Jussi Backman
Current position: Senior Research Fellow, Tampere Institute for Advanced Study / Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University.
Ph.D. 2010 Theoretical philosophy (University of Helsinki)
Diplôme d'études approfondies 2003 Philosophy and history of ideas (Université de Nice)
M.A. 2002 Theoretical philosophy, Comparative literature, Aesthetics, Ancient Greek, Latin (University of Helsinki)
Senior research fellow 2023-2026 (Tampere University)
Academy of Finland research fellow 2018-2023 (University of Jyväskylä)
Senior lecturer in philosophy 2012-18 (University of Jyväskylä)
Postdoctoral researcher 2010-12, research project European Rationality in the Break from Modernity (University of Helsinki)
Visiting academic 2019 (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Visiting academic 2018-19 (University of Helsinki)
Visiting academic 2014 (Kingston University London)
Main areas of interest:
- phenomenology, hermeneutics, continental political thought, recent French philosophy (Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux)
- ancient philosophy (the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle)
- conceptual history
Latest research:
- the Greek beginning and the contemporary "end" of metaphysics, the new postmetaphysical ontologies in contemporary continental philosophy
- the philosophical history of the concept of creativity
Ph.D. 2010 Theoretical philosophy (University of Helsinki)
Diplôme d'études approfondies 2003 Philosophy and history of ideas (Université de Nice)
M.A. 2002 Theoretical philosophy, Comparative literature, Aesthetics, Ancient Greek, Latin (University of Helsinki)
Senior research fellow 2023-2026 (Tampere University)
Academy of Finland research fellow 2018-2023 (University of Jyväskylä)
Senior lecturer in philosophy 2012-18 (University of Jyväskylä)
Postdoctoral researcher 2010-12, research project European Rationality in the Break from Modernity (University of Helsinki)
Visiting academic 2019 (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Visiting academic 2018-19 (University of Helsinki)
Visiting academic 2014 (Kingston University London)
Main areas of interest:
- phenomenology, hermeneutics, continental political thought, recent French philosophy (Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux)
- ancient philosophy (the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle)
- conceptual history
Latest research:
- the Greek beginning and the contemporary "end" of metaphysics, the new postmetaphysical ontologies in contemporary continental philosophy
- the philosophical history of the concept of creativity
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Books by Jussi Backman
Review by Michael Bowler at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/complicated-presence-heidegger-and-the-postmetaphysical-unity-of-being/
Review by Pascal Massie in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual:
https://heidegger-circle.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Gatherings2019-09Backmanreview.pdf
This study addresses this contemporary situation on the basis of the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Its methodological framework is Heidegger’s phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to the history of philosophy. It seeks to understand, in terms of the metaphysical quest for unity, Heidegger’s contrast between the first (Greek) beginning or “onset” (Anfang) of philosophy and another onset of thinking. This other onset is a possibility inherent in the contemporary situation in which, according to Heidegger, the metaphysical tradition has developed to its utmost limits and thereby come to an end.
Part I is a detailed interpretation of the surviving fragments of the Poem of Parmenides of Elea (fl. c. 500 BC), an outstanding representative of the first philosophical beginning in Heidegger’s sense. It is argued that the Poem is not a simple denial of apparent plurality and difference (the “mortal acceptances,” doxai) in favor of an extreme monism. Parmenides’ point is rather to show in what sense the different instances of Being can be reduced to an absolute level of truth or evidence (aletheia), which is the unity of Being as such (to eon). What in prephilosophical human experience is accepted as being is referred to the source of its acceptability: intelligibility as such, the simple and undifferentiated presence to thinking that ultimately excludes unpresence and otherness.
Part II interprets selected key texts from different stages in Heidegger’s thinking in terms of the unity of Being. It argues that one aspect of Heidegger’s sustained and gradually deepening philosophical quest was to think the unity of Being as singularity, as the instantaneous, context-specific, and differential unity of a temporally meaningful situation. In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger articulates the temporal situatedness of the human awareness of meaningful presence. His later work moves on to study the situational correlation between presence and the human awareness as such. Heidegger’s “postmetaphysical” articulation seeks to show how presence becomes meaningful precisely as situated, in an event of differentiation from a multidimensional context of unpresence. In resigning itself to this irreducibly complicated and singular character of meaningful presence, philosophy also faces its own historically situated finitude. This resignation is an essential feature of Heidegger’s “other onset” of thinking.
Edited volumes by Jussi Backman
Conservative thinkers on the European continent have generally been less prone to compromise with the political Enlightenment than their Anglo-American counterparts. Since the eighteenth century, they have been profoundly influenced by the relativist and antirationalist intellectual currents designated by Isaiah Berlin as the "Counter-Enlightenment" and extending via nineteenth-century Romanticism and vitalism to the "conservative revolution" of Weimar-era Germany. If such an uncompromising stance towards the main tenets of progressive thought constituted a liability in the aftermath of the Second World War, soon their fundamental questioning of liberal principles acquired a new – and perhaps unexpected – audience among left-leaning democratic theorists and critics of modernity. Today, with the resurgence of nationalism, nativism, and cultural and ethnic particularism, it is safe to argue that such a thinking is far from being old news.
The volume engages in a discussion of conservative topics and thinkers on the European continent from 1789 to the present. It addresses issues such as attitudes towards change, conceptions of time, sovereignty and democracy, the role of conflict, the limits of reason, and the relation between the individual and the community, as they have been interpreted and reinterpreted from conservative points of view. In addition, close attention is paid to the links of conservative thought to late modern strands of continental philosophy – nihilism, relativism and historicism, among others – and to its permeation by ideational components stemming from the universes of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and fascism. The contributions will mainly draw on the resources of political philosophy, conceptual history, and ideological analysis. They assess the relevance of the continental varieties of conservatism for – and their impact on – contemporary discussions in and beyond Europe. The main aim of the volume is to shed new light on the conservative intellectual lineages of various topical notions in today’s political disputes.
The focus of the volume is on conservative political movements, ideologies, thinkers, and intellectual currents on the European continent (as opposed to Anglo-American political conservatism) from the 1789 French Revolution to the present day. In particular, the volume explores the ways in which continental political conservatism was influenced by the Counter-Enlightenment. The emphasis is on original research articles in the fields of political philosophy and theory and intellectual history, but empirical studies as well as systematic review and review articles will also be welcomed. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- The proto-Romantic German Counter-Enlightenment and its conservative political legacy.
- French counterrevolutionary conservatism and its legacy.
- Conservative political legacy of German idealism and Romanticism.
- Conservative political legacy of historicism.
- Conservative political legacy of Lebensphilosophie and Nietzsche.
- The German "conservative revolution" of the Weimar period and its legacy.
- Postwar and contemporary "radical conservatism".
Jussi Backman and Pedro T. Magalhães:
Editorial: Conservative Dispositions in Continental Thought
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.1095849
Giovanni Damele:
Crowds, Leaders, and Epidemic Psychosis: The Relationship Between Crowd Psychology and Elite Theory and Its Contemporary Relevance
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.1009181
Timo Pankakoski:
What is Conservative and Revolutionary about the "Conservative Revolution"? Argument-Level Evidence from Three Thinkers
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.959411
Ville Suuronen:
Why Are Political Discussions with Fascists Impossible? Reflections on the Far-Right Politics of Silence
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.951236
Hjalmar Falk:
The Modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's Katechontism as Reactionary Chronopolitics
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.957094
Jussi Backman:
Radical Conservatism and the Heideggerian Right: Heidegger, de Benoist, Dugin
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.941799
Pedro T. Magalhães:
Beyond the Reactionary Sea Change: Antimodern Thought, American Politics, and Political Science
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.954668
Tuukka Brunila:
Depoliticization of Politics and Power: Mouffe and the Conservative Disposition in Postfoundational Political Theory
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.974065
PART I: BIOPOLITICS IN ANCIENT THOUGHT
1:Biopolitics and the "boundless people": An Iliadic model (Sara Brill)
2:Plato and the biopolitical purge of the city-state (Mika Ojakangas)
3:Sovereign power and social justice: Plato and Aristotle on justice and its biopolitical basis in heterosexual copulation, procreation, and upbringing (Kathy L. Gaca)
PART II: ANCIENT THOUGHT BEYOND BIOPOLITICS
4:Otherwise than (bio)politics: Nature and the sacred in tragic life (Kalliopi Nikolopoulou)
5:Beyond biopolitics and juridico-institutional politics: Aristotle on the nature of politics (Adriel M. Trott)
6:Bene vivere politice: On the (meta)biopolitics of "happiness" (Jussi Backman)
PART III: BIOPOLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF ANCIENT THOUGHT
7:Hannah Arendt's genealogy of biopolitics: From Greek materialism to modern human superfluity (Ville Suuronen)
8:From biopolitics to biopoetics and back again: On a counterintuitive continuity in Foucault's thought (Sergei Prozorov)
9:Agamben's Aristotelian biopolitics: Conceptual and methodological problems (Antonio Cimino)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biopolitics-and-ancient-thought-9780192847102?cc=nl&lang=en
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847102.001.0001
Review by Morten S. Thaning in Foucault Studies:
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i35.7083
Kokoelma piirtää Heideggerin haastavasta ja syvällisestä ajattelusta rikkaan ja moni-ilmeisen kuvan, joka soveltuu niin tutkijoiden kuin filosofian harrastajienkin käyttöön. Teos on ensimmäinen kattava kokoelma suomalaista Heidegger-tutkimusta. Kirja sisältää myös toimittajien johdatuksen Heideggeriin ja katsauksen aiheen historiaan Suomessa.
Translations by Jussi Backman
Martin Heideggerin luentosarja Johdatus metafysiikkaan vuodelta 1935 edustaa siirtymää Olemisen ja ajan (1927) fundamentaaliontologiasta hänen myöhempään ”olemishistorialliseen” ajatteluunsa, joka hahmottelee metafyysisen tradition rajoja ja viitoittaa tietä kohti länsimaisen ajattelun ”toista alkua”. Kielen ja filosofian historiaa koskevien pohdiskelujen avulla Heidegger pyrkii osoittamaan, ettei ”oleminen” pohjimmiltaan suinkaan ole tyhjä ja epämääräinen sana, vaan sen mieli onkin länsimaisessa ajatteluperinteessä rajautunut ja määrittynyt monessa suhteessa.
Published papers in English by Jussi Backman
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781438492131-011
"If the previous chapters by Cabrera, Reid and Craig, and Cerbone all accentuate the paradox of existence, that our being-in-the-world is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, good and evil, joyous and painful, Jussi Backman's "Not One Power, But Two: Dark Grounds and Twilit Paradises in Malick" investigates this fundamental ambivalence in terms of Schelling's doctrine of evil, a view that assigns evil (and hence melancholy) a fundamental place as a basic principle of reality. Backman's suggestion at once deepens and complexifies the way in which Malick's films can be seen as exercises in "aesthetic theodicy," as Sinnerbrink has said." (Steven DeLay, Introduction)
Review by Michael Bowler at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/complicated-presence-heidegger-and-the-postmetaphysical-unity-of-being/
Review by Pascal Massie in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual:
https://heidegger-circle.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Gatherings2019-09Backmanreview.pdf
This study addresses this contemporary situation on the basis of the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Its methodological framework is Heidegger’s phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to the history of philosophy. It seeks to understand, in terms of the metaphysical quest for unity, Heidegger’s contrast between the first (Greek) beginning or “onset” (Anfang) of philosophy and another onset of thinking. This other onset is a possibility inherent in the contemporary situation in which, according to Heidegger, the metaphysical tradition has developed to its utmost limits and thereby come to an end.
Part I is a detailed interpretation of the surviving fragments of the Poem of Parmenides of Elea (fl. c. 500 BC), an outstanding representative of the first philosophical beginning in Heidegger’s sense. It is argued that the Poem is not a simple denial of apparent plurality and difference (the “mortal acceptances,” doxai) in favor of an extreme monism. Parmenides’ point is rather to show in what sense the different instances of Being can be reduced to an absolute level of truth or evidence (aletheia), which is the unity of Being as such (to eon). What in prephilosophical human experience is accepted as being is referred to the source of its acceptability: intelligibility as such, the simple and undifferentiated presence to thinking that ultimately excludes unpresence and otherness.
Part II interprets selected key texts from different stages in Heidegger’s thinking in terms of the unity of Being. It argues that one aspect of Heidegger’s sustained and gradually deepening philosophical quest was to think the unity of Being as singularity, as the instantaneous, context-specific, and differential unity of a temporally meaningful situation. In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger articulates the temporal situatedness of the human awareness of meaningful presence. His later work moves on to study the situational correlation between presence and the human awareness as such. Heidegger’s “postmetaphysical” articulation seeks to show how presence becomes meaningful precisely as situated, in an event of differentiation from a multidimensional context of unpresence. In resigning itself to this irreducibly complicated and singular character of meaningful presence, philosophy also faces its own historically situated finitude. This resignation is an essential feature of Heidegger’s “other onset” of thinking.
Conservative thinkers on the European continent have generally been less prone to compromise with the political Enlightenment than their Anglo-American counterparts. Since the eighteenth century, they have been profoundly influenced by the relativist and antirationalist intellectual currents designated by Isaiah Berlin as the "Counter-Enlightenment" and extending via nineteenth-century Romanticism and vitalism to the "conservative revolution" of Weimar-era Germany. If such an uncompromising stance towards the main tenets of progressive thought constituted a liability in the aftermath of the Second World War, soon their fundamental questioning of liberal principles acquired a new – and perhaps unexpected – audience among left-leaning democratic theorists and critics of modernity. Today, with the resurgence of nationalism, nativism, and cultural and ethnic particularism, it is safe to argue that such a thinking is far from being old news.
The volume engages in a discussion of conservative topics and thinkers on the European continent from 1789 to the present. It addresses issues such as attitudes towards change, conceptions of time, sovereignty and democracy, the role of conflict, the limits of reason, and the relation between the individual and the community, as they have been interpreted and reinterpreted from conservative points of view. In addition, close attention is paid to the links of conservative thought to late modern strands of continental philosophy – nihilism, relativism and historicism, among others – and to its permeation by ideational components stemming from the universes of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and fascism. The contributions will mainly draw on the resources of political philosophy, conceptual history, and ideological analysis. They assess the relevance of the continental varieties of conservatism for – and their impact on – contemporary discussions in and beyond Europe. The main aim of the volume is to shed new light on the conservative intellectual lineages of various topical notions in today’s political disputes.
The focus of the volume is on conservative political movements, ideologies, thinkers, and intellectual currents on the European continent (as opposed to Anglo-American political conservatism) from the 1789 French Revolution to the present day. In particular, the volume explores the ways in which continental political conservatism was influenced by the Counter-Enlightenment. The emphasis is on original research articles in the fields of political philosophy and theory and intellectual history, but empirical studies as well as systematic review and review articles will also be welcomed. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- The proto-Romantic German Counter-Enlightenment and its conservative political legacy.
- French counterrevolutionary conservatism and its legacy.
- Conservative political legacy of German idealism and Romanticism.
- Conservative political legacy of historicism.
- Conservative political legacy of Lebensphilosophie and Nietzsche.
- The German "conservative revolution" of the Weimar period and its legacy.
- Postwar and contemporary "radical conservatism".
Jussi Backman and Pedro T. Magalhães:
Editorial: Conservative Dispositions in Continental Thought
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.1095849
Giovanni Damele:
Crowds, Leaders, and Epidemic Psychosis: The Relationship Between Crowd Psychology and Elite Theory and Its Contemporary Relevance
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.1009181
Timo Pankakoski:
What is Conservative and Revolutionary about the "Conservative Revolution"? Argument-Level Evidence from Three Thinkers
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.959411
Ville Suuronen:
Why Are Political Discussions with Fascists Impossible? Reflections on the Far-Right Politics of Silence
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.951236
Hjalmar Falk:
The Modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's Katechontism as Reactionary Chronopolitics
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.957094
Jussi Backman:
Radical Conservatism and the Heideggerian Right: Heidegger, de Benoist, Dugin
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.941799
Pedro T. Magalhães:
Beyond the Reactionary Sea Change: Antimodern Thought, American Politics, and Political Science
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.954668
Tuukka Brunila:
Depoliticization of Politics and Power: Mouffe and the Conservative Disposition in Postfoundational Political Theory
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.974065
PART I: BIOPOLITICS IN ANCIENT THOUGHT
1:Biopolitics and the "boundless people": An Iliadic model (Sara Brill)
2:Plato and the biopolitical purge of the city-state (Mika Ojakangas)
3:Sovereign power and social justice: Plato and Aristotle on justice and its biopolitical basis in heterosexual copulation, procreation, and upbringing (Kathy L. Gaca)
PART II: ANCIENT THOUGHT BEYOND BIOPOLITICS
4:Otherwise than (bio)politics: Nature and the sacred in tragic life (Kalliopi Nikolopoulou)
5:Beyond biopolitics and juridico-institutional politics: Aristotle on the nature of politics (Adriel M. Trott)
6:Bene vivere politice: On the (meta)biopolitics of "happiness" (Jussi Backman)
PART III: BIOPOLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF ANCIENT THOUGHT
7:Hannah Arendt's genealogy of biopolitics: From Greek materialism to modern human superfluity (Ville Suuronen)
8:From biopolitics to biopoetics and back again: On a counterintuitive continuity in Foucault's thought (Sergei Prozorov)
9:Agamben's Aristotelian biopolitics: Conceptual and methodological problems (Antonio Cimino)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biopolitics-and-ancient-thought-9780192847102?cc=nl&lang=en
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847102.001.0001
Review by Morten S. Thaning in Foucault Studies:
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i35.7083
Kokoelma piirtää Heideggerin haastavasta ja syvällisestä ajattelusta rikkaan ja moni-ilmeisen kuvan, joka soveltuu niin tutkijoiden kuin filosofian harrastajienkin käyttöön. Teos on ensimmäinen kattava kokoelma suomalaista Heidegger-tutkimusta. Kirja sisältää myös toimittajien johdatuksen Heideggeriin ja katsauksen aiheen historiaan Suomessa.
Martin Heideggerin luentosarja Johdatus metafysiikkaan vuodelta 1935 edustaa siirtymää Olemisen ja ajan (1927) fundamentaaliontologiasta hänen myöhempään ”olemishistorialliseen” ajatteluunsa, joka hahmottelee metafyysisen tradition rajoja ja viitoittaa tietä kohti länsimaisen ajattelun ”toista alkua”. Kielen ja filosofian historiaa koskevien pohdiskelujen avulla Heidegger pyrkii osoittamaan, ettei ”oleminen” pohjimmiltaan suinkaan ole tyhjä ja epämääräinen sana, vaan sen mieli onkin länsimaisessa ajatteluperinteessä rajautunut ja määrittynyt monessa suhteessa.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781438492131-011
"If the previous chapters by Cabrera, Reid and Craig, and Cerbone all accentuate the paradox of existence, that our being-in-the-world is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, good and evil, joyous and painful, Jussi Backman's "Not One Power, But Two: Dark Grounds and Twilit Paradises in Malick" investigates this fundamental ambivalence in terms of Schelling's doctrine of evil, a view that assigns evil (and hence melancholy) a fundamental place as a basic principle of reality. Backman's suggestion at once deepens and complexifies the way in which Malick's films can be seen as exercises in "aesthetic theodicy," as Sinnerbrink has said." (Steven DeLay, Introduction)
https://netn.fi/fi/artikkeli/mita-aleksandr-dugin-tarkoittaa?fbclid=IwAR2gDtmjz8wnio6jpabh-JerEcPT_ZVNMJ55clYyBknUyWe-gV6DszhNw6k
Translated from: “Transcendental Idealism and Strong Correlationism: Meillassoux and the End of Heideggerian Finitude,” by Jussi Backman, in Phenomenology and the Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen, pp. 276–294. Copyright 2014. Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group through PLSclear. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203797037
Translated by Fernando Huesca Ramón, translation revised by Jean Orejarena Torres and César Mora Alonso.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-and-the-problem-of-phenomena/
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama presented his provocative thesis of liberal democracy as an “end of history,” as the culmination of political history in a system of maximal freedom and mutual recognition. Fukuyama invokes the teleological philosophy of history of Hegel, Marx, and Alexandre Kojève that sees the historical process as fueled by intellectual, social, and economic contradictions whose ultimate resolution will remove the driving force behind substantial historical transformations. Fukuyama’s thesis contrasted conspicuously with Jean-François Lyotard’s equally provocative 1979 diagnosis of the ongoing loss of credibility of grand “metanarratives” – post-Hegelian teleological and totalizing narratives of universal history – as a result of the increasing fragmentation of knowledge. Instead of an end of history, Lyotard predicts the end of History as a universal narrative and its replacement by “small narratives” or micronarratives – local histories whose limited scopes accommodate the existence of other, incommensurate narratives. In the light of Heideggerian and Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and Foucauldian discursive genealogy, micronarratives can here be understood as a heuristic, temporary, and situated narrative interpretations that are never total or definitive, but are constantly being renarrated for the changing purposes of changing presents.
I suggest that the dispute between grand and small narratives of history is an ongoing one and an aspect of the wider complex conflict between the legacies of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. The primarily theoretical and intellectual conflict has a central and volatile political dimension. While the critique of totalizing metanarratives has typically been seen as an emancipatory critique and can be connected to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the structure of totalitarian ideology, it has in recent decades been associated with “post-truth” phenomena and has also been increasingly appropriated by radical-conservative and “ethnopluralistic” ideologists such as Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. An example of an opposite but no less controversial historical narrative strategy is Steven Pinker’s recent rehabilitation and vindication of Enlightenment universal progress narratives.
The terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” were famously used by Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the intensifying tendency of modern political governments to view and control their citizens as members of a biological population, with a focus on health, reproduction, and genetic, in some cases even eugenic, considerations. For Foucault, biopolitical government was primarily a modern phenomenon connected to the emergence of industrial capitalism and modern human sciences and biosciences. However, several later commentators have argued that biopolitical tendencies are in fact characteristic of the entire history of Western political thought and political technology since antiquity.
In my talk, I approach the question of the history and origin of biopolitics by looking not at specific political techniques but rather at political ideals, theoretical notions of the final aim of the political community. I acknowledge that it is undeniable that biopolitical techniques and means of control existed already in Greek antiquity and ancient and medieval political thought. However, I argue that the “happiness” (Greek eudaimonia, Latin beatitudo) that constitutes the greatest human good and the ultimate end of polities in the Aristotelian tradition is not a “biopolitical” ideal, but rather a “metabiopolitical” one, consisting in a contemplative activity situated above and beyond the biological as well as the political levels of human existence. This ideal persists through the medieval tradition of Aristotelian thought.
It is only in modernity that this classical ideal of happiness is fundamentally challenged and transformed; as Hannah Arendt puts it, in Western modernity, mere being alive comes to be seen as the greatest human good, and happiness gradually begins to be understood as a subjective “quality of life.” This is particularly evident in Thomas Hobbes, who denies the validity of the Aristotelian ideal of a supreme human good and insists that the end of the political commonwealth is rather to preserve citizens from the supreme evil, namely, violent death. This “biopolitical” understanding of the end of political government as mere preservation of life leads Hobbes to identify civic happiness with “commodious living,” that is, with the liberty to privately pursue one’s private goals and to thus seek a maximal quality of life. John Locke echoes Hobbes by equating happiness with maximal subjective pleasure, which different for different persons; the purpose of the commonwealth is the preservation of life for the pursuit of whatever one’s individual happiness may consist in.
I conclude by noting that in both the Aristotelian “metabiopolitical” and the Hobbesian “biopolitical” paradigms, the political realm is ultimately seen as a means to an end that itself is situated outside the realm of politics. Hannah Arendt draws our attention to a neglected third alternative: an ideal of “public happiness” consisting in political participation itself.
The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek since the third century BCE required the readaptation of Greek terms to transmit theological concepts foreign to the Greek mythological and philosophical traditions to the Hellenistic world. One such concept was the notion of divine creation that had become central in Second Temple Judaism. While the verb poieō, “to make, to produce,” was often used, in certain contexts the Septuagint uses the verb ktizō, which originally signifies “to inhabit, to settle (a land or place)” and later “to found, to establish, to institute (a city,polity, or institution).” Philo of Alexandria (De opificio mundi) compares the act of creation to the founding of a new city (polis) by a ruler with sovereign power (autokratēs exousia), and contrasts this with the Platonic model of the divine Demiurge, who works on the basis of pre-existing models and materials. I examine these special political connotations of ktizō (“to create”) and ktisis (“creation”) and argue that the use of these terms seeks to emphasize the absolute novelty of the act of creation and the absolute sovereignty of the creator’s will.
The terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” were famously used by Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the intensifying tendency of modern political governments to view and control their citizens as members of a biological population, with a focus on health, reproduction, and genetic, in some cases even eugenic, considerations. For Foucault, biopolitical government was primarily a modern phenomenon connected to the emergence of industrial capitalism and modern human sciences and biosciences. However, several later commentators have argued that biopolitical tendencies are in fact characteristic of the entire history of Western political thought and political technology since antiquity.
In my talk, I approach the question of the history and origin of biopolitics by looking not at specific political techniques but rather at political ideals, theoretical notions of the final aim of the political community. I acknowledge that it is undeniable that biopolitical techniques and means of control existed already in Greek antiquity and ancient and medieval political thought. However, I argue that the “happiness” (Greek eudaimonia, Latin beatitudo) that constitutes the greatest human good and the ultimate end of polities in the Aristotelian tradition is not a “biopolitical” ideal, but rather a “metabiopolitical” one, consisting in a contemplative activity situated above and beyond the biological as well as the political levels of human existence. This ideal persists through the medieval tradition of Aristotelian thought. It is only in modernity that this classical ideal of happiness is fundamentally challenged and transformed; as Hannah Arendt puts it, in Western modernity, mere being alive comes to be seen as the greatest human good, and happiness gradually begins to be understood as a subjective “quality of life.” I show that this is particularly evident in Thomas Hobbes, who denies the validity of the Aristotelian ideal of a supreme human good and insists that the end of the political commonwealth is rather to preserve citizens from the supreme evil, namely, violent death. This “biopolitical” understanding of the end of political government as mere preservation of life leads Hobbes to identify civic happiness with “commodious living,” that is, with the liberty to privately pursue one’s private goals and to thus seek a maximal quality of life.
I conclude by noting that in both the Aristotelian “metabiopolitical” and the Hobbesian “biopolitical” paradigms, the political realm is ultimately seen as a means to an end that itself is situated outside the realm of politics. Hannah Arendt draws our attention to a neglected third alternative: an ideal of “public happiness” consisting in political participation itself.
(1) The emergence of the creation narratives of the Hebrew Bible, dated by most scholars to the postexilic period of the development of Second Temple Judaism in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The new focus on the theology of creation is closely linked to the development of Jewish monotheism in the full sense of the word and its new universalistic dimensions. This theology is transmitted to the wider Hellenistic world by the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible since the third century BCE.
(2) While actual creation myths are largely absent from traditional Greek cosmogony and theogony, the gradual emergence of teleological conceptions of nature in Greek philosophy from Anaxagoras and Empedocles to Diogenes of Apollonia and Socrates makes the notion of intelligent divine design relevant in a novel manner. This approach culminates in Plato’s Timaeus, a rational reconstruction of the design and ordering of the cosmos by the divine Demiurge, on the basis of pre-existing ideal forms and chaotic materiality. This model and its many reinterpretations had a determining influence on the Platonic tradition and Stoicism as well as the earliest Christian theology (Athenagoras of Athens, Justin the Martyr).
(3) The emergence in the second century CE (Theophilus of Antioch, Tertullian) of the theological doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, which denies the pre-existence of matter and interprets the ideal forms as thoughts of the creator. This radical concept of creation, which as such does not appear in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, was partly motivated by the need to resist Gnostic ideas of the material world as inherently evil; its focus on the absolute novelty of creation is the basis for the modern concept of creativity.
Following up on the introductory talk by Antonio Cimino, I briefly discuss biopolitics as 1) a “political technology,” as governmental techniques aimed at controlling citizens as members of a biological population, with a special focus on their health, reproduction, and mortality, and involving genetic, sometimes even eugenic, considerations; and as 2) an ideal of political theory in which the ultimate aim and purpose of the political community and the political government is to enhance the biological life-process of the population, and which understands the civic “happiness” of the population in terms of a biologized “quality of life.” As many commentators have shown, it is evident that biopolitics in the first sense of a governmental technique existed in antiquity and was also an important facet of ancient and medieval political theory in Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. However, I argue that biopolitics as a political ideal is a modern phenomenon that properly emerges with Thomas Hobbes. In ancient and medieval political theory, the ultimate purpose of the polity – supreme human happiness – was situated on a level above and beyond the human biological life-process.
Francis Fukuyama herätti kylmän sodan jälkeen laajaa ärtymystä teesillään liberaalista demokratiasta ”historian loppuna”, joka on osoittautumassa koko ihmiskunnan poliittisen historian päätepisteeksi, vapauden ja keskinäisen kunnioituksen huipentumaksi. Fukuyama viittaa teesillään G. W. F. Hegelin, Karl Marxin ja Alexandre Kojèven teleologiseen ajatusperinteeseen, jossa historian moottorina nähdään erilaiset ajatukselliset, yhteiskunnalliset tai taloudelliset ristiriidat, jotka lopulta raukeavat jännitteettömään loppuratkaisuun, jolloin myös sisällöllisen historiallisen muutoksen perusdynamiikka häviää. Hegeliläinen historianfilosofia on modernin idealismin tuote, mutta se juontaa juurensa kristilliseen luomisesta viimeiseen tuomioon etenevään pelastushistoriaan ensimmäisenä aidosti universaalina kehityskertomuksena.
Vastaavaa ärtymystä herätti Jean-François Lyotardin kymmenisen vuotta aikaisemmin esittämä analyysi jälkimodernista ajasta tilanteena, jossa suuret ”metakertomukset” menettävät uskottavuutensa. Metakertomuksilla Lyotard viittasi juuri hegeliläisiin historianfilosofisiin narratiiveihin, joissa historia näyttäytyy universaalina teleologisena kehityskulkuna; tiedon etenevä fragmentoituminen vie Lyotardin mukaan yhtenäisiltä metakertomuksilta pohjan. Hegeliläinen historian loppu kääntyy universaalihistorian lopuksi ja korvautumiseksi ”pienillä kertomuksilla”, paikallisilla historioilla, joille toisten, yhteismitattomien kertomusten olemassaolo ei ole ongelma.
Esitelmä tarkastelee ajatusta universaalihistorian jälkeisestä pienten kertomusten ajasta Martin Heideggerin ja Hans-Georg Gadamerin filosofisen hermeneutiikan valossa. Hermeneutiikka hyväksyy Hegelin ajatuksen ajattelun ja kulttuurin historiallisuudesta ja muuttuvuudesta ja myös sen, että historia kerrotaan aina lopustaan käsin. Se kuitenkin hylkää hegeliläisen teleologian taustalla olevan ajatuksen absoluuttisesta tiedosta, loppuun saakka kehittyneestä ja täydellisen (itse)tietoisesta näkökulmasta, jolla ei ole enää ulkopuolta. Ajattelumme nykytila on historiallisen perinteensä kehityksen muovaama emmekä katso tuota kehitystä objektiivisesti tai neutraalisti vaan aina nykytilanteesta käsin, mutta nykytilanteen näkökulma on olennaisesti äärellinen ja kontekstisidonnainen. Itseymmärryksemme edellyttää, että yritämme muodostaa historiastamme johdonmukaisen kertomuksen, joka kaikkien kertomusten tapaan kerrotaan lopustaan käsin – mutta samalla on hyväksyttävä, että tämä kertomus on nykytilannetta palveleva heuristinen väline, joka voidaan kertoa toisin ja tullaan kertomaan toisin. Voimme kertoa menneisyytemme, emme tulevaisuutta. Hermeneuttisella ajatuksella historian kerronnallisesta tilannesidonnaisuudesta on ollut keskeinen vaikutus Hayden Whiten ja Paul Ricœurin kaltaisten teoreetikkojen edustamaan historianfilosofian ”narratiiviseen käänteeseen” ja myös Michel Foucault’n diskurssihistoriallisiin genealogioihin, jotka palvelevat viime kädessä ”oman itsemme kriittistä ontologiaa”.
I argue that the visual paradigms and metaphors permeating Platonic metaphysics can be regarded as the result of a synthesis of the approaches of Heraclitus and Parmenides. In pre-Platonic thought, the visual paradigm is still marginal. For Heraclitus, the basic structure of being is its discursive articulation (logos) into conceptual pairs of binary opposites, an articulation that at the same time binds differences together into a tensional unity. The fundamental grasping of this ultimate unity-in-difference is conceived primarily through acoustic terms as a non-sensory “hearing”; in Heraclitus, we thus find a primarily auditory epistemological paradigm. For Parmenides, by contrast, the ultimate unity of contraries is based on the capacity of thinking (noos) to intend anything as present; in fragment B 4, the exclusive relationship of thinking to intelligible presence is finally visualized in terms of a seeing or looking (leussō). This, I claim, is where a visual paradigm initially emerges.
Panel: Conservative Dispositions in Continental Thought: From Post-Revolutionary France to the Resurgence of Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century.
International Political Science Association (IPSA) 2021, 26th World Congress of Political Science, virtual conference. https://wc2021.ipsa.org/wc/panel/conservative-dispositions-continental-thought-post-revolutionary-france-resurgence.
Aleksandr Dugin has recently characterized Martin Heidegger as the key philosopher of the German “conservative revolution” of the Weimar era; Pierre Bourdieu and Göran Dahl have described Heidegger as a “radical conservative.” The paper will examine this “right Heideggerian” reading—contrasted with a “left Heideggerian” tradition— by tracing radical-conservative features in Heidegger’s work and by looking at the significance of Heidegger for two of the most influential theorists of contemporary radical conservatism, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin.
According to the historical narrative of the later Heidegger, the Western metaphysical tradition culminates in the modern technological domination and homogenization of reality, which, however, opens up the possibility of a post-metaphysical, post-modern “other beginning” of Western thinking, involving a profound rethinking of the Greek beginning of philosophy. This idea of a cyclic movement through which nihilistic modernity is overcome by letting modernity radicalize and culminate itself, which allows us to turn back to the roots of our tradition in a novel sense, is indeed analogous to the basic model of a “conservative revolution.” In Heidegger’s work of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in his recently published Black Notebooks, we encounter the national and cultural particularism of the German conservative tradition. Heidegger’s view of Nazi biological racism as an extreme avatar of modern technicity alongside liberalism and Bolshevism presents him as a radical conservative rather than a committed National Socialist. '
De Benoist, the key figure of the French Nouvelle Droite, is particularly inspired by Heidegger’s account of late modern technological nihilism, its historical roots and different manifestations. He makes use of this account in his attack on the universalism, subjectivism, and absolutism he sees as underlying the Western human rights doctrine and in the formulation of his own culturally particularistic “ethnopluralism” and “ethnoregionalism.” De Benoist’s Russian collaborator Dugin, sometimes perceived as a“chief ideologue of Putinism,” bases his polemic against the Western liberal hegemony and his conservative “fourth political theory” on the legacy of the German conservative revolution, particularly Heidegger’s philosophy of history and Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical particularism, and on the Russian tradition of Eurasianism.
I will present an alternative, Heideggerian account of the allegedly ongoing end of Western modernity and the possible dimensions of genuine postmodernity. In the Heideggerian historical narrative, the contemporary end of modernity is first and foremost a culmination and completion of the entire history of Western metaphysics, which begins to unfold in ancient Greece with Parmenides’ insight into being as pure intelligibility, as pure accessibility to thought. Metaphysical modernity is only the last phase in the development of metaphysics in which being gradually comes to be seen as availability to subjective control and ordering; Western modernity culminates in the late modern age of technical nihilism in which reality shows itself as a completely manipulable and homogeneous resource.
What is today commonly seen as postmodernity is, in fact, completed modernity in which the modern autonomous subject and the modern teleological “metanarratives” of history as progress dissolve into what Heidegger calls the technical “enframing” or “setup” (Gestell): a matrix of complete scientific, economic, and social surveillance and administration of all resources, including “human resources.” For Heidegger, the key thinker of completed modernity is Friedrich Nietzsche, the last great metaphysical philosopher of the West. A true “postmodernity” in the Heideggerian sense has not yet emerged—for Heidegger, postmodern thinking would consist in a radically new encounter with the fundamental finitude, historical and cultural situatedness, locality, and contextuality of all meaningful presence. Heidegger describes the turn from modernity to postmodernity as the turn from the complete homogeneity and universality of the technical Gestell to the extreme heterogeneity and singularity of the Geviert, the “fourfold,” a postmetaphysical perspective on things as dynamic points of convergence of four dimensions of meaningfulness.
The Heideggerian narrative of metaphysical modernity, contemporary late modernity, and emerging postmodernity is illustrated, in particular, with the help of examples from architectural modernism and postmodernism, with a focus on the question of what a genuinely postmodern architecture in the Heideggerian sense could look like.
In On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics (2016), Mika Ojakangas shows beyond dispute that the political art of governance as understood by Plato and Aristotle offered a wide array of techniques for governing human beings through the exercise of what can be characterized as “biopower” in the Foucauldian sense. In this sense, Platonic and Aristotelian political though was indeed “biopolitical.”
However, with the help of Hannah Arendt, I will propose a slightly different understanding of biopolitics based not on techniques of governance but on the way in which the final aim of the political community is conceptualized. The Western tradition of political thought since Plato has generally identified this aim as “happiness” (eudaimonia, beatitudo, felicitas), taken to consist in the attainment of the supreme good (summum bonum) accessible in the human life; Ojakangas cites this as one of the “biopolitical” features of ancient political thought. I argue—with Arendt—that Aristotelian eudaimonia was not a “biopolitical” ideal in the sense that the supreme good, for the human being, consists neither in the fact of being alive (zēn) nor in any way of life (bios) typical for the human species, but rather, as Aristotle puts it in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, in a bios according to something “divine” in the human being, namely, in a contemplative beholding (theōrein) of reality in the light of an intuitive insight (noein) into its most fundamental principles. This “metabiopolitical” understanding of the “good life” (eu zēn), for the sake of which the political community ultimately exists (even though, according to Aristotle, it initially comes into being for the sake of survival), was then transposed by Thomas Aquinas into a Christian context, in which the ultimate aim of political governance becomes the salvation of souls for an eternal life of the contemplation of God (contemplatio Dei), which alone constitutes the perfect human beatitudo.
As Roberto Esposito notes, it is only in the early modern model introduced by Thomas Hobbes that civic happiness (felicitas civilis) becomes identified with the simple avoidance of violent death as the human summum malum. For modernity, Arendt maintains in The Human Condition, being alive as such becomes the greatest human good, and the task of the contractual state is the coordination of individuals’ private pursuits of subjective happiness—or “quality of life” or “welfare”—in order to avoid the deadly conflicts characteristic of the prepolitical “state of nature.” In this sense, “biopolitics” is a decidedly modern paradigm. Interestingly, Arendt traces the roots of this biopolitical valuation of life for its own sake to the Christian notion of the sanctity of life, which Ojakangas, in turn, credits for the decline of ancient biopolitical practices under the influence of Christianity.
The paper studies Hannah Arendt’s attempt, in On Revolution (1963) and related writings, to retrieve the “lost treasure” of the American Revolution as an outstanding act of postwar intellectual “homecoming” in political theory. In stark contrast to most European theorists, Arendt, herself a refugee from the Third Reich, thought that Europe had a vital political lesson to learn from its American offspring—not from its contemporary mass culture, consumerism, and social inequality deplored by other émigré intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, but from the original political ideas of its founders. Arendt argues that the French Revolution of 1789 was turned by the Jacobins into a program of social transformation aimed at the eradication of misery and moral vice and that this social orientation subsequently became the standard model for the European revolutions of the nineteenth century, particularly with the introduction of the Marxist notion of class struggle as the motor of history. The American Revolution, by contrast, largely thanks to the absence of social misery of citizens on the European scale (an absence largely due to the alternative misery of slavery), had focused on founding a lasting polity in the form of a constitution and had thus, with relative albeit incomplete success, alone implemented the great positive political possibility of modern revolutions: the establishment of a new public realm of civic freedom. After the totalitarian disasters had revealed the dangers inherent in a focus on ideological social mobilization, it is to the American Founding Fathers that Arendt directs us for a modern example of classical antiquity’s ideal of political founding and free participation.