2025 NPSA Paper Presentation: Heidegger, Antigone, and Authenticity

The title of this paper is different from the proposal I submitted. Now the working title is: "Can we have a thoughtful nationalism? Heidegger, Antigone, and Authenticity." 

Like many of you, I'm thinking and teaching about what comes next. We do not bear witness to a successful constitutional order at present. To indulge cliche, "the norms have been shattered." If you want to return to them, you return to them with a wholly different spirit and set of considerations than before. Nothing is actually "returned" to.

So I've been looking at Martin Heidegger for a little while because I'm not smart. I just wanted to understand his multiple readings of Antigone. One occurs in 1935, in Introduction to Metaphysics, and it has both philosophic value and serves as Nazi propaganda. Heidegger speaks at length about struggle, violence, and glory. He does a reading of the "Ode to Man" from Antigone without even mentioning Antigone herself. In 1942, with the entry of America into the war, he reads the "Ode to Man" from Antigone again, and it sounds like a Nazi eschatology in places. He says "Americanism" will "annihilate Europe," as if Germany at the time loved peace. And he tells his audience that if they can achieve what he will explore, then "being able to wait is a standing which has already leapt ahead, a standing within what is indestructible." He connects hope, a prophetic vision, to his overt and extreme nationalism.

You can see how I'm wondering if a thoughtful nationalism is even possible. For us, the problem comes from another direction. From the opening of the paper:

In the United States, we hear “this is not who we are.” I personally am tempted to snort and laugh. Slavery, Jim Crow, and incessant warring for continental expansion are only the first few issues with that statement. Whether it is running concentration camps when occupying the Philippines or drone-bombing weddings or practicing extraordinary rendition, it would seem brutality is a national pastime. 

But “this is not who we are” is not a simple lack of historical knowledge. People do believe in the words of the Declaration and Constitution. “All men are created equal” and the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” do not feature terribly prominently nowadays because people are reading the other part of the Declaration. They are taking careful note of the 27 charges against the British King and asking which ones might describe the situation at hand. And they are acting on what they find.  

So what I'm seeing is a reaction to injustices which is, no matter how cynical I want to be, some kind of concrete instantiation of a thoughtful nationalism. "This is not who we are" is perfectly acceptable for a number of allies in a number of movements. And Heidegger reading Antigone can't be irrelevant with this in mind. Yes, Heidegger ignores the question of Antigone's justice. He's focused on her sacrifice, her reasoning about family and the end of her own life in the face of death. You can ask what that has to do with nationalism, but becoming the symbol of a higher law which everyone else sacrifices for, I believe, answers that concern.

What do we need to know from Heidegger's account of Antigone, then? The first thing we should pay attention to is Heidegger's weird use of the Greek word polis. Usually we think of polis as city-state, something like Athens or Sparta. If we use it in a more theoretical sense, we might mean the idea behind a small city or civilization, where a purposeful lack of complexity makes what is ethical easier to track. Heidegger of course uses it in none of these ways. He plays with the idea that the polis is an axis (he actually uses the word "pole," which I'm avoiding here), and that around that axis is a "swirl" which gathers all kinds of beings. It is a pre-political site which allows for politics and history to emerge. In the swirl there is status, not in the sense of state, but in the sense that human beings begin to recognize other things, other people, and themselves.

I know what you're thinking: this sounds ludicrous. But Heidegger says the essence of this polis is that it is questionable. This is the polis which Aristotle and Plato were questioning and theorizing from. And it makes more sense when you consider the more radical implications of Antigone as a play. Antigone is asking on some level whether family or politics are even possible. Does family require so much devotion that you can destroy your family in loyalty to the idea of it? That seems right, so how exactly does this work as a concept? Doesn't politics require that we exclude traitors at base? If that's true, why can't we simply ignore or exile those fundamentally antagonistic to the political order? For us now, I'm thinking about how we're still stuck on the logic property rights and American Constitutionalism pushes. We've got people who really believe that negotiating about tariffs or economic policy will bring people who fire missiles at fishermen in international waters in line. They can't understand the level of radicalization they are witnessing because we don't know how to question politics itself. We were taught that ambition must counter ambition and that capitalism would soften people in general. That wealth as an object would be non-radicalizing. And we are really struggling to break those assumptions in the face of the obvious.

We also need to think about Heidegger's verdict on Antigone herself. Here I follow Kate Withy at Georgetown, who says Antigone is responding not to a natural law, but something you could call the "call of being." There are realms where you cannot articulate what needs to be known. Why exactly do we bury bodies? And if you respond to that primal knowledge, you might be less than articulate, but you are in a world which political life must reverence. And this brings us to authenticity. An encounter with this world can't be anything other than fully authentic. You know what you must sacrifice for, and the ages will welcome you for it. I'll read from the rest of the paper to conclude:

Authenticity stems from an encounter with being and its limits—Antigone certainly thinks about death all throughout the play—and entails a will to sacrifice. Authenticity conceived this way is not merely uniqueness or individuality. Not everything has to have the tragic weight of Antigone, of course, but authenticity seems to entail recognition of citizens as moral beings who want to discover the truth about their existence. It is worth contrasting this with the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” keeping in mind that Locke’s original formulation had “property” in its place. I cannot and will not argue that a government should be built on existentialist musings. But I can say a regime which sees its citizens as manipulable in their materialism will find itself challenged by forces it will not be able to see, much less identify. It will not be able to understand who actually fights for it. Note which groups emphasized “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, which ones fought for universal public schooling, which ones fought to increase immigration in the United States, which ones eliminated obstacles to voting. Which ones, you could say, recognized other human beings in the swirl of the polis, named what they saw, and conferred dignity. Then ask if the machinery of the United States government has ever been explicitly favorable to those groups. 

Thank you for your time.