The Agony of Polemos

PREFACE TO THE 2021 EDITION

A new edition of The Agony of Polemos, four years after it was initially written, deserves a careful revision. This new edition has been arranged emphasizing the ontological aspect of Polemos, a concept which was reclaimed principally by Heidegger from the Hellenic past. This, because the philosophy of the German thinker has been gaining renewed importance in recent years, is the foundation for a philosophical meditation focused on confronting the political and cultural hegemony of what is known as globalism.

The political area known as the third position or national-populism, which encompasses different political entities that appeared in different periods and continents, has been especially receptive to this Heideggerian renewal. In fact, the greatest political theories have always emerged from deep meditation, embracing many more aspects than just the mere politics. Both the one known as first political theory, that is, liberalism, and the second theory, Marxism, as well as the third political theory of the nationalist movements, have all had true worldviews or ways of seeing the world and the nature of man as the basis for their political unfolding.

Among these, the third political theory is the most recent one. It arose as a revolutionary reaction against liberalism and the threat of Marxism, the latter a theory that was about fifty years ahead of the nationalist movements when these burst into the world’s political scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. It can be said that the precursors of the third political theory date back to the eighteenth century, and the genealogy of these ideas in their modern shape is well detailed by Sternhell in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition. However, a more convincing political philosophy of such theory came during the first decades of the last century. This process was not coordinated; rather it burst spontaneously into different countries and at different times. German, French, and Italian thinkers were the most important in Europe. However, after the defeat of nationalism during the Second World War, national populist thought acquired the greatest depth in the Americas, and especially in Argentina.

Many philosophical systems and thinkers served as the grounding of the third political theory. Some theories of Aristotle and his medieval Christian interpreters, which covered communitarianism and the political nature of man, were essential in this process. Much was also borrowed from Hegel and his theory of the embodiment of the Absolute in the state. Fichte’s idealism was another essential piece, especially his Addresses to the German Nation, as well as that of Herder and his reclamation of the people (völk) as a historical subject. Nietzsche likewise was of great influence with his Will to Power and the heroic vision of life.

Nevertheless, it appears evident that the two exponents whose political philosophies reached the greatest insight in the field were Martin Heidegger and Giovanni Gentile. Between their ideas, Heideggerian ontology is the one which acquired the greatest importance for the refinement of a firmly grounded political project.

Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche have been utilized by nearly every political current; however, Heidegger and Gentile are far more difficult to employ. It is certain that the Italian theorized about a societal structure that could encompass more than just nationalism, and that the German’s philosophy has served as an inspiration for thinkers outside the nationalist realm, such as Sartre or Derrida. But with Heidegger, something is needed which must go beyond the mere intention of reclaiming certain aspects of his philosophy while leaving aside others. As the years pass on, his most political writings are becoming widely disseminated again. This delay has not been the consequence of ill-intentioned actions of the past; rather, the explanation is that immediately after the war, Heidegger’s thought of the thirties and forties was lost, and even the philosopher himself did not bother to deal with this situation. Part of this nationalist ontology came to light during the eighties, only to return again at the center of various controversies which were sparked by the ambiguity of the various bibliographical references.

Today the scenario is different, as all of Heidegger’s seminars given at the time of nationalist hegemony in Germany and Europe have been recovered and published, including his legendary Black Notebooks. There is now no doubt. Heidegger’s ontology was connected to a way of thinking which considered of great importance a kind of nationalism, sovereignism, or identitarianism, whose roots had to be mainly popular or social. Also, most importantly, the foundation for this ontology is found in the concept of Polemos, translated by Heidegger as confrontation. From this an ontology or study of Being originated in which the identitarian aspect was fundamental.

Having said this, it is clear that Heidegger’s polemology has come to present itself as an authentic and radical philosophical principle in the domain of the third political theory.

Heidegger’s Polemos lays the foundations for a new ethic rooted in the heroic vision of pre-capitalist societies. From these foundations emerges a new—yet, ancient—way of understanding man and communities, a collection of ideas and values through which Heidegger tried to oppose the liberal plan of his times, and with which the hegemony of contemporary globalism could likewise be opposed.

Carlos Videla

POLEMOLOGY

Polemos is a philosophical concept stemming from Greek culture that is reminiscent of a tradition and a way of understanding existence as old as mankind.

This natural principle—which was subsequently made culture—has been interpreted in the following complementary ways in different disciplines: ontologically as the experience of existence as confrontation, anthropologically as the struggle for life, and sociologically as the basis of heroic and agonal societies. Understanding and experiencing existence polemologically was preserved in the majority of known cultures until the appearance of the European liberal system of values. The replacement of the hero with the merchant and of traditional communities with consumer societies have essentially meant the dissolution of this ancestral way of seeing the world.

In this process, the deviation of the concept of freedom, essential to liberalism, has played an important role in the ontological subversion of the agonal tradition. Freedom, defined for millennia as the sovereign ability to determine personal and community boundaries, generating diversity and identity, has been transformed during the last centuries into precisely the opposite; that is, into the absence of limits.

Freedom was fundamental in the Greek paideia, the educational system based on the virtue of self-control and its extension into the autonomy of the polis. This virtue allowed for the making of autonomous decisions based on thoughtful judgments, with the limitations that community involvement entailed. Classical freedom, therefore, was based on discipline, rigor, control, and limit.

Liberalism, born in the sixteenth century, rebelled against this tradition, even though during its first centuries of existence it kept some ties with classical culture. During this period, authors such as John Locke were dynamiting the foundations of the traditional culture by defining the concept of self-control as something irrational, pre-modern, paternalistic, and even tyrannical. The liberal order’s idea of freedom was based on emancipation from the restraints of tradition, social and economic rules, and even from the limits of nature. Locke, the first philosopher of liberalism, considered freedom as the individual ability to think, stripped of any cultural or communitarian ties. Even belonging to a family, a community, or a nation had to be something thought out by the individual will and accepted or rejected following a personal and detached consideration. Broader views were discarded or put aside as secondary. On this premise, Hobbes stipulated that human beings were autonomous, unconnected, and therefore freedom itself was achieved where law was silenced, and where norms—nomos—and customs and community ties were reduced to a minimum.

The ancient individual choice based on self-control and the limits imposed by social integrity, culture, and connection to nature was turned into a decision driven by selfishness and devoid of any ethical boundary over individual reason. Man, who once was the political animal of the paideia and classical virtue, gave way to the liberal individualist.

This concept of freedom without limits generated a new cultural principle that pervaded the social, economic, and political domains over the following centuries. In this transformation, productive labor has drifted into a deregulated and transnational financial capitalism, a libertarian and right-wing anarcho-capitalism with deeply negative effects on human nature. Furthermore, this process has cleared the way for a nihilistic culture, promoted by the new progressive and transhumanist left, in which the lack of identity reigns at a personal and communal level.

The globalist world order of our days derives directly from the interpretation of freedom as a radical opposition to the pre-modern virtue of self-control. Globalism is the implementation on a planetary scale of a culture based on the end of the concept of limit, a plan for a society based on universality and undifferentiation.

Any philosophical and political project that truly intends to confront the current system must base its worldview on aspects that invalidate the conceptual basis of liberalism. As such, the ideas that are radically antagonistic to global liberalism are represented by diversity, particularity, identity, and limits. Neither proletarian universalism nor deconstructive progressivism could and will ever be able to stand up to present-day globalism. Therefore, the alleged omnipotence of postmodernism and deconstructionism is not such, and for this reason they have been neutralized and assimilated into the hegemonic globalist bloc since the last several decades.

The background to this situation lies in the philosophical roots shared by liberalism and the so-called cultural Marxism. Postmodern authors attempted to use precisely the concepts of undifferentiation, abstraction, deterritorialization, and desubjectification for their revolutionary project,