Abstract
To be human is to be in the world with others, and so what it means to be goes to the root of ethical and political life. One would have to be exceptionally obtuse not to recognize that this age, which we now share as a planetary humanity, is indeed in crisis, despite all our apparent progress if not because of it: the economic and political upheavals that threaten to throw whole regions into uproar, the shifts in climate that threaten the entire globe with unparalleled disruption, the “advances” in technology that threaten to lay waste to entire cities and reduce human beings to “human resources.” Despite these ongoing or potential disasters, what Heidegger’s work challenges us to think is that the most fundamental disaster is a failure to think what it means to be human, that these other dangers can only be addressed if we confront this question first. My argument here is that Heidegger misreads a form of thinking vital to ethical–political life, phronêsis, so-called practical wisdom, because his radical historicism prevents him from seeing the intersection of principled norms with life as we find it.
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Notes
For an overview, see Fried (2011).
For my reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, see Fried (2006).
For a detailed treatment of polemos in Heidegger, see Fried (2000).
In what follows, where Heidegger (2014) is not cited, the translation is my own.
I have amended the McNeill-Davis translation here; in subsequent citations, I will amend their translation by rendering Sein as “Being” rather than “being.”
Dennis Schmidt made this analogy in his July 2013 lectures for the Collegium Phaenomenologicum.
For Heidegger’s attack on Platonism and liberalism, see Fried (2011). A decisive passage from Heidegger is this one:
“If we talk of [Plato’s] doctrine of ideas, then we are displacing the fundamental question [of truth] into the framework of ideas. If one interprets ideas as representations and thoughts that contain a value, a norm, a law, a rule, such that ideas then become conceived of as norms, then the one subject to these norms is the human being—not the historical human being, but rather the human being in general, the human being in itself, or humanity. Here, the conception of the human being is one of a rational being in general. In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, this conception achieves a definite form. Here all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root.
Opposed to this conception are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings” (Heidegger 2001, 165–166, 2010, 129).
Heidegger’s most sustained discussion of phronêsis may be found in his lecture course, Platon: Sophistes. Because this course took place in 1924–1925, it falls outside our period of study here. A full study of Heidegger on phronêsis would require a treatment of that text; suffice it to say that Heidegger interprets phronêsis as a mode of alêtheuein, of unconcealment, in Dasein’s practical life, but he does not address in detail, as Aristotle does, what this praxis might mean for actual ethical and political life. See Heidegger (1992), especially Sects. 8, 19–21, 23–25, and 68–69.
See Dreyfus (1990, 4–5).
Consider this point in reference to a people’s working out its collective fate through Mitteilung und Kampf, “communication and struggle” (that is logos and polemos) in Being and Time, §74 (Heidegger 1987b, 384–385).
See Fried and Fried (2010), especially the chapters on “No Beginning or No End” and “Learning Not to Be Good.”
Jefferson also writes, “A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest… To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us” (quoted at Fried and Fried 2010, 136). Like Antigone, Jefferson holds that the right to pass judgment on the adequacy of standing law is critical to justice.
References
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This essay is dedicated to Dennis Schmidt, whose lectures on “Idioms of the Ethical in Heidegger” at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in July 2013 provoked much of my own thinking here. It is dedicated as well to the students in my seminar at the Collegium, with whom I worked through some of these ideas. I am also grateful to Richard Polt, who commented on an earlier draft.
