Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections

5 A Pathway to Essential Political Thinking

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 155 CHAPTER FIVE A Pathway to Essential Political Thinking 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 156 Essential Political Thinking 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...