Heidegger’s influence penetrated every aspect of society. As a rector, his revolutionary thought dominated the university,[1] but he was also a popular author whose books were found in countless rucksacks of fallen German soldiers across Russia and Africa.[2] Heidegger continues to rule philosophy from the grave, but here will be a discussion of two schools of thought that are in superficial conflict with each other even though they are ideological cousins that trace their roots to Heidegger.
The Western Left
Today the Western Left borrows heavily and unapologetically from the Frankfurt School critical theory, but with two significant developments: intersectionality and environmentalism. Intersectionality is a term that came about over a decade after Heidegger, but the theory and practice of intersectionality align well with post-Heideggerian thought. Environmentalism is a task that Heidegger contributed to more directly.
The first development to critical theory is intersectionality, which is a term that was born in 1989 in an article that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw wrote to address legal challenges for Black women.[3] Since then, intersectionality has grown into a global movement to identify and unite new critical groups with a focus on racial and ethnic groups, genders, nationalities, sexual orientations, disabilities, and so forth.[4] While this is not an idea that Heidegger advocated, it fits Heidegger’s framework best for the current atmosphere. Heidegger sought to cleanse the Dasein of the undesirable minority, but the West is not monolithic enough to identify a majority group. With intersectionality, an individual can identify with multiple oppressed Daseins; the more groups he is a part of the more enlightened and desirable he is. The push from the Left is to identify that group that is more White, more male, more Christian, and therefore a greater enemy and push him away to the corners of society. For example, “On 18th April 2021, over 500 people were booked in to an online day conference, entitled Dismantling Whiteness, and hosted by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, in partnership with BIAPT,” the papers of which were published in a volume of the journal Practical Theology.[5]
The second development is environmentalism, which may seem out of place since the environment is not a critical group, but the materialism of Marx is inseparable from its ecological ramifications.[6] Mark Musser puts it well that “Martin Heidegger built the fascist bridge between Nietzsche’s natural existentialism and what is today called deep ecology.”[7] Deep ecology is a worldview approach to the environment that rejects the biblical teaching of man’s place over nature (Gen. 1:26–31) as egalitarian and instead lowers man and elevates nature to equal status.[8]
Critical theorists tried to distort the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to say that he was not truly a Nazi sympathizer, but in 2001, some of his writings from 1933 were released that proved otherwise, as quoted above. Interestingly, even with these released documents, some deep ecology advocates evidentially think the movement is not fascist enough as there is a call to pull even more from Heidegger.[9]
Fourth Political Theory
Aleksandr Dugin is frequently called “Putin’s Philosopher” as his political theory of neo-Eurasianism serves as the basis for Russian expansion into surrounding territory. Dugin’s political theory is the worldview of Russian aggression and it relies heavily upon Heidegger’s notion of Dasein.
Dugin formulated neo-Eurasianism as a fourth political theory that follows and borrows from three previous theories: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Ironically, the rhetoric against Ukraine during the war has been to call Ukrainians “Nazis,” while Russia’s political theory itself is the one that openly advances fascist thought. The Nazi verbiage comes from a propaganda push to reframe the current war as an extension of the second world war, so that anyone who opposes Russia is to be called a Nazi.[10] While Russia is right to point out the Nazi roots of Western Leftism, in reality, the fourth political theory is an ideological cousin to the Left through Heidegger.
In Aleksandr Dugin’s model of prior political theories, “The subject of communism was class. The subject of fascism was government (in the Italian fascism of Mussolini) or race (in the national-socialism of Hitler).”[11] He continues:
And finally, we can outline the deepest—ontological!—basis of Fourth Political Theory. Here we should turn not to theologies and mythologies but to the deep philosophical experience of the thinker who made a unique attempt to construct a fundamental ontology–the most generalized, paradoxical, deep, and shrill teaching about being. That is to say, Martin Heidegger.[12]
Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein is as fundamental to neo-Eurasianism as class was to communism or race to Hitlerism.
In the Duginist rearrangement of Heidegger, Dasein goes beyond the government of Mussolini’s fascism and the race of Hitler’s fascism. Borrowing from Carl Schmitt, who, like Heidegger, was a philosopher and a Nazi Party Member, Dugin sees the world as naturally divided into big spaces; these big spaces are the proper Daseins and they should unite into poles so that the world can be a multipolar ideal.[13] Dugin describes the Russian Dasein as distinct from other Daseins as it engulfs the individual into the collective.[14] Dugin’s approach to Dasein and multipolarity is inherently evil and expansive and when it is combined with the denial of the existence of Ukrainians,[15] it becomes genocidal. In the footsteps of Heidegger’s call for the extermination of enemies, anything that stands out as an individual in a collective Dasein is a threat to the Dasein itself and so it is declared an enemy to exterminate.
Just as the Left tries to bury Heidegger’s Nazism, so too does the Russian propaganda machine. While there is no denying that Heidegger was a fascist, Russian ideologues are quick to point out that “Heidegger saw in Russia and Germany healing forces that could save the world from ‘the nihilism of the Platonic-Judaic tradition,’” [16] but this could be speaking more to Heidegger’s and Dugin’s flaws, not to their strengths. The root of this worldview is a rejection of the clear biblical teaching, which they throw under the bus of nihilism. If one holds to a holistic biblical worldview, then the result is far from nihilism and will not be a suitable framework to fit Dugin’s fourth political theory.
[1] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York, Doubleday, 2007), 173–175.
[2] Mark Musser, Nazi Oaks, 163.
[3] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 139–167.
[4] For a history of some important developments through 2013, see Devon W. Carbado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Vickie M. Mays, Barbara Tomlinson, “Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory,” Du Bois Review 10:2 (Fall 2013): 405–424.
[5] Al Barrett Revd Dr and Jill Marsh Revd Dr, “Critical White Theology: Dismantling Whiteness?” Practical Theology 15, no. 1–2 (2022): 2.
[6] John Bellamy Foster develops this point well in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: NYU Press, 2000).
[7] R. Mark Musser, Nazi Oaks, 159.
[8] Sandra Mijač, Goran Slivšek, and Anica Džajić, “Deep Ecology: Contemporary Bioethical Trends,” Southeastern European Medical Journal 6, no. 1 (2022): 131–132.
[9] Magdalena Holy-Luczaj, “Heidegger’s Support for Deep Ecology Reexamined Once Again: Ontological Egalitarianism, or Farewell to the Great Chain of Being,” Ethics and the Environment 20, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 45-66.
[10] Taras Kuzio, “Imperial Nationalism as the Driver Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” Nations and Nationalism 29, no. 1 (2023): 30.
[11] «Субъектом коммунизма был класс. Субъектом фашизма — государство (в итальянском фашизме Муссолини) или раса (в национал-социализме Гитлера).» Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertai͡a politicheskai͡a teorii͡a: Rossii͡a v politicheskie idei XXI veka [The Fourth Political Theory: Rossia and Political Ideas of the 21st Century] (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2009), 23.
[12] «И наконец, можно наметить саму глубокую — онтологическую! — основу Четвертой политической теории. Тут следует обратиться не к теологиям и мифологиям, но к глубинному философскому опыту мыслителя, который сделал уникальную попытку выстроить фундаментальную онтологию — самое обобщающее, парадоксальное, глубокое и пронзительное учение о бытии. Речь идет о Мартине Хайдеггере.» Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertai͡a politicheskai͡a teorii͡a, 12.
[13] Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertai͡a politicheskai͡a teorii͡a, 192–198.
[14] Aleksandr Dugin, Martin Khaĭdegger: Posledniĭ Bog [Martin Heidegger: The Last God] (Moscow: Akademicheskiĭ Proekt, 2014), 349–392.
[15] Taras Kuzio, “Imperial Nationalism,” 34.
[16] «Хайдеггер видел в России и Германии исцеляющие силы, которые могут спасти мир от «нигилизма платоновско-иудейской традиции». Aleksandr Mikhaĭlovskiy, “Khaĭdegger Budushchego I Budushchee Khaĭdeggera” [Heidegger of the Future and the Future of Heidegger], Horizon 7, no. 2 (2018): 358.
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