Richard Polt

Book Review: The Religion of the Future, by Roberto Mangabeira UngerThe Religion of the Future, by UngerRoberto Mangabeira. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

there is something a little unreal about her reading of recent history. Her critique of existing global governance institutions is based on an exemplary diagnosis of the problem, but the cure is less compelling; a democratising constitutionalism at the global level, a global version of the EU, would obviously meet resistance from the most powerful governments in the world—the United States, China, Russia, and India—but, more important in the long run, there is to my mind little evidence that it would actually garner support from the peoples of the world. But for all that, this is a deeply impressive book which should be required reading for legal theorists, political theorists and, yes, International Relations theorists as well.

A Heideggerian Critique of Cyberbeing

“Cyberbeing” is the interpretation of all beings in terms of information processing, along with our everyday experience of immersion in a world that revolves around such processing. This essay draws on Heidegger to critique both aspects of cyberbeing. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics aspired to grasp humanity, society, life, machines, and the cosmos in terms of information, but Heidegger viewed cybernetic metaphysics as a form of the modern “humanist” project of representation and calculation, which misunderstands the human condition. This criticism is relevant to twenty-first century conceptions such as the information philosophy of Luciano Floridi. Heidegger’s thought can also illuminate cyberbeing as experience, because his account of inauthenticity in Being and Time can be applied to prevalent uses of information technology today. The technology does not create inauthenticity, but it tempts us into behavior that illustrates Heidegger’s concepts of curiosity, ambiguity, and idle talk, as well as inauthentic forms of spatiality and temporality. In conclusion, the essay considers the prospects for distancing ourselves from cyberbeing.

Hitler the Anti-Nihilist? Statehood, Leadership, and Political Space in Heidegger’s Seminar of 1933-34

I focus on a seminar that Heidegger held in the Winter Semester of 1933-34: “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State.” Gregory Fried and I have recently completed a translation of the text. My purpose here is to introduce the seminar, contextualize it, and offer a few critical reflections on its main points: in particular, Heidegger’s views on the relation between people and state, the role of a leader, and the nature of political space. Heidegger attempts to distinguish human existence from the natural world and argues that a people can attain its full, distinctively human being only through its state. The state is to be ruled absolutely by the soaring will of a born leader. Heidegger also offers an account of political space that distinguishes between the local homeland and the activity of “interchange” that opens this homeland to the broader fatherland. On the whole, this text is the closest thing we have to a Heideggerian political philosophy — that is, not just general reflections on the essence of Dasein, Mitsein, or the polis, but some more concrete thoughts on better and worse forms of social organization.