond the manner of association characteristic of animal species. The human “transcendence” is given determination through his politicality. In his and her being-political, in short, the human is an entity neither to be understood nor to be treated by way of the categories of extant nature. Thus, one cannot legitimately draw from extant nature a paradigm by which one might then determine the factual political. Moreover, human transcendence implies “an ordering within man’s ‘being-with’, such that his being-with or caring for animals dare not take precedence over his being-with other persons, and his

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being-with his inanimate belongings or property dare not take precedence over his concern for fellow humans.”36 In Heideggerian terms, in the structure of human existence as Mitsein, Mitdaseienden—being-with-other-Daseienden—is a claim superordinate to that of mit-Vorhandensein (being with things present at hand) and mit-Zuhandensein (being with things ready to hand). It is at this point that Heidegger’s fundamental ontological hermeneutic matters in its relation to ontical issues. Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as Mitsein speaks of a “belonging-together” to which humans are called and which is not of their making or doing, and to which they inevitably respond manifestly in various factual forms of being-political. Here we have what Pax calls “the efficient cause” of the political, that to which form and telos are indebted. Yet, to think the essence of the political requires more than an analysis guided by way of Aristotelian causality, especially given Heidegger’s distinction between the metaphysical concept of essence as essentia and the phenomenological or existential concept of essence as eksistence. (Again, I attempt this thinking in chapter 6.) Insofar as we are concerned with the human return to our ‘essence’ such that a spirit of devotion determines our meditation, we must articulate the manner in which this essence of beingpolitical originally claims the human being. In short, to speak of being-political or the essence of the political is to speak first and foremost of humanity’s historical essence. Politicality and historicality are inextricably bound in a unitary manner. At this point we may consider an important linkage between Pax’s concerns and those of George Schrader. Schrader’s reflections on responsibility and existence help to move us another step along our path towards essential political thinking. The human ontological structure of Mitsein, we have noted by way of Pax, is ordered such that there is a priority of Mitdaseienden over the involvements the human has with things of nature (Vorhandensein) and of artifice (Zuhandensein). This priority of involvements with other Daseienden is nothing less than an “ontological responsibility” present for every Dasein precisely insofar as Dasein ‘is’, i.e., ‘ek-sists’. However, notwithstanding the equiprimordial character of the human being-with,37 the original human liability is “ownmost” (eigentlich) for each case of Dasein; and only because this liability is first of all ownmost can it be exercised with reference to others: Commitment to responsible involvements with others depends upon a responsible commitment to one’s own ‘eksistence’. Says Heidegger: Only because Dasein can expressly choose itself on the basis of its selfhood can it be committed to others. And only because, in being towards itself as such, Dasein can understand anything like a “self” can it furthermore attend

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at all to a thou-self. Only because Dasein, constituted by the for-the sakeof, exists in selfhood, only for this reason is anything like human community possible.38

Schrader’s remarks are consonant: Man is responsible, in the first instance, because he is burdened with the ontological necessity of responding to himself in the sense of having to answer to himself for what he is and does. The first as well as the last problem man encounters is his own existence. To be is not simply to be liable; it is the original human liability.39

The priority of Mitdaseienden and, most important, the manner in which this is determined as a consequence of human politicality, depend upon the Dasein’s individual response to an ownmost claim. This is a claim from which no human may be alienated, although the manner of response permitted and manifest by the factual political order can be (and often is) negative (indifferent, deficient, etc.). Here is spoken a distinction between a ‘must’ and an ‘ought’, between what Schrader calls “ontological responsibility” and “moral responsibility.” The former founds the latter. Says Schrader: “In stating that a man must care for his existence in the sense of presiding over his own destiny, we are not claiming or even suggesting that he should be concerned about himself. At this stage of the analysis there are no explicit or implicit norms.”40 The foregoing can be understood more specifically in the distinction among three propositions: (a) “The human is political”; (b) “The human must be political”; and (c) “The human ought to be political.” The first proposition, we may say, is descriptive. To say that the human is political is to say that his facticity is encountered manifest in a particular manner, i.e., as monarchic, democratic, etc. The second proposition is ontological and speaks of the necessity of humanity’s being political. At all times humans are political: Human politicality is at all times given determination.41 The third proposition is normative and is concerned with the legitimacy or justification of the concrete determinations of human politicality. Propositions such as “Man ought to be democratic,” “Man ought to be socialist”—in short, how to be political—make explicit what is for the human ever at issue. Following Schrader’s order of reflection we may say that the ontological condition expressed by the proposition “The human must be political” founds the moral condition expressed by the proposition “The human ought to be political,” the latter made concrete in a particular proposition of the type “The human ought to be democratic.” The manner in which Schrader

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pursues his central question is, at this point, especially pertinent. He asks: “. . . what has man’s inescapable ontological liability to do with an alleged moral liability . . . ?” Consider Schrader’s remarks: My care for my body is, in the ontological sense, ambiguous and problematic. The ought statement prescribes the way in which I should determine this problematic relationship. What I do in the ought statement is to acknowledge the claim which my body makes upon me by being my body. If the ought statement is valid, it can do nothing more than this. Either the fact that I have a body in itself establishes a claim upon me such that I should nurture and affirm it as a vehicle for the realization of my existence, or the moral ought commanding this is arbitrary. The moral imperative expresses and must express a de facto relationship of the self to itself. So far is it from being a pure normative statement prescribing an ideal, that it actually expresses the ontological condition of the self.42

Thinking analogously, we may say that being-political is, in the ontological sense, ambiguous and problematic. That the human must be political is an ontologically necessary truth. That the human is political is factually true. This political facticity is determined in manifest ways (being democratic, monarchic, socialist, anarchic, tyrannical, etc.), each prescriptive of a way in which this problematic relationship is to be determined. In all such determinations the human acknowledges the ontological claim of politicality. But this acknowledgment may be positive or negative; and whether the one or the other prevails is a matter of whether the individual Dasein understands his or her original liability in terms of (what Heidegger distinguishes as) his or her “authentic Self” (eigentlich Selbst) or his or her self as “they-self” (das Man-selbst).43 That is, understanding one’s original liability in terms of “the ‘they”’ (das Man) means that politicality in its multiple determinations is taken up in accordance with “the ‘they’s”’ interpretation and prescription. But this is nothing other than being lost in ‘publicness’ and that dominance of “the they-self” which defines human inauthenticity, i.e., that dominance which prohibits and suppresses the individual Dasein’s disclosure and response to a more primordial claim—namely, his or her own proper potentiality-for-being.44 Insofar as the human must be political, publicness (the “they’s” interpretation and prescription of politicality) cannot but prohibit and suppress an authentic mode of being-political precisely in that manner in which publicness sustains “anonymity” such that “no one in particular is responsible” and each yields to the decisions made by “everyone” yet “no one.”45 In short, politicality manifests itself not only in determinate forms but also in the modes of authenticity and inauthenticity. Thus, the individual

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Dasein may be encountered either as authentic political being or inauthentic political being. It is by way of articulation of the former that the essence of the political is to be thought. A decisive question for us, then, is: What are the fundamental features of authentic politicality, and how is such politicality to be given determination? To answer this question we must understand how politics first ‘announces’ itself. This means we must understand our Grundfrage, but do so paralleling Heidegger’s order of reflection.46

THE CALL TO ESSENTIAL POLITICS

In asking the question “What calls for politics?” we are to keep our distance from every particular factual form of the political. We seek to understand what calls us to think politics and to be political. Yet, we seek also to understand how we may be able to think politics and be political “with essential rightness.” In other words, we seek to understand what is called for on our part such that we may each time achieve “good political thinking” and, thus, “good politics.” Posed in an essential way, the question “What calls for politics?” asks: What is it that calls us, as it were, commands us, to think politics and to be political? What is it that calls us into politics, into political thinking, and into political being? In short, what is it that directs us into political thought and gives us directions for political thinking and, thus, for being political? Concerning “calling” Heidegger observes: “To call,” in short, means “to command,” provided we hear this word, too, in its native telling sense. For “to command” basically means, not to give commands and orders, but to commend, entrust, give into safe-keeping, keep safely. To call means: to call into arrival and presence; to address commendingly.47

We seek to understand what it is that, calling the human, brings his and her essential nature into the safekeeping of politics. This “what” is that which first joins and appropriates the human to politics by being political through political thinking. In seeking to understand what politics is, we come to ask what calls for politics in the sense of what joins our nature to politics in a way such as to keep safe our nature. A naming is at issue here, insofar as “by naming, we call on what is present to arrive.”48 Thus, for example, in naming “democracy,” “aristocracy,” etc., we call on what is present in each to arrive and to remain as the factual political in just that determinate form. The naming at issue for us today is a naming that joins our nature to politics in a way such as to keep safe our nature while we are yet subject to the planetary domination of technology

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(i.e., Being’s mode of Enframing). Such ‘joining’, we recall, can occur in the modes authentic and inauthentic. Notwithstanding, whether we are to incline sufficiently to the essence of politics depends fully on how we come to understand the abiding call. When we ask what it is that calls on us to be political, we are to reflect not only on the source of the calling but with equal resolution on what we are called to be. Insofar as this calling hails us in words, we are with every naming “venturing into the gambling game of language, where our nature is at stake.”49 Let us consider that in the word politics and the words being political we readily encounter a given possibility of politics, be it democracy, aristocracy, etc. But, if Heidegger is correct, “what we encounter at first is never what is near, but always only what is common.”50 In democracy, for example, and in being-democratic, etc., we encounter politics in its commonness. Remaining in this encounter only, we abide only in what is common and never in what is always essential. Here we have some further sense of Pax’s distinction between the factual political—that which we encounter at first—and the essence of the political—that which is near yet tacit. If we ask what the word politics designates, it may be said that we “obviously” must go back into the history of the word. Attention to what the word politics tells us in this way “is supposedly the decisive step.” That is, it may be that in being thus directed we are brought near “originally telling” words in a retrieval that prepares us “to receive from their speaking a directive which carries us closer to the substance expressed in those words.”51 By giving our attention to what these words tell us, we come to grasp the “essential situations” of their speech—that which they name, thus gaining from them “the possibility of an appropriate bond.” Through this possibility, authentic politics may be appropriated for an enduring world order. (N.B. It is in light of the foregoing that the earlier discussion of ‘dwelling’ must be appreciated.) The telling root of the word politics is the Greek word politikos. In going back to this root “we are heeding what is called by name in it, and what is unspoken in it.”52 This is what in Greek is called the polites. The polites is the human who constitutes the polis—s/he is what makes the polis possible (in Pax’s sense, its “material” possibility). In the word politikos we have a clue given to us—if we can perceive it, for “to perceive a clue, we must first be listening ahead into the sphere from which the clue comes.”53 We ask, then: What clue do we perceive in the originary word politikos? The answer is already given insofar as we hear in the word politikos both the word polites and the word oikistes. The word politikos initially did not mean at all what is of or belonging to “the statesman” or “ruler” (archon) in distinction from “ruled” (archesthai). Initially, politikos meant of or for a polites, befitting a polites. The

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root of politikos is polites in the sense of one who constitutes a polis and whose constituting is a preserving through oikesis, i.e., through an act of dwelling. That meaning of politikos which thinks of “belonging to the state or its administration,” hence which thinks also of “belonging to or befitting a statesman,” is a subordinate and derivative meaning. Yet, this subordinate or derivative meaning lies at the basis of the logic of statecraft in modernity precisely as that which is present in a quiescent manner, holding sway since the political philosophy of antiquity gave primacy to investigations concerning politeia or “form of government” and in that way determined the political. Essential political thinking, in contrast to political philosophy, renders this concern for politeiai subordinate to articulating the tacit dimension of the political, i.e., that which speaks to us in clue in the originary words of Greek antiquity. Significantly, the history of political thought has proceeded in accordance with the Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of ‘being’ in terms of the matter-form conjunction (notwithstanding the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns). The form of the political has always been understood to determine the arrangement, disposition, and manner of disclosure of the material possibility of the political. Humans, as political beings, have ever been more or less a “product” of this matter-form conjunction and made disposed to the purpose or telos attributed to a determinate form—now to democracy, now to monarchy, now to aristocracy, etc. Each such determination is a work of politics, opening up a world in such a way as to “keep it [that world] abidingly in force.” Yet, to the extent that humans are the material possibility of the political, and insofar as every such work of making or determinate form takes humans into its service, there is the danger—prominent today—that humans are taken into service at the risk of being used up and laid waste. Such is the implicit consequence of politics understood in terms of “fabrication.” The possibility of not being used up depends on preservers of the political who listen to the essential speech of that work through which the political is disclosed. Such preservers listen only insofar as they belong to such work “with an essentiality equal to that of the creators” of the work—that is, they appropriate that work “in an experientially appropriate manner.” Both those who create and those who preserve a work of politics, if only tacitly, seek to bring politics into its truth, yet into a truth which ever makes its appeal from the origin: To every factual determination of the political belongs the originary task of bringing political being into its essential determination. We cannot hope to think what it means to determine the matter of politics “essentially” without first thinking concerning the essence of humanity understood in Heidegger’s sense of ‘eksistence’; for, as Heidegger understands,

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“apart from the truth of Being man himself does not matter.” All that mankind does, all that the human is, is for this truth—for its safekeeping, its preservation. All that matters does so because of and for this truth. To determine the matter of politics essentially, then, is to determine “the historical essence of man in his derivation from the truth of Being.” Political thinking is essential, thus, insofar as it thinks the political “in light of its source, that essential source which always remains for historical humanity the essential future.”54 At the heart of this thinking is the need to think the human other than as zoion or animalitas which, bound up with metaphysical categories, determine human nature without what Heidegger understands as “the involvement of Being in human nature.” Heidegger, we must remember, chooses the word Dasein to “characterize with a single term both the involvement of Being in human nature and the essential relation of man to the openness (“there”) of Being as such.”55 In short, an essential determination of political being can be accomplished only in locating the meaning of the political in the horizon of Being. Moreover, an authentic understanding of political being is possible only on the ground of existence, for politics is what happens as a disclosure of Dasein, a way in which the Dasein discloses itself. The human, as Heidegger taught us, is an ek-sisting being. That is, the way in which “man is essentially in his own essence moving towards Being, is that he stands outside himself within the truth of Being.” But—and this is key—as the eksistent being the human is the “guardian of Being.” The ‘care’ that the human has (better, that possesses the human) is care of Being, which is also to say that the human is the custodian of beings granted by Being in and for a world occurrence. Thus, “for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence which corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being.”56 Bearing this in mind, we can now begin to see how it is that essential political thinking has as its concern humanity’s ‘essential home’. This home, we have noted in our remarks on dwelling, is not to be understood geopolitically, i.e., in terms of this or that nation-state or even merely in terms of a cosmopolitanism which posits the planet Earth as home. Rather, what is intended is that within which the human has his and her essence, and which cannot be approached by way of a subjectivism. “Each nationalism,” Heidegger tells us, “is metaphysically an anthropologism and as such subjectivism.”57 Metaphysically, too, cosmopolitanism remains a subjectivism, being basically particularistic, i.e., as the cosmopolitanism belonging to that anthropologism rooted in Western humanity. Such cosmopolitanism is a “mere internationalism” and as such does not “overcome nationalism, but only expands and

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elevates nationalism, anthropologism, subjectivism to a system embracing the whole of the planet.”58 This cosmopolitanism is absolute self-assertion of humanity intent upon mastery of all beings, including human beings. It is the attempt to realize subjectivity in totality. But the human does not find his or her essential home in mastery of all that is. Rather, as Heidegger learns from the poet Hölderlin: “Man is the shepherd of Being.” We here begin to interpret politics and the world order in its future possibility by way of the history of Being, i.e., the interpretation is ‘existential’. This we may say insofar as we seek to respond to a call, remembering that “the calling stems from the place to which the call goes out.”58 To think politics thus is “to respond to the appeal of its presence, in a response that stems from and releases itself towards the appeal.” We understand, of course, that the presence of politics reveals itself and issues its appeal or call in the Dasein as an original liability. Understood from the origin, politics is ever ownmost— that with which the Dasein is to concern itself, that with which “I am to concern myself.” But, as a response to the claim of Being in the unconcealment of a world of involvements, politics as an ownmost burden speaks of beingwith as a necessary condition prior to any particular determination of beingwith as ‘with others’ (Miteinandersein). In view of this ontological liability that founds the particular liability which obtains in this or that factual political order, it is significant that there are “political norms which derive their authority not simply from the constitution of particular states but from the nature of the political community as such.”60 That is, although there are explicit laws setting forth the “responsibility” or particular liability of the members of a factual order, nevertheless it is clear that “law itself is but a rough and approximate statement” of this responsibility; but also that “the greater part of our conduct does not require explicit legislation but follows of itself.”61 That this is so is, perhaps, one of the most important of phenomenological insights, consonant to Heidegger’s claims that our being is “both hidden and revealed,” appearing and withdrawing (as J. Glenn Gray put it) “not in turn but concomitantly.”62 Just why it is that the greater part of our conduct does not require explicit legislation takes us to the essence of political being, to an “answer” to our question; but an answer that, as an utterance, “speaks from a correspondence.”63 (This “answer” I propose in the next chapter.) “Truth,” Heidegger asserts, “establishes itself as a strife within a being that is to be brought forth only in such a way that the conflict opens up in this being. . . .”64 The human’s original liability is such that it is first and foremost “mine.” This means that political truth establishes itself as a “strife” proper to each Dasein. This strife, prior to the strife between and among humans, is nothing other than that original strife which first opens up the

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political (in Aristotelian terms as Pax would put it, makes the human no longer merely “natural” being but “political” being). How are we to think this original strife? We must think it in terms of the fundamental opposition of arche and an-arche through which every political being is determined. This original strife is at the ground of Plato’s spiritual politeia (the politeia of the tripartite psuche) as much as it is at the ground of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (the Overman as “self-overcoming” man). Notwithstanding differences, both Plato at the beginning and Nietzsche at the completion of political philosophy recognize the dependence of the ‘rightness’ of the factual political order upon the resolution of a fundamental strife in the individual (even as the former conceded the inevitable need of hoi polloi to be ruled and as the latter did “the herd”).65 Here lies another feature of Nietzsche’s essential connection to Plato. Insofar as it is Nietzsche who poses “the decisive question” for us today, let us consider Nietzsche’s position for what it may teach us.66 Nietzsche speaks of the Overman as the possibility that the human would subject himself to himself just as he would subject the whole of the world to his domination. In short, the Overman is the “self-overcoming man.” Such a human being, in this possibility, is for Nietzsche not lawless and despicable but, rather, more disciplined in the spirit of the law and less despicable than the “last men” of today. Heidegger clarifies for us: To this man, who overcomes himself, Nietzsche gives a name which is easily misunderstood. He calls him “the superman” [Overman]. But Nietzsche does not mean a type who casts off “humanity,” to make sheer caprice the law and titanic rage the rule. The superman is the man who first leads the essential nature of existing man over into its truth, and so assumes that truth. Existing man, by being thus determined and secured, in his essential nature, is to be rendered capable of becoming the future master of the earth—of wielding to high purpose the powers that will fall to future man in the nature of the technological transformation of the earth and of human activity. The essential figure of this man, the superman rightly understood, is not a product of an unbridled and degenerate imagination rushing headlong into the void.67

We have here said something about what this Overman is and is not. What is eminently clear is that he is not determinately what the party ideologues of Hitler’s Third Reich made him out to be—this was a debasement of Nietzsche’s insight and intent. On the contrary, the determination and securement of the existing human “in his nature” has little to do with such atrocity—indeed, nothing in common with it. If we have been attentive to what Heidegger makes clear for us, we will have caught the central words:

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The self-overcoming man is the man who first leads the essential nature of existing man over into its truth, and so appropriates that truth. It is of note, further, that in Nietzsche’s characterization of this Overman, as “Caesar with the soul of Christ” who is himself “ruler,” “Caesar” is not a great “statesman”—“the public figures who in the course of current history emerge in the limelight are as far from the superman’s nature as is humanly possible.”68 Moreover, such a one “never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of power, nor in the wellstaged meetings of politicians.”69 Presumably, the politics of the self-overcoming man is an essential politics, authentic politics, different from the commonplace and petty or inauthentic politics of “the last man” or “man as he is so far.” But precisely what and how this politics is, what and how this “Caesar with the soul of Christ” is political, remains unclear; for it comes to us as an ambiguous possibility at the end of political philosophy under the sway of the metaphysical dispensation of the will to power articulated by Nietzsche. This means that the task yet remains to think Nietzsche’s word more essentially and to name what remains concealed and distorted even in Nietzsche’s effort to think humanity’s self-overcoming. Heidegger’s thought points the way, without accomplishing the naming, i.e., without ‘bringing to language’ the essential words by which authentic politics becomes potent as a world-historical possibility of Dasein. Our task, in preparation for a new (authentic) determination of political being, is to name the human (speaking here of ‘historical essence’) who first leads the essential nature of existing mankind over into its truth and so assumes—appropriates—that truth. This possibility comes not as any mere human doing, not as a self-assertion of an autonomous will, but as the receptive heed of a claim. This possibility, understood as a world-historical possibility, comes as a possibility granted for a transition from inauthentic political being to authentic political being correspondent to Being’s commissioning of itself in a transformed ‘order of Being’. Such a grant is nothing less than that ‘world occurrence’ which begins to appropriate us today and which thus may inform our horizon. In once again asking the question “What calls for politics?” we are ultimately concerned with what for a future world order may be the genuine order of human being. Here, while not abandoning the ontological concern with Being itself, we are concerned with the factual possibility at the heart of Heidegger’s later reflections in the context of his understanding of Being’s epochal dispensations: “We are thinking of the possibility that the world civilization which is just now beginning might one day overcome the technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn.” This possibility of overcoming speaks of the “difference between

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man’s present life as technological being under the aegis of Gestell, frame, framing [Enframing]—in which everything, including man himself, becomes material for a process of self-assertive production, self-assertive imposition of human will on things regardless of their own essential nature—and a life in which he would genuinely dwell as a human being.”70 This difference bespeaks the possibility of restoration of an authentic criterion of humanity’s world sojourn. But, observes Heidegger, this possibility depends on “the readiness of man for a determination which, whether listened to or not, always speaks in the destiny of man which has not yet been decided.” Following Heidegger’s lead—as we have begun to do in what has preceded—we must think “in an even more Greek manner” what the Greeks have thought of the political. That is, we must “pursue more originally what the Greeks have thought, to see it in the source of its reality. To see it so is in its own way Greek, and yet in respect of what it sees is no longer, is never again, Greek.”71 Thereby, we may yet be granted what since the first beginning of Being’s unfolding has been “held in reserve for an originary advent.” What possibility is granted for a transition from inauthentic political being to authentic political being? In what essential words is this horizon disclosed, speaking in the destiny of humanity and, thus, as an original claim? I ask: Might it be that an originary advent announces itself in these essential words—autarcheia, autarchos? It is to this we must now give thought, for such is thinking’s claim upon us.

CHAPTER SIX

The Essence of Political Being

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BEYOND OBJECTIVE REPRESENTATION

In the posthumously published Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger states that “Man has already been uprooted from the earth. What’s left are purely technical relations. Where man lives today is no longer an earth.”1 How, then, we might ask, does the transformation of humanity’s world sojourn become possible? Does it become possible through philosophy? No, answers Heidegger: “Philosophy will not be able to effect any direct transformation of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of any simply human contemplation and striving.” Philosophy as such (that is, as metaphysics) cannot bring about the possibility of transformation of humanity’s world sojourn, for philosophy has attained its end. Yet we are not to despair of the present situation, for with the end of philosophy comes also the task of

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thinking long held in reserve, now to be undertaken in a way more original. This requires that we “contemplate the present” fundamentally, that we listen to that ‘determination’ even now speaking in the destiny of humanity which has not yet been decided. “What we must do,” Heidegger admonishes, “is try to forecast (vorzudenken) the times that are to come, without prophetic pretensions, on the basis of the barely grasped fundamental features of our present age.” For Heidegger this vorzudenken or “thinking ahead” is a thinking characterized by the most fundamental attunement. “Thinking is not inactivity, but that very action (Handeln) which is in dialogue with the world’s destiny.” This “action” is the authentic doing of the thinker, but of the political thinker in particular insofar as human destiny is ever manifest in the historico-political configuration of an age. In the discussion of Part 1 I have sought to express the fundamental features of our present age, linking contemporary world order thinking to “the dominance of the subject” as humanity’s newly found freedom. In this freedom “man in each case independently posits what is necessary and binding.” This freedom, as the expressed ‘precedence of the human ego’, remains determinative of humanity’s world sojourn, inasmuch as it already posits an understanding of that world of the human, and of humanity’s relation to that world. “Viewed metaphysically,” Heidegger discerns, “the new freedom is the opening up of a manifold of what in the future can and will be consciously posited by man himself as something necessary and binding.” He continues: The essence of the history of the modern age consists in the full development of these manifold modes of modern freedom. Because such freedom implies man’s developing mastery over his own definition of the essence of mankind, and because such being master needs power in an essential and explicit sense, the empowering of the essence of power as fundamental reality can therefore become possible only in and as the history of the modern age.2

Everything fundamental that characterizes the present age is referred to this “modern freedom” which appropriates power to sustain and to enhance the dominance of the subject. And what is this “power”? We have seen that it is nothing else but the will to power: “‘Power’ in its correctly understood modern meaning—that is, as will to power—first becomes metaphysically possible as modern history.”3 This is what modern freedom is all about. Modern history is the history of the dominance of the subject on the basis of the metaphysical possibility of will to power. Understood in its fullest metaphysical significance, the will to power which characterizes modern times seeks unconditional absolute dominion: “The securing of supreme and absolute

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self-development in all the capacities of mankind for absolute dominion over the entire earth is the secret goad that prods modern man again and again to new resurgences, a goad that forces him into commitments that secure for him the surety of his actions and the certainty of his aims.”4 The contemporary movement for world order is the latest of resurgences, positing the whole of the planet as what is to be bound by the dictates of selfasserting humanity. The contemporary globalism—no matter that it be called normative futurism or technocratic futurism—remains committed (even unwittingly) to the objective representation of the future world order. As a “politically relevant cosmopolitanism” (to echo Leo Strauss), the contemporary globalism, in accord with the metaphysical ground of the modern age, “increases man’s power, but not his wisdom.” Accordingly, the dominance of the subject in the present age posits unhesitatingly the possibility of world domination—ostensibly the ultimate, ontical assurance of dominion and satisfaction of the will to power. This possibility of world domination is part of that “manifold” opened up by the new freedom. As something posited (Latin, positum, “decreed”), it is different from any and all historically precursory establishment of “universal states” or “empires”; for now the positing comes with the dual force of making the possibility necessary and binding upon a scientific-technological world literally encompassing the entire Earth. The resurgence of Western humanity in the world order movement ostensibly would restore an ordo breached and denied. But it is incapable of restoring anything so long as it steps forward in a self-assertion that yet strays from the origin. The politics of the modern age is yet grounded in metaphysics, and thus is the playing out of its essential configuration determined. Modern politics has its essential ground in metaphysics. As modern politics, it is grounded metaphysically by Descartes and brought to completion by Nietzsche. It is the metaphysical determination of the modern world running from Descartes to Nietzsche which makes possible that modern liberation of the human by which he “comes to be the self-posited ground and measure for all certitude and truth.” This new possibility of humanity, in the domain of politics, posits the ‘truth’ of political reality, hence the ‘essence’ of this reality—doing so, we must be careful to remember, first according to the Cartesian metaphysic which gives precedence to the human ego, then finally in the Nietzschean completion of that metaphysic in the “doctrine of man as lawgiver of the world” and in “the absolute subjectivity of will to power.” Accordingly, modern politics is a pro-positing of the world order, i.e., (a) an advance re-presenting of that order in accordance with a ‘world-view’ or Weltanschauung, and (b) a pro-positing as power-politics. Politics is determined in its fundamental features by what mankind ‘requires’. Thus is world-order-future a

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positing in a way that is determined as both necessary and binding upon human, Earth, things, speech, action. The grossen Politik of which Nietzsche spoke— as power-politics—became planetary power-politics in accordance with the requirements mankind has imposed in his developing mastery, i.e., in his assertion of planetary dominion. World-order-ism is planetary politics grounded in that metaphysical possibility which is already beyond the inter-national tensions of North-South and East-West, beyond the “organization of the masses” and the Marxist appeal to dominance of the proletariat, and beyond “the development of the power of self-reliant nations.” Unwittingly, the movement for world order posits that metaphysical possibility of humanity which would be “the creation of a mankind that finds the shape of its essence neither in ‘individuality’ nor in the ‘mass’, but in the ‘type’”: The type unites in itself in a transformed way the uniqueness that was previously claimed for individuality and the similarity and universality that the community demands. But the uniqueness of the “type” consists in an unmistakable prevalence of the same coinage, which nonetheless will not suffer any dreary egalitarianism, but rather requires a distinctive hierarchy.5

The “type” of humanity posited by world-order-ism is, for the most part, the ‘cosmopolitan’—the “politically relevant” but, nonetheless, ambiguous cosmopolitan. And what is it that fundamentally characterizes this cosmopolitan to make him politically relevant? It is power—and power because this politically relevant cosmopolitanism is grounded in Western humanity, in metaphysics which is Western and which, as we have said, wholly gives to the modern age its fundamental features. The politics of globalism issuing forth out of the movement for world order is first and foremost the possibility of the absolute ascendancy of the Western political Weltanschauung. Politics, of course, has always been Western in essence. It is Greek in origin. Now, however, its ascendancy as globalism is the sign of the successful positing of Western metaphysics as a way of thinking and being, thus a sign of the dominance of the modern subject seeking its planetary securement. In the objective representation of the world order, the whole of mankind and the whole of the Earth are placed “at the disposal of absolute serviceability.” The possibility of world order is thus the would-be ultimate assurance to Western humanity of the advance of its every intention and representation. Becoming certain of itself, grounding certainty and truth in itself, Western humanity becomes certain of its politics, that it is politics, that its representation (cogitatio) of politics is, indeed, ‘the truth’ concerning the political. “Everything that is certain of itself,” Heidegger noted, “must in addition guar-

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antee as certainly given that being for which every representation and intention, and through which every action, is supposed to be assured.”6 Politics, even the essence of the political, is guaranteed as certain in the representation Western philosophy gives it—guaranteed because of Western humanity’s guarantee of its own being circumscribing the essence of truth. The possibility of world order determined in accordance with a framework of values, in the whole of its objective representation, is assured and guaranteed in the metaphysical ground of Western humanity. In the representation of politics and in the ongoing representing of political things, there is no longer any doubt what and how politics is, thus about what and how the ordo of a planetary politics is to be. In this way, the world order movement emanating from the West, however cosmopolitan its claim, remains fundamentally particularistic: The politics it would secure is, above all, a self-representing and, as such, a casting of Western humanity as ‘type’ for planetary human existence. The possibility of world order, as the quest for world domination that comes at the end of political philosophy, comes as an objective representation. That is, the pro-positing of this possibility of ordering takes place “within the scope of the one representing,” viz., Western humanity. The whole of politics, of course, from the explicit beginning of political philosophy under the sway of metaphysics, has fallen and remained within the scope of the one representing. Thereby, every representation of politics, what and how it is, has been determined on the basis of the Greek orthotes, then the Latin perceptio, as the metaphysical conception of ‘truth’. Politics as it is understood and defined today in the dominant paradigm of objectivist-scientism, is in advance decided as being secured for mankind as a whole—secured in the orthotes, in the perceptio, in the ‘correctness of the glance’. In this way, the fundamental orientation of the West has become fully the basic orientation of global humanity in its quest for ordo. Heidegger could accordingly write in his “Overcoming Metaphysics”: “Metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance” (my italics).7 From the beginning, metaphysics is the presupposition of the West’s planetary dominance, all the more so in the realm of the political. In Michael Zimmerman’s words, “Western society is egoism on a planetary scale.”8 The presupposition of planetary dominance finds its expression in the empowering of the will, of the will to power. The presupposition contained in the call to world order is nothing but the presupposition of planetary dominance of the will as given expression in the metaphusica specialis of the West: “What is in accordance with its will is correct and in order, because the will to will itself is the only order.”9 The movement for world order, however,

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steeped as it is in either of its modes of normative or technocratic futurism, does not know that it is already outwitted by this will to power. This movement, ostensibly having its inception in a human volition, posits the possibility of order against a perceived chaos of inter-national power-politics. Supposedly faced with a lack of ordered governance—faced with international anarchy rather than international society—it would proceed (at least initially) with an escalation and expansion of government, to become effectively planetary by institutionally ordering the space of the inter-. But the movement falls victim to a basic deception, for what is determinative here is not this side or that side in the ongoing struggle of power-politics, but power itself: “Everywhere,” Heidegger writes, “power itself is what is determinative.” Indeed, power-politics in the twentieth century “is in the service of power and is willed by it. Power has overpowered these struggles in advance.”10 Both normative and technocratic futurism are in the service of power empowering itself to the possibility of ‘unconditional dominance’. The one (normative futurism) thinks in terms of ‘values’, the other (technocratic futurism) in terms of the technological as ‘utilitarian intelligence’. Both are under the sway of the ‘framework’, Ge-Stell, the essence of technology as will to power. What is posited as value finds itself in the service of the framework, just as much as does what is preferred as technological ‘fix’. The call to world order that finds expression in the work of social scientists is the ‘gathering agent’ of Ge-Stell “that challenges mankind to put everything that discloses itself into the position of stock, resource, material for technological processing.” It is in this specific sense—being in the service of the unconditional dominance of the will to power as the essence of technology—that the movement for world order, as the globalism of normative and technocratic futurism, is the extreme possibility of ‘completed’ political philosophy. By now we must have learned that properly to approach the problem of world order is not to do so as if it were chiefly or solely an epistemological question, i.e., “approaching a problem as if it were to be solved by the acquisition of knowledge.” Rather, it must first and foremost be understood as a metaphysical or ontological question; i.e., it can be solved primarily by understanding it as one that requires the penetration of Being as a response to the call of Being. This means that world order thinking must think more deeply the essence of its quest and task, that it must see the problem of world order in terms of the abiding epochal dispensation of the essence of technology, of Being as the will to power, and then in terms of Being’s potential ‘turning’. World order thinking that thinks in terms of values—peace, justice, economic well-being, ecological balance—or by way of instrumental reason must, if it is to attain to the possibility of an alternative criterion for

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mankind’s world sojourn, come to understand how its movement is steeped in the fundamental features of the modern age. Only in this way can it understand the immediately relevant question of whether the world-order-future is to be the genuine ordo of human being, of Being, or the production of its semblance, the representation of that ordo, rather than its most proper presentation. Only in this way can it come to see the need for asking the fundamental question, “How must we think?,” rather than the ambiguously urgent question, “What ought we to do?” (which is not really a ‘rather than’ but the recognition of thinking itself as action, as the authentic doing).

NAMING THE ORDO OF BEING

Taking as our point of departure the question “How must we think?,” we have come to think the held-out possibility of an alternative criterion for humanity’s world sojourn. The possibility of understanding the character of this alternative stems from the distinction between human existence as ‘technological being’ and existence as ‘proper dwelling’. What is the way into thinking this possibility in terms of essential political engagement? It is the thinking that thinks the political difference—the difference between (a) the factual political and (b) the essence of the political. (This notion of difference obviously calls to mind Heidegger’s notion of “ontological difference,” to which it is of course indebted. The point of putting this conception forward, however, is to illuminate a pathway for thinking politics essentially. Whether this conceptual move is “justified” will be decided only in our moving along this pathway.) This thought of the political difference opens up the way to an elucidation of the meaning of politics: It remains open to a naming of an ‘order of Being’ which may be/come the world-orderfuture. Thinking the ontological meaning of the world order movement has opened up this possibility; for, in thinking this movement ontologically we (dare to) speak of the possibility of world-order-as-presentation in two ancient yet entirely governing words: αυταρχεια (autarcheia) and αυταρ− χος (autarchos). With these essential words a fundamental transformation is commissioned by Being. If we now speak of autarcheia and autarchos in the sense of the transformation of the political-philosophical conceptions of ta politika and zoion politikon, it is only because political philosophy itself has already entered its transition into the experience of the difference between the factual political and politicality as the essence of the political. Both the metaphysically conditioned question, “What is politics?,” and the immediately relevant question

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(whether the world-order-future will be the ordo of Being) depend for their authentic understanding on our being open to what is granted in this essential naming: autarcheia. Our naming of the ordo of Being as autarcheia is not superficial and contrived. To echo Heidegger in present context, “With this translation we ascribe to the Greek word a sense that is foreign neither to the word itself nor to the matter designated by the word in the saying.”11 On the contrary, the word has depth of meaning in what it reveals, if we know how to (or, at least, are ready to learn how to) listen to what the word speaks. In this naming of autarcheia, as yet unthought through, there is to be found something in tune with Heidegger’s fundamental thinking, something that has “pushed beyond this time”; so much so, indeed, that it is seemingly ‘a-political’ when measured by what counts as ‘political’ in the Western tradition, yet remains political in an essential manner.12 That possibility of an authentic politics named by the Greek word autarcheia has a potential far greater than all conventional forms of politeia to date, all of these ‘forms of government’ understood as the politics permitted by the now-ending epoch of Western metaphysics. Following Heidegger, we would have to say that the conventional politics of this metaphysics has rested for the most part in “untruth” as consequence of the “oblivion of Being.” By contrast, the potential of autarcheia is corollary of that yet more fundamental potential which arrives with Being’s disclosure in its truth as over against the ‘untruth’ of the now-passing epoch of its history. Thus, if “for Heidegger, traditional thought plays a role in determining history, even though the true sense of Being remains withdrawn from it,” then (as Werner Marx rightly understood) we must consider “how much stronger must then be the history-founding power of a thought in which the true sense of Being no longer ‘withdraws’ itself but ‘commissions’ itself.”13 We now name autarcheia as “Being-Self-ruling” and autarchos as “self-ruling Dasein.” The naming of autarcheia as “Being-Self-ruling” and as the Dasein’s “authentic potentiality-for-Being” harbors a presupposition as yet unthought. But the word itself gives us information about this presupposition, if we look to the root of its formation: αυτος (autos) and αρχη (arche). Autarcheia speaks of the belonging-together of to auto and to arche. This belonging together, however, is not a conjunction of two elements, not a nexus or connexio. Rather, this belonging-together is to be understood in terms of what Heidegger would call the “mutual appropriation” of to auto and to arche. But what is the meaning of this to auto? And what is the meaning of this to arche? What is it that is “mutually appropriated”? Heidegger refers to the fragment of Parmenides—το γαρ αυτο νοειν εςτιν τε και ειναι (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai)—both in his What is

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Called Thinking? and the lecture “The Principle of Identity” in his Identity and Difference. Heidegger translates to auto as “the Same,” eventually saying: “It means what belongs together.” And what is it that belongs together? According to the fragment, thinking (noein) and Being (einai)—in the German, Denken and Sein—belong together. Thus, Heidegger interprets the whole of the fragment to say: “thinking and Being belong together in the Same and by virtue of this Same” (Identity, 27). Arche has been associated with various words in translation; e.g., “beginning,” “principle,” “rule,” “govern,” “office,” “foundation,” “first cause,” “origin,” “realm.” In each of these renderings, there is something wanting to be said which ties all together to give the authentic speech of the word arche. John Myres, in his The Political Ideas of the Greeks, comes closest to this in writing: “In Homer . . . arkhe is not primarily an office, or status; like its verb, it signifies simply ‘initiative’, that personal quality of spontaneous ‘drive’, ‘push’, ‘vim’ (to borrow modern words forceful enough to characterize it), which ‘gets things done’, manifested especially as a cause of activity in others.”14 He adds: “The stem from which arkhe is formed is represented in Sanskrit by arh-, giving a verb arhami, ‘I am able’, ‘I have it in me to do’. . . . A man’s personal initiative, of which he himself is conscious and of which others become aware by his manifestations of ‘push’, is arkhe . . .”15 Arche, in its authentic speech, speaks of an authentic doing as that which is origin of initiative—the realm out of which the ‘I’ is ‘able’. This “I am able” speaks most clearly in “I have it in me to do.” Observe that Heidegger, in his “Letter on Humanism,” says: “The ‘It gives’ [Es gibt] rules as the destiny of Being.” We can hear in this statement a twofold, yet unitary, pronouncement: (a) The “It gives” grants arche as the destiny of Being. (b) The ‘initiative’ of “I am” is the granting of the “It in me”—the ‘It’ grants the ‘to do’ of “I am able.” Arche, then, thought essentially, is first and foremost the authentic doing of the Es gibt. For now let us hold on to this thought and then in due course explore its implications. We come now to thinking the mutual appropriation of auto and arche. We must recall that auto has a reflexivity to it, such that same means “the very one” and “self.” The mutual appropriation of auto and arche, then, speaks of to auto which appropriates arche and of the arche which appropriates to auto: The ‘Same’ appropriates initiative, authentic doing; and authentic doing, initiative, appropriates ‘the Same’. But this ‘Same’ is noein and einai— i.e., the relation of ‘thinking’ and ‘Being’. Accordingly, it is the relation of thinking and Being that appropriates ‘initiative’. The belonging-together of thinking and Being is the appropriation of arche, and, as such, the belongingtogether of Dasein and Being (Sein). This is the realm, i.e., arche, “through

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which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature.” And what is man’s and Being’s “active nature”? It is ‘self-ruling’, appropriation of ownmost (eigentlich) arche. Hence do we call autarcheia “Being-Self-ruling” and autarchos “the Dasein’s authentic potentiality-forBeing.” “We must understand the Greek word arche in its fullest sense,” writes Heidegger. “It names that from which something proceeds. But this ‘from where’ is not left behind in the process of going out, but the beginning rather becomes that which the verb archein expresses, that which governs.”16 In the mutual appropriation of to auto and to arche, “that which governs” rules as historical Dasein, indeed rules for historical Dasein. Autarchos is the primordial name for Being’s release of the human to his and her ownmost self as political Dasein; and the arche of to auto is the incipient power of Being gathering das Dasein to itself precisely for the sake of this release. In the history of Being—which is given first of all as a history of metaphysics—the zoion politikon (i.e., the political determination of the zoion logon echon so denominated in the metaphysical dispensation represented by Plato and Aristotle) is the venture out of which is to arise the autarchos. The essential transformation of zoion politikon to autarchos is that manifest “historical repetition” (Auseinandersetzung) in which the metaphysical venture of the anthropos is returned to its essential origin. ‘Autarchos’ names that to which the human as political being is authentically released as the originary presence of politics. If we recall our exposition of the word through the aid of etymology, this much is clear, for it follows upon Heidegger’s word that precedes it: “authentic releasement consists in this: that man in his very nature belongs to that-which-regions, i.e., he is released to it.”17 This belonging, however, is itself to be understood in terms of ‘appropriation’, for authentic releasement itself is but the complement of the appropriation of that-which-regions, i.e., the appropriation of the human’ s nature by that-which-regions “for its own regioning.” We can understand this region-ing to mean “govern-ing,” “rule-ing.” That-which-regions, as thatwhich-governs, appropriates humanity (as historical Dasein) for its own govern-ing; but this it can effectively do only by the authentic releasement of the human as autarchos “for its own regioning” by virtue of the mutual appropriation of Being (Sein) and Dasein. Thus, we can now appreciate more fully the sense of the dialogue between scientist, teacher, and scholar in the following passage from Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking: Scientist: . . . the relation between that-which-regions and the thing is neither a connection of cause to effect, nor the transcendental-horizonal relation; and hence neither an ontic nor an ontological relation. . . .

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Teacher: What are we then to call the relation of that-which regions to the thing, if that-which-regions lets the thing abide in itself? Scientist: It determines the thing, as thing.

With this passage we are we brought back to our earlier question: What does it mean to determine the matter of politics? Answer: It means to determine the zoion politikon as autarchos; to determine ta politika as autarcheia; to let that-which-regions as that-which-governs govern thereby through its incipient power of Being-Self-ruling. THE OFFER OF ‘WORLD’

The ‘saying’ of autarcheia offers in all the suddenness of a “moment of vision” (Augenblick) a world, a world whose order is the ordo of Being in its truth (i.e., beyond the heretofore ‘untruth-ful’ history of Being’s metaphysical dispensations), and which, as such ordo, is the claim of Being upon the zoion politikon to be released to autarchos. We think, and are claimed to be attuned to think: Autarcheia: the politics of Being? Autarchos: the Being of politics? This remains yet thought-provoking and lays claim upon contemporary humanity in and for a historically effective and, thus, world-transforming attunement (Gelassenheit). In finding a name for something, so it is often said, there is given the determination of its reality. This reality, qua determined, becomes commonplace, even as standard. So it is with political phenomena—with what is named as this and that political thing. The naming determines how it is: as ruler, ruled, statesman, citizen, state, constitution, and so on and so forth, each in its framework of specificity of being just “this” one. We understand the sense of this in Heidegger’s reference to Stefan George’s poem “The Word” and in his paraphrase of the last line of the final stanza: “Where word breaks off no thing may be.” Heidegger transforms the stanza (cautiously), thus: “No thing is where the word is lacking.” Hence does Heidegger say: “Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it. Accordingly, we must stress as

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follows: no thing is where the word, that is, the name, is lacking. The word [i.e., the name] alone gives being to the thing.”18 Hitherto, throughout the history of Western humanity governed by a series of metaphysical dispensations, we have understood political reality by the naming that occurred at the beginning of the Western tradition in Greek antiquity. Politics as we know it, as established at that beginning and for that beginning—this would not be what and how it is “if the word framing that order and challenge had not spoken.” Now, however, a new finding comes as a result of a new naming, a naming attuned to Being’s commissioning itself in its turning from Enframing. In the word autarchos is concentrated (difficult though it be to discern) the whole of an experience undergone in essential (wesentliche) political thinking—that experience which enters into the relation of zoion and politikon most essentially, whereby, as the response that has its source in the reciprocity of thinking and being, an event takes place as world-historical. This event (Ereignis) is what the word autarchos bestows as the essential relation of the human being to the essence of politics. As bestowal, the word lets the autarchos be present, lets it appear as what the zoion politikon is originarily, what has perdured always in the changing context or multiplicitous manifestation of the zoion politikon as monarch, democrat, aristocrat, etc. In this word, autarchos, Western humanity experiences its political calling authentically. That experiencing which experiences autarchos is the lasting matter promised to, yet withheld/concealed from, politics ever since its explicit beginning in the Platonic-Aristotelian dispensation. Hence, to experience the saying of this word—autarchos—this is the task reserved for political thinking (Denken) at the end of political philosophy. With the accomplishment of this task politics as theoria and as praxis is released to its essence (Wesen). Only after more than two thousand years does language grant the possibility of an ‘originary advent’ of the autarchos. Therein is granted the enduring possibility of authenticity for Western humanity and, then, perhaps also for planetary humanity in its quest for planetary dwelling beyond the claim of Enframing. We must take care to listen to the saying: autarchos. We must learn from Heidegger, and through him learn from Stefan George: [It] is the word which first holds the treasure in its presence, indeed, first fetches and brings it there and preserves it. Suddenly the word shows a different, a higher rule. It is no longer just a name-giving, a grasp reaching for what is present and already portrayed, it is not only a means of portraying what lies before us. On the contrary, the word first bestows presence, that is, Being in which things appear as beings.19

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Accordingly, we come to say: It is the word autarchos that first holds the treasure in its presence; i.e., that first holds the possibility of world-historical autarchos, that first fetches and brings this world-historical autarchos into its world-historical presence and preserves it there. We think the meaning of this naming all too inadequately unless we feel the force of what has taken place, for what takes place by virtue of the word is a ‘commending’ of world to the essential being of zoion politikon and, thus, a granting of autarchos to world: The autarchos may be only where the word is granted, for the word “allows the thing to presence as thing,” i.e., it “bethings” it. The word autarchos bethings the presencing of the autarchos qua autarchos. In its world-historical advent, the autarchos is the only essentially human possibility of preserving the Earth; but it is such because it is the only essentially human possibility of preserving the essential being of the human in his and her historical Dasein. Autarcheia is that supreme necessity of being-political without which humanity cannot but forgo—sooner or later—its guardianship of Being, for having forgone our ownmost (eigentlich) affirmation of our essential being. The response of the autarchos is a response to what is original and originating of politics. As response, it confers to politics its essential mode of givenness, viz., autarcheia. In the given Mitsein of autarchoi, then, autarcheia is the ‘essential’ politeuma: The politeuma of autarchoi is the original political Mitsein, for the autarchoi let each other be originally political, reciprocally granting the measures of governance which a politeuma is in essence. As it was once said that man is the measure of all things, so must it now be said that the autarchos is the essential measure of politics.

AUTARCHEIA AS POSSIBILITY OF WORLD ORDER

Autarcheia, we have stated, is a possibility of world order. It is not a solution to the problem of world order, but rather the possibility that opens up the direction to that order. It is a possibility in Heidegger’s sense of ‘possibility’ which stands “higher than actuality.” In speaking of autarcheia, we think the possibility not merely as ‘actuality’ but as possibility. Werner Marx clarifies the sense of this understanding: “Higher than actuality stands possibility.” But against the tradition, “possibility” is here understood as a mode which simply cannot come to an actualization. . . . The projective disclosure of the “can be” of possibilities, the undertaking of the possibilities into which Dasein is thrown . . . is to be out

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Autarcheia: a possibility of world order. But, we must yet ask: Of what do we speak in thinking ‘world order’? We first have to think ‘world’, then ‘order’, to understand what is said in their conjunction. Or do we first have to think the conjunction ‘world order’ to understand ‘world’ and ‘order’? Does not the Greek word kosmos speak of a ‘world order’ in the sense of the ‘worlding’ of an order and also of the ‘ordering’ of that world qua world? Let us recall (bearing in mind the need to think the sense of kosmos) that Heidegger speaks of ‘world’ in several ways. We have taken note that in Being and Time he refers to the world’s “worldliness” as “the unity of a referential context that bestows significance upon the relations of ‘in order to’, ‘whereto’, ‘for’, and ‘for the sake of ’”—related, of course, to Dasein, where ‘world’ “has the character of being for the sake of Dasein.” In the essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” the world for Heidegger is “the ever changing circuit of decision and work, of action and responsibility, but also of caprice and commotion, decadence and confusion.” Then, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” world is “the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessings, victory and disgrace, endurance and decadence, secure the shape and course of the human being in his mission.” Ultimately, we come to an understanding in which world is apparently no longer merely the “selfchanging circuit of decisions” nor the “unity of the paths and relations of birth and death, blessings and curses.” Now, the ‘words of Being’ secured from the dialogue with Hölderlin’s poetic work become the ‘building tool’ for the other sense of Being and ‘essence’ of the ‘world essence’. The Earth and the heavens, the divine and the mortal, become “neighborhoods” (Gegenden), near in the sense of being “over against one another,” which in this essay constitute the prevailing and worlding of the world.21 Thus, the world is constituted by four neighborhoods—earth, heavens, divine, mortals—each granting of itself to order the world in the neighbor-ing. The ‘how’ of the kosmos is this “fourfold” (Geviert) which, in neighbor-ing, thereby orders. To speak of world order, then, is to speak of the fourfold—not just of man, or earth, or God, or space—but of their essential unity or ‘jointure’, their belonging-together. To speak of world order in this sense of fourfold, we may say, is Heidegger’s way of speaking the early Greek sense of kosmos which “refers to the ‘how of the Being’ of ‘being as a whole’ which in an ‘antecedent’ way and ‘relative to

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Dasein’ determines and makes possible every particular how.”22 Hence, this sense of kosmos also determines and makes possible the particular ‘how’ of the world political order. How, then, are we to understand autarcheia as a possibility of world order? Autarcheia, thought through essentially, is that setting up of a world and setting forth of the Earth which is an instigating of the strife of archist and an-archist in the individual Dasein. In autarcheia, this opposition in the individual Dasein is brought into the intimacy of a simple belonging-to-one-another. In the strife of autarcheia, archist and an-archist appear for the first time in that authentic yield of “liberated surge” from “self-seclusion,” thus to “unconceal” the origin of the zoion politikon as autarchos. As a ‘work’ of political thinking that founds the history of an arriving epoch, however, autarcheia “does not happen so that the work should at the same time settle and put an end to the conflict [i.e., of archist and an-archist] in an insipid agreement, but happens so that the strife may remain a strife.”23 This is what underlies the characterization of autarcheia as a simultaneous “danger” and “saving power.” It is the danger that restores, amid the essential strife of archist and an-archist in political being, the burden and responsibility of authentic self-hood in the essential determination of the zoion politikon—a burden all too easily cast off for the false security of a “public” (offentlich) order. The danger here lies in this willingness of political Dasein to cast off this burden even now in the face of a final call to decision, a decision in the direction of unconcealed (unverborgene) political originality. Autarcheia, therefore, instigates the strife of archist and an-archist in a way such that it remains a strife. The strife alone is what maintains both in an authentic interaction for the possibility of that liberated surge from selfseclusion that yields the zoion politikon in its unconcealed originality. The possibility held out by autarcheia is the “saving power” only if the danger is itself undertaken as the possibility so understood. Undertaking the possibility of autarcheia means making a decision. If such a decision is “risky,” seemingly fraught with insecurity, this is to be expected, for such is the character of a decision. “Every decision,” Heidegger tells us, “bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision.” Politics itself is what for us yet remains concealed in its essence—it remains enigmatic. For all its manifest ways of being in one or another politeia, politics remains unmastered by humanity. Hence, it bases its decision of political engagement on such a confusing, concealed basis. Autarcheia, however, is different from all forms of politeia to date in the history of the West precisely in that politics is understood as that which is yet in concealment, which is yet not mastered and which never can be mastered by engagements that characterize and belong to

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conventional politics. In the naming of an authentic politics by the Greek word autarcheia, a world is opened up, and opened up at the “second beginning” in the history of Being. As that which is opened up, autarcheia “submits to the decision of an historical humanity the question” of authenticity and inauthenticity, authentic self and everyday self, people and public, political truth and un-truth. “The dawning world brings out what is as yet undecided and measureless, and thus discloses the hidden necessity of measure and decisiveness.”24 To speak of the possibility of autarcheia as decision is not to speak merely of an abstraction. It is to speak of a genuine concretion of possibility while holding out this possibility as possibility. If autarcheia opens up a world, it must at the same time set itself upon the Earth, and find its topos in the strife of archist and an-archist. This strife, as “rift” (Riss)—no less than the temple that must set itself back “into the heavy weight of stone,” or the hand-carved statue that must set itself back “into the dumb hardness of wood,” or the painting set back into “the dark glow of colors”—must be overcome in the “earth” of dwelling humanity. It must do so because “truth occurs only by installing itself within a particular being.” Political truth occurs only by installing itself within political Dasein. Without this setting itself back into the essence of the zoion politikon in the constraints of an earthly existence, autarcheia as Being-Self-ruling has no ground, for “upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world.” The historical dwelling of humanity in the world opened up by autarcheia has its ground upon the Earth and in it. Through this grounding, political truth is fixed in its place. Yet, this grounding nevertheless occurs in a way such that the world of autarcheia “transports us out of the realm of the ordinary,” displacing us in a way such that “our accustomed ties to world and to earth” are transformed: All “usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking” is retrained “in order to stay within the truth” happening in that “work of politics” that is autarcheia. Thus are world and Earth in their historicity preserved. The grounding of the autarchos in living Dasein preserves the political for the possibility of its releasement. This releasement owes it import to the unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) which belongs to language. The import of the Greek word autarcheia derives from the essence of language itself. “Language,” Heidegger tells us, “by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as.”25 In autarcheia, we have a “projective announcement” which “forthwith becomes a renunciation of all

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the dim confusion in which what is [in present case, e.g., politics] veils and withdraws itself.” In this projective announcement, we have a “saying” as well as the “happening of a saying,” in which a people’s world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed. Projective saying is saying which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the sayable as such into a world. In such saying, the concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging to world history, are formed for that folk [people], before it.26

Notwithstanding, what is here said, what has happened and yet happens in the saying, comes in this moment as an announcement for the most part unnoticed. That which has here happened as a saying comes in language as a work of politics—whose origin is itself politics setting-into-work of truth, of political truth. But it is yet without “actual effect”; for, as Heidegger makes clear, “a work is in actual effect as a work only when we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own nature itself to take a stand in the truth of what is.”27 Only in this work being in actual effect does the “founding of truth” occur, “bestowing” the truth of politics, “grounding” that truth and “beginning” it in the historical existence of the political being. The importance of a work being in actual effect derives from the fact that founding is actual “only in preserving”; hence, in the creative act of the political being who preserves the work of politics by moving into what the work discloses. But the political being cannot look to the past tradition of political understanding for assurance of the ‘truth’ that the work discloses: “The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. What went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work.”28 The political being, as preserver, is needed by the work of politics, hence by politics itself, for its arrival into its truth. This is why political truth, in the work, is “thrown toward the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group” of humans. That which is cast forth historically (think here: Geschichte) as autarcheia is not “an arbitrary demand.” Rather, in the sayinghappening of autarcheia, the human being as the essential preserving political being is projected into that historicity into which s/he is “already cast.” That autarcheia is the granting and founding of an authentic politics out of the original strife of archist and an-archist speaks of a ‘beginning’ which has prepared itself “for the longest time and wholly inconspicuously”; and, as a genuine beginning—however disguised or ambiguous it is at that beginning— “already contains the end latent within itself.” Hence, autarcheia is a

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“pregnant projective announcement” containing “the undisclosed abundance of the unfamiliar and extraordinary, which means that it also contains strife with the familiar and ordinary.” Thus is a history—a political history— founded anew. What is founded, what is as beginning, is “the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.” Thus, politics is indeed the “site of history,” as Heidegger said, but “history in the essential sense that it grounds history.” Politics, as the ‘realm’ of the historical disclosure of Being, “lets truth originate.” The origin of the work of politics—that is, the origin of both the creators and preservers of the work (each a political being), “which is to say [the origin] of a people’s historical existence”—is politics. This is so because politics is “by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.” Hence, we can say that even here, in this reflection and projection which we understand by way of the question “What calls for politics?,” we have what is “the preliminary and therefore indispensable preparation for the becoming” of politics: “Only such knowledge prepares its space” for politics—“their way for the creators, their location for the preservers.” In this time of crisis which stands at one and the same time as the passing and becoming of epoch, we, in our dialogue with Heidegger, must ask: “Are we in our existence historically at the origin? Do we know, which means do we give heed to, the nature of the origin?” Or, in our relation to politics: “Do we still merely make appeal to a cultivated acquaintance with the past”? In this, we have an “either/or” as the challenge of our time, a decision which is to be taken up; and, as Heidegger “hinted” by referring to Hölderlin’s words, “Reluctantly, that which dwells near its origin departs.” The departure is reluctant because the origin in its beginning bestows a simultaneous presence and absence of assurance or security for that beginning—present in the very unconcealment of the possibility of an authentic politics and authentic world order, yet absent in the departure that engages in the encounter with the unfamiliar and the extraordinary. The irony of this reflective knowledge which comes concomitant to our inquiry into the nature of politics is that, in arriving upon a new beginning— a beginning that purports to have latent in it the ultimate disclosure of an authentic politics—we do not solve the problem of politics. Rather, we come only so far as to see the problem. Yet, such seeing is no trivial accomplishment, for the seeing occurs as authentic understanding. Thus did we assert that autarcheia in its facticity is not a solution to the problem of world order but, rather, an indication of the direction to be taken. Taking up this direction, seeing the problem genuinely—as it were, “after long and inconspicuous preparation”—is what is granted by Being for and in being (viz., political Dasein) as the ‘call’ to respond to the challenge of Being in its mode of pres-

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encing as planetary technology. But, that we do not yet take notice of the danger of that representational thinking in whose language “we are the stakes” all the more urgently raises a question. It is the one question that (again, thinking with Heidegger here), no longer considered, might never be taken up in time: Is politics still an essential and necessary way in which truth happens that is decisive for our historical existence, or is politics no longer of this character? Perhaps it is to be said that politics never has been of this character. Perhaps, in a simultaneous haste and need to engage in dialogue with Heidegger—the ‘thinker’ for this “time of need”—we have from the outset erred so greatly that we have strayed irretrievably far. If this is so, we must then consider whether autarcheia is “that which is thought to thinking man” or “that which man has thought up.” (As we continue here in our elucidation of autarcheia, this possibility cannot but remain as a basso continuo . . .)

THE CALL TO ORIGINAL PRAXIS

Authentic politics can have its source only in authentic existence—that is, in the possibility of ‘authentic Being-one’s-Self’. What is critical in the attestation of such a possibility is that this possibility “takes the definite form of an existentiell modification of the ‘they’ [das Man].” This modification has that form which is a reversal of the ‘lostness’ of the Dasein in the ‘they’. “This process can be reversed,” however, Heidegger notes, “only if Dasein specifically brings itself back to itself from its lostness in the ‘they’.”29 But this process means that “because Dasein is lost in the ‘they’, it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be ‘shown’ to itself in its possible authenticity.”30 The claim being advanced here is that the naming of autarcheia makes this possibility of showing and finding accessible. Autarcheia is Dasein’s ownmost possibility of disclosure as political being: “Being towards this possibility [of political existence] discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being [political], in which its very Being [as Beingpolitical] is the issue. Here [in autarcheia] it can become manifest to Dasein that in this distinctive possibility of its own self, it has been wrenched away from the [inauthentic public politics of the] ‘they’ [hence, from the domination of the ‘they’].” The gist of this statement is this: that “when one understands that this [wrenching away from the ‘they’] is something which Dasein ‘can’ have done, this only reveals its factical lostness in the [political] everydayness of the they-self.”31 The call to autarcheia, as the call to the manifest ordo of Being, appeals to Dasein itself. “And to what is one called when one is thus appealed to?”

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we can ask along with Heidegger, answering: “To one’s own Self. Not to what Dasein counts for, can do, or concerns itself with in being with one another publicly, nor to what it has taken hold of, set about, or let itself be carried along with.”32 What is the significance of the appeal of autarcheia thus understood? It signifies the collapse of the ‘they’—“the call pushes it into insignificance,” inasmuch as the call is a summons to that potentiality-for-beingpolitical which is most one’s own (eigentlich). But, it will be said, such a summons is itself precarious, ambiguous, lacking a secure and clear ontical content. “How does one factically engage in autarcheia?” it is asked. What are the ontical-factical conditions for such an engagement—the praxis of autarcheia? For the moment this must remain ambiguous, for the emphasis here is given to the direction to be taken, in recognition that this direction is itself a ‘clearing’, an ‘open space’ ahead, essentially constituted so as to grant “a different interpretation in the individual Dasein in accordance with its own possibilities of understanding.” “Different” here does not mean discordant, but rather ownmost political authenticity; and ownmost political authenticity is not a solipsism but the Mitsein of dwelling, a be-ing and letting-be that is never chaotic, but profoundly an ordo of care (Sorge) and concern (Fursorge). Freedom, we recall Heidegger saying, is the “condition or the grounding of the possibility of Dasein.” To say that the human is a possibility of freedom, in short, is to say that the human is possessed by freedom (as distinct from the conception of freedom as a property of the human being). But, as Heidegger elsewhere says, freedom alone can be the source of obligation.33 Thus, as a possibility of freedom, the human’s potentiality-for-Being carries its own ‘obligatory lawfulness’. This obligatory lawfulness qua originary obligation is nothing other than the ontological liability disclosed in and as the autarchos. Insofar as being-free is to understand oneself out of possibility, only in autarcheia is originary freedom appropriated and made manifest in care and concern. It is thus in accordance with the sense of the verb ereignen used by Heidegger that we speak of autarcheia. Autarcheia is bound to what Heidegger has called Ereignis, the “event of appropriation.” Autarcheia, we have said, is Being authentically Self-ruling and, thus, the Dasein’s ‘authentic potentiality-for-Being’ to which Dasein itself attests: Said otherwise, Dasein, as autarchos, is the ‘fidelity of existence’ to its own self constituted by resoluteness. As Heidegger uses the word Ereignis, we discern its ‘identity’ with autarcheia. Joan Stambaugh’s comments are especially pertinent on this point: The event of appropriation (Ereignis) is a word belonging to common language and means “event.” But Heidegger’s use of it is more (a) ‘abstract’ in

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the sense of being infinitely removed from everyday events and yet being that which is so close to us that we cannot see it, and (b) ‘concrete’ in its use of the very roots of that word: er-eignen (eigen = own, thus to come into one’s own, to come where one belongs) and er-augnen (Auge = eye—this is the real etymological root of er-eignen), thus to catch sight of, to see with the mind’s eye, to see face-to-face.34

The point here is that the reality of autarcheia is infinitely removed from the inauthentic everydayness of publicness where politics is objectivized as this or that structural form of government and where citizenship is itself construed in the terms that correspond to that form. Yet, as the essence of being-political, the autarchos is that which is “so close” to us that we cannot see it. Ereignis, having its roots in eigen = own, is the event of ownmost appropriation, of coming into one’s own, of coming to where one belongs. This ownmost appropriation is the event of autarcheia. We think autarcheia in the course of questioning concerning politics; but we have attained to the clarification of the question in coming to understand Heidegger’s insight into the essence of the polis. This insight makes Stambaugh’s following statement all the more meaningful: “The event of appropriation is the realm in which man and Being reach each other in their very core.”35 Politics is in each case made one’s own, in each case appropriated by oneself, as that which, as the realm for the disclosure of Being in being, must be one’s own as the political being in essential determination. The very word, as Albert Hofstadter has observed, is chosen by Heidegger and used “to speak of an activity or process by which nothing ‘selfish’ occurs, but rather by which the different members of the world are brought into belonging to and with one another and are helped to realize themselves and each other in realizing this belonging.”36 Thus understood, the politics of autarcheia cannot be a mere subjective freedom of anarchy; for, in autarcheia—that appropriation of politics named by ereignen—humans as mortals ‘meaningfully and mutually entrust’ themselves to one another, ‘commending’ each other to a ‘belonging’ of mortal to mortal and mortal to the authentic existence of ‘the Fourfold’. In this appropriation of self-appropriating, wo/men ‘unite in their belongingtogether’—they arrive at an authentic political solidarity (Mitsein) on the basis of that appropriating which discloses politics authentically in the human being as political Being-there, that is, as autarchos. Furthermore, as Michael Zimmerman has noted, the German word eigen “means ‘own’ in the sense of ‘my own’ or what is proper to me. Hence, a literal reading of Eigentlichkeit might be ‘ownedness’, while a translation true to Heidegger’s early conception of authenticity might be ‘self-possessedness’.”37

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The eigen of Eigentlichkeit or ‘authenticity’ and the autos of autarcheia each refer to what is one’s own—and properly so, i.e., essentially so. If we are to think political authenticity in the same manner in which Heidegger thinks of being authentic, we must think autarchos in the fullest (essential) sense of the word. To be autarchos is to be fully political in the essential sense of what it means to be political, effectively resolving the strife of archist and an-archist in the individual Dasein. To be anything other than autarchos is to be disburdened of that possibility of being-political which is always and ever one’s own. Indeed, it is to be ‘fallen away’ from there. Graeme Nicholson, too, has commented on the precise meaning of authenticity. He writes: “Authenticity” is a translation of “Eigentlichkeit” and it is a good one because its root, autos, coincides with the root of “eigen,” or “self.” Authentikos is a rare term, but in later Latin “authenticus,” and the German and English terms invariably carry as well the connotation of “true,” “from the source,” etc. To determine that the primary meaning is “pertaining to self” rather than “original,” “true,” is not possible on philological grounds, only on philosophical grounds, and only in reference to a particular occurrence.38

In effect, Nicholson says that the authentic self, understood politically, is the autarchos. He simply did not name the authentic self, though he approximated it ever so closely. It is to be said that authenticity, in Greek αυθεντια (authentia) and αυταρχεια (autarcheia/autarchia ) are one and the same: The Greek authentia means “original authority,” the Greek αυθεντικος (authentikos) “of first-hand authority, original,” and the Greek αυθεντης (authentes) “one who does a thing himself, a principal.” The authentes is himself the origin of an inherent authority, such that it is this alone which is properly authoritative. “That is called authentic, which is sufficient to itself, which commends, sustains, proves itself, and hath credit and authority from itself.” What is “sufficient to itself” is, in the Greek, autarches. What is originally authoritative in a self-sufficient manner is, in the Greek, autarchos. That state of affairs which is authentia is also autarchia /autarcheia. To be ‘authentic’, thus, is to appropriate that authority which is ownmost qua ‘belonging to self’, appropriating so as to ‘act of itself’ out of a ‘self-originated rule’. Authentic action is, first and foremost, this appropriation of self-originated rule, viz., autarchos. In this sense can it be said that the autarchos is the origin of politics, that the true politikos is the autarchos, that ta alethos politika (true politics) is autarcheia. To be autarchos, of course, is to be in that always precarious situation of commending oneself to self-rule, to sustaining the ownmost appropriation of that original rule, and, thereby, to proving oneself to be authentikos /authentes.

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Politics thus becomes possible in terms of its ‘truth’, i.e., its ‘source’ and ‘from the source’, viz., the autarchos understood as the place (topos) of the mutual appropriation of to auto and to arche. The primary meaning is thus “original” as well as “pertaining to the self,” inasmuch as ‘autarchos’ speaks of both the origin of politics (Being-Self-ruling in and for the Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being) and the self (Being-there or Dasein). The ‘truth’ of politics as autarcheia and autarchos thereby takes on an even more definitive quality in Heidegger’s statement that “To create [e.g., to create a just world order, to found an authentic politics] means to fetch from the source. And to fetch from the source means to take up what springs forth and to bring what has been so received.”39 In autarcheia we have the possibility of a politics authentic because it is a politics into which we are drawn, rather than that politics as one or another politeia over against which we stand in the mere encounter of it without ever having resolutely chosen it. In autarcheia we give emphasis to the Sein of the Dasein—to ‘Being’ that ‘constitutes Dasein itself’. The call to be authentically one’s self which comes in the domain of politics as the call to autarcheia has its ‘ontological possibility’ in the fact that Dasein is in each case (i.e., singularly) politics. That which is today dominant in political understanding, viz., the politics of the ‘public’ and all that is thereby taken up as the ‘infallible’ theoria and ‘legitimate’ praxis of a ‘public’ politics, is, nevertheless, in its essence in each case mine: (a) in the sense that in each case the appeal of politics is to one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being as transformed zoion politikon; and (b) because the origin of the appeal to politics, to be political, arises from that being which in each case “I myself am.” The “danger,” it will be said, of such a claim is to relegate the whole of politics (in its ontical-existentiell structure) to widespread error resting upon an inauthentic subjectivism: Politics is rendered “merely subjective.” On the contrary, however, the call to autarcheia as the ordo of Being—to use a phrase of Heidegger in present context—“does justice to the ‘Objectivity’ of the appeal [of politics] for the first time by leaving it its ‘subjectivity’, which of course denies the they-self its dominion.”40 That is to say, the current ontical understanding and engagement in politics undergoes a fundamental transformation away from the objectification of politics—away from the onticoontological tendency of “objectivist-scientistic” and behaviorist or cyberneticist political inquiry—toward inclusion of the subjectivist-experiential dimensions of that inquiry, in that moment overcoming the subject-object dichotomy presupposed and sustained by that inquiry. The denial of dominion to the ‘they-self’ occurs thus to show that the ordinary ontical way of understanding politics and being-political is not “the first court of appeal” for

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an ontologically grounded understanding. Politics is first and foremost a ‘phenomenon of Dasein’ and as such is basic to the ontological constitution of Dasein. Hence have we spoken of autarcheia as the “factical ideal” of Dasein, i.e., as that way of taking up an authentic existence by which Dasein itself attests to that potentiality-for Being-political which is most its own. The politics disclosed by the authentic self is thus wholly other than that politics which, in its everydayness, is disclosed and sanctioned by the ‘they’. Politics as disclosed by the authentic self has a ‘state of mind’ and a specific ‘way of understanding’, ‘talking’, and ‘interpreting’ in contrast to the politics of everydayness disclosed by the ‘they-self’. This, perhaps, we come to know only in taking up the factical ideal as one’s own. If the ‘they’, the ‘public’, is wary of the transformation in political understanding heralded by autarcheia, it is precisely because concomitant to this transformation in understanding comes an existentiell transformation: “Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized,” as Heidegger would say. Hence, the Gerede (idle talk) of contemporary political science (which happens, for the most part, unwittingly and unconsciously, i.e., without deliberate “aim to deceive”), by the ‘state of mind’ of the everyday interpretation of the political world, “discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back.”41 This is the wariness that is to be encountered in the ‘they’ when first the disputation of autarcheia disrupts the supposed ‘correct’ understanding of the political dominating the stubborn reality of the ‘public’ and that stands ‘ascertained’ and ‘certified’ by the modern metaphysics, indeed by the entire history of metaphysics in its structural relation to political philosophy. The significant danger of the language of contemporary political science and the politics of everydayness disclosed and maintained by the ‘they’ is to be found in the objectification of politics—an objectification which seeks to secure its continuity even in the transition from the epoch which closes with the end of metaphysics to that commissioning of Being which (one might say) ‘begins’ with the andenkende Vordenken of Heidegger. The danger is made clear in that language which distinguishes between the “That is politics” of political philosophy under the sway of metaphysics qua representational thinking and the “I am the site of the political” of essential political thinking. Whereas the former has led to an extreme objectivism, the latter is not a form of mere subjectivism but, rather, the long-needed ‘bringing-together’ of the ‘belonging-together’ of the object-subject dichotomy grounding political philosophy. Accordingly, we must be clear that the possibility of autarcheia is not a possibility of world order created by any one individual; but, rather, a possibility that Being itself grants for discovery through histor-

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ical Dasein in humanity’s contemporary ‘fateful situation’. The naming of authentic politics in the word autarcheia serves to emphasize the thesis that the authentic standard of political action emanates from the resolutely individuated Dasein, rather than being solicitously supplied (in the sense of “leap-in”—einspringen—solicitude) by an elite corps of social scientists/ social engineers or by absolutely-ruling politicians manipulating ‘human resources’ so as to conform them to whatever ‘order’ is requisitioned by an objectivist-scientistic paradigm. This says: Being alone grants the standard for authentic action. In this sense, autarcheia is the name for the authentic response to the planetary domination of the essence of technology as will to power. In autarcheia there is made a distinction between nomos emanating from the ego cogito as ego volo and that which issues out of Being itself: Only so far as man, ex-sisting in the truth of Being, belongs to it, can the assigning of all the directions which must become for man law and rule, come from Being itself. The verb “assign” in Greek is nemein. The nomos is not only law, but more originally the assigning concealed in the destiny of Being. Only this is capable of ordering man in Being. Only such ordering is capable of bearing up and binding. Otherwise, all law remains but the handiwork of human reason. More essential than establishment of rule is the abode in the truth of Being.42

Taking up one’s “abode” in the truth of Being, as we must here understand it, means taking up politics as what is most one’s own, hence becoming autarchos. Politics, in the mode of authenticity, we have said, is that with which the individual is to concern himself as what is proper to or ‘owned’ by the self. It is thus unjust (contrary to ontological obligation) for any individual Dasein to be disburdened of being political such as prevails in the publicness of everydayness, i.e., in the dictatorship of the ‘they’. How so? Long ago Socrates answered for us, in Plato’s Republic, when he said that “justice admittedly means that a man should possess and concern himself with what properly belongs to him.”43 This is to be read here otherwise than usual, disruptively yet responsibly according to the originary determination of ontological obligation: Politics properly belongs to the human as the autarchos; and only when the human is being-political as autarchos is there justice to be found in political life. When Aristoxenus thus says, “In everything there is an arche,” he understands this arche in terms of Being, in terms of the “rule that rises and resides in itself”—phusis. But this arche in its essence is none other than the rule of Being, for dike is “the matter of order and disorder with respect to Being,” i.e., it is in the first place an ontological, not a moral, concept (as Heidegger clarifies).44

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Dike, Heidegger writes, “names Being with reference to the essentially appropriate articulation of all beings.” He continues: To be sure, dike slips into the twilight zone of morality precisely on account of the Platonic philosophy. But that makes it all the more necessary to hold onto its metaphysical sense, because otherwise the Greek backgrounds of the dialogue on the state do not become visible. Knowledge of dike, of the articulating laws of the Being of beings, is philosophy.45

Dike, justice, is “the articulating laws of the Being of beings.” This is to say, it speaks of the ordo of Being, the order which belongs to Being and which, therefore, is granted by Being. “From the metaphysical founding of community life in Plato’s dialogue on the state,” Heidegger discerns, “we know what properly sets the standard is manifested in dike and dikaiosyne, that is, in the well-wrought jointure of the order of Being.”46 Accordingly, each zoion politikon, before he or she is metaphysically named as either archontos (ruler) or archesthai (ruled), is autarchos in essence: “Zeus gave the political ‘art’ of justice to all, since all must share therein, if the cities of men were ever to exist and prosper.”47 The appropriation of dike, thus, is the appropriation of that authentic doing which is ever most one’s own, of arche as autarchos or BeingSelf-ruling. Socrates thus was correct in saying, in the Republic, that justice means that a human should possess and concern himself with what properly belongs to him, and that justice “is not a matter of external behavior, but of the inward self and of attending to all that is, in the fullest sense, a [hu]man’s proper concern.” The foregoing gives us to understand, then, that the task of essential political thinking, in its ontical concernfulness, is to prepare for the restoration of the ownmost burden of being-political to the traditionally disburdened zoion politikon. This preparation listens to Being’s call for original praxis. Original praxis, as Joseph Kockelmans has already pointed out, means the human’s “concernful dealing with things and care for his fellow man.” This is the praxis of the autarchos, we have said with specification. That we attribute original praxis to the autarchos should be in no way surprising. Understanding what has been said concerning the autarchos, this is but consistent. It is all the more so when we have taken into consideration the meaning of the reciprocity of thinking and being, or—if you will—the relation of language and the human eksistent as historical Dasein: “Genetically, historically, and from our own immediate experience here and now, it can easily be shown that all meaning found in our theoretical knowledge refers back to a ‘primordial praxis’ in which it originated.”48 The “primordial praxis” of the autarchos is what originates the theoretical knowledge of the political,

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notwithstanding its having done so historically via the hitherto concealed essence of the zoion politikon. The possibility of autarcheia brings to humanity the possibility of the restoration of its forgotten (because obscured) primordial praxis, showing the human being most dynamically his historically originary essence as autarchos. We must consider here that autarcheia, insofar as it refers to primordial praxis, is far from any attempt to “turn history back” or to escape the present realities of world politics. History, i.e., future history, can be laid open to access only if we learn (in present case, learn from Heidegger) the importance of achieving those ‘other possibilities’ for relationship to Being, i.e., possibilities other than the ‘ambivalent beginnings’ of “the Platonic-Aristotelian beginning of the Western metaphysics of domination,” which, in the modern world, abides and presides in the form of planetary technology. Authentic politics, as the authentic action correspondent to an authentic thinking of Being, would be an authentic doing insofar as it assists the turn (Kehre) of the history of Being precisely as Being moves beyond its ‘unconditional mastery as the will to will’, thus reversing the tradition’s trend of domination. And what does this reversal mean specifically in terms of the connection between Being and Dasein? It means “the readiness to recognize something authoritative for subjectivity which is not posited by it and in whose presence it can answer for itself; it is a readiness opposed to the will to the will-to-power.”49 Such readiness is a ‘determinate ethos’ which recognizes Being as that which is authoritative, as that which is never posited by the human, as that which always answers for itself in itself in its historical presence as Dasein. The connection between Being and Dasein is to be found in that which is named autarchos; and the possibility of autarcheia is for us a possibility beyond the ‘determinate historical epoch of Being’ in the current dispensation of the will to power. What do we mean here in making this claim, this claim of “beyond”? We mean that autarcheia, in its most essential significance, is not ‘a new formation in the history of Being’—not another metaphysical scheme or form of epochal Being—inasmuch as metaphysics, as ‘the history of the formations of Being’, has arrived at its end. Rather, in its essential saying, autarcheia speaks of the task of political thinking in the service of the determination of the matter of thought; i.e., “that from which this thinking receives its determination.” It speaks thus because thinking “stands in and before That which has sent the various forms of epochal Being”50—it is part of the “entry of thinking into Appropriation.” In its essential saying, autarcheia says in what way “Appropriation appropriates”: Appropriation “brings into its own and retains in Appropriation the belonging together of Being and man.”51 Consequently, the

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whole of the present work (to the extent that it succeeds) would contribute to the task which “remains for thinking to determine the unconcealment of the different regions of things,”52 the all-encompassing region being that of ta politika insofar as this is the topos and scene of history. Autarcheia is the selfsame danger and saving power of political theory and practice made possible by the dynamic of Being itself. Its danger is the always-present difficulty of maintaining oneself in authenticity, the failure of which then becomes mere ‘sophism’ in the sense spoken of by Reinhart Maurer, where “the realm of human action is established autonomously as the compromise relationship of the many individual autonomies”: “Autonomy dissolves itself in an absolute freedom which has nothing on which to stand and on which to rely except each man’s claim to freedom. Therefore, the political and the ethical appear together as the problem of discovering and establishing a system which will do justice to this claim.”53 Where authenticity comes to prevail, political thinking in reciprocity with political being comes into service for the im-mediate determination of its matter. The Western tradition of political philosophy, both as theoria and as praxis, has been a mediated response to the claim of politics. This mediation has manifested itself in the words (i.e., the language of this tradition) that name politics in accordance with humanity’s response to its ambivalent, establishing claim—monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, etc. In monarchy, the mediation takes place through the monarch; in aristocracy, through the aristocrat, and so on and so forth. In none of these, taken strictly, is the human response to the claim of politics the authentic im-mediate response. But, then, this is of course the necessary situation of the human metaphysically bound to the dimension of zoion, of animalitas. Today, “after ravenous time,” the possibility of reciprocity of thinking and being appeals to the essence of human being as the selfsame claim of that essence; and, in this ‘authentic speech’ it makes its claim for response without mediation. Freed from the limitations of animalitas, as the conceptual basis for the character and possibility of political being, the essence of the zoion politikon reveals itself in the im-mediacy of the autarchos. Henceforth, leaving behind ‘the enigma of the animal’, of the zoion, and incorporating Being for the overcoming of political philosophy as metaphusica specialis, political Dasein claims his and her essence: autarchos. Autarchos speaks of the essence (Wesen) of human being. It speaks of the essence of that which metaphysics called the zoion politikon after the more fundamental nomination, zoion logon echon. Today, however, the word autarchos comes to language, making possible (in the hearing of those who are prepared to hear) the achievement of what Heidegger has called “the humanitas of the homo humanus”—“the authentic dignity of [the hu]man.”

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TRANSFORMING THE ‘SITE’ OF HISTORY

The words autarcheia and autarchos come to language only after traditional metaphysics reaches its end, i.e., only after the as-yet-undetermined unity of animality and rationality, as man’s ‘nature’, remains undetermined in the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel (Nietzsche giving ultimate expression to the animalitas and Hegel giving ultimate expression to rationalitas). Yet, the human remaining an undetermined entity in the moment of philosophy’s completion notwithstanding, the statement still stands: “Man is.” More specifically, it is yet said: “Man is politically.” This says: Politics is what first lets the human be human; but, more accurately, politics is what first lets being be being and only then lets humanity be. What is said here? Nothing other than Heidegger’s understanding of the polis. Referring to Sophocles’ Antigone, Heidegger comments on “line 370,” which speaks of “hypsipolis apolis.” Let us listen at length: It speaks not of poros but of polis; not of the paths to all the realms of the essent but of the foundation and scene of man’s being-there [my italics], the point at which all these paths meet, the polis. Polis is usually translated as city or city-state. This does not capture the full meaning. Polis means, rather, the place, the there, wherein and as which historical being-there is. The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens. To this place and scene of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the army and the fleet. All this does not first belong to the polis, does not become political by entering into a relation with a statesman and a general and the business of the state. No, it is political, i.e., at the site of history [my italics], provided there be (for example) poets alone, but then really poets, priests alone, but then really priests, rulers alone, but then really rulers. Be, but this means: as violent men to use power, to become pre-eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this.54

To be political is to be “at the site of history”; and to have one’s abode in the polis is to abide in the “scene of man’s being-there,” i.e., human Dasein. The polis is the ‘site of disclosure’, the site of unconcealment, the site of aletheia. Hart and Maraldo, in their commentary in Heidegger’s The Piety of Thinking, write:

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Essential Political Thinking In the 1935 lectures on Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger appropriates the ancient Greek notion of polis in order to elucidate what later would be primarily referred to as the clearing. The polis is the there wherein Dasein is most properly himself: This, paradoxically, requires of human beings that they be violently apolitical in the sense of striving to wrest the meaning of their own lives and the meaning of whatever is from obfuscating familiarity and hominess. This means that human beings who most properly dwell in the polis habitually place themselves outside of the taken-for-granted established order and its legitimations. This is not done out of any chaotic or asocial predilections but rather because proper “political” life entails frequently the hexis of poetic dwelling which holds open or creates anew the spaces in which the established ways come to be.55

We take note here of the two statements to which we give emphasis: 1. “The polis is the there wherein Dasein is most properly himself.” 2. “. . . human beings who most properly dwell in the polis habitually place themselves outside of the taken-for-granted established order and its legitimations.” We lay stress in the first sentence on the words “most properly himself,” with added emphasis on “most.” Properly to dwell in the polis requires that the human as historical Dasein be most properly himself, i.e., that he appropriate his own or most proper being-there, which is to say, that he be political by appropriating his own or most proper dwelling in the polis. This he does by placing himself outside of the taken-for-granted established order and its legitimations, as Hart and Maraldo interpret here—which is also to say, outside the ‘publicness’ of the ‘they’. Immediately, because one hears of this “placing-oneself-outside” the prevailing order, one identifies this action as a-political or an-archical. One hears only a denial, a refusal, a rejection, a negation of the prevailing arche of the ‘public’ understood both as principium and princeps. Yet, such hearing does not hear soundly enough, for we have here a determinate negation, if negation at all. What is determinate in this ‘placing-oneself-outside’ is its essential happening of ‘placing-oneself-inside’: The most proper locus of politics is retrieved when the arche is ‘appropriated’ as most his and her own by political Dasein. This happens only when the Dasein is in actual effect as the autarchos. Concomitantly, the polis is only then most properly a polis, for the Dasein is ‘most properly himself’ as autarchos. To be autarchos is to be oneself pre-eminent in action, in that authentic doing which ever safeguards the neighboring of the Fourfold.

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This pre-eminence in action as authentic doing is resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), and as resoluteness for individuation it is essentially political rather than a-political. Just as “resoluteness” is the name Heidegger gives to authentic existence, so the individual Dasein’s political resoluteness is what grants the further possibility of an authentic politics correspondent to that authentic existence. This authentic politics, granted by the individual’s resoluteness, takes its form by way of that authentically eksistent being-withone another determined by resoluteness. The inter-relatedness of Daseienden as autarchoi is that authentic relational freedom which is consequence of such resolute individuation: Each such resolutely individuated Dasein, as autarchos, cannot but be authentically free and open for the other in his and her ownmost bearing of politics. Consider Fred Dallmayr’s remarks here: In Being and Time, incidentally, resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] is linked intimately with the notion of “openness” (Erschlossenheit), that is, with Dasein’s availability for its own essence or ontological ground. This openness is manifest primarily in the call of “conscience” that as the “call of care” summons Dasein into the realm of its ownmost potential. To cite Heidegger again: “This unique and distinctive openness witnessed in the call of conscience— this silent and anxious self-projection toward proper accountability and guilt—this is what we call resoluteness.”56

Autarcheia, to be autarchos, is precisely what is attained when the Dasein gains access to its own essence or ontological ground. To be autarchos is the Dasein’s innermost potential to which s/he is summoned by the call of conscience. The autarchos is the achievement of resoluteness and, thus, “the authentic mode of In-der-Welt-sein.” Autarcheia is the possibility of Being-inthe World in which “resolute Dasein sets itself free for its world” and, thereby, “enables Dasein to let fellow beings ‘be’ in their innermost potential.”57 It is the innermost potential of the Dasein to be free for Being, to be receptively comported to the grant of Being, that presences as the domain, the dominium, of freedom. Most originally, Being gives of itself as Being-Self-ruling, that is, as autarcheia, making its claim upon the Dasein itself to appropriate its ownmost essence, viz., autarchos. This is that “fateful happening” in which Being and Dasein truly belong together, i.e., are reciprocal in their need for each other, in the reciprocity that issues in the belonging-together of unconcealment or disclosure (on the side of Being) and the receptive comportment or appropriation (on the side of Dasein) which transforms humanity’s history. Dasein, Heidegger has written, “‘knows’ what it is itself capable of [woran es mit ihm selbst ist], inasmuch as it has either projected itself upon possibilities of its own or has been so absorbed in the ‘they’ that it has let such possibilities

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be presented to it by the way in which the ‘they’ has publicly interpreted things.”58 The thinking that ‘projects ahead’ the possibility of autarcheia and the potentiality-for-being that is the autarchos originates in a ‘state-of-mind’ or ‘mood’ to which the understanding of autarcheia and self as autarchos belongs, in the sense of that ‘knowing’ of what the Dasein as authentic self (Selbst eigentlich) is capable. But, of course, such a knowing occurs as consequence of a breaking off of that ‘listening-away’ to the ‘they’ in its publicness. Another kind of ‘hearing’ interrupts that ‘listening away’: Dasein gives to itself the potentiality-for-being that originates in listening to itself, and listening thus ‘without mediation’. The seeming disruption and radicality of autarcheia, therefore, lies in that ‘tendency to disclosure’ having the character of ‘an abrupt arousal’. That an authentic politics can even be considered as autarcheia is but concomitant to Dasein’s being constituted by disclosedness, that is, by an understanding with a state-of-mind, i.e., understanding that is authentic and a state-of-mind that is authentic. Autarcheia thus stands as the possibility of being autarchos, which always means the Dasein as ‘Being-towarda-possibility’. But, this Being-toward-a-possibility which is the autarchos for us signifies “‘Being out for’ something possible, as in concerning ourselves with its actualization.” However, in autarcheia—that is, in the constancy of autarcheia— its possibility is not annihilated “by making it available to us.” The character of authenticity—being such that the Dasein must be cognizant of maintaining itself in authenticity—enhances the understanding and state-of-mind that belong to autarcheia as possibility. Hence, “even though actualized, it remains, as actual, something possible for doing something; it is characterized by an ‘in-order-to’.” That is to say, autarcheia, characterized in its ‘in-order-to’, speaks of that comportment of the Dasein towards its possibility of authentic claim to political understanding and political engagement as autarchos. The Dasein in each case expects itself as the autarchos; and it is this comportment of expectation whose constancy defines autarcheia as possibility. “Expecting is not just an occasional looking-away from the possible to its possible actualization,” Heidegger writes, “but is essentially a waiting for that actualization [ein Werten auf diese]. Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the actual. It is for its actuality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the actual, arising out of the actual and returning to it.”59 Hence, Being toward the possibility of autarcheia is so to comport ourselves toward autarcheia that in this Being-toward-autarcheia, and for it, autarcheia reveals itself as a possibility. The Dasein, as Being-toward-autarcheia, is then in the mode of anticipation of this possibility—i.e., anticipation of

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authentic political being, autarchos. In accordance with the essence of expecting, the interplay of the possible and the actual occurs as that striving of Being-toward-autarcheia which must preserve its authenticity in and for that comportment. Thus, the expecting is in the configuration of Dasein’s existentiality: “to project oneself on its ownmost potentiality-for-Being[-the autarchos] means to be able to understand itself in the Being of the entity so revealed—namely, to exist [as autarchos].”60 We should be clear, however, on what is intended in this understanding: “It must be noted that understanding does not primarily mean just gazing at a meaning, but rather understanding oneself in that potentiality-for-Being[-autarchos] which reveals itself in projection.”61 The objectification of politics and the ‘subject’ which belongs to modern subjectivism are thus reconciled in a way that is neither mere objectivism nor subjectivism but, as we said earlier, “does justice to the ‘Objectivity’ of the appeal [of the authentic self] for the first time by leaving it its ‘subjectivity”’. The anticipation of authentic political-being held forth by autarcheia allows Dasein to understand that the potentiality-for-Being-political, in which its ownmost Being-political is an ‘issue’, must be taken over by Dasein alone; that is, taken up as what is his and her own to be—what is, in its authenticity, in each case mine: Politics lays claim to the Dasein as resolutely individuated Dasein, having done so ‘primordially’, though this claim has, for the most part, been obscured by that disclosure of politics characteristic of the ‘they’ and into which political Dasein has been ‘thrown’. The ontological constitution of politics “individualizes [political] Dasein down to itself”; and “this individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence.” Ultimately, the understanding that is achieved reveals that “Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord . . . Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.”62 Accordingly, the “placing-oneself-outside” of which Heidegger speaks in reference to line 370 of Sophocles’ Antigone is not a legitimation of anarchy, for it is not to be taken as opposition to arche. The “apolis” to which Heidegger refers speaks of an inner concentration of arche, hence a ‘highest state’ of arche. This appropriation of arche—again, never a mere subjective freedom or solipsism—is the surrender to the concealed originality of the source of one’s own being, thereby the possibility of humanity being carried beyond subjectivism. Thus we speak of the possibility of ‘taking up’ a ‘factical ideal of Dasein’, which factical ideal is nominated in the naming of the human political essence as autarchos and in humanity’s essential political Mitsein as autarcheia. The appropriation of arche is the authentic doing of historical

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Dasein, of the autarchos. Autarcheia—as the word which, having named an authentic (eigentlich, emphasizing eigen) politics—arrives with the ‘new’ or ‘second’ beginning in the history of Being [Seinsgeschichte] precisely to distribute ‘power and impotence’ between Being and the essence [Wesen] of the human eksistent. This is why this existentiell possibility is simultaneously the ‘danger’ and the ‘saving power’ in its confrontation with the planetary domination of technology. This is what may be seen to underlie Werner Marx’s observation (which he himself, of course, does not think in present context) that “in this ‘constellation’ of Being and the essence of man, man himself retains much more ‘power’ than the tradition had ever consigned to him. . . . The creative modes of human response already designated by Heidegger in forethinking, namely, poetizing, thinking, building, and dwelling, are all no longer violent, but they are nonetheless, each in its own way, the expression of an enormous power of man.”63 The “enormous power” granted the human being in autarcheia is that power which opens up to him and her the authentic founding of political history in the new beginning. Autarcheia indicates the way in which humanity “is allotted the role of co-creating creatively in the occurrence of Being.” In this co-creation which the word autarcheia speaks, the site of history is transformed in an original manner precisely inasmuch as the historical essence of humanity undergoes transformation in the direction of the origin. “Basic words are historical,” writes Heidegger.64 “That does not mean simply that they have various meanings for various ages which, because they are past, we can survey historically; it means that they ground history now and in the times to come in accordance with the interpretation of them that comes to prevail.” Such, so the claim here goes, are the words autarcheia and autarchos. They ground the political history of the new beginning which mankind is now entering and in which humanity will perdure—if, one might well have to say, mankind overcomes the immediate challenges to its sheer physical survival. The naming that occurs in autarcheia and autarchos is the onset of a fundamental historical movement, fundamental in that it comes to language as the gift of Being. But, then, this should be expected, for any history grounded all the more originally, as Heidegger notes, “overcomes radically what has gone before by creating a new order in that realm where we have our roots.”65

FROM POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY TO AUTARCHOLOGY

In thinking that possibility of political existence named by the word autarcheia, we assign politics its niche in the domain of Being. We do so in a

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way that overcomes the teleological influence on political philosophy operative since Greek antiquity. The event that is a questioning of politics from its origin is itself a sign of the end of the epoch of political philosophy established in Greek antiquity. It is in the expiration of the Aristotelian teleology that the arche, as principium and princeps, renders itself speakable “more originally in its originality”: “The principle of an era,” writes Reiner Schürmann, “is that which gives it cohesion, a coherence which for a time applies without discussion or question. At the end of an epoch, however, discussing and questioning such coherence becomes possible; in expiring, a principle renders itself speakable.”66 Thus, the questioning posed here is a questioning possible today only because of the crisis [Entscheidung] that today opens a passing epoch, issuing forth the possibility of reversal in the principia long ago established and dominating in and for the domain of traditional politics. Indeed, Schürmann is correct in observing that an epoch is known by its reversal, for the reversal of the dominating political principles simultaneously clarifies what has been taken for granted without question and founds a new order. In the quiescent epoch established some 2,500 years ago in Greece, the “code de la route” that established for politics its ‘field of intelligibility’ was to dominate (until now) in the regulation of the world ‘order’ according to “both the theoretical ‘principles’ of a time and its practical princeps (‘prince’ or authority),” as Schürmann puts it—i.e., “rule by first propositions and by a top institution.”67 This history has been manifest in the multiple ways in which politics has been rendered its ground in the course of political philosophy, viz., as that rule (arche) where principia and princeps have the structure of monarchy, democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and so on. This sense of arche now undergoes reversal such that the new beginning is understood first (i.e., at its beginning) in the sense of an-arche (which itself is but a ‘clue’ to the inner sense of the arche in this an-arche). Politics today, understood in terms of the ‘end of political philosophy’ at the ‘completion of metaphysics’, passes through the first two senses of ‘origin’ so that the matter of politics may itself be determined: The origin of the political passes from ‘begin and dominate’ and ‘rule by first proposition and a top institution’ to arrive fully in the sense of the political that ‘comes to presence’. In the new beginning politics becomes thinkable in terms of “the difference between the order of things present and their presence,” i.e., in terms of the political difference conceived as that between the factual political and politicality. To understand the origin of the arche in both arche-ism and an-archeism as auto-arche—that is, to understand the archontos and anarchos each as grounded in the autarchos—is to be granted that authentic understanding of the origin’s “own manner of being” made possible by the

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retreat of a long-quiescent principle in the domain of the political. What comes in the mode of such understanding is the recognition of the difference itself, and, hence, the possibility of giving way to the presence of things present, i.e., to the presence of political things present. Human understanding thus achieves the authentic locus of the political, coming finally to see that to give determination to the matter of politics is to let the autarchos be as the site or space where the phenomenon of politics has its essential presence. Politics, under the domination of an objectivist-scientistic paradigm, thus ceases to be that of which the individual is ‘disburdened’. In the transformation of the political from its objective representation to its ‘ownmost’ presentation, the autarchos gives testimony to his and her belonging to the political and to the belonging of the political to his and her being as that ‘burden’ which is always in each case ‘ownmost’. Thus, the ‘an-archic presencing’ and ‘anarchic existence’ of which Schürmann writes, i.e., “the deliberate negation of archai and principles in the public domain,” is correct to a point—i.e., only insofar as the negation is understood in terms of the dominium of a ‘public’. To what Schürmann writes it must be added that the negation turns out to be determinate: The political achieves its locus as arche in the originary, yet historically dispensated, autarchos. The ‘historical ground’ of the arche (as principium and princeps) “is already the transition into another beginning” now that the completion of metaphysics finds its fulfillment in the planetary domination of technology; which, in the political realm, is manifest in the trend toward some technocratic form of global order. This transition into another beginning that begins ambiguously with the possibility of the anarchos who, “strictly conceived,” is also political Dasein intent on being autarchos, displaces the political itself away from humanity conceived as ho anthropos to its origin in Being itself. Being—not man—itself determines political truth. In the domain of the political, the dispensation in the destiny of Being which now begins on the historical ground of the arche (as it has been known to political philosophy) is that grant which Being destines as that ‘way of life’—‘way of being’—which, as autarcheia, is a response in thought and in practice to the all-encompassing danger of Being’s presencing in the mode of Ge-Stell. What is most significant here, however, is that the arrival of autarcheia is not the result of mere human ‘planning’ or ‘fabrication’: The political essence of the human being as autarchos is “released to the truth of Being” already—that is, before the possibility of such fabrication is even understood as an ‘in-order to’. Being, in its mode of presencing as Ge-Stell, being thereby the ‘danger’, simultaneously reveals and releases that possibility of the ‘saving power’ that is responsive, viz., autarcheia pervading the whole of human existence as that possibility of

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“rebirth of mankind out of the originary.” Autarcheia, in a way that uniquely testifies to the truth Being grants, is the event that, as the “anarchic essence of Es gibt defies fixed social constellations,” beckons mankind “upon the road made of ever new beginnings.” Hence is there the precariousness of the journey, where ‘security’ and ‘authority’—of the type expected from “the structure of metaphysical ontology”—are wholly displaced by the Dasein’s grounding on the Ab-grund, the abyss: In what relationship now does the thought of Being stand to theoretical and practical behavior? It is superior to all contemplation, because it cares for the light in which only a seeing as theory can abide and move. Thought attends to the clearing of Being by putting its speaking of Being into language as the dwelling of existence. Thus thought is an action. But an action that is superior at the same time to all practice. Thinking surpasses doing and producing, not through the magnitude of its performance, nor through the consequences of its activity, but through the humbleness of the achievement that it accomplishes without result. Thinking, as you know, brings into language in its saying only the unspoken word of Being.68

We have been questioning concerning politics, concerning the essence of politics. This questioning would initiate an essential thinking (wesentliche Denken). As essential thought, it attends to politics. But what is the meaning of politics? It is the site of history, for to-be-political is to-be-at-the-site-of-history. To be political is to abide in this site, this open, this clearing. The possibility of autarcheia and the autarchos is nothing other than the essence of what Heidegger means by “building dwelling thinking,” where the human abides as mortal, but abides authentically, building by cultivating and constructing in care and concern, dwelling by initiating his and her ownmost nature (and, thereby, “letting-be” or “releasing” the ownmost nature of others), thereby letting preside the reciprocity of thinking and being. Thought that attends to politics thus is thought attending to the clearing of Being, the polis. The arrival of the zoion politikon into its ‘truth’, viz., the autarchos, speaks of politics in a wholly novel way, hence giving to politics a new beginning. Heidegger’s term “Dasein” has given to us our clue for the autarchos. He has said that the human “stands in the unconcealment of beings as the concealed locale within which Being essentially occurs in its truth.”69 Standing in the concealed locale which the polis is, the human lets politics occur in its truth, to occur in the autarchos for the onset and perdurance of autarcheia, the ordo of Being. What is thus ‘spoken’ as novel speech is expressed succinctly in a sentence by Reiner Schürmann: “The foundation of a phenomenon is no

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longer extrinsic as in the metaphysical difference that results from competition, but is intrinsic.”70 This means, in present context, that the foundation of the primary political phenomenon—the polites—is ownmost possibility for being-political; and, as Schürmann noted, there takes place “a convergence between the order of existing and the order of understanding.” No longer is the foundation of the political external, as it is so demanded by an ‘order of understanding’ arising out of the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysic of being, i.e., politics conceived “along the lines of fabrication.” In the autarchos and in autarcheia, the “identity between Being and thinking”—between political existence (einai) and political thinking (noein)—is achieved: “A human way of being turns into Being’s way of being.”71 This is the most essential and attuned human ‘turning’ ever responsive to Being’s turning (Kehre). Humanity as political being is rescued, as it were, from a commonplace and leveled language which was established at its beginning by political philosophy as metaphysica specialis. The identity between Being-political and thinkingpolitical is fundamentally transformative, for it transforms the political reality of the tradition from Plato to Nietzsche, transforms it by language establishing a mode of Being-in-the-World that is, indeed, “one’s own” in the most original sense. In The Essence of Reasons, Heidegger states that “Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein) denotes a “state of affairs.” This statement is meaningful for authentic political understanding, inasmuch as we understand ta politika as the ‘affairs’ of the polis (the clearing of Being or site of historical Being-there) that bear upon and concern the polites. “Surpassing to the world is freedom itself,” Heidegger says: Transcending and holding itself over against the “for the sake of . . . ,” Dasein happens in man, so that he can be under obligation to himself in the essence of his existence, i.e., he can be a free self. Thus, freedom reveals itself as that which makes bonds and obligations possible in the first place. Freedom alone can let a world govern and “world” Dasein. World never “is”; it “worlds.”72

Accordingly, Being-in-the-World is freedom itself, essential freedom. This Being-in-the-World, as the ‘happening’ of Dasein in the human, happens first and foremost to bring the human eksistent to his essence as ‘free self’, i.e., as one under obligation to him/herself in the essence of his existence—what has been referred to as ‘ontological responsibility’ or the ‘obligatory lawfulness’ to which authentic freedom binds each case of human Dasein. Being-in-theWorld, letting a world govern, is itself the condition for the taking-place of ‘govern-ing’ as the happening of Dasein in the human being. This is the essence of the polis as Heidegger interprets it. Humanity is capable of arche,

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in the sense of ‘initiating’ action, only on the basis of that ‘happening’ of Dasein in the human eksistent which constitutes the essence of freedom. Autarcheia, as that which is the essence of politics, hence as the essential configuration of freedom, is the original way to be political. It is, indeed, the ‘state of nature’, but in a sense that is an important transformation of the Hobbesian view. It is not the depravity, chaos, and lawlessness Hobbes makes it out to be; although, ironically and perhaps unwittingly, Hobbes defines it most precisely in holding that in the state of nature “every man rules himself and is ruled by no man” except him/herself. Here Hobbes may be said to echo Othanes, as quoted by Herodotus, who says: “Oute archein oute archesthai ethelo”—“I wish neither to govern nor to be governed.” This is not the desire for anarchy—it is not the appeal of the anarchos. No human as political being properly understood is without arche or without the capacity of initiation. Each is always capable of arche as archontos (ruler). But, at the origin, this capacity, this potentiality, is there as autarche, the very beginning, hence as autarchos, the very original initiation of politics. It is only with Plato’s relegation of this realm to fabrication that the autarche of politics is forgotten, thus making the conflict between archontos and anarchos, between ruler and ruled, between the one and the many, both possible and actual throughout the history of the tradition. Thus, some might well ask: What is “the fundamental problem” of politics? It is, some would say, the problem of the one and the many. The problem of the one and the many refers to the conflicts that arise between a man and his polity, between the individual and the community. The problem is fundamental and seemingly intransigent because it is an ethical dilemma. It is a problem that requires a choice between desirable but apparently contradictory goods, the individual or personal good of a man as a single entity and the good of the community as community.73

This way of stating “the fundamental problem” of politics makes it clear that it is the problem given to the whole of the tradition by the explicit beginning of that tradition along the lines of fabrication. At the origin, however, there is no dichotomy, no contradiction or competition, between individual good or between that of the individual and the community. The conception of politics along the lines of fabrication set up the distinction between the ‘good man’ and the ‘good citizen’, between ‘law’ and ‘justice’. This it did when it foreclosed the possibility of the ‘best regime absolutely’, conceding the feasibility only of the ‘best regime practicable’—and this in accordance with Plato’s metaphysic which limited archein and prattein to the few who “know.” On this basis, then, Judith Best accurately writes:

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Only so long as politics remains that of fabrication can it be said that “The political problem, then, is how to reconcile this conflict between the individual and the group.” Although the ancients, namely Plato and Aristotle, did not fully give expression to the ‘best regime absolutely’, they understood the nature of the resolution of the problem: For the ancients the ultimate resolution occurs only in the best regime simply, or it occurs only in the most natural regime. In the best regime simply, the good man can be a good citizen because in this regime the wise, those who know what justice is, rule. This resolution is based on something that is not only natural, but that is most natural, because it is higher than political life, it is based on the philosophic life.75

In this last statement, we find politics subordinated to philosophy—the one life (bios politikos) ranked lower than the other (bios theoretikos). But this, we must recall, is the political life of fabrication, not political life as it authentically and originally is. As Schürmann puts it, “Between a system of social constitution and its negation by spiritual individualism or apolitical solipsism there is a place for a thinking about society which refuses to restrict itself to the pragmatics of public administration as well as to romantic escapes from it. I should agree, though, that if theories of collective functioning and organization are alone to be called political philosophy, then it is better to abandon this title . . .”76 In the political life of fabrication, we might say, there is an absence of the ‘meeting together’ of power (dunamis) and wisdom (sophia). Yet, this conjunction is ever a possibility. Heidegger’s remarks are pertinent: Knowledge of dike, of the articulating laws of the Being of beings, is philosophy. Therefore, the decisive insight of the entire dialogue on the state says,

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dei tous philosophous basileuein (archein): it is essentially necessary that philosophers be the rulers. The statement does not mean that philosophy professors should conduct the affairs of state. It means that the basic modes of behavior that sustain and define the community must be grounded in essential knowledge, assuming of course that the community, as an order of being, grounds itself on its own basis, and that it does not wish to adopt standards from any other order.77

The community, as Heidegger notes, is an order of Being, capable of selfgrounding in essential knowledge. But how are we to conceive this ‘essential knowledge’ which must be other than that knowing which is attributed to political philosophy? Essential knowledge, as that knowledge pertinent to the grounding of authentic political life, this we call autarchology. Autarchology is the essential thinking of the political. On the basis of this essential thinking of the political, the community may become truly an ordo of Being as that ordo in which political Dasein appropriates that potency as autarchos which is ever beyond an ostensibly irreducible distinction of ruler and ruled. The authentic (ownmost) task of being political is to rule and to be ruled—not merely to rule, not merely to be ruled, but to establish this ‘jointure’ in oneself even as the condition of possibility for what later Plato and Aristotle find problematic as the doctrine of separation of ruler and ruled (i.e., that externalization of arche through which the polites undergoes disburdenment and impotence). After Heidegger’s “new beginning” and the correlative disclosure of the possibility of autarcheia, what matters is not the ‘good citizen’ ever so important to the factual political qua politeia, but the good human qua autarchos. To be a citizen, Aristotle said, is to hold public office. But with Heidegger, politics aspires to leave the realm of inauthenticity for its origin, manifest in the transformation of a ‘public’ into a ‘people’. Autarcheia is not a ‘polity’ in which a person primarily engages in ‘legislative-deliberative’ or ‘judicialadministrative’ functions. The citizen qua citizen, in Aristotle’s represented and disburdened sense of citizenship, is in autarcheia effectively transformed in and for an original potency. The original zoion politikon, the autarchos, takes up his and her ownmost possibility of terminal excellence (arete), of leading the virtuous life, of being a ‘good human’. The autarchos gives to herself the law, in the profoundest sense, which is to say not that she herself ‘subjectively’ decides what is lawful but rather that she, being autarchos, lets Being rule—i.e., lets Being grant the ‘standard’ by which she acts. Therefore, she transcends, as it were, the formal rule of law of this or that particular politeia, attending instead always and everywhere to justice as the ordo of Being. She, as autarchos, takes upon herself the possibility of “exception to the general

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duty to obey the law” always (or for the most part) obligatory for the good citizen—the exception which the ancients themselves conceded as the possibility of the good man, “the privilege conferred by wisdom and maintained by prudence.” In this way, the autarchos takes the polis out of the domain of this or that particular politeia and places it squarely into the claim of Being according to an authentic reciprocity of thinking and being. This reciprocity is the essence of the good life, indeed of the philosophical life as the life of justice. The good life, the philosophical life in its traditional conceptualization, is not always identical with the life of the good citizen. Indeed, to the extent that political life is the life of the citizen (in the sense of “nobody in particular,” of das Man), it is not the philosophical life, for it is mere life in accordance with the dominium of a politeia, rather than the good life of the politeia ariste. Hence, Judith Best speaks aptly in writing: “Philosophy is a tension with law because philosophy questions the law. This is very dangerous since a polity is composed of citizens and citizens must be law-abiding. Philosophy can undermine law-abidingness and thus citizenship.”78 Thus, philosophy in Greek antiquity gave to politics its explicit beginning, ‘establishing’ it along the lines of fabrication that instituted the formal rule of law. Today, essential thinking gives to politics a new beginning, undermining mere law-abidingness and citizenship, not by making “sheer caprice” the law and “titanic rage” the rule, but by establishing politics effectively in the return to the origin where the polites really has the potency of the autarchos. This is what the politics of empowerment really means in an age of global governance. In the return to the origin, original praxis becomes possible by virtue of that potency in which there is reciprocity of thinking and being. In this way, the tradition of Western political philosophy is overcome. “To overcome,” Heidegger has told us, “signifies: to bring something under oneself, and at the same time to put what is thus placed under oneself behind one as something that will henceforth have no determining power.”79 To overcome the tradition means that political philosophy as what it is under the sway of metaphysics henceforth will have no determining power over political understanding and, hence, over political existence. Accomplishing its ownmost, self-critical task, then, political philosophy—in its surrender to essential political thinking—would renovate itself. The possibility of renovation begins with the words that “name” the essence (Wesen) of that renovation: autarcheia and autarchos. These words, we have said, are not mere terms; rather, they have an ‘essential historical fullness’ which needs to be recollected. Accordingly, this is the task of an essential political thinking that would genuinely be contemporary and originary. We ask: “What is the element of a political thinking which thinks in terms of this element?” We answer: “Autarcheia and autarchos.” But then we go fur-

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ther to say that essential political thinking is thus a thinking of the autarchos. We consider thus the possibility of political philosophy’s overcoming in autarchology. In raising this possibility, we must be careful about how we understand it; for, as Heidegger puts it, “terms like ‘logic’, ‘ethics’, ‘physics’, occur only when original thinking has stopped.” We do not want an original thinking of politics to stop by placing the element of political thinking in the context of an ‘-ism’, i.e., by relegating it to mere ‘idea-ology’ or ‘scholarship’. To emphasize autarchology qua discipline (i.e., as postmodern theoretike) over the element, the autarchos, is to ‘withdraw’ from the autarchos, which alone “is potent, is potency” in bringing political thought to its essence. Political thought is eventuated by and for the autarchos and as such is action higher than that praxis which is taken up for the sake of an ‘effect’. It is ‘higher’ in what it accomplishes: It, the autarchos, brings political thought into its essence, for political thought as thought of the autarchos is ‘thought of Being’. Political thought, to be essential, must be a thinking parallel to and grounded upon thought of Being, hence as thought of (belonging to) the autarchos, where we hear mutual appropriation of to auto and to arche. Political thought is essential insofar as it ‘listens to’ and ‘heeds’ the autarchos; for, thereby, it is a listening to Being, thus letting politics be constituted as what it is in its essential origin. We speak of autarchology as that which ‘names’ essential political thinking, hence as that thinking of the political which is carried on no longer under the sway of metaphysics. This, we say, is the consequence of the new beginning given to thinking. Yet, we cannot say that this essential political thinking is carried on without regard for, or in the absence of, metaphysics. Rather, as Heidegger has made clear, a metaphysics which is overcome “does not disappear”: “It returns transformed, and remains in dominance as the continuing difference of Being and beings.”80 Essential political thinking, thus, goes on under the sway of the political difference as corollary of the ontological difference. The transformation of metaphysics lets the political difference take place in language, such that the previous authoritative claim of the factual political as politeiai—that is, the claim by which metaphysics previously held sway—is overcome. The arrival of the possibility of essential political thinking means the decline of the ‘untruth’ of politeiai and, thus, the ‘completion’ of the heretofore prevailing metaphusica specialis which determined political philosophy. More important, however, the arrival of the political difference in language means that the tradition is incorporated by this essential thinking. To pay attention to the autarchos as the authentic and primordial meaning of the polites is not to think the autarchos in terms of causa prima, causa sui

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for that which we understand as politics. Yet, we speak of a history of political philosophy which is itself ‘under the sway of metaphysics’, which is itself a history, i.e., the ‘history of Being’. For Heidegger, metaphysics—as the history of the epochal transformations/dispensations of Being—is “the history of the oblivion of Being.” And what, then, is the history of political philosophy under the sway of a metaphysics whose history is that of oblivion of Being? It is nothing other than the history of the oblivion of the autarchos. Concomitant to the distinction of ‘essence’ (ti estin) and ‘existence’ (hoti estin) articulated by Plato, the immediate experience of the original meaning of political being was ‘lost’, so that politics has since been understood primarily in terms of its facticity in the everyday disclosure of politics as a multiplicity of politeiai. Now, however, the tradition must undergo a ‘deconstruction’, the possibility of a more original way of thinking the matter of political philosophy. This is demonstrated in the distinction between the essence of the political and the historically factual political which we know as a multiplicity of politeia, i.e., in the political difference which, like the ontological difference of Being and beings, “is always already represented without being thought, unthought with respect to the differentiation.” Inasmuch as we have understood politics in its history under the sway of metaphysics, we can with Heidegger likewise say in present context that “the difference remains the unexplained pre-supposition.” Autarchology, as that manner of thinking which overcomes the tradition of political philosophy to give it its essence more originally in its originality, has its ground not in an anthropology, but rather in the project (if not in the achievement) of a fundamentalontologie. This signifies the renovation of the problem of politics in a way that liberates it from the sway of metaphysics and subsequent ‘philosophical anthropology’, and that places it upon the path of that essential thinking [wesentliche Denken] which would indeed determine its matter. The constraints and problematic of the polis which (because of its inadequate interpretation) have plagued mankind since antiquity are now removed to make way for the authentic human of the future. In the authentic future, the zoion politikon is transformed to be the autarchos; for, it is as the autarchos that the human eksistent as Dasein is co-respondent to that ‘call of Being’ which presences in the mode of Ge-Stell, i.e., in that will to power which hails as the planetary domination of technology. Autarchology, then, is that thinking which thinks the relation of Being as Being-Self-ruling (autarcheia) and self-ruling Dasein as autarchos. It is that meditative thinking belonging to the second beginning which effectively pits itself against the calculative thinking that belongs to the planetary domination of technology. To speak of autarcheia as the ordo of Being, hence as the best political order (when understood in its existentiell possibilities) that is normative for an

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authentic political existence, is—some will say—to invite danger, even unnecessary danger, because of the ambiguous nature of such an existence and its potential for lapsing into a chaotic anarchy. Indeed, there is a danger here, for it stems from being on that path of essential political thinking which determinately negates the Western tradition of political philosophy in favor of a future possibility which we are now only barely gaining the capacity to “transpose into the language of our speech.” This wariness of danger and the danger itself are not cause for us to flee in its face; for, as Heidegger himself understands, “what is most thought-provoking—especially when it is man’s highest concern—may well be also what is most dangerous. Or do we imagine that a man could even in small ways encounter the essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace [we add—the essence of politics]—without danger?”81 Furthermore, if what is dangerous is so because it is apparently subversive, we must recall the nature of this subversion, in that sense which is not merely negative. As Heidegger himself puts it, “the seemingly subversive will tries above all to recover the things of the past in a more originary form.” This, we might say, is its only danger, hence its only possibility of indictment. Of course, the attempt to recover the things of the past in a more originary form always occurs as an ‘issue’ of human existence, i.e., as a way in which existence is ever at issue for human Dasein. This existence, however, is ever an issue along a threefold path. The possibility that comes as the possibility of determination of the matter of political thinking encounters a supreme danger along this threefold path—the danger that hails from absence of arche and dike (i.e., anarchia and a-dikia) as well as from distortion (eidolon) of the political. We have here the fundamental precariousness of the human as political being. That is, the possibility of ‘determination’ must somehow win itself out of humanity’s discriminating ‘setting forth’ along the three paths that, as Heidegger puts it, ever delimit his possibilities of emergence, viz., being, appearance, and nonbeing: . . . the man who holds to being as it opens round him and whose attitude toward the essent is determined by his adherence to being, must take three paths. If he is to take over being-there in the radiance of being, he must bring being to stand, he must endure it in appearance and against appearance, and he must wrest both appearance and being from the abyss of nonbeing. Man must distinguish these three ways and accordingly he must decide for them and against them. Thought at the beginning of philosophy was the opening and laying out of the three paths. Discrimination (das Unterscheiden) placed sapient man on these paths and at their crossing, hence in a permanent decision (Entscheidung).82

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I have suggested, then, that the possibility of determination of the matter of political thinking thus is dependent upon an essential, yet precarious, undertaking: “to take upon oneself being-there (Dasein) as a decision between being, nonbeing, and appearance,”83 which, in the domain of the political means a decision between genuine or authentic politics (autarcheia), no politics (anarchia), and the semblance of politics qua politics of semblance (eidolopolitika). Understood in terms of an originary praxis, the task of an essential political thinking qua authentic doing is to take over Dasein as autarchos, to bring autarcheia to stand, to endure autarcheia in self-emergence and against eidolopolitika, all the while of necessity wresting both eidolopolitika and autarcheia from the abyss of anarchia. Here we have the threefold distinction that essentially characterizes the polis as the site of historical Dasein: autarcheia, eidolopolitika, and anarchia. To speak of politics as semblance—eidolopolitika—is to speak of politics ‘appearing’ and appearing to be what it is not in essence. That is to say, eidolopolitika is not ‘genuine’ politics (autarcheia), notwithstanding the ‘actuality’ which eidolopolitika has. To distinguish between eidolopolitika and autarcheia is to distinguish between inauthentic and authentic modes of the political, both of which have their actuality. Since each is actual ‘in its own right’, one cannot therefore rely merely on the actuality of either to demonstrate the distinction. Moreover, while it is the case that eidolopolitika is perspicuously dominant in the ‘showing’ of the political, one cannot thereby consider it to have greater sanction or justification. The actual as such is never superordinate; rather, possibility retains its primacy over the actual as the latter’s presupposition. The ‘meaning’ of the political, thus, does not—must not—take its legitimacy by appeal to what is actual. To be political, precisely insofar as it is to be historical, is to accede to the claim of past and future upon the present, to mediate those claims in that ‘decision’ which fuses the horizons of the three temporal ekstases. Properly to be political, thus, is never to be overwhelmed by the merely present-at-hand of history but to have that out-look, that trans-cendence, beyond the present which is the projection of possibilities. It is thus that autarcheia must be endured against eidolopolitika. In effect, the claim here is that the Western tradition of politics is dominated throughout by semblance (eidolon), i.e., we primarily encounter the politics of semblance, which I denominate by the neologism eidolopolitika. We must understand this claim in the light of what Heidegger has to say about semblance (Schein). For this we can turn to L. M. Vail in his discussion of this point: By emphasizing the an ihm selbst Heidegger contrasts his notion of the phenomenon with semblance (Schein) and with appearance (Erscheinung). In

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semblance a thing can show itself as that which it is not, as when fools’ gold shows itself to be gold. The ancients always allied semblance with nonbeing; in semblance a thing shows itself as that which it in essence is not. Heidegger points out however that semblances are grounded in showings; thus all semblances have a real basis and are to be treated as instances of phenomena along with so-called “real” showings or manifestations of nondeceptive objects (SZ, 29, 36).84

With regard to the phenomenal realm of politics we can say that the politics of semblance, eidolopolitika, is a showing. In eidolopolitika politics shows itself as that which it in essence is not. Eidolopolitika has a real basis, viz., the politics that this eidolopolitika deceptively shows itself to be. What is important to grasp here, however, is made clear by what Vail subsequently points out: “In another sense, semblance is grounded in a showing insofar as the thing after whose example something is showing itself must also be manifest. We could not have a counterfeit coin without the genuine coin; we could not have fools’ gold without gold.”85 The domain of the political, we have said, is dominated by the semblance of politics qua politics of semblance. But eidolopolitika is itself grounded in a showing of politics—i.e., in the ‘real showing’ which must also be manifest. Along with eidolopolitika must be manifest authentic politics, just as along with fools’ gold there must also be a showing of real gold. In short, the phenomenal historical disclosure of the political has always been such that politics shows itself in semblance and as it genuinely is. The future holds promise of being no different in this regard, and thus the quest for the creation of a just world order promises to be steeped in a precarious possibility of discrimination and decision. World order as the ordo of Being, autarcheia, will not come to pass in the absence of enduring autarcheia in self-emergence in and against eidolopolitika. The task of autarchology as essential political thinking, thus, is to discriminate and decide in this direction.

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CONCLUSION

Projecting-Open [ENTWURF] with Heidegger

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Part 1 and Part 2 constitute my attempt to mediate the fundamental comportment of world order studies and that which emanates from Heidegger’s meditative thinking. Such an attempt is not easily undertaken, of course; for, while the discourse of world order studies is readily accessible to anyone diligent in his or her concern for the unfolding conditions of planetary life, Heidegger’s meditative thinking is never immediately intelligible. Out of fidelity to that experience of thinking and being which Heidegger’s language seeks to disclose, I have deemed it necessary to employ much of the Heidegger lexicon hitherto. I am aware that this decision may well have taxed the world order scholar to the point of exhaustion—to read Heidegger is inevitably to share with him the protracted intensity of his thought,

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thus to find oneself reading him again and again, yet without any assurance of understanding. In these concluding remarks I wish to address the theme of essential political thinking with reference to the recently issued Heidegger text Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning] and then turn once again to my earlier references to the artwork of Ursula LeGuin. Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) calls us to the task of an originary thinking (anfängliche Denken), a thinking during the sway of which humans are no longer conceived metaphysically as ‘rational animal’ (animal rationale). This thinking must entail a ‘transformation’ of the human, indeed a ‘restoration’ of the human into the truth of Being (Seyn).1 This restoration can succeed only if there are thinkers who turn away from the first beginning (der erste Anfang) which inaugurated the Western tradition and who take up a different “questioning and saying” (Fragens und Sagens). The ‘questioning and saying’ is itself a unity in which the thinker ‘grasps’ what Heidegger has denominated Ereignis—enowning, as given in the recent English translation of the German text by Emad and Maly. To grasp “enowning” is to stand in a “grounding-attunement” (Grundstimmung) to Being (Seyn). Such a statement seems coherent to those who are accustomed to working with the Heidegger corpus. Yet, such coherence is immediately rendered suspect by Heidegger’s own words: No one understands what “I” think here: to let Da-sein emerge from within the truth of be-ing (and that means from within the essential swaying of truth), in order to ground beings in the whole and as such and to ground man in the midst of them.2

Heidegger adds: And he who will someday grasp it does not need “my” attempt. For he must have laid out his own path thereunto. He must be able to think what has been attempted in such a way that he thinks that it comes unto him from far away while still being what is ownmost to him, to which he has been owned-over as the one who is needed and thus does not have the inclination or opportunity to mean “himself.”3

So, he who stands in ‘grounding-attunement’ to the truth of Being really does not need Heidegger’s attempt, at least not insofar as it is encountered as a contribution to the historically (historische) past of ‘philosophy’. He must not see this at all as Heidegger’s attempt, as this man’s attempt. To understand what Heidegger thinks is to think not of what is Heidegger’s contribution to

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the prospect of ‘essential thinking’ (wesentliche Denken). Rather it is to think that which is most one’s own, in that thinking to acknowledge a “directive” that comes to one from far away, and to apprehend oneself as one who is needed for this “happening of the truth of Being.” This latter statement tests and usurps all steadfastness to modesty. One is called, claimed, to “take a stand,” precarious though it be insofar as it is a grounding-questioning that must first establish ‘ground’ (Grund) of ‘another history’ in a ‘time-space’ (Temporalität) well beyond the first beginning. How does one take this stand? Heidegger answers thus: “We must risk a projecting open of being’s essential swaying as enowning, precisely because we do not know the mandate of our history.”4 In this work I have risked the immodesty of taking a stand, of thinking with Heidegger in the claim of a ‘projecting-open’, of attempting a preparatory thinking which, as questioning-saying, questions while saying and says even as the saying remains thoroughly interrogatory. What is interrogatory while saying is not a ‘propositional’ discourse in the usual sense. It is a saying that attempts a showing of a way, but is thereby more indicative than demonstrative. Such an attempt perhaps must face the criticism that Heidegger himself expected, viz., that one gives evidence of stumbling, which is the rule for all grounding-questioning.5 To think in an enowning sense is to experience a “displacement” (Verrückung).6 The ‘evidence’—if we may call it that, tentatively, cautiously—is that “no immediate representation of anything extant is ever possible” when this displacement occurs. The task of this thinking thus is not to represent something extant, but rather to “clarify an attunement.” This clarification will succeed even minimally only if one abandons reverence for the first beginning, in particular only if one abandons “the familiar conception of man” inaugurated in and for that beginning. We find some orientation in this task from Heidegger when he writes, “grounding-attunement attunes Da-sein and thus attunes thinking as projecting-open the truth of being in word and concept.”7 To be oneself attuned, to attune thinking, is to experience oneself as displaced from all metaphysical representations in word and concept—and that includes both metaphusica generalis and metaphusica specialis. It is, moreover, to find metaphysical humanity in need of displacement—but displacement that occurs in word, in thought, and in deed as evidence of an originary appropriation undertaken by an attuned humanity. All grounding-questioning “determines” humanity inceptually “as that which needs to be dis-placed from out of his hitherto accepted determination, in order first to be attuned to a determinability.”8 Thus, what must be ‘questioned’ and ‘said’ is how “in the future man belongs to the truth

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of being.” Herein is the essential ‘determinability’ that calls for determination in word and concept. Herein is a decision (Entscheidung) taken so that “the genuinely historical be-ing of peoples” may be won rather than be lost. Displaced from the determinations of metaphusica generalis, then, one no longer thinks humanity as zoion logon echon such as classical Greek philosophy did, or as animal rationale such as medieval and scholastic philosophy did, thus not as “rational animal” as we ourselves say it consistent with modernity’s equivalent appropriation of that ancient concept. Displaced from the determinations of metaphusica specialis, accordingly one no longer thinks humanity as zoion politikon or, as we say, as “political animal.” The displacement displaces both the animality and the rationality so that one can think more essentially what is essential to humanity in belonging to the truth of being. Not only is the concept of zoion displaced, but so is the concept of ho politikos—“the political one”—as understood since Plato and Aristotle. To think what is essential to humanity we must “recover self-being” (Selbst-sein zurückgewinnt),9 and do so without appeal to either the concept of animality or the concept of rationality. The word for this recovery, of course, seems entirely lacking, even as the language of the new beginning is today enigmatic. To stand in determinability, open for an essential determination relative to the displacement of the sway of metaphusica specialis, is to eschew what Heidegger calls “total political belief” (der totale politische Glaube), insofar as such belief renounces essential decisions.10 Total political belief is a manifestation of philosophy reduced to ideology, to a ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung). Worldviews are easily accessible to the masses, observes Heidegger: “A ‘worldview’ arranges the experience in a certain direction and into its range—always only so far that the worldview is never put into question.”11 It is this never being put into question that characterizes a worldview as ideology, offered to the many even as the semblance of philosophy. Here all genuine questioning halts even as there is surrender of individual opinion to the totality of the worldview, and so is there a halt to the possibility of genuine historical [geschichtliche] experience. As Heidegger says, emphatically: The total worldview must close itself off from the opening of its ground and from engrounding the domain of its “creating”; that is, its creating can never arrive at what is its ownmost way of being and become creating-beyond itself, because thereby the total worldview would have to put itself into question.12

The essential determination of humanity thus (at least, as far as Heidegger is concerned) will not be found in the language of any Weltanschauung.

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Yet, an essential decision must be taken such that a people “becomes free for its law, which it must struggle for, as the ultimate necessity of its most noble moment.”13 Looked at from the outside, these words seem to speak politically, having the traditional concepts of ‘freedom’, ‘law’, ‘struggle’, ‘nobility’. Yet, one is bound to assert, with Heidegger, that that thinking which heretofore has belonged to politics is lacking in the essential decision that claims us today out of the second beginning. To think a people essentially is to transform ‘the political’ in word, in concept, and in deed, thus to move beyond all that since classical antiquity has been understood and fostered by words such as ta politika and zoion politikon. Here, too, especially here, a displacement must occur as a people undertakes the ultimate necessity of its most noble moment. Humanity is to overcome the “theory-praxis” unity of the bios politikos as advanced by the Western tradition of political philosophy. The directive of ‘essential thinking’ is such that it seeks a grounding legislation far more primordial than that positive legislation that issues from and for this or that politeia (regime, constitution) and its subsequent historical (historische) developments such as the modern state. Thus, one must surrender the concept of bios even as one surrenders the concept of ho politikos, and thus surrender with the latter the determination of a people by way of the concept of politeia. ‘Grounding legislation’ presupposes that “Be-ing needs Da-sein and does not hold sway at all without this enownment.”14 Said otherwise: “man as Dasein is en-owned by be-ing as enowning and thus belongs to enowning itself.”15 Hence, what comes to word and deed is first and foremost a “gifting” of be-ing for humanity’s historical (geschichtlich) appropriation in a self-determination that is originary. Only insofar as there is this simultaneity of (a) gifting from Being (Seyn) and (b) appropriation by Da-sein is there a “crossingover” from the end of metaphysics to the second beginning. This crossing-over occurs inevitably, when it occurs, in word, in concept, and in deed. As a crossing-over from metaphusica specialis, there is a displacement from “political philosophy” (whether conceived as structurally dependent upon or derivative of a first philosophy [prote philosophia]). In the moment of the transition, in the tension between the first and second beginnings, one may speak of the displacement as from political philosophy to ‘essential political thinking’. Yet, to think ‘the political’ essentially one must ultimately surrender the concept and signal its incorporation (Verwindung) into the truth of Being. This, as Heidegger instructs us, one can accomplish only by way of projecting-open. For Heidegger, ‘Da-sein’ is chosen in part to displace metaphysical thinking, to overcome philosophical anthropology, and to connote “the domain . . . where above all a being returns to itself.” For humanity this amounts to an

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act of self-recovery, but beyond both the ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘self-assertion’ that have characterized modern metaphysics from Descartes to Nietzsche. It is, thus, not to discover an Ego either in the mode of the Cartesian cogitans or the Nietzschean volo. Self-recovery, self-determination, depend upon an historical (geschichtlich) appropriation of a gifting of Being (Seyn), we noted above. Da-sein, thus, becomes ‘en-owned’ by Being. But, as Heidegger says, “As en-owned, Da-sein itself becomes more its own and the selfopening ground of the self; and this self first gives the guardianship of man its keenness, decidedness, and intimacy.”16 Here ‘intimacy’ means “being the founder and preserver of the truth itself” (der Gründer und Wahrer der Wahrheit selbst zu sein). Thus, even as the first beginning had its founders and preservers in the acts that founded and preserved the polis (e.g., Solon, Plato, Aristotle) and then the modern state (e.g., Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bodin), so the second beginning must have its founders and preservers in an act of essential legislation. But what is needed first and foremost is an essential word, itself already a deed that happens in one of those moments “where the lightning flash of a great enlightenment goes through the universe.”17 As such the deed is neither objective nor subjective, nor can it be construed as some heroic or prophetic act. Here then, now, one must face the charge of immodesty, even as it is the unavoidable risk any thinker takes in attempting a projecting-open. Beyond presumption, then, but also beyond the usual demand for demonstration, one declares: Being today enowns humanity as Da-sein and “gifts” the essential word for the second beginning, for its world occurrence, and thus for Da-sein’s appropriation in self-recovery. The proposition, if we may call it that, is for now proleptic and must remain so for a time. Nonetheless, the essential word that is thus given in its “gifting” of Being simultaneously closes the breach of metaphusica generalis and metaphusica specialis, thus incorporating while transcending the whole of the history of metaphysics as prote philosophia. Because the second beginning is in tension with the first beginning, the essential word is—must be—also an originary word belonging to Greek antiquity. It must be a word that speaks “the involvement of Being in human nature,” and thus it must locate the originary meaning of ‘the political’ in the horizon of Being, i.e., in the order of Being. As Heidegger has instructed, an originary appropriation requires that we “pursue more originally what the Greeks have thought, to see it in the source of its reality.”18 Our task, then, if I may submit it so, though it be proleptic, is (a) to hear two originary words, thus (b) to be attuned to an originary speech, then (c) to pursue more originally what the Greeks have thought in these two originary words, and (d) to see the meaning of these words in the source of their

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reality. In uttering these words we simultaneously name the order of Being and name the essential self-being of humanity. What are these words? I submit: αυταρχεια, αυταρχος. With these words it may be understood that, on the one hand, Being commissions itself (to use the words of Werner Marx here) and, on the other hand, commissions Da-sein. With these words we name: αυταρχεια: Being-Self-ruling αυταρχος: self-ruling Da-sein • To name αυταρχεια thus is to understand, with Heidegger, the belongingtogether of to auto and to arche, i.e., to understand their mutual appropriation, even as this was already understood in Parmenides’s fragment, το γαρ νοιεν εστιν τε και ειναι. • To name αυταρχος thus is to understand, beyond Heidegger, that already in the eighth century B.C.E. in the thought of Homer αρχη is related to the Sanskrit arh-, “giving a verb arhami, ‘I am able’, ‘I have it in me to do’.”19 With Heidegger, yet beyond him, we must think the Es gibt granting αρχη as the destiny of Being, granting to Dasein its power of authentic (eigentlich) doing. In this mutual appropriation, αυταρχεια, as the order of Being, is the realm, the αρχη “through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature.” In a way yet to be articulated, ta politika is incorporated by αυταρχεια so that the essence of ho politikos may be given its historically essential and active expression in the word αυταρχος. We stand before the possibility of an ‘originary advent’ if—but only if—we are prepared to experience the saying of these words as the task reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy, but also as the task of an ‘essential political thinking’ at the end of political philosophy. Thus, despite the logocentric nuance of the word, autarchology is the name for that essential thinking of the political experienced under the sway of the second beginning. It inaugurates the displacement of ρολιτικη. But one must remember that to experience the saying of these words is to experience a displacement in word, in concept, and in deed. The essence of ho politikos is founded, in the second beginning, in the αυταρχος even as the essence of ta politika is founded in αυταρχεια. Here essence must become manifest in deed as human Da-sein appropriates an ownmost (eigentlich) αρχη. Here, against the total political belief of all Weltanschauungen, against the false security of a Weltanschauung’s ‘public’ (offentlich) order with its anonymous opining that blocks all genuine experience of what is essential,

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one is called to overcome the strife (Riss) of archist and an-archist. But, the point is not to overcome this strife merely in the opposition of the traditional political doctrines of ‘archism’ and ‘an-archism’. Rather it is to overcome the strife of archist and an-archist in the individual human Da-sein, who can and must accept the ownmost ontological obligation of being-self-ruling. Humanity’s self-recovery cannot but have its existentiell consequences as evidence of a founding and preserving of the truth of Being (Seyn). In short, with this originary word—αυταρχος—human Dasein is called to an ‘original praxis’ which overcomes the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction of ruler and ruled.20 Ereignis, the word having its roots in eigen (own), is the event of ownmost appropriation, of coming into one’s own, of coming to where one belongs. He who in the Western tradition of political philosophy was denominated ho politikos recovers an original praxis only as αυταρχος. And only in this recovery is there inaugurated the essential self-determination of Western humanity for the sake of its essential history (wesentliche Geschichte). I want now (a) to return to the epigraph from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, with which I began chapter 2 of Part 1, and (b) to juxtapose to LeGuin’s written word some pertinent insights of Hannah Arendt. If ever we may bear witness to a thought-provoking conjunction of philosophy, crisis theory, and world order, we need only engage LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. This work of art poses all the salient questions and illuminates all the possibilities, yet without giving easy and ready answers. Like Heidegger, LeGuin confronts us with the task of thinking of that always enigmatic relation of being and time. To the extent that our understanding of time and possibility is one of sequency, it may be said that LeGuin speaks to the present from the vantage point of the distant future. Yet, to the extent that our understanding of time and of possibility is one of simultaneity, it may be said that LeGuin speaks from out of the interplay of distance and proximity. To speak thus is to understand a given time as crisis, i.e., as a time of decision and, thus, as a time of opportunity as well as danger. It is the essence of decision that indifference is ruled out altogether—not because the future is, in some sense, determined, but precisely because the call that claims us from out of the future is ever a ‘free-ing claim’. The future ever claims us in and for the possibility of our freedom to be. Thus, the future is not something “out there,” something ‘objectively’ present-at-hand. Rather is it always a disclosure of the multiple possibilities that each one of us is and which each of us may appropriate as his or her own. Both Heidegger and LeGuin appreciate the thought-provoking force of crisis. The fundamental ‘declaration’ of each is reciprocal: For Heidegger, as one claimed by the ‘fundamental features’ of our age, “Most thought-provok-

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ing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking”; for LeGuin, as one sensitive to “the incredible realities” of our existence, “As surely as the past becomes the future, the future becomes the past.” In short, to be as we are—in Arendt’s formulation—“between past and future” is to be brought before our greatest need: to think. To think our position between past and future is to think the essential character of possibility; and to think this with the understanding that “thinking and being are the same.” To understand that the past becomes the future is to understand possibility one way. To understand that the future becomes the past is to understand possibility yet another way. To understand that the past becomes the future as the future becomes the past is to understand the simultaneity of all possibility, thus to find ourselves addressed in our being by our uttermost possibility. It is in this latter sense that we may fathom the significance of the passage from The Dispossessed which ever remains for me epigraph to my effort to navigate the pathways of essential political thinking. Let us listen again to Keng as she gives voice to a future simultaneous with our present: My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. . . . We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. . . . Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival.

Speaking to Shevek, the central figure through whom LeGuin illuminates the contours of that human journey which is at once political and ontological, Keng, as I said, gives voice to a future simultaneous with our present. LeGuin forces us to see and to hear what is disclosed in the interplay of distance and proximity. To see and to hear while standing as we are between past and future is to endure the experience of “speechless horror”—

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“the speechless horror at what man may do and what the world may become.”21 And so I submit: Essential political thinking has its beginning in the experience of speechless horror. As Arendt observes, this experience “is in many ways related to the speechless wonder [thaumadzein] of gratitude from which the questions of philosophy spring.”22 It is in enduring this experience that essential words may then be uttered and, out of fidelity to the sameness of thinking and being, world and Earth be preserved through the power of the most essential of transformations: metanoia, change of mind. The experience of speechless horror manifest in the spoken word of Keng presents us with one future ever simultaneous with our present. The wonder of it is that, as a possibility, its presence is never simply necessary or inevitable. Speechless horror offers to us, by way of a free-ing claim, the possibility of a beginning resolutely sustained: Imagination and desire, disciplined by understanding and sustained by vision, are at the root of actualizing those possibilities through which the future makes present against the rigidity of a past making future. How does essential political thinking understand the possibility of such a beginning? Each of us, as Hannah Arendt never ceases to point out, is a new beginning—as possibility of action, each one an essential source and place (topos) of world disclosure. At issue in the decision concerning the future of the world order, thus, is nothing less than the potentiality-for-being that each one of us is, and which each one of us cannot but appropriate as one’s own and then offer to others as one’s unique presence. Each one of us is and each one of us appears. Our condition, as the ancients knew and as Arendt reminds us, is one of plurality, hence the ancient admonition gnothi sauthon—“know thyself”: In the Socratic understanding, the Delphic oracle “know thyself” meant: only through knowing what appears to me—only to me, and therefore remaining forever related to my own concrete existence—can I ever understand truth. Absolute truth, which would be the same for all men and therefore unrelated, independent of each man’s existence, cannot exist for mortals. For mortals the important thing is to make doxa, to see in every doxa truth and to speak in such a way that the truth of one’s opinion reveals itself to oneself and to others. . . . For Socrates the chief criterion for the man who speaks truthfully his own doxa was “that he be in agreement with himself. . . .” The axiom of contradiction with which Aristotle founded Western logic, can be traced back to this fundamental discovery of Socrates. Insofar as I am one, I will not contradict myself because in thought I am two-inone; therefore I do not live only with others, as one, but also with myself.

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The fear of contradiction is the fear of splitting up, of no longer remaining one, and this is the reason why the axiom of contradiction could become the fundamental rule of thought. . . . What Socrates was driving at (and what Aristotle’s theory of friendship explains more fully) is that living together with others begins with living together with oneself [emphasis added]. Socrates’ teaching meant: only he who knows how to live with himself is fit to live with others. . . . “It is much better to be in disagreement with the whole world than being one to be in disagreement with myself.” Ethics, no less than logic, has its origin in this statement, for conscience in its most general sense is also based on the fact that I can be in agreement or disagreement with myself, and that means that I do not only appear to others but also to myself.23

Each one of us is and appears. In appearance one offers oneself and always discloses presence or absence of that fundamental accord with which the world order—or denial of it as something indeed ‘ordered’—is begun and thus sustained. Thinking and being have their sameness in that intentionality of self which is the spring of word and deed. To cite Arendt again: . . . this self remains always changeable and somewhat equivocal. It is in the form of changeability and equivocality that this self represents to me, while I am by myself, all men, the humanity of all men. What I expect other people to do—and this expectation is prior to all experiences and survives them all—is to a large extent determined by the ever-changing potentialities of the self with whom I live together. In other words, a murderer . . . will see all other people in the image of his own action. He will live in a world of potential murderers. It is not his own isolated act that is of political relevance, or even the desire to commit it, but this doxa of his, the way in which the world opens up to him and is part and parcel of the political reality he lives in. In this sense, and to the extent that we still live with ourselves, we all change the human world constantly, for better and for worse, even if we do not act at all.24

The implication for world order thinking cannot be more clear: Planetary dwelling is not a matter of government but of governance. Whereas the concept of government rests on an ostensibly irreducible distinction of ruler and ruled (e.g., of ‘statesman’ and ‘citizen’, of ‘sovereign’ and ‘subject’), the concept of governance relinquishes the artifice of the former so as to recover and venture the originary autarchos or self-ruler. So dominated are we by the obfuscations of the Western political-philosophical tradition, and even more so by the modern turn to institutional structures to mitigate the ‘war of all against all’, that we are today rather forgetful of this elementary possibility. It

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is clear, furthermore, that the relationship between ethics and politics must be disabused of the rigid dichotomy that contributes to this forgetfulness. In her own way, in reflections on the polis in her The Human Condition, Arendt commented on the above point: The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only “equals,” whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled. . . . [To] be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed.25

One cannot overemphasize here the essentially obligatory character of autarcheia as I have presented it in contrast to both government (understood as an encroachment of the master-slave relationship) and anarchy (to my mind, represented best by Heidegger’s phrase—“to make sheer caprice the law and titanic rage the rule”). Planetary dwelling is, essentially, neither a global constitutionalism (the logic of which, when examined, turns out to be modernist in prejudice—Hobbesian if ‘absolutist’, Lockean if ‘limited’) nor a global anarchy. I have no “strategy” or “program” to recommend as a way of conceiving what I take to be chiefly a pedagogical task (as opposed to building institutional structures as such, managing international interdependence, proceeding with social engineering, organizing technocracy, etc.). I can, at this point, only share two significant observations to the extent that planetary dwelling is essentially connected to the possibility of a genuinely planetary thinking. These are “intimations” of autarchology in the sense that a thematic treatment of these lines of thought will inevitably complement what I have undertaken to do in this book. First, Gandhi’s experiment with “right mind,” with nonviolence (ahimsa) as that way of life which holds to the truth (satyagraha), is fully consistent with the comportment of autarcheia. Indeed, in the native language to which he returned, Gandhi articulated what I believe is the substantive equivalent of the Greek word autarchos—viz., swaraj (swa-self; raj-rule). In this respect, Gandhi himself has already advanced the cause of planetary thinking/planetary dwelling. His advocacy of swaraj is itself an “Eastern” voicing of autarchology. I put Eastern in scare-quotes out of vigilance for the modern subjectivist prejudice—the ‘imaginative geography’—tacitly operative in this “East-West” dichotomy. LeGuin, I believe, has already given the appropriate corrective to this tendency to dichotomize—i.e., in the word Terran. Hence-

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forth, I suggest, all ‘voicings’ of autarchology may properly be characterized not as “Western” or “Eastern” but, simply, as “Terran.” This brings me to my second observation: Gandhi is not a lone voice, for planetary thinking is being advanced also by the Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji. As Evan Thompson observes concerning Nishitani, who “studied with Heidegger in Germany in the 1930s”: “His philosophical endeavor (and that of the Kyoto School) is monumental, for it is one of the few examples of European philosophy being appropriated by another tradition and being replied to by that tradition, both thereby becoming part of a planetary movement. If one of the philosophical tasks left to us . . . is the appropriation of Heidegger’s thought, we would do well to look to Nishitani, for he shows that Heidegger’s call for planetary thinking has not gone unheard.”26 In short, “Terrans” across the way are already speaking and contributing to the emerging planetary dialogue of Terra. If we who are concerned with the future of the world order are capable of a beginning—i.e., capable of an experience of speechless horror such as LeGuin’s imaginative work of art qua work of politics enables—we cannot but see that the world-order-future, planetary dwelling, has its enduring possibility in that plurality of ones who, as autarchoi/swaraji, give (disclose) that world to themselves. Only thus can the one then give that world to another who, in receiving it from the one, makes a gift of the same world in turn.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Hwa Y. Jung, The Crisis of Political Understanding (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979). 2. Fred Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 3. See my “L’affaire Heidegger,” Human Studies, 16, October 1993, pp. 359–380; and the sequel discussion, “Gnothi sauton: Heidegger’s Problem Ours,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 25, no. 3, October 1994, pp. 263–287. 4. William Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 105. 5. Hanna F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 1. 6. Ibid., p. 3. 7. Ibid., p. 4. 8. Ibid., p. 21. 9. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 10. Pitkin, p. 294. 11. Ibid., p. 316. See chapter 14, “Political Theory and the Modern Predicament.” 12. Ibid., pp. 320–321. 13. John Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy: A Reexamination of the Foundations of Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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Crisis Theory and World Order 14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. Ibid., p. 3. 16. Ibid., p. 13. 17. Ibid., p. 199. 18. Ibid., p. 203. 19. Ibid., p. 206.

20. See Robert Amdur, “Rawls’ Theory of Justice: Domestic and International Perspectives,” World Politics, 29, April 1977, pp. 438–461; Peter Danielson, “Theories, Intuition, and the Problems of Worldwide Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 3, 1973, pp. 331–340; Joseph P. Demarco, “International Application of the Theory of Justice,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 62, 1981, pp. 393–402; David A. J. Richards, “International Distributive Justice,” in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, eds., Ethics, Economics, and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 1982). 21. See Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), especially part 3, “Globalizing the Rawlsian Conception of Justice,” pp. 211 ff. 22. Ibid., p. 10. 23. Ibid., p. 10. 24. Pogge is seriously concerned with “what the substance of Rawls’s conception of justice might imply for the assessment of the existing world order and of various possible efforts towards global constitutional reform” (p. 216). He considers how Rawls’ conception contributes to thinking about “a global order that embodies shared values” (p. 219). In this respect, Pogge seeks to move beyond a Hobbesian account of “international relations as a modus vivendi,” i.e., coexistence without shared values. 25. Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 2 & 96. 26. Ibid., p. 104. 27. Ibid., p. 108. 28. R.B.J. Walker, “World Order and the Reconstruction of Political Life,” in R. Falk, R. Johansen, & S. Kim, eds., The Constitutional Foundations of World Peace (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 191–209, at p. 203 . 29. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1958), p. 20. 30. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 31. Scott, op. cit., pp. 104–105. 32. For a sense of what I have in mind here, I refer the reader to two essays in which I attempt a deconstruction of Plato and Aristotle on the question of the polit-

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ical. See my “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” Man and World, 19, 1986, pp. 203–223; and “The Authentic Tele of Politics: A Reading of Aristotle,” History of Political Thought, 12:3, autumn 1991, pp. 403–420. 33. Scott, p. 102.

CHAPTER 1 1. Kenneth E. Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 161. For a summary account of Boulding’s early work, see Emile Benoit, “Kenneth Boulding as Socio-Political Theorist,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 21:3, September 1977, pp. 551–560. 2. Ibid., p. 76. 3. Ibid., p. 77. 4. Ibid., p. 103. 5. “Kenneth Boulding: A Discussion with Harry Redner,” Social Alternatives, 3:1, 1982, pp. 15–20. 6. I do not imply that the peace research movement has limited itself to this orientation. In fact, as is well known, peace research has seen this orientation challenged by the “broader” view advanced by Johan Galtung and his associates in the idea of “positive peace,” i.e., the absence of structural violence. See Galtung’s “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 6:3, 1969. Moreover, as the peace research movement has become more transnational in representation, it is clear that conceptual difficulties continue to be raised according to whether “First World,” “Second World,” “Third World,” etc., interests are being articulated. Thus, one must mention as well the “radical” view in peace research, which works within a MarxistLeninist framework, taking up the Marxist argument that “the general principle of social ills [is to be sought] in the principle of the state itself.” 7. Boulding, op. cit., p. 161. 8. Ibid., p. 162. 9. Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 136. 10. Ibid., p. 138. 11. Kenneth E. Boulding, Human Betterment (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985), p. 75. 12. Ibid., p. 24. 13. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton & V. Deutsch (New York: University Press of America, 1985; Regnery/Gateway, 1967), pp. 43–44.

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14. Roscoe Pound, “Towards a New Jus Gentium,” in F.S.C. Northrop, ed., Ideological Differences and World Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 1–17. 15. Ibid., p. 4. 16. For a summary account, see John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 17. This is, of course, the title of the provocative work by Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 18. See R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); R.B.J. Walker, “World Politics and Western Reason: Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony,” WOMP Working Paper No. 19 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982); Rajni Kothari, “Towards a Just World,” WOMP Working Paper No. 11 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1980). 19. See Hwa Y. Jung, The Crisis of Political Understanding (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), especially chapter 5, “A Critique of Political Behavioralism as Scientific Epistemology,” and chapter 6, “A Critique of the Cybernetic Model of Man in Political Science.” Also see Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 20. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). The passages cited are from the “Preface,” p. xiii. What Megill has in mind in referring here to Kant’s first critique (Critique of Pure Reason) is, I believe, captured nicely by Alasdair MacIntyre in his provocative work After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), at p. 266: Kant’s thesis that the nature of human reason is such that there are principles and concepts necessarily assented to by any rational being, both in thinking and in willing, encountered two distinct kinds of crucial objection. One, to which Hegel and subsequent historicists gave great weight, was that what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places, and stages of human activity and enquiry. Just as what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science as such turned out after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of morality turned out to be the principles and presuppositions of one highly specific morality, a secularized version of Protestantism which furnished modern liberal individualism with one of its founding charters. Thus the claim to universality foundered. 21. Megill, p. xiii.

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22. Ibid., p. 195. 23. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985). 24. Ibid., p. 138. 25. Ibid., p. 179. 26. Ibid., p. 99. 27. Ibid., see chapter 8. 28. Ibid., p. 90. 29. Ibid., p. 90. 30. Ibid., p. 91. 31. Ibid., p. 91. 32. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” Modern Judaism, vol. 1, 1981, pp. 17–45. 33. Jung, note 19, pp. 48–49. 34. For an important critique of power understood in terms of ‘dominance’, see Berenice Carroll, “Peace Research: The Cult of Power,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 16:4, 1972, pp. 585–616. Carroll’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s thought on conceptions of politics is especially pertinent. 35. For such a perspective, see Jung, chapter 4, “The Life-World, Language, and Human Knowledge,” pp. 59–91. 36. See Hwa Y. Jung, “An Introductory Essay: The Political Relevance of Existential Phenomenology,” in Jung, ed., Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), pp. xvii–lv. 37. Jung, note 19, p. 56. 38. See Jung, “Two Cities of Scientism: Leo Strauss and Edmund Husserl,” Independent Journal of Philosophy, 3, 1978, pp. 81–88. 39. See Thomas A. Pangles, ed., The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 40. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, 1978), p. 12. 41. See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), especially chapter 1, “Tradition and the Modern Age.” For a summary account, see Noel O’Sullivan, “Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society,” in A. deCrespigny & K. Minogue, eds., Contemporary Political Philosophers (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1975), pp. 228–251. 42. Arendt, ibid., p. 23.

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44. Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” text of address presented at 1954 meeting of the American Political Science Association; available in Arendt Collected Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 45. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 39. 46. Jung, The Crisis of Political Understanding, p. 147. 47. Ibid., p. 147. 48. Ibid., p. 153. 49. Ibid., p. 155. 50. Ibid., p. 157. 51. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second ed., (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 277. 52. Ibid., pp. 257–258. 53. bid., p. 259. 54. Ibid., pp. 260–261. 55. Ibid., p. 262. 56. Ibid., pp. 268–269. 57. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 58. Ibid., p. 351. 59. Ibid., p. 352. 60. Ibid., p. 368. 61. Ibid., p. 391. 62. For one of the more lucid treatments of Heidegger’s project, see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Also see chapter 3 of Hwa Jung’s The Crisis of Political Understanding, “Toward a New Humanism: The Social Principle of Man and Nature as the Politics of Civility.” 63. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans., J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). See the essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” pp. 55–73. 64. Ibid., pp. 58–59. 65. Ibid., p. 59. 66. Ibid., p. 60.

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67. Megill, note 20, pp. 346–347. 68. Berenice Carroll, note 23, p. 605. 69. Ibid., p. 159. 70. As cited by Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 159. 71. That such a process is now unfolding became clear when the International Political Science Association convened its 1988 World Congress on the theme “Toward a Global Political Science.” 72. Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

CHAPTER 2 1. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), pp. 73 & 78. 2. Richard A. Falk, This Endangered Planet (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 8. 3. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 4. Ibid., p. 13. 5. Lester R. Brown, et. al., State of the World 1987 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), p. 24; see also State of the World 1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). 6. Ibid., p. 24. 7. Donnella H. Meadows, et. al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), pp. 11 & 12. It is significant that this work has been made available in twenty-nine languages. 8. Ibid., pp. 23–24. 9. Robert E. Clute, “International Futures,” in Gary K. Bertsch, ed., Global Policy Analysis (Berkeley Hills: Sage Publications, 1982), p. 171. 10. Ibid., pp. 173–174. 11. Jagdish N. Bhagwati, ed., The New International Economic Order: The NorthSouth Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 1. 12. See appendix to Jyoti S. Singh, A New International Economic Order (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977). 13. Annex B-2, in G. F. Erb & V. Kallab, eds., Beyond Dependency: The Developing World Speaks Out (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1975).

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14. See Jeffrey Cason, “Whatever Happened to the New International Order,” in Andrew Valls and Virginia Held, eds., Ethics in International Affairs (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 201–213. 15. See Daedalus, vol. 95, no. 2, spring 1966. 16. In his later work, Primacy or World Order (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), Hoffmann articulates his position in terms of the general dictum that “the best is the enemy of the good” (p. 186), arguing that “World order is, or rather would be, the state in which violence and economic disruptions are tamed; it is, or would be, a state of moderation among the actors, plus . . . economic progress . . . plus collective institutions. It is also all those processes, of negotiation as well as deterrence, of balancing of force as well as of managing the economic bonds, that could lead to such a state” (p. 188). The word “moderation” signals Hoffmann’s position (the appeal for a “moderate international order”) as in contrast to the “idealism” or “radicalism” of worldorderism (the appeal for a “just world order,” especially if understood as “the universal triumph of a particular political philosophy, such as liberalism or Marxism”) (pp. 188–189). 17. See Richard A. Falk, “Anarchism and World Order,” in J. Roland Pennock & J. W. Chapman, eds., Anarchism (New York: NYU Press, 1978), pp. 63–87. In his essay Falk does not reject the anarchist position as “a perspective relevant to global reform,” but rather thinks that “the anarchist tradition has something important to contribute to the emergent dialogue on the tactics and shape of global reform.” Also see Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order (London: Souvenir Press, 1974); and N.K. Swazo, “The Anarchical Stream in World Order Thinking,” Alternatives: A Journal of World Policy, 3:2, May 1978, pp. 515–525. For a more recent related discussion, see my “Polypragmon, Apragmon or Autarchos: Questioning Dauenhauer on Citizenship,” International Studies in Philosophy, XXX:4, 1998, pp. 79–95. 18. Peter Brigg, “The Archetype of the Journey in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Fiction,” in J. D. Olander & M. H. Greenberg, eds., Ursula K. LeGuin (New York: Taplinger, 1979), pp. 36–63. See also in this volume: Phillip E. Smith, “Unbuilding Walls: Human Nature and the Nature of Evolutionary and Political Theory in The Dispossessed,” pp. 77–96; and J. P. Brennan & M. C. Downs, “Anarchism and Utopian Tradition in The Dispossessed,” pp. 116–152. 19. The Dispossessed, chapter 7. 20. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956, 1962, 1966; see also Introduction to World Peace through World Law (Chicago: World Without War Publications, 1973). 21. Ibid., p. 10. 22. Ibid., p. 11. 23. R. Falk, R. Johansen, & S. Kim, eds., The Constitutional Foundations of World Peace (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 8. 24. Ibid., p. 9.

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25. Ibid., p. 58. 26. Saul Mendlovitz, “Introduction,” On the Creation of a Just World Order (New York: The Free Press, 1975), p. ix. The nine research groups were originally from West Germany, Latin America, Japan, USA, India, USSR, Sub-Saharan Africa, nonterritorial actors, and the Arab States. See also S. Mendlovitz & T. G. Weiss, “Toward Consensus: The World Order Models Project of the Institute for World Order,” in Clark & Sohn, Introduction to World Peace Through World Law, pp. 74–97. 27. Ibid., p. x. 28. Ibid., p. xi. 29. Summary statements of the various positions are given in the volume edited by Mendlovitz, On the Creation of a Just World Order. Other volumes include: Rajni Kothari, Footsteps into the Future; Ali A. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures; Gustavo Lagos & Horacio Godoy, Revolution of Being; Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds; and Johann Galtung, The True Worlds. 30. In a recent essay, “The Pathways of Global Constitutionalism” (May 22, 1989), Richard Falk comments on Mendlovitz’s constitutionalism, noting that Mendlovitz’s “best guess over the years has been that power-wielding elites of the present system are working away on their cold-hearted blueprints for centralized governance.” See, more recently, R. Falk, et. al., The Constitutional Foundations of World Peace, op. cit. 31. Ibid., p. 4. 32. Ali A. Mazrui, “World Culture and the Search for Human Consensus,” in Mendlovitz, On the Creation of a Just World Order, pp. 1–37. 33. Ibid., p. 36. 34. Ibid., p. 36. 35. Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures, p. 7. 36. Ibid., p. 12. 37. Rajni Kothari, “World Politics and World Order: The Issue of Autonomy,” in Mendlovitz, pp. 39–69. 38. Ibid., p. 52. 39. Rajni Kothari, “Peace in an Age of Transformation,” in R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 323–361. 40. Ibid., p. 324. 41. Ibid., p. 336. 42. Gustavo Lagos, “The Revolution of Being,” in Mendlovitz, pp. 71–109. 43. Ibid., pp. 85 & 86. 44. Richard A. Falk, “Toward a New World Order: Modest Methods and Drastic Visions,” in Mendlovitz, pp. 211–258. Falk’s distinction of world-order gradualism and

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world-order radicalism is stated by Henry Kissinger (“Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” Daedalus, spring 1966, pp. 503–529) as a difference of policy style, viz., the political and the revolutionary, the former represented by the personality of the statesman and the latter by the prophet. Kissinger writes: “The statesman manipulates reality; his first goal is survival. . . . To the statesman, gradualism is the essence of stability; he represents an era of average performance, of gradual change and slow construction. By contrast, the prophet is less concerned with manipulating than with creating reality.” In short, what is in contrast here is purpose and method: “The test of the statesman is the performance of the international structure under stress. The test of the prophet is inherent in his vision.” 45. Ibid., p. 241. 46. “The Global Promise of Social Movements: Explorations at the Edge of Time,” Alternatives, XII, 1987, pp. 173–196. 47. Ibid. For further discussion of critical social movements, see: R.B.J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988); and H. C. Boyte & F. Riessman, The New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and J. Brecher, et. al., Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 48. Reinhart Kosseleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988). 49. Mansbach and Vasquez, op. cit., pp. 336–337. 50. Ibid., pp. 349 ff. 51. Kosseleck, p. 161. 52. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Notes on Planning for the Future,” Daedalus, spring 1966, pp. 572–589. 53. Ibid., pp. 572–573. 54. Ibid., p. 575; emphasis mine. 55. Ibid., p. 578. 56. Ibid., pp. 575–576. 57. Carl-Friedrich von Weiszäcker, “A Skeptical Contribution,” in Mendlovitz, pp. 111–150. 58. Ibid., p. 145. 59. In his more recent work, The Ambivalence of Progress: Essays on Historical Anthropology (New York: Paragon House, 1988, originally published as Der Garten des Menschlichen by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munchen Wien, 1977), von Weiszäcker yet sustains this claim (see p. 160). 60. Weiszäcker, p. 137.

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61. This position stands related to certain “political evaluations” von Weiszäcker makes. Consider the following passage from The Ambivalence of Progress (p. 160): “Humankind understands very well the demand for the sacrifice of the ego. In respect to political values, this is actually everywhere their core. The unity of absolutism results from forced sacrifice of particular interests. The freedom of liberalism is essentially the freedom that I tolerate in my fellow citizen. The solidarity of socialism always demands the sacrifice of the personal in the name of common interests. There is perversion in all these values in that the ego converts them into demands made on others rather than on itself. The insight of these political evaluations is usually limited by the replacing of the egoism of the individual with the egoism of the group, in which the undifferentiated values of the immature ego merely reproduce themselves. The task is to recognize and describe the one relation of self-realization to the human community of world peace.” 62. Weiszäcker, “A Skeptical Contribution.” 63. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 85. 64. Ibid., p. 85. 65. F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 25. 66. Ibid., p. 26. 67. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928), p. 514. 68. Ibid., p. 513. 69. Hinsley, p. 122. 70. Geoffrey Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe 1648–1780 (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 184. 71. Richard A. Falk, The End of the World Order: Essays on Normative International Relations (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983); see in particular “The Grotian Quest,” pp. 25–32. Also see Charles S. Edwards, Hugo Grotius: The Miracle of Holland (Chicago: Newton Hall, 1981). 72. Hinsley, p. 139. 73. Ibid., p. 189. 74. Mansbach and Vasquez, pp. 4 & 332–333. 75. Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: The Free Press, 1975), p. 59. 76. These are, of course, the “disvalues” articulated by the World Order Models Project at the outset of its series of works, “Preferred Worlds for the 1990s.” It is to be noted that to speak of war as a “disvalue” is to oppose “the diplomacy of Realpolitik” in

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its claims that war is “consistent with the security of the state,” that war is “itself creative of the moral order,” and that the “moral international order was the achievement of war and the strife of states.” 77. Richard A. Falk & Samuel S. Kim, “An Approach to World Order Studies and the World System,” WOMP Working Paper No. 22 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982). 78. Ervin Laszlo, A Strategy for the Future: The Systems Approach to World Order (New York: George Braziller, 1974), p. 14. 79. Ibid., pp. 9 & 11. 80. Ibid., p. 29. In quoting Laszlo I should note that he himself rejects this claim and instead speaks of “the evolution of complexity.” Nevertheless, despite Laszlo’s focus on “sociocultural evolution” and his view of sociocultural systems as “self-stabilizing homeostatic systems” and “self-organized,” General Systems Theory does not escape the social engineering orientation which remains at least tacitly in a desire for the reform of social conditions “according to the logic of humanism.” This point will be developed in chapter 3 in light of Heidegger’s remarks concerning the essence of technology. 81. Ibid., pp. 17 & 23. 82. See Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 1995). 83. Falk, Johansen, & Kim, p. 6. 84. See, for example, Rajni Kothari, “Towards a Just World,” WOMP Working Paper No. 11 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1980). Also see R.B.J. Walker, “East Wind, West Wind: Civilizations, Hegemonies, and World Orders,” in Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology, and World Order, op. cit., pp. 2–22. It is to be noted that the liberal orientation is characterized by some analysts as internally divergent. The “pure liberal” is said to favor the existence of a “minimal state” while thinking at the global level of “a minimal constitutional framework that will protect an open world economy and enable it to function efficiently.” The “compensatory liberal” is said to allow for a more extensive role of government (“the welfare state”) because of shortcomings with the free market. See the discussions of McKinley and Little, Global Problems and World Order, op. cit. 85. Kothari, Towards a Just World, pp. 22–23. 86. Ibid., p. 33. 87. Elliot R. Goodman, The Soviet Design for a World State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 9. 88. It is important to understand that the ‘socialist’ orientation on world order is itself distinguished between ‘Marxist’ socialists and ‘non-Marxist’ socialists, the for-

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mer grouping further divided between ‘scientific’ Marxists (doctrinaire on ‘historical materialism’) and ‘critical’ Marxists (who emphasize ‘voluntarism’ and ‘activism’, as opposed to the ‘lawful’ or ‘inevitable’ unfolding of socialist structures). See McKinley and Little, op. cit. 89. See Georgi Shakhanazarov, The Coming World Order (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), and Global Problems of Mankind and the State, Problems of the Contemporary World Series No. 116 (Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1985). Also see I. Kirshin, “World Politics: Essence, Chief Characteristics, and Tendencies,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy, 22, summer 1983, pp. 26–44; and P.N. Fedoseev, “Dialectics in the Contemporary World,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy, 25, spring 1987, pp. 3–37. 90. Goodman, see chapter 2 in particular. 91. Ibid., p. 2. 92. Ibid., p. 8. 93. Ibid., pp. 9–10. It is to be noted that the emphasis on perestroika and glastnost by the Gorbachev regime, while outwardly congenial to capitalist and liberal-democratic ideology, was also inwardly consistent with the “Soviet prudence” of retreat. Gorbachev’s openness to the economic integration of Europe, for example, was not essentially different from Lenin’s propaganda in favor of a United States of Europe while ulteriorly being concerned with “the overthrow of the monarchies of Europe as a preliminary link in a chain reaction that would end in a proletarian revolution” (see Goodman, chapter 12). Glastnost, in the context of Eastern Europe, could readily add to fragmentation and destructuring precisely at the moment that the European Community sought integration, thus effectively undermining implementation of an essentially capitalist unification. The pressures of subnational loyalties associated with militant ethnicity were evidence of just this kind of event. Mr. Gorbachev’s emphasis on perestroika (restructuring) and glastnost (openness) seemed set on overcoming “the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty of socialist states” as well as confronting the difficulties of welfare in a socialist state. This conciliatory posture may, nevertheless, have had its arcana imperii. See Mikhail S. Bernstam, “Anatomy of the Soviet Reform,” Global Affairs, 3(2), spring 1988, pp. 63–88; Jacques Chirac, “Soviet Change and Western Security,” Strategic Studies, 17(1), winter 1989, pp. 9–15; and E. S. Williams, “The Soviet Union in 1988: Fundamental Change?”, RUSI and Brassey’s Defense Yearbook 1988, pp. 35–48. 94. Ibid., p. 205. 95. Mark Blasius, “The Discourse of World Order,” in Walker, Culture, Ideology, and World Order, op. cit., p. 254. 96. Ibid., p. 254. 97. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 190.

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1. These three words are essential to a fundamental understanding of world order thinking. So far they have been introduced as political terms. I shall elucidate their metaphysical content at a later point in the chapter. 2. Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. M. Anderson & E. M. Freund (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 43–57. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 53–112, at p. 71. 4. These categories are set forth by Richard Falk and Samuel Kim in “An Approach to World Order Studies and the World System,” WOMP Working Paper No. 22 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982). By “system-diminishing” strategies, Falk and Kim have in mind attitudes and actions that include “abandoning concern about human rights, renouncing efforts to complete negotiations on a new law of the seas, eroding support for the United Nations, diminishing support for programs designed to help poorer Third World countries, and avoiding procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes.” By ‘system-maintaining’ strategies, we are to understand a posture that is “defensive,” oriented towards “stabilizing the present statist framework” and “preventing a further breakdown of existing patterns of power and authority.” ‘System-reforming’ strategies are, likewise, state-oriented, indeed almost “unconditionally statist,” insofar as such a perspective stems from Third World countries seeking national autonomy and self-reliance in an interdependent world. Concern here is focused more on economic well-being and, thus, on the implementation of a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO), rather than on the restructuring of political institutions. ‘System-transforming’ globalism “seeks a comprehensive restructuring of the frameworks that shape our political, economic, and cultural lives.” It has a “normative agenda that can only be realized by comprehensive restructuring (including destructuring and a political program for imposing its vision on the historical process).” 5. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans., R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 8. Consider also these subsequent remarks from p. 12 of the text: “It is absolutely correct and proper to say that ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy’. It is only wrong to suppose that this is the last word on philosophy. For the rejoinder imposes itself: granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us?”. 6. Ibid., p. 46. 7. Martin Heidegger, appendix 1 to “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 137. 8. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 13.

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9. Ibid., p. 13. 10. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 2, 1094a23–1094b12. 11. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 29 & 30. Emphasis is mine. 12. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, trans. F. A. Capuzzi & ed. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 86. 13. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book E, chapter 1, 1026a25–34. 14. Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, p. 92. Heidegger states this slightly differently in appendix 8 to “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology (p. 145): What is essential in a fundamental metaphysical position embraces: 1. The manner and mode in which man is man, i.e., is himself; the manner of the coming to presence (Wesensart) of selfhood, which is not synonymous with I-ness, but rather is determined out of the relation to Being as such. 2. The interpretation of the coming to presence (Wesensauslegung) of the Being of whatever is. 3. The delineation of the coming to presence (Wesensentwurf) of truth. 4. The sense in which, in any given instance, man is measure. 15. In Volume II (Eternal Recurrence of the Same) of Nietzsche, pp. 184–197, Heidegger comments on the essence of a fundamental metaphysical position and the possibility of such positions in the history of philosophy. There (at p. 191) he says: The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which one who poses the guiding question [viz., what is being?] remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the question comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings. 16. Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in W. Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: The New American Library, 1975), pp. 242–264, at pp. 256–257. 17. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 67. 18. Ibid., p. 40. 19. Ibid., p. 41. 20. Ibid., p. 41. 21. Ibid., p. 41.

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24. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans., T. Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 115. 25. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 428. 26. Ibid., pp. 432–433. 27. Ibid., p. 92. 28. In Being and Time, p. 93, Heidegger takes note of the following several senses of world: 1. “World” . . . signifies the totality of those entities which can be presentat-hand within the world. 2. “World” . . . signifies the Being of those entities. . . . And indeed ‘world’ can become a term for any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities: for instance, when one talks of the ‘world’ of a mathematician, ‘world’ signifies the realm of possible objects of mathematics. 3. “World” can be understood . . . as that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’. . . . Here again there are different possibilities: “world” may stand for the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment. 29. Ibid., p. 119. 30. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 295–296. 31. Ibid., p. 277. 32. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (p. 241), Heidegger puts it thus: “As fundamental ontology reveals, the understanding is not simply a mode of cognition but a fundamental moment of existence.” 33. Ibid., p. 278. 34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 438. 35. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 61. 36. Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans., J. T. Wilde & W. Kluback (New Haven: College & University Press, 1958), p. 73. 37. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” p. 54. 38. Ibid., p. 24. 39. Heidegger, “Logos (Heraclitus Fragment B50),” Early Greek Thinking, trans., D. F. Krell & F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 76. 40. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, p. 75.

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41. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 44. 42. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, p. 75. 43. Insofar as Aristotle raises the guiding question of metaphysics and is concerned with the being qua being (on hei on), Heidegger observes, even this question has its presuppositions, such that a more primordial question is necessary. In his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (at p. 230), Heidegger advances his argument: The object of this question is that which determines the essent as such. This determining (element) must be known in the how of its determining and interpreted (i.e., understood) as such and such. However, in order to be able to understand the essential determination of this essent through Being, the determining element itself must be understood with sufficient clarity. It is necessary, therefore, first to comprehend Being as such, and this comprehension must precede that of the essent as such. Thus, the question ti to on (what is the essent) implies a more original question: What is the significance of Being which is pre-comprehended in this question? 44. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 23–24. 45. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, pp. 7–8. 46. Ibid., p. 3. 47. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 91. 48. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, p. 4. 49. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, trans. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 215. 50. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Basic Writings, p. 389. 51. In this sense, Heidegger rethinks the Platonic-Aristotelian conceptual terms of genesis and phthora, ‘becoming’ and ‘degeneration’ or ‘perishing’, respectively. Both of these terms, he says, are to be thought from phusis “as ways of luminous rising and decline.” Thus: “Certainly we can translate genesis as origination; but we must think this originating as a movement which lets every emerging abandon concealment and go forward into unconcealment. Certainly we can translate phthora as passing away; but we must think this passing away as a going which in its turn abandons unconcealment, departing and withdrawing into concealment.” See also “The Anaximander Fragment” in Heidegger’s Early Greek Thinking, p. 30. 52. See Heidegger’s The End of Philosophy, p. 66, and his On Time and Being, p. 8. 53. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 8. 54. Ibid., p. 9. 55. Heidegger, “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34–41),” Early Greek Thinking, p. 98. 56. See Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.”

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57. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans., J. Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 25. 58. Ibid., p. 25. 59. Ibid., p. 58. 60. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking, p. 27. 61. Ibid., p. 40. 62. Ibid., p. 41. 63. Heidegger, “Logos (Heraclitus Fragment B50),” Early Greek Thinking, p. 72. 64. Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, pp. 103 & 89, respectively. 65. In his essay “Science and Reflection” (The Question Concerning Technology, p. 175), Heidegger puts the distinction thus: The word Historie (historein) [historiography] means to explore and make visible, and therefore names a kind of representing. In contrast, the word Geschichte [history] means that which takes its course inasmuch as it is prepared and disposed in such and such a way, i.e., set in order and sent forth, destined. Historiography is the exploration of history. But historiographical observation does not first create history itself. Everything “historiographical,” everything represented and established after the manner of historiography, is historical [geschichtlich], i.e, grounded upon the destining resident in happening. But history is never necessarily historiographical. 66. In his essay “The Age of the World Picture” (The Question Concerning Technology, p. 115), Heidegger writes: “Metaphysics grounds an age, in and through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed (der Grund seines Wesensgestalt). This basis holds complete dominion over all phenomena that distinguish the age.” 67. In mentioning Descartes and Nietzsche as the two poles of the modern dispensation, of course, I implicitly speak of an ‘essential’ continuity of thought as characterizing intermediately historical positions (e.g., Kant, Hegel), despite the variety and diversity that is to be conceded. 68. See Harold Mah, The End of Philosophy, the Origin of “Ideology”: Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). In his introductory remarks concerning the general statement of the theory of ideology (p. 2), Mah writes: Philosophy appeared to be autonomous and authoritative, but in actuality it was dependent on social and political conditions. To explain this disjuncture between the autonomous appearance and the derivative reality of philosophical abstraction Marx and these other critics of philosophy postulated an inverse relation between philosophical thinking and reality: a bad

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reality, they argued, generated its opposite in abstract thought. Philosophy compensated for and justified adverse social and political conditions by presenting a distorted representation of them. It deluded itself into believing that contingent worldly conditions were derived from timeless and universal abstract truths. 69. See Karl Marx, “Holy Family,” in Collected Works, 4, p. 119. 70. Richard Wisser, ed., “Martin Heidegger in Conversation,” trans. B. Srinivasa Murthy (India: Arnold Heinemann, 1977), pp. 38–47; originally Martin Heidegger im Gesprach (Munchen: Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg, 1970), pp. 69–77. 71. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton & V. Deutsch (New York: University Press of America, 1985; Regnery/Gateway, 1967), pp. 43–44. 72. The word subject translates what in classical metaphysics is hupokeimenon and what in scholastic metaphysics is subiectum or substantia. Substantia translates the Greek ousia, which Aristotle defines in the Categories, chapter 5, thus: “Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man or horse.” Hypokeimenon is understood by Aristotle (in the same chapter) as equivalent to ousia (i.e., to primary substance): “. . . primary substances are most properly called substances in virtue of the fact that they are the entities which underlie everything else, and that everything else is either predicated of them or present in them.” Again, “primary substances are most properly so called, because they underlie and are the subjects of everything else.” Scholastic metaphysicians such as Suarez and Ockam essentially retained the Aristotelian concepts and distinctions. Jorge J. E. Gracia, in the “Glossary” accompanying his translation of Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputation V: Individual Unity and Its Principle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982), pp. 265–266, cites Ockam, Summa logicae, Chapter 30: “. . . something is called a subject because it really underlies another thing that inheres in it and is really present in it. In this way subject is taken in two ways: Strictly, [something] is called a subject in relation to the accidents which really inhere in it [and] without which it can continue to subsist. Broadly, [something] is called a subject because it underlies something else, whether the thing which it underlies is an accident really inhering [in it] or a substantial form which informs the thing to which it [i.e., the form] adheres.” Concerning ‘substance’ Gracia notes (p. 268): “According to the scholastic formula, a substance was a thing that existed in itself [in se] and by itself [per se], but for them this did not mean complete existential autonomy. It only meant that a substance was, from its own essence, independent, i.e., that it did not receive its being except through its own essence or form. Of course, all substances are in one way or another dependent on other substances for their efficient causation, and, according to scholastics, on God for their creation. But for their formal causation they do not depend on anything else, since there is no reference to other substances or beings in their definition. In this way they differ from accidents, which are always defined in terms of another and, therefore, are dependent on something else.”

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73. We are concerned here with the ‘metaphysical’ sense of principium rather than the ‘logical’ or ‘physical’ sense of the word. Aristotle, in Metaphysics, Book V, 1013a18–20, had said: “It is common to all principles (archai) to be the first point from which a thing either is, or comes to be, or is known; but of these some are immanent in the thing while others are outside.” Suarez, in his Metaphysical Disputations (XII, section I, 8 & 11), speaks of two common characteristics of principles: “to be in some way prior to what is begun”; and “that there be some connection or consequence (consecutio) between the things, one of which is called a principle of the other.” See Gracia, ibid., pp. 248–249. 74. Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, chapter 8. I have abridged Heidegger’s remarks, selecting what I believe captures his main point in each case. 75. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 148. 76. See Ernest L. Fortin’s contribution on “Thomas Aquinas” in Strauss & Cropsey (1972). 77. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 152. 78. Ibid., pp. 132–133. 79. Concerning the Kantian presuppositions of world order thinking as treated by Stanley Hoffmann (ed., Contemporary Theory in International Relations, 1960, and “Theorie et relations internationales,” Revue Francaise de Science Politique, June 1961), see Richard Cox’s remarks in his essay “The Role of Political Philosophy in the Theory of International Relations,” Social Research, 29:3, autumn, 1962, pp. 261–292. More to the source one may also see Kant’s essays, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use” (1793), and “To Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch” (1795). The influence of the Cartesian quest is explicit in the latter essay in reference to a “jus certum”: “For the possibility of a formula (such as exists in mathematics) is the only true criterion of all subsequent legislation, and without it the so-called jus certum will forever remain a pious wish. In its absence, we shall merely have general laws (which are valid in general), but no universal ones (which are universally valid), and it is the latter that the concept of law requires.” 80. Reinhart Koselleck (Critique and Crisis, p. 176) is illuminating in this regard: “In its historical sense the ‘outside world’ of the modern subject is the world beyond Europe. In his ‘provisional moral treatise’, Descartes, interestingly enough, compares the outside objects inaccessible to man with China and Mexico (Discours de la Methode, III). The expanding discovery, conquest, and control of this outside world is the historical expression of the modern philosophy of history.” Alastair M. Taylor, in his essay “Some Political Implications of the Forrester World System Model,” in Ervin Laszlo, ed., The World System: Models, Norms, Variations (New York: Braziller, 1973), pp. 29–68, at p. 36, emphasizes another aspect of this point: The nation-state matured within a model of Cartesian spatial coordinates and Newtonian mechanics. Occupying a specific two-dimensional plot of

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the earth’s surface, a state was held to be independent of all other states and absolute in its juridical pretensions. In conceptualiziing the norms of international behavior, jurists of the period developed their concepts of war and peace, aggression and defense, upon a “spatial sovereignty” based upon a one-to-one—that is, isomorphic—relational thinking. Thus, each state (as a person in international law) possesses certain essential characteristics: a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and a capacity to enter into relations with similar polities. All states possessing these attributes qualify for “sovereign equality” (to employ the terminology of the United Nations Charter, Article 2[1]). As a consequence of this juridical isomorphism, positivist law accords states equality of status while ignoring all relativity of stature, which comprises such variables as differences in population, resources, size and location of territory, economic organization, technological development, education, and so forth. This is the metaphysical foundation on which the modern nation-state is founded. [emphasis added]. 81. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, pp. 31–32. 82. Prior to the sixteenth century, i.e., for medieval political thought, God was conceived as author in the ultimate sense insofar as he ordains government per se while leaving to humans its designation, i.e., the form of the regime. In this regard, humanity’s role in the establishment of government was instrumental, and his ‘authorship’ proximate. The ‘essential formation’ which is given as modern subjectivity enables the human being’s abandonment of proximate authorship in the political domain and invests humanity with ultimate authorship consistent with that selfdetermination which self-liberation enables and enjoins. I am indebted to E.C. Wines for this distinction of ultimate and proximate authorship, which he mentions in another context and for other purposes (E.C. Wines, Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews (New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1853), especially the “Introductory Essay on Civil Society and Government,” pp. 2–100). 83. See Strauss and Cropsey (1972) for commentaries on the respective positions of these writers. 84. See R.B.J. Walker, “Political Theory and the Transformation of World Politics,” World Order Studies Program Occasional Paper No. 8, Center of International Studies, Princeton University, January 1980. Also see Walker’s “World Politics and Western Reason: Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony” WOMP Working Paper No. 19 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982). In the former essay Walker points out the need for “those who respond to problems arising from a perceived emerging global context of human affairs” to “pay much greater attention to the philosophical and metatheoretical difficulties which such a commitment involves.” He succinctly presents the problem (p. 3), thus: “. . . any attempt to comprehend the nature or implications of such a global context necessarily confronts a dialectical hegemony. At the level of praxis, globalization of political, social, and economic relations has come to mean either the emulation of, or incorporation into, the industrial West by the ‘devel-

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oping’ states. At the level of theoria, understanding and evaluation of this process occur within the categories of Western social and political theory.” 85. In Volume I (The Will to Power as Art) of Nietzsche, Heidegger writes: “. . . in Nietzsche’s thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect. . . .” Precisely what Heidegger means by this will be clarified in the course of the discussion of this section. 86. Ibid., p. 4. 87. In Human, All Too Human, (trans., R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986), “Of First and Last Things,” note 5, Nietzsche writes: “The man of the ages of barbarous primordial culture believed that in the dream he was getting to know a second real world: here is the origin of metaphysics. Without the dream one would have had no occasion to divide the world into two.” 88. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Reason in Philosophy,” note 2; in W. Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 89. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, p. 17. 90. Michael Gillispie, “Martin Heidegger,” in L. Strauss & J. Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy, third edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 888–906. 91. In note 1006 of Book IV of The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “Moral values have hitherto been the highest values: would anybody call this in question?—If we remove these values from this position, we alter all values: the principle of their order of rank hitherto is thus overthrown.” 92. Heidegger, Nietzsche, III, p. 143; emphasis mine. 93. Ibid., p. 19. 94. Ibid., p. 61. 95. Ibid., p. 20. 96. Note 1066 of The Will to Power reads: “The world exists; it is not something that becomes; not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away—it maintains itself in both.” 97. Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, chapter 20, “The Inner Connection Between the Fundamental Positions of Descartes and Nietzsche.” 98. Ibid., p. 123. 99. Ibid., p. 129. 100. Heidegger, at p. 130 of Nietzsche IV, cites here note 123 from Volume XIII of Nietzsche’s Grossoktavausgabe. 101. Ibid., p. 133.

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102. Ibid., p. 128. 103. In The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606, edited by Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 159, Jean Bodin states “the first and chiefe marke of soveraigntie” thus: Wherefore let this be the first and chiefe marke of a soveraigne prince, to bee of power to give lawes to all his subjects in generall, and to everie one of them in particular, (yet is not that enough, but that we must ioyne thereunto) without consent of any other greater, equall, or lesser than himselfe. 104. See chapter 10, “Valuation and Will to Power,” of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, IV. 105. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” pp. 107 & 108. 106. In a later essay Kothari historically situates the same point: “. . . the modernist conception of universalism that emerged in the West fed the drive for expansion of a local civilization and its dominance over the rest of the world, legitimized by a belief in manifest destiny that was an outgrowth of the dominant thrust of JudeoChristian religiosity in the post-medieval age.” See Kothari, “Peace in an Age of Transformation,” in Walker (1984), p. 335. 107. Kothari, “Towards a Just World,” pp. 21–22. 108. Kothari is likely to be premature in his belief in the end of the West’s domination, especially because of what he sees as a shift in the locus of imperial power from continental Europe to the United States. I believe it is absolutely essential to remember that Europe yet seeks to be Europe, and that the tension between intergovernmentalism and confederalism or federalism must heighten as the EEC seeks to implement the Single European Act of 1992 and the recent Treaty of Maastricht. The drive towards economic integration promises eventual political integration, and most likely by way of a restructuring of the present EEC political structure. It is with this restructuring of Europe—L’Unita Europea, indeed with a Mitteleuropa at the heart of it—that Europe promises to heighten its world hegemony. The question is whether this world hegemony will be along the lines of Europe’s Greek heritage or that of imperial Rome. I believe Europe’s preeminence on the world scene in the near-term future will have its arcana imperii and promise to be a system-diminishing development—a short-term, but nevertheless destructive, configuration of the West’s resurgent will to power. Only after this transformation of Europe and its global impact have taken place might we begin to speak of the West’s irretrievable loss of hegemony. For a recent discussion of mine on related themes, see my “A Preface to Silence: On the Duty of Vigilant Critique,” Janus Head, vol. II, no. 2, fall 1999, pp. 189–215. 109. Johan Galtung, “Global Processes and the World in the 1980s,” in W. Ladd Hollist and James Rosenau, eds., World System Structure: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 110–138, at pp. 113–114. 110. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 13.

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Crisis Theory and World Order 111. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 112. Heidegger, Nietzsche, III, p. 203.

113. In this regard see Johann Galtung’s discussion of the role of “nonterritorial” actors in the world order transition (in Mendlovitz, On the Creation of a Just World Order, pp. 151–181, and in Galtung, The True Worlds: A Transnational Perspective). Rajni Kothari, in his essay, “Masses, Classes, and the State,” Alternatives, XI, 1986, pp. 167–183, notes that this “new ideological crystallization” seeks “replacement of the State by the market.” “The idea is to dismantle the State apparatus in regard to the distribution of the national product. In short, while dismantling the apparatus in the social sphere, the idea is to fully and systematically use the State for promoting high technologies and the dual economy that goes with them.” 114. See Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, XII, 2 April 1988, pp. 177–194. Nandy discusses here “the long shadows of the ‘Western Man’,” i.e., the way in which post-colonial societies respond to Western man’s rule of the world “because of his superior understanding of the relationship between religion and politics.” Nandy writes (p. 186): The first response . . . is to model oneself on the Western man. I do not want to use the word ‘imitation’ because something more than mimicking is involved. The response consists in capturing, within one’s own self and one’s own culture, the traits one sees as the reasons for the West’s success on the world stage. Seemingly it is a liberal, synthesizing approach and those responding to the West in this fashion justify it as a universal response. . . . The second response to Western Man is that of the zealot. The zealot’s one goal is to somehow defeat Western Man at his own game—the way Japan, for instance, has done in economic matters. This is a crude way of describing a complex response, but it does convey that what passes as fundamentalism or revivalism is often only another form of Westernization becoming popular . . . 115. Richard Falk, “The Making of Global Citizenship,” in J. Brecher, et.al., Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 39–50, at p. 42. 116. See Richard Kennington’s insightful contribution on Descartes in L. Strauss & Cropsey (1972), pp. 395–414. 117. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” pp. 152–153; emphasis mine.

CHAPTER 4 1. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 175–176.

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2. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 55–73, at p. 59. Heidegger speaks of this “broadening out” in his essay “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” p. 104. 3. Ibid., p. 58. 4. Ibid., p. 58. 5. See Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 247–282. Also see his “Science and Reflection,” The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 155–182. Heidegger’s mention of the mathematical project of modern science draws on the Greek ta mathemata which for the Greeks means “that which man knows in advance in his observation of whatever is and in his intercourse with things,” what is “stipulated in advance as what is already-known.” See “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology. 6. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy . . . ,” p. 59. 7. It is of note that the theme of the XIV World Congress (1988) of the International Political Science Association was “Toward a Global Political Science.” The miniplenary on political theory was to consider two principal questions: (a) Can there be, and should there be, a global political theory? (b) How valid is the claim of Western theory (and, thereby, of Western political theory) to be universal?. 8. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 152. 9. William Lovitt (at p. 3 of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology) remarks as follows concerning the word essence in Heidegger’s use: “‘Essence’ is the traditional translation of the German noun Wesen. . . . [For Heidegger] Wesen does not simply mean what something is, but . . . further, the way in which something pursues its course, the way in which it remains through time as what it is.” At p. 30 of the text, Heidegger explicitly states that essence in “essence of technology” is not to be understood “in the sense of genus and essentia”: “If we speak of the ‘essence of a house’ and ‘the essence of a state’, we do not mean a generic type; rather we mean the ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay—the way in which they ‘essence’ [Wesen].” For another, more developed discussion, see Alfons Grieder, “Essential Thinking: Reflections on Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 23, no. 3, October 1992, pp. 240–251. 10. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 13. 11. Ibid., p. 15. 12. Heidegger, “The Turning,” The Question Concerning Technology, pp. 36–49. 13. Ibid., p. 37. 14. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 20.

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15. What Heidegger finds significant in the elaboration of logic into logistics is the tacit or concealed ‘attack’ upon the nature of ‘language’. See “A Dialogue on Language,” On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 16. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 33. 17. Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. W. Kluback & J. T. Wilde (New Haven: College & University Press, 1958), p. 65. 18. W. Ladd Hollist & James N. Rosenau, “Introduction: World System Debates,” in W. Ladd Hollist & James N. Rosenau, eds., World System Structure: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 11–27, at p. 13. 19. David P. Rapkin, “The Inadequacy of a Single Logic: Integrating Political and Material Approaches to the World System,” in William R. Thompson, ed., Contending Approaches to World System Analysis (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 241–268, at p. 257. 20. Albert Wilson, “Systems Epistemology,” in E. Laszlo, ed., The World System: Models, Norms, Variations (New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 119–140, at p. 126. See, in a more general context, Ludwig von Bertalannfy, General Systems Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968) and E. Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1972). 21. Albert Bergesen, “Let’s Be Frank About World History,” in Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1995), pp. 195–205, at p. 195. 22. Ibid., p. 195; my italics. 23. The very notion of system is modern, alien to the Greeks and the medieval period, observes Heidegger in appendix 6 to “The Age of the World Picture”: “In the Middle Ages a system is impossible, for there a ranked order of correspondences is alone essential, and indeed as an ordering of whatever is in the sense of what has been created by God and is watched over as his creature.” The system is still more foreign to the Greeks insofar as the conception of Being, presence, is quite different from ‘representedness’. The Greek experience of Being is such that man “acknowledges the concealedness of what is and the insusceptibility of the latter’s presencing or absenting to any decision, and to a like degree acknowledges the insusceptibility to decision of the visible aspect of that which endures as present” (appendix 8). The difference, in short, between man as measure (metron) in the Greek sense and as measure in the modern sense is the difference between the holding sway of what presences and the rule of the subject’s assault (appendix 9). 24. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 134. 25. Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, p. 143. Richard Mattesich, in his Instrumental Reasoning and Systems Methodology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 306–316, spells out how ontological hypotheses and systems principles are convertible. Mattesich articulates five such hypotheses/principles. For example, his ontologi-

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cal hypothesis concerning ‘Being’ is understood in terms of what he calls a “polarity principle”: “(1a) Being (i.e., any kind of existing entity) presupposes another ‘being’ of opposite polarity. This results in a tension, the release of which tends to annihilate (fully or partly) one or both of these entities, or to create a new one with its own opposite.” Stated as a systems principle, this ontological hypothesis is understood by Mattesich thus: “(1b) To any system belongs a counter-system (e.g., the environment). A removal of the boundary between these systems tends to dissolve one or both of them and possibly creates a new or changed system with its own counter-system.” Thus, Mattesich remarks, “polarity and tension are the most fundamental notions underlying the phenomenon of Being.” 26. Heidegger. “The Turning,” p. 37. 27. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 12 & 13. 28. Ervin Laszlo, A Strategy for the Future: The Systems Approach to World Order (New York: George Braziller, 1974), p. 17. 29. See Richard Mattesich, Instrumental Reasoning and Systems Methodology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978). 30. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” p. 107. 31. See Stephen D. Bryen, The Application of Cybernetic Analysis to the Study of International Politics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). Bryen (at p. 23) writes: “Steering involves the ability of the system to deal with its environment—even if the environment is disorganized and merely disturbs the system. Control involves the ability of the system to make use of its human and physical resources. . . . One cannot steer a system unless one has control over the resources of the system; one cannot control a system unless the system can be steered.” 32. Laszlo, A Strategy for the Future. See also related work by Gerald Feinberg, The Prometheus Project (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1969). For shorter, more general discussions, see: R. Rosencrance, “Categories, Concepts, and Reasoning in the Study of International Relations,” Behavioral Science, VI, (1961), pp. 221–231; K. E. Boulding, “Political Implications of General Systems Research,” General Systems Yearbook, VI, (1961), pp. 1–7; O. R. Young, “The Impact of General Systems Theory on Political Science,” General Systems Yearbook. IX, 1964, pp. 239–253. Among philosophical articles, see L. K. Acheson Jr., “The Systems Approach to a New World View,” International Journal of General Systems, VIII, 1982, pp. 131–138; and E. Laszlo, “A Systems Philosophy of Human Values,” Behavioral Science, 18:4, July 1973. 33. Laszlo, A Strategy for the Future, p. 55. 34. Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision of Our Time (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 1996), p. viii. 35. Ervin Laszlo, Systems Science and World Order: Selected Studies (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), p. 154.

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37. Ervin Laszlo & Christopher Laszlo, The Insight Edge (Westport: Quorum Books, 1997), p. 99. 38. Laszlo, Systems Science and World Order, p. 185. 39. Ibid. 40. Laszlo, A Strategy for the Future, p. 144. 41. In so arguing, I do not mean to deny the utility of strategic reason, especially as it is employed in conceiving and implementing strategies of transition to a “preferred” world order. Neither is it my intention to diminish or depreciate Laszlo’s contribution, for there is much in what Laszlo says that is important. Indeed, Laszlo himself is very much aware of negative features of GST applications which tend toward entrenched bureaucracy, restricted popular involvement in political decision-making, coercive policy implementation, etc. Nevertheless, any view of strategic reason which understands societal technics, social technology, or technology in general merely in terms of human activity misses what is essential. Thereby, the outlines of a future world order that are identified as “preferable” may be prematurely orienting as well as constraining of more enduring and more authentic (as well as autochthonous) possibilities of planetary dwelling. 42. Heidegger’s phrase on which I focus here is “in seiner eigenen Seinsart.” 43. Mario Bunge, “Things,” International Journal of General Systems, 1974, I, pp. 229–236. See also Joseph A. Goguen, “Objects,” International Journal of General Systems, 1975, I, pp. 237–243. 44. Heidegger, Nietzsche, III, p. 221. 45. John Richardson, Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 46. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 157; emphasis mine. 47. Richardson, op. cit., p. 94. 48. William Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 33. 49. Barry K. Gills, “Capital and Power in the Processes of World History,” in Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change, op. cit., pp. 136–162, at p. 149. 50. Ibid., p. 149. 51. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Notes on Planning for the Future,” Daedalus, spring 1966, pp. 572–589. 52. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 42–43.

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53. See Being and Time, “The Preliminary Conception of Phenomenology,” pp. 58 ff. 54. See Heidegger’s treatment of Descartes in Section 21 of Being and Time, “Hermeneutical Discourse of the Cartesian Ontology of the World,” pp. 128 ff. The Cartesian ‘move’ consists in the prominence given to the res as extensae, the extentio being “the presupposition for every definite characteristic of the res corporea” (p. 134). See also a short piece by Rivka A. Eisikovits, “Descartes and Bertalannfy: Break or Continuity,” Journal of Thought, 19, spring 1984, pp. 49–55. Eisikovits discusses “the main tenets of Descartes’ method and GST from a synchronic perspective” and thereby points to the continuity operative in the quest for method. 55. Heidegger, ibid., p. 133. 56. Richardson, Existential Epistemology, p. 76. 57. For synoptic treatments of Husserl and Heidegger with respect to political thinking, see the third edition of Leo Strauss & Joseph Cropsey’s History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). More generally, see Carl J. Friedrich, “Phenomenology and Political Science,” in M. Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, Volume 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 175–195. Also see, in particular, Hwa Y. Jung, The Crisis of Political Understanding: A Phenomenological Perspective in the Conduct of Political Inquiry (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), especially Chapter 6, “A Critique of the Cybernetic Model of Man in Political Science.” Finally, see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 58. Jean-Pierre Cavaille, “Politics Disavowed: Remarks on the Status of Politics in the Philosophy of Descartes,” Diogenes, 138, summer 1987, pp. 118–138, at p. 125; emphasis added. 59. Ibid., pp. 125–126; emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 121. 61. Ibid., pp. 121–122. 62. Ibid., p. 123. 63. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 157. “Solicitude” here translates Fursorge, literally, ‘caring-for’. 64. Spanos, p. 32. 65. Heidegger, Being and Time, Section 26, “The Dasein-with of Others and Everyday Being-with,” p. 158. 66. Heidegger, “Words,” On the Way to Language, p. 146. 67. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 62. 68. Ibid., p. 151.

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69. Richard A. Falk & Samuel Kim, “An Approach to World Order Studies and the World System,” WOMP Working Paper No. 22 (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982). 70. Mark Blasius, “The Discourse of World Order,” in R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 243–257. 71. Richard A. Falk, “Solving the Puzzles of Global Reform,” Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, XI, 1, January 1986, pp. 243–257. 72. R.B.J. Walker, “Political Theory and the Transformation of World Politics,” World Order Studies Program, Occasional Paper No. 8, Center of International Studies, Princeton University, January 1980, p. 6. 73. Rajni Kothari, “Masses, Classes and the State,” Alternatives, XI, 1986, pp. 167–183, at p. 170. 74. Ibid., p. 172. 75. Rajni Kothari, “Peace in an Age of Transformation,” in Walker, Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 336–337. 76. For a sense of what I have in mind with respect to the political thought of Plato and Aristotle, see my “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” Man and World, 19, 1986, pp. 203–223, and my “The Authentic Tele of Politics: A Reading of Aristotle,” History of Political Thought, 12:3, autumn 1991, pp. 405–420. 77. For the latter see R. A. Falk, R. C. Johansen, & S. S. Kim, eds., The Constitutional Foundations of World Peace (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 78. J. Brecher, J. B. Childs, & J. Cutler, eds., Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 79. See Richard Falk, “International Law: A Mask for Geopoliticians, a Shield for Citizens, a Tablet of Commandments to Shape a Just World Order,” in G. Feuerstein & T. L. Feuerstein, eds., Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow (Wheaton: Quest Books, 1993), p. 333–335). 80. Brecher, et. al., p. x. 81. James N. Rosenau, “Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics,” in J. N. Rosenau & E. O. Czempiel, eds., Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–29. 82. Ibid., p. 4. 83. Rosenau, “Citizenship in a Changing Global Order,” in Rosenau and Czempiel, eds., op. cit., pp. 272–294. 84. Ibid., p. 273. 85. Ibid., p. 283.

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86. Swazo, 1991, ibid., p. 419. 87. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 105. 88. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 190. 89. Heidegger, “The Turning,” p. 40. 90. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 85. 91. See Richard A. Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics (University Park: The Penn State University Press, 1995). 92. See Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in his Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 149.

CHAPTER 5 1. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 60. 2. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 167. Heidegger’s remarks on p. 168 elaborate and exhort at the same time: . . . Historicism brings the past to the present and explains it in terms of what lies further back in the past to find something to hold on to and counts on escapes from the present. It wants “restoration” or else “eschatology. . . .” Actualism is the reverse side of historicism. Through it relativism is seemingly overcome. It calculates the present value of the past. The “future” is the prolonged “present” whose plans are to be guaranteed by calculability. The relation of the “future” changes nothing if it is only the prolongation of the present in a forward direction and is that present in its rigidification. The calculating game between origin and future turns out to be servitude to the uncomprehended present. 3. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 386. 4. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, p. 167. 5. Ibid., p. 4. 6. This question is wholly congruent to Heidegger’s ‘attunenent’ to the claim of Being in his formulation, “Was heisst Denken?” 7. Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” reprinted in D. B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche, pp. 64–69, at p. 67. 8. Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Heidegger, Spokesman for the Dweller,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, XV, 2, 1977, pp. 189–199. 9. Ibid., pp. 192–193. Dauenhauer explicates metaphysical vengeance in the context of Heidegger’s concern with technology. Consider also Michael Zimmerman’s

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remarks at pp. 215–216 of his “A Comparison of Nietzsche’s Overman and Heidegger’s Authentic Self,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 14, 1976, pp. 213–231: Nietzsche claims that pity is the greatest obstacle which the Overman must overcome . . . Nietzsche asserts that this self-pity is actually a form of selfrevenge. For with the creation of an eternal world (the Platonic realm of forms, the Christian heaven) beyond this one, man takes total revenge upon his temporal existence by denying that finite life is real or significant. What might seem to be pity for man’s earthly lot thus turns out to be a form of man’s self-hatred. Unable to accept the fact of his finitude, man denies the meaning of his own life. To overcome pity, then, is to overcome self-hatred, to overcome the tendency to conceal from ourselves the fact that life is suffering and pain and also joy, and to confront human finitude. To affirm the possibilities of finite life, the creative individual must be able to affirm that “God is dead,” i.e., that the Christian-Platonic values which denigrate life are “devalued.” 10. Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1963), Volume I, p. 109. 11. See Zimmerman’s article, above note 9. Zimmerman notes (at p. 213): “the difference between the two [Nietzsche’s Overman and Heidegger’s ‘authentic self’] is that the concept of the Overman arises from Nietzsche’s desire to establish a goal for man as a species (a kind of philosophical ‘anthropology’), whereas the concept of the authentic Self arises from Heidegger’s attempt to disclose the meaning of Being as such by way of the analysis of human Being (fundamental ontology).” 12. I have posed the essential questions and possibilities, though in undeveloped form, in two essays: “The ‘Ontological’ Meaning of the World Order Movement,” Alternatives: A Journal of World Policy, 10:2, fall 1984, pp. 267–296; and “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” Man and World, 19: 1986, pp. 203–223. 13. Dauenhauer, op. cit., p. 194. 14. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, pp. 327–328. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 149. 17. See Heidegger’s essay, “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, pp. 197–250. 18. Ibid., p. 201. 19. Ibid., p. 204. 20. Ibid., p. 221. 21. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, p. 210. 22. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 329.

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23. Ibid., p. 328. 24. Reiner Schürmann has taken an important step in this direction. See his Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 25. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, p. 25. 26. Ibid., p. 58. 27. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 181–182. See also the “Postscript” to Heidegger’s essay “What is Metaphysics?” in Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), p. 356. 28. Clyde Pax, “Politically Man Dwells On This Earth,” Philosophy Today, winter 1980, pp. 338–348. 29. Ibid., p. 338; emphasis mine. 30. I say “partially situated” because Pax’s reflections seemingly remain immersed in Aristotelian concepts of essence and causality. It is at all times important to remember Heidegger’s distinction between essentia and eksistence. 31. Ibid., p. 340. 32. Ibid., p. 339. Pax adds in a footnote: “Although the precise meaning of the term political as here used must be developed in the following pages, what is sought is not so much an understanding of any actual political order but an understanding of the question of how it is that men exist politically.” 33. Ibid., p. 341. 34. Ibid., p. 344. 35. Ibid., p. 345. 36. Ibid., p. 346. 37. I refer the reader to my “Heidegger on Being-with Others,” Dialogue, 30, 1, October 1987, pp. 1–9. 38. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 190. 39. George Schrader, “Responsibility and Existence,” in Hwa Jung, ed., Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader, pp. 265–293, at p. 271. 40. Ibid., p. 272. 41. One important implication is that both anarchy and tyranny are determinations of politicality. Both anarchist and tyrant exercise arche, affirming rather than negating this arche. To the extent that either determination is said to be normatively indefensible, nevertheless each is ineradicable from the manifold of determinations. A second implication is that the time-honored distinction of public-private which accords politicality only to the former is rendered questionable. This, in turn, raises the further question about the ruler-ruled distinction.

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Crisis Theory and World Order 42. Schrader, pp. 275–276.

43. See Heidegger’s Being and Time, Also see Michael Zimmerman’s Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986 rev. ed.). 44. Consider the following remarks from Being and Time, section 27, “Everyday Being-one’s Self and the ‘They’,” p. 165: “Thus the ‘they’ maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore.” And, on p. 167, Heidegger notes that while “the ‘they’” is an ontological concept characterizing man’s way to be, nonetheless: “It itself has, in turn, various possibilities of becoming concrete as something characteristic of Dasein. The extent to which its dominion becomes compelling and explicit may change in the course of history.” In short, in Dasein’s projection of its way-to-be, in its understanding of self in the concrete context of political involvements that obtain in space-time, whether identified as democratic, aristocratic, socialist, etc., “the ‘they’ proximally and for the most part has “dominion,” more compelling “now” rather than “then,” “then” rather than “now,” “here” rather than “there,” “there” rather than “here,” even “now and then” and even “here and there.” 45. It is important to remember, as Michael Zimmerman points out, that “the ‘they’ is Heidegger’s term for a possible way of existence (inauthentic) into which every Dasein falls most of the time. The ‘they’, then, is not a group of people,” although this mode of the individual Dasein’s existence is the Dasein’s projection in a concrete context of involvements with others. 46. I here begin a thought experiment by paralleling the structure of thinking of portions of Heidegger’s Was heisst Denken?. 47. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 118. 48. Ibid., p. 128. 49. Ibid., p. 128. 50. Ibid., p. 129. 51. Ibid., p. 142. 52. Ibid., p. 143. 53. Ibid., p. 138. 54. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 277. 55. Heidegger, “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” p. 270. 56. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 210. 57. Ibid., p. 288. 58. Ibid., p. 288.

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59. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 124. 60. Schrader, op. cit., p. 291. 61. Ibid., emphasis mine. 62. J. Glenn Gray, “Introduction” to M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row., 1968), p. xi. 63. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 168. 64. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 63. 65. See Plato’s Republic and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, in particular. 66. For a discussion of this theme in light of the Socratic-Platonic doctrine, see my “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” cited above, note 12. 67. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 59. Consider, in light of Heidegger’s commentary, the following remarks Nietzsche makes in his Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 174 of The Portable Nietzsche: “Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law.” 68. Heidegger, ibid., p. 70. 69. Ibid., p. 72. 70. Albert Hofstadter, introduction to Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, p. xv. 71. Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” p. 39.

CHAPTER 6 1. Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us Now’: An Interview with Martin Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 6:1, winter 1977, pp. 5–27. The published text of the interview appeared in Der Spiegel, No. 23, May 1976, pp. 193–219, under the title “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.” The interview itself was given in 1966. 2. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, p. 98. 3. Ibid., p. 98., 4. Ibid., p. 99. 5. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 6. Ibid., p. 102. 7. Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 90.

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Crisis Theory and World Order 8. Michael Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self, p. xxv. 9. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” p. 100. 10. Ibid., p. 102. 11. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking, p. 52.

12. That we have here an indication of a political thinking as a ‘possibilityahead-of-itself’ puts into question the claim that Heidegger’s work, from Being and Time onward, is ‘a-political’. See Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” The Review of Metaphysics, 24 (June 1976). 13. Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, p. 119. 14. John Myres, The Political Ideas of the Greeks, p. 145. 15. Ibid., p. 146. 16. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, p. 81. 17. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 82. 18. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” On the Way to Language, pp. 61–62. 19. Heidegger, “Words,” On the Way to Language, p. 146. 20. Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, p. 111. 21. Ibid., p. 187. 22. Ibid., p. 183. 23. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 49. 24. Ibid., p. 63. 25. Ibid., p. 73. 26. Ibid., p. 74. 27. Ibid., pp. 74–75. 28. Ibid., p. 75. 29. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 312–313. 30. Ibid., p. 313. 31. Ibid., p. 307. 32. Ibid., p. 317. 33. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, pp. 19–20. 34. Joan Stambaugh, introduction to Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, p. 14. 35. Ibid., p. 14. 36. Albert Hofstadter, introduction to Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, p. xx. 37. Zimmerman, op. cit., p. xxx.

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38. Graeme Nicholson, “The Commune of Being and Time,” Dialogue, vol. 10, no. 4, 1971, pp. 708–726, at p. 716. 39. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 120. 40. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 323. 41. Ibid., p. 213. 42. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 300. 43. Plato, The Republic, Cornford translation, p. 128. 44. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I, pp. 165–166. 45. Ibid., pp. 165–166. 46. Ibid., p. 195. 47. Ernest Barker, Greek Political Theory (London: Methuen & Co., 1947), p. 150. Reference is to Plato’s Protagoras. 48. Joseph Kockelmans, “Language, Meaning, and Ek-sistence,” in Kockelmans, ed., On Heidegger and Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 3–32, at p. 11. 49. Reinhart Maurer, “From Heidegger to Practical Philosophy,” Idealistic Studies, II, May 1973, pp. 133–162, at p. 148. 50. “Summary on the Lecture, ‘On Time and Being’,” in Heidegger, On Time and Being, pp. 25–54, at pp. 40–41. 51. Ibid., p. 42. 52. Ibid., p. 47. 53. Maurer, op. cit., p. 158. 54. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 152–153. 55. James Hart and John Maraldo, in Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, p. 151. 56. Fred Dallmayr, “Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy,” Political Theory, 12:2, May 1984, pp. 204–234. 57. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 60; my italics. 58. Ibid., p. 315. 59. Ibid., p. 306. 60. Ibid., p. 307. 61. Ibid., p. 307. 62. Ibid., p. 308. 63. Marx, op. cit., pp. 226–227. 64. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I, p. 144.

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Crisis Theory and World Order 65. Ibid., p. 26.

66. Reiner Schürmann, “Principles Precarious: On the Origin of the Political in Heidegger,” in Sheehan, ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, p. 248. 67. Ibid., p. 246. 68. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 300. 69. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV, p. 218. 70. Reiner Schürmann, “The Ontological Difference and Political Philosophy,” p. 113. 71. Ibid., p. 113. 72. Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons. 73. Judith Best, The Mainstream of Western Political Thought (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980), p. 121. 74. Ibid., p. 122. 75. Ibid. 76. Schürmann, “The Ontological Difference and Political Philosophy,” p. 122. 77. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I, pp. 165–166. 78. Best, op. cit., p. 131. 79. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV, p. 223. 80. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” p. 85. 81. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 31. 82. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 110. 83. Ibid., p. 113. 84. L. M. Vail, Heidegger and Ontological Difference (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1972), p. 10. 85. Ibid.

CONCLUSION 1. As Emad and Maly note in their translation of Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), Heidegger uses the word Sein for ‘being’ understood metaphysically and Seyn for ‘being’ no longer understood metaphysically. 2. Heidegger, Contributions, p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 7.

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4. Ibid., p. 9. 5. Ibid., p. 59. 6. Ibid., p. 11. 7. Ibid., p. 16. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Ibid., p. 23. 10. Ibid., p. 29. 11. Ibid., p. 26. 12. Ibid., p. 29. 13. Ibid., p. 30. 14. Ibid., p. 179. 15. Ibid., p. 180. 16. Ibid., p. 211. 17. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 25. 18. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971). 19. John L. Myres, The Political Ideas of the Greeks (New York: Greenwood Press), pp. 145–146. 20. For some discussion on this theme, see my “Contemporary Politics: Crisis of Infirmity,” Man and World: An International Review, vol. 19, 1986, pp. 203–223, and my “The Authentic Tele of Politics: A Reading of Aristotle,” History of Political Thought, vol. 12, no. 3, autumn 1991, pp. 403–420. 21. Hannah Arendt, “Concern for Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” p. 023260; unpublished text of a 1954 address to the American Political Science Association; available in the Arendt papers held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 22. Ibid. 23. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, 57:1, spring 1990, pp. 73–103. The published piece is the revised version of the third and final part of a lecture series given by Arendt at the University of Notre Dame around 1954. 24. Ibid., p. 88. 25. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 32–33. In a footnote in which she takes note of Otanes’ remark that he “wishes neither to rule nor to be ruled” (Herodotus, iii., 80–83), Arendt adds:

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“According to Coulanges, all Greek and Latin words which express some rulership over others, such as rex, pater, anax, basileus, refer originally to household relationships and were names the slaves gave to their master.” 26. Evan Thompson, “Planetary thinking/planetary building: An essay on Martin Heidegger and Nishitani Keiji,” Philosophy East & West, 36:3, July 1986, pp. 235–252. Thompson refers to Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Index

absolutism, theological, 26 actualism, 157, 271 n agnosticism, ideological, 2 ahimsa, 238 Appropriation, 205 architectonic, 75 Allen, J. W., 60 anarchia, 224 anarchy, 45–46, 273 n anthropology, philosophical, 19, 231 Aquinas, Thomas, 22–23 Arendt, Hannah, 29–31, 234, 236, 238, 279 n; on gnothi sauton, 236–237 Aristotle, 156, 218, 230, 232, 236 Aristotelian teleology, 4–5, 103 Aristoxenus, 203 atheism, hypothetical, 25 attunement (Gelassenheit), 189; see also Heidegger Ausnahmezustand, 27 autarcheia, 178, 185–186, 189, 191, 193–194; and Being-Self-ruling, 194, 201, 222, 233; in its facticity, 196–197; and polity, 219; and the threefold path of Being, 224 autarchology, 219, 221–222, 225 autarchos, 148, 178, 185, 188–191, 193, 200; oblivion of, 222; as original zoion politikon, 219; as self-ruling Dasein, 233

authentic self, 194, 210 authenticity, 170, 194, 199–200 authentikos, 148, 200 Bacon, Roger, 9, 100 Barrett, William, 12 Bayle, Pierre, 26 Being: attunement to, 85–86; claim of, 85–86; concepts of, 88; epochs of, 89; essence of, 83; history of, 88, 212; in contrast to beings (Seienden), 83; oblivion of, 87, 92, 161; ordo of, 185–186, 189, 201, 215, 219, 222, 225; presuppositions concerning, 86; revolution of, 52; topos of, 85; understanding of, 81 Bergeson, Albert, 125 Best, Judith, 217, 220 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 44 bios politikos, 218, 231 bios theoretikos, 218 Blasius, Mark, 67–68, 143 Blumenberg, Hans, 25–26 Bodin, Jean, 60, 100, 232 Boulding, Kenneth: on ideology, 19–21; on negative peace, 18; on normative science, 20; on postcivilization, 17–18 Brown, Lester, 42 Bryen, Stephen D., 267 n Bush, George H., 147

281

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calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), 28, 67–69, 71–74, 130, 141 Carroll, Berenice, 37 Cavaillé, Jean-Pierre, 136–137 Christian eschatology, 4–5, 103 citizenship, global, 115–116 civility, politics of, 28; see also Jung, Hwa Yol civilizations, clash of, 114; see also Huntington, Samuel Clark, Grenville, 47 closure to Western history, 5 Club of Rome Project, 43 Clute, Robert, 43 communism, scientific, 66 Concert of Europe, 54 Connolly, William, 17 constitutionalism, global, 48 contractarian thought, 2 convergence, normative 49; see also Mazrui, Ali cosmopolis, 5 cosmopolitanism, 2, 174–175 crisis: absolute cultural, 37; planetary, 3, 12, 41; of reason, 4; of Western humanity, 4, 23; of Western philosophy and science, 3 crisis theory, rubric of, 23 Dallmayr, Fred, 5, 209 Danford, John, 8–9 Dasein, factical ideal of, 202 Dauenhauer, Bernard, 158–159 Deism, rational, 25 dependence, structural, 3 dependency, cultural, 50; structural, 50 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 6 Descartes, René , 9, 25; basic metaphysical position of, 95–100; and jus certum, 260 n; and political utopia, 137–138; ontology of world, 136, 269 n Destining (Geschick), 84 determinism, ontological, 30

dike, 223 dwelling, as oikesis, 163; planetary, 237–238 egoism, subjective, 98, 102, 114, 116, 119 eidolon, 223–224 eidolopolitika, 224–225 eksistence, 79, 168, 173 enantiodromia, 58 Enframing (das Gestell), 143–144, 150, 172, 178, 190, 214; see also Heidegger engineering, social, 129, 140, 238 Enlightenment, 25 Entscheidung, 223, 230 epoche, 89 Ereignis, 190, 198–199 essentia, 87, 130, 135, 168 essential configuration, 4 essential history (Geschichte), 93 essential political thinking, 165, 220–221; and autarchology, 222 essential thinking (wesentliche Denken), 34, 69, 84, 91–92, 120, 142, 215, 229 existentia, 79, 87, 130, 135 existentiell, 197 ethics, limits of, 11 facticity, political, 170 Falk, Richard A., 40–41, 115, 144, 147, 159, 248 n; on futurism, normative and technocratic, 142; on global constitutionalism, 48, 249 n; on peace of Westphalia, 61; on planetary crisis, 41; on social movements, 53; on system strategies, 254 n; federalism, world, 48 federalization, regional, 51 first philosophy (prote philosophia), 3–4, 34, 77, 231 forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), 87 Fourfold of Being (das Geviert des Seins), 34, 160, 162–163, 192

Index Foucault, Michel, 1 freedom, authentic, 216 fundamentalontologie, 222 futurism: normative, 62, 117, 142, 184; technocratic, 6, 62, 117, 142, 184 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 55, 134 Galtung, Johann, 113, 243 n, 264 n Gandhi, Mahatma, 238 General systems theory, 63 George, Stefan, 189–190 Gills, Barry, 134 globalization, 113, 115–116, 128, 147 Goodman, Elliot, 65–66 governance, global, 146–148, 163 government, global, 146–147 Gray, J. Glenn, 175 Grotius, Hugo, 22, 61, 101 Grundfrage, 156, 164–165, 171 Grundstimmung, 228 Grundzüge, 74, 90 Hegel, Georg F., 22, 207; Phenomenology of Right, 21; Phenomenology of Spirit, 21 Heidegger, Martin: and Aristotle’s guiding question, 257 n; on the Beiträge zur Philosophie, 228–229; on basic metaphysical positions, 77, 255 n; on das Geviert, 160, 163; on Dike, 204, 218; on dwelling, 151; on end of philosophy, 35; on Enframing (das Gestell), 124, 126; on essential words, 90, 164, 212; on essential thinking, 149; on modern freedom, 180; on modern science, 121; on selfhood, 13; on senses of ‘world’, 256 n; on Sophocles’ Antigone, 207, 211; on “system” view and world picture, 266 n; on subjectivity, 131; see also 261 n; on techne, 122; on “the ‘they’,” 274 n; on tradition, 135; on valuation, 111; on Western history, 4; and Wittgenstein, 8; on worldviews, 120

283

Heraclitus, 163 Herodotus, 217 hermeneutic, ontological, 76 Hinsley, F. H., 59 historicality, 79–80 historicism, 24, 157, 271 n historiography, 4, 258 n history, authentic, 82; quiescence of, 94 history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), 34 Hobbes, Thomas, 26, 60, 101, 217, 232; on language, 8 Hoffmann, Stanley, 45, 248 n Hofstadter, Albert, 199 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 175, 192, 196 Hollist, W. L., 125 hoti estin, 87, 222 Huntington, Samuel, 113–114 Husserl, Edmund, 8, 23, 28, 30–31 ideology, beginning of, 21; liberal-democratic, 115; Marxist, 65; socialist, 115; theory of, 93 inauthenticity, 170 Jung, Hwa Yol, 5, 28, 30 jus ad bellum, 19, 22 jus gentium, 22 jus in bello, 19 Kant, Immanuel, 24 Keiji, Nishitani, 239 Kim, Samuel, 48, 142 Kockelmans, Joseph, 204 Koselleck, Reinhart, 54, 260 n Kosmos, 192 Kothari, Rajni, 50–51, 64, 112, 263 n; on technologism, 145 Lagos, Gustavo, 52 Laszlo, Ervin, 63, 127, 140, 252 n, 268 n law, natural, 2 Lebenswelt, 28 LeGuin, Ursula K., 39–41, 45–46, 234–235, 239 Leitfrage, 156, 164–165

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liability, ontological, 170, 175; see also ontological responsibility Lovitt, William, on ‘essence’ (Wesen), 265 n

nihilism, 23, 38, 103; essence of, 161–162; metaphysical, 104; moral, 104; practical, 104; theoretical, 104; and vengeance, 158

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 60, 100, 232 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 31–33 Mah, Harold, on theory of ideology, 258 n Marx, Karl, 23, 29; and challenge to Hegelian theodicy, 21 Marx, Werner, 186, 191, 212, 233 Marxism, 32; practical crisis of, 21 Mattesich, Richard, 266 n Mazrui, Ali, 49–50 Maurer, Reinhart, 206 meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken), 34, 69, 72–74, 84 Megill, Allan, 24, 36, 244 n Mendlovitz, Saul, 39–41; 48 metaphysics, anthropological conception of, 84; closure of, 106, 121; as fundamental history, 82; as history of Being, 84; defined, 76–77; and subjectivity, 120 modernity, defending, 25 morals, typology of, 116 Myres, John, 187

objectivism, ontological, 30 oikousis, as homecoming, 162–163 ontology, political, 75–76, 135 onto-theo-logy, 77 Organization of African Unity, 50 originary thinking (anfängliche Denken), 34, 84, 142

Nandy, Ashis, 264 n national autonomy, struggle for, 51 National Socialism, 5–6 Neo-Idealism, 22 Neo-Thomism, 22 NIEO, 44–45 Nietzsche, Friedrich: and end of philosophy, 207; essential connection to Descartes, 107; five rubrics, 102; fundamental metaphysical position, 106; and herd morality, 114; on largescale politics, 110, 114, 182; and Overman, 120, 176; on petty politics, 110; subversion of Western morality, 4; on will to power, 105–106, 115

Parmenides, 186 Pax, Clyde, 165–167, 172, 273 n peace research, 2–3 peace, technocratic, 57, 126, 151 perestroika, and Glastnost, 253 n philosopher-king, 219 philosophy: at its completion, 21–22; birth certificate of, 82; end of, 34, 155, 179 phronesis, 56 phusis, 68, 87 Pitkin, Hanna, 7 Plato, 22, 120, 129, 156, 176, 203, 218, 230, 232 Platonic idealism, 4–5, 103 Pogge, Thomas: on globalizing Rawls, 9–10; 242 n polis, 5, 173, 207–208; and autarchos, 220; essence of, 216 politeia, 146, 173, 176, 186, 193, 219, 222, 231; and claim of Being, 220 polites, 172, 216, 219, 221 politeuma, 191 political difference, idea of, 185; and ontological difference, 221 political philosophy, completion of, 121, 156, 184, 190 political science, as positive science, 75 politicality, 133, 165, 169–171 politics, as site of history, 196 politikos, 172–173, 200 positivism, legal, 2

Index praxis, original, 197, 204, 234 presence (ousia), 87, 89 princeps, 97, 208, 213–214 principium, 54, 97, 208, 213–214, 260 n quiescence, and world order thinking, 109 rationality, scientific and technological, 27, 34; strategic, 67, 71 Rawls, John, 7, 9 resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), 209 responsibility, ontological, 169, 216, 234; see also ontological obligation Richardson, John, 132 Rosenau, James N., 125, 147–148 satyagraha, 238 Schelling, Friedrich, 69, 149 Schrader, George, 168–169 Schürmann, Reiner, 156, 213–216, 218 science, modern, 125 Scott, Charles, 10 Seinsverständnis, 81 societal technics, 63 Socrates, 203, 218; and Delphic oracle, 236–237 Sohn, Louis, 47 solicitude, 129, 139; authentic, 138, 146; leap-in, 140, 203 Solon, 232 sovereignty: idea of, 100, 109; popular, 54; principle of, 34, 59, 119, 144, 147; ruler, 54, 60; and subjectivity, 120, 130–131 Spanos, William, 6, 139 speechless horror, 236 Stambaugh, Joan, 198–199 statecraft, logic of, 2, 6, 9–10, 26, 59, 61, 101, 116, 144, 173 St. Augustine, 23 Strauss, David Friedrich, 24 Strauss, Leo, 29–31, 181; on idea of progress, 27

285

Sophocles, 211; see also Heidegger Suarez, Francisco, 100 subiectum, 95, 109, 116, 119; and substantia and hupokeimenon, 259 n summum ens, 22 swaraj, 238 Swazo, Norman K., 242 n, 263 n, 270 n, 272 n systems philosophy, 63, 125, 127, 138 systems science, 133, 139–140, 142; and exact philosophy, 130 Taoism, 46 Taylor, Alastair, on metaphysical foundation of nation-state, 260 n techne, political, 56, 68, 116, 136, 140 technocratic order, 6 technology: as epochal dispensation, 92; das Gestell, 34; essence of, 122, 141–142, 184; planetary domination of, 6, 117, 122, 126, 144, 171 Temporality, 79–80, 229 Thompson, Evan, 239 Thompson, William Irwin, 58 ti estin, 87, 222 transcendence: human, 167; loss of, 24 truth, as correspondence, 88 Unconcealment (aletheia), 87–89 Vail, L. M., 224 valuation, Western, 13, 115 von Weiszäcker, Carl-Friedrich, 55, 57, 251 n Vorhandenheit, 129, 133 Vorhandensein, 79, 168, 230 Walker, R. B., J. 11, 144, 149, 252 n, 261 n Weltanschauung, 181–182 Wesensgestalt, 99, 122, 233 Westphalia, peace of, 61; rules of, 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7 WOMP (World Order Models Project), 48–53, 249 n, 251 n

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world, as ontological attribute of Dasein, 80 world-craft, 67, 101 world order, defined 45; values of, 72 world order gradualism, 52, 249–250 n world order radicalism, 52 world orderism, 2 world-picture (Weltbild), 133

Zimmerman, Michael, 183, 199, 271 n, 274 n zoion logon echon, 86, 206 zoion politikon, 167, 185, 188, 190, 193–194, 205–206, 215, 219, 222, 230–231 Zuhandenheit, 80 Zuhandensein, 168

SUNY series in Global Politics James N. Rosenau, Editor

List of Titles American Patriotism in a Global Society—Betty Jean Craige The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations—Brian C. Schmidt From Pirates to Drug Lords: The Post—Cold War Caribbean Security Environment—Michael C. Desch, Jorge I. Dominguez, and Andres Serbin (eds.) Collective Conflict Management and Changing World Politics—Joseph Lepgold and Thomas G. Weiss (eds.) Zones of Peace in the Third World: South America and West Africa in Comparative Perspective—Arie M. Kacowicz Private Authority and International Affairs—A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter (eds.) Harmonizing Europe: Nation-States within the Common Market—Francesco G. Duina Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian-Russian Relations—Paul J. D’Anieri Leapfrogging Development? The Political Economy of Telecommunications Restructuring—J. P. Singh States, Firms, and Power: Successful Sanctions in United States Foreign Policy— George E. Shambaugh Approaches to Global Governance Theory—Martin Hewson and Timothy J. Sinclair (eds.) After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the Twenty-First Century— Ronnie D. Lipschutz Pondering Postinternationalism: A Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century?— Heidi H. Hobbs (ed.) Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies—Rudra Sil and Eileen M. Doherty (eds.)

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Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and U. S. Arms Control Policy—Steve Breyman International Relations—Still an American Social Science? Toward Diversity in International Thought—Robert M. A. Crawford and Darryl S. L. Jarvis (eds.) Which Lessons Matter? American Foreign Policy Decision Making in the Middle East, 1979–1987—Christopher Hemmer (ed.) Hierarchy Amidst Anarchy: Transaction Costs and Institutional Choice—Katja Weber Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy: The Dialectics of Marginalized and Global Forces in Jamaica—Randolph B. Persaud Global Limits: Immanuel Kant, International Relations, and Critique of World Politics—Mark F. N. Franke Power and Ideas: North-South Politics of Intellectual Property and Antitrust— Susan K. Sell Money and Power in Europe: The Political Economy of European Monetary Cooperation—Matthias Kaelberer Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention—Anthony F. Lang, Jr. Life After the Soviet Union: The Newly Independent Republics of the Transcaucasus and Central Asia—Nozar Alaolmolki Theories of International Cooperation and the Primacy of Anarchy: Explaining U. S. International Monetary Policy-Making After Bretton Woods—Jennifer Sterling-Folker Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance—James N. Rosenau and J. P. Singh (eds.) Technology, Democracy, and Development: International Conflict and Cooperation in the Information Age—Juliann Emmons Allison (ed.) The Arab-Israeli Conflict Transformed: Fifty Years of Interstate and Ethnic Crises—Hemda Ben-Yehuda and Shmuel Sandler Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia— Nazih Richani Debating the Global Financial Architecture—Leslie Elliot Armijo

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Political Space: Frontiers of Change and Governance in a Globalizing World— Yale Ferguson and R. J. Barry Jones (eds.) Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections—Norman K. Swazo Political Identity and Social Change: The Remaking of the South African Social Order—Jamie Frueh Social Construction and the Logic of Money: Financial Predominance and International Economic Leadership—J. Samuel Barkin