enough, namely, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised. (However, Heidegger would also have been right in rejecting Arendt’s Aristotelian politics as not radical enough to break out of the nihilist space of European modernity.)
Arendt would thus have been justified in countering Pippin’s all-too-easy version of a contemporary political Hegelianism; his basic claim is that while, of course, from today’s perspective, Hegel’s notion of a rational state no longer works, its limitations are evident, and these very limitations should be addressed in a Hegelian way:
In some fairly obvious sense and in the historical terms he would have to accept as relevant to his own philosophy, he was wrong. None of these institutional realizations now looks as stable, as rational, or even as responsive to the claims of free subjects as Hegel has claimed, even though such criticisms are often themselves made in the name of such freedom. But the nature of that wrong is, I am arguing, also Hegelian, a matter of being incomplete, not wholly wrong-headed.38
In short, it is a matter of an Aufhebung, of the immanent self-critique and self-overcoming, of these solutions, not of their outright rejection … However, what cannot but strike the eye is the “formalist” character of Pippin’s formula: he does not provide any concrete examples that would render it operative. The question is, of course, how far do we have to go in this Aufhebung if we are to bring Hegel’s project of a rational state of freedom up to today’s conditions—how “deeply” is irrationality inscribed into today’s bourgeois society so that its critique can still be formulated as a defense of bourgeois society? Do we have to stay within capitalism or risk a move beyond it? These, however, are not Heidegger’s concerns: his fundamental move apropos our critical historical moment is to emphasize the underlying sameness of the (ideological, political, economic …) choices we confront:
from the point of view of their onto-historical origin, there is no real or fundamental difference between the Christian doctrine and Bolshevism, between the biologism and imperialism of Nazism and the forces of capital (which, today, have permeated all spheres of life), and between vitalism and spiritualism. This, I believe, is at once the strength, and the extraordinary weakness and limitation of Heidegger’s position. For on the one hand it allows us to establish continuities and complicities where we thought there were incompatibilities, and to shift the weight of difference to a different terrain (that of the “meaning” or the “truth” of being). On the other hand, though, by revealing such differences as pseudo-differences, he also neutralizes the decisions and choices they often call for, thereby erasing the traditional space of politics and ethics.39
Unfortunately, de Beistegui’s solution to this deadlock remains all too commonsensical—a balanced approach which takes into account the legitimate demands of both levels:
whatever our commitments to the deconstruction of metaphysics, and to the struggle for new possibilities of thought and action beyond it, or perhaps on its margins, we continue to live within the metaphysical, technical framework, and so must remain committed to taking seriously, and discriminating between, the many differences, choices and situations we are faced with at the historical, political, religious and artistic level. […] The free relation to technology Heidegger advocates may, after all, also involve an active participation in intra-metaphysical processes, and not just a meditation of its essence. For within technology, there are differences that matter, and to which we cannot—and must not—remain blind. With one critical eye, and the other deconstructive, we may be better equipped to navigate the often treacherous waters of our time.40
But what if there is a fundamental discordance between the ontological and the ontic, so that, as Heidegger put it, those who reach ontological truth have to err in the ontic? What if, if we are to see with the ontological eye, our ontic eye has to be blinded?
Ontological difference
When Heidegger speaks of the untruth-concealedness-withdrawal as inherent to the truth-event itself, he has in mind two different levels:
1. On the one hand, the way a man, when engaged in inner-worldly affairs, forgets the horizon of meaning within which he dwells, and even forgets this forgetting itself (exemplary is here the “regression” of Greek thought that occurs with the rise of Sophists: what was the confrontation with the very foundation of our Being turns into a trifling play with different lines of argumentation with no inherent relation to Truth).
2. On the other hand, the way this horizon of meaning itself, insofar as it is an epochal Event, arises against the background of—and thereby conceals—the imponderable Mystery of its emergence, in the same way a clearing in the midst of a forest is surrounded by the dark thickness of the woods.
The same ambiguity repeats itself with regard to the earth as that which resists, remains forever obscure and unfathomable: “There always is something resisting and supporting our practices, and that something is very real.”41 So, on the one hand, the earth designates what resists the meaningful totality of a historical world:
As a world strives to grow back into the earth, it encounters resistance. In the process, the earth appears in a determinate way in terms of the resistance that the world encounters. In building the cathedral, we discover particular ways in which our practices are limited and constrained. […] Our worlds, and consequently our meaningful relations to things, are always based in something that can’t be explained in terms of the prevailing intelligible structure of the world.42
On the other hand, however, what is most impenetrable is the basic structure of the world itself. For example, when we argue that the modernization of Japan was desirable because it brought about a higher gross domestic product and per capita income, one should raise the more fundamental question:
But why one should have just those preferences is precisely what is at issue—if one would prefer the pace and style of premodern Japanese life to an increase of per capita income, then the argument that Japan should modernize in order to increase average income will not be persuasive. […] So it seems that the strength of the drive to establish a new world and destroy the old depends on something withdrawing from view—that is becoming so self-evident that it is no longer open to question: namely, the desirability of the new world itself. This desirability is an earthly thing: it withdraws and shelters the world it supports. […] Our world is supported by our most basic preferences—a taste for efficiency and flexibility—having largely withdrawn from view.43
The earth is thus either the impenetrable abyss of the ontic which withdraws from ontological disclosure, or the horizon of this disclosure itself, invisible on account of its excessive self-evidence—we do not see it as such because it is the very medium through which we see everything. One should make the properly Hegelian move of identifying the two levels: the Beyond and the obstacle-screen that distorts our access to Beyond. So this is not simply Heidegger’s mistake or confusion (to be resolved or corrected by introducing a further notional distinction: one term for the earth as the darkness of what resists disclosure, another for the invisibility of the very horizon of disclosure). The oscillation between the two levels is what defines the earth.
What this also means is that ontological difference is not “maximal,” between all beings, the highest genus, and something else/more/beyond, but, rather, “minimal,” the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing. Insofar as it is grounded in the finitude of humans, ontological difference is that which makes a totalization of “All beings” impossible—ontological difference means that the field of reality is finite. Ontological difference is, in this precise sense, “real/impossible”: to cite Ernesto Laclau’s determination of antagonism, in it,
