Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political

by Michael Millerman

Beginning with Heidegger is an in-depth examination of the influence that Martin Heidegger's inceptual thought exerted on Leo Strauss, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Alexander Dugin. How did these vastly different thinkers employ Heideggerian concepts to define their own philosophies and often antagonistic politics? After outlining Heidegger's main philosophical points, it discusses attacks on and the misuse of Heidegger's ideas to advance Rorty's left-leaning and liberal political agenda as well as the different interpretations that Strauss and Heidegger offer regarding Plato's notion of the Good.

It also looks at the existential rebirth in Russia that Heidegger's groundbreaking theories and Dugin's extension of them made possible. The role of Heidegger's notion of "Dasein" is the key to a Eurasian awakening for not just one but for many peoples of the heartland. In this respect, both Heidegger and Dugin seem to be the lights that guide a people without a philosophy into a destiny filled with meaning and identity.

The book calls for the incorporation of Heidegger's thinking into the field of political philosophy and cautions against the distorting effects of our prevailing political prejudices.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics

1134 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Paul Bard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thesis turned into a book, this explores Heidegger through four modern philosophers whose views range across the political spectrum.

I found it good to dig into the ideas that interested me. The book really presupposes that you will have some familiarity with Heidegger himself before hand.

It’s clearly written and a fascinating accompaniment to modern political theory by an important thinker.

[James Love]

Preliminary Review

Let us be done with the gods of being, truth, and theory, with all gods except those of our making, and let us make the gods that best serve us and our purposes, so that it is we who become the demiurges of our world— a world of our free making.”

The main reason I am reading this book is to learn more about Alexander Dugin aka "Putin's Brain." I have only read Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics for a College level Philosophy course on Existentialism and Ontology that focused on Sartre, Heidegger, & Kierkegaard. I was not really impressed by Martin Heidegger and his philosophical views. I tried reading the State University of New York edition of Being and Time only to find out Martin NEVER FINISHED writing the book.

This fact is the main reason I don't see the book as his Magnum Opus. This is one of the reasons I am finding flaws in the authors thesis. The other reasons are of a medico-legal stance, and the author's use of Tarot Cards and other occult examples which places his ideas into a more arcane and less scientific area.

The author describes intentionality in the correct way and then attempts to rationally explain that an inanimate object has an intent even though it has no conscious awareness and cannot form the thought process to create the requisite intent. We give the object of our perception the intent and in many cases those intents are erroneous perceptions which explains why eyewitness testimony during a crime from five different people will never match up 100%. Those five different people saw the same act five different ways and the best example is Akira Kurosawa's movie Rashomon.

The first major discovery of phenomenology is intentionality. Intentionality is a “structure of lived experience,” according to which “the very being of comporting is a directing-itself-toward.”

All doctors and lawyers agree that consciousness is an awareness of something. An individual can have a conscience and consciousness unless they have an altered mental status. There are substances (alcohol, LSD, Opiates, THC, etc.) and situations (assault, battery, coercion, etc.) in which that consciousness can be altered making the use of the conscience null and void.

The Glasgow Coma Scale is one way of describing an altered level of consciousness. A patient in a comatose state that is unresponsive to opening eyes, speech, or pain would receive a 3; while a rock or Millerman's infamous chair would receive the same score.

In Millerman's chair example the chair never intended to appear yellow. The woodworkman who created the chair and then painted it might have liked the color yellow and chose that color. Or that particular color of paint was all he could afford or have been the only color available in stock.

The main point of Phenomenology is to look at all the different possibilities by using the tool of the Epoché aka the Phenomenological Reduction which is expressed as a set of {brackets} used to isolate the individual phenomena and think of all the ways that it can be explained. This fact is another reason I am finding issues with the author's thesis because he falls to mention them earlier in the introduction in favor of more esoteric occult examples.

[Knecht René · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Millerman’s "Beginning with Heidegger" gives us a view of Heidegger across 4 political-philosophical interpreters (Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin).

I will leave Strauss and Rorty aside here, simply because I do not know them well enough: although Strauss did catch my attention, and I ended the book wanting to read more. To be continued ...

What is interesting is because of these subjective interpretations you paradoxically come closer to Heidegger. Truth is, in a certain sense, always “subjective”: you need these interpretive viewpoints in order to gain clarity and a grip on the concepts.

==> I've to admit that for me Heidegger is often clearer and purer, when you read him slowly, than his interpreters: this is exactly why the footnotes are an important and excellent part of the book which pushed me back into Heidegger’s Contributions, opening the book to read the referenced fragments. That is maybe the most instructive part: the book points you toward these mindblowing passages. (And yes: Heidegger is mindblowing.)

What I learned from these viewpoints in this first reading I will summarize under 'KHORA':

KHORA/CHORA
The most compelling themes in the book, at least for me, runs through Derrida’s relation to negative theology and khōra and Dugin’s geopolitical rereading of khōra (from Plato’s Timaeus, 48-52).
Plato’s khōra is basically a third term/factor between Being and Becoming: not a thing, not an idea, but the strange “place” or spacing that makes sensible manifestation possible (the Womb, the Mother, ...):

==> it is the formless space in Plato/Timaeus = different from the One/Father/eternal/A=A/the form 'IS' and also different from the Son/the world of phenomena/copies/ICONS/the world of time/appearing-concealing/A is different from A/the world IS not)

In Plato’s Timaeus (48–52), khōra is introduced in terms of SPACE:
• a receptacle or “receiving place” for everything that comes-to-be
• neither being nor non-being
• something that “gives place” to all generated things
• an interval, a kind of formless spacing in which Forms can acquire/receive sensible copies

To Be Discussed: This can also be loosely related to structuralism or Lacan/Zizek, Schelling: objet a, the “empty place” or indivisible remainder that has no substance of its own, yet functions as the operator that holds a symbolic structure together, a kind of No-thing/Non-Being that nonetheless organizes desire, ideology, and meaning. Or something like the imaginary numbers in mathematics.


“It is fair to regard hyperessentiality and spatialization as features of Heidegger’s inceptual thought.” (cf. p.145)

Examples of the Topological/SPACING from Heidegger (Contributions): leap across the threshold, transposition, cleared region, playing field, the human being as “builder and steward of the site of truth”.
You can also think about the FourFold: Sky, Earth, Gods, Mortals and the interstice , the in-between spaces where ‘Event happens’ (Es Gibt …).

DERRIDA

The Derrida chapter contains a.o. fragments of Derrida’s 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denials': where deconstruction resembles a form of apophatic mysticism? (p. 137)

Apophatic mysticism claims that the divine cannot be described with positive predicates: one can only say what it is not, a logic that (at least superficially) resonates with Heidegger’s own attempt to approach Beyng/Seyn beyond metaphysical predication. In apophatic mysticism, the goal is "to prepare us for a silent intuition of God.” (p. 137 )

Derrida is fascinated by the rhetoric of the unsayable, but he refuses mysticism.
==> For Derrida, negative theology remains bound to what he calls “hyperessentiality”: the idea that there is still “being beyond Being” that functions as a hidden goal (a God as beyond/without being/Dark Light).
==> But this “empty place” is for Derrida not a mystical beyond, it is simply no-place, nothing, it stops here, there is no ‘Ereignis’, no radical change or transformation.

Derrida’s deconstruction is therefore not searching for a leap beyond language, but for what he calls:"the language of non-presence ("dark light", cf. p.140), ..., a non-presentable condition of possibility ..." (page 141) and you see the link with his ‘Differance’.

“the experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible”(P. 141): necessary and impossible at the same time.

Secret, Promise and Khora belong to the domain of necessary impossibilities (cf. p. 144)

==> Deconstructive figures/words such as “secret” and “promise” function as (im)possible possibilities: they exist only thanks to a constitutive failure. A secret must communicate at least itself in order to be a secret, a promise must remain unfulfilled in order to be a promise.

==> In this context Derrida speaks of the "experience of khōra which is above all not an experience, if one understands by this word a certain relation to presence." (p. 141)

==> Khōra is place-giving without event, without promise, without historical “arrival.” It is place without destination.

It is here that Millerman introduces his own concept of topolitology (his term (?), not Derrida’s, cf page 147 ): the idea that both Heidegger and Derrida think through spatial figures, threshold, clearing, region, field, but with radically different stakes.

Heidegger thinks in terms of:
• leap
• transposition
• cleared region (Lichtung)
• es gibt
• unfolding
• Event
• Aletheia
• PLACE as the opening of BEYNG

Derrida thinks in terms of:
• spacing without transcendence
• a-theological apophasis without GOD
• space without subject
• NO-THING
• non-human
• the unsayable

Heidegger’s thinking is “inceptual”, the (new) beginning rethought as a leap toward an “other beginning”, while Derrida’s thinking is deconstructive: iteration, contamination, aporia.

"Heidegger does not write about the “leap” into another beginning "from the outside", bur rather as one to whom what he describes has come “like a jolt”. (P.147)

==> This another beginning, comes “like a jolt.” = Which is an existential event, a kind of shock, that transforms your relation to Being, it changes the coordinates, in another paradigma , …. It is not a lineair, predictable, measurable event.

Millerman even compares this to mystics, who likewise insist they have crossed a threshold into an experience that remains inaccessible to those who have not undergone it. Derrida, on this reading, may deny the possibility of such a passage only because he has not lived it. (cf. p. 147)

==> Derrida’s deconstruction might miss something in Heidegger that is not primarily conceptual, but experiential. That is the reason that Dugin becomes interesting: see next point.

DUGIN: Chaos- khōra
The most fascinating part of the book, however, was the chapter on Dugin, precisely at the moment where khōra returns, but now in a geopolitical form. (pp. 184 ff)

Most of the quotations in the book come from Dugin, 'The possibility of Russian Philosophy", which is already partly translated by Millerman (cf. his website) and what is interesting for all Heidegger's students.
==> I’ve read Dugin’s book on Heidegger (The Philosophy of Another Beginning), and it remains one of the stronger works in the secondary literature. Millerman, as a translator of Russian philosophical texts, has access to Dugin materials that are still unavailable in translation , which makes his account unusually interesting and offers a unique insight into Dugin’s interpretation.

For Dugin khōra is a kind a chaos but a chaos which includes LOGOS not the chaos as a disorder, as a consequence of a loss of order.

==> "... Chaos in the original sense is nothing nonessential and ’negative’- instead it is the gaping open of the abyss of the essential possibilities of grounding an experience of this kind of ‘chaos’ is reserved for the one who is decided and creative - this chaos cannot be brought to into order, but 'only' into an unfolding toward an extreme and ever freer opposition ..." (refering tot Heidegger’s Ponderings VII-XI, 323, fn. 67, P.184)

“khōra is the field of the unfolding of a logos” (P.183)

Dugin takes Heidegger’s Dasein and radicalizes it into a doctrine of existential multiplicity: multiple Daseins, and multiple Seins / SEYNS.

Western Dasein, according to Dugin, is divisive, split by oppositions. Russian Dasein, by contrast, is described as a border:
“ ... not between something and its opposite, but between one and the same thing.“It is a border that doesn’t separate anything.” (p.181)

Here Dugin defines identity as auto-referential: i.e. individuality is bound to the Narod (Russian Dasein). Through identification with the Russian Narod the Russian individual acquires a quality that always differs from his individual structure, is always something other than himself.” (P.181) (i.e. a dual identity)

==> which sound as a subjective destitution or radical de-subjectivization, passing through a void or "in-between-death" state to become an object (Zizek, Lacan, Badiou) characteristic for patriotic societies or the proletarian revolution? (TBD)

Then comes the khōra passage:
==> Dugin reads khōra as a "zone of exclusion" in Western Philosophy and bears the mark of rejection and oblivion. (P. 182)

==> For Dugin “Khōra is Russian.” (p. 183)

This functions as a metaphor: Russia today is also placed on the periphery of Western thought. The periphery of metaphysics becomes geopolitical, Russia as the shadow of the West. Dugin goes further, linking khōra to “country/horizon” and to Chaos and Earth (where the Dasein of West is more connected to the SKY, cf. Heidegger’s Fourfold) and as such another spatiality.

==> In Russian Dasein: “khōra is the field of the unfolding of a logos” (P.183)

Derrida vs Dugin

Where Derrida keeps khōra radically a-subjective, Dugin turns it into collective ground. Where Derrida thinks khōra as a-theological and non-human, khōra becomes in Dugin almost a mythical-ontological destiny.

Millerman does not treat Dugin as a extremist. He presents Dugin as a philosophical experiment that helps us understand Heidegger better, precisely because Dugin makes Heidegger’s implicit topology politically explicit.

Dugin is maybe problematic, but intellectually intense: he reads Heidegger with a seriousness that is missing from much academic literature. That is why we should read him.

Millerman’s book ultimately stays with me as a struggle between two “places,” two topolitologies: inception (leap, place as event) versus deconstruction (place as spacing, an irreducible remainder).

“Of the authors studied, Dugin’s Heidegger is the closest to Heidegger himself.” (p.235)

“Still Derridean political philosophy is “a legitimate contender on the polemical plain, but that means that it is secondary to that plain itself, and it cannot unfold or decide the question of the constitution of that field as comprehensively, it seems, as Heidegger does.” (P.235)

==> Derrida can critique the field, but Heidegger determines the ground-structure of the field.

Millerman does not end with “Dugin is right or wrong.” Instead he ends with:

Dugin opens a field of possibilities that even liberals cannot simply dismiss (cf. p.239).

Dugin even suggested that a “Heideggerian deepening of liberal individualism could proceed through a renewal of the mystical traditions of Eckhart and others …”. (cf. p.239 for sources)

So the book does not resolve the tension: It opens up a new space …

Very thought provoking.

[Ben Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book, to be sure. Odd in some instances, not especially clear in others. The strength of the book was in the author’s close reading of the work of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugan.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Millerman’s Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin, and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (2020) offers a bold and intellectually rigorous exploration of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical influence on modern political thought. Millerman situates Heidegger’s ontology as a central point of contention and inspiration for a diverse array of thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Alexander Dugin. Through a comparative and dialogical approach, the book examines how these figures engage with Heidegger’s work to formulate divergent responses to the crisis of modernity, revealing the ways philosophy intersects with politics at a profound level.

Millerman opens by emphasizing Heidegger’s significance as a thinker who challenged the metaphysical foundations of Western philosophy. This critique, centered on Heidegger’s analysis of Being, provides a fertile ground for interpreting political problems, particularly those arising from modernity’s technological enframement. Millerman adeptly frames Heidegger’s thought as both a philosophical and a political intervention, suggesting that his legacy lies not only in his critique of modernity but also in the possibilities he offers for rethinking political life.

The book is divided into thematic chapters, each devoted to a thinker who grapples with Heidegger’s philosophy in distinct ways. Leo Strauss, for example, is presented as a thinker who engages Heidegger critically to recover classical political philosophy. Strauss’s interpretation highlights the tension between philosophical inquiry and the demands of political life, an issue central to his critique of Heidegger’s alleged historicism. In contrast, Richard Rorty’s pragmatism rejects Heidegger’s foundationalism, opting instead for a liberal, anti-metaphysical stance that underscores the contingency of truth and politics.

Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, as Millerman explains, builds on Heidegger’s dismantling of metaphysics while diverging in its political implications. Derrida’s focus on différance and the aporia of justice exemplifies a more radical openness to the undecidability of political life, in contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on rootedness in Being. Millerman’s analysis of Derrida is particularly nuanced, revealing the affinities and tensions between deconstruction and Heideggerian thought.

The inclusion of Alexander Dugin, a controversial figure, is perhaps the most provocative aspect of Millerman’s book. Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger for his “Fourth Political Theory” demonstrates the philosopher’s capacity to inspire anti-liberal and geopolitical discourses. Millerman’s engagement with Dugin is critical yet measured, avoiding simplistic denunciations while highlighting the risks of politicizing Heidegger’s ideas in ways that may align with authoritarianism.

One of the book’s strengths is its capacity to clarify complex philosophical arguments without sacrificing depth. Millerman’s prose is precise and accessible, making Heidegger’s dense and often opaque ideas comprehensible to readers less familiar with his work. Moreover, the book’s comparative framework offers a unique perspective on the intersection of philosophy and politics, illuminating the varied ways Heidegger has been interpreted and deployed across ideological lines.

However, some readers may find the inclusion of Dugin problematic, given the ethical and political concerns surrounding his work. While Millerman addresses these issues, his critical stance could be more explicit in delineating the dangers of Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger. Additionally, the book’s focus on Heidegger as a unifying thread risks underplaying the distinct philosophical projects of the figures discussed.

Beginning with Heidegger is a significant contribution to the study of political philosophy and Heideggerian thought. Millerman demonstrates how Heidegger’s critique of modernity continues to resonate in contemporary debates, shaping diverse and often conflicting visions of political life. Scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics will find this book both enlightening and provocative, even as it raises challenging questions about the implications of engaging with Heidegger’s legacy.

GPT